Untitled - Awaken Video

Chapter 8. The Making of a Seiðman 207
mine, I came to realize that he also had a personality and a personal agenda. In
a sense, pneumonia had moved in my mind from simply been a disease to being a
complete personage, a ghost, as it were. The others were still more aligned with
being dream characters or hallucinations, but that was short-lived.
About one week later, I was out collecting herbs in the deserts of NM somewhere
south of Santa Fe, and for the first time I saw it: the South American devil flower
lived here. I came upon the exact scene that I remembered from the dream of the
winter before. The flower was huge with the very sweet, almost sickeningly sweet,
scent and leaves stank somewhat reminiscent of crushed leaves of a tomato plant.
That I had learned the proper method for approaching and collecting the plant came
back to me as a memory. The plant’s name is Toloache and the Latin name is datura
meteloides.
As a medicine, the plant is very unpredictable and dangerous. It is not often
used because of its unpredictability. In my 25 years in NM numerous people have
died in respiratory distress from toying around with the plant as a recreational
drug. However, it is much more common for people to ingest the plant and then
commit acts of violence while on a 24-hour blackout. Some of these acts of violence
are committed against themselves (like the man who stabbed himself through the
skull with an ice pick which had to be removed surgically from between the cerebral
hemispheres) and some are committed against others (shooting one’s best friend
under the influence of Toloache is common). Here I was approaching and collecting
this dangerous plant using a ceremony which came to me in a hallucination.
Somewhere in early winter of 1992/1993 I was sitting with my music partner
and,Richard, a friend of his. We were kind of chuckling about what an odd year I
had experienced, and some point the dream about the ghost of the Fly Agaric came
up in the conversation. Richard grew interested at that point. He said in his own
quaint south Mississippi way “Hell, them ain’t rare. They grow all over my land up
in the mountains!” I was stunned and could speak for a moment. “Are you sure
it’s the same ones?” I asked. “Hell, yes. I get them by the hundreds, all over the
place. Never would take them though.” (He had a liking for recreational drugs and
used them regularly.) I immediately felt strange as if the dream-ghost were reaching
out from my sleepy memory guiding my movements so that I would be in just the
right place at just the right time. His piece of land up in the mountains were to
become my first collecting place for the Fly Agaric, and although I felt him to be
exaggerating at the time, if anything, he was understating the numbers.