Free Light at the Edge of the World by Wade Davis Page A

people and inextricably enmeshed in the fibre of their being. The shamanic view of the world is manifest in every aspect of the material culture, not merely in a symbolic sense but because the very construction of the object demands mindfulness and fidelity to ancient religious and customary laws. A sacred rattle, the Calabash of Ruffled Feathers, both protects the community and serves as the axis mundi that allows the shaman in death to ascend to a celestial abode, where from the zenith, he travels as a shooting star, a bolt of lightning, or a comet to the house of his patron deity, one of the gods of the north, east or south. A musical instrument, a simple fiddle, provides the music for the dancers, whose grace in movement recalls the sweeping winds of change that have blown so fiercely over the delta in the history of the Warao. Everything thus resonates with the possibilities of another domain, another point in time, another dimension.
    The most sacred object of all, Werner explained, was also the most utilitarian, the very canoes that had carried us for days now into the forests. Warao means “owners of canoes,” and in a world of water, the people not only travel by canoe, they virtually live in them: sleeping, playing,
cooking, trading. To be a builder of canoes is to become a man. Not to possess a canoe is to be relegated among the undistinguished souls of the dead, impoverished, unfed, the lowest of the low. An infant’s first canoe is the flat root of a sangrito tree, a plank laid down on the floor of the hut, a surface to practise upon. Before a child can walk, he or she can paddle, and after a week at Winikina, I grew used to the sight of three-year-old boys and girls, alone, fearlessly manoeuvring small dugouts across the wide expanse of the river.
    Canoes, in addition to providing an essential means of transportation, moving goods and people throughout the delta, are, more profoundly, the vessels of Warao culture. The toy-like dugout of the child, the discarded hull slowly rotting beneath the landing, the massive seagoing craft that once journeyed to Trinidad and beyond—all represent the mystical knowledge transmitted by the master builder and acquired by the apprentice during their construction, every step of which is dominated by shamanic insight and regulation.
    No tree can be felled without the permission of the ancients, the ancestral carpenters who receive offerings of sago starch and tobacco. The spirit of the trees lives on in the canoes, which are carved from the embodiment of Dauarani, the Mother of the Forest, whose womb is both
birth canal and coffin. The master builder, who must abstain from sex with his wife until the canoe is consecrated, is visited daily by the spirit of the tree; and as the canoe takes shape as the vulva of the goddess, the very act of carving becomes a mystical act of love, intercourse with the divine.
    Seeking what lies beneath the surface of things, as Werner had put it, was the metaphor that had inspired all of his father’s life. I had managed over the course of days at Winikina to overcome my ignorance and to sense the beauty and completeness of life in the delta, but Johannes Wilbert had over the course of decades completed the incomparably more arduous task of seeing through to the very essence of Warao identity. The more he learned, the less he knew, or so he would say. What he uncovered beneath the veneer of quotidian life in the delta was an invaluable treasure, a profound insight into another way of being. As a young anthropologist, Werner had the choice of working anywhere he pleased. He chose the Warao, because there was so much more to discover.
    Illuminating a world within a world, detecting the underlying symbols of a culture and making sense of what they mean, is a visionary gift of great ethnographers like Johannes Wilbert and Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff. I once spent a weekend with Johannes in his cabin high above the
Los Angeles hills and