I had been invited to bring a group of friends to Florianópolis in 2006, for a ten-day ayahuasca immersion built around a focused diet and three ceremonies. I had no money to get there, so I organised a group of eight, each paying enough to cover their own journey and a little extra to bring me along. It was the first time I had organised an international group for this work, and I felt a bit nervous.
The group was diverse: a psychologist, business owners, a fashion model, and one or two close friends I had already worked with in South Africa. Every one of them had sat in ceremony with me before, back home.
We flew to Florianópolis, to a small place called Sambaqui, close to the forest and the beach. The house we stayed in had incredible architecture, built on the patterns of ayahuasca visions. From our rooms, we looked out over the channel to the mainland of Brazil, a short walk from the beach. Inside was a large oblong room where we would hold our ceremonies.
For ten days we stayed on a strict diet, no meat, no salt, no sugar, no alcohol, and no sex, with meditation, tai chi, and some sightseeing filling the days between ceremonies. By the time we sat for our second ceremony, on the fourth night, my nerves had settled. I went into that night satisfied and happy.
The ceremony room was oblong, mattresses laid out on either side, four people to a side. The facilitator sat in a chair by the sound system near the open door, the garden and forest beyond it. A fireplace was kept going the whole night through. I lay next to a close friend of mine, his wife positioned opposite us.
The music was a well-chosen mix, icaros from Peru among other pieces, sometimes even concertos, with many long silences. There was no praying, no invocation of deities, and no live singing. We were there simply to hold the space for each other.
Near the fireplace stood a pillar, and beside it a wooden statue I had passed for days without really looking at. I had taken it for a woman riding a fish, carved plain, no paint, only varnish, the whole thing the same wooden brown. Usually when I went to the altar, I knelt, held my cup, and prayed to my ancestors for guidance. That night, without planning to, I leaned over instead and rested my head against the statue’s head.
I stayed there a while, in silence. When I opened my eyes, the statue’s face was centimetres from mine, and I saw, having been a fisherman in my early days, that what covered it were fish scales, each one patterned with colour I had never seen before, each one holding what looked like a whole universe inside it. I sat back and looked at her properly. She was alive and moving. Her skin was blue, her hair long and draped over her body. She was not a woman riding a fish. She was a mermaid.
I followed her plaited hair down over her body and watched it become an ayahuasca vine, twisting up and into the cup I was still holding. Before I understood what was happening, the medicine was inside me. I never felt myself tilt the cup or bring it to my mouth. It was as if the medicine was drawn into me from the upright cup.
I got up and went back to my mattress. Earlier I had asked the facilitator if I might sing a song or two later in the night, with the sound system turned off. I had been craving live singing, and it was agreed.
Lying back down, I found my friend deep in the medicine beside me, struggling to hold himself over his bucket as he purged. I leaned over and held his hair back until he finished and lay back. He took my hand then, and I understood it as a brotherly need for male energy, and held it while he lay there, clearly somewhere far inside himself.
It was at this moment the facilitator said it was time for my song. I sat up, still holding my friend’s hand, and began to sing the one chant I knew well at that time, Om Namah Shivaya, over and over. A woman in a blue dress appeared before me. It was Yemanjá, though I did not know her then.
“Niyan,” she said, “let go.”
I was singing, holding my friend’s hand, so I let go of it.
“No, no, Niyan. Just let go.”
I did not understand. I told her so. She asked again, and again I told her I did not know what she meant, what it was I was meant to let go of. She looked at me the way a woman looks at someone who is missing something obvious, put her hands on her hips, and said, “Well, if you cannot let go, then hold onto this.”
She placed a golden egg into my stomach. I could not tell you how. I only saw her place it there, and immediately I went into a state of ecstasy, energy moving up and down my spine, the kind often described as a kundalini awakening.
I kept singing. Beside me, my friend reached for me again, and this time I let him hold my arm instead. But what happened then was different; his hands began moving over my body in a way that made me uncomfortable, touching me in places I did not want touched. Later, I asked him if he was aware he was in my space. He was somewhere deep inside the medicine that I could not reach, and he never knew afterward what his body had done while he was there. He said it was not him; it was the medicine moving through him.
Then Yemanjá spoke again. “Do you see what happens when you hold the love of women?”
I was pulled at once into a vast remembering, every woman I had known, every small thing I had done or failed to do that might have made a difference to how she felt. I was given, in that moment, what it is to be touched as a woman is touched, while my friend’s hands moved over me without my consent. I grew up in South Africa, where every young man was compelled by law into two years of military service. I went straight from school into a world built entirely of men, taught by sergeants how to think and how to carry myself. It is not a place that teaches a man much about women beyond how sexy one might be. I have never been a violent man. I have always said I am a lover, not a fighter, and I have never raised a hand to a woman. But I carried, from those years, a way of seeing women that had little to do with respect.
She told me that what she had placed inside me was to show me the mermaids’ cosmic purpose, that they carry the essence of feminine love in a way that can never be taken from them, that they are protectors of women’s love. She told me the beauty of mermaids feeds men with their love just by looking at them, but a mermaid cannot be possessed by a man. That is not possible. She went on to teach me about the mermaids themselves, spirit beings who move in the astral, here to help mankind, gone from us a long time and now returned. She told me much more than that, teachings I still carry, but asked me not to share them. I would remember them, she said, when I needed them.
I had never encountered Yemanjá before that night, had no image of her to measure this against, so the sternness in her, hands on hips, scolding me for not understanding, took me entirely by surprise.
Before she disappeared, she told me I could call her anytime, simply by singing her name, and she sang me the song for it. I still sing that song in ceremony when I feel I need her, and often outside of ceremony too, and it gave me a deep and certain knowing that she is real. There may be more of this vision still to recall. What I can say is that since that night, my relationship to women has been a different one. More trust, more honor, and more real respect for what is beautiful and intelligent in them.
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