Here’s an article by the Dutch artist and writer Loes Modderman, which takes a look at the Ayahuasca-inspired visions of the late Peruvian shaman Pablo Amaringo. As with everyone who partakes of this potent psychedelic brew, Amaringo was able to touch diverse metaphysical realities, and interact with entities there, several steps removed from anything in our consensual physical material world. His large body of artwork is testament to what he found within these realities. Loes ties in Amaringo’s visions and art with a discussion of plant consciousness, UFOs, out-of-the-body experiences and Charles Bonnet Syndrome. All of this this relates to the faeries and their otherworld at a deep level. When consciousness is altered from its normal state, we can experience beings that appear to have an autonomous non-physical existence, and which interact with our material reality when certain conditions are met. Sometimes they appear as faeries, sometimes not. But whatever they represent, the ontology of the entities that are regularly experienced in altered states of consciousness demands investigation and interpretation. The article was first published by The Fairy Investigation Society. Thanks to Loes for agreeing to allow deadbutdreaming to republish it here.

‘Visions and Pablo Amaringo’ by Loes Modderman

Plant Consciousness

On the question of how the Shamans of the Amazon know that certain plants contain exactly the right chemical components to induce otherwordly visions, these shamans tell us that they know it from the plants themselves. ‘The plants tell us’ sounds crazy in the ears of Western scientists. Or used to. But the subject of plant-plant and plant-human interaction has been explored by a lot of people, in the wake of the groundbreaking 1973 book by Tompkins and Bird: The Secret Life of Plants. That plants are endowed with a particular kind of consciousness that makes them aware of us and able to respond to stimuli like attention, voices and music has been proven. They even compose their own music, as experiments in the Italian ecological community Damanhur seem to indicate. Plants also have empathy. Whoever reads the book Primary Perception (2003) written by lie- detector specialist Cleve Backster may still have a kind of guilty feeling whenever they slice a carrot or peel a potato. I have, time and again, but we have to eat, haven’t we?

In the longstanding Scottish community of Findhorn miracles happened. The barren ground in the harsh climate of north eastern Scotland was magically transformed into green gardens that yielded enormous vegetables and lots of flowers during the 1960s. Eileen Caddy (1907- 2006), one of the three people who started the community in the years after their arrival in 1962, was a clairvoyant, who talked to the plant spirits , just like the shamans of the Amazon and everywhere else in the world do. Nature spirits, caring for the plants, as is their given assignment, worked with Caddy and the results were not a question of belief, but of obvious fact. Caddy was able to see the spirits, which facilitated communication. They told her how to, and how not to. In this light the simple remark of a shaman is utterly believable: ‘the plants tell us.’

What is commonly known as ‘Ayahuasca’, a brew from a vine growing in the Amazonian rainforest, is actually made from two different plants, which supplement each other in making it work on our brains. The active substance is DMT – Dimethyltryptamine. This chemical compound differs from most other mind altering drugs: it takes the user into a different reality. And here it gets interesting, for in this reality there are elves as well as UFOs, and a lot of other real and mythical creatures. People using Ayahuasca in the forest or pure DMT in the laboratory come up with the same experience of having been somewhere outside normal space and time. Their experience is real and transformative, different from LSD or the more common psychoactive chemicals that manipulate this reality.

The Visions of Pablo Amaringo

Pablo Amaringo (1938-2009) was an ‘Ayahuasquero’, a simple Peruvian who took the brew regularly and transformed his visions into colorful paintings of exquisite beauty and multi-layered symbolism. Amaringo painted hundreds of them, and in his later years taught others. Spaceships and Faeries are intimately connected in Amaringo’s family of paintings. The first time Pablo took Ayahuasca he saw a huge UFO. Manuel, Pablo’s older brother, is a curandero, a healer. He employs mostly one special icaro – a sacred song rooted in the ‘music of Creation’ – which he learned from a faerie, named Altos Cielos Nieves.

In 2011 an exceptional book was published, The Ayahuasca Visions of Pablo Amaringo (parenthesised numbers relate to the indexed images in this book), which sadly Amaringo never held in his hands while still being in this world. The book is a true legacy of the artist and his philosophy. Every painting is commented on and explained by Amaringo himself, and there are also several articles from Dennis McKenna, Jeremy Narby, Graham Hancock and other ‘psychonauts’ with DMT experience. Amaringo roamed many worlds. Reading through the explanations of his paintings and looking at them, one is overcome by the feeling that here is a reality more real than ours, and we ‘normal people’ are the ones living in a dream world. The interconnectedness of everything is the central theme; the universe is alive, there are multiple dimensions, plants and animals are conscious beings, conveying deep wisdom to the shaman. Amaringo’s Ayahuasca world is populated with mythical beings, the kind we have banished to faerie-tales or religion. There are many mermaids, shapeshifting animals, talking birds and dolphins, spirits of place like the undines, salamanders and sylphs of Paracelsus or the Comte de Gabalis. There are Angels, Devas, enlightened beings and extradimensional visitors. Heavenly, as well as under water cities exist in this visionary world.

Essential to all life are the Icaros, according to Amaringo, being ‘the sound of the Universe – the planets, stars, comets, Everything is created by music, by vibration, by sound. Icaros is the music of creation’ (172). Here many other traditions come to mind, and one is reminded of the Music of the Spheres, an old concept, which lately came to life again with the discovery of the sounds planets and the sun make and on which even electronic compositions were based. The painter sang Icaros into the paintings when working, which, he said, ‘makes them alive and endows them with healing powers’.

As for the UFOs he painted so colourfully: ‘Extraterrestrial ships visit Earth frequently. They come from parallel universes with Sumirunas (human beings that attained mastery over land, air and water) aboard them to understand the mysterious forces of electromagnetism and gravity that maintain the cosmos’ (128). In his explanation of the painting ‘Pagoda Dorada’ (145), Amaringo says: ‘In in the corner are extraterrestrial ships carrying beings who visited primitive peoples on earth in prehistoric times, and gave them laws and spiritual teachings.’ A repeatedly painted subject is the transformative power of shamans and living things. Matter is not something static, spirit is what determines its shape. ‘You see extraterrestrial ships arriving from a celestial city to teach sumirunas and banco sumis (maestros who have attained the level of an angel) the science of the transformation of physical matter’ (147). And: ‘The Incan masters transformed themselves into machaco runas (a being with the head of a human and the body of a serpent) with ease, and in this form were able to traverse the great distances between the galaxies at the speed of thought. These great maestros developed extrasensory abilities that allowed them to explore other dimensions and celestial realms’ (147). In another painting (149) Amaringo explains: ‘Here you see the flower of toé, a plant sometimes combined with Ayahuasca to intensify your visions. With toé you can learn what a person is thinking, and it can enable you to see spirit beings as they are in their natural form. Shamans use toé to help them delve into profound mysteries. They may be assisted by extraterrestrials, coming from Mars and Jupiter, and from other galaxies (150).’

When the Shaman is in the process of healing someone from the influence of a malignant spirit, he sings the sublime sumac icaro. ‘The spirits always accept the invitation, and nymphs, dryads, faeries and hamadryads who live in the trees , and elves and sibyls all come to listen to the sumac icaro. Spirits arrive in spaceships from far away galaxies to see if someone needs them’ (151). In one painting Amaringo states: ‘There’s an extraterrestrial craft radiating a blue beam, which transmits knowledge from other dimensions’ (153). In one of the last paintings in the book, Misterio Profundo, a space ship has a central position. He explains: ‘The spaceship that has arrived from a distant galaxy brings spiritual beings to teach the sumiruna (far advanced humans), muraya (master with the ability to live under water) and banco sumi (master of wisdom, as wise as an angel) in their ceremony. They warn of the imbalance of the biosphere caused by man’s destruction of the rain forest. Through negligence, ignorance and greed, humans have prejudiced the delicate web of life on which we depend. The beings are giving shamans’ energy to heal the planet with icaros and soplos (smoke used in rituals and healing)’ (159).

It is clear from these fragments that in the wisdom obtained by regularly drinking Ayahuasca no clear distinction is made between different realities. The idea is that multiple realities overlap and in fact fill the same space, only at different vibrational levels. Amaringo’s descriptions of what ‘extraterrestrials’ are doing in his paintings is seemingly as much part of our own abduction lore (the environmental warnings, the extraterrestrial origin on other planets) as it is of interdimensional origin, as described in the interaction with nature spirits, shamans and holy humans in an extradimensional space-time setting. Some elements also sound reminiscent of our own UFO lore: the shapeshifting abilities, the sudden appearance when being called, the ancient astronaut analogies and even the disappearances under water. Amaringo says that these vehicles may take many shapes, are able to attain infinite speed, and can travel under water or under the earth. The beings travelling in them are like spirits, having bodies more subtle than ours, appearing and disappearing at will. They belong to extraterrestrial civilizations that live in perfect harmony. Great Amerindian civilizations like the Maya, Tiahuanaco, and Inca had contact with these beings. Pablo says that he saw in his journeys with Ayahuasca that the Maya knew about this brew, and that they left for other worlds at some point in their history, but are about to return to this planet. In fact he says that some of the flying saucers seen by people today are piloted by Maya wise men. Just wondering: could the amazing frequency of UFOs seen in the heavens and on the grounds of the Latin American continent have any connection with their being ‘called’ and contacted by Ayahuasquero and shamans? Or do otherworldly beliefs and practice like those of the Candomblé and Umbanda religions in Brazil have any influence? If UFOs really are (sometimes) liminal objects, between ‘real’ and psychic, this could be a possibility.

Ayahuasca, OBEs, Faeries and DMT

Ayahuasca doesn’t yield its wonder-world easily. One has to grow into the experience and in this it is no different from moving to another country: one has to learn and adjust before one can easily find the way. What makes the Ayahuasca different from other drugs is that in time one encounters beings that seem to be aware of you being there. They react, and talk to you. There is interaction. How strange is that? No more strange than what Ingo Swann, the late psychic and Remote Viewer encountered when he visited the dark side of the Moon. He saw beings there, buildings, saucers, and they saw him too (Penetration, 1998). Imagine the power of the human mind, which allows us to project our consciousness over enormous distances and take an astral shape that can be seen, and talked to. Ingo Swann didn’t let that happen, he was simply afraid and left. What’s the difference between inner and outer space when Remote Viewing as well as Ayahuasca allows the psychonaut to have a conversation with beings from other worlds or other dimensions, while physically sitting in his easy chair? The late Terrence McKenna in True Hallucinations (1993) wrote: ‘A UFO is essentially this hyperspatially mobile psychic vortex, and the trip may well involve contact with some race of hyperspatial dwellers. Perhaps it will be an encounter similar to a ‘flying lesson’: instruction in the use of the transdimensional stone, how to navigate in hyperspace, and perhaps an introductory course in Cosmic Ecology tending.’

People having Out of Body Experiences are doing the same thing, and some of them mention encounters with other OBE-ers, or frightening encounters with less agreeable astral beings. Probably the air around us is alive with astral junk, and not being able to see them is a gift. ‘Only with DMT do people meet up with them, with other beings in a nonmaterial world’, writes Rick Strassman in his book DMT – The Spirit Molecule (2001). No other drug has this effect. From 1990 till 1995 Rick Strassman carried out government sanctioned research at the University of New Mexico (normally DMT is a scheduled drug) with 60 volunteers, by injecting them with various doses of pure DMT. Karl, a 45 year old blacksmith, described his experience: ‘This was real strange. There were a lot of elves. They were prankish.(…) They commanded the scene, it was their terrain! They were about my height. (…) one of them made it impossible for me to move. There was no issue of control; they were totally in control. (…) I heard a giggling sound – the elves laughing or talking at high speed volume, chattering, twittering’.

Elves were met by Terrence McKenna too, on his regular DMT trips. He calls them ‘machine elves’. Some of them, seen by him and others, wear pointed hats and green elf- garb and are around one metre in height. Aaron, another of Strassman’s guinea pigs gave the following description: ‘An insectlike thing got right into my face, hovering over me as the drug was going in. This thing sucked me out of my head into outer space. It was clearly outer space, a black sky with millions of stars.’ In the next experiment Aaron felt helpless and being watched by reptilians. This all sounds very much like an alien abduction scenario, only nobody was abducted – not in the flesh, anyway. A guy named Lucas said: ‘There was a space station below me and to my right. There were at least two presences, one on either side of me, guiding me to a platform. I was aware of many entities inside the space station – automatons, androidlike creatures, except that they were living creatures, not robots.’. Experiences get increasingly strange and the whole hodgepodge of beings from faerie folklore and abduction scenarios are encountered. But if there are many dimensions, there is no reason to assume that every user of DMT end up in the same dimension. Some experiences are good and warm, others are extremely frightening, but all are absurdly weird. For almost every person who participates, these experiences are among the most impressive and unforgettable of their whole lives.

Jacques Vallée has done pioneering work in Passport to Magonia (1969), in which he explores the many similarities between folklore and Ufology. He was the first to study this subject scientifically, though not the first to pay attention to the phenomena in this way. Many followed, among them the Fortean writers John Keel and Jerome Clark. I’m not going into Vallée now, everyone should read this book. Vallée never mentioned DMT though. In the light of the DMT related visions we can safely assume that the world of spirits and elementals, and the world of UFOs are somehow connected by inter-dimensional strings. How, we don’t know. Maybe all dimensions are endowed with the same ‘magic’ and the same characteristics. Something really fascinating is going on.

A Postscript – Charles Bonnet Syndrome

People with a form of macular degeneration, known as ‘Charles Bonnet Syndrome’ lose sight at the centre of their vision. But in some cases that is not all that happens. Some of them, maybe many, start hallucinating. They see all kinds of beings parading through their rooms and in the street. Some are ‘extra’ people or animals, others are characters that seem to be out of faerie folklore. Ophthalmologists are quick to point out that this is one of many tricks our brains play on us, when there is lack of visual stimulants. Our minds tend to fill in the blanks. Oh, is that so? I always have the feeling that some scientists can’t think straight, because of all the eye woes that people suffer – cataract, inherited bad eyes, you name it – Charles Bonnet Syndrome is the only one where the brains seem to produce ‘replacement’ stimuli in this particular way. Strangely enough, this theory is the accepted one. Clifford Pickover, who talks about Charles Bonnet Syndrome extensively in his book Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves (2005) compares the Bonnet experience with DMT visions. Elves, strange midgets with pointed heads, angels, ghostly figures, aliens, floating processions of the damned parade where they should not be. Small wonder that the sufferer thinks he is raving mad, and is reluctant to mention his visions to his family. DMT is a substance that naturally occurs in our brains: it makes you wonder why it is forbidden in many countries! Just a thought: could it be that the brains of people with Charles Bonnet Syndrome are somehow opening up, or producing more of the chemical for some unknown reason, rending the veil between dimensions? Are there always, in every Charles Bonnet patient, the same sort of visions? Somehow these visions are triggered. Somehow these visions must be real, somewhere. Maybe these people are compensated in a very unusual way for the partial loss of sight.

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The cover image is ‘Sumac Ňusta’ by Pablo Amaringo. He describes her thus: Sumak Ňusta – Hermosa Doncella. She is a faerie from the Aquarius constellation and she stands in front of a celestial temple inspiring love, beauty, and gentleness. In her hand she holds a jar of aromatic balsam, and flowing from this are iridescent waves that transmit the sublime fragrance of flowers. She is a specialist in the extraction and distillation of balsams, scents, and incenses from flowering plants found only on earth. Her delightful perfumes are a source of joy and contentment for these extraterrestrial beings.

Loes’ artwork can be found at her website here. She also has a blogsite ParaVaria. Prints of Pablo Amaringo’s original artwork can be viewed and purchased here.