This was originally done by mah niggah studious_redux
"A thousand years ago, deep in the darkest jungles of the amazon, the ancient incas discovered the mysterious vine, to brew up the sacred, psychoactive, hallucinogenic drink. The holy ayahuasca"
And in 2002 that was about all I knew about the brew. A 1200 mics song, some reading on erowid. I had just stepped off a grotty russian charter airplane into the steaming heat of Iquitos in the rainy season.
Rewind a few years, to 2000. A free party in a large squat in hackney, London, to where I met Sean. At the time I was sat cross legged on the floor trying in vein to get a vein up and inject a substantial amount of heroin as a battleclash of psytrance beat out from the speakers that seemed to fill the room. Like many at the party I'd been awake for over 48 hours, fueled by a cocktail of amphetamines, MDMA and whatever else had come my way. I just needed to crash.
As I sat and stabbed around trying to get a vein and get enough smack into it to get me down and crash into the pile of sleeping bodies in one of the other rooms, Sean came and sat over with me. An enigmatic German-English mongrel, He was one of the growing number of serious psychonauts on the freeparty scene at the time. people who thought the secrets of the universe could be discovered with chemical help, he carried around a little cigarette tin full of magical chemicals, like a miniature modern day Leary spreading the word of psychoactive discovery to anyone who would listen. After helping me to get the shot in, we settled to conversation, chiefly about the three months he had spent dieting ayahuasca in the peruvian amazon.
At the time I was just finishing off a degree in pharmacology and I had more than a passing interest in medicinal plants. I also had a reasonable history of psychedelic drug use and the concept of a psychedelic medicine intrigued me. At the time I was toying with the possibility of a masters thesis and after a few months I felt like I needed a break after three years of studying.
The idea of Ayahuasca had been playing on my mind. I tried to research as much as i could about this medicine and I was deeply interested in it's supposed mystical powers. it was time to call on Sean again. After tracking him down I got a name and a phone number of a curandero who might or might not still be somewhere in iquitos and who might or not be able to teach me about ayahuasca.
So time for another half arsed trip. As with my usual brand of traveling to far off destinations for long periods of time, I packed as much as I could fit into a small rucksack, bought the cheapest ticket to Lima I could get my hands on, and left the country with No Spanish, a dog eared passport, an open return ticket and $1500 in cash. I had no idea how long I was going to be there and I was pinning all my hopes on a smudged napkin from a man who wasn't quite sure where in reality he was most of the time.
Having had 24 hours to have a crash course in Spanish via a phrasebook and the hilarious buying of an internal airways ticket from someone who spoke no english, I braved the phonecall to finally get in contact with my curandero. With a bit of help from a friendly bystander I managed to establish a meeting in a village, a couple of miles out of iquitos the next morning. I took a taxi to the edge of the city, got out, got pointed down the right road and started walking.
To borrow a phrase from apocalypse now, it felt good to be back in the jungle again. Called Green Hell by some, it reminded me of a childhood spent on the outskirts of a tropical rainforest in southeast asia. The smell of the earth, the rain, the noises around me all seemed reassuringly familiar as I walked into the village in the growing dusk.
Using the international language of wild gestures, some elementary spanish and a lot of luck I managed to get myself a hammock for the night in a room shared with a couple of mangy dogs, the family pig. A meal of fish, chunks of corn and rice and some kind of locally distilled raw alcohol rounded off the area and I fell into a contented sleep.
Several hours after I was awakened by the dawn cacophony of the jungle an old woman walked into the town. struggling under the weight of some baskets. As I watched her stagger across the village square I sat and watched her from the porch of my overnight house, finally working out that she was walking towards me. As she reached me, my jaw dropped when in near perfect, slightly german accented english she looked me straight in the eye and said 'You must be ******, I am Maria, now why don't you help an old woman with her bags' This was my protector and guide for the following months. She led me a couple of miles outside of the village where we boarded a boat and headed into the unknown.
Maria, as it turned out, was a Curandera, a female traditional healer. She was part Urarina, unusual in that it was normally urarina men who drank and prepared ayahuasca. But, she explained to me, she had been widowed young and had always been very aware of the world beyond and so had left her local community and gone to learn about ayahuasca from another, now dead curandero nearer Iquitos. there she had learned about ayahuasca and medicinal plants. As we boarded the small boat for a ten hour journey deeper down the river, into the forest properly, I asked her how long she would be able to teach me for. "Until you're ready to leave" was her reply; I asked her what she would want for payment. Sean had taught her English (explaining the slightly odd german accent). We settled on $500 to help her son in university (who I'd spoken to on the phone), a new pig, and my help with the daily chores.
As I carried on journeying into the unknown I contemplated the months ahead. suffice to say it was nothing I expected......(To be continued in part two)
Part 2: Maria
Idly, I swatted at the insects buzzing around my head, inwardly wishing I’d thought to bring a mosquito net with me. Not that it would have done much good, in this insect filled little piece of mosquito heaven, just a few hours walk from the river, about 10 hours journey from Iquitos. The damn things were everywhere. I’d honestly not thought it possible that so many wonderful examples of creation could be so perfectly evolved to feed on white boys who were a long way from home.
I’d been in Peruvian Amazonia for two weeks now, staying with Maria, a Curandera.
Maria herself deserves some description. Sitting still she resembled the gnarled roots of an old lightning scared oak, coated in foliage of grey white hair. Dark eyes, not black and empty, but full of fire and depth peered out calmly from a face with lines etched like scars in the rock of a mountain. She exuded age and quiet dignity. Habitually she dressed in a confused mixture of traditional dress, strange pieces of jewellery made from oddly shaped stones, feathers and animal parts. Oddly she topped this off with an obscure jersey from a minor league German football team, another reminder of Sean. Everything about her looked worn but not tired. If you saw Maria, reclining in her hammock and smoking an out of place cigarette, hand rolled in scraps of paper, you’d think her a broken down old woman in the twilight of her years.
As soon as she moved everything changed. Muscles which looked gnarled and contracted became wires and cables, as hard as iron, twining around her bones like the vines that encircled and choked the trees around her. She moved like a cat, quietly, but purposeful, full of silent power. She had and amazing physical strength, regularly lifting loads I struggled to carry without complaint. In the dead of night a few days I arrived I heard an almighty crash and saw the huge stone quern stone used for preparing cornmeal walking it’s self around the front room. Hunched underneath a weight it would have taken five of me to carry was Maria. She’d decided to do a little redecoration at four in the morning.
She operated on some completely different circadian rhythm to the rest of humanity. Never sleeping at night, and apparently not for most of the day, she was always busy doing something. Maria was the queen of the cat nap, falling asleep suddenly and apparently in the middle of a task, she’d break the day into periods of furious activity with short siestas and long, long waking nights. More than once she chastised me for resting more than a couple of hours in one break. She’d spend her nights talking to me, or, if I’d finally fallen asleep, it would be to the sound of Maria singing softly and staring into the fire. At the time I didn’t understand this sleeping ritual, but later I’d learn.
(continued in part 3: Maria's genesis)
Part 3: Maria's Genesis
Maria delighted in her new domestic slave (sorry, pupil). She worked me at a furious pace. She had a house that needed repairing before the rains really came, food needed gathering out in the forest under her tutelage and the pigs needed looking after. Days began at dawn and ended whenever Maria decided I was done, normally long into the night. I was having a crash course in life in a small Amazonian village. However none of Maria’s supposed healing powers came to the forefront. No-one called on her for a remedy or for divination of an illness. In short, in the first weeks I learned nothing about ayahuasca. I did, however, learn a lot about Maria
Maria’s past was troubled. She was married at 15 to an older Urarina man, who she instantly disliked. She was one of three of his wives and from her description, was treated more like a chattel than a partner. While her husband hunted and generally lazed around the house she spent long days doing chores, farming a small patch of land and gathering edible plants in the forest. When she expressed an interest in what happened when the men were shamanising she was dismissed. More than once she was beaten and raped. When she was twenty, her husband died, drowned trying to cross a river in full flood leaving her with a new son.
Maria was left with a choice, she could stay, possibly marry another Urarina and carry on or she could leave, into the unknown.
The decision to leave came after a dream. In the middle of the night, she dreamed she woke up to the sound of singing coming from the forest. She walked out of her house to find a glowing tree singing to her. In her dream, she learned her first Icaro.
An Icaro is a power song. They can be sung in Spanish, Quecha, another tribal language such as Urarina, even a speaker’s native language such as English. Icaros are also often filled with soft moans, humming, whistles, anything in the glorious range of sounds the human instrument can create. They range from obviously translatable phrases, asking different things from different plants, ancestors and the spirit world to words which make no sense as phrases. Icaros are individual to the person singing them. They are not taught, more granted by the ayahuasca. Icaros are used to add to the healer’s power, to target specific ailments, to raise and invoke the spirits.
Maria left the Urarina with her son. She aimed to travel the not inconsiderable distance to Iquitos and find a healer there to learn from. She travelled by boat for four days with a young baby, making progress with only shreds of Quecha and Spanish. In a small port near to Iquitos she met another Urarina exile who was practising traditional healing near town. She spent 10 years learning from him, including several years in near isolation in the jungle dieting ayahuasca, with her son being farmed out to a host of her mentors friends and family. 10 years later she emerged a curandera, a wise woman and healer who could treat any kind of spiritual or physical illness introduced to her.
(continued in part 4: Maria's lessons)
