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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.
Small game is a staple in the diet of both mestizo and indigenous peoples in the Upper Amazon. Small game is generally gutted but not skinned. Once I was helping my jungle survival instructor, Gerineldo Moises Chavez, field dress an agouti — essentially a large rat. “In North America,” I said, “we generally take off the head.” He looked at me as if I was crazy. “Lots of good things in the head,” he said.
A virote was originally a crossbow bolt, brought to South America by the conquistadores. The Spanish term was then applied to the darts shot by the Indians with a blowgun. These darts were made primarily from two sources — from the spines of any of the spiny Bactris or Astrocaryum palms or from any of several Euterpe palms, whose very hard wood is used to make both bows and arrows. My jungle survival instructor, Gerineldo Moises Chavez, could whittle a usable dart from the wood of a Euterpe palm with his machete in less than a minute.
Mestizo shamanism of the Upper Amazon is closely associated with plant healing; indeed, anthropologist Françoise Barbira-Freedman speaks of vegetalismo as a syncretic mix of herbalism and shamanism. In this regard it is different from other Amazonian traditions, where shamans and herbalists occupy separate social and cultural niches. Shuar shamans, for example, have traditionally not used or prescribed plant medicine; such knowledge is widely distributed, especially among women, and herbal remedies have usually been tried before consulting a shaman in any event. Anthropologist Michael Harner, who worked with the Shuar in the 1950s and 1960s, is unequivocal: shamans, he says, never use herb remedies.
There is an often unspoken hierarchy among mestizo shamans. There is, first, a relatively informal ranking based on length of practice, the number and length of dietas, the number and types of plants that have been mastered, and the number and quality of icaros in their repertoire. Icaros become increasingly prestigious as they incorporate words from indigenous languages, unknown archaic tongues, and the languages of animals and birds; the more obscure the language, the more power it contains — and the more difficult it is to copy.
There have been relatively few investigators who have studied the healing practices of the mestizos in the Upper Amazon. All of them — anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna, medical anthropologist Marlene Dobkin de Ríos, and Jacques Chevalier, an expert in social anthropology and political economy — have characterized the healers they worked with as shamans. And, indeed, my teachers don Roberto Acho and doña María Tuesta have been perfectly comfortable being called — and calling themselves — chamánes. This differs markedly from the attitude of many indigenous peoples in North America, who object strongly to having their traditional healers called shamans, as a term imposed from outside by the dominant culture.
The attack took place at the tourist lodge, at night, when doña María was sleeping. She tried to get out of bed to urinate, but, when she got up, she fell to the floor, partially paralyzed, unable to move. She cried for help. One worker came, but he was not strong enough to move her. Eventually, with the help of the gringo owner, she was lifted back onto the bed. “She was just like dead weight,” the owner later told me. “It was all I could do to get her up to her bed myself.”
Among ribereños in the Upper Amazon, there is a body of traditional lore regarding both the uses and the administration of a relatively large number of Amazonian medicinal plants. My jungle survival instructor, Gerineldo Moises Chavez, who made no claims at all to being a healer, knew dozens of jungle plant remedies, including insect repellants, treatments for insect bites, snakebite cures, and antiseptics. While mestizo shamans claim to have learned the uses and administration of their medicinal plants from the plant spirits themselves, it is also true that their uses of the plants are, in most cases, consistent with widespread folk knowledge about the plants.
Of central importance in ribereño life is the chacra, the swidden or slash-and-burn garden. This is true also of many Amazonian peoples, for whom gardens — and garden magic — are a central feature of the domestic economy. A chacra is made by clearing an area of forest, burning the felled trees and other vegetation, clearing the movable remaining vegetation and reburning it, and then planting yuca, manioc, cassava (Manihot esculenta), plátano, plantain (Musa paradisiaca), and other cultivated plants and trees such as beans, palms, pineapples, papaya, and mango.
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.