Synergism between Catholicism and Indigenous Spirituality within the Drug Addiction Rehabilitation Program of Takiwasi,a Therapeutic Community in the Peruvian High-Amazon

Traditional Amazonian Medicine in Takiwasi’s Rehabilitation Process

TAM is a set of orally transmitted practices and knowledge that can be grouped under certain common cosmologies and principles that have maintained their distinctive features over the centuries despite all the series of dramatic changes in which indigenous peoples were involved. TAM is considered the main therapeutic resource by the 48% of the population in the Amazon area according to a 2002 ENAHO survey. ² In some areas, such as in the San Martin region, this percentage can reach up to 80% (Giove, 2012).

TAM is based on a concept of health that exceeds that of a purely corporeal dimension and is dominated by the experience of the relationship with invisible agents (Luna, 1986), belonging to a category of living beings whose identity has been widely translated in the various European languages with the term ‘spirits’. They manifest themselves by constantly crossing the boundaries of natural bodies, though they come into contact with human beings through physical and bodily dimensions. A human’s life is marked by the disposition of these beings towards them. Therefore, in order to know these rules and be able to relate with spirits in a concretely effective manner, over the centuries the Amazonian populations have learned to receive teachings from some species of plants, called teachers, through the ritualized and consecrated ingestion of their natural extracts.

Teacher plants, intake rituals, and the set of concepts connected to them constitute a source of knowledge of vital importance for the indigenous and mestizo Amazonian peoples (Luna, 1986). Many of these plants have a psychotropic effect and induce non-ordinary states of consciousness. These powerful effects can put human health at risk if the relationship with the plants doesn’t take place according to consecrated and ritually correct methods. Among these plants, there is one that takes a position of central importance for over seventy ethnic groups of the Amazon basin, scattered in a vast area that goes from Brazil to the northernmost areas of the Colombian Amazon. This is the vine Banisteriopsis Caapi, popularly known by the Quechua name of Ayahuasca (Mabit, 2018). The ritual use of the psychoactive brew Ayahuasca and many other medicinal plants derived from TAM knowledge plays a fundamental role in Takiwasi’s patient rehabilitation protocol. The other two pillars of the treatment model are the psychotherapeutic accompaniment and living together in accordance with the general model of therapeutic communities.

Worship Spaces for Catholic Celebration and Prayer

The fundamental axes of the therapeutic model adopted by the Takiwasi Center do not explicitly include the Christian faith. In fact, the therapeutic approach is not a confessional one and the Christian proposal is an option offered to patients, though it does not constitute part of the obligatory therapeutic process in which they are involved. Likewise, neither the staff nor the participants in the other therapeutic spaces offered by Takiwasi are selected according to religious criteria. Inside Takiwasi’s facilities there are a series of places for prayer and statues and images of saints that make precise reference and invitation to the Catholic Christian faith. Such a fact expresses the will of the managers of the therapeutic community to create a symbolic dimension religiously oriented in the Christian sense. Takiwasi’s evolution over the years has gone in this direction in part as result of the patients’ will. A clear example in this sense is the chapel. Being the main religious space, the chapel is located just a few meters away from the headquarters building. Here a weekly Sunday mass is celebrated for all those who freely want to take part. Generally, there is a mass celebration also on the same day as the weekly Ayahuasca ceremony, just a few hours before the night intake session. The center has the support of a priest appointed by the bishop of Moyobamba who offers his pastoral assistance to the patients and celebrates mass; in his absence Takiwasi’s staff might try to find a temporary substitute for mass celebrations.

Other particularly significant places of worship are a simple space for prayer in front of the image of the Virgin of La Puerta (also installed after a patients’ vision) and an altar dedicated to St. Martin de Porres, where one can pray before the painted image of the saint and a cross fixed on the wall. As proof of the Christian devotion of the managers and main healers of the community, a statue of St. Padre Pio (donated by a visitor) is located a few meters from the entrance door of their offices, while inside these we find images of the Crucifix and the Virgin. Christian images are also found in the largest and most important ceremonial space of the center, constituted by the maloca ³ where the Ayahuasca ritual takes place. The wall behind the healers in charge of the ceremony displays three paintings to the participants’ view: at the center is the image of the Stabat Mater, i.e. Jesus crucified before Mary and the apostle John; ⁴ on both sides of this central painting there are two more, on the left the Virgin of Guadalupe and on the right the Archangel Michael.

The Concrete Ritual Contexts and Actions: their Fundamental Value

Almost all the descriptions, ideas and beliefs that constitute the contents of the interviews to be presented below come from the informants’ experiences that emerged in ritual contexts, especially in the Ayahuasca ones. At Takiwasi the ritual is the place where the spiritual experiences dwell. Therefore, the fundamental value of ritually shaped experiences within the therapeutic process constitutes a solid starting point for our research and a sort of hidden thematic category that results from our codification of the interviews and the testimonies presented by the literature. The rituals effectively seem to mark lives of those that take part in them. The patients at Takiwasi are guided through a precise ritual pathway from their first days in the community until their last ones. As we have already considered, Catholic rituals at Takiwasi aren’t obligatory. The obligatory rituals can be divided into two broad categories:

Rituals belonging to indigenous-mestizo traditions, among which the most relevant are those of Ayahuasca, Yawar Panga (Aristolochia didyma), ⁵ Purgahuasca ⁶ and the “Dieta”, ⁷ all of them based on the ritual ingestion of teacher plants;

The Testimonies from the Interviews and the Contribution of the Literature on the Topic

Based on the interviews conducted in July 2018, through the open codification ⁸ of the interviewees’ answers, four general thematic categories have been identified along with a series of testimonies considered significant for the topic of this research. To these four categories we should always add the somehow hidden but fundamental category constituted by the ritual context and action, where the experiences reported by the interviewees take place. The data of the interviews were compared and integrated with those of the academic literature.

The Relation between Catholicism and Indigenous Spirituality at Takiwasi

As observed, the testimonies offered by the interviews conducted at Takiwasi seem to confirm the clear coexistence of experiences and beliefs developed from models belonging to the Catholicism and indigenous spirituality, made effective in order to reach the common goal of human health and salvation. We deem that this sort of coexistence could be correctly defined as a synergy.

Faith in God, Jesus Christ, the Virgin, the Saints and the angels, and experiences of the encounter with them, are lived in parallel or combined with the experiences of meeting the spirit of animals, plants, places, teacher plants, giving proof of the power of the curanderos and their ikaros. These experiences and beliefs aren’t by any means alien to the cultural environment that surrounds Takiwasi. The mestizo vegetalismo spread in this region is historically mixed with Christian elements, and in this context a higher power is delivered to the Christian figures compared to the indigenous ones, according to a hierarchy that has been generally accepted. The beliefs of the operators at Takiwasi, who are in part traditional healers and in part therapists of the western school, clearly reflect this acceptation. The therapeutic approach of the Center seems then to mirror fairly well the cultural context, in terms of religious and spiritual beliefs, and the interviews of the informants that work at Takiwasi underline the role played by the therapists in transmitting to the patient the elements of both religious-spiritual traditions.

Based only on the testimonies that emerged from the interviews, we could have the impression of a sort of general syncretism between elements of Catholicism and the indigenous and mestizo traditional spirituality. However, if we look at the ritual context the situation appears different. From this point of view the two cultural categories “Catholic” and “indigenous-mestizo”, that we have schematically focussed on as distinct and in synergy, appear to act in such parallel and cooperative pathways, but with an evident asymmetry that reveals a merging only on the indigenous-mestizo side. In Takiwasi there are in fact specific and exclusive places dedicated to the Catholic rite and prayers, and this is respectful of Catholic doctrine. The integrity of the Catholic character of the chapel is essentially respected. The Catholic mass is an ordinary one and is performed by a priest regularly appointed. Where we find a sort of evident syncretism are TAM rituals, and particularly the most powerful one, the Ayahuasca ritual, performed in a site, the maloca, where we find the visual depictions of Jesus Christ, the Cross, the Virgin, the Archangel Michael, fixed high and in a dominant position on the wall behind the seats of the healers that lead the ceremony. Then, the conditions under which the entities that we have called spirits come to be agents in this ritual are connected to the Catholic-indigenous “cosmology” of the Center on stable physical premises based on concrete iconographies and the use of items during the ceremony. These elements, far from being confusedly merged, confer a solid and at the same time dynamic structure to the ritual experiences.

The Spiritual Fighting and its Mystical Resolution

As a consequence of the Catholic-indigenous symbolic framework shared at Takiwasi, that takes the concrete form of structured ritual settings, the experiences of alternate states of consciousness emerging during Ayahuasca ritual sessions are to some degree patterned beforehand as well as during the ceremonies, in that way helping the human beings to cope with potentially dramatic encounters. We have to remark the wide emphasis reserved by the informants, particularly by Mabit, to the fighting among good and evil spirits, whose outcome is determined by faith in the Christian God. The positive outcome is obtained also through acts of exorcism mediated by figures belonging to Christian religion and the indigenous spirituality. The testimonies collected seem to show that the strong realism and the very intense emotions associated that emerge during Ayahuasca sessions constitute the factors that mark a qualitative, decisive difference compared to any other experience. In that special condition any cognitive content can be engraved in the memory of the person who experiences it for a long time to come. In this way, the figures that reveal themselves during the rituals have to be almost inevitably remembered and can play a fundamental role to orient the ongoing therapeutic process.

Considering the potential effectiveness of these dramatic dynamics, the central value of the spiritual world in Takiwasi’s conception of health, illness, and indeed patient care is evident. This spiritual world is populated by spirits and many of them reveal themselves as very dangerous to humans. Modern European thought has been fashioned by an idea of spirituality that denies the existence of spirits, including the evil ones. We share the thought of O’Shaughnessy (2017) when he affirms that while Takiwasi’s system places a strong emphasis on controlling the negative aspects of the spiritual world, the therapeutic goal is actually to support and foster a healthy relationship with the positive aspects of existence. He calls this perspective a dualistic one, but we consider that this definition fails to express the complex reality of the spiritual fighting, that needs to be further investigated.

“Spirits” are figures that have been gradually disappearing from the European (and therefore “Western”) scene starting from the critical and violent centuries of witch hunting (1500) and obsession with Satan (1600), for causes that have never been well understood. In an oversimplified categorization, we can now distinguish in Europe three very broad categories of attitudes towards the world, that can be defined as atheistic, theistic and a third, called “spiritualistic” or “New Age”, that despite its name gives little or no space to those beings recognized as dangerous spirits. In Amazonia, on the contrary, reality is still populated by spirits. The Christian faith we find at Takiwasi seems coherent with a Christian faith of the past, which is now considered “archaic” in the European world.

In the context of this dramatic and potentially dangerous fighting with evil spirits, the mystical experiences lived during Ayahuasca ritual sessions can be resolutory. These experiences could be deeply healing because they instill in the person the assurance that God and the spiritual world exist, that they are real, although they reveal themselves beyond the possibility of ordinary thought. In this way the “mystical” category is taken out of the usually narrow space where it is enclosed and confined, as if it were an exception, something reserved for extraordinary people and beyond the reach of the average human being. In the work with teacher plants, anyone willing to surrender and open up to God can experience that extraordinary dimension. As already observed, according to our informants the mystical experience can constitute a foundation for the future life of patients and the development of a true spirituality lived deeply in their own flesh.

About Ontology: Materialism and Spiritualism Facing Christian/Amazonian Thought

The synergy between Catholicism and Amazonian traditional spirituality poses many stimulating and problematic issues. We are dealing with the realm of experience labeled as “spirituality”, a word that means many different things, especially in a place like Takiwasi, where the so-called spiritual experience is very physical, corporeal in a strict sense: “material” and “spiritual” at the same time. According to O’Shaughnessy (2017) Takiwasi requires legitimate scientific studies in order to demonstrate the efficacy of its treatment. However, these same studies will often tend to intellectually purge or understate those elements that are not measurable. Nonetheless, in Takiwasi, paying attention to these elements remains an obligatory concern with regard to therapy and patient safety.

A very stimulating idea of O’Shaughnessy (2017), that we share, is that the issues of the relation between spirituality and healing in Takiwasi, and we add that of synergy, are not a matter of utility, but rather ontology. We agree with him in considering that while it remains unproblematic to write about the utilitarian function of spirituality in a psychosocial sense, the same cannot be said of any handling that considers the spiritual world itself to be an objective and discoverable external reality. He retains that an ontological perspective, more than a pragmatic one, predominates in Takiwasi when considering the spiritual and religious dimension.

We deem it very interesting that in the last decades a new trend has been rising within anthropological thought that defines itself as an “ontological turn” (Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017), and is born precisely from Amazonian ethnography. ¹¹ In relation with this anthropological trend we can suggest that the work carried out in Takiwasi crosses the boundary between two different cosmological and anthropological conceptions that we can broadly define as “materialism” and ”spiritualism” and constitute what we can define as the historical “big partition” that has been characterizing the last four post-cartesian centuries of dominant Western culture (Descola, 2013). In Takiwasi, Catholicism and indigenous tradition seem to be in alliance with a very concrete and carnal spirituality in order to “spiritualize” the physical world and make the “big partition” more permeable.

This alliance is not so obvious and can be considered almost surprising by several authors. For example, Descola (2013) affirms the existence of a strict connection between the emerging dominance of “naturalism” ¹² in a materialistic sense, with the disappearance of animistic cosmologies from western cultures, and the diffusion of Christian thought, specifically of the Christian faith in the Creation as a divine act. Vilaça (2015) has recently refuted this assumption, reporting a more complex relation between the animistic and the Christian thought that was revealed during her ethnological fieldwork among the Wari people of the Brazilian Amazonia in contact with the Evangelic missionaries of the New Tribe Missions. In Takiwasi, a different and interesting picture on this issue emerges, which requires further investigations.

In connection to this subject, it is also interesting to observe how O’Shaughnessy (2017) proceeds to distinguish between the lifeworld and the system, using Habermas model (Habermas, 1987), in order to describe the process that operates effectively for the rehabilitation of drug addicts in the Takiwasi Center. In his model, Habermas made a sharp distinction between instrumental actions, which are non-communicative and non-social, concerned primarily with means and ends, intended to causally influence another for some utilitarian purpose proper to what he called the “system”, and communicative action that does not aim at the fostering of purposive goals, but rather takes an “intersubjective” stance that is oriented towards a process of mutual understanding, to acknowledge a subjectivity to the “other”. We do not get fixed precisely on the Habermas model, but we think that the German sociologist, and after him O’Shaughnessy, have singled out, possibly still in an incomplete form, an essential difference that can lead us toward a deeper understanding of the distinction between material and spiritual worlds.