Ayahuasca, Icaros and a Mestizo Amazon

A vegetalismo healing ceremony is held at night, usually indoors or under a simple shelter, and is built around the vegetalista's icaros, sung or whistled over the course of the session to call the plant spirits, direct the ayahuasca's effect and address a participant's particular complaint. A chacapa, a hand rattle of bound dried leaves, marks the rhythm of the icaros and is shaken or brushed over a person's body; mapacho, a strong wild tobacco, is smoked and blown to open and close stages of the work. Vomiting and other purging during the session are understood within the tradition as the body expelling what is making a person ill, a reading of the effect as itself therapeutic rather than as a side effect to be managed.

Vegetalismo took its present mestizo shape through contact between Amazonian indigenous plant knowledge and the growing river town society of the Peruvian Amazon across the 19th and 20th centuries, migration during the rubber boom prominent among the forces that mixed the two. Catholic prayer, saints and the sign of the cross sit inside many vegetalista icaros and practices alongside plant spirits and indigenous cosmology, a folk Catholic layer that marks vegetalismo as a mestizo tradition rather than an indigenous one. It is therefore distinct from the curanderismo of specific indigenous peoples such as the Shipibo, even where the two share plant repertoire, technique and sometimes ceremonial space; the atlas records vegetalismo and Shipibo practice as related but separate lineages, not as one tradition under two names. Since the late 20th century the ceremony has also drawn foreign visitors in growing numbers, a visibility this entry records without instructing in the practice it describes.