Kambo

Kambo is the secretion from the glands of the Phyllomedusa bicolor, the giant monkey frog of the Amazon rainforest. Indigenous tribes have used it for generations to strengthen and purify hunters. The Huni Kuin call it kampum, and it is best known through the Matsés people of Peru.

The first time I experienced Kambo was around 2008. It was given to me at dawn in the forest by someone from the Santo Daime community in Florianópolis. I did not know what to expect, but it was recommended as part of the process. We woke just before sunrise and walked down into the forest. The facilitator asked us to drink two litres of water before he would attend to us.

Once he was sure we had enough water in our system, he sat down next to me, lit a small stick with his lighter to make a glowing coal at the end, and made seven burn marks in my skin. It stung. He used a little water and his fingers to scrape the burnt skin, then with a small knife placed one drop of Kambo onto each open point.

By the seventh, I could no longer stand and fell to my knees. I was already beginning to purge. A vile, bright yellow-green liquid came out of my stomach, again and again. My face swelled, my lips to twice their size, my eyelids until they covered my vision. My throat swelled and I felt I would not be able to breathe. I truly thought I was going to die in that moment. I kept purging, every drop in my body, as if all the poisons I carried had been gathered into my stomach for me to release.

After about three quarters of an hour the nausea began to subside and I started to ground. There were no visions, no songs, no music. It was just me, the frog, and the forest.

It took two days for the swelling in my face to go down. After twenty-four hours of rest I felt energized and inspired, and I started doing all the things I had been putting off. In the Huni Kuin tradition, kampum heals panema, which they understand as a disease of laziness. A lazy person is seen as a person with an illness. That is what Kambo did for me: it gave me the energy and motivation to work.

After that first time, I received Kambo whenever I worked with Yawabani of the Huni Kuin, who brought it as part of our time together in ceremony in South Africa. Over the past twenty years I have received it about twelve times, from three points up to thirteen.

I have had no training with Kambo, and I have never sat in anything called a Kambo ceremony. As Yawabani explained it to me, there are no songs for Kambo. It is done in silence. To me it is an application, a healing process, and I would not call it a ceremony.

For anyone who wants to know more, I trust the work of Peter Gorman (1951 to 2022), the first outsider to receive and write about the frog medicine of the Matsés. His book Sapo in My Soul: The Matsés Frog Medicine tells of his own experiences, and any questions are best taken to his work.

Sapo in My Soul: The Matsés Frog Medicine →
Peter Gorman’s life and writing →