This essay attempts to demonstrate that the intricate design art of the Shipibo-Conibo Indians of eastern Peru may once have been a codified system of meanings, a vehicle of communication. Although certainly not a veritable writing system, it may well have constituted a graphic device comprising symbolic, semantic units, in perhaps a mnemotechnical arrangement and was employed in ritual context. Present-day indigenous understanding of the meaning of the designs is fragmentary at best. The prime, almost obsessive, motivation of the Indians to preserve the art style, regardless of the loss of semantic content, is their continued belief in its overall spiritual, ethical, aesthetic, emotional, and medicinal significance, which provides both the individual and society with a mode of differentiation, integration, identity, and meaning. In its essential parts, the Shipibo-Conibo healing system may be understood as the application of a spiritual design message that is perceived both visually and rhythmically-melodically and is transformed into culturally meaningful information. Messages from the spirit world need a mediating agent to be comprehensible for the village world. Visual, auditory, and olfactory perceptions are, therefore, introduced as a connecting link and bound together to form a synaesthetic - and aesthetic - body of shamanic cognition.