Ayahuasca And The Secret Of The Rainforest - The Lost Amazon Journal Of Edson Pereira

Edson Pereira was a 19th Century Brazilian botanist and explorer who had heard of the hallucinogenic qualities of certain Amazonian plants, and had intended to mount an expedition into the forest to try to find incidences of the drug and report on its effects. Rumor had it that the drug produced unheard of visions - all those who took the drug, ayahuasca, reported the presence of 'the goddess of death'. 

The Brazilian Journal of Botany says only this:

Ayahuasca visions are vivid, often transformative experiences that occur during a ceremony.  Participants report encountering intricate visual patterns, ethereal entities, and profound symbolic scenarios with deep personal and spiritual significance. 

In the cosmovision of its users, the ayahuasca is the vine that allows the spirit to wander detached from the body, entering the spiritual world, otherwise forbidden for the alive.

The Journal entry was considered to be part myth, part rumor, part exaggerated colonial curiosity. The origins of the account were unclear and indistinct, but Pereira was fascinated.  This might be the psycho-pharmacological find of the century and a boon for the new one soon to come. 

At around the same time that Pereira was planning his expedition, a tribal Amazonian Indian wandered through the jungle up the Napo River and disoriented, euphoric, and naked stumbled upon the camp of a small contingent of white colonial traders in the town of Misaualli. 

As well as euphoric, the man was incomprehensible, not only because his language was as yet untranslated, but because of his behavior, at times vacant and staring, at others with a beatific smile and embracing gestures.  He seemed a man possessed - not of some demonic forces but of some kind of spiritual animation.  

He seemed insistent on telling the white men something, urgently in fact, and realizing that they could not speak to each other, he drew a series of primitive outline pictures in the sand along the riverbank. As far as the tradesmen could make out, it was some animist figure, goddess-like.  

The man pointed to the pictures and then to the sky and then to each of the men gathered around him and said 'Nungui....Nungui'. 

The tradesmen were nonplussed, curious and interested; but for them as for most Europeans of the era, the Amazonian Indians were savages, barely human, and indistinguishable from the wild animals of the forest.  Yet there was something unsettling about this Indian, his behavior, and his drawings. 

The traders had only incidental contact with the Jivaro and other Amazonian tribes - they had preferred to stay in the altiplano and trade with the Quechua and Aymara.  This had been their first trip down the torturous but passable road down 3500' to the river - they like the Spanish explorers centuries before were hoping to find gold deposits along with jade, topaz, and diamonds.  The sight therefore of this wild Amazonian Indian, a species rarely emerging from their deep forest enclaves, was startling and enigmatic.  This was not simply a cross-cultural contact, but a more profoundly curious experience. 

The traders had no idea what to do with the man, but it was a moot point because the next morning he was gone, returned to the jungle.  His image, however, was not easily shaken, and when the traders returned to to Quito, they shared it with their colleagues.  No, their friends replied, they had no idea who the man was, where he came from or from which tribe, let alone his unsettling behavior. 

Word, however, travelled to a senior botanist at the Ecuadorian Institute Of Bio-Pharmacology who thought there was something to the story.  He for one had spent years hoping to find natural pathways to spiritual evolution.  He published a short article in the Institute's journal which was read by Edson Pereira who immediately travelled to Quito to meet him. 

Would the Ecuadorian Institute finance a small expedition down the Napo River?  There might be a chance that it would come upon the Jivaro Indian settlement from which the itinerant man had come, and there scientists could explore what might likely be ayahuasca. 

The scientist agreed and a small grant was afforded to Pereira who would be expected to write up his experiences and publish them in the Institute's journal with full credit given to his sponsors. 

Pereira insisted on travelling alone - this was both because of his proprietary interests and for cross-cultural ease.  The Indians in the rainforest, unused to white men, might react violently to what they considered an invasion if there were more than one. 

Pereira was a good scientist, a well-trained botanist, and a responsible journalist; and he kept a running, detailed log of his journey into the jungle. 

The trip down the Napo from Misaualli on the swift current is fast, and a small dugout canoe can easily navigate the upstream rapids.  The small outboard motor is not needed on the outbound trip but would be the only way of getting back to port. 

They stopped at a number of small villages along the way inhabited by altiplano Quechua who had intermarried with the few Jivaro who had come upriver.  Pereira picked up useful information about the Jivaro and the powerful brujos, the medicine men found in each Indian settlement.  These brujos were curanderos, herbal medicine healers, but also thought to draw on the spirits of the forest for divine healing.  

After many miles down the river, and what Pereira was told was the last civilized outpost on its banks, the boatman and mate said they would go no further.  From there onwards was uncharted, unexplored, frighteningly primitive regions, and they would not risk their lives. 

So Pereira went on foot, hacking his way through the forest tangle, finding animal paths which had been worn down enough to make walking easier, and slogging hour after hour deeper into the jungle. 

His journal is illustrative:

I have never seen such trees, reaching fifty meters into the sky, creating a canopy so thick and complete little sunlight can filter through.  At the base of these giants are tangles of undergrowth, dense and impenetrable but with a surprising plethora of tropical flowers, shoots, and richly colored vines.  I have seen no wildlife, but I hear it - birds in particular, and at times the wild cry of a predator  

Finally, and at long last, exhausted, hungry, and dispirited, he came upon a simple hut no more than fifty meters from the river's edge, and there sitting akimbo on a straw mat in front of it was an old man, dressed in a ragged, torn shirt and a loin cloth fashioned as shorts.  He was smoking a pipe and remained seated as Pereira approached. 

He was a mestizo of mixed race, but not of the usual Quechua-European kind.  He was part Quechua and part Jivaro and because of his altiplano roots could speak a rudimentary Spanish.  Pereira let him know the reason for his visit, and the old man gave him fermented manioc root to drink and a river fish to eat.  

Pereira stayed with the old man for days without anything happening, but he felt that this was simply an anticipatory period, a preface, a preamble, and patience was required. 

Then one night, a group of Indians assembled in the small courtyard of the brujo's shack while he brewed a thick, dense liquid in a large cauldron over a wood fire.  As it grew late, the brujo invited each tribesman to come up and take some of the brew, Pereira included.  This was the ayahuasca he had heard about!

His journal entry written at some point during the ceremony told of the experience.  It was never narrative nor perfectly coherent.  It was fragmentary, without chronology or cause and effect.  It was amazing that he had the composure and the will to write at all

I am afraid...the jungle is collapsing, the vines are alive, wrapping me, choking the breath out of me but a wind from the river fills my lungs, turning me into a vinous plant as tall as the forest canopy...I look down and see the river on the face of the moon flowing upstream carrying baskets of something...babies, food, earth, fire...

The journal entry ended abruptly without conclusion.  The fear had been replaced by calm, a sense of intimacy, and quiet, he wrote, and then stopped. 

He stayed for at least a week with the brujo and on another night like the first, the ceremony was repeated - the natives, the brew, and the visions.  This time his journal entry was only a scrawl, barely legible, almost indecipherable, words punctuated by lines and dashes and swirls, crude silhouettes that were very much like those etched into the riverbank sand at Misaualli.  

The journal entry, if it can be called that, ended with nothing but crude drawings, inchoate visual musings that recalled the Candomblé myths of Dahomey the African country from which most slaves were brought to Brazil, and the voodoo zombies of Angola. 

'They all saw her', was the last scribbled entry in his journal found a year later by a Spanish missionary who had come to the forest to evangelize the natives.  The journal hung by a leather thong from the thatch of the brujo's roof had become a talisman, a gri-gri, a source of native spiritual power; but no sign of the white man who had come before.  The brujo was still there, alive but more aged and feeble, but he had nothing to say except that the man had disappeared into the forest.

The missionary returned to Quito many months later and thanks to an inscription written on the inside cover citing the Ecuadorian Institute Of Bio-Pharmacology, he was able to deliver it to the senior scientist who had authorized Pereira's expedition.  

The scientist published an article about the voyage and included an edited, assembled, and readable version of Pereira's journal, all of which generated increased interest in the Amazon, tribal medicine, witchery, and of course ayahuasca. 

Despite many subsequent trips down the Napo River to the area where Pereira had set foot in the forest, he remained without a trace.  The jungle had simply swallowed him up.