The Cosmic Serpent

by Jeremy Narby

  I scampered after him, thinking about what he had just said. It had never occurred to me that one could seriously consider taking pictures of hallucinations. I was certain that if I did so, I would only obtain photos of darkness. But I knew that this would not prove anything, because he could always question the capacities of my camera. In any case, these people seemed to consider the visions produced by hallucinogenic plants to be at least as real as the ordinary reality we all perceive.

  A few weeks later I started recording a series of interviews with Carlos, who had agreed to tell me his life story. The first evening, we sat on the platform of his house, surrounded by the sounds of the forest at night. A kerosene lamp made of a tin can and a cotton wick provided a flickering source of light and gave off blackish fumes.

  Despite my training, it was the first time in my life that I interviewed someone. I did not know where to start, so I asked him to start at the beginning.

  Carlos was born in the Perene Valley in 1940. He lost his parents when he was five years old in the waves of epidemics that swept the area with the arrival of white settlers. His uncle took care of him for several years. Then he went to an Adventist mission, where he learned to speak, read, and write Spanish.

  What follows is an extract from the transcript of this first interview. We talked in Spanish, which is neither his mother tongue nor mine, as a faithful translation reveals:“My uncle was a tabaquero. I watched him take lots of tobacco, dry it a bit in the sun, and cook it. I wondered what it could be. ‘That’s tobacco,’ my uncle told me, and once the mixture was good and black, he started tasting it with a little stick. I thought it was sweet, like concentrated cane juice. When he ate his tobacco, he could give people good advice. He could tell them, ‘this is good’ or ‘this is not good.’ I don’t know what the intellectuals say now, but in those days, all the Adventist missionaries said, ‘He is listening to his bats, to his Satan.’ He had no book to help him see, but what he said was true: ‘Everybody has turned away from these things, now they all go to the missionary. I do not know how to read, but I know how to do these things. I know how to take tobacco, and I know all these things.’ So when he talked, I listened. He told me: ‘Listen nephew, when you are a grown man, find a woman to look after, but before that, you must not only learn how to write, you must also learn these things.’”

  “Learn to take tobacco?” I asked.

  “Take tobacco and cure. When people would come to him, my uncle would say: ‘Why do you ask me to cure you, when you say you know God now that you are at the mission, and I do not know God? Why don’t you ask the pastor to pray, since he says he can cure people with prayers? Why don’t you go to him?’ But he would cure them anyway. He would pull out his coca, start chewing it, and sit down like us here now. Then, he would swallow his tobacco. Meanwhile, I would watch him and ask him what he was doing. The first time I saw him cure, he said: ‘Very well, bring me the sick baby.’ First, he touched the baby, then took his pulse: ‘Ah, I see, he’s in a bad way. The illness is here.’ Then, he started sucking the spot [suction noise]. Then, he spat it out like this: ptt! Then, again, and a third time: ptt! There, very good. Then he told the mother: ‘Something has shocked this little one, so here is a herb to bathe him. After that, let him rest.’ The next day, one could already see an improvement in the baby’s health. So I took a liking to it and decided to learn. Ooh! The first time I had tobacco, I didn’t sleep.”

  “How old were you?”

  “I was eight years old. I thought tobacco was sweet. But it was so bitter that I couldn’t even swallow it. My uncle said: ‘That’s the secret of tobacco.’ Then, he showed me everything. He gave me a tobacco gourd. Little by little, I learned to take it and to resist. Fairly quickly, I stopped vomiting.”

  “Did your uncle also teach you how to use ayahuasca?”

  “No, I learned that later, with my father-in-law. ...”

  Over the following months, I recorded approximately twenty hours on the meanders of Carlos’s life. He spoke Spanish better than anybody in Quirishari; in the past, he had taught it to other Ashaninca in an Adventist school. However, his grammar was flexible, and he talked with unexpected rhythms, punctuating his sentences with pauses, gestures, and noises that completed his vocabulary nicely, but that are difficult to put into written English. Furthermore, his narrative style varied from a first-person account to the commentary of a narrator who also plays the roles of the characters. This is no doubt more appropriate for oratory, or radio plays, than for a text.

  By taping Carlos’s life story, I was not trying to establish the point of view of a “typical” Ashaninca. Rather, I was trying to grasp some specifics of local history by following the personal trajectory of one man. In particular, I was interested in questions of territory in the Pichis Valley: Who owned which lands, and since when? Who used which resources? As it happens, the overall history of the Ashaninca in the twentieth century is closely defined by the progressive expropriation of their territory by outsiders, as Carlos’s life story reveals.

  Carlos’s birthplace, the Perene Valley, was the first Ashaninca region to undergo colonization. By 1940, the majority of indigenous lands in the area had already been confiscated. Ten years later, Carlos the young orphan had followed the mass migration of the Perene Ashaninca toward the Pichis Valley, where the forests were still free of colonists and diseases. After living twenty-six years in this new homeland, Carlos had been elected to the presidency of the congress of the Association of the Indigenous Communities of the Pichis (ACONAP). The goal of this organization was to defend indigenous lands from a new onslaught of colonization. Carlos was forced to abandon his position after four years when he was bitten by a snake. At this point, he retired to Quirishari to cure himself “with ayahuasca and other plants.” When I appeared five years later, he was living like a retired politician, satisfied with the tranquillity, but nostalgic for yesteryear’s struggles. He did not seem displeased at the idea of confiding his memoirs to a visiting anthropologist.

  Over the course of our conversations, I often asked Carlos about the places he had lived, directing the conversation toward the solid ground of social geography. But he would regularly answer in ways that pointed toward shamanism and mythology. For example:“The earthquake in the Perene, was that in 1948 or 1947?”

  “1947.”

  “And were you there at the time?”

  “Of course, at that time, I was a young boy. It happened in Pichanaki. It killed three people. Pichanaki was a nice plain, but now there are more than twenty meters of earth burying the old village. It used to be a fertile lowland, good for corn.”

  “And why was this place called Pichanaki?”

  “That’s the name that the first natives gave it in the old days, the tabaqueros, the ayahuasqueros. As I have explained to you, it is simply in their visions that they were told that the river is called Pichanaki.”

  “Ah yes. And ‘Pichanaki’ means something? All these place names that finish in -aki, like Yurinaki also, what does ‘aki’ mean?”

  “It means that there are many minerals in the center of these places. The word means ‘eye’ in our language.”

  “And ‘Picha’?”

  “He is called like that, because in the hills, there is a representative of the animals whose name is Picha.”

  “Ah, ‘the eyes of Picha.’”

  “Now you see.”

  I often asked Carlos to explain the origin of place names to me. He would invariably reply that nature itself had communicated them to the ayahuasqueros-tabaqueros in their hallucinations: “That is how nature talks, because in nature, there is God, and God talks to us in our visions. When an ayahuasquero drinks his plant brew, the spirits present themselves to him and explain everything.”

  Listening to Carlos’s stories, I gradually became familiar with some of the characters of Ashaninca mythology. For instance, he often talked of Avíreri: “According to our ancient belief, he is the one of the forest, he is our god.
He was the one who had the idea of making people appear.” Carlos also referred to invisible beings, called maninkari, who are found in animals, plants, mountains, streams, lakes, and certain crystals, and who are sources of knowledge: “The maninkari taught us how to spin and weave cotton, and how to make clothes. Before, our ancestors lived naked in the forest. Who else could have taught us to weave? That is how our intelligence was born, and that is how we natives of the forest know how to weave.”

  I had not come to Quirishari to study indigenous mythology. I even considered the study of mythology to be a useless and “reactionary” pastime. What counted for me were the hectares confiscated in the name of “development” and the millions of dollars in international funds that financed the operation. With my research, I was trying to demonstrate that true development consisted first in recognizing the territorial rights of indigenous people. My point of view was materialist and political, rather than mystical.1 So, after nine months in Quirishari, it was almost despite myself that I started reading Gerald Weiss’s doctoral dissertation on Ashaninca mythology, entitled The Cosmology of the Campa Indians of Eastern Peru—“Campa” being the disparaging word used until recently to designate the Ashaninca, who do not appreciate it.2

  I discovered as I read this thesis that Carlos was not making up fanciful stories. On the contrary, he was providing me with concise elements of the main cosmological beliefs of his culture, as documented extensively by Weiss in the 1960s.

  According to Weiss, the Ashaninca believe in the existence of invisible spirits called maninkari, literally “those who are hidden,” who can nonetheless be seen by ingesting tobacco and ayahuasca. They are also called ashaninka, “our fellows,” as they are considered to be ancestors with whom one has kinship. As these maninkari are also present in plants and animals, the Ashaninca think of themselves as members of the same family as herons, otters, hummingbirds, and so on, who are all perani ashaninka, all our fellows long ago.3

  Some maninkari are more important than others. Weiss distinguishes a hierarchy among these spirits. Avíreri, the god who creates by transformation, is the most powerful of them all. In Ashaninca myths, Avíreri, accompanied by his sister, creates the seasons with the music of his panpipes. He shapes human beings by blowing on earth. Then he wanders with his grandson Kíri, casually transforming human beings into insects, fruit trees, animals, or rock formations. Finally, Avíreri gets drunk at a festival. His malicious sister invites him to dance and pushes him into a hole that she has dug beforehand. Then she pretends to pull him out by throwing him a thread, a cord, and finally a rope, none of which is strong enough. Avíreri decides to escape by digging a tunnel into the underworld. He ends up in a place called “river’s end,” where a strangler vine wraps itself around him. From there, he continues to sustain his numerous children of the earth. And Weiss concludes: “There Avíreri remains to the present day, no more able to move, because of the vine that constrains him.”4

  Finally, Weiss notes in passing: “To be sure, although these accounts are to be classified and referred to as myths, for the Campas they are reliable reports handed down orally from past generations of real happenings, happenings as authentically real as any actual event of past years that someone still remembers or was told about.”5

  I had the same impression as Weiss: My Ashaninca informants discussed mythological characters and events as if they were real. This seemed quite fanciful to me, but I did not say so. As an anthropologist I was trained to respect outlandish beliefs.

  THE INHABITANTS of Quirishari had made it clear to me that I was not supposed to gather plant samples. However, I could study their uses of the forest as I pleased, and I could try their plant remedies.

  So whenever I had a health problem and people told me they knew of a cure, I tried it. Often the results went beyond not only my expectations, but my very understanding of reality. For instance, I had suffered from chronic back pain since the age of seventeen, having played too much tennis during my adolescence. I had consulted several European doctors, who had used cortisone injections and heat treatment, to no avail. In Quirishari there was a man, Abelardo Shingari, known for his “body medicine.” He proposed to cure my back pain by administering a sanango tea at the new moon. He warned me that I would feel cold, that my body would seem rubbery for two days, and that I would see some images.

  I was skeptical, thinking that if it were really possible to cure chronic back pain with half a cup of vegetal tea, Western medicine would surely know about it. On the other hand, I thought it was worth trying, because it could not be less effective than cortisone injections.

  Early one morning, the day after the new moon, I drank the sanango tea. After twenty minutes, a wave of cold submerged me. I felt chilled to the bone. I broke out into a profuse cold sweat and had to wring out my sweatshirt several times. After six rather difficult hours, the cold feeling went away, but I no longer controlled the coordination of my body. I could not walk without falling down. For five minutes I saw an enormous column of multicolored lights across the sky—my only hallucinations. The lack of coordination lasted forty-eight hours. On the morning of the third day, my back pain had disappeared. To this day it has not returned.6

  I tend not to believe this kind of story unless I have lived it myself, so I am not trying to convince anybody about the effectiveness of sanango. However, from my point of view, Abelardo had pulled off a trick that seemed more biochemical than psychosomatic.

  I had several other similar experiences. Each time, I noted that the seemingly fanciful explanations I was given ended up being verified in practice—such as “a tea you drink at the new moon which turns your body to rubber and cures your back pain.”

  So I began to trust the literal descriptions of my friends in Quirishari even though I did not understand the mechanisms of their knowledge.

  Furthermore, by living with them on a daily basis, I was continually struck by their profound practicality. They did not talk of doing things; they did them. One day I was walking in the forest with a man named Rafael. I mentioned that I needed a new handle for my ax. He stopped in his tracks, saying “ah yes,” and used his machete to cut a little hardwood tree a few steps off the path. Then he carved an impeccable handle that was to last longer than the ax itself. He spent about twenty minutes doing the bulk of the work right there in the forest and an additional twenty minutes at home doing the adjustments. Perfect work, carried out by eye alone. Up until then, I had always thought that ax handles came from hardware stores.

  People in Quirishari taught by example, rather than by explanation. Parents would encourage their children to accompany them in their work. The phrase “leave Daddy alone because he’s working” was unknown. People were suspicious of abstract concepts. When an idea seemed really bad, they would say dismissively, “Es pura teoría” [“That’s pure theory”]. The two keywords that cropped up over and over in conversations were práctica and táctica, “practice” and “tactics”—no doubt because they are requirements for living in the rainforest.

  The Ashaninca’s passion for practice explains, in part at least, their general fascination for industrial technology. One of their favorite subjects of conversation with me was to ask how I had made the objects I owned: tapes, lighters, rubber boots, Swiss army knife, batteries, etc. When I would reply that I did not know how to make them, nobody seemed to believe me.

  After about a year in Quirishari, I had come to see that my hosts’ practical sense was much more reliable in their environment than my academically informed understanding of reality. Their empirical knowledge was undeniable. However, their explanations concerning the origin of their knowledge were unbelievable to me. For instance, on two separate occasions, Carlos and Abelardo showed me a plant that cured the potentially mortal bite of the jergón (fer-de-lance) snake. I looked at the plant closely, thinking that it might come in useful at some point. They both pointed out the pair of white hooks resembling snake fangs, so that I would remember it. I asked Carl
os how the virtues of the jergón plant had been discovered. “We know this thanks to these hooks, because that is the sign that nature gives.”

  Once again, I thought that if this were true, Western science would surely know about it; furthermore I could not believe that there was truly a correspondence between a reptile and a bush, as if a common intelligence were lurking behind them both and communicating with visual symbols. To me, it seemed that my “animist” friends were merely interpreting coincidences of the natural order.

  ONE DAY at Carlos’s house, I witnessed an almost surreal scene. A man called Sabino appeared with a sick baby in his arms and two Peruvian cigarettes in his hand. He asked Carlos to cure the child. Carlos lit one of the cigarettes and drew on it deeply several times. Then he blew smoke on the baby and started sucking at a precise spot on its belly, spitting out what he said was the illness. After about three minutes, he declared the problem solved. Sabino thanked him profusely and departed. Carlos called after him, placing the second cigarette behind his ear: “Come back any time.”

  At that point, I thought to myself that my credulity had limits and that no one could get me to believe that cigarette smoke could cure a sick child. On the contrary, I thought that blowing smoke on the child could only worsen its condition.

  A few evenings later, during one of our taped conversations, I returned to this question:“When one does a cure, like the one you did the other day for Sabino, how does the tobacco work? If you are the one who smokes it, how can it cure the person who does not smoke?”

  “I always say, the property of tobacco is that it shows me the reality of things. I can see things as they are. And it gets rid of all the pains.”

  “Ah, but how did one discover this property? Does tobacco grow wild in the forest?”

  “There is a place, for example in Napiari, where there are enormous quantities of tobacco growing.”