The Ayahuasca Diaries by Caspar Greeff Launched (Far from South America)

November 19th, 2009 by Thando

Introducing Caspar Greeff, author of The Ayahuasca Diaries, at The Book Lounge last night, veteran journalist Andrew Donaldson explained that Greeff had gone a long way – halfway around the world, in fact, to Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and Ecuador, with his elderly father in tow – to imbibe “the mother of all medicines” in his pursuit of enlightenment.

Ayahuasca is used as a religious sacrament performed in various contexts where participants align themselves with the philosophies and cosmologies associated with South American shamanism. Greeff spoke about the spiritual applications of the drug; a less well-known traditional usage focuses on its medicinal properties, which give it the name “la purga”. (An intense period of vomiting is known to clear the body of worms and other tropical parasites.)

Dietary taboos and abstinence from sex before and/or after the ceremony lead, says Greeff, “to a profound sense of integration”. He claimed that ayahuasca is like meeting the best priest, rabbi and psychiatrist – all rolled into one – that it gets you in touch with all your repressed emotions and psychic material. “Six years of psychoanalysis is compressed into one eight hour ceremony,” he said.

At the time of the ceremony he found himself shaking and sweating when the shaman called him to the ceremonial hut. “As you go along, you learn to navigate the territory that Ayahuasca leads you into, but you must do it with a shaman. You should never do this alone.”

Donaldson, a colleague of Greeff’s at the Sunday Times, asked, “So, where did your interior journo cynic go in all of this? At what point did you question the ’sham’ in ’shaman’?”

Greeff said the drug had changed him. He came back believing that everything has a spirit. “Even a glass of beer as a spirit!” he quipped.

And spirits were duly drunk to toast the advent of his book, courtesy Leopard’s Leap wines!

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