Caapi and Niopo in “On Some Remarkable Narcotics of the Amazon Valley and Orinoco”

Source: Richard Spruce, "On Some Remarkable Narcotics of the Amazon Valley and Orinoco," in Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon & Andes, edited by Alfred Russel Wallace, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1908), 413-433. This excerpt follows the public-domain printed text, with light cleanup of OCR spacing.

On Some Remarkable Narcotics of the Amazon Valley and Orinoco

In the accounts given by travellers of the festivities of the South American Indians, and of the incantations of their medicine-men, frequent mention is made of powerful drugs used to produce intoxication, or even temporary delirium. Some of these narcotics are absorbed in the form of smoke, others as snuff, and others as drink; but with the exception of tobacco, and of the fermented drinks prepared from the grain of maize, the fruit of plantains, and the roots of Manihot utilissima, M. aipi, and a few other plants, scarcely any of them are well made out. Having had the good fortune to see the two most famous narcotics in use, and to obtain specimens of the plants that afford them sufficiently perfect to be determined botanically, I propose to record my observations on them, made on the spot.

I. Banisteria Caapi, Spruce

The first of these narcotics is afforded by a climbing plant called caapi. It belongs to the family of Malpighiaceae, and I drew up the following brief description of it from living specimens in November 1853.

Habitat: on the river Uaupés, the Içanna, and other upper tributaries of the Rio Negro, where it is commonly planted in the roças or mandiocca-plots; also at the cataracts of the Orinoco, and on its tributaries, from the Meta upwards; and on the Napo and Pastasa and their affluents, about the eastern foot of the Equatorial Andes. Native names: caapi, in Brazil and Venezuela; cadana, by the Tucano Indians on the Uaupés; aya-huasca, meaning "dead man's vine," in Ecuador.

The lower part of the stem is the part used. A quantity of this is beaten in a mortar, with water, and sometimes with the addition of a small portion of the slender roots of the caapi-pinima. When sufficiently triturated, it is passed through a sieve, which separates the woody fibre, and to the residue enough water is added to render it drinkable. Thus prepared, its colour is brownish-green, and its taste bitter and disagreeable.

The Use and Effects of Caapi

In November 1852 I was present, by special invitation, at a Dabocuri or Feast of Gifts, held in a malloca or village-house called Urubu-coara, above the first falls of the Uaupés. We found about three hundred people assembled, and the dances at once commenced.

In the course of the night, the young men partook of caapi five or six times, in the intervals between the dances; but only a few of them at a time, and very few drank of it twice. The cup-bearer, who must be a man, for no woman can touch or taste caapi, starts at a short run from the opposite end of the house, with a small calabash containing about a teacupful of caapi in each hand. In two minutes or less after drinking it, its effects begin to be apparent. The Indian turns deadly pale, trembles in every limb, and horror is in his aspect. Suddenly contrary symptoms succeed: he bursts into a perspiration, and seems possessed with reckless fury, seizes whatever arms are at hand, and rushes to the doorway, where he inflicts violent blows on the ground or the doorposts. In about ten minutes the excitement has passed off, and the Indian grows calm, but appears exhausted.

I had gone with the full intention of experimenting the caapi on myself, but I had scarcely dispatched one cup of the nauseous beverage, which is but half a dose, when the ruler of the feast, desirous apparently that I should taste all his delicacies at once, came up with a woman bearing a large calabash of caxiri, or mandiocca-beer, of which I had to take a copious draught. Above all this, I had to drink a large cup of palm-wine, and it will readily be understood that the effect of such a complex dose was a strong inclination to vomit.

White men who have partaken of caapi in the proper way concur in the account of their sensations under its influence. They feel alternations of cold and heat, fear and boldness. The sight is disturbed, and visions pass rapidly before the eyes, wherein everything gorgeous and magnificent they have heard or read of seems combined; and presently the scene changes to things uncouth and horrible.

In May 1857, after a sojourn of two years in the north-eastern Peruvian Andes, I reached, by way of the river Pastasa, the great forest of Canelos, at the foot of the volcanoes Cotopaxi, Llanganati, and Tunguragua; and in the villages of Canelos and Puca-yacu, inhabited chiefly by tribes of Zaparos, I again saw caapi planted. It was the identical species of the Uaupés, but under a different name, in the language of the Incas, aya-huasca, or "dead man's vine."

Aya-huasca is used by the Zaparos, Anguteros, Mazanes, and other tribes precisely as I saw caapi used on the Uaupés, namely as a narcotic stimulant at their feasts. It is also drunk by the medicine-man, when called on to adjudicate in a dispute or quarrel, to give the proper answer to an embassy, to discover the plans of an enemy, to tell if strangers are coming, to ascertain if wives are unfaithful, or in the case of a sick man to tell who has bewitched him.

All who have partaken of it feel first vertigo, then as if they rose up into the air and were floating about. The Indians say they see beautiful lakes, woods laden with fruit, birds of brilliant plumage, and soon the scene changes. They see savage beasts preparing to seize them; they can no longer hold themselves up, but fall to the ground. At this crisis the Indian wakes up from his trance, and if he were not held down in his hammock by force, he would spring to his feet, seize his arms, and attack the first person who stood in his way. Then he becomes drowsy, and finally sleeps. If he is a medicine-man, when he has slept off the fumes he recalls all he saw in his trance, and thereupon deduces the prophecy, divination, or whatever is required of him.

Villavicencio says: "When I have partaken of aya-huasca, my head has immediately begun to swim, then I have seemed to enter on an aerial voyage, wherein I thought I saw the most charming landscapes, great cities, lofty towers, beautiful parks, and other delightful things. Then all at once I found myself deserted in a forest and attacked by beasts of prey, against which I tried to defend myself. Lastly, I began to come round, but with a feeling of excessive drowsiness, headache, and sometimes general malaise."

Niopo Snuff and the Mode of Using It

We owe our first knowledge of niopo snuff, and of the tree producing it, to Humboldt and Bonpland. In the modern niopo, as I saw it prepared by the Guahibos themselves, there is no admixture of quicklime, and that is the sole difference from Humboldt's account.

I first gathered specimens of the paricá, or niopo, tree in 1850 near Santarém, at the junction of the Tapajoz and Amazon, where it had apparently been planted. In the following year I gathered it on the little river Jauauari, one of the lower tributaries of the Rio Negro, where it was certainly wild. But I did not see the snuff actually prepared from the seeds and in use until June 1854, at the cataracts of the Orinoco. A wandering horde of Guahibo Indians, from the river Meta, was encamped on the savannas of Maypures, and on a visit to their camp I saw an old man grinding niopo seeds, and purchased of him his apparatus for making and taking the snuff, which is now in the Museum of Vegetable Products at Kew.

The seeds, being first roasted, are powdered on a wooden platter. The snuff is kept in a mull made of a bit of the leg-bone of the jaguar, closed at one end with pitch and at the other end stopped with a cork of inarima bark. For taking the snuff they use an apparatus made of the leg-bones of herons or other long-shanked birds put together in the shape of the letter Y. The lower tube being inserted in the snuff-box and the knobs in the nostrils, the snuff is forcibly inhaled, with the effect of thoroughly narcotising a novice, or indeed a practised hand, if taken in sufficient quantity; but this endures only a few minutes, and is followed by a soothing influence, which is more lasting.

The Guahibo had a bit of caapi hung from his neck, along with the snuff-box, and as he ground his niopo he every now and then tore off a strip of caapi with his teeth and chewed it with evident satisfaction. "With a chew of caapi and a pinch of niopo," said he, in his broken Spanish, "one feels so good! No hunger, no thirst, no tired!" From the same man I learnt that caapi and niopo were used by all the nations on the upper tributaries of the Orinoco, on the Guaviare, Vichada, Meta, Sipapo, and the intervening smaller rivers.

The Catauixi use niopo snuff as a narcotic stimulant, precisely as the Guahibos of Venezuela, and as the Muras and other nations of the Amazon, where it is called paricá. For absorbing paricá by the nose, a bent tube is made of a bird's shank-bone, cut in two, and the pieces joined by wrapping, at such an angle that one end being applied to the mouth, the other reaches the nostrils. A portion of snuff is then put into the tube and blown with great force up the nose. The effect of paricá, taken as snuff, is to speedily induce a sort of intoxication, resembling in its symptoms, as described to me in this instance, that produced by the fungus Amanita muscaria.

Medicine-Men and Their Customs

Among the native tribes of the Uaupés and of the upper tributaries of the Orinoco, niopo or paricá is the chief curative agent. When the paye is called in to treat a patient, he first snuffs up his nose such a quantity of paricá as suffices to throw him into a sort of ecstasy, wherein he professes to divine the nature of the evil wish which has caused the sickness, and to gather force to counteract it. He next lights a very thick cigar of tobacco, inhales a quantity of smoke, and puffs it out over the sick man, over the hammock in which he is laid, and over everything he habitually uses, but especially over the food he is to eat.