Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (9 page)

This theory has been applied to shamanic performance in the Amazon.
Anthropologist Philippe Descola recounts that an Achuar shaman told him that old pieces of glass, which he had spit into his palm as the pathogenic objects sucked from his patient, had actually been secreted earlier in his mouth.
The shaman did this, Descola says, in order to avoid explaining to the patient
that he had taken the real pathogenic objects, the darts he had sucked out, and
blown them into his own wrist, for use against his own enemies.4'

But I am not persuaded of the trophy view. It is based on what we can call a
two-realm assumption-that there is a spirit world separate from this world,
that there is a shamanic state of consciousness opposed to an ordinary state
of consciousness. Like the dichotomy between curing and healing, the trophy
theory assumes that the sucking shaman removes nothing really ... well, real,
an assumption based in a naive metaphysical dualism. Achuar patients are
hardly unaware of what shamans do with the darts they have sucked out from
them. Both don Antonio, an Otomi Indian from Mexico, and don Augustin Rivas, a mestizo shaman from Pucallpa, talk about physical stuff rotten meat,
a metallic object, thick choking phlegm-that appears in their mouths when
they suck.42

Many shamans simply deny this dichotomy. Anthropologist Marie Perruchon, who is married to a Shuar husband and is herself an initiated uwishin,
shaman, puts it this way: ayahuasca "is a plant which has the effect that when
you drink it, it allows you to see what otherwise is invisible, and it attracts
the spirits. It is not that the ayahuasca takes one to another world, otherwise
unreachable; it just opens one's eyes to what is normally hidden. There is only
one world, which is shared by all beings, humans, spirits, and animals."43

Let us turn again to the shaking tent ritual. Anthropologist Weston La
Barre offers a simple explanation. "How does the shaman make the seance
tent shake?" he asks. "By the same naturalistic means the seance medium
makes the table tip."44 Professional magician Eugene Burger is more subtle.
There are many ways that a professional conjurer could approach such ceremonies, including discussion of the numerous ways in which the effect could
be achieved. Burger, however, makes two important points. First, he notes the
numerous tales of the shaking of heavy and stable structures-a lodge with
a double row of forty poles set close together, a lodge of sixty poles-with
the inference being that such structures would be too solid to be shaken by
human effort. There are also tales of frail old men in a lodge that shook for
hours, shamans operating in full view, tents shaking while the shaman remained entirely outside, three lodges shaking at once. The point, he says, is
that the audience was quite aware of the potential for trickery; otherwise, they
would not have told such stories.

Second, there were criteria for distinguishing between fake and genuine performers. An old man confided: "Once when I was a boy I made a lodge and
shook it myself. I was trying to do what I had seen done. My father stopped
me immediately. He said something bad would happen to me if I played with
things like that."45 The tent-shaking ceremony could be done only if authorized by the appropriate dreams on how to build the lodge and how to call
the spirits; failure to have the dreams, or failure to follow the dream instructions, meant failure in the long run and even illness or death. Burger remarks,
tellingly, "But members of the community tried to duplicate the phenomena
anyway. Some showed off, and some never had the dreams in the first place.
Who were the imposters and charlatans? Those who had not had, and had not
followed, the dream. Concern for sincerity was acute. But it was not a concern
about the method of shaking the lodge, or about prowess with the method,
but concern about vision and discipline."46

The problem, of course, is the importation of our own cultural attitudes
toward conjuring into our appreciation of the conjuring other. That cultural
attitude is not simply that conjuring is bad because it is somehow false. The attitude is that conjuring is about what Burger calls "the adventures of the props
in the performer's hands"-strange adventures that happen to objects.47

We tend to see shamanic conjuring as about vanishing pebbles, bloody
fluff, and retching and gagging, while that is not what it is about at all. "In
the earliest conjuring performances," Burger writes, "magicians would probably have thought they had failed if people had complimented them on their
skill and technique. These early conjurers seem to have believed that skill and
technique were to be invisible, so that the mystery was the center of focus."
In modern magical performances, on the other hand, the effects "do not
point beyond themselves to an audience member's actual life in the world;
nor do they point to a larger magical universe beyond the boundaries of the
performance. 1148

HEALING CEREMONY AS ART FORM

The healing ceremony is intended to communicate the mystery of healing and
the risk and mastery of the healing performer. Shamanic healing rituals in
particular are designed to use a "multiplicity of communicative channels"costumes, props, music, conjuring, poetry, movement, plots, suspense,
stagecraft, dialogue.49 The ceremony, like other compositions in art, dance,
and music, does not constitute a single message sent intact to receivers; it relies instead on the spectators to make meaning of the performance.

We should not assume, just because we have our own cultural bias toward
linear verbal interactions between healers and patients, that emplotment by
a healer is necessarily either verbal or linear. Healing ceremonies do not restore order or resolve contradictions; healing performances manipulate spiritual and social power in part by withholding denotative meaning from some of
the participants. It is, I think, this mystery that is at the heart of the shamanic
performance. Don Roberto's ceremony is rife with uncertainty, ambiguity,
and obscurity, filled with apparently meaningless elements, with communicative indeterminacy. His icaros are in secret incomprehensible languages,
whistled, whispered; his interactions with the spirits are hidden; his power is
dangerous and ambiguous.

The fact is that some stories are not told so much as acted, embodied,
played. Healing actions acquire the formal and artistic qualities of the narrative-drama, suspense, risk, adventure, surprise, plot, a sense of the whole,
and especially a sense that something significant is happening.s° The healing ceremony of a mestizo shaman such as don Roberto is just such a narrative; it has
a quality of vividness and heightened experience that sets the healing apart
from the merely routine. To the sufferer, participation in the ceremony is not
mere experience, forgettable and dull; rather, it is an experience, an extraordinary event, fixed in memory as a singular time.S' In don Roberto's healing,
with its active touching and sucking, its sounds and whispers, its penetrating
smells and intestinal heavings, its drama, the body becomes the place in which
the meaning of the sickness is revealed.

THE SPIRITUAL SHAMAN

Anthropologist Michael Brown, who has studied the shamanism of the Aguaruna, an Amazonian people of northeastern Peru, tells how his friends in Santa Fe, New Mexico, have expressed to him their admiration for the beauty of
the shamanic tradition, the ability of shamans to "get in touch with their inner
healing power," and the superiority of spiritual treatments over the impersonal medical practices of our own society., This spiritual view of shamanism is
expressed in several key themes-healing, personal growth, empowerment,
community, compassion; it sees shamanism as a set of techniques for selfrealization, alternative healing, personal fulfillment, and success. Indeed, an
anthology of contemporary writings on shamanism declares itself to be about
"healing, personal growth, and empowerment."'

We can, very briefly, lay some of these beliefs alongside the Amazonian
ethnographic evidence. Shamans, we read, work in harmony in an egoless
way.3 Yet the visionary paintings of Pablo Amaringo, based on his years of experience as a mestizo shaman, show recurring images of attack sorcery, dark
shamanism, in which "evil shamans try to kill the person who is counteracting their evil doings by throwing magical darts, stealing the soul of their victims, or sending animals to bring harm."4 We are told that true shamans do
not even claim to be shamans; they are humble, identify only as servants of
the sacred, and put the interests of others before their own.5 Yet Shuar shamans brag about their experience and power and find it morally appropriate
to put themselves and their families first.I Warao shamans, similarly, gain status and reputation by demonstrating their skills and talents.? In other cases,
as among the Desana, shamans are indeed silent about their knowledge and power, but only in order to avoid magical attacks by envious sorcerers.' Again,
we are told that shamans find their calling through "a spontaneous initiatory
crisis conducive to profound healing and psychospiritual transformation ...
an experience of psychological death and rebirth followed by ascent into supernal realms."9 Yet many mestizo ayahuasqueros "have learned their trade
much as one would learn to become a car mechanic or doctor."" Among the
Aguaruna and Canelos Quichua, shamanic power may be purchased for money or trade goods.-

Such descriptions of the benevolence and spirituality of shamans have little
to do with the real world of shamanic practice, a world filled-like real human life-with danger, uncertainty, envy, betrayal, and loss. Dona Maria was
twice stricken, the second time fatally, by magical attacks launched against
her by envious and resentful sorcerers. Two shamans with whom I had close
relationships turned, apparently for reasons of greed and envy, on two other
friends of mine, one a shaman, filling their bodies with magical darts: shaman A attacked my friend B, who was healed by shaman C, who in turn attacked shaman D because he believed that shaman D was being favored by my
friend B. That is the true landscape of shamanism-the landscape of suffering, passion, and mess.

SPIRIT AND SOUL

Psychologist James Hillman distinguishes between two basic orientations to
the world, which he calls spirit and soul. Spirit, he says, is detached, objective,
intense, absolute, abstract, pure, metaphysical, clear, unitary, eternal, and
heavenly. Soul, on the other hand, is mortal, earthly, low, troubled, sorrowful, vulnerable, melancholy, weak, dependent, and profound. 12 Spirit means
fire and height, the center of things; soul means water and depth, peripheries,
borderlands. Spirit seeks to transcend earth and body, dirt and disease, entanglements and complications, perplexity and despair.13 But soul "is always
in the thick of things: in the repressed, in the shadow, in the messes of life, in
illness, and in the pain and confusion of love."14

Spirit "seeks to escape or transcend the pleasures and demands of ordinary earthly life. -5 Spiritual transcendence, writes Hillman, "is more important than the world and the beauty of the world: the trees, the animals, the
people, the buildings, the culture." Spirit seeks "an imageless white liberation.",' What Hillman calls spirit, Martin Buber calls, simply, religion-as he
puts it, "exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy." But the mystery instead dwells here, he says, "where everything happens as it happens," in the possibility of dialogue.'? Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas puts this idea in theological terms: "Going towards God is meaningless," he says, "unless seen in
terms of my primary going towards the other person.""

The transcendent orientation of spirit can be a way of escaping the messy
demands of soul-a process that psychotherapist John Welwood, in a muchcopied phrase, has called spiritual bypass.19 Buddhist meditation teacher Jack
Kornfield puts the idea this way: "Many students have used meditation not
only to discover inner realms and find inner balance but also to escape. Because we are afraid of the world, afraid of living fully, afraid of relationships,
afraid of work, or afraid of some aspect of what it means to be alive in the
physical body, we run to meditation. 1120