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by Claudio Naranjo
CLAUDIO NARANJO,
M.D., was formerly an Associate of the Institute of Personality Assessment
and Research of the University of California, Berkeley. He has conducted
experimental and clinical work in psychotherapy both at the University of
Chile School of Medicine and in the United States, to which he came as a
Guggenheim fellow in 1964·
When we consider the
anthropological reports on the uses and effects of yage or ayahuasca among
the different Indian cultures in South America several questions naturally
come to our mind: What is peculiar to the natives' experiences or their
interpretations of such? Would a white man in our culture share what the
shamans report of themselves or would he experience the drug's effect
according to his own values, expectations, and previous life history? In a
way these questions are equivalent to asking what kind of drug this is,
since we can only generalize about the effect of a drug seeing through and
beyond personality and cultural differences that bear on it, after which
we may either affirm its relativity or grasp a common core of experience
behind the disparate interpretations and symbolizations of it in the
individual reports.
An answer to these questions,
interesting to pharmacology and psychology as well as to anthropology, can
be sought in the study of the reactions to the drug among non-natives that
are not informed of the natives' accounts of theirs, so I hope that some
in- sights in this direction can be gained from the following report on
experiences from thirty-five such volunteers in Santiago, Chile. The
contents of this paper will report on some features in the experience with
harmaline, the active alkaloid of yage, as reported by thirty-five
subjects who took it either orally or by intravenous injection, in
different dosage levels and in some cases more than once (cf. Naranjo,
1967)·
I shall not go into details about the physiological aspects of the
reaction or its comparison with the experience induced by other
hallucinogens, but I may say that, on the one hand, the experimental
subjects ingested either mescaline or LSD on a different occasion, and
they all agree that their reactions to these drugs are very different from
those brought about by harmaline. On the other hand, this difference
partly lies in that yage (or harmaline) induces a more sleep-like trance;
the person under its influence generally wants to keep his eyes closed,
since the external world appears as of little interest and distracting
from the world of visions and inner happenings that take place when it is
shut off. Parenthetically I can also mention that this trance-like state,
somehow resembling sleep or a self-contained reverie, is neuro-physiologically
more like a state of alertness in that the EEG recordings show the
disappearance of alpha waves when the subjects have their eyes closed.
But what can be of greater interest for the purpose of comparison with the
preceding paper by Harner undoubtedly lies in the content of the
experiences, be this the description of visions, or, in some cases, pure
feelings or thoughts.
In general terms it can be said that the great majority of these
experiences were of the sort that is generally misnamed hallucinatory.
That is, the person would visualize with closed eyes--and rarely with open
eyes--images that are not mistaken for reality (though they may be
associated with intense feelings). In some of the subjects this went along
with or was followed by an inclination to think about personal or
metaphysical problems with a feeling of unusual depth, insight, and
inspiration. In only two cases out of thirty-five a person under a full
dose of the alkaloid had no hallucinations at all but only an
indescribable feeling of joy, loving serenity. Most people became nauseous
and some vomited profusely or experienced a vague but intense malaise,
which on two occasions led to the interruption of the session. It is
difficult to decide to what extent this discomfort was psychological in
origin, but it appeared to be concomitant with a state of diminished
awareness of the psychological happenings of the moment, a sort of
sleepiness in which the person seemed to take refuge and shut himself off
from overwhelming visions or feelings that he could not recall again.
Before we examine more closely the content of these experiences I would
like it to be understood that the mere description of one such session,
lasting about six hours, would easily take an hour to convey. In fact, I
have in my possession a forty-page report written by one of the subjects
on his experience. Since illustration with case material seems
indispensable if one is to convey the particular duality of the content,
in what follows I shall alternate between excerpts of session notes and
the discussions of such. This will be necessarily unilateral because of
the limited space avail- able, so I have chosen to concentrate on the
highlighting of some of what appear to be recurrent themes underlying the
individual experiences. I think it will become apparent that almost any
illustration for one of these themes could also be used to illustrate some
other, since such motives converge and are condensed in a synthetic whole
in the actual play of fantasy.
I have chosen as a starting point for the following discussion the first
vision of a 25-year-old woman, born in Europe of European parents, who has
lived in Chile since late in her childhood. She says:
I went at a terrific speed. I came to a strange street. I only saw one
side of it. It was an interminable row of two- or three-storied houses
with pointed roofs and wooden beams, in the style of medieval houses or
English country houses.
I suddenly saw a man running. ire was a messenger. I had to slow down and
placed myself next to him. That is, next to his face, since in this dream
only my soul participated. My soul is a sphere of some 7 cm. in diameter,
pure energy, and it rotates on itself at such enormous speed that it would
be the same if it didn't. It can displace itself in any direction at the
speed it wishes. My soul sees, hears, thinks; it perceives odors, I
believe, but has no sense of touch for the simple reason that it repels
matter.
We must in the first place take notice that this is a dream of fantasy of
her "soul," and this awareness of an entity which is regarded as a soul as
distinct from the body is seen with the same explicitness in other
experiences too. Consider the following description by a al-year-old
Chilean journalist:
I was going farther and farther away from myself. I was realizing that my
body and my mind were such autonomous forces that if they had ever
converged in me it seemed pure chance. What during my entire lifetime I
had sensed like mingled con- fusion now appeared to be divided in three
precise domains: outside lay the world, people, buildings and noises (for
which I cared less and less); closer, as a boundary, stood my organism,
with those hands, that mouth and its laugh, now commanded by itself;
inside, at last, in the innermost and recondite, warmly floating in the
skin that was always with me, was I. That is, my mind.
It is perhaps this transition from everyday-like awareness to that of the
autonomous self, soul, mind, or whatever name we may wish to call it, that
might: perhaps explain recurrent images of falling into one's body, or
simply falling--leaving the everyday ground --entering one's body or some
symbolic place. The process is also expressed as one of dissociating and
leaving, as going unconscious (though this does not actually happen) or,
more radically, dying. Eight persons in thirty-five experienced visions or
feelings of their own death.
The same subject of the last quotation felt he was dying, too, and
comments: "If I was going to leave the body, that didn't worry me. I knew
that I existed in essence, and this was the ideal state, with no skin, no
liver, no resentments, atemporal."
In one of the two subjects who did not visualize, the experience of death
was present too, but as pure feeling and as a bodily sensation:
"Physically 1 felt that I was dying and I feel that when my time comes I
shall die well."
In the following excerpt both the theme of death and that of an
independent soul can be noticed:
I saw my own death, with anguish; how I was carried across fields of rice
in Korea or China, on a stretcher, between two men, coolies, perhaps, and
I could see my face, once more from the outside and very close. It was
like tanned leather, as in a suitcase, covered with droplets of blood or
scratches on the temples. . . .
The observer in this scene is a point in space, and the subject has
previously commented that there is a feeling to it like being a butterfly.
But this can now lead us to a different theme.
If we now turn our attention once more to the image of that spherical soul
flying at high speed I would like to point out that this speed itself
tends to recur in other visions; the lack of tactile sensations perhaps
has its equivalence in a feeling of benumbed- ness which is often
reported, whereas its being suspended in space, soaring through it at some
altitude appears or is implied in about one-third of the subjects'
comments or reports.
Consider the following excerpt from the account of a male subject who took
a fairly large amount of harmaline with the addition of mescaline:
The first thing I did, involuntarily, was lift my hand. It seemed to lose
weight, it rose, rose . . . and then I felt that it was no longer a hand
but the tip of a wing. I was turning into a winged being. I then stretched
my wings and felt extreme freedom and expansion. My wings were growing and
as they did my feeling of freedom increased, as if I had been imprisoned
during my entire lifetime and I suddenly had organs that made it possible
for me to expand.,4nd I would say: "I have wings! I have wings! There is
no space that can contain them, the air cannot contain them, they are
immense!" I felt my wings grow above the earth, and had the image of a
huge bird above the earth, with its extended wings beyond its limits,
reaching infinity. I then, timidly, began to move them. I felt the
movements of flying clearly: how the wing rested on the resisting air, and
how a wave of motion went from the tip to the other end permitting me to
lift the body. And I said: "I fly! I fly!" And felt the air coming into my
mouth, caressing my whole body, and saw the perspective of the earth. I
didn't go anywhere. I just flew and the air passing through my body gave
my breathing a special rhythm, a rhythm of flying which expressed not only
the movement but the joy.
It may be related to this experience of flying that some subjects who do
not report it as such nevertheless describe their visions as scenes viewed
from above, sometimes from great altitude. Such evidence of an aerial
viewpoint can be found, for example, in the following description:
I remember a Negro woman I saw from above ... I saw her from a distance of
some 3 meters and then approached her further, from her right side. She
carried a purple parasol of a very bright, almost luminous color, like a
sea anemone, like embroidery, and would twist it around its axis so that
it unfolded like loose chiffon or in the form of an aurora borealis, and
she laughed with a coarse and vulgar laugh.
It happens with this as with many other yage' visions that it contains
more than one of the recurrent themes, and I would be tempted to elaborate
on each. Here it is not only the physical point of view from above that
seems typical but, too, the image of a geometric center for the
happenings, the merry-go-round-like rotation, the Negro woman and the
experience of being teased. For the time being I shall conclude the
discussion of the flight- theme by mentioning the most common presentation
of it, which is the mere visualization of birds. The following is not the
most typical example, but may be interesting from many points of view:
Suddenly, a crucified Christ ascended moving his arms like wings. And then
another, moving his arms with the crossed sticks. All these movements were
at an incredible speed. I thought, in seeing it, that here was from where
the idea had come of depicting the Holy Ghost as a dove. And then Christ
turned into a sort of dove that ascended.
On the whole ten subjects mentioned at least one of the experiences
related to flying.
I would now like to concentrate on another aspect of our initial
quotation, which is the spherical shape and rotating motion of the
transparent flying sphere. I am mentioning both the rotation and the shape
not only because the first already suggests the idea of circularity, but
for the fact that both, in turn, imply the idea of a center of the form or
movement. This center may be the most adequate symbol to refer to the
theme we now want to discuss.
It may be recalled that this idea of a central element and the rotating
motion were already encountered in that vision of the Negro woman with the
turning parasol which unfolded into an aurora borealis. Now consider the
following passage from the same person's report:
I saw tiny dots, like those on a television screen, transparent dots that
agitated and turned (when I fixed the gaze on one point) around a cone
forming a sort of funnel, like the whirlpool that is formed when one
removes the stopper. They turned, rather slowly, and this funnel opened
upwards from the floor I was gazing at, and extended to the sides into my
entire visual field.... And in this swirl of particles lies all my visual
experience. It all comes from it, this is the foundation of the scenes I
saw, this was their spirit, in the same way that the dots on the
television screen are the ground of all the images; but even the meaning
of this incessant turning was in everything, like a merry-go-round, or
like fair-music; it was like circus music. Was the teasing already here!
Something of a sardonic joke was in all of this, these changing situations
confronting the spectator (me), these images in incessant transformation,
never permanent, meaning nothing but change as such, like the whirlpool
that turned and carried in it all these visions.
The "center" can appear in the different visions as a source of motion or
the region to which motion flows, a source of light or a perceiving eye, a
geometric region such as a circular pond in the middle of Heaven or Hell,
a being at the center of the earth, of the universe, the skull or inside
the subject's body. (In nine of the subjects this was a noticeable feature
appearing in more than one image.) From the subject's experiences and
associations, as from the context in which these images appear, I
definitely believe that this contraposition of center and periphery, the
core and the surface, the immobile and the incessant turning, the source,
beginning and end, and the everchanging flow, is that of the deeper self
and the multiplicity of experience, and it encompasses but transcends the
duality of mind and body. More precisely, it is that of being and
becoming, and it matches the traditional Hindu symbol for samsara and
nirvana: the wheel of incessant death and rebirth, and its hub. Or,
according to a remarkable passage of the tao-te-ching, the practical
materiality of a jar and the enclosed void that constitutes its essence.
I still have to illustrate one of the most important and striking themes
in the yage' experiences, but this time, if I am to illustrate it with the
initial dream of the spherical soul I have to quote a bit further from it.
After describing the messenger in what seems to be medieval clothes, the
subject goes on:
I left him behind and proceeded onwards, skimming just above the ground. I
met a very large man, a sort of giant with a bronzed skin, black mustache,
leather jacket and pants made of leopard's skin, who looked at me in a
rage, who knows why. He produced a very long whip and wanted to whip me
with it, taking my soul for a top. But the whip would stop at one cm. from
my soul and couldn't go further. The giant and the whip were furious about
their failure. The whip then turned into a black serpent's head with no
teeth, that opened its mouth wanting to devour me. It could not. At the
moment my soul's attention was caught by a funeral procession so I didn't
see the giant or the whip anymore.
So here we find, in a brief scene, rage, dark skin, hostile whip- ping,
leopard skin, a black serpent, and the prospect of being swallowed. In
this particular instance, too, the soul appears invulnerable to the
threats because of its very nature. Here, as in other instances, it can be
a matter of choice how embracing a category we want to regard as a theme.
Serpents certainly recur in the visions, and crocodiles or reptiles in
general, and so do tigers, leopards and cats; but fangs also do, and birds
of prey and vampires, and perhaps all these are interrelated by their
implication of danger, and would also be related to the giant and the
whip. Since it is not possible in the present circumstances to elaborate
on the different elements of this complex, though, I shall choose to
illustrate the two which are striking enough at least for their frequency.
Strangely enough, tigers, leopards, or jaguars were seen by seven of the
subjects even though big cats are not seen in Chile. These are sometimes
encountered as aggressors, sometimes as a graceful sight, a friendly
companion or, in one instance, experienced as a true impersonation.
Reptiles, too, were seen by six subjects. In three instances these were
dragons, and in another there was a dinosaur. Snakes were reported by
three subjects, and for one of them these were the most prominent element
in the whole experience.
The following excerpt is from the same lady of the spherical soul and the
giant with the leopard skin:
At first, many tiger faces. Panthers and all kinds of cats. Black and
yellow. Then the tiger. The largest and strongest of all. I know (for I
read his thought) that I must follow him. I see the plateau. He walks with
resolution in a straight line. I follow; but on reaching the edge and
perceiving the brightness I cannot follow him. The dream vanishes. But
above the luminescence rises a statue of the Virgin with the child in her
arms, and ascends from the hole into the sky.
At a still later stage she is able to follow the tiger further to the end
of the plateau and look into the abyss which is Hell (see Fig. I). It is
round and in it is fluid fire, or fluid gold. People swim in it.
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. I then
suddenly see my tiger is eating up a woman. But no. It is not the tiger.
It is an animal with a crocodile's head and the body of a fatter, larger
animal with four feet (though these were not seen). All kinds of lizards
and frogs begin to appear now. And the pond gradually turns into a
greenish swamp of stagnant waters, though full of life: primitive forms of
life, such as algae, anemones, and micro-organ- isms. It is a prehistoric
pond [see Fig. II]. A shore appears, not with sand but vegetation. Some
dinosaurs are seen in the distance. I rise on the tiger on the shore. The
serpent follows us. It catches up with us. I stay aside and let the tiger
take care of her [see Fig. III], But the serpent is strong and my tiger is
in danger. I decide to take part in the fight. The serpent notices my
intention, lets the tiger loose and prepares to attack us. I hold its head
and press on its sides so that it will open its mouth. It has an
iron-piece inside, like the bit of a horse. I press on the ends of this
bit and the serpent dies or disintegrates, it falls into pieces as if it
were a mechanical serpent. I go onwards with the tiger. I walk next to
him, my arm over his neck. We climb the high mountain. There is a zig-zag
path between high bushes. We arrive. There is a crater. We wait for some
time and there begins 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 towards the sky and fly
onwards.
I have deliberately quoted more than what is strictly relevant to the mere
illustration of the tiger motive so at least an intuition can be formed as
to the complex relationships between the themes of tiger, serpent,
crocodile, fire, destruction, and those of flying, ascending, disembodied
existence.
Just One more example before we proceed to a different aspect, this time
from the same person who felt like a huge bird flying beyond the limits of
the earth:
I wasn't a fish anymore, but a big cat, a tiger. I walked, though, feeling
the same freedom I had experienced as a bird and a fish, freedom of
movement, flexibility, grace. I moved as a tiger in the jungle, joyously,
feeling the ground under my feet, feeling my power; my chest grew larger.
I then approached an animal, any animal. I only saw its neck, and then
experienced what a tiger feels when looking at its prey.
This may be enough to show how the tiger by no means stands for mere
hostility, but for a fluid synthesis of aggression and grace and a full
acceptance of the life-impulse beyond moral judgment. It is now time to
turn to an aspect in these experiences which is much more diversified than
those discussed, and which, though expressed here and there through
particularized images, can choose such a variety of images that it makes
it more appropriate to speak of a trait or quality of the yak experience
than of a "theme." This quality is what we may want to call the religious
or the mythical.
If we choose to regard as religious those images which belong in this
category according to common knowledge, or the feelings and concerns that
the subjects express in explicitly religious terms, we find that these
were reported by fifteen out of the thirty-five. Five persons saw the
Devil or devils, three of them mentioned angels, three had a vision of the
Virgin Mary and two of Christ; three spoke of Paradise or Heaven, and two
of Hell, three of them described priestly figures, while others saw
churches, altars, or crosses. Aside from these fifteen, two had ecstatic
feelings which were described in religious terms.
It is probably an arbitrary matter where to trace the limit between what
is religious and what is not. One instance of this can be seen in the
transition between the vision of "the Devil" or minor demons to monstrous
images or horrible masks, and from these to horrible people or animals.
References to Greco-Roman gods, sirens or nymphs are not uncommon, and we
may wish to place them in the same category with the religious images of
Christianity. And, again, we can detect a mythical quality in the
atmosphere of the typical fairy tale, with castles, kings, and medieval
costumes, as has been reported in at least four of the experiences. One
subject said he felt like a pharaoh, but in his written report two days
later he did not mention the image or idea of a pharaoh, but said instead
that this was a feeling of being God. If it were not for this additional
information, the essential religious implication of the image could have
been overlooked. For these reasons I believe the mythico-religious element
is more pervasive in the experiences than what appears from their outward
descriptions and may be completely unrelated to the visual imagery. In one
instance, for example, a subject had been instructed to imagine the depth
of the ocean. Only a month later did I discover, to my own surprise, the
importance that this experience had for her:
The most important was descending to the bottom of the sea [she
commented]. The feeling of being myself. The sea was in myself. There was
a continuity of the external with the internal. I have recalled this when
I have been unhappy. The sand and the plants were myself or something of
mine. The idea of God was in everything. I think that must be what is
called a mystical experience. I cannot describe it. I wouldn't have words.
Beauty, joy, peace, everything I longed for was there. God in myself.
A familiar mythical character came to the fore during an experience the
most important aspect of which was the feeling the subject had of not
being the doer of his actions when he talked, laughed, or made a drawing.
When he looked at himself in a mirror, too, his face seemed to him a mask
while somebody else was looking through his eyes. This feeling of being,
so to say, "possessed" by another spirit developed into the notion that
this was a dwarf inside of him. This dwarf, childlike and aged at the same
time, bisexual or asexual, manipulator of the body and free from necessity
but, at the same time imprisoned by the body, was part of his perception
of different situations during the drug experience, and the following
excerpt refers to his viewing of a picture showing a sexual act:
... I thought eroticism would come next but it didn't. Never did I grasp
the carnal side of the movements, and I saw it as an act as natural as
any. Then, what was physically a genital turned into a communication tube,
a bridge between two beings. The figures were communicating in the only
possible way, interrupting during a fleeting interval the solitude of the
spirit. Then, suddenly, the dwarf appeared in the bodies, laughing in
amusement while he pushed out his obscene finger. He took de- light in it
since this was his definitive, triumphant joke: while the body believed it
was seeking its satisfaction it was really letting free the imprisoned
dwarf. Love, it seemed, was the supreme irony. Man and woman give
themselves to each other in pleasure, the body instinctively seeks it,
but, in the accomplishment, it ceases to exist, since the orgasm is a
fleeting death. It being death, imprisonment and dependency cease to
exist. In the battle between the body and tile dwarf this was the truce.
But suddenly the dwarf's laughter vanished, and as if it were sucked by
itself it grew smaller and smaller until it was only a light, an
incandescent worm, a shining point, a microscopic and luminous
spermatozoan. In this state it shot from the man's body to the woman's
womb. In the midst of this truce the dwarf, too, was fooled. He was forced
to abandon his inaction and was precipitated into doing something. A new
human being, to begin again the cycle with the duality of dwarf and body.
This led me to the thought of a higher joke.
Even though the focus of this report has been descriptive, I think the
different motives illustrated thus far almost out of their own accord fall
together in an embracing whole. The complex of images discussed first as
portraying the polarity of being and be- coming, freedom and necessity,
spirit and matter, only set up the stage for the human drama. This
involves the battle of opposites and eventually their reconciliation or
fusion, after giving way to death and destruction, be this by fire,
tigers, drowning, or devouring snakes. The beauty of fluid fire, the
graceful tiger, or the subtle and wise reptile, these seem most expressive
for the synthetic experience of accepting life as a whole, or, better,
accepting existence as a whole, life and death included; evil included
too, though from a given spiritual perspective it is not experienced as
evil any more. Needless to say, the process is essentially religious, and
it could even be suspected that every myth presents us one particular
aspect of the same experience.
The themes I have illustrated are by no means the only ones that can be
discerned in the sessions. As I mentioned in passing, Negro people appear
very frequently, and this research was carried out in Chile where there
are no Negroes. Landscapes and cities are often described (as the medieval
houses in the first quotation) and these sometimes seem to be related to
the experience of flying. Masks, especially monstrous or sardonic ones are
often mentioned, and so are eyes. Not uncommonly robots, vehicles or a
feeling of automation are reported, and so are mobs, caves, prehistory,
pearls, and so on. It would take too long to illustrate all of them and
more so to elaborate on their meaning. I think, though, that the themes
discussed here are the central ones, and I would suggest that they invite
us to regard some shamanistic conceptions more as the expression of
universal experiences than in terms of acculturation to local traditions.
REFERENCE
Naranjo, Claudio
1967 Psychotropic Properties of the Harmala Alkaloids. In
Ethno-Pharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs (Daniel H. Efron,
editor-in-chief), pp. 385-91· Public Health Service Publication No. 1645
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare
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