The Cosmic Serpent (4 page)

I laughed, saying I did not think the visions would appear on film. “Yes they would,” he said, “because their colors are so bright.” With this, he stood up and started wading across the river.

I scampered after him, thinking about what he had just said. It had never occurred to me that one could seriously consider taking pictures of hallucinations. I was certain that if I did so, I would only obtain photos of darkness. But I knew that this would not prove anything, because he could always question the capacities of my camera. In any case, these people seemed to consider the visions produced by hallucinogenic plants to be at least as real as the ordinary reality we all perceive.

A few weeks later I started recording a series of interviews with Carlos, who had agreed to tell me his life story. The first evening, we sat on the platform of his house, surrounded by the sounds of the forest at night. A kerosene lamp made of a tin can and a cotton wick provided a flickering source of light and gave off blackish fumes.

Despite my training, it was the first time in my life that I interviewed someone. I did not know where to start, so I asked him to start at the beginning.

Carlos was born in the Perene Valley in 1940. He lost his parents when he was five years old in the waves of epidemics that swept the area with the arrival of white settlers. His uncle took care of him for several years. Then he went to an Adventist mission, where he learned to speak, read, and write Spanish.

What follows is an extract from the transcript of this first interview. We talked in Spanish, which is neither his mother tongue nor mine, as a faithful translation reveals:

Over the following months, I recorded approximately twenty hours on the meanders of Carlos's life. He spoke Spanish better than anybody in Quirishari; in the past, he had taught it to other Ashaninca in an Adventist school. However, his grammar was flexible, and he talked with unexpected rhythms, punctuating his sentences with pauses, gestures, and noises that completed his vocabulary nicely, but that are difficult to put into written English. Furthermore, his narrative style varied from a first-person account to the commentary of a narrator who also plays the roles of the characters. This is no doubt more appropriate for oratory, or radio plays, than for a text.

By taping Carlos's life story, I was not trying to establish the point of view of a “typical” Ashaninca. Rather, I was trying to grasp some specifics of local history by following the personal trajectory of one man. In particular, I was interested in questions of territory in the Pichis Valley: Who owned which lands, and since when? Who used which resources? As it happens, the overall history of the Ashaninca in the twentieth century is closely defined by the progressive expropriation of their territory by outsiders, as Carlos's life story reveals.

Carlos's birthplace, the Perene Valley, was the first Ashaninca region to undergo colonization. By 1940, the majority of indigenous lands in the area had already been confiscated. Ten years later, Carlos the young orphan had followed the mass migration of the Perene Ashaninca toward the Pichis Valley, where the forests were still free of colonists and diseases. After living twenty-six years in this new homeland, Carlos had been elected to the presidency of the congress of the Association of the Indigenous Communities of the Pichis (ACONAP). The goal of this organization was to defend indigenous lands from a new onslaught of colonization. Carlos was forced to abandon his position after four years when he was bitten by a snake. At this point, he retired to Quirishari to cure himself “with ayahuasca and other plants.” When I appeared five years later, he was living like a retired politician, satisfied with the tranquillity, but nostalgic for yesteryear's struggles. He did not seem displeased at the idea of confiding his memoirs to a visiting anthropologist.

Over the course of our conversations, I often asked Carlos about the places he had lived, directing the conversation toward the solid ground of social geography. But he would regularly answer in ways that pointed toward shamanism and mythology. For example:

I often asked Carlos to explain the origin of place names to me. He would invariably reply that nature itself had communicated them to the ayahuasqueros-tabaqueros in their hallucinations: “That is how nature talks, because in nature, there is God, and God talks to us in our visions. When an ayahuasquero drinks his plant brew, the spirits present themselves to him and explain everything.”

Listening to Carlos's stories, I gradually became familiar with some of the characters of Ashaninca mythology. For instance, he often talked of Avíreri: “According to our ancient belief, he is the one of the forest, he is our god. He was the one who had the idea of making people appear.” Carlos also referred to invisible beings, called
maninkari,
who are found in animals, plants, mountains, streams, lakes, and certain crystals, and who are sources of knowledge: “The maninkari taught us how to spin and weave cotton, and how to make clothes. Before, our ancestors lived naked in the forest. Who else could have taught us to weave? That is how our intelligence was born, and that is how we natives of the forest know how to weave.”

I had not come to Quirishari to study indigenous mythology. I even considered the study of mythology to be a useless and “reactionary” pastime. What counted for me were the hectares confiscated in the name of “development” and the millions of dollars in international funds that financed the operation. With my research, I was trying to demonstrate that true development consisted first in recognizing the territorial rights of indigenous people. My point of view was materialist and political, rather than mystical.
¹
So, after nine months in Quirishari, it was almost despite myself that I started reading Gerald Weiss's doctoral dissertation on Ashaninca mythology, entitled
The Cosmology of the Campa Indians of Eastern Peru
—“Campa” being the disparaging word used until recently to designate the Ashaninca, who do not appreciate it.
²

I discovered as I read this thesis that Carlos was not making up fanciful stories. On the contrary, he was providing me with concise elements of the main cosmological beliefs of his culture, as documented extensively by Weiss in the 1960s.

According to Weiss, the Ashaninca believe in the existence of invisible spirits called maninkari, literally “those who are hidden,” who can nonetheless be seen by ingesting tobacco and ayahuasca. They are also called
ashaninka,
“our fellows,” as they are considered to be ancestors with whom one has kinship. As these maninkari are also present in plants and animals, the Ashaninca think of themselves as members of the same family as herons, otters, hummingbirds, and so on, who are all
perani ashaninka,
all our fellows long ago.
³

Some maninkari are more important than others. Weiss distinguishes a hierarchy among these spirits. Avíreri, the god who creates by transformation, is the most powerful of them all. In Ashaninca myths, Avíreri, accompanied by his sister, creates the seasons with the music of his panpipes. He shapes human beings by blowing on earth. Then he wanders with his grandson Kíri, casually transforming human beings into insects, fruit trees, animals, or rock formations. Finally, Avíreri gets drunk at a festival. His malicious sister invites him to dance and pushes him into a hole that she has dug beforehand. Then she pretends to pull him out by throwing him a thread, a cord, and finally a rope, none of which is strong enough. Avíreri decides to escape by digging a tunnel into the underworld. He ends up in a place called “river's end,” where a strangler vine wraps itself around him. From there, he continues to sustain his numerous children of the earth. And Weiss concludes: “There
Avíreri
remains to the present day, no more able to move, because of the vine that constrains him.”
⁴

Finally, Weiss notes in passing: “To be sure, although these accounts are to be classified and referred to as myths, for the Campas they are reliable reports handed down orally from past generations of real happenings, happenings as authentically real as any actual event of past years that someone still remembers or was told about.”
⁵

I had the same impression as Weiss: My Ashaninca informants discussed mythological characters and events as if they were real. This seemed quite fanciful to me, but I did not say so. As an anthropologist I was trained to respect outlandish beliefs.

 

THE INHABITANTS of Quirishari had made it clear to me that I was not supposed to gather plant samples. However, I could study their uses of the forest as I pleased, and I could try their plant remedies.

So whenever I had a health problem and people told me they knew of a cure, I tried it. Often the results went beyond not only my expectations, but my very understanding of reality. For instance, I had suffered from chronic back pain since the age of seventeen, having played too much tennis during my adolescence. I had consulted several European doctors, who had used cortisone injections and heat treatment, to no avail. In Quirishari there was a man, Abelardo Shingari, known for his “body medicine.” He proposed to cure my back pain by administering a
sanango
tea at the new moon. He warned me that I would feel cold, that my body would seem rubbery for two days, and that I would see some images.

I was skeptical, thinking that if it were really possible to cure chronic back pain with half a cup of vegetal tea, Western medicine would surely know about it. On the other hand, I thought it was worth trying, because it could not be less effective than cortisone injections.

Early one morning, the day after the new moon, I drank the sanango tea. After twenty minutes, a wave of cold submerged me. I felt chilled to the bone. I broke out into a profuse cold sweat and had to wring out my sweatshirt several times. After six rather difficult hours, the cold feeling went away, but I no longer controlled the coordination of my body. I could not walk without falling down. For five minutes I saw an enormous column of multicolored lights across the sky—my only hallucinations. The lack of coordination lasted forty-eight hours. On the morning of the third day, my back pain had disappeared. To this day it has not returned.
⁶