JSRNC Final)

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JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF

RELIGION, NATURE AND CULTURE
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JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION, NATURE AND CULTURE
Editor in Chief Assistant Editor Assistant Editor
Bron Taylor, Joseph Witt, Gavin Van Horn,
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(University of Florida)
Editorial Board
Gustavo Benavides (Villanova University), Richard Foltz (Concordia University), John Gatta (University of the South),
Stewart Guthrie (Fordham University), Graham Harvey (Open University), Adrian Ivakhiv (University of Vermont),
Issiaka-P. L. Laleye (Université Gaston Berger), Sarah McFarland Taylor (Northwestern University), Alastair McIntosh
(Centre for Human Ecology & University of Strathclyde, Scotland), Ibrahim Ozdemir (Ankara University), Clare
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Study of World Religions), Victor Manuel Toledo Manzur (Unidad Académica Morelia), Mark Wallace (Swarthmore
College), Nina Witoszek-Fitzpatrick (Oslo University/European University, Italy), Egleé L. Zent (Instituto Venezolano
de Investigaciones Cientificas)
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© Equinox Publishing Ltd, 2009
ISSN 1749-4907 (print) ISSN 1749-4915 (online)
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Lightning Source UK Ltd, Milton Keynes
Volume 3 number 1 March 2009
Special Issue
The Religious Lives of Amazonian Plants
Guest Edited by
Robin M. Wright
________________________________
Contents
________________________________
Editors’ Introduction:
Robin M. Wright and Bron Taylor 5-8
‘We Come from Trees’: The Poetics of Plants

among the Jotï of the Venezuelan Guayana
Egleé L. Zent 9-35
Singing to Estranged Lovers:

Runa Relations to Plants in the Ecuadorian Amazon
Tod Dillon Swanson 36-65
Visions of Christ in the Amazon:

The Gospel According to Ayahuasca and Santo Daime
Lisa Maria Madera 66-98
The Celestial Umbilical Cord: Wild Palm Trees,

Adult Male Bodies, and Sacred Wind Instruments
among the Wakuénai of Venezuela
Jonathan D. Hill 99-125
The Fruit of Knowledge and the Bodies of the Gods:

Religious Meanings of Plants among the Baniwa
Robin M. Wright 126-153
Book Reviews 154-158
JOSEPH A.P. WILSON
Fikret Berkes, Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource
Management
Graham Harvey (ed.), Readings in Indigenous Religions
Notes for Contributors 159
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2008.

[JSRNC 3.1 (2009) 5-8] JSRNC (print) ISSN 1363-7320
doi: 10.1558/jsrnc.v3i1.5 JSRNC (online) ISSN 1743-1689
_____________________________________
Editors’ Introduction:
_____________________________________
Robin M. Wright and Bron Taylor

University of Florida,
Gainesville, FL 32611-7410, USA
rowrightrobin@yahoo.com
The focus of this special issue is on the religion-nature-culture nexus

specifically with regard to plants among indigenous peoples of Amazo-
nia. A great deal of attention has recently been given in studies of
Amazonian indigenous religions to prey and predator relations among
humans, fish, and animals. Very little has yet been said about religious
symbolism in the realm of humans and plants, nor for that matter
anything significant about the spiritual lives of plants. Yet there is every
indication that, in the primordial times recounted in native myths, some
plants were deities and sacrificed themselves for the well being of their
human descendants, even transforming their bodies into life-giving
plants. Alternately, this sacrifice is the result of a relation of retribution
between primordial animals and deities, in which predatory animals,
having been overcome by the deities, transform into poisonous plants
that may be used to kill by the actions of witches, sorcerers, or spirits
who give sickness and disease.
When we initiated the work on this issue, we hardly expected the
extraordinary material that eventually would emerge from each article.
One culture, the Jotï, of the Venezuelan Amazon, described by Dr. Egleé
Zent of the Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas (IVIC) in
Caracas, Venezuela, places plants at the very origin of the cosmos and
human life. We could hardly understand anything of Jotï religious views
without immersing ourselves in the deep significance of plants for the
notion of personhood. Nor did we expect to read the beautiful love
poetry from the Ecuadorian upper Amazon, translated magnificently by
Dr. Tod Swanson of Arizona State University. Through his interpreta-
tion, we learn that plant species evolved from a previously human state
in which the plants were lovers or children who became estranged, and
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW.
6 Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture
so they are treated this way in the songs the Napo and Pastaza Runa
women sing to their garden plants.
Swanson and his sister, Dr. Lisa Madera, grew up in the Ecuadorian
Amazonian Province of Pastaza and so provide us with an understand-
ing that goes far beyond the years of study that anthropologists normally
take to know a little of what is behind the veil of ethnographic percep-
tion. Madera’s contribution focuses on the Aguarico use of the ‘visionary
vine’, ayahuasca. The central question she raises is how does ayahuasca
transform the telling and retelling of the Christian story? Or, as she says,
the ‘Gospel according to ayahuasca’, as told by the Aguarico Runa. She
then traces local phrasings of the Gospel according to Santo Daime, a
Christian sect centered on the ritual use of ayahuasca which originally
emerged out of the upper Amazon in the 1920s and later spread through-
out Brazil and into other parts of the world. Finally, she compares the
Gospel of ayahuasca as told by a Santo Daime center in Santa Catarina
state, Brazil, leading us into the vision of an eco-utopian movement
again stimulated by the same entheogenous plant.
Both Drs. Jonathan Hill and Robin Wright explore sacred plants
among the Wakuenai indigenous people of the Venezuelan Amazon,
and their kin, the Walimanai, or ‘Baniwa’, of the Brazilian Northwest
Amazon. Hill’s piece is structured as a musical opera in three major
movements that he calls ‘The Gift’, ‘The Secret’, and ‘The Meal’, each
corresponding to a social transformation: from ‘wild’ nature to consum-
able and exchangeable cultural items. All three can be synthesized
through the production of a certain flute, unique to the Wakuenai, which
encompasses the three meanings and highlights aspects of religious
identity. Hill’s article is especially appropriate for this issue of the
journal which celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of Claude
Levi-Strauss; it was, after all, from the French Master’s insight into the
meanings of myth and the relation of myth and music that we now
understand more fully how Nature/Culture transformations are forged.
Wright’s intensive work over twenty-two years with Walimanai
(‘Baniwa’) shamans and chanters has led to a profound understanding of
the entheogen called pariká, another ‘teacher plant’, which, like ayahuasca,
reveals the sacred world to the seeker. Pariká transforms the shaman’s
vision and thought into a powerful creative act much like the Creator’s
in the beginning-time. The article explores plants as distinct markers of
cosmological epochs, as gifts from deities to humanity; and as deities
who are sacrificed in fire and from whose bodies the instruments of
social reproduction and domestic food production are made. Wright
concludes by commenting on the theory of Amerindian perspectivism,
from the point of view of the entheogens, which do not clearly fit the

Editors’ Introduction 7
model since the sacred plants are gifts from the deities to humans not
objects of prey–predator relations.
When wrapping up this special issue we learned of a remarkable event
in Ecuador that signaled a shift in efforts to extend rights to non-human
nature. On 5 October 2008, this Latin American country overwhelmingly
passed a new constitution that included this innovative language:
Natural communities and ecosystems possess the unalienable right to
exist, flourish, and evolve within Ecuador. Those rights shall be self-
executing, and it shall be the duty and right of all Ecuadorian governments,
communities, and individuals to enforce those rights.
This language went beyond that of the Endangered Species Act to

protect natural communities and ecosystems, not just individual species.1
It thereby reflected an ecocentric value system that included all organ-
isms. As we discussed this momentous vote, we wondered not only
about how this new constitutional principle would be implemented, but
also whether it would be successful. We also wondered why such a
strong constitutional provision protecting both flora and fauna and
ecosystems themselves was first enacted in Ecuador. It occurred to us
that this may, in part, be because Ecuador has one of the largest propor-
tions of indigenous citizens in the world (estimated at 80% of the popu-
lation). We wondered, as well, if religious and spiritual perceptions about
the life force in plants, common to indigenous traditions and explored in
this special issue, provided fertile cultural soil for this development.
Although we may not have a definitive answer to this question, the
present JSRNC issue certainly underscores the possibility that there are
important, contemporary echoes of the longstanding cultural beliefs and
practices related to plants, perceived as persons, in indigenous societies.
Such perceptions may be eroding in some places, but, even when they
do, they may break out in new and unexpected ways.
1. In 1974, a conference on the ‘Rights of Non-Human Nature’ was held at Cali-

fornia’s Claremont Graduate School, inspired in part by intellectual efforts to construct
environmental ethics in which all forms of life, and even ecosystems, would have
moral and legal standing. These efforts included Arne Naess’s initial statement pro-
moting ‘deep ecology’, and Christopher Stone’s law review article arguing that trees
and other natural objects should have legal standing and have their interests
represented in the courts. About the same time, the Endangered Species Act (1973)
took a significant step in such a direction, but it soon met fierce resistance. See Naess
1973 and Stone 1972. For the background to the controversy that led to his article, see
Stone 1987: 3-14. Roderick Nash (1989: 127) observed that before Stone and Naess, a
number of other scholars and activists had already been talking about the rights of
nature. For the background on the Ecuadorian vote, see Kendall 2008.

References
Kendall, Clare. 2008. ‘Ecuadorians to Vote on Constitution Making Its Nature a
Rights-Bearing Entity’, The Guardian, 24 September 2008. Online: http:// www.
guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/24/equador.conservation (accessed 27
September 2008).
Naess, Arne. 1973. ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A
Summary’, Inquiry 16: 95-100.
Nash, Roderick. 1989. The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press).
Stone, Christopher. 1972. ‘Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for
Natural Objects’, Southern California Law Review 45: 450-501.
———. 1987. Earth and Other Ethics: The Case for Moral Pluralism (New York: Harper &
Row).

________________________________________
‘We Come from Trees’: The Poetics of Plants
among the Jotï of the Venezuelan Guayana
________________________________________
Egleé L. Zent*
Lab. Human Ecology, Instituto Venezolano de
Investigaciones Científicas, Caracas 1020-A, Venezuela
elzent@ivic.ve
Abstract
This paper explores the pervasive role of plants in the lives of the Jotï, a
group of 900 people from the Venezuelan Guayana. In contrast with other
Amazonian people for whom plants play relatively minor roles in spiritual
spheres when compared to animals (e.g. the Ese Eje, Aguaruna, or Yano-
mami), among the Jotï plants pervade their religious universe, assuming
fundamental and polysemic dimensions. Plants constitute active agents in
Jotï biological, cultural, and spiritual production and reproduction. Plants
are prominent within all aspects of Jotï society, making it difficult to estab-
lish strict separations between subsistence and ideological spheres. This
issue is explored here using a broad concept of religion including four
interrelated concerns: protology, anthropogony, ecogony, and eschatology.
Embedded in this text are three aspects: (1) the contemporaneity of phyto-
myths in daily lives; (2) the centrality of plants in the fabrication of
humanity; and (3) the relationship of the phyto-world to what some
Amazonian scholars refer to as ‘the symbolic economy of alterity’.
* I am thankful to Robin Wright for inviting me to write in this volume and for
his kind and proficient editorial help. I am grateful to the Jotï for their kindness,
friendship, and willingness to help in the data collection, and for sharing their homes
and taking care of me on their lands. Immense thanks to Stanford Zent, my academic
and life partner. Thanks also for the financial help received from the Instituto Venezo-
lano de Investigaciones Científicas and the Wenner Gren-Hunt Fellowship (Gr 7518).
Introduction
This paper discusses some ways in which plants permeate the Jotï uni-
verse beyond the material sphere. The main argument is that plants are
actors in the reproduction of the Jotï ethos, spiritual performances, and
integral lifestyle. This paper is organized along Robin Wright’s definition
of Religion as consisting of ‘cosmogonies, cosmologies, theories of the
nature and relationships among beings in the cosmos, and eschatology’
(Lecture, University of Florida, 23 August 2007). A slightly modified
notion used here considers religion as productive poetics embracing
those four interrelated areas of praxis and ideology: (1) protogonies, the
order that explains the origin of the cosmos and surroundings (per-
ceptible or imperceptible) and the entities that dwell therein; (2)
anthropogonies, the discourse that explains human creation; (3) ecogony,
the elucidation of the interrelationship and dynamics between the enti-
ties of the biosphere and their current function; and (4) eschatology, the
declaration of closure, the individual, and social end or potential tran-
scendence of selves in the afterworld. Poetics refers to the modes in
which these matters are ‘woven into the fabric of everyday life’, a merged
arrangement of ‘empirical observation’ and ‘a fanciful embellishment of
the inexplicable’ (Whitehead 2002: 2). The focus is on the significance
and value of plants interdigitated in ritually marked stages of Jotï
dynamics in the four areas mentioned.
The reconstruction of plants’ roles in the Jotï universe presented here
is based on the testimony of over 55 Jotï (of varying ages and genders) as
well as on a decade of personal observations of the behavior of the Jotï
people in different communities (<500 persons). This research was origi-
nally focused on techno-ecological, cognitive, and behavioral aspects of
the Jotï (Zent and Zent 2004a, 2004b). Gradually, subjective and religious
dynamics expressed through Jotï notions of body, personification and
socialization were incorporated (Zent 2005). These dynamics in turn
offer the central logic for understanding the Jotï lifestyle, such as repre-
sentations of constant events of interchange and communication among
the entities of the universe exemplified by hunting, gathering, garden-
ing, and fishing. Plants generate, catalyze, and provide the meaning of a
large portion of these dynamics.
The theories subsumed in this article are eclectic, associated with the
symbolic economy of alterity (Viveiros de Castro 1996). Alterity is used
here as a synonym of Otherness, how a given culture defines and identi-
fies itself, as opposed to its most significant and different Others
(enemies, affines, animals, etc.).

Zent ‘We Come from Trees’ 11
Ethnographic Background
My data here are drawn from broader ethnoecological research con-
ducted with Stanford Zent among the Jotï, an indigenous group from the
Venezuelan Guayana, since 1996. In 1969 the Jotï were the last of
Venezuela’s thirty indigenous groups to come into contact with the
Western world. Most of the 900 Jotï are monolingual, of a language
apparently affiliated to the Saliva family (Zent and Zent 2008b). Both the
Jotï and their homeland, the Sierra Maigualida (Amazonas and Bolívar
states), were virtually unknown to scientists, which stimulated our inter-
est in developing a research project with an interdisciplinary approach.
Maigualida is a mountainous formation of rugged terrain about 300
kilometers long and almost 7000 square kilometers in land area, reaching
its highest altitude of 2400 meters at Cerro Yudi. The entire mountain
range is covered by dense and high forests (pluvial, riverine, premon-
tane, montane, and gallery forests), except above 2000 meters where
tepui flora prevails (Zent and Zent 2004c). Most of the 25 Jotï communi-
ties maintain to a large degree their ancestral subsistence strategies,
although they have been exposed to a varied degree of contacts (with
missionaries, scientists, tourists, miners, other Amerindian groups,
soldiers, etc.), which in turn have triggered disparate cultural changes
among them (Zent 2005; Zent and Zent 2008b). Despite recent changes in
their settlement patterns due to this contact (see Zent and Zent 2004a),
the Jotï still spend more than half of the year trekking between tempo-
rary campsites.
In Maigualida, the Jotï live traditionally in small, dispersed, and iso-
lated communities of about five to thirty-five people, although their
population has been concentrated in two Christian missions (Kayama
and Caño Iguana,1 Catholic and Protestant respectively) and today at
least 65% of the Jotï live in one of them. However, even in these commu-
nities the Jotï are organized in mobile, egalitarian, and temporary bands
with loose kinship rules (Zent and Zent 2008b). Jotï subsistence ecology
consists mostly of the hunting and gathering of wild resources during
frequent overnight forays and longer seasonal treks, intermingled with
shifting agriculture and some fishing. Their settlement pattern consists
of temporary shelters during the annual cycle, although each group
might retain a sort of base camp where erratically tended gardens are
kept. Gardening practices are one among multiple foraging strategies in
an environment characterized by seasonally unstable and spatially
1. In February of 2006 a Presidential Decree ordered the expulsion of the North

American New Tribe missionaries and a military base was installed in its place.

dispersed resources. The Jotï dedicate about 80% of their subsistence

activity time to foraging and around 20% to agricultural tasks.
Jotï Ecological Ethos and Ethics
Jotï language does not have terms that translate concepts such as
‘ecology’ or ‘nature’. Jotï conception of space is more akin to a notion of
unnamed, continuous, socio-cosmic totality or biosphere that includes
diverse and multiple entities. Current research aspires to understand the
customs, habits, and characteristics of the Jotï associated with their
plants and their views on ecology (oikos, home, study of home), ethos
(etho, to be accustomed to, expertise, a form of knowledge), and ethics
(ethic, custom, character, habit).
Daily actions that people execute without major reflections offer a
perceptual expression of their ethos and define a lifestyle centered on
notions of the ‘right way’ of existing in the world. Perhaps the causes of
those conducts are found in the diffuse space that lies between ideology
and the material world. Among the Jotï, plants are like medullar triggers
that underlie the stimulus for movement and the construction of events
(expeditions, hunting, ritual events, etc.). In contrast to other Amazonian
people for whom plants seem to play minor roles compared to animals
in their ideological and religious universe (Aguaruna, Brown 1985; Ese
Eje, Alexiades 1999; Yanomami, Miliken, Albert, and Goodwin Gomez
1999), plants pervade life spheres among the Jotï and take on fundamen-
tal and polysemic dimensions. Jotï conceive plants as entities ontologi-
cally and factually equivalent to people in a way that is similar to that
reported for animals in other Amerindian cultures (Viveiros de Castro
1992; Århem 1996a; Cormier 2003; Kohn 2007). Plants play a role not
only as landscape components that shape physical contexts (forests,
savannas, ecotones, etc.) where the events that generate life take place, or
as differentiated physical organisms (herbs, trees, vines, etc.), but also as
subjects that assume multiple characters, acting contextually and loca-
tionally as hypostatic beings, tricksters, predators, immanent beings, or
diacritics that potentially perpetuate or end life dynamics. Not all plants
(or animals) are considered equivalent to people, but those perceived as
persons have the same social organization and dynamics as the Jotï.
Some people even state that they have kinship with plants. Plant-persons
continue to be people behind their everyday appearance (Viveiros de
Castro 2004: 466) and are thus endowed with agency, unique personali-
ties, and attributes beyond their immediate perceived aspects. The Jotïs’
distinctive ethos and ethics, cosmological, social, and individual realms
are embraced by vegetal forms as reflected in at least three current
dynamics: (1) the occurrence of phyto-myths and phyto-cosmologies in

daily lives; (2) the centrality of plants in the fabrication of humanity and
the reproduction of culture; and (3) the relationship of the Jotï phyto-
world to the symbolic economy of alterity.
No records of Jotï history exist prior to their Western contact in the
early 1970s. Furthermore, Jotï oral traditions reflect minimal concern
about documenting their history. Therefore, little can be said about the
Jotï past except through information recalled in mythological discourses.
Inasmuch as myths and narratives are as dynamic as life itself, they
constitute a prominent tool to understand the past as interpreted and
enacted in the present. Myths are receptacles and expressions of history
(Hill and Wright 1988). Phyto-myths—those myths where plants are
dynamic, agentive actors—provide significant insight into the Jotï ethos
and past. Contrary to being stagnant, Jotï are acutely aware of changes,
particularly those that have occurred during the last decade of their
lives. Ancestral discourses and behaviors that pervade the Jotï ethos are
re-played through new contexts (schools, church, nucleated communi-
ties, cities, etc.), through novel medias (written texts, taped histories,
etc.), and through using recently adopted tools (GPS, computers, etc.).
They sustain and reproduce the right way of being a Jotï in the current
world. Parallel to embracing changes, the Jotï have demonstrated a
remarkable interest in incorporating old customs and narratives into
new, changeable settings. The fabrication of bodies is a synthetic exam-
ple of these processes: a statement of both difference and continuity. Jotï
bodies are the outcome of multiple structured interactions (symbiotic,
predatory, mutual, competitive, material, symbolic, etc.) in which plants
are vigorous and determinant in the final product. Interaction is used
here as equivalent to communication and social networks (Zent and Zent
2008a) among entities: plants, animals, hypostatic beings, people, and so
on. Not just matter but also immaterial and essential components of
humanity are fabricated with particular vegetal species whose incorpo-
ration or exclusion is pivotal to determining future successful relation-
ships with entities in the universe. Use of a myriad of plants is reflected
in the daily ritual incorporation of vegetal matters into the body, a
broader practice of introducing essences in the bodies that constitutes
the self, and that we have translated and conceptualized as ‘essence
interpenetration’ (Zent and Zent 2008a).
Essence interpenetration (au woi, au jkwa, au dïlï) is a set of practices
that requires the direct application of fragments of mostly organic and a
few non-organic components to the body. It consists of the individual
performance of primarily nasal but also oral and corporal ablutions,
libations (au wai), concoctions (au jkwa), inhalations (au iño jkwa lamau),
and partial or total body baths (au dïlï, au ibï) with parts or portions of

certain plants, arthropods, fungi, fish, birds, and mammals as well as

waters rich in some minerals or rocks. This practice ensures connectivity
or relatedness with sentient beings in the cosmos. While components of
this essence interpenetration vary, plants are a constant presence and the
most prominent ingredient. Essence interpenetration is among the last of
the habits learned at the beginning of times that distinguishes the Jotï
way of life. It was taught by jkyo ae (hypostasis of thunder, a canonic and
strong being) to moali ja (a wise primordial person) who trained the jkajo
jadï (wise light people, shamans) who in turn instructed nïn jotï (the true
people, entities where the spiritual and physical essences and appear-
ances coincide) to practice it every day.
Essence interpenetration is a multi-purpose practice for the Jotï; seven
core functional categories include: fabrication-transformation of the
body and matter (in order to create the spiritual components such as
jnamodï, ensure connectivity, and trigger change), purification-restora-
tion (specifically, to amend transgression that breaks connectivity and
relatedness), invigorating-recuperation (to restore all health, animus,
and beauty), trigger-acquisition (to catalyze vital functions, such as those
that start walking, swimming, hunting, etc.), contacting-access (to pre-
pare for gathering or hunting), and preventive-deterrent (to preclude
diseases or death of children or adults). Finally, but fundamentally,
essence interpenetration is a practice to construct alterity. Through dif-
ferent mechanisms (body painting, ablutions, drinking, eating, bathing,
etc.) the Jotï allow essences of organic and inorganic matters to penetrate
their bodies. Penetration of the same essences within a residential group
allows for the assessment of self/other. Alterity is more and more a
matter of degree in the daily movement of relations: life seems to be
associated with a conscious process of relating the self to an equivalent
set of life forms that, while penetrating the bodies not only build and
transform them, but are them (Zent and Zent 2008a). Essence interpen-
etration is conceptually comparable to consubstantiation (Storrie 1999;
Belaunde 2005; Londoño Sulkin 2005). I found, nevertheless, meaningful
differences. Essence interpenetration is foremost a very conscious corpo-
ral technique and also most of the time void of moral value. The Jotï
decide when and how to submit their bodies to the practice. Another
difference is related to what seems to be considered substance versus
essence of the entities involved in the interchanges and events of com-
munication among the Amerindians. Among the Jotï, not just the
particularities that define and set apart a species (in a more abstract and
broader sense) but also the variable natural histories and social memories
of the individual members of the species (whether plant, arthropod, person,
insect, rock, etc.) that takes part in the act are transmitted synergistically

to the person’s agentivity. In that sense, both what could be considered

the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ aspects of a given entity are active in the
essence interpenetration performance. That is one of the reasons why it
is unthinkable to eat pets or why a hunter returns to the same individual
tree to enhance his/her connectivity with game (Zent 2005). Among the
most important essences in constant transferences are blood, tobacco,
paints and attires (vegetal resins, animal bones, exoskeletons, etc.), bio-
triggers (vegetal, animal, and mineral matters that potentially activate
changes in sensual, perceptual, cognitive, or physiological process in
human bodies), as well as edible substances (Zent and Zent 2008a).
Protogony
As in most Amerindian cosmogonies, nothing in the Jotï cosmos is
generated ex nihilo (Viveiros de Castro 2004: 477). Physical perceptual
reality originated through transformations of something already existing
in a different form. The Jotï’s cosmos structure is similar to that of other
Amerindian groups (Yekwana, de Civrieux 1980; Nukak, Cabrera,
Franky, and Mahecha 1999; Makuna, Århem et al. 2004) and involves
three layers or tiers of life and reality: jkyo above (sky), jne in the middle
(earth), and jne jkwa below (underworld). Prominent, emergent trees
found in Maigualida flora support these oval tiers: jkyo is buttressed by
several trees, the most commonly mentioned being nïn alawini (Vitex
capitata Vahl), jkyo alawini (Vitex sp.), jnujtiyebo jele (Amphirrhox longifolia
[St. Hil.] Spreng), and jkawale jkajka (Caryocar microcarpum Ducke); jne is
sustained by four individual trees of the same species which vary
according to the speaker: muye jyeï (Copaifera officinalis L.), nïn alawini
(Vitex capitata Vahl), jkawale jkajka (Caryocar microcarpum Ducke), and
kyabo jyeï jkajka (Qualea paräensis Ducke). Finally, an intricate root system
of these trees lies in jne jkwa, the most stable tier and the location of
widespread abundance and happiness. Running water moves under and
around the spatial span that mediates the spaces between the ovals of
jkyo, jne, and jne jkwa. The water and the tiers float in endless motion.
The beginning of conscious time is attributed to the third and current
cosmic creation generated after the last chaos or total destruction of the
former cosmos. The narrative recalls that the primordial being ikyejka ja
(the hard one, a trickster being), tired of the disproportion and abuse of
power among the overpopulous jkajo jadï, cut down the trees that sustain
the biospheres causing the collapse of the earth and the shaking of the
sky. The underworld remained motionless and unchanged in its own
cycles and flows. Along with jkyo ae, ikyejka ja shaped the earth out
of amorphic chaotic matter. Likewise, plants were instrumental in

reinstituting the current availability and presence of the four essential

elements: air, water, earth, and fire. To avoid losing water, the rain was
stored in the trunk of the jkawïle jyeï (Faramea sp.); still today, this tree
regulates the rain which comes from inside its branches. Likewise, the
air was stored by jkwana uli ja (hypostasis of giant sloth) on a tree that,
according to different versions, could be either nïn mujkë jyeï (Jacaranda
sp.) or jkyo kyabo alawini (Jacaranda obtusifolia H & B). Once the earth was
rebuilt, the air came out of the tree’s trunk. After the last period of chaos,
the fire was also kept hidden by jkwaijlo (a man that transformed himself
into a frog) inside the trunk of some trees, among them jkyo jkulilu jyeï
(Bixa urucurana Willd.), malile jyeï (Brosimum sp.), jwejkao jele (Pouruma
sp.), jlude jyeï (Dacryodes sp.), nïn luwe jyeï (Inga sp.), uli luwe jyeï (Inga
sp.), wejtolo wawa (Cecropia sp.), and uluku jyeï (Heisteria sp.). Earth was
again located on top of the canopy of trees, and the roots of many species
(former people) created convoluted nettings and webs that definitively
consolidated the stability of a permanently moving oval biosphere.
In addition to constituting the fundamental structure that supports
life, plants provide aesthetic images translated into circular processes:
the stars are tree flowers especially jkawale jyeï (Caryocar microcarpum
Ducke), alawni (Jacaranda sp.), ili jluwe jyeï (Inga sp.), jono jyeï (Lecythis
sp.), duade jono jyeï (Eschweilera sp.), and jluwe jyeï (Inga sp.), and these in
turn are stars in the forests. The moon was originally a man who, after
his involvement in an incestuous relationship, left the earth and decided
to transform himself forever into the nocturnal light. He grew up quickly
in the canopy of a notable tree, jkaile jyeï (Micropholis; cf. egensis [A. DC.]
Pierre) and was helped into the sky by two other tree-people that decided
to turn themselves into plants: uli mujkë jyeï (Tachigali; cf. guianense
[Benth.] Zarucchi and Herend and muye jyeï Hymenaea; cf. courbaril L.).
Anthropogony
Similar to other Amerindian peoples, the Jotï do not believe that human-
ity is an exclusive, essential quality or condition of a single life form
(Hallowell 1960; Viveiros de Castro 1992, 1998). A myriad of beings are
humans: many plants, animals, mushrooms, stars, the sun, the moon,
topographic features (rocks, soils, etc.) are not merely animated, but
rather humans in a different morphological appearance. Humanity is the
common or original condition of them, or their shared ultimate reference
point. Likewise, humans are the most susceptible, and even predisposed,
to change their surroundings constantly while producing the dynamics
of life. For Jotï there is no tension between humans as objects (Homo
sapiens) and subjects (endowed with agency sensibility, sensitivity):

humanity is not just a physio-biological given but also a socio-cultural

fact (Seeger, Matta, and Viveiros de Castro 1979; Viveiros de Castro 1979,
1992; Ingold 1991). Humans are persons with perspectives provided by
their bodies: subjects’ inherent differences are not metaphysical but
corporal. Bodies have a central position in the understanding of reality
(Viveiros de Castro 1979, 1992, 1998). They are the outcome of socio-
physiological phenomena involving an endless double motion, fabrica-
tion and transformation. Furthermore, the construction of persons goes
beyond sensual perception: the body totalizes a particular vision of the
cosmos (Seeger, Matta, and Viveiros de Castro 1979).
Jotï language does not have a word that translates body in a Western
sense. The ‘human body’ is an aggregate of material and non-material
components. Plants are agentives in the social (myths explain the ethnic
fabrication of people) and individual (stages of growth of a person)
fabrication of human bodies. Social and individual notions are used here
heuristically since both refer to the same process.
Creation of Human Society

Plants, compared to animals, as the substrate of humankind are infre-
quent themes among South American narratives. Exceptions include: the
Apinayé (Nimuendajú 1939), the Matchigenka (Métraux 1948), the
Bakairi (Métraux 1948), the Arawaks (Brett 2003), the Maipures (Roth
1915), and the Salivas (Roth 1915).
Jotï recognize two narratives of human creation, both of which involve
specific plants. The first (assumed to be older) is known as the jtawï bo
jotï or the tree-trunk people, and credits the gestation of current people
to a set of wild plants. The second, known as the walule miji people, con-
siders as the raw matter of human creation the domesticated complex of
banana-plantain.
Jtawï bo jotï
It all happened during the last chaos, at which time the current cosmos
was destroyed and recreated. Jtinewa, the sun (a very big and tall person)
stopped his walk at the zenith in the midday point. He had forgotten his
trail. A single but incomplete wise man, jkajo ja, lived in the earth alone
in his ïnë ja dodo (lit. the ‘wrapper or skin of meat’) or body. Ikyëjka ja had
predated his ijkwö ju (lit. ‘heart, blood’) and all his jnamodï (lit. ‘spirits’ or
animus selves). Jkyo ae came down to earth after noticing that jkajo ja
pretended that a muli jwëjlo (bract from the Socratea exorrhiza’s palm;
other versions claim jkolowa [Attalea sp.]) was a woman. Both went to
look for a jobei jtawï (tree that sings) and found jtïjtïmo jyeï (Apeiba sp.;

other versions recognize jkwijkwi jyeï or nïn jluwe jyeï) and, crying out,
cut off a piece of wood of approximately 60 centimeters. Then jkonoto jatï2
(a couple of wise bird-man and woman, Psarocolius decumanus) gave jkajo
ja indications to carve the first woman, ñamulie3au, out of that stick. The
she-life sprouted from inside the trunk; first her heart, then, gradually,
the rest of her body (times range between nine days to nine months
according to the narrator). The wood sang and the first woman was born
looking towards the direction where the sun sets. Jkonoto au (the wise
woman) placed the baby over a mat and gave her a bath with some plant
leaves, seeds, and flowers of agreeable scent. Jkonoto mali (the wise man)
took jkajo ja for jkyo balebï (to hunt, fish, gather, explore, and go out in the
forest) and returned a few days later with a mass of organic matter with
which to bath the baby girl. They cried out welcoming the first female
nïn Jotï. The child grew up quickly and when she menstruated for the
first time, they celebrated abstinence, isolation, and silence, then climbed
a mountain to perforate her nose and thereafter they painted their
bodies, took herbal baths, and practiced ablutions. Life was blown into
the primordial couple through their two sons, ñamulie jañye (first son)
and jtujtea jañye (younger son) who transformed into the complete, true
humans when bathed by their mother with a piece of the first mushroom
(yakino)4 that sprouted from her leg.
Walule miji jotï

A more recent version of human origins attributes a second and more
numerous type of person to yowale uli ja and yowale uli jau, the big male
and female opossums from the underworld. The story recalls that for a
long time uli yowale jau piled and stored all walule miji (plantains’ skins,
Musa x paradisiacal) that people discarded on the ground after eating the
fruit. She fastened the plantains’ skins to a shaft that supported their
house, just as present-day Jotï do in order to mix the plantain skins with
tobacco after burning them to ashes. Eventually there was no room for
all of the skins and they fell down. Out of those skins the uli yowale jadï
modelled and fabricated a whole set of nïn Jotï, and thereafter created
people from different ethnic groups, including dodo ma Jotï (us, the people
2. Some narrators mentioned ñowalibujka jadï, moali, moali yaya jadï, or moali bujka
jadï (eternal wise woman and man). Also cited were jkajwiye moali (protectors of
peccaries) or a generic couple of jkajo jadï (wise light persons).
3. Jotï do not use personal names. Ñamulie means literally ‘first’, whereas au
translates woman but is not recognized as a personal name but as a description.
4. There is no consensus about what kind this first mushroom was; usually a
generic one is mentioned. Allegedly, from this first mushroom sprang and diversified
all existent fungi throughout the world.

who use clothes). Since people are finite and thus require endless pro-
duction, uli yowale jadï are still in the underworld, fabricating humans in
the same way (Zent and Zent 2008a).
Whereas the first myth attributes agency to wild plants, the second
gives it to domesticated ones. In the first myth, there is consensus among
all interviewed regarding the structure, sequence of events, characters,
and the co-existence of three different wild species as the wood-material
used to create the first woman. Thus, there is consensus about the fact
that Jotï come from trees and even about the fact that three species of
trees created the true humankind, and from those trees sub-groups of
Jotï ascend and are organized thereafter. Such awareness mirrors aspects
of the social composition, dynamics, and ascendancy of Jotï sub-groups,
since the three trees jtïjtïmo jyeï (Apeiba spp.), ajlikwete lue jyeï (Inga bour-
goni Aublet), and jkiwi jyeï (Caraipa densifolia Martius) are considered the
generators of their sub-groups. This divergence of species varies accord-
ing to the self-ascription of the speaker claiming a unique ascendancy: ‘I
come from alikwete lue jyeï whereas my wife comes from jtïjtïmo jyeï’, for
instance. Jotï recognize at least three trees that sing, which vary as the
proper species according to the person. Consequently, they distinguish
three, and not one, events of creation marking an endogenous social
differentiation within the ethnic group. A form of non-extreme alterity is
highlighted by an essential tree-origin; the attributes of each case define
a subtle differential character among subgroups that is only revealed in
critical situations (such as potential conflicts). Explicitly, the ascendancies
of the three groups are considered as ways to ponder the most conven-
ient spouses or to avoid incest. Furthermore, the tree’s tropical genera
are diversely represented in Venezuelan Guayana by a meaningful num-
ber of species, Inga with thirty-nine (Steyermark, Berry, and Holst 2001:
616), Caraipa with thirteen (Steyermark, Berry, and Holst 1998: 13), and
Apeiba with six (Gentry 1993: 820). This intra-genera diversity mirrors the
intra-ethnic group diversity of which the Jotï are also very aware.
In some instances, traces of history may be encrypted in the mytho-
logical narratives to indicate potential migrations of new groups or
dynamics of interaction. This seems to be the case with the second myth
in which the raw material involves a domesticated genus introduced
purportedly less than 500 years ago from Southeast Asia. Meanings of
Musa x paradisiaca attest to the agile cultural appropriation of alien
material becoming ‘traditional’ non-antique components. The domesti-
cated Musa is made up of many varieties, similar to human ethnic diver-
sity since it is held responsible for all people in the world (including
some nïn Jotï). More extreme alterities are established in this narrative,
exogenous and endogenous ones respectively.

Individual Human Creation

Guiding principles of day-to-day behaviors find echoes in these mythical
narratives at individual levels in different stages of growth and change:
gestation, pregnancy, birth, adolescence, adulthood, and death. The first
three moments are focused on the construction of humanity and person-
hood, while during adulthood the individual strives to maintain his/her
human condition mostly through proper eco-cosmic interactions. Finally,
death prescribes the closure of a way of being in the universe.
Beginning of Life
The conception of a person occurs when fluids from a man and a woman
(semen and blood) are mixed. A woman’s pregnancy, similar to what
occurs among other Amerindians, does not guarantee the birth of a
human. Rather humanity must be fabricated with the culturally deter-
mined series of sociological techniques (Seeger, Matta, and Viveiros de
Castro 1979). The first body part to form inside the womb is the heart. As
part of the couvade rituals (followed by parents and some community
members to substantiate the making of a human child), certain plants
should be contextually consumed (corn) whereas others should not be
eaten (short banana, long yam) to avoid malformations and predations
to the fetus and to protect it from corporeal transformations. Plants are
also used at the start of the process of individuation or separation of
baby from the mother. Following the procedure used when the first
woman was born, the umbilical cord should be cut with a sharpened
bambusoid grass (jtawibo jwajwa [Guadua sp.] or jwana jwajwa [Arthros-
tylidium sp.]). After the severing of the umbilical cord, the father must
wash the placenta with the bark of some secret trees and wrap it in
monocot leaves (nïjnëo wawa [Monotagma laxum K. Schum.], jtawe jwajwa
[Calathea spp.], or dökö [Calathea spp.]). The following morning, he buries
the wrapped placenta superficially on the roots of certain (usually
undisclosed species) soft wooden trees and asks the primordial being
jkyo ae to take it.
A crucial and definite power of plants in the development of individ-
ual human life is associated with the jnamodï: invisible components of
human beings that insufflate human intelligence, volition, knowledge,
and sensibility and serve as the seat of health (Zent and Zent 2007).
Jnamodï are both fabricated and given in three liminal moments of the
person: at birth, during adolescence, and during some specific training.
Three days after the baby is born, the father goes deep into the forest and
simultaneously requests and fabricates the first jnamodï for his child.
Proportional to his shamanic knowledge and according to the sex of the

newborn, the father looks for a large number of leaves, vine fluids, barks,
roots, flowers and fruits of diverse plants (yewö tawï, jkwii hele, luwilo,
jtamu adé, jkyo jtuku, jne jkwa, jani jkalïwëkï, juluwëka jnejkana, maina jtuku
aiye, malawa, alawini, etc.), mushrooms (uli jkwayo yakino, awëla wede
yakino, etc.) and arthropods (spiders, scorpions, ants, etc.).5 He chews up
those elements and makes a mass that he introduces into a basket woven
specifically to store the mass. The generative role of plants in this com-
plex moment is undeniable: the newborn’s father fabricates spiritual and
intangible components (jnamodï) of his baby with compounds of many
(mostly botanical) species while simultaneously requesting from jkyo ae
the jnamodï. The process is double: the mass assembled by the baby's
father (including his saliva) makes up the jnamodï bonded by jkyo ae into
the basket. On the morning of the fourth day, the baby’s father returns
home and the baby’s mother rubs and bathes the newborn with the
compound of substances amassed by the father. These essences
penetrate, protect, and connect the newborn forever with each of the
species that were part of the compound: they act as vehicles through
which the jnamodï penetrates the new being, providing strength, health,
and life. Thereafter, all members of the residential unit are whipped with
certain leaves on their legs and arms. Each of the newborn’s parents
bless portions of a set of different plants and then take separate baths
with them (Zent and Zent 2007).
Infancy
During the first two years of life, at least three processes occur wherein
plants introduce their agentivity to a person: as tools through body para-
phernalia, painting, and dreaming. At approximately five months of age,
the parents tie a woven band of cotton around the infant’s waist that
marks his/her perceptual difference as human being in relation to other
entities. Usually the person wears that band until puberty as the sole
item of ‘clothing’. At ten months of age and through celebrating at a com-
munal party, the children are introduced to the jkwarajka or woven beads
in order to protect the person’s interior self. Jkwalajka are comprised of
mostly seeds and bracts of wild and domesticated plants (uli and jani
jnajtae), bird feathers, bird and mammal claws and bones, fish cartilage,
portions of bottle caps, coins, buttons, glass, and so on. Jkwalajka is placed
onto infants’ chests in the shape of an X, and, as they grow, beads cover
their arms and legs (Zent and Zent 2008a). Moali ja, a deity, taught Jotï to
use beads at the beginning of times as a distinctive feature of humanity,
5. Systematic biological determinations are not provided when bioactivity of

those organisms is suspected.

happiness, and personhood. People use beads at all times but especially
in the forests. Beads make their wearers jti ja: beautiful, good, and
healthy; they ward off predators such as awëladï,6who do not use and are
repulsed by these adornments (Zent and Zent 2008a). At about ten
months old the infant is introduced to the complex practice of maluwe
duwidekae, or body painting, which was taught by jkëmabakä jadï in
primordial times. Colorful or black vegetal, mineral, or animal essences
adorn but especially protect the infant body and are based on different
species of wild trees such as mou jtawï (Protium spp.), jtokolo jtawï
(Himatanthus spp.), and malu jtawï (Trattinnickia spp.), and the cultivated
shrub jkulilu (Bixa orellana L.). Gradually, as the Jotï enter into adult life,
maluwe duwidekae is practiced more intensely and frequently. Beads and
body painting act as tools aiding the wearer to appropriate essential
attributes of the organisms from whence they came.
Figure 1. Body-painting of infant and pre-adolescent boy

during a communal ceremonial feast
6. Numerous beings, but especially three kinds of feared polymorphic predators:

hypostatic (huge black hairy persons that crave eating a person’s eyes), eternal (who
were left imprisoned in the underground since the last chaos), or finite (transforma-
tion of bad things, laziness, diseases, death; they have autonomous volition but no
sense or language [see awetha, Overing and Kaplan 1988; kanaima, Whitehead 2002]).

Before the infant is able to consume most edible items, s/he is intro-
duced to dreaming. Dreaming is an art learned through the body by the
penetration of essences of unique plants. Before two years of age, the
person must be bathed with jlojkodï and ibuju mäli leaves. The compul-
sory prescription of the bath is determinant: the child’s tender body
must be penetrated by those leaves’ essences in a certain time period of
her/his development or s/he will never be a dreamer. Plants here are
more than agentive: they make possible or impossible an exceptional
competence. The plants teach the jnamodï three arts: to communicate
with other beings including ancestors and jnamodï while traveling in
dreams, to hunt/explore the forest, and to heal, restore, and cure.
Dreams provide a fundamental perspective of the life sphere; contrary to
playing a role secluded from habitual life, they offer clues to guiding
daily existence (Zent and Zent 2007: 99). Overall, to dream properly is to
consolidate a lifestyle that could not otherwise be enacted without the
agentivity of plants.
At approximately ten years of age, childrens’ ear lobes are perforated
in order to wear small cane plugs which are believed to help in the
development of the listening skills of their bearers.
Adolescence
Far from being exclusively material tools, plants are instrumental at the
onset of adolescence when the individual’s consolidation of personhood
is marked through a ritual that entails spatial, corporeal, symbolic, and
behavioral elements established during primordial times (López 2006).
Plants are prominent throughout three structural stages found in this
initiation ritual: restrictions and teachings, corporal marking and depart-
ing, and hyperactivity and intemperance (van Gennep 1960 [1909];
Viveiros de Castro 1979: 36). The initiates are allowed to eat just one
cultigen (corn, plantain, manioc); they sleep in new hammocks made
with wejtolo jyeï (Cecropia spp.) inside a little shelter built at the middle of
the family house with palm leaves of ulu ji (Attalea maripa Mart.) and
bajte ji (Oenocarpus spp.) that spatially isolates them. The initiates stay
there between seven days and three months (it varies according to the
speaker) until they depart to a mountaintop to pierce their superior nasal
septum with jani bajte ji’s darts (carved from the midrib of Oenocarpus
bacaba Mart.). While walking to the mountain they protect their head
with a muli ji hat (Socratea exorrhiza Mart.) to hide their presence from
ñëjto ja (rainbow-predator person) and to avoid the penetration of any
harmful substance. Returning from the mountain and nearing home, the
hat along with the fiber of the little shelter used during isolation and the
hammock is put on a termite nest and burnt under a hardwood tree

(alawini, iyëjka jyeï, muye, manio, jtuwomelekejke) while the initiates pro-
duce loud noises (shouting, tree beating). A few days later, a small piece
of wood is introduced in the nasal hole hidden inside the nose and this
will stay there for the rest of that person’s life. Common wooden plugs
are made from Rinorea pubiflora, Licania apetala, and Pseudolmedia spp.
Figure 2. Young man playing a cane flute (Guadua sp.)

prior to introducing tobacco to initiates

Thereafter, the initiate heads off noisily to the forest, practices ablutions
and libations with specific plants, takes a bath, and ornaments her/his
body (necklaces, body painting, etc.) to get ready for the final phase of
the ritual: a communal festival to return to sociality and request jnamodï.
The festival starts seven days before the actual congregation of people
when the initiates’ kin request permission for a ceremony dedicated to
the jkyo aemodï, known as Masters in Amerindian literature (Reichel-
Dolmatoff 1971; Overing and Kaplan 1988; Århem 1996a; Whitehead
2002; Cormier 2003). On the eighth day, they head to the forest while
dancing and singing to cut off and hollow out a tree trunk (preferably
jtijtimo jyeï, the same tree of human creation; alternatively, jwani jyeï
Jacaranda sp. or jtabali jyeï Ceiba spp.) to act as a receptacle for the fer-
mented beer made out of sweet potatoes or manioc. Paraphernalia is
fabricated for all participants with leaves, seeds, and fruits of different
species of palms and trees. The initiate drinks, dances, and sings all
through the night. The next morning s/he is introduced to tobacco and is
allowed to eat various foods. A week of rest follows after the festival and
then the initiates go to the forest. After the nasal perforation, the initiate
is incorporated as a complete human into social, cosmological, and
potentially eternal life. An adult who dies without having endured the
initiation ritual is doomed to extinction since s/he will be eaten by jlojkoi
uli ja (a huge person-predator, hypostasis of a lizard). The ritual closes a
cycle of human completeness and marks the beginning of the Jotï’s life in
symbolic, spiritual, and behavioral spheres.
Ecogony
After adolescence, the person is considered an adult ready to start a fam-
ily since he/she should have the knowledge to guarantee the production
and reproduction of cultural and biological life. Only after the celebra-
tion of the rite of passage is the initiate allowed to interact properly with
many species without jeopardizing the life of community members.
Adulthood
Some central ideas permeate daily events in which the awareness of the
interconnectedness of entities in the biosphere is crucial. The subject
(individual or social) constitutes the causal foundation that triggers most
dynamics in the Jotï universe. The subject-person is simultaneously
receptor and transmissor of multiple visions of her/his surroundings.
These perspectives are given by her/his inherent characteristics (species-
specific, body-specific), and in turn defined by her/his habitus (bundle of
affections). Both subjects and surroundings exist in constant motion.

Movements are interactions among the many characters (plants, sun,

animals, moon, stone, etc.), and interactions are the mutual or reciprocal
influences, exchanges, contacts, connections, and foremost communica-
tions between them in the biosphere (Zent and Zent 2008a). Subjects with
their volition, sensibility, reflexive consciousness, intentionality, and
agency (Ingold 1991) are responsible for sociality: the immanent element
of the Amerindian thought that shapes the cosmos network (Viveiros de
Castro 2004: 7).
Figure 3. Ae ja, a wise man, holding the traditional wooden shaft

that indicates his leadership and ascendancy

Early in the twentieth century, the Estonian biologist von Uexküll

(1907) attributed to all species the condition of subjects and not just to
humans. He conceptualized umwelt, the subjective universe or the outer
world as perceived by the organism. Umwelt is species-specific and pro-
vides the unicity of the different entities in the world. Hence, individual
or social preceptors de-codify or ignore the network of interrelated signs
and symbols that permeate the biosphere and build their interactions
accordingly (cf. Kull 2005: 179). The notion of umwelt is in accord with
Viveiros de Castro’s Amerindian perspectivism (1992), Århem’s perspec-
tival quality (1996a), Gray’s perspectival relativity (1996), and articulates
meaningfully with Ingold’s dwelling (2000, 2006). Partially based in the
Heideggerian notion of building, remaining, or staying in a place, ‘to
dwell’ is to engage in the outer world, the ability to do so enabling the
subject to immerse her or himself in an environment of holistic life as the
inescapable condition of existence. This theoretical scheme adapts well
to Jotï reality. For the Jotï, relationships and interactions have ultimate
importance. The everyday lives of the subjects are defined by their
motions and their capacities to interact with the multiple entities of their
universe as well as to affect and be affected by them, by their powers
and the nature of their inherent selves. Likewise, the subjects’ ability to
create and modulate relationships frames a network that delimits their
life. Furthermore, entities themselves are loaded with meanings (Zent
and Zent 2008a). Subjects are assemblages of relational events whose core
is determined by their networks of kin and experiences (Deleuze 1993).
Plants are significant in these interwoven dynamics. Both in mythical
and current times, Jotï interactions occur in different spheres (abiotic,
biotic, among humans, non-humans, etc.), frequencies (isolated event,
daily, monthly, once in an individual life-span, etc.), intensities (total
engagement, superficial transactions, intermediate force, etc.), and for a
variegated number of reasons (economic, social, religious, pleasure, etc.).
In these interactions, plants are generative and active actors in the inter-
actions. They constitute meaningful links in the steps of life-form trans-
formations; in fact, one complexity of the interactions lies in the fact that
most life forms come from a circular, Boolean-type ontological reality. As
described previously, human life sprouted from a trunk carved in the
shape of the first woman, while the first mushroom sprang from the foot
of the first wood-woman, enabling the fungi speciation processes that
generated all mushrooms existing today. Likewise, most wild plants
were originally humans (i.e. palms such as Attalea spp., Oenocarpus spp.,
Socratea exorrhiza, canes to make flutes [Guadua spp.] or blowguns
[Arthrostylidium spp.], etc.) in the primordial times but decided to trans-
form themselves into plants to sustain people on earth; because they

were bored, the plant-person walked away from the Sun’s abode to Earth
and chose where to live (their habitats) and how to look (their habit).
Most of the current mammals and birds as well as cultivated plants were
people who decided to transform as desired into actual species. These
metamorphoses took place after humans transited and sang, from the
interior of an emergent tree trunk (Qualea sp.) to the outer forests. Thus,
connections between life forms perceived as people-plants-animals-fungi
are direct: humanity is an essential component shared by many life
forms that interact daily today. Indeed, some people claim to have kin-
ship relationships with various plants and animals species.
The generation of life depends upon an ecocentric ethics and it is
pragmatically reflected in the effort to maintain connections through the
material and spiritual transference among the spheres of sensible life and
social domains. All biota are ontologically interlinked as well as prag-
matically dependent upon each other. For example, our data account for
45 mammal species (in 15 biological families) and 53 bird species (in 20
families) hunted by the Jotï with the help of tools fabricated with 61
botanical species (in 33 families), whereas we have recorded over 100
species of mostly plants but also some mammals, fish, arthropods, and
mushrooms involved in the essence interpenetration associated with
subsistence ecology practices that guarantee successful interactions (Zent
2005). Likewise, Jotï collect parts of over 220 wild plant species to eat and
11 help them to alleviate thirst while they are distant from water sources,
285 plant species are used to build shelters and houses, 36 botanical
species aid them to fish, 193 are employed for technological ends, and 15
botanical species are used to clean and bathe their bodies (Zent and Zent
2004a, 2004b). The biospheric link is constantly consolidated through the
essence interpenetration practice supported by applying systematically
their knowledge in terms of ecology (species natural histories and inter-
actions, distribution and movements of populations, anthropogenic
impacts, etc.), technology (fabrication or trade tools, skills, traditional
ecological praxis and wisdom, etc.), sociology (gender relations, kinship,
interchange, trade, camping, socialization, etc.), and religion (cosmology,
health, myth, rituals, dreams, ceremonies, taboos, essence interpenetra-
tion, etc.) (Zent and Zent 2004a, 2004b, 2008b).
Interactions have various dynamics involving characters that change
their roles according to the context and the venture: mutualism, amen-
salism, commensalism, symbiosis, and predation including forms of
parasitism (Zent and Zent 2008a). For instance, the hunters’ seduction of
game starts, just as it occurred in primordial times, with the multi-fac-
eted practice of maluwe duwidekae, body painting with a compound based
on vegetal resins (Protium spp. or Trattinnickia spp. and Mabea spp. for

male hunters and Aphelandra spp. or Psychotria spp. for female hunters),
seeds, leaves, and pieces of the inner bark of some trunks (jkwajtakä) that
includes processed parts of arthropods, mammals, birds, and fish,
sometimes even mineral substances. But especially, the body paints are
mixtures of plants able to communicate with other entities (Himatanthus
articulatus, Zingiber sp., Bixa sp., Protium aracouchini, Copaifera officinalis,
Trattinnickia lawrancei, Trattinnickia burserifolia, Protium crassipetalum,
Protium tenuifolium, Mabea sp., Garcinia sp., Hibiscus abelmoschus, Ecclinusa
guianensis, etc.). A permanent interchange and transfer of qualities and
essences, both material and non-material, is enacted among the life
forms that sustain the ethics of belonging, dependence, and affection.
Eschatology
The ultimate destiny of humankind and the world were revealed in
primordial times.
Death
Ikyejka ja cut the trees that supported earth at the beginning of times, but
night did not exist since the Sun remained motionless in the zenith. Con-
cerned, the first son ñamulie jañye, encouraged by his parents, climbed up
the sky and tried to convince the Sun, jtinewa, to walk behind him so that
he could, once more, learn the oval trail around the three life-tiers.
Unable to persuade jtinewa, and lacking other seductive strategies,
ñamulie jañye killed him with a wooden lance. After many days of dark-
ness the sun was reborn as a tiny halo of light, which came out from the
coals of the minuscule core of the first sun’s heart. The Sun grew up fast,
and during his maturation ñamulie jañye taught him the whole circuit
around which he must walk everyday and how to be a proper nïn Jotï (to
make baskets, blowguns, mats, lances, houses, and hammocks, and to
perform rituals, songs, stories, dances, etc.). Then ñamulie jañye
descended to earth in the shape of a bat. The cycles began again after the
Sun started walking, and with them, many night-creatures became
known. Life was in abundance and regained motion (Zent and Zent
2008a). However, no one on earth followed the mortuary rituals required
when the Sun died, provoking irreversible consequences for humans:
they lost immortality and the opportunity to be jluweoäï (eternally
young, shedding the skin like crabs or snakes), which forced ñamulie
jañye to open the path that all people must follow after death towards
the Sun’s abode. The first people were afraid. With darkness on earth,
many predators came and surrounded their home (yewidï [lit. powerful
predator jaguars] and awëladï) and people remained quiet and silent,

even after the peoples’ first son (probably transformed into a jaguar)
begged them to open the door for him. The chain of potential outcomes
is again the product of interlinked (ecological) occurrences of diverse
actors and does not consist of isolated events crafted as dogmas or
cryptical whims of a powerful entity or a few deities. A crucial goal
attributed to one of the first complete men, ñamulie jañye, is announcing
the destiny of humankind and the potential end of this era if humans did
not reproduce the Jotï lifestyle (Zent and Zent 2008a).
After death, the person’s soul walks to where the Sun is born (i.e. to
the East). The voyage is marked by potential predatory events, the nature
of which depends upon facts that involve plants—such as whether the
deceased wears a wooden plug in her/his nose, consumes tobacco, and
whether the mourners fulfill the funerary rituals. Likewise, the final
destination varies (underworld, sky, under some mountains, etc.)
according to which of the three trees of the primordial Creation myth the
deceased came from. Three components of the person—body, heart, and
jnamodï—endure transformations after death, the viability of which
depends upon the mourner’s fulfillment of the mortuary rituals. Failure
to complete the funerary rituals may result in predation and fatal
substantial contaminations (chronic diseases).
As with the birth and adolescence rituals, the three stages characteriz-
ing the mortuary rituals also involve generative plants: (1) restrictions
and isolation, (2) body markers and depuration, (3) hyperactivity and
intemperance. The corpse is washed with vegetal and animal substances
before being buried, frequently in areas with abundant subsoil plants. It
is wrapped in a mat or a hammock made of wejtoro jtawï (Cecropia spp.)
or cotton fiber, before it is placed into the hole. Large sticks are crossed
on top and along the body, and over them are placed leaves of jkanawa
wawa (Phenakospermun guyannense Endl. ex Miq.). Besides the body, the
mourners place items they believe the deceased will use to complete the
journey (food, lance, blowgun, paints, necklaces, etc.). Thereafter, mourn-
ers go away to avoid awëla’s attacks (diseases, kidnapping, frightening,
etc.) and seek to protect themselves by eating certain mushrooms and
decorating their bodies (painting with vegetal substances such as
jkalawine, Erechtites sp., jkulilu Bixa spp., Protium spp., muye jaï, alawini
jyeï, balana, etc.). Protection is acquired forever once a mushroom (awëla
yakino) mixed with water is rubbed on the piece of wood that is used for
the first nasal perforation. After burial, the group’s house is burned, and
a new shelter is built about an hour’s walk away. For around three
months, the mourners, and especially those who touched the corpse,
must wash their hands, take baths, vomit, and make ablutions with cer-
tain plants. They must also provoke ants to bite their arms, hands, legs,

and chest and wash their scars with particular vegetal substances (vary-
ing according to sex and age) while positioning themselves on top of the
ants’ nests so as to allow the blood mixed with the vegetal fluid to enter
the nests. The mourners scarify their bodies and mouths with specific
leaves letting the blood drip on several ants’ nests. They abstain from
consuming wild products. Those who buried the corpse cannot touch
children for a month until they have taken a warm bath with specific
plants (jtokwawa, jtijti, jkulilu, jtikiwili, jtuku jedö, mailaj tuku, wejkana, jedö
najte alejtö). Gradually, during a six-month period, the mourners eat one
food type after another until they can offer a feast in the new house.
On his final voyage, the deceased must cross a river at the end of the
world. Jlojkoi uli ja, the biggest predator, is waiting for all dead persons
midway across the river: he eats all who lack the nasal wood plug, and
only grants passage to the Sun’s abode to those who have the piece of
wood in their noses. Good spirits receive the survivors in the Sun’s home
where the dead person turns into a spirit.
Funerary rituals do not just protect a soul from cosmic final predation
but allow the continuation of the Jotï lifestyle while maintaining health
and connectedness with all life forms, thus avoiding cultural and
biological extinction.
Conclusions
Similar to other Amerindian people, Jotï myths disclose the standard
guidelines of the right lifestyle. Plants are central to Jotï poetics, both in
their narratives and everyday life. Phyto-myths are repositories of reli-
gious wisdom that conceal the proper ways of being human in the cos-
mos. Phyto-myths that explain Jotï protogony, anthropogony, ecogony,
and eschatology act as moral decalogues, articulating practices in the
dynamics of Jotï ecological ethos and ethics (ideal bio-spheric behaviors).
These dynamics are perceived through daily cultural poetics or perform-
ances linking praxis and ideas, primordial and everyday time.
Plants are at the base of life among Jotï, constituting a critical link in a
circular conception of relations among living beings. Of the examples
cited above, significant examples of the role played by plants are as
follows:
1. The cosmos structure is maintained, supported, and sustained by
more than twenty plants.
2. Human beings were generated from plants, whereas most
animals, plants, and mushrooms were originally people. Thus,
this origin in vegetal substance continues to have consequences
for the Jotï ethos today.

3. Intangible components of humanity are produced and given

through plants. Plants operate meaningfully in the endless
process of fabrication and transformation of bodies; at least
thirty-five plants assist explicitly in giving birth to a new human;
several more are secret; over thirty are active agents in the initi-
ation ritual and a higher number are used in the funerary rituals.
4. Inductions to real worlds through dreams, as well as the skills to
interact, apprehend, and communicate successfully in the cos-
mos (hunt, gather, dwell, etc.), depend upon particular plants.
5. Plants have a multi-functional role in the reproductive cycle and
are used to stimulate, avoid, and terminate pregnancy. The daily
consumption of certain plants (as tobacco) guarantees life and its
continuation. The bond among plants, humans, and eternity is
sanctified through a physical marker since human beings must
always carry wooden plugs inserted in their nasal septa. Wooden
plugs are believed to provide protection from predation, provide
access to the ancestors’ world, cure, maintain relatedness with
entities in the world, and avert death and extinction.
Permanent intercommunicability of matter and essence permeates and
affects individual discrete limits as well as identity and alterity. Plants
are critical to this process of intercommunicability. Feelings of belonging
and self-definition are highlighted in extreme events of exposure, when
the differences are evident between sub-groups of Jotï who ascend from
different trees, as previously mentioned in reference to the human crea-
tion stories. Hence, the statement ‘we come from trees’ alludes directly
to the three trees (jtïjtïmo jyeï [Apeiba spp.], ajlikwete lue jyeï [Inga bourgoni
Aublet], or jkiwi jyeï [Caraipa densifolia Martius]) from which each person
and each sub-group of Jotï come. Inversely, but subtly, each subgroup is
represented by a tree and each group adjudicates its phylogeny to a tree.
Tension between similarity and diversity is a more permanent state that
appears among the Jotï, and plants make those tensions subtle or sharpen
them. Difference is stressed through the constant fear of being predated
upon, even by certain trees, and turning into one of the predators. Inter-
actions with plants provide diacritics of alterity: beyond providing
resources to satisfy needs, plants state the interconnection and complexi-
ties of the established limits of discrete individuals since many of them
act as the main vehicle of permanent transformations.
The practice of essence interpenetration is today observed on a fre-
quent, if not daily, basis. The insertion of substances in the body is pre-
cisely what initiates the change, making the body permeable, sorting out
the succession of changes. When a Jotï celebrates essence interpenetra-
tion through nasal, oral, and corporal ablutions (libations, inhalations,

and partial or total baths) with portions of some plants, mushrooms, and
arthropods, s/he sharpens her/his capacity to see, hear, smell, being in
the world of the senses. The practice enhances and purifies the body and
establishes effective and affective links with the different organic spheres.
The bath (essence interpenetration) with the first mushroom given to the
first man is the metaphor that summarizes the metamorphosis practiced
through the penetration of substances (such as is observed in the fabrica-
tion of jnamodï, the practice of hunting-magic, the use of tobacco, the
carrying of nasal wooden plugs, etc.). The penetration of essences
symbolizes the potential metamorphosis after essential body contact/
penetration with organic matter takes place.
Finally, plants are fundamental to following the most crucial human
purpose in the cosmos: to maintain and reproduce total interconnection
of life forms. This interconnection is perceived as the only possible strat-
egy to preserve the universe’s existence. This cosmogonic responsibility
is the marker par excellence of humanity, which is measured by the unique
Jotï lifestyle. Hunting, gathering, fishing, and singing are all part of a
continuous vital interchange. Humanity’s fragility is also the Jotï’s major
strength: their hyper-consciousness of the latent possibility of chaos, the
cosmic collapse and destruction that inappropriate human behavior
could trigger by cutting the trees that sustain and support the Cosmos.
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_______________________________________________
Singing to Estranged Lovers:
Runa Relations to Plants in the Ecuadorian Amazon*
_______________________________________________
Tod Dillon Swanson

Department of Religious Studies, Arizona State University,
P.O. Box 3104, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA
tod.swanson@asu.edu
Abstract
This article examines Runa relations to plants in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
By analyzing ritual songs to plants as well as gardening behaviour, it
argues that plants are treated like dangerous lovers or difficult children. To
find out why this should be the case, it then examines Quichua and Shuar
language accounts of the origins of plant species. These accounts suggest
that plant species evolve from a previously human state in which the
plants were lovers or children who became estranged. The estrangement is
triggered by a particular fault called quilla in Quichua. The meaning of this
key term includes both ‘laziness’ and ‘sexual looseness’. The resulting
emotional estrangement then hardened into a physical transformation
giving rise to a new species. Although the fault called quilla is overcome
through the transformation, the resulting plants continue to be treated as
though they were moody children or lovers prone to withdraw from the
gardener. The article concludes by suggesting that treating plants as high-
maintenance lovers leads to a kind of gardening that is more costly in
terms of time and dedication than most women can afford under
conditions of modernity.
In his book Tsewa’s Gift, Michael F. Brown studied relations to plants

among the Aguaruna Shuar in Peru during 1977–78. He was puzzled by
the perceived precariousness of manioc gardening. Why, he wondered,
* I would like to thank Michael Uzendoski, Bron Taylor, and Robin Wright for
their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. Conversations with Janis
Nuckolls also helped to shape the ideas developed here. Finally, I would also like to
thank my wife Josefina Andi for her assistance with the sometimes difficult Quichua
translation of the texts included in the article.
Swanson Singing to Estranged Lovers 37
would Aguaruna women invest so much anxiety into gardening when

the successful outcome seemed relatively secure (Brown 1986)?1 Against
this background he interpreted Aguaruna gardening songs as a kind of
‘technology of sentiment’ for increasing affinity between gardeners and
their plants. In field work carried out during roughly the same period
(1976–79), Philippe Descola noted a similar anxiety among the related
Achuar: ‘Unlike the very great majority of Amazonian societies, the
Achuar consider that the growing of manioc must be surrounded by a
tight web of ritual precautions’ (Descola 1994: 191). Descola found that in
carrying out these ritual precautions, the Achuar maintained social rela-
tions with plants and animals patterned on human kinship. While
women treated garden plants on the model of consanguineal kin, men
treated game animals as affinal relatives.2 Hence he entitled his book In
the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia.
In this article, I examine women’s relation to plants in a society related
to the Achuar, the Runa (Quichua-speaking) communities of the Pastaza
and Napo headwater valleys in the Ecuadorian Amazon.3 For these
women, plants can evoke deep and ambivalent emotion. Manioc plants
are often treated as if they were delicate children. Medicinal trees can be
addressed in song as if they were moody male lovers. Why should
plants be experienced in ways that seem incongruous with their passive
1. ‘For them [the Aguaruna] the garden, like the forest, is a spiritually charged
realm that poses dangers to the unwary or imprudent… To a scientific observer, the
Aguaruna horticultural system is remarkably productive and resistant to the climactic
fluctuations, plant diseases, and pests that make plant cultivation so risky in tempe-
rate zones. Not so for the Aguaruna gardener, who feels that without magical interven-
tion the success of her crops is always in doubt’ (Brown 1986: 97).
2. For example, Descola cites an Achuar hunting song that addresses the woolly
monkeys as ‘little brother-in-law’ (1986: 261).
3. Quichua-speaking people (Runa) on the Pastaza and upper Napo Rivers are
not primarily descended from Andean migrants but are rather Amazonians (mostly
Zaparoan and Achuar/Shuar) who have undergone a language shift. They share more
rituals, origin stories, and customs with the Achuar/Shuar than with any other
language group (including Quichua dialects of the sierra). In his early work, Norman
Whitten demonstrated close kinship ties between the Achuar and the Runa living in
the Rio Pastaza valley (1976). Although his early work portrayed the Napo Runa as
distinct, he later extended his portrait of Pastaza Runa kin networks to include the
Napo headwater region (Whitten and Whitten 2008). The work of Muratorio (1991)
and Uzendoski (2005) tended to strengthen the view of the Napo Runa as culturally
distinct from the Pastaza Runa. Although space does not permit me to argue the case
here, from long residence in both the Pastaza Runa (1961–65, 1971–73, 1996) and the
Napo headwater Runa areas (summer and winter breaks from 1997–present) as well
as a comparison of texts, material culture, and dialects, I have become convinced that
the two are best treated as a single cultural continuum.

leafy appearance? In ritual contexts the name of a plant species is often

followed by the Quichua term runa (man) or warmi (woman), suggesting
that they are persons of some kind. But what kind of persons? What are
the moral and religious qualities of human relations to these persons?
Plant runas are classified in Quichua as a kind of supai, a term that native
speakers frequently translate into Spanish as diablos. Yet, even though
plant supais may be perceived as frightening, deceptive, or dangerous,
they are also attractive and regarded as sources of life.
Like Brown and Descola, I am interested in why such intense and
ambivalent emotion is put into acquiring plant products. To better under-
stand Runa relations to plants, I will examine two sources of evidence.
The first is ritual songs to plants. The second are stories that account for
the origins of plant species. From these sources I will argue that plant
species are understood to be children or adult lovers who have with-
drawn from the human family because of a particular moral fault called
quilla, a kind of lazy immaturity. The reason that harvesting forest plants
is believed to be so precarious is that it depends on overcoming this fault
through a mature and disciplined relationship with these difficult lovers.
Figure 1. Matiri Runa (Clavija sp.)
I begin by examining two songs by Clara Santi, a woman with roots in

both the Pastaza and the Napo valleys.4 Her first song is addressed to
4. Clara Santi, the key Pastaza Runa resource for this article, exemplifies the
fluidity or relations between the Pastaza and Napo valleys. Although she speaks in

Matiri Spirit Man. Matiri is the Quichua name of a plant in the Clavija
genus of the Theophrastaceae family. Clavija is a deep forest plant that
bears clusters of yellow fruits about the size of a grape. These fruits con-
sist of a large pit surrounded by a thin, crispy skin with the thickness of
a tangerine pealing. This pealing is considered to have a medicine (jambi)
that hunters consume to dull hunger and attract game while out on long
hunts in the forest. According to Clara Santi, ‘When you walk in the
forest with hunger, when its fruits are smooth and ripe, you take them
and you suck on them, breaking, breaking, breaking, their thin skin. You
suck on these when you walk with hunger. The hunger goes away. It is a
medicine’.
The matiri plant is said to have a personality or runa within it called
Matiri Runa. To harvest the matiri fruit, the medicine gatherer addresses
a song to this persona hidden in the plant. As Clara put it, ‘This is one
you sing to. You are to sing to it’. Clara then sang her matiri song which
goes as follows:
1. Matiri Man 1. Matiri Runa

2. When he goes to the forest 2. Pai sachama.
3. Carrying his matiri fruits 3. Amtirita aparisha riushcai
4. To kill this bird 4. Cai pishcuta wañuchingahua
5. Matiri Man goes carrying it 5. Matiri Runa aparisha rij mara
6. Killing birds 6. Pishcuta wanuchisha
7. Filling the basket 7. Matiri Tapata undachisha
8. Giving (her) a bite [of the 8. Canichisha
game bird]
9. Dressed in green he will bring 9. Verdilla churasha apamuj mara
it back
10. Preparing that [game] bird 10. Chi pishcuta pelasha
11. He will have it (with him) 11. Charisha
12. That Matiri Tree Man 12. Martiri Ruya Runaga
13. Seducing a woman 13. Warmita engañasha
14. Drinking his little fruits 14. Matiri Ruya pai muyuhuata
upisha
15. Sitting there giving the bird 15. Payhua enamorado warmita
(he killed) to the woman he pishcuta cusha tiasha
loves
16. So that what he wants will 16. Pay munai tucusha
happen
the Pastaza dialect her mother was from Ahuano on the Napo. Clara spent some of
her childhood years living in the home of her Napo Runa grandfather Asua Juanchu
Grefa. There she was exposed to many influences (including one of her grandfather’s
four wives who came from the Rio Ucayali in Peru).

17. He seduced her 17. Engañara5

18. That is how Matiri Man is 18. Chasna man Matiri Runaga
19. That matiri fruit 19. Matiri muyuga.
20. I will go taking his power/ 20. Payhua supaita apasha risha
spirit
21. He is the man who stands 21. Apahuai nisha shayaj runa mara
there saying ‘Take me’.
22. That Matiri Man. 22. Matiri Ruyaga
The purpose of the song is to persuade the plant man to allow the
singer to take some of his medicine away with her: ‘I will go taking his
spirit with me’, she sings. ‘He is the man who stands there saying “Take
me”, That Matiri Man’. The reason that the song is necessary is that the
medicine works well only if the plant cooperates and gives its medicine
willingly to the healer. Simply taking the plant will not produce an
effective medicine. Getting the plant to give its medicine willingly is a
delicate matter, however, because the plant is thought to be tempera-
mental, guarded, and prone to withdraw from relationships. The song,
which is sung to the matiri plant by a female singer, portrays the Matiri
Man both as a seductive lover and as a skilled hunter.
By portraying matiri in this way, the song represents the guardedness
or inaccessibility of the man behind the matiri medicine as a kind of male
sexual coyness. Once portrayed in this light, the female singer knows
how to behave toward the plant in order to coax him to cooperate. She
attracts him with love songs like she might any evasive but attractive
man who is vulnerable to women. Since hunters chew his fruits when
they go out hunting, it is with Matiri Runa’s power and personality that
they endure hardship to bring back game to give to the women they
love. Hence Clara’s love song to matiri portrays Matiri Runa himself as a
hunter and seductive lover who brings back game to seduce his love.
The song builds on traditional patterns of courtship and love in which
men hunt to give game to women in exchange for love, sex, and asua
(manioc drink). Giving game to a woman is a recognized act of
courtship, much like giving red roses.6 In this case, the game that is given
5. ‘Engañara’ is a loan word from Spanish engañar (to deceive) which in this
context means ‘to seduce’. The suffix ‘–ra’ is a Pastaza Quichua third-person singular,
past tense marker, although it looks like a Spanish third-person singular, future tense
marker.
6. I use the example of roses to suggest the idea that Amazonian men are
romantic and not just exchanging products (meat for chicha) and much less meat for
sex. Nevertheless, comparing game to roses has its limits. While roses are given to a
woman as an individual, game is given to a woman understood to be part of an ayllu

is a bird (pishcu). The word pishcu may have a double entendre because it is
a common term for the male organ frequently used by women in jest.
The double entendre is made more probable by the context. ‘Drinking his
little fruits, sitting there to give the bird (he killed) to the woman he
loves so that what he wants will happen. He seduced her. That is how
Matiri Man is’. Since in the larger context the song is about the relation-
ship of the Matiri Man to the singer herself, it is likely that Clara is refer-
ring to herself as the woman that the Matiri Man is trying to seduce.
What Clara hopes to receive from the Matiri Man is his medicine. Hence,
the bird given to the woman probably ultimately refers to the Matiri
Man’s medicine, here compared to the stereotypical male gifts of game
and sex.
By singing teasingly to him in this way, the female singer turns the
tables on him. By flattering the male plant with her song, she seduces
him into giving her his medicine. In the beginning of the song, Matiri
Man is the one in control, seducing women. By the end, however, he is
the ‘man who stands there saying take me’ and Clara concludes, ‘I will
go taking his spirit away with me’.
The second song is addressed by Clara Santi to Huanduj Man (Brug-
mansia suaveolens). Like matiri, Brugmansia suaveolens is the source of a
medicine (jambi) that the singer hopes to acquire. The soft stems of
Brugmansia are split open and left outside overnight to expose them to
the dew. The pulp is then scraped out and ingested to produce visions.
The flowers and leaves are used as poultices for wounds and for acts of
ritual cleansing called pichana in Quichua or limpias in Spanish. Brug-
mansia is also planted around homes as a protective border against
witchcraft. Yachajs (shamans) who drink ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi)
claim to see the Brugmansia borders glowing in the dark.7
In introducing this song she said: ‘Ok. I am going to sing about the
how the Huanduj Man went taking me to bathe me in the fragrance of
his flowers. I stand inside the fragrance of the opening of [his flowers]. I
am going to sing of the huanduj flower, the Napo River flower. That is
what I am going to sing, the huanduj flower’. Her song goes like this:
or extended family. Unlike the gift of roses the gift of game is also evidence of a
suitor’s masculinity developed in complex relation to the forest. For another explora-
tion of the love, sex, and meat/manioc relationships, see Gow 1989.
7. Ritual healers called yachaj (literally ‘one who knows’) regularly drink a bitter
tea made from steeping the ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) vine together with chagruna
(Psychotria viridis) to alter consciousness so that they can communicate with the supai
(spirit) world.

1. Little Huanduj Flower Woman 1. Huanduj Sisa Warmiwa

2. Little Huanduj Flower Woman 2. Huanduj Sisa Warmiwa
3. Huanduj Spirit Man 3. Huanduj Supay Runa
4. Taking (her) from right here 4. Kaymandalla apasha
5. Placing her on the point of the 5. Isla punday churasha
island
6. Where he is flowering. 6. Pay sisarishkay
7. I am the woman who stands 7. Asnarisha shayak warmi mani-ari
smelling.
8. Giving off perfume with just his 8. Paibaj sisallawa asnarisha
flower
9. When she arrives where he is 9. Pay shayaushkay paktarijpi
standing
10. The Huanduj Man bathes her 10. Sisawa Huanduj Runa armachisha
with his flower
11. I am the woman just standing 11. Shayaushkalla warmi mani-ari
here
12. Wherever he wants to take her 12. Mayta apasha nisha
13. In the house 13. Wasi
14. On an island in the Napo 14. Napo Yaku islai
15. The Huanduj Man, standing 15. Huanduj Runa shayasha
16. Called (me) from here 16. Kaymanda kayawara
17. Standing at the head of the island 17. Isla punday shayasha
18. The Huanduj Flower Man. 18. Huanduj Sisa Runaga.
20. He wanted to take [me] 20. Apasha nisha
21. But he was not able to overcome 21. Mana ushawarachu
me
22. He will not be able to overcome 22. Mana ushawarachu
me.
23. With only his flower. 23. Paipak sisallawa
24. Smelling, asking 24. Asnasha, mañarisha
25. I stand making him drunk 25. Paita machachisha shayag mani-ari
26. Huanduj Spirit Man 26. Huanduj Supay Runata
27. I stood making him give off his 27. Payta asnachisha shayarani ari
smell
28. The Huanduj Flower Woman 28. Huanduj Sisa Warmiga
29. The Huanduj Flower Woman 29. Huanduj Sisa Warmiga
30. I stand turning back and forth 30. Kihuirisha shayani
(ambivalent)
31. I stand turning back and forth 31. Kihuirisha shayani
(ambivalent)
32. He himself 32. Paillatamiga
33. The Huanduj Flower Man 33. Huanduj Sisa Runaga
34. He thought he could just take me 34. Apashalla nisha pas?
35. He will not take me 35. Mana apawangachu yari

36. He himself secretly 36. Paillata pakalla

37. with his huanduj flower stem 37. Huanduj sisa paibaj tulluwa
38. I am the who stands making 38. Uyachisha shayak warmi mani-ari
herself heard
39. Bathing with his huanduj 39. Pai wandujta armasha
40. I am the traveling woman who 40. Paibaj sombrerota churarisha shayaujpi
looks into his eyes when he paibaj ñawita rikushalla purik warmi
stands there wearing his hat. mani-ari
41. He stands wanting to take me 41. Pay apawangaj shayarin
42. The Napo River Huanduj 42. Napo Yaku Huandujga
43. Stands wanting to take me 43. Apawangaj shayarin
44. He stands wanting to take me to 44. Apasha paibaj isla punday churawangaj
put me on the point of his island. shayarin
45. He wants to take me 45. Apasha nisha
46. The Huanduj Spirit Man 46. Huanduj Supai Runaga
47. Stands [there] intending to take 47. Apawangaj Shayarin
me
48. Wearing his hat 48. Pay sombrerota churarisha
49. The huanduj flower opened 49. Huanduj sisa paskaririshka
50. With only his smell 50. Paibaj asnayllawa
51. I am the woman who stands 51. Muktirisha shayak warmi mani-ari
smelling
52. The Huanduj Spirit man 52. Huanduj Supay Runaga
53. Laughs (flirts) wanting to take me 53. Apashalla nisha asin
54. He won’t be able to overcome me 54. Mana ushawangachu
55. The strong Santi woman 55. Santi warmi supaita
56. Only his eyes/face 56. Paibaj ñawillatata
57. I am the woman who stands 57. Kihuirisha shayak warmi mani
turning back and forth
58. I am the woman who stands 58. Paibaj huanduj sombrerota apasha
taking his huanduj hat shayak warmi ani
59. Looking into my eyes 59. Ñuka ñawita rikusha
60. He sweeps with only his huanduj 60. Pai picharisha wandujllawa
61. The standing man 61. Shayak runata
62. He laughs wanting to carry me 62. Apisha nisha asin
away
63. I couldn’t do it 63. Mana usharanichu
The purpose of Clara Santi’s song to Huanduj Man is similar to that of

her Matiri Man song. As with Matiri Man, the medicine produced by
Brugmansia does not work mechanically but through a relationship. This
song is the pathway of a romance between Clara and Huanduj Runa. In
the first two lines of the song, the singer takes on the identity of the
Brugmansia identifying herself as the Huanduj Flower Woman engaging

the plant as the Huanduj Spirit Man. Her identity as the Huanduj Flower
woman is derivative from her relationship to the Huanduj Flower Man.
The Huanduj Man is by nature hidden because he is a spirit not visible
to the human eye. To describe the hiddenness of the Huanduj Man,
Clara draws on the physical appearance of the flower itself. The long
tubular flowers hang downward so that the stamen and other internal
parts of the flower are invisible unless one leans over and peers up
inside the flower. As they hang downward the flowers look like a tall
pointed hat with a wide brim at the bottom. Clara describes herself as
the woman who stands peering under this hat. In line 58, she takes his
hat and looks inside. In line 59, her peering inside of him is turned
around so that it becomes his peering into her eyes.
Another observable quality, the aroma of the huanduj flower, is used in
the song as a symbol of the Huanduj Man’s flirtatious attraction. In the
daytime huanduj flowers have little or no aroma. But at night they
mysteriously open and give off a pungent aroma that seems compelling
and irresistible. Clara describes this opening as the Huanduj Man put-
ting on his hat. In her song she compares the experience of this attractive
aroma to the experience of being teased, laughed at, and flirted with by
an elusive man wearing a hat. ‘The Huanduj Spirit man laughs wanting
to take me’. She says of herself ‘I am the woman who stands smelling’.
She becomes the Huanduj Flower Woman by bathing herself in his
attractive aroma.
Although the huanduj is beautiful, being carried away by its aroma is
not an unambiguously good thing. The Huanduj Man, like the spirit
world in general, can also bewitch and kill. The singer’s relation to the
huanduj is portrayed as a journey. The journey is an erotic contest of
power in which either she will take him or he will take her. The goal is to
know him and receive his gifts without being carried away, losing
control and possibly being killed by him. Near the beginning of the song,
she articulates what she sees as the real danger of engaging him: He
might take her away to place her on the head of the island.
The relationship is portrayed as a contest between intense attraction
and the will to resist. In lines 30 and 31, she describes herself as the
woman who stands turning back and forth. The Quichua word kihuirisha
here refers to restlessness in which she is continually pulled toward the
Huanduj Man but then turns back. ‘He won’t be able to overcome me,
the strong Santi woman’, she concludes.
The songs examined above display a more complex emotion than one
might have expected to be generated by plants. Certainly plants are
beautiful but how do they generate the passion of a great human love?
Certainly plants can be poisonous but how can they generate the

ambivalent feelings of attraction, seduction, resistance, fear, and giving

that characterize erotic relations between a man and a woman? These are
emotions that we generally associate with family relations within our
own species, not with human relations to other species and especially
not with plants. That we find such ambivalent and passionate emotions
(usually reserved for human domestic disputes) associated with relations
to plants suggests that Amazonian Runa understand plants differently.
But how are plant species understood? One of the best places to look for
the answer to this question is in stories about the origins of plant species
which explain how the present qualities of a particular plant have come
into being.
Unfortunately, of the many thousands of species that inhabit the
region, only a handful have origin stories. Of these, most are related to
the origin stories of animals. There are, for example, no known origin
stories of the Matiri Man or the Huanduj Man. Nevertheless, the evi-
dence from the accounts that do exist is telling. I will present parts of the
origin stories of five plants: Bixis orellana (Quichua: manduru); Genipa
americana (Quichua: huituc); Fabaceae Lonchocarpus species (Achuar:
Timiu); Clibadium surinamense (Achuar: Masu), and Manihot esculenta
(manioc or Quichua: lumu).8 I will then trace a pattern of similarity
between these origin stories. Although space does not allow me to make
the case, the same pattern is present in the origin stories of animals. Since
this pattern is consistently present in Amazonian Runa origin stories, I
propose that it can be used as a hypothesis for understanding Runa
thinking about plant species in general. Runa understandings of the
personalities of the plants will then help to explain how people behave
toward them.9
We begin with the story of manduru (Bixis orellana) and huituc (Genipa
americana), two plants of great cultural significance to Amazonian com-
munities. Bixis orellana is the source of a red paste or dye that is used as
body paint. It is symbolic of blood and used in many ceremonies. Genipa
8. Photographs of all the plants treated in this article can be viewed in the
Ethnobotany Database at http://andes.asu.edu (accessed 4 March 2009).
9. By using the word ‘personalities’, I mean to suggest that a plant or animal
species has something like a psychological history or memory of estrangement formed
by the distinctive events of its origin. Although the events occurred while the species
was still human, their effects on the subjectivity of the species lingers on as a forma-
tive factor in its contemporary behavior. It is this lingering effect of the past history of
domestic relations that allows the species to become a partner with a human being in
a complex and ambivalent relationship of attraction, coyness, seduction, and
resistance. By using the word ‘personalities’ I do not mean to suggest, however, that
individual plants have their own psychological histories.

americana is the source of a black dye that is also used as body paint and
has many ceremonial uses. The narrative cycle of the sisters Manduru
and Huituc is central to the creation story of Quichua-, Achuar-, and
Shuar-speaking people south of the Rio Napo. In a series of loosely
related stories, it narrates the sexual experiences of two human sisters
who move from one man to another until they eventually become the
plants Bixis orellana and Genipa americana. As we have seen, Clara Santi’s
songs have presented two plant species as male lovers. By examining the
stories of the sisters, Manduru and Huituc, it may be possible to gain a
deeper insight into how Runa understand the past love life of plants.
This in turn may provide insight into the present status of plants as
potential objects of human love songs.
I will present a Quichua-language segment of this story narrated by
Luisa Cadena.10 According to Cadena, before becoming plants, Manduru
and Huituc were human sisters about to marry brothers. Manduru, the
older sister (and in some versions both sisters), had a series of affairs.
While married to a man who later became the squirrel, she had a secret
affair with a man who became the dolphin accepting fish from him and
giving him manioc. After a series of other affairs, the two sisters entered
into a relationship with two brothers who later became swallow-tailed
kites. The two brothers offered fish to the girls and sent them to bathe
their future mother-in-law. They warned the girls not to bathe her in hot
water but the girls playfully did bathe their future mother-in-law in very
hot water, melting the old lady. As a result, the girls were abandoned by
their potential husbands. The story then continued as follows:
On the Origin of Manduru and Huituc

1. In the afternoon when they were 1. Chishi painata saquirisha ninaura
left behind they said, when they saquirishashi nira Cunangalla, imata
were left [one sister] said ‘Now tucushun? Caillei shaquirishun!
what is going to happen to us? Cunanga imata tucungaraunchi nisha,
Let us stay right here. Now what Imata tucushun? Nira.
will we turn into? Now what will
we become?’
2. ‘I am (have a) hairy vagina. I am 2. Ñucaga punzhuracamani. Ñuca
going to turn into manduru’, [one manduru tucusha nishca.
sister] said.
10. Luisa Cadena has served as a primary resource for Janis Nuckolls’s work
(1996). Cadena is a Quichua-speaking woman form Montalvo whose parents were
Zaparoan speakers from the Andoas area on the Pastaza. I am indebted to Janis
Nuckolls for making it possible for me to record Luisa Cadena in the context of
Arizona State University’s Andes and Amazon Field School during July of 2008.

3. The other sister said, ‘I am 3. Shuj ñana nishcashi, ñucaga mas

hairless. I don’t have hairs. I am vilmaguas illaj. Mana vilmayujchani
a naked vagina. I will turn into Lluchu racamani nira. Ñucaga huituj
huituc’, she said. tucusha nira.
4. ‘I am going to be in the mud and 4. Ñuca turui shayaringarauni. canga
you will stand in good soil’, she ali allpai shayaringui nishca,
said.
5. Then the sister who was 5. Chiga naña chi ñaupa tucura huituj
transformed first stood up as a shayariirgrishca. Shayarigrisha
huituc tree. Standing she said cunan tucuni. Huitujmi
‘Now I am transformed. I am tucungarauni, Cambas manduru
going to become huituc. You be tucungui nishca.
manduru’, she said.
6. ‘Tuluc!’ It sounded. ‘Aiii!’ She 6. ‘Tuluc!’ uyarishca ‘Aiii!’ shi
cried again ‘Tuluc aiii!’ Again caparira, Cuti ‘tuluc aii’, cuti ‘tuluc
‘Tuluc aiii’! New leaves sprouted aii’, Llulupanga, ‘lican!’ Huituj
‘Lican’! Becoming a huituc tree tucushashi shayarira.
she stood up.
7. The other sister who stood 7. Shuj randi ricusha shayauj.
watching. ‘No, I will go up on Mana, ñuca urcui rishalla nisha
the hill (even though she had (paiguna chagrai shi shayarijlleira).
stood up in their gardens)’.
8. Standing up she said, ‘I will just 8. Shayaririsha ñuca manduru
become manduru to paint their tucushalla. Paina lumu caspi
manioc cuttings, to put in their shayachina, paiguna micunai
food, to paint their pale things. churana.
9. We will be turned into things that 9. Ñuchanchi cariyachina
make people happy. tucungaraunchi.
10. My sister will become something 10. Pai irisda humata charic
for dyeing the heads of those pucumagunata yana zhinqui tucuna
with red hair charcoal black’. ñuca ñana tucán.
11. With that, ‘Tuluc, Aiii!’ Again 11. Shinashi, chigua ‘Tuluc, Aiii!’, Cuti
‘Tuluc, Aiii!’ Becoming manduru ‘Tuluc, Aiii!’ manduru tucushashi
she stood up. Now becoming shayarin. Ña chasna tucusha ña chai
those things, they stayed that saquirinaura
way.
For the purposes of my argument, the important elements of the story

are these. Bixis orellana and Genipa americana were once very attractive
human girls. These girls got themselves into so many problems with
men that, eventually, they became homeless. When there was no place
left for them in the human family they became plants. It is particularly
the sexuality of each girl that is important in determining the kind of
plant that she will become.

Figure 2. Huituc Warmi (Genipa americana)
In order to understand the nature of these plants it necessary to explore

in some detail the problems that they had with men. To anticipate, the
problem that they had with men can be attributed to a particular moral
fault called quilla. It is because of this same moral fault that a new species
typically splits off from the human family. Hence, understanding the
meaning of a quilla is key to understanding the relationship between
humans and other species, whether plant or animal. Before examining
the girls’ encounters with their various male lovers, it will therefore be
helpful to have a better idea of what Runa mean by quilla
The word quilla denotes what for Quichua- speaking people is perhaps
the greatest moral fault. Although it has no direct translation its mean-
ings approximate the English terms ‘lazy’, ‘sexually loose’, and ‘imma-
ture’. Laziness and sexual looseness are connected in Quichua for several
reasons. First, work is highly gendered. Hence the products of female
work, such as productive gardens or elegant ceramic vessels, are consid-
ered proof of a powerful and skillfully used femininity. Successful hunt-
ing is similarly proof of a skillful and disciplined use of male sexuality.
Laziness, by contrast, is the result of immature sexuality. Often it is the
result of being distracted from the task at hand by unsuitable partners.
In Quichua, when the infix ‘chi’ is inserted into any verb it changes the
meaning so that the subject of the verb causes the object to do the activity

signified by the verb. Hence the verb ‘quillana’ means ‘to be lazy’ while
‘quilla-chi-na’ literally means to make someone else be lazy. In
contemporary Quichua, however, ‘quilla-chi-na’ is also the verb which
means ‘to flirt’, ‘to bother’, or to ‘seduce’. Hence, in Quichua, to flirt or to
seduce necessarily also means ‘to make lazy’ because seduction distracts
a man or woman from attention to the task at hand.
Because the behavior described as quilla leads to the breakdown of
marriage, the word must be understood by contrast to the Quichua ideal
of marriage. In Quichua thinking, marriage (and by extension human
society as a whole) is based on a sensuous exchange of disciplined female
work for male work. Most typically women give men asua (manioc
drink) in exchange for fish and game. In order to understand the contrast
to quilla, it is important to see that this exchange is both sensuous and
the result of highly disciplined work on each side.
Asua embodies self-disciplined female sensuality. Each woman has her
own manioc garden which she cares for as if it were her own baby. From
the manioc roots that grow there, she makes her own brew of asua.
Because the manioc is chewed to increase fermentation her saliva gives
the asua an intimate quality.11
For the man’s part, hunting is like a martial art that is successful only
with great balance and endurance. To stay up all night hunting, to be
successful, and then to bring home game to a beloved woman is an
admired expression of mature masculinity. In response, the woman
mixes asua in a mucahua (ceramic bowl) painstakingly adorned with pat-
terns from her dreams, painted with a brush made from her own hair.
The woman holds her bowl to the mouth of the returning hunter moving
it sensuously while he drinks sometimes with movements reminiscent of
a kiss. While he drinks the woman who has waited for him, caring for
his children, looks into his eyes and sings a love song composed just for
him. The result is a sensuous and intimate exchange between a man and
a woman. In this ideal exchange the female partner is called a chagra
mama (garden mother) and the man an aicha yaya (meat father).
An aicha yaya or chagra mama of this kind are characterized as shinzhi
(strong) because they have the strength to endure in their work without
being overcome by distractions, whether from hunger, tiredness, curios-
ity, or sexual desire. They are also described as iyaiyuj (intelligent) and
sabiru (clever) because they do not allow impulsive distractions to cloud
11. In recent years, the practice of chewing manioc to start the fermentation
process has declined, particularly in the Napo region. Most young women now use a
little fermented mash left over from a previous brew as a starter to ferment a new
batch.

their judgment. For example, Clara Santi could be described as a shinzhi

warmi (strong woman) because she did not allow the seductiveness of
Matiri Man or Huanduj Man to cloud her judgment or to distract her
from her task of harvesting medicine. In their narrowest meaning, shinzhi
chagra mama and shinzhi aicha yaya refer, respectively, to a skilled manioc
gardener and a skilled hunter. But in their broader meanings they refer
to the whole range of female and male work performed and exchanged
with alertness, skill, and endurance.
A quilla is the opposite of these self-disciplined lovers. A quilla is a
woman or a man who is too lazy or distracted to stick to the labor needed
to exchange with a partner. A quilla is gullible and prone to being
seduced because she allows intellectual laziness or the distractions of
desire to cloud her judgment. A quilla warmi is a woman who flirts with
other men instead of working hard to give asua to the husband who
provides her and her children with meat. A quilla also gives asua in the
wrong way to the wrong man: to one who is not the husband who works
hard to provide meat for his family.
A quilla runa is a man who fools around instead of hunting and fishing
in a disciplined way. A quilla runa gives fish or game to the wrong
woman, one who is other than the wife who works hard to take care of
his children and who gives him asua. A quilla is also a person who wan-
ders from place to place because they want to be someone or something
else in order to escape the hard work of being a chagra mama or an aicha
yaya in the place that they are from.
We can now return to the story of Manduru and Huituc to show how
their relationships to men exemplify the character trait called quilla.
Although there are many oral versions of the girls’ encounters with these
different men, the most complete text published to date is a Shuar-
language version recorded by Siro Pellizzaro (1988).12 In Shuar culture,
12. Quichua-language texts of two shorter episodes appear in Foletti-Castegnaro

(1985). Norman Whitten and Dorothea Scott Whitten have also provided insightful
interpretations (2008). Their extensive work with Pastaza ceramic art has brought
many visual images from the Manduru and Huituc myth cycle into print (Whitten
1976; Whitten and Whitten 1988, 2008). The Whittens portray the Manduru and
Huituc saga as a story of Runa resistance to foreign oppression (2008: 2-4). According
to this interpretation, Machin is a foreign man who locks up the native women
Manduru and Huituc. The women are later liberated by Sicuanga (toucan) who
represents the Runa warrior. In this interpretation, fault lies primarily with Machin as
foreign oppressor rather than with the quilla qualities of the various parties. Although
Pellizzaro’s version uses the Shuar names Sua (Huituc) and Ipiák (Manduru), I retain
the Quichua names for consistency.

the preferred form of marriage was one man married to two sisters.13
Hence, in Shuar versions, the two sisters, Manduru and Huituc, move
together from man to man. According to Pelizzaro’s text (as well as Luisa
Cadena’s unpublished version), Manduru and Huituc lived with a man
named Kunamp/Ardilla (Sciureus sp.) who had very prominent front
teeth. Although the girls appeared to be working hard carrying the corn
from their gardens, they were unable to control their tongues and loudly
made fun of their husband’s teeth. The annoyed husband promptly
imprisoned the girls in bamboo, ending the relationship (Pellizzaro 1988:
181-86). Another man, Paushi (curassow) according to Cadena, or
Sicuanga (Ramphostos cuvieri the toucan) according to Whitten (2008), cut
them free but instead of pursuing stable alliances with these men, the
girls move on to more unsuitable encounters.
The two sisters then arrived at a home of an older woman who invited
them in to wait for her son. Her son, she told them, was a great warrior.
Instead of asking questions the girls allowed desire for marriage to cloud
their judgment. At first the sisters prepared steamed fish for this man in
the hopes of getting married. Then, unable to stick to their intentions, the
girls ate the food themselves and fell asleep. Upon waking they sensed
that someone had molested them. As they lay watching they saw the
woman feeding her son by the fire. To their surprise he was not a war-
rior at all but the moth boy Katarkap sitting by his mother in the night, a
long penis wrapped around his neck.14 After feeding him, the mother
placed her son on a stool beside the girls’ bed. Without giving game to
the girls’ family or receiving manioc drink, the boy sought to penetrate
first one sister and then the other. This time, however, the girls were
sleeping with their skirts tucked tightly between their legs and he was
unable to penetrate them through the cloth (Pellizzaro 1988: 87-94).
Leaving the home of Katarkap, Manduru and Huituc finally meet a
good man, Nayapi (Elanoides Forficatus; Quichua: Tijeras Anga), who
offered the girls fish and game and was willing to marry them. Because
Naypi was on his way to a long hunting trip he sent the girls to wait for
him in his home where he asks them to take care of his mother. The girls
lose their way, however, because they are tricked by a man who later
became Tsuna, a large deep forest tree with a very foul smelling sap.
Instead of arriving at the home of Nayapi, they mistakenly arrive at the
13. Because Quichua-speaking people have lived in closer proximity to Catholic

missions, they became monogamous at an earlier date.
14. In Runa tradition, moths are viewed with a certain aversion and as something
which should not be touched because they are believed to cause shicshi, an itchy skin
condition.

home of Tsuna. Tsuna’s mother invites them to help her make asua while
they await her son who, she says, is a great hunter (and whom they think
is Nayapi). After the girls are in bed, the son comes home. The woman
and her son noisily chew on a little crab, commenting loudly that they are
chewing the bones of a large animal killed by the son. The girls thought
that he was indeed the great hunter. Tsuna climbed into bed between
them and spent the night caressing first one and then the other. In the
morning the girls found themselves covered with a disgusting secretion
that reminded them of sap of the Tsuna tree. Instead of making love with
the hunter, they had been seduced by the tree man Tsuna. The foul smell
of his sap was in their eyes, in their armpits, in their nostrils, and in all of
the places where he had kissed them. Although they bathed, they could
not completely get rid of the smell (Pelizzaro 1988: 103-10, 151-63).
Finally, still smelling of their night with Tsuna, the girls arrive at the
home of Nayapi and are invited in to wait by his mother. In return for
his gift of fish, Nayapi had asked the girls to perform the female task of
bathing his aging mother with lukewarm water. In Runa thinking, a cari
mama or husband’s mother is a respected figure for a cachun or daughter-
in-law. Loving care of a cari mama is a central part of female labor. Yet
instead of bathing their cari-mama carefully in lukewarm water, the girls
playfully and deliberately scald the old woman with hot water as a kind
of joke, melting her and causing her son to withdraw from the marriage
(Pellizarro 1988: 110-20). In a Quichua version collected by Foletti-
Castegnaro, the girls do bathe their future mother-in-law carefully at
first but are then overcome by curiosity to see what would happen if
they bathed her in very hot water (1985: 99-103).
The girls then fled from Nayapi to the home of a young man named
Machin/Tsere who later became a capuchin monkey (Cebus capucinus).
In a narrative style reminiscent of erotic comedy, the narrator tells how
Machin invented an array of schemes designed to satisfy his sexual
curiosity. First, he invented lice, hoping that the girls would ask him to
delouse them so he could play with their hair. Instead the girls learned
to delouse each other. Machin then invented fleas, hoping they would let
him search their bodies for the pesky creatures. Finally, Machin invented
scabies and other skin diseases in the hopes that the girls would ask him
to cure ailments in their private parts. The girls, however, learned to heal
each other (Pellizzaro 1988: 167-74).
Eventually, though, the girls succumbed to Machin’s seduction when
they were unable to resist curiosity. Machin had busied himself rolling
fiber into string. Curious, the girls asked him why he was making string.
Machin offered to tell them on the condition that they let him kiss their
breasts. Dying of curiosity, the younger sister Huituc exposed her breasts

first. Machin kissed one breast and then another. Still he still would not
tell what the string was for, so Manduru exposed her breasts too. After
kissing Manduru’s breasts, Machin finally told the girls his secret. To
avenge the death of his mother, Nayapi had commissioned Machin to
make the string so that Nayapi could make smoked meat out of Huituc’s
body (Pellizzaro 1988: 122-23).
Hearing this, the girls continued their flight. They soon realized,
however, that they had nowhere else to go. They had become estranged
from men, and men had become estranged from them. Through their
acts of quilla, they had alienated the aicha yaya Nayapi who wanted to
marry them and who might have sustained them with fish. In addition
they had become disenchanted by quillas like Katarkap, Tsuna, and
Machin. These men only sought to seduce them offering nothing in
return. In short, Manduru and Huituc had had a series of misadventures
in which different men had had sex with them, not so much because the
girls wanted sex, as because they were tricked into things, could not
resist curiosity, fooled around, or were too lazy to pay attention. Now
distanced from human men, they were no longer capable of entering into
a productive marital union.
Manduru and Huituc therefore withdrew from the human race to
become plant species. As with all of the transformation stories, there is
continuity between who the women were before and what they become.
The older sister who had a hairy vulva becomes Bixis orellana, a plant
with a hairy red pod containing seeds that yield a red paint symbolic of
blood. The younger sister becomes Genipa americana, a plant with a
smooth hairless pod that yields a black paint.
As a result of the transformation, Manduru and Huituc ceased to be
quillas. Instead of wandering, they became stationary. Manduru, the girl
who wandered most, became stationary in the chagra, or garden, the
place of female work. The word quilla, it will be remembered, means
both ‘lazy’ and ‘sexually loose’. Instead of being promiscuous and avoid-
ing work, the transformed vulvas of Manduru and Huituc now produce
valued gifts. Manduru produces a red paint while Huituc produces a
black paint.
Once they become plants, Manduru and Huituc become agents for
transforming their human ex-lovers into elegant and productive animal
species. Squirrel man painted himself red with manduru to become the
Amazonian red squirrel. Nayapi painted his chest black with genipa to
become the swallow-tailed kite. Sicuanga, the toucan, painted his feathers
black with huituc and red with manduru. The curassow painted his feath-
ers black with huituc. Through the women’s transformation into plants,
their men too were transformed into the various species of animals and

plants that now interact in an orderly and productive ecological

exchange (Pelilizzaro 1988: 206-10; Whitten and Whitten 2008: 4).
In Amazonian society, these two paints are central to the exchange
between men and women who are not quillas. Women paint their own
faces as well as the eyes of their manioc stems when they plant manioc to
make asua. Men painted their faces with manduru and huituc to attract
game while hunting. In social situations, these body paints symbolized
the attractiveness and sensuous beauty of men and women who came
together in socially appropriate exchange. Huituc and manduru dyes are
now gained by humans through exchange with these plant species.
Although the exchange is with plants, the origin story leaves little doubt
that the reception of these dyes and medicines is to be understood on the
pattern of exchange of female for male products. Bixis and Genipa may be
transformed women but they are women all the same. The red and black
dies are inescapably the products of female work because they are
produced in the transformed female organs of Bixis and Genipa.
Although Manduru and Huituc are clearly quilla women, they are not
flat characters that represent only sexual looseness and laziness. As they
proceeded through their adventures, they also resisted and matured so
that in the end they also became exemplars of the shinzhi warmi’s (strong
woman’s) modesty and ability to resist quillachina (seduction). By learn-
ing to resist seduction, they invented many of the practices that become
recognized markers of female modesty. They were the first to learn to
groom each other’s hair rather than ask men to do it. They were the first
to learn to sleep with their dresses tightly tucked between their legs. By
learning to cure each other’s itches and skin ailments rather than allow-
ing themselves to be treated by men, Manduru acquired the medicinal
properties that inhere in the plant today. As will be recalled from Clara
Santi’s songs to Theophrastaceae and Brugmansia, the ability to resist
seduction is a crucial part of being a shinzhi warmi.
Parallel to the saga of the two sisters, Manduru and Huituc, is the story
of brothers, Timiu and Masu, who became transformed into plants used
by men as fish poisons (Fabaceae Lonchocarpus sp. and Asteraceae Clibadium
surinamense). A brief examination of this story will show that a plant can
also originate from the transformation of a male human lover’s act of
quilla. In a Quichua version of the story, a hunter was walking alone
through the forest when he heard a particular tree frog called an atan
(Shuar: kaka). This frog, which is generally heard only in old growth
forest at night, has a loud arhythmic call which Runa men jokingly
associate with the sound of a woman in the throes of sexual pleasure:
‘atan a-tán atán’. Hearing this sound, the hunter jokingly called on the
atan to come down from the tree and make love with him. Later, as he

again passed the tree on his way home, he was startled to find a woman.
‘That woman was a beautiful woman, a good looking young woman’.
The hunter was overcome with fear but she put him at ease, saying ‘You
said to me “tan tan tan, do me”, well now do me then’.15 After making
love, the woman turned back into the atan and climbed up the tree with-
out letting go of his penis. When his penis stretched out tremendously
the man panicked and cut it off with a machete. The pieces were
eventually thrown into the various rivers where they became anacondas.
In the Achuar version of this story there are two hunters rather than
one and the hunters are named Timiu, Lonchocarpus species, and Masu,
Clibadium surinamense (Descola 1994: 280-81). Although the Achuar
version does not mention the sound of the frog, in a Shuar version both
brothers joke together about the frog’s erotic call expressed in Shuar as
‘kaka kaká kaká’ (Pellizzaro 1979: 115). When the woman appeared, the
older brother (Timiu in the Achuar version) resisted, sticking to the task
of hunting while the younger brother Masu succumbed to the seduction
of the atan woman. It was his penis that was stretched out and thrown
into the rivers to become anacondas. In Quichua such joking is called
quilla-chi-na (flirting, seducing, literally: ‘making someone to be quilla’).
A shinzhi aicha yaya (strong hunter) would have resisted the temptation
to make sexual jokes about the forest. The idle sexual joking had conse-
quences which spiraled into the sexual encounter and finally into trans-
formation. The two brothers became the plants Masu, a weak fish poison
that can only kill minnows in relatively still shallow water, and Timiu, a
potent poison that can kill larger fish. Just as Clara Santi sees Matiri as a
strong hunter, one could also interpret the plants Masu and Timiu as
fishermen because they are used as fish poisons. While both could now
be seen as aicha yaya plants useful in the male task of fishing, Masu is a
weaker fisherman because as a human lover he was more of a quilla,
while Timiu is a stronger fisherman because as a human man he was
more able to control his sexuality.16
15. ‘Irgumusha, ñukara shina tan tan tan rawai nisha rimawakakangui nisha, kunaga
rawai nisha rimashka… Chi warmiga sumaj warmi ashka, ali malta warmiwa’ (unpublished
oral narrative by Camilo Andi recorded and translated on the Napo by Tod Swanson).
16. It is only in the Achuar version that the hunters turn into the plants Masu and
Timiu. Although the material culture of fishing with the two plants is the same in
Shuar and Runa communities, no Shuar- or Quichua-language origin stories for these
plants have been collected to date. In all three language versions, the cut penis
accounts for the origin of anacondas. Since the Achuar are the least acculturated, it is
possible that the plant transformation ending may have been present in the other
languages and was subsequently lost.

Although the origin story of the fourth plant, Mahihot esculenta,

appears to be quite different from the story of Manduru and Huituc, it
has underlying similarities. In a version of the story I recorded from Ana
Shiguango on the Napo River, Quillor and Ducero (the miraculous
warrior twins) decided to help a woman who had no asua to give to her
husband. They told her to go out to the garden with her own baby girl
and to put the child in a hammock. The twins then stationed themselves
at either end of the field. With magic words they created an immense
garden of tall manioc plants. The woman left the baby in the hammock
and began to work in the chagra, returning every so often to nurse the
baby. After a while the woman forgot her baby. When at last she did
remember her, the garden had become so large that the woman got lost
in it and could not find her baby. The woman searched for the girl until
dusk but to no avail. When she returned home without the child her
husband became furious.
The next day she returned to the spot with her husband. This time
they easily found the baby just where the mother had left her. The
daughter, however, was distant, changed irreversibly by being aban-
doned. The mother and father found their daughter sitting calmly on the
ground with a crown of woven manioc flowers on her head. Fanning out
from her were manioc tubers as if she were their stem. She told her
parents that she had changed to become the manioc flower woman.
Although the parents found their daughter, she remained lost to them
because of the transformation into manioc. In losing her daughter, the
woman did, however, gain something else. At the beginning of the story
the mother was a quilla warmi in that she was unable to give her husband
asua. She was also a quilla in the sense that she was so careless at the
female task of mothering that she forgot and lost her daughter. By the
end of the story, she was no longer a quilla. She had learned how to treat
the garden so that it would grow for her. In fact, she had become the first
lumu chagra mama (manioc garden mother). When she treated the manioc
plants as though they were her lost daughter, devoting time to them lest
they too disappear, the garden produced. She was able to harvest man-
ioc and to give her husband asua when he came home from hunting.17
17. The story of the manioc baby is widely diffused in the Pastaza Runa and
Achuar/Shuar communities where she is called Nunguli or Nunkui (Brown 1986: 97-
132; Descola 1994: 191-215; Foletti-Castegnaro 1985: 35-41; Pellizzaro 1978; Whitten
1976). The Nunkui tradition is complex, displaying likely influence from a signifi-
cantly different Andean tradition of plant origins which would require separate treat-
ment. As the manioc baby retreats, she creates wild or useless variants of domesticates
by cursing the key crops of the chagra. Out of the edible manioc Manihot esculenta, she
creates the inedible Manihot brachyloba, out of plantains she creates heliconias, and out

Despite differences, the manioc origin story has clear similarities with
the story of Manduru and Huituc, Masu, Timiu, and the Tsuna. In each
case (1) the new plant species arises out of a transformation of previously
human beings; (2) the transformation is the result of an estrangement
within a family or in male–female relations; (3) the estrangement results
from an act of quilla, understood as a breakdown in the exchange of male
and female work; (4) with the act of transformation the character flaw of
quilla is overcome and the protagonist becomes a chagra mama or an aicha
yaya. Although space does not permit me to elaborate here, the same pat-
tern can be found in most Runa accounts of the origins of animal species.
Since this pattern is consistently present in Amazonian Runa origin
stories I propose it can be used as a hypothesis for understanding Runa
thinking about other plant and animal species in general. Hence the
relation to plant persons will be characterized by quillachina seduction,
making lazy, and the resistance of a shinzhi warmi who is not quilla.
We can now return to the songs of Clara Santi. Why does she sing to
Matiri Man as a hunter who brings a bird to the woman he loves? To be
sure, we still do not know for certain. But from studying the extant ori-
gin stories, we can risk a more educated guess as to who these plant
people might be. Like all species, matiri and huanduj must have acquired
the personalities they have through a history of transformation. Although
there are no known origin stories of Matiri Man or Huanduj Man, it is
reasonable to suppose as a working hypothesis that they were men who
became plants through the same pattern of speciation that occurs in
nearly every Runa origin story. Santi probably treats matiri and huanduj
as male lovers because they were once human men involved in relation-
ships with human women. They became plants through a process of
estrangement caused by a particular cultural construction of fault called
quilla. We can surmise this by examining the known origin stories in
which quilla is the standard Runa religious explanation for all transfor-
mation, just as karma is the Hindu cultural explanation for all instances
of reincarnation.
of yams Ipomoea batatas, a wild and inedible variant. Bamboo is blessed or called into
existence to help her in her flight. As she escapes downward through its trunk, she
repeatedly seals the space off behind her creating the compartments that characterize
bamboo (Brown 1986: 97-132; Pellizzaro 1978). Eventually she enters the earth through
the roots of the bamboo to become the allpa mama or earth mother. A beginning time
runa’s creation of new species by cursing and blessing beings that aid or hinder their
flight as they withdraw from the world is reminiscent of the Andean tradition of the
flight of Viracocha in the Huarochiri Manuscript (Salomon and Urioste 1991). It also
has parallels to the Andean yumbada as well as Andean narratives of the flight of
Nuestro Señor that I have recorded in the Ecuadorian sierra.

As we have learned, quilla is a quality of relationship between men

and women in which the disciplined exchange of male for female work
breaks down. Quilla can be understood as a kind of laziness or immature
sexuality which contrasts to the mature femininity of the chagra mama or
the mature masculinity of the aicha yaya. We have learned that once
speciation occurs, the fault of quilla is resolved. Speciation can thus be
understood as a process of maturation. As a distinct species, the plants
and animals cease wanting or pretending to be someone else. They are
no longer useless, for they now produce products that benefit humans as
well as other species.
This article has sought to explore the nature of Amazonian Runa rela-
tionships to plants. How are plant persons experienced in the context of
Runa religious life? Why are they experienced in these ways? Is there an
ethical dimension to the relationship with plants? If so what is it? What
are the appropriate and inappropriate ways of engaging plant persons?
The answer is this: The relationship to another species, in this case to a
plant species, should be understood on the model of an exchange of gifts
between a man and a woman. It is a personal exchange based on attrac-
tion. If the breakdown between human beings and the other species was
caused by immature sexuality, then the relationship is restored by the
mature exchange between chagra mama and aicha yaya. A human woman
generally approaches another species as though they were men; a man as
though they were women.
Harvesting the ambi (medicine) of an ambi yura (medicine tree) is not
just a technical process that can be done by anyone. Medicine is given by
a tree in the context of a relationship. Trees like Matiri Runa have become
mature through the process of speciation and will no longer waste their
gifts on a quilla. They have experienced the estrangement and ‘divorce’
of speciation. They are like experienced ex-lovers who, although distant
and withdrawn, are still vulnerable to loving and being loved. Although
they will not respond to fools, they will respond to the disciplined sensu-
ality of a chagra mama, to someone like Clara Santi. Hence, Santi looks at
the green leaves and yellow fruits of the Matiri and sings a love song to
the aicha yaya hidden there. In her song, Matiri Man is a hunter dressed
in green who goes to the forest to kill a bird to give to the woman he
loves. In this case the bird is the medicine and the woman the hunter
loves is the singer, Clara Santi herself. ‘Taking his spirit (supai) with me’,
she sings at the end of the song, ‘He is the man who stands there saying
“Take me, that Matiri Man”’.
As we have seen, a mature sexual relation is not the only model for
engaging plants. Manioc and other garden plants are treated as children
who have withdrawn from a quilla or immature mother. Nevertheless,

the idea is similar. These plants too have been transformed through a
process of estrangement. They are children who have been burned by
parental abandonment, and so they also will not give their gifts to a fool.
They respond only to another expression of mature femininity, the
sensuous and disciplined mothering of a chagra mama.
Treating the garden like a sacred child prone to estrangement is much
more time consuming and labor intensive than strictly necessary for
agriculture. One of the ideas guiding the ritual behavior of chagra mamas
is to treat the time it takes plants to grow as a kind of pregnancy. Young
plants are like children growing in the womb of the gardener. This idea
involves transferring a range of pregnancy related sasi or taboos to the
act of gardening. For example, the chagra mama observes certain dietary
restrictions either during critical times early in the plant growth cycle or
during the entire time that the plant is growing. In the growing of pea-
nuts, the woman avoids eating fish heads at the time that the peanuts are
first forming because, at that time, the young peanuts have the shape of
fish heads and might be harmed by the eating of fish heads. Gardeners
also fast from eating any kind of sweet while they are growing beans in
their gardens.18
Chagra mamas avoid going into their gardens while they are menstruat-
ing because, just as menstruation would signify the end of a pregnancy,
going into a garden during menstruation will cause the manioc tubers to
cease growing and rot. Chagra mamas also avoid going into their gardens
in a state of advanced pregnancy because it could cause the manioc
tubers to burst or split. When manioc is finally harvested, the area
around the plant is first cleaned with much greater care than necessary.
After being taken out of the ground, the tubers are cut from the stem
with great care and placed head down in a basket just as a child should
be placed in the womb. So close is the identification between the manioc
tuber and the fetus of the gardener that should the gardener be so
careless as to place the tuber in the basket crosswise or feet first, it is
believed that gardener’s own child would be born feet first or crosswise.
No tubers, even those too small to be worth eating, should be left aban-
doned in the field because if they are left behind they might cry like
babies causing the manioc to withdraw. All of this makes the life of the
chagra mama meaningful, but it is also time-consuming and emotionally
demanding.
Besides being hard work, the relation to plants is perceived as poten-
tially dangerous to the gardener. We saw that in Clara Santi’s songs to
Matiri Man and Huanduj Man there is not only attraction and flirtation
18. For Achuar dietary restrictions during planting see, Descola 1994: 208-10.

but also resistance. In her song to Matiri Man, Santi suggests that the
matiri wishes to seduce her. In her song to Huanduj Man, she sings that
huanduj wants to take her away but that he will not be able to do so.
What is this threatening quality of the plant that must be resisted? In the
process of speciation, the person who withdrew became not only the
external leafy green plant but also what is called a supai, the spirit person
behind the plant. Although I and other scholars might translate the
words supai runa as ‘spirit people’, native speakers of Quichua most
frequently translate these words into Spanish as ‘diablos’, suggesting
something more sinister.
In Runa thinking, supai runa are similar to the dead in that they once
lived openly in this world as humans and then retreated behind the sur-
face appearance of this world. They now inhabit the invisible world
behind plants and animals as well as inside mountains, earth, rocks, and
oxbow lakes. Like all supai, the plant runas have a superhuman quality.
To see them is unnerving. They are overwhelmingly attractive, mysteri-
ous, and terrifying (words that Mircea Eliade, following Rudolph Otto,
used to describe an experience of the sacred [1957: 8-9]). To engage them
means opening the heart to a current of attraction, a ‘crush’, that could
prove fatal. If the gardener should be overwhelmed by this beauty, she
could be pulled inside to that place where the supai reside, withdrawn
and hidden from this world.
The supais behind the plants are similar to the dead in that through the
process of transformation they have died and become something else. To
enter into an emotional relationship with the plant and animal supais is
to risk undergoing the transformation that they have undergone. To be
pulled there means death. Thus traditional gardening means maintain-
ing a relationship to plants that is not only sensuous and disciplined, but
also dangerous.
The portrait of women’s relations to plants developed here both col-
laborates and amplifies previous work on Runa and Achuar/Shuar rela-
tions to other species. Michael Brown (1986) interpreted Aguaruna Shuar
gardening songs as a ‘technology of sentiment’ for increasing affinity
between gardeners and their plants. By examining how plants are under-
stood as formerly human lovers who became distanced from the human
family, I have sought to shed light on the estrangement that exists
between humans and plants. It is this estrangement which Runa singers
like Clara Santi seek to overcome to increase affinity with plants through
their songs.
In his work on the Achuar, Phillipe Descola found that Achuar men
treat the forest world of game animals as affinal kin while women treat
domesticated garden plants as consanguineal relations (1994, 1996). This

fits a structuralist pattern in which the binary opposition between male

and female is mirrored in parallel contrasts between forest and garden,
affinal and consanguineal. My findings do confirm that Quichua women
engage their manioc gardens as mother to her children (a consanguineal
relationship). However, Clara Santi’s songs to matiri and huanduj show
that women can also engage plants as male lovers (an affinal relation-
ship). Because matiri is a deep forest plant while huanduj is domestic,
Santi’s songs show that women can engage both forest and domestic
species through an affinal relationship. In Santi’s songs, both the domes-
tic and the wild plant are treated as dangerous and seductive lovers.
Since many Pastaza Quichua women like Clara Santi have married into
the Achuar communities for generations, it is likely that Achuar women
also had songs like those sung by Clara.
Perhaps it is best to say simply that a range of human to human rela-
tions can be used as models by both men and women to engage the supai
world behind the other species. Because any species has both male and
female members, it is, in theory at least, possible to engage any plant
species as either male or female. All things being equal, men engage the
supai as female lovers while women engage the supai as male lovers. The
strongest evidence for this comes from male yachajs and hunters. I have
worked with a considerable number of Amazonian Runa male yachajs in
both Pastaza and Napo and have gathered information on still others.
Every one of these men developed relationships with the forest and
water supai behind the game as female lovers or wives (yacu warmi and
sacha warmi). I have also worked closely with two female yachajs (one in
the Andes and one in the Napo), who both treated the water and forest
or mountain supais as husbands.
Although this is the default pattern, a few plants that have origin
stories are more strongly portrayed as specifically male or female. Man-
duru and Huituc are perceived as female by both men and women.
Masu (Asteraceae Clibadium surinamense) and Timiu (Fabaceae Loncho-
carpus sp.) are thought of as male by both men and women because they
originate in the transformation of two men. Since only men work with
these fish poisons, I assume that the relation to the plants is male to male
with little or no erotic context. Manioc fits into this pattern of plants with
origin stories well. Since the origin story portrays manioc as the transfor-
mation of a female child, gardeners treat manioc as a baby. To a certain
extent, men also treat manioc as a baby. For example, a man may help
his wife pick up small left over tubers that are not to be left abandoned
lest they cry. Such a relationship could be treated as a father–child
relationship. I know of one man, Anselmo Aguinda, who had a spiritual
gift (lumu paju) for relating to manioc. He was a widower who had his

own flourishing manioc garden. Before he died, he passed his gift to his
granddaughter, Carmen Andi, now a chagra mama in her fifties who
treats her own manioc as her babies. Although I do not have evidence, I
think it is likely that Anselmo engaged his manioc through a father–child
relationship. In all of these cases, however, the relations to plants are
tenuous, delicate, and dangerous because the plants were persons who
withdrew from their humanness through a process of estrangement,
resulting in speciation.
By portraying the Runa practice of treating plants as persons, this
article also implicitly raises the question of whether Runa communities
might have a more cosmocentric or nature-centric (as opposed to anthro-
pocentric) ethic. For example, one might wonder whether Runa commu-
nities might extend something like ‘human rights’ or the respect due to
all human beings to plants and animals as well. This is a difficult ques-
tion which would take a different article to examine. In this essay, I have
used the word ‘person’ to translate the Quichua word ‘runa’. Although
there is no better English word to use, the semantic fields of ‘person’ and
‘runa’ only partially overlap. In English the word ‘person’ carries with it
a whole Christian and European philosophical history suggesting an
individual of a unique class of beings who descend from a single pair,
are equal, and of infinite worth because they and only they are made in
the image of God. The word ‘runa’ like the words ‘dine’ (Navajo) or simi-
lar words in other languages indigenous to the Americas refers first and
foremost to the ethnic group that speaks ‘runa’ or ‘dine’ and who are
related through kinship. The word ‘runa’ can be extended outwards by
degrees to groups who are more similar until at its outer edges it can
mean human or the human-like beings behind the plants and animals.
The word ‘runa’ contrasts to terms referring to other ethnic groups and
above all to ‘aucas’ (enemies or outlaws). In short, the words ‘runa’ and
‘person’ carry with them very different religious and moral histories.
Thus, attributing runahood to plants would not carry the same moral
and philosophical implications as attributing ‘personhood’ would. The
similarities and differences would have to be carefully worked out.
It should also be noted that the ritual language for treating plants as
runas occurs almost exclusively in the context of gardening and gather-
ing plant medicines. In other words, plants seemed to be treated as
persons in order to enter into an exchange that results in the reception of
food and medicines for human use. Apart from ritual aspects of hunting
and gardening, plants and animals are generally not thought of as
human beings. Nevertheless, the idea that there are supai runas behind
the plants and animals that could appear unexpectedly gives people
what might be called a ‘healthy respect’ for plants and animals.

One might suggest that, for Amazonian people, plants and animals are
not so much persons as they are ex-persons. The transformation of vari-
ous previously human beings into plant and animal species was a crucial
part of the emergence of a good and habitable world. In the act of trans-
formation, plants and animals ceased to be human in ways that are
ethically important. As we have seen, the transformations occurred in
part because the previously human plants and animals could not get
along with their families. If plants and animals were still human they
would compete for the same foods, spaces, and sexual partners, making
life untenable. If they were still human, plants and animals could not be
killed and eaten, for to do so would be a kind of cannibalism. It is by
becoming another species that they are now able to coexist with human
beings in a productive exchange. The barriers between species created in
the acts of transformation are thus believed to be good. They are what
make the world habitable. It is considered dangerous and perhaps
morally wrong to break these barriers down unnecessarily. Plants and
animals are thus respected but generally kept at a distance unless the
tasks of gardening or hunting require otherwise.
I have written this article as though the relationship to plants and ani-
mals represented by the chagra mama or aicha yaya ideal were typical of
all, or at least most, adult Runa. That, however, is no longer the case. The
change comes, I believe, not because secular agriculture is more credible
but because it is easier. The relationship to plants described in this article
is a way of life that demands a gardener’s full-time attention. As such it
is increasingly in tension with going to high school, employment in
towns, eating in restaurants, and much of modern life in general.
Years ago I attempted to plant runa purutu (native beans) with a young
Runa woman who later became my wife. She was shaped by the chagra
mama tradition but not romantically attached to it. She had brought some
beans back from her mother’s chagra on the Napo and I was anxious to
plant them. ‘Let’s go plant those beans’, I said. She told me that, although
you can plant store-bought beans at any time, runa purutu can only be
planted when the chucu (Erythrina peoppigiana) trees are in bloom. We
waited a couple of months until I saw the bright orange blossoms appear
on the chucu trees along the banks of the Pastaza. ‘Let’s go plant those
beans’, I said. She told me that runa purutu could only be planted during
the full moon when the chucu trees were blooming. I waited until the
moon was full and said ‘Let’s go plant those beans’. She told me that the
person who planted runa purutu has to abstain from sugar and deserts
from the time the beans are put into the ground until the time they are
harvested (her mother had always done that). I said, ‘Well just plant the
beans in the ground and fast like your mother’. She thought about it for

awhile. Probably she thought about Sprite, Coca-Cola, ice cream, lemon-
ade, and apple pie. Finally she turned to me and said, ‘You plant them’.
Evidently, neither one of us thought that it was worth giving up sugar
and deserts just so we could grow our own beans. Ritual gardening had
become too complicated. To this day my wife continues to maintain a
chagra (traditional garden) but does so in a much simpler fashion.
Although the self-disciplined ritual life of the chagra mama and the
aicha yaya are increasingly in tension with the jobs and lifestyles of
younger people, younger gardeners are finding new ways to carry on
the gardening piety of their grandmothers. Although very few young
women observe the menstrual and dietary restrictions or paint their faces
and manioc cuttings with manduru, nearly all younger Runa women who
have land do continue to garden with respectful attitudes shaped by the
chagra mama tradition. They still prepare their manioc cuttings for plant-
ing with an attitude of love, remembering (iyarisha llaquishalla pitina)
their mothers and grandmothers. They are still careful to clear the area
around a manioc plant neatly before harvesting. The tubers are still
carefully placed head down in the basket. Most importantly, a neatly
kept manioc garden is still the most prominent symbol of a an ali runa
warmi (a good Runa woman) who is neither quilla nor orgullosa (ashamed
of her heritage). Although the traditions of the chagra mama and aicha
yaya are undergoing rapid change, they will continue to influence mod-
ern Runa attitudes towards plants and animals for many years to come. I
conclude by translating the words of a Quichua song that men sing to
those elegant women they call chagra mamas:
1. Manioc Flower Mama 1. Lumu Sisa Mamalla

2. Rising while it is still dark 2. Llandu, llandu atarisha
3. Carrying your basket 3. Ashangara aparisha
4. You stand dancing 4. Bailahami shayaungui
5. On sunny days and cloudy days 5. Indi llandu punzhapi
6. You stand firm like the Callamballa 6. Callamballa shayaungui
7. My beloved woman 7. Ñuka warmishitalla
8. With what joy you work! 8. Ima kushi tarbangui!
References
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ton, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press).
Descola, P. 1994 [1986]. In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia (New
York: Cambridge University Press).
———. 1996. Spears of Twilight: Three Years among the Jivaro Indians of South America
(New York: The New Press).

Eliade, M. 1957. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World).
Foletti-Castegnaro, A. 1993. Quichua Amazonicos del Aguarico y San Miguel: los pueblos
indios en sus mitos (Quito: Abya-Yala).
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Economy’, Man 24.4: 567-82. doi:10.2307/2804288.
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and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press).
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Ecuatoriano (Quito: Houser).
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———. 1979. Tsunki: El Mundo del Agua (Quito: Abya-Yala).
———. 1988. Shakaim: Mitos del la Selva y del Desmonte (Quito: Abya-Yala).
Salomon, F., and G. Urioste (trans. and eds.). 1991. The Huarochirí Manuscript: A Testa-
ment of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion (Austin: University of Texas Press).
Uzendoski, M. 2005. Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press).
Whitten, N. 1976. Sacha Runa: Ethnicity and Adaptation of Ecuadorian Jungle Quichua
(Urbana: The University of Illinois Press).
Whitten, N., and D. Scott Whitten. 1988. From Myth to Creation: Art from Amazonian
Ecuador (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).
———. 2008. Puyo Runa: Imagery and Power in Modern Amazonia (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press).

_________________________________________________
Visions of Christ in the Amazon:
The Gospel According to Ayahuasca and Santo Daime*
_________________________________________________
Lisa Maria Madera

Servidao Sérvulo Chagas 299, Campeche,
Florianopolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil
lmbrazil5@gmail.com
Abstract
In the Amazon, under the influence of ayahuasca, eco-revolutionary
Christian visions describe how Christ’s power takes root in the Amazonian
ground. I explore the ‘Gospel’—the story of Christ’s life and teachings—
according to ayahuasca, as told by the Quichua Aguarico Runa, a native
people of the Ecuadorian upper Amazon. I then trace local phrasings of the
Gospel according to Santo Daime, a Christian sect indigenous to Brazil. As
the Christian myth transforms, these radical botanical visions reinterpret
South American history, bringing healing to continental and communal
memory, and to the decimated and threatened land.
In the Amazon, under the influence of ayahuasca, we find alternate and

eco-revolutionary Christian visions where the miraculous power of
Christ takes root, not in the European or Mediterranean imaginary, but
within the fertile ground of the Amazonian world. Under the vine’s
influence, the Christian myth takes on a radical botanical edge that aligns
and expands according to the Gospel’s vision of Christ as an uncanny
person who has extraordinary encounters with the natural world.
According to the Gospels, when Christ was born, a star marked his
birthplace. As a young man, the Gospels recount that Christ stilled the
storm. The winds and the waves obeyed him. He walked on water. He
smeared mud on a blind man’s eyes and healed him. He cast a legion of
demons into a herd of pigs that promptly threw themselves into the sea.
He flew with the Devil in the desert. He raised Lazarus and Jairus’s
* I am grateful for valuable editorial comments from Bia Labate, Edward

MacRae, Tod Swanson, Bron Taylor, and Robin Wright.
Madera Visions of Christ in the Amazon 67
daughter from the dead, and, of course, he himself came back from the
grave.
These stories of the natural world giving voice to the divine in turn
link back to the Hebrew Bible stories of God appearing to the Israelites
as a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, the splitting and collaps-
ing of the Red Sea, the ten plagues of Egypt, the burning bush, all the
way back to the myth of Creation itself. When we compare these scrip-
tural themes of the wild expression of the divine through nature, we find
similar values and events expressed in Amazonian ayahuasca visions that
describe human access to an ongoing revelation of the sacred in the
natural world around us.
Beginning in the 1930s, there is an ongoing line of controversial
scholarship that proposes that many of the world’s major religions,
including Jewish and Christian traditions, were shaped by the ritual use
of a variety of entheogens, sacred vision-inducing power plants.1 These
arguments range from Robert Gordon Wasson (1968), who argued that
soma, the divine nectar of the gods in the Hindu Vedas, was a sacred
infusion of the mushroom Amarita muscaria, to the philologist John
Allegro, a British scholar on the international team of editors translating
the Dead Sea Scrolls. In his book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
(1970), Allegro contended that the early Christians were a sect centering
on the ritual use of the Amarita muscaria and that Christ was actually a
code word for the mushroom. In 2000, the psychoanalyst Dan Merkur
proposed that the holy manna that fed the wandering tribes in the Sinai
was a psychoactive mushroom, and, most recently, scholar of cognitive
psychiatry, Benny Shanon (2002, 2008) of Hebrew University, proposed
that Moses’ visionary encounters with God in the Sinai desert were
mediated through the psychotropic use of the acacia tree, an entheogen
with the same chemical properties as ayahuasca. These controversial
theories and hypotheses regarding the influence of entheogens over the
origin and history of religions provoke dynamic discussions regarding
the role of plants in the human relationship to the divine.
In this article, rather than discuss the influence of entheogens in rela-
tion to the origins of religious traditions, I want to explore the reverse:
What happens to the traditional Christian myth when it comes under the
influence of ayahuasca? In other words, how does ayahuasca transform the
telling and retelling of the Christian story? In as much as the ‘Gospel’ is
the story of Christ’s life and teachings, this article explores the Gospel
1. For discussion of the role of entheogens in world religions, see Allegro 1970;
de Félice 1979 [1936]; La Barre 1972; Ott 1995; Shannon 2002, 2008; Wasson 1968;
Wasson et al. 1986; and, in popular culture, McKenna 1992 and Merkur 2000.

according to ayahuasca as told by the Quichua Aguarico Runa, a native

people of the Ecuadorian upper Amazon, and then traces local phrasings
of the Gospel according to Santo Daime, a Christian sect centered on the
ritual use of ayahuasca that originally emerged out of the upper Amazon
in the 1920s and later spread throughout Brazil and into other parts of
the world. By understanding the transformation of the Gospel within
local Aguarico and Daime contexts, we can see how—when transplanted
into the Amazon’s fertile and psychedelic soil—the Christian story takes
root, flourishes, flowers, and grows wild.
But what can be gained by understanding how the Christian myth is
transformed under the influence of ayahuasca? Scholar of religion Wendy
Doniger defines myth as a ‘true story’ ‘in which many people have come
to find their meanings’. Doniger writes that a myth is ‘true’ in the sense
that its meanings are implicit and that we ‘cannot understand a myth
merely by telling it, but only by interpreting it’. In fact, ‘there is no myth
devoid of interpretation; the choice of the words in which to tell it begins
the process of interpretation’. In addition, myths ‘encode meanings in
forms that permit the present to be construed as the fulfillment of a past
from which we would wish to have been descended’ (Doniger 1995: 31).
Throughout this article, I will decode some of the meanings embedded
within Christian ayahuasca visions, framing these within a broader his-
torical and cultural context, thereby sketching out how these particular
narratives construct the present in relation to an inherited past.
To better understand the botanical re-visions of the Christian myth
and the cultural meanings preserved in the retellings, I will discuss two
visionary narratives that emerge when Christianity is introduced into
the pre-existing ayahuasca culture of the upper Amazon. I will begin with
a discussion of an Aguarico post-colonial narrative that recasts Christ’s
Passion through the lens of an ayahuasca battle between the powerful
Amazonian shaman or yachaj Nuestro Señor, or Our Lord Jesus, and the
treacherous brujo diablos, or witch devils that seek to destroy him. This
Aguarico mythic account of Christ deeply aligned to the rainforest
resonates, in turn, with Brazilian Santo Daime doctrine where visionary
encounters with Christianity form a radical botanical theology of tran-
substantiation. Through a brief analysis of local Santo Daime doctrine
and ritual practice as expressed by a few of its contemporary followers, I
will trace out how Daimistas graft Christian theology to an Amazonian
botanical sensibility, rephrasing the Christian myth in the process. When
Christianity melds with ayahuasca, the traditional Gospel transforms and
is reborn, exploding in livid color against the backdrop of the Amazo-
nian riverine world.

Ayahuasca
Ayahuasca, which means ‘vine of the spirits’ in Quichua, is a vision-
inducing brew usually made from two or more plants whose recorded
use in South America dates back to the Incan Empire. Used for millennia
among indigenous groups in the Upper Amazon, ayahuasca is also known
through the local names of yagé, caapi, natem, pinde, karampe, vegetal, and
Santo Daime, among others (Luna et al. 1991: 10).
Figure 1. Malpighaceae Banisteriopsis caapi
The brew is made by pounding or grating the Banisteriopsis vine and

mixing it with the leaves of Psychotria viridis or Chacruna (DMT), or other
plants of either therapeutic values, such as cacao beans or anti-rheumatic
plants, or stimulants such as tobacco, caffeine, or coca. This plant mixture
is then cooked into a bitter, dark brown brew. Considered to be spiri-
tually and physically cleansing, the brew is a purgative that can cause
violent diarrhea and vomiting. Ayahuasca produces intense visions—at
times extraordinarily beautiful, at others horrible and terrifying—with
thematic similarities reported throughout South America. Those who
drink the tea often report that an invisible spirit world embedded in
nature becomes apparent, making the person aware of a profound
interconnection between species that exists throughout the universe.
Amazonian yachajs or shamans recognize ayahuasca as a living sacred
spirit mother that teaches, disciplines, and reveals. For many Quichua
Runa living along Ecuador’s Napo and Aguarico Rivers, ayahuasca

functions as a spiritually cleansing and curative potion, and it serves to

guide yachajs as they diagnose a patient’s illness or discern the cause of
events. Some ayahuasceros utilize different parts of the plant as treatment
for specific diseases, but on the whole, the healing role of ayahuasca lies in
its power to reveal both the cause of a person’s suffering and the means
to release that person from disease. Within Amazonian cosmologies, the
physical and the spiritual world interpenetrate and ayahuasca reveals this
interconnection and the means to strengthen or sever these links.
Within Christian Amazonian communities, yachajs sometimes com-
pare their experience of suffering under the effects of ayahuasca to
Christ’s suffering on the cross.
Like yagé, the Passion immerses Christ in a world of horrible delusions. But
also like yagé it eventually teaches him to overcome these delusions and
gives him the clear vision he needs to distinguish the species and create the
world. Therefore, kamsá shaman Miguel Chindoy says that ‘the crown
which they put on Christ’s head, and which made him bleed was made of
yagé’ (Ramírez de Jara et al. 1986: 184). And Asael Moreno, an Ecuadorian
Kofán shaman, says that ‘the Lord Jesus Christ drank yagé in order to
suffer, in order to learn’ (Studebaker Robinson 1979) (Swanson 1986: 128).
In this Amazonian interpretation of Christ’s sacrifice, the crown of thorns

twined around Jesus’ head represents the ayahuasca vine and the visions
that it offers. In another Kofán account, ayahuasca rises directly out of
God’s head. In his forgetful old age, God pulls a hair from his head and
plants it in the forest:
With His left hand God plucked a hair from the crown of His head. With
His left hand He planted that hair in the rain forest for Indians only. With
His left hand He blessed it. Then the Indians—not God—discovered its
miraculous properties and developed the yagé rites. Seeing this, God was
incredulous, saying that the Indians were lying. He asked for some yagé
brew, and on drinking began to tremble, vomit, weep, and shit. In the
morning he declared that ‘it is true what these Indians say. The person
who takes this suffers. But that person is distinguished. That is how one
learns, through suffering’ (Taussig 1987: 467).
The story shows how God learns from the Kofán the miraculous powers
of yagé, His own buried body. Within the upper Amazon, yachajs learn
and ‘become distinguished’ through the suffering of ayahuasca and the
access it offers to the spiritual world. Assisted by plant, animal, and
spirit helpers in the world of visions, the yachaj battles powerful forces of
evil. On the banks of the Aguarico River, the story of the life and death
of Christ takes root within this context—as Christ comes into the
Amazon, he is identified as a yachaj and his story gains meaning through
the visionary lens of the ayahuasca world.

‘Ethnocidal Simplification’ of the Ecuadorian Amazon

Since the arrival of Europeans to the Americas, chilling accounts of
greed, violence, abuse, slavery, decimating disease, and cultural disrup-
tion permeate the history of the upper Amazon. According to Blanca
Muratorio (1991: 41), the earliest documented records in the Quijos
region reveal that between 1559 and 1608, as a result of disease and
brutal raids, the population decreased from 30,000 to 2,829. The Jesuits
controlled Archidona parish from 1660–74, and from 1708 until their
expulsion in 1768. Organized for Christian indoctrination, the Jesuit
reducciones concentrated large numbers of people from different ethnic
groups, which became ‘one of the major foci for the spread of diseases
and epidemics’ (1991: 41). As a result, in 1737 Indians of the Quijos
region fled to the Bobonaza River and north towards San Miguel and the
Aguarico Rivers (1991: 42).
In the early nineteenth century, Portuguese raids, Spanish abuses, and
deadly epidemics continued to wipe out entire ethnic groups and deci-
mated others (Muratorio 1991: 41). During the rubber boom of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the terrors and nightmare of
the debt peonage system intensely practiced through the neighboring
Putumayo region also bled into the Ecuadorian Amazon where Indians
were victims of slave raids and abuse by local and neighboring rubber
barons (Muratorio 1991: 99-121; Taussig 1987: 17-92). Oil exploration,
and its corresponding effects of displacement and environmental change,
began as early as the 1920s in Pastaza Province and intensified in the
1960s through Napo and Sucumbios Provinces. By the late 1970s, Lago
Agrio, on the banks of the Aguarico, had become a small boomtown
supporting the surrounding oil fields. Muratorio writes that the cultural
disruption created by this lengthy process of conquest and evangeliza-
tion ‘brought about an “ethnocidal simplification” of the Amazon’s rich
ethnic variety’ resulting in ‘the widespread Christianization of the
Indians—no matter how superficial it may have been—and in their
complete Quichuanization’ (1991: 42).
In his account of a patient with Karsakov’s syndrome, a disease that
causes severe amnesia, clinical neurologist Oliver Sacks reflects on the
patient’s constant need to create elaborate fictions about his life in the
face of the devastating loss of memory. ‘We have, each of us’, writes
Sacks, ‘a life-story, an inner narrative—whose continuity, whose sense, is
our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a “narra-
tive”, and that this narrative is us, our identities’ (1998: 110). But for the
victim of amnesia, whose ‘world keeps disappearing, losing meaning,
vanishing…he must seek meaning, make meaning…continually

inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaning-

lessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him’ (1998: 111).
The story of Christ’s Passion on the Aguarico is both a mythic result
and response to ‘ethnocidal simplification’. To the extent that this post-
colonial myth reflects the values of the ayahuasca world, this suggests the
possibility that the continual use of ayahausca through the ravages of
Andean and Amazonian history has served to preserve visionary lines of
history, throwing ropes of meaning across the abyss, adeptly challenging
the threat of cultural amnesia in the face of the encounter with multiple
disappearing worlds.
The Life of Christ in the Aguarico

In the 1980s, along the banks of the Aguarico River in the northeastern
Ecuadorian jungle, the anthropologist Alessandra Foletti-Castegnaro
(1985) recorded an Amazonian account of Christ’s Passion. A variation
of a myth told all along the Aguarico and Napo Rivers, the story
describes Nuestro Señor (Our Lord Jesus) as an old beggar traveling
through the Andean foothills and along the rivers in the Amazon basin
counseling, healing, and helping people as he traveled. In the midst of
his travels, the story relates that Nuestro Señor encountered envious
brujo diablos or witch devils that chased him across the countryside and
finally killed him in his own home.
For those accustomed to the traditional story of Jesus’ life, death, and
resurrection as told in the New Testament Gospels, this particular
Aguarico account presents a highly unusual description of the life of
Christ. A mythic celebration of collage and powerful evocation of pal-
impsest, the Aguarico narrative combines an amalgam of Andean and
Amazonian story elements with some of the Gospel narrative features
from the Mediterranean version of Christ’s Passion. This story does not
‘function as a myth in isolation’, but rather ‘it shares its themes, its cast
of characters, even some of its events with other myths’ (Doniger 1995:
31). Framed within the upper Amazonian historical and cultural con-
texts, the myth makes sense as a local rephrasing of the Gospel under the
influence of ayahuasca. While ayahuasca is not named in the account, the
influential presence of the vine is culturally implicit to the narrative.
Native American scholar and activist Vine Deloria writes that ‘tribal
religions are actually complexes of attitudes, beliefs, and practices fine-
tuned to harmonize with the lands on which the people live’ (1994: 70).
Christianity, however, ‘eliminated the dimension of land from religion’
(1994: 144). In its early moments of development, Christianity effectively

pulled its roots out of the land by ‘substituting heaven for the tangible
restoration of Palestine to the Jews’ suffering under Roman control (1994:
144). Because of the intense variation of culture, climate, and topogra-
phy, when Christianity came to the Americas, it ‘shattered on the shores
of the continent[s], producing hundreds of sects in the same manner that
the tribes continually subdivided in an effort to relate to the rhythms of
the land’ (1994: 145-46).
The Aguarico retelling of the Christian myth effectively takes this
‘shattered’ Christianity and encodes cultural as well as topographical
layers of meanings that both preserve and transform not only a Chris-
tian, but also an Andean and an Amazonian history. As a powerful tool
of interpretation, the visionary lens of ayahuasca has been used to make
sense of the world throughout Amazonian history. As the myth travels
through space and time, upon reaching the Amazon, it transforms
within the interpretive range of the ayahuasca world.
In the time before, Kofán the storyteller begins, Our Lord used to walk
through the world. He looked like a little old man and he walked all over
the place without ever stopping to rest. In this way he walked around
counseling the people, seeing how they lived, helping them. But after a
time some brujo diablos, you know, those witch devils that come around
sometimes, they became envious of him and they began to stalk him,
hunting him down in order to kill him (Foletti–Castegnaro 1985).
In this opening section of the story, the narrator’s invocation to ‘the

time before’ calls out to the mythic time before the conquest and conjures
the oldest and most familiar of Andean creation myths, the story of the
wandering w’akas or ancestors who—often traveling in disguise—created
or transformed the world as they traveled through it. Evolutionary in
structure, the myths of the w’aka ancestors emphasized the way that
nature evolved by adapting to conflict and change.
The most famous written accounts of these mythic w’aka ancestors are
recorded in the Peruvian Huarochirí manuscript, which is the oldest
Native Andean document that relates local religious traditions. Written
in Quechua sometime between 1598 and 1608, the manuscript recounts
the escapades of two of the local Huarochiri ancestors, Viracocha and
Paria Caca (Salomon et al. 1991).
Typical tricksters, Viracocha and Paria Caca often traveled in disguise
as beggars, birds, plants, rocks, and so on. As these w’akas met up with
other people, animals, plants, or landforms, they would strategically
change these creatures through blessings or curses depending on
whether these creatures were helpful or hostile to the wanderers. Plant
and animal characteristics and features of the earth and sky all served as

proof of the w’akas’ travels (Madera 2005). In the altiplanos of Peru these
myths still resonate with contemporary ayllus, or lineage groups, who
say, for example, that the Milky Way is the trail of Viracocha’s sperm
seeding the night (Urton 1985). Preserving the same evolutionary struc-
ture as the w’aka myths, post-contact Andean narratives maintained
variations of the traditional plot lines but recast Nuestro Señor (Our
Lord Jesus) into the role of the wandering w’akas.
Additionally, in his discussion of the Nuestro Señor myth cycle in the
Andes and Amazon, Tod Swanson (1986) locates the roots of these
myths in the Incaic solar calendar where the Incas divided the solar
godhead between Punchao and Viracocha. Punchao, the Churi-Inti or
Son Sun, was born at Inti Raymi, the feast of the winter solstice, and then
traveled south ‘growing closer, warmer and stronger’ until it reached its
‘full maturation’ as Viracocha, the adult sun during Capac Raymi, the
great Inca summer solstice festival in December (Demarest 1981: 25).
After the feast of Capac Raymi Viracocha, ‘the mature Señor Sol’, then
began his adult traveling life ‘shifting gradually northward and waning
until its death and subsequent rebirth (as Punchao, “the son”) in Inti
Raymi’ (Demarest 1981: 27). The Nuestro Señor cycle mirrors this calen-
drical movement of maturation, pairing the Christ Child with Punchao
and the aged God the Father with Viracocha. Within this ‘cyclical solar
Christology, the birth narratives are also resurrection narratives, and
therefore, the child Christ’s powers to discern and create are actually
fruits of the crucifixion they seem to precede’ (Swanson 1986: 122).
From this perspective, the Aguarico narrative’s opening invocation to
‘the time before’ also calls out to the story of the Creating Christ who
brings order to the old, dying world. Associated with Dios Yaya (God
the Father), this primordial time, ‘the time before’, is characterized by
chaos, cacophony, and confusion engendered by God’s old age (Swan-
son 1986: 119). In this narrative, like others in the region, the Indian
Christ that appears to transform the chaos of the primordium ‘is an
ambiguous figure because he emerges out of the very primordium he
overcomes’ (1986: 122).
This solar connection with the life of Christ aligns the pre-dawn sun to
Jesus’ birth and childhood. The flight of the Holy Family, for instance,
takes place during the earliest light of the morning:
As dawn approaches, the increasing light of the sun begins to reduce these
primordials to distinct species of plants and animals, and to relate them to
each other in a seasonal harmony. To resist this fate, the demons pursue
Christ through the grey forests and mountains hoping to kill the child sun
before he rises. But as they flee, Christ and Mary create the world
(Swanson 1986: 123).

As a result, throughout the Andean highlands and to a lesser extent

into the Amazonian lowlands of Ecuador, local stories relate in detail the
specific encounters that Jesus, his mother Mary, and their burro had as
they passed through a storyteller’s home. The events in the Holy Family’s
flight altered the South American landscape, leaving their sacred mark
on rocks, fields, rivers, animals, and plants.
Like the pre-contact myths, the stories of Nuestro Señor’s adventures
traveled with traders, porters, and yachajs who carried these tales
throughout the Andean mountains and down into the Amazonian foot-
hills. Set adrift from the Bible and married to these older Andean plot
lines, the Christian story traveled, transformed, and adapted to local
geographies, histories, social needs, and cultural realities. Dressed in
new costume, but maintaining its Incaic and Huarochirí roots, the story
made its way across the mountains, down into the Amazonian foothills,
emerging in the late twentieth century on the banks of the Aguarico, as a
story that recounts how Nuestro Señor disguises himself as a beggar and
wanders without resting across the land. Once the story reaches the
Amazon, it absorbs the realities of the ayahuasca world.
As he travels, Our Lord Jesus has the curative powers to see, counsel,
and heal those he encounters. Here Nuestro Señor plays the role of a
traveling yachaj, literally knower, healer, or medicine person. Conse-
quently, the myth also fits into an Amazonian genre of stories about the
deadly battles between yachajs. Traditionally, these battles between
yachajs take place on the spiritual plane during ayahuasca flights. Under
the influence of ayahuasca, yachajs can recognize, counter, and evade their
enemies, and, most importantly, they can shape shift into the form of
another creature as a means of traveling incognito, escaping pursuit, or
launching surprise attacks. Within the Amazonian cultural context, it is
understood that the yachaj’s power arises directly from his or her inti-
mate knowledge of and skilled experience with ayahuasca.
In this story, it is Nuestro Señor’s significant powers that attract the
envy of brujo diablos, demon witches who use their power to kill rather
than heal, to curse rather than bless. On the banks of the Aguarico,
Christ’s Passion is thus recast through the lens of an ayahuasca battle
between the powerful yachaj Nuestro Señor and the treacherous brujo
diablos that seek to destroy him.2 Later in the text I will discuss the
resonant meanings elicited by these brujo diablos but for now I will focus
on the nature of their envy.
2. For an historical account of battles between yachajs in Brazil, see Wright 2004:
82-109.

Envy
In the Andes and in the Amazon, envy is a primary sin. In a region
where the strength of communal bonds and communal identity tradi-
tionally (and ideally) take precedence over individual needs and desires,
envy is considered to be a vengeful and murderous emotion with the
extraordinary power to disrupt and destroy the blossoming of life, luck,
and love. Within the logic of the Aguarico world (as well as within the
extended Ecuadorian Amazonian and Andean world), the cause for the
brujos’ envy is implicit—the Son of God is a powerful yachaj. He pos-
sesses knowledge and has established an extensive network of alliances
with the forest, mountains, and rivers; the plants and the animals; the
living and the dead; the four elements and the extended cosmos; and
therefore possesses the ability to thwart or foster life, luck, and love. For
Amazonian yachajs, many of these alliances are formed during ayahuasca
flights where the spirit nature of the world reveals itself. Under the
influence of ayahuasca, the yachaj forms and breaks alliances, and guides,
negotiates, attracts, and repels the flow of spiritual and material energies
in, through, and around his or her home community. Because of this
mastery, the skilled yachaj continually risks attack from envious competi-
tors who want to steal his or her power or undermine the health and
well being of the community.
Within the region, the addition of envy into the story provides an
immediately accessible rationale for Nuestro Señor’s troubles. Gone is
the complicated historical and remote political intrigue surrounding the
Mediterranean account of the crucifixion of Jesus. With a simple altera-
tion, the Aguarico story cuts to the chase by dispelling any confusing
background material and adeptly identifies a powerful, locally recogniz-
able motivation behind the enmity that rapidly propels the tale.
When Nuestro Señor encounters the killing envy of the brujos, he
returns to his jungle home and works in the fields closest to his home so
that he can hide when necessary. Here the story describes the Creating
Christ in action. It shows plants and animals engaged within Christian
realities, acting as sentient players in the spiritual life of the world. When
the brujo diablos arrive, Our Lord seeks shelter from the plants in his
chacra or vegetable garden. When the plants fail to care for him they are
punished in kind. And so the myth continues:
Now when the devils arrived, Our Lord hid in his field. First he hid
beneath the yucca, but as the little branches broke under his feet they made
so much noise that they couldn’t serve as a proper hiding place. And so he
went and hid beneath the maize plant, but these leaves, too, crackled
loudly as they bent and there was no way they could save him. Finally he

went and hid beneath the peanut. Here he was able to belly underneath the
plant but the poor little leaves were so small and so few that they failed to
hide him sufficiently.
That is why even today we cannot eat raw yucca or raw maize. We have
to cook the yucca and the maize because Our Lord was not able to hide
beneath their leaves. This is also why we can eat peanuts raw, but only a
few at a time. Too many will make you sick (Foletti-Castegnaro 1985: 78,
author’s translation).
Like the w’akas before him, Our Lord creates the world as he moves
through it. Unlike the creation of the world in Genesis, the story reveals
how the Amazon is not created in a few days upon divine verbal com-
mand; instead, creation is an ongoing, transformative event that occurs
in the dynamic encounter between creatures or species. This Aguarico
account maintains Andean and Amazonian mythic visions of many
creations, always in motion (Madera 2005). The story demonstrates the
intimacy of this creation. The limitations of yucca, maize, and peanuts
and their failure to help Nuestro Señor directly affect Quichua Runa who
depend on these domesticated plants for food. In the end, it is the
Quichua Runa that suffer from the frustrated encounter between these
plants and Our Lord.
Unable to remain safely at his home, Nuestro Señor travels from house
to house with the devils in hot pursuit. He blesses those who feed him
and clothe him with fertile fields and storehouses full of food, but those
who insult him or refuse to aid him receive his curses. It is here where
we see Nuestro Señor’s ability to curse others that the myth offers a
more detailed description revealing Nuestro Señor as a traditional yachaj
who travels with a range of spiritually laden materials that can be used
either for healing or harm. Sometimes, the teller relates, Nuestro Señor
…would run into bad people with a bad heart who would say to him,
‘Hey, you! Ugly old man! Who told you to come here? What kind of curses
and sorcery do you come carrying around with you anyway?’
Now it is true that Our Lord carried with him all kinds of sickness,
carachas, mushrooms…and so, cursed like that, he would leave these
things under the houses of these bad men so that they would realize who
they were dealing with (Foletti-Castegnaro 1985: 78).
This depiction of Nuestro Señor reflects the traditional abilities of

yachajs to harness the powers of nature to the necessities of the
moment—blessing or cursing, bringing healing or causing harm,
depending on the demands of the particular situation. To the people
who fail to offer hospitality and curse him, Nuestro Señor leaves disease.
To the people who offer food and shelter to the old beggar, Nuestro
Señor blesses their fields and brings plentiful harvests.

Brujo Diablos
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the brujo diablos themselves.
Both Spanish words are used in the original Quichua version and they
point to a larger religious history of the interaction between native
traditions and Christianity. In the Andes, the term brujo is used to refer
to a killing yachaj, someone who generally uses his powers to destroy
rather than heal. The Spanish term curandero is used for yachajs who use
their powers for healing rather than harm and who traditionally state
this fact, along with their Christian alliances, at the beginning of a curing
session (Freedman 2000: 113-19). Despite the fact that historically, within
the region, Jesuits appointed yachajs as capitanes—captains or leaders—of
the reducciones and thus yachajs played a pivotal role both in disseminat-
ing Christianity and in navigating native response to Jesuit control, still
in the contemporary Napo world, yachajs do not incorporate Christianity
into the structures of the curing sessions to the same extent as their
Andean counterparts.3 Instead, curandero is used as a polite form to refer
to a yachaj who is friendly to the speaker and brujo simply means the
yachaj from a competing family or community who attempts to attract
limited local resources away from the speaker’s community towards the
rival yachaj’s people and home.
Historically, since the conquest, Catholic and later Evangelical mis-
sionaries in the twentieth century often identified yachajs, ayahuasceros,
and other ritual and herbal specialists in the Andes and Amazon as
brujos, witches or sorcerers who consorted with the Devil. The Devil
itself is foreign to South America and the idea was initially imported to
the continent with Catholic Europeans on the heels of the Inquisition.
Catholic authorities in South America projected this European notion of
the Devil onto Andean and Amazonian spirits and nature deities. How-
ever, as time progressed, Native Andean and Amazonian Christians
maintained many traditional customs, weaving Christianity into their
own cultural systems of belief (Cervantes 1994; Mills 1997). Through this
process, among Native Andeans and Amazonians, the concept of the
Devil took on an additional nuance and came to represent dark, danger-
ous, destructive, or consuming spirit manifestations of the land. The
Devil manifestation of the land is typically associated with envy, power,
money, greed, violence, illicit sex, deformity, disease, war, and other
typical ‘non-Christian’ values, so to speak. Killing yachajs or brujos seek
out this consuming, glutinous aspect of the land in order to gain power
or wealth or to cause harm to their enemies.
3. Tod Swanson, personal communication, September 2008.

Consequently, with the brujos in hot pursuit, Nuestro Señor travels

year after year across the countryside, visiting people and helping them.
In moments when the brujos nearly catch him, Nuestro Señor ‘would
make snow fall in the path and then he would slip from view and look as
they might, the demons could no longer find him’. Finally, says the
Aguarico storyteller,
…Nuestro Señor’s hour arrived and of his own will the Son of God
allowed himself to be caught. He returned to his homeland, to a mountain,
a cerro named Calvario and he arrived to the house of some women. There
he hid in a room (Foletti-Castegnaro 1985: 78).
Because of his willingness to submit to his fate, Nuestro Señor has

some control over the parameters of his death and goes home. In
Ecuador, many traditional Andean and Amazonian people believe that
when they die they go to live inside their home mountain, or cerro, the
place out of which they were born. Transformed by this indigenous
narration, we find that Calvary is the Son of God’s cerro, his home moun-
tain, his place of origin, his dawning place—as it were—or his ‘pacarina’
to use the older Andean Quichua term. It is in this context that the Son of
God returns home, to his tierra, to the locus of his power—his cerro
Calvario—to die. The suggestion that Christ, too, has a pacarina reveals
the way that this key Christian figure has been fully re-framed by native
cosmology. He was born out of the Amazonian land and will return into
the land when he dies. This basic inclusion suggests the impossibility of
imagining Christ arising out of an alternate reality. His accessible power
as a focus of Native Christian worship depends upon his familiarity with
and participation in the local Andean and Amazonian worlds. And so
Nuestro Señor returns to his homeland, to his cerro Calvario.
When the diablos arrived, they searched through the whole house until
they found him. They caught him, whipped him, insulted him and beat
him. Afterwards they made him carry the cross. They called on a blind
diablo and had him kill the Son of God piercing him through with a lance
(Foletti-Castegnaro 1985: 78).
At this point, the myth shifts in source material from the Andean
stories of the traveling w’akas or ancestors to the Gospel accounts of
Christ’s Passion. The women at the cross translate into friends who
protect the Son of God by hiding him in their home. The image of the
cross itself appears suddenly and disappears quickly. The story
acknowledges the symbolic importance of the cross as an object of ritual
humiliation and thus gestures to the colonial history of extirpation of
idolatry and the neo-colonial repression of native traditions.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Church authorities

organized official extirpation campaigns to wipe out specific native reli-
gious practices that the Church defined as witchcraft. The idea of what
made up witchcraft and sorcery was informed by the European inquisi-
tion and imported to the Americas. One of the punishments for sorcery
included a procession of shame where the accused was forced to wear a
coroza or pointed headgear and led half naked through the town on the
back of a mule with a wooden cross hung around the accused person’s
neck while the town crier called out the sorcerer’s crimes (Mills 1997:
124). Church authorities also planted crosses on w’aka sites (Andean holy
places) after destroying all sacred objects, punishing the ministers of the
w’aka and attempting to dismantle the surrounding cult of worship (de
Arriaga 1920 [1621]). In the Amazon, the cross was used as the symbol of
religious and social conquest over hunter/gatherer groups whose con-
version entailed forced settlements in Christian towns or reducciones
(Muratorio 1991: 72-98). The Church and the States’ condemnation and
persecution of w’aka ministers, native healers, traditional religious spe-
cialists, and yachajs continued in some form all the way through the late
twentieth century. For this reason, in the Aguarico account, the cross
does not signify the instrument of Christ’s death and human redemp-
tion, but rather represents the sign of his conquest and humiliation. This
in turn aligns him with Native Amazonians and Andeans in their rela-
tion to the cross as the signifier of the historical repression of native
traditions by various Church authorities. And so the story pauses
momentarily on the cross as a sign of humiliation, but then swiftly
changes the details of Christ’s death by translating the Roman Centu-
rion’s spear into a familiar deadly weapon—an Amazonian lance.
The brujos trick a blind demon into piercing the Son of God through
the heart. Two tiny drops of Jesus’ blood spurt from his heart and splash
into the eye of the blind demon and heal him. Upon recovering his sight,
he echoes the Roman centurion at the cross and exclaims in horror: ‘This
was the Son of God! Why did you make me raise my spear against him?’
This narrative ploy allows the spectacular unveiling of the stranger—
revealing his identity as the true Son of God. The myth suggests that,
like the blind demon, the previous men with ‘bad hearts’ would not
have treated this yachaj so poorly had they realized his true identity.
Sadly, these realizations come too late:
When the Son of God died, the Demon became blind again. Afterwards
they buried the Son of God beneath his house.
The demons took possession of all of his things and took over his house
and they began to eat all of his chickens. They even proceeded to cook the
white rooster, which is the rooster of God. While they were eating, the cock

farted three times, each time with such force that it was like an earthquake
shaking his whole body. And because they were witches, they became
frightened and they wondered amongst themselves, ‘Could this rooster
still be alive?’
‘No, no it’s not possible, certainly he is dead. Why are you afraid?’ But
then, after that, the Son of God came back to life. In that same instant the
white rooster began to crow from the pot where they were cooking him,
‘Resuscitó!’ ‘He’s alive! He’s resurrected!’
The rooster opened up its wings and shook them as he crowed and as he
did so he flung the ají [hot sauce made from red peppers] from the soup
straight into the devils’ eyes. With that, all the devils turned into frogs.
And then the Son of God sent them all down to the Kingdom below,
down to hell (Foletti-Castegnaro 1985: 79).
Finally, like the Roman centurions gambling over Jesus’ robe, the brujo
diablos take possession of the Son of God’s Amazonian property and take
over his house. Now, as discussed earlier, throughout this region when
the Diablo (Devil) appears in personal accounts, local myths, and legends,
he frequently appears in moments of imbalance motivated by envy,
greed, or a desire for power. However, instead of appearing as a Runa or
an indigenous person, invariably in these settings, the Diablo appears as
a ‘Señor’, a gringo (white man), or an hacendado (landholder) (Madera
2005).
In Bolivia, June Nash and later Michael Taussig recorded the sacrifices
of llamas, coca leaves, and aguardiente required to El Tio, the spirit owner
of the Potosi tin mines who appeared as a gringo devil (Nash 1993;
Taussig 1980). In Ecuador, Tod Swanson recorded as well an account
from the brujo and foreman of the construction crew on the Guacamayos
road built in the late 1980s where the mountain appeared as the Devil,
dressed as an upper-class gringo, and required the sacrifice of fifteen
men in exchange for the carving out of the mountain’s body (Swanson,
unpublished ms.). These three written records reflect a fairly common
apparition within shamanic stories where the consuming, killing, dark
side of the mountain, forest, or river appears as a Señor, a patrón, a
gringo, or white or light-skinned man often with green or blue eyes.
Given this narrative pattern of Amazonian and Andean stories about
encounters with the Devil, within the Aguarico myth the brujo diablos
may well represent oppressive landholders and white colonizers, and, in
this way, Christ becomes doubly aligned to Native Amazonians in their
suffering. Through this lens, the story of Nuestro Señor’s suffering is
also the story of the suffering of Native Amazonians at the hands of
thieving conquistadores, explorers, hacendados, and brutal colonizers.
These murderers and thieves bury Nuestro Señor beneath his house in
traditional Amazonian fashion and proceed to cook the white rooster of

God, the rooster that crowed when Peter denied knowing Jesus. In this
indigenous translation of Christ’s Passion, rather than crowing three
times, this rooster farts over the outrageous betrayal of his dead master.
The fart adds humor at a depressing moment in the story, while at the
same time hilariously gesturing, in strength and effect, toward the
earthquake of Golgotha at the moment of Jesus’ death, which is tradi-
tionally clocked at 3:00 in the afternoon.
At the moment of the resurrection, the cock comes back to life and
speaks, crowing, ‘Resucitó! Resucitó!’ In an inverse gesture of the earlier
splashing of Christ’s healing blood, the rooster flings the ají into the
demons’ eyes and turns them into toads.
In the Napo and Aguarico regions, rubbing ají or red pepper in the
eyes of children is a traditional form of discipline that helps the child to
correct the error of his or her sight and to gain wisdom, endurance, and
the ability to see clearly. Here the demons are punished for their inaccu-
rate vision. The ají tests the demons for the nature of their true spirit.
They fail the test by transforming into toads, revealing their true charac-
ters as creatures of darkness.
Again, Christian elements combine with Amazonian details to create a
powerful story, spicing up the original version through the embellish-
ment of complimentary differences. We do not see the resurrected Christ;
instead, the white rooster of God rises up out of the pot his white wings
flung open. Shape shifting—from human to bird (or some other creature
for that matter) and back again—is an essential feature of both ancestral
myths and ayahuasca stories. Within Catholic churches in Ecuador, as in
the local church in Napo’s capital of Tena at the Josefina Mission, the
Christian symbol of the Holy Spirit, the white flying dove, often hangs
above images of Jesus with his arms stretched out on the cross. With his
wings wide open, the white rooster echoes simultaneously the visual
form of the dove and the crucifixion, thus uniting the white rooster to
the spirit manifestation of Nuestro Señor. This shift in the shape of the
Christian resurrection story gains an eerie angle when the resurrected
Jesus appears as a crowing bird rising out of the primordial soup.
The Aguarico myth re-figures Our Lord Jesus as a clever Amazonian
shape-shifting yachaj within a recognizable local geography. Nuestro
Señor is not a foreigner—a gringo, rancia, or extranjero. Instead, narrative
tradition suggests that the brujo diablos are the foreign aggressors while
Christ is native to the Amazon. Nuestro Señor’s success in vanquishing
his enemies arises out of his local knowledge and mastery of Amazonian
forces within a specific world. Informed by his ayahuasca visions and
travels, Christ’s autochthonous power as yachaj allows him to win
Amazonian and Andean allies alike—the plants, the snow and fog, the

white rooster of God—which all work with him in conquering the brujo
diablos. The myth displays the healing and revelatory powers of
ayahuasca. In fact, through the ayahuasca visions, the Christian story itself
is healed and Christ himself redeemed and released from the grip of the
brujo diablos, who for a time controlled his house. The narrative power-
fully rephrases a shattered Christianity. In this Gospel according to
ayahuasca, the conquest and colonial expansion of Christianity is
reframed as the aggressive and greedy action of brujo diablos during the
time that Nuestro Señor lay dead.
We will hear this aspect echoed and amplified in the Gospel according
to Santo Daime. For now, this piece of the story opens up the opportu-
nity to reflect on an alternate theological explanation for the terrors that
have visited the Amazon since the time of the conquest. When we
consider the Christian Church as that which houses the spirit of Christ,
the story provides an explanation for Christianity’s dark history. In the
narrative, Nuestro Señor lies dead while his house—the Church—serves
as a hideout for murderers and thieves. It is as if the conquest of the
Americas and the brutal colonization of the Amazon, that process of
‘ethnocidal simplification’, had occurred within the expanded space of
Holy Saturday—the time between Christ’s crucifixion on Friday and his
resurrection on Easter Sunday morning.
This logic is consistent with an ayahuasca sensibility where time and
space frequently expands, doubles, or collapses. In this alternate time/
space, ayahuasca allows the person to enter into the past or the future and
connect with people from other places and other times. As we will see in
the Gospel according to Santo Daime, in this alternate Amazonian
mythic history the conquest of the Americas takes place in the darkness
of Holy Saturday when Christ lies dead and God has turned his face
from the world.4
In the face of profound historical and ongoing challenges to survival,
the Aguarico retelling of the Christian myth casts bridges of meaning
over abysses of meaninglessness. These bridges, these mythic innova-
tions, create communal continuity in the midst of the disruptions of
change. As Sacks argues, ‘To be ourselves we must have ourselves—
possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” our-
selves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves’ (Sacks 1970:
111). In an act of cultural resilience, the Aguarico narrative repossesses
communal life-stories by adeptly selecting and then weaving together a
Christian, Andean, and Amazonian history and cultural inheritance
4. For an analysis of Indian suffering under the Conquest and the corresponding
meaning of the crucifixion, see Swanson 1986: 140-54.

thereby preserving and, at the same time, transforming the cultural past.
The post- and neo-colonial myth recollects communal life through story
and, in so doing, affirms the meanings and values of the present. It is in
part the resilience of these kinds of continuous narratives that serves to
maintain communal identity.
For the Aguarico Runa, their identity depends on the history of their
cultural alignment to the banks of the Aguarico. Accordingly, Christ
comes to the Amazon, he comes to the Aguarico, and there, powerful
yachaj that he is, he transforms and aligns himself in solidarity with this
river forest world. The Aguarico account reveals how, for the Quichua
Runa of Ecuador’s northeastern jungle, the Christian story takes root into
local ground. As it drinks in the nutrients and water of this specific
cultural soil, the story takes new form and readjusts to the extended
logic and history of the Amazonian encounter.
Like the Quichua Runa, Christ’s power is expressed and revealed
through his native alliance to the Amazon and his intimate knowledge
and mastery of this intricately complex environment, a mastery tradi-
tionally mediated by ayahuasca. At the same time, the Amazonian ele-
ments of the myth gain force through the radical potential of the ‘Good
News’ of this imported Christian story where good is destroyed by evil
but wittily wins in the end: the dead come back to life with new powers
gained from the grave—a grave imbued with the powerful mythic
history and biological realities of the Amazonian hills.
The post-colonial Aguarico story of Christ’s Passion reveals the way in
which multiple layers of indigenous meanings, values, and identities,
both Andean and Amazonian, are preserved within the mythic context
through dexterous narration that maintains the local geographical
setting and marries ancestral and Christian plot lines, while insisting on
the value of indigenous character traits. By maintaining the landscape,
meanings within the myth privilege a local cosmology and history
despite the playing out of a sacred plot originally cast in the Mediterra-
nean. The narrative rephrases and reframes a shattered Christianity.
Here, the larger cosmological realities of the Amazon and nearby Andes
take precedence over written Scripture and become the stage out of
which the Christian plot emerges. By marrying and interweaving multi-
ple mythic realities, Christian, Andean, and Amazonian, a new powerful
creature is born—an Amazonian Christian story where the redemptive
death-defying power of the Gospel takes root within the infinitely
fecund, transformative, and evolutionary world of the Amazon basin.
The Aguarico Runa’s experience of Christ deeply rooted and aligned
to the rainforest resonates, in turn, with Santo Daime doctrine in Brazil,
where visionary encounters with Christianity form a radical botanical

theology of transubstantiation. While the Aguarico Runa describe Christ

as an Amazonian yachaj intimate with ayahuasca, the Doctrine of Santo
Daime goes one step further and proposes the revolutionary idea that
Christ has returned to this world as an ayahuasca power plant, re-incar-
nated in his Second Coming within the alchemical mix of this Amazonian
brew.
Santo Daime
Santo Daime is a Christian tradition indigenous to Brazil that melds
popular Catholicism and nineteenth-century European Spiritualism with
Native Amazonian and Afro-Brazilian traditions. The doctrine was
founded in 1920, in the State of Acre by Raimundo Irineu Serra, a seven-
foot tall, afro-Brazilian rubber-tapper, after the collapse of the rubber
industry. Part of a larger group of migrants from northeastern Brazil,
Serra was one of ‘thousands of displaced and dispossessed, exploited
and downtrodden rubber-gatherers who sought to eke out a living in the
unknown and—to them—exceedingly dangerous frontier regions’
(Wright 2008: 182). While working in the Amazonian forest, Serra and
his friend Antonio Costa first took ayahuasca in the Cobija region of
Bolivia with a Peruvian vegetalista, Don Crescencio Pizango, who report-
edly credited his knowledge of ayahuasca to descend all the way from the
Inca Huascar (MacRae 1992).
Through the revelations of mama ayahuasca, Serra encountered a blond,
blue-eyed Queen of the Forest dressed in blue. The Queen of the Forest
revealed herself to be the Virgin of the Conception and she called ayahua-
sca ‘Santo Daime’, literally ‘Saint Give Me’, as in ‘Give me strength, give
me love, give me light’. In Serra’s visions, the Virgin revealed that Santo
Daime was the living Christ incarnate and she gave Serra a collection of
hymns that grafted together Christian theology with an Amazonian
botanical sensibility. In addition, the Queen of the Forest entrusted Mestre
Irineu with the mission to replant the Doctrine of Jesus Christ on Earth.
From Mestre Irineu’s visions emerged an Amazonian theology of the
hibernating Christ. According to Daime legend, when Jesus died,
…the Doctrine saw the distortions made to Jesus’ teachings, and It knew
the necessary darkness ahead for humanity. It left the world at large,
entering the deep forest. There It secreted itself in the jagube vine and the
rainha leaf. It waited with Its guardians, the native peoples of the Amazon,
for the day when humanity would be ready to re-embrace It (Goldman
1999: xxiv).
Similar to the Aguarico account of the brujo diablos ransacking Nuestro

Señor’s house after they murdered him, the Daime myth suggests a

theology of Holy Saturday where the spirit of Christ abandoned the

Church after Jesus’ death and retreated to the Amazon to hibernate in
the sacred plants during the brutal age of Christian conquest and Ama-
zonian exploitation. For some followers, Mestre Irineu was actually a
reincarnation of Jesus who had returned to earth to serve as the instru-
ment for the re-awakening of the Doctrine.
Figure 2. Banisteriopsis caapi vine
By the 1930s, Mestre Irineu, the ‘Christ of the rubber-working and

caboclo communities’ (Wright 2008: 182), had drawn together a commu-
nity of mostly poor, black, rural devotees that used Santo Daime as a
communal means of accessing divine guidance, communing with the
natural and supernatural world, and forging healing. The legend of the
hibernating Christ may have been one of the many aspects of Santo
Daime that resonated with the rubber-tappers of Acre and their own
particular brutal histories of abuse and disenfranchisement. In addition,
‘“Strength” was an important element in indigenous experiences of
ayahuasca’, suggests Robin Wright, ‘“love” and “light” were the building
blocks of a new community sentiment for those who had been literally
abandoned in the unknown’ (2008: 182).

The movement gained force, attracting rural peasants, Native Brazil-

ians, and environmentalists. Drawn by the ‘apotheosis of nature and the
possibility of using hallucinogens reminiscent of Castaneda’s account’
backpackers from the countercultural movement flocked to the early
Daime communities like ‘Colony 5000’, a utopian colony led by
Sebastião Mota de Melo (Wright 2008: 182). According to Wright, ‘The
objective of the members of the Colony was to find a way of eking out
their survival while living in harmony with nature, autonomous from
the corrupt, urban way of life, and in accordance with the teachings of
Mestre Irineu and especially in their further elaborations by Padrinho
Sebastião’ (2008: 182).
In 1987, as a result of CONFEN (Conselho Federal de Entorpecentes)—
a Brazilian government commission led by doctors, psychologists, psy-
chiatrists, sociologists, and lawyers—the Brazilian courts legalized the
ritual use of Daime. This further legitimized Daime and attracted more
followers. Currently, there are more than fifty Daime communities in
Brazil and the rest of the world.
Unlike the Runa of the Ecuadorian Amazon whose narrative histories
and cosmologies root communities to a specific topography, in this
marriage between Christian theology, Amazonian botany, and Brazilian
demography, Santo Daime Doctrine took on a mobile form and traveled
with its adherents across the land. As Santo Daime, the Banisteriopsis
vine, and the Psychotria viridis literally left the Amazon, it took root in
new ground. In places where the plants traveled as dried material—to
Europe, Asia, or the United States—Daime functioned as a kind of
botanical ambassador whose use forged unusual alliances benefiting the
preservation of all species. The Santo Daime communities in the Nether-
lands, for example, have dedicated their efforts to strengthening
European support of Amazonian preservation and raising money to aid
the Ceu de Mapia community in their attempt to live in ecological
harmony with the rainforest (Groisman 2000).
Given the vast cultural differences between Daime communities, con-
flicts within and between communities inevitably occur.5 Still, in places
where the plant was carried in living form and replanted, as it has been
replanted in the Atlantic Forest on Santa Catarina Island in southern
Brazil, Santo Daime effectively creates new sanctuaries as communities
work to preserve and protect the native and adopted ecosystems that
support these sacred plants.
5. See, for example, MacRae (1992: 114) and his description of conflicts between
southern Brazilians and the northern members of the community.

Figure 3. Mestre Irineu
One of these recently founded sanctuaries created by the Doctrine of

Santo Daime is the Associação Comunitaria Espiritualista Patriarca São
José—The Community of the Patriarch Saint Joseph—in the town of
Vargem Grande on Santa Catarina Island in the south of Brazil. Led by
Enio Staub, the group is made up of urbanites primarily from Rio and
São Paulo. Members of the group initially arrived on the island in 1987
and set up base near the beach of Santinho. In 1991, the group bought
forty-five hectares of pasture and farmland and founded The
Community of the Patriarch Saint Joseph. Currently a total of about sixty

people live in eighteen houses at the community, while some one

hundred and fifty people live outside of the community but regularly
participate in the Santo Daime rituals.
In 2004, as part of a documentary video project, I had the opportunity
to interview Enio Staub as well as a few other members of The Commu-
nity of the Patriarch Saint Joseph. When Staub first told me the story of
Santo Daime, I was struck by how an Amazonian ayahuasca vision by a
marginalized rubber-tapper powerfully re-invented and re-inscribed the
Christian myth in such a profoundly attractive and identifiable way that
it created a narrative bridge of meaning that transformed the lives of
thousands of disenfranchised Brazilians, disaffected urbanites, and other
followers all over the world.
Accounts of the transformative nature of Daime permeate the myth.
Embedded with layered incarnations and reincarnations, Santo Daime
Doctrine echoes Andean and Amazonian myths of the shape-shifting
powers of nature spirits, ancestors, yachajs, and the divine. In one of
Mestre Irineu’s mirações or visions, the Mestre looked up at the seven
stars of the Pleiades and saw the stellar manifestation of Christ who then
re-emerged in the form of the botanical Christ Child of Santo Daime.6
The Gospel according to Santo Daime offers this kind of radical vision
of the incarnating fluidity of the divine: Christ as human, Christ as star,
or Christ as plant. This, in turn, echoes Andean and Amazonian under-
standings of the transforming, evolutionary, shape-shifting nature of
sacred life reflected in regional myths and creation stories, where we see
many creations always in motion.
Additionally, according to Daime legend, Christ incarnates into the
vine at the moment of crucifixion when Christ retreats into the forest and
hibernates in the sacred plants during the Conquest (Goldman 1999:
xxiv). This story of the Hibernating Christ echoes aspects of the Andean
Nuestro Señor solar cycle where, in God’s old age—in the moment before
the crucifixion—the world grows chaotic, corrupt, and disorderly.
According to this solar Christology, the crucifixion is ‘the sacrificial
death of the old sun that empowers resurrection or solar rebirth as the
Christ child. But Christ is also the new sun who rises from the old sun’s
death to impose order on the primordium from outside’ (Swanson 1986:
122). The Daime legend calls to mind the Kofán account of the elderly
God burying a hair from the crown of his head in the forest. The hair—
this small piece of the buried body of God—transforms into the yagé vine
whose miraculous power is then discovered by the Kofán (Taussig 1987:
467). In taking yagé, God consumes the brew made from his own buried
6. Conversation with Enio Staub, June 2004.

body and learns that through suffering one gains discernment. In an

additional account evoking the Last Supper, it is Christ who offers yagé
to the Kofán, saying, ‘My children he who has no fear [in drinking this]
will learn as I have, and he who has fear will not learn’ (Robinson 1979:
262).
In Daime Doctrine, the male divine spirit, God the Father, infuses the
jagube vine, while the female divine spirit, the Virgin of the Conception,
infuses the Rainha chacruna leaves. Santo Daime is the child of this union,
the reincarnation of Christ as plant. Enio Staub reflected on this union,
drawing comparisons to Jesus’ miracle at the wedding in Cana. ‘As the
marriage of one plant with another,’ Staub related,
…we can make the comparison with the Christian tradition. We can see
that within the Bible, within scripture, that the first so-called miracle of
Jesus, the citizen Jesus, was at a wedding when he transformed water into
wine. And so, in a similar fashion, we can also see in the marriage of jagube
with the leaf, where we add water, this also transforms into wine. The
wine of the souls, Santo Daime (Madera 2004).
Here ayahuasca, the vine of the souls, transforms into Santo Daime, the
wine of the souls. In the invocation to the miracle at Cana, the layered
meanings invested in Santo Daime summon not only an Amazonian
inherited past but a Christian mythic history as well. The story of Jesus
at the wedding in Cana activates the metaphor of marriage while
conjuring the miracle of water turning to wine. When adherents drink
the tea, they partake in the marriage of two plants—botanical incarna-
tions of God the Father and the Virgin of the Conception. United in
water, these divine botanical parents give birth to Santo Daime, the
Christ Child incarnated in the wine of the souls.
The sacrament of Santo Daime parallels the Catholic theology of
transubstantiation where, as a result of the priest’s blessing, the wine
and the wafer miraculously transform into the redemptive blood and
body of Christ consumed by Christians in Mass. Like the Catholic Eucha-
rist, in this radical botanical theology of transubstantiation, when
adherents drink the wine of the souls they partake of the living Christ
Child, becoming infused by his being which then unveils the true nature
of the spiritual and physical world.
Or as Padrinho Sebastião’s hymn conveys:
I live in the Forest
I have my teachings
I don’t call myself Daime
I am a Divine Being
I am a Divine Being
I came here to teach you

The more you ask of me

The more I have to give to you (Polari De Alverga 1999: xxxi).
Like the Eucharist, when Daimistas partake of this ‘wine of the soul’,
followers abide in Christ/Daime and Daime/Christ abides in them.
Daimistas consider the brew as a ‘spiritual short cut’ to God as the
visions radically reveal an alternate reality, stripping the veil from the
material world so that the spiritual realities become present. ‘Daime has
that delicacy’, says Staub. ‘It is that Child that goes right there into your
heart, with love and at the same time with great discipline, the discipline
of a father or a mother who gives special attention to the child and
knows what needs to be corrected’ (Madera 2004). As Daime fills the
person, it takes him or her on a journey, leading them through a spiritual
path, a ‘way’ that reveals the true nature of life.
In the founding moments of the tradition, Mestre Irineu as well as
many of his original followers were illiterate, nor does the Bible play a
significant role in contemporary Daime ritual or worship. Nevertheless,
aspects of Daime doctrine resonate strongly with the Scriptures inform-
ing the Christian Eucharist. In particular, the doctrine offers a provoca-
tive literal re-interpretation of Jesus’ farewell discourse to his disciples at
Passover. As recorded in the Gospel of John, chs. 13–17, on the eve of
Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, Jesus told his disciples:
Let not your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me. In My
Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have
told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a
place for you, I will come again, and receive you to Myself; that where I am
there you may be also (John 14.1-3).
Among Christians, this promise of Jesus’ return is known as Christ’s

Second Coming, and, for a significant number of followers, Santo Daime
is the Second Coming of Christ where Christ’s spirit is made material,
incarnate in the brew.
A few verses later in the biblical text, Jesus says, ‘I am the way the
truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me’ (John
14.6). And then, ‘I am the true vine… I am the vine, you are the branches;
he who abides in Me, and I in him, he bears much fruit; for apart from
Me you can do nothing’ (John 15.1, 4). Within the context of Santo Daime
Doctrine, in his Second Coming to earth, Jesus had literally fulfilled his
prophecy. He returned to the Amazon as ‘the way, the truth and the life’,
reincarnating as ‘the true vine’ within the tea.
Peregrino, which means ‘Pilgrim’ in Portuguese, is a middle-aged
leader in the Vargem Grande community. Peregrino relates the story of
his encounter with Santo Daime and the spiritual path that led him to

the community in Florianopolis. For Peregrino, like many followers of

Daime, an urban existential crisis compelled him toward a radical trans-
formation of his personal identity and lifestyle. Peregrino’s story has the
cadence of a Christian conversion narrative and echoes the Gospel
stories of the Galilean disciples who abandoned their nets to follow
Jesus. ‘For me Daime was like this’, Peregrino told me,
…In São Paolo I managed for a while part of [a famous hotel.] It had a
nightclub… You go to my mother’s house and you will see a picture of me
with my arms around Pelé. At my nightclub Chico Buarque, Pelé…that
whole gang would hang out there. Just so that you have an idea, Pelé
celebrated his fiftieth birthday at my nightclub covered by Veja magazine.
I watched all this. I participated in all the parties. I had everything a
person could ever want, you know? But then I thought, is this all that life
offers us? And I came to the conclusion that it was so little. Sure there was
good food, I could go out with whomever I wanted, but still it seemed like
so little. I thought, I want much more than this.
And so I sold everything and went away to Chapada dos Guimarães. I
went way in there. It’s the door to the Amazon, the opening to the
Amazon. I went there to Chapada dos Guimarães and I stayed there for
two years. I lived on the bank of a river. Me, who had everything in São
Paulo, moved to the bank of a river in a hut, no water, no plumbing, no
electricity, no lights, in a completely primitive state. And I stayed those
two years there (Madera 2004).
From the outset of Peregrino’s story, the invocation ‘Daime!’ or ‘Give

Me!’ compels his spiritual search. Peregrino had everything from urban
life that he could ever have wanted, but still ‘it seemed like so little’, and
he wanted so ‘much more’. The transformation, the shift in the shape of
Peregrino’s identity, begins when he sheds his São Paulo skin and leaves
everything behind. He turns his back on the civilized and sets his sites
on the primitive. He goes North, to that magical imaginary, to the ‘door
to the Amazon’, and lives in a completely rustic fashion—in a hut, on the
bank of a river, no plumbing, no electricity, no lights. He lives like this
for two years, and then he is called back to the city for business. His
timing is perfect, divinely guided, perhaps:
…One week after I returned, a friend of mine, a university professor, a
physicist, a mathematician, a statistician, he says to me, ‘Peregrino, I found
what I have been looking for for so long. I found a spiritual path in Santo
Daime’. And I said, ‘Are you crazy? Are you nuts? Santo Daime! I saw a
Global Reporter on T.V… People who take that…that’s heavy drugs!
People who take that fall on the floor. They start vomiting. I can’t believe
this, Sergio!’
Now Sergio is a person, how should I say it, culturally speaking he’s the
most intelligent person I know. You know? I said to him, ‘I can’t believe
that you got involved in a mess like that’. He said, ‘No. You need to go

there’. ‘No, I don’t need to go there. You crazy? I’m getting out of here and
going down to Florianopolis’. ‘No, you need to go there because when I
talked to the Master, he said your name, “Peregrino”, he said, ‘That’s the
person. This is the man.’ ‘No way! You’re making this whole thing up!
You’re trying to trick me by getting to my vanity! I’m not going, no way’.
…And then my crazy vanity got to me. I wanted to know why this guy
said I was the one? Why did he say I was the guy? He probably tells the
whole world that! I’m going to go find out. And that’s how I came to know
Daime… I came to know Daime in the city of Ondonopolis in Matto
Grosso (Madera 2004).
Back in the city, through a message carried by the most respected and
rational of friends, Daime calls Peregrino. Peregrino’s initial resistance to
the idea of involving himself in ‘heavy drugs’, in ‘a mess like that’ erodes
in the face of irresistible curiosity and ‘crazy vanity’. ‘Why did [the
mestre] say I was the guy?’ Peregrino closes his story with the narrative
rhythms of respect. With detailed specificity he marks where and when.
He sets his personal flag, marking the moment of his profound transfor-
mation, onto the Brazilian map. ‘And that’s how I came to know Daime…
I came to know Daime in the city of Ondonopolis in Matto Grosso’.
Staub describes the way Daime takes root in people’s lives. Like
Peregrino, he evokes the metaphor of a Door. His words convey the
image made famous throughout popular Christian culture of Jesus
knocking on the wooden door of the soul.
Daime has great meaning for those that know Daime, those that take
Daime, those that partake of the sacrament of Daime. For those that take it,
they receive a knock on the door of their hearts. Their hearts are touched
by understanding and it awakens that consciousness. I believe that it is a
cosmic consciousness, but also an individual consciousness, an individual
consciousness you know, because it brings self-knowledge (Madera 2004).
Within the tradition, the sacrament of Santo Daime is consumed ritu-

ally by the entire group of ‘fardados’ (literally, ‘those who are uniformed’,
referring to the uniform clothing initiated men and women must wear at
all ceremonies), in two alternate settings: a ritual of concentration where
members drink the Daime tea and then sit for two hours and meditate
together; and a dance ritual where members sing hymns while dancing
throughout the night. The dance organizes male and female energies by
separating the men and woman and organizing them according to their
social status as virgins, married, or single. ‘The Dance takes the form of a
mandala’, Staub described,
…with men and women separated, separating their energies and as it
forms a dance in that way moving from one direction to the other, continu-
ing with three types of dances, the march, the mazurka, and the waltz, and
so in a certain way this creates a dynamo of force, right? In this movement

that is also like, how can we describe it, like the movement of the waters,
the river, the sea, that kisses the beach and then returns…and that’s how
we are within the hall dancing like that. And through this we go detaching
our spirits from our intellects, from the material world, through the
discipline of the dance, of the energy, and from there in that moment, then,
as everyone becomes attuned to each other within the ceremony of the
dance, each one begins—according to their individual ability and under-
standing—each one begins to detach from the physical plane, while
remaining within the little square dancing the entire time (Madera 2004).
By separating and organizing these material energies into the moving

mandala, the dance creates ‘a dynamo of force’ that mirrors the move-
ment of water currents in nature. Through the strict discipline of the
dance, members begin to disconnect from the material plane and begin
traveling into a realm where the fluidity between the material and spiri-
tual world becomes apparent. Just as Christ healed the blind man’s eyes
with mud, so, too, through the botanical miracle of Santo Daime, the veil
that blinds the person in waking life falls away and the active, invisible
world of spirit appears before his or her eyes. The spirits of the earth, air,
water, plants, and animals, the spirits of the planets and the stars, crea-
tures from other galaxies, the spirits of the living and the dead all
emerge during the mirações (visions).
Peregrino describes the transformative power of one of these mirações
where he encounters and enters into that dynamo force of nature:
…I drank Daime one night and I came down to wash my hands in the
stream there and all of a sudden a whirlwind came up, a spiraling energy
of the forest came up right here and stopped right in front of me like that
and said, ‘Now we are going to show you the force of Nature, the power of
the Forest’. And I became frightened and then that whirlwind came and
surrounded me. It was like entering into a centrifugal force. It tore me up
into a million pieces and then I firmly focused my thoughts on Jesus
Christ, who is a great master. I focused my thoughts while that wind
absolutely destroyed me. Until I relaxed and said, ‘Alright, there’s no way
to go back’. And then I came back and that energy left and said, ‘Now you
know what is the energy of the forest’. And it went away, just like that. It
was fantastic! What I want to say is, things like that happen with Daime
because we go through trials, you know? Daime tests you. It puts you
through trials… I can only give thanks because all of a sudden in this
incarnation I found a spiritual path that demands a lot but it also gives you
so much, you know? (Madera 2004)
As Padrinho Alex Polari de Alverga, a leader of the Céu de Mapiá

community, writes, the miração is ‘an inner perception combining insight
and ecstasy that can be induced by the ritualized use of these divine
plants in a religious context’. He continues:

The miração contains the model for a new state of being brought forth from
an internal reality, revealing an ancient wisdom and foretelling a spiritual
consciousness, our whole being beholds a mystery and shares a secret:
Christ is risen among us in a new form! He left the sumptuous cathedrals
and now He pulses in the heart of the Amazon forest. The Green Hell of
the conquistadores has become a Green Paradise for those willing to enact
the conquest of themselves. The forest is the Garden of Eden, wherein may
be found both the Tree of Life and the forbidden fruit (Polari de Alverga
1999: 2).
Like the Gospel according to Ayahuasca, the Gospel according to

Santo Daime regards ayahuasca as an empowering source of enlighten-
ment. It affirms the divine potential of life within nature. It envisions the
plant and animal world engaged within Christian realities and acting as
sentient players in the spiritual life of the world. It regards the Amazon
forest as Scripture’s true spiritual setting. It counters the brutal moments
of South American religious and economic history by separating a
shape-shifting Christ out from the repressive activities of the Church and
proposing, instead, a theology of Christ’s hibernation and botanical
incarnation into sacred power plants. Additionally, Santo Daime relo-
cates the Garden of Eden from Mesopotamia to South America where
Daime/Christ is both the forbidden Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of
Life in the Amazonian paradise. In effect, this replacement of the bread
and wine Eucharist with ayahuasca
…brings an eco-spiritual force into communion with Christian saints and
their prescriptions of love, peace, charity, and fraternity. By unifying the
naturalized and the civilized, it appears to work as a bridge over the 500
years of culture clashes wrought by the colonialist enterprise. In this way it
births new cultural forms of indigeneity, ways of belonging to the land that
reflect the needs of the various peoples brought to it (Morgan n.d.).
If tribal religions are, as Deloria writes, ‘complexes of attitudes, beliefs,

and practices fine-tuned to harmonize with the lands on which the
people live’ (Deloria 1994: 70), then Santo Daime communities like the
Associação Comunitaria Espiritualista Patriarca São José may indeed
have taken a ‘shattered Christianity’ and given birth to a ‘new cultural
[form] of indigeneity’. Santo Daime mediates this new indigeneity by
requiring a person
…to be present within the material world within nature…planting the
jagube vine, planting the rainha leaf, planting wood for the fire, cultivating
the springs, caring for them, making sure that the water never runs dry in
order to ensure that nothing is missing that is required for making the
Medicine.
At the same time, it requires the person to detach

…into profound spiritual spheres, as the hymns say. Where the person
travels alot within his own being and within the universe, returning, at
times from the ceremony, after the ceremony finishes, fulfilled, content,
with all kinds of revelations that frequently transform the person’s entire
life, things that they already knew, or had forgotten about, or things that
they had never known, never thought they’d known, though effectively
this was inside of that person (Madera 2004).
It is this principle that impels Daime followers to attempt to create an

ecologically sustainable community living in harmony with nature as
they do on Santa Catarina Island. The Associação Comunitaria Espiritu-
alista Patriarca São José actively reforests the land with native species,
offering ecological workshops, building ecologically sound houses, and
creating guidelines that limit negative human impact on the environ-
ment. Because dogs and cats hunt and destroy nesting sites of native
species, members are not allowed to have these domestic animals. Addi-
tionally, members are asked to turn off lights outside their houses at
night in order to allow for maximum visibility of the stars.
As a result of the reforestation, the community has seen a significant
rise in the population of threatened species, like the island’s toucans.
This sanctuary has also become a winter roosting site for migrating birds
such as the swallow-tailed kite. Significantly, the community has suc-
cessfully transplanted both the jagube vine and the chacruna bush onto
the communal lands, insuring communal access to Santo Daime.
Like the story of Christ’s Passion in the Aguarico, Santo Daime’s
radical botanical visions offer a re-phrasing of the relationship between
the Gospel story and human history. In so doing, the Gospels according
to Ayahuasca and Santo Daime both provide the possibility not only of
physical and spiritual healing to individuals, but also through the
weaving and rephrasing of important cultural myths, they cast narrative
bridges of healing across continental and communal memory, and thus
serve as defenders of the decimated and threatened land.
As Staub says, Daime ‘brings with it the understanding that each one
of us is a very important particle of the universe, right? Because from
each of our lives, through the development of each of our lives, we are
reaffirming all of that divine potential of the sun, the moon, and the
stars, of all of nature, the very existence of life within all things, you
know?’ (Madera 2004)
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_____________________________________________
The Celestial Umbilical Cord: Wild Palm Trees,
Adult Male Bodies, and Sacred Wind Instruments
among the Wakuénai of Venezuela
_____________________________________________
Jonathan D. Hill
Southern Illinois University,
Department of Anthropology, Mail Code 4502
Carbondale, IL 62901, USA
jhill@siu.edu
Abstract
This article focuses on the multiple uses and meanings of wild palm
species as sources of musical wind instruments and edible fruits in sacred
ceremonies and rituals of the Wakuénai (or Curripaco) living in the
Venezuelan Amazon. In myth, the emergence of a macanilla (púpa) tree
from the ashes of the primordial human being (Kuwái) became the source
of sacred flutes and trumpets, and the sounds made by these wind instru-
ments opened up the world for a second time. In ritual and ceremonial
performances, the different instruments have animal namesakes and are
also said to be different parts of the body of Kuwái. This article explores
these intimate relations among wild palm species, adult male bodies,
sacred wind instruments, and the primordial human being of myth. The
article also draws on verbal and nonverbal imagery performed in sacred
singing and chanting (malikái) in which wild palm species are associated
with the celestial umbilical cord that nourishes humanity with the life-
giving and world-creating powers of Kuwái and other powerful mythic
beings.
Introduction
This essay provides an in-depth exploration of the multiple uses of wild
palm species as sources of musical wind instruments and edible fruits in
sacred ceremonies and rituals of the Wakuénai (or Curripaco) living in
the Venezuelan Amazon. A brief overview of indigenous mythic narra-
tives about an omniscient trickster-creator, named ‘Made-from-Bone’
(Iñápirríkuli), and the primordial human being (Kuwái) will provide a
general understanding of the mythic significance of púpa (macanilla;

Socretea eschorrhiza spp.; Spanish: macanilla) as a source of powerful
musical wind instruments that provide groups of men with the means
for connecting the celestial world of mythic ancestors to the terrestrial
world of human beings, both living and dead. From this starting point,
the essay will focus in greater depth on the specific meanings and uses of
púpa in ritual performances of chanted and sung speech (malikái) and in
collective male activities of dancing, playing music, and exchange during
ceremonies known as kwépani (‘Kuwái-dance’) and in male and female
initiation rituals.
Wakuénai mythic narratives and ritual performances establish a
complex web of symbolic interrelations among wild palm trees, adult
men, sacred wind instruments, and various species of forest animals and
birds. In myth, the emergence of a macanilla (púpa) tree from the ashes of
Kuwái became the source of sacred flutes and trumpets, and the sounds
made by these wind instruments opened up the world for a second time.
In ritual and ceremonial performances, the different flutes and trumpets
have animal namesakes and are also said to be different parts of the
body of Kuwái.
The fruits of wild palms are an important food source for forest animal
and bird species, and the local availability of game animals is closely tied
to the seasonal flowering and fruiting of wild palm species. When the
palm trees fail to bear fruit in the usual season, a shaman must travel to
máliwéku, the house of forest animal (éenunai) and bird (képinai) spirits in
the world of dead souls, musically open the door with his songs
(málirríkairi), and entice the animals outside with offerings of guacu, yúri,
and other species of wild palm fruits. The ecological, trophic relationship
between forest animal and bird species, on the one hand, and the fruits
of wild palm species, on the other, is closely observed by Wakuénai
hunters and becomes an object of symbolic elaboration in kwépani
ceremonies, where men determine which species of animal and bird
instruments to make by the species of wild palm fruits harvested for
ceremonial exchange.
In addition to these multiple symbolic and practical linkages, a more
direct relation between adult men and wild palm species is established
by the men’s wearing of crowns of palm leaves and hanging of bunches
of edible palm fruits down their backs as they play the sacred flutes and
trumpets. However, in spite of the overwhelmingly masculine orienta-
tion of these mythic and ritual connections among wild palms, men’s
bodies, animal species, and the primordial human being of myth, the
overriding image that subsumes all of them is not masculine at all but
supremely feminine: the association of púpa and other wild palms with

Hill The Celestial Umbilical Cord 101
the cosmic umbilical cord that nourishes humanity with the life-giving
and world-creating powers of Kuwái and other powerful mythic beings.
Retheorizing Plants, Materiality,

and Musical Instruments in Amazonia
This empirically rich study of sacred meanings of wild palm species
among the Wakuénai of Venezuela will bring together and advance two
ongoing comparative theoretical projects in current Amazonianist
ethnology. The first of these theoretical developments is the renewed
attempt to identify ‘the basic tenets of what can be considered a native
Amazonian theory of materiality and personhood’ (Santos-Granero
forthcoming: 4) by exploring how objects—both human-made artifacts
and natural things or phenomena—‘are often attributed the role of
primordial building blocks in Amerindian constructional cosmologies
and composite anatomies’ (Santos-Granero forthcoming: 3). A second
theoretical project aims to develop comparative understandings of a
specific class of material objects that are widespread among indigenous
communities of Lowland South America and that are considered to have
exceptional power and meaning: flutes, trumpets, and other wind
instruments. Through comparing a number of intensive studies of ritual
wind instruments and their music from Lowland South America,
researchers are exploring the complex ways in which flutes and other
ritual wind instruments are used to introduce natural sounds into human
social contexts and to cross the boundary between verbal and non-verbal
communication. They are also concerned with documenting and analyz-
ing how these musical instruments and their music enter into local
definitions and negotiations of relations between men and women, kin
and affine, and insiders and outsiders (Hill and Chaumeil forthcoming).
The current rethinking of materiality in Amazonianist studies is
underpinned by the widespread idea that there was no distinction
between humans and objects in primordial mythic times and that objects
in the contemporary world are often capable of crossing the line between
subjectivities and objectivities.1 The recent surge of interest in perspectiv-
ism (Viveiros de Castro 1998) and shapeshifting (transformations of
humans into animals and vice versa) has foregrounded the importance
of relations among humans, animals, and spirits at the expense of human
relations with plants, artefacts, and natural phenomena. The latter are
1. Santos-Granero (forthcoming) cites Levi-Strauss’s study (1969) of the myth of

‘the revolt of objects’ against their owners in support of his general thesis that the
meaning of objects and materiality deserves greater attention from ethnologists.

supposedly regarded by indigenous Amazonians as ‘secondary or

derivative in comparison with the spiritualization of animals’ (Viveiros
de Castro 1998: 472). Perhaps it is worth asking if this anthropocentric
privileging of animate life forms is not also a Eurocentric projection of a
specifically Western worldview (i.e. ‘the animal kingdom’ versus ‘plants
and material objects’) rather than an accurate reading of Amazonian
ways of conceiving relations between humans and the material world. In
western Amazonia, for example, the Jivaro-speaking Aguaruna consider
tobacco and other vision-producing plants to have souls that are most
closely related to humans (Brown 1985). More generally, why should
human relations with plants, artifacts, and things be regarded as
‘secondary or derivative’?
Introducing the essays in The Occult Life of Things (forthcoming),
Fernando Santos-Granero argues that ‘objects are not derivative’ and
asks us to consider the questions of what things are most likely to
become subjectivized, or animated, how so, and why. In an essay entitled
‘Materializing the Occult: An Approach to Understanding the Nature of
Materiality in Wakuénai Ontology’ (Hill forthcoming), I searched for
answers to these questions by exploring the polytypic sets of nouns
placed together into grammatical categories, or numeral classifiers, that
are used in everyday verbal expressions of quantity. Analysis of these
grammatical features demonstrated how language and speech partake
simultaneously in two complementary and mutually interdependent
ways of producing meaning. On one level, numeral classification is an
explicitly taxonomic process of putting kinds of persons, animals, and
things into their proper places. As a taxonomic process, nominal classifi-
ers serve as a parsimonious way of condensing and organizing a myriad
world of sensuous objects into a finite number of semantic sets. Through
arranging the ‘mesocosm’, or the world-as-experienced on the scale of
human sense perception (Delbrück 1986), into shared categories of
meaning based on common interactive properties (e.g. edibility and
utility), numeral classifiers provide a set of cognitive ‘handles’ on reality.
At the same time, these explicit taxonomic processes are also the basis
for linguistically marking species and objects that are especially power-
ful. At this level, numeral classifiers are a way of creatively reformulat-
ing the representation of objects through experientially based categories
into implicit sub-sets of more dynamic, powerful species and objects.
Analysis of these grammatical markings requires knowledge of mythic
narratives that explain how the world came into being and how these
transformative processes are episodically reenacted in shamanic singing,
chanting, blowing tobacco smoke, and other ritual activities. Both the
taxonomic and shamanic dimensions of numeral classification provide

insight into how the experiential world of objects and species is sub-
jectivized, or animated.
By arranging the mesocosm into more and less powerful or dangerous
kinds of things, Wakuénai numeral classifiers exemplify a culturally
specific mapping of the distribution of cognition in the material surround
of the body, or an ‘extended, situated embodiment’. Numeral classifiers
and their analysis according to underlying taxonomic and shamanic
(transformative) principles provide insight into an indigenous Amazo-
nian way of answering the questions of what material things become
subjectivized, how so, and why. Things most likely to become subjectiv-
ized are those that come into bodily contact through eating, using, and
touching; things that come in pairs or that are otherwise involved in
quantitative expressions; and things that are believed to have excep-
tional power to cause harm in ritual and myth.
If grammatical categories and lexicality provide a way of understand-
ing intersubjectivity, or how and why some kinds of things are subjectiv-
ized, how can we approach the complementary process of how human
subjectivities become ‘thing-like’ or materialized? Such interobjectivity is
not centered on language and lexicality per se but on ritual and ceremo-
nial activities of sound production, such as singing, chanting, speaking,
exhaling (tobacco smoke), playing musical instruments, drumming,
rattling, and making objects. Materializing the occult is a process of
awakening the senses through auditory stimulation that then becomes
visible through bodily activities, such as dancing or blowing tobacco
smoke, which in turn double or reinforce the primarily auditory creation
of political, ritual, historical, generational, developmental, and gender-
inflected social spaces. These processes of materialization are dramatized
in shamanic curing rituals, or contexts in which shamanic singing,
rattling, and blowing tobacco smoke give audible, visible, tangible, and
olfactory substance to the fear and anger of sorcery victims whose body-
souls have been taken away and to the shaman’s efforts to restore their
patients’ health by bringing their spirits back to the world of the living.
Shamanic singing is not a performance about moving or traveling around
the cosmos; rather it is a set of journeys away to death and back to life, a
harnessing of the collective physical energies of the living that trans-
forms subjectivities into materialities, a materializing of the occult. For
the Wakuénai, materiality is as much about transforming subjective
relations of thought and emotion into materials, or at least ‘thing-like’
entities, as it is about bestowing animateness or ‘subject-like’ properties
on material things and beings.
The privileging of sound and hearing over sight and vision is a basic
principle of Wakuénai mythic narratives, cosmology, and ritual practices.

More generally, sound production and auditory perception are regarded

as the main sense modes for mediating between humans, animals, and
spirits throughout Lowland South America (Basso 1985; Beaudet 1997;
Chaumeil 1993; Gebhart-Sayer 1985; Hill 1993; Hill and Chaumeil
forthcoming; Menezes Bastos 1995; Seeger 1987). Among the Wakuénai,
the sound of shamanic blowing of tobacco smoke as a voiced, aspirated
rush of air (‘h-h-m-m-p-f’) from inside to outside ritual healers’ bodies is
the prototypic act of materialization. As the shamanic breath-sound
becomes visible in a cloud of tobacco smoke, it gives material substance
to the shaman’s power to link together a world of invisible spirits—
spirits of the dead, forest spirits, and other disease-causing spirits—with
a visible world of ritual objects: foods, tools, weapons, musical instru-
ments, patients’ (and their families’) bodies, and even visiting anthro-
pologists and their cameras and tape recorders. The central importance
of blowing tobacco smoke in shamanic rituals is underscored by the facts
that chant-owners (málikai limínali) are referred to as ‘blowers’ (sopladores)
in local Spanish and describe their singing and chanting as ‘blowing
tobacco smoke’ (ínyapakáati dzéema).
Although this indigenous theory of ritual power as a process of mate-
rialization is specific to the Wakuénai of the Upper Rio Negro region in
Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil, it is but one of many variant forms of
shamanic practices in Amazonia that make use of audible breathing, or
exhaling, as a primordial sound of life that both animates and material-
izes the world of objects, species, and people and that can be amplified,
collectivized, and otherwise harnessed by making and playing musical
wind instruments (or aerophones) from hollowed-out bones, ceramics,
and plants. In Burst of Breath: New Research on Indigenous Ritual Flutes in
Lowland South America, Jean-Pierre Chaumeil and I (Hill and Chaumeil
forthcoming) have organized case studies by a group of Amazonianist
scholars in order to explore the variety of ways in which ritual flutes,
trumpets, and clarinets are linked to the ritual power of shamanic breath
and how these wind instruments act as ‘energy transformers’ (Rivière
1969) that embody the power to convert affines into kin, spirits of the
dead into living persons, animal sounds into human speech, and so on.
Musical wind instruments are examples of the category of tube-shaped
objects in Lowland South America, which are in turn linked to the preva-
lence of male and female genitalia—penises, breasts, wombs, birth canals,
and umbilical cords—as symbols that ensure the flow of life through
allowing passage of food, water, air, sound, semen, blood, children, and
other vital substances. ‘Like rivers, anacondas, palm trunks, and flutes,
the human body and its various parts—vocal apparatus, gut, bones, and
genitals—are all tubes’ (Hugh-Jones 2000: 252). Ritual wind instruments

belong to this family of tubular structures that transform energy, sustain

life, and convert potentially dangerous ‘others’ (e.g. affines) into fully
socialized members of local kin-based communities. Ritual wind instru-
ments are thus symbols of the ability to build connections, or enduring
social ties, between the living and the dead, mythic ancestors and human
descendants, humans and animals, men and women, kin and affine,
indigenous peoples and nation-states, and so on. These sacred flutes,
trumpets, and clarinets are the skeletal inner structure of the social body
that binds together men, women, animals, spirits, and others into coher-
ent universes of meaning and discourse.
The Wakuénai of Venezuela

The Wakuénai, who include the Curripaco of Venezuela (Hill 1993, 2009)
and Colombia (Journet 1981, 1986, 1993, 1995, 2000) as well as the Baniwa
of Brazil (Wright 1981, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1998), form one of the largest
and most geographically widespread communities remaining in the
Northern, or Maipuran, branch of the Arawakan language family. The
overall population of Wakuénai living in Venezuela in 2001 was 4,925.
The Wakuénai of Venezuela are located primarily in villages along the
Guainía-Negro River from Victorino in the north to Cocuí in the south. A
smaller number of Wakuénai villages are found along the lower
Casiquiare River; the Rio Atabapo and its tributaries, the Temi and
Atacavi rivers; and neighborhoods and villages in and around Puerto
Ayacucho. Archeological, linguistic, historical, and ethnographic evi-
dence indicates that the Isana-Guainía drainage area of Venezuela,
Colombia, and Brazil formed the core region of ancestral Wakuénai
territories. Indigenous mythic narratives describe the creation of proto-
humanity as a process in which a powerful trickster-creator, named
Iñápirríkuli (‘Made-from-Bone’), raised the mythic ancestors of
Wakuénai phratries and patrisibs from a hole in the middle of the rapids
at Hípana on the Aiarí River in Brazil. In this myth, the trickster-creator
brought these ancestors to life by blowing tobacco smoke and giving
each of them powerful spirit-names. A cycle of mythic narratives about
the birth, life, and ‘death’ (or fiery transformation) of the primordial
human being (Kuwái) explains that the contemporary world of fully
human social groups and history opened up in a series of movements
away from and back to the mythic center, or place of emergence, at
Hípana.
At the time of my fieldwork in the early 1980s, the use of sacred flutes
and trumpets was in serious decline, reflecting the sustained campaign
of extirpation of native religious practices that the New Tribes Mission

and their indigenous converts had waged during the 1950s through the
1970s. Given this situation, I focused more attention on documenting
and learning how to make and play ceremonial musical instruments
made largely from máwi (Astrostudium schomburgkii) rather than the
highly secretive and restricted sacred instruments made from púpa and
other sacred plant species.
Figure 1. Bundles of máwi palm trunks before being hollowed out to make flutes,
trumpets, blowguns, and fish traps (photo by Jonathan Hill, 1981)
The ceremonial instruments made from máwi are of great cultural

significance for the Wakuénai, since they mark the transition from a
primordial mythic time of unceasing violence between the trickster-
creator and his adversaries to a more recent period in which communi-
ties of people come together to peacefully exchange gifts of food and

other products. I was also able to study sacred singing and chanting (Hill
1993) and associated mythic narratives (Hill 2009) that provided much of
the basis for my understanding of the meanings of sacred flutes and
trumpets played in kwépani ceremonies and puberty initiation rituals. In
the course of documenting these verbal genres of ritual power, I also
elicited detailed descriptions of the ritual and ceremonial activities sur-
rounding the use of sacred flutes and trumpets. Finally, through col-
laboration with an indigenous research assistant, I obtained a complete
audio recording of the musical and verbal performances making up a
male initiation ritual held in March 1985. By listening to these tapes and
transcribing much of their contents in June through August of 1985, I
was able to gain a relatively fine-grained ethnographic account of the
music of sacred flutes and trumpets.2
Mythic Origins of Sacred Flutes and Trumpets
In the final period of mythic history, or ‘The World Opens Up’, the
trickster-creator continues to display the same powers of omniscience
and invincibility that he had wielded since his creation in primordial
times. However, in ‘The World Opens Up’, the trickster-creator’s powers
of creativity are largely overshadowed by the powerful musical sounds
and naming processes embodied in the primordial human being, Kuwái,
who is the child of Made-from-Bone and a paternal aunt, named Ámaru
(‘First-Woman’). It is the musical voice, or word-sounds, of Kuwái as he
flies across the skies overhead that begin to open up the closed, minia-
ture world of the mythic primordium into the cultural and geographic
landscape that humans, fish, forest animals, birds, and plants inhabit
today.
2. All my cassette field recordings of Wakuénai verbal art and music have
recently been digitized and placed on the Web in the Archives of Indigenous Lan-
guages of Latin America (AILLA) at the University of Texas. The collection can be
accessed at http://www.ailla.utexas.org/ under the title 'Curripaco' (KPC001,
KPC002, and KPC003). KPC001 contains several hours of ceremonial flute and
trumpet music from pudáli, many hours of sacred shamanic (málirríkairi) singing and
priestly chanting (malikái), and other recordings made during my dissertation research
in 1980–81. KPC002 has female and male initiation rituals recorded by an indigenous
research assistant in 1985 and includes about ten hours of instrumental (flute and
trumpet) music. KPC003 contains all the mythic narratives I recorded in the 1980s and
‘90s, which are the subject of my book, Made-from-Bone: Trickster Myths, Music, and
History from the Amazon (2009).

Kuwái began to speak the word-sounds that could be heard in the entire
world. The world was still very small. He began to speak, ‘Heee’. The
sound of his voice ran away and opened up the world.3
Through a series of episodes, ‘Made-from-Bone’ and his brothers use

various forms of deceit and trickery to cajole Kuwái into coming down
to the ground and teaching them the sacred singing and chanting
(malikái) for puberty initiation rituals and other rites of passage. After the
brother of ‘Made-from-Bone’ has memorized all these ritually powerful
ways of singing and chanting, they push Kuwái into a bonfire, and the
world shrinks back to its original miniature size.
The world closed back up again after Kuwái died. It was tiny again.
‘Okay’, they spent the night and were very sad. ‘Now we are not well. We
don’t know what to do now. We have killed the only one who knows what
to do. Why did we kill him’? said Made-from-Bone.
Made-from-Bone ate coca to divine what to do. He foresaw that things
were going to turn out well. ‘I know that he will leave some other thing for
us in the place where he died’, said Made-from-Bone.
After three days, Made-from-Bone went to look at the place where they
had burned him. He saw a tall púpa tree there, kadápu vines, and
dzámakuápi vines. Then he saw that water was flowing out of the place. It
made a sound, and Made-from-Bone listened: ‘Tso-wai, tso-wai, tso-wai’.
He returned to his house. In the early morning he went to look again and
saw an enormous tree that reached above the sky. He saw large, beautiful
kadápu vines and large, beautiful dzámakuápi vines. It was beautiful how
the púpa tree rose up.
Then Made-from-Bone summoned a squirrel. ‘Do you know how to do
this’? he asked. ‘Yes’, said squirrel, ‘I do know how to do it. I’m a
carpenter’. ‘Okay’, said Made-from-Bone, ‘you go to work on this tree’.
‘Good’, said squirrel. Made-from-Bone left for his house. The squirrel was
already working, cutting through the tree trunk but leaving a little piece
uncut. The squirrel measured different lengths—waliáduwa, white heron
flutes, molítu frog flutes, paca trumpets, wild chicken flutes. He finished.
He left the tree this way to kill Made-from-Bone, the revenge of Kuwái.
‘I’ve finished what you asked me to do, Made-from-Bone’, squirrel said.
‘Go and push the tree so that it falls down’. ‘Okay’, said Made-from-Bone,
who went to have a look. He chewed coca to divine what to do. He had a
bad feeling. ‘This is not right’, he said, ‘he wants to kill me’. Made-from-
Bone got a long stick and struck it against the tree from a distance. ‘Aaa’,
said Made-from-Bone, ‘look at this. If I had pushed it with my hand, I’d be
dead underneath this pile of logs’.
3. Digital recordings of these narratives are available on the AILLA website in

the Curripaco collection (KPC003R301, ‘The Powerful Sound that Opened Up the
World’ and KPC003R302, ‘The Struggle between Made-from-Bone and First-Woman’).

‘Let’s go’, Made-from-Bone said after a few days had passed. ‘Squirrel,
let’s go work on those logs’. ‘Let’s go’, said squirrel, and they left. When
they arrived, squirrel explained to Made-from-Bone all the names. He left
the logs lying down group by group. He told Made-from-Bone the names
of each of the logs. ‘This one, waliáduwa, comes in three. That one, máaliawa,
comes in two’. He finished explaining how all the logs are used, and they
left them all lying down.
‘How do you make sound with them’? Made-from-Bone tried to blow
through them. ‘It’s not like that’, said squirrel, who took out a feather from
a large hawk. ‘With this you can make sound’, he said to Made-from-Bone.
Made-from-Bone blew air with the hawk feather, and it made a sound.
‘Heee’, and then the world opened up again, from here to there, this entire
world. The sound went up into the sky above. All the sounds of Kuwái
spoke—waliáduwa, máaliawa, all of them. Made-from-Bone heard how this
one sounds, how that one sounds, how the other ones sound. ‘Now’, said
Made-from-Bone, ‘These are going to belong to us men, and we will hide
them from the women. This is the son of First-Woman, but we must keep it
hidden from her’, he said. Then Made-from-Bone lived with the people
and began to hold dabucurí and kwépani ceremonies. First-Woman was
furious. ‘Made-from-Bone believes that I don’t know that this is my son’,
she said.
First-Woman organizes a group of other women, who succeed in steal-

ing the sacred wind instruments from Made-from-Bone and the men. As
the women play these sacred flutes and trumpets in various places, the
world opens up for a second time. Eventually, Made-from-Bone and his
brothers regain control of the sacred musical instruments from the
women.
These excerpts from the Kuwái myth cycle explain how púpa origi-
nated from the ashes of Kuwái after his fiery death and transformation.
The púpa tree and large hanging vines are a beautiful sight to behold,4
but the tall trunk is also a dangerous trap that a squirrel has fashioned in
yet another unsuccessful plot to kill Made-from-Bone. When the tree
collapses into a pile of logs of varying lengths and widths, Made-from-
Bone learns to make sounds by blowing air through them with a hawk
feather, and the world began to open up for a second time. Kuwái has
transformed from a proto-human being whose voice musically named-
into-being the species and objects of nature into a set of physical,
4. According to the website of the Palm and Cycad Society of Australia

(PACSOA), Socratea exorrhiza is ‘Probably the most famous of the stilt rooted palms,
with the roots coming from up to 2m (6 feet) from the ground. Even young plants
have no trunk going into the soil, only roots. The palms themselves can grow to 20m.
It has a small head of plumose, deep green leaves, up to 2m long, with a greenish blue
crownshaft (http://www.pacsoa.org.au/palms/Socratea/exorrhiza.html [accessed
September 2008]).

material objects—a tall palm tree and sacred wind instruments. This
mythic transformation of a human-like subject into material objects is the
mythic prototype of shamanic and other ritual processes of
materialization.5
The Kuwái myth cycle also relates how wild palm fruits came to be
regarded as the only foods appropriate for harvesting, exchange, and
consumption during initiation rituals. In the first part of the myth cycle
(i.e. before the fiery death of Kuwái), Kuwái is attracted back down to
earth by the buzzing, hissing sounds made by a group of boys who have
captured some wasps and put them inside a vase. The boys include three
nephews of Made-from-Bone as well as Éeri, Made-from-Bone’s younger
brother. As soon as they come into contact with Kuwái, the boys are
ordered to begin fasting and living in a special seclusion hut outside the
village.
‘Now we are going to collect palm fruits; seje finito, guacu. You must
harvest the seje fruits quickly’, he said. ‘Your wives will work quickly;
that’s why I am teaching you to work this way’.
They returned and arrived at their house with large quantities of seje and
guacu fruits. Kuwái carried all these fruits inside his stomach. When they
arrived at the house, Made-from-Bone called the women to come and
receive the seje and guacu fruits. They shared the fruits among all the
women.
Shortly after this episode, three of the boys break their fast by cooking
and eating the forbidden guacu fruits, and Kuwái devours the three boys
by transforming himself into a rock cave. In the end, only Made-from-
Bone’s brother, Éeri, succeeded in resisting the pain of hunger and went
on to become the first male initiate.
The importance of seje (Jessenia bataua) and other wild palm fruits
returns in the second part of the myth cycle during an episode in which
Made-from-Bone and the men have lost control of the sacred wind
instruments to First-Woman.
‘I don’t agree with First-Woman’, said Made-from-Bone. ‘It would be good
if she would harvest seje, manaca, seje finito, or yuku fruits. But what First-
Woman is doing now is not good. These women aren’t doing anything; we
men are,’ he said.
The ritual significance of seje (punáma), and especially the variety known
as seje finito (púperri), is thus clearly established in mythic narratives as
the most appropriate food for exchange and consumption in initiation
rituals and in sacred kwépani ceremonies. Other species of wild palm
5. I will elaborate on this point in the concluding section of this article.

fruits, such as manaca (manáake) and yuku (hínirri), are also considered
suitable, but seje and seje finito are always the first species to be men-
tioned and are the only one explicitly named in both the first and second
parts of the Kuwái myth cycle.6
Kwépani: The Dance of Kuwái

The playing of sacred flutes and trumpets made of púpa forms a central
core of activities in kwépani (‘Kuwái-dance’). These instruments are also
played during all male initiation rituals (wakapéetaka iénpitipé) and in
some female initiation rituals (wakáitaka iénpiti). The Wakuénai regard
these flutes and trumpets as sacred instruments that must never be pho-
tographed, filmed, or visually represented, and for this reason I will not
explicitly describe the instruments’ appearance or construction here or in
other publications. In terms of organology, the sacred flutes of Kuwái
belong to the category of duct flutes with stops with partly covered
sound orifices. The sacred flutes are similar to ceremonial flutes called
máwi inasmuch as both have palm leaves lashed to the outside of the
barrel and these leaves partly cover the sound orifice, or hole cut into the
side of the barrel’s upper end. However, unlike máwi flutes, the flutes of
Kuwái have finger holes, or stops, allowing each instrument to produce
a greater range of larger and smaller melodic intervals. The sacred trum-
pets of Kuwái are classified as bark trumpets, or single tubes of hollowed
púpa made by wrapping bark spirally into a cone-shaped resonator held
together by a framework of sticks attached to their outside.7
The following description of the main activities making up kwépani
ceremonies is based on interviews with senior men of the Dzáwinái and
Waríperídakéna phratries living in villages along the lower Guainía
(Negro) River in Venezuela in the early 1980s. The sounds made by the
various instruments are not subject to any prohibitions or restrictions,
6. ‘This is a beautiful palm with feathery leaves up to 8m long. In the wild the
palm grows up to 25m in height… The tree produces large clusters of dark purple,
olive-sized fruits with a nutritious pulp and high quality oil. The oil, light green or
yellow in color, is almost identical to olive oil in its physical and chemical properties.
In addition, the protein found in this fruit is comparable to that of good animal
protein, and much better than most grain and legume sources of protein. For example,
in comparison with the biological value of soybean and animal protein, patauá scored
approximately 40% higher’ (Balick n.d.).
7. A detailed account of the construction of a ‘Yurupari’ trumpet collected by
Richard Spruce in 1851 is available on the website of the Royal Botanical Gardens,
Kew (http://www.kew.org/collections/ecbot/spruce/59672.html, accessed July
2007).

and I include record and item numbers for the specific musical pieces
played in kwépani from the Curripaco collection (KPC002) at AILLA.8
Although these recordings were made in the context of a male initiation
ritual held in March 1985 (see KPC002R003I001 for a report containing
an English translation of my indigenous collaborator’s fieldnotes from
this event), my indigenous collaborators have assured me that the
musical pieces played on different kinds of sacred flutes and trumpets
are the same as those performed in kwépani ceremonies.9
Kwépani ceremonies are social gatherings at which two local groups
play the sacred flutes and trumpets of Kuwái over an offering of wild
fruits. The owner of kwépani (kwépanímnali) is the male leader of the
guest group bringing a ceremonial offering of wild fruits. The polarity
between men and women is a constant feature of kwépani, beginning
with the exclusively adult male activity of harvesting wild fruits. The
kwépanímnali organizes the collection of wild fruits and the making of
sacred flutes and trumpets from púpa, bark from yebaro (Eperua grandi-
flora) trees, and the vines known as kadápu and dzámakuápi. Upon return-
ing to the village, the men cover the instruments with palm leaves so that
women and children cannot see them. The latter depart for the hosts’
village in separate canoes, ahead of the adult men, whose canoes are
laden with the offering of wild fruits and the sacred wind instruments.
Women and children arrive at the hosts’ village in the late afternoon and
quickly go inside a special house set aside for them. The kwépanímnali
and his male kin play the sacred wáliáduwa flutes as they near the hosts’
village. Younger men carry the offering of fruits up onto the village plaza
and pile it in front of the host men. The three wáliáduwa flute players are
followed by men bearing the two máariawa flutes, a molítu flute, and a
variety of other flutes and trumpets named after animal and bird species.
From time to time, the molítu flute is sounded during the opening dance
of kwépani (see KPC002R002I001, 22:50-28:38).
8. Readers interested in listening to the musical examples discussed in this article

can enter the AILLA website after agreeing to the terms and conditions of use. The
majority of examples cited here are to be found in the KPC002 collection from 1985,
record number 002. Because the items making up this record are 30 minutes long and
contain numerous musical performances, I have introduced starting and ending times
for each example in minutes and seconds (e.g. 00:01-05:01).
9. Kwépani, or dabucurí, as it is named in Lingua Geral, and related initiation
rituals have begun a resurgence in recent years among some of the Arawak-speaking
peoples of the Upper Rio Negro region, especially in Brazil. The Brazilian researcher,
Paulo Maia Figueiredo, includes an extensive and detailed first-hand description of a
kariamã (male initiation ritual) organized by the Baré living along the Upper Rio
Negro below the mouth of the Xié River in Brazil (Maia Figueiredo 2007).

As the guest men play wáliáduwa flutes and dance around the pile of
wild fruits, the host men stand in a line, shoulder to shoulder. The prin-
cipal costume of the men is a crown of palm leaves with a bundle of wild
fruits tied on and hanging down their backs. In addition, long strands of
sweet-smelling tsipátsi grass are tucked into the headdresses of palm
leaves and hang down over the men’s shoulders. The host headman and
the kwépanímnali wear special capes made from small pieces of animal
fur that have been patched together.
The music of wáliáduwa flutes, a set piece that is invariably played at
the beginning of kwépani (KPC002R002I002, 03:42-07:20), provides the
main theme of the opening dances. While the host men watch, the guest
men dancing immediately behind the wáliáduwa flute players lash them
with kapéti whips. The loud sounds of whips striking the backs of wáliá-
duwa flute players punctuate the mournful-sounding melody that the
men play (see KPC002R002I002, 07:36-17:44). Immediately following this
opening dance, the host men play the same wáliáduwa melody as the
guest men watch. The whips are temporarily put aside, and men play
duets on flutes and trumpets named after various animal and bird
species, such as dápa (paca, a large rodent) and dzáate (toucan).
Shortly before sunset, the men pick up kapéti whips and begin to sing
kápetiápani, or ‘whip-dance song’ (KPC002R002I002, 17:45-24:00). The
dancers pound the handles of their whips on the ground in unison with
each other and with the stomping of the right foot on the ground. After
circling a few times around the pile of wild fruits, the column of male
singer-dancers circles around the women’s house and gradually pene-
trates to the inside. At this early stage of the ceremony, the women
remain silent as they join the men as dance partners in kápetiápani.
During this performance, two men remove the sacred flutes and trum-
pets of Kuwái from the dancing ground to a port at the river’s edge
designated as off limits to women and children. The sets of instruments
belonging to hosts and guests are deliberately mixed up in a single heap
so that in later dances there is no distinction between instruments made
by the host and guest men. As the kápetiápani performance comes to an
end, the owner of kwépani leads the column of male and female dancers
out of the women’s house, and the hosts’ headman announces that
women can go to bathe and bring water from the river. The two leaders
stand facing one another across the displayed pile of wild fruits and
make formal speeches of offering and acceptance. The fruits are then
taken inside the hosts’ house, and a period of drinking fermented man-
ioc beverages and juices made from the wild fruits lasts until midnight.

Figure 2. Women squeezing cooked pulp of seje palm fruits and pressing
mass through sieve to make drinks during female initiation ritual
(photo by Rebecca Holmes, 1981)
Women and children are sent back into seclusion, and the men go down
to the river to bring out the sacred flutes and trumpets of Kuwái for a
second time. Standing near the door of the house, molítu flute players
carry on playful dialogues with the women inside (KPC002R002I005
23:58-26:42). The women ask the molítu player who its ‘owner’ is, and the
man playing the flute must not answer with his own name but with
another man’s name. The molítu flute is a short, thick piece of púpa palm-
wood that produces only a single tone. By holding one hand over the
opening of the flute opposite the mouthpiece, a man can produce
‘words’, or stress patterns that resemble words. Once the molítu player
has passed the test of disguising his identity from the women, he trans-
forms into a sort of musical oracle to which pregnant women can address
the question of whether their unborn children will turn out to be male or
female.
At midnight, the men perform a second wáliáduwa dance and whip-
ping ceremony. The period from midnight until shortly before dawn is a
joyous celebration filled with dancing, singing, and drinking. Using their
special form of speech, the molítu players ‘ask’ women for fermented
drinks until all the men have become inebriated. Inside the house,
women consume large quantities of beer and add to the general atmos-
phere of euphoria by singing and joking. The night of festivities reaches
a climax when the men begin to sing kápetiápani for a second time and

enter the house to dance with women (KPC002R002I006, 06:04-31:04).

When the men’s voices are first heard, the women pause briefly from
their boisterous talking and singing. Once the line of male singer-dancers
has entered the house, however, the women accompany the kápetiápani
song with their own personal drinking songs (pákamarántakan). One of
the senior women stands in the middle of the dance-circle and makes a
long, high-pitched shriek that can be heard above the din of male and
female singers, ecstatic conversations, laughter, and the low thumping of
kapéti whip handles and feet against the ground. In the background,
some men begin to play a low, throbbing bass ostinato on dápa trumpets
outside the house, and a molítu player lets out an occasional shrill blast
on his flute. This moment is the musical, social climax of kwépani.
In the very early morning, just as the eastern horizon starts to grow
light, the joyous atmosphere of the night of drinking and musical per-
formances is brought to an abrupt halt. Men, women, and children fall
silent as the two maaliáwa flute players perform tsépani, the final dances
of Kuwái (KPC002R002I007, 03:03-07:06). Finally, the men send Kuwái
back to the forests and rivers away from the village by playing the wáliá-
duwa and molítu flutes as they embark in a canoe. The kwépani ceremony
ends with the sounds of Kuwái’s flutes fading into the distance and the
voices of birds and people beginning a new day (KPC002R002I019,
00:14-09:55).
The kwépani ceremony contains a wealth of symbolism that is
grounded in the narratives about Kuwái’s transformations of nature,
society, and cosmos through music. The entire ceremonial process builds
up to tsépani, a solemn evocation of the fate of the three boys who ate the
forbidden guacu fruits and who were in turn eaten alive by Kuwái. The
symbolic significance of wild palm fruits as a form of sacred food is
supported by various details of mythic imagery and ceremonial activity.
Wild palm fruits are literally the highest species of edible food, the ones
most vertically removed from the social world of fully adult, human
beings on the ground. In kwépani, the felling of palm trees and the
downward motion of palm fruits evoke the passage of generational time
and relations between mythic ancestors in the celestial world and human
descendants in the terrestrial world. The importance of palm trees as a
symbol of continuity across generations is also evident in the basic rule
that pairs of larger sets of flutes and trumpets must be constructed from
continuous pieces of a single felled trunk of a púpa tree. Ensembles of
male flute players in kwépani reunite the cut pieces of palmwood into a
single entity, or the mythic pupa tree that grew from the ashes of Kuwái.
The costumes of male musician-dancers in kwépani add another layer
of meaning to the symbolism of palm trees. Aside from the two

ceremonial leaders, the men wear crowns of palm leaves and hang
bunches of wild palm fruits down their backs. In a sense, the men
become palm trees in kwépani, since by donning palm leaves and fruits
they transform their bodies into ‘trunks’ that connect upper and lower
regions of body, society, and cosmos. By ceremonially whipping each
other’s bodies, the men evoke the mythic act of chopping down the tree
of Kuwái. At the same time, they complete the circle of symbolic connec-
tions between musical instruments and the mythic body of Kuwái by
making their bodies into living ‘drums’, the striking of which forms a
percussive sound that evokes the downward motion of felled palm
trees.10 Later, the same whips are used to make a percussive, rhythmic
accompaniment to kápetiápani songs by banging the whips’ handles
against the ground. In short, kápetiápani completes the palm trees’ down-
ward motion, and the ground itself becomes a percussive instrument.
The musical performances making up kwépani provide further clues to
its interpretation. Kwépani begins and ends with the same solemn trio of
wáliáduwa flutes, thereby creating a strong sense of continuity in the flow
of ceremonial events. The specific performances of wáliáduwa, molítu, and
other flutes and trumpets are highly repetitive and stable. Like the
opening and closing melodies played on wáliáduwa flutes, the interven-
ing performances consist of a simple theme played over and over with
only the slightest amount of variation. This lack of musical change is
highly significant, since it supports the underlying purpose of effecting a
stable, continuous transmission of sacred power from older to younger
generations of men, from mythic ancestors to human descendants.
The musical performances of kwépani also have a more dynamic, pro-
gressive character, insofar as they change from the opening wáliáduwa
flute melodies, to a concern for the dynamic interplay of male and
female singer-dancers, and finally to the evocation of collective mythic
death in tsépani. The contrast between highly formalized, unchanging
10. It is important to add that the use of ritual whips is not only a percussive,
rhythmic accompaniment to the more melodic sounds of singing and playing wind
instruments. Ritual whippings are also tangible ways of purifying men’s bodies by
extracting the potentially harmful power (línupanáa) that is believed to accumulate in
peoples’ bodies from eating fish and game meat and other ‘strong’ foods (Journet [ed.]
forthcoming; Maia Figueiredo, personal communication, September 2008). The
purifying effects of ritual whippings are explicitly dramatized in male and female
initiation rituals when chant-owners use kapéti whips to tap out the rhythm of sacred
songs and chants on an overturned basket that covers the pot of hot-peppered, boiled
meat. The purpose of whipping the overturned basket is to ‘beat the rawness’ out of
(i.e. cook or purify) this ritual food, called káridzamái, which serves to end the initiates’
ritual fast and signifies their entry into adulthood (Hill 1983, 1993).

male singing in kápetiápani and the spontaneous, emotional outbursts of

women’s drinking songs suggests that the other underlying purpose of
kwépani is to re-energize and regenerate social relations.
Women are strictly prohibited from seeing the sacred flutes and trum-
pets of Kuwái. But to generalize from this prohibition by interpreting
kwépani as an all-male ritual performance that merely excludes women
would be a serious oversimplification. Women play important roles as
participants in kwépani by preparing drinks made from manioc and wild
palm fruits, hearing the sounds of the men’s sacred wind instruments,
dancing with male singers in kápetiápani, singing their own drinking
songs, and singing and speaking in dialogues with the molítu flute
players.
It is instructive to turn once again to mythic narratives for insight
about kwépani. In both mythic narratives and kwépani, the secret of
Kuwái is not an absolute one of knowledge versus ignorance. In myth,
the women know that Made-from-Bone and the men have tricked them.
‘Aaa’, he said, ‘Those things [flutes and trumpets] have all transformed
themselves into animals; fish, jaguars, all dangerous animals. Now we men
are going to watch over them. You women cannot see them any longer
because they are very dangerous’, Made-from-Bone said to First-Woman.
‘Okay’, she said, ‘It doesn’t matter; another of Made-from-Bone’s tricks’.
In kwépani, the secrecy that surrounds the sacred flutes and trumpets of
Kuwái applies primarily to the sense of vision. Women know about
these instruments, can hear their music, and ‘converse’ with men playing
the flutes and trumpets; but they must never see either the instruments or
the men who play them. Clearly the secrecy of the sacred flutes is an
avowed one in which both men and women are required to participate
in a ritual co-construction of the secret.11
The Celestial Umbilical Cord

In ritual performances of málikai singing and chanting, musical and other
non-verbal dimensions of ritual action become direct, sensual instantia-
tions of mythic meanings that are verbally constructed in narrative
discourses or in the esoteric, secret ‘language’ of spirit-naming (see Hill
1993). Perhaps the most dramatic expression of this process of ‘musical-
ization’ is the moment when young women and men are initiated into
adulthood through a series of málikai singing and chanting over the
sacred food (káridzámai) that marks the end of their period of ritual
11. See Nicolas Journet (forthcoming) for a detailed exploration of the meaning of
‘avowed secrets’ in Wakuénai, or Curripaco, ritual music.

fasting. Female initiation rituals are called wakáitaka iénpiti, or ‘we speak
to our child’, referring to the elders’ ritual advice given after the six
hours of singing and chanting that begins at noon and continues almost
until sundown. On the morning of her coming of age ritual, the girl-
initiate’s mother prepares a pot of hot-peppered, boiled fish or game
meat in a large bowl and presents it to a chant-owner (málikai limínali).
The food is covered with yagrumo leaves, but small holes are left in the
covering to allow the chant-owner to blow tobacco smoke over the food
during intervals between periods of singing and chanting. The chant-
owner places a large woven basket upside down over the pot of sacred
food and, together with a shaman or other assistant, begins tapping out a
loud, rapid rhythm on the basket with ritual whips (kapéti). In the open-
ing song for female initiation (see KPC001R090I000), the chant-owner
uses four distinct pitches and invokes the primordial human mother
(Ámaru) and child (Kuwái) of myth living in the sky-world (éenu). After
singing the spirit-names of these powerful mythic beings, the chant-
owner sings the name of the celestial umbilical cord (hliépule-kwa dzákare)
that connects the sky-world of mythic, ancestral beings to the navel of
the world at Hípana, the place of mythic emergence. The singing and
rapid, percussive tapping of whips continues for several minutes before
transforming without interruption into a slower chanting of place-names
along the Aiarí and Isana rivers. In a series of twenty-one chants lasting
for nearly six hours (see KPC001R090I001-021), the chant-owner names
all the places along the Isana, Negro, Cuyarí, Guainía, and Casiquiare
rivers that form the ancestral territories of the various Wakuénai phra-
tries. In the final chant, ritual specialists name the mythic home of
Ámaru at Mutsípani (‘Palm grub-dance’), a site along a curved stream
near the place of emergence at Hípana. Before performing a final bless-
ing and blowing tobacco smoke over the sacred food for the last time,
the chant-owner sings-into-being the celestial umbilical cord that
connects the sky-world of mythic ancestors to the world of the living at
Hípana. The food and the girl-initiate are then both taken outside where
they become the objects of the elders’ collective ritual advice, which
brings the ritual to an end.
Málikai singing and chanting for female initiation rituals invokes a
bewildering variety of spirit-names and makes extensive use of a spirit-
naming process called ‘going in search of the names’ (wadzúhiakáw
nakúna). All these names and naming processes are densely interwoven
with processes of mythic creation that are described in narratives about
the primordial human mother and child, Ámaru and Kuwái. The
singing-into-being of the celestial umbilical cord at the beginning of the
long series of chants provides a vocal equivalent to the enormous púpa

tree of myth that sprouted from the ashes of the fire where Kuwái had
been burned alive. The series of movements, or expansions, outlined in
the long set of malikái chants replicates the mythic struggle between
Ámaru’s group of women and Made-from-Bone’s army of men for
control over the sacred flutes and trumpets of Kuwái. Just as the world
opened up for a second time as Ámaru and her female companions
played the sacred flutes and trumpets of Kuwái in various places, so too
does the world of the child undergoing initiation open up into the world
of adulthood as the chant-owner names and chants all the places in the
world. And just as the cycle of myths about Kuwái ends with the move-
ment of Made-from-Bone and Ámaru back up to the celestial world, so
too does the set of chants for initiation return to the sung, vertical
connection—the celestial umbilical cord—between earth and sky
(KPC001090I022).
In mythic narratives, the movements of Made-from-Bone across the
world in pursuit of Ámaru and the women is not described as a mere
journey or movement between pre-existing places. Rather, it is character-
ized as a dynamic ‘opening up’, or creation, of a world of culturally
distinct peoples and geographically separate places (rivers, villages,
landmarks, etc.).12 This opening up of geographic space does not unfold
in a vacuum but is bracketed by powerful images of the connections
between vertically distinct regions of the cosmos, the sky-world of
mythic ancestors and primordial human beings and the terrestrial world
of living human descendants. Much like the tree that grows from the
ashes of Kuwái in myth before being made into sacred flutes and
trumpets, the opening song of female initiation is a verbal and musical
instantiation of the connection between sky-world and terrestrial world,
ancestors and descendants. The use of four distinct, sung pitches in the
opening song directly embodies, or ‘musicalizes’, the chant-owner’s
movements up to the sky-world of mythic ancestors and connects this
powerful realm to the world of living people via the celestial umbilical
cord. Loud, rapid drumming of whips on the overturned basket cover-
ing the girl-initiate’s sacred food also makes the connection between sky-
world and terrestrial world audible and material. When the chant-owner
modulates into a slower paced, chanted series of place-names along the
rivers criss-crossing the Isana-Guainía drainage area, he musically evokes
the mythic process of creating an expanding world of places through the
women’s playing of sacred flutes and trumpets in various regions. This
dynamic expansion, or ‘opening up’, of the world is musically conveyed
12. See Santos-Granero (1998) for a discussion of similar toponymic naming

processes among the Yanesha, an Arawak-speaking people of eastern Peru.

in the series of twenty-one chants through the use of different starting

pitches, acceleration/deceleration of tempo, microtonal rising, and
loud/soft contrasts. Finally, to reiterate the fact that this geographic
movement across the world is not just some aimless meandering or
wandering around, the closing málikai song of female initiation returns
to exactly the same four sung pitches as the opening song and to the
loud, rapid percussive tapping of whips over the upside-down basket.
In both mythic narratives about Ámaru and Kuwái and in the malikái
singing and chanting for female initiation rituals, there is a chiasmatic
structure of beginning with the building of a vertical axis mundi at the
center of the world and returning to the same place of origins at the end.
This return to the point of departure is given material expression in the
opening and closing málikai songs of female initiation rituals, which
make use of the same style of percussive whipping and exactly the same
four pitches.
Male initiation rituals are called wakapéetaka iénpitipe (‘we show our
children’) and are larger, collective events in which adult men teach
groups of boys how to make and play the sacred flutes and trumpets of
Kuwái. The connection between the chant-owner’s singing-into-being of
the celestial umbilical cord and the men’s playing of sacred flutes and
trumpets is dramatized at the moment when the group of male initiates
have been brought out of seclusion in order to be shown Kuwái.
The chant-owner took the boys out of their house and arranged them in a
line on the village plaza. All the other men were inside, preparing the
ancestor trumpets of Kuwai without saying a word. Then the chant-owner
began to call Kuwai to come outside to show himself to the boys. Kuwai
answered three times from inside, and on the fourth time he came outside,
where the chant-owner was giving advice to the boys and whipping them
with kadapu. The fathers of each of the boys also gave advice. They told the
boys never to speak about Kuwai, especially not with the women, for
whom Kuwai is very dangerous. They told their sons that Kuwai is no
game, that he comes from the beginning of the world, that he was made by
God (Inapirrikuli) from stone, water, earth, and wood (see
KPC002R003I001, p.13, ‘Male and Female Initiation Music of the Arawakan
Wakuénai, Río Guainía, Venezuelan Amazon’).
The crucial moment at which the chant-owner calls Kuwái to come

outside and show himself to the boys takes the form of a musical call
and response between the chant-owner’s singing of the opening song
and the men’s playing of the ancestor trumpet named after a species of
fish (héemali, or pavon grande).
…each time the chant-owner sings a high note, the ancestor trumpets
(heemali) of Kuwai answer with a brief, loud burst of sound (augmented by

dzaate, dapa, maario, and waliaduwa flutes). On the fourth time, the men
come outside playing all the instruments at once… The boys stand at the
center of a circle of male dancers/flute-players (KPC002R003I001, p. 13).
This musical dialogue between the chant-owner and flute and trumpet
players can be heard at KPC002R002I004, 01:16-04:45.
Concluding Thoughts: Palm Trees are Us

In the introductory section of this essay, I pointed to an apparent paradox
that runs through the Wakuénai complex of sacred rituals and associated
mythic narratives. The web of symbolic and practical connections con-
necting adult men, wild palm species, and sacred flutes and trumpets
creates a strongly masculine domain, yet the deeper underlying imagery
encompassing all these masculine activities is that of the quintessentially
feminine processes of birthing and nurturing. The reasons for this appar-
ent paradox emerge from a close reading of the ethnographic descrip-
tions of kwépani and initiation rituals. The men’s collective playing of
sacred flutes and trumpets creates a strong sense of their unification as
parts of the mythic body of Kuwái and as animal species that Kuwái’s
musical naming power originally brought-into-being. The men’s collec-
tive music-making directly evokes key moments of creation, destruction,
and transformation from the cycle of narratives about Kuwái and
constitutes a relatively formal, highly structured process of enacting a
stable, continuous transmission of sacred knowledge and power across
older and younger generations of men. At the same time, however, more
formal musical performances of the men are juxtaposed with and
energized by the women’s more spontaneous performances of drinking
songs and their participation as dance partners in kapetiápani, a song that
evokes the great transformation of the world when Made-from-Bone and
his brothers pushed Kuwái into a bonfire.
The mythic eruption of a tall, beautiful palm tree from the ashes of
Kuwái serves as the prototypic act of materialization, or the transforma-
tion of human (or human-like) subjectivities into material things and
physical objects. Just as the sounds of shamanic blowing of tobacco
smoke as a voiced, aspirated exhalation of breath is the elementary form
of materialization in rituals, so is the transformation of Kuwai’s musical
naming power into an orchestra of sacred wind instruments the basis of
materialization in mythic narratives. Both ritual and mythic transforma-
tions privilege sound production and auditory perception over sight and
vision. The musical naming power of Kuwái in mythic narratives, or the
word-sounds that travel far away and bring into being the species and
objects of nature, becomes the model for malikái singing and chanting in

sacred rituals. Even before being chopped down and made into a variety
of flutes and trumpets, the visual beauty of the tall pupa tree is tied
directly to the making and hearing of sounds.
He saw a tall pupa tree there… It made a sound, and Made-from-Bone
listened: ‘Tso-wai, tso-wai, tso-wai’.
And it was only through learning how to make sounds with the
hollowed-out logs that Made-from-Bone opened up the world for the
second time.
These sound-based mythic transformations—or the materialization of
Kuwái’s word-sounds into ritually powerful singing and chanting
(malikái) and of his body into a palm tree and sacred wind instruments—
play out in complex ways in men’s collective performances during
kwépani ceremonies and male initiation rituals. As visible, tangible,
physical objects, the instruments are dangerous to the point of being
considered life-threatening to women and children, and they are also
dangerous to the men who touch, make, and play them, since they are
regarded as parts of the body of Kuwái as well as animals (fish, birds,
and game). However, the sounds made by these instruments are power-
ful in a more creative, ‘world-opening’ sense and transcend the danger,
or ‘toxicity’, of the instruments themselves. In addition, the men tran-
scend the danger inherent in the instruments as individual objects by
playing them in ensembles that reunite the mythic body of Kuwái, the
severed pieces of the mythic púpa tree, and the celestial umbilical cord
connecting celestial and terrestrial worlds.
The mythic púpa tree, sacred wind instruments, adult male bodies
adorned as palm trees, and the celestial umbilical cord are all subsumed
within the broader category of tubular structures that serve as symbols
promoting the flow of life through allowing passage of vital substances.
As the biological connection that carries life-giving substances between
mothers and unborn children, the umbilical cord makes a powerful
symbol of the ritual singing-into-being of the life-giving powers of
Kuwái and Ámaru in male and female initiation rituals. Kwépani ceremo-
nies and initiation rituals provide ways of collectively dramatizing these
life-giving powers by extending them into a symbolic domain of the
men’s playing of sacred wind instruments and ultimately to the adult
male bodies of flute and trumpet players who adorn themselves with
crowns of palm leaves and bunches of wild palm fruits. In effect, kwépani
and male initiation rituals are contexts in which adult men become the tall
púpa tree that emerged from the ashes of Kuwái in mythic times and its
ritual enactment as the celestial umbilical cord in malikái singing and
chanting during initiation rituals.

A similar extension of the imagery of female birthing and umbilical

cords takes place in childbirth rituals. The first set of chants aims at
neutralizing the potentially harmful effects that the father’s tools,
weapons, and everyday work activities can have on newborn infants. In
this set of chants, each child’s ancestral tobacco spirits must be actively
sought through naming the spirits of a variety of potentially dangerous
animals, plants, and material objects. This musical searching of the
cosmos is focused on an internal, spiritual umbilical cord that is believed
to exist inside the infant’s body and that is directly connected to every-
thing the newborn’s father does, feels, or experiences (Hill 1983, 1985,
1993). Childbirth rituals make use of the umbilical cord as a symbol of
the flow of vital substances by extending the biological role of maternal,
prenatal nurturance during pregnancy and gestation to the social role of
the father’s economic activities during early childhood.
As I have noted in a previous essay (Hill 2000), it is necessary to
understand Wakuénai sacred rituals and ceremonies as a process that
does not deny or negate the importance of women’s fertility and repro-
ductivity but that metaphorically extends these capacities from the realm
of biological phenomena into the social and cosmological realms.
Although the sacred flutes and trumpets require that men and women
be sharply differentiated in terms of their ability to see the instruments,
the separateness of men and women is transcended in multiple ways by
their common abilities to hear and be heard by each other’s singing,
chanting, and instrumental music and to consume collectively drinks
made from seje and other wild palm species. The púpa tree, the celestial
umbilical cord, wild palm fruits, and the sacred wind instruments are
less about exclusion and differentiation than about communication and
connectedness across differences—between men and women, adults and
children, chant-owners and non-specialists, mythic ancestors and human
descendants. Like the celestial umbilical cord of malikái songs, the sacred
flutes and trumpets are tubular vessels that serve as channels for control-
ling the flow of food, water, air, semen, blood, and other vital substances,
including the powerful musical sounds that opened up the world in
myth and that regenerate human social relations in kwépani and
initiation rituals.
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_______________________________________________
The Fruit of Knowledge and the Bodies of the Gods:
Religious Meanings of Plants among the Baniwa
_______________________________________________
Robin M. Wright
University of Florida,
Gainesville, FL 32611, USA
rowrightrobin@yahoo.com
Abstract
This article focuses on the sacrificial acts of divinities and other primal
beings whose bodies became cultivated, and wild plants, particularly
plants as forms of gifts and other types of exchange from the deities to
humanity among the Baniwa peoples of the Northwest Amazon. I seek to
reflect on Viveiros de Castro’s ideas on Amerindian ‘perspectivism’ (1998,
2002) to evaluate their ‘fit’ to Baniwa spiritual ethnobotany. Initially, I see a
major difference between the perspectivism and agentivity of animal and
fish-people, which is very common among all Arawak and Tukanoan-
speaking peoples, and the plants which derive more often from a divinity
that has been sacrificed, dismembered, transformed, and divided up into
many distinct species. The predator–prey relation between animals, fish,
and humans is actually secondary when compared to sacrifice and gifting
relations between plants and humans, which seem to have more to do with
the peaceful development of chiefly and priestly societies.
Introduction
In the Northwest Amazon region, bordering Brazil, Venezuela, and
Colombia, the Arawak-speaking Baniwa people (pop. approx. 12,000)
have developed a highly refined conceptual system for understanding
and managing their animal and plant resources. The Baniwa live basi-
cally from horticulture, specializing in manioc, fishing, and, to a much
lesser degree, hunting. They have also experienced a long history of
contact involving them in various kinds of salaried labor for non-
indigenous peoples, primarily those of European heritage.1
1. On the history of contact, see Wright 1981, 1998, 2005.
Wright The Fruit of Knowledge and the Bodies of the Gods 127
Their stories of the creation time (oopidali, ancient times) illustrate how
the deities struggled to eke out a niche for themselves in a world
dominated by predatory animal tribes. In large part, the critical issue for
the creator deities was how to make the world safe from predatory
animals and fish so that humans could not only live within it but also be
prosperous and enjoy well-being. The world the deities left for their
descendants (walimanai, lit., ‘our others who will be born’) was far from
perfect, however; but at least the deities left the instruments by which
humans could not only protect themselves from predators but also
obtain their food from various domains and by various means.
This article will discuss the following topics in order: (1) the sacred
plants introduced in mythical times and their religious and cultural
importance; (2) the major cycles of creation epochs which produced the
cosmos as it is known today; (3) the shaman’s psychoactive pariká, the
most important agent of creation, and the narratives that shamans tell of
how they acquired their powers; (4) the shaman’s experience ‘on pariká’
of being ‘taught’ how the world is; (5) narratives of how the earth was
made for gardens, how tobacco was given to humanity, and how the
divine ‘owner of gardens’ sacrificed himself in a new garden-fire to
alleviate the hunger of his children; and (6) concluding remarks linking
the themes of divine sacrifice, the gift of knowledge and power, and
Amerindian perspectivism.
Plants of Creation and Destruction

Given that the food chain is a critical issue in many stories of creation of
the Northwest Amazon, it has long been studied by anthropologists.2
These studies have generally focused on the ‘predator–prey’ exchange
relations among humans, animals, and fish.3 Unlike their Tukanoan-
speaking neighbors, for whom the anthropological literature is far richer
in scope (Arhem 2001; Hugh-Jones 1979; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1968, 1975),
for the Baniwa/Kuripako/Wakuenai,4 there is one book-length study on
2. On the Brazilian side of the border, the indigenous population is more than
30,000 people, or 22 ethnic groups, pertaining to 3 major language families—Tukano,
Arawak, and Maku.
3. K. Arhem (2001) gives an in-depth description of the interconnection between
humans and nature in his ethnography of the Makuna, Tukanoan-speaking people on
the border of Colombia and Brazil.
4. The three names refer to three groups who consider themselves kin to one
another, who speak dialects of the same Arawak language, and make their villages on
three sides of the Brazil/Venezuela/Colombia border. The present paper is concerned
with the Baniwa of the Aiary River in Brazil.

Baniwa horticulture (Journet 1995), one article on shamans’ snuff, pariká

(Wright 2005), Wakuenai symbolic ecology (Hill 1984), and stories
related to water-spirits and fish (Garnelo 2007; Wright 1993–94). There
have been no studies that have systematically examined the nexus of symbolic
meanings related to plants and their religious significance for human life. This
article seeks to provide at least an introduction to this field by selecting
several of the culturally most significant plants.
Figure 1. The Northwest Amazon
In Baniwa stories of creation, the trees from which the psychoactive

pariká (Virola calophylla, Virola theiodora, Anadenanthera peregrina), or

shamans’ snuff, is produced are perhaps the most important of all the
plants since it was only through the visions propitiated by the snuff that
the creator deity could ‘see the world and everything in it’.5 In the wrong
hands, as the story tells, pariká transformed a gluttonous and selfish tapir
into a predatory jaguar and made other animals who snuffed the powder
go mad.
Tobacco and pepper are two other plants of major importance in the
creation stories. The first is essential for ‘bringing the souls [of humans]
back’ from wherever they have wandered (in sickness or dreams). The
second is an essential element of commensality because, according to its
mythic origin, it prevents food (fish and animals) from giving sickness to
humans by annulling the sickness-giving potential of both fish and
animals on humans. Both pepper and tobacco were also among the gifts
of the deities to humanity. At the time the first ancestors emerged from
the hole in the rocks at Hipana waterfalls, each clan was given its own
riverine territory, ancestral flute or trumpet, stock of ancestral names,
and kinds of sacred pepper and tobacco.
Manioc is the fourth plant; it is a staple food, but its religious impor-
tance is that it is also the ‘body’ of the deity Kaali, who sacrificed himself
in a great fire in order to provide food for his children. His ‘body’ became
food for humans, in the form of manioc bread, which, like pepper and
tobacco, are the staple of life. This cannot be described as a predatory
relation, but rather a sacrificial ‘gift’ of the deity’s body and knowledge
of planting to humanity.
Finally, there are the poisonous plants—timbó, for example, used in
fishing; curare, for hunting; and numerous plants used in witchcraft and
sorcery as well as in their cure. These were generated from the bodies of
slain primordial beings who left their viscera, fluids, or body-parts
which transformed into these plants in retribution for their killing, or the
killing of one of their kin. They clearly serve humans today as tools of
predation. This paper discusses above all the nexus of ‘exchange’ and
5. The original pariká came from the fruits of the ‘Great Tree of Kaali’ (Kaali ka
thidzapa), a huge tree that was the source of all cultivated plants. The Great Tree of
Kaali is one of the central symbols of primordial unity, or All-in-Oneness that is found
in Baniwa religion. The Tree is said to have been located at Uaracapory Falls on the
Uaupés River, to the Northwest of where the Baniwa live today. In the early twentieth
century, the famous German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg, during his travels
throughout the Northwest Amazon, noted the great number of place-names on the
upper Uaupés that were Arawak and related to Baniwa mythology, indicating that
this area had been populated by Baniwa. Early mid-eighteenth century maps corrobo-
rate this (Wright 1981).

‘predatory’ relations involving plants which are essential for the creation
and reproduction of society.
The order in which the plants will be considered here follows the
order of creation stories according to Baniwa narrators of the villages
where I have done most of my field research, Uapui or Hipana and Ukuki
(see map above).6 It does not reflect a ‘definitive’ ordering of the narra-
tives; although, in comparing among narrators of several other villages,
there appears to be agreement on which of the narratives are, as Baniwa
narrators say, ‘the really important ones’ which happened first. In 1999,
the indigenous association of the area, I, and several of the narrators
published a volume of these narratives under the title Waferinaipe
Ianheke: The Wisdom of our Ancestors.7
Religious Lives of Baniwa in Brazil

The religious lives of the Arawak-speaking Baniwa and Kuripako or
Wakuenai8 of the Brazil/Venezuela/Colombia borders are, like their
Tukanoan-speaking neighbors, based on great mythological and ritual
cycles related to the first ancestors and symbolized by the sacred flutes
and trumpets, as well as the central importance of shamanism and a rich
variety of dance rituals, called pudali, associated with the seasonal cycles
and the maturation of forest fruits. In the 1950s, the majority of the
Baniwa converted to evangelical Protestantism, introduced by mission-
aries of the New Tribes Mission. Their mass conversion was historically
continuous with their participation in prophetic movements since the
mid-nineteenth century; however, evangelicalism provoked a radical
break from their shamanic traditions, as well as serious divisions and
conflicts with Catholic Baniwa and those who sought to maintain
Catholic-based ritual traditions. Today, after half-a-century, evan-
gelicalism is now the predominant religion in over half the Baniwa
6. My doctoral research was done in 1976–77; brief periods of fieldwork were

done in 1986, 1997, 2000–2002. Since 2005, I have been in internet and telephone
contact with the children of my main interlocutors of my first field research.
7. This was volume 3 of the series ‘Indigenous Narrators of the Rio Negro’
(Federation of the Indigenous Organizations of the Rio Negro, São Gabriel da
Cachoeira, AM, Brazil).
8. ‘Wakuenai’ and ‘Walimanai’ are the two ethnonyms used by the people to refer
to all interrelated phratries on all three sides of the borders. Wakuenai means ‘All those
of our language’, and Walimanai means ‘All our descendants’. Since colonial times,
‘Baniwa’—which is not originally an ethnonym—has been used by outsiders to the
extent that it has become one, like ‘Kuripako’ which refers to a dialect-group among
the four extant today.

communities, although there is a growing movement among non-

evangelicals and some evangelical communities to revitalize the initia-
tion rituals and mythic traditions.
In the history of the cosmos, according to both evangelical and non-
evangelical Baniwa, there have been various moments when the world
was destroyed and later regenerated. The Baniwa diverge on the nature
of the first world: evangelical Baniwa believe that only one Being, Heeko,
existed at that time; shamans refer to that time as an ‘ancient, hidden
world of happiness’. But little else is known about this being and the
ancient, hidden world in which he existed, except that it was a world in
which everything was possible—the gardens grew by themselves, there
was never any shortage of food, and so on.
For all Baniwa, the first world came to an end when the great world
tree called Kaali-ka thidzapa9—which connected the Other World of the
deities with This World—was cut down. The felling of the tree initiated
the second period of the universe which is the epoch when the creator
deity Nhiãperikuli walked on the earth and obtained things in this world:
the earth itself, the gardens, day and night, cooking fire, fish; in short, all
things with which humanity could live in this world and prosper.
Baniwa cosmogony is remembered in a complex set of over twenty
myths, the main protagonist of which is the creator/transformer Nhiãperi-
kuli, beginning with his emergence in the primordial world and ending
with his creation of the first ancestors of the Baniwa phratries and with-
drawal from the world. Many of these myths recount the struggles of
Nhiãperikuli against various animal- and fish-peoples who seek to kill
him and destroy the order of the universe. More than any other figure of
the Baniwa pantheon, Nhiãperikuli was responsible for the form and
essence of the world; in fact, it may even be said that he is the ontological
principle that governs the universe.10 As narrators state, Nhiãperikuli
9. This was the tree from which pariká, shamans’ snuff, was obtained. If it was an
Anadenanthera tree, these grow to as high as sixty feet tall; the Virola trees grow to as
high as one-hundred forty feet, with bases of up to five meters in diameter. The name
refers to a hill (in Baniwa, hidzapa) on the upper Uaupés River where there is a huge
stone which is the petrified stump of the Great Tree of Kaali.
10. The notion of ‘governing the world’ is implicit in the phrases which the
Baniwa use to express their relation to their creator and other divinities: as ‘owners’ or
‘patrons’ (iminali) and as ‘masters’ (thayri) or ‘priests’. Nhiãperikuli, Kuwai, and Dzuliferi
are all considered the ‘owners of the world’ (hekwapi iminali). This ‘proprietary’
relation means that, through their actions, they caused things, conditions, and places
to come into being, leaving them after their deaths for posterity, as an inheritance.
Nhiãperikuli made ‘everything in the world’ and gave it to the Baniwa with instruc-
tions on how to live well on it. Dzuliferi is the ‘owner’ of shamans’ snuff, pariká, and

‘foresaw’ how things should be in this world for all future generations
(walimanai, ‘for all those who will be born’).
Another great cycle in the history of the cosmos is told in the myth of
Kuwai, the son of Nhiãperikuli and the first woman, Amaru. This myth has
central importance in Baniwa culture for it explains major questions on
the nature of existence in this world: how the order and ways of life of
the ancestors were/are reproduced for all future generations, the
Walimanai; how children are to be instructed in initiation rituals about
the nature of the world; how sicknesses and misfortune entered the
world; and what is the nature of the relation among humans, spirits, and
animals that is the legacy of the primordial world. The myth tells of the
life of Kuwai who is an extraordinary being, whose body is full of holes
and consists of all the elements, all the animals of the world, and whose
humming and songs produce all animal species. Like Kaali-ka thidzapa,
Kuwai was an undifferentiated all-beings-in-one. His birth set in motion
a rapid process of growth in which the miniature and chaotic world of
Nhiãperikuli opened up to its real-life size.
tobacco; he gave them to Nhiãperikuli who left them to posterity, especially for the
shamans ‘to know the world’. Kuwai is the ‘owner of sickness’ and the ‘owner of
poison’ who left them in all their forms in this world, but he also taught the shamans
how to cure them. In the broadest sense, Nhiãperikuli, his brothers, and Kuwai are
considered to be ‘our owners’ (waminali), for humanity lives, prospers, and grows in
the order and the conditions inherited from them. The relation of divinities/humanity
is brought into experience through, for example, shamans, who request from the
‘owners’ remedies with which to cure, which may involve bargaining, for the patient
must present a material offering or payment (dawai), which the shaman then takes to
Kuwai in order to bargain for the return of his soul. This payment may be refused if it
is judged to be insufficient, or the sickness deemed incurable. The relation of ‘master’
or ‘priest’ (-thayri) in the Other World is applied to the same triad, Nhiãperikuli, Kuwai,
Dzuliferi, all of whom are considered the ‘Masters/Chiefs/Priests of the World’
(Hekwapi-thayri), ‘eternal masters/priests’, ‘masters from the beginning’. Another
deity, Kaali, is also called ‘Master/Priest’ because he gave to humanity all cultivated
plants for their gardens and the planting ceremonies. In many respects, Kaali is like
Nhiãperikuli, and some narrators are even more explicit: ‘Kaali is really Nhiãperikuli’
one shaman said. In the myth about his life and death, Kaali sacrifices himself in a
huge earth-fire and from the white earth that was left at the place where he was
burned (the word kaali also means ‘white earth’), the first manioc tree emerged, from
which humanity obtained all the plants they needed. In other words, he gave of
himself for the needs of others. His body is manioc bread, or beiju. Catholic missiona-
ries have equated Kaali with Adam, the first man made of the earth. However
simplistic this may be, Kaali is the deity who taught humanity how to plant their
gardens, and how to sing and pray at the time of planting. This suggests that a more
adequate translation for the term ‘thayri’ may in fact be ‘priests’ because it is canonical
knowledge that he transmits to his children.

This period ended with the felling of another great world tree, or axis
mundi, which likewise connected This World with the Other World and
which was produced from the body of Kuwai, who was sacrificed in a
great fire at the end of the first rite of initiation. At the place where Kuwai
was burned, an enormous paxiuba palm tree burst out from the earth up
to the sky. When this great tree was felled, Nhiãperikuli produced from
its pieces the first sacred flutes and trumpets, which are the ‘body of
Kuwai’, with which the men initiate their children today. The idea is that
the sacred flutes represent the principle of social and cultural reproduc-
tion—the means by which culture is transmitted over time—and in fact
everything which Nhiãperikuli had obtained, which was left for all future
generations. Like the felling of the Kaali-ka thidzapa from which all of
humanity got their food, the felling of the Kuwai tree left humanity with
the instruments with which humans could reproduce their society. After
this, Nhiãperikuli purified the world, washing it and ridding it of all
predatory beings and malignant spirits, and then brought forth
humanity.
The myth of Kuwai thus marks a transition between the primordial
world of Nhiãperikuli and a more recent human past, which is brought
directly into the experience of living people in the rituals. For that reason,
the shamans say that Kuwai is as much a part of the present world as of
the ancient world, and that he lives ‘in the center of the world’. The
shamans seek Kuwai in their cures, for his body consists of all sicknesses
that exist in the world—including poison used in witchcraft, which still
is the most frequently cited ‘cause’ of death of people today. The
material forms of witchcraft Kuwai left as poisonous plants in this world
in the great conflagration that marked his ‘death’ and withdrawal from
the world. At the precise moment of his burning, he left his liver, lixu-
pana, which became the poisonous plant called hueero. Following that, a
class of spirits called Yoopinai emerged from the ashes of Kuwai’s body.
These spirits take the material forms of sickness-giving plants, insects,
lizards, spiders, and so on. The poisonous fur from Kuwai’s body then
‘entered’ the body fur of the black sloth wamu, which is the deity Kuwai’s
animal-body form in this world. This sloth has fur containing an enor-
mous variety of fungae that may give sickness to humans, and whose
sudden appearance is considered an omen (lhinimai) of peoples’ deaths.
Many, but not all, of the Yoopinai took on the material form of plants;
they are thought of as a tribe of spirit-‘people’ whose ‘chief’ has the body
of a lizard (dopo) and, ‘as a person’, he is described as a powerful, white,
dwarf-shaman with long, loose hair, a golden chain around his neck, a
large cigar, and is a mortal enemy of humans.

Once the sacred instruments had been fabricated, the creator deities
went to Hipana falls on the Aiary River, the sacred place where Kuwai
was born and died, the center of the world connection between the
Upper and Lower worlds, and brought forth the first Kuwai-ancestors of
the phratries.11 These were not entirely human yet; they were a mixture
of flute and body form. The fully human ancestors, with bodies like
humanity has today, were born later. When these phratric ancestors
were born, the creator deities—Nhiãperikuli, Dzuliferi, Eeri —stood over
the holes in the center of the rapids12 and watched as each came out.
Each ancestor was given sacred pepper and tobacco, sacred names of the
ancestors, and sent to the places where they were to live and plant their
gardens.
Humanity today lives in the third period of cosmic history. Evangeli-
cals believe that this third period will likewise come to an end. But to
non-evangelicals, only shamans are capable of ‘seeing’ and knowing
when the end of the world will occur. At the time when the first evan-
gelical missionaries arrived among the Baniwa in the late 1940s, it is said
that some of the shamans foresaw that great transformations were about
to occur and that the world would return to its initial paradisiacal and
miraculous state. Indeed, this prophecy resonated with the first mission-
ary’s announcement that the end of time and the imminent coming of
Christ was at hand.
In Baniwa cosmology, the universe is formed by multiple layers, asso-
ciated with various divinities, spirits, and ‘other people’. According to
one very knowledgeable shaman, it is organized into an enormous
vertical structure of twenty-five layers or ‘worlds’ (kuma), there being
twelve layers below This World (hliekwapi) of humans—collectively
known as Uapinakuethe, ‘Place of Our Bones’—and twelve above, collec-
tively known as Apakwa Hekwapi, the ‘Other World’. Each one of the
layers below the earth is inhabited by ‘people’ or ‘tribes’ with distinctive
characteristics (people painted red, people with large mouths, etc.). With
the exception of the people of the lowest level of the cosmos, and one
other place of the underworld, all other peoples are considered to be
‘good’ and assist the shamans in their search for the lost souls of the sick.
Above our world are the places of various spirits and divinities related
to the shamans: bird-spirits who help the shamans in their search for lost
souls; the Owner of Sicknesses, Kuwai, whom the shaman seeks to cure
11. Phratries are groups of clans or sibs that consider themselves to be ‘brothers’;
they are ranked in relation to each other according to their birth order—elder brother,
younger brother.
12. People who have seen these say that they form almost perfectly round and
very deep holes in the center of the rapids, which can be seen in the dry season.

more serious ailments; the primordial shamans and Dzulíferi, the Owner
of pariká (shaman’s snuff) and tobacco; and finally, the place of the
Creator and Transformer Nhiãperikuli, or ‘Dio’ which is a place of eternal,
brilliant light, like a room full of mirrors reflecting this light. While
Nhiãperikuli is light, the sun is a manifestation of his body. With the
exception of the level of Kuwai, all other levels are likewise inhabited by
‘good people’. Some may ‘delude’ or ‘lie’ to the shaman, but only the
‘sickness owner’ possesses death-dealing substances used in witchcraft.
The ‘Fruit’ of Creation: Pariká

Pariká (Virola calophylla, Anadenanthera spp.) is a psychoactive snuff
widely used by the shamans of the Northwest Amazon, especially, but
not exclusively, for rituals of curing. It is sometimes used together with
another psychoactive, caapi (Banisteriopsis sp.), although the mixture of
the two was more common in the past when, oral histories relate,
prophets could enhance their visionary powers in their struggles to
eliminate witchcraft and sorcery. Such visions were fundamental to the
restoration of the internal social order constantly threatened by both
negative internal forces and exploitation, often with violence, by the
White Man. Through their psychoactive powers to reveal, to open com-
munication with the ‘Other World’ and the deceased who advised and
counseled their living kin on events that were about to happen, the two
substances had a fundamental role in restoring harmonious conviviality
at various critical moments in history.13 Various myths explain how
13. Pariká has been used by indigenous peoples of several language groupings
distributed over a vast area of western South America. Undoubtedly the most com-
plete and original study of pariká is the doctoral thesis by Wolfgang Kapfhammer
(1997), The Great Serpent and the Flying Jaguar, which seeks to develop a dynamic
panorama rooted in shamanism and cosmology. Inspired by Johannes Wilbert’s
classic study, Tobacco and Shamanism (1987), and in the comparative methods of
Lawrence Sullivan and Otto Zerries, Kapfhammer focuses a good part of his analysis
on the iconography and ritual instruments found in South America. He argues against
the existence of a complex of predetermined perceptions and sensations that the effect
of the snuff has in relation to mythological and cosmological themes specific to each
culture; rather, he argues that the snuff serves as a ‘trigger’ for certain sensations and
perceptions, which, up to a certain point, are structured by pharmacologically induced
processes, but these in no way determine cultural understanding of these perceptions.
The author also analyzes the complex iconology present in a rich variety of para-
phernalia used in rites of pariká. His analysis of motifs reveals a connection between
the rites and seasonal cycles. Thus, serpentine forms found on the pariká trays used by
the Sateré-Mawé are associated with the rainy season, the constellations of the Great
Serpent, the predominance of sickness during this time, and the presence of female

shamans obtained pariká, but the most important one consists of a set of
episodes in which Nhiãperikuli and his brothers find the powers and
instruments of the shamans (collectively known as malikhai)—powers to
see and to transform, to become invisible, to sound thunder, a jaguar-
tooth collar (the main adornment of the jaguar-shaman), and pariká. In
the first episode, Nhiãperikuli’s younger brother desires to learn how to
make the sound of thunder; he seeks and finds the harpy eagle, Kama-
thawa. The eagle gives him one of his crest feathers and tells him to sniff
it; suddenly, as if smitten by a charge of energy, the young man’s vision
‘opens’ and he begins to ‘see’ as the shamans see today. He sees the eagle
then as a person. Next, the eagle gives him another feather from his body
and tells him to sniff it, and, smitten again, the young apprentice makes
the sound of thunder. With these powers, he returns home and meets his
brother Nhiãperikuli, but the young apprentice is invisible, for he had
acquired the power to transform and to leave his visible body.14 Thus,
the first episode relates how the primal shamans acquired some of their
most fundamental powers—to see, to sound thunder, and to transform.
All of this occurred in the Other World, the World before the present one
of humans. They still had not found pariká, the means by which the
shamans today acquire the same powers.
The second episode revolves around the felling of Kaali-ka thidzapa,
that connected the two levels of the universe still in formation at that
time, and which was the source of all the cultivated plants in the world.
Pariká is a ‘little fruit’ (or bean) found inside a hole at the top of the huge
tree. Once the tree was felled—the best narrators skillfully heighten the
expectancy of the event—Nhiãperikuli could not get the pariká because of
swarms of bees that prevented him from getting near the hole. Suddenly
the tapir plows his way through the brush and, with his thick hide, is
able to get the pariká without getting stung by the bees. The tapir is
characterized in this story as a gluttonous and selfish animal, and he
takes all of the shaman’s powers for himself, the jaguar-tooth collar and
the pariká, stealing them from their rightful owner, Nhiãperikuli.
primordial beings who keep the snuff inside their vaginas. Other myths associate
predatory birds, such as the harpy, the dry season, and icons on the paraphernalia,
thus complementing the symbolic values related to the Great Serpent. In short, Kapf-
hammer provides a rich analysis connecting ritual use of snuff and meteorological
cycles; and it is well known that one of the shamans’ most important functions is
control over seasonal transitions.
14. In Baniwa belief, the body is ‘like a shirt’ (kamitsa, from the Portuguese word
for shirt) a covering for the ‘person’ (newiki). In myths, primordial beings are con-
stantly leaving or exchanging bodies; one being may have several bodies but remains
the ‘same’ being.

Figure 2. Anadenanthera spp.
In possession of the pariká, the tapir calls his companions together to

sniff the psychoactive powder. The tapir immediately becomes a fero-
cious jaguar who growls that he wants ‘to eat people without stopping’.
The catastrophe that this could have caused led Nhiãperikuli to simply
snatch the pariká away from the tapir, giving him a sound tap on his
snout, and giving him a miriti fruit (blood-red in color) to eat. Even then,
the myth continues, Nhiãperikuli takes the miriti fruit away, leaving the
tapir totally inoffensive, eating leaves, which is what he does today. The
tapir’s companions, one after another, ‘go crazy’ (napikaka) on pariká: one
falls down in a drunken trance, another falls into the river and emerges
as an otter, and the last runs into the forest and transforms into a forest-
spirit. The acquisition of shamanic powers and the use of pariká by non-
apprentices provoke alterations in the perceptions of the subjects: the
tapir, an already gluttonous and selfish animal, becomes an insatiable
jaguar, but is quickly reduced to an inoffensive leaf-eater.15
In the final episode, the spatial and temporal separation between the
primordial shamans and the human level of the cosmos occurs through
15. The shaman can also ‘transform into’, or, more precisely, acquire the perspec-
tive of a variety of other predatory animals—the alligator, anaconda, eagle.

the ascension of the wakaawenai, primordial shamans, to the heavens and

their definitive withdrawal from the human world. These shamans
simply took pariká and ‘went away’, transforming with their song, rising
body and soul to the sky. They live eternally in the Other World where
they are seen only by the shamans of today who visit these realms. In the
story, however, their ascension (hirali) seems to represent the idea that
the primordial shamans ‘never died’. Their transformation through their
song was a passage from one world to the other, whole, without the
normal separation between body and souls that takes place at death. At
the end of the myth, only Nhiãperikuli stayed in this world of the future
humans, preparing everything for the existence to come. Pariká, the
means by which shamans travel to the Other World, was given, as was
the whole practice of the shamans: ‘they are doctors’, one of the narra-
tors said, for ‘they extract sickness, they revive people well. They help us
well. That is the truth’.
It should be clear that what the story relates is the creation of the
Other World (Apakwa Hekwapi), distinct from This World of humans,
separated by the felling of the Great Tree. The cutting of the tree pro-
voked a rupture in the ‘univocality’ (Sullivan 1988) of the primordial
world, but it also was followed by, first, a brief struggle for shamanic
power, malikhai, between the animals and Nhiãperikuli’s tribe of shamans,
the wakaawenai. The animals acquire powers that they cannot have,
exacerbating their animal attributes. Tapir is a glutton and becomes an
insatiable jaguar, a powerfully shamanic being. It is the mixing of what
cannot by their very nature be mixed that produces the catastrophe. The tapir
and his companions ‘go mad’, that is, are unable to control the trans-
formation that pariká produces. Thus, the proper ownership falls to Nhiã-
perikuli and the true shamans. A second major consequence of the felling
of the tree is the ‘distribution’ (liniuetaka) of cultivated plants to all the
tribes who came and took their share of food (manioc sprigs, potatoes,
etc.) back to their villages. It was from that time that plants multiplied
and covered the earth as the Baniwa knew it. All of these were gifts from
Nhiãperikuli to humanity, showing his generosity and mindfulness of
future generations, their descendants.
The episode of the felling of the tree can also be interpreted to refer to
the beginning of various interconnected food chains: the annual agricul-
tural cycle synchronized with meteorological phenomena, fishing activi-
ties associated with the levels of the rivers, and the appearance of species
of sauva ants. As J. Hill explains: ‘When the level of the rivers begins to
go down and fishing begins to improve after a long rainy season…the
men select and cut the new gardens according to the mythical calendar
of Kaali’ (1984: 532), and, ‘the general belief underlying all the phases of

the annual cycle of agriculture is that people can facilitate agricultural

labor by synchronizing their activities with the mythical calendar
of…Kaali and his children’ (1984: 533). Thus, in the myth, while the pri-
mordial shamans are cutting the great tree down, the tapir fishes in the
large fishtraps. Again, Hill clarifies:
The annual cycle reaches its high point with the main planting of the new
gardens of manioc at the end of the long dry season. This period, called
walipere inuma (the ‘mouth’) or beginning of the Pleiades also is the time of
spectacular spawning-runs of various species of fish. These species return
every year to the same streams and appear in recently flooded areas of the
forest and open fields. The mouths of the streams are then blocked off with
large fish traps after a school of fish swim by to the lake upriver (1984: 535).
This period also corresponds to the annual cycle of exchange festivals, or

pudali, when groups of kin and affines drink and dance together. For the
Baniwa, the fish during their annual fish-runs are doing precisely the
same thing as humans do in their celebration of exchange and dance
festivals.
Another story of pariká tells that the brownish-red snuff was actually
the menstrual blood of Dzuliferi’s daughter, and Nhiãperikuli took it from
her vagina while she slept. Dzuliferi reprehended his brother for this act,
as did all of the primal shamans who collectively went away to live in
the sky-world. It was Nhiãperikuli’s improper relation to a menstruating
woman that produced the separation between him and his brother-
shamans. But, the association of pariká with menstrual blood has a coun-
terpart in the way shamans refer to it today as ‘the blood, the first men-
strual blood of Kuwai’ (Kuwai irana, likanupa Kuwai),11 which certainly
suggests that Kuwai is a liminal being, both male and female, who is not
‘of this world’, and who is both a sickness-giving spirit and a great
healer. In short, this deity is the paradoxical unity of opposites, extremely dan-
gerous should it mix with the uninitiated and women. To develop this further
would require a great deal more ethnographic background, which space
does not permit here.
11. The key notion of -kanupa can be translated as the dangerous state of being
‘mixed’. Its indissociable complement is that of tabu, separate, ‘closed’(itakawa). All of
Kuwai’s body is full of holes, kanupa. At girls’ first menstruation, they are also said to
be kanupa, and it is interesting that the Arawak-speaking Tariana people, who were
once neighbors to the Baniwa of the Aiary, used masks to represent Kue (= Kuwai)
who appeared as masked dancers at the initiation rituals. The masks were made out
of woven hair that had been cut at girls’ first menstruation ceremonies, along with the
fur of the black sloth. The masked figure would appear with a whip in hand and—one
detail that was noted about his body—it had three claws on its paw, just like the sloth.

A third story tells how shamanic knowledge was ‘distributed’ to all

the Baniwa villages. Initially, a child of the sun (not Kuwai) snuffed pariká
and transformed into a very powerful black jaguar whose predatory
powers came to be so dangerous that his father had to sacrifice him, later
throwing his dead body into the river. At every village the body passed,
the inhabitants would take a piece of the body—even the brains, which
went to a people who later became very powerful jaguar-shamans. Thus
jaguar shamanism was distributed to all Baniwa villages, and, until their
conversion to evangelicalism, most Baniwa villages had several of these
practicing jaguar shamans.
Shamanic Experiences with the ‘Teacher’ Plant

As we have seen in the first myth, pariká has the marked effect of ‘open-
ing the [shaman’s] vision’, stimulating clairvoyance. In cosmology, pariká
is intimately connected to shamanic voyages to all other levels of the
cosmos, even to the place of Nhiãperikuli. The shamans sing that pariká
‘raises a stairway’ for the shaman to ascend to the other levels of the
cosmos. With pariká the shaman transforms into (that is, he acquires the
agentivity of) a series of other spirit-beings, for his soul has left his body
and thus can assume any number of forms.
Figure 3. Shamans’ souls voyage on pariká
The shamans’ descriptions of their experiences with pariká can be very

elaborate. Here, I cite selected parts of the discourse by one of the most

experienced shamans, Mandu, with whom I have worked since my first

field trip in the 1970s. Thirty years later, we still maintain contact by
telephone conversations, and, with the generous help of his daughter, he
continues to teach me many aspects of his art and practice through taped
and filmed interviews.
In this interview, taped in the 1970s, he spoke of his travels to the
Other World, encounters with the divinities, and the powers that pariká
gives to the shamans. He began his apprenticeship as the result of a
sickness, attributed to witchcraft, which nearly killed him. He had a
vision in his sleep of a powerful shaman who came to cure him and told
him to return home from his journey to the houses of the dead. After
Mandu recovered, his parents sent him to learn from the same master
shaman who had cured him in his dream. I asked him to speak about
pariká and the following are some passages of what he said:
Long ago Nhiãperikuli made these shamans’ things for us. Then he gave us
these healing things. For us, our people. So we snuff this pariká, that lets us
know the world. For, since the beginning of time this pariká has been in
existence, for a long time we have had pariká. From the beginning of time
we have this pariká, this way to know the world. He gave us his blood, the
blood of Kuwai, which is pariká. The owner of pariká is Dzulíferi. Dzulíferi is
the owner of pariká and of all the sickness-things. But he gave them to us,
to us the people, our pariká. Thus, they snuff pariká, and then they see with
pariká. They see this Dzulíferi, they see this Kuwai. Then they see this, our
owner also, Nhiãperikuli. Then they see this Kamathawa [harpy eagle, pet of
Nhiãperikuli] also. Dzulíferi also gave us tobacco, this Dzulíferi is the owner
of tobacco, the owner of tobacco. But this tobacco is his plant, this Dzulíferi.
…
…Thus, it seems, what the master of the world said, thus the pajés16
return and tell it to the people. The pajés cannot speak nonsense, about
what the master of the world said. The pajé tells the people well, just as the
owner of knowledge told him. The owner of knowledge said this and that,
in such a way that the pajés are capable of understanding how it is. About
this world also. They are capable of knowing everything about the world,
about sickness too. Thus, the pajé tells what Dzulíferi said, this owner of
pariká, what he said, it seems, to his kin.
Later the pajé tells his kin other things also, everything that our owner
Nhiãperikuli told him, about what is going to happen in this world. The pajé
tells them what our owner said. Then, the pajé comes back and tells his kin,
what they saw and what the owner of the world showed to them…
Pariká changes everything, it shows everything to the pajés whatever it
may be. With it, this pariká, the pajés are capable of knowing the world.
Pariká shows to you in order that you see not just anything, it seems…
16. Pajés are shamans (in Baniwa, maliiri). Pajé is more commonly used in Amazo-
nia, so it will be left as such in the text.

(…) After they know everything about the world, the pajé comes back
and tells the people. They tell everything to the people how it is in the
beginning, before them, as Nhiãperikuli told the pajés. The pajés can become
like the master of the world, in their thought also. They make the world.
They can, in their thought (…). Everything—they cannot deceive on that.
They become very much like—like Nhiãperikuli was, so they are. There, the
pajés are like Nhiãperikuli. They make everything. They make the rocks,
they make the wood, they transform everything with pariká. They
transform themselves into wood, they transform themselves into jaguars,
they transform themselves into alligators, they transform themselves into
dolphins, they transform themselves into vultures, all of that in their
thought—they transform themselves into people also. Thus also, it seems,
they transform themselves into the master of the world. Then they are
capable of knowing the world.
Several points are important to note in this discourse: first, pariká is what
can be called a ‘teacher plant’, for it shows the shaman everything he
needs to know about the universe and things that are happening in it or
are about to happen. It is this knowledge that the shaman/pajé is
expected to teach his people. Mandu stressed that the pajé has the obliga-
tion to tell the people exactly what the deities told him; as an emissary
from the divinities, his messages are of vital importance not only for the
well-being of the patients whom he is treating, but also for the commu-
nity and its collective future. Secondly, and most importantly, pariká
propitiates the altered state of consciousness that allows the pajé to know
and to do what other sacred beings and divinities know and do. That is
to say, pariká propitiates the alteration of perspectives, in which the
shaman acquires the perspectives and agentivity of other kinds of beings
(see M. Carneiro da Cunha [1999], for a similar conclusion among pajés
of the southern Amazon). In ‘becoming like Nhiãperikuli’ and transform-
ing everything that exists in this world,18 Mandu explained that:
The pajé seeks the hidden world, the first world of Nhiãperikuli. In his
thought the pajé stays where Nhiãperikuli is and seeks to open [that is,
reveal] this hidden world. He uses the log and the feathers of the harpy
eagle Kamathawa in order to open it. This hidden world is the place of
happiness. When the hidden world opens for the pajé, he goes up to it. He
sits in the place of Dzuliferi and opens the world again. The pajé is near
Nhiãperikuli and sees the entire world. He can make everything as Nhiãperi-
kuli made in the beginning: as Nhiãperikuli saw the world in the beginning
in his thought.17 Then he can make the world. The pajé stays near the
18. For a more complete discussion of these discourses, see Wright 1998, 2005.
17. That is, as he formed an image of it. One article which I find helpful in under-
standing the discourses of the shaman about this ‘hidden world’ is by Overing,
‘Shaman as a Maker of Worlds’ (1990).

eternal sun in order to open the ancient and hidden world of Nhiãperikuli.
He sees the world becoming happy, that all people become happy, as in
the beginning. Thus the pajé makes the world better, not letting it come to
an end. The pajé knows when the world is going to come to an end; he
advises Nhiãperikuli and he doesn’t allow it to come to an end.
Here we have an extraordinary statement by a pajé of the salvific power

he detains. It is pariká that shows (inhata) the pajé all of this through a
series of visions of the Other World. What is the ‘ancient, hidden world
of happiness’ that the pajé reveals? Is it perhaps the first world, that
existed before the felling of the Great Tree of Kaali, when everything
would get done by itself, when people did not have to suffer or die,
when there was no poison or witchcraft in the world? Access to this
hidden world is restricted only to the most powerful of the pajés, very
few indeed have attained it—only the true prophets of whom there have
been several since the mid-nineteenth century (see Wright 1981, 2002,
2005). Through the psychoactive effects of pariká, the pajé ‘raises the
stairs’ (an image common to shamanism throughout the world) to the
Other World; he sees and communicates with the primordial beings who
inhabit the sky. These inform, advise, and assist him not only on the
form, character, and treatment of the sick in This World, but also of all
that is about to happen. This is undoubtedly what makes pariká the most
sacred of plants that the Baniwa shamans know.18
The Primordial Plantations

The following story is one narrator’s version of how the earth for gar-
dens came into being and how one important ‘soul-food’, tobacco, was
obtained by Nhiãperikuli; both are among the gifts the deities left for
humanity.
Nhiãperikuli Looks for the Earth, Gardens and Tobacco
(told by Luis Manuel of Ukuki village)
When Kuwai was born, for him our orphan father Nhiãperikuli,19 at his
birth, Kuwai was very small, very small was his child. Then Kuwai shat,
18. Shamans used to use Banisteriopsis caapi, yaje (ayahuasca), sometimes together
with pariká (see Wright 2005), but this practice seems to have become extremely
restricted to one or two pajés today.
19. Nhiãperikuli is called the ‘orphan’ because, as some narrators say, his father
and mother had been devoured by the animal-tribes that wandered over the first
world, killing and eating people. Other narrators say that in the beginning, there was
just a bone inside the ‘pot of the sun’. That bone was Nhiãperikuli, for the name
literally means ‘He-inside-the-bone’.

shat, and shat… This earth is his shit, the shit of Kuwai is this earth. The
earth grew a little, it was so small the earth was, thus was the earth long
ago, the first world for us. His earth then, of our orphan father was a stone,
thus, it was a stone, his village was of stone.
So Nhiãperikuli thought about this earth—was there no way for him to
get earth for the people to plant, to get plants for people to put in their
gardens? So he got earth from Kuwai. Like so, the first earth was very little.
The earth grew… Kuwai shat the earth, …Nhiãperikuli saw it. Then, the one
that the Whites call Adam, but that we know as Kaali in Baniwa, he saw the
earth and got it with Nhiãperikuli to make gardens on it. After that, Kaali
made gardens on it. After he made the gardens, then he got the food for us
that truly we have today as it was in the beginning. Kaali got plants from
Kuwai…all of them! Yams, bananas, all the plants… They were his, Kuwai’s.
Kaali, the one they call Adam, looked and got plants for their plantations.
Things for gardens, thus they made. Thus, in the beginning, the earth was,
since the beginning, for gardens. Then after, it was from then on truly that
we grew on it until today. That’s all, but the earth was very small in the
beginning. (…)
After that, Nhiãperikuli looked for this tobacco, Nhiãperikuli got it from
Dzuuli [Dzuliferi, his brother]. He got it from Dzuuli first! In the beginning.
This tobacco, Nhiãperikuli knows that it is good, ‘Give me a little, my
brother’, he said to Dzuuli. ‘So it is, I give it to you’, Dzuuli said to Nhiãperi-
kuli. He gave it to him, but it was his dry tobacco. ‘No, I want the other
kind that’s green for me to plant, a basketful of it’, Nhiãperikuli said. ‘Go
back home then’, Dzuuli said, ‘I will deliver it’. So Dzuuli would deliver it
to Nhiãperikuli’s village. Dzuuli went and there he met Nhiãperikuli’s
children there. Dzuuli approached them… He met those children, he came
up to them. He delivered the tobacco to them. ‘Where is Nhiãperikuli?’ he
asked the children. ‘He went out’, they answered. ‘I have brought tobacco,
this good tobacco for him’, Dzuuli said to those children. ‘This good
tobacco for him, I will leave the tobacco for him there behind the house’,
Dzuuli said. He went to the back of the house and planted the tobacco.
‘Now I am going away from you’, he said and that’s all, he left them and
went back home.
It was night when Nhiãperikuli returned and asked the children, ‘where
is Dzuuli?’ ‘He’s already gone back,’ they answered, ‘but he left something
good for you’. The night passed… The tobacco then grew and grew. Nhiã-
perikuli went to the back of his house and went out to see… Nhiãperikuli
went out and saw that it was full of tobacco. ‘Ooooh, so it will be’, he said,
‘For our descendants, for our others who will be born’. Then, he divided it
up for everyone, today, all our tobacco. All the tobacco that the Whites
have… There, those Whites what they have is different from ours… What
the Whites have, we don’t know how it is. This, what I am telling you, is
ours, of our people!
The episodes of the story begin with similar primordial conditions which
are static or sterile (the first earth is a rock, the excrement of Kuwai;
Nhiãperikuli has the dry tobacco and wants the green kind in order to

plant); a different condition is sought (Kaali gets the earth and plants
from Kuwai; Nhiãperikuli gets the green kind of tobacco from Dzuliferi)
which is described as ‘good’. This different condition is introduced and,
in the process, a transformation occurs in which a new, dynamic order is
created: the earth is cultivated with plants; the strong, green tobacco is
domesticated.20 The new order of fertility sustains life for humanity, and
is given to humanity, defining a meaningful and symbolic order in which
people can live and be prosperous.
The story of Kaali, however, continues beyond his obtaining the earth
and plants for plantations and develops over a series of episodes. Several
narrators thought that the figure of Kaali was really Nhiãperikuli; others
that they were distinct. All agreed that he was the source of cultivated
plants, especially manioc.21 Yet the story above states that he obtained all
plants from Kuwai. This is not necessarily a contradiction, for Kaali was
responsible for cultivated garden plants, while Kuwai is associated with
all fruits and palm trees.
The time sequence of all these stories, of who came first, seems to
matter little to narrators, really, since they all lived in the same ‘old
times’ (oopidali). While the story of the Great Tree of Kaali ends with
cultivated plants being distributed to ‘all the tribes’ (with, of course, the
narrator’s people getting more), the following story of Kaali and his
family has to do with the relations of garden production. The important
episode in Kaali’s life occurred after he was married and had several
children. According to one narrator, he attempted to plant manioc in his
son’s wife’s body, making—so it would seem—a garden in her belly, as
though she would then give birth to the plant. She quarreled with him
over this, Kaali’s wife quarreled with him, and the girl’s father quarreled
with him. Consequently, he took all of the plants from his garden and
20. Another episode not included in this narrative tells how Nhiãperikuli obtained
night. In the beginning it was always day; Nhiãperikuli’s wife tells him to get night
from her father. The ‘owner of night’ gives Nhiãperikuli a small and tightly shut little
basket, with instructions to open it only when he got back to his village. The basket
was so heavy that Nhiãperikuli stopped midway back home and opened the basket.
Darkness burst out covering the world. Nhiãperikuli and the animals and birds
ascended the trees and waited until they saw the sun returning from its journey across
the underworld and back. Nhiãperikuli had made the sun come back. Henceforth, time
was divided into two equal cycles: day, when people would work in their gardens,
and night, when people would rest.
21. One narrator said he also made several species of deer from a manioc plant,
which is why the deer like to eat manioc leaves. Other stories seem to link Nhiãperikuli
and Kaali through animals that like to eat manioc leaves and manioc bread.

abandoned his family, going to live far away.22 His children and wife
were left without food, and they were unable to plant new gardens since
Kaali made it rain every day. One day, while Kaali’s sons were trying to
set fire to the garden before planting, their father appeared to them
announcing that he would leave them forever. He started the fire in the
garden, then he got his ceremonial dance-staff, his shield, and his drum.
He ordered his son to give him a bit of manioc beer to drink and, when
the fire was burning high, he told him to push him into it. ‘Why do you
want me to do this to you, father?’ the son said, ‘Why do I have to burn
you, father?’ And his son pushed him into the fire. As he burned, Kaali
said, ‘Come back one week from now to see your garden! For, she, your
mother, will never know how the garden was planted’. At the appointed
time, his wife and children went back and saw that the garden was full
of every kind of manioc, pineapples, bananas, and other fruits. Kaali had
left them with an abundance of food. A huge manioc tree stood in the
garden and one of his sons cut it down. Kaali’s wife began the process of
scraping manioc tubers. His son prayed with tobacco at the center of the
garden.23 Kaali’s body lay in the earth; his knowledge (that is, all
horticultural knowledge) spread (was distributed, liniuetaka) all over the
earth. ‘Only one thing he left for us to eat: manioc bread, pete, this is his
body. “My body it will be”, he said. “You will eat it in this world”’
(ACIRA 1999: 112-15).
A simple reading of the story would say that the father/hero’s ‘deed’
of trying to make his daughter-in-law a manioc woman failed, and a
grave intra-familial conflict situation arose. To resolve the conflict, the
father abandons his family, taking all of his plants to two hills where he
lived alone. Seeing his family in desperate hunger, the father decides to
22. At the hills called Waliro at the headwaters of the Cuiary River. Some narrators
say that the reason why Kaali abandoned them was that his sons refused to work in
the gardens.
23. Today, at the planting of new gardens, a lengthy prayer to Kaali thayri, Kaali
priest (or master) is spoken to make the earth fertile for planting. It is called ‘turning
the earth’ and various parts of fishes are mixed in with the earth to ‘make the earth
good’. Each of the species of fish and animals invoked in this prayer has the name of a
body part of Kaali. Then, an image of the body of Kaali is made, complete with his
lance, painted, and then ‘lifted up’ by the back, ‘in order to make what we plant grow
well’. Great lizards are called from the four directions to bring various plants from the
Sun to the center of the garden. Again, these plants all have the names of parts of
Kaali’s body, as well as body parts of various other deities. Finally, the planter takes
earth in his hands and says: ‘I will see like the child of the Sun, I will plant’. (Note
how ‘seeing’ and making things come into being are again associated.) With all of this
correctly done, the garden will grow well.

sacrifice himself, leaving his body in the earth, which produced the
cultivated plants that were no longer his but of his entire family, indeed
all the peoples of the earth. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the story,
though, is how Kaali puts on the vestments of a ceremonial priest (shield,
staff, and the title -thayri, which could be rendered as ‘master’—in the
sense of a spiritual master, i.e. ‘priest’) suggesting that Kaali is the earthly
equivalent of the creator of humanity, Nhiãperikuli, and that, in the past,
there was a more elaborate ritual than what exists today. Some of the
prophets in Baniwa history were known by the rituals they performed in
the gardens, to make the gardens grow well (Wright 1981, 2005).
Catholic priests have insisted with the Baniwa that Kaali, being of the
earth, is in reality Adam of the Christian religion. ‘The first man made of
earth’, associated with a primordial tree that contains shamanic knowl-
edge, is suggestive of the biblical image of Eden. This interpretation,
however, fails to see that Kaali is the god of all cultivated food and is
himself food, having sacrificed himself of his own will in order to resolve
a situation of conflict in relations of production. In his comparative
works, the German ethnologist Alfred Jensen gathered numerous
examples of myths from Asiatic, African, Oceanic and South American
‘horticultural’ (Pflänzerkulturen) societies (Jensen 1948). The dramatic
climax of these narrations was the killing of a primordial being, whose
dismembered body parts transformed themselves into cultivated plants.
Central to this religious belief, held by Jensen to be a creation of the first
horticulturalists, is the cultivated plant. In accordance with its impor-
tance for humans, it is taken to be divine, but nevertheless or because of
this, the divine being has to be killed, for growth would only be conceiv-
able in close association with death. For Jensen, the ‘Killed Deity’ (Jensen
1948) embodies one and the same idea: killing is a prerequisite for
growth, and the primordial killing, which brought food and life to
humans, has to be perennially repeated in ritual (Kapfhammer 2009;
Streck 1997). This is a theme found in Baniwa myths and rituals related
to initiation also, involving the sacred flutes and trumpets, the bones of
the sacrificed deity Kuwai, which suggests the parallel between initiation
rites and garden-planting rites. We can now see how the stories line up
in a series of parallels: pariká, the teacher plant, propitiates the mediation
between humans and the primordial world; it cannot be taken by the
unprepared because to do so would mix together incompatible catego-
ries (e.g. the tapir who is already gluttonous, becomes a ravenous jaguar;
a woman’s menstrual blood cannot be treated as shaman’s snuff; Kuwai
is the mixture of opposites par excellence). Finally, shamans who in real
life have ‘mastered’, or gone beyond, that is, have gone further in their
proximity to the deities, come ‘close to’ becoming ‘masters’ (‘eternal

masters’), the deities themselves, who ‘see’ as the creators saw in the
beginning.
But why are pepper and tobacco so important as to be included among
the first gifts that the creator deities gave to the first ancestors who
emerged from the holes of Hipana falls? What do they have to do with
the well-being of human souls? Tobacco, as we have seen, was a pure
gift from Dzuliferi, Nhiãperikuli’s brother, to him, and, like pepper, is a
plant cultivated in home gardens (i.e. both are domesticated). Tobacco
promotes the health, well-being, and happiness of the soul. One smokes
fresh tobacco and passes around the cigar, saying ‘Alira’, which means
‘thanks’.
Capsicum pepper came into being when Nhiãperikuli, as the story goes,
was married to the daughter of ‘Grandfather piranha’, and one day
decided to accept his wife’s invitation to visit his father-in-law’s house in
the company of various birds, the allies of Nhiãperikuli. As Garnelo
astutely observes, the story underscores Nhiãperikuli’s ambiguous posi-
tion, since he feeds off his wife’s and father-in-law’s kin, that is, fish.
The story not only tells how pepper came to be created by Nhiãperikuli
who uses it to ‘cook’ the raw flesh which his father-in-law was going to
use to kill him, thereby neutralizing its poison, but also explains the
appearance of an illness (whíokali, amoebic dysentery) associated with
eating raw or undercooked fish, whose secretions can destroy the vic-
tim’s internal organs. A number of murder attempts occur while the hero
is at his father-in-law’s house, but Nhiãperikuli manages to escape thanks
to his skills and shamanic power. The permanent by-products of this
episode are pepper and the whíokali illness (see Garnelo 2007; Garnelo
and Wright 2001).
Pepper is thus like a shield against the potential harm of raw or rotten
flesh; it is also like an arrow in killing any animal or human food that
may still be ‘alive’; and it is like fire in that it ‘burns’ or cooks raw food.24
24. In the lengthy chants to ‘bless’ food for people undergoing rites of passage,
pepper is compared to all of these elements: the arrow, fire, and the shield. It is
polysemic in that sense. The Baniwa also have an expression, ‘burning sloth fur is a
good medicine for pepper’, which is a marvelous and pithy statement of what would
take many pages to explain. Enough to remember that Kuwai’s body (that is, his
animal-body-projection) is the black sloth and, of course, that Kuwai was burned in a
huge fire at the end of the first initiation rite. This moment in myth coincides with the
moment in the ritual when new initiates are given pepper and manioc bread to eat,
signaling that they are fully human beings. Manioc bread, as noted previously, is the
body of Kaali, likewise burned in a fire.

Concluding Remarks
This article has discussed the religious symbolism of shamans’ snuff and
manioc, and to a lesser extent, pepper and tobacco. Its original intention
was to include plants that were derived from the bodies of predatory
beings of the primordial world as well—such as timbó and curare.
Further explorations will look, with equal complexity, at both of these
and perhaps others.25 Thus, the conclusions we draw here represent only
a part of the domain of plants and their religious significance.
Pariká and manioc do have one major element in common: both derive
from the same deity, Kaali, the source of all foods. But they come from
two distinct periods of the cosmos: the first, before humanity had been
born; the second, when this world had already been formed. Geographi-
cally, the main reference points for the two myths are distinct: the Great
Tree of Kaali was located on a hill of the upper Uaupes River; the hill of
Kaali’s great plantation is called Waliiro, located in the middle of the
forest between the Cubate and Içana rivers. The two places may serve as
cardinal points in the terrestrial organization of cosmic space.
The story of pariká had Nhiãperikuli and his tribe of shamans pitted
against their animal-‘grandfathers’, the tapir and others. The story of
Kaali-thayri focuses on conflict in human relations in the production of
gardens and staple food. Predation is not a central theme of either the
pariká or the manioc stories, except at the moments when the tapir trans-
forms into a jaguar with an insatiable appetite, which is quickly sub-
dued, and, even then, predation is not the key issue, but rather the
mixing of two elements that should be kept separate. The knowledge
and practice of the pajés were only ‘tamed’ and distributed, according to
the story, after the child of the sun was killed and his body floated
downriver for every village to receive its share.
Pariká’s most important power is to reveal the hidden, the invisible,
what is secret in this world, including witchcraft. Regarding the latter,
pariká is an instrument against which pajés may control the actions of
witches. In the Other World, it both assists in locating lost souls, and in
healing sick people of This World in the Other World first. In short,
pariká possesses the enormous power to make the pajé ‘know the
world’—to reveal all that is happening in it and what will happen in the
future. This does not refer to power in the political sense of hierarchy
and domination, but rather the power to act as emissary from the divini-
ties and to guide humans into living in harmony, the much-desired state
25. My hope is that the continuation of this study may be published in a future
issue of this journal.

of well-being and ‘happiness’. It is a relation of trust that people invest in

the pajés that they (the pajés) will not ‘deceive’ them.
Manioc, we might say, is parallel to pariká in its social and religious
importance. Pariká is to the shamans in their intermediary relations
between the celestial deities and humans as manioc bread is to the
‘masters’/priests, thayri, in their immediate relations between the deity
of the earth and humans. Whereas the story of pariká occurs predomi-
nantly on the vertical axis of the cosmos (the link between the Other
World and This World), the story of manioc is framed by the horizontal
extremities of this earth (where Kaali’s plantations were located). This
perhaps explains the elaborate rituals of garden-planting which exist at
least in the memory of the elders, and why some of the prophets of the
past were said to have powers over the gardens. The myth of Kaali is
similar to stories in other cultures of the divine being who sacrificed
himself to his people or is sacrificed by his people, whom he has aban-
doned or who have rejected him, and the transformation of this god into
food for the health and prosperity of the people. Kaali was sacrificed in
the great fire but left his body in the earth (the very name Kaali means
‘white earth’) to be eaten in the form of manioc bread. In that way, Kaali
attained immortality, much like the figure of Kuwai, the child of the sun
who was sacrificed in a huge bonfire and whose body was transformed
into the paxiuba palm tree, through which the men initiate their children
for all times (see Hill 1993; Journet 1995; Wright 1998) and whose blood
is pariká. The Kuripako, whom N. Journet worked with, associate the
five-leaved manioc plant not only with Kaali but also with Nhiãperikuli
which makes sense of the phrase associated with him, ‘our orphan
father’. Manioc is a self-generating plant; in the eyes of some it is an
orphan, to others, it is immortal.
Returning now to the point mentioned in the Introduction regarding
Viveiros de Castro’s discussion of ‘perspectivism’, I wish to raise several
questions regarding his instigating article ‘Shamanism and Sacrifice’
(2002: 59-472). In it, the author discusses the distinctions between
shamans, priests, and prophets. Initially, it is important to note that he
leaves completely out of the discussion the figure of ‘witches’ or ‘assault
sorcerers’, which, Whitehead and I have maintained (2004), are religious
specialists of equal importance to the others but rarely studied not only
because of the secrecy and danger attached to them but also because of
the incapacity of Western culture to accept such practices as part of a
cultural ‘poetic’ (see the Introduction to our book for further discussion).
If the notion of ‘predation by enemy others’ is so central to Amazonian
cosmologies as De Castro and his students argue, then it is highly perti-
nent to raise this question and its relation to the plants used in assault

sorcery. This is crucial to the understanding of both the figures of

‘poison owners’ among the Baniwa and Kanaima practitioners among the
Patamona. The ‘poison owners’ derive their practice from the original
figure of Kuwai and work predominantly with plant poisons, which are
numerous (see my article in Whitehead and Wright 2004).
Viveiros de Castro goes on to discuss the well-known distinction in
South American ethnology of horizontal and vertical shamans, both
being ideal types of shamans, the first exemplified by a sacrificer-victim
and the second by the priests (2002: 470). Prophetic movements, for
which the Northwest Amazon is a classic area (Wright 2002) were
‘always commanded by the horizontal-type shamans’ (Viveiros de
Castro 2002: 470). He ponders, however, that the horizontal/vertical
distinction is not as important as the potential within shamanism to have
various ‘derivatives’—one that goes in the direction of priestly transfor-
mation, the other, prophetic transformation. ‘Prophetism would, in this
case, be the result of the historical “heating up” of shamanism, while the
emergence of the well-defined priestly function would be the result of a
political “cooling off”, that is, its submission to social power’ (2002: 471).
With regard to whether the Northwest Amazon prophets were ‘always
commanded by the horizontal-type shamans’, in my research of the past
thirty years on Northwest Amazon prophets, I have found no evidence
that would permit making such an assertion.
Secondly, with regard to the potential for derivatives of shamans,
either prophets or priests, or even a mixture of both, the model pre-
sented by the story of Kaali is that of the priest being sacrificed as a
consequence of marital disruption; the priest becoming a divinity at the
same time his body is absorbed by the earth; and, as though to heal
social conflict, the body of the divinity/father is then transformed into
life-giving food. It is also worth recalling that the growth of gardens has
been one of several central themes of Baniwa prophetic movements.
Baniwa mythic models seem to be a complex mixture of shaman/priest/
prophet and, beyond that, are coherent with the mythic models of
Pflänzenkulturen, as defined by Jensen above.
Thirdly, far from being symbols of ‘predatory alterity’, the model of
Kaali is that of a pacifier who avoids open conflict by taking refuge in
inaccessible places. Similarly, the story of pariká is of the divinity as
pacifier of animals/humans-turned-predators. Thus, both pariká and
manioc bread are life-giving substances that the divinities left for humans
in order that they may live in peace.
Finally, I raise an alternative interpretation to those acts which might
be considered as ‘predation’ according to Viveiros de Castro’s model.
The notion of a dangerous ‘mixing’ of two elements that should be kept

separate and which produces intolerably ambiguous situations is far

closer to the Baniwa understanding of why such situations are dan-
gerous than the supposition that they represent ‘predation’. Similarly,
the theory of Amerindian perspectivism is considerably more complex
when we examine the variety of situations in which perspectives trans-
form because the bodies of subjects actually become Other. Not all is
predatory; a great deal has to do with peace.
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grundlage des rituellen konsums halluzinogener schnupfdrogen in Südamerika
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———. 2009. ‘Divine Child and Trademark. Economy, Morality, and Cultural
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de Letras).

JSRNC (online) ISSN 1749-4915
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Book Reviews
__________________________________
Fikret Berkes, Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management
(Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 1999), pp. xvi + 209, $51.95 (case), ISBN: 1-56032-694-
8. Review doi: 10.1558/jsrnc.v3i1.154.
Fikret Berkes’s compact volume is an essential piece of the rapidly growing literature
on traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK. In three concise sections (3–4 chapters
each), Berkes provides a splendid literature review (section 1), rich examples taken
largely from his own fieldwork among the Cree of the Canadian subarctic (section 2),
and concludes with a bold affirmation of the dynamic nature and sustainable future of
local and indigenous knowledge systems (section 3). Berkes acknowledges ambiguity
(there is no widely agreed upon definition of TEK) and expresses some reservations
about the word ‘traditional’, because ‘tradition’ is static whereas ‘local’ and ‘indigen-
ous’ knowledge systems are frequently invented and adapted to meet contemporary
needs. For his purposes, he considers TEK to be a culturally transmitted ‘knowledge-
practice-belief complex’ (p. 14) which is concerned primarily with the relations
between living beings, including humans.
The ‘sacred ecology’ of the title is a broad category, making implicit reference to the
non-dualistic view of nature and culture among many indigenous societies. The moral
and ethical context for TEK follows from the supposition that if nature is imbued with
sacredness, and if humanity is inseparably part of nature, it becomes impossible to
differentiate religious ethics from ecology. In Berkes’s view, this is the legacy of pan-
theism and animism among indigenous peoples, a legacy only present as a residue in
the mystical branches of Western monotheism (e.g. St. Francis of Assisi). The ‘reli-
gious or ritual representation of resource management’ (p. 22) is the crucial means by
which indigenous peoples have succeeded as resource managers, but ultimately reli-
gion itself is not the key; rather, it is simply a powerful ethical and moral code. Berkes
would have Western scientific ecology learn this lesson from TEK and adopt a secular
moral code. Fascinatingly, the Cree hunters and fishers who are the central examples
of this book have themselves been Christians for generations, but nonetheless retain
their strong spiritual attitudes toward fish and game. The obligation of respect to
other beings has not been eroded, despite the efforts of missionaries.
Berkes argues that TEK is not a panacea but that it is still invaluable. Indigenous
peoples have occasionally been implicated in the mismanagement of resources and
the Natives’ identification as ‘original ecologists’ has at times been exaggerated. But
by highlighting the scientific accuracy of indigenous systems of biological classifi-
cation (‘folk taxonomies’) and the successful management of varied resources for
countless generations, Berkes paints as foolish those scientific critics who have dis-
missed TEK as laden with superstition.
Book Reviews 155
My only critique of this book is that the role of the sacred is not addressed suffi-
ciently throughout, especially in Chapter 8, which offers an otherwise compelling
argument about the dynamic production of local ecological knowledge. The view that
emerges from this chapter is one of common property theory—that the improvement
of local security for resource use-rights is the key to fostering the growth of sound
resource management and the sustainability of small-scale economies. Berkes’s caveat
is that the destruction of resources follows the free-for-all exploitation of open-access,
regardless of the indigenous status of the community. This does not necessarily con-
tradict the major argument of the book that moral and spiritual elements of TEK are
the means for the enforcement of land-management customs. However, these argu-
ments are more-or-less independent, and the subtle shift in emphasis undermines the
coherency of the text.
In general, that this book seems to embody numerous contradictions is intriguing
rather than frustrating. Berkes’s quantitative approach remains faithful to his roots in
human ecology, a subfield of cultural anthropology located on the empiricist/ positiv-
ist end of the spectrum. Yet he ultimately asserts that the positivist paradigm of West-
ern science is woefully inadequate to address the qualitative virtues of TEK. He
argues that TEK is the manifestation of an ‘indigenous science’ grounded in empirical
observation, but one that violates fundamentally many of the central tenets of Western
scientific resource-management practice. This is the central paradox in the field; ‘how
do some of these societies do such a good job of managing resources, given that the
very notion of management is inconsistent with their worldviews?’ (p. 118). The proof
is in Berkes’s meticulous approach to the data. One possible explanation is what
ecologists call the ‘population compensatory response’; fish populations are healthier
where natives practice optimal foraging, as fish species respond with increased fertil-
ity and early maturation. The lopsided, size-restricted harvesting of conventional
resource management does not elicit a similar response. Similar examples abound.
Northern Native Americans believe that animals willingly make themselves available
to hunters, and that no human action can ultimately threaten a species. However, a
disrespectful and wasteful attitude can offend the animals and cause them to
withdraw their support for people. So improper and gluttonous hunting practices are
still implicated in the reduction of animal populations, but the Cree attribute this fact
to the animals’ spiritual agency, the innate power of non-human creatures, rather than
to the mere fact of overhunting.
In conclusion, this book is a rare gem which should be of general interest to natural
scientists, social scientists, and religion scholars, and which is nonetheless accessible
enough to be an introductory textbook on TEK. Berkes is neither a cynic nor a roman-
tic, but is realistic about the potential for an ethically construed TEK to positively
influence the field of natural resource management.
Joseph A.P. Wilson
Department of Anthropology
University of Florida
joawilso@ufl.edu

Graham Harvey (ed.), Readings in Indigenous Religions (London: Continuum, 2002),

371 pp., $70.00 (cloth), ISBN: 0-8264-5100-4. Review doi: 10.1558/jsrnc.v3i1.156.
This substantial and dense volume is a sequel to be read in conjunction with Harvey’s
earlier anthology (Harvey 2000), but it can just as easily be conceived as a prequel; the
first section of the Readings in Indigenous Religions provides the theoretical underpin-
nings for both books. Seventeen chapters draw almost exclusively upon the native
traditions of Australasia, North American Indians, and to a lesser extent Africa, to
exemplify indigenous religions, only lightly touching upon those of Asia and neglect-
ing the Circumpolar Arctic and South America entirely. Harvey’s earlier collection
was only slightly more evenhanded in this regard. Harvey seems to apologize for this
deficiency when he states that ‘it would be foolish to attempt to say something about
every indigenous religion in a single book (however long)’ (p. 10). This is obviously
true, but given the enormous bulk of this collection presenting itself as representative,
this neglect of entire continents is not so easily dismissed. The motives for this skewed
distribution possibly relate to Harvey’s theoretical interests, though a subtle Anglo-
phone bias might also be in play, and unavoidable under the circumstances. Nonethe-
less, the ambition of this project is commendable and it represents a formidable
contribution to a diverse and growing field.
In a notable improvement over the format of the earlier book, each chapter now
includes a thought-provoking introductory section written by the editor, illuminating
the cohesion of the selections, as an informative road-sign identifying the theoretical
and methodological currents of the text. Despite this, the book is inappropriate for
introductory-level courses, because it presumes a considerable depth of theoretical
foreknowledge appropriate for a graduate seminar. It does, however, provide remark-
able insights into both early and contemporary anthropological views of indigenous
religions. In some ways this text is straddling the fence between modernist and
postmodernist epistemologies, validating the politics of postcolonial critique, while
simultaneously rejecting an uncritical embrace of postmodernist theory and noting a
prevalent indigenous skepticism toward novel Western academic trends.
Part I, ‘Ontology’, might also have been called ‘Metaphysics of Personhood’, as it is
concerned with the study of a diverse range of animate entities endowed with person-
hood. This approach follows closely upon the first chapter, Irving Hallowell’s classic
article ‘Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and Worldview’, originally published in Diamond
(1960). While most of the subsequent chapters were written during the 1990s, many
still refer back to this earlier era of scholarship, as does much of the first volume
(Harvey 2000), hence Hallowell’s piece is the foundation of the whole enterprise.
Marylyn Strathern’s chapter is a comparative study of biological metaphors for social
reproduction, as expressed through gift-giving in Melanesia and in the West. This
clearly ties back to the concluding section (Part III: ‘Gifts’) of the earlier book (Harvey
2000). Nurit Bird-David’s chapter on the animism of south-Indian Nayaka hunter-
gatherers has conscripted Hallowell’s and Strathern’s earlier approaches in an effort
to challenge Tylorian ‘modernist self-models’ (p. 79) perpetuated in contemporary
anthropology and serving to reinforce old stereotypes of animism as ‘simple religion’
and ‘failed epistemology’ (p. 72).
Part II, ‘Performance’, continues with Margaret Drewal’s discussion of the cyclical
departure and return of spirits to the earth in Yoruba funerary rites. Her piece is also

Book Reviews 157
focused on ‘ontology’ just as much as any of the articles in the previous section. Like-
wise, Kenneth Morrison’s chapter on Yaqui American Indian appropriation and use of
Christianity, though placed at the end of Part I, is equally concerned with perfor-
mance as such. The ambiguity of these section transitions is clearly intentional and
may reflect Harvey’s motives to deconstruct intellectual dichotomies and dissolve the
boundaries between epistemological categories. Three of the chapters in Part II con-
cern African peoples (Drewal, Turner, and Lerner), while the other two concern North
American Indians (Stover) and Korean shamanism (Kendall), respectively. Among the
great insights of this section is the demonstrated futility of the modernist ideals of
intellectual detachment during participant observation, and the critique of the sterile
universalizing tendencies of salvage ethnography (i.e. that which patronizingly seeks
to reclaim scraps of ‘authentic’ aboriginality, imperiled by inevitable modernization).
In looking for a ‘pure’, ancestral, and generalized state of indigenous religion, mod-
ernists have failed to comprehend the dynamic engagement with the present,
sometimes dismissed as syncretism, which is at the heart of every living tradition. It is
through exchange with contemporary ‘others’ that ancient traditions are maintained.
Then in Chapter 9, Berel Dov Lerner interprets Evans-Pritchard’s work to provoca-
tively suggest that the study of indigenous secularism has been grossly neglected.
Although most of the component chapters are interesting enough on their own
merits, the weakest section as a whole is Part III: ‘Knowledge’, because it far too
narrowly focuses on contemporary New Zealand to constitute an adequate introduc-
tion to indigenous knowledge systems. The unfortunate decision to include Ward
Churchill’s truculent polemic ‘I am Indigenist’ (Chapter 14) as the lone viewpoint
outside of Australasia is the only blemish worth mentioning in detail. Since the
publication of this volume, it has become clear that Churchill has systematically built
his academic career on plagiary and misrepresentation (see Brown 2007), leading to
his recent dismissal from a post at the University of Colorado. While Harvey may be
forgiven for including so prominent a scholar as Churchill in this volume, a greater
familiarity with the American Indian Studies literature would have ‘red-flagged’
Churchill as an authority of dubious status within the field. As early as 1996,
Churchill was accused in the pages of American Indian Quarterly of being a charlatan
and agent provocateur, subverting rather than supporting indigenous activist causes
(see LaValle 1996).
The tightly knit theoretical threads of the first two sections become more unraveled
and diffused by the concluding chapters. The final section, Part IV: ‘Land’, ends
abruptly after two good essays. Deborah Bird Rose’s article makes a clear argument in
favor of political engagement in the application of Maori traditional ecological
knowledge within the contexts of global environmentalism and academic activism.
The final chapter, taken from Richard Nelson’s (1983) ethnography of the Koyukon
Athapaskans of Alaska, gracefully communicates Koyukon views of the landscape as
animate entity. Nelson’s piece appears as a good example of the type of ethnographic
engagement advocated in Part II. However, Nelson’s lack of explicit theoretical
positioning stands in contrast to most of the previous chapters. Limited deficiencies
aside, the majority of selections in this anthology are expertly chosen and arranged,
forming a substantive and coherent (even animate!) body of interwoven discourses,
sure to stand the test of time.

References
Brown, Thomas. 2007. ‘Ward Churchill’s Twelve Excuses for Plagiarism’, Plagiary:
Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification 2: 28-39.
Diamond, Stanley (ed.). 1960. Culture in History (New York: Columbia University
Press).
Harvey, Graham (ed.). 2000. Indigenous Religions: A Companion (London: Cassell).
LaVelle, John. 1996. ‘Review Essay, Review of: Indians Are Us?: Culture and
Genocide in Native North America by Ward Churchill’, American Indian
Quarterly 20: 109-18.
Nelson, Richard K. 1983. Make Prayers to the Raven (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press).
Joseph A.P. Wilson

Department of Anthropology
University of Florida
joawilso@ufl.edu

[JSRNC 3.1 (2009) 159] JSRNC (print) ISSN 1749-4907
JSRNC (online) ISSN 1749-4915
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Notes for Contributors
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The Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture is the affiliated journal of
the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture. It is
fully peer reviewed and published quarterly (simultaneously in print and
online) in March, June, September, and December.
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JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF

‘We Come from Trees’: The Poetics of Plants

Singing to Estranged Lovers:

Visions of Christ in the Amazon:

The Celestial Umbilical Cord: Wild Palm Trees,

The Fruit of Knowledge and the Bodies of the Gods:

Notes for Contributors 159

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2008.

Robin M. Wright and Bron Taylor

The focus of this special issue is on the religion-nature-culture nexus

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

This language went beyond that of the Endangered Species Act to

1. In 1974, a conference on the ‘Rights of Non-Human Nature’ was held at Cali-

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

1. In February of 2006 a Presidential Decree ordered the expulsion of the North

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

dispersed resources. The Jotï dedicate about 80% of their subsistence

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

certain plants, arthropods, fungi, fish, birds, and mammals as well as

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

to the person’s agentivity. In that sense, both what could be considered

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

reinstituting the current availability and presence of the four essential

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

humanity is not just a physio-biological given but also a socio-cultural

Creation of Human Society

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

Walule miji jotï

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© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

Individual Human Creation

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5. Systematic biological determinations are not provided when bioactivity of

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Figure 1. Body-painting of infant and pre-adolescent boy

6. Numerous beings, but especially three kinds of feared polymorphic predators:

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© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

Figure 2. Young man playing a cane flute (Guadua sp.)

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

Movements are interactions among the many characters (plants, sun,

Figure 3. Ae ja, a wise man, holding the traditional wooden shaft

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

Early in the twentieth century, the Estonian biologist von Uexküll

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

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3. Intangible components of humanity are produced and given

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

Tod Dillon Swanson

In his book Tsewa’s Gift, Michael F. Brown studied relations to plants

would Aguaruna women invest so much anxiety into gardening when