Part travelogue, part introspective journey into the psychological shadow-realm of dreams, illusion and ecstatic healing, novelist and memoirist Brian C. Short describes, in intimate yet concise detail, his encounters with ayahuasca, the Vine of the Dead, in the Peruvian Amazon. After more than thirty years of strict sobriety, there seems much that could be sacrificed – but perhaps also profound spiritual experience to be had, and from it much to be gained. Under the facilitations of Shipibo shamans and a coterie of assistants, the medicine’s animating intelligence not only reveals hidden corners of the psyche, but works to address the old, old wounds to the spirit which remain unhealed. EATING GODS is a first-person evocation of that process, of what becomes a conversation with that animating spirit itself.
Following upon The Seventh Dead: The UFO and The Underworld, EATING GODS is a further exploration of the ambiguous character, both of the mind itself, and of that which appears as ‘other’ at its conscious and hypnagogic thresholds. It is an ongoing inquiry into the nature of both the strangeness and ultimate familiarity of a type of interspecies relationship, and the ongoing conversation with one’s own depths, attempting to avoid the trap of taking either too literally, but rather to walk the razor’s edge of a deep, generous liminality.
