3.
“Evoking the Devil: Fasting with Tobacco to Learn How to Cure”
In 1652, French priest Antoine Biet accompanied an expedition to South America. In what is now called French Guyana, Biet observed the customs and practices of the area’s indigenous inhabitants, who were Caribs. Biet observed that the local doctors, known as piayés, endured a rigorous training to learn their profession. The ordeal included fasting until they fainted, being bitten by large black ants, and drinking large quantities of tobacco juice. The bite of these ants causes extreme pain and lasts for weeks. Those who survive a massive dose of ant toxin come back to normal life much fortified.
He who aspires to be a piayé is first put in an ancient’s home. He stays there a very long time, to receive instruction and to make, as it were, his novitiate, sometimes serving his master for the period of ten years. The ancient piayé observes him to see whether he has in him the qualities necessary for a piayé. He is not elevated to this dignity until the age of twenty-five or thirty years.
When the time has come that they are to put him to the tests, first they make him fast as strictly as the chief and even more so, because, for a year, he eats only boiled millet and a very little cassava. On this fare, he becomes so thin that he seems a skeleton with nothing but skin stretched over his bones and becomes almost without strength. The old piayés assemble after this long fast, shut themselves up into a hut, and teach the aspirant the way to call up the demon or to consult him. In place of whipping the aspiring captain [as certain Christian monastics do], they make him dance until he is so exhausted because of the weakness caused by his fasting that he falls fainting and swooning to the ground. To revive him they put on him girdles and collars of those great black ants whose bites cause so much pain. They open his mouth by force and put in it a sort of funnel into which they pour a great vessel full of juice drawn from tobacco. This strange medicine causes him to have vertigo and vomit blood. Its effects last several days.
After such violent remedies, and such rigorous fasts, he is made a piayé and has the power of curing illnesses and evoking the Devil. But, to do so properly, he is ordered a fast of three years duration. The first year he eats millet and bread, the second, crabs with his bread and the third, some little birds. They keep these fasts so exactly that, although the others drink and make good cheer in their feasts and assemblies, they no longer drink a draught, since they believe that, if they broke this fast, they would have no power over illnesses or over the devils to evoke them.
These poor infidels are in such blindness! See what they suffer in this life for a vain honor; they are true penitents of the Demon, who starts to make them feel the torments of Hell, while they are still alive. These miserable doctors are obliged to abstain from time to time from certain things and to drink that rude potion of tobacco. Sometimes they drink as much of it as a great drunkard can take wine. Doubtless their stomachs grow accustomed to this sort of drink since they can tolerate it.