Icaro is the general name for the medicine songs used by healers in the Peruvian Amazon. A 2024 review describes them as one of the healer’s primary tools: single melodies without harmony, built from a few repeated phrases, that healers sing, hum or whistle, often with a rattle (Efthimiou et al., 2024).
Healers explain what the songs are for in their own terms. In a 2021 study of a Shipibo-led healing program for Western visitors, the healers said the first icaro of a ceremony sets up a protective structure around the space, and later songs diagnose and clear what they call dense energies (Gonzalez et al., 2021). A 2026 study of Shipibo-Konibo song argues that, in that understanding, the songs do things rather than describe them (Favaron Peyón and Zariquiey, 2026). These are beliefs within a tradition, not tested mechanisms.
The anthropologist Bernd Brabec de Mori, who did long fieldwork with Shipibo healers, puts songs at the centre: in his account of healers working in their own communities in the early 2000s, songs were the main means of healing, and patients did not drink the brew (Brabec de Mori, 2021). One small interview study at a Peruvian addiction-treatment centre found that patients said the songs helped them feel safe and guided them through difficult memories (Graham, Saucedo and Politi, 2022). Research on icaros is qualitative and early.
Sources
- Efthimiou et al., 2024, Psychedelic Medicine: music in psychedelic practice
- Gonzalez et al., 2021, Frontiers in Pharmacology: Shipibo ceremonial use of ayahuasca
- Brabec de Mori, 2021, Frontiers in Psychology: social attribution and ayahuasca healing
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