Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (38 page)

These aphrodisiacs are made from both plants and animal parts, the latter
primarily the ullo, penis, of various animals-the achuni, coatimundi, a relative of the raccoon, which is believed to have a penis that is always erect; the
machin, capuchin monkey; and the lagarto negro, black caiman.39 It is popularly
said that ingesting achuni ullo induces a priapism so profound as to survive
death, requiring that a hole be cut in the coffin to accommodate it.4°

Two plants in particular are thought to have male potency enhancement
effects-chuchuhuasi and clavohuasca, clove vine. Clavohuasca is reputed to
work as a libido enhancer for women as well. Interestingly, both of thesealong with a number of the plants with which they are mixed-are considered
hot plants, used to treat cold conditions, such as arthritis and rheumatism;
in addition, the bark with which they are mixed comes from trees that produce strong durable hardwood used in construction for posts, supports, and
uprights-a good example of the doctrine of signatures. The most frequently
used hardwoods for this purpose are cocobolo, cumaseba, huacapu, icoja, and
tahuari.

Some recipes are relatively straightforward: the chuchuhuasi drink is a
maceration in aguardiente of chuchuhuasi bark; abejachado is the chuchuhuasi
drink with honey added; achuni ullo, coatimundi penis, is a maceration in
aguardiente of scrapings from the dried penis of a coatimundi. More complex
recipes can add to chuchuhuasi both hot plants, such as abuta and ipururo,
and the bark of such hardwood construction trees as huacapu and cumaseba,
mixed with honey. The various Rompecalzon recipes use, in similar fashion,
clavohuasca bark instead of chuchuhausi. Empirical studies of efficacy, I am
sad to say, are lacking.

General tonics such as Siete Raices, Seven Roots, and Veintiun Raices,
Twenty-one Roots, often contain chuchuhuasi or clavohuasca or both, and
thus claim potency enhancement along with their numerous other benefits.
The term rakes is metaphorical, since most of the ingredients are tree bark
rather than roots. The ingredients can vary from place to place; here are four
different recipes for Siete Raices:

• chuchuhuasi, murure, huacapurana, cumaseba, tahuari, icoja, huacapu

• chuchuhuasi, clavohuasca, murure, huacapurana, cumaseba, cocobolo, ipururo

• chuchuhuasi, clavohuasca, sanango, renaquilla, cascarilla, cocobolo,
ipururo

• chuchuhuasi, clavohuasca, chiricsanango, cascarilla, huanarpo, maca,
ipururo

The capinuri palm is also worth mentioning. The ends of its fallen branches look remarkably like erect penises, and wearing a two- or three-inch piece
of the branch end on a string around the neck is considered to increase virility-another example of the doctrine of signatures. The phallic ends of the
branches are also the subject of a great deal of ribald humor.

There have been relatively few investigators who have studied the healing
practices of the mestizos in the Peruvian Amazon. All of them-anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna, medical anthropologist Marlene Dobkin de Rios, and
Jacques Chevalier, an expert in social anthropology and political economyhave characterized the healers they worked with as shamans., And, indeed,
both don Roberto and dofia Maria have been perfectly comfortable being
called-and calling themselves-chamdnes.

Of course, in all likelihood, the term chamdn, shaman, has only recently
been introduced into mestizo professional classifications. Mestizo healers
generally call themselves not shamans but vegetalistas, curanderos, medicos,
curiosos, and empiricos.2 The term brujo, sorcerer, is today often used pejoratively, to refer to a person who uses shamanic power to harm others-for money,
for revenge, or just out of spite. But don Agustin Rivas Vasquez, a mestizo
shaman from Tamshiyacu, says, `Back then the word shaman wasn't known,
only now we know the word. Earlier we were all brujos, some doing good and
some doing evil. 113 To the extent that the term brujo connotes power, shamans
may embrace it; one shaman advertises himself in the newspaper, proudly, as
el unico brujo que tiene pacto con el diablo, the only brujo who has made a pact with
the devil.

Many mestizo shamans refer to themselves as vegetalistas-that is, those
who have received their power from the vegetates, plants.4 The boundaries of
this term are uncertain. According to Luna, this term distinguishes vegetalistas from such other healers as oracionistas, prayer healers, and espiritistas,
spiritist healers.s Chevalier opposes vegetalismo to brujeria, sorcery.' Followers of the Brazilian new religious movements use the term vegetalismo to refer to both mestizo and indigenous ayahuasca shamanism in the Upper Amazon,
in contrast to their own practices.? Among mestizos in the Peruvian Amazon,
the term vegetalismo is often used to distinguish mestizo shamanism from that
of indigenous peoples.

Other of these terms are used as well. Cesar Zevallos Chinchuya, a Campa
healer, calls himself a medico.8 Dona Maria and don Roberto describe themselves as curanderos, healers, which they oppose to brujos, sorcerers.9 Don
Francisco Montes Shui a, on the other hand, uses the term curandero not as
opposed to brujo but to indicate a mestizo healer as opposed to an indigenous
one.'°

SPECIALIZATIONS

Perhaps most often used are terms referring to a practitioner's specialty or
subspecialty, just as we might more readily describe a biomedical practitioner
as, say, a pediatrician rather than more generically as a doctor. Such terms indicate the teacher plants with which the shaman has undertaken la dieta and
with which the shaman has formed a special relationship.

Throughout the Upper Amazon, the three most important psychoactive
plants are the three hallucinogens mapacho, toe, and ayahuasca, which embody the primary functions of protection, power, and teaching. Thus, there
are three primary shamanic specialties, based on which of these plants the
shaman uses to diagnose sickness and to contact the healing and protective
spirits-tabaquero, toero, and ayahuasquero.

Then there are what we can call subspecialties:"

• paleros use the bark and resin of palos, large hardwood trees, such as
ayahuma, hacapii, chullachaqui caspi, remocaspi, cumaseba, huayracaspi, icoja, and tahuari; the distinction is between plantas, plants,
of which the leaves and stems are primarily used, and palos, trees, of
which primarily the roots, bark, or resin is used

• sanangueros are expert in the use of a heterogeneous group of plants
called sanango, especially chiricsanango

• camalongueros use the seeds of the camalonga, yellow oleander, usually
dissolved in aguardiente along with camphor and white onion

• catahueros use of the resin of the catahua tree

• perfumeros are experts in the use of fragrant plants as well as commercially prepared colognes, such as agua de florida

• ajosacheros use drinks made from ajo sacha

• tragueros use trago or aguardiente, distilled fermented sugarcane juice

• encanteros use magic stones

These subspecialties frequently combine with primary specialties: a shaman
can be a palero ayahuasquero, perfumero ayahuasquero, or, like don Roberto,
a sananguero ayahuasquero. None of this is exclusive; ayahuasqueros smoke mapacho, ingest toe, and drink camalonga. On the other hand, don Cesar
Zevallos Chinchuya, a Campa toero, sees the specialties as rivals. Ayahuasqueros are his mortal enemies, he says: ayahuasca is a creeping bush, and toe is a
small tree; they cannot mingle.12 A similar belief-that toe is antagonistic to
the ayahuasca spirit-is also found among the related Asheninka.13 Zevalos
also considers the catahuero to be his dangerous enemy, since catahua is used
to kill rather than heal.14

Sanangos

Don Roberto is well known as a sananguero-that is, an expert in the use of a
group of plants collectively known as sanangos. The best known of these plants
is chiricsanango. But there are, in fact, two Brunfelsia species called chiricsanango-B. grandifloria and B. chiricaspi, the first also called chuchuhuasha
and the second also called chiricaspi. Note that the Quechua term chiric, cold,
chills, appears in the names of both plants. Note too that chuchuhuasha is a different plant from chuchuhuasi, although understandably their names are sometimes confused. To add to the confusion, the poet Cesar Calvo distinguishes-on
what basis I do not know-between red and white chuchuhuasha.'

Moreover, the sanangos include not only chiricsanango but also motelosanango; a variety of species in the genus Tabernaemontana, called, without
much consistency, lobosanango, uchusanango, or yacusanango; a variety of
species in the genus Bonafousia, called cocasanango orsanango macho; and a
variety of species in the genus Faramea, called caballosanango oryacusanango.
Just about any of these species may be called, simply, sanango.2

It is not clear to me what these plants have in common. Chiricsanango causes
chills and tingling when ingested, and is therefore considered a cold plant, used
to treat hot conditions-fever, diarrhea, wounds, and inflammations. But motelosanango is a hot plant, which has, as mestizo shaman Manuel Cordova says,
"the effect of warming the blood," and is used to treat cold conditions, such as
arthritis, rheumatism, and erectile dysfunction .3

Nor can I detect any overriding physical resemblance among the sanangos;
for example, as far as I can tell, the cordate leaves of motelosanango look nothing like the elliptic leaves of chiricsanango. Interestingly, several Tabernaemontana species contain ibogaine;4 ethnobotanist Norman Bisset reports that
Tabernaemontana sananho is used as an arrow poison .5 Famed ethnobotanists
Richard Evans Schultes and Robert Raffauf in effect throw up their hands. "The
Peruvian name sanango," they write, "indicates that this shrub has a medicinal
use."6

NOTES

1. Calvo, 1981/1995b, p. 211.

2. For example, Gentry, 1993, p. 242; Schultes & Raffauf, 1990, p. 383.

3. Lamb, 1985, pp. 174-175.

4. Van Beek, Verpoorte, Svendsen, Leeuwenberg, & Bisset, 1984.

5. See Bisset, 1992; Duke & Vasquez, 1994, p. 164.

6. Schultes & Raffauf, 1990, p. 383.

Other commonly used terms with the -ero suffix indicate what we can call
shamanic practice areas-for example, pusanguero, a maker of love potions;
curandero, a healer of sickness; shitanero, a practitioner of shitana, sorcery; hechicero, a caster of evil spells; chontero, a sorcerer who inflicts harm with magic
darts. These practice areas are independent of plant specializations: a chontero might be an ayahuasquero or a tabaquero; a tabaquero might be both a
curandero and a pusanguero. Still, some subspecialties and practice areas
tend to go together: a perfumero, for example, is likely to be a pusanguero.

PRESTIGE AND HIERARCHY

Sources of Prestige

There is an often unspoken hierarchy among mestizo shamans. There is,
first, a relatively informal ranking based on length of practice, the number
and length of dietas, the number and types of plants that have been mastered,
and the number and quality of icaros in their repertoire.15 Icaros become increasingly prestigious as they incorporate words from indigenous languages,
unknown archaic tongues, and the languages of animals and birds; the more
obscure the language, the more power it contains-and the more difficult it
is to copy.

Additionally, prestige is acquired by association with indigenous traditions, on the one hand, and with Western biomedicine, on the other. The former is based on the mestizo assumption that jungle Indians are the ultimate
source of shamanic knowledge and that any powers acquired directly from
them are of particular value." The latter is based on the social status of urban
biomedicine and is manifested in the use of imagery involving hospitals, surgical scrubs and masks, medical procedures, and spirits dressed as doctors
and nurses.'? Reference to these two sources of prestige may be found in the
way don Roberto and dona Maria dress for their ayahuasca ceremonies. Don
Roberto wears a crown of feathers and a shirt inscribed with Shipibo Indian
designs; dona Maria would often wear a long white coat, like that of a doctor.