A Gringo in Quest of Power
Of the diet of an indigenous youth and the weakness of flesh – The ineffable beauty of Mother Ayahuasca – Of the diet of a fifty-year-old gringo – Is asceticism universal? – Banisteriopsis, that wild vine – More than 1,080 recipes – A brutal purge – The visions that come not
Following the advice of a friend who reads tarot cards, Randal Nerhus, 54 years old, decided to travel to the Amazon to begin a cleansing process with ayahuasca and to learn ayahuasca healing.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 257 of Cáñamo magazine, May 2019.
The 1940s are underway when the boy Rogelio is chosen by his grandfather, the great curaca, to be the recipient of his medicinal knowledge. They settle him in a small house on the chagra, a plantation far from the village where, away from childish games and worldly noise, he spends long periods. He takes ayahuasca several times a month, a larger dose during the new moon, and undergoes a strict diet without salt, sugar, fat, or spice. In this way, his grandfather says, during any ceremony—or perhaps during sleep—the Mother Ayahuasca will appear to grant him “the power.” The power to heal. But months pass, the power does not come, and the boy grows bored: “Grandpa, I don’t want to take it anymore,” says little Rogelio. “No, son, you’re almost there, keep taking it. Soon you will receive the power.” “When?” he replies, bored, while imagining playing with his brothers and cousins, swimming in the river, fishing in the lagoon, eating papaya and banana.
Until one night it happens. In the vision, the boy is by the edge of a sea of calm waters. From the horizon, a modern speedboat approaches rapidly; upon reaching the shore, it transforms into a radiant woman whom he can barely look at, dazzling in her beauty. She is Mother Ayahuasca, who approaches Rogelio and touches his head; then the miracle occurs. “She has already given you the power,” his grandfather exclaims joyfully. “But you still can’t heal; your body is too green, you must diet more,” which displeases the apprentice, now a teenager, who is tired of the diet and has carnal inclinations—because since he is clean and healed, when his grandfather is away, grown women come to the little house, and well… since sex is incompatible with learning medicine, to hell with medicine!
“The older women sought me out!” Don Rogelio recalled, laughing. “That’s why I left my grandfather, and now, how I miss him! If I had taken advantage, if I had had the luck to endure it… But even so, I thank God that with the little I know, I save many people from their suffering.” He turned toward Randal Nerhus, his 54-year-old American disciple, and repeated the dissuasive warning he had given him many times: “This is not easy. Especially because your body is an old body, it needs a lot of work, it’s not a child’s body. This will come slowly to you, and maybe it won’t come, because you’ve already endured many circumstances in your life, a thoughtful, hardworking man with physiological needs.” Randal, aware of the difficulty of his aspiration, was determined: “At least I will have cleansed my body and lost weight, I’m too fat.”
Randal Nerhus, three months after beginning his diet, had lost several kilos and resolved a chronic gastritis problem.
banisteriopsis in the pot
Banisteriopsis caapi is the scientific name of this vine, a plant species about which, botanically speaking, little is known. It is very significant that, although numerous varieties are distinguished in local classifications (based on shape, size, color, habitat, or biochemical properties), Western taxonomy groups them all under the same category. Banisteriopsis grows wild, although curanderos have always planted specimens in their gardens for convenient use. They propagate it by cuttings: a section of the stem is buried next to a tree, whose trunk it climbs until it reaches the canopy, where it spreads its leaves to the sun. Over time, it will have grown so much that, by stealing light from the host tree or strangling it, it will kill it.
It is ironic that on the spiritual plane don Rogelio represents it as a lovely and benevolent Mother Ayahuasca, who brings healing everywhere, while on the material plane it is an invasive and abusive plant that causes devastation among other plant species and must be kept in check to prevent what happened to a famous ayahuasquero from Iquitos, Javier da Silva, who found that his medicinal plant garden, inherited from another maestro, had been invaded by ayahuasca to the point that any attempt to eradicate it was futile; an intricate network of roots allowed its tenacious resurgence. “It’s a weed, it doesn’t know how to die. I want to make it disappear but I can’t,” Da Silva lamented.
Most of don Rogelio’s ayahuasca grew deep in the jungle, but next to Randal’s house, at the foot of a fruit tree, don Rogelio had a plant that he had assigned to his apprentice. One of the branches had bridged the gap between the host tree and the palm-leaf roof of the house, which Randal regarded as a hopeful sign, a metaphor for his increasingly close relationship with ayahuasca, but don Rogelio immediately ordered it cut to prevent damage to the palm-leaf roof.
An old specimen of Banisteriopsis caapi.
Every afternoon, the apprentice had to leave his house, light a cigarette, and blow smoke onto each of the branches of the lush plant. “Each of these branches is a prayer,” don Rogelio once told Randal. “Every time you cut one of these branches and cook it, it’s a prayer you make to the Mother and knowledge that the Mother will give you. But you must take it with respect; you have to ask for it. And when you’ve used this entire plant, then you’ll be ready to receive the power. From one branch, you’ll learn to cure fever; from another, to assist childbirth; that one over there will serve for snakebites because it will give you the prayer you will sing when there’s a bite.” “And how will that knowledge come to me?” Randal asked. “In dreams, or during the ayahuasca ceremony, but you still have to diet a lot.”
“To work with this here, you must have no interruptions whatsoever. You don’t need kids shouting: ‘Ah, damn! Get out of here!’ ‘Hey, woman! Why don’t you watch where…?’ Nothing, nothing. Because you’re focused on someone who is with you. You’re working with your noble heart, with the hope that this remedy… How many people will maybe take it? But it’s a hope that when they take it, it will do them good, not harm. I’m caring for my plant, my remedy. Hopefully, the remedy will be good. Everything is with a noble heart. I always say what my grandfather said: ‘The Spirit is correct, we are bad. And if we are going to ask for that divine power to come close, may your heart be noble, happy, joyful, open to receive that power.’”
Whenever the new moon ceremony approached, maestro and apprentice would rise at dawn and, after blowing tobacco smoke and whistling a ritual melody, they would break off a secondary branch, cut it into pieces, and pound it against an anvil to separate the fibers. At those moments, don Rogelio behaved with the same solemnity he showed during ceremonies and repeated to Randal the same refrain his grandfather had repeated to him for years.
“To work with this here, you must have no interruptions whatsoever. You don’t need kids shouting: ‘Ah, damn! Get out of here!’ ‘Hey, woman! Why don’t you watch where…?’ Nothing, nothing. Because you’re focused on someone who is with you. You’re working with your noble heart, with the hope that this remedy… How many people will maybe take it? But it’s a hope that when they take it, it will do them good, not harm. I’m caring for my plant, my remedy. Hopefully, the remedy will be good. Everything is with a noble heart. I always say what my grandfather said: ‘The Spirit is correct, we are bad. And if we are going to ask for that divine power to come close, may your heart be noble, happy, joyful, open to receive that power.’”
After pounding the vine, he would find an old pot and place at the bottom some tobacco, a few ayahuasca leaves, and on top of all, the pounded stems, just as he had learned from his grandfather.
Don Rogelio, like many other curanderos, often employs prayers during the cooking process.
The Catalan anthropologist Josep María Fericgla suggests that it would be much more appropriate to speak of “ayahuascas,” in the plural, when referring to the remedy, since in the Amazon there are thousands of recipes that vary both in ingredients and preparation methods. “Making the enormous cultural leap that the comparison demands,” Fericgla explains, “we could compare it to wine, which has many varieties, alcoholic degrees, with or without bubbles, and various flavors, effects, and colors, although we use the generic term ‘wine’ to name it.” Fericgla’s reflection challenges the widespread idea that the “authentic” ayahuasca is always the result of the decoction of two plants: the liana and the leaves of a shrub called chacruna (Psychotria viridis). According to this notion—common in the West both in popular and specialized texts—the essential active principle of this mixture is dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the molecule attributed to causing visions, while the liana contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) whose function would be to neutralize enzymes in the stomach that destroy orally ingested DMT. In other words, the MAOIs in the liana are little more than bodyguards of the DMT, allowing it to reach the bloodstream and, finally, the brain to trigger the visionary journey.
However, the theory of DMT’s preeminence clashes with ethnographic information, which clearly shows that for the local peoples, Banisteriopsis is the principal ingredient and Psychotria is a dispensable additive. The first evidence lies in the name itself: the two most widespread denominations, ayahuasca and yagé, designate both the liana and the remedy cooked with or without chacruna or any other additive. Chacruna is, in fact, a Quechua word meaning “mixture.” Anthropological documentation confirms that many peoples prepare the remedy without chacruna or any other DMT source: this is or was the practice of the Eastern Tucano peoples of northeastern Colombia, the Jíbaro-speaking peoples of Peru and Ecuador, the Marubo of the Brazilian Yavarí, and, of course, don Rogelio Carihuasari of the Cocama ethnicity.
According to many popular and academic texts, the most important plant in the “ayahuasca” remedy is, paradoxically, the leaf of chacruna (Psychotria viridis). This belief clashes with the practices of numerous Amazonian peoples.
brutal purge, elusive vision
“I don’t use chacruna,” Maestro Rogelio used to tell Randal. “Why? So you hallucinate? What good is that if you hallucinate but don’t get healed? What I want is to heal you and for you to learn how to heal. Ayahuasca is the foundation. Chacruna is the perfume, its little scent; it’s a mild purge too, it also heals, but the one in charge is ayahuasca. You can mix ayahuasca with all the plants you want.” And when Randal, who had read the role Westerners gave to chacruna, asked if ayahuasca alone would give him the vision he was expecting, Maestro nodded and said, “You have to be patient, this is not easy, it takes a long time to come.”
The search for visions is the main motivation for Westerners coming to ayahuasca, and also a great source of frustration, because, as the experienced American ayahuasquero Alan Shoemaker knows well, visions come much less frequently than expected. “Gringos take ayahuasca because they want visions, because they have read articles in Shaman’s Drum, or books written by Peter Gorman, me, or whoever. I have taken ayahuasca about two thousand times; if I wrote about the sixteen hundred times I took it and only purged, who would publish that? What was published in Shaman’s Drum were the most incredible experiences I had.”
Although most Western researchers consider the active principles of the liana as non-visionary, there are two notable exceptions. In the mid-20th century, the American botanist Richard Evans Schultes took the remedy without chacruna in Colombia and reported subtle visions, in shades of blue and purple. In the 1970s, Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo administered harmaline (one of the MAO inhibitors present in the liana) to thirty-five volunteers, who reported truly hallucinatory experiences. What nobody doubts at this point is the purgative power of the liana, pharmacologically explained by the interaction of the MAO inhibitors with serotonin receptors in the brain. In the ayahuasquero healing jargon, the term “purge” is synonymous with the decoction “ayahuasca,” which shows the importance of this property locally. Cleansing oneself, expelling stomach impurities, getting rid of bad energies or bad luck, are some of the reasons the locals offer to explain why they undergo the often nauseating experience of drinking ayahuasca.
Maestro Rogelio and Randal, examining a specimen of ayahuasca. Western botany classifies them all under the taxonomy Banisteriopsis caapi, yet there are clearly differences between varieties; in this case, the protuberances at the nodes.
The first time Randal tried ayahuasca, at don Rogelio’s house, months before he decided to return to the Amazon to begin his apprenticeship, he had a brutal experience: he shat, vomited, howled, thought he was going to die, from the first minute until, empty and exhausted, five hours later, he surrendered to sleep. “Your body is dirty,” don Rogelio explained to him. “You have a negative condition, and ayahuasca takes that out of you.” But when he came back to learn, after several months of dieting and numerous doses and small “training” ceremonies, the remedy still produced a barely bearable discomfort in Randal.
The ceremonies took place in his little house, where in a small corner a tiny bathroom with a toilet had been set up. There Randal spent the night, dizzy, shitting and vomiting, while don Rogelio, in the dark, continued with his chants, blowing tobacco smoke, moving the chacapa to whose rhythm the gringo’s guts seemed to move. The next morning, Randal would express his frustration; he disliked that after so many doses he still experienced such an adverse reaction, nothing close to a revelation. don Rogelio repeatedly asked for patience: “You’re purifying yourself little by little. Your body has to be healthy first in order to receive the power. It has garbage inside, it’s full of symptoms. That’s something even I don’t understand.”
After almost six months of intense dieting, what Randal longed for had not happened. It was true that the effort hadn’t been in vain: he weighed fifteen kilos less, had stopped suffering from chronic stomach acid, and had become familiar with the liturgical basics of curanderismo. “I’m very grateful to be here for what the plant has done for me so far,” Randal said. “My body feels much better, and I owe that to ayahuasca.” However, his main aspiration remained unfulfilled: nothing from the spiritual world, no clear visions, no messages. He felt “stuck,” “behind schedule,” victim of a “blockage.”
It’s true that on one occasion, after a ceremony, while resting in the dark, perhaps already drifting into sleep, he saw the eye of a great feline, which startled him. Another night, countless portraits of old men flashed by quickly, whom he identified as ancient maestros. Perhaps the most intense interaction took place after one of his ceremonies in the sixth month: “I heard music in my right ear. A woman singing with a big band, music from the fifties. At first, it was beautiful music, but then the woman stopped singing, and the instruments just made noise.” don Rogelio listened with a smile on his lips. “Something is coming to give you its gift,” he said. And asked: “Can you remember the music?” “No.” “You have to record that music in your head. The spirit is teaching you. It’s coming closer, it’s coming closer.”
And Randal, just as don Rogelio had done with his grandfather, kept dieting.
