The Herborists of the Forest
The Shipibo women of the Peruvian rainforest have, over centuries, accumulated vast knowledge about the therapeutic powers of plants. From childhood, they learn to identify, cultivate, and use hundreds of plants: anti-inflammatories, painkillers, fever reducers, relaxants, stimulants, and many more — inspiring chemical-pharmaceutical laboratories. A cruel paradox: now the pill replaces the plant.
Norma Vega applies the sap of a palm tree with anti-inflammatory properties to her daughter Yolanda after she suffered an accident.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 147 of Cáñamo, March 2010.
Ida Ramos' nine brothers died before reaching their first year of life, struck by diarrhea and fevers. One after another, they passed away, and only she and her younger sister survived. "My mother used to say," Ida recalls, "that she had a first husband whom she left to be with my father, but the first husband, who was a sorcerer, sent a curse on all the male children out of revenge. That's why they died." Ida's childhood was marked by experiences of illness and death. For many years, her mother suffered from a disease that neither the Shipibo nor mestizo healers could cure. When she turned fifteen, she had her first daughter, who died at three months old from fever and diarrhea. It was then that she decided to learn the healing secrets of plants. "To cure sick children, to heal them when they had diarrhea and vomiting. That’s why I wanted to learn."
The Shipibo, ancestral inhabitants of the Ucayali River banks, are globally renowned for being powerful ayahuasca healers; this fame attracts thousands of people from around the world to the Peruvian jungle every year. But very little is known about the "raomis", a Shipibo term that could be translated into Spanish as "apothecaries" or "herborists". They are usually older women who do not operate in the spiritual realm like shamans but in the material world: while ayahuasca healers cure through songs after connecting with their spiritual allies, the apothecaries prepare their remedies from biologically active plants.
It is estimated that there are around twenty thousand different species of angiosperm plants (flowering and seed-bearing) in the Peruvian jungle, hundreds of which are used by the Shipibo as medicine. How did the ancestors of today's Amazonian peoples discover which of these plants had biological activity? How did they determine whether to use the grated bark, the cooked root, the leaf as a poultice, or the sap as an infusion? How did they find the right combinations to make the remedy effective? This is one of the most fascinating debates in contemporary ethnobotany. French researcher Jacques Tournon (to whom this article owes much) believes this sophisticated knowledge comes from an empirical process based on trial and error with each plant, testing its biological activity or inactivity. Yet, finding the right remedy for fever among twenty thousand plants—and identifying the correct part to use (the leaf as an infusion or the grated bark)—seems like an impossible mission. Meanwhile, the indigenous people insist their knowledge comes from communication with the spirit world.
Ida Ramos poses next to the bottles where she stores several of her plant-based remedies
ida's diet
When Ida decided to learn how to heal, after the death of her baby, she had to undergo what the Shipibo call “the diet”—a process during which she followed a strict dietary regimen, abstained from sexual relations, and remained relatively isolated, avoiding strenuous work. During that time, she developed a close relationship with a master plant (smoked, taken as an infusion, or used in baths), which, by the end of the diet, became an ally to the then-young herbalist. “When I treat a patient, I smoke my tobacco and I get dizzy. Then the allied spirits come and tell me what the illness is and what remedy to give the patient.” And there lies the second theory: knowledge of plant properties would have been transmitted by the plants themselves, through communication with people in the spiritual realm. Master plants communicate with shamans and herbalists, revealing which plants serve which purposes.
As she completed successive periods of dieting, Ida gained more allies and more power. At the same time, she learned from her elders how to identify, cultivate, cook, prepare, and dose countless remedies. Ida knows preparations for problems as varied as fever, intestinal parasites, diarrhea, hair loss, or menstrual pain. In her apothecary, there are abortifacients, stimulants, painkillers, aphrodisiacs, relaxants, anti-inflammatories... Most of the remedies are made from plants growing in the garden of her modest house on the outskirts of the native community of San Francisco de Yarinacocha, where Ida receives visits from Indigenous people, mestizos, and foreigners who come seeking a specific cure. On a table, she displays several large bottles filled with dark liquids and pieces of bark, stems, and leaves in maceration… She points to one of the bottles: “When you don't want more children, you moisten some cotton and put it in your vagina. It has six plants. No more eggs. Insert in the vagina for twenty days, every night. Diet for a month: no salt or lard.” According to Ida, this remedy not only sterilizes but also stops menstruation. She herself, after the birth of her second son at age 19, decided to take the remedy and verified its effectiveness. Another of the bottles contains a remedy useful against rheumatism, “when your knee hurts at night,” she explains. “Noni is for bladder pain, and chuchuwasi, when the man no longer...” —that is, to lift the spirits.
Some believe that the effectiveness of these remedies originates in the power of autosuggestion, in the effectiveness of the symbolic, discrediting the supposed biological activity of the remedies. But analyses conducted by Tournon demonstrated the effectiveness of six antibacterial and ten anti-inflammatory remedies and confirmed a close correlation between what the herbalists say and what is proven in the lab. It is not just a placebo effect.
During my stay in San Francisco de Yarinacocha, I had the chance to experience firsthand a healing by the hands of Ida Ramos. One morning, I woke up with an indescribable pain in my abdomen: a kidney stone. Armed with her tobacco pipe, Doctor Ida came to visit me. She smoked until she reached a trance-like state and began to feel my abdomen with her hands. She placed her mouth over the painful area and sucked. Then she passed two small branches over my back and abdomen, one of pión colorado and the other of nettle, which caused a slight itching sensation. At the end of this therapy, she gave me a remedy: a bright red liquid, acidic and slightly bitter in taste, made with the juice of pión colorado, lemon, and salt. “It’s for the pain.” Strangely and remarkably, the terrible pain disappeared.
Norma Vega walks through the jungle in search of a medicinal plant.
piripiri
Of all the plants commonly used by these specialists, the most important are the piripiris, which are used to treat a wide range of ailments: headaches, fevers, cuts, diarrhea, birth control, or postpartum hemorrhages, among many others. But piripiris possess a particularly remarkable feature: in fact, the plant family to which they belong is not classified as medicinal, so researchers in recent decades have wondered why they are so prominent compared to other types of plants. The reason lies in the fact that the cultivated varieties host a fungus that produces ergot, the alkaloid so thoroughly studied by Albert Hofmann in rye ergot, and which has a molecular structure similar to LSD.
Thus, it's not surprising what researcher Glenn Shepard reported after working with the Machiguenga in Peru: “When I learned that piripiris were used for such a wide variety of illnesses and conditions, I dismissed it as superstition. However, everything they told me always proved to be true. For example, I tried one of the varieties to relieve a headache. It worked, but even more surprisingly, it gave me an extraordinary—though temporary—ability for juggling.” This psychotropic dimension helps to better understand the great diversity of uses that Shipibo women attribute to piripiris. “When I was a child, before I started embroidering my skirt, my mother would have me wash my hands and eyes with piripiri,” says Ida, and thus she would produce those complex, intricate, beautifully kaleidoscopic designs. Beyond treating illnesses, among the piripiris there is a group of varieties categorized as "etothropic", meaning they modify behavior. Thus, there are well-known and commonly used piripiris for hunting, fishing, calming people’s promiscuity, falling in love, soothing emotions, or designing.
It should be noted that only the cultivated piripiris contain the fungus (and therefore the alkaloid), and since the plant reproduces vegetatively (a piece of another plant is planted), the new individuals always inherit the fungus. This may explain the fact that although botanical analyses recognize only three varieties, the cultivators can distinguish up to fifty types, morphologically identical but with different properties. This might be due to different strains or concentrations of the fungus (and therefore the alkaloid) in the plant, whose properties are known only to the cultivator, who in turn inherited the different varieties (and the knowledge of their properties) from people of previous generations or through exchanges with other cultivators.
Norma Vega applies an antipyretic to her granddaughter.
BUT THE PILL...
This vast and sophisticated knowledge (which today the pharmaceutical chemical industry tries to imitate with its smart drugs) is in danger of extinction, just like the rainforest and the cultures that inhabit it. Beginning in the 1950s, shortly after the arrival of the highway, primary education in the jungle fell into the hands of evangelical missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), a controversial U.S.-based organization whose stated purpose was the study of indigenous languages but which effectively became the gateway for a new worldview: that of the developed, civilized, industrial, Christian, democratic world. Through an agreement with the Peruvian government, they created and organized schools and their curricula, effectively holding the key to shaping new minds. And that is what they did. Knowledge of medicinal plants was considered superstitious—if not outright demonic, as in the case of ayahuasca. Moreover, SIL missionaries undertook the task of training health promoters among the Shipibo, setting up health posts in communities, and supplying industrial medicines to treat illnesses and ailments that could have been cured with plants.
However, in the early 1980s, as the Shipibo people became more politically aware, a process of recovering ancestral practices began, which had been pushed aside by the glitter of the pharmaceutical industry: pills in their packaging, syringes, white coats, and the privileges granted to health promoters. With the help of international cooperation, the AMETRA project (Association of Traditional Doctors) was launched—a program coordinated by the sabedor Guillermo Arévalo, aiming to revitalize the discredited traditional practices.
Norma Vega, an active 60-year-old woman, was one of the hundreds who attended the annual workshops organized by AMETRA in each area of Shipibo territory. In the workshops, the grandmothers’ knowledge was passed down, but wisely, Western medicine was not excluded. “First the plant remedy, and if that doesn’t work, then the pill,” Norma recalls being told. And this is what is now seen in the small community of Vencedor, where Norma lives. When children have a fever or diarrhea, or if there is a bump or swelling, they turn to Norma, who comes with her preparation. Many say that Norma has saved their lives, but despite this recognition, it’s clear that pills are preferred over plants, and it is probably more a matter of lacking money that leads people to opt for plant remedies—especially among the younger generations. Very telling is what happened to Norma when she was away from her community for a few weeks. Her daughter, in a burst of domestic industriousness, decided to clean the garden and destroyed dozens of medicinal plants her mother had cultivated over the years—mistaking them for weeds.
