Supernatural

The Plant that Enables Men to See the Dead I lay on a couch in the darkened drawing room of a 200-year-old townhouse in the English city of Bath. The streets outside were deserted and offered few clues to remind me of the familiar world. It was reassuring to find that I could still read the luminous dial of my wristwatch if I held it in front of my eyes. Ten minutes passed, then 20, then 35. I began to feel bored, restless, even a little blase After 45 minutes I closed my eyes and directed my thoughts inwards towards contemplation, still noticing nothing unusual. But at the end of the first hour of my vigil, when I tried to stand up and walk around, I was amazed to discover that my legs would not work. Out of nowhere, an enervating feebleness had ambushed my limbs, the slightest physical effort set off uncontrollable tremors and stumbling, and I had completely lost my sense of balance. A wave of giddiness and nausea washed over me and I fell back exhausted on the couch, drenched in cold sweat. I remembered with a shudder of finality that I could not change my mind because there was no antidote. Once it was underway, the process I was going through could not be stopped and would simply have to be endured. My hearing was the next faculty affected. At intervals, there would be a tremendous ringing and buzzing in my ears, blotting out all other sounds. My eyesight also rapidly deteriorated, soon becoming so obstructed at the edges with strange black lines, like fence-posts or gratings, that I could no longer see my watch and had to abandon all control of time. For what felt like a very long while the poison remorselessly tightened its grip and I fell prey to indescribable sensations of physical and psychic unease. There was a great deal of pain, weakness and discomfort. It was as if my body were being slowly and systematically smashed and dismembered and I began to fear that I might never be able to put it back together again. In a moment of stillness when my eyes were closed a vision popped upa vivid moving tapestry of intertwining branches and leaves, elaborate arabesques and Celtic knotwork. I blinked my eyes open. Instantly the writhing patterns vanished and the darkened drawing room returned. But as soon as I closed my eyes the patterns came back. More unmeasured time passed while the patterns continued to expand and multiply. Then another great gust of dizziness hit me and I winced at the terrifying new sensation it brought of balancing on a swaying tightrope over a bottomless abyss. I found that if I lay on my back, looked straight up at the ceiling and stayed absolutely still I could minimise these uncomfortable effects. But all it took was the slightest movement of my head to left or right to bring on another spectacular surge of vertigo. When at last I closed my eyes again the sinuous intertwined patterns reappeared with renewed intensity and then were abruptly overwritten by a profile view of a heavily built blond young man with his eyes turned towards me in a glare of reproach. He appeared right at my side, startlingly close. His skin was pallid and his brow blotched with patches of green mould. Shamanic portals In the Central African countries of Gabon, Cameroon and Zaire certain age-old ancestor cults still flourish in the twenty-first century. Their members share a common belief, based they say on direct experience, in the existence of a supernatural realm where the spirits of the dead may be contacted. Like some hypothetical dimension of quantum physics, this otherworld interpenetrates our own and yet cannot ordinarily be seen or verified by empirical tests. It is therefore a matter of great interest, with highly suggestive research implications, that tribal shamans claim to have mastered a means, through the consumption of a poisonous shrub known locally as eboka or iboga, by which humans may reach the otheHancock, Graham is the author of 'Supernatural', published 2005 under ISBN 9780385662161 and ISBN 0385662165.