The following essay is the prologue to Jungle. Star. Medicine: Astrology at the Edge of Consciousness, a work-in-progress.
Prologue: Of Planets and Plants
In 2005, while attending graduate school for English, I created an independent study in travel writing so that I could visit Peru and drink the ancient psychedelic plant medicine called ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a powerful visionary tea made from plants in the Amazon rainforests of south and central America. Over the past several decades thousands of spiritual seekers from across the globe have flocked to various sacred sites to drink ayahuasca with traditional shamans. The experience of drinking ayahuasca is commonly described as life changing, intensely psychotherapeutic, other worldly, mystical, beautiful, and often terrifying. Throughout the course of a typical ayahuasca ceremony in the jungle, an ayahuasca shaman, called a curandero, will whistle magical healing melodies, called icaros, and guide participants through multi-dimensional, visionary trance states. During these intensely altered states of consciousness, participants are confronted by their “shadows.” These confrontations can be peaceful and easy, or they can be purgative and terrifying. Often people release stored up stress, trauma, and negative psychological patterns by crying, moaning, screaming, vomiting, or diarrhea (but also through laughter, joy, and incredible happiness). It has often been said that drinking ayahuasca is like going through years of therapy in a matter of hours. After working with ayahuasca for almost a decade now I can sincerely say that all of these things are true…and more. Ayahuasca is truly a magical potion of the gods. It is both a great secret of the Amazon, and also a simple herbal medicine. Used in the right context, with traditionally trained practitioners, ayahausca is a remarkable teacher, like a guru, therapist, or mentor. What’s more, ayahuasca tends to illuminate for its students the nature of the “inner teacher,” the wise sage that lives inside all of us.
Unlike some of the popular associations we have of recreational psychedelic use from the 1960’s (people tripping on acid and jumping out windows or thinking themselves Jesus Christ), ayahuasca shamanism, like other forms of traditional plant spirit medicine, is about anything but irresponsibility or escapism. The teachings of the ayahuasca traditions, across the board, encourage an intense degree of spiritual responsibility, inner practice, and outer discipline. After drinking ayahuasca, people are commonly more grounded, healthier, more patient, more in touch with their inner lives, and less inclined to toxic lifestyle patterns. This has been my personal experience as well as my observation of other participants over the years: ayahuasca changes lives in real time, as much as it generates extraordinary visions and mystical experiences.
As my healing journey with ayahuasca continued through the years, I became interested in astrology as a kind of bi-product of what I was learning about myself and the human psyche. To put it simply, ayahuasca was exposing me to the “archetypal” or “patterned” nature of human consciousness, and specifically the mythic storylines present in my own life. As I began studying astrology outside of ceremonies, reading introductory books at first, I was amazed to find that for thousands of years all these timeless themes and patterns had been described in the ancient myths and tales of the zodiac, in the planets and constellations and cycles of the heavens, and in the various Greek and Roman and Near Eastern stories of the gods and goddesses. My interest in astrology grew quickly and I began having profound astrological insights and visions during my ayahuasca ceremonies, as though the landscape of the medicine had become almost entirely astrological in nature.
To this day, four years since beginning my professional astrology practice, ayahuasca remains an integral part of how I learn more about astrology. If I had to quantify the plant medicine’s presence in my development as a practitioner, I would say that nearly half of everything I’ve learned about doing astrology has come through the insights, visions, and memory work of ayahuasca ceremonies. To briefly explain. Like many other psychedelic plant medicines, ayahuasca works deeply on the level of the subconscious. For many people ayahuasca ceremonies are therefore like guided tours of the past. The medicine takes people into specific time periods or eras of their life and illuminates the presence of various behavioral patterns or mythic themes. Some of these mythic themes are traumatic and painful to bear witness to, while others are blessings we may have overlooked or simple joys we’ve forgotten. In each ayahusca “memory” there is also the presence of a vast intelligence. We’re not simply “going backward,” but we are being guided into the past directly, purposefully, to see or reflect upon something incredibly specific, and the memories are lucid and flexible, as though the past is being reshaped as much as it is being “observed” or merely “relived.”
Through this therapeutic/visionary memory work, the notions of linear time and deterministic causality (epistemological assumptions most of us carry unconsciously) soften a great deal and lose their power over us. We realize that we are no longer prisoners or victims of the past, but powerful co-creators of an unbound present moment in an infinitely evolving universe. We recognize that all memories are very much like stories, and all stories can be “read” or “told” from many different angles, from the perspectives of many different places and people and all the various environmental factors that have participated in the shaping of our lives. We realize that we don’t live in a vacuum and that our personal stories are reflective of timeless collective stories and vice versa. From here the question naturally becomes “which stories have I been living?” and “which stories, if not those of my past, do I want to create from here on out?”
As soon as I started studying astrology it was like discovering a skeleton key for all the guided memory work I was doing during ceremonies. As the memory work continued to unfold in ceremony, I found myself naturally reflecting upon the archetypal dynamics of the planets in my birth chart, even the planets in the sky at the time of a ceremony. Ayahuasca memory work began doubling as “birth chart study,” and quite naturally my memories and birth chart reflections would weave their way into elaborate astrological insights and visionary experiences. For example, a memory of a childhood playground confrontation might lead me to reflect upon the planet Mars (god of war) in my birth chart, which then might lead to a kind of “Mars themed visionary dimension,” in which I might see a mandala of cascading Mars images, and hear Mars sounds, and experience Mars feelings in my body. It felt quite literally as though ayahuasca was teaching me astrology, or as though the planets were actually speaking to me personally through the visionary portholes ayahuasca opens. Although none of this understanding would have been available to me without a tremendous amount of personal research and study of astrology and religious cosmology (up to 100 books per year on average), ayahuasca remained the critical tool that constantly turned the astrological “theory” into a multi-dimensional experience or an embodied “wisdom,” connected fluidly to important memories.
In this book I’ve constructed a series of short stories based on the memory work and visionary insights from ceremonies, as well as the initial psychedelic experimentation that led me to the ayahuasca ceremonies in the first place. I’ve done this in a way that follows the twelve signs, houses, and planetary rulers of the horoscope from start to finish (shaping the entire book, in other words, according to the Zodiac story). I’ve purposefully embedded the symbolism of astrology within the narrative, while also extracting the theoretical “meaning” of the symbols in question through reflective essays woven into each stage of the book’s development. In the simplest sense, I’ve tried to create the experiential feeling of both psychedelic consciousness (the mythic dream space where archetypes live and breathe) as well as the kind of consciousness that occurs while reading birth charts or relating to astrological symbolism. I’ve also tried to make this book a teaching tool for people who are new to the language of astrology or wish to go deeper with it.
As a result, this book is as much myth and metaphor as it is “true story.” As the astrologer Steven Forrest sometimes says, “This is a true story, but I’m going to make up the facts.” I might modify this to say, “This is a true story, and I’ve arranged the facts accordingly.” I believe it’s important to issue this kind of qualifier as someone writing a “psychedelic memoir.” Not to evade responsibility but to be clear that this story is as much a crafted “symbol” as it is a straight up or “proper” exploration of astrological, biographical, or psychedelic “facts.” In graduate school the PC phrase for this kind of creative-self-symbolizing was called “creative non-fiction.” In my experience its always best if an author says a little something about this genre before you get into it and start scratching your head wondering if you’re reading fiction or biography. It’s always somewhere in-between, isn’t it?
More than anything, though, it’s my simple hope that people reading this book will be as inspired as I am by the universe we live in, the lives we are living, the planets and the plant teachers, and by the mysterious consciousness that we all share in, no matter what myths we’re currently living.
Image by Mark Morgan, courtesy of Creative Commons license.