Some Announcements

• The Spring 2008 meeting of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness will take place at the Yale Divinity School from March 19-23, 2008. The theme of the conference, which is being co-sponsored by the Yale Divinity School's Initiative in Religion, Science, and Technology, will be Consciousness and Spirit. You can take a look at the conference program here. There will be scores of presentations; among the many that might be of interest to readers of this blog are Evgenia Fotiou, Transcendental experiences with ayahuasca among western users; Stanley Krippner and Adam Rock, Realism and the shaman’s cosmos; Maria Glowacka, Potentiality or 'spirit': an ethno-linguistic interpretation of Hopi ontology; and Malte Chr. Lyneborg, Philosophy of perception, sacred places, and spirit worlds.


• The Fourth Annual Conference on Shamanism and Shamanic Practice, sponsored by the Society for Shamanic Practitioners, will be held in Sante Fe, New Mexico, on May 15-18, 2008. Among the preconference workshops will be two of special interest — Enrique Flores, Herlinda Fernandez, Jose Luis Stevens, and Lena Stevens, Healing traditions of the Shipibo, followed by a presentation of a documentary film by Anna Stevens, Woven songs of the Amazon. Additional presentations that might be of interest include Carol Proudfoot-Edgar, Tom Cowan, and Cecile Carson, Shamanism without borders; Stanley Krippner and Sidian Morning Star, Shamanic ecology; and David Cumes, Shamans and the dream time.


• The very first issue of The Journal of Shamanic Practice: Exploring Traditional and Contemporary Shamanism has been published. The issue contains an editorial by Barbara Tedlock, a guest editorial by Jeanne Achterberg, essays and articles by such experts as Dennis Tedlock and Hank Wesselman, and Marilyn Walker's outstanding interview with Anai, a Tsaatan shaman of the Mongolian taiga. The journal is free to members of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners.

And here are two important events taking place this summer in Iquitos, Peru.

• Convergence 2008, to be held in Iquitos on July 10 through July 18, 2008, is intended to be an ayahuasca shamanism seminar, retreat, and visionary gathering — as the organizers put it, a little bit of Bioneers, a little bit of Burning Man. The Convergence will offer dialogues, lectures, indigenous art workshops, traditional indigenous and leading-edge music, visionary art exhibitions, and ayahuasca ceremonies. Among the presenters will be artist Pablo Amaringo, Shipibo shamans Guillermo Arévalo and Maria Valera, visionary artist Eric Avondo, anthropologist Jeremy Narby, and many others.


• The Fourth Amazonian Shamanism Conference will be held in Iquitos on July 19 through July 27, 2008. The conference will be opened by Dennis Mckenna, and presenters will include artist Pablo Amaringo, filmmaker and director Jan Kounen, visionary artists Robert Venosa and Martina Hoffman, author Howard Charing, sound healer Richard Grossman, journalist Peter Gorman, and many others. There will be approximately fifteen indigenous and mestizo shamans giving presentations and offering evening ceremonies.

The War on Coca Leaves

Chuspa, traditional coca bag

Chewing the leaves of the coca plant (Erythroxylum coca) plays a significant role in traditional Andean culture. Coca acts as a stimulant to overcome fatigue, hunger, and thirst. It is considered particularly effective against altitude sickness. It also is used as an anaesthetic to alleviate the pain of headache, rheumatism, wounds and sores. Coca leaf chewing is most common among indigenous communities across the central Andean region, particularly in the highlands of Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru, where the cultivation and consumption of coca is part of the national culture, and where sharing coca leaves is a powerful symbol of social and cultural solidarity. And the consumption of mate de coca, coca tea, is common among all sectors of society in the Andean countries, and is widely held to be beneficial to health, particularly at high altitudes.

Chewing coca leaves

Doris Rivera Lenz, in an interview with Howard G. Charing, says that chewing coca is part of an Andean culture that knows how to make work into a sacred activity. When sharing coca, a mouthful of leaves is carefully chosen from a decorated chuspa, coca bag, and mixed with llipta or ilucta, alkaline lye, while chewing, to release the active ingredients; the lye is often kept in an ishcupuro, a small decorated gourd hung around the neck, and added to the leaves with a small stick. Sharing coca leaves may be a preliminary to the sacred Andean mesa ceremony, and coca leaves play a crucial part in offerings to the apus, inti, and pachamama — the mountains, the sun, and mother earth. Coca leaves are often used for medical diagnosis and divination.

However, the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances classifies coca in Schedule I, along with cocaine and heroin, as substances that are considered particularly unsafe and lacking any medical use. Under Article 7(a), parties to the convention must prohibit “all use except for scientific and very limited medical purposes.” This classification is based primarily on a 1950 study, widely considered to be seriously flawed, which included the coca leaf as “narcotic drug."

Coca leaves for sale in the marketplace

This month, the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) — 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 asks Bolivia and Peru to make possessing and using coca leaf criminal offenses — a move that would affect millions of people in the Andes and Amazon. The INCB is heavily influenced by the United States when making and suggesting policy. The 2007 recommendation reads:

Recommendation 7: The practice of chewing coca leaves continues in Bolivia and Peru. The countries in the region are suffering from the illicit manufacture of and trafficking in cocaine. The Board calls upon the Governments of Bolivia and Peru to initiate action without delay with a view to eliminating uses of coca leaf, including coca leaf chewing, that are contrary to the 1961 Convention. The Governments of those countries and Colombia should strengthen their efforts against the illicit manufacture of and trafficking in cocaine. The Board calls on the international community to provide assistance to those countries towards achieving those objectives.

Coca leaf divination

This recommendation has been widely criticized. Famed Amazonian ethnobotanist James Duke and pharmacologist Dennis McKenna, an expert on psychoactive substances, have condemned the proposed ban. The Transnational Institute, a group that studies drugs and conflict in the region, made the following statement: "The INCB, rather than making harsh judgements based on a selective choice of outdated treaty articles, should use its mandate more constructively and help draw attention to the inherent contradictions in the current treaty system with regard to how plants, plant-based raw materials and traditional uses are treated."

Some of the criticisms have been quite blunt. Pien Metaal, a researcher specializing in coca issues at the Transnational Institute, put it like this: “The Board is displaying both arrogance and blindness by demanding that countries impose criminal sanctions on distribution and possession for traditional uses of the coca leaf, which is a key feature of Andean-Amazon indigenous cultures. Isn’t it time for this UN treaty body to get in touch with reality and show some more cultural sensitivity?” And the International Drug Policy Consortium said, "The approach adopted in the report towards this complex and sensitive issue demonstrates a surprising ignorance and insensitivity not suitable for a UN body."

Congresswoman Hilaria Supa Huamán

Even more srikingly, legislators in Peru criticized the recommendation by defiantly chewing coca leaves on the congessional floor. Congresswoman Hilaria Supa Huamán — activist, active member of several indigenous women's organizations, and congressional representative for the Andean capital of Cusco — initiated the protest. "The coca leaf has existed for thousands and thousands of years," she said. "It's part of our agriculture, our food and our medicine. It's sacred." And she added: "The United Nations doesn't know our culture. It doesn't understand our values." Dozens of politicians took handfuls and chewed the leaf during what has been described as "a raucous session."

Jose Garcia Belaunde, the foreign relations minister of Peru, said that Peru's right to chew coca leaves is protected as an Andean tradition. Bolivian President Evo Morales, who rose to power as a leader of coca growers, has pushed to have coca removed from its current classification as a controlled substance.

Some Thoughts on DMT Art

A number of artists have attempted to render the striking visual experiences that occur after ingesting ayahuasca or DMT. In the Upper Amazon, there are both indigenous artists, whose traditional work consists largely of abstract patterns, such as those found on the now well-known pottery, clothing, and other household goods of the Shipibo; and visionary artists, mostly mestizo, whose work is characterized by detailed representations of spirits, trees, animals, objects, and participants in ayahuasca healing ceremonies. These latter works fall almost paradigmatically within what has now come to be called outsider art, sometimes naïve art, and sometimes visionary art — direct, intense, content-laden, narrative, enormously detailed, personal, idiosyncratic, two-dimensional, and brightly colored. While indigenous artists work for the most part in anonymity, their work stigmatized as craft rather than art, the work of mestizo visionary artists has become much better known, largely through the publication, fully annotated and sumptuously reproduced, of the visionary paintings of former shaman Pablo César Amaringo.

Outside the Amazon, artists not born into or raised in indigenous or mestizo ayahuasca-using cultures, including such well-known visionary artists as Alex Grey, Robert Venosa, and Martina Hoffmann, have also rendered visual experiences attributed to the ingestion of ayahuasca or DMT. For want of a better term, I will call this body of work DMT art.

There are some remarkable convergences between DMT art and the abstract representations of the ayahuasca experience in indigenous Amazonian art. The indigenous work on the left, below, by Cashinahua artist Arlindo Daureano Estevão, represents the different worlds of the ayahuasca vision as houses with doors to be entered and paths linking the different contained spaces. This type of design is called nawan kene pua, or stranger's design, since it is a map that keeps one from getting lost in the ayahuasca world. This abstract representation is strikingly reflected in the work on the right, below, entitled DMT, by photographer Peter Kosinski. It is difficult to say whether such convergences are due to acquaintance with indigenous art or to similarities in the visionary experience.

Arlindo Daureano Estevão, Nawan Kene Pua	Peter Kosinski, DMT

Similarly, on the left below is a traditional Shipibo woven cloth, whose design represents a sacred pattern derived from a cosmic anaconda whose skin embodies all possible designs. Shipibo shamans employ these patterns to reorder the bodies of persons who are sick. Certain diseases are thought to be caused by harmful, messy designs on the wsick body, which the shaman must magically unravel and replace with orderly designs. After drinking ayahuasca, the Shipibo shaman sees a luminous design in the air. When this design floats down and touches the shaman’s lips it becomes transformed into a song the shaman sings. Different elements of the song relate to different elements of the design; for example, the end of each verse is associated with the end-curl of a design motif. When the patient is cured, the design has become clear, neat, and complete. Again, this abstract representation is strikingly reflected in Vibrata Chromodoris's Emergence, below on the right.

Anonymous, Shipibo Woven Cloth	Vibrata Chromodoris, Emergence

However, most DMT art is representational rather than abstract, and taps into the work of mestizo Amazon visionary artists. The first painting below is by mestizo artist Pablo Amaringo; the remaining pieces are DMT art by artists from outside the Amazon, all working with content recognizably similar to that of Amaringo, although not necessarily in the same naïve outsider style.

Pablo Amaringo, Ayahuasca and Chacruna (Detail)	Robert Venosa, Ayahuasca Dream (Detail)
Cyril Lanier, Ayahuasca Vision of the Blue Perfume	Michael Jacobs, Ayahuasca Dream

But even more striking, I think, are two motifs that appear with some frequency in DMT art but not in the indigenous or mestizo artistic traditions. The first of these I will call The Face — that is, a recognizably humanoid face with eyes, a nose, and a mouth, often filling the entire frame, and often constructed from smaller units, either geometric figures or dots. These figures are often described as a being, an entity, or a visitation. For example, Roger Essig says of his painting DMT Entity, below on the right, "This image was inspired from my first unnatural encounter with the spirit molecule. An Entity that seemed extremely real and intelligent appeared before me with terrific precision and speed. It dissipated as soon as I imposed my will upon it."

Alex Grey, Ayahuasca Visitation	Roger Essig, DMT Entity

Indeed, The Face often appears in works that are not conceptually about The Face. In Luke Brown's Pineal Feline, for example, below on the right, the titular face is that of a cat, at the bottom center of the painting; what then makes up The Face are floral arabesques and ornamentation of the cat's face, almost entirely buried within — indeed, reduced almost to a decorative adornment of — The Face. Similarly, in Martina Hoffman's La Chacruna, below on the left, The Face decomposes, upon closer inspection, into arabesques, including snakes and elephant heads, elaborated upon the relatively small face of the goddess, in the upper middle of the painting.

Martina Hoffmann, La Chacruna	Luke Brown, Pineal Feline

Sometimes The Face is deconstructed to simpler, rather than more complex, elements. At that point, we can begin to see the basic patterns from which complex Faces are constructed.

Dennis Konstantin, DMT Entity	Nisvan, Ayahuasca Vision (Detail)

What is interesting here is that underlying The Face is a relatively simple symmetric pattern, not unlike the abstract patterns of indigenous Amazonian ayahuasca art, but here cognitively assembled into a recognizable human face. Perhaps that is why Essig's Face dissipated as soon as he imposed his will upon it; attempting to control the image distracted the perceiver from its imposed structural coherence.

Another recurring motif we can call the wingspread. This is a pattern very similar to the wings of a moth or dragonfly. Below, for example, is a more or less typical moth — actually, the tobacco hornworm moth (Maduca sexta):

Wingspread Moth

We can see this wingspread motif reproduced with increasing elaboration in the following pictures:

Dennis Konstantin Last night I was Astro Dynamic (Detail)	Carey Thompson, Diosa Madre Tierra
Danny Gomez, DMT (Detail)	Robert Venosa, Yage Guide

Strikingly, this wingspread pattern is often hidden rather than explicit, providing a formal structure rather than any content; look, for example, at the wingspread position of the hands in Alex Grey's Light Weaver, especially in conjunction with, say, Robert Venosa's Yagé Guide, above. The wingspread pattern underlies the purely formal similarity between Mariela de la Paz's Ayahuaska at the Gates of San Pedro and Alejandre Segrégio's Presente Divino. Indeed, sometimes this structure is so deeply embedded as to be difficult to discern, until the pattern suddenly emerges, as with the darker rock formation in Olga Spiegel's Rendezvous.

Mariela de la Paz, Ayahuaska at the Gates of San Pedro	Alex Grey, Light Weaver
Alejandre Segrégio, Presente Divino (Detail)	Olga Spiegel, Rendezvous

The Jungle Cookbook

Small game is a staple in the diet of both mestizo and indigenous peoples in the Upper Amazon. Frequently hunted mammals include large rodents, such as agouti (Dasyprocta fuliginosa) and capybara (Hydrochaeris hydrochaeris); monkeys, especially howler monkeys (Alouatta seniculus) and spider monkeys (Ateles belzebuth); peccary, including huangana, white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari), and sajino, collared peccary (Tayassu tajacu); sachavaca, tapir (Tapirus terrestris); and gray and red brocket deer (Mazama spp.). Most hunting for small game is done with a 16-gauge shotgun.

Agouti (Dasyprocta fuliginosa) with edible brain and tongue

Small game is generally gutted but not skinned. Once I was helping my jungle survival instructor, Gerineldo Moises Chavez, field dress an agouti — essentially a large rat. "In North America," I said, "we generally take off the head." He looked at me as if I was crazy. "Lots of good things in the head," he said.

Once gutted, the entire animal is thrown onto a fire. When the hair has been singed, any remaining hair is removed by scraping. Mestizo hunters may then roast the game over a small fire, which can be quite palatable, especially when flavored with albaca, wild basil (Ocimum micranthum), or ajosacha, wild garlic (Mansoa alliacea), which has the additional advantage, hunters believe, of disguising human scent. With some plátano, plantain (Musa paradisiaca), roasted on the fire; some chonta, palm heart; and some huito fruit (Genipa americana) for desert, roast large rodent can be a treat. "You cannot go hungry in the jungle," Moises told me.

In indigenous villages, on the other hand, the carcass is chopped indiscriminately into pieces, put into a pot of boiling water, and boiled like crazy. This is not gourmet cooking. I tried to introduce the Shapra Indians to the idea of a nicely trimmed monkey roast, but they were disinterested. They preferred just to boil the bejeezus out of their meat.

Monkey for dinner

There are, I think, two reasons why small mammals are not skinned. First, there is no use for the skin. Indigenous peoples of the Upper Amazon appear to lack material goods because they can make anything they need very quickly from resources that are ready to hand. I have seen Shapra Indians make a basket out of leaves in just a few minutes, fill it with gathered fruit, carry it back to the village, and simply discard it. It is easier to make the basket than it is to keep it. Second, there is reason to believe that the subcutaneous fat of small game is one of the few sources of fat in the indigenous diet. This may also account for the preference for boiling, which preserves the fat, as opposed to roasting, which does not.

Other small game — birds, tortoises, caimans — is treated pretty much the same way: inedible parts, such as feathers and shells, are removed; everything else is chopped up and boiled. Attractive feathers are kept for making crowns and jewelry; other inedible parts are thrown away.

Scraping off the hair

One exception I have seen has been the drying of peccary hides to be carried downriver to market. I remember spending two days in a speedboat filled with the smell of gasoline in 55-gallon drums and a pile of raw peccary hides decomposing in the heat. Vividly.

Once, when I and a few friends lived among the Shapra and Candoshi Indians, we were eating boiled monkey soup. A friend of mine dipped in, pulled out a wrinkled pale piece of meat, and handed it to me. "Please tell me this is not the asshole," my friend said. I looked at it. I sniffed it. "Yup," I said. "That's the asshole." We discreetly discarded that piece of meat.

The complete one-pot jungle kitchen, with wooden paddle for stirring the soup

When hunting is good, extra meat and fish are smoked and salted. Fish that has been salted and dried in the sun makes excellent pack food for long trips; I recall a memorable snack of smoked salted monkey cheeks. Fariña — coarsely ground dried yuca root (Manihot esculenta) — is the jungle survival food of the mestizos. It is light in weight, easy to pack, and, believe me, a little bit goes a long way. It tastes like the worst breakfast cereal you ever had. Fariña can be mixed with water, lemon, and — if you are on la dieta — sugar, to make what is called shibé, which is a significant improvement.

Suri, the grubs of palm beetles (Rhynchophorus palmarum), are such a special treat that I discuss them separately here. Fishing, especially with the fish poison barbasco (Lonchocarpus urucu), will get a blog post of its own.

I would really enjoy hearing other people's stories of jungle cuisine — with recipes, if possible.

Terry Riley's Peyote Ceremony

Terry Riley

I have always been a big fan of Terry Riley. I still have my original 1964 vinyl pressing of his In C, which burst on the classical music scene like a revelation — minimalist, aleatoric, melodic, haunting. His musical trajectory has carried him beyond minimalism to a sometimes startling eclecticism, but all his music is shimmering, luminescent, and beautiful. My teacher don Roberto Acho spoke of the singing of the plants as being puro sonido, pure sound; Riley writes, in the same sense, pure music.

The Kronos Quartet

Riley's latest work is The Cusp of Magic, a string quartet commisioned by the Kronos Quartet, his long-time collaborators, in celebration of his seventieth birthday. The work showcases his sonic eclecticism, employing the sound of children's toys, peyote rattles, synthesizer, drums, and the instrumental and vocal talents of Wu Man, master of the Chinese pipa, a type of lute. Riley said that, above all, he wanted the piece to be, as he put it, magical. And, indeed, the work takes its title from the summer solstice, and represents all those moments of transition when the world becomes filled with possibility, miraculous, like Riley's music itself, in which, all at once, there is the inimitable sound of a rubber duck.

"It was in my mind all the time," Riley explains, "to have layers in this piece that had different realities and that can be perceived in different ways." He based the opening and closing movements of his quartet on the peyote ceremonies of the Native American Church — an attempt to capture, in his own idiom, the all-night ceremonies of prayer, songs, and meditation, which themselves live on the threshold of the magical world.

Wu Man with pipa

The first section of the work, entitled The Cusp of Magic, inspired by the peyote ceremony, is built on a rhythmically shifting pulse of drum and rattle; the final section, entitled Prayer Circle, returns to the peyote ritual pulse, now without drum and rattle, weaving together the pipa with the string quartet. The Kronos Quartet's violinist David Harrington has said that this section is "one of the great movements that Terry's ever written, and the propulsion that it gets to at the end, you feel like the piece is bounding with joy. The level of variety in feelings and emotions has rarely been equaled, including really thoughtful considerations about the world that we're all a part of right now, about what we're all facing in the future."

Riley has participated in peyote ceremonies, and he intended this section to take the listener similarly from dark to dawn. In a peyote ceremony, each participant contributes a unique song, and all the voices combine to create, through the sacred night, a coherent and transformative experience. Here is how Riley, in the final section of Cusp, presents that ceremony:

Riley says that peyote ceremonies are no longer part of his life. He still keeps sacred plants in his garden, he says, given to him by an Oklahoma medicine man; but they are not there to be ingested. "The plants absorb the music," he explains, "and I absorb their vibes." Reviews of The Cusp of Magic are here, here, here, and here.

Virotes

Virotes

A virote was originally a crossbow bolt, brought to South America by the conquistadores. The Spanish term was then applied to the darts shot by the Indians with a blowgun. These darts were made primarily from two sources — from the spines of any of the spiny Bactris or Astrocaryum palms or from any of several Euterpe palms, whose very hard wood is used to make both bows and arrows. My jungle survival instructor, Gerineldo Moises Chavez, could whittle a usable dart from the wood of a Euterpe palm with his machete in less than a minute.

Spiny Astrocaryum palm

All three genera are known rather indiscriminately as chonta, and the term chonta is often used as a synonym for virote. Thus, too, the verb chontear means to cast magic darts at a victim; a chontero is a sorcerer who inflicts harm with magic darts. Euterpe and Bactris species, too, are a primary source of edible palm hearts, also called chonta; palm hearts make a delicious salad. The Shuar term uwishín, shaman, may derive from uwí, the spiny Bactris palm, which they also know as chonta; the Shuar thus often use the term chonta as a synonym for the Shuar word tsentsak, magic dart.

Spiny Bactris palm

The virtually universal method of inflicting magical harm in the Upper Amazon is to project a pathogenic object into the body of the victim. Among mestizos and a number of indigenous peoples this projectile is conceptualized primarily as a virote, a magic dart. This intrusion causes acute and painful sickness, which can kill within a few days. To understand the power of the virote, we can turn to poet César Calvo, who writes that it is a “very small poisoned dart, capable of abandoning and resuming its material shape in order to traverse any distance; any time; any wall, shield, or protection; to nail itself in enemy flesh and to reach the target selected by the sorcerer who gave it form and then animated that form, endowing it with destiny and transcendence.”

Darts in the phlegm of a Shipibo sorcerer (detail from a painting by Pablo Amaringo)

But these pathogenic projectiles can also be — varying in different cultures and under different circumstances — tufts of hair, tiny stones, quartz crystals, fur, insects, beetles, scorpions, snake fangs, stingray stings, the beaks of certain birds, porcupine quills, bats, toads, snakes, monkey teeth, sharp-pointed bones, a piece of a knife, a bead, stinging caterpillars, crystal arrows, or razor blades. A Cashinahua claimed to have seen the muka, the bitter shamanic substance, within the body of a shaman — a small ball of poison, a small piece of a knife, a small wood splinter, a bead.

Insects, spiders, and scorpions in the phlegm of a Cocama sorcerer (detail from a painting by Pablo Amaringo)

These pathogenic objects are kept within the shaman’s body, often embedded in some phlegm- or saliva-like substance. The projectiles are also in some sense autonomous, alive, spirits, sometimes with their own needs and desires, including a need for nourishment, often supplied by tobacco, or a need to consume human flesh. The darts, and their slimy or sticky carrier, are defensive as well as offensive; they can prevent enemy darts from entering the body, or absorb them, acquire their power, or project them back to the one who sent them. The same darts that are used in attack sorcery are most effective in protection against attack. The primary cure for the intrusion of such a magical object into the body is its extraction: the healing shaman sucks it out and disposes of it.

A painting by Pablo Amaringo shows the phlegm of two sorcerers — a Shipibo chontero, who inflicts harm with darts made from the thorns of spiny palms, the fangs of snakes, the beaks of birds, porcupine quills; and a Cocama sorcerer, whose phlegm contains snakes, scorpions, bats, rays, toads, which he sends to inflict harm.

Palm heart (chonta) salad

Among mestizos and other peoples, these projectiles are taken from the phlegm and shot into the victim by blowing with the mouth, either with or without tobacco smoke. Other sorcerers may project them through their arms and out an opening in their hands; or they may be carried by an animal or bird controlled by the sorcerer, given in food or drink, or left on the ground to be stepped on. Yagua shamans keep their darts in their stomach — some claim to have as many as a thousand — and project them by rubbing their arm and shoulder progressively toward their hand; the dart is extracted by blowing with tobacco smoke, propelled with the aid of magic gloves, and carried to its destination by the spirit allies.

Remember that the next time you are eating an expensive heart-of-palm salad.

Visionary Information

As I have said before, the shaman can see things that people who are not shamans cannot. The shaman may be able to find lost objects, know where game is plentiful, discern who has cast a curse, diagnose the location or cause of an illness. Many scholars, influenced by the work of Mircea Eliade, maintain that the characteristic activity of shamanism is soul flight — celestial ascent, ecstasy, out-of-body journeys to the spirit realm, almost always vertically, upwards, toward the sky. And it is true that, among some shamanic traditions, out-of-body flight is the way that shamans acquire the information that is their stock in trade. They travel through the air and go look.

Shamanism in the Upper Amazon is, I think, different.

As we have seen, mestizo shamans summon the protective and healing spirits to the place of ceremony by singing the appropriate icaros, magical songs, and receive from them, often in strange or secret languages, information regarding the diagnosis and treatment of their patients. Thus, the locus of their interaction with the spirits is not the spirit realm, to which the shaman travels, but rather the place where the shaman conducts the ceremony.

This general rule applies even when shamans are retrieving a soul lost through susto or manchari, or retrieving a person physically stolen away by the spirits of the underwater realms, the mermaids or yacuruna, the water people. They do not journey in pursuit of the soul; rather, they summon the soul back to the body it had inhabited, or summon and coerce the people of the waters to bring the stolen person back to the place of ceremony, using the icaros they have learned from the plant spirits or, indeed, from the water people themselves.

Drinking ayahuasca can give visions of distant people and events. These visions can give both shaman and patient information about the location of a lost object, the health of a distant relative, the face of a secret enemy, the seducer of a spouse. Such visions encompass past and future as well: my teacher doña María Tuesta saw in her visions how her brothers had died, both murdered years before, one in a robbery and one in a drunken brawl. Indeed, people may come to a healing ceremony and drink ayahuasca simply to gather such information — the welfare of a traveling relative, the seducer of a spouse, the location of a stolen water pump.

Shamans get just this sort of information from ayahuasca — and more. They can see what is happening on distant planets and galaxies, where in the underwater realm a kidnapped fisherman is being held captive, the mountain cave in which a stolen soul is hidden, what the doctors at vast spiritual hospitals have to say about a patient’s condition. Among the Cashinahua, too, ayahuasca is taken with the intent to get information about distant places and their beings, the hiding places of game, the real intentions of opponents in conflicts, the motives of visitors, future events, and the causes of sickness.

We should not assume, based on our own cultural preferences, that this information is only or always conveyed visually. Consistent with the role of the auditory in the jungle environment, such information can be conveyed verbally. Thus, Aguaruna shamans are able to know events that are distant in space and time; they do this, not by traveling themselves, but because their pasuk spirits bring them information from faraway places. The same is true for mestizo shamans: the etiology of a patient's illness — the source of the pathogenic object, the identity of the sorcerer who projected it, the faithless spouse or false business partner or offended stranger who instigated the attack — can be whispered audibly, with startling clarity, into the ear of the shaman by the plant spirits who are in attendance at the healing.

Thus, shamans 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.”