Shitana and Arkana: Songs of Harm and Protection

A note on this page. This documents a sensitive aspect of Shipibo–Konibo and mestizo shamanic tradition. It is presented as cultural and educational material — a description of what is believed and practised, not an endorsement of those beliefs and not an instruction manual. The forces described here are understood within the tradition as real and potent, and are never to be approached outside the guidance of an experienced maestro. The page is informed by ethnographic scholarship and practitioner accounts; review with a traditional Shipibo knowledge holder is ongoing.

At a Glance

Shitana is, in the documented tradition of the Peruvian Amazon, a term for harming sorcery — and more specifically for the songs sung to cause someone harm. It belongs to a family of magical song-categories used by Amazonian healers (alongside arkana, cutipo, manchari and huarmicara), and it comes from a Quechua/Kichwa verb meaning “to throw” or “to cast” — the act of sending a harmful spirit (supay) into another person (Brabec de Mori, 2015; 2018). Its protective counterpart is arkana. A separate, more recent usage — common in contemporary retreat and online circles — applies the word to the “dark” or testing side of a plant met during a dieta; that sense is described further below, and clearly marked as the later, oral usage.

What Shitana Means

In the best-documented record of Amazonian curing — the ethnomusicology of the Ucayali valley — shitana is not the “dark side of a plant.” It is one of the principal categories of magical song that healers (médicos) understand and use. Bernd Brabec de Mori, who spent years recording and analysing this repertoire among the Shipibo–Konibo and neighbouring peoples, lists the main categories by their intended effect: huarmicara (love magic), arkana (protection), cutipo (treating harm from natural entities), manchari (against susto, fright-sickness) — and shitana, “the songs that are sung in order to cause someone harm” (Brabec de Mori, 2015, pp. 661–663). In Shipibo, the same idea is carried by the words yotoai and boman (Brabec de Mori, 2018, p. 77).

The word itself reveals the concept. It derives from the Quechua/Kichwa verb shitana, “to throw” or “to cast” — used elsewhere for casting something into the sun, or for killing. In the language of sorcery it means to send: to throw a supay (a harmful spirit) into another person, who then falls ill (Tödter, 1992, cited in Brabec de Mori, 2015). Among Kichwa speakers to the north, shitana covers harmful techniques in general; among the Spanish-speaking mestizos of Iquitos and the Ucayali, the terms narrow — supay comes to mean a malevolent sorcerer (a synonym of brujo), and shitana his specific techniques, among them his songs (Brabec de Mori, 2015, p. 663).

So at its documented core, shitana is an act, not a substance: a directed, intentional working of harm, transmitted above all through song.

A Later Usage: the “Dark Side” of a Plant

Alongside this, a second, looser usage has become common in contemporary retreat centres and online plant-medicine communities. In this sense, “shitana” names the challenging or testing aspect of a plant spirit encountered during a dieta — the difficult visions, fear, or turbulence a dieter may face before a plant “opens” to them. Some practitioners speak of certain plants as carrying a great deal of shitana in this sense; the Toé and the ayahuma tree (Couroupita guianensis) are often named among them.

This usage is real and widely held, and worth recording — but it is best understood as a later semantic extension of the term, circulating mainly in mestizo-influenced and international circles, rather than the meaning attested in the ethnographic literature. We document it here as living practitioner belief, while keeping the distinction clear: in the tradition Brabec de Mori records, shitana is sorcery and its songs; the “plant’s dark side” is a more recent way of speaking. (On how plants are ranked and dieted — and why “master plant” should be used sparingly — see Menor and Mayor; ayahuma and most dieta plants are teacher plants rather than apex master plants.)

Arkana: the Protective Counterpart

If shitana is the song of harm, arkana (also arcana) is the song of protection. Luna traced the term to the Quechua arkay, “to block” or “to bar” — “something that protects the individual, so that nothing evil may penetrate him” (Luna, 1986, p. 90, quoted in Brabec de Mori, 2015). In Shipibo it is paanati (Brabec de Mori, 2018, p. 77). An arkana may be a protective song or an object, and it serves both the healer — who shields himself against hostile médicos and ill-disposed entities while he works — and the patient. A healer will commonly “place” an arkana on a client at the end of a successful treatment, so that the healing cannot be disturbed or undone, and so the person is guarded against further harm (Brabec de Mori, 2015, p. 662).

In the lived language of the dieta, arkana is often spoken of as a kind of spiritual protection or “armour” earned through discipline and a completed dieta, and sealed by the maestro’s icaro. That experiential framing sits comfortably alongside the documented one: the song that protects is the mirror of the song that harms.

Related Vocabulary

Supay and brujo

A supay is, in Quechua and Kichwa, a very general word for a spirit or “devil” — the invisible and visible beings that populate the world (Tödter, 1992, in Brabec de Mori, 2015). In the Ucayali its sense narrows to the malevolent sorcerer himself, the brujo. The distinction between a healer (curandero/médico) and a brujo is not one of tools but of intent: both draw on the same plant spirits, songs and knowledge. Notably, the act of curing sorcery can itself involve “inflicting” — redirecting the harm (daño) back toward its original sender — so the line between defence and attack is, in practice, a matter of position and purpose (Brabec de Mori, 2018, pp. 76–77).

Virote (magical darts)

Across mestizo vegetalismo, harm is often imagined as a virote — an invisible pathogenic dart that a sorcerer keeps within his body and projects into a victim to cause illness; the healer, in turn, extracts it, classically by sucking (Luna, 1986). The visionary “weapons” sometimes reported during a difficult dieta are conceptually linked to this world of darts and sending.

A note on “kapi quiribo” and “maya yoshin”

Two further terms — kapi quiribo (visions of vermin and decay) and maya yoshin (visions of death and corpses) — circulate in contemporary online plant-medicine communities as labels for specific kinds of difficult vision. We have not been able to find them in the ethnographic or linguistic record, and so present them only as contemporary practitioner usage, not as established Shipibo–Konibo vocabulary. (Yoshin / yoxin on its own is well attested — a spirit, often a malevolent one.)

A Note on Context and Safety

These concepts belong to a sophisticated, living indigenous knowledge system. Within the tradition they are not metaphors for psychological difficulty — they describe real spiritual forces, and they are handled by trained specialists within a framework of discipline, protection and lineage. Engaging with them outside the supervision of a qualified, experienced and ethical traditional guide (a maestro or Onanya) is held to be genuinely dangerous. The role of the maestro is not supplementary; in this tradition it is the single most important safeguard.

This page describes beliefs and practices; it is not a guide to performing them, and it deliberately avoids any “how-to” detail. Where possible it privileges indigenous and collaborative scholarship over external commentary, and it uses the tradition’s own terms rather than loaded translations such as “black magic.”

Common Questions

Is shitana the same as a plant’s “dark side”?
Not in the documented tradition. There, shitana means harming sorcery — specifically the songs a sorcerer sings to cause harm (Brabec de Mori, 2015). The “dark side of a plant” meaning is a more recent usage that has grown up in contemporary retreat and online circles; both are described above.

Is shitana the same as brujería?
They are closely related. Brujería is the practice of sorcery in general; shitana is, more precisely, the sorcerer’s techniques — above all his songs (yotoai, boman in Shipibo).

What is the opposite of shitana?
Arkana (Shipibo paanati) — protective songs and objects that block harm. The same person who can sing harm can sing protection; intent is what separates them.

Are “kapi quiribo” and “maya yoshin” traditional Shipibo terms?
They circulate online among contemporary practitioners, but we could not find them in the ethnographic or linguistic literature, so we treat them as modern practitioner vocabulary rather than established tradition.

Does every plant have shitana?
That idea belongs to the later “dark side of a plant” usage, not the documented one. Practitioners who use the word that way often say certain potent plants — Toé, ayahuma — carry it strongly; this is oral belief, not a documented property of the plants.

References

1. Brabec de Mori, B. (2015) Die Lieder der Richtigen Menschen: Musikalische Kulturanthropologie der indigenen Bevölkerung im Ucayali-Tal, Westamazonien. Innsbruck: Helbling, pp. 661–663. (Based on the author’s 2011 doctoral dissertation, University of Vienna.) Publisher
2. Brabec de Mori, B. (2018) ‘“The Inkas’ Song Emanates from My Tongue”: Learning and Performing Shipibo Curing Songs’, in Aharonián, C. (ed.) La música y los pueblos indígenas. Montevideo: Centro Nacional de Documentación Musical Lauro Ayestarán (CDM), pp. 73–107 (esp. p. 77). Full text
3. Luna, L.E. (1986) Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon. Stockholm Studies in Comparative Religion 27. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. (Arkana, p. 90; virotes/magical darts.)
4. Tödter, C. (1992) study of Río Pastaza Kichwa healing terminology, cited in Brabec de Mori (2015), pp. 662–663 (for the etymology of shitana and the sending of supay).

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