Una Noche con el Shamán

Hola a todos.

So, as I mentioned in my last post, this past weekend I finally did my first ceremony with a shaman. And now I´ll tell you all about it.

We (myself and four friends) went to Tumbaco, a nearby valley of Quito on Saturday evening. We got there sometime between five and six. There was a lot of waiting around, but I´ll skip those parts. Let me introduce the setting and the characters briefly.

The setting was on a small hill, on one side overlooking the city, spread out as lights below; on the other side overlooking some woods. The shaman is, I would guess, in his fifties. He is from Chile but has lived here for a while, and does this for a living. Don´t picture him as some super exotic medicine man with feathers and a loin cloth. He was a pretty normal guy, joking around, being friendly, and dressed in slacks and a turtleneck (he was wearing some sort of animal-tooth necklace). He had a number of young people that helped facilitate the logistics of the ceremonies. Most of them did look a bit on the hippie side. But then again, so did we all. Most of the people there were young, but there were actually some families with young children (although I don´t think they really partook), and middle-aged couples, etc. In all I would estimate fifty to sixty people attended.

First, the shaman and his aids set up a small dome (stick frame wrapped in canvas); at the same time they built a bonfire around some stones to heat them red hot. This took a while but eventually we all stripped to bathing suits, or just boxers, and crawled into the tiny dome where all of us were packed in shoulder to shoulder and practically sitting on others´ laps.

One by one, someone passed the heated stones into the tent. With each one he said the name of a mountain. (I think this has something to do with the spirits of mountains here. The ideas in the ceremonies often centered around Mother Earth, and bordered on nature worship. Unfortuneately, since this was my first time, and since it was all in Spanish, I only grasped the most superficial of cultural significance within the ceremony. So I´m sure I missed a lot.) The stones were placed in a hole in the middle; the flap was closed, making it pitch black inside; then some herbs were tossed on the rocks and some water.

He said a short sort of prayer, mostly asking that the ceremony would be successful for each, that the sweat lodge part of it would serve its function as a cleansing practice; and also giving thanks to Mother Earth for various things. His prayer emphasized gaining greater understanding of the Great Mystery, and changing. Exactly what he meant by change was vague to me, but I understood it as a serious change of who you are, how you see the world, and act within it. After the prayer, he and a helper played on a moracca and a little animal-skin drum, and began singing a song that could only be described as some sort of hymn, and everyone began singing along. Then it was another´s turn. One by one, each of his helpers (I think: it was pitch black, recall) also added a little prayer of thanks or well-wishes, and began another song that everyone joined in on. The songs were more similar to what you might imagine a stereotypical indian pow-wow song to sound like than I expected them to be. Some of them were in Spanish and others in Quechua.

(After each prayer and song, everyone shouted, Ajó! I´m not sure if this is spelled right; in fact I´m not sure if this is Spanish, or if it comes from one of the indigenous languages here. It is used as an expression of agreement and solidarity, basically in the same way that Amen is used in Christian communities.)

Our sweat lodge got hot and steamy to the point of discomfort. But eventually they opened the flap . . . to pass in more stones. After two or three rounds of this, it had turned into an endurance test. We were all pouring sweat down our bodies; people were leaving because they couldn´t stand it anymore; my back hurt from sitting (I have terrible posture), and my legs were falling asleep; it was so hot that it hurt my throat to breathe; the guy in front of me lay down and put his head in my lap. Including such a trying practice as a cleansing ritual at the beginning of the long ceremony was an interesting and appropriate methodology, as we all left both tired and invigorated, and, in a way, feeling healthier and prepared.

After the sweat lodge, we got dressed, and then did some more waiting around as the place of the ceremony was prepared. The place was a small clearing with a circle in it that held the fire, some designs in the dirt, and some flowers. It was sacred and no one (including the shaman) would walk inside it or walk across the line that bisected it, walking the long way around it instead. Two posts with flags acted as portals to the circle and stood at each of the four cardinal directions. However, only one could be used to enter and exit the circle, and the others were guarded by people at all times. Why, I don´t know.

We all sat in a line along the circumference of the circle. The shaman spoke to us a bit about the ceremony, its purpose, and then said another prayer and sang a song. Then we each took a little pinch of the herb and each of us approached the fire, thought a silent prayer regarding what we wanted to accomplish that night, and then dropped the herbs onto the fire. (He kept calling the herb medicine--not to be confused with the San Pedro to come--but it was more like an insense than anything else; although it did have a ceremonial significance as it was used at many times throughout the night, and it was customary to wave one´s hands in a gesture of covering your face, head and heart with the smoke.)

At this point they passed out la medicina (a brew made from a San Pedro cactus, the active ingredient being mescaline), along with plastic bags to vomit into. It had a gag-inducing bitterness, but nothing too horrible. I didn´t really take enough, though. The trip was mild, and mostly just the sort of tense body high one might experience with LSD, but no visuals. Also, I didn´t vomit (which is an expected part of the process, and often opens the door to a stronger trip) and so I had a mild undersensation of nausea the whole time.

After this, we all sat or laid down while he walked around the circle playing a little drum over each of us, as if annointing us. There was some more singing by individuals, along with playing of various flutes. Eventually, we began a ritual (a series of them, really) in which a group would go kneel by the fire, the shaman would say some words to them in front of the crowd, and then proceed to blow alcohol in their faces and down their backs. He would then walk behind them, grab their heads, and make strange squaking noises in their ears. This was meant as a cleansing ceremony to remove ¨evil spirits.¨ (This is my term and not the shaman´s; and it isn´t the best, since the idea is much more abstract and much less superstitious than the term evil spirits implies; but this is a long blog and I can´t think of the right term right now.)

This ceremony went on for a number of hours as different groups went up to be cleansed. I didn´t go. The last ceremony happened around dawn. At that point the ceremonies stopped and a new ritual was undertaken. In this one all of the women left the circle to prepare food, while the men remained in the circle, waiting. Now, this sort of machismo double standard is something I still haven´t become comfortable with here. However, this time things fell on me differently. You see, while I don´t know that I grasp the full significance of the ritual, or the distinction in gender roles, I realized that there was much more than sexism at work here. It was clear that the preparation of the food was not a servile task for inferiors, but was in fact a sacred ritual with grave ceremonial importance. After preparing the food (mostly fruit and some varieties of corn; yes, there are varieties) the women processed with hymn back to the circle where they didn´t immediately begin serving. Instead we waited in silence as each of the women took her turn saying a little prayer of thanks, or simply speaking her mind, or even just kneeling down and sending up a quiet thought with the smoke from the herbs she threw into the fire. With each one we cried out, Ajó, and moved our hands, wafting the smoke in our direction and symbolically partaking of the woman´s offering of herself. For some reason this was very moving to me. I felt like I had recieved a new perspective on communal social dynamics and seen an aspect of culture down here that I hadn´t expected to see.

Then the women processed around the circle offering us water, and the food. I noted that the shaman wasn´t served at all. After serving us, the women sat down together and ate. When that was all done, the shaman closed the whole ceremony with a few words, opened the circle for us to leave, and then, laughing, ran over to get some of the leftovers.

All in all it was a very interesting and educational experience. It opened my eyes to looking at ritualistic religious ceremony from a new perspective. Next time I feel like I will get more out of it, since I plan to participate more instead of just sitting back and trying to figure out what is going on. This was something I´ve been wanting to do since before I even came down here, and I´m not at all sorry I did.

Mitad del Mundo

So this is a quick update to tell you about a short trip I took to Mitad del Mundo, or the equator. It was pretty cool, with a few demonstrations of how things work slightly differently on the equator. For example, it´s supposedly easier to balance and egg on its end, although I wasn´t able to do it. Water really does drain in opposite directions in the different hemispheres, but falls straight down right on the equator. It´s also harder to walk a straight line if that line is the equator itself.

There´s not much more to tell, but it was cool to have straddled the equator, and I suppose that it was one of the things I had to do while I was here.

Tonight I finally have my first ayahuasca ceremony with a shaman. I´ve been looking forward to this for a while. I´m sure I´ll write about here in a couple of days.