[Dialogue] 8/13/09: Spong: The Study of Life, Part 3: On Meeting a Shaman in the Amazon Rainforest

Wed Aug 19 11:29:08 CDT 2009

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Thursday August 13, 2009 

The Study of Life, Part 3
On Meeting a Shaman in the Amazon Rainforest

In studying for my recent book on life after death I spent considerable time examining the religious history of human beings. Our religious journey has been long and complex. Beginning in the hunter-gatherer religion of animism we have traveled as 
a species through the fertility cult religions of our early agricultural civilizations into the coupled gods of the Olympus and then through tribal religions into the budding monotheism of today. At each stage we picked up practices that still remain a part of the human religious scene, from the fire we place on our altars at the time of worship to the evolving recovery of the feminine that is occurring now in the Christian Church. Far more than most religious people know or are willing to admit, modern religious practices have ancient roots stretching back far beyond the boundaries of our particular religious system. We tend, however, to have very little understanding of, or sympathy for, the religious traditions of those who are different from us. It was, therefore, a rare privilege for me, while in the Amazon Rainforest, to have an opportunity to meet a Shaman, who lives and functions within an animistic religious world akin to that of our earliest human ancestors and to see firsthand some of the most primitive stages of human religious development. It was an experience so moving and profound that I want to share it with my readers through this column. 
The Shaman's name was Domingo. That is all, simply Domingo. He was about 65, though he looked old for that age. He was a single man, having never married. Being single was not a requirement of the office, but it was encouraged by suggesting that sex was not appropriate while actually functioning as the Shaman. Domingo had served his people in this 
office for some 40 years. In true animistic fashion he viewed the world as "spirit-filled" and defined himself as a "spirit-filled man" or at least as one through whom the spirit flows. His role within the tribe is to be "the banisher of evil spirits," a not untraditional role for the designated "holy man." Both he and his tribe believe that he enhances the wellbeing of his people. 

Domingo was introduced to us by our guide in the Amazon. It was a regular feature offered on the tour, a unique way to open Westerners to the culture of the area. While pleased with this opportunity, I discovered in this meeting what the barriers to real communication were. The Shaman spoke no language other than his tribal dialect. There are perhaps six different tribal groups in the rainforest, most of whom cannot even communicate with each other, to say nothing of with the outside world. It slowly dawned on me that because of this language barrier, this Shaman had never read anything unless it had been translated into his native dialect. He had not heard of Galileo and had no concept of space as we know it. He had not heard of Darwin and had no sense of evolution. He knew nothing of Pasteur and had no awareness of the causes of sickness other than "evil spirits." He had only the vaguest sense of the world beyond the rainforest. Places like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea had no content in his mind. In order for us to talk with the Shaman we spoke to our guide, who translated our English i
nto the Spanish of our native expert, who in turn translated the Spanish into the native dialect of the Shaman. The Shaman responded and his words made the reverse journey. One never knew how our questions were interpreted or what was lost in translation. 

We wanted to know how he became the Shaman, what the selection process involved? He answered that he was "chosen by the spirit of the forest" and that it was the responsibility of the Shaman to reflect the "unity of the forest." We asked how the "spirit of the forest" made the selection. He said that a young man or woman (yes, in rare instances women could be Shamans in this tribe) would go into the forest and have some kind of transcendent experience, perhaps losing consciousness and even staying in the forest under the forest's protection for a number of days. When regaining consciousness, the candidate would seek out known hallucinogenic leaves in the forest in order to test the vision. The three major hallucinogenic leaves available and used for this purpose were ayawaska, the most potent of the three; wanto, also called "angel's trumpet;" and tobacco. All have known hallucinogenic properties. Domingo favored tobacco, hand rolled, but he also used wanto. He tended to avoid ayawaska. In this drug-induced state of euphoria, Domingo said he saw visions and perceived things that others could not see. Among them were the causes of sickness and the harm that evil spirits did to people. He used these powers in the practice of his healing art. When th
e people of the tribe heard about these experiences upon his safe return from the forest, they acclaimed him chosen by the "Spirit of the Forest" to be the next Shaman. He was then apprenticed to a Shaman nearing the end of his life and career from whom he learned the rituals and the words to use in fulfilling his calling. 

People came to Domingo to escape perils like the evil eye, a spirit of weakness, or in an attempt to contact the dead in time of grief. His treatment included the use of hallucinogenic leaves so that the boundary between this world and the Spirit world might be breached, fear banished and the comfort of seeing a deceased loved one happy or at peace could be known. 

Domingo indicated a willingness to perform one of his ritual practices on a member of our group. A volunteer quickly raised her hand and was invited to sit on a stool in front of him. She closed her eyes and the rest of us were told to be silent and to enter as deeply as we could into the meaning of this experience. We did. The ritual began. Domingo carried a leaf fan, gray in color, that rustled audibly when he shook it or gave it a whip-like stroke into the air, which we were told meant that he had cleansed the troubling spirits from the victim. He moved the leaf fan up and down the woman's body, not touching her with anything but the breeze of the leaves, while he chanted words that we could not understand. They did, however, seem repetitive as many religious chants are. Period
ically, he would face away from his "patient" and flick his leaf fan vigorously toward the woods. After this had gone on for some five minutes, he began to make guttural sounds, as if to clear his throat of a lingering phlegm, then circled his "patient's" head with his hand and began to blow on her head. This, we were told, was his attempt to pour a new and positive spirit into her. In about ten minutes the ritual was ended. 

Was this Voodoo? I do not think so. It would be easy from our perspective to be critical and to see this as some primitive act that more developed cultures have discarded. But is it? In the Christian baptismal service, we pour water on the child's head and pray that all evil spirits will be banished from the child's life as the child renounces "the world, the flesh and the devil." Is that really very different? Are not both experiences attempts to bring life into harmony with what we perceive to be infinitely real? 

Can modern people make contact with the religious and health practices of a tribe of people who live isolated in the Amazon Rainforest? I think we can, but only if we make a crucial distinction. All human experience is the same. It is the way that we interpret that experience that is so different. All human beings live with forces we cannot control. To help us cope with that world and our powerlessness we all design cultural rituals to bring help from beyond ourselves. It is also the fate of self-conscious beings to feel alone, separated=2
0from the world of nature, and so every religion develops a method of achieving atonement which, we assert, is ultimate. Thus the thing we have in common with the people of the Amazon Rainforest is that we share the anxiety of what it means to be human, which includes the knowledge that we are mortal and on a one way path toward death. This human experience is universal. 

When any one begins to explain or interpret that experience, each of us does so in terms of the way each perceives the nature of life and the nature of the universe. Here the explanations vary widely as the perceptions of the universe are based on the knowledge available to us, the time and place we live in history, the nature of our education, the values handed down for many generations and many other factors. Are our modern explanations better than those of a people who inhabit the Amazon Rainforest? We do see through a wider lens. We have lived through changes in the perception of reality that have been given to us by the intellectual giants of our cultural past. We know things about the universe, about the laws of cause and effect, about our evolutionary history and about germs and viruses as the causes of sickness that they do not know. We can minimize the effect of epilepsy with drugs while earlier, even in Jesus' time, he sought to banish the demons that had apparently possessed the victim. We treat pneumonia with penicillin, leukemia with chemotherapy and remove tumors surgically. None of these things are availa
ble in the world of Domingo, the Shaman. The explanation of why things are as they are will always vary widely based upon the knowledge available to the one explaining. No human explanation, however, is ever final and thus no human explanation can ever be literalized. Every explanation is always an expression of cultural knowledge, but no explanation can ever be substituted for the human experience, which is common, universal and real. 

I do not judge the work of Domingo the Shaman. I seek to appreciate it. He works within his animistic world view to make sense out of life. I work within my Western mechanistic world to make sense out of life. The goal of us both is to create human wholeness, to introduce us to transcendent dimensions of reality that our experience tells us must either be real or be delusional. Both Domingo and I are convinced that we are in touch with reality. I am glad I had the experience of entering, if but for only a few moments, into the worldview of a culture vastly different from my own and was able to see a oneness in the humanity we share. 

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

Gary Anderson from Duluth, Minnesota, writes: 

I've heard of pastors in our area who tell lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people that "they can change if they turn to Jesus." What can you say to this?
Gary Anderson from Duluth, Minnesota, writes: 

I've heard of pastors in our area who tell lesbian, ga
y, bisexual and transgender people that "they can change if they turn to Jesus." What can you say to this?

Dear Gary, 

What do you say to people who maintain that the earth is flat or that the moon is made of cheese? Ignorance abounds in our world and the statement you quote is profoundly ignorant. There is not a shred of medical or scientific evidence that sexual orientation, which is clearly one of life's givens, is capable of being changed. For clergy persons or anyone else to allow their prejudices to blind them to reality means that they are simply out-of-touch, religious bigots. Perhaps a lawsuit by a victim of such "pastoral counseling" would be in order, to warn clergy and anyone else functioning as a counselor that, prior to dispensing medical advice, they need to be medically trained and certified by some appropriate federal or state agency. No one in our society has the right to practice medicine without a license, not even in the name of religion. 

It is worth noting that those organizations that claim to be able to change homosexuals into heterosexuals are all identified with right-wing religious movements. They also refuse to let their data be analyzed and they have a dreadful track record for failure. More importantly they victimize those who become their "patients" for their own financial gain, since they normally collect fees for their services, which are, of course, paid by their victims. This is little more than racketeering under the protection of religion. Racketeerin
g and fraud are crimes that need to be exposed wherever they appear. Trying to cure people of homosexuality is both homophobic ignorance and fraud. I hope you and others will expose these practices for what they are.

– John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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