Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (10 page)

THE SHAMAN AND SOUL

It is soul, not spirit, that is the true landscape of shamanism. Shamans deal
with sickness, envy, malice, betrayal, loss, conflict, failure, bad luck, hatred, despair, and death-including their own. The purpose of the shaman is
to dwell in the valley of the soul-to heal what has been broken in the body
and the community. Graham Harvey, a scholar of indigenous religions, puts
it about as pithily as it can be put: "Salmon ceremonies and salmon respecting," he says, "are about eating salmon, not about communing with symbols
of

Eliade, Wasson, and the Mushrooms

Historian of religions Mircea Eliade famously viewed shamans as essentially
characterized by celestial ascent, ecstasy, soul flight, and out-of-body journeys to the spirit realm.22 His widely cited treatise on shamanism is filled with
references to the sky, to ascent, to the vertical rather than the horizontal. He
sees the sacred in the transcendent, the vertical plane, the center as opposed
to the peripheries of things;23 it is thus at the center, he says, at the tent pole,
the mountain, the world axis, that the shaman communicates with the sky,
ascends through the central opening, ascends the sacred mountain, and ascends to the sky.24 Eliade is willing to denigrate as decadent or aberrant any
shamanism in which the ascent to the sky plays an insufficiently important
role.25 Shamanism among the Tungus people today, he says-that is, in the
i93os, when Shirokogoroff produced his famous studies-cannot be considered shamanism in its classic form, because, among other things, of "the small role played by the ascent to the sky.1126 Eliade's description of shamanism thus emphasizes both the center of things and the upward journey-almost paradigmatically as spirit rather than soul.

In 1955, banker R. Gordon Wasson, an amateur connoisseur of mushrooms, was introduced by the Mazatec shaman Maria Sabina to the ancient
teonandcatl-the Psilocybe mushroom, called `nti-si-tho in Mazatec, Little-OneWho-Springs-Forth. Maria Sabina called them her saint children. Wasson was
deeply impressed by his mushroom experience. He speaks of ecstasy, the
flight of the soul from the body, entering other planes of existence, floating
into the Divine Presence, awe and reverence, gentleness and love, the presence of the ineffable, the presence of the Ultimate, extinction in the divine
radiance. He writes that the mushroom freed his soul to soar with the speed
of thought through time and space. The mushroom, he says, allowed him to
know God.27

Wasson's description falls effortlessly into the language of ecstasy, awe,
soul flight, the Divine Presence, the knowledge of God-the same stock of
European concepts from which Eliade drew. But Maria Sabina herself could
not understand any of this. She says: "It's true that Wasson and his friends
were the first foreigners who came to our town in search of the saint children
and that they didn't take them because they suffered from any illness. Their
reason was that they came to find God."

And none of it, of course, had anything to do with the indigenous uses
of the mushroom, whose purpose was to cure sick people by, among other
things, making them vomit.28 She adds: "Before Wasson nobody took the
mushrooms only to find God. They were always taken for the sick to get
well. 129 To find God, Sabina-like all good Catholics-went to Mass.3°

When Sabina ingested the mushrooms, the mushroom spirits would show
her the cause of the sickness-for example, through soul loss, malevolent
spirits, or human sorcerers: "The sickness comes out if the sick vomit. They
vomit the sickness. They vomit because the mushrooms want them to. If the
sick don't vomit, I vomit. I vomit for them and in that way the malady is expelled.131 And she would then be able to cure the patient through the power
of her singing. Sometimes the spirits told her that the patient could not be
cured.32

Wasson had clearly come to Mexico anticipating a religious or mystical
experience, and now he had one.33 Indeed, he had been less than forthright
about his motives. He knew that the mushroom ceremonies were for curing
sickness or finding lost objects, and he told Sabina-as well as other Mazatec healers-that he was concerned about the whereabouts and well-being of his
son. He later admitted that this was a deception in order to gain access to the
ceremonies.34

Like Wasson, the influx of North Americans who followed him to Sabina's
village were not seeking the cure of sickness; they were seeking enlightenment. Sabina could not understand why well-fed and apparently healthy foreigners were seeking her mushrooms. These people certainly did not look
sick to her:35 "Some of these young people sought me out for me to stay up
with the Little-One-Who-Springs-Forth. `We come in search of God,' they said.
It was difficult for me to explain to them that the vigils weren't done from
the simple desire to find God, but were done with the sole purpose of curing the sicknesses that our people suffer from. 1131 She laments: "But from the
moment the foreigners arrived to search for God, the saint children lost their
purity. They lost their force; the foreigners spoiled them. From now on they
won't be any good. There's no remedy for it. "37

While Wasson was climbing the mountain of spirit, seeing Sabina as a
saint-like figure, a spiritual psychopomp, "religion incarnate," Maria Sabina
dwelled steadfastly in the valley of soul, healing the sick, vomiting for them,
expelling their sickness, living her own difficult and messy life-until Wasson's spiritual bypass destroyed the power of her mushrooms.38

Ayahuasca and the Body

Moreover, ayahuasca shamanism is irreducibly physical. The body is the instrument of power and understanding-power stored in the chest as phlegm,
understanding achieved through ingestion. The shaman learns the plants by
taking them into the body, where they teach the songs that leave the body as
sound and smoke. An ayahuasca healing session enacts the physical materiality of the human body-nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, sucking, gagging, belching, blowing, coughing up, spitting out; perfume, tobacco smoke, rattling,
whispering, whistling, blowing, singing, the taste of tobacco and ayahuasca,
the imagery and ritual of the body, conflict, mess.

Similarly, in the ayahuasca ceremony substances traverse body boundaries,
reminding us of our penetrable and leaky borders. Excrement and vomit are
ejected, magical darts are sucked out through the skin, internal substances
are spit out through the mouth, magical phlegm is transferred from shaman
to disciple, tobacco smoke is blown into the body through the crown of the
head-the body exaggerated, vast excretions, ferocious corporeality. Reminders of the darker side of human existence constantly lurk in the margins of shamanic performance-dangerous ambiguity, broken boundaries, ambivalence, transgression, disorder.

THE SOCIAL AMBIGUITY OF THE SHAMAN

The territory occupied by the shaman is suffering, hope, failure, envy, spite,
and malice. We are stricken by the resentment of others; we are betrayed by
those we have trusted; our successes are stalked by illness and death. In this
landscape, the shaman occupies a position of dangerous power and ambiguous marginality. Native American writer Gerald Vizenor says that "shamans
can be treacherous, unstable, and touchy."39 The idea is the same in the Amazon: the shaman is "ambiguous, suspicious, ... fundamentally distrusted,"
says one anthropologist;4° "dangerous, disquieting," says another.4' "Once
one is known as a shaman," writes anthropologist Marie Perruchon, herself
an initiated Shuar shaman, "trust is forever gone."42 Even shamans do not
trust each other. As one mestizo shaman puts it, "The only shaman you can
really trust is yourself."43

People see that the shaman can heal, which means that the shaman can
also kill.44 Social anthropologist Stephen Hugh-Jones points specifically to
the ambivalent nature of the shaman in Amazonia; shamans may use their
power for good or evil.45 Anthropologist Mary Douglas calls this the theory
of the unity of knowledge-that those who can cure can kill.46 Among the Napo
Runa of Amazonian Ecuador, for example, to proclaim oneself a yachac, possessor of yachay, shaman, is to endanger not only one's life but the lives of
one's family. Shamans are thought to have the power to harm as well as to
heal, doing the former sometimes through their mere anger. Because most
sicknesses and deaths are thought to be caused by the ill will or anger of a
shaman, to reveal oneself is to risk being associated with and attacked for the
tragedies of others.47

In the Amazon, the power of the shaman to heal is the same as the power
to harm. As pioneering ethnographer Alfred Metraux points out, the shaman is able "to draw magic substances from his body in order to heal or to
harm. In many cases, the power that infuses a shaman's being and resides in
his body is identical with poison capable of killing.1148 The same theme is repeated throughout the Amazon. Among the Desana of the Upper Rio Negro,
the Yagua of eastern Peru, and the Aguaruna of the Rio Maranon, shamans
and sorcerers, curing and killing, come from the same source.49 Healing and
sorcery are two aspects of the same process. "A particular plant," says don Javier Arevalo Shahuano, a Shipibo shaman, "has a spirit which can either
heal or

Anthropologist Steven Rubenstein, speaking of Shuar shamanism, puts it
this way: "One cannot help others unless one works within the same framework that hurts others. The power to kill and to cure is the same because it is
embodied in the same instrument"-the tsentsak, the shaman's magic darts.5'
As one Shuar puts it, "There are bad shamans and there are good shamans,
but they are all

The very nature of shamanic power is believed to invite malfeasance on the
part of the healer. Shamans have the power to call the spirits, the Sharanahua
say, and no one can be sure if they call them for good or evil; shamans enjoy killing.53 Indeed, increasing power often goes hand in hand with increasing ambivalence: more powerful shamans may be better healers but are also
potentially more dangerous.54 This ambivalence has been described either as
sociopolitical-shamans should kill their enemies in other groups and heal
their friends in their own group-or as the product of apprenticeship-shamans who master their emotions and aggressive desires use their powers to
heal, and others who fail to exercise self-control become sorcerers.55 It is in
fact much easier-requiring less time and suffering-to become a sorcerer
than a

Outbreaks of sickness have often been the occasion for one village to attack another whose shaman is deemed responsible. Early Spanish incursions
into the Amazon, bringing epidemics in their wake, may in fact have caused
an increase in interethnic warfare.57 A raid by one Achuar village on another,
occasioned by high fevers in both, and blamed by each on the shaman in the
other, was recounted as recently as 1996.58

Until recently, little attention was paid to dark shamanism-what has also
been called assault sorcery-or to the centrality and importance of dark shamanism to the overall spiritual and cosmological ideas ofAmazonian peoples
in general.59 There is an ambiguity inherent in shamanic practice, where the
dangerous work of healing and sorcery intersect. Because shamans possess
spirit darts, and with them the power to kill, the boundary between sorcerer
and shaman is indistinct.6° Social anthropologist Carlos Fausto characterizes
Amazonian shamanism as predatory animism, where some people can enter
into relationships with other-than-human persons, which permit them to
cure, to fertilize, and to kill. Shamanism, he says, "thrives on ambivalence.ift

This ambivalence is nowhere more clear than among the Shipibo, who
clearly state that the healing act itself ineluctably causes harm-that to remove the sickness from one person is to cast it upon another who lacks the
power to repel it. Since the illness-causing substance cannot be destroyed, the
shaman, in curing one, always harms another.62 In the same way, Yagua shamans toss extracted sickness-causing darts toward the sun, where they reach
the subterranean realms of the people-without-an-anus, causing considerable harm. Even more, the harm multiplies. In reprisal, the shamans of the
people-without-an-anus fling balls of earth at the Yagua, on which their children sometimes choke.63 Similarly, in return for successful hunting, the Tukano shaman must pay a fee-the lives of living people, who are sent to serve
the Master of Animals. The shaman drinks ayahuasca and sees these victims
in the form of birds sitting on the rafters of the spirit's house. The lives are
those of people who live far away; when shamans learn that people have died
in some other place, they know that the debt has been paid.64

In the Amazon, the dark and the light, killing and curing, are at once antagonistic and complementary; shamanic healers and shamanic killers represent interlocking cultural tendencies, and their battleground is the flesh of the
sick, the ambiguous heart of the shaman, the valley of the soul. Thus, the shaman's power is granted grudgingly by a society that both needs and fears it.
As Brown reports, in the Alto Rio Mayo, if one asks, "Do you have an ishiwin,
a shaman, in your community?" the reply is likely to be, "No, we get along
well here. We have no problems. "15

THE DANGERS OF BEING A SHAMAN

It is, in fact, dangerous-and I mean physically dangerous-to be a shaman,
for four reasons. First, since all shamans are themselves potential sorcerers,
and have the ability to kill if they desire, they are prime suspects when there
are deaths suggestive of sorcery, especially the deaths of their own patients.
Second, since the shaman can identify sorcerers, and such sorcerers may be
marked for death because of this accusation, the shaman inevitably has enemies. Third, the spirits with whom the shaman works can be dangerous,
fickle, jealous, and unpredictable, and they may abandon the shaman without warning. And, fourth, a successful shaman invites envidia, and other shamans will attack out of jealousy and resentment.