Review of the book “O Uso Ritual da Ayahuasca” (“The
Ritual Use of Ayahuasca”) by
Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Wladimyr Sena Araújo (Eds.)
While studies of the indigenous use
of the psychotropic drink ayahuasca (or yajé) in the Spanish-speaking countries
of the Amazon region have resulted in an impressive bibliography over the past
few decades, relatively little has been published to date about the equivalent
practices in Brazil. This gap has now
been filled by a anthology of 26 essays by a variety of Brazilian and foreign
investigators, entitled O Uso Ritual da
Ayahuasca (The Ritual Use of Ayahuasca) and edited by the Brazilian
anthropologists Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Wladimyr Sena Araújo. It is an
outgrowth of a congress on the subject held in 1997 by the Unicamp University
of Campinas, São Paulo State which, aiming for a multidisciplinary approach,
invited social scientists, doctors, psychologists and government officials to
discuss the multiple dimensions of its ritual
use.
The anthology goes far beyond
questions of ceremony, cosmology or altered states of awareness. In fact, we
might say that it is three books in one. The first section covers the use of
ayahuasca among indigenous and mestizo groups in different Amazonian countries.
This includes some original research into practices among rubber gatherers in
the jungles of Brazil, but there is little information about the way that
country´s Indians employ it, which seems to confirm that the heart of
traditional use lies in the piedmont jungles of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and
Bolivia The third section, including
contributions by foreign experts like D.J. Mckenna, J. C. Callaway, J. Ott and
B. Shanon, deals with the brew´s pharmacological, medical and psychological
effects. While providing useful
information, these two sections do not cover much new ground, at least for the
reader familiar with the literature already available in English. In my
opinion, the second one, on the Brazilian ayahuasca religions, is the
strongest, for never before has the subject been covered in such a
comprehensive and detailed form.
I am speaking, of course, from the
standpoint of a foreign reader. The
overview of ayahuasca that it presents is probably not so accessible in
Portuguese, hence its value to the Brazilian public, whereas we know little of
the syncretic uses of ayahuasca that are unique to Brazil. For this reason, the
book merits an English translation.
One clue to the significance of the
Brazilian phenomena is found in an essay by the Colombian doctor Germán
Zuluaga, who helped found an association of indigenous yajé healers in Colombia
whose purpose is to protect the “purity” of their practices from
commercialization by the white man´s world and draft a code of ethics for the
shamans themselves. Zuluaga is sceptical about attempts to adapt a custom so
intimately associated with those cultures to western religious, therapeutic,
new age or humanistic uses. Indeed, he frankly states that “he who is familiar
with the true value of indigenous yajé would never wish to experience it in
another context”.
Nevertheless, as the anthology
shows, Brazil has elaborated what is virtually an alternative “school” of
ayahausca with at least 10,000 adepts (by Labate´s estimate) who belong to
legally-recognized “churches” that hold
rituals in established centers on a regular basis throughout the country and
have communities in the jungle that grow the plants and prepare the remedy for
themselves and their urban branches. Moreover,
considering that the Indians represent less than 1% of the population in
Colombia and only a minority of that minority uses yajé, it might be argued that the absorption of ayahuasca rituals into
that fusion of beliefs so
characteristic of Brazilian popular
religion has enabled ayahuasca to have a stronger impact on
mainstream society in Brazil than in neighboring countries. While this may not
invalidate Zuluaga´s claim, the ritual use of ayahuasca in Brazil is a reality
that can no longer be ignored or rejected as “ inauthentic ”. In “Diary of the trip” by Walter Dias Jr and
other personal accounts of the ayahuasca experience found in the book, it is
clear that, in addition to being flourishing, colorful and well-organized, the
Brazilian ayahuasca movement is motivated by sincere spiritual longings.
The anthology presents a detailed
study of the origins, development, creeds, rituals and present situation of the
three principal ayahuasca churches of Brazil: Santo Daime, União Vegetal and Barquinha. Some people might
say four: it wasn´t until I read the
book that I found out that the original
Daime movement founded in 1930 by a 7
foot-tall Black laborer named Raimundo
Irineu Serra split into two branches,
Alto Santo and Cefluris, in the 1970s, among other reasons because they differed
about who was the legitimate successor to Irineu. Afterwards, Cefluris
incorporated marijuana, which they name Santa María and consider to be the
plant of the Virgin Mary, into some of
their ayahuasca rituals whereas Alto Santo does not use it, (it is strongly
rejected by the Indian shamans of Colombia). Cefluris is perhaps the best-known
and now has branches in Holland, Japan and Spain. But
its rival, the União do Vegetal, which was
founded in the 1960s, likewise has a national presence and is trying to establish
overseas branches. The UDV, as it is also known, is more secretive and stricter about admitting people to its
rituals. The odd men out are Alto Santo and Barquinha, which have never spread
from their original home in the State of Acre, also the birthplace of
Daime. Barquinha, founded in 1945, only
has 500 members, and as its name, which means “little boat”, indicates, its
ritualism revolves around the symbol of a boat (that is, a paradigm for a
spiritual journey). A photo of them
dressed in their ceremonial costume of mariners of the steamboat era says as
much about the appealing exoticism of the Brazilian cults as any of the essays.
There are many smaller groups which
have derived from the four principal churches, ranging from a dissidence resulting
from religious disputes to those who wish to give a new therapeutic or artistic
meaning to ayahuasca. If to that we add
the poor mestizos in frontier regions who continue to use ayahuasca in an
informal way and a few tribes who conserve their ancient practices, the number
of ayahuasqueros in Brazil may be
larger than the figure given above, as
Labate herself admits.
In contrast to Colombia and Peru,
where the diffusion of ayahuasca to urban or tourist contexts has been done by
healers (be they Indian or mestizo) who roughly follow the indigenous
tradition, the Brazilian churches grew out of the “caboclo” population of
itinerant Blacks or Creoles, many of them “nordestinos” from the eroded lands
of the country´s northeast, who began to penetrate the jungle frontiers with
Peru and Bolivia in the early 20th century, mainly working as
rubber-gathers. There, they picked up a knowledge of the plants and
preparations from the Indians of the neighboring countries and then, in the
isolation of remote jungle communities where orthodox Christian influences were
not particularly strong, evolved their own autonomous version of ayahuasca.
Indeed, for a good part of the 20th
century the churches were lost in the ocean of evangelical cults that exist in
Brazil, and it was only a few decades ago that
they began to attract the interest of hippies, urban intellectuals and the
like. Its higher profile provoked
charges that ayahuasca was a drug and led to a serious study by the Brazilian
government, some of whose officials drank ayahuasca themselves, which resulted
in its legalization. In this respect Brazil is a lot more enlightened than most
of the developed countries.
Because of this historical
background, the four churches broadly share the same approach. They are essentially
Christian, with a mixture of Afro-Brazilian and European esoteric beliefs. This
contrasts with Indian ayahuasqueros, whose visionary encounters and evocation
of supernatural healing powers tend to revolve around the spirits of the
natural beings of the jungle. Nevertheless, in the Brazilian cults the methods
of preparation, prohibitions like the one on the participation of menstruating
women and the concept of a plant teacher derive from their original indigenous
teachers. Despite the fact that all of
the Colombian shamans are Catholic nowadays (and some are devout ones), what we
might roughly call an “animist” inspiration still persists: the ritual songs
and gestures often have a “pagan” feeling that is not found in the ayahuasca
religions of Brazil. But the Catholicism of the Brazilian groups is by no means
conventional, being part, as we have said, of a wider syncretism. In line with
this heterogeneity, the groups have a strongly ritualized use of music, dance,
costume and decoration that is neither conventionally Catholic nor indigenous
but sui generis and exclusive to Brazil. In addition, compared to the
informality of many indigenous practices in Colombia nowadays, where the
discipline is tacit, the Brazilian rituals are highly structured: there is
little room for free personal expression and in some cases, they are stricter
about small points of ceremony or hierarchy than most of the Indians I know.
While a common denominator of all
ayahuasca practices is the search for self-realization and spiritual
enlightenment, always mediated by music considered to be “given by the
spirits”, usually the practices in Colombia and Peru are specifically directed
to healing illness, whereas in Brazil the emphasis is on worship. At least with
regard to outward forms, like the characteristic healing of individual patients
with a leaf-fan done in Colombia, which does not seem to be common in Brazil:
the UDV and Santo Daime would probably say that their ceremonies effect the
same healing but in an ethereal and collective
way. Finally, while some Brazilian
schools are more elitist than others, there is none of that indigenous
“chauvinism” you find among some healers in Colombia (the suspicion that
outsiders may “steal their secrets”) nor that selling of Indian exoticism which
you see in Peru. You enter as a Brazilian among
Brazilians, not a white man among Indians.
Despite this common “Brazilian”
identity, the different churches are not free of the kind of ideological
differences that plague the Colombian scene. Indeed, the question of “purity” that Zuluaga raises has simply
been transposed to another vocabulary, where the synonym for “authenticity” is
no longer “indigenous” but has to do, instead, with doctrinal matters. Significantly, there is an essay in the book
by Edward MacRae entitled “A plea for tolerance among the different ayahuasca
tendencies, based on a Brazilian
vision”.
Having been reared in the Colombian school myself, it is hard to shake off a snobbish feeling that its elderly Indian healers are
the only ones who really know how to liberate the power of the vine. But recognizing that my own access to those
practices is part of a wider aperture that is eroding many of their traditional
customs, I have had to face up to the question of what happens when those
marvellous old-timers are no longer around to guide us.
If ayahuasca has the universal
significance I believe it to have, we must consider alternative ways of working
with it. This doesn´t mean that anything goes but one valuable lesson of this
anthology is the way it challenges the idea that the Indians are the only ones
who have a "tradition”. I have no particular stake in the Brazilian
movement - in fact, I am not even a Christian - but of the many experiments with new uses
that I have heard of (and to a small degree experienced myself) it seems to be one of the most promising.
Some of the innovations jar me, I admit, like Daime´s unwillingness to let
participants freely enter into a communion with nature because of the ritual
prescription on leaving the precincts of the church. But I recognize there is a
principle of concentration behind it and in this and other aspects, they
conserve a sense of ritual, discipline and respect for the sacred plants that
is usually absent from freer, new age- or psychonautic- type experiments in the
developed world. They also share with the Indians what for me is the absolutely
fundamental rule that you prepare the brew yourself, and, from the little I
have seen, the traditional healers´ idea that you have to drink a good amount
of ayahuasca to have a fruitful contact with the spirits. I welcome their
diversity, because I think the only valid way to find a meaningful replacement
for the indigenous tradition in places where it does not exist or is moribund
or prostituted is by allowing a lot of experimentation with the use of
ayahuasca. Sooner or later, the spiritual, therapeutic and visionary results of
the non-indigenous schools will speak for themselves and time will tell us
whether or not they know how to successfully work with these sacred plants.
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An edited version of this review was originally published at Erowid: http://www.erowid.org/library/review/review.php?p=191