Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
FIRST CONTACT
During the summer of 1877, Everard Im Thurn (not yet sir Everard, as he became later) arrived in British Guiana to take up his appointment as curator of the museum and begin his practice of a new branch of science, social anthropology. In pursuit of the latter, he began a series of trips to the interior of the colony and there managed to charm the indigenous Macusi people to such an extent that they permitted him to take up residence in one of their tribal villages. There he fell on an experience so bizarre that his account of it reads like the exotic adventure fiction of the Victorian author Rider Haggard.
The whole thing began when he developed a slight fever and headache. He had, at the time, been attempting to forge a relationship with the local peaiman, or witch doctor, apparently successfully since the man promptly offered to cure him of his illness.
An hour or two after dark, Thurn turned up at the peaiman's home equipped, as previously instructed, with his hammock and a pocketful of tobacco leaves. He slung his hammock and handed the tobacco to the peaiman, who steeped it in a calabash of water and placed it on the ground, surrounded by several bunches of green boughs he had cut from bushes on the savannah. The peaiman was not alone. Some thirty Macusi had crowded into the house, attracted, as Thurn wrote later, "by such a novel performance as the peai-ing of a white man."Someone closed the door and doused the fire, leaving the chamber in total darkness. (Macusi houses had neither windows nor chimney.) Thurn was instructed to climb into his hammock and was sternly warned not to set foot on the ground, otherwise the kenaimas (spirits), who would soon be on the floor, might catch him and do dreadful things to him.
It seemed the stage was set for the healing to begin, but the peaiman suddenly had second thoughts. He was, it appeared, wary of working in front of a white man. Thurn tried to reassure him by swearing he would not stir from his hammock, nor look at anything, nor attempt to lay hands on anything that might touch him. The peaiman reluctantly agreed to go on with the ceremony.
For a moment, there was utter silence, then the darkness exploded with "a burst of indescribably ... terrible yells ... roars and shouts which filled the house, shaking walls and roof." The noise ebbed and flowed in a steady rhythm, sometimes rising to a roar, sometimes sinking to a distant growl, but continuing without pause for six full hours. Thurn knew very little Macusi, but it seemed to him that questions were being roared out and answers shouted back. A Macusi boy, whose hammock was close by, did his best to translate and confirmed that the peaiman was roaring out his commands and questions to the kenaimas and the spirits were yelling and growling back their answers.
At intervals through the cacophony, something even more weird occurred. There was a sound, indistinct at first, but growing louder, like that of some great winged creature approaching the house, then passing through the roof to settle with a thud on the floor. As it did so, distant yells came closer and reached their peak as it landed. Then, so it seemed, the thing lapped tobacco water from the calabash while the peaiman shouted questions. After a time, it seemed the creature took flight again and passed through the solid roof to return the way it came. Each time this happened, Thurn felt the air of its wings on his face. This was, he decided, the kenaimas coming and going. In the darkness, his imagination gave them forms — tigers, deer, monkeys, birds, turtles, snakes, and even Indians of the Ackawaoi and Arecuna tribes. Each shouted hoarsely in tones appropriate to their nature, each apparently promised the peaiman not to trouble Thurn anymore. As the last of them prepared to depart, a hand was laid briefly on Thurn's face.
The effect on the anthropologist was as strange as the performance itself. Before long he ceased to hear the whispered explanations of the boy and passed into something akin to a mesmeric trance where, incapable of moving, he seemed suspended somewhere in a ceaselessly surging din. Occasionally, when the noise died away and it appeared as if the peaiman had passed through the roof and was shouting from a distance, Thurn began to awaken. But when the peaiman returned and the noise increased, he would again sink into a stupor.
Toward morning, the ceremony ended and the noise stopped. When the door was opened, Thurn rushed out into the open savannah. It was still dark, a wild night with heavy rain and incessant thunder. As lightning flashed, he could catch glimpses of the far-off Pacaraima mountain range. Although without hat, shoes, or coat, Thurn stayed out in the storm until dawn. It felt strangely refreshing after the noise and the darkness of the stuffy house.
Spectacular though it was, the ceremony did not appear to be a therapeutic success. Thurn subsequently reported:
It is perhaps needless to add that my head was anything but cured of its ache. But the peaiman, insisting that I must be cured, asked for payment. He even produced the kenaima, a caterpillar, which, he said, had caused the pain and which he had extracted from my body at the moment when his hand had touched my face. I gave him a looking-glass which had cost fourpence; and he was satisfied.
Despite falling into trance, Thurn was quick to rationalize the whole experience:
It was a clever piece of ventriloquism and acting. The whole long terrific noise came from the throat of the peaiman; or perhaps a little of it from that of his wife. The only marvel was that the man could sustain so tremendous a strain upon his voice and throat for six long hours. The rustling of the wings of the kenaimas, and the thud which was heard as each alighted on the floor, were imitated, as I afterwards found, by skilfully shaking the leafy boughs and then dashing them suddenly against the ground. The boughs, swept through the air close to my face, also produced the breezes which I had felt. Once, probably by accident, the boughs touched my face; and it was then that I discovered what they were, by seizing and holding some of the leaves with my teeth.
Everard Thurn was not the only European to disapprove of peaimans. Contact with them (under several different names) began in the sixteenth century with the early exploration of the Americas. It was a particularly difficult time for anyone claiming contact with spirits. Witches were being burned throughout Europe, a custom carried enthusiastically to the New World where, notably in Central and South America, colonial and church authorities joined forces to torture and kill literally thousands of indigenous people for the crime of following their tribal traditions. Attitude and mind-set were neatly summed up in the writings of a French Franciscan named André Thévet.
In 1557, Thévet found himself in Rio de Janeiro, then the first European colony in Brazil, and undertook to gather information about the area's native inhabitants, the Tupinamba. He quickly discovered that "these people — being thus removed from the truth, beyond the persecutions they receive from the evil spirit and the errors of their dreams — are so outside of reason that they adore the Devil by means of his ministers, called pagé ... or Caribo."
Thévet had little good to say about the pagé, whom he described as "people of evil custom" who had given themselves over to the Devil's service in order to deceive their neighbors. The pagé apparently had a nomadic streak, or perhaps simply favored the solitude of the forest in order to practice their profession, but Thévet saw this as a failing as well, claiming that they chose not to reside permanently anywhere, in order to disguise their nastiness. They did no honest work, but were supported in ones and twos by villages who inhabitants superstitiously believed them to carry messages from the spirit realm.
What a pagé actually did in order to receive such messages was described in some (not entirely unprejudiced) detail by Thévet. First the witch doctor constructed a brand-new hut, where no one had ever lived before, and furnished it with a white bed. He then moved in large quantities of supplies, notably a native drink made from a plant called cahoiun along with flour ground from its roots. For a total of nine days, the pagé abstained from sexual intercourse, then entered the hut where he was ceremonially washed by a young virgin girl of ten or twelve years. The girl withdrew, as did any villagers standing close to the hut, and the pagé stretched out on the bed to begin his "diabolical invocations."
Thévet was not privy to exactly what went on in the hut, but he noted that it lasted for more than an hour, at the end of which the spirit — the evil spirit in Thévet's account — would make itself heard by "whistling and piping." He was told by some of the Tupinamba that no one ever saw the supernatural creature but only heard the howling and other noises it made.
When the consultation was finished, the pagé emerged and was immediately surrounded by his people, who stood by while he described what he had heard. Few important tribal decisions were made without spirit advice, so the pagé was typically the recipient of many "caresses and presents."
Brother Thévet summed up his analysis of the experience with a brutal recommendation:
Of this magic we find two main kinds, one by which one communicates with evil spirits, the other which gives intelligence about the most secret things of nature. It is true that one is more vicious than the other, but both are full of curiosity ... Such curiosities indicate an imperfect judgment, ignorance, and a lack of faith and good religion ... I cannot cease to wonder how it is that in a land of law and police, one allows to proliferate like filth a bunch of old witches who put herbs on their arms, hang written words around their necks, and many mysteries, in ceremonies to cure fevers and other things, which are only true idolatry, and worthy of great punishment.
Thévet's attitude was typical of his day, nor was it confined to church professionals. The Spanish navigator Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, a layman through and through, encountered old men who communicated with spirits on the island of Hispaniola and subsequently commented on their activities in terms that would do justice to the most rabid prelate:
They worship the Devil in diverse forms and images ... they paint, engrave or carve a demon they call cemí in many objects and places ... as ugly and frightful as the Catholics represent him at the feet of Saint Michael ... not bound in chains, but revered ... they prayed to him and had recourse to him in all their needs ... And inside [the house] there was an old Indian ... whose evil image was standing there; and it is to be thought that the Devil entered into him and spoke through him as through his minister; and ... he told them the day on which it would rain and other messages from Nature ... and they did not undertake or carry out anything that might be of importance without considering the Devil's opinion in this way.
The old men, so anxious to carry out the Devil's work, did so by means of tobacco smoke that they inhaled through hollow canes until they fell down drunk or unconscious. They were then carried to their hammocks by their wives (noted by de Oviedo as "numerous") and subsequently awoke to prophecy future events and advise on proper courses of action, as dictated to them by the spirits.
A century later, as Russia began to colonize Siberia, explorers discovered similar individuals in its chill interior. Here too were men and women, claiming, like their American counterparts, to commune with spirits, heal or harm, influence the weather and game. In the east of the country, the Tungus peoples called them saman or shaman, the latter term destined to become a worldwide generic in describing the profession. Once again, there were priests impatient to condemn them. The conservative Russian cleric Avvakum Petrovich, in the first written account of shamanic practice, denounced the object of his study as "a villain of a magician who calls the demons" and, like others before him, suggested trickery might also be involved.
With the dawning of the Enlightenment at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the theory of fraud became more widespread and more all-encompassing. Shamans were no longer looked on as demonologists who sometimes used tricks but as tricksters through and through who only pretended to truck with spirits. It was not an entirely unwelcome development since it took away the excuse used by the religious to execute them. But even the rationalists could be harsh in their judgments. A German professor of chemistry and botany, Johann Georg Gmelin, spent ten years studying Siberian shamans. After watching one performance marked by much leaping, shouting, sweating, and "infernal racket," he dismissed the whole thing as humbug and remarked that "we wished in our hearts that we could take him and his companions to the Urgurian silver mine, so that there they might spend the rest of their days in perpetual labor."
The French Jesuit missionary Joseph-François Lafitau, who spent five years among the Amerindian tribes near Montreal, also decided their shamans worked largely through "tricks of skill" but retained doubts that this was the whole story. He found them to have "some innate quality" that reminded him of the divine. He had witnessed them enter states of ecstasy in which a spirit appeared to take possession of them, throwing them into "frenzies of enthusiasm and all the convulsive movements of the Sibyl." Interestingly, Lafitau remarked that the voice of the spirits, speaking from the depths of the shamans' chests, led to their being considered ventriloquists — an example, surely, of a genuine phenomenon masquerading as a fake, rather than vice versa. It is also difficult to reconcile trickery with his observation that the power of spirit sometimes raised shamans into the air or gave them greater stature than they normally possessed.
Lafitau, despite his religious convictions, stands out as one of the most open-minded of the early investigators of shamanism. It proved a rare enough quality. Even after the distinguished German-American anthropologist Franz Boas established the principle, in the late nineteenth century, that indigenous cultures should be appreciated on their own terms, there was a noteworthy tendency toward lip service when it came to evaluating shamanism. Western observers might conscientiously report the claims of the shaman as if they were true, but the unspoken assumption was that no civilized person could possibly believe them. In 1904, Waldemar Bogoras was careful to place the word spirits in inverted commas when he published his study of shamanism among the Chukchee peoples of the North Pacific.
This situation endured throughout the first half of the twentieth century and only really began to break down when a handful of intrepid anthropologists took the unprecedented step of trying out some shamanic techniques for themselves. Few were intrepid enough to face the prolonged fasting and other, sometimes life-threatening, ordeals of traditional shamanic training but concentrated instead on the use of plant narcotics. Limited though it was, this approach produced striking insights.
The first recorded example of the approach dates back to 1957 and involved not a professional anthropologist, but an American banker named R. Gordon Wasson. With his friend Allan Richardson, Wasson approached a Mexican shaman named Maria Sabina and asked for her help in experiencing the secrets of a "divine mushroom" used in certain religious rites. The woman agreed and the two Americans found themselves drinking chocolate with some eighteen Mixtecos, all dressed in their best clothing. After the chocolate, they each ate their way through twelve acrid-tasting, evil-smelling mushrooms. The effect was, in Wasson's own word, staggering.
As the final candle was extinguished shortly after midnight, Wasson and Richardson were plunged into a visionary experience — or, if you prefer, began to hallucinate — and the visions continued at high intensity for fully four hours. They included art motifs in vivid colors, palaces set with semiprecious stones, and a chariot drawn by some great mythological beast. The walls of the house dissolved and Wasson left his body to float in midair viewing mountain landscapes with camel trains crawling across slopes which raised tier upon tier until they reached the very heavens. The figure of a beautiful, enigmatic woman appeared, leaving him with the impression that he was viewing a different world in which he played no part. He had become nothing more than a disembodied eye, poised in space.
From time to time, the shaman would make oracular utterances that, Wasson knew, were accepted by her native audience as the words of God. At one point something even stranger occurred. The shaman's daughter, herself a shaman, began a rhythmic dance during which she produced claps and slaps that came from unpredictable directions in complex rhythms, sometimes appearing close at hand, sometimes distant, sometimes above, sometimes below. Wasson described them as "ventriloquistic," although it is clear that if ventriloquism really was involved, it was nothing like ventriloquism as we know it in our present culture.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Whisperers"
by .
Copyright © 2013 J. H. Brennan.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
