Ed Barnhart: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, interesting. They call spirits down. There’s this whole spirit world. There’s the ancestors and the people that drink San Pedro cactus juice, they don’t talk about the fanged deity anymore. I think Christianity in 500 years has somewhat put him in the back. It was unpopular to have a pagan deity. So they don’t talk about him much anymore though he’s still around. They’re around Trujillo. They call him Iopec. But music, in the Amazon, they play flute. Sometimes a chorus of women sing and that’s supposed to bring the spirits down into the ceremony. There’s a spirit that’s hurting the person that’s sick, and then the priest or the shaman or the corundero, whatever you want to call him, has his own posse of spirits that are going to help him figure out what’s going on. So when the music starts, that’s bringing those spirits in and people don’t see them unless they’ve imbibed the San Pedro cactus juice, which is this hallucinogen, which is in the Amazon side, it was Ayahuasca. On the coast, it was San Pedro cactus, but that’s what allows you to actually see that other world. Yeah. I went to the Amazon recently and did Ayahuasca, a very high dose of it.…

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