202 9 The Secret Liji feNature
round the squatting gringo, mocking his queasiness until they evapo-
rated with the squirts of shit."
Less scatological and more inspiring are the nature spirits seen and
described by Pablo Amaringo, Brazilian shaman and painter of extraor-
dinary rainforest scenes, some sixty of which appear in Ayahuaska
Visions, a luxurious volume published by North Atlantic Books of
Berkeley, California, accompanied by an illuminating text by Louis
Eduardo Luna.
Amaringo's complex and beautiful paintings contain a cumulative
amalgam of his shamanic visions, depicting not only the boas and ana-
condas of the jungle but also its fairies, sylphs, gnomes, and fire spirits.
Amaringo's spirits of stone and metal, gnomelike guardians of subter-
ranean treasures, are colored to represent diamonds, gold, copper,
bronze, silver, garnet, and quartz, their weird elongated bodihns ac-
cordingly white, yellow, red, green, light blue, purple, or lilac.
Fairies in this Latino shaman's vision are blond and oddly reminis-
cent of Margaret Murray's description of spirits in the British Isles,
where ranking fairies appear in long, flowing dresses, cover their hair
with veils or hoods, and sport small coronets. To these familiar spirits
are added mermaids and pink dolphins, the latter normal in the many
rivers of the Amazon delta. Amaringo's mermaids are beautiful women
with hypnotic eyes who live in caves at the bottom of lakes and rivers,
particularly where the water is agitated by great whirlpools, playing
musical instruments and singing in melodious voices.
Every tree, every plant, says Amaringo, has a spirit, alive and con-
scious, that sees everything around it; and if one takes ayahuasca one
can hear the trees cry out when they are about to be cut down. His
plant spirits adopt many different forms, usually anthropomorphic but
also theriomorphic. In an article entitled "Sociopsychotherapeutic
Functions ofAyahuasca Healing," Dr. Walter Andritzky points out that
during the ayahuasca intoxication "all of nature seems converted into
an anthropomorphic drama, and the myths sung by the shaman are ex-
perienced multisensorially as absolute reality. Legends are not only
heard, but seen in their full vitality and experienced with their emo-
tional impact."