Julio Jerena sat on his porch, leaning against the front wall of his home, a stilted ut on the Rio Auchyako in Peru’s Amazonia. Around us night had fallen. The heat of the day had subsided but the air was still thick with the incessant buzz of insects and the dank smells of the jungle. The moon, half-full and hung askew, began to rise above the trees across the little river.
    The eerie yellow light from a small kerosene lamp illuminated Julio’s frame and face: He was old, small, wiry and tired from chopping wood and maintaining a fire all day. He had a shock of white hair. Sunken cheeks highlighted his prominent nose. The veins in his neck stood out through his thin skin. But his eyes, clear and dark and almost luminous, riveted my attention. They had a quality about them that was ageless and strong, warm and understanding.
    I’d known Julio for several years. He is a curandero, a jungle doctor who works with plant medicines. The missionary family who live not far from him on the Auchyako call him a brujho, a sorcerer, and dry to dissuade the other families who live on the river from going to him. They rarely succeed: He simply understands illness and cures too well.
    Among the medicines he uses is ayahuasca, a liquic extracted from cooking sections of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, chacruna leaves and a number of tree barks (1). It is foul smelling and awful to the taste but used throughout Amazonia (2) by mestizos and Indians alike for both its curative and spiritual properties.
    “When I use ayahuasca I can see inside a person and tell what hs wrong,” he explained once during one of our rare verbal conversations. “The spirits let me look very closely and tell me what to do.”
    Julio interrupted my thoughts by asking for a matsch. He took it and lit a mapacho, a hand-rolled black-tobacco cigarette common to the region.
    “Muy bueno,” he said, exhaling the thick smoke into the open neck of an old brown bottle filled with ayahuasca. The smoke, he said, would prevent evil spirits from contaminating it.
    He chanted while he smoked: His woive was gruff and the words ran together incomprehensibly. Next to him his 12-year-old son, Antenor, played a guitar he’d fashoined by stretching a boar skin over an improvised frame. His fingers flew about the fretless neck effortlessly, picking out the chant’s haunting melody (3).
    Julio, Antenor and the rest of us—my guide, Moises, a friend of mine, Larry Lavalle, and myself—were sitting in a circle. In the center of it was an old piece of blue plastic sheeting  upon which Julio had placed a number of things: the ayahuasca bottle, a handful of mapachos, a bottle of sweet orange-smelling Florida water, a bottle of camphor and garlic teeth in aguar diente—clean cane liquor—and a fan made of dried leaves.
    Julio chanted until he’d finished two of the mapachos, then corked the bottle and took the ayahuasca into his bedroom, the only walled section of the stilted-platform hut. He would leave it there in the dark for an hour to give it a chance to settle after it has been ‘smoked’, so that good spirits could gather around it.
    “Bueno,” he said after he returned and resumed sitting. “Una hora mas.”
    We sat silently, listening to the beautiful music coming from Antenor’s odd guitar. He’d never played a real one so had no idea that what he had made was all wrong—for frets he’d dug out little canals in the neck, and he only had five strings—but its music was nonetheless clear and filled the night air with warmth and melancholy.
    When he finally grew tired and put the instrument down his father smiled. “Ah, bueno,” he said in the harsh, gutteral Spanish of the region. “Todo bien.” Good. Everything good.
    He looked to each of us. “Ahora,” he began. “Have you any questions you would like to ask?”
    “Yes,” said Larry, a strapping 40-year-old from Brooklyn with Meditteranean coloring and chiseled features who’d been living in Los Angeles. “What kind of visions do you have when you drink ayahuasca, don Julio?”
    Julio smiled again. “Many things. I see boats, planes, people, spirits. I talk with them and they tell me things. Some of them are dead family members or old friends. Some of them are then ancients, spirits I don’t know. There are a lot of different spirits which speak with me. Some of them are good and some of them are not. But they are only spirits.”
He turned to Antenor, who was going to drink ayahuasca for the first time that night. “If you get afraid you must remember that. They are only spirits.”
He might have said it to all of us. It was always a little frightening to drink ayahuasca, and occasionally terrifying. The visions it produced were not always the visions one wanted to see, and even when they were they were difficult to reconcile with ordinary reality. I had learned that several years ago, with my first ayahuasca experience.
I had been traveling in Peru with Larry and another friend, Chuck Dudell in 1984. We had spent time in the Cordillera Blanca mountains and later at Machu Picchu and had finally worked our way to the jungle, the part of the trip I had most looked forward to. After spending some time in a river town called Requena we arrived in Iquitos, the city where the Amazon river, traveling south to north until that point, hits a slightly raised land mass and turns east, toward the Atlantic. Iquitos is that land mass. It was there we’d met Moises, a fifty-year-old mestizo guide with tatoo’d arms, a cocky air and a good smile. He had approached us on the street , explained that he was a former military man whose specialty was jungle survival training and offered to take us into the jungle for a few days.
When he learned that we had already looked into a number of established guide services but had turned them down because we were looking for something different, he beamed.
“Perfectamente! I am the only guide in Iquitos who will take you into the real jungle,” he said in pidgin English. “No tourist camps. Pura selva. Pure jungle. I can even arrange for you to try ayahuasca.”
    It was obvious that he expected us to know what he meant but we didn’t, and when we asked him what it was, he laughed. “Hallucino. Jungle medicine.”
Though all of us had done a fair share of hallucinogens, none of us was familiar with ayahuasca. Moises, who claimed no knowledge of drugs outside the jungle, doubted it would be like anything we’d done before. “Muy differente,” he said. “Muy especial. It is the fastest way to know the jungle. It will make the jungle your friend and give you night vision. And if it likes you, you’ll be able to visit any part of the world you want to see.”
    Two days later, we set off about dawn in a flat-bottomed boat heading up the Ucayali River.
    By mid-morning we had left the big river and were traveling up a smaller one in dugout canoes. By noon we had reached the home of a woman Moises described as a Shipibo Indian curandera. She was beautiful, strong and old, and Moises assured us that her ayahuasca would produce incredible visions.
    Unfortunately, she refused to make it for us. We were dilitants, she said, who had no business using ayahuasca, and no amount of cajoling on Moises’ part would entice her to change her mind.
    We set off by foot on a path to the home of another person who might make us ayahuasca. We traveled along the river through a dense stretch of jungle to the home of a man named Alphonse. It was a hard walk. There were several nearly impossible bridges to cross—just a log or two across deep flood-stream bed, some of them several yards wide. The logs were slippery and unanchored: At each we crossed with a painstaking caution that Moises found hilarious.
    When we finally arrived at the unwalled platform hut where Alphonse lived he was not home. Moises explained to one of his wives what we wanted and she explained that it was too late in the day to begin making ayahuasca. She said we ought to come back in the morning. Moises persisted and the woman eventually agreed to pass the message along in return for some small presents.
    We left the camp, hiked for an hour, and returned. This time Alphonse was there. He was a bull of a man wearing raggedy clothing and an old painter’s cap. My first impression was that he was a dangerous man, but that vanished almost immediately. His smile was broad and radiant.
    He was sitting by a great cast-iron pot, tending a fire beneath it. The ayahuasca was being made, he explained, though he cautioned us that it wouldn’t be at full potency since the preparation required a full day’s attention, then told us to return that evening at eight.
    Just before sunset we made our way back to the hut. The going was even slower than it had been earlier. The thought of falling 10 or 12 feet onto the riverbed debris—rotting tree trunks, broken branches and such—prevented us from anything more than inch-by-inch progress.
    When we arrived Alphonse was waiting for us. We were invited to join him on the platform floor of his hut. At the rear of the hut his wives and their children were already asleep beneath mosquito netting.
    Once we were settled Alphonse asked for an hour of silence while we prepared ourselves. We sat quietly, listening to the occasional rustle of foraging animals and the cries of distant monkeys. Except for the insects the night was beautiful. Alphonse laughed when he saw us flailing away at them and promised that they would no longer bother us after we drank the ayahuasca.
    “Otre effect,” Moises explained. “The ayahuasca keeps the mosquitos away.”
    When the hour was up Alphonse had us sit in a circle, then retreated to a corner of the platform. In the center of the circle he placed the ayahuasca, a bottle of camphor and garlic in aguar diente, a little bottle of gasoline, a handful of mapachos and a leaf fan.
    Alphonse lit one of the cigarettes and blew the smoke into the ayahuasca. Under his breath he began to chant. As he did he filled a small gourd with the brown liquid and passed it to Larry. Larry tipped the gourd to his lips, made a face as though he’d just bitten into a sour fruit, then passed the gourd back to Alphones. Watching him, it suddenly occurred to me that I knew nothing of these people, of their medicine or its effects. What if something should go wrong? If we couldn’t handle it?
    Moises didn’t help when he declined to drink. “Someone has to watch out for you guys,” he said, “to make sure you don’t go off into the jungle.” He assured us that was the way it was done.
    When the gourd reached me I ignored my fears and drank. The ayahuasca tasted like burnt grapefruit juice infused with dank smoke. It was acrid and awful and almost impossible not to spit out.
    Alphonese drank last, then passed the bottle of camphor for us to sniff, and the gasoline for us to wipe on our lips and faces. The mapachos were passed last. When Larry, who didn’t smoke, declined, he was told to smoke anyway as the smoke was a good medicine that would keep bad spirits from him.
    Suddenly, Alphonse leaned over the edge of the platform and began to vomit. We’d been warned that we would all vomit, but there was something unusual in the way Alphonse did it. The sound he emitted was unnatural, almost beautiful. From deep within his belly came what sounded like the rush of water over rocks, like a flash flood crashing and tumbling against stone. Louder and louder it grew, boiling up within him with the clarity of a mad spring bursting from a glacier. It was an astonishing sound, moving and powerful.
    And then suddenly it came on me and I lunged for the platform’s edge. I could feel the toxins in the liquid cramping my stomach, by blood rushed and my head pounded and I heaved into the night.
    When I was finished Alphonse was still not through. His rushing river was calming though, the rumbling and boiling in his stomach settling. I looked to Moises, sure I’d imagined the sound. “He’s a man of great power,” Moises said. “He doesn’t do anything in a small way.” I looked to Larry and Chuck and in the light of the moon they confirmed that they too had heard the sounds.
    Alphonse began chanting and shaking the leaf fan. The dry leaves made a noise like wind rushing about the platform, enveloping the haunting and distant sound of his voice.
    The night grew peaceful, the mosquitoes vanished. I lay on my back and closed my eyes. Suddenly a strange image appeared. I saw a bird flying over snow-crested mountains. It was a huge brown bird with long broad wings tipped with white. I was looking at the bird from a great distance and then suddenly felt myself merging with it. I realized I was seeing with the bird’s perspective, my sharp eyesight picking out the mist minute details of the landscape. I flew over a range of mountains and peered into a stream: I saw fish moving about, the colors of their scales unimaginably fish hues of blue and green. And then, unexpectedly, I topped off the face of the earth and plummeted toward them. I don’t remember any feelings of fear, only that I was hungry and wanted a fish. I split the water with hardly a splash and in an instant was racing skyward again, the fish in my beak. I snapped it in two and the pieces of it entered my stomach unchewed. I remember thinking I didn’t generally eat food that way.
    The instant I thought of myself apart from the bird I was back in Alphonse’s house. I became immensely sad and tried to bring the image back, without success. It was only when I finally stopped trying to fly that the vision returned. I would suddenly be flying, sometimes with the bird, sometimes just below it, looking at the arrangement of the feathers, aware that each feather moved individually to control our flight.
    Twice I was able to ask the bird to take me somewhere. First, I wanted to see my wife Clare, who was at that time in California. Instantly I was in her room, hovering on the ceiling. For a moment I watched her making love with someone and a wave of nausea washed over me. The moment I got jealous the image disappeared and I was back on the platform in the jungle.
    The second image was of our apartment in New York, sublet to friends. They were reading, one in the living room, one in a bedroom, and all was quiet. They had moved the living room furniture around.
    The only other vision I can remember from that first time using ayahuasca was of a tree: I stared at it as if I were looking down the wrong end of a telescope, then suddenly found myself next to it, focusing on one of its burls. I saw thousands of ants moving on the bark. I saw them in such detail I could count the hairs on their bodies. When I looked across the rings of the burl it was as if I was looking across a vast plane.
    And then I heard talking and the others were saying they weren’t having much effect; that all they felt was ill. I wanted to stay but was overruled and in a few minutes were started back to our camp.
    We’d gotten a good distance from Alphonse’s, Chuck and Larry still talking about how little the ayahuasca had affected them, when Moises pointed out that we were waling in the jungle at night, crossing the precarious log bridges, and none of us were using our flashlights.
    “Even with no visions it’s a good medicine for the jungle,” he said. “Night vision is very important here.”
    The next morning Moises had us take a cold river wash, saying it was necessary after ayahuasca to make us whole again. I did as told and immersed myself in the water.

When I returned home, I began collecting a number of books and articles on ayahuasca, thinknig I would learn more about this strange and wonderful medicine. In fact I didn’t read any of them. I was afraid that what others had written would influence my next experience and I didn’t want any more clutter in my head than I already had.
    Much of that clutter involved whether to believe the experience or not. On the one hand I knew it had been real, that I’d glimpsed what it was to be a bird, to be hungry and to eat a fish. On the other I had no way of knowing whether or not I’d invented the entire vision or dream or whatever it was. It was a particularly difficult experience to trust because it was precisely what I wanted to believe. Magic mushrooms and acid had taught me that there was a spirit in everything, that ours was a mystical world. Ayahuasca not only appeared to verify that, it had allowed me to become viscerally involved with one of those spirits and that was too fantastic. Was it possible that my ego had really dissolved enough—momentarily—to allow me to interplay with another form, or was my ego so distended that I could dream the vision up and convince myself it was true?
    And what of the apparent astral traveling I’d done to California and New York? That my friends would be reading in my apartment was typical enough to have been imagined; equally true that my fears concerning my wife’s behavior—we were separated at the time—would surface in the moment I tried to envision her.
    There was one odd thing: The furniture in our apartment in New York had indeed been rearranged when I returned. The problem was that I had only noticed it had been moved, I hadn’t really paid enough attention to it to know if it was in the positions I’d seen.
    The only undeniable aspects of the experience were the temporarily improved night vision, the temporary disappearance of the mosquitoes and a sense of connection with the jungle we all shared in the days we spent with Moises following the ayahuasca experience. It felt as though the ayahuasca had indeed made the jungle a more friendly and less alien place than it otherwise would have been. Still, real or imagined, that Winter I often dreamt of flying with the bird with the white-tipped wings.
    When I returned to Iquitos some months later so spend more time with Moises learning about the jungle, there was no question about my doing ayahuasca again. It was only a question of where.  I wanted to return to Alphonse’s. Moises argued that to stop there would cost us several days but assured me that there was a curandero, Julio Jerena, who lived in the direction we were taking who would make it for us. He was an old man, Moises said, and respected as a healer.
    We traveled by riverboat up the Ucayali for nearly 24-hours before we hired a local with a peque-peque, an oversized canoe with a small motor that sounded like pe-ke, pe-ke, when it ran, and headed up the tiny Rio Supay to the Rio Auchyako. It was a beautiful trip through the forest. Macaws sang in the canopy overhead and pink and gray river dolphins danced in the waters around us.
    Julio’s house was set back from the river, a ramshackle hut surrounded by fruit trees. Old fishing nets dried in the sun next to freshly washed laundry on a patch of lemon grass. A pig and dozens of chickens ran for the safety of a crawl space beneath the hut as we approached.
    Julio was waiting for us on the porch. He was older than I’d imagined, and wiry. He wore a mustache and had widely space, dark eyes. Moises introduced us and explained what we wanted. Julio said alright, then told us we could stay in a small hut not far from his.
    The next morning I woke to the sound of chopping wood and from the porch of the little hut I could see the smoke from Julio’s ayahuasca fire. I asked Moises if I should offer    to help; he said that making the fire was curandero’s job, but that in any event Julio had an apprentice, a young doctor named Salis Navarro.
    I tried to remain calm but as the evening approached I grew more and more anxious. When it was finally time to take the short walk to Julio’s house I fairly flew through the underbrush. Moises chided me for acting like a child but I didn’t care. I desperately wanted to fly again.
    There were a number of men gathered on Julio’s porch. Among them was Salis. He was young, strong and bright, with clear eyes and a thick neck. I asked about his being a curandero’s apprentice. He told me it was not something he would have chosen to do but the plant spirits had always been friendly with him and urged him to study. When I looked at him questioningly he said that most city people didn’t understand. “They can be a persistent bunch of spirits,” he laughed.
    One of the other men asked what had brought me there. I explained that it was probably the same thing that had brought him: curiosity.
    “I’m not here for curiosity,” he said. “I’m here for my leg.” He pulled up his right trouser leg: His calf was shriveled and purple and the bone looked as though it was covered with only a tissue-thick layer of skin. The flesh was necrotic and gave off a foul odor of rancid meat.
    “Shushupe,” he said. “Bushmaster.” He explained that he’d been bitten by a bushmaster—the largest venomous snake in the Americas—several weeks earlier while working near Iquitos. He had gone to the hospital there and they had done what they could but after several days had decided to amputate.
    The men gathered around and began to add to the story, describing the size of the snake and mimicking the man as he explained how he left the hospital and made his way by boat to Julio’s where he’d been treated with ayahuasca and topical plant medicines. He’d also been given a regimen of exercises to follow, which including walking up and down a three-step device Julio had “seen” while under the influence of ayahuasca.
    “Almost two months now and I still have my leg.”
    Julio, mostly through Moises, explained that the ayahuasca had cleaned the man’s system of toxins and that except for the area in the immediate vicinity of the wound—which was dead—the leg would heal well.
    One of the other men said that he too was there for treatment. He said that Julio had performed an operation on his stomach, then showed me a scarless stomach to prove it. I asked what had been wrong and Julio said the man had a large tumor in his belly and that he’d had to cut him open, extract the stomach, then remove the growth. Afterward he’d washed the stomach in the river, replaced it and sewn the man back up.
    I asked when the operation had taken place. He answered that it had been performed two days earlier. “All doctor Jerena’s scars heal quickly,” the man said.
    Everyone laughed when I looked skeptical. They said my believing it or not didn’t alter the facts. Julio explained that ayahuasca was a powerful ally with many uses but that trying to understand how it worked was difficult. “If you talk with the Shipibo people,” he said, “they would tell you things that even I don’t know. I was trained as a doctor and I went to practice in Pulcallpa with them. They introduced me to ayahuasca and I gave up regular medicine. How is it possible to cut open a stomach and wash it in the river? It isn’t. But with ayahasca it is. How can you work and not leave a scar? You can’t. But with ayahuasca you can. I can’t explain it to you. You might say it is all a vision. Still people come to me and with ayahuasca I heal them.”
    That night, Salis was the primary curandero. He had us make a circle and brought out the necessary things. Once again Moises removed himself, saying he wanted to see that no harm came to me.
    We drank the foul tasting ayahuasca, sniffed the camphor and Florida water, passed the mapachos. Vomiting came easily, though I was disappointed that neither Salis nor Julio regurgitated with Alphonse’s style.
    Salis began to chant. His voice was strong and clear, his words a mix of Latin, Quechua—from the Andean highlands—local dialect and Spanish. I’d been given permission to tape the songs but all attempts to translate have failed with the exception of little snip-its. Among them was this:
“Dominating the occult science,
Dominating the occult spirits.
Calling the occult spirits,
Calling what moves below the currents,
Calling the spirits in these moments.
White magic, green magic, red magic, black magic,
Vampires and demons, cover us with your shadow.
In these moments I want to be granted my desires.
Fly, fly little body that was born free.
Fly, fly little body that was born free.”

    Julio added his voice to Salis’ while I waited patiently for the bird to appear. It never did. There were no visions whatsoever that night. Whether that was because I anticipated them or because the ingredients used to make the ayyahuasca were different than those used by Alphonse, I’m not sure. Instead, the chanting of the two curanderos began to echo in my head, a resounding noise that seemed to pull me apart, as though a wedge were splitting me in half. I grew terrified of what might happen if I allowed the parts of me to separate. It seemed, on one hand , to make sense: I needed to be pulled apart if I was ever going to become whole. At the same time I didn’t know whether I would ever come together again. It was a frightening experience, one I wasn’t prepared for. Louder and louder the chants resounded, deeper and deeper went the wedge, until I finally fled the porch for the safety of the river’s edge. Moises followed and warned me against going into the water. His voice was like an anchor that pulled me back from the edge of some horrific abyss. I turned to thank him. He was still on the porch.
    Suddenly more afraid of the voice than of the doctors, I returned to the circle. This time the chanting was no longer frightening. It was soothing and beautiful and I soon fell asleep. When I awoke Moises and I returned to our hut.
    After a river wash the next morning I asked Moises what had happened and why I hadn’t been able to fly. He aid that while I was asleep Julio had explained that I needed to be opened up so that some personal things that were holding me back could be removed. That was what Salis and he had done. Moises also said that the magical effects of ayahuasca that I’d experienced the first time were not to be sought or missed. When I needed to bird the bird would guide me. When I needed to become friendly with the jungle ayahuasca would guide me in a different way. “Ayahuasca gives you what you need,” he said, “not what you want.”
     I thought he might have been justifying the ayahuasca’s apparent lack of effect but didn’t question him further (5).

    The following year I returned to Amazonia and had an extraordinary, and to a degree, verifyable, ayahuasca experience. Moises, my brother-in-law Steve Flores, and I had planned a trip deep into Peru’s to the border region of Brazil. Our plan was to fly in a sea plane, visit a number of Matses Indian communities and then hike out. During the hike we would be met at a pre-arranged river crossing by Moises’ eldest son, Junior, himself an accomplished guide and, by then, a friend of mine. Junior would have supplies for the last few days of the hike. If things went smoothly we would eventually end up on the Auchyako river and make our way to Julio’s home.
    One of the keys to the plan’s success was our assumption that one of t he Matses men would be willing to guide us between their camps and to the Rio Lobo, our meeting point with Junior. Unfortunately as we were preparing to leave the Matses’ communities a jaguar killed a 14-year-old boy, setting off a series of events—the burning of the twin villages where the death occurred and the moving of the inhabitants to a new location—that left us guideless. We nonetheless tried to hike across the jungle, but after four days realized it was futile and backtracked to the Matses camp. We borrowed a peque-peque, traveled down the river to a military border post and radioed for a plane.
    We had the plane take us to the Rio Ucayali where we bartered for a second peque-peque and made our way to Julio’s from the opposite direction that the one we had been expected to take. Which meant that Junior, who could have known nothing about the change of plan—was still waiting in the jungle for our arrival.
         As soon as we arrived at Julio’s, Moises asked him to make ayahuasca. He agreed to do it the following day. I thought Moises was being cavalier about his son—I expect us to set off up the river after him—but he explained the situation.
           “Mi hijo,” he began, “ is at least three days away from here.
If he is still waiting for us he will have problems because I know what supplies he had. For us to go after him without additional supplies is unthinkable; that would jeopardize us all. Instead, I’m having Julio make the ayahuasca and you will go and find my son. You’ll explain what happened and tell him to leave. That is the only way.”
             “I’ll never find my way. Where will I go?”
             “You’ll go with the bird. Have the bird tell him.”
             I couldn’t believe what he was asking. I would have had a
better chance finding him on foot that astrally. I didn’t even think the bird wold reappear, but even if it did, how would I find someone in a vision? I told Moises that what he was asking was out of the question and that we should set off after his son immediately, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
    All through the next day he pestered me to concentrate, to meditate on that evening’s task; I did as he asked and told him I would try, but sill didn’t imagine it could be done, at least by me.
    That evening we sat on the porch of the little hut as Julio began the simple ceremony. Salis had helped with the collection of the vine but didn’t attend. The only people who were drinking the ayahuasca were Julio, Steve, and myself. As the little cup was handed to me I silently asked for help, then gulped the liquid down.
    When we were finished drinking he put out the little kerosene lamps and we were enveloped in darkness. It was a beautiful night, full of sounds. There was no moon because clouds covered the sky: bullfrogs croaked, letting us know that rain was coming.
    Not long after Julio began to chant I felt my stomach tighten and lunged for the edge of his platform. I could feel my insides welling up and when I vomited, for the first time I felt some of the swell and motion I’d heard from Alphonso. It was a strange and powerful feeling, a wonderful racking of my system. Over and over the swelling came and I found myself roaring into the night with each heave—though I couldn’t imagine what I was heaving as Moises never let us eat after breakfast on days we were drinking ayahuasca. For a moment I imagined myself inhabited by something larger than I was; I’m not quite sure how to describe it except to say that I realized Moises’ request was not at all extraordinary.
    The visions began soon after my stomach settled and I retook my seat. My mind filled with pictures of demon skulls and hellish faces; a sea of them in corpse-white, a tour of hell.  Body parts and wars; hatred and jealousies; famine and pestilence; red serpents and hoards of insects; as though I’d opened a page of my mind from a modern Dante’s Inferno. Vietnam, Indian conflicts, New York City suffering.
    The visions of horror soon passed and I felt myself rising up from the porch with incredible speed, felt myself hurtling through the clouds and looking down on the whole of the Auchyako river. In a moment it had become a dot and the whole of the jungle was beneath me, a blur. In another moment the whole earth was little more than a pinpoint.
    I saw skies like I’d never imagined—clear, vast, celestial skies. Deep blues and purples, yellow planets, swirling galaxies. I moved through worlds of green and plenty inhabited by forms I didn’t recognize.
    From somewhere I could hear the shaking of Julio’s leaf-fan and the low, murmuring chant. What a beautiful song it was. I saw the white-tipped wings of the bird I’d traveled with and tried to merge with it. I couldn’t
    And then I heard Moises’ voice, coaxing me, reminding me to find his son: In an instant I was submerged in cold liquid. It took a moment to orient myself as my vision shifted from a sort of telescopic sight to a kind of macro-vision. Once I’d adjusted I realized I was in the river reeds right in front of our little hut. A snake appeared, yellow and black, with a whitish underbelly, It was long and strong and as thick as my leg. I watched it glide through the reeds. A drip of water hit the surface of the river and the ripples were tactile. I felt them and realized I was with the snake. We swam on the surface around submerged and floating trees, my body moving with powerful contractions.
    I remember wondering whether it was all an hallucination, whether I was dreaming everything from imagination. Just as I did a bright green tree-frog came into view, sitting on a branch near the water’s surface. We—the snake and I—moved silently toward it and in a flash had eaten it. It felt strange in my throat and stranger still when it jumped in an effort to escape. I was so surprised by the feeling that I separated from the snake for a moment. Re-merging, I felt the muscles in our neck contract to kill it and felt it slide easily into my belly.
    Seeing through the snake’s eyes the world was flattened and wide-angled: Peripheral vision was extraordinary. I decided to visit my family and took off with the snake. In a moment we were in New York. I visited Clare at the restaurant where she was working—she’d returned to New York but we were through—and saw her take an order from some customers then move to the bar to get their drinks. While she waited she made faces about them. I visited my sister Barbara in her new home. Her husband Paul, a musician, was asking her to listen to a new riff he’d written. I visited an old friend, Gail, in Los Angeles: She was talking on the phone, standing. She held the phone in her right hand and gesticulated with her left.
    There were moments when I was with the snake and others when I was sort of watching it. It wasn’t hallucination or dream, not vague or delusional. It was a kind of seeing, clear and close but just out of reach, the way it feels when someone touches you through a thick coat. The images were all real, I thought, but I still had no way of knowing how real. I wanted to see something that would verify the experience.
    I had hardly had the thought when I found myself at my sister Pat’s loft in downtown Manhattan. She sat at a desk, drawing. I watched her for a few minutes. Suddenly she stood, walked across the large room and said “Hello,” aloud, to both Steve and me. Thinking she could see me I moved about the floor. She didn’t notice. I tried to see what she was drawing but with the snake’s flattened vision the images meant nothing to me.
    I finally decided to visit my own apartment to see if Larry, who was staying there, would be able to see me. In a flash the snake was speeding up Third Avenue in New York, entering y building and gliding up to the second floor. We moved around the landing and up the second flight of stairs to my apartment. Both Chuck and Larry were in the kitchen, sitting at the table, Chuck sat in my usual chair; Larry near the door. Chuck had a bottle of something in his hand. They toasted and I heard Chuck ask when I was due back.
    I suddenly found myself back on the porch. My head was throbbing. Julio was already gone. Steve and I spoke for a minute: He hadn’t vomited and was feeling ill. We stood and walked to our hammocks. Just as I was getting under the mosquito netting Moises asked whether I’d seen his son. A wave of self-contempt washed over me. I’d been so enthralled with my visions that I hadn’t even tried to find Junior, but I didn’t dare tell that to Moises. Instead I lied and said I hadn’t been able to find him.
    I lay in my hammock and closed my eyes: The snake reappeared and I thought of Junior. Instantly we took off up the Auchyako. We sped through the water, nearly flying past things. I asked the snake if it knew where to turn off the river and into the jungle to begin looking and suddenly we were moving along the forest floor, trees and vines all around us. We came to a small clearing and I recognized the smell of old smoke clinging to the underbrush. Someone had been there recently. I felt silly doing it but forced myself to call out: “Junior! Junior! Come back! We’re not there! Come back to Julio’s!”
     No one answered.
    We looked all around the clearing. There was a sensation of death in the air but it didn’t feel like human death. Someone had hunted there recently. I asked the snake to keep going deeper into the jungle but it surprised me and returned to the river and began to move back downstream. We moved much more slowly than we had earlier. I felt miserable that I’d have no good news for Moises.
    Unexpectedly, because the river was so narrow that far up, I felt motion in the water. It came from both ends of a long, thin object. It occurred to me that the object had to be a canoe being paddled by two people, but that didn’t make sense. No one lived that far up the river and we hadn’t heard or seen anyone heading in that direction earlier in the day.
    The closer we drew to the object the more sure I was that it was a canoe being paddled by two men, but in the darkness and with my snake-vision I couldn’t make out their faces. We pulled up alongside the craft and moved downstream with it for a few minutes. I heard talking sounds but couldn’t make out what was being said. Suddenly we moved past them. I began to scan the riverbanks for anything recognizable: Within a few minutes I saw the silhouette of a small camp Moises and I had built on my last trip up the Auchyako. The moment I did I was back in my hammock, the snake gone for good.
    U called out to Steve and asked if he was still awake. He was. I told him what I’d seen and asked him what I should do.
    “Tell Moises,” he said.
    “But what if it was just an hallucination?”
    “He asked you to do it. He knows the risks.”
    I woke Moises and told him. He laughed. “My son is safe. Gracias, Pedro.”
    I cautioned him against false hope.
    “It was a real vision,” he assured me.
    I asked him how he knew it was a real vision and not just something my mind made up.
    “Because you saw two people and I only told you about one.”
    I laughed too when I realized how he’d tricked me but still wasn’t confident. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll know soon enough. If they’re at the old camp and paddle all night they’ll be here at noon.”
    Moises was so confident that the next morning he  had us pack our gear and say our goodbyes. He wanted to make the riverboat ferry back to Iquitos that afternoon. I spent the morning making notes of the night’s visions and when just after noon Junior arrived, no one but me seemed surprised. With Junior was a man I didn’t know, a fellow named Mauro.
    Moises got on his son for taking so long to get there from the old camp and asked why they hadn’t kept going, trying to find us in the jungle. Junior explained that they’d seen a small plane two days earlier coming from the direction of Brazil toward the Auchyako and knew it had to be us. But how, he asked, did we know of their return? Moises explained the ayahuasca vision I’d had. Mauro said he and Junior had debated about killing the large boat they’d seen in the river the previous night but as they were out of shells for the shotgun decided against it.
    It seemed to make sense to everyone but Steve and me. I still wasn’t sure it wasn’t just luck or all some staged dream. The only way to prove it, I thought, was to call the people I’d seen when we returned to Iquitos. There wasn’t much to check on, of course; most of what I’d seen was typical activity for the people in the visions. Except for two events: Chuck being at my home on a Sunday evening, a night he normally spent with his girlfriend; and the image of my sister Pat drawing at midnight. Even then, the image of hew drawing wasn’t significant as she was a graphics designer, but my feeling that she had been aware of the snake’s presence, had even said hello, was.
    Steve, her husband, made the first call and shouted for me to join him in the phone booth when she began describing Sunday evening. She’d been working late, she said, trying to finish designing a poster for National College Television. The drawing she’d done was of a group of jungle animals standing in a thicket. Near midnight she’d stood to stretch and thought of us. She had not, she said, said “Hello” out loud. But while she stretched the image of a large clack and yellow snake had come to her very clearly and she had drawn one into the design of the poster, hiding in the thicket grass.
    The call to my home was equally revealing: Chuck’s girlfriend had gone out of town that weekend and he had indeed been to my apartment and had a few drinks in my kitchen with Larry on Sunday night.

Looking only at the more astonishing events which occur while under the influence of ayahuasca makes it appear that the visions were not only the primary event—other than improved night vision and a temporary respite from insects—of the medicine, but a primary reason for my frequent visits to the jungle. In fact, they were only one aspect of the ayahuasca experience and that, in turn, was only one aspect of my visits there.     
    My initial trip was prompted by a desire to glimpse the Amazon before man had completely destroyed it. But that trip had been so potent, and my first ayahuasca experience was one of the reasons for that, that learning about the jungle and its people had become a motivating force in me. I saw it as a place of immense beauty and mystery, a place where growth and decay, living and dying, happen at a fantastic pace. The movement of the rivers, the seasonal changes, the animals and plant life, all of it fascinated me. The whole natural history of the swamps and rainforests captured my imagination. I wanted to walk through it, to taste its wild foods, to meet its people, to sleep out there in the deep green. And the more I traveled there, the more time I wanted to spend there. I’d fallen in love with the cries of the birds and animals, the constant rustle of leaves, the smell of rotting vegetation. And I’d fallen in love with the people who live along the riverbanks or back in the woods. And learning about all of it was aided by those ayahuasca experiences.
    The ayahuasca was part of the whole experience. The visions it produced only one of its mysteries. The songs Julio sang, their rhythms were the rhythms of the rivers and the wind. They somehow put the motion of the jungle under my skin, introduced the jungle’s spirit to my spirit.
    Even the two days it took to get to Julio’s from Iquitos were part of the experience, as were the families I’d come to know on the Auchyako, the day of fasting before we drank the medicine, the meditation time on the porch and the river wash the next morning. Those things and a hundred others were the rich context in which the visions occurred.
    If I’d wanted nothing but the visions I would never have needed to leave Iquitos. There were dozens of ayahuasqueros and curanderos practicing there, and many specialize in producing visions for the tourists. The city is the center of the plant medicine practices for the region’s many tribes and in the marketplace vision-producing plants and medicines are readily available.
    But even in Iquitos most curanderos and herbalistas concern themselves with physical illness (6). A large portion of the population still prefer them to medical doctors. Used in the treatment of illness it is often only the curandero who drinks the ayahuasca and then only to contact spirits who can identify the problem and suggest appropriate measures. In some cases, such as the man who’d been bitten by the bushmaster, the ayahuasca is used to purge the body of toxins directly, as well as to divine the healing plants and exercise regimen necessary to effect maximum physical healing. Even Western medicine has found a use for it: The ayahuasca vine, banisteriopsis caapi, is used in extract form for a number of delicate eye operations because of its property of dilating the blood vessels behind the eye—no doubt accounting for the night vision it produces as well.
    To talk of using a plant medicine to contact spirits who not only exist but are capable of diagnosing illness may seem crazy to most of us, but the results can hardly be questioned. People are simply cured. Even Moises, who as a former military man has access to the finest medical treatment available in Peru, found himself bringing his ailing wife to Julio for treatment after the best doctors in Lima had given her only a short time to live.
    She’d had a stomach tumor which had grown so large that it was kiling her. Two operations had failed to remove it completely as it was apparently growing around vital organs and too dangerous to cut away completely. In desperation Moises had gone to Julio for help. Julio had looked into her while using ayahuasca nd produced an herbal diet which would make the tumor release its hold on her vital organs. Moises was skeptical and had called me nearly every week for several months during 1989 to ask whether he might not kill her with such treatment. I tried to convince him that Western medicine had already given her up for dead and didn’t see what he had to lose. After months of procrastination she began the dirt. Four weeks later the tumor was operable; she went to the hospital in Lima and had it removed.
    “They didn’t know why it suddenly began to shrivel up,” he told me. “I told them about Julio and the diet. They laughed and sai that was jungle merde, shit. They preferred to think it was a miracle.”
    Others in Iquitos and in the towns and villages of the region tell similar stories. And when I talk about seeing Junior through a snake’s eyes they discuss those kinds of visions as commonplace. “How else would the nativos have been able to survive in that green hell for so long?” they ask. “They have learned to talk with the plants.

After my experience at Julio’s with Steve, I made several trips to the Auchyako during which I didn’t use ayahuasca. Not that part of me didn’t want to, it was simply to powerful to use unnecessarily. I still didn’t—and don’t—understand the concept of talking with plants or communicating with the spirit would, but I’d lost what remained of my skepticism and knew that it was not something to be played with. When the appropriate time came for me to use it again, I would know it.
    That time came in the summer of 1988. I’d taken a long trip with Moises that had ended with a three-day ferry ride from Leticia, Colombia, back to Iquitos. Among the people onboard was a Peruvian named Roberto whom I’d known off and on for years. As his game was bilking tourists for phone environmental causes and I was a tourist, we weren’t close. Still, we talked occasionally.
    “Hello, Peter,” he said when we both found ourselves at the ferry’s refreshment stand. “Have you done any ayahuasca lately?”
    “No.”
    “There’s a fantastic curandero now living in Pevas you should see. I’ve taken lots of tourists. What visions they have! Much better than that old man you see. Maybe I’ll take you.”
    “Thanks, Roberto. No need.”
    “Well, then,  have you heard about the ayahuasquero fight?”
    “No.”
    “You probably don’t know anything about them.” He went on to explain that many ayahuasqueros used their spirit connections to accumulate personal power or wealth, frequently by making bad things happen to people at the behest of their enemies—what is called brujeria. The brujeria needed to be countered by a curandero working for the good, which supposedly led to great battles between good and evil ayahuasqueros. Those battles were said to be fought with invisible arrows called virotes, which could inflict great physical harm or even death. I’d heard something about those battles somewhere but had never believed they were taken seriously. Not that the idea of witchcraft seemed improbable, it just seemed more complicated than necessary.
    “Well,” Roberto said, drinking a beer I’d bought him in exchange for his story. “One ayahuasquero in Santa Clara has been slowly poisoning another in Iquitos. Very well done. By the time the man in Iquitos realized his illness came from invisible arrows it was almost too late. Fortunately, one of his sons has been studying with him and now he too is in the fight. Everyone says that all three of them will be dead before long. Not that’s a story, eh?”
    While I acted skeptical at the time, when we reached Iquitos I began to make plans to see Julio to ask him about this aspect of the medicine. I had no real intention of asking him to make ayahuasca for me, but while I was still in Iquitos I had a dream which changed my mind. It was about my father, who had been dead for nearly 16-years at that time. In the dream he told me that he could no longer see my mother—also dead several years—and asked me to find her and find out why. It was an eerie dream and I decided to use ayahuasca to try to discover what it meant. I don’t know what I expected, or whether it was just an excuse to use ayahuasca again, but it made sense to me that that was what I should do.
    I brought along a friend from Iquitos who had never been to the Auchyako, and at the last minute discovered that Moises had found four tourists who would also be going. But Junior and Mauro would be accompanying them—Moises did not come—which made our party enormous. Worse, when Moises learned that my friend, Jarli, and I were planning to use ayahasca he immediately sold the idea to his group.
    Despite the size of our party the time we spent on the little river was glorious. Mauro and Junior took care of Moises’ gang, while Jarli and I were left to our own devices. I was saddened to learn that Salis, Julio’s apprentice, had been killed in a dispute with a Matses man, one of the few who lived on the Auchyako. It seems that Salis had been recruited by one of the big tour companies operating out of Iquitos to offer ayahuasca once a week to large groups at a camp just outside the city. It had evidently gone to his head that he was important and when back on the little Auchyako he took advantage of his position and money to seduce some of the women there. Among them was a young Matses woman, the main wife of a young Matses man named Antonio, who, like Salis, had been my friend for a couple of years. The seduction evidently occurred while Antonio was out in the jungle hunting for a few days: When he returned and was told of it he’d put a shotgun to Salis’ belly and fired, then headed off with his wives and children to Brazil.
    When I raised the subject of the invisible arrows with Julio he was at first reluctant to discuss it. And even when he finally agreed he prefaced his remarks with the comment that I wouldn’t really understand what he was talking about.
    “This is not something for people to talk about,” he said, “so I won’t say too much. You ask if there are spirit arrows. Of course. When I was younger and still in Pulcallpa there was a brujo there who hated me. At first he used them on my house and chickens. I would come home from fishing and find everything in disarray, or some chickens dead. Healthy chickens he killed with his invisible arrows.
    And then he began to use them on me. One day I could no longer walk. I stood at my table and just fell over.”
    “What happened?” I asked.
    “When I could walk again I went into the woods to talk with the plants. I didn’t know what else to do. I really thought he was going to kill me. There I found this.” He took out a small stone ax-head. It was very old and perfectly crafted. I’d seen it once before but didn’t know anything about it. “This from the Incas, the ancients,” he said. “It has a lot of power. It saved me from that brujo.”
    He stared at me to see if I understood. I didn’t.
    “I said you wouldn’t understand. Look: Ayahuasca is a strong medicine. That is why we call the four colors in our song: Red, green, white and black. Each represents a different kind of magic. Some people practice only one or two of them. But if your know four and concentrate only on one there is no balance and the magic can take you over. Some people fall in love with money, or power or women. All different things. But they do not control the magic that brings those things, the magic controls them. Entiendas? Understand?”
    Again I shook my head.
    “Everything has a spirit. This house, these trees, the river, the fish in the river. You might say that ayahuasca helps you reach those spirits. But when people learn to work with those spirits there is a temptation to forget that they are only the doctor, not the medicine, and they lose their balance. They are they ones to watch out for. Muy peligroso. Very Dangerous. They are drunk with power.”
    I’d never heard Julio speak so much and though I knew I’d missed a great deal of detail with my weak translation, I was thrilled. I still didn’t really understand the concept of invisible arrows, but I didn’t press him further.
    Before I left I asked if he would make ayahuasca the following night. He asked for how many and then why. I told him about my dream.
    “You’ll have to go to the world of the dead,” he said. “Muy lejos. Very far. I’ll make it strong.” He said it plainly, as though it wasn’t much different than taking the ferry to Iquitos.
    By dawn we could hear the sound of Julio chopping wood for the ayahuasca fire and that evening at eight our whole group set off on the short walk from the small house to Julio’s. All but Junior and Mauro sat in the circle around the blue plastic sheeting on the porch. We sat quietly for an hour before Julio brought out the ayahuasca, began to chant, then passed the gourd.
    I had spoken to the others about what they might expect but as they drank they were on their own. When the gourd reached me I almost choked getting the ayahuasca down. It was thick and still warm, burnt grapefruit and dank smoke, and I knew I would vomit easily and soon.
    Julio’s chanting was clear and strong, the tune something I always forgot, until the moment I heard the first notes again. I suddenly leaned for the edge of the platform to retch: Violent empty bursts of swelled and pulled deeply from within me. In the back of my head I could hear the words Julio sand: “Limpia, limpia, cualpamine, cualpamine…” urging my body to cleanse itself. Over and over my stomach contracted tumultuously. The sounds seemed to come from a far place, echoing from across the river, water cascading onto stone. I’d never felt that kind of power course through my body and though I was utterly helpless I felt fantastically strong.
    When my stomach settled I closed my eyes. All around me were insects, visions of marching insects crawling over me, alternately tickling and annoying. Like a movie the insect wings became the scales on a boa so broad and long I could only see a small portion of it at one time. It was undulating gently, slowly. In the black pitch of its scales glinted a hundred hues of red and blue. I was mesmerized. It turned its head to me and flicked its tongue. Its eyes, almost s large as the scope of my vision, were a fine black and yellow. Its underbelly was strong and white.
    In an instant it changed its size to normal dimensions and we moved underwater. Eels and boas swam gracefully amid rocks. I followed their motion and tried to swim with them. I was awkward and ungainly and they ignored me.
    The sound of vomiting brought me back to the porch. One of the others, a British fellow named Mark, was leaning over the platform’s edge and retching violently. He tried to stand and I reached to calm him. He told me he was about to shit; I tried to help him but could hardly find my own footing and called to Junior to lend a hand. One of the others was beginning to get ill as well.
    I closed my eyes again and thought about the dream I’d had. Suddenly I felt myself moving. I wasn’t with the snake and I wasn’t flying. I don’t know hoe to describe it except to say that perhaps I was still and the world was rushing past me. In moments I was surrounded by darkness. More than that I was hurtling through a kind of vacuum with no body, no sensations. I don’t know how long I continued but I suddenly found myself stopping abruptly at a sort of white wall. It wasn’t a solid wall, but it wasn’t passable either, like a wall of gauze or clouds. I sensed that it was the wall to the world of the dead. Even as I admitted that thought it seemed preposterous and I began to scratch at it. It fell away like fog in my hands, but however much I tore at it I didn’t get through and suspected that I would never get through no matter how long I tore at it.
    I began to cal out to my mother while I worked: After some time had passed a figure began to appear on the other side of the wall, just out of reach. Not really on the other side of the wall, but coming together from the stuff of the wall itself, recognizable but as flimsy as the ether. It was my mother. I watched her for a long time, then said hello and told her why I’d come. I expected her to smile but she didn’t.
    “Hello, Peter,” she said, finally. It’s good to see you but you have to stop calling me like this. It’s hard to come together for you.”
    “Where are you?” I asked. “What are you doing?”
    “It’s not something you could understand. Things are different here. I’m not your mother anymore, but you won’t understand until you get to this place.”
    A feeling of abandonment like I’d never known washed through me. “What place? What do you mean you’re not my mother anymore?”
    “I’m doing something else now. It’s difficult to take this shape so you’ll recognize me.”
    “But what about Tom? Why can’t he see you anymore?”
    “Don’t worry about Tom. That was just a dream you had. When it’s time for us to be together we will be but you needn’t worry about him. Or me either. Things are good here. Trust me.” Her voice began to grow heavy, as if talking was a strain. “Just know that I love you and the gang and I always will. But don’t call me. It’s just too difficult and I’m doing something else now. If you really need me I’ll come, but you can’t just call me like this or in your dreams anymore. I love you, kiddo.”
    She began to disappear back into the gauze and I was back on the porch, crying, wondering whether I’d really seen what I’d seen. In all the reaches of my imagination I couldn’t have imagined her saying what she’d said, but I knew it was crazy to think I’d gone to the world of the dead, if such a place even existed.
    I sat on the porch, confused, angry, abandoned, unable to distinguish one reality from another, the dreams from the visions. And then Julio’s song caught me again and I was a snake. I was not traveling with a snake. I didn’t see a snake. I simply knew I was a snake, or that the snakeness in me had come out for a time. It was fun, sensual. I invited the mosquitoes and other insects to land on my arms and hands, watched t hem with flat eyes, then ate them. Mark began to trip up the notched ladder back to the porch, reeling in a spooky windmill motion, his great scarecrow arms and legs nearly disconnected form his body. I had to stop myself from grinning at him like easy prey.
    Suddenly everyone was vomiting at once and there was moaning and groaning. It was not good vomiting, it was sick vomiting and I found out later that nearly everyone had ignored my request that they not eat past breakfast. One of the tourists kept saying he couldn’t breathe and was going to die. I pulled free of my snake-fiction to calm him down, to breathe with him. Two of us had to carry him back to the small house and sit up with him all night.
    The next day I washed in the river early, and thou I was weak and still upset from my encounter the night before, I knew I was well. I noted that I couldn’t find any bites from the insects, though I know I felt them all over me. Either I was just hallucinating them or I ate more than I remembered.
    Later that day I returned to Julio’s to thank him. I brought some small presents of salt, sugar, batteries. He asked if everyone was alright. I assured him they were.
    When we returned to Iquitos two days later, Moises was waiting for us at the top of the steep muddy hill that served as the ferry dock. After he got his group settled back in their hotel, he came to my room.
    “The old curandera, Maria, asked me to give you these,” he said, handing me a packet of hand-sized, oval leaves wrapped in newspaper. They were datura leaves, used for making a drink called to-e, a very powerful medicine, one that I knew a little about but had never used.
    “She said to tell you to put one leaf behind your head and one leaf on your forehead just before sleeping. Then crumble a third leaf, make a cigarette and smoke it.”
    “What for?”
    “She says it will help you dream. You will be able to dream who has stolen your things and where they have hidden them.”
    It was a surprising suggestion and one I didn’t give much thought to until I returned to New York some days later to find that my apartment had just been robbed. I called Moises and asked him what else Maria had told him.
    “Nothing,” he said.
    “But why did she give you the leaves for me?”
    “I thought you’d asked her for them.”
    I told him I hadn’t and he said he’d ask her when next they met. He called me two weeks later.
    “She says she was thinking of you one night while using ayahuasca and saw a house in a big city that was a shambles. She thought it must have been yours and that’s why she gave you the leaves. Have you used them yet?”
    “No,” I answered. I had thought about using them but didn’t know what was to be gained. The burglary had happened days earlier and my things had long since been sold. More importantly, the idea of datura frightened me, especially since its use would be unsupervised. It was sometimes the called ‘the wind that blows you over the edge of the world’. “But thank Maria for me,” I said. “And tell her the vision was true. Tell her I still have them, in case it happens again.”
    Thinking about Maria’s true vision, and unable to forget what my mother had told me, I began to make a mental list of the things I could have imagined my mom telling me if I met her this many years after she died.
    No matter what I came up with, I could not imagine that she would have talked about it being difficult to come together in a shape I could recognize as her. It simply wasn’t a thought of mine and it wasn’t a thought I could imagine her thinking. It wasn’t something I’d seen in a movie or read in a book. It was just what it was, and if I’d had endless paper and endless time and wrote down a list of 10.000 things my mother might say on meeting her after she died, that would not have been on it. When I realized that I realized I knew the difference between a vision and an hallucination. I had a workable way to think about it, anyway. If something wasn’t on a list of 10.000 possibilities, it was probably a vision.

It was nearly two years before I returned to the jungle. A research group in Italy had asked me to get a frog from the Matses whose secretions they used as a medicine; I’d written about it but never brought back a specimen and some scientists wanted to investigate it. Larry joined me as my photographer. He and Moises and I were planning to try the same hike—from the opposite direction—that Steve and I had failed to do. We were going to hike from Julio’s house to the Brazilian border to visit the Matses. On the way we stopped at Julio’s and asked him to make us ayahuasca in preparation for the trip.
    On our layover night in Lima I’d had a dream that one of the Matses village chiefs, my friend Pablo, had tried to reach me. I couldn’t quite remember the dream and didn’t know if he was trying to make me come to his river or stay away. I hoped it would become more clear with the help of ayahuasca.
    On the day we were going to drink, Larry and I spent much of the time watching Julio prepare it. He was up before sawn cutting the wood for the day-long fire while a new woman he was living with, a beautiful old curandera named Sophia, filled the great iron pot with water from the Auchyako. Despite their age they refused all offers for help and as they worked the years fell away from their faces. Julio especially: The sinewy muscles on his tiny frame seemed to grow younger and more taut with each stroke of his axe.
    By noon the several gallons of liquid in the pot had been reduced to perhaps a quart. He strained it through an old pair of pantyhose into a large plastic container, cleaned the pot of the crushed vines, leaves and tree barks he’d cooked, then refilled it and began the process again. He worked quietly, intensely. Now and then he chanted softly or flew mapacho smoke into the pot. At one point he tossed in several whole cigarettes (8).
    “Muy bueno por los espiritos,” he said, smiling. Good for the spirits.
    When the second pot full of liquid had also been reduced to a quart or so he strained it off again, cleaned the pot, then combined the reductions and cooked them down together. What had been maybe 20 gallons of water at the start was less than a quart when he was done.
    I’d asked Sophia whether she would join us that evening. She had said no, ayahuasca was not for her. “It’s not a very friendly spirit to me,” she said. “But it seems to like Julio quite a lot.”
    That evening, after Antenor h ad put away his odd guitar and Julio had answered Larry’s question about what his visions were like, Julio stepped into the walled off bedroom to retrieve the medicine. I was surprised when Moises didn’t leave the circle. I reminded him that I’d never seen him use ayahuasca; that he always stayed off to the side to act as a protector.
    “I’ve never done it before,” he said.
    “You’ve never done it?” I asked. “But you were the one who suggested we use it on that first trip!”
    “Too dangerous,” he answered. “But I have a feeling that I should use it tonight.”
    I suddenly understood why he’d been so afraid to have his wife use it when she was ill, but I resented him not telling us years ago that he’d never even tried it.
    “If I start to wander into the river, stop me,” he said quietly. I assured him he wouldn’t but that if he did, we would.
    Julio returned and placed the bottle of ayahuasca on the sheet of plastic near his other things. “Bueno,” he smiled. “Ready?”
    We all nodded. Julio reached for a mapacho, lit it, then pulled the shriveled piece of corn cob he’d used as a stopper from the bottle. He hunched over, held the bottle-neck close to his mouth and began to pray. With his free hand he smoked: Short, rapid puffs that he blew into the liquid. When he finished the first mapacho he lit a second, then put the bottle down, cleaned out a small plastic cup with smoke, filled it with ayahuasca and began to sing.
    The words were clear, the song rich and beautiful. It seemed to echo off the trees around his house and fill the night air. When he finished he handed the cup to Larry, who closed his eyes and drank. The cup came to me next. The ayahuasca was as thick and dank and difficult to get down as always. Julio repeated the process for Moises, Antenor and finally himself, chanting all the while. What power he possessed! With each song he seemed to grow stronger and more luminous in the light from the little kerosene lamp.
    When we’d finished drinking and he’d passed the other things around, he put the bottles to the side of the circle and flicked off the lamp with his fan. I closed my eyes and listened to the hissing of Julio’s fan as he shook it in time with the songs. In moments the visions began.
    Green points of light appeared in front of me, like a dot matrix. They combined and made the skeleton of an archway and ceiling, a sort of luminous green skeleton of a cathedral ceiling. I opened my eyes: They lights didn’t disappear.
    They didn’t last long either. In a few minutes I found myself in utter darkness, eyes opened or shut. I saw bright fruit handing from trees and realized I was in a forest full of trees bearing mangos, papayas and bananas. I reached for one of the bananas. To my surprise it began to peel itself. Instead of a banana it revealed a small beautiful reddish-brown monkey with shining eyes. It began to grin and I felt myself grinning back. But the monkey’s grin kept growing wider until it was a hideous, jabbering mouth screaming obscenities that broke off finally into a sort of insane laughter.
    I recoiled and opened my eyes. I’d never had such a dream-like vision while using ayahuasca before. But when I closed my eyes the image returned. It laughed at me and when it did finally disappear it was by a series of visions I can only describe as a trip through a funhouse of desires and fears. I was in a place of roller coasters and huge slides. Faces appeared out of the darkness while I rode on the rides. There were demons and beautiful women. There were funhouse mirrors in which I saw a thousand versions of myself. It was a strange voyage, altogether different than what I’d expected or anticipated.
    The women were cartoonish and sexy, with huge breasts and round hips and dark Peruvian eyes. They called to me. I wanted to be with them. All of them. And then I found myself as a tiny me facing a huge inverted ‘V’. It was a luscious vagina seen from below on a giantess of some sort. I began to hurtle towards her. As I grew close she turned and I realized to my horror that it wasn’t a woman at all, but a giant with a giant penis. I thought of the sexual connotations of the monkey in the banana peel and resigned myself to the homophobic implications of the naked giant. I was disgusted with what I thought was my mind playing a cruel joke on my sensibilities but as I moved closer I realized I was not titilating myself with a secret urge so much as I was being driven to confront myself. The closer I moved the more awful the thought of having sex with the giant became; simultaneously I felt I was supposed to embrace it, deal with the implications.
    I resigned myself, but just as I got within inches the giant turned around and became the giantess again. She was beautiful, with brown hair and sparkling eyes and she was laughing. She danced above me, tantalizing, a fantastic bronze goddess. I shivered ecstatically and rushed toward her, burying myself in her inviting vagina.
    But I didn’t stop. I found myself hurtling up the tunnel of her vagina. I grew younger and younger the deeper I went, younger till I was a child, a baby and then in the time before I was born, a kind of amorphous embryo buried in the deepest well-spring of life. I was surprised that I seemed to understand more about the nature of the universe than I’d ever known, as if in that state before birth all things were common knowledge. It was a brilliant state of awareness.
    I looked around the space where I’d stopped. It was warm and soft on three sides; on the fourth there were prisonish bars. I was a prisoner of time and the moment of birth, afraid to regress further, afraid to come out of the cage. But something was prodding me to leave and I wasn’t strong enough to fight it: The bars gave way and I began to emerge. Down the tunnel I slid. There was a light at the end of it. With every moment closer to that light I could feel my knowledge and awareness slipping away. I wanted to stop. It was an awful and cruel joke played on humans by the universe.
    The moment I emerged, the moment I was born I separated from the embryo and watched the baby emerge. All the knowledge I’d had just a moment ago was gone, all the awareness vanished except for the bitterness of knowing that I’d known and didn’t know any longer. I could feel immense lonliness coming from the baby’s tiny spirit.
    The baby disappeared. The image gave way to a space filled with beautiful women draped in briliantly-colored materials. More than colors and material, they were draped in iridescent light the nature of which I can hardly describe. It was more vibrant and exciting than anything I’d ever seen. I wanted to stay with them forever, but the patterns of light became a light glinting from the scales of a thousand snakes. One in particular seemed to notice me. Its head was triangular and glowing, but though I recognized it as a viper I knew it wouldn’t harm me. I tried to travel with it but it reared and wouldn’t allow that. I tried harder and lost the power of movement altogether. I couldn’t even open my eyes.
    When I finally relaxed, beautiful feelings of warmth washed over me, filling me with joy. I basked in them but in an instant the joy was transformed to something ugly and paranoid. I felt so meager and weak, so cruel and unworthy. I was useless and had always been useless. I was small. It was a waste of life that had been given to me.
    I was sure that the others could see me for what I really was and I wanted to hide. I could hardly live with seeing this, the real me, and certainly couldn’t live knowing that Larry and Julio and Moises had seen it as well. It occurred to me that hiding would not protect me from their awareness of my meanness. The only thing to do was to kill them all with my machete. I pictured myself hacking them up and tossing them into the river. I could return to Iquitos and explain that we’d had an accident in the canoes. By the time we returned to look for their bodies the predators would have finished them off.
    I fought to control the urge and as I did I felt a warm wind on my face. I opened my eyes. It was Julio, blowing mapacho smoke on me and fanning me with his leaves. He chanted softly.
    “You don’t have to act on everything you see on ayahuasca, Pedro,” he said softly. “Still, I think I’ll just put the machete away.”
    I felt a wave of relief shudder through me and knew that the moment of uncertainty had passed.
    When I closed my eyes again I tried to focus on the dream of Pablo that I hadn’t been able to remember clearly. Instantly I was in the jungle. In the distance I could see his village. I began running toward it but the more I ran the further it receded. Suddenly I was surrounded by Matses. I realized I belonged with them, that I wanted to be one of them. They grabbed my arms and began dragging me into the forest. As they did one side of my face began to take on their tatooing and color, so that I was  half-Matses, half-me. The half that was Matses had no awareness. The half that was me was being pulled through something I couldn’t see and though I tried to be brave I was terrified and fighting, not because of what they would do with me but because I was afraid of losing me. I knew that if I went with them I would no longer exist. The Matses saw my quandry and stopped puling. They put me down and began laughing at me as if I were a child who had just failed an important test miserably, then disappeared.
    The sound of Julio’s song brought me back to the porch. I was breathing heavily and soaked with sweat. I lit a cigarette and looked around: Larry was walking in the trees  nearby; Moises was leaning over the platform, vomiting with great heaves and gusto. Antenor was still sitting by his father’s side.
    I listened to the music. It was so simple, so soothing and centering. I realized that Julio’s voice was the anchor to which I was meant to tether myself.
    I wanted to vomit and left the porch. But vomiting wouldn’t come, Instead I began to excrete. I don’t mean to be graphic but the effect was similar to the vomiting: From deep within me I could fee motion, deeper than a body function, cleansing me of things I didn’t even know I’d bottled up inside.
    When I returned to the porch I closed my eyes again. I was exhausted. I wanted only simple things: To fly with the bird or travel with the snake. I was tired of the extremes the other visions had produced.
    I thought of my friends back home. Chuck, Alberta—the woman I was seeing—my sisters. As each crossed my mind I found myself looking in on them. I didn’t feel like I was traveling, I was just there. Chuck’s apartment was dark but familiar and I guessed he’d gone to sleep early. Alberta was sleeping as well, but her lights and television were still on. The clock next to her bed read 11:45. I lingered with her for a few moments. She looked so lovely, so peaceful, hidden beneath her great quilt, one of her cats balled up behind the crook of her legs. I tried to wake her; she brushed a hand up by her fast as if I were a lfy that was disturbing her sleep.
    Suddenly the image of Clare crossed my mind. I still thought of her sometimes but we hadn’t been in touch since she’d gotten married and moved to Florida nearly four-years earlier. I hadn’t meant to think of her just then and didn’t want to visit her, so I tried to get rid of the thought. It wouldn’t leave. Worse, in a moment she unexpectedly appeared. She looked at me long and hard.
    “Hello, P,” she finally said.
    “Hello, Clare,” I answered, It felt like I said the words aloud but I don’t think anyone else could hear them. “I didn’t mean to bring you.”
    “I know. But I have to tell you something. You have to let me go.”
    “I already let you go.”
    “No. I mean you really have to let me go. I’m not coming back to you.
    “I know.”
    “Part of you is holding on, P. But you’re holding on to the me that doesn’t exist anymore.”
    An empty feeling welled up in me. “I don’t mean to be holding on to you, Clare. I want to let you have whatever life you want.”
    “Don’t you see? It’s not your choice to let me have anything. Just let me go.”
    I started to get angry. I hadn’t meant what she thought. I just meant I loved her enough to let her go. “I didn’t mean that,” I said.
    “Yes, you did. That’s the problem.”
    “Okay. Maybe I did. But I’m trying to let you go. It’s just hard. Why couldn’t you even write one Christmas card just to say hello?”
    “I just couldn’t. You’re not in my life.”
    “Will I ever see you again, even in the street?”
    She thought for a moment. “Not like you think. Not until it doesn’t matter whether you do or not.”
    And then she was gone and I was crying. I suddenly understood what she meant, realized how much I’d been holding on and how all of the visions I’d h ad that night were about letting go. About desires and fears and how they held me back. The sadness that came with those realizations was deeper than I’d ever known. I felt cut lose from everything that I thought mattered to me. I felt hollow and weak and torn apart.
    And then a voice began to speak. “Hello,” it said.
    There was no one I could see, just a voice, but not one I recognized.
    “Hello,” it said again.
    “Who are you?” I asked, hoping it was just a voice I was inventing.
    “You know who I am,” it said plainly.
    I did. I sensed it was the spirit of ayahuasca. I know that seems crazy and it seemed crazy to me as well, but I also knew it was true and I began to get terrified. I believed in the spirit of things, and I knew the power of ayahuasca, but I’d never imagined anything like that disembodied voice. It wasn’t just a spirit or a vision or anything like talking with Clare or even my mother. This was like being in the presence of something unfathomable.
    I opened my eyes, hoping it would go away if I ignored it. It didn’t It was just waiting me out. “What do you want?” I asked finally.    “You’re the one who called me,” it said. “You’re the one who keeps calling me.”
    “I don’t mean to. I just used ayahuasca to get ready for the trip, and to travel and see things…”
    The voice said that wasn’t true. It said I called because I needed things and I was getting what I needed: My immense sorrow, my confrontation with my desires and fears. The voice said that this was a time for cleansing, for emptying out, not for proving I could visit friends on ayahuasca.
    What it said was true, and my initial fear of its presence began to subside. But then it asked me if I would let it enter. It was such a strange request that I was taken aback. The ayahuasca was already inside me, I said. The voice said no, that wasn’t what it meant.
    Suddenly I had the vision of a snake wrapping itself around my head. I saw my head open and a side view of my brain, as if it had been cut in two and I was looking into it. It looked like the inside of a bee colony, all tunnels. Dozens of snakes appeared and began sliding into the tubes of my brain. At first it felt wonderful, like immense power and motion was sliding into me but then I wasn’t sure that I should let them. I thought that maybe I was being fooled, that Julio had warned us that while some of the spirits we might meet were good, others were evil and I was afraid that this might be an evil one. What if it wasn’t ayahuasca, or if it was, what if it was some awful and dark part of it?
    I asked the voice what the snakes meant, why they had to enter me, but I didn’t get an answer. Part of me thought it was a kind of test, but an other part of me thought it was a kind of trick, and that if the snakes were allowed to disappear in my brain I would never get them out. I don’t know what I thought that would mean but it was terrifying. Whatever it was, I knew it wasn’t the right thing, that I shouldn’t let those snakes into my brain. I began to pull them out by their tails. They were strong and hard to dislodge and the longer UI fought the more I was sure that if it really had been the voice of ayahuasca speaking with me it wouldn’t have asked me to let it enter in such a terrifying way. I felt like I was fighting for my life, that if I lost I would be enslaved forever.
    The moment I got the last of them out I was no longer sure I’d made the right choice. It was like the vision of the Matses I’d had earlier: The minute they put me down I felt I might have missed something extraordinary. I asked the voice why it hadn’t just talked with me, why everything seemed to be a test designed to make me fight it.
    It answered that it had already given me so many gifts that I should have some faith and trust. It said I should t ask for so much without giving anything in return. The voice didn’t sound angry or disappointed, it just said those things then disappeared, and I knew my visions were done.
     I opened my eyes and stood weakly. The ground was glistening and wet. It had rained at some point but now I stared at a sky full of falling stars and tried to absorb the lessons I’d been given. After a few minutes I stepped off the porch and joined Larry. I wanted to tell him everything I’d seen and heard but was afraid that if I did the voice might come back and I didn’t want that to happen. Instead we walked to the river quietly. He told me that he too had experienced the lesson of letting go, though neither of us talked about it in depth.
    When we returned to the house both Moises and Antenor were asleep but Julio was waiting up for us. “Un noche fuerte,” he said. “Bastante espiritos.” A strong night, filled with spirits.
    He asked us to sit, then sang a song for each of us. While he did he washed us down with mapacho smoke, then rubbed camphor on our hair and torsos. “To see the spirits don’t cling to you,” he explained. He’d never done that before and it felt intimate and generous. I wondered whether he sensed or saw something of the nature of the experience that night which made him think it was necessary. He didn’t say. I remembered the incident with the machete and almost laughed. He’d seen everything. His cleansing was good: The moment he began to blow smoke on us my fears disappeared.
    When Julio was finished he said goodnight and went to bed. I stayed on the porch for a long time, trying to figure what I’d seen and heard. It certainly felt real, and the lessons I’d been given were ones I needed to learn. I thought of what Moises had told me years earlier: Ayahuasca gives you what you need, not what you want.
    I finally gave up thinking and just stared at the sky. I felt alive and unenslaved. I wanted to embrace the night and the trees and everything in the jungle, Probably an hour or two passed before I grew tired, got into my hammock and went to sleep.

In the morning we bathed in the river, thanked both Julio and Sophia with some presents, then set off on our hike. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that in organizing our things I’d forgotten to ask Julio about the voice and by then it was too late to return.
    I did speak about it to a number of people who were familiar with ayahuasca in Iquitos some weeks later. To most there was nothing extraordinary about being contacted by a spirit that way, the only question was whether it was a good one or a bad one. On that they were divided, some thinking I’d lost a great opportunity when I pulled the snakes free, others thought I was lucky to have escaped a spirit-trap so easily.
    Some months later I asked Julio and he slapped his thigh. “Si, Pedro. That was a gift. You missed a wonderful chance to know things.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Snakes know so much. It was probably the spirit of a snake talking with you, but to you it was a man’s voice. If you had let it in it would have lived in you. You would always know who your friends are and who are just pretending to be your friends. You would know many things.”
    I felt awful. “Will it come back? Will I get another chance?”
    “I don’t know. It depends on the spirit.”
    The other lessons from that night were all worth learning. But if I were asked today whether I’d have had the courage to let those snakes in, at least that invasive way, I don’t know that I would be able to answer. It was a very terrifying experience. Of course, it might be just what I needed. It probably was.

NOTES:
1)      According to Julio Jerena, a good ayahuasca preparation begins with cappi vine (generally Banisteriopsis caapi, though a number of other Banisteriopsis species may be used), and chacruna leaves (Psychotria viridis), to which he adds the barks and inner flesh of one or more of the following trees: capirona (Calychphyllm spruseanum) the lupuna negra (Trichilia toachana), the chiric sanango (Brunfelsia grandiflora), the ahahuman (Couroupita guianensis), the chuchuhuasi (Maytenus ebenifolia), and the catawa (?). Julio says that there are a number of other tree barks and leaves he can use as well, depending on what is available, both seasonally and locally. During those occasions on which I’ve seen him making ayahuasca, he rarely uses more than two tree-bark additives, and the choice seems dependent on what results he wants: Each of the additives have specific properties. The actual making of the ayahuasca can look a bit helter-skelter, as though the ingredients are just put in the pot with no thought of measurement. It would be more precise to think of the ayahuasquero as a chef who doesn’t need to measure things but knows exactly how much of each ingredient is needed. I once saw Julio replace two chacruna leaves (of thousands) after I’d taken them for collection from his pot.
   Other ayahuasqueros and curanderos use a variety of additives in making ayahuasca, including several species of the Acanthaceae (Acanthus),  Amaranthaceae (Cockscomb), Aposynaceae (Dogband), Cactaceae (Cactus), Erythroxylaceae (Coca), Marantaceae (Arrowroot), Pontederiaceae (Water Hyacinth) Rubiaceae (Madder), Solanaceae (Nightshade) and Violaceae (Violet) families.
While the chemistry of ayahuasca preparations has been detailed numerous times (Schultes and Hofmann, The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens; Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, IL, 1980, among others), Schultes notes that “the compounds responsible for the psychotropic effects of ayahuasca are the beta-carbolines… B. caapi contains the beta-carboline alkaloids harmine, harmaline and tetrahydroharmine. Psychotria viridis leaves containe N, N-dimethltryptamine. Tryptamines are not psychoactive when ingested orally unless they are taken with the monoamine oxidase inhibitors. The addition of the leaves of this plant greatly heighten the narcotic effect of the drink.” (Schultes and Raffauf, The Healing Forest; Dioscorides Press, Portland, OR, 1990)
The Banisteriopsis caapi is a member of the Malpighiaceae (Malpighia) family; chacruna and capirona belong to the Rubiaceae (Madder) family; the lupuna negra to the Melianceae (Mahogany) family; the chiric canango to the Solanaceae (Nightshade) family; the ayahuman to the Lecythidaceae (Brazil Nut) family, and the chuchuhuasi to the Celastraceae (Staff/Spindle Tree) family.
2)       Originally found among the tribes of northwest  
Amazonia—Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, parts of Venezuela and      western Brazil, the use of ayahuasca is now common among mestizos throughout Amazonia as well, and has even reached the United States, primarily through the aegis of a number of small religious groups, most notably Santo Daime. The most common names used for ayahuasca are: ayahuasca, caapi, natema, pinde, yage and yaje, though dozens of others are used by indigenous groups who employ the preparation.
3)          Julio Jerena sings a number of different chants during the course of a single ayahuasca experience. They were taught to him, he says, by the ayahuasca itself, during an apprenticeship period. Other ayahuasqueros suggest the same, though many scientists say the songs are simply part of a given region’s cultural tradition
The rhythm of the songs change during the course of an ayahuasca session, and those rhythms  help direct the visions themselves by altering the patterns of the ‘ayahuasca dream.’
Luis Eduardo Luna published seven of the ayahuasca songs of an ayahuasquero named Don Emilio Andrade Gomez in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology (#11, 1984), all of which were taught to Don Emilio by the spirit of ayahuasca.
4)        The night vision mentioned by Moises is one of the most
interesting practical effects of ayahuasca use. It approximates a person seeing at dusk. The effects can last for several days, though they diminish the further removed one is from the experience.
5)        I later discovered that neither Salis nor Julio had chacruna leaves at that time, a vital element to the psychotropic effects of the ayahuasca (see Note #1). For subsequent experiences I always brought them from Iquitos, where they were purchased at the market.
6)        There are two classes of illness treated by ayahuasqueros: Sickness in the sense the Westerner understands it, and those illnesses caused by spirits employing invisible arrows, or virotes.
     It is fair to say that in northwest Amazonia, physical illness and bad luck are considered symptoms of something wrong on a psychic level. To effect a cure, the ayahuasquero utilizes ayahuasca to access those planes normally hidden from human sight to see what is out of balance. Rebalancing on the psychic plane can effect a cure of the symptoms here on the physical plane.
     Among those illnesses typically treated by ayahuasqueros are anemia, numerous blood disorders, bronchial problems, food poisoning, the grippe, infections, rheumatism, syphilis and yellow fever. It is also used as an analgesic, to heal wounds and as a purgative. No doubt many of these uses depend upon the additives in the ayahuasca preparation more than the Banisteriopsis caapi and chacruna leaf base.
     Among those illnesses treated by medicine other than ayahuasca which are investigated and diagnosed while the curandero or ayahuasquero uses ayahuasca are: cancers, cataracts, fetal disorders, intestinal problems, liver diseases, menstrual irregularities and tumors.
    Many shaman and curanderos (frequently verified by their patients) also claim to perform operations while using ayahuasca which involve the removal of body parts (stomach, kidney, liver, etc) which are then treated (often by washing in various preparations or river water) and then replaced. While this appears to a Westerner as utterly impossible, the concept involves what North American indigenous people call ‘shape-shifting’, at least on a psychic level, where both the curandero and the patient ‘see’ the operation take place as they both later describe, complete with blood, an operation that may never have occurred on the physical plane.
    Among the illnesses caused by spirits (or brujos employing them) using virotes, Marlene Dobkin De Rios lists the following categories: Susto (nervous disorders); Dano (which causes bad luck or a number of unspecified diseases); Pulsario (symptoms of restlessness, hyperactivity and free-floating anxiety); Despecho (behavior that causes one to seek revenge for real or imagined scorn); Mal de Ojo (the evil eye, whose symptoms include nausea, vomiting, fever and other ailments).
7)    To-e’ or toay, is a drink made from any of a number of plants from the Solanaceae (Nightshade) family, specifically those from both the Brugmansia and Brunfelsia genera. Very powerful, very toxic, the leaves are frequently added to the ayahuasca preparation to increase both the potency and duration of the psychotropic effect. A participant will know if datura leaves, another name for the plant, have been added to the ayahuasca if his lips, fingers and toes go numb.
    One of the additives Julio Jerena typically includes in his ayahuasca—chiric sanango—belongs to the Solanaceae family, though he uses small quantities of it. When I once asked him to make me To-e’ alone he did but refrained from drinking it—and wouldn’t let me drink it with him—as he said the spirit of datura is unfriendly to him and therefore dangerous.
     A herbalist friend from Lima, Dr. Solomon, Melchor Arroyo, has classified several uses of various datura preparations, including divination, future seeing and the stealing of a person’s willpower, which has led many Peruvians to speak of datura as ‘the plant of the demon.’  In Colombia, and Bogota in particular, certain datura preparations are used on unsuspecting tourists which leaves the tourist awake but susceptible to suggestion. There are many stories of tourists who have gone to the bank and withdrawn all of their money under the influence of datura and who have no recollection of it the following day. At its most extreme, datura states have been responsible for the phenomenon of tourists waking up to discover they have lost a kidney without having any recollection of the operation having taken place.
    Medicinally, various datura preparations are used for treating fever, swollen joints, muscle cramps, rheumatism, snake bite, yellow fever, infections and a number of other diseases and symptoms. Additionally, to-e/ is frequently used by curanderos as a diagnostic tool, much the same way ayahuasca is used. The use the curandero Maria suggested—putting one leaf behind my head, another on my forehead and smoking a third in order to see who robbed my house and where they put my things—is, I believe, unknown in the literature.
8)    The use of tobacco (Nicotiana, a genus of the Solanaceae family)
     as both a medicinal and spiritual aid is widely documented       
     throughout both North and South America.

REFERENCES USED IN THE NOTES
Dobkin de Rios, Marlene (1971) Ayahuasca—The Healing Vine, Int.
      Journal of Psychiatry: 17 (4) 256-269
Dobkin de Rios, M (1970) Banisteriopsis in Witchcraft and Lealing
      Activities in Iquitos, Peru; Economic Botany 24:35, 296-300
Dobkin de Rios, M (1972b) Curing with Ayahuasca in a Peruvian Slum.
     IN: Michael Harner (editor), Hallucinogens and Shamanism, Oxford
     University Press, New York
Gorman, P. (1986) High Times, June, 1986—Ayahuascca: Mindbending
      Drug of the Amazon
Gorman, P. (1988) High Times, Dec. 1988—The Psychedelic Plant
      Doctor
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