The Root of All Things

Halfway through our hour-long Skype call, Carlos Tanner warns me that he is going to “cross over.” He means that our conversation is about to leap from things that make sense in this world—how his new baby is sleeping, how many students are enrolling in his school—into things that only make sense if you are very deep in the world of ayahuasca, a world of spiritual warfare and healing, of bioluminescent trees with fabled powers, of songs that turn into snakes that turn into doctors that turn into smoke and drift back into the jungle.

Tanner, a soft-spoken man with short-cropped hair and wire rim glasses, does not cross over half-heartedly. He commits. When he wanted to have a child, he tells me, he drank a tea made from the leaves of a tree that glows in the dark and gives off special powers. His wife got pregnant soon afterwards. His personal healing testimony is even more supernatural: when he wanted to cure the gastric maladies that brought him to Peru from Massachusetts eleven years ago, he drank ayahuasca, left his body, shrank himself up and entered through his own mouth to examine his stomach. Once there, he found the cause of his distress: a squid blocking his intestines. He pried the squid loose so it could return to swimming in the “dirty water” of his stomach, and never had those symptoms again. These are the things Tanner speaks of when he crosses over.

There isn’t much magic left in the world today, which might explain the widening appeal of ayahuasca—the plant has made Joe Rogan’s “Scholar List” and apparently changed Sting’s life and saved Lindsay Lohan. But not everyone can come to the Amazon. Some believers think the solution is to bring the plant, and the ceremony, to the rest of the world. Tanner’s Ayahuasca Foundation, in conjunction with a Shipibo medicine man named Don Enrique, is training curanderos from all over the world how to lead ceremonies back home. So let’s talk briefly about things as they are in the real world. And then we too will cross over.

In the real world, Tanner’s Initiation Courses are training a generation of medicinal healers whose work is outlawed in the countries where they will practice. Ayahuasca is a compound of mashed ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) boiled together with chacruna leaves (Psychotria viridis). This mixture is illegal in most countries because chacruna contains N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a powerful psychedelic that occurs naturally in the bark of acacia trees and other plants and is even thought to be produced by the pineal gland in humans. DMT has been widely outlawed as a result of protocols established by the 1971 United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances. It remains a Schedule I drug in the United States, a Class A drug in the United Kingdom, and classified as an illegal stupéfiant in France.

In the real world, Tanner’s school is a small jungle camp outside of Iquitos called Inkankana, where through much of the year you can find up to a dozen foreigners—from North America, South Africa, Israel, Europe—studying under Don Enrique. The heat is outstanding, and languor rules. The foreigners smoke a heavy local tobacco called mapacho and try to learn the songs of Don Enrique’s ancestors. They might spend some hours drawing kaleidoscopic patterns given to them during visions. They journal thoughtfully in the shade. Every night or every few nights, depending on their fitness for it, they drink ayahuasca in a ceremony. This means four or more hours of lying on a mat in a circular hut in the pitch black with the jungle screaming all around them. Don Enrique sings, blows tobacco smoke on them, and talks gently to them. The foreigners weep profusely, gasp with joy, and suffer diarrhea that sends them into the dark to the outhouses twenty yards away. Once back on their mats, they take over the songs from Don Enrique, because they are learning to lead these types of ceremonies back...