Meaning, Myth, Magic and Mind-Bending Medicine

What is the relationship between narrative and disease progression, and what does ayahuasca have to teach us about prescribing our own medicinal mythology?

The Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness salon presents:

Meaning, Myth, Magic and Mind-Bending Medicine

Danny Nemu

Tuesday, 28th October, 2014

October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3AL

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Entry £7 /£5 Concessions, Arrive 6pm for a 6:30pm Start - Wine available

Angel of the library, Genie of the pen, Write the demon on the page, And cross him out again.

In the Vedas, the mysterious soma potion is described as exhilarating, song-giving and curative, and poets have been enthusiastically seeking remedies on the poison path ever since. In my own experience, undergoing a cure in the Santo Daime ayahuasca tradition for a potentially fatal leishmaniasis infection, the remedial power of ayahuasca was neither the psychedelic state nor the physiological effects of the purgative, but the freedom it offered me to reframe and rewrite the narrative I was living in. The ‘poem’ that emerged encompassed not just my illness but my whole biography; its driving meter, the clear and well signposted plot lines, and the strict rhyme scheme allowed for only one conclusion to the stanza: cure.

What is the relationship between narrative and disease progression, and what does ayahuasca have to teach us about prescribing our own medicinal mythology? And what does all this have to do with the Lesser Key of King Solomon?

Danny encountered Santo Daime while living in Japan, and followed the trail back to its source in the Amazon six years later. His background in the History and Philosophy of Medicine was thrown into perspective by a bacterial parasite which colonized a few inches of his skin, and by the cure he underwent - comprising of barks, fasts, and the multidimensional purgative ayahuasca. He lost 10 kilos, one wife and a pair of rose-tinted spectacles, but gained a wicked scar and a deep respect for the complexity and intelligence of the natural world. Danny is the author of a half-finished trilogy: Nemu’s End: The History, Psychology and Poetry of the Apocalypse. Part I, Science Revealed, is out on Psychedelic Press.

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