by Wade Davis
By the time I met Schultes in the fall of 1973 , it had been some years since he had been capable of active fieldwork. I found him at his desk in his fourth floor aerie in the Botanical Museum, dressed conservatively, peering across several large stacks of dried herbarium specimens. Introducing myself as one of his undergraduate students, I mentioned that I was from British Columbia and that I wanted to go to the Amazon and collect plants, just as he had done so many years before. The professor looked up from his desk and, as calmly as if I had asked for directions to the local library, said, “Well, when would you like to go?” A fortnight later I left for South America, where I remained during that first sojourn for fifteen months.
There was, of course, method in Schultes’s casual manner. He took for granted the capacity of anyone to achieve anything. In this sense he was a true mentor, a catalyst of dreams. Though not by nature a modest man, he shared his knowledge and experience with his acolytes as naturally as a gardener brings water to a seed. Sometimes his faith in a student would lead to disappointment, but not often. His own achievements were legendary, and merely to move in his shadow was to aspire to greatness.
In Schultes, I found the perfect complement to Maybury-Lewis, my anthropology tutor. Whereas Maybury-Lewis awakened the soul through the sheer power of his intellect, the wonder of his words and ideas, Schultes inspired by the example of his deeds. In all the years I was formally his student, we never had an intellectual conversation. It was not his style. He was a true explorer, and the very force of his personality gave form and substance to the most esoteric of ethnobotanical pursuits. He would pass along these thoughts that were both gifts and challenges. “There is one river that I would very much like you to see,” he would say, knowing full well that the process of getting to that river would involve experiences guaranteed to assure that were you able to reach the confluence alive, you would emerge from the forest a wiser and more knowledgeable human being.
Typical of the way Schultes operated was his suggestion, offered casually just before I left for South America, that I look up one of his former graduate students, Tim Plowman, in Colombia. Tim, who would become a close friend, was Schultes’s protégé, and the professor had secured for him from the U.S. government the dream academic grant of the early 1970 s, $250,000 to study a plant known to the Inca as the Divine Leaf of Immortality, the most sacred medicine of the Andes, coca, the notorious source of cocaine.
It was a remarkable assignment. Though the drug had long been the focus of public concern and hysteria, and efforts to eradicate the coca fields had been underway for nearly fifty years, astonishingly little was known about the actual plant. The botanical origins of the domesticated species, the chemistry of the leaf, the pharmacology of coca chewing, the plant’s role in nutrition, the geographical range of the domesticated species, the relationship between the wild and cultivated species—all these were mysteries. No concerted effort had been made to document the role of coca in the religion and culture of the Andean and Amazonian Indians since W. Golden Mortimer’s classic History of Coca, published in 1901. Tim’s mandate from the government, made deliberately vague by Schultes, was to travel the length of the Andean Cordillera, traversing the mountains whenever possible, to reach the flanks of the montaña to locate the source of a plant that had inspired an empire. Eventually, Tim and I would spend over a year on the road, a journey made possible by the great professor and infused at all times with his spirit.
We knew, of course, that coca was the most revered plant of the Andes. The Inca, unable to cultivate the bush at the elevation of the imperial capital of Cusco, replicated it in fields of gold and silver that coloured the landscape. No holy shrine in the land could be approached unless the supplicant had a quid of coca in his mouth. No field could be planted, no child brought into being, no elder released to the realm of the dead unless the transition was mediated with an offering of coca leaves for Pachamama, the Goddess of the Earth. To this day in parts of the Andes, distances are measured not in miles or kilometres but in coca chews. When Runa people meet, they do not shake hands, they exchange leaves. Soothsayers divine the future by interpreting the patterns of leaves cast onto cloth and the patterns in the venation of the leaves, a skill that can only be possessed by someone who has survived a lightning strike.
In time, Tim would solve the botanical mystery, identify the point of origin of the domesticated species and reveal how they had diverged through centuries as their cultivation had spread over much of a continent. But perhaps his greatest research contribution came about from a simple nutritional analysis, the results of which horrified his government backers, even as they transformed scientific thinking about this most sacred of plants. Coca leaves do contain a small amount of cocaine, but only about as much as there is caffeine in a coffee bean. When the leaves are chewed, the drug is absorbed slowly through the mucous membrane of the mouth; it is a benign and useful stimulant in a harsh and unforgiving landscape. Highly effective as a treatment for altitude sickness, the leaves proved also to be extraordinarily nutritious. Rich in vitamins, coca has more calcium than any plant ever assayed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, suggesting a vital role in a diet that traditionally lacked dairy products, especially for nursing mothers. It was also suggested that the plant enhances the ability of the body to digest carbohydrates at high elevation, again an ideal complement for a diet based on potatoes. In one elegant scientific assay, Tim revealed that coca was not a drug but a sacred food, a medicinal plant that had been used without any evidence of toxicity, let alone addiction, for over four thousand years by the peoples of the Andes. This revelation put into stark profile the draconian efforts underway then and continuing to this day to eradicate the traditional fields with herbicides that poison the myriad streams cascading out of the mountains to form the headwaters of the Rivers Amazon.
COCA WAS THE lens through which the ancient rhythms and patterns of life in the Andes gradually came into focus. Wherever Tim and I travelled, we encountered evidence of worlds that had never been vanquished, indigenous communities that despite desperate struggles remained inextricably linked to their homelands. Nowhere was the spirit of survival stronger than among the Ika and Kogi, descendants of an ancient civilization that had flourished on the Caribbean plain of Colombia for five hundred years before the arrival of Europeans. Since the time of Columbus, these Indians have resisted invaders by retreating higher and higher into the inaccessible reaches of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the highest coastal mountain range on Earth. Ruled to this day by a ritual priesthood, they consider themselves the Elder Brothers. We, who to their minds have ruined much of the world, are deemed the Younger Brothers.
Tim and I entered the mountains from the south, along a narrow track that rose in a day and a night through cactus and thorn scrub to a steep river draw carved into the rising flank of the massif. Just after dawn, having made our way through the shadowy darkness, past scattered houses of stone linked one to another by small fields of coca, leaves translucent in the early morning light, we came upon a portal to the sun. Framed within its arch was a solitary figure, a silhouette blocking entry to the upper valley of a river known to the Indians as the Donachuí.
His name was Adalberto Villafañe. He was a young man, perhaps twenty, strikingly handsome with fine features and black hair flowing down past his shoulders. He wore a white cotton cloak held at the waist by a belt of fibre. His leggings were of the same rough cotton. His sandals had been cut from a rubber tire and, together with his fez-like hat of woven sisal, revealed that he was Ika. The Kogi, a more reclusive people, disdain the use of hats and shoes, and live higher in the mountains, closer to what they believe to be the heart of the world. Across each of Adalberto’s shoulders hung a woven bag decorated with brilliant geometric designs. These contained coca. In his left hand was a small bottle-shaped gourd. A thick quid of the leaves created a bulge in his cheek. As we explained the purpose of our visit, he removed from the gourd a lime-coated stick, which he p
laced in his mouth. He bit down gently. A trickle of saliva ran past his lips as he withdrew the stick, now wet with coca. Reflexively, he began to rub the head of his gourd with the stick, a habit of years that had resulted in a crown of calcium carbonate, the lime of burnt seashells, built up around the top of the gourd, shaped carefully, a symbol of prestige, the measure of the man.
At the time, I did not know that Adalberto’s gourd had been a gift from the priest who had officiated at his marriage. The lime is essential, for it makes potent the plant, adding alkali to saliva and thus facilitating the absorption of the small amount of cocaine within the leaves. When a man marries, the priest presents him with a perforated gourd and, before his eyes, makes love to the bride, thus suggesting through ritual the fundamental notion that as a man weds himself to a life of matrimony, fidelity and procreation, so he weds himself to the destiny of the ancestors and a lifetime dedicated to the sacred leaves. Nor did I know that the Ika and Kogi societal ideal is to abstain from sex, eating and sleeping while staying up all night, chewing leaves and chanting the names of the ancestors. What I saw in the moment was a simple man, decent beyond words, who found satisfaction in our explanation and was willing to accompany us into his homeland.
Turning abruptly, Adalberto led us through the stone wall and along a chalky trail that ran through plantings of maize and coca to a settlement that had existed for untold generations, a cluster of stone huts in the shade of frail trees and a temple where the elders awaited. Each of them spoke in turn, and after some deliberation, their voices met in a decision to allow us to proceed.
As we moved about the mountains over the next fortnight, collecting plants by day, reading and talking with Adalberto and the elders by night, the patterns of life in the Sierra slowly came into focus. Much of what we learned came from the writings of the great Colombian anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, who had lived among the Kogi and Ika in the 1940s. Without his insights, gleaned over the course of months of fieldwork, the baroque world of the Sierra would have remained to us utterly incomprehensible. For beneath the veneer of everyday life, of fields being planted, crops being sold, children being taught, lay a complex of sacred laws and expectations, a body of beliefs astonishing in their complexity, profound in their implications, luminous in their potential.
According to Reichel-Dolmatoff, the Kogi and Ika draw their strength from the Great Mother, a goddess of fertility who dwells at the heart of the world in the snow and ice of the high Sierra, the destination of the dead and the source of the rivers and streams that bring life to the fields of the living. At the first dawning when the Earth was still soft, the Great Mother stabilized it by thrusting her enormous spindle into the centre, penetrating the nine levels of existence. The Lords of the Universe, born of the Great Mother, then pushed back the sea and lifted up the Sierra Nevada around the world axis, thrusting their hair into the soil to give it strength. From her spindle, the Great Mother uncoiled a length of cotton thread with which she traced a circle around the mountains, circumscribing the Sierra Nevada, which she declared to be the land of her children. Thus, the spindle became a model of the cosmos. The disk is the Earth, the whorl of yarn is the territory of the people, the individual strands of spun cotton are the thoughts of the sun.
For the Indians of the Sierra, everything begins and ends with the loom, and the metaphor of thread in the cosmic cloth. Constantly on the move as they gather food and various resources, the Indians refer to their wanderings as “weavings,” each journey a thread woven into a sacred cloak over the Great Mother, each seasonal movement a prayer for the well-being of the people and the entire Earth. When the people of the Sierra plant a field, the women sow lines of crops parallel to the sides of the plot. The men work their way across the field in a horizontal direction. The result, should the domains of man and woman be superimposed one upon the other, is a fabric. The garden is a piece of cloth.
The surface of the Earth itself is an immense loom upon which the sun weaves the fabric of existence. The Indians acknowledge this in the architecture of their temples, simple structures with high conical roofs supported by four corner posts. On the dirt floor, positioned between the central axis of the temple and each of the four posts, are four ceremonial hearths that represent the four lineages founded at the beginning of time. In the middle is a fifth hearth, representative of the sun.
The orientation of the temples and the hearths within them is precise and critical. On the summer solstice, as the sun rises above the mountains, a narrow beam of sunlight shines through a hole in the roof and falls on the hearth that lies in the southwest corner, then moves across the floor until, just before dusk, it reaches the hearth in the southeast corner. On the winter solstice, the beam of light passes through the hole in the roof to touch the northwest hearth in the morning and passes over the floor to strike the northeast hearth at dusk. On both the fall and spring equinoxes, the beam of light slices a path equidistant between north and south; with the sun high in the sky, the central hearth, the most sacred of the five, is bathed in a vertical column of light. At that moment, a waiting priest lifts a mirror to the sun; as the light of the Father fertilizes the womb of the living, the mirrored light forms a cosmic axis along which the prayers of the people may ascend to the heavens.
Thus, over the course of a year, the sun literally weaves the lives of the living on the loom of the temple floor. The strands of the warp are laid down on the solstice, and the cloth is completed on the equinox, at which time the priest begins to dance at the eastern door of the temple, slowly moving across to the western entrance, while in gesture and song drawing a rod behind him. On reaching the western door, the priest pulls forth the imaginary rod, and the fabric of the sun unfolds: a new cloth is dreamt into being, the divine weaver soars over the loom, and life continues.
For the Kogi, the equilibrium of the world spun into being at the beginning of time is completely dependent on the moral and spiritual integrity of the Elder Brothers. The goal of life is knowledge, not wealth. Only through insight and attention can one achieve an understanding of good and evil, and an appreciation of the sacred obligations that human beings have to the Earth and the Great Mother. With knowledge come wisdom and tolerance, though wisdom is an elusive goal. In a world animated by the sun’s energy, people invariably turn for guidance to the sun priests, the enlightened mámas who control the cosmic forces through their prayers and rituals, songs and incantations. Though they rule the living, the mámas have no special privileges, no outward signs of prestige, but their pursuit of wisdom entails an enormous burden: the survival of the people and the entire Earth depends on their labours.
Those who are chosen for the priesthood through divination are taken from their families as infants and carried high into the mountains to be raised by a máma and his wife. For eighteen years, they are never allowed to meet a woman of reproductive age or to experience daylight, forbidden even to know the light of a full moon. They sleep by day, waking after sunset, and are fed a simple diet of boiled fish and snails, mushrooms, grasshoppers, manioc, squash and white beans. They must never eat salt or food not known to the ancients, and not until they reach puberty are they permitted to eat meat.
The apprenticeship falls into two phases, each of nine years duration, symbolic of the nine months spent in a mother’s womb. During the first phase, the apprentices learn songs and dances, mythological tales, the secrets of Creation and the ritual language of the ancients. The second nine years are devoted to the art of divination, techniques of breathing and meditation that lift them into trance, prayers that give voice to the inner spirit. The apprentices pay little heed to the mundane tasks of the world, but they do learn everything about the Great Mother, the secrets of the sky and the Earth, the wonder of life itself in all its manifestations. Knowing only darkness and shadows, they acquire the gift of visions and become clairvoyant, capable of seeing not only into the future and past but through all the material illusions of the universe. In trance, they can
travel through the lands of the dead and into the hearts of the living.
Finally, after years of study and rigorous practise, of learning of the beauty of the Great Mother, of honouring the delicate balance of life, of appreciating ecological and cosmic harmony, a great moment of revelation arrives. On a clear morning, with the sun rising over the flank of the mountains, the apprentices are led into the light of dawn. Until then, the world has existed only as a thought. Now, for the first time, they see the world as it is, in all its transcendent beauty. Everything they have learned is affirmed. Standing at their side, the máma sweeps an arm across the horizon as if to say, “You see, it is as I told you.”
WHEN I FIRST travelled down the spine of the Andean Cordillera, past the remnants of temples and enormous storehouses that once fed armies in their thousands, through valleys transformed by agricultural terraces, past narrow tracks of flat stones, all that remains of the 14,000 miles (22 500 km) of roads that once bound the Inca Empire, it was difficult to imagine how so much could have been accomplished in less than a century. The empire, which stretched over 3,000 miles (4800 km), was the largest ever forged on the American continent. Within its boundaries lived nearly all the people of the Andean world. There was said to be no hunger. All matter was perceived as divine, the Earth itself the womb of creation.
When the Spaniards saw the monuments of the Inca, they could not believe them to be the work of men. The Catholic Church declared the stonework to be the product of demons, an assertion no more fantastic than many more recent attempts to explain the enigma of Inca masonry as being of extraterrestrial origin. There was, of course, no magic technique. Only time, immense levies of workers, and an attitude toward stone that most Westerners find impossible to comprehend.