Cactus of Mystery

by Ross Heaven

  How do you prepare San Pedro and teach others to make it?

  Orellana: How I cook San Pedro is on an esoteric level; it is not a formula that can just be passed on or written down on a page, nor is it a simple recipe that you might find on the Internet!

  “Esoteric” means that you must be a serious student of San Pedro and form your own relationship with it because there is no standard way to prepare it. You need to be ready for it and want to know more; then the medicine will itself teach you all that you need to know. This is what I tell my students. It is not that I want to keep secrets from them; it is simply that the medicine speaks for itself.

  There is a great mystery about San Pedro and its origins just as there is with ayahuasca. It seems strange after all that anyone in ancient history would cut down a cactus and brew it for its effects. How did they even know it would have effects or what those effects would be . . . or how to prepare it in the first place?

  Because of this mystery we cannot say where our healing tradition began or who the first shaman was or even, in linear time, when San Pedro first spoke to us. But it is clear that San Pedro itself called that first healer and passed on its secrets and in the same way each person who drinks it must come to San Pedro alone and learn its language, develop a personal relationship with it, and find a way to befriend the plant. It will then teach them and gradually reveal its mysteries. Then when the healer finally connects with the wisdom of this beautiful medicine is the moment when they really know truth.

  Can you give an example of how San Pedro might speak to a healer?

  Orellana: Yes, one example is that when I cook San Pedro I often see images in the brew of the people who will come to drink it. I see in the liquid the parts of their bodies where healing is needed, like the heart or the kidneys. Or maybe the messages are more symbolic and concern a feeling or state of mind. In this way I receive premonitions of who will drink, and the particular conditions they have. This is normal and one of the ways that the plant might speak with us. As people develop their own connections with San Pedro and learn its secret language they will also see these things, and it helps them to prepare as healers.

  For this reason whenever I cook any medicine—not only San Pedro—I carefully watch the brew. When you do this you also send energy to it so you empower the medicine with your intention and tell it what you want from it so it can learn from you too. I always cook fresh medicine for each patient—I do not have bottles on my shelves like a pharmacy—so the thoughts that I send are uniquely about that person and the healing they need and the plants can begin their work as soon as they receive my intentions. They tune in to the patient and begin the process of arranging their qualities and powers in accordance with that person’s needs.

  So a lot of information appears even in the cooking pot and this helps me as a healer. The energy of intent is a very powerful force, and all healers must master it because the plants respond to it in their own language.

  How frequently do you hold ceremonies and what conditions might you treat?

  Orellana: I provide ceremonies whenever they are needed so there is no rule to it. I know some healers say that ceremonies should only be held on certain days like Tuesday or Friday because those are when San Pedro works best and when the powers of the fates are strongest, but that is to forget the most fundamental teaching of San Pedro: that there is no such thing as time! Linear time does not exist so there is no calendar, no special days of the week—no weeks!

  Instead we should follow natural cycles. If someone has a very grave problem and I need to work deeply with them for example then I will hold a ceremony at the full moon because the energy then is very high.

  What conditions do I treat? Any may be possible. No matter what the problems of a particular client, however, most diseases are psychosomatic in origin because when people break the balance of their emotions their immunological systems are always affected and in this way they lose power so the body will accept any disease. The purpose of ceremony is to strengthen the emotions and bring the patient back to equilibrium as well as empowering the body with medicine plants.

  To be a healer I must also put myself in the place of the patient, so I become in a sense the person who needs my help. One example is a man who comes to me to cure his alcoholism. The solution is not to say, “Well okay then, don’t drink”; it is for that person to fully accept that they are alcoholic and acknowledge the problems it is causing in their life. The next step is to identify the true cause of this disease and find healing for that.

  I know healers who will simply give a patient like this plants and herbs that make him sick if he should drink alcohol, assuming he will therefore avoid it. But this does not solve the problem. Instead he may just stop taking the herbs if the spirit of alcohol is stronger than his desire to be well.

  I put myself in the position of the alcoholic to see what has caused his condition because such diseases are a response to circumstances. A healer must have empathy in this way and be clear about the responsibilities that are involved in healing.

  You also use San Pedro to heal conditions that Western medicine finds difficult to cure, like cancer. If disease is a response to circumstances why do people get sick with conditions like cancer and how can they heal it?

  Orellana: One of the big problems for modern society is stress. It has been there from the beginning of course but our ancestors had rituals to release it. In today’s world nobody is doing that. You take a pill or you drink alcohol or take drugs and you think this solves the problem but it does not release the energy of stress; it merely suppresses it so it stays with you, hidden by the effects of the drugs or the alcohol you’ve consumed.

  The pH levels of your body start to change because of the stress itself and the “cures” you have taken for it, and so you become more acid. As a result your body will automatically accept any disease.

  When you use alkaline to restore the body’s natural pH it makes a big difference because then it will start to heal itself. So the idea with San Pedro is not really to provide a “miracle cure” but to create balance in the body and emotions and in this way cancer and many other diseases will start to disappear.

  Just to be clear, are you saying that San Pedro heals because it contains chemicals that change the pH of the body—or that it de-stresses and relaxes you so the body functions differently and releases its own chemicals, which will restore the natural pH balance?

  Orellana: Both! First of all the medicine itself switches the body to alkaline. Secondly, San Pedro relaxes you and brings new understanding of your problems so you have a resolution in mind. For both of these reasons your body changes and becomes more alkaline.

  San Pedro also teaches you why your problems exist. What I mean by this is that there is no “cancer” in itself—or “diabetes” or “heart attack.” All of these conditions are messages from the body about the true origins of the problem and by-products of an underlying mood or state of mind that I am calling stress. Once you know what is really wrong the problem is more easily solved and the body can return to balance and health.

  More importantly, San Pedro releases the stress itself so you don’t really need to do anything but accept its healing and the information it gives you.

  Medicine ceremonies are not like Western psychoanalysis because San Pedro does not show you how to control stress or find a way to cope with it. Instead it removes the stress so you don’t have that problem anymore. The information it provides you with is about how to stay free of stress by bringing your life back into balance.

  With San Pedro you can no longer lie to yourself. That is one of the great differences between medicine and psychoanalysis.

  We’ve used the example of cancer but you also mentioned heart problems. Can you say something about conditions like these?

  Orellana: When I see people with heart conditions I first explain to them about the nature of time: the fact that a journey begins for us on the day we are born and so starts our work
to die well. That is the truth, and it is important for all of us to understand that we are not here for eternity. This is the first step toward healing and the appreciation of our lives.

  According to the person I am working with and the true nature and origins of their disease I will then select the methods of healing and the plants most appropriate for them. Nowadays San Pedro and ayahuasca are very popular but we have more than seventy plants that can help with conditions like this.

  Can you explain the elements of the mesa you use during healing ceremonies?*81

  Orellana: The first rule of shamanism, of Andean healing—and therefore of mesa work—is that there are no rules.

  The mesa is the personal altar of the healer; the place where he stores his power. In our tradition there is not just one layout for the mesa or a standard series of objects or elements, which must always be used, since all healers work in different ways.

  On my mesa I have a clear division between the left and the right sides—the female and the male—and between the three worlds: the upper world, this world, and the internal world.*9 I also work with the four elements of wind, water, earth, and fire. The objects or artes†10 on my mesa reflect these allies and the powers they contain. This is my personal choice, and other healers may take a different approach. That is allowable!

  Along with San Pedro I also work with tobacco, which connects me to the element of fire, and I use a lot of perfumes and aromas because these start to change the way we are thinking so that bad ideas can be transformed and healing can follow.*11 2 The intention of these perfumes and of healing in general is to play with the brain†12 because our first enemy and our first blockage to healing is usually our brains. Unhealthy thoughts or beliefs lead to disease since illness arises from the mind as much as the body.‡13

  The tools of the mesa are ways of summoning power in order to change the mind.

  One of the reasons I asked about the mesa is because I have seen a lot of altars with swords and sticks3 (chonta) and other “obviously powerful” symbols.*14 Do you use chonta and swords? Are they important?

  Orellana: All of the elements we use in ceremony have a purpose and it is simply this: they are containers of energy. Some people have chosen to work with chonta. This is a wood of the jungle that is rich in silica crystals. Some also work with swords, tobacco, Florida water,†15 and other objects. We have a civilization and healing approach that is twenty thousand years old, and many different races like the Incas and the Spanish have been part of our evolution. Each added something of themselves to the way that healing is done and to the elements that might, therefore, appear on an altar.

  Each of these elements holds a very different energy even if they appear the same, so every sword or stick or crystal on every altar is different, just as Titicaca Lake in Peru and Titicaca Lake in Bolivia are both composed of the same water but contain different powers because each part of the lake has its own unique qualities. What is most important, then, when working with the mesa is not the items on it or how many are there but the special connection you have to each one. Your mesa may feature the singado, the seguro, or tobacco*16 4 . . . maybe a thousand different elements . . . but it is your relationship to each and the way you employ their energies not the objects that matter.

  I know some people who say, “This—and only this—is the mesa of the Andes”—but what part of the Andes do they even mean? It is not the same throughout, just like the people of Titicaca Lake and the people of Cusco are different.

  I use the elements of the jungle and the elements of the mountains and the coast but does this make my mesa more powerful? No. It is the way I use these things that is important. I know very good healers who use only three elements on their altars, and some people might look at this and say, “This guy only has three elements; he’s not powerful,” but they would be mistaken because those are the most powerful shamans.

  So what I am saying is that it doesn’t matter what you use or whether you have swords or chonta or little at all as long as you have a strong connection to each and it works with you as your ally. The element is only the bridge to the spirit, which we use to move energy.

  The Huaringas, the lakes in the north of Peru in the highlands of Piura, are also seen by many as a special place, and they have their own mythology among those who want to include their waters on their mesas. But again it is not only the Huaringas that contain this power of healing. The Huaringas are important because they are sacred waters, which can be used in cleansing, but in Cusco we have many other beautiful places where there is powerful running water, which comes from the apus [mountain spirits] and has special qualities of healing so you don’t need to visit the Huaringas or have the water from these lakes on your mesa.

  In fact so many people now visit the Huaringas to take their waters or bathe there that the lakes themselves are losing power so it is better to look for alternative sources of healing.

  As well as adopting mesa practices Westerners who want to learn Andean healing increasingly talk about initiation into “munay ki.”*17 5 As far as I can tell this is similar to reiki with a transmission of symbols and realignment of energy and so forth. How do you understand it from an Andean perspective? Is it important, and do you work with it?

  Orellana: I don’t even know it! In our tradition we don’t even have this word. The Q’ero healer Manuel invented the term munay ki but he is now dead so he cannot speak for himself and there is no way for us to confront him. All I can say is that his own grandchildren do not know what I mean when I put the term to them. But it is easy for anybody to be guilty when he is not here to defend himself.

  Since its invention the idea of munay ki has unfortunately gathered momentum and it is now a creation on the part of many people, which is destroying our tradition. I do not agree with these people. Through their pretenses they have in the past twenty years begun to ruin a healing tradition that has survived for thousands of years.

  I know the Q’ero and the Andean people well because I have spent many years of my life with them and they know nothing of munay ki.

  Traditions do change over time though and those who support munay ki have defended it on the grounds that it is an “evolution” of Andean healing. In a similar way I’ve also heard people say that before the Spanish came to Peru San Pedro ceremonies were different—that they were held in daylight and there was less ritual involved. Do you agree or disagree with this?

  Orellana: Yes, we have the influence of the Catholic tradition for more than five hundred years and behind this the Inquisition.

  There is a lot of information preserved in the documents of the Inquisition and even now in the countryside of Peru we have the oral tradition, which goes back to the beginning of time, and which tells us how ceremonies were conducted before the Catholics.

  What I know from these sources is that there were two forms of ceremony. Those for healing were held at night while those in the day had the purpose of growth so that the people could connect with the energy of the universe and ask the father sun to return to their lives. That is the difference between the two.

  According to these records healing ceremonies were held at night because then you do not have cognition of time and space. In daylight you know whether it is morning, afternoon, or evening because of the sun in the sky and what you can see around you, so you are still connected to the mundane world. At night we work with the penumbra, which is neither light nor dark, but the threshold between both where the nature of reality changes. It is the penumbra that allows you to truly see.

  The night, you may notice, is not really dark. We think it is because we live in the light of cities but really we can see clouds and trees and animals just as we do at other times. It is the way that we see that changes. The penumbra allows us to go into deep meditation and we may also move backward and forward in time because time and space both open up. This helps us go deeper into healing.

  Our way of healing did change as a result of the Catholics of course.
Even the name of our medicine was altered to hide the true meaning of our ceremonies from them. We gave it the name San Pedro because in English this refers to Saint Peter who has keys to the heaven, which Catholics approve of. The real name of this plant, however, is huachuma, which simply means “dizzy” and refers to one of its effects on human beings, although not to its most important effect of healing, which would still remain hidden, even if the word was translated.

  We have syncretism in our ceremonies too where healers have absorbed Catholic elements into their mesas, which now feature many religious symbols, like the cross and the Madonna. We accept these symbols because there is only one creator of the universe so all of these elements contain divine energy, which helps us connect with the universal creative force.

  You have said that once a person drinks San Pedro it is always in them and they will feel it working on them even if they never drink it again. What do you mean by this?

  Orellana: We are talking about two different things when we speak of San Pedro. Western society puts emphasis on the chemicals it contains but its other aspect is the special energy of this plant.

  The chemicals and their effects—the dizziness and dilation of your pupils and so forth—will eventually leave your body, but the energy will always stay with you, as will the wisdom of the plant, which becomes a part of your brain. The medicine wakes up your memory so you remember who you are, and this knowledge is yours for the rest of your life so you can never forget the most important truths.

  Your awareness will then connect with the other experiences you have so you see the world in a different way, and through San Pedro you continue to learn and grow. That is why when people ask me how many hours they will be affected by San Pedro after they drink it I tell them it will not be hours but the rest of their lives!