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The Forbidden Game
Brian Inglis
4. The Impact of Civilisation
THE FACT THAT SO SMALL A NUMBER OF PLANT DRUGS WERE KNOWN in the
Old World, compared to the new, has naturally led to speculation:
why? The reason, the American anthropologist Professor Weston
La Barre has suggested, is simple; that shamanism had survived
in the Americas, and it was 'so to speak, culturally programmed
for an interest in hallucinogens and other psychotropic drugs'.
And not only for an interest in them: the medicine man, by training
as well as by instinct, knew how to exploit drugs. The Europeans,
taught as they were to regard divination as the work of the devil,
were culturally programmed to regard vision-inducing plant drugs
as his instrument. In Europe, this was not a problem; though witches
might use them, they were not ordinarily encountered in everyday
life, and few people would have thought of experimenting with
them. But the drugs found in use in the New World appeared to
be a direct threat to Church and State—not then differentiated;
and the tendency, wherever shamanist drug-practices were found,
was to try to suppress them.
Coca
Drugs came under attack even when they were widely used for secular
purposes, as medicines, or to increase endurance—as in the case
of coca, in Peru. The Inca religion had retained an element of
shamanism, and coca was one of the drugs used by the diviner-priests
to help themselves into a trance; or, where that art had been
lost, the diviner burned the leaves so that he could 'see' coming
events in the curling smoke. Infusions of coca were taken at festivals;
corpses were buried with coca, to help them over the Inca equivalent
of the Styx; there was a 'Coca Mama'—the equivalent of the Corn
Mother of other cults; and coca was included in sacrifices, on
the principle that whatever was most valued should be given up
to the gods. Appalled at these manifestations of idolatry, missionaries
and priests were soon denouncing coca. It was formally condemned
at the first Ecclesiastical Council held in Lima in 1551, and
again in 1567 as connected with the work of idolatry and sorcery,
'strengthening the wicked in their delusions, and asserted by
every competent judge to possess no true virtues; but, on the
contrary, to cause the deaths of innumerable Indians, while it
ruins the health of the few who survive.'
The civil authorities had their own reasons for mistrusting coca.
Anything so closely linked with Inca tradition was likely to become
identified with it, in the minds of those who cherished the hope
of overthrowing Spanish rule. There was also a more practical
reason for suppressing the use of the drug. It was taken by workers
throughout the day, pouched in the cheek, and replenished when
necessary. The need for replenishment did not suit employers,
who felt it was an unnecessary expense. By a simple device, they
had ensured that labour in Peru would be both readily available
and cheap; a tax had been imposed on every Indian of working age,
which meant that the male population had to find work, in order
to be able to pay it. The tax was nicely judged to leave the worker
with only nominal wages—a penny a day—and his keep. As part
of his keep, however, he expected a ration of coca. Why, employers
naturally asked themselves, should they have to provide him not
only with food and water but with a luxury—worse, a drug condemned
by the Church?
Prohibition was demanded, and in ordinary circumstances, could
have been expected to follow. But those Spaniards who had established
themselves as the owners of the coca plantations on the slopes
of the Andes had quickly made their fortunes. From 1548 to 1551,
the Spanish chronicler Cieza de Leon recalled, 'there was not
a root, nor anything gathered from a tree, except spice, which
was in such estimation', and they grew rich on the proceeds. They
were not inclined to let the source of their wealth be wrested
from them; and their profits gave them the means to campaign in
Lima and in Madrid to save their business from extinction. Prohibition,
they claimed, would be impracticable. The coca plantations might
be ploughed up, but this would not stop the plant from being grown
illicitly. And what evidence was there that coca was bad for the
Indians? On the contrary, not merely did it help them to work
long hours; it provided them with the necessary stimulus to do
the work—coca being the only currency available to them.
These were arguments which could be expected to make some impression
on the Government, in its capacity as an employer. More surprisingly,
they also made an impression on the Church. A Spanish priest,
Blas Valera, who worked in Peru in the early years of the seventeenth
century—and who thought highly of coca, particularly as a medicine—described
how the change of heart came about. Some people, he recalled,
had been hostile, 'moved only by the fact that in former times
the heathen offered coca to their idols, as some wizards and diviners
still do'. Because of this, they had argued that coca should be
suppressed. If the Incas had offered coca and nothing else in
their sacrifices, this might have been reasonable. But they had
also sacrificed cattle; was beef therefore to be banned? On reflection,
it had been decided that it would be best not to ban coca, but
instead, to instruct the natives how to avail themselves of God's
gifts in a Christian fashion. This resolution, Valera noted, had
not been without its benefits to the Church; 'the income of the
bishop, canons and other priests of the Catholic Church of Cuzco
is derived from the tithe on the coca leaf'.
So the Indians, though they were punished if they were caught
using coca in religious observances, were allowed to take it while
working, in order that they might be able to put in still longer
hours. The consequences were to be summarised four centuries later
by John Hemming, in The Conquest of the Incas:
Coca plantations lay at the edge of humid forests, thousands of
feet below the natural habitat of the Andean Indians. This did
not deter Spanish planters and merchants who made huge profits
from the coca trade. They forced highland natives to leave their
encomiendas and work in the hot plantations. The change
of climate was devastating to Indians with lungs enlarged by evolution
to breathe thin air. Antonio de Zuniga wrote to the King: 'Every
year among the natives who go to this plant a great number of
Your Majesty's vassals perish.' There were also ugly diseases
in the plantations. A tiny mosquito-like dipterous insect that
lives between 2,500 and 9,500 feet in the Andean foothills carries
the destructive 'verruga' or wart disease, in which victims die
of eruptive nodules and severe anemia. Coca workers also caught
the dreaded 'mal de los Andes' or uta, which destroys the
nose, lips and throat and causes a painful death. Bartolome de
Vega described the native hospital of Cuzco 'where there are normally
two hundred Indians with their noses eaten away by the cancer'.
Those who escaped the diseases returned to their mountain villages
debilitated from the heat and undernourishment; they were easily
recognisable, pale, weak and listless. Contemporary authorities
estimated that between a third and half of the annual quota of
coca-workers died as a result of their five-month service.
Decrees from Lima, and even from King Philip in Madrid, tried
to regulate working hours and conditions. The frequency with which
they had to be repeated—one Viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, issued
over twenty ordinances designed to protect the Indians—suggests
that they were not obeyed; not, at least, until wastage reduced
the supply of labour to the point when the employers in their
own self-interest had to begin to treat their workers with more
consideration, or risk having too few of them to harvest the coca
crop.
This pattern was to be repeated in colonised territories. Missionaries
disliked shamanism and the drugs associated with it because they
were pagan; the colonial authorities, because they might be a
focus for unrest, and for law-breaking. But where a plant drug
could be exploited commercially, farmers, entrepreneurs and traders
would find reasons for permitting, and encouraging, its consumption.
They would use their influence to persuade the colonial authorities
that it was essential to the colony's economy; and—particularly
if they could extract revenue out of the drug—the colonial authorities
would usually allow themselves to be persuaded.
Peyotl
Where commercial considerations were unimportant, either because
the drug was taken exclusively in shamanist rites, or because
it could not be cultivated, the Church was more likely to have
its way: as it did with the peyotl cactus. As late as the middle
of the seventeenth century, when Francisco Hernandez published
his pioneering work on the flora and fauna of Mexico, he was still
careful to intimate his disapproval of the way certain of the
plants he described were used. By eating peyote he noted, the
Indians 'can foresee and predict anything; for instance, whether
enemies are going to attack them the following day? Whether they
will continue in favourable circumstances? Who has stolen household
goods? And other things of this sort.' Far from being impressed,
when Hernandez described what peyotl looked like he observed that
it 'scarcely issues forth, as if it did not wish to harm those
who discover it and eat it'. Similarly with ololiuqui—the 'morning
glory'; when the priests wished to commune with their gods, and
to receive messages from them, they ate it to induce a delirium,
in which 'a thousand visions and satanic hallucinations appeared
to them'. A catechism used in Mexico in that period reveals the
priests' attitude. 'Art thou a soothsayer?' each convert would
be asked.
Dost thou foretell events by reading signs, or interpreting dreams,
or by water, making circles and figures on the surface? Dost thou
suck the blood of others, or dost thou wander about at night,
calling upon the demon to help thee? Hast thou drunk peyote or
hast thou given it to others to drink, in order to find out secrets
or to discover where stolen or lost articles were?
In 1620, peyotl was formally denounced:
We, the Inquisitors against heretical perversity and apostasy,
by virtue of apostolic authority declare, inasmuch as the herb
or root called peyotl has been introduced into these provinces
for the purposes of detecting thefts, of divining other happenings,
and of foretelling future events, it is an act of superstition,
to be condemned as opposed to the purity and integrity of our
holy Catholic faith. The fantasies suggest intervention of the
devil, the real authority of this vice.
The civil authorities shared the Inquisition's views. They, too—according
to the chronicler Fr Joseph de Acosta—were impressed by the
evidence that under the influence of peyotl shamans were able
'to report mutinies, battles, revolts and death occurring 200
or 300 leagues distant, on the very day they took place, or the
day after'. That divination could provide such a rapid communication
service was an excellent reason for banning consumption of the
drug. With characteristic cunning, however, the devil had provided
alternatives; as well as ololiuqui, there were tobacco, datura
and certain types of mushroom. All that Church and State could
do was ban the drug cult ceremonies; and when the risk of holding
them openly became too great, the cults continued underground.
Alcohol: Siberia
Suppression was not the only weapon with which colonists could
attack indigenous drug cults. They brought their own substitute
drug with them: alcohol. Along with beer and wine, they introduced
spirits: brandy, whiskey, gin and rum. Traders found it convenient
to use them to lubricate negotiations, buying and selling; and
then, as merchandise in their own right.
The results were often depressing. When the Russians began the
conquest of Siberia at the end of the sixteenth century, they
determined to put down shamanism; and to that end they banned
the consumption of the fly agaric—a futile gesture; the naturalist
Nikolai Sljunin observed in 1900 that the law was 'completely
ignored'. The introduction of vodka by traders proved a more effective
weapon. Vodka was cheap—and readily available, unlike mushrooms,
all the year round. But not merely did it fail to provide the
shaman with visions; it actually blocked them—coming to be
regarded, according to Sljunin, as an antidote to the mushroom's
effects. The evidence, in fact, suggests that it was not drugs
which made Siberian shamanism decadent, as Mircea Eliade claimed;
it was one particular drug, alcohol, which destroyed the shaman's
ability to induce a trance, and tempted him to fake it, and delude
the company with conjuring tricks.
Alcohol: Tahiti
Traditionally, the saddest story of the effects of alcohol concerns
Tahiti. When the island was discovered in the 1760s, the crews
who had been there returned with glowing accounts of a paradise,
where the people lived free from worldly cares, doing little work
because most of their wants were provided for by nature; enjoying
sexual relations uninhibitedly because they were untroubled by
the taboos or the guilt which Christianity had attached to them;
and in general appearing to lead a wonderfully contented existence.
Their only mild intoxicant came from a root which, when ground
up, could be made into the drink kava; and was taken only on ceremonial
occasions. Though Captain Cook's crew were told that it could
make men drunk, they never saw this happen. When first offered
alcoholic drinks, their Tahitian guests took them in all innocence,
became drunk, and—after experiencing hangovers—took care not
to get drunk again, 'shunning a repetition of it', Joseph Banks
observed in his account of the visit, 'instead of greedily desiring
it as most Indians are said to do'. It was as if the islanders,
close to nature as they were, had no need of artificial intoxication;
they lived in the happy state which Europeans tried in vain to
reach with the help of alcohol.
Before long, however, as more ships began to call, some Tahitians
began to develop a taste for alcohol; particularly members of
the ruling families, who were recipients of much of the hospitality.
The missionaries, who by this time were establishing themselves,
abetted the process. On arrival, they had determined to compel
the Tahitians to cover their nakedness, and to cease their uninhibited
sexual play. They were also anxious to put an end to Tahitian
religious rites—among them, the ceremonial drinking of kava—because
they were pagan. To implement these reforms, however, they had
to win the Paramount Chief's support. The heir, Pomare II, intimated
that he was willing to back the missionaries, so long as they
did not interfere with his personal pleasures. Arriving in 1802
on his voyage round the world John Turnbull found the royal family
demoralised by excess, and Pomare an alcoholic and a public menace.
Under the influence of drink, Turnbull feared, he would not scruple
to kill anybody who annoyed him.
What possible benefit—Diderot had asked—could Christians with
their hypocrisy, guilt and ambition, bring to the South Sea islanders?
They would arrive, he warned, 'with crucifix in one hand and dagger
in the other, to cut your throats or force you to accept their
customs and opinions'. Gin bottle in the other, would have been
nearer the mark; but Diderot's warning—'one day under their
rule you will be almost as unhappy as they are'—was soon shown
to be justified. Tahitians lost their childlike innocence, which
made even their pilfering endearing; they had to wear 'Mother
Hubbards'; they had to work; they were no longer happy; and they
drank. When William Ellis arrived on Tahiti as a missionary in
1817, he found Turnbull's fears had been justified. Under Pomare,
intemperance prevailed 'to an awful and unprecedented degree'.
On impulse, men would get together to erect a still, and then
over a period of days consume its product, 'sinking into a state
of indescribable wretchedness, and often practising the most ferocious
barbarities'. While the liquor lasted they were more like demons
than human beings; and after it was finished,
sometimes in a deserted still-house might be seen fragments of
the rude boiler, and the other appendages of the still, scattered
in confusion on the ground; and among them, the dead and mangled
bodies of those who had been murdered with axes or billets of
wood in the quarrels that had terminated their debauch.
As soon as they had established their authority, the missionaries
tried to stop the islanders from drinking spirits; but with so
many ships coming in, the task was hopeless. Among the arrivals
was the Beagle, in 1835. When Darwin offered the Tahitian
guides a drink they 'put their fingers before their mouths and
uttered the word "missionary" '—but they did not refuse.
'The natives having nothing at all to do', Gauguin reported half
a century later, 'think of one thing only: drinking.'
Was alcohol the cause of the destruction of Tahiti's island paradise,
or were there more insidious reasons? Other Pacific islands were
given much the same introduction to colonialism and Christianity;
not all of them were so marked by it. Pondering this on his tour
of the Pacific, early in the 1890s, Robert Louis Stevenson came
to the conclusion that it was unwise to put the blame for what
had happened there either on gin or on 'Tartuffe insisting on
unhygienic clothes'. No single cause, he felt, was responsible
for decay, where it was to be found. What was decisive was the
amount of dislocation involved in the islanders' way of life:
'where there have been fewest changes, important or unimportant,
salutary or hurtful, there the race survives. Where there have
been most, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there
it perishes.'
J. W. Anderson, who had travelled around among the Pacific islands
in the 1870s, was of the same opinion. He cited the stability
of Fiji as an example. There, he found, yangona (as kava was known)
was still taken in an elaborate ritual. First, young men and women
with good teeth were employed to chew the root, until it was of
the right consistency to be put in a bowl of water and its juices
squeezed out. The resulting liquid appeared 'greenish-grey and
muddy-looking'; it tasted to him like 'a mixture of rhubarb, magnesia
and soapsuds'; and it left those who drank it rather unsteady
on their feet. So the missionaries wanted to ban the ceremony—as
did some employers, who disapproved of the time it wasted; islanders
would drop whatever they were doing to attend. But it had not
been banned; rightly, Anderson felt. The chewing process might
appear to be disgusting (and to spread unmentionable diseases);
the kava itself might be debilitating, to anybody who took it
to excess. But in moderation it did no harm. The islanders, in
fact, regarded it as a purifier of the blood. And even those who
took so much of it that they became intoxicated displayed 'neither
unseemly behaviour nor incoherency of speech', but rather showed
'an inclination to remain mute in a mood of happy dreaminess'.
In the circumstances, Anderson hoped, kava drinking would continue,
'for the chances are that by and by, its substitute will be "yangona
papalangi" that is, white man's grog; and we are too
well aware what havoc the fire water plays among savages who once
take a liking to it'.
Alcohol: America
As Anderson's reference showed, alcohol had become notorious for
its effects on primitive communities; particularly in North America,
where distilled liquors had been unknown before the arrival of
the colonists from Europe. As in the Pacific, it was the traders
who introduced the American Indians to 'fire water'; and the Indians,
unaccustomed to intoxication (tobacco was ordinarily used for
that purpose by the shaman, but not by members of the tribe, except
under his guidance) developed a craving for it. Towards the end
of the seventeenth century missionaries were beginning to report
the dire consequences, 'Lewdness, adulteries, incest, and several
other crimes which decency keeps me from naming'—Father Chrestien
Le Clerq wrote of a tribe on the Gulf of St. Lawrence—'are the
usual disorders which are committed through the trade in brandy,
of which some traders make use in order to abuse the Indian women,
who yield themselves readily during their drunkenness to all kinds
of indecency.' The places where the Indians drank brandy, another
missionary wrote in 1705, were 'an image of hell. Fire flies in
all directions, blows with hatchets and knives make the blood
flow on all sides. They commit a thousand abominations—the mother
with her sons, the father with his daughters, and brothers with
their sisters. They roll about on the cinders and coals, and in
blood.'
It was stories such as these to which Anderson (and Banks, a century
earlier) were referring; the assumption then being that alcohol
had been the really destructive influence. But this view has recently
been challenged by Craig MacAndrew and Robert Edgerton in their
Drunken Comportment: a social explanation, published in
1969. They were able to show that the American Indians, like the
Tahitians, when they first tried spirits were attracted by the
novelty of the experience—'a merry-go of the brain', as one
of them described it—but for a while were not adversely affected.
So long as their experience was 'untutored by expectations to
the contrary'—MacAndrew and Edgerton claimed—'the result was
neither the development of an all-consuming craving nor an epic
of drunken mayhem and debauchery'. That epic only came when their
way of life had been destroyed by the settlers, and their culture
debased—another instance of the destructive power of change
which Stevenson had observed.
But there was more to it, MacAndrew and Edgerton decided, than
simple change. The consumption of spirits brought out a trait
which had already existed in their tribal societies: cruelty.
The Red Indians had been notoriously cruel to captured foes, practising
tortures on them of the most savage but sophisticated kind. They
now learned from the white traders that a man should not be held
responsible for what he did under the influence of drink. Alcohol
therefore provided them both with the stimulus and the excuse
to repeat the kind of behaviour they had formerly indulged in,
with tradition's sanction, when they captured a member of an enemy
tribe.
It was not the drug, therefore, that was responsible for the way
people behaved under its influence. The drug was simply the release
mechanism, the behaviour being largely conditioned by expectations.
Where the expectations from an established drug were of gentle
intoxication, as with kava, it was in the colonists' self-interest
to encourage it, and discourage the sale of spirits; and where
this became settled policy, as on Fiji, the results appeared satisfactory—as
Basil Thomson, who spent many years in Fiji around the turn of
the century, recalled in his memoirs. Although the missionaries
had continued to wage their campaign against yangona with 'a fiery
zeal', the civil authorities had contented themselves with regulations
chiefly designed to try to restrict its use to precisely the ceremonial
occasions that the missionaries most deplored. As a magistrate,
Thomson had to enforce this policy; and he came to the conclusion
it was justified, because the vice of kava drinking 'if it isa vice at all, cannot
reasonably be condemned for bringing in
its train any of these social evils that are due to alcohol'.
But colonial authorities were sometimes less far-sighted; and
they could not, as a rule, stop the introduction of alcohol. Nor
was it easy for them to prevent the erosion of traditional cultures
and beliefs. Shamanism had been based on certain assumptions which
Christianity and, later, the even more powerful force of rationalism
challenged. Inexorably, the shaman's authority was eroded. He
might still get his visions from tobacco, or other drugs. But
they were of little comfort to the tribe if they predicted, correctly,
that it was futile to oppose the superior power wielded by the
white man—and disastrous when they incorrectly roused expectations,
as occasionally they did, that the white man was going to be destroyed
by a whirlwind, or some other form of divine retribution. When
Sitting Bull smoked, and gave a hundred pieces of his flesh, before
dancing the Sun Dance, his aim was to receive a vision; and he
had one, which revealed that white soldiers were coming, and that
the Sioux would slaughter them. The Sioux duly did, when Custer
and his force appeared. But the vision had not revealed what was
to follow: the massacre of the Indians at Wounded Knee, which
banished their last hope of successful resistance.
In such circumstances, vision-inducing drugs were a hazard; and
shamanist observances came to rely more upon ritual—or on alcohol.
Where alcohol was involved, they often came to resemble saturnalia,
of the kind Ruth Underhill described in her study of the religion
of the Papago Indians. At the annual rainmaking ceremony the shaman
was still employed, but only as a subordinate. The most important
role was that of the brewer, who made the fermented liquor from
cactus fruit; the shaman being required simply to protect the
brew from harmful influences. If he failed, he rather than the
brewer would suffer for it. The principle which had attached itself
to the ceremony was that 'the saturation of the body with liquor
typifies and produces the saturation of the earth with rain';
the aim was to get everybody concerned 'full', without any expectation
of visions, let alone of clairvoyance. Neophytes, admittedly,
were encouraged to 'dream' songs which could be added to the tribal
repertoire: but to judge by the samples Underhill obtained suitability
was not equated with any great originality of insight.
Come and sing!
Come and sing!
Sing for the evening!
The sun stands there.
Sing for it!
For the liquor delightfully sing!
And in the traditional songs and speeches, the emphasis was on
the pleasures of inebriation for its own sake. To each recipient
of the brew, the cup-bearer would say
Drink, friend ! Get beautifully drunk
Hither bring the wind and the clouds.
Nor did the use of the term 'beautifully' mean that the Papagos
were under any illusions as to the effects of the liquor—as
one of the songs sung during the progress of the ceremony indicated:
On the morning of the second day
They come hastening from all directions
They grow drunk, they stagger, they grow very drunk
They crawl around in their vomit
Much dizziness,
Much dizziness
Within me is swelling
And more and more
Every which way I am falling
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