Colin Campbell, a sangoma and traditional African doctor from Botswana, tells the story of a villager in his country who fell seriously ill and called in a local traditional doctor for help. The healer examined the patient and then set off to consult with the mountains, waters, animals, and plants of the area. In a few days, he returned to announce his diagnosis: someone had cut down a tree without asking permission of the spirit of the tree itself. The disrespectful act of one person had created imbalance, which had showed up as someone else’s illness. The villagers understood very well that there would be consequences for everyone unless good relationship to the trees could be restored. A ritual was prescribed to remediate the offense; the whole village participated, and the patient and his community returned to health.
This is not a story about an evil spirit out to smite people. Plant spirits are part of a web woven of love and respect, giving and receiving. We humans are part of it too. When we tear the web, a messenger comes to town carrying a suitcase full of something designed to make sure we take the message to heart. The suitcase is labeled “misfortune.”
“For the sake of all creation, repair the web,” the messenger says. “Get back to what supports you, what supports others, what supports everything: love and respect, giving and receiving.”
This story should be remembered in any interaction with plants. If you are interested in engaging one of the sacred plant teachers, such as peyote, ayahuasca, or special mushrooms, you should remember the story as if your life depends on it. The power of these plants is beyond imagination; you don’t want to see their messenger arriving with his suitcase.
Some will say, “I have good intentions, and I am respectful. There won’t be any problems for me.” This is naïve. Yes, sometimes naïve engagements work out okay, but sometimes they don’t. If we wish to be blessed with knowledge, wisdom, or healing, what must we give in return? How must we demonstrate our respect? It is not for us to say. The spirit of the plant will make the call.
To understand respectful engagement with these great teachers, we have to go back to the time when the gods were singing a great story—the story of the world. Their singing brought the world and all its creatures into being, including, eventually, us humans.
The Darwinians made their best guess about how this came about, but according to the indigenous wisdom keepers, they didn’t get it quite right. The different human peoples did not evolve out of a common ancestor; they were each born out of the womb of their own homeland. We appeared in different parts of the world at the same time. Each group was as much a part of their environment as the other animals and plants of the region.
The Arctic willow and the banana have much in common: they both have roots and leaves, they both do photosynthesis, and so on. At the same time, each is part of a different environment and needs different conditions to live and thrive. The Inuit and the indigenous Amazonian are as similar and as different as the Arctic willow and the banana.
Each of the animals was sung into the world with the equipment it needs: wings, gills, fur, pointy or hooked beak, claws, fast-running legs, a keen sense of smell or hearing, and so on. The special equipment given to us was the human mind with its unique ability to create the sensation of separateness: “This is me, and everything else is not me.” The mind goes on from this primal separation to make many more separations and distinctions: “This is a rock. That is a plant. That is a stick.”
Our mind, driven by a fearful concern for survival, comes up with creative interventions: “I am hungry, and the deer runs faster than I do. If I break the rock to make a sharp point and fasten it to the stick with plant fibers, I can throw it at the deer and have a meal.”
All this is fine, but a problem arises when we dwell too much in the mind. The mind creates the illusion of a separate self and then justifies any action it thinks will protect that self. Like the man who cut down the tree for his own selfish purposes, we tear the web of relatedness. This brings many misfortunes: illness, isolation, never-ending fear, personal and environmental catastrophe.
Human intelligence is amnesiac. It forgets that we are part of the web of being, and this forgetfulness is the source of illness and suffering. For this reason, when we were given this problematic gift, we were also given the ways to keep it in balance as a small, though important, part of our lives. All the original peoples were given teachings and practices to remind us that we are part of the web. Remembering produces healing, wisdom, a flourishing environment, and a sustainable way of life.
Some peoples were given sacred plant teachers as memory aids—doorways to sacred realms of knowledge, wisdom, and healing. Some of these plants, like peyote, are ingested; others, like the Wind Tree, are not. But not one of them was brought forth everywhere. This is because, as we have seen, peoples are different. The Inuit and the Amazonian, the Aborigine and the Celt, the Zulu and the Mongol each have different needs. Their souls are made of the ancestral stuff of different lands. The ways of remembering are different for each. None of the sacred plant teachers are for everybody.
In the old days, it was perfectly clear who could benefit from a sacred plant teacher. For example, if you were a member of a group that had been through countless cycles of living and dying where the ayahuasca vine grows, then you and ayahuasca were made for each other. If you were from someplace else, ayahuasca was not for you.
These days it is more difficult to know whether something is for you. The collapse of adequate funerary rites has caused many souls to wander after death and drift into foreign ancestral realms, so the reservoirs of ancestral energy have become quite mixed. Since the human soul is constructed from ancestral energy, we ourselves have become soul mutts. To say it another way, your genealogy and place of birth are no longer reliable guides to what your soul is made of. Maybe you were born in Chicago into Eastern-European Jewish families, as I was. Despite that, maybe your soul is mostly made of Huichol ancestral stuff, as mine is. If so, maybe you could benefit from peyote, as I have. But do you really know the construct of your own soul? In these times, few people do.
When you consider working with a sacred plant teacher, do you consider whether the plant sees you as one of its people—the people it was brought into the world to help? Or do you consider only what you want? If it’s all about you, then the plant teacher will see you as disrespectful. It may ignore you, it may play a little trick on you, or it may send its messenger with a bulging suitcase.
These days, you always need the help of a trustworthy guide who can look into your soul to see whether you and the sacred plant teacher are soul mates and to help you walk the plant’s path; actually, the sacred plants insist on it. They were brought into the world to benefit us. They open into vastness we cannot navigate on our own. On our own, we easily get lost, and lost people are of no benefit to themselves or others, except as an example of what not to do.
A good guide has herself had a guide. She has walked the path and is still walking it. She knows the direction, the twists and turns. She knows who belongs to the medicine and who does not. She has seen many who have received blessings and some who have suffered misfortune. The successful ones, like her, stayed true to the traditions given by the plant and passed down through generation after generation of ancestors. The unsuccessful ones wanted to have it their way.
In the Huichol tradition, this is what it takes to become a guide for peyote: First, there is at least five years of grueling apprenticeship under the supervision of a tricky, hardball-playing shaman. Then there is a dangerous initiation ritual. If the candidate makes it through initiation successfully, he has himself become a shaman and must take on a life of service to his community. But even then he is not ready to guide others. He must work as a shaman for another five years. If he is seen to be an effective healer who is devoted to his people’s welfare, he may ask for a second initiation, which is even more dangerous than the first. After running that gauntlet, he presents himself for a third initiation as a guide to peyote. In that final initiation, the ancestors, the gods, and peyote itself at last declare the shaman ready to help others who would ask this sacred plant teacher for help.
The training and initiation are different for different sacred plants and different peoples, but preparing to become a guide is always a big responsibility. The one who disregards tradition, who looks for shortcuts, who merely declares him- or herself a guide—that person is a dangerous fool. These days all kinds of people offer themselves. Some are authentic; some are deluded; some are after money, sex, or power. Make sure your guide is properly initiated and has your interest at heart.
When the moment arrives to invoke the medicine of the sacred plant teacher, ask yourself, what kind of situation is the sacred plant teacher invited into? Is it focused, respectful and safe, as the plant desires? Or is it scattered, contaminated by egotism—an invitation to misfortune? A trustworthy human guide follows the instructions given to the ancestors about how to build a proper ritual container, and he listens carefully for guidance on moment-to-moment adjustments.
The rituals of engagement are not invented by an individual; they are not even invented by a culture. They were given to the peoples along with the plant; actually, they are part of the sacred presence of the plant.
When the people of the peyote, the Huichols, want to ask their sacred plant teacher for special gifts, they take great care with the ritual setting. First the human guide sets a date for a pilgrimage to the birthplace of their traditions. There is a preparatory month of abstinence from sex, salt, and bathing. A deer is hunted and killed with the proper prayers and respect; a bull is also purchased and properly sacrificed. Special offerings are constructed and prayed over with love and devotion; later these will be left at the sacred site. The journey from the Huichol village to the birthplace is long—until a few years ago, it took a month of walking. These days, trucks and buses can be hired, but the cost is so great that the journey may be postponed for lack of funds. Along the way, there is much protocol to attend to, culminating at the entrance to the holy land with a specific purification rite that leaves the fasting pilgrims innocent as young children. There are moments to move and moments to stay still, moments to speak and moments to keep silent. A fire is built, consecrated, and lovingly tended. An altar is constructed, festooned with offerings, and anointed with the blood of the deer and the bull. The sacred medicine is prayed to, searched for, found, prayed to again and again, blessed by the attending shaman, and finally eaten. The prayers, the offerings, the altar preparation—everything is done with scrupulous and loving attention to the instructions given to the Ancestors at the beginnings of time. The pilgrims vigil through the night. At dawn they sing the traditional prayers of gratitude and start the long journey back to their village.
Traditional indigenous peoples understand such practices; they know the practical value of rituals, and they take great care with them. Modern Western people often feel these things are quaint and obsolete. But have we benefited from our “highly evolved” approach? I know many traditional people—grounded, practical, and effective community leaders, farmers, healers, artists—who make wonderful contributions to life as a way of sharing the gifts they receive from their sacred plants. How many Westerners do you know who produce blessings for others from their involvement with sacred plant teachers?
Due to their enormous popularity, two sacred plant teachers deserve special mention here: marijuana and tobacco. Let’s consider marijuana first. Its homeland is Central Asia. In the Western world, it is rare to find a person with substantial soul relatedness to that land and plant. It is even more rare to find someone initiated into its indigenous protocols, and it’s rarer still to find a properly initiated guide willing to teach others. Marijuana tricks people into believing they are benefiting from it. Outside of its sacred context, the sacred plant teacher becomes a trickster carrying an intriguing, prettily decorated suitcase.
Many more people have relatedness to tobacco, but very few recognize and respect its sacredness. These days it is feared and condemned as a poison, and the numbers of smoking-related deaths and illnesses would seem to support that view. But tobacco, like all sacred plants, becomes destructive only when treated with disrespect. The statistics do not prove the malevolence of this plant; they only demonstrate that it is massively abused.
Yet the plant that produces danger and illness in the modern world produces healing and protection in the indigenous world. Tobacco was brought forth in the Americas, and I have never been anywhere on these continents where it does not have an important place in indigenous spiritual practices. It helps people hear with the ears of the heart, so it is a special adjunct to prayer and the source of many blessings. In most cultures, tobacco does not require elaborate conditions for its proper use, but it does demand unfailing gratitude and respect. A minimal ritual setting is good for keeping the user focused and honest about his or her intentions.
Lest you think these sacred plant teachers have no relevance in today’s “real” world, consider this: A few years ago, I was talking to a Huichol acquaintance. He was a prosperous man by Huichol standards, and he was serving a term of unpaid community service as the traditional governor of his area. He spoke excellent, educated Mexican Spanish. To make conversation, I asked him if he had attended a nearby Catholic mission school, where others of his generation had learned Spanish.
“No,” he said. “I never went to school. I don’t know how to read or write.”
Surprised, I asked him, “So how did you learn to speak Spanish so well?”
“I learned the same way my grandfather did. He was a great shaman who lived to be 110 years old. He learned Spanish at about 80.”
“Well, how did your grandfather learn?”
“Peyote taught him.”
Teaser image by Dennis Hill, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
