The Myth of Merula

The timing for undergoing a guided Ibogaine trip at the hands of Akyundo could not have been worse. I was feeling weakened from my bout with dysentery. I had also been suffering nightmares as I slept on my foam mattess in Apurali’s courtyard. I would dream I was the leopard whose paws had been cut off to be sold in the fetish market. My cubs were watching, hazel eyes enormous, from their hiding place in a patch of brush. Or the monkey whose head had been chopped off. I had just been weaned from my mother. I was eating fruit in a tree. With violence, a rope ripped me from the tree, and I was held in rough hands. Or the antelope whose testicles had been wrenched from its body. Nothing else from me was wanted, so I was not even killed. I was left there to bleed to death.

Most of all, I dreamed I was a baby inside of a wicker cage, surrounded by the putrescent smells of rotting animal body parts, overheated, soon to be out of the misery I had endured in my short life, comforted to be held by the withered old hands of a man who was about to … about to what? Sometimes, in my dreams, I would be held upside down with my throat slit until all the blood drained from me, like the young buck goat I had seen being sacrificed on a family altar … just moments before, he had been romping and butting heads with another young goat. I had petted him as the people laughed. (Goats are for eating, not for petting.) Sometimes my tiny, fast-beating heart would suddenly be ripped from chest as I lay there trusting in those wiry old arms, relieved to be cooler now that it was dark and I was free of the wicker cage, about to fall asleep from my exhaustion ….

In the morning, I would shake off the nightmares easily. I knew exactly why I was having them, after all. They were due to my short tour of the village fetish market. That, and my weakened physical condition. Yes, I reasoned to myself, the fetish market was shocking and repulsive to me. But even if my own culture doesn’t chop off monkey heads and sell them for magic, it cages monkeys and gives them diseases and cancers on purpose. In both cases, the principle is the same. It’s acceptable for animals to be sacrificed for human purposes. Those purposes may be a love potion or a lipstick, a cure for infertility or a cure for cancer.

It would take a lot more than a village market, a stomach bug, an old man and a few dreams to scare me away from Blackbird’s story. I doubted Akyundo would murder me. He would give me a substance, and I would dutifully report my visions. I might puke a couple times along the way. But I would wake up, and I would return to normal. I would visit Blackbird again. I would have to work on bonding with her so well that Akyundo would no longer be able to get in the way. Who knows what he is about? I know I have to be careful passing judgement on a man from a completely different culture. I could easily be misreading the things I see and hear. The Dogon are a gentle, happy people who are free of neurosis and violence. Their high hogon could not be a murderer.

The more I thought about my impending acid trip, the more I just wanted to get it over with. I felt calm, except for an intermittent lurching feeling in my stomach. Being in Mali has changed me in that a stoic state of mind has become my ordinary mood. All my life, I have had the ability when under stress to go into an endurance mode. In this mode, I don’t feel anything. I think and I act, but I don’t feel.

Since returning to Sevare, I have done some research on psychedelics, and now I realize that I should have been in a much more positive mood and receptive mood. It would proabably have made my experience more pleasant.

It began with Apurali leading me blindfolded, for what seemed like two hours and often involved stepping carefully on rocks, to the site of my initiation. When he removed my blindfold, as my eyes adjusted to the now very dim light, I could see that I was standing inside of a narrow but deep cave in the side of the escarpment. I could see a pool of dark water on the cave floor several feet away. Then I could hear Akyundo’s voice as he emerged from the shadows deeper inside in the cave. I heard what sounded like a baby coo echoing from the depths that Akyundo had just emerged from. But the high pitched noise could easily have been bats, and my imagination may have embellished the noise until it sounded like a baby.

A few minutes later, Apurali had departed, and I sat on the cave floor, several times swallowing back the vomit rising in my throat from the foul taste of Akyundo’s concoction. In French, he told me that I had to tell him everything I saw. I closed my eyes, but I didn’t see anything. I didn’t feel any different. I could hear him chanting and singing words I didn’t understand. I don’t know how much time went by, before I started to see vivid scenes of people and places, scenes I could zoom in on or scroll past. They seemed a little ordinary. I saw my parents in their back yard. I saw people walking in the airport in Senegal. I wondered if these would be good enough for him. I wondered what kind of vision would please him. I couldn’t imagine. If I made a vision up just to please my host, it would be hit or miss.

After a while, though, free will and deception were no longer options for me, anyway. I’ll save the details for my next entry.