433 Chapter Seven Cosmos For the Matsigenka of Shimaa, kameti ...

wear shining armor and carry large guns that they fire off in anger when they have no ayahuasca
to drink; we hear the sound as thunder.
Casiano remembers being cured by a seripigari in his childhood, when they used
to
drink ayahuasca. His illness--chest pains--went right away and he was well. Memories like this
are the basis for a deep faith in the power and benevolence of seripigari. The image of the
seripigari blowing tobacco smoke, sucking out deadly spirit arrows, and passing bamboo fronds
back and forth over a patient is very strong even today, when the disapproval of the
missionaries and exposure to western biomedicine have thrown doubt on the old practices. But,
by virtue of this very profound dependence on the curative power of the seripigari, there persists
an ambivalence, a basic skepticism about the goodness of others, even one’s own family. The
ambivalence is not often openly expressed, but it finds its way into the core religious beliefs of
the community.
Self and Cosmos: The Personalization of the Matsigenka Universe
Matsigenka cosmology begins in a generic division of the world into good and not good,
where good refers to aspects of the world that bring pleasure and satisfaction, and not good
refers to those that bring unpleasure and frustration. In this guise, their world view is
fundamentally self-centered and amoral, like that of the culture hero Kashibokani, the Self-
Creating One (Chapter 3). The all-powerful trickster acts spontaneously and without restraint,
as he creates himself and then brings new features of the world into being, including monkeys
that people enjoy hunting and eating. But he also threatens the very existence of humankind and
waits bound at the edge of the sky for human contact that will enable him to destroy the world.
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