Observations placeholder
Dr William McGovern - Trip to Pira Parana
Identifier
004271
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
in 1927, Dr William McGovern, assistant curator of South American Ethnology, Field Museum of Natural History, provided one of a number of reports attributing apparent … powers to the individual ingesting a drink prepared from the Banisteriopsis caapi.
This was ayahuasca.
Describing some of the effects of the caapi, which he took with the natives of an Amazon village, McGovern wrote:
A description of the experience
W M McGovern – Jungle Paths and Inca Ruins 1927
"curiously enough, certain of the Indians fell into a particularly deep state of trance, in which they possessed what appeared to be [special] powers. Two or three of the men described in great detail what was going on in malokas hundreds of miles away, many of which they had never visited, and the inhabitants of which they had never seen, but which seemed to tally exactly with what I knew of the places and peoples concerned. More extraordinary still, on this particular evening, the local medicine man told me that the chief of a certain tribe on the faraway Pira Parana had suddenly died. I entered this statement in my diary and many weeks later, when we came to the tribe in question, I found that the witch doctor's statement had been true in every detail. Possibly all these cases were mere coincidences"