Yajé, The New Purgatory:  Encounters with Ayahuasca by Jimmy Weiskopf.  Bogotá, Colombia:  Villegas Editores, 2005.  Glossary; illus.; 670 pp.; $16.95 (paper).

Reviewed by Timothy White. Reprinted from Shaman's Drum, Number 72.

Regular readers of Shaman’s Drum may need no introduction to the yajé (ayahuasca) narratives of journalist Jimmy Weiskopf.  Over the last decade, the magazine has published several articles by him, including accounts of his early yajé experiences with Siona shaman don Pacho Piaguaje (first published in 1995, and reprinted in the 20th anniversary issue), and a recent interview (published in 2004) describing his subsequent explorations working with Ingano shaman don Antonio Jacanamijoy and Kofan shaman don Diomedes Doas, as well as his experiences drinking with Santo Daime churches in Brazil. 

An American-born journalist who has lived in Colombia for twenty-five years, Weiskopf is also a translator of books from English into Spanish, and vice versa.  His fluency in Spanish, his journalistic eye for detail, and his intimate familiarity with Colombian culture have allowed him to document the subject of yajé in much greater depth and breadth than most Americans could ever dream of doing.   The richness and thoroughness of his perceptive reporting are evident in this massive 670-page book, Yajé, the New Purgatory:  Encounters with Ayahuasca, which—despite its incredible attention to detail—reads almost effortlessly. 

Yajé, the New Purgatory is organized into two sections, both of which could have stood alone as separate books.  However, because the first section focuses on comparative and theoretical discussions of yajé, and the second focuses on experiential narratives, they complement each other, providing a very informative and intimate look at the practice of drinking yajé in Colombia.  In this reviewer’s opinion, this volume offers one of the most perceptive portraits of the inner world of yajé drinking found anywhere. 

The first section, “Scenario,” provides well-informed descriptions of yajé practices in Colombia and elsewhere—in fact, it could serve as an informal traveler’s guide to working with yajé, providing vitally important advice to novices contemplating taking yajé for the first time, while offering experienced ayahuasca users stimulating insights and new ways of approaching the sacrament.  Drawing upon the best available Western anthropological and ethnobotanical resources, rare Spanish-language research papers and descriptive reports unavailable in English, and his own personal experiences, Weiskopf presents a sensitive, reliable panorama of yajé facts and observations that are often overlooked elsewhere. 

In one chapter, “The Kitchen of Yajé,” Weiskopf devotes sixty-plus pages to scrutinizing ethnobotanical reports regarding the key species and subspecies of plants used in ayahuasca brews; considering pharmacological disagreements over the efficacy of using the primary vine, Banisteriopsis caapi, with or without admixture plants (Psychotria viridis, Diplopterys cabrerana, and Brugmansia sp.); exploring indigenous understandings about the potency of different varieties or parts of the B. caapi vine; and examining the many individual recipes and approaches used while cooking and ritually preparing the potions.  Weiskopf suggests that preparing yajé may be comparable to preparing special regional French cuisines—it is a complex, intuitive art form that cannot be learned from a cookbook, and one needs both experience and intuition to know how best to prepare the potion for the conditions and work at hand.  He explains, “The choice of the plant components; the way they are gathered, handled and stored; the precise balance of leaf and vine; the time spent in cooking; and other material factors all play a role in the potency and visionary power of the finished brew, as do, of course, the invisible ‘energetic’ influences surrounding its preparation, which explains why the Indians are so ritualistic about it.” 

Weiskopf is keenly aware that yajé practices differ slightly from one region to another and from one shaman to another, yet his detailed observations of specific ceremonies ultimately provide readers with an good sense of fundamental practices.  For example, in the chapter, “The Casa de Yajé,” he examines some of the social factors that have influenced the changing ritual structure of ceremonies in Colombia.   At one point, he contrasts the strong familial nature of traditional indigenous ceremonies—where a shaman was called taita (father) or abuelo (grandfather) because he was a family patriarch serving an extended family group—against the newer ceremonies of urban curanderos (healers) who serve loose communities of diverse patients and drinkers, and who are accorded respect comparable to Western doctors because of their professional skills and reputations.  Moreover, as Weiskopf relates various stories of yajé sessions, readers can get a good feel for the varied types of people attending the sessions.  In short, because his observations are drawn from direct experience and supported with practical examples, they can provide readers with a vivid feeling of almost being there.   

Occasionally, Weiskopf’s descriptions wax poetic, but on the whole I appreciate his astute insights, so I won’t complain too loudly.  Some of his most loquacious wording appears in his passages describing the magic of the yajé chants.  For example, at one point, he describes the force of a chant striking him in his gut:   “This chorus is a repetitive, drummed, throaty lour of indecipherable grunts, growls, bellows and snarls.  It surges from the nostrils and viscera of the transported healer, filling the air with the turbid waters and misty banks of the river of milk.  It brings down a drizzle of sand, feathers, blood and saliva; of horns and caterpillars; of spikes and lightning.  It is an amphibian lament that makes us feel the genetic grain of our evolution from the most primitive creatures of the planet.” 

A little later, after discussing how the yajé chants can include archaic ceremonial phrases, bizarre languages spoken by spirits, regular Spanish words, and sometimes even foreign languages, he suggests that the tremendous power of the chants comes not from the words but from the shaman’s identification with the supranatural entities.  He notes that when this happens, the chants take on an unearthly sonority that radically distorts the normal sounds of the words, so they become almost impossible for non-indigenous drinkers to comprehend.  He explains, “Even if it were possible for us to understand the words of the song, the inspiration behind them, which is the white-hot source of their healing power, will be beyond our reach.”

One of the things I appreciate about Weiskopf’s writing is that he combines the practical experience of a dedicated practitioner with the perceptive insights of an alert observer.   After explaining theoretical advantages to conducting ceremonies in a designated “house of yajé”—because familiar places provide secure refuge for the shamans, and physical places absorb, conserve, and magnify certain kinds of energy—Weiskopf observes, “For me, the collection of second-hand leaf fans that were stuck in the thatch of the hut symbolized the way that the house of yajé successively acquired more power, more human warmth, more harmony, with every session that we did in it.” 

Weiskopf is skilled at grounding his generalities with illustrative examples.  After relating how the shaman weaves an invisible magical circle of protection around the sessions, using music, tobacco smoke, incense, and ritual actions, Weiskopf notes, “Not even the experienced indigenous yajecero is immune to the sinister influences that appear in the jungle once you go beyond the reach of the protective circle.”  He describes how novices sometimes are intrigued by the idea of wandering through the jungle under the vine’s influence, hoping to encounter plant spirits and animals, but he warns about the danger that, once separated from the shaman, the novice can come up against spirits too powerful to handle and can fall into a state of terror, compounded by nausea and suggestibility.  Then he relates a story of how one night, during a ceremony, his teacher sent one of his most experienced apprentices to get something from the nearby community, and the man returned visibly frightened:  “Pale and trembling, he told us that he had run across the spirit of a dead taita along the path and that it had taken all of his willpower and prayer to escape from the baleful influence.”

All of the above examples are drawn intentionally from the first section of the book, because I wanted to show how even Weiskopf’s analytical overviews of yajé practices are simultaneously grounded and enlivened by his firsthand experiences.   In the second section, “Narrative of the Living Experience,” which takes up slightly more than half the book, Weiskopf provides even more detailed and equally insightful narrative accounts of specific sessions, or series of sessions, that he experienced while working with different taitas.  Interestingly, because many of the chapters presented in the second section were written sequentially during Weiskopf’s ongoing encounters with yajé, they reflect the evolution of his growth as he evolved from a naive novice drinker into an experienced yajecero, capable of cooking yajé and leading small ceremonies.

Some astute Shaman’s Drum readers may recognize that two of the chapters presented in this second section originally appeared in the magazine, and that they appear here in only slightly modified and expanded form.  Nonetheless, I must say that, despite having read the original articles numerous times while preparing them for publication, I still found Weiskopf’s narrative descriptions in the book to be interesting and insightful.  I invite readers interested in the subject of yajé, or ayahuasca, to read his narratives for themselves.  I am confident that most will find, as I did, that Weiskopf provides an impeccable overview of yajé practices in Colombia, and offers entertaining insights into the dynamic, transformative worlds of yajé.

Timothy White is founding editor of Shaman’s Drum and a practitioner of psychotropic shamanism.