SANTA CLARA, Peru — “Every time a shaman dies, it is as though a book is burned,” says Jose Roque mournfully as he hacks through a vine with a machete.
The 63-year-old indigenous Shipibo healer is showing me around an overgrown jungle garden behind the traditional thatched-roof hut he calls home here in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon.
Roque has long been cultivating plants on this dense patch of rain forest to treat a host of ills, including headaches, nausea, inflammation, skin rashes and menstrual pains.