Reviewed by Timothy White. Reprinted from Shaman's Drum, Number 67.
Although there are a great many books offering narrative accounts of journeys to South America in search of mind-blowing entheogenic experiences, I wholeheartedly recommend Ayahuasca: The Visionary and Healing Powers of the Vine of the Soul as a must-read to anyone contemplating drinking ayahuasca—either in the Amazon or in other environments. A veteran journalist and seasoned spiritual seeker, Joan Parisi Wilcox uses her skills as an observant and articulate writer to provide readers with a vivid multisensory recreation of her wild rollercoaster ride into the transformative world of jungle medicines. This volume doesn’t pretend to be a comprehensive study of ayahuasca shamanism, but it does paint an edifying picture of what Westerners may expect to find on some ayahuasca retreats in the Amazon.
Wilcox is no blundering novice to the world of indigenous
spirituality—before embarking on her ayahuasca journey, she spent years studying with Q’ero spiritual elders under physically challenging conditions in the high Andes. She brings an unusually well-balanced, well-tempered, and respectful perspective to her spiritual encounters with ayahuasca. She is also not a foolhardy psychonaut who delights in leaping into mind-blowing, galactic worm holes. For nearly a decade while she explored Andean spirituality in Peru, she ignored numerous opportunities to try the sacrament. Later, after a chance encounter in her home town with ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes—who suggested she might find ayahuasca “interesting”—Wilcox and her husband, John, were invited by some friends to attend an ayahuasca session in Virginia with a Peruvian ayahuasquero, whom she refers to in the book as “don Luis” to protect his privacy. Wilcox’s first ayahuasca experience was so overwhelming and potent that she was initially reluctant to try the entheogenic brew again. However, a year later—vacillating between feelings of “dread and exhilaration”—she and her husband signed up for a second session and then for an eight-day-long ayahuasca dieta (medicine diet) offered at the ayahuasquero’s Amazonian jungle retreat, located several hours outside of Pucallpa, Peru. This volume begins with the story of their introduction to ayahuasca in the United States and continues through their life-changing encounters working with Grandmother Ayahuasca in the Amazon.
One of the book’s strengths is that Wilcox provides a very thorough and perceptive account of her initiatory odyssey into the gut-wrenching world of ayahuasca dietas—traditional “diets” that entail eating bland foods, abstaining from sex, and limiting social interaction, while undergoing repeated ayahuasca healings and working with other, specialized plant teachers. On the one hand, she deftly describes the superficial wonders of ayahuasca visions: “One moment there was darkness, punctuated with the pleasant, flitting colors of the phosphenes one normally sees with closed eyes, and the next was an eruption of carnivalesque color and pattern so intense as to be almost dizzying.” On the other hand, her imagery can cut to the heart of the ayahuasca experience: “This bitter jungle brew can saw through the gristle and tendons that hold the meat of who we are—or who we think we are—to the bone of body.… It can wickedly trim the fat of our sureties and fillet our beliefs, plopping them matter-of-factly under the see-through wrapping of the Styrofoam tray of our cultural traditions.”
Wilcox describes the dark underbelly of jungle living in graphic detail, providing a discrete warning to romantic readers intrigued by the idea of trekking through pristine jungle environments in search of indigenous ceremonies. She relates unsettling encounters with welt-raising fire ants, giant cockroaches, bizarre bird-sized insects, and toe-nibbling fish. She recounts at length her struggles to cope with prolonged inactivity, tasteless foods, and open-air jungle latrines. In unabashed imagery, she conveys the nauseating side effects of drinking ayahuasca, dealing with unpleasant revelations, and purging.
Although this volume focuses primarily on her inner experiences and personal revelations, Wilcox does provide, in passing, many perceptive insights into the techniques used by traditional ayahuasqueros to guide and heal participants. In some places, she shares her own intuitive insights into ceremonies: “I sensed that [don Emilio] had been bargaining with the spirits in some way on our behalf, that he was taking on our heavy energy and processing it for us, making it less burdensome for us.” In other cases, she passes on insights provided by her ayahuasca guides. For example, when asked about the function of icaros (sacred songs), one guide compared drinking ayahuasca to setting out in a canoe on a river but not having any oars: “You are at mercy of the currents. The icaros … are oars by which the ayahuasquero helps you navigate the river.” Later, Wilcox describes her own experience of the icaros: “Like tongues of fire, the icaros both anointed me and forged within me finer ways of seeing, feeling, and understanding. For these reasons and more, I believe that the traditional ayahuasca ceremony, with its sometimes demanding requirements, is a useful way to ‘dream’ yourself to life.”
Unlike many Westerners writing about ayahuasca, Wilcox does not seem to have any personal vested interest in promoting the growth of ayahuasca tours. She writes, “As Mother Ayahuasca so pointedly made clear to me, just about anything—from meditation to prayer to tai chi—can be used to cleanse our inner and outer lenses. For me, ayahuasca was a heavy-duty solvent, dissolving resistances that might have taken much longer to discover, never mind overcome, using other means.” As someone who has been inspired by ayahuasca, she openly endorses the responsible use of sacraments: “Ayahuasca, like many other entheogens, and spiritual and energy practices, not only can grant us freer access to what may be hidden within us but also may be a doorway itself to other realms, dimensions, nonphysical modes of being, and connections to the vast network of Life.” However, she recognizes that ayahuasca diets are not for everyone, and she hints that it serves nothing to collect entheogenic experiences like snapshots of last year’s vacation trip. In fact, she frequently reminds readers that what ultimately matters is not the profundity of our revelations but how we integrate those insights into our lives.
By presenting detailed descriptive accounts of both her joyful and her challenging experiences working with ayahuasca in the Amazon, Wilcox provides a respectful introduction to one of the world’s most powerful and demanding plant teachers. In closing, she offers this testimony to ayahuasca’s transformative spirit: “Ayahuasca is a maestro, and I can only befriend it as I would a beloved but intimidating teacher: with respect, with a bit of wariness, with the understanding that I will never be the recipient of all it has to offer, but feeling honored, or lucky, to have been under its tutelage at all.” If all who approach ayahuasca, or any other entheogen, learn as much and as fast as Wilcox seems to have, the plant teachers will be well served.
Timothy White is editor of Shaman’s Drum.
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