ivresse-Twisted language of South American Shamans and the "spirits" they commune with.

I sense a relationship between the utility of twisted language of the Yaminahua people and the contour rivalry (Contour rivalry is an artistic technique used to create multiple possible visual interpretations of an image. An image may be viewed as depicting one thing when viewed in a certain way; but if the image is flipped or turned, the same lines that formed the previous image now make up an entirely new design.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contour_rivalry
) used in sculptures similar to the stelae found in the Peruvian labyrinth of()
"The third example is drawn from the work of another British anthropologist, Graham Townsley, who worked with the Yaminahua people, and is from an article called “Song Paths” that he published in the French anthropology review L’Homme, published in English in 1993. Francis Huxley and I gave a large excerpt of this text in Shamans Through Time, which is an anthology that we wrote in Rupert and Jill’s basement fifteen years ago.

Yaminahua people drink ayahuasca, which they call shori, and communicate in their visions with yoshi beings. Yoshi are invisible, and they animate plants and animals. But they are also multifaceted and ambiguous, and all reports of them underline the fundamental difficulty of knowing them. They are like and not like. They are the same and not the same.

These entities emit songs, and shamans listen to these songs, sing along with them, and learn to communicate with these entities by singing their melodies back to them, but they use words. And the language that they use to sing to these entities is deliberately abstruse and metaphoric; they speak what they call tsai yoshto yoshto, meaning “language twisting twisting,” or twisted language. Almost nothing in twisted language is called by its usual name. Jaguars are called baskets, anacondas are called hammocks, and fish are called peccaries. In each case there is an obscure but real connection between the two terms. Jaguars are called baskets because certain fibers used to make baskets have patterns similar to the markings of a jaguar. Anacondas are called hammocks because as they hang from trees they sometimes look like hammocks.

Yaminahua shamans say that they use this twisted language to talk to the multifaceted yoshi beings because normal words would crash into them, whereas with twisted words you can go in close but not too close and circle around them and see them clearly. So it’s like with a boomerang: you aim it over there to impact over here. You say one thing to mean another; this is how you address yourself to these multifaceted and fundamentally ambiguous beings who have no unitary nature. So here, metaphor is not incorrect naming, it’s the only naming possible.

The Amazonian people have a view of reality in which the visible world that we usually see is a world of appearances that hides a more fundamental world that is normally invisible and contains powerful entities."-      http://realitysandwich.com/323480/amazonian-perspectives-on-invisible-entities/?fbclid=IwAR3s2-jB__tBt9-tkdH4Kj4_lZaSak2AjeDwPwANblcsAGoQHcHDp_OkG3s   retrieved Dec.14 2018