Ayahuasca and the concept of reality. Ethnographic, theoretical, and experiential considerations. (cont.)
By Luis Eduardo Luna, Ph.D., F.L.S.
Supernatural Entities
Shamanism,
which implies altered states of consciousness and the activation of
what seems as common archetypes beyond ethnic and cultural
differences, may have a role, as Winkelman suggests (2010) in the
emergence of modern humans. This may have its roots back in ancient
primate ritual heritage from our evolutionary past. Winkelman
attempts “to understand the original manifestation of shamanism
and the diversity of manifestations of shamanistic phenomena produced
by social influences on our innate potential for ritual, alterations
of consciousness, and endogenous healing responses.”
Contact
with supernatural entities of some sort is documented since Upper
Paleolithic time, the so-called therianthropes, part human and part
animals, found in rock art of all continents (Hancock 2003:69-93).
Lewis-Williams (2005:10) explores the possibility that people from
that period “harnessed what we call altered states of
consciousness to fashion their society and that they used imagery as
a means of establishing and defining social relationships”.
The same author summarizes thus one of the chapters in his
extraordinary research on Upper Paleolithic Art: “… most
researchers have consistently ignored the full complexity of human
consciousness and have concentrated on only one slice of it and made
that slice the defining characteristic of what it is to be an
anatomically and cognitively fully modern human being. Here I examine
interaction of mental activity and social context: how, I ask,
notions about human experience that are shared by a community impinge
on the mental activity of individuals and how does socially
controlled access to certain mental states become a foundation for
social discrimination?”
When
I was doing fieldwork among the mestizo riverian population of the
Peruvian Amazon I was marveled as what seems to me full sincerity
when for example a fisherman described the mermaids he saw once in
the river, or when another man vividly told me of the apparition at
night of a frightening huge water snake, the Yakumama.
Mermaids, dolphins turning into human beings in order to seduce, bird
spirits announcing a death in the family, are all to be expected
given the shared notions about human experience of that society.
Actual apparitions are usually extraordinary events, often connected
with altered states of consciousness, the same way that UFO
apparitions often are (see Vallee 1969, Hancock 2005). Culture has
been, no doubt, a powerful influence in the way we perceive the world
and ourselves. It is well known that anthropologists sometimes are
afflicted by the so-called ethno-specific illnesses of the human
groups they study. At the same time this would also explain why
Westerners (except children) seldom see fairies. They are said to
live in the forests. Most westerners live in cities, far from nature,
and their notions of reality do not accept this kind of belief beyond
a certain age. I read fairy tales to my mother when in her deathbed,
and I know of psychologists who read those stories to very old
people. The results are often simply extraordinary, as if we would in
this way connect with something deep inside us with which we were in
touch as children.
 A Shipibo woman painting a pot with a visual representation of a medicine song. Photo by Luis Eduardo Luna |
