Conclusion
So far as I have been able to determine, tobacco is the only psychotropic substance available to the three kinds of Warao shamans. The Curucay resin employed by the wishiratu, and to some extent also the bahanarotu, appears to lack any hallucinogenic properties. All three supernatural practitioners-wishiratu, bahanarotu, and hoarotu-employ tobacco extensively to put themselves in ecstatic trances. They achieve this trance state exclusively by smoking, rather than through infusions of liquid tobacco, as do novice shamans of some other Indian groups.
At the same time, as in many aboriginal societies in North and South America, tobacco smoke figures prominently in sorcery and, conversely, in curing: tobacco smoke is clearly as essential to the healing process among the Warao as it is elsewhere in Indian America-even where some other true hallucinogen is central to belief and ritual. Among California Indians we find tobacco side by side with Datura. In lowland South America novice shamans undergo their initiatory training with powerful infusions of liquid tobacco before they are introduced to Banisteriopsis Caapi. In eastern Bolivia shamans of the Tacana employ ayahuasca (B. Caapi) to place themselves in trances but also utilize tobacco as a magical deterrent against malevolent spirits. In northern Peru liquefied tobacco constitutes an essential ingredient in contemporary folk healing with the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus.• Even in a society so totally committed to a single psychotropic plant as are the Huichol to peyote, we find tobacco playing a crucial role, not only in shamanic curing but in the peyote rituals themselves.* Indeed, juat as the tobacco gourd is an identifying characteristic of Aztec priests in the codices, so it is the insignia par excellence of the Huichol peyote seeker to this day and, as Lumholtz noted more than seventy years ago, is treated with great reverence throughout the pilgrimage.
Tobacco belongs to Our Grandfather, the Fire Shaman, who led the first peyote hunt of the supernaturals and cured them of their ailments with its help. Preuss (1908:S77) describes an important ritual, performed by the Huichol shaman at intervals of about ten years, which reenacts the curing with tobacco smoke of the whole group of leading supernaturals. The ritual takes place in early summer at the beginning of, or shortly before, the rainy season. The illness of the gods consists of the fact that they are not giving sufficient rain, and the long nocturnal song cycle recited by the mara'akáme, the shaman-priest, describes the healing process. This is not very different from ordinary shamanic curing among the Huichol-or, for that matter, the Warao and other groups. Tatewarí, the Fire Shaman and principal supernatural, lets the smoke from his tobacco pipe flow over each ailing god in turn, while his spirit helper, the Sacred Deer Kauyumarie, sucks out the intrusive disease object, or "arrow of sickness." In the same way shaman and tutelary deer spirit cooperate in the curing of human patients.
While tobacco thus shares curative powers with the hallucinogenic peyote among the Huichols, there is nothing in Warao tradition to indicate that any other psychoactive plants were ever used in the past, either before or since the advent of tobacco. Naturally such negative evidence cannot be taken as definitive. In any event, the ritual use of tobacco itself is of respectable antiquity in the Americas as a whole: in Mexico, for example, the earliest clay tobacco pipes date to Olmec times, ca. 1200-900 B.c.,• and it is probably safe to assume that consumption of tobacco without the aid of imperishable instruments goes back a good deal further.
Whether or not one accepts tobacco as one of the ritual hallucinogens -and thus far neither botanists nor pharmacologists would classify it as such-it is clear that the role of tobacco as a vehicle of the vision quest in Warao shamanism does not differ qualitatively from the role which the various psychotomimetics of plant origin play in other Indian societies. Also, as with other psychotropic preparations used ritually, cultural traditions clearly influence the kinds of vision experienced by the shaman in the Warao tobacco trance. It would be too much to speak of "programming," but there is obviously cultural conditioning toward specific ecstatic experiences that have nothing to do with the chemical action of the tobacco plant itself. Through long instruction by his master, and as a child of his culture, the novice learns the precise nature of a Warao's "non-ordinary reality." Indeed, if the promised cosmic landscape failed to appear for him in his trance state, the failure would be his, and he might well die. Thus there exist powerful cultural stimuli which interact with the chemistry of the tobacco plant to produce the kinds of vision required for the shaman's vital role in his society.
This brings me to another important point, namely, the nature of the initiatory ordeals of the novice Warao shaman, and the nature of Warao shamanism as such. It will have been immediately apparent to anyone familiar with the literature on shamanism that the Warao experience contains much that is near-universal, or at the very least circum-Pacific. Fasting, purification, skeletonization, symbolic death and resurrection after a trance, dismemberment, gashing, shamanic trees, celestial ascent by rainbows etc, replacement of internal organs and introduction of magical power into the shaman's body in the form of pebbles, rock crystals, and so forth, killing of the neophyte by initiatory demons, travel on flying animals, sexual abstinence, magical arrows of sickness, sucking, blowing, tutelary spirits, cannibalistic tests, animated "pains" as sources of power and causes of illness, almost all can be found in shamanistic initiation and the quest for shamanic power in a wide variety of native societies, from Australian aborigines through Indonesia, Japan, China, Siberia, across to the American Arctic, and southward through North America and Mexico into South America (Eliade, 1964). .
I would like to single out the initiatory celestial quest for shamanic power of Warao neophyte shamans as a case in point. That it should closely resemble the quests of other tribes in South America and even North America is perhaps not so surprising as is its remarkable correspondence to the neophyte's quest for supernatural power among Australian aborigines-not only in general content but specific detail:
Among the Wiradjuri the initiatory master introduces rock crystals into the apprentice's body and makes him drink water in which such crystals have been placed; after this the apprentice succeeds in seeing the spirits. The master then leads him to a grave, and the dead in turn give him magical stones. The candidate also encounters a snake, whkh becomes his totem and guides him into the bowels of the earth, where there are many other anakes; they infuse magical powers into him by rubbing themselves againat him. After this symbolic descent to the underworld the master prepares to lead him to the camp of Baiame, the Supreme Being. To reach it, they climb a cord until they meet Wombu, Baiame's bird. "We went through the clouds," an apprentice related, "and on the other side was the sky. We went through the place where the Doctors go through, and it kept opening and shutting very quickly." Anyone whom the doors touched lost his magical power and was certain to die as soon as he had returned to earth (Eliade, 1964: 135-36).
Compare this Australian account with the initiatory journey of the Warao wishiratu; the candidate, we recall, has to 'pass through a hole in a tree with rapidly opening and closing doors. Inside is a great serpent with colored horns and a fiery-red luminous ball on the tip of her tongue; her servant is another snake whose task it is to clear away the bones of neophyte shamans who failed to clear the clashing doors.*
As Eliade (1964) demonstrates in his classic work on shamanism, the motif of the rapidly opening and closing passage (e.g., floating islands, cliffs, icebergs, mountains, knives, snapping jaws, spears, razor-edged dancing reeds, grinding millstones, etc.) is one of the characteristic themes in shamanism, found in many parts of the world in both funerary and initiatory mythologies. Along with its associated motif of the narrow and perilous bridge connecting this world to the celestial regions or the underworld, it survives well beyond the limits of the shamanistic ideology in which it had its remote origin, but most characteristically in contemporary indigenous societies which retain strong vestiges of an ancient shamanism. In a recent study of Huichol conceptions of the soul, for example, Furst (1967) identified the motif of the dangerous passage in no less than four different forms (clashing rocks, stone trap, snapping jaws, and fiery solar curtain) along the path of the soul and its shamanic guardian from this to the Otherworld. The gateway of clashing clouds that ban the entrance to the sacred peyote country is yet another version of the same theme. This multiplicity of what Eliade has aptly called the "paradoxical passage" is characteristic also of the Warao account of the neophyte wishiratu's ecstatic initiatory journey: the snapping jaws of jaguars, alligators, and sharks in the abyss across which he swings himself on a celestial vine; the slippery path lined on both sides with demons who jab their spears at him; the snapping beak, grasping claws, and flapping wings of the giant hawk; and, finally, the opening and closing doorway to the giant tree , trunk. Universally, the promised land lies beyond the dangerous passage, and its attainment requires that the traveler be "light" and that he have transcended the human condition-i.e., become shaman or spirit.
It will have become apparent that the various forms of shamanism practiced today by the Warao with the aid of tobacco occupy a central position in tribal culture. They seem to me to constitute true survivals of a more ancient shamanistic stratum with roots in Mesolithic and even Paleolithic Asia, introduced into the Americas 15,000 to 20,000 or even more years ago. Although attenuated and certainly overlaid with more recent feature, including some characteristic of more advanced social systems in Mesoamerica and western South America, they seem to belong to what some anthropologists, including La Barre, Furst, M. D. Coe, and myself, have come to see as an archaic shamanistic substratum underlying and to some extent uniting all or most aboriginal American Indian cultures.
I am convinced that a true Warao community cannot exist without this very powerful shamanistic ideology. Its loss, I feel, would seriously disturb the social and psychic equilibrium of the local community, and eventually that of the entire indigenous society. Rooted in an ancient Paleo-Indian past, and beyond that in the total human experience, with its focus on tobacco as the vehicle of ecstasy, it represents a very special elaboration of Warao culture. Its undermining through Creole and Mission contact would probably dislocate this axis mundi of the Warao seriously enough to put an end to one of the earliest and most successful aboriginal social and cultural systems in South America.