macht then mutters incoherently, and her assistants in- 
terpret the divinatory mumblings. 
In addition to this revelatory state, she also employs 
other means of determining the cause of illness. Often 
she will kill a lamb and extract the heart; or she may 
pretend to remove the patient’s intestines, which are 
then magically replaced without a scar; or she will pre- 
tend to remove from the patient’s body some foreign 
object, such as a worm or a thorn, which is the presumed 
source of trouble (Latcham, 1922; Cooper, 1946). 
Hallucinogenic and narcotic plants play an important 
role in the life of the Mapuche shaman. These drugs are 
normally employed during the machitun ceremony and 
are administered to the young machi as part of her educa- 
tion. Certainly these psychoactive plants have a powerful 
effect on her psyche and enable the machi to experience 
what Castaneda (1968) has called ‘‘non-ordinary reality”’, 
consisting of trances and hallucinatory states. In this 
realm of consciousness, she is capable of free exchange 
with the spirit world from which she derives her magical 
healing powers. It is not surprising that the plants used 
to produce these states are considered sacred and secret. 
‘Tobacco has been regarded as the most important 
narcotic plant of the machi (Latcham, 1922). Several 
strongly intoxicating varieties are known and smoked in 
ceremonial pipes or cigars, snuffed in powder or chewed. 
Tobacco is not only smoked by the machi, but the smoke 
is blown upon the patient to purify him. ‘This plant 
serves a dual purpose of exorcising the demonic spirits 
and of propitiating the Supreme Being. 
A species of Datura is also employed narcotically by 
the Mapuche. Datura Stramonium L., known as miayu 
or chamico, has been used to discipline unruly children 
who are fed the seeds in order to narcotize them mildly, 
while they are lectured by their elders (Gusinde, 1936: 
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