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Tasting the Vine of Souls
By Dara Colwell
Used traditionally for visionary experiences, ayahuasca has become the chosen cocktail of contemporary urban seekers.
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.
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"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
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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... »»
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