1b Amazonian Shamanism

It was Karsten Canelos (Contributions to the Sociology of the Indian Tribes of Ecuador) [in order to cohabit with a man without getting pregnant the Canelos women are in the habit of taking a medicine prepared from the small piripiri plant] Nicole: ...how many of our present beliefs make about that much sense. The more you see of jungles, the more you wonder about those things. Anyway, they were the hardest of all things to get. You see, all medicines–at the beginning, at least (were kept secret)–now the acculturation process is proceeding at such a rate that the old taboos have worn kind of thin in some places. But when I first started doing this: medicine is magic and magic is secret; you don't tell anyone. One tribe would be using a totally different set of medicinal plants from another tribe. Their pharmacopeia's would be quite different–they'll overlap a bit but–the Witotos would know a plant that heals infected third-degree burns of seamless (?4:57) without any scarring and the Ocainas–who were even of the same language group–didn't know it because a Ocaina girl told me how a Witoto woman cured her; her type hadn't know this. The just keep it separately secret, even when it's a friendly tribe and a somewhat-related tribe. So, it made it rather a sporting proposition how much you could work out of them. Being a woman and traveling alone made it a lot easier because there was no threat to anybody. I'd have a boatman and his wife and an interpreter that picked up at the edge of the language area. Also, I'd travel a very inconspicuous and–not necessarily by choice–a rather ordinary and poverty-stricken way. That made it better, too. You go in all with fancy equipment and a fine boat and half-dozen people you aren't going to get very far because they're too used to being putdown and that, in itself is a putdown, to go in looking very elegant. So, I managed to get quite a lot of stuff and it was really rather more funny there was always something to be gained (?6:48) so you could feel you were pretty smart. The one thing that–even when I had formed a very strong friendship–I could not, for years, get anyone to tell me about was their contraceptives. I knew they had them because some missionaries, medical missionaries, had told me of cases in which a woman of malformed pelvis had had a terrible time giving birth and they told her she couldn't have any more children. In particular case, the woman said, “Well, that's too bad.” They said, “Are you going to leave your husband?” “Why should I do that?” the woman said, “he's a nice man, why would I leave him?” “But you can't have any more children.” And she goes, “Well, I'll take some medicine.” But she wouldn't tell what it was and she never had another child. Over the time they were with them there were about four tribes–(four more women in the tribe?7:49) who had that same experience and so they were convinced that oral contraceptives did exist, and were effective. But, at that time–when I first heard about it, it was about 1951, it was before I'd even really started going after medicinal plants–oral contraceptives did not get published and get on the market until 1960. So, I believed them and I thought it'd be kind of interesting to get them but you just draw a blank when you mention them, in fact you may ruin . You're going into some tribes that are kind of far away and not used to white people–maybe it hasn't seen them very often–and you're getting along fine, you say something about a contraceptive—once I just said, “I smell piripiri,” I've had twenty piripiris for all different purposes: rheumatism, contraceptives and some you wash your husbands pants with and he'll be impotent with another woman. They use them for everything. They've got one for whatever it is. But, I even got myself practically thrown out a couple of times just by mentioning it. So, finally–it took a long long time but you will eventually– if you keep going into different tribes and meeting different people– get a sudden understanding, it's like the leap of an arc between two electric poles—now and then it happens, and then you're in, you're very lucky. And so, I did find the Jivaro woman who got them for me, and even then I had a very difficult time getting away with it because—but we managed. Well, it was very funny, actually, how I managed–I had been

thinking about this–I was going up the Rio Corrientes, and there's a Jivaro colony about halfway up the river on the way to the Macusari, and there was a great fiesta and everyone was getting very drunk when we arrived. And, you don't want to hang around when—fights are apt to happen when Indians get drunk, so we went home with this one woman who was taking her husband home to clean him up– I think he'd been a little sick, it is not considered bad manners at all for a man to get roaring drunk and throwing up because that's part of the fiesta; it's almost a ritual. So, she and I sat and talked– and, with me she spoke Spanish, very bad Spanish, sometimes very hard to understand, but she did know a little. She didn't like my boatman and his wife–neither did I by that time–so she wouldn't speak Spanish in front of them. In fact, I found out that there were three people in the tribe who spoke Spanish excellently, or at least intelligibly... that's excellent in the jungle. When they had left, she said to me, in Spanish, the first thing she said, “Where's your husband?” And I said, “Oh,” I didn't know that Indians had divorces then, I said, “we are not married anymore. He is in one place, I am in another place, he is no more my husband,” thinking I was giving her a good shock and she said, “Oh, me too.” So, she had been married to a very brutal man, she told me. He beat her and finally abandoned her to a great delight. And, her stepfather was the witch doctor of that tribe so he told her—it was a long time before she was willing to marry again, she'd had a bad time and her little daughter–there's no question of custody, the child stays with the mother in jungle divorces—he told her that she ought to marry again and finally did find a man who was very good and he was quite an important guy in the tribe; he even had a pair of shoes. They were bright yellow. He was the only Indian on that river who had a pair of shoes. He was an awfully nice man, too. So she married him but she would not give him a child. And I said, “Well, how'd you manage that?” She said, “Well, of course I took the medicine.” And I thought at last. She told me she'd give it to me. I was going up the river and I said, “Give it to me when I get back.” For one thing I didn't want to carry it around because I knew by then that anything that has to do with the giving or withholding of life, things that ease birth, ease labor–and they have some very good ones, and the contraceptives, and the abortifations—they have very good things for abortion—all of those are so secret that you have to be awfully careful and awfully sure that you're an intimate before you mention it. At least you did in those days, it's easing up now as they're losing their taboos, they're losing their culture, they're their knowledge of the plants (?15:09) so it doesn't help much. So, she gave them to when I came back down but they were having another fiesta and the men were all sitting together at one end of the house–it was an Indian house–has a trunk in front to climb up because they're build they're build on stilts because of the floods and there's a platform and a roof—nice and airy. They were all sitting around there, it was raining, and the women got me the plants and I was just about to get them down to the canoe when some of the old men, who were sitting in a little row in the back came over and looked that the plants and looked at me then they started talking and my friend Tesa started explaining–it didn't work. She was looking very distressed and so was her auntie who had helped in this deal. And, I'd been thinking about this, I learned the trick from a man in Shanghai who had a hard time getting the best of his Chinese servants sometimes, so through the interpreter I said, “Tell Tesa to tell them I already knew the names of all these plants, I knew all about them.” So Tesa did, I suppose, spouted Jivaro. And the man said, “OK, if that's the case, what's the name of this one?” So, I to the interpreter said, “Well tell them of course I don't speak his language so I couldn't tell him what this bench is in Jivaro, I don't know the word for “bench.” I couldn't tell him what the rain is. But, I can tell him what it is in my language. It is a... this one is a “logarithm” and this one is an isosceles quadrangle. You know they do sound magical and they are magic to me, I don't understand them at all. And, the old witch doctor which I had bribed by giving him a glass eye, with which I think that he could sort of pull a few fast ones if he ever got in a problem with magic. So, it worked beautifully. And, I left rather quickly, got them in the canoe and off we went. But, that's how secret they are. Now...

Terence: Now I'll let you off the hook. Thank you. I talk about how this plant knowledge is being lost–even more quickly than the rainforest itself. I think very few modern ethnographers have taken the time to learn the it the way you have and very few modern ethnographers have been able to gain the confidence of women the way you have. Nicole: They haven't tried. Terence: No, they haven't tried but I know horror stories of clashes between insensitive anthropologists and tribal groups— Nicole: You have to keep your antenna up at all times. Terence: And you have to take your time and not be in a hurry. Nicole: I have been sometimes and got myself thrown out. Terence: By being in a hurry. Yes, Nicole is the only white person I have ever met who has been able to convince me that they actually enjoyed being in the jungle and Nicole does enjoy being in the jungle. Nicole: Well, why not? Terence: [laughs] There are ten thousand reasons why not. Nicole: It is the most exciting, the most beautiful and the most, sort of sacred... it has a spirit, a very strong spirit and also has the great pleasure, it's like (?) “Imagine me doing this” and feeling like somebody important for yourself. Terence: That's right. Nicole: I don't get that chance very often. Terence: But, I traveled, years later, to many of the same places to many of the same places that Nicole describes in her book The Witch-Doctor's Apprentice and the model–let me tell you–for exploratory writing is you go nowhere and then you exaggerate when you write about it, and all these hairy-chested guys who are running around the Amazon with machine guns and helicopters inevitably exaggerate the difficulty and if you read Nicole's book it sounds as though the Amazon basin is just dotted with wonderful, clean, friendly villages filled with happy, fascinating people. Nicole: Oh, nuts. I didn't want that. My books aren't phony. Terence: No, that's what I mean, you don't exaggerate. But Sebastian Snow and some of these other people... Nicole: I knew Sebastian, he came to my door. Many years ago somebody banged on the door and it's this nice little blonde guy (?). And he said, “I'm Sebastian Snow, the Royal Geographical Society.” I said, “That's nice, I'm a Fellow, too.” He said, “Well, I'm not yet, I'm going to be.” Terence: I think the acid test for every Amazon explorer is how hard you find it to stay at Arica.

Nicole: That was not... Terence: That was a hellhole. Well, Alfred Russel Wallace, in 1858, described it as absolutely unbearable. You had a terrible time there. I had an awful time there. Nicole: Not only that but I lived in a double boiler. Terence: You lived in one of those metal buildings that they put up. Yes, so did I. Why would people put up with this kind of stuff unless they felt they were in touch with a living world of... Nicole: Because the people they sent down, they didn't know, it was the Colombian police. And they sent down people who were from Bogata, grew up in Bogata, didn't know a thing about the jungle and they set you in the house so you didn't have time to learn anything. (? 23:11) Terence:Very lonely boys from Boyaca. Nicole: And the thing that's bad about that place is that they have the most stinging gnats I have ever seen. Three kinds of stinging insects that fly in clouds. Really, in clouds. There are the little black gnats that make a blister, there are the little black gnats that make a bloody spot and there are the tábanos– you know, the triangular black flies Terence: This is the one we were trying to remember yesterday. Nicole: Tábano. They would eat through the heaviest jeans or anything else and they were very painful, burning. Of course the misquitos are all on duty, too. Terence: It's an awful place. Nicole visited La Chorrera long before I was there, even before John Sullivan was there, that's how out in front of the pack she was. Nicole: I was there in '59. Terence: You were there in '59, I didn't get there until '71. Nicole: They're wonderful people, the nuns and priests there. Terence:Yes, I wonder how well they're fairing in the middle of the coke wars. Nicole: But I haven't heard of them killing any Catholic priests. Terence: No, I think that airfield is very important to the cocaineros and probably they strive to keep decent relations there. Nicole: Well, they're all Catholics, too. Terence: Oh, yes. Absolutely. The higher horror of the whiteness is certainly a Catholic trait. Well, let's see here. I'm a little off-balance because I held a weekend at Esalen two weeks ago and you know they allow the people who participate in the workshops to evaluate people and I got dinged. And somebody

wrote an evaluation and said: Terence McKenna is the William Buckley of the psychedelic left and he needs to learn to listen. So you'll see me trying to do a lot of listening this weekend. I have a kind of obsessive need to create a certain kind of closure, so excuse me for about five minutes and I'll do it— It's to satisfy an itch of mine. It's the need to try and tie this all together and make some kind of sense of it. What does a plant that heals wounds have to do with hallucinogens and what do these things have to do with a global planetary crisis in the ecosystem and what does that have to do with us? Well, to create an overarching metaphor that can connect all this together: I think what we have to do is think in terms of the exhaustion of our own cultural forms. That’s what we’re living through – a global dying created by the exhaustion of our cultural forms and the vitality of the cultural forms that we see in the so called “primitive,” – I call them preliterate, people. As Nicole pointed out, they have nothing. But, what they seem to have, that we cannot seem to get a grip on, is a kind of dynamic equilibrium with their environment and peace of mind in the felt experience of the moment; these are the two things we don’t have. As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As human beings, as individuals, it’s very hard for us to be at peace with ourselves. I mean I consider my own life, the search for peace of mind — forget enlightenment, forget Śūnyatā, all this stuff — just a little piece of mind would be a tremendous boon as far as I can see! So, I really think that there’s a confluence here of themes and possibilities. It has this richly plotted texture that always lets you know that you’re in the presence of a higher order of things. It’s that the shamans, whom we admire, who we idealize, are seen to be at the center of this environment; the warm tropics that we find it necessary to destroy. It’s a perfect image of us being at war– not only with ourselves, but with nature itself. You’ve heard all about how the Amazon and the Congo basin and eastern Indonesia are all being cleared and lumbered and turned into cattle ranches – this is a tragedy, obviously, we understand and can perceive the dynamics of that. But, how to make sense of a situation where as the World Bank and the IMF attempt to halt this kind of destruction, on the other side of the coin, the U.S. Department of State and the DEA propose, and are planning to carry out, the defoliation of the Why-guaga (??) basin. So, there’s a schizophrenia here that is not academic. Are we trying to get the patient well or are we pulling the plugs one-by-one? We seem to be acting in both dimensions simultaneously. And I think it’s because we have not, in this culture, awakened to the depth of the crisis that surrounds us. You know, there’s a lot of self-congratulatory back-slapping going around these days over the fact that communists everywhere are in hot water and have to admit that they did it wrong. This gives a lot of satisfaction to people who feel that that means we did it right. We didn’t do it right. They did it wrong and now admit they did it wrong. We do it wrong and have yet to even raise the possibility of turning away from what we are doing. The internal contradictions of Marxism were based on a false definition of what people are. People do not respond to central planning, hortatory propaganda and stereotyping. Neither do people respond to an ethos of self-denial or a view of human beings that denies the fact that we have certain itches which must be scratched. I think that the collapse of Marxism is only the collapse of the outer edge of the societal and civilizing assumptions that we have made. After all, Marxism is nothing more that the millenarian retread of Christian millenarianism. So is modern science – yet, another secular retread of Christian millenarianism. So, our culture is at a terminal crisis – a bifurcation that can only go one of two ways: horror beyond your wildest imagination or breakthrough to dignity, decency, community and caring beyond your wildest imagination. Now, where do you look for models? Where do you go? The answer is so obvious. You go to nature. Nature has been playing this game for three billion years on this planet. We have been playing the

game, we the apostles of Christian Scientism, for about 2,000 years. Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style that, if we could but emulate it, we could rise out of the rubble that we are making of the planet. It was the geographer Carl Sauer who said, “Man found the planet a climaxed primeval forest. He (and notice the gender here) will leave the planet a weedy lot.” This is a metaphor where you change climaxed rainforest for weeds – but it’s also true. By clearing land we promote the kind of plant evolution that stresses very rapid seed production and annular cycles of growth, in other words: weeds. This tendency to find perfection and then to leave rubble in our wake has haunted us for the past three or four thousand years of our history. Now, with the ozone shield disappearing, with acid rain falling on the earth that can melt blocks of marble, with the CO2 levels rising, with the levels of strontium and chlorofluorocarbons... you know the litany. We have now one last chance to fish or cut bait, and the place where nature has provided the models for how to respond to this situation is the climaxed rainforest. Only the climaxed tropical rainforest had the kind of complexity of signal transfer, movement of nutritional materials, movement of electromagnetic radiation that we find in the modern city. It is a cliché of modernity that the city is a jungle – the problem is it isn’t jungle enough. I think it’s the task of the new shamans to take the metaphor of the jungle – which is a metaphor of tremendous wealth, tremendous variety, a tremendous outpouring of form and of energy and of potential fulfillment of various bifurcation patterns of flow, to take that and enrich our own lives with it. The way this is done is by empowering the presence of experience. The main thing that you get with these so called primitive pre-literate people, and with people like Nicole who have spent time in this situation, is they are in the moment. They know how to have fun. They know how to work. They know how to live. And, the reason they understand this is because they are focused within the confines of the felt presence of experience. They do not live by abstraction. Abstraction is the knife poised at our hearts. We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat. That’s the level of disimpassioning that abstraction has laid upon us. Well, hopefully this weekend there will be passion, there will be an effort, wherever there is abstraction, to drag it down into the felt presence of the moment. I think basically we are a kind of green anarchy; an effort to revivify social forms that have been atrophied in the West at least since the destruction of Eleusis, probably in most places thousands of years before that. This is our last chance. I have done the best I could in terms of trying to sift through all these options and, as a communicator, offer the best way out. I could only do my best, and so that’s what you get. I can’t preach Scientism because I don’t believe in it. I can’t preach Buddhism because I can’t understand it. The only thing I can preach is the felt presence of immediate experience which for me came through the psychedelics – which are not drugs but plants; it’s a perversion of language to try and derail this thing into talk of drugs. There are spirits in the natural world that come to us in this way and, so far as I can tell, this is the only way that they come to us that is rapid enough for it to have an impact upon us as a global population. This weekend will be different because we will be hewing close to the source. Nicole is a priceless repository of information, more even than she knows. If I could declare her a national treasure, I would. Who knows what this woman knows? Who knows how much human suffering, the alleviation of how much anxiety, lies in the hands of perhaps half a dozen people of Nicole’s caliber, who have paid their dues in these jungles. This information is flowing through our fingers and disappearing. In another thirty years it will be all gone. Every time I go to the Amazon I can feel the way in which it’s slipping away. When my brother and I go off looking for these unusual hallucinogens, often we have the experience where, when we finally find the person who claims they know what we’re after, the line goes like this: “Well I’ve never taken it but as a child I remember seeing my grandfather prepare it and I think I can do it,” if it weren’t

for us standing there asking that it be done it would never have even risen into the gentleman’s mind as a possibility. This is the knife-edge upon which this knowledge is poised. If it can be saved, it gives me hope that we can be saved. If we can’t save this kind of knowledge, we cannot save ourselves because this kind of knowledge is ourselves. Culture is a garment which you put on, medical systems are pieces of jewelry which you wrap around your throat or neck, religious ideals are like objects which you push through pierced nostrils and earlobes. If we cannot come to terms with that which allows us to give birth with ease, to die with dignity and to live in health, then what kind of future do we have? No future at all. So, this is not a meeting of obscurantists or enthusiasts of some private vista of transcendence. This is a meeting of political activists, people who are socially committed to themselves, to each other, to the larger idea of community, and who understand that when you talk about Gaia, it's only an abstraction unless you talk about plants. The division between the masculine and the feminine is only trivially a difference between men and women, it is fundamentally a division between plants and animals. Plants are the enveloping feminine matrix of control and refurbishment. Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced. So, The Archaic Revival, if it means anything, it means reconnecting the Gaian mind which is a vegetable mind, a feminine, infolding, boundary-dissolving, planetary mind that is not an abstraction, not a stereotype, not something used to create hortatory propaganda, but a living breathing reality. A reality which is the only thing which stands between us and Armageddon. We will pursue this, in detail, over the next two days. Thank you very much.