Davis participating in a sacred Mazatec Indian "magic mushroom" ceremony in Oaxaca, Mexico

Image courtesy of Peter Von Putterkamer/ Gryphon Productions

Having decided to go to the Amazon, there was only one man to see, and that was Richard Schultes, the Harvard professor who was the greatest Amazon explorer of the 20th century, without a doubt. So I knocked on his office door at Harvard. I just said: “Sir, I’m from British Columbia. I’ve saved up money in a logging camp. I want to go to the Amazon like you did and collect plants.”

At the time, I knew nothing of botany. I’d never taken a serious biology course—any biology course—in my life. And he didn’t ask for credentials. He just said, “Well, son, when do you want to go?” And two weeks later I was in the Amazon.

What advice did Schultes give you?
My poor mother. I was trying to placate my mother back in Victoria, so I went back to see him to get his advice and he said, “Don’t bother with leather boots because all the snakes bite at the neck.” And then he said, “Don’t forget to bring a pith helmet.” And then his third piece of advice was “don’t come back without trying ayahuasca,” which is the most potent of the hallucinogenic preparations of the whole shaman’s repertoire.


Did you wear a pith helmet?
No

You are flung into other levels of reality so visceral, so tangible, so all-enveloping, that they become your sense of the real world.

Get bitten by a snake?
No. I did step on an anaconda once. I never had any problems at all.

Did you try ayahuasca?
Oh yes, many times.

What is it like?
You are flung into other levels of reality so visceral, so tangible, so all-enveloping, that they become your sense of the real world. And you suddenly realize that the relatively mundane realm of ordinary consciousness is a crude facsimile of what awaits in the psychotropic trance. This and other experiences in the presence of people taken by the spirit left me with visceral evidence that cultural beliefs can really make for different human beings, that there are other ways of knowing, other levels of intuition, that cannot necessarily be understood through the filter of Cartesian logic.

What do you mean by “other ways of knowing”?
When Schultes was in the Amazon in the 1940s, the Seona in Ecuador identified for him 17 varieties of ayahuasca liana, and all of them, to his Harvard-trained taxonomic eye, were the same species. When he finally asked them to give him lessons in the nature of their systematics, they looked at him like he was a fool and said, “Don’t you know anything about plants? Each one of these 17, when taken on the night of a full moon, will sing to you in a different key.” That’s not gonna get you a Ph.D. at Harvard, but it’s more interesting than counting flower parts.

So drugs do for the Seona people what science does for us?
Not drugs. That’s a pejorative notion in our society—cocaine, crack, crystal meth, whatever. These aren’t drugs. These are sacred medicines. These are the facilitators. These are the avenues to the doorways of the gods.

You went from investigating one kind of sacred medicine to another. Is that what propelled you from the Amazon to Haiti?
I have always lived by the adage that if it works, it’s obsolete. The minute I get good at something, I generally drop it and try something else. I was looking around for a thesis topic that would really catch me, and Schultes came up with this zombie thing. A team of psychopharmacologists led by a man named Nathan Kline­—he was derided by one newspaper as the father of Thorazine, but his science was impeccable—went on record saying they had found the first zombie. They didn’t believe in magic, but they believed it was possible that a person could appear to be dead in such a way as to fool a physician. The existence of a poison that would do that was taken for granted by the Haitian government and specifically mentioned in the penal code of the country, but nobody had investigated to see what was in it. I went down there almost on a whim, thinking that the assignment would be a lark, a couple weeks in Haiti. In the end, of course, it consumed four years of my life.