Photos From 1:55 AM I Don’t Remember Taking.

Ayahuasca at a rancho in Yucatán. Fifty pesos, a clip-on tie, and a church I’d never heard of.

A table with a white cloth. Candles. Water glasses. A framed picture of an old man with a white beard. Behind the table, five men in white shirts and navy ties, standing in a row. The timestamp says 1:55 AM.

I was there. They’re on my phone. I don’t remember having it out. I don’t remember standing up. Nobody stopped me. And I never saw the old man in the frame. Not that night. He turned up when I went through the photos.

1:55 AM. I took this. I have no memory of it.

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This was 2013. I was spending more and more time in Houston and less at home in Mexico. Commuting between the two, running Loco Gringo from both. I was in Mexico when Sol called my mobile. I remember it was a sunny Saturday. I had the house to myself, with no plans.

Hey, there is an opportunity to do ayahuasca in the jungle tonight, do I want to go?

Yeah! Where?

Yucatán.

Her abuelito’s rancho just across the state line.

She went on to explain he was not her real grandfather. The endearing term of respect, not blood.

Sure. Whatever, I’m in.

Thinking, great now I have something exciting to do this weekend.

I didn’t ask another question except what time I should be ready.

I’d been in the Yucatán peninsula for twenty years. In my mind I thought the rancho would be in the jungle with some Mayans, an old man, the abuelito. We would probably be in a stick palapa, outside. I wondered if the floor of the palapa would be dirt. Did I need a mat? I had spent plenty of time in the jungle so was comfortable with what I was going to find. Some Mayans. A palapa. Basic. Down to earth. I figured I would just wear my jungle clothes.

Sol and I had known each other for years. She’s a photographer, known for her “Trash the Dress” shoots, brides in full gowns in cenotes and surf, and she gets hired all over the world for weddings and events. I’ve modeled for her as Wonder Woman, under water. A story for another time.

Dark eyes to match her dark hair, a smile that fills a room, and the talent to go with it. You would think, even I would think, we would not have much in common beyond business and the Riviera Maya. What we had was the same itch. To go find out. She had never done ayahuasca either.

I did a quick search on Google. People said to eat light for a few days before. Ayahuasca can make you purge, which is a nice way of saying vomit. I had only a few hours. I ate some pineapple and drank water. And thought I would take my chances.

Ayahuasca is a psychedelic. Two plants from the Amazon, a vine and a leaf, boiled together for hours into a bitter brown tea. The leaf carries the drug, DMT. The vine keeps your body from breaking it down before it reaches your brain. Tribes along the Amazon have been drinking it in ceremonies for centuries, with a shaman running the night. People see things. They say they meet their dead, see their own lives from the outside, and come out the other side changed. That’s why people fly to Peru for it. Healing, they call it. Finding yourself. Most people throw up first. That’s considered part of it.

She picked me up wearing shorts and sandals, in her Jeep. Me in fatigues, a t-shirt and flip flops. We drove the back roads, down through Tulum, across to Cobá, and towards X-Can.

The gate. The cross is right there. I never noticed it.

Not a Mayan in sight.

When we arrived the gate was open for us. There was a cross on a post by the entry. Two crossbars instead of one. I didn’t see it. I found it years later, going through the photos for this piece. The rancho was a cinder block house, chickens and cows in an overgrown milpa. Not a village. Not a palapa like I knew. Not a Mayan in sight.

Sol got out and greeted her abuelito with a big smile, a kiss on the cheek and a hug. She introduced me. I said mucho gusto. White hair, a round weathered face, guayabera, a smile that stayed while he said, “No llevas puesto blanco,” you are not in white.

Sol and I looked at each other. Now what?

He shouted to young girls inside the house. Told them to find us some white clothes. Then another girl took us beyond the main house to a thatch-roofed palapa to hang our hammocks. A dozen or more were hanging. We found two empty hooks. The palapa had a small bathroom with a shower everyone was to share. We were to shower and be in white by seven that evening. We had to be clean.

While we waited I started noticing the girls. Navy blue pleated skirts to the ankle. White blouses with short sleeves. In the jungle. The more I looked around the more girls in uniform I saw. I could have asked somebody. I didn’t.

Wandering the property we came to a bigger palapa. Concrete floor, a knee wall, hand-hewn tree trunks holding up a thatch roof the size of a dance hall. White plastic Coca-Cola chairs lined up in rows, one side facing the other. A table in the center.

The abuelito's house.

At 6:45 pm we walked to the big palapa. There was a table at the entrance and a man behind it. Dress pants. White short-sleeve shirt. Clip-on tie. Who wears a clip-on tie in the jungle? On the table, a cross made of twisted vine, two crossbars lashed with twine, standing in a piece of log. Same as the one at the gate, the one I didn’t see.

This was not what I had envisioned. This had rules, procedures. My defenses went up.

We signed a book. Name, where you’re from. We paid fifty pesos. As soon as we stepped up to that table, the experience started. There was no turning back.

A visitors’ book and the price of a beer, then you went in, sang in Portuguese and drank something nasty until 4:00 AM.

The cross from the sign-in table. Fifty pesos and your name.

Men on one end of the palapa, women on the other, seated by age. As people filed in I started seeing faces I had seen somewhere. Cancún was small when I moved to Mexico. We all went to the same dentist, the same hairdresser. Shopped in the same stores. Twenty years later here they were. An old Mayan couple, she in a huipil with two fine gold chains at her neck, he in a guayabera and sandals. She hugged me hello. I hugged her back. I could not have told you her name. I was the only gringa in the palapa.

Everyone was saying buen viaje. Have a good trip.

The palapa. Men on one side of the altar, women on the other. Coca-Cola chairs.

In the middle, between the men and the women, a table. Four or five men behind it in white shirts and navy ties. Real ties. The girls in the blue skirts were the ayudantes, we were told. The helpers. Most people vomit on ayahuasca. The helpers would walk you to the jungle and hold your hair.

We started chanting. In Portuguese.

A little book of hymns was given to each of us. I don’t speak Portuguese. I speak Spanish, twenty years of it, none of it from a classroom. So I sat there turning Portuguese into Spanish and Spanish into English in my brain to find out what I was saying. What was I saying? Was I agreeing to something? I grew up Catholic. I knew this scene. The altar, the rows, the standing and sitting, the helpers in uniform. I came for a trip. I did not come to become a follower.

They called us up one row at a time. A little paper cup, the size of a small shot glass. Foul.

I drank it. We chanted. They called us up again. I drank again. A little woozy. Nothing like alcohol. The night air was heavy. Humidity, candle wax, mildew off the thatch.

I couldn’t let go. Everyone around me was going somewhere and I was sitting there taking inventory. Skirts. Tie. Cross. Hymnal. Faces. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to know what the hell this was. I couldn’t have left anyway. I hadn’t driven. Sol was in the row behind me.

A woman in the row in front of me, over to the right, stopped moving. I mean stopped. Slumped over. I stared at her for a long time. She was dead. I was sure of it. Then one of the girls, in the skirt, came up with a spray bottle, spritzed the air over her, and the woman came back to life. Picked up her hymnal. Started chanting.

It went on for hours. The helpers led people out and brought them back. I turned looking over my shoulder and saw Sol. Hunched over, face wet, trembling. Two of the girls were wrapping a blanket around her. I turned back. I faced the altar. I stepped up for every round.

At some point I needed a helper. She took my hand and walked me to the edge of the trees. I had short hair. Nothing to hold. I dry heaved while she stood next to me, her hand on my back. Then she walked me to my seat.

Later I had to use the bathroom. I had to ask for permission. Another girl led me. I washed my hands and looked up at the mirror.

A skull.

My face was a skull. I knew it was me. I didn’t think it was anyone else. I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t anything. I looked down at my hands to check. Hands. Skin. I looked back up. Skull. It was only in the mirror. So it was working. It had me, and I still felt nothing. I stood over the sink and stared, aware that I was looking at a skull and the skull was me.

I’ve wondered since what it was showing me. That I was dead. Or dead inside.

I walked out and begged to lie down.

No. Tienes que volver y cantar. No. You have to go back and chant.

Please?

No.

Please.

The girl gave in. No mattress, a bed frame. Wooden slats and a blanket. From there the chanting and the cicadas ran together, in tune. I was shivering, teeth chattering. A few minutes later, maybe, a girl told me I had to go back. She spritzed me. How I managed to ask what the spray was I have no clue. Hierba de limón, lemongrass, she said. Whether I hallucinated that part I can’t tell you. But it worked on me the way it worked on the dead woman, and she took me to my chair.

The altar and the elders blurred.

I slumped over, they sat me up.

This went until four in the morning. I don’t know how many rounds.

The day was breaking. A rooster crowed. All of us found our way to the palapa with our hammocks. I was drained. Then someone started drumming, somewhere off in the palm trees. I drifted off to the drums.

After a few hours of sleep we made our way up to the main house. Seven in the morning. On the porch, a table, a joint going around, tea. People talking about their trips in Spanish. I couldn’t follow it. I’d spent the whole night running Portuguese into Spanish into English and the machine was done. Plain Spanish went by me like traffic. So I sat there. Ready to go home. How I get myself into these things, I will never know.

Sol drove us back to the coast. It’s a long drive. She told me what happened to her. It’s hers, and it stays in the Jeep. I told her I saw a skull. I said it the way you’d report a flat tire. We didn’t say much after that. What the fuck just happened was the whole conversation.

Back in Akumal I sat down and began my research. Googling ayahuasca, cults, crosses. Looking at crosses. Dozens of them. Then I found mine. A symbol of Santo Daime, it turned out. Brazil, not Peru. Started in the 1930s by a rubber tapper in the Amazon. The white uniforms, the navy ties, the pleated skirts, the hymns in Portuguese, the two-bar cross. All of it standard. All of it in books.

Santo Daime. A religion founded in the 1930s in the Brazilian Amazon by Raimundo Irineu Serra, a Black rubber worker from the northeast, born two years after Brazil ended slavery. Followers call him Mestre Irineu. He mixed Catholic saints, Afro-Brazilian spiritism, and the ayahuasca the local tribes had been drinking for centuries. He called the drink Daime, from dai-me, give me. Dai-me força, dai-me amor. The hymns are said to have come to him while drinking it. They’re sung in Portuguese, for hours. The two-bar cross is the Cruzeiro. Legal in Brazil, and it has spread to Mexico, the United States, and Europe.

I had gone looking for a Mayan shaman in a palapa. I found a church I’d never heard of, with a clip-on tie at the door.

So I called it a cult.

P.S. Would I do it again? Yes. I’d ask more questions this time. Who’s running it. Who’s been before. And I’d double check the dress code.

Were you there that night? Or somewhere like it? I'd like to hear it.

Sources: Santo Daime, Wikipedia, Mestre Irineu: A Black Man Who Changed the History of Ayahuasca, Chacruna

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