Light at the Edge of the World (10 page)

The pharmacological effects of these preparations are stunning, and their place in shamanic life revelatory. But what interested Dennis as a phytochemist was the mystery
of their origins. He spoke at length about ayahuasca
,
the vine of the soul, a sacred brew that has fascinated travellers in the Amazon since first being reported by the English botanist Richard Spruce in the mid-nineteenth century. I knew the plant, and at Schultes's behest had sampled the potion on several occasions. But Dennis was one of the world authorities, and as he spoke long into the night, I truly came to understand for the first time the genius of the shaman and the allure of the mystery that had attracted Dennis and Terence to this forgotten village on the banks of a little known affluent of the Rivers Amazon.

Ayahuasca, also known as
yagé
or
caapi
, is a preparation derived from two species of Amazonian lianas,
Banisteriopsis inebrians
and, more commonly,
Banisteriopsis caapi
. The potion is made in various ways, but long ago, the shaman of the Northwest Amazon discovered how to enhance the effects by adding a number of other plants. With the dexterity of a modern chemist, they recognized that different chemical compounds in relatively small concentrations may effectively potentiate one another. In the case of ayahuasca, some twenty-one admixtures have been identified, including most notably
Psychotria viridis,
a shrub in the coffee family, and
Diplopterys cabrerana
, a forest liana closely resembling ayahuasca. Unlike ayahuasca, both of these plants contain tryptamines.

“The only way a tryptamine can be taken orally,” Dennis explained, “is if it is taken with something that inhibits monoamine oxidase, the enzyme in the stomach. Amazingly enough, the beta-carbolines found in ayahuasca are precisely the kind of inhibitors necessary for the job.”

In other words, when the bark of the banisteriopsis liana is combined with either the bark or leaves of these admixtures, the result is a powerful synergistic effect. The visions become brighter, and the blue and purple hues induced by banisteriopsis alone are augmented by the full spectrum of the rainbow.

“Now I ask you,” Dennis said, “how on earth did they figure it out? What are odds against finding in a forest of fifty thousand species, two plants, totally different, one a vine, the other a shrub, and then learning to combine them in such a precise way that their unique and highly unusual chemical properties complement each other perfectly to produce this amazing brew that dispatches the shaman to the stars? You tell me.”

Many ethnobotanists avoid the question by invoking trial and error, a catchall phrase that explains very little, since the elaboration of the preparations often involves procedures that are exceedingly complex or that yield products of little or no obvious value. An infusion of the bark of
Banisteriopsis caapi
causes vomiting and severe diarrhea,
reactions that would hardly encourage further experimentation. Yet not only did the Indians persist, but they developed dozens of recipes, each yielding potions of various strengths and nuances for specific ceremonial and ritual purposes.

“I don't think there is a scientific explanation,” Terence remarked. “And if there is, why should it take precedence over what the Indians themselves believe? They say they learn in visions, that the plants speak to them. They're not making it up to please us. It's what they have always believed.”

The Indians have their own explanations, of course: rich cosmological accounts of sacred plants that journeyed up the Milk River in the belly of the Anaconda, potions created by the primordial jaguar, the drifting souls of shaman dead from the beginning of time. As scientists, Dennis and I had been taught not to take these myths literally. Terence, who suffered from no such constraints, suggested that their botanical knowledge could not be separated from their metaphysics.

“Have you ever been in the upper Putumayo with the Ingano or the Siona?” I asked, referring to tribes with whom Schultes had lived in the 1940s in the lowlands of Colombia. The Ingano, I explained, recognize seven varieties of ayahuasca. The Siona have eighteen, which they
distinguish on the basis of the strength and colours of the visions, the authority and lineage of the shaman, even the tone and key of the incantations that the plants sing when taken on the night of a full moon. None of these criteria makes sense scientifically, and, to a botanist, all the plants belong to a single species,
Banisteriopsis caapi
. Yet the Indians can readily distinguish the varieties on sight, and individuals from different tribes can identify these same varieties with remarkable consistency.

“Imagine what it means,” Terence said, “to really believe that the plants sing to you in a different key, to have a taxonomic system that is consistent and true, based on an actual dialogue with the plants.”

In the end, Dennis did manage to solve the enigma of the Bora pastes. It turned out that the resins themselves contained, in addition to various tryptamines, other compounds in small concentrations that served to inhibit monoamine oxidase and thus potentiate the drug. But, curiously, he was never able to experience the effects himself, at least nothing close to the intensity of the visionary intoxications reported by the Bora and Witoto shaman. His research earned him a doctorate and was widely heralded, but in his own mind a large part of the mystery remains.

Though acknowledged as the greatest Amazonian plant explorer of his generation, Schultes always claimed
to rank as a novice in the company of shaman. Like so many of his acolytes, Dennis and I had been drawn to the Amazon to seek its gifts: leaves that heal, fruits and seeds that provide the foods we eat, plants that could transport the individual to realms beyond reason. But in time we both came to realize that in unveiling indigenous knowledge, our task was not merely to identify new sources of wealth but to understand and celebrate a distinct vision of life itself, a profoundly different way of living in a forest. This is something that Terence always knew.

 

IT MAY SEEM odd, given how fortunate I had been in my choice of vocation, but after eight years of thinking only of plants, their place in their culture, and the wonder of the Amazon and Andes, I grew restless, eager for change. Not that I regretted the months of fieldwork, the thousands of specimens collected, but my work had reached a certain plateau.

After three years of research, the story of coca was essentially known. As an ethnobotanist, I had surveyed other plants as well and encountered a number of unusual mysteries. In northern Peru, a casual collection yielded a new psychotropic cactus. The valley of the moon in Bolivia revealed yet another hallucinogen, closely related to the Cactus of the Four Winds,
Trichocereus pachanoi
, the
sacred plant that had sparked the rise of civilization in the Andes two thousand years before the birth of Christ. The pursuit of an admixture used with coca led to one of the first descents of the Apurimac and later the Urubamba, headwaters of the Amazon. For nearly a decade, my every thought had been a plan to return to one of the lowland societies I had come to know: in Bolivia, the Chimane, Mosetene and Tacana; in Peru, the Machiguenga, Shipibo, Bora and Yagua; in Ecuador, the Shuar, Kofán, Siona-Secoya, Waorani and Quichua. From Colombia beckoned the Kamsa and Ingano, Embera, Barasana, Witoto, Tukano, Cubeo, Makuna, Tikuna and a host of other peoples who, true to their essential spirit, had always welcomed me, an itinerant scholar, as they would any sympathetic outsider.

But I was tired of simply documenting plants recognized by a particular culture. Once compiled, these academic reports seemed to me little more than grocery lists, devoid of scientific content. I wanted to use plants, and the genius of people who manipulated them, to ask larger questions. In part, this impulse was driven by intellectual aspirations, simple curiosity, really, but it also reflected a certain impatience, a reflexive tendency to move on just as things were becoming comfortable. The more experience I had as a plant explorer, the more I yearned for something completely novel. Fortunately, I was based at the right
institution, for a new challenge always loomed at Harvard's Botanical Museum, in the fourth-floor aerie of Professor Schultes.

One morning, as I was attempting to explain to an undergraduate student the nuances of Xavante kinship, word came that the professor wanted to see me. As soon as I could, I abandoned my young charge, raced up the iron steps of the museum and burst into his office only to encounter the university president, Derek Bok. Spewing apologies, I retreated for the door, but was stopped by Schultes, who politely asked Bok to step outside for a moment as he had a student to see him. As the president of Harvard shuffled out, a smile on his face, I took his place in a chair across from the great professor's desk. At this point, I would have done anything for him. So when he asked if I might be interested in travelling to Haiti to seek the formula of a powder used to make zombies, I didn't hesitate. I accepted the assignment, not knowing that it would, in the end, consume four years of my life.

ON EASTER SUNDAY, 1982 , I RETURNED FROM HAITI to New York and was strolling through the customs hall at John F. Kennedy Airport when, suddenly, I was accosted by a nearly hysterical agent of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Word had reached her that an anthropologist, with some knowledge of Vodoun, had just passed through immigration. I expected her to ask for permits. In my suitcase were dried toads and snakes, seeds and herbs, powders made from toxic fish, a small collection of amulets, fetish symbols, and bits and pieces of human bones destined for chemical analysis. Ignoring my luggage, she reached her hand into the cleavage of an ample bosom and withdrew a large silver crucifix. With breathless urgency, she asked, “Will this help?”

“Excuse me?” I replied.

“The Haitians!” she roared. “The Haitians!”

Only then did I realize that the fate of American agriculture was the last thing on her mind. What she wanted to know was whether the cross would protect her from the Haitian immigrants, voodoo and devil worshippers all, as she put it, then entering the country. I told her not to worry and walked on. In my backpack was a live toad, six inches (15 cm) across, with enough venom in its glands to kill half a dozen people.

My visit to Haiti had been prompted by an unusual assignment. A team of physicians and scientists, led by Nathan Kline, a pioneer in the field of psychopharmacology, had discovered the first documented instance of zombification. What made the case unique was the fact that the putative victim, a middle-aged man named Clairvius Narcisse, had been pronounced dead at an American-directed hospital that kept impeccable records. The demise of Narcisse had been documented by two physicians, both American trained, one an American, and witnessed by a sister of the deceased. Many years after the burial, to the horror and astonishment of family members, Narcisse had wandered back into his native village, where he presented a chilling tale of having been victimized by a sorcerer and transformed into a zombie. Lamarque Douyon, Haiti's leading
psychiatrist, conducted a thorough investigation and, in collaboration with Nathan Kline, went public in 1980 with the stunning conclusion that Narcisse's account was true.

A zombie, according to folk belief, is the living dead, an individual killed by sorcery, magically resuscitated in the grave and exhumed to face an uncertain destiny, a fate invariably said to be marked by enslavement. Kline and Douyon, of course, did not believe in magic, and knew there had to be a scientific explanation. They focussed their attention on reports of a folk preparation, mentioned frequently in the popular and ethnographic literature, which was said to induce a state of apparent death so profound as to fool a Western-trained physician. The Haitian people evidently accepted the existence of the poison, for it is specifically mentioned in the penal code of the country and penalties for its use are severe. Since the medical potential of a drug capable of inducing apparent death could be considerable, especially in the field of anaesthesiology, Kline, after contacting Schultes at Harvard, dispatched me to Haiti in the spring of 1982 with the goal of securing the formula of the preparation.

 

FROM THE START, I pursued two avenues of research. To satisfy Kline and his colleagues, I sought to document the elaboration of the poison, in the hope of identifying a
natural substance that could actually induce apparent death. But the higher goal was to make sense out of sensation, to provide a context for a folk belief that had been exploited in a lurid, even racist, manner to discredit an entire people, their culture and their religion. Though sent to Haiti to seek the chemical basis of a social phenomenon, I would, in the end, explore instead the psychological, spiritual, political and cultural dimensions of a chemical possibility. As it turned out, the zombie phenomenon was one small dark thread woven through the rich and colourful fabric of the Vodoun worldview.

When I arrived in Haiti, I knew little of the culture. But it did not take long to realize that a chasm existed between reality and the popular misconceptions that had sent the agricultural agent at Kennedy Airport into a paroxysm of fear and anxiety. The capital of Port-au-Prince was a sprawling muddle of a city, but life in the streets had a rakish charm. Street-side vendors in alleys damp with laundry hustled their herbs, market women sauntered with exquisite grace along broken boulevards while down by the docks where the cruise ships glittered, men with legs as hard as anvils dragged carts piled high with bloody hides. Children were everywhere, their angelic faces laughing. As I drove into the city, a solitary figure, dressed in white, quite sane and perfectly harmless, stepped into the road, halting all traffic as he stood alone, dancing with his shadow.