Michael Taussig first visited the Putumayo region of the Colombian Amazon in 1972 and has returned almost annually since 1976 to drink yage (the hallucinogenic vine ayahuasca) by the Mocoa River with his shaman friend, the late Santiago Mutumbajoy. Medical doctor, professor of performance studies, and now anthropologist, Taussig's writings on ayahuasca are notable for his sense of theater no less than of the magic that colonialism bestows upon the shaman, thereby magnifying to dizzying heights the mystical powers of the drug.