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Max Carocci2 min

Shamans: Decoding a Colombian Visionary Drawing

September 12, 2025

This depiction of a vision features many elements that reflect stories of creation, as told by the oral traditions of the Tukano people. Collected by anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, who claims it was drawn by Yebá, a Tukano person from the Vaupés area of Colombia, this image is composed of geometric and anthropomorphic motifs.

While geometric shapes may be part of a shared visual language across the world, the meanings assigned to each visual element are determined by culture. As such, the motifs here would not make sense without the expert’s explanation, which Reichel-Dolmatoff provided in the book in which the image was published, Beyond the Milky Way: Hallucinatory Imagery of the Tukano Indians (1978).

U SHAPE

The sideways U shape represents a door or portal that connects different worlds. Cosmic doors can be physical features or invisible ones that shamans know how to access.

INVERTED HUMAN

This diving person is linked by a meandering line to the canoe, which suggests that the figure is associated with the people in it. He is likely a character from the cycle of accounts that form the creation myth.

RATTLES AND SONGS

Reichel-Dolmatoff reports that the L shapes are rattles (the shaman’s preferred instrument), and the wavy lines depict songs, which can connect humans to the invisible world and transmit knowledge.

CELESTIAL CANOE

The canoe carries some of the first humans. Celestial canoes are a common theme in Amazonian oral accounts, though they are sometimes talked about metaphorically as anacondas.

Y SHAPES

This is the shape of a cigar holder, used by Tukano and other Amazonian peoples to rest the rolledup tobacco they smoke. Some holders may be tall enough to reach from the ground to the mouth of a sitting shaman.

SEVEN COLUMNS

The seven columns in the lower part of the image represent songs that relate to different recitals of creation. Differences in the designs may stand for differences in the contents of the myths.

Max Carocci

Max Carocci is a cultural and social anthropologist and is currently adjunct professor in Art History and Visual Cultures at the American University in London. For 12 years, he designed and taught the World Arts programme for Birkbeck College, London, in partnership with the British Museum. He is the co-editor of Art, Shamanism and Animism (2022), and has curated numerous exhibitions and collections for institutions, including the British Museum, the Horniman Museum, the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, and the Musée du Nouveau Monde in La Rochelle, France.

This feature has been extracted from SHAMANS: The Visual Culture of Animism, Healing and Journeys to Other Planes by Max Carocci (£25, Thames and Hudson), out now.