Inside War: From the Jungle to the Jordan
Reviewed by Rosemary Johnson
Tony Maisey travelled to Peru in search of a witch doctor to cure him of his self-inflicted sickness. He described himself as a ‘criminal’, ‘a violent knife-wielding thug’, an ‘armed robber’ and a ‘global drug dealer’. He had ‘done it all’ and ‘seen it all’ and ‘got my hands on most of it’ and his wrongful activities had made him wealthy. He wrote off a stash of his money buried in the ground somewhere in south London. Inside War is about his frantic quest for inner healing.
In Peru Maisey experimented with ayahuasca ceremonies, drinking the potion offered by the shamans (witch doctors) – another drug to chase out all the others which had rendered him ‘paranoid, depraved and sick’. At the second ceremony he attended, he saw a devil-creature with wrinkly skin, which wailed, squealed and clicked, emerging from one of the other tourists. The thing then entered Maisey himself through his mouth, down his gut, and then he felt it inside his stomach.
Too frightened afterwards to do any more ayahuasca, he was sitting in his dormitory during a ceremony a few days later, trying not to hear what was going on a few yards away, when he heard the devil-creature wail, groan and click from inside him. In desperation, half-remembering from his childhood a stained-glass window showing Christ on the Cross, he prayed, ‘Help me … Jesus, help us.’ The following morning, the shaman asked him if he had been praying, the inference being that his prayers had disrupted the forces conjured up by ayahuasca.
Maisey had never attended church and didn’t know the Jesus he had been praying to. He couldn’t understand how the God of the Bible of two thousand years ago could help him, a criminal from South London, but he was becoming fascinated by it all, particularly the book of Exodus. He would learn, bit by bit.
He was attracted to Stella, another member of ayahuasca group. Initially, his response was measured and mature, holding back from another relationship whilst in a fragile state, but he was drawn to her nevertheless, in part willingly, in part by something controlling him which he didn’t understand. On a conscious level Maisey leant emotionally on Stella, believing that she was the only person who would not assume he was suffering from mental health problems when he spoke of the devil-creature. Yet strange things happened when he left her side, even to walk down a street to consult a travel agent. Stella was a woman with her own problems, flaunting other men in front of him.
Inside War presents twenty-first century Christians with a challenge, which becomes more insistent throughout the book. Do we believe Maisey when he tells the reader that a devil-creature physically entered him? Or do we regard this sort of thing as the stuff of horror films? The devil-creature, and also Maisey’s feeling that someone or something is controlling him, could be horror film material. Do we take literally those stories in the Bible of demonic possession, such as the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:1–13, and also in Matthew and Luke’s gospels)? Or do we attempt some other contemporary – and possibly scientific – explanation? Perhaps we could explain away Maisey’s experiences as the hallucinations caused by his longstanding abuse of recreational drugs and alcohol. The worst of his horrors occurred following the second occasion when he took part in an ayahuasca ceremony, and they continued for three years. You could argue that the potion he drank blew apart the mind of a man whose resistance was already weakened through cocaine, which is actually more potent, and more likely to scramble his mind, than ayahuasca. On the other hand, his description of the devil-creature reflected depictions of the beasts in Revelation.
Maisey asserted that his stumbling journey towards Christ was hindered by the devil-creature and also by what he eventually decided was the malign influence of his friend, Stella, until he managed to shed both. He inferred an even more fundamental question: do we, modern and superior, believe in the devil?
The author’s style of writing is straightforward, direct and compelling. Don Wilkerson (Co-Founder of Teen Challenger and Global Teen Challenge) writes in the inside cover, ‘You won’t be able to put the book down. I couldn’t.’ Nor could I. Written in the first person, this is Tony Maisey’s story throughout, told with searing honesty and sparing himself no embarrassment. He believed he had ‘gone too far’ (his own words), but, as he found out, however low we sink, God is with us and ready to restore us. All we need to do is to seek Him out and humble ourselves before Him.
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