Excerpt
Food of the Gods
1SHAMANISM: SETTING THE STAGERaongi sat still in the fading light of the fire. He felt his body flex deep within in ways that reminded him of the gulping of an eel. As he formed this thought, an eel's head, oversized and bathed in electric blue, appeared obediently in the darkened space behind his eyelids.
"Mother spirit of the first waterfall ... "
"Grandmother of the first rivers ... "
"Show yourself, show yourself."
Responding to the voices, the darkened space behind the now slowly spinning eel apparition filled with sparks; waves oflight leaped higher and higher, accompanied by a roar of increasing intensity.
"It is the first
maria." The voice is that of Mangi, the elder shaman of the village of Jarocamena. "It is strong. So strong."
Mangi is silent as the visions close over them. They are on the brink ofVentiui, the real world, the blue zone. The sound of falling rain outside is unrecognizable. There is the shuffling of dry leaves mingled with the sound of distant bells. Their tingling seems more like light than sound.
Until relatively recently, the practices of Mangi and her remote Amazonian tribe were typical of religious practice everywhere. Only in the last several millennia have theology and ritual graduated to more elaborate—and not necessarily more serviceable—forms.
SHAMANISM AND ORDINARY RELIGION
When I arrived in the Upper Amazon in early 1970, I had just spent several years living in Asian societies. Asia is a place where the shattered shells of castoff religious ontologies litter the dusty landscape like the carapaces of sand-scoured scarabs. I had traveled India in search of the miraculous. I had visited its temples and ashrams, its jungles and mountain retreats. But Yoga, a lifetime calling, the obsession of a disciplined and ascetic few, was not sufficient to carry me to the inner landscapes that I sought.
I learned in India that religion, in all times and places where the luminous flame of the spirit has guttered low, is no more than a hustle. Religion in India stares from world-weary eyes familiar with four millennia of priestcraft. Modern Hindu India to me was both an antithesis and a fitting prelude to the nearly archaic shamanism that I found in the lower Rio Putumayo of Colombia when I arrived there to begin studying the shamanic use of hallucinogenic plants. Shamanism is the practice of the Upper Paleolithic tradition of healing, divination, and theatrical performance based on natural magic developed ten to fifty thousand years ago. Mircea Eliade, author of
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy and the fore most authority on shamanism in the context of comparative religion, has shown that in all times and places shamanism maintains a surprising internal coherency of practice and belief. Whether the shaman is an Arctic-dwelling Inuit or a Witoto of the Upper Am azon, certain techniques and expectations remain the same. Most important of these invariants is ecstasy, a point my brother and I make in our book
The Invisible Landscape:
The ecstatic part of the shaman's initiation is harder to analyze, for it is dependent on a certain receptivity to states of trance and ecstasy on the part of the novice; he may be moody, somewhat frail and sickly, predisposed to solitude, and may perhaps have fits of epilepsy or catatonia, or some other psychological aberrance (though not always as some writers on the subject have asserted). In any case, his psy chological predisposition to ecstasy forms only the starting point for his initiation: the novice, after a history of psy chosomatic illness or psychological aberration that may be more or less intense, will at last begin to undergo initiatory sickness and trances; he will lie as though dead or in deep trance for days on end. During this time, he is approached in dreams by his helping spirits, and may receive instruction from them. Invariably during this prolonged trance the nov ice will undergo an episode of mystical death and resurrec tion; he may see himself reduced to a skeleton and then clothed with new flesh; or he may see himself boiled in a caldron, devoured by the spirits, and then made whole again; or he may imagine himself being operated on by the spirits, his organs removed and replaced with "magical stones" and then sewn up again.
Eliade showed that, while the particular motifs may vary between cultures and even individuals, shamanism's general structure is clear: the neophyte shaman undergoes a symbolic death and res urrection, which is understood as a radical transformation into a superhuman condition. Henceforth, the shaman has access to the superhuman plane, is a master of ecstasy, can travel in the spirit realm at will, and most important, can cure and divine. As we noted in
The Invisible Landscape:
In short, the shaman is transformed from a profane into a sacred state of being. Not only has he effected his own cure through this mystical transmutation, he is now invested with the power of the sacred, and hence can cure others as well. It is of the first order of importance to remember this, that the shaman is more than merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself, who is cured, and who must shamanize in order to remain cured.
It should be noted that Eliade used the word "profane" delib erately with the intent of creating a clear split between the notion of the profane world of ordinary experience and the sacred world which is "Wholly Other."
