Civilization and Savagery: From the Andes to Tierra Del Fuego

The artistic grandeur of Andean civilizations preceding that of the Inca, who had dominated the area for less than a century when Pizarro brought a brutal end to their vast empire, wholly belies the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's claim (30) after the Spanish Conquest that these peoples were little better than beasts. So completely did the Inca impose their culture, imperial religion, and adoptive Quechua language during their brief dominion, however, that it is only of their beliefs, recorded mainly by Spanish writers, that we can speak with any confidence.

The highly efficient Inca empire "was one of the most thoroughly regimented societies the world has ever known" (Steward and Faron, 5–6). Local populations were organized into family groups (ayllus ), and all power and land belonged in theory to the Inca himself, who as descendant of the Sun held absolute authority by divine right. "Formal religious organization with priests, as distinct from medicine men" (Bennett, 9), prevailed in this highly stratified agricultural state. The gods were hierarchically ordered, with the heavenly Creator Viracocha or Pachacámac at the summit, and the Sun, divine ancestor of the Inca dynasty, as his regent. (The Inca appear to have fatally confused Pizarro with Viracocha, as the Mexicans confused Cortés with Quetzalcoatl, and viracocha continued to be a common noun for the white man.) In addition to other major deities officially worshiped throughout the em-

pire, like Pachamama, the Earth Mother, and Mamacocha, Mother Sea, countless natural and man-made objects were venerated as sacred huacas (or wakas ): anything extraordinary was huaca . The bones of lineal ancestors were also revered; and every family seems to have had its household gods, called conopas or chancas . ^[5]

An imposing priestly hierarchy formed what Mason (202) calls "the only instance in aboriginal America of an established church," with the High Priest of the Sun in Cuzco, a brother or uncle of the Inca, at the top. Inca religion "emphasized ritual and organization rather than mysticism and spirituality, and its chief interests were for food supply and curing" (Rowe, 293), which an elaborate ceremonial cycle aimed to promote. As in Mesoamerica and intervening kingdoms, human sacrifice was practiced, at least at times of crisis, and as many as two hundred children might be strangled at a coronation; other victims, as in Mexico, had palpitating hearts torn from their chests.^[6]

In its emphasis on sin (understood as violation of ritual or natural order), confession (often individual and secret), and purification, Inca religion resembled the Catholic, as Spanish priests who denounced it uncomfortably recognized. The confessor belonged to the priestly hierarchy; especially heinous sins might be confessed to the High Priest. Curing too pertained in large part to the priestly order. At the summer festival of Situa, as Molina (20–34) described it in the sixteenth century, the people of Cuzco went to the Temple of the Sun calling on sickness to depart, and armed men ran to distant destinations where they bathed to purge evils causing disease. The people lighted torches; days of sacrifice and prayer, feasting and singing followed.

Not only communal but individual curing appears to have been largely performed by priests. But the curer-diviner, though incorporated—insofar as the imprecise terminology of Spanish sources permits us to judge—into the lower ranks of the priestly hierarchy, nevertheless retained traces of his putatively shamanic origin, to the extent that Brundage (1963, 55–56) even suggests that "a fundamental shamanism lies behind all sacred offices in ancient Peru." This curer, unlike higher priests, received a personal supernatural call to his or her office. Molina (14) speaks of a class of "wizards" called camascas, "who declared that their grace and virtue was derived from the thunder," and Cobo (2:227–28) specifies that most healers called camasca or soncoyoc said that someone appeared in dreams and taught them to cure. Both light-

[5] See, e.g., Arriaga, 28; also Cobo, 2:163–65, on worship of the dead, and Garcilaso, 76–77, on huacas .

[6] For early accounts of human sacrifice in Peru, which the Inca apologist Garcilaso (86–87) vigorously denies were performed by his people, see Molina, 54–59, and Cieza de León, 150–51, 180. On the Inca calendar, see Rowe, 308–11, and the sources he cites.

ning and dreams are common forms of the shaman's (or medium's) call, and an Inca curer's initial vision may have remained the guardian spirit from which his or her power derived.

Cures for diseases caused by malevolent spirits, evil winds, and soul loss through fright (Mason, 219) included—besides confession—massage and sucking, sacrifice and prayer, a rich variety of herbal medicines (many of which Europeans adopted), and sophisticated surgical methods such as trepanation. A relative absence of horrified denunciations supports Rowe's contention (291) that narcotics were unimportant in Inca culture, unlike that of Mexico. Coca, whose dried leaves were chewed with lime to release cocaine, was less widely used before than after the Spanish Conquest (von Hagen, 110–12); its main religious use was in divination and sacrifice, and far from producing frenzied visions it assuaged hunger and gave strength to those who chewed it, substituting for food (Cieza de León, 259–60). Other visionary substances, such as hallucinogenic cactuses, were probably known to ancient Andean peoples (Sharon, 40), and intoxication with chicha beer was common on festive occasions, but nothing indicates that ecstatic trance was an important element, even for curers or diviners, in the highly ritualized Inca culture.

Divination was largely mechanical, by grains of maize, beans, or colored stones, spiders' legs, masticated coca, or lungs of slaughtered birds or animals (Cobo, 2:226–27). A more solemn form of divination on critical occasions communicated with spirits answering questions out of flaming braziers around which food and drink were set (Rowe, 302–03; cf. Molina, 14). And a wide range of "oracles," from the High Priest to local practitioners, carried on the shamanic tradition, in very constricted form, of direct communication with the divine. At the annual festival of Capaccocha, at which two male and two female infants were said to be sacrificed, the High Priest and his assistants questioned the principal "idols" about the future of the Inca people; drunken priests, Cieza de León scornfully writes (19), "invented what they saw would most please those who asked the questions, assisted by the devil." At much lower levels "sorcerers" in charge of innumerable huacas talked incomprehensibly with spirits in the dark in order to find lost articles or learn what was happening at a distance (Rowe, 302; cf. Molina, 14–15; Arriaga, 32–33; Polo de Ondegardo, 26–34). In such ways, and by interpretation of dreams, an unpredictable element lingered at the outer margins of the Incas' rigidly ordered world, as if to remind them of a residual shamanic quest or to presage the dark uncertainty soon to descend inexplicably upon them from beyond the farthest borders of this four-cornered empire of the Sun.

Not surprisingly, Andean cultures since colonial times have contin-

ued, despite the shattering impact of Spanish Conquest, to reflect attitudes already ancient, no doubt, when the Inca ruled. The rigidity of indigenous (now outwardly Catholic) ritual has been maintained and intensified among the Quechua of Peru and the Aymara and other peoples of highland Bolivia in reaction to centuries of exploitation in the mines and encomiendas. The Andean village is a "closed corporate community" in which the ayllu, a group of families claiming common descent, is the basic unit of social organization as it was for the Inca and possibly their predecessors. Aboriginal social stratification has been heightened by polarization between natives and Europeans, and here as in Mesoamerica ceremonial life in many communities is directed by holders of rotating "cargos" ranked by expense and prestige (Buechler, 44–49). Closure and immobility, though never total, typify both the reality of these societies as perceived by outsiders and the ideal of many Indians: to be left to themselves.

In such societies ritual tends to be stereotyped and invariant. Besides public festivals of the Catholic calendar, personal rites are performed, but no important cults of ancient gods have openly survived. For the Aymara around Lake Titicaca, as for the Colla before them, "religion was and is," La Barre writes (1948, 165), "a worship of strongly localized, sometimes ancestral and totemic, place-deities." In the Quechua community of Qotobamba in southern Peru, too, deities of earth and mountains intimately partake of the life of the people (Nuñez del Prado, 242–49).

If Inca priests vanished, or adopted a new faith, diviners, curers, and sorcerers flourish much as before. Aymara diviners employ ancient techniques of reading coca leaves; they may claim power from lightning but learn mechanical methods by observation (Tschopik, 563–64). The most powerful of them can converse with a dead person's soul (Radin 1942, 285–94). These diviners are sometimes called shamans, but there is little of visionary trance in their procedures: their rituals, like those of their ancestors, are hardly less standardized than a priest's. Curers too "belong rather to a 'priestly' than to a 'shamanistic' tradition," Tschopik (558) notes of the Aymara; though accompanied by herbal medicines, cures are essentially magical, employing blood sacrifice, libations, and food offerings to restore the individual or communal harmony (Métraux 1967, 276–80; Bastien, 129–49).

Central Andean religion thus appears to exclude ecstatic shamanism, yet within this closed world, openness to an indeterminate beyond has sporadically made itself felt. The late sixteenth-century millenarian Taki Onqoy ("Dancing Sickness"), like other Native American revivalist cults, aimed to replace the Christian God with native huacas, which swept down and seized its followers, causing them "to shake, tremble, fall, and

dance insanely" (Stern, 52) in a frenzied contact with the divine that was largely foreign to the sober religion it strove to reinstate. Such revitalization movements arise, A. Wallace notes (1966, 157), when members of a traditional community no longer practice the values they profess and must therefore seek new ones, which they equate with the old. Their nearly inevitable failure to restore a vanished past projected into the future often eventuates in embittered acceptance of a once again closed and now demonstrably immutable order.

On the north coast of Peru, where Moche civilization flourished, folk healing has preserved much of its presumably shamanistic content. At a session observed in the 1940s (Gillin, 119–22), the brujo summoned spirits by shaking his rattle, chanting, and whistling until he sank into trance and learned from the saint's picture on his table how to treat a patient, while his helper attacked hostile spirits with a knife. In Trujillo, northwest of Moche, the folk healer Eduardo Calderón Palomino was educated in a Catholic seminary, but his practices were overwhelmingly indigenous. Denunciations by Catholic priests in the seventeenth century (Sharon, 43) attest to ancient use of the San Pedro cactus and other hallucinogens by means of which the modern curandero, too, is able to transcend mortal limits, voyage to supernatural realms, divine the future—"in short, to attain 'vision,' to 'see'" (45). His soul sets forth in "ecstatic magical flight" (46) to sacred lagoons where it learns the causes of illness and sometimes battles spirits, performing somersaults with sword in hand. Such a figure, bridging ancient tribal and modern urban worlds, embodies not the closed conservatism of the ritualistic Andean healer but the "restless search for meaning" (11) and "constant innovation and growth" (22) characteristic of the age-old shamanic quest.

The vast Inca empire dominated only a fraction of South America, and beyond its confines shamans continued to flourish, often without priestly rival. Nowhere south of Alaska are parallels with Eurasian shamanism more striking than among the Araucanian peoples of the southern Andes, who for centuries resisted both Inca and Spaniard until driven over the cordillera to Argentina or herded onto reservations in Chile. The Araucanians have long practiced agriculture, and among the Mapuche, the largest Araucanian group, priestly ritual probably influenced by ancient Andean civilizations remains central. Indeed, in continuing to worship gods of Sun and Moon, Earth and Sea, the Mapuche have quite possibly perpetuated rites long vanished in the Inca's own domains. In their worship of ancestral deities, too, the Mapuche resemble the Inca and other agricultural peoples. Their most elaborate funeral ritual in recent times is the ñillatun, in which prayers to ancestors were probably once the central component. Far from being strictly calendrical, however, this ceremony, as Titiev (1951, 129–30) observed it in

the late 1940s, was characterized by lack of standardization. Formulaic invariance was apparently foreign to this traditionally warlike people.

The ritual priest's power derives from social standing and knowledge of ritual. The machi, on the other hand, though she too has frequently taken a leading role in the ñillatun "largely by default" (Faron 1964, 102), is in many ways an archetypal shaman showing extraordinary affinities with counterparts in Eurasia and the American Arctic. Although now usually female, the machi was formerly more often, as in some Siberian and Eskimo tribes, a transvestite male; nineteenth-century reports suggest that unlike most of his female successors, he often resembled classic Siberian shamans in being neurotic, epileptic, or otherwise sickly or deformed (Métraux 1967, 183–84; cf. Titiev 1951, 117–18).

A vision, sometimes in conjunction with a serious illness or handicap, is a normal sign of shamanic vocation (Faron 1964, 141–43), and appears to have been standard for centuries past. This initial vision often involves ecstatic ascent to the heavens and revelation from the ancestral sky god Ñenechen or his Christian counterpart; training by an experienced elder follows election and culminates in an initiation ceremony strikingly parallel to those of some Siberian peoples. The machi induces trance not principally by the gourd rattle nearly universal in the New World but by the shallow wooden drum common in Eurasia but rare in America south of the Pacific Northwest. A still more conspicuous shamanistic appurtenance is the rewe, a squared tree trunk three meters high with a human head carved at the top and a stairway hewn into the back. On the culminating second day of a ceremony, having demonstrated her curative powers and entered trance, dancing to drum, rattle, and chant, a machi wildly struggles to escape those restraining her, then slowly climbs the rewe —much as the Altaic kam climbed his birch tree—stands swaying on a platform at its top, then descends to the halfway point from which, shaking her bells, she falls unconscious into a young man's arms.^[7]

The Araucanian machi resembles spirit mediums and many Siberian shamans, in contrast to most American shamans outside the Northwest Coast, in being possessed by a spirit—usually a supernatural animal or bird helper or the soul of a dead shaman—and communicating through an interpreter what was revealed during trance. While possessed, she "is unaware of what she says and does and often uses a secret language" (Faron 1964, 139); she sometimes handles hot coals and passes her arms through fire. But machis not only incorporate possessing spirits but "visit

[7] Based on Robles Rodríguez's account summarized in Métraux 1967, 193–95. See also Métraux, 195–201.

them in the lands where they stay in order to obtain from them the knowledge they need" (Métraux 1967, 208–09). The shaman, an old and blind male machi told Faron (1968, 79), "is inbetween," linking this world to another both by receptively opening herself and by setting actively forth in search of what transcends her. Possession and ecstasy are thus complementary moments in the unending quest to enlarge the given human condition through interchange with what is forever beyond yet inseparable from it.

The most dangerous illnesses are caused by soul loss (Faron 1964, 146), usually inflicted by a witch hostile to the shaman. At the climax of the machitun curing ceremony, in another striking parallel to Siberian practice, the machi drinks copiously of urine, then sings and beats the drum, jumps over the patient, and works herself up to a frenzy of possession. She speaks in the possessing spirit's voice without revealing its name, begins a violent dance, often rushing out to climb her rewe, then dances around the pole, accompanied by a young man charged with catching her when she falls (Titiev 1951, 115–16). The machi may also directly combat the witch responsible for the disease, or the demons under her command, through powers won from the heavens she is thought to revisit during trance (Métraux 1967, 216).

The impressive parallels between Araucanian and Siberian shamanism must surely be attributed, as Métraux contends (234), to "survival of a great number of traits which elsewhere have been retained in a partial or incomplete fashion and which here have persisted in a coherent complex." In contrast to highly ritualized Mesoamerican and Incan priests, the machi—whether female or transvestite male—is an outsider to dominant hierarchies, and the high esteem bestowed on her without regard to sex or birth provides "compensation for the overwhelming attention given to males in both the mundane and the spiritual segments of the Mapuche world" (Faron 1964, 152). By preserving much of the primordial shaman's mobility in an increasingly sedentary world, Araucanian machis assured that their people's religion would not be only an invariant round of repetitive ritual oriented toward a sacrosanct past but would remain open to the uncertainties of a changing present and indeterminate future. Variant procedures characterize even priestly ceremonies, and healing rites, Titiev notes (1951, 117), leave ample room for "individual whims." Like rites of other mediums or shamans who open themselves to the unknown, they are not automatically effective, as magic and formal ritual are thought to be, but depend upon unpredictable dialogue with spirits who can never be infallibly coerced or commanded.

This dialogic openness to the unexpected accounts for the machi's exhilaration in exploring new realms of the spirit, but also for the sense

of peril that often attends it. "When I am possessed by a spirit, I am close to death," one of Faron's informants told him (1964, 142): "It is dangerous, and I do not like to do it," exciting though she found it when young. Both the danger and the excitement derive in large measure from the intrinsic incertitude of the authentic shaman's interaction with a world of boundless transformative potentiality that is not given and cannot be wholly foreknown.

Far to the south the Selk'nam (or Ona) and Yamana (or Yahgan) eked out a livelihood by hunting, fishing, and gathering on the frigid islands of Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of the inhabited world. Among the now nearly extinct Selk'nam of the main island, society was "egalitarian and individualistic" (Chapman, 40), with no chiefs, council of elders, or governing institutions; the seafaring Yamana of the smaller islands south to Cape Horn, whom hunger kept perpetually on the move, likewise recognized no external authority. "An inner unrest moves these people," Gusinde remarks (1961, 2:363 = 1937, 612), "which they themselves cannot account for, because they were born with it."

Repelled by these "miserable, degraded savages" (1962, 208) during the visit of the Beagle in 1832–33, Darwin could hardly think them inhabitants of the same world (213), or attribute to them belief "in what we should call a God" (1936, 470) or practice of any religious rites except "the muttering of the old man before he distributed the putrid blubber to his famished party" (1962, 216). Later missionaries and scientists likewise found that the Fuegians "have no knowledge whatever of God" and "are completely lacking" in religious ideas.^[8] Such opinions arose from misconceived identification of religion with the priestly rituals of more settled peoples, relegating the shaman, if noticed at all, to the peripheral role of "wizard or conjuring doctor" whose existence Darwin noted (1962, 216) but "whose office we could never clearly ascertain."

But the shaman, however simple his practices, was central to Fuegian religion. A Selk'nam received the shamanic spirit of a dead relative from a living shaman who rubbed his body; thereafter he could accomplish nothing when not possessed by this spirit (Gusinde 1931, 740). Every Yamana shaman maintained an intimate connection with a guardian spirit invoked with songs learned in his vision. While treating disease he sang himself into a semi-trance during which he took counsel with his spirit (1961, 5:1340–48 = 1937, 1415–21). The Selk'nam shaman like-

[8] Quoted from G. P. Despard (1863) and C. Spegazzini (1882) by Gusinde (1961, 4:951 = 1937, 1035); cf. Lothrop, 35. For Darwin the distinction was not racial; though ranking the Fuegians "amongst the lowest barbarians" (1936, 445), he was surprised "how closely the three natives on board H. M. S. 'Beagle', who had lived some years in England, and could talk little English, resembled us in disposition and in most of our mental faculties." On Darwin's attitudes toward the Fuegians, see Gould 1993, 267–74.

wise consulted with the spirit who entered him during trance, and cured by singing, massaging, and sucking (1931, 757–62). These familiar procedures show little resemblance to ecstatic journeys by Siberian, Eskimo, or Araucanian shamans, for transcendence of the Fuegians' harsh conditions was difficult to envisage.

Yet even in this peripheral outpost of American shamanism, indications remained of a once—and, until their extinction, always a potentially—larger role for Fuegian shamans. According to a Selk'nam myth, the first man and woman descended from the sky by a rope which broke behind them (Lothrop, 98); in other myths the culture hero Kenós came down from the heavens, then near the earth, to mediate between the Highest Being and inhabitants of this world (Gusinde 1931, 573; cf. 1975, 21). Such myths suggest a lingering memory of spirit realms to which Fuegian shamans, like spirit mediums of Polynesia or Africa, no longer had access.

If access to the heavens was not in his power—had it been lost in the distant age when men slaughtered the women who once ruled over them, driving their primordial shaman, the Moon, to the skies in anger at her husband, the Sun?—the vast realm of the future might still reveal itself to the rare Selk'nam shaman who became a "father of the word," a prophet able, through knowledge of celestial lore, to foretell events (Chapman, 44–47).^[9] Here mastery of the limitless heavens is again associated with the dynamism of language through which the indeterminate future can be apprehended. The restless Yamana "believe that their medicine men can see into the future and that they have infallible prescience" (Gusinde 1961, 5:130 = 1937, 1422). In this orientation, as in their access to dream and myth, both Yamana and Selk'nam shamans continued to embody, in however attenuated a form, the age-old shamanic vocation of enlarging the boundaries of the bleak and seemingly ineluctable here and now.