What the Healer Heals
Juan Curico is a perfect example of "vegetalismo", a mestizo shamanic system described by anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna. Belonging to the Cocama people and born near Lagunas—the former capital of the Maynas missions—Curico lives and works in Iquitos, serving both his neighbors and the retreat centers specialized in offering ayahuasca.
Juan Curico and his young son at the door of their house (and clinic) in the Punchana district, Iquitos.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 201 of Cáñamo magazine, September 2014.
The afternoon falls over the popular district of Punchana, in Iquitos. Inside a humble house, the healer Juan Curico, in his hammock, lights his pipe, inhales until he obtains a thick smoke, and blows it over his wife and young son, lying beside him. Then he sits up and heals every corner of the room with the tobacco smoke. “You have to place the arcana in the house so that no evil enters. I always ask the divine creator to guide and protect us.”
He returns to the hammock with a tired gesture while explaining that he hasn’t been able to work at full capacity in recent weeks. “My head wasn’t well.” His ailment began with a nightmare: monstrous beasts beat him mercilessly. He woke up “half crazy.” In the mid-afternoon, he temporarily lost his sight, and reality became a nightmare: a tiger stood in the room ready to eat him, demons burst in intending to kill him. “I became somewhat aggressive. I saw my children and thought they were against me.” He spent a month convalescing, out of this world.
When he recovered, he took ayahuasca and discovered the origin of his illness. He saw the sick woman who had come to seek him with abdominal pain, whom he diagnosed with “daño” (harm), a type of illness caused by the bad practices of a sorcerer. He prescribed the woman an infusion of camalonga (a medicinal plant) conjured with an icaro, the magical healing chant. After hours, the woman expelled through her vagina a stingray fish, spiritually introduced by the sorcerer. “Sometimes they put a worm or a scorpion, and you feel it biting you, and it makes you hurt. The sting gives you pain; that animal is moving inside. These are amazing things, things that those who don’t know consider a fantasy; but witchcraft things are real.”
The following night, Juan and the woman took ayahuasca to identify the aggressive sorcerer. She remembered the theft of her canoe, and how they found the culprit, a young man whom she publicly slapped a couple of times. The young man swore revenge, told his father, who hired a sorcerer to kill her. Juan Curico intervened in time, knowing that by freeing the woman, the furious sorcerer would try to kill him. “For defending a person, I have suffered the blow. Many healers when they see damage don’t want to heal. ‘I can’t,’ they say. To avoid feeling bad themselves. But I did heal her, and we are both alive. The lady and I, thank God.”
At six in the evening, Juan Curico and his wife perform an unavoidable ritual, blowing tobacco to protect the house and family from spiritual attacks.
sorcerers and healers
For Amazonian healers, serious illnesses are rarely due to natural causes; like their remedies, they come from the spiritual world. God, together with the healers, heals; the Devil, with the sorcerers, causes illness. “The damage is the work of the sorcerer. The sorcerer is like a merchant: he sells his witchcraft. Someone comes: ‘I want to kill so-and-so. How much do you charge?’ The sorcerer doesn’t charge little, like a healer. ‘You give me three thousand soles.’ When he is paid, the sorcerer does the job: kills.”
Amazonian medicine is an incessant struggle between the spiritual forces of good and evil, between sorcerers and healers. However, the line separating one from the other is not easy to draw. If I ask Juan what master plants sorcerers use, he answers: “The catahua, the white and red lupuna, the spiny trees,” and immediately clarifies that these also serve for healing. The same happens with animal spirits: “The jaguar, the puma, the panther, the yakuruna,” he identifies as allies of the sorcerers. “But can they serve you for healing?” I ask. “Also,” he concedes. There is a certain ambiguity in the healers’ accounts: none admit to doing harm, but they do consider it legitimate to defend themselves aggressively against the sorcerer who sent the damage to the patient. “There are healers who know two things: they heal and kill. They learned part of the witchcraft: ‘My defenses,’ they said. To counter the evil, they had to learn more witchcraft to kill the other one. Bang! And they take down the sorcerer. That’s the end.”
And who are the sorcerers? Any other ayahuasca shaman, especially if they enjoy social recognition or economic power, is mistrusted. But there is one trait of witchcraft on which everyone agrees: “Learning witchcraft is not difficult. Killing is easy, right? Take the knife and stab that man. You kill him. Witchcraft is just the same. To be a sorcerer, a three-month diet. To be a healer, a three-year diet. That’s the difference.” That is why the sorcerer cannot do anything against "daño", nor against "susto" (fright, when a person suffers trauma that leaves them bedridden in apathy, in discouragement, and they wither), or against the "malaire" (literally bad air, when a spirit of negative energies approaches a person, causing vomiting and diarrhea that can lead to death).
Juan Curico talks with a neighbor in the living room of his humble home in Punchana, Iquitos.
DIETS
Juan Curico Macuyama was born in 1952 nearby Santiago de Lagunas, ancestral land of the Cocama people, and he is able to heal all these spiritual illnesses because, from the cradle, he was trained in medicine by his grandparents. “They wanted me to inherit their knowledge. They made me diet, starting with my mother’s breast.” When the baby nursed, the grandfather would lean over the mother’s breast and sing icaros. After weaning, his meals were selected with care, and already by the age of two or three, he was subjected to small diets: no sugar or salt, no fats or spicy food, no pork or catfish. Occasionally, the grandparents held a ceremony to spiritually prepare the child. This was only possible in the life of former times, when the grandfather’s word wasn’t buried under modern forms of indoctrination: school and television. Those were the times of abundant fish, of household units scattered across an unlimited territory, of itinerant traders who navigated the rivers of the Amazon exchanging salt, clothing, cartridges, or hooks for forest products. The child simply yielded to it.
At the age of twelve, Juan underwent his first prolonged diet. He was on the Oroza River accompanying his grandparents, who were engaged in the extraction of rosewood, a precious timber. The grandparents made him a small shelter in the forest, where Juan lived in isolation for a year, subsisting on one banana and one fish per day; salt was strictly forbidden. His master plant was ayahuma; his grandfather scraped a bit of the tree’s bark, mixed it with water, and gave it to the boy. Changes in perception came quickly. “You talk with all the plant spirits, just like we are talking now. They tell you what each medicine is for. They sing, and all the icaros they sing, you record in your mind. The master who guides your diet doesn’t teach you; it’s the plants themselves that teach you.” That diet was followed by another three-year diet, with huayra caspi, another master plant. “When you learn through the diets, you discover a lot of things you’ve never seen before. There are wonderful worlds in the secrets of the medicine. Villages with enchanted people. And when you reach that world, you don’t want to return because you feel your body and soul at peace.”
He was eighteen when he led his first ceremony as a healer, under his grandfather’s watchful eye. “The medicine concentrates in your body, and there are moments when a flood of knowledge comes to your mind. When a sick person arrives, you immediately see how to heal them, and you have to do it; it’s as if someone compels you to act. You blow tobacco in the ayahuasca ceremonies, and the ayahuma tells you what medicine to give the patient. And they heal quickly.” A few months later, both grandparents died, within a short span of time. “Immense sadness.”
Juan Curico, on All Saints’ Day, visiting the grave of his grandfather and teacher Jacinto Macuyama.
HUMblE PROFESsioN
“All of us go to the grave when the time comes; we remain here on earth.” Beside his grandfather’s grave, a violinist plays a mournful tune. It’s All Saints’ Day, and the cemetery in Punchana looks like a colorful, tropical celebration. Hundreds of people visit their dead. Street musicians offer plaintive tributes, young men rent out their arms and machetes for a few soles to clear the weeds around the graves—most of them unmarked, with little more than a wooden cross and a name clumsily written. Juan offers boiled eggs and flowers and lights several candles. “My teacher…,” he says, letting tears fall. “The sick would come to him and he would heal them… Damn.”
The cemetery sits on the edge of a lagoon, into which in recent years the city of Iquitos has expanded, with houses raised above the water’s surface. Humans shouldn’t be here, in the realm of caimans and boas, of the water beings—but dry land is scarce. People arrived in a disorganized and individual fashion at first; later, the authorities built long streets into the lagoon using rubble and sacks of soil, and provided electricity. Along those streets, houses cluster tightly together, excreting waste directly into the lagoon, which stagnates in a constant stench. But the place is lively and cheerful: noisy mototaxis come and go, neighbors share beers in cumbia-blaring dives, women play volleyball with a net stretched across the street, lifting it whenever a vehicle passes. And a little girl warns me that I’d better put my camera away—there are lots of thieves, she says, and someone might steal it.
Juan Curico’s house appears humble if you only look at the front room. The back—kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom—is miserable: the roof is almost non-existent, and the floorboards, rotted from constant water, could give way at any moment. Falling through them would mean landing in a lagoon of low water and high sewage, so one must carefully balance to relieve oneself on a toilet that flushes directly into the lagoon.
Juan’s home is also his clinic. Patients arrive at any hour for many different reasons. Most go to the hospital first but maintain strong faith in the curanderos—or at least in Juan Curico, a man of calm and kind demeanor, liked by many of his neighbors (and by me). A young couple, parents of a baby, bring their child because he’s “caught some air”; Juan blows tobacco smoke onto the baby’s crown. A heavyset man, visibly agitated, says his daughter broke out in hives, her eyes swelled up, and she had a fever. They took her to the doctor, who prescribed some medicine; she got better. A few days later, the hives and swelling returned. They had a blood test done; the doctor said everything was normal. “Don’t you think it’s a ‘daño’?” he finally asks. Juan answers without hesitation: “It’s not a daño, because if it were, the shot wouldn’t have helped the first time. Give her fresh mallow with salt of hay.” “So it’s not daño?” the man insists. “No. Fresh mallow, not too strong.”
Juan treats a wide variety of ailments and problems. The woman has come to him for help in finding a husband.
finding a husband
At night, a ceremony is held for a woman of about thirty-five, who has arrived on a motorcycle and who, judging by her clothes and hairstyle, belongs to an upper social class. When I ask her why she takes ayahuasca, she hesitates and replies, “to cleanse the body.” She asks if I like to go dancing, if I’ve gone out in Iquitos yet, if I would like to… (she seems to have a strictly personal interest in the matter).
Juan arranges the paraphernalia on the floor, lights his pipe, blows the smoke, and spreads it in all directions with the chacapa; then he blows on the ayahuasca, sings to it, and pours it into a small cup which he offers to me. Then he drinks himself. The woman will not drink, but Juan will work on her problem spiritually. When the candle is blown out, the orange light filtering through the cracks in the wooden wall becomes more pronounced, along with the noises from the street: music, mototaxis, frogs. Juan sings softly, in a barely audible voice. The environment does not favor concentration, my trance doesn’t open. The woman leaves after two hours, following a tobacco-blowing ritual by Juan on her crown, hands, chest, and back.
“The teacher is here because she can’t find a husband and wants a good marriage. In some cases people come because of family problems. The family must be normalized to prevent them from living in turmoil, and I work as an intermediary to help organize their thoughts according to their case.” Before retiring, Juan confesses that he did not sing louder because some neighbors accuse him of witchcraft. His work is as loved as it is condemned: for centuries Christian churches have cultivated the idea that healers are heralds of Satan. To prove his power to me, he invites me to travel with him to Mazán, a small town a few hours away where Juan has a property rich in medicinal plants and a maloca where he can sing freely.
According to Juan, nature holds the cure for all ailments, but overexploitation is causing many species to disappear.
POor PLANTS
The next morning, plans change: Juan finds out that Jungle Jeannie, an Australian healer he collaborates with, needs him to hold a ceremony for several foreigners. “Tourists come to heal with ayahuasca, because it has the property of cleansing bad vibrations from the body. Some come stressed or feeling unwell, they take ayahuasca, vomit, go to the bathroom, purge, and the next day they feel calm, the mind is clear and the body ready to work.”
Although he occasionally works in these establishments, Juan is very critical of the impact they’ve had on traditional healing: commercialization. “In the past, patients would come to the healer… ‘Let him go up.’ He wouldn’t ask for money first, he would heal. Once the patient was cured, they would ask: ‘How much do I owe you?’ ‘Well, I’ll charge you a chicken.’ It was like a gift from the patient to the healer. Not anymore. Today, Mister Money speaks.”
Mister Money and Mister Market—what dangers. Inflation: as ayahuasca becomes scarce, its price has multiplied, so the ceremonies are also more expensive. Professional imposters: “Many have become healers here in Iquitos just by listening and watching the sessions of other healers. That’s how they’ve learned to sing the icaros. They’ve never gone into the forest to do dieta, and unless you do dieta, your songs have no power, because the power comes from the dieta. There are tons of them at the airport with their little portfolios: ‘Shamanic services available.’ But when they have problems with the passengers, they don’t even know what to do, and some people die. A true healer, when he sees someone getting too deep into the trance, blows over them, sings an icaro, and fans them with the chacapa, and brings the drunkenness down.” The risk increases when, as some ayahuasqueros do, they add other master plants to the traditional brew of ayahuasca and chacruna—plants like the dangerous toé, to create a more intense experience. “Toé is toxic, poisonous. It’s not advisable. It gives you visions, but it’s very strong. Many of the old ones who worked with toé went blind. It burns your eyesight, and you go blind before your time, before you grow old.”
Jeannie is not at her house in Padrecocha, a community on the Nanay River about half an hour from Iquitos by boat. We continue by mototaxi to the Bora community of San Andrés, whose members have granted Jeannie land to establish her spiritual healing retreat. On both sides of the narrow road stretch sad, barren fields. Juan notes that there are four or five retreats in the area, and when he sees a “for sale” sign on a pasture, he jokes, “Here they’ll build the next one.” Jeannie’s maloca, still under construction, is empty, but we go for a walk in search of medicinal plants in the nearby forest, already depleted by insatiable demand and logging. We walk from plant to plant, from lament to lament at the scarcity of remedies, though we do find several species: chancapiedra, for kidney stones; red capirona, for ulcers; tangarana, which cures pellagra; sanga piri, used to attract women… “The difference between chemical and natural medicine is that if you have a headache and buy a pill, in fifteen minutes you’re pain-free: it soothes quickly but doesn’t cure you, the pain comes back. Natural medicine has the ability to heal slowly, gradually—it doesn’t cure instantly, but it cures well.” As we leave the forest and head back, we discover in a newly cleared clearing a large two-story house with spacious rooms. Two local men are guarding it. We ask who the owners are. “Some gringos,” they say. “They’re building a retreat for taking ayahuasca.”
