The Serpent and the Rainbow Read online

  Praise for The Serpent and the Rainbow

  “Mr. Davis’s book should become a classic in the literature of scientific adventure. He reports his adventures brilliantly, conjuring up characters and settings vividly and creating sinister suspense with the skill of an accomplished novelist.”

  —Atlantic Monthly

  “This first-hand account reads like inspired fiction. You can’t help but sink back in your chair and gleefully drink in the incredible journey that unfolds.”

  — Glamour

  “Certain to enthrall both the lay and the scientifically minded reader. He tells his incredible tale in a straightforward, highly readable manner.”

  — Saturday Review

  “As engaging as any fictional spy thriller … a must read for anyone fascinated by real-life adventures.”

  — U.P.I.

  “The rich flavor in this strange book is like that in the early Carlos Castaneda.”

  — People

  “Eloquent and dramatic… [Davis’s] greatest success is in revealing the world of vodoun without sacrificing the sense of wonder and mystery it evokes.”

  — Village Voice

  “The book is a thriller: Davis captures the excitement of a scientist hot on the trail of an elusive compound; he explores an exotic and beautiful country with the eye of a poet; he insinuates himself into Haiti’s secret societies and returns to tell us about it. It’s a virtuoso performance.”

  — Baltimore Evening Sun

  “You might call this Indiana Jones Goes Spooking. And spooky it is.”

  — Playboy

  “A powerful living cosmic view that questions and challenges the basic premises of western society and thought. A provocative look beyond the ‘black magic’ cliche.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  “It is a remarkable story. I was fascinated by it.”

  — Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park

  “It is an exciting blend of adventure, science, and mysticism.”

  — George Schaller

  “Beautifully written. Wade Davis puts the search back into research and science back where it belongs — in the realm of high adventure. An absorbing blend of Journey to Ixtlan and The Double Helix.”

  — Lyall Watson

  “An interesting report on zombies, voodoo, and the secret societies of Haiti by an adventurous explorer of the botanical, pharmacological, and psychological mysteries of exotic cultures.”

  — Andrew Weil, M.D., author of Spontaneous Healing

  “Fascinating.”

  — Peter Mattiessen

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS

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  Copyright © 1985 by Wade Davis

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  Designed by Edith Fowler

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover

  edition as follows:

  Davis, Wade.

  The serpent and the rainbow.

  Bibliography: p.

  Includes index.

  I. Zombiism—Haiti. 2. Bizango (Cult). 3. Tetrodotoxin—Physiological effect. 4. Datura stramonium. 5. Davis, Wade, DATE—. 6. Haiti-Description and travel. 7. Haiti—Religious life and customs. 8. Haiti—Social life and customs. 9. Pharmacopoeias—Haiti. I. Title. BL2530.H3D38 1986 299’.67’097294 85-22114

  ISBN-13: 978-0-671-50247-8

  ISBN-10: 0-671-50247-6

  ISBN-13. 978-0-684-83929-5 (Pbk.)

  ISBN-10: 0-684-83929-6 (Pbk.)

  eISBN-13. 978-1-451-62836-4

  Title and part titles based on material in Calligraphic

  Alphabets by Arthur Baker, published by Dover Publications, Inc.

  CONTENTS

  A Note on Orthography

  PART ONE The Poison

  1 The Jaguar

  2 “The Frontier of Death”

  3 The Calabar Hypothesis

  4 White Darkness and the Living Dead

  5 A Lesson in History

  6 Everything Is Poison, Nothing Is Poison

  PART TWO Interlude at Harvard

  7 Columns on a Blackboard

  8 Voodoo Death

  PART THREE The Secret Societies

  9 In Summer the Pilgrims Walk

  10 The Serpent and the Rainbow

  11 Tell My Horse

  12 Dancing in the Lion’s Jaw

  13 Sweet As Honey, Bitter As Bile

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Annotated Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  To my parents,

  to Professor Richard Evans Schultes, who made it possible,

  and to John Lennon.

  He knew the story of King Da, the incarnation of the Serpent, which is the eternal beginning, never ending, who took his pleasure mystically with a queen who was the Rainbow, patroness of the Waters and of all Bringing Forth.

  —A. CARPENTIER The Kingdom of This World

  Everything is poison, nothing is poison.

  —PARACELSUS

  A Note on Orthography

  THE ORTHOGRAPHY of the name of the Haitian traditional religion has been the source of some academic debate. The word voodoo comes from the Fon language of Dahomey (now Benin) and Togo. It means simply “god” or “spirit.” Unfortunately, as a result of the sensational and inaccurate interpretations in the media, Hollywood in particular, the word voodoo has come to represent a fantasy of black magic and sorcery. Anthropologists have attempted both to highlight and to avoid this stereotype by using a number of terms including vodu, vodun, voudoun, and vodoun. I have followed their lead because I feel, as I hope this book will show, that the rich religion of the Haitian traditional society deserves to be recognized, and what we have come to know as “voodoo” bears little resemblance to it. I use the term vodoun because it seems to me to be phonetically the most accurate. However, it is important to note at the outset that the Haitian peasants themselves do not call their religion “vodoun.” Theirs is a closed system of belief, and in a world of few alternatives one either “serves the loa”—the spirits—or one does not. Vodoun, from their point of view, refers to a specific event, a dance ritual during which the spirits arrive to mount and possess the believer.

  For the sake of clarity, I refer throughout the book to the “vodoun society.” This is a concept of convenience, and it also reflects the view of an outsider looking in, not that of a believer surrounded by his spirit realm.

  Likewise, the spelling of zombi is a matter of some disagreement. Webster’s prefers zombie, the more familiar form, to zombi. My Oxford dictionary doesn’t even have the term, which reflects the American fascination with Haiti since the Occupation. The sources in the literature are mixed. Seabrook (1929) spelled it zombie, as did Deren (1953). Metraux (1972), Huxley (1966), and Leyburn (1941), on the other hand, use zombi. Metraux is perhaps the recognized authority on the religion, but to my mind Deren had more intimate contact with the people and is an important source as well—although this has little to do with the spelling of the term.

  Of more interest is the derivation. The word probably comes from the K
ongo word nzambi, which more or less means “spirit of a dead person.” This is yet another example of the African roots of the vodoun religion and society.

  PART ONE

  The Poison

  1

  The Jaguar

  MY FIRST MEETING with the man who would send me on my quest for the Haitian zombi poison occurred on a damp miserable winter’s day in late February 1974. I was sitting with my roommate David in a café on a corner of Harvard Square. David was a mountain boy from the West, one generation removed from the family cattle ranch, and just about as rough-cut and restless as Harvard could tolerate. My home was on the rain coast of British Columbia. Both of us had come East to study anthropology, but after two years we had grown tired of just reading about Indians.

  A map of the world covered most of one wall of the café, and as I huddled over a cup of coffee I noticed David staring at it intently. He glanced at me, then back at the map, then again at me, only this time with a grin that splayed his beard from ear to ear. Lifting his arm toward the map, he dropped his finger on a piece of land that cut into Hudson’s Bay well beyond the Arctic Circle. I looked over at him and felt my own arm rise until it landed me in the middle of the upper Amazon.

  David left Cambridge later that week and within a month had moved into an Eskimo settlement on the shore of Rankin Inlet. It would be many months before I saw him again.

  For myself, having decided to go to the Amazon, there was only one man to see. Professor Richard Evans Schultes was an almost mythic figure on the campus at that time, and like many other students both within and outside the Department of Anthropology I had a respect for him that bordered on veneration. The last of the great plant explorers in the Victorian tradition, he was for us a hero in a time of few heroes, a man who, having taken a single semester’s leave to collect medicinal plants in the northwest Amazon, had disappeared into the rain forest for twelve years.

  Later that same afternoon, I slipped quietly onto the fourth floor of Harvard’s Botanical Museum. On first sight the Spartan furnishings were disappointing, the herbarium cases too ordered and neat, the secretaries matronly. Then I discovered the laboratory. Most biological labs are sterile places, forests of tubes and flashing lights with preserved specimens issuing smells that could make a fresh flower wilt. This place was extraordinary. Against one wall beside a panoply of Amazonian dance masks was a rack of blowguns and spears. In glass-covered oak cabinets were laid out elegant displays of the world’s most common narcotic plants. Bark cloth covered another wall. Scattered about the large room were plant products of every conceivable shape and form—vials of essential oils, specimens of Para rubber, narcotic lianas and fish poisons, mahogany carvings, fiber mats and ropes and dozens of hand-blown glass jars with pickled fruits from the Pacific, fruits that looked like stars. Then I noticed the photographs. In one Schultes stood in a long line of Indian men, his chest decorated with intricate motifs and his gaunt frame wrapped in a grass skirt and draped in bark cloth. In another he was alone, perched like a raptor on the edge of a sandstone massif, peering into a sea of forest. A third captured him against the backdrop of a raging cataract in soiled khakis with a pistol strapped to his waist as he knelt to scrutinize a petroglyph. They were like images out of dreams, difficult to reconcile with the scholarly figure who quietly walked into the laboratory in front of me.

  “Yes?” he inquired in a resonant Bostonian accent. Face to face with a legend, I stumbled. Nervously and in a single breath I told him my name, that I came from British Columbia, that I had saved some money working in a logging camp, and that I wanted to go to the Amazon to collect plants. At that time I knew little about the Amazon and less about plants. I expected him to quiz me. Instead, after gazing for a long time across the room, he peered back at me through his antiquated bifocals, across the stacks and stacks of plant specimens that littered the table between us, and said very simply, “So you want to go to South America and collect plants. When would you like to leave?”

  I returned two weeks later for a final meeting, at which time Professor Schultes drew out a series of maps and outlined a number of possible expeditions. Aside from that he offered only two pieces of advice. There was no point buying a heavy pair of boots, he said, because what few snakes I was apt to find generally bite at the neck; a pith helmet, however, was indispensable. Then he suggested enthusiastically that I not return from the Amazon without experimenting with ayahuasca, the vision vine, one of the most potent of hallucinogenic plants. I left his office with the distinct feeling that I was to be very much on my own. A fortnight later I left Cambridge for Colombia without a pith helmet, but with two letters of introduction to a botanical garden in Medellin and enough money to last a year, if spent carefully. I had absolutely no plans, and no perception at the time that my whimsical decision in the café at Harvard Square would mark a major divide in my life.

  Three months to the day after leaving Boston, I sat in a dismal cantina in northern Colombia facing an eccentric geographer, an old friend of Professor Schultes’s. A week before he had asked me to join him and a British journalist on a walk across “a few miles” of swamp in the northwestern corner of the country. The journalist was Sebastian Snow, an English aristocrat who, having just walked from Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, now intended to walk to Alaska. The few miles of swamp referred to was the Darien Gap, 250 roadless miles of rain forest that separated Colombia from Panama. Two years previously a British army platoon led by one of Sebastian’s schoolboy friends had traversed the Darien Gap and, despite radio communication, had suffered several casualties, including two unpublicized deaths. Now the intrepid journalist wanted to prove that a small party unencumbered with military gear could do what Snow’s schoolmate’s military unit could not—traverse the gap safely.

  Unfortunately, it was the height of the rainy season, the worst time of year to attempt such an expedition. By then I had some experience in the rain forest, and when Snow discovered I was a British subject he assumed that I would accompany him all the way. The geographer, on Snow’s instructions, was offering me the position of guide and interpreter. Considering that I had never been anywhere near the Darien Gap, I found the offer curious. Nevertheless I accepted, and gave the assignment little thought until the night before we were to depart, when in the clapboard town at the end of the last road before the rain forest an old peasant woman approached me on the street and offered an unsolicited appraisal of my situation. My hair was blond, she said, my skin golden, and my eyes the color of the sea. Before I had a chance to savor the compliment she added that it was too bad that all these features would be yellow by the time I reached Panama. That same night, to make matters worse, the geographer, who knew the region far better than I, somewhat mysteriously dropped out of the expedition.

  The first days were among the worst, for we had to traverse the vast swamps east of the Rio Atrato, and with the river in flood this meant walking for kilometers at a time in water to our chests. Once across the Atrato, however, conditions improved, and without much difficulty we moved from one Choco or Kuna Indian village to the next, soliciting new guides and obtaining provisions as we went along. Our serious problems began when we reached the small town of Yavisa, a miserable hovel that masquerades as the capital of Darien Province, but is in fact nothing more than a catch basin for all the misfits exiled from each of the flanking nations.

  In those days the Guardia Civil of Panama had explicit instructions to harass foreigners, and we were the only gringos the Yavisa post was likely to see for some time. We came expected. Already at a border post two days west of the frontier an unctuous guard had stolen our only compass; now at the headquarters we were accused of smuggling marijuana, an accusation which, however absurd, gave them the excuse to confiscate our gear. Sebastian became violent and did his best to prove his maxim that if one yells loudly enough in English, any “foreigner” will understand. This they did not find amusing. Things went from bad to worse when the sergeant, detail
ed to rummage through our gear, discovered Sebastian’s money. The mood of the commandant changed immediately, and with a smile like an open lariat he suggested that we enjoy the town and return to speak with him in the evening.

  We had been walking for two weeks and had hoped to rest in Yavisa for a few days, but our plan changed with a warning we received that afternoon. After leaving the guardhouse I paddled upriver to an Australian mission post we had heard of, hoping to borrow a compass and perhaps some charts, for the next section of forest was uninhabited. One of the missionaries met me at the dock and acted as if he knew me well. Then, soberly, he explained that according to some of the Kuna at the mission, agents of the commandant intended to intercept our party in the forest and kill us for our money. The missionary, who had lived in the region for some years, took the rumor seriously and urged us to leave as soon as possible. I returned immediately to the jail, discreetly retrieved a few critical items, and then, abandoning the rest of our gear, told the commandant that we had decided to spend a few days at the mission before continuing upriver.

  Instead, equipped with two rifles borrowed from the mission, and accompanied by three Kuna guides, we left Yavisa the next day before dawn, downriver.

  Our problems began immediately. On the chance that we were being followed, the Kuna led us first up a stone creek bed and then, entering the forest, they deliberately described the most circuitous route possible. Sebastian stumbled, badly twisting an ankle. That first night out we discovered what it meant to sleep on the forest floor at the height of the rainy season. In a vain attempt to keep warm, the three Kuna and I huddled together, taking turns in the middle. Nobody slept. By the end of the second day I had begun to suspect that our riverine Kuna were less than familiar with the forest hinterland, and after three days I realized they were completely disoriented.

  Our destination was a construction camp at Santa Fe, which in those years marked the eastern limit of the right-of-way of the Pan-American Highway. A passage that should have taken two days at most stretched on to seven.