The Ragged Edge of the World (36 page)

After building the house, Sydney was walking in the woods one day when he heard a noise. Thinking it sounded like a machete, he fled. That night the spirit visited him again, and asked, “Why did you run away?”

Then the spirits upped the stakes. Two spirits visited him in his dreams and told him that they could make him a great healer. He recalled that they smoked a long, thin cigarette, and the smoke it produced formed a ball. He inhaled the smoke from each spirit three times. This, he said, sealed his senses and left him in a coma-like state. He said he “stood” for twenty days. It was like being dead, although he also said that the spirit delivered regular, chatty reports on villager reactions to his trance. People thought he was under a spell and the victim of black magic.

His concerned clan members finally went to another village to summon a great shaman to see what was wrong with Sydney. The spirit then told Sydney, “I can't wait to see what this man will say.” As the great shaman examined the immobile Sydney, the spirit continued its narrative: “He's smoking; let's see if he can see me.” Then the great shaman fainted. Again, the spirit said, “Let's see if he can see me.” When the great shaman came back to consciousness he pronounced Sydney the victim of black magic.

The spirit was exultant: “See! He can't see me. He can't see what I put in your eyes, your nose, your ears. . . .” The shaman then tried to heal him. He placed his hands on Sydney's face and chest, but Sydney didn't feel anything. Sydney reported that the spirit merely laughed at the shaman's efforts.

The spirit then told Sydney that he could see that his people were getting worried, and promised that on the next day at 4 p.m. he would allow him to see, hear, and feel again. When he came back to the living, Sydney said, it was difficult to move, walk, or even stand up, but he did feel a deep need to smoke.

He also came back possessed of powers: He could extract things from people's eyes, noses. The clan was amazed; an elder said that the ancients had those abilities, and that Sydney was destined to be one of the greatest shamans. Exhausted, Sydney fell asleep and the spirit gave him further instructions. He was to stay in the house in the woods for eight months and during that time he could not touch his wife. People brought him food, because he couldn't fish or hunt either.

Eight months later he began practicing as a shaman, and his first patient was a young woman who was bleeding from the mouth. He was timid at first, but he was able to capture the disease. In the shaman's universe, illnesses are often malicious spirits, which adepts can capture with their hands. For other diseases he would use plants, and if he did not recognize the symptoms, the spirit would show him what plants to use and how they should be applied. For instance, he claimed that the previous year he had cured a malaria epidemic by preparing what he called
moacap,
a thin-stemmed, long-leafed plant with a huge root like a tuber. For measles he used different preparations taken from a big tree he called
yahu kuitap ariuwap
.

As he talked, I got the impression that he served as a type of National Institutes of Health. The spirit would tell him which plants to use, and then medicine men would come to him and he would pass on the prescription. The spirit was always with him, and he would access the spirit through a waking dream.

After Sydney finished his story, we got down to business. I ceremoniously handed Sydney the $100 bill, and he began to work on me. First he rolled some plant into a fat cigar, lit it, took a deep puff, and blew the smoke into his hands. Then he started moving his hands over my stomach, at first slowly and then more urgently as though he were trapping something under my skin. Finding his quarry, he squeezed his hands together directly on my stomach and grunted in satisfaction. He rubbed his hands and then showed me my disease. It looked like an inert brown worm. I wanted to touch it but was strongly advised not to, as it was dangerous.

Then, as I watched, he took another puff of smoke and blew it onto the brown thing in his hands. It disappeared. Through the translator he remarked that it was a disease related to a fish spirit.

This seemed highly unlikely, as I had contracted the disease in Africa and I was fairly certain that it hadn't come from fish. Also, I had to wonder whether Brazilian spirits and African spirits were one and the same. And, of course, the rainforests were entirely different, too.

My skepticism notwithstanding, the treatment did work. I felt better almost immediately, and the disease really did vanish. Here again was a case in which something worked in practice (or at least produced the sought-for result), though I certainly knew of no credible theory to support it. Least credible of all was Sydney's explanation of what he had done. But it worked.

Robert Thompson, the noted authority on Congo influences on African American culture, later told me that black healers in the tidewater regions of Georgia and South Carolina would similarly trap and “concretize” a disease, producing a tiny lizard after they successfully captured the ailment. Thompson thought such displays were clearly feats of prestidigitation intended to impress future clients. I suppose that could be precisely what Sydney Sapaim had done, and I suppose that my immediate recovery could have been the result of the placebo effect (making me one of the more suggestible people on the planet). It's also possible that what Sydney referred to as spirits were energy fields ignored by or as yet inexplicable in the Western medical paradigm, and perhaps Zev Kolman was tapping into something similar.

Regardless of the source of these men's powers, shamans are fast disappearing. Of the 10,000 to 15,000 cultures on the planet, only a handful of groups still live outside the market economy. Most are deep in the Amazon rainforest, hidden in New Guinea, the Far North, or clustered in other remote areas that are too difficult to penetrate. A few tribes—people inevitably cite the Masai of Kenya—do seem to be able to preserve some aspects of traditional life even in proximity to modernity and its inducements.

Preserving some aspects of a culture, however, is not the same as perpetuating the curative rituals, knowledge and beliefs that comprise a complete worldview. Consider what Sydney Sapaim had to go through to become a shaman. Would he have endured this ordeal if he had had any doubts about the existence of the forest spirits and their life-and-death powers? Many tribal people continue to value their extended family and clan, but in the long run the mystique of a shaman cannot really hope to compete with the technological magic of the consumer society. And so the shaman begins to seem a relic of the past, the spirits retreat along with the forest, and the best and brightest children go off to schools to learn the ways of the West rather than the secrets of the ancestors.

O
ne of the predictable ironies of the ragged edge of the world is that both ecosystems and cultures finally begin to receive the appreciation they deserve just before they disappear. Wolves were demonized and exterminated from the West, and in their absence mule deer proliferated wildly. Now that they've been reintroduced to rebalance the ecosystem, tourists by the thousands flock to see the very animals that had been disparaged as vermin just a few decades earlier. For much of our history, a primary responsibility of the Army Corps of Engineers had been to drain wetlands, which were viewed as pestilential incubators of insects and disease. Today the national mantra is wetland restoration, as these areas have come to be recognized as nurseries of fish, shrimp and migratory birds.

So it is in the realm of culture. When I began my career traditional cultures were widely viewed as impediments to development. In my book
The Alms Race,
I quoted a development official who stated this principle succinctly: “The village way of life is the root cause of poverty.” Now that development and modernity have driven traditional cultures to the brink of eradication, more and more people from developed countries have come to recognize that not only do traditional cultures provide safety nets and meaning for tribes around the world, they are stores of knowledge and often-wondrous expertise. And, since we're the type of people who never let something that can be overdone remain underdone, the enthusiasm with which visitors from the developed world have embraced the wisdom of tribal ancients sometimes surpasses that of members of the tribes themselves. Ground zero for such enthusiasm is Machu Picchu in Peru.

In 1998 I returned to Machu Picchu after several years' absence. I had come to Peru with my wife, Mary, on an itinerary that included Machu Picchu, as well as a trip into one of the most vibrant parts of the Amazon. We'd flown overnight from New York to Cusco and then taken a bus down to Machu Picchu, arriving in the late afternoon. The vibrancy we encountered there was of a different sort than what I had experienced in the rainforest.

My first thought as we wandered around the ruins was that the stunning archaeological site had been taken over by a new species of cold-blooded human. Arrayed on various rocks were tourists of various nationalities, seemingly gathering warmth to kick-start their reptilian metabolism. As I was to discover, however, it was not the sun's energy these pilgrims were after, but rather the vibrations from the interior of the mountain itself. It appears that sometime during the past few decades word had gotten out that Machu Picchu sits atop a giant crystal.

I learned as much back at the Machu Picchu Ruinas Hotel (the three-star hotel with four-star prices and five-star views that stands next to the entrance of the archaeological site) when I overheard a woman with a rich Texas drawl casually telling a younger friend, “That's the rock where you gather your wizard energy.” Indeed, the fragments of conversation I overheard in the lobby and dining room were littered with comments about astral bodies, reincarnation and other New Age touchstones. When I asked one man why his group had come to Machu Picchu, he cheerfully explained, “We all lived here hundreds of years ago, and so this is a reunion of sorts.”

For decades the staggering physical beauty of Machu Picchu, and the mysteries surrounding its purpose and abrupt decline, eclipsed other aspects of the region that might enthrall visitors. Now that is changing as pilgrims come to explore new dimensions of the area. Clearly, one of these new dimensions is the fifth dimension. A hotel manager told me that what was once a mere trickle of grungy hippies, scorned by the locals for their lack of cash, had become a flood of well-heeled New Age types who arrived in package tours as large as sixty people. Known locally as “esotéricas,” these seekers are assiduously courted by the local hotels and merchants.

As I walked into the temples I could hear the sounding of conch shell trumpets as New Age imams summoned the faithful to devotions. I came upon one such group at the “Hitching Post of the Sun,” an altar that Inca priests used to mark key points in the passage of the seasons. As I watched, a tall Peruvian man guided a clutch of Italian esotéricas toward the energies of the sun, the water and the mountains.

The fifteen acolytes lined up at the edge of the terrace, facing west toward the setting sun. Standing in front of each initiate by turn, the priest-leader held a pouch under his or her chin. I stared, mesmerized—not so much by the prospect of the initiation as by the potential for imminent calamity. If any of the initiates flinched or stepped backward, he would find himself plummeting a long way down in this temple complex (whose Peruvian administrators seem to have taken a caveat emptor approach to warnings about cliffs and other dangers). The Peruvian priest murmured some words and then bowed by turn to the sun and then other quadrants of the compass.

While this was taking place, another priest was in the middle of his own ceremony at the Hitching Post itself. He had reverently spread out an assortment of objects—including a conch shell, a crystal and a cocoa leaf—on the altar. When another group arrived one of its members approached the priest who had been leading the Italians and asked, “Why does the ‘Temple of Three Windows' have five windows?” Perhaps irritated by the interruption, the priest brusquely replied, “I don't know.”

Later I caught up with this priest, who turned out to be Juan Nunez Del Prado, a charming former anthropologist. We sat on one of the myriad walls of the temple complex, and Nunez told me a bit about his own conversion from academic to spiritual guide, and about the special energies of Machu Picchu that drew so many visitors.

Despite the conventional wisdom that the old religion had died out not long after the Spanish conquest, studies of Inca traditions that Nunez undertook in the 1960s convinced him that the traditional gods continued to endure in remote villages. He hypothesized that if people were continuing to perform Inca rituals, there had to be some priesthood or other support system involved. With funding from the Ford Foundation he gradually uncovered a network of acolytes, who in parallel with their work as Catholic priests kept alive the old Inca traditions. One of the most senior of this secret clergy was a revered priest named Don Benito Corihuaman.