The Wayfinders (11 page)

In the beginning, before the creation of seasons,
before the Ancestral Mother, Romi Kumu, Woman Shaman, opened her womb,
before her blood and breast milk gave rise to rivers and her ribs to the
mountain ridges of the world, there was only chaos in the universe. Spirits
and demons known as
He
preyed on their own kindred, bred without
thought, committed incest without consequence, devoured their own young.
Romi Kumu responded by destroying the world with fire and floods. Then, just
as a mother turns over a warm slab of manioc bread on the griddle, she
turned the inundated and charred world upside down, creating a flat and
empty template from which life could emerge once again. As Woman Shaman she
then gave birth to a new world: land, water, forest, and animals.

In a parallel story of creation, four great
culture heroes — the Ayawa, also known as the primordial ancestors or the
Thunders — came up the Milk River from the east, passing through the Water
Door, pushing before them as ploughs the sacred trumpets of the Yurupari,
creating valleys and waterfalls. Rivers were born of their saliva. Slivers
of wood broken off by the effort gave rise to the first ritual artifacts and
musical instruments. As the Ayawa journeyed toward the centre of the world,
the notes of the trumpets brought into being the mountains and uplands, the
posts and walls of the cosmic maloca. At every turn, the Ayawa confronted
greedy demonic forces, avaricious spirits that thrived on destruction and
coveted the world. Outwitting the monsters, casting them into stone, the
Ayawa brought order to the universe, causing the essence and energy of the
natural world to be released for the benefit of all sentient creatures and
every form of life. Then, stealing the creative fire from the vagina of the
Woman Shaman, they made love to her, and, fully satiated, rose into the
heavens to become thunder and lightning.

Realizing that she was pregnant, Woman Shaman
went downriver to the Water Door of the East, where she gave birth to the
ancestral anaconda. In time the serpent retraced the harrowing journey of
the Ayawa, returning in body and spirit to the riverbanks, waterfalls, and
rocks, where it birthed the clan ancestors of the Barasana, Makuna, and all
their neighbours. Each of these physical and geographical points of memory
remains vibrant and alive, the sacred nexus where the Ayawa released to
humans the raw energy of life, even as they bequeathed to all Peoples of the
Anaconda the eternal obligation to manage the flow of creation.

Thus, for the people living today in the forests
of the Piraparaná, the entire natural world is saturated with meaning and
cosmological significance. Every rock and waterfall embodies a story. Plants
and animals are but distinct physical manifestations of the same essential
spiritual essence.

At the same time, everything is more than it
appears, for the visible world is only one level of perception. Behind every
tangible form, every plant and animal, is a shadow dimension, a place
invisible to ordinary people but visible to the shaman. This is the realm of
the
He
spirits, a world of deified ancestors where rocks
and rivers are alive, plants and animals are human beings, sap and blood the
bodily fluids of the primordial river of the anaconda. Hidden in cataracts,
behind the physical veil of waterfalls, in the very centre of stones are the
great malocas of the
He
spirits, where everything is beautiful — the
shining feathers, the coca, the calabash of tobacco powder, which is itself
the skull and brain of the sun.

It is to the realm of the
He
spirits that the shaman goes in ritual. Contrary
to popular lore in the West, the shaman of the Barasana never uses or
manipulates medicinal plants. His duty and sacred task is to move in the
timeless realm of the
He
, embrace the primordial powers, and
harness and restore the energy of all creation. He is like a modern engineer
who enters the depths of a nuclear reactor to renew the entire cosmic order.

Among the Barasana, such renewal is the
fundamental obligation of the living. In practice, this implies that the
Barasana see the earth as potent, the forest as being alive with spiritual
beings and ancestral powers. To live off the land is to embrace both its
creative and destructive potential. Human beings, plants, and animals share
the same cosmic origins, and in a profound sense are seen as essentially
identical, responsive to the same principles, obligated by the same duties,
responsible for the collective well-being of creation. There is no
separation between nature and culture. Without the forest and the rivers,
humans would perish. But without people, the natural world would have no
order or meaning. All would be chaos. Thus the norms that drive social
behaviour also define the manner in which human beings interact with the
wild, the plants and animals, the multiple phenomena of the natural world,
lightning and thunder, the sun and the moon, the scent of a blossom, the
sour odour of death. Everything is related, everything connected, a single
integrated whole. Mythology infuses land and life with meaning, encoding
expectations and behaviours essential to survival in the forest, anchoring
each community, every maloca, to a profound spirit of place.

These cosmological ideas have very real
ecological consequences both in terms of the way people live and the impacts
they have on their environment. The forest is the realm of the men, the
garden the domain of women, where they give birth to both plants and
children. The women cultivate thirty or more food crops and encourage the
fertility and fecundity of some twenty varieties of wild fruits and nuts.
The men grow only tobacco and coca, which they plant in narrow winding paths
that run through the women’s fields, like serpents in the grass. For the
women, the act of harvesting and preparing cassava, the daily bread, is a
gesture of procreation and a form of initiation. The starchy fluid left over
once the grated mash has been fully rinsed is seen as female blood that can
be rendered safe by heat, and drunk warm like a mother’s milk. The crude
manioc fibre resembles the bone of men. Fired on the griddle, shaped by
female hands, the cassava is the medium through which the plant spirits of
the wild are domesticated for the good of all. Like all food it has
ambivalent potential. It gives life but may also bring disease and
misfortune. Thus nothing can be eaten unless it has passed through the hands
of an elder, and been blessed and spiritually cleansed by the shaman.

Food in this sense is power, for it represents
the transfer of energy from one life form to another. As a child grows he or
she is only slowly introduced to new categories of food, and severe food
restrictions mark all the major passages of life — moments of initiation for
a male, the first menses for a woman, transitional moments when the human
being by definition is in contact with the spirit realm of the
He
.
When men go to the forest to hunt or fish, it is never a trivial passage.
First the shaman must travel in trance to negotiate with the masters of the
animals, forging a mystical contract with the spirit guardians, an exchange
based always on reciprocity. The Barasana compare it to marriage, for
hunting too is a form of courtship, in which one seeks the blessing of a
greater authority for the honour of taking into one’s family a precious
being. Meat is not the right of a hunter but a gift from the spirit world.
To kill without permission is to risk death by a spirit guardian, be it in
the form of a jaguar, anaconda, tapir, or harpy eagle. Man in the forest is
always both predator and prey. The same cautious and established social
protocols that maintain peace and respect between neighbouring clans of
people, that facilitate the exchange of ritual goods, food, and women, are
applied to nature. Animals are potential kin, just as the wild rivers and
forests are part of the social world of people.

All of these ideas and restrictions create, as
anthropologist Kaj Arhem has written, what is essentially a land management
plan inspired by myth. Of the forty-five game animals available to the
Barasana and Makuna, for example, only twenty are hunted with any
regularity. Of some forty species of fish, perhaps twenty-five are consumed.
The complex food restrictions result in a highly diversified subsistence
base, which is concentrated on the lower end of the food chain. Tapir,
though highly prized, is rarely hunted and is reserved at any rate for the
elders. Meat in general, though important to the identity of the hunter, is
far less important as a source of protein than fish or insects. Ants,
larvae, and termites, along with cassava bread, are the foundations of a
diet and a cuisine that is both delicious and highly sophisticated. Since
virtually every bend and rapid in a river, every stream crossing and every
stone is associated with a mythic event, the entire landscape is mapped in
the mind of the shaman. Hunters avoid salt licks. Fishing is prohibited in
places toxic with the blood of the ancestors, beaches and side channels that
also happen to be spawning habitat for sabelta or palometa. Entire stretches
of the Piraparaná, home to several hundred species of fish, are deemed off
limits for spiritual reasons. Shamanic sanctions, though inspired by
cosmology, have the very real effect of mitigating the impact of human
beings on the environment. And as the mythological events that inspired such
beliefs are ongoing, the consequence is a living philosophy that really does
view man and nature as one.

Where this all comes alive is in ritual. Before
leaving the Piraparaná, we attended a fertility ceremony in honour of
Cassava Woman, an event that lasted for two days and nights, attracting
hundreds of men and women and families from up and down the river to the
maloca at Puerto Ortega. Our host was Reinel Ortega García, a Barasana
shaman. The chief of the maloca was Patricio; his wife Rosa was Cassava
Woman, symbol of fertility and continuity. All of the hierarchical
leadership was in place — the chanter and the dancers, the wisdom-keeper and
the chief, the shaman, and the kumu, the priest. Stephen Hugh-Jones
described the roles of these distinct religious figures with a curious
metaphor. The shaman, he said, is like the minister of foreign affairs; he
deals laterally with the forces of nature. Meanwhile, the kumu, or priest,
deals vertically, through time, with the ancestors. He does not improvise.
His language, like that of the chants, is liturgical, archaic, beyond the
understanding of all but those who have been taught its inner meaning. His
is a canon of deep religious knowledge, and he does not deviate or
improvise. To do so would be as inappropriate as a Catholic priest changing
the language and prayers of the Eucharist.

Intensity of devotion was most evident in the men
responsible for weaving the feathered coronas to be used in the dance. They
had been isolated in the maloca for several weeks, forbidden to eat meat or
fish, or to be with their wives. To create the brilliant yellow plumes they
had plucked the feathers of living birds and applied a paste of frog venom
and toxic berries to the breasts of the parrots, causing the new plumage,
normally deep red, to emerge the colour of the sun. The regalia is not
decorative. It is the literal connection to sacred space, the wings to the
divine.

As the ritual begins, time collapses. There are
two series of dances, separated by the liminal moments of the day, dawn,
dusk, and midnight. In donning the feathers, the yellow corona of pure
thought, the white egret plumes of the rain, the men become the ancestors,
just as the river is the anaconda, the mountains the house posts of the
world, the shaman the shape-shifter, in one moment a predator, in the next
prey. He changes from fish to animal to human being and back again,
transcending every form, becoming pure energy flowing among every dimension
of reality, past and present, here and there, mythic and mundane. His chants
recall by name every point of geography met on the ancestral journey of the
Anaconda, toponyms that can be traced back with complete accuracy more than
1,600 kilometres down the Amazon to the east where the great civilizations
once thrived.

White people, Ricardo told me, see with their
eyes, but the Barasana see with their minds. They journey both to the dawn
of time and into the future, visiting every sacred site, paying homage to
every creature, as they celebrate their most profound cultural insight, the
realization that animals and plants are only people in another dimension of
reality. This is the essence of the Barasana philosophy. Consider for a
moment what this implies, and what it tells us about the culture and its
place in history. It is a tradition based on knowledge acquired through time
and intense priestly study and initiation. Status accrues to the man of
wisdom, not the warrior. Their malocas rival in grandeur the great
architectural creations of humanity. They have a complex understanding of
astronomy, solar calendars, intense notions of hierarchy and specialization.
Their wealth is vested in ritual regalia as elegant as that of a medieval
court. Their systems of exchange, infinitely complex, facilitate peace, not
war. Their struggle to bring order to the universe, to maintain the
energetic flows of life, and the specificity of their beliefs and
adaptations, leaves open the very remarkable possibility that the Barasana
are the survivors of a world that once existed — the complex societies and
chieftains that so astonished Gaspar de Carvajal and Francisco de Orellana,
the lost civilizations of the Amazon.

Perhaps, in the adaptation and cultural survival
of the Barasana and Makuna and all the Peoples of the Anaconda, we can
glimpse something of the beliefs and convictions that allowed untold
millions to live along the banks of the world’s greatest river. When the
Barasana today engage in ritual and take yagé, an astonishing potion, and
say that they travel through multiple dimensions, reliving the journey of
the Ayawa, alighting on the sacred sites, accomplishing all of these
remarkable spiritual deeds, it is because they really do. When we say that
the Barasana and their neighbours both echo the ancient pre-Columbian past
and point a way forward, embodying a model of how human societies can live
and thrive in the Amazon basin without laying waste to the forests, it is
because they really can.