Untitled - The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

436 NOTES OF A BOTANIST CHAP.
essential to the making of payes. Bancroft says :
" The order of Peiis is inherited by the eldest sons.
A young Peii is initiated with superstitious ceremonies
lasting several weeks. Among other things,
he is dosed with tobacco till it no longer operates
as an emetic" (loc. cit.\
Tobacco -smoke is blown on the sick person
by the paye in almost all methods of cure, whether
the maraca, niopo, or caapi be the primary agent.
In lieu of the two latter it would seem that in some
nations the enchanters narcotised themselves by
chewing tobacco and swallowing the juice. The
is smoked in the
large cigar used on the ordinary way, and the
Uaupes
smoke blown from the
but in the country bordering the Pacific
mouth ;
coast of Equatorial America the cigar two or
three feet long, but slenderer than that of the
Uaupes was held in the mouth at the lighted end,
and the smoke blown from the opposite end upon
the sick person, or, at a feast, in the faces of the
guests, whereof Wafer has an amusing account and
a rude picture (p. 327, loc. He calls the cit.']. payes
pawawers, evidently the same name, with a merely
dialectic difference. It is curious that at the present
clay the Indians and negroes along that coast frequently
hold the lighted end of a cigar in their
mouths, as any one who has sojourned at Panama or
Guayaquil may have observed.
The uses of niopo (or parica) and of caapi (or
indicated above. The
aya-huasca) I have already
former is the chief " medicine " of the payes on the
affluents of the Amazon, both northern and southern,
and on the Orinoco ;
but
the latter in the roots of
the Equatorial Andes. I have not learnt that they