I must confess to being troubled by the apparently politically correct expression faith community, which seems to me to have a built-in bias toward a Christian way of looking at spiritual traditions. Belief is very important among Christians; it is the kind of thing Christians have fought wars over. Comparative religion texts often show the same bias: they will have individual chapters on the Big Religions, each with a section headed something like What They Believe.

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Mapacho, the tobacco ingested by shamans in the Amazon, is a species containing very high levels of nicotine and other psychoactive pyridine alkaloids — indeed, the highest nicotine levels of any tobacco species; leaves from this species contain more than eight percent nicotine, as much as twenty-six times the amount found in the common cigarette tobacco in North America. There is also reason to believe that psychoactive alkaloids other than nicotine are present in noncommercial varieties of tobacco.

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Indigenous Amazonian peoples ingest tobacco in every conceivable way — smoked, as a snuff, chewed, licked, as a syrup applied to the gums, and in the form of an enema. Mestizo shamans consume tobacco as a cold-water infusion, in cigarettes, or in specially carved pipes; tobacco may also be added to the ayahuasca drink.

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Before thinking about the thorny question of how shamans heal, it is worth posing a logically prior question: do they heal? There are remarkably few data on this question. In particular, even moderately long-term follow-up is lacking. As anthropologist and medical doctor Gilbert Lewis puts it, “It is rare to find examples of anthropologists who record the frequency of therapeutic failures, do follow ups, or find out how many people do not bother to come back next time to the shaman.”

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Icaros, the sacred songs of the Amazonian shamans, are traditionally sung either unaccompanied or with the rhythmic shaking of the shacapa, the leaf-bundle rattle. Recently, however, there has been some experimentation with additional instrumentation. Don Agustin Rivas Vasquez, for example, sings his icaros using a variety of drums, pan pipes, maracas, a harmonica, and a stringed instrument of his own devising, as well as a variety of singing styles, some sounding very much like Peruvian popular music.

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Psychologist James Hillman distinguishes between two basic orientations to the world, which he calls spirit and soul. Spirit, he says, is detached, objective, intense, absolute, abstract, pure, unitary, eternal. Soul, on the other hand, is mortal, earthly, low, troubled, sorrowful, melancholy, and profound. I believe it is soul, not spirit, which is the true landscape of shamanism — the landscape of suffering, passion, and mess. Shamans deal with sickness, envy, malice, conflict, bad luck, hatred, despair, and death. Indeed, the purpose of the shaman is to dwell in the valley of the soul — to heal what has been broken in the body and the community. Shamans live with betrayal, loss, confusion, need, and failure — including their own.

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