A Nation of Mystics - Book II: The Tribe Read online

  Benjamin stood. “María Guadalupe, I would be honored if you would give us your wisdom.”

  María Guadalupe allowed herself a reserved smile, her voice gentle, quiet, barely audible.

  “Voy a enseñar,” she said. I will teach.

  For the next week, Benjamin and Jerry walked the mountains with María Guadalupe, searching in field and forest for fungi. Often, after a rain, they would kneel at the roots of trees, pushing through layers of rotting vegetation or make their way to cow pastures to search for cow dung on which spores might have germinated. Benjamin felt an extraordinary peace as he walked the misty mountains. Collecting had been part of his early work as a botanist, and he recognized his younger self in Jerry. The two worked together without needing words, innately knowing each other, a strong pulse between them.

  Jerry’s job included drawing and photographing every specimen collected, from tiny lichens and bracken fungi to the larger capped mushrooms, the Basidiomycetes. Using the caps of the mushrooms, he made spore prints with detailed lists of colors and arrangements of spores. He noted their gill patterns and the shape of their caps and stems. He distinguished genus and species, measured for length, made notations on the veil, the annulus ring, and the color of the stain, whether it bruised yellow, blue, or red. As he touched and classified, Jerry began to feel a working relationship with each mushroom, communing with it, fathoming early choices the plant had made in its own evolution. While he worked, María Guadalupe spoke of the life of each mushroom, and with her words, his consciousness gave a leap. He knew innately that the world of the fungi directly contributed to the delicate ecological balance that nurtured all life, including his own.

  If I know the mushroom, he thought, if María Guadalupe knows it intimately, perhaps the mushroom also feels our presence.

  Among those mushrooms collected were fourteen separate species of hallucinogenic mushrooms belonging to three genera, Psilocybe, Stropharia, and Conocybe. María Guadalupe explained the history of each, her personal experiences, the relationship she held with each variety. She spoke of the special mushrooms that loved her and allowed the greatest healing power, the Psilocybe.

  Finally, walking the forests and pastures in the mist one morning, Benjamin asked María Guadalupe the question he had been impatient to ask about the mushroom ceremony. “Will you lead us in the velada before we leave?”

  “Is there an illness?” And she turned to look into Jerry’s face.

  As if unbidden, the words came to him. “I am … not well. Can you help me?”

  “In the velada, I should see something,” she answered simply.

  Her eyes once again focused on the forest ground and, moving at random, she searched under trees and over a pasture until she stopped to pick up a clump of mushrooms growing from cow manure, a bouquet of perhaps twenty mushrooms still bound by mycelium. Ten feet from the first clump, she collected another large cluster of white stalks and brown caps and, finally, a third—over sixty mushrooms in all.

  “So it will be tonight,” Dr. García observed, looking around the basement room at the preparations.

  A small table had been placed against one wall with a white tablecloth, a picture of the Blessed Virgin and another of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Candles and flowers had been set before the holy images. On the floor, partially hidden, Barry had set up a tape recorder and a microphone.

  “Will you be present for the ceremony?” Benjamin asked Nicolás García.

  “I would be honored. And you … you will eat the mushroom?”

  “I know it only from the outside,” Benjamin answered. “Now it’s time to learn it from the inside.”

  “The shamanic calling again. I will observe tonight, along with several others from the village, other curanderos, not as powerful as María Guadalupe, but men and women who will understand what takes place. Will Jerry and Barry record?”

  “Only Barry. Jerry will be the center of the ceremony.”

  Nicolás hesitated, then, “Is he ill?”

  Benjamin thought for a moment. “In a manner of speaking.”

  Something was eating at Jerry. Yes, something to do with his arrest. But what? All Ben’s subtle suggestions to learn about the problem had been sidestepped. Why had he now brought the problem to María Guadalupe?

  Indeed, at that moment, Jerry was asking himself what had caused his startling involuntary response.

  As the sky grew dark, the room began to fill with people, many of them already known to Jerry. In one corner, talking quietly with Nicolás, was Luis Juárez, the shopkeeper. Next to Luis was his wife, and at her breast, a new baby. Juan Pablo, the baker, and his cousin, Rosario, with two boys, nine or ten years of age. Grandmother Juana and her daughter Juanita. Two younger men from the village who worked in the fields, Pedro and Gustavo. Pedro rocked a small girl on his knees.

  How many more? Jerry wondered. Quiet. Unobtrusive. Gliding through life, silently nurturing the Spirit.

  From the basket, María Guadalupe reverently took mushrooms and gave Jerry and Benjamin six large mushrooms each. Then she turned to face the altar, sitting on the ground before it, and began to eat the mushrooms herself, not just six, but perhaps twenty in all. Jerry took a place slightly behind her on the floor. Nicolás sat next to him, ready to translate María Guadalupe’s Mazatec words.

  Even before María Guadalupe had finished eating her share of the mushrooms, Jerry’s eyelids became heavy and flashes of light pierced the dim room. He blinked hard and turned to Benjamin, who smiled reassuringly. His body started to sway. A hum began, the oscillations again—from where? He closed his eyes and sat straighter.

  As the altered state became familiar to him, he could not single out this mushroom experience from other psychedelic journeys. The moment came when the veil separating him from knowledge lifted. He could not move; his breathing became shallow, his eyelids heavy, closed, to reveal shimmering patterns of light, shifting, reforming, symmetric, patterned. As each moment passed, each longer and longer, his world became the square of rug he had chosen, and his vision one of soft, bright color.

  Out of the darkness, María Guadalupe’s voice entered his world. He clung to its sound, its cadence, and relaxed. María Guadalupe would lead him. There was nothing for him to do. Her voice was part of the oscillations, part of the low humming. The sound carried the room, and she became the focal point of all the minds in that sacred space. “These are the mushrooms who love me,” she had told Benjamin, speaking of the Psilocybe cubensis they had eaten. Now Jerry could appreciate the countless voyages of discovery María had taken as she tried all the different psychoactive varieties.

  Out of the humming, her strong voice suddenly pierced the room with flat monosyllabic sounds, a Mazatec Gregorian chant. Jerry no longer knew the basement floor with its old furniture and worn rugs, but a church with rows of priests and monks, heads bowed to reveal shaved tonsures.

  To the monosyllables, she added an up and down melody. Jerry’s mind flew upward on the high notes, then down with the low. A test flight.

  Her song continued. The humming pulsed in his ears. The image of Christian monks changed. This time, the monks chanted “om,” deep and full and vibrating.

  The air snapped. Startled, Jerry opened his eyes and saw María Guadalupe’s hands moving to an unseen rhythm, clapping, cracking the air, matching his breathing. The back of her right hand smartly hit the palm of her left. He closed his eyes and, on his eyelids, saw a hand drum—a shaman’s ancient drum covered in skin, the drum of Africa as the iboga worked its magic inside the men who made the music, the drum of the Inuit and Siberian Yupik who healed, the drum of the Plains Indian making the vision quest—each beat on the drum skin of his mind paralleling María Guadalupe’s clap.

  “To expand the mind,” the drum vibrated, “to enter the underworld, or the upper world, to cure the sick.”

  In between the beats, he heard murmurs of low conversation and the noise of babies in the room. Were the children on the cement flo
or of the Mazatec village? Or on the dirt floor of Africa? He knew as he asked that it did not matter and began to understand Ben’s theory that pockets of knowledge were stored in different parts of the world, where they had always been—waiting. People like Benjamin Miller and Barry and himself would seek them out and bind them into a rediscovered body of wisdom. What was it that guided their investigations? Why unbury secrets that native peoples had hidden for centuries? Why was higher consciousness important to people now?

  Abruptly, María Guadalupe began to speak. Jerry opened his eyes and tried to comprehend the symbols on his watch. Forcefully, he compelled his mind to understand time in ordinary reality. Forty minutes. He felt someone beside him, a flutter of pulsating energy. Nicolás García. Jerry blinked, tried focusing on his face.

  “I will translate for you,” Nicolás said softly. “María Guadalupe will speak with you.”

  Jerry grinned. True. He had been unable to understand María Guadalupe’s Mazatec words. But it had not mattered. He understood by the tone and sound of the words what she prayed.

  “She gives her credentials,” Nicolás said to him in Spanish. “She tells the mushroom that she is a good woman, a clean woman, a woman without sin, a humble woman, a woman worthy to have the mushroom speak through her. She invokes the Blessed Virgin to let her Son speak to her through the mushroom.”

  Jerry closed his eyes again, listening to the melding of Nicolás’s voice with that of María Guadalupe’s, as she repeated the litany of her abilities, maintaining the clapping, sometimes fast, sometimes slower, carrying the room with the sound, directing the energy, focusing mind and emotion.

  “She says she is beginning to see. She sees the darkness that sickens you. It blocks the light, and without light, you cannot live.”

  Sitting slightly behind Jerry, Nicolás spoke her words to his ear, while Jerry let her voice pull him along paths fused from the form of the Catholic litany and ancient ceremony, the images startling as he visualized the words.

  “I am the wise woman, the mushroom says.

  “I am the soarer, the mushroom says.

  “I am the daughter of the Virgin, the mushroom says.

  “I am earth, the mushroom says.

  “I am sky, the mushroom says.

  “I am the flight of the eagle, the mushroom says.

  “I am the mouse of the field, the mushroom says.

  “I am the green corn, the mushroom says.

  “I am the deer of the forest, the mushroom says.

  “I am the growth of plants, the mushroom says.

  “I am the breast for the child, the mushroom says.

  “I am the bearer of life, the mushroom says.

  “I am the woman who heals, the mushroom says.”

  Jerry saw her soar, fill the sky, brush through clouds, grow from the earth, suckle mankind, maintain life. The clapping carried his heartbeat, her sucking and sighing breath supported his breathing. Great round globes of concentrated energy, warm, moved through his body with her humming.

  “The blockage is a darkness. There cannot be growth. What is the darkness? Let the mushroom speak. Let the mushroom guide.”

  A landscape appeared and in it a tunnel. Jerry entered, following the voice, deeper and deeper. He moved with María Guadalupe, sinking into the depths of the cave. With each step, the Catholic litany and the poetry of the Mazatec, carried them.

  “It is a sin that makes you ill. The blockage is a sin.”

  Again the clapping, the heavy sigh.

  “The Virgin will show me.

  “St. Peter will show me.

  “The saints will show me.

  “The angels will lead the way.

  “This woman will see in the darkness.

  “This woman is unafraid.

  “There will be truth.

  “This woman is a Truth Seeker.

  “St. Peter. St. Paul.

  “Blessed Saints.

  “Show me.

  “I am the woman who sees in the darkness.”

  Eyes closed, Jerry felt his mind extend, his body shake as if cold, his pores open. Behind his lids, parts of his life came into view, real in the world of the mushroom. He was small, a child once more. María Guadalupe was with him, watching, and as he left the tunnel, he walked into a waiting field of spring wildflowers. His father stood beside him, alive again, a book of California wildflowers in one hand, a magnifying glass in the other. Jerry touched the petals of the golden poppy, felt its softness, his eyes reveling in the brightness of its orange color. The wild iris called him with its scent, and bending, he used his magnifying glass to observe the fuzzy yellow growth on the purple petals. On and on through the field he romped, collecting specimens for his collection, the names rolling from his memory—the yellow star-like dwarf poppy, Ithuriel’s spear, pink phlox, and bright red paintbrushes. Mariposa lilies of yellow and white. Shooting stars with a golden tail. Purple lupine. Small baby blue eyes with a pale blue-white center.

  “I am the flower of the earth,” María Guadalupe sang, delighting in his vision, “the mushroom says.”

  “I am color, the mushroom says.

  “I am softness, the mushroom says.

  “I am seeds falling to earth, the mushroom says.

  “I am the scent in the breeze, the mushroom says.

  “I am the sound of the root moving through earth, the mushroom says.

  “I am the Source of Life, the mushroom says.

  “I am a woman born, the mushroom says.

  “I am the woman of wisdom, the mushroom says.

  “St. Peter says it.

  “St. Paul says it.

  “The Blessed Saints say it.

  “The Blessed Virgin says it.

  “Jesus Christ says it.”

  Jerry breathed deeply, smiling with the warm spring air on his skin.

  Suddenly, he caught his breath, only to feel it quicken a moment later.

  Another child with a laughing face ran to him—Myles.

  “The darkness. Why is there darkness?”

  Jerry could not answer María Guadalupe’s question. His tongue was large and fastened to the roof of his mouth. The vision changed.

  He and Myles stood together on the stage in elementary school, ready to receive individual prizes for science projects; walked together in the graduation ceremony from sixth grade, each with a white carnation on the lapel of their dress jackets. Summer vacation floated by while they camped and swam, collected seeds, and classified plants. Excursions with Dr. Corbet in Central America over Christmas vacation, eighth grade. Summer school at UC Berkeley, just past their sixteenth birthday.

  Another trip with Dr. Corbet, this time to Ghana, junior year high school, the colorful woven cloth they’d wrapped around themselves one night, laughing at their gaudiness in the firelight, then … the moment … looking into each other’s eyes, turning away, frightened at the scope of what loomed between them.

  The excursion to Gabon with Dr. Miller. A telephone call from Myles asking for a kilo of pot for a friend. A knock at the door. Confusion. Police. Guns. Rough hands. Handcuffs. Fear …

  Why, Myles, why?

  “A sin causes the sickness. Confess the sin. Release it. You will be ill until you are made clean.”

  María Guadalupe rocked back and forth in the darkness, humming, clapping her hands with a steady beat, the back of one hand against the palm of another, humming, giving Jerry time to still his heartbeat, to arrest the tears in his eyes.

  My friend! My best friend set me up. The man I love had me arrested and sent to prison.

  Suddenly, he knew that his anger and hatred were indeed dark, emotions that had killed something in him. The person he’d once been was lost. He was living his life as if looking at the world through a tiny slit in a curtain, his hatred fanned by the jealousy of what Myles had that he did not. Myles had the academic future he had always dreamed would be his; his bitterness, the result of a love betrayed.

  Just as suddenly, Jerry un
derstood that Myles had no future at all. No aspect of greatness.

  The future he’s building is one structured on lies. Lies will crumble, and his future with them.

  Envy?

  What does he have that could make him a source of my envy? Would I trade my integrity for his future?

  The curtain parted a few more inches. Sunshine. A glimpse of green.

  What had Myles feared?

  Jerry understood with staggering clarity what Myles must have known—terror. The temptations that had seduced Myles assailed him, flooded his senses—until he understood the pain.

  Empathy rose within him so powerfully, so intensely, it extended past himself, past Myles, moving outward. A heavy ball welled up, centered in his throat, and floated from his mouth. Lighter, no longer choked by ill will, the curtain parted. The green field of the springtime meadow spread up and away. Alone, he raced to the top of the hill, dazzled by the motion of waving grass and wildflowers and brilliant sunlight. At the top of the hill, María Guadalupe waited for him.

  “It is gone. The sickness is gone. You will grow.”

  “Thank you,” he whispered to her in his vision. “Thank you for sight.”

  Jerry opened his eyes and looked at the woman sitting on the rug before him facing the altar. The room was dim, pierced only by the light of the candles and occasional colored flashes. The luminescence of altar candles outlined her body, creating a shimmering frame, a radiating star ignited by her own power.

  Eyes closed, Benjamin Miller felt María Guadalupe’s mental presence as she touched him and began to lead him. Before Benjamin’s mushroom eyes, a lake stretched calm and flat, an inland sea, and near the lake, a cave. María Guadalupe entered easily, the image of the small opening with darkness behind clear to Benjamin. Reaching out, he touched smooth rock.

  “Come with me into the tunnel.

  “Come to meet your Guardian Spirit.

  “The Spirit that protects you.”

  Benjamin could no longer see María Guadalupe, could only hear her voice. Bending low, he tried to push his way through the narrow opening, but could not. He heard her call, but the voice was becoming faint. Desperately, he tried to reach her, knew it was enormously important to follow, but struggled at the passageway. Sucking in his breath, he visualized the lengthening of his body. Shoving and clawing the rock, he felt his head pass through the opening, then his shoulders and arms painfully squeeze through the hole, finally slipping into darkness. Standing, he took a few faltering steps, following the voice, only to find himself falling through space, turning easily, over and over as if gravity were no longer at play, his body light and spinning through the black hole. Ahead, he could see illumination.