Decoding Orinoco Shamans

By Federico Cook

This book is a tribute to the shamans of the Orinoco, those men who learned to bow to nature by using the multiple facets of the human mind. It is also the expression of a blood debt of more than five hundred years, for where many saw only charlatanism and deception, there was an elaborate tradition of wisdom, far ahead of its time, which vanished forever as a result of the violence that followed the discovery of America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jan 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9781035832668

Federico Cook

Federico Cook has dedicated much of his life to understanding the profound wisdom implicit in the practices of jungle shamans. In Decoding Orinoco Shamans, he reveals the objective basis of their extrasensory experiences, which are closely linked to their ability to superimpose the instinctive and reactive waves of their archaic brains on the waves emitted by other living beings.

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Prologue

Today, virtual reality and the widespread use of stimulants seem to lead us away from our true potential in favour of ready-made happiness, available on every street corner as another commodity of the consumer market. This troubling reality stands in sharp contrast to the profound harmony that the shamans of the South American jungle have achieved with themselves and their environment through the management of mental faculties that are often underestimated in other cultures. Their quiet, practical wisdom is a stark reminder that we all possess ancient cognitive tools whose primary function is to help us achieve the goals we set for ourselves.

Although it may seem strange to look for inspiration in the mental processes of people who roam naked in the tropical forests of South America, their customs reveal that they have achieved in practice what other societies have been able to imagine only through the utopias of their thinkers. Their excellent health, for example, is the result of more than 12,000 years of prophylactic hygiene based on long walks in a privileged environment with abundant oxygen, and a frugal diet rich in trace elements, low in protein and virtually free of saturated fats. In addition, the remarkable effectiveness of their herbal remedies and the excellence of their hunting, fishing, and agricultural techniques have freed them from the fear of the morrow.

Since these Indians have created the ideal conditions for enjoying a peaceful and healthy life in a unique environment of pristine beauty, it is not surprising that recent studies conducted in Venezuela on the Yanomami Indians of the rainforest show that their blood pressure remains at optimal levels from infancy to death.

In retrospect, it is clear that the South American jungle shamans were well aware of the importance of reconciling the needs of humans with those of nature, for their survival strategies contributed as much to the physical health of their people as to the sustainable use of their environment. Moreover, since there was never a centralised governing body with the power to make and enforce binding laws, their decisions would not have been unanimously accepted by their many tribes unless they brought concrete and substantial benefits to all concerned. Thus, the few historical rules that eventually found their way into everyday life in the forest were adopted solely on the basis of their wisdom. This explains the uniformity and respect with which they were scrupulously followed by all its inhabitants.

In Du Contrat Social, the eighteenth-century Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote that the degree of a nation’s social development is inversely proportional to the number of its laws. Accordingly, the few rules that historically governed and still govern daily life in the South American jungle are a testament to the high social standards of its original inhabitants.

Nevertheless, because of some supposed cultural gaps, it is generally accepted that these Indians never went beyond the evolutionary state of Stone Age man. However, since this opinion is necessarily speculative in nature, it may prove more objective to evaluate their mental capacity on such grounds as their contributions to the welfare of humanity as a whole.

This is where a serious stumbling block arises, for the sheer magnitude of the task places it far beyond the scope of any epistemological marker. The truth is that in order to adequately honour the Indians of the rainforest, it would be necessary to recognise the benefits that have been derived over the centuries from such epochal achievements as the discovery and hybridisation of the bitter manioc (Manihot esculenta), which has since provided carbohydrates to hundreds of millions of people worldwide, or the neutralisation of its cyanogenic glycosides, which has made it possible to produce energy-rich food in the poorest soils on the planet, or the wide range of herbal medicines that form the basis of more than 50% of all our modern pharmaceutical products. Thus, even those who question their intelligence are likely to reach out every day, wittingly or unwittingly, for something created by their wisdom.

Moreover, the notion that some human groups have higher levels of intelligence than others runs counter to current scientific trends, as the very concept of race is being questioned due to the lack of well-defined genetic differences.

From these considerations, it necessarily follows that the cultural contrasts found among the peoples of the earth do not reflect intellectual superiority or inferiority, but rather their particular path to self-realisation under the specific conditions of their environment. Given that the sustainable use of the jungle and the optimal enjoyment of its natural resources were the primary goals of the rainforest shamans, and that they successfully achieved what they set out to do, any attempt to disqualify their results on the grounds of some mental deficiency would be as inconsistent as claiming, for example, that the works of abstract painters are little more than an expression of their inability to depict reality.

Not surprisingly, the survival strategies these men eventually developed through instinct, emotion, intuition, and rationality reveal how deeply they were conditioned by the immutability of their living environment in both time and space. As might be expected, the social patterns that followed in the wake of this approach differ markedly from the continuous and strictly rational forward movement called progress that has emerged in other cultures, where competitiveness is constantly fed back through an overt cult of the smartest, the fastest, and the strongest.

Inferring Causes

The eminently practical nature of the measures taken by the wise men of the jungle makes it possible to perceive the root causes of their decisions. Thus. it does not take long to discover that behind the traditional distribution of tasks among the members of the tribe lies the optimisation of the relationship between effort and output through specialisation. Over time, this dynamic led to the assignment of the functions of healer and spiritual advisor to the shaman, the most sensitive member of the community, and those of cacique or chief to whoever stood out among his peers as a born leader. The exploitation of the forest and the tending of the crops were left to the hunter-gatherers and the women of the tribe, respectively, for reasons that will be discussed in later chapters.

The strict sectorisation of tribal activities necessarily separated rainforest communities from applied sciences such as engineering or architecture, since it created an abyss between the world of ideas, administered by the shamans, and the world of facts, ruled by caciques. Thus, it was their vision of the cosmos that kept these men and women from engaging in theoretical constructs, not a lack of mental capacity. In their pursuit of the common good, they all had to do their fair share by unconditionally accepting and fulfilling the task given to them, to the best of their ability and without interfering in other matters.

The shamans were no exception. They too adhered to their duties and rose to the occasion by creating a domain of their exclusive competence in which they acted as physicians, psychologists, and philosophers all in one. Although this monopolisation of knowledge could easily have led to the stagnation and even impoverishment of their wisdom, it seems to have had quite the opposite effect.

Because of their large numbers and frequent encounters, the sages of the forest created an autonomous supra-tribal body of knowledge that articulated information, homogenised knowledge, and channelled individual efforts towards common goals. In some ways, this web of a thousand faces behaved like an army of jungle ants on the move, individually and anonymously targeting common interests and using feedback to identify new goals. Each shaman came to rely heavily on this ethereal structure, contributing to its functionality with his own experience and receiving far more information in return than he would have gathered on his own in a lifetime.

It is reasonable to assume that the power of this community of knowledge, stretching across the entire jungle, would have made all its members sensitive to the fragility of the ecosystem and the damage that humans, left to their own devices, would ultimately cause. Perhaps, this is why these shamans, unlike most historical leaders, did not seek to perpetuate themselves through artifacts or monuments, but instead instructed their people to leave no lasting traces of their passage through the jungle. This, at least, can be inferred from the fact that none of the countless tribes that shared its space at any given time during the pre-Columbian era disfigured it in any significant way or substantially altered its primary character.

This feat of ecological awareness ante litteram is not the result of accidental circumstances, but rather the consequence of land ownership, a social novelty deliberately introduced by the shamans to bring about profound and irreversible changes. There can be little doubt that once the jungle dwellers realised that they were the undisputed owners and users of the territory in which they lived and that the old practices of territorial conquest by brutal force were gone forever, they quickly became zealous protectors of what was now theirs and theirs alone. Thus, the rigorous conservationism of the rainforest Indians can be traced back to the shamans’ skilful exploitation of a basic human trait: the territorial instinct.

It is no secret that the environmentalism of the original inhabitants of the South American jungle is by far superior to that observed in other latitudes. There is no other way to describe this than as a puzzling paradox, since the practices of the forest Indians were based solely on the intuitions of their wise men, while those of supposedly more advanced societies were programmed from the top down by their intellectual elite and, accordingly, coupled at all times with their latest technical and scientific developments. These circumstances, together with the silence that until recently surrounded the disastrous effects of poorly planned exploitation of natural resources, highlight a longstanding disregard for the environment in most parts of the globe, including the so-called First World.

This lack of sensitivity to nature is reminiscent of the theories of Niccolo Machiavelli, that emblematic figure of Italian humanism who, following the trends of his time, replaced medieval theocentrism with anthropocentrism. He soon realised that there was nothing in pure logic that prevented the self from satisfying its desires, and accordingly concluded that a rational mind could legitimately use all available means to achieve its ends, including cunningness and deception. There may therefore be a touch of unconscious Machiavellianism in the undertakings of those who, for personal lucrative reasons, continue to openly promote the destruction of the environment even as humanity teeters on the brink of an ecological catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions.

In light of the above, it might be in our interest to turn our attention to the wisdom of men who, thousands of years ago, sensed that the survival of our species depended on our ability to protect life in all its forms. The sobriety of this approach contrasts with the frivolous optimism of those who claim that our future is assured by space exploration. However, they fail to explain how the hypothetical departure of a handful of astronauts to a distant planet could mitigate the tragic fate of billions of people left behind on