Castro Valley Women's Health

Shamans of Peru - Ceremonial Chants, Icaros, and Music

This unique collection of recordings documents a collection of ceremonial chants and Ayahuasca icaros CD.

Tracks 1-3 San Pedro ceremony held in Puruchucu, head of the valley of Rimac. The ruins of this sacred site of Huaca or the date of the pre-Inca and have been faithfully reconstructed. Preparing the ground for the ceremony, three musicians play with replicas of pre-Hispanic instruments. Alonso del Rio wrote: "while retaining their original setting, we explored the possibilities of musical instruments to give an idea of what music might look like pre-Columbian times. The melodies came to us through the ancestral memory evoked through medicinal plants like San Pedro and Ayahuasca. Instruments: flutes ceramic notch Chincha civilization, Nazca panpipes or Antar with their special settings like oriental scales, and Nazca drums.

The Mesa Nortena is a ceremonial tradition best conserved in the region of Las Huaringa, high and remote sacred lakes in the northern department of Piura.
There are probably only a few good teachers who continue this ancient tradition in Peru today. The rest simply work with the externalities of the mesa, while giving their clients minimal doses of the visionary cactus San Pedro. Originally more importance was given to medicine, to be participants in the organization and the maestro of the power flow. The Mesa was then used to intensify the power plant.

An altered state is required to enter the symbolic world of objects on the mesa (the word refers to the altar and the ceremony itself). The abundance of macerated plants, perfumes and odors employed in the Mesa to move the feelings associated with memories. At depth, the feelings are translated into vibrations which the medicine brings to consciousness so that associated hurt and pain can be "re-membered 'again and a new attitude can emerge.

The singado, or absorption of macerated tobacco juice through the nostrils involves another power medicine which is used to intensify the San Pedro at regular intervals. The direction of the maestro to pour up the left or right nostril reflects the notion of duality in shamanic disciplines all over the world: the world male and female, hot and cold, upper and earth, expansion and contraction, flowing and stagnant. The disease results from one of these polarities lose balance. Singado The word comes from the Quechua word singa meaning nose and is perhaps an Andean notion of Pranayama!

Also audible in the following two mesas of 4 or 5 are the clicking of Chonta, or black bamboo sticks used for cleaning and the auras of people spraying the maestro and assistants' mouths, of perfumes and macerated plant over the participants.

The trend towards commercialization of a tradition is inherent in urbanization and see things for their utility and business. For example mesas are sometimes held so that lawyers win legal battles. Piles of documents are placed on the mesa so that the power works on them and they win their case. In this way a shamanic ceremony is degraded to folklore. We can try to reconstruct the original tradition the way it was in pre-Columbian times and remove the images of Sarita Colonia and the other saints, crucifixes, photos etc., that have accumulated over the centuries and evolved the mesa into the mestizo tradition which survives today. Left behind are the ancient stones, magic plant brews and enchanted waters of Lake Las Huaringa, being the original elements, which have survived underneath.

Track 4 Mesa with Alejandro Sanchez. Maestro Sanchez lives Comas, a distant suburb of Lima b.