Medicine man -- 2/6/07

Today we were visited at our hostel by a medicine man who had come to deliver bread. He sat down and talked to us for awhile about his worldview. First he wanted to make sure we understood that America is NOT just the United States, it is ALL of America. Then he accused us all of reading too many books, proclaiming that in order to find yourself you need to awaken your memory, because all of human culture lies in memory. He started telling us about Ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic plant. He said that Ayahuasca gives you visions, that it can cure you by opening your senses and helping you to find yourself. But then he added that Ayahuasca is not for everyone. Women, for example, don’t need Ayahuasca because they have eight senses, while men only have three (I’m not making this up). What better evidence for this than the fact that women give birth (in Spanish, the phrase for “giving birth” is “dar la luz”, which literally means “give light”)? We are light, the medicine man said, and the body is a vehicle to return to the sun. He then started talking about the apocolypse, which in Quechua is called “Pachacuti.” In the Quechua worldview, when the world ends, the Inca’s ancestors will be saved and live in a new world where the social hierarchy is reversed. According to the medicine man we are already living in the 10th Pachacuti (the most recent one was in 2002). He concluded his speech by saying that each person must find his or her own “medicine” to be reborn.