The One the Masters Inhabit

Before describing his world, Virgilio López Flores tells us from whom he received his knowledge. He introduces himself—Finoratoɨ, “the bird that solves all problems,” from the community of Maairidikai on the upper Putumayo—then names his father: a nimairama, whom he glosses as “master of all knowledge.” It was from him that he inherited the Uitoto cosmovision. The word recurs like the summit of a hierarchy. At the base, the curanderos, those who heal, and the sorcerers, who strike; above them all, the nimairama. Todos los curanderos están bajo las órdenes del nimairama—all healers answer to the nimairama.

One expects the portrait of a man brimming with knowledge, one who knows everything. López offers another.

Spanish

Cuando el nimairama se concentra, los maestros que están en el espacio se posesionan de su cuerpo.

English

When the nimairama gathers himself, the masters who dwell in the sky take possession of his body.

The master of all knowledge, then, is not the one who holds it. He is the one others come to inhabit. Here, wisdom does not lodge in a mind like a hoard one has amassed; it descends from above, from the sky, and enters a body that has made itself available. To concentrate is not to delve into one’s own memory: it is to empty oneself enough for the masters to enter.

And these masters have a name, a precise origin. They are the dead.

Uitoto knowledge, then, is not something one builds alone over a lifetime, to be carried away. It is a good that circulates between the living and the dead. The nimairama of former times ascended to the sky; from there, when one of their own below gathers himself, they descend into his body. To know, for the nimairama, is to be the passage through which this lineage flows—the point where the masters of yesterday return to act. He is not wise because he knows: he is wise because through him, others still know.

This is where the word unsettles ours. We say “knowledge,” and we think accumulation: information stored, expertise built, a capital of learning that is mine, earned and wielded. The wisest among us is the fullest. The nimairama inverts the measure: the highest sage is the most dispossessed, the one whose body is no longer entirely his own, which can be taken. His authority comes not from what he has retained, but from what he has made room to yield.

He also stands apart from another Amazonian pinnacle, close yet opposite. The Shipibo meraya likewise stands at the height of a science; but his mark is to depart—to traverse all the spaces of the world alive, transforming into jaguar, into boa. The meraya journeys toward other worlds. The nimairama goes nowhere: he remains still, and it is the other worlds that come to him. One attains knowledge by crossing the boundaries of the body; the other, by opening that body to those who have already crossed them. Two ways of never knowing alone—but one sets out, the other welcomes.

What remains is what the word leaves in our language. Not “the sorcerer,” not “the sage,” not “the one who knows”: nimairama, the one through whom the lineage of departed masters continues to think in a living being. A knowledge whose perfection lies not in being full, but in being inhabited.