A new Bolivian exhibit showcasing a collection of ritual artifacts provides insight into ancient indigenous ceremonies during which shamans took psychedelic substances.

The objects exhibited in a gallery in downtown La Paz belong to the ancient Tiwanaku culture, which spread over the Andean highlands between 2000 BC and 1500 AD.

The spear tips, polished stones with llama wool wrapped around them and colorful hand-woven fabrics were kept in bags made with puma or jaguar skin and used in rituals to invoke indigenous deities.

But the star of the show is a carved wooden board studded with colorful stones from which indigenous shamans inhaled a hallucinogenic preparation - a powder made with seeds from the cohoba tree, which can be found in several South American countries.

Archaeologist Pablo Rendon describes the board, which has a human figure carved into it, as “really spectacular.” Although plenty of similar stone boards have been discovered in the Andean region, only a handful of wooden ones have been uncovered.

Also, the importance of this one lies in the fact it was found with other objects used for this particular ritual, all of which he says are in “mint condition.”

They were discovered by a local farmer in 1998 under a rock in Amaguaya, a village in the Andean highlands near lake Titicaca, and exhibited soon after. But they have not been seen by the general public for nearly ten years.

Rendon estimates the board was crafted between AD 350 and AD 1000, at the heyday of the Tiwanaku civilization. The set also includes a spoon made with llama bone and featuring a condor-like bird carved on the handle, which was used to measure the amount of powder to be inhaled.

Rendon said the psychedelic dust was consumed only by shamans, who found that getting high was the best way to rub shoulders with supernatural beings and “see into the future.”

(Photograph by David Mercado/REUTERS, April 3, 2009)

I went to Carnival in the Bolivian city of Oruro expecting to be blown away by tens of thousands of dancers and musicians, towering devil masks and llama sacrifices in the mines. I was. But even more striking was the pervasive small-scale ritual of “ch’alla,” the offering of libations to the earth goddess Pachamama taking place in the streets and fields during Carnival.

After viewing the massive Carnival processions in Oruro, I traveled to Bolivia’s main city, La Paz, last week. There, I saw small groups of Bolivians from all walks of life gathered on street corners. Each group defined a ritual space on the sidewalk with colorful paper streamers and flower petals. The people set off firecrackers in the center of the improvised altar, and then stood around or sat on chairs drinking beer from cases they brought with them. Before each quaff, they poured a little beer onto the ground, or onto the wheels of a car that was decorated with ribbons, balloons and flowers. By making the offerings to Pachamama, they hoped to be blessed with luck, safety and abundance. 

Driving through the Andes, I saw Bolivians on streets, in the fields, and in the patios of their houses, getting together for ch’alla rituals, making offerings to the Pachamama and blessing their cars. Apparently Bolivians do ch’alla often when they drink — spilling or flicking alcohol onto the ground — but the practice becomes a full-blown ceremony on special days, such as at the end of Carnival, just before Lent begins.

What intrigued me was that many of the people I saw doing the ritual appeared to be of mixed European and indigenous descent and were dressed in so-called Western clothes, instead of the typical garb of Aymara or Quechua Indians. Pre-Columbian spiritual practices are part of everyday life in Bolivia and I was fascinated with how intermingled they are with Catholicism. In a drive to improve rights for indigenous people, President Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, included guarantees of freedom of religion in a new constitution. The previous constitution explicitly recognized and supported the Roman Catholic Church.

Oruro, Bolivia - I’m walking through a mining tunnel in Bolivia, dark but not too narrow, with a deafening brass band marching behind me. A stumbling drunk miner stops to urinate on the wall near me. The choking smoke of a bonfire inside the mine mixes with the sharp tea-like smell of the coca leaves the miners are chewing. Just ahead of me other miners are carrying four trussed-up llamas, drenched with beer and festooned with ribbons and confetti. The miners forced firewater down the llamas’ throats in a ceremony at the mouth of the mine and now they are bringing them into the mine to sacrifice them and ask for safety and abundance in the dangerous shafts.

The llama sacrifice is a ritual at the heart of Bolivia’s carnival, which also includes more familiar trappings such as parades, masks and carnival queens. The Quechua Indians who run the tired old Itos mine above the city of Oruro make offerings to two different protectors during carnival. As Catholics, they have a shrine to the Virgin Mary in the mine. As Quechuas who observe pre-Columbian religious beliefs they make sacrifices to “uncle,” the spirit who owns the zinc and tin and silver they blast out of shafts 300 meters deep. It’s dangerous work because they run aging equipment on a shoestring budget - each miner gives 10 percent of his earnings back to the cooperative. Commercial miners abandoned Oruro long ago, having sucked the biggest riches out of the mountain. The Quechua cooperative miners make a hard living off of the leftovers but if things go well at the sacrifice it could mean better days ahead.

For the sacrifice, dozens of miners and several journalists walk into the mine and stop in a cavern about 25 meters in. The atmosphere is serious, as befits a religious ceremony, but also joyous and a little unhinged as the miners drink heavily and their children run around squirting everyone with gigantic pump-action water guns (which is something children in Oruro do during carnival week). Some of the miners are in Andean ponchos, others in coveralls and helmets and headlamps. Most of their wives are in traditional Bolivian Indian wide skirts and bowler hats and shawls.

Deep in the mountain around me, miners are taking creaky lifts into other mines this day to make their own sacrifices asking for safety and abundance for the next 12 months.

“We must do this with all our faith,” says Jorge Gutierrez, the head of the mining cooperative, speaking through a wad of coca leaves. Then a Quechua witch doctor, Jose Morales, takes over the celebration, sprinkles sugar over the crowd in the dim cavern and blesses the eggs, alcohol and other offerings that were pushed into the mine on a trolley.

As he speaks people cheer, raise their 1-1/2-liter bottles, sprinkle beer on the floor and then drink deeply and drag off of cigarettes that were handed out as part of the ritual. I hear the rustle of hands in green plastic bags as the miners grab coca leaves from their stash and stuff them in their cheeks. They drink, chew coca and smoke at the same time.

The witch doctor, in a long red poncho, prays that the miners who cut the llamas will have “steady hands.” This is because the goal is to take out their hearts still beating - which is a good sign for safety in the mine. The brass band starts up again with gusto.

Betsabe Pacheco, a 48-year-old school teacher married to a miner, says she has come with her husband to the “challa,” or offering, for 20 years in a row. “I always ask for things to go well. We do this with all our hearts. I ask for a lot of mineral, a lot of zinc, a lot of silver,” she says.

The miners invite television camera crews to close in around them while they slit the llamas’ throats, drain blood into bowls, then open the animals’ chests to pull out their hearts. Morales holds up each gleaming heart in a bowl. Each one in turn beats vigorously for several seconds.

The lift rushes up and down the elevator shaft, taking blood to each level of the mine. The miners smear their faces with blood and then hug each other, their children and their wives and pose for photos. The band plays on. I jump when firecrackers go off behind me.

“Everything has its place. The things below the earth belong to uncle,” Morales tells me, looking a little dazed after the ceremony and rubbing his blood-caked hands. “We are giving something back for what he has given us. The blood is so we don’t have any accidents and we also ask that he gives us good veins of minerals,” he said.

The miners are eager to tell reporters about the ritual and their mine. Jaime Robles boasts to me that he can still carry 70 kg of ore on his back even though he is 51. After ascertaining that I’m roughly in his age group he tries to get me to dance. I can smell his coca breath as he leans in to tell me about the spirit of the mountain.

“He owns everything in there, he can kill us. You have to have a lot of faith in uncle.”

Photo credit: Reuters/David Mercado (Scenes from Ilama scrifice at Bolivian mine, February 20, 2009)

Is Egypt’s Ministry of Religious Endowments planning to blindside people by quietly implementing an unpopular project to unify the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer?

That’s certainly the impression I got when I recently spoke to one of the ministry officials in charge of the project to enquire about its status. There has been talk for years about how chaotic and noisy it is to have each mosque in a city call out “Allahu akbar” at slightly different times, in quite different voices, sometimes in different musical keys and different tempos. A project unveiled two years ago to have one centralised call to prayer seemed to officials to be the answer.

The official was cagey at first, refusing to be drawn on whether the plan was going ahead or had been suspended, and refusing to give an ETA for the mythical unified adhan.

But then he relented and said, revealingly: “I’ll tell you something, one day you’ll find us, without media coverage… you’ll find (a unified) ‘Allahu akbar’ from the minarets.”

That goes some way to explaining why the whole thing seems to have dropped out of sight since it was “inaugurated” more than two years ago.

Back then, the project was hailed by officials as “a civilizing step.” In a ceremony at the ministry’s neo-Islamic offices in downtown Cairo, the minister handed out commemorative shields and monetary rewards to a number of people involved in the project. Everything about the news conference suggested the project would be up and running imminently.

But there’s been no almost no sightings (hearings?) of the unified adhan, save for some experiments carried out in a number of mosques, presumably to the delight of the plan’s many opponents - which includes the parliament’s religious affairs committee.

The committee expressed its opposition to the project in 2006 and said the money could be better spent elsewhere, on one of Egypt’s myriad problems, but local media quoted ministry officials as saying they were adamant about going ahead with it.

An IslamOnline report (in Arabic) on some of the ministry’s experiments described the scorn poured on the initiative by worshippers at the mosque where it was tested. “Flavourless, canned adhan” was how one described it. Another said he might just as well stay home and listen to the adhan on the radio. Others resented the mechanical nature of the thing, saying the move removed the human touch from the ritual and made it seem less spiritual.

The ministry says the move is meant to end the “clamour” that can result in areas with multiple mosques, where it can sometimes sound like the muezzins are attempting to drown each other out. They sometimes start seconds or even minutes apart.

Some Egyptians complain that the adhan in their neighborhood is too loud and disturbs their sleep. But sheikhs point out that the adhan is intended to do exactly that: wake people up to pray. They also say the argument that Egypt’s Christians shouldn’t be subjected to that is about as reasonable as expecting church bells to be silenced in Rome for the benefit of Italian Muslims.

IslamOnline also posted two fatwas prohibiting the use of an electronically transmitted adhan, saying that the recitation of the adhan is a ritual of worship in itself. The religious requirement was for an actual human voice at the location to recite the adhan.

They also point out that the performance of the adhan is a greatly meritorious deed. People draw lots for the privilege. Limiting the adhan to one person citywide or nationwide, they said, effectively denies people the spiritual reward.

The ministry says that currently, a lot of people with really horrible voices end up chanting the adhan, much to the discomfort of surrounding residents. The parliamentary committee responds that, well, maybe the ministry should carefully select the muezzin on the basis of vocal talents. And if noise pollution is the issue, how does the adhan compare to the 24/7 din of Egypt’s notoriously snarled and noisy traffic?

It looks like all that is moot, as the ministry seems unwilling to be deflected from a project that is way behind schedule, possibly over budget and almost certain to further alienate a large segment of Egypt’s devout Muslims and independent sheikhs.

Ask any altar server or visit any busy Chinese temple and you can smell for yourself that incense can be overpowering. But is it a mind-altering substance? A kind of drug that puts the faithful at ease and fosters feeling of peace and togetherness? And if it is, why aren’t more people flocking to services where clouds of incense billow up out of swaying golden thuribles, rise from joss sticks lit by the faithful or fill the air at other religious rituals?

The incense-as-a-drug thesis comes from the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Their FASEB Journal has published a paper arguing there could be a biological basis for the use of incense because it seems to have the effect of a psychotropic drug that helps relax people.

As the scientists put it after testing this on mice,“incensole acetate (IA), a resin constituent, is a potent TRPV3 agonist that causes anxiolytic-like and antidepressive-like behavioral effects in wild-type (WT) mice with concomitant changes in c-Fos activation in the brain.”

Thanks to Meredith Small for translating that on the Live Science website to the more user-friendly statement: “Under the influence of a good snoot full of incense, mice in scary situations, such as being put in a swimming pool, remain calm, anxiety-free.” A component of the resin in question, she explains, is none other than “frankincense (yes, the same stuff brought to baby Jesus by the Three Kings).”

Does this jibe with your experience of incense?

(Hat tip to Salman Hameed at Science and Religion News)