Interview with Stephan Beyer

Lila.info has a short but great interview with Stephan Beyer, author of 'Singing to the Plants'.

One thing that is touched on in your book is how shamans in the Amazon do not fit into our usual dualisms of light and dark, good and evil, and that shamanic power is morally ambiguous and ambivalent. As Ayahuasca extends itself beyond the forest, can we anticipate the same patterns of shamanic healing, shamanic warfare, and the same depth of magical reality to emerge in Western entheogen-using cultures?

Ayahuasca seems to be spreading along two different paths — the Brazilian new religious movements and the shamanic traditions of the Upper Amazon. Anthropologist Edward MacRae has specifically pointed out that Santo Daime has not incorporated such features of Amazonian shamanism as magic darts, protective arcanas, shamanic phlegm, or the idea of the moral ambiguity of the shaman. I have had some very interesting discussions with people about the extent to which the Brazilian ayahuasca religions can be considered shamanic. But in none of these discussions has anyone maintained that these churches have incorporated any idea of dark shamanism, attack sorcery, or the power of the shaman to harm as well as heal.

I also think that most foreigners are deeply uncomfortable with this darker side of Upper Amazonian shamanism — what I have called its tragic cosmovision. Shamans deal with sickness, envy, malice, betrayal, loss, conflict, failure, bad luck, hatred, despair, and death. But we have tended instead to assimilate the shaman to our existing catalogue of spiritual teachers, along with Zen monks, Tibetan lamas, Ascended Masters, and Hindu gurus. Many foreigners simply do not see the shaman as ambiguously dwelling in the landscape of suffering, passion, and mess.

Some shamans who work with foreign tourists adopt the concepts and language of their clients, some for commercial reasons, some out of a genuine desire to communicate. Mestizo shamanism in the Upper Amazon has always been voraciously eclectic, and we can observe it now as it incorporates currently popular foreign ideas about the nature of healing, the origins of suffering, and the sources of sickness.

This process appears to be largely one way. I just do not see most foreigners adopting the complex, tragic, and ambivalent views on healing and sickness that lie at the roots of ayahuasca shamanism in the Upper Amazon. Yet the existence and spread of the Brazilian ayahuasca churches shows that the teachings of the ayahuasca experience are in some ways separable from its cultural origins. This may be true in other settings as well. We will just have to wait to see how it all turns out.