Customer Reviews

Vine of the Soul: Medicine Men, Their Plants and Rituals in the Colombian Amazonia

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The collaborative work of Richard Evans Schultes (formerly Jeffrey Professor of Biology and Director of the Botanical Museum of Harvard University) and Robert F. Raffauf (formerly Professor of Pharmacognosy and Medicinal Chemistry, College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Professions, Northeastern University, Bost-on), Vine Of The Soul: Medicine Men, Their Plants And Rituals In The Colombian Amazonia has been newly re-issued by Synergetic Press and is an informed and informative exploration of the religious beliefs and superstitions of the people native to the Colombian Amazon River area. Here studied are tribal sacred dances, art, petroglyphs, and architecture, hunting and fishing rituals, and more. Vine Of The Soul is wonderfully enhanced with different black-and-white photograph, and text captions describing particular aspects of the Colombian Amazonian native traditions represented therein. A beautiful and absorbing tour of faith and spirituality, Vine Of The Soul is a core addition to personal, professional, academic, and community library Amazonian Studies reading lists and South American Indian reference collections.

This is much more of a picture book than I had expected but it is a fascinating book. For the most part of it's 270 pages there are full page photos of plants, places and traditional people of Amazonia engaged in the use of medicinal plants, traditional art or music. Accompanying the photos are brief one to two paragraph descriptions of what peoples use the plant, where they are located, where the plant is found and what its traditional usage is.

The black and white photos are of places rarely seen including sacred waterfalls, rock formations, unique endemic forest and plant communities that are not often depicted in photographic books on the amazon region.

This is a great book to thumb through and read as your curiosity is caught by one page after another showing a scene of extensive forest, a cliff-side pictograph, a strikingly bizarre flower. It is not a detailed text of ethnobotany, it is more like coming across an explorer's own notes and pictures that gives you a sense of privilege to view.