a Shaman in the Amazon

12-12-09
These past two weeks have been very different from any of my previous travelings. On my first day in Iquitos I found an Ayahuascero – a shaman who cures people with medicinal plants and ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic vine that is so common in these parts – and arranged to spend 2 weeks living with him and learning his practice. Needless to say, it has been a very interesting two weeks.
Jorge, the shaman, works mainly with a mixture of garlic, alcamfor, and sugar cane alcohol, into which he whistles one of over 150 songs of power and healing to give it specific properties, and then rubs or sprays it onto the body to heal his client. He then gives whatever remedy is needed and finally strengthens and protects the healing with tobacco smoke. This is the procedure for minor healings, but for anything major, he turns to the ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca is a vine that grows in the jungle which, combined with the leaves of the chacruna tree, is highly hallucinogenic, and is used for healings all throughout the Western Amazon. Jorge drinks ayahuasca twice a week at midnight, and in that altered state is able to see and cure what ails the people who come to him, anything from lost love to bad luck finding a job to cancer. He’s highly respected in the city, and says he has never been unable to cure his patients, who often come to him in desperation after the hospitals have tried and failed to help them.
He took me to the market on my first day, to get to know the medicinal plants you could buy there (did you know that cinnamon is good for nausea and tobacco is a powerful form of protection?) and later we went into the jungle to collect and learn about the plants you could only find in the forest.
One day he was asked to come to a jungle lodge to do an ayahuasca ceremony for a group of tourists, and, as his “student”, I tagged along. It was great – I got an almost-official jungle tour for free, complete with canoe trips looking for sloths (too quick for us, unfortunately, we didn’t see any), a night walk to see tarantulas, scorpions, snakes, and spiders (I have never been so very aware of the myriad ways to die in the jungle), and an ayahuasca ceremony. I decided to take the ayahuasca to see how the shaman does his work and what he meant by “seeing the illness”, so that night we skipped dinner and all went out to a tiny cabin and one by one drank a shot glass of thick, brown, foul-tasting liquid. I have to say, it was not the most pleasant experience. For someone who has never even been drunk, hallucinating for 4 hours was pretty intense, especially as it was accompanied by vomiting and violent shaking. I was disappointed that I didn’t have any fantastic spiritual revelations, but maybe my expectations were set too high. Anyway, I didn’t do that again, though I continued to study with Jorge for another week.
Now I’m off down the river again, this time towards the coast of Peru. I’m officially traveling to Arequipa to spend Christmas with Joaquin, a good friend from UWC, but I’m making a couple detours to check out pre-Incan ruins and sunny beaches. More on that when I get there.