Logo
Prev
Bookmark
Rotate
Print
Next
Contents
All Pages
Related Articles
Browse Issues
Help
Search
Home
'
National Geographic : 1982 Mar
Contents
Taken to a small home near the slaughter house, I was introduced to Crist6bal Solin. He brought out a corked bottle filled with a brownish, bubbly fluid. "Ayahuasca," he said. "With this one can cure the victim of a brujo-but only if the brujo was not too powerful." He pointed to his right eye; the pupil seemed broken, like the yolk of an egg. "AbrujodidthattomewhenIwasa young man," he said. "The eye went blind, there was terrible pain. The doctors couldn't help, so I went to a curandero. For months he tried to cure me. The pain went away, but still the eye was blind. Finally the curandero said he could do no more; the brujo who had cast the spell was too powerful. "From that time I studied the ways of curanderos. I learned the old knowledge and how to make the ayahuasca. Now I try to help others. We have meetings every Sun day where people come to be cured." Could I attend? He measured me with his one good eye. "Yes, but you must buy the cigarettes." The cigarettes? "We need them for the ceremony. Two packs. You will see." THAT SUNDAY NIGHT we drove out to an old abandoned tanning factory on the outskirts of Iquitos. We sat in a circle on the dirt floor. In the pitch-darkness a single candle was lit. The maestro and four "patients" each drank a small tumbler of ayahuasca, then sat back. Now the maestro took out the cigarettes. He would smoke them incessantly for the next four hours, taking in deep gulps of smoke, then blowing it onto the heads and into the nostrils of the men. Each patient in turn lay on the ground. The maestro took out a fist-size rock he called the sucking stone. Chanting hypnoti cally, he leaned over each of the men, applied the stone to the parts of their bodies where they felt pain, then made a loud suck ing sound as he drew the "poison" through the stone and spat it out on the ground. For hours the chanting, the smoking, the sucking, and the spitting went on. The men moaned and shook as the maestro hovered over them. Finally, he got up. That was it? 316 A child's grief all but overwhelms him moments after a hit-and-run taxicab rounded a blind curve and killed six of NationalGeographic, March 1982
Links
Archive
1982 Apr
1982 Feb
Navigation
Previous Page
Next Page