Shamanic Wisdom

It all started with a trip to see a shaman. It’s not your typical Thursday-night outing, by any means. But given that I’m in Quito, and he was in town giving a presentation on his community and the uses of the hallucinogenic herbal drink ayahuasca, it seemed like a natural place to end up.

It started off innocently enough. I arrived at the colonial South American Explorers Clubhouse and perched on a sofa with other curious travellers, students and volunteers, eager to share in the wisdom of the Amazon Rainforest and its people. We looked around at each other, grinning in anticipation, and stroked the huge fluffy dogs adopted by the Clubhouse, who were always eager for attention from members, and liked to squeeze their huge, warm bodies onto the sofas between the people.

Juan the shaman, a stocky Indian with long, straight, black hair parted in the centre and pouring down his broad back, eyed us all as he walked into the room. He played a video which showed Ecuadorian government representatives walking into his village by force, attempting to rob the indigenous community of their rich, treasured land which contains so much of that modern evil – oil.

Juan looked sadly on as he described the deaths of two community members at the hands of the military.

“They don’t protect their own people” he sighed. The jungle has no hospitals, no Pharmacies. It has its own, ancient resources for curing disease and ill-health, for protecting its wise inhabitants. The jungle can cure physical, mental and spiritual ailments. And the shaman is the key to these rituals.

On cue, grasped a glass bottle from the little coffee table, filled with a sludgy orange-brown liquid.

“Ayahuasca” he said, huskily.

We all stared, fascinated, at this legendary potion, made from Amazonian plants boiled for 50 hours. It is said to induce hallucinations; to take those who consume it on spiritual journeys; to transform them into animals and fish and birds; and, to those who understand the secrets of the spirits, to reveal “the answers”. Pre-ritual preparation involves several days of strict diets and, most importantly, a spiritual cleansing, to prepare the mind and soul to receive the visions. The hallucinations are internal, not external, said to reveal truths about one’s self, rather than to show them anything outside the body. Juan had once been transformed into a tiger, and he followed trails through the jungle until he found the spirits of the dead members of his community, with whom he was able to speak. That made him happy, he said.

Juan’s body language was curious, all soaring hand movements – up, out, away – which were utterly out of sync with his speech, like a badly dubbed film. He gazed at the ceiling, at his captive audience, into nothingness. He uttered words that didn’t belong in sentences, he started sentences he never finished. He repeated certain words over and over again “strength… strength… strength…”, cupping his hands together and clutching them as if he was holding on to this word, “fuerza.” Juan bragged that he had taken ayahuasca “like, 50,000 times.” We didn’t doubt it.

The curious onlookers were keen to ask questions.

“What other medicines can be found in the jungle?”

“How do you know if a child will grow up to become a shaman?”

“What does the cleansing ritual consist of?”

Juan’s answers became more and more obtuse, more disparate, a collection of words chosen at random from his forest vocabulary. The bolder participants repeated their questions, but the answers were not forthcoming. Maybe reading the shaman’s responses required the same teaching and preparation as understanding the answers offered by the ayahuasca. We naive Westerners clearly weren’t ready for this.

A volunteer eagerly offered to undergo a cleansing. It is a spiritual cleansing, we were reminded, it does not clean the body. The lights were flicked off, and we sat, seriously, our anticipation growing in the darkness. The volunteer sat in front of the shaman, who began to chant, wail, hum, possibly in the native language of Quechua. He bashed the volunteer on the head with a branch of dry leaves, and made strange sucking and spitting sounds. A puro – a small cigar – was lit, and Juan took deep drags. He blew the smoke around the volunteer’s head, and announced that the cleansing was finished. It was brief, and unsatisfying for those of us who wanted to see sparks and spirits and evidence of the supernatural at work. The volunteer appeared unmoved, except for his ruffled hair as a result of the swishing leaves.

We tried again with questions, but Juan took to the floor and his voice became aggressive. He raised his arms, he strutted into the centre of the room.

“I… I speak to the cascades,” he began, melodramatically, “I speak to the trees. You – can you speak to the trees? Can you speak to the condors? To the whales? To the rivers? To the rain?” We gawped.

“I can,” he affirmed proudly, and not because he had “been to Harvard.” Oh no. Not Juan.

“It is because I am an Indian!”

He proceeded to reel of a list of all the creatures, living and dead, of all the animate and inanimate objects, of the natural and supernatural beings that he could communicate with. He named the fauna and flora of the forests, of the oceans, of the Andes. We were wondering where this was leading, and if this guy, this shaman in jeans and a navy blue t-shirt was really for real.

“I speak to the tigers! I speak to the dolphins! I speak to the dead!” He was there, charged, hands raised, building up, building up, and then…

…

And then the dog fell off the sofa. Loudly. Clumsily. With a huge thud and a scraping of claws on the polished wooden floor, as he scrambled and struggled to crawl out from under the table where he had inelegantly rolled. Muffled spluttering around the room transformed into snorting, guffawing, unstoppable laughter. The shaman paused, unable to continue his monologue amongst his no-longer-captive audience’s hysterical giggles, but unwilling to break his own face into a smile. He was stumped.

From the raucous laughter a voice emerged, sniffling to get the words out: “Can you speak to the dog?” Mass choking ensued, tears were wiped from eyes, and we tried to pull the edges of our mouths downwards and focus once more on the flowing-haired Indian in the centre of the room.

The humiliated dog slunk away, and the shaman contented himself by sucking on his puro. The presentation was over, we had all learnt something, though whether it was through what Juan had said or what he hadn’t said was unclear. We had learnt that whatever our backgrounds, our nationalities, out mother tongue; for those willing to let go, laughter is universal. We had learnt something about the massive gap in human understanding, about our own incomprehension of certain ways of life: we, travellers, who thought we knew the world. And we had also learnt that translation is more than translating words; it means translating beliefs, environments, history and knowledge. And there are some things that we realised we will never be able to explain to others, because no matter what language we use, they do not know how to form sentences from our words.