Amazonian Vegetalismo

Vegetalismo is the healing and visionary tradition of the mestizo river towns of the Peruvian Amazon, most thoroughly documented around Iquitos and Pucallpa by the anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna. Its practitioners, vegetalistas, hold that certain plants are teachers rather than mere materials: a madre, a plant spirit or plant mother, is understood to reveal itself to a person who approaches it correctly and to pass on both healing knowledge and the songs, icaros, needed to use it. Ayahuasca, the vine Banisteriopsis caapi taken together with an admixture leaf such as chacruna, is the tradition's central plant teacher and the sacrament of its principal ceremony, but it is one master plant among many rather than the whole of the practice.

The route to becoming a vegetalista is the dieta, a period of isolation on a restricted, largely bland diet, without salt, sugar, alcohol or sexual contact, undertaken while ingesting a chosen plant teacher over days or weeks. Practitioners describe the dieta as the actual site of learning: the plant is said to teach directly, in dreams and in the icaros a dieter comes away singing, rather than through any human instructor explaining technique. A vegetalista's authority and reputed skill rest on the plants he or she has dieted and the icaros received in the process, a curriculum that is personal and plant given rather than institutional. The atlas describes this structure of belief and practice; it does not set out how a dieta or a ceremony is conducted.

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.