Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon Read Online Free PDF Page B

says they sound like ping ping dan dan. These are the spirits
who help provide the diagnosis; they look at the patient and tell don Roberto
where the problem lies, where to suck, what songs to sing, what healing
plants to call; they also help him to heal, by blowing on the patients and waving their hands over them. "Treatment begins with the calling of spirits," says
don Juan Flores Salazar, "the studying of what plants are
    SMALL HEALINGS
    It is full dark. The frogs have started calling from the trees. There is one that
sounds surprisingly like the ringing of a cell phone. Outside the hut, the jungle is breathing in the darkness-the river flowing, the wind in the palm trees,
the delicate susurration of the shacapa, the syncopated singing of the magical
icaros. I am beginning to feel really nauseous. Oh boy, here it comes, I think.

    Once all the healing spirits have assembled in response to don Roberto's
icaros, he begins the treatment of individual patients. He walks around the
room, stopping before individuals, checking whether they are mareado, hallucinating. He approaches some of the patients, stands in front of them, and
does relatively quick healings. He draws crosses on their palms and foreheads
with agua de florida, sings icaros, and rattles his shacapa leaves, touching
the bundle to their head and torso. He bends over and blows tobacco smoke
into their bodies through the crowns of their heads, each with a soft voiceless
sound-pshooo....
    Meanwhile, I am vomiting. Among mestizos, vomiting is accepted as natural and healthy; indeed, for many participants in this healing session, it is
the vomiting, not the visions, that is the primary goal. But, to a North American like me, vomiting is a painful loss of control, a humiliating admission of
weakness, often resisted, done in private; my embarrassed attempts to silence
the sounds of my vomiting result in strangled retching, horrible sounds. In
the context of ayahuasca, at least for those on the ayahuasca path, the giving
up of control to the doctores, the plant teachers, is a lesson in itself, one I have
still to learn.
    BIG HEALINGS
    Then the most serious healing begins. The patients requiring special attention are called up to the front, walking by themselves or helped forward by
friends and relatives. One by one, the most seriously sick first, they sit or lie in
front of the room, before the cloth where don Roberto has laid out his implements. Sometimes he asks them, "Where does it hurt? What is your problem?"
Then he sings over them, shaking his shacapa, touching it to the places where
they claim affliction. The patient is touched, prodded, as don Roberto seeks
out the place where the illness is lodged in the form of a magic dart; then he
blows tobacco smoke on the place, rubs it to loosen the affliction from the
flesh in which it is embedded.
    Then he ceases his singing and begins making extraordinary and dramatic
sounds of belching, sucking, gagging, and spitting. He is drawing up his
mariri, his magical and protective phlegm, to make sure that what he sucks
from the body of his patient cannot harm him; then he loudly and vigorously
sucks out the affliction, the magic dart, the putrid flesh or stinging insect,
the magically projected scorpion or razor blade. He gags audibly at its vicious power and noisily spits it out on the ground. I watch don Roberto do
his work-a synesthetic cacophony of perfumes, tobacco smoke, whispering, whistling, blowing, singing, sucking, gagging, the insistent shaking of the
shacapa leaves, the internal turmoil, the inchoate visions. When the healing is
done, don Roberto blows mapacho smoke into the patient through the crown
of the head, over the place from which the sickness was sucked, and over the
patient's entire body, cleansing and protecting both inside and out.

    It is the medicine that tells don Roberto which icaros to sing, what healing
plants are needed. He hears this as a voice speaking