Mariri Magazine - Mayantuyacu ~ Spirits of the Mountain and River

Mayantuyacu, (“Spirit of Mountain and Water” in Quechua), the center of medicinal plants founded by Juan Flores Salazar, is located in the Amazon rainforest of the Ucayali region of Peru, five hours outside of the frontier town of Pucallpa. In a region inhabited primarily by the indigenous tribes of the Shipibo-Conibo, there is also a presence of the people of the Asháninca

tribe, from whom the healer – curandero in Spanish – Juan Flores came.

Juan Flores Salazar, mayantuyacu, pucallpa, peru, curandero, rainforest shaman

Juan Flores with shacapa. Photo by Robert Tindall

To describe Mayantuyacu, without depicting the unique individual from which the little village sprang, would leave out its essence, for Juan Flores is recognized as an intellect of rare caliber, capable of establishing a center of medicinal plants with an international vision. A rare find in a world of competing sorcerers and chasers after the ayahuasca tourist buck. Yet the profundity of Flores’ indigenous mind emerges through distinctly non-Western channels, for in character he is a humble native of the rainforest, a man of few words, deeply concerned with environmental and cultural conservation. To truly hear Juan Flores is to step off a thousand years of the conveyer-belt intellectual development of the West and reencounter the origin of planet medicine.

My wife Susana Bustos and I sought out Flores in the course of her study of the healing potential of icaros – the medicinal songs that call the spirits of the plants – and arrived to a heart-felt welcome at his sanctuary filled with medicinal trees and an alchemical river boiling from geothermal activity.

The first evening we participated in an ayahuasca ceremony, the stoic front of the Master fell away to reveal a bard. In the darkness of the great maloca painted with Shipibo designs that occupies the center of Mayantuyacu, Juan sang icaros in whose tones, as in the finest crafted cathedral organs, emerged an entire living cosmology. Old mysterious icaros of the peoples of the rainforest, the mariri of plants, spirit boats riding the whirlpools of the sea, mermaids and boas and great trees, deep resonances of generations of immersion in the healing powers of nature, filled with praise. Within his icaros, I realized, lay landscapes, maybe pure lands, present in what Debussy called the true essence of music: the silence between the notes.

Here lies the expression of the genius of the native intellect: To summon the vital forces of nature as gift rather than control and manipulate it as property.

I cannot help but relate an anecdote from our early days settling in with the community at Mayantuyacu.

The Cocina para Medicinas, the medicine kitchen, was located down the hill from the main maloca, over a bridge crossing a boiling little stream at a spot where the river forked and flowed off in directions only the low flying carrion eaters could follow.

It was a typical indigenous structure: packed-earth floor, posts of tree trunks still swathed in their bark, roof of woven palm frond. Squarish boulders were set, clean and smooth as molars, into the earth around the fire pit, where huge logs were fed into the flames that licked the hot, vapor-laden air throughout the day. Gigantic pots and ladles were set upon shelves on the far end of the structure.

juan flores salazar, maloca, mayantuyacu, pucallpa, peru, curandero, rainforest shaman, shipibo

The Malocas at Mayantuyacu. Photo by Robert Tindell

It was a good place to hang out. After our arrival, Flores had immediately set to work on our education in ethnobotany and we were now preparing the indigenous medicines we had come to study, as well as entering the rainforest to harvest plants with names like Came Renaco, Shihuahuaco, Tamamuri. Sitting with Brunswick, Juan Flores’ apprentice, we clumsily wielded machetes to scrape bark or split vine, smoked mapachos (cigarettes rolled of the organic, black tobacco of South America, used extensively in healing), and got to know one another.

That morning Juan had been circling us with an ax in his hand for some time, and finally he came in and sat with us. He wore a green cap molded over his Asháninca features, reminding me of Yoda. Especially the way his facial muscles fanned out laterally across his face whenever he smiled.

“So you’re learning how to prepare the plants,” he said approvingly, leaning his ax against a log. “Very good. It’s important to know the plants, how to harvest them and prepare them.”

Sitting on one of the stumps that served as benches, he took out a mapacho, lit it, and blew little puffs of smoke on both sides of his body before settling back to talk. He made polite queries about how we were accustoming ourselves to Mayantuyacu and life in the rainforest. After awhile we began talking about the doctors of the plants we were preparing, how they transmit their knowledge through icaros, and about the mariri, the essence of the plant the curandero accumulates in his chest.

ayahuasca, icaro, juan flores salazar, mayantuyacu, pucallpa, peru, curandero, rainforest shaman

Preparing ayahuasca. Photo by Susana Bustos

Describing ayahuasca as the university of the Amazon rainbasin, Juan told us that through the archives preserved in the cells of the plant one can major, for example, in art. How he had seen playing before him in vast panoramas the art of the ancient Egyptians, of the Incans, Chinese, and Mayans. How within the plants there were no limits to the living worlds that could be read once one learned how to direct the mind.

It reminded me of a certain modern theory in physics, which to account for the non-spatial and non-temporal features of quantum reality, postulates the universe as a hologram, in which each part contains a faithful image of the whole. Each cell, each molecule, each electron, “enfolding” the entire cosmos within it, contains “archives” of all events, past present and future. And since the brain is also an integral part of that hologram, theoretically there is no obstacle preventing us from “reading” those archives once we get over our habit of lurking exclusively within the province of our gray matter.

Then Flores pulled the rug out beneath us.


“You two are very educated people,” he said. “I would like to ask you a question.”


“Go ahead, Master,” I said, expecting an obtuse query about Western science or philosophy.


“God is the creator of the universe, yes? And it’s said that everything we see and experience has its source in him. Bueno, is there something that God doesn’t know?”


Silence.

Flores wore a poker face. Was he asking this question with the humility he was displaying? Or was he setting a trap for our “educated” minds to fall into?

Sitting listening to Susana’s description of how Vedanta philosophy would answer that question, he displayed no indication that he took his question in any way but seriously.

“Is there something that God doesn’t know?” I asked myself. The question smacked of heresy, something out of the old beliefs of the Gnostics.

But Flores didn’t seem out to undermine Yahweh, at least not deliberately. His question was far deeper than the metaphysical, I decided, and felt that existential vertigo one gets in confronting koan of the Zen masters of old, questions such as, “What is the sound of a single hand?” or “Say something without moving your lips and tongue.” Direct pointing to the nature of mind, the old texts say, cutting off the mind road.

“Master,” I said, “there is an ancient question in the Buddhist tradition. When the entire universe is consumed by fire at the end of the world age, is Buddha nature consumed as well? Your question strikes me as similar.”

Juan Flores nodded. Then he said, “Since I don’t know anything that is outside of myself, how can God know what is outside of himself?” Watching him rise and take his ax in his hand, it occurred to me we had just received a sly lesson beyond classroom ethnobotany – this one in the style of the Asháninca, who transmit their knowledge orally, through encounters, independent of the written word. Time at Mayantuyacu teaches that to comprehend a representative of indigenous tradition like Juan Flores – just like the rainforest – one must enter into the silence that lies between words. This immersion in nature is facilitated by the practice of dieting, which Flores directs both his patients and disciples in.

In dieting, the rich pharmacopoeia of the jungle is utilized for spiritual and psychological development, as well as to heal diseases such as arthritis, cancer, and hepatitis. Diets often involve strict alimentary restrictions, such as foregoing intake of salt, stimulants, alcohol, spices and meat, along with intake of preparations of medicinal plants discovered through the empirical methods of the natives of the rainforest. Key to the process of dieting, which may last as long as a month and be conducted in deep isolation in the jungle, is the guidance of the shaman.

Evolution in the jungle is a witches’ brew at roiling boil, which a curandero such as Juan Flores, with his forty years of experience, is able to orchestrate. In the course of our work, we documented healings of diseases such as brain tumors and hepatitis by the Master, healing outcomes which he is able to consistently achieve.

rainforest distruction, juan flores salazar, mayantuyacu, pucallpa, peru, rainforest conservation

The enemy of the rainforest.

Mayantuyacu is presently under siege, its silence broken by the fall of the great medicinal trees lying on its borders, deep gouges left in the jungle floor by the extraction machinery of tractors and cables.

Indigenous people survive waves of foreign aggression to their worlds through adaptation. They go mestizo, hold on to tradition while working fluidly with circumstances, wait for the destructive wave to pass. Juan Flores holds on, but in a recent visit as I walked through the dramatically altered environment surrounding Mayantuyacu, I could not help thinking the words, “This is a sacrilege.”

What had seemed impregnable forest had revealed its deep vulnerability. The spirits of the land cried out in ceremonies of ayahuasca: Steward us! Protect us!

Spurred into action, supporters of Mayantuyacu are now evolving a plan to purchase land around the center to reforest and protect the locale. The loss of the ecological wealth of the region, so closely knit with the healing work of Flores, is an avoidable folly.

As the painter Pablo Amaringo, another inhabitant of Pucallpa, told us, “When men destroy a tree they destroy an entire library.”

For information on journeys to Mayantuyacu and how to protect and nourish its future, please contact the author at: tigrillo ( at) gmail.com.

Robert Tindall
		About the author:
		Writer Robert Tindall is a writer and inveterate traveler, whose publications include journeys into Zapatista-held Mexico, along the Camino to Santiago, and through the Santo Daime and Barquinha churches of Acre, Brazil. Influenced by the medieval genre of the quest, as well as his years of practice of Zen Buddhism at Ring of Bone Zendo, Robert views travel as a spiritual discipline, and writes with the intention of reintroducing sacred exploration back into travel writing. He is presently completing his first book, tentatively entitled “The Jaguar that Roams the Mind, a Pilgrimage into the Medicines of the Amazon.”
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