Why You Will Never Get a Traditional Ayahuasca Treatment
[chacruna.net]
(Excerpt)
[chacruna.net]
(Excerpt)
Quote
Ayahuasca, Means and Ends
The first difference lies in the role that ayahuasca plays. Locally, it is tool that the healer employs to enter the world of the spirits, channel the chants he receives from the spirits into his healing, and capture information about the illness of the patient and the medicine the patient needs. It often happens that the local patients do not drink ayahuasca, as in the case of the ceremonies run by the Shipibo, who are currently the most popular “shamans” in Iquitos. In the 10 ceremonies I participated in the small Shipibo settlement of Vencedor, on the river Pisqui, I did not see a single patient drink ayahuasca.
In the lodges, everything revolves around the drinking of ayahuasca, which is known as the “Medicine,” capitalized for emphasis. A client may drink it up to six times in ten days, which is exorbitant in local terms. In some lodges they do not adhere to the practice of “diets” (the abstention from sex and certain foods), nor do they give the patients medicinal plants other than ayahuasca, even though those two practices are locally regarded as crucial for an effective cure with ayahuasca.
The Purge and the Visions
The inhabitants of the region refer to ayahuasca as the “purge,” which is a metonymy for the main effect of drinking ayahuasca: the expulsion, through defecation and vomiting, of the “filth” in the patient’s stomach, which is related in turn to his or her bad energies; it is a purge both of the body and spirit. The term mareación (dizziness/nausea) refers to the physical effects of the plant. On a local level, drinkers also seek to have visions but, generally, it is only to discover the cause of the illness the person is suffering from or ascertain whether a relative who is not present in the ritual is or is not well.
For Westerners, the main attraction is DMT, the active ingredient in chacruna, the jungle plant which is cooked with the ayahuasca, and to which the visions are attributed. It is not so easy to see visions; however, the obsession foreign novices have with visions exerts pressure on the ayahuasqueros and, in order to meet their expectations, in some cases, they add another plant to the usual mixture of the ayahuasca vine and the chacruna leaf: toé (Brugsmansia sp.), which contains scopolamine, said to intensify the visions but with possible dangerous side effects.
This bias towards visions and DMT clashes with the ethnographical evidence of local use. The terms most widely used for the medicinal brew—ayahuasca (in Peru and Brazil) and yajé (in Colombia)—refer both to the vine and to the brew itself, whether or not it contains chacruna. Some ethnic groups only cook the vine, without any additives, like the Tucano Oriental, the Marubo, the Achuar and the Matsiguenga. The latter’s word for the vine, kamarampi, means “the medicine for vomiting.”2