Paricá among the Mura in Spix and Martius's Reise in Brasilien

This translation is prepared for the archive from the public-domain 1831 German volume by Spix and Martius. The original passage uses hostile and racialized nineteenth-century language; the translation keeps the descriptive content while preserving the source's judgmental tone where it affects interpretation.

The Use of Paricá Snuff

A highly strange custom, one of the distinctive practices of the tribe, is the use of a snuff tobacco (Paricá). The powder is prepared from the dried seeds of Paricá-üva, a kind of Inga, and acts first as a stimulant, then as a narcotic. Once a year each horde uses Paricá for eight days amid continual drinking of intoxicating beverages, dancing, and singing. The festival is said, according to Ribeiro, to celebrate the entrance of young men into manhood; we heard, however, that it was held after the ripening of the seeds and had no relation to that. In a roomy open house the whole horde gathers, and the women heat them up with richly supplied calabashes of cajiri and other plant-based drinks. The men then pair off by mutual choice and whip one another with long straps of tapir or manatee hide until they bleed.

This strange scourging is not regarded by them as hostile, but rather as an act of love; according to all the reports we received, the whole excess may be considered the expression of a misdirected sexual relation. After the bloody operation has continued for several days, the paired companions blow the Paricá into one another's nostrils by means of a tube about a foot long, usually the hollowed thighbone of a tapir. This is done with such force and so unremittingly that sometimes individuals either suffocate from the fine dust driven up into the frontal sinuses, or, overstimulated by its narcotic effect, die on the spot.

Nothing is said to equal the fury with which the pairs fill the hollow bones prepared for this purpose with Paricá from the large bamboo tubes (tabocas) in which it is kept, using a hollow crocodile tooth that holds the measure for each blowing, and then, kneeling close together, blow and pack it into one another. A sudden exaltation, senseless speech, screaming, singing, wild jumping, and dancing follow the operation; afterward, stupefied also by drinks and every kind of excess, they fall into a bestial drunkenness.

Another use of Paricá is to administer a decoction of it to oneself as a clyster, whose effect is said to be similar, though weaker. One cannot help being reminded by this bestial amusement of the disgusting custom of the Ostiaks and Kamchadals, who, as is well known, heat themselves into a similar fury by consuming fly agaric and the urine of those who have drunk the poisonous decoction. For the ethnographer of America it remains puzzling how hostile peoples can resemble one another precisely in such eccentric customs. The use of Paricá is also characteristic of the Mauhés, and we observed it there ourselves, though among them, with the higher cultivation of the whole tribe, it appears in a more refined form. Finally, a very similar aberration is the use of Ypadú powder from the leaves of Erythroxylon coca L., which we encountered among the Miranhas, and which other travelers have encountered among Peruvian peoples.