Giuseppe Caruso in “Onaya Shipibo-Conibo El sistema médico tradicional y los desafíos de la modernidad.” explores interesting possibility about the polarity of still existing Onaya, a term for traditional healer in Shipibo culture, a middle level practictioner of plant based medicine, and Meraya, who is always, in current narrative presented as long extint superior master shaman – magician. A suggestion made is that it is not just “people these days do not have patience to learn” and so graduate in a rational, linear career from lower specialist into some kind of professor, but rather that in the modern paradigm, which can still accommodate an idea of herbal doctor, there is no space for supernatural Meraya, who actually often didn’t dedicate himself so much to treatment of individual maladies but rather, among many others, to control of the weather, wild animals, bending time, traveling physically to watery underworld and last but not least controversial, constant and direct communication, interaction and negotiation with the spirits of animated and non animated world.
Now the interesting part is that responsibility for living in a dead spiritless world which can not accept such a persona of a magician, but will eventually tolerate a village herbalist, a specialist relegated to his small space in compartmentalised modern reality, is equally shared by institutionalised religion, and modern science ( including recently medicalized psychedelic science ), which, despite occasional declarations and wishful thinking especially of the former, are not at all opposed to each other but unified in manufacturing of increasingly materialistic trap. Both create dualistic opposition of matter and spirit, however Western religion was the first to blame.
From the beginning separating matter and spirit, and as a consequence gradually ceding ground to rationality, recognizing spirit as exiled first from examinable reality to some distant location in heaven, when this was also progressively explored by the lay science and sacred was not proven to be present in nature, whether on macro level of cosmic space or micro level of atom and microbe, religion was forced to exile the sacred even further – this time into a story of another epoch. So what was possible to be witnessed in the mythical time of the Bible, now only can be believed, but God forbid not claimed as actual experience, as proves a case of Polish monks in the main national shrine of the Virgin calling on mental health services when a woman goes into mystical rapture in the middle of the church.
Likewise, after centuries of persecution of herbal medicine intuitively perceived as something of competing agency, the priests finally are forced to accept and tolerate the Onaya, as long as he is perceived ( and himself supports that narrative ), as someone serving the plants, in some sense ignorant to the objective action of hidden alcaloids, augmenting it with his placebo operations of traditional nature, such as quasi magical songs. Such ignorance can be forgiven, accepted in the spirit of modern political correctness, cultural diversity, a bit patronising tolerance of still immature indigenous population, not yet ready for our modern division – sacred is for the priest, medical for university trained specialist. What can not be accepted though, and that is why Meraya is exiled from modernity, is a magician – truly spiritual operator, crossing freely from world of matter to world of the spirit, bending the strict boundaries, destroying the dualism, and it is equally an offense and a challenge to the spiritual hegemony of the church – still very much an active force in the reality not just of the Amazon – as well as to those who see themselves as opposed to the religion, but clinging to a different set of double blind and measurable brain activity dogmas. Modern reinterpretation of the shaman, even from times of Eliade, and very much so in the era of psychedelic renessaince claiming monopoly over and wishing to legitimise use of the plants, is always utilitarian. Please, heal our neuroses and depressions, we will even accept you doing so to the tune of weird songs in the darkness of the exotic night, but how will our hurt egos benefit from someone turning into jaguar and turning his back on us as he sets off into the wilderness. Meraya is not fit for the client oriented service industry, trickster is not welcome neither in clinic nor in church.