Filmmaker Keith Aronowitz

The ceremonies proved to be profound. “It was an incredible experience,” Aronowitz says, “and forever changed my life.” He also happened to have brought his camcorder and, just for something to do, he recorded some of the ceremonies and interviewed some of the people who had also journeyed to drink ayahuasca. When he shared his footage, the response was enthusiastic. So he thought: Why not make a documentary?

The film Aronowitz envisioned was deeply personal, so he wanted it to be completely self-funded and under his own control. He spent months teaching himself about documentary filmmaking, and he used the money he had been saving for Vietnam to purchase video equipment. Shooting the film was a challenge, especially because he was working by himself. He used a camera with night vision in order to film the ceremonies without compromising their integrity. But most of all, he says, the challenge was to translate the essentially internal ayahuasca experience into film.

After months of filming in the jungle, additional trips for supplementary footage, and about fifteen rough cuts, Aronowitz felt confident that he had captured the story he wanted to tell. The film, cut down to ninety-five minutes, was titled Metamorphosis.

Don Alberto Torres Davila

Then came more challenges — distributing the film. Once again, despite having a distribution deal, Aronowitz decided he wanted to do it himself. He began with small private screenings while he submitted his work to film festivals. At the 2009 Breckenridge Film Festival in Colorado, Metamorphosis won the award for Best Cinematography. He has shown the film at the Wild Project in New York, and at the Fifth International Conference on Amazonian Shamanism in Iquitos, Peru. He sells the DVD of the film online here.

Metamorphosis follows five westerners — ayahuasca tourists — on a nine-day retreat at the jungle lodge maintained by Blue Morpho Tours, where they participate in five ayahuasca ceremonies. The lodge is run by Hamilton Souther, who has been practicing shamanism for about seven years. “The spirits came along,” Souther says in the film, “and they said to me: You have to go into the jungle and drink ayahuasca.” Souther apprenticed under don Alberto Torres Davila and don Julio Gerena Pinedo, and they now all work together leading ceremonies at the lodge. The film tells Souther’s story, incorporates his explanations of the ceremonies, and portrays the physical, emotional, and spiritual changes through which he guides his guests.

Hamilton Souther

The film does not flinch from depicting the sometimes overpowering physical and psychological effects of the drink. “Everybody who comes here suffers,” says Souther. Aronowitz puts this into his own context. “Fear is not the only thing that takes place,” he says. “You experience divinity. Universal knowledge through visions. Oneness. Love. Your heart opens. You feel connected to everyone and everything. I feel like I had to go to hell in order to get to heaven.”

Blue Morpho Tours specializes in what it calls all-inclusive shamanic workshops. The lodge is relatively comfortable, at least compared to the amenities available in local villages, and has hosted not only tourists but also journalists who have described their ayahuasca experiences in such widely read publications as the Houston Chronicle and National Geographic magazine.

Perhaps because of its success, Blue Morpho Tours has attracted both criticism and defense, largely concerning the commercialization of indigenous spirituality and the effect of ayahuasca tourism on local communities. “Blue Morpho is a unique place,” Aronowitz says, “because one of the shamans is a westerner. He left his life in America in order to learn this healing tradition in the middle of the Amazon. So he’s a conduit to helping other people heal through this tradition.”

Here is a trailer for the film. Additional clips are available here.

Cheryl Lynne Bradley has posted a lengthy interview with Aronowitz, and Adam Elenbaas has an interview on Reality Sandwich. The film has a Facebook page, and Aronowitz recounts his story here. There is an audio interview by Nick Zart on Radiohuasca which you can listen to here:

]]> http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/09/metamorphosis/feed/ 2 http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/08/krippner-on-ayahuasca/ http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/08/krippner-on-ayahuasca/#comments Sat, 08 Aug 2009 14:36:18 +0000 Steve Beyer http://www.singingtotheplants.com/?p=3075 Stanley Krippner, the Alan Watts Professor of Psychology at the Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center in San Francisco, is internationally known for his pioneering work in the scientific investigation of human consciousness, and especially of what he has come to call anomalous experiences — precognitive dreams, parapsychological phenomena, hypnosis, dissociation, altered states of consciousness, psychic surgery, and shamanism. Here is a thirty-minute interview with Krippner on the subject of ayahuasca, the "brutal teacher."
]]> Stanley Krippner

Stanley Krippner, the Alan Watts Professor of Psychology at the Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center in San Francisco, is internationally known for his pioneering work in the scientific investigation of human consciousness, and especially of what he has come to call anomalous experiences — precognitive dreams, parapsychological phenomena, hypnosis, dissociation, altered states of consciousness, psychic surgery, and shamanism.

He has served as President of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, the Parapsychological Association, and the International Association for the Study of Dreams; he is a Charter Member of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation; he is a Fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. He is the author or co-author of more than 900 articles, chapters, and book reviews appearing in scholarly or academic publications.

Stanley Krippner (right) with Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart

It is largely through his efforts that the study of such anomalous experiences — previously ignored, marginalized, or pathologized — has been brought into the mainstream of psychological research. Krippner has insisted unwaveringly over the years that psychologists must take these experiences seriously, and that this seriousness includes unbiased and rigorous scientific examination.

Two events, I think, mark the culmination of these lifelong efforts. In 2000, the American Psychological Association published Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence, co-edited by Krippner, containing scholarly articles examining, among other things, hallucinations, synesthesia, lucid dreams, out-of-body experiences, past-life experiences, alien abduction experiences, and near-death experiences. And, in 2002, Krippner was awarded the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology.

Bruce Eisner, author of Ecstasy: The MDMA Story, calls Krippner “both one of the most important contemporary psychologists and one of the only authentic countercultural icons still living.”

The following is a thirty-minute interview with Krippner on the subject of ayahuasca, the “brutal teacher.” The interview is a mix of reminiscence, reflection, and insight delivered in Krippner’s typically understated manner. There is a characteristic Krippner moment when he looks at the interviewer and says, “I doubt that. I would like to see experimental data.”

]]> http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/08/krippner-on-ayahuasca/feed/ 0 http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/08/niptuck/ http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/08/niptuck/#comments Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:59:49 +0000 Steve Beyer http://www.singingtotheplants.com/?p=3030 I continue to observe, with fascination, the slow infiltration of ayahuasca into American popular culture. And now ayahuasca has appeared — much as it did on the show Weeds — on the hugely popular plastic-surgery soap opera Nip/Tuck. The show is engrossing, in much the same way that a slow-motion train wreck is engrossing.
]]> I continue to observe, with fascination, the slow infiltration of ayahuasca into American popular culture. And now ayahuasca has appeared — much as it did on the show Weeds, which we discussed here — on the hugely popular plastic-surgery soap opera Nip/Tuck.

Left to right: Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh), Julia McNamara (Joely Richardson), Christian Troy (Julian McMahon)

The show centers on the dysfunctional lives and relationships of two plastic surgeons — Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon). Sean is a brilliant surgeon, plagued by self-doubt, pathetically dependent on his wife Julia (Joely Richardson), and easily manipulated by Christian; yet, at the same time, he is himself passive-aggressively manipulative and pathologically unable to resist cheating on his wife. Christian, a mediocre surgeon and a compulsively self-destructive womanizer, depends on Sean for his success, attempts ruthlessly to control him under the guise of their long friendship, and periodically has sex with Julia. In fact, Christian is the father of Matt (John Hensley), whom Sean long believed was his and Julia’s child.

It is little surprise that, in its debut season, Nip/Tuck was the highest-rated new series on American basic cable.

The show is engrossing, in much the same way that a slow-motion train wreck is engrossing. The underlying theme of the show is superficiality in all its forms — the vacuity of the culture first of Miami and then of Los Angeles; the obsessive quest for physical perfection; the commodification of beauty. In its best seasons, and its best episodes, the quest for superficial beauty through plastic surgery mirrors the superficial nature of the characters’ relationships.

In the episode we are considering — the twentieth of the fifth season, based on the widely publicized case of the Indonesian fisherman Dede, called the Tree Man — Sean has been treating a patient named Budi Sabri, whose entire body is covered with overgrown warts, which have become so large and elongated on his hands and feet that they have come to resemble the roots of a tree. Sean has also been dating the sexually voracious and adventuresome anesthesiologist Theodora “Teddy” Rowe (Rose McGowan), who has been trying to loosen his uptight persona — for example, by having sex on the bed of a stranger’s house while it is being shown by a real estate agent. Now they are heading out into the desert on a motorcycle to meet with a shaman; the clip is short enough to be worth transcribing in its entirety:

Shaman: I am a shaman. Welcome.
Teddy: We fasted like you asked.
Shaman: Good. Have you ever experienced ayahuasca before?
Sean: I dropped acid a few times in college.
Shaman: Ayahuasca is much stronger. You’re both about to go much deeper than you ever have before.
Sean: What do you mean, deeper?
Shaman: It is possible under the power of the tea to cleanse yourself of all anxieties and depressions. You can even find a greater spirituality. But there is a price. The Incas call it the vine of the dead for a reason. [Sean drinks and begins to vomit.] The nausea will be extreme. You will want to die. But you must have strong courage and discipline. And if you are lucky, you may experience what is called the murdering of the ego.
Teddy: Actually, I think I’d like to try that.
Sean: Yeah.
[Both drink. The shaman sings, and Teddy begins to laugh. Seam hallucinates that he is confronted by Budi Sabri.]
Budi Sabri: You are petrified, Dr. McNamara. Untouchable like me. Not human.
Sean: I can’t move!
Budi Sabri: That is your curse.
[Sean returns from his vision to hear Teddy still laughing.]
Teddy: This is fantastic.
Shaman: Are you happy now?
[Sean has a vision that he is being rooted to the ground.]
Shaman: Are you happy now? Are you happy now? [Budi Sabri and Teddy both laugh.]

]]> http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/08/niptuck/feed/ 0 http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/03/a-victory-for-santo-daime/ http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/03/a-victory-for-santo-daime/#comments Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:41:00 +0000 Steve Beyer http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/03/a-victory-for-santo-daime/ On March 18, 2009, United States District Judge Owen M. Panner found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act protects the Santo Daime’s use of ayahuasca as a sacrament of their church. The court was guided by the unanimous decision of the United States Supreme Court in the very similar União do Vegetal case in 2006, and concluded that RFRA requires that — subject to reasonable restrictions — the plaintiff church be allowed to import and drink ayahuasca for their religious ceremonies.
]]> On March 18, 2009, United States District Judge Owen M. Panner found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act protects the Santo Daime’s use of ayahuasca as a sacrament of their church. The court was guided by the unanimous decision of the United States Supreme Court in the very similar União do Vegetal case in 2006, and concluded that RFRA requires that — subject to reasonable restrictions — the plaintiff church be allowed to import and drink ayahuasca for their religious ceremonies.

Mestre Imperador Raimundo Irineu Serra, Founder of Santo Daime

The suit was brought by the Church of the Holy Light of the Queen in Ashland, Oregon, led by padrinho Jonathan Goldman, a student of Santo Daime for twenty-one years, who had traveled frequently to Brazil to receive instruction from church leaders, and learned Portuguese in order to understand the hymns that constitute church doctrine. Joining in the suit was a separate church in Portland, called Céu da Divina Rosa, Church of the Divine Rose, and its leader Alexandra Bliss Yeager, as well as several individual members of both churches.

Goldman had been arrested and the church’s supply of ayahuasca seized by federal agents in1999. Counsel for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit attempted to negotiate an agreement with the Department of Justice, which refused to consider a religious exemption for the church. On the other hand, in 2000, the Oregon Board of Pharmacy determined that the religious use of ayahuasca by the Church of the Holy Light of the Queen was a “non-drug” use, and therefore not subject to state drug laws and regulations. Since that time, ayahuasca has had a status in Oregon law similar to that of peyote when used as a sacrament by the Native American Church.

Following Goldman’s arrest, the plaintiffs continued to practice their religion in secret. In 2006, after the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the União do Vegetal case, the plaintiffs commissioned a study of Church of the Holy Light of the Queen members by psychiatrist John H. Halpern, who had written extensively on the use and abuse of hallucinogenic drugs, including a paper on the long-term health of members of the Native American Church who consume peyote as a sacrament — a study we have discussed here.

In 2008, armed with the results of that study and the earlier ruling of the Supreme Court, plaintiffs brought suit in federal court, seeking an injunction that would allow them to use ayahuasca as a central sacrament of their religious practice.

Judge Panner’s opinion provides a scholarly and sympathetic account of Santo Daime history and doctrine in general, and of the practices of the Church of the Holy Light of the Queen in particular — their careful records of ayahuasca purchase and use, their screening procedures for new members, their use of medical questionnaires, their “controlled and supportive religious ceremony,” their security procedures for storing and distributing ayahuasca.

The court was less sympathetic to the claims of the government, particularly its scientific case concerning purported short- and long-term effects of ayahuasca use. “I find studies of LSD and pure injected DMT,” the court wrote, “are only marginally relevant in evaluating the risks of consuming Daime tea in a religious ceremony.”

The court was also unimpressed with the government’s other arguments. For example, the government asserted a compelling interest in preventing the diversion of ayahuasca to recreational users. “The government has not presented evidence that there is a significant market for Daime tea,” the court wrote. “The government also has not presented evidence that plaintiffs have allowed the diversion of a single drop of Daime tea. This is an issue best addressed through reasonable guidelines for storing and inventorying plaintiffs’ supply of Daime tea.”

The court closely followed the legal reasoning of the Supreme Court in the União do Vegetal case, and similarly found that the government had failed to establish either a compelling state interest in forbidding the use of ayahuasca by the church, or that “outright prohibition of the Daime tea is the least restrictive means of furthering its interests.” On those grounds the court found that the plaintiffs were entitled to the requested injunction under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The entire opinion is cogent, clear, sensible, and well worth reading as a road map for the litigation of similar cases in the future.

Ordinarily, we could now expect a long, expensive, exhausting slog to the Supreme Court. But it may be worth noting that, on the same day as Judge Panner issued his opinion, U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told reporters that the current administration would effectively end the earlier policy of frequent raids on distributors of medical marijuana. He said that the Justice Department’s enforcement policy would now be restricted to traffickers who falsely masqueraded as medical dispensaries and “use medical marijuana laws as a shield.”

It is not at all clear whether this might signal a change in administration policy toward the use of ayahausca by such entities as the Santo Daime church. Commenting on this case, Mark Kleiman, a nationally recognized expert in the field of crime and drug policy, suggests that the simplest approach would be for the Attorney General to tell the DEA Administrator to draft and publish in the Federal Register a set of procedures and criteria to deal with cases such as this in the future.

We will see.

Other central aspects of the Upper Amazon culture area, particularly its shamanism, were also not adopted along with the ayahuasca drink. In fact, anthropologist Edward MacRae has specifically pointed out that Santo Daime has not incorporated such features of Amazonian shamanism as virotes, darts, arcanas, protections, phlegm, or Amazonian ideas of the moral ambiguity of the shaman. Rather, ayahuasca was incorporated as a sacrament into a folk Catholicism that had already been profoundly influenced by spiritism and Afro-Brazilian culture.

These religions began in the 1930s, when many Brazilian immigrants moved southwest to the Amazon seeking work tapping rubber trees. Most of these impoverished Brazilian immigrants became sedentary seringueros, but came in contact not only with indigenous Amazonians but also with itinerant mestizo caucheros from the Upper Amazon. Three of these Brazilian immigrants — Raimundo Irineu Serra (1892-1971), Daniel Pereira de Mattos (1904-1958), and José Gabriel da Costa (1922-1971) — founded new religions, mixing African-Brazilian, spiritist, and Christian elements with mestizo and indigenous use of ayahuasca.

The Brazilian new religious movements have developed their own terminology for the ayahusca drink, often distinct from the terminology of their Upper Amazonian sources. Followers of Santo Daime and Barquinha call their sacred drink santo daime or simply daime, based on the words of Mestre Ireneu — daime força, daime amor, daime luz, give me strength, give me love, give me light. The ayahuasca vine, which they call cipo, vine, or jagube, is the masculine, solar aspect of the drink; the added leaf is called chacrona, or rainha, queen, or simply folha, leaf, and is its feminine, lunar aspect. Followers of the União do Vegetal call the drink hoasca or vegetal. The vine is called mariri, representing the masculine força, power, and the leaf is called chacruna, representing the feminine luz, light, in the combined drink. The various churches have also developed ceremonies quite different from those used for healing in the Upper Amazon.

Bia Labate

These Brazilian churches have generated a significant amount of social science literature, much of it in Portuguese. We now have available, however, thanks to anthropologist Bia Labate and her colleagues, including translator Matthew Meyer, a major contribution in English to the study of these ayahuasca churches — a book entitled Ayahuasca Religions: A Comprehensive Bibliography and Critical Essays by Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Isabel Santana de Rose, and Rafael Guimarães dos Santos, translated by Mathew Meyer from the Portuguese Religiões ayahuasqueiras: um balanço bibliográfico. The book is published by — and is now available from — the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

The book consists of three parts. The first is a thorough overview of the history of the Brazilian ayahuasca religions, along with a critique of the main publications devoted to these religions, describing the characteristics, tendencies, and central perspectives in this research area. The second part discusses the most significant scientific investigations — pharmacological, psychiatric, and psychological — that have been published about these movements, including critical discussion of their results, contributions, and limitations. The third part is the most exhaustive bibliography to date on the topic of the Brazilian ayahuasca churches, including texts written in Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Spanish. This list includes not only academic publications but also the texts of the new religious movements themselves. There is a foreword by Ralph Metzner.

More please.

My plant teacher doña María Tuesta had such an initiatory dream when she was eighteen, in which the Virgin Mary confirmed doña María’s destiny as a healer. The dream, as she told it to me on several occasions, was long and complex, and sometimes changed in the telling. But it always began with a beautiful young woman coming and sitting by her side. “Today we are going to go upward,” the woman says, “and see everything that is happening on earth.”

María and the woman go into María’s mosquito net, which carries them up into the clouds to a beautiful green meadow. This is paradise, filled with angels — men and women, adults, children, and babies — wearing brilliant white robes and crowns of sweet-smelling flowers. All the angels start to pray the Ave María and the Pater Noster, holding hands and dancing in a circle around her. As María marvels at the sight, the young woman tells her that she is in paraíso terrenal, the earthly paradise. There are thousands of angels, holding beautiful brightly lit candles, holding up their hands and saying amén in a single voice.

In the dream, doña María sees many more miraculous things and is dressed by spiritual doctors in the white robes of a healer. But that is a story for another time.

A small detail in the dream is of great interest. The fact that doña María is carried to heaven in her mosquitero, mosquito net, has significant symbolic resonance in the Upper Amazon. In crowded households, the impenetrable cotton mosquito net is a refuge of privacy. Even more, shamans of the highest order work secretly within their woven mosquiteros — as pioneering ethnographer Robert H. Lowie says, “in complete darkness under a mosquito net.”

Pablo Amaringo, Spirits Descending on a Banco (detail)

The ability to enter a mosquito net and disappear, or to converse under the mosquito net with the most powerful spirits, is one of the things that distinguishes the Shipibo meraya shaman from the lesser onanya. The mosquito net within which the meraya retreats after drinking ayahuasca is called a bachi, an egg.

Don Francisco Montes Shuña says that the banco — the highest rank of shaman — enters a mosquito net in the middle of the house, lying face down, while all the disciples remain outside. Then the spirits come to the banco from below to talk to him, and to speak through him. Pablo Amaringo has painted a picture of a banco lying beneath his mosquito net while three spiritual beings — a wise old king and two princes — descend and sit on his body. The shaman is here the banco, the bench, for the sprits descending into the mosquitero. Others wait outside the mosquito net to hear these spirits speak through the shaman’s mouth.

A mestizo who heard doña María’s dream would understand, from the mosquito net reference, that she was experiencing an initiation of a very high order.

Josep María Fericgla

The twenty-question Self Report Questionnaire, or SRQ-20, is a screening tool for common mental disorders that investigates nonpsychotic symptoms — depression, anxiety, somatiform disorders — in the month prior to the interview. The questionnaire consists of four questions about physical symptoms and sixteen questions about emotional symptoms, all with yes-no answers — questions about such things as crying, tiredness, and inability to enjoy life. The test was validated in a Brazilian population, and thus is commonly used in South America to identify psychiatric symptoms in a primary care setting.

The higher the number of positive yes responses, the greater the likelihood of psychopathology. The validity study in Brazil reported that a score of more than eight positive responses is an adequate cut-off point to detect nonpsychotic mental disorders. The test was reported to have a sensitivity of 83 percent, a specificity of 80 percent, and both positive and negative predictive values of 82 percent, which makes the SRQ-20 a pretty good little test. Josep María Fericgla, director of the Institut de Prospectiva Antropológica in Barcelona, is an ethnopsychologist and cognitive anthropologist who has done fieldwork with Shuar shamans in Ecuador, and has written widely on shamanism and sacred plants, including a classic Shuar ethnography, Los jíbaros, cazadores de sueños. In his book Al trasluz de la ayahuasca: Antropología cognitiva, oniromancia y consciencias alternativas, he reports on his administration of the SRQ-20 to 113 Shuar, and analyzes the results according to the number of times each participant had drunk ayahuasca in the past.

The chart below should make the results clear. The stacked columns run from zero positive responses on the left to greater than sixteen positive responses on the right — that is, from left to right in order of increasing psychopathology.

The chart clearly shows that Shuar who drank less ayahuasca had higher psychopathology scores on the SRQ-20, and those who drank more ayahuasca had lower psychopathology scores. Put another way, the chart shows Shuar who drink more ayahuasca stacked at the left-hand low-pathology end of the chart, and those who drink less ayahuasca stacked at the right-hand high-pathology end. Of those participants who gave zero positive responses, 72 percent had drunk ayahuasca more than 21 times.

The study also revealed that there appears to be a generally high rate of psychopathology among the Shuar: more than 60 percent of the participants gave eight or more positive responses on the SRQ-20. Fericgla attributes this unusual level to the accelerated process of deculturation that the Shuar were undergoing — the destruction of their traditional way of life, the plundering of their environment by multinational petroleum and lumber companies, territorial conflicts with colonists, the loss of their spiritual values. Even so, the distribution of the high scores is interesting. Of those who gave eight or more positive responses, 72 percent were women, and 35 percent were men. Part of the explanation may be that Shuar women bear the brunt of deculturation more than the men. Another part may be that Shuar men drink ayahuasca at twice the rate of women.

Now, again, what we have here is simply an apparent association between increasing ayahuasca consumption and lower scores on the SRQ-20. The study cannot tell us if there is a causal connection, or, if there is, in which direction it runs. It may be, for example, not that drinking ayahuasca causes better mental health, but rather that people with greater mental health — for any of a variety of reasons — drink more ayahuasca; or even that some third factor — family or social status, for example — is causally related to both.

But the bottom line of this study remains that — consistent with the results of the União do Vegetal study and, indeed, of the long-term study of peyote use we discussed here — there is little evidence that the long-term use of either sacred plant in its ceremonial setting causes any psychological harm, and appears to be associated with mental health benefits.

Back in November of 2007, Santiago, Chile, was the host of the first — and, sadly, never repeated — Hollyweed International Psychoactive Film Festival. The festival showcased an international selection of films related to psychoactive substances of natural origin, such as marijuana, coca, and ayahuasca.

El Grio

The festival was sponsored by the Spanish owners of the magazine Cañamo, or Hemp. Submissions included animations, short films, feature films. and documentaries, with prizes in each category. There were entries from Brazil, Spain, Peru, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, the Netherlands, Colombia and Chile. I am unclear as to whether there was any prize money, but I am certain that everyone had a very good time.

The first prize winner was a short animation by a young Chilean painter and muralist named José Benmayor Mansilla, known as El Grio, who paints oddly compelling cartoon-like and brightly colored creatures on canvas and public walls. “I enjoy creating scenes or situations in my own figurative style,” he writes, “characterized by synthesizing forms in different ways.”

Sometimes I have the scenes clearly in mind when I start the painting, and at other times they appear and start acquiring meaning as the work progresses. The images have a meaning that varies according to the perception of each viewer; different people feel different things when looking at the paintings. I believe this happens because I try to make the elements symbolic and to have a relationship among each other, even if it is not obvious. This also happens with the colors and the way in which I paint. Basically, I try to stimulate and make the viewer feel different sensations — memories, emotions, fears, and so on. My language is close to that of comic books and animated cartoons.

Benmayor’s winning project at the film festival was called Ayahuasca:

Benmayor has a blog and — if you want to see more of his fascinating paintings and murals — a Flickr photostream and displays of recent works here and here.

Aleah Long is an experienced session singer, vocal arranger, songwriter, and activist whose music has many roots: worldbeat new-age afro-pop trance-dance soul might be a good description. She makes frequent appearances at women’s and lesbian festivals with a number of groups she has helped form — her One World Inspirational Choir, and the theatrical performance and ritualist ensemble Evolution, which was inspired, she writes, “by the Great Mother, who beckons her daughters to call her names, embrace divine purpose and awaken to the creative healing powers, restoring balance and beauty to the Earth.”

Long lives in Newburgh, in the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York State. Somewhere in her travels — there is little information on this — she encountered ayahuasca, and, in her album En Full Circle — A Shamanic Journey, she uses her music to capture what appears to have been a deeply transformative experience. “My work,” she has written, “is with sound vibration and journaling my experiences with DMT / plant / root medicine through music.”

En Full Circle is Long’s only album to date. The title perhaps refers to the documentary film Full Circle, an exploration of contemporary women’s spirituality, but the content is born out of her experience with Amazonian plant medicine. You have never heard ayahuasca music quite like this — for example, the following cut, entitled Icaro:

The Ayahuasca Conversation is intended to explore ethnobotany, pharmacology, and the roots of faith. The project began, Jerónimo says, “with filming the way in which indigenous peoples have protected themselves from acculturation by hiding their traditions back inside the religions of the colonizers.” This focus then expanded into a consideration of “the process by which religions are created and lead invariably to healing, to that point of human history where medicine and religion were not separate things,” and then into traditional medicine.

“We have traveled a dozen countries and three continents,” Jerónimo writes, “interviewing priests and shamans, scientists and curanderos, intellectuals and illiterate farmers, leading thinkers and anonymous people whose lives have been transformed by their encounter with these worlds. We have filmed otherworldly rituals and extraordinary behaviors that at the same time manifested something that seemed universal to all mankind.”

Jerónimo refuses to create a conventional documentary out of his hundreds of hours of film. Rather, he intends to create one- to seven-minute pieces, spread virally, designed for cross-media versatility and able to be repackaged into varying lengths.”These videos,” he says, “are embedded into an innovative living interface: a plant-based ecosystem that thrives or withers, branching from the central narrative and unlocking batches of additional content that grows increasingly intimate. This project is ongoing and participatory: the long-term investment allows users a feeling of inclusion into the process of the documentary.”

The evolving project is thus what he calls “a stylized narrative of serial webisodes” — a proposed gigantic online video archive where viewers can consult portions of the film at their own pace. The idea is eventually to transcribe the interviews and tag the videos, so that people can follow their own threads through the material, find interviews where a particular topic is mentioned, queue the video segments for viewing one after another — in effect, create their own documentaries. There may be a number of predefined paths through the material, but the user could jump off the path at any time and then return to the central thread — the diary of an addict undergoing transformation.

The documentary project is also multiplatform — the films, a collection of documents, and a bilingual blog, named Legitimos Guerreritos, which incorporates a wide variety of documentary videos. I am a big fan of this blog. The posts are always thoughtful, interesting, and filled with content — the penetration of Santo Daime among indigenous Cashinahua in Acre, Brazil; the work of cognitive anthropologist Josep María Fericgla on shamanism and ayahuasca; a response to a video showing teenagers drinking ayahuasca in their living room; the culture of the Kogi of Colombia. There are not many of them, but every one is worth a careful reading.

As intended, a few of Jerónimo’s films have achieved wide circulation — including the video discourse by Jacques Mabit I posted here — although far too little footage has actually found its way onto the Internet. The following example is a more-or-less extemporaneous talk that Jerónimo himself gave in July 2007 at the Third Amazonian Shamanism Conference in Iquitos.

While attending the conference, he says, “I saw people that in my opinion were not properly prepared, make a farce, a theater play, out of something I respect and love very much, the work and practices of Amazonian curanderismo. All in order to feel better about themselves in front of people who didn’t know any better … That mix of the good and the bad is certainly an integral part of Iquitos ayahuasca scene.” His critique of the commercialization and distortion of shamanism is well worth listening to.

More please.