The Sweet Purge of the Gringo Shaman
Ron Wheelock, the Purguero, is the only foreigner in Iquitos who serves ayahuasca without a local maestro by his side. Famous for the strength of his brew, passionate and visceral, he has no qualms about speaking openly on seldom-discussed aspects of ayahuasca healing: how it has become a thriving business, or how envy has sparked dangerous shamanic rivalries.
Ron cooks practically every week of the year, not only for his ceremonies, as he sells the remedy to many of the ayahuasca lodges operating in the area.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 199 of Cáñamo magazine, July 2014.
Sitting in Ari’s café at the Plaza de Armas in Iquitos, Ron Wheelock keeps greeting everyone around while we talk. Quetzalcoatl, his son with an Iquiteña woman, quickly finishes an ice cream; Ron only drinks water, as he is completing an ayahuasca diet. The master plant this time is a thorny stick, whose power he will use to repel the spiritual attacks from witches who bother him. “There’s a lot of witchcraft in Iquitos,” he says mysteriously, opening his crystal blue eyes. “Here, when people have a problem with someone else, they don’t go to a lawyer, they go to a witch. They bring the name and a photo, and the witch can cause harm in many ways: bad luck in business, family relationships, health. I don’t know if there are any left now, but before there were witches who could kill with their darts.”
Ron could never have imagined that ayahuasca, which opened the doors of love and the will to help humanity for him, hid a dark reverse side: the terrible spiritual battles that pit shamans against each other, now fueled by the dynamics of the ayahuasca business. “When I started working here, and barely had money to live, they didn’t bother me much, but now my name and work have grown and many envy me because I’m not Peruvian, maybe they think I’m stealing their work. But I always say that the color of your skin or your place of origin doesn’t make the person. We all have the ability to learn.” Generally, ayahuasqueros are reluctant to talk about the wars they face; Ron is not. “I could write a book about the harmful things they do to me during the ‘mareaciones’: they send demons, evil spirits, sometimes with swords, knives, machetes, and they threaten to kill me. Sometimes they hit me with sticks, or throw blood or shit over me, disgusting things I can smell. It all feels very physical, even if it’s not.”
Shortly before a ceremony begins, beside the table where he works, full of amulets and objects of shamanic power.
the path to fame
Another “gringo” (in Iquitos, every foreigner is called that) greets from outside the café and comes in. He is a journalist, American, and has been in the jungle for a few months. He has also written about Ron on his blog, and that post has received the most visits. This interest aroused by the “gringo shaman,” as he is known, is not new: he has already appeared in Peru’s major newspapers and popular publications in his own country, like Hustler, Larry Flint’s magazine. The report was titled Ayahuasca, The Ultimate Mind Fuck, a very inappropriate title for a healing tradition, but it boosted his fame—more people, more money. “For many years, I never charged for my work,” he explains. “Donations, tips, were more than enough for me. But because some people didn’t treat me well, I started charging, though I have never charged a Peruvian; I only charge foreigners, and I keep reasonable prices.” Before leaving the café, as usual, he leaves a generous tip for the waitress.
Ron has prospered through courage and hard work. He is proud to be the only foreign ayahuasquero who offers ayahuasca without the support of a native maestro, which in this unpredictable world is quite an achievement. You have to have a very tough head, a touch of madness, and a past that predisposes you. He was born in a small farming community in Kansas (his origin is still evident in his southern accent, the aesthetic of long thin hair, tattoos, mustache, bare torso). As a child, he competed with his father to see who could grow the biggest vegetables (his father won). At school, he always excelled in intelligence tests, but classes bored him to death, so at fifteen he dropped out of high school and started working: in construction, slaughterhouses, mechanical workshops, and for thirty-six years growing marijuana for sale on the black market. “I think many of the things that happened earlier in my life prepared me for my work with ayahuasca. Growing marijuana helped me understand plants; butchering livestock helped me a lot with anatomy because a pig resembles a human a lot; and working as a mechanic opened my understanding of how things work.”
His friends joked about his desire to take a trip to the Rocky Mountains to find a Native American who would teach him shamanism. He was intrigued by the writings of Carlos Castaneda and other authors, but words were not enough. One day, he came across a specialized shamanism magazine; among the articles he found an ad for a trip to the Amazon jungle; when he learned that the trip would include a ceremony with sacred hallucinogenic plants, he decided to go. That’s how he arrived at the lodge of the well-known ayahuasquero Agustín Rivas in Tamshiyacu, a village near Iquitos. He took ayahuasca twice. Like so many others, his life changed.
Ron poses with a Harley he owns. The ayahuasca business has made him a wealthy man.
PROSPERIty
A few months later, in November 1996, he returned intending to stay for six months and begin his apprenticeship. His first dieta was with ojé (Ficus insípida), a master plant known for its purgative properties, which had him vomiting and defecating until complete cleansing. He barely touched the unsalted rice and plantain allotted to him, isolated in a small house open to nature, with no contact with the maestro or other apprentices except during ceremonies, seeking supernatural communication with the plant spirits. During the last ceremony, something incredible happened. A woman with uterine cancer had decided to forgo chemotherapy and undergo spiritual healing. For some inexplicable reason, Maestro Rivas had entrusted Ron with the woman’s healing. “Is Don Agustín crazy?” Ron wondered, as he had just begun. In the final ceremony shared with the woman, a black panther appeared to Ron: “Why have you called me?” it asked. “We must heal this woman,” he said, and suddenly found himself inside the woman’s body. They reached a pit, jumped in, fell, and landed in the uterus — a filthy stable with several umbilical cords connecting the wall to rotting fetuses. They found an old woman, also connected by an umbilical cord; the panther approached and tore her neck apart. The next day, the woman told him her vision had been identical from her point of view. “A year later, she was alive and telling people that Ron Wheelock had cured her cancer.”
Over the next four years, he frequently returned to Agustín Rivas’s lodge, bringing groups so that his stay was free, and continued his healing and learning process. “It changed me in many ways. I used to worry a lot and had a bad temper; it didn’t take much to irritate me. The way I saw life wasn’t very rational. Thanks to taking ayahuasca over all these years, it’s hard for me to get angry now, things don’t bother me, my understanding is broader.” In 2000, after his first month-long dieta, he decided he would no longer care for adults in lodges; he would establish himself independently. It was tough at first. “Only some Peruvians took with me, but foreigners, when I invited them, said, ‘Sorry Ron, I didn’t come to Peru to take with a gringo from Kansas.’ Gradually they started looking for me, and now, the fact that I speak English is an advantage, because when people take with Peruvians and there’s no translator, if they have a bad experience, they can’t talk to anyone or explain what’s happening to them.”
His prosperity is evident in his large house, built with his own hands on a multi-hectare farm outside Iquitos: good materials, quality furniture (some beautifully crafted by himself), high-end appliances. Ron works with ayahuasca because it is his passion, but he has also learned to profit from it and openly acknowledges this. Much of his income comes from making and selling the remedy. In Iquitos, lodges are proliferating, and many do not prepare their own medicine but buy it; Ron is a preferred supplier, known for potent purges. Although beautiful ayahuasca plants and many other master plants grow on his farm, he rarely harvests them. “I buy most of the ayahuasca I prepare; if I didn’t, I’d run out quickly.” The production chain starts with peasants who plant and sell the vine. “Ayahuasca has become an easily marketable crop,” he explains. “The market is growing because of tourism.” Sometimes, early in the morning, sellers show up at his house carrying two or three hundred kilos of ayahuasca packed in sacks. “I pay a good price because my motto is: treat people well and they’ll treat you well.”
Ron is one of the major buyers of ayahuasca in Iquitos. He processes it himself and exports it abroad.
innovations
After cooking hundreds of times, Ron has become an expert in ingredients and processes and has developed his own recipe, different from the one he learned while cooking for his maestro Agustín Rivas, which used the vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) and chacruna (Psychotria viridis), which contains DMT, the molecule generally attributed to the visionary response. Ron learned from his second master, José Corral Mori, to cook ayahuasca with the leaves of huambisa or chagropanga (Diplopterys cabrerana). Ron explains that while chacruna contains N,N-DMT, huambisa has 5-MEO-DMT, whose visionary effects he considers superior. “Many people in Iquitos are switching to huambisa lately.”
He usually adds other plants, such as the flowers of bobinsana (Calliandra angustifolia), “which give beautiful visions and open the heart chakra,” tobacco, or the leaves of chiric sanango (Brunfelsia grandiflora): “The energy of these plants in the mixture gives me more strength, so the witches don’t bother me; it’s like going into battle with the whole army.” The fighter he no longer wants by his side is the untamable toé (Brugmansia sp.), which contains scopolamine. “I haven’t used it for years, because when, during ceremonies, I was singing, I would blank out, forgetting what I was doing. So I asked ayahuasca: ‘Why does this happen to me?’ and it clearly showed me the toé flower. ‘Never use this plant again,’ it told me.”
Another of his innovations is finely grinding the ingredients with a modern machine: “It breaks down the molecules so extraction during cooking is easier.” Additionally, this technique eases the tedious work of crushing the vine. Ron doesn’t prepare small amounts: each time he cooks, he uses 150 kilos of vine, 20 kilos of huambisa leaves, and small amounts of tobacco, bobinsana, and chiric sanango, plus a secret ingredient he doesn’t want to disclose, which he credits for the good flavor of his remedy. He uses four large pots. Each pot requires 45 gallons of water. The final result ranges between 25 and 40 liters of well-concentrated remedy. The liter sells for 250 dollars.
A few years ago, Ron bought a machine that crushes the vines and leaves so that during the cooking process the active compounds are extracted more easily and the remedy becomes more potent.
gringo shaman
Ron’s second source of income is his own lodge, located on the Iquitos-Nauta highway, where he holds ceremonies twice a week, whether or not he has participants. “I mainly take it for my health. The men in my father’s family are known for dying young. My father died at 58 years old, the same age I am now. My two half-brothers died in their sixties. All of pancreatic cancer. I hope to live to be one hundred years old.” Sometimes he hosts large groups from England or the United States, whom he gives ayahuasca intensively for ten or twelve days. Most Westerners who come to his lodge do not have a specific illness but seek a spiritual experience to pull them out of the dullness of urban societies: “They feel alienated from the people around them, they don’t fit into society, they worry about everything; some have physical illnesses, but most have psychological problems: many people are taking antidepressants and feel like zombies.”
Occasionally, some of these foreigners want to learn, but so far his experiences as a teacher have been disappointing because the students are unable to endure the sexual abstinence, dietary restrictions, and isolation. This doesn’t stop many of them from considering themselves shamans, opening their own lodges, and offering ayahuasca. “They take it three or four times and they’re shamans without doing the diet. How are they going to become shamans without dieting!” he laments indignantly. Despite everything, he continues accepting students, aware that the knowledge he inherited from his teacher is at risk of disappearing. “Every healer has the great responsibility to pass on and share their knowledge with others. I talk to many ayahuasqueros and they tell me they have no students, they are getting old and want to pass on their knowledge. If a healer dies without passing on their knowledge, it’s like losing a library.” He clarifies, however, that although all ayahuasqueros share common elements, each incorporates their own into the teachings they receive.
Thus, in the center of the maloca where he holds his ceremonies hangs a gong, whose sound waves Ron uses to ward off evil spirits. On his work table rest dozens of crystals: “They contain energy, even radios today use crystals to transmit; I use them in my healing work. I place them on the patient’s sick area either to attract energy to that point or to remove it.” A caiman skull serves Ron as protection against spiritual attacks. He perfumes his arms and head after taking ayahuasca so that the vibrations defend his body. And, of course, his tobacco pipe (“tobacco is the first sacred plant, it serves to cleanse and to heal, it’s my best friend, my defense against attacks, my weapon”), his Bible (“you have to ask God for permission to heal; in reality I am not the healer, God heals through me”), and the dry leaf rattle fan, the chacapa (“it produces an impressive sound effect during the ‘mareación’ [the ayahuasca journey]”).
Generally, Ron Wheelock cooks four large pots with one hundred fifty kilos of liana, plus twenty kilos of huambisa leaves, and small amounts of chiric sanango, tobacco, and bobinsana.
lots of love
When night falls and Ron sits behind his table, faintly lit by the glow of a candle, he looks like a transformed man: composed, solemn. Six people have gathered in his maloca to take ayahuasca tonight: his friend Micaela Saxon, an English traveler, three lodge workers, and me. We sit in a circle on plastic chairs. Ron is not a fan of the comfortable mats used in other lodges. “When you lie down during the ‘mareación’ (the dizziness phase), ayahuasca dominates you, and the body misses much of the experience. But nowadays, due to tourism, people want tourists to be comfortable. Since they pay and want comfort, they get it. So many lodges have beds for comfort.”
Ron lights his pipe and blows smoke around the maloca and over the bottle of ayahuasca. Then he prays aloud: “Thank you, Lord, for this day, for this night, for the people who have come to take ayahuasca. Thank you for the visit of Carlos, of Micaela, thank you for all the plants in the world that give us life, that heal us, because without plants no one lives, nothing. Especially thank you for ayahuasca. We ask for beautiful visions. Cleansing of our bodies, hearts, and to learn a bit more about how to live in this world, with nature, with ourselves. Thank you for the water, the air, the fire, the earth. Everything this beautiful world has. May no evil spirits enter. All my work is positive. Thank you for all the people who work by my side, for the powers they give me. For my friends, my family, for my Quetzalcoatl Wheelock Angulo, for my daughter Christina Michelle Wheelock, for my beloved Karina Marina Díaz Paredes. And for her son Sebastián. Thank you for everything you give us, Lord. Amen.”
Then he calls each person present by name. When I come forward and bring the remedy to my lips, tasting it as I drink, I can’t help but exclaim in surprise at the impossible: “Delicious!” Ron smiles, and as he serves the next person, he explains: “Lots of love.”
