This is Part 1 of A Diet of Tobacco, a three-part series by Dr. Caterina Conti exploring the teachings of Mapacho, death, and rebirth.
“Only in facing death does a human being become fully aware of the authenticity of existence.” Heidegger
For five days, I had been wrapped in darkness and cold—in the Amazon forest, and within myself.
Then, last night, as the sharp intoxication of the final cup of tobacco brew (mapacho, as it is known in the Peruvian Amazon) began to fade, the stars returned.
The clouds drifted away, and the sun came back.
I found myself smiling again, skipping lightly from place to place, singing; the wild rush of creative thoughts returned, along with those sudden contradictions that are my way of teasing myself, and that strange hermetic, sarcastic philosophy that bursts from my mouth in laughter.
“Better to be than to be human.”
“Immensity, caught in an instant.”
“Funny, if that medicinal oil is truly rare and powerful, why waste it when it isn’t needed?”
“Thought matters,” my mother used to say when, as a little girl, I would answer her reprimands not with words but with a clenched, destructive glare. Ready to launch rockets from my eyes… Boom.
That same face must have come back last night, as I summoned all my strength into a prayer before the cup—from which I expected cramps and the deepest disgust of my life—and Fabrizio kept interrupting me, asking for this or that. I could have blown him up with my mind.
But instead, I let the tension break open in tears. I laughed. And I drank.
Thought matters in the light as well as in the dark. I felt it before sleep, when my mother came back into my thoughts. Though far away, though I cannot hold her, I imagine us locked in an embrace so vivid I feel it in my body: arms entwined, belly to belly, breast to breast, one womb close to the other. How I long to give you this embrace, mamma. Now that I can love you as a woman, after releasing you from the burden of being my model.
Tobacco, or Mapacho
Tobacco (Nicotiana rustica) is revered by many Amazonian peoples as a master plant—an ally in both healing and knowledge. They call it a stern teacher, one who teaches through difficulty, purifies body and mind, and “puts you in line.” It is not psychoactive, at least not in the way we usually mean, but its effects cut deep. Tobacco digs down, strips away to the bone, and cleanses. Wounds, soil, the human body, the soul. At the same time, it prevents collapse, just as it stops bleeding.
I entered a tobacco diet—something that feels like an initiation.
Every morning I had to drink a cup of black liquid, sharp and burning. Maestra Alicia, a vegetalista shaman, had prepared for me a maceration of 200 grams of mapacho in just over a liter of water. Each day it grew more potent.
It reminded me of scenes from an old film of natives I watched as a child, where to accept a gringo into the tribe they hung him from ropes, eagle claws piercing into his chest. The point of initiation is to endure—to surrender, to prove you can surpass yourself. Only then are you accepted, admitted to the group, recognized as grown, a little more ready.
And even though every day the anticipation broke me more—leaving me unwilling to rise from bed, sinking back into sleep, complaints, and tears—I chose to drink. I saw myself as a small child, dwarfed before the colossal spirit of the plant. It said only, “Drink,” without explanation. And like a child forced to swallow a medicine they despise—its taste, its texture, the nausea it might bring—but given by an authority whose good faith they cannot doubt, the only thing I could do was surrender.
Before such a force, I had only one choice: to prepare myself for suffering, and for love.
These were days without relationships, without hunger, without joy. All of my energy was turned toward surviving cramps and nausea, vomiting, self-hypnosis, transcending pain. My body, faithful ally, refused to move in order to save strength. My mind drifted into dreamlike visions and occasional hallucinations, offering no resistance. My emotions shrank to the minimum.
Kneeling, head bowed, at the feet of whoever came to call me. Because here, this is how things work: plants and their spirits form relationships with other beings and other spirits.
Having embraced this cosmovision, having woven a bond with abuela ayahuasca, one night in ceremony, seeking guidance from another master plant of the forest, a figure appeared: a black man, immense and muscular, with a great bald, shining head, as if waiting for a crown. He pressed that head against my stomach, lingered a moment. He showed me his darkness: great force and resolve. He let me know I could not say no. I felt pinned beneath him, then entered.
What he told me—with surprising gentleness, giving me a sense of protection—was that his intention was to teach.
“You are lucky that Tobacco came looking for you, and apparently loves you.”
Yes, I am lucky. So immense is he that otherwise I would have been terrified. I accepted; by then, I had no choice. But it wasn’t a battle with him, it was with myself. And I won it, showing endurance through sheer determination and focus.
I anchored myself in my intention: I want to strip away what I am not. I want to feel my essence. I want to know you. And the plant answered: “Then first, I will take everything from you.”
“Can you bear it, like this, without armor, without props, without identity?”
“Can you bear the emptiness?”
Yes. Through dedication, trust, and respect, toward him and toward myself. Each day, I thanked my body with massages of copaiba and coconut oil. I restored what strength I could with small, careful treats, since I could not eat salt or sugar and felt repulsed by food cooked in oil. I slept as much as I could.
First Ceremony
“Teach me what I can bear.”
Darkness. Tremendous.
My hearing sharpened, amplifying every hiss, every roar, every breath of predators or animals poised to strike, driven by hunger or fear. I could hear the footsteps of danger from miles away, know which direction it was coming from, and even, before it revealed itself, sense what it was. I jolted at the sound of someone coughing on the other side of the maloka, as if they had slammed their tonsils into my face. The shaman’s voice was a wall of thunderous speakers. Death, skeletons, remains.
I was underground. I was one of those animals, one of those bacteria, one of those molds, a fungus feeding on corpses. I was putrefaction. At least I couldn’t smell it. But I felt myself attracting larger creatures; better to stay alert, to remain buried deep in the earth.
What lies at the bottom of these tangled brown Amazonian waters?
I have asked myself this for months.
The dead. Dead trees, their amputations, leaves, branches, roots. Dead animals, their teeth, claws. Dead men, women, children. Pieces of life. Life in pieces. And so it is at the bottom of the sea. At the base of the mountains. The planet Earth itself, in its depths, is made of this.
Not even ayahuasca, with all its love and effort, could hold a flicker of light there for more than a moment in that abyss.
Thankfully, I carry a kind of instinctive affinity with death. With those graceless fish that live in darkness. I do not suffer from fear of insects. I move with ease in the dark, which, in many cases, because of a certain sensitivity of my eyes, I even prefer to the light.
As the ceremony kept ticking through visions and sensations, the world around me grew steadily more unreal.
My fellow retreatants are inert—they are the corpses. And yet, if the bodies can no longer move, their spirits can: keeping their shapes, they rise from the bodies, beckon to me, draw near.
I am dead too. I see strobing flashes, white and red, of my feral funeral. I want to be laid out naked on a raft, ringed and covered with animal bones, painted in the colors of plants, and set adrift on the river.
I am carried into a physical-vibrational space I do not recognize. Uprooted wholesale from the matter I know. Buried and released into another dimension at the same time. Decomposed, and yet present.
I am dead; everyone is dead. The maloka is a cemetery. The Amazon is a cemetery; the earth itself is a cemetery.
Tobacco had stripped me bare, placing me face to face with death in the maloka. Yet death is not only a vision inside ceremony — it is something humans everywhere try to touch, name, and give form to. From the Amazon to Europe to far corners of the world, I began to notice how we mark this threshold in our own ways. Cemeteries, with all their silence and symbolism, became my next teachers.