The Vine Of The Soul

And above all watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you.

Because the greatest secrets are hidden in the most unlikely places.

Those who do not believe in magic will never find it.

*

At the end of the summer in the middle of a wood in the south of Holland I sat for two nights in the pitch black of a cabin under the watchful eye of a shaman and drank a powerful brew concocted by the ancient tribes of the Amazon. The Vine of the Soul, the Vine of the Dead, Ayahuasca, a dark green gloop made up of the leaves of one plant and the vine of another found in opposite ends of the jungle, boiled together to make a plant medicine, a sacred healing power used by these tribes for some say thousands of years.

Ingested independently of one another the plants are broken down quickly in the digestive tract and have no effect. Mixed together and boiled down into a liquid and ingested, one small cupful can elicit journeys of the mind, experiences of the spiritual and the mystical, and realisations of such scale they can change the course of lives. When the Amazonian tribes were asked how they knew to combine the two, how on earth they had landed on the right combination from the 70,000-odd species found growing in the jungle, they were known to reply simply… the plants told us.