Dear Readers,

Please excuse my terribly extended absence from SoulDish; I’ve been stuck swimming in a vortex, somewhere in the mountains of southern Vermont. But without such a view of the whirlwind from its center, who knows what kind of mysteries I would have missed.

I recently finished an incredible book of excerpts compiled from anthropological research done over the past 500 years. The book is called “Shamans through Time” and is edited by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley (you may recall Narby was one of the first interviewees ever to appear on SoulDish). In its pages are 64 amazing accounts (many of them firsthand) of indigenous Shamans from various countries, and various time periods.

The anthropological standpoint gives a scientifically supportive backbone to otherwise fantastic accounts of magic, and I find myself going back to the book almost daily to review passages. One of the most fascinating and bazaar topics addressed by the book is that of “magical darts”. What’s more bazaar is the fresh connection between “magic darts” and the recent advent of computer generated creatures used in nanotechnology and robotics to understand autonomous behaviors.

Magic Darts – the indigenous description

The indigenous peoples of the Ecuadorian jungle, the Peruvian Amazon, and nearly all of South America all share in a radical conception: their belief in “magic darts”. The widespread belief was first described in detail by Swiss anthropologist Alfred Metraux in the Handbook of South American Indians (1949), which was published by the U.S. government. Here he addresses the basic role of magic substances in native South American tribes.

“There is no difference between the magic substance – an invisible but tangible stuff – and the arrows [darts], crystals, and thorns that sometimes lodge in the shaman’s body. These objects really are materializations of the shaman’s power which is sometimes conceived of in the more abstract and vague form of “magic substance”. The guardian spirit or familiar is likewise a personification of the same power rather than a different entity coexisting with the same notion of invisible substance. Magic substance, pathogenic objects, and guardian spirits are three different aspects of the same fundamental but vaguely conceived notion of magic power.”

44 years later French anthropologist, Jean-Pierre Chaumeil (1993) writes a very similar description of the Amazonian magic-darts. He however, draws a more a moving conclusion, suggesting that the concept of magic darts correlates to the modern scientific opinion of viruses.

“Generally speaking, these invisible projectiles are owned by shamans who keep them inside their own bodies (in the stomach, chest, or arm), and “nourish” them, either directly with their own blood, or with tobacco smoke or juice, which they consume throughout their career; this enables the darts to grow and even reproduce inside the body. It is generally accepted that these darts come from the supernatural world, mainly from invisible entities or forest spirits with which shamans enter into contact during their initiation…

These invisible substances are believed to cause illness and death when shot at a victim by a powerful shaman; by means of lodging in the bodies of the victims, the darts are able to reproduce and damage the host, whose body is not “immune” to the projectiles (only a shaman can be immune to the darts). By establishing a system for cognitively dealing with magic darts, and then passing it down through each shamanic generation, the system (which possesses its own very real dangers) comes to mean knowledge, and the knowledge is taken with all seriousness in maintaining a tribes health.

But what are magical darts, and how are they “seen” if they cannot be seen by anyone but shamans? What do they look like? How do they move and function? These kinds of questions have been explored and documented and the following is a brief summary of the information I’ve come across (Narby and Huxely).

First, the darts are only seen by trained shamans and under the influence of Yagé (a.k.a ayahuasca, and natema); it is a hallucinogenic brew of the Banisteriosis caapi mixed with varying concentrations of other plant species. It is a common practice in South American tribes to ingest the brew and enter a trance in which knowledge is revealed to the shaman, and in healing cases, the source of illness is determined by the shaman’s ability to “see” the magic darts if there are any present.

The Jìvaro and Yagũa tribes of the Amazon associate the darts with “phlegm” – a sticky mucus-like gel that coats and protects the darts. It also stops the projectiles from sticking together through mutual attraction, and allows them to move easily through the victim’s body. Similarly, viruses are most often transported between bodies through mucus enclosed membranes that are sliding around in bodily fluids. The contraction of viruses is most commonly a result of exposure to bodily fluids, or to species actively living in moist, organic, clusters.

The darts are believed to be living creatures that posses some kind of electrical charge, and thus some kind of attractive and repellant force (like magnetism). They appear as “beams of light” to the shaman who can perceive their energetic configuration in his trance. Viruses are scientifically classified as “non-living”, or at least they were until the discovery of the mimivirus, which put viruses into their own category of non-living life. They are organisms without an organism. They are bodies without biology. They have a beginning, an end, and a means. They reciprocate the behavior of the organisms they inhabit, and in doing so become the eternal symbiotic partners of the living.

They do not move freely however, instead they function autonomously as though programmed (or “controlled by forest spirits”). Some are exotic, some are generic. “Each kind of dart is associated with a type of illness that it is supposed to inoculate and sometimes heal…” (Chaumeil). They can travel great distances, reproduce quickly, and respond to environmental changes in essentially the exact same way pathogens do. They are viruses basically, and the shaman’s mastery of them is an astounding marvel of old world knowledge.

The shaman collects and cultivates the darts within his body, and nourishes them with tobacco smoke, juice, and other substances. He is able to grow new hybrid viruses; “the shaman’s body becomes a kind of virological complex, which not only carries pathogens but also produces them (as well as counterviruses).”(Chaumeil) The ability of the shaman to inflict sickness, or to heal, is entirely dependent upon the individual’s personal persuasion.

Nanotechnology introduces Darts

Researchers at the University of Michigan) have been working on the formation of nanostructures (structures of size .000000001 meters) that can perform multiple medical purposes. These include: detecting cancers, treatment of viral infections, DNA analysis, and general biobot repairs. The development of such a project required something special from scientists – an army of computer generated, autonomous nano-creatures. They had to be able to perform the same operation time and time again (hence the autonomous); they needed to survive, compete, cooperate, and reproduce all in the same artificial breath. But due to the vast nature of potential health problems and solutions, the nanobots (“bots” for short) needed to come in more than one form. To do this, scientists pooled their knowledge to determine what basic structures and behaviors are most universal, most simplistic, and most versatile.

Their computer generations produced three unique forms of autonomons:

1. The Clampers –“clamp” onto living cells and send of a pulse signal that attracts other clampers in the area. When a response signal is received, the clamper jumps off the host cell and matches up with another clamper to reproduce.
2. The Dolphins — have no skeleton, bones, or internal organ structures. Instead they are formed of hollow tubes that respond to outside pressure (much like vehicle hydraulics). Their movement is like liquid, and they remind me of the minnows I see everyday at the lake: moving in schools, following the sporadic jerks of the currents and running from the ripples made by bullfrogs.
3! The Darts – shaped like typical dart-board darts, with four cardinal wings. These darts travel in packs, moving like arrows towards their victim hosts (the clampers). They act in the same manner as viruses, landing on the host they invade the body and reproduce, gradually taking over unless thwarted by another dart species, or until the host dies.

I found this last computer generated autonomon particularly interesting for obvious reasons. It’s correlation to the behavioral mechanics of real world viruses and old world “magical darts” amazes me. The computer’s generation was based on a pre-determined set of guidelines deduced by observational evidence. The computer’s goal was to mimic natures’ most basic tendencies in organism structure and function, to provide a framework for searching for extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and to assist in the upcoming field of behavioral robotics.

How opportunistic, how evolutionary and organic, how viral and primordial are these forms the ancients called “magical darts”? How will nanotechnology and robotics advance in the coming years to embody this primordial configuration of atoms into “mindless” carriers of death and disease, health and healing? As a final thought I leave you all with the newest plaguing my mind: If the “Darts” correspond to viruses, what are the other two breeds of computer species correlated to? The “Clampers” seem to mimic bacteria, but the “Dolphins” dissolve my resolve that anything is so obvious…

I don’t know where everything fits in, but perhaps the old shamans did, or perhaps the scientific moral of the story is that you can tell a story, true grit and glory, in many more ways than one.