The Gospel According to Ayahuasca
and Santo Daime
This essay appeared in The Journal of Religion Nature and Culture [JSRNC 3.1 (2009) 66-98] JSRNC (print) ISSN 1363-7320 doi: 10.1558/jsrnc.v3i1.66 JSRNC (online) ISSN 1743-1689. For a PDF of this article please contact me.
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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.
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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 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 collapsing 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 scriptural 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 relation 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 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 Amazonian riverine 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 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 collapsing 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 scriptural 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 relation 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 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 Amazonian 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).
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Figure 1. Malpighaceae Banisteriopsis caapi
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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 spiritually 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 compare their experience of suffering under the effects of ayahuasca to Christ’s suffering on the cross.
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 compare their experience of suffering under the effects of ayahuasca to Christ’s suffering on the cross.
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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).
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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:
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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).
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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 “narrative”, 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.
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 “narrative”, 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 palimpsest, 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 contexts, 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.
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 palimpsest, 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 contexts, 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.
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In the time before, 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).
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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 structure 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 (Swanson 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:
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 structure 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 (Swanson 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:
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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).
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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 intimate 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.
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 intimate 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.
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 traditionally (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 possesses 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 competitors 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 alteration, the Aguarico story cuts to the chase by dispelling any confusing background material and adeptly identifies a powerful, locally recognizable 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:
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 alteration, the Aguarico story cuts to the chase by dispelling any confusing background material and adeptly identifies a powerful, locally recognizable 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:
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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
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
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…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 disseminating 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 missionaries 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, dangerous, 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.
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,
Historically, since the conquest, Catholic and later Evangelical missionaries 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, dangerous, 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.
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,
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…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).
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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 mountain, 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.
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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).
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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 inquisition 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 conversion 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 specialists, 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 redemption, but rather represents the sign of his conquest and humiliation. This in turn aligns him with Native Amazonians and Andeans in their relation 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 Centurion’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:
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 inquisition 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 conversion 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 specialists, 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 redemption, but rather represents the sign of his conquest and humiliation. This in turn aligns him with Native Amazonians and Andeans in their relation 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 Centurion’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:
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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 Tío, 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 inaccurate vision. The ají tests the demons for the nature of their true spirit. They fail the test by transforming into toads, revealing their true characters as creatures of darkness.
Again, Christian elements combine with Amazonian details to create a powerful story, spicing up the original version through the embellishment 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 opportunity 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 innovations, 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 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 traditionally mediated by ayahuasca. At the same time, the Amazonian elements 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 Mediterranean. 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 multiple 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-incarnated in his Second Coming within the alchemical mix of this Amazonian brew.
In Bolivia, June Nash and later Michael Taussig recorded the sacrifices of llamas, coca leaves, and aguardiente required to El Tío, 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 inaccurate vision. The ají tests the demons for the nature of their true spirit. They fail the test by transforming into toads, revealing their true characters as creatures of darkness.
Again, Christian elements combine with Amazonian details to create a powerful story, spicing up the original version through the embellishment 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 opportunity 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 innovations, 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 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 traditionally mediated by ayahuasca. At the same time, the Amazonian elements 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 Mediterranean. 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 multiple 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-incarnated 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 reportedly 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,
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,
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…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).
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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.
2. For an historical account of battles between yachajs in Brazil, see Wright 2004: 82-109.
3. Tod Swanson, personal communication, September 2008.
4. For an analysis of Indian suffering under the Conquest and the corresponding meaning of the crucifixion, see Swanson 1986: 140-54.
2. For an historical account of battles between yachajs in Brazil, see Wright 2004: 82-109.
3. Tod Swanson, personal communication, September 2008.
4. For an analysis of Indian suffering under the Conquest and the corresponding meaning of the crucifixion, see Swanson 1986: 140-54.
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