by Steve Hely
Hot and exhausting, this walk, but it struck me like Yes, of course, this is how it ought to be. Like a pilgrimage.
If you are gonna take this drink and its ritual seriously, you couldn’t get it delivered. You had to go to the source. You had to go on a journey to some kind of sacred place before you could even begin.
Sure enough, the shaman’s house appeared in a clearing, up on stilts, a few chickens running around.
Under the thatched roof in the house, there was one big room for cooking and eating and sitting, and a room behind where the shaman’s wife came and went. The shaman was there, and his wife, and there was a girl who was maybe the shaman’s daughter or his niece, and there was a toddler who was maybe the shaman’s grandchild, who squealed and smiled.
They didn’t pay me much mind. They’d set up a mosquito net for me and told me to rest. There was a printed calendar on the wall and a radio and plenty of other things. The house itself, it seemed to me, could’ve been built in this same place in this same way five hundred years ago.
When the sun went down, the girl disappeared, and the shaman’s wife put the toddler to bed, then she went to bed, too.
In the darkness the shaman lit a candle. Alberto and I sat cross-legged. He was gonna drink, too.
“Maybe I have a vision of my mother,” he said. Maybe I would, too, I thought.
The shaman produced again his Coke bottle, overflowing this time with a tempestuous burbling brew. He began the slow rhythms of his chant.
Whether his incantation was always the same, according to some liturgy, or if it was part the same and part improvised, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe he even encoded it with special spells to suit the occasion or his perception of the participants. I had heard Alberto use at one point the Spanish word brujo, witch or wizard, which freaked me out a bit. There is said to be malevolent ayahuasca shamans as well as good ones. But this man seemed trustworthy. The casual way he’d played all afternoon with his grandchild was the way, I figured, only a good man would. Maybe under his chant, there was even a sermon of some kind.
After forty minutes, maybe, he poured me out a big spoonful of his brew and I drank it.
* * *
At no time in the hours that followed did I not know, like, physically, where I was. Like, on Earth. If you’d asked me, I could’ve told you: Lying on the wood floor of the shaman’s house. There are mosquitoes everywhere, I can hear the shaman gently slapping at them with a towel. I drank ayahuasca. What’re you doing here? I would’ve said.
But at the same time, eyes closed, I could perceive myself as a tiny, insignificant molecule connected invisibly to a boundless universe extended to an infinity that rendered any idea of “me” absurd and meaningless. Just a flip of perspective, though—Whose perspective? What consciousness is even perceiving this?—and I could see and feel myself as a unity of billions of even tinier molecules in a latticework that shrunk incredibly in size but yet grew equal to the universe in the vastness of its infinity.
Ooooooooo. Kkkkaaaayyyy, I thought to myself, though my thinking was maybe not exactly in words. Got it. Got it. Got it.
Spectacular visions of vines and life and animals in colors and encirclements like the best illustrations from the finest wonder books for science of the 1950s and ’60s appeared, deeper tapestries and shifting faster than I could ever take them in. But that was just a pageant compared to the dawning to me that I was a flick of spirit at most in a cosmos beyond comprehension, but contained within me was the seed of the whole universe and everything in it, too.
Even in that time, I was aware that this is the kind of idea “high” people have all the time. Non-high people, too. This wonder is what the best people on Earth seem to always remind themselves of, touching it and revisiting it through channels of science or religion or art or love or just awe.
Maybe this was just that, in concentrated form. I knew that—still, to feel truly dissolved into it was humbling and scary and wonderful.
What it felt most like, to me, was relief. To be that puny, to be shown or even shouted at by the whole of everything how insignificant an ability one consciousness has to even comprehend. Terrifying and awesome and liberating.
Four hours or so in, I sat up, knowing I would throw up. The shaman nudged over a bucket. Black bilious vomit heaved out of me, like I was shedding my skin from the inside out, as if my body was expelling for me my worst and most devilish contents. One palpable sense I remember is hating the smell of my insect repellent—bad as the mosquitoes were, it seemed awfuller to be covered in poison. The insects that teemed were just the shore of the ocean of boundless life spirit anyway.
When I was done I felt like I’d vomited up every bad thing that’d ever been in me. All that foulness now sloshed around in the bucket.
Also, I had to pee.
As I stepped to the edge of the house, Alberto dreamily said I should put my boots on. Snakes, he whispered.
Snakes were not anything I felt like thinking about as I peed. But in that moment, I took it as a test of courage, I guess, or else I was sure that no snake would harm me and I stepped down in just my sandals.
In the clearing, the sky was full of stars like a crude painting of what I’d just seen and perceived myself to travel through. The trees looked like they might bend down and talk to me.
* * *
The sun woke me up.
* * *
Well, okay, I thought as we walked back down the trail to the village and our boat, what now?
It’s one thing to see enlightenment for a few hours, and another thing to carry it with you all the next day, and every next day to come.
But happy was what I felt. Relieved.
Whatever it was I’d gone on this trip to look for, I wasn’t sure I’d found it. But I was sure I could stop looking so hard. At best, I was a nodule of energy and observation, flickering for a brief time. Go on, good-hearted, wherever we were going, try to perceive and feel and be open. “I,” whoever that was, couldn’t control or understand even a fraction of everything. Best just to smile and be the finest spot of the infinity I could.
* * *
I’ve read to the end of my understanding about ayahuasca. There’s more to read every day. There’s evidence that DMT, the psychedelic agent at work, is already in pretty much every living thing, and that the pineal gland of your brain produces it naturally. It’s often told that the blend of chemicals from two plants, the DMT from the Psychotria viridis, and the monoamine oxidase inhibitors from the caapi vine is what produces the hallucinogenic effects. This is suggested as evidence of the holiness or mystery or curious evolution of the brewing of ayahuasca, because how would a shaman know to blend these two plants that don’t grow together? It’s said sometimes that plants speak to shamans in dreams.
Healers and people invested in ayahuasca as a spiritual idea can be as electrified or as stern about the subject as anybody arguing points of religion. There are also quacks and con artists trading in it. This is a powerful thing.
The great Wade Davis, who anyone who approaches this subject ought to pretty much bow down before, came to the study of ayahuasca as a botanist but stresses in his writings and talks and interviews the ethnographic, too, the anthropology, the sense that setting and cultural understanding and perception can affect your mind as much as the DMT does.
I would never step to Wade Davis, who knew more about the Amazon when I was a fetus than I could ever learn. In a recent interview he has a “back in my day” swagger on the topic of ayahuasca.
“I meet young people who take ayahuasca and they speak so positively about the experience,” says Davis, “whereas I remember the whole point of ayahuasca was facing down the jaguar, being ripped away from the tit of jaguar woman. That was sort of what its point was.”*
So says Wade Davis. Before I left the Amazon, I’d meet an American guy who’d taken ayahuasca five times a wee
k for two weeks. “I’d really recommend it,” he said, “if you’re in any time of transition.” He himself had fallen in love with a twenty-two-year-old Portuguese girl he met at the retreat. “She has the power of a much older woman,” he said. Regrettably, she was studying to be a shaman and thus had entered a one-year period of sexual abstinence. “It’s difficult, to not be able to express yourself in that way, your erotic self,” he said. I nodded.
Back on the trail, Alberto didn’t stop walking as he turned and asked me, “Did you have visions?”
“Yes.”
“Of the jungle?”
“Yeah, the jungle—everything. Did you have visions?”
“Yes,” he said. “I had visions of my mother. She is very sick.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry to hear that.” I was. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say about it.
“Yes.”
A fluorescent blue butterfly the size of my whole outstretched palm and digits flew along the edge of the trail and alighted on a leaf. It was a bright electric blue, a color I’d never seen a crayon of, not even in a big Crayola 64-pack.
“Look,” said Alberto. “This one, it has an eye.”
So it did, a spot of gray and white on its wings that looked like a detailed eyeball staring out from the jungle.
Damn, I thought, what am I drinking hallucinogenic plants for? This whole place is a hallucination.
Three Commandments of a Brand-New Religion
If I were going to start a religion based on the experience I had on ayahuasca, these would be the laws, as they were revealed to me in my mystic trance.
You are not that important. Don’t worry about “yourself.” That is a meaningless drop in an infinite bucket, believe me. “You” are a minuscule nothing, and trying to puff yourself up in any way is too pathetic to even be laughable. Imagine a microscopic crumb being like “Er, am I important enough?” Forget about that. Give all that up.
You are a part of everything. You’re not nothing, though. What’s valuable about you is that you’re a tiny spark from the great, infinite energy and spirit of the cosmos. You carry that spark within you.
Don’t poison yourself. This one was almost like it was said aloud to me. But: I’m not sure how strict to be on interpretation. What counts as poison? I’ve ruled out beer and moderate to semistrong doses of quality alcohol. Those are allowed, quite confident in that, I think. After that? I’m not sure. I think you’re supposed to eat good nutritious food? I dunno, a lot of religions stronger than mine seem to get lost in the weeds around here.
* * *
Those seemed like good rules. But the last thing the world needs is a guy starting a religion based on the revelations he got from drinking ayahuasca twice.
So, on we go.
Best Qualities of My Good Friend Alan Tang:*
When you need him, he will appear. Sometimes when you don’t need him, too. But: You’ll be happy to see him. He will be smiling.
He is quick. Both his body, which he is constantly jumping up and down like a child (he is thirty-one), and his brain. His brain is going super fast, a million scans a second, and what it is scanning for is comedy opportunities or interesting twists of fact.
* * *
That is why I like him, that is why when he was like I’m coming to South America, where should I meet you, Machu Picchu GALÁPAGOS?! I was like Fuck yeah, meet me in Cusco. Though I played it very cool, ever the brave solo wanderer, to say I was happy to see my old friend would be an insane understatement.
Oh! One More Quality
When he travels, he travels in style.
If I let Tang book our hotel in Peru, it would be incredible. Yet I would arrive sweaty and worn from my travels, having suffered all kinds of rough nights, and could scoff at his luxury while still enjoying it. A delicious position.
If there’d still been ayahuasca in my system, my body would’ve ejected this rascally thinking in the form of black vomit, but I guess I was clear.
Sure enough, within minutes of our arrival, we were in his room in the best hotel in Cusco, while a man made us Pisco sours, my clothes in my backpack still jungle moist from the Amazon. Tang was laughing and making me laugh and jumping up and down about the many awesome things we were about to do.
First up: Explore the ancient capital of the Inca Empire.
In the Inca Capital
Cusco has 400,000 people, many of them Quechua-speaking people descended from the people who were here long before the Spanish turned up. The Inca laid out the city, diverting rivers to build it. No easy job at an altitude of 11,000 feet, twice as high as Denver. Some people arrive in Cusco and immediately feel sick from the altitude. I kept it together fine, but walking up steep old alleys in a neighborhood like San Blas, I was for sure feelin’ it. Diverting a river would’ve been a big ask, for me personally.
On top of the locals, there is, in Cusco, every kind of hiker and backpacker planning every kind of expedition. It is where you slump exhausted or head out determined for the Inca Trail, or even longer, wilder hikes along the ridges of the Andes on old Inca roads, or down into the roaring rivers at the bottom of the sharp valleys.
Every kind of craft and product and wonderful or mysterious thing from across the Andes and Peru can be found in Cusco. Bear in mind just as an example that in the Andes, they have five thousand types of potatoes alone. You might get sick or exhausted in Cusco, but you will not get bored there. Especially not if you’re fascinated by different types of potatoes.
The Rise and Fall of the Inca in Four Pages
There is so much great writing about the Inca: Kim MacQuarrie’s book The Last Days of the Incas is fascinating from page one. Turn Right at Machu Picchu by Mark Adams is informative and funny. The description of the Incas in the great Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is so terrific, I had to pull my car over while listening to the audiobook—you couldn’t drive and listen to facts that astounding at the same time.
Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of the Incas, was himself illiterate. But among his small company of men, there were a number of literate guys, former clerks and boy secretaries and the sixteenth-century Spanish equivalent of paralegals. This might seem odd, but lots of conquistadors weren’t experienced soldiers. They were just ordinary Spaniards who had nothing to lose and figured they’d take a shot at becoming millionaires on some harebrained expedition. Some of these guys wrote accounts, but for my money, none is nearly as good as Bernal Díaz, chronicler of the insane Mexico adventure.
Of Pizarro’s four shitty brothers who were with him, all very brave and handsome assholes, only Hernando wrote about it. His account is very flattering to himself and his big brother. So we have that, too.
Felipe Guáman Poma de Ayala, a descendant of Inca nobles who was born perhaps the year the Spanish seized Cusco, wrote a thousand-some-page document. A plea for restoration of the rights of Inca aristocrats, Ayala made his case in part by describing the lives and customs of the Inca. He illustrated his book with 398 drawings. In his old age he sent the only copy to the king of Spain. But it never turned up and was assumed lost. In 1908, at the Royal Library of Denmark in Copenhagen, a German librarian, Richard Pietschmann, found it while poking around in his off-hours from a conference.
So now we have that.
The best thing I can do is crib from all these sources and tell you: The Inca were incredible.
When Columbus hit the shore of what’s now Haiti, the Inca* Empire was the biggest empire in the world. Ten million people or so lived in it. It stretched 2,500 miles. Down its spine ran one of the sharpest and highest mountain ranges in the world.
To manage it, the Inca built roads that are still there, five hundred years later, up astounding grades and down into rain forest valleys and back up again to altitudes that can knock people out. They did all this without wheels or metal tools.
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A system of runners, maybe fueling themselves with coca leaves, took messages and commands and reports, keeping track of numbers and dates and categories with knotted ropes called quipu. Charles Mann compares the quipu system to lines of binary computer code. Everything in the Inca Empire flowed to Cusco. And Cusco was incredibly weird.
In Cusco the main ceremonial square was surrounded by houses of mummies.
Generations of mummies who were treated like they were semi-alive. Female attendants swatted flies away from them and communicated the mummies’ wishes. The mummies would even visit each other. What they talked about is anyone’s guess.
In Cusco the Temple of the Sun was plated in gold. Loads of silver came in on the backs of llamas. There were llamas everywhere. Also guinea pigs. You would not walk far in Cusco in 1533 without hearing the squeal of a guinea pig.
The emperor wore a cloak made of the hair of vampire bats, and there were alpaca-wool sweaters and hats and rugs. There were great stone aqueducts and canals, and storehouses and castles made of stones that weighed three hundred tons, twenty feet tall, somehow fitted together so tight you can’t stick a pin between them. You could drink chicha and eat rich stews and dried fish.
And there were thousands of kinds of potatoes.
In 1533, though, Cusco was on one side of a civil war or a coup.
The Inca Empire was vast, but it wasn’t old. By the time Pizarro arrived, it had only been around for ninety years or so. The great founder, not the first Inca ruler but the guy who in two-plus decades of rolling conquest stretched the borders out from the valley of Cusco down into Chile and north into what’s now Ecuador, was Pachacuti. When Pachacuti died after ruling for thirty-four years, his son, called Túpac or Thupa, took over. Thupa married his own sister, he conquered along the northern coast, he may have sailed to Easter Island. He died in 1493, the year after Columbus landed. Though no one in Cusco had heard about that yet: It was happening two thousand miles away. Thupa’s son Huayna, or Wayna, Qhapaq took over. He ruled for thirty-some years, but then he died of a strange new disease that was sweeping across the Inca realm. This might’ve been smallpox. His mummified body was paraded into Cusco and added to the powerful collection of mummies already there.
