Lucho and the Spirits
Lucho Panduro embodies the mestizo healer from the Iquitos region—a fusion of mixed ancestry, jungle wisdom, and a shamanism of a thousand influences. In Tamshiyacu, one of the Peruvian Amazon’s quintessential shamanic towns, he runs a spiritual retreat center for seekers from afar.
Thirty minutes from the small town of Tamshiyacu, deep in the Amazon jungle, the phone signal is excellent.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 200 of Cáñamo magazine, August 2014.
Lucho Panduro has traveled several times to Austria to share ayahuasca, but he got bored: he couldn’t stand the food. He missed his fish and yucca. Macaroni, cheese, milk—yuck! Disgusting. And how boring it was to be unable to communicate with Europeans (although he learned a bit of English and uses amusing oh, my God! expressions in his regional Spanish). Since he’s adopted a (let’s call it) hippie aesthetic, at first he seems like a cultural defector, but spend four days with him and you’ll understand who the people of the Amazon jungle really are and what they believe in.
The property where Lucho Panduro set up his “shamanic spiritual camp” belonged to his parents, whom he remembers as “poor folks.” (I think to myself that “poor folks” don’t usually own a large tract of fertile land, rich in fish, game, medicinal plants, construction materials, and the knowledge to use all of it. The idea that “the Indigenous people of the Amazon were poor” is an ideological intoxication imposed by the omnipotent powers that seek to commercially dominate every last corner of the planet—but maybe I’m a little crazy). His childhood was (let’s call it) typically Amazonian, alternating the work (or learning) that was expected of him as a boy (hunting, fishing, working the chacra) with participation in the fledgling system of school indoctrination, which changed his life the day he confronted a bully who was hitting his younger brother—and was met with a punch in the nose: he bled and bled; months passed and it wouldn’t heal, wouldn’t heal.
His youth was no less typical: at seventeen, when he realized he didn’t understand math, he fled to the army. After serving his country, he worked here and there along the rivers of the jungle before returning to his hometown, now a grown man (but a sick man, who felt that something was eating away at the upper part of his nose, eating and eating). Neither the doctors in white coats nor the traditional healers could get it right: fungus, cancer, ulcer, they guessed. Back in his village, he turned to an old healer with little hope. The old woman offered him ayahuasca and made her diagnosis: “Listen, my son, if you want to get better, you have to go into the forest, far away. There you’ll go on a diet, in your tambito (little hut), where no one can see you. Take your fariña (cassava flour) and your chestnuts to eat, because you can’t make a fire. There you’ll take bark from the trees, and that’s what will heal you. But remember, no sex and no salt.” Lucho followed the old woman’s advice, and that’s how the typical course of events in the life of an Amazonian shaman began: the diet.
Lucho Panduro, summoning the arcane forces at the beginning of the ayahuasca ceremony.
healing and learning
You are flying above the uneven carpet of the jungle—there is no clearing, only that inextricable, mysterious mass of trees—and you wonder what might lie beneath. You dive into the green and stop three meters above the ground, staring at trees, shrubs, a floor of leaves in every shade of brown, listening to birds, insects, animals that aren’t afraid of you, feeling the heat and humidity. You discover that beneath your feet is a small roof made of palm leaves, and you descend, peer inside, and sure enough, there lies young Lucho Panduro, stretched out on a small platform of palm bark, inside a patched-up mosquito net, skinny after three months of dieting and isolation.
Night falls. The sounds of the jungle intensify. You enter the body of our man, who is sleeping, and hear someone calling you: “Lucho!”—a clear voice, just to your right. You shine your flashlight. No one’s there. You lie down again. “Lucho!” This time you don’t need to turn on the light: he’s there, dressed in a white coat, the spiritual doctor rewards your dedication by showing you the seed of the sacha mangua: you must extract its resin and pour it into your nose. The next day, when you do so, you feel like you’re dying or flying—you get a fever and pain, your whole body trembles. You would rather die than do that again a week later, as your spiritual doctor instructed, but you’re a man, and in the weeks and months that follow, you do it several more times, until one early morning, you feel something lodged in your nasal passages, blow your nose several times, and a piece of dried flesh falls to the ground. You’ve expelled the illness.
Typically Amazonian: the sick person who heals through diet and, having discovered the miracle, decides to learn how to heal spiritually. To achieve this, Lucho followed a regular diet for three years. Imagine being cut off from the world, surrounded by a threatening mass of life, on the verge of starvation, and one night you hear a chilling scream. You’re scared, you want to run, but you must stay calm. You light your tobacco pipe and blow smoke around your body—this way, they can’t touch you. Someone knocks on the base of a tree. Ton, ton, ton! You grab your Florida Water and rub it all over your body—they won’t dare. Out of nowhere, your mother appears, so sweet: “Come, my son, let’s go home, you’ve done enough dieting, you need to rest.” You’re suspicious—you blow pipe smoke at her. Your false mother reverts to her form as chullachaqui, the fearsome dwarf with a twisted foot who makes people get lost when they venture into the forest. You want to give up, return home—but you resist. You know that to become a healer, you must strengthen your mind, that when you battle the illness in others, you’ll have to face far more dangerous spirits.
You don’t imagine that years later, when you travel to Austria shortly after the tragic death of your daughter, you’ll take ayahuasca and some small winged demons will come for you, grab you by the arms and lift you into the air, make you dance, try to seduce you into becoming one of them. But you’ll be able to defend yourself because you kept taking master plants in your little tambito, until the healing spirits bless you with their gift in a dream: you are in a hospital, dressed in a white coat, receiving patients with sores or stomach problems, and the spirit of each allied master plant tells you what remedy to administer to the sick person, and how, and for how long. Sometimes in dreams, sometimes in waking life, you hear a song or a whistle; you no longer look around searching for the singer—you know that icaros come from the infinite, and that they are with you forever.
The young branches of the renaco tree curl around the thicker ones; that is why this tree is used in diets by those who wish to find a partner.
the arrival of the spirits
Thirty years later, Lucho is sitting by his worktable in the temple, preparing to give a dose to a young Englishman who, in his first ceremony the night before, hadn’t stopped crying incoherently. “Too much marijuana, too many drugs, mental problems—like all Europeans, crazy, spaced out—they have to suffer during the cleansing,” Lucho thinks. Lit by a small candle, he wears clothing adorned with the intricate typical designs of the Shipibo indigenous people: he discovered during a mareación that he was the reincarnation of a healer from that ethnicity, which is why he felt drawn from a young age to natural plants. Concentrated on summoning the arcane, the spiritual defenses, he whistles icaros: with the first ones, he raises around the temple a barrier of electricity and one of fire, already hard to cross; but there are cunning sorcerers, and with the following whistles, he sends forth cobras and jaguars, fearsome anacondas, Indians with firearms, who station threateningly at every corner. The last whistle places a black stone bell over the most intimate space of the ceremony; no undesirable can enter to cause trouble.
Then follow the healing songs he acquired during the diets, and doctors come to examine the patient, diagnose the illness, and prescribe the remedy. And great ancestral masters from the Shipibo, Campa, Achuar, and Huambisa peoples lend their help. The great anaconda approaches the patient’s face, sticks its tongue down to the stomach, and pulls out all the accumulated filth—marijuana, alcohol—and the Englishman vomits all night. What is an English watchmaker doing in Tamshiyacu, traveling through South America, aspiring to reach San Francisco, California, where he plans to apply for a visa to work in New Zealand picking fruit (or perhaps on an organic farm)? Well, like all gringos: Tamshiyacu, an hour from Iquitos by outboard motor, is a small town but probably has the highest number of shamanic lodges per capita in the world.
The dean of this movement is master Agustín Rivas Vásquez, in whose establishment Lucho Panduro began to fight for his bread—or rather, to fight for money. It’s a story I’ve heard many times in Iquitos: that in ceremonies the gringos preferred me over the maestro because my songs inspired beautiful visions, so much so that one of the gringos proposed we open a lodge, because he didn’t dare to offer ayahuasca alone, and we did, we built the lodge—but then I realized the gringo was keeping all the money, that I did the hard work and received next to nothing in return. That’s what Lucho says; and the consequence was his desire to set up on his own: with work and patience he built his own lodge.
At first, there was only a small house, barely more than a roof, but the gringos arrived, enjoyed the experience, and recommended it to friends. More people came, left some money, bungalows were built, a temple, a kitchen, a dining hall, bathrooms… His fame grew, his lodge grew, envy grew, and with envy, inevitably, spiritual war broke out. Because thinking that ayahuasca opens you to a world of love and fraternity (as I once thought) is a mistake. On the contrary: ayahuasqueros perform spiritual healing in a dangerous context of accusations and suspicions from which only God is exempt (whom, by the way, everyone claims as their instrument). Except for rare alliances, the other healers are evil sorcerers or ignorant fraudsters, against whom there is a perpetual war.
Besides the ayahuasca sessions, the treatment at Chicuruna includes tobacco purges. In the picture, he is giving a dose to an English tourist.
fake shamans
Lucho Panduro says that in Tamshiyacu there is an abundance of the type of shaman called “bamba” (fake). “They set up lodges focused on money, without any knowledge of the plants. They become shamans overnight without doing the diets. And their songs were not given by the spirits; they just invented them like that: cumbias, ballads, salsa, merengue… You shouldn’t go to those because they don’t know anything. They’re performers, they use lights and noises. They can cure simple, mild illnesses by asking others what’s good for rheumatism or arthritis. But when a seriously ill person comes because another negative sorcerer has sent harm, a dart, they won’t be able to heal because they don’t have the power.”
Just as good exists, evil exists, Lucho argues, and so the healer also knows how to make people sick. Because people envy him and wish him ill—but since they can’t touch him (he dieted for years and gained powerful spiritual allies)—they go after his family. The darts fly, fiuuu!, and stick into his children’s bodies, who then become seriously ill. Then Lucho, using the yaúsa, the shamanic phlegm he stores in his throat, sucks on the affected area and removes the deadly dart. Still, danger lurks, but Lucho remains alert. He regularly washes the houses of his lodge with certain leaves to repel negative energies that sorcerers send through their messengers: some use bats, others nocturnal owls. Lucho also has his messenger, a pretty little bird with an innocent appearance: the chicuruna, which gives its name to his lodge.
His lodge is guarded against intruders by three chullachaquis, the fearsome forest beings who once tried to confuse him and are now his allies. It is several hectares of forest with hills and hollows; in one of these, Lucho has dammed a small lagoon where he raises land turtles (motelos) and water turtles (taricayas). “They are not for eating,” he says with a compassionate face as he feeds them; he sees them in the market awaiting their gastronomic fate and feels sorry for them: he buys them to save them. He already has about a hundred specimens. But I didn’t bring you here to look at the little turtles; that was just a picturesque element before continuing our walk through Lucho’s botanical garden, full of medicinal plants he talks about passionately. He stops at the renaco, a tree with extraordinary properties. Healers who diet with its bark receive visits in dreams from skeletons that teach them how to set bones and massage muscles. The younger branches of this tree curl lovingly around the thicker branches, which is why the renaco is also recommended for people who want to find a partner, or for couples who want their relationship never to weaken.
The “shamanic spiritual camp” Chicuruna is located on the outskirts of Tamshiyacu, a village near Iquitos.
VARIETIES
But the plant that reigns in Chicuruna is, of course, ayahuasca, or rather, the hundreds of ayahuasca vines that Lucho Panduro has planted. They come in all ages: from newly planted cuttings to their thick thirty-year-old sisters. It is very common for lodges of this kind to buy ayahuasca from third parties because they consume more than they produce, but Lucho neither buys nor sells: his chacruna bush and his ayahuasca vines are exclusively for his own use; only this way can he be sure of the composition of the brew, that the plant he is using is at least ten years old, an age at which he already considers them masters.
Lucho works with four varieties. The “cielo” ayahuasca is the one he usually uses to provide gentle and celestial visions to his patients; it climbs easily. The “encanto” ayahuasca does not want to stop being low-growing and small and grows full of knots; it is especially indicated for people who have relationship problems. The “trueno” ayahuasca, which is thick, produces tremendous storms when harvested (or on the day it is taken). And the “yanapuma” ayahuasca has extraordinary strength, brings visions of tremendous felines, and is very healing, but must be used by experts because it can be frightening; its leaves are round and it doesn’t grow much. The four varieties share fundamental properties. “It opens your third eye, gives you more intuition, and you project the work of the next day in the visions. It makes you creative: I have seen a little house for my lodge, I’m going to build it, and I do. I go to the forest and can’t hunt the animal, or I don’t catch anything, damn, what’s going on! I take my ayahuasca. I go to the forest and now you’re hunting, fishing.” Sometimes, ayahuasca can trigger much more intense experiences: “Death, but you don’t die, your ego dies and you are reborn with a healthy mind and a healthy body, like a child, without sins or guilt. The soul and spirit are cleansed.” And Lucho dares to say that “when you have faith in ayahuasca, it makes the lame walk and the blind see.”
Perhaps you think, as I do, that these claims are exaggerated. Then I invite you, armed with your skepticism, to join us in Tamshiyacu. The three of us fit on the small motorcycle that Lucho rides somewhat hesitantly (he just bought it) on dirt roads until we reach the paved streets of the quiet town with low houses. Let’s wander aimlessly, look at the school, the small shops, the noisy motorized tricycles, the tree-filled plaza, pass in front of the luxurious houses of the famous shamans, arrive at Lucho’s modest home, meet his family, his soccer-playing son who wants to be a lawyer, his wife from a distant indigenous community, who watches a German league soccer match, and let's go down to the yard to be amazed by an immense chacruna tree like none we have ever seen or will ever see, and hear Lucho say that chacruna is “the painter,” the one that gives the vision, while showing us as irrefutable proof a small bunch of the plant’s tiny multicolored fruits. We resume the motorcycle ride and reach the river dock just as the back of a dolphin emerges from the opaque waters of the Amazon. Let’s be ecstatic. And before returning, we run into a gringo who has settled in Tamshiyacu and rushes to his first Spanish class, and listen to him enthusiastically tell us how Lucho cured him of severe headaches he had always suffered. It’s true: he seems reborn. Maybe ayahuasca is an extraordinary medicine.
