THE ONENESS OF OURSELVES, OF EACH OTHER, OF US AND OUR COMMUNITIES, AND US AND OUR PLANET, AND US AND THE ALL OF THE CREATION. ALL IS ONE. WE LIVE AND BREATHE WITH OUR PLANET, OUR BEAUTIFUL GAIA; AND WE RISK DYING WITH OUR PLANET, OUR BEAUTIFUL GAIA. THIS IS THE SPIRITUAL AND SACRED TRUTH UNDERLYING ALL THAT WE DO AND ALL THAT WE ARE. THIS IS THE SPIRITUAL AND SACRED MEANING OF US, OF ALL OF US, OF OUR HOLY GAIA.
Antonio Bolivar Salvador (Tiapuyama to his tribe) was an actor and a storyteller of all but mystic dimension. He died of covid-19 back in April 2020. He was aged 75.
In the film ‘The Embrace of the Serpent’ he played Old Karamakate, a shaman who was guiding a white explorer through the Amazon rainforest in search of the magic yakruma flower. Years before, as a young man, he had led another white explorer on the same quest. That journey, and the 2015 film, highlighted how the rainforest was being defiled by outsiders. A metaphor for the spiritual and thereby religious calamity that is engulfing our Earth, our Gaia. The film also focussed on the perennial search for wisdom that so many of us encounter when immersing ourselves deeply in the natural world; especially when we see the natural world in danger of being despoiled. Rightly, the film sees all life as sacred, and all of creation, all of our planet as being an holistic ONE, the fracturing of which fractures each and every one of us. The environment is the clue to what we have become and what we should try to be. That clue is our path back to meaning, that clue is the embodiment of our spiritual quest, if we would but attempt it. That clue, if embraced, offers us spiritual healing.
Wikipedia describes the film in the following way: Embrace of the Serpent (Spanish: El abrazo de la serpiente) is a 2015 Colombian internationally co-produced adventure drama film directed by Ciro Guerra, and written by Guerra and Jacques Toulemonde Vidal. Shot almost entirely in black and white, the film follows two journeys made thirty years apart by the indigenous shaman Karamakate in the Colombian Amazonian jungle, one with Theo, a German ethnographer, and the other with Evan, an American botanist, both of whom are searching for the rare plant yakruna. It was inspired by the travel diaries of Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes, and dedicated to lost Amazonian cultures.
Embrace of the Serpent was premiered on 15 May 2015 during the Directors' Fortnight section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Art Cinema Award. The film was released in Colombia on 21 May 2015, and worldwide over the course of the following twelve months. It has received universal acclaim from critics, who praised the cinematography and the story's theme, the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and way of life by white colonialism. It has won numerous awards, including the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, the Grand Jury Prize for Best Picture at the 2017 Riviera International Film Festival, and seven awards at the 3rd Platino Awards to recognise the best Ibero-American films of 2015, including the Platino Award for Best Ibero-American Film. In 2016 the film was submitted as Colombia's entry for the category of Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards and was included among the final five nominees, becoming the first Colombian film ever to receive a nomination for an Academy Award.
The film tells two stories thirty years apart, both featuring Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and last survivor of his tribe. He travels with two scientists, firstly with the German Theo von Martius in 1909 and then with an American named Evan in 1940, to look for the rare yakruna, a (fictional) sacred plant.[4]
Theo, an ethnographer from Tübingen who has already been residing in the Amazon for several years, is very sick and is travelling by canoe with his field notes and a westernised local named Manduca whom he had saved from enslavement on a rubber plantation. Karamakate prolongs his life, blasting white powder called "the sun's semen" (possibly a hallucinogenic made from virola[5]) up his nose, but is reluctant to become involved with a westerner and refuses his money. Theo is searching for yakruna as the only cure for his disease and the three set off in the canoe to search for it.
Many years later an American botanist, Evan, paddles up to a much older Karamakate who has apparently forgotten the customs of his own people. Evan says he is hoping to complete Theo's quest and Karamakate does assist, again reluctantly, saying his knowledge is spent. Evan has a book of Theo's final trek, which his aide had sent back to Europe, as he did not survive the jungle. The book includes an image of Karamakate, which he refers to as his chullachaqui, a native term for hollow spirit. Karamakate agrees to help him only when Evan describes himself as someone who has devoted himself to plants, although Evan's real purpose is actually to secure disease-free rubber trees, since the United States's supplies of rubber from South East Asia had dwindled due to the Japanese wartime advance.
Both expeditions feature a Spanish Catholic Mission by the side of an Amazon tributary, run in 1909 by a sadistic, lone Spanish priest who beats orphan boys for any "pagan" behaviour, and in 1940 by a delusional Brazilian figure who believes he is the Messiah. He only trusts the visitors when he believes they are the Biblical Magi, but Karamakate wins his respect when he heals his wife. By now the children of 1909 have grown into disturbed and violent acolytes.
In 1909, we are left with Theo, sick and having fled the Mission, arriving at a frontier post just about to be invaded by Colombian soldiers during the Amazon rubber boom, where the sacred yakruna is being abused by drunken men, and cultivated, against local traditions. Karamakate is furious and destroys it. In 1940, Karamakate does show Evan the origin of the plant in striking denuded dome-shaped mountains (Cerros de Mavecure), allegedly the home of yakruna. He reveals one yakruna flower that is on the last plant – he has destroyed all the others – and prepares it for Evan. The preparation, being hallucinogenic, aids Evan in undergoing a superconscious experience. While most of the film is in black-and-white, a part of this experience is shown in colour to signify its intensity. The film ends with a transformed Evan remaining enamoured by a group of butterflies.
The film explores the representation of the first people nations of the Amazon. In the film multiple languages are spoken: Ocaina (which is most frequently spoken), Ticuna, Bora, Andoque, Yucuna (Jukuna), and Muinane.[citation needed] The indigenous peoples are shown to have suffered at the hands of colonizers, and Colombian film critic and author Pedro Adrián Zuluaga states that Guerra highlights this by "shooting peripheric geographies... and bringing to the centre of the narrative an unavoidable contradiction between progress and tradition".[7] Daniela Berghahn, a professor of film studies at the University of London, notes how through time-lapse, Guerra highlights the pillaging of the Amazon rain forest by conquistadors, missionaries and rubber barons, and also the enslavement and degradation of the indigenous peoples, who were converted to Christianity — the character Manduca is both enslaved and Westernised — at the cost of their traditions and beliefs. The black and white cinematography bears similarity to the daguerreotype photography of early twentieth century explorers who initially documented the Amazon and inspired the film.[8]
Not only was the forest dying, Antonio Biolivar Salvador’s tribe was also dying. He was one of the last, and one of the last to live and breathe the ancient wisdom of his people. He did accept that people yearned for progress and more comfortable lifestyles, but at the same time he saw that a great truth was dying with the dying of the old ways. This was that Nature was the interconnected life of all things, from the soil to the plants and to the creatures. He saw that harm done to the natural world did greater harm to all beings. This was a Great Truth that he had been desperate to pass on.
