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shaman or charlatan:

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Shaman or Charlatan?

by THE
███████ ███

FEBRUARY 22, 2011 8:29 AM

K.E. HODGE/
██

ANAPAIKE, Suriname (
██
) — Flash frosts, technoshamanism, and artifacts from the spirit world. Juan Castillo, a medium of the María Lionza religious sect, has channeled it all through his portal in the jungle.

This isolated border town, deep in the wilds of the Amazon basin, has long claimed to share a boundary with the mystical, boasting a rich spiritual history of the otherworldly, and are claiming the recent feats of their local shaman as proof.

Mr. Castillo has often retreated to the wilds of the jungle to commune with hidden forces, employing the aid of psychedelics to speed him along on his vision quests. While in the past he has returned from these sojourns with divinations and epiphanies, of late Mr.
Castillo, a self-proclaimed technoshaman, has brought back with him an altogether different phenomenon: blizzards.

Though the Amazon is host to many bizarre creatures and nonpareils, snow has never been one of them. Unfortunately, the tropical climate has precluded any photographic documentation of these flurries. However, a team of climatologists from Brazil’s Universidade Católica do Salvador did travel to the remote village and confirmed what appear to be the residual effects of a flash frost on jungle vegetation. The affected flora circumscribe an almost perfect circle with a 100m radius.

While Mr. Castillo refuses to “perform” for foreign cynics, locals claim to also have witnessed him conjuring objects out of inter-dimensional portals. Objects range from the mundane: rotten Russel River limes (
Microcitrus inodora
), flat cans of beer (Carlton Draught); to the miraculous: a carbon dodecahedron, a blue sapphire; to the peculiar: a green plastic bead.

Though impressed by these recent feats, villagers prefer Mr. Castillo attend to his priestly duties as the village spiritual guide and resident psychosurgeon.

shaman     charlatan     Suriname

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Off and on, this project has taken years of effort and dedication. It was a journey I could not have completed on my own without the love, support, and, most of all, patience from my friends and family. A few particularly masochistic individuals deserve a special thanks: my wife, for her love, tolerance, and taste; Jason, for being my ideal reader and careful critic; Jeff, for his belief, acumen, and collaboration; Mike, for the numerous math, coding, and cryptography conversations (which definitely got him red-flagged on the NSA’s watch list); Laurel, for her encouragement and mad French skillz; Jon, for his artistic vision and generosity; Paul, for his endless reading suggestions (especially Murakami); Mrs. Eder, for letting me play with her typewriter when I was little; my mother, for nineteen hours of labor (and other subsequent sacrifices); and my father, for warping me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2015 Josh Ryan

Joshua Scher is a recent transplant from New York City to the hills of Hollywood, California, where he is continuing his transition from writing for the stage to writing for the screen, both theatrical and television.

Scher’s film,
I’m Ok
(2015), starring Dot-Marie Jones and Alex Frnka, is currently in postproduction and is anticipating a film-festival run in 2016. The cinematic adaptation of his play
The Footage
was developed with Pressman Film and is currently being packaged. In 2006, a fruitful collaboration with Joe Frazier and his manager, Leslie Wolff, brought forth the treatment of
Behind the Smoke
, the Joe Frazier biopic for Penny Marshall and Parkway Productions. In the TV world, Scher’s one-hour action drama,
JiGsAw,
was developed with Danny Glover and his company, Louverture Films.

His musical
Triangle
played at the Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma, was part of TheatreWorks New Works Festival (Silicon Valley), and debuted in New York City as part of the National Alliance for Musical Theatre’s
Festival of New Musicals.
The Footage
had its Australian premiere at the Stooged Theatre after enjoying its World Premiere at The Flea Theater in New York City. His work
MARVEL
was included in Roundabout Theatre’s New Voices Program, directed by Charles Randolph-Wright. Scher has also worked with the Huntington Theatre, Portland Stage, the O’Neill Theater Festival (with Robert Longbottom, director of
The Scarlet Pimpernel
), and the Williamstown Theatre Festival. His first play,
Velvet Ropes
, was published while he was still a student at the Yale School of Drama. A collection of his monologues was published by Smith and Krauss in their 2006 Audition Arsenal series, and his play
Flushed
was published by Baker’s Plays. He holds a BA with Honors in Creative Writing from Brown University and an MFA in playwriting from Yale University.