The Year Begins With Forgiveness

Every year on the Monday before Ash Wednesday, a man in a red mask leads a procession through the streets of Sibundoy.

The mask is freshly carved. A master woodcarver makes a new one each year, terracotta-colored, with mocking features and a wide painted mouth. On the morning of the procession the man puts it on, takes up his bell, and stands at the front of his people.

He is called the Matachín. In the cosmology of the Kamëntsá, the indigenous people who have lived in this valley since long before anyone tried to put dates on it, he is an incarnation of the sun.

He walks ahead. Behind him come the flag bearers, the dancers in their bright clothes, the seven taitas of the Cabildo, the masked Sanjuanes whose stretched-out tongues mock the language the Spanish once tried to impose, the elders, the children, the whole community.

They are walking toward the cathedral.

They are also walking into a new year.

This is the Bëtsknaté. The Big Day. Some call it Clestrinÿe, the season of flourishing. The Spanish priests who tried to fold it into their calendar called it the Carnival of Forgiveness, and that name stuck, but it does not say everything.

What the day actually does is harder to name in one word. The Kamëntsá have their own term, which translates closer to harmonization. The balance of the world is restored. The conflicts of the previous year are released. The dead are invited back. The new cycle starts clean.

This is not a metaphor. This is a day that does work.

Picture the Valley

The Sibundoy sits in the upper Putumayo, in the transition zone between the Andes and the Amazon. Cloud forest above, jungle below. Two peoples have lived here for centuries, the Kamëntsá and the Inga.

The Kamëntsá speak a language that exists nowhere else on earth. Not Quechua. Not Spanish. Not any of the major Amazonian families. A linguistic isolate, the scholars call it, which is their way of saying no one knows where it came from.

That fact alone tells you something. This valley has been holding its own thread for a very long time.

The Inga came later, descendants of the Quechua-speaking peoples whose empire once reached this far north. The two communities share the valley. They share the carnival. They share the medicine.

That medicine is Yagé.

You may know it by its more famous name. Ayahuasca.

It is the same brew. The same vine. The same spirit. The tradition that carries it in Putumayo has its own particular texture and its own particular fire, but the medicine the world has come to know as ayahuasca is the medicine the Kamëntsá and the Inga have been drinking, for ceremony and for everything else, for longer than anyone can name.

The night before the Bëtsknaté procession, the taitas of the valley sit in ceremony in the central plaza of Sibundoy. The plaza was built on top of the old indigenous cemetery. This was not an accident.

The Yagé wakes the ancestors. They are invited to the carnival. The next day, they walk with the community.

In the plaza that night, wooden sculptures stand throughout the open space. They were carved by hand over weeks of community work, depicting the cosmovision of the Kamëntsá. The taitas move among them. They sing. They clean each sculpture with their songs, with smoke, with the soft sound of the dulzaina. The medicine vibrates through the air.

By the time the sun comes up, the energy of the day has already been laid.

Practice Is the Medicine

Most of what gets written about ayahuasca pretends the medicine exists in a vacuum. A vine. A leaf. A brew. A ceremony.

It does not. The medicine exists inside a culture that is still being lived, still being defended, still being celebrated.

The taitas who hold the medicine are the same taitas who lead the carnival. Grandmothers who weave the ceremonial cloth sing the same Icaros their grandmothers sang. Children who run alongside the Matachín in February will one day inherit what he carries.

The medicine is the practice. Practice is the medicine. Without the day of forgiveness, the medicine forgets where it lives.

What the Capuchins Could Not Erase

The Capuchin missionaries who arrived in Sibundoy in the early twentieth century tried to stamp this carnival out. They saw the masks, the drums, the chicha, the Yagé, and they wanted it gone.

When they could not eliminate it, they tried to rename it. They emphasized the forgiveness part, because forgiveness was Catholic enough to be allowed. The rest they tried to push into the background.

The community kept going. They walked the procession. The masks stayed on. The medicine kept being drunk. And every year the priest was put on his knees in front of the Taita Mayor and crowned with the petals of the clëstrinÿe flower.

This still happens. In the middle of the Catholic mass, in front of everyone, the priest kneels and is harmonized by the Taita. The petals of the clëstrinÿe tree are placed on his head. For one moment, the hierarchy that the conquistadors brought is briefly, ritually, inverted.

The Kamëntsá kept their day.

The thing the conquistadors most wanted to erase, the people simply refused to put down.

The Morning of the Bëtsknaté Procession

The morning of the Bëtsknaté begins early. The Matachín assembles the community at a small rural church south of Sibundoy. He rings his bell. The procession forms.

Then they walk. Drums, harmonicas, flutes, rattles, every kind of small instrument anyone could make. There is no designated band. Everyone makes the music.

The flag bearers carry colors that mean specific things. White is peace. Blue is water. Green is hope. Red is blood.

Next come the dancers. First the Sanjuanes with their masks. Then the Saraguayes in their red costumes, mocking the Spanish soldiers who once tried to take everything. Behind them, the community in ceremonial dress.

Visitors are welcomed in. A Kamëntsá woman with the petals of the clëstrinÿe flower on her head will sprinkle them onto the head of a stranger as a sign of goodwill. Chicha is shared, sometimes pressed into the hands of someone who has never tasted it.

In the homes, before the procession even begins, children kneel before their parents and ask forgiveness for the wrongs of the year. The parents forgive them.

The year does not begin with resolutions. It begins with a clean slate, granted in a kitchen, before the sun has fully come up.

Food is everywhere. Mote, the hominy that is the staple of these valleys. Potatoes, corn, meat in quantities no household could eat alone. Chicha de maíz fermented in the days leading up to the celebration. Anyone walking through the village will be fed. Refusing is not really an option, and after a while you stop wanting to.

You walk through it. You drink with strangers. You are crowned with flower petals by a woman whose name you will never learn. You eat from a pot stirred by hands that have been stirring it for generations.

Something held together here. Something refused to be domesticated by any of the systems that came in and tried to do the domesticating.

What Taita Miguel Carries

Taita Miguel Mavisoy, our Taita at MahaDevi, comes to ceremony at the end of these days.

By the time he sits down with the medicine, he has walked the whole route of the procession. The dancers have made him laugh. Strangers have crowned him in petals, and he has crowned them back. He has eaten the mote. He has drunk the chicha. His bell has been ringing in his hand since dawn.

The festival is in his bones. The valley is in his bones. The people who fed him and laughed with him and sang with him have left something of themselves in him.

The medicine meets him there.

This is what you are sitting with when you sit with this lineage. Not a taita who walked in from somewhere else. A taita who walked through the carnival on the way to the maloca.

A taita who carries his people the way other people carry their phones.

This is what the medicine knows. This is what the medicine is.

Why the Bëtsknaté Matters

There is a reason this matters for anyone drawn to the medicine.

The people who carry Yagé in Putumayo do not separate the ceremony from the rest of life. The ceremony exists because the rest of life exists. The forgiveness, the kneeling, the masks, the bells, the colors of the flags, the chicha shared with a stranger, the priest crowned with flowers, the procession that begins at dawn and ends at the church.

All of this is part of how the medicine knows where it is.

You cannot import the Bëtsknaté. You cannot package it. It will not fit in a brochure. But you can travel to Sibundoy in February and walk in it. And anyone who has done that knows something happens to them on that day. A weight comes off. A bell rings somewhere in the chest.

This is not because the carnival is beautiful, though it is. It is because the carnival does what it says it does.

The conflicts loosen. The ancestors come closer. The year that just ended is set down. The year that begins is received with cleaner hands.

People often ask what is different about the Colombian tradition of ayahuasca. The most honest answer is that the medicine here lives inside a culture that has, every February, for as long as anyone can remember, gathered to start over. Together. In bright colors. With a man in a red mask at the front.

The Big Day, the Kamëntsá call it. Bëtsknaté. The biggest day of the year.

Whatever it is you are carrying, you set it down before the day is over.

That, more than anything else, is what we mean when we say the medicine is alive.