BELIEFS BEYOND SHORI

- Friday, July 22, 2011

             The Shori ritual is for men because only they have need of it. On the other hand, the men have to go forth frequently into the uncertain jungle and brave it's tangles on the hunt. They do not live in the homes of their birth but go to live with their wives.
             The Shori ritual functions to promote a feeling of fellowship among the unrelated men of the village, who were strangers to each other. 
             Originally, they found their women living like snake woman, in a spot in the jungle guarded by their fathers. The Shori ritual is the only way for sharanahua men to experience fellowship of any sort with the other men.

ONE INSTINCT, ONE RITUAL

-

The first symbol in the Shori ritual is the scroll, the little curling lines that the Shori drinker sees. It may be that these visions are caused by the chemistry of the drugs. They believed that Shori's vine it self, part of the vegetation of the jungle which surrounds them. But the vines soon transform into SNAKE, and the snake became SPIRITS and turned into a BEAUTIFUL WOMAN. 
According to this history, a hunter observed a beautiful woman coming out of the water to receive geninaps ( a jungle fruit ) from a tapir, who then copulated with her. The man rushed to bring her fruits himself and received the same reward, he took the Shori drink, and it revealed that they were all SNAKES!!!

THE SHORI: STEP BY STEP

-

  • The ritual starts casually.
  • Men scroll over to the Shaman's fire and help themselves to bowls of the liquid.
  • No man looks at another's face.
  • They sit quietly, then they rise, and leaning on a special cane, go to vomit.
  • Then they sit again.
  • The men start singing and their visions come.n 
  • At first, there visions are of scrolls, vine like curlicues.
  • When they arrive, the men grow calmer and sing in unison.
  • The whole event ends slowly in the early morning hours as men come out of their trance and one by one leave the logs and go to bed in their own houses.

SHORI'S RITUAL ( Sharanahua Indians)

-

Shori is a hallucinogenic drink prepared from a jungle vine. Men undertake the hallucinatory Shori ritual throughout the year, and during the dry season , every two to three days. During the dry season there is heightened masculine activity. The men go out frequently on solitary hunting expeditions in which their luck is very important to their families' diet. During the rainy season, they take Shori only two or three times a month. In this season, they fish in  expeditions with their wives and kinswomen, and their luck is much less uncertain. 

RITUAL IS....

- Thursday, July 21, 2011

Rituals are composed of symbolic act having many meanings:


               
         * a religious or other ceremony which involves a series of actions perform in a fixed order.

         * it is a way of behaving or a series of action which people regularly carry out in a particularly situation because it is their custom to do so.                                    

         * they make use of many concrete symbols which reflect a belief system about the nature of the participants, and their community. 

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)