page_title: Manuel Córdova-Rios
section_title: Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo
hierarchical_section_title: Manuel Córdova-Rios / Subject of novel, and poem / Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo
caption_attribution_description: chaman forêt amazonienne equatorienne juin 2006
context_page_description: Manuel Córdova-Rios was a vegetalista of the upper Amazon, and the subject of several popular books.
  As a young mestizo of Iquitos he joined in a company to set up camp in the surrounding Amazon forest and cut rubber trees. He was captured then by a native tribe, among whom he apparently lived for seven years. The elderly chief taught him in intensive private sessions traditional knowledge, e.g., about medicinal plants of the jungle, and about ways of leadership. From the small tribe he learned skills for hunting in the jungle and acquired the name Ino Moxo. The chief also led night-long group sessions under the influence of ayahuasca to sharpen prowess in the hunt. After the chief's death, Córdova was acknowledged as leader of the tribe for some years.
  He then returned to Peruvian life, married and raised a family. Eventually he became well known in the upper Amazon for his success as a curandero, by using the chief's herbal teachings. He also regularly sent medicinal plants to New York.
  In the early 1960s he met an American forester, Bruce Lamb, a veteran of many years in the Amazon.
context_section_description: Manuel Córdova-Ríos inspired a 1981 novel by the Peruvian writer César Calvo Soriano, who was himself a native of the Peruvian Amazon. It was published in Iquitos. The Three-Halves of Ino Moxo is the novel's title in English translation.
  The story told describes a pilgrimage to the shaman Ino Moxo, undertaken by author César Calvo and his fictional cousin César Soriano, along with appearances by Félix Insapillo and Iván. First are presented encounters with several other shaman-curanderos in the region: Don Juan Testa, Don Hildebrando, Don Javier, and Juan González. The party continues their fictional journey to the remote refuge of an elderly Córdova (known here as Ino Moxo).
  The novel appears based on very real people, yet they become transformed into characters who inhabit a poetic epic. Hence the work partakes somewhat of the new journalism or creative nonfiction. Although the book often reads like poetry, demonstrating at times an imaginative voyage through a shifting intersubjectivity, nonetheless mixed in are events from Peruvian history. The narrative is framed as factual. Over a dozen identified photographs are included, of local scenes and portraits of people, e.g., Córdova.
  In interviews with the book's author Calvo, Ino Moxo discusses matter-of-factly the sense of mystical surreality in the Amazon forest. He describes the inward progression of his reality as his life unfolded: from urban youth in Iquitos to capture in the Amazon, then his adoption of tribal lifestyles. This last involved an interior-cosmic recalibration. Amazonian arts of visionary perception are interspersed with reportage from the region's troubled past: episodes of the violent conquest and ruin of native tribal communities during the rubber boom. Calvo thus portrays an historical context of fundamental intercultural incomprehension. Yet Ino Moxo, by following his teacher the revered shaman Xumu, manages to transcend the contradictions. He both shares and contests the urban landscape of modernity set in the Amazonian ecology, while cultivating an organic knowledge of forest mysteries. The medium of this transcendence is an imaginary realm of inward connection and intrasubjective realization, which remains inscrutable and continuous, pathways in a labyrinth.
caption: Amazon shaman, as one of Córdova's three-halves in Calvo's book
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