The Shamans Who Are Coming
Heirs to millennia-old knowledge passed down through families, a new generation of young Shipibo ayahuasqueros emerges from the heart of South American shamanism’s mecca: San Francisco de Yarinacocha.
The shaman of Vencedor, Pedro Pérez, stores the ayahuasca after having cooked it under the watchful eye of Melissa, his young apprentice.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 145 of Cáñamo magazine, January 2010.
On the shores of Lake Yarinacocha, in the Peruvian rainforest, lies an Indigenous community that may be the most prominently marked on the maps of those traveling through South America. It is true that the lake is of great beauty, and that the women of the village craft beautiful handicrafts, but visitors come seeking, above all else, their extraordinary shamans.
Around two thousand people live in San Francisco de Yarinacocha, half an hour from the bustling city of Pucallpa. It is a Shipibo village, the only Amazonian group that has maintained a degree of territorial control over a vast Amazonian basin: that of the Ucayali River, the most important source of the Amazon and quite possibly the most privileged natural area of the entire basin. How did they manage to preserve their precious ancestral land? Perhaps through the power of the shamans, who are responsible for mediating between supernatural forces and everyday reality, between the spirits of the forest and domestic life, between their own people and the otherness embodied in an aggressive succession of missionaries, explorers, settlers, state authorities, anthropologists, corporations, and NGOs.
In a new setting where ancestral practices attempt to coexist—without too much trauma—with new technological, productive, and consumerist modes, shamanism has become a path for many young people to achieve a better future, prosper economically, and revalue their long-denigrated culture, while simultaneously opening up to the global world of “the gringos,” cyberspace, travel, money, and, ultimately, the multitude of possibilities.
Misael Vásquez pounds ayahuasca vine stalks to prepare the medicine.
The Ethnopsychologist’s Cumbia
“There are people who get into shamanism for money, but what I seek is to help others. To heal.” Since he was very young, Misael wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father, the plant doctor Herminio Vásquez. Encouraged by that intention, he began studying psychology far from home. His goal was to train both in the ayahuasca tradition of his culture and in Western techniques for diagnosing and treating mental problems. The experience was enriching, but Misael did not finish his studies; in San Francisco his father called him back to start Niwe Rao, a natural medicine center where sick people come from all over the planet to heal, and healthy people come to have an ayahuasca experience or, beyond that, to learn how to heal with plants.
I met 23-year-old Misael in the small town of Vencedor, a day by boat from the city of Pucallpa. He deliberately moved away from the semi-urban community of San Francisco seeking isolation and nature, an appropriate setting to undergo his first dieta under the guidance of three respected shamans of Vencedor: Justina Serrano, César Pérez, and Pedro Pérez. The dieta is an essential process to learn to heal: isolation, a strict dietary regimen, sexual abstinence, and daily contact with a master plant (whether through infusions, baths, or smoking it). After several months of dieta, the spirit of that plant appears to the dieter in dreams or in the dizziness from ayahuasca and grants its healing power, which is a song.
Misael never parts from his small pocket Bible. “There is great knowledge in the Bible,” he states. I am surprised how this mythology of violence, punishment, death, anger, censorship, and cruelty has taken root among the Shipibos: calm people, not prone to confrontation, where everyone lives their life more or less freely, with joy, without guilt. That Bible lies at his feet during the last ayahuasca ceremony we will share.
It is half-past seven in the evening at Pedro Pérez’s house. A small candle weakly lights those present. Several sick people are resting lying down beyond the circle formed by the three masters (Justina, César, and Pedro), Misael, César’s son, and me. Pedro softly blows a melody over the mouth of the ayahuasca bottle; he is icarando, conjuring his allied spirits to guarantee the success of the healing. Those present smoke. “Tobacco drives away evil spirits,” Misael explains to me as he finishes a cigarette. Then we take a dose of the brew. Misael immediately focuses, lowers his head, and closes his eyes.
Two hours later, already under the effects of ayahuasca, Misael gently calls me, asks me to sit up, and to sit facing him. He blows tobacco smoke several times on my crown. Then he hands me a cigarette, I smoke and blow the smoke to him. Misael asks me: “How is your mareación (dizziness)?” But my mareación is not good: I wander, feel nauseous, and can’t concentrate. I answer him: “Strong. But I think I shouldn’t have taken it today. I’m very distracted.” Misael nods, as if he already knew. He warns me of the importance of having “one single thought, not many,” and repeats that maxim as if it were the first law of mareación: “You must concentrate.” He says the plant is not human and therefore acts according to other parameters. “The plant rejoices when our actions are good and punishes us when they are bad.” He tells me what is happening to me has happened to him “many times.” It is the last time we talk. The next day Misael will start a six-month dieta. It will be his first step on the long path that leads to this healing knowledge.
Roldán Muñoz, Rawa, painting in the garden of his house. In the background, his companion Netentsoma.
inner landscapeS
The Shipibo name of Roldán Muñoz is Rawa: The man who embraces the world. It was given to him by his paternal grandfather, Martín Muñoz, a distinguished and elderly shaman who has traveled to different countries from San Francisco de Yarinacocha on the wings of his knowledge. His father, also a shaman, Antonio Muñoz, is likewise an ayahuasquero, a frequent collaborator with urban psychotherapists. Continuing this family tradition, Roldán, at 20 years old, represents the future and embodies the rapid transition from a culture based on forest exploitation to the globalized urban world. Rawa captures the ineffable visions of ayahuasca on canvases—formats foreign to his cultural tradition. He began painting landscapes at eight years old. “I had no teacher nor went to school. I am self-taught.” But at eleven, he felt the call of “the plant.” He recalls the first time he took it: “The dizziness hit me hard. I wanted to scream. The plant told me: Don’t scream. We are going to open something for you. Experience it. I used to paint landscapes but the next day, when I wanted to paint, my body itself told me: Don’t paint landscapes anymore. Look for something else. The next night I took ayahuasca again, and I saw myself painting, but I wasn’t painting landscapes anymore, I was painting pictures of my visions.” Since then, Roldán follows in the footsteps of other great ayahuasca painters like Pablo Amaringo. Rawa sells his paintings to visitors hosted by his father at their home in San Francisco and exhibits periodically in Lima or Cusco.
Art and medicine compose the leitmotif of the ESAASHI association, School of Ayahuasca and Shipibo Art, founded by Roldán himself, aiming to introduce young people from his community to pictorial art. They also try to advise ayahuasqueros from other Shipibo communities far from the city, which are only now beginning to receive visitors, hoping for the economic income this implies. Roldán explains that in these villages “they know the plant but are afraid to give it to foreigners.” So, he holds workshops teaching them how to explain in Spanish what ayahuasca means, its composition, and how to treat outsiders.
Roldán is also politically active. His interest in the affairs of his community, which most young people of his generation neglect, earned him the position of vice president of an indigenous youth organization of the Ucayali Region. But politics is absorbing, and so is the plant, so he had to choose. “A lot of politics bores me,” he confesses. “Better the plant.” And he decided to diet again, this time with aipana, a powerful master plant. “You take this plant in the afternoon, get up at midnight, and think you are not dizzy, but you are. You have visions of little elves. Aipana can also save you when you’re very high in the mareación of ayahuasca. The aipanas climb in your head and lower the strong mareación you have. You have to know how to control it because many things come. It’s not like dieting with other plants. Aipana is different, it’s much stronger. That’s why the master tells you: If you’re going to diet aipana, you’re playing with death.” He assures that now he knows how to heal “a little bit” and trusts that within a year he can be called a maestro.
Walter, second from the right, supporting a ceremony officiated by his older brother Roger, on the left.
the one who shows the light
Although he is already a maestro, Walter López does not like to be called that. “I consider myself a guide, someone who tries to show people their light, so they can know themselves and learn to love and respect themselves.” Just turned thirty, he says that in recent months a milestone occurred in his shamanic “career”: he felt it was time to separate from his maestro and follow his own path. Although he can already heal, Walter continues to diet periodically. He assures that his next dieta will be to “aromatize the environment.” “Aromatizing means filling with peace, tranquility, well-being… People approach you and you no longer need to be in an ayahuasca ceremony. Simply a pure and healthy conversation makes them feel well. I talk about that person’s world, a conversation lasting half an hour or an hour, and they feel almost hypnotized.”
Walter is used to working with foreigners, introducing them to the world of ayahuasca, explaining in accessible language the virtues of this medicine and how it works. For five years, Walter worked on natural resource protection and management projects with an NGO. The experience was doubly enriching. On the one hand, office work, report writing, organizational discipline, and bureaucratic demands made him aware of the lifestyle and ailments that afflict Western urbanites. “People who come from other countries have a different process than my fellow countrymen. They spend 24 hours on computers, phones, and other technologies doing their work; and that is destroying their minds. That’s why it’s necessary to focus on reviving certain neurons.”
His experience at the NGO also gave him the opportunity to visit small Shipibo villages far from the city; there he witnessed a sad reality. “Knowledge of the plants is declining among the Shipibos. Most people prefer to go to a hospital to get a pill and calm down rather than heal. So the shaman no longer worries because the population no longer has faith that they can heal through the plants.” In the Shipibo medical tradition, the sick must follow a strict dieta if they want to heal. “People no longer like to diet. A person who wants to heal has to rest, has to meditate. We doctors who learn this kind of knowledge diet because we are healing from some ailments. Once you have healed, you know how to heal the ailments of others.” The cause of this decline lies in the fierce campaign of satanization carried out in the last half-century by U.S. evangelical missionaries.
Paradoxically, also coming from abroad are the psychonauts, experimenters, travelers, curious people, or daring therapists whose support and interest have been fundamental to the emergence of a new golden age of Shipibo shamanism. To attend to these visitors, Walter has joined his older brother, the well-known shaman Roger López, to give new momentum to the latter’s natural medicine center: Suipino. Suipino is already a reference point and aims to develop further by completing its botanical garden, improving its lodgings and ceremonial houses, building isolated zones for dieters, carrying out reforestation projects, and offering initiation courses into the plants. Ultimately, an indigenous enterprise based on the commercialization of medicinal plants and the knowledge associated with them.
Difficult times run in the Peruvian Amazon. The self-sufficient life based on hunting, fishing, and horticulture has come to an end. The integration of the Shipibos into the market economy, into the Western culture born at school and fed by television, Hollywood cinema, and the internet, is a fact. Walter, Roldán, and Misael try to find their place in this threatening panorama, and they do so with knowledge that links them to a centuries-old tradition of medicine. It is, in a new version, the millenary mediation of the chamán with the threats and opportunities of alterity.
