by Tahir Shah
Without waiting to be invited into the longhouse, Alberto led us up the tree trunk ladder. The central chamber was about seventy-five feet long, with a sturdy bamboo floor and plenty of light from the open sides. The roof had been newly thatched, but was already lined with cobwebs. At the far end, a separate area was set aside for cooking. There was no furniture, save for a simple cloth hammock, strung at the near end of the room. A few possessions had been stowed under the eaves; and a large number of bottles and bowls lined one of the walls.
The house was empty, leading me to wonder whether Ramón was at church. But, as Richard pointed out, the village bore no signs of Christianity.
“They are not evangelists,” said Enrique ruefully, “the Word of the Lord has not come here yet. But with the help of Jesus, they will see the light. They will build a church, a big one, with a great cross on the roof. And the sound of hymns will be heard.”
Enrique might have endured a Shuar childhood, complete with tsantsa feasts, but it had been swamped by the wooly-speak of the evangelists. His elation at the thought of a missionary crusade, was matched by our disapproval.
“Screw the missionaries,” said Richard, “they think they’re spreading religion, but what they’re spreading is a disease.”
Before I could add my own vitriolic remarks, the great ayahuasquero climbed the ladder into the house. He received Alberto first, thanking him for the sloth. Then, he welcomed the rest of us to his maloca.
As he extended his hand towards me, I regarded Ramón’s face. It was mischievous, adorned with flame-red lines painted with achiote. His cheeks were unwrinkled, despite his age, which was certainly the far side of fifty. A shine of sweat lit up the end of his nose, and his teeth were darkened by the black nut nushumbi. Upon his head was the finest feather corona I had seen. Crafted from a single scarlet macaw, its wings wrapped around the shaman’s head, like the winged head-dress of Apollo. Ramón’s wife, a large-boned woman, with a broad face and a square jaw, sported a smaller crown made from feathers and porcupine quills.
I admired his crown. He replied that great care is needed to make such a thing.
“If you cut the bird open,” he said, “the feathers will start falling. So, when you have killed the bird with a single dart, you place it in an ants’ nest. After five days all the flesh has been eaten away, leaving the bones and the feathers.”
When the creamy masato had been passed around, I opened my pack and withdrew a selection of gifts. I had brought some old clothing, some flour, rice, and a box of shotgun shells. The cartridges were clawed away, and stuffed in the eaves of the roof. Pleased that they had gone down so well, I gave Ramón’s wife two of the Fanta bottles. She was so delighted that she brought out more masato. When I commented on the beverage, she invited me to watch her prepare it. In the cooking area, I looked on as she chewed handfuls of boiled manioc, spitting them back into the bowl. The woman’s deteriorated dentistry severely hindered the process.
I illustrated the merits of the Fanta bottle as a kitchen appliance, making random crushing and rolling movements. Ramón’s wife was very pleased with her new tool. She spoke no Spanish, but explained in sign language that she would make a toad and turtle stew for dinner. She was an adventurous cook, with a well-stocked larder. Her kitchen contained a number of animals, some live, some dead, others hanging in limbo between the two. They included the giant turtle, which had retracted its head and limbs; a gold and blue macaw, a pair of dead peccaries, and the hind legs of an unidentifiable hoofed mammal.
Sitting miserably beside the fire was a baby red-faced monkey, tethered by a short string. Its hands were furry, the size and shape of tarantulas. Richard identified it as an extremely rare Red Uakari. He said it hadn’t had malaria, as the illness tends to bleach the redness from the face. The creature, he went on, would probably be kept as a pet for a while, then cooked for food.”
Suspended above the fire from rattan hooks were three heads. I assumed they were being dried. They weren’t human, but sloth heads, and had been shrunk. Despite their dreadful state, I recognized them immediately. For I’d seen sloth tsantsas before in Oxford’s Pitt-Rivers Museum. They’re no larger than oversized key fobs, with scrunched up features and a mass of wooly hair.
The Shuar supposedly regard sloths as their cousins. As such a close relative they’re said to be capable of having a musiak, an avenging soul. Kill a sloth and, in revenge, it will send a falling tree to crush you in the jungle. Some say sloths can even acquire an arutam soul as well; others insist that they cannot, and that’s why they are easy to kill.
Fearing that Alberto’s sloth would shortly be served up by Ramón’s wife, and his head turned into a tsantsa, I cajoled Richard to come to his rescue. The sloth, he told Ramón, had been a valuable companion during the journey from San José. And, as a weary traveler, he deserved freedom.
The shaman called his son. He told the boy to take the sloth to the edge of the forest, and to free it.
“Take what you need and there will always be enough,” he said.
I thanked him for his generosity of spirit.
“I killed another sloth this morning, when I saw it swimming in the stream,” he replied. “Later, we will eat it.”
A second round of masato came and went. Keen to get down to business, I asked Ramón about ayahuasca. The old maestro was seated on a block of wood, carved in the shape of a turtle. He held his palms out at arm’s length, and whistled through his blackened teeth.
“Aya-hu-as-ca is the key to life,” he said. “Drink it, and you will find answers.”
“Will I fly?”
Ramón lit a pipe of mapacho and rearranged himself on the stool.
“You will fly if that is what you want,” he continued, “but flying isn’t important.”
I felt my lower lip tighten with worry. Was the chief of the Birdmen telling me to forget about flight?
“The flight is the journey...” said Ramón, “the journey from this world to the other world.”
“But if you fly, you are with the spirits,” I said.
Shaking his head slowly, the maestro drew on the pipe. The quid of burning tobacco crackled in its bowl.
“You do not have to fly to be with them,” he said. “The spirits are all around us in the air, they are the air.”
*
The toad and turtle stew sat heavily on my stomach. So fearful was I of offending our hosts, that I consumed three helpings of the curious dish. It tasted like a greasy, gamey coq au vin.
Before we turned in for the night, Ramón went behind the long-house and broke off a section of dry termite mound. He placed it under the floor and set fire to it. The resins in the nest burned, keeping away insects. Richard told me to sleep away from the walls. The blood sucking assassin beetle, which carries Chagas’ disease, would sure to be lurking there, he said. The disease, which brings faintness, swelling and vomiting, is reputed to have killed Charles Darwin.
Ramón agreed to prepare a special batch of ayahuasca. Residing so deep in the jungle as he did, he could get his hands on mature vines. The older the vine, the stronger the ayahuasca. No shaman ever grows the vines near his house, for ayahuasca vines are too powerful.
Soon after first light, Ramón took me into the jungle to search for a suitable piece of caapi vine. He told me to beware of falling trees. The avenging soul of the sloth he’d killed the day before may come after us. All around animals and insects were feeding. I felt fortunate to be at the top of the food chain.
Early morning was the best time to cut the ayahuasca vine, the maestro said, as the juices are concentrated in the bark. Selecting an old gnarled liana, he started to chop. Like other shamans I met, Ramón was an expert with a machete. His arms seemed wasted of their muscle, but they could strike with an immense force. Until a century ago, metal blades were almost unknown to the Shuar, who still hacked off heads and cut vines with stone axes. I would always see the hunters carefully cleaning and sharpening their machetes before going int
o the jungle. All their weapons were kept in a state of readiness, perhaps a legacy of the head-hunting days.
Cut into foot-long sections, the vine looked very ordinary. Its thin mottled bark and cornsilk-colored wood hardly smelled of anything. The jungle abounds with plants, some no bigger than a light-bulb’s filament, others stretch up two hundred feet. Every leaf, every tree trunk and seed pod are quite unique. Most are more attractive than the caapi vine. So how on earth did the peoples of the Upper Amazon ever come across it, and work out the process of brewing ayahuasca”! It’s one thing to break off the leaf of a plant and chew it for particular relief, like coca. But it’s a giant leap to mix it with other plants, for an entirely new effect. The reductionist theory, wheeled out by intellectuals, says that centuries of trial and error explains it all. Just as infinite monkeys with typewriters could come up with Hamlet, the Amazonians had worked out ayahuasca.
Ramón must have cut about six feet of the liana. He kept repeating that such mature vines were very powerful. But perhaps even he didn’t realize the enduring strength of Banisteriopsis caapi. In 1851, the first botanical specimens of the ayahuasca vine were taken to Kew Gardens by the celebrated British explorer Richard Spruce. In 1969 they were tested, and found to still contain high levels of the active ingredient, harmaline.
An alkaloid, harmaline is similar to mescaline, the active ingredient in many other hallucinogens (including the peyote cactus, the psilocybe mushroom, as well as LSD).
When he had collected enough caapi, Ramón gathered leaves from other plants, careful not to take more than he would require. These admixtures contained the actual hallucinogens which would enter our blood thanks to the effects of harmaline on the digestive tract. The specific hallucinations depend on the blend of admixtures used by a particular shaman. There are more than seventy-five plants commonly used as admixtures in the region. Most contain tryptamine derivatives which, as I understood it, lead to the sensation of flight.
Ramón wrapped the leaves and chunks of caapi vine in a cloth, before leading me through the labyrinth of trees and vegetation, back to the village. He was a man of few words, not given to idle chatter. Only once on the way home did he speak.
“We will take the ayahuasca,” he said. “We will take it together. And we will die. The ayahuasca will kill us.”
I didn’t know what to make of the remark, but hoped he was referring to allegorical death.
As soon as we returned to the maloca, the shaman’s wife collared me. Sheepishly, she held out an enormous gourd. It was filled to the brim with the usual vile saliva-based beverage. Thanking her, I took a sip. I had sometimes managed to offload the drink on Richard. He had a far stronger stomach than me, and was always mindful to respect hospitality. But he had gone spear fishing with Ramon’s youngest son. I explained that I felt a bout of malaria coming on. I’m not sure why, but as all Shuar know, you must never drink masato if you have malaria.
It was then that I remembered about my precious beetles. They were still in my pack and hadn’t been fed in two days. I opened up the Tupperware containers. Thankfully, both were still alive. Ramón’s wife showed great interest in the insects. She motioned with her hands, admiring their size.
I should have looked after them myself; they were my responsibility. But given the woman’s enthusiasm, I asked her if she could take them to the kitchen, indicating in sign language that they were partial to rotten wood. She whisked the beetles away.
At the far end of the maloca, the maestro began to make the ayahuasca. Using the end of a Fanta bottle, he smashed the chunks of vine. The harmaline is contained just beneath the bark, and it must be crushed in order to release the alkaloids. Ramón was meticulous. He counted out five chacruna leaves (four inches in length, oval in shape), four leaves of sanango, and a few bobinsana leaves, and eight roughly made mapacho cigarettes. When the ingredients were ready, he laid a few pieces of vine in his cauldron, layering on top a few leaves. Then another layer of caapi and more leaves, more of the vine and, lastly, a handful of scrapings from the sanango root.
We carried the cauldron down to the water, filled it up and placed it on a special fire. Ramón did not use the cooking area in the maloca for making ayahuasca. The concoction was left to brew and the shaman turned his attentions to another matter.
The sloth he had killed the day before was being made into lunch by his wife. Its meat was considered a delicacy. Many Shuar, he told me, no longer ate sloths, for they feared retaliation. Unlike others, Ramón had not forgotten how to capture the creature’s avenging soul – by making a tsantsa from its head. He said that one must never go out to hunt a sloth, but if one crosses your path, you’re entitled to kill it.
Ramón fetched the head from the kitchen, and held it in his hands, gazing at it. He observed the lifeless features, the copper-brown hair, and the hole where its neck had been severed. Using a home-made blade, a sliver of steel, he started to peel the skin away. The shaman was skilled in the art of scalping, just as the Andean maestro had been in skinning the guinea pig. As the sloth had been dead for some time there was no blood. The skin came away from the bone remarkably easily.
The shaman said he always used the same red earthenware pot to boil sloth heads. He lit a fire behind the house, kindling it with banana leaves. The pot was dipped into the river.
When the water was boiling, the head was carefully dropped in. Raiding parties would sometimes carry a smoldering hornets’ nest with them, to light fires. The smoke had the added advantage of keeping other insects at bay. The Shuar could also light a fire quickly using a bow and a hardwood stick. Ramón demonstrated the technique. But the other Shuar I met, had lost the art, since the missionaries had brought them matches.
The sloth’s head was pulled from the water after about ten minutes. Longer than that, Ramón said, and the hair would start falling out. I saw none of the oily yellow grease which is said to exude from a human tsantsa. The sloth’s head had shrivelled noticeably, and was ready to be sewn up.
Taking some fiber and a splinter of wood, the shaman darned the two flaps of skin together. A sloth is far smaller than a human, so its head requires far less shrinkage to turn it into a tsantsa. Ramón had heated a pan full of sandy gravel on the fire. When it was sufficiently hot, he funnelled it through the sloth’s neck. Time and again, the sand was replaced. As Ramón agitated it inside the tiny pouch of skin, a smell of burning hair and meat mingled with the banana leaf smoke.
Satisfied that the sloth’s musiak had been controlled, Ramón went to the maloca to hang the head up with the others. He left them above the fire for a week or so, he said, after which he buried them in the jungle. On the few occasions that missionaries had cut their way through to the village, they had offered to buy the heads. As Ramón saw it, tsantsas, whether human or sloth, had no intrinsic value, and could therefore not be sold.
During the afternoon, the cauldron of ayahuasca boiled down. The shaman refilled it with water and placed it back on the fire. Richard returned from the river with seven good-sized fish. They were flat fish, similar to plaice. He gave them to Ramón’s wife, who hurried to the kitchen.
Soon after, she ferried several dishes into the main room of the maloca. Richard, Alberto, Enrique and I waited for the famous shaman to sit. He came up the tree trunk ladder, and said that, if I was to take ayahuasca that night, I should not eat. The stomach had to be empty. Even masato was off limits.
I edged back from the food, thankful that I could pass up the bowl of sloth goulash. Richard wolfed down two helpings of the stew. He picked at one of the roasted fish. Ramón’s wife then offered her guests the third dish. It was common at a Shuar meal to have no idea what the food actually was. But the dish, which was sitting on a cactus-green banana leaf, was unlike any other jungle food I had come across. It consisted of two hard black lumps, a little smaller than golf balls. Richard passed up the dish, saying he could eat no more. Alberto ate one of the lumps, after peeling off its shell. Ramón’s wife popped the ot
her one into her mouth. When she had swallowed it, she looked over at me. And, in sign language, she thanked me.
I was just about to ask Richard what was going on, when it hit me. I sensed a jabbing pain in the base of my stomach, and acidic saliva in my throat. Ramón’s wife had mistaken my precious Titanus giganticuses for food.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Flight of the Birdmen
Just before he died, Ramón’s father had called his young son to where he was lying. The old man had been in a trance for many days, getting weaker and weaker. Even though he was a respected shaman and a healer, his family knew he was about to die. He had finished his work in this illusory world.
Moments before he slipped away, he filled his lungs for the last time, and blew into Ramón’s face.
“That breath...” said Ramón, squinting, “that breath passed on to me la sabiduría de la ayahuasca, the knowledge of ayahuasca.”
“How long ago did your father die?”
Ramón thought for a moment.
“Hace mucho tiempo, a long time ago,” he said. “I was no more than a child. I still had much to learn.”
“Without your father, who taught you?”
“The ayahuasca taught me,” he said, “and it told me to speak to the trees and plants in the forest. They welcomed me, telling me how to use them. Ayahuasca is the pass which opens all secrets,” Ramón said. “It’s the most powerful medicine there is.”
When the third batch of water had more or less evaporated from the cauldron, Ramón filtered away the remaining liquid. It was the color of caramel.