The Disenchantment of an Apprentice
A middle-aged Westerner in search of spiritual answers comes across ayahuasca by chance, and the experience awakens in him a new conception of himself and the world. So, he leaves everything behind, moves to a community in the Amazon, and places himself under the tutelage of a shaman. The rest is history.
At the beginning of the ceremony, the Shipibo maestro Roger López from San Francisco de Yarinacocha offers the prodigious drink to his Japanese apprentice.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 191 of Cáñamo magazine, November 2012.
With the intention of becoming a shaman, Jean Claude had been visiting San Francisco de Yarinacocha regularly since the first year of the 21st century. He was already popular among the locals in 2004, during my second visit: even those community members who had never had a close relationship with him referred to him with familiarity. One of the village children, whom he had sponsored, bore his name. I, burdened by the illusion of visiting a community without tourists, without Westerners, found myself inwardly annoyed by his influence. Years later, when I returned to carry out my fieldwork, Jean Claude had been living with a shaman for four months, devoted to learning the mysterious intricacies of plant medicine. I admit that between the curiosity and admiration I felt for him, something akin to envy grew—intense enough to restrain my desire to get to know him.
Before overcoming my antipathy, I saw him twice. One afternoon, accompanied by two female friends, he was arranging with an ayahuasquera the ceremony they would celebrate that night. I was on the other side of the yard, and I pretended he didn’t exist, but I didn’t miss a detail. His voice was hoarse, deep; his laughter boisterous and sincere. The young women, who had never taken the remedy, voiced the usual apprehensions, which Jean Claude dispelled with jokes. The second time was on the occasion of a theatrical performance organized in the village by the NGO of some friends. Jean Claude organized the event and presented it, addressing the locals with a naturalness I still lacked.
A greeting, a smile, a conversation that unfolds, and the obviousness that beneath others’ skin stir illusions and sufferings, noble ideals or petty meannesses, fears, aspirations… And the barriers fall. With Jean Claude it happened to me in the taxi, on the way to Pucallpa, which was driving empty looking for passengers through the community. With a gesture of his long arm, he stopped the car. He had lost weight, which I attributed to the diet. Upon entering and discovering me in the back seat, he extended his hand warmly. In his gaunt face, his large blue eyes stood out—an open gaze that dispelled my misgivings. Two minutes later, like in the long-postponed reunion of two old friends, Jean Claude was unraveling what had brought him to San Francisco de Yarinacocha.
A middle-aged Westerner in search of spiritual answers comes upon ayahuasca fortuitously, and the experience awakens him to a new conception of himself and the world. He recognizes the emptiness of Western life; he catches a glimpse of the power of his inner self, until then buried by worldly conventions; he feels compassion for the sickness and anguish he sees in family and friends; he begins to offer ceremonies in his country of origin but accepts that his knowledge is insufficient; he resolves to step aside, renounce the privileges acquired in his professional career, settle in the jungle, and devote himself to the study of plant medicine… A frequent sequence up to that point; what distinguished Jean Claude’s path was his decision to set up a natural medicine center open to visitors from around the globe. “A place where anyone who wants to can come to learn,” he explained enthusiastically. “The condition I set for my maestro is that no money be charged, but that people collaborate as they see fit,” he said, looking at me intently, giving those words a special intensity. He immediately lamented the commercialization of plant medicine. “Now anyone calls themselves a maestro: they give ayahuasca, make people see a few little colors, and that’s it. But the work of ayahuasca is much more.” The lament gave way to indignation: he couldn’t stand the “business” (shaking his head) “of shamanism”; no more than the change the village had experienced since electricity had arrived five years earlier.
To learn the secrets of ayahuasca medicine, it is necessary to follow a strict dietary regimen that excludes fats, salt, sugar, meat, or spicy foods.
An Arcadia, a Walden, a Utopia—that was what Jean Claude intended to create on his maestro’s land, on the outskirts of the village. When I visited for the first time, several cabins to host visitors were still under construction, as well as a large ceremonial maloca, a kitchen, and his own house—large, spacious, and well finished. In between stood old fruit trees and newly planted medicinal plants that Jean Claude named one by one, describing their properties enthusiastically; in a large garden grew cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, and peppers; a fish farm, for which they had had to hire an expensive excavator, would provide fish for the establishment. The project had required a radical investment: he gathered all his savings, liquidated his assets, left a well-paid job, asked for financial support from some friends, and said goodbye to his partner, as if out of fear of a possible change of heart he wanted to close off any possibility of turning back. “My goal is to stay here five years and learn to heal so I can return to my country and work as a healer,” he stated firmly. Behind his apparent confidence, however, he had doubts: “I’m afraid I might’ve screwed up. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in this situation, but sometimes…” And he confessed contritely how the budget had multiplied due to the builders’ lack of foresight. I listened to him, already with sympathy, between admiration for his boldness and fear of his downfall; it wasn’t a minor detail, I thought (and kept to myself), that the entire investment had been made on his maestro's land.
The Shipibo community of San Francisco had been swallowed up by the irresistible voracity of the nearby city. The once-prodigious forest was nothing more than a desolate thicket; the lagoon barely offered a few small fish, insufficient to feed the growing population. Daily food was now obtained with money, a profound change for a people who had always drawn abundant, varied, and nutritious food from the immediate natural surroundings. The villagers were submerged in the maelstrom of the market: the young dreamed of higher education, chasing the chimera of professionalism; the elders adapted their ancestral knowledge (ayahuasca, crafts) to sell to tourists, believed to come from a world of endless money. For their part, the Westerners visiting San Francisco hoped to confirm their idealization of the indigenous shamans: spirituality, natural goodness, practical wisdom, selflessness… Between the two groups there arose an essential divergence between expectations and stubborn reality, a problematic intersection of interests. As if he had guessed my doubts, Jean Claude praised his maestro. “I trust him completely. He’s a very good person. We know each other very well. It’s been many years drinking together. With his help I’ll fulfill my goal, and when I return to France I’ll be strong and withstand all the crap over there.”
Martin, a 28-year-old Slovak, spent several months in San Francisco, dieting with the powerful plant toé (Brugmansia sp.).
I will never forget the enthusiasm with which a few days later he appeared before the assembly to present his project. The community chief opened the session inviting him to explain how it would benefit the neighbors. The question, which had a tricky tone, was precisely the one Jean Claude wanted to answer. With a solemn voice, measuring every word, enjoying himself like a theater actor on stage, he emphasized that the project was not only his, but also of many other people in Europe and, above all, of his maestro. “He is the one who has healed us, that is why we are supporting him. I am going to diet here for five years and when I finish my apprenticeship and return to my country, the houses and goods will remain in my maestro's name.” The man was in the front row, watching attentively; he seemed overwhelmed by the wheel of fortune. “This is not a business,” continued Jean Claude. “We are not going to charge anyone, but people will give voluntarily.” His statement awakened a murmur of strangeness, perhaps approval. “There are many benefits for the community: all the workers of the center are from the community; each person who arrives contributes ten soles for the authorities and ten soles for the police; when the fish farm is producing, ten percent of the fish is for the community; if the crops do well there will be tomatoes for the community at a reasonable price.” And perhaps because he felt the assembly’s acceptance, a shadow of joy showed in his smile. “There is no intention of making a business,” he stressed throughout his presentation. That was his big bet: to prove that Western visitors, enlightened by ayahuasca, would collaborate economically without needing to demand money upfront. Of course, I thought at that moment, that was the place he would have wanted to find the first time he visited San Francisco.
Jean Claude’s spiritual enthusiasm found a few hours later its realistic counterpoint in my host, the ayahuasquero Roger López, Suipino, owner of the most visited natural medicine center in San Francisco, proud to be one of the few entrepreneurs in the community, much admired by his own. When at night I asked him about Jean Claude’s decision not to charge, he shook his head from side to side, with a skeptical grimace. “Ayahuasqueros have always charged for our work. To my grandfather, the patient who didn’t have money gave him food. The sick who took him a long time to cure stayed afterwards to live with him to help him tend the chagra and paid with work.” He clicked his tongue and got slightly annoyed: “Now the gringos get upset if we ask them for money. But if you don’t put a price on this work, do you think they will give something? They give a pittance, or leave without giving anything.” For Roger, there was no doubt: he considered himself a professional who charged for his services. “Who is going to feed our children? Now everything is money. How are we going to pay for their university?” And, raising his eyebrows, he predicted: “It’s not going to work, you’ll see.”
When a few weeks later I visited Jean Claude for the second time he was accompanied by two founding partners, to whom he had given ayahuasca in Lyon. “We had no idea what ayahuasca was, and we came for therapeutic reasons. We didn’t know anything about visions or colors,” explained the woman, before a plate of salad and cooked vegetables. “In fact, the first ceremony was hell,” continued he, who had suffered from insomnia for years. “The second ceremony and the third and the fourth were hell.” Both noticed a clear improvement in their condition and decided to support Jean Claude’s project financially, whom they regarded with reverence. “We are going to stay here two months. First we are going to cleanse ourselves. Then our goal is not to learn to cure but at least to understand what this world consists of.” “The important thing is the shaman,” interjected Jean Claude. “The plant is a purgative, and it is strong, but what heals, the constructive or the destructive, the shaman brings. That I have very clear.” And he tried to make us understand how spiritual healing is performed. “An illness is, so to speak, a demon you have in a certain organ; as if that demon was beside you and with its tentacles was touching and damaging your organ. What the shaman does in the mareación is cut those tentacles and then clean. And he does that through singing.” We spent the afternoon over tea, ranting against consumer society (our favorite topic). When saying goodbye Jean Claude informed me that he would finally start his first diet: six months of isolation in his brand-new house (he could only see his maestro), following a strict diet. He presented it as the decisive test. I wished him luck, hugged him, and missed him already.
Many natural medicine centers in the Amazon offer visitors the opportunity to become familiar with the world of ayahuasca.
Not merely content or optimistic, when I ran into Jean Claude walking through the village streets several months later, he was euphoric. He was little more than a bundle of bones, yet full of intense energy—everything but sickly. “I can’t touch you,” he said, raising his hands to his chest. “I haven’t fully finished the diet yet.” We walked toward the lagoon in the beautiful San Francisco sunset. “Very intense, very good, and very hard. It’s an experience I recommend to everyone,” he explained with a hint of condescension, as though speaking from a higher level. And he did seem to be: overwhelming, exultant. He had followed the diet and the isolation strictly. “The maestro’s work is almost as hard as the apprentice’s because he must absorb the frustrations, the bad energies of the one dieting. The maestro redirects them.”
We sat on the dock; the lagoon opened up, beautiful—its greenish surface dotted with small canoes under a cottony blue sky. He spoke about the Bible, the only book his maestro had allowed him to read. He justified its most violent passages and pointed to the People of Israel as an example: “You have a path, and around you are people who prevent you from reaching your goal—and that’s why war, destruction, and fire.” From exultation, he slipped into exaltation; his discourse drifted from the universal love he had once embraced. “Staying on this path is going to bring me problems,” he said enigmatically. He repeated the word “difficulties” several times, without clarifying, and finally admitted that one of them was financial. “Visitors aren’t coming.” He was disappointed; despite his resolve not to charge, he had hoped the center would generate income. “It was a punishment because one of us misbehaved in daily life. But we took ayahuasca, and we saw it, and we agreed on the solution: humility. When you lose humility, punishment comes. Ayahuasca gives you great personal power, and you can start to feel superior, like a guru. That happened to me during my last period in France—I felt like a guru.”
Jean Claude began his second diet several weeks later. We only saw each other once during that time, and he quickly apologized for the exaltation of our previous meeting. He was calmer; still determined to complete his five years of training. My fieldwork would end long before his next break, so we said goodbye, feeling the emotion you feel for a friend who’s setting off on a dangerous adventure—someone you might never see again.
Seven months later, I wrote him an email asking about the progress of his training. His reply took several weeks and, when it arrived, it seemed less a response than the opposite. Jean Claude wrote that he had returned to Lyon to help a gravely ill friend. Since then, he had devoted himself “completely” to plant medicine and claimed to have “many patients.” His only reference to San Francisco was brief and detached, incompatible with his former enthusiasm: “Returning isn’t in my plans for now, also because I don’t have any money left.” Also? So there was another reason—unwritten but thought? Then he clarified: “Surely I’ll return sooner or later, even if just to get some ayahuasca and visit the few friends I still have there.” I couldn’t help interpreting that “surely” as unlikely, and the “sooner or later” as more never than sooner. The “few friends” hinted at “many non-friends,” and the “even if just” suggested that nothing truly bound him to San Francisco anymore. Not a single mention of the fate of the center into which he had poured all the money he could gather, all the hope he had. Not a word about his relationship with his maestro. Not a lament about the frustrated training process that was supposed to last five years.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have written to him again—shouldn’t have prodded at his experience or risked coming across as nosy—but I did. I claimed to be preparing an essay about intercultural relations in various contexts and asked him directly about his relationship with his maestro and the fate of the project. Weeks passed, then months, with no reply. I wrote a second time. This time, I received an automated message notifying me that the address barimetsa@xyz.com did not exist. Bari Metsá, Beautiful Sun, was the Shipibo name his maestro had given him.
