Light at the Edge of the World (9 page)

The lowland forest, with its thousand shades of green, envelops and consumes the imagination, and it is only when they are on the rivers that the Indians are able to see
the sky. The waterways are not just routes of communication; they are, for the Barasana, the veins of the Earth, the link between the living and the dead, the paths along which the ancestors travelled at the beginning of time. In an astonishing manner, as Reichel-Dolmatoff realized, myth and reality come together in adaptation, a fusion of the past and present that allows the Barasana to cope with the fragility of their lives and thus thrive in an environment that might otherwise so easily overwhelm. Like many nuances of culture, this is not something that the Barasana discuss or even think about. Rather, it is a theme embedded in their very essence, an impulse that lingers along the boundaries of their collective subconscious.

Their origin myth speaks of a great journey from the east, in sacred canoes brought up the Milk River by enormous anacondas. Within the canoes were the first people, together with the three most important plants—coca, manioc and
ayahuasca
, gifts of Father Sun. On the heads of the anacondas were blinding lights, and in the canoes sat the Mythical Heroes in hierarchical order: chiefs, wisdom keepers, warriors, shamans, and, finally, in the stern, servants. All were brothers, children of the sun. When the snakes reached the centre of the world, they lay over the land, outstretched as rivers, their powerful heads forming river mouths, their tails winding away to remote headwaters,
the ripples in their skin giving rise to rapids and waterfalls.

Each river welcomed a different canoe, and in each drainage the Mythical Heroes disembarked and settled, with the lowly servants heading upstream and the chiefs occupying the mouth. Thus, the rivers of the Vaupés were created and populated by different peoples. In time, the hierarchy of mythical times broke down, and on each of the rivers the descendants of those who had journeyed in the same sacred canoe came to live together. Still, they recognized each other as family, speakers of the same language, and to ensure that no brother married a sister, they invented strict rules. To avoid incest, a man had to choose a bride who spoke a different language.

When a young woman marries, she moves to the longhouse of her husband. Their children will be raised in the language of the father, but naturally will learn their mother's tongue. Their mother, meanwhile, will be working with their aunts, the wives of their father's brothers. But each of these women may come from a different linguistic group. In a single settlement, as many as a dozen languages may be spoken, and it is quite common for an individual to be fluent in as many as five. Through time, there has been virtually no corrosion of the integrity of each language. Words are never interspersed or pidginized.
Nor is a language violated by those attempting to pick it up. To learn, one listens without speaking until the language is mastered.

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 art 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.