The following is an excerpt from Aya: A Shamanic Odyssey now available from Icaro Publishing.

"The vine has spread her tendrils across the world and a genuine archaic revival was underway. My bags were packed; South America beckoned, and the ancient mysteries of the rainforest awaited. I wanted in on it..."

Iquitos, Wednesday July 5th., 2006

IQUITOS IS ELECTRIC WITH NOONDAY HUMIDITY as Vance, John and I wade through the horde of locals hustling trinkets outside the Parthenon gates and join the other ayahuasca gringos amassing by the pool. It's Bowman's birthday -- he's twenty-four today -- and drinking with Guillermo is going to be his present.

We're waiting for Alexis, a blond, twenty-ish dude from Washington D.C. who's going to help translate the interview with Guillermo I've lined up. Alexis is a Princeton dropout who's backpacking around on a spiritual path, drinking ayahuasca with shamans and asking critical questions to deepen his own understanding. He's drunk with Guillermo four times now, and calls him "a fucking Jedi." When he turns up an hour late, wearing a Corey Feldman School of the Arts t-shirt, I know he'll fit right in with our media crew.

Vance wants to get out to the Espiritu de Anaconda, Guillermo's ayahuasca retreat to take some shots before we lose the afternoon light, so we pile into two motorcarros and speed away from the front of the Hotel Parthenon before the touristos bus has even arrived. But our motorcarros get bogged down on the dirt road turnoff from Km 14, a long undulating strip of mud from recent rains, and we get out to walk. The local villagers are busy building a concrete footpath to run from the highway past their village and towards the ayahuasca retreat a few miles in, and part of me wonders if this will facilitate t-shirt and refreshment stalls springing up wherever the gringos go, like mushrooms after a fresh rain.

Before I'd left Australia I'd watched a pirated DVD of the hard-to-find psychedelic Western Renegade, which shot Guillermo to fame, and a little of the Hollywood spin had rubbed off. In the Hollywood feature, co-written and directed by French filmmaker Jan Kounen, an ayahuasca drinker himself, Guillermo plays a master shaman who initiates the lead character, Mike Blueberry, a Civil-War cowboy, into the world of ayahuasca and spirits.

It cost US $34 million to make and flopped at the box office, mainly because of bad marketing. The special effects were as accurate a copy of Kounen's own ayahuasca journeys as the digital rendering could replicate, triggering "flashbacks" amongst many of the ayahuasqueros who watched it and unsettling revulsion in others.

When I'd interviewed Kounen last night, after the screening of his documentary Other Worlds, which tells the story of his own apprenticeship to Guillermo in over one hundred ayahuasca drinking sessions, he said that it was vital for him to make films about spiritual reality, and ayahuasca.

"There is... a tremendous knowledge that we cannot imagine in our culture, you have to make a bridge to that to make people consider, just consider. The culture protects itself from these concepts. It's like a philosophical issue but it's also like a keeper that doesn't want you to go outside of your own culture."

Kounen has bright shining blue eyes and the calm and grounded nature of a man in his forties who has found inner peace. This French music video and feature film director has carved out a career specializing in bringing aspects of the spiritual world to the screen. As well as Renegade and Other Worlds, he has also filmed a series of one-hour documentaries for TV called Another Reality, and his latest docu-pic was on Amma, a modern day Hindu saint, who purportedly performs miracles.

"Cinema is a great tool to deal with modified states of consciousness and different perceptions, [just as] shamanism, or meditation, or other ways, help us to understand how the creatures that we are work," Kounen said. "If you start to think of [perception] as separate channels, then you start to know how to work the channels, all relative to the information." And if you shatter the channels, which is what he believes ayahuasca does, it can "reveal information... going to the deep meaning of what it is to be human."

In essence, media itself is an altered state of mind, Kounen said, where the director can close-up on an eye or change the sound, and thereby change the perception. This might explain his transition from Hollywood director to ayahuasca drinker, and also the synchronistic fit with the casting of Guillermo as a master shaman playing the master shaman, art mirroring life.

Bowman, Vance and I feel like media ayahuasqueros ourselves as we walk under the blue sky and marvel at the giant cumulonimbus clouds billowing overhead, and take some panoramic shots with our cameras, capturing everything but the spirit of this place. We're in a funny position here as Western media reporting on these spiritual realms -- no matter how many mediums we record in the essence of the ayahuasca experience can't be replicated, only approximated. And even then just crudely.

It's translinguistic, as Dennis McKenna would call it. The shamans say that nature speaks in signs, in the overlapping coincidences and resonances of the natural world and the beings in it. Walking down the dirt road through the cleared jungles, awash in a sea of grassland, it's speaking to me now.

After a few kilometers we reach a sign, which reads: Espiritu de Anaconda. Walking over wooden bridges we pass the lush cultured rainforest and enter into a sprawling multi-unit complex designed to cater to Western standards. The central maloca is about 30' in diameter with a conical roof that reaches almost as high again and houses over two dozen people.

It's booked full tonight with conference attendees wanting to drink ayahuasca in this Amazonian cathedral, fully mosquito-proofed, leave your shoes at the door, please. Add a dozen smaller malocas, guesthouses, the dining room and toilets with porcelain bowls and doors and this starts to feel like the "Club Med" of ayahuasca. I half expect Elle MacPherson to come out of the jungle clad in a leaf bikini, offering a selection of fruits and nuts.

Guillermo moved here from his native Pucallpa and built the center only two years ago, after money from Renegade gave him the capital to expand. "It's safer here, you know," says Carlos, a native Iquitian who works here and meets and greets us ayahuasca gringos. "We have the army here, and the police -- and there is nowhere to run. Pucallpa has the bus to Lima and many exits -- someone can kill you and never be caught, they could get out of town in any of a dozen ways."

It's an oft-repeated urban wisdom and there may be some truth it, but I imagine Guillermo might have been a target himself down in Pucallpa. Despite being a respected healer his expertise has also brought him fame and fortune that most locals can only dream of, and other curanderos have been targeted and blackmailed before.

We've arrived early but there's no sign of Guillermo himself as we have a look around and Vance sets up his photography equipment. Rama, a tall, beautiful black woman with a large afro introduces herself as an anthropology student from France, who has been studying with Guillermo as part of her work documenting indigenous cultures for her fellowship in neo-shamanism.

She films one of Guillermo's helpers who's boiling up crushed ayahuasca vine and other plants in a giant soot-blackened cauldron in a wall-less hut behind the main maloca. As the flames lick up and spray into the air it resembles a witches pot, with the attendant in his shorts, t-shirt and baseball cap looking like a mestizo Beverly Hills pool-boy.

A plume of thick gray smoke billows out, stinging my eyes, and when they clear I can see the jungle medicine, ayahuasca, brewing, bubbling, writhing with life in the boiling phlegm-like green brew. A giant witches cauldron full of snot, and around the thick, brown vine bark are chakroponga leaves that contain the active DMT.

I get a whiff of the brew and it makes me want to vomit. A surge memory of ayahuasca washes up -- the taste of my last experience catching in my throat. I struggle to force it down. They say it takes a few years for the ayahuasquero's body to get used to the brew and properly acclimatize. But the soul? That takes longer -- sometimes forever...

Ayahuasca is not a drug ­-- not in the Western sense. It cannot be abused like recreational chemicals because the taste and experience are so demanding, and the hallucinogenic effect is never the same twice. Rather, it develops a relationship with the drinker, sometimes healing the body, other times illuminating the mind, or deeper still, taking the soul on journeys beyond.

But it will do none of this without the participant putting effort in -- it's not just "pop the red pill and escape the Matrix." Serious students have to give up their Western ways and embrace a rigorous diet low in foods containing tyramine, a chemical which can react badly with the MAO -- inhibiting properties of the vine. No red meat, pork, salt, sugar, fat, caffeine, acidic foods, alcohol or sex, all of which affect the body's sensitivity to ayahuasca. But tell that to a bunch of Western thrillseekers looking for some jungle kicks.

The dark clouds that have been gathering on the horizon all afternoon finally break and a late downpour cleans the air as the other conference gringos start to rush in. They take off their coats and shoes and leave them by the door and pass into the main maloca. We all form a concentric circle hugging the wall, a spiderweb crisscross brace of poles supporting the high cone roof above.

We're an eclectic bunch -- I spot Jay, whom I drank with at Percy's, dressed in a one-piece vomit-proof ayahuasca jumpsuit, and Frank the professor and other familiar faces. Dennis McKenna's here holding court, his bald head gleaming in the late afternoon light as he sits on his mattress and puffs away on his pipe, chatting about altered states. "A lot of psychologists are into science fiction," he says, "it's the closest we can legally get in the West to other worlds..."

Next to him is his seventeen-year-old daughter Caitlin, who's going to college in the fall and is taking ayahuasca tonight for the first time. She's reading a fantasy novel in the dim light like she's in an airport departure lounge waiting for take-off. With her hair back in a bow, glasses and soft, mellow energy, she looks like she'd be more into ponies and horses, maybe some Christian rock.

"I haven't done any psychedelics before, I haven't felt it was time," she tells me with the honed nonchalance of someone who's father is one of the planet's most pre-eminent legal psychedelic researchers. "This is my first ayahuasca experience. I have no expectations, y'know. I'm keeping it open."

Everyone waits patiently and swaps ayahuasca stories and travelers tales, letting our collective energies mingle in the flesh before they meet in the spirit. After my previous problems letting go around the energy of a group, I wonder if this many people all in one maloca, on ayahuasca, will turn me into a psychic pressure cooker ready to explode?

"The word on the ayahuasca forums is that Guillermo's brew is one of the strongest in town," Bowman tells me with a wry smile as he sets up his recording gear down by the edge of his mattress. "And the crew who drank with him on Saturday night say he's definitely loaded the brew to kick gringos' butt!"

"I haven't really seen any spirits or anything of that sort," Alexis chips in excitedly beside us. "But it's really ... I've felt it, like, going through every crevasse, on a sub-atomic level of my body and my spirit... And anything it finds that's dead... or not life and movement... it gets rid of, or fixes or makes me vomit. I remember the first time I drank I vomited, and each time I vomited it would show me a picture of all my bad habits and my life that I was vomiting up and getting rid of."

Great. Everyone seems to vomit up easily but me; it's going to another interesting night. And as the rain keeps falling down and the sounds of the jungle come alive, I start to feel the fear. Fear of the real, of the deep ayahuasca experience and the madness it can bring.

When Jan Kounen apprenticed with Guillermo to make his documentary, Other Worlds on Shibipo shamanism, he went mad for a time, temporarily schizophrenic when he failed to respect the diet and ayahuasca. He says the difference between a madman and an ayahuasquero is that the madman can't communicate what he's seen. Trapped in a recursive psychic groove, the hapless psychonaut doesn't have the guidance, or the ability to escape, and sometimes when he does, not all of him returns.

The trained ayahuasquero, on the other hand, can navigate the abyss and integrate it, even bring a bit of it back and ground it in this realm. This, Kounen told the conference audience before the screening of his documentary, is the role of the artist and the magician. I guess that tonight will be the test of my magic.

There's still a while before the ceremony, so I meander out to the main dining room with the thatched roof and meet Kathleen, a fiftyish American woman from Denver with a blond bob, blue eyes and the warm, nurturing appearance of Carol Brady.

She looks like somebody's mum doing ayahuasca -- and in fact, she is, but she's also a clinical psychologist who's here for her own healing. Kat's drunk the brew once before, ten years ago, and the thought of going back into that raging dimensional flux has gotten her all nervy. She gets out her rosary beads and says prayers over the dining table as I fix us a cup of herbal tea.

There's a half dozen other ayahuasqueros milling about, and Guillermo himself walks in casually, followed by Sonia, his wife and Rama, who at six-foot-two towers over the others.

Guillermo's got a very down-to-earth air about him, and as heads turn and everyone looks he doesn't react, just sits down at the table. With his broad face, graying hair and mellow vibe, he looks like a Peruvian version of Lorne Green on the Ponderosa, tucking into his dinner of chicken, rice and vegetables. Apparently he's not worried about a strict diet before drinking, but I guess he writes the rules. Only the Timex watch hints at his affluence, and there's still no hint of the mystic who will lead the ceremony tonight.

One of the gringos asks about the mix of the ayahuasca brew, and Rama translates Guillermo's explanation that the DMT-containing chacruna that he usually uses still hasn't reached maturity in the new gardens. Instead he's using another plant analogue -- chacropanga, which is native to the Iquitos area, but is just as powerful, he promises. This worries Kat, who doesn't want an overwhelming experience.

"Will you help us, Guillermo, if it's too strong for us? Will you look after us?" she pleads with her big blue eyes. "Francisco said he would at Sachamama, but when I cried out for him he was overwhelmed helping others, and he wasn't there for me."

Guillermo assures her he will look after everyone, and because of the big size of the group tonight his wife Sonia, who has also been trained as a shamana, as well as another apprentice shaman, will be brought in to help facilitate the circle. In today's tourist market with different sizes and physiologies, the curanderos control undue effects by measuring the dose of the brew they give their customers, and they also claim to be able to psychically tune in and help control the journey while it's happening. Nobody wants to see Carol Brady freaking out on ayahuasca, nobody.

"I drank three times, then no more," Rama says as she tells me more about her own ayahuasca experiences. "The brain has the memory of the plants so I am still connected to the visions. After [ayahuasca] I had flashbacks in my dreams and when awake."

She's known Guillermo since she worked as a translator on Kounen's Renegade film, and tonight she will also help facilitate the ceremony. She's not the only French speaker here at the center -- probably because of the fame of Kounen's movie and documentary in his native France, there is a disproportionate number of French seekers here, and French Canadians. Perhaps to stave off the rapidly spreading interest by French front-runners, in 2005 France became one of the first countries in the world to ban ayahuasca usage outright, regardless of religious considerations.

Back in the ceremonial maloca, Tobin from Denmark is tending the altar with a small Swiss/Peruvian boy with a bowl haircut who's in his pyjamas, while his mother rests nearby on a mattress near the door. The boy has a sweet, confident spirit as he melts the bottom of one candle and joins it on top of another, like he's at an adults' pyjama party and he knows the drill.

"Will you be drinking tonight?" I ask him, and he shakes his head calmly from side to side.

"No. Tonight I just watch," he says, and I wonder how old he is -- seven? Nine? It seems natural and right that he is here with his mother and family, participating in an ayahuasca ceremony, witnessing the healing that the medicine brings. It makes it feel more real, like the way native South Americans have been taking ayahuasca for millennia as part of their village life, no War on Drugs or war on consciousness, just plant medicines connecting to a greater spiritual whole. How can you hide this from your children, this secret from the jungle that unlocks the world?

At sunset, we drink. Yet again I learn that when you spend the night in pitch darkness with a large group of people and take ayahuasca, purging, sweating, dying and rebirthing together, you get to know each other pretty well. You might not remember their names, but afterwards you remember their face and the sound of their suffering, and they yours, and there is a special bond between you.

To my left, Bowman darts forward and crouches by the round plastic bowl placed at the end of his mattress. Gripping it with both hands he makes a swift, sharp gurgling sound and vomits quickly into the bowl. I can see his shape and the outline of his back in the diffuse moon light as it shines through the thick mosquito nets that surround the maloca, heaving over and over.

Around the circumference of the room another drinker scrabbles for their bucket, as if set off by Bowman's vomiting. Dry wracking heaves and the choking of dry bile reverberate through the dark as the drinker gets caught with nothing to bring up. The vomiting goes on in successive waves across the room and through the night, for three, four, six hours or more, and just when you think you've kept it down, or purged as much as you could, the spirit of ayahuasca finds another dark crevasse and helps bring it to the light.

I find I'm a bit lighter than the first time, but I still have blockages. I'm sitting cross-legged on my jaguar-spotted blanket with the heels of my feet tucked under me, spine straight, chakras aligned and my crown pointing up to the stars.

Ayahuasca is a fickle mistress -- she likes it when you put out for her, make a show of it and put some effort in. Ayahuasca is also a plant medicine, and as such she reads you and what you need, and that changes every time, both as you progress on the path and as new issues come to light. Like a high maintenance girlfriend, the relationship with 'aya' can be hard work, but the rewards far outweigh the sacrifices.

I'm starting to come on slow, a warm billowing headspace enlarging to take in the whole maloca and the spirit zones phasing in. My head is awash with the psychic detritus of my own mind: Past loves, mistakes, issues from my life all flash before my eyes, but I'm not sure if my brain's just hyperactive or if there's something deeper going on...

Like last time, there appears to be some subtle interspecies relationship in this fugue where ayahuasca is reading me as I re-experience my issues and my head pours out my subconscious into my conscious mind. The vision/ dreams don't stop, they plague me all night long in wave after wave of emotional torment, little things blown out of all proportion. Maybe this is part of the healing, that as I remember I also let go, for la purga, she is coming, I can feel her building...

In the Amazonian "cosmovision" everything on the earth has a spirit animating it and the bridge between the earth and the spirit world is us, the living things. Guillermo says that there is a unity between everyone and everything, an "ecological bridge between the living systems." And this extends beyond the material plane to a multi-dimensional universe, he believes, where the shaman has to work on a superior level to accomplish his will.

Working with the plants is the first level, he says, and the second is to "control the occult elements of the spiritual world." The third is a purely spiritual level that affects the physical, for example: The knowledge of how to become invisible, or how to travel in the innerworlds, the sub-aquatic world or the cosmic world. The other dimensions you go to depend on the person drinking ayahuasca and how they want to work, he says. Spoken like a true Jedi.

The candle goes out and it's pitch black. A heavy stillness hangs in the air like a burlap curtain -- maybe it's the spirits. Everyone is quiet, moving around slightly, the silence of the moment punctuated by the inevitable promeathean heave of another drinker vomiting. And as they vomit up come all their hurts, their pains, their suppressions and ills.

There's no point of focus in this darkness, no sense of time progressing. To the unprepared this could be hell. Possessed by a strange spirit, your body wracked by wave after wave of nausea, vomiting up green bile in crushing waves.

And in the darkness my mind is up to its old tricks, trying to imprint form on the primal chaos. I want to see the snakes, the alligators, the jaguar totem spirits, and I want it so much my mind is doing its best, grabbing at the shadows and seeing eyes, slithering obsidian dream snakes. It's as if the world of spirits is playing itself out as shadows on a black canvas, tantalisingly beyond reach. It must be the chacropanga Guillermo's using in this brew, it's less full-on visual than the chacruna after all.

The flash of mental thoughts continues and at times it's impossible to tell which bits are me thinking, which bits the ayahuasca speaking and which bits the ayahuasca making me think I'm speaking. The voice of aya is soft, subtle, and yet again it has the emotional nuances of a relationship. She speaks in concept-images, in that post-McCluhan symbology where you become what you see, and in the overlapping you know it, message/medium as one.

On the dark of my vision I see a flash of a seed snaking through the void of space, coming from beyond. The funny thing is, as I see it another bit of me is sifting through the mental dialogue and saying: "that's not one of your thoughts."

"Whoo hoo hoo" Guillermo's staccato breaths punctuate the dark, short, pitched breaths that strike like compressed air darts and cut through the heavy atmosphere around us. It is one of the most eclectic sounds I have ever heard. Distinctly sentient, with an intelligence behind it, but at the same time insect-like, alien and just beyond the reach of the conscious mind. The sound is his icaro, the first wave of his bag of tricks to piece the veils that separate the worlds.

"Whoo hoo hoo ooo" his icaros cut through the dark, tuning in my consciousness as something cracks along the back of my skull, some slight tweak as the muscles tighten and now I'm feeling lighter, different, but it's hard to place. Guillermo's tuning us in, sinking us into a shared phase space and voila: the curtain is pulled back and we're smeared across the invisible canvas. We've arrived.

Outside the maloca a wave of insect consciousness is resonating back a whoo hoo hoo pitch that matches Guillermo's icaros, and as the two meet and cancel each other out I feel as if I'm breathing in a dreaming universe...

By the moonlight I can see the wooden beams of the roof shimmering like a vast spiderweb, the central pole flashing with mythic resonance like the World Tree of Norse myth, connecting the axis mundi with the worlds above.

And suddenly around the circumference of the roof a billion, billion eyes come into view like a shimmering peacock tail, all veiled behind a dark lens. They drink me in, blink and stare again with a reptilian coolness, images warping one into another rapidly. I feel like I'm looking into some sort of hyper-dimensional mirror and that the thing on the other side is experiencing what it is to be human through my eyes, all our eyes...

Sometime in the dream Guillermo comes round and blows mapacho smoke down our necks and backs. He beckons me to lower my head, not out of respect, but to cleanse my crown chakra, and his touch has a gentleness and a collected strength. Then quite suddenly the darkness erupts with a thundering growl, bigger than us all, big enough to hold the world in its jaws. Snakes, crocodiles, writhing anaconda spirits and jaguar eyes imprint from my subconscious onto the canvas of the night, all my fears spewing forth with them.

The ayahuasca makes urgent rumbles in my belly and as a wave of nausea washes over me I muster the fortitude to stand and grope my way through the dark to the door. Mercifully, it opens as I push it and stumble out into the night, punch-drunk with the spirit of the vine in me and threatening to come up quick.

The silhouetted jungle is bathed in a silver spectral light as Peruvian helpers stationed outside the door point me towards the toilets, a shimmering ball of light only twenty metres away that seems to skip in my field of vision. My whole body feels like it's underwater, that the consciousness trying to drive it is doing so from very far away and under challenging circumstances.

After an eternity on the path, lost in the trees, I finally find my way to the toilets and an empty cubicle. The porcelain bowl and seat is a miracle, as is the fresh toilet paper, and as I am bathed in the bright artificial light the ayahuasca in me judges all is ready. With some secret psychic trigger I'm not in control of, a violent rush of vomit erupts from me and into the basin next to the toilet, then another and another, my whole body gripped with peristalsis and squeezing out sickness.

The lightness of my body post-vomit feels wonderful. As I cough and splutter over the sink and try to hang on to the shifting space-time coordinates around me, a trick of light draws my attention to the warm sick backed up in the sink.

It's still bubbling like a fizzy drink, this ayahuasca-cola, but it has a curious opalescent film to it, like oil rainbows on water, or the eyes from the other side of the mirror. A magic mirror, perhaps, created from my ayahuasca vomit. As I look into the magic mirror the eyes become spots, and the spots move with the shape of a large cat, a jaguar stalking the jungle.

He stops in front of a grandfather tree with thick snakes of flowering ayahuasca vine twining around its frame and looks back, as if he can see me. Suddenly he pounces, muscles rippling and claws extended, and shreds the thick vine into shards and starts nibbling on the leaves. Then he starts tripping out, rolling around with glazed eyes, and then he's vomiting too, and I realize it's me, me in the jaguar skin, and it's me who's vomiting once again into the sink.

I meet my fears and they devour me, and with another roar of the jaguar-god melts the realization -- it's the thunder of a jumbo jet overhead -- the 10:00pm flight back to Lima, back to civilization. And as the hallucinogenic jungle envelops me I start to wonder if I can ever come back from this, ever return to civilization as I left it, or if something inside me has now changed forever, and the jaguar is the one who stalks the world in my skin...

But there's no turning back now, no off switch, just me alone with the universe and the jaguar in the forest, two crazy cross-species trippers sharing a cosmovision that says we are both one.

Photo by John Bowman

Forget the war on terror: global military has been engaged in a decades-long campaign to find chemicals that can control the mind, and 50 years after their first experiments it seems the battlefield of the brain is once again front and centre, writes Rak Razam...



According to the US Centre for Strategic Command, the US is presently engaged in a campaign of "Full Spectrum Dominance" in all fields of existence – land, water, space, cyberspace, etc. – and now the realm of the mind itself. Yet the military's interest in psychoactives has been long and sustained. During the height of WWII the OSS, the wartime precursor to the CIA, began the search for a truth serum they could use in intelligence interrogations. In 1945 the US Navy Technical Mission reported that Nazi scientists experimented with mescaline on subjects at the Dachau concentration camp. After the war the U.S. Navy began investigating mescaline itself under the guise of Project Chatter, and for the next three decades they engaged in experiments with mind-altering drugs in an attempt to crack the secrets of the brain.

A 1994 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office says that between 1940 and 1974, the American Department of Defense and other national security agencies experimented on thousands of people with mind-altering substances. The CIA reportedly gave hallucinogens to "volunteer" soldiers in 149 projects throughout the 50s and 60s. Most of these experiments were part of the MK-ULTRA program, which was formed to counter supposed Communist advances in brainwashing on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea, as later dramatised in the film ‘The Manchurian Candidate’. The Army was largely interested in using LSD as an incapacitating agent to disable enemy troops without bloodshed, but a bizarre culture of acid experimentation soon ensued as the game got out of control.

There's a video on YouTube: "LSD Military Experiment", which shows LSD being given to British troops in the 1950s. Around 25 minutes after ingestion signs of the drug become apparent. Whilst on a mock military exercise the men begin to relax and giggle, while others start to trip out. After 35 minutes the radio operator takes off his communications backpack and looks around with a huge grin. The efficiency of the rocket launcher is also under some doubt, and "ten minutes later the attacking section had lost all sense of urgency" the narrator decries. As well trained military soldiers roll around in fits of laughter and climb trees, the true power of the mind-altering drug becomes suddenly became apparent: here is something that can undermine the nature of the war machine itself.

LSD and mescaline were just two of a host of specific psychoactive substances experimented with; others included tetra hydro cannabinoids (agents injected highly-concentrated liquid THC onto cigarettes) and a wide array of pharmaceutical agents. In 1962 the U.S. Army added Quinuclidinyl benzilate, a "superhallucinogen" code-named BZ) to its neurochemical arsenal, after noticing very small doses produced stupor and delirium that lasted for days. By 1964 the Army was using BZ in Vietnam, and stockpiling huge quantities of the gas for anticipated use.

Many compounds were unknowingly tested not just on soldiers, but on the civilian populace as well. Perhaps the most infamous was an intelligence project wryly named "Midnight Climax", where prostitutes were enlisted to give their unwitting clients LSD. The CIA also seems to have partly-funded and promoted the use of LSD throughout the 1950s and 60s, in part to do to the burgeoning anti-war movement what it had done to soldiers both in England and America.

Now in the 21st century, in a growing climate of urban unrest and resource scarcity, military officials have been funding an increasing number of projects exploring non-lethal weaponry for crowd control. But restraining an unruly populace on a physical level is redundant if you can control their mind, which might explain the current resurgence in medical and military interest in hallucinogens.

The lesson learned from their Cold War mind experiments wasn’t, it seems, that testing drugs on unsuspecting people is ethically wrong. Instead it appears to be that the level of scientific knowledge back then made the drugs administered unpredictable. But since the 1990s modern assay techniques have allowed greater understanding of the workings of the brain and how chemicals bind to neuro-receptors there. And now, as the war on terror funds an unprecedented military budget, neuroscience can finish what was started all those years ago.

If you think civilians are protected from such experimentation, think again. The 1925 Geneva Protocol was the first international treaty to ban the use of chemical weapons, and it was backed up by the 1975 Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention and the 1995 Chemical Weapons Convention. While all modern nations say they are against such neurochemical warfare, loopholes exist for use in cases of "law enforcement, including domestic riot control". And the development of calmative agents, dissociatives and "equilibrium agents" by military scientists for urban use, is on the rise.

In 2002 during the Russian theatre seige at Breslen, the Russian army used a knockout agent – most likely the opiate derivative fentanyl – against Chechen rebels that also killed 120 hostages. Not long after, in 2003 as the US went to war in Iraq, the then US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, announced the US was interested in (bio)chemical weapons. Rumsfeld charged the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) and the US Army's Soldier Biological Chemical Command (SBCCOM) to lead research into drugs that affect things like the sense of pain, consciousness itself and emotive states like anxiety and fear. Fentanyl, ketamine, diazepam and a swath of other anaesthetics and anti-depressants were on their list of drugs of interest.

As the pharmaceutical companies line up for the growing military budgets to explore these new wave of mind weapons, a whole new market is opening up for the military-industrial complex that threatens to change the way we think – one way or another.

For as William Burroughs said in 'Nova Express': "This is a game planet. All games are hostile and basically there is only one game, and that game is war. Research into altered states of consciousness – which might result in a viewpoint from which the game itself could be called into question – is inexorably drawn into the game."

It's your move.

* this article first appeared in Australian Penthouse magazine, July 2008 

As they begin their magick rite, the sky clouds over and darkens. A cold wind sweeps the top of Glastonbury Tor, the legendary British power spot where ley lines converge and primal dragon energy is concentrated. Four altars are set up with wooden poles forming triangular spaces, littered with talismans. Inside the circle between the altars step 12 people, a ragtag collection of pagans, gypsies and travellers that represent the source races of humanity. As a brilliant zig-zag flash of lightning breaks the clouds, Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule steps into the circle followed closely by two others, their six arms waving like a spider, spinning, measuring and cutting the thread of life. The initiates are pierced through their chest and sewn together with a string web, then anointed as they sing a range of tones to activate their chakras, the energy centres running up their spines. This was the ‘13th Tribe’ weaving, a boggling ritual to unite the warring races of humanity and connect to the earth, and you haven’t seen anything yet…

What the fuck, you’re probably thinking? Here’s the deal: the world is stranger than you believe. And one of the strangest of the strange is Australia’s own Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule. He’s a ‘chaorder magickian’ who dabbles in invoking Godforms, mutating his own body, travelling the astral realm, and manifesting his will in any number of exotic rituals across the world, from Uluru to the pyramids in Egypt. But tonight we’re sitting round an open fire in a concrete backyard in a dilapidated share house in Brunswick, in the suburbs of Melbourne. There are ley lines here too, but the power lines overhead are more evident. A life-sized, hand-carved clay statue of the Goddess Kali is here with us, terrifying Kali with her eight limbs and long rolling tongue, adorned with skulls round her neck and a belt of human hands.

But wait, let’s step back a second and take all this in. If you can suspend your cultural disbelief, this is all about magick – and it’s heavy stuff, indeed. None of that garden variety smoke and mirrors that celebrity magicians like Harry Houdini practised, this is the real deal, the ancient deal for a new age. This is the knowledge that witches and warlocks, medieval magickians, alchemists, and generations of occultists have kept alive, and one of its leading modern practicioners is sitting opposite me now. A lean man in his 30s, Orryelle’s got a long face with a broad nose, his hairline shaved back into a sharp triangle at the crown. It makes his head seem elongated, like it’s been stretched. There’s a collection of esoteric jewellery and charms around his neck and dangling from his ears, which have an elfin tweak to them. His blue eyes are piercing, mischievous, matching the cheeky smile he radiates.

“Magick is … a direction and focusing of will and intent,” Orryelle says, handing me a cup of coffee he’s just made. I can’t help but notice the serpent head tattooed along his thumb and forefinger, jaws open wide and about to strike. “To do a ritual or a spell is to manifest your desired intent or result… [But] magick isn’t necessarily all about spell casting and looking for deliberate results. Magick is something that's alive in our existence.” He sits down cross-legged by the fire and gazes deeply into the flames, flickering shadows dancing across his face.

Since the last peak of magickal interest back in the Victorian era, when the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had wealthy and famous initiates like the poet W.B. Yeats, the idea of magick has been on the decline. Reduced in the public mind to Harry Potter special effects and Hollywood glam, or stage magic, illusion and sleight-of-hand tricks, magic has become a pale shadow of its true origin. That’s why Orryelle and many other ‘Chaos Magickians’ have upheld the tradition of spelling ‘magick’ with a ‘k’, which was originated by the infamous Aleister Crowley in the early 20th century to set it apart from the sanitised version. As they see it, everything is magick, and life itself is a spell we’re all under. When you have the eyes to see and the will to connect, it’s like reaching out and plucking ripe fruit off a tree.

“You have to look at things differently and see the magick in things, hear it, be aware of the flow of synchronicity. You need to be aware of the patterns of fate, of the Gods and spirits that are around us all the time, and be tuned into them,” says Orryelle , the Trickster-magickian in the moonlight. The fire swirls around and casts light on the Kali statue to my right, as if on cue. Kali’s one of the allies that Orryelle works with in his magickal rituals, along with the Egyptian lioness-headed Sekhmet, the ‘demon’ Choronzon and others, an astral posse handpicked from the religions and mythologies of the world. Orryelle made the Kali statue himself and has used it in his ritual performances that he and his band of magickians in Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Co. have conducted to take theatre beyond its usual bounds of ‘acting’ into the realm of Becoming. You see, in their modern blend of ancient magick ritual and public performance, they don’t just act out their characters, they become them, invoking Gods and archetypes of many mythologies and grounding their attributes.

"Sometimes it can feel quite strange, like you're not yourself, you're possessed or whatever,” Orryelle explains. “But a lot of the time I feel like it's all something within me anyway, something within us all. Even scientists acknowledge this now with the whole DNA thing, that everything we've all experienced is within us as a potential, it's just a matter of accessing it. If it was completely outside us then how could we experience or know it? [So] invoking different deities or archetypes is like expressing different parts of us that we might not normally acknowledge or tap into, a more complete awareness.” Sounds all above board, doesn’t it? Just slip into a nice, comfortable Godform, take on its attributes and use them to enact your will. Well try this on:

“The spirit of Black Eagle came as a great black silhouette - a living shadow of sorts – and alighted on my chest, where its talons sank deep into my flesh, melding into my skin, until I had absorbed the entire shadowy bird within. Then the wings burst out my back, as my head morphed into that of a goat, great horns spiralling up and out from my hairy black forehead.” That’s how Orryelle described the time he ritually invoked the Templar deity Baphomet a few years back. The transformations might all be on the astral level, but the results are reputed to bring forth material from both the subconscious, and the supra-conscious beyond the individual. Knowledge of events and people, ideas, secrets; glimpses of beyond. As Orryelle explains: “Fantasies and astral journeys, or dreams are magickal in their way, but real magick is bringing those fantasies or visions to the physical world so you can then share them with other people. It's all about manifesting things in this world.”

And what better way to ground the realm of ideas than in the canvas of the flesh? Orryelle has been pushing his body to new forms of magickal expression, using it like any artist would a tool. As part of his performance art, which has taken him from the streets of Fitzroy to the Edinburgh Fringe and the world stage, he’s had small bird’s wings sewn on his ears, and wedge-tailed eagle wings sewn onto his back, sutured into the skin and a dozen other bodily mutations each more shocking than the one before. “It's all about focusing on yourself to go beyond the pain for temporary transformations. It's focusing of the will to demonstrate your mutability,” Orryelle tells me. “The [eagle wings] were so large and heavy and were sewn in quite deeply; it really felt like they were part of me,” he sighs. They only lasted 48 hours before decomposition, pain and the logistics of having real wings embedded in his back made it too difficult to continue, but it started a phase of extreme body modification as a magickal act. “The actual body, the human form, is more mutable then we may think,” Orryelle laughs with an impish grin, stoking the fire with a stick.

Ha, it sure is. I remember when my English mate, Tom, first met Orryelle in the middle of Australia back in 2000, on an eco-activist convoy celebrating the Winter Solstice out back of Alice Springs. He’d just conducted another one of his group chakra workings, this time at Uluru, ‘the solar plexus of the world’. He was also taking estrogen, the female growth hormone, as a magickal act, and as he came over the lip of the dusty claypan where we were camped and walked towards us, his top off, a pair of small, pert girl-breasts jiggled on his chest. Tom tried to keep his eyes off his puckish man-woman’s assets, but understandably, his jaw dropped.

“I've always been attracted to the hermaphroditic [both sex organs] Gods/Goddess forms and I love the idea of becoming more feminine in an actual physical, manifest way – but without becoming less masculine,” Orryelle explains when I ask him about his man-boobs, which have receded since he stopped the hormones, although an increased sensitivity has been retained. “But then I found, as I have with any kind of physical transformation that I've done, that… the physical journey began to create spiritual changes. I went further into recognising aspects of my femininity on emotional as well as physiological levels. [Then] nine months or so of taking the estrogen and invoking this inner hermaphroditism, to become as female as I could without becoming any less male, I began to realise I was getting to the end of that process... I couldn't keep doing this without it affecting my masculinity.”

The ‘Crying Game’ maneouver culminated in his own ‘Alchymical Wedding’, where he married himself, first dressed as a bridegroom, then bridesmaid. Then in combined regalia s/he threw a bone boquet with flowers attached and engaged in some spontaneous glossalalia, or speaking in tongues. It was just perfect. Oh sure, so you can imagine him possessed by Baphomet, all tails and horns, but not a wee pair of boobies? Get a grip. No door must go unexplored for the serious magickan. “What we think of as our identity or what we present as our identity is just the surface, and underneath is a more central essence. And that's a scary thing for a lot of people in itself because they identify with the social masks,” Orryelle says.

It makes sense then, that he called his magickal group the ‘Hermaphroditic Order of the Silver Dusk’, both as a counterpoint to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and his own mutational experiments. Orryelle describes it as “an art movement [in which] we totally immerse ourselves in magick. We plunge ourselves into the abyss if need be and see what's really there in the deeper recesses of the subconscious. We use art to do that and to explore the deep self. We don’t just explore a bit of magick symbolism in our artwork. We actually use art to fully explore magick and the untapped and unknown – that's the true meaning of the occult, the hidden.”

The Silver Dusk is the hidden face of his Metamorphic Ritual Theatre public performance troupe, which became famous for their ‘Labyrinth’ art-installation pieces at Confest in the mid-90s. Rather than just being a performance in a theatre, the Labyrinth installations were large mazes woven through the forest, creating paths with string and rope in-between trees. People got totally lost in them in more ways than one. Within the space was a whole world where the Metamorphs took on the roles of different characters and archetypes, mixed in with performers invited in to do their own thing, and punters who were drawn into the act, totally blurring the line between performer and audience. “A lot of people received some kind of transformation or initiation from it, by wandering into another world and becoming absorbed by it. It gave them a realisation of the possibility of creating their own world,” Orryelle says, poking at the embers of the fire.

Indeed. One of my fondest memories of the whole thing is getting zapped on the nipple by a raven-haired beauty with an electric cattle prod. Very arousing, and that’s all part of the magickal theatre, to enagage the senses. Which might be where Hollywood has gotten confused about magickal groups being all some type of Satanic sex orgy. That isn’t always accurate – the truth is that sexuality itself is a very powerful magick force and it can sometimes be used in a group setting if the participants agree. “Kundalini energy is a raw creative fire that can go into sexuality or other types of creativity and expression, arts or ritual,” Orryelle says. “Or it can go into several or all of those things at once. Why not use it for all simultaneously? It's the same basic energy. They can fuel each other.”

That same kundalini energy is also what Orryelle’s been helping raise with his global chakra workings on both a personal and global level. These group rituals “help activate the kundalini of participants and open their chakras at the corresponding sacred sites which are the Earth's charkas in ritual microcosmic resonance with it’s own rising Kundalini,” the magick man explains. He’s led five group workings so far: The first working was at Mt Shasta in California – the base chakra; Lake Titicaca, on the border of Peru and Bolivia, is the navel chakra; the solar plexus chakra is Uluru in the centre of Australia, and Glastonbury Tor, in England is the heart chakra. And most recently, just last year, he performed a group throat chakra working in Giza, Egypt that took him deep within the pyramids themselves for an amazing ritual. “Vissudha is the chakra of sound, vibration and communication so the emphasis was upon harmonic chanting and Words of Power, rooted in Ancient Egyptian magick and mythology to resonate with the site of activation,” he says. Just imagine:

The colourful troupe rides across the desert sands on decorated camels and horses, bells jangling and magickal garments blowing in the wind. The Great Pyramid of Giza crests the horizon, they disembark their rides and enter. Cutting through the herd of tourists, the magickians ascend the long, dark, narrow shaft up to the King’s Chamber in a somber silence. Taking deep breaths together, the crew begins chanting the tone of the base chakra, which grows and resonates through the ancient chamber. “When we reached the throat chakra tone itself, the volume and power of its open-mouthed 'Eeeee...' resonance set the guard off again, but his now high-pitched cries were barely audible, and soon ceased. This was the Vissudha Chakra wide open:unsupressed, unstoppable,” Orryelle recollects.

“[We] continued this primary Vissudha tone for as long as possible, wave upon wave of it resonating throughout the pyramid and beyond until we felt to finally shift on up to the third eye's more inward 'mmmmm' humming vibration, then the wyrd harmonics of the tongue-turned-back 'nnng' of the Bindu chakra in the back of the head. The subtleties of this then blasted up into our crowns, voices and spirits exultant in the ecstatic high 'Ohhh' tone of the Sahasrara. We were open to and at one with the Universe, even the guard's last futile and wavering barks now just a speck in this all-pervasive bliss. Grounding back to the low base chakra tone, we paused for a few moments silence, released each others hands and turned to leave, our work there complete.”

Wow. Heavy. Duty. Shit. What strikes me most about Orryelle is the sheer audacity of what he’s doing, of the magickal life he’s living, beyond the realms of everyday perception. He’s brought his magickal self to the internet via his extensive 'Mutation Parlour' site and now his myspace page, which he uses to network the global magickal community for future ritual performances, and is the editor of a printed magickal journal, SilKMilK MagiZain. He’s also a prolific visual and sonic artist, and has recently launched the second edition of his BOOK of KAOS Tarot Deck. His artwork on the tarot cards revels in a raw, elemental energy that captures the images of the Gods and spirits he works with on the astral level and grounds them with ink and paper, often with erotic imagery. "A lot of erotic art touches upon the realms of esoterica, since 'occult' means 'hidden' and there are many realms of sexuality still taboo.” Orryelle calls his art ‘Esoterotica', as it “displays the inner kundalini energy which propels eroticism, rather than just the exoteric or outer play of forms.”

Orryelle’s ultimate goal with the global chakra workings is to culminate the work at the crown chakra (in Tibet) by Solstice, 2012, because there's a large collective vision that there's going to be some kind of mass transformation in or by that year. And transformation is what he thrives on. “It feels like the planet’s kundalini, her fire, her collective energy as an organism is transforming and awakening as a natural progression, perhaps as a response to what's going on in the world,” Orryelle muses. And as she wakes, the magick is returning, or maybe it’s just that more of us are able to see it once again.

Finally, our audience is over. Orryelle stands up and stabs at the dying embers of the fire with his stick, sending a skinny plume of smoke trailing up, stinging my eyes. And when I open them again, he’s gone...

Just like magick.

* A truncated version of this story first appeared in Australian Penthouse Nov 2007. Photos courtesy Orryelle and co.

Dennis McKenna is one of the leading figures in the global psychedelic and scientific communities investigating plant entheogens and indigenous plant medicines. He was involved with the “Hoasca Project” studying ayahuasca usage by members of the Church de Vegetal and recently issued the manifesto “Ayahuasca and Human Destiny”. Along with his late brother Terence, Dennis co-wrote the book “The Invisible Landscape” which revealed their psychedelically influenced insights into the nature of reality and spacetime they received during “The experiment at La Cholerra” in South America in 1971 (later recounted in Terence’s book “True Hallucinations”). Here, he talks at length about what happened at La Cholerra and how that influenced his later work with ayahuasca.


Rak> Dennis you received your doctorate in 1984, so you’ve been studying plant entheogens for over twenty years now professionally. I’d like to backtrack just a bit to talk about how you got into the psychedelic and plant sacrament culture. In your brother Terence’s book “True Hallucinations” he details your adventures into Amazonian shamanism, could you tell us a bit about those times and how you and Terence began?

DENNIS> Right. [True Hallucinations] was Terence’s book but I was one of the main subjects in it. We wrote together a book in 1975 called “The Invisible Landscape” which we were co-authors on. That was an attempt to kind of lay out in scientific terms and make sense of our experiences at La Cholerra. But True Hallucinations was more like a novel version of that. The Invisible Landscape was like a pseudo-scientific screed in a way, and True Hallucinations was more like a travel novel of our adventures in the Amazon kind of thing.

Rak> I guess what interested me about all this is that you’ve become a leading scientist in this field but before that as the books reveal there was this thirst for adventure, this calling to know more about indigenous people and the plant medicines. Both The Invisible Landscape and True Hallucinations reveal some intense encounters with plant medicines, could you explain what happened there at La Cholerra?

DENNIS> Yes... What happened at La Cholerra... (laughs) What happened is a very long story. I guess the first thing to make clear about what happened at La Cholerra is that it didn’t occur in the context of any indigenous use of psychedelics, or ayahuasca, or any of these things. At the time we thought it did, but we were deluded in many ways. I was 20, [Terence] was 24. We were at that stage where you know everything (laughs).

And yes, we had a thirst for adventure but our adventure at La Cholerra really grew out of our preoccupation with DMT. We were both hippies in the 60s, in Berkeley and the Haight-Ashbury and all that. Like everybody at that time in that sort of countercultural movement we were interested in psychedelics. We took LSD and thought that was interesting and so on. But unlike a lot of people, for various reasons that I now view as fated, in a way, DMT came down the pike.

So we began to look into the ethnobotanical literature on this, and I don’t know what even lead us to ethnobotany... maybe it was Carlos Castenada or something like that. LSD and all those psychedelics were not used in the 60s in the context of any shamanic tradition, it was, if anything, it was in the Leary Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out kind of ideal. [But] through various routes we found out that DMT was the active ingredient in a lot of South American hallucinogens that were in use.

When we got to La Cholerra we were, if not exactly welcomed, at least not thrown out. And so we settled in, and at this scene, this mission, they had cleared maybe a couple of hundred acres or rainforest and they had brought in cows. So these cows were everywhere and as a result the pasture was literally dotted everywhere with psilocybin mushrooms. Everywhere you looked out of cowpies there were these huge clusters of psilocybin mushrooms growing. We had actually had a previous encounter with the mushrooms on the way in at Puerto Leguizamo, which was the first time either one of us had taken any mushrooms.

RAK> They weren’t big in the States at the time?

DENNIS> They weren’t big and they were unheard of in the States at the time.

RAK> They didn’t exist in the States or they just weren’t being used widely?

DENNIS> No. Not really. Psilocybin was a legendary substance that never really showed up on the streets. Things showed up on the streets that purported to be psilocybin, but they were LSD basically. Nobody knew how to grow mushrooms at that time. It wasn’t happening. What you got was frozen store bought mushrooms that had been sprayed with LSD. It was totally fake, nobody knew about it.

So we started taking these mushrooms and having lively conversations all the time fuelled by mushrooms and fuelled by liberal ingestion of cannabis at all times of the day and night. Cannabis was virtually legal in Colombia at that time. We brought in a pound and a half of the best native bud we could lay out hands on.

... And one of the aspects of taking the mushrooms was this sound that we could hear at high doses. You could hear a sound at the edge of detection that seemed to be a kind of high-pitched, electronic buzzing and popping sound. It’s the sound you can hear very strongly when you smoke DMT. The sound of ripping cellophane, people describe it that way, or crumpling cellophane or things like that.

We developed this idea that if you could listen to this sound, and not only listen but imitate the sound, you could sing it, it was something that you could imitate and if you tried to imitate it you reached a point where it sort of locked on to this internal resonance. Initially it sounds stupid, y’know, you’re trying to follow a tune along and you’re not getting it very well, but at some point you would lock on to this, and then it would just pour out of you. You couldn’t even stop it.

What we were doing was not science - it was magic    . We thought we were doing science but we didn’t know anything about science at the time. We set up what we called an experiment, but what we should have really called a ritual. Honestly it was a ritual but we had the idea that if we took a large dose of mushrooms, along with ayahuasca and heard this sound, that we could generate this standing wave form and that we could actually transfer that into the body of a mushroom in a stable way so that it would be outside the body and it would be sustained by it’s own superconducting circuitry, and you would be able to see it and be it at the same time. It would be, in a sense, an artifact from beyond that you generate out of your own head. It would be a super, transbiological artifact, translinguistic matter that would be meaning itself fixed into a biological matrix.

RAK> And do you think it succeeded, the experiment?

DENNIS> (hesitates)... No... (laughs) No, not exactly… What we were trying to do, essentially, if I can harken back to the basis of this in myth and history, I mean the closest analogy to it is the Philosopher’s Stone. We were trying to recreate the Philosopher’s Stone, which in some ways is the ultimate artifact. That thing that exists and is both mind and matter and responds to thought and is you and can do anything you can imagine, literally, anything you can imagine.

And so we performed the experiment and what we postulated was going to happen – didn’t happen, obviously. How could it happen? It didn’t happen that the mushroom would explode on a cloud of super-condensed glowing crystals and leave a glowing violet disk in front of us, no. That’s not what happened, y’know. That was the whole for result. That we’d just be able to get in the saucer and fly away. And end History in the process.

RAK> It’s a very grand ideal there, and I guess the immediate result was that your MAO inhibitors were mixed up for a while there?

DENNIS> Totally fucked up for a while, that’s one theory. I was completely out of it for two weeks.

RAK> But were you in that zone, that completely hallucinogenic DMT zone inside your head for two weeks?

DENNIS> No, no, what happened was... Well one theory is the MAO permanent disruption of MAO brain chemistry for weeks, and that’s one possibility. I’m now not so sure that that’s true. Because other people take mushrooms and ayahuasca or they synergize mushrooms with beta-carbolines and things like that any they don’t go crazy. Invariably they don’t go crazy.

I had this feeling that I had been literally smeared over creation by this experiment that we’d done. I was literally a space cadet. What was happening to me was I was experiencing this slow collapse over each 24 hour period from the edges of the universe to a concentration. So that over each period, like the first time, the first 24 period I was in the whole cosmos. And then the second one it was like the galactic cluster...

And I’ve thought about it, of course. I’ve thought about it a lot since then, and really the only model that really fits is not a biochemical model or a pharmacological model. The only model that fits is a shamanistic initiation. That’s what happened to me.

I didn’t ask for it. I wasn’t prepared for it. But that’s what happened. Because in shamanic traditions in all cultures all over the world, there is this notion of being literally torn apart and put back together - in a better way than you were before. And I feel -- and I’m not a shaman, I’m not claiming to be a shaman, I didn’t ask to be a shaman -- but I got the initiation and I do feel that ultimately it was a very integrative thing. It was a healing thing that happened to me.

RAK> Do you think that then has influenced your future career as a scientist, which is the Western shaman, in a way.

DENNIS> Oh, totally. Totally influenced my future career.

RAK> Could you then tell us a bit about the “Hoasca Project” and some of the other scientific explorations you’ve done with ayahuasca? What were the results, that the receptors of the brain were improved? The serotonin receptors?

DENNIS> In 1991 [I was] invited to a conference… that the UDV [Unaio de Vegetal, a legal ayahuasca church] had organized. And the UDV had a medical studies section at the time. Although they’re quick to deny that ayahuasca is a drug but they still had a medical health section. They were under scrutiny from the Brazilian government who was looking at their practice and wondering should they allow this? Or should we prohibit it? And what’s going on, is this harmful of not? So they wanted to do an actual biomedical study, and they wanted foreign researchers to do it.

I came away from that field trip with that idea, that we could develop a bio-medical study [that eventually showed that] the receptors of the brain were improved. Maybe we thought they would have an improved immune function, we didn’t really have any idea what it might be .

RAK> There seems to be a growing influence by science in general and Big Pharma – big pharmacological companies to engage in ‘bio-piracy’.

DENNIS> Uh, yeah, yeah. There has always been some degree of interest from Big Pharma to look into Amazonian plants for potential sources of new medicines. At one time I wanted to develop a standardized preparation of ayahuasca and file an IND in the United States and do a clinical study to look at it’s potential for the treatment of alcoholism... But then I had an epiphany a while back. The FDA is never going to approve and IND, that is, an Investigational New Drug application for a plant that, for a medicine that not only is a plant, but a plant that contains a controlled substance.

I’m still curious about ayahuasca and I still think science can tell us a lot about ayahuasca. But I have given up my pharmaceutical ambitions to turn it into a drug, or a drug that can be used clinically. I’ve gotten a strong message that… ayahuasca is a sacred thing and I don’t want the pharmaceutical industry to co-opt it. I think that those who need to find ayahuasca will find it. I think ayahuasca will find those it needs to find.

RAK> How much of you as a scientist believes that the chemical structure [of ayahuasca] can be replicated versus how much of it is the spirit of the plant, the shaman or the practioner administering the plant that is involved in the outcome?

DENNIS> Well... Um... I think that in the practice of ayahuasca a lot of it has to do with the shamanic practice and the spirit of the thing.

RAK> Apart from the science, how do you feel about the countercultural interest in ayahuasca and indigenous medicines that’s really booming at the moment globally?

DENNIS> I’m not sure how I feel about it. I think that it’s sort of inevitable. I think that in the global culture, in the world culture a great many people are spiritually bereft. I think that the conventional religious institutions and other type of institutions that have normally sustained society are now seen to be simply empty, and without meaning, or actually inimical to the survival of our species.

And I think there’s a great deal of anxiety, whether it’s expressed or not, about the global crisis that we’re in. And I think the people are turning to indigenous traditions in search of something, something more meaningful.

RAK> You wrote the recent document from 2005, “Ayahuasca and Human Destiny”, and I guess for me reading that it seemed a bit of a positive manifesto of the potentials of ayahuasca for Westerners.

DENNIS> Absolutely. I don’t think you can arrest this. I think it is a positive manifesto. The agenda that’s been manifested is not our agenda -- it’s ayahuasca’s agenda. And it works in a co-evolutionary way. I don’t believe that you can fence indigenous people in and protect them from the outside world, that’s not the right message. It’s not even possible because people are going to inevitably come down to places like this [Iquitos] and look for whatever it is they can’t find in their own traditions. There’s always been this cross-cultural fertilization. I mean, shamans have websites now, and things like that. And that’s okay, I’m okay with that.

RAK> Do you think that the West is perhaps getting what it needs? In the last 50 years or so of Western history there’s been the beatniks and marijuana, acid and the hippies in the 60s, rave culture and ecstasy in the 80s and 90s, and now in the 00’s ayahuasca is coming in? It seems that every successive generation needs to reconnect via some drug, and now it’s going back to an indigenous way?

DENNIS> In some degree I think by increments we’re learning maybe how to do it better. I think that the thing that maybe distinguishes the global interest in ayahuasca from these other movements is that they lacked a context. They lacked a tradition. The reason so many people got into trouble with psychedelics in the 60s was that there was no context. It just sort of appeared on the scene and the chief spokesman for the whole thing was Timothy Leary. And he was in some ways hardly an admirable figure. He had his own agenda, which was fame and recognition, and he’s kind of a trickster figure. But there was no context. The same with rave culture in a sense.

RAK> Your late brother Terence was quite a prominent figure in the 90s representing psychedelics in the rave scene, and he had a very positive agenda as well.

DENNIS> I think ultimately he had a positive agenda. I think even Timothy Leary had a positive agenda. But I think the rave culture... there was a Spanish [doco maker] here before and he said it’s really cut loose in Spain... And people go to these venues and they dance all weekend and they’re totally loaded on ecstasy all the time and it means nothing. They get nothing out of it.

RAK> The West is actually bereft of elders in an indigenous sense and we hunger for them. It doesn’t have that structural history and people like Terence became an elder of the global tribe...

DENNIS> Yeah, and really urging people, I think, to rediscover the sacred. His whole notion of the Archaic Revival was right on, in a sense. And I think that’s what you’re seeing with ayahuasca, it’s not just the substances that you have to rediscover, it’s the sacredness and the context of their use, the traditions. And so I think the interest in ayahuasca is encouraging in that people are waking up to the fact that you have to rediscover not only the substances but the context for their use and are looking to these archaic traditions where people have developed over millennia ways to relate to these plants and these substances.

RAK> It seems like a lot of the indigenous cultures are chasing the Western dream of materialism at the moment, yet at the same time in the West people are chasing the indigenous dream, so maybe it’s balancing out.

DENNIS> That’s right. And then there’s the whole other aspect of the global culture, what I call the Corporatist Fascists who basically want to control everything and want to suppress both of these things because they think that they should own the world. And that the rest of the world, that their job is to be consumers and workers and shut up and not cause trouble.

RAK> You call ayahuasca in your manifesto, “Ayahuasca and Human Destiny”, a “Holy Grail for our species”, or a potential Holy Grail for our species. Do you think it can heal the world?

DENNIS> (pauses)... I hope so, because something needs to (laughs)... I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean I think it has the potential to. But I’m a worried optimist in a sense. I think the world is in serious need of healing and in serious need of waking up. I think there are a lot of trends happening at the same time...

Some very positive trends like the global ayahuasca movement and the rediscovery of the Archaic. I think this is an encouraging thing but there are a lot of bad things happening, too, in the world. The destruction of the environment, the changes we’re making to the global climate, the unwillingness of the powers that be to even acknowledge that this is going on, let alone do something about it. The implementation of the global police state, the implementation of a state of perpetual war. I mean terrorism, c’mon! This is a smokescreen.

RAK> It’s Dominator Culture having it’s last wrestle trying to control the steering wheel.

DENNIS> Exactly. And they’re very powerful, very dangerous and very ruthless.

RAK> Does it seem sort of ironic and yet balanced again that while Dominator Culture’s trying to wrest control, the spirit of the earth or of nature is actually seeding all these things and going out again to try and regulate the human monkey out of control?

DENNIS> Yeah, well, totally. I couldn’t have said it better myself. This is exactly what it’s doing.

This has been an excerpt from a larger interview from the forthcoming "Ayahuasca Sessions" anthology featuring conversations with curanderos, shamans and Western plantworkers. It was first published in this format by High Times magazine July 2007.

Dr Dennis Mckenna will be in Australia in November speaking at the Entheogenesis Australia 2007 conference.

In the classic 1936 propaganda movie 'Reefer Madness', a good young man is seduced into the ways of "marihuana… the new drug menace which is destroying the youth of America", and descends into a nightmare of crime, rape, murder and eventually madness. According to the movie, now a cult classic on the stoner circuit, 'Marihuana is... [a] drug – a violent narcotic – an unspeakable scourge... ending often in incurable insanity." Well, at least they got the last bit right. Over seventy years since the first wave of marijuana demonising, the “incurable insanity” has well and truly set in with politicians worldwide, and shows no sign of abating. Around 39 per cent of our population are reported to have tried the devil's weed, and crop sales are worth an estimated $5-8 billion Australia-wide. With the clash between official rhetoric and the cultural experience as wide as ever, a fresh wave of ‘Reefer Madness’ is sweeping our nation, fuelled by stories of mind-bending ‘hydro’ cannabis and drug war clichés that hide deeper-seated issues.

This is nowhere more apparent than in the sleepy hippie town of Nimbin, in the Lismore Shire of NSW’s North Coast. Walk up and down Cullen Street in Nimbin on any day of the week and you’re sure to be asked if you need any weed, mull, pot, green, ganja, smoke, marijuana or any of the other colourful names the most prolific cannabis plant is know by. The green dollar is what supports all the businesses here and it's the foundation of the economy. Local traders estimate half a million tourists come to the town each year, drawn by the scent of marijuana. But while Nimbin might be Australia’s answer to Amsterdam, it’s also in all-round Aussie heartland, half redneck and half hippie, or that blurring line between the two cultures you have to expect after a generation of interbreeding. The footy’s on in the pub and the Tabaret’s doing a roaring trade, about equal to the Hemp Bar. Bearded blokes with big potbellies in t-shirts and thongs chat to weatherbeaten farmers in their utes as Japanese and European backpackers in tie-died gear and big bloodshot eyes wander by. It’s just another country town – that happens to grow and smoke dope.

And despite 25 years of sustained cannabis use, I can’t see any of the psychotic casualties that the propaganda films warn about. Okay, there’s a wizened old dude with no front teeth and a long elven beard walking by, a cheerful relic from the Rainbow Days of the 1970s when Nimbin was overrun by idealistic hippies from Sydney hosting the 1972 Aquarius Festival. The alternative culture that settled here considers cannabis to be a sacrament. It’s a hardy plant to cultivate and grow, and a whole generation of hippie farmers soon discovered it could generate a cashflow to make them happy, healthy and self-sustainable. But local outrage and conservative drug laws quickly saw the media popularise the town as a drug culture, which drew people to the town for drugs and helped fulfil the negative stereotype.

To combat this Nimbin also became home to the Help End Marijuana Prohibition (HEMP) movement and the Hemp Embassy, the stoned nerve centre for this idealogical war, established in 1992 to promote drug law reform. Today the Hemp Embassy is a rainbow-trimmed wooden building with a hand-painted mural above the street level, where most mainstream businesses have their logo. Underneath an Egyptian Eye of Horus in a rainbow pyramid, a green hemp goddess holds a perfectly rolled joint, standing on a sign, which reads “Holy Smoke”. At exactly the same level as the rainbow eye in the pyramid hangs the black lens of a surveillance camera, conspicuously attached to an eight metre long metal pole on a forty-five degree angle. Directly under its gaze this morning there’s a scruffy guy in his 40s in an orange jacket and green army camo pants nonchalantly dipping into his bag of weed spread out on the sidewalk and doing a deal for a passing customer.

He’s underneath one of six surveillance cameras monitoring the action and piping the footage to the police station 500 metres away, to a security room where a watchman presumably looks on in bored familiarity at the largest and most sustained act of civil disobedience in Australia by the most surveilled town in the nation. If the cameras are any indication, Nimbin could well be ground zero for the war on marijuana currently being zealously waged by the NSW government, like so many worldwide. Since the 1961 United Nations Convention, which prohibited cannabis cultivation, this war on nature and those who use the cannabis plant has cost untold billions of dollars and made criminals of millions of people. The convention is policed by the International Narcotics Control Board who regularly advise and stir up regional and international governments on the issue.

In 1998 the Control Board urged signatory nations, including Australia, to “devise strategies for the attempted elimination of cannabis use within 10 years”. In June, 2006 Morris Iemma’s NSW state government seemed to comply when it introduced legislation first mooted in 1999 to create a separate offence for the indoor cultivation of hydroponic or ‘hydro’ marijuana, which they claim is up to seven times more potent than organically grown ‘bush buds’, with further allegations that it has a direct link to mental illness. Penalties and fines of between $395,000 and $550,000 or 15 years imprisonment for the cultivation of commercial quantities of indoor-grown drug plants are now in force. NSW Premier Iemma quotes “Canadian research” for his claims, which are unsubstantiated and refuted by academic and health professionals, as well as growers and users themselves.

“The THC might be slightly higher today than 20 years ago due to various strains, but it's only a few percentage points stronger,” says Kog, a friendly, beer-bellied local in his 60s with red cheeks, a greying ZZ Top beard and long curly grey hair. “The scare campaign for hydro weed just isn't true. This whole Prohibition thing's based on fear. The police try to get the fear into you. What I'm on about lately is turning that fear around and showing no fear under any circumstances. Grow your plants with love and have no fear. No fear. If you do that, you'll beat them. “

Kog has that righteous look of a man who stands by his convictions, even if they lead to the wrong side of the law. He’s been growing pot for over 24 years, but after being busted and serving time in jail 12 years ago he became a spokesperson for the legalising marijuana movement. He’s recently released a book and DVD called Marijuana: A Grower's Lot, to help other people learn how to become sustainable growing the cannabis staple crop.

“I'm basically a farmer, and the crop I grow is green. It's a simple process, you've just got to take a seed and plant it. I've tried growing commercial quantities of potatoes, carrots, cabbages – I used to be an organic vegetable grower, I tried all that and the only thing worth growing is marijuana (laughs). By a mile. I've never made a fortune, but I do earn $20-30,000 a year. It pays the bills and I live pretty simple. I have the farm with the wife and four kids, and it's enabled me to survive. And there's a lot of people just like me. The majority of people I met in jail were in there like me, for growing pot. We're all prisoners of war.”

Speaking of war, there’s oil in those there hills, but it’s hemp oil. At a time when other Aussie farmers are being hard hit by climate change and other pressures, these grassroots success stories only hit the headlines when they're busted and their crops seized and burnt in the ongoing War on Drugs that fuels an extremely profitable black market economy. It's all about supply and demand, and according to research the business of marijuana is roughly twice the size of the wine industry and second only to beer as Australia’s favourite consumable.

A 2006 study by the University of Western Australia’s Business School by Professor Kenneth Clements and co-author Xueyan Zaho of Monash University examined price variations for marijuana around the country, bulk buying and expected revenues if governments could tax the plant. They found that the average annual household spending on marijuana was $758 per household per year, or near $8 billion dollars annually Australia-wide, all of it funneled into the black market economy that prohibition creates and sustains. But if it was legalised, and grown like any other staple crop, like tomatoes, it would be worth the same – about $5.99 a kilo instead of somewhere between $3000-5000 kilo as it is now, and the bottom would drop out of the market.

“The Australian hydroponic industry is the biggest per capita in the world, and we have the highest amount of [cannabis] users per capita in the world,” says Tim Wells, editor of the new cannabis magazine Stickypoint. “There's a lot of growers out there and a lot of stigmas and stereotypes which come with it.” One of the stigmas politicians and the media help perpetuate is that or large-scale organised crime. Yet most of the millions of cannabis users are everyday people forced into criminality by archaic laws that trace their origins back to the 1930s propaganda campaigns designed to oust marijuana and hemp production in the US, which only became illegal with the marihuana tax act of 1937.

Some of these so-called criminals are people who have applied for and are still waiting to use marijuana for health reasons. Rock, a dreadlocked local medical marijuana activist, suffers from constant migraines and other pain resulting from an accident he had several years ago. “I believe in cannabis and I'm standing up for it because it works for me. It might not work for everyone but it does for me,” Rock says, and [the NSW government] is interfering with my medical rights. It's my right to choose.”

There are provisions for the use of medical marijuana to relieve pain for approved patients, but the deck is well and truly stacked against anyone implementing the provisions, Rock says. “[The provision] is so hard to find, so buried, and such a money-spinner plot. It's all about money. If you're a volunteer organisation it's only $15 to apply for a cannabis license, $55 for an institution, and a whopping $495 for an individual. That’s just for the application, though, there’s no guarantee your application will be approved.” Official figures of how many people then succeed in their requests for legal marijuana medication are still unclear.

“Think of how much it costs them to bust people,” Rock tells me. “They can spend millions of dollars but you can't stop people getting high no matter how hard you try. Prohibition doesn't work – we know that. It didn't work in America and it's not going to work here.”

John Kayes, the recently elected Greens member of the NSW parliament (Upper House), agrees. ““The War on Drugs is a failure,” he says, “and its prohibition is destroying our society.”

Then why, one must ask, after all these decades, is marijuana still illegal? Cui Bono – who profits? Not the users who risk arrest and stigma at worst, and paying artificially inflated prices to a black market economy at best. As has been mooted many times before, governments of the world could tax cannabis, like cigarettes, but instead they’re going down the prohibition path in earnest, despite seventy years of unsuccessful banning and mounting evidence of the ease of use of hemp for fuel, fibre, food, medicine and recreation.

Tim Wells from Stickypoint magazine says that Australia's far worse than the US with it's drug war at the moment, where “marijuana is decriminalised in around 16 states in the US, with upwards of 70,000 medicinal permits given out in California, and more states getting on board every day. Europe is extremely liberal towards it, as is Canada. Yet here in Australia we're stuck in the dino-ages with government messages parroting the Ainslinger reports from the 1930s,” Wells says.

Steve Bolt is a Lismore solicitor and the unofficial lawyer for the Nimbin Hemp Embassy. He’s also the author of ‘Rough Deal: A Plain English Guide to Drug Laws in New South Wales’, an indispensable source of information on the sweeping drug law changes and how they affect drug users. He says that the NSW North Coast region is by far the highest in Australia for [marijuana] drug busts. “But despite that, the general population is probably not aware that [prohibition] is really not working. The demand is too high and it's not going to go away, and all you do is influence how people use drugs, normally in a negative way, rather than stopping them using drugs at all. If you're going to use, you're going to use.”

NSW has invested millions into the prohibition approach, and one of it’s new tactics is the controversial saliva-testing drug bus which tracks for “the presence of [cannabis], not [evidence] that you’re intoxicated,” says Associate Professor Dr Michael Dawson, the head of the University of Technology, Sydney’s Department of Chemistry, Materials and Forensic Science. “This is an unjust and unfair piece of legislation,” Dr Dawson says. Not only that, it doesn’t always work. Out of hundreds of samples taken at one of the drug bus’s few outings, the Byron Bay Blues Festival, there were only three test positives. The INTRA outreach drug service later field-tested smokers with the new THC-breathalyser devices that cost $40 per initial test, and had repeated cases where a negative result was returned by people that had smoked, and a few cases where a false positive was returned by people that didn’t.

“I don't think you have a chance of fighting it legally,” says Bolt, and as a solicitor he should know. “I think your only chance is fighting it politically and through civil disobedience. But civil disobedience is a tool of last resort. Unless you've got the political climate right and you're sure that you're not going to be hung out to dry, it's something you've got to think about very, very carefully.”

NSW State Greens MP John Kaye agrees. "I think we have a very long way to go in terms of reforming cannabis laws in NSW. And I think freedom of speech always plays an important role. I can't think of any major gain we have made in the last two hundred years that's been made directly by politicians... First and foremost you need to build a groundswell. You need to educate the community on the issue of cannabis. We're talking a lot more to the community basically so we can overcome the cannabis hysteria that's going on, particularly in the outer suburbs in places like Sydney.

“Our first task is to undermine the propaganda that's coming out of the right wing that says if their kid smokes a joint he's going to go psycho. We've got to get over that. Secondly, we've got to get over the idea that the way to deal with the problem associated with all of these drugs is to have tougher law and order penalties. We have strong evidence that both of those things are not true. And we need to get that evidence out there and make it part of the common conversation. At the same time we're challenging the law, and we need to work out clever ways to challenge this so people don't end up going to jail, but we need to be challenging these laws.”

Which is where the infamous Nimbin Mardi Grass festival comes in. The Nimbin ‘Mardi Grass and Cannabis Law Reform Rally 2007’ celebrates fifteen years of Australian civil disobedience that can only happen when a community rallies round what it believes in. “The Hemp Embassy was started in 1992 by a guy called Bob Hopkins, who initiated Mardi Grass, too, after a particularly bad year of police harassment,” says Michael Balderstone, the grey-bearded spokesperson for the Hemp Embassy and the unofficial ‘mayor’ of Nimbin.

We’re out on the downstairs back verandah of the Hemp Embassy as he rolls a lunchtime joint, surrounded by Salty, the Embassy webmaster, Andrew Kavasilas, hemp activist and author of ‘Medical Uses of Cannabis – Information for Medical Practitioners’ and a few of the other local boys all chillin’ with Bob Dylan one fine weekday afternoon.

“The first Mardi Grass was such a success residents vowed to do it every year till the laws change," Michael says with a youthful exuberance, looking like a bush Santa Claus. “It's a real unique scene here, clearly. We're empowered and I don't think we realise it. People have been on a long, strong journey to get here [to Nimbin]. And throwing a bunch of pot smokers all together... we'll, were all criminalised. But we've got the numbers in the town now.”

They sure do. On the Sunday of the annual May Mardi Grass festival, as six boys in blue look on from the front of the cop shop with tight grimaces, arms folded aggressively, the Plantem, Nimbin’s very own cannabis-powered superhero walks by in his green longjohns with a group of local children carrying the emblem of the Hemp revolution, the Giant Joint. Dozens of Nimbin women, and a few blokes dressed as green-hued Ganga Faeries, amass around peace flags, all of them wailing like banshees to celebrate the humble marijuana plant.

As is the custom, the parade is led by the Ganga Faerie Queen, this time a seven-and-a half-months pregnant local woman who represents the re-birth of the seasons – and “perpetuation of the movement to bring about cannabis law reform”. It feels like a medieval harvest festival as the Big Joint takes off down the main street of Nimbin, flanked with thousands of happy, stoned revelers and locals either side. Take a deep breath: this Nimbin strain of reefer madness is just as infectious as those of the politicians, but it’s a lot more fun.

first published in Australian Penthouse, August 2007

photos: Rak Razam

So I call up the prophet Raël on Skype, talking to him over the internet in far-off Switzerland, where he’s staying in some chalet or something while he pushes ahead with his mission to preach the word of the aliens to save us from Armageddon – if, like, we live righteously and stuff, and give Raël the money to build an embassy for their arrival.

Raël’s assistant has the sweetest, sexy French voice. Her name is Li-Li. She sounds delectable, and if that’s really her avatar on the Skype dial screen she's a hot, caramel-skinned honey. If I was dialing up the Pope, or the Dalai Llama, or any other global religious leader it might be wrong to think lewd thoughts about their personal assistants, but this is Raël, man, ALL his personal assistants are gorgeous, and at the core of his religious teachings is a simple recipe of free-love and feelgood vibes. Like, if I was there in the chalet I’m sure he ‘d be offering me Li-Li and a one-way ticket to the mothership, he’s just that kinda guy. So don’t be so hard on him, y’know, I mean all people with just one name are a bit weird – Cher, Madonna, Prince, Raël, it comes with the fame, I guess, or the enlightenment.

“ALLO, how are you?” the voice of the prophet Raël booms across the internet as I sit here staring at his publicity shot, a star-shaped pendant round his neck, his neat black beard with streaks of grey, balding head and side hair up in a topknot, to be a better cosmic antenna for the subtle vibrations of the aliens’ telepathy, he claims. “You are Rak Razam, and you work for Australian Penthouse?” Raël asks in warm tones. Well, this sure doesn’t sound like the “leader of an alien cult” with “worrying apocalyptic tendencies” as dozens of global media outlets have reported. His voice has a French accent and a light-hearted tone, like a cheeky schoolboy brimming with good humour, like he’s about to burst out laughing at his own joke. “If I may say something about Penthouse? I really love this magazine and I think this magazine ... is very important and has a very big role and responsibility to change the society and destroy the guilt created by the Judeo-Christian civilsation. I am happy to see in many countries more people are joining sex shops than churches. You have more people visiting sex shops in France than visiting church. And that’s great.”

It sure is, isn’t it? How down-to-earth is this guy, hey? I feel like I’m talking to my ribald uncle, not the ‘Guide of Guides’, the founder and leader of the international Raëlian movement, a purportedly 60,000 strong UFO worshipping religion that hit the headlines a few years ago when they claimed to have successfully cloned a human baby named Eve. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Raël says he’s also the Messiah (which properly translated means ‘chosen one’); that his real father was the elder alien we know in the bible as Yahweh; that the bible has mistranslated ‘God’ from the plural ‘Elohim’, which does, in fact, originally mean “those who come from the sky”; that he’s been taken to the Elohim’s planet; cloned; met Jesus his half-brother, Buddha and Mohammed and a few other guys you might remember from the history books; and now he hangs out with a rotating bevy of supermodel Raëlian ‘Angels’ in his own private harem, practising sensual meditation. Like, is that totally Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, or what? Did I mention that he also had sex with biological robot women on the aliens’ home planet? Way cool, dude. Raël is truly a pop-Messiah for a media-saturated world.

It’s early Monday morning in Switzerland, and I wonder if Raël’s wearing white, that 60s Star Trek inspired new age number he parades in the publicity stills, or maybe he’s still in his pyjamas and dressing gown, who knows? If you were a prophet, y’know, and not just any prophet but the last of all the prophets, entrusted with the message of our space fathers and the responsibility of the world’s first post-modern global religion, you’d stay in your pyjamas all day, too, if you wanted to, wouldn’t you? Damn straight. Why, it’s good enough for Hugh Hefner. And when Raël was invited to the Playboy mansion a few months back, he brought along his own sexy Raël’s Angels to stack up against Hef’s playbunnies, like two boys sharing toys. “We had a great encounter – he's a wonderful man,” Raël says. I wonder if they compared their stats? Hef claims to have slept with over 1,000 women, but the prophet Raël is just “a poor young guy, so [has slept with] maybe only 400.” Wow. Like, what a life, eh?

Ah, so, how did this 60-year-old Frenchman end up as the prophet of an advanced alien civilisation? Well, it was like, the 70s and all, and Raël says that everything was “organised upstairs to make it the right time to happen.” After the atomic bomb explosion at Hiroshima in 1945 there was that wave of UFO sightings across the world, which also parallelled the growth of television and shows like the Twilight Zone and Star Trek. Religion stated to decline just as science and consumerism started to rise. Raël’s now buddy, Erich von Däniken, known as the ‘father of the ancient astronaut theory’, was the author of ‘Chariots of the Gods’ and over two dozen books on this theme that popularised the idea in the early 70s that space aliens seeded life on Earth. Raël says Däniken’s bitchin’ that he had all the big ideas but the aliens never chose to reveal themselves to him, but that’s why Raël’s the Messiah and Däniken’s just some wacko.

Raël, or Claude Vorilhon, as he was known back then, had been a minor pop star, releasing a few records throughout the late 60s. By the early 70s he was married with two kids and was almost living his childhood dream of racing cars by running a small motor racing magazine. But one day, he says, he received a telepathic command to go to an inactive volcano called Puy de Lassolas near the capital of Auvergne, France, where in a crater he claims he “saw a very strong flashing light in the sky and then [a] UFO came down and a trap door opened and...” And, well, the rest is history. Our parents from space came down and gave him their message of peace, love and friendship on earth, and invited us, their experiment in genetics, to reach our full potential, experiencing “love, real love.” They charged him to be their latest prophet, waiting for us to be scientifically advanced enough to see the truth of their message, of the science behind creation. On their second visitation they took him to their planet and he had sex with beautiful biological robot women, a blonde, brunette and a redhead. Oh, I already told you that, didn’t I?

Raël claims Yahweh gave him a bible-school intensive on his space ship over six days, explaining the translation problems and the poor understanding of modern and still futuristic sciences like cloning and genetics, space travel and telepathy, amongst others. Raël gathered together all this knowledge in his 1975 tract, ‘The Book Which Tells The Truth, The Message Given to Me by Extra-Terrestrials’, which is like an elementary reader of the Old Testament spliced with 70s sci-fi, but over the last 30-plus years has reportedly sold over one million copies in various repackagings. That may include free downloads as an e-book off his website, exact figures are unknown. Anyway, that’s not the point, is it? Sure, book sales stats can be fudged, so can membership numbers, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. This is a growing worldwide religion with literally, universal themes. Many of the core beliefs of old religions like Judaism, Catholicism and Islam have been retained, like loving one another and our creators. But instead of belief in a supernatural God, Raël brings us another way. “When I checked with what the Elohim claim and compared it with the rationality of the message I received, I think it's a better transmission because it's so rational,” Raël says, with a gravity to his voice like he’s comparing brands in his shopping. “There's absolutely no belief in a supernatural God, or anything like that, so it's more natural.”

“Like, wicked, prophet Raël. But do you think that's just changing the icing on the cake, that instead of saying God created us we can now say aliens created us? Don't we now have to have faith in aliens that still won't reveal themselves to us?” I feel sorta bad for asking questions like this, like I’m going to burst Raël’s bubble or something, but no, he doesn’t mind, he’s been facing skeptical journalists for over 30 years and is used to such incendiary questioning. “And there’s been thousands of reports of UFO sightings over the last few decades, so what makes yours so special?”

“I think what makes it special is that I am supposed to be the only messenger,” Raël says mirthfully, like he’s explaining it to little child. “A lot of people, millions of people may be seeing UFOs, what people on Earth call UFOs, but the Elohim told me that I am the only messenger.”

That’s funny, because there’s also a black guy from Vegas who calls himself the prophet Yahweh and who also claims to be a messenger for the aliens, and you can see him on YouTube calling down shining lights for reporting TV cameras – maybe they’re different aliens, I don’t know. Raël does say there’s a galactic brotherhood out there, and the Elohim aren’t our only space brothers. But Raël is definitely the one and only prophet of these aliens, and they’re the only ones offering to save us from our own ignorance if we blow ourselves up with our atomic weapons, so don’t diss them, alright?

“We have a lot of people watching us on the ‘Cosmic You Tube’ right now,” Raël chuckles,“ and they are laughing so much. It's like being a primitive tribe when the coke bottle comes from the sky. For primitive people right now, and I think it’s very famous in Australia, the cargo cults in the Pacific Islands where they are awaiting the return of the Americans who created their religion. You know about the cargo cults?” Raël pauses to make sure I’m still following him.

“Yes,” I say, wondering just who are the primitive people, exactly.

“It’s the same thing – everything coming from the sky must be Gods. There is a movie that I love – I don’t know if it was made in Australia or Africa, I don't remember – The Gods must be Crazy.”

“Cheech and Chong! Yes!”

“You have seen this movie?”

“Yes, I have seen this movie.” For a second I wonder if the prophet likes a smoke himself, but then I remember Raëlians don’t do drugs, including tea, coffee and alcohol. Except that red wine is okay, y’know, ‘cause he’s a Frenchie and all. Gambling’s bad, too, except maybe for that time Raël was video-tapped betting by two amateur documentary-makers at the casino in Vegas after a spiritual awakening seminar. I dunno, maybe some things are ok, we’re all human, after all.

“When the Coca-Cola bottle falls from the sky in the plane?" Raël chortles, holding back a giggle. "And the primitive people think the Gods must be crazy to send us this thing!” and finally he laughs. "And this is the same process. When you are primitive everything you see in the sky is Gods. And then when you evolve, then you place satellites around the earth and you go to the moon and you don't think things around you are things connected to a God or something supernatural."

Haw, that’s my favourite scene, too. I feel like slapping my knee and having a good old laugh at the way we always get things so wrong. Raël is so gosh darn funny. It’s like he’s always telling a joke and the whole world is in on the punchline, and as I bask in the warmth of his humour, I get the same feeling I got as a small boy looking at the watercolour pictures in my children’s bible. Like Jesus was my big brother, and maybe now Raël could be, too. Which makes sense, kinda, since they’re related and all.

For such a cool dude, he seems to have made a lot of enemies, but that’s jealousy, I guess. Raël says the Catholic church is real pissed at him, y’know. ‘cause not only does he and his religion promote gay rights, contraception, divorce… and cloning, my mate Raël is also personally responsible for the de-baptising of over 20,000 Catholics, which requires a permission slip from the Vatican. “As well as the Israelis all the Christian people are afraid to lose all their power. It’s very simple. They see it as a market and there’s a new competition, which is very dangerous,” Raël says.

Then there are the Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders who have come down real heavy on the Raëlian company CloneAid, saying it encroaches on the power of God, who “created Man in his own image.” There was also a little mix-up over the use of the swastika within the Star of David as the central Raëlian symbol. Raël says the star-swastika symbol “is formed by interlocked triangles which means ‘as above, so below’ enclosing a swastika which means ‘all is cyclic in infinite time.’” The swastika really is an ancient religious symbol which predates the Nazi’s appropriation of it, but it didn’t go down Raël well, heh, when the Raëlians wanted to build their space embassy as the Third Temple in Jerusalem.

“I am surprised every morning to be still alive,” Raël says, but maybe the aliens are helping him there, as always. “The Moslems, also, you know what they think … I’m surprised also that they haven’t decided to kill me yet. There was also a fanatic Buddhist group that were threatening me with death threats. At a hotel in Bangok just before a public speech I received a letter that said 'if you talk tonight about Buddha in your public speech we will kill you'. I was rolling on the floor laughing.”

Y’know, maybe there is hope to unite the world, after all. If the four main religions can finally unite over something, even something bad, like killing the prophet Raël, then maybe the aliens’ plan of global enlightenment is coming to fruition after all. Who knows, maybe it’s not just the message, but the medium that’s important. Maybe the real meaning is in the way that ideas themselves can stir up a planetary hornet’s nest and shape our world.

“You know what I don’t understand with any of these religions, Raël? The way they all get fixated on the messenger, and not the message. Does it really matter who says it, or where they got it from, if the message is good?” I bemoan, and Raël seems to know where I’m coming from. Does it matter if it was a long white bearded dude in the heavens or an olive-skinned alien from the stars, that Raël is a loveable rogue or the long-awaited Messiah the Jewish faith has been waiting for? I dunno. Maybe. As Raël says, “There was a study for the top rabbi in Israel talking about me, and saying, 'we don’t agree with him, but let's be careful, in case he's really the Messiah!’" he chuckles.

“Have you seen that movie, 'Monty Python's Life of Brian?’” I ask. “Where they say, "He's not the Messiah, he's just a very naughty boy!"

“I love it,” Raël says, and laughs. “I love it, all these, all the Monty Python... The Meaning of Life is one of my favourite movies, also...”

Y’know, it’s not only sex-shops that are better attended than churches, it’s television, the internet, shopping malls and consumer culture. And in an over-stimulated global village, a unifying, digestable idea like space alien saviours is the type of thing that could just about float as a global religion. Like a planetary cargo cult the Mcpopulace is ready for the new message of Raël, of spiritual truths synthesised from old religions, for the free love, for the expansive cosmology that integrates and puts science at its core as the driver. Raëlianism might just be the religion of the 21st century, because in the end you get what you’re ready for.

“Raël, I know what you should do, dude. It’s all about target markets. You need to update the message of the Elohim with some advertising spin, yeah, override the old religions and reach new audiences who are into new mediums… like Reality TV.” Get some TV company to fund the embassy and get those Raël’s Angels hotties out there with some boobie action and let’s just see if those aliens don’t come down for some good lovin’!

“You are right on. And that’s exactly what we are preparing. We sign a contract, which is still in negotiation with a Hollywood company...” Raël says excitedly.

“You’re kidding?! I just had this idea the other night for the 'RAËL WORLD’!”

“Yes, we are really talking about it. The internet is our best tool now. Before, there were Raëlians everywhere spreading pamphlets and all that, but now that's finished. With the internet we have thousands of people reaching us in 27 languages, and we have the future, because the future's of us.”

Listen, I know what you’re thinking, but who knows? Wouldn’t you like to live forever and have sex with aliens? Dreams can come true, and if you build it, they’ll either come, or you can sell people the t-shirt and DVD and make a good prophet at the same time. The media is the medium IS the message, and as Raël so happily epitomises, we are all UFOs.

And I’d like my biological robot super-woman to be blonde, thanks.

originally published in Australian Penthouse, June 2007

Friday morning, day one - "Hippies, hippies... they want to save the world but all they do is smoke pot and play frisbee!" – Eric Cartman, South Park


I wake to the sounds of a cluster of Japanese girls camped next door, their voices mixing with Spanish, German and thick Aussie accents. Renegade soundsystems pump out thumping electronic beats that fill the dusty air. The ever-present doof doof doof of the music is so ubiquitous you eventually forget it’s even there. We’ve run out of beer, but it was only a slab between three thirsty blokes and it should have been expected. All around us party crew are camped next to their vans and cars, an endless gypsy village covered in layers of dust. The camps touch upon each other in every direction, a vast, fractal tent city that folds in on itself like architectural origami. It reminds me of the way insects make their homes, of a hive consciousness. North American tipis and flags of all countries are mixed in with ancient symbols and psychedelic images. It looks like civilization after the fall, after the oil peaks and the power shortages kick in.

I’m here with my friends Matty from Byron and Kaptain Khaos from Paris and a slew of aging dancers that have come out of retirement to celebrate the 10th anniversary Rainbow Serpent Festival, a four day celebration of “soul and technology”, according to the organizers. Here in Australia the outdoor party scene has been flourishing for over a decade at bush ‘doofs’ (named after the bass beat of the electronic music), where ‘doofers’ revel in Trance music, community and enhanced states of mind. “Since the first gathering in 1998, Rainbow has become a popular annual get-together for thousands of like minded people,” says Frank Venuto, one of the festival’s founders. Rainbow Serpent is a landmark of the Global Trance music calendar, where semi-retired doofers like myself mix it up with the young turks of the dancefloor and the old hippies that can still shake it.

As I walk down by the edge of the property I marvel at the thousands of punters still streaming in from the main road, waiting in bumper-to-bumper gridlock to get in. By the peak of the festival there's over seven thousand people from all over the world living together like counter-culture refugees, gathered together here in the Aussie bush. Yet there’s an unspoken thing about Global Trance culture and the Trancers that carry the beat. For the festival is not just about music, or art, or any of the things advertised. The real essence of Rainbow Serpent is the people, and the vibe, and what they do in the time and space outside the normal rules and mores of civilization. This is a wild space, a ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’ as anarchic philospher Hakim Bey has called it, a ‘liminal’ space on the edges of possibility where anything goes and everything is possible. A hedonistic orgy of the senses where designer states of mind blend with the electronic music and wild psychedelic art, and all I have to do is dance… if I still can.

The beautiful people are here – the cream of the crop of the global tribe, twirling their staffs and playing Frisbee in the morning light. Ferals, suburban groovers, mums and kids and beer drinking bogans, faeries and freaks all in loud clothes and knitted cardigans, bedspread pants and capes are milling about in hedonistic orbits, their hair adorned with feathers. The bush groovers are swathed in earthy tones of brown and black and green on clothes with an Eastern cut, overlaid with stencils of trees, birds, and nature prints. There’s a sea of bare chests and fisherman's pants, straw hats and five-dollar petrol station sunnies crossed with an 80s-retro chic; mad trippers everywhere except when everyone's doing it, it doesn't seem that mad at all.

This is the great counter-cultural dream, mate, forget the 1/4 acre block of land and the AV Jennings house and the Hills Hoist – these revelers have embraced the market area dancefloor as their temporary home. Banana lounges litter the edge of the dirt floor, pockets of hard leisure going on, punters drinking and smoking and consuming like hungry caterpillars fuelling an alchemical transformation as speakers pump out mega-bass and the crowd sways rhythmically to the music. Hundreds of multi-coloured doofers are bumping and grinding out there, thumping up a storm. This is the “Archaic revival” – a tribal mode of living, coasting from festival to festival across the world in search of the perfect beat.

“People are having some profound experiences out in the bush amongst the trees, dancing,” says DJ Krusty, a Trance tribal elder with wise eyes and long dreadlocks who has been involved with Rainbow Serpent since the early days. “This kind of stuff has been going on for centuries – people going out and dancing outdoors. It doesn't matter whether you're an African culture, a Middle-Eastern culture or a European culture, a North-American culture, a South American culture, an Eskimo culture; whatever. They're all dancing, all the time. Western dominator culture doesn't like that because it's all about control. The dance frees the body up and moves it around, allowing consciousness to expand into a larger state, or to go within to find the universe inside.”

Right now the crowd is chattering and buzzing and quicksilvering around each other on the dancefloor, hot skin sweating as the dancers pump and pound the dirt and clouds of dust plume up and layer us all in the skin of the earth. I shouldn’t have worried; dancing is like riding a bike – you never forget how. The music floods through us like the wind and we are all connected together, here, now, in this single moment in the heat of the day, until it feels like we're all dancing on the skin of the sun…

Saturday, day two - "Never take a drug named after a pound of your ass," – Matty L, Byron Bay



It's cold and rainy today but a cloud of dust still hangs in the air. "I love life! Life is a party!" says Kaptain Khaos as he puts on a Mexican wrestling mask under his hoodie, like Dr. Doom in the bush. "His face was scarred with acid", I tell the startled revelers he’s terrorizing by dry humping a fluffy five-foot blue chimp in the bushes.

The doofers are on the dancefloor, of course, moving to the syncopated beats like trees in a storm, their limbs blown this way and that by the sounds. They gesticulate wildly with their hands, surfing the music with them to express what words cannot: the secret language of the dancefloor. There's little verbal communication because that's one of the lower forms of consciousness; instead everyone looks, they stare at others staring at the others, all of us groking one another over and over in all our multi-faceted diversity. And every face you see has the same look on it, mirroring and reflecting each other. Our bodies are 60 percent water and as the sound travels through them we become one big skin, sexing through the dirt.

Roving performers snake through the crowd: mermaids, harlequins, faeries with painted faces and Japanese girls with white angels wings, to name just a few. Three beautiful tribal goddesses in white are dancing a dance of purple veils, looking like pinups from a 1970s macrobiotic lifestyle calendar, eco-sex symbols. They’re flanked by all-Aussie farmer boys in thongs and acubras and girls in bellbottom denim pants with fluro trim and your mum's 70s hand-knitted organic wool jumpers with Mayan glyph necklaces. To my right on the edge of the dancefloor a beautiful blonde girl is making love to a hula-hoop as it gyrates around her hips and breasts and up to her neck in an endless spiral, and I’m loaded; everything’s organically melting into everything else, people looking at people watching people in a human kaleidoscope.

As night falls the Main Floor opening ceremony starts with some haunting digderidoo and a cleansing by the local Aboriginal custodians. They sing sacred chants and smudge the whole dancefloor with smoke and sound, making it ready for the dance. "While dancing their Dreamings, Aborigines spiritually connect themselves to the land and to the Dreamtime,” the RSF website reads. “The drumming of feet during the dance draws the earth into dialogue with the dancers, allowing the ceremony to bring the power of the Dreaming to life." Aboriginals have their own festivals and tribal gatherings, too – corroborees they call them, or sacred meetings. They are places to tell the sacred stories that have been handed down through music, singing and dance, stories like the tale of the Rainbow Serpent itself.

In the Dreamtime, the world was flat, bare and cold. The Rainbow Serpent slept under the ground with all the animal tribes in her belly waiting to be born. When it was time, she pushed up, calling to the animals to come from their sleep. She threw the land out, making mountains and hills and spilled water over the land, making rivers and lakes. She made the sun, the fire and all the colours. And the energy of the Rainbow Serpent lives on in all of us that connect to the land, that dance on its skin and feel the pulse of life running through. Aborigines used hand made paints to act out these stories, just as the doofers dress in their own archetypes and costumes and flair. The fact that this ancient culture is mirrored by a modern electronic one is all the more natural when you consider they’re both doing the same thing: connecting to the spirit.

“It's so awesome this community, the creative community coming together like this...” says Ganga from Ganga Giri, the tribal percussion dance act that’s opening up the night and raising the vibrations. “Thank you for letting us be here on this beautiful dance ground and letting us come here to celebrate life. This is why we're gathered together yeah, to celebrate life!” he shouts down the mike.

“You know it you know it!!!” screams the crowd, crying and clapping.

In the wee hours of the morning the crew and I stumble across a film zone on a little hill near the market. They’re screening a history of LSD, the first flowering of the Summer of Love and expansive consciousness, surrounded by a blur of faerie lights. Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters kicked off modern dance parties in the 1960s with the 'Acid Tests' – a multi-media extravaganza that overloaded the senses and experimented with collective consciousness. Walking through the market after the doco and stepping into a sea of crusty hippies young and old – mostly young– it strikes me that we're living in the world that Kesey and his ilk helped create, that the 60s hippies pioneered, but now Trance/dance culture is a planetary thing.

In the moonlight I bump into an old friend, Kathleen, a dreadlocked woman with chunky Roy Orbison sunglasses and a striped top under a denim jacket, who wants to bend my ear about the culture here: “To me the crux of what makes us a bit different from hippies and other subcultures is the technological growth that has happened...” she says. “These types of gatherings are definitely a seed of revolution in peoples thinking. And I say peoples thinking because it is definitely more than a party. This is definitely more than recreation… There’s a growing connection to earth and tribalism, a greater respect and understanding of humans place on the earth.”

As I look up at the stars Comet McNaught blossoms into life and lights up the night like the tail of a cosmic peacock. It's biblical–thirty million miles long and tonight it shines down on us like an auspicious omen as the party tribe revels under the stars. The sound of drumming reverberates through the night as a green laser pointer cuts through treetops. Cosmic, it’s getting cosmic, man…


Sunday, day three – “étais là, halluciné ça" – Col. Kurtz, Sydney


A dozen feral drummers in earthy tones and dreadlocks have melted out of the night and congregated in the Chai Tent as the bushniks sip drinks and roll endless joints. The drummers thread themselves into rhythms within rhythms, weaving their primal tattoo around the warmth of the tribe. A bald, Buddha-like gypsy called Arizona slips out into the middle of the drumming circle and shakes a tambourine as he begins a belly dance, mesmerizing the crowd like a snake charmer.

Col. Kurtz, a mid-40s uber-tripper from Sydney dressed in a princess tiara and a Kylie Minogue necklace, is holding five tall peacock feathers like plumed staffs as he focuses his red headtorch beam at them and stares into the infinite eyes of God. The drumming goes round and round in peaking waves, a dense tribal temple beat that scoops up all the stoned minds and carries them away on journeys of the spirit.

COL. KURTZ: There’s a neat French phrase, "étais là, halluciné ça".
RAK: Which means?
COL. KURTZ: Which means, "Been there, hallucinated that". But in French it sounds better.

I know what he means. There are the bits of the culture you can only understand after being in a big acid mosh pit for three days. “Do you know what I think? I've developed this theory that the dancefloor is a canvas full of something akin to junk DNA in the body of the species. When it's 3am in the morning and you're all there, coagulated into a group mind and your sweaty little bodies are doing what they do to the beats, everyone's getting on that same wavelength. And everyone's looking around and doing the vogue thing, but in those lookings it's like the beast with a thousand eyes, it’s one fluid consciousness... And something jumps from person to person like a wave packet in the quantum foam, some essential essence that we're all channelling out there in the mix...”

“I get that all the time on the dancefloor, all the time,” Col. Kurtz says, staring at me with big, dilated eyes, his $2 shop tiara glinting in the light. “We reflect each other – it’s the group mind. That's what the whole dancefloor experience is about, really.” And then he’s lost in the eyes of the peacock feathers and the sound of the snake dance all around, the smell of hashish.

A dark-haired girl in Prada-feral wear and a big smile yells out, “Yavoo makoshhhey....!” and spills her cup of chai. It’s Serbian for: "It’s the only way it can be,” she tells me. “That’s the way it is. That’s the way it should be.” She’s right, of course. It's probably anti-capitalist, but the tribe seems to share whatever they've got on them – water, beer, tobacco, joints, smiles, freely offering tribe-mates and the extended friendship circles their abundance. Right here, right now, all of us hanging out here in the bush, on the same wavelength, we all know we’re part of something special. And all we have to do is live it.


Monday, day four - "We are all of us a mirror to the sky" – Japanese Trancer, Tokyo


The potporri tent city stretches out ahead of us in the Monday morning sun, but it’s giving away to entropy as campers pack up and head back to the city. Everybody’s starting to burn out. The pressure of four days of relentless, full-tilt partying is getting to even the best of us. But the psychic pressure has been building, the invisible essence of the group mind has been rising and this is the day it all goes OFFFF.

We’re on the market floor again as the dancers shimmy across the dirt and merge into a single groove, fuelled by disco biscuits and liquid states of mind. A huge mosh pit hundreds of people strong coalesces under the mushroom petalled ceiling as the sprinklers threaded throughout the webwork turn on and dose the crowd in instant rain and the light catches the water in the air and rainbows shine around us. The dancers' feet hit the earth and their hips hug the beats, thumping electronic Trance that goes right through you and holds you up out there in the primal mix, lost amongst a sea of smiles and grinding bodies wrapped in the cast-off fashions of the global village, all of us in a shared state of no-mind, like a single-cell cosmic amobea on the dancefloor, that's what we've become. Looking around with a thousand eyes and thousands of feet that communicate the single message of our group consciousness: dance.

And just as I'm having that thought about us mirroring each other on the dancefloor and the group mind is peaking, feeling the sprinkler water fall down and drench us all on this hot Monday afternoon in paradise, this Japanese girl tugs on my arm and tells me that my white kung-fu style top is lettered with Japanese calligraphy.

“Do you know what this says?” she asks in delicate geisha tones. I shake my head and keep dancing to the beat. “It is a Buddhist text, like a prayer, many prayers, all of them to God. The first line says something like: ‘We are all of us a mirror to the sky’”. And voom! The satori moment hits, and the group consciousness gels. All of us a mirror, and as the remembrance burns through we shine and shine and shine... It’s us, all of us. We are the Rainbow Serpent, snaking through the dirt in our colorful costumes, channeling the earth spirit. And this old doofer is back home at last, on the dancefloor, where we are all One.

Originally published in Australian Penthouse magazine May, 2007

all photos by Firdaus Emir aka Webgrrl www.ozdoof.com

Percy Garcia Lozano comes from a tradition of curanderos and was initiated into the science of ayahuasca at age ten. Now in his early 30s he is one of the new breed of indigenous shamans straddling two worlds – his indigenous heritage and the globalized 21st century. He lives in Iquitos and balances his work between treating locals and the growing rise of Western ayahuasca seekers.

translation by Chuck

RAK: Percy, how long have you been a curandero?

PERCY: I come from a tradition where you are born to become a curandero. You don’t choose to become a curandero. And the person who wants to enter the science of curandismo when he is older, it is because he will be called. He will have a calling.

The tradition I have learned has been handed down to me by my grandfather, who was himself a powerful maestro. So I have been preparing myself [to be a curandero] since I was ten. I am the only grandson that follows the tradition with healing plants. My grandfather – Enrique Garcia Mozombite – prepared me to have the strength to complement ayahuasca and to be strong enough to work with this most sacred of plants. It was a long and enduring initiation, in that the apprentice curandero must come to know not just the kind of plants available and the properties of each, but establish a relationship with the spirits in the plants. It’s a very demanding job being a curandero, and many youth aren’t carrying on the traditions.

RAK: What Is your understanding of ayahuasca and the world of the spirits?

PERCY: Ayahuasca is Quechua for ‘vine of the dead (souls)’, but at the same time, as a healer, we don’t call the dead spirits – we call them Allies. Ayahuasca is medicine. It is strength, intelligence, wisdom and healing. In this way everything is in accord with tradition. While nature represents what life is, ayahuasca is the mother of us all. I have used the vine since I was 14 years old and started on a long series of diets with the master plants. The diets were simple to begin with and as the years progressed my ability to do more intensive diets increased, as did my connection with the plants. It is a long and hard road to travel to become a vegetalista healer, one who heals with plants, especially when this knowledge starts when you are a child. But I learned about the spirit in the ‘vine of souls’, ayahuasca, and how to prepare it, as well as other medicinal plants like chacruna and others...

This is an excerpt from the forthcoming book: The Ayahuasca Sessions, conversations with indigenous curanderos and Western shamans  by Rak Razam. For the full interview download the PDF below.