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Ayahuasca 12.2
In Iquitos, Peru there is now an
association of shamans, not just those who deal in ayahuasca but
those who work with other plant medicines, each one local to the
shaman, some dealing with exotica that brings scientists from around
the world to study with them in the hope of learning something not
known before, and perhaps in the hope of finding a miracle drug like
asperin or quinine or barbasco or any number of other marvel in the
Modern that we take for granted now and can't imagine a world
without. But there was a time, and not so long ago, that Amazonian
medicine was hidden from the rest of the world, and for some shamans,
that's just the way they would like to keep it. But most know such is
not possible, that the world encroaches, that the shamanic world must
make way for “progress,” such as it is, even when it destroys
local village life. And thus there is an association of shamans who
have elected Rossana to deal with the outside world of lawyers and
government officials and tourists and other shamans making noises
about this and that that brings Rossana to village after village oft
times by canoe in the wet season when there are no roads at all but
the water ways. And Rossana brings some sort of healing with her in
the form of talk. Over and over she mentions “prudence,” a
feminine way of dealing with the rough and tumble of a man's world
that women have to cope with as well as they can. The village elders
chose her, and the shamans work with her. It has been so for ten
years, since the previous woman died, some suspect murdered by poison
and a blow across the back from a club. Prudence only goes so far in
the world. Slowly, slowly, little by little, and still there are
stories of shamans murdered wholesale in the area of Yurimaguas, a
story I find little evidence to support it, but now folk loric and
true to the those who live the village life and shamanic profession.
In this epistemological realm a death is caused, it doesn't simply
happen of its own accord, doesn't come from a mindless force that we
call nature. For the shamanic and the villagers who live in the
worlds of plants, it is the power of the spirits of plants that do
all things. That's why there are shamans and various sorts of plant
doctores. Without them, people would be helpless against all
harms. With them, life is frightening and bitter and short. Not all
shamans are good guys. Some are witches. All shamans though are part
of the matrix of plants and thus are all bound by the same rules of
awareness of the realities of life.
Sitting in Rossana's sparsely furnished
room with toys scattered around one can sense the village life still
in her conversation and the look in her eyes when she talks of life
outside the bustle of the city. Though we sit mere feet from the
window on the street I don't hear any sound but Rossana's voice as
she talks about tribal warfare, murdered shamans, raped babies, and
demonic shamans sabotaging each other for the sake of gaining power
over rivals. The shamanic world is a closed world, not only to me as
a Westerner and modern world man but to others not initiated and
trained in plants and lore. I have some sense of the village life as
I hear my grandmother talking to me about the clans across the way,
of the raids and the spirits of the glens and dales, the tors and the
bens. I know the village life as well from the closed mind and the
adamant refusal to speak further about some plain fact my grandmother
will not accept, it being in contradiction to her life in the
blistering north of poverty and toil and want. It's the jungle life,
one of superstition and irrationality that one cannot change in the
person living it. I remember it.
I'm not a science guy. I have little
sympathy for the myopic cutters. My love in life sees grand
narratives of high vision and the Moral in literature. It don't
hardly include spirits living in trees and weeds. Like us all,
however, I have a sense of the whole, and that is what the selva
shaman in the Amazon provides along side the lab-bound molecular
physicist and the Orthodox rabbi ducking bombs in Sderot, and the
leftard conspiracy theorist sleeping in his mother's basement in
Bumfuck, Colorado. We all of us search for a grand story that makes
sense of what the world is and why we live in it as we do, well or
ill. I look to Sophocles and Aeschylus and Shakespeare and Milton for
reality and meaning; others look to the jungle and beyond, to the
avatars of plants. Some look to the stock market, and some look to
the Golden Age of the distant past in the hope of finding the way to
the future perfect. Surprising to some, there are doctors of novels;
and equally surprising to others, there are doctors of ayahuasca.
What is? How do we know? What is the Good? I asked these questions
over and over during the hours I spent talking with Rossana. Each
time the answer came back to prudence. The story becomes clear if one
hears the voice of a female shaman speaking as a female first and as
a shaman second. Don't recklessly destroy things in haste and
aggressive competition and pride. The story is grand and it needs
many to make it clear, not the super shaman with the greater power,
but all shamans working slowly and locally to make things good for
those around them in need. Prudence. Don't, don't, don't.
Don't go to the shaman to ruin him for
selfish needs, Rossana said, those sick people who want to die of the
effects of ayahuasca and then leave their troubles at the shaman's
door. Then followed too many examples of tourist who come to die.
Don't come to seduce the shamans, I heard examples of, because some
of them will go for it and some will retreat ever further from the
world of outsiders from fear of demonic possession. And please, which
made me choke on my coffee, please do not send us hippies, not people
from Argentina, but especially not the worse of all, hippies from
Chile.
Hippies came in the sixties and in
various guises they come today to strip the selva of shaman, turning
the original 50 or so lodges meant for jungle sightseeing into a
massive industry now that harvests shamans and places them in modern
luxury where they make the tourist happy and reap small rewards,
often cheated so badly that the time came when Rossana and others
were outraged to the point of starting an association to protect the
professionals from further harm. Prudence. Get along, be careful,
take a few drops of ayahuasca first to see if it might give on heart
palpitations or even kill. Gently, gently. And do no harm.
Rossana gave ayahuasca once to three
strange men, men she didn't know. Shortly thereafter at church she
saw the same three men-- all of them Catholic priests. She went to
her own priest and asked if now she would go to hell for her actions.
The priest said no, that it is important that they know what it is
the locals experience, knowing as well as they can the lives of
others, those they hope as well to tend.
To know life and make people able to
live it well without pain or fear is the good in the story of being
Rossana tells. It's a girl's story. There is another story to tell
that Rossana only hints at, a dark and frightening story of katawa
and the family of
poison drinkers.
I
don't know, and the young Italian lad doesn't know, but someone
might, and someone might tell the story of the attack on the boy that
has left him terrified by his ayahuasca experiences, close to 20 and
all benign at least and uplifting till the last when he was invaded
by a bruha, the witch
who came to destroy his mind and capture his soul.
“I don't know
anything anymore,” he told me, sweating and frightened and
sleepless as he sat on my bed and fairly begged me for answers I
don't have to give him. “I thought ayahuasca was good. But now I
don't know. I am afraid I have lost my mind.” I sat and smiled and
listened and said nothing much because there are answer I don't have
to give him. I know a little more, having looked a little deeper. Maybe I could tell him, but I don't know that he would understand. There are mysteries I don't quite get and don't want to waste time with fools pondering. There are evils too that one might want to ponder even if they attack the simple badly. I see him now in my mind's eye. I've seen some things, now I know I can tell. I thought he was a goof. Now? Well, now
I don't know what to think about the lad. I've come back a changed
fellow.
A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:
http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1
And here are some reviews and comments on said book:
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html
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