Although the meaning of the word “sentience” is abstract and esoteric and can be difficult to precisely define, it is generally accepted as a noun meaning the readiness to perceive sensations. Thus, a person capable of walking through the woods and locating grapes or apples by scent, or rutting scrapes left by whitetail bucks, would be called sentient. That is, having fine-tuned senses. The same could be said of a person capable of finding his or her way through the wilderness on a sunless journey by reading the lichens, the moss and the figuration of tree branches.
The word can take on other meanings associated with sage wisdom and even Far Eastern religion, but let’s, for now, focus on sentient human beings — those who display extraordinary or even supernatural sensory abilities and interpretations. Then let’s ponder how the senses of human beings in their non-hunter-gatherer, civilized forms have weakened, faded or even vanished. I would make a case that scent is, in the modern world, the most diminished of all human senses. In this supermarket and pharmacy epoch of domesticated livestock and industrial agriculture, because we no longer must hunt and gather, we have lost our ability to follow our noses to wild foods and medicines.
One may wonder what brought me to this realization. That’s easy. I have observed my dogs for a lifetime, watching them search out specific grasses to eat for many different medicinal purposes I can never be totally sure of. But this much I know: On rare occasions when they’re not feeling just right and reject the morning food they typically run to and devour, they often run instead to these specific clumps of grass along the elevated brook bank and eat it until I call them off, and even then, do so reluctantly. Later, when I run them through fragrant hayfields of clover, rye and orchard grass, they search out these same green, hairy clumps of foot-tall grass to eat. At other times, they choose another type of grass, again being obviously selective, as though they have a sixth sense for a needed vitamin or nutrient, purgative or diuretic from among many available grasses in the habitat.
Having many times watched this unfold to my utter amazement, it is clear to me that it is a combination of instinct and a refined sense of smell that leads them to plant remedies for whatever ails them. No one will ever convince me that it is not their sense of smell that guides them to these grasses.
Now ask yourself this question: If animals, even domesticated gundogs, can find medicinal plants to cure their ills, and we are indeed animals, why can we not sniff out wild, natural remedies? My answer is that we have lost this ability over time, beginning with the dawn of civilization some 7,000 years ago. Since the first hunter-gatherers moved to the river valleys to live harmoniously in villages, then cities supported by domesticated livestock and horticulture, our ability to find food and medicine with our noses has been lost, never to be found. Yes, if we’re walking through hot, sticky woods, we can catch the sweet scent of wild grapes and follow our noses to them. But identification of medicinal plants and poisons by scent? Not a chance. Civilization has bred it out of our internal tool kit.
I have floated my personal fascination with this subject past many scholars in recent years. Not one has extinguished the concept with icy cold water. In fact, every last one of them has paused to ponder the possibilities before nodding in, at the very least, tepid agreement. This sample includes astute friends and sources in the fields of medicine, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, languages, poetry, you name it — they’re all in agreement, admitting what no rational being can deny. That is, we are animals who evolved from primitive hunter-gatherers.
I have in my extensive reading about primitive cultures kept my eyes open for confirmation of my little hypothesis based on deductive reasoning — a conclusion I am quite sure is not original. Yet never until recent weeks have I struck confirmative gold.
Then, like a bolt of lightning in the midnight sky, proof appeared a couple of weeks ago in a book given to me by my archaeologist friend Richard Michael Gramly, a learned man who’s study of ancient cultures and people has taken him around the world. When I told him during a telephone conversation that I was reading a book about hallucinogenic drug use by Amazonian jungle shamans seeking spirit quests and a mystical understanding of nature, he suggested I read Mark J. Plotkin’s 1993 book “Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice: An Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Amazon Rain Forest.” Then he gave me a copy by mail when he was done with it.
Having read three Tobias Schneebaum accounts of living with different South American Stone Age jungle tribes during the 1950s and ’60s, plus another on the same subject by French anthropologist Pierre Clastres, not to mention Virgil J. Vogel’s classic “American Indian Medecine,” I jumped on the book as soon as it appeared in my mailbox. And, yes, Plotkin put an end to my diligent search for answers I knew existed somewhere.
There, in black and white — on page 280, describing a shaman’s otherworldly ability to find and identify plants capable of curing illness in the dense, tangled South American rain forest of Kwamala, Suriname — was my answer. Seeking a way to identify these medicinal plants by sight, Plotkin suggested the shaman show him the important plants when they were in bloom or with berries as surefire identification guides. The medicine man gave him a bemused and bewildered smirk that screamed, “Huh? Why is that necessary. We know these plants with or without flowers and berries.”
Though it wasn’t what Plotkin wanted to hear, he accepted it, explaining: “They could identify any plant by its appearance, without needing fruit or flowers — its reproductive organs — as clues. Living in tropical rain forest, surrounded by hundred-foot trees whose tiny fruits or flower would appear 100 feet from the forest floor only one week each year, they had developed the infinitely more practical ability to identify a species by the sight or smell of the bark.”
Plotkin explains elsewhere that these primitive medicine men — in the occidental vernacular “witch doctors” — could also easily identify many poisons by smell alone, which makes sense, knowing these poisons could be fatal and had to be known. Plus, they had ways of boiling the poison out of some plants used in sophisticated medicinal or hallucinogenic decoctions.
So, take it to the bank: Native Americans throughout North America — and right here in the Northeast — had similar plant knowledge that could still be used today had it not been dismissed as hocus-pocus by evangelical missionaries.
There was much lost in this conversion — an annihilation of deep knowledge that’s far beyond our reach today. Saddest is that we could use a little concoction of their old ways.