I closed out the year by doing a ceremony with the entheogenic grandmother medicine, known as ayauhausca, followed by another entheogen: frog medicine, or Kambo. Both have purgative qualities, the frog medicine much more so than the grandmother medicine.
When the opportunity arose to do these ceremonies, I couldn’t think of a more fitter way to end the year than with a powerful ceremony and purging: physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
This was my fifth time doing ayauhausca, though my first time in 15 years. And it was my first time doing Kambo. Kambo is administered by first making a slight burn in the skin and then by applying the frog medicine. When it was my turn, and the person doing the administering started to burn my skin he said, “Meat eater?” To which I answered, “Yes, how can you tell?” Bacon, he told me. “You smell like bacon. Meat eaters do.”
This reminded me of a theory (perhaps more of a thought) that came to me a few years back when I was helping out a lot at friend’s farm where they raised pigs in a woodland setting. We talked a lot about pigs then. Pigs, sausage, bacon, curing. Pigs’ biology, how similar their bodies are to ours, how pigs and humans suffer from similar maladies, how pigs eyes and human eyes are the most similar.
It was in these few years of being around pigs so much that I thought there was probably a correlation to the religious prohibition against eating pork (something I could never understand–come on, pork has to be the tastiest of meats … and bacon! don’t even get me started on bacon!). In my earlier years, none of the explanations I’d heard of why certain religions prohibited the eating of pork had ever made a lick of sense to me.
So, this has always been a question in the back of my mind: Why would a religion deny people the right to eat pork? What’s the motivation?
Then, on the farm, talking so much of pigs, being around pigs, eating pig this and pig that is when this theory/thought/idea popped into my mind, and it’s this:
Humans probably taste like pork! And the religions didn’t want people having a taste for pork (for eating people) and thus banned pork. Yes, I know, it’s a bit of an out-there thought, but it seemed the only plausible explanation I could fathom.
Then, on the new year’s morning, as I prepared to receive my frog medicine, as I was asked if I was a meat eater based on my smell, this quirky (and possibly more true than might appear at first glance) thought came back to my memory.
For the sake of this blog post, I googled about the taste of human flesh and found that, yes, human-eaters of yore have often compared the taste and texture of human flesh to pork.
Stranger things have been true.
