The Hekura: The Tiny Spirits That Live in the Chest

Inside the shaman’s chest there are mountains.

This is not metaphor in the Yanomami framework. The hekura — the tiny spirit-beings who are the actual operative force in all Yanomami healing — live in their own territories inside the shapori’s body, and those territories have geography. There are mountains where the hekura of the mountains live. There are rivers where the hekura of the river-fish live. There is a forest where the hekura of the forest animals move through the undergrowth.

The shapori’s body is not a container for the spirits — it is a world that contains them.

He maintains them the way a person maintains a home: with attention, with feeding, with the specific care that each hekura requires. Some hekura are demanding — they want the shapori to abstain from certain foods, to sleep in certain positions, to avoid certain social situations that might contaminate the space inside him. Some are more easygoing. All of them require the yãkoana to stay present.

Yãkoana is the shamanic medium — a powder made from the inner bark of the Virola tree, blown into the nostrils by an assistant through a long tube. The hekura are attracted by yãkoana. When the shapori ingests it, the space inside his chest becomes accessible to the spirits — he can see them clearly, communicate with them directly, send them out on tasks, receive their reports.

Without yãkoana, the hekura are present but quiet, living their own lives in the mountains inside him.

---

He has been a shapori for twenty years.

He learned the practice from his father’s brother, who was the most respected healer in their community. The learning takes years — not the technique of the yãkoana, which is simple, but the cultivation of the hekura relationships, which require the patient development of trust between the practitioner and beings who are not human and do not share human concerns.

The hekura who chose him first was the hekura of the toucan. This is common: the birds often come first, because they move between levels of the world more readily than other spirits. The toucan-spirit appeared during his first serious yãkoana ceremony as a small luminous figure, brilliantly colored, standing in the center of his chest in a forest he had never seen before. It looked at him with an assessment he would come to recognize in all his hekura: not friendly exactly, but interested. Willing to negotiate.

The negotiation is his life’s work.

Each hekura has things it can do. Each one has things it will not do. The shapori who understands his hekura’s capacities and limits is the effective healer; the one who overestimates them or misunderstands them fails the patient.

---

The healing ceremony for the sick child goes through the night.

The shapori sits. The yãkoana is blown. His hekura come forward inside him — he can feel them gathering, feel the mountains inside him becoming more vivid, more present. He describes what he sees in the singing voice that is the ceremony’s primary form: the hekura moving through the space inside him, the specific location of the child’s spirit-problem that they are showing him.

The child has lost a part of her spirit to a predatory hekura from outside the community — a foreign spirit, from the territory of a distant group, that has been drawn by a food violation. The shapori’s own hekura identify it, encircle it, negotiate its release. The negotiation takes three hours and is conducted entirely in the singing that the people around him hear as continuous and nearly rhythmic but that, from inside, is a complex diplomatic exchange.

Davi Kopenawa, the great Yanomami spokesman whose account of this practice has reached the world, writes:

The hekura are the true inhabitants of the forest. They are not here for humans. They are here because the forest is here. We shapori learn to enter into relationship with them, and in return for the relationship, they help us. But it is their help, freely given. We do not command them.

The child’s fever breaks before dawn.

The hekura settle back into their mountains inside him.

The forest is very large. The mountains inside a shaman’s chest contain only a fraction of what lives in it.