Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (35 page)

In addition, doctor ayahuasca reveals where the sickness is located. Don
Agustin Rivas says that the shaman who has drunk ayahuasca can see into the
skeleton, brain, organs, or intestines of the patient; sometimes the shaman
may see something white in the bones and knows that something is wrong.5
For example, "I looked into Benjamin's head, and saw his brain like a light,
very clearly. Sitting in his brain was a little green leaf. The borders of the leaf
were serrated and looked like they had been cut."' When shamans touch a patient, Pablo Amaringo says, their brains immediately give a picture of what
might be wrong.?

The Shuar, the Achuar, and the Aguaruna all say that the shaman can visually penetrate the body of the patient-that ayahuasca makes the body transparent, so that the shaman can see the darts shot into it as glowing dots
of varying color and luminosity.' Piro shamans drink ayahuasca in order to
see the sorcery objects glowing within "the ordinary opacity of the human
body."9 A Shapra shaman once told me that ayahuasca was a spiritual x-ray
machine with which he could see the location of the magic darts inside a patient. Canelos Quichua shamans see the intrusive object-a spider, darts, a
cutting or stinging creature-encased in blue mucus within the body.'° Some
shamans maintain that they can distinguish different types of sorcery by observing the aura around the patient; zigzagging lights indicate an attack by a
chontero; small waves crossed by dark lines indicate that the patient has been
hit by a huani, a crystal arrow shot from a steel bow." A Tukano shaman describes what he sees: "We, too, can see the splinters and stones.... These
splinters have different colors: white, red, and whitish.... The splinters make
us feel sharp pains. There are other, similar splinters. On another splinter
there is a bushel of hair, like a sprout. On the other side it is yellow and yellowish. This splinter, too, causes fever and vomiting." And he adds: "White
people do not know anything about all this. 11I2

In addition, the location and nature of the sickness may be pointed out by
the attending spirits, the maestros de la medicina, the doctores, the extraterrestrial doctors from distant planets or galaxies, the plant spirits, the souls
of ancient and powerful shamans, doctors from England or Japan, who communicate mentally or speak clearly into the ear of the shaman. They appear to
don Romulo Magin as Peruvian military officers; they appear to don Roberto
as dark-skinned, almost naked, wearing only short skirts; they appear to
painter Elvis Luna as brilliant celestial beings like angels.

These spirits speak in many languages. Sometimes they speak in Castellano,
Spanish, sometimes in idioma, tribal languages. Thus, dona Maria's spirits
speak to her in a language she calls Inca-that is, Quechua-which is perfectly comprehensible to her, although she herself speaks no Quechua. Don
Roberto is attended by outer space spirits who speak in computer language.

The spirits may communicate mentally, or they may use clearly audible
speech to diagnose and prescribe: they speak directly into the shaman's ear,
telling what is wrong, what icaros to sing, where to suck out the sickness or
malignant darts, whether to use a sweat bath, what plants to prepare. Don
Roberto hears this as a voice speaking clearly and distinctly in his ear. "Suck
in this place," he told me the voice tells him. "Blow mapacho smoke in that
place. Use this icaro." He spoke this directly into my ear, with startling clarity.

Finally, a shaman has many independent sources of information-questioning the patient, talking to the family of the patient, overhearing the conversations of patients and families as they wait for the healing session to
begin. The shaman, too, may be a member of the community to which the
patient belongs, and may well have access to current news, rumors, and gossip about the patient and about the patient's family, affairs, business, and
enemies.

We can distinguish between general and specific diagnoses. A shaman may
be able to diagnose a magical attack by a sorcerer; it is, as a general rule, up to
the patient-perhaps with some prompting-to discover why the attack was
made. This can require a patient to make a searching inventory of moral failure, breaches of trust, lack of generosity, or failures of reciprocity, and may require that the patient allow the ayahuasca to reveal, in a vision, the face of the
sorcerer, the business rival, or the seducer of a beloved. Sometimes the shaman will have a vision or a dream of the evildoer; but, of course, as don Roberto once reminded me, such a vision is useless if the shaman does not know
the identity of the person seen, which then has to be supplied by the patient in
any case. Sometimes the shaman asks the spirit of ayahuasca to convey to the
patient a specific vision of who caused the illness; in such cases, the patient is
convinced of the diagnosis not only by what the shaman says but also because
the patient has personally seen the face of the one who cast the spell.13

ORDINARY HEALING

A significant percentage of a mestizo shaman's practice is not in ayahuasca
ceremonies, and does not involve either the shaman or patient drinking ayahuasca at all. Much of what the shaman does I have come to think of as tenminute healings, in which the shaman sucks the sickness from the patient's
body, seals and protects the body with shacapa and tobacco smoke, and then
prescribes plant medicine for recovery from the continuing effects of the
physical intrusion. This is the bread-and-butter work of the shaman, just as in
the clinic of any general practitioner.

The Shaman's Tools

In the Upper Amazon, there are a number of medical specialists who are not
shamans-for example, parteras, midwives; hueseros, bonesetters; oracionistas,
prayer healers; espiritistas, spiritists; and vaporadoras, givers of steam baths.
They differ from shamans in that they have not been taught by ayahuasca. Unlike shamans, they have not undergone la dieta; they have not established relationships of intimacy with the healing and protective spirits of plants and animals. They have not nurtured their protective phlegm; they do not possess
magical darts. Moreover, their healing does not use three distinctively shamanic healing tools-shacapar, rattling with the leaf-bundle rattle; chupar,
sucking out pathogenic objects; and soplar, blowing tobacco smoke.

Dona Maria began her healing career as an oracionista, a prayer healer,
strongly influenced by the folk Catholicism and traditional Hispanic medicine
of Amazonian Peru, as well as by her own idiosyncratic dreams and visions.
She was also influenced by mestizo shamanism. Even as a child, she used the
term icaro to refer to the oraciones, the prayer songs, she made up and sang
while walking to and from school, and later sang for her patients.

She healed by singing these prayers and laying her hands on the heads of
her patients. She protected herself with strong sweet smells, drinking the
commercial cologne agua de florida, the commercial mouthwash Timolina,
and camphor dissolved in aguardiente, sometimes adding camalonga, the
seeds of the yellow oleander. These increased the fuerza, power, of her healing, she said, and made her prayers muy poderosa, full of divine power.

She used tobacco-her father had been a tabaquero-to induce and augment her visions. She swallowed the smoke of finos, commercial cigarettes,
deep into her stomach; she drank a cold-water infusion of tobacco, letting
it steep, squeezing out the water through a cloth, and drinking it, with the
appropriate prayer. In fact, to prepare herself for her first drink of ayahuasca
with don Roberto, she first drank a mixture of tobacco, camphor, camalonga
seeds, and agua de florida cologne.

Once she had become his apprentice, don Roberto taught dona Maria to
drink ayahuasca, and how to undertake the restricted diet in the monte, the
jungle wilderness. Where she had previously worked with plantas, plants, of
which the leaves are primarily used in medicine, he taught her palos as well,
hardwood trees, of which primarily the roots, bark, or resin is used. And don
Roberto taught her about transcorporacion, and she learned how to call into
her body the spirit of Oscar Rosindo Pisarro, a deceased Rosicrucian, to come
help her in her healing and work through her.

Probably most important, in addition to drinking ayahuasca, dona Maria
acquired during her training with don Roberto the foundational triad of mestizo shamanism-shacapar, using the leaf-bundle rattle; soplar, blowing tobacco smoke over and into the patient's body; and chupar, sucking. Although
she had smoked finos, commercial cigarettes, this had been to induce visions,
not to blow over patients. Don Roberto had introduced her to mapacho; and,
as dona Maria told me, "Without mapacho, there is no soplando." And she learned to rattle, rather than lay her hands on top of her patient's head, as she
had before in her prayer work. Maria loved using the shacapa. "The shacapa,"
she used to say, "is my pistol."

And she learned to suck. While Maria's prayer healing practice had not included chupando, sucking, it was later analogized to the cognate practice of
jalando, pulling or drawing with her mouth from a distance, just as her laying
on of hands was analogized to the use of the shacapa. Indeed, Maria never
took up chupando, the sort of full-contact vigorous, noisy, dramatic sucking
used by don Roberto, but, rather, used the more sedate and ladylike jalando
throughout her later career.

Ten-Minute Healings

The key features of the ten-minute healing are the shaman's tools-shacapar,
rattling with the shacapa leaf-bundle rattle; soplar, blowing tobacco smoke;
and chupar, sucking out the sickness-along with the singing of the appropriate icaro. Don Agustin Rivas says about this ten-minute healing: "I was
grateful that I had learned how to heal with tobacco, instead of healing like
the brujos who have to do such a long ritual for healing that a patient can die
before they're finished."14 Sometimes a brief healing will end with a recommendation that the patient come to don Roberto's house on a Tuesday or Friday night to drink ayahuasca.

Here is an example of a ten-minute healing, from a patient's perspective.
Once, I asked don Roberto to work on my left knee, where I had a replacement anterior cruciate ligament, and which sometimes ached in the jungle
humidity. I sat in a chair, and don Roberto, with dona Maria present, blew
tobacco smoke from a mapacho cigarette all over my body and into the top
of my head, with that untranscribable whispery sound, pshooo. He began to
rattle his shacapa, along with a soft tuneless whistle, which gradually grew
into a whispered song and then an icaro, all the while rhythmically shaking
the shacapa over my body; he burped and belched, drawing up his mariri.
Then he knelt next to me and began to suck the side of my knee-and I mean
really suck, with the skin drawn into his mouth, with great suction, bordering
on the painful. Clearly, whatever pathogen was in my knee was not repulsive;
there was no dramatic gagging and spitting, as in his ayahuasca ceremonies.
He would release his mouth, take a breath, blow more smoke, and suck again.
This went on for several minutes. Finally, he blew tobacco smoke one last time
on my knee, blew smoke all over my body and into the top of my head, and
shook the shacapa all over my body, singing his icaro. Then we were done.

Dona Maria then applied her own mixture of grasa de bufalo to my knee. I asked her what plant spirits had attended the healing and what they had
looked like. She appeared genuinely surprised: "Didn't you see them?"

This is why, by the way, neither don Roberto nor dona Maria can predict
how they would treat a particular sickness in the future, or provide correlations between diagnoses and treatments. They do not know what the plant
spirits will direct in any particular case in the future; but they can discuss
which plants can be generally used for particular conditions, and they can say
what they have been led to do for particular conditions in the past.

CLEANSING

Dona Maria's healing practice incorporated both inner and outer cleansing.
Inner cleansing, of course, is la purga, vomiting and purgation. Outer cleansing included her bano de flores, flower bath, which she often called simply
limpia, cleansing; the sahumerio, sweat bath; and, less frequently, what she
called sahumerio boliviano, the Bolivian sweat bath, smudging a patient with
dried herbs or aromatic woods such as palosanto. Cuerpo limpio, espiritu tranquillo, she would tell me: Clean body, peaceful spirit.

Flower Bath

The limpia, cleansing bath, or bano de flores, flower bath, has many functions among Amazonian mestizos. Sick or feverish children are frequently
bathed with water containing flowers or herbs. A persistent run of bad luck
and misfortune-called saladera-is invariably caused by sorcery, which is believed to manifest as salt on the skin;15 sorcery is sometimes just called sal,
salt.,' Saladera is treated with a cleansing flower bath, which washes away the
sorcery, rather than by sucking out a pathogenic object. A flower bath, using
strongly scented herbs, flowers, and commercially prepared perfumes, imparts the sort of strong sweet smell that can help protect against sorcery. And
flower baths may be used to bring good luck in love, when given in conjunction with a huarmi icaro, woman icaro.17

Dona Maria's cleansing practices were interconnected; when a patient
could not purge enough to satisfy her by drinking ayahuasca, she would "unblock" the patient with a flower bath. She would first give the patient the leaves
and fruits of the achiote, annatto, itself popularly used as an emetic, grating
the leaves and fruits together, filtering out the seeds and pulp by squeezing
through a cloth, and mixing with water, which the patient would drink. The
bath was then her regular cleansing bano de flores, but with a special icaro.
In fact, dona Maria's limpia was most often the same, although additional plants might occasionally be added; what varied was the icaro that she sang
while pouring the water. Some of her most beautiful songs were sung over her
flower baths.