Observations placeholder

from EROWID  - posted by Astro Zombie at 11:21 PM on April 10, 2009

I once ate something called the apocalypse pepper. It grows in very small amounts in the Amazon basin, and the natives who live in the region have no word for it in their language. They just use their word for death. Every so often, a member of their tribe will brush against it by accident in the forest and burst into flames.

When this happens, the unfortunate tribesman's ashes are mixed into a paste and then ceremonially eaten. Obviously, this is the only way you can eat the apocalypse pepper. The pepper itself has never been tested, but the ashes of someone who has touched them come in at a whopping 30 million Scoville units. It's extraordinarily rare to be invited to participate in the apocalypse pepper ceremony. To the best of my knowledge, only non-natives have ever done so. The first was Sir Robert Blythe-Green in 1909; he left a handwritten account of the ceremony the day he took his own life. There is Margaret Whitechapel, who, of course, went mad from the experience. And there is me.

I was in the Amazon in the late 80s doing some ethnopharmacological work. I had become friendly with a small and unusually prankish tribe, and they had already given me a number of plants to eat, just to see how I would react. They found my reaction to the Panther Flower particularly amusing, although I am not sure the ferry pilot I mauled appreciated the humour. And so, when a teenage boy accidentally touched an apocalypse flower and exploded, they decided to ask me to join the ceremony.

The tribespeople set aside three days for the ceremony, and hide anything sharp or anything that might be used as a weapon. The actual eating of the ashes takes only a few minutes, and is done with surprisingly little ceremony. I suppose none is really needed. When you're about to eat the ashes of someone who has died from the apocalypse flower, any introductory ceremony is just busy work.

I watched three or four of the tribesmen eat the paste before they passed it on to me. I don't know what I was expecting, but I knew it wasn't going to be like anything I had ever experienced before. The man who passed me the paste was grinning, but his eyes were stained red from blood vessels inside them bursting. This doesn't happen to everybody. I don't know if it happened to me.

I've had peppers before. I ate a bhut jolokia chili years ago, when I was in India, and it was about the hottest thing I had ever had up until that point. I was really afraid I might die from it, and my tongue felt scorched for days afterward.

Well, the apocalypse pepper is so far beyond that, your brain is not even capable of registering it as pain. Instead, you simply assume you have gone mad. There is a very distinct sense that you may actually have lost your mouth, you nose, and throat; one imagines oneself rather grotesquely, as a humanlike thing who has had these body parts torn away. Balance is generally impossible, but the experience is so enormous that you can't stop moving. The natives call it the crawling trance, because tribesman have been found as far as seven miles away, having squirmed the entire distance while under the spell of the apocalypse pepper. Some, of course, try to kill themselves, which is why anything that might be use as a weapon is hidden. Some succeed anyway, by drowning themselves or throwing themselves off cliffs. It doesn't happen every time, but it happens enough that you take precautions, and be ready for the possibility that someone might be dead at the end of the experience.

There is a lot of hallucinating. A lot. And the hallucinations are beyond nightmarish. The natives like to say "There is no wisdom in the pepper," and they're right. Some hallucinogens will give the user the distinct feeling that they have journeyed, and learned something. What you see on the apocalypse pepper you wish you didn't, and try to forget, and never speak of. I won't describe my hallucinations. I am not sure I can. They have an extra-dimensional quality that defies language, as though the edges of the world were just so much putrid, rotting flesh, and there is something outside it chewing its way in. That's about the best I can describe the experience, and I'd rather not think about it anymore.

I cried for a full year after I ate the apocalypse pepper. I don't mean that my eyes watered. I mean that I regularly burst into long fits of anguished weeping. Weirdly, this behavior seemed like it was just a reflex to me. I wasn't actually feeling some psychic torment, and I watched myself sobbing with embarrassed curiosity. It could happen anytime, and there seemed to be no reason for it. It could have been worse, though. A percentage of those who eat the pepper lose their sense of smell. Some lose their ability to see. There's nothing physically wrong with them, mind you -- their eyes work, and their optic nerve is fine. It's as though the pepper simply burned away their ability to register what they saw.

And, of course, some, like Margaret Whitechapel, never regain their sanity. I don't know what her madness was like. If it was the gibbering horror of my hallucinations, I don't know how she could stand it, although I understand she was frequently restrained. They say when she died, she was unable to speak or make any noise, as she had screamed so much and so loudly that she had destroyed her vocal chords.

It's marked me. I feel like I just walk through the world, unconcerned about anything, like a living ghost. A few years ago my doctors were worried I might have a cancerous tumor on my neck, and had me tested. It proved to be benign and they removed it. Afterward, one of the doctors, a kind man named Erhardt, confessed to me he had never seen anybody like me. He said that I barely seemed to register the news when he first told me of the possibility of cancer, and that I behaved toward the tests and the surgery with the same vague disinterest of someone waiting for a bus. And it was true. The whole thing barely registered to me. It was more like a dull chore to me than a potentially life-threatening diagnosis. My whole life is like that.

The worst part is, I want to go back to the Amazon and to eat the ash of the pepper dead again. It's the last time I remember really feeling anything. I suppose that's why the Amazonians keep doing it, whenever somebody in their tribe accidentally touches the plant. They're gentle people with a good sense of humour, but I suspect, like me, their lives are mostly seen as being the lull between when they last had the pepper and when they will have it again.

I might go back to the Amazon next year, but the truth is, I am a little afraid to do so. I have started to wonder if anybody really ever does accidentally brush against the apocalypse pepper. It's not like it is a plant that you might not notice, because it might be found buried in a mass of other local flora. No, the apocalypse pepper grows on its own in a patch of scorched earth, and nothing living can be found within a 20 foot circle of the plant. Additionally, the air around it seems to shimmer, like the air above an oven or a volcano.

I have been thinking about that pepper a lot. Because if eating the ashes of someone who has touched it is so powerful, what must the experience of touching it be like?

When the Amazon tribesmen say that there is no wisdom in the pepper, maybe they aren't talking about the experience of eating the ash. Maybe it is a warning against touching the plant itself. Maybe they are warning that it is just death, which is, after all, their word for the plant. Maybe there is no experience at all. You're a living person one moment, and the next, upon touching the pepper, you are ash, and there was no experience between the first state of being and the second.

I can't help but wonder, though. And that's why I fear going back to the Amazon. Because, in the ghostly half-world I live in, where every experience comes to me like a muffled sound, and where I respond to it all with a shrug, thinking about touching the flower is something different, and something I crave.

It's exciting.