The Vine That Lets You See What Spirits See

The plant came to him first in dreams.

He was a young man who had been ill for six months — an illness that the older healers in his community recognized as the calling sickness, the same illness that the shamans described in their own histories: a fever that didn’t break, dreams that were more vivid than waking, the persistent sense of something just outside vision that was trying to get his attention.

He had tried to ignore it. Illness-calling is not a comfortable invitation. The shamans in his community worked hard and carried heavy burdens and died at the same age as everyone else, without any of the benefits that magical thinking might suppose. He had hoped the calling would go to someone else.

The vine appeared in his dreams for thirty consecutive nights.

Not always in the same form. Sometimes it was a serpent — green and vast, spiraling around the great kapok trees that he knew from the forest. Sometimes it was a woman — old, with a face mapped with patterns that he would later recognize as the geometric visions the vine produces in ceremony. Sometimes it was simply a light, deep in the forest, that moved when he moved toward it and stopped when he stopped.

On the thirty-first night he went looking.

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He did not know, going in, that two plants were required.

The ayahuasca vine alone produces little effect when prepared as a tea — the active compound, DMT, is normally broken down by the body’s enzymes before it reaches the brain. But the vine also contains specific alkaloids that block those enzymes. Combined with the chacruna leaf, which contains the DMT, the two plants create a preparation that is more sophisticated than either alone.

This combination was not arrived at by trial and error among thousands of plant preparations, though Western observers often suggest this. The Amazonian healers say: the plants told them. The vine taught the first ayahuascero which leaf to combine it with, and how, and in what proportion, and in what ceremony, and with what songs.

The songs are essential. This is what distinguishes the Amazonian plant-medicine tradition from the Western pharmacological model. The icaros — the healing songs — are the actual medicine; the brew is the vehicle that makes the patient capable of receiving them. Each plant spirit has its own icaro. The healer learns hundreds of songs over years of practice, each one taught by a specific plant ally, each one the sonic signature of that plant’s healing intelligence.

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He drinks for the first time with the forest around him and the night enormous overhead.

What he sees, in the tradition of those who have drunk before him and those who will drink after: the world’s structure becomes visible. The ordinary opacity of matter thins. He can see the energy that runs through every living thing — through the trees, through the insects, through the river — and he can see where that energy is disrupted or stolen or poisoned in the body of a sick person.

This is diagnostic vision. Not hallucination in the sense of seeing things that aren’t there, but the ability to see the spirit-side of physical illness. The tumor as a dark growth in the energy body. The depression as a cord attached at the solar plexus, running to somewhere outside the person. The fever as a spirit lodged in the lungs.

The healer can see these things. He can sing to them. The icaros are, in this framework, software for the spirit world — each song addresses a specific category of problem and proposes a specific solution.

He learns to heal.

He will spend the next forty years deepening this practice, adding plants to his network of allies, learning the specific icaros that each plant teaches in the dieta — the isolation fasts where a healer lives with one plant at a time, eating only what the plant prescribes, waiting for the plant to teach its song.

The forest is still full of teachers.

They are still offering the dreams to people willing to be called, willing to be sick first, willing to enter the relationship on the plant’s terms rather than their own.

The vine spirals around the great trees.

The light in the forest moves when you move toward it.