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The best book yet on ayahuasca:
"Singing to the Plants" by Stephan Beyer
January 13, 2010 - Arthur Magazine
The spiritual superhero of the baby
boomers
was the guru. But where the guru once hovered with his beatific smile,
the shaman now shakes his stuff: an earthier, more pragmatic icon of
mystical powers more suited to our era’s green anxieties. Now a
significant figure for scholarly discourses as well as popular ones,
the shaman, and especially the ayahuasca-swilling Amazonian variety,
has not only stepped forward as a vehicle of archaic spirituality but
has become—as the gazillions of bedazzled Avatar initiates can attest—a
seductive site of fantasy and projection. For many of the aya tourists
now hustling down to Peru in droves, or the untold thousands dropping
300 bucks or so to drink in their own Euro-American backyard, the man
with the rattle (and his less common female compatriots) has become a
visionary Rorschach blot: a New Age therapist, an avatar of
environmentalism, a psychedelic captain fantastic.
This is why we need Stephan Beyer’s new book, the magisterial Singing
to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon.
In this tome, Beyer has found the sweet spot between scholarly and
popular writing, the otherworldly and the disenchanted, participation
and observation; the result is the best or at least most comprehensive
book I have seen on ayahuasca.
In addition to a law degree, Beyer hold doctorates in psychology and
religious studies, but his discovery of ayahuasca was more than
intellectual. Arriving in the Amazon to practice wilderness survival,
he soon realized that learning about the jungle meant learning about
the spirit of its plants. So he apprenticed himself to two mestizo
teachers named Don Roberto and Dona Maria. He studied ceremony, healing
plants and the inevitable sorcery tactics with them and others for many
years.
While Beyer’s personal tale enlivens Singing to the Plants,
he resisted the temptation to write a memoir. Instead, he allowed his
experiences to round out, deepen, and authenticate what is a manifestly
solid work of scholarship designed, happily, for the rest of us.
Beyer’s book offers broad discussions more than new data or highly
focused arguments; despite some arcane and fascinating discussions of
magic stones and sex with plant spirits, I suspect that ethnobotanists
and anthropologists familiar with the Amazon will find relatively few
surprises. But the ant hills of detail are not the point. Singing to
the Plants
is designed to inform a wider audience—and gently bust some myths—by
presenting this almost literally kaleidoscopic phenomenon through a
number of distinct lenses: anthropology, ethnobotany, pharmacology,
psychology, international law, cultural politics, and magic both crafty
and occult.
I knew I was gonna love this book when, after presenting
illuminating and occasionally disturbing tales about his own teachers,
Beyer frames the shaman’s work through an understanding of performance.
Like stage magicians (or western doctors), shamans are, on one level,
performers with an audience, and aspects of their performance are
deeply linked with everything from the sleight of hand of conjurers to
costume. Beyer’s breakdown of shamanic performance is thorough and
fascinating, with chapters on “Phlegm and Darts,” “Sucking and
Blowing,” and “Harm.” I was particularly wowed with his discussion of
shamanic sounds and songs, and especially the haunting, nasal whine of
icaros. In addition to presenting research on how these sacred songs
are passed on and improvised, he emphasizes the abstract effects
produced when lyrics break down into alien tongues or pure sounds like
whistles, hacks, and hums, whose “correct resonance and vibration [are]
more important” than meaning.
Beyer roots shamanic performance and the ayahuasca ceremony in the
body. As initiates know, the aya ritual can be an intensely physical
experience—a woozy, vibrating, literally gut-wrenching dance of
coughing, spitting, burping, and, of course, puking. (Beyer spends a
lot of time with phlegm, for example, an aspect of shamanic performance
that is not always emphasized north of the border.) This carnal and
even carnivalesque dimension reminds us that ayahuasca is not a mystic
or transcendentalist affair, and resists the highly internalized or
even disembodied approaches that many American seekers bring to it,
with their background in meditation or other more internalized
psychedelics. Along these lines, Beyer makes the provocative
argument—which is growing on me the more I think about it—that DMT (the
most active ingredient in ayahausca) deserves to be classed as a
“hallucinogen” distinct from “entheogens” like LSD and mescaline, which
peel away the layers of the self to reveal the god within (the literal
meaning of entheogen). In contrast, according to Beyer, DMT unveils a
visionary world out there, one that is not only believable but
seemingly inhabited.
While Beyer uses plenty of concepts and lingo drawn from
anthropology and psychology, he does not offer these views in a spirit
of reductionism. After all, Beyer has been learning the ropes for
years, and has spent far too much time wrestling with wizardry to try
to dissipate its dialectic of healing and harming with the word-spells
of academe. Beyer’s critical discussions only help illuminate the
central mystery with greater intensity. So while he offers up useful
maps of the phenomenology of visionary states, when it comes to talking
about the spirits themselves, Beyer just calls ‘em as he sees ‘em.
Spirits—or “doctores”—are simply part of the picture; there is no need
to reduce them to projections or myths—they harm and they heal,
converse and confuse. As long as we remain aware of the various
contexts which structure our encounters, we have every reason to
acknowledge and engage the spirits as part of our world—an aspect of
nature and consciousness, but also—and this is crucial—an aspect of
modernity itself.
In contrast to many Euro-American aya fans, who fetishize the
otherness of the Amazonian shaman, Beyer does not characterize the
Amazon’s techniques of religious ecstasy as archaic residues free from
any contamination from today’s globalized world. The culture of
ayahuasca is both stronger and weaker than that, more expansively
eclectic and also more ordinary. Beyer notes that Dona Maria’s spirit
doctors regularly spoke in “computer language,” just as an earlier
generation of shamans used metaphors of electro-magnetism and radio to
characterize the spirit world. The UFOs found scattered through Pablo
Amaringo’s paintings are icons of this visionary futurism. But they are
equally signs of the syncretic, mix-and-match, opportunistic, and
almost willfully contaminated aspects of mestizo culture—which must
make itself up as it slips along between jungle and city, modernity and
the indigenous forest. That said, Beyer is all too aware of the
political, economic, and spiritual costs of the Amazon’s deepening
imbrication with global flows of capital and culture—an encounter that
is increasingly taking place through the medium of ayahuasca tourism,
which receives a sharp if too short treatment here.
If shamans are not frozen under glass, they are not squeaky-clean
avatars of sweetness and light either. Beyer is very clear: to enter
the shamanic world is to enter a world shot through with sorcery, with
harms as well as healings. Budding shamans either struggle with
sorcerers or join the wickedness; in his fascinating discussion of
psychic darts, which healers store in their bodies for a rainy day
after extracting them from victims, Beyer explains why the dark side is
actually an easier path to take. “Good” shamanism reveals itself to be
an intensely ethical discipline, not only in relationship to the
community of persons (human and otherwise), but to the darkness within.
The shaman’s predicament is also grounded in social reality: a
successful healer necessarily creates rivalry and envy, and when he
fails at his healing task, necessarily creates paranoia and suspicion
as well. This accounts for what Beyer calls the “social ambiguity of
the shaman,” the fact that many of them are sneaky, unstable, and
mistrustful. It’s a lonely path, anxious and ambiguous all the way down
the line.
And the job has only gotten harder, even though there is more cash
to be had and the global profile is at an all time high. Beyer closes
the book with a pessimistic assessment of Amazonian shamanism’s future
in a world where the younger generation would rather learn quick
techniques from occult books than take on the ascetic rigors of the
plant healing path. Beyer knows that conscientious gringos like himself
will not fill the gap, especially when the general effect of the
exploding Euro-North American interest in Amazonian shamanism is a
spectral assault of dream darts soaked in naive assumptions and often
narcissistic desires. Hopefully, Singing to the Plants will help us
realize that one of the best cures for our own poisons is to learn how
to hold them.
I really like the sound of this book. Long read but very worth it (this article, not the book). The penultimate paragraph was probably the best/most helpful to me. Definitely want to pick this book up