Explore Articles Filed Under: The Amazon
Among Amazonian mestizos, the world is often viewed in terms of male and female, macho and hembra. Not only animals but also plants — even inanimate objects — appear in both male and female forms; rain, for example, can be male or female, depending on the force with which it falls; if a plant species has two varieties, one with thorns, the one with thorns is considered male.
In the Amazon, plants and animals are ascribed the status of persons, who may differ corporeally from human persons but, like them, possess intentionality and agency. Indeed, other-than-human persons are believed to see themselves in human form, and thus to be self-aware of their own personhood. Among the Ashéninka, for example, a white-lipped peccary is held to perceive its own herd as a foraging human tribe, its wallow as a human village, and the wild root it eats as cultivated manioc.
In the Upper Amazon, people believe that there are sorcerers, and that much of human suffering — sickness, death, misfortune, bad luck and trouble — is caused by sorcerers, either from the sorcerer’s own malevolence, or on behalf of an embittered and resentful client. There is little that the ordinary state apparatus can do about sorcery. Alejandro Tsakimp, a Shuar shaman, puts the thought this way: “They killed my father with witchcraft and not with a bullet…. With killings like this, through witchcraft, there aren’t any witnesses. I can talk about all this, I can go to lawyers, but nobody will believe me.”
Mestizo shamanism is found in an arc from southern Colombia and Ecuador to northern Bolivia, through the present-day Peruvian departamentos of Loreto and Ucayali, westward along the Río Marañon, and spilling over eastward into western Brazil. This distribution is the result of historical factors, one of which was the great Rubber Boom — a period of about thirty-five years, approximately from 1880 to 1914, which transformed Amazonian culture in ways both profound and irremediable.
Photographer Vance Gellert has come back from South America with a series of striking photographs of healers and healing, currently on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in an exhibit entitled Smoke and Mirrors: A Journey to Healing Knowledge. Gellert used medium- and large-format film cameras to bring out details and vibrant colors, to evoke a spirit of place; photography, he says, captures images infused with layers of meaning and nuance that give the recorded facts a human and emotional connection.
On the planet Sarkovy, one of the many imagined by science fiction writer Jack Vance, the inhabitants, called Sarkoy, are experts in the art of killing by poison. An adept of this art is called a venefice, and it is believed that a Master Venefice can kill a victim merely by walking past him. The venefices of Sarkovy are amateurs compared to sorcerers in the Upper Amazon. Throughout the Upper Amazon, people believe that they can be made sick through ingestion of noxious substances prepared by their enemies and put surreptitiously in their food or drink — bat saliva or phlegm, the burnt bones of dead humans mixed with the entrails of water snakes, the blood of a black dog.
There has been a lot of press lately about the discovery of a previously uncontacted tribe along the Peru-Brazil border. There are pictures of a village from the air, with painted indigenes aiming their arrows at the airplane. Quaint, childlike Indians! There is a rush now to protect them, like an exotic threatened species, the way we protect the rainforest itself, for our future use.
There are a number of places in the Upper Amazon which are particularly good for finding fish. Large and medium-sized rivers in low areas often form numerous meanders which, when the river changes course, become cochas, oxbow lakes. These cochas often have sediment settled on the bottom, relatively clear water, and high temperatures, and therefore rapid plant growth, which in turn supports quite large fish populations. Sometimes too you can see strips of clear and very slow water in a river. These are quiet places where plankton tends to grow; you can usually find fish downstream. You can also find fish under camalones, places where aquatic vegetation has formed a dense mat on the surface of the water. And fish love to move into the waters covering seasonally flooded forests.
There is a theme woven through the shamanisms of the Upper Amazon — that human beings in general, and shamans in particular, have powerful urges to harm other humans. The difference between a healer and a sorcerer is that the former is able to bring these urges under control, while the latter either cannot or does not want to. Thus, what distinguishes a healer from a sorcerer is self-control.
Daniel Mirante is a young — thirty years old, which is young to me — visionary artist, author, and researcher fascinated with deep ecology, shamanic traditions, ancient mythology, and the creative process. In 2000, he founded the well-known Lila website — the word lila means something like cosmic play in Sanskrit — as a creative collective and resource for people exploring what Delvin Solkinson of the Elfintome Arts Collective has called medicine culture — shamanic forms of creativity and healing, including plant-based entheogenic practices.