Mentored by a Madman

by A. J. Lees

  Unphased by the relative lack of data, Burroughs embarked on his first serious attempt ‘to dig yagé’ in 1953. Not long after his arrival in Bogotá, he had the good fortune to bump into Doctor Richard Schultes (in The Yage Letters he is disguised as ‘Doctor Schindler’). Schultes was an American ethnobotanist who had graduated from Harvard a year after Burroughs and had then spent most of the next twelve years sailing down the tributaries of the North Western Amazon in a portable aluminium craft. Schultes’ close collaboration with plant chemists in Boston had helped to reveal the medicinal secrets of at least two hundred indigenous plants and his exacting fieldwork had culminated in important new insights into ‘the second sight’ of the Amazon Indian. At their first meeting at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Schultes had pulled out a dry, wrinkled piece of caapi stem and told Burroughs that under the plant’s influence he had experienced blue and grey colours.

  Schultes’ Victorian decorum, his habit of voting for the Queen of England in the American Presidential elections and his dogged insistence on the use of systematic botanical names had made some of his Harvard students question whether he might be the living embodiment of the Yorkshire-born Richard Spruce.

  Burroughs then left Bogotá alone on an eventful five-week journey to Puerto Asis in the Putumayo region of Colombia. As well as having his first experience with yagé he was mugged, thrown in a police cell, contracted malaria and witnessed first-hand the civil war that had been raging in the countryside between the Conservatives and the Liberals (La Violencia) for more than five years. On 28 February 1953, he wrote to his ally, the poet Allen Ginsberg, from the Hotel Niza in the Andean mountainside town of Pasto, describing his first half-baked experience of yagé:

  That night I had a vivid dream in color of the green jungle and a red sunset […] Also a composite city familiar to me but I could not quite place it. Part New York, part Mexico City and part Lima which I had not seen at this time.

  – The Yage Letters

  After his return to Bogotá, Schultes provided Burroughs with the opportunity to attach himself with the Anglo-Cocoa Commission that was about to begin a thousand mile round trip expedition into the rainforests of Southern Colombia. On this trek Burroughs was to learn a great deal more about yagé. Schultes told him that his father, a plumber, had read him excerpts of Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and the Andes when he was ill as a teenager and it was this that had led him into the jungle. He told Burroughs that the Indians saw the caapi stem as a cord that connected them with their mythical past. In order to communicate with the invisible world of the Milky Way and their ancestors, they needed to pass from one cosmic plane to another. He also told him that when a Desãna Indian feels ill he asks who he has annoyed, not what he might have eaten.

  In the municipality of Mocoa, Burroughs was introduced to an elderly baby-faced Ingano medicine man who invited him to partake in a yagé ceremony. The shaman lived in a thatched shack inside which was a shrine with a picture of the Virgin Mary, a cross, feathers, a wooden effigy and a few small packages tied with ribbons. The Indian took a swig from Burroughs’ bottle of aguardiente and then sat down on the dirt floor behind a bowl set on a tripod. He started to chant the words ‘Yagé Pintar’ and then got up and swished a light broom on Burroughs’ shoulders to whisk away the evil spirits. The Indian then took a drink from the bowl and poured some of the dark oily liquid into a dirty red plastic cup. Burroughs drunk the bitter concoction and within two minutes felt vertiginous, nauseous and inebriated. He then saw some blue flashes, the hut took on a far-Pacific look with Easter Island heads, and as he stumbled about in an uncoordinated fashion he saw squawking larval forms surrounded by an azure haze. A few hours after he had taken the drink, in fear of an impending convulsion he was forced to take the barbiturate Nembutal as an antidote. By first light he was well enough to walk back down the mountainside to the Hotel America but was still experiencing showers of blue flashes. He told members of the expedition that he considered the shaman to be a deceitful charlatan who specialised in bumping off gringos.

  Burroughs learned from Schultes that the Inganos and Cofans crushed the vine with a rock and often mixed it with leaves from other plants, whereas close to the Brazilian border on the upper Uaupés, the Tukanos that Spruce had befriended scraped shavings from the vine and allowed it to mull alone for several hours in cold water. One of Schultes’ Indian guides from the Rio Uaupés prepared this pure version for Burroughs, who sipped it over an hour but the effect was disappointing, with only a few blue-grey flashes and mild erotism that he likened to the effects of marijuana.

  On his return to the Colombian capital, Burroughs continued his scientific investigations in the run-down laboratory at the Botanical Institute of the university, with the intention of distilling the active substance from the nauseating oils and resins. Schultes provided him with a published extraction method but the brown feathery residue Burroughs managed to isolate from the crate of dried yagé he had brought back with him proved to be disappointingly devoid of hallucinatory effect. He wrote again to Allen Ginsberg saying that only the fresh vine had the real kick and that yageine or harmine extracts were a pale replica, devoid of a vital volatile element.

  He then headed for Peru in search of more yagé experiences and in Pucallpa, on the banks of the Rio Ucayali, he learned that a team of Russian scientists had visited the region in 1927 and shipped a ton of yagé back to Moscow. Burroughs was now certain there was an undercover story to write relating to brainwashing experiments with the devil’s vine that implicated both the KGB and the CIA.

  His experiences with yagé in Peru were far more intense than anything he had experienced in Colombia. He described scintillating diamonds that turned like dancers on the tips of remote freeways, slow undulating celestial waves (‘blue spirit’), multitudes, and monochromatic clouds racing across the night sky. He later wrote that the kick was seeing things from a special angle: it was purely visceral and permitted a temporary freedom from the claims of the ageing, terrified, cautious flesh. Writing hurriedly in pencil from the Hotel Pucallpa on 18 June 1953, Burroughs orders Ginsberg to hold back the scientific Yagé article he had sent him (in which he had stated that only the fresh liana was responsible for the hallucinogenic effects):

  Hold the presses! … I am now prepared to believe the Brujos do have secrets, and that Yage alone is quite different from Yage prepared with the leaves and plants the Brujos add to it.

  In a letter to Allen Ginsberg posted from Lima on July 8 1953, he spoke of yagé being a ‘blue drug’ and a ‘night drug’:

  Like I say it is like nothing else. This is not the chemical lift of C, the sexless horribly sane stasis of junk, the vegetable nightmare of peyote, or the humorous silliness of weed. This is an instant overwhelming rape of the senses.

  – Letters 1945–1959

  Burroughs had defined junk in Naked Lunch as a generic term for opium and its morphine derivatives, including all its synthetic forms such as heroin, Demerol, Palfium, Eukodal and Paregoric. Yagé was different and the most powerful drug he had ever taken.

  On July 10 he wrote once more to Ginsberg from Lima:

  Yage is space-time travel. The room seems to shake and vibrate with motion … You make migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains.

  – The Yage Letters

  In Pucallpa, Burroughs had got to know the local ‘doctor,’ a young man named Saboya (‘a doctor works cures whereas a ‘brujo’ deals in both cures and curses’), who poured some yagé out of a beer bottle into a cup and whistled over it. After Burroughs had drunk from the cup, a blue substance invaded his body, his jaw clamped tight and he developed convulsive tremors of the limbs. Saboya told Burroughs ‘I have no enemies, I turn them all into friends’. Burroughs learned that the vine of the soul helped to correct any disharmony the Indian felt with the forest. In their universal womb the visible and invisible become of equal authenticity and when they return to conscious unreality they incorpora
te the shapes and patterns of their visions into their forest world. After several more ceremonies, Saboya eventually agreed to divulge to Burroughs the trade secrets of his yagé preparation:

  He mashes pieces of the fresh cut vine and boils two hours with the leaves of another plant tentatively identified by a Peruvian botanist as Palicourea Species Rubiaceae. The effect of Yage, prepared in this manner is qualitatively different from cold-water infusion of Yage alone, or Yage cooked alone. The other leaf is essential to realize the full effect of the drug. Whether it is itself active, or merely serves as a catalysing agent, I do not know. This matter needs the attention of a chemist.

  – The Yage Letters

  Burroughs bought several bottles of the magic brew from the medicine man and observed that after repetitive yagé use, tolerance to the debilitating nausea developed which persisted for several months after abstinence. Burroughs now associated the cerebral nausea with motion sickness and inner space travel. Through the power of yagé he had glimpsed a supernatural state of being that provided him with a gateway into a proximate closed-off past. Daily living was an illusion or a dream, and if he were to free himself from the dementia of Middle America he would need to stop questioning and give up all attempts to explain. He must now eschew the results business and stop trying to seek answers in terms of cause and effect and prediction. The mechanical acquisition of facts was a waste of time, at least where the Amazon was concerned. Yagé had permanently altered his metabolism and in so doing altered the constant scanning pattern of his former reality. It would provide him with a ladder to the Magical Universe. He later wrote that his exposure to the liana had been more effective in straightening him out than a hundred hours of psychoanalysis.

  Burroughs remained in contact with Doctor Schultes and posted him a Christmas card and a voucher specimen of the plant that enhanced the effects of Banisteriopsis. In January 1955, he wrote to Ginsberg from Tangier about his disappointment that Schultes, whom he greatly respected, had stopped corresponding with him.

  In ‘Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs’, published in the British Journal of Addiction in 1956, Burroughs wrote:

  About five pieces of vine each eight inches long are needed for one person. The vine is crushed and boiled for two or more hours with the leaves of a bush identified as Palicourea sp. Rubiacea.

  Twelve years after Schultes had severed contact with Burroughs, The United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare organized a symposium entitled ‘Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs’ in San Francisco. At this meeting Schultes informed the scientific world that the strongest yagé fireworks occurred when the bark of Banisteriopsis caapi was mixed with the leaves of the perennial shrub Psychotria viridis, known by the Indians as chacrona, or with another plant they called chacropanga. The Proceedings of this conference became a classic in psychedelic literature, although Schultes’ seminal paper was largely ignored in the frenzy of interest in LSD-25 and psilocybin.

  The chemical secrets of yagé had also now been partly unlocked. Sidney Udenfriend, a Brooklyn born biochemist working at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, had shown that harmine, the alkaloid believed to be responsible for yagé’s pharmacological effects, was a reversible monoamine oxidase inhibitor which could impede the physiological destruction of serotonin in the brain. The leaves of chacrona and chacropanga both contained the short acting psychoactive serotonin compound N, N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT). The combination of these two molecules could create a prismatic firework display in the mind’s eye.

  A year after the San Francisco conference, Schultes visited the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and analysed Spruce’s samples of caapi. In the learned journal De plantis toxicariis e mundo novo tropicale commentationes he reported that even after more than a century of preservation the stems of B.caapi still contained a substantial quantity of harmine. In the same article he acknowledged William Burroughs’ one and only contribution to ethnobotany:

  The utilisation of Psychotria viridis was first reported in 1967, but an earlier herbarium collection had indicated its use as an additive with b.caapi (William Burroughs s.n.).

  What continued to nag away at Schultes was how Indians in many different regions of the Amazon had learned to successfully pair these particular plants for their sacred practices. Could the instinct of the jaguar or elemental plant forces have led the ancient civilizations to a synergy that then gradually spread through the forest? Could the living communion of the Amazon have created plant-human symbioses that went far beyond natural selection or was it all simply a result of trial and error?

  I felt justified in concluding the historical review in my doctoral thesis by crowning Richard Spruce the father of monoamine oxidase inhibition. He had identified B. caapi as the single most important ingredient of caapi but had also hinted that other plants could be added to the potion. Richard Schultes was the first to scientifically detail the medicine man’s trade secrets but William Burroughs also deserved an honourable mention. In Burroughs’ world no scientific law was perfect or certain. Naked Lunch and The Yage Letters had tuned me into an unsentimental form of rain forest science.

  My intense period of scientific research was now over and I resumed my clinical training at the National Hospital, Queen Square – the cradle of British neurology where I had been so inspired on my return from Paris by teachers like MacDonald Critchley. Ascetic yet charismatic, tall and always impeccably dressed, Critchley cast an imposing and elegant figure on his visits to the bedside of the neurologically sick. By the time I ‘got on the house’ he was in his eighties and retired from the National Health Service but he was still a sought-after second opinion and my new chiefs would sometimes ask me to go and discuss difficult cases with him. After several visits to his small third floor apartment next to the hospital, I plucked up courage to ask him about his early interest in visual hallucinations. With his arresting turn of phrase and polished prose he told me that after reading Louis Lewin’s book Phantastica: A Classic Survey on the Use and Abuse of Mind-Altering Plants, he had taken 0.2 mg of mescaline sulphate under experimental circumstances. He then drew my attention to his 1931 article on the subject entitled ‘Some Forms of Drug Addiction: Mescalism’. Towards the end of the essay, Critchley had speculated about mescaline’s potential as a therapy:

  Lastly, the scope of mescal in the field of therapeutics is almost unexplored. The Indian uses this plant for every manner of ailment; and indeed attempts have been made to introduce peyotl into American therapeutics. From time to time reports have appeared as to its efficacy in the treatment of asthma, neuralgia, rheumatism and neurasthenia.

  I then asked him whether he had also taken yagé? He told me he had first learned about the devil’s vine from a man called Edward Morrell Holmes, a London pharmacist and botanist. Holmes had persuaded the famous British chemist W. H. Martindale to synthesise the active alkaloid from the Banisteria vine and then offered some of the purified sample to Arthur Conan Doyle for his investigations into the spirit world.

  Critchley had been intrigued by the story and had begun to carry out his own research but told me he regretted never having the opportunity to assess the liana’s effect on himself. He drew my attention to an article entitled ‘The Ayahuasca and Jagé Cults’ that he had written in the British Journal of Inebriety in 1929 in which he had stated that yagé made from Banisteria caapi allowed the Indians to communicate with one another telepathically. The vine of the soul also imparted remote viewing faculties that enabled those who drunk it to visualise distant cities. In his article Critchley also raised the possibility that yagé might be a different plant from Banisteriopsis caapi, possibly Prestonia amazonica:

  The pharmacological possibilities of the New World flora have as yet been investigated only superficially, but already there is ample suggestion of a wealth of untapped material.

  Critchley was recognised as one of the twentieth-century giants of British neurology and his authenticity was
magnetic. His restless curiosity had led him to study the sciences of anthropology and social psychology as well as the traditional teaching of his speciality and now I had learned that he had even experimented with hallucinogenic drugs. Following our chats in his home I was now even more determined to bolt down the rabbit hole in pursuit of a wonderland of distorted reality and contingent deficits.

  10

  – Breakthrough –

  In September 1982, I sent a hand-written letter to the Secretary of the Board of Governors at the National Hospital, Queen Square, explaining that I wished to apply for the Consultant Neurologist position vacated by Doctor Gooddy. After weeks of cloak and dagger politics and whispers in the hospital corridor, news filtered down that it was going to be a close race. The informal ‘trial by sherry’ went well and the day after the formal inquisition, Olive Rodger, Head of the Medical Personnel department at Queen Square, called me to say I had been successful. One of my referees told me that it was my impressive list of research publications attached as an appendix to my curriculum vitae that had swung the committee in my favour. On October 5, I was appointed to the staff at both ‘The National’ and University College Hospitals. My new job offered me an unprecedented opportunity to pursue my research in Parkinson’s disease.

  Most of the patients I was still following in the clinic at University College Hospital had continued to benefit substantially from L-DOPA but the stable response that had been present in the first few years had now given way to a terrifying multidimensional rollercoaster ride that had only been temporarily slowed by the introduction of bromocriptine and deprenil. I was now confronted in the clinic with some of the most dramatic and abrupt physical transformations ever witnessed in neurological practice.