A second local tribal group, the Apurinã, “narrated that their parents had advised them to pass by the earthworks quickly and avoid their vicinity when possible because they signify difference, promote avoidance, and are regarded as ‘enchanted,’ or ‘miraculous’ places.”6
Certainly, then, at least the traces of a memory of how significant the earthworks must have been in their prime, and of the awe that they formerly inspired, lingers on in local superstitions and folklore.
But a reservoir of much more detailed information has been stored away in the Amazon and here, too, Saunaluoma and Virtanen are pioneers in finding links to the earthworks.
THE SHAMANISTIC COSMOS
SOME OF THE CLUES THEY have drawn on have been available for more than 130 years.
They’re found in the account, given in the last chapter, of the worship of “geometrical” gods by the Aroana people in the vicinity of the geoglyphs when Colonel Antonio R. P. Labre stayed among them in 1887. From Labre we also learn that the Aroanas had “temples and a form of worship” and that their religious officiants were “medicine men.”
During the twentieth century the term “medicine men” went out of fashion and, where indigenous systems of spirituality are still practiced in the Amazon today, the majority of ethnographic and anthropological studies define the officiants as “shamans.” This word is NOT derived from, or used, in any Amazonian language. It comes, instead, from the Tungus-Mongol noun saman, meaning, broadly, “one who knows.”7
Its widespread use by anthropologists today—not only with reference to religious ritual functionaries in the Amazon but also to similar figures who are found in tribal and hunter-gatherer societies all over the world—has not come about because the Tungus mysteriously contacted and influenced other cultures but because Tungus shamanism was the first example of the phenomenon to be studied by European ethnologists. The Tungus word entered Western languages through their enthusiastic written reports and has subsequently continued to be applied in all parts of the world where systems very similar to Tungus shamanism have been found.
It is the shaman—usually a man but sometimes a woman—who stands at the heart of these systems. And what all shamans have in common, regardless of which culture they come from or what they call themselves, is an ability to enter and control altered states of consciousness. Often, but not always, psychedelic plants or fungi are consumed to attain the necessary trance state. Shamanism, therefore, is not primarily a set of beliefs, nor the result of purposive study. It is, first and foremost, mastery of the techniques needed to attain trance and thus to occasion particular kinds of experiences—shamans call them “visions,” Western psychiatrists call them “hallucinations”—that are then in turn used to interpret events and guide behavior:
The true shaman must attain his knowledge and position through trance, vision and soul-journey to the Otherworld. All these states of enlightenment are reached … during a shamanic state of consciousness, and not by purposive study and application of a corpus of systematic knowledge.8
Such a method of knowledge acquisition seems absurd and fantastical to the “rational” Western mind. And indeed, underlying the whole notion of soul-journeys to the otherworld is a model of reality that is diametrically opposed in every way to the model presently favored by Western science. This remotely ancient shamanistic model holds our material world to be much more complicated than it seems to be. Behind it, beneath it, above it, interpenetrating it, all around it—sometimes symbolized as being “underground” or sometimes “in the sky”—is an otherworld, perhaps multiple otherworlds (spirit worlds, underworlds, netherworlds, etc.) inhabited by supernatural beings. Whether we like it or not, we must interact with these nonphysical beings, which, though generally invisible and intangible, have the power both to harm us and to help us.
THE GEOMETRICAL PULSE
THE BIG PICTURE OF SHAMANISM, altered states of consciousness, and their immensely important place in the human story—was the focus of my 2005 book Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind.9 I refer the reader to that book for a comprehensive body of data that reinforces and underlines what I have to say in this chapter.
Meanwhile, the key point, standing right at the heart of the matter and nonsensical to “rational” Western minds, is the notion that the human condition requires interaction with powerful nonphysical beings. Across much of the Amazon the nexus that facilitates such interaction is the extraordinary visionary brew ayahuasca, a plant medicine that has been in use among the indigenous peoples of this vast region for unknown thousands of years. Its active ingredient, derived from the leaves of the chacruna shrub (botanical name Psychotria viridis) is dimethyltryptamine—DMT—an immensely potent hallucinogen. It is from the other ingredient, however, derived from the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, that the brew gets its name. The function of the ayahuasca vine in the brew is to transmit a monoamine oxidase inhibitor into the bloodstream of the recipient so that he or she may gain sustained access to the extraordinary effects of DMT—a substance that is normally neutralized in the gut by the enzyme monoamine oxidase. There are other ways of accessing the visionary power of Amazonian plants rich in DMT—notably by snorting them as snuff—but the effects are short-lasting. Taken orally, in the form of the ayahuasca brew, however, the experience can last up to 6 hours, permitting a much more sustained and immersive trance “journey.”
It is, in my view, a remarkable scientific feat that such a highly effective combination of just 2 out of the estimated 150,000 different species of plants, trees, and vines in the Amazon was discovered by mere trial and error. Nor if you ask Amazonian shamans, as I have done, how their ancestors made this discovery, will they admit to trial and error at all—or indeed to any other method that Western science would recognize as rational. What they claim, very simply—but unanimously—is that a variety of “plant spirits,” among which ayahuasca is paramount, have taught them everything important they need to know about the properties of other plants in the jungle, thus allowing them to make powerful medicines, to heal the sick, and, in general, to be good “doctors.”10
Ayahuasca itself is said to be a “doctor,” possessing a strong spirit, and is considered to be “an intelligent being with which it is possible to establish rapport, and from which it is possible to acquire knowledge and power.”11 The anthropologist Angelica Gebhart-Sayer, who studied the Shipibo-Conibo people of the Amazon, notes that under the influence of ayahuasca “the shaman perceives, from the spirit world, incomprehensible, often chaotic information in the form of luminous designs.”12 As Gebhart-Sayer sees it, it is the shaman’s function to decode and “domesticate” this raw, unprocessed data beamed at him by the plant spirits by “converting it” into therapy for the tribe as a whole.
Very often these luminous designs, rich in data, take the form of geometry. I speak from experience, having participated in more than seventy ayahuasca sessions since 2003, continuing to work with the brew for the valuable lessons it teaches me long after Supernatural was researched, written, and published. Here’s part of my account of the first time I drank ayahuasca in the Amazon:
I raise the cup to my lips again. About two thirds of the measure that the shaman poured for me still remains, and now I drain it in one draught. The concentrated bittersweet foretaste, followed instantly by the aftertaste of rot and medicine, hits me like a punch in the stomach. … Feeling slightly apprehensive, I thank the shaman and wander back to my place on the floor. …
Time passes but I don’t keep track of it. I’ve improvized a pillow from a rolled-up sleeping bag and I now find I’m swamped by a powerful feeling of weariness. My muscles involuntarily relax, I close my eyes, and without fanfare a parade of visions suddenly begins, visions that are at once geometrical and alive, visions of lights unlike any light I’ve ever seen—dark lights, a pulsing, swirling field of the deepest luminescent violets, of reds emerging out of night, of unearthly textures and colors, of solar systems revolving, of sp
iral galaxies on the move. Visions of nets and strange ladder-like structures. Visions in which I seem to see multiple square screens stacked side by side and on top of each other to form immense patterns of windows arranged in great banks. Though they manifest without sound in what seems to be a pristine and limitless vacuum, the images possess a most peculiar and particular quality. They feel like a drum-roll—as though their real function is to announce the arrival of something else.13
Other notes I made following my ayahuasca sessions in the Amazon refer to a “geometrical pulse,”14 to “a recurrence of the geometrical patterns,”15 to “a background of shifting geometrical patterns,”16 and to “complex interlaced patterns of geometry. … I zoom in for a closer view. … They’re rectangular, outlined in black, like windows. There’s a circle in the centre of each rectangle.”17
PATHS
THOSE SESSIONS TOOK PLACE IN January and February 2004 some years before I first learned of the existence of the great geometrical geoglyphs of the Amazon. The reader will understand, therefore, that when I began to research the glyphs in 2017 and to wonder about their meaning to whichever unknown peoples created them, it was natural for me to consider ayahuasca as an inspiration. I can’t confirm whether any circles within rectangles are among the more than 550 glyphs discovered by 2018, but Jacó Sá (where the Manchineri group brought by Saunaluoma and Virtanen reported sensations of being in an ancient ritual atmosphere) certainly gives us a circle within a square. And, while the geometrical patterns that I likened to “multiple square screens” and “banks of windows” might be described and manifested using very different materials in very different ways by people from different cultural backgrounds, what seems to stay constant throughout is the geometry.
Tukano sand painting of patterns seen in an ayahuasca vision. (After G. Reichel-Dolmatoff, The Shaman and the Jaguar, 1975, p. 46.)
It is the fundamental motif of the earthworks but it turns up in much else besides—for example in the ayahuasca-inspired art of the Tukano of the Colombian Amazon (where the brew goes by the name of yajé).18
The Tukano create geometrical patterns and abstract designs in sand, on fabrics and musical instruments, on their houses and on the communal malocas where they consume yajé.19 Colombian anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff reported the results of an intriguing experiment he carried out in which he asked members of a Tukano community to make crayon drawings of what they saw when they were drinking yajé. (The drawings were of course made from memory, after the drinkers had returned to everyday consciousness.)
The results, broadly identical to the designs on the houses and fabrics, included a triangle flanked by vertical lines ending in spirals, a rhomboid, a rectangular design filled with parallel lines, patterns of parallel undulating lines drawn horizontally, a number of different oval- and U-shaped elements, rows of dots or small circles, a vertical pattern of little dots, grid patterns, zigzag lines, nested rectangles, nested parallel arcs (catenary curves), and so on.20 Significantly, the Tukano also paint identical shapes and patterns on rock faces in the hills of the northwest Amazon.21
More than seventy different indigenous Amazonian cultures use ayahuasca—many giving different names to the brew (yajé, natema, caapi, cipo, shori, etc.).22 Since almost all report seeing geometrical visions, I wasn’t surprised to discover that Saunaluoma and Virtanen were already far ahead of me in contemplating a connection between ayahuasca visions as expressed in indigenous art and the immense geoglyphs now emerging from jungle clearances along the southern rim of the Amazon.
Of the contemporary Manchineri, for example (who live much closer to the ancient earthworks than the Tukano), they note in a 2015 paper that “certain geometric motifs,” often expressed in ceramics and body paintings, “have meaning as signs of specific ancestors. Some ancestors possess their own geometric designs that may appear in shamanic ayahuasca visions, transmitting ancestral knowledge and power.”23
They therefore conclude that “not only using but also constructing geometric earthworks may have been important social intra-group or inter-group events.”24
In a follow-up paper, published in American Anthropologist in August 2017, Saunaluoma and Virtanen take their analysis much further, proposing that the geoglyphs “were systematically constructed as spaces especially laden with visible and invisible entities.”25 Their argument is that, regardless of scale or medium, the whole process of materializing visionary iconography, in particular geometric patterns, is “related to the fluid forms inhabiting the Amazonian relational world. Different designs ‘bring’ the presence of nonhumans to the visible world of humans for a number of Amazonian Indigenous peoples, while perceiving geometric designs in Amerindian art as paths from one dimension to another allows a viewer to shift between different worlds, from the visible to the invisible.”26
Citing the work of their colleague Luisa Belaunde, Saunaluoma and Virtanen note that for the Shipibo-Conibo of the Peruvian Amazon, “the lines embody a package of ways in which beings move, travel, communicate between themselves, and transmit knowledge, objects, and powers. These paths exist everywhere, from macro to micro scales. Geometric designs are thus about certain ways of thinking, perceiving, and indicating invisible aspects so they can be seen.”27
Saunaluoma and Virtanen further establish that, to the Shipibo-Conibo, the geometric lines open “a window to the macrocosmos” and allow “macrocosmic order” to be “iconically sketched in the microcosmos here, in landscape designs.”28
As above, so below.
PORTAL
BY TAKING THE WORLDVIEW, INSIGHTS, and philosophies of indigenous peoples seriously in efforts to understand their past, Saunaluoma and Virtanen’s research marks a refreshing change of note for Western science and offers rewarding insights into the realm of ideas underlying the geoglyphs. It is by no means a realm of “primitive” ideas. On the contrary: with its notions of pathways between dimensions, and of making visible the presence of usually invisible entities, there are aspects of thought surrounding the traditional use of ayahuasca that would not be out of place in a quantum physics laboratory.
Once again I suggest we are looking at the remnants of an advanced system that propagates itself through time and across cultures with powerful memes among which geometry and cosmic alignments take a large share. We do not know where or when this system originated. In the ancient Amazon, however, to a greater degree than anywhere else, its dissemination became integrated with the use of vision-inducing plants—and there, up to the present day, the secrets of how to use these plants have been preserved and passed down within indigenous shamanic traditions.
The origin myth of the Tukano speaks of the time, eons ago, when humans first settled the great rivers of the Amazon basin. It seems that “supernatural beings” accompanied them on this journey and gifted them the fundamentals upon which to build a civilized life. From the “Daughter of the Sun” they received the gift of fire and the knowledge of horticulture, pottery-making, and many other crafts. “The serpent-shaped canoe of the first settlers” was steered by a superhuman “Helmsman.”29 Meanwhile other supernaturals “travelled by canoe over all the rivers and … explored the remote hill ranges; they pointed out propitious sites for houses or fields, or for hunting and fishing, and they left their lasting imprint on many spots so that future generations would have ineffaceable proof of their earthly days and would forever remember them and their teachings.”30
The slow, methodical progress of the serpent canoe, setting down its cargo of migrants here and there, explains anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff:
Was marked not only by the successive spots of debarkation but also by an advancing scale of human achievement. …
The rules for the initiation into shamanism were laid down, accompanied by a large body of prescriptions, regulations and prohibitions that, from now on, were to guide and govern the life of the people.
But above all … if mankind was to prevail and survive as part of nature, and
was to pass on a true legacy to new generations, people had to assume responsibilities and find ways to control the organization of society so as to procure a balance between human needs and the resources available in nature.31
In this period “the spirit-beings prepared the land so that mortal human creatures might live on it.”32 Once that task had been completed, however,
the supernatural beings returned to their otherworldly abodes. Before leaving … they took care to provide mankind with the means of communication, of establishing contact with them whenever there should be need. Mortal men could not be left alone without the possibility of communing with the spirit-world. … It was essential, then, for the welfare of mankind to have at its disposal a simple and effective means by which, at any given moment, an individual or a group of people could establish contact with the supernatural sphere.33
It is rather brutally to compress many colorful and thought-provoking details to say that at the end of the lengthy myth, the “effective means” of contacting the spirit-world turns out to be … ayahuasca:
A plant that opened the door into another dimension, a drug that produced visions in which the spirit-beings revealed themselves to men—talking, teaching, admonishing and protecting.34
There are multiple different elements intertwined in the Tukano story but three of them stand out for me.
First, what’s being described is dressed up in the language and imagery of myth and may of course be “just a myth.” What it sounds like, however, is a mythologized account of a settlement mission in the Amazon in which a group of migrants were accompanied by a number of more sophisticated people considered to be “supernatural” or “superhuman.”
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