Tasting the Vine of Souls

By Dara Colwell, AlterNet. Posted October 27, 2004.

It was that cavernous, growling sob of insanity that nearly tipped me over the edge. The howler, wrapped in layers of white linen, bawled with such regularity he could easily have carried the Summer Stage. When I met Bill an hour earlier, he told me taking ayahuasca was a horrifying experience.

"It catapults you into misery," he said, gritting his teeth. "I screamed all night."

I instantly decided that whatever happened I wasn't going to sit next to Bill. But soon, it wouldn't matter where I sat – his feral cries filled the room. It wasn't until my neighbor, a square-jawed, hearty-looking Southwesterner later started to giggle that I began to relax.

There were 23 of us – strangers, mostly – in the darkened room, all tenuously linked by what Baudelaire centuries earlier would have dubbed a "thirst for the infinite." While the French poet had quenched his visions with a heady cocktail of opium, hashish and absinthe, ayahuasca was an earthier brew.

Coined by Amazonian shamans as the "vine of souls," yage, as it was also known, lead you straight down the path to Higher Truth. Of course, Hell sometimes proved a convenient detour. When Beatnik-cum-heroin junkie William Burroughs took the drug he became violently nauseous, transfixed by the "larval beings (that) passed before my eyes, each one giving an obscene, mocking squawk." His compatriot Allen Ginsberg, juiced up in giddy reverie, fared no better. "The whole fucking Cosmos broke loose around me," he wrote to Burroughs from Peru. "I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe."

So there I sat, in a rented dance studio in Manhattan's Chinatown, keyed up and yet oddly sober, anticipating all hell breaking loose. I found some reassurance we were all dressed in white – giving the room the innocuous feel of a Heavenly Baggage Claim – when to my left, a young woman suddenly began writhing gracefully on a yoga mat. For her, the drug was working like an express train to Nirvana. I felt nothing and sat impatiently. I was eager to tune in, turn on, and drop down, preferably onto my back.

My first ayahuasca ritual introduced me to an unexpected, thriving urban subculture. Used traditionally for visionary experiences, the drug – relatively new to the city but not city-goers – has resurfaced in recent years, becoming the chosen cocktail of contemporary seekers. Some take it to trip out, others to find God. But whether they are hoping for revelation or simply chasing the next high, more urban folk are opting for vine tasting parties, where soul-searching has replaced small talk.

In South America, ayahuasca is known as "the great medicine," and it is used for healing much as peyote is used by North American tribes. Its use dates back eons. More than 42 indigenous names exist for the vine and roughly 72 different Amazonian tribes have detailed knowledge of its preparation. In 1851, British schoolteacher Richard Spruce first observed the plant and its effects, but it wasn't until 1923 that word arrived in the States – when the American Pharmaceutical Association viewed a film about yage ceremonies at its annual meeting. When Burroughs experimented with the potion in Lima, Peru, awareness of the drug's potency was propelled further, albeit underground.

In Brazil, ayahusaca is considered a legal sacrament in the Santo Daime (literally, "St. Gimme") Church, but in the U.S., the drug's legal status remains fuzzy. The actual plant is legal, although its active chemical, N-dimethyltryptamine, is a Schedule 1 substance according to DEA guidelines. Of course, the age-old draw of illicit substances could be part of its current popularity. According to Daniel Pinchbeck, author of "Breaking Open the Head," which trails the New York native's global psychedelic exploits, there's "definitely a growing current of interest in ayahuasca" on both coasts.

"I think people's antennae are picking up because the substance is still semi-legal and illegitimate," says Pinchbeck, whose book covers a cultural history of shamanism and psychedelic use. "It has been percolating away for a number of years because it has a very subtle and somewhat secret history. If it was legal," he adds, "I'd want to take it every week."

Dara Colwell is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn.

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