I asked him about it. He remained quiet. After a long pause I asked him:
‘What kind of a power is an ally?’
‘It is an aid. I have already told you.’
‘How does it aid?’
‘An ally is a power capable of carrying a man beyond the boundaries of himself. This is how an ally can reveal matters no human being could.’
‘But Mescalito also takes you out of the boundaries of yourself. Doesn’t that make him an ally?’
‘No. Mescalito takes you out of yourself to teach you. An ally takes you out to give you power.’
I asked him to explain this point to me in more detail, or to describe the difference in effect between the two. He looked at me for a long time and laughed. He said that learning through conversation was not only a waste, but stupidity, because learning was the most difficult task a man could undertake. He asked me to remember the time I had tried to find my spot, and how I wanted to find it without doing any work because I had expected him to hand out all the information. If he had done so, he said, I would never have learned. But, knowing how difficult it was to find my spot, and, above all, knowing that it existed, would give me a unique sense of confidence. He said that while I remained rooted to my ‘good spot’ nothing could cause me bodily harm, because I had the assurance that at that particular spot I was at my very best. I had the power to shove off anything that might be harmful to me. If, however, he had told me where it was, I would never have had the confidence needed to claim it as true knowledge. Thus, knowledge was indeed power.
Don Juan said then that every time a man sets himself to learn he has to labour as hard as I did to find that spot, and the limits of his learning are determined by his own nature. Thus he saw no point in talking about knowledge. He said that certain kinds of knowledge were too powerful for the strength I had, and to talk about them would only bring harm to me. He apparently felt there was nothing else he wanted to say. He got up and walked towards his house. I told him the situation overwhelmed me. It was not what I had conceived or wanted it to be.
He said that fears are natural; that all of us experience them and there is nothing we can do about it. But on the other hand, no matter how frightening learning is, it is more terrible to think of a man without an ally, or without knowledge.
3
In the more than two years that elapsed between the time don Juan decided to teach me about the ally powers and the time he thought I was ready to learn about them in the pragmatic, participatory form he considered as learning, he gradually denned the general features of the two allies in question. He prepared me for the indispensable corollary of all the verbalizations, and the consolidation of all the teachings, the states of non-ordinary reality. At first he talked about the ally powers in a very casual manner. The first references I have in my notes are interjected between other topics of conversation.
Wednesday, 23 August 1961
‘The devil’s weed [Jimson weed] was my benefactor’s ally. It
could have been mine also, but I didn’t like her.’
‘Why didn’t you like the devil’s weed, don Juan?’
‘ She has a serious drawback.’ >
‘Is she inferior to other ally powers?’ ”
‘No. Don’t get me wrong. She is as powerful as the best of : allies, but there is something about her which I personally don’t •>. like.’
‘Can you tell me what it is?’
‘She distorts men. She gives them a taste of power too soon without fortifying their hearts and makes them domineering and unpredictable. She makes them weak in the middle of their great power.’
‘ Isn’t there any way to avoid that?’
‘There is a way to overcome it, but not to avoid it. Whoever becomes the weed’s ally must pay that price.’
‘How can one overcome that effect, don Juan?’
‘The devil’s weed has four heads: the root, the stem and leaves, the flowers, and the seeds. Each one of them is different, and whoever becomes her ally must learn about them in that order. The most important head is in the roots. The power of the devil’s weed is conquered through the roots. The stem and leaves are the head that cures maladies; properly used, this head is a gift to mankind. The third head is in the flowers, and it is used to turn people crazy, or to make them obedient, or to kill them. The man whose ally is the weed never intakes the flowers, nor does he intake the stem and leaves, for that matter, except in cases of his own illness; but the roots and the seeds are always intaken; especially the seeds; they are the fourth head of the devil’s weed and the most powerful of the four.
‘My benefactor used to say the seeds are the “sober head” the only part that could fortify the heart of man. The devil’s weed is hard with her protégés, he used to say, because she aims to kill them fast, a thing she ordinarily accomplishes before they can arrive at the secrets of the ” sober head “. There are, however, tales about men who have unravelled the secrets of the sober head. What a challenge for a man of knowledge!’
‘ Did your benefactor unravel such secrets?’
‘No, he didn’t.’
‘ Have you met anyone who has done it?’
‘No. But they lived at a time when that knowledge was important.’
‘ Do you know anyone who has met such men ?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Did your benefactor know anyone?’
‘He did.’
‘ Why didn’t he arrive at the secrets of the sober head ?’
‘To tame the devil’s weed into an ally is one of the most difficult tasks I know. She never became one with me, for example, perhaps because I was never fond of her.’
‘Can you still use her as an ally in spite of not being fond of her?’ • m
‘I can; nevertheless, I prefer not to. Maybe it will be different for you.’
‘Why is it called the devil’s weed?’
Don Juan made a gesture of indifference, shrugged his shoulders, and remained quiet for some time. Finally he said that ‘devil’s weed” was her temporary name [su nombre de leche]. He also said there were other names for the devil’s weed, but they were not to be used, because the calling of a name was a serious matter, especially if one was learning to tame an ally power. I asked him why the calling of a name was so serious a matter. He said names were reserved to be used only when one was calling for help, in moments of great stress and need, and he assured me that such moments happen sooner or later in the life of whoever seeks knowledge.
Sunday, 3 September 1961
Today, during the afternoon, don Juan collected two Datura
plants from the field.
Quite unexpectedly he brought the subject of the devil’s weed into our conversation, and then asked me to go with him to the hills and look for one.
We drove to the nearby mountains. I got a shovel out of the trunk and walked into one of the canyons. We walked for quite a while, wading through the chaparral, which grew thick in the soft, sandy dirt. He stopped next to a small plant with dark-green leaves, and big, whitish, bell-shaped flowers.
‘ This one,’ he said.
Immediately he started to shovel. I tried to help him but he refused with a strong shake of the head, and went on to dig a circular hole around the plant: a hole shaped like a cone, deep toward the outer edge and sloping into a mound in the centre of the circle. When he stopped digging he knelt close to the stem and with his fingers cleared the soft dirt around it, uncovering about four inches of a big, tuberous, forked root whose width contrasted markedly with the width of the stem, which was frail in comparison.
Don Juan looked at me and said the plant was a ‘male’ be- cause the root forked out from the exact point where it joined the stem. Then he stood up and started to walk away, looking for something.
‘What are you looking for, don Juan?’
‘ I want to find a stick.’
I began to look around, but he stopped me.
‘Not you! You sit over there.’ He pointed to some rocks twenty feet away.’ I will find it.’
He came back after a while with a long, dry branch. Using it .as a digging stick, he loosened the dirt carefully along the two diverging branches of the root. He cleaned around them to a depth of approximately two feet. As he dug deeper the dirt became so hard-packed that it was practically impossible to penetrate it with the stick.