by Wade Davis
One inevitable consequence of this unusual marriage rule—what anthropologists call linguistic exogamy—is a certain tension in the lives of the people. The tradition prevents the people of any one river from becoming inbred. With the quest for potential marriage partners ongoing, and the distances between neighbouring language groups considerable, cultural mechanisms must exist to ensure that eligible young men and women come together on a regular basis. Thus, the importance of the gatherings and great festivals that mark the seasons of the year. Through sacred dance, the recitation of myth and the sharing of coca and ayahuasca, these celebrations promote the spirit of reciprocity and exchange on which the entire social system depends, even as they link through ritual the living with the mythical ancestors and the beginning of time. Myth and language, trade and procreation, all are entangled in the challenge of adaptation.
As Rufino told our story, we both took a great deal of coca, perhaps too much, for even as the last embers of the fire faded away, I lay awake in my hammock, unable to sleep. Everyone else had long since retired, and in the absence of voices, the maloca came strangely alive. The interior was vast, perhaps one hundred feet long and sixty feet across, with a vaulted ceiling rising thirty feet above the dirt floor. The symmetry of the structure was exquisite: eight vertical posts spaced evenly in two rows, with two smaller pairs near the doors, crossbeams and a roof of pleated rows of thatch woven together over a grid of rafters. Still, even to me in a somewhat heightened state of attentiveness, it remained a building, curious and exotic, but a building nevertheless.
Reichel-Dolmatoff experienced it through different eyes. He saw the longhouse as both the womb of the culture and a model of the Barasana cosmos. The roof is the sky, the house beams are the stone pillars and mountains that support it. The mountains, in turn, are the petrified remains of ancestral beings, the Mythical Heroes who created the world. Smaller posts near the doors represent the descendants of the original Anaconda. Overhead, the long ridge pole represents the path of the sun that separates the living from the limits of the universe.
The floor is the earth, and beneath it runs the River of the Underworld, the destiny of the dead. The Barasana bury their dead underneath the maloca, in coffins made from broken canoes, and, going about their daily lives, they walk above the physical remains of their ancestors. To facilitate the departure of the spirits of the dead, the maloca is always built close to water along an east-west axis, since all rivers, including the River of the Underworld, are believed to run east. The placement of the maloca adjacent to a running stream symbolically acknowledges the cycle of life and death, for the water recalls the primordial act of creation in the journey of the Anaconda and Mythical Heroes, and foreshadows the inevitable moment of decay and rebirth.
Outside the longhouse is a world apart, the place of nature and disarray. The owner of the forest is the jaguar, and the demon spirits long ago transformed into animals that eat without thought and copulate without restraint. White people are like the animals, reproducing with such abandon that their numbers swell, spilling over into lands reserved from the beginning of time for the Barasana and the other peoples of the Anaconda. The wild is a place of danger, the origin of disease and sorcery, the realm where shaman go in dreams and where hunters walk each time they leave the protective confines of the maloca and surrounding gardens. When Rufino hesitated in the forest, he had reason to be afraid.
IN A CURIOUS sense, the deeper I delved into the esoteric realm of myth and religion, the closer I came to understanding both the raw challenges that confront Amazonian Indians on a daily basis and the cultural mechanisms that allow them to overcome adversity and thrive in a forest homeland that is anything but benign. There is life on the material plane, scarlet macaws sweeping over the canopy at dusk, a field of manioc to be harvested, sweat bees buzzing about at noon. And there is the realm of the spirit, the place where jaguar go and lightning is waiting to be born. The two domains are never confused, nor are they kept apart. The mediator is the shaman, and it is his ability to slip between spheres that allows for the maintenance of the sacred balance, the harmony of social, religious and political life.
To understand the role of the shaman, and to know anything of his genius in using plants, one must be prepared to accept the possibility that when he tells of moving into realms of the spirit, he is not speaking in metaphor. This was perhaps the most difficult lesson for me to learn as an ethnobotanist schooled in science. But once embraced, it offered a perfectly plausible explanation of how the Indians discovered their useful plants, and thus suggested a possible solution to one of the great mysteries of ethnobotany.
One day in the fall of 1981, during the low point of an expedition to the Peruvian Amazon, I found myself sitting by a fetid slough in the flat light of noon, with the monotonous face of the forest rising on all sides. With me was Terence McKenna, a minstrel of the mystic, who after his death some twenty years later would be eulogized by the New York Times as a man who combined a leprechaun’s wit with a poet’s sensibility to become the Timothy Leary of the 1990s. In the moment, nothing so grand was on his horizon.
“Anyone who says they like the Amazon,” he said, “is either a liar or they’ve never been here. I always feel like a crystal of sugar on the tongue of the beast, impatiently awaiting dissolution.”
At the time, Terence and his brother Dennis and I were stranded in the lowlands in a Bora village in the upper reaches of the Río Ampiyacu, the River of Poisons. For ten days, we had been pursuing a curious mystery, the botanical origins of a sacred hallucinogen made from the blood-red resin of several species of virola, trees of the nutmeg family. The basis of a ritual snuff employed by tribes throughout the upper Orinoco, the resins contain a series of powerfully psychoactive compounds, known as tryptamines, that induce not the distortion of reality but rather its dissolution. In fact, they can scarcely be called hallucinogenic, because by the time the effects come on, there is no one home anymore to experience the hallucinations.
Potent as they may be, tryptamines are orally inactive due to the activity of an enzyme, monoamine oxidase, found in the human gut. They may be smoked, injected, or taken through the nose, but not eaten. Yet, alone amongst all the tribes of the Amazon, the Bora and their neighbours the Witoto prepared an orally administered paste, which, according to ethnographic reports, allowed them to commune with the spirits of the forest. Identifying the botanical ingredients and understanding how the preparation worked was the phytochemical challenge that had brought the McKenna brothers to Peru.
By day, we moved through the forest, collecting specimens and bark samples of the various virolas, observing the elders prepare the drug, carefully setting aside for later analysis each stage of the elaboration. In the late afternoon, Terence and I would watch as Dennis lay back in his hammock and swallowed a dose of the latest batch. After more than a week of this, with little to report but nausea and headaches, certainly no little people dancing upon leaves as the shaman had predicted, we had all grown somewhat frustrated.
At night, however, once the experiments were complete, every difficulty was forgotten. The forest itself was transformed. By day, the land lies under a weight of tedium, with vegetation of interest only to the botanist, and the air redolent with fermentation. Then, toward dusk, everything shifts. The air cools, the light softens and shapes emerge from the forest: flocks of cackling parrots, sungrebes and nunbirds, and in the branches of scandent trees, monkeys and sloths. There is movement in the water, caiman and perhaps an anaconda, its wide head hovering like a periscope. Suddenly, the forest and the water come alive, and the sense of isolation is shattered.
Every evening, we set aside our work and sat for long hours in the men’s circle in the longhouse, taking coca and listening to the Bora discuss their day. Often, infused with the plant, we returned to our lodgings by the river, where we spoke long into the night, comparing notes from our travels. I was interested in the role of psychoactive plants in religion and in the healing a
rt of the shaman. For Dennis, it was the shaman’s alchemy, the phytochemical mystery itself, that held his imagination. Terence was drawn to the metaphysics, the philosophical implications of plants capable of inducing effects so unearthly, visions so startling, that they had acquired a sacred place in indigenous cultures throughout the world.
I had just come from a month in the northern mountains of Peru, where in the valley of Huancabamba, I had lived with an old curandero, a master of a healing cult, the origins of which may be traced in direct lineage to the very dawn of Andean civilization. As I explained to Terence and Dennis, even today people from all over South America go there to seek guidance and treatment for a plethora of ailments. Once or twice a week, every week, a new set of acolytes assembles in the courtyard of the curandero’s farmstead and patiently awaits the darkness.
The ceremony is complex, lasting well into the night, and everyone in the healing circle imbibes through the nostril as much as half a quart of raw cane alcohol infused with tobacco or datura leaves. At midnight, the curandero dispenses a decoction prepared from San Pedro, the Cactus of the Four Winds. During the ensuing mescaline intoxication, the curandero diagnoses each patient’s ailment. But treatment can take place only the following day, at the end of a long pilgrimage that carries the patients far higher into the mountains to a series of sacred lakes, around whose periphery grow the medicinal plants that are alone believed to be therapeutic. Before the herbs are administered, the patients participate in a lengthy ritual, culminating in a baptismal plunge into the frigid water of the lakes.
The metaphor is clear. In order to heal the body, aspirants must seek spiritual realignment through the use of the magic plant, as well as move through geography, enduring physical hardships to reach the sacred lakes, where only after a ceremony of metamorphosis can they be open to the pharmacological possibilities inherent in the medicinal plants. Here, I suggested to my friends, was the essence of the shamanic art of healing: a fusion of mind and spirit, plant and landscape, sacrifice and yearning.
In the West, the shaman is often regarded as a harmless figure, a gentle elder who heals with feathers and beads and incantations. In my experience, however, most shaman are just a little crazy. That, after all, is the nature of the calling. The shaman, as Joseph Campbell said, is the one who swims in the mystic waters the rest of us would drown in. Indeed, he or she chooses to enter realms that most people do not want to even imagine.
Most indigenous people are as happy to relegate affairs of the spirit to the shaman as we are to leave such issues to our priests. In Western society, however, we make a distinction between religion and medicine, whereas in most indigenous traditions, priest and physician are one, for the state of the spirit determines the state of the body. Thus, to treat disease, to address the cause of misfortune, the shaman must invoke some technique of ecstasy that allows him to soar away on the wings of trance to reach those distant metaphysical realms where he can work his deeds of medical and spiritual rescue. Hence the use of psychoactive plants.
The pharmacological effects of these preparations are stunning, and their place in shamanic life revelatory. But what interested Dennis as a phytochemist was the mystery of their origins. He spoke at length about ayahuasca, the vine of the soul, a sacred brew that has fascinated travellers in the Amazon since first being reported by the English botanist Richard Spruce in the mid-nineteenth century. I knew the plant, and at Schultes’s behest had sampled the potion on several occasions. But Dennis was one of the world authorities, and as he spoke long into the night, I truly came to understand for the first time the genius of the shaman and the allure of the mystery that had attracted Dennis and Terence to this forgotten village on the banks of a little known affluent of the Rivers Amazon.
Ayahuasca, also known as yagé or caapi, is a preparation derived from two species of Amazonian lianas, Banisteriopsis inebrians and, more commonly, Banisteriopsis caapi. The potion is made in various ways, but long ago, the shaman of the Northwest Amazon discovered how to enhance the effects by adding a number of other plants. With the dexterity of a modern chemist, they recognized that different chemical compounds in relatively small concentrations may effectively potentiate one another. In the case of ayahuasca, some twenty-one admixtures have been identified, including most notably Psychotria viridis, a shrub in the coffee family, and Diplopterys cabrerana, a forest liana closely resembling ayahuasca. Unlike ayahuasca, both of these plants contain tryptamines.
“The only way a tryptamine can be taken orally,” Dennis explained, “is if it is taken with something that inhibits monoamine oxidase, the enzyme in the stomach. Amazingly enough, the beta-carbolines found in ayahuasca are precisely the kind of inhibitors necessary for the job.”
In other words, when the bark of the banisteriopsis liana is combined with either the bark or leaves of these admixtures, the result is a powerful synergistic effect. The visions become brighter, and the blue and purple hues induced by banisteriopsis alone are augmented by the full spectrum of the rainbow.
“Now I ask you,” Dennis said, “how on earth did they figure it out? What are odds against finding in a forest of fifty thousand species, two plants, totally different, one a vine, the other a shrub, and then learning to combine them in such a precise way that their unique and highly unusual chemical properties complement each other perfectly to produce this amazing brew that dispatches the shaman to the stars? You tell me.”
Many ethnobotanists avoid the question by invoking trial and error, a catchall phrase that explains very little, since the elaboration of the preparations often involves procedures that are exceedingly complex or that yield products of little or no obvious value. An infusion of the bark of Banisteriopsis caapi causes vomiting and severe diarrhea, reactions that would hardly encourage further experimentation. Yet not only did the Indians persist, but they developed dozens of recipes, each yielding potions of various strengths and nuances for specific ceremonial and ritual purposes.
“I don’t think there is a scientific explanation,” Terence remarked. “And if there is, why should it take precedence over what the Indians themselves believe? They say they learn in visions, that the plants speak to them. They’re not making it up to please us. It’s what they have always believed.”
The Indians have their own explanations, of course: rich cosmological accounts of sacred plants that journeyed up the Milk River in the belly of the Anaconda, potions created by the primordial jaguar, the drifting souls of shaman dead from the beginning of time. As scientists, Dennis and I had been taught not to take these myths literally. Terence, who suffered from no such constraints, suggested that their botanical knowledge could not be separated from their metaphysics.
“Have you ever been in the upper Putumayo with the Ingano or the Siona?” I asked, referring to tribes with whom Schultes had lived in the 1940s in the lowlands of Colombia. The Ingano, I explained, recognize seven varieties of ayahuasca. The Siona have eighteen, which they distinguish on the basis of the strength and colours of the visions, the authority and lineage of the shaman, even the tone and key of the incantations that the plants sing when taken on the night of a full moon. None of these criteria makes sense scientifically, and, to a botanist, all the plants belong to a single species, Banisteriopsis caapi. Yet the Indians can readily distinguish the varieties on sight, and individuals from different tribes can identify these same varieties with remarkable consistency.
“Imagine what it means,” Terence said, “to really believe that the plants sing to you in a different key, to have a taxonomic system that is consistent and true, based on an actual dialogue with the plants.”
In the end, Dennis did manage to solve the enigma of the Bora pastes. It turned out that the resins themselves contained, in addition to various tryptamines, other compounds in small concentrations that served to inhibit monoamine oxidase and thus potentiate the drug. But, curiously, he was never able to experience the effects himself, at least nothing close to the intensity of the visionar
y intoxications reported by the Bora and Witoto shaman. His research earned him a doctorate and was widely heralded, but in his own mind a large part of the mystery remains.
Though acknowledged as the greatest Amazonian plant explorer of his generation, Schultes always claimed to rank as a novice in the company of shaman. Like so many of his acolytes, Dennis and I had been drawn to the Amazon to seek its gifts: leaves that heal, fruits and seeds that provide the foods we eat, plants that could transport the individual to realms beyond reason. But in time we both came to realize that in unveiling indigenous knowledge, our task was not merely to identify new sources of wealth but to understand and celebrate a distinct vision of life itself, a profoundly different way of living in a forest. This is something that Terence always knew.
IT MAY SEEM odd, given how fortunate I had been in my choice of vocation, but after eight years of thinking only of plants, their place in their culture, and the wonder of the Amazon and Andes, I grew restless, eager for change. Not that I regretted the months of fieldwork, the thousands of specimens collected, but my work had reached a certain plateau.
After three years of research, the story of coca was essentially known. As an ethnobotanist, I had surveyed other plants as well and encountered a number of unusual mysteries. In northern Peru, a casual collection yielded a new psychotropic cactus. The valley of the moon in Bolivia revealed yet another hallucinogen, closely related to the Cactus of the Four Winds, Trichocereus pachanoi, the sacred plant that had sparked the rise of civilization in the Andes two thousand years before the birth of Christ. The pursuit of an admixture used with coca led to one of the first descents of the Apurimac and later the Urubamba, headwaters of the Amazon. For nearly a decade, my every thought had been a plan to return to one of the lowland societies I had come to know: in Bolivia, the Chimane, Mosetene and Tacana; in Peru, the Machiguenga, Shipibo, Bora and Yagua; in Ecuador, the Shuar, Kofán, Siona-Secoya, Waorani and Quichua. From Colombia beckoned the Kamsa and Ingano, Embera, Barasana, Witoto, Tukano, Cubeo, Makuna, Tikuna and a host of other peoples who, true to their essential spirit, had always welcomed me, an itinerant scholar, as they would any sympathetic outsider.