The English Teacher and The Shaman

Meeting Dionysus

My zeal for psychedelics led my older female friends to introduce me to The Shaman at a journey in Florida.

He was barely five feet tall, and he wore platform sneakers and a Rolex. The other women said he was an indigenous man from Peru who had come to the United States because of a prophecy that he was the one who was supposed to share his tribe’s knowledge with white people.

I’m aware the term shaman is an unfortunate appropriation that gets too broadly applied in the psychedelic renaissance, but I use it here and in my novel because of the following reasons:

A.) It was the word used by the mostly white and wealthy people in his groups.

B.) I use the generalization to point out common characteristics among the spurious Messiah-like figures in the psychedelic scene.

C.) I use the term in lieu of revealing my former teacher’s identity.

This guy was the shaman of shamans, iykwim. He had been leading psychedelic groups in the underground for more than 40 years, and he’d done it across the globe. He claimed he could make any plant psychedelic. He had novel drugs I’d never heard of, although, in the groups, we weren’t allowed to use language like “drugs” or “drug trip.” The shaman’s pills were sacraments and what we did was journey. The first time I met him, we made a deep connection fast by talking about literature, specifically The Resurrection by Tolstoy, which is one of my favorite novels. I was on drugs, but apparently I’m even better at talking about literature when I’m high.

He asked for my phone number the first time I met him, and I gave it to him. After that, he became my personal psychedelic integration coach. I texted him about my increasingly vivid nightmares, which I believe were activated by psychedelics. After he had a near-death experience in Peru, he started calling me in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep.

He offered me a job, and said I should move in with him in LA. He had a live-in girlfriend at the time, but he said they were separating.

People got jealous of the attention the shaman paid me. His girlfriend attempted suicide, and then I started to shed journey friends who were salaciously interested in his personal life. While he helped his girlfriend ride out her psychological crises, I kept my teaching job in Montana. It seemed unlikely that I’d ever work for the shaman.

But he continued to offer me jobs, and I was so drawn to psychedelics that I went to LA in February of 2020 to check out the possibility of working for him and to drink Ayahuasca.

I drank the tea three nights in a row and saw images of the Hi-Line, the place in Montana where my mother grew up and where my Russian German family homesteaded in 1914.

In between ceremonies, I went to the shaman’s house, and attended a company meeting. The dynamics of his company were off-putting to say the least. Facilitators complained about inconsistencies in his sacraments, which I suspected were chemicals from a lab billed as sacred indigenous plant medicine. I don’t have a problem with synthetics, but I think it’s imperative that people are upfront and honest about what they serve others. In the shaman’s groups there was creepy secrecy about the alleged sacraments and obfuscation and gaslighting when people asked questions about them.

Not only that, but it became clear to me that the shaman’s relationships with women were messy and exploitive. The agreements he made with people were flimsy, and he made offers he never intended to follow through on. There was a woman parked in her Benz outside his house who had a psychotic break in one of his groups and believed she had to conduct surveillance to protect him. He later called the cops on her for stalking him. His employees worked as contractors, and some said they were not regularly paid. I still believe many of the women around him looked the other way as a consequence of white guilt or trying to be woke or—even worse—because of the creditability you gain in the psychedelic scene by working with an indigenous man.

After the LA trip, it became clear to me I couldn’t work for the shaman. Instead, I found a job at Rocky Boy Schools and headed to Northern Montana.

Story continued in my next post: The Psychedelic English Teacher and the Rez Baller here: https://psychedelicauntie.substack.com/p/the-psychedelic-english-teacher-and