(A publication of outstanding paintings of ayahuasca visions experienced by a native medicine man, Pablo Amaringo, and interpreted by distinguished anthropologist, Luis Eduardo Luna)

The spaceship motif has an important place in Pablo's visions. As we saw earlier, when the curandera who cured his sister gave him ayahuasca, Pablo saw a huge flying saucer making a tremendous noise that made him panic (Vision 7).

Don Manuel Amaringo, Pablo's older brother, has a similar story. He told me - with tears in his eyes - that the main icaro he employed to cure many people he learned from a fairy called Altos Cielos Nieves Tenebrosas, who came in a blue spaceship:

She asked me: 'Do you want to listen to my song?' She sang and that song I have always kept in my heart.In spite of the frequency with which Pablo depicts spaceships, he is sparse in his commentary about them. Pablo says that these vehicles may take many shapes, are able to attain infinite speed, and can travel underwater or under the earth.

The beings travelling in them are like spirits, having bodies more subtle than ours, appearing and disappearing at will. They belong to advanced extraterrestrial civilizations that live in perfect harmony. Great Amerindian civilizations like the Maya, Tiahuanaco, and Inca had contact with these beings.

Pablo says that he saw in his journeys with ayahuasca that the Maya knew about this brew, and that they left for other worlds at some point in their history, but are about to return to this planet. In fact he says that some of the flying saucers seen by people today are piloted by Maya wise men."

...French anthropologist Francoise Barbira-Freedman, who did extensive work among the Lamista of San Martin province, told me that among her shaman informants spaceship sightings in ayahuasca were common.

When I visited Don Manuel Shuna, Pablo's uncle, a vegetalista more than 90 years old, I showed his several photographs of Pablo's paintings. Pointing to the flying saucer in one of the photographs he told me with excitement, almost with stress, that the last two years he had been haunted by people coming out of machines like that. He said that these people fly standing slightly above the surface of the water.

...Flying is one of the most common themes of shamanism anywhere. The shaman may transform himself into a bird, insect, or a winged being, or be taken by an animal or being into other realms. Contemporary shamans sometimes use metaphors based on modern innovations to express the idea of flying. Thus it is not strange that the UFO motif, which is part of modern imagery - perhaps, as proposed by Jung (1959), even an archetypal expression of our times - is used by shamans as a device for spiritual transportation into other worlds.

The flying saucers, extraterrestrial beings, and intergalactic civilizations that appear in Pablo's paintings should not necessarily be considered unusual or extraneous to Amazonian shamanism; they may be manifestations of old motifs.

Descriptions of shamanic journeys under the influence of ayahuasca and other psychotropic plants, even among culturally isolated Amazonian tribes, frequently include the idea of a shaman ascending to heaven to mingle with heavenly people or, conversely, celestial beings descending to the place of the ceremony.