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!
Jacana Media and The Book Lounge invite you to the launch of journalist Caspar Greeff’s The Ayahuasca Diaries.
The Ayahuasca Diaries is a vine-entangled tale of shamans, jungles, psychedelic substances, a broken-hearted poker player, a few pretty girls (and a couple who aren’t) and several dark temples where smoking and spitting are encouraged… if only to ease access into the spirit world.
In this, the first South African title to chronicle the South American Ayahuasca experience, Caspar Greeff, in the throes of a mid-life crisis, travels to Peru with his father where they are introduced to Ayahuasca, “the vine of the dead”.
The dark, foul-tasting psychedelic brew is made up of the leaves of an indigenous shrub and a jungle vine. While Ayahuasca is believed to transport its drinkers to the world of spirits, the land of the dead, it is also known as “the mother of all medicine” by the Quechua Indians of the Amazon. They regard it as a healer of body, mind and spirit, which enables its drinkers to purge both physical and spiritual toxins.
Documented as a cure for everything from cancer to cocaine addiction, Ayahuasca is a way to clear emotional blocks, to gain a sense of inner peace and an enlightened perspective on life. This lively travelogue takes the reader along on the author’s psycho-spiritual odyssey through the rain forests of Peru and further to Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela and Ecuador where Ayahuasca is taken in the dark of night at ceremonies presided over by shamans who sing otherworldly songs that are both magical and healing.
Greeff’s Ayahuasca experiences ignite in him a renewed enchantment with life that leaves him with a burgeoning sense of self and an intimate connection with the natural world.
Please join us for the launch of the book, where the author will be in conversation with his Sunday Times colleague Andrew Donaldson:
When a close friend is stricken with cancer, Wilna Wilkinson decides to walk the Camino, the pilgrimage of Santiago de Compostela, to find a challenge as close as possible to her friend’s battle against the incurable disease. With no answers on how to cope with the situation, her feelings of helpless ineffectiveness drive her to tackle the 850km journey in the middle of the European winter.
This is the spiritual journey of a woman who chooses to walk alone, in the heart of winter, and who generously offers to take the reader by the hand to share her experience.
On both a physical and a mental level the Camino – from the heart of France into the northern territories of Spain over the awesome heights of the Pyrenees – is a more demanding challenge than any Wilna has ever had to face in her privileged life.
The Way of Stars and Stones offers practical advice and information about walking the Camino. In addition there are spiritual reflections; an overlap of history and personal observation, of perception and of reality, of deep thought and light humour. Wilna candidly introduces the reader to many of her fellow pilgrims and travellers, she pulls you into their conversations, invites you to eavesdrop on their confessions, and to listen to their myriad points of view. She cries with you when you learn their inspirational stories, she laughs with you when their humour fills the refuge dormitories.
2010 is the Holy Year of the Camino and it is estimated that more than two million people from all over the world will be walking this ancient pilgrimage.
The author has pledged all royalties from the sales of this book to cancer research.
About the author
Wilna Wilkinson’s entire life has been a joyful journey of discovery. From the first time she managed to reach the top branches in the big old Belhambra tree in the bottom corner of the garden of the home of her childhood – and discovered that from there she could see not only to the end of the street but even further – she wanted to be out there and learn, and experience more.
Wilna Wilkinson was born and educated in Pretoria. Soon after finishing her studies at Pretoria University, she got down from her tree lookout and set off on her gypsy wanderings around the globe.
As a speech writer, a coach in presentation skills and public speaking – and in particular as motivational speaker – she has travelled and worked all over the world. She had regaled and delighted audiences from Iceland to Mexico, Japan to Canada, Malawi to Brisbane, Birmingham to Bangkok, and trained people in all walks of life to believe in themselves and to speak up for that which they believe in.
A few years ago she packed up her old life and started a new one – in a 13th Century fairy castle (which stands with its feet in the Dordogne River) in the countryside of south west France.
Here she makes her own contribution to the conservation of our beautiful planet by, for instance buying only food from the local farmers. She also makes a cultural contribution to the local community by hosting a monthly ‘Soiree for Interesting Women’, teaching English at the little local university and organising regular musical evenings to introduce exciting new musicians and hosting literary dinner parties to which she attracts some of the best French authors of the day.
“The Camino changed my life completely,” Wilna says. “Because there was so much I could tell, so much I still think about and so much I wanted to share with everyone to get them thinking too, that I had to sit down and write about my experiences and my observations on the pilgrimage. In a way the writing process was reliving and recreating the original experience. I am hoping that it will be the same for the reader.”
And will she walk it again? “You can bet your bottom dollar I will do so the first opportunity I get!”
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.
When a close friend is stricken with cancer, Wilna Wilkinson decides to walk the 
