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Cactus of Mystery
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For the Sarah I knew then: Echo en falta que la mayoría de todos skank-ho. Fuma y agua; amor para siempre. ¿Y el Sarah ahora? No le conozca.
For those who contributed. For Darryl, Bobby, Suzie, Emily, and Jeannie ~ who kept the faith and fire alight during darker nights. For Teertha, Tania, Sue, and Emily ~ for new adventures. For my children.
CACTUS OF
MYSTERY
“An amiable, intelligent, and passionate introduction to the sacred medicine of the Andes. Ross Heaven’s Cactus of Mystery is valuable not only as an orientation toward the ancient Huachuma tradition but also as an exploration of the experiences of healing and creativity common to all sacred medicine traditions.”
ROBERT TINDALL, AUTHOR OF THE JAGUAR THAT ROAMS
THE MIND AND THE SHAMANIC ODYSSEY
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
INTRODUCTION
The Mystery of San Pedro
Ross Heaven WHY?
THE CACTUS AND THE CEREMONY
THE SAN PEDRO MESA
SOME CONTROVERSIES
MESCALINE, SAN PEDRO, AND SCIENCE
THE BIRTH OF ENTHEOGENS
OTHER EARLY WORK WITH MESCALINE
A NEW SCIENTIFIC PARADIGM FOR EXPLORING THE SAN PEDRO EXPERIENCE
THE SPIRIT OF THIS BOOK
PART 1
SAN PEDRO SHAMANS AND SHAMANISM Chapter 1: Shamanism and Curanderismo
The Approach to Healing in Peru
Ross Heaven THE CRISIS OF SHAMANISM
BECOMING A SHAMAN
SHAMANISM IN PERU
THE ANDEAN COSMOLOGY
THE ORIGIN OF DISEASE IS SPIRITUAL
THE PROCESS OF HEALING
Chapter 2: Traditions of San Pedro Healing: Ancient and Modern
An Interview with Rubén Orellana
Ross Heaven and La Gringa
Chapter 3: San Pedro, the “Miracle healer”
An Interview with La Gringa, an Andean San Pedro Shaman
Ross Heaven PART ONE: THE 2008 INTERVIEW
PART TWO: THE 2011 INTERVIEW
Chapter 4: Working Practically with San Pedro
Michael Simonato BREAKDOWN
RECOVERY
MY INTRODUCTION TO PLANT MEDICINE
HOW OTHERS HAVE HEALED BY DRINKING WACHUMA
HOW I PREPARE THE MEDICINE
COMBINATIONS OF DIFFERENT CACTUSES
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DIFFERENT STARS (RIBS)
COMBINATIONS WITH OTHER PLANTS
OTHER USEFUL PLANTS
THE CEREMONIAL SETTING
ADVICE FOR THE JOURNEY
POSTCEREMONY INTEGRATION
A FEW LAST WORDS
PART 2
THE WESTERN MIND Chapter 5: The Anaconda and the Hummingbird
Sacraments of the Lowland Rain Forest and the Highest Mountains
Eve Bruce, M.D. AYAHUASCA
SAN PEDRO
HEALING EXPERIENCES
Chapter 6: Notes on Getting Cactus Lodged in Your Reducing Valve
San Pedro and Psychic Abilities
David Luke, Ph.D. THE CACTUS OF THE FOUR WINDS
THE CACTUS OF VISION
ARTIFICIAL PARADISES—OR NATURAL CHEMICAL UTOPIAS?
CLEANSING THE DOORS OF (EXTRASENSORY) PERCEPTION
UNCORKING THE GENIE’S BOTTLE
PUTTING THE CORK BACK IN THE BOTTLE
REFERENCES
Chapter 7: Heaven and the Hummingbird
Morgan Maher
PART 3
SAN PEDRO HEALING Chapter 8: San Pedro Healing
Ross Heaven WHAT CAN WE DRAW FROM THESE COMMENTS?
OTHER ACCOUNTS
SAN PEDRO AND OTHER TEACHERS
THE SHAMAN’S VIEW
Chapter 9: San Pedro and the Cure of Addiction
Tracie Thornberry
Chapter 10: Healing an Abusive Past
Alexia Gidding Photo Insert
Chapter 11: New Insights, Emotional and Physical Healing
Robyn Silvanen
Chapter 12: The Universal Heart
Daniel Moler
Chapter 13: Deciding to Live Not Die
Sonna-Ra
PART 4
SAN PEDRO AND CREATIVITY Chapter 14: San Pedro in Art and Music
Ross Heaven MUSIC AND SONG
Chapter 15: San Pedro
Inspiration and Art
David “Slocum” Hewson
Chapter 16: San Pedro and the Healing of the Divine Mother
Peter Sterling
Chapter 17: The Songs of San Pedro
Ross Heaven RESEARCH INTO PLANT COMMUNICATION
THE IMPORTANCE OF LOVE
SACRED SONGS
HOW THE SONGS COME TO BE
THE CREATIVE NATURE OF THE SHAMAN AND HIS SONGS
CONCLUSIONS
The Gifts of San Pedro
Ross Heaven THE NATURE OF GRACE
LIVING WITH GRACE
APPENDIX
San Pedro Testimonials
Footnotes
Endnotes
About the Author
About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company
Books of Related Interest
Copyright & Permissions
INTRODUCTION
The Mystery of San Pedro
Ross Heaven
If you are reading this book you are in a privileged minority, for almost nothing has been written about San Pedro or its use in shamanism and healing. Before my 2009 book The Hummingbird’s Journey to God, there was little information available on it at all apart from scattered references in a few other works. Trout’s Notes on San Pedro (Mydriatic Productions, 2005), for example, is a study of the botany, chemistry, and history of the plant, but does not address its shamanic uses. One of the more useful books in the latter regard is Douglas Sharon’s Wizard of the Four Winds: A Shaman’s Story (Free Press, 1978), but this has its limitations also because it is more or less the story of a single individual (the book’s subtitle suggests as much), Eduardo Calderon, an Andean healer whom Sharon worked with for a few seasons some decades ago. As such it focuses on one healer operating within the traditions of one part of Peru (the north) and is a study of curanderismo (Andean healing) in general rather than San Pedro, per se. A further limitation is that the book has been out of print for many years and is hard to come by, with copies on the web often selling for a hundred dollars or more.
A Google search will not help much either, yielding next to nothing useful for students of shamanism or San Pedro, apart from a few articles and interviews mostly stemming from me.
Frankly, I am amazed that so little research has been done on San Pedro, its effects, or its applications for healing, especially since the latter are, in my experience, real and profound.
I have worked with the plant since the late 1990s and increasingly so in the past decade, during which time I have also taken groups of people to Peru so they can drink it themselves. I have witnessed firsthand what some of the shamans in this book refer to as “healing miracles” during the course of these journeys, and seen people cured of cancer, depression, grief, childhood traumas, alcoholism, diabetes, and other debilitating and sometimes life-threatening diseases. And yet there is still almost nothing published about this plant.
WHY?
At least in part this lack of information is a reflection of the fact that the most ancient healing traditions of Peru, like those of other pre-Christian cultures, are transmitted orally. Not much is ever written down by shamans so where records do exist they have tended to be made by European explorers, invaders, or missionaries who have brought their religious beliefs with them and denigrated indigenous practices that did not sit well with their own notions of God.
Another, Father Olivia, part of a seventeenth-century-church-sponsored scheme to “extirpate idolatries,” wrote in 1631 that “after they drink it they [participants in San Pedro ceremonies] remain without judgment and deprived of their senses and they see visions that the Devil represents to them and consistent with them they judge their suspicions and the intentions of others.”3
Fundamentalism like this never results in any pure or useful critique and, as Jim DeKorne remarks in Psychedelic Shamanism (Breakout Productions, 1994), rather than trying to understand native customs:
The Spanish Inquisition reacted with characteristic savagery to anyone who dared to break their laws by eating [sic] [San Pedro] . . . a great many Indians were flogged and sometimes killed when they persisted in [doing so]. . . . [One man’s] eyeballs were said to be gouged out after three days of torture; then the Spaniards cut a crucifix pattern in his belly and turned ravenous dogs loose on his innards. . . . This level of response to the ingestion of . . . San Pedro in Peru effectively drove the use of [the cactus] underground for hundreds of years.4
Even the name of the plant owes more to Catholicism than the shamanic traditions of the Andes, for the cactus (originally known as huachuma) was, as DeKorne relates, renamed after Saint Peter, “guardian of the threshold for the Catholic Paradise . . . an apparent strategy of the Indians to placate the Inquisition.”
Juan Navarro, with whom I drank San Pedro in the 1990s, may be suggesting something along these lines as well when, in my book Plant Spirit Shamanism (Destiny Books, 2006), he remarks that San Pedro retains “a certain mystery to it.”
Navarro’s ceremonies are performed at night from a mesa (altar), which contains many Catholic symbols, crosses, staffs, rosaries, icons, and lithographs of the Christian saints. This may be a form of syncretism but most likely is also a sort of mask that draws attention away from the way that things were originally done within the San Pedro tradition. When Navarro performs a ceremony, for example, he prays to God, the saints, the Virgin, and to Jesus and he holds a cross aloft, but I have no doubt that these emblems have a different meaning to him than to us. Some anthropologists suggest that the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose image is ubiquitous in Andean healing rituals, is in fact a Christianized version of the Aztec lunar goddess Tonantzin, so whomever Navarro is praying to is most likely not the same Holy Virgin we know.
These historic considerations have been pushed aside in recent times, however, certainly by the shamans I know and work with in the Andes, who seem keen to lift the veils of secrecy surrounding San Pedro. The feeling among these shamans (some of whom have written for this book or been interviewed in its pages) is that the time for greater openness about this medicine is now, because we are entering a period of great change and its healing is needed more than ever before.
The feeling seems mutual among the scientific profession as well, and a number of academics are also beginning to look again (or for the first time) at San Pedro and the role it may play in healing, ESP, precognition, and other extrapersonal and transpersonal states. David Luke, Ph.D., is one such academic—in this book he examines the potential of San Pedro in this regard and reports on an intriguing experiment of his own.
But let’s start with the basics. What exactly is San Pedro and what do we know of its usage?
THE CACTUS AND THE CEREMONY
Trichocereus pachanoi is a tall cactus that can reach heights of seven meters or more. Its cylindrical branches produce a funnel-shaped flower of green-tinged white that itself can grow to ten inches or so. It enjoys a tough, desert-like environment and grows readily in the highest parts of Peru, such as the Yunga and Quechua regions (2,300 meters and 3,500 meters above sea level, respectively) between Piura, Lambayeque, and La Libertad, and in the Huancabamba Valley.
It has many names among shamans and healers, including cardo, chuma, gigantón, hermoso, huando, pene de Dios (literally, “penis of God”), wachuma, and El Remedio, “the Remedy,” the latter referring to its healing powers. Another Quechua name, punku, also suggests this quality. The word means “doorway” since the cactus is considered able to open a portal into a new world so that healing and visions can flow from the spiritual to the physical dimensions.
Even the Christianized name “San Pedro” has similar connotations. It refers to Saint Peter, who holds the keys to heaven, and is suggestive of the plant’s power to open the gates between the visible and invisible worlds (the “doors of perception” as the novelist Aldous Huxley called them after taking mescaline himself), and between the sacred and profane, so those who drink it enter a realm where they can heal, know their true natures, and find purpose for their lives. “Just as the saint called San Pedro is ‘keeper of the keys . . . and guardian of the doors of Heaven’ so the San Pedro plant is called ‘guardian of the doors of remedy,’” as one Peruvian curandera, Olinda, put it.5
Some of the shamans I have spoken with, informed by their country’s colonial past, go further and relate that Saint Peter was so appalled at the behavior of the gold-greedy Spanish that he hid the keys to paradise from them in the one place he knew they would never look: within the cactus that contains the true spirit of God.
The curandero Eduardo Calderon defined this spirit in the following way:
Many think of God the way the Christians depict him: as a bearded man with the world in his hands. . . . But God is the cosmic energy within ourselves. Yes, we are part of God because we have that energy and this energy is an elemental force.6
What Saint Peter required from the Catholics was not religious devotion but Earthly respect—where love and healing replaced the destructive lust for gold that seemed to dictate the Spaniards’ actions.
Among healers, San Pedro is also known as huachuma, and the shamans who work with it are called huachumeros if male and huachumeras if female, sometimes also spelled wachumeros or wachumeras. Its use as a sacrament and in healing rituals is ancient. The earliest archaeological evidence so far discovered for this is a stone carving of a huachumero found at the Jaguar Temple of Chavín de Huantar in northern Peru, which is almost 3,500 years old, predating by more than a thousand years the religion that the Spanish brought with them to South America.
Textiles from the same region and period of history depict the cactus with jaguars and hummingbirds, its guardian spirits, and with stylized spirals representing the visionary experiences brought by the plant.
A decorated ceramic pot from the Chimú culture of Peru, dating to 1200 CE, has also been unearthed that shows an owl-faced woman holding a cactus. In the Andes the owl is the tutelary spirit and guardian of herbalists and shamans, and the woman depicted is, therefore, most likely a curandera and huachumera.
Some of the reasons that San Pedro ceremonies were (and continue to be) held are:
To cure illnesses of a spiritual, emotional, mental, or physical nature
To know the future through the prophetic and divinatory qualities of the plant
To overcome sorcery or saladera (an inexplicable run of bad luck)
To ensure success in one’s ventures
To rekindle love and enthusiasm for life
To restore one’s faith or find new meaning in life by experiencing the world as divine
San Pedro can perform healings like these because, in the words of Eduardo Calderon, it is “in tune with the powers of animals and beings that have supernatural powers. . . . Particip
ants [in ceremonies] are set free from matter and engage in flight through cosmic regions . . . transported across time and distance in a rapid and safe fashion.”7
Calderon also describes the effects of the plant as this healing takes place: “First, a dreamy state . . . then great visions, a clearing of all the faculties . . . and then detachment, a type of visual force inclusive of the sixth sense, the telepathic state of transmitting oneself across time and matter, like a removal of thoughts to a distant dimension.”8
Like ayahuasca, the other great teacher plant of Peru, San Pedro is always taken as part of a shamanic ceremony with the intention of healing—never lightly and never as a “recreational drug.” Healing in a ceremony like this is defined more widely than a Western doctor might understand the term, and means an ultimately beneficial or positive change in the mental, emotional, or spiritual aspects of one’s life as well, often, as a physical cure or change.
The anthropologist Wade Davis described a ceremony performed in 1981, for example, where the people present included a girl who had been paralyzed and was suffering from back and stomach pains, members of a family whose cattle had become diseased, a person seeking healing for a relative who had gone mad, a man who had become unstable after seeing his wife with her lover, and a businessman wanting to know who had stolen money from his company.
To us, the last reason for attending may appear to have nothing in common with the first, but in the Andean view of healing the ability to bring order to one’s financial and business affairs is just as valid in terms of restoring balance to the soul and peace to the mind as relieving the pains of a paralyzed girl. Both are healing.
Many San Pedro ceremonies involve their participants in lengthy and challenging procedures: the snorting of tobacco macerated in alcohol for example, the drinking of an emetic to purge evil spirits, beatings with sticks, and dousings in cold water. But others are less demanding so that the spirit of the plant is given the freedom to work directly with participants in the way it sees fit. In the latter case, the shaman defers to San Pedro, which he regards as the real healing force, rather than conducting a stylized ritual that in effect puts the shaman center stage. Whatever the inclination of the shaman, however, the mesa is always involved.
Cactus of Mystery