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The following interview with Donal Ruane was conducted in May 2006 by Gyrus, and was first published in Dreamflesh Journal Vol. 1.
Gyrus: What strikes you as unique about the experience of ayahuasca?
Donal: It’s a difficult question to answer, as I get more experienced. The reason being that my experience ofayahuasca varies according to who I drink it with, and the brew. It appears to me that how the brews are made, and the additives that are used, and the set and setting in which it is consumed, very much alter the experience.
Last year in Iquitos I had a session with an Indian shaman from the Witoto tribe—a very interesting tribe who have had an awful history of exploitation and abuse, by colonists and by missionaries, who have devastated their belief systems and their way of life. They feature heavily in Wade Davis’ book, One River. I didn’t know much about them until I met this shaman, Don Mariano. He’s from Columbia, along the Rio Negro I think, one of the tributaries of the Amazon. He’s sixty-four years old, and he first started training to be a shaman, dieting with ayahuasca, at eight years of age. So he’s been drinking for a long, long time.
His ayahuasca was very different from the other brews I’ve drunk. My experiences are mainly with two types ofayahuasca. Initially it was with the Church of the Santo Daime, and then later I started to drink with Peruvian shamans.
Now after drinking regularly with the Santo Daime for a few years I started to feel increasingly restricted. I felt the experience itself and the brew itself was controlled and there was pressure to conform to their particular model and ultimately to become a member. The church itself was founded by Raimundo Ireneu, a black rubber trapper, after a period spent drinking ayahuasca in the jungle where he received instructions to found the church from a female spirit who he associated with the Virgin Mary. Ironically enough, Ireneu himself was probably initiated into the use of ayahuasca by a Peruvian mestizo shaman. Of course, the Santo Daime only works within a certain spectrum of what is possible with ayahuasca. This is not necessarily such a bad idea; ayahuasca has the ability to manifest some pretty dangerous phenomena. Let’s say that of all the hallucinogens it is one of the more unpredictable.
Don’t get me wrong, I am enormously grateful to the church. However, as is often the case with such matters, a synchronicity nudged me in another direction. The day I bought the book Ayahuasca Visions I also met Pablo Amaringo for the first time, coincidentally, in a London art gallery where I had gone to meet a friend. Out of that initial meeting, my friendship with Pablo developed so much so, that I decided to visit him in his hometown, Pucallpa, four months later. During that first visit, while talking to Pablo, I realised there was a lot more to learn about ayahuasca than I could possibly learn in the context of the church. The ritual use of ayahuasca in the Upper Amazon region has developed over millennia into a sophisticated science, a plant alchemy with a remarkable mythology of its own.
Now there is a big difference between the Santo Daime brew and the traditional ayahuasca drunk by shamans in Peru—it’s a lot less visionary and isn’t as purging. You don’t enter the remarkable visionary realm, and you don’t get the ‘drunkenness’ which you normally associate with ayahuasca in Peru, which they call mareación—a Spanish word which translates as ‘sea-sickness’…