I Do Not Recommend Boofing Plants

Notes from the Field #1

This went inside me.

Note: This is a post I sent to my friends and family while conducting fieldwork in Lesotho. Due to popular demand from them, I’m publishing it, with a few edits from when I originally wrote it. I look forward to addressing the concerns of my future employers.

Okay, let’s be clear: did I want to take seipone through an enema? No, I did not. I did not want to use an enema to take a hallucinogenic drug¹. But I am an anthropologist, and I make sacrifices for my research.

Let’s start from the beginning. Seipone — also known as leshoma, or Boophone disticha — is a plant used ubiquitously across Southern Africa as, among other purposes, a tool for divination. People ingest it and stare into a mirror, dark wall, or cloth, and visions induced by the plant indicate the sources of their misfortune: usually, someone who has bewitched them. A healer then interprets the visions to help them parse out an interpretation.

I thought it would be interesting to try the ritual myself. Betsy (my main collaborator, and a Sotho traditional healer) and I had been interviewing healers and their patients about their experiences with seipone. Perhaps doing it would help me better understand their experiences, since it’s famously hard to describe a drug-induced state to someone who’s never done that drug. So I asked Betsy to find someone trustworthy who could administer the ritual to me.

She replied about two hours later to let me know that we had an appointment set. On 7/19, we drove to Roma (not that one, I’m in Lesotho), where the healer was based. On the way, though, we picked up a woman named Gogo and her son, Robby (names changed for anonymity). Robby was 22, did not seem to have yet shaved his mid-pubescent mustache, and had just accidentally fathered a child. His mother was not pleased by this. She wanted him to do the seipone ritual to figure out why, exactly, the spirits had placed this burden upon him.

Robby did not talk very much on the way to Roma. I think he was playing Clash of Clans on his phone.

A note on my mental state, at this point. Betsy and I had spent the entire previous night at a ceremony in the hills of Mafateng — which required some insane offroading to reach — and the ceremony lasted until sunrise. There was prayer, dancing, singing, goat meat (though no sacrifice), crowds of children clustering around me, a car ride to get more beer at a local shop where the manager, perhaps thinking that he was not speaking aloud, said “Ah, a white man means money.” I’ll write about it another time. The takeaway is that I was completely exhausted, had not eaten for 20 hours (one must fast before seipone), and was primarily functioning off a strange South African energy drink. An optimal approach to meeting my ancestors in a wall, I think.

After a long and bumpy ride, we drove up a terraced hill and parked in front of a series of three clay huts, designed in the usual Basotho way — like straw farmer hats placed on top of very large, cylindrical heads. The healer was leading a group of four people into one of the huts, presumably to administer seipone. We sat down on a row of wooden benches to wait. Occasionally, children would emerge from the nearby shrubs carrying piles of firewood. Cows and donkeys grazed in nearby yards, while dogs and a set of gray kittens wandered the roads in search of food.

One of the aforementioned kittens, vibing.

I had not yet said more than a few words to Robby. So I asked him how he was feeling. This was a mistake — Robby was feeling good, because his last experience with seipone had been absolutely awful, which meant that this one had to be better. His father had (for unclear reasons) prepared a dose for Robby when he was about 17, then left him alone with his nanny. Robby drank the concoction and walked outside to look at the sky. He saw a dragon. Then he was unconscious for three days. His nanny later told him that he had spent an entire weekend in his room, intermittently groaning, yelling, and sleeping. Robby remembers none of these events.

When you’re about to try a psychedelic, you do not want to hear that someone has been pushed into a fugue state by that same psychedelic. It was good to hear that the dose had apparently been far too large and prepared by someone with literally no experience — a bit like asking your accountant to take his best shot at giving you morphine through an IV. Still, I spent the next hour wondering if I was making a terrible mistake, walking around the yard and intermittently staring at a large cross that had been built on a nearby boulder. But I was reassured upon seeing the original four patients emerging from the healer’s hut, evidently unscathed by the drug.

I was less reassured by Betsy: she was speaking to the healer, and her face suggested a mix of confusion and amusement. She walked over to me and said: “So, it’s only 180 rand.”

“Oh, great!” I said. “That’s fantastic.”

“Yes,” she said. “But the standard procedure is an enema.”

“What?”

“Yes.”

I was not sure what to say. Down the hill, Robby looked like he was about to vomit.

“He can’t let us drink it, like literally everyone else we’ve met?”

“I know, I know,” she said. “They’d have to brew it from scratch. We’d be here all day. Try anything once, yeah? Brave anthropologist?”

She was kidding, but a set of images crossed my mind — personal heroes, placing themselves in odd and perhaps humiliating positions to better explore their subjects. Richard Schultes, the legendary ethnobotanist, spent an entire day rolling around in an Amazonian hut to understand the effects of datura. My own advisor, Manvir, had imbibed yopo in Colombia and promptly vomited all over himself, his best friend and his wife. Who was I to refuse a minor medical procedure that would both circumvent the usual nausea that comes from drinking seipone and make for a much funnier story?

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Enema it is.”

“Have fun!” Betsy said. I handed her the keys to our car — she and Gogo were going to get hamburgers and sit by the river. Meanwhile, Robby and I followed the healer — carrying a small red tube, one end of which gleamed with Vaseline — into his hut.

“I think this is a bonding experience, Robby,” I said to the soon-to-be first person to watch me boof a plant.

“Bro, I so did not sign up for this,” he said.

The healer’s hut was about fifteen feet across. The walls were painted with light-blue stripes and polka dots, and several bags of animal feed littered one side of the room. The other side was dominated by a blue cloth hanging from the ceiling. In front of it sat two woven mats, and a bench; to either side were a series of multi-colored cloths, as well as a table littered with what appeared to be monkey hands.

The healer did not speak English, so Robby translated his instructions. We would stare at the cloth — nowhere else, or we would not learn what we needed to learn — and our ancestors would appear. We could then direct the ancestors to show us visions that would answer our questions. If we became overwhelmed, we could simply ask not to see what we were currently seeing, and the ancestors would politely change the channel, so to speak.

Then he held up the enema and bent over one of the benches. Robby translated: “He said we should put it in, like, three inches. But make sure it’s centered.” The healer spoke again. “And you have to bend over like him.”

“What does that mean,” I asked. “Centered?”

More Sotho from the healer. Robby: “Like, in the middle. I don’t really know, man. Fuck.”

At this point, I had completely ceded to the experience, and volunteered to go first. The healer smiled — a little too gleefully, I thought — and handed me the enema. Several steps followed from this point, such that I was no longer holding the enema in my hands. I’ll spare those particular details.

But not these, because they’re too funny to leave out. Apparently, I am bad at inserting enemas: the liquid was not flowing. The healer spoke. Robby: “He says go back and center it.”

“Meaning, out?”

“I guess, yeah.” Robby was facing the opposite wall and looking at his feet.

I adjusted. The healer spoke. Robby: “He said go back and center, again.”

I adjusted. The healer spoke. Robby translated. I adjusted. The healer spoke. Robby translated. My legs were beginning to shake from holding the sacred position.

Finally, something clicked, etcetera. Operation completed, I placed the enema in a bowl of soapy water. “I promise it’s not that bad, Robby,” I said. Robby was looking exceptionally pale. “It’s like being slightly constipated.”

“Bro. Are you sure?”

I left the hut so Robby could take his turn. I looked at some flowers and slowed my breath; I focused on my intention with doing this ritual, and not the fact that I had just mainlined a vaguely poisonous liquid into my rectum. As instructed, I waited for a few minutes before going to the toilet. Upon entrance, though, I realized I had no idea whether I was supposed to — let’s say “void — just a little bit of the liquid, some of it, most or all of it. I took my best guess and contributed to the pit toilet that had been constructed specifically for people with seipone in their intestines; the healer had a separate space for the usual suspects. Robby emerged from the hut at the same time that I emerged from the toilet, by which point the familiar buzzing and far-too-close sounds of birds had begun to set in.

I reentered the hut, followed closely by Robby, and we sat down on the bench to wait. Before he left, the healer suggested we pray, and handed us what appeared to be an anti-emetic plant as well as a bucket for vomit. I don’t really know how to pray on cue. Robby, though, began to whisper to himself in Sotho, so I looked into the cloth and stated my question to the ancestors.

A nearby church had placed a cross on this boulder.

With the door shut, the room was very dark. Shadows roamed over the cloth, forming slight eccentricities in the light that could, even to the sober eye, transform into complex shapes. Our eyes were not sober. The shadows stretched and congealed into parallel lines, then a tangled mess of branches and leaves. A circle swelled on one branch, bearing arms and legs and needles on its back. The silhouette of a porcupine — it jittered darkly through the canopy, searching for something unknown, before settling down and shifting into a man in a woven hammock, swaying gently and watching the sky.

An ancestor, perhaps? I had no idea what Robby was seeing. I again whispered my question. The man gasped and tumbled from the branch, and the whole scene fell to pieces. Curious about how else my perception had been affected, I closed my eyes and saw nothing save a bright, distant beam of light.

Returning to the cloth, a cityscape was slowly blooming. Each time I moved my eyes, though, the hallucination would break; and if I held my eyes steady, a blur would descend over the world, leading me to what felt like the edge of sleep. Entities began to emerge at speed: faces contorting as if passed through a thousand funhouse mirrors, placed upon bodies regaled in Hindu vestments. They leered at me. They smiled, and they seemed to have sharp teeth.

Then they stepped out of the cloth, and before me stood a shimmering series of gods, ancestors, demons — I don’t know what to call them, really. There was no sense of meaning or joy to their presence; to those who have tried classic psychedelics, I can relay no shared feeling of the world’s unknowable beauty. Instead, the world felt exceedingly alive, every slight nuance in vision emerging into alien being; but these beings stalked me like novel prey, as if trying to discover a weakness. Somewhat afraid, now, I stated my question more loudly. The entities laughed and displayed a blank tab from Google Chrome: for the first time, a vision in complete color.

From here, the experience disintegrated. I remember very little from the next hour, save occasional glimpses of bodies contorting out of the cloth — or rather, from what had been the cloth and now seemed to be more like a doorway. My most salient memory is of the table strewn with gibbon hands. In the periphery of my vision, it merged into a Hanuman-like royal figure, comprised of spare parts from some poor clan of monkeys. It reached for me repeatedly; I could banish it only by turning my gaze directly toward it, at which point it would revert to the standard form. At some point, Betsy and Gogo returned to ask how it was going. Robby and I did not reply.

Was Robby enjoying himself? Was he finding the experience meaningful? I have no idea.

Eventually, I regained my memory (apparently) and turned away from the cloth. Robby was standing there with his hands in his pockets, as though he had not been tripping at all. From what I recall, he seemed to be trying to strike up a genuine conversation.

“So, what are you hoping to learn from the healers you’re talking to?”

“Robby,” I replied. “There is a pig-face man lying behind you.”

We — or just I — must have come down enough by then to be ushered from the hut and into another room. I am told that the healer prayed, but did not have time for a consultation. So Gogo drove us home. Out the window, I watched full-fledged people rupture from the earth, then melt away into air. The visions had ended by the time we had arrived at my guest house, fortunately. I called my girlfriend and went to sleep.

So went my experience with seipone. Was it enjoyable? No: in fact, it was deeply unpleasant. Did I learn anything about myself? No: I can attest to no personal revelations, no renewed love for the world and all the good people in it, nothing that has endeared me to psychedelics in the past. Would I do it a second time? Probably not: and I understand why very few of our informants report having tried it more than once.

Ultimately, though — and strange as it sounds — this was participant observation, conducted for my research. I now understand what people mean when they discuss their visions, the strangeness and paranoia beneath them, and the necessity for external interpretation. Like most divination methods, seipone is a Rorschach test: an ambiguous set of data lies before a trained individual who, whether through true intuition or charlatanism or something in between, can provide some order to the chaos to a patient in need of that structure.

But unlike tarot or the I Ching, the data falls from the skull of the person searching for meaning within it: the ink blot splatters from the patient’s open mouth. It is perhaps especially compelling to many, many people across Southern Africa — despite being so harsh on the mind — because the difficulty of the experience makes one feel as though the visions are wrenched from an entirely separate world.

Also, healers give me props now when I tell them I tried seipone. And props are the beating heart of anthropological fieldwork. For props, I will apparently do just about anything.²

Hectic, ntate. Hectic.

1. Just to be clear: seipone is perfectly legal, much like other comically strong psychedelics (i.e. salvia) that were too scary to fit into the flower power era. South Africa (and Lesotho, to a lesser extent) basically copied the FDA’s drug restrictions.

2. For other cross-cultural psychoactive nerds — this experience is sort of atypical for seipone users. I tripped for about nine hours; usually, people report one or two. Why the difference? Because, as I discovered later, the healer had also put datura into the brew. If you know anything about datura, you’ll understand why I was very displeased to find out about this change. Datura is dangerous! But also, it confounds the effects of the seipone. So, I would refrain from anointing this as a “first-person account” of the ritual; no one else we spoke to uses datura, and the effects of that plant make it impossible to tell which effects were triggered by which substance.