Since my last post about suspected deaths connected to the underground network I was once a part of, many people have left comments and DMs asking why I’m still choosing to withhold the shaman’s name. Here’s what I’m waiting for:
Confirmable information—dates, places, names and victims who will go on record to tell their stories.
It’s been strange to receive sympathy in the DMs because it has become abundantly clear to me that many people have been harmed by this network much worse than me. Troublingly, the harm that people are reporting has been worse than I imagined. I want to acknowledge the gossip that circulates within the shaman’s network, while also trying to help this information in the world. This network needs to be investigated and I hope more people will step forward. What follows are the most troubling unconfirmed allegations reported to me and several journalists who are working on this story:
Additional deaths. My tally of suspected deaths is now four at journeys and one suicide among the inner circle.
18 reported sexual assaults by one male facilitator in the network.
These claims need further investigation and the people who are doing the investigating need more information, especially dates, places and names. Ironically, when I gave my novel Dharma Sluts a suspenseful plot, I felt guilty about suggesting people died in the psychedelic underground. Learning more information about the shaman’s network has been unsettling. I am pressing forward because I believe information I learned while I was trying to be his ghost writer can help others piece together their experiences.
As I said before, not only is the shaman’s network full of gossip—as tends to happen when no one knows the truth—but the network is also full of conspiracy theories and—let’s be honest—people who think they’re lizard people or aliens because of past life regressions. Journalists have been unable to verify the most serious accusations because the many tips they’ve received tend to lack verifiable information like names, dates, places and victims who are willing to come forward.
When I was writing my novel, I deliberately made the shaman into a character and named him Don Mateo to spoof Carlos Castaneda. Once I make someone into a character—once I fictionalize them—I have always believed they become more of my creation. You could call my characters my projections. I intentionally created Don Mateo to be an “every shaman” type of character so that he could embody many fantasies of whiteness, white American new age spirituality and the psychedelic renaissance. I didn’t want him to be dismissed as an outlier or singled out as one bad actor because I wanted the psychedelic field to finally cope with its hypocrisies connected to whiteness. Fat chance, you might say.
I was altered during most of the brief in-person time I spent around the shaman. Not to mention, the kind of stuff that happened around him was unbelievable, such as the woman who was parked outside his house in Pasadena glassing us when I arrived in February of 2020. He said she was a former client who had a psychotic break in a journey and was living in her car outside his house to protect him from evil energy. Seriously. When I was writing my novel, before I knew about the deaths, I believed the truest parts of it were the psychedelic vision scenes. Now it seems more of my fiction is coming true.
Cassandra, the journalist in my novel who is investigating Don Mateo, asks him to define shamanism. “It’s a figment of the white imagination,” he responds. Although the real shaman deleted our old text messages last week, in my novel Don Mateo tells the journalist, “Make me whatever you need me to be.” So I did. I wanted to make art as in fiction as in real literature from my experience. I didn’t want to write a half-baked psychedelic memoir about my proximity to him. I am making these posts now to help others piece together their experiences with this network. There are other people working in psychedelics who should be—and should have been—calling out this person and this network for a long time. This experience has profoundly soured me on the psychedelic movement as a whole. Alleged mental health professionals working in psychedelics are hopping on here and popping off about how I should be naming him and assuming all the risk when they should be looking in the mirror. I’m writing these posts because people working in psychedelics have lacked the courage to speak out against these practices and end them.
The people who talk about knowing of this network for a long time make me the sickest. If you knew why were you silent? If you knew, why didn’t you try to stop it?
(Btw someone reported to me that the name the shaman uses isn’t even his real name. Go figure.)
I knew a white chick writing about a corrupt Peruvian shaman would be a hard sell, but I believe I write about whiteness more than I write about him. His network is equally an amplification of himself and American culture. His groups’ practices of secrecy and NDAs are adaptations to U.S. drug laws. His network’s success, up until now, is also a product of current drug regulations. Things have to change in the psychedelic movement as a whole to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m tired of having this story on my conscience. Like many of the people in my DMs, I want it to be revealed so that everyone can move on.
Provide confirmable information!
Here’s some previous work that discuss shamanism in the United States and whiteness:
And here’s The Story of White Water: A White Guy With a Sweat Lodge published in Hobart Pulp last year.
I’ll say it happily: Armand Bytton. I am not protecting anyone.