Sleeping with a shaman broadens the mind and spirit.

SHAMAN ETIQUETTE
By
Elaine Masters
© 2001


I met Chalaw in a village near Chiang Rai in northern Thailand. He was the friend of a friend, a small, sturdy teenager from the Lahu tribe. He spoke Lahu, Burmese, and Thai, but no English. I spoke Spanish, a bit of French, and English. We had no common language. If our mutual friend wasn’t present, we sat helplessly shrugging our shoulders and smiling at each other.

As the months went by, Chalaw learned a smattering of English, I learned some Thai, and we began to communicate. Although our words were halting and awkward, still it was a glorious relief to express our thoughts directly without having to go through a third person, wondering how much was translated accurately and how much was omitted.
Together, we visited a few villages in the Golden Triangle area of northern Thailand, telling the tribes people that God loves them (they didn’t know), Chalaw explaining their culture to me and cueing me in on the niceties of etiquette. One day while we were in Mae Sot, a town in western Thailand, Chalaw asked, “Aunty, you like stay at shaman’s?”

“Shaman? Can we do that? Is it all right?”

Up to that time, I’d visited animist villages, observing how the people cooked over wood fires and raised their undisciplined children, hand-planted their rice and built their bamboo houses. I’d visited and enjoyed their hospitality, but to be safe, I’d always returned to a Christian village before nightfall. I’d never met a shaman, let alone slept in his house.

“Yes. Shaman. Belong Lahu Sheh Leh tribe. He friend.”

The idea of staying in a shaman’s house was tantalizing but also unnerving. What would it be like?

“So beautiful clothes, Auntie. Blue and black, all special clothes. You like see?”

I regarded Chalaw’s eager face, his dancing eyes, his hands restless to pack his knapsack. And I knew that inside his small, brown body was a soul I could trust.

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go.”

An hour later, we set off.

We rode a siilor from Mae Sot towards Hod. Siilors (literally, “four wheels”) are pickup trucks converted for passengers. Two benches line the sides of the truck bed, a metal canopy keeps out some of the sun and rain, and metal steps and a vertical handle at the back enable passengers to scramble aboard.
After a couple of hours traveling, Chalaw tapped the window separating passengers from driver and the siilor stopped. As we clambered down, we faced a one-lane dirt road leading off from the main road.

“There,” said Chalaw, motioning. “Village there.”

“How far?” I asked.

“Not far.”

I should have known better than to ask a tribesman how far. They always said, “not far.” For their superbly-conditioned bodies, nothing seemed very far.

After trudging along with our backpacks for fifteen minutes or so, my knees began to shake and I felt short of breath. I asked Chalaw if he was afraid.
.
“No worry, Aunty,” Chalaw reassured me. “He my friend.” He knew what was bothering me.

“Could we pray?” I asked.

Chalaw spotted a fallen tree and we sat down together with him staying a modest distance away. We prayed until my legs and voice were steady. After all, I reasoned, God was with us, and the shaman was Chalaw’s friend. I had nothing to fear. Of course not. We marched on.

The acrid smell of a cooking fire told us we were approaching the village. Four men by the side of the road wore beautiful Lahu Sheh Leh clothes of baggy turquoise pants and black jackets lined with turquoise. They laid aside their machetes, interrupting their woodcutting to stare at us.
Immediately, a pack of barking black dogs came rushing out of the woods. A young boy from the village, volunteering as our bodyguard, sprang into action. He shouted and whipped a heavy club about, fighting back the dogs.

What a welcome!

Scattered on the ground were bamboo thingamajigs: two-foot circles attached to poles.
“Yesterday they have ceremony for New Year,” said Chalaw. “Caught all bad spirits, those circles.”
Well, that was good to know. At least we wouldn’t be bugged by bad spirits.

As we sought the shaman’s residence, dirty, ragged children raced up the hill to meet us, wide-eyed, giggling, with the littlest ones hiding behind older siblings and peeking out at us.

“They all come see Aunty,” Chalaw grinned. “Never see white woman before.”

I wondered what the protocol would be with a Lahu Sheh Leh shaman. I was sure the rules of etiquette would be very different from those I followed in my American home. Would I be sensitive to all of the do’s and don’ts? Or would I do something so gauche that I would wind up an ingredient of some magic potion? Although Chalaw said he was the shaman’s “friend,” I wondered, was he actually a close enough friend to smooth over my mistakes?

We reached a bamboo house perched on five-foot-high posts. It didn’t really look any different from the rest of the houses of the village except that it flew a long white streamer at the top of a bamboo pole.

“Cloth make spirit come down into shaman’s house,” explained Chalaw. “Like for TV. What you call it?”

“Antenna?” I asked.

“Yes. That. All shamans have spirit antenna. Pull spirit in.”

I thought, Oh, great. How comfy. Rather than fending off spirits, the shaman’s goal was to lure them in. I began to wonder what other cultural differences I would encounter.

We stood on the ground looking up at the house while the boy continued to flail his club at the barking dogs. As I watched the streamer blowing gently in the breeze, I thought about the spirits being attracted, and again my knees went weak. What was I doing here? God? Are You with us?

After what seemed a long time, a wizened old man tottered out on the porch.

He exchanged pleasantries with Chalaw until his eyes flickered in recognition. Then he motioned us up his ladder.

“You see, Aunty? We friends,” Chalaw smirked. “I meet him last month.”

Chalaw’s vocabulary obviously did not include “acquaintance.”

From the porch, we stooped to enter the sootiest, darkest two-room Lahu house I’d ever been in. Fire pits built into the bamboo floor of both rooms instead of the single fire pit I’d encountered in other Lahu houses testified to the coolness of the climate and the ready availability of firewood. Smoke meandered around the room, burning our eyes and tainting our lungs, then slithered out through tiny holes at the eaves.

Ten or twelve village children scrambled onto the porch and pressed around the door, jostling each other to peer in after us.

Ill at ease, I waited for the shaman to seat us. Being a good host, he quickly did. Chalaw and I sat on the floor on one side of the fire pit; he sat on an adjacent side.

The two men settled down to a leisurely discussion in Lahu. The Sheh Leh dialect was similar to Chalaw’s Black Lahu, so they had no trouble communicating. Now and then, Chalaw remembered to give me a condensed version of their conversation, but most of the time I had no indication of what they were saying.

I was used to this, however, and enjoyed lounging and observing, taking it all in. The shaman certainly didn’t look threatening. Like most Lahus, he was short, probably less than five feet tall. His arms and legs were inordinately thin (hinting at frequent puffing on the opium pipe). He bore the tattoos that are traditional for animist Lahus, with geometrical designs covering his arms and legs and much of his torso to keep him from being harmed by the spirits. He walked with a slight stoop formed from years of sitting on floors, bending over fires, and tilling soil with short-handled hoes. He was a cheerful, dried-prune sort of a man.

I don’t know what I’d expected: paint and feathers, maybe? A bone through the nose? This man certainly didn’t fit the idea of high drama I’d always associated with shamans. But he was not ordinary. His flashing eyes revealed an intelligence and familiarity with spirits quite different from the eyes of the other villagers.

Suddenly I became aware of several women sitting in the shadows along a back wall of the room, observing us. When did they come in? Their stealthy arrival was as quiet as the drifting smoke.
A few children still peeked through the doorway, but most had whooped off to a jungle-vine swing, taking the dogs with them.

Chalaw caught my attention. “Aunty, he say long time ago, German man come, study people. What you call that?”

“Anthropologist?”

“Yes. That. He stay with him, ask questions, write book. He stay maybe three, four months.”

Ah! Now I understood why he was willing to receive us. He’d hosted a westerner before, with no evil results. Thank you, Unknown German, for preparing our way.

Several small rice bowls lay in the ashes at the edge of the fire pit. While the shaman continued his conversation with Chalaw, he partially filled each bowl with tepid tea from the kettle, then rubbed its inside with his fingers. He poured the waste tea through the cracks in the bamboo floor onto the chickens clucking and scratching on the ground below. Then he held a bowl up and examined it. Not clean enough.

He scooped up some ashes and scrubbed each bowl thoroughly, rinsed it with the stale tea again, inspected the results, then nodded approval.
He sprinkled raw, dried tea leaves in a wok, stirring them over the low fire until they crackled and smoldered, perfuming the air with the delicious black pekoe grown in long straight rows of bushes marching over the hills outside. Then, he tossed the crisp, smoking leaves into another kettle filled with boiling water. In a short while, he poured the brew into the freshly-washed bowls and placed one in front of each of us.

What was proper Lahu shaman etiquette? Should I drink first or wait for him to drink? How should I hold the bowl? I watched Chalaw for my cue, then sipped after he did. The tea was delicious.
As the men continued their conversation, the shaman motioned to the bowls and dismay flitted across Chalaw’s face. Then his placid expression returned.

Now what? Would Chalaw let me in on the discussion? How I wished I spoke more Lahu!
After a few moments with no enlightenment, I asked, “What? What is he saying?”

Reluctantly, Chalaw explained, “He say, these bowls very valuable. Worth much money.”

Worth much money? That was no cause for dismay. There had to be more to it than that. “And…?” I pursued.

He waited a moment, then asked, “What you call it when people in ground?”

“People in ground?”

“Dead people.”

“Oh. Umm…Graves?”

“Yes, that.”

“What about graves?”

“Shaman say, this valley, many graves. Old, very old. People come from Bangkok. French people. Germans. Dig up graves.”

“And the bowls?”

“Bowls found in graves. Only found in graves of kings. Mon kings. Long time ago, this all Mon country. Many Mon kings in graves in this valley. Bowls very valuable.”

“The bowls were in the graves of the Mon kings?”

“Yes. Found on head, here, upside down.” And Chalaw pointed to his forehead.

What do you do when you’re sitting by a shaman’s fire, holding a bowl of mountain tea, not wishing to offend your host, yet knowing your drinking bowl was once inverted on the skull of a dead Mon king?
I stared at the tea in my bowl a moment, then cast a sideways glance at my host. He was smiling benignly at me, waiting for me to drink his hospitality. Resolutely, I closed my eyes, forced away visions of Mon skulls, and gently sipped the fragrant tea.

He smiled again and continued conversing with Chalaw, ignoring me. I had passed the test.

When our host had finished several bowls of steaming tea, he lay down beside the firepit and lit up his pipe.

Soon, I was experiencing violent stomach cramps.
“I think that tea was too much for me,” I whispered to Chalaw. “My stomach hurts.”

“Opium, Aunty,” he whispered back.

Opium! So that’s what was in that pipe!

As the shaman’s eyes began to close on his pipe dream, Chalaw said, “We go.”

We explored the valley behind the shaman’s house and watched the village children swinging on a long vine. The dogs were playing with the kids and we were able to walk about without being bothered. I yearned to grasp that vine, kick off from the hillside, and swing out over the valley like the gleeful kids. I could just feel the stretch of my arm muscles, the exhilaration of the flight over the abyss, but Chalaw said no. “Maybe vine not strong,” he explained. “Maybe break.”

Reluctantly, I obeyed him. Best to follow the interpreter’s advice.

Eventually, I needed to “go to the bush” (there were no outhouses) and grunting pigs trotted along beside me, ready to gulp up whatever came out. This is the sanitation system of many animist villages. It does eliminate the stench of casual waste management, but doctors tell me many diseases are transmittted this way. For instance, say a human is sick and defecates on the ground. The delighted pig gobbles it up. The pig doesn’t contract the disease, but it carries it. If the slaughtered pig’s meat is not thoroughly cooked, the person who eats the meat will contract the disease. Of course, when the villager gets sick, he blames the spirits.

It was disconcerting, squatting down while flailing my Bible to shoo away the garbage collectors. I had trouble concentrating.

Squatting before the fire, the shaman and his wife cooked us a delightful dinner of pork and jungle greens, spiced blistering hot with chilis, served over steamed rice. They kept urging us to eat more, eat more. True to Lahu custom, they did not eat until we were fully satisfied.

That evening, as twilight changed to blackness, my bladder reminded me I would have to give it some relief before I crawled into my sleeping bag. Dogs were again prowling around on the ground below, renewing their interest in our visit. I asked Chalaw what I should do, and he in turn asked the shaman. No prissy prudery here!

Chalaw told me just to go to the edge of the split-bamboo porch and do my business in the dark. The shaman sent a boy out with me. He stood at the top of the ladder on the far side of the porch and swung his club as the dogs in full bark tried to get up the ladder to attack me. I didn’t tarry.

My American doctors always insist I take along diarrhea medicine when I fly to Thailand. When I try to explain to them that, on these trips, constipation is my problem, they don’t understand why. I don’t give further explanation. The cultures are too far apart to explain the situation in a brief sentence in a doctor’s office.

As we bedded down beside the fire pit, the shaman, bless his heart, gave Chalaw a blanket. His wife’s? He then covered my sleeping bag with his own blanket. He was willing to sleep cold so I could sleep warm. That’s Lahu shaman etiquette.
My fears were groundless. He was a perfect host.

THE END