The Doctors of Vencedor
In the small indigenous village of Vencedor, deep in the Peruvian jungle, no one knows anything about the international financial crisis. The days pass peacefully amid a prodigious nature that still nourishes, shelters, and heals. Despite the inexorable advance of the market economy and its pharmaceutical products, the locals place blind trust in their healers, heirs to a sophisticated and ancestral knowledge, who use ayahuasca to ally with spiritual forces and heal.
César Pérez and Justina Serrano, two of Vencedor’s healers, together with their apprentices, before a ceremony.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 134 of Cáñamo magazine, February 2009.
Pedro Pérez is a small, wrinkled man of sixty years. He has just returned from the forest carrying a sack of ayahuasca. Sitting by the riverbank, he cuts the vine into twenty-centimeter pieces and with a hammer beats them against a log placed on the ground. The stems he crushes are smaller branches of a three-year-old plant, whose main trunk is ten centimeters in diameter. Pedro’s grandson, watching attentively, goes into the house and comes out with a bag containing chacruna leaves. “Here is its companion for the ayahuasca,” Pedro points out. “If you don’t add chacruna, it won’t cause effect.” Then he puts all the ingredients—the chacruna, the ayahuasca, and water—into a large pot over the fire. “It has to boil strongly.”
When only a small layer of thick liquid remains at the bottom of the pot, Pedro strains it and stores it in a plastic bottle. Less than a quarter of a liter remains, despite having used about twenty-five liters of water to cook three or four kilos of plant material. He sits with the bottle in hand, staring at it intently; meanwhile, he smokes a cigarette and softly blows a melody into the bottle’s opening. I ask him if the cooked ayahuasca can be preserved. “It doesn’t spoil or lose its effect, it can last for years.” Pedro Pérez has been drinking ayahuasca for almost half a century. “My father gave me the purge when I was fifteen, and since then I’ve been taking it.” But drinking ayahuasca is not the same as healing; healing is knowledge acquired through demanding apprenticeship. That is why he did not heal his first patient until he was 27 years old. Since then, he has healed both indigenous and mestizo people all along the Pisqui River, on whose banks lies Vencedor, the village where he lives.
Pedro Pérez standing by one of his ayahuasca vines.
plant masters
Dozens of ethnic groups in the Upper Amazon use ayahuasca for healing, although it is impossible to determine who and when made this astonishing discovery and how it spread throughout the region. But there are very beautiful stories, and Pedro knows one that explains how the Shipibos acquired this knowledge. “When ayahuasca didn’t exist, there was a great healer who had dieted with all the woods of the forest. That’s how he became very wise. One day, the healer went up to heaven and told the Lord Jesus Christ that he wanted to live up there, with Him. But the Lord did not allow it and sent him back to Earth. One day the man left his house and went into the forest, but did not return. His son went out to look for his father and found him at the foot of a tree with his arms raised in a cross, transforming into ayahuasca because that was what the Lord had willed. His hair was already ayahuasca, and from the tips of his fingers ayahuasca also grew. When a month later the son returned to visit his father, the great healer, he had completely turned into ayahuasca.”
The Shipibos have occupied the banks of the Ucayali River and several of its tributaries in the Peruvian jungle long before the arrival of the Spaniards. The Ucayali has been since precolonial times the most important communication route between the jungle and the Andes. It is a fertile territory, privileged by the rich sediments the river carries from the young mountain range. Chroniclers and travelers of past centuries admired the animal and plant wealth of the region, although today that exuberance hangs by a thread. In recent decades, the river has been colonized by tens of thousands of mestizos from other parts of Peru, while the Shipibo population has multiplied. The demographic pressure, fueled by the chimera of the market economy, the seductive power of money, and the fever of development, have led to deforestation and scarcity of hunting and fishing. A way of life without money, chiefs, schedules, or accumulation, with fertile nature, is disappearing; medicine and healers that have endured through the centuries despite various religious persecutions—first by Spanish Catholics and, since the 20th century, by American evangelicals—are endangered. But this knowledge, transmitted from generation to generation since time immemorial, resists being displaced by pills and white coats.
Like Pedro Pérez, his sister-in-law Justina Serrano is also a small woman. She was born in Vencedor 49 years ago, when the river was silent. Then there were no mestizo villages, no peke-peke motors, no cattle ranches, nor the sawmills that now line the shores. At 21, she took ayahuasca for the first time. “I was very sick, almost died. My uncle was a healer and cured me. He said: the woman learns quickly. So he encouraged me.” Justina decided to take the path of plant medicine and began to diet. For several months, whoever wants to learn must respect a strict dietary regimen, abstain from sexual and social relations, and avoid hard work. “Lying in bed... For four months I didn’t eat salt, sugar, or ripe banana. Only boquichico fish… grilled. When I completed four months, I got out of bed.” Along with these restrictions, it is necessary to diet with a master plant; infused, vaporized, or smoked, for several months the plant becomes physically part of the apprentice’s daily life.
For the Shipibos, the world has a material and a spiritual nature: people, plants, animals, even geographical features are endowed with spirit. Ayahuasca is a key to this spiritual world; when dieting with a plant and taking ayahuasca, the master of that plant, its spirit, appears in the “mareación” (state induced by ayahuasca) to grant its power, its healing knowledge. Throughout her life, Justina has dieted with different plants. “Each plant has a lot of power, a lot of energy. The more plants you diet with, the more knowledge you have. When healing the sick, the masters of those plants come and help us.”
Justina Serrano sings an icaro over the mother’s milk before giving it to a sick baby.
THE SONG OF THE MERAYA
César Pérez, husband of Justina and brother of Pedro, was the last of the three to learn to heal, in the mid-1980s. He explains that under the effects of ayahuasca, allied spirits visit them to detect the patient’s illness and deliver the appropriate medicine: the songs. From the moment they begin to feel the effects of the “mareación” (intoxication) until these effects fade, the healers spend several hours singing. Each night the song is different. “The song is the medicine,” César explains. “The plant teaches the song. When the intoxication passes, you don’t remember what you sang, but during the ayahuasca intoxication you sang very beautifully. You saw it. That’s why once the intoxication ends, you can no longer sing.” Beyond a melody, the song appears in the intoxication as an active force, healing energy, a tangible image endowed with materiality.
César considers himself an onanya, one of the three categories of shamans that the Shipibo have. Onanya literally means “the one who knows,” and it is a lower rank than meraya, “the one who finds.” There is consensus among today’s Shipibo healers: no meraya remain. These men followed strict diets, isolated in the jungle for long periods. “They built their little houses far from everyone,” César explains. “No one saw them. A girl would bring them food, and she had no sexual relations with them, because they couldn’t have relations.” Their powers were extraordinary: “They could go after the souls of the dead, catch them, and bring them back to the body. They could fly, body and soul. But they no longer exist. Now there are shamans like us, who heal. And there are many liars,” he laughs loudly. The third category is yobé, which can be translated as “witch,” who uses their power to do harm.
If he doesn’t have patients to heal, Atilio Mori, the fourth and youngest healer of Vencedor, takes ayahuasca only once a month. “To defend my power, because sometimes there’s a witch who wants to harm you.” He says sometimes bad spirits come. “You throw them away from your side. You transform into anything and send your defenses.” Atilio began taking ayahuasca in 1995; his teacher was Justina. “I wanted to learn because sometimes my children get sick. So I don’t have to look for doctors.” The first person he healed was his daughter. “She had vomiting, diarrhea, a swollen stomach. She had been cutipada by an eel.” Cutipar is one of the ways of becoming ill in Shipibo medicine; the spirit of an animal or plant can cause a person to get sick. “I passed near a dead eel and smelled it. Then I came home, and that’s what I passed to her.” When he took ayahuasca, Atilio saw the spirit of the eel harming his daughter. “With the song, it is expelled,” he says. That time he took it six nights in a row. His daughter got better.
The youngest of the healers in Vencedor, Atilio Mori, shortly before beginning a ceremony.
the power of the purge
On Friday, there is a ceremony at Atilio’s house. At seven o’clock, the patients begin to arrive, bringing their blankets which they spread on the floor, forming a circle that starts and ends at the healer. At eight, he serves a little ayahuasca in a small glass that he hands me after singing an icaro over it. “If you need more, just tell me.” I drink it in one gulp. I lie down on my back and wait for the substance to take effect. After a while, Atilio asks me, “Carlitos, are you feeling dizzy?” “Not yet.” “If you need more, just tell me.” A little later the songs arrive; Atilio is already connecting with his allies. First come rhythmic, slightly melodic blows; shortly after, the shaman intones a first song, still timid. Then the plant begins to act.
The changes occur on two levels. On one hand, thought is modified, elevated; it leaves the body behind and plunges into a world of images. Ideas take on a different value, good intentions shed their petty burdens, love and kindness rise in all their purity and present themselves as achievable and necessary goals. The self—this spirit, this mind, this body that I am—finally appears clearly in all its strength, aware of its powers and weaknesses. The soul frees itself from its dark and deep confinement and flies through a world of plants and flowers. But the body… The activity of the plant is astonishing. It is not simply a medicine; perhaps it would be more accurate to say it is a doctor, a guest in the body that examines every channel, expels air, empties the digestive system, massages with cold and heat, opens the lungs with yawns, produces tremors whose purpose may be to shake every cell, to tense and release every organ. It is no coincidence that the healers refer to this drink as “the purge.” Ayahuasca is a strong medicine, administered by a man who has prepared himself to do so, who cares for the patient who lies down in general muscular weakness and, at times, marked physical discomfort. A session can be beautiful but it can also be tough. A healer can be good but can also be bad.
Atilio continues singing nonstop for hours, except for brief pauses when he asks those around how they are feeling. The wave of ayahuasca seems to subside but then Atilio returns to his songs and that cottony, suspended, floating world reopens, to which I surrender with big yawns. This is the final entrance. The other patients, who have dozed through the entire ceremony, begin to stretch little by little; none of them has taken ayahuasca. “So you don’t need to move to heal,” I ask Atilio. “You take ayahuasca, go to the spirit world, see what they have, and with your songs you heal.” Atilio nods. I thank him for his care: “It seemed like it was fading, but with your songs the world opened again. It was very good. Thank you.” “Yes, Carlitos. I have taken care of you,” he says, raising his arms forming a protective dome. A few minutes later, the session concludes with some tobacco blows; the patients head to their homes. The night is cool and dark; the sky is full of stars. The people of Vencedor sleep peacefully: tomorrow there will be plantains and fish on the table, they have a roof over their heads, and healers to restore their health.
