Amazing Stories and Weird Tales: Origins of The Yage Letters
Uncovering the origin of William S. Burroughs’ interest in yagé.
The Yage Letters is a fascinating piece of Beat history. It is one of Burroughs’ most popular works, but even by his standards it is a rather strange book. Sold as an “epistolary novel,” it was a collection mostly of letters released in three separate editions before The Yage Letters Redux came much later, along with explanatory notes from Oliver Harris. The textual history of this work is something Harris details well in his introduction to that book and in the essay “Not Burroughs’ final fix: Materializing The Yage Letters.” Harris has done an incredible job of unpicking a great many confusing threads of this story, but there is one thing missing. This is something that many have speculated about but no one really knows for sure: Where and when did Burroughs first learn about yagé?[1]
The drug more commonly referred to as “ayahuasca” in the 21st century was not well known in the early 1950s, yet for some reason Burroughs became obsessed with it and went on two different missions to find it. The first (to Panama and Ecuador) was in 1951 and he was unsuccessful. The second (to Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru) was in 1953, and this time he not only found but tried the drug. The failed quest was described in Queer, published several decades later, and the successful one was recounted in The Yage Letters, first published in 1963. The original versions of some of these letters can be found in the first volume of Burroughs’ correspondence and most of his readers will know that yagé was briefly discussed in the final pages of Junkie, which was written between 1950 and 1952 and published in 1953. It ended with that tantalising line: “Yage may be the final fix.”
We can see then that yagé was important to Burroughs for at least a few years and that it had an outsized importance in his literary output (with Junkie, Queer, and The Yage Letters at one point considered a single collection called Naked Lunch) but what is relevant to this investigation is that fact that even though all three books feature it, you can read them cover to cover and still end up with absolutely no idea why Burroughs went looking for yagé in 1951. Even when you dig beneath surface, there is simply no proof. His letters do not tell us anything and he was vague in later interviews. That has resulted in a situation where the various experts on his life and work have had to hazard guesses or simply say they don’t know.
I believe I have found the precise source of his interest and I will come to that in the second half of this essay, but before I do I would like to explore what others have said and give the necessary context to evaluate my suggestion.
Context: What Was Known About Burroughs and Yagé
In the biography Literary Outlaw, Ted Morgan (who, let’s remember, had a great deal of access to Burroughs and would surely have known had Burroughs himself remembered), seems not to have any idea of where Burroughs learned about yagé. He writes:
He had this fixation about going to Ecuador and finding a hallucinatory drug the Indians used that he had read about somewhere, called yage.[i]
He goes on to describe the journey in detail but on this key point he has nothing to say except that Burroughs “had read about [it] somewhere.” It is possible Burroughs forgot, for in later interviews he was similarly vague.
The most recent of the biographies is Call Me Burroughs, by Barry Miles. I have highlighted the key line but included others for context. It refers to the year 1951.
With his Texas land-sale money, at the end of June or early in July, Burroughs was able to invite Marker to accompany him on a trip to Ecuador in search of yagé, a new interest stemming from his experiments in telepathy. Yagé was supposed to increase telepathic sensitivity. Burroughs had read—no doubt in one of the fringe-science magazines he loved—that the Russians were using yagé in experiments on slave labor to induce states of automatic obedience. Rather than research the project before leaving, Burroughs was confident that he would find a scientist in Ecuador who could point him in the right direction.[ii]
This is more specific but still seems like a guess. The phrase “no doubt in” says as much and “fringe-science magazines” of course includes a great many possible publications over any number of years. The language Miles uses here is taken from a number of texts Burroughs produced but in none of these does he actually say where and when he heard about yagé. Nonetheless, for all this is a guess, it is similar to one put forth by Allen Ginsberg, who said that Burroughs probably read about it “in some crime magazine or National Geographic or New York Enquirer or some goofy tabloid newspaper.”[iii]
Oliver Harris gave Burroughs a little more credit in the introduction to The Yage Letters Redux, suggesting that he learned about this plant/drug via more reputable sources: namely, Richard Spruce’s Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes (1908) or Louis Lewin’s Phantasica (1924). Harris notes that Burroughs knew of Spruce had “probably read [Phantasica] at Harvard.”[iv] These books are certainly valid possibilities but I don’t find them wholly convincing. For one thing, Phantasica gives information that Burroughs seems to have learned for the first time in 1953 (including how it is prepared). If he had read this book prior to the 1951 trip, he probably would have had better luck finding it and he would’ve been less surprised by certain discoveries he made in 1953. Spruce’s book is more likely, for it mentions the local belief that “aya-huasca” might bestow upon the user some degree of foresight, something that clearly interested Burroughs. However, neither of these books actually mentions “yagé,” which was the name by which he always referred to this substance (spelling and diacritics aside). There is also no clear proof that he read them (except that he had read Spruce before 1956), so while it is not impossible that these are the sources of his interest, I do find it unlikely.
Before I explore what I think is the real source, it is worth looking a little more at Burroughs’ activities around this time and referring to his letters. This will help us better understand the timeline and circumstances. (Again, for much more information about Burroughs’ activities and his various attempts at writing about yagé, please see the two aforementioned texts by Oliver Harris. What is written below is necessarily brief.)
In the above two quotes, the biographers refer to the year 1951 and a trip Burroughs took to South America with Adelbert Louis Marker (better known as “Lewis Marker”). This journey to Panama and Ecuador was covered in the novel Queer (and also the recent film adaptation, my review of which can be read here). Burroughs and Marker searched unsuccessfully for yagé in July and August of that year and, shortly after returning to Mexico City, Burroughs accidentally killed Joan Vollmer in an incident involving a firearm. That incident occurred on September 6.
Burroughs’ first written reference to yagé came the following year. In March 1952, he wrote to Allen Ginsberg:
Did not score for Yage, Bannisteria caapi, Telepathine, Ayahuasca—all names for the same drug. I think the deal is top secret. I know the Russians are working on it, and I think U.S. also. Russians trying to produce “automatic obedience,” have imported vast quantities of Yage for experiments on slave labor. I will score next trip.[v]
Of course, yagé was mentioned in the final pages of Junkie. There are a number of paragraphs that give some information about yagé and then the famous line that ends the book: “Yage may be the final fix.” One might think, then, that Burroughs had written this in 1950, which is when he wrote a lot of the novel, but actually this section was added in 1952, with the text seemingly taken from the quoted letter. In fact, it is quite obvious that Burroughs used the ideas and language from that letter to craft paragraphs for both Junkie and Queer. Even so, he does not say much about when and where he first heard of yagé. He simply writes:
I read about a drug called yage, used by Indians in the headwaters of the Amazon.[vi]
He repeats this and other lines in chapter two of Queer, but adds a key detail:
I read all this in a magazine article.[vii]
He goes on to say that it had actually been two magazine articles. The first told him that yagé was a South American drug reputed to increase telepathic abilities and the second said it was being used by the Russians “in experiments on slave labor. It seems they want to induce states of automatic obedience and ultimately, of course, thought control.”[viii]
It is strange and unfortunate that Burroughs did not make any reference to yagé prior to, during, or immediately after his 1951 trip because these writings from a year later are the best information we have and of course they were chopped, expanded, and put into a fictional context. We have no clear statements from his first expedition to go on and later he was never entirely clear about the origins of his interest. That he learned about it in a magazine (and then learned more in a second magazine) is really the best explanation he gave.
Although the claim about discovering yagé “in a magazine article” was made in a novel, I believe Burroughs was being honest and I think I can prove it. Aside from that novel being based on real events and that particular passage being developed from a letter, it doesn’t seem to have been invented. I would like to draw the reader’s attention to an article Burroughs wrote in 1956, several versions of which are collected in The Yage Letters Redux. In the most complete of them, he wrote:
Waiting for a train in Grand Central, I bought one of those he-man True magazines, and read an article about a lurid narcotic known as yagé or ayahuasca used by Indians of the Amazon.[ix]
We can see then that Burroughs maintained this origin story several years later, which adds some credence to the Queer claim. (Also, remember Ginsberg had the same idea, probably because Burroughs had told him the same thing.) However, he is not specific here. It is simply “one of those he-man True magazines.” Like Miles’ theory, he is proposing a category of publication rather than a specific one.
He seems to quote from this magazine but the quotes are obviously fake. We can be sure of this for a few reasons, one of which is that he attributes a lengthy quote to a made-up and arguably racist name: “Colonel Frijoles Barbasco de Carne of the Colombian Marines.” Burroughs explains:
Two years later I was planning a trip to the Amazon area, and I decided to check on yagé. A trip to the public library convinced me that such a narcotic does exist, but I could not learn much more than that. References to yagé were vague and contradictory. I gathered that the informants had not taken yagé themselves, but were merely repeating unconfirmed statements they had heard from someone else. I did learn that the scientific name for yagé is Banisteria Caapi.[x]
Given that he was uncertain of the name of the publication and had used a clearly fake name, how much trust can we put in this? I would not have used it as the basis for further research except that by the time I came to scrutinise this particular document, I had already found the article he was describing.
Weird Tales
Burroughs was telling the truth when he said that he’d read about yagé in a magazine article two years prior to his South America trip. It was in Amazing Stories, one of the wacky, pseudoscience publications that he enjoyed reading. The article had the appealing title, “The Mystery of Magic Drugs,” and was written by Vincent H. Gaddis, a confirmed crackpot who wrote misleading articles about subjects such as the Bermuda Triangle and spontaneous combustion. It was published in 1949.
I found this article by a strange coincidence (if, unlike Burroughs, you believe such things exist). Exhausted from my work on a number of books and journals, I decided to spend a day making collages, a hobby of mine. I made one based on Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and thought to make another related to William S. Burroughs. I wanted there to be a reference to yagé, so I started looking for magazine articles, encyclopaedic entries, and so forth from the 1940s and 1950s. I did not think for one minute I might find the actual source of Burroughs’ interest in yagé. Rather, I wanted to find the sort of thing he might have read.
I found what I was looking for in the illustrations for a rather Conradian short story from 1950 in Weird Tales, another of Burroughs’ favourite publications. It is called “The Smiling Face” and is a tale of adventure and horror in the Amazon rainforest. It is a silly story filled with much casual racism that tells of a British archaeologist called Cedric Harbin who is in search of a lost city. He is travelling with his beautiful new wife but he falls ill and she disappears, causing him to be overwhelmed by paranoia. It is then he encounters yagé, which is referred to both by that term and as “ayahuasca”:
“Senhor — do not espeak! Brujo esmoke the ayahuasca. The drug of second sight—”
“Oh!” Sir Cedric snorted, impatient. “I’ve heard of that—damned lot of nonsense. Or,” he smiled wryly, “maybe it isn’t. Maybe it works something like sodium pentothal. Releases the subconscious mind. Helps dig out facts the conscious mind’s forgotten. Hmmp!” He rolled over on his side, wincing, to watch the old man as he sat, swaying and smoking, in utter silence.[xi]
It is strongly implied in the following paragraphs that ayahuasca can allow the smoker (note that it is smoked, not drunk, suggesting that the author of the story did not actually know how the drug was used) to see beyond his present location in time and space. The story continues:
“Do you desire that I shall look into the future, Capitao?” the old Chavante asked gently. “The ayahuasca sends the eyes in all directions. One is able to see what was, what is, and what is to be.”
There are monkey skulls, deadly jaguars, blow darts, man-eating piranha, and other tropes of the era. There is even a shrunken head… At the end of the story, the man finds that his wife has not been unfaithful to him as he suspected. The native people have cut her head off and shrunk it, and they show it to him with a dramatic flourish. It is a story filled with twists and turns and ends with that horrible revelation (beating David Fincher to the punch by some 45 years).
Ayahuasca is mentioned a few times and it is always smoked by the Brujo (medicine man). It does seem to have given him certain powers and it does prove vaguely prophetic, for Cedric’s wife has indeed gone off to the lost city on behalf of her husband, fearing that he cannot do it himself due to sickness. It is there that she is killed by head-hunters. “There are great blocks of stone, carven with strange writing,” the Brujo says, and later a letter from his dead wife says these are “hieroglyphics,” something that no doubt would have intrigued Burroughs, who had studied Mayan and Mexican archaeology at Mexico City College and had been fascinated by hieroglyphics of various sorts for some years.
I noted several connections between the story and Burroughs’ later writings about yagé, which initially made me curious about whether Burroughs had read this. They were not exactly hard proof that he had read the story but it set me on the path to finding the right one.
Firstly, there was the line (quoted above) about yagé being “The drug of second sight” and Burroughs did use this expression a few times, including in a 1985 introduction to Queer, which of course was about that first search for yagé. But “second sight” was certainly not coined by the author of this story. Both the short story and Burroughs’ later writings on yagé used “Brujo” (capitalised) to describe a medicine man, and both depicted brujos as devious, even murderous. Both present brujos as possessing human frailties mixed with supernatural power. They are addicts, too. Burroughs bribes his with liquor; Cedric Harbin uses tobacco to bribe his brujo. Burroughs expanded his letters to Ginsberg for later publication and really played up the fact that he supposedly had malaria when he arrived in South America the second time, and in the short story the protagonist is suffering from an unnamed fever for which he takes quinine.
Shrunken heads were another connection. I mentioned in my summary of the story that the native people killed Cedric Harbin’s wife and showed her smiling, shrunken head to him at the end. Of course, Burroughs did not have his wife murdered by Indians (he did that himself a month later), but he mentioned shrunken heads in a 1953 letter from Peru, after taking yagé. He wrote:
Hipsters with smooth, copper colored faces lounge in doorways twisting shrunk heads on gold chains, their eyes blank with an insect’s unseeing calm.[xii]
This paragraph remained unchanged after he expanded his various letters for The Yage Letters, but he referred to them again in a cut-up work at the end of that book:
The brujo began crooning a special case — It was like going under ether into the eyes of a shrunken head — Numb, covered with layers of cotton[xiii]
Like “second sight” and “brujo” and other connections, shrunken heads are hardly exclusive to the compared texts and by no means prove that Burroughs had read this and later paid tribute to it, but these multiple connection points start to add up. When you add in the photos of Burroughs the pith-helmet-wearing explorer traipsing through the jungle with Indian assistants, you begin to wonder to what extent he was playing out the role of Cedric Harbin.
These are all just speculative connections and certainly do not constitute proof that Burroughs read the story and learned about yagé. However, the line about yagé being “The drug of second sight” led me to another published the previous year in Amazing Stories, another magazine that we know Burroughs read throughout his life. In fact, when he mentioned Weird Tales, he tended to mention Amazing Stories as well. The two magazines were in his mind connected. For example, in 1987 he said “As I remember, there were some good stories in Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, though I can’t remember who wrote them.[xiv] He may not have remembered the names of the authors, but as we shall see he certainly remembered a great many details…
Amazing Stories
Although the term “second sight” is not an uncommon expression, the phrase “the drug of second sight” seems absurdly rare. Google shows it only to have been used by the author of “The Smiling Face” but in fact it was used at least one other time. Several months prior to the publication of “The Smiling Face,” it appeared (minus a space) as “the drug of secondsight” in Amazing Stories.
“The Mystery of Magical Drugs” looks at peyote, yagé, and ayahuasca. Evidently, the writer was under the impression that the latter two were completely different substances. It also uses “yaye” rather than “yagé” or “yage.” Given the pronunciation, it is not an unreasonable spelling. When you read this article, you immediately see why Burroughs would have loved it. (In fact, the narrative voice and ideas are both very similar to his.) Although ostensibly a scientific article, it plays up the exotic side with brujos and bubbling concoctions, and infers certain magical powers. Looking at a group of drugs rather than just yagé, the writer says that “responsible explorers and scientists” have reported
tales of prophecy, clairvoyance and projections of the consciousness by medicine men, curacas and brujos—masters of jungle witchcraft who have told of coming events, and have located missing persona and buried treasure. Behind these enigmatic feats are drugs, brewed from plants and herbs with secret ingredients, that open obscure doors deep into the labyrinth of the mind and release inexplicable, little-known abilities.[xv]
I mentioned above that in 1956 Burroughs attempted to write an article about yagé and said he was quoting from a magazine he could not name and cited a fake colonel. I believe that he was repeating certain stories from memory and it seems beyond doubt that they came from this magazine article. For example, in Amazing Stories we get the following:
Two observations of this drug’s incredible powers was (sic) made by Dr. Sheppard. In the first the brujo, or medicine man, who had never been out of the jungle and did not know how to read or write, took the drug and closed his eyes. Suddenly he started speaking in Spanish, and said that he was going to visit a great city in the country from which the scientist came. After naming the city, he “proceeded to describe it so well that only one who had lived there for years could equal it.”
Burroughs very obviously repeats this:
One of the most remarkable powers attributed to this drug, (sic) is the ability to see and describe in accurate detail, cities and places never seen or heard of by the aborigines of these remote jungle regions. A Danish explorer tells of a Medicine Man of the Kofan tribe who, under the effects of yagé, described in detail the business district of Copenhagen, even writing out street signs though in a normal state he was completely illiterate.[xvi]
This is clearly the same story paraphrased and with the foreign observer’s nationality switched. Note the reference to illiteracy both in the article and in Burroughs’ memory of it.
Blending scientific claims with supernatural nonsense, Vincent Gaddis goes on to make the following claim:
But it is the drug’s supernormal effects—the telepathic, prophetic and clairvoyant qualities—that are the most amazing. So outstanding is this factor that the Columbian scientist. Dr. Rafael Bayon has given the drug the name telepatina.
This Dr. Bayon was a real person and the article does seem to faithfully report his experiences as far as I can tell from limited documentation, but it should be quite obvious that most experts were fairly sceptical of his claims and reports tended to be politely mocking. Unsurprisingly, the author of “The Mystery of Magic Drugs” is more inclined to report his discoveries as legitimate:
Captain Custodio Morales, commander of a military post in the Caqueta region, volunteered for an experiment with yaye under Dr. Bayon. The officer at once became conscious of the death of his father and the illness of a sister living in a distant part of Columbia (sic). Weeks later letters arrived confirming the death and illness.
It appears Burroughs was rewriting that when he turned Captain Custard into Colonel Beans, who said:
I had left my great aunt in the capital suffering from a serious illness. Arriving at my post, I discovered that the wireless was broken, so I would have to wait some weeks for news of my great aunt. Noting my perturbation of mind, an Indian servant urged me to take an infusion of yagé. I followed his suggestion, and that night had an extraordinarily vivid dream in which I saw my great aunt in a coffin surrounded by my entire family. A fortnight later I received word from the capital. My great aunt was dead, and the wake had been held the night of my dream.[xvii]
The article then says:
Many distinguished Europeans have taken yaye out of curiosity, either to see whether lost objects could be found or to get news of relatives at a distance, and they were amazed by the success of their attempts.
Burroughs repeated this, saying that yagé can
induce a trance state in which [users] are said to read the thoughts of others, locate missing or stolen objects, diagnose and prescribe for diseases that have baffled the skill of modern science, and to foretell the future.[xviii]
Burroughs refers to diagnosing diseases and Gaddis says that police officers have used it to solve murders.
Unfortunately, Burroughs did not write much more about this article but it’s quite clear from the little that he did write that he was describing the September 1949 article from Amazing Stories and that this was where he first learned of yagé. I think the above comparisons make that quite clear.
Note also that it fits with our timeline. In the 1956 article, Burroughs writes:
Two years later I was planning a trip to the Amazon area, and I decided to check on yagé. A trip to the public library convinced me that such a narcotic does exist, but I could not learn much more than that. References to yagé were vague and contradictory. I gathered that the informants had not taken yagé themselves, but were merely repeating unconfirmed statements they had heard from someone else. I did learn that the scientific name for yagé is Banisteria Caapi.
He read the article in 1949 and two years later became disillusioned with Mexico, heading to South America on a trip with Lewis Marker. We can see from his writings then that he was not yet obsessed with yagé but evidently he did some research prior to the trip. Yagé was something of a side quest. It was not his main focus even if the ending to Junkie implied that it might be. But that part of Junkie was written in 1952, when he was fully obsessed. It was then that he began researching yagé obsessively, writing and rewriting paragraphs about it. And why might that be?
I am making arrangements to leave Mexico. I can not wait for process of law to take its interminable course. May lose my bond money (all that remains from sale of Texas land), but I must go. I must find the Yage. Plan expedition to Colombian jungles.
[…]
For some reason I have forebodings about this S.A. expedition. Don’t know why except it seems a sort of final attempt to “change fact.” Well, a ver (we shall see).[xix]
Shortly after returning from South America, he killed Joan Vollmer and we can see from the above May 1952 letter that he connected the killing with the search for yagé. He saw it somehow as a “final attempt to ‘change fact.’” He seemed to believe every outrageous claim about yagé at this point and perhaps thought it presented an opportunity to escape his trauma. Whether it could “change fact” in a literal or psychological sense, he was desperate to find out.
Final Thoughts
I think it’s quite obvious that Burroughs learned about yagé from this 1949 article. It fits with the timeline and the similarities between his account of it and the article itself are too great to ignore. It seems that Burroughs later encountered another article that mentioned Russian plans to use the drug to enslave people, after which he did some more conventional research in libraries, where he learned about the scientific name for the plant from which yagé is derived. He said that he did not trust the accounts provided by scientists because they had not taken the drug themselves and merely repeated unsubstantiated rumours. This was certainly true but Burroughs himself tended to believe whatever fit his worldview, even when those were silly articles from sci-fi magazines. In any case, he felt that the only way to understand it was to take it, and that’s what he set out to do, thereafter sharing what he believed was an accurate and fair account through his various writings.
I think I have proved this beyond reasonable doubt but I suggest that other people read the 1949 article and look at its connections to Burroughs’ later interest. There is a long section about astral projection and the idea that the mind can be released from the body so that it can even travel into outer space. Burroughs was obviously fascinated by this sort of thing in the 1960s and I wonder to what extent he remembered this article when later posing that sort of suggestion. I think it warrants further attention.
The Amazing Stories article can be read here: https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v23n09_1949-09_cape1736 (pages 146-151)
The Weird Tales piece can be found here: https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v42n02_1950-01 (pages 33-42)
Notes
[1] I’m going to write this word as “yagé” (it’s pronounced “yah-hay”) but in most quotes and Burroughs’ book title, it is written without the diacritic mark.
[i] Morgan, Ted, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (Henry Holt and Company: New York, 1988), p.188
[ii] Miles, Barry, Call Me Burroughs: A Life (Twelve: New York, 2013), p.198
[iii] Harris, Oliver (ed.), The Yage Letters Redux (City Lights Books: San Francisco, 2006), p.xiv-xv
[iv] Harris, Yage Letters Redux, p.xv
[v] Harris, Oliver (ed.), The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945-1959 (Viking Penguin: New York, 1993, p.104
[vi] Burroughs, William S., Junkie (The Olympia Press: London, 1966), p.152
[vii] Burroughs, William S., Queer (Penguin Books: New York, 1987), p.49
[viii] Burroughs, Queer, p.50
[ix] Harris, Yage Letters Redux, p.91
[x] Harris, Yage Letters Redux, p.92
[xi] Counselman, Elizabeth Mary, “The Smiling Face,” in Weird Tales, January, 1950
[xii] Harris, Yage Letters Redux, p.50
[xiii] Harris, Yage Letters Redux, p.77
[xiv] Hibbard, Allen (ed.), Conversations with William Burroughs (University Press of Mississippi: Jackson, 1999), p.118
[xv] “Gaddis, Vincent H., “The Mystery of Magic Drugs,” in Amazing Tales, September 1949
[xvi] Harris, Yage Letters Redux, p.91
[xvii] Harris, Yage Letters Redux, p.92
[xviii] Harris, Yage Letters Redux, p.91
[xix] Harris, Letters of William S. Burroughs, p.126-127