Francisco Montes in Visions
An ayahuasquero since before birth. Disciplined apprentice to several healers. Keeper of an extensive botanical garden with hundreds of medicinal species. Brewer of a powerful remedy. Painter of international renown. Teacher to foreigners. Sad witness to a vanishing knowledge.
Francisco Montes, with his crown, chants the ayahuasca before the ceremony. In the background, Rachel Willay.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 202 of Cáñamo magazine, October 2014.
THE BABY. The most common version is that pregnant women cannot take ayahuasca. The tradition in Francisco Montes’ family of healers was different. “In my village, women take it up to four months of pregnancy. I have taken it since my mother’s womb. That’s why I know these things about ayahuasca. Nobody will fool me.” Grandparents, uncles, aunts, everyone in the Capanahua village of Tamanco, in the Lower Ucayali, was linked to the tumultuous world of ayahuasca. The parents, tragically: when Montes was four years old, his mother was killed by an enemy sorcerer; a couple of years later they finished off his father. Dark revenge. The boy decided to learn. “I’m going to be a good healer to defend myself from sorcerers, to apply harm when necessary.”
THE ICARO. The grandmother took charge of the orphan Panchito. She gave him ayahuasca at six years old (an early age; it usually happens at puberty). They entered the jungle at dusk and, under a huge tree, the grandmother explained to the kneeling boy that he would experience dizziness and that he should not be afraid. She offered him the little cup of the remedy. The waiting, the nocturnal symphony of the jungle, the calm barely disturbed by the inevitable mosquitoes. The crash of thunder, the flash of lightning, the sensation that the world had broken. The boy wanted to cry and run but only screamed. When the grandmother blew tobacco smoke, Panchito had already died, a thousand years before, and from the underworld of the fractured earth, thousands of children howled, swallowed and crushed by an infernal mechanism. Panchito pulled a chain, the children came out, formed a spiral around him, safe. He heard music. “It’s the perfumer,” said a voice, “don’t be afraid.” The old woman arrived preceded by an unusual fragrance, her white hair and blue eyes shining; she approached Panchito and danced for him, moving her flowing dress to softly fan the child’s face. The owner of the perfume approached Panchito and sang him an icaro, the first healing song of the future maestro Montes. Hours later, when the boy returned to ordinary reality, the grandmother gave him advice: “My child, you were born to be a good healer. Your mother and father died because of the evil arts of sorcerers, but this that I am giving you is not to do harm to anyone.” Since then, the apprentice regularly took ayahuasca with the grandmother, attended her ceremonies, learned her preparations. “I saw my grandmother singing her icaros to a liquid and turning it into powder. Imagine that power. Who? I don’t see anyone now.” The old woman died, she didn’t die, she had announced months before: at one hundred and ten years old she would disappear in the river, transform into a mermaid or boa, a powerful water being. That’s why the day she went to bathe and didn’t return, no one worried about looking for her.
The origin of ayahuasca and chacruna was the first painting that Francisco Montes’ spiritual allies suggested to him.
THE CORONATION. The boy became a young man; the apprentice dieted until reaching the rank of disciple: under the supervision of his uncle and maestro, Francisco attended to patients with minor problems. But young Amazonians must travel, see the world to understand its variety, its limitless extent, to test themselves against strangers. With a Cocama healer from his paternal family, he acquired the wisdom of tobacco. He dieted with the plant for eight weeks: no salt or sugar, no sex or conversation, no fat or distractions; alone in the forest against himself. Tobacco infusions and a full pipe he had to smoke completely. “How it makes you sweat cold!” At the end of the diet, the spirit of tobacco gave him the magical song. “During ceremonies, there are people who cannot vomit, it’s frustrating because vomiting is the release. Then I sing to them and at the second… Puaaahhhjj! They vomit. Because I am managing the tobacco icaro.” Talking about tobacco awakens my desire to smoke. I interrupt the conversation, look for two mapacho cigarettes, light one and offer another to Francisco. He refuses with a wave of his hand and observes condescendingly: “I smoke because that’s what the healer uses, but I do it with discipline, only in ceremonies or when giving medicine, that’s when I smoke. During my work, it’s all about the cigarette.” I feel like a vicious profaner while Francisco recounts the diets he undertook with different ayahuasqueros (Cocamas, Shipibos, Boras, Asháninkas) and the more than three hundred icaros in unknown languages that he claims to have received. After his thirties, he returned to his village, to his uncle: it was time for the disciple to become a master. To face the coronation ceremony, he had to fast for five days: in his weaknee he saw flashes , thought about death when “an encyclopedia” of wisdom came to him, “which you don’t even know how to receive.” On the appointed day, he took ayahuasca and met his uncle in a room, in front of a large table where two dozen masters sat, witches on one side, doctors on the other. His uncle, his advocate, gave a detailed account of the merits of his apprentice. The jury had no observations. “Which side do you want to join?” they asked. Francisco didn’t have to think; his discipline inclined him toward the doctors, who crowned him with a headdress made of condor and hawk feathers. The same crown he wears today, almost three decades later, every night he takes ayahuasca.
THE GARDEN. Francisco Montes says that vision is also “an idea or a project that you carry out,” like Sachamama, on the Iquitos-Nauta road, a land he inherited from his healer aunt and converted into a botanical garden. Sachamama: the great anaconda that lives in the trees, mother and protector of vegetation. “Mythologically, if Sachamama lives, the jungle lives too. This botanical garden must never end, that’s why we gave it that name.” He tells me this beside an extraordinary ayahuasca vine that twists on the ground and climbs thirty meters up the crown of an imposing chonta caspi tree. “Every chonta caspi tree has an ayahuasca vine beside it. What an incredible relationship between them!” Francisco counts twelve hundred different plant species spread over nearly ninety winding hectares, which we traverse briskly: at sixty years old, Francisco has the body of a marathon runner. He is an active man who enjoys physical work: when guiding me among his plants, he cannot pass them without stopping to weed with his machete. “The wisdom of the maestro and his medicine come from the plants, that’s why it’s important that the maestro takes care of them. I live from them, and they also live from me.” There are several hectares of ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) and huambisa (Diplopterys cabrerana, which contains DMT), the main ingredients of his remedy. Surprisingly, he is one of the few ayahuasqueros in Iquitos who works only with plants he has grown himself. “I’ve never needed to buy ayahuasca. I’ve always tried to make my own material, as my grandmother taught me. To harvest ayahuasca, there’s a way, you have to do a process of dieting, praying to it, talking to it, explaining what you want it for.” Regarding the large ayahuasca and chacruna trade in Iquitos, he has a poor opinion. “They do business in the market because it no longer exists in the wild. But in my view, it’s not right because anyone makes the remedy without knowing the wisdom of the plant, and they don’t respect it. Each maestro has to harvest from their own plants, those they are connected with. It’s necessary to manage the energy of the plant, its feelings, so that it truly becomes good healing medicine.”
Francisco Montes next to one of his huambisa plants (Diplopterys cabrerana), whose leaves contain DMT and are added to the ayahuasca brew.
THE REMEDY. Not just ayahuasca and huambisa—as he learned from his grandmother, Francisco adds tobacco to the brew: “As a laxative and for the purge.” And chiric caspi: “To cure you of all those aches and pains you’ve got.” Canelilla: “To open up your visions.” Chiric sanango: “To give stronger colors. I add twelve leaves and ten little flowers.” Guayusa: “For people who are very hard-headed and can’t have visions or can’t understand the vision. This plant is what opens you up. When they tell me, ‘I can’t have visions…’ ‘OK, you’re going on a guayusa diet.’ And the next day: ‘Oh, maestro, what a wonder.’” I agree: around seven in the evening I leave behind the simple wall-less hut, isolated and peaceful, where each patient stays. I light the narrow path through the vegetation and the dense chorus of crickets, toads, and birds. The temple is a simple construction without walls, on packed earth, with a table at the far end and long benches on either side. There are two French patients and one German; all three are over forty. Francisco and his assistant, the French healer Rachel Willay, sit behind the table, focused, surrounded by amulets. They sing icaros to the ayahuasca, smoke mapacho. Before offering the remedy, Francisco approaches each patient: he knows their problems, gives them advice. When he comes to me with the cup in hand, in the half-light, he seems like an old hermit, gaunt and solemn. The remedy is thick, bubbling, it makes me nauseous and gag. “Salud,” he says, and blows out the candle. The dizziness arrives quickly: my body becomes heavy, my arms feel weighed down, nausea knocks me onto the bench. The vomiting comes, heralded by waves of heat and cold sweat; I don’t remember ever vomiting so quickly, so easily. Defeated, I lie back and an extraordinary world of geometric figures, rays, and flashes opens up: the entrance to the inner dimensions of my being. It’s true: “What a wonder, maestro!” Small beings with helmets and lab coats work tirelessly inside my body, keeping it functioning: an extraordinary piece of engineering that Francisco’s remedy lets me understand. Workers, cranes, cables, scaffolding. I see the problem: a rusty pipe where there shouldn’t be iron. It has to be changed, following the icaros of Rachel and Francisco. Yes, that’s better.
THE HORSEMEN. Taking care of a 90-hectare botanical garden requires a lot of money. There was a moment of crisis fifteen years ago. There was no money. One night, depressed, he took ayahuasca to consult his allies: the spirits of the plants. “There’s no way to take care of you all, so I’ll have to leave this,” he told them. “I’ll dedicate myself to healing people and live in the city, because that’s where the patients are. Anyone will come and destroy you, cut down all the trees.” The answer came from a Pachamama: “You cannot abandon this, you must stay in this place.” “But how will I do it?” he lamented. “This garden will become world-famous,” she said, showing him four horsemen (of the apotheosis): the white horse came from the United States, the bay from Switzerland, the blue from Germany, the yellow from England. “These are the horses that will accompany your work with painting, because that is what you’re going to do to save Sachamama.” Francisco responded, surprised: “But I’m not an artist, I’ve never painted, I don’t even like it.” The woman ignored him, showed him the bark of the llanchama tree, which he would use as a canvas, and each of the plants that would produce the natural dyes. Then she showed him a vision of his first painting, The origin of ayahuasca and chacruna, and continued until she engraved fifteen images into the new painter’s mind. Francisco did as she advised: after three months, he had the paintings. “But what paintings!” he thought, dismayed. “If someone gives me two dollars for each…” One afternoon, walking in Iquitos, he ran into Patty, a woman from the United States who had once brought tourists to his garden. And she happened to be with a group of twenty tourists; and he was depressed, about to close his garden; and she said her group wanted to learn about medicinal plants, that they’d see each other later; and he, hopeless, said he had paintings for sale; and she wanted to see them and told him to bring them to the hotel. And when she saw The origin of ayahuasca and chacruna, she said “This one’s mine” (the American woman on the white horse). And the other tourists followed their guide and snatched the paintings from his hands in a matter of minutes. “What’s the price?” was the logical question, to which Francisco went silent and Patty (providentially) replied: “One hundred dollars.” And so the novice painter pocketed fifteen hundred dollars in a single afternoon. Months later, riding the yellow horse, the English woman appeared, with terrible back pain. Francisco says he cured her lifelong condition in four weeks. And it turns out that the woman had a foundation, and the foundation had an art gallery, and in the art gallery there was space for thirty paintings that Francisco Montes, painter and shaman, exhibited. His first (but not last) trip to England, and a gain of twenty-five thousand pounds. I don’t know the details of the other horsemen of the apotheosis, but they took him far: he has exhibited in France, Germany, the United States, Japan… With the money he earns, he buys adjacent land and reforests, reforests.
Next to one of the largest ayahuasca vines I’ve ever had the chance to see.
THE VISIONS. The “gringos” (subjugated by omnipresent screens) arrive at Sachamama eager to see (on a full, kaleidoscopic screen), their minds loaded with Amaringo-style crowded imagery, fabulous testimonials, and the desire for revealing visions. They want to see so they can tell. “They deceive themselves: when they encounter reality, it’s something else entirely.” The reality is that, for those who arrive ill, Francisco Montes tells them: “Don’t crave visions, because visions won’t heal you. Crave to receive the medicine, healing. That’s why I speak very clearly. What do you want, what have you come to find?” The reality is that visions are rare, especially for first-timers. “It’s the plant that opens our vision. You don’t decide. You ask, sometimes it doesn’t give. That’s why, to have visions, you must not be thinking about visions. If you’re anxious for visions, it’s like that part closes off.” Francisco himself only seeks visions when he needs material for his paintings. “I don’t look for visions, I don’t rely on vision but on intuition because that helps me feel what’s happening with the patient. If I’m immersed in visions, I won’t be able to tend to my work, I won’t feel what’s going on with the patient, why you’re vomiting, why you’re not.”
THE TELEVISION. Francisco’s maestros never charged. “It was their will.” Today’s teachers “have learned to speak in pure dollars.” He sees this evolution as “simply the result of human life,” without dramatizing. Francisco charges five hundred dollars per week; he does not accept stays shorter than two weeks, nor tourists in a hurry. Some become apprentices: “Foreigners can be good healers. It depends on the will and on time. There’s no color or race here; if you want it, you must commit to the discipline the maestro gives you. That’s it. If you do a good process, stay disciplined, the path opens to you.” Francisco gets angry when talking about a well-known spiritual center in Iquitos that gives students a shaman certificate after just three months. He’s upset because apprentices arrive from other centers without having learned anything. “They just take their money.” He gets irritated at the proliferation of foreign little shamans. “‘I’m already a maestro,’ they say. Ask them, interview them, they won’t answer anything. The preparation of the medicine—that’s where the most delicate part lies. Many add toé (Brugmansia spp.) to the ayahuasca, so it blows your mind and you never return to normal. They think that by giving strong ayahuasca they are good maestros, but it’s no longer up to the medicine; it’s up to the maestro, who has to provide the remedy with the right strength so the patient does well. That’s what I do in my work. I take great care.” And he gets pissed off—pissed off because the ayahuasca shamanism business is mostly in the hands of “gringos.” “It’s a robbery, a mockery they’re making of us. And there’s no law that can stop it.” And he grows sad seeing how young Indigenous people have lost interest in this valuable knowledge. “This science itself is a blessing that came from God, but these cultures are being lost, have really been lost. Now the youth no longer want to engage in these processes, they want their television.”
