Learning to Be People
Miguel Cárdenas cured his epilepsy with ayahuasca. He paddled down the Putumayo River. He was a disciple of great indigenous shamans; today he is a generous master. He lives deep in the jungle, outside the “system.” And he challenges: “City people aren’t really human—they’re multiplied parasites eating away at the Earth, destined to disappear.”
Miguel Cárdenas harvests, one by one, seven hundred chacruna leaves that he will use in the preparation of yagé.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 167 of Cáñamo magazine, November 2011.
Parsimoniously, he approaches the tree up which one of his yagé (ayahuasca) vines climbs. He stops at a meter's distance, with a large lit cigar between his fingers. He surveys with enraptured gaze the capricious contortions of the vines, to which he blows tobacco smoke with reverence. "It's to cure the yagé; tobacco is very important." Miguel Cárdenas is going to harvest this vine for the first time, which he planted six years ago. The occasion is special: he has just returned to his idyllic home on the Calderón River after a long and forced stay in the city of Leticia; in several months he has not released the ballast of ordinary consciousness. "That state that yagé produces is better than the normal state of consciousness: it's the true state. Through this tool is how I acquired knowledge of life. The ancient inhabitants of the jungle achieved humanity thanks to these magical plants, which taught them to be people."
Although mestizo blood from this Colombia in perpetual conflict flows through his veins, although he was born in the Andean highlands in the bosom of a conventional middle-class family, Miguel Cárdenas, about to turn sixty, is already one more inhabitant of this Amazon jungle. Marked cheekbones, forehead furrowed with wrinkles, long hair in a ponytail for work. Thin: the muscles of his body are reduced to what's necessary, slender but powerful enough to climb by hand up the ayahuasca vine, to cut the selected vines at several meters' height. Then, when he comes down, he segments them into smaller pieces, puts them in a sack and takes them to his "workshop."
As a sign of respect, Miguel Cárdenas blows tobacco smoke over one of his yagé plants.
the taitas of the PUTUMAYO
It was a long journey (interior and exterior) that led him to settle in the jungle and learn from its magical plants. I like Miguel in his role as narrator, grave and measured voice: he lacks the anxiety of those who fear boring others or of those who need to be heard. In his youth he discovered marijuana and mushrooms. Sacred plants, nature and the relationship that indigenous cultures established with them were always motivations in the trips he undertook through Colombian geography. He felt special curiosity about the yagé of the great taitas, maestros, of the Putumayo River; he intuited that there they could cure the epileptic attacks that regularly afflicted him.
At the end of 1990 the Putumayo was a hotbed of drug traffickers, hitmen, soldiers and guerrillas, but together with his partner Valeria, he arrived at the village of Taita Pacho, a yagé practitioner of the Siona ethnic group of notable reputation. Taita Pacho received them affectionately. "I told him I suffered from epilepsy, that I had attacks, one each month. He told me: Ah, well, calm down, here we're going to see these nights." And after taking it three times: "Do you know Miguel? You don't have anything." Miguel replied: "Yes grandfather. I have very ugly attacks; once I fell down a second floor staircase and broke my head." The old man dismissed it: "No Miguel; just taking the plant, you are cured." So it was: he never again suffered any epileptic attack, to this date.
Miguel, his partner Valeria and her children, spent six months with Taita Pacho. They took yagé every Saturday and some Wednesdays. There he completed his first dietas (deprivation of most foods and sexual relations), and learned the Siona rituals: "The yagé they prepare is potent. They gave us a small portion but it was repeated three times in the night. From the second it became much more potent. And with the third it was prolonged more. The session was long. It started at seven at night until four in the morning. The participants were from the region, mostly Sionas and some mestizos. The only visits from outside people were anthropologists and us. There were no tourists. They didn't charge anything." And the unforgettable figure of taita Pacho, "one of the last great shamans" of the Putumayo: "He worked sitting in the hammock, next to the table; from there he cleansed. It was incredible to see how things came out of people."
Pounding the yagé vines in Miguel’s working place on the Calderón River.
It was with taita Pacho that Miguel acquired the respect with which he prepares his yagé today. He carefully harvests seven hundred leaves (there are a dozen shrubs around the house) and takes them to the "workshop," a small clearing in the forest, beside a little stream from which he gets water. "It's a beautiful place to work," he exclaims. He spreads a sack on the ground, where he leaves the vines, which he then hammers against a hardwood anvil, conscientiously separating the fibers. Then he fills separate pots with both ingredients. "I used to give greater importance to the chacruna than to the yagé, but I've understood through experience that what's truly important is the vine, because it was when I cooked the thicker vines that the visions became more potent," he explains.
From the small stream he collects water and pours it into the pots that he takes to the nearby kitchen. Rain gently strikes the kitchen roof; Miguel smokes a joint; night falls; the darkness is softened by the orange light of the fire and the beam from Miguel's flashlight, wedged between his chin and neck to illuminate the surface of the overflowing pots. With two long sticks, Miguel crushes the plant matter; this way he prevents it from overflowing. He moves around the fire with the solemnity of a magician, moving carefully, as if he feared awakening some irascible genie. "Until I didn't harvest my own plants, I never cooked my yagé," he confesses. "Of course I had helped cook for the masters I learned from, but that was their yagé."
That is undoubtedly an essential difference in these times of intermediaries, when everything is bought and sold, where the ayahuasca practitioners who spring up in urban environments to serve tourist demand cannot cook the medicine from their own plants and are forced to buy from third parties. These times of business. For Miguel, ayahuasca tourism and the consequent increase of shamans, with money involved, constitutes "a profanation." On whether this boom can contribute to reviving shamanic traditions, he is even more forceful: "Money can never recover any culture. In Iquitos false shamans proliferate only for tourism; that's not cultural recovery, that's economic interest." He doesn't lament it: "Life is dynamic. The process has to continue and the capitalist system will finish harvesting its bonanza of perishable products. Let them finish harvesting. It's better that they enjoy it because it will end soon. True, archaic shamanism hasn't lost anything. Those shamans transcended, conquered that other world."
Producing one's own yagé (like producing one's own food) by rejecting intermediaries is an act of rebellion and freedom that Miguel tries to reproduce every day. That's why he lives as removed as he can from the market economy: in the company of his wife, Adriana, and his son, a prodigal nature allows him to live as he learned alongside the Secoya, another indigenous group from the Putumayo River where he spent two years after saying goodbye to Taita Pacho. Being self-sufficient; being independent; not being within a "system" controlled by "rats" and "mafias"; building a world tailored to the individual...
Perhaps that was the objective with which he undertook an epic journey: in mid-1993, after saying goodbye to his Secoya friends, together with his partner Valeria, he descended fifteen hundred kilometers of the Putumayo River in a small canoe, to its mouth at the Amazon, with the energy of his arms, the food they fished and harvested, the breath of finding themselves.
The cooking lasts three hours. "Until the water reduces by half." Then he pours the water from each pot into a third and places the liquid back on the fire to continue reducing. It's already late; he leaves the yagé on the fire and goes to sleep.
In the pot, layers of yagé and chacruna are arranged alternately.
death and healing
In September 1993, forever marked by the journey, Miguel and Valeria arrived at the small city of Leticia. It didn't take them long to find the most prestigious shaman of the region, don Miguel Shuña, of the Cocama ethnicity, a powerfully ayahuasquero people. With the octogenarian Shuña, Miguel dieted and took [ayahuasca] for the space of two years. Then, under the tutelage of master Vides, a Peruvian mestizo settled in the Brazilian city of Tabatinga, he learned for another two. While he continued his formation, destiny gradually distanced him from worldly noise, bringing him closer to a house on the inaccessible Calderón River: ayahuasca and chacruna that keep growing, solitude, the "plant spirit" that becomes a form of meditation.
Because for Miguel Cárdenas yagé is above all a tool of comprehension. "Life is a dream; death is the awakening. Yagé is a preparation for this journey to the beyond. People remain in ignorance: they don't know why they were born and they don't know why they die. In contrast, the taitas were penetrated with that world, before dying they had already died many times, yagé was a means for transcendence." And healing: "Yagé is a psychophysical purge. In the body one stores much dirt, from Western diets and industrial food; and the mind is full of contamination from social conditioning: neuroses, repressions of all kinds... People store it, conserve it and care for it... And it turns out that yagé draws everything out." But he warns: "Yagé is strong, yagé is not easy. That's why the taitas had all that ritual, all that work they do of cleaning the environment, people's aura, blowing tobacco on them, singing."
This is also what Miguel does the night he offers me his yagé: shortly after taking a good dose he gets up and gently shakes my body with a chacapa fan, a plant that "protects, cleans the body and mind, keeps away all types of curses, and attracts benign influences." Then each one retires to his hammock. The candle is extinguished. The jungle envelops us with a symphony of sounds. A few minutes later, the songs begin, which won't cease until some hours later; and with the songs, a world of healing images. "The song directs the exploration of the interior jungle; one has to open a path and the chants are the guide," Miguel explains while smoking a marijuana pipe, the next day, with a clean body and fresh mind animated by cannabis. Miguel compares the songs to "mantras" that summon a world of indescribable images and stop the normal flow of thought. "If it weren't, a journey this complex would be a disaster, with the mind and its words. Because one doesn't even rest from that monologue while sleeping. Many words is incomprehension, too much waste of energy. One is badly accustomed by the Western rational wave, which is pure word, but in the long run it's a hindrance. Yagé is the complete opposite: it teaches with images, which are more codified; with a single image you can describe many more things. Vision purifies."
It's my last night in the company of Miguel, Adriana and their little one; the moment arrives to leave this small eden forged with acts of daily life, modest and therefore ambitious. I take with me this report and the sensation of having known an exceptional person: much more than shaman, painter or explorer, Miguel Cárdenas is a Man who with his yagé finds and constructs himself, vindicates his singular humanity, confronting a society where people are only despicable numbers, slaves of unreason. There is still freedom in the magical nights of the Calderón River.
