The worship of nature may unite us more than anything else and allow us to overcome doctrinal discrepancies that are relatively unimportant if considered from the perspective of human culture as a whole...
...Therianthropes have been a part of our species’ artistic endeavors ever since. They are found in the human-headed winged bulls and lions guarding Assyrian palaces. In ancient Egypt, we have Anubis, the jackal-headed god associated with the afterlife, Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess of war and battle, and, of course, the sphinx, silently gazing forever toward the eastern horizon. In India, there is Ganesha, the elephant god, and Hanuman, the monkey god. Fauns, centaurs, mermaids and angels are familiar images from antiquity, as well as Satan, a powerful archetype of Christianity and Islam, depicted as a therianthrope with horns, tail and wings. We find therianthropes in Picassos’ Minotaur. They are also the main heroes of today’s blockbuster films such asSpiderman, The X-Men, and the Na’vi of planet Pandora, in Avatar.
Clearly, our compulsion to create myths explaining our place in the natural world and the nature of existence itself dates from ancient times. What is the origin of all these enigmatic figures depicted in such diverse geographical areas since the very beginning? Do they come from dreams? Have they emerged from altered states of consciousness, as proposed by Lewis-Williams (2002)? Are they manifestations of beings that exist either in other dimensions or in the minds of particular individuals with enough power or charisma to imprint them in future generations? This remains a great mystery. In any case, they are certainly not beings from ordinary reality. Subjectively, at least, our ancestors were deeply affected by such apparitions, and, as far as we know, most cultures through time and space have believed that human-animal figures play an important role in supernatural worlds...
...Once copies of Pablo’s paintings began to circulate, and even more so when the book was published, I witnessed a profound reaction among Peruvian Amazonians themselves, who immediately recognized that these paintings depicted worlds revealed by the ayahuasca experience. Except for a few illustrations by Peruvian artist Yando Ríos that appeared in a book onayahuasca by his wife, anthropologist Marlene Dobkin de Rios (1972), to the best of my knowledge no artist had attempted to render these kinds of visions as works of art. Friends of mine who are anthropologists took the book to Amazonian indigenous communities and encountered similar reactions. The book also caused something of an international stir, with some people claiming this publication was partially responsible for the new global interest in ayahuasca.
In 1988, Pablo Amaringo and I created the Usko-Ayar Amazonian School of Painting in Pucallpa, a project to which I dedicated several years of my life, buying high- quality materials, photographing the art, and organizing exhibits in various countries. At its apex, the school had three hundred students, mostly between the ages of 10- 20. Amazonians seem to have extraordinary eidetic memories, and Pablo, a remarkable pedagogue, was able to transmit his own technique of projecting on paper what the students had seen in the forest. Although it might be difficult to believe, not a single sheet of high quality paper was ever wasted...
...What might the current interest in sacred Amerindian plants mean for the religious and spiritual life of today’s globalized world? It isn’t entirely clear. New religions that adopted ayahuasca as a sacrament under the names Santo Daime and Vegetal emerged in Acre and Rondônia (in the Brazilian Amazon) beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. These syncretic religious institutions incorporate Christianity, Afro-Brazilian religious elements, European esoteric traditions and Amazonian ideas. Undoubtedly, institutions of many kinds are now being developed that will have a future impact. Experiences with sacred plants (in the proper setting) are not incompatible with these worldviews or symbolic systems. Previously held cosmological ideas may even be reaffirmed: encounters with Jesus or Mary, Lord Shiva, Odin, Ogun, the Cosmic Serpent, the World Tree, or Mother Earth (Gaia) are common. Strassman (2014) finds powerful explanatory models in the mystic Jewish tradition for the DMT experience. And, certainly, as presented by Professor Richard DeMaris in this catalogue, visionary experiences abound in the Christian tradition.
Remarkably, regardless of their cultural background, many persons participating in ceremonies with the sacred plants discover a renewed interest in nature and environmental issues. This represents extremely important common ground. In this time of ecological calamity caused in part by the desacralization of nature, all world religions and spiritual traditions (regardless of ideological differences) urgently need to reconsider our relationship with the natural world. The worship of nature may unite us more than anything else and allow us to overcome doctrinal discrepancies that are relatively unimportant if considered from the perspective of human culture as a whole.
Our Western contemporary world is perhaps an historical exception in that our attention is constantly being drawn (in keeping with the devastating logic of unbridled consumerism) solely towards controlling and profiting from the external world. We have forgotten our own traditions that facilitate entering inner worlds during our waking hours, even though we have learned the benefits of meditation from the East. Too often, we pay no attention to our dreams, arranging our lives so that we are violently disconnected every morning from our inner world by all sorts of clocks and artifacts. Art saves us, which perhaps explains why it fascinates us. Art reminds us (sometimes explicitly, as in the case of the artists in this exhibition) of other realities, hidden in the inner recesses of our minds.