AYAHUASCA WEAVING DESTINIES

SIGNED & DATED by Author JIMMY WEISKOPF

SCARCE BOOK

By Jimmy Weiskopf

Privately Published by Author, Bogota, Colombia, South America

2010 November  FIRST EDITION 

Only 200 copies in First Edition Printing.

TEXT IS IN ENGLISH

SIGNED & DATED"Bogota', October 2011, Jimmy Weiskopf "

This book is a Thick pictorial Soft Cover in near fine condition with 557 pages.      

This edition also includes in its appendix, the essay, "A Peculiar But Prototypical Gripe by the Author"

Ayahuasca (or Yajé), the sacred plant remedy of the Amazon, has been the subject of academic studies, travel narratives and documentaries but rarely do they tell the inside story.

This novel lifts shamanism out of the category of anthropology or self-help to reveal how the mysterious powers of Yajé highlight the debilities of those who seek enlightenment from it. Ayahuasca Weaving Destinies is the parable of the sorcerer's apprentice in a post-industrial context. This is Weiskopf's first novel.

CONTENTS

Introduction

How I met the Vine

A Story on Which To Dine Out

The Monkey Assassin

The Saint of the Rainforest

A Gorilla in Pursuit

The Botanical Garden

Stepping Over The Cadavers of Sheep

A Queer Kind of Erotic Itch

Uprooting the Plants, The Past and Any sort of Prevision

Like an Ash-Daubed Saddhu with a Disturbing Erection

Sacrificing the Cultural Wrapper in the Name of a Higher Good

A Collective Strait-Jacket of too Many Thoughts Running Wild

Scandal at the Andes

Back to the Mysterious Seed

The Society of the Vine

Whether to Scratch the Soul or Skin

Wise Sayings of the Digestive Tract

Facing the Music

Fitting One Person's Mastery of the Vine into that of Another

A Compressed Chapter of Revelation

A Symbolic Absorption of Alien Modes

The Rear View Glass of the Vine

A Crudely Painted Pasteboard of Arching Palms

Every Organ Complete

Subversively Liberating Oneself

Three Voices in Four Acts

His Still Potent Dau

Journey and Pursuit

Brute Force in a Flow of Sympathy

In a Microcosmic Second of Slanting Light

Precipitated Intentions

The Unstained White that Defines the Life of a Plant

The Fish Dies by the Mouth

The Old Lion , Lolling Between Kills

A Dependence on Harmless Emissaries

A Painting is never Finished

Afterword : Yaje' as Metaphor

Glossary of Spanish & Indigenous Words

Appendix: Translation of Verses of Songs

A Peculiar but Prototypical Gripe by the Author

FROM THE COVER

Ayahuasca (or yaje), the sacred plant remedy of the Amazon, has been the subject of academic studies, travel narratives and documentaries but rarely do they tell the inside story. This novel lifts shamanism out of the category of anthropology or self-help to reveal how the mysterious powers of yaje highlight the debilities of those who seek enlightenment from it. Ayahuasca Weaving Destinies is the parable of the sorcerer's apprentice in a post-industrial context.

Taita Franciscano of the Putumayo, "last of the traditional healers", knew the risks his culture would face when, defying the taboo, he invited white men to his rituals to win Western recognition for his tribe's medicinal heritage.

The irreverent sage may even have welcomed the opportunity to play with fire. But not even his visionary gifts foresaw what would happen when a cast of conflictive characters were drawn into his dream of founding a botanical garden.

Among them are the ambitious anthropologist who "discovered" yaje, the autobiographical narrator, a militant indigenous leader, a "revolutionary" poet, several legendary shamans, including the still-living spirit of a dead one, and a feminist from the hippy circle the narrator and his ex-wife belonged to, years before, in Ireland.

As they interact, the lure of the garden spreads from the jungle to Bogota, the U.S. Congress and Europe, setting off a power struggle between professors, missionaries, NGO's, ethno-botanical entrepreneurs and the guerrilla... until the shaman's despised, illiterate and lovelorn apprentice unexpectedly wrecks everyone's plans.  Yaje, the author claims, "is as much about, say, smart bombs or derivatives as therapy".

Yet if, on one level no quest for inner knowledge takes place in a social void and the all too human gets in the way of illumination, on another, as the novel's title indicates, those who surrender themselves to its godhead enter a cosmic field which rules their destinies.

As the narrator suffers the agonies of the purge, unwittingly stirs up trouble with the Indians and gets dragged into the politics of ancient wisdom, all sorts of bizarre synchronicities emerge, which reach their climax when a mage "reads" the presence of sorcery during a special ceremony and the real-life consequences force the narrator to acknowledge the reality of parallel dimensions. 

Weiskopf nevertheless insists that such magic is only a metaphor: "Yaje may be a little too exotic, I fear, for the good of my story, which, as in any novel, is a backstage tour of the human circus". From one angle, going to the jungle to drink yaje amounts to a pilgrimage to a hidden source of self-realization which echoes a real journey to another continent or society.

From another, its anti-logic is in tune with the self-destructive nature of the machine society has invented for itself. Its exoticism, he writes, stirs a romanticism which led him to the tropics, but it also goes right to the heart of universals that any writer, in any place, has to deal with. 

JIMMY WEISKOPF is the author of Yajé: The New Purgatory, hailed as the definitive study of Ayahuasca in Colombia and winner of a 2005 Latino Book Award. He has lectured on the subject in Colombia, the United States and Brazil and was a speaker at the The 2nd Amazonian Shamanism Conference.

For the past eighteen years, he has drunk Yajé (Ayahuasca) with some of the most renowned indigenous shamans of Colombia and participated in rituals in Peru and Brazil.

A graduate of Columbia and Cambridge Universities, he is a veteran of the Colombian foreign press corps. He is also one of the country´s top translators, of more than 50 books ranging from novels to economic studies. Born in New York City, he has lived in Colombia for 30 years and is a naturalized Colombian citizen.

FROM THE BACK COVER == "When it comes to ayahuasca, Jimmy Weiskopf knows what he is talking about and he writes with clarity, depth, style, wit and originality". == Michael Taussig, author of Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man.

Ayahuasca from the inside out! The new novel by the author of Yaje: The New Purgatory, winner of the Latino Book Prize, 2005 . How is it possible for a plant, however powerful its effects, to control the destinies of those who use it, even retroactively?

In Ayahuasca Weaving Destinies, Jimmy Weiskopf explains what happens to the life of persons who passionately surrender themselves to a cosmic field where everything is governed by the spirits.

This is a study of the Western appropriation of indigenous magic, seen through the microcosm of the white, urban following that grew up around a particular healer, the ultimate lesson of which perhaps is that ayahuasca was already a mongrel by the time they got to it.

"Without hearing the words, the Taita catches their thoughts and flicks them away with his fan. His crown slips, his throat grows raw, the necklace of his eighty Aprils bows his neck. In a sky that never lightens the coming day announces his failure: so much expected of him, so little returned, hopes like the lashes of a whip. His pinta paints roundness pointed by incomplete eyes and arms and scraps of paper and canvas immersed in smoke.

A somnambulist by now, blinded by dawn, thirsty from the music he drinks, tired, empty, aching and insatiable, he rides on the shoulders of his maestro and chants. He chants to vex and impress, to mark territory, proclaim identity, summon totems, scatter colors, defile the angels of reason, blow air into an expiring ritual.

And because the spirits leave him no choice but to be the saddest bird with the loudest plumage and a rare voice which, carrying beyond death, will continue to ring in the gratitude of his followers".

Psychedelics Hallucinogenic hippies Surrealism Cannabis Marijuana Hashish LSD DMT peyote mescaline