Burst of Breath: Indigenous Ritual Wind Instruments in Lowland South America

4. Hearing without Seeing: Sacred Flutes as the Medium for an Avowed Secret in Curripaco Masculine Ritual

4. Hearing without Seeing Sacred Flutes as the Medium for an Avowed Secret in Curripaco Masculine Ritual nicolas journet “The most useful science is the art of dissimulation,” wrote a Jesuit philosopher in 1647 (and he added that “passions are an open door to a man’s mind”) (B. Gracian, maxime 98). He insisted that concealment and secrecy can be necessary in ordinary life and even more so in court life. Religions, too, use dissimulation , often mixed with mystery and ambiguity. Because religions deal with death, destiny, and morals, they are accepted as containing mysteries even more than secrets. Initiation rituals, especially when participation is restricted, are often treated as if they were triggering mysterious forces and transmitting esoteric knowledge. They are frequently analyzed as a collection of symbols, and the ethnographer or the religious specialist undertakes to decode these symbols even more completely than any of the actors of the rite. This essay begins by distinguishing among mystery, lies, and secrecy . A quick review of the topic (G. Simmel 1996, H. Bonello 1998, A. Petitat 1996) shows that religions may comprise all three categories . Mystery refers to an unrevealed truth supposedly unknowable or deemed so by some authority. Thus the difference between lies and secrets has little to do with intentionality. For example, within Christianity the Holy Trinity is a mystery that has been consciously instituted by the Church. Nevertheless, mystery always implies that truth is beyond the reach of ordinary human intellectual capacity, and its effectiveness relies on the belief that obstacles to revelation are either natural or supernatural, but not human. So dissimulation may use the mystery as a tool to enforce some secret ; mystery relies on the belief that truth is out of range of the human mind. Secrecy is different; it is maintained by ignorance, threat, or even convention. Ignorance is fueled by lying, whereas threat is a public manifestation. Hence secrets are of different kinds. Some are like lies; others are publicly acknowledged as secrets and maintained as such, whether by threat or convention. These distinctions are useful for understanding the numerous prohibitions that exist around sacred musical instruments in Amazonia . The particular example considered here is that of the Curripaco people of the Guainía River in Colombia. Sacred flutes and trumpets called Kuai—named for a mythic hero—are still sometimes exhibited in their villages for ceremonial purposes. In 1985, a male initiation ritual (kapetiapan) was performed in the village of Neeripan. Most of the ethnography in this essay comes from direct observation of that event. We will first describe the different kinds of precautionary measures that are required for both initiated and uninitiated persons when using the sacred flutes. Some of these measures are like the Polynesian taboo, and as such are imbued with supernatural beliefs. Others involve a deliberate restrictive arrangement toward women and children that requires dissimulation. Then we will turn our attention to analyzing the cognitively ambiguous kind of secret that is enacted in the flutes’ prohibition. Symbols and Food Avoidance Scholars have frequently considered the symbolic dimensions of the prohibition of women from seeing Jurupari sacred flutes in the northwestern Amazon. In his analysis of the He concept among the Barasana, which is very close to the Curripaco Kuai semantic field, Stephen Hugh-Jones (1979) identifies the second most 124 journet important ritual paraphernalia within the He ceremony as a wax gourd that men activate in the middle of the night. This gourd embodies a very strong and obvious female symbolism. Although this object is not formally forbidden to women, the wax gourd is exhibited along with a pair of sacred trumpets, and the moment when the wax is burned is considered to be a dangerous one, since it is associated with the idea of male menstruation. For obvious reasons, women are not welcome to witness such an event. It appears then that He ceremonies activate cosmic and sexual symbols , which acknowledge the strong gender separation that keeps at least half of the community out of the sight of the sacred flutes. If such a point a view were to be applied to the Curripaco Kuai ritual, it would inevitably consider a word that Curripaco currently use to distinguish Kuai ceremonies from all other kinds of feasts. When speaking Spanish, Curripaco men use such words as dangerous and mysterious when trying to explain the specific climate in which kapetiapan is to be held...