Each doctor, each vegetal que enseña, each species of teaching plant has what mestizo shamans call a madre, mother, or genio, genius, or espíritu, spirit, or imán, magnet, or matriz, matrix. Informally, we generally translate all these terms simply as the spirit of the plant. In addition, mestizo shamans have a wide variety of protective birds and animals and plants, which we call, too, something like protective spirits. Yet, as Graham Harvey points out, those who are willing to argue endlessly about the meaning and applicability of the term shaman often refer to spirits as if everyone knows what the word means.

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Once you begin la dieta, once you drink ayahuasca, once you begin to form relations of confianza with the healing plants, the world becomes a more dangerous place. Sorcerers resentful of your presumption will shoot magical pathogenic darts into your body, or send fierce animals to attack you, or fill your body with scorpions and razor blades — especially while you are still a beginner, before you gain your full powers.

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The attack took place at the tourist lodge, at night, when doña María was sleeping. She tried to get out of bed to urinate, but, when she got up, she fell to the floor, partially paralyzed, unable to move. She cried for help. One worker came, but he was not strong enough to move her. Eventually, with the help of the gringo owner, she was lifted back onto the bed. “She was just like dead weight,” the owner later told me. “It was all I could do to get her up to her bed myself.”

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Among ribereños in the Upper Amazon, there is a body of traditional lore regarding both the uses and the administration of a relatively large number of Amazonian medicinal plants. My jungle survival instructor, Gerineldo Moises Chavez, who made no claims at all to being a healer, knew dozens of jungle plant remedies, including insect repellants, treatments for insect bites, snakebite cures, and antiseptics. While mestizo shamans claim to have learned the uses and administration of their medicinal plants from the plant spirits themselves, it is also true that their uses of the plants are, in most cases, consistent with widespread folk knowledge about the plants.

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Mestizo shamans in the Upper Amazon maintain relationships with two types of spirits — the spirits of the healing plants, who appear almost invariably in human form; and the protective spirits, often powerful animals or birds or human beings, or the spirits of certain plants such as the spiny palms. The animals and plants that protect the healer are the same as those that carry out the destructive will of the sorcerer.

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There are relatively few women shamans in the Amazon, and certainly few among the mestizos. On the other hand, my teacher doña María Tuesta said that she had encountered very little prejudice because she was an ayahuasquera. There were some shamans who have said that she should not be a healer, but — in her typical way — she said that those were all stupid people with no shamanic power anyway. Still, her vocation is rare.

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Most mestizo shamans will tell you they are Catholic, and they are probably about as Catholic as most mestizos living in the Amazon. More than 80 percent of Peruvians say they are Roman Catholic. The Peruvian constitution recognizes Roman Catholicism as deserving of government cooperation; public schools offer mandatory classes in Catholic religion, from which non-Catholic parents must request an exemption in writing from the school principal.

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I had promised myself that I would not talk about canaima. Now, I have been a lot of places in my time, and I have seen some very weird things. But there are really only two things that I find truly creepy — tsantsa, shrunken human heads, and canaima. And that is because, I suppose, both tsantsa and canaima are supposed to be creepy. That is their purpose — to create horror and fear.

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The first seventy years of Soviet power, writes historian Philip Walters, “saw a sustained offensive against religion on a scale unprecedented in history.” Shamanism — sometimes called black faith — was a particular target; shamans in Siberia were subject to public denunciation, confiscation of their property, and imprisonment. Their drums were impounded, and they were branded kulaks, class enemies — not a frivolous charge, since many shamans were in fact centers of anti-Soviet resistance.

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Khadak — the term is a Mongolian loan word from Tibetan meaning ceremonial scarf — is a film directed by Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth. Brosens had already made three documentaries about Mongolia when he and Woodworth filmed Khadak, which began as a documentary about commercial aviation, and then transformed itself into a piece of magical realism about Mongolian shamanism. “Motivating the film are not only the complex economic and political manifestations of change,” the directors say, “but also the more evasive and intangible spiritual ones.”

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