• 1 From 2001–2006 I worked with various indigenous groups, mostly with the Pano-speaking Shipibo-Koni (...)
• 2 I prefer to use the local Spanish term médico instead of the more common shaman (...)

2During my research among indigenous people in the Western Amazon lowlands,1 I came across a number of opportunities to witness activities of healers and sorcerers. At a time when I was ill myself, for example, two Shipibo médicos – local healers applying traditional medicinal knowledge – agreed to help me. 2 They staged three nightly curing sessions in my home, and soon discovered that my problem had been caused by somebody who (and they refused to tell me who) had bewitched me. During the last session, I heard the older médico performing a song that caused me a great uneasiness. The melody seemed swirling, circling, seeking, catching and binding, in a way harmful. I could understand parts of the lyrics, and he sang that he “had got him”, that he would “tie him up”, and similar dire insinuations. Worried, I asked the younger healer, who kept silent at this point, what his brother was doing. “Sending back the sorcery, he does”, was the reply, and I understood in that moment that my healer was just transformed into the deadly nemesis of somebody else. The performance was part of a healing song sequence for me, and at the same time the climax of a sorcery assault for the person held responsible for my illness.

• 3 Dale A. Olsen, “Music Alone Can Alter a Shaman’s Consciousness, Which Itself Can Destroy Tape Reco (...)
• 4 The lyrics are not complete, and for the listening example (cf. appendix), the singer did not appl (...)

4Recording plain sorcery songs is often difficult. Olsen (2004) tells us how a Warao sorcerer destroyed the researcher’s tape recorders through singing. Sometimes one encounters such songs by chance like Lewy, whose recordings, along with historical ones by Theodor Koch-Grünberg,3 were later identified as “Canaima’s killer songs” by knowledgeable research associates. Here I present some lyrics from a counter-sorcery song: 4

• 5 Bernd Brabec de Mori, “Tracing Hallucinations: Contributing to a Critical Ethnohistory of Ayahuasc (...)

9Sorcery and counter-sorcery are a complicated issue. The singer obscures his identity in multiple ways: he says that (instead of him) the plantbobinzana, personified as a powerful healer-sorcerer (meráya), is singing (lines 1–2), although the singer is first person (line 5), but at the same time another plant (theyashingo, line 11). Musically, something similar happens, when the first two sequences (lines 1–9) are performed in theikaro melodic style borrowed from down-river Kukama5 (see Brabec de Mori 2011). Lines 3–4 quote the ikaro singing style of mestizo people who often pronounce vocables rather than verses, as if the Shipibo identity of the singer should be shrouded. From line 10 on, a Shipibo repetitive mashá style is employed, and the lyrics engage the concrete topic of fighting: the Shipibo singer who says he was a plant entity pretending to be another plant entity, clad in a disguise of rocks (line 19), attacks the demonic forces he faces.

• 6 Bernd Brabec de Mori, “About magical singing”.
• 7 The singing and sorcery techniques mentioned above were often employed by master healer-sorcerers (...)

11It is sometimes said among indigenous healers that certain “musical aesthetics” can serve to identify the purpose of magical songs. Many singers use sonic transformation, for example, or “voice masking”6 (Brabec de Mori 2012), thus suggesting contact with a certain kind of entities: among the Shipibo, a high falsetto voice indicates the sonic presence of divine, “good” helping spirits, while rough accentuated chest singing means aggression. However, this only helps for some heuristics: in any healing procedure, aggression against the spirits of illness (or an enemy healer-sorcerer) is a necessary part of the sequence of songs. This is usually called “cleaning”, “driving away the malign”, or “summoning the illness in order to cage it”. But how should one judge whether this happens for the purpose of healing a present client or of harming an absent (or why not even a present?) person? I remember many reports from visitors – mostly white people from North America or Europe – who attended ayawaska sessions 7 with Shipibo healers, telling that they became scared when the singer started to sing in low, fast, staccato voice, mentioning demons and evil. It is practically impossible to judge whether the song would aim against you, or against your enemies. Here, in order not to panic, it is crucial to work with the “right” guy: with the healer who ascertained that perhaps the others are sorcerers, but that he was the “good” healer (given you believe this).