CHAPTER FIVE HALLUCINOGENS AND "ARCHETYPES"

In the preceding chapter it was suggested that visions of jaguars, anaconda snakes, and the like are expectable images in a tropical forest setting. After all, one would hardly expect psychedelic visitations from Asian tigers or African lions among the Tukano; they would be even less likely here than in the urban slums of Amazonian Peru, where healers called ayahuasqueros employ the "vine of the souls" in the psychotherapeutic curing of supernaturally caused illnesses, especially those associated with witchcraft. Such emotional or psychosomatic maladies are a common complaint among the culturally and economically uprooted and psychologically disoriented Indians who have left, or been displaced from, their traditional lifeway in the forest (cf. Marlene Dobkin de Rios, The Visionary Vine: Psychedelic Healing in the Peruvian Amazon [1972]).

There is nevertheless a distinct possibility that harmaline and other alkaloids are biochemically involved in the formation of what Jung called archetypes, and that to this category belong big cats of whatever species happen to be familiar to the individual. Claudio Naranjo makes precisely that case in The Healing Journey and some of his previous writings. As it happens, such a thesis, which has a psychological as well as biochemical basis, is not inconsistent with what has been written by Harner, Reichel-Dolmatoff, Koch-Gtiinberg, and others about the effects of harmala alkaloids on the Indians, by Harner (1973) about his own experiences and yafi as a transcultural phenomenon, and by Naranjo himself about non-Indian subjects in experimental settings. All this is obviously important enough, not alone in the specific context of Banisteriopsis , to warrant some consideration here.

Harner (1973:154-194), lists the following common themes in the yaje experiences that have been collected over the years from Indian informants in different parts of Amazonia:

(1) The soul is felt to separate from the physical body and to make a trip, often with the sensation of flight.
(2) Visions of jaguars and snakes, and to a much lesser extent, other predatory animals.
(3) A sense of contact with the supernatural, whether with demons, or in the case of missionized Indians, also with God, and Heaven and Hell.
(4) Visions of distant persons, "cities" and landscapes, typically interpreted by the Indians as visions of distant reality, i.e. as clairvoyance.
(5) The sensation of seeing the detailed enactment of recent unsolved crimes, particularly homicide and theft, i.e., the experience of believing one is capable of divination.*

The Transcultural Phenomenon

Among the transcultural yaj experiences of South American Indians Harner lists auditory hallucination and visions of certain geometric forms, auras, one's own death, combats with demons and animals, bright colors, constant changing of certain shapes that seem to dissolve into one another, and the like. However, he cautions (p. 173), it must be remembered that all of the peoples who traditionally use Banisteriopsis occupy a similar tropical forest environment and, however far apart, the total content of their cultures is rather similar; these similarities could account for the striking similarity in their ya.j experiences.

What Reichel-Dolmatoff has written about the meaning of the yag experience in relation to certain universal or at least widespread themes and symbols in prehistoric art and in present-day Tukanoan imagery is very much to the point here and I will return to it below. But even more immediately pertinent to the question raised by Harner are the harmaline experiments of Naranjo with a group of non-Indian subjects, as well as a biochemical peculiarity of harmala alkaloids that places the whole problem in the context of the chemistry of the brain. Harmaline is of special interest, writes Naranjo

. . . because of its close resemblance to substances derived from the pineal gland of mammals. In particular, 10-methoxy-harmaline, which may be obtained in vitro from the incubation of serotonin in pineal tissue, resembles harmaline in its subjective effects and is of greater activity than the latter. This suggests that harmaline (differing from 10-methoxy-harmaline only in the position of the methoxy group) may derive its activity from the mimicry of a metabolite normally involved in the control of states of consciousness.*

Among the typical harmaline trance symbols or experiences that many of Naranjo's subjects reported were felines, snakes, dragons, birds, flight, sun, passage through perilous regions, descent and ascent, death and rebirth. This experience is all very familiar from the shamanistic world, but one particular harmaline dream among those cited by Naranjo is especially pertinent not only because it mirrors in many of its details the characteristic experience of initiatory ecstasy but also because it even echoes some familiar themes from the cosmologies of ancient China and pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. The subject in this case is a woman.

"Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright . . ."

Her dream begins with tiger eyes as the initiatory image, soon followed by many faces and sleek bodies of big cats of different colors. From these images there emerges a large and powerful Siberian tiger, an animal of grace and beauty whom she feels compelled by a great longing to follow to the ends of the world. The tiger takes her to the edge of a high plateau, from where she glimpses a deep abyss filled with liquid fire or molten gold in which many people are swimming:

The tiger wants me to go there. I don't know how to descend. I grasp the tiger's tail, and he jumps. Because of his musculature, the jump is graceful and slow. The tiger swims in the liquid fire as I sit on his back. . . . (Naranjo, 1973:154)

They swim on together and she sees a monstrous crocodile-headed serpent-like animal swallowing a woman. Frogs and toads suddenly appear around her as the fiery pond turns into a stagnant, greenish swamp full of primitive life forms. But she rides her protective tiger safely through the terrifying images to the far shore, followed by the great serpent. A cosmic battle ensues between her protective tiger and the snake, in which she intervenes on the tiger's side. The snake is vanquished, it disintegrates like a mechanical toy, and she and her feline guardian travel onward together, side by side, her arm draped around the animal's neck. They come to a high mountain and ascend it along a zigzag path that leads upward through a forest. At the top there is a crater. Tiger and woman wait there for a time, until there is an enormous eruption:

The tiger tells me I must throw myself into the crater. I am sad to leave my companion, but I know that this last journey I must travel. I throw myself into the fire that comes out of the crater. I ascend with the flames toward the sky and fly onward. (Naranjo, 1973:155)

Experiences such as this during a single exposure to the effects of harmaline, Naranjo writes,

. . . constitute a plunging of the mind into an area of myth, transpersonal symbols, and archetypes, and thus constitute an analogue to what is the essence of initiation in many cultures. Typically, for instance, the puberty ordeals are occasions when the young are brought into contact (with or without drugs) with the symbols, myths, or art works which summarize the spiritual legacy of their culture's collective experience. The attitude toward the world that is expressed by such symbols is regarded as important to maturity and to the order of life in the community, and for this reason its transmission is reverently perpetuated, made the object of initiations and of other rituals or feasts in which the people renew their contact with, or awareness of, this domain of existence, irrelevant to practical life but central to the question of life's meaning. The harmalaalkaloid-containing drinks of South American Indians are not only employed in puberty rituals but also in the initiation of the shamans, primitive psychiatrists whose expertise in psychological phenomena is revealed, for instance, in the fact that they are frequently expected to understand the meaning of dreams. (1973:152-153)

Journeys into Mythic Time

All of this is very true, and obviously is of great significance not only to psychology and psychotherapy but also to the ethnology of religion and the ecstatic experience. But it is important to note that the phenomenon of "plunging the mind into myth" or mythic time, that is, into a time when everything is possible, is larger than the choice of a particular alkaloid or group of related alkaloids, because, as we know, other plants with active principles that belong to different groups than the harmala alkaloids are also used in this manner. And similar experiences can also be obtained without any drug. So the cultural context has to be stressed again as being at least as important as the subjective effects of a certain drug.

Transposition from the "here and now" to the "there and then" is common in the initiatory experience, whether in the yaji ritual of the Tukano or in the peyote quest of the Huichols, which Weston La Barre (1970b) has characterized as "probably the closest to the pre-Columbian Mexican rite." It is especially important in shamanic curing, precisely because in the mythic "there and then," experiences of transformation, or being and becoming, are the normal order, and all manner of ordinarily difficult or impossible things respond with ease to the efforts of the gods, who are themselves the original and most powerful of shamans. To illustrate what I mean, let me digress for a moment from the contemporary ya0 complex and modern psychotherapy and return to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century central Mexico and the world of the Nahuatl-speaking curer.

In the course of analyzing the extraordinary corpus of shamanic incantations collected in Ruiz de Alarcón's Tratado of 1629, historian Alfredo Lopez Austin (1973) has found that the synthesis of mythic chants and mind-manifesting drugs (e.g. piciM [Nicodana rustica], and also peyote, mushrooms, and ololiuhqui [morning-glory seeds]) assists the process of curing in two ways: one, it gives the shaman or "magician" the gift of clairvoyance—the perceptive capability of discovering the occult reality of things, the "supernatural in the natural," in actual time and space, and of achieving contact and communication with supernatural beings that have become visible to him. Second, myth and magic plant

. . . permit him to break free from the actual time and space and travel to a world in which the action that is being attempted (the cure) is both feasible and more effective. In short, chant and drug enable him to act in the here and now or there and then.

For example, to set a fractured limb (which he does pragmatically by splinting) the shaman invokes the magic powers of the drug and chants the myth of the journey of the God Quetzalcóatl to the land of the dead, Mictlán, to obtain the bones of the dead of a previous creation and with them to recreate a new race of humanity. In the myth a quail caused Quetzalcóatl to fall and break the bones. The shaman identifies the evil spirit that has taken possession of the fracture with this mythic quail, and he identifies himself with a divinity that has the power of counteracting the evil and reconstituting the broken bones of the dead. He even calls the fractured limb of his patient "bone of the world of the dead." "Aha," we say, "this is obviously what anthropologists call analogous magic." But that is too simplistic, and it fails to appreciate the philosophical subtleties of the Aztec perception of mythic times in relation to the here and now. It is not, writes Lopez Austin, that the expulsion of the evil that has taken possession of the fracture is identified with the myth of the taking and breaking of the bones of the dead and their reconstitution into living beings. Rather,

the mythical element "fractured bone" is the fissure through which the magician slips in order to avail himself of a favorable point in time. He does not attempt to relate analogically a divine event with a result that he wishes to obtain in the real world. It is not simply analogic magic. The magician does not want analogies; he wants a moment of time that by virtue of being of the Creation, and hence critical, abnormal, is also malleable, pliable, subject to easier manipulation than any other.

None of the above invalidates Naranjo's thesis, especially with respect to archetypes; but it does extend the mythic experience as such beyond the boundaries of a specific psychedelic. This will be especially evident in the peyote quest (Chapters Ten and Eleven).

Yajé and the Origins of Art

According to Reichel-Dolmatoff (1972), the Tukano attribute everything we would call "art" to the images that occur in the yaj dream. The striking polychrome designs that adorn the fronts of communal houses, the abstract motifs on their pottery, bark cloths, calabashes, and musical instruments—all these, they say, first appeared and consistently recur under the influence of the psychedelic drink. Not only is there consensus about the forms of these motifs, but in addition their meaning is codified, each having a fixed value as an ideographic sign.

According to the Tukano, the geometric or nonrepresentational motifs, which are interpreted in terms of exogamy, incest, fertility, and the like, appear with the onset of yci.j intoxication, and are followed by scenes from the mythic world, with well-defined images of animals—especially felines and reptiles, birds and other beings, and themes whose models are familiar from the natural and social environment of the tropical forest. It would seem, then,

• . . that in a state of hallucination the individual projects his cultural memory on the wavering screen of colors and shapes and thus "sees" certain motifs and personages. (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1972:110)

Furthermore, there is nothing secret about the content of the dreams. The ecstatic trance experiences are shared, and their interpretation is often done publicly by the shamans and others respected for esoteric knowledge and wisdom. Thus a consensual fixing of images, and their meaning, in accordance with the common cultural pattern, could easily develop and be transmitted through time.

But that does not account completely for the striking parallels among the nonrepresentational images described and drawn by Tukano informants The problem becomes even more complex,

. . . if we consider it from the perspective of artistic inspiration. It is amazing to note how frequently the [geometric] design motifs . . . appear in the petroglyphs and pictographs of the region and far beyond. It would not be difficult to find parallels to these motifs in other prehistoric artifacts, such as the decorations of ceramics or the rock carvings of ancient indigenous cultures. It could be argued that we are dealing with such elementary motifs that they could have evolved independently in any place and era, for they are simply circles, diamonds, dots, and spirals, and nothing more. But are they really that elementary? (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1972:111)

The Colombian anthropologist suggests that both the corpus of nonrepresentational images and their ethnographic and archaeological parallels might have arisen from the organic effects of yaji and perhaps other hallucinogens. Considering the known antiquity of the psychedelic complex among American Indians, he writes, we might conceive of "great cultural zones" wherein, since very ancient times, a certain hallucinogen was ritually employed, giving rise to a body of symbols and motifs that gradually came to be culturally fixed or institutionalized, along with their interpretations. This is all the more plausible, he argues, in that it is typically the shamans, the bearers of the magicoreligious traditions, who are also the artists of their societies and who are ultimately responsible for the symbolic images that appear on the artifacts of the culture and on the living rock in their environment.

That different hallucinogens tend to produce similar geometric or abstract images has been recognized by some investigators of the psychedelic phenomenon since the 1920's. Recent long-term experiments at the University of California at Los Angeles also indicate an organic basis for specific sensations in fixed sequences reported by many subjects under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. What is new is the suggestion that the commonality of abstract or geometric symbolic art through time and space might likewise have a biochemical origin.

Might this be extended to include motifs we would call representational—specifically the great cats, the snakes, and the birds that recur in so many yaji dreams? Certainly feedback and projective mechanisms are at work here: feline, reptilian, and avian motifs predominate in the cosmologies, the myths, and the art of prehistoric as well as contemporary Indian societies from Mexico south. But these have to have started somewhere: might they in fact be archetypes, embedded deeply in the unconscious since very ancient times, to be released, perhaps, by biochemical stimuli? Are there, then, biopsychological explanations rather than culture-historical ones for the parallels in ancient Chinese ritual art to the feline-reptilian-avian symbol complex of the New World?* Or are both only two sides of the same coin, interdependent rather than mutually exclusive? And how is one to understand the similarities in the yaji experiences of Indians, anthropologists, and volunteers in psychotherapeutic experiments?

That something ties all these transcultural and transpersonal phenomena together seems obvious. How much is due to the chemistry of consciousness and how much to culture, however, remains a large unanswered question.

*This sensation explains why one of the harmala alkaloids of Banisteriopsis caapi was originally called "telepathine."

*In man the pineal gland, which rises conelike from the third ventricle of the brain, is a vestigial organ, representing more evolved forms in lower vertebrates and their long-extinct reptilian ancestors. The pineal body has sometimes been thought to be the seat of the soul. Serotonin is a neuro-transmitter agent that occurs naturally in the mammalian brain, including that of man, and, interestingly enough, also in the venom of toads (Bufo spp.). The highest concentrations of serotonin have been found in the brains of schizophrenics. See also the first footnote in Chapter Six, below.

*The "dragon" is the synthesis of these three cosmic elements, as is the "Feathered Serpent" of Mesoamerica.