Singing to the Plants

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2009-08-09T04:48:00.000-07:00

This is an important message for all the people who have subscribed to the Singing to the Plants blog via RSS or Atom feed.

As you know, the blog has now moved to a new website at http://www.singingtotheplants.com/. If you want to skip the main website page and go right to the blog, just point your browser at http://www.singingtotheplants.com/blog/. If you go to the old blog, you will automatically be redirected to the new site, where the blog contains all of the posts of the old blog.

If you want to continue to receive RSS feeds of the blog posts, just go to the new blog page, click on the RSS link in the upper right corner, and then click on the name of your news reader. That's all there is to it.

If you want to subscribe manually, the feed URL is http://www.singingtotheplants.com/feed/.

Thank you for subscribing! I am looking forward to continuing our conversation on shamanism and the medicine path.

The Website Has Moved

2009-07-16T07:40:00.000-07:00

Singing to the Plants has a new website!

Please head on over to the new website to read all about my new book, Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. Read a free excerpt!

If you want to jump right to the blog, just direct your browser here. The entire blog has been ported over to the new site, including all the more recent comments.

Please let me know how you like the new website, and, as always, feel free to leave lots of comments on the blog posts.

Sacred Justice, Part 1

2009-05-25T05:16:00.000-07:00

We live in a culture that is hierarchical — that is, in which people have power over other people. We accept this as being normal and natural, as if there were no other way to live. We create spaces — classrooms, offices, courtrooms — that express this hierarchy architecturally. But there are consequences to this way of living that are worth examining.

Hierarchy is essentially unstable. In our culture, people with power over other people seek to maintain this power primarily by using punishment and the threat of punishment. This punishment can take many forms — as many forms as there are ways people can harm other people. We assert and maintain hierarchical relations by public shaming, verbal abuse, physical injury, intimidation, reduction in status, and denying basic social goods, such as education, employment, the right to vote, and liberty. We swim in a punitive ocean without even realizing it is there. We do not realize the extent to which we think in terms of punishment in our workplaces, our schools, our justice system, and our relationships with our children. We think that punishing people is normal.

In addition, power relationships are constantly being negotiated. We think that negotiation is a fair way to decide issues of power. That means that we view relationships with other people in transactional terms. When people are in apparent conflict with each other, we expect them to handle it transactionally — to negotiate, bargain, compromise. This is reflected in one of the key strategies of our criminal justice system — the plea bargain. We are constantly seeking to craft outcomes rather than deepen relationships.

Then we wonder why these fixes are so temporary. We see our solutions discarded, our carefully negotiated agreements abandoned in cycles of violence. We try to force people to behave, and then we are bewildered when they do not. The result is a culture in which people are oppressed by the power that others have over them — a culture in which we all oppress each other, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

The punitive foundations of our culture, like most cultural foundations, are expressed in myth. In our case, the foundation myth is what theologian Walter Wink has called the myth of redemptive violence — believing that a harm can be made right by humiliating or physically harming the offender, that violence is a necessary and appropriate response, even that such violence is healing for the victim. It is normative in our society to seek vengeance for a harm done to us. Anyone brought up in our culture has seen thousands of hours of movies and television in which the schoolyard bully is finally beaten and humiliated by his victim, or the ruthless outlaw is shot dead by the gentle sheriff. The schoolyard victim and gentle sheriff are empowered and healed by this response, and often given a sexual reward for their violence. We are all constantly tempted to reenact this mythology.

When a harm has been done in a punitive culture such as ours, founded on the myth of redemptive violence, there are, I think, four consequences.

First, it is completely rational for the person who has done the harm to try to evade responsibility for it — to lie, hide, deny, and blame others. What is the point of being accountable, if all that you get for it is punishment? What is the point of accepting responsibility for a harm you have done, if your own needs — to apologize, to make things right, to repair broken relationships — are not going to be met?

Second, a punitive system focuses on the past at the expense of the future. A punitive system is obsessed with the fact component of stories — who did what to whom in what sequence — because it is looking to single out the blameworthy participant for punishment. This means that a punitive system ignores the other components in the stories of the participants — how they feel, what they need. The system thus leaves all the participant with their stories untold, and their primary, most basic need — the need to be heard — unfulfilled. Moreover, the emphasis on punishment for the acts of the past means that the system largely ignores how to go forward into the future, how to make things right, and how to repair and restore broken bonds of trust in the community.

Third, a punitive system imposes a kind of Manichaeism — a belief that the world consists of two powers, good and evil, light and dark, easily distinguished, in constant battle. This Manichaean mythology pervades our criminal justice system and most of our thinking. We worry about the facts because we believe the facts will show us how to apportion blame. When people are in conflict, we attempt to punctuate their ongoing relationship, and thus determine who is the one to be punished.We feel compelled to distinguish bad guys from good guys, because only in this way can we make sure that bad guys get what they deserve. And, if we fail at punctuating the interaction, we often throw up our hands and punish both.

Fourth, our culture views punishment in transactional terms. The very terms we use — giving people what they deserve — embodies a transactional view. Being punished for having harmed someone is very much like a business transaction. The punishment is frequently negotiated. For example, punishment may be lessened in exchange for an admission or an apology — often a meaningless apology, with no intent to repair the harm or make things right. The transactional nature of punishment is also captured in the saying, Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. Think about the converse: If you can do the time, then hell, you might as well do the crime.

This means that the decision to harm another person is reduced to a calculus that does not involve the other person at all — only the harmer and the justice system. This means, too, that someone who has harmed another person is not put face-to-face with the harm that has been done — the physical injury, the fear, the loss of safety, the inconvenience suffered by the person harmed. The harmer does not have to deal with the person harmed at all. The harmer is involved only in negotiating with the justice system for the best possible deal.

This is our current culture of punitive justice. But there is an alternative — a culture of sacred justice, which focuses on repair, restoration, and healing. We will discuss this in Part 2.

Jungle Survival Tips: Wounds

2009-03-31T04:23:00.000-07:00

Someone carelessly tossed a machete in the bottom of the boat, your barefoot friend stepped on it, and now he has a laceration that is bleeding all over the place. Do not panic. Here are the steps to take.

Step 1. Protect yourself. The first step in wound care is to protect yourself from blood-borne pathogens, including HIV and Hepatitis B.

Bare foot meets carelessly tossed machete

  Always assume that all body substances are infectious.

  Wash your hands before and after any wound contact, either with soap and water or — even better — an alcohol gel, such as those made by Purell or Lysol.

  Carry some exam gloves in your medical kit, and put them on for any anticipated contact with nonintact skin, blood, body fluids, mucous membranes, or contaminated items. Wash your hands immediately after you remove the gloves.

  Protect your own mucous membranes — eyes, nose, and mouth — from blood splash. Tie a bandana around your face, and put on your glasses.

Step 2. Stop the bleeding. The second step in wound care is to stop further blood loss. Apart from an obstructed airway, nothing else matters until the flow of blood is stopped.

Apply direct pressure on the wound to stop bleeding

In almost every case — even in amputations — bleeding can be stopped by elevating the wound above the level of the heart and applying strong direct pressure for about ten to fifteen minutes. Blood is slippery, so use a piece of gauze, preferably sterile, or even a clean bandana if that is all you have; a Kotex pad tossed in your medical kit is ideal for this purpose. Put your thumb or fingers or your whole palm over the wound and press down hard; alert and cooperative patients can do this themselves. If the gauze gets soaked with blood, do not remove it, but add more gauze.

Do not use a tourniquet. Tourniquets kill limbs. There may be occasions when a tourniquet is necessary, such as massive shrapnel wounds, but using a tourniquet is a deliberate decision to sacrifice a limb in order to save a life.

Step 3. Clean the wound. The third step in wound care — especially in the jungle — is to make sure the wound is as clean as you can possibly make it.

Clean the wound with an irrigation syringe ...

  Remove any existing bandages or wound closure strips.

  Clean the skin around the wound with soap and water or a topical antiseptic such as povidone iodine. Scrub gently with a sterile gauze pad. The idea is to remove any dirt that might seed the wound with bacteria. Avoid getting soap or antiseptic in the wound itself. Scrub in a spiral pattern away from the wound rather than toward it.

  Allow the wound to open naturally. If necessary, spread the wound edges apart using a pair of sterile forceps.

  If the wound has become infected, pus has probably collected in pockets, so gently probe the deeper parts of the wound with a sterile instrument to make sure that all such pockets are drained.

  Irrigate the wound copiously with a high-pressure stream of purified water to remove clotted blood, pus, debris, and other contaminants. Use an irrigation syringe and splash shield; in an emergency, you can use any sort of clean plastic bag with a pinhole punched in it, or melt a pinhole in the top of a standard water bottle, but protect yourself from blood splash.

... preferably one with a splash shield

The primary medium for infection within a wound is dead tissue. Dead tissue is basically meat. It has no blood supply; white cells and antibodies have difficulty penetrating it; and thus it is a good culture medium for bacteria and fungi. You can identify living tissue because it is reddish, elastic, and bleeds when you poke it; dead tissue is dark, mushy, and does not bleed. Look for dead tissue in the wound. If any remains after high-pressure irrigation, then — unless a relatively brief evacuation is imminent — it must be removed or debrided. In a wilderness emergency situation, your best bet is to scrub the wound with sterile sponges, sterile dressings, or sterile pieces of cotton. Rough cloth works better than smooth cloth. Scrub with firmness. It will hurt. Your friend will use very bad language. The wound will bleed again, since clots will have been knocked off, but the bleeding can readily be stopped by direct pressure with a sterile dressing.

Always follow any debridement with additional high-pressure irrigation. The wound should be clean and pink.

A cleaned and debrided wound

Step 4. Protect the wound. Once the wound is cleaned of dirt, debris, pus, and dead tissue, the fourth step is to dress the wound to provide a healing environment and prevent further contamination.

A dressing is any material applied to a wound to control bleeding and prevent contamination; a bandage is any material used to hold a dressing in place. Think about dressings and bandages in layers. Immediately next to the skin should be a nonadherent base — Telfa, Second Skin, Xeroform, a piece of sterile gauze impregnated with petroleum jelly — that will not stick to the wound. Above that should be a gauze sponge to absorb wound discharge. Those two layers should be held in place by bandaging material that either sticks to itself or is attached to the skin with adhesive tape.

Dressings and bandages are often sold as a combined adhesive wound covering. A simple Band-Aid is a good example — neat, versatile, and sterile.

Apply a dressing ...

  If you were not in the middle of the jungle, it might make sense to use butterfly strips or Dermabond tissue adhesive to bring the edges of the wound together and minimize scarring. But closing the edges of a wound can create a deep dark warm pocket in which bacteria can grow and form an abscess. At this point, avoiding an abscess should be a higher priority than minimizing a scar.

  A goal of the dressing is to keep the wound moist and create an environment that encourages healing. Current nonadherent dressing materials — including sterile gauze impregnated with petroleum jelly — are designed to provide such an environment. You can also apply a thin layer of antibiotic ointment, which helps keep the wound moist, and may — or may not — provide some additional protection from infection. Bear in mind that no amount of antibiotic ointment can compensate for inadequate wound cleaning.

  Antibiotic ointments designed for wound care usually combine antibiotics effective against both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria. The antibiotic bacitracin targets gram-positive bacteria; neomycin and polymyxin target gram-negative bacteria. Triple antibiotic ointments — brand names include Neosporin and Mycitracin — contain all three. However, some people have allergic skin reactions to neomycin, so some antibiotic ointments, such as Polysporin, contain just bacitracin and polymyxin, which provide the same coverage. Some antibiotic ointments add the topical analgesic pramocaine. Check the ingredients before you buy.

... and bandage

  If you are applying a dressing with a separate bandage, try to avoid wrapping the bandage or adhesive tape completely around a limb. It can obstruct circulation, like a tourniquet, as the limb swells. If you must wrap a limb, monitor the distal pulses and check frequently for bluish color, tingling, or loss of sensation.

  Movement may cause bleeding to recur, so severely injured limbs should be immobilized before evacuation. Elevation of an infected wound can reduce swelling and pain.

Step 5. Watch the wound. The fifth step in wound care is to change the dressing periodically and examine the wound carefully.

  Be alert for signs of infection.

  Infected wounds should be drained and washed, as described above, two or three times a day.

  Infected wounds benefit from warm compresses for 15 to 20 minutes several times a day. The warmth causes the blood vessels to dilate, increases blood flow to the area, helps the body fight the infection, and loosens clots, scabs, dried serum, and pus. For an injury to a finger or toe, it is possible to immerse the wound in warm, sterile water to which an antiseptic such as povidone iodine has been added. You can make a hot compress by bringing a piece of cloth to a boil in water to make it hot and sterile, then wringing it out, folding it, and placing it against the wound.

Step 6. Consider evacuation. Once you have done everything you can to clean and protect the wound, the sixth step in wound care is to consider whether the wound is beyond your skill and requires evacuation to definitive care. Seriously consider evacuation in cases of

  Severe animal bites, especially from potentially rabid animals

  Deep puncture wounds, dirty wounds with embedded foreign material, and wounds that contain crushed, shredded, or ragged tissue, where there is high risk of infection

  Wounds involving joints, severed tendons, or fractures

  Infected wounds that do not respond promptly to treatment

  Severe blood loss

Bioneers

2009-03-27T11:11:00.001-07:00

In 1985, at Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo — at that time called San Juan Pueblo — in New Mexico, a young filmmaker named Kenny Ausubel watched a Native American farmer take some bright red corn seeds from a little clay pot that had been embedded in the mud wall of his adobe home. This was the sacred red corn of the Pueblo, which no one had grown in forty years. The old farmer planted the sacred seeds, renewing an ancient contract between the people and the earth. For Ausubel, the moment was revelatory.

Bioneers founders Kenny Ausubel and Nina Simons

Ausubel went on to form an organization named Seeds of Change, devoted to conserving the world's indigenous agricultural heritage by offering heirloom seeds to backyard organic gardeners. Along with his wife Nina Simons, he also initiated the annual Bioneers Conference and its parent organization, the Collective Heritage Institute.

The term bioneer is intended to indicate a biological pioneer — one who sees the solutions to contemporary global problems not in technology but in a biological model of interconnectedness, in what Ausubel calls true biotechnologies, based on biomimicry, natural design, and the restoration of natural capital.

Bioneers states several interconnecting goals for its annual conferences — to cultivate and disseminate environmental solutions to national and global audiences; to inspire and equip people toward effective action; to develop and spread model economic strategies for ecological agriculture, environmental restoration, and community self-reliance; to strengthen traditional, indigenous, and restorative farming practices; to revitalize our cultural and spiritual connection with the natural world.

And, in fact, the conference has over the years brought together a remarkable array of visionary activists, organizers, and speakers on such topics as restoration, ecology, bioremediation, alternative health, indigenous land practices, green medicine, natural capitalism, relation to place — and the role of sacred and psychoactive plants in world renewal.

The Bioneers propose that there is a profound intelligence in nature, and that, in our present moment of predicament and opportunity, we must learn and follow that intelligence. It is in this context that speakers at the Bioneers conferences have addressed the issue of sacred plants and fungi, and their role as guides both to the reality of the natural world and to the ways in which we can learn to live in harmony with it.

Fourteen of these presentations, taken from conferences held between 1990 and 2004, have been collected in the book Visionary Plant Consciousness: The Shamanic Teachings of the Plant World. In the book, twenty-three leading ethnobotanists, anthropologists, artists, and medical researchers — people such as Terence McKenna, Wade Davis, Alex Grey, Kat Harrison, Paul Stamets, and Luis Eduardo Luna — present their understandings of the nature of psychoactive plants and their significant connection to humans.

The Bioneers conference is traditionally held in San Rafael, California, in the Fall — the 2009 conference will run from October 16 to18 — and is also carried by satellite feed to other locations. Here is an example — environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist, and best-selling author Paul Hawken, introduced by Kenny Ausubel, addressing the final plenary session of the 2007 Bioneers conference:

Eagle Feathers

2009-03-26T10:20:00.001-07:00

According to several recent news reports — here, here, here, and here — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is currently conducting a large-scale undercover investigation targeting people who are illegally buying, selling, or receiving bald and golden eagle feathers.

On March 12, federal agents arrested four men — three from Washington and one from Oklahoma — for killing eagles and selling their feathers. One of the men, Reginald Dale Akeen, an enrolled Kiowa, is accused of traveling the powwow circuit under the name of J. J. Lonelodge and selling illegally obtained feathers to dance competitors for use in their regalia.

Golden eagle

While the arrests in Washington and Oklahoma were of Native Americans, the undercover sting operation is apparently more expansive, with agents operating in sixteen states, and targeting both Native and non-Native Americans. Reports of additional arrests and confiscations have been reported on blogs here and here, including the alleged arrest of well-known Diné fan maker Patrick Scott.

There are a number of federal laws addressing the protection of eagles — the Lacey Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. The federal agency charged with this protection is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and its regulations governing the religious use of eagle feathers by Native Americans are found at 50 CFR § 22.22.

Under these regulations, you can legally possess an eagle feather only if you are "an Indian who is authorized to participate in bona fide tribal religious ceremonies" and have received a government-issued eagle permit. To be an Indian you must have the appropriate Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood, and you must be an enrolled member of one of the 562 entities officially recognized by and eligible to receive services from the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Those convicted of possessing eagle feathers without the appropriate permit face imprisonment and fines — as much as two years in prison and a $250,000 fine for a second offense, which is a felony.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service maintains tight control over eagles and eagle feathers. The agency has established a National Eagle Repository at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge in Denver, Colorado, to provide Native Americans with the feathers of golden and bald eagles needed for religious purposes. The repository serves as a collection point for dead eagles, most salvaged by state and federal wildlife personnel, and most either killed by electrocution, vehicle collisions, or illegal shooting and trapping, or dead from natural causes.

Under the current law, the repository is the only legal source of bald and golden eagle body parts. In order to get an eagle feather legally, you must first obtain an eagle permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service, authorizing you to receive and possess the feather from the repository for religious purposes. Then you have to apply to the repository for the feather. There is currently about a three-and-a-half-year waiting list. More than 5,000 people are standing in line for the approximately 1,000 eagles the repository receives each year.

These rules can have surprising consequences.

Dancer with eagle feather bustle

Robert Soto — see here, here, and here — is a holy man of the Lipan Apache. In 2006, during the giveaway ceremony at a powwow in Texas, his eagle feathers were confiscated by an agent of the Fish and Wildlife Service. Soto did not have a permit for the feathers, and he could not get one if he tried. The Lipan Apache are not recognized as a Native American tribe by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The rules also make it illegal for anyone — including enrolled members of federally recognized tribes — to possess an eagle feather that has simply fallen on the ground from a live eagle. The rules make it illegal to trade or barter feathers. The rules make it illegal for a Native American to give an eagle feather, as a sign of honor or respect, to a non-Native American, or to a Native American who is not an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe, or to an enrolled tribal member who does not have a permit. It is illegal for a Native American to give an eagle feather to a non-Native spouse.

And, in some cases, as among the Northern Arapaho of Wyoming, feathers from an eagle killed by an automobile, for example, or by flying into power lines, or by poison, are not considered pure, and cannot be used in the Sun Dance. Instead, the feathers must be from an eagle acquired personally by the sponsor, as a gift of the Creator. The current rules make that impossible.

The National Eagle Repository

Clearly there are a number of competing ethical and constitutional values at work here. Although the bald eagle was removed from the endangered species list in 2007, there is every reason to continue to protect eagles and other raptors from poaching. There are good reasons, too, to try to curtail the appropriation of indigenous ceremonies by outsiders to the tradition. That is why many people believe that, after centuries of genocide and marginalization, only enrolled tribal members should be allowed to possess eagle feathers.

Moreover, under both the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, there is every reason to accommodate Native American religious use of eagles and eagle feathers. At the same time, there are legitimate questions raised by restricting that accommodation to a group defined first in racial terms and then by a quintessentially political act of regulatory legitimation.

Courts have differed on whether the Religious Freedom Restoration Act requires the government to open the application process for eagle feathers to Native Americans who are members of tribes that lack federal recognition. Two cases illustrate this conflict. In both, the government argued that it had a compelling interest in preserving the eagle population, and that limiting eagle permits to enrolled members of federally recognized tribes met that goal with the least possible impact on Native American religious practices.

In U.S. v. Hartman (2002), the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit held that the government had not presented sufficient evidence to show that expanding the permit system to a member of the federally unrecognized Chiricahua Apache would threaten the eagle population. In fact, the court said, expanding the pool of applicants while the number of permits issued remained constant would at worst add to the delay to applicants, with no effect on eagles.

On the other hand, in U.S. v. Antoine (2003), the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act did not require the government to grant an eagle permit to a member of the federally unrecognized Cowichan Band of the Salish Indian Tribe in British Columbia. "RFRA requires least restrictive means to avoid substantial burdens on religion," the court stated.

But, in this case, the burden on religion is inescapable; the only question is whom to burden and how much. Both member and nonmember Indians seek to use eagles for religious purposes. The government must decide whether to distribute eagles narrowly and thus burden nonmembers, or distribute them broadly and exacerbate the extreme delays already faced by members. Religion weighs on both sides of the scale. The precise burdens depend on how many nonmember applicants there would be, but not in any illuminating way: Fewer nonmember applicants means shorter additional delays for each member if the restrictions are removed, but also fewer people burdened if they are left in place.

Given this uncertainty regarding Native Americans who are acknowledged members of historical tribes that lack federal recognition, it appears unlikely that the permitting process will be opened any time soon to applicants who are not Native Americans at all.

Nez Perce beaded eagle feather fan

One organization, Religious Freedom with Raptors, has proposed replacing the tribal enrollment requirement with a Certificate of Religious Participation endorsed by a tribal member or spiritual leader. Requiring such a certificate, the organization argues, would ensure that only approved participants in bona fide Native American customs are eligible to receive eagle permits, and would allow for direct oversight of eagle feathers to ensure that feathers and ceremonies are not abused. The certificate would thus give legal protection to Native Americans who wish to include others of their choosing in traditional customs involving eagle feathers.

But the organization does not address a further issue. If enrolled tribal members are willing to poach eagle feathers and sell them for money, as is alleged of Reginald Dale Akeen, an enrolled Kiowa, there seems to be little to stand in the way of enrolled tribal members selling Certificates of Religious Participation to outsiders for money as well. While this may reduce poaching — at least for those non-Native Americans actually willing to stand in line for years to get a legal feather — it will, as the Ninth Circuit pointed out, just make the line longer, and increase the wait for everyone.

I would like to think that there is a fair solution to these issues, but I sure don't know what it is.

The Last Man

2009-03-25T06:08:00.001-07:00

On March 25, 1916, a man of unknown name died of tuberculosis in California. He was known as Ishi, but that was not his real name, which no one knows; the word ishi means man in the Yahi language.

Ishi was the last surviving Yahi. His people had been destroyed by mining silt that poisoned their salmon streams, livestock that competed for grazing with deer, epidemics of alien diseases. His people had been hunted down and killed by white ranchers.

In the early 1860s, the Yahi started to steal cattle in order to survive. The cattle ranchers responded by slaughtering Yahi, who were apparently less important than cows. The Three Knolls Massacre in 1865 left only thirty members of the people alive. The ranchers used dogs to find the survivors, and killed another fifteen. The remainder fled into the hills, where they hid for more than forty years. By 1911, the man known as Ishi was the only one left. The whole story is here.

Ishi was caught, apparently trying to steal food, in Oroville, California, and came to the attention of two anthropologists, Alfred Kroeber and Thomas Waterman, who arranged for him to live at the new University of California museum of anthropology in San Francisco. Ishi survived by working as an assistant at the museum, demonstrating the living skills of the Yahi, identifying the Yahi artifacts that had been taken from his people. Spectators paid money to see him make arrowheads.

Kroeber's wife, Theodora, later wrote two popular books about Ishi, which are still in print. Their daughter, Ursula Le Guin, is a respected science fiction writer, whose work constitutes a sort of speculative anthropology of culture contact. In her novel Always Coming Home, for example, she describes the culture of the Kesh, inhabitants of the Napa Valley in California long after some unnamed catastrophe has sunk the cities of the coast. The book is a collage of autobiography, verse, tales, reports, drawings, music, and even the recipes of a minutely constructed egalitarian matriarchal culture that had — much like Ishi — survived contact with a group of hierarchical and murderous outsiders.

When Ishi died, the museum staff apparently tried to give him a traditional Yahi funeral. They cremated him along with bow and arrows, acorn meal, shell beads, tobacco, jewelry, and obsidian flakes.

But there was one last Yahi artifact to be plundered. Someone took Ishi's brain, presumably so that it might be studied someday, like a Yahi basket. The brain then disappeared.

Under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a group of Maidu Indians from the Sierra Nevada region sought to reclaim Ishi's ashes and bury them in his tribal homeland near Mt. Lassen. Duke University anthropologist Orin Starn helped them — finally — locate the missing brain in an obscure Smithsonian storeroom. Starn has written a poignant and outraged book about his quest.

Today is the anniversary of the death by tuberculosis of a man with a name no white person ever knew. He has gone to join his people.

Jungle Survival Tips: Infections

2009-03-21T12:42:00.001-07:00

In the jungle, any open wound — abrasion, puncture, avulsion, incision, or laceration — is an invitation to infection. To understand infection, and how to tell if you have one, it is helpful to understand the normal process of wound healing, or inflammation.

Potential Infection

When you are cut, the tissue around the wound immediately constricts, compressing the small vessels and slowing blood loss. In fact, for about ten minutes, all the blood vessels in the body reflexively constrict, reducing blood flow even more. Platelets in the blood are attracted to the site of injury and form plugs in the torn vessels. Tissue clotting factors activate the clotting cascade; within minutes, clots of elastic protein fibers fill the wound. This is why, with the aid of direct pressure and elevation, almost all bleeding, even from serious wounds, will stop within ten to fifteen minutes. Over several days, the clot surface dries, forming a natural bandage in the form of a scab.

Underneath the clot, the process of inflammation also forms a protective barrier. After about ten to fifteen minutes, as the clotting process blocks the bleeding from the injured vessels, the body releases vasoactive amines into the wound region, and these cause the uninjured capillaries to get larger and start to leak, so that blood plasma pours into the wound area. In addition, mast cells under the skin release histamine, which attracts white blood cells out of the blood vessels into the extracellular fluid, where they help to clean the wound. Polymorphonuclear granulocytes swallow and kill bacteria; macrophages consume and destroy other debris left lying around.

Inflammation

These processes explain the classical characteristics of acute inflammation, listed mnemonically as four Latin words – rubor, calor, tumor, and dolor. Rubor or redness is due to the dilation of the blood vessels and the escape of red blood cells into the wound area. Calor or heat is also due to vascular dilation and increased local tissue metabolism. Tumor or swelling is caused by the leaking of fluid into the surrounding tissues. Dolor or pain is due to increased tissue tension from fluid accumulation. Some amount of redness, warmth, swelling, and pain are thus part of the normal inflammatory healing process. In addition, a slight temperature elevation is normal for a few days after a severe injury, and lymph nodes in the area of the wound may become mildly enlarged as they help trap bacteria and debris. Again, these signs are normal.

But if the inflammatory process is being overwhelmed by invading bacteria, the body responds by increasing the local inflammation. It is thus excessive inflammation which, among other things, serves as a sign of a local infection.

Infection

Pain from a wound should normally subside by the second or third day. There may be an infection if pain persists, or especially if the pain increases rather than subsides.
Redness is usually limited to the margins of a wound, usually within a quarter inch. There may be an infection if the redness extends beyond the margins of the wound. In particular, a clear sign of infection is the presence of red streaks extending from the wound along a limb toward the body.
Severe swelling may be a sign of infection, especially if the skin temperature increases rather than decreases over time. Increasing limitations of motion, due to swelling and pain, may also indicate an advancing infection.
Pus is fluid filled with dead white cells. The presence of pus in a wound indicates a failure of cellular defense and confirms the presence of an infection. The pus may be whitish, green, or even reddish, depending on the infecting organism. Sometimes, but not always, there may be a foul odor.

Septicemia

It is possible for an infection to spread beyond the local area and enter the general blood circulation. This is septicemia, sometimes called blood poisoning. Signs of developing systemic infection include lymphangitis, or enlarged and painful lymph nodes, especially if they are beyond the immediate area of the infection; a high and persistent temperature elevation; chills, headaches, nausea, vomiting, or malaise. A person with a systemic infection is desperately ill and requires immediate evacuation to a facility where definitive care — including intravenous antibiotics — is available.

In any injury, but especially in a wound to the foot, there is particular concern for tetanus, which is caused by Clostridium tetani, an obligate anaerobe that is especially common in soil contaminated with animal feces. All open wounds are susceptible, especially those that have been contaminated with soil. Tetanus is 100 percent fatal, and 100 percent preventable. In my opinion, wilderness leaders and jungle guides should require that all trip participants have up-to-date tetanus booster immunization. A booster shot received shortly after injury may prevent development of the disease.

Gangrene

Gas gangrene results from contamination of a wound by the bacterium Clostridium perfringens, widely found in soil and in the intestinal tracts of humans and animals. The bacteria grow and create spores in dead tissue where the oxygen content is very low. This is why the proper debridement of dead tissue from a wound is extremely important, especially in a wilderness setting. The signs of gangrene include gas bubbles in the wound, drainage of foul-smelling reddish-gray fluid, and crepitus or a "Rice Krispies" feeling in the skin surrounding the wound. The gas bubbles come from the bacteria fermenting carbohydrates into carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Gas bubbles under the skin cause the crepitus. Gangrene is an immediately life-threatening condition, which may be fatal in as little as thirty hours. Immediate evacuation is required.

In the next installment, we will discuss how to prevent and handle infected wounds in the jungle.

Green Power

2009-03-20T10:38:00.001-07:00

The term poder verde, green power, was first applied to cumbia amazónica — the boisterous sexy ironic kick-ass garage-band party music that first developed in the Upper Amazon during the oil boom of the 1960s.

José Asunción, Huarmiboa (2007)

Now there is an equivalent in painting — an exhibition entitled Poder Verde, Visiones Psicotropicales, Green Power: Psychotropical Visions, currently on display through April 9 at El Centro Cultural de España in Lima, which brings together the boisterous sexy ironic kick-ass visionary work of contemporary Upper Amazonian painters.

The Lima exhibit has clearly been a success. One newspaper calls it "a world vision defined by sensuality, abundance, and color." Another says, "Opulent naked women populate several of the works of these artists, together with luxuriant fruits and wild animals that appear to enjoy the richness of the land."

Luis Sakiray, Preciosa belleza amazónica (2006)

And it is indeed true that this is wonderfully exuberant, extravagant, and often wryly transgressive art. Famed visionary artist Pablo Amaringo is included, of course. But also represented are the lesser known painters Harry Chávez, José Asunción Araujo, Brus Rubio, Miguel Saavedra, Jorge Cabieses, Luis Sakiray, Roldán Pinedo, and Christian Bendayán.

These artists are, for the most part, not traditional gallery artists, but rather commercial painters, muralists, folk artists, their paintings inspired by posters, advertisements, magazine illustrations, ayahuasca visions, popular symbolism, figures from Amazonian folklore and mythology. Included as well are indigenous painters — Shipibo Roldán Pinedo and Bora-Huitoto Brus Rubio — "escaping from the anthropological museums," as the catalog puts it, so that their work can be taken seriously as art.

Pablo Amaringo, Aya-Mayuywayra (2005)

Luis Sakiray Macuyama, for example, has been principally a muralist for Chinese restaurants, chicken shacks, and cebicherías, where his art links the succulence of the food inside to visions of curvaceous women and a bountiful landscape. José Asunción Araujo, another self-taught painter, has specialized in the decoration of Iquitos bars, nightclubs, and whorehouses.

Christian Bendayán, curator of the exhibition, said that jungle culture has always been "lively, garish, colorful, quite different from the rest of Peru, which has even looked upon it as immoral." Surprisingly, the swirling visionary art of Pablo Amaringo appears quite at home in this company. Indeed, the exhibit takes a broad view of the visionary. "Mediated through drunkenness, sexuality, wisdom, psychotropics," says the catalog, "the result is an aesthetic that reclaims our hallucinations, our dreams, our visions."

Christian Bendayán, Recuerdo de tu hijo (2006)

Fittingly, the exhibit includes performances of cumbia amazónica by groups such as Los Chapillacs, and, of course, Juaneco y su combo. Opening night featured Los Hijos de Lamas — "entertainers for weddings, funerals, divorces, and suicides."

The catalog concludes, "It is green power, the return to roots, the snake of life that gives us these psychotropical visions, to intoxicate us with their lights and colors. Thus art and life, imagination and reason, dream and reality become one. Now we are able to see again, be again, be born again."

The complete exhibition catalog is here.

A Victory for Santo Daime

2009-03-19T07:41:00.000-07:00

On March 18, 2009, United States District Judge Owen M. Panner found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act protects the Santo Daime's use of ayahuasca as a sacrament of their church. The court was guided by the unanimous decision of the United States Supreme Court in the very similar União do Vegetal case in 2006, and concluded that RFRA requires that — subject to reasonable restrictions — the plaintiff church be allowed to import and drink ayahuasca for their religious ceremonies.

The suit was brought by the Church of the Holy Light of the Queen in Ashland, Oregon, led by padrinho Jonathan Goldman, a student of Santo Daime for twenty-one years, who had traveled frequently to Brazil to receive instruction from church leaders, and learned Portuguese in order to understand the hymns that constitute church doctrine. Joining in the suit was a separate church in Portland, called Céu da Divina Rosa, Church of the Divine Rose, and its leader Alexandra Bliss Yeager, as well as several individual members of both churches.

Goldman had been arrested and the church's supply of ayahuasca seized by federal agents in1999. Counsel for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit attempted to negotiate an agreement with the Department of Justice, which refused to consider a religious exemption for the church. On the other hand, in 2000, the Oregon Board of Pharmacy determined that the religious use of ayahuasca by the Church of the Holy Light of the Queen was a "non-drug" use, and therefore not subject to state drug laws and regulations. Since that time, ayahuasca has had a status in Oregon law similar to that of peyote when used as a sacrament by the Native American Church.

Following Goldman's arrest, the plaintiffs continued to practice their religion in secret. In 2006, after the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the União do Vegetal case, the plaintiffs commissioned a study of Church of the Holy Light of the Queen members by psychiatrist John H. Halpern, who had written extensively on the use and abuse of hallucinogenic drugs, including a paper on the long-term health of members of the Native American Church who consume peyote as a sacrament — a study we have discussed here.

In 2008, armed with the results of that study and the earlier ruling of the Supreme Court, plaintiffs brought suit in federal court, seeking an injunction that would allow them to use ayahuasca as a central sacrament of their religious practice.

Judge Panner's opinion provides a scholarly and sympathetic account of Santo Daime history and doctrine in general, and of the practices of the Church of the Holy Light of the Queen in particular — their careful records of ayahuasca purchase and use, their screening procedures for new members, their use of medical questionnaires, their "controlled and supportive religious ceremony," their security procedures for storing and distributing ayahuasca.

The court was less sympathetic to the claims of the government, particularly its scientific case concerning purported short- and long-term effects of ayahuasca use. "I find studies of LSD and pure injected DMT," the court wrote, "are only marginally relevant in evaluating the risks of consuming Daime tea in a religious ceremony."

The court was also unimpressed with the government's other arguments. For example, the government asserted a compelling interest in preventing the diversion of ayahuasca to recreational users. "The government has not presented evidence that there is a significant market for Daime tea," the court wrote. "The government also has not presented evidence that plaintiffs have allowed the diversion of a single drop of Daime tea. This is an issue best addressed through reasonable guidelines for storing and inventorying plaintiffs' supply of Daime tea."

The court closely followed the legal reasoning of the Supreme Court in the União do Vegetal case, and similarly found that the government had failed to establish either a compelling state interest in forbidding the use of ayahuasca by the church, or that "outright prohibition of the Daime tea is the least restrictive means of furthering its interests." On those grounds the court found that the plaintiffs were entitled to the requested injunction under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The entire opinion is cogent, clear, sensible, and well worth reading as a road map for the litigation of similar cases in the future.

Ordinarily, we could now expect a long, expensive, exhausting slog to the Supreme Court. But it may be worth noting that, on the same day as Judge Panner issued his opinion, U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told reporters that the current administration would effectively end the earlier policy of frequent raids on distributors of medical marijuana. He said that the Justice Department's enforcement policy would now be restricted to traffickers who falsely masqueraded as medical dispensaries and "use medical marijuana laws as a shield."

It is not at all clear whether this might signal a change in administration policy toward the use of ayahausca by such entities as the Santo Daime church. Commenting on this case, Mark Kleiman, a nationally recognized expert in the field of crime and drug policy, suggests that the simplest approach would be for the Attorney General to tell the DEA Administrator to draft and publish in the Federal Register a set of procedures and criteria to deal with cases such as this in the future.

We will see.

The War on Coca Leaves Redux

2009-03-16T08:38:00.001-07:00

As we have discussed, the International Narcotics Control Board — a United Nations monitoring body that oversees the implementation of the UN drug control conventions — has called for the governments of Bolivia and Peru to abolish all uses of the coca leaf, including coca leaf chewing. In its 2007 annual report, the INCB asked Bolivia and Peru to make possessing and using coca leaf criminal offenses — a move that would make criminals of millions of people in the Andes and Amazon.

The Peruvian response was dramatic, with legislators defiantly chewing coca leaves on the congressional floor. The current meeting of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna has elicited a strong response from Bolivia as well. Some context might be helpful.

Morales wearing indigenous clothes

Evo Morales, an Aymara, is the first indigenous president of Bolivia. He came to power in 2006 promising a decolonizing revolution, a term with a special meaning to indigenous Bolivians. The first decolonization took place when Bolivia became independent from Spain in 1825; but, for Bolivia's indigenous population, this political separation meant only that their exploitation and marginalization took on new forms. For the poor and disenfranchised indigenous people who helped bring Morales to power, colonialism is still very much alive in Bolivia, in everything from the educational system to the Catholic Church.

Although publicly declaring himself a Catholic, Morales has actively promoted indigenous beliefs, including appointing traditional shamans to his government. Bolivia’s previous constitution had allowed for freedom of religion, but had specified Roman Catholicism as the sole state religion. The new Bolivian constitution, approved in January, has the stated goal of refounding Bolivia as a “socially just state guided by indigenous beliefs," including the elevation of Pachamama, Earth Mother, to the same stature as the God of Christianity.

In a recent dissertation in social anthropology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, entitled As Though We Had No Spirit: Ritual, Politics and Existence in the Aymara Quest for Decolonization, Anders Burman examines how the government policy of decolonization has been interwoven with indigenous rituals and cosmology. He carried out his ethnographic field work among shamans and activists within the Andean indigenous people's movement.

Morales receives a sacred staff from an indigenous shaman

Burman distinguishes three different ways of looking at the decolonization project. The government views colonialism as inherent in existing political structures, and therefore seeks institutional change. Indigenous activists view Bolivia itself as a colonial project, and therefore seek to build a new country from the ground up. But the shamans and their apprentices with whom Burman worked perceive colonialism to be a sickness and decolonization as the cure, and, based on traditional cosmological linkages, work to decolonize not only the state and society, but the landscape and the self as well.

Still, these three ways of looking at decolonization overlap in significant ways. Political activism and the ritual practices of shamanism, Burman says, derive from the same interpretive cultural framework — how to deal with that which is understood as alien, whether a national power elite that is perceived as foreign, or unfamiliar spirits that bring about sickness. In the same way, traditional Andean cosmology is one of the cornerstones of the government representation of its decolonizing policies.

Morales campaigning with a coca plant

And Bolivian indigenous beliefs are deeply intertwined with the sacred coca plant. Morales, a former cocalero union leader, won his greatest political support in the impoverished coca-growing areas of central Bolivia. In a New York Times op-ed piece published three days ago and entitled Let Me Chew My Coca Leaves, Morales challenges the United Nations to reverse what he calls a forty-eight-year-old mistake — the false notion, incorporated into the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, that the coca leaf is a narcotic in the same category with cocaine, and the concomitant order that "coca leaf chewing must be abolished within 25 years from the coming into force of this convention."

That deadline passed in 2001. "So for the past eight years," Morales writes, "the millions of us who maintain the traditional practice of chewing coca have been, according to the convention, criminals who violate international law. This is an unacceptable and absurd state of affairs for Bolivians and other Andean peoples."

Morales urges the UN to distinguish between a narcotic and the plant from which it is derived. "What is absurd about the 1961 convention is that it considers the coca leaf in its natural, unaltered state to be a narcotic," he writes. "The paste or the concentrate that is extracted from the coca leaf, commonly known as cocaine, is indeed a narcotic, but the plant itself is not. " And he concludes:

The custom of chewing coca leaves has existed in the Andean region of South America since at least 3000 B.C. It helps mitigate the sensation of hunger, offers energy during long days of labor and helps counter altitude sickness.... Today, millions of people chew coca in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and northern Argentina and Chile. The coca leaf continues to have ritual, religious and cultural significance that transcends indigenous cultures and encompasses the mestizo population.... It is time for the international community to reverse its misguided policy toward the coca leaf.

According to ABI, the official Bolivian news agency, Morales chewed coca leaves at the conference on drug policy in Vienna as he asked the Commission reverse its decision to qualify the coca leaf as a narcotic.

Jungle Survival Tips: Hyperthermia

2009-03-16T05:02:00.000-07:00

I mentioned here that the temperature in the jungle remains pretty steady at around 85 degrees and the relative humidity at about 90 percent. Although the temperature in the jungle does not get as high as it does in the desert, the high humidity prevents the rapid evaporation of sweat, which is one of the body's primary cooling mechanisms. You can be perfectly comfortable under most jungle conditions, but you can still get heat illness if you are not careful.

Heat illness or hyperthermia is what happens when you are too hot. There are two serious types of hyperthermia — heat exhaustion and heat stroke. The two conditions are points on a continuum which runs from being uncomfortably hot to being deathly ill. The primary difference between heat exhaustion and heat stroke is that in heat exhaustion the body’s heat dissipating mechanism has been overworked, while in heat stroke the body’s heat dissipating mechanism has been overwhelmed.

It is important to remember that, in the jungle setting, both heat exhaustion and heat stroke can often be prevented simply by adequate hydration. Whoever designed the human body made two major mistakes — the knee, which comes apart under even moderate lateral pressure, and the thirst mechanism. The trigger for thirst is a beginning electrolyte balance; that is, when you get thirsty, it is already too late. That is why it is important to drink lots of water in the jungle, and to drink it before you get thirsty. Pound it down. Force yourself. Drop a tea bag in your water bottle to give the water some taste. Set up a rule that if one person drinks, everyone has to drink.

How much should you be drinking? Under normal circumstances, water intake should be between 9 and 12 cups per day — that is, between about 2¼ and 3 quarts of water per day. The amount needed can increase with exercise and environmental factors. In 2003, the International Marathon Medical Directors Association and USA Track and Field jointly issued fluid replacement guidelines for marathon runners, advising them to drink as much as they wanted between 400 and 800 mL/hour — that is, between 0.42 and 0.84 quarts each hour. For an average amateur marathoner, that means between about two and four quarts during a five-hour marathon. Conversely, with only light to moderate exercise, a person in the desert should drink about four quarts of water per day.

But you don't have to measure your intake when you can observe your output. You can know you are properly hydrated by paying attention to your urine. Your urine should be clear, copious, and colorless — or at least pale yellow. Most people live in a state of chronic dehydration; so, when you are properly hydrated, you should feel like you are urinating a lot.

Heat exhaustion

Heat exhaustion is actually an early stage of hypovolemic shock. The body’s fluid levels have dropped sufficiently that organs are not getting enough oxygen carried to them by the blood. The fluid pressure has dropped because of a combination of excessive sweating, dilation of surface blood vessels, and inadequate water intake.

Since the brain is one of the first organs affected by inadequate perfusion, one of the first signs of heat exhaustion is often a change in level of consciousness — spaciness, forgetfulness, confusion, odd speech, restlessness, anxiety, and changes in behavior, sometimes subtle. Other signs and symptoms are thirst, weakness, headache, nausea, dizziness, rapid pulse, rapid breathing, exhaustion, and profuse sweating. Patients can sweat so much that they feel cold, have goose bumps, and complain of chills. The skin is cool and pale.

The treatment for heat exhaustion is simple. Get the patient cool. Move the patient to the shade of a tree, fan her, pour water on her head. Remove excess clothing. Have the patient lie down. If the patient is alert and able to swallow, give water; or, if you have it, Gatorade diluted three to four times; or about a half–teaspoon of salt dissolved in a quart of water, maybe with a pinch or two of sugar. Have the patient drink as much as a quart of water over the next hour. Recovery should be rapid and without consequences. If the patient does not improve promptly, then the condition may in fact be an early stage of heat stroke, and immediate evacuation should be seriously considered.

Always suspect heat exhaustion when a person becomes ill in hot conditions, especially during physical exertion, and particularly if accompanied by changes in level of consciousness. Heat exhaustion should be treated aggressively. More important, it should be prevented by drinking lots of water.

Minnesota Vikings right tackle Korey Stringer died from heat stroke in 2001

Heat stroke, as opposed to heat exhaustion, is a life-threatening illness that requires immediate evacuation. It has many of the same signs and symptoms as heat exhaustion, but they are more severe. There is an altered level of consciousness, rapid heart rate, and increased respiratory rate. The altered level of consciousness can be dramatic — disorientation, irritability, combativeness, delusions, incoherent speech. There can even be loss of coordination and convulsions. The patient may or may not be sweating, but will complain of being hot rather than cold. The skin is hot, red, and wet rather than pale and cool. The body’s core temperature has risen to above 105 degrees. It will be obvious that something is very wrong.

The treatment for heat stroke is the same as the treatment for heat exhaustion. Cool the patient off as rapidly as possible. Remove excess clothing. Cover the patient with wet cotton clothing and fan vigorously. Apply ice if it is available, and at least pour the coldest available water over her. Concentrate on cooling the head and neck. It is probably not a good idea to try to immerse the patient in a river or stream, because a disoriented, combative, or convulsing patient is hard to manage and may drown. Do not delay. Be aggressive. You are saving a life. As the core temperature continues to rise, vital organs, such as the brain and kidneys, start to shut down. Cardiovascular and neurologic collapse are imminent. Evacuate immediately to where definitive care, including IV saline, is available, and continue cooling procedures during evacuation.

A few other points. Keep good records of vital signs, especially body temperature. The temperature may go down during cooling, and then rise again when you have stopped active cooling measures. If the patient becomes unresponsive, pay particular attention to keeping an open airway. If shock occurs, elevate the patient’s legs twelve inches.

Bear in mind that I am talking about wilderness emergency care, or care where resources are extremely limited — no ice, no normal saline, no IV start kit, no ambulance, no hospital. I will defer to others about urban street medicine, or patient management where such resources are readily available.

Peyote Songs

2009-03-14T06:48:00.001-07:00

Peyote songs are the prayer music and ceremonial heart of the Native American Church. The songs have traditionally been sung, accompanied by the gourd rattle and water drum, in the various languages and musical styles of the indigenous peoples from which the church drew its membership.

At the same time, the pan-Indian nature of the church made it a powerful vehicle for the diffusion of musical styles and content. Early studies of peyote songs, dating from the 1940s, found Navajo peyote singers using the Ute musical style, and recognizably the same peyote song among the Tarahumara, Navajo, and Cheyenne. Such studies can be helpful in tracing the historical spread of the new religious movement.

An important aspect of peyote songs is their use of non-lexical vocables — sequences of phonemes without conventional semantic content, but meaningful to the singer in the context of the ceremony, and often an indication of the song's origin as a spiritual gift. Peyote songs often combine the consonants y, w, h, c, k, t, x, and n with vowels, in the sequence CVCVCV... to produce vocables such as the important peyote word heyowicinayo.

Beginning in the 1990s — their first CD was released in 1995 — two singers, Verdell Primeaux, a Sioux, and Johnny Mike, a Navajo, developed a new form of peyote music they called healing songs, characterized by mesmeric and meditative vocal harmonies and frequently without the paradigmatic driving beat of the water drum and gourd rattle.

Brian Stoner

The songs, sung in Lakota and Navajo, became immensely popular, not only with Native Americans, but also among the same audience that was eagerly purchasing the similarly meditative flute recordings of R. Carlos Nakai. Their crossover appeal is evidenced by the fact that, in 1998, their seventh recording, Peyote Songs of the Native American Church, won both the Native American Music Award for Best Traditional Music and the New Age Voice Music Award for Traditional Native American Music.

Their haunting music, however, embodied a partial disconnection from the traditional roots of the peyote song, where the gourd rattle and water drum have traditionally been an integral part of the ceremony, and tying the soaked deerskin drumhead onto the cast-iron drum kettle is an important and symbolically resonant part of the preparation. Indeed, this disconnection in part drove their popularity. One music reviewer — apparently intending to be complimentary — went so far as to say that the new peyote music "transcends the usual ethnographic feel of peyote recordings and becomes true art."

Whitehorse and Crowe

There is now a new generation of peyote singers. The term new generation means, apart from relative youth, two things — first, that the singers have been deeply influenced by the harmonizing peyote songs of Primeaux and Mike, yet most often retain the traditional accompaniment of the gourd rattle and water drum; and, second, that they have MySpace pages and distribute their videos on YouTube, and selectively incorporate English into their songs.

Three of these singers are Brian Stoner, from the Ponca and Cherokee tribes of Oklahoma; and the brothers Maynard Whitehawk and Lance Crowe, of Plains Anishinabe and Saulteaux heritage, who sing together under the name Wikiwam Ahsin, which are Anishinabe words usually translated as tipi rock. I have attached two representative videos below.

The first video features a song set from the album With Love and Faith We Pray, which was named the Best Spiritual Album at the 2007 Indian Summer Music Festival, and which features Whitehawk and Crowe joining Stoner on several songs. The second features a set from Whitehawk and Crowe's eponymous album Wikiwam Ahsin. Listen for the children's songs at the end.

Jungle Survival Tips: Snakebite II

2009-03-12T07:17:00.001-07:00

I have talked about Crotalid or pit viper envenomations here. Elapids or coral snakes are different from the Crotalids in a number of significant ways. Coral snakes are generally shy and docile, and they do not attack unless deliberately provoked. Fewer than forty percent of Elapid bites result in significant envenomation. Fatalities are rare.

Coral snakes have very short fangs in the front of a small mouth. The small mouth and fangs make it hard for a coral snake to bite anything other than a finger, toe, or fold of skin. Pit vipers strike and release, but coral snakes hang on and chew. And while Crotalid venom causes rapid tissue necrosis, Elapid venom slowly attacks the central nervous system. These differences mean that you treat a coral snake bite differently than you would a pit viper bite. In particular, for Elapid envenomation,

the use of a Sawyer Extractor appears to be of little benefit, and
the use of the Australian pressure-immobilization technique has become accepted as a standard treatment. Since Elapid venom is a systemic neurotoxin, wrapping the entire bitten extremity can help delay systemic absorption of the venom, but, unlike Crotalid venom, will not cause local tissue necrosis.

When an envenomation occurs, the bitten extremity starts to become weak and numb after about an hour. In the following hours, the signs and symptoms of central nervous system poisoning begin to appear — nausea, vomiting, weakness, muscle twitching, tingling in the extremities, slurred speech, increased salivation, and difficulty swallowing and breathing. In the worst case, depression of the central nervous system can lead to respiratory and cardiac paralysis and death.

A significant problem is that it is often hard to know whether the person bitten has been envenomated or not. The fang marks can be hard to see, although sometimes you can squeeze blood from the tiny puncture sites. Local swelling is usually minimal. There are often many nonvenomous mimics of coral snakes in the same area, so it can be difficult to know whether the biting snake was venomous or not. It can take more than an hour for the bitten extremity to feel weak or numb, and sometimes as long as twelve hours before the victim feels sick enough to need help.

So, if someone has been bitten by something that may have been a coral snake, it is important to begin treatment and observation right away, and to give serious consideration to evacuation, even in the absence of signs and symptoms, and even if you might feel foolish later if nothing happens. Treatment for Elapid envenomation in the wilderness is as follows:

Keep the patient calm and with as little movement as possible. Provide lots of support and encouragement.
Clean and flush the wound with clean water and apply a sterile dressing.

Wrap the bitten limb with an elastic bandage, at about the same tension as would be used on a sprained ankle. Start wrapping about four inches above the bite and wrap away from the body toward the hand or foot. If you have an additional elastic bandage, you can then wrap in the other direction, starting about four inches below the bite and wrapping toward the body. This should help to immobilize the venom. The wrapping should be loose enough so that you can slip a finger underneath, and you should check the peripheral pulses to make sure there is no constriction of blood flow. Remember that the venom spreads through the lymphatic system, which lies close to the surface of the skin, so that great pressure is not necessary in order to constrict its flow.
Splint the limb and keep it at about heart level.
Encourage the patient to drink frequent small amounts of water.
Provide basic life support and treat for shock as necessary.
Transport as quickly as possible to definitive medical care, where antivenom and appropriate facilities for its administration may be available.

As with Crotalid bites, the use of alcohol, incisions, electric shock, sucking, and ice are not recommended.

Jungle Survival Tips: Snakebite I

2009-03-12T06:56:00.001-07:00

I have written here about the varieties and habits of snakes in the Upper Amazon and how snakebite is treated by local healers. Remember, of course, that your chance of being bitten by a venomous snake in the Amazon is really very small, especially if you take basic precautions, such as not sticking your hand blindly into places where a snake might be sleeping. It is probably worth noting that more than fifty percent of pit viper envenomations in North America are associated with alcohol ingestion on the part of the victim.

There are, as I said, two families of venomous snakes in the Upper Amazon — the Crotalidae or pit vipers and the Elapidae or coral snakes. If you are bitten by a pit viper — and actually envenomated — you are in for a memorably unpleasant experience. But, if you treat the wound properly and avoid infection, you are unlikely to die or have permanent injuries.

There is no question that a Crotalid envenomation is a medical emergency requiring urgent evacuation, if at all possible, to a definitive care facility that is equipped to administer Crotalid antivenom. In an ideal world, anyone envenomated by a pit viper in the wilderness would be immediately evacuated and receive antivenom within four hours — six at the most — in a hospital setting, under sterile conditions, with constant monitoring, and with a crash cart available in case of an allergic reaction. If such an evacuation is possible, then by all means it should be done. As professional handlers of venomous snakes say, "The best equipment for treating a venomous snakebite is a set of car keys."

However, the first step in treatment is to avoid panic. Death is rare. Even without evacuation, most cases result in several days of serious misery and then full recovery. Remember that the fatality rate even for untreated pit viper bites is extremely low. The treatment steps are:

Use the Sawyer Extractor. If you are in snake country, the Extractor should always be within easy reach in your pack. The Extractor can remove as much as 30 percent of Crotalid venom proteins if applied within three minutes. Use the Extractor as quickly as possible and then keep it on the bite for about thirty minutes. Because of the great suction it creates, no cutting is necessary. This should always be the first thing you do, even when evacuation is in progress.
Remove rings, bracelets, or any other constricting jewelry on the affected limb, which may swell to as much as twice its normal size.
Immobilize the bitten extremity with a splint, just as you would a fracture.
Have the patient rest and keep activity to a minimum.
Have the patient drink as much fluid as possible, in frequent small amounts, in order to maintain fluid volume and kidney flow.
Remember that a snakebite is a contaminated puncture wound, and treat it as such.
Get to definitive care as quickly as you can. Otherwise, have the patient rest and drink fluids; keep the wound clean; give lots of encouragement and support.

The following are not recommended for pit viper envenomations:

Do not make incisions or try to suck out the venom. In jungle conditions, cutting into an already compromised limb is asking for an infection. You absolutely do not want pit viper venom in your mouth. Conversely, your mouth is full of all kinds of bacteria. And you can't suck as hard as the Extractor can anyway.
Do not use a tourniquet. Tourniquets can result in loss of the limb due to decreased blood flow. In addition, you are just keeping the venom localized where it does the most tissue damage.
Do not use electric shock. It can be dangerous, and has no proven value in managing pit viper bites. It is the great urban legend of wilderness first aid.
Do not use ice. There is no evidence that snake venom enzyme activity diminishes with cold. Freezing already compromised tissue can lead to frostbite, which can damage the limb more than the original bite. Packing in ice has probably resulted in more lost limbs than snakebite itself; this is particularly tragic when limbs have been lost to frostbite because of a non-envenomated bite.
Do not give alcohol. It causes vessels to dilate and may speed venom absorption.

The use of an elastic bandage pressure wrap — recommended for use with bites from Elapidae or coral snakes — has been recommended for use in some cases of Crotalid envenomation as well. The argument against its use is that the pressure may actually increase the risk of disfiguring local tissue damage, which may then require skin grafts and extensive repair and treatment; and that removal of the pressure may result in sudden massive swelling and discoloration. The argument in favor of its use is that the spread of venom to vital organs can be life-threatening — in fact, some Crotalid bites can cause serious damage to limbs even when the bites were to a finger or foot — and the use of a pressure bandage can prevent this spread, even at the risk of greater localized damage. The way to apply a pressure bandage is described here.

The problem is that there is no way of knowing how serious the envenomation is at the outset, when the decision must be made. There is a tradeoff between averting more serious life-threatening damage and increasing the risk of painful and disfiguring local damage. Such a decision should be considered a serious one, to be decided in full consultation with the patient.

The Psychedelic Review

2009-03-11T09:37:00.000-07:00

We have talked about the Fall 1989 issue of the Whole Earth Review. For aficionados of classic psychedelia, however, there is no substitute for the Psychedelic Review, which was sporadically published from 1963 to 1971, and was excerpted for the book The Psychedelic Reader. The entire run of the journal — eleven issues from 1963 to 1971 — is available online, in PDF format, in the Luminist Archives, and on the website of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, where individual articles are also accessible.

By the 1970s, the term psychedelic had acquired indelibly frivolous connotations, but the term had originated, with the best of scholarly intentions, as a way of describing the effects of a number of psychoactive substances considered to be of both intellectual and spiritual importance. The term itself — from the Greek psykhe, mind, and deloun, reveal, make manifest — was proposed in 1956 by the British psychiatrist Humphrey Fortescue Osmond, and first used in a scholarly paper he presented the following year at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Aldous Huxley, in an earlier letter to Osmond, had instead proposed the term phanerothyme, from Greek phanero, make visible, manifest, and thymos, soul. In support of his neologism, Huxley offered the couplet, To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gramme of phanerothyme. To which Osmond responded, To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic.

The Psychedelic Review was intended to be an intellectually serious publication, begun by members of the Harvard Psilocybin Research Project. It was published and sponsored by Timothy Leary's International Federation for Internal Freedom, whose purpose was "to encourage, support and protect research on psychedelic substances," with the goal of increasing "the individual's control over his own mind, thereby enlarging his internal freedom." One purpose of the review was thus apparently to provide a scholarly and intellectual predicate for IFIF's advocacy.

The original editorial board consisted of Paul Lee, Ralph Metzner, and Rolf von Eckartsberg. The announcement of the new journal indicated an intention to publish articles on visionary plants, the neurophysiological aspects of drug action, the epistemology of transcendent experience, the relationship between mysticism and schizophrenia, and other weighty topics. The goal was to publish "original research reports, scholarly and historical essays, outstanding phenomenological accounts of spontaneous or induced transcendent experiences, and reviews of relevant pharmacological and other literature." Editorial consultants included Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary, Huston Smith, and Alan Watts.

And, indeed, the journal wound up publishing articles not only by its founders but also by such diverse contributors as R. Gordon Wasson, Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, R.D. Laing, Sir Julian Huxley, and Alain Danielou, although some of its material was reprinted from earlier sources. Beginning in 1967, in the final three issues, both the covers and the content became visibly more — well, psychedelic. The journal ceased publication in 1971.

As Erik Davis says in his introduction to the 2007 reprint of The Psychedelic Reader, the articles in the review are a time capsule from a different age. Timothy Leary was already embarking on his own unique trajectory; the Psychedelic Review manifests an attitude that I can only describe as high seriousness mixed with a sort of roguish innocence.

When the first issue came out in 1963, a student could subscribe to the first year for four dollars.

A New Ayahuasca Book

2009-03-10T02:25:00.001-07:00

An important recent social phenomenon has been the development and expansion of new religious movements in Brazil, which use ayahuasca as a central sacrament within a largely Christian theological and rhetorical context — referring to ayahuasca as the Blood of Christ, for example, or mareación, the ayahuasca experience, as awakening to Christ Consciousness. The Upper Amazonian contribution to these movements was the use of the basic ayahuasca drink, made from the ayahuasca vine and — exclusively — chacruna. Unlike the Upper Amazon, no other companion plants, such as chagroponga or sameruca, and no admixture plants, are used in the drink.

Other central aspects of the Upper Amazon culture area, particularly its shamanism, were also not adopted along with the ayahuasca drink. In fact, anthropologist Edward MacRae has specifically pointed out that Santo Daime has not incorporated such features of Amazonian shamanism as virotes, darts, arcanas, protections, phlegm, or Amazonian ideas of the moral ambiguity of the shaman. Rather, ayahuasca was incorporated as a sacrament into a folk Catholicism that had already been profoundly influenced by spiritism and Afro-Brazilian culture.

These religions began in the 1930s, when many Brazilian immigrants moved southwest to the Amazon seeking work tapping rubber trees. Most of these impoverished Brazilian immigrants became sedentary seringueros, but came in contact not only with indigenous Amazonians but also with itinerant mestizo caucheros from the Upper Amazon. Three of these Brazilian immigrants — Raimundo Irineu Serra (1892-1971), Daniel Pereira de Mattos (1904-1958), and José Gabriel da Costa (1922-1971) — founded new religions, mixing African-Brazilian, spiritist, and Christian elements with mestizo and indigenous use of ayahuasca.

The Brazilian new religious movements have developed their own terminology for the ayahusca drink, often distinct from the terminology of their Upper Amazonian sources. Followers of Santo Daime and Barquinha call their sacred drink santo daime or simply daime, based on the words of Mestre Ireneu — daime força, daime amor, daime luz, give me strength, give me love, give me light. The ayahuasca vine, which they call cipo, vine, or jagube, is the masculine, solar aspect of the drink; the added leaf is called chacrona, or rainha, queen, or simply folha, leaf, and is its feminine, lunar aspect. Followers of the União do Vegetal call the drink hoasca or vegetal. The vine is called mariri, representing the masculine força, power, and the leaf is called chacruna, representing the feminine luz, light, in the combined drink. The various churches have also developed ceremonies quite different from those used for healing in the Upper Amazon.

Bia Labate

These Brazilian churches have generated a significant amount of social science literature, much of it in Portuguese. We now have available, however, thanks to anthropologist Bia Labate and her colleagues, including translator Matthew Meyer, a major contribution in English to the study of these ayahuasca churches — a book entitled Ayahuasca Religions: A Comprehensive Bibliography and Critical Essays by Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Isabel Santana de Rose, and Rafael Guimarães dos Santos, translated by Mathew Meyer from the Portuguese Religiões ayahuasqueiras: um balanço bibliográfico. The book is published by — and is now available from — the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

The book consists of three parts. The first is a thorough overview of the history of the Brazilian ayahuasca religions, along with a critique of the main publications devoted to these religions, describing the characteristics, tendencies, and central perspectives in this research area. The second part discusses the most significant scientific investigations — pharmacological, psychiatric, and psychological — that have been published about these movements, including critical discussion of their results, contributions, and limitations. The third part is the most exhaustive bibliography to date on the topic of the Brazilian ayahuasca churches, including texts written in Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Spanish. This list includes not only academic publications but also the texts of the new religious movements themselves. There is a foreword by Ralph Metzner.

More please.

Listening to the Dreamer

2009-03-09T02:58:00.000-07:00

A lucid dream is one in which the dreamer is aware of being in a dream state while the dream is still in progress. Lucid dreams can be extremely vivid and realistic, depending on the level of self-awareness during the dream. Most strikingly, lucid dreamers report being able to actively participate in and often manipulate experiences within the dream environment — that is, deliberately walk, fly, look around, handle objects, and interact with dream persons.

Lucid dreams provide a unique opportunity to find out more about the experience of dreaming — and, by extension, perhaps more about the experiences of shamans, and about other visionary experiences, including those related to ayahuasca.

It is clear, however, that dream reports, given after the dreamer awakens, have a number of methodological problems — problems with recall, conflation, censoring, exaggeration, and confabulation. Dream states are notoriously slippery and prone to being forgotten. Significant details are easily either lost or filled in; coherence is imposed on narrative; connections drawn later are understood as part of the dream itself; memory of the dream is subject to constant revision. People may fail to report the contents of dreams that they perceive to be too revealing, embarrassing, or in conflict with the dreamer’s waking persona.

Here is a simple example. Can a lucid dreamer perform mathematical calculations during a dream? If a lucid dreamer is instructed beforehand to calculate, say, the factors of sixteen while in a lucid dream, will the dreamer be able to do it? And — here is the methodological question — how would we know? The dreamer may misreport or misremember the dream content; the dreamer may dream that he or she had calculated the factors of sixteen without actually having done so.

What we would like, of course, is for the dreamer to answer the question during the dream, and somehow communicate that answer to the investigator.

Similarly, some lucid dreamers report being able to control events in their dreams. There is some reason to believe there are limits to this control — for example, that major changes in dream setting, or even sudden changes in ambient light, such as turning on or off a light switch, are beyond the power of a lucid dreamer. Interestingly, lucid dreamers almost universally are unable to read material of any complexity, being able to read only a few words, with longer sequences deteriorating quickly into gibberish. Again, we would like to have the dreamer both carry out and report the results of reading experiments while still dreaming.

So: Is there any way for a lucid dreamer to communicate with us while dreaming? The problem is that, during REM sleep, when lucid dreams seem most likely to occur, there is physical paralysis — known as REM atonia — and difficulty of arousal. However, we can take a look at several interesting possibilities.

Here we can distinguish between passive communication from the dreamer to the investigator, using such tools as electroencephalography, and active communication, in which the dreamer voluntarily initiates and controls the communication.

It is possible to use instrumentation to attempt to confirm at least some claims of experiences in lucid dreams. In one case, a female lucid dreamer claimed to be able voluntarily to initiate sexual activity in her lucid dreams, leading to orgasms of “profound” intensity. She was fitted with EEG, EOG, and chin-EMG measuring devices, as well as devices to measure respiration, heart rate, vaginal EMG, and vaginal pulse amplitude. She was able to signal, with eye movements, when she was initiating dream sexual activity, and reported upon awakening that she had had an orgasm while dreaming.

The instrumentation revealed that, at that time, her heart rate showed a moderate increase, and her respiration, vaginal blood flow, and vaginal muscle activity reached their highest point of the night. As a methodological issue, it is not clear whether — or by what criteria — those results count as a confirmation of an orgasm. It is reported that “comparable results were obtained with a male subject,” although presumably, in that instance, such elaborate instrumentation would be unnecessary, as would also concern over definitions.

This example raises important issues. To the extent that we are dealing with physiological correlates of internal states, when can it be said that instrumental verification of a physiological correlate confirms the reported state? Presumably what we would want to know about the female subject in the preceding paragraph is the state of her vaginal blood flow and muscle activity during a waking orgasm. Similar examples might include fear, excitement, sorrow, exaltation; to what extent can we claim to have confirmed such reports through physiological correlation? Can we legitimately generalize from physiological correlation of heart rate and fear, say, in waking life to a similar correlation in the course of a lucid dream?

The male volunteer raises similar questions. Since erections are regular concomitants of REM dream states in any event, to what extent does an erection confirm a report of voluntarily initiated sexual activity in a lucid dream? The question is generalizable, and once again raises the issue of baseline for particular dreamers.

But there are also ways in which the dreamer can voluntarily communicate while in the dream state. The most frequently used mechanism for voluntary communication from a dreamer is by eye movement. It appears that, when a lucid dreamer looks left or right in the dream, the physical eyes in fact make the corresponding motions, which can be picked up and measured by electrodes near the eye muscles. A number of ingenious experiments have been performed using these eye movements. Using such signals, experimenters can determine at what part of the sleep cycle lucid dreaming takes place, how long lucidity lasts, and the correlation of lucid dreams with REM and NREM sleep. Moreover, it has been possible to show that lucid dreamers can in fact remember tasks set for them before going to sleep and can carry out those tasks during the dream state.

For example, one lucid dreamer was instructed to draw triangles during the dream and follow the movement of his hands visually while doing so; and, indeed, the physical motions of his eyes while asleep corresponded to those that would have appeared had he been drawing a triangle while awake. Finally, eye movement has been used to show that a lucid dreamer’s sense of time is similar to his or her waking sense of time; instructed to signal with eye movements every ten seconds, lucid dreamers were about as accurate as their waking counterparts.

But eye signaling raises methodological issues of its own. While eye movement can signal that the dreamer is, in fact, lucid, it is difficult to use for more sophisticated communication. Moving the eyes apparently changes what the dreamer sees, and such changes in visual imagery apparently can on occasion be sufficiently disruptive to wake the dreamer. Further, there is a limit to the complexity of eye movement that can either be controlled by the dreamer or picked up by a polygraph, and, therefore, there seems to be a limit to the amount of information that can be transmitted by eye movement. Eye movement signaling is an information channel of very narrow bandwidth, usually confined, in experiments so far, to providing yes-no information.

In addition to eye movements, it is at least on occasion possible that nerve impulses generated by voluntarily walking during a lucid dream can be detected by electrodes placed at the feet. Apparently a lucid dreamer, when moving his or her legs in a dream, can actually cause nerve impulses to travel down the legs; although the legs do not actually move, these impulses can be detected. It is not clear that this can be done consistently, or to what extent this ability is found among lucid dreamers generally. It has also been reported that a lucid dreamer can affect the rate of breathing in the physical body by changing the rate of breathing during the dream.

The possibilities of such communication can be multiplied by the utilization of various current heads-up and virtual reality devices. For example, it is possible to detect, with relatively accessible technology, not only the movement but the position of the eyes; there are digital cameras available that use this technology to focus on what the viewer is looking at. Data-glove technology, used in virtual reality simulations, can similarly detect minute changes in the positions of the fingers. It should be possible, with proper training, to develop more elaborate codes than the simple yes-no eye-movement codes previously used in lucid dreaming experiments.

Such studies apparently remain to be performed.

Jungle Survival Tips: Clean Water

2009-03-06T03:24:00.000-08:00

I mentioned here that getting clean potable water can be difficult in many parts of the Amazon, including the larger cities. In fact, I strongly recommend against drinking any untreated water in the Amazon, no matter how clear and tempting it might appear. And that includes rainwater, unless you know that the containers in which the water has been caught and stored have been properly cleaned and maintained.

Even when you get water through a pipe, the quality of the water depends on where the water comes from and whether the pipe has any cracks or leaks. In addition, the single most important cause of gastrointestinal illness in the wilderness is oral-fecal contamination from dirty hands. Sure, you wash your hands after using the latrine, but does everyone who handles your food and water?

So, if you are thinking of heading into the jungle, here are some survival tips.

There are three sorts of waterborne microorganisms that can cause human illness in the wilderness — viruses, bacteria, and protozoan cysts. Bacteria in contaminated water may include Escherichia coli, Shigella, and even Salmonella; protozoa may include Giardia and Cryptosporidium — all potential contaminants whenever animal or human fecal material gets into your water source. It is worth bearing in mind that just about any gastrointestinal infection you get from contaminated water can do more than just spoil your trip.

Apart from packing in your own bottled water, there are four ways of treating water in the jungle.

Boiling is completely effective against protozoan cysts, nontoxic bacteria, and viruses. Bringing the water to a rolling boil is enough, except at higher altitudes, where longer boiling is required because the water boils at a lower temperature. If you are backpacking, there is nothing extra to carry, since you have a pot and stove anyway. On the other hand, boiling takes time and uses up your fuel. Boiling also does not remove sediment, but filtering the water through a bandana usually takes care of that.

Halogens such as iodine or chlorine kill bacteria and viruses, but may not kill all protozoan cysts. Iodine tablets such as Potable Aqua and saturated iodine solutions such as Polar Pure are readily available, inexpensive, and lightweight. You can make your own water treatment kit by putting iodine crystals in the bottom of a small bottle, filling it with water, and using capfuls of the resulting saturated iodine solution to treat your drinking water. If you just keep refilling the bottle with water, the iodine will last indefinitely.

Some people dislike the iodine taste of treated water, but the taste can be eliminated by adding some vitamin C, as in powdered fruit drinks; in fact, the Potable Aqua "taste neutralizer tablets" are simply ascorbic acid. Another drawback is that the halogen must be given time to work before you can drink the water — anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour, depending on how cloudy or cold the water is. Pregnant women and people with thyroid conditions may have adverse reactions to iodine.

Mechanical filtration forces the water through a finely porous internal element inside the case in order to physically strain out solid materials, including fine sediment and most — but not all — microorganisms. Bear in mind the difference between a filter and a purifier. A filter mechanically removes protozoa and bacteria from contaminated water. A purifier goes a step further and eliminates viruses as well, by passing the water through either a matrix containing iodine, which kills them, or a filter medium that carries an electrostatic charge, which traps them. A device must inactivate 99.99 percent of viruses to be labeled as a purifier.

There is spirited debate about the relative merits of filters and purifiers. Portable filters and purifiers are compact, relatively speedy, efficient, and you can drink the water immediately. On the other hand, they are heavy, a chore to operate, occasionally cranky, and easily become clogged with sediment.

Ultraviolet light, if strong enough and applied long enough, destroys the DNA of microorganisms, making them unable to reproduce and cause illness. A small portable ultraviolet light source, weighing less than four ounces, called the SteriPEN Adventurer is designed to be inserted into a wide-mouth water bottle, and is supposed to take about fifty seconds to purify sixteen fluid ounces and about ninety seconds for a liter. It is said to be effective against viruses, bacteria, and protozoa, and it leaves no iodine taste.

A drawback is that the device is operated by batteries, and batteries require recharging or replacement, which may not be feasible in wilderness conditions; and the device's performance is significantly affected by the quality of the batteries used. You can get the device with a solar panel battery charger storage case, but it can take two to five days to recharge two cr123 batteries, depending on sun conditions. The device does not remove sediment, but, as with boiling, you can prefilter with a bandana.

Jungle Madness

2009-03-05T05:06:00.001-08:00

We have talked — here and here — about the image of the jungle in the European imagination. Part of that mythology is that the jungle — filled with what German filmmaker Werner Herzog called “fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away” — has a mysterious power to drive Europeans crazy.

As famed Amazon explorer ColonelPercy Harrison Fawcett said, before his final expedition, "We will have to achieve a nervous and mental resistance, as well as physical, as men under these conditions are often broken by their minds succumbing before their bodies." The term men presumably did not apply to those indigenous people who actually lived under the conditions he was describing.

There can be little doubt that this mythology is founded on a hierarchic colonial discourse, in which the colonial Other was seen — often contradictorily and inconsistently — as lazy, aggressive, violent, sexually promiscuous, bestial, primitive, innocent, and irrational, and the colonizers feared contamination by absorption into indigenous life and customs. But more, this colonial discourse was permeated by sexuality. Going native meant, above all, transgressive, interracial sex, with its attendant deterioration and degeneracy — the "abominable practices," the "monstrous passions" of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

The promotional material for a recent book on Amazon exploration speaks of a history in which countless explorers, irresistibly drawn into the green hell of the jungle, "have perished, been captured by tribes, or gone mad." Note the mythic conflation of death, madness, and assimilation into the indigenous. All three fates are essentially the same.

Klaus Kinski

In Aguirre The Wrath of God, directed by Werner Herzog, Klaus Kinski plays conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro on a doomed quest for El Dorado, the city of gold, in the impenetrable jungles of Peru. The story is based on a historical expedition in 1650, as recorded in the journals of a priest who accompanied the mission. The conquistadors, greedy and cruel, face an environment whose cruelty is equal to their own — hostile natives, disease, starvation, and treacherous waters.

The opening shot shows a long line of men and animals snaking their way down a trail on the eastern slope of the Andes into the jungle; the final shot — one of the most unforgettable in cinema – has the camera swooping around the insane Aguirre drifting down the river on a raft filled with corpses and monkeys. In the beginning, Aguirre is rational and careful, surrounded by all the useless trappings of triumphal European civilization, carried on the backs of native porters; in the end, firing his cannon uselessly into the jungle, he is stripped of everything but transgressive sexuality, muttering about how he will conquer Mexico, marry his own daughter, and found "the purest dynasty the earth has ever seen."

Bulle Ogier

The Valley (Obscured by Clouds), produced and directed by Barbet Schroeder, follows a different set of European invaders — a group of hippies searching for paradise in the jungle of Papua New Guinea. The beautiful Bulle Ogier plays the bored and self-centered Vivian, married to the French Consul in Melbourne, who is in New Guinea searching for feathers of the near-extinct Bird of Paradise, which she plans to send back to Paris to sell in her boutiques. She falls in with a ragtag bunch heading for the interior to search for an unknown valley, obscured by clouds and thus invisible from the air, where the natives believe that the gods live.

What follows is not entirely clear. The feckless group heads into the jungle, Vivian has sex with the leader, they are welcomed by a primitive people wearing mud masks, they abandon their horses, and finally, at the point of death, they think they see a valley — and the movie ends.

The cruel conquistadores and the ineffectual hippies both fall prey to the madness that the jungle inflicts on Europeans. Both movies express this process in dreamy psychedelic soundtracks — by Popul Vuh in Aguirre and Pink Floyd in Valley. Both films enact the European myth of jungle madness; both sets of invaders are stripped bare, absorbed into the jungle, assimilated, finally, into primal fornication and death, gone native entirely.

It is worth taking a moment to compare the endings of the two films.

The Magic Mosquito Net

2009-03-04T03:44:00.001-08:00

In order to become an ayahuasquero, one must be coronado, initiated, usually by receiving the phlegm of one's own maestro ayahuasquero. Still, a number of mestizo shamans also report being initiated by dreams that announce — or confirm — their healing vocation. Strikingly, these dreams tend to share certain themes — a journey, often to a spiritual hospital; initiation by a powerful woman, such as the Virgin Mary, or the Queen of the Hospital; the gift of healing or of shamanic tools, flowers and a shining crown; the prediction of great strength or healing ability.

My plant teacher doña María Tuesta had such an initiatory dream when she was eighteen, in which the Virgin Mary confirmed doña María's destiny as a healer. The dream, as she told it to me on several occasions, was long and complex, and sometimes changed in the telling. But it always began with a beautiful young woman coming and sitting by her side. "Today we are going to go upward," the woman says, "and see everything that is happening on earth."

María and the woman go into María’s mosquito net, which carries them up into the clouds to a beautiful green meadow. This is paradise, filled with angels — men and women, adults, children, and babies — wearing brilliant white robes and crowns of sweet-smelling flowers. All the angels start to pray the Ave María and the Pater Noster, holding hands and dancing in a circle around her. As María marvels at the sight, the young woman tells her that she is in paraíso terrenal, the earthly paradise. There are thousands of angels, holding beautiful brightly lit candles, holding up their hands and saying amén in a single voice.

In the dream, doña María sees many more miraculous things and is dressed by spiritual doctors in the white robes of a healer. But that is a story for another time.

A small detail in the dream is of great interest. The fact that doña María is carried to heaven in her mosquitero, mosquito net, has significant symbolic resonance in the Upper Amazon. In crowded households, the impenetrable cotton mosquito net is a refuge of privacy. Even more, shamans of the highest order work secretly within their woven mosquiteros — as pioneering ethnographer Robert H. Lowie says, "in complete darkness under a mosquito net."

The ability to enter a mosquito net and disappear, or to converse under the mosquito net with the most powerful spirits, is one of the things that distinguishes the Shipibo meraya shaman from the lesser onanya. The mosquito net within which the meraya retreats after drinking ayahuasca is called a bachi, an egg.

Pablo Amaringo, Spirits Descending on a Banco (detail)

Don Francisco Montes Shuña says that the banco — the highest rank of shaman — enters a mosquito net in the middle of the house, lying face down, while all the disciples remain outside. Then the spirits come to the banco from below to talk to him, and to speak through him. Pablo Amaringo has painted a picture of a banco lying beneath his mosquito net while three spiritual beings — a wise old king and two princes — descend and sit on his body. The shaman is here the banco, the bench, for the sprits descending into the mosquitero. Others wait outside the mosquito net to hear these spirits speak through the shaman’s mouth.

A mestizo who heard doña María’s dream would understand, from the mosquito net reference, that she was experiencing an initiation of a very high order.

Native American Film Festival

2009-03-03T06:48:00.000-08:00

If you are going to be in New York this month, check out the 2009 Native American Film + Video Festival, running from March 26 to 29.

Founded in 1979 and now celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, the festival is organized by the Film and Video Center of the National Museum of the American Indian. The festival aims to showcase the creative talents of Native American directors, producers, writers, actors, musicians, and cultural activists. The Film and Video Center serves indigenous media throughout the hemisphere through extensive exhibition and information services.

From the more than 350 entries received, sixty award-winning shorts, features, and documentaries are being screened, representing indigenous media artists from Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Venezuela, and the United States. The films deal with themes central to indigenous life in the twenty-first century — honor to elders and hope for youth, courageous community action, the survival of Native languages, and the everyday strugle for life and dignity in a profoundly changing world.

Subjects of the films range from young Apache skateboarders to the Chiapas massacre, from blood quantum rules to Indian boarding schools, from Navajo weavers to preserving the traditional umiaq skin boat. Several films recount the struggles — and the triumphs — of Asháninka, Guarani, Ayoreo, and other indigenous Amazonian peoples.

All festival programs are free. For details, take a look here.

Ayahuasca and Mental Health Among the Shuar

2009-03-02T17:21:00.000-08:00

We have talked before — here and here — about the Grob, McKenna, Callaway, et al. psychiatric study on the long-term effects of drinking ayahuasca in the ceremonies of the União do Vegetal church. I noted that the study had not clearly disentangled any bias that might have resulted from the fact that the ayahuasca drinkers — but not controls — had been preselected for their orderly churchgoing habits. Here is a study that may shed some light on that question.

The twenty-question Self Report Questionnaire, or SRQ-20, is a screening tool for common mental disorders that investigates nonpsychotic symptoms — depression, anxiety, somatiform disorders — in the month prior to the interview. The questionnaire consists of four questions about physical symptoms and sixteen questions about emotional symptoms, all with yes-no answers — questions about such things as crying, tiredness, and inability to enjoy life. The test was validated in a Brazilian population, and thus is commonly used in South America to identify psychiatric symptoms in a primary care setting.

The higher the number of positive yes responses, the greater the likelihood of psychopathology. The validity study in Brazil reported that a score of more than eight positive responses is an adequate cut-off point to detect nonpsychotic mental disorders. The test was reported to have a sensitivity of 83 percent, a specificity of 80 percent, and both positive and negative predictive values of 82 pecent, which makes the SRQ-20 a pretty good little test.

Josep María Fericgla

Josep María Fericgla, director of the Institut de Prospectiva Antropológica in Barcelona, is an ethnopsychologist and cognitive anthropologist who has done fieldwork with Shuar shamans in Ecuador, and has written widely on shamanism and sacred plants, including a classic Shuar ethnography, Los jíbaros, cazadores de sueños. In his book Al trasluz de la ayahuasca: Antropología cognitiva, oniromancia y consciencias alternativas, he reports on his administration of the SRQ-20 to 113 Shuar, and analyzes the results according to the number of times each participant had drunk ayahuasca in the past.

The chart below should make the results clear. The stacked columns run from zero positive responses on the left to greater than sixteen positive responses on the right — that is, from left to right in order of increasing psychopathology.

The chart clearly shows that Shuar who drank less ayahuasca had higher psychopathology scores on the SRQ-20, and those who drank more ayahuasca had lower psychopathology scores. Put another way, the chart shows Shuar who drink more ayahuasca stacked at the left-hand low-pathology end of the chart, and those who drink less ayahuasca stacked at the right-hand high-pathology end. Of those participants who gave zero positive responses, 72 percent had drunk ayahuasca more than 21 times.

The study also revealed that there appears to be a generally high rate of psychopathology among the Shuar: more than 60 percent of the participants gave eight or more positive responses on the SRQ-20. Fericgla attributes this unusual level to the accelerated process of deculturation that the Shuar were undergoing — the destruction of their traditional way of life, the plundering of their environment by multinational petroleum and lumber companies, territorial conflicts with colonists, the loss of their spiritual values. Even so, the distribution of the high scores is interesting. Of those who gave eight or more positive responses, 72 percent were women, and 35 percent were men. Part of the explanation may be that Shuar women bear the brunt of deculturation more than the men. Another part may be that Shuar men drink ayahuasca at twice the rate of women.

Now, again, what we have here is simply an apparent association between increasing ayahuasca consumption and lower scores on the SRQ-20. The study cannot tell us if there is a causal connection, or, if there is, in which direction it runs. It may be, for example, not that drinking ayahuasca causes better mental health, but rather that people with greater mental health — for any of a variety of reasons — drink more ayahuasca; or even that some third factor — family or social status, for example — is causally related to both.

But the bottom line of this study remains that — consistent with the results of the União do Vegetal study and, indeed, of the long-term study of peyote use we discussed here — there is little evidence that the long-term use of either sacred plant in its ceremonial setting causes any psychological harm, and appears to be associated with mental health benefits.

Mark Your Calendar

2009-03-02T08:18:00.000-08:00

Ralph Metzner

April 1—5 The Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness and the Association for Transpersonal Psychology jointly present a conference on Bridging Nature and Human Nature at the Edgefield Resort in Portland, Oregon. The conference is intended to create an "interdisciplinary coalition to help reassess science and culture and the interface between technology and nature" — that is, to call for a more systemic, process-oriented, intimate, and sensual understanding of the universe in which we live. There will be presentations by Marlene Dobkin de Ríos, Stanley Krippner, David Lukoff, Ralph Metzner, and many others. Two panels are of particular interest to students of shamanism — Sacred Brews: Ayahuasca Controversies and a Clash of Cultures, Indigenous and Postmodern, chaired by Evgenia Fotiou; and Bateson, Postmodernism and Shamanism, chaired by Constantine Hriskos and Sarah Williams. The complete schedule is here.

Luis Eduardo Luna

April 7—11 The Association pour la Recherche Transdisciplinaire sur les Hallucinations et autres États Modifiés de Conscience presents its second annual Spring Symposium on Hallucinations in Philosophy and Cognitive Science in Paris, France. While the main focus of the conference is the phenomenon of hallucination, this year invited experts will speak on a wide range of related topics — REM sleep, out of body experiences, meditation, cognitive and affective mechanisms of altered states of consciousness, the phenomenology of conscious states, the ontology of hallucinations, psychoactive plants, traditional rituals, and shamanism. Among the speakers will be ayahuasca experts Luis Eduardo Luna and Benny Shanon, as well as neurologists, neuroscientists, neuropsychopharmacologists, and artists. A preliminary program is here.

June 7—10 The Takiwasi Centre holds the first International Conference on Traditional Medicines, Interculturality and Mental Health in Tarapoto, Peru. This conference brings together practitioners of traditional medicine, indigenous representatives, participants in projects that integrate traditional medicine with conventional medicine, academics, government representatives, and international organizations, in order to demonstrate and promote the contribution of traditional medicine in providing solutions to contemporary problems in mental health. A list of proposed presentations is here.

Augustine Kandemwa

June 18—21 The Society for Shamanic Practitioners holds its Fifth Annual Conference on Shamanism and Shamanic Practice at Menla Mountain, Catskills, New York. Although the program has not yet been set, the conference will feature Mandaza Augustine Kandemwa, an nganga or Bantu medicine man in the Shona and Ndebele traditions of Zimbabwe. Also featured will be healing practitioners Pamela Albee, Jane Burns, Leontine Hartzell, Sharynne MacLeod NicMhacha, Mark Perkins, Linda Secord, and others. A continuous drumming prayer ceremony will take place twenty-four hours a day during the conference. The Society of Shamanic Practitioners was formed to support the re-emergence of shamanism into modern western culture, and to document the ways in which shamanism is changing and being used in the twenty-first century world.

Stanley Krippner

June 26—30 The International Association for the Study of Dreams presents its Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference at Wyndham O’Hare Hotel in Rosemont, Illinois, with the theme Earth Dreaming: Twenty-five Years of Carrying the Dream Forward. Keynote speeches will be given by psychologist Stanley Krippner, Everyone Who Dreams Partakes of Shamanism, and cognitive anthropologist Barbara Tedlock, The Shamanic Power and Spirituality of Dreaming. Invited presenter Robert Moss will speak on The Secret History of Dreaming. There will be five days of seminars, workshops, papers and events focusing on clinical, theoretical, research, cross-cultural, artistic, and spiritual approaches to understanding dreams and nightmares from over 150 international presenters.

Dennis McKenna

July 11—18 Soga del Alma hosts the Fifth International Amazonian Shamanism Conference with the theme The Art and the Heart of Healing. Local curanderos will hold evening healing ceremonies, and there will be a special showing of the movie Heaven Earth, along with discussion with the filmmakers Rudolf Amaral and Harald Scherz. The schedule is still being compiled, but expect to see a number of local healers, including huasero Marie Louisa Garcia, as well as psychopharmacologist Dennis McKenna, journalist Peter Gorman, painter Pablo Amaringo, sound healer Richard Grossman, and many others.

Pablo Amaringo

July 25—August 5 Eagle's Wing Centre for Contemporary Shamanism offers The Ayahuasca Visions of Pablo Amaringo, a visionary art workshop to be held in the Alpahuayo Mishana Nature Reserve with famed painter Pablo Amaringo, who will give daily hands-on art workshops. There will be ceremonies in the evening with Shipibo shamans Enrique Lopez and either Benjamín Ochavano or Leoncio Garcia.

September 5—7 The Society for the Study of Shamanism, Healing and Transformation holds its Annual International Conference on the Study of Shamanism and Alternative Modes of Healing at the Santa Sabina Center, San Rafael, California. This year the theme is Shamans of the Twenty-First Century. The schedule is not yet set, but the conference will feature Bantu medicine man Mandaza Augustine Kandemwa, as well as presentations by practitioners and independent scholars of shamanism and alternative healing.

Danashin Tamang

November 29—December 8 Psychoactivity presents its sixth annual conference at the Dhulikhel Mountain Resort, Kathmandu, Nepal, on the theme The Tiger Meets The Jaguar. Nepalese shamans Maile Lama, Parvati Rai, Danashin Tamang, and Dawa Sherpa will meet with anthropologist-turned-shaman Kajuyali Tsamani, head of the Fundación de Investigaciones Chamanistas in Colombia, and with noted scholars Christian Rätsch, Arno Adelaars, and Claudia Mueller-Ebeling to share their life stories, ceremonies, and shamanic knowledge. Psychoactivity was founded in 1997 in Amsterdam to organize conferences on new visionary plant research, shamanism, and altered states of consciousness.

Primer Festival de la Selva Peruana

2009-03-01T15:08:00.000-08:00

Wilindoro Cacique, left, and La Tigresa del Oriente

The photograph on the right shows Wilindoro Cacique, original vocalist with the famed Juaneco y su Combo, masters of cumbia amazónica, whom I discussed here, and Judith Bustos, La Tigresa del Oriente, whom I discussed here, "making click click," as one music blog put it — "kissing each other on the mouth like teenagers" and posing very affectionately for the photographers. "Hot-blooded," said another, enthusiastically.

"We are great friends with each other," said La Tigresa, who is now 63 years old, about the same age as Wilindoro. "My children support me and do not care what I do at this stage of my life." The performers say that they plan to appear together — romantically — in a video on the subject Felina, Cat Woman.

According to the Orbita news agency, this historic meeting took place in Lima on February 23 at the first Festival de la Selva Peruana. "This is the first time that the most important groups of our jungle will share the same stage," said the organizers of the event. "The idea is that the charapas living in Lima will be able to enjoy the pure style of our birthplace and thus recreate in the capital a true Amazonian carnival. Nothing will be missing."

The term charapa, literally turtle, has traditionally been used to refer, often pejoratively, to the indigenous and mestizo inhabitants of the Peruvian Amazon, with the implication that they are slow, like turtles. Like many pejorative terms, this one has been adopted by its targets as a mark of pride, who see themselves — especially those far from home in Lima — as hard-shelled, thick-skinned, and invulnerable.

The festival included a number of new Amazonian music groups — Kaliente, El Lobo y su Sociedad, Los Caribeños, Los Patos, and Ilusión — as well as regional dishes, exotic drinks, and the election of Miss Jungle Fashion 2009.

Miss Jungle Fashion! Damn, I can't believe I missed this.

El Dorado, Part 1

2009-02-27T08:38:00.000-08:00

When Europeans first came to South America, they were awed by the grand civilizations of the Andes. The jungle, on the other hand, was for Europeans a place of dark and savage mystery, inhabited by primitive and ferocious warriors. Two interlocking assumptions about the Amazon have persisted to this day. The first is that the Amazon is a place of virgin wilderness, untouched by human cultivation or management; the second is that the people of the Amazon have always been — as they were found to be by twentieth-century anthropologists — small bands living by gathering, hunting, fishing, and slash-and-burn agriculture.

Still, stories of El Dorado — a grand and complex civilization in the jungle, the equal of the great Andean cities — have circulated since Europeans first arrived. One eighteenth-century Portuguese mercenary and gold-seeking bandeirante wrote in his memoirs, kept in the manuscript department at the National Library of Brazil, how he had discovered, in the heart of the jungle, "a large, hidden, and very ancient city." Such accounts have been assumed to be be untrue. After all, what civilization could have emerged in such harsh subsistence conditions?

These assumptions may be slowly changing.

Anna Roosevelt

Archeologist Anna Curtenius Roosevelt — a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt and a winner of the MacArthur "genius" award — is a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She began working in the Amazon in 1983, and spent several years collecting evidence from a cave called Caverna da Pedra Pintada, Cave of Painted Rock, at Monte Alegre in the uplands of Brazil, overlooking the Amazon River. The cave contained the remains of buried fruits from nearby rainforest trees; mussel shells and fish bones from the river; drops of the red pigment used to make the paintings on the cave walls; and, in the same layer of deposit, stone projectile points buried near the mouth of the cave.

Apparently the cave was occupied several times a year by people who camped in the main cavern, cooked meals, knapped stone spear points, and made paintings, including what may be calendrical or astronomical calculations.

Caverna da Pedra Pintada

In 1996, in an article in the journal Science, Roosevelt reported that a combination of carbon-14 dating for the organic matter and thermoluminescence dating for the stone artifacts and sediment showed that humans had lived in the cave as early as 11,200 years ago — twice as long ago as scientists had previously estimated human presence in the Amazon.

That report caused quite a stir. The most widely accepted theory of the peopling of South America is that, 11,000 years ago, over a period of 3,000 years, Paleoindians from the Siberian steppes followed big-game herds across the Bering Strait to Alaska on a land bridge that has since been submerged, and then migrated through what is now the western United States and Central America into South America, settling along the Andes. These migrants brought with them distinctive and beautifully worked spear points, known as the Clovis tradition, with which they hunted large game in the open, temperate, upland habitats in the interior of North America. Paleoindians in the Andes and those in North America had similar cultures. They avoided the humid rainforests of the Amazon.

That is why Roosevelt's claim was so unsettling. "This really changes the picture of migrations and ecological adaptations of early Americans," Roosevelt says. "People were not even supposed to be in this part of the hemisphere at this time."

Cave paintings

An important piece of evidence for Roosevelt's theories is a spear point found in the Cave of Painted Rock. The long narrow Clovis spear point — the earliest dated examples are between 10,900 and 11,200 years old — was designed to be struck deep into the bodies of large animals such as mastodons, mammoths, and bison, causing them to bleed out from internal injuries. The point that Roosevelt found is short and triangular, with a barbed base more suitable for spearing fish and smaller game, where the point may pass entirely through the body. Similar points, none as well documented, are found in South American museums.

"We found strong evidence that a culture quite distinct from the North American Paleoindian culture, but contemporary with it, existed more than 5,000 miles to the south," Roosevelt says. "Paleoindians traveled far and adapted to a diverse range of habitats. The existence of distinct cultures east of the Andes suggests that North American big-game hunters were not the sole source of migration into South America."

The Paleoindians of the Amazon were therefore not descendants of the mammoth hunters of North America; rather, they were contemporaries, with their own distinctive art and technology adapted to their jungle and riverine environment. "Clovis is evidently just one of several regional traditions," Roosevelt concludes. "Clearly, Paleoindians were able to adapt to a broad range of habitats. In the Amazon, they developed a long-term adaptation to the humid tropical forest."

Non-Clovis spear point

These conclusions have been challenged, most often by questioning the dates that Roosevelt has assigned to the artifacts. Richard Reanier of the University of Alaska concluded that the Amazon site had been settled a thousand years later than the Clovis site in New Mexico, giving a thousand-year window within which Paleoindians could migrate to the Amazon. Similarly, C. Vance Haynes of the University of Arizona revised the statistical reading of the evidence to make the cave no more than 10,500 years old, and thus allow its culture to be a descendant of Clovis.

Others think that Roosevelt's broad conclusions may have been too hasty. "It's tantalizing evidence that the adaptations of some of the first Americans may have been different from what we thought," said Dr. John Rick, a Stanford University anthropologist. "But we can hardly use a single site for a whole revision of New World archeology."

Roosevelt herself has never displayed an inclination to be conciliatory. John Douglas, a University of Montana colleague who co-authored the Science paper, notes that "Anna tends to cut a controversial figure in the field. She's often right, but she has a way of stirring people up." Dr. Gordon Willey, a professor emeritus of archeology at Harvard, puts it this way: "Anna's a good researcher and very passionate about being right."

Roosevelt is unmoved by her critics. "You have to face the idea that some opinions won't change," she says. "But in the end, if you have the evidence, you will be in the textbook, not them."

Roosevelt made another very significant discovery at the cave — pottery that dates back to 7,500 years ago, more than 2,000 years older than the earliest pottery found in Mesoamerica or the Andes. Apparently the hunting and foraging artists of the Cave of Painted Rock had, over thousands of years, developed into the earliest ceramic-producing culture in the Americas, without the influence of the high civilizations of the Andes.

Yuwipi Man

2009-02-26T06:47:00.000-08:00

The shaking tent is a ceremony widespread among indigenous peoples of North America, during which a shaman is tightly bound within a darkened lodge, the structure shakes violently, and the shaman — and sometimes the audience as well — converses with spirits who speak and sing, and sometimes appear in various forms, such as darting blue lights. When light is restored, the shaman is revealed to be unbound and sitting comfortably, apparently untied by the spirits.

Norval Morrisseau, Shaking Tent

The picture at right, by famed Ojibwa painter Norval Morrisseau, depicts a shaking tent ceremony — the healer and patient seated within the lodge, which is being shaken, at its top, by the immense powers of the spirit world invoked by the healer.

Among the Lakota, the shaking tent ceremony is called a yuwipi. As elsewhere, the healer is tied up with ropes or leather thongs and a special blanket — wicahpi šina, star quilt — while praying for the healing of a specific person or persons. The term yuwipi is usually derived from the Lakota verb form they wrap him up. The healer is called yuwipi wicaša, yuwipi man, who gives away a piece of his life every time he performs the exhausting ceremony, in order to serve the people.

The yuwipi man mediates between the people and the spirit world. He is a wicaša wakan, a sacred person, who is not only a healer, but whose counsel is sought for family and business matters. He understands the languages of all creatures and can communicate directly with the spirits, who tell him how a patient's sickness may be cured. The Lakota distinguish between white sickness, which can be cured by biomedical intervention, and Indian sickness, which is the result of disharmony between humans and the spirit world. The yuwipi man is the sole healer of Indian sickness.

During the ceremony, a helper holds the sacred pipe, and people around the perimeter of the room also pray for the healing. While the spirits are present, people other than the patient may also make their requests known to the spirits, addressed as tunkašila, grandfather, through the medium of the yuwipi man, who acts as the ieska, interpreter. A detailed description of a yuwipi ceremony is here.

Gary Holy Bull, yuwipi man

Ringing Rocks Foundation in Sedona, Arizona, is dedicated to conserving indigenous healing practices and cultural traditions. The foundation supports ethnographic fieldwork, public education, and the active promotion of indigenous cultures. The foundation's seminal work is a book series, Profiles of Healing, which collects first-person narratives from some of the world's most respected indigenous shamans, healers, and medicine keepers. The project was founded by the remarkable Bradford Keeney, author of more than thirty books in the fields of psychotherapy, cybernetics, and indigenous healing traditions, many of them considered to be classics. The first volume in the series is a profile of the life and teachings of Gary Holy Bull, a widely respected Lakota yuwipi man.

Cultural Survival is the leading US-based organization defending the rights of indigenous peoples around the world. It was founded in response to the opening up of remote Amazonian and South American areas during the 1960s, and the drastic effects this had on indigenous inhabitants. It has since worked with indigenous communities in Asia, Africa, South America, North America, and Australia, guided by a board of directors that includes not only anthropologists, philanthropists, and entrepreneurs but also prominent indigenous leaders.

Gary Holy Bull gathering sage

One Cultural Survival program is the Guatemala Radio Project, a five-year partnership with five Guatemalan organizations designed to strengthen a network of 140 community radio stations across the country, many of which broadcast in one or more of the country’s 23 indigenous languages. The stations provide news, educational programming, health information, and traditional music, all reinforcing pride in Mayan heritage.

As part of this project, Cultural Survival joined with the Ringing Rocks Foundation to produce a series of programs in which indigenous spiritual leaders from around the world talk about their practices and traditions. The talks are part of a lecture series sponsored by Ringing Rocks, and the audio portion of the talks is then translated into the four principal Mayan languages and broadcast on the Guatemalan radio stations. The video clips below, by yuwipi man Gary Holy Bull, are from the first of these programs.

The Cultural Survival website — brief registration required — provides Holy Bull's fascinating first-person account, transcribed from the talk he gave at the Ringing Rocks Foundation, of how he became a healer. Here is a brief excerpt:

I want to tell you how I became a healer. I was a little boy, 10 years old, running around Rocks Side. It was mid-July, a hot summer day, no cloud in the sky. I got tired, so I went inside the house to take a nap. To this day, I’m not sure if I fell asleep and these things happened or if I really did see them. We lived in a log house, a one-room log house, and there was one big log right down the middle, all the way across, which held all the rafters. I sat down on the bed, looking out, and I think I laid down. I saw this lightning come in on both ends of this one log. And that lightning came through, met in the middle, and went down. When it hit the floor I heard this big crack, and when I looked at it, there was a man standing there with a sacred pipe. He stuck the pipe right through the floor into the ground.

Cultural Survival has also made available two video excerpts from that talk, one containing Holy Bull's advice to young indigenous men, and the other talking about change.

Animated Ayahuasca

2009-02-25T05:19:00.000-08:00

Back in November of 2007, Santiago, Chile, was the host of the first — and, sadly, never repeated — Hollyweed International Psychoactive Film Festival. The festival showcased an international selection of films related to psychoactive substances of natural origin, such as marijuana, coca, and ayahuasca.

The festival was sponsored by the Spanish owners of the magazine Cañamo, or Hemp. Submissions included animations, short films, feature films. and documentaries, with prizes in each category. There were entries from Brazil, Spain, Peru, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, the Netherlands, Colombia and Chile. I am unclear as to whether there was any prize money, but I am certain that everyone had a very good time.

El Grio

The first prize winner was a short animation by a young Chilean painter and muralist named José Benmayor Mansilla, known as El Grio, who paints oddly compelling cartoon-like and brightly colored creatures on canvas and public walls. "I enjoy creating scenes or situations in my own figurative style," he writes, "characterized by synthesizing forms in different ways."

Sometimes I have the scenes clearly in mind when I start the painting, and at other times they appear and start acquiring meaning as the work progresses. The images have a meaning that varies according to the perception of each viewer; different people feel different things when looking at the paintings. I believe this happens because I try to make the elements symbolic and to have a relationship among each other, even if it is not obvious. This also happens with the colors and the way in which I paint. Basically, I try to stimulate and make the viewer feel different sensations — memories, emotions, fears, and so on. My language is close to that of comic books and animated cartoons.

Benmayor's winning project at the film festival was called Ayahuasca:

Benmayor has a blog and — if you want to see more of his fascinating paintings and murals — a Flickr photostream and displays of recent works here and here.

Telling Dreams

2009-02-24T08:15:00.001-08:00

A story is a metaphysical entity. What exists in the world is the telling of a story. The same story may have different tellings, at different times, by different people, or in slightly variant versions. These tellings are tokens for which the story is the type. We can, arguably, reconstruct a story from its tellings, as we can reconstruct a dead language from its living descendants. But it is the tellings that are alive.

It is common to say that myths and dreams are interpreted or analyzed. But this way of speaking contains a small but important inaccuracy. It is not myths or dreams that are interpreted; it is tellings of myths or dreams. These tellings may be oral or written, in a wickiup or in a dreamwork group, or communicated in writing to the privacy of a dream journal. But they are all tellings; and there may be different tellings of the same myth or dream — different because they are recited or written at different times, or told by different tellers, or told in different circumstances. Although it seems that a dream is peculiarly ours, access to a dream, like access to a myth, is only through its telling, private or public.

But all this raises an important question. Is there, in fact, a myth or a dream apart from its telling, its disclosure, its revealing? Dreams offer an interesting instance of Wittgenstein’s argument against private language. The argument goes — with some obscurity — something like this. Suppose I have a purely private language, in which I use the word snark to refer to a certain sensation I feel at the time. At a later time, upon feeling a sensation, I say, "There is another snark." But how can I determine whether I have used the word correctly on this second occasion? Maybe I misremember the first sensation; maybe I mistakenly think that the second sensation is similar to the first, when it is really not similar at all. But that means that the application of the term snark is undetermined; a term whose application is undetermined is meaningless; therefore there cannot be a private language.

By the same reasoning, dreams — in the sense of a sequence of moving pictures in the mind — cannot be meaningful. Dreams gain meaning only in their telling, even when I am telling the story of the dream to myself, as I review it or puzzle over it. Suppose there is a figure in my dream. Upon awakening, I cannot identify that figure except as a companion. Later in the day, I see my friend John, and I realize — or come to believe — that the figure in my dream was in fact John. But how can I determine whether I have identified the figure correctly on this second occasion? Suppose that I am mistaken; suppose that the figure in my dream was not John at all. Perhaps the figure was another friend, or my father, or no one in particular.

But here, for a dream, it does not matter. What matters is the telling. The telling of the dream is where the analysis, the interpretation, the understanding, all the meaning-making activity can begin to take place. A dream is undetermined until it is told.

There can be many tellings of a dream; a dream, of course, is a construct out of its tellings. These tellings are tokens for which the dream is the type. Now which of these — type or token — is meaningful? Suppose I misremember my dream as containing John rather than Mary. Does that mean that any interpretations I make of my dream will be wrong?

Once again, Wittgenstein provides an analytical model. He says,

The fact is that whenever you are preoccupied with something, with some trouble or with some problem which is a big thing in your life – as sex is, for instance – then no matter what you start from, the association will lead finally and inevitably back to that same theme. Freud remarks on how, after the analysis of it, the dream appears so very logical. And of course it does.

So, it does not matter whether it was John or Mary in my dream. I could make up a story on the spot; indeed, I could invent a dream. What matters is the story, and the telling of the story.

That is why it is possible to work with any fragment of a dream, like a fractured piece of a hologram. Jeremy Taylor writes of a hesitant dreamer in one of his dream workshops who simply could not remember his dreams. Finally, Taylor suggested to him that he make up a dream: "What would your dream have been like this morning if you had been able to remember it?" Taylor adds — and note the use of words of telling — that "a conscious fantasy narrative could have been explored as readily as the regular nighttime dreams shared by the other members of the class." It is the telling that counts.

The same thing is true for any experience. Life is a hologram. Every little piece carries the meaning of it all.

Literary Shamanism

2009-02-23T07:58:00.000-08:00

I have always enjoyed reading certain writers — Gabriel García Márquez, Leslie Marmon Silko, Isabel Allende, Italo Calvino — whose works are often grouped together as magical realism. I think I know why. The world of these writers is, in a significant way, the world of the shaman, the visionary world, in which reality is interfused with the miraculous.

El realismo magical, lo real maravilloso americano, is deeply associated with the resurgent literature of South America, and is characterized by a detailed realism into which there erupts — in a way often experienced as unremarkable — the magical world of the spirits. Critics David Mikics, Derek Walcott, and Alejo Carpentier say that magical realism "projects a mesmerizing uncertainty suggesting that ordinary life may also be the scene of the extraordinary."

This idea is often expressed, as one commentator puts it, as "exploring — and transgressing — boundaries.” In a 1969 interview, Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez said, of his own magical realist writings, ”My most important problem was to destroy the line of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic. Because in the world that I was trying to evoke, that barrier didn’t exist.”

Gabriel García Márquez

Yet García Marquez describes himself as a realist writer, “because I believe that in Latin America everything is possible, everything is real.” Thus, in the fictional town of Macondo, Remedios the Beauty rises to heaven with her sister-in-law's sheets. No reason is given, and her sister-in-law Fernanda does not wonder how this could happen. She accepts it without surprise, and only regrets that she has lost her sheets. My own plant teacher doña María Tuesta similarly was lifted to heaven inside her mosquito net to be initiated by the Virgin Mary. For her, too, this was wonderful and unsurprising.

Thus the visionary world does what literary critic Theo L. D’Haen calls "decentering privileged centers." Magical realist texts — and thus the visionary world itself — are ontologically subversive. The magically realist world subverts the privileged ontological center that dichotomously divides experience into the real and the unreal.

William S. Burroughs

Magical realism is often said to occur in places that postmodernist literary critics have called the zone. "The propensity of magical realist texts to admit a plurality of worlds," write critics Lois Zamora and Wendy Faris, "means that they often situate themselves on liminal territory between or among those worlds — in phenomenal and spiritual regions where transformation, metamorphosis, dissolution are common, where magic is a branch of naturalism." William S. Burroughs put it this way in a letter to Allen Ginsberg in 1955: “The meaning of Interzone, its space time location is at a point where three-dimensional fact merges into dream, and dreams erupt into the real world.”

This zone is the world of the shaman — the vision, the apparition, the lucid dream, seeing through the ordinary to the miraculous luminescence of the spirits, perceiving the omnipresent pure sound of the singing plants.

The Natufian Shaman

2009-02-22T09:16:00.000-08:00

The view from the cave

The Natufian culture flourished in the southern Levant between 15,000 and 11,600 years ago. One of the places that Natufian dead were buried is a small cave named Hilazon Tachtit, located on a steep cliff about 500 feet above the Hilazon River, with a sweeping view of the river and the Mediterranean shoreline, in which twenty-eight burials have been excavated. These burials can be dated to between 12,400 and 12,000 years ago, during the time that Natufian culture was in transition from foraging to farming.

All of this would normally be of interest primarily to professional archeologists, but one of the burials, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has received considerable attention, including an article in Time Magazine.

The burial site

The person buried was a small woman, probably about five feet tall, and perhaps 45 years old, based primarily on heavy erosion of her teeth. The burial had two striking features. First, the woman herself had congenital deformities of the pelvis and the lumbar and sacral vertebrae, as well as fusion of the coccyx and sacrum. These pathologies would have given her a limping or foot-dragging gait and an abnormally asymmetrical appearance.

Second, the woman was buried with a number of very unusual grave goods — more than fifty complete tortoise shells, two stone marten skulls, the feathered wing tip of a golden eagle, part of an aurochs tail, the pelvis of a leopard, the forearm of a wild boar, a male gazelle horn core, and a complete articulated human foot.

The grave itself was also unusual. The walls had been intentionally plastered with mud, the floor lined with limestone slabs, and the body itself pinned down with more than ten large stones. The burial, the authors state, is unlike any other found in this area during the Natufian period or the preceding Paleolithic. In addition, this burial was apparently the first use of this cave, which is located more than six miles away from the nearest Natufian domestic site, so it presumably took some effort to carry the body to be buried.

Clearly this was a special person.

The skeleton and grave goods

But just what kind of special person was she? The authors conclude that the burial is, specifically, that of a shaman — and, if so, one of the earliest shaman burials known from the archeological evidence. “There is no doubt that this woman had a special social position," says lead author Leore Grosman of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, "and the most viable interpretation of this burial is that it was for a shaman.” Other scholars agree. “The most parsimonious explanation of this unique grave treatment for a Natufian person is that this woman was a shaman,” says Harvard University archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef. Grosman believes that the grave thus offers some of the earliest physical evidence of religious and spiritual belief. "Several attributes of this burial," the article states, "later become central in the spiritual arena of human culture worldwide."

Now the authors are making a large claim here, and it is worth following their reasoning. The conclusion is based on just two facts. The woman was physically disabled; and she was buried with animal parts. But then how does this make her a shaman? In some cultures, the authors state, there are accounts of physically disabled individuals being ascribed healing and spiritual powers. And, because of the presence of animal remains in the grave, the woman "was perceived as being in close relationship with these animal spirits."

Some of the tortoise shells found in the grave

I am not persuaded that these two facts support the conclusion that this woman was a shaman. Apart from the grave itself, of course, we have no way of knowing whether the Natufian culture even had shamans, at least in any form recognizably similar to the indigenous practices we know of since the sixteenth century, when they were first recorded. There is no evidence from the grave that the woman had anything to do with healing — no herb bundles, for example. In some cultures, it is true, some shamans with physical deformities have been held to be healers, but the inference does not run in the other direction; the fact that a person has a deformity does not make that person into a shaman, if we even knew what the Natufian culture believed about the relationship between deformity and healing, which we do not.

I am also not convinced that the presence of buried animal remains, no matter how unusual, are persuasive evidence that the grave contains a shaman. It is true, of course, that some shamans in some cultures are buried with animal parts, but again the inference does not run in the other direction. Since we have absolutely no evidence of Natufian spiritual beliefs, we are free to speculate at will. If the woman had a congenital limp, and was about forty-five years old, perhaps each turtle shell stood for a year of her life during which she walked slowly and awkwardly, like a turtle, and the eagle, gazelle, and leopard parts are meant to give her, in the next life, the speed and grace she lacked in this one. Perhaps the human foot was meant to be hers in the hereafter.

This speculation is not offered to be taken with any great seriousness. The point is that it accounts for the evidence just about as well as the speculation that the woman was a shaman — that, to use Bar-Yosef's term, it is just as parsimonious.

There is no question that the grave is unusual and fascinating. It is apparently also true that the burial took place during the presumably profound social and economic changes associated with the transition to agriculture. In this specialized burial, we may be seeing the emergence of social rather than spiritual stratification, or some other cultural phenomenon entirely.

How to Build a House

2009-02-20T13:08:00.000-08:00

The first thing I was taught by Gerineldo Moises Chavez, my jungle survival instructor, was how to build a tambo, a jungle hut. It wasn't fancy, as you can see, but it kept me dry when it rained and kept me off the ground while I slept.

My first tambo

In fact, all ribereño houses are built on exactly the same principles — a thatched house on stilts, built entirely of jungle materials, which may range in size from a small temporary hunting shelter, just large enough to sleep one or a few people, to an elaborate structure able to house an extended family.

Some of these houses are relatively isolated; some — connected together by footpaths through the jungle, or clustered about a central square — form caseríos, villages, with a soccer field, perhaps a cement schoolhouse and community center, even a clinic or a small bodega for goods brought upriver by motorized canoe.

A ribereño house

Ribereño house construction is similar throughout the Upper Amazon. Both the thatched roof and the raised flooring are supported by upright posts made of durable hardwoods, usually huacapú (Minquartia guianensis), icoja (Unonopsis spp.), or tahuari (Tabebuia spp.). These hardwoods have acquired symbolic meaning in shamanism and plant medicine: their bark is used in medicines to enhance male potency, and is added to the ayahuasca drink to support those who drink it, just as these trees support the ayahuasca vines that climb their trunks.

The roof is thatched with irapay palm leaves (Lepidocaryum tessmannii), whose stems are looped and knotted on poles of pona wood (Socratea exorrhiza) to form long sheaves, called crisneja, that are then tied in an overlapping pattern onto the rafters with strips of atadijo bark (Trema micrantha) — the same bark that is used to bind the long cylindrical bundles of cured tobacco sold in the market. The peak of the roof is covered with yarina palm leaves (Phytelephas spp.), and the springy floor — it bounces when you walk on it, which can be disconcerting at first — is made of slats cut from the trunk of the huacrapona palm (Iriartea deltoidea). Ethnobotanist James Duke estimates that as many as twenty different species of plants may be used in the construction of a single dwelling.

Huacapú — uprights

There is usually a single primary room, where people sleep under mosquito nets, either on the floor or in hammocks; bedding and nets are rolled up during the day. There may be a separate storeroom, or a separate sleeping room for the older members of the household. Supplies and equipment are also kept up in the rafters that support the thatched roof. The kitchen is often separated from the main house, at ground level, or connected with the main house by an elevated walkway, with a thatched roof for cooking when it rains. A notched tree trunk provides steps to the main room; there may be a railing around the front of the elevated room, forming a porch, from which residents talk to passers-by.

Irapay — roof thatch

So: There is a family room, perhaps a bedroom or storage room, and a kitchen. Where's the bathroom?

When I was living in the jungle hut of don Rómulo Magin, trying to learn the medicine, I would get up on shaky legs to vomit at the edge of the clearing. The next morning, embarrassed, I would go to look at the mess I had made, and find that everything was gone. The jungle had recycled it.

Pona — thatch crossbeams

One day, I decided to experiment. I defecated at the edge of the jungle, and waited to see what would happen. Metallic flies immediately started to swoop around my leavings, and small dung beetles converged and began eating, the females laying eggs in the warm scat. Then larger dung beetles arrived and began rolling up small balls of dung — gifts for their lady friends, who mate with the male who brings the largest present, and deposit the fertilized eggs into the ball of dung, which the couple then bury together. Other beetles burrowed under the mound to eat the smaller beetles; large centipedes came rushing up to get their share. For some reason — perhaps its high potassium or protein content — human scat is greatly prized by small jungle creatures. More than fifty species of dung beetle may converge on a human pile. Within half an hour, everything I had left on the ground was gone.

Crisneja — irapay leaves looped on a pona pole

That is one of the reasons there is no humus on the jungle floor. Humus — dirt — takes hundreds of years to accumulate. In the jungle, everything is recycled much too quickly to form dirt. This lack of soil is why tall jungle trees fall over so frequently; you can hear the sharp cracks of falling trees while lying in your hammock. Treefall is one of the primary ways in which the jungle renews itself.

You get used to this instant recycling. One of the problems with living in the jungle for many generations is that you assume that the jungle cleans itself, which is largely true. But this attitude creates some problems. One of the problems can be found on the beautiful Pacific beaches in Lima, which, even in the fanciest neighborhoods, are covered with garbage. Another problem is potable water.

Yarina — roof peak

In the jungle there are few latrines. Many people go out into the jungle to defecate, or squat in the water at the edge of the river; many houses on stilts on the river’s edge have tiny rooms with a hole in the floor directly over the water. I have seen people bathe and wash dishes downstream from where they defecate. Even when ventilated concrete latrines have been constructed, they are often not well maintained and, when full, abandoned. Many larger river boats have a small screened room sticking out over the water with a hole in the floor. Clean drinkable water remains a significant need in many ribereño communities.

Soul Ayahuasca

2009-02-19T09:36:00.000-08:00

Aleah Long is an experienced session singer, vocal arranger, songwriter, and activist whose music has many roots: worldbeat new-age afro-pop trance-dance soul might be a good description. She makes frequent appearances at women's and lesbian festivals with a number of groups she has helped form — her One World Inspirational Choir, and the theatrical performance and ritualist ensemble Evolution, which was inspired, she writes, "by the Great Mother, who beckons her daughters to call her names, embrace divine purpose and awaken to the creative healing powers, restoring balance and beauty to the Earth."

Long lives in Newburgh, in the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York State. Somewhere in her travels — there is little information on this — she encountered ayahuasca, and, in her album En Full Circle — A Shamanic Journey, she uses her music to capture what appears to have been a deeply transformative experience. "My work," she has written, "is with sound vibration and journaling my experiences with DMT / plant / root medicine through music."

En Full Circle is Long's only album to date. The title perhaps refers to the documentary film Full Circle, an exploration of contemporary women's spirituality, but the content is born out of her experience with Amazonian plant medicine. You have never heard ayahuasca music quite like this — for example, the following cut, entitled Icaro:

Good Blog: Legitimos Guerreritos

2009-02-18T12:00:00.000-08:00

Jerónimo M. M. is a professor of interactive TV and mobile applications, as well as a consultant on Internet video, online communities, and user experience for such clients as MTV, Tele5, The Movie Channel, and Telefonica. For the past seven years he has been working on a documentary film project entitled The Ayahuasca Conversation.

The Ayahuasca Conversation is intended to explore ethnobotany, pharmacology, and the roots of faith. The project began, Jerónimo says, "with filming the way in which indigenous peoples have protected themselves from acculturation by hiding their traditions back inside the religions of the colonizers." This focus then expanded into a consideration of "the process by which religions are created and lead invariably to healing, to that point of human history where medicine and religion were not separate things," and then into traditional medicine.

"We have traveled a dozen countries and three continents," Jerónimo writes, "interviewing priests and shamans, scientists and curanderos, intellectuals and illiterate farmers, leading thinkers and anonymous people whose lives have been transformed by their encounter with these worlds. We have filmed otherworldly rituals and extraordinary behaviors that at the same time manifested something that seemed universal to all mankind."

Jerónimo refuses to create a conventional documentary out of his hundreds of hours of film. Rather, he intends to create one- to seven-minute pieces, spread virally, designed for cross-media versatility and able to be repackaged into varying lengths."These videos," he says, "are embedded into an innovative living interface: a plant-based ecosystem that thrives or withers, branching from the central narrative and unlocking batches of additional content that grows increasingly intimate. This project is ongoing and participatory: the long-term investment allows users a feeling of inclusion into the process of the documentary."

The evolving project is thus what he calls "a stylized narrative of serial webisodes" — a proposed gigantic online video archive where viewers can consult portions of the film at their own pace. The idea is eventually to transcribe the interviews and tag the videos, so that people can follow their own threads through the material, find interviews where a particular topic is mentioned, queue the video segments for viewing one after another — in effect, create their own documentaries. There may be a number of predefined paths through the material, but the user could jump off the path at any time and then return to the central thread — the diary of an addict undergoing transformation.

The documentary project is also multiplatform — the films, a collection of documents, and a bilingual blog, named Legitimos Guerreritos, which incorporates a wide variety of documentary videos. I am a big fan of this blog. The posts are always thoughtful, interesting, and filled with content — the penetration of Santo Daime among indigenous Cashinahua in Acre, Brazil; the work of cognitive anthropologist Josep María Fericgla on shamanism and ayahuasca; a response to a video showing teenagers drinking ayahuasca in their living room; the culture of the Kogi of Colombia. There are not many of them, but every one is worth a careful reading.

As intended, a few of Jerónimo's films have achieved wide circulation — including the video discourse by Jacques Mabit I posted here — although far too little footage has actually found its way onto the Internet. The following example is a more-or-less extemporaneous talk that Jerónimo himself gave in July 2007 at the Third Amazonian Shamanism Conference in Iquitos.

While attending the conference, he says, "I saw people that in my opinion were not properly prepared, make a farce, a theater play, out of something I respect and love very much, the work and practices of Amazonian curanderismo. All in order to feel better about themselves in front of people who didn't know any better ... That mix of the good and the bad is certainly an integral part of Iquitos ayahuasca scene." His critique of the commercialization and distortion of shamanism is well worth listening to.

More please.

A Golden Guide to Hallucinogenic Plants

2009-02-17T14:55:00.000-08:00

If you are as old as I am, you remember growing up with the Golden Guide books — sturdy, profusely illustrated, pocket-sized guides to such topics as flowers, planets, spiders, birds, stars, painting, pond life, photography, and rocks and minerals, intended for a young audience. They were perfect for taking along on field trips for identification purposes. The series began in 1949 with Birds and continued — remarkably — until Endangered Animals in 1995. There is, of course, a collector's website with details about every Golden Guide ever published.

In 1976, the series published A Golden Guide To Hallucinogenic Plants, written by famed Harvard botanist and Amazon explorer — and, some say, model for Indiana Jones — Richard Evans Schultes, with illustrations by Elmer W. Smith. Schultes spent decades in the Amazon, collected over 30,000 herbarium specimens, including 300 species new to science, and cataloged 2,000 medicinal plants. More than 120 species bear his name, as does a 2.2 million-acre tract of protected rain forest in Colombia, Sector Schultes, which the government there set aside in 1986. He studied both peyote and ayahuasca, and he was the first botanist to identify the traditional Mexican hallucinogens teonanácatl and ololiuqui. There was no one in the country better qualified to write the book.

The book has become quite rare. A quick look around the online used bookstores shows copies of the original hardcover edition for sale at prices as high as $858.00. Some maintain that this scarcity is the result of deliberate suppression — that the book was promptly recalled, pulled from the shelves, discontinued by the publisher. I have seen no evidence of such censorship; in fact, the book apparently went through four printings before being allowed to go out of print.

The book itself is wonderful, with beautiful botanical illustrations, a lot of cultural detail, and ethnographic paintings with the sort of old-fashioned charm that somehow reminds me of the dioramas of exotic peoples I used to love as a boy at the American Museum of Natural History. The writing is straightforward and is, for its intended audience, at a high level of sophistication. I suppose I should be retroactively offended by references to "primitive societies" and "early man," but somehow I just can't work up much indignation.

If you want to take a look, a copy has been lovingly scanned, transcribed, and posted by the invaluable Vaults of Erowid. Another copy is here. We should credit David Pescovitz at Boing-Boing for first bringing this gem to the attention of the online community.

Here is the description from the back cover of the book:

What are hallucinogenic plants? How do they affect mind and body? Who uses them — and why? This unique Golden Guide surveys the role of psychoactive plants in primitive and civilized societies from early times to the present. The first nontechnical guide to both the cultural significance and physiological effects of hallucinogens, hallucinogenic plants will fascinate general readers and students of anthropology and history as well as botanists and other specialists. All of the wild and cultivated species considered are illustrated in brilliant full color.

And, in the introduction, Schultes writes:

Hallucinogenic plants have been used by man for thousands of years, probably since he began gathering plants for food. The hallucinogens have continued to receive the attention of civilized man through the ages. Recently, we have gone through a period during which sophisticated Western society has "discovered" hallucinogens, and some sectors of that society have taken up, for one reason or another, the use of such plants. This trend may be destined to continue.

It is, therefore, important for us to learn as much as we can about hallucinogenic plants. A great body of scientific literature has been published about their uses and their effects, but the information is often locked away in technical journals. The interested layman has a right to sound information on which to base his opinions. This book has been written partly to provide that kind of information.

No matter whether we believe that men's intake of hallucinogens in primitive or sophisticated societies constitutes use, misuse, or abuse, hallucinogenic plants have undeniably played an extensive role in human culture and probably shall continue to do so. It follows that a clear understanding of these physically and socially potent agents should be a part of man's general education.

Jaguar on Ayahuasca

2009-02-15T13:30:00.000-08:00

By now I am sure everyone has seen the short video showing a jaguar purportedly hallucinating after eating leaves from the ayahuasca vine. The clip is from the Peculiar Potions episode of the BBC Weird Nature series. If you haven't seen it yet, here it is:

Now there is no doubt that many animals self-medicate with plants. A field of study known as zoopharmacognosy has grown up to investigate this phenomenon, utilizing the talents of animal behavorists, ecologists, pharmacologists, anthropologists, geochemists, and parasitologists.

The field was founded in large measure by one person — primatologist Michael Huffman at Kyoto University in Japan. In 1987, in the Mahale Mountains National Park in Tanzania, Huffman observed a chimpanzee suffering from diarrhea pull a young shoot off a small tree named Vernonia amygdalina. The chimpanzee stripped off the leaves and bark with her teeth, and chewed on the branch, swallowing the juice and spitting out the fibers. The chimpanzee ate several of the branches in this way for half an hour. The next day, the chimpanzee, who suffered from an intestinal parasite infection, was back to normal. Exactly the same plant — called mujonso, or bitter-leaf tree — is used by indigenous humans in the same area as a remedy for the same condition.

The word zoopharmacognosy was coined by Eloy Rodriguez, a biochemist and professor at Cornell University. "Some of the compounds we've identified by zoopharmacognosy," he told an interviewer, "kill parasitic worms, and some of these chemicals may be useful against tumors. There is no question that the templates for most drugs are in the natural world." Huffman agrees. He says, "The probability that animals may have something to teach us about the medicinal use of plants is quite high."

There is, I think, little doubt that animals — or at least primates — also ingest hallucinogens. Baboons eat small amounts of Datura inoxia and Datura stramonium, both of which are rich in hallucinogenic scopolamine; gorillas have been observed to ingest Tabernanthe iboga, which contains ibogaine. It is not clear whether, in either case, enough is ingested to cause hallucinations, or the plants are eaten in smaller doses for other reasons.

So: Is the jaguar eating leaves of the ayahuasca vine in order to hallucinate? I think we can base no conclusions on this video, which seems to me to be an obvious fake. It is true that the leaves pictured in the first second or two of the video appear in fact to be leaves of the ayahuasca vine; compare the leaves in the video to the Banisteriopsis caapi leaves pictured at right. But I can find little else to give me confidence.

We, of course, do not have a clue as to what the jaguar is experiencing, if it is in fact experiencing anything other than perfectly normal jaguar perceptions and perhaps sleepiness. We do not have a clue about how a jaguar would behave if it was hallucinating. We certainly have no idea how a jaguar would react to relatively low doses — the jaguar apparently eats just a few leaves, and a jaguar weighs between 120 and 220 pounds — of the β-carbolines found in the ayahuasca vine.

There is nothing in the video to indicate that it was not shot entirely in a zoo, and then intercut with stock footage of jungle animals and an actor playing an indigenous hunter for three seconds. There is no explanation of why so many ayahuasca leaves — it is, after all, a vine — are growing so conveniently low to the ground. I do not know why the announcer was not taught how to pronounce the word yagé. If this video was shot in the jungle, I am in awe of a camera operator so intrepid as to get a close-up of the eyeball of a wild jaguar.

I just don't buy it. Any other opinions?

The Dimethyltryptamine Receptor

2009-02-14T11:26:00.000-08:00

No one knows how dimethyltryptamine causes its hallucinogenic effects. Dimethyltryptamine structurally resembles the tryptamine neurotransmitter serotonin. In fact, there is sufficient conformational resemblance between these two molecules that DMT can dock comfortably at serotonin receptors in the brain. Thus research to date has concentrated on serotonin receptors as the key to understanding DMT.

But a recent study by Dominique Fontanilla and her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, published this month in the prestigious journal Science, may change the direction of that research.

The Sigma-1 Receptor

The sigma-1 receptor is widely distributed throughout the body, and is found in almost all mammalian cells, including the central and peripheral nervous system. Its function has remained unclear. Stimulating the sigma-1 receptor can increase muscle tension, heart rate, breathing rate, and the size of the pupils. Drugs with a high affinity for binding at the sigma-1 receptor include the synthetic compounds cocaine, heroin, dextromethorphan, fluvoxamine, haloperidol, methamphetamine, and PCP.

Sigma-1 has long been considered an orphan receptor, without a known endogenous neurotransmitter of its own. Given the nature of the exogenous compounds that bind to the receptor, researchers took to calling the unknown sigma-1 neurotransmitter endopsychosin or, sometimes, angeldustin.

At the same time, as we have discussed before, DMT is known to be present in human blood, urine, brain tissue, and cerebrospinal fluid, and no one knew what function this endogenous DMT might have. This latest research solves both puzzles. The mysterious endogenous ligand of the sigma-1 receptor is DMT.

Several lines of reasoning — biochemical, physiological, and behavioral — led the researchers to this conclusion. They first diagrammed the chemical structures of several of the drugs known to bind to the sigma-1 receptor, reduced them to their simplest forms, and then searched for possible endogenous molecules with the same structures. Because DMT resembles these exogenous ligands — they all contain an N,N-dimethylated amine — and DMT occurs endogenously, they considered DMT a plausible candidate. The researchers were then able to demonstrate that, in rat liver homogenates, DMT could in fact bind with sigma-1 so strongly that DMT, once bound to sigma-1, could not be displaced by other high-affinity molecules.

There is a strain of mutant mice bred by scientists without sigma-1 receptors, usually called sigma-1 receptor knockout mice. When DMT is injected into nonmutant mice, it causes increased motor activity or hypermobility; when the researchers injected DMT into mutant mice, without sigma-1 receptors, no hypermobility occurred. The researchers also compared the effect of DMT on heart muscle cells from nonmutant mice with those from the genetically engineered mice. The activity of voltage-gated sodium ion channels in the cells was inhibited where sigma-1 was present, but unaffected in its absence.

Ion channels are important in cell signaling processes. These results suggest that sigma-1 receptors function to regulate ion channels in cells, and that DMT in turn is an endogenous modulator of the sigma-1 receptor.

There is further evidence for this hypothesis. Sigma-1 receptors are found in the endoplasmic reticulum inside cells. The endoplasmic reticulum is responsible for the folding and transport of proteins, which are then either secreted from the cell or used in the cell membrane. These sigma-1 receptors have been shown to function as molecular chaperones for plasma membrane ion channels in the cell, helping them fold into their functional conformations, and preventing them from folding into inactive shapes. Thus, in addition to — or instead of — affecting sigma-1 receptor modulation of ion channels, the behavioral effect of DMT may be due to activation or inhibition of sigma-1 receptor chaperone activity.

"The finding that DMT and sigma-1 receptors act as a ligand-receptor pair," the authors conclude, "provides a long-awaited connection that will enable researchers to elucidate the biological functions of both of these molecules."

Most commentators on this finding emphasized its practical value in studying mental illness, and therefore — this was implicit — offering an opportunity for increased research funding. James Stone of the Institute of Psychiatry in London said, "This is a very important finding and will lead to more interest in the role of DMT and the sigma-1 receptor in mental illness. People did not know what the natural ligand of sigma-1 was, and this has led to a lot of blind alleys. So this is really big news."

Radiochemist Erik Arstad, of University College London, who has worked on sigma-1 receptors, agrees that the finding is significant. "Given the potent hallucinogenic effects of DMT, its presence in the human body has so far been a mystery. The role of the sigma-1 receptor is also poorly understood, so the suggested link between endogenous DMT levels and modulation of the sigma-1 receptor is intriguing. The findings are likely to spur considerable interest in the sigma-1 receptor, as well as trace amines, particularly in relation to mental illnesses such as schizophrenia."

So: do we know how DMT causes hallucinations? Not yet, says senior author Arnold Ruoho, chair of pharmacology at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. "We have no idea at present," he said in an interview, "if or how the sigma-1 receptor may be connected to hallucinogenic activity."

Indigenous Top-Level Domains

2009-02-13T14:17:00.001-08:00

A top-level domain is the last part of an Internet domain name. The original set of these TLDs, defined in October 1984, is still the most familiar — .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, and .org, to which .net was added in the first implementation of the domain name system. Management of TLDs is in the hands of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which operates under contract to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Over the years, new TLDs — now called generic TLDs, to distinguish them from, say, country-code TLDs — have been added, and now .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, and .pro are all operational, even if not widely used. Several additional new gTLDs have been approved in principle, although only .mobi, for the delivery of the Internet to mobile devices, seems to have aroused much interest.

Most important, in June 2008, ICANN approved the recommendation of a new gTLD program which would allow just about any organization to apply to reserve its own gTLD. Under this system, for example, Microsoft could apply for .msn, Google for .google, or New York City for .nyc. The implementation plan for the new system is expected to be published in 2009. The plan must then be approved by the ICANN Board before the system is implemented. ICANN is currently aiming to receive applications for domains starting in the second quarter of 2009.

This new plan is now seen as an opportunity for indigenous peoples to have their own gTLDs — .taino, for example, or .shipibo. But applying for a gTLD requires significant resources of time, money, and expertise. For that reason, an organization named Dot Indigi has been formed, with the aim of helping indigenous peoples be represented on the Internet in a space that is self-governing, representative, and restrictive of intellectual property abuses.

Here is how it would work. The Dot Indigi organization will apply to ICANN for the new gTLD .indigi — or another name if the community prefers — to represent all indigenous groups of the world. The .indigi domain would then offer indigenous organizations the opportunity to register their own second-level domains under the .indigi gTLD — for example, māori.indigi or diné.indigi. The organization would petition ICANN to approve the use of such characters as ā and é as part of indigenous names at the second and lower domain levels.

Karaitiana Taiuru

Individual indigenous organizations could then govern their own domain name space and distribute or resell third-level domain names — for example, ocetiwakan.lakota.indigi. Indigenous peoples could structure their domain levels to accommodate their own culture; the Māori people could, for example, create the third-level domain .kura.māori.indigi under which each individual Māori school could have its own domain. Additional second-level domains would be made available to the public for the use of indigenous individuals or smaller indigenous groups that cannot justify the expense of setting up their own second-level domain.

Dot Indigi envisions that a percentage of annual profits would be given back to indigenous groups, to allow them to participate in additional information and communication technology projects that would empower their people and organizations.

Dot Indigi is currently headed by Māori Internet activist Karaitiana Taiuru. The organization partners with the International Indigenous Task Force and the New Zealand Maori Internet Society, with support from the International Indigenous Librarians Forum and the World Intellectual Property Office, and with technical advice from ideegeo Group LTD, a domain registration and management service for international web addresses.

Dot Indigi is certainly utilizing the resources of the Web to get its message out. In addition to their website, the organization currently has a Facebook group, a Google group, and a Bebo profile, and can be followed on Twitter.

Psychoactive Plants Online

2009-02-13T02:04:00.001-08:00

The computer magazine PC World recently published a cluster of exposé articles by staff writer Tom Spring, revealing that a number of more-or-less psychoactive plants and plant extracts — many legal and some not — are easily available online. "At a time when authorities are cracking down on illegal sale of steroids and prescription drugs online," he writes, "substances such as kratom and Mexican prickly poppy, which pack a psychedelic and narcotic-like punch, are flourishing on the Internet." One doctor with whom he spoke warned, "With some of these substances it's like playing Russian routlette with your life."

Datura inoxia

There is no doubt that some of the plants the author was able to purchase online can be dangerous. Datura inoxia, for example, contains scopolamine, and a high enough dose of scopolamine can cause, among other unpleasant effects, agitation, delirium with persecutory ideation, and frightening hallucinations. There is no doubt that people can do very weird and self-destructive things after ingesting scopolamine, especially if they are young, naïve, unprepared, and unattended. Horror stories are here.

Still, the author reports, injuries or overdoses related to the ingestion of natural stimulants and hallucinogens are rare. "Emergency room visits are infrequent," he was told by a hospital pharmacist at the University of California–San Francisco School of Pharmacy. Most emergency room visits stemming from the use of hallucinogens involve bodily harm, the pharmacist said; someone falls down and bruises a bone.

Banisteriopsis caapi

The online stores generally state that the products sold are "not for human consumption" or "for incense use only." The same idea is expressed in different ways — "We do not offer products for human consumption" or "Do not ingest anything from this site." This wording stems from the provisions of the Federal Analog Act, 21 U.S.C. § 813, intended to ban designer drugs, which at the time were being invented so fast that the law could not keep up with them. Under this Act, any chemical "substantially similar" to an illegal drug in Schedule I or II is to be treated as if it were also in Schedule I, but only if it is intended for human consumption. Hence the disclaimer.

Sometimes specific warnings are appropriately stronger. "Datura is an extremely poisonous plant," says the site selling Datura inoxia. "There have been many reported fatalities ... We strongly discourage anyone who is contemplating ingesting any part of this plant." Dutch Green Bud smoking mixture, which is made from plants containing leonurine and lactucopicrin, both mild sedatives, is accompanied by the warning, "Do not drive or operate any machinery after using this product."

Among the plants and plant extracts purchased online by the author were Salvia divinorum, motherwort (Leonurus sibiricus), kratom (Mitagyna speciosa), jurema (Mimosa hostilis), fly agaric (Amanita muscaria ), argemone (Argemone mexicana)), kanna (Sceletium tortuosum), datura (Datura inoxia), ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi), and chacruna (Psychotria viridis). One online store offered, not a plant or plant extract, but what it claimed was the powerfully hallucinogenic 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine.

Psychotria viridis

All of these, with two exceptions, are, as far as I know, legal. The first exception is Salvia divinorum, which is now illegal in thirteen states, with more presumably on the way. The second exception is chacruna (Psychotria viridis), which contains the Schedule I controlled substance dimethytryptamine, and is illegal everywhere. 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine might, under appropriate circumstances, fall within the ambit of the Federal Analogue Act.

The articles, despite their stern warnings about the effects of these plants, and scary videos of teenagers looking really stupid after ingesting Salvia divinorum, yield several ironies. The first is that the author provides links to the online sources of the psychoactive plants and fungi the articles are warning against, making it very easy for the reader to go right ahead and buy them online.

Second, the author submitted the nineteen samples he had purchased to the National Center for Natural Products Research at the University of Mississippi. The reports issued by the NCNPR emphasized all the potential dangers of the plants, but also reported that, with one exception, the plants they tested were exactly the plants they were advertised to be. The one exception was when a substance purported to be the hallucinogen 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine turned out to be the muscle stimulant 5-methoxytryptamine.

So the links provided in the articles are not just to online sources for psychoactive plants. They are — with this one exception — links to reliable sources.

Psychointegration

2009-02-12T02:57:00.000-08:00

Anthropologist Michael Winkelman, at Arizona State University, says that shamanic practices — drumming, chanting, and the ingestion of sacred plants — create a special state of consciousness he calls transpersonal consciousness, and that these practices create this state of consciousness through the process of psychointegration — that is, by integrating a number of otherwise discrete modular brain functions. Anthropologist Homayun Sidky, at Miami University in Ohio, says that this theory, despite a surface plausibility, is without empirical justification.

The argument raises a number of interesting questions, and is worth following.

Michael Winkelman

Winkelman's position consists of two intertwined elements, one descriptive and one historical. The descriptive part begins from the concept that the human brain is modular — that it is a large collection of small modules that have evolved to perform specific functions. These modules can be quite specialized. Modules have been proposed for such functions as distinguishing living from nonliving things, identifying faces, understanding motives, throwing accurately, attaching emotions to faces, and recognizing causal relationships. Tools such as Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging may even be able to locate these modules in particular areas in the brain.

Winkelman maintains that shamanic techniques for inducing transpersonal consciousness override this modularity through what he calls integrative brain processes. In this integrative mode of consciousness, he says, ordinarily separate modules can interact, so that the brain processes information through several modules at once, in a way that is different from other states of consciousness. Synesthesia — seeing sounds or smelling colors, for example — is such a cross-modular experience, as is the uniquely human capacity for metaphor, mimesis, and symbolism. Winkelman sees such capacities as central to the role of the shaman.

There is much to be said for this last observation. Jerome Rothenberg, poet and pioneer of ethnopoetics, calls the shaman the protopoet. Poet Gary Snyder says that the shaman gives song to dreams, “speaks for wild animals, the spirits of plants, the spirits of mountains, of watersheds. He or she sings for them. They sing through him.” For these poets, the shaman is the healer who sings — the creator of metaphor, the shaper of symbols.

Winkelman's view has started a trend toward speaking of the sacred plants — such as the ayahuasca drink, the peyote cactus, the teonanácatl mushroom — as psychointegrator plants. Such plants "enhance integration of information by eliciting cognitive capacities based in presentational symbolism, metaphor, analogy, and mimesis ... representing preconscious and prelinguistic structures of the brain." The shaman's individual psychodynamics, Winkelman says, expressed symbolically in the language of myths and spirits, are restructured "at levels below conceptual and operational thought."

This is also where the historical element comes in. Premodern humans, Winkelman says, had highly modular brains. It was shamanism that was the foundation for the development of "synthetic symbolic awareness" in early humans. "The integrative potentials of shamanism," he writes, "help explain the rapid rise of culture in modern Homo sapiens sapiens and the origin of shamanistic and religious features ... from the cross-modal analogic and psychophysiological integration processes from different innate modules."

Homayun Sidky

Sidky doesn't buy it. His critique has two prongs, both directed against Winkelman's historical thesis. First, Sidky questions the assumption that shamanism — at least in any form recognizably similar to contemporary indigenous practice — was in fact a paleolithic phenomenon. This point has merit. As I have written before, historical materials on shamanism date back only as far as the sixteenth century. By the time the first European travelers brought home descriptions of Siberian shamanism, it had already been influenced by centuries of contact with Buddhism, Islam, and Russian Orthodox Christianity. We have no direct evidence of what any sort of indigenous spiritual practice might have been like before that time.

Second, the question of what caused the sudden emergence of behaviorally modern humans about 40,000 years ago is a highly contentious one, and a wide variety of mechanisms have been proposed, including the introgression of Neanderthal alleles into the human genome. Sidky questions whether the hypothesized integrative mode of consciousness would have been advantageous in the sense Winkelman intends. Winkelman says that "altering consciousness provides a variety of adaptive advantages through development of a more objective perception of the external world." Sidky quotes Charles Tart as saying that altered states of consciousness are, just like ordinary consciousness, "mixtures of pluses and minuses, insights and delusions, genuine creativity and misleading imagination." What would be the benefit of such a state of consciousness to a paleolithic human?

More interesting to me than where these two thinkers differ is where they seem to agree. Both agree that there is something we can call a shamanic state of consciousness, although they disagree about what it is. Winkelman claims it is a state in which normally discrete brain modules interact. Sidky maintains that there is no empirical justification for hypothesizing the existence of such a state. Rather, he says, the state is clearly one of dissociation — a state in which "the ordinary meta-awareness that gives us our sense of personal identity and agency, and which operates atop the brain's cognitive hierarchey, is temporarily overtaken." Such a state is in fact a state of increased modularity, "when parallel brain modules disengage from each other or from ordinary meta-awareness and operate independently."

My first reaction to all this is that we seem to be theorizing far ahead of a sufficient factual basis. If cognition does work in a modular fashion, there is still little agreement about what those modules are, how many there may be, and how they might interact. There are numerous modular models of the mind, but their modules often do not correspond; one review of the literature came up with a total of fifty different modules that had been proposed in different studies. If there is little agreement about the modularity of the contemporary human brain, it is hard to see how we can reasonably discuss the modularity of paleolithic humans.

And there are continuing conceptual difficulties. If there is a speech processing module, are there submodules for semantic coding, phonemic processing, pitch recognition? Is the semantic coding module for speech reception the same as one for speech production? How do all these modules and submodules interact? For these and other reasons, modular models are currently being challenged by alternative models that are increasingly holistic and nonlocalized.

But my concern is deeper. Shamans are not states of consciousness. Shamans are people who have messy personal lives, an ambiguous social role, and the risky job of making sick people better. In fact, as I wrote here and here, I am not at all sure that there is such a thing as a discrete, unitary, contextless, disembodied shamanic state of consciousness at all. Perhaps what we should be talking about instead are the experiences of shamans in their global, postcolonial, historical, and ineluctably idiosyncratic cultural settings.

In the same way, we cannot simply assume that sacred plants all function in the same way, or produce the same experience, especially under their ceremonial conditions of use. Indeed, I think it is pretty clear that the effects of the ayahuasca drink, the peyote cactus, and the teonanácatl mushroom are phenomenologically distinct. What happens to the shamanic state of consciousness then?

Philip Glass on the Amazon

2009-02-11T08:20:00.000-08:00

Since we've been talking about the Amazon River lately — here and here — I thought we might listen to some Amazon River music. The story of this particular piece brings together three significant artists — the dance company Grupo Corpo, the instrumental group Uakti, and composer Philip Glass.

Grupo Corpo

Grupo Corpo — the Body Group — is a Brazilian dance theater company founded in 1975 by Paulo Pederneiras. The company has now taken its Afro-Brazilian fusion of ballet, jazz, and modern dance all over the world, to the delight of both audiences and critics. Their performances have, as one critic put it, "sexy physicality and dramatic visual flair." The Globe and Mail says they are "arguably the best on the planet."

Uakti — pronounced wahk-chee — is a Brazilian instrumental group that consists of Marco Antônio Guimarães, Artur Andrés Ribeiro, Paulo Sérgio dos Santos, and Décio de Souza Ramos. The musicians all have classical backgrounds, and play with the Minas Gerais Symphonic Orchestra. Their group Uakti, however, is known for using custom-made instruments, built by the group itself using everyday materials — pipe, glasses, wood, metal, rocks, rubber, even water. For Uakti, anything can produce sound, including conventional instruments, such as guitars and cellos, but played, for example, using drumsticks.

Uakti

Founded in 1978 under the leadership of Marco Antônio Guimarães, the group was first noticed and sponsored by prominent Brazilian singer, songwriter, and guitarist Milton Nascimento, who used the group on several of his albums and also produced their first record. Their name is taken from a Tukano legend about the musician Uakti, who had holes in his body, through which the wind would produce music that seduced women. The men grew jealous, and killed and buried him; and from his grave there grew the palm trees from which flutes are made.

Philip Glass, along with his contemporaries Terry Riley and Steve Reich, is a pioneer of minimalist music — what Glass prefers to call "music with repetitive structures." An extraordinarily prolific composer, he has written more than twenty operas; eight symphonies; concertos for piano, violin, timpani, and saxophone quartet; five string quartets and more than thirty additional compositions for chamber orchestra; and soundtracks for more than thirty movies, ranging from Tod Browning's Dracula to Paul Schrader's Mishima to Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi. He has collaborated with Brian Eno, Ravi Shankar, Leaonard Cohen, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Paul Simon, and many others; yet his sound has always remained distinctively his own, and instantly recognizable. It is fair to say that Glass has had an extraordinary — indeed, an unprecedented — impact on contemporary music.

Philip Glass

Almost forty years ago, I wore a groove into my vinyl recording of his hypnotic Music with Changing Parts. I have seen his operas Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Galileo Galilei. I was privileged to see him perform sections from his then uncompleted opera Hydrogen Jukebox, based on the poems of Alan Ginsberg, along with Ginsberg himself, in his finest incantatory mode, accompanying himself on the harmonium, performing his poems on the stage.

In 1993, Uakti came to Glass with a proposal that they collaborate on a dance score for Grupo Corpo, for whom Marco Antônio Guimarães had already written several original compositions. "Years ago when I first met Uakti," Glass writes, "I saw their music and performance as a unique and beautiful contribution to the world of new and experimental music. I became friends with the musicians; especially I came to admire Marco's extraordinary ear for color and composition. I was therefore very pleased when some years later they proposed a collaboration." The arrangement was done by Guimarães, who adapted the work to Uakti's instruments; this was the first time that Glass's music was arranged by another composer. The result, Glass says, "represents a true melding of my music with their sensibilities."

The product of this collaboration was a work entitled Águas da Amazônia—Sete ou oito peças para um balé, The Waters of Amazonia—Seven or Eight Pieces for a Ballet. Each piece is a musical representation of one of the great rivers of the Amazon. By the time the recording of the music was released in 1999, the number of rivers had grown to nine — the Tiquiê, Japurá, Purus, Negro, Madeira, Tapajós, Paru, Xingu, and Amazon. The piece Amazon River, which we offer below, uses keyboards, big pipe, borel, chori, glass marimba, marimba d'angelim, grand pan, inclined pan, condensator drums, xylophone, flute with prepared mouthpiece, and snare drum. The homemade instruments give these pieces a softer and less crystalline edge than many other works by Glass, and capture both the slow broad flow of the river and its surprisingly swift and dangerous currents.

Curing

2009-02-10T06:39:00.000-08:00

Among mestizo shamans in the Upper Amazon, the verb icarar means to sing or whistle an icaro, a magic song, over a person, object, or preparation, in order to give it power; water over which an icaro has been sung or whistled and tobacco smoke blown, for example, is called agua icarada. Another term for the same process is curar, cure; that which has been sung over is said to be curado, cured, in the sense that fish or cement is cured, ripened, made ready for use.

“To cure any object,” says poet César Calvo, “is to provide it with powers, to give it strengths, to endow it with purposes previously ignored by the object, which would not have been placed there originally by habits or from birth.” Calvo calls these imbued powers the cargo, the charge, the way a battery is charged, or a person charged with a mission: “That is why we work so hard at fasting, and why we are so careful about curing plants, stone or water or wood plants, charging them with suitable powers, gathering from the air the suitable icaros, and giving power to those remedies.” Manuel Córdova Ríos, a mestizo shaman, puts it this way: “What good do you think my remedies would be if I didn’t sing to them?”

A shaman can cure objects of just about any sort — a seed necklace, a bracelet of snakeskin, a wristlet made from the labia of a dolphin, a ring, a lock of hair, a handkerchief. Most important, of course, is a medicine; the shaman sings the icaro of the spirits that infuse the healing mixture. Then the object, the medicine operates, Calvo says, “according to the intensity and intention of the charge, to grant life, love, youth, forgetfulness, sexual plenitude, evil spells, or death. The same object, once cured, is capable of resuscitating, healing, making sick, or killing, according to the length of the fast and the direction of the charge.”

I think this lends perspective to discussions about the role of plants and the plant spirits in healing.

With the correct icaros alone, water becomes medicine. Anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna tells of how don Williams Vásquez deals with difficult childbirth, singing icaros of slimy fish, demulcent and mucilaginous trees, the slippery boa, and the ray, which can give birth in any position. He sings these songs over a glass of water, which is given to the woman to drink. Pablo Amaringo tells of how a patient’s eyes had been harmed by a sorcerer shining a magic flashlight at him. The shaman cured this person by giving him a drink of water over which he had sung icaros and blown tobacco smoke.

Similarly, a menstruating woman had left her wet underwear in a canoe by the riverside; a boa had excreted something living into her underwear and thus implanted the larvae of boas into her womb. The shaman treated her by taking a fruit of the huito, cutting it in half, and scraping some into warm water for the woman to eat. He prepared this abortifacientmedicine “by singing many icaros, blowing on it, and putting in it arcanas” — that is, protective icaros.The icaro calls all the spirits that will cause the medicine to work — the great serpent corimachaco, the multicolored rainbow, the precious stones, the mud of the waters, the laughing falcon, and the tiger; with his icaro he summons the spirits of the pucunucho, pepper, and of the rocoto, hairy pepper — both hot pepper plants with which to stun the boa who, with its own spirit helpers, is supporting the pregnancy.

And again: A man had been poisoned by a woman he had spurned by being given the blood of a black dog. Pablo Amaringo, directed by a spirit who gave him instructions in a dream, put some leaves of lengua sacha in a bowl of water, added three drops of camphor water, three drops of perfume, three drops of the commercial mouthwash timolina; he sang an icaro, blew on the medicine, and then gave it to the young man to drink from the same side of the bowl that Amaringo blew on.

A common way to create pusangas, love charms, is by blowing on an object — soap, perfume, cloth — which is then given, now imbued with power, to the person one desires, causing the person to fall madly in love with the giver. A shaman can also blow on a photograph of the one desired. A shaman once blew his icaros into some perfume, a drop of which was then put on each of several sculptures don Agustin Rivas had made and which he was exhibiting in Lima. “This is for you to sell your art work,” the shaman said. Don Agustin sold nearly all his sculptures, while other artists sold nothing.

Such cured objects can be used for countersorcery as well. Don Emilio Andrade fills a dried toad with tobacco, patiquina, and camphor, sings over it, and places it in the house of a person persecuted by sorcery, to catch the magic darts directed at the owner.

The Great Amazon Raft Race

2009-02-08T08:47:00.000-08:00

The Amazon Rafting Club, based in Iquitos, Peru, is once again hosting the Great River Amazon Raft Race. The three-day race will start in the town of Nauta on Friday, September 25, and finish in Iquitos on Sunday, September 27. Each four-person crew will paddle a raft they build themselves, the day before the race, from the balsawood logs that are provided. Each raft must use at least eight logs no less than five meters in length, and only single-bladed paddles are allowed.

Then the crews will raft down the Amazon for 112 miles. Teams will be judged not only on their finishing time but also on excellence in raft construction, teamwork, stamina, and knowledge of currents and rivers.

The event began in 1999, with a one-day twelve-mile race on the Nanay River. In 2003, the course was extended to twenty-six miles over two days. Finally, in 2006, the race developed into its current format, attracting competitors from Australia, USA, England, Scotland, Peru, Canada, Switzerland, New Zealand, Holland, Germany, and Mexico. The 2008 Great River Amazon Raft Race was the first to be won by a foreign crew — David Kelly and the Easy Living team.

The sponsoring organization, the Amazon Rafting Club, was informally formed after the 2006 race. The current president is David Kelly, the captain of the 2008 winning crew. Anyone who competes in the race becomes a member.

I just thought you would all like to know about this. It is clearly an event not to be missed.

Two Songs of My Teacher

2009-02-07T08:20:00.000-08:00

I have spoken before about my plant teacher doña María Luisa Tuesta Flores. She was born in September 1940, in the town of Lamas in the province of San Martín, and she died, the victim of sorcery, in July 2006. She had begun her healing career as an oracionista, a prayer healer, and, even after she became an ayahuasquera, her icaros, magic songs, remained inflected with the rhythms and melodies of prayers.

Her youth was filled with dreams and visions of angels and the Virgin Mary. She delighted in working with children; when she retrieved the soul of a child, lost through susto or manchari, sudden fright, the soul would appear to her as an angel. When she was seven years old, she had her first dream of Hermana Virgen, sister virgin, who began to teach her how to heal with plants. From that time on, she frequently had dreams in which either the Virgin Mary or an angel appeared to her. The Virgin would appear as a young and very beautiful woman, show her the healing plants, and teach her the plants to cure specific diseases. The angel would appear and tell her where in the area there was a child who was sick and needed her help. She then went to the house of the child and told the family what plant would cure the illness and how to prepare it.

She did not drink ayahuasca until she was twenty-five, when, injured in a magical attack by a vengeful sorcerer, she apprenticed herself to don Roberto Acho Jurema, already at that time a well-known healer, my own maestro ayahuasquero. Unlike many ayahuasqueros, doña María did not herself perform regular Tuesday and Friday ceremonies, although she would from time to time work together with don Roberto. Even as an ayahuasquera, she would go — as she always had — wherever her healing powers were needed.

Doña María often shook her head in dismay at my questions, my blockheaded inability to absorb the immense plant knowledge she offered to me. What I needed to learn I would learn, over time, from the plants themselves, she said; the way for me to learn was to “continue on, and all will be shown to you.” This was typical doña María. When I would say I couldn’t learn any more, she would scold me. Study, study, study, she would tell me. Follow, follow, follow.

Doña María was not a simple person, and certainly not a saint. She was genuinely warm, giving of her knowledge, impatient, dramatizing, complaining, generous, fussy, proud, unassuming, earthy, demanding, motherly. She lived as a healer in the disorderly landscape of the soul.

I feel blessed to have known her, even for such a short time. Here are two of her icaros, her healing songs.

The Telepathy Meme Again

2009-02-06T06:17:00.000-08:00

A while ago, I wrote about what I called the telepathy meme — the tenacious idea that ayahuasca opens telepathic communication with others in the group, or allows one to see events that are distant in time or space. This latter is, of course, consistent with the Upper Amazonian idea that ayahuasca is not itself a healer but rather a teacher, which is ingested in order to get information.

Apparently it was a traveler named Rafael Zerda Bayón who first suggested, in 1905, both the idea that ayahuasca visions were telepathic and the corresponding name telepathine for its active constituent. The name was then used by the Colombian chemist Guillermo Fischer Cárdenas when he actually isolated the compound in 1923. In 1939, it was determined that banisterine, yagéine, and telepathine were all the same as harmine, and that is the name that has been used ever since.

I originally thought that the meme then lay quiescent until resurrected in 1953 by American writer William S. Burroughs in his early novel Junky, where, in his closing meditation on yagé, the "uncut kick," the "final fix," he noted that the drink "is supposed to increase telepathic sensitivity."

But apparently the telepathy meme was less dormant than I thought. In the April 1932 issue of Modern Mechanics is a very brief and unattributed article that says, in its entirety:

Drug Said to Cause Clairvoyance
A South American plant called Yage is believed by natives to have the magical property of enabling the drinker to see great distances or through obstacles. Before the drinker falls asleep everything seems to be filled with hazy bluish rings. As the stupor deepens the sleeper sees vivid visions of things or people known to be somewhere else. This is the reason the drug is supposed to cause clairvoyance.

This brief article is skeptical in tone, gives no author, and provides no source for the information it conveys. I have been able to dig up no further information, although I certainly wonder whether this may be one of the sources that informed Burroughs's view of ayahuasca. Can anyone add anything?

Hallucinogens and Pornography

2009-02-05T06:05:00.000-08:00

Given the current climate of moral panic and the attendant assault on Salvia divinorum — possession of which is now a felony, at last count, in thirteen states, although it is hard to keep up — I thought we might do some thinking about drugs and the law generally.

Let us say that I have been arrested for possession of an illegal hallucinogen. Let us say, too, that I possess that substance, not because it is a sacrament in my church, but because I simply want to experience a hallucinatory mental state. Since I cannot rely on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, are there any constitutional arguments available to me?

Here is the rule to keep in mind. Generally speaking, a legislature can constitutionally pass just about any law it wants, as long as the law implicates only what is called a liberty interest — that is, an interest in staying out of prison — and the law passes the rational basis test. That is, to successfully challenge such a law, you would have to convince a court that the law had no rational basis at all — that the legislature was effectively out of its mind when it passed it. Even though that often seems to have been the case, it is difficult to prove in court.

On the other hand, where a fundamental right is involved, the burden shifts to the State to show that the law is narrowly tailored to satisfy a compelling state interest. That is why it is advantageous to frame a challenge to a law prohibiting possession of a hallucinogen as involving a fundamental right rather than a liberty interest.

Free speech is a fundamental right, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. So the question becomes: is there a way to bring my possession of a controlled hallucinogen within the ambit of the Free Speech Clause?

As you would expect, the jurisprudence of the Free Speech Clause is complex, extensive, and not entirely consistent. But there is a body of law that talks about free speech not in terms of speech but rather in terms of freedom of thought. And there is enough Supreme Court language out there condemning "government programs of thought control" to indicate that the state may not attempt to control the contents of my mind. The Supreme Court, according to Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe, "has insisted that the activities actually going on within the head are absolutely beyond the power of government to control." In Stanley v. Georgia, the Court asserted that the State "cannot constitutionally premise legislation on the desirability of controlling a person's private thoughts" — and that would include lustful thoughts, racist thoughts, violent thoughts, and, presumably, hallucinatory thoughts as well.

There is, I think, an arguable analogy here between hallucinogens and pornography, which is a mind-altering technology intended to induce or sustain a state of mind that the Court calls prurience — a state of mind characterized, the Court has put it, by "itching, morbid, or lascivious longings." There are physical instrumentalities for inducing this state of mind, such as books, photographs, and videos. The State may constitutionally prohibit the transport, importation, sale, or mailing of these pornographic instrumentalities, or the public display of pornography itself; but it may not prohibit the private possession of adult pornography in my home.

In Stanley v. Georgia, the defendant had been convicted for possessing pornographic films, which government agents had discovered in his home while searching for evidence of illegal gambling activity. The State argued that it had the same right to protect the minds of its citizens as it had to protect their bodies. But the Supreme Court found it "wholly inconsistent with the philosophy of the First Amendment" to concede to the State "the right to control the moral contents of a person's thoughts."

But suppose we were talking about, not books or films, but rather a plant that induced prurience, called, say, Obscenia prurientis. If I was charged with possession of pornography because I possessed Obscenia prurientis plants, presumably the outcome would be the same. Pruriogenic plants, just like pornographic books and films, are simply an instrumentality for changing the contents of my mind. As long as I don't transport, import, mail, or hand out these plants to others, the State presumably has no more interest in my private possession of a pruriogenic plant than in my private possession of a pruriogenic movie.

And this ought to be true even though such pornographic instrumentalities as books and films might look to a court more like the sorts of communicative technologies that the Free Speech Clause was originally intended to protect. If the goal is to protect states of mind from government constraints, then the nature of the instrument used to induce the state of mind ought to be irrelevant, whether it is a pornographic video, an electronic brain stimulator, the drug Lawrence Tribe called obscenamine, or our imaginary plant Obscenia prurientis.

Here comes the analogy. Suppose we were talking about, not Obscenia prurientis, but another plant — say, Psychotria viridis — whose purpose and effect was to induce a temporary state of hallucination, just as the purpose and effect of Obscenia prurientis is to induce a temporary state of prurience. On what grounds should the outcome differ? If the State has no permissible interest in my private possession of an instrumentality to induce a mental state of prurience, why should the State have a permissible interest in my private possession of an instrumentality to induce a mental state of hallucination?

In both cases, we have an instrumentality which is illegal to possess, and whose function is solely to create a state of mind — prurience on the one hand and hallucinations on the other — that is disfavored by the State. Yet the Supreme Court has said that the State cannot constitutionally prosecute me for possessing pornography — indeed, for using pornography, in the privacy of my home, to alter my state of consciousness. And this is arguably true even if the pruriogenic instrumentality is a plant. It is hard to see why a hallucinogenic plant should treated differently.

Here, of course, the State would argue that there were other harms — health risks, the chance that the plants would fall into the hands of children, failure to meet international obligations under the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances — whose prevention constituted a state interest sufficiently compelling to outweigh my First Amendment right to control the contents of my own mind. But at least, under this argument, the burden is on the State to show that such harms actually exist, that the harms are so serious that the State has a compelling interest in preventing them, and that total prohibition is the least restrictive way of preventing those harms.

Now that would be an argument worth having.

Soccer

2009-02-04T05:05:00.001-08:00

As of January 2009, for the season running from February until December, Colegio Nacional Iquitos has been promoted from the Segunda Division to the Primera Division of Peru. This is very important news.

Soccer — which is, of course, fútbol — is played and followed with almost religious intensity throughout Perú. According to sociologist Julio Cotler, soccer played a major role in forging a Peruvian national identity when, in 1970, the Peruvian national team surprisingly eliminated top-ranked Argentina to qualify for the Mexico Cup. For the first time, the games were broadcast nationwide, and soccer became a national passion.

Indeed, in 1996, when Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement guerrillas captured the Japanese embassy in Lima and held 72 hostages for 126 days, the occupation was broken by a surprise raid when the guerrillas had gathered for their daily afternoon soccer game.

Iquitos has two professional soccer clubs — Colegio Nacional Iquitos and Hungaritos, the Hungarians — and several amateur leagues, as well as an endless stream of pick-up street games, which can last for hours, and are played right through the pouring rain. Ribereño villages throughout the Upper Amazon have soccer fields, and often a game is played every day in the evening.

Because some of these ribereño villages are small, they often play a downsized version of soccer called fulbito, with five or six players on a side. Famed writer Mario Vargas Llosa, in his novel The City and the Dogs, describes a fulbito game: “They wore sneakers, … and they made sure the ball was not fully inflated, to keep it from bouncing. Generally they kept the ball on the ground, making very short passes, and trying for goals from very close, without kicking hard.”

Fulbito is thus a close sport, sometimes even played indoors; the MRTA guerrillas were playing fulbito in the embassy grand dining room when the raid occurred. Some commentators have claimed that playing fulbito rather than soccer from childhood has kept Peruvian soccer players from developing kicking power, so that they are considered skilled rather than strong opponents.

Games played against neighboring villages are a major social event, and may involve three or four communities, with wagering, feasts, beer, dancing, and battery-operated CD players blaring cumbias. These games can be very exciting, especially in the rainy season, because the fields become quite muddy and slippery, with spectacular wipe-outs, and everyone winds up covered in mud.

The acculturation of indigenous groups to the ribereño lifestyle almost inevitably includes the adoption of soccer.

The Survival of Plant Knowledge

2009-02-03T12:03:00.000-08:00

I swear, the spirits must read this blog. Just a day or so after I blogged about the importance of plant knowledge and the health costs of losing that knowledge, the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine published a comprehensive study of plant use in the culture area encompassed by northern Peru and southern Ecuador.

The study is by two distinguished scholars, ethnobotanist Rainer Bussmann and anthropologist Douglas Sharon, who had previously co-authored two significantly useful books — Plants of the Four Winds: The Magic and Medicinal Flora of Peru and Plants of Longevity: The Medicinal Flora of Vilcabamba. The present study was based on research earlier published here and here.

Rainer Bussmann

Northern Peru and southern Ecuador form a single culture area and share the same flora. Both are heirs of a regional plant healing tradition that goes back as far as the Cupisnique culture of the first millennium BC. But the two areas now show striking differences in plant knowledge and use.

The authors did a comprehensive survey — collecting, identifying, and recording vernacular names, traditional uses, and applications — of 510 plant species used for medicinal purposes in Peru and 215 plant species used for medicinal purposes in Ecuador. The number of species used as medicine indicates that the healers, market vendors, and members of the public whom the authors interviewed in Peru had considerable knowledge of plants in their surroundings, while in Ecuador much of this traditional plant knowledge appears to have been lost. Plants used as medicine in southern Ecuador comprise only forty percent of the species used in northern Peru.

How this difference came to be is particularly interesting.

Colonial chroniclers often included detailed descriptions of useful plants in their reports, and the authors reviewed both earlier and later compilations. In 1780, Martínez Compañon, Archbishop of Trujillo, had a complete inventory of the plants in his dioceses prepared, which covered much of the territory in the present study, and which contained 526 plant species. The work included detailed paintings of each plant, which the authors compared closely to the modern medicinal flora of the region, finding that the vernacular names of most plants had not changed since colonial times. In northern Peru, the number of medicinal plants did not seem to have changed significantly since the late 1700s — more than 500 species were found in both the Compañon survey and in modern Peruvian markets — while in southern Ecuador the number of plants used as medicine had declined significantly.

Douglas Sharon

A closer comparison, however, showed that only 41 percent of the plants described by Compañon were still sold in Peru; the remainder of the contemporary Peruvian pharmacopoeia had been added more recently. Even more, the plants used in Ecuador today remain most similar to those reported in the earlier rather than the later colonial herbals, as though plant knowledge there had become frozen at the time of colonization. This means that, from earliest colonial times, practitioners in both northern Peru and southern Ecuador stopped using a certain number of medicinal plants. But in Peru these plants were replaced by new ones, and in Ecuador the pharmacopoeia simply grew smaller.

So: why should this be? Bussmann and Sharon give a historical explanation. In Ecuador, the colonial Spaniards immediately began the persecution of traditional medical practitioners, while in Peru the colonial administration was much more tolerant. And this difference continued. In the 1980s, the Peruvian government established a National Institute for Traditional Medicine, while in Ecuador traditional medicine remained illegal until a constitutional amendment was passed in 1998. The persecution of traditional medical practitioners in Ecuador inhibited experimentation with new remedies, and the tradition withered.

The lesson here is worth emphasizing: the survival of a tradition of plant medicine lies not in its remaining static, but rather in its ability to experiment, innovate, and adapt. A static knowledge base inevitably shrinks. Persecution in Ecuador did not cause the loss of plant knowledge; it prevented the acquisition of new plant knowledge.

And a further implication is worth drawing as well. This finding runs directly counter to the common assumption that indigenous traditions today have survived through lack of change.

Conference Notes

2009-02-03T04:35:00.000-08:00

Three important conferences on shamanism were held in 2008, two of which were not easy to get to from the United States — the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland, March 21–24, and the Fourth Annual Amazonian Shamanism Conference in Iquitos, Peru, July 19–27. A third conference — the 25th International Conference on Shamanism and Alternative Modes of Healing — was held closer to home, in San Rafael, California, August 30–September 1. If you missed these conferences, there are still ways to access at least some of the presentations.

At the World Psychedelic Forum, more than fifty experts from all over the world met and discussed the psychedelic experience, including such heavy hitters as Stanislav Grof, Ralph Metzner, Jeremy Narby, Jonathan Ott, Daniel Pinchbeck, and Michael Winkelman. An entire day was spent on the topic Legacy of the Shamans: Ancient Traditions and New Dimensions. You can take a look at the whole program here, and a report of the conference is here. Couldn't make it? You can still get audio recordings, for a price. Videos of at least a few of the presentations are available for free here.

The Fourth Annual Amazonian Shamanism Conference also had a distinguished group of speakers — Pablo Amaringo, Howard Charing, Frank Echenhoffer, Richard Grossman, Martina Hoffman, Jan Kounen, Dennis McKenna, Robert Venosa, and many others. Recordings of a few of these presentations in a variety of audio formats — unfortunately, often of poor sound quality — are available without charge here.

It is likely that videos will also be available soon, but not for free. Soga del Alma, the sponsoring organization, has made available videos from the 2005 and 2006 conferences, under a sort of rental arrangement. For £15 you can watch all thirty-one of the presentations from those two conferences, as streaming video, as often as you wish, for a period of one year. To get a sense of what the videos are like, you can get a free look — although registration is required — at Dennis McKenna's 2005 presentation, Ayahuasca and Human Destiny. That talk, by the way, has now circulated widely, and is available both as a podcast and in its written form.

The 25th International Conference on Shamanism and Alternative Modes of Healing included presentations by Stanislov Grof, Jürgen Kremer, Stanley Krippner, and many others; you can still see the entire program here. Especially noteworthy were presentations by a number of scholars and practitioners of Mongolian shamanism — Batbayar Gonchigdorj, Purevsuren Begziav, Sumiya Tserendorj, Battsetseg Bataa, and Saruul Magsar. Audio recordings of the conference are available here, but only as a complete set, and they are pricey.

I look forward to the day when all such conference presentations, as a matter of course, will be made immediately available as podcasts and vidcasts.

Weeds

2009-02-01T09:10:00.000-08:00

I am always interested to see how ayahuasca and other sacred plants are portrayed in the popular media, from horror movies to reality television to psychedelic westerns. Here is another example.

The quirky television series Weeds was a surprise hit for Showtime. It was the channel's highest rated series in its first year, and its fourth season premier attracted 1.3 million viewers, Showtime's highest-ever viewership. Mary-Louise Parker, as the lead character Nancy Botwin, won a Golden Globe for her performance on the show.

Nancy is a normal suburban soccer mom until her husband Judah suddenly drops dead. To maintain her lifestyle, she begins selling marijuana to her local clientele — her accountant, her lawyer, and other soccer moms. Her entrepreneurial success in the highly competitive drug business complicates a life already made challenging by her strange family and backstabbing friends.

The title of the series is triply significant. It refers to widow's weeds, the traditional dark dress of a woman whose husband has died. It refers, of course, to marijuana. And it refers to the eruption of the unfamiliar and unwanted in the otherwise controlled and artificial environment of the suburban lawn.

In episode 10 of the fourth season, Nancy is faced with a moral dilemma — her discovery that a tunnel to Mexico that she thinks is being used to smuggle drugs is also being used to smuggle humans and weapons. The episode is notable for two things. First, Nancy drinks ayahuasca as a way to deal with her fears and cure a chronic headache. "Peyote magic?" she asks. "Like hallucinogenic magic?" And she is told: "Peyote is a bicycle. Ayahuasca is a rocket ship. Like thirty years of psychotherapy in one night." Despite that, the portrayal of the experience is surprisingly unromanticized:

The second interesting thing about the episode is the music in the background during the ayahuasca scene. If you were too enthralled by Mary-Louise Parker vomiting to listen, go back and pay attention to the music. It is, of course, cumbia amazónica. The song is Sonido Amazonico by the group Chicha Libre, a modern American Brooklyn-based neo-cumbia psychedelic surf music combo put together by Olivier Conan of Barbès Records. The song is derived from a recording by the same name originally performed by the classic cumbia amazónica group Los Mirlos. If you want to hear how guys named Burrows, Camp, Conan, Cudahy, Douglas, and Quigley can play jungle music with real verve and affection, here is the background song in its entirety:

The Importance of Plant Knowledge

2009-01-31T05:28:00.000-08:00

How important is traditional plant knowledge in the Amazon? According to a recent study among the Tsimane' in Amazonian Bolivia, each standard deviation of maternal ethnobotanical knowledge increases the likelihood of good child health by more than fifty percent. And the study raises the question: What will be the cost — to the Tsimane' and other indigenous peoples — if such ethnobotanical knowledge is lost?

The Tsimane' number about 8,000 people who live in about 100 villages along the Maniqui River and the interior of the Pilon Lajas region of the Bolivian Amazon. Tsimane' villages are small, with an average of about 24 households linked by kinship and marriage. At the time of the study, no household had electricity or running water, and half the villages were inaccessible by road. The Tsimane' have traditionally lived by slash-and-burn agriculture, gathering, hunting, and fishing. However, since the 1970s, their territory has been encroached on by colonist farmers, logging firms, cattle ranchers, and oil companies. The Tsimane' now increasingly interact with the market economy through the sale of goods and wage labor, primarily on cattle ranches, logging camps, and farms.

Such integration into the market economy brings about changes in occupation, preferences, social organization, and health and nutritional status. The Tsimane' are now starting to merge into a culture that places no value on their indigenous knowledge, especially their ethnobotanical knowledge. Under this pressure, traditional knowledge of medicinal plants is starting to disappear, with little to take its place. Too often, as here, the global market holds out the offer of western medicine without providing the means to gain access to it.

Thomas McDade and William Leonard from Northwestern University set out to learn what impact the loss of traditional plant knowledge might have on the health of children. To do this, they assessed the health of 330 Tsimane' children, aged from two to ten years old, and tested their mothers and fathers on both their knowledge of local plants and their skills at using them. Local ethnobotanical knowledge was quantified using five measures — agreement with local experts on plant uses; botanical knowledge; skills in using plants; total number of plants used; and diversity of plants used. Child health was measured using three variables — concentration of C-reactive protein, a marker of infectious burden; skinfold thickness, a measure of fat stores; and stature, used to calculate height-for-age scores, an indicator of nutritional and health status.

The results were striking. For each measure of health, mothers with higher levels of plant knowledge and use had healthier children, independent of potentially confounding variables related to education, market participation, and acculturation. The Tsimane' ethnomedical tradition

may play a particularly important part in protecting health because effective commercial medicines are expensive and difficult for the Tsimane' to procure. If remedies derived from local plants are effective in preventing or treating illness, this would contribute not only to lower levels of inflammation but also to improved linear growth and body fat stores by reducing allocations of energy to fueling immunity and fighting infection.

Strikingly, although the authors infer a direct association between maternal plant knowledge and child health, it may be that this association is mediated by the children themselves. Tsimane' children spend much of their time away from parental supervision, playing and foraging in small peer groups, and the authors report seeing older children use medicinal plants both for themselves and for younger children. It may be that plant knowledge — like so much other cultural knowledge — is passed, not from adults to children, but rather from older children to younger children.

In the preservation of plant knowledge lies the destiny of the people.

Jungle Music

2009-01-30T06:48:00.000-08:00

I was staying with my teacher don Rómulo Magin in his hut in the jungle. He was playing an ancient transistor radio for me, barely bringing in the scratchy music of a distant station. The music was infectiously lively, and I asked him what it was. La música de la selva, he told me, grinning. Jungle music.

Cumbia is a popular music of Colombia, especially along the northern Caribbean coast. A form of cumbia is also found in Perú, called chicha, named after the popular fermented drink, usually made of maize. Peruvian chicha took Colombian cumbia rhythms and instrumentation and added the Andean elements of popular huayño music; and in turn chicha spun off two variants — tecnocumbia, which added synthesizers and other electronica to the mix, and cumbia amazónica. Jungle music.

Cumbia amazónica developed in the 1960s in the larger Upper Amazonian towns such as Iquitos, Moyobamba, and Pucallpa, where the accordions of chicha were replaced by cheap, loud, portable garage-band instruments such as Farfisa organs and big-reverb guitars, and local bands played cumbias amazónicas for oil workers as a display of regional pride — what one commentator has called “eastern Peruvian wild west Amazon mining town jump up music.” They sang about partying, oil prospecting, and jungle life, often with wry tongue-in-cheek humor: My grandfather has died, ayayay, drinking liquor, ayayay, my grandfather has died, ayayay, drinking masato, ayayay. Their sense of their music’s regional and ethnic roots was encapsulated in the phrase poder verde, green power.

Two long-surviving groups, Juaneco y Su Combo and Los Mirlos, are primarily associated with this music. The original Juaneco y su Combo was formed in 1966 in Pucallpa; it consisted of singer Wilindoro Cacique; guitarist Noé Fachín, called El brujo because it was said his melodies came to him during ayahuasca visions; and saxophonist Juan Wong Paredes, leader and principal composer, the original Juaneco. When Paredes’s son Juan Wong Popolizio took over the band, he traded in his accordion for a Farfisa organ.

The group put on their first public concert in Iquitos in 1967. The concert has spawned legends — that the crowd was so large that the army had to be called out; that the venue was too small for the crowd and the band played out in the street; that Fachín’s guitar was so erotically charged that rioting broke out, people ripping their clothes off. Half of the group, including Fachín, died in 1976 in a plane crash; Wong died in 2004. The group continues under the leadership of Mao Wong Lopez, the founder’s grandson. The only survivor of the original trio, Wilindoro Cacique, lives in a taxi garage in Pucallpa, and does occasional gigs under the name Wilindoro y la Leyenda Viva de Juaneco, Wilindoro and the living legend of Juaneco. The original name, with a new lineup, lives on.

Most distinctive about Juaneco y su Combo was their adoption of the symbols of indigenous Amazonia. While band members were mostly poor mestizos, their pride in local tradition led them to wear Shipibo cushmas and feather coronas onstage. “They think of it as their culture, even though they are not Shipibo,” says Olivier Conan, a New York musician who has been key to their revival. “It is a very important part of their whole music.”

Their song lyrics also embraced distinctively Amazonian themes and legends — Vacilando con ayahuasca, Floating with ayahuasca; El hijo de la runamula, Son of the spirit mule; El llanto de ayaymama, The weeping of the ayaymama bird; Mujer hilandera, Woman spinning. Here is a video of Vacilando con ayahuasca, which will give you an idea of the musical and performance conventions of the genre. The orgasmic female moaning for ayahuasca has always been part of the song, and no doubt contributed to its breakthrough popularity.

Los Mirlos was founded in 1973 by Jorge Rodriguez Grandez, who enlisted two of his brothers and a cousin to form the group. Many of their songs — Sonido amazónico, Amazonian sound; El milagro verde, The green miracle; Muchachita del oriente, Jungle girl; Fiesta en la selva, Party in the jungle — refer to the area of Moyobambo, in the departamento of San Martín, where Rodriguez was born, although he moved to Lima when he was very young. Guitarist Danny Johnson gave the band a darker sound — music critic Francisco Melgar Wong calls it “sinuous and reptilian” — which differentiated the group from its more cheerful contemporaries. Rodriguez has been outspoken about his regional roots. “I have spoken to my jungle,” he has said, “to all immigrants from Peru.” The following video of Muchachita del oriente gives a good idea of the kind of good-time party music Los Mirlos is still capable of putting out:

Both these groups have had a remarkable revival beginning in the 1990s, as their countercultural style appealed to a new generation of young people in Lima. Despite its recent embrace by the middle class, chicha remains an outsider music — an expression of migrants, nostalgia for home, hope for a better life. It is, above all, party music, a concept operationalized by the ubiquitous scantily-clad callipygian bailarinas who dance onstage while the band plays. The term chicha, very much like the term hip-hop in the United States, has come to refer to a broad range of limeño underclass culture — inexpensive folk housing, tabloid newspapers, outdoor concerts and dance parties in venues, such as empty parking lots, called chichodromos.

Cumbia amazónica brought an indigenous world to the attention of those who had previously been only dimly aware of it. Juaneco y su Combo and Los Mirlos achieved their primary success in the mid-70s, the time of the Amazon oil boom. Prior to that period, the axis of Peruvian indigenous discourse had run between Lima and Cuzco, and thus between Spanish and Inca culture. Indeed, the term indigenismo traditionally had little to do with indigenous peoples of the jungle; it was, instead, an identification that the upper-class light-brown trigueño elite in Cuzco made of themselves in connection with their own purported Inca heritage. Jungle Indians were chunchos, not worth thinking about.

Although there undoubtedly have been culturally exploitative currents in cumbia amazónica — take a look, for example, here — it was, in fact, revelatory. There had long been a profound social divide between urbanized mestizos and indigenous peoples of the jungle. But, according to music critic Ricardo León Almenara, when Juaneco y su Combo began to appear in Shipibo cushmas, it seemed for the first time that there might be something in common between the two worlds, if only a species of good-time jump-up bar music; and for the first time, says anthropologist César Ramos, mestizos and Shipibos would drink beer from the same glass at a festival.

An outstanding recent collection of classic cumbias, including songs by Juaneco y su Combo and Los Mirlos, entitled The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru, compiled by Olivier Conan on his Barbès Records label, can be found here.

Best New Product of 2009

2009-01-28T14:23:00.001-08:00

Anyone who has traveled in Peru knows about Inca Kola, the strangely phosphorescent carbonated drink that tastes like melted bubblegum. You may not know, of course, that Inca Kola has its own Facebook fan page with 2,790 fans, as well as a Facebook group, Inca Kola Lovers, with — I am not making this up — 10,475 members. There is also a diet version, Inca Kola Light, without sugar, which I must confess I have never tried. For me, the intense sugar rush of the original Inca Kola is part of its mystique.

Peruvians have a deep emotional attachment to Inca Kola. They drink it with everything, including el chifa, Chinese food, and it is served in the fanciest restaurants. It is considered a cultural heritage, and is often named as the one thing Peruvians miss most when living abroad. The slogan Es Nuestra!, It's Ours!, captures some sense of the national pride in a home-grown drink that outsells Coca-Cola in Peru.

Therefore, I think it is important for everyone to know that there is now an Inca Kola ice cream. It took more than nine months of negotiations, but the D'Onofrio ice cream company and Inca Kola agreed to invest $5 million in the new popsicle, which is to cost 1.20 soles. The news release states that the two companies agreed there was no competition on the market for this flavor of ice cream. I think that is entirely correct.

No, I don't know where to get Inca Kola ice cream in the United States.

Pierre Clastres

2009-01-28T06:20:00.000-08:00

The basic political unit of traditional Amazonian society is the village, larger than an extended family, but still never larger than a few hundred inhabitants. These villages are politically autonomous entities, often widely separated, several days walk from each other. When the population of a village grows too large, a portion will split off and form its own village elsewhere in the jungle.

These village political units share two striking features. First, they have no chiefs. Village members in apparent leadership roles actually have very little authority over anyone else. Second, they have historically spent much of their time fighting each other, in armed conflict that is often protracted, bloody, bitter, and cruel.

The warfare consisted — and not infrequently continues to consist today — primarily of stealthy nocturnal raids on another village, with the goal of slaughtering the inhabitants in their hammocks, except those who manage to flee into the jungle. The dispersed survivors then gather, often change the location of their village, and plot a revenge raid of their own. Anticipating such raids, many Amazonian peoples have maintained several distant gardens to which they might flee, and slept with their most important possessions close to hand.

Such Amazonian warfare appears to be very old. The Spanish invaders — professional soldiers with a sharp eye for such things — frequently remarked on the skill and ferocity of the Amazonian warriors they encountered. Ethnohistorian Linda Newson has described internecine Amazonian warfare as endemic at the time of first contact. Village raids and killings have continued into the present. As one Huaorani told anthropologists Stephen Beckerman and James Yost, "That is how we lived in the old days. Back and forth we killed. Back and forth, back and forth. Together we died."

Why should this be?

French anthropologist Pierre Clastres, who died in 1977, spent two years in the early 1960s living with the Guayaki in eastern Paraguay, who were wiped out shortly after his departure — "eaten away by illness and tuberculosis, killed by lack of proper care, by lack of everything," their women and children hunted for slaves by white settlers. His oddly disturbing ethnography, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, was translated into English, as a labor of love, by famed novelist Paul Auster. The ethnography mirrors many of Auster's own novels, in which innocent protagonists, like Clastres himself among his cannibal and infanticidal hosts, find themselves by chance in a world where they slowly discover that the rules have changed in hidden and dangerous ways.

Clastres was a founding thinker in the discipline now commonly called political anthropology, and he wrote two books — Society Against the State and The Archeology of Violence — which forced a new direction in French anthropology and a rethinking of the nature and function of violence in indigenous cultures.

Clastres ties the lack of chiefly authority and constant warfare to a theory of the State, which he defines as a "separate organ of power" — that is, as social power that has been separated from society. Instead of horizontal egalitarian decisionmaking, the State splits society into masters and subjects, dominators and dominated. The State, he writes, "is the total sign of division in society, in that it is a separate organ of political power: society is henceforth divided into those who exercise power and those who submit to it. Society is no longer an undivided We, a single totality, but a fragmented body, a heterogeneous social being."

Amazonian society has been described as stateless, as if it were afflicted by a failure to evolve a historically necessary form of social organization. On the contrary, Clastres says, Amazonian society represents a deliberate choice to keep power dispersed and prevent the formation of what he calls the cold monster, the nightmare, the State. Amazonian society is determined to prevent any monopoly on the use of force. As Clastres has said:

Yes, the State exists in the most primitive societies, even in the smallest band of nomadic hunters. It exists, but it is ceaselessly warded off. It is ceaselessly prevented from becoming a reality. A primitive society directs all its efforts towards preventing its chief from becoming a chief (and that can go as far as murder). If history is the history of class struggle (I mean in societies that have classes), then the history of a classless society is the history of their struggle against a latent State. Their history is the effort to encode the flows of power.

There are two ways that a stateless horizontal indigenous society resists the centralization of power — first, by limiting the agency and authority of village chiefs; and, second, by waging war.

Thus, among indigenous Amazonian peoples, a leader does not exercise power over others. Leadership is rather a matter of technical competence in discrete fields — oratorical talent, expertise as a hunter, ability to coordinate martial activities — as well as the persuasive power of constantly renewed generosity. Clastres writes that "the chief has no authority at his disposal, no power of coercion, no means of giving an order. The chief is not a commander: the people of the tribe are under no obligation to obey." Should a leader overstep these bounds, he may be violently removed — murdered, or abandoned to die alone in battle.

For example, among the Huaorani, as described by anthropologists Stephen Beckerman and James Yost, there were no chiefs, no village council, and no specialized leadership. Raids were in most cases initiated by a man in his twenties, who would lead only those whom he could persuade to join him. Clastres sharply distinguished prestige from power. While successful warriors might gain prestige, they were precluded from turning that prestige into political power.

A number of motives have been offered by scholars to account for Amazonian warfare — revenge, social status, slaves, women, animal resources, human body parts for trophies. Following Marshall Sahlins's then-recent Stone Age Economics, Clastres maintained that competition for scarce resources cannot account for Amazonian violence and warfare, since indigenous peoples lived, not in the scarcity posited by Marx, but rather in overabundance. Indigenous peoples, he said, have no markets because they have no surplus; but the lack of a surplus — pejoratively labeled a subsistence economy — was due not to an inferior technology, but to a technology that was precisely calibrated to give the society just what it needed. "In other words, far from exhausting themselves in the attempt to survive," Clastres writes, "primitive society, selective in the determination of its needs, possesses a machine of production capable of satisfying them."

What indigenous people have a surplus of, Clastres says, is leisure. The indigenous hunger for metal tools is not in order to produce more, but rather to produce the same amount in even less time. What Sahlins called the first affluent society is not driven to warfare by competition for scarce resources; the explanation of Amazonian warfare is not economic but political. Just like the constraints on chiefly power, warfare is a strategy to prevent the concentration of dispersed power — to prevent, in other words, the emergence of the State. Only through war, Clastres says, can each village political unit maintain dispersion and therefore autonomy. "The dispersion of local groups, which is primitive society's most immediately perceptible trait," he writes, "is thus not the cause of war, but its effect, its specific goal."

What is the function of primitive war? To assure the permanence of the dispersion, the parceling, the atomization of the groups. Primitive war is the work of a centrifugal logic, a logic of separation, which expressed from time to time in armed conflict. War serves to maintain each community's political independence. As long as there is war, there is autonomy: this is why war cannot cease, why it must not cease, why it is permanent.

It is important to bear in mind that Clastres had his own political motivation for this analysis. Like Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was once his mentor, Clastres wanted to use his ethnographic data as a critique of contemporary society — to exercise what sociologist Fuyuki Kurasawa has called the ethnological imagination. Clastres was a Parisian intellectual, director of L’École des Hautes Études in Paris for six years, and an anarchist. What the Amazon taught, he said, was that the State is not intrinsic to social life, and that stateless egalitarian societies can actively resist the development of state coercion and oppression, through acts of deliberate fragmentation.

To this analysis we can add that, in the Upper Amazon, accusations of sorcery function very much in the way Clastres describes warfare, always involving the potential for social fragmentation and dispersion.

Among the Arakmbut, for example, accusations of sorcery are directed at those the accusers fear or dislike, and therefore represent current lines of political cleavage. But those lines can shift. In one Arakmbut village, after the death of a prominent and respected shaman, sorcery accusations were originally directed at non-Arakmbut outsiders. But, within months, the accusations turned toward persons with prestige, influence, and position in the opposite halves of the village. Such sorcery accusations within the community usually indicate that a political situation has reached a breaking point, leading to bitter recriminations, physical attacks, and even the death of an accused sorcerer. When relations break down in this way, one party usually moves away.

It has been noted that, in the Upper Amazon, sorcery accusations increase when distribution of wealth becomes more unequal. Among the Shuar, for example, a contemporary increase in accusations of sorcery apparently correlates with increasing urbanism, consumerism, and inequality in the distribution of goods. Thus sorcery accusations may encourage the dispersed settlement patterns and frequent splitting found in such Amazonian societies as the Shuar and Arakmbut. If sorcery challenges inequality, then sorcery, accusations of sorcery, and gossip about sorcery may — like warfare — function to maintain what Clastres calls the logic of separation.

Clastres stood against several philosophical strands that had been deeply woven into French culture before the 1970s — the Rousseauan idea that indigenous societies existed in a natural condition of noble innocence; the Marxist idea that indigenous societies lived in a condition of scarcity and were destined to turn into states; the Hegelian idea that an inevitable master-slave dialectic drives societies forward towards the end of history. Most of all, according to historian Samuel Moyn, he opposed the fashionable communist allegiances of postwar French intellectuals, and was one of the leaders in the 1970s critique of fulfillment through the totalitarian state. The Amazon had made him the first Nietzschean anthropologist.

Entheogen: The Movie

2009-01-27T06:06:00.000-08:00

On Friday, January 30, at The Wild Project in New York, Reality Sandwich, Souldish, and Critical Mass Productions will present a screening of the film Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within. Following the film there will be a panel discussion featuring the film's co-director Nikos Katsaounis, Reality Sandwich Contributing Editor Adam Elenbaas, and holistic health and philosophy instructor Tatiana Forero Puerta. An interview with Nikos Katsaounis is here.

Since at least the 1970s, a tenacious meme has circulated among a generally progressive youthful demographic, some of whom have now carried that meme with them into their elderhood. The meme states that there is a connection between our ecological crisis and our loss of earth-connected spirituality — a connection to both earth and spirit that we once possessed but have now lost, and which is still preserved for us by some indigenous peoples. Still, the meme says, there is hope. A spiritual awakening is coming, associated with the Age of Aquarius, or the fifth pachakuti, or the culmination of the Mayan calendar in the year 2012.

This shift is away from ego, self-importance, greed, racism, capitalism, consumerism, and left-brain linearity, and toward a recovery of our primal connectedness with nature. The signs of this shift are everywhere — in the rise of neoshamanism, technoshamanism, rave culture, and in the recovery of archaic techniques of ecstasy. Psychoactive substances, both natural and artificial, are an inherent part of this shift. Such entheogens — the term is taken to mean something like awakening the divine within — were the basis of a primal universal human spirituality and, indeed, may have been the basis of the very process of our becoming human. Today, entheogens not only reconnect us with our past but point us toward the future, where we will all be shamans — interconnected, peaceful, creative, and deeply in touch with spirit and the earth.

There. That's the plot of the movie.

Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within is a 70-minute documentary about ecological awareness, the evolution of consciousness, electronic dance culture, technoshamanism, the revival of shamanism — and, of course, entheogenic substances. In an interview, co-director Rod Mann said: "The film Entheogen is about discovering the ways in which we participate with the dance and flow of life — and how to maintain that flow. The film also gives us context from our history — from the evolution from indigenous tribes through shamanism through world religions throughout the course of history." He continues:

I think that entheogens offer us a window into the deeper dimensions of our Self, our psyches, our behaviors, our subconscious patterns, and we may use these substances in the proper context of course, to do the necessary work, the individuation, bringing a sense of awareness to ego inflation and self importance so that through that process we may gain a stronger sense of our community and our families, and also regarding other species, plants, etc. — how we fit into the sempiternal interconnected web of life which sustains the whole of existence.

The film features Charles Tart, Stanley Grof, Marilyn Schlitz, Ralph Metzner, Alex Grey, Terrence McKenna, John Markoff, Daniel Pinchbeck, Jeremy Narby, Barabara Marx Hubbard, Kat Harrison, and other carriers of the meme, discussing the relationship between the current ecological crisis and the re-emergence of archaic techniques of ecstasy, between dance festivals and the collective consciousness, and between the disenchantment of the modern world and the next leap in the evolution of the planetary mind.

And, if you can't make it to New York for the screening and panel discussion, you can buy the DVD here, or you can watch the entire film without leaving your computer:

Magic Stones

2009-01-26T01:40:00.000-08:00

Vance Gellert, Victor Ventos' Stones (2005)

Significant among the tools used by shamans in the Upper Amazon are piedras, or piedras encantadas, magic stones, sometimes called just encantos, charms; such stones are called inkantos by the Machiguenga and Shipibo. My teacher doña María Tuesta told me that her father was a tabaquero who kept two magic stones, one male and one female, in a jar filled with a mixture of tobacco and water. When doña María was about eight years old, while her father still lived with the family, she saw him work with the stones twice. She could see the spirits of the stones: they both had very dark skin and long black hair. The male spirit of the stone had dark red eyes like huayruro seeds. His mouth was painted red, the color of brujería, sorcery — magia roja, red magic, the worst kind. He could stick his tongue out all the way to his chest, as is typical of sorcerers; his flema, magical phlegm, was filled with scorpions, snakes, and toads.

In addition, doña María, in the dream journey that constituted her coronación as a prayer healer, dreamed that she passed by a stream in which piedritas, magical stones of all kinds, large and small, were singing to her: “Welcome, welcome, maestra, doctora.” Doña María counted such magic stones among her animal protectors, since the imanes, spirits, of the stones became black boas, yellow boas, condors, and macaws in order to protect her.

Black flint

Magic stones may — but need not be — striking in appearance: color, shape, and texture may indicate that a stone is, in fact, encantada. The stone may be shaped like a person or animal, like a snake or a jaguar claw, or have an unusual color, or be visually attractive, or just be rare. The stone may turn up in an unusual place or behave oddly; among the Aguaruna, a magic stone is often found in the stomach or crop of an animal as it is being cleaned. The stone may speak to the shaman, or the spirit of the stone may appear in the shaman’s dreams, or in an ayahuasca vision. Cocama shaman don Juan Curico says that encantos are stones that with time have taken the shape of jungle animals or human body parts. He himself has stones in the shape of a snail, the head of an anaconda, the head of a crocodile, a human hand and head.

Crystals particularly are prized; they are, says one mestizo shaman, luz solidificada, solidified light, with a celestial origin. Ordinary piedra pedernal, flint — “like a crystal, but black,” doña María explained to me — may be a powerful magic stone, perhaps in part because it is not native to the Amazon. Such stones come from Lima, I was told; they are about three inches long. If you put the stone in a glass jar of water, and then drink the water, the stone takes away shame, sorrow, anxiety.

Crystal

The doctrine of signatures applies to stones as well as to plants. Don Francisco Montes Shuña says that a shaman can tell what stones have power, and what power they have, by looking at their shape and color. A stone of white marble can be an arcana, protection, because it purifies, cleanses, and protects the body; a red stone can nourish the blood; translucent crystals give vision and clarity. A stone in the shape of a human hand can take away pain from the body part on which it is placed.

Magic stones will stick for several hours to the place on the body where sorcery has struck, suck out the harm — the dart, the insect, the scorpion, the phlegmosity — and then drop off. Stones can also be used to rub the place where the sickness is located, to loosen the intrusive pathogenic object, so that the shaman can suck it out from the suffering flesh.

Just as the shaman drinks the plants in order to master them, the shaman drinks the magic stones. The shaman leaves the stones in water for a day, observing la dieta, blowing tobacco smoke over them, telling the stone what the shaman wants to know, and finally drinking the water. The spirit of the stone will then appear in a dream and teach the shaman what the shaman seeks. The spirit of the stone can also be seen when drinking ayahuasca; the stones can also be kept in a tobacco infusion, and the tobacco drunk. “It is something admirable,” says don Juan Curico, “to share the wisdom of millions-year-old beings.”

Vance Gellert, Victor Ventos, Stone Healer (2005)

Beliefs about magic stones are widespread in the Upper Amazon. Among the Waiwai, a magic stone, called ñukwa, appears in the mouth of the apprentice shaman during a dream; holding the stone in his mouth, the apprentice learns to sing the magic songs. Similarly, Warao shamans acquire magic stones which descend into their mouths during dreams. Among the Aguaruna, magic stones are generally used for a variety of purposes — hunting, seduction, planting, warfare. These stones have souls, and can assume human form in dreams; they can drink blood, eat souls, and run away if not properly fed. Rock crystals among the Desana are invested with complex cosmological and sexual symbolism. The stones are fed on tobacco, and stored in water infusions of tobacco; these nicotine-rich infusions are drunk in order to communicate with the spirits of the stones.

Yagua shamans keep two kinds of magic stones — small stones called soul-stones or invisible stones, which are kept safe in the stomach; and visible stones, which are kept in a bag hung around the neck. No shaman ever shows these visible stones, saying that they would then lose their power. Blowing tobacco smoke on these stones increases their size a hundredfold. When small, they may be used as weapons, just like darts; when enlarged with tobacco smoke, they became a barrier of protection. Shamans can also keep pieces of glass, called transparent stones, in their stomach, which they can regurgitate and place in the beer gourds of their victims; when swallowed, the glass cuts up the body from the inside.

The Machigengua apprentice receives stones from an invisible celestial being who appears in the apprentice’s ayahuasca vision. The stones must be fed regularly with tobacco smoke; when they are thus nourished, they turn into jaguars. Machigengua shamans acquire these stones — light-colored or transparent, especially quartz crystals — during initiation or from the shaman’s father or other close relative. These stones are considered the body, or residence, or material manifestation of the spirits. The shaman carries the stones in a small bag and feeds the stones tobacco daily; if the shaman fails to do so, the spirits will leave the stones, and the shaman will die. Canelos Quichua believe that the spirits in their magic stones are those of dead shamans. If you gently blow on such a stone, you will see condensation appear on its surface; this shows that the stone “has breath,” that it is a powerful shaman.

Fire on the Mountain

2009-01-25T10:28:00.000-08:00

The documentary Fire on the Mountain: A Gathering of Shamans was filmed in 1997 at a ten-day gathering of tribal elders, wisdom keepers, and medicine women from five continents, who had travelled to Karma Ling, a Tibetan Buddhist retreat center in the French Alps, to discuss their concerns with the Dalai Lama and representatives of the world's religions.

The project had begun when Lama Denys Teundroup, the spiritual director of Karma Ling and Honorary President of the European Buddhist Union, was traveling in Ecuador, giving Buddhist teachings, and was invited by poet Alexis Naranjo to journey with him into the jungle to visit the Shuar. There Teundroup met Shuar shaman don Hilario Chiriap, and the two men quickly became friends. Teundroup was struck by the Shuar reverence for nature and its similarity to the Buddhist concern for the welfare of all sentient beings.

Don Hilario voiced his concern about the impact of deforestation and oil and mineral exploration on the rainforest, and expressed his wish for an international gathering where indigenous shamans from around the world could meet each other, present a united message to representatives of the world's organized religions, and challenge them to take up the environmental cause on spiritual grounds.

Six months later, Teundroup sent out the first invitations for an interfaith gathering "to explore the common themes of peace, compassion, and solidarity which underlie the world's faiths, and to draw attention to the endangered spiritual traditions of Indigenous Peoples, whose holistic ecological wisdom and social insights have so much to offer the modern world."

One of the first to accept the invitation was the Dalai Lama. "From my personal experience, I believe such a gathering should have two major objectives," he wrote. "The first is that the world's principal traditions consider how to participate in the improvement of the world and of Humankind as a whole, by promoting fundamental human values such as compassion and ethics. The second objective is that each of these major traditions consider how to contribute to the preservation of different ancient traditions which are working for the well-being and survival of their own communities."

The brochure for the Gathering said: "The monotheistic religions descended from Abraham, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, together with Hinduism and Buddhism, now communicate with each other through a deepening interfaith dialogue that is actively engaged in the development of peace and the promotion of universal values. If these religious traditions, through some of their representatives — in their differences, oppositions, or rivalries — become factors of war, then their dialogue in respect of the difference of each one, is on the contrary the true source of a profound peace."

The gathering, which ran from April 26 to May 2, 1997, was offically held as part of the United Nations 1995–2004 Decade of Indigenous Peoples. The ceremonies included Buddhist and Bön rituals from Tibet, a tree blessing by a shaman from Tuva, a healing ceremony by a woman shaman from the Buryat Republic, a Voudoun ceremony from Benin, shamanic rituals by a Shuar shaman, prayer rituals by the elder wisdom-keeper of the endangered Rendille nomads of Kenya, a night-time celebration where a Purupecha medicine man of the Native American Church performed the Ceremony of the Four Colors, and other ceremonies performed by representatives of the North American Tlingit, Onondaga, Apache, Mohawk, and Cherokee peoples.

As these indigenous spiritual leaders performed their ceremonies, they realized how much they had in common — a loving respect for the natural world, belief in the importance of dreams, the persecution and suffering of their people, and a determination that the old ways be preserved for future generations.

This private part of the gathering was followed by a public event where the Dalai Lama and the shamans shared their conclusions with high-level representatives of the world's organized religions, in front of an audience of five thousand people who had spent the previous four days listening to the Dalai Lama's teachings on the Four Noble Truths. The official photographer was Henri Cartier-Bresson. A book has been published about the gathering — Le Cercle des Anciens: Des hommes-medecine du monde entier autour du Dalai Lama, by Patrice Van Eersel and Alain Grosrey.

The documentary film was produced and directed by award-winning filmmaker David Cherniack, and is available for purchase from Mystic Fire Video. The documentary has been made available on the Web in its entirety.

Long-Term Peyote Use

2009-01-24T07:25:00.000-08:00

I talked here and here about a 1996 study of long-time users of ayahuasca in the União do Vegetal church, which showed that drinking ayahuasca hundreds of times over decades of participation had no adverse impact on personality, and was in fact associated with significantly higher scores on measures of concentration and short-term memory.

In 2005, a similar study of long-term peyote-using members of the Native American Church reported similar results. The study was funded by the National Institute for Drug Abuse and published in the journal Biological Psychiatry. Members of the Native American Church may attend ceremony as often as two or three nights a week or as infrequently as once a year, but most members attend, on average, one ceremony a month. Many ingest peyote hundreds or thousands of times in their lifetime.

The study involved three groups of Navajos aged 18 to 45 years old — 61 Native American Church members who reported ingesting peyote on a least a hundred occasions; 36 recovering alcoholics, sober at least two months, who reported a history of drinking more than fifty twelve-ounce beers or their equivalent per week for at least five years; and a comparison group of 79 persons reporting minimal lifetime use of peyote or any other substance.

All the participants were given a battery of ten nonverbal neuropsychological tests as well as the Rand Mental Health Inventory, a standard instrument used to diagnose psychological problems and determine overall mental health, including subtests that examine anxiety, depression, life satisfaction, and behavioral and emotional control. No significant differences were found between the peyote group and the comparison group on any of the neuropsychological measures. The peyote group also showed no significant differences from the comparison group on most scales of the RMHI, except that they scored significantly better than the comparison group on two scales that measure general positive affect and psychological well-being.

Moreover, within the peyote group, log-transformed lifetime episodes of peyote use showed no significant associations with neuropsychological measures, and were associated with significantly better scores on several RMHI measures. In other words, the more that people had participated in peyote ceremonies, the better were their mental health scores.

Of course, as with the União do Vegetal study, these results are associated with two potential causal factors — peyote use on the one hand, and, on the other hand, attendance at more than a hundred religious ceremonies. The study does nothing to disentangle these. But, again as with the União do Vegetal study, the results demonstrate that long-term peyote use in a ceremonial context certainly has no adverse effect on cognition or overall mental health. As the study states, "These findings suggest that long-term use of this hallucinogenic substance, at least when ingested as a bona fide sacrament, is not associated with adverse residual psychological or cognitive effects."

The study includes a caution that these results cannot be generalized to other hallucinogens. "It is not clear whether our findings with peyote would apply to other types of hallucinogens," the article states. "We cannot exclude the possibility that long-term use of chemically different hallucinogens (such as LSD or psilocybin) might produce adverse residual effects, even if peyote does not." One of the authors of the study, in an interview, explained this concern. "The hallucinogens that are typically abused on the street by substance abusers are LSD and psilocybin, which is the principal component of mushrooms," he said. "Those are indole molecules, and an indole is a different type of molecule from mescaline, which is the hallucinogenic component of peyote. So even if it is true that peyote has no long-term neuropsychological toxicity, you still cannot leap to the conclusion that indoles lack such toxicity."

Of course, dimethyltryptamine, a hallucinogenic component of the ayahuasca drink, is just such an indole. Yet the peyote study surprisingly makes no reference to the União do Vegetal ayahuasca study, which, since it was published nine years earlier in the prestigious Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease, seems hard to miss, and which might have gone some way toward addressing that concern.

Ayahuasca and Cancer

2009-01-23T05:46:00.000-08:00

In 1998, a man named Donald Topping wrote an article in the Bulletin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies entitled Ayahuasca and Cancer: One Man's Experience. Topper was a retired professor of sociology and linguistics at the University of Hawai’i, a proponent of drug policy reform, an advocate for medical marijuana, and a founder of the Drug Policy Forum of Hawai’i. He had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer and been treated, apparently successfully, with surgery. But, in September 1996, he was told that the cancer had metastasized to his liver; the next month, the right half of his liver was surgically removed. A long-time believer in alternative medicine, he refused follow-up chemotherapy.

The article he wrote two years after this diagnosis tells an extraordinary story. Beginning four months after his surgery, he drank ayahuasca four times — twice in ceremonies of the Santo Daime church, and twice with an unidentified person who claimed to have studied ayahuasca with shamans in Peru. A week after his fourth ayahuasca session, he was given a blood test for carcinoembryonic antigen, a cancer marker, and the following week the oncologist told him that his CEA count was completely normal. "You're one of the lucky few," the oncologist told him. Topping attributed his recovery to ayahuasca.

A year later, in 1999, he followed up with another article in the Bulletin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies entitled Ayahuasca and Cancer: A Postscript. Here he said that "the metastasized cancer appears to be in complete remission." He said that he has no scientific understanding of how ayahuasca had the effect it did, but he suspects that it had something to do with ayahuasca realigning his cells.

Topping died of his cancer on June 29, 2003, at the age of 73, apparently having continued to refuse chemotherapy. Fewer than ten percent of patients with metastatic colorectal cancer survive for three years after the initial diagnosis; fewer than four percent survive for five years. There is no question that Topping's seven-year survival was remarkable. The question is whether it had anything to do with his having drunk ayahuasca four times shortly after his diagnosis, and — this is unclear — at various times after that. There seems to be very little reason to believe that it did.

No scientist or physician ever considered Topping's ingestion of ayahuasca to have anything to do with his remarkable survival. No study — indeed, as far as I know, not even a case report published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal — has ever associated ayahuasca with cancer remission. No constituent of the ayahuasca drink has ever been associated with anticancer activity.

I have found very few additional claims by cancer patients of having been cured by ayahuasca. In a 1996 interview, a woman named Anna reports having been cured of malignant breast cancer by a Peruvian shaman during a single very intense ayahuasca session, during which she was also given an infusion of the bark of a tree she calls capipa, which she says is a traditional cancer remedy, and which I have been unable to identify. The story has very few medical details. Another story, interestingly, tells of how an increase in the cancer protein marker Ca125 led the writer to fear a recurrence of her earlier — and apparently successfully treated — ovarian cancer. She was reassured by a vision during an ayahuasca session that she had no cancer, and, upon retesting, her Ca125 level had in fact returned to normal. Sadly, the reassurance proved false. A year after her ayahuasca experience, her Ca125 levels again began to rise, several small tumors were discovered, and she began chemotherapy again.

A number of curanderos claim that they can cure cancer, although, for reasons discussed below, it is often not clear that they are claiming to do so by using ayahuasca rather than other traditional healing plants. Ayahuasquero don Juan Tangoa Paima claims, for example, that he can heal cancer, as well as AIDS, epilepsy, heart disease, stomach and intestinal conditions, sexually transmitted diseases, depression, drug addiction, mental disorders, migraines, anxiety, and obesity — indeed, the "complete and total healing of any and all afflictions." Dr. Roberto Incháustegui Gonzalez , who is the drector of the Hospital de la Luz in Iquitos, or perhaps director of the Instituto de Medicina Tropical de Loreto, has been said to cure cancer with ayahuasca, although elsewhere he claims to cure Parkinson's disease, diabetes, psoriasis, and various forms of cancer using hierbas de la selva, jungle plants, among which ayahuasca may or may not be included.

Thus, apart from a few anecdotes and apparently inflated claims, I am aware of no scientific basis to believe that ayahuasca can cure cancer. Now this is an entirely different question from the idea that ayahuasca can bring healing in the sense of acceptance, reconciliation, or life-affirming joy. It is an entirely different question from whether any profound spiritual experience can have an effect on cancer survival — a proposition that is itself deeply controversial. And it is an entirely different question from whether some other jungle plants that are traditionally used for the purpose, such as uña de gato, Uncaria tomentosa, might have anticancer properties.

Robert Forte is a scholar of the history and psychology of the ancient and modern use of psychedelic drugs. Over the last thirty years he has worked with Stanislav Grof, Albert Hofmann, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Claudio Naranjo, and many other figures in the modern psychedelic movement. He edited the collections Entheogens and the Future of Religion and Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In. He holds a master's degree in the psychology of religion from the University of Chicago Divinity School, was a director of the Albert Hofmann Foundation, and taught at the University of California–Santa Cruz. He is currently adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and advisor to the Purdue University Library Special Collection on Psychoactive Substances.

On December 11, 2008, Forte posted a notice on the message board of the CancerCompass website, where he says:

There are several very compelling reports of ayahuasca — a medicine used throughout South America — combined with rigorous diet, and a profound spiritual and psychological component, being helpful in treating cancer.... I have been studying ayahuasca for several years and have received a small grant to explore its uses in its native context. I'd like to invite one or two people who have cancer to embark on a journey to Peru, for one month and see if these natural remedies work. I can show you, and perhaps introduce you to people who have done this.... I've posted here with the hope to find someone who might be up for an adventurous healing journey.

The message contains only two references. The first is to the second of the two articles by Donald Topping, which we discussed above; and the second is to Forte's own book, Entheogens and the Future of Religion, whose writings, he says, "reflect my approach to these practices." Already one person, suffering from angiosarcoma of the breast, has expressed interest.

I think what we are observing here is the slow imposition of a western idea on traditional shamanic practice in the Upper Amazon — the idea that ayahuasca is a particularly powerful healing plant. The power of its healing is then apotheosized as being a cure for cancer, the ultimate disease — intractable, unpredictable, disfiguring, deadly.

But this is not how ayahuasca is thought of in the Upper Amazon. I am aware of no ayahuasca-using culture of the Upper Amazon in which ayahuasca is considered to be autonomously healing of anything, including cancer. Rather it is viewed as a tool for diagnosis and prescription.

Shamans in the Upper Amazon do not drink ayahuasca to heal; they drink ayahuasca to get information — as Cocama shaman don Juan Curico puts it, “to screen the disease and to search the treatment.” Mestizo shaman don Manuel Córdova says the same thing: “Ayahuasca, it tells you how, but by itself it cures nothing.”

If a patient comes to an Upper Amazonian shaman to be healed of, say, cancer, the traditional purpose of drinking ayahuasca is not to heal the cancer, but rather to determine both the etiology and the treatment of the disease. The ayahuasca tells the shaman where to suck, and what healing plants to use after the carcinogenic projectile has been removed. The ayahuasca reveals to the patient the person ultimately responsible for this intrusion and the resulting cancer — the identity of the sorcerer who projected it, the faithless spouse or false business partner or offended stranger who instigated the attack.

Then other medicines, empowered by magic song, are used to heal.