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For my beloved pilgrim, Susana
THE JAGUAR THAT ROAMS THE MIND
“Like the twists and turns of ayahuasca, the sacred vine of the
Amazon, this wonderful narrative of love and self-discovery
connects vast inner worlds of dream and vision, power and magic,
with a passionate pilgrimage in time and space. A joy to read.”
LUIS EDUARDO LUNA, AUTHOR OF AYAHUASCA
READER: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE AMAZON’S
SACRED VINE AND COAUTHOR OF INNER PATHS TO
OUTER SPACE
“If you want to know what vegetalismo is really like, you could
go to the Amazon, or you could read this book.”
DALE PENDELL, AUTHOR OF PHARMAKO/GNOSIS:
PLANT TEACHERS AND THE POISON PATH
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With gratitude I wish to recognize the entire web of relations that aided in
the bringing forth of this book. I especially wish to thank Robert Aitken
Roshi and Nelson Foster for their years of guidance in the Way, as well as
William Merwin, who first opened my eyes to the sentience of nature and
how “the whole of life is necessary for the whole of life.”
Other generous spirits with whom I have had illuminating talks or at
whose hands I have received succor are Louis Bluecloud, Sheelo Bohm,
Débora Bolsanello, Julia Caban, Judyth Collin, Robert and Meg Ellis, Lia
Gatey, Sean Kerrigan, Lorna Li, Maryann Lipaj, Jeremy Narby, Dale and
Laura Pendell, Jen Sheffield, Gary Snyder, Kent Tindall, Pat Walsh, and
Brad Yantzer.
To the scientific pioneers Philippe Bandeira de Melo of the Arca da
Criacão and Jacques Mabit and Rosa Giove of the Centro Takiwasi, as well
as the communities of Daime in Brazil, in gratitude for their welcome and
for their endeavors to transmit the ancient ways of the rain forest to the
modern world.
Finally, and above all, I wish to thank the master curandero Juan Flores
Salazar and his partner, Sandra Encalada Guerra, for their welcome to
Mayantuyacu. We arrived virtually penniless, and they put more water in
the soup so we could stay.
“Los Blancos son más inteligentes,” he said. The whites are more
intelligent. That’s why they go to the Indians to get healed.
PEDRO JUAJIBIOY IN WADE DAVIS’S ONE RIVER
You could not find the ends of the soul though you traveled every
way, so deep is its logos.
HERACLITUS
CONTENTS
Cover Image
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Mark J. Plotkin, Ph.D.
Chapter 1: Prelude—It’s Better to Pray Than Sleep
Chapter 2: The Jaguar that Roams the Mind
Chapter 3: Fear No Spirits
Chapter 4: Close to the Hurt Lies Growing the Balm
Chapter 5: The Spirit of Mist
Chapter 6: The Sacred City
Chapter 7: The Will to Heal Is the Will to Be Whole
Chapter 8: A Sweet Odor Shall Enter Their Bones
Chapter 9: The Holy Tree
Chapter 10: Our Revels Now Are Ended
Appendix: The Verse of the Plant We Follow by Susana Bustos, Ph.D.
Healers’ Voices
Western Voices
Clients’ Voices
Footnotes
Endnotes
Bibliography
About the Author
About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company
Copyright & Permissions
FOREWORD
Mark J. Plotkin, Ph.D.
While walking across Harvard Yard one afternoon in the late 1960s, the
great ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes was hailed by a fellow Harvard
professor. “Greetings, Richard,” he said. “How was your recent expedition
to Colombia?”
“Excellent,” replied Schultes. “Very productive. We found a new
species of hallucinogen!”
“Just what we need at Harvard—more drugs!” muttered his colleague as
they headed back to their respective offices.
Schultes maintained his ever-calm demeanor. He never seemed troubled
that his research was sometimes considered peculiar by some of his
university colleagues. That these plants often played central roles in the
lives of his beloved indigenous colleagues was more than enough proof that
he had found something special.
How special is still being determined.
Schultes collected thousands of plants employed for medicinal purposes
over the course of decades of research. Most have yet to be examined in
detail in the laboratory, meaning that their potential importance to the world
at large is not yet known. The magical mushrooms he collected in Oaxaca,
Mexico, in the late 1930s, however, yielded compounds that helped give
rise to the beta-blocker class of cardiac drugs (as well as the music of the
1960s). But perhaps his greatest discovery (and he disliked the term
discovery, since he always insisted that “the Indians found these plants
first!”), was the botanical identity of ayahuasca, the vine of the soul.
Schultes first encountered this powerful plant in the upper reaches of the
Putumayo in the Colombian Amazon. He never failed to puzzle those who
sought him out to learn about the effects and potential of the sacred
remedio, as the Indians call it. Many is the time when I heard him tell some
inevitably disappointed psychonautic pilgrim who had gone to great lengths
to seek him out: “It really didn’t have much effect on me—I just saw a few
colors.”
Of course, all great shamans have a bit of trickster in them.
I once mentioned Schultes’s comments to Pedro Juajibioy, a Kamsá
Indian from the Sibundoy Valley of Colombia who had worked closely in
the field with the great ethnobotanist for many years. Pedro smiled and
shook his head. “My uncle was a great taita [shaman], and he is the one
who first gave Ricardo the remedio for the first time,” he said. “Schultes
spent the whole night laughing, singing, and talking in his hammock.
Because none of us spoke English, we have no idea what he saw or said!”
Schultes steadfastly refused to write a popular account of his travels
through the Amazon, but he did inspire the first noteworthy popular book
on ayahuasca, The Yage Letters, by William S. Burroughs. Having read
several of Schultes’s technical publications on the vine, Burroughs decided
to visit the northwest Amazon to sample the brew. His account of this
experience—in which he refers to Schultes as “Dr. Schindler”—has never
gone out of print.
Neither Schultes nor Burroughs could possibly have foreseen how this
once-obscure Amazonian vine would become such an object of fascination
to much of the rest of the world. Ayahuasca is sold on the Internet; whole
web pages are devoted to its use; ayahuasca workshops are advertised in
national magazines; and so many books have been written on the subject
that excerpts have been collected into The Ayahuasca Reader.
As one would expect, the literature varies greatly in quality. Few of the
articles and books are based on extensive experience regarding the use of
this vine as a sacrament by the indigenous peoples who discovered it. This
is why Robert Tindall’s book—The Jaguar that Roams the Mind—is such a
welcome and valuable addition to the canon.
While the typical hero’s journey involves a Westerner in search of
knowledge heading to the mysterious East—the film Lost Horizon and W.
Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge are two classic examples—Tindall
turns this model inside out. He starts in the northern deserts of the Sahara
and heads west. The first stop is Rio de Janeiro, where the use of ayahuasca
has been incorporated into not one but two state-recognized religions. He
then heads west again, participating in religious ceremonies entailing the
ritual consumption of the vine by Afro-Brazilians. Finally, he reaches the
western Amazon—the original home of the vine of the soul—where he has
the opportunity to participate in traditional ceremonies with Indians of the
Kaxinawa, Asháninca, Cocama, and Shipibo tribes.
Like all great literary heroes, Tindall meets the archetypes: the Herald, the
Shadow, the Shapeshifter, and the Mentor. And he is a wounded protagonist
—after an exceedingly difficult childhood, a strained relationship with his
parents, and challenges with substance abuse, he is in search of healing and
wholeness. That the balm he finds to heal those wounds proves to be a
combination of ancient wisdom and beta-carboline alkaloids makes it all the
more intriguing.
One of the great strengths of The Jaguar that Roams the Mind is
Tindall’s prose; he has a gift for making his characters come alive. His
description of the lovely and haunting Susana is one of the book’s strong
points. Tindall is skilled at evoking a sense of place, so the reader is right
there with him as he moves from Morocco to Brazil and then to the
Peruvian Amazon. And he is a student of both history and literature, making
deft use of them as he draws parallels and analogies from sources as diverse
as Shakespeare, the Bible, The Lord of the Rings, the Crusades, and Greek
mythology.
Ultimately, the strength of this book—like all classic writing—is that it
can be read on many levels: as adventure story, travelogue, personal quest,
psychodrama, or even an ayahuasca dream. Tindall has served his time,
paid his dues, sought the Tree (or Vine) of Knowledge in some of the most
challenging environments on our planet. But he writes with a sense of
foreboding: in the penultimate chapter, he tells of oil companies and other
commercial interests that have invaded his beloved forest. One sincerely
hopes that The Jaguar that Roams the Mind will not become the last
chronicle of forests and cultures that have disappeared from the Earth.
Mark J. Plotkin, Ph.D., is an ethnobotanist and president of the Amazon
Conservation Team, an environmental organization whose express goal is to
conserve biodiversity, health, and culture in tropical America by working in
partnership with the indigenous peoples there. He studied at Harvard and
Yale and earned his Ph.D. from Tufts University. He received the San Diego
Zoo Gold Medal for Conservation (1993) and in 2001 TIME magazine
named him an “Environmental Hero for the Planet.” In 2004 he was
awarded the Roy Chapman Andrews Distinguished Explorer Award and in
2005 Smithsonian magazine hailed him as one of “35 Who Made a
Difference.” He is the author of several books including Tales of a
Shaman’s Apprentice and Medicine Quest: In Search of Nature’s Healing
Secrets.
1
PRELUDE—IT’S BETTER TO PRAY
THAN SLEEP
We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of
undying adventure, never to return—prepared to send back our
embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are
ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife
and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid
your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are
a free man—then you are ready for a walk.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
There comes a moment in long journeys when travel ends and pilgrimage
begins.
That catalyzing moment came to me far from the Amazon jungle and
the songs of the shamans, arriving as an eerie and strident call, cutting into
the womb of my sleep and wrenching me into consciousness in the early
morning darkness.
Awaking in an unknown little room, I cast about between the four
looming walls for something to orient myself to. Then my hand touched the
young woman sleeping beside me and I remembered where I was: the
Moroccan city of Fez. I was hearing the cry of the muezzin for the first time
in my life. Taking a deep breath, I listened as my pulse gradually slowed.
The call to prayer was not the beautiful sound I had expected. It was more
akin to a battle cry than a chant.
Lying back in the darkness, I again felt the poor fit between my images
of the Islamic world and the reality we were now facing.
Literary ambition and a nascent love affair had already carried me far
beyond the green fields of France. I had come in pursuit of a distant figure
named Stephen de Cloyes—a character whose spirit still burns like a
glowing ember among the ashen footnotes of medieval histories.
According to the sparse entries in medieval chronicles, in the year 1212,
at the height of the Crusades, this French shepherd boy turned prophet led
an army of children across France to retake the Holy Land while eschewing
the violence and corruption of previous Crusades. Carried on a royal
palanquin with the oriflamme fluttering before him, Stephen and his
charismatic preaching left a swath of abandoned peasants’ huts, tradesmens’
shops, merchants’ houses, and nobles’ castles in his wake. Arriving with his
army of children in the port town of Marseille, he prophesied that the
Mediterranean Sea would part and they would walk, as Moses and the
children of Israel once had, to the Holy Land.
But instead they faced an indifferent sea, and Marseille soon found itself
inundated with runaway children. The city fathers, therefore, did not inquire
too deeply when a pair of merchants came forward and offered, out of
charity, to give the children free passage to Jerusalem.
All accounts of Stephen cease at this point, and nothing more was heard
of this children’s Crusade until years later when a friar returned from the
Holy Land with word of their fate. The ships had deviated from their course
and the merchants had taken their cargo to Egypt and sold all the children
into slavery.
It was a dark event in a dark time, an age filled with visionary struggles
that too often went astray.
Stephen’s career haunted me as a parable of lost innocence. I fancied,
however, that he might have encountered a better world in Islam than the
barbaric Europe of that age. I had therefore set myself the task of re-
creating his passage across worlds, and I felt the best way to pick up his
long lost trail was to attempt to approximate it. I was joined on this quest by
Julia Caban, an American illustrator I had met in Paris, who remained
dozing beside me in the darkness as the Fajr, the morning call to prayer,
died away.
