Antrocles,
You mentioned in your first post about the 'Jaguar on The Chain'. I have researched and found some additional information on this phenomena that may be of interest to you:
The Tragic Cosmovision
There is an ambiguity inherent in shamanic practice, where the dangerous work of healing and sorcery intersect. Because shamans possess spirit darts, and with them the power to kill, the boundary between sorcerer and shaman is indistinct. Such shamanism, says social anthropologist Carlos Fausto, “thrives on ambivalence.”
In the Upper Amazon, life and death are inextricably intertwined, and the cosmos is conceptualized in terms of predator-prey relationships.
Indigenous Amazonian communities often draw a connection among attack sorcery, hunting, warfare, and predation — particularly by the jaguar, the ultimate predator. By forcibly inserting pathogenic darts into bodies, sorcery is a form of human predation; the sorcerer is an eater of human flesh; the Piaroa always consider a disease to be a process of being eaten. Stories among the Sharanahua explicitly relate shamans to cannibalism. The shaman Ruapitsi, they say, ate one of his wives; so powerful was his hunger for human flesh that he cut pieces from his own thigh for food. His second wife killed him with an axe.
Shamans are often equated with jaguars — indeed, are thought to become jaguars.
Sorcery is the evil twin of healing. Instead of extracting harmful objects from sick bodies, the sorcerer introduces them; instead of maintaining relationships of trust and friendship, the sorcerer is antisocial, dangerous, secretive. Thus, too, healing and harming are intertwined.
The Shipibo clearly state that the healing act itself ineluctably causes harm — that to remove the sickness from one person is to cast it upon another who lacks the power to repel it. Since the illness-causing substance cannot be destroyed, the shaman, in curing one, always harms another. In the same way, Yagua shamans toss extracted sickness-causing darts toward the sun, where they reach the subterranean realms of the people-without-an-anus, causing considerable harm. Even more, the harm multiplies. In reprisal, the shamans of the people-without-an-anus fling balls of earth at the Yagua, on which their children sometimes choke.
In the same way, in return for successful hunting, the Tukano shaman must pay a fee — the lives of living people, who are sent to serve the Master of Animals. The shaman drinks ayahuasca and sees these victims in the form of birds sitting on the rafters of the spirit’s house. The lives are those of people who live far away; when the shaman learns that people have died in some other place, he knows that his debt has been paid.
And this works in the other direction as well. Among many indigenous peoples of the Guyana Amazon, the term canaima refers both to a mode of ritual killing and to its practitioners, a form of dark shamanism involving the mutilation and lingering death of its victim, who becomes, after death, the shaman’s food.
But the killing of the helpless victim is also seen as a human sacrifice to Makunaima, the creator of all animals and plants, in return for his bounty to humans, and in order to ensure his continuing benevolence; the victim is food for lord jaguar and the garden spirit
I also have used Ayahuasca and smoked DMT. I also thought these where tools to grow spiritually but I do not believe this anymore.
You mentioned in your first of this thread:
i came back new. complete. lost but with an undeniable cargo. my teachers told me as much and made it clear that i would need to return many times to learn how to wield this 'jaguar on a chain' . it was made understood that as long as i held on and never let the chain go (ie: try to go back to an old life that was no longer there anyways) i would have this power within me that i could use to clear all blockages and, more importantly, to heal.
if i let go of the chain...the jaguar would immediately turn around and consume me. (ie: madness).
This to me doesn't sound benevolent at all and doesn't respect free will in the least. Animal possesion in the Shamanic world is very common and these entities are your 'allys' aslong as your in line with what they want. Would you agree with me that this sounds dangerous?
A person with much Shamanic experiance also had this to tell me:
Alliances with “spirits” can be dubious and are often fickle. Relying on spirit helpers depends on either your control over them or their good will towards you. However close you may feel them to be; they can turn on and betray you on a whim. I’ve seen this in my own experience, and curanderos like Pablo Amaringo have quit the path after his helpers betrayed him. (He wasn’t the only ayahuasquero this has happened to, either.)
Antrocles, I am not trying to be confrontational. I always just try to find the 'Truth' in things. And in my research I have found that Shamanism is a dangerous path and a slippery slope with 'bargains' between yourself and other entities that have there own goals and desires that may be at odds with yours.
One thing that I have learnt is that in the Spiritual world, it is very hard to discern between good and evil, and things that look good on the surface may be otherwise.