Trip diary by Anonymous, ghost-written from interviews. 

in Amazonia

So I’m on a painted wooden bus heading out of Iquitos, former riverine rubber outpost in the Peruvian Amazon, final leg of a 4-plane, 20-hour trip. One of 30-odd gringos who’ve made similar treks, chatting, looking out at the scenery as old colonial buildings, mototaxis, and full-family-laden scooters give way to peel-paint cinderblock, then clapboard houses, then clusters of open thatched huts, then electric green forest. Rain comes and goes.

I hang out the windowless window. Though there’s talk all around me about what we’ve come to do – participate in shamanic ceremonies involving a psychotropic plant, ayahuasca -- no one talks about why. Because ayahuasca is a medicine, and medicine is for sick people, and this medicine (at least if you’re not a local) is primarily for psychological and spiritual maladies. And these things don’t make for good small talk.

We’re split between two buses, chartered by probably the best-known of the ayahuasca centers in the region, not leastwise because its principle, a preppy Californian with a knack for marketing and PR. A piece in National Geographic has probably done the most for business; The New York Times and NPR have done their share as well, along with a robust web presence, and maybe some search engine optimization. What’s good for the center is good for Iquitos; they get special rates at all the higher-end hotels, and as a gringo walking on the Malecon promenade, you’re likely to hear, in this order: Hello, where you from?...Ayahuasca?...(name of center)?  Iquitos to the West is little if not the jumping-off point for ayahuasca experiences; even the local river tour outfits offer ‘ayahuasca healing’ in their pamphlets, alongside the pink dolphins, butterfly farms, and animal preserves. A Colombian friend, who’d done some non-gringo research, described this place to me as the Club Med of ayahuasca centers.

Of course, for a gringo such as myself, the marketing serves its purpose – it provides information, and with it, a level of comfort for what’s ultimately a risky endeavor. Consider: you travel to the Amazonian jungle to ingest a hallucinogenic plant decoction with people you’ve never met, with the express intent of altering your mind, and, to some degree, temporarily incapacitating yourself. At a certain point, the seals of approval – major media, or a type of face, or an accent you recognize, or a web community -- have their uses. Barring a personal contact and direct introduction in the region, you gotta start somewhere, right?

All that said, I’ll take authentic over well-packaged, and this is serious stuff for me. So in the last weeks before the trip, I’d hedged my bets: I also have reservations with another center after I’m done at Club Med -- decidedly indigenous, and decidedly lacking in the marketing department. Depending on how things go, I have the option, anyway.

Sitting behind me on the bus is a Ukrainian, here for her sixth visit, which surprises me. It turns out half our number are return visitors -- third, fourth, and on upwards. Some have come to do dietas or diets, to deepen their experiences with vegetalismo, the broader shamanic practice with medicinal plants, of which ayahuasca is only one. All of us have been dieting in the sense that we’re observing restrictions against certain foods, medicines, and activities in advance of the ayahuasca ceremonies; many of these folks will be on stricter regimens (including not touching anyone), while ingesting additional plants. Vegetalismo holds that each plant has its teacher spirit, that each spirit has its lesson. Any sickness is the result of crossed energies, and the plants can straighten out these energies -- on a pharmacological basis, as well as a more subtle energetic basis.

Diets are no joke, and you break one at your own peril. I was curious about one plant I’d heard of, sanango, and the Ukrainian says yes, she’s done this diet. Days later, when I think to ask more closely about its effects, she casually affirms that yes, one person lay paralyzed in their bed for half a day, another went blind for a day or so. Later still, I come to understand that to become a shaman in the Amazon, it’s not enough to have apprenticed. You need to have survived the apprenticeship.

After an hour or so, we turn off the main road onto a bumpy dirt track into the forest, and arrive at the Center, an immaculate, park-like enclave of traditional thatched-roof buildings linked with brick paths, landscaped (by the Principal's s mom) with vibrant flowers. Uniformed guards stroll by, black, pump-action shotguns slung over their shoulders.

It’s about noon; we get our briefing in the expansive main house, where we’ll eat our meals, listen to talks, and lounge and read and chill. From #2, an Australian, and the Principal's aide-de-camp, we get the logistics, among them: the guards are for our protection, but don’t go leaving the compound for a hike after dark lest you accidentally get, well, shot. We’ll be having lunch soon, then fasting afterwards in preparation for the first ceremony that night (ayahuasca ceremonies are conducted in the dark).

There’s a booklet to hand out, with the basics of ceremony and some context. Ceremonies will take place in that round building there (he points); we should go check it out in advance because it will be dark (and needless to say we’ll be altered), and we’ll want to be able to find the facilities. If you need to get up during ceremony, please cover your head lamp with your hand, and just let it peek out in intervals to find your way, so as not to disturb others. If you find you need help, call for it, don’t be shy. The most common requests are for another bucket (for vomiting), help to the bathroom, or, if things are too intense, water (poured on the crown of the head, it eases the experience).

By now, the group has pretty clearly split into newbies and the seniors, many of whom know each other, and are smoking and joking in little groups. Smoking, apparently, is a hallmark of ayahuasca devotees – shamans smoke mapacho, a strong, black jungle tobacco, during ceremony, and it also has its place within the broader context of vegetalismo. The seniors seem to have taken to the practice, though cigarettes are the most common choice, and it’s hard to tell whether they’re just garden-variety smokers anyway. Regardless, they’re clearly more relaxed; friendly as everyone is, there’s an undercurrent of tension amongst the rest of us. We all have our unspoken expectations of what we’re in for in a few hours, though I don’t think any of us expect things to go as we expect.

Then we eat, the dieters begin their diet (not yet looking longingly at our own simple, bland fare – no oil, no salt, no spice), and the Principal comes to give his talk.

He's a tall (probably six-four), blond, young (thirty-one or -two) blue-eyed, son of a surgeon who, in 2002, came down to study shamanism. He lived with the locals, built his own house, and apprenticed with the local shaman. A little after a year later, he founded a center in the area, and started bringing in people to participate in ayahuasca ceremonies, under the auspices of the shaman. They got some press, things grew, and the Principal bought a parcel of land off the road from Iquitos and built the new center – more accessible than three hours by river boat. In 2007, the shaman died, and his associate, Don Alberto, took on a larger role. Don Alberto would be joining us that evening.

My sense, as Principal talks, is that he may have genuine shamanic experience and knowledge, but that at some point along the way he’s set them aside, or moved beyond them. He gives a nod to the traditional practices and beliefs, but it’s almost from an anthropological perspective – an implied they, not a we -- which I suppose makes sense. Because he’s a gringo, and this isn’t his culture. And with the Principal's s teacher now gone, the Principal is running the show. Which makes for a complicated social and power dynamic out here -- one I haven’t, at this point in the trip, unpacked yet.

The Principal's talking about his own belief as it relates to ayahuasca ceremonies, and these are about universal love, how all is love, how no matter what you experience in ceremony, you should focus on love, how if you say to him Jesus, he hears love, if you say to him Buddha, he hears love. It’s all love. And the thing is I’m not picking up a love vibe from him. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not love, and if a shaman is a healer, I don’t pick up healer, either. I get a sense of someone who’s in their little kingdom, who’s joking with the seniors like a bunch of jocks, and who has built this, this, this thing out in the jungle, this vehicle for – doing what, exactly? Because I don’t feel concern, or respect, or gentleness coming from him, but rather a sub-current of, possibly, boredom, and likely, machismo in the sense of letting the newbies know what they’re in for while the seniors smoke and nod knowingly.

It’s not inspiring, but I write it off. I’m not there to be inspired or led by anyone, I can take or leave this stuff, leave him to it, and if it’s working for some of these folks, the ones nodding like, yeah, man, wow, yeah, I mean you don’t put yourself in a room like this unless you’re looking for something, then more power to them. I’m there to do some work, and don’t need him to do anything other than provide the means to that end.

We spend the balance of the day hanging out, poking around the compound, catching up on jet-laggedness. It’s hot. The mix is international, tending towards the anglophiles: Brits, Canadians, Americans, South Africans, Australians. Median age probably late thirties, evenly gendered. The gigantic, tattooed Canadian, who competes in strongest-man-in-the-world competitions. The pony-tailed rocker with combat boots and pierced nose. Mid-western mother and daughter. Ex roller-derby queen and husband. Then the Russians; a couple of émigrés who live in New York, and a handful from St. Petersburg and Ukraine who speak no English, smoke continuously, and stick close to one of the seniors, Roland. He’s on his fifth or sixth visit, jokes around with the Principal and the staff like an old mate.

Our beds are in thatched bungalows with low, movable partitions for walls -- cubicles, really -- curtains for doors, inflatable mattresses within mosquito netting, chair, desk, shelf, lockable steel box bolted to floor, extra vomit bucket. Everything immaculate, clean, new. There’s no power; night time is lit by head lamps and kerosene. Click of geckos in the rafters, butterflies flit past the screen walls.

In the evening, I head over to the ceremony house in advance of the suggested time to get a spot, and because, really, what else is there to do? Tension is rising. I meet several other newbies who apparently feel the same; we fall in and walk together. The circular ceremony house is ringed with chairs at its periphery, against the screened wall, futon-like mats in three rows on the floor. Each space has its kit: pillow, blanket, cup, roll of toilet paper, round plastic bucket. The back of the space is partitioned off, with curtained entries at each end: this leads to a small, curved hallway with a half dozen toilet stalls (each with a spare bucket) behind shower curtains, a couple sinks, and a shower. The seniors have apparently come earlier in the day and left stuff to stake out their spaces – all opt for being upright in the chairs. Newbies go for the mats. There are several high-backed office chairs for the shamans and their apprentices, around which everything is arranged. There are several bottles of various sizes on the floor next to them; cloudy potions with herbs floating in them, others clear, and two very distinctive ones: battered two-liter plastic bottles with a dark brown sludge in it. The ayahuasca.

I pick a mat in front of one of the chairs. And sit, with a few others. And wait. More people filter in, and as it gets dark and the sound of the frogs and monkeys comes up outside, a couple kerosene lamps are lit on the floor in front of the high-backed chairs. It’s like the first day of school – seniors kidding each other, joking, smoking, hanging in clusters; freshman keeping to themselves, looking around, fidgeting. Don Alberto enters with his apprentice, and with the Principal, to hearty greetings from the seniors. Don Alberto is carrying a white plastic grocery bag, wearing a baseball cap, smoking a cigarette. He takes his place.

We review: there are helpers, call if you need something. Lights will go out when ceremony starts; back on when ceremony is over. If you’re not done, stay quietly in the ceremony house with others until you feel ready to go back to your room. Dosage is not an exact science. The Principal chooses a standard dosage – ¼ of the tin cup he holds, with options for the seniors to modify this. He starts with the chair to his right, and works his way down the line; Don Alberto to his left. The Principal high-fives a couple of the seniors before pouring their doses. #2 shines a headlamp into Don Alberto’s cup to double check; the Principal jokes about his ‘jungle doses.’ Don Alberto comes from a long line of shamans; he was given his first dose of ayahuasca at the age of nine, and, since shamans drink ayahuasca along with the others in ceremony, that means, by approximate count, he’s drunk about 4,500 doses.

One after another, we come before a shaman, and he softly whistles an icaro into the cup. Icaros are songs, sung or whistled by Amazonian shamans, and they play a complex, crucial role in ceremony. They are where medicine meets magic. Icaros are a shaman’s tools, an expression of their spiritual energy, used as a means of communication between shaman and spirits, and shaman and ceremony participant. As I learn later, they also directly shape, protect, structure, and clarify the mareacion, or vision space the ayahuasca creates, managing how it is experienced, in order to facilitate learning and/or healing. #2 had said earlier that anyone who found themselves lost in mareacion should return to the icaro as a life-line. It’s your connection to your guide.

One after another, we take the cup, proclaim İSalud!, drink. The rest of the room responds: İSalud! When about half the room has been dosed, Roland abruptly vomits into his bucket. Man! he says, That was fast! The seniors chuckle. The shamans drink, lights out, and the sounds of the jungle come on with full force. Presently, Don Alberto and the Principal start chanting an icaro, shaking shacapa, dry palm frond rattles. We all wait to enter mareacion.

The sounds of sporadic vomiting come within half an hour, people standing to go to the toilets. Within about an hour, it begins for me. I’d come expecting demons and terror, while also knowing there’s no way I could expect anything, that every individual is different. And for me, it begins with the sacred geometry common to mareacion, the intricate, shifting patterning that’s depicted in indigenous art throughout the Amazon. So distinctive and beautiful and so…typical that I hear myself laugh out loud, in spite of myself, equal parts happy surprise and affirmation. At the back of my mind I remind myself that there’s no way to tell how things will go: sometimes, apparently, ceremonies are gentle and pretty, other, an express elevator down. As if to prove the point, the guy on the mat next to me says İAyuda! İAgua! only in a tone too low to be heard by anyone but me in the increasing noise of the room. I consciously tell myself to focus on where I’m at, and trust that others will take care of themselves, or be taken care of without my supervision. He doesn’t repeat himself. Somewhere in the back, in the toilets, a man – a really big man -- is vomiting so violently the very air vibrates. It goes on and on. The icaros stop for awhile, as if to give him the floor.

My flat patterns have morphed into three dimensions, and taken on color; abstract, yet organic, alive somehow, and with a life and intelligence to them now, cascading mixtures of plant and insect, continuously shifting and replicating, leaves and thorns and waving, shivering legs and antennae and mandibles. More sinister than before, but still benign-seeming, and non-directed; these things are being shown to me, but they’re not aware of me. As the sounds of purging escalates, I feel the nausea creep on me as well, only I feel it more strongly in my bowels, and I get up, palming my headlamp. In the brief pools of light at my feet, I see people in various postures; I purposely don’t look or let myself get engaged. The shapes have resolved themselves more clearly into dark, swarming centipedes; this is what I pass as I sit, and reaching down to the corner of the stall, a brilliant flash of light behind my eyes illuminates shivering worms. I vomit up a foul, thin solution of ayahuasca, a bitter, acrid second taste of something nasty enough going down the other way.

As pathetic a picture as I must present in that stall at that moment (darkness has its benefits) I welcome the experience, I feel as though, literally, or figuratively, or spiritually, or by any other measure, my body’s convulsive purging is ridding me of things I don’t want, that don’t serve me. The vomiting intensifies, as if something large needs to pass, and doesn’t have the momentum. In a brief respite, hugging the bucket in my lap, shivering, I see an fierce spread of four-part mandibles, an aggressive display, and know that’s me, not other, me challenging whatever it is to show itself. Shuddering on my cool little white throne, I bear my puke-dripping teeth: come on motherfucker. Is that the best you’ve got? Come on…  And I convulse with a noise I didn’t know I could make, and something black, and smooth, and shiny, featureless, like the rounded end of a field hockey stick, pokes itself up at the base of my gaping throat, back behind my tongue…but it doesn’t pass, and sinks down again. I’m shaking. Motherfucker. There you are. Motherfucker. Come on.

But it’s past. My body settles out, my stomach tender and unsettled, my bowels capricious, but all quieting, quieting. I light-peek-shuffle my way back to my mat. In the process I see some of the seniors are out of their chairs; some sitting at the foot of other chairs, one at the Principal's feet. The Principal and #2 are now singing a tandem, harmonic improv in English, less chant than droning croon, about love, it’s all love, and then something about a rubber ducky (!) and how the rubber ducky and love are one. It’s tongue-in cheek, it’s a lark. Like late night in a pub. A handful of seniors start giggling, delighted. It’s the rubber ducky! This is a repeat performance. One voice calls out in the darkness:

(Principal )?
Yeah?
You know how you said to ask if we need some more?
Yeah.
I definitely don’t need any more.

Guffaws. I try to concentrate on what I’m seeing, try to focus on my intention, but it’s not getting me anywhere. The visions have settled out into non-specific, ever-changing amalgams of color and pattern and plant and insect, and I start to notice they morph in direct relation to Don Alberto’s icaro. His icaros have been coming and going, some strong and strident, accompanied by shucapa, others gentle and crooning, others an almost spooky whistling. The icaros are in Quechua, which I don’t understand, but I can make out ayahuasca, and pura medicina, and poderosa medicina. No rubber ducky that I can tell, and the Principal and #2 have subsided into silence. Over Don Alberto’s chanting, the Principal says Okay, everyone take a deep breath, and relax! Deep sighs.

As I’m having no luck directing or receiving anything from the visions, I shift focus, and visualize my daughter, my love for her. And the visions instantly darken, melt into skulls, and blackening, withering roses – not prophetic, but rudely dismissive: you want to go where? Oh, no. You’re not running this. This is what (we? I?) think of that. This is (our? my?) world. (We? I?) call the shots. So I settle in for the next couple hours, Don Alberto leading, watching walls of living complexity, breathing, shining architectures of light, all non-specific, ebbing and expanding in time with the icaro. Some sadness seeps from me, slowly, and some tears, as slowly. Quietly. Each time Don Alberto brings an icaro to a close, some of the seniors sigh in appreciation and thank him.

This is a show? I think. Like, a laser show?

Abruptly, the lamps are lit, #2 makes the announcement that it’s over, and thank you Don Alberto! (applause and cheering). Thank you Principal! (more applause and cheering). Don Alberto is already standing, plastic bag in hand, waves good naturedly, and strolls out. The Principal stays, slouching splayed legged in his chair. You guys did great. You guys are my rock stars. The seniors start congregating around him and each other, smoking, chatting, joking. It’s an after-party. I’m definitely not done yet, and from the looks of others sprawled and curled on their mats, neither are they. But we blink at the lamps, and I lay on my stomach and try to reintegrate. My body feels tender, tentative, if deeply relaxed. A senior asks after me, and I say I’m defragging. The guy to my left, who’d called for help early on, starts talking to me, monologue, about his depression, about how he still lives with him mom, about how he hasn’t worked in years, about how great his step-dad is, how he suggested this, was footing the bill for the whole trip. How appreciative he was. How he’d been through hell just then, real hell, but he felt so much better coming out the other side. How grateful he was to be able to talk to me. And on. And, bless him, on. I don’t have the heart to stop him. Or, for that matter, let on that I’ve just managed, in a gentle, minor way, to shit myself.

After awhile I’m standing outside, looking up at a staggering spread of stars, framed by black canopy and high-decible jungle sounds. Then into my mosquito net cocoon. It’s probably near sunrise before I get to sleep. Two more ceremonies to go.

* * *

I’m up at 7 a.m to be down at the cook-house, an open shelter where the next batch of ayahuasca will be prepared. Folks dribble in, and we all wind up pitching in for the preparation: scrubbing the segments of ayahuasca vine, pounding them into fiber with mallets, washing chacruna leaves and other roots, piling them all into big vats to be boiled over the course of the day on an open wood-fire pit. The cooked-down, turbid stuff at the bottom of the vats is what’s decanted into the battered bottles for the week’s ceremonies, starting with tonight. It rains on and off, hard. Don Alberto sits on the woodpile, under a broad banana leaf, smoking, talking with one of the seniors who can understand his jungle Spanish (a mix of Castilian Spanish, Portuguese, and tribal dialect). The Principal comes by and starts holding forth again on universality and love and so on with a small group.

Later, we get a chance to talk to Don Alberto, through a halting interpreter. One woman asks his advice: last night, she said, she’d gotten the answers to some big questions in her life, and now that she had them, she was wondering whether she needed to participate in ceremony tonight. I can see Don Alberto’s answer coming a mile away: yes, she should. The plant process is a cleaning, a cleaning, a cleaning (and he makes a sweeping motion away from his torso). The implication: one ceremony, you’re not clean. I pass the day, as do others, aimlessly, laying my head or body down frequently, sapped of energy, but never quite making it to sleep. At lunch, I drink as little as possible, to maximize the digestion of the solid food. Then we fast.

* * *

Second ceremony, I feel I know a bit more what to expect, and so may be able to maintain focus better, and hopefully learn something. Mainly, I’m going after that bastard who’d poked his head up. The doses are all over the map tonight, as the Principal is letting people self-select. There’s a mixture of a good deal more, to much less, depending on the person. Thinking of how I’d fallen just short of expelling that thing, I request a little boost. The stuff is hardly measured out in a beaker, but going down, it doesn’t feel much more than the night before. Salud.

Things go very differently. Mareacion doesn’t sidle up to me with sacred geometry: it announces itself by abrupt vomiting – so soon, and so, well, like regular vomit, that I fear I’ve just evacuated all the ayahuasca, and don’t have anything in me to work with. But rather than go back for more (I don’t want to risk a common error: some people, feeling nothing, go back for more, and just after they drink the second dose, the first one kicks in), I settle back to see what happens.

And, from what I can remember, things go well; I’m staying on intention, I’m maintaining focus, I’m riding the early purging with, as yet, not too much drama. The room is a little noisier than the night before, with discordant sounds coming from all points, the most distracting of which is the young guy to my right, one of the Russians. He’s sitting up, and he’s saying something to Roland, who’s sitting across from him, in a chair. The tone is challenging, just verging on aggressive. And he’s asking something in Russian, finishing each sentence withhm? Hm? Rolan? Rolan? Macchu-picchu, ayahuasca, Peru hm? Hm? Ro-laaaan. Ro-laaan?

Nothing. The Principal's icaro is again English, drunken-droning style, this time about Rainbow Care Bear Jesus (sic), which is provoking chuckles from a small group of seniors near him. And the Russian continues, now sing-song: Ro-laaaan. Ro-laaan? He’s arms-length from me. Some of the seniors are starting to laugh at him. Someone behind me is quietly sobbing. Someone to my left giggling maniacally. I’m trying to concentrate. And then… and then…

And then, no better way to describe it, the energy in me, the energy in the room, takes a ninety-degree left turn – not metaphorically, but literally, I feel the pull from my left – it takes a left turn and goes very, very dark. Instant, frigid, wilting. Not dark as in, we’re sitting in the dark, or dark as in, my eyes are closed dark, but dark as in bad. Dark as in despair. But sharper than despair dark – dark with malice, dark with bad things. Dark verging on evil. And all I know is it has nothing to do with me, and still, it’s here, it’s in the room, it’s real, and it’s very, very bad.

In response or not, my bowels loosen up, and I unsteadily make my way back to the hallway on my left. In my flash-views there seems to be more people curled up on the floor at the foot of their chairs than the night before, more scattering of bodies, more motion, but as before I ignore them. Then I part the curtain to the back, flashing my light to find an unoccupied stall -- and see hell.

In the brief LED flash, I see a hallway strewn with bodies, probably a half dozen in the close space, plus whoever is in the stalls, lying on their backs, or writhing, or gone fetal, or crouched holding knees and rocking, or leaning against the wall, or aimlessly staggering, a muted murmuring of sobs and pleading and moaning and purging. It’s unmoored, dark, insanity. And I think, even as I know I have to find an empty stall:

This is wrong. It’s gone wrong. It’s a bad batch. We’ve drunk a bad batch. I think of myself, happy goofy gringo, smashing up the vine earlier that morning, la la la la la. Shit. It’s the new brew tonight. And it’s gone wrong. And as I step over the woman who’d asked whether she should drink again tonight, I wonder where are the helpers? Who’s taking care of these people? I answer myself: There are too many. They can’t keep up. And the woman is in hysterics at my feet, one arm trailing into the toilet stall, only she doesn’t have the energy anymore for full hysterics, it just oozes out of her now, head lolling, which somehow makes it worse.

And things are going darker and darker, and I listen for the icaro, and from the other room I hear Rainbow Care Bear Jeeeeesus and Rolan? Ro-lAn! and laughter and I rapidly pass a two-foot centipede, orange and red, into the toilet, and scrabble for the bucket in its trusty spot and there is no bucket! There is no bucket, they’re overwhelmed, they can’t keep up, there’s too much, it’s too much, there are too many of us and the woman is writhing at my feet and I’m feeling in the dark for the bucket, it’s definitely not there, and I also realize I’m losing spatial sense, my body is becoming dissociated, the stall is at once oceanic and microscopic, I can hear my hands slapping the walls but can’t feel them, and Rolan! Rolan? and I finally find Don Alberto’s icaro, but it’s the spooky whistling, which only serves to deepen the darkness, and where am I going to vomit? and all shapes and visions have diminished to a slender, skittery neon ribbon, winding around the icaro, itself diminishing in the darkness, this skittery little ribbon in the dark more terrible than any legion of monsters, because, because… and I realize this is it, it’s time to pull the cord, it’s time to get out. I’m on the toilet by dire necessity, but it’s time to get out because, because insanity – insanity, man -- is just around the corner, this diminution is not me facing my shit, it’s different, it’s got nothing to do with me other than it’s in me, it’s in the room, and it’s leading to madness, there’s no doubt I’m about to go insane, there is a chemical process in my brain just now that is not good, and it’s about to sever something important and render me insane, I can feel it coming, here it comes, and I’m in Peru in the jungle with people who’ve lost control and if I leave to go home just now I could get shotgunned in the dark, and this is very, very, very fucked up, and it’s time to stop it.

So, water, water, the sink - fuck the sink I’m going to go stand in the shower, full blast, fully clothed, and put an end to it. Only I have to make it to the shower, ten paces down the hallway, through the bodies. And I have to get my pants back on. And I have to flush the toilet. Which I must do. I may be losing my shit, but I’m not going to lose my shit, panic’s on my shoulders, but fuck panic, I’m flushing the goddamn toilet come what may and as the madness knocks more insistently, I reach through time and space to find a cool, solid surface I know means toilet, so there must be an orientation I know means horizontal, and there is, then a direction I know means away, and that works out all right, then an orientation I know means vertical, so now I have momentum, then a protrusion I know means handle, wouldn’t you know it, then an action I know means flush, and goddamn it, I’ve flushed the goddamn toilet and gripping the doorframe I step carefully over the woman, I make it out of the stall and, leaning against the wall in the hall, realize I’m not going to make it. I’m not. My mind, everything, it’s slipping away. I’m not going to make it to the shower, and I’m going to go mad. And though at this point, Rubber Ducky Rainbow Care Bear Jesus, I have little faith in the folks running this place, I have no other choice, and I call out, who knows at what volume, İAyuda! İAgua! and then, apparently, lose consciousness.

* * *

Later, I’m told I was out for about ten minutes. When I come to, I’m on my back in the hallway next to the needs-more-cleansing woman, #2’s face hovering upside down over mine in the near light of an LED, hands, not his, gripping either side of my head. My head’s propped on something. He’s saying I’m going to put some water on your head, all right? What I’m thinking is considerably less restrained than what comes out of my mouth, which is: Yeah, man, do it. And there seems to be three people at my head, and although I’m not together enough in the moment to notice the madness has already backed away, the water on the head nonetheless has a grounding effect to my body, and I start shivering and sweating, waves of heat pass through me, and I grunt and expel the sensations through forceful breaths, bringing the horses back into the corral. #2 asks me if I’m all right, and again I filter my answer, Yeah, man, what else are you going to say. And he splits, and the man holding my head eases his grip and I run my fingers through my wet hair bring it back bring it back bring it back and he asks me something, and either it’s in jungle Spanish and I’m not getting it, or maybe just the Spanish part of my brain is offline just now, either way I have no idea what he’s saying, and feeling like a dolt I tell him: I have no idea what you’re saying. More. He wants to know if I want more water, which I don’t.

And as I grunt and growl and ease the shakes I think to myself: what the fuck. What are you doing on the floor by a toilet in the jungle in Peru with these people? Has it come to this? Really? Are you really so far gone? And it occurs to me just then that this is rock bottom. This idea that you must really hit rock bottom to start your way back up, that you know it when you hit it, well this is it. If I’d come to clear myself, or heal myself, or in whatever way enable myself to reverse my downward spiral, well hell. No further to go is one way to do that, and here I am. And though the madness, the evil is gone, I’m still in mareacion. I’m not engaging with it, so it’s not carrying me, but it’s still in full effect, and I wonder to myself whether I will ever come out of it, whether I’ve damaged something. Nothing to it but to ride it out, find out.

I start to sit up, the man behind me tries to hold me down, tells me to take it easy, relax. I tell him, yeah, right, okay, but not on the floor, man, not by the toilets like this, Jesus, I’m going back to my mat. I make it to my feet, and sag against the wall. Well, okay then, I say, by the toilets it is, and he helps me back down, puts a blanket over me, and splits.

About half an hour later, I make it back to my mat. A woman behind me continues to sob, someone to the left continues giggling. The Russian has devolved into a full-blown monologue which is now more playful sounding, and which the seniors are responding to like it’s a comedy routine. At one point, the Principal, in a tired, exasperated voice, says Roland, man, you need to tell your friend to relax. There’s an exchange of Russian, and whatever’s exchanged, it doesn’t make any difference. The Russian has a fit of vomiting, then picks up where he left off. My eyes are open, I look out at the jungle and the stars through the screen, and as I shift in and out of full clarity, I focus on one thing: whatever else happens, the sun will come up. No matter what, the sun will rise. And when it rises, I can assess, and I can move on. Ride it out until the sun rises.

There’s a pause in the icaros. From the back, by the toilets, a woman starts vomiting, and violently. It’s the woman who was next to me on the floor, I’m sure of it. It escalates, punctuated by pauses for her to catch her breath, until she’s making inhuman noises, profoundly deep, wrenching, resonant, echoing, guttural bellows, a lowing, a mooing, like a sea elephant, like an ox, a cow, sounds from way, way deeper than her throat. I imagine her mouth stretched wide like a bass to accommodate the volume and violence of what is leaving her. And as the sounds reach crescendo, some of the seniors start to laugh. At the degree of distortion. At the impossible progression. At the cartoonish, medieval, one-upmanship each fit demonstrates over the previous.

They’re laughing.

The Principal says: Okay everybody, relax. Take a deep breath. Big sighs. The Russian continues. At one point, I see #2 stalk over to him and shake a shacapa in his face for a few seconds, then stalk back to his chair. Finally, from the Principal: Roland, man, put some water on your friend’s head. A handful of people gather around him, position his bucket between his crossed legs, bend him over, and douse him slowly. OooooOOOoooh! Puuuupupupupu! he exhales in surprise and delight, prompting more laughter. This slows him down, but doesn’t stop him. He’s still calling out to people, asking questions that go unanswered. Don Alberto has picked up an icaro again, and he starts calling to the shaman. Don Alberto? Don Albeeeerto? Don Alberto reaches the end of his icaro, and in his leathery, smoker’s voice, cuts straight through the gloom in a tone at once humoring and parental:

¿Si Seňor?

The room erupts in laughter. #2 lights the lamps. Applause for Don Alberto, who leaves. Applause for the Principal. The Russian lays down, wrapped in his blanket. Cigarettes passed around, the after-party begins. I leave as soon as I’m able to walk. Lay in bed reading, structure and distraction for my brain, still twitching, then listen to the jungle until the sun comes up and I sleep.

* * *

I wake in my right mind. Thoughts of immediate departure are tempered by practicalities. I’m not going to participate in ceremony tonight. Claro. I’m slated to leave with half the group tomorrow, which isn’t that far away. I can lay back and take it easy for a day, recuperate. If I wanted to leave now, it would be drama I’m not interested in – pieces of disparate information from previous days are recombining in different patterns now. Just before getting on the bus, we’d signed an indemnity agreement which largely covered the scenario where someone went psycho, in which case it was made clear this person would be restrained in a sheet, water poured over them, and when they’d come down, asked to leave immediately. We’d been asked to let #2 know if we had any advanced degree of martial arts training. People who had chosen not to stay the full length of their booking were invited to hike out to the main road, where a bus back into Iquitos would come by every so often. The Principal's war story of a man who’d aggressively confronted him during ceremony, and whom he’d told he’d cover in a sheet and give the beating of his life. I mean, you don’t challenge someone on their turf. I wouldn’t challenge a prize fighter in the ring. The guys with baseball caps, big-bore weapons, and cartridge belts. No. Most of the folks I’ve gotten to know are very kind, I like them, I can hang loose for a day. And anyway, experiences are so personal and different in ceremony, who knows where others are at, and I’m not interested in proselytizing or making a scene.

And how right I am. Breakfast is little different than the day before. The woman who’d had such supernatural purging isn’t there (I found a note from her on the floor in our bungalow, asking Midwestern Mom whether she had a spare pair of panties, and to set some eggs aside for her, she just needed to sleep). Other folks seem fine. A couple of the seniors note that it was a little stormy, they heard a lot of running around, they heard someone passed out. One says she heard I passed out. Which is how I learned I passed out. There’s good-natured ribbing of the Russian – Machuu-picchuu! Machuu-picchuu! -- who smiles sheepishly.

I ask the Ukrainian what he’d been saying, what was happening with him. She tells me he was lost. He didn’t know where he was, and he was calling out for his friends to come help him. He was saying he remembered going to Machu Picchu, but why? What was he doing in Peru? How did he get there? And what was ayahuasca? And where were they, could they come help him? I ask why Roland didn’t help him out. Because he was in mareacion himself, and he’s not trained, not capable of doing so like a shaman would. I ask whether the other Russians were among those laughing at him. She says, yes, it was very funny. In the most neutral tone I can manage, I say: But he was lost. He was calling for help. Her eyes go suddenly deadly cold, mouth grim: It. Was. Funny.

The Principal comes to hold his post-breakfast audience. I’m more than a little curious. The Ukrainian asks, and I love that she asks it: How did the ceremony go last night? He says he knew immediately after it started that it was going to be intense, so he gave #2 the heads up. Then it was fine. And did we hear, just now, the sound of water, and of kitchen work going on? If you put your attention to it, it takes on meaning, there’s a story behind it. But if you don’t, it’s just noise. And that’s how it is in ceremony.

Later, I go find #2, who’s in the ceremony house, to let him know I won’t be joining them tonight. He asks whether I’d accomplished what I’d come down to do. I tell him I think so, but not at all in the way I’d expected. That I’m still processing the experience. He nods, sagely. I’ll be processing for months, he says. He asks whether I’ll join them tonight, and not drink? I decline. And then I tell him my two reasons for abstaining – that I’d experienced something that had crossed over from spiritual to medical, which wasn’t okay, and my observations in the hallway, and how the Principal, with his Rainbow Care Bear Jesus, and his characterization of what was going on as ‘just noise’ had lost credibility and trust for me. If I can say so, I’m thorough, and calm, and clinical, and non-confrontational, though #2 is sitting as if pinned back in his chair, deer-in-the-headlights, oh-shit look on his face, nodding and saying okay. Okay. Okay. Then I tell him I’d like to arrange for dinner. He says one isn’t normally prepared, there isn’t one; I tell him I’m not willing to eat the crackers stacked by the water pitcher, I’d like to arrange a dinner. He consents. He notes that I’ll need to stay in the bungalow after dark because of the guards. Of course. And he’ll need to talk to Don Alberto about my venteado, my sealing-up for re-entry into the world after the opening-up of the ayahuasca, which would normally be done at the end of tonight’s ceremony. I thank him.

Shortly afterward, I hear the Principal in a nearby building, shaking a shacapa, singing an icaro in English. I can’t hear very well over the conversation in the main house, but get: …well I’m right here, I’m right here, I’m right here. Na-nananana, na-nananana, I’m right here…

At lunch, I see the woman who’d been my floor mate in the hallway. She exudes peace. Her skin is smooth. And, this no hyperbole, or metaphor, or hallucination: her face is a completely different shape.

One of the guys I’d been hanging out with says something about the coming ceremony; I let him know I won’t be joining. No! How come? He agrees with my observations, but had a different experience, which makes the difference: he’s still willing/able to look the other way and do his own work. The rest is noise. He comes back later to formally, earnestly ask me to look deep in my heart and see whether I might join them. Otherwise, there will be a hole in the room. Word trickles out; I’m asked and invited to join by others, am told I’ll be missed if I don’t. I’m not sure whether to be touched, or a little creeped out.

* * *

At the appointed hour, as ceremony starts, I’m served dinner by light of my headlamp in the main house. Across from me is a young Canadian girl, also eating by LED. She’d been a fellow hallway body the night before. It was just so dark last night, she says, with flat affect. SO dark. This is her sixth visit. Six! I ask her what brings her back, she shrugs. It feels good. Then, with a clarity and simplicity I wonder at, same flat affect, she shrugs again. I think I’m done.

The buildings don’t have walls, just screens; from my bungalow I can hear the Principal saying something to the group, stridently, about the Spirit of Care Bear. But there are two guards just outside my door, shooting the shit, and I can’t hear clearly over them. Presently, the icaros start, none of them in English. Then silence, and the sounds of vomiting echo into the night. I feel isolated, and disappointed, and foolish, and sad. Try to read a book.

* * *

I rise at six for my venteado appointment with Don Alberto in the ceremony house, still in disarray from the night before. The process, done with shacapa, and icaro, and tobacco smoke, is to seal up the points of the body opened up in ceremony, then wrap you tight in ties of steel-wooded plant spirits as protection from the hurly-burly of the real world. I’ve re-entered society after retreat before, and it’s no joke; this makes eminent sense, and I’m grateful.

Departure is awkward; I wind up standing next to the Principal for the group picture. Folks are talking about life-changing experiences, and keeping in contact, and hugging, and I just want to be away. I shake the Principal’s hand, say thank you, get my ass on the bus. I leave convinced of the genuine power of this medicine, ayahuasca, and equally convinced of the importance of proper context and ceremony for its use. I’m in no position to say how it should be; I do have a point of view as to how it shouldn’t. The day before, teh Principal had casually mentioned that he’d had a couple people end up in asylums, that he’d worked with one and they’d come out, that another was still there. That in the past year three people in the region had died from ayahuasca, probably because they’d gone out drinking alcohol and partying afterwards.

This stuff, it’s live ammunition.

Gone, with the mareacion, is the idea of booking the next flight out; I’m not ready to give up yet, I’ve come too far. I have a day in Iquitos, then am expected at the other center, for which I have higher hopes. With a little more wisdom under my belt, with sharper eyes, I’ll check it out, and see whether it feels right. If it doesn’t, worst-case scenario, I’ll hang out and read in the jungle for a few days before heading home.

* * *

The next morning I’m on a long boat with a guide, Jairo Quicube Mozombite, headed up the Amazon. We go ashore at the Yagua village of San Juan de Huashalado, walk through village and forest on a raised concrete path (recent addition – too many fatal snake bites in flood season) to the narrow, dark, still waters of the Yanayaku river, where we head inland in a dugout canoe with big, leaf-shaped paddles. It’s hot. We stop to fish for piranhas, the little red kind, agitating the water with fishing pole tip before dropping in baited hook. They’re fast; you need just the right flick of the wrist to sink the hook. Who knew, they have voices: they make a low, throaty honking noise in the bottom of the boat.

We have lunch back at the village (someone else gets to eat the fish), in the stilt-standing building that serves as speakeasy on Saturday nights when there’s a generator to cool beer. There’s a single lopsided table, two benches, and a hammock. Three little kids are clustered in an open doorway across the way with a prone sloth. Two of them, knee-high, detach themselves and swarm over me while I wait for Jairo to come back with lunch. They detach slyly from time to time to take discreet swigs of his soda bottle, long as their arms, which he’s left on the bench. Lunch is cabesa de Juan, or Jesus’ head – rice boiled in chicken broth, wrapped around chicken and plantain, then wrapped and boiled in banana leaves. It’s amazing. I point to my empty leaves and say there’s Jesus’ skull. Jairo thinks that’s pretty funny. He’s a good deal older than me, though it can be hard to tell, and is a bachelor, lives with his Mom. He tells me there are six women to every man in Peru, he doesn’t know why. Accordingly, he has six women in different villages along the river.

I spend the rest of the time in the hammock, waiting for the river boat, doing Spanish-to-English translations of common guide phrases for Jairo in his notebook. Where are you from? Do you have a hotel? How much do you want to spend? In the boat, we doze on the hard benches, shifting when we change course and the sun hits our heads. The river is massive, and muddy, and mined with flotsam -- dark branches, root balls, full trees. There’s a distinct line, and change of color where the Amazon meets the Nanay river, which flows past Iquitos.

Later that night, someone from Centro Espiritu Anaconda is coming to meet me at the hotel, at least I think so. Anaconda is a shamanic healing center founded by Don Guillermo Arevalo Valero, considered by some as the spiritual leader of the Shipibo, one of Amazonia’s indigenous peoples, known for their strong shamanic tradition. I’d come across his name through the Colombian friend who was trying to find centers less westernized than Club Med. I’d seen a film that documented a trip to Anaconda, so to some degree had seen Don Guillermo work, and liked the fact that his center not only represented a relatively unfiltered connection with Amazonian shamanism, but that it didn’t focus solely on ayahuasca ceremony – it was dedicated, generally speaking, to vegetalismo.

I’ve had naught but spotty, spare email contact with the center; I don’t know if it was a language, or cultural, or other barrier, but getting clear answers on simple questions took several tries and several weeks. At one point, before reserving, I’d thought I’d come by and meet them, and asked if they had business hours. A couple days later: No, come by any time. We live here. I’d managed, finally, to confirm a date, time, place, and cost per diem. That was it, no contracts, handouts, waiver forms, indemnity agreements, anything, and that was a month ago. I have faith.

* * *

I’m met twenty minutes before the agreed time -- not by Don Guillermo’s daughter, as expected, but by a pirate. At least that’s what he looks like, broad, swarthy face, earring and black headscarf. It’s like a spy novel: he comes in, looks around, asks if I’m me, I ask, incompletely, if he’s from Centro Espiritu- and he finishes the sentence -Espiritu Anaconda, and okay, sure, I’ll grab my gear and go off with you into the night. His mototaxi (motorcycle rickshaw) is all black, yaaaaar matey, and we roar off into the stream of other mototaxis, through night city, to two-lane unlit blacktop, vibrating, temperature dropping, smell of exhaust and gasoline and motor oil, turning after some time onto an uneven, sandy track, itself like a broad yellow river, sandy wound slashed through the jungle, lit by the weak headlight. The pirate negotiates it gingerly, trying not to tip or get us stuck. Another turn, a narrower passage, bumpy, we’re in the trees now, narrower, and we sputter to a stop in a sandy clearing. A compound: see-through thatched buildings, weak fluorescent light filtering through green screen walls. A handful of locals hanging out, lounging on benches, women, little kids, men with shotguns.

I thank the pirate, grab my stuff, look for a place to check in. One building has a sign over the door, some folks on benches just outside, I’m greeted as I walk up. She introduces me to a man who will show me to my room. Sitting next to Isadora is an old woman with a traditional Shipibo do: jet-black hair square-cut, short bangs. The old woman smiles. I’m escorted through the compound, away from the main buildings.

¿How many people live here?
About twenty.
¿And how many visitors?
I don’t know. They come and they go.

My room is half a traditional thatched hut split down the middle by a dividing wall, tattered green screens all around, a naked, fly -specked compact fluorescent giving it a ghoulish cast. Shelves, hooks, string to hang laundry, night table, single bed, sheet not big enough to cover the mattress, bug-husk encrusted light switch hanging from the rafters (there’s a generator on site that runs during certain hours). Drop my stuff, head back out to the main buildings; a large two-story that looks like a library/ meeting room, connected to an equally large one that must be the kitchen/dining hall. I see few gringos through the screen walls.

The autopsy lighting and flies notwithstanding, I’m immediately struck by the slack, morbid energy coming from those buildings, and up close doesn’t change the impression. The small handful of people I see are spider-thin, drawn, sunken-chested, almost cadaverous. Moving slowly. Most are alone. A couple of young men, one with a question-mark shaped spine, sit together in the dining room, mostly in silence. No sound, no laughter, no quick gestures. The only person who projects any vitality so far is a young woman I pass while entering; we nod at each other. I see her now in the other building, engaged in what seems like normal conversation with someone. I head over, and, hearing that she’d arrived earlier the same day, invite myself to join them. She’s an Israeli; she’s talking to an older woman, a slight, dark-haired Austrian who’s been at this center for several years, and in the region with other shamans for several more. She’s a firecracker, has the skinny on everything, it seems, and isn’t shy about sharing it. For starters, we’ve arrived at the crescendo of a political struggle at the center with the shamans (there are several), to which she is both witness and participant. Oh, and Don Guillermo is traveling, out of the country until next week.

No way. Unbelievable.

My hang-loose plan shifts; with no Don Guillermo, I’m not going to participate in ceremony, and from what little I’ve seen and felt, I’m not interested in hanging around this place for four days. The Israeli isn’t enchanted either.

With the travelers’ directness, we get right to talking about my most recent experiences, and I get some much-needed context, or at least point of view that rings true to me. Turns out the Austrian was the Principal's first apprentice, years ago, before he severed all apprentice relationships.

At that time, his biggest goal, she said, was to get on that talk show. That woman. I don’t remember her name.
……Oprah?
Oprah.

She’s baffled about Rainbow Care Bear Jesus. But…but…he knows 400 Quechua icaros! Shakes her head. That’s too bad, she says, really too bad. He’s doing ayahuasca tourism now.

I ask her about my experience, this feeling that the darkness, the evil, was external to me, was in the room. She nods. It was. And I got infected. Ayahuasca ceremonies, she says, open us up to expose things, in order to heal them. In mareacion, we’re like surgery patients open on the table, and as vulnerable. We’re highly susceptible to dark spirits then, whether they’re entirely external, or coming out of others nearby. What happened with me was that I probably had a certain sensitivity to begin with, it was amplified in ceremony, then for whatever reason it was a particularly dark night (they’d had one at Anaconda the night before), and I started taking these things on. And yes, it would have driven me insane, which is why, defense mechanism, I left my body, and didn’t come back until it was safe. Happens all the time, she says. She’s come to believe that extreme dark energies should be processed in a separate ceremony house, like quarantine, like with lepers.

Isn’t it the shaman’s role, I ask, to mediate these things in ceremony? Yes, she says, but. But depending on the shaman and the power of what’s going on, the shaman may be busy fighting it off himself. Or the shaman may just be in it for the money, not interested in healing. That happens all the time too. Worse yet are shamans who prey on people in mareacion to increase their own power.

When I mention the Russian, she says quickly: they’re some of the worst. The worst? Why? Think of it, she says. Think of their history, think of all that suffering, all that darkness, of a whole people. Of a whole culture. For centuries.

* * *

The next morning, in the daylight, the center looks even more sad, rundown, neglected. In the documentary, I’d seen a village with a clean-swept sandy floor beneath the trees, a network of walking paths between the buildings. Now the ground is a dark mat of dead, unswept leaves. There are jagged rents in the screen to the kitchen, refuse outside the door, where mangy dogs make hollows in the ground against the coming heat. The toilets and shower outside the ceremony house are a row of cinder-block stalls open to the sky, stained, crooked, dilapidated, slap-dash affairs. In the meeting room, torn, peeling, faded ayahuasca art leans against the walls; there’s a tall, dusty, glass knickknack display case in one corner, empty now, next to what must have been a small retail counter. The counter, located next to a power outlet, has become a station for charging electronics when the generator is on.

Gringos start to drift in from the edges of the jungle for breakfast, and I see and feel the same slow-motion, sunken, wasting. There’s a vigor coming from the little kids playing, later there will be a spirited soccer game between the young local men in the clearing; there’s a clatter and easy conversation through the kitchen door, and there’s even life, however tenuous, in the scraggly chickens huddled at its doorstep. I try to sort what is unvarnished reality of jungle village life from what is not. Because whatever it was before, this place is a ghost town, bony hips in pants three sizes too big. I run into the Israeli, and we both agree – we’re not sticking around. I start doing the math in my notebook: bluffing my way back into the hotel at the discounted Club Med rate, versus changing my flight (a number I won’t know until the generator is turned on, and I can borrow the Austrian’s laptop). I feel dispirited, sad, adrift. But also not wanting to waste a trip.

Stefan, the fellow I’d been corresponding with via email, finds me at breakfast so I can check in. He’s a young Frenchman, whippet-thin like the others, arms like pipe cleaners in his tank top. We go back to the office where he and Isadora copy down my passport number, and I again engage in this dance I’ve learned in Peru: the examination of the paper currency, in this case American Dollars, and the rejection of any bill that is marked (as some are by banks, with a slight swipe of highlighter), or irregular (slight tear at corner, non-straight edge), or worn, or overly creased. In Iquitos a restaurant didn’t want to accept a bill that had been folded. The rate at Anaconda: $50/day, $20 more for ceremony. (Club Med rate: $400/day).

Handing over the cash, I tell them I’m only staying the day, I’ll be leaving first thing in the morning, and I won’t be participating in ceremony that night. To their blank looks, I explain: I’d just had an experience in ceremony I didn’t like, and Don Guillermo isn’t here. It’s a bit awkward, but there’s no discussion; I’m just asked what time I’d like a mototaxi to come in the morning. 9 a.m would be fine, thank you.

I spend more time talking with the Israeli, the Austrian, and meeting some of the other gringos. The Israeli points out that I shouldn’t be surprised by the ethereal, unhealthy mien of the people here – this is a healing center, and people are, in fact, sick. And the more time I spend, and the better I get to know individual stories, the more I find this to be true. The mix here is French, German, Norwegian…and the Russians. Ayahuasca, despite its magnetism and global PR, is still only one plant among thousands of Amazonian medicinals, and the people here are serious about working with the plants. Besides the Austrian, who’s spent years, on and off, in the jungle, and who is founding her own village and healing center, others have come for diets and retreats for anywhere from six weeks to a year. Many live at the outer fringes of the center, in the jungle, in tiny tombas: four posts with a thatch roof, a hammock, a bed, a mosquito net, and tupperware to keep the bugs out of your stuff. There’s a definite monastic discipline involved, a deep desire not only for healing body and/or spirit, but to do so in harmony with nature -- to, in effect, become nature, to invite the plants in, where they will become part of your very being, teachers to be carried with you, even after the diet is closed. It’s profound. If only it didn’t feel like no one was running the show.

By lunch, the Israeli has decided to participate in the evening ceremony, though as the hour approaches, she says she’s afraid. Me, I’m back to my original plan: I’ll sit in, without drinking, check it out. I spend the balance of the sweltering day nearly naked within the tangle of the plants, reading in the hammock of a bare tomba.

* * *

The ceremony house -- maloca in Shipibo – is much bigger than at Club Med, lit by bulbs, uninterrupted in its high, circular space by any walls or rooms (the downside of this being, of course, the added time, and distance logistics of exiting the maloca, finding your sandals, negotiating the path, and finding a toilet, all in the dark, and in mareacion). There are no chairs; only mats, arranged like spokes against the outer screen walls, each with its familiar cluster of accessories.

After sundown, people start to filter in. There’s little, if any talking; several shuffle by wearing nightgowns or pajamas, lie down, snuggle under their blankets. Others meditatively puff on heavy, wooden, conical pipes of mapacho, pulling the smoke over themselves with their hands. Many of the long-term dieters have them -- it’s a fixture in Shipibo ceremony, and a shaman here will carve you one if you ask, inscribing it with sacred geometry, and soaking it overnight in ayahuasca. Several villagers come in, two of the older women in traditional dress – knee-length wrapped skirt with sacred geometry patterning, plain bright green tunic with pink border at the neck. The shamans are among them, the ones taking their place on mats with bigger pillows, and with the cluster of big bottles next to them. Another woman in traditional dress comes in, with a little girl, takes spots distinctly apart from the other villagers. The little girl gets tucked in. They’re from a village down the way; the older woman has a health issue, and this is her equivalent of a doctor’s appointment.

When all are settled, little more than half the mats are occupied. Folks lounge quietly for awhile, smoking, dozing, waiting, but with no tension. With unhurried motions, the man with the biggest pillow sets the big two-liter bottle at the foot of his mat, wraps some toilet paper around his fingers, and cleans a small glass. In a low voice I can barely hear, he says ¿Quien toma ayahuasca? There’s a pause, then someone gets up, squats down in front of him. There’s a murmured exchange, the glass is handed over, a pause as it’s contemplated, then drained. The process goes unnoticed by the about half the room, under their blankets. All told, only a third opt to drink. The shaman stands, walks to the crusty switch, kills the light. Blackness but for the indigo through the screens. Silence but for the jungle.

When all are settled, little more than half the mats are occupied. Folks lounge quietly for awhile, smoking, dozing, waiting, but with no tension. With unhurried motions, the man with the biggest pillow sets the big two-liter bottle at the foot of his mat, wraps some toilet paper around his fingers, and cleans a small glass. In a low voice I can barely hear, he says ¿Quien toma ayahuasca? There’s a pause, then someone gets up, squats down in front of him. There’s a murmured exchange, the glass is handed over, a pause as it’s contemplated, then drained. The process goes unnoticed by the about half the room, under their blankets. All told, only a third opt to drink. The shaman stands, walks to the crusty switch, kills the light. Blackness but for the indigo through the screens. Silence but for the jungle.

Silence for half an hour, maybe more. Then a soft, slurry whistling from the shaman, quiet, rhythmic. More silence. In the distance, two echoing shotgun blasts. One more. Then, at some point, an icaro, strong, rising and falling, joined by another one, overlaying the first, distinct, but at the same time not clashing. Then a woman’s voice, higher, and with markedly different cadence and energy to it. They weave in and out of each other, stopping and starting at different times. Beautiful and moving and living and urgent, subtly powerful even to someone just sitting in the dark listening. I want to keep them with me, put them in a box, break the glass at some future date in case of emergency. I want to join in. And then they move within the room. The shamans have spread out, and are visiting people, singing directly to them, each icaro different for each person, overlapping. I hear one of the Norwegians trying to match the chant, haltingly, during his time – is he being taught? I’m right next to the screen door, and I hear a few squeaky-hinged exits and returns, a handful of, yes, I’m now conversant with the delicate nuances of vomiting, a handful of genteel purges, but overall, no drama. Then only icaros, up, down, and around, moving through the room. For hours. I feel left out, but grateful to be there.

We’d started around 8 p.m; by the time I slip out and head to bed, it’s past one, and the chanting continues to spiral out behind me, into the canopy and the frogs and the bugs and the snakes and the monkeys.

* * *

The next morning, I tell Isadora I’ll be staying. For her part, she hands me back the $20 bills I’d given before, saying there was a problem with all of them, and could I give her different ones. Ceremony is held on specific days. The next one isn’t until tomorrow, my last day in Peru.  

* * * 

The Israeli wants to show me something she’d found exploring the day before, and we walk. Past an empty, cracked swimming pool. Past a water collection tower. The generator building, silent just now. A looming, two-story cinderblock building, a dormitory, with neat rows of outdoor shower and toilet stalls, completely empty, no linens on the beds. And through some trees and into a hillside clearing, vista of the jungle horizon, hot, hot in the direct sun. It’s a garden. Raised beds everywhere, parti-colored shrubs and trees and vines and bushes and plants, plants, plants, each with its fading, hand-painted, wooden sign. Sangre del grado. Achiote. Chiriguayusa. Chacruna. Coca. Dozens of them on this little hillside. In a corner by a collapsed nursery building, I pick a green ayahuasca leaf, shaped like a canoe paddle, as a souvenir bookmark.

At breakfast, the Israeli says she had a beautiful experience in ceremony, but doesn’t understand it. She asked the ayahuasca whether the path of plants was for her, and immediately, doors started closing in front of her, boom, boom, boom, one after the other. Then a white light shone down on her from above. Which was lovely, but she’s not sure what to take away from it. The Austrian doesn’t skip a beat. The Diet of Light. You diet the light. You should look into it. She describes a year-long commitment, carried out in the regular world, but monastic and strict and simple -- no pork, no sex, there are other things, none of them to do with vegetalismo, they can find out what. The more she talks, the more the Israeli’s eyes, yes, light up, and she sits back, nodding. She’s gone before lunchtime, among her last words: I feel so complete leaving here, so happy. So happy.

That day, I get to know some folks a little better, including a young German who’s finishing out a three-month diet, and a Russian who appears to have gone native. He wears broad, colorful beaded Shipibo bracelets on each wrist, each one a different sacred geometry, each ones’ pattern from a specific plant. Carries a Shipibo shoulder bag, in which he keeps, among other things, his pipe and mapacho, never far from his lips. He’s been at the center six months, is leaving with the Austrian, and makes a wavy, downhill motion with his hand to describe the changes there during his stay.

* * * 

After dinner, I poke around the two-deep disaster of a book case in the meeting room, an eclectic collection in English, Russian, French, and Spanish. Buried in the lower back corner is what looks like a big sketch pad; I open it to discover the center’s erstwhile guest book – page after page, stretching back years, of encomiums and poems and drawings, a forest of exclamation points in half a dozen languages. All addressed directly to Don Guillermo, some mentioning apprentices now gone. Nearly every one speaking of joy discovered, healing achieved, loads lifted, answers found, gratitude everlasting. (There are a couple exceptions. One requests the mats in the maloca be thicker. Another complains of seeing a mouse in their bungalow. Who writes this in a guestbook?)

I sit on the floor with the book between my feet, feeling again like I’d somehow gotten the bus schedule wrong. Right bus stop, wrong time. I want what’s on those pages, and what I’ve been seeing to my left and my right. There was a guy at Club Med whose experience was unsubtle, if terrifying: a tiger had come bounding out of the jungle, knocked him flat, and started eating him alive, great scything bites into his chest, huge chunks torn from him. Then, gory white snout, it had loped back into the jungle, just behind some trees, and started spitting out what it had devoured, the stuff coming out black and foul.

Give me that.

And at the same time, I know it’s not something I can just go over and pick up off a shelf, it’s just too subtle, there are too many variables, and, I know, it’s likely the harder I try, the further it will recede. And I’m okay with the idea of things coming when they need to. But there’s also this one airplane, it’s got a pilot, and he’s got a watch, and this thought makes me feel a bit subdued.

One of the slow, dusty dogs has found his way into the room, is nosing around behind me. I hear him start the rhythmic prelude to vomiting, do his thing on the plank floor, then lugubriously lap it back up again.

* * * 

One of the seniors at Club Med was a former apprentice who’d participated in over 250 ceremonies, including an ongoing series with a female shaman back home in the U.S (Amazonian shamans are increasingly touring, bringing ceremony to other countries via a network of Western apprentices. In the States, it’ strictly underground; with the exception of a couple hard-fought, Supreme Court-sanctioned cases, ayahuasca ceremony is considered a criminal activity). She’d remarked on her perception of the masculinity of Don Alberto’s icaros, and how it was so different with a female shaman, and, me passing out and all, perhaps I’d benefit from a different approach. Which made a certain kind of sense.

I ask the Austrian whether I can request to work specifically with the woman I’d heard the other night, and how might that work. She says yes, of course, her name is Rosa, she’s Guillermo’s half-sister. (And by the way, they’d been making their way to my mat the other night, everyone is worked with, drinking or no drinking, only I’d left too soon. Man!) Just before we drink, I should tell Stefan, and he’ll arrange it.

By that evening, I feel comfortable within this odd, wispy, gentle group. I’m propped in the maloca next to the German and the Austrian, adjacent to the big-pillow mat, smoking fat mapacho cigarettes, they their pipes. With Don Ricardo gone, it will be just Don Antonio and Rosa tonight. The villagers trickle in as before, possibly more this time, and I know from the Austrian now which are Don Guillermo’s grandsons, which is his mother; the one nursing the infant his granddaughter-in-law. It’s a family affair. The Russian is wearing full traditional ceremonial garb: long hair down, double bracelets, loose white tunic and pants printed with bold black sacred geometry. With the exception of the older women, most of the Shipibo are wearing jeans and soccer jerseys. I buttonhole Stefan, who introduces me to Maestra Rosa, translates for me, as I want to be clear as possible, my intention in ceremony, my request that she assist. She nods, expressionless. As we sit in the lounging-around period, I notice her (watching? Looking at? Appraising?) me from time to time. Inscrutable. And somehow I’m glad she is.

When it comes my time to drink, Don Antonio places a thick finger at a certain height on the glass before pouring, makes an enquiring noise: Hm?  This, of course, is a pivotal moment, the dosage, and though by now I have some context and experience, I also know enough to understand every brew is different, and anyway, it’s technically the shaman’s call as to how much they think you need, given where you’re at, not what you want. The little mono-syllable is equal parts I suggest this and here’s a starting position, you can negotiate. Which of course I can, but from what I can tell it’s similar to previous dosages, so I consent. Bottoms up. Yechh. And lights out.

* * * 

From the beginning of mareacion, I’m ill-at-ease. There’s nothing terrible, no evil in the room, the icaros providing a strong through-line, but there is a definite intelligence confronting me. A sentience to the twining vines and flowers and thorns and shapes, and it’s an intelligence I feel could cut either way -- beneficent or malicious -- in an instant. So though I feel it pressing up against my chest and forehead, I’m not willing to let it in. I can’t lie still for more than a moment, tossing, turning, and I realize I’m probably dodging what’s coming at me, unwilling to give it a stationary target. Riding the brakes, I open my eyes from time to time.

After maybe an hour, there’s some activity at my feet, and I recognize the shape of the Austrian, standing, along with a couple others, speaking in low voices. Then someone tapping my feet, saying something I don’t understand. In jungle Spanish. It’s Rosa. She wants me to sit up. She’s probably less than arm’s length from me. And she starts her icaro, and I cringe.

It’s a high, thin keening, a crone’s voice, it comes at me from up and to the left, it comes at me in sideways fashion, and it seems to me this is the feminine way, the feminine power, this flanking, sideways approach, this indirect envelopment, this thin adamantine force like an oyster knife, finding the tiniest crack and prying open. It’s a prying song, it’s inexorable, and it’s almost too much to bear. I want to get away. I want to get away, and at the same time, I feel, not love, but cool benevolence, the inflexible compassion of a physician – yes, this is unpleasant, but it’s for your own good. This is what it takes.

This is what it takes, so I sit with it, though I can’t sit with it, and I start swaying, I start davening, a snake charmed, switching up the oscillation, dissipating as best I can the vortex of energy both directed at me, and rising within. And as the icaro changes register, she unfolds, she unfolds, slowly, in the most horrific fashion, spider-crab legged fingered things, long, thin, smooth, articulated, in a stick-spreading blossom around her; curved, knitting needle talons reaching for me from the sides, from the sides. And I’m weaving like a boxer, dodging, yet keeping myself within the zone by force of will, letting the terrifying, inexorable, clicky talons come in because of the clinical will behind them: You asked. And here I am now. And this is how it is.

This is how it is, stay with it, and I start to sweat, I’m burning up, I drag the blanket from my lap. I start ticing, my head twitching down to my right shoulder, to my right shoulder, to my right shoulder. I start yawning, continuously, eyes hemorrhaging tears. It’s dark, it’s all darkness, it’s sadness and it’s despair and it’s viscous and dull and dumb, and it’s oozing up out of me, like out of a sponge, out of my pores, out of any exit, I’m wiping my eyes, yawning, gaping, and still I’m swaying, the icaro is relentless, the icaro the emetic, and I find my bucket and I begin to vomit, thin, black, black, blackness. And I know this is it, and I know this isn’t everything.

And she sits with me and sings with me for maybe three quarters of an hour, who can tell, until it’s crested, and receded, and cooled, and she’s speaking to me, giving me instruction in the dark I can’t understand, guiding me with her hands to bend my head forward as she blows something onto the crown of my head, onto my extended arms and prayer hands, and I recognize the motions of a venteado, she’s sealing me back up again, and as she finishes I grasp her hands in mine and place them on my forehead and say thank you, thank you Maestra, and she says yes, yes, and something else, and pats me on the shoulder and leaves.

And I sit and cry then, wracking sobs, grateful for the anonymous dark, sit and cry in relief, and in disbelief, and in gratitude, and in regret. This being my first, and my last night in ceremony, in this place melting away before my eyes.

* * *

Morning. Sunlight.

A couple hours before leaving, on a tip from the German, I ask the ladies in the kitchen whether they’d prepare me something for the plane trip. I’ll still be dieting for a time. As the mototaxi pulls up, they produce an ungainly stack of Styrofoam: a half dozen boiled potatoes, a half dozen boiled eggs, and a whole chicken cut in two, smashed flat, bones and all, then wood-fire grilled nearly to jerky). I’m waiting on the Russian, who last-minute has asked to piggy-back on my ride to town.

I’d run into the Austrian and the German at dawn, the Austrian smoking her pipe at the ungodly hour. You did some good work last night, she’d said. The three of us had talked, and she’d said Rosa was the kind of shaman who drew out darkness. Other shamans, like Don Ricardo, amplify light. Which, in its way, was harder. Don Guillermo could do that, and his icaros were widely revered, their beauty incredible. I asked where he was; I’d heard it was the U.S – did she know where?

Where you came from, she’d said. He’s been where you came from. 

I’ll open you, I’ll open your thoughts
And by opening them, I’ll fill you with joy
Filling you with joy
I’ll straighten your thoughts
And by straightening them, I’ll straighten your body
And now I’ll heal you to the depths of your heart
And by healing you, I’ll fill you with immense joy
And by filling you, I’ll return life to your body
I’ll return life to your thoughts
I’ll heal your being
I’ll heal your body
With the powerful essence of the plants
With the impeccable essence of the universe
Think now, so that you may be joyous
Remember my words
And so that you may remember them
I’m singing them to you
And though I’m small
I’ve made your thoughts shine
The universe is in harmony
The word is, and ever will be

(Shipibo icaro)

For some really good, cross-disciplinary context on the science, philosophy, anthropology, practice, and direct, first-person experience of all this, complete with decent CGI of visions, I recommend this documentary, streamed for free, no vomiting required. Don Guillermo was one primary source.

Other Worlds: A Journey to the Heart of Shipibo Shamanism