The shaman uses the power offered to him not only by the animals, but also by the plants of garden Earth. All of these, of course, derive their power from the sun. While the animals usually act as guardian spirits, the plants tend to serve as spirit helpers. Unlike guardian spirits, spirit helpers are only possessed by shamans. Nonshamans do not normally have the plant power at their disposal.
Just as the powerful guardian spirit animals are usually wild, untamed species, similarly the vast majority of spirit helpers are wild, undomesticated species of plants. It appears that most of the domesticated animals and plants simply do not have the spiritual power necessary to be of significance in shamanism. From a shamanic point of view, the very fact that certain animals and plants have been tamed and domesticated for food and other forms of exploitation is symptomatic of their lack of power.
Plant Helpers
The plant helpers individually do not have nearly as much power as the power animals, but a shaman can come to possess hundreds of spirit helpers, so that their cumulative power can in many ways match that of his guardian spirit. But the importance of the wild plants lies in the variety of their individual capabilities. These plant helpers have two realities, their ordinary and their nonordinary aspects. The nonordinary nature of the plant may be an insect form, for example, a giant butterfly, or some other kind of zoomorphic, or even inanimate, form.
Most of us in our Western “civilization,” unlike our ancient ancestors, are sadly ignorant of the identities of wild plants. Accordingly, for many of us, the accumulation of spirit helpers requires acquiring some elementary knowledge of the properties of particular wild plants, the kind of knowledge that is routinely known among primitive peoples. Here is how I suggest you get your first spirit helper. The technique is the same for your later ones.
First, walk through an area of forest, prairie, desert, or any other undomesticated area. As you stroll through the wild area, keep conscious your mission: to encounter a plant to be your helper. When one plant seems particularly to attract you, sit down with it and become familiar with its details. Explain that you have to take all or part of it for your work, and apologize to it before picking part of it or pulling it up. If it is a bush or tree, you may need only pick part of a branch, enough to permit botanical identification. For a smaller plant, you may need an entire flowering specimen. Take the specimen to someone who will be able to identify it and tell you whether it is poisonous or not. A knowledgeable farmer or rancher may be able to give you the information; or you can go to a local museum or herbarium for assistance.
Once you know that the species is nonpoisonous, return to the same habitat and find a living member of the same species, apologize to it, and without destroying it eat four small pieces, such as bits of its leaves. Then wrap two more pieces of it together, and put them in your medicine bundle for a later use that will be explained.
Now you are ready to discover its hidden, nonordinary aspect. The evening of that same day, and aided by the sound of drumming, make the shamanic journey into the earth and search until you see two or more of that kind of plant. Visit with the plants, just as you did in the OSC earlier in the day. Keep studying the plants until they change into a nonplant spirit form. Almost any form is possible, but insects, serpents, birds, and even stones are common. As soon as you see the change, eat them in their nonmaterial form in the SSC just as you ate their ordinary material aspect that day; but this time take in the whole entity of each of the pair. Then return from the journey. Repeat the whole procedure to acquire each new pair of spirit helpers.
While this work is an adaptation of my Jívaro training, the basic method is also reported from elsewhere in the shamanic world. For example, the way in which plants reveal their hidden nature and make themselves available to the shaman is illustrated by this account of a journey to the Lowerworld by a Siberian Tavgi Samoyed shaman:
Going along the shore I saw two peaks; one of them was covered with bright-colored vegetation, the other was black earth all over. Between them, there appeared to be an islet with some very nice red plants In blossom on it. They resembled the flowers of the cloudberry. “What is this,” I thought. There was nobody neer me, but I found it out myself. When a man dies, his face becomes blue and changes: then the shaman has nothing more to do. As I noticed the red grass grew upwards, the black downwards. Suddenly I heard a cry: “Take a stone from here!” The stones were reddish. Since I was marked out to survive, I snatched a red stone. What I thought to be flowers were stones.1
In order to use spirit helpers in healing, you should work toward accumulating at least a dozen plants as a minimum. You should probably have among them, in their nonordinary aspects, at least one of each of the following as helpers: Spider, Bee, Yellow Jacket, Hornet, Snake. The greater the variety as well as number of his spirit helpers, the more capable a shaman is of dealing with illness.
The shaman uses spirit helpers in healing persons suffering from harmful power intrusions. The extraction of these intrusions is a more advanced and difficult form of shamanic healing than guardian animal retrieval. I recommend that you enter such work only if you have already mastered the shamanic journey and guardian spirit work, have acquired the plant helpers, and are extremely serious about shamanism. As Eliade correctly observes, “in order to extract the evil spirits from the patient, the shaman is often obliged to take them into his own body; in doing so, he struggles and suffers more than the patient himself.”2
Removing Intrusions
Illness due to power intrusion is manifested by such symptoms as localized pain or discomfort, often together with an increase in temperature, which (from a shamanic point of view) is connected with the energy from the harmful power intrusion. In some ways, the concept of power intrusion is not too different from the Western medical concept of infection. The patient should be treated both for the ordinary aspect of an intrusion (i.e., infection, by orthodox material medicine), and for the nonordinary aspect by shamanic methods.
Power intrusions, like communicable diseases, seem to occur most frequently in urban areas where human populations are the most dense. From an SSC viewpoint, this is because many people, without knowing it, possess the potentiality for harming others with eruptions of their personal power when they enter a state of emotional disequilibrium such as anger. When we speak of someone “radiating hostility,” it is almost a latent expression of the shamanic view.
A shaman would say that it is dangerous not to know about shamanism. In ignorance of shamanic principles, people do not know how to shield themselves from hostile energy intrusions through having guardian spirit power. Nor do they know that they, in turn, may be harming others unintentionally. Shamans believe that, because people are unaware that their hostile energies can penetrate others, they are unconsciously causing damage to their fellow human beings much of the time.
The shamanic removal of harmful power intrusions is difficult work, for the shaman sucks them out of a patient physically as well as mentally and emotionally. This technique is widely used in shamanic cultures in such distant areas as Australia, North and South America, and Siberia.
If you ever viewed the film Sucking Doctor, which shows the healing work of the famous California Indian shaman Essie Parrish, you saw a shaman pulling out intrusive power.3 But Western skeptics say that the shaman is just pretending to suck something out of the person, an object that the shaman had already secreted in his mouth. Such skeptics have apparently not taken up shamanism themselves to discover what is happening.
What is happening goes back to the fact that the shaman is aware of two realities. As among the Jívaro, the shaman is pulling out an intrusive power that (in the SSC) has the appearance of a particular creature, such as a spider, and which he also knows is the hidden nature of a particular plant. When a shaman sucks out that power, he captures its spiritual essence in a portion of the same kind of plant that is its ordinary material home. That plant piece is, in other words, a power object. For example, the shaman may store in his mouth two half-inch-long twigs of the plant that he knows is the material “home” of the dangerous power being sucked out. He captures the power in one of those pieces, while using the other one to help. The fact that the shaman may then bring out the plant power object from his mouth and show it to a patient and audience as OSC evidence does not negate the nonordinary reality of what is going on for him in the SSC.
In the following adaptation of the sucking technique, the shaman does not store nor use pieces of plants in his mouth. This is because I have found that this particular use of material power objects seems to hinder, rather than help, Westerners in their shamanic sucking work. Odd as it may seem, Westerners often are at least as accepting of the intangibility of power as their primitive counterparts. Perhaps this is partly a result of the Westerners’ knowledge of the invisibility of electrical energy and radiation. In any case, in this type of work the Western shaman appears to be most effective using only the SSC, or spirit, aspect of his plant helpers.
To accomplish sucking work successfully, the shaman must alert and marshal his spirit helpers to help him in the extraction of power intrusions from a patient. For this, the shaman uses one of his power songs. We have discussed these earlier, and in Chapter 5 I gave you the words to one that can also be used for this kind of work. Here are the words of another one, from a shaman of the Samoyed people of Siberia, for calling his spirits to work:
Come, come.
Spirits of magic.
If ye come not,
I shall go to you.
Awake, awake,
Spirits of magic,
I am come to you,
Arise from sleep.4
The procedure for extracting or removing a power intrusion is the same as undertaking the journey for a patient, up to a point. That point is usually very early in the journey before the shaman has gotten very far away from the entrance into the earth and while he is still in the Tunnel to the Lowerworld. If the patient has a harmful power intrusion, the shaman suddenly sees one of the following: voracious or dangerous insects, fanged serpents, or other reptiles and fish with visible fangs or teeth. He immediately stops the journey to deal with these intrusive powers. That is, the simple sight of one of these powers in the Tunnel is a signal that it should be removed immediately by sucking. This work, however, should only be undertaken by a shaman who possesses two spirit helpers identical to the spirit of the power intrusion he has just seen. If a shaman is not ready for this work, he either returns from the Tunnel or passes by the intrusive power spirit and proceeds to get a guardian spirit for the ill patient, which is essentially supportive treatment, until extraction of the intrusion can be done.
It is hard to explain, but the sight of one of these creatures in the Tunnel involves a complete certainty by the shaman that it is eating away or destroying a portion of the patient’s body. At that moment, one may experience an incredible revulsion and an awareness that the insect or other creature is evil and the enemy of the shaman as well as of the patient. Even a Sioux medicine man such as Lame Deer, with great reverence for the plants and animals, shows this awareness when he says that the spider “has a power, too, but it is evil.”5 (See Plate 13.)
Plate 13. Harmful intrusive powers in the form of spiders and a snake. Seen in patients’ bodies by a Jívaro shaman while in the SSC. Drawn by him subsequent to the experiences.
This seeing, and passing by, of voracious or dangerous insects or other creatures is conveyed by Cloutier’s poetic rendition of a Tsimshian shaman’s healing journey experience:
I’m bleeding all over
many arrows all over
I’m going to die
I’m going to die
far away
huge bee-hives
I walk around
huge bee-hives
Grandmother
sees me
her small boy
she heals me
she makes me grow
feeds me
small boy
inside
If a qualified sucking shaman encounters the listed creatures in the Tunnel, and if he possesses two spirit helpers of the type he has just seen, he must immediately stop his journey and raise himself up from a lying position onto his knees. If the spirit canoe journeying method is being used, the drummer, on seeing the shaman get up, knows that the journey has been aborted, and immediately stops the drumming, leaving the canoe “dead in the water.” The cessation of the drumming is also a message to all the crew members to stop their poling or paddling, since the journey has been stopped.
Remaining on his knees, the shaman starts to sing his power song, calling his spirit helpers to aid him in the sucking he is about to undertake. He also pulls toward him a basket or bowl containing sand or water, usually a container that he has used many times, in which to spit that which he extracts from the patient. Shaking the rattle over the patient and singing powerfully, the shaman concentrates upon calling up his spirit helpers to aid him in the sucking (see Plate 14). The audience or crew members, now sitting in a circle facing in toward the patient and the shaman, contribute to this effort by joining in singing the power song.
The shaman must locate the harmful, intrusive powers within the patient. To this end he uses a divinatory technique. In the absence of taking ayahuasca to see into the patient, the shaman may use a technique that is something like employing a divining rod. In the SSC, with his eyes closed, he stretches out his free hand back and forth over the patient’s head and body, slowly discovering if there is any special sensation of heat, energy, or vibration coming from any localized point in the patient’s body. By passing his hand a few inches above the body slowly back and forth, an experienced shaman gets a definite sensation in his hand when it is over the place where the intrusive power lies. Another technique is to pass a feather over the patient to pick up any vibration.
Plate 14. Preparing to suck out a harmful power intrusion. Drawn by Barbara Olsen.
When the shaman senses the particular location, he calls the two spirit helpers, either silently or in song, as he shakes his rattle steadily over the patient. When he clearly sees the helpers approaching in the darkness, with his eyes still closed he wills them into his mouth. There they will capture and absorb the power intrusion as he sucks it out of the patient. When he definitely sees the two in his mouth, he wills all his other spirit helpers to assist him in the sucking. Now he is ready to begin the work of extraction.
At the location in the patient’s body where he sensed the harmful intrusion, the shaman sucks with all his might (sec Plate 15a). This can be done through clothing, but it is usually more efficacious to pull open the clothing at that spot and physically suck the skin where the intrusive power is located. This is an act involving not only the shaman’s body, but his mind and emotions, which in the SSC are powerfully aroused and totally committed to the task.
The shaman has to be very careful in this process not to permit the voracious creature he saw from passing through his mouth and throat into his stomach. The creature is so emotionally repellent, however, that there is little likelihood of the shaman swallowing it. If by any chance he does, he should immediately seek the help of another sucking shaman in extracting it. (This is another reason why it is desirable for shamans to have partners.)
The shaman repeatedly sucks and “dry-vomits” as many times as necessary. It is important not to swallow the sucked-out power, but to expel it after each sucking into the container on the floor or ground (see Plate 15b). This is done with powerful, sometimes involuntary, violent retching that gives the shaman a real sense of cleansing, of being emptied of the emotionally disgusting power that he has extracted. As he removes the power intrusion from the patient, the shaman may feel engulfed in waves of extracted power that almost stun him and cause his body to tremble. After each time that he dry-vomits, he recovers his concentration by singing his power song and focusing on raising his spirit helpers again until he is strong enough to repeat the process. He keeps up such cycles of sucking until finally, in passing his hand back and forth above the patient, he no longer feels any localized emanations of heat, energy, or vibration.
Then he may continue to do some additional sucking at the places where he has already worked, or where he senses some residual dirtiness from the intrusive power, dry-vomiting into the container. When he no longer can sense any additional location of contamination or dirtiness, then he stops the sucking process. He may still sing his power song a bit longer to maintain the protective power of his animal and his spirit helpers around him.
Plate 15. (a) Sucking out a power intrusion, (b) Expelling the power intrusion. Drawn by Barbara Olsen.
Finally, when he is convinced the patient is spiritually clean, he shakes his rattle around the patient’s body in a circular fashion four times to provide a definition of the unity of the cleansed area, demarcating its boundaries for the spiritual world. The patient then can either remain lying down or can sit up.
At this point it is important for the shaman to take the container of the vomited or expelled intrusive power out-of-doors and safely away from the patient and the group. There he throws away the contents. He brings back the container to refill it later with clean sand or water for further use when necessary.
Depending on the shaman’s sense of power and his opinion of what is best to do, the journey can be begun over again immediately or delayed. Ideally, it is better for the journey to resume immediately so that the patient can now receive a power animal and thus be power-filled and therefore resistant to any additional harmful intrusions.
An Example
As I have indicated, one should undertake the sucking type of shamanism only if fully prepared, as set forth above. Yet in the case that follows, a beginning shaman with only slight knowledge of the sucking method found himself knowing what to do as the experience unfolded. This is not surprising, because once an apt student grasps the basic principles of shamanic power and healing, he can usually operate logically from those principles to solve new problems creatively. His description illustrates how the shaman casually moves back and forth between the SSC and the OSC in accomplishing a healing. The student decided to undertake the journey, which he thought would only be to recover a power animal, because of his deep concern for his friend, “a young woman in Vienna, who was much in conflict with her parents and was in a miserable state that day.” He was not trained or prepared to suck out intrusive creatures, but he spontaneously did a creative job of removing the “dirtiness” just mentioned.
Down I went as usual, but immediately after the entrance there was a left turn and suddenly all went black. None of the features I had earlier encountered, just black. To the right, just before the blackness, there was an incredibly disgusting kind of slimy laocoon-mass, intertwined snakes, and spiders whose legs were black, blue, and red in color. After trying to go into the blackness on the left—which didn’t work—I faced the mass to examine what I could do there. It was about two meters high—relative to me. It wouldn’t go away, so after a while I started climbing up it—a filthy job, believe me! Overhead there was a chimney-like tube with rungs on one side, so I just went on climbing. The tube was vertical and dark at first, but got brighter as I went up. After climbing for a while, I still couldn’t see an end, so I just let go of the rungs and flew the rest of the way. The tube was very high, and very bright at the top. I emerged into a sunlit landscape and found myself on the top of a flat roof.
I examined the roof. There was an entrance to a staircase that formed a triangular construction, sloping on one side with the door on the other. I climbed up the slope to peek inside from above. Just as I bent down to look I was grabbed by a bear and dragged inside. Down we went. The bear held me under his arm and just kept going. After a moment of apprehension I decided to wriggle myself out of his grip. I did. He never noticed and went his way. I then found myself in a long cavern, fairly bright and oval, which I later identified as the inside of my own torso. To my left [the side on which his patient was lying in ordinary reality] I noticed some cracks in the otherwise solid wall of the cavern. Black slime oozed out of some of the cracks. I pulled out some stones and more black slime poured out. Finally I got an opening big enough for me to go through, and I went in.
I found myself in a cave similar to the first one, only this one was filled knee-deep (in some places deeper) with this black slime. Towards the lower end there was an opening almost completely obstructed by black rocks and the slime that had built up there. I was wading knee-deep. Through the opening I could see light, like a warm sun, which was mostly hidden by the obstructions there. At first I didn’t know what to do. So I got up on my knees (in ordinary reality] and started examining the patient’s body from the outside with my hands. I could not get a clear sensation at first. It felt like it was covered with spider webs. I brushed them off with my fingers and then clearly felt a focus of energy—neither hot nor cold, yet both—around the stomach/ovary/bladder area. I sucked out what I could and got rid of it down the wash basin. It was very disgusting. After rinsing my mouth clean of any trace of whatever it was, I returned to my lying position next to the patient and went back into the cavern. The level of the black stuff was much lower now and it seemed a bit dryer too. I stood and looked around for a while not knowing what to do next.
Then I had an inspiration. I pulled off my pullover and lit it. With this torch I set fire to the slime everywhere in the cave. After a while it burned down to a substance that seemed like charcoal and black ashes. It was not slimy anymore. I don’t know how I survived in there white everything was burning, but it didn’t seem to be a problem. When the fire had stopped I examined the cavern some more and found—at the upper end—a tunnel leading away horizontally, large enough for a man to crawl through comfortably. In I went. After what seemed about five or six meters it dropped abruptly for about one or two meters and then bent back towards the direction of the cavern. I went in and found that it ended after two meters, widening slightly. I started digging in the floor at the end of the tunnel. Soon water started flowing up. I enlarged the hole and quickly left the tunnel as the water flowed stronger and threatened to inundate me.
The water flowed into the cavern with great force and washed the debris left by the fire towards the lower end of the cavern where the warm light could be seen dimly through a little hole. I went down there as the water pressure built up behind the rocks that obstructed the opening. I kicked at them a few times. The opening got larger and finally it was wide open. There was indeed a warm sun there. The filthy water poured towards it and was seen no more. Light and air began flooding the cavern from that end. It was not so dark anymore. I had done a good cleaning-up job, I realized. The cave walls and floor had a light color except for very few places where there were bits of black stuff left. The water formed into a brook running along the center of the cave to the lower end where it disappeared towards the sun that shone outside. (A very big sun! And quite close toot) With the fresh air that blew in from that end there came swallows. They flew around in the cavern, making it feel quite lively again I took one with me when I came back from the cave and gave it [a power animal] to the patient.
At crucial points of my journey the patient started breathing heavily as if she could feel what was going on. She later explained she had been feeling a gradual loosening in her abdominal area. When I told her what I had found, she confirmed that she had digestive and ovary problems. In a letter six weeks later she reported changes for the better. The feeling of being stuck had gone and concrete conflicts were coming out into the open. I hope to see her again soon. Maybe we can establish a connection to the upper part of her body this time.
That’s the story. Maybe you can use it in some way. I found it particularly interesting since I was so often at a loss about what to do, and yet ended up doing a lot of things no one had ever told me about.
One of the most famous North American Indian shamans to use the sucking method in recent decades was the late Essie Parrish. She was not just a see-er of power intrusions, but could hear them as well. She stated that when she was in trance, “… you can hear something in the patient laying there .. you can hear the disease making noise. The disease in people’s body is something like madness and they [the diseases] are living, lots of times they make noise, just like insects. they’re living there like insects.. .”7
Patients, both Indian and non-Indian, came long distances to be healed by Essie Parrish, and she often traveled to Nevada and Oregon in response to requests from the sick. She had received a vision that she should reveal her shamanic methods to non-Indian as well as Indian, so that everyone could eventually benefit from the knowledge. Because of that vision, she cooperated in making the Sucking Doctor film previously mentioned, and also explained her work to the spectators after her healing sessions. Since she was a specialist in extracting power intrusions, you may find the following account, recorded by Robert L. Oswalt, a valuable supplementary explanation of the sucking method of removing power instrusions.
The Work of a Sucking Doctor
Told by Essie Parrish
I am going to tell about treating people, since you want to know these things about me. I have been a doctor and will be one for all my life on this earth—that’s what I was created for. I was put here on earth to cure people.
When I was young I didn’t know about it—whenever I dreamed things (had visions)—because that was the only way that I dreamed.* I thought everyone was like that; I thought all children were that way. Those are the things that I used to tell about—things that I knew and saw.
The first person I cured was when I was more than twelve years old. At that time white doctors were hard to find; we were far away from any [white] medicine doctor.
One time my younger sister fell sick. She was so extremely sick with sores In her mouth that they thought she would die. My great-uncle, the one who raised her, must have been making plans when I didn’t know about it—I was playing around outside. Unexpectedly they summoned me from inside the house. I still remember that; that was towards four o’clock in the evening.
Then when they had called me into the house he said, “Couldn’t you do something for your little sister? I say to you that you possess a prophet’s body.* You with your prophet’s body could perhaps cure her. Couldn’t you do something.”
“I wonder what I should do now.” I was thinking to myself because I was little and didn’t know. But I said, “All right.” That had been said to me. My power had told me, “If anyone ever asks anything of you, you should not say, ‘No’; you are not for that purpose. You are one who fixes people. You are one who cures people.” That’s why I said, “All right.”
After I had agreed, I prayed to heaven. My right hand I put on her head. When I had done so, a song that I didn’t know came down into me. Amazingly that song came up out of me. But I didn’t sing it out loud; it was singing down inside of me. “I wonder how I am going to cure her,” I was thinking to myself To my amazement she got well a few days afterward. That was the first person I cured.
Unexpectedly another person got sick. They say he was about to die with what the white people call “double pneumonia.” He was lying almost gone. It was a long way to a [white] medicine doctor. His older sister had come for me. She said. “I have come to ask you a great favor. I want you to see him. See him! Even though I see that he is dying, I want you to look at him.”
Then when I had gone there I laid my hand on him here and there. And I sucked him. Amazingly it cured him. While I am doctoring I get better and better. Like the white people learn, I learn. Every time I treat people I move upward (in skill).
After a long time—several years—it was probably twelve or thirteen years—I moved still higher. Then I noticed that I had something in my throat to suck pains out with. And my hand power, I found out about my hand power. That power is always near me. But other people can’t see it; I alone can see it.
When I sit there alongside a person, I call on Our Father.** That’s my power—the one I call Our Father. Then it descends, my power comes down into me. And when that sick man is lying there, I usually see it (the power). These things seem unbelievable but I, myself. I know, because it is in me. I know what I see. My power is like that. You may doubt it if you don’t want to believe; you don’t have to believe but it is my work.
Way inside of the sick person lying there, there is something. It is just like seeing through something—if you put tissue over something, you could see through it. That is just the way I see it inside. I see what happens there and can feel it with my hand—my middle finger is the one with the power.
When I work with the hand power it is just like when you cast for fish and the fish tug on your bait—it feels like it would with the fish pulling on your line—that’s what it is like. The pain sitting somewhere inside the person feels like It is pulling your hand towards itself—you can’t miss it. It lets you touch it. I don’t place my hand myself; it feels like someone—the disease—is pulling with a string. It is like what the white men call a ‘magnet.’ That’s the way the disease in a person is—like a magnet.
And then it touches it. And when the power touches the pain, your breath is caught—it gets so that you can’t breathe. But there is no fear. It is as if your chest were paralyzed—your breath is shut off. If you should breathe while holding that pain, the disease could hide itself. As the pain quiets your breathing, you can feel that pain there, with the result that your hand can take it out. However, if the breathing were not shut off I couldn’t lift out the pain.
When I lake it out you can’t see it. You can’t see it with your bare eyes, but I see it. Whenever I send it away, I see what the disease is. When the disease comes down into a person, which the white people talk about way differently; and we Indians too, we shamans, explain it way differently. That disease that comes down into a person is dirty; I suppose that is what the white people call “germs” but we Indian doctors call it “dirty.”
I am going to talk about my hand power some more. The palm of the hand has power, and the finger in the middle of hand has power. That doesn’t work just any time, only when I summon (power).
When there is a sick person somewhere to be found out, the hand power can find it out. Whenever someone thinks about it from somewhere, thinks toward me. there, on the tip of [the] middle finger, it acts as if shot—what the white people call “shock.” If you touch something like electricity, you will know what the shock is like; that’s how it acts there on the middle finger. When they think from somewhere, it is then that the power finds out, that it gives a warning. That is when I know that someone wants me. And It always turns out to be true. That is my hand power.
There is still a lot more to that (subject of doctoring). There is a doctoring power in my throat. Here, somewhere in the throat, the power sits. When that doctoring power first came down into me, I had already had some kind of growth there for about four years. It had affected me like diphtheria. I had almost died from its constricting (the throat) from the beginning, but I knew all along that it was becoming that (power).
But those that are staying with me didn’t know; I had never told them about it. However, my power had told me saying, “That is because power has entered you there.” When that happened (growth came), they called a white doctor to see me. The white doctor didn’t recognize it; he told me that it was probably diphtheria. But I knew what it was. When that thing had finished growing there, I recovered.
That felt like a tongue lying there and it first moved when I sang. I was probably that way for four years with that thing lying there. After it grew on me, my voice improved. It told me for what purpose it was developing. It told me, “Power is developing.” Without that I couldn’t suck out any diseases. Only when it had developed could I suck out pains.
Then it gave me this staff with designs and said, “This is your power. Those designs on there are symbols. Those are disease words.” And it spoke further saying, “There are many rules to this: You can’t treat a menstruating woman and you can’t doctor in a house where someone is menstruating. (In those situations) the power will not be your friend; the power will not rise for you.” It has turned out to be true.
When I first doctored with my throat, it was for a young woman. When I treated her and sucked the disease out, something like a bubble came up out of my throat; just as it would if you blew up a big balloon, that is how it came from my mouth. Everyone there saw it. It had become inflated quite a lot when it floated from my mouth. Everyone saw it. Like foaming soap bubbles would look; that is how it looked at the start.
Ever since that happened I have been sucking diseases out. The disease that I suck out works like a magnet inside too (as when using hand power). On the place here where I said the power entered my throat, the disease acts as fast as electricity—it acts in [a] flash, like a magnet. And it shuts off the breath. When it does that, when it closes off the breath, like a magnet it comes along extremely slowly.
However, one doesn’t notice how long he holds his breath. It’s like being in what the white people call a “trance.” While the disease is coming to me, I’m in a trance. It always speaks to me saying, “This is the way it is. It is such and such a kind of disease. This is why.”
That disease flies and sticks to a certain place in the mouth. Our (shaman’s) teeth have the power; there is something attached to our teeth. There is where the power is, on one certain tooth. There is where the disease sticks. Sometimes it flies under the tongue. When it sticks there it is extremely hard to release—it is, as I said, like a magnet. Then it dies there.
I spit out the dead disease. Then I let it fall into my hand so that many people can see it. They always see the disease that I suck out. But that is not to be touched by anyone else—it is contagious. Whoever picks the disease up, into him it would enter. Whenever it sits in my hand, it sticks to it like a magnet. It won’t fall off—even if you shake your hand it won’t fall off. Even if you want to shake it loose it won’t come loose.
You can put it in something like a piece of paper or a basket. If you are going to do that, you should sing for that purpose, you should call for that purpose. Some diseases sit for a while—sit for a few minutes—but others are fast. Some fast diseases stay just so many minutes after being put down and then disappear.
There is still much more (to tell about doctoring). In those many years that I have been treating people, I have seen many different kinds of disease.8
Tobacco Traps
Sucking out harmful power intrusions is, as we have seen, an advanced shamanic technique that requires considerable preparation. A much simpler technique involves what I call “tobacco traps,” and is an adaptation of a method I learned from a Lakota Sioux medicine man in South Dakota. The method is based on the principle that the intrusive spirits enjoy tobacco, and are attracted to it. This is consistent with the Jívaro view, as you may recall, that the shaman keeps tsentsak, the spirits responsible for power intrusions, fed on tobacco water. This Sioux method involves the use of tobacco ties, or miniature cloth pouches containing tobacco.
In tobacco-trapping, the ties are used as bait to lure and catch intrusive spirits that may be within the body of a sick person. One of the ways in which this is done is to make a circle of tobacco ties around the patient, who is lying on the ground or the floor. Then when the shaman is working to remove harmful power intrusions from the patient, he also has the help of the tobacco ties in drawing the spirits out. When his extracting work is done, he carefully rolls up the tobacco ties in a ball and immediately takes them to a remote location. There the ball is unrolled and the tobacco ties draped over the branches of a tree, similar to the draping of tinsel on a Christmas tree. This is done to allow the spirits to disperse far from the humans whom they might harm.
An adaptation which I sometimes use is to employ the tobacco ties to cleanse an entire group of persons sitting together in a circle. In this approach, the string is held at one end of the circle by the person to the left of the shaman. The shaman then unrolls the string all the way around the circle in a clockwise direction, leaving adequate slack for each person to tie on a tobacco tie. Next a large piece of red cloth is passed around the circle in the same direction, each person cutting out a small square with scissors, and passing the cloth and scissors on. A package of plain tobacco is passed, each person putting a pinch of tobacco (usually Bull Durham) into his small square of cloth, and folding the sides up to make a pouch. Then with concentration, each participant quietly takes his most serious individual pain and projects it into his tobacco pouch. Each person ties his tobacco pouch into the string. When everyone in the circle has done this, the shaman rises up and goes around the group on the outside of the circle, shaking his rattle. This is to help shake the pain, the hurt, the illness, the unhappiness, out of the individuals into their tobacco ties, which they hold before them. The shaman circles the group, shaking his rattle until he feels himself starting to enter the SSC.
When the shaman returns to his place and puts down his rattle, he now undertakes the most difficult part of the work. To do this, he must be certain he is filled with power, so that none of the painful, illness-causing spirits that have been projected into the tobacco ties will be able to penetrate him.
Singing his power song, he grasps one end of the string of tobacco ties and walks slowly into the center of the circle. He places that end carefully on the ground and keeps singing. Then slowly, and with great care, he starts pulling the string from the hands of the people in the circle, laying it down on the ground inside the circle into an ever-widening clockwise spiral. In the process the shaman may experience waves of despair, unhappiness, and pain washing over him as he slowly lays down the linked tobacco ties. He is sensing the pain that he is taking away from the people in the circle. It can be an almost overwhelming emotional experience. When finally the last end of the tobacco tie chain is on the ground, he continues to sing his power song to protect himself. He then, on his knees, slowly and carefully winds up the spiral into a ball, starting with the outer end. As he does this, he may feel an intense continuation of the feelings of pain, hurt, and unhappiness of the circle members.
As soon as the shaman is finished, he picks up the ball from the ground and carries it outstretched from him, walking rapidly away from the circle to a location at least a quarter of a mile away. There he unrolls the ball and drapes the ties onto a tree. He closes his eyes, pushes the power surrounding the tree away from him, and immediately leaves. The others may watch him do this from a distance. Then they can all return together to their original location, sit together in a circle holding hands, and sing the power song.
Becoming the Patient
A related technique of shamanic healing is “becoming the patient.” This method was taught to me by a Coast Salish Indian shaman in the State of Washington a few years ago. As with other methods of removing harmful spirit intrusions, the shaman should practice this method only when he is power-full, for in this technique he takes aboard or onto himself the power(s) causing harm to the patient. The invisible cloak of power surrounding the Coast Salish shaman prevents the spirits from intruding into him.9
The way one can use this approach is as follows. First the shaman discusses with the patient the nature of the pain or illness. He finds out everything he can about how the illness or pain feels, and develops a feeling for what it is like to be in this condition. He interrogates the patient as to the first onset of the affliction, learning about all the circumstances the patient was aware of at that time. Then he continues his questioning to learn what it is like to be the patient, what the patient’s outlook on life is, what are the patient’s problems and hopes. In other words, the shaman does his best to learn what it feels like to be the patient. This work, in contrast to psychoanalysis, normally only covers a few days, depending upon the skills of the shaman and his rapport with the patient.
When the shaman is satisfied that he can identify emotionally with the patient, he is ready to undertake the critical phase of the healing work.
At this point the shaman and the patient go to a wilderness location devoid of human habitation. The shaman, with his rattle and power song, wakes his guardian spirit to help him. The patient sits quietly beside him during this phase.
When the shaman feels power-full, he and the patient slowly take off their clothes and exchange them with each other. As the shaman puts on each article of the patient’s clothing he concentrates on taking on the patient’s hurts and afflictions and on assuming the patient’s personality, By the time the shaman puts on the last piece of clothing, the shaman should now begin to feel that he is the patient.
Now the shaman and the patient start dancing, accompanied by the shaman’s rattle. The shaman imitates every movement and gesture of the patient to become the patient. Then, when the shaman feels his consciousness changing, he holds his hands against the patient’s body until he feels that he has taken on all that is necessary for the patient—and all that he feels he can safely carry—of the patient’s affliction. If the work is done right, the shaman will feel waves of sickness, or pain, passing over him.
At that moment, the shaman runs away several hundred feet into the uninhabited wilderness, stops, and stretches out his arms before him. He focuses with all his strength upon “throwing away” the painful intrusive power that was causing harm to the patient and now is resting on him. With actual physical motions of his arms, and with whatever sounds that emerge, the shaman throws the harm-causing power into the distant sky, toward the horizon, with all his force.
This sending-away process may take several minutes or more. The shaman will know when he is finished by the sense of the removal from his body of the patient’s affliction and of the patient’s personality. The shaman will feel cleansed and relaxed.
He now returns to the patient and they re-exchange their clothing. The shaman finishes the work by singing a power song and standing together with the patient in the smoke of a fire containing wild sage or cedar boughs to complete the cleansing.
A modification of this technique, especially for demonstration purposes, may be used in groups at workshops. First the group goes to a wild area, uninhabited by humans. A volunteer sits in the center of the circle of participants and is interviewed for a brief period of time by the entire group. Each member asks one question regarding how the patient experiences the pain or illness, the conditions of the onset of illness, the tikes and dislikes of the patient, and anything else that will help them learn to feel like that patient. In this exercise, it is not desirable for nonshaman participants individually to take on much of the power causing the harm to the patient. The procedure to be described thus permits all of them to take on only a small portion of the harmful intrusive power, so as not to jeopardize themselves. It is important for the leader of the group to tell any participants who do not feel power-full not to participate, but simply to be spectators.
Then the patient is asked to dance in any way he pleases. Members of the group shake rattles and beat a drum, continually adjusting their tempo to that of the dancer. Volunteers are asked to imitate in every possible way the dancing of the patient, by dancing alongside him. Every movement of the patient should be mimicked.
When each of the dancers reaches the point where he feels emotionally that he has to some degree, become the patient, he should touch the patient only briefly, draw some of the intrusive power from him, and run away several hundred feet, face the wilderness, and throw the power away from him as earlier described.
When all the dancers have done this, and feel cleansed, they return to the group and embrace the patient. All join together to form a power circle by holding hands, incorporating the patient into it, and the group sings a power song (subsequently a journey can be undertaken to restore the power animal for the patient).
Obviously, this technique has an interesting resemblance to psychoanalysis, including the principle of countertransference, and is an illustration of how shamanic techniques often foreshadow aspects of healing methods developed only recently in the West. The “becoming the patient” method of the Coast Salish also has an analogue among the !Kung Bushmen of southern Africa, whose shamans:
.place their fluttering hands on either side of the person’s chest, or wherever the sickness is located. They touch the person tightly, or more often vibrate their hands close to the skin’s surface. At times the healer wraps his body around the person, rubbing his sweat—believed to carry healing properties—on the sick person. The sickness is drawn into the healer. Then the healer expels the sickness from his own body, shaking it from his hand out into space, his body shuddering with pain.10
In the !Kung healing, the shaman “pulls out the sickness with eerie, earth-shattering screams and howls that show the pain and difficulty of his healing.” The work lasts several hours.11
* As Spott and Kroeber have pointed out with regard to shamanism among the Yurok of northern California, it is often difficult to distinguish in native accounts between dream or trance experiences (Spott and Kroeber 1942: 155). Often shamans and other primitive visionaries tend to group these two states of consciousness together in opposition to ordinary waking consciousness.
* Mrs. Parrish was a prophet as well as a shaman.
** Mrs. Parrish was at one point the leader of the local Church of the Latter Day Saints and, as a master shaman, integrated some Christian concepts into her shamanism.
