Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (22 page)

The mestizo shaman's blowing sound-an almost silent and untranscribable pshoo-is the most refined and abstract sound of the shaman, beyond
even silbando, the breathy and unintelligible whistling of the icaros, like the
rustling of the leaf-bundle shacapa. Blowing tobacco smoke over the patient,
or into the patient through the patient's corona, crown, combines the protective effect of mapacho with the power of the shaman's mouth. Tobacco,
blown over and into the body, protects it como una camisa de acero, like a steel
shirt.33

Shamans may blow strong sweet substances other than tobacco smoke.
Some blow aguardiente over a patient's body, to cleanse and cure, or agua de
florida, or the mouthwash Timolina-even the disinfectant Creolina.34 Don Agustin Rivas says, "I'd blow a fine spray, very powerfully and very fast, upwards from their feet. 1135 Pablo Amaringo tells of a female shaman who sweetened her breath by drinking a mixture of chopped tobacco, perfume, camphor, aguardiente, hot pepper, lemon, and salt, together with a little arsenic;
then she began to sing, and to blow forcefully here and there with her perfumed breath.36

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE MOUTH

Throughout the Amazon, sucking and blowing-the power of the mouth to
draw out sickness and to blow tobacco smoke-constitute the defining features of the shaman's art. Chupando, sucking, and soplando, blowing, were
two key features that differentiated don Roberto's practice from dona Maria's
when she first came to him as an apprentice. In a Guayaki myth, the creator,
Inapirikuli, called into being the first two paje, shamans. The first spoke the
proper words over food so that humans could consume food without dying;
the second sucked objects out of the body-bones, hair, stones, and tiny bits
of wood-in order to make healthy life possible.37 The name of the second
shaman was Mariri. The pair of first shamans instantiate the two modes of
contact between the sacred mouth and the world: the first demonstrates
speaking, singing, blowing, regurgitating-movement outward; and the second demonstrates sucking-movement inward. Both defeat death.

This twofold symbolism of the mouth is reinforced in shamanic initiations
in which the apprentice first regurgitates and then reswallows the magical
darts that have been received from the master.38 The darts coming out of the
mouth are a temptation to blow, to project outward, to use the darts for destruction; the darts swallowed back into mouth are an exercise in self-control,
mastery of shamanic power, becoming a healing shaman.

Sucking, swallowing, and regurgitating are part of the shaman's physical
spirituality-a corporeal spirituality of bodily boundaries transgressed. The
shaman's mouth is transformative and curative, a synecdoche for the function
of shamanic healing itself.39 Just as the shaman's mouth takes in sickness,
magic darts, evil of all sorts, and spits it out-just as the shaman's mouth
takes in the power of sorcery and incorporates it and then regurgitates it into
the corona or mouth of the apprentice-the shaman's mouth incorporates the
sociospiritual illness of the sufferer and renders it harmless, yet retains, with
all the ambiguity of the shaman, the possibility of projecting it once more-as
song, as dart, as blowing-into the body politic.

Healing and protection come together in the shaman's mouth, the contact point between sickness and healing; the mouth sucks in sickness, blows
out tobacco smoke, and regurgitates phlegm and magic darts. Life and death
move in and out through the sucking, blowing, gagging, regurgitating mouth.

THINKING ABOUT THE SPIRITS

Mestizo shamans in the Upper Amazon maintain relationships with two types
of spirits-the spirits of the healing plants, who appear almost invariably in
human form; and the protective spirits, often powerful animals, birds, or human beings, or the spirits of certain plants such as the spiny palms. The animals and plants that protect the healer are the same as those that carry out the
destructive will of the sorcerer.

And, of course, the visionary world is filled with other-than-human persons of all sorts-visitors from other planets and galaxies in shining spaceships, denizens of vast sparkling cities, the beings who live in the deep jungle
and beneath the dark waters, great teachers and healers of the past and future,
silent denizens of infinite labyrinths of crystal rooms. I have seen dark-robed
and faceless beings gathered to support me in my nausea, tall thin darkskinned men in white shirts and white pants with black suspenders flitting on
unknown errands among the participants at a ceremony, vast lines of Peruvian
schoolgirls in blue and white uniforms ascending and descending a stairway
by a radiant swimming pool.

The healing plants are doctores, teachers and healers; these are the vegetales que ensefian, the plants who teach. What they teach are their own secrets-what sicknesses of body or soul they heal, how to summon them with
their songs, and how to prepare and apply them. Several different terms are
used to designate the spirits of plants and animals. Don Roberto and doh a
Maria generally used the term genio, genius or nature; shamans also speak of
the plant's madre, mother; its espiritu, spirit; and even its imdn, magnet. Don
Romulo Magin spoke to me of the plant's matriz, its womb, and thus its matrix, its archetype.

Informally, we generally translate all these terms simply as the spirit of the plant. In addition, we call the wide variety of protective birds and animals and
plants that mestizo shamans have something like protective spirits. Yet, as Graham Harvey points out, those who are willing to argue endlessly about the
meaning and applicability of the term shaman often refer to spirits as if everyone knows what the word means-as if, he says, "the word were self-evidently
universally understood, and the beings universally experienced. "I

So, what do we know about these spirits?

In many ways, spirits act very much like imaginary objects. First, spirits
lack the sensory coherence of real things. That is, primarily, spirits cannot be
touched, unlike real things, though they can often be heard and occasionally
smelled; although, in fairness, perhaps I should add that I have felt spirits-for
example, rubbing my head-but never been able to touch them. Second, spirits
are, unlike real things, not public. Other people, in the same place at the same
time, do not see the same spirit objects or persons I see. This point can be disputed by claims to the contrary, or by a claim that shamans, at least, can perceive the ayahuasca visions of others; but, as far as I know, these claims have
not been well tested. Third, the behavior of spirits is unusual; spirits appear
and disappear suddenly and unpredictably, fade away gradually, and transform themselves in ways inconsistent with the generally recognized behavior
of real things. Fourth, the appearance of spirits may be significantly different
from that of real objects and people. For example, the spirit of the ayahuma
tree often appears as a person without a head, contrary to the normal appearance of real people, at least living ones. And the spirit of a particular plant may
appear in a different form at different times-for example, as male or female,
old or young, with one or several heads-unlike real objects and people, who
are generally fairly consistent in appearance from meeting to meeting.

On the other hand, spirits have many of the qualities of people-selfawareness, understanding, personal identity, volition, speech, memory. They
are autonomous; they come and go as they wish; they may unilaterally initiate
or terminate a relationship with a human. They can provide information or
insight that the recipient finds surprising or previously unknown. They may
have relatively consistent personalities-helpful, harmful, callous, malicious,
indifferent, or tricky, just like human persons. Relationships with spirits may
be comforting, demanding, dangerous, and exhausting, just as with human
persons. As a result of such relationships, other-than-human persons may
provide information, insight, power, vision, healing, protection, songs, and
ceremonies. The receipt of such gifts entails reciprocal obligations, just as
with human persons. The shaman's relationship with such spirits is the core
ofAmazonian animism.

ANIMISM

Animism is the view that human beings on the earth live-whether they know it
or not-in community with persons who are not human beings. These otherthan-human persons may include animals, plants, trees, rocks, clouds, thunder, and stars. The phrase other-than-human persons was coined by anthropologist Irving Hallowell to describe the world of the Ojibwe, in which humans,
animals, fish, birds, and plants-and some rocks, trees, and storms-are all
relational, intentional, conscious, and communicative beings.2 Ethnographer
Thomas Blackburn reached similar conclusions for the Chumash, whose
cosmos, he said, is composed of an "interacting community of sentient creatures."3 Cultural ecologist David Abram speaks of "the intuition that every
form one perceives ... is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations .))4

Persons are recognized in a variety of ways, including whether they can be
talked with, whether gifts can be exchanged with them, and whether they can
be engaged in a cultural system of respect and reciprocity. Human persons
can give gifts to stone persons, who can receive those gifts and give their own
gifts to human persons in return-a dream, say, or a song. Animism is what
anthropologist Nurit Bird-David has called a relational epistemology.5 Anthropologist Enrique Salmon, himself a Tarahumara, calls this a kincentric ecology-"an awareness that life in any environment is viable only when humans
view the life surrounding them as kin.i6 When indigenous cultures speak of
spirits, says David Abram, what they are really referring to are "those modes of
intelligence or awareness that do not possess a human form"-that is, precisely, other-than-human persons.?

This use of the term animism differs sufficiently from its earlier use that the
term neoanimism is sometimes used instead. The term animism was first used
by nineteenth-century anthropologist Edward Tylor to define the essence of
religion as "the belief in spirits"-that is, as a category mistake made by young
children and primitives who project life onto inanimate objects, at least until
they reach a more advanced stage of development.'

The more recent view, on the other hand, does not see animism as a set
of beliefs so much as a way of engaging with the world. This engagement is
based on relationships, within which humans are not separate from the world
or distinct from other beings in any meaningful way. Indeed, for some humans-certain clans, for example-the mutual relationship with a particular other-than-human person, sometimes called a totem, from the Ojibwe
word dodem, can provide a significant focus for social and ritual life. The new animism, Harvey says, "contests modernist preconceptions and invites the
widening of relational engagements generated and enhanced by gift exchanges and other forms of mutuality. "9

This engagement is often reflected in animist mythology, in which otherthan-human persons were created before humans, at one time spoke with humans in a mutually intelligible language, and, indeed, appeared in the form
of humans. When asked to define the term myth, anthropologist Claude LeviStrauss once said that it is "a story about the time when humans and animals did not yet distinguish themselves from each other."" Anthropologist
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro says that a virtually universal notion in indigenous
thought in both North and South America "is that of an original state of nondifferentiation between humans and animals.-

Thus, 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.12 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 Asheninka, 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. A peccary sees a human
hunter as a jaguar; a jaguar sees its human prey as a peccary, and sees other
jaguars as humans.13 Similarly, among the Machiguenga, a human sees himor herself as a human; but "the moon, the snake, the jaguar and the mother of
smallpox see him or her as a tapir or a peccary that they kill."14 These percepts
extend to all aspects of culture: animals see their fur, feathers, claws, and
beaks as body decorations and cultural instruments, and their social system
as organized in the same way as human institutions.' In a series of influential
articles, Viveiros de Castro has called this theory of the world perspectivism, and
has explicitly tied it to theories of animism.,'