Tropical Quest: Shamans of the Amazon
On the high plains and western slopes of the Andean cordillera and its narrow Pacific strip, from the Colombian tropics to the frigid wastes of Tierra del Fuego, shamanistic practices either coexisted with priestly rit-
[9] Few Selk'nam shamans were prophets, and not all prophets were shamans; some prophets were "mothers of the word." With the Selk'nam myth of men's seizure of power from women (Chapman, 66–70), cf. the Yamana myth in Gusinde 1961, 5:1237–49 = 1937, 1337–45. Similar myths of women's primordial pre-eminence (for Australian examples, see Berndt 1951, 18–19, and Strehlow 1947, 93–94) gave rise to theories of aboriginal matriarchy which Bachofen supposed, mainly on the basis of classical literary sources, to be a fundamental stage in the development of civilization.
ualisms or continued, as among the Fuegians, in depleted form. In the sparsely populated regions east of the Andes, on the other hand, above all in the rain forests and highlands watered by the vast Amazon and Orinoco systems, complex shamanisms survived into the present as the predominant, if not unrivaled, expression of tribal religion. With its small semi-migratory bands combining hunting and gathering with slash-and-burn horticulture, the Amazon Basin has been for the most part, in contrast to Mesoamerica and the Central Andes, "a region of the shaman and of minor cults rather than of priests and of the worship of important deities" (Goldman 1963, 4).
Not that communal rituals of fertility, healing, or initiation were absent; on the contrary, studies of Tukanoan peoples of the Colombian Vaupés in northwest Amazonia have demonstrated the extent to which intricate rituals of these relatively settled longhouse communities restore the equilibrium of "an ordered cosmos created in the ancestral past" (C. Hugh-Jones, 1) and allow participant males to be identified with mythical forebears. In the He House rites of the men's Yorupary cult among the Barasana, "Regular contact with the world of spirits and ancestors . . . ensures that the human world is attuned to a wider and more embracing cosmic order" (S. Hugh-Jones, 38).
But here, as in central and southern California, the principal officiant is normally a shaman (who is sometimes the headman), not a priest of a rival order, and the use of hallucinogens transforming celebrants into animals able to traverse cosmic layers is distinctly shamanistic. The festivals provide the opportunity for participants "partially to experience what shamans experience—to 'see' beyond everyday reality" (Jackson, 202). Mythical progenitors are venerated, but there is no lineal "ancestor worship" as in Africa, and few signs of sharp division between shaman and priest such as Lévi-Strauss (1973, 269) found among the dualistic Bororo of Brazil. Spirit possession, though attested in some tribes, is relatively infrequent.
Shamans, Métraux observes (1944, 1:197), display "remarkable uniformity in the entire tropical zone extending from the Antilles to the Gran Chaco" two-thirds of a continent to the south. Like the Tapirapé of northern Mato Grosso in central Brazil (Wagley 1977, 174), many of these peoples had no true religious rituals and therefore no priests, but shamans whose personal characteristics gave direct access to the supernatural. Differences in religious practice are great, but in so vast a region it is again, as in northern Eurasia, similarities that are most striking. The near universality of ecstatic shamanism bears witness to the urgency of the spiritual quest among these tropical peoples.
Some Amazonian peoples divide the cosmos into three layers, others into four or more, but many give the impression, as the Shavante of
eastern Mato Grosso did to Maybury-Lewis (284), "of having comparatively little speculative interest" in its structure or origin. Opinions concerning the soul vary greatly, and often seem contradictory to outsiders. Belief in a guardian spirit or nagual attached to an individual for life is fairly rare (Chagnon, 48–50; Montgomery, 124), but belief in a mobile soul capable of traveling forth in sickness or dream—the precondition of visionary shamanism—is very widespread.
The headhunting Jívaro of the Ecuadorian Amazon have developed a rich doctrine of multiple souls in which the quest has a crucial role. Of their three souls, the visionary arutam which protects against violent death is not given at birth but must be acquired. A boy (rarely a girl) begins seeking it at about age six. Accompanied most commonly by his father (Harner 1972, 136–39), he makes a pilgrimage to a sacred waterfall where these wandering souls meet. By day the vision seekers bathe, by night they fast, drink tobacco water or datura, and await an arutam for as long as five days, departing if unsuccessful. If the seeker is fortunate, he wakens to find the earth trembling and a great wind felling trees amid thunder and lightning; while he grasps a tree trunk the arutam appears as a pair of creatures, a disembodied head, or a ball of fire. The seeker boldly touches the arutam, which explodes and disappears; he then returns home, telling no one he fulfilled his quest. After nightfall, the arutam he touched comes as a dream in the form of an old ancestor who promises success and enters his body. Unlike the guardian spirit of many American peoples the Jívaro arutam departs each time a man kills an enemy, so that new arutams must continually be sought by successful warriors. Among most other South American tribes the visionary soul is not acquired through a quest or dream encounter but is a potentiality inborn in every woman and man.
Early and recent writers alike have remarked on the prominence of belief among these peoples in the power of the mobile soul, above all the shaman's, to transform itself into a bird or animal. In central Brazil, von den Steinen observed a century ago (351), human beings, birds, animals, and fish "are all only persons of different appearance and different attributes" into any of which the shaman can transform himself "and understand all languages that are spoken in the forest or in the air or in the water"; and myths of the Gê, Bororo, and other Amazonian peoples compiled in Lévi-Strauss's Mythologiques bear witness to this all-but-universal conviction of the interchangeability of human and animal particularly characteristic of shamanistic peoples. The shaman is the self-transformer par excellence, and the animal into which he especially changes himself throughout the forested regions of South America is the swift and powerful jaguar.
If transformation into animal form is one means of transcending the normal human condition, contact with the heavens is another. The sky, the ancestral land where history began for the Bakaïri of central Brazil, "previously lay near the earth, and one could easily cross over to it" (von den Steinen, 349–50); but after men migrated to earth it rose to its present distance. Some peoples worshiped an astral pantheon based on careful observation of the skies (W. Roth, 254–70), and a star-divinity might appear in a vision, Nimuendajú reported (1942, 86) for the central Brazilian Sherente, to reveal supernatural knowledge. At their Great Feast, already a thing of the past when Nimuendajú visited in 1930 (97–98), a man carried a wad of rosinous bast to the top of a pole called "road to the sky" and raised it to be ignited by a heavenly spark. Others climbed up to learn from dead kin how long they would live; finally, an official received a message from the Sun god. In this way the primordial connection between the earthly and heavenly spheres was restored.
Spirits of the dead are widely believed to reside in the sky, in or beyond the Milky Way, which the living—especially shamans—are thought to visit in quest of knowledge or power. Among the Desana of northwest Amazonia, the Milky Way is the zone of contact, through drug-induced visions, between terrestrial and supernatural beings, including the divine Master of Animals (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971, 43; cf. Koch-Grünberg, 173; Murphy and Quain, 75). Here animal and celestial transcendence intersect in a complex realization of the transformative spiritual quest.
Twins, sometimes identified with Sun and Moon, were prominent South American culture heroes; and although the quest is often submerged in a tangle of other motifs rather than being found in the "practically unmixed form" of Navajo and Pueblo myths (Radin 1942, 81), it finds striking expression in tales from widely dispersed Tupí-Guaraní-speaking peoples. In a myth of the long-extinct Tupinamba of coastal Brazil, recounted by Métraux (1948, 132; cf. 1928, 31–43), twins of the culture hero Maira by Opossum seek their father, who imposes a series of tasks before acknowledging them as his children. Each is killed and revived by the other during these ordeals, but in the end Maira recognizes both.[10] Such widely disseminated tales give mythical expression to the arduous quest re-enacted by the shaman and indeed by every person who combines celestial and animal powers potentially surpassing the normally human.
[10] For more recent Tupí-Guaraní versions, see Wagley and Galvão, 137–40, and Bartolomé, 16–40. Myths of twins exist among many other groups; see, e.g., the Carib versions from the Guianas and Brazil recorded in W. Roth, 130–36, and E. Basso, 10–12.
Shamans acquire their powers in several ways. In the Guianas, the office was apparently hereditary (W. Roth, 333), and among the Jívaro, where warriors must seek a vision-soul, a shaman obtains power through purchase (Harner 1972, 118). But in most cases a visionary call, followed by isolated apprenticeship, is necessary. Thus among the Mehinaku of Mato Grosso a monkey demon offers to be the dreamer's "pet"; instruction in smoking and three months of seclusion and taboos follow (Gregor, 335). Among the Tapirapé, all young men who wished to be shamans gathered each evening to seek dreams, swallowing smoke and falling into trance. Those who succeeded (as not all did) later took part in a ritualized "fight against the beings of Thunder" and performed cures alongside their mentors (Wagley 1977, 197–99).
Tobacco and other hallucinogens—notably the potent concoction of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine widely known as yagé or ayahuasca —are frequently used to induce the shaman's visionary call. Even Jívaro candidates, whose purchase of shamanic powers is nearly routine (about one of four men is a shaman!), make contact with the "real" or supernatural world (Harner 1972, 154) only after imbibing the drink. Elsewhere the apprenticeship is normally more arduous and uncertain. Helena Valero, a Brazilian peasant girl captured by the Shamatari of northwest Amazonia, observed the rigors of a secluded young initiate (Biocca, 71–73) who became so drunk with hallucinogenic epená, inhaled day and night, that he could not stand while learning to repeat his teacher's chants. If he survived this ordeal of up to a month, the initiate would have mastered the spirits and become a true shaman: an experience equated with death and rebirth. Novice shamans of the Colombian Desana, secluded for a year or more, strove in a slow and difficult quest to attain "weapons" in a drug-induced visit to the celestial House of Thunder (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975, 78–79), until finally "they will see a tree, a piece of wood, or a stone and will suddenly know: this is mine, this is what thunder sent me!" With this, the long search to transcend the given by uniting powers of earth and sky embodied in the most familiar objects attains fruition.
Disease is thought to be caused by intrusion or soul loss, evil spirits, sorcerers, or broken taboos. Métraux (1944, 2:325) finds belief in soul loss widespread in the Andes and Gran Chaco but rare in tropical America, even suggesting (1967, 133) that its prevalence in the Chaco may derive from Andean civilizations rather than native traditions. Many accounts testify, however, to persistence of this ancient belief in widely separated parts of the immense Amazonian region. Only when the soul has been robbed does the otherwise "singularly uniform" shamanistic treatment of illness change, Métraux remarks (1944, 2:325), as
the widespread methods of massaging, blowing tobacco smoke or swallowing tobacco juice, and sucking out intrusive objects, along with singing, dancing, and shaking of rattles, are supplemented by spirit possession[11] and ecstatic flight. Some Amazonian shamans, moreover, directly engage hostile spirits in dialogue or battle. One dramatic instance is the cure Im Thurn (336–37) underwent in the 1880s, when suffering from fever, by a Macusi shaman of Guyana. As he lay in total darkness, roars filled the house; the shaman thundered questions and disease spirits shouted answers: "I seemed to be suspended somewhere in a ceaselessly surging din; and my only thoughts were a hardly-felt wonder as to the cause of the noise, and a gentle, fruitless effort to remember if there had once been a time before the noise was."
Many Amazonian peoples believe, like the Jívaro, that the "real" world can be seen only with the aid of hallucinogens (Harner 1972, 134; cf. Karsten 1935, 444–45). Drinking of yagé and similar substances, not only by shamans but in communal celebrations like those of the Tukanoans (C. Hugh-Jones, 209), "creates an alternative experience of time and space." The thin shell between the two worlds can be traversed only in hallucinatory trance, and "people say they have visited this other dimension and have seen its inhabitants" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975, 192). Whether drunk, smoked, or inhaled through a blowpipe in the form of snuff, the drug enables the soul to communicate with spirits, and sometimes frees it to rise above this world to another. Thus tobacco not only attracts spirits, Wilbert observes (34), but transports man into their realm, "where he can learn how 'to see' things that are beyond his physical field of vision."
After drinking yagé (known as ayahuasca in Peru), the nineteenth-century Ecuadorian geographer Villavicencio reported (Harner 1973a, 155–56), natives "feel vertigo and spinning in the head, then a sensation of being lifted into the air and beginning an aerial journey," though elevated visions of lakes, forests, and birds are followed by terrible horrors. For the Desana of Colombia, hallucinogenic snuff, or its supernatural master, is the intermediary through which those chosen by it "ascended to the Milky Way and turned into jaguars" allowing them to roam in the forest unrecognized (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975, 109).
[11] Métraux (1944, 2:322) notes, contrary to Loeb, that shamartistic possession is far from unknown in South America. Sometimes the shaman is possessed, sometimes another specialist (see Gregor, 339, on the Mehinaku). In most tropical tribes, however, as Reichel-Dolmatoff writes of the Desana and other Tukanoan peoples (1975, 104), "the concept of spirit-possession seems to be completely lacking. . . . A payé [shaman] is always himself; never is he seized or invaded by a spirit; he simply interprets and transmits what this spirit shows him or tells him."
Among some Tukanoan tribes only great shamans of the past could travel to the sky (C. Hugh-Jones, 62), but belief in celestial ascent by living shamans has persisted elsewhere. A Tapirapé shaman could travel to villages of the dead by turning himself into a bird (Wagley 1977, 185), and certain shamans traveled to the sky in their canoes or visited the Pleiades as "Jaguars of the Skies." Such celestial journeys are a quest for renewal of superhuman powers lost by the primordial schism of earth and sky, but still possessed by hawk, jaguar, and other animals.
The heavenly quest is central to cures for soul loss. In the Gran Chaco, where this diagnosis is common, the shaman sends his own soul in quest of his patient's, traveling in the sky and under the earth to discover and restore it (Métraux 1967, 133–34). When a Taulipáng shaman of northwest Amazonia wishes to communicate with the Mauarí, or spirits, during a curing session, Koch-Grünberg reported (211–12) in the early twentieth century, he cuts some pieces from a vine resembling a ladder and drinks the brew concocted from them: "In this way this vine . . . becomes a ladder for him to climb up to the land of the Mauarí ."
When her baby appeared to be dying among the Namoeteri, Helena Valero recalls (Biocca, 211–13), the old shapori or shamans, having inhaled epená snuff, sought his shade, examining the various paths it might have taken. The chief shaman then announced that spirits of the Sun had stolen him, and bade the others follow him to the Sun, for when drunk with epená "they really believe they are rising into the air." Finally, having sung, sucked, invoked the spirits, and sprinkled invisible water, the chief went away. The child, as his mother remembers, "had truly improved."
The shamanistic quest for knowledge of a transcendent heavenly realm thus plays an important part in tropical South America. Yet the prominence of hallucinogenic drugs in inducing these visions both diminishes the heroic effort required of the spiritual quest—the shaman may be less exception than norm, so easily attained are his visions—and reduces its indeterminate exploration of the beyond. "In spite of the individual nature of the hallucinogenic experience," Kensinger notes (12) of ayahuasca among the Cashinahua of eastern Peru, "there is a high degree of similarity . . . from individual to individual during any one night of drinking," giving their visions a repetitively standardized quality. Among the Desana, the shaman "is not a mystic, and the mechanisms he employs are not sacred" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975, 201–02). As mechanisms they share the invariability of compulsive rites, and to that extent do not so much open toward the unknown as guarantee a repetition of the expected.
Yet like patterns of ritual or spirit possession, use of hallucinogens
does not preclude the exploratory quest but guides it in restricted channels toward a finally unpredictable goal. Its initial effect is often disorienting—"It can ruin a man's mind," the Amahuaca shaman-chief Xumu warned his Peruvian captive, Córdova-Rios (Lamb, 131)—if he cannot control his visions; successful effort to gain an always imperfect control distinguishes the shaman from those who submit to stereotyped hallucinations. In Xumu's chant, as his pupil later remembers it, the emphasis is on incessant search for knowledge (Lamb, 89–90):
We are here again to seek wisdom
give us tranquillity and guidance
to understand the mysteries of the forest
the knowledge of our ancestors . . .
to translate the past into the future . . .
To transcend past in future is to enter a realm of indeterminate danger, as myths of shamanic flight repeatedly stress. The shaman is thus far more than a channel for monotonous hallucinations; indeed his social role, as among the Sharanahua of eastern Peru, may be the only one not determined by kinship or marriage (Siskind, 52). He is therefore uniquely qualified to explore the unknown, so that new songs created from his observations and experiences may become as much a part of traditional knowledge as the old songs had been (162), expanding tribal horizons and effecting change within a framework of perceived continuity.
The ecstatic shaman is no mere technician, then, but an explorer as well: "the reformer of received traditions, the preserver and innovator alike" (Bödiger, 54). The quasi-mechanical effect of communally shared hallucinogens may indeed diminish individual endeavor and constrict the indeterminacy of the quest by channeling it, like ritual formulas, into expected patterns. But wherever unpredictable chance prevails—as among semi-nomadic forest tribes it often does—the Tapirapé and other peoples of the Amazon basin "depended markedly upon their shamans" (Wagley 1977, 195) to assimilate the new and unknown. As religious leader of his people, the shaman is often not only curer but prophet or even messiah; and it is rare, Métraux remarks (1967, 38), "that a messianic movement, even if it aims at re-creating the past, is not at the same time innovative."
The close relation between Amazonian messianic movements and native myths of a culture hero who leads his people to a paradise on earth or beyond it strongly indicates, Schaden asserts (172), that millenarian conceptions were indigenous to these cultures—above all to the wandering Tupí-Guaraní tribes dispersed in historical times from the Atlantic
coast of Brazil to the Peruvian montaña, and in particular to the Apapocuva of southern Brazil and their neighbors.[12] For these peoples the questing culture heroes of myth were no mere legend of long ago but a present reality embodied by the shaman as leader of his people. Maira, father of the mythical twins, according to the Tenetehara of northeastern Brazil, came to earth in search of a "Beautiful Land," and there created man and woman, and taught them to procreate, plant, and prepare manioc before he returned to his carefree "Village of the Gods" (Wagley and Galvão, 100–01). In widely separated parts of the Amazonian forests his people have continued his quest.
The classic account of their wanderings was written by a young German, Curt Unkel, adopted by the Apapocuva as Curt Nimuendajú. At the beginning of the nineteenth century shamans from this and other Guaraní tribes prophesied imminent destruction of the world, gathered disciples, and with dances and chants set off "in search of the 'Land without Evil,' which . . . most thought was in the east, over the sea" (Nimuendajú 1914, 87). The roots of such movements, in which whole tribes migrated hundreds of miles through hostile terrain, go back at least to the sixteenth century; to Nimuendajú (335) the apocalyptic belief of the Apapocuva expressed the "disconsolate pessimism" of a dying tribe which had lost its faith in the future. Yet by his own account (357–60), it is their unshaken perseverance in this desperate quest that is most compelling. For as long as a year after the shaman's visionary summons his people strenuously danced to elicit a revelation of the way to the east, demonstrating "an utterly astonishing determination and persistence" and enduring the harshest privations with no thought of retreat: forward was the only direction they knew. Reaching the coast, they danced again in hope of being lifted through the air to the Land without Evil beyond the sea, until "the way to the beyond had been shut off forever."
A small band of Paraguayan Guaraní whom Nimuendajú met, to his amazement, near São Paulo in 1912 showed how persistent this quest could be. "They wished to go over the sea to the east, and their confidence in the success of this plan," he writes (361–63), "brought me almost to despair." Only after utter failure of chants and dances on the shore had at last brought disillusionment did they reluctantly follow him to a reservation west of the coast; but when he returned a month later he saw them packing up their belongings and setting out once more, "very probably again to the sea; I have never heard of them again." This
[12] Among the Avá-Chiripá or Avá-Katú-Eté, a Guaraní tribe that returned to the Paraguayan forest after 150 years under the Jesuits, Bartolomé (70) suggests that "little or no interruption took place in the transmission of mythical narratives and of tribal cosmological concepts inside the Missions."
small band of undaunted seekers, like other Tupí-Guaraní speaking tribes over centuries of recorded history (cf. Métraux 1967, 9–41; Eliade 1969, 101–11), and perhaps long before, had taken the shaman's vision of another world in the literal sense and unstintingly committed themselves to its realization, however long it might take, and whatever price they must pay for their intransigent resolve in the face of insuperable odds. The spiritual quest had become too vital a part of their life as a people to conceive of abandoning one without surrendering the other as well.