Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (23 page)

In the Amazon, this idea is almost always associated with another-that
the visible form of every species is an envelope, a form of clothing, that conceals an internal human form visible only to other members of the same species, or to a shaman.'? This clothing is changeable and removable;" in the
Amazon, not only do shamans become jaguars, but also humans and animals
constantly shift into each other, in what anthropologist Peter Riviere has
called a "highly transformational world. "19 But, interestingly, humans put on
animal clothes and turn into animals, and animals take off animal clothes and
turn into humans; but animals never put on human clothes.20 All beings are human-which is just how they see themselves. "The common condition of humans and animals," says Viveiros de Castro, "is humanity, not animality.1zi As Piro shaman don Mauricio Roberto Fasabi says of the kachpero, the strangler
fig: "We see the kachpero as a tree, but that is a lie, the kachpero is a person.
We just see it as a tree. When we take ayahuasca, we see it as people.""

This is the animist matrix of the Amazonian shaman-as Viveiros de Castro puts it, an "intentioned universe.123 Shamans-including don Roberto
and dona Maria-develop relationships with powerful beings, even in the
form of stones. This animism is not necessarily benign; social anthropologist
Carlos Fausto calls it predatory animism. "Subjectivity is attributed to human
and nonhuman entities," he writes, "with whom some people are capable of
interacting verbally and establishing relationships of adoption or alliance,
which permit them to act upon the world in order to cure, to fertilize, and to
kill. 1124 It is in this context, too, that we should look at the claim the people in
the Amazon believe that shamans turn into jaguars; rather, jaguars, beneath
their jaguar clothing, are already shamans. The ferocity of the jaguar is not
due to its being an animal, but due to its being a human.25

IMAGINAL BEINGS

Of course, shamanic spirits are not the only anomalous nonphysical autonomous beings; we encounter what Terence McKenna has called alien intelligences
elsewhere as well.21 Later we will discuss what I call visionary experiences-hallucinations, waking dreams, apparitions, lucid dreams, false awakeningswhich have in common, among other things, that they frequently involve
interactions with apparently autonomous others. Psychologist Carl Jung
developed a technique, which he called active imagination, for deliberately invoking such visionary experiences, by which one can become aware of and
interact with what he called imaginal beings embedded in visionary worlds.27
What is notable about these beings is how clearly they seem to be precisely
other-than-human persons, strikingly similar to plant and animal spirits. These
beings, Jung says, know things and possess insights unknown to the person
encountering them; they "can say things that I do not know and do not intend. 1121 The encounter is a dialogue-a conversation between me and something else that is not-me-"exactly as if a dialogue were taking place between
two human beings. 1129 These persons possess autonomy, independent knowledge, and the ability to form relationships-"like animals in the forest," says
Jung, "or people in a room, or birds in the air."3° They "have a life of their
own."31

Jungian analysts have had much to say about these imaginal beings, and
much of what they have said applies to spirits encountered in other contexts as well. James Hillman says that this "living being other than myself ... becomes a psychopompos, a guide with a soul having its own inherent limitation
and necessity.131 When we actively confront these other-than-human persons,
respond to them with our own objections, awe, and arguments, then, as analysts Ann and Barry Ulanov state, we "come to the breath-stopping realization
of just how independent of our conscious control such images are. They have
a life of their own. They push at us. They talk back. "33 They are, says Hillman,
"valid psychological subjects with wills and feelings like ours but not reducible to ours. "34

ONTOLOGY

Interestingly, hallucinations in other contexts do not immediately appear to
raise metaphysical questions like those raised by the extraordinary experiences of people-such as shamans and ayahuasqueros-studied by anthropologists. When a patient with Charles Bonnet syndrome, for example, sees
a monkey sitting in his neurologist's lap, neither patient nor doctor spends
much time discussing its ontological status.35 Among anthropologists, on the
other hand, the metaphysical question is usually phrased dichotomously as
whether the spirits spoken of by anthropological others are or are not real.

Classical animism says that there are no spirits; they are a mistake, a misattribution, the trope of personification-what anthropologist Michael Winkelman more politely calls a "metaphoric symbolic attribution" of humanlike
mental qualities to unknown and natural phenomena, including "gods, spirits, and nonhuman entities, particularly animals. 1131

On the other hand, some anthropologists, sometimes based on their own
anomalous experiences, contend that spirits are, instead, real-what Edith
Turner calls spirit stuff.37 Felicitas Goodman, for example, maintains that spirits are real beings who seek communication with humans;38 Richard Shweder
proposes the reality of malevolent ancestral spirits.39 Jenny Blain specifically
protests against turning spirits into "culturally defined aspects of one's own
personality, not external agents." Such reductionism is, she says, "part of the
individualization and psychologizing of perception that pervades Western
academic discourses of the rational, unitary self. "41

But I think that the encounter with other-than-human autonomous personalities, whether spirits or visionary beings, should be taken as subverting
dichotomous ontologies that categorize such beings as either real or unreal.
Both positions assume that there is only one way to be real, and that is to be a
thing, a sort of stuff, like a chair or table, and that anything else is not real only imagination, only a hallucination. Such dichotomous metaphysics takes
as normative a particular set of experiences characterized by sensory coherence, predictability, and consistency. Experiences that are not normative by
these criteria are treated in one of two ways: they are dismissed as mistakes,
illusions, or misattributions; or else they are normalized, reified, turned into
stuff, into gaseous fauna.

PERSONIFYING

Hillman takes a very different approach. He does not reify the imaginal; rather, he mythologizes reality. He calls this soul-making. The act of soul-making
is imagining, the crafting of images: "Soul-making is also described as imaging, that is, seeing or hearing by means of an imagining which sees through
an event to its image. Imaging means releasing events from their literal understanding into a mythical appreciation. Soul-making, in this sense, is equated
with de-literalizing-that psychological attitude which suspiciously disallows the naive and given level of events in order to search out their shadowy,
metaphorical significances for soul."41 The human adventure, Hillman says,
"is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul. 1142
"Soul is imagination," he says, "a cavernous treasury ... a confusion and richness.... The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can
become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic
space grows."43 And soul is "the imaginative possibility in our natures, the
experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy-that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical."44
The question of soul-making is this: "What does this event, this thing, this
moment move in my soul?"45

Magical Realism

If we want to capture the visionary world of the shaman, we can turn in part
to the literary mode often called magical realism. Deeply embedded within the
resurgent literature of South America, el realismo magical, lo real maravilloso
americano, is characterized by a detailed realism into which there erupts-in
a way often experienced as unremarkable-the magical world of the spirits. As
literary critic David Mikics says, magical realism "projects a mesmerizing uncertainty suggesting that ordinary life may also be the scene of the extraordinary.",

This idea is often expressed in terms of "exploring-and transgressingboundaries.", In an interview with Miguel Fernandez-Braso in 1969, Nobel
Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez 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 endeavoring to evoke, that barrier does not exist."3

Yet Garcia Marquez describes himself as a realist writer, "because I believe
that in Latin America everything is possible, everything is real."4 Thus, in the
fictional town of Macondo, Remedios the beauty rises to heaven with her sisterin-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. Dona Maria was similarly lifted to heaven inside her
mosquito net to be initiated by the Virgin Mary. For her, too, this was marvelous
and unsurprising.

Thus the visionary world does what literary critic Theo L. D'Haen calls "decentering privileged centers."5 Magical realist texts-and thus the visionary
world itself-are ontologically subversive 6 The magically realist world subverts
the privileged ontological center that dichotomously divides experience into the
real and the unreal.

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 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. In Interzone dreams can kill ... and solid objects and persons can be as
unreal as dreams."9

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.

NOTES

1. Mikics, 1995, p. 372.

2. Zamora & Faris, 1995, p. 5.

3. Doody, 1997, p. 470.

4. Bowers, 2004, p. 92.

5. D'Haen, 1995, p. 191.

6. Zamora & Faris, 1995, p. 6.

7. McHale, 1987, p. 44.

8. Zamora & Faris, 1995, p. 6.

9. Miles, 2002, p. 99.

Hillman calls this seeing through-the ability of the imagination's eye to
see through the literal to the metaphorical.46 Re-visioning is deliteralizing or
metaphorizing reality. The purpose of analysis is not to make the unconscious
conscious, or to make id into ego, or to make ego into self; the purpose is
to make the literal metaphorical, to make the real imaginal. The objective is
to enable the realization that reality is imagination-that what appears most real is in fact an image with potentially profound metaphorical implications.47
Thus, says Hillman, soul is "the imaginative possibility in our natures ... the
mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical."48
"By means of the archetypal image," he writes, "natural phenomena present
faces that speak to the imagining soul rather than only conceal hidden laws
and probabilities and manifest their objectification."49

So Hillman speaks of personifying not as a category mistake but, rather,
as a "basic psychological activity-the spontaneous experiencing, envisioning and speaking of the configurations of existence as psychic presences," as
a mode of thought that "takes an inside event and puts it outside, at the same
time making this content alive, personal, and even divine. "5° Personifying is "a
way of being in the world and experiencing the world as a psychological field,
where persons are given with events, so that events are experiences which
touch us, move us, appeal to us"-a way of imagining things into souls.5'

If Hillman's personifying, seeing through, soul-making, becomes a way of
engaging with the world, a relational epistemology, then it is verging upon a
genuine and nonreductive animism, one in which the world has become magical, filled with wonders, filled with the spirits.

THE APPEARANCE OF SPIRITS

While animal spirits almost always appear as animals, plant spirits almost always appear in human form. There are exceptions: the spirit of the ui a de
gato vine has appeared to dona Maria as a tigrito, a small jaguar, and the spirit
of lobosanango as a wolf. Dona Maria told me that the plant spirits often appear
to her first as plants, and then transform into humans.

It is worth emphasizing that the plant spirits do not always appear in the
same way to different people, or even to the same person on different occasions. For example, the spirit of ayahuasca can appear as a human, either
male or female, or as an anaconda. Indeed, the spirit of ayahuasca has appeared to Maria as two genios at the same time, one male and one female,
who stood on either side of her-the woman dressed in beautiful clothing,
the man ugly, with bad teeth. The spirit of the una de gato vine has appeared
to her not only as a small jaguar but also as a strong, muscular man on whose
arms were claws.

I have encountered ayahuasca in the form of a little blonde girl wearing a
golden crown and of a teenage Indian girl with a dazzling smile. The spirit
of maricahua has been said to appear as an Indian man surrounded by little
children; but the spirit came to me as a beautiful dark lady with raven hair. Spirits may appear as either male or female on different occasions; as poet
Cesar Calvo writes, "On some days a plant is female and good for some
things, and on other days the plant is male and is good for the opposite. "52