Diet and other precautions when using ayahuasca

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Vegetalistas, like their counterparts the Indian shamans of many
indigenous groups of the Upper Amazon, claim to derive healing
skills and powers from certain plant teachers - often psychoactive -
believed to have a mother (). Knowledge -- particular medicinal
knowledge -- comes from the plants themselves, the senior
shaman only mediating the transmission of information, protecting
the novice from the attack of sorcerers or evil spirits, and
indicating to him or her the proper conditions under which
transmission is possible. Among the plant teachers large trees are
considered particularly powerful. The necessity of -- which also
includes sexual segregation -- to learn from the plants was stressed
by every vegetalista I met. The body has to be purified to
communicate with the spirit realm. Only in this way will
the neophytes acquire their spiritual helpers, learn icaros (power
songs), and acquire their yachay, yausa, or mariri -- phlegm the
novice receives at some point diuring his initiation, either from the
senior shaman or from the spirits. Particularly important are the .
[..] The icaros constitute the quintessence of shamanic
power. The icaros and the phlegm -- both of which have material
and immaterial qualities -- represent the transference of the spirits
of each plant, with all their knowledge and theriomorphic and
anthropomorphic manifestations, into the body of the shaman.
Diet: "During the month .. we ate only fish, plantains, and rice
without salt or any spices, and only twice a day [..] We took
ayahuasca once a week" (cf. :14). "We were supposed to be far
from people who were not keeping the diet. There were people
coming there, the relatives of the patients, women of fertile age. It
was not possible to learn anything in this way" (cf. :16). "He gave
me a mixture of Psychotria viridis and tobacco to drink every four
days. He told me that it was like this he had learned medicine: If
the diet and isolation were maintained long enough, the plants
themselves would reveal their properties in a sort of telepathic
way" (cf. :17). You can only become a good vegetalista by keeping
a diet or fasting for years, then you become one that knows the
science of the muraya, of the sumi, and of the banco, which are the
three highest degrees in the traditional vegetalista medicine in the
Amazon (cf. :48).


Footnotes:
4 - The importance of psychotropic plants in the shamanistic
practices of many indigenous groups of the
Upper Amazon is paramount. For the Yagua, for example, contact
with the spirits of the plants by ingesting
them is considered "the only path to knowledge" (:33).
Psychotropic plants correspond to the category of
plants known among the Shipibo as muraya-cai = shaman-makers
(:203). These plants reveal the "real"
world, while the normal world is often considered illusory (cf. :102
for the Yagua; :78 for the Siona: : 134
for the Jivaro). Also see Harner 1973:
5 - The same plant may manifest itself to the vegetalista by means
of several spiritual figures, all having
common features among them, in such a way that there is no
extreme contradiction between one vision and
another.
81 - The term dietar (to keep a diet) includes not only dietary
restrictions (not eating salt or condiments,
sweets, pork fat ,etc.), but also sexual segregation and other
prerequisites, as for example avoiding the sun
or making food, etc. (cf. :346). One of the reason shamanism is
declining among Indians and mestizos alike
is because young people don't bother to keep the difficult diet (cf.
:192; :418; :175).


Bibliography

Chaumeil, Jean-Pierre
1983 Voir, Savoir, Pouivoir. Le chamanisme chez les Yagua du
Nord-Est
peruvien. Paris, Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences
Sociales.

Chevalier, Jacques M.
1982 Civilization and the Stolen Gift: Capital, Kin, and Cult in
Eastern
Peru, University of Torontoi Press.

Gebhart-Sayer, Angelika
1984 The Cosmos Encoiled Indian Art of the Peruvian Amazon,
New York,
Center for Inter-American Relations
1986 Una Terapia Estetica. Los Disenos Visionarios del
Ayahuasca entre los Shipibo-Conibo. America Indigena
46(1)189-218.
Mexico.
1987 Die Spitze des Bewusstseins. Untersuchungen zu
Weltbild und Kunst der Shipibo-Conibo. Hohenscaftlarn, Klaus
Renner
Verlag.

Harner, Michael J.
1972 The Jivaro People of the Sacred Waterfalls, Berkeley,
University of California

Huxley, Francis
1963 Affable Savages: An Anthropologist Among the Urubu
Indians of
Brazil, London, Rupert Hart-Davis.

Langdon E. Jean
1979b The Siona Halliuicinogenis Ritual, Its meaning and Power.
In John
H. Morgan (ed.), Understanding Religion and Culture:
Anthropological
and Theological Perspectives. Washington University Press of
America.

Luna, Luis Eduardo
1984 The Concept of Plants as Teachers Among Four Mestizo
Shamans of
Iquitos, Northeast Peru, Journal of Ethnopharmacology 11135-
56.
1991 Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of
a Peruvian Shaman, North Atlantic Books

Taussig, Michael
1987 Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in
Terror and
Healing. The University of Chicago Press.
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