Psychological Aspects of the Yage
Experience in an Experimental Setting
by Claudio Naranjo
taken from _Hallucinogens and Shamanism_ by Michael J. Harner Copyright 1973, Oxford Press
When we consider the anthropological reports on the uses and effects of yage or ayahuasca among the different Indian cultures in South America several questions naturally come to our mind: What is peculiar to the natives' experiences or their interpretations of such? Would a white man in our culture share what the shamans report of themselves or would he experience the drug's effect according to his own values, expectations, and previous life history? In a way these questions are equivalent to asking what kind of drug this is, since we can only generalize about the effect of a drug seeing through and beyond personality and cultural differences that bear on it, after which we may either affirm its relativity or grasp a common core of experience behind the dis- parate interpretations and symbolizations of it in the individual reports.
An answer to these questions, interesting to pharmacology and psychology as well as to anthropology, can be sought in the study of the reactions to the drug among non-natives that are not in-
CLAUDIO NARANJO, M.D., was formerly an Associate of the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research of the University of California, Berkeley. He has conducted experimental and clinical work in psychotherapy both at the University of Chile School of Medicine and in the United States, to which he came as a Guggenheim fellow in 1964·
formed of the natives' accounts of theirs, so I hope that some in- sights in this direction can be gained from the following report on experiences from thirty-five such volunteers in Santiago, Chile. The contents of this paper will report on some features in the experience with harmaline, the active alkaloid of yage, as reported by thirty-five subjects who took it either orally or by intravenous injection, in different dosage levels and in some cases more than once (cf. Naranjo, 1967)·
I shall not go into details about the physiological aspects of the reaction or its comparison with the experience induced by other hallucinogens, but I may say that, on the one hand, the experi- mental subjects ingested either mescaline or LSD on a different occasion, and they all agree that their reactions to these drugs are very different from those brought about by harmaline. On the other hand, this difference partly lies in that yage (or harmaline) induces a more sleep-like trance; the person under its influence generally wants to keep his eyes closed, since the external world appears as of little interest and distracting from the world of visions and inner happenings that take place when it is shut off. Parenthetically I can also mention that this trance-like state, somehow resembling sleep or a self-contained reverie, is neuro- physiologically more like a state of alertness in that the EEG recordings show the disappearance of alpha waves when the sub- jects have their eyes closed.
But what can be of greater interest for the purpose of compari- son with the preceding paper by Harner undoubtedly lies in the content of the experiences, be this the description of visions, or, in some cases, pure feelings or thoughts.
In general terms it can be said that the great majority of these experiences were of the sort that is generally misnamed hallucina- tory. That is, the person would visualize with closed eyes--and rarely with open eyes--images that are not mistaken for reality (though they may be associated with intense feelings). In some of the subjects this went along with or was followed by an inclina- tion to think about personal or metaphysical problems with a feel- ing of unusual depth, insight, and inspiration. In only two cases out of thirty-five a person under a full dose of the alkaloid had no hallucinations at all but only an indescribable feeling of joy, lov- ing serenity. Most people became nauseous and some vomited pro- fusely or experienced a vague but intense malaise, which on two occasions led to the interruption of the session. It is difficult to decide to what extent this discomfort was psychological in origin, but it appeared to be concomitant with a state of diminished awareness of the psychological happenings of the moment, a sort of sleepiness in which the person seemed to take refuge and shut himself off from overwhelming visions or feelings that he could not recall again.
Before we examine more closely the content of these experi- ences I would like it to be understood that the mere description of one such session, lasting about six hours, would easily take an hour to convey. In fact, I have in my possession a forty-page report written by one of the subjects on his experience. Since illustration with case material seems indispensable if one is to convey the par- ticular duality of the content, in what follows I shall alternate be- tween excerpts of session notes and the discussions of such. This will be necessarily unilateral because of the limited space avail- able, so I have chosen to concentrate on the highlighting of some of what appear to be recurrent themes underlying the individual experiences. I think it will become apparent that almost any illus- tration for one of these themes could also be used to illustrate some other, since such motives converge and are condensed in a synthetic whole in the actual play of fantasy.
I have chosen as a starting point for the following discussion the first vision of a 25-year-old woman, born in Europe of Euro- pean parents, who has lived in Chile since late in her childhood. She says:
I went at a terrific speed. I came to a strange street. I only saw one side of it. It was an interminable row of two- or three-storied houses with pointed roofs and wooden beams, in the style of medieval houses or English country houses.
I suddenly saw a man running. ire was a messenger. I had to slow down and placed myself next to him. That is, next to his face, since in this dream only my soul participated. My soul is a sphere of some 7 cm. in diameter, pure energy, and it rotates on itself at such enormous speed that it would be the same if it didn't. It can displace itself in any direction at the speed it wishes. My soul sees, hears, thinks; it perceives odors, I believe, but has no sense of touch for the simple reason that it repels matter.
We must in the first place take notice that this is a dream of fantasy of her "soul," and this awareness of an entity which is regarded as a soul as distinct from the body is seen with the same explicitness in other experiences too. Consider the following de- scription by a al-year-old Chilean journalist:
I was going farther and farther away from myself. I was real- izing that my body and my mind were such autonomous forces that if they had ever converged in me it seemed pure chance. What during my entire lifetime I had sensed like mingled con- fusion now appeared to be divided in three precise domains: outside lay the world, people, buildings and noises (for which I cared less and less); closer, as a boundary, stood my organism, with those hands, that mouth and its laugh, now commanded by itself; inside, at last, in the innermost and recondite, warmly floating in the skin that was always with me, was I. That is, my mind.
It is perhaps this transition from everyday-like awareness to that of the autonomous self, soul, mind, or whatever name we may wish to call it, that might: perhaps explain recurrent images of fall- ing into one's body, or simply falling--leaving the everyday ground --entering one's body or some symbolic place. The process is also expressed as one of dissociating and leaving, as going unconscious (though this does not actually happen) or, more radically, dying. Eight persons in thirty-five experienced visions or feelings of their own death.
The same subject of the last quotation felt he was dying, too, and comments: "If I was going to leave the body, that didn't worry me. I knew that I existed in essence, and this was the ideal state, with no skin, no liver, no resentments, atemporal."
In one of the two subjects who did not visualize, the experience of death was present too, but as pure feeling and as a bodily sen- sation: "Physically 1 felt that I was dying and I feel that when my time comes I shall die well."
In the following excerpt both the theme of death and that of an independent soul can be noticed:
I saw my own death, with anguish; how I was carried across fields of rice in Korea or China, on a stretcher, between two men, coolies, perhaps, and I could see my face, once more from the outside and very close. It was like tanned leather, as in a suitcase, covered with droplets of blood or scratches on the temples. . . .
The observer in this scene is a point in space, and the subject has previously commented that there is a feeling to it like being a butterfly. But this can now lead us to a different theme.
If we now turn our attention once more to the image of that spherical soul flying at high speed I would like to point out that this speed itself tends to recur in other visions; the lack of tactile sensations perhaps has its equivalence in a feeling of benumbed- ness which is often reported, whereas its being suspended in space, soaring through it at some altitude appears or is implied in about one-third of the subjects' comments or reports.
Consider the following excerpt from the account of a male sub- ject who took a fairly large amount of harmaline with the addition of mescaline:
The first thing I did, involuntarily, was lift my hand. It seemed to lose weight, it rose, rose . . . and then I felt that it was no longer a hand but the tip of a wing. I was turning into a winged being. I then stretched my wings and felt extreme freedom and expansion. My wings were growing and as they did my feeling of freedom increased, as if I had been imprisoned during my entire lifetime and I suddenly had organs that made it possible for me to expand.,4nd I would say: "I have wings! I have wings! There is no space that can contain them, the air cannot contain them, they are immense!" I felt my wings grow above the earth, and had the image of a huge bird above the earth, with its extended wings beyond its limits, reaching in- finity. I then, timidly, began to move them. I felt the movements of flying clearly: how the wing rested on the resisting air, and how a wave of motion went from the tip to the other end per- mitting me to lift the body. And I said: "I fly! I fly!" And felt the air coming into my mouth, caressing my whole body, and saw the perspective of the earth. I didn't go anywhere. I just flew and the air passing through my body gave my breathing a special rhythm, a rhythm of flying which expressed not only the movement but the joy.
It may be related to this experience of flying that some subjects who do not report it as such nevertheless describe their visions as scenes viewed from above, sometimes from great altitude. Such evidence of an aerial viewpoint can be found, for example, in the following description:
I remember a Negro woman I saw from above ... I saw her from a distance of some 3 meters and then approached her further, from her right side. She carried a purple parasol of a very bright, almost luminous color, like a sea anemone, like em- broidery, and would twist it around its axis so that it unfolded like loose chiffon or in the form of an aurora borealis, and she laughed with a coarse and vulgar laugh.
It happens with this as with many other yage' visions that it contains more than one of the recurrent themes, and I would be tempted to elaborate on each. Here it is not only the physical point of view from above that seems typical but, too, the image of a geometric center for the happenings, the merry-go-round-like rotation, the Negro woman and the experience of being teased. For the time being I shall conclude the discussion of the flight- theme by mentioning the most common presentation of it, which is the mere visualization of birds. The following is not the most typical example, but may be interesting from many points of view:
Suddenly, a crucified Christ ascended moving his arms like wings. And then another, moving his arms with the crossed sticks. All these movements were at an incredible speed. I thought, in seeing it, that here was from where the idea had come of de picting the Holy Ghost as a dove. And then Christ turned into a sort of dove that ascended.
On the whole ten subjects mentioned at least one of the experi- ences related to flying.
I would now like to concentrate on another aspect of our ini- tial quotation, which is the spherical shape and rotating motion of the transparent flying sphere. I am mentioning both the rotation and the shape not only because the first already suggests the idea of circularity, but for the fact that both, in turn, imply the idea of a center of the form or movement. This center may be the most adequate symbol to refer to the theme we now want to discuss.
It may be recalled that this idea of a central element and the rotating motion were already encountered in that vision of the Negro woman with the turning parasol which unfolded into an aurora borealis. Now consider the following passage from the same person's report:
I saw tiny dots, like those on a television screen, transparent dots that agitated and turned (when I fixed the gaze on one point) around a cone forming a sort of funnel, like the whirlpool that is formed when one removes the stopper. They turned, rather slowly, and this funnel opened upwards from the floor I was gazing at, and extended to the sides into my entire visual field.... And in this swirl of particles lies all my visual ex- perience. It all comes from it, this is the foundation of the scenes I saw, this was their spirit, in the same way that the dots on the television screen are the ground of all the images; but even the meaning of this incessant turning was in everything, like a merry-go-round, or like fair-music; it was like circus music. Was the teasing already here! Something of a sardonic joke was in all of this, these changing situations confronting the spectator (me), these images in incessant transformation, never perman- ent, meaning nothing but change as such, like the whirlpool that turned and carried in it all these visions.
The "center" can appear in the different visions as a source of motion or the region to which motion flows, a source of light or a perceiving eye, a geometric region such as a circular pond in the middle of Heaven or Hell, a being at the center of the earth, of the universe, the skull or inside the subject's body. (In nine of the subjects this was a noticeable feature appearing in more than one image.) From the subject's experiences and associations, as from the context in which these images appear, I definitely believe that this contraposition of center and periphery, the core and the sur- face, the immobile and the incessant turning, the source, begin- ning and end, and the everchanging flow, is that of the deeper self and the multiplicity of experience, and it encompasses but tran- scends the duality of mind and body. More precisely, it is that of being and becoming, and it matches the traditional Hindu symbol for samsara and nirvana: the wheel of incessant death and rebirth, and its hub. Or, according to a remarkable passage of the tao-te- ching, the practical materiality of a jar and the enclosed void that constitutes its essence.
I still have to illustrate one of the most important and striking themes in the yage' experiences, but this time, if I am to illustrate it with the initial dream of the spherical soul I have to quote a bit further from it. After describing the messenger in what seems to be medieval clothes, the subject goes on:
I left him behind and proceeded onwards, skimming just above the ground. I met a very large man, a sort of giant with a bronzed skin, black mustache, leather jacket and pants made of leopard's skin, who looked at me in a rage, who knows why. He produced a very long whip and wanted to whip me with it, taking my soul for a top. But the whip would stop at one cm. from my soul and couldn't go further. The giant and the whip were furious about their failure. The whip then turned into a black serpent's head with no teeth, that opened its mouth want- ing to devour me. It could not. At the moment my soul's atten- tion was caught by a funeral procession so I didn't see the giant or the whip anymore.
So here we find, in a brief scene, rage, dark skin, hostile whip- ping, leopard skin, a black serpent, and the prospect of being swallowed. In this particular instance, too, the soul appears invul- nerable to the threats because of its very nature. Here, as in other instances, it can be a matter of choice how embracing a category we want to regard as a theme. Serpents certainly recur in the vi- sions, and crocodiles or reptiles in general, and so do tigers, leop- ards and cats; but fangs also do, and birds of prey and vampires, and perhaps all these are interrelated by their implication of dan- ger, and would also be related to the giant and the whip. Since it is not possible in the present circumstances to elaborate on the different elements of this complex, though, I shall choose to illus- trate the two which are striking enough at least for their frequency. Strangely enough, tigers, leopards, or jaguars were seen by seven of the subjects even though big cats are not seen in Chile. These are sometimes encountered as aggressors, sometimes as a graceful sight, a friendly companion or, in one instance, experienced as a true impersonation. Reptiles, too, were seen by six subjects. In three instances these were dragons, and in another there was a dinosaur. Snakes were reported by three subjects, and for one of them these were the most prominent element in the whole expe- rience.
The following excerpt is from the same lady of the spherical soul and the giant with the leopard skin:
At first, many tiger faces. Panthers and all kinds of cats. Black and yellow. Then the tiger. The largest and strongest of all. I know (for I read his thought) that I must follow him. I see the plateau. He walks with resolution in a straight line. I follow; but on reaching the edge and perceiving the brightness I cannot follow him. The dream vanishes. But above the luminescence rises a statue of the Virgin with the child in her arms, and as- cends from the hole into the sky.
At a still later stage she is able to follow the tiger further to the end of the plateau and look into the abyss which is Hell (see Fig. I). It is round and in it is fluid fire, or fluid gold. People swim in it.
The tiger wants me to go there. I don't know how to descend. I grasp the tiger's tail and he jumps. Because of his musculature the jump is graceful and slow. The tiger swims in the liquid fire as I sit on his back. I then suddenly see my tiger is eating up a woman. But no. It is not the tiger. It is an animal with a crocodile's head and the body of a fatter, larger animal with four feet (though these were not seen).All kinds of lizards and frogs begin to appear now. And the pond gradually turns into a greenish swamp of stagnant waters, though full of life: primi- tive forms of life, such as algae, anemones, and micro-organ- isms. It is a prehistoric pond [see Fig. II]. A shore appears, not with sand but vegetation. Some dinosaurs are seen in the dis- tance. I rise on the tiger on the shore. The serpent follows us. It catches up with us. I stay aside and let the tiger take care of her [see Fig. III], But the serpent is strong and my tiger is in danger. I decide to take part in the fight. The serpent notices my intention, lets the tiger loose and prepares to attack us. I hold its head and press on its sides so that it will open its mouth. It has an iron-piece inside, like the bit of a horse. I press on the ends of this bit and the serpent dies or disintegrates, it falls into pieces as if it were a mechanical serpent. I go onwards with the tiger. I walk next to him, my arm over his neck. We climb the high mountain. There is a zig-zag path between high bushes. We arrive. There is a crater. We wait for some time and there begins an enormous eruption. The tiger tells me I must throw myself into the crater. I am sad to leave my companion but I know that this last journey I must travel. I throw myself into the fire that comes out of the crater. I ascend with the flames towards the sky and fly onwards.
I have deliberately quoted more than what is strictly relevant to the mere illustration of the tiger motive so at least an intuition can be formed as to the complex relationships between the themes of tiger, serpent, crocodile, fire, destruction, and those of flying, ascending, disembodied existence.
Just One more example before we proceed to a different aspect, this time from the same person who felt like a huge bird flying beyond the limits of the earth:
I wasn't a fish anymore, but a big cat, a tiger. I walked, though, feeling the same freedom I had experienced as a bird and a fish, freedom of movement, flexibility, grace. I moved as a tiger in the jungle, joyously, feeling the ground under my feet, feeling my power; my chest grew larger. I then approached an animal, any animal. I only saw its neck, and then experienced what a tiger feels when looking at its prey.
This may be enough to show how the tiger by no means stands for mere hostility, but for a fluid synthesis of aggression and grace and a full acceptance of the life-impulse beyond moral judgment. It is now time to turn to an aspect in these experiences which is much more diversified than those discussed, and which, though expressed here and there through particularized images, can choose such a variety of images that it makes it more appropriate to speak of a trait or quality of the yak experience than of a "theme." This quality is what we may want to call the religious or the mythical.
If we choose to regard as religious those images which belong in this category according to common knowledge, or the feelings and concerns that the subjects express in explicitly religious terms, we find that these were reported by fifteen out of the thirty-five. Five persons saw the Devil or devils, three of them mentioned angels, three had a vision of the Virgin Mary and two of Christ; three spoke of Paradise or Heaven, and two of Hell, three of them described priestly figures, while others saw churches, altars, or crosses. Aside from these fifteen, two had ecstatic feelings which were described in religious terms.
It is probably an arbitrary matter where to trace the limit be- tween what is religious and what is not. One instance of this can be seen in the transition between the vision of "the Devil" or minor demons to monstrous images or horrible masks, and from these to horrible people or animals. References to Greco-Roman gods, sirens or nymphs are not uncommon, and we may wish to place them in the same category with the religious images of Christianity. And, again, we can detect a mythical quality in the atmosphere of the typical fairy tale, with castles, kings, and medie- val costumes, as has been reported in at least four of the experi- ences. One subject said he felt like a pharaoh, but in his written report two days later he did not mention the image or idea of a pharaoh, but said instead that this was a feeling of being God. If it were not for this additional information, the essential reli- gious implication of the image could have been overlooked. For these reasons I believe the mythico-religious element is more per- vasive in the experiences than what appears from their outward descriptions and may be completely unrelated to the visual im- agery. In one instance, for example, a subject had been instructed to imagine the depth of the ocean. Only a month later did I dis- cover, to my own surprise, the importance that this experience had for her:
The most important was descending to the bottom of the sea [she commented]. The feeling of being myself. The sea was in myself. There was a continuity of the external with the internal. I have recalled this when I have been unhappy. The sand and the plants were myself or something of mine. The idea of God was in everything. I think that must be what is called a mystical experience. I cannot describe it. I wouldn't have words. Beauty, joy, peace, everything I longed for was there. God in myself.
A familiar mythical character came to the fore during an experi- ence the most important aspect of which was the feeling the sub- ject had of not being the doer of his actions when he talked, laughed, or made a drawing. When he looked at himself in a mir- ror, too, his face seemed to him a mask while somebody else was looking through his eyes. This feeling of being, so to say, "pos- sessed" by another spirit developed into the notion that this was a dwarf inside of him. This dwarf, childlike and aged at the same time, bisexual or asexual, manipulator of the body and free from necessity but, at the same time imprisoned by the body, was part of his perception of different situations during the drug experi- ence, and the following excerpt refers to his viewing of a picture showing a sexual act:
... I thought eroticism would come next but it didn't. Never did I grasp the carnal side of the movements, and I saw it as an act as natural as any. Then, what was physically a genital turned into a communication tube, a bridge between two be- ings. The figures were communicating in the only possible way, interrupting during a fleeting interval the solitude of the spirit. Then, suddenly, the dwarf appeared in the bodies, laughing in amusement while he pushed out his obscene finger. He took de- light in it since this was his definitive, triumphant joke: while the body believed it was seeking its satisfaction it was really letting free the imprisoned dwarf. Love, it seemed, was the su- preme irony. Man and woman give themselves to each other in pleasure, the body instinctively seeks it, but, in the accomplish- ment, it ceases to exist, since the orgasm is a fleeting death. It being death, imprisonment and dependency cease to exist. In the battle between the body and tile dwarf this was the truce. But suddenly the dwarf's laughter vanished, and as if it were sucked by itself it grew smaller and smaller until it was only a light, an incandescent worm, a shining point, a microscopic and luminous spermatozoan. In this state it shot from the man's body to the woman's womb. In the midst of this truce the dwarf, too, was fooled. He was forced to abandon his inaction and was precipitated into doing something. A new human be- ing, to begin again the cycle with the duality of dwarf and body. This led me to the thought of a higher joke.
Even though the focus of this report has been descriptive, I think the different motives illustrated thus far almost out of their own accord fall together in an embracing whole. The complex of images discussed first as portraying the polarity of being and be- coming, freedom and necessity, spirit and matter, only set up the stage for the human drama. This involves the battle of opposites and eventually their reconciliation or fusion, after giving way to death and destruction, be this by fire, tigers, drowning, or devour- ing snakes. The beauty of fluid fire, the graceful tiger, or the subtle and wise reptile, these seem most expressive for the synthetic ex- perience of accepting life as a whole, or, better, accepting existence as a whole, life and death included; evil included too, though from a given spiritual perspective it is not experienced as evil any more. Needless to say, the process is essentially religious, and it could even be suspected that every myth presents us one particular as- pect of the same experience.
The themes I have illustrated are by no means the only ones that can be discerned in the sessions. As I mentioned in passing, Negro people appear very frequently, and this research was carried out in Chile where there are no Negroes. Landscapes and cities are often described (as the medieval houses in the first quotation) and these sometimes seem to be related to the experience of flying. Masks, especially monstrous or sardonic ones are often mentioned, and so are eyes. Not uncommonly robots, vehicles or a feeling of automation are reported, and so are mobs, caves, prehistory, pearls, and so on. It would take too long to illustrate all of them and more so to elaborate on their meaning. I think, though, that the themes discussed here are the central ones, and I would suggest that they invite us to regard some shamanistic conceptions more as the ex- pression of universal experiences than in terms of acculturation to local traditions.
REFERENCE
Naranjo, Claudio
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