The Voice of the Serpent
You will hear my serpent voice slithering in your ear…
you will see my light without seeing it through the senses…
and my warmth will follow you beyond the cold…
And I will be part of you, earth thrown to the infinite…
(translation of Icaro Ayahuasca, Rosa Giove / Peru)
Not long ago in the Peruvian Amazon, healing with plants was almost the only “system” of health. The plant doctors, almost all old sages, worked with master plants; the jungle is and was the pharmacy. Each doctor had their own rituals and chants, their own perfumes and methodology and they were adapting and learning from the plants together with their cultural tradition, which was different in each ethnic group and ancestral knowledge, as well as the different Christian currents that arrived 500 years ago. But truly their wisdom comes from the conversation with the plants and the forest. The forms of working, the traditional animist methods, were syncretized with the miscegenation (mestizaje) as is the case in all of Peru. A few masters of other Andean traditions were also born, but they did not lose the chant or icaro (1), nor the connection and dedication to the pain of humanity.
People came from far away to cure ailments, from infections of the body to their cancers to deep wounds of the soul. They walked kilometers, sometimes hundreds, because very few villages had these intermediaries with the world of the plants. Ayahuasca, the great mother, grew in abundance crawling like the Yacu mama (2) at the foot of the protection of the Lupuna (3) tree, surrounded by leafy Ajo Sachas, different Sanangos (4), Yawar Pangas (5), masters of the forest united to the song of man, who takes their essence and through it pours to humanity the compassion of these divine intelligences contained in nature.
Upon leaving the jungles, Amazonian medicine had to face a world full of spiritualistic paradigms, with absurd beliefs and paradigms of the native and its purity or impurity. Many “shamans” appeared, where previously there were only a few masters called vegetalista doctors, and even luxurious consortiums and franchises appeared in the absurdity of having “a staff of shamans” who were salaried, offering daily ayahuasca sessions or similar, without purging, without digestion and integration, without vision of the medicine nor its transcendence. The number of ceremonies, the comfort, the paradigms and ideas of the good savage and the “shamanic” or “psychedelic” tourism today appear as contaminating ingredients on a path that demands purity and truth. For lack of this, ignorance leads us to countless “shamans” and a motley new age fauna of personalities imparting medicine that is very far from healing or even understanding the subtle world. The sacred medicine of the forest then begins to face the disease of money and all the consequences of misuse and lack of understanding from a culture so alien to the understanding of the Amazon forest and its essence.
In my journey through the jungle, almost at the end of the world that gives origin to this medicine, I could not imagine the boom of ayahuasca and the color that this new age genesis has given to the medicine. The masters I met were not worried about using feathers or pretending to be Incas, nor about qualifying themselves before someone whether they were purely native or Christian, indigenous, white or mestizo. Rather they were focused on the power of their chants, their delivery and compassion to the patient, and their wisdom gained from being a channel of the forest – a channel of entities of the compassion and love of the universe. Masters with many shamanic diets in the jungle, and decades of learning before daring to even think of healing with plants.
Sinchi Runa is now in Europe, which is an immense challenge from confronting so many pseudo shamanic paradigms to the legality of the plants and the incomprehension of the state entities. We seek from the purity of the heart to bring healing to a world lacking real alternatives to alleviate human pain. We have found on our way from the jungles of Peru other intelligences embodied in songs, stones or plants. In addition to those we bring from the Amazon and our icaros of the jungle; we now have various quartz that we can program and heal with, and our perfumes today also smell of plants from Asia and Europe. We also chant the mantras of the Vedic culture in immense appreciation of this sacred technology of vibration, healing and understanding of the cosmos and divinity, as well as use knowledge of ayurveda and tools such as vipassana meditation, and others. We remember and revere our essence in the forest and even now the Lupuna protects us, teaches us and speaks to us.
We have been doing retreats and some longer processes of immersion with plants and shamanic diets. In all of them we look for silence, humility and the real search for healing as the main tool. That is why we are now entering a more authentic stage in the spirit of medicine, for us, in which you come with that which is your limitation or pain, that disharmony that we call disease, and put us at your service as it was in a singular or private origin, giving the medicine and plants according to the ailment of each one, as it really is a healing process. Not only in the limited time of a retreat and its lack of individuality but in a particular process created for each patient. We are going to call these processes treatments or immersion processes, and with this we are opening our house to understand together the immensity of possibilities of this medicine, its healing capacity and the truth of the use of plants and their potential.
(1) Icaro: shamanic chant of the Amazon. Vibrational tools used by master healers (maestros curanderos) to speak with entity of the plant, with the patient’s body and pull out demons, evil or disease. Also harmonise and invoke the plant for the type of work to be done. It is considered to ‘descend’ or ‘come down’ or is given to the healer by the plant world or his master.
(2) Yacu Mama: The mother of water, the anaconda. The great serpent is associated as the archetype of Ayahuasca. Represents ancestral knowledge, inner truth, compassion and medicine.
(3) Lupuna: the tallest tree in the Amazon, reaching up to 70m in height and its trunk can reach more than 3m in diameter, with tabular roots. Under its influence numerous ecosystems grow. Its archetype is wisdom, eternity of knowledge, compassion and truth. It teaches chants and shamanic healing arts. Protector of the plants and animals of the forest.
(4) Sanangos: Family of master plants. Chiric Sanango heals through cold, opens the heart; Uchu Sanango: Male plant that burns the “bad”, purifies; Ushpawacha Sanango: heals through memory, frees the heart.
(5) Yawar Panga: ‘Blood cleaner’ in Quechua. Strong traditional purge used at the beginning of the work with Ayahuasca that can last between 3-8 hours, powerful emetic and cathartic work with addictions, clinging and others such as bad energy, subtle or “physical” parasites, and any other form of intoxication.