Sacred Grounds

AMAZONIAN RAIN FOREST YIELDS HOLY AND HEALING SECRETS

Ethnobotanist Mark J. Plotkin has lived in the Amazon for much of the
past 20 years. Trained at Harvard, he apprenticed himself to the
shamans -- the tribal healers -- of the rain forests. From them, he
gained an intimate knowledge of the medicinal plants and religious
practices of indigenous peoples. This has led him to try to decipher
what he calls the "inexplicable link between the holy and the
botanical."

Plotkin's research focuses on the interrelationship between medicine,
environment and religious practice that has defined life among Amazonian
tribes since antiquity. In "Medicine Quest: In Search of Nature's Healing
Secrets" (Viking, $22.95), he writes about how this ancient knowledge can
assist in
biotechnological advances: painkillers derived from the skin of rain forest
frogs, anti-tumor agents from snake venom.

Plotkin, 45, was spurred to his quest by his Harvard mentor, Richard
Evans Schultes, perhaps the greatest ethnobotanist of the 20th
century, who arrived alone in the Amazon in the 1930s and spent years
paddling thousands of miles in a canoe. Along the way, he cataloged
thousands of plants and documented how tribes used them to cure
illnesses, to see the past and divine the future.

One such plant was ayahuasca, the so-called "vision vine" with
hallucinogenic properties that Plotkin sampled in an all-night
ceremony in the rain forest not long ago. He spent hours vomiting,
imagined himself attacked by giant caimans and anacondas, and finally
had a vision of crawling on all fours onto a white sandy beach.

When it was over, Plotkin writes in "Medicine Quest," the shaman who
administered the brew gave him a cryptic, Cheshire cat smile and said:
"You have had a glimpse of our world. You have been purged, cleaned,
healed. You will never again fear death as you have now died and been
reborn."

Plotkin is president of the Amazon Conservation Team, an Arlington,
Va.-based environmental group. He is also a research associate at the
Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History. I recently phoned
him at his Arlington, Va., office. This is part of our
conversation.

In terms of lifestyle, Silicon Valley is about as far away from the
Amazon as you can get. What relevance does your work hold for people
here?

It's frustrating to find that people in the 21st century feel that
nature has no role to play in their lives. The attitude seems to be,
"In the age of the Internet, who needs fungi?" But all these new
technologies have the potential to make nature more important than
it's ever been before. That's because we now have the ability to
manipulate and make use of molecules as never before. And Western
technology can benefit from the Amazon's natural resources and
indigenous wisdom in terms of advancing our medical and other abilities.

It is important to recognize that Western medicine doesn't have all
the answers. We can't cure schizophrenia. We can't cure many forms of
cancer. We can't cure AIDS. We can't cure deep depression. So I'm
interested in the interface between technology, Western medicine,
shamanistic medicine, religious belief systems and the environment. I
believe that exploring that interface may lead us to some of these
cures.

You write about the "inexplicable link between the holy and the
botanical." What does that mean?

Consider the example of ayahuasca, the vision vine. In the hands of
indigenous healers, it's a sacrament. But in Brazil, scientists are
studying it as a potential cure for crack addiction and chronic
alcoholism. So you have the holy, the botanical and the medical rolled
up in this one plant -- ayahuasca.

Now these are only studies at this point, and it is important to
emphasize that an interesting lead does not often turn into a cure.
But the Indians of the northwest Amazon claim that this plant is a
sacrament. And not only does this plant help them cure illness, but
under the influence of this plant, they have visions of other plants
which they can use to treat intractable diseases.

We tend to dismiss this type of stuff -- learning while under the
influence of sacred or psychotropic plants or through trances or
dreams. But let me tell you about Friedrich August Kekule von
Stradowitz, one of the greatest European chemists of the 19th century.
He couldn't figure out the structure of the benzene molecule.
Exhausted by his efforts, he went to sleep and dreamed about snakes.
The reptiles were chasing and wrapping themselves around one another
until they formed a ring. Then he woke up with the solution: The
benzene molecule is ring-shaped.

When Western scientists dream the answer to perplexing problems, they
may become famous, well-respected and sometimes offered a knighthood.
But when Amazonian shamans do it, we dismiss it as
"unscientific."

So how do you promote their cause? How do you help them win some
respect?

The Amazon Conservation Team (www.amazonteam.org) is a grass-roots
environmental organization working in partnership with indigenous
peoples to help them protect their land and their culture. In fact,
among these traditional peoples, land and culture are inextricably
linked. These folks have not only a material tie to the rain forest,
but a spiritual one as well.

Our culture has become atomized -- things don't relate. Our medicine
is devoid of spirituality. The genius of these shamans is that they
combine the chemical -- the chemical entities that are in the plants
and animals they use for healing -- with the spiritual side of things,
which includes chanting, dancing, shaking rattles, and so on.

Traditional medicine has been dismissed by Westerners because there
are no rules, no code, no science, supposedly -- just an oral
tradition. And yet if you go to our Western hospitals and medical
schools and nursing schools, you will find that we are now teaching
courses on aromatherapy, massage therapy, visualization therapy. These
are all essentially shamanic healing techniques. Let me tell you, when
you drink ayahuasca, you visualize!

In visualization therapy, you imagine that the body is whole, that the
cure has already begun, that there is no stress. And, hopefully, this
helps put you on the road to recovery. This is what the shamans do as
well as, if not better than, anyone. This is what we hear so much of
these days: harnessing the mind-body connection to accelerate the
healing process.

And how do the shamans use these visions? To diagnose and heal? To
divine the future?

When these guys use plants for divination, they claim that sometimes
they can see the future, that sometimes they can see the past.

Now, as a scientist, when I deal with stuff that I can't understand or
interpret through the prism of Western science, I tend to say, "This
is what they claim. Draw your own conclusions."

But I have to tell you that I've seen some strange
things.

Like what?

I had chronic tendinitis, from weight lifting, in my left elbow. So
when I was a graduate student at Yale, I went to the clinic and they
gave me heat treatments, they gave me aspirin, they gave me steroids,
but there was no long-term beneficial effect.

Then when I took a research post at Harvard, I tried again. But
whatever the doctors did had no effect. Then finally I went to this
Wayana medicine man in the northeast Amazon and explained to him how
I'd been feeling. And he took me to an all-night ceremony, where he
gave me an herbal tea of some sort, and I felt myself floating in the
air, looking down at the floor of the hut. In California, they would
call this an "out-of-body experience."

I haven't felt a twinge in that elbow for 14 years now. So let me ask,
who would you rather be treated by?

Don't get me wrong. Western science can do all sorts of things these
shamans cannot. It's not "all or nothing," on either side. I believe
that the future of medicine is integrative -- bring the best of all
different systems under one roof to make medicine more affordable and
more effective.

What are some herbs, other than ayahuasca, that are used by the
shamans?

Medicine men and women literally use plants from head to toe -- to
treat everything from headache to athlete's foot. Shamans cannot
prevent everything -- I have yet to see the herbal equivalent of polio
vaccine. But they can do some things as well as Western medicine --
and a few things better than Western medicine, like curing certain
fungal infections of the skin. Let me tell you, if you live in the
Amazon forest and can't cure fungal infections of the skin, you are a
fungal infection of the skin!

You've been criticized for not publishing enough technical works about
your findings.

There's an ethical issue here: When you write something down, the
outside world gains access to it. Yes, I've been criticized for not
publishing more technical works over the years. Well, I'm not going to
write down secrets that the shamans have told me -- and that they did
not want to share with the outside world.

I've spent 20 years studying medicinal plants in the tropics. But I'm
not going to publish the details, because it might get scarfed up by a
big pharmaceutical company that might not be willing to share profits
with the local government and tribe. So the next best thing is for the
shamans to write it down in their own language. That's what's
happening. I don't think the folks at Merck will read that.

There's a whole book of Tirio medicinal plants that's been written
down by the shamans. And there's a shaman's apprentice program that's
up and running in the northwest Amazon. We have three shamans working
with seven apprentices to run this clinic, which is right next to the
Western missionary clinic in a village called Kwamala. It's not like
we're trying to replace Western medicine. It's complementary. The
shamans refer patients to the missionary clinic, and the Western
doctors refer patients to the shamans. Recently they've been referring
women with PMS, which they feel the shamans can cure and they cannot.

How can technological advances help preserve this old, oral
tradition?

One of my dreams is to set up a program to train indigenous people to
use computers, and to use video cameras to record all this stuff: the
medicinal practices, the traditional songs, the weaving patterns that
the women do. So not only are they maintaining their traditions in the
process, but they're learning how to operate in the 20th-century
world. Then, if they want to go and sell their secrets to Merck, they
can do it. It's their choice.

A lot of this archiving has to do with data entry. The video camera is
probably most important because we're recording oral traditions. But
what Indians really need is to be plugged into the Internet so that,
when the loggers show up, they can go online and check out all the
international legislation that affects them.

It was interesting to read that many indigenous people have absorbed
Christian practices into their own traditions.

In some Native American societies -- I'm talking way out in the
boonies of tropical America -- you see people cross themselves before
they do a healing. I was in a healers' place in the mountains of
Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, and the shaman had on her altar a picture
of Mary and a picture of Xochipilli, who is the Aztec god of flowers
and hallucinogens.

If you believe in archetypes, you can argue that these are similar
figures in the Indian pantheon. I'm reminded of the Tirio, in the
northeast Amazon. Supposedly, the reason they became so Christianized
so fast is they were monotheistic. They had one God, known as Kan, and
all the other deities and forest spirits were lesser gods. So the
missionaries said to them, "See, you have one true God. And the rest
of these gods are really saints."

Does the Christian missionary influence disturb you?

I guess it is better than the old belief that "my religion is the one
true religion, and if you don't believe it, I'll chop your head off."
The Christmas tree was originally supposed to have been a pagan thing.
But the world didn't end, when it got incorporated into Christmas.

I'm more comfortable with this syncretism -- this combining of
religious elements -- than with an absolutism that says, "Believe
what I believe, or I'll kill you." But as an environmentalist first
and foremost, I'm more interested in seeing people help protect our
planet as part of their spiritual practice, which sometimes makes for
strange bedfellows. A few years ago, during the attack on the
Endangered Species Act under the "Gingrich Revolution," some
fundamentalist Christians showed up on Capitol Hill with placards
saying: "Species -- God Made 'Em, We Protect 'Em!"

That is my kind of fundamentalism.