Ayahausca Memoirs: Traveling up the Vine of the Dead across South America
My experiences and advice for taking one of the world’s most powerful hallucinogens…
Admittedly, there are already far too many online essays about backpackers’ brushes with shamanism in exotic locales: ayahuasca in Peru, San Pedro in Bolivia, Peyote in Mexico, God knows what in India, Africa, Southeast Asia… Alas, here is another psychotropic travelogue. For years I was reticent to write about my experiences with ayahuasca, but I now feel ready to try to put to pen an experience that profoundly transformed me. Having stumbled across her throughout South America, from the jungles to large cities, I offer my memoir exploring the Vine of the Souls and my humble advice for those curious about taking it.
My first encounter with ayahuasca was in Northeast Brazil, in an idyllic, coastal fishing village where I had fled to sort out a quarter-life crisis. In a Kerouacian fantasy, I sold all my possessions, erased myself from social media, compiled my meager savings, and bought a one-way ticket to Fortaleza, whence I would travel an entire day on dirt roads and broken highways to my destination. Criticized as I was for this decision, for a golden hour in my early twenties, I could say that I was living exactly the way I wanted: residing in a paradise of natural beauty, reading the books I had wanted to devour for years, and approaching every day as another adventure to unfold. The deities of love and romance were beneficent. I earned enough money to live cooking and teaching English, and before long I acquired the nickname of ‘teacher’ around the village.
The days, weeks, and months flowed by as easily as the cool breeze through lush palm fronds. My body, heart, and mind relished the blessings of the sunny coast of Ceará: the joyful beats of forró and capoeira; sunsets dripping pink, gold, and blue; the smell of tropical flowers and ocean greeting me in the morning; women with green eyes and curly hair. The most beautiful part, and the reason I fell in love with this region originally, was the revelation that profound richness of life could be attained while having next to nothing. Possessing only the contents of a backpack, sleeping in a hammock in a rented room, and living off fried fish, rice, and bananas was all blissfully liberating. The sunshine, enjoyable work, and simple diet left me healthy and vibrant. The celestial visions and insights that ayahuasca showed were an extension of this wave of rebirth that I already felt like I was riding.
It began one day on the beach when I met two women visiting from Fortaleza who had come to the village with a bottle of ayahuasca and their mestre (master in Portuguese, but shaman or guru is closer to the meaning). They answered my questions about daime (one of the Brazilian terms for ayahuasca) and invited me to participate in a ceremony at their house a few mornings later. They suggested that I began fasting that day in case I decided to partake. The purpose of the fast, they explained, was to enter a deeper state of spiritual and physical purity in order to enhance the effects of the brew.
I woke up at the crack of dawn of the appointed morning with my mind made up that I would participate. I had never taken a psychedelic substance before, and my adrenaline was pumping in anticipation of what would happen. Wending through sandy roads and past placid feral donkeys, I arrived at the house and was greeted by the mestre, a man in his fifties with a warm and jocular demeanor. The mestre was originally from the Amazon and returned there every year to produce ayahuasca for the church he was in charge of in Fortaleza. Also present was his wife and their small child. I took reassurance in the fact that he and his family radiated sattvic energy of simplicity, kindness, and health.
The morning unfurled and the mestre returned to the patio with a large soda bottle full of a brown, muddy liquid. We began with repeating a series of the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary (Ayahuasca churches are a fascinating syncretism of Catholicism, Amerindian, and Afro-Brazilian religiosity), and afterward the mestre poured the brew into small cups and offered them first to the two female participants present. Then he turned to me and silently handed me a cup, upon which I was overcome by a smell that I only describe as liquid wood and tree bark. The taste was even worse, compost with a cloyingly sweet aftertaste and syrupy consistency. Years have passed, and I still cringe thinking about this taste.
The mestre drank last, and then everybody reclined in hammocks waiting for the effects to take place. The mestre put on special music from their church, soothing beats of drumming, chanting and singing. After about an hour, I still felt nothing. The mestre’s wife came to my hammock and asked me what I was experiencing. I told her I noticed no difference, at which she returned with another small cup of the brew for me to imbibe. About half an hour later, I noticed that my sense of hearing had become more acute; a 4×4 passed by on the sandy road, and the sound of the engine was nearly unbearable. Next, I felt the physical effects, my body becoming heavy and relaxed within my hammock. I knew the journey was about to start.
Some report having visions while under the influence of ayahuasca, for example of beholding the Virgin Mary, Christ, or angels. I did not have any such mirações, but I was overcome with a flood of memories, insights, and emotions. Above all else, I was struck with an overwhelming sense of the Sublime – how utterly beautiful creation and humanity are. So precious that I could weep, and I did at one point. I understood the unspeakable sacredness of human life, why we are beloved by our Creator. There was that sense of beauty that I understood as a child, but which I had long forgotten or become distracted from. I felt waves of love and gratefulness for family and dear friends. The feelings are difficult to describe; my limitations as a writer do not allow me to do them justice.
Ayahuasca has a strong association with death; in fact, the name is Quechua for ‘Vine of the Dead’ or ‘Vine of the Souls’. According to indigenous groups in the Upper Amazon, the Creator instructed human souls how to make ayahuasca before embodying them. God told the to-be-incarnated souls to take the ayahuasca when they inevitably forgot where they had come from. In other words, ayahuasca was considered a lifeline back to the most fundamental origins, the place whence our souls came and whither they would eventually return. Something in my own experience resonated with this myth, an intuition or memory that something in me was far older than the age of my body. Finally, there was the visceral acknowledgment of impending death that chilled me to the bone, a deep recognition that it was truly going to happen one day.
Ayahuasca showed me that existence is complex, beautiful, terrifying, and miraculous beyond mortal comprehension. She convinced me that there is far more than can be observed, that there is a spiritual realm that envelops and passes through our waking and dreaming lives. I understood that my Self is as mysterious as the depths of the cosmos. Most importantly, and what I strive to remember, I grasped that we are here, in bodies, to live as fully as possible as human beings. In other words, the joy, agony, compassion, pain, triumph, and experiences that remind us of the breathtaking awe of our existences are the meaning of life.
My curiosity about ayahuasca eventually led me to depart the coast and enter the Amazon rainforest, in a quest to discover the cultures that had used ayahuasca for millennia. In the Amazon, I saw the good, the bad, and the ugly of this strange brew. I stumbled into communes growing, harvesting, and brewing it and organizing ceremonies. Some of them charged while others allowed participation in exchange for work. Crossing the border into Peru (more on that in later posts), I was saddened to see that an entire tourist industry had developed around ayahuasca and other jungle entheogens, leading to armies of charlatan ‘shamans’ and foreign tourists paying for psychedelic travel packages. Further north in Colombia, I chanced upon el yagé yet again, this time in a traditional indigenous setting led by a shaman from the Putumayo region. From Catholic masses within Brazilian ayahuasca churches to campfires in Amazonian communes, to a maloca in the misty Andes resonating with singing in an indigenous language, I can say that I saw many different faces of ayahuasca ceremonies.
At the risk of sounding cliché or cheesy, the best advice that I can offer to those interested in taking ayahuasca is to wait for it to find you. The best experiences with it seem to happen by chance when it falls naturally into your path. For example, I recall talking to an older friend, years before taking ayahuasca myself, about his experience with it. He recounted how he took it with a group of Andean Indians he met while trekking in Peru. They unexpectedly offered it to him, and he had also had a transformative experience that he affected him even 40 years later. Be wary of unscrupulous shamans or communities that seem primarily interested in money. Likewise, avoid people and groups that treat ayahuasca as a recreational drug. Finally, fast and withdraw yourself for the days leading up to taking it. Disconnect from civilization as much as you can beforehand.
