Curandero and Shaman in Modern Mesoamerica

Among peoples still aware of an unpredictable wild surrounding the closure of ritual we might expect to find significant traces of ancestral shamanisms. Many Mesoamerican curers are indeed often characterized as "shamans," though most learn their technical craft, especially in Mayan areas, without personal visions. Thus in Mam-speaking Santiago Chimaltenango in Guatemala the chimán, with his bagful of beans and rock crystals, is both soothsayer and curer; through his divinations alone "can a Chimalteco order his life to suit the unchangeable future" (Wagley 1949, 71). Most divinatory techniques in Guatemala (see Oakes, 178; Wisdom 1940, 344) and throughout Middle America produce automatic results through strict procedures rather than individually variant visions or ecstatic flights of the spirit.

The impersonal nature of the curer's call in most of this region is underscored by absence of the personal guardian spirit central to shamanism in much of Eurasia and the Americas. The guardian-spirit concept has a Mesoamerican parallel, however, in the animal companion called nagual or tonal . (The former term, from Aztec nahualli, is also used of a witch capable of transformation into animals.) As early as 1530, Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas (in Foster 1944a, 89–90) noted such beliefs in the Honduran mountains: "The devil deceived these people and appeared in the form of a lion, tigre [jaguar], coyote, alligator, bird, or serpent; and these are called naguals, which is to say 'guardians' or 'companions'; and when the animal dies the Indian bound to it also dies." Acquisition of this companion, as Herrera describes it, is strikingly similar to guardian spirit quests in many North American tribes. The searcher went to a secluded place "and cried out to obtain the favors which his ancestors had had." After the animals he sought appeared in a dream, he made a pact that the first one he encountered would be his "nagual and companion for all time." It is a procedure which a Nootka or Twana, Crow or Sioux, would instantly have understood.

But in virtually no modern account of Middle American nagual beliefs is any personal initiative found, much less a purposeful quest nor even, in many instances, a vision. The name tonal, by which the animal companion is known in parts of Mexico, stems from Aztec tonalamatl, or calendrical book of fates; designation of this alter ego is almost always involuntary and at least implicitly predestined, from birth or before, by forces beyond individual control. The Tzeltals and other Mayan peoples of Guatemala and Chiapas believe that shamans assign naguals "according to the day of one's birth" (La Farge and Byers, 133); but even where no explicit connection with the sacred calendar is made, a sense of fatality is generally strong. Because no one, in many Mayan villages, knows

the identity of his nagual (see Wagley 1949, 65), the sickness or death of any animal at any time may lead without warning to one's own.

Whether the animal companion's identity is known or not, the individual almost never takes an active part in its acquisition. Among the Chatino of Oaxaca a specialist determines which animal has left its "tracks" in ashes around the house of a newborn child and ascribes the tracks to its tona (Greenberg, 91–92). A Mixe nagual might be known from a birthmark (E. Parsons 1936, 225), and in virtually every case, as G. Soustelle stresses (124) in discussing the Nahuatl village of Tequila, the nagual (here identified with a species) is not a guardian but only a companion to whose destiny the human being's is bound^[2] in a passive relation from which the individual derives no new knowledge or power.

Thus the Mesoamerican animal companion differs fundamentally (despite probable historical connection) from the guardian spirit elsewhere in the Americas. No quest and usually no vision is needed to acquire this shadowy and often unrecognized "secret sharer" allotted by forces beyond human ken. The nagual, not unlike the natal day-god of the ancient calendar, represents, as Bunzel writes (1952, 275) of the Quiche Maya villagers of Chichicastenango, "an utterly arbitrary and capricious destiny."

Affliction of the animal companion, which automatically leads to one's own, is one cause of disease; others widespread throughout Mesoamerica include invasion by evil "airs," witchcraft and the evil eye, sudden fright (espanto ), and imbalance between hot and cold (Redfield and Villa Rojas, 160; Wisdom 1952, 129–32). Most native curers rely principally (apart from herbal medicines) on magical and thus automatically effective practices in accord with their mostly involuntary vocation. No visionary quest is involved in their cures any more than in their call, and they are thus "shamans" in only a residual sense, by distinction from the priestly officials responsible for communal ceremonies. It is hardly surprising, given their fatalistic legacy, that most curers, instead of perilously venturing into the unknown, rely on infallible techniques to dispel disease from the patient's body.

Thus the Mayan h-men of Yucatán, far from being a Siberian shaman of the southern jungle, recites prayers, offers food to the gods, and cures by exorcism, herbal medicine, and bleeding (Redfield and Villa Rojas, 75). Another ancient Mayan technique, practiced by the Chorti of Guatemala and the villagers of San Antonio in Belize, is to "seize" the foreign matter from the patient's body by applying an object such as a fish or tortilla, chicken or tobacco leaf, which draws the sickness into itself

[2] But in San Pedro Chenhalhó, some animal 'souls "protect the souls of their compañeros" (Guiteras-Holmes, 248).

(J. Thompson, 71–73; Wisdom 1940, 347–49). Other common curing methods are blowing tobacco smoke, spitting, and sucking.

Even if Mesoamerican curers descend from primeval shamans, long centuries of settled agriculture, stratified societies, and ritualized religions (aboriginal and Catholic) have made them, in most cases, not ecstatic explorers of the unknown but diviners, herbalists, and ritualists, "shaman-priests" empowered by birth and training, not personal vision, to practice standard curing techniques. The questing dimension has not vanished but has been largely confined (as in the Pueblos) to set forms, so that curers embody less a visionary alternative to priestly hegemony than an extension of its dominant outlook from public to private sphere.

Largely confined, but not entirely: in some regions shamanistic traits remain prominent, whether surviving from preagricultural times or generated anew by historical and ecological changes. Herrera's account of nagual acquisition in sixteenth-century Honduras testifies to a pre-Columbian guardian spirit quest on the fringes of Mesoamerican civilizations, and far to the north, among the pagan Cáhita, "the source of curing power was the dream or vision, through which the individual acquired the assistance of a spirit, in animal form usually, which helped him or over which he had a certain control" (Beals 1943, 64).

Among Mayan descendants of perhaps the oldest continuous New World civilization, emphasis on hereditary office does not preclude a personal bond between curer and spirit, even without a vision. In Todos Santos, Guatemala, this bond takes the form of a metal chain thought to be "the pact between the chimán and the Spirit" (Oakes, 110; cf. 151); if the latter fails him, the chimán can go to its mountain home and break his chain and thus his connection with it. The bond symbolized by the chain distinguishes the shaman-curer, even in a culture so remote from ecstasy as the Maya, from the priest who derives automatic authority from his office and whose rituals depend not on relationship to a particular spirit but on their own efficacy, ex opere operato .

In the Valley of Mexico, the center of Aztec ritualism and Spanish missionary zeal, Madsen (1955, 49–56; cf. 1960, 181–86) reported in the 1950s an extraordinary parallel to Siberian shamanism among Nahuatl speakers in San Francisco Tecospa south of Mexico City. Here Don Soltero Perez's vocation was no mere matter of birth or training. One night in 1918 lightning struck, subjecting him to recurrent loss of consciousness. During these spells, "his spirit was kidnapped by the 'enanitos,' dwarf-size rain deities who have existed in the Valley of Mexico since Aztec times," and detained in mountain caves until he agreed to become a curer. After six months he consented and was given a spirit wife by whom he had children. He "and all other 'curanderos de aire' die twice a year; their spirits then go to a cave of the enanitos where they

receive instructions for curing." In his coercive call and ability to enter the other world when summoned, this curer, Madsen suggests, resembles Siberian (and especially Gold) shamans, even though his treatment of disease remains typically Mesoamerican in its reliance on magical techniques.

Among some peoples, mainly in isolated mountain regions, disease and its cure are thought to involve loss and recovery of the mobile soul. Thus the Sierra Popoluca of Veracruz believe that in cases of espanto a person's soul will leave his body, captured by dwarfish "masters" of fish and game, until the curer retrieves it by pleading, sucking, or both (Foster 1945, 185). Among the Highland Totonac, a curer "goes, in spirit, beneath the earth, to negotiate ransom" for a soul held captive by evil airs (I. Kelly, 402–03); the pattern is that of the visionary shaman's journey to the world of the dead. In northern Mexico, among the Tarahumara of the Sierra Madre Occidental, soul loss is the main cause of disease, and the curer must bring it back by projecting his own soul in a dream (Kennedy, 129–31; Bennett and Zingg, 259). Though he owes his office to birth or purchase, his power issues, Lumholtz writes (1: 322), "from the light of his heart, which was given him by Tata Dios (God the Father)," and this visionary enlightenment enables him not only to descend to the world below but "to see Tata Dios himself, to talk to him, to travel through space at will, for the shamans are as bright as the sun."

Contributing to Tarahumara visionary ecstasy are intoxicants, especially tesgiüno corn beer (Bennett and Zingg, 253), widely used for inspiration by others, including some generally sober Mayan groups. Use of alcohol before sacred performances in Santa Eulalia, La Farge remarks (161), seems "a mild approach toward ecstasy, a means of achieving a state in which the limited human being can more readily consort with divinity." Some trace of the Siberian shaman's frenzied raptures appears to survive even in formalized rituals of the sedate and long civilized Maya.

More important to traditional practices of Middle American peoples are hallucinogens familiar for centuries. Tobacco, peyote, mushrooms, and morning-glory seeds were, Wasson says (1966, 329), "the four great divinatory plants of Mexico at the time of the Conquest," mediating between men and gods; all are widely used today for medicinal, narcotic, or visionary ends, both by shamans and the people at large. There is little indication in Durán and Sahagún, as we have seen, that such substances were employed at the time of the Conquest to transcend the closure of this world through visionary access to another, but their continued use by widely scattered contemporary peoples, mainly of the mountains, may reflect that shamanistic purpose.

Among the Mixe of northern Oaxaca, the mushrooms called "Our

Lords" are believed to give visionary knowledge of cures. But the vision "is always the same" (Miller, 318): a dwarf who answers questions. Far more varied are visions of the nearby Mazatec. In Soyaltepec an apprentice curer goes to the wild to gather seeds of a vine called "Seed of the Virgin" (Villa Rojas, 118); he drinks a potion prepared from it and withdraws to await a vision. After repeated doses, he is transported to the sky, where he sees Our Lord and converses with curers already dead.

Beginning in 1955, when Wasson first attended a vigil by the "wise woman" Maria Sabina, the Mazatec mushroom cult gained a notoriety that may have contributed, he ruefully confessed (Estrada, 20), to undermining a possibly ancient curative practice. Ever since hearing a Wise Man sing for her sick uncle at a vigil with the "saint children" (as the mushrooms are called), María Sabina was attracted by a mysterious language "that spoke of stars, animals, and other things unknown to me" (39), and drew her beyond the limits of her impoverished existence. After eating the mushrooms she heard voices "from another world" (40) and, though illiterate, read from a Book of Wisdom which taught her to summon the Lord of the Mountains, to "see from the origin," and to "cure with Language" and the wisdom it bestows (56). In her vigils she was transformed into God and entered another world, the vision of which gives meaning to this one.

The Mazatec mushroom experience thus makes explicit the deep affinity between ecstatic vision and language: both breach the closure of the given world and open continually toward one being formed. "The Mazatecs say that the mushrooms speak," H. Munn writes (88). "The shamans who eat them . . . are the oral poets of their people, the doctors of the word." By means of "mushrooms that liberate the fountains of language" (92), the Mazatec shaman "has a conception of poesis in its original sense as an action": the mushrooms inspire him with language and "transform him into an oracle" (93) of the mobile spirit. The process is by nature a perpetual quest: "We are going to search and question," the doctor woman says (94), and what she seeks are tracks toward "the unexplored, the unknown and unsaid into which she adventures by language, the seeker of significance, the questioner of significance, the articulator of significance."

Far to the northwest, among the Tarahumara, peyote induces visionary transcendence, and the quest takes form as a pilgrimage for the sacred cactus. The christianized Tarahumara, Lumholtz observed (1:357) in the 1890s, regard the híkuli (as both they and the linguistically unrelated Huichol call the cactus known to the Aztec as peyotl ) as a demi-god to whom sacrifices are offered as the brother of Tata Dios (360). By the 1930s, the peyote shaman was rare, but the híkuli pilgrimage, lasting as long as a month, continued (Bennett and Zingg, 291–92).

But it is the nearby Huichol, perhaps "the least acculturated major contemporary Indian population in Mesoamerica" (Furst, 5), who have developed the peyote pilgrimage most fully. The Huichol shaman-priest, as depicted by Myerhoff (94–100), is summoned spontaneously in a vision revealed to a solitary young boy (or rarely girl); only after he has undergone rigorous probation and led as many as five peyote pilgrimages will he assume office. Like Eurasian shamans, he can transform himself into various animals, make the magical flight to the land of the gods, and follow souls to the underworld. He divines causes of illness, which he treats by blowing smoke, spitting, and sucking, but he is also a priest who presides, in the absence of both Catholic clergy and a cargo system, over public ceremonies, "embodying and promoting traditional values, jealously guarding the Huichol cultural heritage and identity." Fixed agricultural rituals and ancestral celebrations are not antitheses of the quest but its prelude, by which the shaman inculcates his followers with the itinerary of the peyote pilgrimage, thus firmly rooting this visionary journey in the communal present and inherited past.

Its goal is Wirikuta, the sacred home of the peyote in San Luis Potosí, some three hundred miles from the Huichol homeland. After purification and confession, the pilgrims themselves become the Ancient Ones (Myerhoff, 136), re-enacting—in the liminal communitas that binds them together throughout their journey—the primeval quest of the gods for renewal of life. Henceforth everything once predictable is "upside down and backward" (149), so that words and actions take on significances hilariously reversing the normal. After traveling to a place called Vagina and following the trail sanctified by the mythical first pilgrims, these hunters of the Deer-peyote reach the oasis of Our Mothers (167) and track the life-giving cactus. The shaman shoots arrows toward a peyote cluster identified as the Deer and implores this Elder Brother not to be angry, for it will rise again. Having shared the plants they have shot, the pilgrims leave the dangerous place at a run, "as though pursued and in great peril" (158). The shaman, after eating peyote, receives messages from the gods and learns the names of things, as he does when he drums and sings at sacred ceremonies. The arduously hunted peyote thus reveals knowledge of other worlds which he shares with those to whom hallucinations induced by the cactus could otherwise communicate nothing transcendent.

The Huichol complex of maize, deer, and peyote entails continual interaction between the shamanism predominantly practiced by nomadic hunters and the priestly rites of agriculturalists: ways of life mediated through the shaman-priest who re-enacts the hunt for peyote that originated in the mythical times celebrated in agricultural ritual. The peyote hunt aims "to return to the birthplace of the gods, to Wirikuta,

where all will be a unity, to gather híkuri, which is the maize and the deer, so that 'we may have our life' " (240), becoming the gods who first sought the peyote that each must now find for himself. But this pilgrimage, unlike rites for the corn, looks not toward a fixed ancestral past but toward a never completed future; by openness to this quintessentially shamanic dimension the Huichol "accommodate to new situations" (125) with an innovative flexibility that helps perpetuate their culture. To a Huichol shaman, unlike the once-mighty priests of aboriginal Mesoamerica, "answers were not self-evident or automatically provided" by ritual: for this reason he continues to question, and to quest, long after the ancient priests' confident answers have been forgotten.

The Mixe and Mazatec, Tarahumara and Huichol examples suggest the adaptive survival (and repeated renewal) in these mountainous regions of the shamanic quest for transcendent knowledge. These peoples were marginal, however, to the civilizations of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, among whose Maya- and Nahuatl-speaking successors (and others in the Mexican cultural sphere) we find only scattered traces of practices more ecstatic than the traditional curandero 's ritualized cures. In at least one culture descended from the ancient civilizations, however—the Tzotzil Mayan municipio of Zinacantan—the curer's role, despite millennia of priestly ritual, shows strong affinities with the primordial quest of earlier shamans. While cargoholders of the religious hierarchy perform the annual round of mainly Catholic ceremonies in Zinacantan Center, the h'iloletik or shamans practice in the hamlets. These too have their hierarchy, and many of their public functions are priestly (though only superficially Catholic), presumably adapted from practices of their ancient forebears.

But in other respects the Zinacantec h'ilol embodies not priestly ceremonialism but the questing spirit of the shaman searching for what can never be finally found. The most common way of becoming a shaman is not through heredity or instruction alone, but through a divine call in a series of three dreams over several years. In these the future shaman's soul is summoned by the supernatural alcalde (corresponding to the highest officer of the cargo system) inside "Senior Large Mountain," where he agrees to be a shaman and performs his first cures (Vogt 1970, 26–27).^[3] In curing rites above all, the pervasive ceremonialism of Zinacantec life reveals its continued affiliation with the spiritual quest. In addition to an animal spirit companion, each Zinacanteco possesses a ch'ulel, an indestructible personal soul whose identity is learned in a childhood dream voyage to Senior Large Mountain, and whoever loses

[3] On Zinacantec dreams see Laughlin's introduction and collection of dream accounts. For variants of the shaman's call see Fabrega and Silver, 31–32.

one or more of its thirteen parts requires a special ceremony to recover them (Vogt 1969, 370).

All shamanism inherently allows for unpredictable variations on its accustomed patterns, opening a space of indeterminacy for a spiritual quest that could never take place if everything sacred were given once for all and retrievable only by repetition of an immutable past. It is highly significant, then, that public ceremonies performed by the Zinacantec h'ilol in his priestly role, like calendrical rituals of the cargoholders, "take place without great variation," whereas his private ceremonies, Silver writes (145–46), "are subject to no such adherence to generally held notions of proper procedure," making possible a degree of innovation that priestly ritual in theory denies and in practice retards. "The basic patterns of organization resemble a syntax," Silver suggests, and the ritual symbols a vocabulary: "The ceremonial expressions that result from the interaction of the two are similar to the sentences of a language in their combination of patterning and variability." It is an interaction fundamental, as we have seen, to the spiritual quest.

The most elaborate of the Zinacantec shaman's variable ceremonies, "the Great Vision," is a quest to recover the animal spirit companion, embodying the soul, which has gone astray from its corral. Formalized though the procedure is, with its nineteen steps, fixed prayers, set arrangements of candles, pine boughs, and flowers, ritual baths and meals, and sacrifices of black chickens, the shaman's ancient search remains its recognizable core. The quest takes the form of a pilgrimage, lasting hours or even days, as the curing party travels up and down mountain trails from the patient's hamlet to the Ceremonial Center, then to a series of shrines at each of which the shaman prays to the Ancestral Gods inside the mountain, and finally, after sacrificing a chicken, back to the patient's home. Here the shaman proceeds (if "fright" is involved) to call back the patient's personal soul, shouting "Come, come!" as he strikes the ground with a staff. The parts of the soul are gathered up, Vogt writes (1970, 96),^[4] and led back into the patient's body, terminating the ceremony by the archetypal shamanic deed of retrieving life from the world of the dead.

Far as the sober Zinacantec shaman's quest may be from the visionary ecstasies of his Huichol or Mazatec (not to mention his Eskimo or Siberian) counterpart, it testifies to a continued need for transcendence even among so ritualized a people as the modern Maya. Interviews by Guiteras-Holmes with Manuel Arias, a former curer of the Tzotzil-speaking Mayan village of San Pedro Chenalhó near Zinacantan, suggest how es-

[4] For fuller accounts see Silver, 153–205; Fabrega and Silver, 172–88; Vogt 1969, 425–46, and 1976, 61–83.

sential the hazardous quest of the mobile spirit remains despite centuries of native and Christian ritual. The settled world may be a square and the ceremonial center its navel, and rites inherited from a mythical past may perpetuate its sacred order, but Manuel knows that this world is not a self-sufficient whole. Unlike the cultivated fields, the forest is dark and dangerous: yet this half-alien world of the monte, too, belongs to the experience of being human. When we fall asleep our ch'ulel, or soul, escapes to faraway places where the animal companion roams. But those alluring realms are hostile to human life insofar as they, too, threaten to be sufficient; the healer, in his effort to rescue the patient's soul from exclusive allegiance to this world of the gods and the dead, cannot rely on coercive rituals alone but "struggles against powerful forces in order to recover the ch'ulel that has been lost, exposing himself to danger by sending out his own ch'ulel in search, and by combating the forces of evil" (137). In this fundamental task he proves true to the shaman's primordial calling as heroic explorer of the boundless unknown in which the open-ended quest of imperfectly sapient man to expand his intrinsically limited knowledge and power incessantly takes place.