The most commonly used hallucinogenic plant was the Cebil, a tree from the Argentinean Northwest, whose fruit was reduced to fine powder and then aspirated, smoked in big pipes or drunk. Thus stimulating the moment when the “Chaman” approached the Goddesses and favouring the artistic imagination, creating new images related to religion. So we can observe the impossible in the iconography of the creations, such as a feline turned into an ophidian or bearing aviform features. Human characteristics are also part of this heterogeneous mixture. We can usually find these figurative variety in the Andes cultures as well as in some of the Argentinean Northwest cultures.
Therefore, the effect of the drug would work on the formal aspects and configuration of the iconographic representations but without changing the essencially significant features of the images |
