Prohibición de realizar ensayos nucleares

Among the vegetalistas of the Peruvian Amazon there are ideas similar to those of the various ethnic groups concerning

ayahuasca and other plants. They say that ayahuasca is a doc- tor. It possesses a strong spirit and it is considered an in-

telligent beings with which it is possible to establish rap- port, and from which it is possible to acquire knowledge and power if the diet and other prescriptions are carefully fol- lowed. Ayahuasca belongs to the class of plants with madres

(mothers), a term also found among the Shipibo (1964:82), the Lamista (Barbira-Scazocchio 1979), the Campa (Chevalier 1982: -

346), the Yagua (Chaumeil 1983:74-90), etc. Chaumeil (1983:33), for example, writes that Alberto Prohano, a Yagua shaman living by the Marichin river, told him that the spirits of the plants are the only teachers ("l'unique chemin de la connaissance").

Among ethnic groups plants possessing special properties, such as narcotic, poisonous (for killing fish or for the use as arrow poison), medicinal plants, or very important food, are particularly endowed with spirits. I tried to find the criteria among the vegetalistas to determine which plants were consi- dered as doctores.

I found that in the vegetalistas' reports plants they call doctores or "vegetales que enseñan" (plants that teach) either 1) produce hallucinations if taken alone, 2) in some way modify the effects of the ayahuasca brew, 3) produce dizziness, 4) possess strong emetic and/or cathartic properties, or 5) bring on especially vivid dreams.

Quite often a plant has all these characteristics or some of them. I was somehow perplexed about how to find the right way of questioning my informants about the plant teachers. If I use, for instance, the Spanish verb marear (to make you dizzy), for example: Don Celso, marea esta planta? (Don Celso, does this plant -when taking it- make you dizzy?) The answer could be: "Yes, it is a good medicine", or "Yes, in your dreams the spirit of the plants presents itself to you", or "Yes, it makes you throw up everything", or "Yes, it teaches you", or "Yes, it makes you see beautiful things", or finally "Yes, if you com- bine it with ayahuasca". Similar answers were given to me when I put the questions differently, like, Don Emilio, es esta

planta doctor? (Is this a plant teacher?) or Don Alejandro,

tiene madre esta planta? (Does this plant have a "mother"?). This set of associations is interesting indeed. As we saw earlier (3.4.), the association of psychoactive plants with emetics and vermifuges has been pointed out by Rodriguez and Cavin (1982). The association between dreams and hallucinations is a common theme in shamanic literature. As far as I under- stand, all psychoactive plants are considered potential tea- chers. I once asked Don Emilio if he had ever taken the mush- room Psilocybe cubensis, which is common throughout the region on cow dung. He answered positively: Bonito se ve. Dietándole

debe enseñar medicina (You see beautiful things. If you follow

the diet it might teach you medicine). Similarly, Don Santiago wanted to know whether he could use the same mushroom in medi- cine. He told me that he intended to mix it with ayahuasca in order to study it.

The informants I worked with do not agree as to whether all plant teachers produce visions. According to Don Alejandro, all the plants that have "mothers" marean (make you dizzy). This implies that there are plants without "mother", with which Don Celso and Don Emilio do not agree. Don Celso says: "The mother of the plant is its existence, its life". Don Emilio affirms that all plants, even the smallest, have their "mother". Some of the plant teachers produce visions only when associated with

dizzyness), in which you do not see anything22. other plants teach only in dreams.

During the period of apprenticeship the vegetalista is con- fronted with the task of memorizing a large body of information concerning plants, animals, medicinal recipes, magic chants and melodies, etc. The vegetalistas attribute to ayahuasca and the plant-teachers not only their ability to recall such informa- tion, but insist that the plants themselves teach them about the flora -which, as it is well known, is particularly rich in the Amazon- and fauna. Also the magic chants, as we will see in chapter 5, are learned from the plants. Some of these chants are in Quechua, Cocama, Omagua or other Indian languages, and

they claim that ayahuasca teaches them the languages23.

The idea that ayahuasca has the effect of increasing the in- tellectual and artistic skills is quite common among vegetalis-

tas. When I questioned Pablo Amaringo, the painter, about how

he had learnt his art, he referred to ayahuasca. A similar answer I got from Agustín Rivas, a well known sculptor of Pu- callpa, who is also a practising vegetalista. During my visit to Colonia 5000, near Rio Branco, in the Brazilian state of Acre, they told me that some of the people there had been

22

According to Chiappe et al. (1985:72), the curanderos of Iqui- tos distinguish between plants that produce mareación (dizzi- ness) and visión (hallucinations). It is possible that some

vegetalistas make this distinction. In my experience, however, mareación includes both, dizziness, like that produced by drin-

king tobacco, and hallucinations, like those produced by aya-

huasca.

2 3_{In Lamb's account on Don Manuel Cordoba Ríos, Don Manuel tells}

how he had been given Nixi honi (ayahuasca) for the first time by the Indians that had captured him. He said:

"After spending the night in the forest sharing strange visions with my captors, it became noticebly easier for me to understand the meaning of their pre- viously unintelligible language. It was still many months before I learned to speak with any fluency, but I began to understand most of what was said to me after our first seance in the forest." (Lamb 1971:28-29).

On another occasion (p.32), Don Manuel says that the following chant was sung by the old man who prepared the brew:

Nixi honi, vision vine / boding spirit of the forest

origin of our understanding / give up your magic power / to our potion / illuminate our mind

bring us foresight / show us the designs / of our enemies / expand our knowledge / expand our under- standing / of our forest.

taught to play musical instruments by Santo Daime (ayahuasca). In Iquitos I met several practitioners who, during ayahuasca ceremonies, recite long prayers they know by heart. They also claim that it was due to ayahuasca that they were able to memo- rize whole books of prayers.

The knowledge the vegetalistas have of medicinal plants is also attributed to ayahuasca and the plant teachers. This is also in accord with the beliefs of some ethnic groups. Among the Campa, for example, "Healing practices require more than the absorption or application of a herbal remedy: the indivi- dual must also comply with a series of precisely defined pres- criptions and proscriptions. Herbal recipes do not suffice in bringing about improvements in health, and it is only in so far as they are part of a list of instructions revealed by the plant-mother that they have effects on the patient's condition. Medical information is not transmitted soley from parents to children, or from knowledgeable healers to less informed lay- men; it also originates from the mother of the plant, and is communicated through dreams and hallucinations produced by the absorption of the appropiate herbal potion. Patterns emerge within these varying directives and many recipes are commonly used, but this does not entail any rigid uniformity in the pre- paration or application of medicinal concoctions (Métraux

1967:83)." (Chevalier 1982:346).

Don Emilio pouring the finished ayahuasca brew into a bottle

Ayahuasca is a tool for studying the properties of other

plants. If a vegetalista wants, for instance, to see what ef- fects certain plant has, he will add a few leaves of this plant to the brew during its concoction. By perceiving the changes caused by the additive to the basic preparation, and especially by interpreting the information conveyed during the visions, the properties and application of the plants are studied. This information is also conveyed during the dreams during the fol-

lowing nights24.

In this way, they say, they have recognized the medicinal pro- perties of many plants. Knowledge of the great plant-teachers and of many medicinal plants comes, of course, from los anti-

guos (the ancestors). I have been surprised that among the me-

dicinal plants they use there are also plants introduced by the Europeans. There are, I suppose, only two explanations. Either knowledge of these plants derives from herbal knowledge that the Spaniards and Portuguese might have brought with them to the Amazon and other areas, or the vegetalistas found the medi- cinal properties of these plants by themselves, either by using a method like the one I just presented -if it works-, or through other kinds of experimentation. Nothing can be said, of course, until a comparative study of herbal knowledge of Old World plants introduced into America has been carried out on both sides of the Atlantic, and, especially, until we have some kind of understanding as to what these people are really talking about, when they say that the plants themselves reveal their properties.

2 4

A very good example of how ethnic groups learn about the pro- perties of an unknown plant with the help of ayahuasca is pro- vided by Bristol (1966) in a paper on the Sibundoy of Colom- bia. Bristol's conclusion is as follows:

"In this determination through Banisteriopsis intoxication of the medicinal uses of a previously unknown plant, we see a most interesting mechanism for the expansion of the Sibundoy materia

medica. Not only are new plant drugs thus introduced, but there

can be little certainty that the use of new drugs will be res- tricted to situations for which drugs are already available. Through chance, operating within the supertitious nature of Sibundoy beliefs, it is entirely possible that a new drug would become associated with disease symptoms previously untreatable. This role of narcosis expanding the native pharmacopoeia neither leads to the conclusion that most of the Sibundoy drugs were discovered in this way, nor does it suggest that any drugs so discovered are likely to have a less therapeutic value than drugs discovered in other ways by primitive peoples. Neverthe- less, it would seem that a substantial increase in the number of medicinal plants available to a culture implies at least a slight increase in that small number which are therapeutically effective. The use of Banisteriopsis by Sibundoy medicine-men, not only as an emetic and purge, but even more generally to investigate medicine and disease, may be seen as leading ulti- mately to an improvement of tribal health." (p.135-6).