The image above shows Taita Humberto, a Siona elder from the community of Buena Vista in the Putumayo as he is performing a cure at the very end of the ceremony with teacher plants like ayahuasca or yagé (banisteriopsis caapi and psychotria viridis). In the backdrop we see the walls of the maloka (ceremonial hut) that have been painted with images of the Virgin Mary and child wearing traditional paraphernalia of the Siona tribe.1 The other images are typical from the vision quest that is traversed by the hallucinogenic ritual. The yagé ceremony is an ancient ritual that throws the yachag into an spiritual voyage towards the encounter with the dead and the spirits of animals and plants. This ritual as well as other Amazonian rituals are part of what anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has called an “economy of predatory alterity” a concept explained in his book Cannibal Metaphysics: “He [the warrior] apprehends himself as a subject at the moment that he sees himself through the gaze of his victim, or, to put it differently, when he declares his singularity to himself through the voice of the latter. Perspectivism.” (143) In this essay I will show how a predatory economy enacts a cannibalistic performance in a spiritual sense, that is able to reject and serves as an antidote to spiritual extractivism. In an economy of predation one has to seek the most allies, in this case the Virgin Mary in the maloka is a proven icon for it channels the energy of the feminine without the impure bodily fluids of the woman. It also appeals to Christians who find comfort while they believe they are “sinning” as participants of the indigenous “savage and demonic” ritual.2 The colonial catholic image of the virgin is syncretized with the Amazonian woman personified as mother. Anthropologist Michael Taussig records a Putumayo woman’s perception of the Virgin Mary’s icon:
She sees the miraculous virgin as a magical weapon in racial and spiritual warfare. She says that the Spanish were very superstitious, as were the Indians, and that in their campaigns of conquest the Spaniard’s carried a Virgin, possibly made in Quito, to protect them. The Indians understood this. They understood the Virgin to be a magical weapon and they determined to take her and thereby sap the power of their oppressors. (194)
The Amazonian yachag is the master of ceremonies in the ritual performance of yagé. He is the performer of a total work of art that englobes components such as music, visual arts, relational aesthetics, performance, dance and drama. He is, in a sense, the flowering of the plant collective if we may compare an Amazonian shamanic community with an ancient tree. The tree hosts lichens and mosses, different epiphytes, parasites and alliances of the most diverse kind. The yachag might be paired with a flowering bromeliad, an inflorescence which holds together many florations. In the central composition of the flower is the egg, a camera that houses the pistil or carpel, the feminine part and the stamen, the maschile part in the same floration. This reproductive machine, molecular in its most malleable composition is an hermaphroditic container that is able to transform the flower into the seed in order to enable the cycle of life and death to be turned over and over again. This cycle is what makes possible life on the planet. The Siona yachag is the translation into the human of this floration. Male and female energy at the same time, he/she is able to conduct the patient’s voyage towards healing and the discovery of a another way of being. The flower brings the possibility of proliferation to the tree or community, in a cosmopolitical engagement enacted within the various characters who are part of this symbiotic relationality. At the same time since this engagement institutes a predatory economy, everything is circumscribed to a state of warfare. Viveiros de Castro notes:
Amazonian shamanism, as is often remarked, is the continuation of war by other means.
This has nothing to do, however, with violence as such but with communication, a transversal communication between incommunicables, a dangerous delicate comparison between perspectives, in which the position of the human is in constant dispute. (151) The shaman as artist enacts a “ total work of art.” Wagner called this type of work Gesamtkunstwerk: a work that englobes everything from the visual, dramatic, musical and sculptural arts. Mathew Wilson Smith writes about it:
The most frequent translation of the word is “total work of art” but even this is by no means straightforward: other possibilities include ‘communal work of art,’ ‘collective work of art,’ ‘ combined work of art,’ and ‘unified work of art.’ Indeed, the concept
includes all of these ideas, for it is an art-form as much about collectivity as about unity, about community as about totality. (8)
If we take the yagé ritual with all its components, we have an action which includes music, drama, a catharsis or climaxing point, visual arts elements, a social performance of participants in situ; in short, a total work of art. It is a joyful communion to be realized in life.
Transformation may be one of the outcomes of this performatic endeavor, if not, it is seldom something one may just bypass without any consequences in everyday life. Moreover, the performatic part engages the sharing of a potion or plant food that induces altered states of consciousness and may pair the ritual to greek tragedy which included intoxication as a means to
attain ecstasy through lucid dreaming . As Nietzsche reflects in the Birth of Tragedy:
Dionysiac art, by contrast, is based on play with intoxication, with the state of ecstasy.
There are two principal forces which bring naive, natural man to the self-oblivion of intense intoxication: the drive of spring and narcotic drink. Their effects are symbolized in the figure of Dyonisos. In both states the principium individuationis is disrupted, subjectivity disappears entirely before the erupting force of the general element in human life, indeed of the general element in nature. (120) This principium individuationis which guides us in awaken state of consciousness, disappears in
plant potion or hallucinogenic ceremonials. The communal takes over and the collective as a plant moves as one. For the objectives of the performance this movement is helpful, nevertheless, often collectives are unable to leave the altered state of consciousness after a yagé ceremony. Often the yachags guide their communities towards an objective. It might be a common objective or it might be an individual shaman’s own ambition. Such is the power of the yagé potion and the magical arts attributed to the indigenous healer. This is seldom the case within the realm of art. Most rituals and performances by artists are done within an institutional artistic context in which participants might not really be a captive public, but mere visitors,
interested in the artist’s performatic and entertaining action. Often it is the case that the artistic ritual cannot engage a public, nor it can convince them further. The question is, does art exist outside an art gallery/museum context? If the object is outside this institutional space, is it art? If not, what is it? Art rituals, nonetheless, seem to be capable to make profound impacts in
participants, as is the case with greek tragedy. “He [man] feels himself to be a god;” Nietzsche writes:
That which had previously lived only in his imagination he now feels in his own person.
What does he now care for images and statues? Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art; man himself now moves with the same ecstasy and sublimity with which, in dream, he once saw the gods walk. (121) This ecstasy is no doubt produced by intoxication where: “Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of the plant in us” (Deleuze and Guattari 11) enables a person to embody a certain state of altered consciousness outside of the ordinary.
In order to conduct the ceremony, the yachag needs to be enabled with all the prowess possible. A predatory economy of spiritual cannibalism seems to pervade the exchanges between the yachag, who needs to have total control and to be in full strength in order to perform the ceremony, and the participants. Since he will be traveling to the realm of the dead and of
nonhuman entities, he needs to be fed, as in a sacrificial offering, all creativity and strength at hand. In other words, the ultimate performance of the shaman is the voyage in which he would be conversant with the master spirits of the jaguar, the plants, and the spirits of the dead. This is of course, a figure of speech, a “metonymic contiguity”, of which the yachag is just part; he continues the chain of plant, animal, human through the conversions he is enabled to perform during his travels to other states of consciousness.3 The overall success and performativity of the ceremony depends on the level of ability of the shaman. There are those who are renowned performers, such as full-fledged musicians who enact their performance under the influence of the yagé; they are also well informed in all the feats that the shaman must be schooled, in order to be part of a ceremony, like chanting, sensing the patients voyages, etc. This knowledge is provided by the training and use of all kinds of plant remedies which enable the yachag to travel and speak to all those “spirit masters”. Anna Tsing speaks of the travels of shamans in their own bodies:
Through his metaphorical travels, the shaman constructs the healthiest body conceivable, one with the spiritual power of the entire cosmos. Further, the glorified body of the chant is not just the shaman’s own body, but a model of the empowered body for all who listen.
The shaman’s metaphors create the healthy body for all his potential patients. Health proceeds from his body to encompass theirs. (190) Amazonian thought contends that everything on planet Earth has a spirit master and the yachag is able to communicate with it during the ceremonial trance and his own travels, in order to know what is happening with a patient or the community. Descola refers to these “master spirits” in these terms: “Because they are bigger and more beautiful, it is they who best embody the characteristic features of the species that they represent and so are the species’ preferred interlocutors with human hunters who request them to concede a few of their fellows as hunted prey” (18). It is necessary to have an equal partner for humans to communicate with in equal terms.
The yachag, thus, is the enabler or medium through which all energies are channeled and who will be able to translate from one realm to the other. Such creative enterprise is potentiated by the harnessing of the creative energies or entities around the yachag in the ceremony. In Viveiros de Castro’s words: “[T]he idea, in brief, was that the interiority of the social body is
integrally constituted through the capture of symbolic resources ––names and souls, persons and trophies, words and memories––from the exterior” (144) .The shaman is a medium which, through a predatory economy, feeds off the energetic fields of the participants. He channels the desires and creative potentials of the surroundings. In this sense this predatory economy is not altogether different from what the great artists of modern and contemporary times do:
appropriate cultural manifestations to make them their own through a process of digestion and regurgitation. The gist of Oswald D’Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófagico (Cannibal Manifesto) from 1928 is very relevant here; he argued that Latin Americans from the global South must feed off all other art and artists around the globe in order to become greater ourselves.4 “Tupí or not tupí, that is the question” he writes, against all vertical influences there is the possibility of devouring the enemy to get to know them fully and thus, acquire strength and power. In the words of artist Pedro Neves Marques:
But it was also the “descent” to an inverse worldview to that of the moderns. Contrary to Indianism, the modernist anthropophagi desired the Indians in the fullest extension of their alterity. For this reason, the goal was not the return of the repressed but the ingestion of the Superego—in order to inhabit the trauma of excision. (40) Even the yachags themselves are always already a byproduct of mestizaje. When a predatory economy is enacted, all the participants of the ceremony are subjected to some kind of predation.
This might sound quite destabilizing for naive participants, but this is a kind of performance that may leave profound scars. It is indeed an economy of warfare. As is the case in the Tupinambá of Brazil, spiritual cannibalism is at work at all times in shamanic and, nowadays, in neo-shamanic communities. It is perhaps a relevant feature of the concept of cannibalism that the male shaman is able to appropriate spiritually from the members of the community. The metaphor may be interesting, nevertheless, in actuality it may prove to be a form of vampirism.
We might wonder why there are such few women yachags who could turn the table around in this warfare economy, however, deep taboos make it almost impossible for Siona and other Amazon basin communities’ women to become yachags, or chamanas. Bodily fluids, menstruation and childbearing passages are considered impure. In William Vicker’s words:
According to Siona and Secoya precepts women are ritually contaminated because of their biological functions; their menstruation periods, pregnancy and postpartum are potentially dangerous and are protected by a series of restrictions, behavior and diet. A recurrent aspect of these restrictions is the isolation of women. (215) Pains are taken to separate women in menstruation cycle and couples who are bearing a child are often prevented from coming into the ceremonial hut. Shamans, because of the wear and tear they present after years and years of plant dieting and yagé drinking, are the most fragile of all and the damage that women’s energies cause to them is thought to be irreversible.
Nevertheless, in some communities in Brazil, Perú and Mexico many women become chamanas and are able to heal and see the future. If we review the practices of women artists as Maria Teresa Hincapié and Gloria Anzaldúa we will see that anyone may enter a spiritual realm through different processes, proving that the male Amazonian yachag is not the only one able to
communicate with spirits and nonhuman entities. In Tsing’s words: “Without gender-appropriate ways of bringing together dramatic self-presentation and claims to traditional knowledge, women have difficulty breaking into the mainstream of male dominated spiritual expression.” (243) One of the great threats to women in these communities comes within their own subsumption as members, wives, mothers. The success they experience must be within the parameters of their communities in order to be protected by it. It is not easy at all for indigenous women to walk into the uses of mestizo culture with its ambivalent values and ways. We, as mestizo women, ch’ixi or stained, as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui calls us, are always walking a tightrope in between cultures.5 That is why it is so important to identify with other role models of feminism within our own cultures. There is always the great peril to romanticize and idealize the indigenous communities and the work of a yachag; it is important to realize that women do not have a preponderant role in Siona spirituality, unless as aides to their husbands, leaders, and men in general.
This predatory and warfare economy might turn to be extremely dangerous because it ultimately means a quest for who is the strongest warrior and who will be eaten last. Neither shamans nor vegetalistas escape a milieu full of contradictions, such as the South American colonialist, drug and guerrilla state. It is a world where anything is possible according to a notion of “magic realism” perpetuated by writers, anthropologists and artists. The notions of “magic” are embedded since day one in the entourage of its people. As Taussig writes, “the enormity of the magic attributed to those Indians is striking, an attribution as forceful among the lower classes, black, white, and mestizo, as it is among the middle and upper classes and intellectuals –
–including archaeologists and anthropologists.” (171) In such a charged spellbound realm nothing seems impossible, and everything can be attributed to spirits. But then again, why not? If we are looking for other ontologies, we acknowledge the probability of those.
In these pandemic times in which the world seems to offer so little for humans, hallucinogenic plant based groups promises could be tremendously powerful. The ethnobotanist Richard Evans-Schultes was aware of the power of these plants and that is why it is important for those who have access to them to “understand the concept of indigenous medicine before starting to study its pharmacology.”6 And I would add, those who study it, may want to be in alliance with ancestral indigenous traditions, as artist ethnographers perhaps, embedded in a community that carries the knowledge and the potential to curb excess that could become detrimental to its members. The yachag is not an almighty saint or god, he is just another man fulfilling the
cosmopolitical role of mediator between spirits and the human world, enmeshed in a colonial regime of extractivism, traversed by the contemporary threats of narcotrafic, guerrilla and paramilitary interventions in the jungle. Assigning yachags powers that are beyond their reach is a romanticization of their craft and lives. The very fine encounter of perspectives is in Viveiros
de Castro’s terms “[n]ot only a dangerous process but a political art: diplomacy. If Western relativism has multiculturalism as its public politics, Amerindian shamanic perspectivism has multinaturalism as its cosmic politics.” (60) His words speak against idealizing the world of Amazonian communities which is complex with layers of perspectival relationality, predatory
economy and cosmopolitical warfare, enacted at all times to balance a very delicate and perilous world. Perhaps living a predatory economy is akin to acting in a spiritual cannibalistic position at all times donde el que no come se deja comer (“where those who don’t eat are eaten”).7 Of this spiritual cannibalism shamans and pseudo-shamans alike partake. We may say that is what happens in all planes of life in the planet, however, understanding the predatory nature of such communities might prevent us from interpreting their signs (semiotics) in a western metaphysics realm and begin to interpret them as an altogether different “cannibal metaphysics.”
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