Cognition and Psychology of the Shuar (Jivaro) People

Shamanism, Ayahuasca, and Oneiromancy

Dr. Josep M. Fericgla
University of Salamanca
Institute of Anthropological Prospectives
MGS-University of Barcelona

Table of Contents

•Introduction •Ethnographic Profile of the Shuar People

•1.—General Ethnographic Data •2.—Notes on the Shuar Adaptive Process at the End of the 20th Century

•Culture, Theory, and Applications of Ayahuasca-Generated Imagery

•1.—Ethnography of Ayahuasca •2.—Effects of the Entheogen •3.—General Cognitive Theory

•Oneiromancy and the Meaning of Dreams Among the Shuar

•1.—The Context of Discernment •2.—Shuar Terminology Regarding Dream Interpretation and Analyst Typology •3.—Literalness of Dreams and Symbolic Opposition •4.—The Importance of “Great Dreams”

•Cited Bibliography

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Introduction, acknowledgments, and clarification

…. The following text is a very free transcription of four lectures I delivered at the Museu Etnològic de Barcelona on April 13, 14, 18, and 20, 1994. The topics of the lectures were: i) The process of cultural change and adaptive strategies of the Shuar; ii) Culture, theory, and applications of imagery generated by ayahuasca; iii) Oneiromancy and the meaning of dreams among the Shuar; and iv) The Shuar educational system. Despite this, the text below has been reformulated into three major chapters, maintaining only the approximate titles of the first three lectures. The fourth has been merged into the text of the second and third chapters, and a long cultural profile and general ethnographic commentary on the current Shuar people have been added as the first chapter.

…. Thus, in transcribing the content of those lectures, I have not attempted to preserve the oral material I presented there. Nor have I kept in writing the discussions that took place after each of the master classes, the explanations that accompanied the abundant illustrative slides, or the text of the two films that were screened. Verbal and visual communication is one thing, and the written medium is another. Therefore, I have rewritten the texts to the point of turning them into articles intrinsically drafted to be read (with all that implies regarding bibliographic citations, more polished language, reflections, and theoretical proposals to be meditated upon in tranquility, etc.). Furthermore, although those lectures were formulated for a high level of popularization, I have preferred to leave the text here as a reading for specialists. Additionally, those lectures were delivered in Catalan, and the following text has been translated by me into Spanish for the sake of easier dissemination.

…. I want to express my gratitude to Carme Huera, then director of the Museu Etnològic de Barcelona, for the invitation to deliver those four lectures in the cozy library-lecture hall of the Museum; and to Dr. Carme Fauria, the current director, as without her tenacious persistence I would never have gathered the courage to write what follows.

…. In this same sense, I feel grateful to all the people who participated in the lecture series at that time, for the attention, interest, and sympathy they showed throughout the four sessions.

…. I cannot forget the true protagonists of the text, the Shuar people, among whom I count good friends and collaborators: Carlos Pichama, his son Galo Pichama, his daughter Roxana, and the rest of the Pichama family. It is especially with them that I feel indebted, and in various ways.

…. I want to end this Introduction with a technical clarification. Lately, various Spanish texts have appeared in which the word “jíbaro” and its derivatives (both as an adjective and in its function as a noun) appear with a “v”: jívaro/a. This has led to some minor discussion and has generated no small amount of confusion regarding such Spanish spelling. Despite this, I have continued with my commitment to write the term with a “b,” jíbaro/a, just as the reader will have appreciated in the title and will continue to appreciate in the text that follows. Saving the uncertain etymological origin of this linguistic category, it can be affirmed that it is a word of old Spanish origin (although it may come from the Portuguese xebaro), and that in Spanish documents of the 16th and 17th centuries, it already appears with a “b.” The reason for such a change from the traditional “b” to the modern “v,” according to the academic argument of some that has never been made explicit, is that “jíbaros” would refer more to the adjectival and derogatory form of the term, while “jívaros” refers exclusively to the ethnic group that is the subject of part of this text.

…. In this sense, I want to take the opportunity to reproduce the corresponding entry from our beloved, recently revised, and official Dictionary of the Spanish Language:

Jíbaro, ra: (of uncertain origin), adj. Amer., 1. peasant, wild. Said of people, animals, customs, clothing, and some other things, e.g., jíbara party. Applied to people. Also used as a noun // 2. see jíbaro hat. // 3. Mex. said of the descendant of Albarazado and Calpamula, or of Calpamulo and Albarazada. Also used as a noun // 4. P. Rico, belonging or relating to the white peasant. Also used as a noun // 5. Said of the individual of an indigenous tribe of the eastern slope of Ecuador. Also used as a noun // 6. Belonging or relating to this tribe // 7. m. language spoken by these indigenous people.

… (Dictionary of the Spanish Language, Royal Spanish Academy, twenty-first edition, 1992). The bold emphasis is mine.

…. With this, the discussion is settled. In any case, I believe I can affirm that the anomalous ways of writing it, such as the one that, for example, appears in the collection “Las Razas Humanas,” published by the Instituto Gallach under what they call “the scientific direction of Juan Frigolé” (Barcelona 1990), is the typical result of an absurd attempt at taxonomic modernization by way of distancing oneself from what is one’s own (which, moreover, in this case is original) to adopt Anglo-Saxon forms (and by this, I do not mean that I am against innovations when there is a need to carry them out). Thus, in this work edited in VIII well-illustrated volumes, “jíbaros” appears in its anomalous form of “jívaros” (pp. 601, 700, 712, 723, 903, 973, and 1237; and with the term “jívaros shuar” on pp. 963 and 970); and, on the other hand, the form of greater ethnic respect and greater anthropological rigor does not appear: Shuar, Achuara, Huambisa or Aguaruna, Kántuash shuar, and Patúmkei shuar to refer to the great Jivaroan ethnolinguistic group.

…. Without a doubt, this is the result of a less-than-rigorous translation of the English term “Jivaran,” where this form with “-an” is used as an adjective, and of “Jivaro,” which is the noun form in the English language (according to the very prestigious bilingual dictionary “Simon and Schuster’s International Dictionary English-Spanish, Spanish-English,” New York, original 1973 edition). Therefore, we are talking about the Jíbaros (whether they are Shuar, Achuara, Huambisa, or Aguarunas, etc.), not the “jívaros,” nor the “jívaros shuar.”

J. Mª F.

June 23, 1996

THESE ARTICLES ARE PART OF A PUBLICATION THAT WILL SOON BE EDITED BY THE MUSEU ETNOLÒGIC DE BARCELONA

 

ETHNOGRAPHIC PROFILE OF THE SHUAR PEOPLE

“In any case, the culture of the Shuar as it is described in this book now belongs for the most part to history. Personally, I consider it a loss, emotionally and scientifically, and I only hope that these weak efforts will help to preserve a document of what was once an extraordinarily distinct lifestyle.”

(M. Harner, 1978; 199)

About the article and the author

 

1.—General ethnographic data

……. The Shuar inhabit the so-called Upper Amazon or Ecuadorian High Jungle. This name does not refer to the upper or lower basin of the Amazon River, but to the height of the jungle relative to sea level: it is considered Upper Amazon when speaking of jungle above 300 m (984 ft), also called the “jungle brow”; and Lower Amazon when we refer to jungle below 300 m of altitude. These few hundred meters of difference mark a considerable climatic and ecological change.

……. The Shuar geographical environment is delimited by the Kutukú mountain range and the Condor Range, and their traditional sacred center is the Sangay volcano (currently active).

……. There are various archaeological elements that allow us to infer that the Shuar have migrated from more coastal areas to the interior territory they occupy today; there even remains some scattered group in territories near the Pacific coast. Furthermore, they have a descriptive myth that speaks of the “great lake,” which probably refers to the Pacific Ocean (in reference to Shuar mythology, see the collection of books published by the Abya-Yala publishing house, Quito, dedicated to the subject; also in FERICGLA, 1994).

……. Globally, the Shuar-Achuara ethnic group is made up of about 40,000 to 45,000 individuals who inhabit the basins of the Santiago, Morona, and Pastaza rivers, among others of less significant flow (which does not imply that they are mere streams). They live mainly in the state of Ecuador, east of the Zamora Province, the Morona Santiago Province, and south of the Pastaza Province; and a small part of the great ethnic group is found in Peruvian territory, although it is mainly the Achuara branch.

……. The Shuar, the main protagonists of this text, are approximately 35,000–40,000 individuals, and the Achuara are about 5,000 more. These peoples are ethnically related to the Wampis, the Awajún, the Mainas, etc., reaching as far as the Marañón. Among them, they share a vast territory of tropical rainforest, quite a few cultural traditions, and especially the Jivaroan language, with dialectal differences. Fortunately for them, it is an ethnic group that has overcome the imminent danger of physical ethnocide; it has already “turned the corner,” and today the number of Shuar individuals who increasingly assume the Westernized value system is growing, a process of acculturation that has meant physical disappearance (not just cultural, as is the case) for other Amazonian ethnic groups. From a geographical point of view, then, they occupy a territory of about 30,000 km² (11,583 sq mi) in the southwest of the Ecuadorian state.

……. The language they speak is Shuar Chicham, or simply Shuar, and they belong to the great Jivaroan cultural group, basically defined by their languages that form the Jivaroan linguistic family. In addition to the Shuar, other ethnic groups also form this great ethnolinguistic family:

i) the Achuara, territorial neighbors of the Shuar.

ii) the Patúmkei Shuar, who inhabit Peruvian territory and can currently be considered to be on the verge of disappearing as an independent ethnic group.

iii) the Huambisa, also part of the Jivaroan family that inhabits northern Peru; in the West, they are better known by the name Aguaruna, and

iv) the Kántuash Shuar.

……. On the other hand, the great Shuar family—the most numerous of the Jivaroan groups—is divided into:

i) the Muraya Shuar, or “people of the high mountains”; these are the Shuar who inhabit the mountainous foothills of the Kutukú and the Condor, hence the name they receive, Muraya Shuar, which literally translated means “people of the mountain peaks” (due to the shape of the mountains where they live);

ii) the Untsuri Shuar, a name referring to “the numerous people who inhabit the mountains,” and who are the Shuar who live in the jungle brow, and finally

iii) the Pakamaya Shuar, “people from beyond the mountains”; these are the group of Shuar who inhabit further east of their indigenous territory, bordering the Achuara.

……. In general terms, it can be affirmed that it is a typical tropical riverine people, who build their huts, or “jea” in the Shuar language, in the vicinity of the tributaries of the great rivers, so that they can partially subsist on river fishing; they also use the navigable basins of rivers such as the Zamora, Panki, Paute, Santiago, Yaupi, Tutanangoza, Upano, Chiguaza, Palora, Macuma, and a part of the Pastaza to travel with the hollowed-out log canoes that they traditionally manufacture.

……. Their subsistence is based mainly on itinerant horticulture of tubers and the gathering of wild foods (tasks corresponding to women in their natural division of labor), complemented by hunting and fishing (tasks performed by men). They are also the ones who take care of the children and the housework, particularly the preparation of “chicha” (a fermented drink made from boiled and chewed cassava, which is the “national drink” of the indigenous groups of the Upper and Lower Amazon) and food.

……. They use the slash-and-burn cultivation system. Hunting is their main source of protein; they complement their diet with the product obtained from river fishing (with nets, with traps built when the rivers rise in flow, or by the procedure of poisoning the water with “barbasco”) and the gathering of fruits, insects, and plants. Despite this, currently and in a slow but permanent way, a good part of their traditional territory for hunting use is being replaced by pasture fields for cattle herds, which has led to the progressive depletion of the soil and a dwindling availability of their traditional lands. This fact has caused the implementation of a quasi-general sedentary settlement pattern, very especially among the Shuar who inhabit the edge of the thick jungle, which is leading to a profound change in their socioeconomic system.

……. Traditionally, the type of settlement was dispersed, with a distribution of territory according to bounded zones, based on kinship relations, which each extended family group occupied. Today, the settlement pattern is integrated into the political-administrative structure of the Interprovincial Federation of Shuar and Achuara (FICSHA)1, the potential owner of all the territory collectively awarded to the Shuar and Achuara. This Federation is formed by various units called “Centers.” Each Center is formed by family units dispersed in jungle areas that have between 50 and 200 hectares (123–494 acres) per family, units linked territorially to each other by a communal zone that usually has the structure of an open plaza in the thick jungle, and where sometimes, when there is one, the “jea” (hut) dedicated to a school is located, perhaps some Christian chapel, ball game fields, and the communal hut dedicated to the social meetings of the inhabitants of the Center, meetings they call “minga.” Their territory is delimited by the number of families that form the Center and is officially recognized by state authorities through the Federation.

……. The Shuar dwelling hut is elliptical in shape, with a very spacious interior, in which two restrictive zones are located: the “ekent,” a family area occupied by women and children; and the “tankámash,” a social area reserved for the husband, male children, and visitors. The floor of the Shuar house is simple packed earth, the walls are made with “chonta” poles, one of the various species of palm, with very hard wood, and the roof is thatched with leaves of another variety of palm. The Achuar house, with slight structural variations, does not require walls since it is settled in a warmer area and they are not as bellicose as the Shuar, so the walls of the hut would not have the defensive purpose that they do have among the latter.

……. One of their most important institutions, despite being informally structured, is the visit, which strengthens and cohesively binds kinship ties and encourages greater social interaction.

……. Traditionally, the man wore a simple skirt knotted at the waist called a “tipi,” woven from wild cotton and dyed with vegetable materials; the woman wore a kind of tunic supported on the shoulders and cinched at the waist by a cord. In the past, these dresses were also made with tree bark, pounded until it was flexible and thin. Nowadays, it is very common to use Western-style clothing, which they obtain through exchange networks that extend from the edge of the jungle to deep into the interior, through donations from missionaries or NGOs, or by buying them directly in the settlers’ shops. The dress is complemented with body paint made with fresh paste from the fruit of the “achote” tree.

……. The explanatory mythology of the Shuar is closely linked to nature and the laws of the Universe; it manifests itself through a wide range of related superior beings, which are the anthropomorphization of phenomena such as the creation of the world, life, death, storms, dreams, or diseases. The main mythological characters or entities of the Shuar are: Etsa, Nunkui, Tsunki, Shakáim, (especially) Arútam, etc.

……. Etsa, identified with the sun and simplifying quite a bit, teaches and protects men in their hunting activities. Shakáim gives the strength and skill necessary for male work. Tsunki, the primordial being of the watery element, brings and preserves health and is considered female. Nunkui fertilizes the “chacra” (small family garden). Arútam is the source of all good and evil and allows some Shuar to be invincible during war (later, the important information about the Jivaroan conception of Arútam is expanded).

……. Traditionally, the Shuar people have used war as a mechanism of intra-ethnic justice, to restore social balance. The leaders of each community have been respected and prestigious warriors, the “Kakáram,” the powerful (see below the complex semantic content of this term), and they have shared the social leadership of each territorial community or Center with the “wishín,” the shaman or witch doctor of each collective. Despite this, the warrior did not enjoy economic privileges, but rather represented the unity of the family group, and his power lay in the ability to organize large networks of family alliances, the maximum guarantee of security in case of warrior vendetta. Among the Shuar, there has always been a wide range of reasons for carrying out warrior campaigns, hence various anthropologists and social philosophers (such as E. Canetti) have been interested in the internal dynamics of this Amazonian ethnic group, since it seemed to be a people united only by internecine wars, rather than by any other motive.

……. The current inter-ethnic dialogue has affected the social organization of the Shuar, constituting, I repeat, a solid Federation of Centers that, in fact, already had a first model in the alliances established in times of colonization. It is necessary to highlight their capacity for self-management in everything related to the current organizational aspect, schooling, defense of lands, cattle-raising programs, etc.

……. Among us, the Shuar are better known by the name “jívaros,” a term that they find insulting: it is used by missionaries and mestizos in a derogatory sense to refer to someone of an abandoned, unskilled, or lazy character, a brute, etc. (“don’t be a jíbaro!”, “go away, little jíbaro,” etc., are common expressions). Therefore, and even if only for simple intellectual rigor, throughout the entire text I will use the general name by which they call themselves: Shuar, which means “people,” “collective” in general terms. For example, the white-lipped peccary <Tayassu pecari>, an Amazonian variant of the European wild boar, is called “Untsuri Shuar,” where “shuar” has the same meaning as when referring to humans: “people,” because the peccaries live in wild herds.

……. In this first chapter, I will focus on making a description of the Shuar people, emphasizing the process of cultural change in which they are immersed today, at the end of the 20th century. This process of drastic acculturation began in the 1950s, when Salesian Catholic missionaries took charge of the evangelization and literacy of the Ecuadorian Amazonian territory occupied by the Shuar and Achuara. A decade earlier, in 1941, the war between Ecuador and Peru had occurred for territorial reasons, the same conflict that, in a certain way, was reproduced at the end of 1994 and the beginning of 1995. Following that mid-century war, the Ecuadorian army penetrated into Amazonian territories that until that moment had remained practically virgin with respect to Western society, if one discounts the accidental and short entry of the Spanish in the colonial era, when they founded cities such as Sevilla del Oro and Logroño de los Caballeros (16th century), centers that did not enjoy an excessively long life given that the Amazonian inhabitants of that time managed to exterminate the colonizers and delay acculturation for more than two centuries (for more information on colonial eras, demographic, geographical, and cultural changes of the Shuar people or the territory they inhabit today, consult TYLOR and LANDÁZURI, 1994; and RENARD et al. 1988).

……. When referring to the Shuar, Achuara, Aguaruna, and other ethnic groups with a similar cultural pattern, I usually refer to them, in the present text and in others, as primitive peoples. I know that currently there is a tendency to disparage this expression to refer to hunter-gatherer peoples; however, I prefer to use this formula, which is etymologically correct and does not imply any ethnocentrism: “primitive” comes from the Latin “primus,” “those who were first,” “the first,” and both from a historical point of view and from that of cultural evolution, primitive peoples precede our post-industrialized societies. Conversely, terms such as “pre-industrialized,” “developing,” “non-literate peoples,” “pre-literate,” “non-urban,” and other similar categories do contain a significant degree of ethnocentrism since it is implicitly considered that those peoples lack something to become Western (or industrialization, or written language, or having built urban centers…), and this also contains the hidden idea that the only evolutionary path of every society is well represented in the current West, a belief that is false from every point of view when it is verified that some peoples know our worldviews and our ethos, but do not agree with it and choose not to assume it despite the powerful pressure of acculturative processes.

 

ETHNOGRAPHIC PROFILE OF THE SHUAR PEOPLE

2.—Notes on the Shuar adaptive process at the end of the 20th century

……. For students and fans of anthropology and ethnology, the study of the Shuar people and other ethnic groups belonging to the great Jivaroan Amazonian linguistic family is especially important because the first modern ethnographic description of the Shuar was carried out by M. Harner in the 1960s (HARNER, 1966, 1976, and 1978). Since then, three decades have passed and the Shuar world has evolved rapidly and without stopping in the direction of Westernization, especially the indigenous people who live closer to the settlers. This complex society, today bi-ethnic, is a little-studied border society and is really interesting because of all the cultural exchanges and syncretisms that occur within it. There is a very important work on the subject, the product of the fieldwork of an Ecuadorian anthropologist, Ernesto Salazar (SALAZAR, 1989).

……. When Rafael Karsten made the first detailed ethnographic description of the Shuar, it was the early years of the 20th century, and it was published in English in 1935. At that time, practically no indigenous person spoke Spanish, nor did they wear Western clothes. At most, they made exchanges of some Western manufactured products that they needed, such as metal machetes and muzzle-loading rifles (there is a recently published Spanish version: KARSTEN, 1989).

……. When M. Harner carried out his fieldwork, it was the 1960s; quite a few Shuar on the border already understood Spanish and the majority of them wore Western-style clothes.

……. In the 1990s, during my fieldwork, I found that the majority of indigenous people on the border—approximately 10% of the total Shuar population—both young and adult, speak or understand Spanish perfectly; the old ones do not, or almost do not. Regarding the remaining 90% of the indigenous population that inhabits the interior of the jungle, quite a few young people speak Spanish and the majority of adults and the elderly do not even understand it, but it is very strange to find a nucleus inhabited by Shuar who have never seen a Western human. Practically everyone uses clothing like ours, and throughout the four years that I have lived with them temporarily, I have only been able to see one elderly Achuara man who wore a “tipi” daily, the traditional Shuar clothing.

……. The approximately 10% of Shuar who live furthest at the edge of the jungle, bordering on towns of mestizo settlers (Macas, Morona, Sucúa), feed almost exclusively on what they buy, grow, and raise; they practically never enter the jungle to hunt wild animals and go little to fish in the large and small rivers that cross the Amazon jungle. However, they miss that meat and often ask their relatives from the inside to exchange game meat for clothes or money.

……. When M. Harner studied this important Amazonian ethnic group, in their language there were no linguistic categories to refer to the days of the week, nor numbers higher than twenty. Currently, missionaries have led them to adopt the industrial calendar; even in the centers furthest into the jungle, they know that there is an abstract measure of time, more complex than their traditional way of locating themselves chronologically. Until recently, the Shuar and Achuara ordered their chronology in relation to the changes in their ecological niche; for example, they named the different moments of the year according to whether it was the season when turtles lay their eggs, or if the “chonta” tree bears fruit. All these, and other similar symptoms of the acculturation process, even if at a practical level it might seem that they do not have too much importance (what does it matter to an indigenous person who inhabits the interior of the dense jungle to know if we whites say it is Monday or Friday, or if for other societies it is important to be in the month of March or June?), at a cognitive structure level, it has a lot of importance (especially because of the high formalization of abstract thought that this implies).

……. These and other cultural changes and transformations have been fostered and forced by missionaries, first Catholics and currently, with much more weight and cruelty, by Protestants who arrive supported by American dollars. It is already known that with dollars, any indigenous acculturation program is currently financed, of course always disguised as a project of interest to the indigenous people themselves, and it is often carried out even against the own opinion, in this case, of the Shuar. I do not feel especially like a defender of Catholicism (historical brutalities such as the Inquisition Tribunal or the very process of evangelization of America must never be forgotten), and even so, although historically Catholics have allowed a certain freedom to the indigenous world through the processes of religious and cultural obliteration, Protestants seem to have been much more in favor of the physical (and cultural, of course) extermination of non-Western humans. It is only necessary to remember a minimized historical fact: while in the American territories colonized by Catholic missionaries (basically Meso and South America) abundant indigenous societies and cultures endure, in the territories occupied for a century by Protestant groups (North America), the indigenous people have practically disappeared, with the exception of small minorities that are very unrepresentative from a demographic or cultural point of view: the almost null real weight of the North American Indians, not of their symbolic representation converted into material for ethnophile commerce (ethnic music, ethnic clothing, indigenous-style para-religious fashions…), has no comparison with that corresponding to the Andean or Amazonian indigenous populations. And it is not a tiny difference.

……. Until the 1940s, the Shuar practically continued to have no major contacts with whites: there was some mestizo settler who had been settling in their territories, but for the indigenous people, it was almost a “curiosity” who lived like them, learned from them to hunt to survive, to recognize and use medicinal plants, to wear a “tipi” (a long, one-piece skirt that Shuar men wore wrapped around their waist as their only clothing), and to build palm “jeas” to inhabit them.

……. In that decade of the ’40s, the pioneer settlers who were slowly settling in indigenous territory founded the small town of Macas, in a high and airy space next to the Upano River, which today remains the border with the jungle, and for this reason, they were called by the indigenous people themselves “macabeos.” Currently, there is almost no original “macabeo” left with the exception of some elderly person, and the settlers are called by the indigenous people “apachi settlers” (“apachi” is a Shuar term with a derogatory content to refer to foreigners, especially whites; in free translation, it is the equivalent of our “barbarian”).

……. That first entry of settler strangers was one of the consequences, I repeat, of the Ecuadorian-Peruvian war of 1941: the military entered Shuar territory and behind them came the missionaries, and very shortly after, the settlers (on this, see the work of Ernesto Salazar).

The settlers were invading the Shuar territory slowly but progressively and radically. As the elderly indigenous people themselves say:

“at the beginning <referring to the 1940-50 decade> it was funny to us that ‘macabeos’ came to live among us. There was no difference between them and us; they married our women, they drank ‘ninjiamanch’ <chicha> with us, they learned to speak Shuar, and we taught them to build ‘jea’ to live, and also to hunt and fish, and we gave them our territories so they could survive. But little by little more ‘apachi’ arrived, and more ‘apachi,’ and their houses were no longer like ours, but they were much stronger, made of machine-hewn wood and later of stone. And they were occupying lands that were ours and they respected less and less the deals we had made before. In the end, we seemed like their slaves, and they treated us like that. Now it is we and our children who have to learn to speak the ‘apachi’ language, and their police catch us if we do not obey their laws. Now they are the owners of everything.”

……. The situation continued to worsen during the 1950s. More and more frequently, there were deaths and fights between indigenous people and settlers for territorial reasons. Finally, and after much pressure from the settlers, the Ecuadorian government promulgated a law that granted nominal ownership of the jungle territories to any individual who cleared a plot of jungle and dedicated it to intensive cultivation or productive cattle ranching. This meant an open door to declared war between indigenous people and settlers. There was not, nor is there today, any possible field of understanding in this area because what the mestizo settlers see in the land (a means to trade, buy, sell, and resell farms, intensive exploitations, sale of precious woods from the primary jungle forest, etc.) has no parallel with what the Shuar and indigenous people in general conceive (although, certainly and probably unfortunately, it can be affirmed that it is a matter of time before they learn to think commercially and join in groups to exterminate their own territories). For them, the land is a place that must be respected, that contains them as living beings and that is not purchasable or sellable, among other things because never in history (at least in the history remembered by oral traditions) had it happened that there was more demand than supply of land: when two neighbors bothered each other, one of them—usually the weakest—left for a few hours’ walk or a few days’ distance, and settled again with his family group. With the increasing arrival of settlers and their sedentary habits, the demographic pressure on the territory that was until then Shuar, and the inter-social conflicts began to be important. Finally, during the 1960s, various government agreements were carried out, the main one being to grant the Salesians the right to evangelize and pacify the eastern lands of Ecuador, that is, the southern zone of the Ecuadorian Amazon inhabited mainly by the Shuar and Achuara, and since a few years before, by settlers. Immediately afterward, this religious order of Catholic missionaries began their work by inciting the indigenous people to settle in stable centers and to become sedentary around the Catholic missions in exchange for medicines, cows, recognition of the territory that the indigenous people occupied, etc., and all this, in turn, achieved that the Ecuadorian government recognized the Interprovincial Federation of Shuar and Achuara Centers (FICSHA), in 1968, an organization promoted with great personal effort by Fr. Juan Chutka, an Austrian Salesian (the Shuar and Achuara ethnic subgroups themselves were in a constant situation of conflict).

……. Thanks to this indigenous organization, the Shuar today have in communal ownership the territories they occupy, and the settlers no longer have free access to the “virgin lands” they enjoyed until the 1960s. However, and for a few years now, it is the border indigenous people themselves who see this cession of collectively owned land as harmful, since they would like to follow the settlers’ model and sell the lands, which they have been allocated by the Federation to each family group, to obtain money and acquire commercial and consumer goods. Since the Federation strongly defends collective ownership (the only way to maintain a certain ethnic cohesion), some settlers are making lawyers available to the indigenous people who want to sell their plot so that they can fight legally against their own organization. When an indigenous person wins the case against the Federation (the 1960s cession Law has certain formal cracks) and it is forced to allow the sale of the farm to the Shuar, the lands usually end up in the hands of the settler himself who paid for the legal services, who usually acquires them from the indigenous person for ridiculous prices, and subsequently the farm is resold by the settler to other settlers who have just arrived in the Amazonian east. Final result: the Shuar is left without land and shortly after also without the money obtained from its sale, while the settlers have legally acquired a piece of territory more.

……. The current entry into the Amazonian territory occupied by the Shuar and Achuara has been possible thanks to the recent opening of land communication routes. Until the 1950s, penetrating the Amazonian zone inhabited by them was done on foot and it took at least two or three days of walking from the nearest place where one could arrive by motorized vehicle to the indigenous territory. Only the most adventurous or desperate settlers and the military in times of conflict entered there. The great Upano, Pastaza, and Morona rivers were the natural barriers that stopped any attempt at penetration if there were no good reasons to enter.

……. In the 1960s, the first runways for small, low-displacement single-engine planes were opened, used only by the military and missionaries. The first dirt roads were also opened, although wide, where some four-wheeled vehicles could travel without excessive difficulty. Shortly after, these roads were widened, allowing relatively agile road traffic, and the only borders that still stopped the massive entry of strangers at the end of the 1960s were the Pastaza, Paute, and Negro rivers.

……. Finally, in the 1980s, the first footbridges supported by steel cables were built, where these mighty rivers could be crossed with motorized vehicles. At this moment, an important demographic change began, and a process of occupation and acculturation of indigenous lands by settlers that is currently in full growth. The bridges over the Upano River, built during the 1970s, and the bridge that allows the road from the city of Cuenca to reach Macas, from the end of the 1960s, were from a few years earlier; however, it was in the 1980s that the regular and, until now, seemingly definitive migration of settlers began.

……. Faced with so many external pressures, the Shuar who inhabit the border line with the mestizo settlers are plunged into a profound state of anomie, which is reflected, for example, in the 70% of the indigenous population that manifests high levels of anxiety (original data from the ethnopsychiatric investigations carried out by specialists of the interdisciplinary team that I have coordinated, the psychiatrists Dr. Joan Obiols and Jorge Atala).

……. To end this introduction to the subject at hand, I would also like to clarify that throughout the present text I will use contrasting expressions such as inside or outside, interior or exterior, and other equivalents: I am always referring to the situation with respect to the jungle limit marked by the difficult-to-penetrate vegetation. The lifestyle, the mode of subsistence, the social and family structure, the daily schedule, the relationships with Western settlers, etc., of the Shuar change a lot depending on whether they are indigenous people who inhabit inside or outside the jungle. In this sense, today there is a clear opposition between both worlds, even though there are Shuar in each of them. Life changes radically upon leaving the jungle, and this entails that today different needs and expectations are registered between the Shuar from the inside and those from the outside, despite having the same maternal cultural pattern.

……. Accelerated cultural change is the dominant tone of the Shuar world. The Salesians, especially Italians and Spanish, laid the foundations for such an acculturation process; while the settlers dedicated to trade, the North American Protestant missionaries, and the most stark mercantilism over tropical woods are ending what remained of this traditionally semi-nomadic Amazonian culture.

……. Thus, for example, in the two years that separate 1992 from 1994, it has gone from observing some radio-cassette player in the “jeas” or palm huts closest to the Shuar/settler cultural border, to finding these devices even in the most remote corners of the interior of the jungle; young indigenous people between 15 and 20 years old enjoy listening to Ibero-American disco music: a young person can carry, every time he walks through the jungle, the portable sound device wrapped in plastic so it doesn’t get wet, but playing and listening endlessly to the same cassette tape, often the only one, until the batteries run out; then he will have serious problems getting replacement batteries and the device will remain in a corner of the hut for months. The West has become in a few years their ideal cultural model, with all that this implies of deculturation, abandonment of their cultural patterns, anomie, and the thousand complexities inherent in the assumption, forced or not, of another new cultural system.

……. Another illustration of the same situation happens, for example, with flashlights: in the last 5 years, many families have obtained flashlights, but they almost never work due to a lack of batteries. The majority of Shuar, with the exception of the very small percentage who live on the edge of the jungle and have obtained some means of economic income, when they run into some non-settler Westerner (from these they already know they will get nothing) request gifts in the form of metal utensils—which already reach everywhere through exchange—Western medicines, and cassette tapes of Andean disco music, also flashlights to be able to move and go out to hunt easily at night. In this sense, the Shuar, like a good part of the current primitive peoples, soon discovered the interest they arouse among Westerners and have established a culturally unhealthy relationship of dependence towards whites: most contacts still come to them from missionaries or employees of oil companies installed in the Amazon. The indigenous people have become accustomed to receiving gifts in the form of medicines, clothing, small differential and territorial rights that until now they had not received from local governments, interest in their music and other cultural elements of a plastic nature, ecological and shamanic tourism that pays just to take some photographs next to the indigenous person, etc.

……. This custom of receiving gifts and being pampered by Westerners, even if it later turns out to be a naive and folkloric facade, has led many primitive peoples to establish behavioral patterns based on the immediate demand for gifts. An example is the following list. Through an acquaintance who entered the jungle, and who passed through a Shuar center where I had resided for some weeks, one of the inhabitants of that center whom I will call Tx, and with whom we had formed a certain friendship, dictated a list of objects that he would hope to receive when I returned again to that Amazonian region. The list is as follows (observe the memorized detail of commercial brands, proper names of drugs, etc., that, despite the errors, Tx retains after having heard them sometime from some settler, doctor, or missionary):

“15 bottles of the remedy Nextropropoxifeno, Contex pills, noralgina, Benzoparangonico, Tempora suppositories, Bronchodermine ointment, menthol, and a bottle of Sustiblate, gauze and adhesive tape, Broncaopok inhaler; also, 4 large black batteries, 1 flashlight, 1 pair of pants size 41, 1 shirt size 40, a pair of sneakers size 40, a visor to look underwater, 1 small barrel of gunpowder, 2 boxes of percussion caps, and 1 medium ball.”

……. Among the Shuar and Achuara, the gifts they hope to receive from Westerners are the result of their own cultural tradition, plus the historically recent “bribing” attitude of the whites. According to Shuar traditions, it is a certain formula of humiliation to give gifts in public; in this people, gifts out of kindness are unknown, they are never given, and, in the opposite sense, among friends, relatives, and hunting partners, they demand what they need urgently; thus, offering a gift to another is experienced in a shameful way: by giving a gift, one is showing the weaknesses of the one who receives it, and this, in a society marked by endemic pride, can be interpreted as an offense. In this same sense, when some person is in need, they demand from others the help they need (a machete, a blanket to protect themselves from the cold, food, direct help); with which, the giving attitude of the Westerner during the last twenty years, plus the Shuar tradition of demanding gifts in private, has led to inter-social relationships often taking the form of lists of demands like the one I have reproduced above, or much longer and more expensive ones.

……. In the majority of huts near the territorial and cultural border, there are household and kitchen utensils made of plastic or aluminum next to objects of traditional use (“pininkias”—bowls—, “yumis”—long-necked gourds to transport water—, blowguns, etc.) that are kept hanging on the walls of the huts but that have practically lost their utility. And cultural change, or the process of acculturation, is not measured only by changes in material culture, but, and very especially, by the rapid forgetting of traditional hunting techniques with traps and blowguns, of the techniques to make pottery pieces, of the skill of walking through the jungle without making any noise, and of their magical worldview or folkloric cognitive style to construct their reality. It was the year 1994 when I was able to listen to a really interesting conversation between two elderly Shuar men. It could be said that they live immersed in a cultural anomie that they are capable of expressing verbally. One asked the other: “Will it be true that Arútam exists? Or does it not have to be true?”. Arútam is the animistic expression of the fearsome force of the jungle in the Shuar worldview. This people has dedicated much energy to seeking and perceiving Arútam: until the mid-20th century, almost all adolescent boys voluntarily accepted grave sacrifices during an initiatory rite of passage that lasted several days and during which they fasted and consumed the visionary juice of the entheogenic plant Brugmansia s.p.: the purpose was to wait for the appearance of Arútam within their individual mental imaginary, which integrated the subject into their mythological and cultural world in a solid way.

……. If the young man had suffered enough and also had luck, Arútam appeared to him in some form that was always terrifying (two enormous anacondas fighting, a threatening Amazonian tiger, a colossal storm of thunder and lightning, etc.), and the boy had to gather the precise courage to approach and touch with a little stick the unleashed force of nature that appeared before him. Doing this would grant him a specific power (“kákaram”) to excel in one or another sense of life: the young man who has seen Arútam and is capable of maintaining his integrity and courage will become an especially good hunter, or will enjoy many friendships and charisma, or will be capable of raising an especially numerous and healthy family (an event that among primitive peoples always equates to having social power), etc. The two men who questioned themselves about the certainty or not of their youthful perceptions had gone through the initiatory rite during their adolescence… (for the subject of Shuar mythology in extenso see the work in twelve volumes collected by Siro Pellizzaro, 1976 to 1985). Cultural doubt and doubt about one’s own perceptions manifests itself in the form of anxious neurosis and group anomie, in the literal terms of an informant:

“…the Shuar <before> were like birds of the jungle that lived pecking, free. Now they have put themselves inside a cage made by the missionaries and the cage is breaking, and the Shuar do not know how to do. They don’t know how to leave—they like too much having food in the feeder without fighting like before—nor do they know how to stay inside. Before, the grandparents lived peacefully. There were no syndics, nor president, nor federation, nor cattle. Only food, having fun, and fighting were needed. And that was all. They lived peacefully before.”

 

CULTURE, THEORY, AND APPLICATIONS OF THE IMAGERY GENERATED BY AYAHUASCA

……. The text that follows is divided into three blocks of independent although complementary content, in the sense that they are integral parts of the same system. In the first place, I will quickly and globally treat the ethnographic aspect of the use of ayahuasca; in the second place, I will speak of the effects induced by the consumption of this complex entheogen2; and in the third place, I will propose a general cognitive theory that allows us to think about the use of ayahuasca in terms of our current Western cultures.

……. The tendency to study the system as a single entity, rather than as a conglomerate of parts, is the tendency of all current scientific work. Phenomena cannot be isolated in restricted and narrow contexts but rather, once the component elements of a certain phenomenon have been studied (in our case, culture in its totality and within it certain alternative mental processes), one must work to understand the interactions that occur between the fragments, increasingly broad, of nature. This principle of the systemic order of dynamic reality could be announced today with the same words of Pico della Mirandola (1557:40) when he announced: “First we have the unity of things through which each thing is one with itself, consists in itself, and coheres with itself; second, we have the unity through which one creature is united with the others and all parts of the world constitute a single world.”

 

1.—Ethnography of ayahuasca

……. The noun “ayahuasca” is of Quechua origin, although since the colonial era it was already Hispanicized given that Quechua was the “lingua franca” spoken throughout the Andean territory and in a good part of the Western Amazon3. By this term, it is known, in the first place, a plant mixture of powerful entheogenic effects, and at the same time, it is also the popular name of one of the plant components that enter into the composition of the potion, the well-known vine *Banisteriopsis caapi*. There is usually a fairly generalized error that consists in that, by having a single term to refer to one of the components and the result of the boiling, many people believe that entheogenic ayahuasca is the liquid resulting from boiling the vine directly, but it is not so. *Banisteriopsis caapi* alone does not produce any entheogenic effect. Usually, the potion is made based on the aforementioned vine, which contains a potent MAOI (monoamine oxidase inhibitor), and another plant specimen that must contain DMT (dimethyltryptamine) in sufficient quantities to give the sought-after psychoactive result.

……. I will not speak of the various plant specimens that contain DMT (there are extensive ethnobotanical studies on it: OTT, 1996), but I do want to point out that currently more than 90 different plant species are known, distributed in 38 families (of which a quarter are entheogenic plants themselves), used as an additive to *Banisteriopsis caapi* to produce ayahuasca. Some of the added vegetables cause a sensation of cold or other physical or psychic complementary effects also sought to support in some way the visionary effect.

……. Thus, for example, among the Amazonian Shuar and Achuara—better known among us as “jívaros,” although for them it is a pejorative term—the ayahuasca vine is mixed with *Diplopterys cabrerana* (in Shuar “yági”), which provides the visionary DMT to the mixture; with *Rinorea viridiflora* (in Shuar “parapra”) to make the visions more lasting; with wild tobacco juice to enhance the entheogenic effect; and with the “chiriquiásip” shrub (*Brunfelsia grandiflora*) so that it produces cold and helps to combat physical numbness (“with this comes trembling and it drives away the spirits”).

……. From an ethnographic point of view, it can be said that we have documented more than 72 Amazonian cultural groups that consume this plant mixture following their ancestral traditions, most of them located in the western part of the Amazon jungle, both in the Upper and Lower Amazon (LUNA 1986; 57).

……. The visionary experience is so important and fundamental in the worldviews of Amazonian ethnic groups (in their forms of art, their concept of health, their decision-making systems…) that a rigorous study of anthropology, ethnopsychiatry, or medicine of such peoples is unthinkable without taking into account their consensual consumption of entheogens, especially—though not exclusively—that of ayahuasca. In this sense, such is the weight it has in their cultural world that, until now, the consumption of ayahuasca has survived any process of acculturation, no matter how intense it has been. An ethnographic illustration is constituted again by the Shuar and Achuaras, ethnic groups of a warrior character who often enlist in the Ecuadorian army as a strategy to leave jungle life and seek a path of integration into the Western world. This radical change of life—from the interior of the jungle to military barracks—practically implies the loss of all their traditions except one: the consumption of ayahuasca or other entheogenic substances. Therefore, and in a certain way, we could consider that this practice constitutes one of the pillars of the value system of the Jivaroan cultural world, an affirmation extensible to many other Amazonian ethnic groups. For this reason, although the trade of some of the active components of ayahuasca in pure or synthetic state is prohibited, the natural form of this pan-Amazonian entheogen is not prohibited—nor could it probably be—in any Ibero-American country.

……. On the other hand, this psychoactive preparation receives more than 40 different vernacular names, which allows one to get an idea of the great historical depth of its use: “yajé” in Colombia, “kamarampi” among the Ashaninca, “natema” among the Shuar and Achuara, ayahuasca, daime, etc. Different evidence coming from Ecuador and provided by archaeology allows us to affirm that Amazonian indigenous peoples have been consuming ayahuasca for at least 5,000 years (NARANJO, Plutarco, 1986; SCHULTES, 1972; 38-39).

……. In addition to the indigenous consumption of ayahuasca, it is also worth citing its central use in the practices of many South American mestizo healers, both from the Amazonian and Andean territories. In various Ibero-American countries, the cultural importance of ayahuasca is accepted to such an extent that these healers are known as “ayahuasqueros,” in the form of a generic noun. Thus, ayahuasqueros are the specialists in using this entheogenic mixture in their religious practices, of healing, as an adaptive strategy, or as a form of problem resolution. There is already some experimental initiative in the Western style of the therapeutic use of ayahuasca. An example is the Takiwasi Drug Addiction Rehabilitation Center, in Peru. A long list of current, specialized, and popular bibliography could also be made referring to the subject of ayahuasca, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world.

……. I have called it a “pan-Amazonian entheogen,” as some other author has already done, because currently it is also the most popular entheogen among Western experts and tourists: since the 1980s, trips organized with destinations to Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil have been offered in the US with the almost sole objective of consuming this visionary substance at the hands of some alleged indigenous shaman in the service of a travel agency.

……. On the other hand, a series of modern religious syncretisms of Brazilian origin known as “Santo Daime” Churches (Daimistas, Uniao do Vegetal, A Barquiña, Francisca Gabriel, Maestro Daniel) are spreading through various European countries. These are interesting open groupings of a religious nature, born in the 1930s in Brazil, and whose sacrament is the “Daime,” one of the known forms of preparing ayahuasca. The consumption of the entheogen is carried out within a strongly structured ritual and with a sacred and therapeutic sense at the same time. Among all the Daimista churches, they must currently add between 10,000 and 13,000 adherents, plus a figure of irregular followers who perhaps add 4,000 or 5,000 more people. Finally, in California and for a decade now, there have been various plantations of the plant components of ayahuasca, and various therapists offer psychic excursions in a safe way. In this sense, then, it can be affirmed that it is currently the most appreciated entheogen among enthusiasts in the US and other Western countries.

……. All these cultural forms referring to the consumption of ayahuasca have great ethnohistorical importance, given that the classic forms of the use of entheogens were erased radically in the last 100 years in the West (among primitive peoples and Asian and African agricultural cultures it is maintained, although it is also in some retreat), but in the last third of the century, their consumption was restarted with the discovery of the psychedelic experience, and the sacramental use of entheogens appears again under highly formalized ritualized forms and with clear possibilities of application for the investigation of the human mind and for other applied purposes that I will analyze later.

……. Although only in passing, it is worth the effort to remember here that our biochemists have highlighted that the human body secretes components (methylated tryptamines and beta-carbolines) whose regulation is related at the same time to some mental pathologies and to the so-called states of spiritual elevation, and that these are the same substances that the majority of entheogenic products contain. In most cases, very little is known about how such psychoactive substances act in normal people, although it is known that they are related to sleep and to oneirogenesis.

……. Among the Shuar and Achuara, what one sees, feels, and perceives under the effects of ayahuasca becomes resolute, and, like nocturnal dreams, decisively frames their subsequent behavior (FERICGLA, 1994). In the interpretation of oneiric passages and the imagery of ayahuasca, when a Shuar does not understand them by himself, he recurs to the elders, depositaries of their traditional oral wisdom. To such an extent do the Shuar give importance to their elders that when an individual who is not from the family wants to speak alone with one of them, he must ask permission from the rest of the family group, which meets to decide if it allows it. The fear is usually that the stranger—even if he is an acquaintance—tries to provoke some harm in the elder, with which he would leave the rest of the clan without the possibility of understanding some of the visions had as a result of the consumption of ayahuasca and, with that, they would be left lacking resources to make decisions, often vital ones. Because of the acculturation process, the shamans of today have lost much of their knowledge and no longer know how to interpret imagery as they did until a few decades ago. Formerly—in this Jivaroan ethnic group, we could place it in the 1950s—there were masters in the psychological decoding and explanation of dreams and visions.

……. Thus, Amazonian indigenous people take ayahuasca and tobacco to heal themselves through imagery. Furthermore, visions and dreams indicate to them how to take revenge, how to act in case of conflict or indecision, etc., and in this sense, it is necessary to make a distinction between the explicit purposes of the use of ayahuasca among adults, children, young people, and shamans.

……. Among Shuar and Achuara adults, the consumption of the entheogen acts as a mechanism of social venting: it is used to seek mediate solutions (for immediate solutions, chicha, chili, or tobacco are used) from a state of conscious lassitude. They consume ayahuasca to solve their problems, to reaffirm their worldview, and to get in touch with their mythical world. They take it to talk about their Arútam, so that it gives them power and to establish social norms and procedures, to condition themselves, to reinforce ideas referring to solutions, and to channel mental processes in a sense that we could call oneiromancy open to interpretations (what they see is part of what they have to do).

……. On their part, among Jivaroan children, the entheogenic mixture is used to encode and condition behaviors. For example, it is administered so that small children become robust and fast, so that they are brave, or so that they grow up being good hunters. Regarding young people, the entheogen is used during puberty to reaffirm their identity since, according to the Shuar and Achuara, it gives security in the mechanisms that regulate behavior.

……. Shamans or witch doctors claim to consume ayahuasca to have premonitions: regardless of scientific acceptance or not, shamans fast and prepare themselves to see, speculate, and interpret present or future situations. In addition to the specific uses by age groups, the Shuar drink ayahuasca to vomit ritually, and on this occasion, they only boil the *Banisteriopsis caapi* vine, without the second component that provides the DMT4. All this could be concretized by saying, then, that ayahuasca is used to activate compensatory mechanisms of behavior, applied to self-analysis and the search for resolutions to present conflicts, both of an emotional character and of a general adaptive character.

 

2.—Effects of the entheogen

……. It is always extremely complex and difficult to describe with rigor the effect of entheogenic substances: it is just here that we find one of the limits of spoken language. For this reason, I will begin by describing in detail the somatic effects of ayahuasca consumption, despite being the least important aspect for anthropology and for the general understanding of the phenomenon; then I will focus on the attempt to describe the effects on the human mind and understanding.

2.1.—

……. In the first place, it cannot be spoken of as a substance that is either physically or psychically addictive, since no one who consumes ayahuasca regularly has a compulsive or irrepressible desire or impulse to take it again. Its ingestion implies a conscious decision, since the psychic excursion it induces can end as much in an experience of well-being of an ecstatic character as in a painful exploration of the subject’s own limits and shortcomings.

……. The mixture, of a more or less dark reddish ocher color, has a strongly bitter and acrid taste, sometimes even sour due to the rapid fermentation of the glucose it contains, and produces strong and almost immediate salivation after consumption.

……. The properly entheogenic effect takes approximately between 30 and 50 minutes to appear (among Amazonian indigenous people it strangely takes more than 10-15 minutes, which would lead one to think of greater synaptic sensitivity to the beta-carbolines that ayahuasca contains)5. It is indicated by a clear sensation of lassitude and bodily numbness at the same time that the perceptual apparatus becomes very sharpened. It is quite frequent to hear a noise similar to the deep buzzing of a distant plane or high-voltage electricity; such a tense and deep sound, unlike the known buzzing related to fatigue or headaches, is of apparently exogenous origin, to such an extent that the first times I self-experimented with ayahuasca it was hard for me to believe that it was an endogenous sound. A sensation of drowsiness appears in the eyes. Despite such a sensation, the DMT that ayahuasca contains has stimulating effects on the CNS, and after its consumption, it is practically impossible to sleep, contrary to what happens with opiates.

……. At 30/45 minutes, slight nausea usually appears, sometimes a sensation of having the stomach slightly bloated, and a sour and metallic aftertaste in the mouth. Intermittently, yawning can appear, and from what I have been able to verify, the entheogenic effect usually increases after yawning, perhaps because they relax or perhaps because of the greater expulsion of CO2 that this implies. Sometimes the urge to burp also appears.

……. In the opposite sense to the numbness that invades the ocular musculature and the musculature in general, the perceptual apparatus becomes sharpened in a very marked way and the inputs resonate in the mind loaded with emotionality. The external stimuli that acquire the most relevance are high-pitched sounds and bright and white colors, hence Amazonian shamans and Daimista churches use rattles of different material but with a common element: they sound high-pitched and with a cutting sound (the same applies to the high-pitched bells and cymbals that usually accompany the mystical practices and ecstatic ceremonies of most religions). In the opposite sense, the internal sounds that resonate the most are those of a deep character. Any insightful self-observer discerns that under the effects of ayahuasca—as with most entheogens—the perceptual apparatus functions in unison at two clearly differentiated levels. On one hand, the body is recognized as slow and heavy, and the sleepy eyes sting as when one owes hours to delayed sleep, but on the other hand, one is more sensitive than ever; subtle noises are perceived with clarity (a bird that is scratching its beak against a tree branch) and delicate and distant smells (the fruits that are in the remote kitchen of the house). It is impossible to reduce to words the sensation of such an intense perceptual dissociation, which at no time generates excitations of a pathological character. It is under the effects of the entheogen that mythopoetic languages, based on condensation symbols and not on referential symbols6, reveal their semantic depth and their synergistic capacity for the senses: smells, colors, sounds, conceptual content… all in unison for the same end.

……. In any case, what we could call the difference between the eye—as an organ—and vision—as a mental faculty that elaborates perception—is perceived very clearly and delimitedly. It is a state of consciousness of clear cognitive dialogism, experienced in the form of revelation.

……. In reference to the exogenous world, when one is under the effects of ayahuasca and opens one’s eyes in an illuminated environment, whitish and bright threads are perceived that, starting from luminous or illuminated objects, move in space. Such an effect could be phosphenes7 in the strict sense if it were not because there is a clear relationship between these perceived bright little threads and the objects in the environment.

……. If the subject focuses on the physical environment—although it is not even remotely usually the most interesting thing—it is easy for them to generate many plastic associations. The capacity of human potential to produce imagery is strangely awake, but in no way does it modify the physical elements of the environment. For this reason, it can be affirmed categorically that ayahuasca is not a hallucinogen in the strict sense. The change occurs, regardless of interpretations, in the threshold of perceptual stimulation, not in the object content. In this sense, and as a central capacity of the entheogen, the attention of the perceptual apparatus is usually self-directed towards the psychic dimensions of the subject.

……. This consumption produces what someone has called “aesthetic moods,” especially in the field of sounds, melodies, and rhythms: in my opinion, it is a very exact expression to be applied here. A good part of the Amazonian ethnic groups that consume ayahuasca in a traditional way claim that the potion induces “magical melodies that each one must find under the effect of ayahuasca to have good luck in their life.” These melodies, whose origin is perceived in the form of revelation, are those that receive different names according to the ethnic group (“ícaros” in the northern part of Peru; “ánents” among the Jivaroan ethnic groups; “koshuiti” among the Yaminahua; hymns among the Daimistas, etc.). They are often ethnographically related to healing. In reference to the importance of melodies and the state of deep introspection, both physical and spiritual, it is worth citing as an illustration the case of a woman, a musician by profession, who during her first ingestion of ayahuasca commented, stunned, that she could clearly hear and distinguish the harmonics of her own voice when speaking and singing.

……. At 45 minutes after consumption (among Westerners), one usually has the urge to remain with eyes closed and in an attitude of deep inner recollection. However, this sensation of beatitude requires first a cleansing of the body. Often, although not always, the consumption of ayahuasca produces vomiting. So much so that among the Ashaninca of Peru, ayahuasca is called “kamarampi,” which comes from the verb “kamarank” (“to vomit”), and if someone asks a Shuar or Achuara the motive that leads him to drink the potion, in most cases the answer will also be that “to vomit,” which semantically equates to “cleansing the spirits” since the Achuara heads of families decide that the entire family group will consume ayahuasca when situations of group tension occur that are lasting longer than usual. In this sense, I do not believe that such vomiting has its origin in dysfunctions of the digestive or hepatic apparatus since most of the time the indigenous consumer drinks it while fasting, and they do not depend either on the amount of ayahuasca consumed or on whether there is a habit or not. In my opinion, and after self-experimenting with ayahuasca for more than three years and having observed between 300 and 400 consuming people, some regular and others occasional, I have the profound conviction that such vomiting has a psychosomatic origin. Naturally, the spasms of vomiting itself are physical, but I believe that with this, the body somatizes and expels tensions, conflicts, and animic or psychic contradictions: no one should be surprised by such a correlation given the statistically verified correspondences between a great diversity of pathologies and a certain previous psychological substrate. So much so that, after a first time of learning the effect of ayahuasca, it does not seem that the habit of consuming generates more or less frequency in vomiting. Amazonian indigenous people claim that when ayahuasca is consumed, “in the first place the body is cleansed and in the second place the soul,” and certainly it is not a bad way to explain it. People who consume periodically even arrive at perceiving in advance of the ingestion itself if it will provoke vomiting or not, according to the mood prior to the experience. On the other hand, and this seems very significant, after vomiting, the power of the entheogen increases considerably.

……. The effect lasts approximately two hours, being able to ingest new doses periodically to maintain the state of drunkenness for longer, and so on until various repetitions. I know of cases in which consumption has been repeated up to six times, remaining under the effects of the entheogen for more than twelve hours. Unlike other intoxicating substances, the perceived effect of ayahuasca increases geometrically and up to a certain limit with each dose, so when one decides to maintain the effect for long hours, it is sufficient with minimal doses at each repetition of consumption. It seems obvious that there is a certain accumulation of one of the components (J. Ott proposes that it is an accumulation of the MAOI which, although with reversible effects, is maintained for hours, even for some days, before being totally metabolized by the body, with which the DMT of the following ingestions can act within a few minutes).

……. Often, the epidermis acquires a whiter color than usual, which, added to a sensation of cold that does not pass with external heat, indicates some type of vasoconstriction. A sensation of sweating appears on the hands, although one does not sweat. On the other hand, this sweating is of a greasy character, not watery. Thus, after each psychic excursion induced by ayahuasca, one has the impression, for example, of having worn the shirt for a long time and observes that the collar appears slightly dirty. One also has a sensation of “disheveled hair” even though the subject has been still in their place the whole time and only attentive to the ecstatic explosions that follow one another inside.

……. At 60 minutes, an acetone and metallic aftertaste appears in the mouth. A definitive impression of having the body asleep is perceived (and there are usually small difficulties of movement), but the mind is awake and active in an extraordinary way: it is exactly like dreaming while awake. If it can be said so, the psychic dimension dominates over the physical in an unquestionable way. Such is the intensity of the inner perceptions that anyone can remain for three or four hours sitting and absolutely still, without the muscle tension bothering them.

……. The effect is not constant, but comes and goes in the form of outbursts. If one breathes deeply, a more or less normal perception of the world reappears, returning after a few moments to traverse the inner paths that emerge under the effect of the entheogen. With breathing, one can exit the loop of mental activity centered on oneself to momentarily deposit attention on the surrounding world.

……. Often, during the effect of ayahuasca, the facial expression is apparently hard and tense in many people, and this is a reflection of the inner civil war they are waging with their own neurosis.

……. The extreme endogenous perceptual sensitivity also settles on the natural needs of the body, which acquire great intensity. Although with training in the use of the entheogen, a certain level of control over physiological processes appears, the truth is that the need to empty the bowels of remains and detritus, be it via vomiting, via anal, or urinary, becomes a need almost of suffocation, although it is often controllable. After vomiting or defecating, the effect of the entheogen increases in intensity.

……. As the effect of the plant mixture diminishes, people show huge eyes, with a gaze in a certain way fixed and bright; it is not mydriasis (ayahuasca does not produce mydriasis), but what the Greeks called “ecstatic eyes that have seen the beyond” and that were profusely represented in ceramics and bas-reliefs of the various eras of classical Hellenism: round, large eyes, with fixed and apparently unfocused pupils, although vision functions perfectly.

……. To end the description of the physical effects of ayahuasca, it is also worth citing that regular Western consumers usually dispense with alcoholic beverages in their daily diet, especially during the first times. In the first place because they certainly stop being appetizing, and in the second place because what before ayahuasca was a normal amount of alcohol without painful consequences for a moderate drinker, starting from the entheogen, it usually becomes a source of a hangover previously unknown. For this reason, perhaps it would be worth speaking of a probable hepatic cleanser effect and it is practically certain that it has some type of action on the gallbladder. It would be important for medical and biochemical investigations to be carried out on the effect of ayahuasca on such organs, since, furthermore, Amazonian indigenous people who are traditional consumers of the entheogen do not usually have the same side effects as we do and are great consumers of alcoholic beverages (the traditional chicha that reaches 11% alcohol, and the more modern cane spirits that reach 70%), without apparently suffering liver problems with the same prevalence as Westerners who consume in equal amounts. Perhaps it is for genetic reasons that Amazonian indigenous people metabolize ayahuasca faster, which would also explain that in general terms they perceive its effects much sooner than a Western subject, even if the Westerner is accustomed to the entheogen.

2.2.—

……. Described the physical effects of ayahuasca consumption, I will now focus on the undoubtedly most important aspect: its psychic consequences. In general, the entheogenic effect of ayahuasca is more of “letting go,” similar to the process of falling asleep, than of uncontrollable outburst. The feeling that permeates the subject is one of camaraderie and fraternity, not sexual at all. On the other hand, as it is consumed periodically, the effect appears sooner, requiring less amount of substance to obtain the same intensity in the experience. With which, one can speak of a process of psychic and probably biochemical learning. Amazonian shamans decrease the amount of ayahuasca they must consume to enter the trance state as the years go by. Many of them claim that, with age and experience, it is no longer necessary for them to consume more than a few drops, or even nothing, to enter the modified state of consciousness they pursue (which again contrasts with the majority of narcotics and stimulants). In this sense, a definitive proof is the fact that, of the European volunteers who underwent an EEG (electroencephalogram) after having consumed ayahuasca, half claimed not to notice any effect, and this despite the fact that the EEG records showed similar bioelectrical variations in the brain of all of them.

……. An important capacity of ayahuasca is what has been called “oneirogenic,” generator of dreams, or “producer of imagery of a hypnagogic character,” related to sleep. It is not exactly that it generates nocturnal dreams in greater abundance or oneiric richness, but that the type of imagery that is presented is comparable to the oneiric one. In this sense, for example, it is illustrative that the Shuar and Achuara use exactly the same term to refer to nocturnal dreams and to the visions or emotional revisions generated by the entheogenic mixture. On the other hand, on some occasion, ayahuasca has also been called “amplifier of emotions” and “amplifier of consciousness,” and it is not a bad way to call it, although it is inaccurate because it is too generic (the majority of psychotropic substances include these conditions among their varied effects). In any case, it is important to point out that under the effect of this entheogen, neither the perception of time nor that of space is distorted. At most, it happens that during the two to three hours that the effect lasts, one has so many and such intense visions and/or experiences that the subject usually becomes overwhelmed by it and has the sensation that time passes slower than usual. That is to say, there is a clear modification of the experience of time (the experience that each one has of time is related to the emotional content that dyes each moment of life), but there is no modification of temporal perception (unlike LSD) since that would be related to the things one does.

……. The psychic excursion induced by this entheogen sometimes produces an overflowing although serene joy, and other times intense weeping. However, it is not a painful crying, but rather it is the overwhelming experience that the subject has of their own psychological abysses, whether of sadness or joy, and if one is asked about what is happening inside, the answer is usually “I am fine, nothing is happening.” According to my experience, during some session I met or contacted what I would dare to call the emotion of “pure sadness,” beyond explicit motives, biographical reasons, melancholic themes, or love losses in any sense. The same could be said referring to the joyful fullness of joy without limits, although quiet. In this sense, it can be affirmed that ayahuasca is an emotional accelerator with cathartic resolution. Symbols of condensation and children’s stories also act in the same way, with the already known and used therapeutic applications.

……. When the effect is fading, and if the psychic excursion has been of good quality, the subjective perception is that of having traversed an absolutely deep and difficult experience that in the end brings an enormous feeling of joy and fraternity. In these cases, what was lived and remembered during the ayahuasca trance is never forgotten. What each person has been perceiving of themselves and others remains as if burned into memory, and years later one remembers with precision the images and experiences that occurred during each of these sessions with the entheogen. In the opposite sense, there are times when the experience is reduced to a slight modification of consciousness and does not have the effects described here, neither animic nor psychological.

……. Most people who consume ayahuasca and perceive its effects have hypnagogic-type images and bright chromatism. Despite this, in subjects trained in consumption, such images generally lack importance since what is essential is the purpose pursued with dialogical thought. Every time thought is lost among images far from the initial purpose that motivated the ingestion, one must return to the same point by orienting awake attention there, and this is what would distinguish the specialist or shaman from the normal individual who cannot control their mental imagery. This point is resolved by syncretic religious movements with the universally known formula: the adherents sing hymns whose texts and melodies orient them in such a state of modified consciousness, with which in reality they almost never or never make the individual effort of the indigenous shaman to self-control until “generating language” since the doctrine itself with the chants acts as a pre-fixed orienter. On more than one occasion, I have been able to observe people who had never before ingested any entheogen, singing spontaneously during the experience to maintain a certain state of control over their own mind.

……. From a strictly formal point of view, the imagery that most often arises under the effect of ayahuasca is of elongated, resplendent forms and vivid chromatism; they are very dynamic images. The majority of indigenous people speak of snakes. Westerners, less familiar with this zoomorphic metaphor, can speak of snakes or bright-colored borders. This fact—the appearance of snakes or reptilian forms, often double—is something of utmost importance since it is not circumscribable to specific symbolic patterns of a cultural character (later I will refer extensively to it).

……. In addition to reptilian forms, images also appear that are sometimes terrifying, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes of clear archetypal content, sometimes apparently vulgar (for example, a couple of people having something in a bar, or a friend walking down the street), buildings or entire cities also appear. In general, there is much movement in the imagery generated by ayahuasca. Often, the subject does not have visions in the strict sense but rather relives and revises past emotions or present situations, and not in a symbolic key (in the sense of oneiric or hypnagogic symbology) but as a current revision and with full consciousness of the emotional game in which they have become entangled. Awake attention is never lost: as I pointed out before, the subject who has consumed ayahuasca has perfect consciousness of their environment and of themselves. When they stand up, they recognize without hesitation a slight or grave loss of balance induced by the entheogen, although in a state of rest the mind is perfectly awake and active, and the influence on the locomotor apparatus is almost not perceived.

……. Practically all the people I have known in the West who have consumed the entheogen say they have serious reflections about themselves when they are under the effect of ayahuasca. For example, their defects in acting, the origin of problems in their social or personal life, appear clearly defined, and there is usually a will to solve such personality conflicts (regardless of whether such a will for change is concretized later according to each person). From time to time, I repeat, one breathes deeply, which produces a momentary state of relaxation of internal tension. During brief moments after inspiration, it seems that the entheogenic effect dissolves, the individual directs their attention to the external reality, and returns again to the state of inner rapture. From this, then, one can speak of a possible emotional self-education associated with the regular consumption of ayahuasca.

……. Thus, the psychic effect of ayahuasca consists of a profound modification and expansion of awake consciousness, since contact with things in the environment is not lost, and it sharpens and sensitizes the perceptual apparatus and the senses (visual, auditory, tactile, proprioceptive, and olfactory). It proceeds as an emotional cathartic (and laxative!) in the sense of favoring a non-specific adaptogenic action that acts through mental imagery loaded with emotionality, and that predisposes the individual to pinpoint their problems, seek solutions, and, according to the Amazonian indigenous world, resolve diseases provided they are of traumatic or psychological origin (not viral or bacterial).

……. On the other hand, and this is something of great importance, in the consumption of ayahuasca, the learning process has a capital weight. Subjects not trained in performing psychic excursions, nor with one or two times of ingesting the entheogen, hardly perceive the potential of the effect and even less its possibilities of use. It is necessary to have a process of identification and decoding of the intense experiences during the trance, what Richard Noll aptly called “cultivation of mental imagery” (NOLL, 1985: 443-461).

……. Trying another form of more graphic description, we would say that the psychological effect of ayahuasca can be compared to the process of tangling a little string. In the mind, clear and colored forms and images appear, or emotions that suddenly arise from the depths of the unconscious are relived. Our mind processes all this in the form of ideas formalized in images that begin to tangle on themselves and to think about themselves, like a play on words with strong emotional charge—perceived by some as “circular thoughts.” The thoughts that appear are loops, then loops of loops, swirls of images of swirls of images. A good metaphor to describe it is that of the children’s game that consists of tightening a little string or thread between the fingers of both hands and starting to turn it in the opposite direction with each hand. The thread gets tangled on itself and ends up forming loops, and even knots, which at the bottom are nothing more than the string itself tangled on itself. The experience itself is that one will always remember the experience itself (colors, resurgent emotions…) and that at the same time one knows that what one lives one had always known. Everything that happens in the mind, I repeat, is a loop that forms swirls of loops, and at the same time, one lives the certainty that this is not only happening in one’s own mind, but that it is a reflection of all universal dynamics. The well-known drawings of Leonardo da Vinci on the movement of water would be a correct way to express the structure, although very simple because they are lacking the great emotional charge that determines the experience with entheogens. A fairly typical phrase that is usually heard among novices who have taken an entheogen for the first time is: “ah! if I could say everything I feel…”, and when they are asked to formulate it, to express what they have felt, they do not usually find words, but every gesture and expression is heavily loaded with emotional and recurring semantic content: it is significant because it is performed in that state, not by itself.

……. At the beginning of learning and of each entheogenic experience, there is usually a stage of certain confusion and mental disorder until, inadvertently, the thoughts go twisting to finally form an unknown thread that leads to unexpected places of one’s own mind. Sometimes instead of spaces full of images, voids appear, during which dark processes of creation take place, against which it is very difficult to fight.

……. Reflecting on the dynamic process of thought under the effects of ayahuasca, it is worth remembering that practically all the shamans about whom it has been written (regardless of their cultural pattern), as well as Christian mystics or Hindu anchorites, describe their mystical-visionary experiences speaking of a staircase that ascends in a spiral, of a rope, a vine that unites heaven with earth, and with other similar metaphorical forms (ELIADE, 1982; NARBY, 1995). The term “ayahuasca” itself in Quechua means “vine of the dead” in the sense of allowing access to the conceptual and sacred space in which the Quechua world situates the spirits and souls of the dead. It has been three decades since M. Harner timidly suggested that such a processual structure experimentable under the effect of this entheogen has a certain similarity with the formal structure of DNA (HARNER, 1980:1-10), and effectively this would be the most adequate plastic form to express such cognitive dynamics. If we accept that a purpose of the human being on Earth could be that of Nature made self-consciousness (and in a certain strict and biological sense it is so), one could also think that in the depths of our own mind should appear imagery that would reflect plastically the very basic structure of Nature. In this sense, the hypothesis that the imagery generated by the entheogen that concerns us, which basically are reptilian forms that usually appear in pairs or in numerous groups, has some relationship with the formal structure of DNA is risky but not at all unreasonable.

……. Finally, it is worth citing the results of various independent investigations that have highlighted the greater linguistic (and by inference, intellective) mastery and creativity of shamans in relation to their peers (ELIADE, 1976); to this, I allow myself to add the function of a potential emotional trainer that ayahuasca has; and in the third place, it would be worth remembering the direct correlation between the mastery of the emotional sphere and the intelligence quotient, which is currently leading various North American researchers to speak of the Emotional Quotient as an indicator of an individual’s intelligence.

……. The final effect of ayahuasca can be described as a calm rapture at the end of the excursion. The day after consumption, one enters an unusually awake and receptive phase that allows the subject to be very attentive to the objective world and to their daily emotions and feelings: their origin, direction, intensity, etc.

2.3.—

……. In full effervescence of perceptual and cognitive experimentation through computerized simulations, and of the use and already daily applications of virtual reality, the philosophical doubt about the reliability of human perception of the outer and inner world appears again with force. In reality, the illusions and limits of one’s own perception offer the key to the functioning of the brain and the mind. When one experiments with ayahuasca, one of the great rational dilemmas of the human being appears: whether or not to trust one’s perception. In various modern works and others classic directed to study the functioning of our perceptual apparatus, it has been highlighted how the cerebral machinery, sometimes, in an instant must decide between two options: the one that arrives clearly through the eyes and the one that the brain itself evokes by going to the neuronal archives where it has fixed an image or previous memory of that same thing that arrives to it. The typical example is that of the mirrors that deform the image of whoever is reflected in them. In this case, the astonishment lasts only an instant because we all know the contours of our body and know that it is not as it appears in the concave or convex mirror: the brain plays with perceptions and we have fun with it because the contradiction between what the eyes see and the registered image is so grave that in an instant the paradox is destroyed; the brain “sees” the trap and can identify its origin (on the games and deceptions of perception see the interesting article by: TOBEÑA, 1996:59).

……. Now, the mind does not always have it so easy because the world provides distortions and ambiguities much more complex than a room of lying mirrors: one of the fields where this game of perceptions takes a totally alternative course is that of modified states of consciousness. There, these games of simple ambiguities cannot occur because they are perceptions in principle endogenous, and although the brain approaches external reality using patterns of functioning pre-established by habit and culture that go far beyond the specialization and range of sensitivities of the different sensory channels, probably the same does not happen with emotional experiences nor with spontaneous perceptions of a hypnagogic or hypnopompic character. To move through this alternative space, it is necessary to have specific symbolic registers of an emotional and open character: precisely the need that belief systems and religious symbols fill. Hence, the consumption of entheogens traditionally occurs only in highly ritualized frameworks loaded with sacredness, where symbols receive very special treatment since the subsequent lucidity or madness depends on them.

……. In any case, with this, we do not explain the general laws that order the exogenous and endogenous perceptions experimentable under the effect of entheogens. The brain likes to listen, see, smell, and receive inputs, but it never receives them from a naive *tabula rasa*. The mind loves to immerse itself in the massive flow of stimuli coming from the senses and decode them, but it always sets in motion filters and highly peculiar and acculturated reconstructions. With this, we arrive at the key point of this exposition: what form do the cognitive processes proper to modified states of consciousness acquire? Without a doubt, a mental dialogism appears, projected universally in the great dialoguing and complementary cultural categories: good/evil, the two snakes coiled in every esoteric symbolic system, life/death, the ephemeral/the perennial. To take an ethnographic illustration related to ayahuasca, we could speak of the essential dualisms in the doctrine of the Daimistas: sun/moon, father/mother; God/Our Lady; man/woman; *cipó* or *jagube* (*Banisteriopsis caapi*)/folha or *rahina* or *cachrona* (*Psychotria viridis*).

 

3.—GENERAL COGNITIVE THEORY

3.1.—

……. Seen all the above, I am going to point out three elements, in my opinion key, directed to elaborate a general theory on modified states of consciousness and the adaptogenic property that the consumption of ayahuasca has8.

……. In the first place, ethnographic facts force us to accept that one of the purposes that explicitly induces human beings to consume ayahuasca (and by extension, entheogens in general) is related to some cognitive processes that allow for an improvement in adaptive efficacy. This entails posing a previous semantic question: what does it imply for a human being to adapt? We can agree that, at a minimum, it is a double permanent process (biological and cultural), of a negentropic character, divided into two moments (assimilation of information and accommodation to the changing environment) that induces us to act to improve well-being and to ensure the vital process for the maximum time possible. In a general sense, to adapt is the fact of adjusting to new ends. In the human being, adaptation acts by the procedure of modifying oneself, of modifying the external reality, or both things at the same time, following the cultural and cognitive patterns available, which indicate the orientation towards which such adaptive actions must operate. Therefore, speaking of adaptive processes in the human being must be understood under a double sense: passive and active. Passive: changes in the environment produce in us some modification, whether we want to or not; active: we modify our environment at will and/or try to recode our cognitive maps, internal patterns, cultural form, and behavioral patterns. This second meaning, conscious and voluntary self-modification as an adaptive strategy, is what must be understood in reference to the use of entheogens: universally, the human being decides to consume them within a consensual framework (ritualized or therapeutic) and with an almost always explicit purpose for the subject themselves, hoping with this to resolve imbalances and contrarieties related to their location in the world through endogenous change. For all this, ayahuasca must be understood as a substance with an adaptogenic function in reference to the use for which it is usually consumed.

……. In the second place, it is important to fix attention on the mental imagery itself generated by the effect of the entheogen. From the visionary profusion and the valuable emotional experiences promoted by ayahuasca in each subject, it is worth affirming that it is not vacuous fantasy but that there are personal and universal symbolic constants, verified as much by psychology as by ethnology (see with priority the classics: JUNG, 1993; CAMPBELL, 1980; DUMEZIL, 1977; ELIADE, 1976). The content of these constants in imagery has been and is expressible and decodable in practically all human societies through mythopoetic languages. This fact allows us again to situate ourselves on the solid ground of a universal logic underlying mental imagery. The loss of this capacity for logical elaboration, in my understanding, would be the cause of dementias and delusions (without thereby discarding, naturally, that there exists a strictly biological side to deep psychopathologies).

……. This leads us to the already classic proposal of E. Kant on the three steps related to the evolutionary process of knowledge, stages that in recent years have been found materially by the neurologist Jean-Pierre Changeux in the form of distinctly organized neuronal networks. The second of the stages related to obtaining knowledge refers to the transformation of images into concepts (what Auguste Comte had already proposed in a similar way with what he called the logic of images). Nowadays, it is accepted, then, that each cognitive style has as a material support a specific neuronal organization (KREMER-MARIETTI, 1993: 21-46).

……. From all this, we can infer that during modified states of consciousness (whether of an oneirogenic or entheogenic character), a logic proper to mental imagery emerges, whose dominant characteristic is the fact of being endowed with a strong emotional charge. Not in vain do the most elaborate religions have love, fraternity, and ethics as some of the most notable virtues in all their mystics and leaders. Likewise, the consumption of entheogens usually occurs almost always—and so it must be—in environments impregnated with affectivity, whether religious, therapeutic, or friendly environments. The colossal emotional charge that emerges in dialogical or ecstatic processes is capital, although it is not the only property they have, and it is also the predominant vital tone of every experience with ayahuasca. Along the lines of this quality of entheogens, it is worth remembering that every mental state loaded with emotionality is indicating that there exists an implication on the part of the subject of the same vital intensity as the emotions experienced (whether conscious or not).

……. For this reason, then, it can be affirmed that such alternative mental states, achieved through the use of ayahuasca, awaken in the subject an understanding of themselves and their environment based on a logic of images, and at the same time awaken an elevated commitment of the individual towards their vital situation. With this, I am affirming that it is the opposite of an alienating process.

……. In the third place, and to elaborate a cognitive theory of modified states of consciousness, it is necessary to distinguish between what I will call mental states, cognitive processes9, and cognitive styles. As states, it can be affirmed that they are characterized by the strong emotional charge whose internal logic is not that of abstract concepts but that of images. By cognitive process, I will understand the dynamics that lead from one mental state to the next, and by cognitive style, one must understand the dominant and specific form that the mind has of operating in each mental state.

……. In reference to the cognitive style proper to modified states of consciousness, then, we can speak of mental dialogism as the main observable and experimentable phenomenon. In a normal state, our consciousness functions according to dualistic processing (either this or that, or now or later, or here or there, or you or I), and Eastern meditation and yoga practices10, anti-stress techniques, and analytical psychology have as a priority purpose precisely to curb the dualistic functioning of our mind. In previous writings, I have spoken of “holorenic consciousness” as an experience and as a mental state of great importance in cultural production (FERICGLA, 1989): dialogism is part of the processual action that occurs within the holorenic levels of consciousness.

……. Thus, a level of consciousness hierarchically superior (KOESTLER, 1983: 171 et seq.)11 to daily disjunctive dualism is constituted by cognitive dialogism, as a fundamental concept in everything related to spirits, the dead, experiences of sacredness, and psychic excursions. During dialogical mental states, our own mind speaks with itself, self-observes, re-elaborates its recent and distant emotional contents, becomes conscious of itself, etc. To all this, one must add, as analytical psychology has well established, the phenomenon of psychological projection: perceiving as exogenous what is in principle endogenous; seeing in the external what is happening in the internal world. This phenomenon is what in anthropology was called by L. Lévy-Bruhl: “the mystical participation of the primitive with their environment”12 (LÉVY-BRUHL, 1985).

……. The phenomenon of projections refers us to an important reflection on the mind/brain complex: it is a self-organizing complex (I will return to this later) that functions by creating for itself what it can be reflected in and, conversely, reflecting itself in what it has available.

3.2.—

……. In the dialogical cognitive style, under the effect of ayahuasca or another entheogen, the activity that dominates consciousness is that derived from the mind enclosed with itself. When the subject is lost in fragmented thoughts and in excessively vehement emotions, they have a painful sensation of suffocation and absolute mental confusion, and they turn to the stimuli transmitted from the outside in the form of mythopoetic languages. Hence, one way to center the dialogical dynamics if, for example, the subject feels distressed before such an abundance of emotional information, is through chants or readings of texts that have the same character of revelation as the endogenous images themselves. They are a product of them. Chants, words, and sacred images in general have the function of cognitive indicators, literally like traffic signs or signs with the direction to follow, so that the subject can orient themselves in their psychic excursion during modified states of consciousness. In this sense, the aforementioned Brazilian syncretic Daimista doctrines and shamanic practices are a good ethnographic illustration.

……. In other words, dialogical consciousness would be a state structurally similar to that of madness, but controlled. There is a segmentation of the mind into constituent parts and at the same time an observing global view situated beyond each of the parts. This implies a hierarchical ascent of consciousness towards levels from where an “observing eye” is permanently maintained, like a watchtower far from the immediate experience itself, and which is precisely what will allow maintaining awake consciousness over one’s own experiences and emotions, even formalizing it by transforming it into art, science, or religious languages. Often, this ascent or expansion of the domain of conscious subjective experience is perceived as an experience of brutal loneliness, other times as a revelatory experience, and other times as a state of ecstatic fullness.

……. Mental pathologies, I repeat in my understanding, would appear when spontaneous inner dialogism is not correctly regulated or educated. That is to say, so-called mental dissociation is what we could call an uncontrolled and non-conscious dialogical state. Precisely for this reason, it is a hypothesis with many signs of certainty to affirm that the consumption of ayahuasca can help to diminish the danger of psychopathologies and neuroses, since the subject, literally, knows that the visions and amplified feelings have been generated by the entheogen, and this certainty is almost enough to live dialogism without anxiety (although this, obviously, does not remove the pain, distress, or fullness of the experience of self-discovery). If, in addition to this, the subject receives adequate learning to discern and illuminate with awake knowledge the different impulses and perceptions received during the effect of the entheogen, the process is self-healing in the most classic orientation of shamanism and Eastern Buddhist and *zazen* practices. In an anthropological sense, I believe I can affirm that the effort of every human society, in the last term, has consisted of discerning and educating one’s own dialogical consciousness: in it are settled the pillars of every value system. We could say that controlled mental dissociation is the basis of human culture itself (for a more extensive exposition on this specific aspect see FERICGLA, 1989).

……. When a subject, while under the effects of ayahuasca, loses control of their own dialogical consciousness, they are plunged into a state “like” madness, they are prey to their modified perceptions of reality, to emotional amplification, and to their imagery, but in no case is the possibility of returning to daily sanity lost since it is an artificially induced state. Mythopoetic languages and plastic symbols used in ceremonies, rituals, and therapy sessions have the function of precisely reorienting such cognitive dialogism. It is what M. Eliade exposed in reference to classic shamanism, affirming that the shaman is the individual who has passed through a state of madness, has discovered or recognized the theory of madness through their own cognitive processes, and has managed to emerge from it not only unscathed but obviously reinforced. For this reason, the classic *medicine man* can cure madness in others. Hence also that one cannot speak of the effect of entheogens in the abstract, but of the effect that a certain substance produces in a specific subject and immersed in a concrete context: each of the three elements is of enormous importance for the experience. Taking into account that ayahuasca acts as an emotional amplifier, I repeat, it is basic that the environment be highly cared for, friendly, and of intimate complicity.

……. It can be expressed in another way, and already approaching the end of this chapter. We could consider that mental dialogism allows for the manifestation, for the subject’s own understanding, of their shortcomings, problems, and imbalances. With this, a small or large crisis is generated, depending on the biographical moment of each person, which entails as a consequence a greater approach, understanding, manipulation, and acceptance of subjective reality (and since human reality is a social and cultural reality, also of the environment). Hence the very important adaptogenic function of ayahuasca, and this is the explicit purpose with which it is consumed in peoples not subjugated to a religious doctrine of a dogmatic character. With a little practice, the consumer almost always maintains sufficient lucidity that will allow them to distance themselves from the very whirlwind of the crisis they are living, and take the necessary resolutions from their own internal movement.

……. Dialogism as a cognitive style is found in each and every one of the manifestations proper to modified states of consciousness. For example, shamanic initiations frequently imply that the shaman apprentice mysteriously becomes ill, or even on the verge of death. Shamans describe visions in which they self-observe and feel how they are dismembered or flayed and reduced to a skeleton by entities proper to the imaginary, to which they refer as demons or wrathful deities. The initiate perceives such imagery in the sense that they are being liberated from the limitations of the daily world and empowered to perform visionary, healing, and protective works for themselves and for the other members of their collectivity. From another point of view, the destructive demons or wrathful deities at the bottom are also allies of the subject: they help in the task of transformation and liberation13.

……. The Greek myth of Dionysus also clearly expresses the connection between the experience of bodily fragmentation and the psychic dissociation of madness, induced by intoxication and the subsequent ecstasy to the consumption of the body of Dionysus (according to various studies, it was a psychoactive substance) of this divinity of Hellenic classicism. In the words of Walter Otto, Dionysus is the wild spirit of antithesis and paradox, of immediate presence and complete withdrawal, of beatitude and horror. He referred to him as a “divided and undivided spirit.” There is abundant good ethnographic literature on this process and it is not necessary to insist on it. As Erich Neyman says, “madness is a dismemberment of the individual, and just as the dismemberment of the body… symbolizes the dissolution of personality.”

……. The cure for such dismemberment is remembering: remembering who we really are, and this process of self-remembrance, of recollection, and of cognitive self-organization plays a crucial role in Gnostic, Sufi, and initiatory teachings in general. During the effect of ayahuasca, it happens sometimes that mental control, dialogical consciousness, is momentarily lost, and the struggle to recover it is a fight against one’s own madness and to remember who each one is.

3.3.—

……. All this leads us to enter into another field proper to anthropology, and for me one of the most exciting fields of scientific research: the study of the forms of self-organization of the human being. The consumption of ayahuasca induces a dialogical consciousness that, I repeat, is summarized in the capacity to dialogue with oneself, and that expressed in religious terms would be equivalent to the repeated affirmation: “God is within each one.” The human being is a highly complex entity; as far as is known, the most complex in the universe. And it moves according to what I would call a hermeneutic principle of self-organization.

……. The principle of self-organization, within complex systems, has also been considered by Maturana and Varela in their concept of “autopoiesis.” According to these authors, having an open and complex system as is the human being, it is not the input itself that determines the subsequent action and behavior, but rather the response to the stimulus is determined by what happens with the input once inside the system. That is to say, for the subsequent adaptive reaction, what is important is the form in which the stimulus is registered and used, which depends on the internal organization system previously established. In complex systems, a type of interrelation contrary to a linear causal relationship (input-output) occurs since the emphasis on the input falls on the type and form of interaction that it awakens within the system, thus configuring its own future. If we metaphorically use the concept of autopoiesis within the field of individual and collective learning (as Rosa Laffitte does), we will observe that it centers mainly on the character of relationships and exchanges of a psychosocial nature and their power of transformation (fixed behavioral patterns, used knowledge, expectations of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, cognitive maps, emotional reactions, etc.). In this sense, self-revision processes allow taking consciousness of the role that both the individual themselves and the organization in which they are immersed have, and undoubtedly favors the increase of self-organizational and creative capacities: the latter are necessary to generate the change required within the contextual system that surrounds it (LAFFITTE, 1996:5).

……. Thus, then, we can consider self-revision and reflection on oneself as an essential strategy to avoid self-centrism (starting point of radical ethnocentrism), which only refers to actions of the past that in many cases have already become obsolete as forms of adequate behavior.

……. In cybernetics, it has been theoretically and practically highlighted that simple feedback loops (for example, the thermostat of a refrigerator) do not allow questioning either the objectives pursued or the adequacy of the type of action being carried out (ibid, 6). In such a situation, it is probable that even open systems become closed systems and little adequate to give a new response to complex contextual situations (for example, people who repeat the same behavioral patterns even after having moved away from the situations that had originally motivated them).

……. Dialogue is a form of expression that establishes a living relationship between people. Dialoguing implies starting from an open attitude of listening that allows proceeding dialectically in a constructive way, facilitating the revision and restructuring of one’s own knowledge schemes. Hence, dialogism as a form of cognitive processing, or as a form of alternative consciousness, has the same properties as so-called deep reflection. The notion of reflection as a form of learning is not new here at all; we can find it from Aristotle and Plato to more recent authors such as Dewey, Freire, Habermas, or Schön. Reflection, besides being a metacognitive and introspective process, is also directed towards the environment in a critical way. For this reason, it is an error to understand reflection as a purely individual process in which there is only a simple relationship between our thought and our action, but rather reflection is a process, like language, basically social (ibid, 8).

……. Thus, then, intra- and interpersonal communication processes based on dialogism and introspection allow acquiring a broader vision of the situation in which one finds oneself, since through this cognitive style, one learns to observe one’s own thoughts, perceiving their adequacy or lack thereof (in religion they would call it truthfulness). In this sense, for example, shared silence loaded with emotionality is a highly expressive space of union, which at the same time allows us to use attention to expand our consciousness.

……. Often it is difficult or impossible for us to understand situations that require change, due to the fact that we are trapped by old conceptual frameworks. The human being can only open themselves to new situations if they are capable of taking consciousness of their cognitive frameworks and attempt adaptive actions to try to overcome them. This type of taking consciousness and this expansion of cognitive fields arises more easily in stillness, since the silence that usually accompanies the consumption of entheogens gives way to new perceptions and a broader understanding of reality that surrounds us (sometimes silence is substituted by monotonous activities of a hypnotic character, such as chants and prayers).

……. The uncertainty principle in contemporary physics (already since the years 1959 with Heisenberg and 1966 with Bohr) highlights the importance of the observer in the understanding of everything observed, and in this sense, modified states of consciousness, whatever their level of depth, can only be understood from a systemic order that integrates them in their totality, self-including. They are never options of the type that in phonology Troubetzkoy called “privative,” that is, founded on the presence or absence of a distinctive character, all or nothing. The phenomenon of mental dialogism is of a gradual character, it goes from less to more, and we are obliged to study the fact within a dynamic structure where the set of the situation in which the phenomenon is inserted is taken into account: the environment, the person, and the specific substance.

3.4.—

……. To end, we will agree that perception as a human factor of knowledge is a key element for the understanding of the effect of ayahuasca. On the relationship that exists between the set of perception and cognitive processes, Cantril and Watzlawick have investigated extensively, among others (WATZLAWICK et al. 1989 and 1992), who affirm that the world we live in is a product of our perception, not its cause. Our human way of perceiving the world must not be understood as if it were the potential of a passive being that functions according to the simple stimulus-organization-response scheme, but rather that perception starts from an organism systemically organized and functional, with a certain negentropic energy that manifests itself in attitudes of search, curiosity, growth, and investigation (TOBEÑA, 1996; 55-64). The brain acts with biased criteria when incorporating, combining, and handling information, and perhaps it has good reasons to do so since the human brain is not a machine of standardizable qualities. It is a large gland, with a prominent mental function, that is at the service of organisms dedicated to very diverse and changing activities, and it has to act with modular efficiency preferably by criteria of evolutionary adaptation.

……. For all this, it can be affirmed that the basis of human thought resides in bringing to consciousness all those categories in which our experience of the world is classified. The main difference between the mental processes of primitive peoples and ours resides in the fact that we have managed to develop through reasoning and starting from imperfect and automatically formulated categories by our ancestors a better system of the field of knowledge. However, and just because it has been rational logic that has carried out this gigantic change of cognitive style, we have forgotten that the basis of thought is rooted in potentials often irrational, when not absolutely unconscious (affectivity, aesthetics, moods, impulses of diverse texture, etc.). These potentials often remain excessively closed or half-hidden in the field of psychology and so-called parascientific fields because they are not part of the dominant ethos in our culture, and hence they pass from constituting “themes of the human being” to becoming “problems for the human being,” in the form of psychopathologies, compulsions, etc. In these potentials also lies the basis of all cultural creation, and hence some associations as popular as that which exists between the madman and the wise man are born.

……. Our predecessors like the Hellenic Greeks or the Imperial Romans had their Dionysian, Samothracian, Eleusinian, spring ceremonies and rituals, etc., oracular systems and initiatory rites that lasted days, and even months, during which absolute integrity and commitment were required. What happened there was a secret and none of the Hellenic narrators has ever described—or at least it has not reached us—what predecessors accepted and rendered worship to the human potentialities that remain unconscious presumably happened inside their temples. Our predecessors accepted and rendered worship to the human potentialities that remain unconscious and are of an irrational character, anthropomorphizing them into divinities and converting them into generators of culture. Through these hermetic-style practices, they probably also carried out a deep emotional education among the members of their societies. Nowadays, in contrast, one can speak of an epidemic of general alienation by not accepting these human capacities, and even less in trying to educate them.

……. Based on the arguments exposed up to here, then, I believe I can affirm that the use of ayahuasca allows exploring in detail the functioning of the human mind and doing so also in relation to the origin of cultural production, its highest manifestation. Likewise, I believe I can also affirm that the consumption of this and other entheogens is a valuable means that allows incentivizing endogenous mechanisms of adaptation; and that potentially it can be used as an important instrument for emotional education adequate to our historical moment, which would undoubtedly lead to the formulation of a common field to science and non-strictly dogmatic religions.

……. Our Western societies, and during the last century and a half, have been feeding an unhealthy phobia of dialogical cognitive processes, considering them at most “pathological deviations.” To this contributes, among other things, the excessive and interested zeal that States show to maintain control over the private lives of citizens, from which in turn derives a phenomenal situation of collective alienation. This sociocultural process is cause and consequence at the same time of the very demographic and technological size of our societies: at greater social power, lack of control generates greater danger of annihilation, and the solution—although in my way of seeing it is clearly worse the remedy than the disease—is consisting of blocking every possibility of reparative controlled crisis, whether personal or collective, for fear of the consequences. With this, every real movement of adaptation is being blocked with the obvious dangers of social explosion or death by simple entropy. We could say that without abandoning Aristotle, one must pick up Plato again.

……. To end, I want to pose the possibility that the cognitive style that I have called dialogical consciousness corresponds at a biological level to a specific activity of the two cerebral lobes. Perhaps one could start from the hypothesis that controlled dissociation is a functioning separately of both lobes, but that at the same time they generate a superior function of observation. It could be said that dialogical consciousness generates a double symmetrical perception of reality: the body seems to be numb and at the same time very awake, the eyes perceive reality as being unfocused but at the same time register stimuli much more precisely than in a normal state, the mind uncovers thoughts and at the same time observes the creative process, etc. If this process and structure at the same time had to be expressed through a scheme, the most appropriate would undoubtedly be the double helix of DNA.

……. Each historical moment has sought and found the image most in accordance with the different dominant values to describe the internal processes on which the procedure of human essence would be based, and always some formal structure similar to that of DNA appears. In some cases, it has been the biblical snake coiled in the Tree of Wisdom, in other cases it has been the mythical boa of Amazonian indigenous peoples (FERICGLA 1994), or in other cases, it has been the life-giving, double-headed snake of the imperial Egyptian traditions (NARBY, 1995:104). In all this imagery, we find a formal similarity with our representation of DNA. Am I trying, perhaps, to describe in current terms the same evolutionary and adaptive process of the human being in relation to Nature made self-conscious? It is probable that this is not an opportune question but the answer itself.

 

ONEIROMANCY AND THE MEANING OF DREAMS AMONG THE SHUAR

1.—THE CONTEXT OF DISCERNMENT

……. The importance given to dreams is central in traditional Shuar society. It is as much as the mental imagery generated by the consumption of ayahuasca or Brugmansia analyzed in the previous chapter. The information obtained by members of this ethnic group from the decoding of oneiric content is used to make decisions, to try to prefigure the future, to know about distant relatives, or, literally, to locate themselves in the world. One cannot understand almost anything of their medical system, nor of their intimate social relations, of their decision-making strategy, of the rationality underlying their cultural forms, nor of their worldview if one does not understand the importance that the interpretation of dreams and visions induced by entheogens has.

……. To such an extent is the importance of oneiric production capital that people who do not dream are considered by the Shuar almost as poor devils, people without luck, people lacking the privilege of dreaming, with which they are lost in life, they have to turn to others to know how they have to live, what will happen to them, what decisions they have to make: “he is a poor man, he doesn’t dream, he has no knowledge…”, in the words of an informant. However, no one pities them because many times, to dream, one has had to have performed some sacrifice, some especially hard work, and people who have not suffered is because they are lazy: “they don’t have this luck, because no one likes to suffer, but doing so makes one strong, gives luck. One has to suffer to dream.”

……. Traditionally, if children behave in a way that is annoying to adults, they fight, they do not want to eat, or among the family there are problems and tensions, the Shuar usually say: something is missing in this one, and what is missing, for the Shuar, is precisely producing their own mental imagery, having dreams. Then the elder of the family group usually asks rhetorically: “how must we provoke him so that he lacks nothing?”. The answer is known to all: give him to drink juice of “maikiwá” (*Brugmansia* s.p.) or the entheogenic potion of ayahuasca; generally, fresh juice of *Brugmansia* is given to drink. Under the potent visionary effects of this entheogenic plant, Shuar children or adolescents remain reclined for two or three days in a state of apparent unconsciousness, time during which scenes categorized as of an oneiric character, loaded with emotionality, pass through their mind, which act as an emotional catalyst. This same oneirogenic use of entheogenic plants is extended to many other Amazonian ethnic groups and the rest of the world.

……. If the boys do not want to ingest orally the 4 to 6 cubic cm of *Brugmansia* juice, they make them recline and the adults introduce it in the form of an enema through the anus. Another system to generate oneiric imagery consists of making the boy or girl go hungry. Whatever system is chosen, the purpose is the same: that the adolescents or children who show asocial or sickly behaviors have dreams to heal themselves through the indications and realities that are prefigured by this path proper to the personal imaginary. This same oneirogenic use of entheogenic plants is extended to many other Amazonian ethnic groups and the rest of the world.

……. In this sense, it is important to stop for a moment at the central idea of every Shuar: the search for “being complete,” of completeness, an indicator of vital fullness and normality. Every being must be and be complete; from which it can be inferred that they conceive an implicit ontological order, never formulated but always present in their value system, towards which one must tend. And if something is missing in someone, they must be completed through oneiric production or mental imagery: that is where, for the Shuar, the key resides from where reality is reconstructed. Thus, for example, natural dreams and induced visions—I repeat that in the Shuar language there is no semantic distinction—give everything a human being needs to live with fullness: good taste (important for them), health, growing well… If some boy is playing and breaks an arm or a leg, the grandfather or father will tell him: “something is missing in you, the bone must be hardened, something is missing in you. You will take *maikiwá*.” Faced with any anomaly, *Brugmansia* is consumed to have visions, since according to the Shuar, when some accident happens it is because someone “is looking for” the accident victim, and in this case, visions must be provoked in the victim with ayahuasca or *maikiwuá* so that they are saved from the influence of the aggressor. This is also how the elders acted, until a few decades ago, to reproduce their cultural values with an adaptogenic function: through the activation of individual unconsciousness, articulating it in the network of collective mythological representations. Currently, this practice has been lost in the majority of border centers although it remains in force in those of the interior.

……. Like Westerners, the Shuar dream (remember dreams) from time to time, and clearly distinguish between dreams with symbolic charge, which they respect, try to understand, and often remember for years, and vulgar dreams that have no important content and that they quickly forget.

……. On the other hand, among the Shuar, there exists the category of “great dreams” that prefigure the life of the subject or of the entire collectivity if the dreamer possesses strength for it; they can be had once or twice in a lifetime with luck, provided that one is already in use of reason and, according to the Shuar, their effect lasts for the rest of life.

……. Among the Shuar, there is the intimate custom of the entire family group that inhabits the “jea,” hut, or cabin, gathering around the domestic fire every dawn. They usually wake up before dawn, around four or five in the morning, even before. Meanwhile, they wait for the first daylight to appear to start morning tasks (bathing in the nearby river, men going out hunting, women going to gather fruits or roots), the family group spends between one and two hours around the fire that the women have stoked, in intimate attitudes of recollection and stretching. The Shuar wake up slowly, like nature itself, and take a long time to get into action. This is the quietest and softest moment of the whole day. Adult men play with small children, women fan the fire and prepare some food, and the elders take advantage of these morning hours to instruct the young on the various chores of life in the jungle, on their myths, on who their enemies are, on the fact that one must work to not suffer hunger or cold…

……. At this moment is when family groups are most vulnerable, and hence the attacks of enemies always used to occur in these hours of dawn (and usually still occur in the centers furthest into the jungle).

……. It is also in this time of intimacy—visitors are rarely invited to participate in these family scenes—that the members of the family who remember nocturnal dreams tell them to the rest, provided they are not important and there are no outsiders present. If the dream comes from an adolescent or a young person and is easily understandable according to the analytical criteria of the Shuar, it is the wife or mother herself who gives the interpretation and encourages the dreamer to take one or another decision regarding the matter on which the dream or dreams have turned. Exceptionally, it is what the Shuar call “great dreams” or “important dreams,” whose content is conceived as determinant not only in reference to the interested party, I repeat, but also for the rest of the collectivity, and then the meaning and its potential consequences are often consulted in private with the family elder.

……. To such an extent is the content of dreams important for traditional Shuar society in relation to daily life, that the elders are especially protected so that no one can harm them in order to leave the family group without the needed analyst. There are families that have an elderly man or an old woman, and they are the ones who interpret. If one elder remains, it is always the grandfather who interprets, and if an elder man and an elder woman remain, they share together the interpretation of the dreams that are consulted with them. Among the Shuar, as among the majority of indigenous societies, it is considered (and not without reason) that whoever reaches old age is because they really deserve to reach old age, it is not given to just anyone; and in this sense, phrases of the following kind are common: “…if So-and-so lives being so old it is because something has happened with him, he has his power <kákaram>, it is not for nothing that he is living so long, he must have had a good dream…”, and this grants them enough prestige to interpret the dreams of others (although, naturally, there are also personal differences regarding the level of knowledge and trust that each elder in particular awakens). The old ones are like the book that stores the past life of the family and for this reason, they constitute a kind of family heritage, hence strangers who come to request the elder to interpret some dream for them must first ask permission from the family.

……. Thus, if someone has had a dream whose message they do not know how to understand but believe it is important (or needs important advice), and there is no elder in their consanguineous family, they will usually turn to the elder man or woman who has the most prestige as a connoisseur of the subject in the center where they inhabit; sometimes they will even walk many hours to consult some dream with an elder considered especially wise or a connoisseur of oneiric meaning. However, I repeat, before being able to speak with the elder, the subject must ask permission from the family group to which the old man or woman belongs: they will address the adult man who acts as head of the family (Shuar elders always live with one of their children) and will formally ask him: “I want you to allow me to have a meeting with your elders”; or: “cousin Tankámashi, I want you to allow me to speak with your dad.” The elder’s family meets and decides if the consultant is reliable or perhaps hides some interest harmful to them (a situation not strange at all). If they harbor any suspicion of aggression, they will not allow them to speak with the elder; otherwise, they facilitate the consultation, which is always carried out in the presence of one or more members of the family to which the old man belongs, adults and children. These consultations on the meaning of dreams also serve so that the other individuals of the group go on learning to decode dreams by themselves.

……. To understand the cultural role of dreams among the Shuar, and before entering into the specific commentary of them, it is still necessary to clarify something characteristic and basic of the worldview of this ethnic group. For Jivaroan peoples in general—although not only among them—it could be said that the future is a blank sheet, contrary to what is usually defended in some circles of Western scholars who are defenders of blind determinism as a closed worldview of primitive peoples. There does not exist a determinism that closes the possibility of one or another future for indigenous people: in a certain way, it is the opposite, although often the behavior seems to obey deterministic dictates to the extreme. A priori, the Shuar conceive the future as being of an open, undecided, and plastic character. In this sense, the visions generated by the consumption of ayahuasca, of *Brugmansia*, or the oneiric imagery itself is conceived as active prefigurations of the individual or group future, although not in the habitual form with which this is usually understood in the West (where destiny is predetermined by the stars, the divine will, or heavy prospective trends, and all oracular interest, for a Westerner, simplifying would consist of “finding out” what destiny has approximately reserved for them via astrology, via prayers and supplications, or via statistical analysis).

……. For a Shuar, what they have dreamed or “seen” under the effects of the entheogenic substance will happen to them precisely because they have seen it, not because they are inevitably destined to encounter it on their biographical path. Thus, if a Shuar man has had visions of a bloody end regarding some of his warrior raids, he will avoid carrying it out or will consume ayahuasca again to try to have a new favorable vision for him, which annuls the fate that had been created with the first imagery had. In this sense, then, that someone has “good dreams” about other peers is something very appreciated and desired, since the person who has dreamed beneficially about another has carved out a desirable future for them.

……. If you want, it could be affirmed that they are self-conditioned determinists. When, for example, those who inhabit border zones visit a Western doctor, they usually justify their illness with a: “I have this <the ailment> because I dreamed such a thing, so because of what I dreamed, this is happening to me.” They make a resolution from the oneiric message, in such a way that they ineluctably believe that what they dream will be fulfilled, and if we attend globally to the proposals of neurotechnology, this would have an important dimension of feasibility. Their decision-making system revolves around it: “what you dream, son, at some moment it has to be fulfilled,” the informants repeatedly affirm in our interviews, and then they usually tell various biographical stories used as irrefutable proof: “because that happens to everyone, in the whole world it happens the same. There shouldn’t be differences of races in this.”

……. On the other hand, they conceive oneiric contents whose force affects the entire collectivity with clear connections to their mythological world, as the manifestation of a certain power that the dreamer possesses, and is respected for it. It is what in Jungian terminology is called dreams of archetypal content, which make reference to a dynamic symbology of common reach for the entire society that uses them or has used them throughout its biological and cultural history. Later I describe and analyze an ethnographic example of a “great dream” had on the eve of the Ecuadorian-Peruvian war conflict (which happened between the end of 1994 and the first quarter of 1995) and how the acceptance of the content of this dream had by a great man, an elder, by the Shuar soldiers who served in the Ecuadorian army, led them to adopt a launched attitude throughout the conflict, a fact that undoubtedly influenced the final result of the unfortunate conflict in jungle territory.

……. Seen all the above and to speak already of oneiric culture, an introductory commentary of an emic type is essential and for that, I will explain with some detail some of the most important linguistic categories used to refer to dreams14.

 

Kákaram: “strength,” “I am strong for <having had> a good dream.” The concept of “strong” is not used in a physical sense but under a global and psychic meaning. Someone who is capable of performing anything (desirable or nefarious) with an efficacy above the usual average is considered “strong.” For example, someone capable of having offspring that is especially numerous, healthy, and influential is strong; or the man who has earned the respect of his peers for his warrior exploits is considered strong. There is also the meaning of “kákaram” as energy or strength in the abstract, although experimentable in a direct way by any subject, and which is evoked, for example, when someone is under the effects of ayahuasca and it seems that they are going to succumb to the de-structuring force of the entheogenic potion, the shaman who directs the session or his companions can encourage him softly or with force: “¡kákaram, kákaram, kákaram!” (“firmness, strength, integrity!”). For this reason, it is probable that a free translation, but semantically close to “kákaram,” would be a mixture of: effective, wise (thanks to having had a good dream), person with drive, personal energy, impetus, presence, charisma, integrity, and firmness (stripping these last two concepts of the positive moral sense they have in our languages: someone can be firm and whole in their bad acting). “Kákaram” is a very important term to understand the world of psychic and pragmatic values of the Shuar. I believe that another good translation to our conceptual modes is that of “energy” or “psychic strength,” although such meaning should be reformulated with greater rigor than it has today (outside, perhaps, of some minority school of analysis).

kanármajai: “I dreamed well <about myself>.” An individual can have a good dream about themselves or about another person. Whoever has had a good dream about themselves is considered fortunate, and in this sense, “kanármajai” has a causal nuance. Someone can say to another person: “you are very lucky because you have never been hurt in your fights” or “you are fortunate to have so many children who respect and take care of you” and the answer can (or usually is): “kanármajai!” (“because I had a good dream <about it>!”).

kanarmai: “I dreamed well <about another>,” in the sense of having had a dream that will help another, or others, to live better, be strong, not suffer hardships, etc. This action of dreaming well about others, “kanarmai,” is the prerogative of people who are initially already “kákaram,” strong by themselves for having enjoyed one or some good dreams. Generally, the benefit of the “good dream about others” is derived to the own family; for example, it can happen that a family clan is globally fortunate; they will attribute the cause to the grandfather having had a good dream, “kanarmai,” which was fulfilled in the grandchildren.

kara: “good dream,” in noun form.

kuit: this term applies to anything that appears in the dream and that, for the Shuar symbolic decoding system, indicates upcoming abundance and wealth. For example, Shuar and analytical psychology agree that dreaming of excrement is an announcement of psychic enrichment: excrement is “kuit.” In analytical psychology, there is an agreement on the symbolic meaning that the fact that the subject themselves dreams that they are defecating or with their own excrement would have: wealth (of a spiritual or even material character). The psychological cause of such an interpretation is related to the fact that, during our childhood, we pass through the stage of psychological evolution called the “anal stage,” during which the child recognizes their excrement as what they themselves produce and live it as creative and material wealth, shows interest in playing with the droppings they have just produced, etc.; this image remains fixed in our unconscious in such a way that it reappears in the dreams of the adult with the symbolic content commented. In the same sense, according to various European popular traditions, dreaming of excrement means the upcoming arrival of material wealth, stepping on droppings is usually understood as an announcement of “seven years of good luck,” etc. The excrement that appears in dreams is an example of “kuit” also for the Shuar; it indicates the upcoming arrival of abundant food, fruit, of some friend with gifts, etc. Rice in dreams is also “kuit” for the Shuar.

Mesék: “bad dream,” in the sense that the oneiric content is indicating (prefiguring) some upcoming nefarious event.

Mesékar: “bad dream <directed at another>.”

Mesékram: “to dream,” in verbal form.

Mesékranam tsuámarmaj: “in the dream I was healed”; expression of a causal character, in the sense of someone who was sick and who after having an oneiric episode whose content indicates a prompt healing, is healed. Then they explain what happened with this phrase.

Mesémak: “<this is> what I dream.”

Mesémakma: “to dream badly <about oneself>.”

Mesémakjai: “I have dreamed badly <about myself>”

Wéikmiakma o ímiarma: “great dream.” Great dreams are only given to people with power, in the sense commented of “kákaram.” And in the opposite sense, the fact of having an “ímiarma” is indicating that the person has power. Great dreams refer to avatars that affect collective life, and are listened to and used by the entire group as specific guidelines for making determinations. The meaning of this term has been extensively and rigorously exposed by Jungian psychology, whose equivalent would be the so-called archetypal dreams, applied to the psychological analysis of oneiric episodes of Western patients. Later I describe in detail the ethnographic example of a “great dream” had on the eve of the Ecuadorian-Peruvian war conflict (which happened between the end of 1994 and the first quarter of 1995) and how the acceptance of the content of this dream had by a great man, an elder, by the Shuar soldiers who served in the Ecuadorian army, led them to adopt a launched attitude throughout the conflict, a fact that undoubtedly influenced the final result of the unfortunate conflict in jungle territory.

……. Among the Shuar, dreams almost always have a short duration and it is considered a bad omen to have too many dreams in the same night, especially if it is nightmares. Thus, if someone has several dreams in the same night, and especially if it is the elder of the family group, they get up and shout: “chuk, chuk, chuk, chuk mesékrambajai” (“I dreamed badly!”), or they can also shout: “get up, get up! the dream is bad, something is going to happen here! get up!”. For this reason, among the Shuar, it is recommended to sleep for a short time, since otherwise, they can dream badly. They usually retire to sleep around nine or ten at night and get up before dawn, traditionally between two or three in the morning (“so much sleeping! you can dream badly, then, get up!”, and the elders make everyone get up). If the old man or woman has any nightmare, they also make everyone get up earlier and take advantage of the hours of darkness to enculturate the rest of the family, talking about the dream but without referring directly to it. For example, they can harangue saying: “young people, you must be workers, when you marry you must not mistreat women, you must not go to see another’s woman, be good hunters and brave, how are you going to let yourselves be humiliated…?”, and then they start a long lesson already related directly to the dream they have had. For the Shuar, each dream always entails a practical lesson, and at the end of the evening lesson, the elder sometimes makes everyone in the family group vomit with an infusion of ayahuasca and *guayusa* (it is a formula to cleanse themselves of diseases and bad magical influences), and to finish, they order everyone to go bathe in the river. Once up, the Shuar no longer sleep all day, and if the man lies down to sleep, he is accused of being lazy and idle, and the woman the same (although slowly today they are abandoning themselves to a certain laziness and it is not strange to find Shuar from the border who sleep eight hours, even more, and who nap during the day).

……. On the other hand, there is never a discussion about who understands the meaning of a dream better. For the Shuar, a dream is never put on the table to be discussed. The dream is the dream: if it is good, there is no need to talk more about it, and if it is a bad dream, the elder usually says (at most, and if the dreamer argues with him): “be attentive to what may come, this dream is not so good,” and there the discussion ends. That is to say, total trust in the message decoded by the elder is required, the same as in the cultural and mythological values that are the object of oral transmission; however, it is also true that there exists a wide margin of interpretation that each individual takes advantage of to seek personal meaning in their dreams. When they talk about them, each one waits for the meaning granted to the dream according to the global approaches to “resonate” inside them; if it is not so, they seek their own interpretation and wait for events.

……. Among the Shuar, each one decodes and understands their own dreams. Generally, I repeat, it is the older people who, during conversations about dreams, go on transmitting orally the knowledge referring to it to the young. The sequence always usually is that an elder, starting from a fact that has happened to him in daily life, begins to narrate his dreams, describes the meaning of the oneiric symbols that appear in them, and ends with a: “and this happens because I dreamed it so,” and the young learn the lesson. Often, this scene occurs in the long moments of intimacy at dawn, but it can also occur at any other moment of the day; there is no specific scenario for it. It is thus how the interpretation of dreams is done by each one for themselves as they grow and learn from their elders.

……. The understanding of dreams is the fruit of the experience of each individual life, initially encoded according to the mythological content of Shuar culture, but each individual is quite free to re-elaborate the content of that oneiric element. For this reason, if someone asks themselves currently what remains of traditional Shuar mythology as a guide for life, as a cosmology that orients their lives in an empirical way, it may be answered that very little remains, but it is not exactly true. An endogenous analysis of the life of the Shuar highlights that their cultural paradigm, their conceptual scheme, remains alive in a heuristic way through dreams. That is to say, the oral memory transmitted in family intimacy when analyzing or decoding dreams interprets a living and private experience referring it to the memory of the group, conserving with it the mythological traces of the Shuar World and readapting them in a day-to-day way to the group and individual cultural changes to which they are subjected (this same thesis is the one defended also by Carlo Severi in a magnificent work published recently: SEVERI, 1996). With this, it can be affirmed that the analysis of dreams has among the Shuar a marked character of adaptive strategy in the personal and collective at the same time that it connects with their traditional worldview, since through this means they find guidelines and explanatory reasons for their behavioral patterns and orientation in decision-making, which are at the same time in accordance with their mythological traditions and with their changing contextual reality lived in a private way.

……. Generally, the individual who has had a good dream (“kanármajai”: “I dreamed well about myself”) does not relate it. Among the Shuar, it is believed that narrating a dream immediately makes the strength of said dream vanish and it is kept in reserve, with which, and it cannot be ignored, one is also doing an exercise of will and retention that will help in daily practice where hieratism is necessary to keep one’s own intentions secret, something necessary as a strategy of defense and survival. If, for example, a young person begins the narration of one of their dreams that refers to something strictly personal about their future, the elder present usually shouts at them angrily phrases of the style: “enough already, don’t tell any more! You will know what you have dreamed, you will know what the future is for you, for your children, and for your grandchildren! Enough already!”. They believe that if one anticipates explaining what one has dreamed, one can damage one’s own future (although on the other hand, it is also true that thus one never errs in the interpretation if one verbalizes it subsequently to the event about which one has dreamed something). Each one goes on meditating and relating what happens to them in life with what they have dreamed; thus, the dream is conceived as an anticipating what is going to happen to one, precisely because the dream itself has configured it and for this reason, it must be kept in silence. In a certain way, then, the rigorous retention of one’s own impulses forms an essential part of their educational system, and without a doubt, it is an interesting way of educating young people in a vital discipline for the survival of their entire people.

……. For the Shuar, there are dreams that have no valid content. For example, a dream that says nothing is seeing oneself taking a walk here or there, doing anything of no importance… that is not considered a good or bad dream. In the opposite sense, for the Shuar cultural world, a significant dream has as its main characteristic that the subject hears voices that narrate events or experiences of an individual character: at a given moment, upon falling asleep, someone appears within the oneiric episode and speaks addressing the subject: “I am this and that…” or “I lived like this and that, and I had this power and these huts…”, “I was in this sad and weak way but I knew how to recover and I arrived at this and that…”. It is considered a good dream (“kara”) when they speak to the subject themselves although the speaking being does not appear in the oneiric imagery. In Jungian conception, this psychic phenomenon would be described by saying that one of the characters that compose our unconscious mind takes the leading role of the oneiric event; and in clinical psychiatry, it is known that the schizophrenic patient who hears voices is much more complex and long to cure than one who only has hallucinations of a visual character, which is usually attributed more frequently to organic motives (intoxications, hypoxia, consumption of drugs). One could think that sounds, mental sound imagery, root in much deeper or archaic levels of our cognitive processes, and that their eruptions through oneiric or visionary episodes have a more determinant character for the subject’s life.

……. Another ethnographic example. Someone dreams of hearing a voice that announces to them: “look, see how many people there are before you! do you realize what has happened?”, and then the voice speaks to them, perhaps, of a fact that happened previously (although the subject themselves has not seen it): the Shuar understand that with this, it is announcing something of their own future.

……. A rule of habitual symbolic decoding among the Shuar is to interpret a meaning contrary to what the oneiric episode announces, in a parallel way to how Western analytical psychology does it when referring to the compensations of the unconscious, whose oneiric expression is often the opposite of what the subject thinks in a state of wakefulness, precisely to compensate for an inflamed mental state or an exaggerated or mistaken conscious thought according to the assessment of the unconscious. I transcribe textually an illustrative conversation in this regard with a 42-year-old informant:

“…I have dreams that coincide for me. Sometimes, I anticipate when there is going to be a dead person; I have dreams <in which> I see a crowd of people gathered, of people who are happy, cheerful, I hear music, songs, I see flowers, everything is joy, then I wake up and I say to my wife: ‘woman, I had this dream, there is going to be weeping, there is going to be death,’ because it is the opposite of what is dreamed. This last time I was doing my work on my property <he calls ‘property’ the territory he has assigned by the Indigenous Federation to exploit for hunting and to cultivate gardens>, and I participated in the party of Sta. Rosa <a Shuar center so named by the settlers>. I dreamed that there was much joy, party, music although I didn’t know where the music came from. I said to my wife: ‘a person from Sta. Rosa is going to die.’ We returned and the next day they told us that a gentleman from Sta. Rosa had died <this is a ‘mesékar,’ an announcement that something bad is going to happen>. Another thing is, for example, that I am walking in the dream, I arrive at a cliff and I got lost, I don’t know what happened behind me. Other times, I find myself perhaps walking and I meet a little dog of mine that attacks me; and I didn’t know what happened to me. I say to myself ‘do you know what? I go walking and a dog of mine attacked me, I didn’t know what happened,’ I say ‘mesémakjai,’ I didn’t know what happened <but I have dreamed something bad about myself>.”

……. In the second dream described within the same story, although the subject does not understand the direct meaning of its message, he takes refuge in the general decoding facilitated by the Shuar tradition: in this dream, it is interpreted as that someone within the own family group is doing something against him himself, there is an enemy within the same family group who wishes him ill. The explanation given by his traditions takes as a reference daily empirical situations: the dog is the faithful friend of the human being (the Shuar have dogs to help themselves in hunting raids and so that they warn with their barking of the proximity of someone to the hut, it lives in the same house as human beings, it is fed by them) and, therefore, the canine image is identified with the members of the family. The informant himself responds with a concrete case when asked about the meaning of such an interpretation:

“…<some time ago> there was a crime where a nephew killed his uncle. When the uncle went out very early he said: ‘woman, I am going to take care of my cows that are far away’ and upon getting up he said ‘woman, I had a bad dream. I don’t know what is going to happen to me,’ ‘why?’, says the wife, ‘because the dogs of mine that are here, from one moment to another <in the dream> attacked me and I didn’t know what happened to me, I got lost.’ He went and this same morning he appeared dead. It was sought who and it was discovered that the nephews themselves had killed him.”

……. There exists a substantial similarity with the interpretation that a Western analyst would make of a similar dream. The dog, within an oneiric episode, is understood as an emblem of fidelity and of the familiar, with whose sense it appears very frequently under the feet of the figures of the ladies sculpted in medieval tombs: it is the “brother-animal” that symbolizes in the zoological the friendship and fraternity (BIEDERMANN, 1993, 368; PEREZ-RIOJA, 1988, 346; CIRLOT, 1982, 359).

……. Following this comparative description of the symbolic content of dreams between Shuar culture and Western analytical psychology, we find another fundamental parallelism. If an Amazonian indigenous person dreams of a house, they understand that the message of the individual imaginary will refer to the home, in the sense of being a message about their own life. If the hut or “jea” appears within the oneiric content in good condition, the Shuar will understand that the home (the subject themselves) is well; if it appears old, it will mean that the way of living of one’s own self is deteriorating and that something must be changed. If the dreams indicate that the subject moves from a hut, they will understand that some day they will change the location of their “jea,” and with it their life since for the Shuar changing domestic location implies changing territories where they hunt, waiting for new gardens to grow, etc., and vice versa. Similarly, in analytical psychology, it is interpreted that the dreamer themselves is the house they dream of: the image of the house (whether one’s own or another) is used by the unconscious to evoke the dreamer themselves, both physically and psychically and in their diverse levels (see the different dictionaries of symbols cited or others; also the work JUNG, 1984). It is known by accumulation of empirical material that the image of the house (hut, cabin, granary, farmhouse, castle, etc.) is one of the most important symbols of the dreamer themselves within oneiric symbology and, in the case of primitive peoples, it is a key element that here allows us to observe the literal identification with symbolic elements as a key to their cognitive processing. In this sense, at the end of an interview with one of the elderly informants and upon asking him about his idea of the symbolism of the hut, he responded cleanly and inside his house: “I am the house! and since I am the house and I am strong like this house where I live, there is no wind that is going to knock it down because the house is strong. It is strong, I am strong.” Not only is there a symbolic parallelism between the house and the subject, then, but we observe the so-well-known magical identification proper to primitive peoples, a psychological phenomenon with important cultural consequences that L. Lévy-Bruhl called with the expression “mystical participation with reality” (LÉVY-BRUHL, 1985). It is the classic observation investigated by various authors of the projection of psychic images, to the point of confusing primordial ideas or others of an individual, subjective character generated in the own imaginary with the external object.15

……. From a social point of view, the Shuar have distinct enculturation processes according to each gender, and this is also projected into the significance given to dreams according to whether the interpreter is a man or a woman; and that the same oneiric episode can be understood with distinct nuances according to whether it has been had by a man or a woman (and regardless of strictly personal aspects). However, some people are recognized as especially apt and experienced to decode the dreams of others and in case of need, they turn to them, whether they are men or women.

……. From what I have been able to observe, Shuar women usually give a more affective and emotional character to the content of dreams, while men usually orient their interpretation more in the sense of daily action. For example, in a certain experimental situation, I narrated separately the same dream to an elderly man and to his daughter, an already adult woman and mother of a family. The deep interpretation of both did not vary excessively but the tendency of the content did, and especially the advice deduced from it.

……. The content of the dream as I described it to both, in identical content and order of the elements, is as follows:

…I remember that I am in an open space in the middle of the jungle. In this clearing there are enormous cages and in each of them there are animals of different breeds, alive and locked up. They are mixed but calm. I enter the thicket and take out the animals that I am hunting. The cages hold their walls of bars by means of a rope that ties them around, like a bundle. In front of each cage there is a yellow mailbox and the rope that keeps the walls of each cage joined is tied to the mailbox by one of the ends, as if the support of the rope were the mailbox, in a way similar to how ships are tied to the moorings of ports. Then a lion comes out of the thicket and with its teeth breaks the ropes that held the walls of the cages, they fall and the locked animals are transformed into black people. I remain stunned since I believed I was hunting animals but I see that they are black people. Still dazed, I apologize to them and they, half-angry, accept them and rebuke me to never again confuse them with animals of the jungle. (The dream continues, but I end the transcription here).

……. From this episode, I reproduce a sequence of the analytical commentary that C. Pichama performed for its intrinsic interest:

……. Pichama: You ask yourself… why have I dreamed this?

……. Author: Yes.

……. – Why would you dream this…? you were capable of putting all this in the cage! no? To all this, our race says that these tigers and animals, when you catch them it is that you caught the soul of all these, and you put them prisoner. And as they didn’t do anything to you, this means that they are already prisoner and although they think about doing something to you, they can no longer.

……. – Perhaps, but the animals are now free because upon the lion opening the cages it was seen that they are people, not animals.

……. – You wanted to do this! but then someone made them save themselves so that they wouldn’t all die. Someone has seen that you were angry and has saved them because you cannot kill like this, just like that, no? but your spirit punishes theirs. That is why you have dreamed like this. I imagine that you think like this, but your spirit, your *íwianch*, is guarding everything, he knows who is wanting to do something to you, he knows. Each person has their *íwianch*. For example, Juank gave you16. The sorcerers have their defense, but we, all the others, don’t know how, we want to do this same thing but… there is no way. You yourself, your dream doesn’t let these people bother you. When you take ayahuasca it is how you see it and you defend yourself. In your imagination, when you take ayahuasca, you are no longer a person, you are another form that allows you to know everything. Your spirit protects you when you sleep. Although another witch doctor wants to attack you, your *íwianch* protects you. You get scared, you are sleeping and you get scared while he <your spirit, the *íwianch*> works. Many *alamas*17 have told me that while they are sleeping, the *tséntsak* <magic arrows considered as living powers sent by another sorcerer to wound or kill> stick into them but the defense they have, they say, grabs the attacks, they cut the *tséntsak* that attack. Then they wake up scared but safe. This you must have dreamed, because I see that you are also studying everyone, everyone here knows this. Then it happens that others want to know how you are studying, why you want to know, and they attack you.

……. – Pichama, where did you learn to understand dreams?

……. – My dad knew how to tell me, my mom didn’t. When I was little, my dad explained to me ‘I have dreamed to be able to be like I am today.’ When there was a storm, thunder, lightning, at night… He made me go out to go look for the power of the dream, of the demon. I went and never found, I went, I went… in the darkness. My dad told me ‘if you are going to grow up brave you have to go, if you are going to grow up a coward you are not going to go.’

……. Starting from what was exposed by this Shuar informant, it is verified that there is a substantial similarity with the Western analytical interpretation. For a Shuar man, the animals of this oneiric episode described above are interpreted as enemies belonging to what we would call the magical dimension of reality, enemies that the Western dreamer had caged but that then have been freed by some other being that helps them, and although the subject does not know who it is, his spirit, *íwianch*, does know who is the possible enemy and wakes him up to avoid fatal attacks. Aside from the formal content that makes exclusive reference to their worldview regarding the existence of projected magic arrows, which are only visible during dreams or under the effect of ayahuasca, it can be observed that wild animals are treated as enemies, not as evil beings. If we now direct our attention towards the multiplicity of endogenous symbolic contents that support the images of wild animals18, it will be observed that in general terms they indicate an undifferentiated psychic energy, not yet rationalized or subjected to the conscious will of the subject themselves (as they appear represented in the famous painting by Füsli). For the defenders of analytical psychology, then, animals represent the part of the psyche not entirely human, in the sense of the instinctive, what is not controlled by the volatile and conscious action.

……. Taking into account that for the majority of peoples with cultures not influenced by Christianity there does not exist a morality that judges everything based on good or evil, animals, as impulses of the unconscious, are magnified and understood as projections constituted into external realities. However, there is abundant empirical material that allows us to affirm that the fact of dreaming of animals is a representation that the dreamer’s own unconscious elaborates to express something of their emotional or passionate nature (and this, simplifying this affirmation a lot since dreams where animals appear have abundant exceptions). Expanding the explanation, it is worth saying that when I had this dream, I was in the process of analysis with a oneiric interpretation group. This helped me to recognize, differentiate, and control better some emotional impulses that were part of my way of acting in the world and it also served me to verify certain cognitive processes that at the time I was investigating (hence, I understand, that the ropes of the cages were tied to mailboxes, symbol of intellective communication and refreshing news; for more information on this specific aspect, FERICGLA, 1989); in the end, I finished with such analytical practices for a matter of pride (which, naturally, then didn’t seem like it to me) and later I understood that it was the lion, symbol of such feeling, who let go of the ties and put me again before the danger of being swallowed by my own unconscious (the black characters into which the animals are transformed). Very succinctly, this would be the Western interpretation, which is not far from the one performed by the elder Pichama, with all the cultural translations necessary for the case.

……. Upon speaking of “the powers that Juank gave me,” the informant is referring to the tools of self-control that are the first that every adult and, very especially, every shaman novice must sharpen. The power of the witch doctors of any primitive people on Earth is, in the first place, power over themselves: capacity for self-exploration, self-control, presence, and cold equanimity in the assessment of the exogenous and endogenous world, and even, although it seems a contradiction, power in the sense of lucidity and coldness in analyzing one’s own emotions to which they give an objectual sense of reflection of the external world (and this, aside from any other factual capacity, an analysis that would take us too far from our objectives here; see among others: ELIADE, 1976 and 1982). Effectively, like a psychological analyst who offers me his own instruments of analysis converted into means of self-observation (exactly what I did for years to self-experiment with myself, and despite the important difficulties that this entails), the shaman P. Juank had transmitted “power” to me, understood under the broad meaning of “kákaram” (I leave aside from the semantic contents that I am describing for the term “kákaram,” any other potential faculty of an esoteric character that could be implemented and that are so fashionable: anthropology is dedicated exclusively to the analysis of exoteric and cultural elements).

……. On the other hand, Pichama takes weight away from the occurrence of the animals in the oneiric episode and centers on two aspects for him important: the purpose of having had this dream (“you ask yourself why have I dreamed this?”) and the figure of the *íwianch*, spirit, which does not appear in the dream but which for Pichama is the knower of the purpose and of who is the cause of the evil. If we translate these two elements of the Shuar interpretation, we will observe that, from an analytical optics, the symbolic messages of the unconscious are not only not absurd or lacking in meaning but have a finalist direction. In a certain way, it does not make much sense to ask a patient why they have had such or such a dream (without a doubt because such or such symbolic elements have been taken by the unconscious to express themselves, but nothing more is drawn from it), in exchange, it does make sense to ask the purpose, for what one dreams of such a thing. The unconscious part of the human being should be understood as a kitchen where the psychic survivals of the millions of years of evolution of the human being (phylogenesis in its psychic side) and the remains of the individual’s own biography (ontogenesis) are stored, a kitchen where the adaptive strategies that will best serve the subject for their survival and evolution are cooked, or from where they are warned of the dangers of loss of contact with themselves or with the environment, plus the consequences that derive from it from the adaptive point of view as well. I believe it is not too risky to understand that the *íwianch* of the Shuar equates to an external projection of the individual’s own unconscious. For the Shuar, the *íwianch* is a central character in their mythological pantheon, which has the image of the individual themselves (animal, plant, or person) but is incorporeal, it is their spirit or immaterial part but with formal determination: the image of the subject themselves.

……. The *íwianch* knows everything about the subject and each living being has one; if we translate it by unconscious, it will then be understood that it keeps everything and knows who is wanting to do something to you, since in the last term the beings that appear in the dreams of anyone are characters composing their own psychic complexity. We always dream of ourselves, and analytical psychology has highlighted the enormous importance of the phenomenon of projection: it has allowed verifying that the projection of psychic contents towards the exogenous world can even reach the total identification of the subject with the object (phenomenon observable in primitive peoples and children). It is also thus understandable the protective function of the *íwianch* (“when you take ayahuasca you see it… although another witch doctor wants to attack you, your *íwianch* protects you; with this I refer the reader especially to the cognitive theory exposed in Cap. II): the unconscious is self-remunerative and self-regulates as much as it can. It performs the pertinent compensations (regulations) of daily frustrations, indicates where the dangers are in the individual’s evolution, points out paths of access, and self-compensates: that is to say, it protects the subject themselves from the destruction that would mean a flow of energy or unconscious material without partitions (madness).

……. On the other hand, having told the same dream above to a woman, an adult daughter of the elder who performed the interpretation that I have just commented, she performed the commentary that follows:

……. “The dream that you had of the blacks was a black consciousness that could not hold: it had an anger <strong passion>. And the meadow is that you were going to get a good woman who was going to support everything in you. And the animals that are transformed into black people, is your consciousness. <A> That black consciousness is going to be grabbed by the good woman, she is going to take away all the evils that the consciousness has, she is going to support everything in you and is going to change your life. But if you don’t support it and you continue the same as before <you will open> the cage and you are going to let it go <the good woman, the wife> and you are not going to have her there, with you. The animals in cages: you caged someone. The forest is your good wife, the meadow is the child. The white people caged the blacks, they captured them. It is your wife who captured you, perhaps she can compose you, make you a good man, change you, and make you happy. Otherwise, you open that and she leaves. You are left without a meadow and without forests.”

……. I will not lengthen myself commenting on this second female interpretation of the same dream, but consistent similarities appear with the previous one. In the first place, the identification of animals with uncontrollable passions (anger); in the second place, the black characters as a dark part of the dreamer themselves that prevents them from approaching the good woman, being transformed by her, and evolving towards a better personal situation: the good woman must be understood at a symbolic level as the door of access of the man towards his own unconscious (in analytical symbology, the woman has a triple and complex level of interpretation, but generically it is decoded as the door of access of the man towards his own unconscious).

……. In any case, the interpretative difference of the dream between a man and a woman is now important. The woman, despite being the daughter of the elder informant, understands it differently because she has received a different socialization (“I learned to understand dreams from my mother; my father spent the day outside, through the jungle”) and, however, and without being a specialist in the subject of the symbolic analysis of oneiric elements, I would dare to affirm that essentially it is only about different faces of the same and ambiguous coin; also she grants the dream the same finalist sense, indicator of vital strategies, of clues for subsequent action in the daily world.

 

3.—Literalness of dreams and symbolic opposition

……. For the Shuar, it results difficult to know when the content of a dream must be understood literally, or when it must be interpreted as opposition to the conscious content, that is to say, to the contrary (in the field of psychological analysis, one would speak of the same thing only that the terminology used would probably be that of compensation of the unconscious to dream what is contrary to what the subject finds in the daily external world). It is from the very occurrence of life that the Shuar draw the keys to interpret some dreams that were confusing at the time. For this reason, below I will include the interpretations of some symbolic elements just as they are decoded in Shuar culture.

……. Some oneiric episodes are interpreted directly as anticipated warnings of something that happens or will happen in the daily world. For example, someone can tell that they have dreamed a voice that told them: “take care, look at what yours is doing, be attentive; follow him and see what he does” and the Shuar understand it as a reference literal to concrete, physical things (I do not say “real” because it is an excessively slippery concept, and more in a context like the present one). An ethnographic illustration:

……. “…an uncle of mine who lives here, the wife had been cheating on him and the behavior was different, and he tells that in a dream an unknown voice told him: ‘look at your wife, when she goes to bed with you she always carries something under her armpit. Look! she is cheating on you! don’t you realize she cheats on you?’ and my uncle told that he woke up and asked himself: ‘why <the dream> told me this?’. A certain night he decided to go to bed, undress, and lie down. In bed, he pretended to be sleeping, he looked at the wife as if he were sleeping. She undressed as if my uncle were sleeping, but she had something under her armpit, in a little bag she had something. He looked at her and saw that something was peeking out from under the armpits. He got up and said to the wife: ‘hey! what do you have under your armpit? let’s see.’ In the dream someone told him and he did it. The woman did not want to show him the armpit, she grabbed what she had and put it in her mouth but could not swallow it and, what a surprise it was to see that she had carried a photo of the man with whom… it was a young man who had gone out <of the jungle> and had taken a photo. My uncle tells that he forcefully took the photo from her and saw the photo she had in a cloth bag, and for that reason, there was a crime. And he knew that because in dreams someone told him. My uncle saw this and for that reason it happens, if you don’t see it in dreams it doesn’t happen.”

……. These dreams of a premonitory character are interpreted the same whether they are had by a man or a woman. The final commentary is a clear example of the open and prefigurative conception of physical reality that dreams have among this people.

……. The key to knowing when a dream considered premonitory, I repeat, refers to the dreamer themselves or to a different person, is in the situation of the protagonist within the oneiric passage. For the Shuar, when the message refers to the life of the dreamer themselves, it never speaks of them directly; thus, for example, a woman who dreams that she sees someone and in her imaginary appears a voice that tells her: “look at this lady how she is! look how her children treat her!”, she will understand that that is going to happen to herself, and immediately she will ask herself why she has dreamed of this, with what purpose, what she must do as a consequence.

……. On the other hand, if the woman (or man) Shuar dreams with a voice that makes her observe something that is happening to herself, she will interpret it as indicative that it will happen to another person, but never to herself: if she sees herself sick, another woman will get sick.

……. If the protagonist of what is dreamed is the subject themselves but no voice indicates anything to them, the Shuar will interpret that that will happen to them themselves, especially if it is about trips or movement: if they dream that they travel by a river, they interpret it as that they will have a long trip; if they are walking along a path, it means one thing or another according to the ways of walking (if it is annoying, fatiguing, light…), and if during the trip they find some stumble but resolve it, it is interpreted as that they are going to travel but that they will have certain problems and that they will have to overcome them: “I have to travel and something is going to be in the way but I am going to win,” they will say to themselves in case that in the same dream there has been something that broke with the difficult sensations that appeared during the walking. Also, analytical psychology interprets in a literal way such a symbol: walking is the form of the unconscious to represent the “trip” of the dreamer’s own life, with its avatars, progress, difficulties, neurosis, etc.

……. When a Shuar dreams that they are flying, they generally affirm that it is indicative that one is well in health and at home. It is a good omen, especially because often the oneiric flying appears as a resolution of a conflict also represented in the field of dreams: “someone was following me to kill me, wound me perhaps, but I… *fuit*! I flew. Then with me there is nothing, I am well. Perhaps someone thinks badly of me, but they cannot with me because I am well with everything, in myself, with others, in everything I am well.”

……. If a Shuar dreams of many people, of a large town, they interpret it as that literally at some moment they will find themselves surrounded by so many new and unknown people, or that a descendant of theirs some day will inhabit a large urban center and will be in the middle of an anonymous crowd (let us not forget that the Shuar inhabit small family groups scattered through the jungle, with which the image of “many people” can mean a town of 100 inhabitants). In this example, and simplifying, there also exists a marked parallelism between the indigenous interpretation and that which Western analysts have elaborated, since an oneiric episode in which a strange crowd appears is usually interpreted as a symbolic representation of some emerging and new aspect of the personality of the analysand. The Shuar will speak of unknown people who appear in their life, and the Westerner of “characters” that emerge from their unconscious towards the ordered light of the conscious. In this case, again the importance of psychological projections as a key element to understand the classically called “mystical participation of the primitive with their environment” is highlighted: subjective experiences are projected towards the external world and formalized based on mythopoetic or concrete languages that allow the indigenous person to orient themselves in their cognitive processing from the symbolic systems that their culture has created. Later I describe and analyze a dream where elements of Shuar mythology and personal factors of the dreamer subject are interwoven clearly.

……. Other examples of oneiric interpretation in the Shuar world could be: if one dreams of a party and joy, with someone of the family laughing and happy, it is necessary to understand that soon there will be some death or some motive for sadness; if, in exchange, one dreams of death, with someone who is alive but is perceived dead during the dream, it is necessary to interpret that they are well, there is a motive for joy.

……. To end with these illustrations and their significant parallelisms with the Western analytical code, I want to take the snake as an example. If it is accepted that in reality all symbols are functions of the energetic, or of the unconscious in psychological terms, elaborated through the capacity of human imagery (and our capacity for symbolic creation is, without a doubt, the most potent weapon we humans have), the image of the snake is considered the symbol par excellence of the vital energy of the human being, hence its ambivalences and multivalences in all cultural systems. I will not perform a comparative description of the sense granted to the image of the snake in different cultures and moments of history, since this is not the adequate place, but suffice it to say that probably there does not exist a single religious, shamanic, or symbolic tradition that does not grant a most prominent place to the image of the snake (in CIRLOT, 1982:407 et seq. there is a list of the main authors of different schools and tendencies that have treated this specific theme). The Jungian school of analysis considers that the snake, in dreams, constitutes an excellent symbol of the unconscious that manifests itself in a sudden and unexpected way, and that it is a symptom of distress that expresses an abnormal activation of the unconscious dimension, that is to say, an activation of the source of vital force that can have as much a positive as a destructive sense, but always in an extreme degree.

……. On the other hand, for the current Shuar, envy is one of the most destructive psychological impulses, if not the most, the origin of family and group disputes that lead to the burning of huts and murders. Traditionally, envy did not exist among the indigenous people of this ethnic group, nor is there even a linguistic category to express it: even to refer to this emotional alteration, they use the same Spanish word “envidia” (in the opposite sense, they did know romantic jealousy, “akásmamu”). Until the second decade of the 20th century, everyone had the same (hut, blowgun, fabrics woven in cotton to dress, garden, etc.) and what each one possessed was the direct product of their daily effort. If someone had more than another, it was not something enviable, since anyone could put themselves at their level by being more hardworking, more daring, or more sociable. However, with the arrival of missionaries first, and of international cooperation organizations subsequently, situations have been produced daily in which suddenly someone possessed something (clothing, a good steel machete, a shotgun, cows, drugs) that helped them substantially improve life but was inaccessible to others, since many of these goods are obtained as favors received from Westerners in exchange for an acceptance of their cultural impositions or accidental events, such as living near the edges of the jungle and being geographically close to the towns of settlers, from where such longed-for objects and goods come. These inequalities, unresolvable by the traditional path of being more hardworking or more daring in fights, have been fostering a vivid, irrepressible, and destructive feeling of envy among the Shuar. Probably this is the psychological impulse or the strongest passion that moves the Shuar today (above, the attitude with which gifts are received has been described, especially if they come from a Westerner: they are hidden immediately, they are never mentioned, etc.). In this sense, if something were to define the Shuar people from a psychological anthropology point of view, it is precisely their exacerbated and biting envy, which is both a brake and an engine of many of their behavioral patterns. It is a subjective impulse historically new for this people, so it can be affirmed that they have not developed control mechanisms to combat or control it either in the field of psychology or in the field of norms that regulate coexistence. It could be said that it is the psychological equivalent to the new viral epidemics brought by Westerners in the organic. Hence, envy is a destructive force of a very important endogenous character among the Shuar.

……. Exposed these antecedents, it will be possible to better understand the original sense and the parallelism between the interpretation that the Shuar perform of the snake as an oneiric symbol and that which analytical psychology performs.

……. Dreaming of a small snake for the Shuar means, in the first place, envy: “I have dreamed of it, someone does not love me, someone thinks badly of me…”; “if you see that a little snake comes and bites you, you know that they are thinking badly of you, you ask yourself ‘who will be thinking badly of me?'”. Likewise, the *wishín* or shamans claim to see snakes when taking ayahuasca (and, effectively, this visual imagery appears, upon consuming the entheogen, as much to Shuar shamans as to the majority of Westerners who try the Amazonian potion) but in this case, the snakes represent their magic powers and their strength. Thus, if one dreams of larger snakes, like the anaconda, it is interpreted as a representation of personal power, “kákaram.” To our Western terminology, it would be translatable as a plastic sublimation of vital or psychic energy, like the terrible force of their unconscious.

……. Snakes symbolize, then, for the Shuar the most destructive of impulses (envy) and the most appreciated of saving or healing forces (the powers attributed to witch doctors). This duality of the symbolism of snakes appearing in dreams or under the effects of the visionary potion is exactly equivalent to the ambivalence that our psychoanalysts attribute to the activation of the unconscious itself: it can be highly creative if it is handled adequately by giving it a language to be expressed, or it can become a force that disintegrates the subject themselves. On an anthropological plane, furthermore, a double symbolic charge equivalent is glimpsed, since envy has been generated among the Shuar by the action of the *apachi*, the whites: they represent evil, the destruction of the Shuar cultural world, of their myths and of their worldview, the destructive action of the unconscious. While the same increased image (the anaconda or another snake of large size) represents healing forces, the shaman’s energy and, in summary, the vital essence of the Shuar people in their fight against the loss of identity that this unequal inter-ethnic contact supposes (the beneficial use of the same unconscious and its energetic content). Again, it appears clearly how oral memory referring to the personal interpretation of dreams refers and frames a living and individual experience within the memory of the group, conserving the mythological traces of Shuar culture and readapting them constantly to the new situations. In addition to this (the interpenetration of collective mythology and individual dreams), the tan-discussed existence of universal psychological and cognitive parameters is also highlighted, which come from a “liminal space” in reference to the structures, processes, and cultural forms that each society has been weaving throughout its unique and unrepeatable history. Probably we are again before the postulate that defends the existence of universal cognitive archetypes, of a dynamic character, product of the very history of the human being that has been leaving indelible imprints, and of the very plasticity of neurons that reproduces forms and meanings similar adapted to the cultural and historical variables of each people.

……. In a different sense, and as has been commented above, the Shuar interpret some dreams as literal announcements of something that is happening, and regarding which there is no possible deception. I include a new ethnographic illustration of the concrete decisions taken from the information obtained by decoding oneiric material:

……. “It is not to make my husband <present during the whole interview> look bad, who is a madman. I love him, I love him too much. I have given him my love (…) That day his brothers arrived and he told me: ‘look little one, go to the house and attend to my brothers.’ I went believing that he was going to arrive later, but no. Well, I went to sleep calmly. After a while, his mom comes to me in the dream, which had never happened to me, and she tells me: ‘daughter, get up right now, grab my son <‘grab my son,’ that is to say the informant’s brother-in-law>, go to town and knock on the door of your husband’s house’ <the informant’s husband has a rented room in the town of Macas, in addition to the hut on the border>. I woke up immediately and didn’t even know what to do. I believed that something happened to him, he died or something happened to him. I say to my husband’s brother: ‘son, get up, let’s go, let’s go!’. ‘But what’s wrong, sister-in-law?’ he asked me, ‘nothing, let’s go there to have breakfast’ -I told him. And <when we arrived in town> I say to them <to the husband’s brothers who went with her>: ‘wait a little bit here, I’m going to see Cecilio.’ I go up immediately to the room where my husband was. And I commit a grave error. I knock on the door and he doesn’t open for me, nothing. I open with a knife from behind and I find him with a girl. That must be it, wretch! I’ll kill both of them here!. But I calmed down and controlled myself and I said to myself: ‘I am still a lady. Why should I be stingy with a young man?. Better that it stays like that no more.’ I had a displeasure and I already stopped there.

……. On the second night, she <the husband’s mother> appears to me again in dreams and tells me: ‘daughter, you are not going to be well with my son. You are not going to live well, then,’ she grabbed the ring <of marriage; this informant lives near the settlers and had adopted the Western symbology of being married> and threw it. I was telling her in dreams: ‘no, he helps me; I am a poor lady who has children. Don’t throw it because he helps me…’. I don’t know why it will be, but other times it has happened to me in a similar way, his mom gives me dreams. And when he wants to reproach me, the mom appears to me and tells me: ‘daughter, take care; separate from him,’ she tells me. And I in dreams am fighting with him and she tells me ‘separate!’. She grabs me and makes me aside like this, after <waking up> I say laughing to my children: ‘be attentive, I think I am going to fight with dad,’ and just, he comes there. Or sometimes, when I am going to have a joy, I am going to have luck, I know it and I have to cry a lot in the dream, and that is my happiness. When I dream that then, the next day, there comes Cecilio <the husband> and he is happy, he talks to me, we laugh, we play. But this is because in a dream I have to cry. I cry. For some reason I have to cry. And so it is always, for that reason when I dream well of my chickens, that I have many chickens, I know that I am going to be without food. Then I tell them: ‘sons <my children>, we are no longer going to have food. We are going to be without food, ha, ha, ha…!’. And when I am going to have a little food I have to dream a lot of rice, and I tell them: ‘sons, now we are going to have food, we are going to have money.’ Rice is abundance. Abundance is when you grab shit in dreams, or you poop yourself. Or if in dreams I am lousy, very lousy, there is that I will have money. Sometimes I say: ‘there is that I am going to have a good business,’ it is because I am going to have money. Or if in dreams I climb a slope and I fall down again it is because I am not going to overcome. I dream a lot.”19

……. In this example, two of the three main laws that govern the interpretation of dreams among the Shuar remain illustrated (which in a parallel way, I repeat, appear in Western analytical psychology, especially the Jungian one): literalness of content and opposition of meanings (the third law is the symbolic interpretation of diverse oneiric elements).

 

4.—The importance of “Great Dreams”

……. The origin of dreams and the power that is received from them, the capacity to better live that their possible understanding and consideration grants, and the respect that an elder who has accumulated wisdom and temperance through dreams awakens among his peers, all this is conceived as a prize for the capacity to endure with dignity the sufferings of jungle life, training that without a doubt is capital to survive in any context, especially if it is not civilized (in a certain way, civilization means security and comfort). For this reason also, the Shuar affirm that the majority of Westerners have no soul, in the sense of “kákaram”: strength, energy, vigor, and drive, because whites do not know how to endure sufferings like an indigenous person, they have no temperance, they are only active; in the Shuar conception, very few *apachi* (“whites” in a derogatory sense) could have great dreams.

……. Hence, for example, that for the Shuar, democracy is a system of government of absurdity. According to their value system, only someone with charisma can command with efficacy and presence, which implies someone who has had, at least, one great dream during their life: this is what transforms them into an individual capable for such a role with collective weight. Based on these considerations, then, it results absurd and dangerous that everyone has the right to choose those people who will decide on the collective: “there are people who have *wéikmiakma*, great dreams, and others who are poor devils who don’t even have dreams, how are they going to have the same right to decide?”, would be the Shuar thought in reference to great dreams and their consequence on society.

……. Great dreams, *wéikmiakma* or *ímiarma*, with their content configure the own future and often also that of the children, and that of the children of the children. The elder of a family group will say before some favorable commentary referred to his offspring: “by my dream here I have my children, by what I saw in the dream so it happens with mine.” Exceptionally, it is about great dreams that affect the entire Shuar people or an important part that goes beyond the own family circle. These people are considered especially important and with great personal power, “kákaram,” for which they are very respected and frequently they are asked for advice.

……. It has also happened on some occasion the opposite; that is to say, that repeated misfortunes and exceptional anomalies have been attributed to the dreams of someone with personal power, and social tension has ended with the death of the dreamer. Especially this can come to be given regarding witch doctors, since their personal power can be used as much to heal and prevent as for the opposite, hence the distinction that the Shuar perform between *tswákratin* (shaman “beneficial” or good) and *wawékratin* (shaman vengeful and aggressive). In every center, people know who is the witch doctor who heals and who the one who attacks or does harm, but they do not murder the *wawékratin* (unless they suspect him a lot in relation to unfortunate events that repeatedly affect the collectivity) because, although he is feared, at the same time he has the function of regulating aggressions, a function of a police character: people usually turn to him when they suspect that someone distant is causing them harm through witchcraft (a child who does not heal, bad hunting during a long season, diffuse pains…) so that, prior payment, the bad shaman does witchcraft to punish the alleged aggressors.

……. Among other important characteristics to point out, it is worth saying that great dreams unite at one time pieces of the collective symbology of Shuar culture since they are built with symbolic elements of their mythology, and do not have a defined temporal referent. When an individual has a great dream, they know it because through it they connect with the values and original representations of their culture (the “primordial ideas” of the Durkheimian school, or the “archetypal symbols” of the Jungian school), so to speak, mythology appears to them in action, and at the same time they know that it is like a legacy or prefiguration that they have just elaborated with their own strength and that some day it will affect the others, but they never know when this is going to happen.

……. Below I will expose a great dream explained by two different informants, the dreamer themselves and their son. In this case, the author has had the proverbial luck of being able to register the narration of the dream (already in itself exceptional) and verify empirically the relationship that the Shuar established between the dream and an event of great weight for this ethnic group.

……. At the end of 1994, the Peruvian government initiated a war against Ecuador (never officially declared) with the motive of some Amazonian territories situated in the headwaters of the Cenepa River, in the Condor mountain range. These territories had been left in a political situation in a certain way doubtful following another war conflict had between both countries in the year 1941, at the end of which a peace treaty was signed in Rio de Janeiro that awarded them to Peru, but whose validity was never accepted by Ecuador. It is thus that currently, Ecuadorian geographical maps include these Amazonian territories as their own (although with an indicator note on the political situation in which they are) and the maps edited in Peru also include them as their own territories. Given this political reality, the Peruvian army began to take positions, in mid-1994, in the Condor mountain range, and the Ecuadorian army mobilized to defend this portion of the Amazon jungle that Ecuador also has as its own (and I will not enter here, for not being the adequate context, into more detail on the political and strategic arguments that have led to this situation). An important part of the jungle shock companies of the Ecuadorian army are formed by soldiers of Shuar ethnic group, whose preparation to survive in the jungle is, obviously, unbeatable. For this reason, when Ecuador decided to intervene before the advance of the Peruvian forces, there were quite a few young Shuar who were called to join the ranks, and it was in their traditional territory where the quartering of the soldiers was organized and the conflict developed.

……. Before going to the front to enter into war, a high commander of the Ecuadorian army requested the Shuar and Achuara Indigenous Federation to advise him on the best way to harangue the Shuar soldiers in reason of their cultural difference; there they suggested that he speak with the elder Pichama, that he knew how to harangue the young. Thus it was done and Pichama, who claimed to have had a great dream about the conflict, told it to his young peers now enrolled in the army to harangue them. What follows is the story of this great dream, narrated in the first place by his son Galo (adult and already father of a very numerous family) and below according to the extensive version of Pichama himself.

……. “The <dream> that my dad had referring to the war, that nothing would happen, was a *wéikmiakma*, a dream with his strength. Because also with strength he can pass to others <the same strength>. You come to tell that you have problems and a lot of things and you ask him for help. Dad says: ‘I, with my strength, with my dreams I tell you, nothing is going to happen to you.’ Great dreams are had when they arrive, not when they are sought. My dad had and he was not taken with ayahuasca, nor with *maikíwa* nor with tobacco. It was sleeping. Perhaps he returned from work and lay down to sleep with the wife, because he tells: ‘I was lying down near the lagoon, but it didn’t give me sleep, I was meditating and I was turning and turning. My wife was there, but she turned and went to sleep. I couldn’t and at the least thought moment a great dream came to me *pac*! It appeared to me like a <cinema screen>, like this…’

……. The dream can be transmitted to the children, to the friends. This was the case of my brother <who is enrolled in the army>, then he came and told my dad to give him the blessing because he was going to war. Then dad said: “go son, go. I dreamed this and this. Nothing has to happen to you. Go! If my dream is bad someone has to judge me, but now go because I dreamed this and you are not going to die, you have to return.” And the brother was in the first line of combat, but nothing happened to him. After, when they invited <dad> to do the harangue there in Sucúa, the military told him: “you who are older, come”; and he explained to them: “go to war, go! I had this dream and nothing will happen. To me, in dreams they told me that I lived peacefully with the family <because he associates his dream to family unity>, in this country that is a peaceful country. But suddenly someone bothers, who is the one who bothers? who provokes? it is the other, the dream tells me. I knew <in a certain way it is also ‘decided’> with my strength that if he has to receive his due for provoking, that he receives it, but nothing is going to happen with you, go!”. Thus said my dad before all the soldiers and officers, and they went and nothing happened.

……. Before he had never told me, about that he had this dream. Look, I haven’t had the opportunity to have my grandparents but I have been able to talk with my dad and I have talked with many older people because it is difficult to take certain knowledge from the older ones, they are very jealous and don’t tell it to others. Because they say: ‘if I tell it, he is going to take the dream from me, I am going to die soon, I will be left without the strength <of the dream>.’ They have jealousy.”

……. Below, and to facilitate the comparison from two different optics, I include the complete transcription of Pichama’s narration. It is an interesting narration for various contents that it offers that will serve as an illustration to some of the affirmations made further above. The informant speaks of the appearance in his dreams of Jurikri. For the Shuar, Jurikri is a character of their mythological pantheon that inhabits the depths of the jungle (the own vital unconscious in analytical symbology) and is described with the aspect of a hairy person (hair, unlike head hair, in oneiric symbology has a universal sense that indicates the proliferation of the irrational impulses of instinctive life), the head put upside down and the feet looking forward. He grabs children, takes them to the top of a tree, and there he eats them, but only ingests the body, neither the hair nor the nails: any current Shuar can tell some story of some time when it is said that Jurikri appeared in such or such place and took some child to eat him. The Shuar consider him within the category of the *íwianch* (remember what was commented previously on the parallelism that can also be established between this Shuar cultural representation, the *íwianch* or spirits, and the paradigm of the existence of an unconscious in our worldview). Specifically, the Jurikri is an *íwianch túa*: spirit that is characterized by living incestuously, although he is married to another woman (“the Jurikri fornicate between siblings or the dad with the daughter”), with which this attribute comes to reinforce the symbolic content attributed by analytical psychology to the fact of “being hairy” within an oneiric episode.

……. The act of incest, when it is performed between humans, converts them into *túa*, a name by which a category of perverse devils is also known, hence Jurikri is called with the generic *íwianch*, spirit, and with the specific *túa*: incestuous spirit. The Shuar identify the presence of *túa* in the house of someone (that is to say, incestuous cohabitation) because: “…when someone lives badly their house stinks, it has an ugly smell like fetid. To my children I always know how to say ‘here something bad is happening, someone is cohabiting badly,’ I tell them that here is the *túa*. When this happens, the *túa* comes to look for the very soul of the man. The aspect that the *túa* has is like a cat. It transforms like a cat or like a deer.”20, this is the way of describing its presence by one of the informants.

……. I remember here that within the folkloric cognitive style or proper to primitive peoples, values and psychic elements are projected towards the exterior and, very frequently, do not have an assigned moral value, but are defined by behavioral characters or potentials, plus the attributed physical aspect, not by their moral valence. Thus, the Shuar, despite identifying the value “incest between humans” with the stinking presence of *túa*, also conceive *túa* as an independent being that can be seen and attacked. If someone finds *túa* and kills him, the incestuous person appears dead the next day; if someone wants to find out the identity of the incestuous one and meets *túa*, they can throw the black juice that is used as dye and the subject will appear stained, etc. Thus, it could be said that it is the own incestuous act that generates the existence of *túa*, which ends up taking letters of own existence but identified until death with the subject who has created it: magnificent example of the phenomenon of projection through which a psychological transgression (incest) ends up generating a cultural element (*túa*). Also thus it will be better understood that the protective dream of Pichama is attributed to his strength or power, “kákaram,” individual.

……. I transcribe the “great dream” of Pichama that, according to the Shuar, determined a good end for the peers who participated in the war conflict. I transcribe it completely, with the biographical antecedents that explain, from the indigenous worldview, the initial dream that gave personal power to Pichama thanks to which subsequently he has been able to have other *wéikmiakma* or *ímiarma* dreams, great dreams, whose oneiromantic reach goes beyond the subject themselves: the informant speaks of the appearance in his dreams of Jurikri.

……. “… about this I dreamed long ago, about three years ago. Then I didn’t know for what I dreamed it. My dad told me: ‘if you are going to be a brave man you are going to dream.’ I as a little one took *maikíwa* <*Brugmansia* s.p.> to dream. When I went to the mountain or to the waterfall, they only gave me this. I took. Once I was drunk, drunk… <from taking the juice of this visionary plant, not from alcohol>, and my uncle Charupi Patuk presented himself to me. He presented himself to me alive! but he was already dead, killed long before. He comes and says: “Hey nephew! I come to visit you -he tells me- because I see that you walk suffered. That is why I came to visit you.’ He carried the head of a person hooked on a stick <it is the way in which victorious Shuar warriors exhibit the *tsantsa* or shrunken heads of their dead enemies>. I only looked. ‘You walk suffered -my uncle told me-, but I am Charupi, wherever <I go> I am a man! No one has beaten me in war. I win everywhere. Let’s see nephew, if you are going to be a man you have to beat me,’ he told me.

……. Why would he tell me this? I asked myself. Then I grabbed him by the arm and *pum*! I made him burst like a military bomb. It was like thunder that is fired, sounding tremendous. Thus he went *Púchica*! I thought, why, like this…? Why my uncle like this burst? After a while he came <in another dream> and tells me: ‘you already took my power, you already beat me nephew. You are going to be like I was. You have to defend yourself from what they do to you.’ I looked and <I saw in the dream> people dying, I looked back and people were dying. ‘I am like this, Charupi -he told me-. As you took my power, so you have to be…’, and blowing on me he left me <blowing is a way of passing the power of Shuar shamans to their initiates>. I didn’t know, I asked myself what will all this be? what would be what happened? My dad still lived, but I didn’t tell anyone. When <later> they already killed my dad I said to myself, wouldn’t it be that to make me do this I saved myself, then?

……. Then <some time later> my uncle, already older, said: ‘we will avenge the enemies. We have to finish them!’ <his uncle was in charge of killing the murderer enemies of his father>. They were stretching me to support them <in the revenge>. I walked behind them. Those who killed my father died all, all. I myself told him <to my uncle>: ‘this same I have seen before.’ Then Kángua, an older man from Yurupasa, and another called Washécta came and asked me: ‘what did you dream? You, what did you dream Pichama?’. I then was very little <about seven years old> and as I had it engraved in memory, I tell them: ‘this has to be what I dreamed -I told them- what my uncle Charupi made me see, he presented himself to me in this form and spoke to me saying: I am Charupi, I will kill those who started to offend me, I finish with such person, such person, such town, thus I finish everything. I am like this <strong>! When I start to take revenge, thus I finish everything. I am powerful, no one can touch me. I know how to finish with enemies, but you won my power nephew, thus you also have to be.’ Then, there I said: ‘with this power of what I dreamed I am going to accompany you, the older ones.’ That was how they praised me.

……. They were in a row, like that, about thirty people, I little. They grabbed me because when you haven’t dreamed we cannot attack the enemy. Then, when I talked to them in this form saying that I had dreamed like this: ‘this dream I have -I said- with this power I will avenge my father.’ These older ones who were standing, astonished, looked at me: ‘so little and so much you have dreamed…!’, ‘truth’ I told them.

……. It was then that I marched with them <with the men who went with his uncle to avenge his father>, little, and they told me: ‘be brave, make yourself brave, your father they killed for nothing <caprice> and we have to avenge.’ Then it gave me courage and I thought what am I? I entered the house <of the enemy>, and with one blow they killed four people. Arriving there these older ones told me: ‘already see, this boy really spoke! We don’t fail anything. We already caught the enemies. This boy has dreamed for real.’

……. After this I dreamed again, also walking through the jungle, tired. All my children were lying there <in the hut> and I also thinking: ‘tomorrow what will I do? I have to go cutting cattle to feed those kids.’ *Púchica*! looking, thinking, I was lying… and dream attacked me, a little bit *tac!*. After a while I looked and saw light shining <the room>, which wasn’t there before. It was all clear… What happens? I wake up looking. My lady was lying there next to me and I tell her: ‘woman, where did that light come from? why is it shining?’. I tried to wake my lady but she remained like dead. A little while later people come <the informant narrates this in direct style but it must be understood that he saw it in dreams>. One of those who appear presents himself: ‘I am not Shuar -he tells me- I am *apachi* <white>. Look! -he says- I am untouchable, I am like this. When for nothing <by caprice>, my abusive neighbors are bothering my patience, how am I going to do? Without forgiving I am going to kill them, to finish with these people. I am like this -he says-, I am like this!’. And he spoke, but it was an unknown *apachi* who spoke Shuar. ‘I am like this -he says-, I am not *apachi* I am Jurikri *apachi* -he says-. I am brave and when they touch me, they will see. Around here they are attacking me, I am going to send a soldier! by my power, by my strength I am going to finish this! Around here these come to me, also with my power, my strength I make them attack. My enemy wants to be brave! by my power of my dream I am going to send a soldier! Thus I am -he says-, Jurikri I am.’

……. I thought that before, as a little one, also when I went to avenge my father… wouldn’t it be that now like this also they will do this to me? Attentive! what will happen, what will happen…? what rumors, what news did I hear by then? Then what the Federation grabbed that… signatures to throw out my son-in-law who was *apachi* <a daughter of Pichama married a white man, a fact that generated envy and tensions within the Shuar center where he lived, then the Indigenous Federation tried to throw out Pichama’s son-in-law through false accusations of collaborating with armed bands> happened. I told them: ‘see, I have a dream -I told them- it gives me compassion Sevilla <Castilian name of the center where the informant inhabits>. If they touch my son-in-law… I alone am going to finish with Sevilla, because I have a dream. My power I have, I am going to make Sevilla disappear. I alone, see!. After came colonel *apachi* and I told him: ‘Shuar I am and I have no fear, I alone am going to knock down everything if it is necessary,’ thus I told the colonel, when they ordered to grab my son-in-law.

……. After nothing happened. They calmed down, they went and they themselves came to talk to me, to calm me down. Nothing happened. But I said to myself: ‘but then why? why would I dream like this? something has to happen, something will happen some day.’ These dreams never lie.

……. The least thought moment <years later> came a gentleman warning that they are already bothering those of Peru, Peru is already shooting against us. They are already bothering. After they already began to declare war. There, the Deputy came and told me: ‘my province is already at war, why don’t you want to help us?’ There they began to arrive planes, planes flew! war planes began to land nearby. *Púchica*! -I say to myself- wouldn’t this be the dream?. After a while they told us that the shooting against enemies of Peru was already beginning. They are already fighting in the Tiwinza river, there is combat.”

……. When the cited war was declared, and as I have commented previously, Pichama was called to harangue the Shuar soldiers. The elder told publicly, and before the formed battalions, this dream of the white Jurikri, and enjoined them to be brave in the fight; he explained to them that by his dream nothing would happen to them and that everyone would return home, that every man must fight and not be a coward, less still a Shuar. Following this, he had macerated tobacco juice distributed for everyone, including the regular commands of the army present there, and encouraged them to inhale the entheogenic tobacco juice (the authentic tobacco, *T. rusticæ*, is a potent entheogen that cannot be compared with the cigarettes that are marketed in the West, which have been stripped of their potential hallucinogenic action) so that they had the necessary courage in the fight: that is to say, so that “they participated in the dream that he had had.” As a result of this, the Shuar soldiers fought with energy throughout the conflict and the truth is that officially and unofficially, only one Shuar boy died, and furthermore it was not in the conflict directly but in a truck accident during transport (throughout the conflict there was a declared number of casualties that approached 1,500).

……. From this illustration, then, it is easy to approach the form that the magical thought of the Shuar adopts, representative of the folkloric cognitive style and proper to primitive peoples, in which endogenous reality and exogenous reality mix in a single understanding of the world. If one asks any Shuar about their biographical events, one discovers that the majority of them claim to have seen in dreams and with anteriority what happened to them (being widowed, resulting wounded or winners of a vendetta, receiving good gifts…), with which dreams, visions product of the consumption of entheogens, and physical or concrete reality become only faces of one and the same coin that is their world.

……. To end, I want to remember that it is not my intention in this text to propose a total theory that allows us to approach the understanding of dreams, since analytical psychology (not psychoanalysis) has equipped us with a magnificent and consistent theoretical framework and a solid accumulation of empirical material perfectly usable by cognitive and psychological anthropology. To the proposals of analytical psychology, and perhaps for the moment, only it is worth adding the interpenetration that is observed between the concrete historical and mythological dimension of dreams (the cultural and collective) and their private and personal interest (the psychological dimension). Some years ago there was a predecessor in such a concrete line of research, an elderly North American professor from the University of California, Paul Radin, who from anthropology attempted such a theoretical approach, and although currently his texts are totally forgotten by the channels of dissemination among specialists, and as far as I know they have never been translated into Spanish, they do not cease to be interesting (for example RADIN, 1962 in the French edition).

……. Finally, to repeat that for the Shuar, the most complicated thing is to know when dreams are going to be fulfilled and when not, and one cannot know their meaning with certainty before a dream is fulfilled. For this reason, they maintain a constant awake attention on the events that surround them throughout daily life, in a permanent search for signs to which to attribute meaning. The last advice that the elder Pichama gave to the author, and with which I want to end this text, was: “whatever comes out in a dream, and especially if it is about horses or living things, birds, snakes, or other animals… one must be brave and knock them down with a kick *pum*! Win them in some way, and then the animal that it is in the dream becomes a person and gives you the power that it has. Each animal has a power, you must take it from it if it comes to you in your dreams.”

……. It is not necessary to lengthen myself analyzing this advice but, said all the above, it will be simple to capture its importance as much within the Shuar value system as in a context of analytical psychology or Western systemic therapy: the horse is a symbol of very complex interpretation but there is a certain agreement in attributing to it the representation of the intuitive part of the ego (hence the traditions about the luck that entails finding a used horseshoe, the symbolic function that various Asian and Amerindian shamanic systems have attributed to it upon speaking of the horse as an element that allows the shaman to travel to the dimensions of alterity, etc.); the other animals, in the same sense already commented, usually represent the passions and instinctive or “low” impulses of the dreamer subject themselves, and the fact of keeping their powers implies what in Western terms we would probably call recovering the psychic energy unused in neurotic blocks. Cultural forms change but without a doubt there exist, and are verified in each adequately oriented fieldwork, those “primordial ideas” postulated by M. Mauss, E. Durkheim, P. Radin, and other classic anthropologists that are at the basis of a multitude of culturally ordered and formalized value systems.

Fin… 😉

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FOOTNOTES

1) I refer here to the FICSHA for being the oldest Federation that groups the Shuar and Achuara, created in the year 1968. However, starting from the 1990s, two more federations have been created. One has arisen under the pressure of North American Protestant missionaries as a way to group their proselytes and to make a greater wedge to install themselves among the members of this great ethnic group; and another federation that, as it is said, has been promoted by the army and police of Ecuador to try to undermine the social power of the FICSHA, which in recent years posed strong demands to the state government. The problem of the last two federations that have arisen is that they do not have territories to offer their affiliates, while the FICSHA did sign a treaty with the government in this sense, and the Shuar need a broad territory where to inhabit.

2) Entheogen: neologism that freely translated comes to mean “god within us” (coined from the Greek root *teus*, god. It is used in specialized media for three decades to refer to those substances of millenary use, and almost always of plant provenance, that the human being has consumed since the origins of known prehistory to get in touch with their concept of divinity, whatever it may be. Until a few decades ago, the term “hallucinogens” was used to refer to such substances, a linguistic category absolutely erroneous given its literal sense and because it is a word that has been loaded with a negative content totally far from the sense with which humans have consumed such psychoactive substances for millennia.

3) Ayahuasca: comes from the Quechua terms *aya*, “dead body” or simply “dead,” and *huasca* which means “thick cord” and “rope.” According to the *Dictionary of the Qquichua Language* of Fr. Diego Gonçalvez, published in 1952 by the Institute of History of Lima (Peru), the literal expression “dead body” in Quechua is *Aya huañuk vccu*, and “death” is *Huañuy*, for which *Aya Huasca* comes to mean “the rope (vine) that allows going to the place of the dead.”

4) In reference to this use of the vine alone, it is worth mentioning that in 1929 K. Beringer and K. Williams used harmine—the main alkaloid of the vine—to combat Parkinson’s. In the 1940s, A.G. Beer studied the pharmacological effects in cats, demonstrating that it possesses stimulating effects on the CNS. In the 1960s, it was verified that harmine is a potent MAOI. And in 1959, Pletscher proposed that harmala owed its psychoactive activity precisely to its action as an MAOI (OTT, 1996).

5) All temporal indications referred to the effect of ayahuasca, as with respect to all entheogens, must be understood in an indicative, not absolute, way: they change in each person, in each experience, according to the nature of each entheogen, etc.

6) Condensation symbols are those that can refer to a group of disparate, even contradictory, meanings without thereby being lived in a contradictory way. An example is the symbol of the Cross for Christians, which is capable of meaning very distant contents. The condensation symbol of the Daimistas is the “Santo Daime,” an epithet given to the entheogenic substance and whose literal translation is “Saint Give-me,” obviously give me what is missing in a sense generically transcendent and personal at the same time. In the opposite sense, a referential symbol is one that signifies a single object or element and none other, for example, a commercial brand.

7) Phosphene: concept used in biology to refer to luminous impressions produced in the retina by a cause other than light; for example, compressing the ocular globule.

8) I want to clarify here and in relation to what is being exposed, that I conceive science more as a continued effort to clear our horizon of errors than as a search for truth, a category that seems to me more of the field of philosophy and religions than of natural sciences such as anthropology.

9) There exists an interesting compilation text by Daniel ANDLER (1992) on the current advances of Cognitive Sciences, where, although it does not coincide totally with my conceptions, the difference between mental state and mental process appears widely explained.

10) It should not be forgotten that those peoples have a three-thousand-year lead on us in the interest in elaborating cognitive maps and moving through them.

11) I use the concept of “hierarchy in levels of consciousness” here following the solid theoretical conception that A. Koestler elaborated, and which he exposed widely in his work *In Search of the Absolute*.

12) In my way of understanding, the best theorist who has existed on the subject of psychological projections has been C.G. Jung. His contributions are central to the theme as much from the psychological as the anthropological side (although currently he is not taken into consideration within the academy), especially his works referring to symbolic themes.

13) The ritual probably most dramatic that has been documented is the *chod*, or rite of “amputation” in the Tibetan Lama tradition, which represents a fusion of the original Bön shamanism and the Vajrayana Buddhist ideas of India (METZNER, p. 163 et seq.). In this rite, the initiate retires alone to an abandoned cemetery or ossuary, invokes the demons and “wrathful deities,” and invites them to chop up and devour his body (ibid, p. 164). In this text, it is made clear that the dismembered body is transmuted to a “superior and enlightened” form. The destruction of the body is imagined frequently as something performed by demons or monsters; the healing and reconstitution can be executed by the practitioner’s master or guru or by a spiritual or animal ally of power, in the last term expressions of the own impulses of the unconscious, and it remains methodologically extremely complex the attempt to verify if it is also about external stimuli of some type.

14) For the Shuar, the oneiric episodes had during natural sleep and the visions obtained through the consumption of ayahuasca have the same sense and biographical weight. It is exactly the same. We would say that the subject lives it as messages arrived from the “same zone,” for that reason they are interpreted the same because both dreams and visions:

……. “…in a state of ayahuasca or *maikiwuá* (*Brugmansia*) or tobacco is like getting the power that the plant provides towards oneself. Plants have their natural power that they can transmit. Then it is like putting oneself at their disposal to have a suffering, because when you take ayahuasca or tobacco it is not that it is a good little thing that you are going to get happy, but rather it is almost a martyrdom. Take ayahuasca and perhaps you will despair, with *maikiwá* the same, you will despair. Then you find, perhaps, mercy, you find the gift that they give you for the suffering. And sometimes perhaps someone will be able to receive a gift after having suffered so much. Because the dreams of dad <an elder very respected who has had what the Shuar call “great dreams”> had in a state like that normal, is because dad suffered a lot, perhaps at the age of ten, twelve years he began to suffer the death of his dad who had been murdered. Then he suffered and began to work at that age which was a thing of sufferings. I say so, perhaps in his interiors he said: ‘well, putting myself at this age to work as an adult, what bad thing did I do, no?’ For his insides and he obtained the power of his elders.

15) The first who pointed out the existence of “primordial ideas” universally diffused was Adolf Bastian. Subsequently, two classic anthropologists, Hubert and M. Mauss, both of the school of E. Durkheim, worked in this same sense defending the existence of true “categories of the imaginary,” and subsequently this same idea was taken up and shored up by C.G. Jung who reformulated it under the idea of “unconscious archetypes” and “images of the collective unconscious” that are not diffused by mere cultural tradition or through language, but rather that they resurface spontaneously in all eras, and, in this sense, the degree of parallelism that, as is being seen, exists between the theoretical school of psychological analysis and the traditions of an Amazonian people like the Shuar can seem astonishing.

16) My interlocutor is referring here to P. Juank, a *wishín* or Shuar shaman with whom the author was working during previous years, and to whom I owe having introduced me to some of the secrets that form part of the shamanic world of the Shuar, in their symbology and in their initiatory processes. For more detail on the initiatory process and my relationship with P. Juank see FERICGLA 1994, *Los jíbaros, cazadores de sueños*.

17) The *alamas* are an ethnic branch of the Quechuas, who inhabit the jungle brow, very close to Shuar territory. In the prestigious dictionary of symbols of J.E. Cirlot, five pages are dedicated to enumerating the generic symbology of animals, aside from the entries for each specific animal; to the majority of the other concepts, no more than fifteen or twenty lines are dedicated. Aside comment: the husband is present during the whole interview, and while the informant tells this event, the husband repeats several times: “he saw everything in dreams but to the room he came for real! The daughter of…”.

18) Another interesting parallelism is the fact that also the cat, within the oneiric symbology of analytical psychology, is interpreted as sex, sexual activity: what happens in a dream with a cat is usually interpreted as the way in which the subject lives sexuality at that moment of their life.

19) Aside comment: the husband is present during the whole interview, and while the informant tells this event, the husband repeats several times: “he saw everything in dreams but to the room he came for real! The daughter of…”.

20) Another interesting parallelism is the fact that also the cat, within the oneiric symbology of analytical psychology, is interpreted as sex, sexual activity: what happens in a dream with a cat is usually interpreted as the way in which the subject lives sexuality at that moment of their life.

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