First of all, it is important to know that medicine songs are not commercial and are not meant to target massive audiences. These are songs for healing. Depeding on the listeners, some songs may seem monotonous unless they are in a ceremonial setting where the participants can feel the song’s power.

The evidence I will introduce here is a ceremonial song for Ayahuasca ceremonies. This song’s name is 4 Puntos (4 Directions). The author is Andrés Cordoba, a Colombian medicine man or yagesero. I decided to include a song as an evidence analysis for my project’s purpose because medicine songs are always present during many ceremonies with sacred plants. Alonso del Río (2015), a medicine man from Peru, says that whereas healing through music is pretty unique to many Indigenous tribes in South America, healing through words is so to those from North America. I could not find any ‘academic’ evidence regarding what Del Rio says to present here, I decided then to choose a song for that purpose. This medicine song is a song of inclusion. Here is an excerpt  of the lyrics:

Original version

Samuy Mama Cona, Samuy Cankhe Ña

…

Que venga mi Africa, America Central (bis)

Que venga mi Europa a Sudamerica (bis)

Lala lala lala…

Que venga Quetzalcóatl que venga ya

Que venga Viracocha que llegue ya

…

Que venga Cristo que llegue ya

Que venga Buda que venga Alá

Que venga Mahoma llegue ya

 …

(Córdoba, 2013)

English Version

Come in Great Mother, come in my people

…

Let the north and the south join now

Let Orient and Occident join now

Let the four points come gather now

at one single universal center.

Lala lala lala…

Let my Africa and Center America come in now

Let my Europe and South America come in now

Lala lala…

Let Quetzalcoatl let him come in now

Let Viracocha let him come in now

…

Let Christ let him come now

Let buda let Ala join now

Let Muhammad let him come in now

…

This song’s lyric is written in Spanish and Kichwa Inga (an Indigenous language from Putumayo, Colombia). The music of this song is powerful itself, but it needs to be understood in the context of its lyric as well. As mentioned before, it is a song of inclusion. It convokes people and deities from all over the four directions of the Earth in order to make of them “a universal family,” and the ceremonial space “one single universal center.” The singer does not exclude anyone, on the contrary, he is asking all cultures to gather and share the same space.  This song is consistent with that what occurs in most ayahuasca ceremonies, especially in South America. For most of the ceremony leaders, it does not matter what the religion of the participants is whenever they respect the medicine and the people there. The medicine men/women value people’s differences and try to incorporate those particularities in the ceremonies within a margin of respect.

From a broader view, those small ceremonial spaces that promote inclusion are in great extent the milestone upon which alliances take place among many Aboriginal peoples in America. I hope I will gather enough data that can show in this project’s final paper the alliances that take place among Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples through sacred plants and ceremonies like ayahuasca.

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