Nomad Codes

Earth. Occultists also have pointed out the name’s eerie consonance with Aiwass, the disincarnate and—in sketches—alien-looking being that Aleister Crowley claimed dictated The Book of the Law , the central text of Crowley’s revealed religion of Thelema. In any case, contact with Eywa is clearly a visionary operation, one perhaps best seen as ayahuasca lite. For while Avatar features nothing like the South American shaman songs and stupendous aya visuals that litter the otherwise very bad 2004 Western released here as Renegade , Cameron’s film does suggest that the bitter jungle brew, and the spirit of ecological wisdom now attached to it, is having a trickle-down effect. After all, as online ads for ayahuasca retreats almost immediately noted, the Banisteriopsis caapi vine that gives ayahuasca its name (though not its most hallucinogenic alkaloids) is also known as the “Vine of Souls”—an echo of the Na’vi’s Tree of Souls. And at one point in the film, when Sigourney Weaver characterizes the Tree’s powers through a neurological discourse of electrical connection, the corporate tool Parker asks what she’s been “smoking”—a backhanded way of acknowledging how much Avatar ’s visionary take on jungle unity is grounded in psychoactive consciousness.
    After all, beyond a thriving and in many ways damaging ayahuasca tourist market largely centered in Brazil and Peru, clandestine aya circles manned by South American shamans and all manner of Euro-American facilitators are now well established throughout the West. Among the professional creative classes who make up a sizable portion of West Coast seekers—after spirit and thrills alike—ayahuasca could almost be said to be mainstream. So it no longer matters whether Cameron or his animators have themselves drunk the tea; its active compounds are already swimming in the cultural water supply. Indeed, whether you are talking form (ground-breaking 3D animation) or content (cyberhippie wet-dream decor), Cameron’s visual and technological rhetoric is impossible to disentangle from hallucinogenic experience.
    OK, maybe I am the one smoking something. But if there is an aya- Avatar connection, it would at least explain the most crucial way in which the film differs from conventional noble savage mysticism. Rather than ground the Na’vi’s grooviness in their folklore, spiritual purity, or access to supernatural powers, the film instead argues for a direct and material communications link with plant consciousness. This means that Eywa (aka Aya) is not a religious fiction that has to be believed—she can be experienced through corporeal fusion. After temporarily plugging into the Tree of Souls, Weaver’s chain-smoking left-brain doctor character happily confirms Eywa’s existence even as she dies. She is smiling, no longer needing to explain or posit.
    Like the Vine of Souls now wending its way through the psychedelic fringes of the developed world, the Tree of Souls becomes a kind of bio-mystical media, a visionary communications matrix that uplinks the souls of the dead and the network mind of the ecosphere itself. In the end, though, it is tough to say what the real object of enchantment is: the possibility of a biological interface with the plant mind of the planet, or the technological communications networks that already circulate our hopes and fears, our desires and fantasies, our Hollywood blockbusters and ayahuasca vacation packages. Indeed, if anything, Avatar suggests that eco-futuristic dreams are now indistinguishable from the visionary potential of media technology itself, a technology that must disguise its own poisoned environmental footprint through a continual invocation of holistic phantasms.
    2010

TERENCE MCKENNA’S LAST TRIP

    In May 1999, the psychedelic bard Terence McKenna returned to his jungle hideaway on Hawaii’s Big Island after six weeks on the road. He was relieved to be home. Since claiming the mantle of tripster king from Timothy Leary, McKenna has earned his keep as a stand-up shaman on the lecture circuit, regaling groups of psychonauts, seekers, and boho intellectuals with tales of mushrooms, machine consciousness, and the approaching end of history. Weird stuff, and wonderfully told. But the teller was getting tired of the routine. A recluse at heart, McKenna wanted nothing more than to surf the web, read, polish up some manuscripts, and enjoy the mellow pace of Hawaii with his new girlfriend, Christy