Plant Spirit Shamanism and Healing in the Amazon Pt.1
By Ross Heaven
www.thefourgates.com
Art by Arroe Collinswww.soulbehavior.com
PURCHASE DIVINE REVOLUTION AFFIRMATION PRINTS
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Since the beginning of human experience, plants have played a role in the evolution of our species, not only in the provision of food and medicine but in our deepest spiritual experiences and the development of consciousness. According to the shamans of the Amazon – one of Earth’s last (mostly) unspoiled areas and a bastion for deep and intimate plant knowledge – it was the plants themselves who taught us how to heal and know our souls.
I organise shamanic journeys to the Peruvian Amazon for Westerners to meet and work with indigenous healers and on one recent trip, Laurencio Garcia, a Shipibo poet, storyteller, and shaman, told me how “at the beginning of time, the jungle revealed its spirit” to rainforest tribes.
“In those days, our ancestors could still enter the place where the spirits of the animals and forest lived. They could talk with plants and animals and share knowledge of the plants to use for healing. We were one with all life.
“Our ancestors lived like this until the Moon Man came and cut the rope they used to climb into the spirit world. Then we lost our way. It was terrible and there was much sadness. But then we found another way back to that world: the ayahuasca vine, which is the rope that we now climb into the spirit realms”.
In the Shipibo tradition, the moon is associated with the rational mind and it is the coming of science, Western forms of medicine, and the victory of dualistic and logic-based thought over intuition and natural wisdom which therefore severed our connection to spirit. The story of the Moon Man is one which speaks of our need to rediscover our spiritual roots by using a new rope – ayahuasca – which was given to us as a way back to the world we once knew.
Ayahuasca: The vine of souls
Ayahuasca is the most important medicine of the Amazon. Made from the vine Banisteriopsis caapi and the leaves of the chacruna plant (Psychotria viridis), it is a potent visionary mixture which opens the person who drinks it to the experience of the world underlying our
own. Its name, which suggests these properties, is derived from two native words: aya meaning ‘spirit’ and huasca: ‘rope’ – hence it is commonly known as ‘the vine of souls’ or ‘the rope of the dead’.
It is prepared by cutting the vines into lengths which are cleaned and pounded, then placed in a cauldron with the leaves. Water is added and the mixture is boiled for 12 hours, overseen by a shaman.
When ingested, this muddy, pungent liquid produces feelings of warmth which spread from the stomach, creating a sense of well-being and skin elasticity, as if the skin has become rubber-like and no longer separate from the air. After this, there are visionary effects. Images of snakes and vines and iridescent colours are common but, to the shaman’s eye, symbols of the diseases which inhabit his client’s body are also seen. It is these which enable him, and the spirit of ayahuasca, to heal.
During the visionary phase, purging, in the form of vomiting or diarrhoea may also take place. This can sometimes be emotionally uncomfortable for Westerners who drink ayahuasca, and who have been brought up to control their bodily functions and not ‘let go’ like this. But it is welcomed by the people of the Amazon, who believe that this purging releases ‘spiritual poisons’ which can lead to physical illness. By clearing out the system physically and spiritually, la purga (‘the purge’: another of ayahuasca’s many names) restores balance to the soul and empowers the body to fight disease.
Though these beliefs may seem strange to us, in fact, many remarkable cures have been attributed to ayahuasca by Western doctors. In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Crossing Continents programme, for example, Dr Jacques Mabit revealed how a third of the patients that begin treatment with him for drug addictions are completely cured through ayahuasca use, with a success rate as high as 70% for those who complete the full treatment1. Other accounts include remissions from cancer, cures for deafness, and the lifting of depression2+3.
In scientific terms, ayahuasca vine is an inhibitor which contains harmala and harmaline, while chacruna contains vision-inducing alkaloids. It is this mixture which gives the brew its hallucinogenic properties.
There are still many mysteries about how the shamans knew how to combine these plants, for, separate from the other, each is more or less inert. The main ingredients in chacruna, for example, are
tryptamines which, if taken orally, are rendered inactive by the body’s enzymes. The vine, however, contains MAO (monoamine oxidase) inhibitors in the form of harmine compounds, so when the two plants come together they complement each other and a psychoactive compound results which has an identical chemical make-up to the organic tryptamines in our bodies. The mixture therefore finds its way easily into our brains and bonds smoothly to synaptic receptor sites, enabling a powerful visionary experience.
Some, like the writer and ‘psychonaut’ Terence McKenna, believe that our capacity for expanded consciousness and deep thought arose directly from the ingestion of plants such as these and the visionary effects they produced, at a time when human beings were nomadic hunter-gatherers, barely human at all, and would forage for food and eat whatever they found, or whatever ‘spirit’ guided them to4.
Certainly it is true that a million-and-a-half years ago, the human brain underwent what Rita Carter, in her book, Mapping the Mind describes as “an explosive enlargement.
“So sudden was it that the bones of the skull were pushed outwards, creating the high, flat forehead and domed head that distinguish us from primates. The areas that expanded most are those concerned with thinking, planning, organising and communicating… The frontal lobes of the brain duly expanded by some 40 per cent to create large areas of new gray matter: the neo-cortex [and] pre-frontal lobes”5.
Nobody knows what caused this dramatic enlargement, but an expansion in consciousness could be responsible, the theory being that we would need new grey matter to process and store the visionary information downloaded from the plants.
References
(1). Lizarzaburu Javier, Peru Seeks Tribal Cure for Addiction. BBC News, November 5 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/crossing_continents/3243277.stm
(2). Heaven Ross, Spirit in the City: The Search for the Sacred in Everyday Life, Bantam Books, London. ISBN-10: 0553813242. 2002
(3). Perkins John, introduction to The Journey to You: A Shaman’s Path to Empowerment, Ross Heaven, Bantam Books, London. ISBN-10: 0553813234. 2001
(4). McKenna Terence, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, Rider & Co, London. ISBN-10: 0712670386. 1999
(5). Carter Rita, Mapping the Mind, Phoenix Books, London. ISBN-10: 0753810190. 2000
(6). Narby Jeremy, The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, Phoenix Books, London. ISBN-10: 075380851X. 1999
The Author
Ross Heaven is a psychologist, author, workshop facilitator, and presenter. He has written more than 10 books on psychology, shamanism, plant medicines, and the healing traditions, one of which was described by Amazon Books as “The most important book on shamanism in years”, Plant Spirit Shamanism, about Amazonian medicine practices, and The Sin Eater’s Last Confessions, about traditional healing and plant cures in Britain and Wales. Ross runs workshops on the themes of his books and trips to the Peruvian Amazon to work with the ayahuasca shamans. His website is www.thefourgates.com.