Many-Minded Man
A Memoir of Erotic Liberation
Some memoirs make for engaging reading but don’t help you face yourself. With his powerful writing and raw disclosure, Eamon brings you along on his remarkable healing journey and, in the process, helps you discover and relate with compassion to your own burdened parts.
— Richard C. Schwartz, Ph.D. Founder of Internal Family Systems
The Manosphere offers young men a poisoned initiation, Eamon offers a stranger, funnier, more embodied alternative.
Many-Minded Man is Eamon’s wild memoir of the troubled teen industry, global festival culture, psychedelic ceremony, conscious kink and the messy business of becoming a man.
Prologue
June 15, 2018: Libreville, Gabon
It’s always bright in the isolation chamber. It's been four days, but time has no meaning in this windowless building in Central Africa. Tubes of white light hum like trapped wasps. Polyrhythmic harps loop endlessly from hidden speakers.
Bee bee dee dee dee.
Bee bee dee dee dee.
The sound and light aren't aesthetic. They're part of the technology that keeps you alive when you go into the Underworld.
Not everyone comes back.
The Underworld isn't a metaphor here. It's a trance state between life and death, induced by the root bark of Iboga, a psychedelic rainforest shrub.
I'm not alone. There are five other Bwiti initiates, all Gabonese, all a decade younger than me, except an old woman who gave me soup when I ran out of food.
A man in a red cape comes and goes, his outfit like a faded opera-house costume. His eyes carry the weary discernment of a man who's watched too many unready boys try to die bravely.
It's always bright, but I still have to carry a lamp with me everywhere I go. If I forget, the Man in the Red Cape scolds me like a disobedient child. I don’t speak French but I can infer from his tone.
As he guides us through our esoteric rituals, my fellow initiates move with reverent precision. I mostly wait on my mat, thinking about why I came here and the ordeal ahead.
I know I’m supposed to be afraid. Fear of death is part of the initiation. But if this medicine, the last resort of heroin addicts, does fix my sex problem, I’m not sure what will.
I can't cum with another person. My stomach collapses into a tight knot. It feels like an iron seed wedged in the machinery of my desire. I retreat into my mind and crystal walls solidify around me.
In my mind’s palace I am a dark prince. Powerful and free. Sometimes, in my palace, I'm not even a prince at all. Meanwhile, the body I leave behind goes through the motions of pleasure.
I came to Gabon because iboga is the strongest psychedelic medicine, but it might also kill me.
The Man in the Red Cape returns. There's a young woman with him I haven't seen before. As he speaks to the group in French, she slides beside my mattress to translate.
"Now," she whispers. "We give you I-BO-GA. Some get no iboga. Some get one iboga. Some get two iboga."
She raises two fingers. Then points them both at me.
"You. You get two iboga."
She helps me tilt my head and tosses two putrid balls of root bark into my mouth, one after another, like a carnival game. I retch them down with gulps of water. As they begin to unravel in my throat, an intolerable nausea hits.
The paint on my cheeks is mingling with sweat, dripping into my ears. I count my breath. The knot twists in my belly.
Then I close my eyes and feel myself falling through the floor.
Bee bee dee dee dee.
Bee bee dee dee dee.