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The Mushrooms of Language
Henry Munn
from: Hallucinogens and Shamanism, Michael J. Harner, ed.,
©1973, Oxford University Press
The Mazatec Indians, who have a long tradition of using the mushrooms,
inhabit a range of mountains called the Sierra Mazateca in the
northeastern corner of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The shamans
in this essay are all natives of the town of Huautla de Jimenez.
Properly speaking they are Huautecans; but since the language
they speak has been called Mazatec and they have been referred
to in the previous anthropological literature as Mazatecs, I have
retained that name, though strictly speaking, Mazatecs are the
inhabitants of the village of Mazatlan in the same mountains.
(1) HENRY MUNN has investigated the use of hallucinogenic plants
among the Conibo Indians of eastern Peru and the Mazatec Indians
of the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. Although not a professional
anthropologist, he has resided for extended periods of time among
the Mazatecs and is married to the niece of the shaman and shamaness
referred to in this essay.
The Mazatec Indians eat the mushrooms only at night in absolute
darkness. It is their belief that if you eat them in the daylight
you will go mad. The depths of the night are recognized as the
time most conducive to visionary insights into the obscurities,
the mysteries, the perplexities of existence. Usually several
members of a family eat the mushrooms together: it is not uncommon
for a father, mother, children, uncles, and aunts to all participate
in these transformations of the mind that elevate consciousness
onto a higher plan. The kinship relation is thus the basis of
the transcendental subjectivity that Husserl said is intersubjectivity.
The mushrooms themselves are eaten in pairs, a couple representing
man and woman that symbolizes the dual principle of procreation
and creation. Then they sit together in their inner light, dream
and realize and converse with each other, presences seated there
together, their bodies immaterialized by the blackness, voices
from without their communality.
In a general sense, for everyone present the purpose of the session
is a therapeutic catharsis. The chemicals of transformation of
revelation that open the circuits of light, vision, and communication,
called by us mind-manifesting, were known to the American Indians
as medicines: the means given to men to know and to heal, to see
and to say the truth. Among the Mazatecs, many, one time or another
during their lives, have eaten the mushrooms, whether to cure
themselves of an ailment or to resolve a problem; but it is not
everyone who has a predilection for such extreme and arduous experiences
of the creative imagination or who would want to repeat such journeys
into the strange, unknown depths of the brain very frequently:
those who do are the shamans, the masters, whose vocation it is
to eat the mushrooms because they are the men of the spirit, the
men of language, the men of wisdom. They are individuals recognized
by their people to be expert in such psychological adventures,
and when the others eat the mushrooms they always call to be with
them, as a guide, one of those who is considered to be particularly
acquainted with these modalities of the spirit. The medicine man
presides over the session, for just as the Mazatec family is paternal
and authoritarian, the liberating experience unfolds in the authoritarian
context of a situation in which, rather than being allowed to
speak or encouraged to express themselves, everyone is enjoined
to keep silent and listen while the shaman speaks for each of
those who are present. As one of the early Spanish chroniclers
of the New World said: "They pay a sorcerer who eats them
[the mushrooms] and tells them what they have taught him. He does
so by means of a rhythmic chant in full voice."
The Mazatecs say that the mushrooms speak. If you ask a shaman
where his imagery comes from, he is likely to reply: I didn't
say it, the mushrooms did. No mushroom speaks, that is a primitive
anthropomorphization of the natural, only man speaks, but he who
eats these mushrooms, if he is a man of language, becomes endowed
with an inspired capacity to speak. The shamans who eat them,
their function is to speak, they are the speakers who chant and
sing the truth, they are the oral poets of their people, the doctors
of the word, they who tell what is wrong and how to remedy it,
the seers and oracles, the ones possessed by the voice. "It
is not I who speak," said Heraclitus, "it is the logos."
Language is an ecstatic activity of signification. Intoxicated
by the mushrooms, the fluency, the ease, the aptness of expression
one becomes capable of are such that one is astounded by the words
that issue forth from the contact of the intention of articulation
with the matter of experience. At times it is as if one were being
told what to say, for the words leap to mind, one after another,
of themselves without having to be searched for: a phenomenon
similar to the automatic dictation of the surrealists except that
here the flow of consciousness, rather than being disconnected,
tends to be coherent: a rational enunciation of meanings. Message
fields of communication with the world, others, and one's self
are disclosed by the mush rooms The spontaneity they liberate
is not only perceptual, but linguistic, the spontaneity of speech,
of fervent, lucid discourse, of the logos in activity. For the
shaman, it is as if existence were uttering itself through him.
From the beginning, once what they have eaten has modified their
consciousness, they begin to speak and at the end of each phrase
they say tzo-"says" in their language-like a
rhythmic punctuation of the said. Says, says, says. It is said.
I say. Who says? We say, man says, language says, being and existence
say. (2)
Cross-legged on the floor in the darkness of huts, close to the
fire, breathing the incense of copal, the shaman sits with the
furrowed brow and the marked mouth of speech. Chanting his words,
clapping his hands, rocking to and fro, he speaks in the night
of chirping crickets. What is said is more concrete than ephemeral
phantasmagoric lights: words are materializations of consciousness;
language is a privileged vehicle of our relation to reality. Let
us go looking for the tracks of the spirit, the shamans say. Let
us go to the cornfield looking for the tracks of the spirits'
feet in the warm ground. So then let us go walking ourselves along
the path in search of significance, following the words of two
discourses enregistered like tracks on magnetic tapes, then translated
from the native tonal language, to discover and explicitate what
is said by an Indian medicine man and medicine woman during such
ecstatic experiences of the human voice speaking with rhythmic
force the realities of life and society.
The short, stout, elderly woman with her laughing moon face, dressed
in a huipil, the long dress, embroidered with flowers and
birds, of the Mazatec women, a dark shawl wrapped around her shoulders,
her gray hair parted down the middle and drawn into two pigtails,
golden crescents hanging from her ears, bent forward from where
she knelt on the earthen floor of the hut and held a handful of
mushrooms in the fragrant, purifying smoke of copal rising from
the glowing coals of the fire, to bless them: known to the ancient
Meso-Americans as the Flesh of God, called by her people the Blood
of Christ. Through their miraculous mountains of light and rain,
the Indians say that Christ once walked-it is a transformation
of the legend of Quetzalcoatl-and from where dropped his blood,
the essence of his life, from there the holy mushrooms grew, the
awakeners of the spirit, the food of the luminous one. Flesh of
the world. Flesh of language. In the beginning was the word and
the word became flesh. In the beginning there was flesh and the
flesh became linguistic. Food of intuition. Food of wisdom. She
ate them, munched them up, swallowed them and burped; rubbed ground-up
tobacco along her wrists and forearms as a tonic for the body;
extinguished the candle; and sat waiting in the darkness where
the incense rose from the embers like glowing white mist. Then
after a while came the enlightenment and the enlivenment and all
at once, out of the silence, the woman began to speak, to chant,
to pray, to sing, to utter her existence: (3)
My God, you who are the master of the whole world, what we want
is to search for and encounter from where comes sickness, from
where comes pain and affliction. We are the ones who speak and
cure and use medicine. So without mishap, without difficulty,
lift us into the heights and exalt us.
From the beginning, the problem is to discover what the sickness
is the sick one is suffering from and prognosticate the remedy.
Medicine woman, she eats the mushrooms to see into the spirit
of the sick, to disclose the hidden, to intuit how to resolve
the unsolved: for an experience of revelations. The transformation
of her everyday self is transcendental and gives her the power
to move in the two relevant spheres of transcendence in order
to achieve understanding: that of the other consciousness where
the symptoms of illness can be discerned; and that of the divine,
the source of the events in the world. Together with visionary
empathy, her principal means of realization is articulation, discourse,
as if by saying she will say the answer and announce the truth.
It is necessary to look and think in her spirit where it hurts.
I must think and search in your presence where your glory is,
My Father, who art the Master of the World. Where does this sickness
come from? Was it a whirlwind or bad air that fell in the door
or in the doorway? So are we going to search and to ask, from
the head to the feet, what the matter is. Let's go searching for
the tracks of her feet to encounter the sickness that she is suffering
from. Animals in her heart? Let's go searching for the tracks
of her feet, the tracks of her nails. That it be alleviated and
healed where it hurts. What are we going to do to get rid of this
sickness?
For the Mazatecs, the psychedelic experience produced by the mushrooms
is inseparably associated with the cure of illness. The idea of
malady should be understood to mean not only physical illness,
but mental troubles and ethical problems. It is when something
is wrong that the mushrooms are eaten. If there is nothing the
matter with you there is no reason to eat them. Until recent times,
the mushrooms were the only medicine the Indians had recourse
to in times of sickness. 'I heir medicinal value is by no means
merely magical, but chemical. According to the Indians, syphilis,
cancer, and epilepsy have been alleviated by their use; tumors
cured. They have empirically been found by the Indians to be particularly
effective for the treatment of stomach disorders and irritations
of the skin. The woman whose words we are listening to, like many,
discovered her shamanistic vocation when she was cured by the
mushrooms of an illness: after the death of her husband she broke
out all over with pimples; she was given the mushrooms to see
whether they would "help" her and the malady disappeared.
Since then she has eaten them on her own and given them to others.
If someone is sick, the medicine man is called. The treatment
he employs is chemical and spiritual. Unlike most shamanistic
methods, the Mazatec shaman actually gives medicine to his patients:
by means of the mushrooms he administers to them physiologically,
at the same time as he alters their consciousness. It is probably
for psychosomatic complaints and psychological troubles that the
liberation of spontaneous activity provoked by the mushrooms is
most remedial: given to the depressed, they awaken a catharsis
of the spirit; to those with problems, a vision of their existential
way. If he hasn't come to the conclusion that the illness is incurable,
the medicine man repeats the therapeutic sessions three times
at intervals. He also works over the sick, for his intoxicated
condition of intense, vibrant energy gives him a strength to heal
that he exercises by massage and suction.
His most important function, however, is to speak for the sick
one. The Mazatec shamans eat the mushrooms that liberate the fountains
of language to be able to speak beautifully and with eloquence
so that their words, spoken for the sick one and those present,
will arrive and be heard in the spirit world from which comes
benediction or grief. The function of the speaker, nevertheless,
is much more than simply to implore. The shaman has a conception
of poesis (4) in its original
sense as an action: words themselves are medicine. To enunciate
and give meaning to the events and situations of existence is
life giving in itself.
"The psychoanalyst listens, whereas the shaman speaks,"
points out Levi-Strauss:
When a transference is established, the patient puts words into
the mouth of the psychoanalyst by attributing to him alleged feelings
and intentions; in the incantation, on the contrary, the shaman
speaks for his patient. He questions her and puts into her mouth
answers that correspond to the interpretation of her condition.
A pre-requisite role-that of listener for the psychoanalyst and
of orator for the shaman-establishes a direct relationship with
the patient's conscious and an indirect relationship with his
unconscious. This is the function of the incantation proper. The
shaman provides the sick woman with a language by means
of which unexpressed and otherwise inexpressible psychic states
can be immediately expressed. And it is the transition to this
verbal expression-at the same time making it possible to undergo
in an ordered and intelligible form a real experience that would
otherwise be chaotic and inexpressible-which induces the release
of the physiological process, that is, the reorganization, in
a favorable direction, of the process to which the sick woman
is subjected. (5)
These remarks of the French anthropologist become particularly
relevant to Mazatec shamanistic practice when one considers that
the effect of the mushrooms, used to make one capable of curing,
is to inspire the shaman with language and transform him into
an oracle.
"That come all the saints, that come all the virgins,"
chants the medicine woman in her sing-song voice, invoking the
beneficent forces of the universe, calling to her the goddesses
of fertility, the virgins: fertile ones because they have not
been sowed and are fresh for the seed of men to beget children
in their wombs.
The Virgin of Conception and the Virgin of the Nativity. That
Christ come and the Holy Spirit. Fifty-three Saints. Fifty-three
Saintesses. That they sit down at her side, on her mat, on her
bed, to free her from sickness.
The wife of the man in whose house she was speaking was pregnant
and throughout the session of creation, from the midst of genesis,
her language as spontaneous as her being that has begun to vibrate,
she concerns herself with the emergence of life, with the birth
of an existence into that everyday social world that. her developing
discourse expresses:
With the baby that is going to come there is no suffering, says.
It's a matter of a moment, there isn't going to be any suffering,
says. From one moment to another it will fall into the world,
says. From one moment to another, we are going to save her from
her woe, says. That her innocent creature come without mishap,
says. Her elf. That is what it is called when it is still in the
womb of its mother. From one moment to another, that her innocent
creature, her elf come, says.
"We are going to search and question," she says, "untie
and disentangle." She is on a journey, for there is distanciation
and going there, somewhere, without her even moving from the spot
where she sits and speaks. Her consciousness is roaming throughout
existential space. Sibyl, seer, and oracle, she is on the track
of significance and the pulsation of her being is like the rhythm
of walking.
"Let us go searching for the path, the tracks of her feet,
the tracks of her nails. From the right side to the left side,
let us look." To arrive at the truth, to solve problems and
to act with wisdom, it is necessary to find the way in which to
go. Meaning is intentional. Possibilities are paths to be chosen
between. For the Indian woman, footprints are images of meaning,
traces of a going to and from, sedimented clues of significance
to be looked for from one side to the other and followed to where
they lead: indicators of directionality; signs of existence. The
hunt for meaning is a temporal one, carried into the past and
projected into the future; what happened? she inquires, what will
happen? leaving behind for what is ahead go the footprints between
departure and arrival: manifestations of human, existential ecstasis.
And the method of looking, from the right side to the left side,
is the articulation of now this intuition, fact, feeling or wish,
now that, the intention of speaking bringing to light meanings
whose associations and further elucidations are like the discovery
of a path where the contents to be uttered are tracks to be followed
into the unexplored, the unknown and unsaid into which she adventures
by language, the seeker of significance, the questioner of significance,
the articulator of significance: the significance of existence
that signifies with signs by the action of speaking the experience
of existence.
"Woman of medicines and curer, who walks with her appearance
and her soul," sings the woman, bending down to the ground
and straightening up, rocking back and forth as she chants, dividing
the truth in time to her words: emitter of signs. "She is
the woman of the remedy and the medicine. She is the woman who
speaks. The woman who puts everything together. Doctor woman.
Woman of words. Wise woman of problems."
She is not speaking, most of the time, for any particular person,
but for everyone: all who are afflicted, troubled, unhappy, puzzled
by the predicaments of their condition. Now, in the course of
her discourse, uttering realities, not hallucinations, talking
of existence in a communal world where the we is more frequent
than the I, she comes to a more general sickness and aggravation
than physical illness: the economic condition of poverty in which
her people live.
"Let us go to the cornfield searching for the tracks of the
feet, for her poorness and humility. That gold and silver come,"
she prays. "Why are we poor? Why are we humble in this town
of Huautla?" That is the paradox: why in the midst of such
great natural wealth as their fertile, plentiful mountains where
waterfalls cascade through the green foliage of leaves and ferns,
should they be miserable from poverty, she wants to know. The
daily diet of the Indians consists of black beans and tortillas
covered with red chili sauce; only infrequently, at festivals,
do they eat meat. White spots caused by malnutrition splotch their
red faces. Babies are often sick. It is wealth she pleads for
to solve the problem of want.
The mushrooms, which grow only during the season of torrential
rains, awaken the forces of creation and produce an experience
of spiritual abundance, of an astonishing, inexhaustible constitutionof forms that identifies them with fertility and makes them a
mediation, a means of communion, of communication between man
and the natural world of which they are the metaphysical flesh.
The theme of the shamaness, mother and grandmother, woman of fertility,
bending over as she chants and gathering the earth to her as if
she were collecting with her hands the harvest of her experience,
is that of giving birth, is that of growth. Agriculturalists,
they are people of close family interrelationships and many children:
the clusters of neolithic thatch-roofed houses on the mountain
peaks are of extended family groups. The woman's world is that
of the household, her concern is for her children and all the
children of her people.
"All the family, the babies and the children, that happiness
come to them, that they grow and mature without anything befalling
them. Free them from all classes of sickness that there are here
in the earth. Without complaint and with good will," she
says, "so will come well-being, will come gold. Then we will
have food. Our beans, our gourds, our coffee, that is what we
want. That come a good harvest. That come richness, that come
well-being for all of our children. All my shoots, my children,
my seeds," she sings.
But the world of her children is not to be her world, nor that
of their grandfathers. Their indigenous society is being transformed
by the forces of history. Until only recently, isolated from the
modern world, the Indians lived in their mountains as people lived
in the neolithic. There were only paths and they walked everywhere
they went. Trains of burros carried out the principal crop-coffee-to
the markets in the plain. Now roads have been built, blasted out
of rock and constructed along the edges of the mountains over
precipices! to connect the community with the society beyond.
The children are people of opposites: just as they speak two languages,
Mazatec and Spanish, they live between two times: the timeless,
cyclical time of recurrence of the People of the Deer and the
time of progress, change and development of modern Mexico. In
her discourse, no stereotyped rite or traditional ceremony with
prescribed words and actions, speaking of everything, of the ancient
and the modern, of what is happening to her people, the woman
of problems, peering into the future, recognizes the inevitable
process of transition, of disintegration and integration, that
confronts her children: the younger generation destined to live
the crisis and make the leap from the past into the future. For
them it is necessary to learn to read and to write and to speak
the language of this new world and in order to advance themselves,
to be educated and gain knowledge, contained in books, radically
different from the traditions of their own society whose language
is oral and unwritten, whose implements are the hoe, the axe,
and the machete.
Also a book is needed, says. Good book. Book of good reading in
Spanish, says. In Spanish. All your children, your creatures,
that their thought and their custom change, says. For me there
is no time. Without difficulty, let us go, says. With tenderness.
With freshness. With sweetness. With good will.
"Don't leave us in darkness or blind us," she begs the
origins of light, for in these supernatural modalities of consciousness
there are dangers on every hand of aberration and disturbance.
"Let us go along the good path. The path of the veins of
our blood. The path of the Master of the World. Let us go in a
path of happiness." The existential way, the conduct of one's
life, is an idea to which she returns again and again. The paths
she mentions are the moral, physical, mental, emotional qualities
typical of the experience of animated conscious activity from
the midst of which spring her words: goodness, vitality, reason,
transcendence, and joy. Seated on the ground in the darkness,
seeing with her eyes closed, her thought travels within along
the branching arteries of the bloodstream and without across the
fields of existence. There is a very definite physiological quality
about the mushroom experience which leads the Indians to say that
by a kind of visceral introspection they teach one the workings
of the organism: it is as if the system were projected before
one into a vision of the heart, the liver, lungs, genitals, and
stomach.
In the course of the medicine woman's discourse, it is understandable
that she should, from astonishment, from gratitude, from the knowledge
of experience, say something about the mushrooms that have provoked
her condition of inspiration. In a sense, to speak of "the
mushroom experience" is a reification as absurd as the anthropomorphization
of the mushrooms when it is said that they talk: the mushrooms
are merely the means, in interaction with the organism, the nervous
system, and the brain, of producing an experience grounded in
the ontological-existential possibilities of the human, irreducible
to the properties of a mushroom. The experience is psychological
and social. What is spoken of by the shamaness is her communal
world; even the visions of her imagination must have their origin
in the context of her existence and the myths of her culture.
The subject of another society will have other visions and express
a different content in his discourse. It would seem probable,
however, that apart from emotional similarities, colored illuminations,
and the purely abstract patterns of a universal conscious activity,
between the experiences of individuals with differing social inherences,
the common characteristic would be discourse, for judging by their
effect the chemical constituents of the mushrooms have some connection
with the linguistic centers of the brain. "So says the teacher
of words," says the woman, "so says the teacher of matters."
It is paradoxical that the rediscovery of such chemicals should
have related their effects to madness and pejoratively called
them drugs, when the shamans who used them spoke of them as medicines
and said from their experience that the metamorphosis they produced
put one into communication with the spirit. It is precisely the
value of studying the use in so-called primitive societies of
such chemicals that the way be found beyond the superficial to
a more essential understanding of phenomena which we, with our
limited conception of the rational, have too quickly, perhaps
mistakenly, termed irrational, instead of comprehending that such
experiences are revelations of a primordial existential activity,
of "a power of signification, a birth of sense or a savage
sense." (6) What are we confronted
with by the shamanistic discourse of the mushroom eaters? A modality
of reason in which the logos of existence enunciates itself, or
by the delirium and incoherence of derangement?
"They are doing nothing but talk," says the medicine
woman, "those who say that these matters are matters of the
past. They are doing nothing but talk, the people who call them
crazy mushrooms." They claim to have knowledge of what they
do not have any experience of; consequently their contentions
are nonsense: nothing but expressions of the conventionality the
mushrooms explode by their disclosure of the extraordinary; mere
chatter if it weren't for the fact that the omnipotent They forms
the force of repression which, by legislation and the implementation
of authority, has come to denominate infractions of the law and
the code of health, the means of liberation that once were called
medicines. In a time of pills and shots, of scientific medicine,
the wise woman is saying, the use of the mushrooms is not an anachronistic
and obsolete vestige of magical practices: their power to awaken
consciousness and cure existential ills is not any the less relevant
now than it was in the past. She insists that it is ignorance
of our dimension of mystery, of the wellsprings of meaning, to
think that their effect is insanity.
"Good and happiness," she says, naming the emotions
of her activized, perceptualized being. "They are not crazy
mushrooms. They are a remedy, says. A remedy for decent people.
For the foreigners," she says, speaking of us, wayfarers
from advanced industrial society, who had begun to arrive in the
high plazas of her people to experiment with the psychedelic mushrooms
that grew in the mountains of the Mazatecs. She has an inkling
of the truth, that what we look for is a cure of our alienations,
to be put back in touch, by violent means if necessary, with that
original, creative self that has been alienated from us by our
middle-class families, education, and corporate world of employment.
"There in their land, it is taken account of, that there
is something in these mushrooms, that they are good, of use,"
she says. "The doctor that is here in our earth. The plant
that grows in this place. With this we are going to put together,
we are going to alleviate ourselves. It is our remedy. He that
suffers from pain and illness, with this it is possible to alleviate
him. They aren't called mushrooms. They are called prayer. They
are called well-being. They are called wisdom. They are there
with the Virgin, Our Mother, the Nativity." The Indians do
not call the mushrooms of light mushrooms, they call them the
holy ones. For the shamaness, the experience they produce is synonymous
with language, with communication, on behalf of her people, with
the supernatural forces of the universe; with plenitude and joyfulness;
with perception, insight, and knowledge. It is as if one were
born again; therefore their patroness is the Goddess of Birth,
the Goddess of Creation.
With prayers we will get rid of it all. With the prayers of the
ancients. We will clean ourselves, we will purify ourselves with
clear water, we will wash our intestines where they are infected.
That sicknesses of the body be gotten rid of. Sicknesses of the
atmosphere. Bad air. That they be gotten rid of, that they be
removed. That the wind carry them away. For this is the doctor.
For this is the plant. For this is the sorcerer of the light of
day. For this is the remedy. For this is the medicine woman, the
woman doctor who resolves all classes of problems in order to
rid us of them with her prayers. We are going with well-being,
without difficulty, to implore, to beg, to supplicate. Well being
for all the babies and the creatures. We are going to beg, to
implore for them, to beseech for their well-being and their studies,
that they live, that they grow, that they sprout. That freshness
come, tenderness, shoots, joy. That we be blessed, all of us.
She goes on talking and talking, non-stop; there are lulls when
her voice slows down, fades out almost to a whisper; then come
rushes of inspiration, moments of intense speech; she yawns great
yawns, laughs with jubilation, claps her hands in time to her
interminable singsong; but after the setting out, the heights
of ecstasy are reached, the intoxication begins to ebb away, and
she sounds the theme of going back to normal, everyday conscious
existence again after this excursion into the beyond, of rejoining
the ego she has transcended:
We are going to return without mishap, along a fresh path, a good
path, a path of good air; in a path through the cornfield, in
a path through the stubble, without complaint or any difficulty,
we return without mishap. Already the cock has begun to crow.
Rich cock that reminds us that we live in this life.
The day that dawns is that of a new world in which there is no
longer any need to walk to where you go. "With tenderness
and freshness, let us go in a plane, in a machine, in a car. Let
us go from one side to another, searching for the tracks of the
fists, the tracks of the feet, the tracks of the nails."
It seemed that she had been speaking for eight hours. The seconds
of time were expanded, not from boredom, but from the intensity
of the lived experience. In terms of the temporality of clocks,
she had only been speaking for four hours when she concluded with
a vision of the transcendence that had become immanent and had
now withdrawn from her. "There is the flesh of God. There
is the flesh of Jesus Christ. There with the Virgin." The
most frequently repeated words of the woman are freshness and
tenderness; those of the shaman, whose discourse we will now consider,
are fear and terror: what one might call the emotional poles of
these experiences. There is an illness that the Mazatecs speak
of that they name fright. We say traumatism. They walk through
their mountains along their arduous paths on the different levels
of being, climbing and descending, in the sunlight and through
the clouds; all around there are grottos and abysses, mysterious
groves, places where live the laa, the little people, mischievous
dwarfs and gnomes. Rivers and wells are inhabited by spirits with
powers of enchantment. At night in these altitudes, winds whirl
up from the depths, rush out of the distance like monsters, and
pass, tearing everything in their path with their fierce claws.
Phantoms appear in the mists. There are persons with the evil
eye. Existence in the world and with others is treacherous, perilous:
unexpectedly something may happen to you and that event, unless
it is exorcised, can mark you for life.
The Indians say following the beliefs of their ancestors, the
Siberians, that the soul is sometimes frightened from one, the
spirit goes, you are alienated from yourself or possessed by another:
you lose yourself. It is for this neurosis that the shamans, the
questioners of enigmas, are the great doctors and the mushrooms
the medicine. It is the task of the Mazatec shaman to look for
the extravagated spirit, find it, bring it back, and reintegrate
the personality of the sick one. If necessary, he pays the powers
that have appropriated the spirit by burying cacao, beans of exchange,
wrapped in the bark cloth of offerings, at the place of fright
which he has divined by vision. The mushrooms, the shamans say,
show: you see, in the sense that you realize, it is disclosed
to you. "Bring her spirit, her soul," implores the medicine
woman to whom we have just been listening. "Let her spirit
come back from where it got lost, from where it stayed, from where
it was left behind, from wherever it is that her spirit is wandering
lost."
With just such a traumatic experience, began the shamanistic vocation
of the man we will now study. In his late fifties, he has been
eating the mushrooms for nine years. Why did he begin? "I
began to eat them because I was sick," he said when asked.(7)
No matter how much the doctors treated me, I didn't get well.
I went to the Latin American Hospital. I went to Cordoba as well.
I went to Mexico. I went to Tehuacan and wasn't alleviated. Only
with the mushrooms was I cured. I had to eat the mushrooms three
times and the man from San Lucas, who gave them to me, proposed
his work as a medicine man to me, telling me: now you are going
to receive my study. I asked him why he thought I was going to
receive it when I didn't want to learn anything about his wisdom,
I only wanted to get better and be cured of my illness. Then he
answered me: now it is no longer you who command. It is already
the middle of the night. I am going to leave you a table with
ground tobacco on it and a cross underneath it so that you learn
this work. Tell me which of these things you choose and like the
best of all, he said, when everything was ready. Which of these
works do you want? I answered that I didn't want what he offered
me. Here you don't give the orders, he replied; I am he who is
going to say whether you receive this work or not because I am
he who is going to give you your diploma in the presence of God.
Then I heard the voice of my father. He had been dead for forty-three
years when he spoke to me the first time that I ate the mushrooms:
This work that is being given to you, he said, I am he who tells
you to accept it. Whether you can see me or not, I don't know.
I couldn't imagine from where this voice came that was speaking
to me. Then it was that the shaman of San Lucas told me that the
voice I was hearing was that of my father. The sickness from which
I was suffering was alleviated by eating the mushrooms. So I told
the old man, I am disposed to receive what it is that you offer
me, but I want to learn everything. Then it was that he taught
me how to suck through space with a hollow tube of cane. To suck
through space means that you who are seated there, I can draw
the sickness out of you by suction from a distance.
What had begun as a physical illness, appendicitis, became a traumatic
neurosis. The doctors wheeled him into an operating room-he who
had never been in a hospital in his life-and suffocated him with
an ether mask. And he gave up the ghost while they cut the appendix
out of him. When he came to, he lay frightened and depressed,
without any will to live, he'd had enough. Instead of recuperating,
he lay like a dead man with his eyes wide open, not saying anything
to anyone, what was the use, his life had been a failure, he had
never become the important man he had aspired all his life to
be, now it was too late; his life was over and he had done nothing
that his children might remember with respect and awe. The doctors
couldn't help him because there was nothing wrong with him physically;
contrary to what he believed, he had survived the operation; the
slash into his stomach had been sewn up and had healed; nevertheless,
he remained apathetic and unresponsive, for he had been terrified
by death and his spirit had flown away like a bird or a fleet-footed
deer. He needed someone to go out and hunt it for him, to bring
back his spirit and resuscitate him.
The medicine man, from the nearby village of San Lucas, whom he
called to him when the modern doctors failed to cure him of the
strange malady he suffered from, was renowned throughout the mountains
as a great shaman, a diviner of destiny. The short, slight, wizened
old man was 105 years old. He gave to his patient, who was suffering
from depression, the mushrooms of vitality, and the therapy worked.
He vividly relived the operation in his imagination. According
to him, the mushrooms cut him open, arranged his insides, and
sewed him up again. One of the reasons he hadn't recovered was
his conviction that materialistic medicine was incapable of really
curing since it was divorced from all cooperation with the spirits
and dependence upon the supernatural.
In his imagination, the mushrooms performed another surgical intervention
and corrected the mistakes of the profane doctor which he considered
responsible for his lingering lethargy. He went through the whole
process in his mind. It was as if he were operating upon himself,
undoing what had been done to him, and doing it over again himself.
The trauma was exorcised. By intensely envisioning with a heightened,
expanded consciousness what had happened to him under anesthesia,
he assumed at last the frightening event he had previously been
unable to integrate into his experience. His physiological cure
was completed psychologically; he was finally healed by virtue
of the assimilative, creative powers of the imagination. The dead
man came back to life, he wanted to live because he felt once
again that he was alive and had the force to go on living: once
exhausted and despondent, he was now invigorated and rejuvenated.
The cure is successful because not only is his spirit awakened,
but he is offered another future: a new profession that is a compensation
for his humble one as a storekeeper. The ancient wise man, on
the brink of death, wants to transmit to the man in his prime,
his knowledge. What he encounters is resistance. The other doesn't
want to assume the vocation of shaman, he only wants to be cured,
without realizing that the cure is inseparable from the acceptance
of the vocation which will release him from the repression of
his creative forces that has caused the neurosis with which he
is afflicted. It is no longer you who command, he is told, for
his impulse to die is stronger than his desire to live; therefore
the counterforce, if it is to be effective, cannot be his: it
must be the will of the other transferred to him. You are too
far gone to have any say in the matter, the medicine man tells
him, it is already the middle of the night. By negating the will
of his patient, he arouses it and prepares him to accept what
is being suggested to him.
He shows him the table, the tobacco, the cross: signs of the shaman's
work. The table is an altar at which to officiate.. When the Mazatecs
eat the mushrooms they speak of the sessions as masses. The shaman,
even though a secular figure unordained by the Church, assumes
a sacerdotal role as the leader of these ceremonies. In a similar
way, for the Indians each father of a family is the religious
priest of his household. The tobacco, San Pedro, is believed to
have powerful magical and remedial values. The cross indicates
a crossing of the ways, an intersection of existential paths,
a change, as well as being the religious symbol of crucifixion
and resurrection. The shaman tells him to choose. Still the man
refuses. You don't give the orders, says the medicine man intent
upon evoking the patient's other self in order to bring him back
to life, the I who is another. Whether you want to or not, you
are going to receive your diploma, he says, to incite him with
the prospect of award and reputation. Living in an oral culture
without writing, where the acquisition of skills is traditional,
handed down from father to son, mother to daughters rather than
contained in books, for the Mazatecs wisdom is gained during the
experiences produced by the mushrooms: they are experiences of
vision and communication that impart knowledge.
Now he is spoken to. The inner voice is suddenly audible. He hears
the call. He is told to accept the vocation of medicine man that
he has hitherto adamantly. refused. He cannot recognize this voice
as his own, it must be another's; and the shaman, intent upon
giving him a new destiny, sure of the talent he has divined, interprets
for him from what region of himself springs the command he has
heard. It is your father who is telling you to accept this work.
A characteristic of such transcendental experiences is that family
relationships, in the nexus of which personality is formed, become
present to one with intense vividness. His superego, in conjunction
with the liberation of his vitality, has spoken to him and his
resistance is liquidated; he decides to live and accepts the new
vocation around which his personality is reintegrated: he becomes
an adept of the dimensions of consciousness where live the spirits;
a speaker of mighty words.
In his house, we entered a room with bare concrete walls and a
high roof of corrugated iron. His wife, wrapped in shawls, was
sitting on a mat. His children were there; his family had assembled
to eat the mushrooms with their father; one or two were given
to the children of ten and twelve. The window was closed and with
the door shut, the room was sealed off from the outside world;
nobody would be permitted to leave until the effect of what they
had eaten had passed away as a precaution against the peril of
derangement. He was a short, burly man, dressed in a reefer jacket
over a tee shirt, old brown bell-bottomed pants down to his short
feet, an empty cartridge belt around his waist. In daily life,
he is the owner of a little store stocked meagerly with canned
goods, boxes of crackers, beer, soda, candy, bread, and soap.
He sits behind the counter throughout the day looking out upon
the muddy street of the town where dogs prowl in the garbage between
the legs of the passers-by. From time to time he pours out a shot
glass of cane liquor for a customer. He himself neither smokes
nor drinks. He is a hunter in whom the instincts of his people
survive from the time when they were chasers of game as well as
agriculturalists: inhabitants of the Land of the Deer.
Now it is night-time and he prepares to exercise his shamanistic
function. His great-grandfather was one of the counselors of
the town and a medicine man. With the advent of modern medicine
and the invasion of the foreigners in search of mushrooms, the
shamanistic customs of the Mazatecs have almost completely vanished.
He himself no longer believes many of the beliefs of his ancestors,
but as one of the last oral poets of his people, he consciously
keeps alive their traditions. "How good it is," he says,
"to talk as the ancients did." He hardly speaks Spanish
and is fluent only in his native language. Spreading out the mushrooms
in front of him, he selected and handed a bunch of them to each
of those present after blessing them in the smoke of the copal.
Once they had been eaten, the lights were extinguished and everyone
sat in silence. Then he began to speak, seated in a chair from
which he got up to dance about, whirling and scuffling as he spoke
in the darkness. It was pouring, the rain thundering on the roof
of corrugated iron. There were claps of thunder. Flashes of lightning
at the window.
Christ, Our Lord, illuminate me with the light of day, illuminate
my mind. Christ, Our Lord, don't leave me in darkness or blind
me, you who know how to give the light of day, you who illuminate
the night and give the light. So did the Holy Trinity that made
and put together the world of Christ, Our Lord, illuminated the
Moon, says; illuminated the Big Star, says; illuminated the Cross
Star, says; illuminated the Hook Star, says; illuminated the Sandal,
says; illuminated the Horse, says.
One who eats the mushroom sinks into somnolence during the transition
from one modality of consciousness to another, into a deep absorption,
a reverie. Gradually colors begin to well up behind closed eyes.
Consciousness becomes consciousness of irradiations and effulgences,
of a flux of light patterns forming and unforming, of electric
currents beaming forth from within the brain. At this initial
moment of awakenment, experiencing the dawn of light in the midst
of the night, the shaman evokes the illumination of the constellations
at the genesis of the world. Mythopoetical descriptions of the
creation of the world are constant themes of these creative experiences.
From the beginning, the vision his words create is cosmological.
Subjective phenomena are given correlates in the elemental, natural
world. One is not inside, but outside.
"This old hawk. This white hawk that Saint John the Evangelist
holds. That whistles in the dawn. Whistles in the light of day.
Whistles over the water." Wings spread wide, the annunciatory
bird, image of ascent, circles in the sky of the morning, drifting
on the wind of the spirit above the primordial terrain the speaker
has begun to explore and delineate, his breathing, his inhalations
and exhalations, as amplified as his expanded being: an explanation
for the sudden expulsion of air, the whooshes and high-pitched,
eerie whistles of the shamans on their transcendental flights
into the beyond.
"Straight path, says. Path of the dawn, says. Path of the
light of day, says." Through the fields of being there are
many directions in which to go, existences are different ways
to live life. The idea of paths, that appears so frequently in
the shamanistic discourses of the Mazatecs comes from the fact
that these originary experiences are creative of intentions. To
be in movement, going along a path, is an expressive vision of
the ecstatic condition. The path the speaker is following is thatwhich leads directly to his destination, to the accomplishment
of his purpose; the path of the beginning disclosed by the rising
sun at the time of setting out; the path of truth, of clarity,
of that revealed in its being there by the light of day.
"Where the tenderness of San Francisco Huehuetlan is, says.
Where the Holy Virgin of San Lucas is, says. Where San Francisco
Tecoatl is, says. San Geronimo Tecoatl, says." He begins
to name the towns of his mountainous environment, to call the
landscape into being by language and transform the real into signs.
It is no imaginary world of fantasy he is creating, as those one
has become accustomed to hearing of from the accounts of dreamers
under the effects of such psychoactive chemicals, fabled lands
of nostalgia, palaces, and jeweled perspectives, but the real
world in which he lives and works transfigured by his visionary
journey and its linguistic expression into a surreal realm where
the physical and the mental fuse to produce the glow of an enigmatic
significance.
"I am he who speaks with the father mountain. I am he who
speaks with danger, I am going to sweep in the mountains of fear,
in the mountains of nerves." The other I announces itself,
the transcendental ego, the I of the voice, the I of force in
communication with force. His existence intensified, he posits
himself by his assertions: I am he who. The simultaneous reference
to himself in the first and third person as subject and object
indicates the impersonal personality of his utterances, uttered
by him and by the phenomena themselves that express themselves
through him. Arrogantly he affirms his shamanistic function as
the mediator between man and the powers that determine his fate;
he is the one who converses with all connoted by father: power,
authority, and origin. He is the one who is on familiar terms
with the sources of fright. The conception of existence manifested
by his words is one of peril, anxiety, and terror: experiences
of which he has become knowledgeable by virtue of his own traumas,
his life as a hunter, and his adventures into the weird, secret
regions of the psyche. Where there is foreboding and trembling,
the medicine man tranquilizes by exorcising the causes of disturbance.
His work lies among the nerves, not in the underworld, but on
the heights, places of as much anguish as the depths, where the
elation of elevation is accompanied by the fear of falling into
the void of chasms. This is perhaps why, throughout Central and
South America, the conception of illness in the jungle areas is
the paranoic one of witchcraft, whereas in the mountainous areas
is prevalent the vertiginous idea of fright and loss of self.
(8)
"There in Bell Mountain, says. There is the dirty fright.
There is the garbage, says. There is the claw, says. There is
the terror, says. Where the day is, says. Where the clown is,
says. The Lord Clown, says." In vision he sees, throughout
his being he senses a repulsive place of filth and contamination,
a stinking site of pustulence, of rottenness and nausea, where
lies a claw that might have dealt with cruel viciousness an infected
wound. His words, emanating evil, seem to insinuate some horrible
deed that left an aftermath of guilt. The sinister hovers in the
air. Where? Where the clown is, he says. Concern and carefreeness
are linked together, dread and laughter, from which we catch an
insight into the meaning of the matter: during such experiences
of liberation, there are likely to be encountered disturbances
of consciousness by conscience, when reflection comes into conflict
with spontaneity, guilt with innocence. It is as if the self drew
back in fright from its ebullience, from its forgetfulness, unable
to endure its carefreeness for long without anxiety. But the exuberant
welling up of forms is ceaseless, in this flux, this fountain,
this energetic springing forth of life, the past is left behind
for the future, all is renewed. Beyond good and evil is the playfulness
of the creative spirit incarnated by the clown, character of fortuity,
the laughing one with his gay science.
Thirteen superior whirlwinds. Thirteen whirlwinds of the atmosphere.
Thirteen clowns, says. Thirteen personalities, says. Thirteen
white lights, says. Thirteen mountains of points, says. Thirteen
old hawks, says. Thirteen white hawks, says. Thirteen personalities,
says. Thirteen mountains, says. Thirteen clowns, says. Thirteen
peaks, says. Thirteen stars of the morning.
The enumeration, by what seems to be a process of free association,
of whirlwinds, clowns, personalities, lights, mountains, birds,
and stars, is an expression of his ecstatic inventiveness. Whether
he says what he sees or sees what he says, his activized consciousness
is a whirlwind of imaginings and colored lights. Why always thirteen?
Because twelve is many, but an even number, whereas thirteen is
too many, an exaggeration, and signifies a multitude. What's more,
he probably likes the sound of the word thirteen.
The mushroom session of language creates language, creates the
words for phenomena without name. The white lights that sometimes
appear in the sky at night, nobody knows what to call them. The
mind activated by the mushrooms, from out of the center of the
mystery, from the profoundest semantic sources of the human, invents
a word to designate them by. The ancient wise men, to describe
the kaleidoscopic illuminations of their shamanistic nights, drew
an analogy between the inside and the outside and formed a word
that related the spectrum colors created by the sunshine in the
spray of waterfalls and the mists of the morning to their conscious
experiences of ecstatic enlightenment: these are the whirlwinds
he speaks of, gyrating configurations of iridescent lights that
appear to him as he speaks, turned round and round and round himself
by the turbulent winds of the spirit. Clowns are frequent personae
of his discourse, the impish mushrooms come to life, embodiments
of merriment, tumbling figments of the spontaneous performing
incredible acrobatic feats, funny imaginations of joyfulness.
Personalities are more serious. Others. Society. The faces of
the people he knows appear to him, then disappear to be succeeded
by the apparition of more people. The plurality of incarnated
consciousnesses becomes present to him. Multitude. His is an elemental
world where cruel, predatory birds wheel in the sky; where the
star of the morning shines in the firmament. Outside the dark
room where he is speaking, the mountains stand all around in the
night.
I am he who speaks with the dangerous mountain, says. I am he
who speaks with the Mountain of Ridges, says. I am he who speaks
with the Father, says. I am he who speaks with the Mother, says.
Where plays the spirit of the day, says. Cold Water Mountain,
says. Big River Mountain, says. Mountain of Harvest and Richness,
says. Where the terror of the day is, says. Where is the way of
the dawn, the way of the day, says.
It is significant that though the psychedelic experience produced
by the mushrooms is of heightened perceptivity, the I say is of
privileged importance to the I see. The utter darkness of the
room, sealed off from the outside, makes any direct perception
of the world impossible: the condition of interiorization for
its visionary rebirth in images. In such darkness, to open the
eyes is the same as leaving them closed. The blackness is alive
with impalpable designs in the miraculous air. Even the appearances
of the other presences, out of modesty, are protected by the obscurity
from the too penetrating, revealing gaze of transcendental perception.
Freed from the factuality of the given, the constitutive activity
of consciousness produces visions. It is this aspect of such experiences,
to the exclusion of all others, that has led them to be called
hallucinogenic, without any attempt having been made to distinguish
fantasy from intuition. The Mazatec shaman, however, instead of
keeping silent and dreaming, as one would expect him to do if
the experience were merely imaginative, talks. There are times
when in the midst of his ecstasy, whistling and whirling about,
he exclaims: "Look at how beautiful we're seeing!"-astonished
by the illuminations and patterns he is perceiving-"Look
at how beautiful we're seeing. Look at how many good things of
God there are. What beautiful colors I see." Nevertheless,
the I am the one who speaks enunciates an action and a
function, weighted with an importance and efficacity which I
am the one who sees, hardly more than an interjection of amazement,
totally lacks.
"I am he who speaks. I am he who speaks. I am he who speaks
with the mountains, with the largest mountains. Speaks with the
mountains, says. Speaks with the stones, says. Speaks with the
atmosphere, says. Speaks with the spirit of the day." For
the Mazatecs, the mountains are where the powers are, their summits,
their ranges, radiating with electricity in the night, their peaks
and their edges oscillating on the horizons of lightning. To speak
with is to be in contact with, in communication with, in conversation
with the animate spirit of the inanimate, with the material and
the immaterial. To speak with is to be spoken to. By a conversion
of his being, the shaman has become a transmitter and receiver
of messages.
"I am the dry lightning, says. I am the lightning of the
comet, says. I am the dangerous lightning, says. I am the big
lightning, says. I am the lightning of rocky places, says. I am
the light of the dawn, the light of day, says." He identifies
himself with the elements, with the crackle of electricity; superhuman
and elemental himself, his words flash from him like lightning.
Sparks fly between the synaptic connections of the nerves. He
is illuminated with light. He is luminous. He is force, light,
and rhythmic, dynamic speech.
The world created by the woman's words, articulating her experience,
was a feminine, maternal, domestic one; the masculine discourse
of the shaman evokes the natural, ontological world. "She
is beseeching for you, this poor and humble woman," said
the to the exclusion of all others, that has led them to be called
hallucinogenic, without any attempt having been made to distinguish
fantasy from intuition. The Mazatec shaman, however, instead of
keeping silent and dreaming, as one would expect him to do if
the experience were merely imaginative, talks. There are times
when in the midst of his ecstasy, whistling and whirling about,
he exclaims: "Look at how beautiful we're seeing!"-astonished
by the illuminations and patterns he is perceiving-"Look
at how beautiful we're seeing. Look at how many good things of
God there are. What beautiful colors I see." Nevertheless,
the I am the one who speaks enunciates an action and a function,
weighted with an importance and efficacity which I am the one
who sees, hardly more than an interjection of amazement, totally
lacks.
"I am he who speaks. I am he who speaks. I am he who speaks
with the mountains, with the largest mountains. Speaks with the
mountains, says. Speaks with the stones, says. Speaks with the
atmosphere, says. Speaks with the spirit of the day." For
the Mazatecs, the mountains are where the powers are, their summits,
their ranges, radiating with electricity in the night, their peaks
and their edges oscillating on the horizons of lightning. To speak
with is to be in contact with, in communication with, in conversation
with the animate spirit of the inanimate, with the material and
the immaterial. To speak with is to be spoken to. By a conversion
of his being, the shaman has become a transmitter and receiver
of messages.
"I am the dry lightning, says. I am the lightning of the
comet, says. I am the dangerous lightning, says. J am the big
lightning, says. I am the lightning of rocky places, says. I am
the light of the dawn, the light of day, says." He identifies
himself with the elements, with the crackle of electricity; superhuman
and elemental himself, his words flash from him like lightning.
Sparks fly between the synaptic connections of the nerves. He
is illuminated with light. He is luminous. He is force, light,
and rhythmic, dynamic speech.
The world created by the woman's words, articulating her experience,
was a feminine, maternal, domestic one; the masculine discourse
of the shaman evokes the natural, ontological world. "She
is beseeching for you, this poor and humble woman," said
the shamaness. "Woman of huipile, says. Simple woman, says.
Woman who doesn't have anything, says." The man, conscious
of his virility, announces: "I am he who lightnings forth."
"Where the dirty gulch is, says. Where the dangerous gulch
is, says. Where the big gulch is, says. Where the fear and the
terror are, says. Where runs the muddy water, says. Where runs
the cold water, says." It is a landscape of ravines, mountains,
and streams, he charts with his words, of physical qualities with
emotional values: a terrain of being in its variations. He evokes
the creation, the genesis of all things out of the times of mist;
he praises, marvels, wonders at the world. "God the Holy
Spirit, as he made and put together the world. Made great lakes.
Made mountains. Look at the light of day. Look at how many animals.
Look at the dawn. Look at space. Great earths. Earth of God the
Holy Spirit." He whistles. The soul was originally conceived
of as breath. The wind, he says, is passing through the trees
of the forest. His spirit goes flying from place to place throughout
the territory of his existence, situating the various locations
of the world by naming them, calling them into being by visiting
them with his words: where is, he says, where is, to create the
geography of his reality. I am, where is. He unfolds the extensions
of space around himself, points out and makes present as if he
were there himself. "Where the blood of Christ is, says.
Where the blood of the diviner is, says. Where the terror and
the fright of day are, says. Where the superior lake is, says.
Where the big lake is, says. There where large birds fly, says.
Where fly dangerous birds." The world is not only paradisiacal
in its being there, but frightening, with perils lurking everywhere.
"Mountains of great whirlwinds. Where is the fountain of
terror. Where is the fountain of fright." And the different
places are inhabited by presences, by indwelling spirits, the
gnomes, the little people. "Gnome of Cold Water, says. Gnome
of Clear Water, says. Gnome of Big River, says. Big Gnome. Gnome
of Burned Mountain. Gnome of the spirit of the day. Gnome of Tlocalco
Mountain. Gnome of the Marking Post. White Gnome. Delicate Gnome."
The shaman, says Alfred Metraux, is "an individual who, in
the interest of the community, sustains by profession an intermittent
commerce with the spirits or is possessed by them." (9)
According to the classical conception, derived from the ecstatic
visionaries of Siberia, the shaman is a person who, by a change
of his everyday consciousness, enters the metaphysical realms
of the transcendental in order to parley with the supernatural
powers and gain an understanding of the hidden reasons of events,
of sickness and all manner of difficulty. The Mazatec medicine
men are therefore shamans in every sense of the word: their means
of inspiration, of opening the circuits of communication between
themselves, others, the world, and the spirits, are the mushrooms
that disclose, by their psychoactive power, another modality of
conscious activity than the ordinary one. The mere eating of the
mushrooms, however, does not make a shaman. The Indians recognize
that it is not to everyone that they speak; instead there are
some who have a longing for awakenment, a disposition for exploring
the surrealistic dimensions of existence, a poet's need to express
themselves in a higher language than the average language of everyday
life: for them in a very particular sense the mushrooms are the
medicine of their genius. Nonetheless, there is a very definite
idea among the Mazatecs of what the medicine man does, and since
the mushrooms are his means of converting himself into the shamanistic
condition, the essential characteristics of this particular variety
of psychedelic experience must be manifested by his activities.
"I am he who puts together," says the medicine man to
define his shamanistic function:
he who speaks, he who searches, says. I am he who looks for the
spirit of the day, says. I search where there is fright and terror.
I am he who fixes, he who cures the person that is sick. Herbal
medicine. Remedy of the spirit. Remedy of the atmosphere of the
day, says. I am he who resolves all, says. Truly you are man enough
to resolve the truth. You are he who puts together and resolves.
You are he who puts together the personality. You are he who speaks
with the light of day. You are he who speaks with terror.
It is immediately obvious that a discrepancy exists between the
Indian conception of the mushrooms' effect and the ideas of modern
psychology: whereas in experimental research reports they are
said to produce depersonalization, schizophrenia, and derangement,
the Mazatec shaman, inspired by them, considers himself endowed
with the power of bringing together what is separated: he can
heal the divided personality by releasing the springs of existence
from repression to reveal the ecstatic life of the integral self;
and from disparate clues, by the sudden synthesis of intuition,
realize the solution to problems. The words with which he states
what his work is indicate a creative activity neither outside
of the realm of reason or out of contact with reality. The center
of convergent message fields, sensitive to the meaning of all
around him, he expresses and communicates, in direct contact with
others through speech, an articulator of the unsaid who liberates
by language and makes understood. His intuitions penetrate appearances
to the essence of matters. Reality reveals itself through him
in words as if it had found a voice to utter itself. The shaman
is a signifier in pursuit of significance, intent upon bringing
forth the hidden, the obscure into the light of day, the lucid
one, intrepid enough to realize that the greatest secrets lie
in regions of danger. He is the doctor, not only of the body,
but of the self, the one who inquires into the origins of trauma,
the interrogator of the familiar and mysterious. It is indeed
as if that which he has eaten, by virtue of the possibilities
it discovers to him, were of the spirit, for perception becomes
more acute, speech more fluent, and the consciousness of significance
is quickened. The mushrooms are a remedy to which one has recourse
in order to resolve perplexities because the experience is creative
of intentions. The way forth from the problematic is conceived
of, the meaning of resolved. The shaman, he is the one in communication
with the light and with the darkness, who knows of anxiety and
how to dispel it: the man of truth, psychologist of the troubled
soul.
Where is the fear, says. Where is the terror, says. Where stayed
the spirit of this child, says. I have to search for it, says.
I have to locate it, says. I have to detain it, says. I have to
grab it, says. I have to call it, says. I have to whistle for
it in the midst of terror, says. I have to whistle for it through
the cumulus clouds. I have to whistle for it with the spirit of
the day.
Once more there appears the notion of alienation, the malady of
fright, the loss of the self. The task of the shaman, hunter of
extravagated spirits, is to reassociate the disassociated. He
explains his method himself in these words:
Under the effect of the mushrooms, the lost spirit is whistled
for through space for the spirit is alienated, but by means of
the mushrooms one can call for it with a whistle. If the person
is frightened, the mushrooms know where his spirit is. They are
the ones who indicate and teach where the spirit is. Thereby one
can speak to it. The sick person then sees the place where his
spirit stayed. He feels as if he were tied in that place. The
spirit is like a trapped butterfly. When it is whistled for it
arrives where one is calling it. When the spirit arrives in the
person, the sick one sighs and afterwards is cleaned.
It becomes evident from the words used to describe the condition
of fright-the spirit is said to have been left behind, to have
stayed somewhere, to be tied up, and as we will see later, to
be imprisoned-that just as in the etiology of the neuroses, the
sickness is a fixation upon a traumatic past event which the individual
is incapable of transcending and from which he must be liberated
to be cured. It is not by chance that the mushrooms, which cause
a flight of the spirit, should be considered the means of chasing
what has flown away. The shaman goes in search; by empathic imagination,
sometimes even by dialogue with the disturbed one, he gains an
insight into the reasons for the state of shock, which allows
him to make his invocations relevant to the individual case. The
patient, by the mnemonic power of the mushrooms, freed from inhibitions
and repressions, recalls the traumatic event, surmounts the repetition
syndrome that perpetuates it by virtue of the ecstatic spontaneity
that has been released from him, suffers a catharsis, and is brought
back to life, integrated again.
Another method of regaining the lost spirit, used as well as invocation,
is to barter for it. Merchants, the Mazatecs conceive of all transactions
in terms of commerce, of trading one value for another. Throughout
his discourse, the shamans a storekeeper in daily life, dreams
of money, of richness, of freedom from poverty. "Father Bank.
Big Bank. Where the light of day is. Cordoba. Orizaba." He
names the cities where the merchants of Huautla sell their principal
commercial crop-coffee-in the market. "Where the Superior
Bank is, says. Where the Big Bank is, says. Where the Good Bank
is, says. Where there is money of gold, says. Where there is money
of silver, says. Where there are big notes, says. Where the bank
of gold is, says. Where the bank of well-being is, says."
It is not surprising that among such mercantile people it should
be considered possible to buy back the lost spirit, to retrieve
it in exchange for another value.
"Where the fright of the spirit is. Going to pay for it to
the spirit. Going to pay the day. Going to pay the mountains.
Going to pay the corners." The shaman becomes a transcendental
bargainer. He is told by the supernatural powers how much they
demand as a ransom for the spirit they have expropriated, then
he undertakes to transact the deal. He explains it himself in
this way:
Cacao is used to pay the mountain and to pay for the life of the
sick one. The Lord of the Mountain asks for a chicken. This is
an important matter because it is the Masters of the Mountains
who speak. That is the belief of the ancients. The chicken is
the one who has to carry the cacao. Loaded with cacao it has to
go and leave the offering in the mountain. Once it is on the mountain,
seeing it loaded no one bothers to catch it because already it
belongs to the Masters of the Mountain where it is lost forever.
The cacao that it carries is money for the Master of the Mountain.
The bark paper is used to wrap the bundle and the parrot feather
that goes with it. The signification of the parrot feather is
that it is as if the parrot himself arrived on the mountain. It
is he who arrives announcing with his songs the arrival of the
chicken loaded with cacao, the arrival of the money to pay what
was asked for, as if the liberty of a prisoner were being paid
for. It is as if an authority said to you, "This prisoner
will be set free for a fine of one hundred pesos and if it isn't
paid, he won't go free." The transaction probably has the
psychological effect of assuaging anxiety with the assurance that
the powers angered by a transgression have been appeased.
As we have seen, though these shamanistic chants are creations
of language created by the individual creativity of the speakers,
the structure of the discourses, short phrases articulated in
succession terminated by the punctuation of the word says, tend
to be similar from person to person, determined to a large extent
by culture and tradition as is much of what is said. An instance
is the invocatory reiteration of names, a characteristic common
to all the Mazatec shamanistic sessions of speech. The names repeated
by the Indian medicine men, devout Catholics, are those of the
Virgin and the saints. In ancient times, other divinities must
have been named, but without any doubt, to name and make present
has always played a role in such chants. "Holy Virgin of
the Sanctuary. Holy Virgin. Saint Bartholomew. Saint Christopher.
Saint Manuel. Holy Father. Saint Vincent. Saint Mark. Saint Manuel.
Virgin Guadalupe, Queen of Mexico." To sing out the holy
names serves the function for the oral poet, like the stereotyped
phrases of Homeric song, of keeping the chant going during the
interludes of inspiration; at the same time, the rhythmic enunciation
is a telling over of identities, an expression of the interpersonality
of consciousness. To recall again the affirmation of Husserl:
Transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity. The name is
the word for the person. In the mind of the speaker one identity
after another becomes present, names call up people, the vision
of people calls up names. Instead of naming his own acquaintances,
which might occur in a desacralized discourse, the shaman invokes
the holy ones. The sacred nomenclature is a sublimation of the
nomenclature of family and social relationships.
It is now his everyday self, his wife and his family whom he speaks
about. "Our children are going to grow up and live. I see.
I see my wife, my little working woman. I love her. I speak to
her through space. I speak to her through the cumulus clouds.
I call to her spirit. Nothing will befall us." Man and woman,
the couple and their children, that is his theme now that love
for his family wells up in his heart.
Nothing can happen to us. We will go on living. We will go on
living in the company of my wife, of my people. We should not
make our wife irritable. We went to receive her before God, in
the sight of God, in the Sacred Sacrament, in sight of the altar.
There was a great mass, there was a mass of union. We were able
to respect each other forty-three days and therefore God disposed
that our children should be born and live. Because of that our
seeds bore fruit, our offspring grew, offspring and seed that
God Our Lord gave us.
He who speaks and says, perhaps it is rumored that the work he
is doing, this person, is great, that his ranch is large. He is
not presumptuous. He is a humble person. He is a laborious person.
He is a person of problems. He is a person who has al ready loaned
his service as an authority. He has realized himself, his gifts
are inherited, he is of important people: Justo Pastor, Juan Nazareno.
He is of a great root, an important root. Large trees, old trees.
All our children will live, says. Will have a good harvest. Will
rear their animals. Well-being and pleasure in their sugar cane,
in their coffee groves. I will live much time yet. I will become
an old man with gray hair, I will continue living with my offspring
and with my people. My children will have education and well-being.
Education must be given to my sons.
He says the changes through which he passes, the transformations
and permutations of his ecstatic consciousness in the course of
its temporalization-the sense of gamble, the risks, the moments
of fright, the presence of light and vigor. "It turns into
a game of chance, says. It turns into terror, says. It turns into
spirit, says."
He whistles and sings and dances about. "That which sounds
is a harp in the presence of God and the Angel of the Guard. Plays
space, plays the rocks, plays the mountains, plays the corners,
plays fear, plays terror, plays the day." He plays the facets
of the world as if they were musical instruments. Things and emotions,
at the contact of his singing and touch are magically resolved
into ringing vibrating tonalities, into music-music of mountains
and rocks, of space and fear. "Where sound the trees, says.
Where sound the rocks, says. Where sound baskets. Where sounds
the spirit of the day." He is hearing the ringing and the
buzzing and the humming of his effervescent consciousness and
finding analogies for the sounds he hears in the echo chambers
of his eardrums: the soughing of the wind through the trees, the
clinking of stones, the creaking of baskets. He whistles and sings.
His words issue forth from the melodic articulation of inarticulate
sounds, from the physical movement of his rhythmic whirling about
and scuffling in the darkness. "How beautiful I sing,"
he exclaims. "How beautiful I sing. How many good pleasures
concedes to us the Lord of the World." He dances about working
himself up to a further pitch of exaltation. "How beautiful
I dance. How beautiful I dance." Repetition is one of the
aspects of the discourse as it is of the pulsation of energy waves.
"This person is valiant," he says of himself. "He
is of the people of Huautla, he is a Huautecan. With great speed
he calls and whistles for the spirits among the mountains; whistles
the fright of the spirit." Then he flips out. He throws himself
into the shamanistic fit, his voice changes, becomes that of another,
rougher, more guttural, and beginning to speak in the speech of
San Lucas from where came his old master, a town in the midst
of the corn on a high windswept peak, he recalls his spiritual
ancestor, the ancient wise man who taught him the use of the gnomic
mushrooms. "He is a person of jars. He is of San Lucas. A
person of plates. He is a person of jars and bowls. He is an old
one." San Lucas is the place where all the black, unadorned,
neolithic pottery used throughout the region is made. Men go from
town to town carrying the jars, padded with ferns, on their backs
to sell them in the marketplaces of the mountain villages. "Old
man of pots, dishes, bowls. These are the people of the center.
They speak with the mountains arrogantly. He is from San Lucas.
He speaks with the whirlwind, with the whirlwind of the interior."
From what he himself tells of this old shaman, appear vestiges
of the days when the shaman of the People of the Deer, intermediary
between man, nature, and the divine was a thaumaturge who presided
over fertility and the hunt. "I had to visit the same medicine
man," he recounts, "when we went to the hunt. I had
to prepare for him an egg, an egg to be offered to the mountain.
It all depends on the value of the animal that one wants. It is
as if you were going to buy an animal," he said.
He is the one who says what one is to pay. He goes to leave the
egg. Afterwards the dogs go into the woods and begin to work.
It is necessary to rub tobacco on the crown of the dogs' heads.
But with the egg and twenty-five beans of cacao, the master is
sure that the deer is already bought. I have paid for the game,
says the true shaman. And every time we went to hunt, we were
therefore sure to encounter deer because a good shaman from San
Lucas can transform a tree or a stone into a deer once he has
exchanged its value for it with the Lord of the Mountain. We were
sure to come upon deer because they had been paid for.
"Here come the Huautecans. Here come the Huautecans."
Dancing about in the darkness, flapping his coat against his sides
to imitate the bounding of a startled deer through the underbrush,
he, the hunter of spirits and of game, barking like the dogs closing
in around the cornered animal, tells a hunting story, talking
rapidly with intense excitement in the gruff voice of one from
San Lucas who sees from his vantage point the hunters of Huautla
in the distance:
Listen to how their dogs bark. It's an old dog. Here they come
by way of the Sad Mountain. They are bringing their kill. There
is barking in the mountain. Here they come. Listen to how their
arms sound. Already they have shot a colored deer. They pay the
mountains. They pay the corners. The deer was killed because the
Huautecans pay the price. They paid the spirit. Paid the Bald
Mountain. Paid the Hollow Mountain. Paid the Mountain of the Spirit
of the Day. Paid fifty pesos. You can't do just as you like. It
is necessary to pay the White Gnome. The Huautecans are like clowns.
They are carrying the deer off along the path. The rifles of the
Huautecans are very fine. These people are important people. They
know what they are doing. They know how to call the spirit. The
Huautecans call their dogs by blowing a horn. Already the dogs
are coming close.
The story comes almost at the conclusion of his discourse. The
effect of the mushrooms lasts approximately six hours; usually
it is impossible to sleep until dawn. In all such adventures,
at the end, comes the idea of a return from where it is one has
gone, the return to everyday consciousness. "I return to
collect these holy children that served as a remedy," the
shaman says, calling back his spirits from their flight into the
beyond in order to become his ordinary self again. "Aged
clowns. White clowns." The mushrooms he calls sainted children
and clowns, relating them by his personifications to beings who
are young and joyful, playful, creative, and wise.
"The aurora of the dawn is coming and the light of day. In
the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, by the sign
of the Holy Cross, free us Our Lord from our enemies and all evil.
Amen."
What began in the depths of the night with the illumination of
interior constellations in the spaces of consciousness ends with
the arrival of the daylight after a night of continuous, animated
speech. "I am he who speaks," says the Mazatec shaman.
I am he who speaks. I am he who speaks with the mountains. I am
he who speaks with the corners. I am the doctor. I am the man
of medicines. I am. I am he who cures. I am he who speaks with
the Lord of the World. I am happy. I speak with the mountains.
I am he who speaks with the mountains of peaks. I am he who speaks
with the Bald Mountain. I am the remedy and the medicine man.
I am the mushroom. I am the fresh mushroom. I am the large mushroom.
I am the fragrant mushroom. I am the mushroom of the spirit.
The Mazatecs say that the mushrooms speak. Now the investigators
(10) from without should have listened
better to the Indian wise men who had experience of what they,
white ones of reason, had not. If the mushrooms are hallucinogenic,
why do the Indians associate them with communication, with truth
and the enunciation of meaning? An hallucination is a false perception,
either visual or audible, that does not have any relation at all
to reality, a fantastical illusion or delusion: what appears,
but has no existence except in the mind. The vivid dreams of the
psychedelic experience suggested hallucinations: such imaginations
do occur in these visionary conditions, but they are marginal,
not essential phenomena of a general liberation of the spontaneous,
ecstatic, creative activity of conscious existence. Hallucinations
predominated in the experiences of the investigators because they
were passive experimenters of the transformative effect of the
mushrooms. The Indian shamans are not contemplative, they are
workers who actively express themselves by speaking, creators
engaged in an endeavor of ontological, existential disclosure.
For them, the shamanistic condition provoked by the mushrooms
is intuitionary, not hallucinatory. What one envisions has an
ethical relation to reality, is indeed often the path to be followed.
To see is to realize, to understand. But even more important than
visions for the Mazatec shaman are words as real as the realities
of the real they utter. It is as if the mushrooms revealed a primordial
activity of signification, for once the shaman has eaten them,
he begins to speak and continues to speak throughout the shamanistic
session of ecstatic language. The phenomenon most distinctive
of the mushrooms' effect is the inspired capacity to speak. Those
who eat them are men of language, illuminated with the spirit,
who call themselves the ones who speak, those who say. The shaman,
chanting in a melodic singsong, saying says at the end of each
phrase of saying, is in communication with the origins of creation,
the sources of the voice, and the fountains of the word, related
to reality from the heart of his existential ecstasy by the active
mediation of language: the articulation of meaning and experience.
To call such transcendental experiences of light, vision, and
speech hallucinatory is to deny that they are revelatory of reality.
In the ancient codices, the colored books, the figures sit, hieroglyphs
of words, holding the mushrooms of language in pairs in their
hands: signs of signification.
(2). The inspiration produced by the mushrooms
is very much like that described by Nietzsche in Ecce Homo.
Since the statement of Rimbaud, "I is another," spontaneous
language, speaking or writing as if from dictation (to use the
common expression for an activity very difficult to describe in
its truth) has been of paramount interest to philosophers and
poets. Sap the Mexican, Octavio Paz, in an essay on Breton, "The
inspired one, the man who in truth speaks, does not say anything
that is his: from his mouth speaks language." Octavio Paz,
"Andre Breton o La Busqueda del Comienzo," Corriente
Alterna (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1967), p. 53. (Back)
(3). The shamanistic discourses studied in this essay, were tape-recorded.
I am indebted for the translations to a bilingual woman of Huautla,
Mrs. Eloina Estrada de Gonzalez, who listened to the recordings
and told me, phrase by phrase, in Spanish, what the shaman and
shamaness were saying in their native language. As far as I know,
the words of neither of these oral poets have hitherto been published.
They are Mrs. Irene Pineda de Figueroa and Mr. Roman Estrada.
The complete text of each discourse takes up ninety-two pages.
For the purposes of this essay, I have merely selected the most
representative passages. (Back)
(4). "... the Greek word which signifies poetry was employed
by the writer of an alchemical papyrus to designate the operation
of 'transmutation' itself. What a ray of light! One knows that
the word 'poetry' comes from the Greek verb which signifies 'make.'
But that does not designate an ordinary fabrication except for
those who reduce it to verbal nonsense. For those who have conserved
the sense of the poetic mystery, poetry is a sacred action. That
is to say, one which exceeds the ordinary level of human action.
Like alchemy, its intention is to associate itself with the mystery
of the 'primordial creation'..." Michel Carrouges, Andre
Breton et les donnees fondamentales du surrealisme (Paris:
Editions Gallimard, 195O). (Back)
(5). Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Effectiveness of Symbols,"
Structural Anthropology (Doubleday Anchor, 1967), pp. 193-95.
(Back)
(6). "In a sense, as Husserl says, philosophy consists of
the restitution of a power of signification, a birth of sense
or a savage sense, an expression of experience by experience which
particularly clarifies the special domain of language." Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible (Paris: Editions
Gallimard, 1964). (Back)
(7). The story of how he began his shamanistic career, together
with the information to follow about fright, payments to the mountains,
and practices in relation to the hunt, are quotations from an
interview with Mr. Roman Estrada whom I questioned through an
interpreter: the conversation was tape-recorded and then translated
from the native language by Mrs. Eloina Estrada de Gonzalez, the
niece of the shaman, who served as questioner in the interview
itself. (Back)
(8). "Finally, the illness can be the consequence of a loss
of the soul, gone astray or carried off by a spirit or a revenant.
This conception, widely spread throughout the region of the Andes
and the Gran Chaco, appears rare in tropical America." Alfred
Metraux, "Le Chaman des Guyane et de l'Amazonie," Religions
et magies indiennes d'Amerique du Sud (Paris: Editions Gallimard,
1967). (Back)
(9). Ibid. (Back)
(10). It is necessary to express one's debt to R. Gordon Wasson,
whose writings, the most authoritative work on the mushrooms,
informed me of their existence and told me much about them. "We
suspect," he wrote, "that, in its integral sense, the
creative power, the most serious quality distinctive of man and
one of the clearest participations in the Divine... is in some
sort connected with an area of the spirit that the mushrooms are
capable of opening." R. Gordon Wasson and Roger Heim, Les
Champignons halhlcinogenes du Mexique (Paris: Museum National
d'Histoire Naturelle, 1958). From my own experience, I have found
that contention to be particularly true. (Back)
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