Art - Ned Denny on how the shamans of the Amazon got their highs

The most dedicated Clerkenwell cocaine enthusiast has got nothing on the Amazonian shaman. Forget crisp, rolled £50 notes and one-hit glass dispensing phials - when it comes to drug paraphernalia, this lot were in a league of their own. If, for example, he fancied a line of his special hallucinogenic "snuff", a shaman would place the powder in the centre of an elaborately carved snuff tray. The design of these trays made explicitly clear the nature of the journey on which he was about to embark: shaped like a snake with a human figure in its belly, they symbolised, so the catalogue to this extraordinary exhibition tells us, his impending voyage "back into the body of the ancestral anaconda". Not the stuff of your run-of-the-mill Friday-night debauchery, then.

It doesn't end there. Also on display in the British Museum's "Unknown Amazon" show are the hollowed bird bones with which the snuff would be snorted, and a delicate vessel, made from a snail shell, in which it would have been stored. The object reproduced on the poster for the exhibition, a carving of an agonised little man in the carnal-seeming clutches of the jaguar god, is actually a mortar in which the seeds for making the snuff would have been ground. Even the stool on which the shaman sat was specifically tailored for his undertaking, being made in the shape of one or other of the predatory animals that were believed to act as mediators between the human and spirit worlds. A necklace of iridescent beetle wings signalled the hallucinogenic firestorm that would follow inhalation, a necklace of jaguar teeth the shaman's capacity to assume at will his feline alter ego.

All this attention to detail suggests a culture in which drugs were held in some reverence, and used ritually rather than abused indiscriminately. The communal ceremonies over which the shaman would preside, in his combined role of doctor, priest and psychic tour guide, reaffirmed the link between the tribe and a mythical past of wise beasts and brightly flickering forms. (Taken to the west and shown a Hollywood film, some modern-day tribesmen were unimpressed - they had seen far better, they said, in their nocturnal sessions back home.) In fact, it doesn't take too long to see that almost the entire aesthetic of these peoples is drug-derived - or, rather, derived from the strange mental territories to which their drugs gave access. The patterns seen by snuff-takers - "grids, hexagons, zigzag lines and undulating lines, rapidly vibrating lines, eye-shaped motifs, many-coloured concentric circles or chains of dots . . . combining and recombining in ever new patterns and changing colours", according to one western experimenter - seem to have spread like a plague. Enigmatic geometries cover a huge range of objects, from the pixellated weave of basketry to the maze-like designs on pots, plates and loincloths. Many of these patterns bear an uncanny resemblance to computer graphics or electronic circuitry, as though the newest of our technologies were merely following blueprints laid down in the depths of the brain.

Similar patterns adorn many of the anthropomorphic funerary urns that form a large part of this pleasantly scaled show (the cramped round of the British Museum's Great Court, managing to create the atmosphere of some ill-lit forest clearing in the Hortung Gallery, comes into its own for once). Mostly found in groups in riverside caves where they would have stored the disinterred bones of the dead, they humanise to various degrees the basic form of the terracotta pot. The archaeologists who stumbled upon them must have had the shock of their lives, as even in a museum, these alien-visaged containers have a deeply disturbing presence. They show the human body as if hollowed out by some not entirely benign, transfigurative force, and somehow one suspects the involvement of the shaman's magic dust. Perhaps this is exactly how they appeared to each other after a couple of hefty lines.

There is something else, however, that contributes to the ghostliness of the urns. Although for years it was blithely assumed by anthropologists that the forest could support only a small number of isolated communities, it is now estimated that, on the eve of the Portuguese conquest, there were something in the region of 3,250,000 people living in populous settlements along the Amazon and its tributaries. Having no natural immunity to European disease, these highly sophisticated cultures were ravaged by wave after wave of epidemics. By the 1950s, the number of indigenous people living in Brazil had fallen to a low of 100,000. The populations are rising once more, but it remains the case that today's tribes are no more than the scattered remnants of a lost civilisation. The sacred function of these urns thus remains a mystery, their creators some of the first victims of colonial greed.

"Unknown Amazon: culture in nature in ancient Brazil" is at the British Museum, London WC1 (020 7323 8000), until 1 April 2002

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