Cactus of Mystery

by Ross Heaven

  THE SAN PEDRO MESA

  According to Eduardo Calderon, “The mesa is the important part of a curing session for the simple reason that it is the panel where all the elemental forces are computed.” 9

  The mesa (the word literally means “table”) is an altar that may be elaborate or simple, again depending on the shaman. Most are woven fabrics laid directly on the Earth, which contain objects (or artes: “arts”) that hold spiritual energy in the form of artifacts from archaeological or ritual sites to represent the power of the ancestors, herbs and perfumes in ornate or antique bottles that bring good luck and healing, and swords and statues or stones from cemeteries and sacred sites that stand as emblems for the powers conferred on the shaman by his guides and allies in the Land of the Dead.

  Other objects, in Davis’s experience, include hardwood staffs, bones, quartz crystals, knives, toy soldiers (for the powers of opposition or victory), deer antlers and boar tusks (for strength in the face of challenges), shells, and photographs or paintings of saints. I have also seen torches (for spiritual illumination), mirrors (for self-reflection or the return of evil forces), and carvings of various animals that are symbolic of particular qualities. Participants may also place offerings of their own on the altar.

  There are three fields to the mesa and where artes are placed in relation to these may also be significant. The left is the negative or “extraction” field (“the Field of Evil,” in Calderon’s words) while the right is positive and life-giving (“the Field of Justice”) and “the Mediating Center” is the neutral, transformative space in the middle.

  It is important to qualify our terms, however, because negative and positive have different connotations for us in the West and may suggest a quality or intent that is not present in Andean healing. Most shamans do not consider the two sides of the mesa to be “good” or “bad,” and in a sense they are not even “sides” but parts of a continuum where every field is harmonious, and through their relationship to each other ensure that the world remains in balance.

  In fact, even though Calderon uses terms like justice and evil, to him the Field of Justice is really “the primordial axis that moves everything in accord with my criteria, with my feeling, with my religion, most of all with my faith” while the Field of Evil is “where one looks for the cause of a problem.”*1 10 Rather than a repository for, or representation of, negative and positive forces, then, the fields on the left and right complement more than oppose each other. Thus for example, “good” and “bad” luck go hand in hand because without each we could not recognize the other.

  In this sense then the mesa can be regarded as a representation of the divine (rather than human) scales of justice, where the goal is equilibrium and order, not a weighted outcome in favor of “light” or “dark,” or, as Calderon puts it, it is “a control panel by which one is able to calibrate the infinity of accesses into each person.”

  Still another way of understanding the mesa, despite the linearity of its layout, is as a cosmic circle that brings everything back to its rightful place and represents the circularity of human experience. To signify this, the neutral field in the center of the mesa is the point of balance on which the world turns. “Everything is stabilized by the Mediating Center which computes the other two zones,” says Calderon. “It is the balance of the other fields, the stability of the mesa.”

  It is also the place of transformation where illnesses can be cured by finding a point of equilibrium between negative and positive forces. Herbs that bring strength and energy may be placed by the shaman in this zone along with images of the sun (for light, brilliance, and regeneration) or reflective materials and lodestones to draw in appropriate energies and dismiss others so that balance is restored.

  Once the mesa is assembled the ritual can begin, with the altar as the point of focus: a portal through which all energies flow and a visual reminder to participants that the purpose of the ceremony is to heal imbalances so that order prevails and the will of God is done.

  SOME CONTROVERSIES

  I have heard shamans say that San Pedro ceremonies should only be performed at night (or on certain nights—Tuesdays and Fridays most notably, when supernatural energies are said to be most potent and able to flow more freely), while others say that in their original precolonial form these ceremonies were more typically performed in daylight. I have attended both and clearly, therefore, neither of these statements is wholly true in Andean healing today.

  There is even some debate about who should take the medicine. For La Gringa, who is interviewed in these pages, the patient must always drink, because it is the spirit of the plant and not the shaman that performs the healing. For “old school” shamans like Juan Navarro,*2 however, San Pedro is a diagnostic tool for the shaman to use; it is there to help him do his work and not to heal the patient directly. “The maestro has a special relationship with its spirit,” he says. “When it is taken by a patient it circulates in his body and where it finds abnormality it enables the shaman to detect it. It lets him know the pain the patient feels and where in his body it is. So it is the link between patient and maestro.”11

  Regarding the spiritual and revelatory powers of San Pedro, Navarro feels that “it won’t work for everybody” (La Gringa disagrees), but as a healing plant or herbal remedy it is always effective: “It purifies the blood of the person who drinks it and balances the nervous system so people lose their fears and are charged with positive energy.”

  Thus San Pedro, for shamans like Navarro, is a medicine more than a sacrament, an herbal cure more than a divine healer, and if it has any impact on a spiritual level it is for the benefit of the shaman more than the patient, because of the “special relationship” between the healer and the brew. Once in the patient’s body, if San Pedro finds an illness or abnormality it enables the shaman to detect it so that he, rather than San Pedro, can do the healing.

  Again, not all shamans feel the same, and the “new wave” of healers working in Cusco have a rather different relationship to the plant, preferring to get themselves out of the way so that the spirit of San Pedro can perform its healings directly. For Navarro though, just as a Catholic priest stands as an intermediary to God for the members of his congregation, so the shaman stands between the participants in his ceremony and their experience of the divine.

  Peter Furst, in Flesh of the Gods, relates San Pedro ceremonies that are in many ways similar to Navarro’s.12 At the beginning the participant stands before the left side of the altar to drink the medicine as the shaman chants his name and looks for the form that the illness in his body has taken or the problems that have arisen consequentially in his life. Often these have the shape of threatening or frightening animals, an idea consistent generally with the shamanic vision of illness as an intrusive spiritual force that reveals itself in a primal and nonhuman (sometimes also insect) form so that the healer cannot miss or mistake it.

  Having seen the intrusion, Furst reports that the shaman would sometimes massage or suck on the parts of the patient’s body where it was located or use some other means to remove the spiritual affliction. In serious cases, he might take a sword from his mesa and charge out beyond the circle of participants to conduct a battle with the invisible forces he saw as attacking his patient. In one spectacular ceremony, the shaman performed seven somersaults in the form of a cross while grasping the sword in both hands with the sharp edge held forward. This was intended to drive off invading spirits and shock the sorcerer who was sending them to release his hold on the patient. In cases such as these, once again, it is the shaman and not San Pedro who performs the healing, while for the curanderos who appear in this book it is exactly the reverse.

  MESCALINE, SAN PEDRO, AND SCIENCE

  Researchers of a more scientific than shamanic persuasion have found that San Pedro contains mescaline at around the 1 percent level, about a third of the mescaline content of peyote, although some San Pedro cactuses can match the peyote concentration.

 
; In my experience, however, it is usually of limited value and does not aid our understanding to equate a plant in its totality with a summary of its constituent parts, and then extrapolate from these in an attempt to explain its effects. Something gets lost when we do so, which shamans know as the spirit or “personality” of the plant. By the same token, the life of a man cannot be wholly described or explained by simply performing a blood test and listing the values found there.

  Nonetheless, scientific studies into the effects of peyote and San Pedro (such as they are—for there are few enough of them) have tended to do just that, concentrating on mescaline and not the plant as a whole.

  Mescaline was first isolated from peyote cactus by German scientists in the 1890s. However, as Rick Strassman points out in his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, “Medical and psychiatric interest in mescaline was surprisingly restrained and researchers had published only a limited number of papers by the end of the 1930s.”13 A little while later “LSD made its revolutionary appearance” and mescaline was all but forgotten.

  Early research into mescaline tended to be rather mechanical in nature. It suggested, for example, that mescaline stimulated the visual areas of the cortex and that this alone caused the brain to experience an altered state of consciousness and perception, producing “visual phenomena” that tended on the whole to take the form of geometric patterns, grids, lattices, tunnels, and spirals.

  Those who have taken mescaline themselves would surely disagree that the experience is wholly about “visual phenomena” rather than meaningful visions, or that these “phenomena” can be easily compartmentalized as grids or spirals—but those at least are the conclusions of this early research.

  Heinrich Klüver was one of the first to study the effects of mescaline, and in his Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations (1928 and 1966), attempted to account for the (supposed) similarity of visual phenomena by reference to the structure of the brain and eye. He organized the images reported by mescaline users into four groups he called “form constants”:

  Tunnels and funnels

  Spirals

  Lattices, including honeycombs and triangles

  Cobwebs

  From this he concluded in effect that mescaline “hallucinations” are the result of seeing patterns on the retina under the influence of the “drug,” with the images interpreted by the brain.

  As the title of Klüver’s book suggests, he was looking for a mechanism—something mechanical, physical, and nothing much to do with spirit—and this inevitably is what he found. At the time, his research was pioneering, but these days we might say that the Observer Effect also played a part in his conclusions—the process by which an experimenter changes the nature of the experiment, its outcome, or its findings by virtue of being part of the process himself. Or put more simply, whatever we look for we find.

  A related problem, even for today’s scientists, is what has come to be known as the Research Effect. Rick Strassman, who experienced the problem himself during his administration of DMT to volunteers in laboratories, explains it like this:

  In the research setting there is the expectation of getting data from your subjects. This affects the relationship between those who administer and those who receive psychedelics. Volunteers know they need to give something to the project, and scientists want something from them. For the person under the influence, just having his or her trip is not enough. For the investigator, helping that person have the best possible outcome isn’t fully adequate either. This sets up expectations, with the inevitable possibility of disappointments, resentment and miscommunication. The interpersonal setting is fundamentally altered.14

  Then there is the “problem” of Klüver himself. Heinrich Klüver was born in 1897 and took his doctorate in physiological psychology—a discipline that also has a more mechanistic approach to human behavior than, say, the humanistic or psychoanalytic fields. He went on to make his mark in the study of animal behavior, a field where animals (and human beings) are, in the main, considered more or less automata, devoid of spirit or personality and reduced to components capable of analysis or conditioning based on physical processes, as demonstrated by the leading lights of behaviorism: Skinner and Pavlov. With this sort of background perhaps Klüver was in a way conditioned himself to find a physical (rather than a spiritual or emotional) basis for mescaline effects.

  I am not dismissing his work, simply pointing to the limitations of its time and the belief that visions can be reduced to a series of lines and spirals. In fairness too, Klüver’s work did extend beyond a purely mechanistic agenda. He coined the term presque vu for example (literally, “almost seen”) to describe the sensation that accompanies mescaline visions that one is receiving a great insight or revelation that is beyond the ability of the rational mind to fully grasp or comprehend.

  Some of the people who reported their experiences to Klüver demonstrated this. One said that he saw fretwork for example, but then that his arms and hands and finally his entire body became fretwork so there was no difference between him and it: “The fretwork is I,” he wrote. As with many revelations by teacher plants, there is no doubt more philosophically to this statement than is captured by the words. The experience of being fretwork and realizing that there is no difference between I and That, for example, implies a sense of the numinous and of the connection between us and all things, which is beyond the simple reporting of an image.

  In Miserable Miracle, the Belgian artist and poet Henri Michaux (1899–1984) described a similar experience with mescaline, where he realized that “one is nothing but oneself.”15

  “Hundreds of lines of force combed my being,” he continued. “Enormous Z’s are passing through me (stripes-vibrations-zig-zags?). Then either broken S’s or what may be their halves, incomplete Os, a little like giant eggshells. . . . I have once more become a passage, a passage in time.”

  The last line is, I believe, key to Michaux’s experience. It is not the shapes or patterns that are important in themselves, but the information they carry and the realizations they bring. For as plants like San Pedro teach us, we are all just a passage in time, a breath on the wind, vital to the world and at the same time a whisper or insignificant thought, of no more—or less—value or substance than a cloud or a blade of grass.

  The sensation of being bathed in or bombarded by intense colors is also common to San Pedro, as the reports of Klüver’s other mescaline explorers confirm. Once again, however, it is not the colors in themselves that are important but the conduits they provide for new revelations about the beauty around and within us, which is present in even the most mundane of worldly forms, and the realization that our gift of life is special.

  As I gazed, every projecting angle, cornice and even the face of the stones at their joinings were by degrees covered or hung with clusters of what seemed to be huge precious stones . . . green, purple, red and orange. . . . All seemed to possess interior light and to give the faintest idea of the perfectly satisfying intensity and purity of these gorgeous colors is quite beyond my power . . . everywhere the vast pendant masses of emerald green, ruby red, and orange began to drip a slow rain of colors. Here were miles of rippled purple, half transparent, and of ineffable beauty. Now and then soft golden clouds floated from these folds . . . such singular brilliancy that I cannot even imagine them now.

  As beautiful as these descriptions are, there is still a problem with the scientific method in trying to explain the impact and effects of teacher plants as simply visual. Klüver was interested in what people saw and explained their visions by reference to physical processes and biological or chemical mechanisms. The experience of mescaline was not really sought and so is never fully captured, although some of his accounts come close. He asked his subjects to recount what they had seen, and because seeing was regarded as a physical action, the temptation was to reduce and thereby “explain” their visions by reference to the architecture of the eye or the powers of the brain, without ever asking what th
ese experiences meant to the subject himself.

  Another problem is that of Klüver’s inherent, though perhaps not deliberate, bias. He begins from the premise that mescaline experiences are first and foremost hallucinations; it is there in the title of his book. The word suggests that these visions contain no information or have little value in themselves. This in turn implies that our “normal” and everyday way of looking at the world is more important, significant, or “real” than anything mescaline or San Pedro might show us. But is this really the case?

  The psychedelic explorer, Terence McKenna, writes in one of his books that there may well be “true hallucinations” where what we receive from visions is more real and operates at a deeper level than the things seen (or often not seen) in our habitual way of perceiving and processing information from the world.

  One example of such a true hallucination was the discovery of the structure of DNA with its double helix by the Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick.

  Crick wrote that he was struggling to understand how DNA worked one day and entered what he called a “dreaming state”*3 while he had the problem on his mind. He dreamed of snakes writhing together and winding themselves like the serpents of the caduceus. It was “a not insignificant thought” as he later, rather self-effacingly, put it—and from that true hallucination the problem of DNA was solved.