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"I have had visions of terrible ruin!" Moutamba shouted. Because I had not seen and spoken all my visions, the king explained, we would be in mortal danger if we did not stay another night. As Lieberman insisted we were leaving anyway, the king tried to make a bargain. Introducing the analyst to the father of a 9-year-old girl, he suggested that, instead of paying more, she should take the man's daughter and raise her in America.

We convinced one of Moutamba's sons to drive us to the Ogobue Palace, a placid hotel overlooking the river. At the hotel, I discovered that the iboga trip was continuing. I was wide awake and without hunger, despite the fact that I had not slept or eaten in more than 30 hours. Lying in bed, I watched a fleeting phantasm that drifted across cracks in the white wall. Strange men in funny hats and coats marched away, melting into the plaster. I realized these were "ancestor shades," ghost-impressions of my forefathers, a vision that the iboga trance often produced, in accounts I had read. So faint, so quickly, they melted away.

We did not see the king again. After a night's rest, Lieberman and I searched Lambourene for other Bwiti Ngongo. Our guide was eager to buy iboga seeds and powder to bring to South Africa. Off the main streets, the town's back alleys formed mazes of little houses and shacks, and each separate maze seemed its own community. Many of these communities had built their own Bwiti sanctuary from wooden boards and palm fronds, rudimentary compared to Moutamba's temple.

In one of these shrines we found Papa Simone, a young, bearded shaman, with an ascetic, intellectual appearance. I described my visions, scant though they were, to Papa Simone, and he interpreted them for me. The wooden statue, he said, was the spirit of le bois sacre itself, "which comes out and engages you in conversation." The pictures of my apartment and the city streets were a telepathic check-in, showing me that everything was calm at home. The beckoning female figures, he said, indicated what paths to take. I was sorry I hadn't known better how to follow them.

Papa Simone organized another all-night ceremony for us with his Bwiti village, a closing ritual to give us the oil that Moutamba had withheld. During this ceremony, which also involved dancing, drumming and singing, I saw what Lieberman had described as "the essence of love" in the community around Papa Simone. At the end of the night, each of the Bwiti in turn embraced the analyst, then me, and danced us around the temple fire, as violently and quickly as possible. The embraces told us -- more directly than words could -- that despite our alien language and culture and pale skin, we had been accepted among them.

The second ceremony also required eating iboga, but I could not bring myself to swallow enough to hallucinate. Papa Simone's tribe included a large, laughing man wearing a red loin cloth, his sleek black body daubed with white paint. One of the older members of the tribe, he ate iboga throughout the ceremony. He kept pointing at the bowl of shavings, then at his own eyes and then at me, trying to convince me to eat more so I would see things.

Towards morning, he announced that he was having a vision, which Lieberman translated. He said he saw the spirit of my dead grandmother, of my mother's mother, hovering over me where I sat by the yellow flames of the bonfire. "You had a very close relationship with your grandmother," he told me. "She loved you very much, but now she is dead, and she doesn't want to let you go. Her spirit is hanging over you, and she is stopping you from seeing visions, and from visiting the other world."

The tribesman's vision surprised me. My mother's mother was the only grandparent I had known -- the others had died before I was born. If the tribesman was guessing, he had only a one-in-four chance of getting that right. And I did have a close relationship with my grandmother, in a way. She had often taken care of me when I was young. As I got older, I found her a repressed and gloomy presence, and I even tried to avoid her. My grandmother had lived through a sad story of immigrant America -- her father came from Poland, but when he could not find a job in New York, he killed himself, leaving his family in desperate straits. Later on, in revenge, the family destroyed his papers and all traces of him. They never spoke of him again. This repressive act had shaped my grandmother's mental life. It was not difficult to imagine my grandma as a possessive spirit, lingering above me, protecting - preventing -- me from having revelations. After I returned to New York, the tribesman's vision stayed with me as something uncanny and intuitively wise.

Scientists don't know exactly how iboga affects the brain. One speculative theory is that the alkaloid restores a balance between the brain's two halves. Carl Anderson of the Developmental Biopsychiatry Research Program at McLean Hospital in Virginia believes that people prone to addiction suffer from an imbalance between the left and right hemispheres. This disparity disrupts REM sleep, which, according to Anderson, is "essential for emotional regulation, learning and memory consolidation." Iboga, or ibogaine, accesses REM cycling in a powerful way -- after having taken a large dose, many people report their need for sleep is reduced by several hours, for weeks or even months. By this theory, ibogaine returns to psychically damaged people the healing power of their sleep and dreams.

When I returned to New York, I needed less sleep for a while. I mulled over the Bwiti initiation. The psychedelic had given me such strange figments, such glancing views. For a few hours, I was granted a powerful lens through which I could view my life -- that fragile assemblage of habits, moods, past events and relationships -- like an object seen through a magnifying glass. More memorable than the greed of my shaman, the emotional power of my insights stayed with me as an indelible lesson. I am still waiting to learn what touchers can teach.
salon.com | Nov. 3, 1999

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