A Night with the Shaman
An Excerpt
It was rain season in the Peruvian Amazon and I was preparing to leave for the highlands of the Incas in the Andean mountains, a relief from mud and mosquitoes. But there was a strong calling I had to fulfill first. I had heard of an Ese'eja shaman who lived deep in the rainforest. From Puerto Maldonado, a town sprawling along the Madre De Dios River in the south, I hired a car and we the driver zigzagged skillfully through the muddy thick bush. The downpour came in sporadic, mighty torrents, and a few times we had to stop and wait until the roaring mass relaxed its beating onto the car's roof. But an hour later, the sun was already pushing out of the purple clouds, throwing hefty shadows over the Ese'eja settlement nestled under the canopy of the forest. Its name was Infierno, "hell", a hint I preferred not to ponder.
A red-soiled road muddied by the downpour led down into the village. We pulled near a loading dock at river side, and I asked the driver if he knew of Don Roberto. He motioned me outside the car, put his hands around his mouth and at river he yelled the shaman's name across the Tambopata. A tall, strongly built man appeared on the other shore, stared for a long moment with his hand against the sun, then hopped in a canoe tied at his feet and traveled towards us. I had been told that he was a shaman who wouldn't "take just anyone". With a thin voice, I requested to be allowed some of his medicine.
It was rain season in the Peruvian Amazon and I was preparing to leave for the highlands of the Incas in the Andean mountains, a relief from mud and mosquitoes. But there was a strong calling I had to fulfill first. I had heard of an Ese'eja shaman who lived deep in the rainforest. From Puerto Maldonado, a town sprawling along the Madre De Dios River in the south, I hired a car and we the driver zigzagged skillfully through the muddy thick bush. The downpour came in sporadic, mighty torrents, and a few times we had to stop and wait until the roaring mass relaxed its beating onto the car's roof. But an hour later, the sun was already pushing out of the purple clouds, throwing hefty shadows over the Ese'eja settlement nestled under the canopy of the forest. Its name was Infierno, "hell", a hint I preferred not to ponder.
A red-soiled road muddied by the downpour led down into the village. We pulled near a loading dock at river side, and I asked the driver if he knew of Don Roberto. He motioned me outside the car, put his hands around his mouth and at river he yelled the shaman's name across the Tambopata. A tall, strongly built man appeared on the other shore, stared for a long moment with his hand against the sun, then hopped in a canoe tied at his feet and traveled towards us. I had been told that he was a shaman who wouldn't "take just anyone". With a thin voice, I requested to be allowed some of his medicine.
“Come back at dusk,” he offered after a moment of silence.
At sundown, he returned and we canoed across the Tambopata t. "My real name is Shae'jame," he said as we walked to his home, a wooden cottage propped on tall legs. On this bank Shae'jame lived alone, undisturbed by the settlements on the other side. Yet, his neighbors were millions, invisible in the falling night, but raising voices in an intense sunset cacophony of croaking, howling, whistling, shouting, growling, .
"Do not fear," Shae´jame said, "I shoot my rifle now and then so the puma knows not to come near."
During the hour before complete darkness when the ayahuaska healing would begin, we spoke in the light of a lone candle. One of the few left Ese'eja people who still spoke their ancient language, Shae'jame had been using the bitter tea in healing ceremonies for forty years. As a young man he learned with an older shaman. "These plants," Shae'jame said, carry astounding intelligence and knowledge. If one connects to their wisdom with respect, all conditions can be cured, all illnesses overcome, and the mind– blown open to the truth of existence."
As he talked, enormous jungle cockroaches were crawling in our bear feet, but Shae'jame didn'd seem to notice them. In the long moments when he stopped to ponder his words, the silence was overwhelmed by the tremendous symphony of the jungle choir. I pictured the hidden beings who performed it and tried to wrap my mind around this: the largest biodiversity on the planet. Birds seen nowhere else, butterflies and moths long extinct from the rest of the planet, mammals whose breeds I had never suspected, and a kind of humans on a rapid decline.
“The gringos try to help us," Shae’jame said slowly. "They tell us what we should do to prosper and to be happy. They want to tailor us to their cast, to become the kings of our forests. But this–he gestured over to the wilderness that surrounded us– “this is the only future of the earth. Without it, there is no future.”
When the sky sunk deeper in darkness, we emptied the shot glasses with thick brown concoction. Shaa'jame blew the candle out and ordered me lying on my back, right on the wooden floor. He chanted, whistled, called to the spirits, puffed away with his pipe. It was a tense, sticky Amazon night, suddenly so black that I was blind. Bats stormed into the cottage from the openings under the thatched roof. I could hear them wander about, then leave.
My previous explorations with ayahuaska had taught me a few things about the intensity of the medicinal tea, the severe physical discomfort it could create, the continuous purging, and the extremity of the mind states one could enter.
My previous explorations with ayahuaska had taught me a few things about the intensity of the medicinal tea, the severe physical discomfort it could create, the continuous purging, and the extremity of the mind states one could enter.
The psychoactive ayahuaska brew made with an Amazon vine and mixed with shrubs has been for centuries known to healers to evoke the 'death of the ego'. The Quechua called it "spirit vine" for its capacity to deliver profound insights into the nature of being. Many who experienced it spoke of and consciousness-altering experiences, like that of being completely disassembled, beyond a sense of self. During my previous journeys with the ayahuaska medicine overwhelmed my body and mind in a harsh, almost forceful way, and delivered an undeniable sensation of deep connectedness between all living things and the cosmos.
“Do you feel dizzy yet?” Shae’jame asked from the darkness above me.
“I think so.”
"Now," he whispered after a moment of silence. "Now in the whole universe there is only you and I. Nothing else in this moment. Nada mas. ”
I felt waves rising in my body, traveling within and rocking me like a gentle swing.
“One woman, one man,” he whispered.
I drifted away.
I drifted away.
~~~
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