Cultural Hypnosis: Lessons from Amazonian Sorcery and Magic
Amazonian shamanism is inseparable from sorcery and magic. Native practices are embedded within an animistic worldview in which plants, animals, rivers and mountains have spirits. Natural beings are sentient and intentional, feel emotions and hold grudges. Their worlds are enchanted worlds, insofar as they relate to their environment as one would relate to a community of subjects, as opposed to a collection of objects. As Martin Buber would argue, most relationships in the jungle are “I-Thou” relationships, not “I-It” relationships.
Emergent from these enchanted, relational worlds are ways of perceiving health and illness. What we call “shamanic” healing practices, are simply relational practices. Sickness never happens in a vacuum, but is always the result of an infringement of the delicate balance and harmony of that relational world. The loss of reciprocity, the transgression of boundaries between the human and the other-than-human world elicits the rage, fury and jealousy that, projected on us, becomes an explanation for misfortune, suffering and illness.
Since most illnesses, psychological problems or difficulties in life are usually attributed to the bad intentions of another entity, “shamanic” healing must involve sorcery. When an Amazonian curandero or brujo heals, they do so by fighting off and defeating the perceived source of the disease, the antagonistic human sorcerer, plant, animal, river, a patch of land or spirit who bewitched their client in the first place. It Is a dualistic world of envy, jealousy and power where the boundaries between good and evil are fluid and ambiguous, where everybody gets to be prey to somebody else and reciprocity is the highest law.
Art by Pablo Amaringo, Ucayali, Peru (1938-2009)
When we westerners come to the jungle, it is easy to ignore this central dimension of the Amazonian medical systems. We are only interested in our idealised and romanticised versions of “healing”, personal development and wellbeing. We fantasize about saintly healers and benevolent plant spirits at the service of their human masters. We often dismiss sorcery as superstition, some archaic remnant of a primitive cosmology. We either shrug off sorcery as the irrational explanatory framework of pre-scientific people on the one hand, or we submit wholesale to an imagined caricature of their worlds, a juvenile ontological realism where our projections of somebody else’s cosmology are really “real”, unable to discern or think critically about the fantasy worlds we create without much empathy for the lived experiences of those we have “othered”.
As I struggle to come to terms with the reality of these practices, it has become increasingly evident to me that our ongoing collective failure to account for these phenomena is a classic case of the fish who is unable to know what water is, being the very medium in which it exists.
Our failure to understand sorcery and magic doesn’t stem from irreconcilable ontological differences or clashing worldviews. We fail to recognize sorcery because Western people are so used to it, so hopelessly enchanted by it, that we can’t even see it anymore. No culture in the world is so entrenched in black magic, so utterly enchanted by sorcery than our pre-apocalyptic, late-capitalist consumerist societies.
Alan Moore defines magic as “the science of manipulating symbols, words or images in order to achieve changes in consciousness”. To “cast a spell” is thus simply to spell, manipulating words in order to influence someone else’s experience. He believes that artists and writers are the closest that we have to shamans in contemporary western culture. We can use our power to uplift and inspire, to open the doors of perception and tickle the imagination. I resonate a lot with this idea.
But if artists and writers are the “shamans” of our culture, who are then the sorcerers, the black magicians, the demonic antagonists of the archetypal healers? All of these figures derive from the same archetype, the Magician, the person who is adept at manipulating the linguistic and symbolic substrate of the world, the four elemental powers at his disposal, a master of rhetoric, logos, pathos, ethos and kairos. The perversion of magic happens through the agency of greedy advertisers, unscrupulous marketers and copyrighters, mass-media producers at the service of numbness, trash journalists, self-serving politicians. People who are highly skilled in the manipulation of symbols, words and images, who have mastered the art of enchanting the masses into a mindless slumber at the service of the great harlot, the mother of all abominations upon the earth, the whore of Babylon.
Advertisers and marketers cast spells on us in order to convince us that we are incomplete, inadequate, undeserving. Through the cunning manipulation of symbols, they replace archetypal images of the divine within with flat images of Nike and Coca-Cola without, convincing us that the only way out of this manufactured existential anguish is to keep consuming shit we neither want nor need. They rob us of our direct connection with the numinous and supplant it with a thirst for celebrity gossip and pop culture so that our minds can project our longing for the long-lost Goddess into Kim Kardashian’s ass. Their black magic is inescapable: modern life is contaminated with overwhelmingly toxic levels of visual, auditory and mental pollution. Violence is exercised upon our minds multiple times every day in order to convert us into obedient consumers and conformist workers.
The mass media and our root-chakra politicians corrode our innate sense of interdependence and relatedness by flooding our conscious experience with their propaganda of fear. They manipulate symbols and facts to push the masses into nationalistic frenzies of orgiastic violence in order to divide and conquer. We have been desensitized by terror to the point where atrocities are perceived as inevitable facts of life. It is a powerful spell that allows the corporatocracy to keep plundering, extracting, pillaging, exploiting, robbing, raping and murdering the earth while we are all busy trying to look-hot-for-the-summer-with-the-top-5-fashion-trends-for-this-season.
Sorcery is not —only— some metaphysical mystery lurking beneath the dark and moist canopy of the deep jungle. Black magic doesn’t require a wooden wand and a fairy-tale incantation in order to be effective. Amazonian shamanism is effective because it is enabled by powerful mind-altering substances that greatly enhance the capacity of symbols and rituals to penetrate the depths of the unconscious and subconscious mind. Western sorcery is effective because it is so pervasive and normalized that we don’t even notice it anymore. It is with us from the moment we wake up to the moment we close our eyes, with endless product placements and paid sponsorships even in our dreams.
There’s something fundamentally essential in the understanding of sorcery; a view of the world that is not based on objects and subjects, but on relationships. The world is an interdependent web of relations, where ruptures in one thread reverberate and affect every thread. Where politics are meant to safeguard the sanctity of reciprocity, where stories are told to remember wholeness and honour the fragility of balance. We have been so thoroughly enchanted by the allure of affluence and progress, of turning the world into a collection of objects, that we forgot that, when we made that pact with the black magician, there was a price to pay.
