Psychedelia, p.10
Psychedelia, page 10
(Etnologiska Studier issue #3, 1938)
The account is entirely in line with general ayahuasca lore, including the vital elements of song and visions of serpents, yet it contains a reference to the 'Banisteria' vine alone, with no admixtures. Louis Lewin, one of the great names in older hallucinogenic plant research, stated that 'Banesteria' (B. caapi and its harmala alkaloids) produced effects strong enough to warrant comparisons with the extremely powerful Datura deliriants, although he felt that the latter affected consciousness to a higher degree. Several humans and one unfortunate dog were experimental subjects in these pre - WWII debates of natem (ayahuasca) and tonga (Datura). Again, the accounts speak of a powerful hallucinogenic drug, and no admixtures are mentioned.
The leading ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes wrote numerous papers on ayahuasca along with the more obscure hallucinogenic plants of the Amazon. During his field trips of the 1940s he identified many previously unknown hallucinogen plants, yet his long and active relationship with ayahuasca was curiously unfruitful. He had identified one admixture plant (chagropanga, or Diplopterys cabrerana, a DMT liana) during field research with the Ingano tribe on the Caqueta river in 1942, but decades later Schultes still remained unsure of the role played by the B. caapi vine and the admixtures. In 1963 he wrote that 'occasionally but apparently not frequently' admixtures were added to the pure B. caapi brew. Later still he speaks of the B. caapi vine and the harmala alkaloids as 'apparently of prime psycho-active importance'. Schultes' carefully worded accounts in these papers indicate that he realized the severe gap between the extraordinary, radiant spirit worlds that the tribal cultures spoke of, and the modest and soporific effects of the B. caapi brews he himself had experienced. Unbeknownst to Schultes, a solution to this riddle had passed him by during the 1950s, not just once, but twice.
5
In a turn of events strange even by ayahuasca standards, one of the vital pieces to the ayahuasca admixture puzzle was uncovered not by Schultes, but by another Harvard man: William Burroughs. Burroughs' interest in the drug went back to the early 1950s, and his classic underground exchange of trip reports with Allen Ginsberg, The Yagé Letters (1963) would do much to solidify ayahuasca's reputation as dangerous and terrifying; it was 'the one drug that William Burroughs couldn't handle', or so the talk went.
Although rarely acknowledged, Burroughs had written about yagé as early as 1957, in the Black Mountain Review art journal. Using his pseudonym William Lee, 'In Search Of Yagé' is one of the first published writings from Burroughs of any kind, and it makes clear that he took ayahuasca several times, rather than the one terrifying account related in The Yagé Letters. The 4-page account leads from initial impressions of ayahuasca as 'space time travel' among '…minarets, palms, mountains, jungle. A sluggish river jumping with vicious fish…' , into a broad vision of Composite City inhabited by a familiar Burroughsian cast of corrupt people, insects, rotting apparitions, mysterious power brokers, and so forth. As prose this is clearly superior to what was included in The Yagé Letters, and it appears that Burroughs preferred to integrate his Black Mountain Review text into The Naked Lunch rather than view it as part of the Ginsberg correspondence. The complex relationship between Burroughs' yagé expedition, his work on The Naked Lunch (1959), and the related articles scattered across various literary magazines is discussed in the enlarged and annotated Yagé Letters Redux (2006).
Examining the circumstances behind these pioneering ayahuasca writings, an explanation for Burroughs' terrible trips may lie in the foul and cynical (even more so than usual) mood that be set him during his travels in South America. The sarcastic, condescending tone by which he describes the towns and people he encounters is like a perfect inversion of the charitable delight of Schultes. Terence McKenna, travelling through the same territory 20 years later, managed to capture both the destitution of the mestizo river towns, and the magic strangeness of the jungle.
Burroughs, who had journeyed south to look for a cure for his heroin habit, saw only ugliness and hostile, untrustworthy people. In Bogota he looked up the local office of Richard Evans Schultes, who had been to Harvard at the same time as young 'Bill'. Well versed in how to succee d with a Colombian ayahuasca quest, he offered Burroughs precise advise on where to go and who to contact. Ultimately, the unlikely Harvard pair travelled together into the riverfront towns, and in short time the despondent Burroughs found a source for good, powerful ayahuasca – perhaps too good, for a first-time user. The details are best read as he described them in his 'letters' to Allen Ginsberg, but as the drug came on he quickly went into a negative space of hostile, monstrous hallucinations, coupled with the typical physical discomfort. Before the trip had even reached its apex, Burroughs used his emergency kit of downer Nembutal pills, and sat the rest of the night out.
Recounting his hellish experience to Schultes the next day, Burroughs was informed that Schultes never got sick from yagé and only saw colors, which may indicate that Schultes knew only the effect of a vine infusion without admixtures. Fortunately, Burroughs had the foresight to inquire with the local shaman about the nature of the various brews all called 'yagé', and so it happened that it was he, rather than a field professional like Schultes, who was first to identify the admixture of Psychotria viridis, or chacruna, a plant of the coffee family which today is considered the most important DMT source for ayahuasca. The fact that William Burroughs ran across on his first journey what had evaded the world-class botanist Schultes for a whole decade, is very peculiar. The importance of this discovery was not recognized at the time, and Burroughs was in a terrible state anyway. In a comment to Ginsberg that didn't make it into the published book, he called ayahuasca 'the most powerful drug I have ever experienced'. In retrospect it appears clear that these trips of decay, insects and human corruption were vital to the development of The Naked Lunch and its nightmarish menagerie, a link often overlooked due to its geographical setting in North America and Tangiers, rather than Colombia.
Seven years later in 1960, undeterred by his friend's notes of warning, Allen Ginsberg decided to take a trip down to Peru to see for himself. Unlike the aborted mission that Burroughs ended up with, Ginsberg had two complete ayahuasca trips. That's not to say that he had much of a better time. Repeating his friend's success in finding a truly able curandero who served the real thing, Ginsberg's first trip was with bottled ayahuasca a few weeks old, and his recount is typical of a moderate trip with some vomiting, hallucinations of colored snakes and a certain existential angst, but not overly negative. The next night the ayahuasca was freshly made, with the DMT-containing chacruna leaves explicitly used. Just a few moments into the experience,
the whole fucking cosmos broke loose around me, I think about the strongest and the worst I've ever had it […] I felt faced by Death, my skull in my beard on pallet on porch rolling back and forth and settling finally as if in reproduction of the last physical move I make before settling into real death – got nauseous, rushed out and began vomiting, all covered with snakes, like a Snake Seraph, colored serpents in aureole all around my body, I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe…
(Allen Ginsberg, The Yagé Letters)
Ginsberg, clearly, got some mileage out of his ayahuasca. It's interesting to note that from a present vantage point, his trip description doesn't seem overly negative; it is intense and demanding, but much of what Ginsberg speaks of is what one will find with a full-spectrum dose. Recent decades have familiarized us with the snakes and the vomiting, to which he returns over and over, as markers of a classic experience. He mentions seeing an 'x-ray' of another participant's skull at one point; another element familiar today, but not then. The rest of Ginsberg's account, compressed into a single letter, is written in an artistic and increasingly fragmented style, and it's possible that many early readers of The Yagé Letters found Burroughs dry negativity easier to understand. In any event, when the book appeared in 1963, Burroughs identification of the chacruna admixture had been forgotten, him apparently having failed to inform his travelling companion Schultes of this discovery.
6
And so another decade passed with little progress in the question of ayahuasca admixtures, the scientific inertia stemming not just from the limitations and long lead times of field work, but from the lack of interdisciplinary research. The problems were both ethnobotanical and pharmacological; except for the seemingly inactive harmala alkaloids of B. caapi, no one knew which chemical agents were active in the ayahuasca brew, from which plants they came, or how they combined to create its extraordinary effects. As was the case with Burroughs' discovery of Psychotria viridis, relevant answers to these questions did in fact exist, beyond the radar of the botanists and ethnologists.
In 1957, a chemical analysis of ayahuasca plant material was published by F A Hochstein & Anita Paradies in New York, which not only confirmed the presence of the three harmala alkaloids, but also detailed the presence of a recently synthesized drug called dimethyltryptamine, DMT. Unfortunately the chemists' paper contained some botanical errors, and it also repeated the curious claim of 'ayahuasca mixed with yagé' first heard in the old Ecuadorian document. This 1957 paper is the earliest known scientific report of what is today considered the central element in an ayahuasca brew, DMT from a plant source. Typically, and perhaps due to the minor errors in the report, this accurate chemical observation lay dormant within the field for several years. Schultes doesn't even mention it when discussing other aspects of the '57 essay in the Harvard Review (1962) and Psychedelic Review (1963).12 Some time later, he must have gone back and re-examined the paper by Hochstein & Paradies, and in his later essay 'An Ethnobotanical Perspective On Ayahuasca' he acknowledged their finding of DMT in nature. In addition to this discovery, which today would seem to be of great significance, the comment the two chemists gathered from an aboriginal source that '[the DMT plant leaves] suppress the more unpleasant hallucinations associated with the pure B. caapi extracts' is interesting, as it again seems to pull in a different direction from what is usually held to be 'true' about ayahuasca.
But even with the discovery of dimethyltryptamine in ayahuasca, there remained the central mystery of which plant or plants were used as a DMT source. The 1957 report was chemically correct, but botanically incorrect – the wrong admixture plant had been identified, incidentally precisely the same plant that Richard Spruce had picked 100 years earlier. Finally, in 1966, the last step was taken towards a coherent Western understanding of ayahuasca. As detailed in Wade Davis' One River, one of Schultes' botany students named Homer Pinkley had stayed with a village of the Kofán tribe for a year. He found that the ayahuasca tribe Schultes first had encountered in the '40s were increasingly acculturated by Christian missionaries and under pressure from corporations laying claim on their land. However, ayahuasca rituals were still held at times, and after one of them Pinkley gathered the plant residuals. From this he concluded scientifically what William Burroughs had somehow figured out in 1953, namely that the chacruna shrub, Psychotria viridis, was the DMT source added to make the brew stronger and much more hallucinogenic, at least by Western standards.
Oddly, Schultes seemed to take no great interest in his student's discovery. He had an ideal opportunity to present Pinkley's breakthrough identification at the now-legendary conference on ethnobotany in San Francisco 1967, but mentioned it only in passing. Perhaps if he had been better acquainted with the radical psycho-active effects of DMT, which are quite unlike anything the harmala alkaloid brews could produce, he would have taken more interest. This step-motherly treatment of the ayahuasca admixtures runs through Schultes' entire catalog, as though the identity of the admixtures to him presented a purely botanic dilemma, while their radical psycho -active potential is downplayed or neglected. While the chacruna bush (Psychotria viridis) that Burroughs and Pinkley had independently identified is the most frequently used DMT admixture in Amazonia, Schultes himself had identified the second most common DMT plant back in 1942; the liana Diplopterys cabrerana.13 Wade Davis refers to this discovery as one of great importance, but Schultes in his writings rarely mentioned it.14
From this lack of interest in the effects of the admixtures, and his curious inability to move the focus away from the B. caapi vine, it seems probable that Schultes never had a full-spectrum ayahuasca experience, which is nothing at all like the pleasant and controlled daydream states he reports. He may have on occasion had 'strong' ayahuasca in a tiny dose, or with another admixture than a DMT plant, since a few of his reports indicate a different effect than the B. caapi and its narcotic stupor of faint color visions (or entirely negligible effects, according to others). A track record of only mellow trips and faint visions from a man who spent decades among tribes using extremely powerful plant drugs may also stem from a personal lack of disposition for deeper hallucinogenic states, as Schultes himself suggested. A native peyote ritual he underwent with Weston La Barre in 1936 left him much less affected than his colleague, and the native DMT snuff drugs he tried in Amazonia rarely led to memorable experiences, even though yopo and epena may be even more dramatic in onslaught and somatic side effects than ayahuasca. Comparing his field experiences of ayahuasca with the exceptional trips reported by Michael Harner ('61), William Burroughs ('53) and Allen Ginsberg ('60) from the same era, it's clear that something was lacking in Schultes' bio-assay research. Had he been through a full-blown ayahuasca trip in the 1940s, his perspective on the plant drugs and the DMT admixtures would probably have been very different.
Even if Pinkley's recent identification of chacruna was not given the attention it deserved, the 1967 San Francisco symposium would prove very important for modern psychedelic research into Amazonian plant drugs. While the nearby Haight-Ashbury district was teeming with spiritual energy from a great 'gathering of the tribes' at the Human Be-In, dozens of hallucinogen researchers flew in for the first ever cross-scientific conference on psychedelic plants.15 Sponsored by the US Health Department, the 3-day symposium featured older masters such as Schultes and Gordon Wasson, alongside rising young stars like Alexander Shulgin and Andrew Weil. The Swedish ethnologist Henry Wassén, who had been conducting hallucinogen-oriented field work in the Amazon as early as the 1930s, was present, as was Stephen Szara, the Hungarian scientist responsible for the first-ever human experiments with DMT in 1957. Albert Hofmann was invited but unable to attend; his typically eloquent apology to the organizers opens the anthology that documents the proceedings of the conference.
While the more technical chapters may appear challenging to the layman, the 450-page Ethnopharmacologic Search For Psychoactive Plants (1967) is a cornerstone in the psychedelic library, and it includes presentations and roundtable discussions that mapped out directions for scholarly research for decades to follow. Schultes used his opening slot to propagate the use of the term 'ethnobotany', offering his definition of the field as 'a study of the relationships between man and his ambient vegetation'. He also took the opportunity to highlight several unresolved mysteries in hallucinogenic plant research, not just in South America. The volume offers generous space for Amazonian DMT snuff drugs (Wassén's specialty) and ayahuasca, and it also covers in great detail less familiar plant drugs such as the kava of Samoa, the nutmeg family, and Amanita muscaria; the latter is accompanied by a discussion of Wasson's mushroom theories.
But the paper that would turn out to have the most profound effect on psychedelic research was presented by the Swedish toxicologists Bo Holmstedt (one of the symposium's co-arrangers) and Jan-Erik Lindgren. Their analysis of several South American snuff drugs like epena and parica used spectrometry and gas chromatography to present precise chemical breakdowns of the DMT snuffs and underlying plant materials. In all cases, dimethyltryptamine family alkaloids were found present, while in some snuffs the harmala alkaloids used in ayahuasca had also been added. The proportion of the different tryptamines varied, with N,N-DMT ('classic' DMT) and 5-MeO-DMT the active constituents in the majority of the samples. The authors also note the frequent presence of bufotenine, a substance whose psycho-activity had not been proven.16 While these findings offered excellent support to the ethnobotanical work of Schultes et al, the most vital observation appears in a paragraphic remark made almost in passing by Holmstedt & Lindgren. It is interesting, they note on page 365, that beta-carbolines such as harmine have been added to some of the native snuff drugs, since beta-carbolines had recently (in 1958) been found to work as monoaminoxidase inhibitors (MAOI), and '…could potentiate the action of the simple indoles. The combination of beta - carbolines with tryptamines could therefore be advantageous.'
In view of its future importance, the last sentence has a charming tone of understatement. What the two toxicologists pointed out was a problem that arises with any drug from a DMT plant source, and with ayahuasca most of all. Solving this problem fundamentally alters the perspective on the plant entheogen, as well as its usage. However, in 1967, the understanding of these drugs was so incomplete that it was difficult to make cross-scientific gains from this bio-chemical remark; as we have seen above, the ethnobotanists weRenét even sure what plants were used for which drugs. Therefore, the observation made by Holmstedt & Lindgren would not be fully understood until the 1980s. Using the Holmstedt-Lindgren paper as an explicit starting point, modern-day researchers such as Dennis McKenna and Jonathan Ott were able to develop a complete understanding of how ayahuasca worked in the human body, and from these findings came the entire wave of Western ayahuasca culture and 'ayahuasca analogues' in the 1990s. As often with these extraordinarily powerful psychedelic drugs, the Western realization of native ingenuity served to open the door to an even greater mystery, one for which we still are lacking an answer. But prior to addressing that, it's important for any student of ayahuasca to understand the implication of what Holmstedt & Lindgren suggested, and which later researchers like McKenna and Ott were able to prove.
