Achuma

Looking back more than 2 decades ago I had just broken ties with a yuwipi medicine man I had lived with and sang for that was also married to my cousin. The internet was a pretty new thing and forums exploring entheogens were just starting to pop up. I felt a connection to the pejuta/medicine but I was also disheartened with a lot of what I came to see by those that practice with the medicine. For me, after spending most of my childhood and my early adult years under the tutelage of one medicine man or another I was sure of one thing. I wanted to know the medicine on my own terms and free of the bias and the dogma that I had chased after for so long.
I did not like how some talked of half-breeds, apples, or such and how spirituality seemed to be so linked to the color of ones skin and hereditary biases really started to sicken me.

Don’t get me wrong; I loved having the memories and the experiences of sitting in a inipi/sweat lodge. I loved the feeling of camaraderie when we all suffered together in the heat of that inipi. Mitakuye oyasin for we are all related and that interconnectedness felt great. The grandfathers that released their spirit and breathed their life into us in the small setting of an inipi felt great at times and at other times it seemed as if I would surely die as one after another reddish orange glowing rocks were brought in. The heat wasn’t enough and our leader would get the air moving with an eagle wing fan. The wind from an eagle wing fan in an inipi ceremony is anything but cooling. The spirits would sometimes come in and light up the inipi.

Those same spirits are the kind of spirits that come in and light up the room during a yuwipi or lowanpi ceremony. The first yuwipi ceremony I sat in was Leonard Crowdog’s ceremony in Paradise located in Rosebud, South Dakota. It was during the summer months when the choke cherry ripen and sundances are underway.
I was invited into the yuwipi ceremony as a supporter and while I had heard a great deal and read a great deal about the yuwipi, I had never been. To me, they sounded to wild to be true. Crowdogs hands were tied behind his back… each finger secured to the next. A blanket was tied over his body so as to envelope his entire body. He was layed down in the center of the altar that was prepared. The lights were turned off and just as soon as the lights were off it seemed a train had moved into the room shaking it. Lights/spirits were dancing in a line and then the spirits were off dancing around the room. Rain drops fell from the sky and I entered into a visionary state where I saw people covered in blue glowing dots. Yeah, that totally tripped me out.

But I digress, I had left all of that and found these forums where I found Eel of Native habitat of Florida. I acquired many plants from Brugmansia to Trichocereus. I was soon hybridizing Brugmansia and growing B. cappi vines and the like. It was a literal jungle in my yard as I had moved to a little island in Florida as well.

I soon met and befriended a bass and guitar player who introduced me to a cacti that would later be called Lumberjack. I prepared roughly 6 ft of cacti roughly into 4 shot glass shots.

I was told this was a particularly potent cacti and not having had it before I thought it was prudent to divide it into 4 shots for 2 people. Only 1 shot was taken each and after two hours had passed the effects were just starting to be felt. I decided to take another shot of this cacti at this time as I had years of experience with pejuta/hikuri and thought this should be fine. Even if it proved exceptionally strong I felt I was sufficiently prepared to handle it. Besides, I knew that by adding a dosage later and not taking it all at one I was actually minimizing how powerful it would have been had I taken it all in one sitting.

The person I was with however had never taken any pejuta. This was their first experience. They saw me take another shot and immediately demanded the last shot for themselves. I didn’t mean to, but I laughed and said, that is really not advisable your first time. I think they took that as a challenge though. They told me that this may be the only time they explore this medicine and they wanted to experience it all. I.e. they wanted a full-blown experience.

Suffice it to say within an hours time she was telling me that the walls were melting. My face was melting off of my body. Ribbons of color were floating around the room like so many layers of wax peeling off the walls or melting. She then started to see Iktomi/spiders of which I saw none. I will note that it is not uncommon in my experience to see spiders when one has taken a lot of pejuta.

We took a walk outside and both of us watched as the stars dropped from the sky down into the Earth. It was a very powerful experience to say the least and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this medicine properly prepared was just as powerful as any pejuta I had previously tried.

Very good read.

The part that caught my attention is the spider. The one high dose achuma experience I had where I ate about 40 grams of dried achuma green skin rolled into balls using liquid, I actually turned into a spider. It was already going strong, i could see everything in my periphials; to make clear, i could actually read a book that would normally in everyday experience be considered to he in the corner of my eye . I could clearly see my entire field of vision. There were also fractals of colors I've never seen before flaking off of objects in the room and then trailing through the air and breaking into smaller and smaller fractals.

It was me and my girlfriend , who I'd been with for about a year at the time and was the only girl I considered to have a strong connect on with, and also one of my closest friends who passed away recently. They both ate cactus too and we were at the boarding house i had a room in at the time. I was on the same floor as another friend who used less.. lucid drugs, and was blacked out on a smorgasbord of drugs with another old friend and me and the 2 people I ate cacti with had to babysit them most of the night. It was very interesting trying to help them while tripping so hard.

Anyways, around the peak of the experience I had a vision of a cartoonlike spider (I have to say here that being the only vision I've had from cactus it was significantly qualitively different than a tryptamine Vision like dmt or fungi) sitting on a swivel chair in front of a semi circle control panel that I instinctively took to be my brain. The spider turned around and gave me a mischievous look and then spun around in circles in the chair and then stopped and started rapidly hitting switches and buttons and pulling lever on the panel. When he did this my vision splintered off Into honeycomb shapes and the room I was in took on this vision. I began to crawl around on the ground for a few minutes until I ran out of energy and then sat back down and continued the rest of it..

I was still seeing small fractals and color depth enhancement when i woke up the next morning.

The spider is known as Iktomi amongst the Lakota. Iktomi is the trickster and the son of Inyan (Rock) and some claim he was hatched from a Wakinyan/thunderbird egg. The word Wakan can be taken to mean sacred. So, when we look at the word Wakan Inyan or Wakinyan we have the the sacred imbedded in the stone which is the thunderbird or at least that is how my brain sees it as I see different levels of truth being hidden in the language.

Iktomi is the power of the mind or wisdom, but he is also mischief and as such he can be something of a handful. The fact that many vision of the spider when partaking of a particularly powerful dosage of pejuta is something of a marker for me. If I see mention of the spider in a vision… I know it is a particularly powerful one.

Your vision definitely seemed fraught with challenges as you mention having to be the sitter while also participating in your own vision. This to me speaks of the nature of the trickster medicine or Iktomi and the lessons to be learned.