Word: ayahuasca
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Although his parents urged him to study medicine, Jimmy Weiskopf dropped out of college and in the 1970s moved to Colombia, where he eventually began to focus on a different kind of elixir. The New York City native became an early advocate for the hallucinogenic plant mixture ayahuasca. For centuries, Amazonian Indians have been drinking ayahuasca, also known as yaje - a combination of the ayahuasca vine, tree bark and other plants - to achieve a trancelike state that they believe cleanses body and mind and enables communication with spirits. Weiskopf, who has published a 688-page tome about ayahuasca, was once...
...Word of ayahuasca's healing properties has brought a growing number of New Age tourists from the U.S. and Europe, some of whom pay thousands of dollars to stay at jungle lodges where Indian medicine men guide them through all-night ayahuasca rituals. Sting and Tori Amos have admitted sampling it in Latin America, where it is legal, as has Paul Simon, who chronicled the experience in his song "Spirit Voices." "It heals the body and the spirit," says Eustacio Payaguaje, 51, a Cofán Indian shaman who regularly treks to Bogotá to lead weekend ayahuasca ceremonies...
...subtitle of Weiskopf's 2004 book, Yaje: The New Purgatory, suggests, ayahuasca is not for the faint of heart - or stomach. Drinking a few ounces of the sludgy brown liquid usually leads to a violent purge from both ends of the body. Beat Generation novelist William Burroughs, seeking to get high on Colombian ayahuasca in the early 1960s, described hurling himself against a tree and barfing six times. At a recent ceremony on the outskirts of Bogotá, most of the 40 participants packed sleeping bags, water bottles - and rolls of toilet paper. Sting, in a Rolling Stone interview, made...
...Because it contains the hallucinogenic alkaloid dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, drinking ayahuasca in the U.S. is illegal. But traditional use of the plant potion is permitted in much of South America. Its mecca is the Peruvian city of Iquitos, which hosts the annual International Amazonian Shamanism Conference and is home to about a dozen lodges that cater to curious foreigners. At first, local residents feared that a flood of stoned beatniks would turn Iquitos into an unruly rain-forest Woodstock. "I thought they'd be from the hippie graveyard, with tattoos and sunken faces," says Gerald Mayeaux, a Houston native...
...birds, the fetid scent of the deadly fer-de-lance, the click-click of an enraged wild boar. Xumu, the old chief of the Amahuaca, also instructed him in jungle medicine. The stem of the paka nixpo plant, when chewed, prevented tooth decay for years; the extract of the ayahuasca vine was especially prized for producing visions that, Córdova-Rios says, actually enhance human intelligence. After many adventures-hunting, harvesting rubber, procuring arms for the tribe-Córdova-Rios eventually tired of the Indians' pettiness and "musky odor." He escaped to civilization, where he became renowned...