Book description
In the Upper Amazon, mestizos are the Spanish-speaking descendants of
Hispanic colonizers and the indigenous peoples of the jungle. Some
mestizos have migrated to Amazon towns and cities, such as Iquitos and
Pucallpa; most remain in small villages. They have retained features
of a folk Catholicism and traditional Hispanic medicine, and have
incorporated much of the religious tradition of the Amazon, especially
its healing, sorcery, shamanism, and the use of potent plant
hallucinogens, including ayahuasca. The result is a uniquely eclectic
shamanist culture that continues to fascinate outsiders with its
brilliant visionary art. Ayahuasca shamanism is now part of global
culture. Once the terrain of anthropologists, it is now the subject of
novels and spiritual memoirs, while ayahuasca shamans perform their
healing rituals in Ontario and Wisconsin.
Singing to the Plants sets forth just what this shamanism is
about--what happens at an ayahuasca healing ceremony, how the
apprentice shaman forms a spiritual relationship with the healing
plant spirits, how sorcerers inflict the harm that the shaman heals,
and the ways that plants are used in healing, love magic, and sorcery.
Stephan V. Beyer has a law degree and doctorates in both religion and
psychology, and has previously published three books on Buddhism and
Tibetan language and religion. He has been a university professor, a
trial lawyer, a wilderness guide, and a peacemaker and community
builder. He studied wilderness survival among the indigenous peoples of
North and South America, and sacred plant medicine with traditional
herbalists in North America and in the Upper Amazon.
