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    Cactus of Mystery: The Shamanic Powers of the Peruvian San Pedro Cactus
    Cactus of Mystery: The Shamanic Powers of the Peruvian San Pedro Cactus
    Cactus of Mystery: The Shamanic Powers of the Peruvian San Pedro Cactus
    Ebook484 pages7 hours

    Cactus of Mystery: The Shamanic Powers of the Peruvian San Pedro Cactus

    By Ross Heaven

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    About this ebook

    The history of San Pedro and its uses for healing, creativity, and conscious evolution

    • Includes interviews with practicing San Pedro shamans on their rituals, cactus preparations, and teachings on how San Pedro heals the mind and body

    • Contains accounts from people who have been healed by San Pedro

    • Includes chapters by Eve Bruce, M.D., and David Luke, Ph.D., on San Pedro’s effects on psychic abilities and its similarities to and differences from ayahuasca

    San Pedro, the legendary cactus of vision, has been used by the shamans of Peru for at least 3,500 years. Referring to St. Peter, who holds the keys to Heaven, its name is suggestive of the plant’s visionary power to open the gates between the visible and invisible worlds, allowing passage to an ecstatic realm where miraculous physical and spiritual healings occur, love and enthusiasm for life are rekindled, the future divined, and the soul’s purpose revealed.

    Exploring the history and shamanic uses of the San Pedro cactus, Ross Heaven interviews practicing San Pedro shamans about ancient and modern rituals, preparation of the visionary brew, experiences with the healing spirit of San Pedro, and their teachings on how the cactus works on the mind, body, and illness. He investigates the conditions treated by San Pedro as well as how it can enhance creativity, providing case studies from those who have been healed by the cactus and accounts from those who have been artistically and musically inspired through its use. Psychedelic researchers Eve Bruce, M.D., David Luke, Ph.D., and journalist Morgan Maher contribute chapters delving into San Pedro’s effects on conscious evolution and psychic abilities as well as its similarities to and differences from ayahuasca. Exploring plant communication and the vital role of music in San Pedro ceremonies, Heaven explains how healing songs are communicated by the sacred plants to the shamans working with them, much in the same way that other gifts of San Pedro--from healing to inspiration to expanded consciousness--are passed to those who commune with this ancient plant teacher.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherInner Traditions/Bear & Company
    Release dateNov 16, 2012
    ISBN9781594775130
    Cactus of Mystery: The Shamanic Powers of the Peruvian San Pedro Cactus
    Author

    Ross Heaven

    Ross Heaven (1960-2018) was a psychologist and healer with extensive training in the shamanic, transpersonal, and psychospiritual traditions. The author of more than 10 books, including Plant Spirit Shamanism, Vodou Shaman, and Darkness Visible, he taught workshops on plant medicines and coordinated trips to Peru to work with indigenous shamans.

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      Book preview

      Cactus of Mystery - Ross Heaven

      PART ONE

      San Pedro Shamans and Shamanism

      The most representative mystical experience of the archaic societies, that of shamanism, betrays the Nostalgia for Paradise, the desire to recover the state of freedom and beatitude before the Fall.

      MIRCEA ELIADE

      IT IS ONLY RIGHT that we start with the shamans. They are the ones who are doing the work with San Pedro, who have devoted their lives to it, and who have committed themselves to the healing of others. They are the ones who know.

      In this section we hear from three of the Andes’ most celebrated shamans. Curiously perhaps, two of them are not Peruvian by birth, but in a way that makes them even more dedicated to the work and the medicine. It is a commitment and a true act of faith to leave your homeland and all that is familiar to you because you have been called by the spirit of a plant. Peruvian people recognize this too, and the reputations of these shamans are well-known and respected.

      Rubén Orellana, Ph.D., is an archaeologist and anthropologist trained at the University of Cusco, Peru. Now an external consultant to the National Institute of Culture in Cusco, he was for many years the head of archaeology at Machu Picchu, discovering forty-four new sites of archaeological and historical interest. Alongside his scholarship he is also a shaman who has worked with San Pedro and the healing traditions of the Andes for most of his life, as well as researching the history and methods of these practices and how they influence aspects of life and well-being for Andean people. As a shaman he is also the founding director of the Kamaquen (source of energy) Healing Center in the Sacred Valley.

      La Gringa is Rubén Orellana’s most famous apprentice. Her work with San Pedro has featured in several articles and books—including my own—and since 2007 I have drunk her medicine extensively. South African by birth, she first visited Peru in the 1990s and has now lived in Cusco for almost twenty years, working as a healer and huachumera. In 2008, during one of my visits to Peru to work with her, I interviewed La Gringa about her life and experiences with the cactus of vision. Her answers then showed not only the healing potential of this plant, but cast further light on the traditions that surround it and their evolution in the modern world. In 2011, I conducted a second interview with her, delving more deeply into the answers she had given. For those who wish to work with San Pedro, what La Gringa has to say is of great interest, because it shows the nature of shamanic healing with this medicine in the modern world, as well as illustrating the traditions from which it stems. For those who work as healers themselves, what La Gringa has learned from huachuma is also important, because it suggests where illness may come from and how it may be cured, even by those who do not administer San Pedro or drink it themselves.

      Michael Simonato is part of the new wave of San Pedro healers now working in Peru. After a spiritual crisis and awakening of his own, he began a healing quest that eventually landed him in South America—initially, like many others, to drink ayahuasca in search of answers. This in turn led him to San Pedro, a plant he now works with extensively, leading ceremonies of his own in Pisaq after studying and drinking the plant medicine with many different shamans. In his article he relates his own healing story and offers practical advice for preparing and working with San Pedro, its admixtures, and complementary plants and practices.

      To give you a context for understanding the work of these individuals, I first offer an overview of shamanism and curanderismo in Andean Peru that looks at the nature of shamanic beliefs and healing and at the cosmology of the shaman and the spirits he works with. Of course, a study of this kind is overcomplicated because the truth of San Pedro is very simple. Ask any of these shamans and they will tell you that it is about love. Just that. Love and compassion. But I hope that what I have to say is useful to you anyway.

      1

      Shamanism and Curanderismo

      The Approach to Healing in Peru

      Ross Heaven

      Shamanism is a not a discrete activity like, say dentistry or aromatherapy, but a body of practices that have the effect of connecting the material and immaterial worlds, the worlds of man and God, matter and energy. These practices are performed by shamans who, by various means and methods (such as the use of San Pedro and ayahuasca in Peru, or a trance state arrived at by drumming in cultures like Mongolia and Siberia) are able to travel between these worlds to obtain solutions from their spirit guides and helpers, and in this way address the problems that are afflicting their patients or the community in general. These solutions may take the form of guidance, counsel, or direct and spirit-driven healing to ameliorate the sicknesses of the soul and restore balance and equilibrium.

      The word shaman is not Peruvian in origin, but comes from the Tungus people of Siberia and arises from the word saman, which has a specific usage there. It literally means priest of the Ural-Altaic people, although it is often interpreted more generally as one who sees or one who knows. It has now come to be used generically for anyone who carries out healing, counseling, or divinatory work in partnership with spirit guides, allies, and helpers, and which normally involves ritual or ceremonial procedures to make these spirits manifest and elicit their help to create beneficial change.

      This way of working is the oldest psychospiritual tradition known to humankind. Shamanic artifacts discovered in the African Rift Valley date back four hundred thousand years, and cave paintings depicting shamanic scenes of shape-shifting (where the shaman takes on nonhuman powers and shifts into animal or plant forms), such as those at Lascaux and Tassili, though not as old as this, certainly date back thousands of years.¹

      Compartmentalizing spiritual and healing approaches into various camps and specialties (such as aromatherapy, reiki, massage, herbalism, crystal healing, and so on) is a modern fascination—traditional shamans worked with all of these and more, doing whatever was necessary to provide the right medicine for his or her people. This is still the case in Peru, where San Pedro shamans may also use sound healing during ceremonies, for example, or reiki-like techniques to change the energies of their patients into a new and more positive alignment, or offer herbal preparations and teas to help with particular ailments.

      Many of the theories or working concepts that we now accept as the inventions or discoveries of modern science and psychology are also to be found in much more ancient shamanic belief systems, and are embedded in healing traditions from thousands of years ago. For example, quantum physics now tells us that we live in a holographic universe where all things are part of and mirror the whole, where all is composed of energy, and where this energy can be made to change its shape and form (e.g., from a particle to a wave) depending on our interactions with it.²

      Shamans have been saying the same thing for thousands of years. Black Elk, the Sioux medicine man written about by John Niehardt in his book Black Elk Speaks, was quoted two hundred years before quantum physics, remarking that we are all one and that all things are part of the whole, the sacred hoop of life.³ It is a point that La Gringa and other shamans in this book continue to make: we are all connected and we can shape the world we live in to create any reality we want. The Shuar people of the Columbian Amazon have an expression, The world is as you dream It, which means much the same thing.

      THE CRISIS OF SHAMANISM

      How do people become shamans? It begins with a calling—not always in the sense of a spiritual vocation, which implies a desire on the part of the shaman-elect to become a healer, like someone who wishes to become a priest might have, but a calling from the spirits themselves who have recognized the natural gifts and skills of that person and have chosen him to become their ambassador on Earth and a partner in their work, sometimes irrespective of his own wishes.

      Often the call begins as a whisper—with an awareness on the part of the shaman-to-be that the world is not quite as he has been taught to view it, that there are signs, subtleties, and shades of meaning out there, not black-and-white scientific or mathematical certainties. He may have special knowledge—the ability to see, hear, and know things that others do not—for example, a future-seeing awareness of things yet to happen or an active imagination that sees spirits where others just see common reality.

      If the shaman ignores these signs and does not explore what they might mean, then the whispers of spirit may get louder until they become a roar. If he still ignores them, then typically the shaman-to-be will enter what it known as an initiatory crisis.

      A mysterious illness of a mental, emotional, physical, or spiritual nature—or even all four at once—may suddenly afflict him, for which there is no known cause and often no orthodox cure. Such is the story of Black Elk, who was close to death as a child and could not be saved by medical or shamanic healing, but only by the spirits themselves.

      The classical literature, such as Mircea Eliade’s work Shamanism,⁴ also describes people being near fatally wounded by wild animals or hit by a mysterious shower of rocks that falls from the sky. Being struck by lightning is also a sure sign of a calling to shamanize, and in fact the highest level of shaman in the Andes of Peru (the altomisayoq) must be struck three times in order to be recognized as a true healer. Puma, one of the shamans I work with in Peru and who features later in this book, has been struck once but comes from a lineage of shamans that included his grandfather who was one of the lucky ones to be struck three times. The first time, you die, says Puma, "the second time you are taken to the spirit world. To those around you, you just vanish into the air. The third time you are reborn as something new: a

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