There are relatively few women shamans in the Amazon, and certainly few among the mestizos. On the other hand, my teacher doña María Tuesta said that she had encountered very little prejudice because she was an ayahuasquera. There were some shamans who have said that she should not be a healer, but — in her typical way — she said that those were all stupid people with no shamanic power anyway. Still, her vocation is rare. Rosa Giove, a Peruvian doctor at the Takiwasi Cenetr in Tarapoto, reports that, in twelve years of investigation, she has known only two women who heal with ayahuasca. One is an elderly Quechua-speaking woman from Lamas, who lives in isolation, feared in her village as a bruja, a sorceress; the other is well known in Iquitos, but with fewer patients than the male ayahuasqueros, despite the fact that their methods are similar.
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| Ayahuasquera doña Norma Aguila Panduro Navarro |
I know of just two female mestizo shamans — doña María, and doña Norma Aguila Panduro Navarro, who, until her recent death, performed healing ceremonies at Estrella Ayahuasca, her Centro de Investigaciones de la Ayahuasca y Otras Plantas Medicinales between Iquitos and Nauta.
There are some limitations on women both as shamans and as patients. Among most Amazonian groups, women do not drink ayahuasca at all, primarily because of fear of spontaneous abortion; the Shuar are unusual in that there is no difference in ayahuasca intake based on sex. Among the Shipibo, for example, the women are the sole possessors of the ayahuasca-inspired designs with which they decorate their pottery and clothing, yet the women themselves do not drink ayahuasca.
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| Ayahuasquera doña María Tuesta Flores |
Doña María expresses these limitations based on concerns about menstruation. As we have discussed, ayahuasca and the other plant spirits are celosa, jealous, which means, among other things, that they do not like the smell of human sex, semen, or menstrual blood. For that reason, doña María told me, the plant spirits will not go near a woman who is menstruating.
Thus, a female curandera cannot work while menstruating; that restriction means that the most powerful ayahuasqueras will be post-menopausal. And a menstruating woman among the participants at a ceremony will disturb the shaman’s concentration and impair the visions of everyone present. Such a participant can drink ayahuasca, I was told, but she will not receive the full benefit of the drink. Soplando, blowing tobacco smoke, on the menstruating woman — all over her body, beginning from the crown of her head down to the soles of her feet — may mitigate but does not eliminate the problem.
A woman, too, doña María told me, should not drink ayahuasca while lactating, for reasons that she did not make clear — only that ayahuasca should not be in the breast milk. On the other hand, a woman can drink ayahuasca when she is pregnant, because the ayahuasca gets into the child and gives it fuerza, power. The same belief is found among the Shuar: some women express the belief that a child is born stronger if it receives the beneficial effects of ayahuasca while still in the womb.
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Dear Steve,
Thank you for the article. As a woman, I would like to meet an ayahuasquera. I am half Ecuadorian half German currently studying homeopathy. My daydreams take me to the jungle. I speak Spanish and would like to go to the Amazon this year. Is Ayahuasquera doña María Tuesta Flores still alive? Can you help me find her?
Thank you!
Alas, doña María passed on just four years ago, in July 2006. She is now, I am sure, giving her healing baths to the children of the angels.
As usual, excellent writing that raises many interesting questions.
There are more ayahuasqueras, few with public recognition, at least one other who is dying:
http://vimeo.com/13167559
For so long, so very many contradictory tall tales have been told about women that women even begin to believe without question those tales themselves, even wise and powerful women. We are told we are only at our greatest potential when we can bear children … or conversely when we can’t. Or truly feminine when we are menstruating … or not. Or we are only powerful or wise or worthy or clean or beautiful or valuable under so many bizarre cultural circumstances. Are any of them real or true? Who knows, but these ideas about women and power often serve to subtly direct and limit what women believe they themselves can do, and it seems to me to be the case as well sometimes with ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca is certainly subject to cultural norms in which it is used, and I can’t help but wonder how much of the influence of South American machismo culture has influenced the understanding of the role women have to play as ayahuasqueras. One wonders if, as ayahuasca makes its way into the further reaches of the globe, if women will suddenly find their role more accepted, respected, and even needed. Perhaps more defined by women themselves. Or will we continue to believe that menstruation somehow makes us untouchable because it’s been said so many times, even by wise and wonderful women? I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but the teachers I have worked with have never placed this limitation on the women they work with, nor have women seemed to struggle with it.
In the North American native traditions I am familiar with, half seem to ostracize menstruating women. The other half seems to not worry about it at all. Some find a gentle way to squirm an excuse out, claiming that “A woman is in her own ceremony at her moon time so she can’t be part of ours.” There seems to be such disagreement all around about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of menstruating women. Because of the widespread disagreement, I suspect that the problem is not actually menstruation and how the spirits do or do not feel about it, but the fearsome hubbub that humans themselves make about it.
i for a long time felt that women were greatly shunned for their periods. i know feel very differently. i am an apprentice ayahuasquera. i have drank the medicine many times. i agree that the spirits do not like the smell of menstrual blood. i have sat in many ceremonies on the verge of bleeding, bleeding, and not bleeding. as well as with other sisters in the same way. sooner or learner u realize that the heaviness of the flow in your body is a very powerful process and that u would much rather be sitting on a heating pad at home in the comfort of your house. over the past four years i have witnessed so many women come to this conclusion. and that brings me to this. we have stepped out of our moon lodges to compete with men because we have had too. it doesn’t make it right it is what it is. but the moon lodge is a powerful place. it is a place that we can refind and use if we want power. it is not an easy place. the native americans used to initiate their young women into the lodge by having them sit in a pit with a deer skin over their heads for the first part of the rites. there was a mystery in that . it is lost now. but for the women who has the courage to go within and rediscover what it was. well the journey begins in the quite of the blood.