Contribution to the Study of the Toxic Drinks of the Northwest Amazon

Contribution to the study of the toxic drinks of the Indians of the Northwest Amazon: ayahuasca — yajé — huánto

A comparative toxico-physiological study of a personal experience, by Dr. P. Reinburg, on mission for the Ministry of Public Instruction.

Ayahuasca and yajé

Part 1. Introduction

Aya-huasca (Quichua: liana of death, or of dreams, or of spirits), also called among the Indians of the Napo jayahuasca or yayahuasca (bitter liana), is a plant used by the Indians of certain tribes living in the territories watered by the left-bank tributaries of the upper Amazon (eastern Ecuador, Colombia, and southern Venezuela) to induce an intoxication — sometimes agitated, sometimes comatose — during which they have dreams and visions in which they foresee the future, discover their enemy, and so on.

During my stay in Iquitos (late 1912), several of my countrymen, employed in the large trading houses that carry on the rubber business in that small town, had spoken to me of ayahuasca, and claimed that after drinking it they had felt no unpleasant effect, only dreams of one kind or another.

It therefore seemed worthwhile to try this drink personally, and thereby contribute to the study of the toxic drinks of the Indians of the Amazon region.

For that reason, finding myself at San Antonio del Curaray (April–May 1913), staying with my friend the Ecuadorian Antonio Garcés, in the heart of Záparo country, and having learned that these Indians make use of ayahuasca, which they call iyona, I resolved to try its effects on myself.

I asked several Indians to prepare this drink for me. But from my very first words I could see that my request did not please them: their faces changed expression, their eyes evaded mine, and although they never refused outright, it was clear my request had little chance of being granted.

I had better luck, however, in approaching a non-Záparo Indian working for Garcés — a man named Teofilo, of Peruvian origin, I was told, though no more was specified. Having lived a long time at San Antonio and married to a Záparo woman, he had taken up the habit of drinking ayahuasca, and fairly often. I had cured him of a leg ulcer, and he was very grateful to me for it. I should add that he was of a much higher intellectual level than the other servants of the post. So when I asked him to prepare the ayahuasca for me, he raised only minor objections, agreed, and set about the necessary preparations.

The account that follows was written immediately after my experience, while I was still under the very strong impression it had left on me. I ask my readers' indulgence for the somewhat technical and precise detail it contains.

Personal experience

May 1. — In an earthenware pot (Quichua: manga) in which nothing had ever been cooked with salt, Teofilo put a liter and a half of water, four pieces of ayahuasca thirty centimeters long, pounded and chopped, and five or six leaves of yajé.

From 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. he boiled the whole down to a quarter of a liter, over a fire of pona wood — said to be the best, because it "cooks harder" (cocina mas duro).

We had arranged to meet that evening at 9 p.m., that is, after everyone at the post had gone to bed, to drink the preparation. It was essential, Teofilo had explained to me, to be in darkness and silence, so that the action would take effect, so that the dreams would develop, and so that "one could see the future clearly."

At the appointed hour, when all was silent, Teofilo arrived carrying a maté (gourd) full of the brew, accompanied by his ten-year-old son César, who had already taken ayahuasca several times.

I stretched out in a chambira-fiber hammock hung in the outer corridor of the house, took the maté, which was filled with a cloudy brown liquid, unpleasant to look at, and, putting out the lamp, swallowed at one draught the amount of a teacupful — the average dose for a man. If it was unpleasant to look at, what of the taste! It is acrid, bitter, nauseating, leaving in the mouth a truly disagreeable aftertaste.

There was nothing left for me to do but wait for events to unfold. Young César had drunk after me; as for his father, who wanted to join us, I had asked him to abstain so that he could watch over us.

We remained thus for an hour, in absolute silence; still the dreams did not come.

The pulse, however, was slowed, though strongly marked; a kind of numbness came over me, a tendency toward sleep against which I struggled on account of the vampire bats that were circling above me and would not have failed to take advantage of the slightest moment of sleep. My jaw muscles are tetanized, I have a touch of trismus; when I try to open my jaws my teeth chatter against each other, and when I bring them together a contraction clenches them tight. There is some difficulty in swallowing saliva, and I have almost a sensation of paralysis of the muscles of the neck and larynx. Before my eyes shine several luminous circles, phosphenes, and I see, flying in a dazzling sky, a few butterflies belonging to the species collected that morning, which are abundant here. My sight is very sharp, too sharp, and it seems to me that I am seeing through a small hole pierced in a card; my intelligence seems overexcited, my power of observation highly developed; I record all the symptoms with perfect lucidity of mind and witness all the events as though they concerned someone else — a symptom that struck me in particular. I have pains in my ears; salivation is excessive; I have no nausea. Now, Teofilo had explained to me, nausea (mareación) is the forewarning sign of the dreams.

Meanwhile young César was thrashing on the ground, moaning, in the grip of violent nausea without vomiting, to the great satisfaction of his father, who declared that his son was about to set off for the land of dreams. This was not long in coming, and soon, growing calm, he fell into a deep sleep.

Toward 11 p.m., seeing that nothing was happening, and that I was not enjoying the same bliss as César, I mentioned it to Teofilo, who then gave me a second maté, of which I swallowed two or three good mouthfuls. A quarter of an hour later I felt all the previous symptoms intensify, and nausea set in. My mind is highly overexcited; it seems to me that my body has disappeared; I am nothing but a brain observing, with interest, the phases of an experiment happening to someone else.

The pulse is very slow, but I do not know how many beats per minute; blood pressure is greatly reduced, at least as far as I can tell by touch; then the pulse becomes imperceptible at moments, and the nausea increases. Not feeling well, I mention it to Teofilo, who reassures me by saying that this is all as it should be, that the beneficial action (!) of the ayahuasca is beginning, and that I am going to have dreams.

Not very reassured all the same, I have my lamp lit and ask for a mirror: I am ghastly pale, my dilated pupils do not react to light, my hands make clonic, jerky, rapid movements whenever I try to grasp something. The earache has worsened, but my hearing is perfect; the nausea increases and becomes very unpleasant; and, abandoning the precepts of ayahuasca drinkers, who hold that one should let the symptoms subside on their own, I want with all my strength to vomit and to drink tea, especially because my heart worries me. I get up (midnight), urinate copiously, having difficulty standing, and take the two or three steps that separate me from my room, where I want to light the stove to make tea. But there I am seized with weakness and fall like a dead weight onto a trunk, crying out to Teofilo, "I am poisoned." My pulse has vanished completely, I am ghastly pale, my pupils dilated, my throat tight with severe difficulty swallowing, my mouth dry, a sensation that the lower half of my body has disappeared, my hands moving in disorder as I try to grasp something; trismus very pronounced, speech very difficult and halting. I can only give brief orders to poor Teofilo, who is distressed and assures me that it is not poison, that I should have stayed lying down, and so on. He prepares tea, opens my medicine kit, from which I have him bring out tannin, granulated Houdé caffeine, and an ampoule of caffeine, with which I want to give myself a subcutaneous injection; but although everything is there, within reach of my hand, I cannot make a single movement, and I feel that if someone wanted to kill me, I would be unable to defend myself, so utterly am I annihilated.

I have myself laid out flat on a sharply reclined deck chair and drink at least a liter of very strong tea. I cannot vomit; I then put a finger down my throat: the reflex has vanished, and I can put my finger behind the roof of my palate without provoking it. I then take 0.50 to 0.60 centigrams of tannin, then, some time later, ipecac, and at last very copious vomiting comes, three times, after unbelievable effort. I have an intense headache and feel quite cold, although it is +25°. I go on drinking tea and vomit a second time, very copiously. My pulse begins to be perceptible again — thready, intermittent, very faint. I have very strong coffee prepared, which I take with five or six teaspoons of Houdé granulated caffeine, and drink at least a liter of it. Sleep is irresistible; my breathing resembles Cheyne-Stokes respiration; each time sleep overcomes me, my breathing stops, and so does my pulse. I then inhale ether, which brings on great, deep breaths.

While this succession of events unfolds, my mind never once ceases observing and recording; I am perfectly aware of my condition, know what needs to be done, but cannot do it; fortunately I have Teofilo's help — alone, I could do nothing.

May 2. — Toward 2 a.m., the vomiting having stopped, and my pulse becoming better marked though still dicrotic, I am helped to bed and lie down fully dressed. Little by little my pulse increases in rate and strength, my circulation feels better; on the other hand, the headache (especially a frontal headache, a kind of vise gripping my skull) is very intense. The trismus persists. Tingling begins to run through my whole body, my extremities, which had been icy, grow warm again, and I sweat a little.

Toward 3 a.m., in less than half an hour, I urinate four times, very copiously (at least two and a half to three liters). My sight remains just as sharp, my speech less halting, my general state improves. I still need to inhale ether from time to time, whenever my breathing threatens to stop. I then take one last cup of strong coffee, and toward four o'clock, my pulse being if not normal then nearly regular, very rapid, and strongly marked, I let myself give way to the sleep against which I had struggled until then, and do not wake again until about 9 a.m.

I get up dazed, battered, broken, and drag myself out of the room. I have no strength to speak; I have a splitting headache and no appetite, with the difficulty swallowing still present. I take magnesium sulfate and a little tea and spend my day in the hammock. In the afternoon, my pulse still tending to grow thin, I take a little more granulated caffeine. In the evening I go to bed early and sleep soundly.

As for young César, he had a very bad headache all day, but did not complain of it, delighted at having had beautiful dreams. Old Teofilo came to see me several times. He seemed rather crestfallen, for he had not expected to see such a result in me.

May 3. — I feel much better: pulse normal, but still a little frontal headache. I swallow well and eat with a good appetite.

But it is only on May 4 that I can say I feel in my normal state, and even then, over the next two or three days, I still have some difficulty swallowing from time to time.

Plants used to prepare the drink

At my request, Teofilo took me into the forest to see the plant he had used to make his brew: it is a liana, huasca (whence ayahuasca), about the thickness of a thumb. I took a few pieces of it, but they were later unfortunately lost, along with other collections that my abrupt departure for France in August 1914 forced me to leave behind in Ecuador. Generally, Indians who have found an ayahuasca vine always carefully hide it from their friends, so as to keep its enjoyment for themselves.

As for the yajé, which also enters into the composition of the brew, it was shown to me at San Antonio, beside an Indian house where it was cultivated: it is a small shrub, 4.5 meters tall, with petiolate leaves (petiole 15 mm long), entire, oval, 20 cm long, 7 cm wide, regular and ending in a point 2 cm long. I did not observe any flowers. This shrub is frequently found near houses, where the Indians tend it with care, whereas ayahuasca is most often found in the forest.

Uses of ayahuasca among the Záparo

The Záparo, as we have said, use this drink, prepared from ayahuasca alone or mixed with yajé, to induce dreams from which they draw conclusions about the future. Living in the forest, their minds occupied with the struggle for existence, it is not surprising that their principal visions are of the tiger, the serpent, the enemies of neighboring tribes (the Jívaro in particular, and the Tukano), or else the animals they encounter and hunt in the course of their forest expeditions: various birds, monkeys, tapirs, deer, and so on.

Before venturing on any expedition (war, forest hunting, the search for rubber, etc.), the Záparo never fail to drink ayahuasca.

Apart from this special circumstance of foreseeing the future, it seems they also have the custom of drinking ayahuasca purely for pleasure, somewhat like the opium addict who, having first sought a new sensation in opium, ends up smoking it from habit and need. Thus at San Antonio certain Indians took ayahuasca once a week, seeking, they claimed, no other pleasure than that of getting drunk cheaply, cachaça (cane brandy) being scarce and expensive. But most of them saw it above all as a practice of sorcery, and used it as such.

Some drink two to three times the dose that I absorbed.

The sorcerers — brujos in Spanish, tapia in Quichua — make frequent use of this drink mixed with yajé, especially those who practice medical sorcery. When a Záparo sorcerer goes to see a sick person, which always takes place at night, he never fails to take the drink prepared as I have described above, but in successive rather than massive doses (his mithridatism, moreover, allows him to withstand the toxin better than I was able to). Thus, in his sleep, he comes to learn the illness that the spirits reveal to him, and on waking, by applying his mouth to the painful area and sucking, he draws out the chunta (a small thorn or splinter of the palm Bactris ciliata Mart., or a piece of wood, or even a seed, etc.) which he has first taken care to place in his own mouth — the said chunta being always held to be the cause of the illness, and to have come from some enemy who "sent" it into the sick person's body. The sorcerer then indicates where it came from and who sent it, and the patient prepares to take revenge on whoever cast this evil spell on him.

Although it is not, strictly speaking, an ordeal-drink, the act of drinking ayahuasca nevertheless confers, as I was able to observe for myself, a certain standing in the eyes of the Indians. Záparo sorcerers are in fact renowned and feared among the Indians of Canelos.

It is certain that once these Indians learned I had taken ayahuasca and yajé, they placed in my medical care a trust mixed with still greater respect and fear. "For," they said, "if I could cure them, then I could obviously also make them sick." I took care not to disabuse them, for fear of losing all standing.

[The article continues with a second part, "Comparison with similar drinks described by other travelers" — a critical review of the observations of Spruce, Crevaux, Villavicencio, and others — followed by botanical, etymological, and chemical sections (pp. 33–54), omitted here in order to focus on the author's personal experience and his direct ethnographic observations.]

--- Translator's note: prepared for the archive from the French original; a careful working translation that has not yet been checked by a specialist reader. Quichua and Spanish terms are kept as printed in the source.