SAN PEDRO, AN INTERVIEW WITH AN ANDEAN HUACHUMERA

San Pedro (Trichocereus pachanoi), the sacred mescaline cactus and visionary teacher plant of the South Americas, is especially associated with the shamans and healers (curanderos) of the Peruvian Andes. It has other names among these healers as well, including “El Remedio”: The Remedy, which refers to its healing and visionary powers which, they say, help us let go of “the illusions of the world”.

Even its post-Hispanic name, San Pedro, embodies these qualities because Saint Peter is the holder of the keys to Heaven and its name therefore speaks of an ability to open the gates into another world where those who drink it can heal, discover their divinity, and find purpose on Earth.

It is also known as huachuma and this is how it is most often referred to by the shamans who use it, who call themselves huachumeros (male) or huachumeras(female). The earliest archaeological evidence so far discovered of its use as a sacrament and healer is a stone carving of a huachumero found at the Jaguar Temple of Chavín de Huantar in northern Peru, which is almost 3,500 years old. Textiles from the same region and period depict the cactus with jaguars and hummingbirds, two of its guardian spirits, and with stylised spirals representing the visionary experience. 

Cactus ceremonies are held today for the same reasons as in earliest times: to cure illnesses of a spiritual, emotional, mental, or physical nature; to know the future through the prophetic and divinatory qualities of the plant; to overcome sorcery or saladera (an inexplicable run of ‘bad luck’); to ensure success in one’s ventures; to rekindle love and enthusiasm for life; and to experience the world as divine.

La Gringa (“the outsider woman”) is one of the huachumeras offering these ceremonies. “It is a master teacher”, she says. “It helps us to heal, to grow, to learn and awaken, and it assists us in reaching higher states of consciousness. I have been very blessed to have experienced many miracles: people being cured of all sorts of illnesses just by drinking this sacred plant.

“We also use it to reconnect and to realise that there is no separation between you, me, the Earth, and the Sky. We are all one. San Pedro therefore teaches us to live in balance and harmony; it teaches compassion and understanding; and it shows us how to love, respect, and honour all things.

“Each person’s experience will be unique, as we are all unique, and drinking San Pedro is therefore also a personal journey of discovery of the self and the universe. There is one thing in common though:the day you meet San Pedro your life will be changed forever… and always for the better”.

In 2008, during one of my Cactus of Vision trips to Peru which offer participants the opportunity to work with San Pedro, I interviewed La Gringa about her experiences with huachuma. Her answers show not only the healing potential of this plant but cast light on the traditions which surround it and their evolution in the modern world. For those who work as shamanic healers, what La Gringa has learned from huachuma is also of interest because it suggests where illness may come from and how it may be cured, even by those who do not work with San Pedro themselves.

How did you first become involved with San Pedro?

I first drank it in the 1990s and that experience overturned everything I thought I knew. During my visions, out in the mountains, I saw a stairway of light on a nearby hill and I called my shaman over to explain it.

“There is nothing to explain”, he shrugged. “It is a stairway of light”.

“You mean you see it too?” I asked.

“Of course”, he said. “Take a photograph if you don’t believe it is there”.

I thought he was crazy! How could I photograph a vision: something that was just in my head? But I took the picture anyway and when I later got it developed, there it was: the stairway of light, just as I’d seen it, although it was never there in the mountains before and you will not see it now. I called my shaman and he came over to look at the picture. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” he said. “These things are not just in your mind. They exist. San Pedro opens your eyes to what is already there!”

San Pedro had shown me reality as it actually was, but it also changed what I thought of as real. I now understood the power we humans have: that we can manifest whatever we choose. We just have to believe we can.

San Pedro taught me how to believe. Before it I used to walk through the world and not notice anything. Since drinking it I noticed everything and had a new respect for the Earth. I knew then that I had to work more with this plant.

Can you tell us a little about your training?

My teacher’s name is Ruben. He is a famous anthropologist who for many years ran the Machu Picchu sacred site, but he is also a shaman. His training was very rigorous and hard. He made me drink twice a week for many years. Sometimes I would beg him not to have to! I’d say I was too sick to drink, because I couldn’t face another session. But he would say, “Good! You’re sick! That – and the fact that you can’t face the healing you need – is exactly why you need San Pedro! Now get your coat!”

At the time it was agony, but now I know that drinking was the best thing for me. I cleared whole lifetimes of negative energy in those years and I learned much about healing too.

How do your ceremonies differ from Ruben’s?

Ruben is an ‘old school shaman’, with lots of ceremony in his work, but San Pedro told me to keep things simple and allow the plant to do its job without me getting in its way. So there is much less ceremony to what I do.

I do sometimes use tobacco, but not the singado [tobacco leaf macerated in honey and alcohol which many shamans ask participants to snort into their nostrils to clear negative energies], just tobacco smoke to free stuck energy in people. I also use agua florida [a plant-based perfume with healing properties] to balance people’s energies. Mostly I ask them to sniff it from the bottle or from their hands and it helps to ground them, but sometimes I spray it over them.

And of course I also use a mesa [a cloth altar laid out in a specific ritual way], although mine is much simpler than many others. In Peru, shamans work with many standard layouts of mesa, but when you have your own you learn to use it in a way that suits you. It is a living thing so you develop a relationship with it. San Pedro teaches you how to use it.

Some shamans use wooden staffs [like chonta, sometimes used to beat participants to move their spiritual energies around] in their ceremonies and swords on their mesas as well, as protections against the spirits and to change the energies of patients and heal them. I don’t, because I have always known that there is no greater protection or more powerful healer than San Pedro. So why would I need to hit participants with sticks – and interrupt their healings by doing so?

Is your decision to hold ceremonies in the day instead of the night part of San Pedro’s teachings as well?

What people need to understand is that San Pedro is not a hallucinogen like ayahuasca, so they will rarely see images and pictures, and there is no point, therefore, in lying in the dark waiting for something to happen. San Pedro’s teaching is visionary instead, in the revelations it brings about the natural world, and in daylight you can see that more clearly. You can look around you and see the beauty of the world and notice how connected you are to everything: that you are beautiful and part of a beautiful creation. You can’t do that in darkness.

That is why we hold our ceremonies in sunlight: because San Pedro wants it that way and that is how it was also first done.

How do you prepare your San Pedro?

Most shamans peel and cut the cactus then boil it for between four and eight hours. They may also add alcohol and sometimes other plants or ingredients. I cook mine for twenty hours, so it is much stronger. Other brews feel weak to me now and rarely give the same visions.

Some shamans say you don’t really need visions for a healing to take place and that is another reason why they hold ceremonies at night. But I think visions are important because as well as the healing people need to know they have been healed. When the visions come they can feel it; then they understand it is real and pay attention to what they are shown. Without the visions they can’t know this.

I only work with cactuses that have seven or nine spines because they produce the most gentle and beautiful brews. Those with six or eight are not so strong, while elevens and thirteens can be very intense and sometimes dark. I never use either with patients. Those with four spines are only ever used for exorcisms, and the patient and healer must both drink. It is horrible and the visions take you straight to Hell.

While the cactus is cooking we sing songs to it or offer our prayers that it will produce good healings. Sometimes the spirit of San Pedro shows up while we are cooking it too, in patterns on the surface of the water which tell us who will be coming to drink it and why. I have seen patterns in the form of ovaries, for example, or hearts enclosed by circles. Then the next day a woman has arrived for help with a fertility problem and brought with her a man whose heart was closed to her dreams. In this way San Pedro can show us what people need before they even arrive.

What healings have you seen from San Pedro?

One was a woman whose husband had died a few years ago. Then, just three months later, her son was murdered. The woman was shattered. She had a stroke which paralysed her arm and she got diabetes as well.

Finally, she asked me if she could drink San Pedro. I gave her the tiniest amount and then she lay in my arms and cried her heart out for five hours. That is a good description of what happened actually, because, through the eyes of San Pedro I saw strands of energy coming from her heart and circling her chest and arm like a tourniquet. I began pulling them out of her and throwing them away.

The next morning was like a miracle. Her arm had regained all of its movement and when she was tested her diabetes had gone too.

I asked her about her San Pedro experience and she said she had felt a lot of pain in her heart, which is where I had also seen the energy of grief that was binding her. So as well as curing her physical problems, San Pedro showed her why she had them: because of the emotional distress she had been unable to let go of before.

What I have learned from San Pedro is that illness is never a “thing” that is in us; it is not “diabetes” or “a stroke”. It is a belief we carry: that we must mourn for the ones we have lost, for example, or for ourselves, through a pain or disability that makes our suffering visible and “real”. So illness is a thoughtform; a negative pattern we hold on to and reproduce. San Pedro not only heals us but shows us this thoughtform. Then, the next time it arises, we can make a conscious choice to think and act differently.

Another woman came to me after she was diagnosed with cancer and had been receiving chemotherapy. She looked so ill but now, through San Pedro, she is healed. The plant again showed her why she had cancer and told her she had a choice: in blunt terms that she could die or change her mind and live. She decided not to have cancer anymore because she realised that life was so precious once she had seen it through San Pedro’s eyes.

The plant offers us soul retrieval or, rather, life retrieval. We hold our negative beliefs as tensions in our bodies, where they become hardened and manifest as physical problems. At the same time, our good energies are blocked so that the fullness of our souls is not expressed and parts of us stay buried. San Pedro removes our negative beliefs so the positive ones shine through and we return ourselves from ourselves.

I’ve heard it said that the ‘processes’ (like ‘set and setting’) involved in ceremonies also contribute to the effects and it is not just the plant that heals. What do you think of that?

I get asked things like this. People want to know what the “make up” of San Pedro is, what its “active ingredients” are, and “how it works”. I tell them I don’t know and I don’t care! For me, it is not San Pedro’s “mescaline content” or “properties” that are important, or the setting of the ceremony; it is a healing spirit which produces the miracles I have seen with my eyes. I can’t explain a miracle any more than those who ask me about it! But I know this: if you needed a miracle because your life was in pain, and if – by the grace of God and San Pedro – you got one, you wouldn’t care how it worked either!

Part of the disease, it seems to me, is to want to understand the world in terms of its “mechanisms” when its nuts-and-bolts really don’t matter at all. It is the beauty of the world that should attract, engage, and inspire us! When we drink San Pedro that is one of the first things we learn – and then our questions become irrelevant anyway. So the real answer, for those who want to know how San Pedro works, is simple: drink it and you will see!

The “what” of San Pedro is that it heals lives. Let us leave the whys and hows to those for whom such things seem to matter.  

The Author

Ross Heaven is the author of more than 10 books on shamanism and shamanic healing, including Plant Spirit Shamanism, Plant Spirit Wisdom, and The Sin Eater’s Last Confessions. His latest book, The Hummingbird’s Journey to God, about San Pedro healing, is published by O Books.

Ross runs workshops on these subjects too, as well as journeys to Peru to work with the shamans, healers, and plant spirit medicines (ayahuasca and San Pedro) of the Amazon and Andes. For information on these events, visit www.thefourgates.org or email [email protected].