Margaret De Wys first became aware of ecstatic trance healing when she was a young girl fascinated by the rapture of the Holy Rollers. However, it would be decades before she would be called to explore that early fascination. At a gathering in Upstate New York thirty years later she was spontaneously possessed by a sacred Zulu necklace--a gift from one of the most powerful shamans in Africa, Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa. Frightening yet exhilarating, the experience set her on a search to understand the depths of ecstatic healing. Margaret journeys to Brazil to work with famous healer John of God (Joao de Deus), where she witnesses hundreds of miraculous healings through psychic surgery. During her years of spiritual service at John's Casa, she experiences ecstatic visions, which increase her hunger for more knowledge. She begins to attend possession rituals held by Pai Lazaro, an Umbanda priest, and finds she is a natural medium to the African gods. Called through her dreams to work with Credo Mutwa, she travels to Credo's Healing Village in Africa, where she discovers her gift as an ecstatic healer and the meaning of true faith. In sharing her journey to reach a profound understanding of ecstatic states and shamanic healing, Margaret De Wys not only gives the reader a direct experience of holiness but also reveals the potential each of us has for miraculous healing.

When composer and Bard College music professor, Margaret De Wys, learned she had breast cancer, the diagnosis shattered her comfortable life. Seized by fear, crushed by existential loneliness, she couldn't respond when her loved ones reached out to her. To everyone's concern, the illness propelled her away from her family and deep into the Amazon to work with Carlos, a charismatic Shuar shaman and master of medicina milenaria, an ancient mystical tradition with a highly sophisticated and precise technology of healing. In BLACK SMOKE, De Wys writes of her amazing encounter with Carlos as he guided her into a world of potent visionary plants, harrowing initiations, ritual purification and miraculous healings, including the complete disappearance of her cancer. It was, as Carlos called it, "the path of the warrior." Sharing a journey not only through cancer, but, also, through self-transformation, De Wys provides an intimate inside look at the shamanic ceremonies of ayahuasca and the ways this spiritual medicine can heal the emotional origins of disease now plaguing our modern technological culture. Capturing her physical, emotional and "holy voyage" through a world that differs vastly from our own, she offers a revealing chronicle of spiritual insight and a trenchant exploration of the limits of idealism. She not only provides a probing look at how our society can learn and benefit from indigenous wisdom, but, also, weaves a cautionary tale about how potentially dangerous it is-on both sides-to try to cross those frontiers. * Explains in vivid detail De Wys's experience of being healed from cancer through visionary ayahuasca rituals in Ecuador * Describes her apprenticeship and relationship with the shaman who cured her * Explores the ways this spiritual medicine can heal the emotional origins of disease now plaguing our modern technological culture