The Two That Survived

Ten posts, and in every one of them I have been reading a score. Iboga is where that stops. All of them describing the technology of ecstasy.

A razed sanctuary at Eleusis. A manual whose plant nobody can identify. Seven jars on a shelf near Naples, six of them never opened. A ladder of substitutions descending to yellow grass. In each case what survived was notation — a line here, an ingredient there, a rubric — and the performance itself has been over for so long that we argue about which instrument was playing.

There are two places on earth where the orchestra is still assembled.

One of them is iboga, in Gabon, and it is in bounds for this series. The other is ayahuasca, in the Amazon, and it is not — this whole investigation has stayed in the Old World, and the Americas are outside it. I am stepping over that line once, deliberately, and I want the exception visible rather than smuggled. Here is the reason: one survivor is an anecdote. Two survivors, compared, tell you what actually keeps a technology alive.

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What Everybody Has Been Arguing About

Two centuries of scholarship have gone into three questions. What was soma. What was in the kykeon. What was kentritis.

Every one of those is an argument about a single instrument.

Look at what these posts have actually documented, laid side by side. A plant, sometimes. A fast, almost always. Sound — recitation, drums, harp, unbroken through a night. A guide who has been there before. Darkness, or seclusion, or a threshold. A community present and watching. A duration measured in days rather than hours. And a return: somebody to hand you back to, and somewhere to be afterwards.

Which reframes the entire field. Everybody has been arguing about one chair in a very large room.

And in these two places, every chair in the orchestra is still occupied. So for once the claim can be checked instead of inferred.

Two Places Where the Orchestra Is Still Playing

Bwiti is a Gabonese initiation religion, practised in fifty or more villages in a small country, with branches that go by different names — Fang Bwiti, Bwiti Misoko, Bwiti Disumba. Its sacrament is iboga — the rasped root bark of a forest shrub, Tabernanthe iboga, eaten with water. It is syncretic and openly so. The Fang took it up from the Mitsogo in the early twentieth century, meeting at logging sites in the middle of the country, and under missionary pressure folded in Christ and the Virgin and Saint Michael alongside the ancestors.

Ayahuasca traditions run across the upper Amazon in indigenous, mestizo and later syncretic church forms. The drink is a decoction, and the reason it works at all is a pharmacological accident of enormous consequence, which I will come back to.

Both are alive right now. Somebody is doing this tonight.

Iboga and Ayahuasca: One Plant, Two Plants

Here the two cases genuinely differ, and it matters for an argument I have made elsewhere.

Ayahuasca is a chord in the strict pharmacological sense. Its principal active compound is not orally active on its own — it is broken down before it can do anything. The vine supplies an enzyme inhibitor that prevents that breakdown. Neither plant, taken by itself, does very much. Together they open a door.

Somebody worked that out. Without chemistry, without a theory of enzymes, in a forest containing tens of thousands of species, somebody established that these two things taken together do what neither does alone. Nobody has a good account of how.

Iboga is not a chord in that sense. Iboga is one plant, and it is not a mixed drink — root bark, rasped, taken with water and sometimes honey.

But it is not a single note either. Iboga root bark carries a whole family of related alkaloids, of which ibogaine is only the best known. Which raises a real question about the Western use of isolated ibogaine in detoxification clinics: it may not be the same instrument that Bwiti has been playing. One plant is not the same as one compound.

The Purge

And now the strongest thing in this post, which is a coincidence that cannot be a coincidence.

Both substances make you vomit. Not incidentally — directly. They act on the vomiting reflex, which means fasting reduces the volume and does nothing whatever about the nausea. Every initiate in both traditions is going to be sick, and no amount of preparation prevents it.

So look at what both traditions did with that.

In the Amazon it is la purga — the purge, the cleaning out, and being sick is understood as the medicine working rather than the medicine failing. In Bwiti the vomiting is read the same way: part of the passage, not an obstacle to it.

Two peoples, separated by an ocean, with no contact of any kind, faced an unavoidable pharmacological fact and made the identical move. They did not tolerate it. They gave it a meaning and made it a component.

Which also tells you the orchestra is not something one culture invented and passed around. It gets rediscovered, independently, because the constraints are the same everywhere.

The Sound

In the Amazon the vehicle is the icaros — the songs, sung by the person running the ceremony, continuously, for hours.

In Gabon it is the ngombi. An eight-stringed harp, understood not as an instrument but as a being — the voice of a female ancestral spirit. Under the ngombi runs the mongongo, a single-stringed mouth bow that uses the player’s own mouth as its resonator and throws overtones into the deep part of the night. Struck bamboo. Ankle rattles. A fire kept burning. White kaolin on the face.

In the icaros and in the ngombi alike, three things are true. The music is the vehicle and not the decoration. The person playing is a specialist and not a volunteer. And it does not stop.

Now hold that against the rest of this series. Ezekiel does not tell us what was being sung at the Chebar. The Mithras Liturgy gives you hissing and popping sounds and a long bellowing, with no indication of pitch, rhythm or duration. Eleusis had music and we have not one bar of it.

The sound is the first component to go and the last anybody thinks to write down. In these two traditions it is the component you would notice first if you walked in.

The Guide, and Why Iboga Is Survivable

In Bwiti the initiator is the nganga, and an initiate has a sponsor as well — a ritual father or mother who takes responsibility for them through the whole passage. In the Amazon it is the curandero or ayahuasquero. Before either, there is preparation: la dieta, sometimes weeks of restriction, and in Bwiti fasting, sexual abstinence, confession, and in many branches a bathing in the river first.

The water’s edge again, in Gabon, with no possible contact with anyone I have written about before.

And here is the blunt reason none of this is ornamental.

What They Find

The iboga reports have a shape, and it is not the shape of a classical psychedelic.

With iboga, first the nausea and the vomiting, then ataxia — movement becomes unreliable and people lie down. Then long eyes-closed visions which are characteristically described as being watched rather than entered. The observer stays. And the content is overwhelmingly two things: a review of one’s own life, and encounters with the dead — specifically one’s own dead.

Three research traditions converge on that territory from three directions, and they are not competing.

Stanislav Grof’s framework has three levels, and the first is biographical — autobiographical material surfacing, condensed around emotional themes. Life review is not an anomaly in his model; it is his opening move. Then the perinatal level, death and rebirth, which is Bwiti initiation’s own description of itself. Then the transpersonal.

Rick Strassman’s work is about entity contact, and it fits the ayahuasca reports better — autonomous, non-human, with their own apparent agenda.

And Bruce Greyson and Raymond Moody, working on near-death experiences, describe iboga’s core content more precisely than either. Life review. Meeting the deceased. A threshold. A return. And afterwards a set of changes that Greyson’s follow-up research documents as remarkably stable.

The Hard Passage Is Part of It

And then a finding that reaches back and settles something in three earlier posts.

Greyson and Bush sorted the distressing near-death experiences into three kinds: the same phenomenology as the peaceful ones but read as terrifying; a sense of non-existence or eternal void; and a hellish landscape with entities in it. And the finding is that the aftereffects of the distressing experiences are often as positive as the aftereffects of the pleasant ones.

Which means the hard passage is not a failed passage — in an iboga night or anywhere else.

Arjuna, granted a faculty he did not have, seeing more than he can hold and begging for it to be taken back. A merchant coming down from a cave above Mecca shaking and asking to be covered. Chöd, which manufactures terror on purpose, at night, in a charnel ground. Milarepa in the cave, refusing to fight the demons.

Nobody in that list had a pleasant evening, and every one of them is regarded by their tradition as having arrived somewhere.

Note the second of Greyson’s three kinds, too — a sense of non-existence, of the void, reported as distressing. A practitioner with training would recognise that and have a name for it. The same state, met without preparation, is horror. Which is not about worthiness. It is about whether anybody had ever told you what you were looking at.

The Iboga Cup in a Thousand Years

Here is a thought experiment that I think is the whole point of these eleven posts.

Suppose Bwiti ends. The plant is poached out, the villages empty into the cities, the last nganga dies without initiating anybody, and in a thousand years an archaeologist finds a wooden bowl in the forest floor with residue in the bottom of it.

She does everything right. Proteomics, metabolomics, DNA, synchrotron infrared. And she gets an answer: alkaloids of Tabernanthe iboga, in a vessel, used by somebody.

Now count what she does not get. Not the fast. Not the confession. Not the river. Not the ngombi, or the mouth bow, or the fact that it played all night without stopping. Not the nganga. Not the ritual mother. Not the three days. Not the ancestors she was going to meet. Not the village she woke up in, or the people who knew what had happened to her and had somewhere to put it.

That is exactly what happened at the Villa Vesuvio. It is exactly what happened with the Bes vase in Florida. And it is exactly why nobody can identify soma — not because the record is broken, but because the part that survives is the part that mattered least.

Why These Two

Why iboga and ayahuasca? Not virtue. Not superior wisdom. Geography, and an insect.

Across the equatorial belt of Africa runs the tsetse fly, and with it trypanosomiasis, which kills horses, cattle and camels. No draft animals means no caravans, no pack trade and no wheeled transport across that latitude. Central Africa was not cut off from the Mediterranean and Saharan trade networks by distance. It was cut off by something the size of a housefly.

Add to that a river system that runs the wrong way, with rapids between the coast and the interior, and an Atlantic shore with no pre-modern route north. Nothing came in and nothing went out.

And the control case is on the same continent. Coffee is Ethiopian. Khat crossed to Yemen. Both of them conquered the world — because the Red Sea was a highway and East Africa was connected. Two African stimulants: one in every kitchen on earth, one in fifty villages in Gabon. The difference is a sea lane.

The Amazon had its own version: distance, and a forest that absorbed most of the people who went looking.

The Isolation Has Ended

Which brings us to now, and to us.

Global demand for ibogaine in addiction treatment has driven the price of root bark in Gabon to at least eight times what it was a decade ago. In December 2018 rangers in Mayumba National Park seized around two thousand pounds of it in a single operation. The plant takes ten to fifteen years to reach harvestable size, and the richest source of alkaloid is the root, which means harvesting it properly kills it. Gabon declared Tabernanthe iboga a national treasure in 2000 and it is still being poached and smuggled out through Cameroon to online buyers.

The people worst affected are Gabonese. Most of the population is urban now, and it is in the cities that iboga has become scarce and expensive — so the community whose sacrament it is are being priced out of it by foreigners.

The thing that protected this technology for centuries was isolation. That isolation has ended. It did not end with caravans, because caravans never got there. It ended with aeroplanes and a website.

There is one hopeful thing. In 2022 the first legal, fair-trade export of iboga left Gabon under the Nagoya Protocol, from a Bwiti community that had spent three decades planting. Whether that model can outrun the poaching is an open question and I am not going to pretend to know.

The Instrument That Cannot Be Poached

Every component of the ensemble can be taken.

The iboga can be dug up. The songs can be recorded and sold. The ceremony can be staged for tourists, and is. The guide can be flown to California. The nights can be shortened to fit a weekend, and the community and the aftercare can be dropped altogether, because they are the parts nobody photographs.

There is one exception, and it is the reason I keep coming back to my own tradition in these posts. What is carried in the Vajrayana has no ingredient. Nothing grows, nothing can be harvested, nothing can be shipped. It has to pass through a person who has already been through it, which is an appallingly fragile way to hold something — and the only way that walks.

And I want to end by correcting something I have been getting wrong for ten posts.

I thought I was writing about traditions losing their sacraments. I was not. Losing them is what happened to be going on in the background.

Two of them are still at it tonight, and one of those two you could go and hear.

QP

Further Reading

On this site:

1. Empty First — fasting as a complete technology with no molecule in it. →

2. The Recipe You’d Die For — Dioscorides, and wine as the vehicle of the ancient world. →

3. Pharmakon — process over plant. →

4. The Purity Law — the first drug law, and legislating what may be in a cup. →

5. To Die Before You Die — rehearsal for death. →

6. Divine Madness — ego-death as metamorphosis rather than annihilation. →

7. Set and Setting — the container, and the prophets who engineered it. →

8. The Mithras Liturgy — the one manual that survived, and is useless. →

9. The Villa Vesuvio Apotheke — the evidence sitting unscraped on a shelf. →

10. They Lost the Ingredients — soma, and the only tradition that filed the paperwork. →

11. The Two That Survived — iboga and ayahuasca, and why. →

12. The Mechanism — the neuroscience, and where the instruments stop. →

On Gabon, and what is happening now:

• Iboga conservation — the Gabonese reports summarised →

• The first legal fair-trade export →

The standard ethnography:

• James W. Fernandez, Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa (Princeton, 1982)