Rock crystals and peyote dreams : explorations in the Huichol universe 087480695X, 9780874808698, 0874808693, 2006010246

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ROCK CRYSTALS & PEYOTE DREAMS ROCK CRYSTALS & PEYOTE DREAMS FURST

EXPLORATIONS IN THE HUICHOL UNIVERSE PETERT. FURST

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Think with a Good Heart

Stacy B. Schaefer • $35.00

ISBN 10 0 87 480695 X • ISBN 13 0-978 87480-695 3

"To become a weaver is to learn the women's customs, lor weaving is the reason lor living. When you are teaching yourself to weave you are given the power to think with the gods. It is a very beautiful thing to think this way, because weaving is very ancient. That's how I think — Gabriela

For centuries Huichol Indian women of western Mexico, or Wixarika, as they prefer to call themselves, have been weaving textiles on backstrap looms. They weave within the context of family traditions passed down since precolumbian times from mother to daughter, and from grandmother to granddaughter. Stacy Schaefer lived with two families, learning weaving in the same manner as Huichol women and gaining insight into the women's realm. The long initiation opened a door to a deeper path as she became aware that some weavers are also shamans.

ROCK CRYSTALS & PEYOTE DREAMS

Wixarika Women Weavers and Shamans

FURST

THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH PRESS www.UofUoress.com

UTAH

ANTHROPOLOGY / SHAMANISM

he Huichol people live in west T Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental. The most authentically "traditional" of all Mexican Indians, they have become famous because of their vivid yarn paint­ ings, well-documented peyote pilgrim­ ages that take them three hundred miles east from their present homeland into the north-central desert, and sacramental use of the hallucinogenic cactus, peyote. In the mid-1960s, Peter T. Furst began a lifelong encounter with their intellectual culture, facilitated by a growing relationship of mutual trust with Ramón Medina, an aspiring Huichol shaman, storyteller, and artist, and Ramón's wife, Guadalupe de la Cruz Ríos. Ramón, who became a full-fledgec shaman with his fifth peyote pilgrimage, also had a Huichol name: 'Uru Temay, Young Arrow Person.

( Continued on back flap)

Over the years, Furst published a number of articles on various facets of Huichol life, many of them centered on what he learned and observed during his growing relationship with Ramón and his people Bound together by personal reminiscences and background explanations, Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams compiles and updates many of those articles It includes transcriptions of myths that func­ tion as charters for "being Huichols" and descriptions of deities, rituals, and beliefs, as well as the place of hallucinogens in Huichol culture. Furst skillfully weaves memories and current reflections with older material in a manner that makes for a highly readable, contemporary presentation.

'PETER T. FURST is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Latin American Stud­ ies, SUNY-Albany, and Research Associate at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and at the Laboratory of Anthropology/Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH PRESS Jacket design by Jinni Fontana

Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams

ROCK CRYSTALS & PEYOTE DREAMS EXPLORATIONS IN THE

HUICHOL UNIVERSE

Peter T. Furst

The University of Utah Press

Salt Lake City

© 2.oo6

by The University of Utah Press. All rights reserved.

All photos by Peter T. Furst

The Defiance House Man colophon is a registered trademark of the University of Utah Press. It is based upon a four-foot-tall, Ancient Puebloan pictograph (late Pill) near Glen Canyon, Utah. it

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Furst, Peter T. Rock crystals and peyote dreams : explorations in the Huichol universe / Peter T. Furst. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-87480-869-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10:. 0-87480-869-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Huichol Indians—Social life and customs. 2. Huichol Indians—Religion. 3. Huichol mythology. 4. Mexico—Social life and customs. I. Title. F1221.H9F84 2006 305.897'4544—dc22 2006010246

www.UofUpress.com

Contents

Introduction............................................................................................... i

i. “How One Goes Being Huichol”..................................................... 2.1

2. The Chasm Between the Worlds....................................................... 35 3. “Hunting the Deer-Peyote to Find Our Life”................................ 52

4. Kiéri and the Solanaceae: Nature and Culture in Huichol Myth and Ritual....................................................... 106 5. The Magical Birth, Life, and Make-Believe Death of Kiéri the Sorcerer...................................................................... 121 6. Who Are the Huichols, Anyway?................................................... 137

7. Huichol Traditions of the Soul....................................................... 177 8. How the World Was Destroyed by Water and Dog Woman Gave Birth to a New Human Race .................... 219

9. The Half-Bad Káuyumari: A Huichol Version of the Pan-Native American Trickster-Culture Hero........................ 240

10. Child Saint into Child Shaman, Cathedra into ’Uwéni: How the Huichols Adapted and Transformed Some Catholic Icons into Their Own............................................. 276

Afterword............................................................................................ 297 Acknowledgments.............................................................................. 301

References............................................................................................ 304

Index...................................................................................................... 316

Introduction Religion is to them a personal matter, not an institution, and therefore their life is religious—from the cradle to the grave wrapped up in symbolism. CARL LUMHOLTZ,

Symbolism ofthe Huichol Indians

has gone by since I first heard more than just their name about a Mexican Indian people the world knows as “Huichols.” In their own language they call themselves Wixárika, pl. Wixáritari, “Huichol” being a corruption of one of several names by which early Spanish explorers identified them. In this work I use “Huichol,” the name by which they have been popularized and which they, too, use when speaking of themselves in Spanish. The degree to which they have held on to their aboriginal religion, with its crowded pantheon of female and male ancestor and nature dei­ ties; a rich store of oral literature that tells of the “First Times”; the institution of the mara’akáme, the Huichol term for shaman-singer; and family rituals and the annual round of aboriginal community-wide cer­ emonies is remarkable, not to say unique, among Mesoamerican Indians. Finally, their intense, centuries-old devotion to the visionary peyote cac­ tus is legendary. All this was news to me when, as a freelance science writer in the mid-1950s, I went to see a UCLA geographer named Henry J. Bruman for an eyewitness account of peyote, its ceremonial use, and its effects among Mexican Indians. I heard about Professor Bruman from Carl O. Sauer, a highly respected cultural geographer at the University of Califor­ nia at Berkeley, who as Bruman’s mentor directed his 1940 doctoral dis­ sertation. Sauer called it an unusual, even path-breaking study of cultural and geographic boundaries of the different alcoholic beverages in use in ore THAN a half century

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INTRODUCTION

ancient Mexico and their contemporary survivals. And so it was. What interested me was that during his fieldwork in the late 1930s Bruman had visited the Huichols in their rugged homeland in the Sierra Madre Oc­ cidental, a feat no easier then than when Carl Lumholtz, the Norwegianborn pioneer ethnographer of Huichol art and symbolism, visited them on foot and by mule in the 1890s. Of course, Bruman knew something of their peyote rituals and pilgrimages to collect the sacred cactus in the north-central high desert from Lumholtz’s writings (1900, 1902). It was not peyote per se that piqued his curiosity, however, but alcohol. And the Huichols brewed two very different kinds. In first place was their version of the ceremonial maize beer widely known in northern Mexico as tesgüíno, or tejuino (from the Nahuatl [Aztec] teyuinti), but which the Huichols call nawá (related to navait, the Pima-Papago word for a wine made from the fruits of the giant saguaro cactus). Second, Lumholtz had mentioned sotol (from the Nahuatl qotolin}, a fiery brandy distilled from a cactus of the genus Dasylirion, with a head of many long, slender, sharp-pointed leaves sprouting from a trunk that, baked in pits, had been a major source of sustenance for ancient Desert Culture people in the Great Bend region of southern Texas. Still, peyote was too prominent in the mental universe and rituals of the Huichols for him to overlook it. Tesgüíno is ancient, perhaps as old as the first experiments with culti­ vating and selectively hybridizing teosinte, the most distant Mexican an­ cestor of the maize that became, and still is, the basic agricultural staple of Indian Mexico and that quickly spread throughout the world in the centuries since Cortés and his conquistadors made landfall on the coast of Veracruz. Not so sotol, a product of distillation, a process unknown in the New World before the European invasion. The earthen still described by Lumholtz was definitely Asiatic, a curious fact that for some years added to speculations about precolumbian trans-Pacific contact. Bruman confirmed its Asian design, Filipino, to be exact, but of colonial origin rather than precolumbian. Its source was almost certainly the Manila Galleons, which stopped regularly at Acapulco, on the coast of Guerrero, and at San Blas, Nayarit. To this day Huichols travel here on pilgrimages to pay their respects and make offerings to Tatéi (Our Mother) Haramara, the divine personi­ fication of the Pacific Ocean. For them, the Pacific and inland lakes such as Chapala, south of Guadalajara, are survivals of the primordial sea that once covered all the earth and from which all life originated. Here, too, they locate the entrance to the watery underworld, whose guardian stands petrified offshore as a tall rocky spire. Offerings to these sacred places and their personifications include fresh water from sacred springs,

INTRODUCTION

3

in exchange for which they take back the salty water of the sea; mixing the two is thought to hasten the life-giving rains. The technology and design of the earthen still could have reached the Huichols via fugitive Filipino sailors from the Manila Galleons who sought refuge in their mountains. Perhaps there were even Huichols who, captured on the beach near San Blas and impressed into service on one of the galleons, or who even signed on out of curiosity, sailed all the way to Manila, jumped ship on the return voyage, and taught their compatriots how to brew firewater. Bruman’s dissertation, “Aboriginal Drink Areas of New Spain” (1940), covered an enormous terrain, geographically and culturally. It truly was a pioneering contribution without equal to our understanding of the many fermented beverages with which the original inhabitants of Mexico have for untold centuries celebrated and experienced their spiri­ tuality. For reasons beyond anyone’s control (not least its author’s reluc­ tance to devote the time and energy needed for revision), it took more than fifty years to get it published. Now at long last in print, Alcohol in Ancient Mexico (Bruman 2000), remains what it was when I read it as a graduate student: firsthand information that is still not easily available anywhere else. On that first occasion in the mid-1950s, and also later, I found Bru­ man to be generous to a fault with his time and knowledge. He had useful information on peyote, both as a visionary intoxicant in Huichol ritual and, crushed and liquefied, as an additive to tesgüíno/nawá, presumably meant not only to strengthen the inebriating effects of the maize beer but to reinforce its sanctity by combining two species Huichols consider to be, if not exactly equally imbued with spirit power and ancestral sanc­ tion, sacred. I saw this done for myself in the spring of 1967 during a pey­ ote ceremony on the rancho of the great shaman and community leader ’Colas (Nicolás Carrillo de la Cruz) in San Andrés Cohamiata. But it was not until years later that I accidentally came across a mention of the practice in one of the myths of the “First Times” which an anthropologist named Robert M. Zingg collected in 1935 in the Huichol community of Tuxpan de Bolaños. The manuscript of the myths (Zingg 1935) is owned by the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which has for many years made photocopies available to any interested researcher. I’ve had mine since the mid-1970s and over the years have “milked” it, so to speak, for details that fit into my own research and writing. Early in my life as a professional anthropologist, ethnobotanist Rich­ ard Evans Schultes, longtime director of the Harvard Botanical Museum and leading authority on New World “hallucinogens,” paid me the honor

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INTRODUCTION

of an appointment as one of his museum’s research associates, and it was from him that I learned that in South America the addition of one spe­ cies of inebriant to another to strengthen the effects, or sometimes even to activate an otherwise ineffectual alkaloid, is a common practice in ecstatic-visionary shamanism. Bruman had observed a Mesoamerican equivalent: the addition of peyote to a beer-like ritual beverage made from maize. Nor was it much of a surprise to me that Huichol oral tradi­ tion credits the ancestor deities with having been the first to add potency to the fermented beverage they make from sprouted maize and consume in prodigious quantities during the ceremonies. Besides, is not peyote itself not only a manifestation of deer but also of maize? Of course, back in the 1950s I had not the slightest idea of any of this. So it did not occur to me to wonder, as I have more recently, if one basis for the qualitative identification Huichols make of two species so utterly different from one another as maize and peyote lies precisely in the one thing they have in common when maize is processed into alcohol: the capacity to induce an “altered state of consciousness.” I should add that it was also from Bruman that I first learned that “becoming sacred” and thus closer to, or even one with, the divine is a primary reason for ritual intoxication, and not just among the Huichols.

Peyote, the Sacred Cactus Peyote (from the Nahuatl [Aztec] peyotl) is a spineless cactus with a slightly rounded and segmented top and a long tapering root which is native to the Chihuahuan Desert and the lower Rio Grande Valley. It is small in size and unremarkable in appearance: its gray-green crown with its little tufts of hair barely projects above the surrounding soil, and it is often concealed in the protection of spiny vegetation, making it virtually invisible to the untrained eye. When I first got to see it for myself in its natural habitat, I would surely have missed it had it not been pointed out to me by my Huichol companions. Yet it figures very large indeed in the history, ethnology, ethnobotany, and psychopharmacology of the ecstatic-visionary flora of Native American shamanism. In the United States, it was for decades at the center of an ongoing war between, on the one side, the law and on the other, Indian people, cultural anthropolo­ gists, civil rights lawyers, and other advocates of First Amendment and freedom-of-religion rights for Native Americans. Most directly affected by legal and missionary zeal were the adherents of the syncretistic pan­ Indian Native American Church, now numbering about a quarter of a million.

INTRODUCTION

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Figure i. Huichols ensure future growth of their beloved peyote by leaving part of the long tapering root in the ground.

Soon after the founding of the Native American Church in the sec­ ond half of the nineteenth century among Indians exiled to Oklahoma from their traditional territories, peyote was adopted as sacrament in its rituals, rather like sacrificial wine in Holy Communion of the Catholic church. It was largely because of this role that peyote was one of the first of the many “hallucinogenic” plants known to Native Americans to come under serious scientific study in Europe, first by the brilliant German pharmacologist Louis Lewin, in whose honor it was first named Anbalonium lewinii (Lewin 1888a, 1888b). It was long assumed that peyote use north of the border was an import from Mexico. But the natural range of the little cactus extends northward from north-central Mexico into the lower Rio Grande Val­ ley. This fact, and radiocarbon dates ranging from 5,000 to 7,000 years B.R yielded by several desiccated but otherwise intact peyote plants ex­ cavated with other evidence for Archaic Desert Culture ritual in rock­ shelters in the Trans-Pecos region of southern Texas, effectively lays to rest the theory of Mexican origins. There is no doubt that the use of Psilocybe mushrooms and of the morning glories Turbina corymbosa and Ipomoea violácea and many other ecstatic-visionary plants was pio­ neered by Mexican Indians. But the discovery of the visionary effects of peyote appears to be at least as ancient north of the border as south.

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INTRODUCTION

To explain my early interest in peyote some eight years before I met my first Huichol: as a writer specializing in natural history, not as a stu­ dent in anthropology, which I would not become for several years, I was pretty much compelled to learn everything I could about peyote to fulfill an interesting assignment. One of the publications on which I relied for some of my uncertain income was a California biweekly called Fortnight. Its managing editor was Richard Mathison (not to be confused with the science fiction writer, whose name, in any event, is spelled with an e). One day he called with an assignment: peyote use as a First Amend­ ment issue, along with whatever scientific and ethnographic information I could gather about its biology, pharmacology, and history as a ritual intoxicant. What had suggested such a wide-ranging investigative essay was the arrest in Los Angeles of two Navajos on charges of having used a “dan­ gerous drug.” The “drug” was peyote. How far back one could trace its use, by all accounts without any ill effect, was then not known. But there were anthropologists at UCLA who specialized in ancient Mexico, and it was from one of them that I heard about a Franciscan chronicler, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, who in the mid-sixteenth century compiled a massive cultural history of the Aztecs known as the Florentine Codex. From his Aztec consultants Sahagún learned of numerous ritual intoxi­ cants used in ancient central Mexico, among them a cactus called peyote. There was no mention by him or any of the other colonial chroniclers of any physical harm done to those who used it in their pagan rituals. With that as a start I hit the UCLA graduate library for what turned out to be a daunting quantity of authoritative literature. Beginning with Weston La Barre’s The Peyote Cult (1975), his classic history of the Native American Church, I found nothing that would justify its banishment by the government or the prosecution of American Indians who had already been victimized for far too long by the white man’s prejudice and greed. It was the well-founded argument of the jailed Navajos and their lawyer that as members of a pan-Indian religion that integrated Chris­ tian with traditional Native American beliefs in its rites and symbolism, they had a perfect right to have peyote in their possession and to use it in religious ritual. The law, on the other hand, claimed, without any evi­ dence that I could see, that they were using the little succulent just to get “high.” What has continued to amaze me is how long it took, and how much effort by so many people, to make its use in religious ritual accept­ able; as I write this in the summer of 2005, the Navajos, who themselves long resisted peyote and the Native American Church as a threat to their

INTRODUCTION

7

traditional religion (see Aberle 1966), have only just now formally recog­ nized the right to religious use of the powerful little succulent. I had an acquaintance in the Hollywood Division of the Los Ange­ les Police Department, and he (a detective-lieutenant, no less) justified the arrest as the government’s duty to protect its citizens against “stuff” that might well kill them, or at the very least rot out their brains. Liquor, which was perfectly legal, could do that for sure, but peyote? Absolutely. Not only that: it was “well known” to lead to all sorts of sex crimes be­ cause it lowered the normal inhibitions! Even in my relative ignorance I knew that to be just as nonsensical as the lumping, years later, of peyote and other non-addictive visionary plants sacred to Indian people in the same class with hard drugs like crack cocaine and heroin in a “war on drugs” that can never be won. So I went to work. Hours and days in the stacks of the UCLA library were fol­ lowed by face-to-face and long-distance interviews with anthropologists, ethnobotanists, pharmacologists, and even a Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. Humphrey Osmond, who had long experience in researching the effects of the so-called hallucinogens. I learned much that would later serve me in good stead but did not do me much good at the time: just when the last piece of information had fallen into place and I was ready to start writ­ ing, the editor called with bad news: after eleven years of trying valiantly to rival Time, Fortnight had fallen victim to the proverbial bottom line, and the next couple of issues would be the last. That was in 1957. Years passed before I again thought about Huichols or peyote. The fact that it happened at all was not by design but by a for­ tuitous accident. In 1962, my third year of teaching the anthropology of non-Western, especially precolumbian, art and Mexican culture his­ tory, I gave up freelance writing and was accepted into UCLA’s doctoral program in anthropology. Although we were in different departments, I would occasionally visit Bruman and talk German with him. When the time came to flesh out my doctoral committee of three anthropologists with two faculty members from departments other than my own (as re­ quired at UCLA), I asked him and Richard Rudolph, a long-time resident of China who chaired the Department of Oriental Languages and with whom I shared an interest in ancient Chinese funerary symbolism and its relationship to shamanism. Both agreed. I was awarded the Ph.D. in 1966, by which time I was able to pay Henry back with some of my own impressions of peyote among the Huichols. The year before, Johannes Wilbert, who has had a decadeslong professional love affair with the Warao, a fishing culture in the delta

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INTRODUCTION

of the Orinoco River, especially their tobacco shamans (Wilbert 1972, 1987), and who was both my mentor and, as director of the UCLA Latin American Center, my boss, sent me to Mexico. My mission was twofold: to open a regional office of the center in Guadalajara and to pick a sub­ ject for my dissertation. I was pretty sure what the thesis would be about. Even before I first visited Mexico in the mid-1950s, my own long-time interest was the ceramic arts of the west Mexican shaft-and-chamber tomb cultures, not as an aesthetic experience, which was considerable, but what they might tell us about the religions by which they were inspired and of which they, and their subterranean architectural environment, were a function. A related interest was the possibility, and increasing probability, of pre­ columbian coastal contact between west Mexico and the Andes, and perhaps even a South American origin of not only Mexican metallurgy but shaft-and-chamber tomb architecture, which in Mesoamerica was limited to the three West Coast states of Colima, Jalisco, and Nayarit (Furst 1965b). In large part this was inspired by Clement W. Meighan, an archaeologist of wide experience in California and west Mexico who chaired the anthropology department when I was accepted as a doctoral student and who came to seriously consider that possibility during field­ work in western Mexico (Furst 1965b, 2005). In 1959 and i960 I had reconnoitered, so to speak, some of the known shaft-tomb cemeteries and even ventured down into a few deep tombs that had been cleaned out by looters. In 1965 I published the first radiocarbon dates for one of these tombs, in the journal Science (Furst 1965a). By then we knew for certain that earlier estimates of a much later time were wrong and that these cultures flourished between the last one or two centuries B.C. and the first centuries A.D. In the event, a salvage excavation of a shaft-and-chamber tomb that had been looted of its saleable contents some years before but still con­ tained potentially valuable information, and a “shamanic” interpreta­ tion, then new and unconventional, of one class of shaft-tomb figurines, ended up as my doctoral dissertation (Furst 1966). But in the meantime I had the good luck of becoming acquainted with a remarkable Huichol Indian couple, Ramón Medina Silva and Guadalupe de la Cruz Rios. These two, and especially Ramón, were to have an indelible effect on my life and my writings as an anthropologist. The reader will meet them in these pages, for without Ramón I very much doubt that I would have been able to at least get my feet wet in the depths of Huichol intellectual culture. It is not that I abandoned the ancient arts

INTRODUCTION

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Figure i. Guadalupe, Lupe for short, with her informally adopted daughter. Always sickly, the little girl died a few months later, leaving Lupe and Ramón as bereaved and disconsolate as if she had been their biological child. Summer 1966.

and their symbolism for ethnology, quite the contrary. Rather, while I was quickly disabused of any notion of a historic or genetic connection between the Huichols and the shaft-tomb cultures (other than that they shared in a basic Mesoamerican world view to which both Indian past and Indian present subscribe), what I learned of the Huichol spiritual universe did sometimes illuminate problems of precolumbian symbol­ ism. If nothing else, it broadened my horizon and my receptivity to ways other than our own of seeing reality. The accident that brought Huichols into my life was prompted by my first, and mostly bureaucratic, responsibility: to set up a Mexican branch of UCLA’s Latin American Center on which students from UCLA and other institutions could rely for logistical and other support. Other than the relevant Mexican authorities, an American diplomat I had to see in that connection was the cultural affairs officer of the American consul­ ate in Guadalajara. I have long forgotten his name, but it was by way of a large and colorful work of art that graced his office that I first learned that there was such a person as Ramón and that he was both an artist and an aspiring shaman.

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INTRODUCTION

Actually, how Ramón was described was not as a “shaman” (a term not then enjoying the general, and more often than not misty-eyed, usage it does today) but as a “witch doctor.” I could hardly let that pass, and after a brief argument we compromised on curandero, which is what Mexicans and other Spanish-speakers call practitioners of “folk” medi­ cine. And as I was soon to discover, Ramón, though still some years away from “completion” as a shaman, already had something of a reputation as an accomplished herbalist and healer. The artwork on the office wall that caught my eye was my introduc­ tion to what has become the quintessential Huichol art form: the “yarn painting,” so called because in place of watercolors or oils, the artist “paints” in colored yarns pressed into a thin coat of beeswax. The col­ ors were bright, but even used together they somehow did not clash. The subject matter consisted of motifs taken from what I assumed to be nature but was actually the same inventory of symbolism and mythology that attracted the Norwegian pioneer ethnographer of Huichol art Carl Lumholtz: deer, birds, snakes, flowers, trees, rocks. All were in beautiful balance, something I later learned is a hallmark of this artistic medium, as it was also a virtual passion of Ramón’s. I asked about the artist and was told he was a Huichol Indian, that he “hung out” at the great colo­ nial church in Zapopan, outside Guadalajara, and that he was studying to become “some kind of witch doctor.” It was this as much as his obvi­ ous artistic talent that made me want to meet him. I even had the naive hope that such a man, as an indigenous west Mexican training in the esoteric arts, might help me in the interpretation of west Mexican tomb figurines. As it turned out, he did have some useful ideas, especially about the opposition between left and right. But that is another story. I asked where I might find this potential treasure and was told to go and see Padre Ernesto, a Franciscan priest who was a friend and benefac­ tor to Huichols and bought and sold their arts and crafts. And so I went to Zapopan and met the padre. His full name was Ernesto Loera Ochoa, and he turned out to be a most unusual kind of cleric, respectful of Indian cultures in general and that of the Huichols in particular. He insisted on addressing and introducing me to his Indian friends as doctor, no matter that I told him I would not earn that academic honor for another year. He was not at all reluctant to have me understand that he saw no sense in trying to convert Huichols: “Why steal their religion when it so beau­ tiful?” And it was not just words: in the vestibule of the basilica that is home to the bejeweled image of Guadalajara’s patron saint, the Virgin of Zapopan, he had Huichols construct a full-scale replica of a xiriki, the

INTRODUCTION

II

traditional ancestor god house that is integral to most Huichol ranchos in the Sierra and that can also be seen near the aboriginal temples. He even had them make images of some of the principal Huichol deities to place on a niwetári, an altar, inside. Needless to say, and as he assured me with a twinkle in his eye, his bishop did not approve. When Ramón showed up a few days later and we were introduced, he turned out to be not only a sensitive and sociable multi-talented art­ ist with a natural gift of language, a great sense of humor, and a friendly attitude toward inquisitive strangers, but a true man of the soil. Then about forty years of age, he had spent a lifetime subsistence farming, in­ terspersed with harvest-time treks to the Pacific coast as a hired hand on Mexican maize and tobacco farms—a story of unremitting hardship of which he speaks so movingly in these pages. What was also impressive was his command of virtually every art and craft with which Huichol men, women, and even children busy them­ selves when not occupied with the chores of digging-stick horticulture or herding. He was also an accomplished musician on the homemade violin he had inherited from his father and a guitar and the traditional four-hole flute of his own manufacture. And, true to his reputation, he really was an aspiring shaman, or, to use the Huichol term, mara’akáme. “Technician of the sacred,” a term coined by the historian of religion and shamanism Mircea Eliade (1964), is also right on the mark. Both he and his wife, Guadalupe, whom everybody knew as Lupe, came from a fam­ ily of shamans. His grandfather had been a shaman and so was Lupe’s, although she insisted, and much to my surprise he readily agreed, that her shaman forebear had more “power” and was more prestigious. Ramon’s mother, Doña Kuka, who years earlier had lost her eyesight to untreated cataracts, and his sister Concha were both practicing shamans. That he was proficient and talented in the arts was also not that unusual for a Huichol: historically, it has been so rare to see a Huichol whose fingers are not busy with one or another art or craft that Zingg, a graduate of the University of Chicago who in the early 1930s spent over a year in the Huichol community of Tuxpan de Bolaños, entitled his eth­ nography The Huichols: Primitive Artists (1938). (“Primitive” was then, but fortunately has long since ceased to be, the accepted term to differen­ tiate the arts of the Indian Americas, Oceania, and Africa, and hence also their creators, from the European tradition.) Though still some years from “completion,” Ramón was already in much demand as a healer, and not only among his fellow Huichols. I had only just met Padre Ernesto and he and I were conversing outside the

12

INTRODUCTION

church when an obviously middle-class Mexican woman drove up in a shiny new Chevrolet and asked for Ramón. Informed by the padre that he had not come that day, she exclaimed, in obvious frustration, “But he promised to cure me today!” As she drove off, the padre turned to me and said, “These people are hopeless, more superstitious than the Indians.” One could not help but be impressed, and not a little astonished, at finding in a Franciscan such openness and respect for “pagan” religion, for an indigenous spirituality for whose utter destruction and replace­ ment by Christianity the church had labored so mightily and for so many centuries. The more I saw of him over the next weeks the more I won­ dered if he was long for the church. As it turned out, he stuck it out for a number of years more before he accepted an invitation from his Huichol friends that would spell the end of his ecclesiastical career: to come with them on a peyote pilgrimage to Wirikúta. We will hear a lot more about this sacred place, but for now it is enough to know that this is what Huichols call a stretch of Chihuahuan Desert in the state of San Luis Potosi where they go to “hunt” peyote— and I mean hunt, with bow and arrow—and which they insist is the home of their own deified ancestors. Padre Ernesto, a superb photographer, took numerous color photos of this sacred journey, and when he returned to Zapopan he found him­ self summoned by the church authorities to explain and atone for his “apostasy.” In answer, he did what I had long expected: he resigned from the church, married, and moved to Houston, Texas, where at this writing he is a successful commercial photographer. When I told Padre Ernesto, only half in jest, that he had a spiritual role model in Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, the sixteenth-century Fran­ ciscan chronicler who is often called the father of American, or at least Mexican, anthropology, he laughed and said, “Well, what do you expect from a disciple of Saint Francis ? Remember, he conversed with the birds! ” After making sure I saw the tall crucifix made entirely of colorful paper flowers he had commissioned a Huichol artist to make for his church, he suggested I come back the next day to wait, if necessary, for Ramón. Ramón did show up the following morning, and the four of us— Padre Ernesto, Ramón, my wife Dee, and I—repaired to a room off the vestibule of the church to become acquainted. The padre introduced me as a profesor and doctor from the University of California and explained that I had come to learn about Huichol religion and about his becoming a shaman. He pronounced it shaman, with emphasis on the second a, and I remember him shaking his finger and telling Ramón, “Hombre, you had

INTRODUCTION

13

better become a good shaman, because you will never become a good Catholic.” And so we began a relationship that lasted until Ramón’s death, in the summer of 1971, at the hands of an armed cousin heavily intoxicated on maize beer, and resumed years later when friends spon­ sored a visit by Lupe and much of her extended family to the Southwest (see Chapter 4). I should explain that although Ramón and Lupe had not been in the Guadalajara area all that long, they considered themselves already firmly rooted in the local soil and the crops they had planted for themselves on a piece of unoccupied land near a busy highway leading north out of the city. As Ramón explained, it is good to make money with art, but our sus­ tenance comes from Tatéi ’Utuanáka, Our Mother the Earth, moistened by rain and ready for planting, and she will never abandon us. Ramón, I learned from the padre (and the Mexican author Fernando Benítez confirmed in 1968 in the Huichol volume of his five-volume Los Indios de México), had been something of a personality in the rural col­ ony that Huichol refugees from the Sierra had established on the lower Rio Lerma, admired by his fellows not only for his curing skills and de­ monstrable command of esoteric knowledge and ritual but because with his gift of language and irrepressible self-confidence he earned respect as a spokesman for his people to the outside world. In fact, he had on several occasions been invited to Tepic to speak to students and faculty at the state university and on the radio about the needs of his people. Still, life was difficult, arable soil not already claimed by others scarce, the annual migrations to the coast a constant hardship and, with the un­ restrained use of poisonous agricultural chemicals, dangerous to health. Also, the local market for arts and crafts was limited at best. So when Ramón heard stories of a padre in Guadalajara who befriended Huichols and purchased their handiwork, he and Lupe packed up their meager belongings and a sackful of her weavings and embroideries, abandoned their little plot of land near his shaman-mother’s rancho at Paso de los Muertos, and took the bus to Guadalajara to seek out this fabled priest. They stayed in Mexico’s second-largest city just long enough to decide they would hate to live like some other Huichol migrants in the peren­ nial exhaust fumes, dirt, and racket of one of the poorer barrios. And so they set out to locate a piece of unoccupied land in the outskirts. This was before urbanization overtook the countryside, and finding a suitable piece of arable soil without anybody on it proved not too difficult. Once they had fixed on a place with some beauty for the eye as well as soil in which the seeds they had brought would sprout, they cleared it of weeds

14

INTRODUCTION

Figure 3. Huichols often name girl children after the successive growth stages of maize. Here Lupe introduces her adopted daughter to the sacred maize growing in her and Ramón’s little rancho-in-exile near Guadalajara. Summer 1966.

and trash and transformed it into a nice little milpa. When I met them, they were firmly established in what to all appearances was a miniature Huichol rancho-in-exile: a one-room windowless dwelling constructed of mostly found materials, a thatch-roofed ramada, and all around a flourishing crop of maize, beans, squash, tomatoes, and chile peppers. Left standing were several sizable castor bean plants, from whose poison­ ous seeds Ramón knew how to make medicines. They were well aware that without papers they could be evicted at any time (as in fact they were just two years after I met them, when their homestead fell victim

INTRODUCTION

15

to urban sprawl). But in the meantime, their modest rancho had become something of a magnet, a temporary haven, for Huichols on their way to and from the city. In a very real sense, Ramón had emerged as a culture broker, a mediator between the countryside and the mysterious ways of the urban bureaucracy. It was a rare day when Huichol visitors (“cous­ ins” ) did not stop by to take shelter for a night or two under the thatched roof of the ramada, enjoying Ramón and Lupe’s hospitality before con­ tinuing their journey. After about a week of recording sessions with Padre Ernesto trans­ lating, Ramón suggested we continue our work at the rancho. On more than one morning we found him and visitors playing cards and munching peyote as though it were candy. Asked about this, Ramón explained that peyote took hold of you only if you had made yourself “sacred”; other­ wise it just gave you strength, stilled hunger, and cured whatever ailed you. Lupe would be seated nearby on a blanket at her backstrap loom with a little girl we took to be their biological child but who turned out to have been only informally adopted. She would be weaving a bag or one of the long sashes of natural-color wool with serpent designs in natural brown on white that are worn by both men and women. Or she would be decorating cotton clothing with the cross-stitch embroidery first taught to Huichols by the nuns and passed down from mother to daughter. Everybody called him Ramón, but like all Huichols he also had an indigenous name, as did Lupe. By Huichol custom, giving the child its Huichol name shortly after birth is the pleasant duty of a grandfather, who, more often than not, is not only the rancho elder but also its shaman. Ramón’s name was ’Uru Temay, hers Matsuwima. ’Uru means “arrow,” and ’Uru Temay can be translated as Young Arrow Person or Newly Made Arrow, a popular name for boys. Matsuwima means Armband or Bracelet, not an ordinary bracelet but one charged with spirit power. (In the summer of 1967 I was stung in the palm of my right hand by a scor­ pion of the genus Centuroides hidden in a bagful of chanterelle mush­ rooms I had brought down with me from the comunidad indígena of San Andrés Cohamiata [Tatéi Kie, “House of Our Mother,” to Huichols]. My wife rushed me to the Anglo-American Hospital for a shot of an anti­ venin made in Tempe, Arizona. Ramón, who had been stung so many times that scorpions no longer bothered him, was singularly unimpressed by my accident. As was her nature, Lupe was more sympathetic and im­ mediately set about to finger-weave a beaded bracelet decorated with scorpions that she promised would protect me against future attacks by one of these nasty little creatures. And none has ever stung me again,

l6

INTRODUCTION

however many I might see at night, when they fluoresce in the beam of an ultraviolet flashlight. Known also as Durango scorpions, these pale little creatures are a serious problem in the Sierra, where they typically hide out in the thatch of roofs, occasionally falling down and stinging infants asleep in homemade cradles suspended from the ceiling. An adult fatality is rare, but little children are another story.) Ramón had a seemingly inexhaustible store of his own versions of Huichol oral tradition, and he turned out to be an unequaled storyteller. On occasion he was actor as well as narrator, dramatizing for our ben­ efit one or more of the protagonists in the myths he dictated into our tape recorder. That should not have surprised us, for shamanism is it­ self a performance art. Really, there was almost nothing Huichols do in which he did not seem to excel. He was even in demand as one of the elaborately costumed dancers of an “Aztec” group that performed every week or two in front of the Zapopan basilica. One day I showed him a two-thousand-year-old four-hole ceramic flute I had borrowed from the state museum. It took him but a minute before he played it like an expert. Most important to me was that when we met he had completed the first two of the five peyote pilgrimages he had pledged to his personal tutelaries, Grandfather Fire and Father Sun. He would do the third in 1966, the fourth the following year, and the fifth the next. But as early as 1965 we had occasion to see and hear him perform ritual, cure, and sing the mythology—not as he narrated the sacred stories for us, with a beginning, middle, and end and the necessary details in between, but as in the ceremonies, in chant form so allusive and cryptic as to be utterly incomprehensible to the stranger. I also saw him perform seated in his own ’uwéni, the complex high-backed armchair of shamans and rancho elders. At my request he also made one for me, but first we had to drive into the countryside to look for just the right complementary materials. The ’uwéni is so uniquely a Huichol piece of furniture, and so heavily invested with symbolism, that it took me a long time to figure out that its parentage may not have been Huichol at all (see Chapter 10). Especially precious to him, revered as an object of sacred power and magic, was his takwátsi. This is what Huichols call the oblong, tightly lidded basket of plaited palm fiber in which shamans keep their many personal power objects. It is so closely identified with the culture hero Káuyumari that it is even addressed by his name. Of course, its contents were of his own manufacture, especially his muviéri, the feathers of different birds at­ tached in a free-swinging bundle to an arrow which are considered alive and sentient and which serve the shaman in his arts.

INTRODUCTION

17

Once he had agreed to record the oral poetry we call myths but that for him and Lupe were the true and sacred histories of the Huichol people—and to my undisguised pleasure this happened within days of our first encounter—he quickly realized that we would not understand the elliptical and allusive shorthand language in which shamans custom­ arily chant the sacred mythology: “He came. Having come, he did it. He laid it down. He took it. The Mothers were pleased,” and so on, means little unless you have heard it all many times before, it has been explained to you from childhood on, and perhaps even recited in full as an enter­ taining and instructive but still sacred story by a grandfather. So after seeing our puzzled expressions as he talked, he started filling in the details without which we would have been left in the dark. As creative artist, his principal medium, like that of other Huichols, some of whom he had taught the technique, was the yarn painting. At first, before we met and for about a week afterward, I saw these as purely decorative, perfectly balanced juxtapositions of unconnected motifs se­ lected from the considerable inventory of what Lumholtz called Huichol “symbolism.” One day we inquired if he had ever considered using the yarn paint­ ing to tell a story, making a picture of what he was dictating into the tape recorder. We were then still recording at the church, Padre Ernesto act­ ing as go-between and interpreter. Ramón listened intently and looked puzzled. Then he asked how one would do such a thing. We told him that he was the artist and how he did it was entirely up to him. A couple of days later he arrived from his rancho with a striking two-dimensional yarn painting. It had the usual dimensions of two feet by two, but in­ stead of a nice symmetrical arrangement of unrelated motifs, it told a story, or, rather, it illustrated an event from the journey of the soul to the afterworld, a narrative he was just then dictating to us over a period of several days. So that is how Ramón entered the history of Huichol art as the pioneer of a creative tradition that has since graduated, if that is the word, from a “folk” art to one of the “fine” arts (Furst 2003). It was not long after this singular event that Barbara G. Myerhoff, a friend and fellow doctoral student at UCLA, came down on a brief visit in her own search for a topic for her doctoral dissertation. An introduction to Ramón and Lupe settled that question when Ramón, clearly impressed by her charm, her determination, and the respectful curiosity I had already seen her bring to her previous work with a Luiseño shaman on an Indian reservation near San Diego, suggested almost out of the blue that we might both like to join him in the following year on a peyote pilgrimage.

l8

INTRODUCTION

Figure 4. Perils of the soul on its journey to the afterworld in one of Ramón’s first storytelling yarn paintings. Obstacles on left and right fork include clashing rocks; a dog neglected in life; a crow chased from the maize field “in that other life”; the opossum, the fire bringer whose flesh was eaten in violation of a taboo; an insect that, as it did for the Aztecs, represents illicit sex; pools of hot and smelly water. After overcoming these and other trials the soul is greeted with a feast by long-dead relatives. Collection of the Museum of Cultural History, University of California at Los Angeles.

How could we possibly refuse? If it happened, it would be the first time anthropologists had joined the Huichols as participant observers on their most sacred quest, which the world knew only from Lumholtz’s second­ hand description. Barbara turned her experience, and it was a deeply emotional and enriching one, into her doctoral dissertation and a fine book, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians (1974). I have no doubt that without that first experience in 1966 I would

INTRODUCTION

19

not have been able to record (always with the permission and encourage­ ment, or if not that, at least amused tolerance, of the participants) my second peyote pilgrimage in December 1968 and to turn the raw 16-mm footage into an educational film that the UCLA Latin American Center distributed for the next quarter century (Furst 1969). At least I was able to anticipate some of what was to come and get into position to capture it on film. The story of that pilgrimage, on which Ramón “completed” as a full-fledged mara’akáme by consensus of his companions, is retold in these pages (see Chapter 3).

Ramón as Radin’s Unlettered Philosopher When I now think back to Ramón, two classics of cultural anthropology come to mind. One is Paul Radin’s Primitive Man as Philosopher (1927), the other Joseph Casagrande’s In the Company of Man (i960), an an­ thology of warm and appreciative literary portraits by anthropological fieldworkers of some of the individuals;—call them “informants” or, pref­ erably, “consultants”—who volunteered or were recruited among indig­ enous peoples who had little choice but to tolerate the nosy stranger in their midst. It is of course the hope, more often than not unrealized, of every ethnographer to find someone of standing in his or her commu­ nity, preferably with esoteric and other knowledge and the willingness to share some of it with a curious outsider. Casagrande has said it best: Field work by its very nature is at heart a collaborative enterprise. To come as an inquisitive stranger to live among an alien people is an audacious undertaking. At the very least the anthropologist’s pres­ ence on the scene must be condoned and his impertinences suffered. But the anthropologist hopes for more than this: he needs the active cooperation of the people if he is to succeed in his work. That such cooperation is so often freely given is eloquent testimony to the uni­ versal good will of men. Let it be admitted, too, that the successful outcome of field research depends not only on the anthropologist’s own skills, but also on the capabilities of those who teach him their ways. (Casagrande i96o:x)

Barbara and I were incredibly fortunate to have so endlessly gifted, intelligent, ever-generous, and reflective a consultant as Ramón. Though living, sometimes uneasily, between two worlds, he proved himself over and over, as did Lupe, to be irrevocably committed to Huichol tradition

20

INTRODUCTION

and culture, which he considered superior to any other, sometimes to the point of a bit of ethnocentric chauvinism. As our mentor, he was deter­ mined to take us along on his flights into Huichol intellectual culture. As his words reproduced in these pages demonstrate, and as Barbara and I had the chance to experience for ourselves, Ramón was an almost perfect fit for Radin’s “primitive philosopher, ” so long as it is understood that by using “primitive,” Radin was not making a value judgment but dif­ ferentiating the indigenous unlettered intellectual from the product of higher education in the West. In any event, in his time and for many years beyond, “primitive” was the accepted term for “the other.” Universities and colleges were still offering survey courses in “primitive art” in the 1970s (and I taught some of them), to be replaced only gradually with “non-Western,” “tribal,” or some other equally awkward and uninfor­ mative wording.

1

“How One Goes Being Huichol”

E recall that when Padre Ernesto introduced me to Ramón in the summer of 1965, he was in the third year of actively trying for “completion” as a mara’akáme, the shaman who cures, performs ritual for the family or larger community, and chants the sacred poetry we call “myths.” There is no formal apprenticeship to and training by a master that may last for years and during which the neophyte may endure many trials, mental and physical, as in many other indigenous societies: Huichols acquire their knowledge of the esoteric arts by listening and assisting in the numerous family and community-wide ceremonies and by fulfilling certain expectations the community has for them and they have set for themselves. “Going to the peyote” is one of these, not once but a minimum of five times. I have met elderly shamans who have done this thirty and even more times. I have no doubt that Ramón would have done that also had his life not been tragically cut short at age forty-six. Any Huichol can become a shaman: by his or her own volition, by inheritance from an ancestral shaman, or by being “called by the spirits,” as described by the late Vladimir Basilov (1989), whom I met at the Den­ ver Museum of Natural History as chief curator of “Nomads of Asia,” a memorable Russian exhibition heavy on shamanism, and who, before his untimely death in a swimming accident while vacationing in Spain, was an internationally respected Russian scholar of Siberian shamanism. Having shamans in your ancestry, as many Huichols do, also seems to predestine you for this specialization. Future shaman-singers set

W

21

22

Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams

themselves the task of completing five pilgrimages to Wirikúta, home to the peyote the Huichols venerate, and the rocks and other natural phe­ nomena in which the divine ancestors, the kakauyarite, manifest them­ selves. It was they who set the example for their spiritual heirs when they first hunted the deified Deer that originated, or transformed into, peyote as it presented itself for its sacrificial death by their arrows. That is the reason why those who go to Wirikúta bring along bows and arrows, and why the first peyote to reveal itself is shot by the peyotero in charge with an arrow in one of the sacred directions, followed by arrows from his principal companions. Otherwise bows and arrows serve only as reminders of a bygone era that is nevertheless still very much a reality in the Huichol mental universe. Five such peyote quests are also expected of jicaréros, Spanish for keepers or guardians of the sacred votive gourd bowls. The Huichol word for these important religious functionaries, who serve five-year terms (five, the number of world directions and the sacred center, being symbolic of completion) is xukúri’ukáme (xukiiri, the Huichol word for the votive gourd, and gourd bowls in general, and jicara, its equivalent in Mexican-Spanish, both derive from the Nahuatl xicolli). The decorated votive gourd bowl, which Zingg (1938:188) rightly called “the most beautiful” as well as the most sacred object in Huichol symbolic art, is the most potent and effective form of three-dimensional prayer and petitions for benefits addressed to the higher powers, espe­ cially the Mothers of rain, fertility, and fecundity. Ramon’s own journey to completion on his fifth peyote quest in De­ cember 1968 went back, as it often does, to his boyhood. One day, mak­ ing his way barefoot through a Mexican-owned field thick with maize where he and his mother were working, he was struck on the shin by a coral snake, a relative of the Indian cobra. Its venom, a neurotoxin that paralyzes nerves, is twice as potent as that of the rattlesnake. With their small mouths, coral snakes, which share their red, yellow, and black col­ oration with the harmless king snake but in a different order, don’t often manage to puncture the human skin. But it does happen, and Ramón was just a little boy with only a thin cotton shirt and nothing below. As he remembered it, by chance his shaman grandfather was working nearby, and when he heard Ramón scream he came running and tended to the puncture. Exactly what he did Ramón could not remember. What he did recall were his grandfather’s words: that the snake was sent by the ances­ tors to tell him that he was to become a mara’akáme, and that if he did not obey their wishes he might never recover. In fact, for some months his legs were paralyzed and he had to drag himself about with the help of a

“How One Goes Being Huichol”

23

stick before he fully regained his strength. Scholars of shamanism would have no hesitation seeing this as a typical case of “sickness vocation.” All this came out in dribs and drabs one day while we were relaxing from a long stretch of taping. By then we usually worked in the shade of the thatch-roofed ramada on Ramón and Lupe’s little rancho beyond the outskirts of Guadalajara. On a few occasions we drove into the country­ side to get away from the noise of traffic below and interruptions from Huichol visitors who stopped by on their travels on foot to and from the city. It was on one of those occasions that Ramón gave us his dramatic demonstration as performance artist and guide into a realm that we knew only from the literature (see Chapter 2). Ordinary days always began early with a thermos filled with heavily sugared coffee, their favorite but for us almost undrinkable, and a bagful of pan dulces, sweet rolls, which we had learned always to bring along. Taping could begin only when everything was consumed. The stories of the ancestors came first, but there were times when, perhaps in answer to a question or triggered by something in one of the narratives, Ramón lapsed into personal history or philosophical musings. It was especially then that he revealed himself as the thinker, the philosopher who sought explanations for what an ordinary person might take for granted and thus needed no explanation. The great thing about these reflections and reminiscences was that they opened a window on not just his but the Huichol world view, an indigenous people’s intellectual universe. He phi­ losophized about many things: relations between Huichols and mestizos; the whys and wherefores of the sacredness of maize, peyote, and deer; the meaning of fire or the theft of Huichol lands; the proper way of thinking and acting when preparing the field for planting; the threat of sorcerers; or, as above, his own path to becoming a mara’akáme. The several texts that follow were dictated in 1966 and 1967, mostly in Spanish, occasionally in Huichol. Some flowed easily; others came in snatches over a day or more, or even at intervals of several days, to be pieced together in their proper order and edited later but always with care to preserve the flavor of the original. The reader will note a few very brief, even elliptical passages of the kind one finds in sacred chants that relate the doings of divine ancestors, culture heroes, or deities, without specifying gender, name, action, or place. For transcriptions and trans­ lations from the Spanish on the tapes into English, I relied on my ever­ efficient Mexican secretary and assistant Elena Herskovitz, who was as fluent in English as in her native tongue and who often also participated

24

Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams

in the recording sessions. For rendering Huichol passages into English, I am indebted to Joseph Grimes and his wife, Barbara, of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, who spent many years living in the comunidad indígena of Guadalupe Ocotán to acquire fluency in the language.

i. “More or Less My Age Is Forty” More or less my age is forty, as I am speaking to you here. I am close to forty, per­ haps. When my mother brought me into this world, there in San Sebastián Teponahuaxtlan, I came, I don’t know from where. But once I started growing up—I must

have been five or six years old—my father left us alone. Alone he left us, to make do for ourselves. My mother brought us up according to how one must do such things,

as Tayaupá [Sun], as Tatewari [Fire] gave her the ability, as he gave her the will, the love. From then on we started working. A very hard life, very hard. Growing up without a father. I remember we used to braid, when I was a small boy, making braided strips

of palm in order to support ourselves. That with which one makes hats. In order to

put on clothes, in order to eat. I remember often I ran around without pants, without

shirt, without anything. I was cold, often I was cold. Later I would go and work for some people. In the afternoon I would return, very tired, without a thing. All that work, herding goats, cleaning maize, doing all those things. Six centavos [pesos]

they paid me, a centavo a day. If one paid in maize, one paid one liter of maize a day

for all our family. One liter! There was much hunger then. Early in the morning my mother would say, “Hurry, son, it is time to go to work.” To earn six centavos! What is six centavos? To be able to eat, to be able to dress—

what do six centavos come to? We would stay there from six in the morning until six in the evening. Until the crickets commence their calling. Only then the patrón

would let us go home. Those rich ones, those vecinos, those Spaniards, owners of haciendas who had much money, much food, many clothes, much maize. Here we were children, small, hungry, working as best we could to make money for food.

When we returned, sometimes it would rain. Then we arrived all wet and we had no

clothes to change into. Nothing into which to change so that we would be dry and warm. That is how we slept. In that cold, poor ones without anything.

Well, then one night it happened that Tayaupá spoke to me. He said, “Look, son,

do not worry. You must grow upa little more so you can go out and become wise, so

that you can support yourself.” He said, Tayaupá said, “Do not worry, son. It will be good with you one day.”

Since then I had those dreams. Sometimes it would happen when I was asleep,

dreaming. Then sometimes when I was awake, when it was day. When I was working there, so hard. And then I would be very happy.

"How One Goes Being Huichol”

2-5

I was still a small boy. Five, six, seven years old. Then I would become happy. I would wake up happy because Tayaupá would say to me, “Look, you will be able to

support yourself well. You are going to do this, that, and the other.” From that time

on they started to say that one day I would be a mara’akáme. They started to say that one day I would do these things which I make nowadays. I would be told, “You will make fine things; you will make these designs one day and everyone will like you.” In those days I did not think of anything. Oh, in all that time I did not speak

one word of Spanish. Not one word. There was no one to explain things to me. No school, no one to tell me and explain this word or that. There we were, all alone,

sleeping, working, and sometimes going without food for two days, for three days. Because we had nowhere to go and we had no money with which to buy food. We

were really poor!

Ah yes, at this time my father was very thoughtless. He did not think of us. He is dead now and his soul is with Dios Sol. But at that time he was thoughtless. He

went to enjoy his life. And we remained there with our mother, the one who brought

me up at her breast. Who gave me nourishment, everything. Well, in those years I was believing everything, knowing little. But I reflected, I reflected on this and that,

listening to all Dios Sol said, all that which Tatewari said. They said, “You are going to be this way and that, it is for this you were born. It is for this that we are telling you

everything, this way and the other."

Very well. At first I was frightened by this. I did not know. And with time I began to reflect on this, knowing everything, learning everything. Listening to them when

they said that which is our history. Well, I started to think, “Oh, this is what they told me, that I was going to become a mara’akáme. That I was to be this way and that.”

When I was older, some years older, I began to clear some land. I cleared this land, I cut the brush. I burned it with the help of Tatewari. I began to plant there so that I could support my mother. But there was little land and many people. I started to work as it should be in order to support ourselves. But when there is little land,

what can one do? I tried and tried but it did not work out well. And then some people

said, “Ah, what is that boy going to be good for? He will never be able to help us in anything. Always he goes alone, always he reflects. There he is by himself, always reflecting on these things." They wanted to reject me, my cousins, everybody. They saw I was sad, all alone. I would be embarrassed, but what is one to do?

That is how I was, always alone. And I would think to myself, “Whatever those

great ones say, whatever Tatewari says, whatever Dios Sol says, that is the correct thing. If one does it that way, it will come out well.”

That is how I did it, learning this way and that, how one cures, how one goes to Wirikuta, how one learns all these stories of ours which are our history. How one makes those sacred things, the offerings. All that. It takes many years to do such

things, much work, much sacrifice.

z6

Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams Now I see that I grew up well. I have learned what there is to learn. And who is it

who does all these things for his relatives now? Who would do it, if not I? If they had seen these things when I was small, it would not have been as it was for me. They

would not have said these things about me. Now, when something happens, some

sickness, some business with the government, when one has need of this or that, they go to Ramón.

When I was born, that is a very big thing, something we are not able to com­ prehend. My poor mother sacrificed herself, she sacrificed much. Day and night she worked, day and night all of us worked, braiding the palm fiber in order to sell it all

those days. Herding, working at everything. For that is all we could do to support

ourselves.

But now it is well. It is that I have learned much. Have I not learned much? We

know how to support ourselves. How to give to those others, those poor ones, so that they will not go hungry. I have learned how to speak with the vecinos. How to cure. How to make these

things that are our symbols, those adornments people buy for their pleasure. And

my wife, she makes beautiful embroidery, she weaves well. And it is that I have learned how to make all those chants and all the stories which are ours, which are

the stories ofthe indigenous Huichols of Mexico. So that nothing will be forgotten. So that we Huichols, indigenous Mexicans of this state ofjalisco, will continue to exist in this world.

2. “I Am Torn and Need to Be Mended” You ask how I met my wife. Well, at that time I was already grown. I was eighteen, almost nineteen years old, perhaps. I was going to work there, every day. I was clearing fields, weeding, ail that one does to support oneself. Cutting the brush, burning, planting. Then the

harvest. It was hard, hard. Always hungry, tired, tired. And here [the Huichol rural colony on the lower Rio Lerma], here also I lacked something. I lacked someone at my side, for always. I went down to the coast, in

Nayarit; I went to a small village, which they call Pimientillo. I went there to work in the maize harvest. Many Huichols, many, many, they go there when they are hungry. Every year they leave, they leave the Sierra and go down to the coast, to earn a few centavos, in the maize fields, in the tobacco fields. Then they return, poor ones, with

sickness, others tired, worn out. Well, there I went. This one who is now my wife, she also, she came down there to work. She came down from where she was born and she went to where I was,

working. And two cousins came, two first cousins of mine. They knew her. And I, still young, still alone. I see this woman there, all alone. Ah yes, I think, that is good, for I do not have anyone to make my tortillas. And I am cold and I need something to

“How One Goes Being Huichol”

2-7

warm me up a little, no? I am all alone. And I, well, with fear and courage, all the time

being afraid, I had much goodwill toward her. Much affection.

But she, no. She did not like me at all. Who knows about such things? There is

no understanding it, is there? And then one of my first cousins said to me, “Let us go where she is. Let us go

there a little.” We went to where she was, to a little rancho. There we went and we

saw them there, roasting ears of maize on a fire. I was hungry. I said to my cousin, “Tell her to give me a little piece. Ask her for a little piece of elote, if she happens to have any such thing.” She gave it to my cousin, and my cousin gave it to me. I ate it. And she saw this. She was looking at us and she saw how he gave it to me and I ate it. Oh, she was so

angry! She said, “Why did you give it to him? Why did you give it to him? I gave it to you, and you gave it to him!” She was very angry, that one. You see? She did not like

me at all. Not one little bit. Well, then I said to them over at that rancho, “We came to work but there is no

work to support us anywhere.” They said, “Yes, there is. There is work for you for

one week or two." No more than that, just two weeks. Well, we said, let's see how it comes out. So we went to work there. I went playing the violin, to see what she would

say. I returned again about eleven o’clock in the night, playing the violin. She was already asleep. Well, I took my blanket. I went to a tree to sleep. A companion, my first cousin, and I, we stretched out there under that tree and went to sleep. We slept until about

three or four in the morning. Oh, that night! I was dreaming. I was dreaming about

her.

Then, early, very early, I saw her pass by that tree. Going to draw water. On her return I was waiting for her. I grabbed her. I told her my feelings. I said, “Be my

wife.” But she, no. She said, “No, you have another over there.” I told her, “No, I am all alone. I do not have anyone else. I do not have another woman, I do not have a

wife.” She said, “Who knows if you do?” I said, “I am as I am. You can see I need

someone to make my tortillas to eat.” And then, “Look, I am torn and I need to be mended. I need to be washed and ironed and everything.” But no, she did not like me. That is what I thought.

But when one wants to be a mara'akame, one must be astute in everything. Is

that not so? I told her about my promise, my vow. I said to her, “I will be a mara’akame. I have made that promise; I have made that vow. And I want you to be my wife. To

help me always.” That is what I said to her. I thought, perhaps she thinks I am crazy. And I said, “I want us to support ourselves always, so that we can live as we should,

you and I." I thought, now let us see if she likes me or not. And then, after one ortwo

hours, she speaks: “Yes, if that is how it is.” She told me yes. Then we went together. And she brought her things, those poor things she had,

2.8

Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams

her clothes, her blanket. That is all she owned. We were very poor, both of us were very poor. She came to where I was, bringing her things. And I told her, “For all my

life you are going to do." And she said, “Yes." And I said to her, “For all your life, for all my life, we are never going to do less.”

And she said, “I think so also.” And I told her, “And you will be much in my heart.” And she said, “Yes. And you also in the same way.” “Penitinacayeri,” one says. It is as if one says, “I love you." Then she responds,

"Hei natsanacayeri.’’ The woman says, “You, I love you too." One hour. Two hours. Good. In that way we were united. And that was the way in which we have loved each other always, until right now. More than nineteen years we have been together. That is the way it has been. That is

the way we are with each other, all this time.

After Ramón and Lupe lost their little rancho-in-exile to urban sprawl and, after a brief stay with us, resettled in Tepic, Ramón brought a second wife into the house and had a child with her. Lupe absolutely despised this young woman because, as she told me, she could neither embroider nor weave nor even make decent tortillas and so in Lupe’s opinion was totally useless. All she could do, Lupe said, was have a baby, which Lupe, much to her and Ramon’s despair, had not been able to do. Lupe compensated for this by unceremoniously appropriating the baby as her own, to the point where, when I wanted to take a photograph of the biological mother with the child, Lupe snatched it up and insisted I take her picture with the other woman’s baby. All this happened in 1970, the year before Lupe and Ramón visited Los Angeles at the invitation of the Los Angeles County Museum of Nat­ ural History and his own tragic death that summer.

3. How One Should Go Working One’s Field I will tell you now how it is with us Huichols. I tell you this so that you will take note

of everything that is Huichol, here in the state of Jalisco. How we should clear the fields. That is our custom, to go and clear the coamil, which is our field. Because the

Huichol cannot live without working. Let us say he has a wife in his house. Of course he has a wife. Because how can

one live without one’s wife? Then one says to her, “Look, little daughter, let's get up early so that you can make me some tortillas. Also some atole [Náhuatl atolli, a thin

maize gruel]. Because I am going to work.” He gets up early, that Huichol. He begins to sharpen his machete. He will take

Hotv One Goes Being Huichol with him his sharpening stone, his machete, his ax, his gourd full ofwater. She says to him, his wife speaks, “Have you finished sharpening your machete?” “Yes, it is

ready.” She says, “Good. Then come and eat your food. Your food is ready so that you can eat.” Then he eats. He eats his breakfast and is content. He says, “Ah, that one up

there, Dios Sol, has given us light on this day, every day." Then he says to his wife, “I have told you this, my wife. That as long as we live we must work to support our­

selves. So that we will have food to eat. You have your beans, you have your maize, you have everything. From this we get our food, we get our clothing, we get every­ thing.” She answers, “That is very true, little father.” She calls him father, as it is he who

supports her. He is giving her food, everything. She says, “Yes, it is true, as you say it. That is why I am so happy living with you.” He says to her, “Very well, little daughter, I am going now.” He leaves. He takes

his machete. He takes his ax. He takes his gourd filled with water. He takes his little bag of tortillas. She has made them into tacos, with beans inside them. He leaves. She walks with him part of the way. She says, “Be careful, do not hurt yourself.

There are many trees out in that coamil that strike you and hit you. Only Tatewari knows. Only Tayaupá knows. They will help you." He says, “That is how it is.” She says to him, “What do you think? Shall I bring you something to eat at noon?” He

says, “No, that is not necessary. You have made me tortillas. You have made me tacos. At noon I can heat them.” She says, “Yes. But it is not the same.” He says to her, “That does not matter. Do

not worry, wife, I will return in the afternoon.” Well. He leaves. He arrives. The first thing he says is, “Only Tayaupá knows. Tatéi ’Utuanáka [the mother goddess who personifies the earth moistened by rain and ready for planting], she knows. The kakauyarite [ancestor deities], they are the

ones who will watch over me.” He arrives there. He says, “This field has to be cleared.” So he begins clearing. But first he collects some wood and makes a little fire. He has a piece of brazil­ wood, the red wood of the brazil tree. That is the sacred food of Tatewari. The fire is Tatewari, so that he can watch over him. All day he feeds Tatewari, so that he will

not go out, so that he will guard him always. And he makes an offering, a candle, perhaps, a little sacred xukúri [votive gourd bowl], some flowers, a little chocolate. As it should be done. He works all day. Soon he feels hungry. He says, “Ah, when one is out working,

one gets very hungry. That is true.” He has a fire and starts to eat his food. He eats his tortillas. Then he rests a while. Very tired, perspiring. Perspiring so heavily that all his clothes are damp. From so much work, using his machete, using his ax. For it

is hard work, very hard.

30

Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams

Figure 5. Unable herself to bear a child, Lupe insisted on my photographing her with the baby Ramón fathered in a short-lived informal marriage with a second wife. Tepic, Nayarit, summer 1970. He returns to his work in the afternoon, to chop up all that he has cleared. In the

morning he clears the brush. In the afternoon he chops up all that he has cleared. Then he says, “Now I can go, I have done it well today. I can be happy with what I

have accomplished. Tomorrow is another day.”

Then he leaves. The last thing he does before leaving is to take a piece of brazil­

wood, which is sacred there. He takes it home from his field. This he must take to

Tatewari because he is the one who has watched over him, the one who gives light in

the night. Then he goes, that Huichol, walking back to his home. His wife is ready there, waiting for him. She is looking toward the path he will

take. Then she sees him and says, “Here comes my husband. I must go to meet him.” She goes inside the little house which is the xiriki [ancestor god house]. She lights a candle. After she has lit the candle she walks out, taking her little cape. Now

she is ready to receive the ax and the machete in her cape. The ax, the machete, they are alive, they have a soul. Her husband comes forward with his arms outstretched.

He says, “Here, take them, little daughter. I have arrived safely and happily, with the help of Tatewari, with the help of Tayaupá, with the help of all those great ones.”

He gives them to her. Then she turns and walks into the xiriki. There she leaves

“How One Goes Being Huichol

31

them, the machete and the ax. Then she brings food for the machete, for the ax. She

brings them special food, a special pinole, which is sacred. She gives it to them, to the machete, to the ax. Then she gives something ofthis sacred food to her husband, so that he can eat.

She says to him, “I have not eaten. I have not eaten because I have been waiting for you. I have had no nourishment, waiting for you." Then she gives him some water to drink. He drinks it and says, “Oh, I feel very content now. Now I can go and rest.” She

puts out the sacred candle inside the xiriki. Then she tells her husband, “Now I have

hot food for you. Tortillas. Fat little gorditas [diminutive of gordas, mashed or ground

beans surrounded by maize dough]. Hot beans. This thing and the other." Then they eat. Having eaten, they go to bed, if they have a bed. Or [on a mat] on

the floor or however it may be. Then he gives her advice. “You see, have I not told

you we must work so that we can eat and support ourselves?" She says to him, “Cer­

tainly it is that I must take this advice. We must live so that others may come and be pleased by the example we set.”

She says, “More or less we should not wander to and fro, because if we do that

we will have nothing to eat." He says, “That is how it must be. This advice I have given to you we must follow from the first to the last in order that we may live hap­

pily-” That is how it should be when one is Huichol.

4. On Thinking Bad Thoughts While Clearing One’s Field Ah, one ought not to go thinking bad thoughts. Because when one goes with evil thoughts, when one goes thinking bad thoughts while clearing the field, what then? One says, “Ehhhh, I am walking clear­ ing the fields well. When am I going to harvest? What if it does not rain, what if I do

not clear the fields well—ahhh, I do not have maize with which to eat, with which to manage to exist. Ahhh, we are lacking this and that, what if this, what if the other?” If one goes thinking in this manner, that one clearing his coamil, then one says,

Watákame [ancestral Clearer of Fields] says, “No, do not be thinking about this. You work and I will help you."

Only then when he is going with bad thoughts, when he goes thinking bad thoughts, then one is censured. Ahhhh—a machete cuts your foot, eh? In this life

one does not go lacking for something with which to get stuck in the eye. A piece of grass, a stake, it is the same. No, that is not lacking. For this reason there are Huichols here, here in Jalisco, who have gone using their machetes and cut their feet.

That neglecting one’s tools can have a similar effect we had a chance to see for ourselves in 1967 during our summer field school for UCLA

32

Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams

graduate students in anthropology and public health in the Huichol comunidad indígena of San Andrés Cohamiata. One afternoon the son of the great shaman and community leader Nicolás Carrillo de la Cruz, ’Colas for short, returned from the field with a gaping machete cut on his shin. Our medical students could not hide their pleasure: in the United States they were only students, but here was a chance to show some of their skills as “doctors” with sulpha powder, antibiotics, and bandages. To us ’Colas explained that the machete had “bitten” his son to punish him for having forgotten to give it food at the last Ceremony of the Feed­ ing of the Tools. A day later the young man showed up again to have his now very dirty bandage replaced. While he was smoking one of our stu­ dents’ cigarettes, his loose sleeve fell back, revealing another machete cut on his forearm. When did that happen? we asked. Oh, he said, waving his hand in an arc, the machete flew round and round and after cutting his leg, took a slice out of his arm. What really set our medical students back was that although the wound they had treated was still raw and oozing, the cut on his arm, which he said he had treated himself “with some leaves,” was almost completely healed.

5. On the Sacredness of Fire Why do we honor the one who is and is not of this world, whom we call Tatewari [Our Grandfather], the one who is called Fire? We have him because we believe in him in

this form. In this form we see him. Tai, that is fire, only fire, flames. Tai came out of the wood, the wood contained him and he came out when it was rubbed. Tatewari,

Our Grandfather, that is the Fire. That is the Mara’akáme from ancient times, the one who warms us, who burns the brush, who cooks our food, who hunted the Deer

that is Peyote, that one who is [together] with Káuyumari [culture hero, sometime trickster, messenger between the people and the ancestor gods, and spirit helper to Tatewari; see Chapter 9]. We believe in this. Without him, where would we get

warmth? How would we cook? All would be cold. Imagine. One is in the Sierra, there where the Huichols live. One walks, one fol­ lows one’s path. Then it becomes dark. Darker and darker. One is alone there, walk­

ing. One sees less, less, less. Then one sees nothing. What is it there in the dark? One hears something. It is not to be seen. All is black. All is cold. Then one makes

camp there. One gathers a little wood, food for Tatewari. One strikes a light. One

brings out Tatewari. Ah, what a fine thing! What warmth! What light! The darkness

disappears. It is light there, warm, fine. One feels well, contented, safe. Tatewari is there to protect one. Far away another walks. He sees it. There he is walking, all alone in the dark­

ness, afraid perhaps. Then he sees it from afar, that light, that friendly light. A friendly

“How One Goes Being Huichol”

33

thing there in the dark. He says, “I am not alone. There is another Huichol. There is someone. Perhaps he has a place for me, a little warmth." So he speaks. Tatewari is there in the dark, making it light, making one warm, guarding one. Is it possible to live without such a thing, without Tatewari? No, it is

not possible. Or if it is a matter of clearing the brush, how is it then? One works hard. One works with machetes, with axes, one gives one’s strength, all one’s will. Why? For

the purpose of having maize, squash, beans, melons, everything the earth produces.

But is it enough, this effort? Is one's machete enough? Is one’s will enough? No,

they are not enough. None of these things, none of that which we need for our

sustenance, can be gained only by cutting the brush, by clearing the land of trees, of

undergrowth. For that we need Tatewari. We clear the land, we knock down the big trees, the small trees. The branches and everything. Then, when the month of May comes, all our people, all our brothers

are assembled. Then we say, “Look, it is time now to burn the field clean. To place Tatewari there, because with his power he will burn the tree trunks, the branches, everything we have cut, all the brush, all the weeds.” Then we say, “Come, let us do this thing.” We hold a ceremony, we make our

offerings to him, to ask him to help us. And some who have already thought of this make a line so that only the cleared field will burn, so that Tatewari does not burn too much, there where the barranca is, where it is too steep to go there quickly to put out the flames. We make this line, which is as though to say to Tatewari, as if to plead with him, “Look, do not burn too much, do not burn more than the cleared field,

because it will harm us." If one does not do this, if one does not make the proper offerings, then he will burn more than we wish, more than we need. Because Tatewari, with his power, burns everything—sticks, tree trunks, grass,

weeds, everything. He cleans the coamil. Because if we only cut the brush, without his aid, if we did not burn the trunks and the branches, how could we plant? How

could we harvest? How could we have maize? How could we obtain melons, squash,

everything? He burns everything away as he burns away our transgressions. When he has burned the fields, when he has cleaned everything with his power, with his

heat, then Tatewari says to Dios Sol, to Tawerikúa [Our Eagle, another name for the

Sun], “Come, let us work together now, you and I, to give those Huichols their suste­ nance.” They say this, Our Father who is the Sun, Our Grandfather who is Fire, Our Mothers who are the rain and the water, Our Mother 'Utuanáka, they all say, “Let us work together now so that what they have planted will truly sprout, that it will grow,

that they will have life.” Then it comes up, the young maize, the young maize plants. Oh, so green, so beautiful! So beautiful, the young field, that there is nothing in the world more

beautiful to us. But Tatewari comes first. Before one can plant, one must burn. Before one can

34

Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams

eat, one must cook. Oh yes, one does not eat anything raw. There must be some in

this world who have no need for food, who need nothing warm, nothing cooked.

But I believe that cannot be so. I believe that all have him, that all have fire. How else could one live? What is there that one would wish to eat raw? Not much. Not

that which gives us our nourishment. Not meat, not maize, not beans. How could one make tortillas without Tatewari? If one has a wife, and even if she is 'not one’s

wife, she wishes to cook for one. How can one satisfy one’s hunger with a pot of raw beans? With raw maize? It does not satisfy. But give these things into the hands of

Tatewari, let them be warmed by the flower of his flames, then it is well.

In ancient times he was transformed. When the ancient ones brought him out, he came out as Mara’akáme [First Shaman], transformed, so that all could see him

as he was. So that he could lead those ancient, ancient ones to hunt the deer, to hunt

the peyote. So that Káuyumari and he became companions, so that our life, our customs

could be established there from ancient times.

2

The Chasm Between the Worlds

HAT FOLLOWS happened on the afternoon of a fine summer’s day in 1966. It is a story that has Ramón as both actor and men­ tor. It is personal as well as professional, and though it covered only an hour or two, it made a lasting impression on Barbara and me, as lasting as being allowed into that core event in Huichol spirituality, the peyote pilgrimage. Decades later it had an unexpected and instructive sequel. First, it illustrates balance, or equilibrium, a vital aspect of shamanic ideology in general and of its Huichol expression in particular. Plus, it turns out to relate in a fundamental way to some core values of the Aztecs. Second, it shows how easy it is to become so overwhelmed by the drama and perceived universality of one individual’s performance that one forgets to ask questions. I mean questions of the sort that might already then, instead of a quarter of a century later, have placed what one saw more solidly in the context of a specific culture, that of the Huichols. I shouldn’t say “one” but “we,” because it was Barbara and I who didn’t ask the questions. Yet perhaps we may be forgiven, for what we ob­ served Ramón do on that beautiful summer’s day forty years ago was a clear demonstration that, attenuated as Huichol shamanism may seem compared, say, with that of Siberia or the Northwest Coast, the Huichol specialist in the sacred continues to share some fundamentals of a gen­ eralized shamanic world view. And from what we saw, it is safe to say that the shaman-to-be is as much a participant as one who is, to quote Ramón, “completed.”

W

35

36

Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams

Balance, psychic and physical equilibrium, is a precondition to the successful performance of those practical and magical arts that the sha­ man has spent years to acquire and that in the traditional world, of which even today the Huichols remain very much a part, are considered es­ sential for the maintenance or restoration of physical and mental health and mutually beneficial relations with the natural and metaphysical envi­ ronment. The latter embraces not only the realm of ancestor and nature deities and the spirit “owners” of animals and plants but also that of the deceased, who continue to influence the lives of the living and whose participation in the ceremonies Huichols hold to be essential to their success. That Ramón should be concerned with the maintenance of proper balance should not have come as a surprise. Even before I met him, it struck me in the first yarn painting I had ever seen that this artist had a fascination with balance, and if that was true of his art, it should surely apply also to the way he looked at the world. And it did. One day in the summer of 1966 Ramón and Lupe asked us to drive them to Ixtlahuacan del Rio, located on the Santiago River north of Gua­ dalajara. They said we should take the tape recorder and plenty of tape because after they did what they meant to do at the river, there would be time for music and perhaps more stories for us to record. There were four of us—my wife Dee (who died in 1974), our son Bobby, Barbara (who died of cancer in 1985), and myself. There were also several Huichols who had to be squeezed into my Volkswagen camper: a little girl we then took to be Ramón and Lupe’s biological child but who was actually in­ formally adopted, an older couple, and a teenaged half-sister or cousin of Lupe’s and her male companion. One persistent problem with taping at Ramon’s rancho was the noise of passing traffic. It didn’t interfere with the recording of texts, but for Lupe’s singing, Ramon’s occasional chanting and playing his violin, gui­ tar, and flute, all of which were homemade and which he played with real expertise, it was well nigh impossible. They had suggested several times that we go into the country, away from the buses and trucks belching smoke on the road below the rancho. But this time they were insistent: they said they really needed to visit the river, a couple of hours or so to the north. In fact, for some days we had been watching them make prayer arrows and other ceremonial objects while we talked, and now they explained that these were offerings they meant to take to a special place on the Rio Grande de Santiago. From what I understood, it was one of the innumerable places in that part of Mexico which for Huichols are

The Chasm Between the Worlds

37

fraught with sacred meanings and to some of which they make periodic pilgrimages to deposit prayer offerings and petitions for favors to the ancestor deities. We were still very much babes in the woods when it came to gaining some insight, however modest, into Huichol religion, ritual, and intel­ lectual culture generally. But this was something we had at least read about. Their “whole country,” Lumholtz wrote, “is full of what we might call natural fetiches [szc],” to which offerings of food, water, tobacco, and ceremonial arrows must be made “because they are alive and their help is needed to bring rain and good luck” (Lumholtz 1902:138-139). These “natural fetiches” are also scattered outside the boundaries of the Huichol country in the Sierra Madre Occidental, as are many kinds of power spots between the Pacific coast in the west to Wirikúta, the place of peyote and ancestors, in the north-central high desert in the east, and down to Lake Chapala, south of Guadalajara. All have acquired sanctity and potency through association with deities and divine ancestors. It was also Ramon’s birthday, or near enough to it, and afterward we could all go to another place, a grove of oak trees near the Rio Juchipila, “very pretty, very pretty,” not far from the small town of Moyáhua. There we could celebrate with a picnic and record Huichol music and stories. Ramón had expressed a wish for a .22 caliber rifle and ammunition with which to go hunting, and we had bought one to give him on his birthday. So there would also be a chance for target practice. We arranged to be at the rancho at sunup the following morning. It was a fine, sunny day, and I took many 35-mm color slides of Ramón and Lupe making offerings on the riverbank; of the Huichols anointing one another with water from the river; of Lupe dancing with two feath­ ered arrows stuck in her headband to represent deer antlers; of Ramón performing a curing ceremony for the older Huichol woman, who had a complaint in her abdominal region, followed by a similar massaging and sucking ritual for her husband; and of Ramón and Lupe acquainting the little girl with the different colors of wildflowers and the shapes and feel of oak and cottonwood leaves. We ate and drank, played with the child, recorded myths and music, photographed, and at his insistence, tried out Ramon’s new rifle. It was a very full and productive day. As yet we had no inkling of the performance drama to which we were to be treated by Ramón. Toward late afternoon we all piled into our VW camper and set off toward Guadalajara. We had been traveling for perhaps an hour when Ramón, who was sharing the passenger seat with Lupe, asked that I pull

38

Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams

off the highway, jumped down, and motioned to us to follow him. We went across the road and up over a stretch of level, rock-strewn country spotted with brush and thickets of tuna cactus to the banks of a small, fast-flowing stream that occasionally widened into deeper water holes. Some Mexican families were picnicking there and children were play­ ing in the water, and everyone stopped to watch this strange procession behind a Huichol man in full regalia, playing his little violin and striding purposefully along. Lupe, singing in a high, falsetto voice, followed close behind him. The older Huichol man was carrying Ramón’s takwátsi, his plaited shaman’s basket with his power objects. When the basket was not in use, Ramón kept it wrapped in a large red bandanna, taking it out only when needed. That is because the takwátsi is another aspect of the culture hero Káuyumari. And of course even without that association the takwátsi has its own soul or life force. After walking for a short while, we found ourselves close enough to the edge of the plateau to see the little stream, having forced its way through a jumble of giant, water-worn boulders, fall what seemed to me like hundreds of feet to the valley and the Rio Santiago. It was probably less, but we could see for miles across forest and cultivated fields far below and wooded mountainous country edged against the sky—none of the smog here that was already beginning to afflict the rapidly expanding and industrializing city of Guadalajara. Ramón still did not explain what he was doing, except to say in Spanish that this salto (waterfall) was “especially for the mara’akáme.” He also said something in Huichol that we took to be a warning to walk with care, but Lupe, who was carrying the little girl in her arms, was not to be deterred. She ventured as close as she could to the escarpment, and some of the others followed suit. Then, led by Ramón, we all retreated to a small flat area, where he indicated that we should stay and pay close attention. Thus commenced what was to be a truly breathtaking perfor­ mance. First Ramón unwrapped and, after taking off the lid, reverently placed the takwátsi on the rock, addressing it as “takwátsi Káuyumari” and arranging for two prayer arrows to stick out in the direction of the cataract. Next he unwound the leather straps that secured his sandals to his feet and removed his footgear. Now barefoot, he picked his way past the giant boulders that lined the streambed until he was almost to the very edge of the precipice. Lupe, chanting in rapid-fire Huichol, and our other Huichol companions were watching intently. Still not certain what was going on and why he had brought us to this scenic spot, we

The Chasm Between the Worlds

39

Figures 6-8. Ramón demonstrates his own physical and metaphys­ ical equilibrium in a reenactment of an incident on the primordial peyote hunt by the divine ancestors. Summer 1966.

stood off to one side, Barbara asking that I be sure to capture whatever was happening on film for both of us. She needn’t have worried—I often preferred the camera to note-taking on the run. We watched with no little trepidation as Ramón, now barefoot, clambered up one of the rocks, lifted his arms, spread them wide, and, after a moment’s hesitation, proceeded to leap—”fly” might be more ap­ propriate—from crag to crag, often seemingly landing only inches from the slippery edge. Or we would see him stand without moving for per­ haps twenty seconds, arms stretched wide, atop a monumental stone,

40

Rock Crystals

and

Peyote Dreams

Figure 7.

then suddenly wheel about and make a great leap to the other side of the cataract. Sometimes he seated himself right at the edge, leaning slightly forward from the hips and shading his eyes against the sun as he peered down to the river far below and into the country beyond. He was obvi­ ously aware of us, for once or twice we saw him glancing in our direc­ tion, as though to assure himself that we were taking everything in. Now and then he disappeared from view for what seemed like an age, only to emerge suddenly from an unexpected direction. At one point Barbara exclaimed that he looked “like a bird, just like a big, colorful bird.” Little did we realize how close to the truth she was. Unlike us, never for a moment did he seem concerned about los­ ing his foothold or his balance and falling headlong into space. We, on

The Chasm Between the Worlds

4i

Figure 8.

the other hand, were worried and even a bit annoyed at what seemed like foolhardiness, perhaps fueled, we suspected, by the beer he had con­ sumed at the picnic. Lupe and her companions were watching intently. Lupe especially seemed never to take her eyes off her husband. Once or twice she raised her right arm halfway and pointed toward him with a shout of encouragement. None of the others showed any apprehension either, although the older man, in an aside to us in Spanish, said he could never do this because he had a fear of falling, something that had kept him from completing as a mara’akáme, a singing shaman. The performance, which we were never in doubt it was meant to be, rather than some sort of unexplained ritual, ended as abruptly as it had begun. Nobody, Ramón included, provided an explanation. We dropped the Huichols off at the rancho, agreed to meet again the fol­ lowing morning for more taping, and went home, exhausted just from

42.

Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams

having watched. We were still wondering what it had all been about, whether what we had witnessed was more than a bit of good-natured showing off on the part of Ramón. The next morning’s storytelling session began, as usual, with an hour or so of relaxing in the shade of the ramada with pan dulces, café con leche, and small talk. Except for exclamations of appreciation from Ramón and Lupe at the fine taste of the food and drink, nobody said anything significant, and as for us, though full of curiosity we took care not to refer to the previous day’s events. Finally, Ramón inquired with a twinkle in his eyes if we thought he had been showing off. He said, “Perhaps you thought, ‘Ah, Ramón is drunk with too much beer.’” We kept quiet, but our expressions must have suggested that we had been thinking precisely that, because he continued, “But no, no, I took you there to show you what it means to have balance. So you could see and understand. Because when one crosses over as a mara’akáme, one looks below, and then one sees this great barranca filled with all those animals waiting to kill one. The mara’akáme does and undoes. If he does not have balance, he is afraid. Those who do not have balance, they fall and are killed.” Barbara and I looked at each other and said, almost simultaneously, “Eliade!” Ramón had been trying to explain to us for some days that to become a shaman, to learn the art of what he was fond of calling “doing and undoing”—another way of saying transforming—one had to be without fear, because sometimes one has to cross over narrow and dangerous places and doing so requires balance. What he said was strik­ ingly reminiscent of what Mircea Eliade said in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964): balance, psychic and physical equilibrium, repeats itself over and over in traditional heroic, funerary, and shamanic mythologies. Here is how it appeared to us: Aware of the linguistic, cultural, and experiential gulf between us, as this singularly gifted and perceptive Huichol artist and aspiring shaman had been almost from the first days of our relationship, Ramón had evidently been uncertain that we fully understood what he had been trying to tell us. How clever of him, we thought—not to say brilliant—to use dramatic performance to render in­ telligible something he feared our cultural experience might not have pre­ pared us to comprehend. He probably did have a little too much to drink, but that was not the point. The same man who had never seen or heard of the very ancient “X-ray style,” or skeletonization, in Ice Age art, had spontaneously employed it himself to identify shamans and sacred beings

The Chasm Between the Worlds

43

in his yarn paintings, and had again shown us something we, though not he, knew to be universal. “Sometimes,” he once told me, “when one goes traveling to these other places, when I dream these things with the peyote, I can see down there, far, far below in that barranca, the bones of that man, or that woman, who wanted to become a mara’akáme, this man or the other, but who had this fear. Fear gripped them in their hearts and they fell, fell, fell.” To repeat, I trust we can be excused if at the time the impact of all this was so powerful that other questions did not occur to us. We did not consider that there had to have been something more to Ramon’s water­ fall than a convenient stage for him to translate a metaphysical concept into action, into dramatic reality. Performance, verbal and theatrical, is everywhere a vital aspect of shamanism. And Ramón, who was then still what, for want of a better term, can be called an apprentice shaman, was ever the shaman as performer, frequently dramatizing sacred stories he was sharing with us. He did so not only two-dimensionally in his narra­ tive yarn paintings but by acting out the parts of different protagonists. We did not realize that he was doing just that here as well. I briefly mentioned the waterfall incident in Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens (1972) and again in the Canadian journal artscanada as a fitting conclusion to an essay on universals in shamanism through space and time (Furst 1973-74). It deserved better, but a more thoroughgoing treatment had to wait for the right platform. That came in 1989 at a Russian-American symposium on shamanism in Central Asia and the Americas at the Denver Museum of Natural History (Furst 1994). Barbara returned to Los Angeles at the end of summer 1966 to resume teaching at the University of Southern California and to complete her doctoral studies at UCLA. For her what she had seen Ramón do at the waterfall was significant because it seemed to throw light on some peculiar and (like Ramon’s) unexplained antics of a Luiseño shaman named Domenico. She had gotten to know this interesting man, one of the last old Indian shamans in southern California, during our joint sum­ mer fieldwork on the Rincón reservation near San Diego while we were both still Wilbert’s students. First in her doctoral dissertation and then in Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians (1974), she used the waterfall incident as a graphic illustration of shamanic balance, a universal topic in which she had first become interested while working with Domenico (Myerhoff 1965). Whether this was because she had thought more about the event or simply because she was more sensitive than I to subtle nuances, she

44

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clearly could not quite shake off the feeling that there had been some­ thing more to it than just a display of equilibrium for our benefit—that there might have been a ceremonial or ritual component to which we did not at the time have access. As she put it, “I could not be sure whether Ramón was rehearsing his equilibrium or giving it public, ceremonial expression that day.... Whether seen as a practice session or as a ritual, the events of the afternoon provided a most demonstrative assertion that Ramón was... like all authentic shamans, a man of immense courage, poise, and balance” (Myerhoff 1974:46). In a subsequent essay on shamans as mediators between the known and unknown worlds, she returned once more to Ramon’s performance because, she said, it had helped her understand a “peculiar piece of be­ havior” by the California shaman Doménico that had long puzzled her. This shaman was widely renowned for his curing skills, she wrote, with an extensive clientele that included not only Indian people from his own reservation but also Anglos, Mexicans, and Indians from other tribes. He practiced only on weekends, his patients arriving on Friday afternoons with their bedding, prepared to camp out around his little shack. Early on Friday afternoons she would observe Doménico climbing to the roof of his shack and standing there quietly, “without moving for long periods of time while he gazed toward the road with one leg pulled up and curled into the crook of the other.” She assumed at first that he was looking for his clients, but “even at the time it seemed odd that he risked life and limb by standing on the fragile, tar paper-roofed little structure when he could easily have walked up a little hill behind his house for a better van­ tage point.” In retrospect, and with Ramon’s dramatic demonstration in mind, “it seems clear that he was demonstrating his mediating capacity by showing himself to be a specialist in balance” (Myerhoff 1976:101102). For the Nahuatl scholar Willard Gingerich (1988), Ramon’s re­ marks about balance and the danger of falling into chasms fit into a much wider, and clearly preconquest, Mesoamerican ideological framework. As Gingerich points out in an essay on the Nahuatl discourses known (erroneously) as the huehuetlatolli, exquisite balance between chasms as ideal behavior was very much a part of the Nahua ethic generally, and not only in relation to the work of the shaman. Gingerich notes that the same imagery as that invoked by Ramón in Myerhoff’s writings can be found again and again in the discourses scattered throughout Book VI of Sahagún’s Florentine Codex. One instructive example he cites is this ad­ monition by an Aztec mother to her adolescent daughter: “On the earth we walk, we live, on the ridge of a mountain peak (sharp as a harpoon

The Chasm Between the Worlds

45

blade, chichiquilli?). To one side is an abyss, to the other side is an abyss. If you go there, you will fall, only through the middle one can go, or live” (Sahagún 1969:101). Another is this passage from Chapter 22: “They [the elders] used to say that on the earth we walk, we live, on the ridge of a mountain peak. Here is an abyss, there is an abyss. Whenever you devi­ ate, whenever you go astray, there you will fall, you will plunge into the depths” (Sahagún 1969:125). The doctrine of the middle way, then, was a central principle in for­ mulating and interpreting this ethic. But the middle way is decidedly not the Golden Mean of the Aristotelian ideal. This thoroughly indigenous conception, of indeterminate antiquity, has its roots in the shamanic complex which Eliade suggests underlies all religious activity and which retained its original vitality throughout many regions of the Americas, even today providing the essential pattern for ritual in a number of cul­ tural areas (Gingerich 1988:523). As for Ramon’s explanation of what he had been doing at the edge of the waterfall, Gingerich (1988:523) comments that “we almost feel he must have been reading Sahagún’s tenonotzaliztlatolli discourses, so ex­ plicit is his reference to balance between the abysses ‘this way and that.’” He hadn’t, of course, any more than he knew of Eliade, for like most adult Huichols, he had never learned to read and write. But Gingerich is right: Ramón’s behavior was not idiosyncratic but part of a much wider, and very old, indigenous ethic. The fact that the Huichols, like the Aztecs (and the Luiseños), are members of the Greater Nahua, or Uto-Aztecan, family helps, but I suspect much the same ethic exists among many, if not most, Native American peoples. Barbara used these two examples of shamanic balance from her own observations in Mexico and southern California to examine the role of shamans generally as mediators who gain power, always facing and con­ quering the possibility of loss of balance as they stand “at the juncture of opposing forces” and confront the perilous task of moving between and reconciling these opposites. “The passage,” she wrote, “is a dangerous one fraught with peril,” and she thought both Doménico, the shaman of Rincón, and Ramón, the Huichol shaman-in-training, had displayed their mediating capacity by showing themselves to be specialists in balance. They had indeed. But in the Huichol case, this was not the whole story, after all. On June 27, 1989, nearly a quarter century after Ramón’s waterfall demonstration, I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico, just as Lupe was visiting our mutual friend Ada Browne. We were enjoying the sun in Ada’s front yard in one of the old Hispanic barrios when Lupe started

46

Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams

reminiscing, a bit tearfully, about Ramón and our time together so many years ago. Lupe said that since Ramon’s tragic death, life had not been easy. In recent years especially there was often not enough to eat, and she and members of her extended family were beset by illnesses all too obviously linked to malnutrition. Her eyesight was failing, and the rheu­ matoid arthritis in her knees sometimes made walking, and especially dancing at the ceremonies, awkward and painful. Yet, now in her seven­ ties, she was the undisputed elder, financial support, and spiritual mentor of her family. She had established herself as an accomplished artist and artisan in several media, including beadwork, cross-stitch embroidery, backstrap loom weaving, and the storytelling yarn paintings in the style pioneered by Ramón. She was also slowly learning to become a shaman in her own right: healer, singer, ritualist, and spiritual leader of her small band of close and distant relatives and, she added, any other people who came to her for guidance, even those who were not Huichol. In addi­ tion, she had become an enthusiastic and, despite physical limitations, seemingly indefatigable traveler: by 1989 she had visited Indian pueblos, ancestral Pueblo ruins in New Mexico, new Anglo friends in Califor­ nia, Plains Indian powwows, and Cree Indian villages on James Bay in Quebec so remote they could be reached only by small plane. (This last adventure was facilitated by the Quebec authorities. The Cree elders had heard of Lupe and her traveling Huichol band and invited them to come north. Their hope was that meeting fellow Indian people from Mexico who were steadfast in the preservation of their traditional culture, and seeing them perform their age-old dances in their colorful native dress, might counteract the alienation of their own young people.) Lupe was a bit weepy and kept wiping away tears with nostalgia for our time together twenty years ago. Ramón, she said, had so much wisdom, so much power, he knew all the ceremonies and all the historias (their term for the mythology). This had made some people envious, even relatives. And these people had used witchcraft and sorcery against her and her family even after Ramon’s death. Lupe was convinced that this was the reason why she and her people often did not have enough to eat and became sick. But now, with a new market in the United States for their arts and crafts, she and her family could save money to buy land, and life was better. As often happened even this many years after his death, when she spoke of Ramón she be­ came visibly upset, with tears coursing down a face that had become deeply lined by age, care, and memory, even though her life with him had had its share of ups and downs, including a period of off-and-on separa­ tion in the last years before Ramon’s death.

The Chasm Between the Worlds

47

We talked of our two peyote pilgrimages together and about how so many people we had been close to had died. “So many friends dead,” she said her eyes wet with tears. “Ramón, Barbara, Dee [of whose death in 1974 in an auto accident I had told Lupe], all dead, all dead.” Almost more to get us off these painful thoughts than in the hope of information, I asked Lupe if she remembered that wonderful afternoon when all of us had driven into the country and Ramón had taken us to the waterfall. I told her I had many times thought about what he did there. Yes, yes, she said, obviously happy to get away from so upsetting a sub­ ject, it was Ramón’s cumpleaños, his birthday, when he showed you how the mara’akáme is not afraid of anything, even of falling, way, way down into the barranca. And she, whose memory of it seemed astonishingly acute and detailed, repeated pretty much word for word what Ramón had said about the shaman not being afraid of falling. And did she remember where this waterfall was located? Did it have a name? “Sí, cómo no,” she said, yes, of course. “It is called Salto de Temajar, Salto de Temajar.” Does it have a Huichol name? “Aitá,” she said. “In Huichol it is called Aitá. Salto de Temajar in Spanish, Aitá in Huichol.” And how did Ramón know where this salto was? (We had wondered about this even at the time because it had not been visible from the road.) And Lupe launched into a story, or parts of a story, in Spanish, with some untranslatable Huichol terms thrown in, about the first peyote hunt of the kakauyarite, the ancient, ancient ancestors who were gods and who followed the mara’akáme Tatewari to Wirikúta, where they now live in the rocks and the mountains. When the ancestors went to Wirikúta, Lupe said, they visited many places, and where they stopped, the Huichols who go to the peyote today leave offerings to ask for their favor. And one of these sacred places was Aitá. This was a new and entirely unexpected twist to the story, and I dearly wished Barbara had been alive to share in it. I asked Lupe to tell me more. “They came down, tired, tired, from the Cerrito de Picachos, where there are many, many pinnacles, very steep, very hard. And then they came to Aitá,” she said. “There they took their rest.” They wanted to climb down from there, she continued, and they did not know how. Then they saw a little bird, a bird that could fly down there on its wings, “catching the wind on its wings, so”—and she stretched her arms wide, as we had seen Ramón do twenty-three years earlier—“and sailing, sailing, sailing down. They were looking for it to show the way. But they could not fly, they had to go down purely on their feet. And Ramón, he was showing how this little bird spread its wings

48

Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams

and flew from those rocks, how it showed those ancient, ancient ones the way one gets down those big stones, from Aitá, which is the same as Salto de Tema jar.” And what was the name of this bird? Its name is uitzi, “a tiny, tiny little bird,” black all over, Lupe said, and only the mara’akáme, or one who is becoming a mara’akáme, can see it. She added that Huichols are no longer able to go by way of Aitá because “they say all those places are pueblo now.” That sounded as though since 1966, when all the country near the waterfall was uninhab­ ited, the population explosion had caught up with this beautiful and, at least to some Huichols, sacred place, or, as Lumholtz would have put it, one of the many “natural fetiches.” This elaboration by Lupe on Ramón’s dramatic demonstration of his own fearlessness in the summer of 1966 was quite an eye-opener. It explained why he had known about the waterfall in the first place, why he performed as he did—jumping from boulder to boulder, disappearing and reappearing—and why he often did seem like a bird. He was acting out his lack of fear and, on the larger plane, shamanic balance. But he was doing it in a specific Huichol context, the peyote tradition, just as he had acted out myths on other occasions. Was Ramón’s and Lupe’s Aitá the Aitá of the peyote myth, or are there other cataracts that play the same role? There probably are. By their very nature, waterfalls are apt to be landmarks in the sacred geog­ raphy of many peoples. Ramón liked places that manifest what he called a “unity,” that is, combined male and female principles. Waterfalls do that par excellence, certainly in Ramón’s personal world view, and prob­ ably that of other Huichols as well. Falling water is male, phallic; the still water into which the cataract empties is female, uterine, even as it trans­ forms the falling stream to female, thus creating Ramón’s “unity.” The symbolism and beneficial effect become even more pronounced when the process of unifying male and female is repeated in several successive cataracts. There is a waterfall like that close to the ruins of the ancient Maya ceremonial center of Palenque, and I have wondered how much its proximity might have contributed to the choice of location of this beau­ tiful city. According to Ramón, it is the same with rivers and streams: they are male where they flow swiftly, and female in the quiet bends and eddies. According to Ramón, the complementarity of male and female is inherent also in waters of celestial and terrestrial origin, the former, falling as rain, is male, the latter female; and in caves, whose level floor is female, vertical walls male, vault female, and which in totality are uter­

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49

ine entrances to the underworld. The symbolism of water is even more complex because, as Ramón explained it, the male rain originates in the female caves, from which it rises as mist and clouds, which are female, to be transformed and returned to earth in the form of male raindrops. This conception about the origin of rain in the earth belongs as well to other Mesoamerican peoples, including the ancient Aztecs. Did Ramón have some ulterior motive for not having told us of the little uitzi bird? I have no reason to think so. More likely he assumed, as he had on other occasions, that we knew and understood more than we did. So when he said the next morning that now we knew what he meant when he spoke about the shaman’s need for balance, not to be afraid of falling into the barranca, he thought we knew the whole story, too. Didn’t everybody? Some time after the interview with Lupe I shared what she had told me with T. J. Knab. He really perked up when I mentioned that she called the little black bird that helped the ancestors descend a steep waterfall uitzi. Uitzi, he said, is not Huichol but Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, from huitzizilin. Tim, who was once my Ph.D. student at SUNYAlbany and is now a professor of anthropology at the Universidad de las Américas in Cholula, Mexico, used to work as a linguistic investigator for the Institute of Anthropology of the Universidad Autónoma Nacional de México. One of his interests was language death, and another was Nahuatl loan words in other indigenous languages, especially those that, like Huichol, belong to the same Uto-Aztecan, or Greater Nahua, family. In the late 1960s and again later Tim went to Santa Catarina, one of the Huichol comunidades indígenas in the Sierra Madre Occidental and the location of Teakáta, the most sacred place in the entire Huichol sierra. This is a steep-sided canyon full of old shrines and god houses of major Huichol deities and natural formations symbolizing fertility with allu­ sions to human intercourse. Lumholtz visited it in the 1890s, and so did the German ethnologist Konrad Theodor Preuss in the following decade. Tim wanted to see the shrines of Great-grandmother Nakawé, the aged, white-haired earth goddess Lumholtz called Grandmother Growth, and of Tatewari, the aged personification of fire. The descent was steep and very difficult, not to say perilous. When Tim showed some fear, his guide, himself a shaman, told him not to worry because the huitzi bird would get them safely to the bottom. Tim had the impression that this bird with the Nahuatl name was essentially a shaman’s spirit helper. Like Lupe, his shaman friend did not, however, specifically identify huitzi as a hummingbird.

50

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For their part, the Aztecs left no doubt about that. The humming­ bird was the nagual, alter ego and spirit companion of the Sun and War god Huitzilopochtli, whose name means “Hummingbird of (or to) the Left.” In fact, that powerful god’s magical progenitor was himself a hum­ mingbird, who impregnated the goddess Xochiquetzal by pecking her on the breast. The ancient Maya evidently had a very similar story that involved the Mother goddess Ixchél. The Maya story has not survived, except three-dimensionally in the form of beautiful and realistic ceramic figurines recovered from the Classic Maya funerary island of Jaina, off the coast of Campeche. These depict the goddess as weaver, with a little bird perched on her backstrap loom. We can fill in some of the details from the Aztec version: the little bird, a hummingbird, interferes with the goddess’s work at her loom, and when it refuses to go away, she slaps it down with her batten. It falls over as though dead, and she, feeling sorry for what she has done, places it inside the triangular overblouse known by the Nahuatl term quechquémitl, and when it wakes up, it impregnates her magically by pecking her on the breast. The Aztecs believed that dead warriors returned as butterflies and hummingbirds, the latter no doubt because this colorful, feisty, and quar­ relsome little creature attacks and fends off rivals with its long, lance-like beak. As for its present-day role as a shaman’s spirit helper, Stacy Schae­ fer, whose ethnographic fieldwork with Huichols, especially women, has extended over many years, and who herself became a weaver in the Huichol manner under the tutelage of a female master weaver cum sha­ man (Schaefer 2000), was told that when a shaman wishes to acquire the hummingbird as spirit helper and assimilate its power and bravery, he or she catches one and eats its heart. Stacy also added something solid to my ideas about waterfalls. Her Huichol weaving teacher told her that one of the sacred places the soul of a deceased Huichol visits on its way to the afterworld is a waterfall. No location was given. But it caught my interest because Stuart D. Scott, an archaeologist with long experience in western Mexico, in the 1970s came upon a waterfall that lies astride or close to a Huichol pilgrimage route to San Blas on the Pacific coast of Nayarit. This is where Huichols locate the entrance to the land of the dead, and where they come to make offerings of fresh water to Tatéi Haramara, the Mother of the Pacific Ocean, in return collecting sea water, sand, and seaweed to take back home as gifts to the Mothers of fresh water. Carved into the vertical walls of the cataract, Scott found unmistak­ ably Huichol symbols, the most striking of which was a rayed sun face at

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5i

the base of a ladder-like stairway. This was precisely how Ramón had de­ picted the birth of the newborn sun from an extinct volcano in Wirikúta after he completed a subterranean journey fraught with many dangers from his place of descent in the west to the land of light in the east. The coincidence, and I doubt it really is a coincidence, was so striking that Stuart and I published it in the official journal of Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Historia (Furst and Scott 1975).

3

“Hunting the Deer-Peyote to Find Our Life” Life is a constant object of prayer with the Huichols; it is, in their con­ ception, hangingsomewhere above them, and must be reached out for. ---- CARL LUMHOLTZ,

Unknown Mexico

UMHOLTZ IS RIGHT: Ramón often referred to the peyote hunt as climbing to the fifth level, in emulation of the Sun’s ascent to the ze­ nith. This intrepid Norwegian explorer, who before coming to Mexico spent years in Australia with its indigenous inhabitants, deserves the credit for publishing the first description of the most important event in the spiritual and emotional life of many Huichols: the peyote pilgrimage. Each year during the dry season this sacred journey takes small groups of devout Huichols from their present homeland in western Mexico to a patch of north-central high desert in the state of San Luis Potosi they call Wirikúta. Lumholtz himself never went to Wirikúta. Although his ac­ count is secondhand, it includes not only a description of the event itself but also one of the many versions of the oral tradition of the first peyote hunt of the divine ancestors which is its charter and which the participat­ ing peyoteros have been reenacting for, presumably, centuries. Wirikúta, which some Huichols say means something like “in back of the Mother of peyote,” appears as such on no map. But it is easily located by looking for the old colonial silver mining district of Real de Catorce. In 1966, after telling us that we would never really know the Huichols until we had gone to Wirikúta, Ramón invited Barbara and me to join him and a small party of Lupe’s relatives on the third of the five peyote hunts he had pledged to his divine tutelarles, Tayaupá and Tatewari, in fulfillment of his vow to one day become a mara’akáme. For Barbara, her observations as a participant and her analysis of the events became her

L

,5 2.

“Hunting the Deer-Peyote to Find Our Life”

53

doctoral dissertation at UCLA, followed by her much-praised book on the peyote hunt (Myerhoff 1974). I was privileged to repeat this extraordinary experience two years later, this time in company with my wife and partner, Dee, who had been away in the Maya country on the first occasion. Ramón also invited our son Robert, then fourteen years of age. This time the Huichol group was much larger, with several children, the youngest a baby just a few days old when we set out. The oldest was Lupe’s uncle, José Ríos, a veteran shaman and headman of an extended family rancho called El Colorín in the rural Huichol colony on the lower Rio Lerma. His Huichol name was Matsúwa, for the bracelet or armband whose designs have protec­ tive functions. By his own estimate he had been to Wirikúta more than thirty times. We were not the only Anglos our Huichols had to tolerate. And I mean tolerate. Ramón and Lupe had no problem with us, but some of the others seemed at first a bit uncomfortable. Ramón solved this by making the teen-aged Bobby into a Huichol: take off your jacket, jeans, and shirt, he instructed, and put on a pair of Huichol cotton pants and shirt, all new and beautifully embroidered by Lupe, plus a red-bordered scarf, a broad-brimmed palm-fiber hat, and rubber tire-soled sandals. All of it he and Lupe had brought with them for just this purpose. He also told our son, who was almost petrified with awe and wonder, that he must endure the same food and drink taboos as they themselves. Once in the sacred peyote desert, Ramón began feeding Bobby the extremely bitter-tasting sacred cactus, admonishing him, just as he did his Huichol companions, to “chew it well so you will see your life.” There was also Salomón Nahmad Sitton, a Mexican anthropologist and director of the Cora-Huichol Coordinating Center of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista in Tepic, Nayarit. In 1967 he had taken me into the Sierra to meet ’Colas (Nicolás Carrillo de la Cruz), to ask this charismatic shaman and com­ munity leader of San Andrés Cohamiata to allow us to return later that summer with graduate students in anthropology and public health (he had no objection). And now Salomón was about to have his own initia­ tion into the inner sanctum of Huichol spirituality. Salomón, in turn, was accompanied by Enrique Chávez, M.D., the INI center’s young medical officer, whom ’Colas called mara’akáme chico, “little shaman.” Finally, there was the driver of the INI vehicle that was to transport Salomón, Enrique, and those of the Huichol party that did not fit in our VW camper to Wirikúta. As Ramon’s fifth peyote hunt, it would signal his completion: from now on he would have the right to call himself a mara’akáme, even though

54

Rock Crystals

and

Peyote Dreams

Figure 9. José Ríos, Lupe’s uncle, veteran shaman, and

ranking elder of an extended family rancho called El Colorín in the rural Huichol colony on the lower Rio Lerma, was the oldest participant in Ramón’s fifth peyote hunt, in December 1968.

for some years already he had been doing what mara’akáte (pl.) do: sing, perform ritual, and heal. And of course he was our mentor, favorite art­ ist, and master storyteller.

1. The “Diabolic Root” That Indian people in the Sierra Madre Occidental use peyote ritually be­ came known soon after the arrival in western Mexico of the ruthless and avaricious Ñuño de Guzman—one of the most unpleasant characters in the drama of the Spanish Conquest—and the subsequent founding of

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the province of Nueva Galicia in the early sixteenth century. Although peyote was not native to the region, its use by west Mexican Indians was common enough to be mentioned repeatedly and denounced with righteous fervor by Jesuit and Franciscan clerics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—that is, considerably before the actual subjugation in 1722 of the Cora-Huichol country in the rugged Sierra. For example, in 1899 Alberto Santoscoy made the interesting suggestion that Sierra de Xicora, a common seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish name for the then as yet unconquered mountain regions of Nayarit, was actu­ ally a corruption of hikuri, the Huichol (and Tarahumara [Rarámuri]) term for peyote, and that Sierra de Xicora was therefore nothing else than the Sierra de Peyote. The Spanish clergy saw the spineless little visionary cactus as a prin­ cipal medium by which the natives of northwestern Mexico maintained communication with the “devil.” One person’s devil being another’s deity, this assessment was wrong only in its resort to European demon­ ology. The friars recognized peyote and the ecstatic-visionary dreams it triggered as a serious threat to effective Christianization and rigorously sought to destroy any vestiges of a peyote “cult” among Indians under their control. Clearly their efforts were without success. The most widely quoted of these early denunciations of peyote is that of Padre José Ortega, who coined the term raíz diabólico (“diabolic root”) in his Historia de Nayarit, published in Spain in 1754. Ortega convinced himself that with the conquest of the Sierra, the Indians, though for two centuries valiant defenders of their lands and beliefs, had quickly em­ braced Christianity “as lambs” and had resolutely turned their backs on their former heathen practices. A rather less sanguine assessment comes from an eighteenth-century Franciscan writer, Padre José Arlegui, who had firsthand experience with the tenacity of native religion and ritual among the “lambs” of the province of Zacatecas, which included part of the mountain tribes of the Sierra. Arlegui (in Santoscoy 1899) writes that of all the herbs used by the natives, peyote was the most venerated and that, ground and mixed with water, it was imbibed for all manner of infirmities and also to attain “fantastic imaginings” and knowledge of the future. He complained that this “infernal abuse” persisted not only among Indians out of reach of the missionary fathers but even among Christianized natives of this province. These, he reports, were adept at procuring the “horrendous drink” and cleverly concealing it from the watchful eyes of the ministers so that they might inebriate themselves with it to procure knowledge of future happenings. As an especially bra­ zen example he cites the case of Indian elders (politicos) who, in place “of

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the four Gospels one gives to the children in Spain,” concealed peyote in the bags carried by their sons, claiming “without embarrassment or fear” that peyote would make them wise, skillful matadors and agile tamers of horses. Arlegui tells us that such abuses were severely punished. It is interesting that the Indians chose to emphasize those qualities they thought might favorably impress the Spaniards. They have been doing it ever since. Otto Klineberg (1934:440-460), for example, reported in the American Anthropologist that when he asked some Huichols what they saw in their peyote vision, the answer was, “the saints.” He was given, and seems to have accepted, the same explanation when he inquired about the purpose of native “god houses,” that is, the rancho xirikis. Nearly a century before Arlegui, the Jesuit writer Fray Antonio Arias de Saavedra (in Santoscoy 1899), in a lengthy carta to his superiors de­ scribing the conditions and customs of the unconquered “Gentile” Indi­ ans of the Sierra de Nayarit, reported that the Coras drank a decoction of peyote to seal their pact with the spirits. The “creator of peyote” was said to be Nayacuric, a principal spirit who resided in the earth and who had the form of a crayfish. Santoscoy quotes another report on the use of peyote in western Mexico, dated January 20, 1659, in which the cura of San Pedro Teocaltiche, Padre Andres Estrada Flores, complained that the inhabitants of the Caxcana region in northern Jalisco drank peyote ceremonially as well as medicinally, for “different indispositions and con­ vulsions,” and that when they intoxicated themselves with peyote in their ceremonies, they saw “horrible visions.” The early Jesuits who labored among the Indians on the rugged north­ western frontier in Sinaloa, north of the Cora, and among the so-called Laguna Indians of Coahuila, to the north of the sacred peyote country of the Huichols (and the Coras) in San Luis Potosi, were also much per­ turbed by the continued ritual use of peyote by the native population. According to the accounts of the Jesuit fathers, particularly Andrés Pérez de Ribas (1944 [1645]), peyote was generally consumed in liquid form. Pérez de Ribas, who went to Sinaloa in 1604 and remained for sixteen years, says that although it had medicinal properties, peyote was forbid­ den and its use punished by the clergy because it was inextricably bound up with “heathen rituals and superstitions” and used to conjure up evil spirits and “diabolical fantasies.” The widespread use of peyote in colonial times by the native peoples of western Mexico, from Jalisco north to Sinaloa, left the impression that it must be indigenous to the area. Even today one reads occasionally that Lophophora williamsii grows not only in north-central Mexico but also in the Sierra Madre Occidental. That it does not, and that at least the Huichols travel long distances to procure it ritually each year, became

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generally known with the publication by Lumholtz of his observations among the Huichols between 1895 and 1898 (Lumholtz 1900, 1902). Actually, a Mexican, Rosandro Corona, official engineer of the state of Jalisco, preceded Lumholtz by several years in reporting that peyote, not being native to the Sierra Madre, was procured by the Huichols on long ritual pilgrimages to San Luis Potosi. In December 1888 Corona visited the Huichol gobernancia of Santa Catarina, where he observed the welcoming ceremonies for a group of returning peyoteros. His ac­ count was published by Santoscoy in 1899 in a collection of documents pertaining to the history of Nayarit. In his introduction Santoscoy wrote that “patriotic impulse” and the recent work by two foreign scholars, the Frenchman Leon Diguet and the Norwegian Carl Lumholtz, inspired him to rush his volume of historical materials into print. A year later the American Museum of Natural History published the first monograph by Lumholtz on Huichol symbolic art. Lumholtz’s contribution is all the more outstanding when one considers the lack of scholarly precedent, the enormous gulf between his own European system of interpreting the world and that of the Indians, and the difficulties of travel, communica­ tion (both cross-cultural and physical), and sheer survival that he had to overcome during his travels in the Sierra. Of course this applies to all the early visitors to the Huichols. Although Lumholtz did not himself participate in a peyote pilgrim­ age, he observed and reported in detail certain ceremonies connected with it and was also given an excellent description of the trek itself by his informants. What Lumholtz said of the pilgrimage and its meaning in Huichol culture was confirmed not only by us but also by the Mexi­ can author Fernando Benítez (1968, 1974). Indeed, I doubt that any of us would have been able to absorb as much of the ritual as we did had we not had Lumholtz at hand. Not only is this a tribute to his powers of observation and his ability to inspire trust in his Indian friends; it also demonstrates how little change there has been in the ritual in nearly eighty years. This statement gains in significance when one considers that it is precisely this period that has seen the greatest impact of the outside world on Huichol life.

2. “Hunting” Peyote, Past and Present This comes to us from ancient, ancient times. The times of my great­ great-grandfathers, those who were the fathers of my great-grand­ father, fathers of my grandfather who was a mara’akáme, fathers of my father. This is a story from those ancient times. Those ancient ones of whom I speak, they began to say to one

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another, “How will it turn out well, so that there will be unity of all, this unity we have.” And another said, “Ah, this is a beautiful thing, that which is our life. It is the hikuri [peyote].” And another said, “It is like a beautiful flower, as one says. It is like the Deer. It is our life. We must go so that it will enable us to see our life.” So begins Ramón’s version of the original journey to Wirikúta, the primordial quest by the ancestor deities that provides the mythological model for the peyote pilgrimage. There are many versions of this journey, including at least one, collected by Zingg (1935, 1938), that collapses the birth of the Sun god into the Deer-Peyote hunt, and others in which it is the ancestors in the form of wolves who go to hunt the deer. This multi­ plicity of versions of an oral tradition that is at the very heart of Huichol spirituality is yet one more illustration of the truism that in mythology there is never just one “authentic” or “true” account but many. Still, this is the one that, so far as Ramón was concerned, was the actual history of that fabled event. What is unspoken but can be read into at least Ramón’s version is a certain degree of “real” history: separation from, and longing for, the home of the Deer-Peyote had made the divine ancestors ill. To be cured and regain a state of balance required finding their way back and a successful hunt for the sacred deer that was peyote and made its home in Wirikúta. I have no idea how many Huichols sub­ scribe to the same version, but among the peyoteros we joined in Decem­ ber 1968, there seemed to be no doubt of its truth. According to Ramón, the ancestor gods had come together in the first tuki, the circular Huichol temple constructed under the guidance of Tatewari so that each might have his or her proper place. When they were thus assembled, they discovered that all were ill: one suffered a pain in his chest, another in the stomach, a third in the eyes, a fourth in the legs, and so forth. Those responsible for rain (the divine Mothers) were giving no rain; those who were masters of animals were finding nothing to hunt. It was a time of great malaise in the Sierra, and no one knew how to “find his life.” Into this assembly of the ailing ancestor gods entered the Mara’akáme, Tatewari, tutelary deity of Huichol shamans, who manifests himself in the sacred fire. It was he who had called them together, as the singing shaman of the temple to this day calls on the supernaturals “to take their proper places.” “What can be ailing us?” they asked, and each spoke of his infirmities. “How shall we be cured? How shall we find our life?” Tatewari told them that they were ill because they had not gone to

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Wirikúta, the sacred land of the peyote, the place to the east where the Sun was born. If they wished to regain their health, they must prepare themselves ritually and follow him in proper order on the long and dif­ ficult journey to the peyote. They must fast and touch neither salt nor chile. No matter how hungry or thirsty they became, they must nibble only dry tortillas and assuage their thirst with but a drop of water. And so he placed them in their proper order, one after the other. No females were present: they would join the men later, at the sacred water holes called Tatéimatiniéri, which translates roughly as Where Our Mother Dwells. This magical place lies within sight of the sacred moun­ tains of Wirikúta. Not all the divine peyote seekers completed the quest. Some, like Rabbit Person and Hummingbird Person, were forced by hunger, thirst, or sheer exhaustion to leave the ritual file. They remained in their animal form in places that became sanctified by their presence. These, like other stopping places of the divine pilgrims, were forever after acknowledged with votive offerings and prayers by all who journey to the peyote. But the principal male deities and the female ones, the Rain Mothers and those of the Earth-Ready-for-Planting, of maize and other food plants, and of fertility and children, followed Tatewari to the sacred mountains at the eastern end of the world—”to the fifth level,” where the DeerPeyote revealed itself to them, as it still does, in the ceremonial hunt with bow and arrow. In this way they “found their life” and by their example taught the Huichol people how to attain theirs. Peyote pilgrimages, whose participants assume the identities of the ancestor deities, may take place at any time, usually between the end of the rainy season, in October-November, and early spring. Our own two pilgrimages, in 1966 and 1968, were held in December, but Ramón and other Huichols have gone as late as February and even March. In general, the sacred hunt follows a fall ceremony in which children, the drum, new maize, and especially the first ripened squash play the principal roles. Although it does not require the use of peyote, this ceremony, which Lumholtz called “First Fruits,” is actually a vital component of the whole peyote complex. Among other purposes, it is the principal ritual through which the shaman inculcates the children of the extended family home­ stead (usually his own) or several related rancherías with the sacred itin­ erary of the peyote quest (Furst and Anguiano 1976; Anguiano 2004). The ceremony, called Tatéi Néixa, “Dance of Our Mother (the Drum),” is one of the few extended occasions in the annual ceremonial cycle when the mara’akáme employs the upright drum, called tepu, a

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hollowed-out log, usually of oak but sometimes pine, that is balanced on three integral legs, is open at the bottom, and is closed off at the top with a head of pegged deerskin. Like many of the precolumbian minia­ ture drums in west Mexican shaft-and-chamber tomb art, the Huichol drum has a hole (“mouth”) in front through which the drum “speaks” and through which the sacred smoke of Tatewari emerges when burning pitch pine brands are placed beneath the drum to tighten and tune the skin to a proper pitch. Since the drum is called “Our Mother” and hence is female, and the pitch pine brands male, as is the fire itself, this act has symbolic connota­ tions as well as a practical purpose. The drum itself contains great power and possesses its own personality. To play it by beating with the hands is the sole prerogative of the shaman and his assistants. As elsewhere in the indigenous cultural context, it is exclusively a ritual and magical in­ strument, never used simply for dancing or other entertainment. There is an obvious implication here for the interpretation of archaeological clay figurines of drummers from west Mexican tombs and elsewhere in Meso­ america as shamans rather than musicians. In the Dance of Our Mother the deerskin head is beaten by the sha­ man with the palms of both hands, two rapid beats of the left comple­ menting a single, stronger beat with the right. The children meanwhile shake small gourd rattles to keep the drum company. Incessantly pound­ ing the tepu and chanting all the while, the shaman proceeds to transform the participating children into hummingbirds and to lead them in magi­ cal flight from their Sierra homes to the country of the peyote:

Look, you hummingbirds [he begins], Surely we are going where the peyoteros have gone, On their ancient pilgrimage of the peyote. Who knows if we are going to get there or not, Because this journey is very dangerous. One must fly high in order to pass over.

The wind, Light as air, We will make camp there, Under the highest trees. Máxa Kwaxi [the Deer god named Deer Tail] Gives them guidance.

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He gives them the names of where they will fly, So that they may enter there safely. They rise, they rise, Like a string of beads, “How pretty is this pilgrimage, How very pretty. ” So says Máxa Kwaxi. The identification of Tatutsi (Great-grandfather) Máxa Kwaxi in this song as spirit guide to the children on their way to Wirikúta is interesting because in some versions of the primordial peyote quest of the ancestor deities it is he rather than Tatewari who assembles the ailing ancestor dei­ ties and leads them back to Wirikúta (see Chapter 6 for an oral tradition of a real-life charismatic shaman-leader named Máxa Kwaxi recorded by Leon Diguet). According to Ramón, the mara’akáme accomplishes the transforma­ tion of the children into hummingbirds by means of his “secret,” that is, his magical, powers. The children—those under five—ascend and fly eastward on the vibrations of the shaman’s rhythmic beating of the drum. Their flight in single file is symbolized by a sisal fiber string along which the children are arranged like puffs of seed cotton from cottonwood trees, which also represent clouds. One end is tied to the drum, the other to a thread cross (tsikúri) or a pair of deer antlers, representing either the deer deity Máxa Kwaxi or the culture hero Elder Brother Káuyumari, or both. Like the latter, Great-grandfather Deer Tail is conceived both in deer form and as a person crowned by antlers; indeed, Máxa Kwaxi and Káuyumari sometimes appear to be two aspects of the same being. Hummingbirds as transformation of children on the symbolic flight to Wirikúta is of interest in light of Aztec conceptions of these fearless little birds as the souls of dead warriors. The Nahuatl word for hummingbird is huitizizilin (as in Huitzilopochtli, Hummingbird on the Left, the Aztec War and Sun god); as we saw in Chapter 2, Huichols apply the same Nahuatl-derived term to a small black bird that comes to the aid of sha­ mans in times of need. The chant itself consists of several hundred short verses, each re­ peated four times. As is the norm in Huichol chanting, all are elliptical rather than descriptive and certainly none are as explicit as those dictated by Ramón for his ignorant anthropological audience. Along the magical route the shaman points out the sacred landmarks: “Here the ancients

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made tortillas,” “Here they rested,” “Here Rabbit Person remained be­ hind in the cactus thicket,” “Here is the Place of Lost Water,” “Here they ground their face paint,” and the like. Some are merely “overflown” or “circled,” but at others the hummingbird-children alight so that they may become familiar with the features of the sacred places, which pre­ sumably they will one day visit on an actual rather than metaphorical peyote hunt. Significantly, Máxa Kwaxi, speaking through the shaman, also warns the children of danger spots: “In this pueblo live bad Spaniards, avoid it.” “Here they must not see you, they may try to capture you, do not light a fire” (literally, “do not light Tatewari”). Or, conversely, “here live people who are good and will help you.” There may well be a historical basis for such statements, as there may also be for the story of the first peyote quest itself. References to “bad Spaniards who may capture you” sug­ gest a time when peyoteros from the Sierra must have made their way as much as possible in secret, perhaps by night, ever fearful of discovery and capture by slave raiders for the Spanish silver mines of Zacatecas and San Luis Potosi. These mines took a fearful toll of Indians in the first two cen­ turies after the conquest. The peyote country must have been especially perilous since, as already noted, it is roughly identical with the colonial silver mining district of Real de Catorce. How many of those who set out for Wirikúta never returned? The critical moment in the symbolic flight of the hummingbird­ children is the dangerous passage through the “Gateway of the Clouds,” also called “Where the Clouds Open and Close.” In the actual peyote pilgrimage this mythological passage is located on a rise near the city of Zacatecas. The shaman invokes the aid of Máxa Kwaxi and/or Káuyu­ mari, and while the latter holds back the threatening clouds on either side with his antlers, the bird-children fly quickly through this Huichol ver­ sion of the Symplegades, the Clashing Islands of Greek mythology. The audience and the little children are spellbound while the shaman, in his chant, relates how the clouds closed on the tail feathers of one little girl and how Máxa Kwaxí/Káuyumari, “with his power,” raised her from the ground and restored her ability to fly. Finally, the children reach the sacred springs and places of fertility called Tatéimatiniéri, the home of the Rain Mothers of the east, who on the primordial peyote hunt met the exhausted and parched male ances­ tors here and assuaged their thirst with sacred water. From here the flight of the hummingbirds starts out on the final leg of the magical journey to Wirikúta, where, restored to human form,

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they will be received by the divine Mother of Huichol children, Tatéi Niwetúkame. “Let us go where Niwetúkafme] is,” sings the shaman. “Let us go, all of us, in order to know Our Mother. Let us go where the one who embraces us lives, the one who loves us much.” The Mother greets them: “Now I am content, now I am happy. I will give them life. Look, my children, I am the one who embraces you. I am the one who gives you your kiipiiri [life force, soul].” (It is tempting to connect the name of this mother goddess to lyetáku, the Keresan Great Mother. Cer­ tainly they have a similar place in the pantheons of these two widely separated peoples. If there really is a genetic or historical connection, it would be only one of several cultural and mythological correspondences between the Huichol and Pueblo Indians.) Be that as it may, apart from its more subtle meanings and its func­ tion of enculturation and informal education, the ceremony of the drum serves to imprint on the minds of Huichol youngsters a kind of subjective territorial map on which all the sacred landmarks between the Sierra and the peyote country are indelibly engraved and by which they may one day orient themselves, geographically and psychologically, on an actual pilgrimage. As Ramón put it to us, “In this way they begin to learn what it is to be Huichol.”

3. Metamorphosis and Spirit Power Many Huichols pass their entire lives without ever going on a peyote hunt: “One does go or one does not go, as one wishes,” says Ramón. Some participate in the rituals before and after the journey or take peyote at one or another ceremony but are not willing to submit themselves to the intense hardships and abstentions from sex, water, salt, and normal nourishment required of the peyotero. Others have gone five, ten, even twenty or thirty times. ’Colas told me he had gone more times than thirty, and so had Lupe’s uncle José Ríos, who on our 1968 pilgrimage assumed the identity of the Sun god, Tayaupá. Some go to Wirikúta in fulfillment of a vow, perhaps made in a moment of stress or at the behest of a sha­ man when someone in the family fell ill. Ramón himself, and Lupe, went on his sixth journey (Lupe’s third) in 1969 because she was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and, during a curing ritual performed by her shaman-uncle José, had, at his behest, promised the divine ancestors to make the difficult trek as much as possible on foot. Although the pain in her legs was often so severe and her knees so swollen that she could barely stand, in early 1970 she and Ramón told us that they were able to

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cover part of the three hundred miles to Wirikúta on foot. Of course, that used to be the standard before wheeled transport became available. Why do they go? “Patriotism,” among many other reasons, says Lumholtz, by which he presumably means the same thing as Ramón’s “being Huichol.” “What does one go for?” asks Ramón. “One goes to have one’s life.” The pilgrimage helps one attain whatever one desires: health, children, rain, protection from lightning and sorcerers, or divine intervention against the ever troublesome vecinos (neighbors, mestizos), who encroach illegally on the Huichol lands with their cattle and some­ times employ force to drive the Indians from their milpas. Above all, one goes to attain visions of great beauty, to hear the voices of the spirits, the divine ancestors, and to receive their guidance. In a sense, participation in a peyote journey makes of each person a kind of shaman, reinforcing the observation of Lumholtz and Zingg that a large proportion, even half, of adult men have sufficient knowl­ edge of the oral traditions to function as such at least on the level of the extended family. For a long time following the pilgrimage its members acknowledge a ritual bond with one another. They recognize and greet one another in special ways. They have special names. They wear special insignia: the tobacco gourd, called yakwé, of Tatewari, squirrel tails and turkey feathers on their hats. The peyote journey also has the characteris­ tics of initiation: one who has never gone is said to be “new,” like a baby; he is a matewáme and undergoes special restrictions because his tender­ ness makes him extraordinarily vulnerable to the malevolent magic of sorcerers. But if all peyoteros, men and women, have, like the gods, the attri­ butes of shamans (for one thing, for the duration of the pilgrimage they can transform themselves, or are transformed, into spirit beings), they are shamans on a low level, not true mara’akáte, the shaman-singers. Peyoteros who have “completed” as mara’akáte, or are on the road to completion, feel that they are charged with a deeper purpose than ordi­ nary pilgrims. Of course, they too have needs that they hope to have an­ swered through their participation: health, a child, rain, maize. There are no full-time religious specialists, and shamans, like any other Huichol, must support themselves primarily through digging-stick milpa cultiva­ tion, herding, or, if they settled outside the Sierra territory, arts and crafts or wage labor. A man who would assume the enormous burden, physical and psy­ chological, of a mara’akáme, who would make himself responsible for the welfare of his group, must first complete at least five peyote pilgrimages.

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But such an individual should do this not only as a follower, intent on pri­ vate thought and private vision. Ideally he—and although the vocation of shaman is open to women, it is usually a he—must demonstrate the capacity to be an effective soul guide, a psychopomp, who escorts his spirit companions safely across the barriers of space and time, through the gateway of the Clashing Clouds, and to the sacred mountains at the end of the world in the east, where the Sun Father was born and where the Deer-Peyote and the ancestors await them. He must prove his capacity to endure lack of not only food and water but sleep. Even at night, when his companions rest around the fire that is Tatewari, he remains awake, alert, ever ready to defend their spiritual integrity against supernatural enemies. (Ramón, whom I twice saw go virtually without sleep for seven nights in a row on the way to Wirikúta, said that one who leads the peyoteros and the matewámete (pl.), the “new ones,” is “like one who is bent low under the heaviest carrying bas­ ket. Its ropes cut so deeply into his shoulders that they bleed.” In a sense they are all spirits, of course, for the duration of the journey. But he more than any other participant must transcend the limitations of his bodily self and achieve that unique breakthrough that sets the shaman apart from ordinary mortals. If he lacks these qualities, he will never “complete himself.” It goes without saying that the leader must know the minutest mythological details of the itinerary as well as the correct sequence and proper manner in which ritual is to be carried out at the sacred places along the route and, above all, in the peyote country itself. And he must “see” with an inner eye, for only he will recognize the tracks of the DeerPeyote and see the brilliant rainbow-soul of Elder Brother Wawatsári, the Principal Deer, rise from the peyote plant as it is “slain” by his arrows. Conversely, only he will see the Deer himself as, at the moment of his sac­ rificial death, the sacred visionary plants sprout from his body, hooves, and antlers. I want to emphasize that this idea of completing a certain number of pilgrimages in order to become a shaman is not a matter of adding up so many miles, so many hardships, so many visions to a required total, like collecting merit badges or battle stars. Rather, it is an accumulation of spirit power, in geometric progression, through repeated and ever more intensive metamorphosis. “Completing oneself” is really progressive minimization of matter and maximization of spirit to the point where temporary transformation makes the transition to spiritual exaltation and apotheosis. It is my impression that this special condition of the shaman cannot

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be faked—that not only he himself but his companions really do know whether or not a man (or a woman) who lays claim to being a mara’akáme has what Huichols call “balance,” that special, ineffable capacity to ven­ ture without fear onto a “narrow bridge” across the great chasm separat­ ing the ordinary world from the world beyond.

4. Purification and the Peyote Pilgrimage So intense is the drama of the “hunt” for the metaphorical Deer that is peyote that certain events of crucial importance for the success of the quest tend to be overlooked. The first of these is a ritual of confession and purification through which the participants, including the leader, are transformed and thus initiated into the sacred enterprise. Although Huichols take it for granted, this really is an extraordinary ritual. Normally it would take place inside the tuki. Because there was no tuki where we assembled not far from the left bank of the Rio Lerma, the participants collected and piled up dry brush in a wide circle to represent the traditional circular thatch-roofed temple. Within this metaphorical tuki everyone—peyoteros and matewámete, as well those who would remain at home—was required to acknowledge publicly all his or her sexual encounters, from the beginning of adulthood to the present, ex­ cluding marital sex. Further, each sexual partner must be identified by name, regardless of the presence of spouses or lovers, although elderly people are allowed to telescope their love affairs and be less precise about names. No display of jealousy, hurt, resentment, or anger is tolerated; more than that, no one is even allowed to entertain such feelings “in one’s heart.” Any display of hostility and deliberate omission of sexual intimacy or a lover’s identity would jeopardize not only the offender but also his companions and even the entire sacred enterprise. The quest for life could prove fruitless. At the very least, even if the peyote country were reached, those who had failed to purge themselves or who carried “bad thoughts in their hearts” would probably fall victim to sorcerers, suffer terrible hallucinations, and perhaps even die. An extraordinary spectacle indeed, doubly so if one has been taught to regard jealousy and its expression as “natural” human emotions, common to all people every­ where, rather than as at least partly an artifact of culture. Barbara and 1 had occasion to witness the seriousness with which Huichol people take this rite when, in December 1966, Lupe’s niece, then trying desperately to blend into the larger society, refused to name her sexual experiences. First Lupe and then several of the other participants pressured her with such

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obvious anger and frustration, accusing her of endangering the very lives of herself and the entire group, and of preventing the success of the im­ pending hunt for the peyote, that in the end the girl, now in tears, could no longer resist and agreed to own up to her sex life. It may be that some participants in this rite feel resentment, espe­ cially at an unexpected revelation of infidelity on the part of a spouse or lover. However, in neither of the two “confession” and purification rituals I attended did I see the slightest sign of anger or hostility. On the contrary, with the exception of the resistance of Lupe’s niece, there was an atmosphere of marked lightheartedness. Individual recitations of “transgressions” were frequently punctuated by laughter and ribald jokes, particularly when Lupe found it necessary to jog her husband’s memory by reminding him of an extramarital escapade or two he had overlooked or tried to hide. On the other hand, I have had Huichols tell me that if arguments or fights break out suddenly between two people during the year, the cause is often smoldering jealousy or resentment over such revelations. On our 1968 pilgrimage the ritual was held late in the evening of the first day. The seventeen Indians—nine men, five women, and three chil­ dren, the youngest born just seven days earlier—were seated or squatting in a circle around Tatewari, the ceremonial fire. Ramón had brought his ’uwéni, the high-backed woven armchair that is reserved for shamans and headmen of the ranchos, and so had José Ríos and one other man from their ranchos across the river. Ramón and his principal companions and aides were sitting on the west side of the circle facing east across the sacred fire. Following a series of chanted incantations and the recitation of the story of the primordial gathering of the ancestor gods for the same rite, Ramón gave the signal for the first of the participants to be brought before him. In his hands he held a sisal fiber cord and his muviéri, the feather bundle tied to a compound arrow that is the most powerful of the shaman’s paraphernalia. By his feet lay a pair of deer antlers, representing the culture hero Elder Brother Káuyumari, the Deer spirit helper whose presence is indispensable for shamanizing; his takwátsi, the lidded basket in which power objects are stored; and a votive gourd bowl. (Because the ritual took place in open brushland and Ramón’s and his assistants’ cer­ emonial chairs obviously could not be left behind, they came along with us tied to the roof of the INI carryall Salomón had contributed to the pilgrimage to help transport our sizable party to Wirikúta.) Serving as a kind of constable for the ritual and, indeed, the remain­ der of the pilgrimage was a young man name Crescenciano, who on this

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peregrination was the personator or likeness of Elder Brother Parikuté, patron deity of animals and hunting. Crescenciano-Parikuté led the peyote seekers in a ceremonial circuit counterclockwise around the fire, ending in front of Ramón. Men came first, then the women, and finally the oldest of Crescenciano’s three children, a boy aged ten. Each gave a ritual recitation of past love affairs, except, of course, little Francisco, who shook his head, grinning from ear to ear, when Ramón addressed him and asked, with mock seriousness, “Well, little matewáme, tell the Mara’akáme, tell Tatewari, how many women have you enjoyed in your life?” Everyone roared with laughter. Then, for each love affair reported to him, Ramón tied a knot in the cord. Those whose memory faltered were assisted by shouts of encour­ agement or a reminder of this or that love affair. As personification of the Sun and oldest of the pilgrims, José was the first to come before Ramón. He named several women not his wife or wives and then said, “I have had such a long life that my feet are already rotting in the earth; if I spoke here of all those whom I have enjoyed, we would not leave here tomorrow or the day after.” This was hugely appreciated by all, and Ramón said yes, for Tayaupá, the Sun Father (i.e., José), he would make only one knot, a very large one, or there would be no room left on the string for anyone else. Again, laughter. The entire ritual passed in this way, without visible tension of any kind. I should mention here that not only do the participants in the pil­ grimage assume the identities of the ancestor deities who inaugurated the peyote tradition, but there are ritual reversals also in ordinary speech of the meaning of certain words, further emphasizing that the peyote hunt takes place not in ordinary time but in a time out of life, the First Times, when things as they are came to be. Thus, in 1968 José, as the oldest of the peyoteros, was addressed as nunútsi, baby. Earth is sky, water sand, night day, man woman and boy girl and vice versa, hot cold, and so forth. In sexual joking, nose would become penis and sneezing ejaculation. The lighthearted banter during the confession ritual should not be taken to mean that the ritual is not in dead earnest—quite the contrary. Laughter, yes; cynicism, never. There was not a hint that all did not participate fully, “with their hearts,” that they did not feel deeply the seriousness of what they were doing, or that they did not believe in the potentially fatal consequences of any violation of prescribed behavior. It seemed to me that the good-natured badinage that accompanied the confessions served primarily to reinforce the ritual obligation to preserve goodwill toward each of the companions, no matter what. If the potential sting of a confession is neutralized by ritually pre­

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scribed good humor, the manner in which the peyoteros are purged, as it were, of their sexual past leaves no doubt of the gravity of the occasion. As each completed his or her recitation and the last knot was tied, Ramón rose and passed his muviéri with the pendant feathers of the hawk and other power birds over the face, shoulders, arms, and chest and down the thighs and knees to the feet of each companion. He directed the pilgrim and his or her stay-behind relatives to ask Tatewari to “burn away every­ thing, everything, burn away all your transgressions, burn it all away, so that nothing will remain, so that you will be new. The Mara’akáme [Tatewari] does and undoes [transforms].” Leaning into the flames, the actual and metaphorical peyoteros and matewámete held first one hand and then the other over the flames and followed the same procedure with their feet. The women lifted their skirts to allow the heat to travel up their thighs. A few braver souls actually leaped over the flames, a rite they repeated several times on the journey, suggesting a former practice of fire walking. When everyone, including Ramón himself, had completed his or her confession and been purified, he rolled the sisal fiber cord, now crowded with knots, into a spiral and placed it on the flames. It flared briefly and was soon burned to ashes. Ramón stirred these with the brazilwood point of his muviéri and said, “Now you see that you are new. Tatewari has burned it all away. He has removed it all from you. Now we can cross over there. The Mara’akáme does and undoes.” How is one to understand this little drama within the larger drama of the peyote quest? Lumholtz, who speaks of separate confessions by men and women (which we did not see on either occasion, in 1966 or 1968) and gives the fourth day rather than the first as the time of the rite, rec­ ognized its fundamental importance to the success of the pilgrimage but interpreted it primarily in terms of sexual purity. The Huichols, he wrote (1902:129-130), seek to achieve health, good fortune, indeed life itself, by gathering peyote. For these goals to be attained, the participants must purge themselves of all sin, that is, their sexual experiences: “inasmuch as the pure fire cannot benefit those who are impure, the men and women must not only commit no transgression for the time being, but must also purify themselves from any past sin.” At first glance one might be tempted explain the whole phenomenon in terms of Catholic influence. Why else would the Huichols, who prac­ tice polygamy and who in any event are not known for strict fidelity, equate sex outside marriage with “sin,” or at least with transgression? Nevertheless, I see no reason to regard the rite as anything but purely ab­ original and pre-European. In the first place, confession was practiced in

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Mesoamerica long before the arrival of the Europeans: an Aztec goddess, Tlazoltéotl, to whom confessions were addressed and who was also one of the premier creator deities and even goddess of childbirth, was appro­ priately known as “Eater of Filth.” Also, the custom of tying knots for each confession and then burning the knotted cord is reminiscent of an Aztec confession ritual in which straws were drawn through the pierced tongue and then ritually burned in the sacred fire. “With this,” reports the sixteenth-century chronicler Fray Diego Duran (1971:247),“everyone felt he was cleansed and pardoned for his transgressions and sins, having the same faith that we hold for the Divine Sacrament of penance.” Also, there are fundamental differences between the Huichol and Catholic rites that are obscured by the very term “confession.” In Catho­ lic practice the confessing individual admits to having sinned and, if the priest accepts his or her act of contrition and repentance as genuine, is absolved from the sins he or she has acknowledged. The Huichol does not repent but merely acknowledges a certain act as fact. In this sense “profession” might be more accurate than “confession,” except that of course in the context of the peyote hunt, sexual intercourse per se is disapproved and hence is a transgression, whether or not it occurs with one’s wife or husband. But “transgression” against what or whom? I suggest that the answer is to be found in the meaning of the peyote pilgrimage itself. Just as metamorphosis and return to origins are the leitmotif, and fertility the purpose, of the peyote quest as a whole, so it seems to be metamorphosis, not absolution in our sense, that lies at the heart of the confession ritual: metamorphosis from man or woman to child, from ordinary mortal to spirit being. What is less obvious is the re­ lationship this may bear to the concept of incest. Incest is a grave offense among the Huichols, incest and sexual intercourse with a vecino being the only offenses for which there is stricture or punishment—temporary, to be sure—after death. One of the penalties suffered by the soul of an offender is being trampled by mules before it is allowed to continue its journey to the afterworld. According to Ramón, it is mules that do the damage rather than, say, horses, because mules are sterile, which is what can happen to one who lies with a non-Huichol. It is in this direction that I suggest we must look for additional meanings in the rite of confession and purification. In any event, this dimension of the ceremony was not apparent to me in the first peyote pilgrimage and did not begin to take shape until sometime after the second, when there had been time and opportunity to stand back from this very moving experience, compare observations, and look at the footage that went into my film.

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Barbara almost immediately recognized in the journey to Wirikúta a symbolic return to origins and an original state. In order for ordinary mortals to undertake this sacred quest, she writes, “the pilgrims must be cleansed of all sexual experience, that is, they must return to the period of life when they were innocent, before they were mature, worldly adults” (Myerhoff 1968). In that sense, she suggests, the confession ritual is it­ self a journey to origins, as is the peyote pilgrimage as a whole. But why should shedding one’s adulthood open the door to the sacred country? What, indeed, is the sacred country—that is, beyond the obvious answer that it is where the divine cactus grows? Might the sacred country itself be a kind of “Great Mother”? If so, we would have at least one explana­ tion for ridding oneself of all adult sexual experience, licit or “illicit,” before embarking on the journey, lest the enterprise come to naught or the offender go mad in Wirikúta. Also, it is a fact that although the sacred deer that becomes peyote at the moment of its death is male, the peyote species is in charge of a spirit mother, who manifests herself in Wirikúta as an especially large and well-formed specimen of peyote. Would, then, entry into Wirikúta (which, as mentioned earlier, supposedly means “In back of the Mother [of peyote”]) as an adult sexual being be tantamount to incest, an act that threatens not only the transgressor but the entire social group? I don’t want to carry this too far, but it should be noted that the Colombian anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (1978) reports comparable attitudes and fears among the Tukano of the Vaupés. That said, I want to emphasize that so far as I know, there is no explicit equation of Wirikúta with a “Great Mother” in the peyote tradition. Nevertheless, we do have the “Mother” of peyote, plus the embrace of the hummingbird-children by the Mother goddess Niwetúkame as they reach the sacred peyote land on their magical flight. Many interpretations are possible, of course, within the overall theme of the return to a mythical original state, the paradise for which all people supposedly yearn. The peyote quest is part of a very complex sys­ tem of myth, history, and spirituality that to unravel and fully, or at least partially, understand would require a lifetime of immersion.

5. “Knotting” the Peyoteros Sometimes after the obliteration by fire of the sisal cord with its accu­ mulation of knots, Ramón took a second rolled-up cactus fiber string, considerably longer than the first, from the gourd bowl by his seat. He uncoiled it, held one end to the back of his hunting bow, beat the

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bowstring several times with an arrow, and took some minutes to chant, almost sotto voce. Then he and José-Tayaupá, seated to his left, passed the cord around themselves, once in front and again in back. Ramón now rose and walked with cord and muviéri to the far end of the sacred circle. Moving from right to left, he stopped before each individual, touched him or her with the feathers, and tied one knot. When the seventeen pilgrims, including the week-old baby, had thus been “knotted in” by Ramón, he made sev­ eral additional knots for us as participant observers, “so that all will be of one heart.” Back in his seat of spiritual and social authority, Ramón once more held the end (or beginning) of the cord to the back of his bow, beat the bowstring, and passed the cord to José. I should mention here that this use of the bow in the manner of a drum continued throughout the pilgrimage. According to Ramón, its sound alerts the ancestors to the coming of the pilgrims and guides them through several dangerous gate­ ways, beginning with the same Clashing Clouds that threaten to close on the hummingbird-children on their magical flight to Wirikúta. It is also played “to make Elder Brother [Káuyumari, who has his home on a hill in Wirikúta that bears his name] happy” and to magically “transfix” the Deer-Peyote in his tracks so that he may present himself to the arrows of the hunters. Drum and bow represent a “unity” that creates and guaran­ tees life, the former female, the latter male, and so are bow and arrow. (An interesting coincidence: the hunting bow as musical instrument is found also in the Andes and, across the Atlantic, the Ituri Forest of the Congo.) While Ramón continued to beat the bowstring, the knotted cord, stretched tight, traveled counterclockwise in back of the entire group and clockwise in front. When it was back in Ramón’s hands, he wound it into a spiral and tied it to the back of his bow. The identity of this knotted cord and the string on which the hummingbird-children are symbolically arranged, cloud-like, as puffs of cotton in the drum-and-squash ceremony is obvious. Also, there is no question that for the Huichols, knots, knotting, and binding have much the same magical significance they have elsewhere: folk belief, customs, and religion the world over “attribute to knots and bonds a function of healing, a defense against demons, or of conservation of the magic and vital forces” (Eliade 1961:111). The literature on this topic is volumi­ nous, a useful summary being chapter 3, “The God Who Binds and the Symbolism of Knots,” in Eliade’s Images and Symbols, published three

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years before his classic cross-cultural study, Shamanism: Archaic Tech­ niques of Ecstasy (1964). Lumholtz also mentions its use as a calendar, to count off the days, and of course there is the famous case of just such a practical function in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, led by Popé against Spanish domination. In the context of the peyote hunt, the cord on which the participants are strung as knots seems to have an additional dimension that may even be its primary symbolic function: that of metaphorical umbilicus. This suggested itself only after I had time to consider the implications of a difference between the tying ceremony before we set out for the peyote country and an untying ceremony that followed our return. In the first it was the leader, Ramón, who tied the knot for each participant. In the second it was the pilgrim who untied it (the exception being the youngest children). This seemed to suggest the following: just as the midwife ties the umbilical cord of the newborn infant, so the “new” peyote seeker cannot tie the knot for himself or herself but has to have it done by the leader, who in a sense acts as midwife for the passage into the otherworld of the ancestral peyote land. Once the sacred goal has been attained and the pilgrims have safely returned from their quest for life, they regain their former status as adults. This seemed to be reinforced symbolically by the ritual untying of the knots by themselves. As I witnessed it in 1968, in this ritual the knotted cord, which throughout the duration had been in the custody of the leader, was passed twice around the sacred circle, once counterclockwise and once clockwise (symbolizing, as Ramón ex­ plained it, transformation, or, in his words, “doing and undoing”). Then he walked around the inside of the circle with the cord in his hands, stop­ ping before each participant to allow him or her to untie his or her own knot.

6. Passing Between the Worlds There were critical rituals before, during, and after the dangerous pas­ sage through the Gateway of the Clouds. That these took place only a few yards from a heavily traveled highway seemed to matter not at all to our Huichol companions. As usual they acted as though the twenti­ eth century had never happened, or, more correctly, as though the flow of time had been reversed. As a matter of fact, nothing we saw on the entire pilgrimage demonstrated the quality of the enterprise better than the sight of the hikuli seekers acting out their deepest beliefs on the very outskirts of the city of Zacatecas, within sight and sound of the passing

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traffic, apparently oblivious to the trucks and buses belching smoke as they fought the long grade. This extended also to our own mode of trans­ port, my VW camper and INI’s carryall. In former days peyoteros walked the entire three hundred miles or so from the Sierra Madre Occidental. Some still do on occasion, Ramón and Lupe included. But for the most part the peyoteros avail themselves for all or part of the way of whatever transport is available. I don’t know if this is the rule, but our Huichol companions sang songs that denied or ignored how they were traveling. True to the custom of reversing meanings, they called my white Volkswa­ gen bus “the little white pig” and sang its praises because it “is so good for walking” to Wirikúta. I observed two stages to the crossing of the critical threshold be­ tween the worlds. The first is called Gateway, or Entrance, of Clouds; the second, Where the Clouds Open. They are only a few steps apart, but the emotional impact on the participants of passing from one to the other is enormous. From here one travels to the place called Vagina, and from there the trail leads through a series of named stations (the stopping places of the ancestors on their primordial pilgrimage) directly to Tatéimatiniéri, the place of Our Mothers. Of course, as with Wirikúta itself, one would search in vain on any map for places that bear such names, in Huichol or Spanish. For like other sacred loci on the peyote itinerary, these are landmarks only in the geography of the mind. It was midmorning on the fourth day out when we arrived at the outskirts of Zacatecas. The vehicles were parked, and assembling once more in “their proper order” (as originally, and now again, arranged by Tatewari himself), the pilgrims proceeded single-file to a patch of lowgrowing nopal cactus and thorny acacia bushes a few hundred feet from the highway. Here they halted, and Ramón moved down the line, brush­ ing each pilgrim with his muviéri and ritually calling out his or her new name as the likeness of one of the original peyote hunters. They listened carefully as he related passages from the peyote tradition and invoked the protection of Káuyumari and Máxa Kwaxi for the coming ordeal. At his direction, each then took one small red and green parrot feather from a bunch carried by one of the matewámete, the novices, and tied it to the spiny branches of a small bush. When the last feather had thus been fastened, they filed by, muttering prayers, and returned to the vehicles. Instead of embarking, however, Ramón had the cars drive slowly ahead while the pilgrims followed on foot, the older children walking and the youngest in its mother’s arms. This, Ramón explained later, was so that Káuyumari, whose likeness in the form of antlers and ceremonial arrows

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he had earlier mounted on the front of each vehicle, could act as guide and scout on the final approach to the Clashing Clouds (in a more tradi­ tional pilgrimage on foot, the deer horns would be carried by the leader). Beyond their obvious symbolism of celestial flight, the feather offerings evidently serve as prayers for safe passage “to the other side.” Some distance up the road the entire entourage was led to an open space that commanded an unobstructed view of the valley from which we had just come. Here the party formed a semicircle—the men to Ramón’s left, the women and children to his right. Although at least the adults knew the peyote traditions by heart, everyone listened with rapt atten­ tion as he told them how the ancestors “had done this thing” and how with Káuyumari’s assistance they would soon pass safely through the perilous Gateway of the Clashing Clouds into the sacred country beyond. But from now on, until they reached the Place of Our Mothers, those who had not yet traveled to the peyote would have to walk in darkness. For they were “new,” he said, “new and very delicate,” easily blinded by the glare emanating from the sacred country on the other side of the clouds and also especially vulnerable to whirlwinds and any such dangers that malevolent sorcerers try to cast in the way of hikuri seekers. Blindfolded, they would be safe, but they would have to proceed with caution, holding on to the one in front and taking care not to stumble or fall. “It will be hard, very hard, this walk. It is a great penance, this journey to Wirikúta, and you will cry very much.” Starting with the women, Ramón proceeded to blindfold those who were “new and delicate.” Even the three children had their eyes covered, although for the baby this was only symbolic. He was very gentle with all the pilgrims, in speech and touch, exhorting them, and especially the matewámete, to “be of one heart” and take good care as they walked, for soon they would come to the Gateway of the Clouds. It would be dangerous, but with his power, meaning the power of Tatewari and that of Káuyumari, they would be “admitted” and pass safely “to the other side.” The passage—metaphorically to us but very real to the participants— through the Clashing Clouds requires some comment. We recall that in the metaphorical flight to Wirikúta of the hummingbird-children in the drum-and-squash ceremony, one of the bird-children loses her tail feath­ ers in the perilous passage. Nonfatal injury, such as loss of feathers, a foot, or part of the stern of a vessel, is a common feature of the many versions of the widespread motif of the dangerous or paradoxical pas­ sage, from the Clashing Islands, or Symplegades, of the drama of Jason

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Figure io. Time out of life: Huichols assembled single-file by the side of a busy highway in Zacatecas before passing through the perilous gateway of the Clashing Clouds, invisible to the naked eye, on the way to Wirikúta. This is where those who have never experienced the peyote hunt are blindfolded to protect them from the metaphorical glare said to emanate from the sacred country ahead.

and the Argonauts, to funerary and shamanic mythologies in Australia, Siberia, the Arctic, and the Americas. In Huichol myth and ritual the Clashing Clouds have several parallels: stone traps, solar rays, snapping jaws, and the like, all in connection with the shamanic quest for super­ natural power or the journey of the soul after death. Clashing rocks also occur in Aztec eschatology, and they continue to be found among Nahuaspeaking peoples of contemporary Mexico. Although everyone took the blindfolding seriously (some actually wept), we were again impressed by the quick shifts between solemnity and humor. As Ramón came to those who, as veterans of previous peyote hunts, did not require blindfolds, spirited and often very funny dialogues ensued. Was the companion well fed, had he quenched his thirst? Oh yes, went the reply, his stomach was full to bursting with all manner of good things to eat and drink. And yes, he was happy to be “walking” such a long way in such ease and comfort. In truth, none had had more than minimal nourishment for days. Ramón did buy some oranges at a fruit stand and gave pieces to the others, but this was permitted, he said,

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because there were no oranges in the ancient Huichol world. The refer­ ence to ease and comfort, by the way, had nothing to do with the fact that they were riding in a vehicle instead of walking as of old. Several even said that they much preferred going on foot “because it is more beauti­ ful.” Rather, it was part of the aforementioned reversal of meanings, an integral part of the peyote quest that intensifies as the pilgrimage pro­ gresses toward its climax. Reversal was to become more common after we left the paved highway (“Oh, what a rocky path, so full of holes and stones!”) and entered upon desert or deeply rutted wagon trails (“Ah, what a fine highway, so well paved, so smooth!”). Following the ritual blindfolding, Ramón took the peyoteros some hundreds of yards northeastward, to the fateful cosmic threshold which only he perceived but whose reality was evidently in no wise doubted by the pilgrims. When he reached a certain point, he halted abruptly, motioning to those behind to do likewise. Here, on a little rise of dusty clay on the edge of Zacatecas, a place entirely unremarkable to the untutored eye, was the mystical divide, the Symplegades of the peyote quest. The pilgrims remained rooted where they stood, intent upon Ramón’s every move, even if they could not see it through their blindfolds. Some lit candles. Lips moved in silent or barely audible supplication. Ramón bent down and laid his bow and arrows crosswise over his takwátsi, the shaman’s basket, bow and quiver point­ ing east in the direction of Wirikúta. He rose and conducted what ap­ peared to be an urgent dialogue with unseen supernaturals, all the while gesturing with his muviéri in the directions of the world quarters and the sacred center. Visually, the passage through the Clashing Cloud gates was undramatic. Ramón stepped forward, lifted his bow, and, placing one end against his mouth while rhythmically beating the string with an arrow, walked straight ahead, stopped once more, gestured (to Káuyumari, he told us later, to thank him for holding back the cloud doors with his antlers), and set out again at a more rapid pace, all the while beating his bowstring. The others followed close behind in their customary single file. Where the terrain was rough, some of the blindfolded matewámete held on to those in front. Others made it as best they could by themselves. Ramón’s bow music sounded like a high-pitched drumbeat but with a recognizable tune as he alternately tightened and relaxed the string. Whatever all this might have lacked in visual drama for an unini­ tiated observer, there was no mistaking its impact on the participants. Their faces reflected the emotional stress of this critical passage, their

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deep commitment to its truth, and their relief and pleasure that Ramón had proved to have the power to transport them safely through the invis­ ible clashing gates. At one point a battered and noisy dump truck crossed their line of march, drowning out the musical beat of Ramon’s bow. To us, watching it roll over the sacred ground the Indians had just vacated, the symbolism, the contrast, was so stark, so explicit, as to be almost trite. Yet I doubt that the Huichols themselves even noticed its presence or, if they did, that it disturbed them nearly as much as it did us. Ramón himself showed the strain of all that had transpired here. He was solicitous of the blindfolded matewámete, assisting them in re­ boarding the vehicles and speaking soothingly to them, as one would to a frightened child. But he was also insistent that they hurry. For although all had gone well, one should not linger longer than necessary in such dangerous and sacred places. The degree to which what we had just witnessed conforms to Eli­ ade’s analysis of the meaning of the Symplegades motif in shamanism and funerary and heroic mythologies is remarkable. According to Eliade, the “paradoxical passage” opens only to those who are spirit, that is, the dead or those who have become transformed. I may be wrong, but in Huichol mythology, the peyote pilgrimage seems to be the only occasion in which ordinary mortals, and not just shamans, souls, and supernatu­ rals, can achieve the breakthrough from this world to the one beyond. They are able to do so because they are no longer “ordinary” but have been transformed. Yet they are not allowed to forget that this condition is only temporary, even for the shaman, that they are human, not spirit. Hence the required assistance of Káuyumari. Hence also the lost feathers of the bird-child, the damaged stern of the Argo and of a shaman’s kayak as it slips through clashing icebergs in an Eskimo myth. It is after all only the dead and the deities who are truly spirit.

7. The Springs of Our Mothers We arrived at the sacred water holes the Huichol call Tatéimatiniéri in the late afternoon. Ramón said he would have preferred dawn, when the rising Sun Father is stronger and therefore a more effective protector than the setting sun. A number of awesome things were to happen here, and our companions, who, having heard it many times in the chants, were of course familiar with the story and were excited and tense with expectation. The physical setting was hardly inspiring: an impoverished mestizo desert pueblo at the end of a former lake, now dry; a few hun-

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Figure i i. Having safely passed though the perilous invisible gateway, the peyoteros return single-file to their vehicles. In former times the entire journey of twenty days each way was accomplished on foot.

dred yards beyond the last of the adobe dwellings a cluster of water holes surrounded by marsh; and several pigs wandering about. On the peyote quest, however, it is not ordinary reality that matters but the reality of the mind’s eye and the soul. Accordingly, to a Huichol, Tatéimatiniéri is not a forlorn and almost certainly polluted desert oasis. It is beautiful, they exclaim, because Our Mothers live here, and because it is the wellspring of the water of life. The pilgrims were led single-file to the edge of the bog. They set down their bundles and the gourds, glass bottles, and flasks they had brought to be filled from the springs and proceeded to pray with great fervor toward the east. The matewámete, still blindfolded, were again admonished to be very still. When Ramón motioned everyone to sit or squat, he told the blindfolded novices to make themselves small and keep their heads down. Then things became very busy, with much going back and forth to the various water holes, each of which represented a different Mother and was known by her name. (I should explain here also that this is where in the origin myth of the peyote quest led by Tatewari the divine female ancestors awaited their exhausted male counterparts and for the first time assuaged their thirst with precious water.)

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As one of his first acts Ramón inserted the wooden point of his power arrow into several of the water holes, stirred the cloudy liquid, and sprayed water in the four directions, at the sacred center, and on the pilgrims. (We had already observed something very similar at the confession-purification ceremony, when ceremonial arrows were used to spray water from bottle gourds on the women in what seemed to us then, and again here, an unmistakable sexual and impregnating gesture, but also, as here, with the flavor of a former hunting way of life.) Meanwhile, those who were not blindfolded unpacked offerings, such as ceremonial or votive arrows, the thread crosses Lumholtz mistakenly called “eyes of god,” animal crackers, yarn designs, candles, votive gourds, and so on, and laid them out carefully “for Our Mothers to see.” Some were gifts or prayers for the Mothers themselves and would be left in their waterfilled cavities; others were to be sacrificed by fire in Wirikúta. Whether intended as generalized offerings or specific petitions for health, rain, fertility, luck in hunting, or whatever, such offerings gain greatly in ef­ fectiveness by being impregnated with the life-giving water of the sacred springs and by the power of the Rain and Water Mothers. For the still-blindfolded matewámete, the enforced period of sight­ lessness was about to come to an end, for much of what went on about them was designed to prepare them for their emergence, or birth, into the light. To a degree this was true also for the others, since everyone present, including Ramón himself, was to have his or her head washed, in emula­ tion of the washing of a newborn infant, and then internally purified with a swallow of the water of Our Mothers. Only after this ritual washing would they be capable of perceiving the sacred country on the distant eastern horizon. Although Ramón was visibly anxious to hurry along the proceedings (which by this time had drawn a small crowd of curious mestizo onlook­ ers) in order to finish before sundown, the preliminaries took a while. Some of what the pilgrims did was then, and remains today, obscure and unexplained; unfortunately, for much of what happens in these ritual situations there really is no clearer explanation available than the stock answer: “That is the way the ancestors said to do it.” Original meanings may have been forgotten, or else the act requires no explanation because its significance is known to everyone who belongs to the culture. On the other hand, just as the blindfolding before the dangerous passage can be understood in terms of a return to the womb as well as metamorphosis (unborn children are spirits and become human only when they receive their essential life force through the anterior fontanel

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at the moment of birth), so the manner in which the Mothers “receive” the pilgrims from the officiating shaman can be seen to symbolize birth, or, more correctly, rebirth. Consider the following as we witnessed it: Having dipped the muviéri into the cavity of one of the Rain and Fertility Mothers and ritually purified a gourd bowl, the mara’akáme, or, in Ramón’s case, mara’akame-soon-to-be, requests that the pilgrims be brought before him one by one. The assistant selects one of the waiting companions and pulls him by the arm around the water hole and deposits him in front of the personification of the old fire god and divine patron of shamans Tatewari. The shaman asks whether the companion ate well on the journey and how much tequila and beer he or she consumed. Is his belly full? Is he happy? Is he warm and comfortable “in the dark” behind his blindfold? As before, the stereotypical reply is that yes, his belly is full, and yes, he (or she) had drunk much and is snug and warm. In reality it is uncomfortably cold here at over five thousand feet in mid-December (at night the temperature often falls to the freezing point or below). This exchange provokes laughter and shouts of encouragement from everyone except the blindfolded matewámete. They remain very much subdued, kneeling or squatting motionlessly almost in fetal position with their heads down and their shoulders hunched up. Ramón bends down, swoops up a gourdful of water, holds it behind his back, lifts the com­ panion’s broad-brimmed hat or scarf, and, if he is a matewáme, pulls off the blindfold. With sweeping gestures he points to the east, exclaiming: “There, companion, now you are able to see! Behold now the sacred places,” or words to that effect, and suddenly pours the contents of the bowl over the latter’s head. He gives instructions to work the sacred water into the hair, face, and eyes. Although the water is very cold and (as we observers were also shortly to experience for ourselves when he insisted on doing it to us as well) comes as a considerable shock, no one shows any sign of discomfort—quite the contrary. Ramón meanwhile takes up another gourdful from the water hole and holds it to the pilgrim’s lips, telling him or her to drink it all down without leaving a single drop. Then he is given his “first food,” bits of tortilla and animal crackers that have been softened by soaking in the sacred water. This is baby food, and its purpose is to reinforce the symbolic condition of “newness,” that is, of having just been born. These rites were repeated in more or less identical fashion for every­ one, although more gently for the two youngest children, a little girl and the baby. Then came our turn, which went fine, although I have to admit to a fear that however sacred, the springs were badly contaminated. (In

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fact, in 1966 Barbara did get very sick with what is laughingly called Moctezuma’s revenge on the day following this same ceremony.) Ramón had himself ritually washed and “made to see” by one of the other men. I should note here that, with the exception of a required ritual bath and washing of the hair at the beginning of the pilgrimage, and immersion by a nude Ramón in a hot spring inside a limestone cave in Zacatecas, this is the only occasion on which the hikuri seeker washes for the duration, even when the pilgrimage proceeded on foot and took up to twenty days each way plus five in Wirikúta. As mentioned earlier, the sacred peyote country is typical Chihuahuantype desert, five thousand feet or more in altitude, spottily covered with creosote bush, mesquite, tar bush, agave, yucca, Euphorbia, cholla, and other kinds of cactus. The Huichol say “it is beautiful, very beautiful” here, and one has the feeling that they really mean it and are not just using ritual reversals. Presumably, when they say that the Wirikúta des­ ert is covered with “flowers of brilliant colors,” they are speaking of the peyote that grows here, “flower” being one of its metaphors. But they are also seeing something that to us is just not visible. In 1966 Ramón had taken Barbara and me by the hand and pointed out everything that made survival and even a reasonably good life possible in the desert: edible leaves and seeds and roots, barrel cactus full of thirst-quenching liquid, herbs good for healing wounds and sickness, the burrows of small animals. Peyote itself is considered the best medicine of all, effective not only against fatigue but infections and intestinal complaints (a faith, inci­ dentally, that received support when scientific tests isolated antibiotics in peyote that proved effective against staph and other infections [McLeary et al. i960]). “One lives well here,” Ramón said, “if one has learned well and does not take more than one needs.” That lesson in desert ecology came back to me later, when a member of an audience I was lecturing before insisted that the visionary properties of peyote “must” have been discovered accidentally because “there is nothing to eat in the desert” and the starving Indians were so desperate they tried everything and any­ thing, even something as bitter, acrid, and nauseating as peyote. My own view follows that of ethnobotanist R. E. Schultes (1972.) and anthropolo­ gist of religion Weston La Barre (1972.): the discovery of peyote, like that of other ecstatic-visionary species, was more likely the consequence of deliberate exploration of the environment for such plants by shamans. The Wirikúta that Huichols call “Patio of Our Grandfathers,” or their “dancing ground,” is more extensive than the area in which Ramón and his companions collected their supplies of peyote. It lies roughly

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between two mountain ranges about thirty miles apart. One is within Wirikúta proper, and it is below its lower slopes that the Deer-Peyote is hunted—and I mean hunted in the real sense, with bow and arrows that nowadays are used only symbolically. The other range is called Tsinurita. It is said that peyote also grows on and below its lower slopes, which are said to be a mirror image of those of Wirikúta. The Huichol deluge myth we heard from Ramón identifies Tsinurita as one of the ends of the world to which Great-grandmother Nakawé, the aged earth and fertility god­ dess, steered the tightly sealed canoe of zalate (wild fig) wood in which she saved Watákame, Clearer of Fields, and his little female dog compan­ ion (see Chapter 8 for the Huichol version of the universal deluge). The several peaks of both ranges are identified, like large boulders and rocky outcroppings in Wirikúta, as kakauyarite, the generic name by which the Huichol refer to and address the ancestral deities. No trans­ lation that makes sense has been found. According to the Huichols, it means “the ancient, ancient ones,” or ancestor deities. The most sacred of the Wirikúta mountains is called Rau’unar (Re’unar), meaning “moun­ tain that burned” or, in Spanish, Cerro Quemado. This is a long-extinct volcano from which in Huichol mythology the Sun Father was born and which many peyoteros climb to this day to deposit prayer offer­ ings. Its mirror image in the Tsinurita range is the mountain of Tatewari, Our Grandfather, the old Fire god. He has another sacred mountain in Nayarit, close to the Pacific coast, and there is even a mountain in the west that Huichols identify as another birthplace of the Sun. More than likely there are several traditions here compressed into one, as there are also in the journey of the soul to its final abode. According to Ramón, the kakauyarite do not always remain in their eastern abodes but as occa­ sion demands sometimes travel to the west, to where the Huichols make their homes, and to the Pacific coast. When they do so, they transform themselves into ducks, reminding one of Hopi and Zuñi symbolism and that of other Pueblos of the American Southwest. The analogy between Wirikúta as the home of the ancestral deities and the San Francisco Mountains in Arizona as the abode of the kachinas is striking, but it is only one of several traits that point to either ancestral ties between the Puebloan Southwest and the Huichols or a shared archaic Uto-Aztecan substratum. Several things remained to be done before we could resume what our Huichol companions insisted on calling our “walk.” The naming of the baby, by now about ten days old, had been put off because Ramón had agreed with the parents that it would be propitious for the child’s health

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and proper growth to be given its name in the presence of the Moth­ ers. Normally, it is a grandfather who does the naming, but because no grandfather was present, Ramón took his place. The naming was done by first presenting the baby to the Mothers as well as to the Sun, the four quarters and sacred center, and then pronouncing the child’s Huichol name. Next the numerous containers had to be filled with the water of the Mothers. A small amount of this potent fluid was required for the rituals in the peyote country, but most was to be taken back home for the various rituals of the annual ceremonial cycle. I should add that Tatéimatiniéri is not the only source of water to which magical potency is ascribed—indeed, all water and all bodies of water, especially lakes, are sacred to the Huichol. But these desert springs on the way to the peyote country are believed to possess unique fertil­ izing qualities. It is no accident that one of the first acts of the return­ ing pilgrims is to spray their wives and other relatives, especially the women, with bouquets of wildflowers that have been dipped into gourd bowls filled with water from Tatéimatiniéri, an act also performed in the peyote country itself by the officiating shaman. Water from the sacred maternal springs and other sanctified sources is used in different ways, all surely related to the concept of fertility and germination: it is drunk in small quantities in the rituals; added to nawá, the fermented maize drink (more widely called tesgüíno} in the process of fermentation; mixed with ground-up peyote and drunk down; and sprinkled on fields, crops, animals, people, tools, hunting gear, and effigies of different deities. It is also carried all the way to the Pacific Ocean, Our Mother Haramara, in exchange for its salty water to facilitate the coming of the rains. There seem to be some rules—informal, to be sure—about the man­ ner of filling the gourds and other containers. The way we saw it done again suggests symbolic sexual union and impregnation, with the arrow serving as phallus and the vessel, whether bottle gourd or empty beer bottle, as uterus. Before the hikuri seeker can pour water into his or her container or fill it by submerging it in one of the water holes, the officiat­ ing shaman transfers a few drops from the cavity into the container with the hardwood point of his composite ceremonial arrow. Nevertheless, de­ spite such readily apparent sexual symbolism, it would not do to reduce this to the level of symbolic coitus alone. True, the Huichol are hardly lacking in sensuality and its various expressions. Sex for its own sake is considered pleasurable and desirable. On the peyote pilgrimage, how­ ever, it is not sex that matters but fertility and fecundity—the survival of the people and their natural and cultural environment. What the shaman

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simulates with his arrow is unity rather than coitus, the life-producing union of the male and female principles in all nature. Not surprisingly, water from the sacred springs is considered to be a powerful agent against barrenness, and before the journey to Wirikúta was resumed, one of the companions, a childless woman, asked Ramón to cure her with his magic so that she might conceive. The curing rite that followed differed little from traditional shamanic curing elsewhere in the Indian Americas and beyond, except for this: in addition to such familiar acts as blowing tobacco smoke over her body, spitting and suck­ ing to remove the intrusive foreign object believed to be afflicting her (e.g., a splinter, small pebble, or seed), Ramón sprinkled water from one of the Mothers on her bared stomach and spread it about with his fingers and his feathers. Two days later, in the peyote country, he touched the area of her stomach with a peyote cactus and told her to do likewise. We also noted her special petition to the Deer-Peyote and the other ancestral spirits of Wirikúta: a small votive gourd decorated on the inside with the image of a child in the form of a crude little stick figure of beeswax em­ bellished with tiny colored beads and wool yarn.

8. The Climax: Hunting Elder Brother Between Tatéimatiniéri and Wirikúta proper there were to be two more camps, two more opportunities to light candles and pay proper respect to Tatewari. The second was only about ten miles (but, in this rugged desert country, an hour’s driving time) from the place Ramón had selected in his mind for the hunt for Elder Brother, the Deer that is peyote. His name is Wawatsári, he is the “Principal Deer,” or Master of the Species, and he clearly overlaps with the antlered culture hero Káuyumari, and even with Máxa Kwaxi, Deer Tail, who is alternately called Tamatsi, Elder Brother, and Tatutsi, Great-grandfather. Huichol spirituality ascribes great power to the tail of the white-tailed, or Virginia, deer. We broke camp before dawn, in cold bitter enough to have frozen a dish of water beneath my vehicle, waiting only for the first red glow in the east, so that we might pay our proper respect to the rising Sun Father and ask his protection. There was little conversation in this final stretch, Ramón sitting beside me in contemplative silence. This applied also to the other vehicle, Salomón telling me later that everyone remained still, except for the times when both vehicles had to be emptied of passengers to get past a particularly difficult spot in the narrow and deeply rutted wagon trail we were following. Even then there were few unnecessary

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words. Lupe and her uncle José, who with his wife was riding with us, had brought a liberal supply of commercial wax candles, of which they lighted some almost from the moment we started out and, shading the little flames (“little Tatewaris”) from the wind with their hands, had kept them lit virtually the entire distance. It was just past seven when Ramón stopped the cars and told his Indian companions to get out and assemble, again in single file, by the side of the trail. It was time to walk—really walk, that is, and not just call riding in the vehicle “walking.” For no matter how one had traveled thus far, one must enter and leave the Patio of the Grandfathers as Tatewari and his ancient companions had: on foot, blowing a horn, and beating the bow drum. In former times, and even occasionally now when one is available, the horn was said to have been a conch shell; José’s was a goat horn, and one of the others used a cow horn. As the hikuri seekers walked, they picked up bits of dry wood and branches of creosote. Little Francisco, who was lugging his two-year-old brother, stopped to break off a green branch for himself and also stuck a long dry stick in the little boy’s hand. This was food for Tatewari. It is an­ other mark of the total unity of the peyote hunters that each, down to the youngest, is expected to participate in the first feeding of the ceremonial fire when it is brought to life by the mara’akáme. This happened so quickly that we almost missed it. The line stopped, Ramón squatted, and seconds later there was a wisp of blue smoke and a tiny flame. Tatewari had been “brought out,” fire being, in one ver­ sion of the myth of the origin of fire, inherent in wood and needing only “bringing out” with a fire drill or rubbing two pieces of wood vigorously together. Now more than at any other time on the journey, speed and skill in starting the fire are of the essence, for one is in precarious balance in this sacred country and urgently requires the manifestation of Tatewari for protection. The fire is allowed to go out only at the end, when sacred water is poured on the hot ashes, after which the mara’akáme selects a coal, which Ramón called the soul or life force of Tatewari and placed in a little embroidered medicine bag he wore around his neck. Since the same rite is repeated at each campsite, there is an accumulation of magi­ cal coals, which become part of the mara’akáme’s array of power objects. Chanting and praying, Ramón piled up bits of brush that quickly caught fire. The others, meanwhile, arranged themselves in a circle with their pieces of firewood and began to pray rapid-fire with great fervor and obvious emotion. We saw tears course down Lupe’s face, and there was much sobbing also among the others. Such ritualized manifestations

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Figure 12. The hunting bow as musical instrument survives among only a few indig­ enous peoples in the world, among them the Peruvian Campa, the diminutive hunters of the Congo, and the Huichols, who call it the “bow drum’’ and play it on the peyote hunt to please the ancestors, hold back the Clashing Clouds, and, ultimately, “charm” the Deer-Peyote. December 1968.

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of joy mixed with sorrow were to recur several times during our stay in Wirikúta, especially at the conclusion of the “hunt” and again when we were getting ready to take our final leave. After much praying, chant­ ing, and gesturing with firewood in the sacred directions, and a counter­ sunwise ceremonial circuit around the fire, the individual gifts of “food” were given to Tatewari, and everyone went off to prepare for the crucial pursuit of the Deer-Peyote. Around midmorning Ramón signaled the beginning of the hunt. To my question how far we would have to walk to find peyote, he replied, “Far, very far. Tamatsi Wawatsári waits for us up there, on the slopes of the mountain.” I judged the distance to be about three miles. I hoped I could make it with my heavy cameras and a painful hip condition and not disgrace myself, as Rabbit had on the first peyote hunt of the ancestor gods. Everyone gathered up his or her offerings and stuffed them into woolen shoulder bags and baskets. Bowstrings were tested; Catarino Rios, who personified Great-grandfather Máxa Kwaxi, stopped playing his bow to help his wife, Veradera, “transformed” into Our Mother Haramara, the deified Pacific Ocean, cut a few loose strings from a little yarn painting she had made to be sacrificed to the Sun and the Deer-Peyote. It depicted a calf. (The art of the yarn painting, of course, is recent and belongs almost exclusively to Huichol life outside the parental territory in the Sierra. Though inspired by votive gourd bowls decorated with yarn and beads, in this instance the yarn painting had made the journey back from an art form made for sale to a devotional art intended for the ancestral deities!) Catarino’s bow music, we were told, would transfix the deer in his tracks and make him happy before his impending death. Ramón led the companions in another counterclockwise circuit around the fire, during which everyone laid more “food” on the flames and pleaded for protec­ tion. Ramón entreated Tatewari not to go out and to greet them on their return. Then he led the companions away from camp in the direction of the distant hills. About three hundred feet from camp we crossed a railroad track and beyond it a barbed-wire fence. The men had their bows and arrows ready. Everyone had one or more shoulder bags, and some carried bas­ kets as well, containing offerings. We had walked perhaps five hundred feet when Ramón lifted his fingers to his lips in a warning of silence, laid an arrow across his bowstring, and motioned to the others to fan out quickly and quietly in a wide arc. I pointed to the distant rise—was that

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not where we would find the peyote? I had to know because I didn’t want to miss anything important. Ramón shook his head, smiled, and pointed at the ground immediately ahead. Of course, I had forgotten the rever­ sals! When he said, “Far, very far,” he meant close, very close. Ramón now crept forward, bending low, eyes fixed on the ground. Catarino’s bow, which he had been sounding “to please Elder Brother,” fell silent. The women hung back. Ramón halted suddenly, pointing to the ground, and whispered urgently, “His tracks, his tracks!” I could see nothing. José-Tayaupá sneaked up close and nodded happy assent: “Yes, yes, mara’akáme, there in the new maize, there are his tracks, there at the first level.” First level? Yes, there are five levels; for one to reach the fifth, the highest, as Ramón was to do shortly here in Wirikúta, means he has completed himself, that is, done everything required or expected of a new shaman. In ordinary reality José’s “new maize” was a sad little stand of dried-up twigs. The peyote hunters look for any growth that can be associated with stands of maize, for the deer is not only peyote but maize as well. Likewise, peyote is classified by “color,” corresponding to the five sacred colors of maize: blue, yellow, white, red, and speckled or multicolored. Ramón moved forward once more, José following close behind and to one side, his aged face lit up with the pleasure of discovery and anticipa­ tion. All at once Ramón stopped dead, motioning urgently to us to come close. About twenty feet ahead stood a small shrub. He pointed: “There, there, the Deer!” Barely visible above ground under the spiny bush were some flecks of dusty green, signaling a whole cluster of Lophophora williamsii. I have seen peyote growing in full daylight, but more often it is found like this—in a thicket of mesquite or creosote, shaded, and protected by a thorn bush, a yucca, or Euphorbia (here especially E. antisyphilitica), or close to a well-armed cactus such as cholla or rabbit ear. Its only slightly rounded crown is usually almost level with the ground and so is easily missed by an inexperienced eye like mine. Ramón took aim, and the first of his arrows buried itself a fraction of an inch from the crown of the nearest hikuri. He let fly with a sec­ ond, which hit slightly to one side. José, who himself had completed as a mara’akáme so many years ago he had forgotten just when that was, now ran forward and fired a third, almost straight down. Ramón com­ pleted the “kill” by sticking an arrow with pendant hawk feathers—a muviéri—into the ground on the far side, so that the sacred cactus was now enclosed by arrows in each of the world quarters, just as Lumholtz, who had not himself seen it happen, pictured it at the turn of the century.

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Figure 13. The first peyote the “hunters” see in Wirikúta is reverently addressed as Deer and “slain” with arrows in each of the four directions and the sacred center, exactly as it was described in the 1890s to Carl Lumholtz, the Norwegian pioneer ethnographer of Huichol art.

Ramón bent down to examine the “imprisoned” peyote. “Look there,” he said, “how sacred it is, how beautiful the five-pointed deer!” Remark­ ably, each of the peyotes in the cluster had the same number of ribs: five, the sacred number that, representing as it does the four world directions and the sacred center, for Huichols signifies completion. Older ones may have more, younger ones fewer. Later on he was to string a whole series of “five-pointed” peyotes on a sisal fiber cord and drape it over the ant­ lers of Káuyumari that were mounted on the front of both our vehicles. I should mention here that a “necklace” of peyotes shriveled by age, exca­ vated from a Desert Culture rockshelter just south of the Texas-Mexican border, has been dated by the radiocarbon method at ca. A.D. 800. Additional specimens from this site have since been radiocarbon dated at between 3000 and 5000 B.C. In 1994, when Stacy and I were working on our Huichol book and she was teaching at the University of Texas Pan-American, she took me to meet a Hispanic rancher in the lower Rio Grande Valley who was licensed to sell peyote to members of the Native American Church. Though himself a devout Catholic, he spoke of the Indians who came to him for peyote with great respect. He

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had even constructed a shrine for them with peyote plants watched over by a concrete statue representing a Plains Indian. Most interesting to us was his discovery of an old peyote “necklace” in the nearby desert. It sounded very much like those I had seen used on the peyote hunt and the really old one from a Desert Culture rockshelter. Unfortunately, he had mislaid it, so there was no chance to get it dated. In any event, stringing peyote for drying like pieces of deer meat is clearly an ancient custom. Nor is the analogy to drying deer meat my interpretation: the Huichols make it very explicit. The Deer-Peyote having been thus “trapped” and sacrificed, the companions formed a circle around the place where Elder Brother lay “dying.” Some sobbed. All prayed loudly and with urgency. The one called Tatutsi, Great-grandfather, unwrapped Ramón’s takwátsi with its power objects from the red kerchief in which it was kept and, removing the lid, laid it open for Ramón to use in the ritual of propitiation of the slain “deer” and the division of its flesh among the communicants. And a rite of communion it is, the difference being that, like Aztec rituals of the same kind described by Sahagún and other early colonial chroniclers, this was clearly aboriginal and not Roman Catholic. Ramón explained how the küpüri, the life essence of the deer, was “rising, rising, rising, like a brilliantly colored rainbow, seeking to travel to the top of the sacred mountain,” in other words, to the birthplace of the Sun Father. Do not be angry, Elder Brother, Ramón implored, do not punish us for killing you, for you have not really died. You will rise again, Ramón was echoed by his companions, we will feed you well, for we have brought you many of­ ferings, we have brought you tobacco, we have brought you water from Our Mothers, we have brought you arrows, we have brought you votive gourds, we have brought you maize and your favorite grasses, we have brought you tamales, we have brought you our prayers. We honor you and we give you our devotion. Take them, Elder Brother, take them and give us our life. We offer our devotion to the kakauyarite who live here in Wirikúta. We have come to be received by them, for we know they await us. We have come from afar to greet you. I should note here that the ritual propitiation of the slain deer, in other words, the first peyote, symbolically replicates the traditional deer hunt in the Sierra, down to assuaging the slain—or, more correctly, sacrificed—animal’s thirst with sanctified water gently rubbed on its lips and appeasing its hunger with its favorite grasses. To push the rainbow soul, which only he could see, back into the Deer-Peyote’s head, Ramón lifted his muviéri to the sky above and the

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Figure 14. The first “deer-peyotes” are ready to be shared by the peyoteros.

world directions and then pressed it slowly downward, as though with great force, until the tips of the feathers touched the crown of the sacred plant. In his chant, which of course we could not understand but which he later repeated for us slowly and more descriptively in Spanish, he de­ scribed how all around the dead “deer,” peyote plants were springing up, growing from his antlers, his back, his tail, his shins, his hooves. Tamatsi Wawatsári, he said, is giving us our life. He removed his pocketknife from the basket and began to scrape away the earth around the little cac­ tus. Then, instead of removing it whole, he cut it off just above the base, leaving the bottom of the root in the ground. We later saw everyone do this while harvesting peyote. This is done, Ramón said, so that “Elder Brother can grow again from his bones.” I was enormously impressed with this indigenous practice of conser­ vation. Barbara and I had seen it before, in December 1966, but neither of us had then quite appreciated its wisdom and importance for the pres­ ervation of a species that is very much under assault from thoughtless exploitation by non-Huichols and that in any event is slow to mature. The idea of bones as the seat of life or, more accurately, the source of re­ generation is very widespread, of course, and not only through the Indian Americas. That a new plant would generate from a piece of the root left in the ground would have been obvious. But it was not until I had read

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Figure 15. Enclosing the “slain” plants in the customary sacred circle, the peyoteros pay their respects and lament the peyote’s death while celebrating the life they gain through its sacrifice.

Edward E Anderson’s Peyote: The Divine Cactus, which the University of Arizona Press published the year after our 1968 experience (and since republished in an expanded edition), that I really came to appreciate the wisdom of how Ramón and his companions were treating the sacred succulent. Anderson, who made extensive studies of L. williamsii from the Lower Rio Grande valley in southeastern Texas to San Luis Potosi and Queretaro in central Mexico, reported that “injury or harvesting by man induces the formation of many stems from a single rootstock. Single clones more than 1.5 meters across have been observed in San Luis Potosi, for example” (Anderson 1969:302). The Huichols regard such clones as especially sacred and powerful, and they are so treated, especially those that number five or multiples of five. Ramón, for one, would not allow anyone else to touch one such clone he had cut out from the ground until it had been propitiated in the proper manner. (Anderson’s explanation for the isolated stand of peyote he found in the state of Querétaro, far south of its natural range, was that it was probably planted there by Indi­ ans who long ago employed it in their ceremonies, as had numerous other peoples not native to the northern desert.) Ramón now sliced off the tough bottom half of the first peyote and

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Figure t6. Peyotes harvested by Ramón include a cloned clump that grew from a single rootstock purposely left in the ground by previous peyoteros to ensure the rebirth of the sacred cactus.

peeled away the rough brown skin, carefully preserving the waste for ritual disposition later. Then he divided the cactus into five pieces by cut­ ting along the natural ridges and placed them in a votive gourd bowl. The process was repeated by Ramón and Lupe with several additional plants, for there had to be a sufficient amount to leave none of the companions without a portion of “Elder Brother’s flesh.” Those who had made pre­ vious pilgrimages came first. One by one they squatted or knelt before Ramón, who removed a piece from the bowl and, after touching it to the pilgrim’s forehead (in lieu of the anterior fontanel hidden beneath a hat or scarf), eyes, larynx, and heart, placed it into the mouth. (Ramón once explained why he emphasized the larynx, or voice box, in his yarn paint­ ings like this: “If one could not speak, how would his children know how to be Huichol?”) He instructed the companion to “chew it well, chew

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Figure 17. Ramón insisted that the several non-Huichols in the party participate in the ritual distribution of peyote “so all are of one heart.” Here anthropologist Salomón Nahmad kneels, as is customary, to be “purified” and receive his portion of the first “slain” peyotes.

it well, for thus you will see your life.” Then he summoned us, the nonHuichol observers, and repeated the same ritual (he had also included us earlier in the knotting-in ceremony). In the meantime he had gathered up all the tobacco gourds belonging to the pilgrims and placed them near the holes from which peyote had been cut. As Lumholtz noted, the gourd, called yékwé-te, is an indispens­ able part of the outfit of the peyotero. It is interesting that the same was true of the Aztec priesthood. I have heard it said that the yé, tobacco of the nicotine-rich species Nicotiana rustica, started out life as a hawk, and the kwé, the little gourd covered with excrescences, or “warts,” as a snake. The gourds are raised for this purpose, and those with many natural warts are especially valued. However, smooth ones are also em­ ployed, sometimes with a covering of skin from the scrotum of a deer. In the context of peyote symbolism this, of course, makes them especially powerful. As Johannes Wilbert has shown in his seminal work on the subject,

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Tobacco and Shamanism in South America (1987), the use as a shamanic intoxicant of N. rustica, whose nicotine content is many times that of commercial tobacco, is widespread in the Indian Americas, sometimes as the only ecstatic intoxicant, sometimes in combination with other “hal­ lucinogenic” plants. The Huichols, who smoke it in cornhusk cigarettes on the peyote hunt and on other ceremonial occasions to prepare them­ selves for the effects of peyote, call makuche (N. rustica) the “tobacco of Tatewari.” All the hfkuri that had sprung “from the horns and body of Elder Brother” had by now been dug up and set with great care, even rever­ ence, on the ground. Bows and arrows were stacked. Votive offerings and prayer objects addressed to the kakauyarite were placed in a pile before the holes from which the peyotes had been cut. The pilgrims were seated in a circle. Ramón touched the offerings with his muviéri, prayed, and set fire to one of the little yarn paintings he himself had made depicting Elder Brother. As the wax melted, the flames licked at the ceremonial arrows, and soon the entire pile of offerings and the closest creosote bush were ablaze. Ramón muttered staccato incantations, of which the only thing we could understand was the names of deities, and wafted the smoke toward the sacred mountains. It was later that I learned this was in lieu of having carried the offerings to the top of Rau’unar, the extinct volcano from which the Sun was born (on the 1966 peyote pilgrimage Ramón and several of his companions did climb the mountain with offerings, suddenly disappearing from our campsite with the admonition to guard it well and returning a half-day later without immediately letting Barbara and me in on what they been up to). Then Ramón rose and with a gourd filled with pieces of peyote he passed in a ceremonial circuit from right to left on the inside of the circle to give each his portion of “Elder Brother’s flesh.” Forehead, eyes, and heart were touched, and peyote placed in each mouth. The matewámete, the novices, were especially exhorted over and over by Ramón to “chew it well, brother (or sister), so that you will see your life, so that it will ap­ pear to you with clarity.” When Ramón came to ten-year-old Francisco, everyone turned to watch. Peyote is not given in any quantity to young children, but after the age of three their reaction to its taste can be a sign whether or not the child has the disposition to become a mara’akáme. If he or she appears to like the taste of peyote, which is exceedingly bitter, acrid, and difficult to tolerate, it is taken as a positive omen. If it is rejected, it is a negative sign, though not necessarily definitive. Ramón touched the boy on the

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head, eyes, throat, and heart and placed a small piece between his lips. “Chew, little brother,” he instructed, “and we will see how you like it. Chew well, chew well, for it is sweet, delicious to the taste.” There were smiles all around at this obvious reversal but no laughter—this was not a time for hilarity. After a slight hesitation Francisco, who had never tasted peyote before, began to chew vigorously. Smiling broadly, he nodded: yes, he liked it. I was fortunate to catch his delighted expression on film. Later he participated with great enthusiasm in the search for peyote, and that night we saw him eating a goodly amount, with no visible ill effect. One matewáme who was obviously greatly moved by the experience was Veradera, a strikingly handsome young woman probably under twenty. She ate more peyote than anyone else, with the exception of Ramón and Lupe, and later that night she fell into a deep trance that lasted for many hours and caused everyone to regard her as especially sacred. Because her spirit had flown far, far away, Lupe carefully placed burning candles around her. Its flickering flames—“little Tatewaris”—would guard her until her spirit returned from its out-of-body journey. When each of the companions had chewed and swallowed a piece of the first hikuri, in other words, a portion of the sacrificed Deer-Peyote, Ramón took up his fiddle, a homemade instrument he had inherited from his father and of which he was truly a master, and one of the others a little guitar, also homemade. The hikuritámete, veterans of previous peyote hunts, stood aside in a little group to sing and dance. The purpose, I was told, was to sing the matewámete, the novices, into a “receptive condition,” the proper state to let the experience flow over them and take possession of body and spirit. Meanwhile, another gourd bowl had been filled with peyote cut into small pieces, and the initiates were not supposed to rise or move about until they had emptied it. As the gourd was handed around, the others, led by Ramón, exhorted them over and over to “chew well, companion, chew well, for that is how you will see your life.” Lupe then took a sizable whole plant, sliced off the bottom, lifted her voluminous and magnificently embroidered skirt (like Ramon’s outfit, it had been made by her especially for this sacred journey), and rubbed the moist end of the hikuri on her bare legs, taking care to cover the numerous small scratches and cuts inflicted by spines and thorns. The others followed her lead, Lupe explaining that peyote not only acts against hunger, thirst, and fatigue and restores the spirit, but also heals wounds and prevents infection. Ramón having repeatedly admonished everyone to “be of pure heart” and not be misled by a cactus that might look like peyote but was not, the

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actual harvest of hfkuri was ready to commence and the pilgrims went off into the desert, alone or in pairs. Hikuri “hides itself well,” and several of the companions had to walk some distance before spotting their first peyotes. Lupe had taken only a few steps before she discovered a thicket of spiny cactus and mesquite so rich in peyote in its shadow that in little more than an hour she had filled one of the tall burden baskets Huichols carry suspended, as in precolumbian times, from a tumpline across the forehead. Occasionally, she stopped to admire and speak quietly to an especially handsome specimen and touch it to her forehead, face, throat, and heart before adding it to the others. We watched people exchanging gifts of peyote, a particularly beau­ tiful and moving aspect of the whole experience our Huichol friends seemed to take for granted. No ceremony in which peyote was consumed communally passed without this kind of ritual exchange, in which each participant shared his or her harvest with the companions. A man or a woman would carefully divide a peyote, rise, walk from individual to individual, handing over a piece and receiving one in return. Sometimes an older participant would place his gift directly into the mouth of a younger one, urging him, as had Ramón, to “chew well, younger brother (or sister), chew well so that you will see your life.” But most often these ritual exchanges took place in silence. No peyote was ever extracted carelessly or dropped casually on the ground or into the basket or bag. On the contrary, it was handled with tenderness and respect and addressed soothingly by the hikuri hunter, who would thank it for allowing itself to be seen, call it by endearing names, and apologize for removing it from its home. As mentioned, small, tender, five-ribbed plants (called five-pointed, in the manner of deer antlers) are considered especially desirable. Being young, they are also less disagreeable to the taste. Some plants were cleaned and popped directly into the mouth, again after first being held to forehead, face, and heart. Lupe sometimes wept when she did this. She was also chewing hikuri incessantly, as was Ramón. Toward four in the afternoon Ramón rose from where he had been digging peyotes and called out that it was time to return to camp. One of the hikuri seekers had just spotted a sizable cluster and was reluctant to abandon so rich a find. Ramón admonished him, again speaking as though this was deer meat: “Our game bags are full. One must not take more than one needs.” If one did, if one did not leave gifts and propitiate the slain Deer-Peyote (just as one should propitiate the spirits of animals one hunts, the maize one harvests, and the trees one cuts), Elder Brother

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Figure i 8. After the communion meal everyone goes off on his or her own to search the desert for peyote.

would be offended and would conceal the hikuri or withdraw them al­ together, so that next time the hunters would walk away empty-handed. We would call this conservation; to Huichols it is intrinsic to the principle of reciprocity by which he or she orders social relationships and the rela­ tionship to the natural and supernatural environment. And of course it is dictated also by the firm conviction that everything in the environment is animate, has a soul, is sensate and able to communicate, a belief we sim­ plify as “animism.” So the peyoteros—at this point of course there are no longer any matewámete, all now being hikuritámete—gathered up their gear and their bags and baskets, now heavy with peyote and, after a tear­ ful farewell to the sanctified hunting grounds, returned to camp as they had come, single file, to the rhythmic sound of the bow drum. On the way they stopped here and there to pick up “food” for Tatewari. On arriving, they made the customary ceremonial circuit around the fire and offered thanks for its protection, without laying down their burdens. Again there was much weeping, just as Sahagún had written of the Teochichimecas in Volume to of his Florentine Codex. Ramón’s

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Figure 19. No peyote cactus is ever just carelessly dropped to fill baskets and bags but is laid one next to the other with the reverence befitting its sacrifice and with soothing and even loving words to thank it “for our life.” The loads of peyote are taken back home for use, whole or mashed and mixed with sacred water from the water holes called “Where Our Mother Lives,” in rituals for rain and other benefits.

basket, held in the embrace of one arm while he gestured in the sacred world directions with the other, must have weighed a good thirty pounds. Though dormant, the ashes were still aglow, and new flames quickly licked through the growing pile of dry fuel as each deposited some “food” for Tatewari. The green branches sent thick clouds of white smoke bil­ lowing to the leaden sky. It was turning cold and damp. The night was passed singing and dancing around the ceremonial fire, chewing peyote in astonishing quantities, and listening to the an­ cient stories recited by Ramón when he was not lost in his peyote dream, Salomón sitting on one side of him and Lupe on the other. That they were all entranced was evident in their faces, but Ramón showed an amazing ability to pass seamlessly from a state of alert wakefulness to one of com­ muning with the divine ancestors. Despite the lack of food, the long days on the road, and the bitterly cold December nights, Ramón had not really closed his eyes to sleep for

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Figures zo-zi. Wrapped in a wool blanket against the cold of the December night, Ramón, as the responsible guide on the peyote hunt, alternates among the desired ecstatic-visionary state triggered by the psychoactive cac­ tus, storytelling, making music, and dancing in honor of the divine ancestors, manifesting themselves in landmarks in the sacred desert.

six days and nights! Everyone, and especially he, had been in the grip of the high emotional pitch of the sacred drama, with its succession of increasingly intense and exalted spirit encounters. One might have ex­ pected them to feel some letdown now that they had successfully “hunted the deer” and to lapse into an extended visionary dream state induced by the considerable quantities of hikuri they had already consumed. But

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Figure 21.

there seemed to be no real letdown at all, at least not for more than a few minutes. True, after their return from the hunt they were, for the most part, somewhat subdued and contemplative. Some were obviously deeply entranced. Veradera had been sitting motionless for hours, arms clasped around her knees, eyes closed. When night fell, Lupe replaced the candles around her, so as to make sure she was well guarded by Tatewari against attacks by sorcerers while her soul was traveling outside her body. But most of the others seemed soon to become wide-awake, in varying states of exaltation, supremely happy and possessed of seemingly boundless energy. There was constant dancing in place. If the dancing and singing stopped, and it did periodically through the night, it was only because Ramón laid down his fiddle to commune quietly with Tatewari or to chant the sacred stories of the primordial peyote hunt of the ancestor gods. I don’t believe he and Lupe were ever without a piece of peyote in their mouths. Yet they were never out of control—actually, none of them was—and none, little Francisco included, showed the slightest adverse effect from the peyote they had consumed, then or later. The singing, dancing, and speech making, punctuated by merriment and trumpet blowing, went on with few interruptions until well past midnight, when Ramón laid aside his fiddle and allowed hikuri take hold of him completely, so that he might speak directly with Tatewari and the

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spirit owners of place and listen to their counsel (I should explain here that much of what I have written about what other people, including he, thought and felt came from Ramón later in response to my questions). It is in this dream state also that the shaman obtains new peyote names for the pilgrimage, such as Offering of Blue Maize, Votive Gourd of the Sun, and Arrows of Tatewari. These names he said “emerge” from the center, or heart, of the fire like brilliantly colored, luminous ribbons. They are conferred on the peyoteros and preserved at least until the participants are formally released from their sacred bonds and restrictions by a cer­ emonial deer hunt, real or, in this time of .22 caliber rifles and conse­ quently fewer and fewer deer, metaphorical. Our peyoteros seemed to regard their dream experiences as their very own and did not much discuss them with anyone except in the most gen­ eral terms (“there were many beautiful colors,” “I saw maize in brilliant colors, much maize,” or, simply, “I saw my life”). The mara’akáme might be called upon to assist in giving form and meaning to a vision, especially for a matewáme, or in a cure, as Ramón did in the summer of 1966 for Barbara. After her first peyote experience she told us that she had been pursued by a spine-covered cactus person. (Ramón: “That was your hus­ band.”) This much is clear: beyond certain “universal” visual and audi­ tory sensations that can be attributed to the chemistry of the plant and its effect on the central nervous system, there are powerful cultural fac­ tors at work that influence, if not actually determine, both content and interpretation of the peyote experience (as they do also with any other visionary plant or substance). This is true not only cross-culturally but even within the same culture. Huichols appear convinced that the mara’akáme, or one preparing himself to become a mara’akáme, and the ordinary person have different kinds of peyote experiences. Maybe so. Certainly a mara’akáme embarks on the pilgrimage and the peyote experience itself with a different set of expectations than an ordinary Huichol. He seeks to experience a cathar­ sis that allows him to enter upon a personal encounter with the ancestor deities and to travel in ecstatic trance to “the fifth level” to meet the su­ preme spirits at the end of the world. And so he does. Ordinary Huichols also experience the supernaturals, but I have heard it said that they may do so less directly, through the medium of the guiding specialist in the sa­ cred, the shaman. Perhaps what they mean is that they expect the shaman to interpret the experience for them. The hikuritámete left as they had entered—on foot, single file, blow­ ing their horns. Their once-white cotton clothing was now caked with

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the yellow earth of the desert, for during the final night it had begun to drizzle. This was an astonishing event at the height of the dry season and thus an auspicious omen, for in the last analysis the peyote hunt is also a prayer for the rain on which their crops depend. Behind them a thin plume of blue smoke rose from the remnants of the ceremonial fire. They had circled it as required. They had made their offerings of tobacco and bits of food and sacred water they had brought from the springs of Our Mothers. They had purified their sandals and now slapped them as hard as they could on the ground, to signal the ancestors and invite them again into the sacred circle. They had wept and were now again weep­ ing bitter tears as they bade farewell to Tatewari, to Elder Brother, to the kakauyarite. A few hundred feet down the trail, now close to our vehicles, they halted once more. Facing the mountains and the sun, they shouted their pleasure at having found their life and their pain at having to depart so soon. “Do not leave,” they implored the ancestor deities and the DeerPeyote, “do not abandon your places, for we will come another year.” And they sang, song after song, their parting gift to the kakauyarite:

What pretty hills, what pretty hills, So very green where we are. Now I don’t even feel, Now I don’t even feel, Now I don’t even feel like going to my rancho. For there at my rancho it is so ugly So terribly ugly at my rancho, And here in Wirikúta so green, so green. And eating in comfort as one likes, Amid the flowers [peyote], so pretty. Nothing but flowers here, Pretty flowers, with brilliant colors, So pretty, so pretty. And eating one’s fill of everything, Everyone so full here, so full with food The hikuri is very pretty for walking, for shouting and laughing, So comfortable, as one desires. And being together with all one’s companions. Do not weep, brothers, do not weep.

Hunting the Deer-Peyote to Find Our Life

For we came to enjoy it, We came on this journey To find our life.

For we are all, We are all, We are all the children of, We are all the sons of, A brilliantly colored flower, There is no one, There is no one, Who regrets what we are.

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Kiéri and the Solanaceae: Nature and Culture in Huichol Myth and Ritual

I mportant, not to say vital, as peyote obviously is to Huichols, I it has, or had, a rival in the ecstatic-visionary flora. According to oral tradition, this rival might well have prevailed had it not been for the su­ perior power of hikuri, the indigenous name for peyote Huichols share with the Tarahumara (Rarámuri) of the north Mexican state of Chihua­ hua. This was Kiéri Tewiyari, the personification of a plant in the family Solanaceae to which Zingg (1935) gave the name “Jimson-Weed-Man.” As such he appears in oral traditions dictated to Zingg in 1935 by his chief Huichol consultant, Juan Real, but he also figured, negatively, in Ramon’s personal mythological inventory. So he does in that of other Huichols, but not always with the same unequivocal opprobrium. Why “Jimson Weed,” the popular name for an eastern species of Datura, will shortly become clear; for now let me explain that this is the latest permutation of a topic in Huichol myth and ethnobotany that first came to my attention in 1965, when Ramón dropped some disparaging remarks about a “Kiéri Person” as someone to be feared and avoided. When Barbara joined me in the following summer, he entertained us with a lengthy narrative, punctuated several times by his acting out the parts of Kiéri and Tamatsi Káuyumari, the culture hero who was Kiéri’s vic­ torious adversary in a contest to the death for preeminence. I should say “apparent death,” because Kiéri’s death being make-believe, he recovers and escapes to the high rocks to continue to plague people with his wiles. Or so went the version held by Ramón, whose devotion to the divine

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peyote was such that nothing but evil could come from this solanaceous rival. Barbara and I made Ramón’s narrative the centerpiece of a long essay in which we speculated about the possible historical implications of an ancient war between what we, following Zingg, thought was Datura. It was published in 1966. Barbara died of cancer in 1985, and so, regret­ tably, a second version with new information had to be mine alone, this being the third and, I hope, last. What I have tried to do here is to relate the history of Kiéri ethnobotany and the clarification of its nomenclature, which, even if it is not, strictly speaking, Datura, at least confirms its membership in the family Solanaceae. It is forty years since Ramón dictated his epic poem of an ancient war between Kiéri and Káuyumari. It can be read, as we did in 1966, as a piece of actual history framed in the language of poetry and myth, or as yet one more testimonial to Ramón’s literary gifts, or both. Ramón himself had no doubt that what he told us really happened “in those an­ cient, ancient times.” As the essay that follows the strange story of Kiéri suggests, Ramón may well have had a point.

I.

The article Barbara and I published in 1966 was entitled “Myth as His­ tory: The Jimson Weed Cycle of the Huichols of Mexico.” At least tenta­ tively we proposed the story to be not only of ethnological, ethnobotanical, and literary interest but also potentially a contribution to Huichol history: a testimonial to religious change in the history of at least one portion of Huichol ancestry, or that of a related people, from ritual de­ pendence on an ecstatic-visionary solanaceous shrub with spectacular flowers to a small psychoactive succulent, the peyote cactus, Lophophora williamsii. Ramón’s narrative told of a contest between Káuyumari, who is Deer and whose heart, ally, and alter ego is peyote, and his adversary, a malevolent supernatural called Kiéri, and the latter’s defeat by the for­ mer with the help of the powerful little cactus. If there is really history here and not just myth, we need to understand that Káuyumari overlaps with the deer god Máxa Kwaxi, that their names are often combined, and that, as I am increasingly convinced, Máxa Kwaxi was a historical personage, a charismatic shaman-chief who at death became transmogri­ fied into a god. At the time of Ramón’s narration, Kiéri was thought to personify Datura inoxia, the western North American species of the genus Datura.

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I say “thought to be” because Zingg had identified Kiéri as D. meteloides (subsequently renamed D. inoxia) and called its personification “JimsonWeed-Man” in his published ethnography, The Huichols: Primitive Art­ ists (1938), and in the manuscript of Huichol mythology on file since 1935 in the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Although “jimson weed” (a contraction of Jamestown weed) prop­ erly refers to the eastern species of the genus, Zingg’s taxonomy made sense. Datura was widely employed in divination and therapeutics in prehispanic Mexico, and the genus is still in use today for similar purposes among some indigenous groups, including Pueblo Indians of the south­ western United States. But Zingg turned out to be wrong—or, rather, only half right. Early in the 1970s it was discovered that the “god-plant” Huichols identify as the “true” or “real” Kiéri, that is, the Kiéri sup­ posedly possessed of supernatural powers for either good or evil, is not Datura. Instead, it is a species of Solandra, a solanaceous genus that not only is closely related to Datura but is distinguished by a similar array of tropane alkaloids, notably scopolamine, hyoscyamine, and nortropine. Of these, especially scopolamine is capable—as is Kiéri in Ramon’s nar­ rative—of doing permanent physiological damage, to the point of mad­ ness and even death. Jonathan Ott (1993:363-376), in his exhaustive compendium of psy­ chotropic plants, lists sixteen genera in the family Solanaceae contain­ ing psychotropic compounds. At least eight of these genera, he writes, include species employed traditionally for their visionary tropane alka­ loids: hyoscyamine, scopolamine, and atropine or noratropine. These genera are (1) Atropa, (2) Brugmansia, (3) Datura, (4) Hyoscyamus, (5) Latua, (6) Mandragora, (7) Methysticodendron, and (8) Solandra. Of these, Datura occurs in both the Old and New Worlds. Latua, of which one species, L. pubiflora, was used by shamans in Ecuador and evidently also in Chile, where it is popularly known as arból de los brujos, “tree of sorcerers” or “witches”; Methysticodendron, which has only one species, M. amnesian, known in Colombia as both mitskway borrachero, “jaguar inebriant,” and culebra borrachero, “serpent inebriant”; and Solandra (tecomaxochitl or hueypatli in Nahuatl and kiéri in Huichol) are indig­ enous to the New World, as is Brugmansia, a spectacularly flowering South American genus that has been introduced as an ornamental to Guatemala and Mexico. Originally a native of South America, tobacco (Nicotiana rustica), the makuche (makutse) of the Huichols, and N. tabacum, the latter the ancestor of the commercial varieties of tobacco, also belong, with other nicotianas, to the Solanaceae. N. rustica, which

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has a much higher nicotine content than N. tabacum and which has been shown to be especially addictive, has a wide distribution as a shamanic intoxicant, sometimes alongside other intoxicating plants, sometimes by itself (Wilbert 1987).

II. Kiéri’s identity as Datura or Solandra has little bearing on how Huichols regard Kiéri. Ramón, for one, had nothing good to say about Kiéri, and from what I heard from ethnographer T. J. Knab after a visit to the Sierra in the 1970s, many Huichols, if not most, make offerings to the plant and make a shrine for it yet have a very real fear of Kiéri’s great pow­ ers as a capricious and dangerous sorcerer. Accordingly, they avoid the plant and its personification as Kiéri Tewiyari, “Kiéri Person,” as much as possible. Hence offerings to Kiéri are as often prophylactic, meant to ward off his nefarious capabilities, as they are petitions for benefits. In fact, much of what Knab had to say about Kiéri as sorcerer dovetailed with Ramon’s myth. Thus it was becoming clear that whatever Ramón and other Huichols might believe about the plant spirit as an evil and much-feared sorcerer, others—or even the same people—regarded him as a powerful, if minor, divine being from whom favors were asked, and ex­ pected, in exchange for offerings from the petitioner. As a matter of fact, both the older literature, notably volume 2 of Fernando Benitez’s fivevolume Los Indios de México, and the most recent studies in the Huichol country by a Japanese ethnologist of religion, Masaya Yasumoto (1996), make it clear that whatever else he may be, Kiéri may bestow certain ben­ efits, in particular exceptional skill in playing the violin, even when not directly asked for them. It was from Tim Knab that I first heard that Kiéri was not Datura but a species of Solandra. Tim, who had been my Ph.D. student at SUNYAlbany, was then employed as a linguistic investigator at the Institute of Anthropology of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. It was in that capacity that he went to the Huichol comunidad indígena of Santa Catarina, the same community where the cinematographer John Lilly Jr., son of the famous dolphin specialist, and his wife, Colette, were then living. It is, in fact, Colette, a botanist by avocation, who first recog­ nized that the plant the Huichols call kiéri was not Datura but Solandra, an identification that was confirmed by botanists in Mexico City on the basis of samples she had collected. Tim informed me of the revision, and indeed, no one who had actually

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examined Solandra, planted as an ornamental or in the wild, could mis­ take its long, rangy branches and showy yellow flowers for Datura. One could wish that it were that simple, but there were unsuspected com­ plexities that showed up over time. He told me he had written a paper on what he had learned about kiéri and its place in Huichol culture for the journal Economic Botany but that it had not yet appeared. Nevertheless, he allowed me to use his informa­ tion. And so I did, in my book Hallucinogens and Culture, an overview of the visionary/ecstatic flora on which I was then working and which was published in 1976. In it I suggested that perhaps there were differ­ ent species—one, the “real” or “true” Kiéri, now identified as Solandra, the other the one Ramón insisted was a purely evil sorcerer, whose plant form was Datura—another possibility being that Kiéri might be differ­ ently identified in the several communities that make up the Huichol ter­ ritory in the Sierra Madre Occidental. We cannot be certain, but the functional association Huichols consis­ tently make between a visionary plant that was important to the Aztecs and other Nahuatl-speaking central Mexican peoples and a stringed in­ strument that was unknown in Mexico before the Spanish invasion, and that may have first reached the Huichols via the nominally Christianized Nahuatl-speakers the Spanish transplanted into the Sierra Madre Occi­ dental, may have ethnohistorical implications.

III. The scene now shifts to Bandelier National Monument. The time: sum­ mer 1985. Bandelier is a spectacular ancestral Pueblo site in north-central New Mexico, about five miles south of Los Alamos and just over an hour’s drive from Santa Fe, on the eastern flanks of the Jemez Mountains. It is a place of considerable beauty and much history, a collection of ar­ chaeological pueblos, circular semi-subterranean kivas (the Hopi name for the ceremonial chambers of prehistoric and contemporary Pueblo peoples, which also symbolize the underworld from which the ancestors emerged into the present world), residential blocks, and family masonry and rockshelter dwellings and storerooms, with a continuous record of occupation that lasted a little under five hundred years, between A.D. 1070 and A.D. 1550, when it was abandoned. Like other members of the Solanaceae, including the nicotianas, Da­ tura prefers disturbed soil, and while scarce elsewhere in the area, it can be seen in several places adjacent to the ruins at Bandelier. We were photo­

Kiéri and the Solanaceae

in

graphing one of these spectacular white-flowered shrubs when my wife and long-time colleague, Jill Furst, an art historian and Mesoamericanist with a strong interest in the relationship between natural history and the formation of symbols (see McKeever Furst 1995), asked me whether the Huichols connected not just peyote but also Datura with deer. What made her think of deer? “The plant has antlers,” she said. “Take a good look at it.” Sure enough, sticking out among the new green foliage and showy flowers of the D. inoxia before us were bleached, dry, and leafless branches, dead growth from previous seasons. They did in fact look for all the world like antlers, and for Indian people as preoccupied with deer and deer symbolism as are the Huichols, they could well have suggested the forked antlers of the white-tailed Virginia deer. Her astute observa­ tion brought to mind an incident from the charter myth of the peyote pil­ grimage as I had heard it from Ramón: after the ancestral peyoteros, the divine ancestors, the kakauyarite, had shot their arrows into the sacred deer (the form in which the first peyote to be seen on the hunt manifested itself to the hunters), the animal began to transform and peyotes sprouted from its body and antlers. The hunters ground the antlers up and drank them mixed with sacred water from the springs called Tatéimatiniéri, Where Our Mothers Dwell. The divine beverage, said Ramón, gave them “beautiful dreams.” Could this imagery have originated in pre-peyote Datura use, akin, perhaps, to that of some Puebloan peoples of New Mexico and Arizona? Could the white, antler-like dry branches at Bandelier, though long dead and degraded by exposure to the elements, still contain tropane alka­ loids in sufficient strength to be psychoactive, that is, trigger “beautiful dreams”? With the permission of the park rangers, we collected samples of the dry twigs for testing by Robert F. Raffauf, professor of plant chem­ istry in the School of Pharmacy at Northeastern University in Boston and a close collaborator of Richard Evans Schultes, the long-time director of Harvard’s Botanical Museum and world authority on the “hallucino­ genic” flora of the Americas. Raffauf tested the dry sticks to see if they retained some of the com­ pounds of the living plant. They did, though in reduced and attenuated quantities, sufficient, probably, to trigger visions but without the often unpleasant psychic effects and potentially serious physiological damage of which tropane alkaloids are capable (Robert F. Raffauf, personal com­ munication 1985). Interesting, certainly, and suggestive. But it left unanswered the ques­ tion whether people ancestral to the modern Huichols actually equated

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Datura, or a related member of the Solanaceae, with deer, with or with­ out reference to the antler-like appearance of its dead branches. And then of course there was the vexing problem of Kiéri as Datura vs. Kiéri as Solandra. At the time of our visit to Bandelier I could think of no explicit equa­ tion between either of these two related Solanaceae and deer in any of the narratives Ramón had dictated to Barbara and me. On the other hand, there was such a reference in the above-mentioned Huichol volume of Benitez’s Los Indios de México. In the late fall of 1967 Benítez had engaged Ramón as guide and interpreter, as well as his principal source of Huichol myths and explanations of rituals, for his travels among the Huichols in preparation for the book. In the comunidad of San Andrés Cohamiata (which Huichols call Tatéi Kiye, “House of Our Mother”), Ramón and José Carrillo, a literate Huichol employed as a grade school teacher by the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (the Mexican equivalent of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs), gave Benítez considerable information on Kiéri and his role in deer-hunting magic. Kiéri, they told the Mexi­ can writer, could act as supernatural patron of the deer hunt, even as he might also bewitch people and hurl them from high cliffs. Finally there was, from José Carrillo, one brief, but as we now know, significant refer­ ence to Kiéri alternately becoming a child and a deer and flying far away on the wind to a distant mountain. But, said Carrillo, this only happens in the middle of the night and only during the months of August and Sep­ tember (Benítez 1968:282-283). Still, the questions raised by Jill’s observation at Bandelier were not to be definitely answered until the summer of 1989, and then in a most unexpected way. In the meantime, more was learned about Kiéri as a power source for Huichol shamans from Susana Eger Valadez, a graduate of UCLA who, while in the field in the 1970s studying Huichol women’s art, par­ ticularly embroidery, for her master’s degree in Latin American studies, had met and married a talented Huichol artist, Mariano Valadez. After receiving her degree, Susana abandoned an academic career for practi­ cal assistance to Huichol people in health and arts and crafts. During a two-year residence in San Andrés she had also met a young shaman with the Huichol name of ’Ulu Temay (Young Arrow Person, or Newly Made Arrow), a name he shared with Ramón and also the great shaman and community leader Nicolás Carrillo de la Cruz, whom everyone called ’Colas. Susana’s friend was suffering from a debilitating fungus infec­ tion that threatened to destroy his arm and perhaps even kill him. He

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attributed the affliction, which had failed to respond to the ministrations of an older shaman with more experience, to divine punishment. His of­ fense? He had violated a vow of sexual continence during his shamanic training, and now appeared resigned to his fate. Susana refused to ac­ cept this and on a flying visit to Los Angeles went to the UCLA School of Medicine, where specialists supplied her with a powerful drug over which the older shaman then sang a curing song and which, in fact, cured him (though not until he had also sacrificed a bull as payment for his sexual infraction). He and Susana then initiated a long-term project of recording the complicated and esoteric details of his training as a “wolf shaman,” a specialized, and evidently quite rare, form of Huichol sha­ manism that may have been more prevalent in the distant past than it is today (Valadez 1996). A talented artist, ’Ulu Temay illustrated his nar­ ratives with hundreds of colored drawings. It was in the course of this unique collaboration that he told her about the role of Kiéri (pronounced Kiéli by him) as an ally of shamans who train to receive their power and esoteric knowledge from the wolves, including the ability to transform into wolves themselves. There has also been mention of certain mush­ rooms, as yet unidentified but possibly the fly agaric, Amanita muscaria, that wolf shamans ingest to aid in learning the arts of transformation. In fact, years earlier and without any prodding from me, Ramón cre­ ated a yarn painting for UCLA depicting people with skeletal markings around a giant mushroom of vaguely Amanita-\Ae appearance whom Ramón identified as “sorcerers” who used this mushroom to intoxicate and transform themselves. “Kiéli is used by shamans and non-shamans,” Valadez (1986:30) writes, “for a variety of reasons: to excel in the shamanic arts, to be­ come good artists, musicians and deer hunters, and for love spells. Dif­ ferent Kiéli plants rule over these various powers, and the mara’akámes (shamans) dream about which plants pertain to the desires of each indi­ vidual.” There is, however, this caveat: Kiéli (Kiéri) will not stand for any sexual relationship outside marriage by either partner after one of them has made a vow to it (the plant), a rule that stays in effect until a person “completes” with the plant for a period of five or ten years. And if an unmarried Huichol pledges himself to this plant, he is obligated to forgo all sex until the vow is complete—“often a difficult restriction for the Huichols to maintain, in spite of the benefits.” On Kiéli’s psychoactivity, Valadez quotes her Huichol friend and consultant as follows: “Many people are afraid of Kiéli because it can cause great harm to anyone who

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doesn’t complete as he should. Most people don’t ingest the plant. It’s so powerful that just carrying a piece of the branch in one’s tacuatsi (sha­ man’s medicine basket) is enough to gain its powers. Those who ingest it suck the milk from the branches and feel ‘drunk’ like with the peyote.” Those who violate the taboos associated with the plant, the Huichol shaman told Valadez, turn into bewitchers who cast spells on people and who soon “will cause so much harm that someone will eventu­ ally kill them for revenge.” On the positive side, she was told, a man or woman who wishes to become a full-fledged shaman-singer but avoid the hardships of the five or more peyote pilgrimages ordinarily required for “completion” can do so by pledging to Kiéri as his or her patron. To do so would not preclude learning also from the divine peyote cactus, but peyote would not then be the primary teacher. In his study of traditional Huichol medicine, Armando Casillas Romo (1996), who spent three years in the Huichol Sierra, mentions kierixiyá, “kiéri possession,” among behavioral disorders afflicting some Huichols, especially in the community of San Miguel Huaixtita, Jalisco, where it was reported to be almost endemic: “Dr. José Juan Ramirez, a physician with the Mexican Ministry of Health,... told me of a man suffering from this ailment who withdrew completely to live alone in the mountains. Occasionally he would appear naked in the village and eventually he fell into a precipice and was killed” (222). The specialized literature leaves little doubt as to the dangers of over­ dosing with the visionary tropane alkaloids present in Datura, Solandra, Brugmansia, and related members of the Solanaceae (Ott 1979:66, 68, 72). According to Andrew Weil (1980:168), these can “produce fever, delirium, convulsions, and collapse. Death may occur in children, the el­ derly, the debilitated, and any person unusually sensitive to antiparasympathetic effects.” Yasumoto (1996:244) cites an authoritative Japanese source as follows: “With a large quantity, it [scopolamine] paralyzes the central nervous system” and, “in the end, causes death due to heart fail­ ure after frenzied madness (Sekai Daiyakka]iten 1988, Vol. 28:603).” Yasumoto adds that the phrase “after frenzied madness” appears “to describe the psychological aspect of scopolamine. Weil, a medical doctor as well as ethnopharmacologist, believes that the psychotropic effects of solanaceous plants such as Datura are due to scopolamine rather than hyoscyamine, and that therefore these solanaceous plants should be re­ garded as deliriants rather than psychedelics or hallucinogens.” Indeed, as Weil and Rosen (1983:132) characterize the effects of solanaceous plants like Kiéri and its equivalents, the worlds they take people into “can

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be frightening, populated by monsters and devils and filled with violent, frenzied energy.” It is also worth citing Michael J. Harner (1973), an ethnologist with considerable field experience among the Jivaro, whose shamans employ preparations of Brugmansia (form. Datura arbórea) as well as Datura-. “Solanaceous hallucinogens are so powerful that it is es­ sentially impossible for the user to control his mind and body sufficiently to perform ritual activity at the same time.... Furthermore, there is some ethnographical evidence that too frequent use of the solanaceous drugs can permanently derange the mind” (quoted in Yasumoto 1996:250). No wonder that even people who hope for benefits from Kiéri fear the plant and its personification as a dangerous sorcerer! Intriguing as all this was, it still left some crucial questions unan­ swered. For one thing, there was the old taxonomic confusion of Kiéri as Datura, dating back to Zingg; for another, there were the interesting pos­ sibilities, symbolic, historical, and ethnobotanical, raised by the striking resemblance of the dead Datura branches to deer antlers. Or could that have been simply fortuitous, without meaning?

IV. Much of this was to be resolved in August 1989. The place was again Bandelier. The occasion was a visit with friends in Santa Fe, New Mex­ ico, by Guadalupe, the widow of our old friend Ramón. I had reestab­ lished contact with this admirable elder of a large extended family, many of them artists and artisans, in 1988, after an interval of seventeen years. Lupe said she wanted very much to visit one of the “old places that be­ longed to the ancestors.” Her hostess, Ada Browne, and I offered to show her the Bandelier ruins. Lupe, dressed in her best Huichol finery for the occasion, beautifully embroidered by herself in the typical Huichol style, asked for candles, cookies, chocolate, and cigarettes to leave as gifts to the ancestor spirits inhabiting Bandelier. This is a woman who feels a real connectedness with anything to do with ancestors and their living descendants in the Rio Grande pueblos and in a sort of spontaneous pan-Indian way unhesitatingly appropriates them as her own. And so it was at Bandelier: confronted with her first ancestral Pueblo ruin, she began to speak in a rapid-fire awed and re­ spectful hush, except for the times when she prayed loudly and fervently in rapid-fire Huichol, for example, at the Shrine of the Stone Lions and at greater length and with much emotion while standing on the rim of the sunken circular kiva in Tyonyi ruin. Below ground or not, as far as she

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was concerned, this was an ancient tuki, the Huichol term for the native temples in the Sierra that share with these old semi-subterranean kivas .the circular floor plan, placement of the fire pit, central emergence hole the sipapu of the Hopis), and, as at Casa Rinconada, the largest of the Great Kivas in Chaco Canyon, niches all around the interior wall. As is customary in Huichol temple ritual, Lupe’s fervent prayer chant was intended to summon to this archaeological kiva all her own ancestor deities, female and male, on whom the officiating Huichol shaman cus­ tomarily calls to join in the ceremonial gatherings. Lupe was clearly quite overcome by the sacred aura of the whole site. Our visit was made all the more memorable for her when, on our way out, a browsing mule deer doe crossed the trail right in front of her, stop­ ping briefly with its long rabbit-like ears straight up to listen to her softly singing a little song to it. Before we left, Lupe acknowledged her debt to the ancient inhabitants, and her respect, by depositing, with an emotion­ laden prayer chant and tears coursing down her worn face, a lighted candle, cookies, flowers, and cigarettes (the last in lieu of the customary makuche, the potent “Indian tobacco,” Nicotiana rustica), in a little cav­ ity overlooking one of the National Park Service trails. It was indeed very moving, this palpable communion of an elderly Huichol woman from Mexico—she was then in her seventies—with the ancient Pueblo people for whom she felt such instant kinship. But the high point was her encounter, on the trail that runs parallel to the multi-roomed Long House ruin, with an impressive specimen of Datura inoxia in full flower. Lupe’s eyesight was by then rather poor, but when she came close and recognized it for what it was, she first stood stock still, then stepped off the trail and circled the plant to examine it from all sides, all the while speaking to it in Huichol, clearly with respect but no obvious fear. Occasionally she waved her arms and gestured to the sun, the cardinal directions, and the nearby architectural remains. Then she turned to me: “Kiéri-xra!” “Is this Kiéri?” I asked. “No, no,” she said, “I told you, Kiéri-xra.” Not Kiéri, but “like Kiéri,” similar to, or resembling, the real Kiéri. “It is bad,” she said, “this one.” And, she said, this is the Kiéri about which Ramón told you and Barbara so long ago. The Kiéri of sorcerers, of witchcraft, the one who suddenly appeared to her and Ramón while they were on a pilgrimage to Wirikúta, when he tried to mislead her into tasting some of his substance instead of peyote and thereby turn her into a witch or even kill her. She had told me of this fearsome experience in 1970, with the pride of one who had withstood the sorcerer’s wiles. “The good shamans shun it, they have nothing to

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do with it,” she said. “It is only for sorcerers, sorcerers use it to do their evil, to make people ill and to make them crazy, to deceive women. Kiéri Tuhuákame he is called, because he is crazy. The bad Kiéri, the drunken one. Good shamans use peyote, they follow the peyote. The good Kiéri, he is used to cure people who have been bewitched by the bad Kiéri.” It is interesting that Lupe’s “Tuhuákame” as a designation for Kiéri was confirmed some years later in Yasumoto’s essay “The Psychotro­ pic Kiéri in Huichol Culture,” his contribution to Stacy Schaefer’s and my People of the Peyote: Huichol Indian History, Religion, and Survival (1996). Yasumoto spelled it Paweakáme: Huichols associate wind, particularly the whirlwind, cyclones, or tornados, with souls of the dead or the gods. Such a wind, they say, is the harbinger of illness and other misfortunes. Most feared among the whirlwinds is one bearing the name Taweakáme. However, Taweakáme is not the whirlwind itself. Taweakáme is the Huichol term for drunkard. To specify wind as a whirlwind, it is called E’éka Taweakáme, meaning Wind of Taweakáme, because such a wind transforms everyone into a drunkard just like Taweakáme.... But when they think or hear the expression E’éka Taweakáme, Huichols almost unconsciously associate it with Kiéri—not just with a plant of that name, but with its personification as Kiéri Tewíyari, Kiéri Person, and Kiéritáwe, the drunken Kiéri. (Yasumoto 1996:239) There was to be more from this knowledgeable woman, details of the relationship between the different Kiéris, good and bad, and between Kiéri and the culture hero Káuyumari and peyote—details that, as new information so often does in this kind of research, raised as many new questions as it answered or clarified old ones. The one question to which she lent vital illumination concerned the putative relationship between Datura and deer, or Kiéri and Káuyumari. Although in Ramon’s narrative they eventually became irreconcilable adversaries, Káuyumari and Kiéri were both born as deer. As such they were, according to Lupe, primeros hermanos, literally “first brothers” but meaning first cousins, except that Káuyumari was the light deer, the deer of the day, and Kiéri the dark deer, the black deer, deer of the night. So here she had given us, without any prompting, the connection be­ tween Datura and deer that had suggested itself in the bleached “antlers” of another Datura at Bandelier. Shaking her head and wagging her index finger at the Datura in front

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of Long House ruin, Lupe said—as Ramón had two decades earlier: “He wanted to be as great as Káuyumari. But he could not do it. All his power was for craziness. This is why bad shamans, those who are sorcerers, follow him today.” With these words she walked away with us, stopping once to turn and call out something in Huichol that might have been an invocation or supplication against any harm that might befall her, or us, from the plant, and went on to her chance encounter with the deer and to look for a suitable place for the gifts for her temporarily Puebloan ancestors. On the drive back Lupe elaborated on the rivalry* between the two deer, the deer of the day and the deer of the night, and their respective personifications. “Ramón,” she said of her late husband, “he knew all these things.” And she repeated some of the narrative that dramatized their ancient rivalry, Káuyumari’s and Kiéri’s, when the culture hero “killed” his adversary with the fifth of five successive arrows, having first carefully “copied” everything the other did and appropriated it for his own, and protecting himself with the divine peyote against the string of diseases the other spewed forth like brilliantly colored streams as he fell and, apparently, breathed his last. But as Ramón had concluded his mythic dramatization of what in historic terms might be read as an an­ cient rivalry between a peyote-based religion and an ecstatic-visionary shamanism focused on one or more solanaceous “entheogens,” ending in the triumph of the former, the bad Kiéri did not really die. Instead he was blown by the wind to a distant rocky place where he again took root and flourished as what Huichols call “the tree of the wind.”

V.

If Káuyumari was the deer of the day, what about the so-called deer of the night, the “black deer” of Lupe’s elaboration of Ramón’s myth? Is this, like the deer of different colors Huichols associate with the cardinal points, a construct of the mind? Or does it have a natural model? The deer species with which Huichols are most familiar, and whose ceremonial hunt was for centuries the prerequisite for every ritual of con­ sequence, the deer that figures most prominently in myth and cosmol­ ogy (Lemaistre 1996), is the white-tailed, or Virginia, deer (Odocoileus virginianus). It is this ungulate with which Huichols identify or, better, equate peyote and their culture hero Káuyumari. Several of its subspe­ cies are found in their environment or in areas they visit, for example, on the peyote hunt to the north-central high desert and other sacred places associated with the ancestors and their migrations. The Huichols lay par­

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ticular stress on the prominent tail, to the point where, as we recall, one of the principal male ancestor deities bears the name Máxa Kwaxi, Deer Tail. He is also symbolized by a prayer wand made from a deer plume. The deer tail one sees most often among Huichol power objects is light­ colored, probably from the subspecies O. virginianus couesi. Another local subspecies, O. virginianus miquihuanensis, has a much darker tail, often entirely black. The latter could conceivably have served as the natural model for the black deer of the Huichol myth were it not for a much more dramatic phenomenon, that of melanism. Though rarer even than its opposite, albinism, cases of partial melanism in Virginia deer have been reported in North America, specifically from the Adirondacks in New York state and from Idaho, and there have even been sightings of bucks with all-black or blue-black coats. There is no reason to suppose that, however uncom­ mon, partially black or all-black Virginia deer have not also been ob­ served by Mexican Indians. That would certainly apply to the Huichols, whose visits to sacred places situated from the Pacific coast far inland to the north-central desert, as well as north and south of the mountainous Huichol territory, take them over much of the natural range of Virginia deer in northern Mexico. Nor is it insignificant that oddities such as allwhite or all-black deer tend to become outcasts—perhaps, one might venture, because instinct tells their fellows that their unusual coloration, and hence lack of camouflage, might draw the attention of predators and thereby endanger the larger family group in which deer customarily move: just so is the “drunken,” or “crazy,” Kiéri shunned by good people. All this underscores not only the role of natural history observation and natural modeling in the way people order, interpret, and symbolize their intellectual as well as the natural universe, but also the periodic need to reexamine and, where indicated, amend and correct earlier work in the light of new data and, one hopes, insights.

In our original Kiéri essay of thirty years ago, Barbara and I pro­ posed that the epic struggle between Káuyumari and Kiéri described in Ramón’s myth might tell us something of Huichol ancestry and religious history. Perhaps, we ventured, Ramón’s dramatic narrative framed in the language and imagery of myth a religious reform, during which a solanaceous visionary species with tropane alkaloids came to be replaced by the far more benign ecstatic-visionary denizen of the north-central (Chihuahuan) desert, the peyote cactus. Among the dozens of alkaloids in peyote, mescaline is the principal agent responsible for the colorful visions characteristic of peyote inebriation, and mescaline, like the other

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Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams

peyote alkaloids, is structurally related to neurohormones present in the brain that “play an essential role in the biochemistry of psychic func­ tions” (Schultes and Hofmann 1973:20-21). In contrast, the tropane alkaloids of the Solanaceae possess no such chemical-structural relation­ ship to compounds naturally present in the human body. Whether the Kiéri of Zingg’s myths, collected in 1934, and of Ramon’s narrative of thirty years later was the visionary plant the Aztecs called toloatzin or tolohuaxhuitl, in other words, Datura, or whether it was tecomaxóchitl, that is, Solandra, is essentially immaterial, for the two share a similar chemistry and comparable drawbacks. What matters, in the end, is that they have dangerous potential whereas peyote does not. If there was such a “reformation,” it would help explain why many, but by no means all, Huichols hold Kiéri to be, though sacred and one of the kakauyarite, the divine ones of the First Times, an evil sorcerer dangerous to health and happiness, while peyote is invariably held to be beneficent. For that is the way of the replacement of one religion by another: the sacred beings of the former become the devils of the latter. Peyote, of course, is native not to the territory in which the Huichols have been living at least since they were first mentioned in the Spanish colonial literature, that is, the Sierra Madre Occidental, but to the high desert far to the east. Nevertheless, a substantial body of ethnohistorical and cir­ cumstantial evidence argues in favor of a long-ago migration westward of a body of Guachichil-Chichimecs from the same high desert to which Huichols travel each year to gather peyote, finally settling in the Sierra Madre Occidental, under the leadership of a charismatic shaman-chief. As noted earlier, old traditions identify this legendary shaman-chief as a Guachichil named Deer Tail. “Ever since the earliest Spanish days,” wrote the much-published Americanist J. Alden Mason more than sixty years ago, “the Huichols have been regarded as connected with the extinct Guachichil far to the east of the present Huichol territory, and the fact that the latter make long journeys into former Guachichil territory to gather peyote that does not grow in their present habitat affords ethnological corroboration of the close relationship” (1936:191). There is equally good reason to make a connection between just such a historic migration and the present-day uneasy coexistence between a limited, if not yet vanishing, solanaceous “cult” in Huichol visionary shamanism and the far more pervasive fas­ cination with peyote, one that is so central and vital to “being Huichol” that it can be taken as the cultural marker for the Huichol, the most genu­ inely “traditional” of Mexican Indian peoples.

5

The Magical Birth, Life, and Make-Believe Death of Kiéri the Sorcerer

I F WE FOLLOW RAMÓN, peyote’s triumph over the solanaceous kiéri I did not come without a bitter struggle, a contest between their respec­ tive manifestations in human form that could end only in the death of one. Of course, the two protagonists were not really human but spirit in human guise, and so neither could really die. On one side was the cul­ ture hero, the Deer Person Káuyumari, whose heart and ally is peyote, on the other Kiéri Tewiyari, the personification of the flowering shrub once thought to be Datura but now identified as Solandra. Whatever the species, it was probably the one the Aztecs knew as the therapeutic and visionary intoxicant tecomaxóchitl, meaning “vase[-shaped] flower,” from tecomatl, “vase,” and Xóchitl, “flower.” The kiéri stories dictated by Ramón in 1965-66 are really an epic prose poem that describes the birth, life, nefarious activities, and violent death—or apparent death—of Kiéri Tewiyari, the personification of one of numerous members of the Solanaceae family, which also includes the daturas and other species with a similar array of alkaloids, as well as the

nicotianas. Nicotianas occur in many parts of the world. But two, N. rustica, the so-called Indian tobacco, and N. tabacum, the ancestor of our modern commercial tobaccos, are both of South American origin. The former has a nicotine content many times that of the latter and hence is a far more potent and addictive inebriant that has long served Native Ameri­ can shamans as an ecstatic-visionary intoxicant. Interestingly, both were

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hybrids, and hence tobacco appears to be one of the earliest, if not the earliest, products of South American tropical forest horticulture. Ramón was so totally committed to peyote that for him, as for many other Huichols, kiéri could not possibly have any redeeming qualities. That attitude reflects itself in his version of the mythic conflict. As Tim Knab made clear in his 1977 Solandra article, other Huichols may not completely share Ramón’s aversion, but many do have ambivalent feel­ ings toward kiéri in both its guises, as plant and supernatural sorcerer in human form, and some fear and avoid it altogether. At the same time I want to stress that whether kiéri is feared and avoided or respected, Masaya Yasumoto, a Japanese ethnologist of religion who studied the kiéri phenomenon in depth over several field seasons in the Huichol sierra, found no evidence that anyone uses it today as a visionary intoxi­ cant or in the curing of illness (Yasumoto 1996). On the other hand, one has to wonder how Ramón acquired the knowledge to describe pretty accurately the effects of solanaceous alkaloids on the central nervous system. Ramón’s dramatic narrative, here shortened somewhat for reasons of space and to avoid repetition, concludes with Káuyumari’s victory over Kiéri Tewiyari with the aid of peyote. But Kiéri’s death is only apparent. He falls but rises again and flies away to the mountains, from where he continues to try and seduce the people into following him instead of pey­ ote. However many of Ramón’s fellow Huichols may share his visceral aversion, and that of Lupe, it is a great story, and in it we may well read, as did Barbara and I, something of Huichol religious history.

1. How Kiéri Tewiyari Was Born The first passages of the cycle tell of the magical birth of Kiéri Tewiyari, Kiéri Person. He is born not from a mother and father but “from the wind,” and even while he is still a toddler, bats, wolves, poisonous vipers, and other creatures linked to sorcery, illness, and death come flying out of his mouth, accompanied by brilliant flashes of color. Sorcerers await his coming, for he is destined to become their teacher and chief. Ramón: This is how it was. We must know it well. We must be able to know everything. Be­

cause the symbols say all that is sacred to us, and the stories I tell are our stories,

our history. What they say, what they carry in their wisdom, that is our history, and that is what must be fully understood. So I tell these things to you, as it was with us in ancient times, as it is now.

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This is the story of the Tree of the Wind, the evil Tree of the Wind who is called kiéri. Kiéri Tewiyari, that Kiéri Person. He who is known as Tutukúri, whom one called

Tutukúri. Kiéri and Tutukúri, they are the same. How he was born. How he came up, wantingto be more than Káuyumari. How was it when he was born, that Tree of the Wind Person? He was bad, evil, when he was born. He was not born from his mother, his father. He came from the wind, on the wind, an evil wind. The wind was his father. When he was born, sorcer­

ers waited. Five sorcerers waited, seated in a circle. They waited for him. Something happened, something went on there. Something went on inside him when he was

born. It moved in him. Something moved inside him. He was transformed. Bats came out of his mouth. He was just a small child, a nunútsi. Yet bats came

out of his mouth. They flew out.

Wolves came out of his mouth. He opened his mouth, and wolves came out of his mouth. Crawling things came out of his mouth. He saw how he was. He said to

himself, “Ifthat is how I am, that is what I will be.” He said, “That is what I am going to spend my life doing. I will be a collector of vipers, of poisonous snakes. I will be a master of snakes, of crawling things. I am

going to control them. That is what I am going to do.”

From then on he grew. He was afflicted with an illness, right then, from then on.

An illness of the wind. He has a madness in him, as one says. When he was small, dark things came out of his mouth. Blue things came out of his mouth. Crimson things. That is how he was. He was like that. What on earth happened there? He came on the wind. He came, he was born.

He was evil, the chief of sorcerers. That is how he was born. It was seen how he was. Our Mothers saw how he was. They said, “We are going to watch over what Kiéri is saying. What he does. We are worried about it somewhat.

We hope it turns out well.”

2. How the Sorcerers Learned from Kiéri In the second part of the cycle, Kiéri Tewiyari deceives the people by acting like a true mara’akáme, a Huichol shaman. He uses the drum, ceremonial arrows, and chants to gain their trust and then feeds them his juices. Drunk with his magic, some of his victims become demented to the point of self-destruction; others learn the arts of sorcery: how to send illness and death by shooting sickness projectiles into their victims from afar, how to control dangerous creatures such as poisonous snakes and vampire bats, how to make people lose all self-control, how to maim and kill by magical means, and how to transform themselves into various animals.

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There were others there. They were how he was. They said, We will copy what he does.” Even when he was small, they saw that. They went around copying him. What

Kiéri said, what he did. They copied that. They sat in a circle, copying him. He was their chief. Some people are like that, they learn from him. They follow his trail. They get dizzy and cough. It makes them

drunk, it makes them trip all over their feet. They fall writhing. He sings to them. He uses his arrows [the muviéri], he deceives them. He says,

"I am the mara’akáme, follow me.” He influences them in this way. He causes them to roll around. So that they are seized by a desire to climb the high cliffs, to fly, to jump down, down, down, down below. As if they were flying. They think they can fly, those people. Learning from him, they become sorcerers. They were doing this thing without paying heed. They

were acting under enchantment. Others in those times were not like that. They have the heart of Our Father [Sun]

in them. They have the heart of Our Grandfather [Fire] in them. They have the hearts of Our Mothers [the female deities of fertility, rain, children] in them. They see this thing. One says, “Ah, no, if I were to follow that one, if I were to listen as he sings, if I

were to eat those things, it would be bad.” If I am to eat in safety, with a good heart, if I am to have my life, if I am to have

my power, I will have to take my place in the tuki, I have to take my place in the xiriki. I have to cross over there, five times, to Wirikúta, there where one hunts the peyote.

I have to put their offerings in their places. Is that not right? I say this to you here, as I sit here telling it to you. Ah, no, he is not like that. Look, this comes to be that there were many from

the time that he was born. He made them like that. He tells them, “Look, catch that

viper. That animal there that comes and goes, it is good. It is good to paralyze that person. So that he will fall, from this side, to that side. So that he will have sickness. So that he will die.” Those others, those crawling things, as he went telling them. He

was starting them out slowly. “Go catch that little snake there,” he said. “It is good, it will heed yourwords, your command.” He started them on that road. First there is

that little snake. Then there are others. More things, evil. He starts to make sounds, he teaches them. They make sounds even like the deer, from far away. They start to call from far away, as someone is dying. They call him, “Tsiu, tsiu, tsiu, tsiu." They call like deer to him who is dying. They start to make sounds like owls, "Whooo, whooo, whooo, whooo." They go, “Swish, swish, swish," through the night. And that sick person over here starts to moan, “Áyi, áyi, áyi, that

animal has come to eat me, it has come to kill me.” Because Kiéri teaches them these things. He is transformed. He transforms them. And then is heard a noise

made by the fox. Kiéri commands him. He starts to say, “Cau-u, cau-u, cau-u." It is the fox. When the fox comes up to you and bites, you must die. There is no help for

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that. It is the spirit of Kiéri that wanders about. It means death. It is when Tukakáme [a cannibalistic ogre who wears the bones of his victims as clothing] wanders about. The fox is there.

Bats, they arrive where there is one who is sick. It is as Kiéri commands them, as he taught them, there in ancient times. When he was born. The sick person is lying

there, he is asleep. And that bat comes. He moans in his sleep, “Áyi, áyi, áyi.” He

means, “Here comes that animal, here comes another. It will kill me, áyi, it takes my heart out. Áyi," he cries, “that animal is killing me, it is the Tree of the Wind that is killing me.” That is how he teaches them to do these things.

That person is sick. He starts to have visions, he sees things. “Oh,” he says, “here comes this, here goes that, ah, take it away, take it away!” He makes him rise,

that Tree ofthe Wind, he makes him go out into the wind, hot, sick, into the cold out

there. He is killing him. Then they find him there, lying. Dying. Because the Tree of the Wind has it against him. The sorcerers are trying to kill him. Some with knives, others with axes, others with stones, others with those animals. Where the soul is,

they try to grab it as it travels at night; when one is asleep, they grab it, eat it. They throw him down, they kill him. “Oh, my head, oh, oh.” That is how this thing is, that

is what they learn from him, all his power, from that chief of the sorcerers. He trans­

forms them, he transforms people. They learn from him. Many people he transforms. He makes them how he wants them to be. Some into burros, others into birds, others into butterflies, flying, flying with a heart. Every­ thing is done by that Kiéri Person. He sends them this way and that, from one place to another. In a demented state, crazy. They go to one side, and they return and goto

the other. Some laughing, like contented persons, sane persons. But it is because of the sorcerer. Because he started all this. Ah, that one, he learns to deceive. He learns how everything is. The proper forms of speech. What one says. As

one speaks, “Ah, my older brother, my younger brother, how are you? My younger sister, how are you?” He learned well. He comes upon you in no recognizable form. One does not know how he is inside. The way he is inside his mouth. As we full well know. The vipers are in there, the crawling things are in there. The sicknesses are in

there. The wolves are in there. He sings to them, he beats his drum, he uses his [ceremonial] arrows. He says to them, “I am the mara’akáme.” He says to them, “As I play the drum for you, as I sing the chant, you listen. You heed me. I tell you how it is.” He said, I am greater than Káuyumari.” But can that be so? Can one be greater than he who has the heart

[the essence] of Our Father, Our Grandfather, Our Mothers? No, it cannot be so. So he speaks, deceiving them, lying to those people. He went around eating up vipers. He speaks with dark things, he speaks with crimson things, he speaks with intense colors, really intense. He speaks in a drunken way. As they see this, he says,

“Oh, I am just a little drunk. I am fine. I know how to do it.” There he sits, feeling fine,

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as they say. They do not see him as he is. There he sits, he has a fine reputation. He

sings to them,

This is me, Kiéri drunk, I am down below here, I have been commanded, I have been commanded, To be at Tuitári. Why am I crazy? That's why I am crazy, I chase after girls, That’s why I am crazy. Singing that song of his own composition, he goes around, all by himself. He takes

hold of them, he grabs them, he bites them, he makes them lose control of them­ selves. He goes around singing, shouting, “Oh, I am drunk, oh oh, I am getting

around these days, that’s how I am.” He shouts, “Ah, that is how I am, I am drunk, I feel fine, oh can I dance!” So he sings, making them lose control ofthemselves. He teaches those others. They sit with him, they learn from him. They become sorcerers, witches. He speaks to them, “Oh my brothers, I will treat you fine. You are going to make out fine with me.” He says, "If they are like that, I am going to treat

them fine. I will treat them according to how they go.” He sings, “I go around danc­ ing, I vomit as I dance, I go around dancing.” He does this so as to receive the proper

offerings. "Ah,” he says, “my face is brilliant, it is properly arranged, it is shining. My

face is all painted, it looks like the Sun.” So he goes around singing, he goes beating the drum, he goes deceiving them. That is how he is.

3. How Káuyumari Decides to Kill Kiéri Tewiyari Káuyumari enters the picture in the third part of the cycle. He spies on Kiéri in order to learn his secrets, for knowledge is power and Káuyumari will have to muster all his power in order to defeat his rival. Not only does Káuyumari realize that he will have to eliminate Kiéri Tewiyari as a false mara’akáme and leader of a cult of sorcerers, but the gods themselves, Tatewari and Tayaupá/Tawerikúa, the Sun, egg the rivals on to fight it out. This is interesting because according to the Sun myth recorded by Zingg in 1934, Kiéri was originally under the protection of the Sun Father.

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Ah, others are looking on, seeing what he is. Others see this; they hide, watching. They follow him to all those places. What kind of thing is he yelling? “Ah,” one says, “look, they are eating snakes, they are eating vipers, they are eating crawling things

as they go along.” Káuyumari and Tatewari hide there, watching him. “I will go up

there, I will hide there.” Káuyumari speaks. “I will wait quietly. I will see what he does. I will make my decision.” What on earth happened there? As I am telling it to you, that is how it was.

This is the story of the Tree of the Wind and the ascendance of the real mara’akáme.

The ascendance of Káuyumari. When the Tree of the Wind was born, he wanted to be more than Káuyumari. He wanted to be in competition with him. To beat him. They were rivals and he wanted to defeat him. But no, he could not do this. Because

Káuyumari is more powerful. Very, very. They had an ill feeling toward one another. They became enemies. From that day, when he was born, they became enemies. Be­

cause one did not want the other to be more powerful than he. Because Káuyumari

aids Tatewari. All those most powerful ones. He has his horns. He has his arrows. He has his peyote. They were in competition, rivals. Kiéri, that Tree of the Wind, was singing. He deceived them. He sang it wrong. False things. They believed it. Then those most powerful ones, Our Father, Our Grandfather, all those most powerful ones, they

asked Káuyumari, “Why do you let him get the better of you?” They asked, “How is it that he tries to be more powerful than you? That Tree of the Wind?” They said, “No, it should not be like that.” He becomes angry. And they said to the Tree of the

Wind, “Why is it that you let him get the better of you? How is it that you let him be stronger?” So they spoke to that Tree of the Wind, to make him angry. They set them

against each other so that they had a dispute, so that they should meet in combat. So that Káuyumari should beat him. Káuyumari said, “Ah, I have been ready for him ever since he was born.” He said, “I will watch him, I will see what it is they do. I will learn his secrets. All his

wisdom. What he is thinking, what he is saying. What he does. How he does these things. Everything, everything.”

He did that, getting control of it, capturing everything. He was copying it. He followed him. He saw how he did these things, deceiving

them. He learned everything, everything. He acquired it for himself. He saw where he went, how he traveled. And that other one, he had no knowledge of it. He did not

suspect. Thinking he was all alone. That he was the only one who was going to do these things. He did not know. Our Father asked, “How can he be this way? How can you let him be this way?”

Our Grandfather asked, “How can you let him be this way?” Káuyumari is angry. Oh, he is angry. He says, “I am spying on him. I am learning his secrets.” He says, “No, it

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cannot be this way.” He takes his arrows. He says, “It cannot go like this. I am going to see how I can kill him. I must leave him fallen wherever it may be. I will shrivel him

up, that Tree ofthe Wind. I will burn him as I have killed him.” So he spoke as he went spying on him. Looking where he can do it. He arrives at the rancho, where they sit in a circle. Where he sings, there he goes spying on him. His paths, where he walks. The path by which he enters. He waits for him. He does

not come. The path by which he leaves. Over here, another path. Ah, where is he?

No, it could not be that they were getting the better of him. He said, “One must take a chance. One must gamble one’s heart in this world.

There are some things one must do all alone in this world. I will take a chance to see

how I will be able to kill him. Surely this will be my destiny. Surely it is going to be like that.” So he spoke, Káuyumari. Taking his bow, taking his arrows.

4. Káuyumari Meets Kiéri Tewiyari and Kills Him The fourth section records the dramatic encounter between the two ad­ versaries. At first Kiéri Tewiyari tries to evade his fate by changing his shape, for he has many forms. At last he decides to make his stand, and there follows a debate in which Kiéri claims the support of the Sun Father and then offers all his knowledge and power to Káuyumari in exchange for his life. But having spied on Kiéri, Káuyumari already knows all he needs to know of his rival’s secrets. He wounds Kiéri Tewiyari with a succession of arrows while the latter fights back with all manner of evil things and diseases, which he vomits up in the form of brilliant colors. Káuyumari neutralizes his enemy’s powers with the aid of peyote and finishes him off with the fifth and final arrow in the heart. It is this that seemed to Barbara and me to support a historical reading of the myth: the replacement by peyote of an older religious focus on a member of the Solanaceae. Whether that was Datura, as Zingg thought and we ac­ cepted, or a species of Solandra, as Colette Lilly was the first to confirm and Knab the first to publish, is really immaterial. As Yasumoto (1996) discovered, Huichols do not limit the term kiéri to Solandra alone but apply it also to Datura inoxia, and even to Brugmansia, a native of tropi­ cal South America that was introduced as an ornamental to Mexico and Guatemala, where, for obvious reasons, it soon acquired the popular name of árbol loco, “crazy tree.” As I am telling it to you now, it happened, there in ancient times. A day comes, an

opportunity came. Our Father [Sun] told him, “Now is the moment. It is not possible

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that he can overpower you.” Our Grandfather [Fire] told him, “That is how it is. The time has come. You will do it like that.” So they said to him, to do it, to do it quickly.

He came into the rancho. He spied on the paths by which he came, the paths by which he went. Ah, where is he, where is that Tree of the Wind? He could not see him. He turned into air. He turned into wind. He blew like a strong wind, he blew

from every side. He turned into one wind, another wind, a third wind, a fourth. He

changed into a tree. He changed into air. He changed into a person. He had many forms. One could not cope with him. Ah, that Tree of the Wind suspects something. As one says, he divined it a little bit. He said, “They will take me from here. They are coming for me today. In this

place, at this time, they are coming. They are going to kill me.” He began to see how they spied on him. How Káuyumari had noted everything, everything. With his power, with his arrows. To get hold of it, to control it. Oh, Káuyu­ mari is greater, he has more power, he is of Our Father, Our Grandfather. They could not beat him. He said, “If it will be like that, if that is my destiny. I know they are com­ ing to kill me.” So spoke Kiéri Tewiyari, that Tree ofthe Wind Person.

They were meeting at last. Káuyumari says to him, “I have been ready for you ever since you were born." He was on to him with his arrows, with the arrows that

kill. With his horns, with his power. Thus they meet, face to face, at last. ThatTree ofthe Wind Person, he was afraid. He came up at him like a demented man. He said, “You are pointing your arrows at me!”

“Yes, I am pointing my arrow at you.” “Please do not point your arrow at me.”

“You are going to die. I am going to kill you." So they spoke. That Tree of the Wind, he was afraid. He was begging. “Let me

go! Let me go! Do not point your arrow at me. Let us talk." And he said, “My Father [Sun] is here. I am acting under his orders.” “I am going to kill you.”

That other one says, “I might have known that this is what you are like. Let us

see what Our Father says about it. What his attitude is.” Káuyumari speaks. “Ah yes, let us see what he says about it. Let us see where he

dwells. Where does he dwell, anyhow?” “Where I was born. I am of Our Father.” Káuyumari says, “Where were you born, anyhow?” “I was born in a cliff.” So speaks the Tree ofthe Wind, who was born on the

wind. “Ah, so that is how it is. As you say.” And he says, “Why have you acted badly

toward us? You have acted badly. Your thoughts are bad. That is why I am going to kill you.” “Our Father would not harm me!”

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“You have not truly learned about Our Father, Our Grandfather. You have not taken their true paths, their true ways. You do not listen to Our Mothers. You have not followed Our Grandfather. You have not listened to them. You have an evil heart. That is why I am going to kill you.” He says to him, “Tell me your secrets. Tell me all your secrets." He tells him,

how he does it, how he does this and that. Káuyumari has noted it all down. He has it all, he controls it. He says, “Yes, I know your life. How you are. You have acted badly and that is why I will shoot an arrow into you.” He has his bow ready. He has his arrows ready. He says, “Ah, how delicious the

blood of the Tree of the Wind! How well it tastes.” He pulls his arrow through his

mouth, wetting it. He says, “That is how I want to take you now. Because you are very bad.” The Tree of the Wind creeps away, he tries to escape. He grabs him, he pushes

him from side to side. He says, “No, you are not going to escape. I will kill you. I will shrivel you all up.” He tells him, “No, I am not going to forgive you, I will not let you

go.” He pushes him here and there, he brings him over here. “Now you will see how

it is going to go with you.” And the Tree of the Wind says, “Please do not kill me. I turn my whole life over to you. All the souls I have under my power I will give to you." Káuyumari says, “No, I need nothing from you. I have no part in what you do.”

The Tree of the Wind begins to cry, “Let me go, let me go, please!” “This ‘please’ will not work. There are no favors here. Let it happen what is going to happen.” He tries to escape.. He retreats. Káuyumari speaks after him, “Go ahead, try to escape. I shall kill you wherever

you are. My arrows will find you, wherever you are.” So he speaks, pointing his arrow

at him. To shoot him there. The other one turns back, with pain in his heart. His hard heart softened. He looks about. No, no. All have deserted him. All those sorcerers, those who were with

him, they have left. No one stayed. He saw how it was, as he stood there.

“I am speaking, I, Máxa Kwaxi Káuyumari. My arrow knows you." In saying this, he draws his bow. He lets his arrow fly. Kátsa! It has found him. It has hit him.

“Aaaaaaaahhhhh... he has hit me.. .aaaahhhh, so that is what your arrows are

like!” The arrow has hit him on one side. He is down, down on his hands and knees. “Aaaaahhhh, he hit me, aaaaahhhhh, what pain!" He is trembling, that one, he is vomiting up deadly things... He is collapsed. “Ah, you are killing me, I am dying. I

am going.” He vomits up yellow things... He vomits up green things... Another arrow. It hits him on the other side.

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“Aaaaaahhhh, please don’t kill me! Aaaahhhhh, what pain, what pain!” He vom­

its up poisonous things. Crimson things come out of his mouth... blue things come out of his mouth. Káuyumari begins to choke, to cough. “Oh, strong, bitter, horrible.” He coughs, he chokes. Then he takes out his peyote, ground like pinole. He puts it on his hands,

his mouth, his face. He stops choking. The peyote has more power; it stops the bad

things ofthe Tree ofthe Wind. Káuyumari says, “So much less will I let you go. Because it is a bad thing which you are doing.” And he looses another arrow at him. Zinnnnnnnggggg! Kátsa! Into the other side. One arrow, two arrows, three arrows. He says, “This is so you will

suffer for your sins.” “Ah, he hit me again, uuuuuhhhhh, there is another one stuck in here. I am full of them, look at me, I am stuck full of your arrows. Ah, what pain! So that is what

your arrows are like, what you are like. I am growing cold. Look what you have done, look what your arrows have done. My knees are weakening. I am collapsing.” So he

speaks, that Tree of the Wind. One arrow, two arrows, three arrows in him. “Ah,” he says, “I am still alive, I have still some things in me to throw at you!” “Throw them if that is what you are like.” That other one gives one mighty heave, he vomits up purple things, black things, yellow things, crimson things. But Káuyumari, with his power, with the peyote, he is not harmed by them. He says, that Kiéri Person says, “I will go to the wind, I will not die.” Here I will

not die. I will go there, by my own efforts, to the place where I was born, to the place

where I came from. I will transform myself... aaaahhhhh... he got me again, there, another arrow.” The fourth arrow was in him. He vomits, he howls, he screams, he

yells. Those animals, those foxes, those wolves, those owls, those vipers, they yell. One, two, three, four arrows. Káuyumari says, “Ah, he is evil, that one. I can taste his blood. His blood, it

tastes well, how sweet the blood of Kiéri Tewiyari.” He draws another arrow through his mouth. The fifth. Zinnnnnggggg... Kátsa! “Ah, he has got me!" He falls forward, he crumples. Still talking. “This is what you might have expected. This is how it must be. This is my destiny. This is how far

my life has reached. You surely have more power, through Our Father, through Our Grandfather. You surely have more power.” So he spoke, dying, the fifth arrow in his

heart. He is on his back, looking straight up. It has worked out well. “My Divine Mothers, My Grandfathers, the ones who

are all around, in their places, in their present abodes. It has worked out well. I, Káuyumari, am speaking to you. I lay down your [ceremonial] arrows. I put them in

their places.”

That is how it is. That is just how it is.

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5. What Happened When Kiéri Tewiyari Died In his mortal agony Kiéri Tewiyari visits humanity with a multitude of diseases, which he scatters into the world in the form of brilliant, shim­ mering colored lights that in Ramon’s narration sound very much like the phosphenes Reichel-Dolmatoff (1978) and others have described as visual phenomena that precede true ecstatic intoxication. The fifth section of the cycle, then, accounts for many of the diseases that plague people, their crops, and their animals. It also reveals how it was that when Kiéri Tewiyari falls dead with the fifth arrow of Káuyumari in his heart (five, for the four world directions and the center, being the Huichol number signifying completion), he does not really die. Rather, he is transformed into a plant, the “Tree of the Wind.” As Tree of the Wind he establishes himself in the rocks or cliffs, a description that fits the rangy or vining Solandra better than it does Datura. Like tobacco, Datura typically pre­ fers disturbed soil, like that of burials—surely one reason Indian peoples regarded Nicotiana rustica as a gift ofthe ancestors. Perhaps that applied as well to Solandra, Datura, and other members of Solanaceae. This Kiéri, who is Kiéri Tewiyari, who is called Tutukúri, was born. He was born far, far

away, where only the wind is, where the wind speaks. Where the wind speaks. Where the wind says “Xeririririririri," where the wind speaks like that. He was born on the wind. After he was born, he did those things of which we speak. After he had done

them, he thought, “Ah, perhaps I am going. Oh, this must be my destiny. I must be dying.” Right there where he was, in Tuitári, he spoke those words: “If he dies, we are done for. When we are done for, what in the world are we going to do? What will

we do?" Kiéri tells them [the sorcerers]. He says, “Oh, it looks as though I will die.

You will know it. When I die, I will cry the way a deer cries, like a screech owl cries, as a red-tailed hawk flies over the countryside. As the fox cries, that is how it shall be.

When someone dies, that is how it will sound, how he will hear it.” He told them, “I will whistle like a deer, five times, tsíu, tsíu, tsíu, tsíu, tsíu. I will

range over the countryside like that, whistling like a deer, so that he will know it. Thereafter like the owl cries, the screech owl, going hikúri xúa, hikúri xúa, hikúri xúa

[that’s it, that’s it, that’s it]. And the one who sits over there, the red-tailed hawk,

who says, kwiiii, kwiiii xui'a, xui’a. There also the one who goes héuuuuu, héuuuuu, héuuuuu, as he goes ranging over the country-side. And another one sitting there,

cáuuuuuuuu, cáuuuuuuuu, the fox, as he comes up close to you, there....” When he died, he did not die. Only his soul returned to the wind, where he was born. When he died, when the arrows of Káuyumari killed him, he became trans­

formed. He traveled to a cliff to grow there, to be transformed as a tree. Because Our

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Grandfather, Our Father, would not admit him anywhere. “You are evil, this is why

you remain here in this world.” He arrived at the cliff, and his soul fell there, fell like a stone. He transformed there into a tree, which began to grow, grow upward until

it reached the fifth level, a tree with five branches. Then the wind took compassion with him, he blew him here and there, to the five sides. He said to him, “There, in those fields, there it is green, there you can grow.”

From there he arose, following his path, playing his violin, deceiving people. He was not yet tame. At first he was like a wild animal, biting every hand that tried to

touch him. Full of hate, hating everyone. But slowly he began to be tame, until at last

it was possible for all of us to see him. But that was just acting, so that in this manner someone might follow him, be ensnared by him. In this manner he deceived people. Ever since it has been the most terrible thing on earth.

That is why if we had followed him in those days, if we had made this union with him, there would be no mara’akáme, only persons who are sorcerers. But as Our

Father, Our Grandfather, did not permit this, it could not be so. It could not happen that way.

6. How Kiéri Tewiyari Ensnares Those Who Are Weak Though vanquished by Káuyumari with the aid of peyote, banished from the company of good people and forever linked with the black arts, Kiéri Tewiyari continues to pose a threat to the Huichol community. The final passages of Ramón’s narrative are a reflective description of the kind of personality that is likely to fall prey to the bewitching power of Kiéri, and the psychological and physical dangers faced by those who forsake pey­ ote for kiéri, whether Solandra or Datura. We need not take at face value Ramón’s ideas of who is likely to become a sorcerer rather than a prop­ erly completed mara’akáme; the fact is that all shamans have the capacity to turn their power to someone’s disadvantage. Any shaman’s power ob­ jects can, and often do, include “arrows of sickness,” the Huichol version of foreign objects containing illnesses or debilities that can be magically shot from afar into the body of a victim. This form of disease etiology is not limited to Huichols but has wide distribution throughout the world of shamanism. Often it also goes along with the belief that only the sha­ man who originated the sickness projectile can effect the cure. In other words, any Huichol mara’akáme has the capacity to practice “sorcery,” although it is true that there are individuals who, for whatever reason— and failure to complete a vow to train as a shaman may be one—hire themselves out to do harm, on behalf of a client or of their own volition. In Ramón’s narrative the Tree of the Wind, in his human guise, feeds

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those he has deceived some of his leaves, telling his followers that the leaves are like little tortillas. Instead those who eat the leaves become crazy. There is no evidence that, whatever its use in the past, any part of the kiéri plant is today ingested, even by Huichols aware of its ecstaticvisionary qualities or who venerate it with prayer offerings for such ben­ efits as good luck in hunting or skill with the violin. Either survivals of an ancient use of kiéri as an ecstatic intoxicant are extremely well hidden or, more likely, Ramón is speaking of a past when, notwithstanding the unchallenged place of peyote at the center of Huichol spirituality, at least for some Huichols kiéri still enjoyed more than passive veneration. Well, let’s see. This is the story of Kiéri, the Tree ofthe Wind, how he acts now, the tree of Huichols who are sorcerers, those who became transformed. Those who are weak. Those who tried to go on the path ofthe mara’akáme, who stumbled, who did

not reach the ultimate stage. Those who want to do evil. Those who are deceived. That is the tree that makes and unmakes. Because he possesses a gum, a sap, which he expels. He has five branches, which are its five symbols. Some come because he

helps them do things. Bad things, evil things. They think they can fly, but if they do, they fall and die. Because there are Huichols who are able to achieve the ultimate

state as they have promised to Our Father, Our Grandfather, and there are others who never come that far. Because when they come to the bridge and they see the animals down below, those that want to devour them, they are afraid. They turn back. They lack balance. They do not wish to fall. Then they turn back. And those that

do not attain the ultimate state, they do have some power, but not enough. So they come to this tree, and this Tree ofthe Wind deceives them, ensnares them. Because they come, as one says, in a half-crazy state. They walk by themselves, alone in the

barrancas. And this same tree, which is considered their chief, as it was in ancient times, this tree flies to them and bewitches them because they were not able to reach

the ultimate stage. They have not completed their vow to Our Grandfather, Our

Father. So the tree can influence them, bewitch them. Even though they have not kept their promise, this tree does, because what the tree promises, the tree fulfills.

But it is evil. That is how it is. And when that happens, those who are being instructed in these things dance and sing and play a tune [on the violin]. They are like crazy people. They start to go

out and cut toward him because they see the Tree ofthe Wind is coming, the tree

which is a person, a sorcerer, who is going to take them. But this is at night, when he takes them. They follow this tree, which takes the appearance of a person. It is a

man, this tree, and they follow this so-called person. Heis the one who guides them forward. Those who did not fulfill their vows, those who are weak, they go following

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him onto the high cliffs, as though they could fly, and it seems that they will throw themselves over that cliff. From time to time, he, that Tree of the Wind, feeds them the kiéri leaves, which he tells them are like little tortillas, delicious to eat. He keeps

giving them these leaves to eat, and that person, that Tree ofthe Wind, is very happy.

Very elated, because they have become ever more lost. Because he has turned them crazy, mad.

So the chief, himself, that chief of the sorcerers, that Tree of the Wind, he him­ self takes them out and they stay there for five to sixto seven days, eating out there in

the Sierra by themselves. They are all alone, and sometimes, when they climb a cliff

as he calls to them, when they are about to jump down from the great rocks, down

into the awful abyss, into the barrancas, because they think they have wings and can fly, that person takes this thing away from them. He unmakes them, as one says.

But only for a very small while. For two or three minutes. He takes it away, this mad­ ness. Then they reflect and ask, coming to, “Where am I? Oh, where am I? Oh, very far, far away. Our Father, Our Grandfather, look how far! What am I doing way out

here?" But then they get lost again because that tree, the Tree of the Wind, does not leave them alone. That evil Tree ofthe Wind does not let them go, and he sings very happily because he is leading them to and fro, backwards and forwards. He plays

and sings as he did in ancient times, playing the violin, playing it very well, a pretty song, but intense. And so this is why some who do not reach the ultimate stage, who

did not fulfill their vows, become liars, deceivers. Others become evil-looking and others evil-minded, with evil in their hearts, toward everyone, their relatives, their own people, everyone. And that should not be so. Because if you have agreed to

train to be a mara’akáme, you should go through to the ultimate stage. As you have seen with me, the way I am training, that is the right thing. Not everyone who can­

not reach the ultimate stage, who does not travel on that road, becomes a sorcerer. But some do. Some do because it is true that when one has failed to travel the entire road, one becomes vulnerable to the tricks of that tree. Because one wants to have

that power, but it cannot be the power ofthe mara’akáme. That is how it is. That tree uses great care. He sends word with a little arrow from afar, from far

away. It is a little arrow, and the tree must be obeyed. It must be obeyed and one must fulfill one’s duty to it, once one is on that side. But look, many among us might think that this is a friendly thing, good for one, and something that creates pleasant feelings with one’s people, one’s relatives. Something to make one live well and contented, something to see with, something to eat and drink well, to give one good

sleep and tranquility on one’s journeys. But no, this thing is dangerous. One must recognize it for what it truly is. To un­ derstand what is happening. The thing one must recognize is the song. The song he

uses to ensnare them, to make them lose their heads. As ifthey were lost. They begin to go when they hear the first sound. Then comes the second, and they take leave of

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their senses and become as if drunk. Then the third, and after this they see the tree

not as a tree but as a person, the person which is the Tree ofthe Wind, transformed, as he was in ancient times when he was killed by Káuyumari, when he made the dis­

eases. And then the tree begins to invite them, to call, “Come, come, let us go, let us go, to such and such a place.” And he with his violin, and the other one, the Huichol, follows him and says,

“I have been invited, he has invited me," and he says, “Let’s go," and follows him, until they finish with that song. And he says, “There is that Tree ofthe Wind,” and if

it is one who has not reached the ultimate stage, if he could not be a mara’akáme, if he made that vow, he says, “I did not fulfill my promise and now he has driven me mad, in my thoughts he has misled me, he has bewitched me with his thoughts and with his heart. And here I am now. High over the rocks, yelling and shouting." That

is how it is. So that is the story of Kiéri Tewiyari, this Tree of the Wind Person. Sometimes

it is a man and sometimes it is a woman. It is both. It is a man when the one to be

bewitched is a woman. It is a woman when that one is a man. It is only the sorcerers who use the Kiéri. They use it in their evil work, as a

means of defense against the mara’akáme and for everything else. They learn from this Kiéri. They learn bad things in those days. Kiéri begins by telling them this and that and the other things. He does everything he is told. First Kiéri takes them. Then he brings them back. Then they are sorcerers. This Tree ofthe Wind Person, he has

this sap which he expels. People cough and strangle and retch when they get this

sap. It is hot, hot, like very hot chile. Very hot, very bitter. You feel it in your chest. It

is bad, bad. For the mara’akáme who is a true Huichol, there is only the hikuri, the peyote. The mara’akáme does not have anything to do with the kiéri. Peyote is the heart, the heart of the deer, the heart of the maize. It is both, it is the deer and it is maize. It is our life. It has more power. Elder Brother Káuyumari killed Kiéri Tewiyari, that Tree ofthe Wind Person. He fought him with peyote. He could not resist. Only the

mara’akáme can unmake one who has been ensnared by the kiéri. Only the mara’akáme knows. That is how it is, as I have told it to you.

6

Who Are the Huichols, Anyway?

O SAY THERE IS no consensus on Huichol history and origins is to put it mildly. Perhaps because the turi is so small, positions are put forward or opposed with a rancor not often seen in discussions of matters far weightier and of more immediate relevance. One opinion has Huichol

T

culture with its characteristic circular aboriginal temples in place where it is today since A.D. zoo (Fikes et al. in Zingg 2004). But if that were true, why is there not a single Spanish eyewitness account from the early colonial era that mentions temples in the Huichol country? With its steep thatched roof, interior and exterior dimensions many times those of the ordinary dwelling, the tuki, meaning “great house,” is too prominent a feature of the social and natural landscape not to have been noticed and reported on by the several intrepid members of the colonial clergy who ventured into the rugged mountains, mesas, and barrancas ofthe Huichol country in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Spanish re­ ported such structures from the country of the neighboring Coras, calling them by the inverted Nahuatl term callihuey, from huey calli, “great” or “big house.” This term they also introduced to the Huichols when, in the early 1700s, the colonial power finally achieved a measure of civil, mili­ tary, and ecclesiastical control over the Coras, Huichols, and their indig­ enous neighbors in the Sierra Madre Occidental. Since then the Huichols have also used callihuey for tuki when conversing in Spanish. In my opinion, for these and other reasons outlined below, the asser­ tion of a Huichol presence of almost two millennia in the Chapalagana

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Figure 22. The steep-roofed circular tuki, meaning great or big house, of the indig­ enous community of San Andrés Cohamiata, photographed in the spring of 1967.

region of the Sierra Madre Occidental is wishful thinking rather than documentable reality. That I take a very different position on Huichol origins, echoing and expanding on one proposed on many occasions since the late nineteenth century by linguists, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists with no axes to grind, will be obvious from the following pages. Briefly, it is that at least a portion of Huichol ancestry, as well as the Huichol language, may go back to the Chichimec Guachichiles, who became extinct sometime in the colonial era but whose original home before migrating westward was in arid north-central Mexico, including the Huichols’ sacred pey­ ote hunting grounds. If this is the case, the Huichols are the last surviv­ ing remnant of the Teochichimecas (True or Real Chichimecs), whom Sahagún credited with the “discovery” of peyote and its use as a ritual intoxicant. Of course, no one would claim that Huichol nonmaterial cul­ ture is pure Guachichil. Rather, what we take to be “Huichol” is a fabric woven of many strands. Of these, some, perhaps even the majority, are an inheritance from semi-nomadic Chichimec ancestors, while others are contributions from many different peoples and individuals who settled at various times in the Sierra and disappeared into the Huichol gene pool. But there is plenty of evidence, not all of it circumstantial, for the Gua-

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chichil hypothesis. As J. Alden Mason (1936) said long ago, the signposts include above all the powerful emotional attachment to Wirikúta that every year draws small parties of peyoteros to that corner of the Chihuahuan Desert Huichols speak of and honor as the home not only of the sacred cactus but of the ancestors. Why else would Huichols place the “ranchos” of their culture hero, Káuyumari, and of Niwétsika, the divine personification of maize, in the same Wirikúta in which peyote first manifested itself to the ancient ones as deer, and still does so today, if only metaphorically? In other words, we need to listen to the Huichols and take what they say no less seriously than did those who preceded us in Huichol studies. The scholar who made the first and most original contributions to the question of Huichol origins was a French mining engineer and scien­ tific polyglot named Léon Diguet (1899, 1907, 1911, 1992.). It was not, however, until I moved from SUNY-Albany to the University of Pennsyl­ vania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in 1987 that Diguet’s work took on real importance. I joined the museum’s American Section and was assigned an office where the specialists in Maya civilization used to hold sway. For years I warmed the creaky old oaken chair once occu­ pied by the venerable Mayanist Linton Satterthwaite. Behind me was an old-fashioned bookcase that had been either his or J. Alden Mason’s, the longtime head of the American Section, who died in 1967 after a long ill­ ness. I was sure that a dusty folder marked “Diguet” I came across on one of the upper shelves must have been Mason’s because what Diguet had to say about the Huichols would surely have been of interest to him. When I blew off the dust of three or more decades and looked in­ side, I was electrified. In his two American Museum of Natural History monographs Lumholtz concerned himself with Huichol art and symbol­ ism. But here were copies of publications in French by Diguet on other aspects of Huichol culture: “La Sierra de Nayarit et ses indigenes,” from 1899; “Le ‘peyote’ et son usage rituel chez les Indiens de Nayarit,” 1907; and “Idiome Huichol,” a 1911 publication that I realized would have had to be the first scholarly study of that language. It turned out that Diguet was the first student of the Huichols to propose that Guachichil, a north-central Mexican member of the widespread Uto-Aztecan language family, was not, as long thought, extinct but had survived as Huichol. It was this and an old oral tradition recorded by Diguet of a legend­ ary Guachichil shaman-chief called Deer Tail, the same name as that of one of the Huichols’ most important gods, that more than anything else reinforced my impression that Mason was right about Huichols as the

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descendants of the long-vanished Guachichiles, of whom some migrated as far west as the Sierra Madre Occidental not long before the Spanish invasion. Obviously, as valuable sources for speculations about Huichol origins, Mason’s and Diguet’s contributions deserved to be better known and taken seriously. What follows, then, is the product of a lot of reading, remembering, and digesting ideas that first struck Barbara and me on the 1966 peyote hunt and in the days following our return. And they knew the qualities, the essence, ofherbs, ofroots. The so-called peyote was their discovery. These, when they ate peyote, esteemed it above wine or mushrooms. They assembled together somewhere on the desert; they came together; there they danced, they sang all night, all day. And on the morrow, once more they assembled together. They wept; they wept exceedingly. ---- FRAY BERNARDINO DE SAHAGÚN,

Florentine Codex, Book X, p. 173.

Ever since the earliest Spanish days the Huichol have been regarded as connected with the extinct Guachichil far to the east of the present Huichol territory, and the fact that the latter make long journeys into former Guachichil territory to gather peyote that does not grow in their present habitat affords ethnological corroboration of the close relationship. ---- J. ALDEN MASON,

“The Classification ofthe Sonoran Languages” (1936a91).

Introduction No one who has watched Huichols on the peyote hunt greet their sacred cactus in the north-central desert of San Luis Potosi, or bid it farewell, can read Sahagún’s description of a sixteenth-century Teochichimeca peyote ceremony without a sense of having been there. Like these “true,” or “au­ thentic,” Chichimecs, which is the meaning of Teochichimeca, Huichol peyoteros “assemble together somewhere in the desert,” to dance and sing all night, all day. And, in the manner of the Franciscan chronicler’s people of the arid north, these Huichols from the western Sierra Madre assemble again in the morning, to dance and sing some more, and to “weep exceedingly,” offering their tears to the Peyote Mother and the kakauyarite, the ancestor deities who, in company with the divine cac­ tus that is also deer, make their homes in that special corner of San Luis Potosi the Huichols call Wirikúta.

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Nor can one ignore those many signposts on the peyote pilgrimage, and in the peyote desert itself, which point to a reverse migration to what may have been—and probably was—the original homeland of some part of the ancestral Huichols. There is much to suggest that J. Alden Mason was right in taking the peyote hunt as corroboration of an an­ cient connection to the Guachichil of San Luis Potosi. Then there is the intimate relationship they demonstrate with the ecology of the desert and the divinatory-visionary cactus. Perhaps most persuasive is the fact that of all northwest Mexican Indian peoples who used peyote in reli­ gious ceremonies—Cora, Huichol, Tepecan, Tarahumara, and probably others now long gone—the Huichols alone continue, and indeed con­ sider it their sacred obligation, to endure hunger, thirst, salt deprivation, physical exhaustion, and harassment from private land owners, and not infrequently the police, to travel, and even walk, three hundred miles to collect a plant whose psychic effects they could easily duplicate with Solandra, Datura, the seeds of the morning glories Ipomoea violácea and Turbina corymbosa, or Psilocybe mushrooms, all of which grow wild in their present homeland. Last but not least there is their familiarity with the landmarks along the way that bear old Huichol place-names, some of which, transposed into Spanish, even appear on maps or are in common use by local non­ Indians. An example is La Puerta, “Door” or “Entrance.” This is the Spanish toponym for an extremely important landmark on the peyote pilgrimage: a wide, V-shaped pass with sloping sides covered by cactus and other des­ ert growth, on the western edge of Wirikúta, the sacred terminus of the pilgrimage route. The Huichols call this place Va’culii kiitenyi (Wakuri kiteni). Based on Grimes’s analytical dictionary of the Huichol language, published in 1982, a tentative translation of this name is “Doorway of Elder Sister in Her Proper Place” (va [wa] = “in her proper place,” cúlii [uri] = “elder sister,” kiitenyi [ikiten] = “doorway, passage, entry” (Grimes et al. 1982:212, 248). It seems, then, that the European newcom­ ers simply took the old indigenous, that is, Huichol, name and rendered it into Spanish, though probably in ignorance of what exactly this place was supposed to be the entrance to. Some Huichols explain the aboriginal name to mean that here one enters the vagina of the Peyote Mother. Very likely it is the place Lumholtz’s informants were talking about when they told him of a mountain called “Wákuli” near the peyote country. Lumholtz (1902:2:123) assumed that this was the same name as the Huichols’ term for the Tepehuan, perhaps because he did not fully appre­ ciate that in Huichol, a tonal language, a shift in stress from one syllable

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to another, or a doubling of a vowel, can give a word that looks or even sounds the same to the non-native speaker radically different mean­ ings. An obvious example is téwari = “neighbor, mestizo,” and tewari “grandfather.” Like Nahuatl, Huichol has no equivalents for the per­ sonal pronouns he, she, his, or hers, a fact that often causes Huichols to mix up male and female when speaking Spanish, the language in which they and Lumholtz conversed. What we have seen so far gives an idea of the complexity of some of the cumulative evidence that favors the genetic connection—linguistic, historic, folkloric, geographic, ethnobotanic, and ethnographic. At the same time, I hope to make a proper place in Huichol ethnohistory for Léon Diguet, the least known, and least appreciated, of its pioneers.

i. The Huichol Ethnography of Léon Diguet Modern Huichol ethnography is generally thought to have had its start with Carl Lumholtz. Actually, Lumholtz was not alone. In the same de­ cade, the 1890s, an eclectic French scientist named Léon Diguet (18591926) made three extended visits to what was then called the Sierra de Nayarit, which resulted in pioneering contributions to Huichol scholar­ ship. The one with the most lasting value has to do with the contribution of myth to Huichol history. In the typical late-nineteenth-century mode of holistic natural history, Diguet’s fieldwork in Mexico ranged across a whole world of science, “exact” and “soft,” from chemistry and geology to natural environment, physical anthropology, ethnology, ethnohistory, archaeology, botany, zoology, linguistics, economics, and more. He covered so much ground, geographically and across the disciplines, that he deserves a more promi­ nent place than he has been awarded in the history of anthropology and the natural sciences in both France and Mexico (Jáuregui 1989). Born in Le Havre on July 25, 1859, Diguet, who died in Paris on August 31, 1926, arrived in Mexico in 1889 under contract to the House of Rothschild in Paris. He passed the next four years as an industrial chemist, geologist, and metallurgist at the Rothschilds’ El Boléo cop­ per mine, near Santa Rosalía, Baja California, then the most important source of copper in Mexico. During those four years he conducted exten­ sive, and often path-breaking, explorations of Baja California geology, zoology, botany, rock art, archaeology, and ethnology. He went back to France with major scientific collections from the peninsula, then still barely known (as he also did from the Huichol country), and returned to

Who Are the Huichols, Anyway?

M3

Mexico five more times during the following decade on various scientific missions: to Baja California again in 1893-94; to Jalisco and the territory of Tepic in 1896-98; to Puebla and Oaxaca, including the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, as well as southernmost Baja California and the offshore islands (1901-4); and to Michoacán, Jalisco, and Baja California once more in 1911-13 (Jauregui 1989:7-8). Between 1895 and 1896 he spent nine months in Huichol and Cora territory (Jauregui 1989:26), returning twice more to the Huichols, in 1898 and in 1905, when he also visited the Tepehuanos. Diguet had re­ spect for mythology and its possibilities for occasionally establishing history, especially if there was supporting evidence. Thus he assumed that when Huichol shamans sang about a legendary culture hero named “Majakuagy,” meaning Deer Tail, who led his followers from the home­ land of the Guachichil in the peyote desert of San Luis Potosi into the Sierra Madre Occidental, they were talking history. Students of Huichol culture and religion will recognize this legendary culture hero as the proto­ type for the ancestor deity the Huichols call Tatutsi Máxa Kwaxi. If Diguet was right, as I believe he was, it helps explain a great many things, not least why some Huichols credit Máxa Kwaxi, Great­ grandfather Deer Tail, with having revived the traditional hunt for peyote when he led the divine ancestors to Wirikúta, whereas other versions of the peyote tradition, including Ramón’s, award that honor to Tatewari, the old fire god and patron of shamans (see Furst 1972 and Chapter 3 of this volume; Myerhoff 1974). But even in those versions of the mythic charter for the pilgrimage in which it was Tatewari who prescribed the first peyote hunt as a cure for ills afflicting the divine ancestors, Máxa Kwaxi is Tatewari’s chief assistant and second in responsibility for the safety of the peyoteros and the success of the sacred enterprise. Either way, in the modern reenactment of the primordial pilgrimage, Great­ grandfather Deer Tail is right there in the lead. In addition he is often identified as “the same” as Káuyumari. As both geologist and geographer, Diguet was first of all concerned with the environment: climate, the lay of the land, vegetation, natural resources, mountains and barrancas. But it is clear from the amount of space he devoted to the Huichols and their Cora neighbors that what re­ ally caught his interest was the indigenous peoples. In 1899 he published “Contribution á l’étude ethnographique des races primitives du Mexique: La Sierra de Nayarit et sus indigenes,” a lengthy essay that included numerous ethnographic observations on the Coras and the Huichols but with considerably more attention paid to the latter. Diguet was obviously

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Peyote Dreams

taken with the Huichols and the remarkable degree to which they had managed to preserve their indigenous religious beliefs and rituals, in con­ trast to the Coras, who seemed more acculturated and Catholicized. He followed this with two more publications on Huichol topics alone, “Le ‘peyote’ et son usage rituel chez les Indiens du Nayarit” (1907:21-29) and “Idiome Huichol: Contribution a l’étude des langues mexicaines” (1911:23-54). The latter was the first scholarly attempt to dissect and comprehend the structure of the Huichol language. Both appeared in the Journal de la Société des Américanistes de Paris. As the more prolific writer, Lumholtz was destined to become far bet­ ter known as a Huichol scholar than Diguet, especially among Englishspeaking readers. Lumholtz’s first American Museum monograph, on symbolic art, appeared in 1900, followed by a second, in 1904, on the “decorative” arts. Between these two scholarly works came Unknown Mexico (1902), a popular and widely read account in two volumes of five years of travel and exploration among the Tarahumara, Tepehuan, Cora, Huichol, and other indigenous peoples of northwestern Mexico. Whereas Lumholtz, a Norwegian, wrote in English, Diguet published in French, which is not the first language for Mesoamericanists. Of the forty or so titles in Diguet’s bibliography on Mexican topics, prior to 1992, when at long last a collection of Diguet’s works was published in Span­ ish translation in Mexico under the editorship of Jesús Jáuregui and Jean Meyer, only two appeared in Spanish, one on the ethnobotany, technol­ ogy, and economics of maguey cultivation in Tequila, Jalisco (1902), the other a monograph on Baja California (1911). Whether because of language difficulties or bias or some other rea­ son, the fact is that in the United States not even the most interesting and challenging of Diguet’s ideas about the Huichols have received the attention they clearly deserve. Except for Mason, who never doubted the Huichol-Guachichil connection, where Diguet’s writings are mentioned at all they have more often than not been so garbled by mistranslation and the omission of crucial details as to bear little resemblance to the original. Of such distortions in the Huichol literature, Fikes (1985) is a primary example. Myopia, bias, or language difficulties, Diguet deserves better, and so do the Huichols. This is not to say that Diguet could not also be wrong, and some­ times very wrong indeed. But that should hardly surprise us. Who among us is not sometimes wrong—and with far less excuse than a pioneer like Diguet? In 1899 there was not even Lumholtz’s first monograph against which to check some of his own observations, and Unknown Mexico was

Who Are the Huichols, Anyway?

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still three years off. Even if the conclusions Diguet drew from measure­ ments and observations about who and what went into the origins of the modern Huichol population had more than a little validity, there is obviously more to Huichol ancestry than just a blending of an older brachycephalic population and a more recent dolichocephalic admixture out of a northern desert homeland. A great many different groups and individuals, including Indians of diverse cultural affiliations, Africans fleeing slavery, and probably a few Filipinos from the Manila Galleons, sought refuge in the rugged mountains of the Sierra Madre Occidental. Many settled in and around the Huichol country in the wake of the blood­ letting and brutality that marked the entrada of the unspeakable Ñuño de Guzman into the western provinces in 1530, the defeat of the pan-Indian rebellion of 1540-41 known as the Mixton War, the Tepehuan rebellion of 1616, and innumerable other failed uprisings, large and small, against colonial oppression and exploitation. The areas through which Ñuño de Guzman’s army rampaged, including a portion of the Huichols’ own ter­ ritory just north of the Rio Grande de Santiago (Rio Lerma) in Nayarit, suffered enormous demographic calamities. Thousands of Indians were killed, thousands more died of disease and starvation, thousands were deported from their highland homes to sicken and die in the hot and humid coastal lowlands. According to historian Peter Gerhard (1982:49), when the Span­ ish arrived, the tierra caliente had an indigenous population of perhaps 320,000; thirty years later fewer than 20,000 were left. In the aftermath of the Mixton rebellion in 1541, thousands of Indians in the highlands above Guadalajara, most of them Cazcan, were slaughtered and equal numbers starved to death or were carried off in chains to work in the silver mines. A few survivors fled into the safety of the mountains, while their wives and children were enslaved on Spanish farms and haciendas. A plague in 1545-48 killed off more than half the surviving highland Indians. In the west, in the same tragic decade, many of the mountain­ dwelling Tecoxquines and Huichols were forced to move to the coastal plain, while others retreated to the more inaccessible parts of the Sierra (Gerhard 1982:49). An early colonial mention of a forced resettlement of sierra Huichols to the coast is interesting because to this day Huichol shamans and their followers travel west on pilgrimages to San Blas, on the Nayarit coast. The overt purpose is to make offerings, including fresh water from sacred springs in the interior, to Tatéi Haramara, the divine personification of the western (Pacific) ocean, who sends rain clouds to the Huichol country.

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In return the Huichols take sea water, shells, sand, bits of seaweed, and feathers shed by gulls and other shorebirds to give to the Mothers of the terrestrial and celestial waters. The place where the Sun goes down, or dies, metaphorically, is also the direction in which the souls of the dead travel to the underworld, whose entrance Huichols locate near San Blas. Some Huichols explain heavy rains accompanied by thunder and light­ ning as the clash of the clouds—that is, the rain serpents—that come from the west with those that personify the rain goddesses of the other cardinal directions, especially the east. Thus, during these turbulent times of intensive culture contact and mixing just before and just after the Spanish invasion, there must have been a constant process of syncretism, during which Huichol, or protoHuichol, intellectual culture, including the inventory of ceremonial ob­ jects, became enriched by accretions from non-Huichol sources, even as these, in turn, assimilated elements of a symbol complex that by the very nature of its core, the peyote cactus, could, by any reasonable measure, only have evolved not in the western Sierra, where the sacred cactus does not grow, but in the distant desert to which it is native. And surely, not­ withstanding their well-known aversion to mating with non-Huichols, some of these new arrivals in their midst made their contribution also to the Huichol gene pool. Both genetically and culturally, then, the Huichols as Diguet saw them in the 1890s were considerably more than just a mix­ ture of an established older population and the carriers of a peyote tradi­ tion from San Luis Potosi. Finally, modern studies of Uto-Aztecan languages and of Huichol have taken us considerably beyond Diguet’s somewhat primitive, idio­ syncratic, and often inconsistent orthography. Yet there is not complete agreement even now on how to write Huichol words so that their pro­ nunciation is reasonably clear to the nonlinguist reader, the more so in that pronunciation varies from one part of Huichol country to another. If Diguet’s orthography seems old-fashioned now, and sometimes down­ right mystifying, it must be remembered that he was writing in French, for French-speaking readers, so that French pronunciation also influenced how he chose to set down Huichol words. Certainly no modern linguist would render the Huichol word for “Deer Tail” as “Majakuagy.” “Máxa Kwaxi,” with the x pronounced, as it would be in Nahuatl, like a soft sh, comes closer. But these are relatively minor quibbles. It is surely past time to ac­ knowledge that, however they may suffer when compared with those of Lumholtz, there is much of lasting value in this pioneering French

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scholar’s observations on religion, social organization, ritual, language, sacred places and their aboriginal names, foodstuffs, the peyote pilgrim­ age, and sacred and domestic architecture. Speaking of sacred architecture, specifically the Huichol temple, called tuki, “big house,” it is to Diguet that we owe one clue to the origin of the rounded shape of the indigenous Huichol temple. Since the turn of the century, Huichol houses have all become rectangular, but in Santa Catarina in the 1890s Diguet still found dwellings that were of the same round form as the tuki. Thus we see among the Huichols the same repli­ cation in sacred architecture of an older domestic architecture as in the Southwest, where the circular ancestral Pueblo kiva, of which the Great Kivas of Chaco Canyon are the most spectacular examples, evolved from the semi-subterranean pithouse (Nabokov and Easton 1989:357). Just as the kiva was the old domestic dwelling writ large, so, then, was the Huichol temple, both house and sacred space being models of the cos­ mos, in whose exterior and interior spatial arrangements not only human beings but their ancestors and deities had to feel at home. Very much the same evolutionary phenomenon from domestic to sacred architecture, from round nuclear family hut to the ceremonial roundhouse, even long after domestic architecture had shifted to right angles, can of course be observed in many other places. What Peter J. Wilson (1988:66) says about architectural evolution in the rest of the “domesticated world” applies as well to the Huichols:

The house, and often the village, serves not simply as a dwelling, shelter, and spatial arrangement of activities but also as a central instrument through which people record and express their thoughts. Furthermore, it, or its derivatives, embodies the spiritual beliefs of people and contributes the setting, and sometimes the text, of their religious lives.... It makes its own contribution to expressive culture and has evolved from the multipurpose dwelling to the exclusive sacredness ofthe temple, [emphasis added]

Also not to be overlooked is that circular ceremonial buildings are a hallmark of Huastec architecture. San Luis Potosi itself is full of Huastec sites with round ceremonial complexes and circular buildings (Meade 1942.; Cabrera Ipiña 1991). Remains of a round Huastec temple were identified not long ago even in Real de Catorce, close to the Huichol peyote gathering grounds (Patricio Dávila Cabrera and Diana Zaragoza Ocaña, personal communication 1992). The San Luis Potosi archaeologist

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Joaquín Meade (1953) has discussed Huastec relations with areas to the west, and another Mexican archaeologist, José Corona Núñez (1953), has even proposed a Huastec penetration as far as Nayarit, with the cir­ cular temple at Ixtlán del Rio as one striking example of Huastec, or Huastec-influenced, ceremonial architecture in early Postclassic north­ western Mexico. Quite apart from the fact that sacred architecture reflects and repli­ cates a people’s conception of the cosmos, the above should effectively dispose of assertions by Weigand (1979, 1981) that the Huichols “bor­ rowed” the circular shape of their temples from archaeological ruins in the Bolados Valley. The same opinion, again unsupported by any evidence whatever, was made more recently by Fikes and the Weigands (in Zingg 2OO4:xv), except that this time the circular Huichol temples “are ulti­ mately derived from circular temples belonging to the ‘Teuchitlán Tradi­ tion,’ which focused upon the highlands of western Jalisco in the Volcan de Tequila region.” Not to mince words, this, too, is wishful thinking or pure fantasy, as is their assertion on the same page that “Huichol cul­ ture, with its distinctive circular temples maintained by ranchos widely dispersed around them, has existed in the Chapalagana River basin since about A.D. 200.” Neither archaeology nor early Spanish colonial ac­ counts support this statement.

2. The Historic Great-grandfather Deer Tail In addition to language, Diguet’s premier contribution to Huichol schol­ arship lay in the realm of myth and history. In the late nineteenth century astral interpretations of mythology were the fashion of the day. It is thus very much to his credit that when he heard the chant of “Majakuagy,” he assumed, correctly, that it was not phenomena in the night sky the Huichols were singing about but a piece of their history, framed in the language and imagery of myth and magic: the story of a real-life charismatic Guachichil shaman-chief named Deer Tail, idealized, to be sure, as a great civilizer and religious reformer. In a chant recorded and deciphered by Diguet, this great man had led a band of his followers on a five-year-long migration from San Luis Potosi into the Sierra Madre Oc­ cidental, along a route traced (insofar as this is still possible) ever since by Huichol peyoteros. After overcoming the resistance of the people he found there, he introduced to them a new religion that had as its sacred focus peyote, a powerful little psychoactive cactus native not to the Sierra Madre Occidental but to distant Wirikúta.

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Even granting that portions may be poetic imagination, its impor­ tance for the ethnohistory of the area is beyond question. And there is the additional tasty morsel for the historian of religion: the transmogrifica­ tion, in the not-so-distant past, of a real-life shaman-chief into a divine culture hero and major deity. As such, beyond his place in the topography of the sacred as a great ancestral shaman, patron of the ceremonial deer hunt, religious innovator, legislator, unifier, and successful proselytizer of his own traditional peyote-centered religion, he functions as one of the leading ancestor deities of the Huichols in the so-called dry-season round—that is, the desert and peyote-oriented ceremonial cycle. More­ over, in company with the old fire god Tatewari, patron of shamans; the aged creator and fertility goddess Nakawé; and Tayaupá, Our Father (Sun), or Werikúa, Eagle, the ritual term for the Sun god, he is one of the four most important members of the crowded pantheon of Huichol nature and ancestor deities.

3. Anthropometry and Myth I begin with Diguet’s foray into Huichol physical anthropology (prob­ lems and all) and the fit he perceived between it and the legend of Majakuagy/Máxa Kwaxi. It is unfortunate that, except for a few fragments, the legend appears to have been largely forgotten in the course of this century. I say “appears” because its loss is possibly more apparent than real. Perhaps it is only a matter of the right questions not having been asked of the “right” Huichols, that is, those who could be expected to have preserved a memory of such matters. Fortunately, much potentially helpful ethnological and ethnohistoric information has been accumu­ lated by historians and other scholars since Diguet’s time against which to consider the Majakuagy legend and some of Diguet’s ethnohistorical and linguistic assumptions. From their physical appearance and his own measurements, Diguet wrote in 1899, d is evident that the Huichols consist of at least two dif­ ferent ancestral populations. Both men and women, he observed, exhibit the distinctive physical traits of one of these two parental groups, which must have come together and merged at some unknown time in the past. Diguet assumed this to have occurred sometime before the Spanish inva­ sion; more recent writers, notably Mason, the premier student of the Tepecan neighbors of the Huichols in the nearby Bolaños Valley, placed the migration westward of the Guachichil component of Huichol an­ cestry at about, or just after, the Spanish Conquest. One recent German

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ethnographer of the Huichols, Christina Hell (1988), has even suggested that “Majakuagy” of legend might have been a leader of one of the early pan-Indian uprisings against the Spanish, such as the Mixtoh War and the Tepehuan Rebellion. Diguet defined one of these two recognizable physical types as rela­ tively short of stature, heavy-set, with rather large feet and hands, and markedly brachycephalic cranial measurements. The second, which he assumed to be descended from the Guachichil, was taller, long-headed, with more delicate features and extremities. On the basis of a compari­ son of two brachycephalic skulls from an old Huichol burial cave in the barranca of Rhaimota with skulls found decades earlier in burials in San Andrés del Teul, that is, in Tepecan country, and studied by French scien­ tists at the time of the short-lived reign of Maximilian, he suggested that the brachycephalic population was the earlier and more “primitive” one, sharing characteristics with the Chichimec “indios bárbaros, ” who for­ merly inhabited the fringes of the Sierra and who were known as Teules or Teules-Chichimecos, names under which they appear on Orozco y Berra’s ethnographic and linguistic map of 1864 (Diguet 1992:122-123). In that connection, it is interesting that the burials excavated by Ales Hrdlicka at Totoáte, in the Bolaños Valley, contained individuals belong­ ing to a “subbrachy- to brachycephalic people of not very large stature” (Hrdlicka 1903:395). Hrdlicka also noted that the Tepecanos he saw in the village of Azqueltán “are the shortest in stature and the most brachy­ cephalic of all the Mexican tribes north of latitude 21” (1903:415). Could the people on whom “Majakuagy” and his Guachichil migrants imposed themselves, to whom they introduced their own peyote traditions when they settled in the Sierra, and with whom the ancestral Huichols came to exchange and share certain cultural traits in the process of accultura­ tion, have been Tepehuan/Tepecano? That possibility is also suggested by a tradition of the Tepecanos themselves, first reported by Hrdlicka (1903) and expanded by Mason (1918:344-345), that a part of the coun­ try where the Huichols now live was originally theirs, and by an early missionary’s query to his superiors whether the language of instruction to the Indians in the mountains had still to be Tepecano or some other local tongue, or could now be “Mexican,” that is, Nahuatl. In Mason’s view, the fact that parts of the Huichol country were originally Tepecan was “further evidence for the proposition, already suggested by Orozco y Berra, that the Huicholes are the descendants of the former Guachichiles, of the state of San Luis Potosi, who retreated to their present homeland shortly after the Conquest.”

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To recapitulate: in Diguet’s reconstruction, the original inhabitants of the Sierra were short-statured and brachycephalic, meaning broad­ headed, whereas the Guachichil migrants from the peyote country in San Luis Potosi were both taller in stature and dolichocephalic, that is, long­ headed. So there is at least an implication that if not throughout what is now Huichol country, then at least the region around Santa Catarina was originally settled by the Southern Tepehuan/Tepecan and that this branch of the Piman-speaking Teules-Chichimecos supported itself by hunting, fishing, and foraging, not horticulture, which, according to this legend, was introduced by Majakuagy. Perhaps so. But whereas in Diguet’s day physical anthropologists put a great deal of trust in anthropometry, especially head form, since the early 1960s reliance on head shape or physical type to differentiate populations or draw evolutionary conclusions has fortunately gone out of style. For one thing, head shape has long been known to be elastic, re­ sponding to factors ranging from nutrition to environment, an argument advanced a century and a half ago by the German Theodor Waitz (185872). That makes it a dubious marker indeed for evolutionary purposes. More to the point, even if such measurements have some limited utility, not much can be made of them in the absence of blood group markers, a modern technique not available to Diguet and his contemporaries. In his fascination with cranial measurements and body shape, then, Diguet was only following scientific fashion that was the near-universal dogma of the time. But he was too eclectic a scientist, and too curious, to rely on overt physical characteristics and his calipers alone to draw conclusions about Huichol ancestry. What struck him was the apparent overlap between physical characters he had personally observed, the measurements of the pair of skulls from old burials, and a living tradition among the Huichols of Santa Catarina about their own historical past. Here, he thought, was a case where physical anthropology not only coincided with mythic his­ tory but could be used to validate it. The legend has several versions that differ in minor detail, but basi­ cally the story went like this: The ancestral Huichols were still living in the peyote country in San Luis Potosi when a man who supposedly was white of skin and who had the personal name of Majakuagy, meaning Deer Tail, was sent to earth from the heavens by the supreme sky god and creator, called Tahuehuiakame, with instructions that he teach the people new ways and a new and more humane code of laws. “I, engendered by no one,” so goes the opening passage of Diguet’s translation of an invocation to

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the deified culture hero, “I the son of Tahuehuiakame, I Majakuagy, who was sent by Tahuehuiakame to govern in this world.” Majakuagy con­ vinced many people of his message, but he also made many enemies, which is why he decided to leave in search of a new home that would be secure from enemies so that he and his followers might live in peace (Diguet 1899:571-574, 1992:110-112). But when he assembled his people at a place called Rhaitomuany, which Diguet placed between Real de Catorce and the city of San Luis Potosi, they were attacked. The victors smashed the gourds in which Deer Tail’s people had planned to carry the water they needed on the journey and scattered the broken pieces over the desert. They also broke everything else the people required to sustain themselves on their migra­ tion. Seeing this, the gods were moved by pity and transformed the bro­ ken fragments into plants with magical properties to stave off hunger and thirst. This enabled the travelers to face and overcome the obstacles that lay in their path, without concerning themselves with the necessities of life (Diguet 1992:145, 155). The miraculous life-saving plant was peyote, which does indeed sup­ press hunger and restore energy and for which Huichols go to their be­ loved Wirikúta. Diguet (1992:156) gives the meaning of this place-name as “In back of the Goddess of Peyote.” One of the divine Mothers {tatéima, sing, tatéi, lit. “Our Aunt”), she is also referred to as Elder Sister, thus recalling our earlier discussion of the Huichol name for the V-shaped entry into the sacred land of the peyote. Collectively, the male and fe­ male ancestor and nature deities are known as the kakauyarite. This is apparently an archaic term for which we have no precise translation, although the linguist Joseph E. Grimes (personal communication 1966) suggests “our sandal straps” as a literal translation, perhaps as metaphor for “those who connect us physically to the earth.” The ancestor deities in general manifest themselves in the phenomena of the weather and the natural environment—clouds, fire, water, sun, wind, deer, and so forth; the kakauyarite, in particular, are embodied in the sacred mountains, hills, and rocks in the peyote country. The sacred peyote itself, notwith­ standing its qualitative equation with a male deer, especially in the con­ text of the peyote hunt, is conceived as female. The legend is not specific about the identity of the enemies of Maja­ kuagy. They might have been other Guachichiles, but it is also possible that they were the same Huastecs whose archaeological remains are found over much of San Luis Potosi and who also left evidence of their former presence in Wirikúta/Real de Catorce in the form of a sizable

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circular ceremonial structure that was identified by archaeologists not long ago close to where the Huichols go to gather peyote (Patricio Dávila Cabrera and Diana Zaragoza Ocaña, personal communication 1992). Mexican colleagues in San Luis Potosi tell me they see certain similari­ ties in Huichol and Huastec religion, and it is certainly not inconceivable that the Guachichiles who once inhabited this area had assimilated traits from their Huastec neighbors by the time they began their own westward movement into Zacatecas and northern Jalisco. They could also have been Méxicas, the proper name for what are generally called Aztecs, who are known to have made incursions from their central Mexican capital into the northern desert country. It took the legendary Majakuagy and his Guachichiles five years of walking and many hardships to reach their goal. Diguet says that the exact route they followed is now almost impossible to reconstruct but that the Huichols remember and recite by name each of the places at which the ancestors stopped and rested along the way. He obtained a list of fifteen of these places, together with the meaning of their Huichol names (Diguet 1992:155-156). These are the sacred places that Huichol peyote pilgrims acknowl­ edge with prayers and offerings, either directly or at a distance. Once in the safety of the Sierra, the travelers found people already living there, people whose initial resistance they had to overcome. But the culture they brought proved superior; they knew the arts and how to grow food rather than merely collect it; and in time Majakuagy succeeded in his civilizing mission. He imposed a new code of laws and a pantheistic religion with a cult to the Sun and Fire, with thirty-seven principal deities that had charge of the actions and destinies of human beings, and, of course, the peyote ceremonies, with their annual reenactment of the original migra­ tion. The Sun was called “Our Father,” Fire “Our Grandfather, ” as they are to this day. As though to anticipate his own eventual transmogrifica­ tion into a deity, the legend also mentioned a god called Tatutsi, Great­ grandfather. This is the ritual kinship term by which Huichols commonly address Máxa Kwaxi (Majakuagy), although Tamatsi (Elder Brother), the kin term for the culture hero Káuyumari, is also used. In time Maja­ kuagy unified the Huichols, Coras, and Tepehuanes/Tepecanos into what Diguet understood to have been a “theocratic state,” which controlled a territory much larger than it is today. When Majakuagy died, his devout followers made him into a god and placed his remains in a burial cave, tied in seated position as though alive in a chair. The location of Majakuagy’s cave was said to have been

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made known to only a handful of Indians. But elsewhere Diguet notes that one of the most sacred cave shrines in Teakáta, in the territory of Santa Catarina, is dedicated specifically to Great-grandfather Deer Tail. (Lumholtz visited Teakáta and its numerous shrines, and so, ten years later, did Konrad Theodor Preuss during his stay among the Huichols in 1906. Preuss also was shown the sacred cave of Máxa Kwaxi. In that connection, it is interesting that a Huichol companion of T. J. Knab dur­ ing a visit to Teakáta in the 1970s told him that one of the hidden caves in this, the most sacred locale in the Huichol territory, was where long ago the antepasados [“those who came before”] put the mortal remains of Tatutsi Máxa Kwaxi [T. J. Knab, personal communication 1980.]) But Diguet also heard that only fifteen years before his own visit to Santa Catarina, Máxa Kwaxi’s funerary bundle was seen in a cave in a place called Tzinata, near Pochotita, a Huichol community on the banks of the Rio Chapalagana. Following the death of Majakuagy, so concludes the legend recorded by Diguet, his confederation broke apart and was soon rent by civil war, with Huichols, Coras, and Tepehuanes continually fighting one another for supremacy. This rivalry was never resolved and only came to an end with the arrival of what were said to be Nahua-speakers, who took con­ trol of the area and established a temple and sacrificial altar at El Teul (Diguet 1992:111-112). That the Deer Tail legend owes a few details to both central Mexi­ can mythology and the New Testament is self-evident. Most likely they derive from the same source: the semi-Christianized Nahuatl-speaking Tlaxcalans and other central Mexicans whom the Spanish transplanted to western Mexico to guard against incursions by the so-called indios bárbaros. Majakuagy as a white man recalls the half-historical, halfmythical Qe Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl (1 Reed Prince Quetzalcoatl) of Tula, the Toltec-Aztec culture hero. He, too, is described as a white man who descended from the heavens to introduce the arts and agriculture, a new code of laws, and a more humane religion, only to be forced into exile by his enemies through the machinations of his rival, the sorcerer Tezcatlipoca. The Majakuagy myth also reminded the Mexican historian Wigberto Jiménez Moreno (1943) of Mixcóatl (Cloud Serpent, a Nahuatl metaphor for the Milky Way), the legendary founder of the Toltec empire and celestial father of Quetzalcoatl. True, the historic Mixcóatl (assuming there was such a personage) dates back to the tenth century A.D. But there is no reason why frag­ ments of an older tradition should not have merged with a later one. Cen-

Unlike other species of cactus that are more widespread, peyote is limited to the north-central Mexican desert and the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where these were photographed.

Ramón Medina Silva at work on a yarn painting, summer 1966

Shaman’s basket, called takwátsi, overflowing with prayer arrows and other power objects. Huichols also identify this artifact with the culture hero, the Deer Person Káuyumari. Summer 1965.

A 1995 yarn painting by Chávelo Gonzales, a relative of Lupe’s by marriage, of the magi­ cal transformation into peyote of the sacred deer as it lies dying in Wirikúta from the ancestors’ arrows. To honor Ramon’s memory, this yarn painter continues to work in the style Ramón pioneered in the 1960s. Collection of the author.

Votive gourd, called xukúri, with beadwork decoration, collected in 1935 by Robert M. Zingg in the Huichol commu­ nity of Tuxpan de Bolanos and now in the ethnographic collections of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropol­ ogy, #38-23-119.

These decorated votive gourds were sent to the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City as prayer offerings to the colossal basalt statue of Coatlicue (Serpent Skirt), after a Huichol shaman dreamed that the Aztec mother goddess was one of their own ancient rain goddesses. The statue, now standing in the museum’s Aztec hall, is a masterpiece of Aztec monumental religious art that the Spanish invaders tried but failed to destroy.

Ramon, in a dramatic demonstration of his equilibrium, personifies the uitsi bird that helped the ancestors down a steep waterfall on the first peyote pilgrimage (cf. pp. 35ff).

With the arrows still in place, Ramón excavates the first “deer-peyotes” and cuts them into equal slices for a communion-like meal he shares with his companions.

While harvesting peyote, Huichols practice conservation and ensure future growth of the sacred cactus by leaving the tip of the root (its “bones”) undisturbed in the ground.

A yarn painting by Ramón of his vision of the peyoteros encircling the first peyote—the meta­ phorical Deer— after it was “slain” by their arrows.

The Santo Niño de Atocha, a saint born and bred in Mexico, in a nineteenth­ century folk painting on tin (see pp. 276 ff)

Lupe in her seventies with her personal tepu (related to teponaztli, the name of the Aztec horizontal slit gong). The hole in front is the drum’s ‘‘mouth.” The burnt-in decoration of the sacred deer that is peyote and of the Sun god is her own.

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tral Mexican concepts might also have merged with Christian teachings in the name Tahuehuikame for a supreme deity. This, according to Knab (personal communication 1993), becomes a direct analog for one of the names of Tezcatlipoca: Titlahuan, “Maker of What Is Made.” And there is surely something of Jesucristo in Majakuagy’s proclaiming himself the magically engendered son of the supreme deity. Nevertheless, the basic tale reveals itself as an indigenous historical tradition framed in and em­ bellished by the imagery of magic, myth, and symbolism.

4. Huichols and Guachichiles “Doctor Hrdlicka... states that the most intelligent man among the Huichol told him that Guachichil was the ancient name ofhis tribe." ---- CYRUS THOMAS,

Indian Languages of Mexico and Central America (1911:41)

To put the Majakuagy story in ethnohistorical perspective, we need to look at what is documented about Guachichil penetration into areas not originally their homeland, that is, as far west as Zacatecas and northern Jalisco. Driving north into Zacatecas in search of silver mines, a Span­ ish party led by Pedro Almindez Chirinos, who previously, during the exceptionally brutal Spanish invasion of western Mexico in 1530, had taken part of the army and some of its central Mexican and Tarascan In­ dian retainers directly across Huichol country to meet up with Ñuño de Guzmán’s men at Tepic, encountered a band of five hundred “Guachiles” (Guachichiles) living in circular huts in an oak forest near the present city of Zacatecas. There was no clash of arms, and the Chichimec Guachich­ iles fed the hungry Spanish on acorn meal (Gerhard 1982). But there are other accounts, as well, of a Guachichil presence in places immediately adjacent to or in close contact with people more or less certainly iden­ tifiable as ancestral Huichols. Citing Orozco y Berra, Cyrus Thomas (1911:40-41) included in Guachichil territory at the time of European contact parts of San Euis Potosi, Nuevo León, Coahuila, and Zacatecas, and notes that Orozco y Berra also “appears to bring together the Cazcan and the Guachichile as pertaining to the ‘Teules Chichimecas.’” Missionary activity in the Nayarit sierra began in 1580, with the first description of the Indian peoples of this mountainous region, that of Commissioner-General Fray Alonso Ponce, dating to 1587 (Sauer 1934). Ponce’s report “is notable for its systematic observations on Indian lan­ guages and customs” (Sauer 1934:7). In the heart of the mountains he

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found the province of “Vaynamota” (Huaynamota), which became his point of reference. North of it was the province of Vazamota; to its south were about six hundred Zayabeco bowmen, allegedly cannibalistic; to the southwest were the Cora, who shared a language with natives on the coastal plain; in the eastern mountains was the sterile country of the Uzare (one of several names applied to Huichols, others being Alica, Usulique, Guisare, Vitzurita, and Guisol); and to the west “he found the great province of Tepeque [Tepic], who favored the Chichimeca [i.e., wild] Guachichil and joined them on plundering expeditions” (Sauer 1934:7). “In this, the earliest account,” writes Sauer (1934:14), Ponce “notes their connection with the Guachichil.” Sauer (1934:9) also mentions that in seventeenth-century documents “relating to the Guachichil there is men­ tion of an uprising of Tepecano and Usilique in the mountains near San Andrés del Teul and Colotlán, Santoscoy considering, I think correctly, the latter people to have been Huichol.” In his 1899 essay Diguet identified the Huichol language with that of the Guachichil, or directly descended from it. Linkage, or identity, between Huichol and Guachichil has ever since been generally accepted as a given or at least a possibility by most linguists, as indeed it was earlier by Orozco y Berra. So, for example, in his classic work Indian Languages of Mexico and Central America (1911:22-23), Thomas wrote of the Huichols and their language that, though closely related to and formerly classified as a division of Cora, “recent investigations, chiefly by Hrdlicka, have led to the conclusion that they are more closely related to the Guachichile than to the Cora, and are apparently an offshoot of that tribe.” Both Sauer (1934) and Kroeber (1934) took Huichol and Guachi­ chil to be either the same or closely connected, the latter writing (p. 8) that “Huichol-Guachichil” might, with further knowledge, “easily prove a connecting link between Sonoran and Nahuan.” In the more recent literature on Mesoamerican and Utonahuan (Uto-Aztecan) languages Huichol is also often linked with Guachichil. So, for example, Guachichil is followed by the notation “a variety of Huichol?” in Lyle Campbell’s list of forty-eight extinct or near-extinct Uto-Aztecan languages of Mex­ ico (Campbell 1979:911). Diguet expanded his Huichol-Guachichil hypothesis in an essay pub­ lished in 1911, a work that also provided more details than the earlier article on the prayer chant dedicated to Majakuagy/Máxa Kwaxi. The Huichol language, he writes, is used today by a small indigenous popula­ tion in the Sierra de Nayarit. There are at most five thousand speakers

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today, but according to native tradition the population was far more extensive before the Spanish Conquest. This, he continues, is the lan­ guage spoken by numerous nomadic and primitive groups known as the Guachichiles, who once occupied a major portion of the immense terri­ tory north of the central Mexican plateau, a region that now includes the states of San Luis Potosi and parts of Zacatecas and Coahuila. The Gua­ chichiles, who are considered the ancestors of the present-day Huichol Indians, were gradually exterminated during the time of Spanish coloni­ zation. Their language has survived and comes down to us today thanks to a small fraction of the tribe that, before the conquest, established itself in the Sierra de Nayarit under the leadership of a powerful chief called Majakuagy, who founded an independent sedentary state along with the Cora and Tepehuan tribes. In the early documents, Diguet writes, the Huichols are mentioned under various names, but in more recent works, such as those of Mota Padilla (1855 [1742]) and Frejes (1969 [1838]), “the terms Huichol, Guichol, and Guachichil are used interchangeably,” with Guachichil being occasionally “reserved exclusively for the Huichols.” As noted earlier, in the account of Almindez Chirinos’s search for silver mines in Zacatecas and Guachichil territory in the 1530s, the Guachichil are called Guachila by their Zacateco neighbors. Guachil sounds even more like Huichol than does Guachichil, a Nahuatl name said to mean “red heads,” from quaitl - “head,” chichiltic = “red,” for their custom of painting their faces red, Diguet noting that this same custom was still practiced by the Huichols (as, indeed, it is today). Yet he also notes that “according to the more erudite Huichols, the term Guachichil, sometimes spelled Huachichil by different authors, could only be a corruption of Wicharika,” the name by which the Huichols call themselves. The meaning of Wixarika, or, as it is also spelled in the early colonial accounts, Vitsarika or Vitsurika, is uncertain. Diguet was told it meant “cultivators,” to distinguish Majakuagy’s band from those Guachichiles relying exclusively on hunting and foraging. Lumholtz translated it as “doctors,” for the large number of shamans among the Huichols, and a recent Mexican writer rendered it as “people from the region of spiny plants” (Schneider 1993), though on what authority is not known. However the name came to be, the Guachichiles were Chichimecs, prime candidates for the “Teochichimeca,” the “True” or “Real” Chi­ chimecs whom Sahagún’s Nahuatl-speaking informants credited with the discovery of the intoxicating peyote cactus. For Jiménez Moreno (1943:129), Teochichimeca meant essentially those Chichimec peoples

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who had best preserved the characteristic nomadic lifeway of northern desert hunter-gatherers, among them the Guamares, Guachichiles, and "some of the peoples of southern Zacatecas and the Sierra de Nayarit.” It is conceivable, however, that at least some of these groups were no­ madic only in the sense of adjusting their movements to the times when the major wild plants on which they relied as staples were ready to be harvested. The vast forest of tree-sized tuna, or prickly pear, cactus in San Luis Potosi known as El Tunal, which also sheltered a variety of game, including deer, peccary, rabbit, prairie dog, and other rodents, and which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries served Guachichil Chichimec warriors preying on Spanish caravans as an almost impenetrable redoubt, could easily have sustained relatively large populations without need for maize or other cultigens. In fact, as permanent refuge for one of the divine ancestors, Rabbit Person (a reference, perhaps, to a Rabbit Clan?), El Tunal plays a role in the charter myth of the peyote pilgrimage. With the old forests long gone and lakebeds dry, the contemporary envi­ ronment is misleading, for early accounts mention large forests of mixed pine and oak, especially in the higher elevations (Gerhard 1982), where little now grows but mesquite, varieties of cacti whose fruits have long been important in indigenous nutrition, and yucca, tree-sized members of the lily family with highly nutritious seeds and fruit. One should also not discount the possibility—suggested in the legend of Majakuagy—that where the environment allowed it, even some Gua­ chichiles and other desert hunter-gatherers might have had kitchen gar­ den horticulture, perhaps growing amaranth, which is far more resistant to drought than maize, or perhaps even some hardy variety of the latter, with much the same technique of dry desert farming that one can still observe in the southwestern United States among the Hopis and the Na­ vajos. Cultivation or management of the maguey cactus is another possi­ bility; as Susan Evans (1990:117-132) has demonstrated, the maguey and its cultivation contributed mightily to the central Mexican food system. The designation Guachichil may have been applied uncritically across the board to what were really independent small-scale societies organized on the level of simple bands that shared a common lifeway as, primarily, hunters and collectors of wild foods and spoke related dialects of an Aztecoidan language but still considered themselves distinct from their neighbors. But as Jiménez Moreno (1943) has pointed out, there were also Guachichil groups with a much more complex social organiza­ tion, even to the point where, at the time of European contact, they had established incipient local states led by powerful and charismatic chief­

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tains capable of putting up a fierce and sustained resistance to Spanish incursions. Frederick Johnson, in his commentary to the “Linguistic Map of Mexico and Central America” he published in 1940, notes the diffi­ culties in fixing the geographical limits of Guachichil but argues that “in spite of the fact that so little is known of it, there seems to be little doubt but what some language related to the Aztecoidan Family was spoken in the vast region to which this name has been applied. The extent has var­ ied greatly during the different periods in its history, and a demarcation of the boundaries is but a guess, probably a bad one.” One reason is that these boundaries were in constant flux even before European contact. As already noted, when the Spanish made their first forays into what later became the reales from which they extracted enor­ mous riches in silver, they came upon a strong Guachichil presence not only in San Luis Potosi and Coahuila but also in Zacatecas, Jalisco, and Durango. In other words, assuming that the legend of Majakuagy is his­ toric, the band of Guachichiles he is credited with leading into the secu­ rity of the Sierra Madre Occidental was but one of many that had, under whatever compulsion, migrated out of their heartland hundreds of miles westward into Zacatecas and northern Jalisco, without necessarily losing their former allegiance to peyote as divinatory-visionary sacrament and the panacea it still is today for Huichols, and even introducing it, and its rituals and lore, to other indigenous populations. That would help account for the rapid spread of peyote use through northwestern Mexico in comparatively recent times. The arid region around Niéves, for example, consisting of what is now northwestern Zacatecas and a small slice of Durango, was mostly occupied at con­ tact time, as Gerhard notes, “by rancherías of Zacatenco-speaking Chichimecs, but there was a frontier with the Guachichiles in the east” (1982:115). The corner of Zacatecas known as Los Altos de Jalisco was almost completely occupied by “Chichimec hunter-gatherers, prob­ ably Guachichiles with a sprinkling of Guamares in the east” (Gerhard 1982:104). The Jerez region was explored by Spaniards in the 1550s and 1560s, and by 1569 there was a small settlement of Spaniards at Jerez, entirely surrounded by Chichimecs, “probably Zacatenco-speakers, although there may have been Guachichiles in the vicinity” (Gerhard 1982:89). Perhaps most pertinent to our speculations is the alcaldía mayor of Charcas, a large slice of territory that extended all the way from northern Jalisco to the northwestern part of San Luis Potosi and that also included Wirikúta (Real de Catorce), the peyote country the Huichols consider

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their own. Charcas seems to have been wholly Guachichil country, with a population estimated at twenty-five thousand. Based on the early Span­ ish documents, the large territory nominally administered from the small Spanish outpost at Charcas is described by Gerhard (1982:81, 83) as consisting of what is now the northwest corner of the state of San Luis Potosi, along with a part of modern Zacatecas. This vast, arid highland, he writes, forms part of the Mesa del Norte, a region of bolsones (in­ terior drainage basins), often with salt flats, at 1,300 to 2,200 meters, separated by limestone ranges reaching 3,000 meters. With very slight rainfalls of an average of 300-450 millimeters yearly, the desert sup­ ports desert scrub, “but there were pine-oak forests, not many of which survive, in the higher mountains.” Gerhard estimates that the whole area was probably occupied at contact by Guachichil hunter-gatherers. Two additional observations need to be made here. One is that it is precisely parts of this formerly entirely Guachichil territory that the Huichols have traditionally traversed on the pilgrimage to Wirikúta and back. Wirikúta overlaps with Real de Catorce, the northernmost exten­ sion of the Charcas alcaldía. The Guachichil were renowned among the Spanish as fierce defenders of their territory against all foreign intruders. Assuming that the peyote pilgrimage dates back to the earliest days of Spanish colonization, is it likely that the Guachichil inhabitants of the Charcas region would have allowed armed groups of other Indians to travel unhindered for hundreds of miles through their country? Probably not—unless, of course, these strangers were not properly strangers at all but their own cultural cousins, speaking the same or a closely related language and following religious traditions with which they were them­ selves familiar. The evidence that Huichols first started going to Wirikúta after the Spanish invasion is admittedly circumstantial. According to the ver­ sion of the charter myth of the peyote pilgrimage one hears most often, Tatewari, the old Fire god and patron of shamans (or, if not Tatewari, Great-grandfather Deer Tail), prescribed the resumption of the ances­ tral hunt for peyote as a cure for ailments the Huichols were suffer­ ing because, for unstated reasons, they had not done “as the ancestors did”—that is, they had not been following the ancestral custom of gath­ ering and ritually consuming the sacred peyote. Whichever version one prefers, they all contain implicit or explicit statements that these first peyoteros, who were to become the ancestor gods, had to evade dangers posed by the Spanish occupation at the height of the silver boom, with its mass enslavement of Indians to extract the precious metal from deep

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mines in northern Jalisco, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and San Luis Potosi. That would locate this important event in the Huichol past not long after the Spanish invasion. It also helps place the semi-mythical migration of Majakuagy in the context of the history of Spanish colonization. In the version of the charter myth of the pilgrimage Ramón Medina related to Barbara Myerhoff and me, the ancestors are warned by Tatewari to be careful and travel by night, lest they be captured by Spanish slave raid­ ers, presumably as forced labor for the silver mines. The dangers faced by these ancestral peyote hunters were, and continue to be, very much on the Huichols’ minds, for they come up in several mythological contexts. Not only is there the explicit admonition to the ancestral peyoteros by Tatewari, but there is also, in the children’s ceremony Lumholtz called “First Fruits,” Great-grandfather Máxa Kwaxi’s admonition to the little children who, transformed into birds, are about to “fly” to Wirikúta and the land where the Sun Father was born: “In this pueblo live bad Spaniards, avoid it,” and “Here they must not see you, they might try to capture you, do not light a fire” (Furst and Anguiano 1977:131). The implication is almost always one of clear and present danger, not something that happened in the distant past. That this should be so is not surprising. In the peyote hunt, past becomes present, the peyoteros their own ancestors, walking silently single-file, carrying their bows as the old ones did, along with bundles of arrows sheathed in deerskin quivers that now have no other use. The silver mines took a fearful toll of Indian people in the first two centuries after the conquest. How many of those who set out for Wirikúta in those terrible times never returned?

5. Tepehuanes and Tepecanos The last problem I want to consider is the historical relationship between the Huichols and the southernmost branch of the Southern Tepehuan known as the Tepecanos. The proper place to start is clearly with J. Alden Mason, the prolific University Museum ethnologist and archaeologist who was their premier student. In 1912-13, when he carried out field research in the Tepecano village of Azqueltán in the Bolaños River valley, most of its indigenous inhabitants already conversed exclusively in Spanish. But there were still enough native speakers for him to consider questions, and come to some important conclusions, about the relationship of these southernmost sur­ vivors of the Southern Tepehuan to those living farther north, whose aboriginal language exhibited only very slight differences, mainly in the

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pronunciation of some words, from that of the Tepecano. Mason thought that the Huichols, or more correctly, their Guachichil antecedents, could conceivably have been responsible for the break of ninety or so miles separating the Tepecanos from their Southern Tepehuan cousins. He was much concerned with the uncritical way in which, with the single excep­ tion of Lumholtz, writers on western Mexico were tending to ignore the considerable differences in language and culture between these Southern Tepehuan and the Northern, treating them as though they were a single culture, with data from one applicable to the other, when in fact the Southern and Northern Tepehuan have few cultural traits in common: This consistent lack of differentiation between the Northern and Southern Tepehuan in spite of the linguistic difference, while the linguistically similar Southern Tepehuan and Tepecano were dis­ tinguished—although some chroniclers mention the practical iden­ tity—poses some problems and suggests some interesting explana­ tions. Were the Tepehuan of history the Northern group only, who have gradually retired to the northernmost and most isolated part of their former habitat, while the Southern Tepehuan represent the descendants of the Tepecano (who call themselves today Tepehuan) who migrated northward? Or were the Tepecano a Southern Tepe­ huan group that migrated southward, as stated in a legend recorded by Hrdlicka? Was the region of the Southern Tepehuan and Tepecano once coterminous or continuous until separated, possibly, by a westward migration of the Guachichil-Huichol? The linguistic differentiation is so slight that the separation must have been relatively recent, of the order of a few centuries. (Mason 1952:37-38) Linguists have calculated that mutual intelligibility is gradually re­ duced through time and ceases altogether after five hundred years of separation between two populations that started out speaking the same language. Mason based his conclusion of relatively recent separation on the fact that when residents of Azqueltán visited the Southern Tepehuan, they found their language to be virtually identical to their own. Experi­ ence shows that this would not be the case had they become isolated from one another much longer ago than a few hundred years. Although there are fewer and fewer native Tepehuan speakers left, other writers since Mason have found the same thing. It has long been generally assumed that the hearth of the Utonahuan

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(Uto-Aztecan) languages was the region of the upper Gila or northern Sierra Madre, with divergence from the common ancestor beginning as early as 4,700 years ago. Against this the linguist Jane H. Hill has re­ cently—and I must say rather persuasively—proposed that the central Mexican state of Puebla may in fact have been the proto-Uto-Aztecan homeland between 5,600 and 4,500 B.P. (before the present), and that it was these proto-Uto-Aztecans who were the first maize farmers and thus the first to experiment with hybridizing teosinte, a wild-growing grass that is generally accepted as the ancestor of maize. And who knows whether what has been said of the origin of grain agriculture in Mesopo­ tamia, that its original purpose was making beer, not bread, also applies to maize? Be that as it may, if Hill is right it means a complete turnaround for the origin and spread of the Uto-Aztecan language family, and also the diffusion of what we think of the “pan-Mesoamerican world view,” of which the Huichols are very much a part. To quote a recent reassess­ ment by two members of the faculty of the Universidad de las Américas, Patricia Plunket and Gabriela Uruñuela (2005:94), of the place of Puebla in Mesoamerican culture history, “Hill’s study implies that many Aztecan speakers were central to the development of the Mesoamerican worldview and not latecomers who acculturated to civilized patterns in recent prehistory.” Whatever the validity of this revolutionary revision, eventually speakers of Uto-Aztecan or Utonahuan languages would be found as far west as California, as far north as Wyoming, and as far south as Nicaragua and El Salvador, not to mention large areas of Mexico, in­ cluding the Sierra Madre Occidental. As the most divergent of this far-flung language family, PimaTepehuan is believed to have been the first to split off, an assessment, according to Romney (1971:230-231), that agrees “with previous infer­ ences of Kroeber and Whorf on phonological grounds.” Mason (1950:5) characterized Piman as the most aberrant of the Uto-Aztecan families, with relatively few subdivisions. The component languages are slightly differentiated—less so, probably, than Italian and Spanish. This is most remarkable since nearly a thousand miles separate the Pima at the north from the Tepecano in the south. Whatever can be inferred from the language situation, it is self-evident that (1) Tepecan and Southern Tepehuan are to all intents and purposes identical, (2) the relationship between Huichol and Tepecan is a very dis­ tant one indeed, with all mutual intelligibility between the two branches of Uto-Aztecan to which they belong, Aztecoidan and Piman, already gone several millennia ago, and (3) there is an obvious fit between Mason’s

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conclusion about Huichol origins and Diguet’s Majakuagy tradition, as well as with other ethnohistorical data. The Tepecan migration story to which he refers was told to Hrdlicka in 1898 by an old and, he says, highly respected resident of Askeltán (Azqueltán): The ancestors came a long time ago from the north, from a Rio Colorado, and were of the same people as the bárbaros there and continued as bárbaros after their arrival (Hrdlicka 1903:409-410). Bárbaros, barbarians, was the pejorative used for people subsisting on the collection and hunting of wild foods rather than on agriculture. Askeltán (Asqueltán), Temastian, Acapulco, Huila (Huilacatlan), Santa Catarina, and Nostic were all once part of the territory of the Tepecano ancestors, who themselves were originally “Mecos,” meaning Chichimecos. Except for Santa Catarina, situated in Huichol country only about eight leagues slightly northwest of Azqueltán, all the mentioned settle­ ments are located on or close to the Río Bolaños. According to Hrdlicka (1903:409-410), when he visited Santa Catarina in 1902, he came across a number of old petroglyphs, such as are found in the ruins a little north of Azkeltán, for which the Huichols could offer no explanation except that they were made by “other people.” Hrdlicka did not put a name to these “other people,” but presumably they were the same “Héwi” the Huichols say lived in the Sierra before they did and to whom they ascribe the crude figurines, stone tools, arrow­ heads, and other archaeological remains they occasionally find in caves or in the ground. There is also an interesting Héwi origin myth, partly shared with the Coras, that has a decidedly southwestern flavor, including emergence from a sipapu-like hole in the center of the earth and an earth and creator goddess similar to Grandmother Spider or Spider Mother (Furst 1975). Although there is not room here to consider it in depth, it may well be that the subject of an essay by Valadez (1996)—wolves as power sources for a certain class of Huichol shamans and, with it, wolf transformation—is ultimately a syncretistic survival from a Tepecan, and hence southwestern, substratum. The fact is that the wolf appears never to have played an important symbolic role in Mesoamerica, in contrast to North America, where he is almost everywhere a major power animal and spirit ally of Indians. In the Puebloan Southwest, where the wolf plays a large part in myth and ritual, he is also one of the four animal guardian deities of the cardinal directions, his being the all-important east (Tyler 1975). Most directly pertinent, perhaps, is the fact that by Hrdlicka’s and Mason’s time some Tepecanos still retained something of a tradition of wolves as guardians.

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Mason also heard that Santa Catarina and some other places where Huichols now live were once Tepecan. What impresses me is that no­ where—neither in Huichol myths nor in the traditions of the Tepecano— is there anything to suggest a Tepehuan/Tepecano conquest and subjuga­ tion of the Huichols. The cumulative evidence, rather, suggests that when the ancestral Southern Tepehuan/Tepecano reached the end of their thousand-mile migration from the north, they settled not only the bar­ ranca of the Bolaños but the adjacent mountains and valleys, including places that became Huichol only later, with the former occupants either adapting to, and culturally and genetically blending with, the newcomers or moving elsewhere. That the Tepecan, who according to Tumholtz (1902:123) called themselves simply Xumátcam, “the people,” were regarded as true moun­ tain folk is implicit in the very name by which they became known, “Te­ pehuan” or “Tepecan” being almost certainly derived from the Nahuatl tépetl = “mountain.” There is a long list of words with this root in Remi Simeon’s Dictionnaire de la langue Nahuatl (1963), including a deity named Tepeua or Tepehua, meaning “Master of the Mountains”; with the postposition can, this becomes tepeuacan, “from the mountains.” This is not to say that when the Tepecanos arrived they necessarily found the mountains and barrancas empty of people, only that there is no evidence that if they had predecessors there, they did not have to have been the people we now call Huichols, or, to use their term for them­ selves, Wixárite. In any event, there is much to suggest that the Héwi of Huichol mythology may very well have been the Piman-speaking Tepe­ canos, whose surviving aboriginal religious beliefs and customs Mason judged to be a blend of southwestern, Chichimec, and Mexican traits. Earlier I made reference to Mason’s observation, in his 1950 mono­ graph on Papago (itself a dialect of Pima), that the Piman languages are only slightly differentiated from one another. The extraordinary thing is that this remarkably versatile scholar and more recent linguists have calculated the separation of the Southern Tepehuan/Tepecan from the Pima in southern Arizona at less than seven centuries. Other things being equal, this implies that the Tepecanos might have arrived in northern Jalisco as late as the thirteenth to fourteenth century A.D., suggesting that what drove them out of Arizona and the northern Sierra Madre and sent them southward in the first place was the sustained drought that also devastated the ancestral Pueblos and forced the abandonment of such major sites as Chaco, Mesa Verde, and Bandelier. This, in turn, has implications for the dating, or the cultural

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affiliation, of certain archaeological sites within Tepecan territory, such as Totoáte. In any event, at some point the Bolaños Valley and the adja­ cent Sierra Madre Occidental came to form the southernmost extension of a continuous, relatively narrow, strip of mountainous country along the eastern side of the Sierra Madre Occidental inhabited by speakers of Tepiman (Pima-Papago-Tepehuan) languages, extending from southern Arizona and Chihuahua southward for a thousand miles to northern Jalisco (Mason 1952:38). Not only linguistically but also culturally this entire band of related Piman languages had, and intermittently continues to have, in the words of Carroll L. Riley (personal communication 1994), something of a “southwestern flavor.” This finds its most immediately apparent expression in ceremonial objects which resemble, in construc­ tion and use, those of the Hopis and other southwestern peoples and which the Huichols, and also the Coras, share with the Southern Tepehuan/Tepecan. No doubt the Tepiman linguistic corridor also facili­ tated cultural exchanges between northwestern Mexico and the South­ west in the colonial period, but there is little question that some traits that Huichols, Coras, and Tepecanos share with the Pueblos predate the Spanish invasion. Just how and why the Southern Tepehuan of Asqueltán came to be differentiated from their closest relatives to their north as “Tepecano” is not clear, the more so in that Mason reported in 1912 that this name is “absolutely unknown to the natives of Azqueltán, who speak of them­ selves as Tepehuán.” According to Mason,

one of the few references, found in the Franciscan Relations, and quoted by Orozco y Berra, is to the effect that the Franciscan mon­ asteries of Colotlán, Nostic and Chimaltitlan were founded in the territory of the Teules-Chichimecos, who spoke a language known as Tepecano. A further note of the Franciscans gives Tepecano as one dialect of the Teul-Chichimec group, the others being Cazcan and Tecuexe.... Tradition among the present Indians, as well as a few words found by Dr. Boas to the south in the region of San Juan del Teul, tends to corroborate the testimony of the early missionar­ ies. This tradition is to the effect that at the time of the Conquest, the Tepecanos, as they have always been termed, occupied a con­ siderable territory in Jalisco and Zacatecas, north of Guadalajara, reaching to the Rio Santiago and the pueblo of Teul on the south, and to Colotlán on the east. Hrdlicka notes also the tradition that a part, at least, of the country of the Huicholes, the nearest neighbors

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of the Tepecano, was originally theirs, which is further evidence for the proposition, already suggested by Orozco y Berra, that the Huicholes are the descendants of the Guachichiles of the state of San Luis Potosi, who retreated to their present home shortly after the Conquest. (Mason 1912:344-345) With the Spanish conquest of the Southern Tepehuan territory in 1530, so goes the tradition cited by Mason, the majority of the Tepecan left, a part going to join the Southern Tepehuan to the north, a part migrating even farther north, “to a Rio Colorado, which Hrdlicka iden­ tified as a river in the country of the Northern Tepehuane,” and the re­ mainder withdrawing to the country around the pueblo of Azqueltán, in the barranca of the Río Bolaños. Their former lands were occupied by Nahuatl-speaking Tlaxcaltecs, who were transferred to the western frontier by the Spanish for protection, “and possibly also by Huicholes” (Mason 1912:345).

6. Tepecano and Huichol Religion Although aboriginal Tepecan religion was already obscured by a heavy overlay of Christianity in Hrdlicka’s and Mason’s day, it is still pos­ sible to reconstruct something of its core from their writings and those of Lumholtz. When Mason died in November 1967, he left behind a manuscript on Tepecan beliefs and ritual he had planned to complete with a comparison to southwestern ceremonialism. Before he died he gave a copy to George Agogino, suggesting that the latter publish it, if possible with new data from Asqueltán. Agogino did so, in the form of a small monograph (Agogino and Mason 1972), with photographs and additional data on the village of Asqueltán, as it appeared more than fifty years after Mason’s stay there. Equally essential is Mason’s collection of thirty-seven Tepecano prayers, in the native language and translation, which he published in 1918 in the first volume of Franz Boas’s International Journal of Ameri­ can Linguistics. In his introduction to Mason’s essay on Tepecan ceremo­ nialism Agogino noted Mason’s unhappiness that only slight attention had been paid to his collection of prayers, despite its considerable ethno­ graphic interest as showing “a blend of Mexican and Southwest U.S. religious traits” of the sort that “Chichimec and other invaders from the north” may also have carried into the valley of Mexico (Agogino and Mason 1972:8).

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Notwithstanding the extent of Christian conversion and echoes of the Trinity in the way some of the Tepecano deities are addressed, Mason himself felt that the content of the prayers, perdones in Spanish, was much less affected by Christianity than appeared at first sight. My impression of Mason’s data is that, beyond certain fundamen­ tals to which all the indigenous peoples of the Sierra Madre Occiden­ tal subscribe and which, as Mason himself pointed out, are shared in their general outlines by Native American religions from the Southwest to southern South America, Huichol and Tepecano religion are quite dis­ tinct from each other. The two things they share are several kinds of sacred objects used in the ceremonies and, up to a point, peyote ceremo­ nialism. With respect to the former, it should be noted that (i) these also resemble, in form and function, those of the Puebloan Southwest and (2) as Hrdlicka (1903) pointed out, the Huichol and Tepecano prayer sticks, and also the chimales (from the Nahuatl chimalli = “shields”), which are made by spiraling yarn around crossed sticks, differ in several respects, such as the use of colors and materials, those of the Tepecanos generally being made of white cotton and those of the Huichols of colored wool. Most striking is the difference between their respective deities. Like other native peoples, Huichols and Tepecanos have a Sun god, referred to as Father. But beyond that I find no overlap in the identities, func­ tions, genders, associations, and names of divine beings that have charge of natural phenomena and, by extension, the affairs of human beings. Tepecanos and Huichols both venerate mountains in their respective en­ vironments and personify them as deities to whom offerings are made and petitions and prayers for favors addressed. But this is true as well of Mesoamerican Indians generally, past and present, as it is of many other Native American peoples, North and South. In the case of the Huichols, in addition to those in the Sierra Madre Occidental, the mountains, hills, and other natural formations in the distant peyote country hold a special place in their hearts, for these are manifestations of the kakauyarite, the divine ancestors. The Tepecanos, but not the Huichols, had a female deity with lunar associations who is the wife of the Sun god. And there is no indication in what remained of Tepecano belief in Mason’s day of a counterpart to Great-grandmother Nakawé (Lumholtz’s “Grandmother Growth”), the white-haired old earth and creator goddess of the Huichols, nor of the many other female members of the multitude of ancestor and nature deities that make up the Huichol pantheon. Nakawé may have a lunar connection, but not explicitly so. Conspicuous by his absence from the Tepecano pantheon is a direct analog to the aged fire god and patron of

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shamans, whom the Huichols address as Tatewari, Our Grandfather, and who presides, in the person of the mara’akáme, the shaman-singer (Span­ ish cantador) at every ceremony and ritual. There is a Tepecano Fire god, but he is the younger of the two sons of the Sun god, the elder being the all-important Morning Star. As the father of Maize Girl, the Tepecano Sun god is also the father-in-law of her husband, the personified toloache (Datura inoxia), to whom Tepecanos addressed perdones for riches and other benefits.

7. Peyote Ceremonialism The importance of peyote to the Tepecanos, and analogies between Te­ pecano and Huichol peyote ceremonialism, have long been accepted as givens. It is on closer scrutiny that we begin to see some fundamental differences that make the supposed analogies seem more like echoes. Granting that our information is limited, by every reasonable measure it appears to me that Tepecano peyotism is essentially a reflection of the Huichol prototype (or if we will, the Guachichil), and not, as suggested in some of the recent anthropological literature on the Huichols, the other way round. I can think of no more poignant and convincing an affirmation of what peyote means to “being Huichol,” of how deeply the little psycho­ active cactus is embedded in Huichol intellectual culture and religious ideology, historical tradition, mythology, ethnic consciousness, spiritual­ ity, the annual ceremonial round, and economic well-being (for even the beloved maize and the other crops will not grow without it) than that which Stacy Schaefer heard from a peyotero from San Andrés Cohamiata: “Peyote is the crossing of the souls, it is everything that is. Without peyote nothing would exist” (Schaefer 1996:165). In the world view of committed Huichols, then, peyote constitutes the very soul of the religious culture: peyote as visionary sacrament, path­ way to the realm of the ancestor deities, and the hunt for it in Wirikúta as sacred mandates passed down from the ancestor gods through the generations and reaffirmed over and over in poetry and ritual, in artis­ tic creativity, in expenditure of religious emotion, and in economic and physical sacrifice. Here, in full, is Mason’s description of Tepecano peyote ceremoni­ alism:

Peyote (Lophophora williamsii or echinocactus) is most important in Tepecan religion, as in all the religions of the natives of the Sierra

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Madre Occidental. Also termed “maize,” it is a god and a protec­ tor of the Indians, and helps to bring rain. It relieves tiredness and aids the memory. “Rosaries” of peyote buttons are worn at some ceremonies. Probably at the time of assuming office, each Cantador Mayor is supposed to go (at least once) on the search for peyote, which does not grow in the Tepecan region. Thereafter, he may purchase it, presumably from the Huichol. Rito de la Cruz made the journey about 12 years before my visit to Asqueltán, or about the year 1900. The nearest place where peyote is securable is near Cerro del Venado y las Carnuzas, about eight days journey east of Zacatecas. The round trip requires just a month, including five days hunting and the return journey. The trip is made about the middle of September. No food is eaten during the entire trip, and bathing is also forbidden. No water is taken until mid-afternoon. On arriving in the peyote region, payments are left. Peyote bought from the Huichols is purchased with money, but payment for growing live peyote is, of course, of a ceremonial nature. The latter is paid for with jicaras [gourd bowls], with beads, small mirrors, etc. The jicara is said to be peyote. A large jicara is placed on the ground, with beads and other payments in front of it. A prayer which is no longer remembered was recited facing the east. The hunter sees a figure of a deer, but it is peyote and not a deer. They hunt for five days, each day in a different direction, and a prayer is recited each afternoon. A final prayer is said upon departure. On return to Asqueltán, about October 24, a Peyote Fiesta is held immediately in one of the patios, where peyote is given to everyone present. The usual ceremonial singing and dancing lasts all night. The next morning the Cantador may have his first meal and bathe, but after that he must fast for another 20 days to give thanks. Peyote, generally regarded as an infusion, plays a very prominent part in Tepecan religious ceremony. It is usually at all the calendrical ceremonies and probably in many less formal activities. At the ceremonies participants are sprinkled with peyote water. (Mason, in Agogino and Mason, 1972:19-20) Assuredly, there are analogies here to Huichol practice: offerings and prayers to peyote, all-night dancing and singing, identification of peyote with maize and deer, harvesting for five days, restrictions on food and bathing, the peyote fiesta—all these and more are familiar components of

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peyote ritual among the Huichols. But what strikes me as at least as sig­ nificant as the similarities are the differences. First and foremost of these is one that Mason does not mention but that can be found in Lumholtz, who did not visit the Tepecanos personally but obtained information on their culture from three visitors from Asqueltán: “The sacred cac­ tus hikuli is used by them and called by this name. As recently as three years ago the Tepecanos themselves went for the plants, but now they buy them from the Huichols. A form of Cannabis common hemp called mariguana or rosa maria (sativa) sometimes takes the place of hikuli” (Lumholtz 1902:125). Both Lumholtz and Mason observed that once the Tepecano can­ tador has fulfilled his one obligatory journey to the peyote desert, pur­ chased peyote will do as well. Huichols would find this unacceptable. Moreover, to be recognized as a shaman, or cantador, in the first place, a Huichol has to have completed a minimum of five peyote pilgrimages, and preferably ten. In fact, some older Huichol shamans can look back on twenty, thirty, and even more of these pilgrimages to hunt and partake of the sacred cactus in its native habitat and to return with sufficient quantities for the many ceremonies requiring its use and for sale or trade to other Indian peoples. But if purchased peyote is not acceptable, the idea of substituting some other psychoactive species when hikuli (hikuri) is not available is anathema—even one of indigenous origin rather than a foreign import like marijuana. Huichols are, of course, well aware of other plants that will affect consciousness and trigger visions, but that is not the point. It is, rather, that peyote is special: it is the gift of the ances­ tors, and in return it would be unthinkable to attempt to approach them by any other path. Not even peyote that could still be freely purchased in the 1960s and 1970s from herbal stalls in the public markets of Guada­ lajara, Zacatecas, or Tepic would do. For Huichols, peyote is embedded in a whole complex of history and myth and symbol, of observation and experience, of the merging of past and present and future, and no other species, not the Psilocybe mushrooms or morning glory seeds that were so important in the divinatory-visionary rituals of the Mexica and other Mesoamerican peoples, and assuredly not Cannabis sativa, carry these meanings for them. In fact, the only other psychoactive substance that bears a direct ideological relationship to peyote is the potent tobacco Huichols call makuche, Nicotiana rustica, which peyoteros smoke in the form of cornhusk cigarettes to put themselves in the proper condition for the coming peyote experience. One could go down the line and point to other discrepancies that

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clearly mark Tepecano peyotism, however vibrant and important it clearly was in former times, as derivative, a secondary and not a primary religious phenomenon. I cannot emphasize this too strongly, because the recent anthropological literature contains a revisionist model of the ori­ gins of Huichol religion according to which the profound emotional in­ volvement of Huichols with peyote and the peyote hunt may be, after all, not truly aboriginal at all but only a borrowing from, of all people, the Tepecanos: Taking into account the presence of the peyote rituals and the ex­ tremely elaborate ceremonial compounds in the Bolaños valley, it is possible that much of what we regard as Huichol ceremonialism was developed and formalized in the Bolaños valley. I think that the cul­ tural relationships between the eastern Huichol districts and the ar­ chaeological and Tepecan Bolaños tradition are extremely close.... The peyote emphasis... may indicate that it was the Bolaños valley and not the Chapalagana that served as the aboriginal hearth of the Sierra Madre peyote/peyotero complex. (Weigand 1981:11)

Weigand’s opinion—and that is all it is—that the Piman Tepecanos, and not the Huichols, were the originators of what is the very heart of Huichol spirituality seems to me wrong on virtually every count: linguis­ tics, history, ethnography, geography, ethnobotany, archaeology, com­ parative religion, and, let it be said, just plain common sense. First of all, the ultimate homeland of the Tepehuan/Tepecan is the Southwest. Ethnographically and ethnobotanically, the Southwest, including Cali­ fornia, is ‘'“'Datura country,” in the sense that most if not all of its indig­ enous peoples (the Pima or, as they call themselves, Tohono O’odham, included) employed D. inoxia, for which California Indians adopted, presumably from the Catholic clergy, the term toloache (derived from the Nahuatl toloatzin} during the early mission period, in divinatory, initiatory, and therapeutic ritual. So did both the Northern and Southern Tepehuan. The Tepecanos addressed prayers and petitions for riches and good fortune to toloache, the son-in-law of the Sun Father. (This is not to say that Tepehuan/Tepecan conquest of other groups in the course of their southward migration is unthinkable. But if there was, there is no ethnohistoric, archaeological, mythological, or folkloric support for such an event in the Huichol past.) The Piman peoples have no history of involvement with peyote prior to the establishment of the syncretistic Native American Church, whose

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pan-Indian adherents employ the cactus as sacrament. (The single excep­ tion is a small population of Mountain Pima, located between Sonora and Chihuahua, on the edge of the territory of the Tarahumara, now called Rarámuri, whose use of peyote is well documented. It is almost certainly from these Tarahumara neighbors that the Mountain Pima adopted the intoxicating visionary cactus, along with hikuri, its Tarahumara [and Huichol] name [David L. Shaul, personal communication 1994]). Peyote, as we know, is native to the arid north-central region of Mex­ ico, down to about the Tropic of Cancer, and in the lower Rio Grande Valley. (A lone occurrence of peyote as far south as Querétaro is appar­ ently descended from peyote planted there by Indians who, like Huichols today, brought it with them from its natural range.) Thus, if any place is the real hearth of the complex of beliefs and rituals that revolve around peyote and its effects, it would have to have been precisely where Huichols travel to collect it, and surely not a valley inhabited by Piman-speakers hundreds of miles west of where it grows, and even less so “the lake area to the south” of the Bolaños Valley, as has also been proposed by Weigand (1979:26). At the time of European contact, peyote was widely employed for visionary and divinatory purposes, and also as medicine, by native peoples within and also at some considerable distance from its native range, including the shamans, priests, and doctors of the Mexica of Tenochtitlan. From archaeological excavations in the painted rockshel­ ters of the Trans-Pecos region, we know that Desert Culture people in southern Texas and adjacent northern Mexico used it alongside the red and black bean-like seeds of Sophora secundiflora, which though “hallu­ cinogenic” are also dangerously toxic. The earliest radiocarbon date we now have for peyote in these shelters is ca. 5000 B.C. (Furst 1976, 1989). (The dates of more recent I4C assays for archaeological peyotes from the same area are somewhat younger but still impressive—ca. 5,000 years before the present.) In colonial New Mexico some Spaniards were put on trial in the early 1600s by the Inquisition for taking peyote to locate lost or stolen property and strayed spouses (Scholes 1935). That seems to be about as far west as peyote was traded in colonial times. The home­ land of the Piman-speakers of northwestern Mexico is even farther west, nearly a thousand miles from the nearest natural occurrence of peyote. That there is no evidence for the use of peyote by Pimas in precontact times does not, of course, rule it out, but if they did, they would have had to obtain it, directly or indirectly, by long-distance trade from those who had easy access to it, that is, such Chichimec peoples as the Guachichil.

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Given the historical, geographical, and botanical situation, where, when, and from whom, other than the Huichol/Guachichil, are the Tepe­ canos supposed to have acquired peyote as divinatory/ecstatic sacrament and panacea in place of Datura, the traditional visionary species of the Southwest? After all, the Tepecanos are relatively recent immigrants into northwestern Mexico from southern Arizona, with no peyote tradition of their own. And not just the sacred cactus itself but everything that goes with it—the great complex of beliefs, behaviors, ancestor veneration, ori­ gin myths, song, symbolic meanings, associations, transformations, the healing arts, public and private ritual, sacred geography, environmental and ethnobotanical wisdom, and all the rest that are an integral part of peyote use among the Huichols? But even without specific objections, it is surely only common sense to look for the origin of a trait where it is most elaborated and remains most firmly and prominently embedded in the cultural matrix. In the case of peyote ceremonialism, so-called, that is surely the Huichols and not a people for whom, even before the end of the last century, the sacred cac­ tus had so paled in significance that when none was available, marijuana was an acceptable substitute.

Some Concluding Thoughts The thrust of this essay has been that the cultural and genetic heritage of the Huichols includes a substantial Guachichil/Chichimec contribution. Exactly when this occurred is uncertain, but early within the past five or six hundred years is not a bad guess. The most dramatic living expression of this ancient Guachichil component is, of course, the ritual and symbol complex that has the peyote cactus as its heart and soul. Myerhoff (1974) saw in the survival of so much of an older desert hunting ideology (to which the peyote hunt clearly belongs)—even as Huichol society itself turned centuries ago from wild foods to maize as its primary subsistence base—as an “incomplete transition” from an older hunting and collect­ ing way of life to full-scale reliance on maize and other cultigens. Syncretism, not in the sense of a blending of the new with the old at some fixed point in time but as an ongoing dialectic, in which sometimes one predominates, sometimes the other, is probably more appropriate. “Traditional” Huichol culture is not a fossil frozen in time but a dynamic process in which all manner of phenomena, material and ideological, old and new, even “myth” and “history”—and Huichols make no distinction between the two—are constantly being adopted, rejected, or reworked

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and, where deemed useful, brought into harmony with one another. As noted earlier, in the end even maize agriculture is inextricably bound up with the peyote complex, for without peyote, without the hunt for the sacred cactus that is also deer and maize, in Wirikúta, home to the kakauyarite, the ancestor deities, the sacred crop will not flourish. Although much of the Huichol past endures, especially in religious ideology, world view, sacred poetry, and ritual, much that has proved valid and valuable for the preservation of their cultural and physical in­ tegrity is increasingly under assault, including even the peyote pilgrim­ age, which Myerhoff rightly called the Huichols’ sacred journey: a jour­ ney back into their own ancient past. As Allen Franz (1996) argues persuasively in “Huichol Ethnohistory: The View from Zacatecas,” the Huichols were not nearly as isolated from the outside world by the protective shield of their rugged mountains and barrancas as had long been supposed. That makes the survival of so much of their traditional intellectual culture all the more remarkable. Still, as recently as the first decades of the twentieth century the only way to reach them was by foot, mule, or horse, and, even more recently, by small planes, whose landings and takeoffs from unpaved airstrips on some of the mesas were even in the 1950s and early 1960s something of an adventure. Now the semi-isolation of the Huichol sierra has come to an end with the opening of what are optimistically described as allweather roads. And roads mean not only lumber and other natural re­ sources going out but beer trucks coming in. Like the Mayas of Chiapas, the Huichols are a people under siege. Denying them a piece of their history, perhaps conjectural but probably not, whether through ignorance or bias or preference for some pet hy­ pothesis, seems to me a form of cultural imperialism. To be sure, re­ confirming a part of their historical past, even one as central to their very existence as a people as the indigenous origins of the complex of symbols, rituals, and spirituality the nucleus of which is the psychoac­ tive hikuri, will not improve their present lot. It will not protect their lands against mestizo encroachment or the potentially disastrous effects of changes in agrarian law; it will not insulate their traditional religion, and especially the time-honored use of peyote and the peyote pilgrimage, which Huichols take to be their sacred birthright as a mandate from the ancestors, against missionary or drug enforcement zealotry, or, finally, their bodies against toxic agricultural chemicals. Of these, some are so virulent they are banned in the United States. Yet it is to these that the hundreds of Huichol men, women, and children, as well as other Indian

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people, who annually migrate to the coast to work in the tobacco harvest are exposed. But to try to reconstruct a history that is more than just opinion still seems a worthy goal. The aim of this exercise has been just that, to look at whatever data, from whatever source, in whatever discipline, that might with the great­ est degree of probability and good sense contribute to the reaffirmation of Huichol religion, especially the peyote symbol complex, as the work of their own, and not somebody else’s, ancestors. The caveat is that, as my colleague Ward Goodenough at the University of Pennsylvania used to tell his anthropology graduate students when they were about to start on their dissertations, everything we write is, in the final analysis, a progress report, a work in progress. This essay is thus as subject to future correc­ tion and revision as to confirmation.

7

Huichol Traditions of the Soul

or anyone interested in Huichol intellectual culture, or Mexican Indian literature in general, one of the great literary tragedies of World War II was the destruction, on the eve of its publication, of the only two copies of Konrad Theodor Preuss’s collection of Huichol sacred texts, together with their translations into German. A curator at the Museum für Vólkerkunde in Berlin and a major figure in ethnology, philology, and American Indian languages and linguistics at the beginning of the twen­ tieth century, Preuss spent the years 1905-7 with the Huichols, Coras, and Nahua-speakers (“Mexicaneros”) of northwestern Mexico. For nine months of what he called his Nayarit-Expedition, he lived and traveled in Huichol country, including the comunidades indígenas of Santa Catarina and San Andrés Cohamiata, as well as isolated extended-family ranchos and rancherías and their temples, observing daily and ceremonial life and recording myths and ritual orations or chants. His Huichol-German manuscript of these completed, he turned the original over to his pub­ lisher, B. G. Teubner, and kept the sole carbon copy in his Berlin home. Both were destroyed in bombing raids. Among those who felt the loss personally was Franz Boas, the more so in that he and his wife had en­ tertained Preuss for dinner in their home in New York on the latter’s way to Mexico. Boas also published Preuss’s Cora dictionary and grammar in his International Journal of American Linguistics, and they continued to correspond well after the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933. After Preuss left the Berlin Museum (by all accounts a consequence of the increasing Nazification of the staff), Boas helped support him financially,

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the idea being that the Huichol material would also have a home in Boas’s journal. The manuscript became longer and longer, and Preuss evidently decided to publish it in Germany as a companion volume to his earlier work on the religion of the Cora (1912). That was not to be. Preuss died suddenly in 1938. World War II broke out in September of the following year with the Nazi invasion of Poland. The rest is history. Fortunately not all of Preuss’s Huichol observations were lost. As was common practice, he contributed several lengthy articles from the field to major academic journals, the Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologic, the geographical periodical Globus, and Archiv fiir Religionswissenschaft, totaling more than twenty thousand words. I translated these, and Stacy and I pub­ lished them in People of the Peyote: Huichol Indian History, Religion, and Survival (Preuss 1996). In fact, it was what first gave us the idea for such a book. Thirty years earlier I recorded Ramón Medina’s ideas about the human soul in life and after death. At the time, the mid-1960s, I was unaware that there was in Preuss’s essays material on the soul that cor­ responded with what Ramón talked about sixty years later in greater detail. This is how Preuss concluded an article entitled, in English trans­ lation, “Sacred Songs and Myths of Some Tribal Peoples of the Mexican Sierra Madre,” published in 1908 in Archiv fiir Religionswissenschaft:

To round this out, there is also the all-night death chant, which is sung five days after a demise. It is on this night that the deceased re­ turns once more to his home, is fed and finally driven off by magical means. Especially effective for this are, among other things, branches of the zapote tree, a species of burr, and lampblack, which the par­ ticipants smear on their cheeks, hands and feet. In other words, the color of mourning as a prophylactic! The soul has ascended to the sky, to be taken hold of by Werika Uimári (Our Mother Young Eagle Girl, the sky goddess). But where is the deceased? Kauyumári is dis­ patched to look for him, his physical self has journeyed to the west, and Kauyumári now inquires of all the Kakauyárite (the mountains, etc.) along the way whether he has passed by. They tell him that a puff of air, haikúri, passed this way. Might that have been him? Finally he comes to the five vats into which the deceased was dunked and from which he emerged again as a kind of fly. Then the deceased arrives at the huge zalate (from the Nahuatl zalatl, wild fig), the mighty tree of the earth goddess that stands at the entrance to the land of the dead, throws the vulvas of his female relatives—repre­ sented by jicaras (gourd bowls)—five times at the fruits for which

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the dead are waiting, and, having been received by the rain goddess of the west, Kiewimúka, of whose water he drinks, joins with them in a dance. But now comes Kauyumári, flings a burr at him and, thus caught, drags him back to his former home. At the entrance to the courtyard he is frightened by magical prophylactics. To enable him to speak once more with his relatives his soul is returned to him once more. The deceased makes some long speeches, and then he is told: “Now go.” And with those words Kauyumári takes him away. [My translation] With Preuss in mind, let’s listen to Ramón talking of what he called “the life,” meaning the animating force or, if you will, the soul (but one that is not the same as the iyári, which lodges in the heart), how it is formed in the mother’s body and what happens to it after its “owner” has expired: Before the children are born, the soul, that which we call iyári, which means some­ thing like what being Huichol is, all that is and has gone before that we keep secure

in our hearts, that with which we are born, and that which we call küpüri, the life that

lives in the top of the head, these are in the care of these different ancient ones we have. Especially the one called Tatéi Niwetúkame. She looks after the souls of the children. She causes the soul to enter the child because there is formed the body

alone. Only the body, that which is flesh only. This is inside the mother, inside the

womb of the mother. It is done with the help of the man—that is how the child is formed. And then Tatéi Niwetúkame sees if it is a little girl or a little boy, whichever

it may be. First she sends to that little girl her consciousness, her thinking. So that she can

reflect on everything. Before she is born, but after she is fully formed, that is what happens. Tatéi Niwetúkame sends her her face paint, her sandals, her wrist bands,

all this she sends. So that she can be completed in there. This happens when five months have passed.

After it is about seven months along, more or less, the date is set on which it will be born. After about seven months, Tatéi Niwetúkame reviews this thing, which

is to say that the woman will begin to have those feelings in there. The child moves and the woman feels that. Ah, now the woman remembers. “On such and such a day, at such and such a time, that happened to me." In her mind the mother recalls

everything well. Then the husband goes to bring the mara’akáme. He explains to the mara’akáme

what is happening there. He says to him, “This, that and the other thing is happening there." And the mara’akáme says, “So let us go." And they go and the mara’akáme

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sees her. He says “Ah yes, it is time now.” At whatever time the act took place, if they

enjoyed each other during the day, or at one in the morning, or in the afternoon, whenever it was, she remembers it well. Because that is when the birth will take

place. It will be at that exact same hour. And then the mara’akáme says, “This and that is missing here.” Then hetalks to

Tatéi Niwetúkame. And she tells him that the baby is lacking the küpüri. That is the soft spot on the head, the crown. It is the life, the soul. It is the life of the soul of that

person. It consists of five parts, pieces of bone, that which we call five little children, three in front and two in back.

I shared this part of Ramón’s narrative with Arnold Kisch, M.D., of the UCLA Department of Preventive Medicine and co-principal investi­ gator in our joint 1967 medical-anthropological field research and train­ ing program at San Andrés Cohamiata. Dr. Kisch made the following comments: Looking at the top of the skull of a baby below age one, one sees four bones that surround the lozenge-shaped anterior fontanel, Ramón’s “soft spot on the head.” Two of these bones are in front and two in back. In time the two in front fuse almost completely; in the adult skull the line between them has disappeared and there now appear to be only three bones in the top of the skull, one in front and the two parientals in back, divided by the almost transverse coronal suture. Ramón’s assertion that there are not four but rather five bones in the top of the skull can be seen as an accommodation of the anatomical facts, with which Huichols are certainly quite familiar, to the sacredness of the number five, which represents completion and which is here expressed also in the reference to five months, five minutes, etc. In other words, what is being done is that just as the cardinal directions become five in number through the addition of the center, so the number of bones in the top of the skull become five by adding to the four bones, which actually do exist in the infant skull, the bone mass that grows across the old fontanel. Actually of course what happens is that the four bones enlarge and grow toward each other, closing up the anterior fontanel.

Dr. Kisch also pointed to the rather intriguing similarity of the infant’s skull with the four suture lines meeting at the lozenge-shaped fontanel and the tsikúri, the thread cross Lumholtz erroneously called “eye of

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god.” What makes Dr. Kisch’s suggestion especially interesting is the fact that the tsikúri is mainly a children’s symbol, made and used ceremoni­ ally for the protection of small children under age five and also for votive offerings that are left in sacred places when children are desired. The tsikúri characteristically has a lozenge-shaped center, set off by differ­ ently colored yarn. Ramón: And then Tatéi Niwetúkame says that at such and such an hour she is going to send

this thing. This crown of the head, this soft spot, that which gives it its life. The soft spot on the head. Because when the baby is born, they are very soft up there. That is where the crown is formed, that which is of bone, which we call küpüri. That is the

life, the soul. And then, in five minutes, Tatéi Niwetúkame sends all that. Then the child is perfectly formed. This happens five minutes before it is born. It takes just five minutes to form the

baby perfectly. Then it takes shape completely, it is completed. Now it may happen that Tatéi Niwetúkame decides to change the child’s sex before it is born. This might be for her own reasons, or it might be that the mother has recently lost a child and

would like one of the same sex to replace it, or if the family has expressly wished for either a boy or a girl. If Tatéi Niwetúkame does not want the child to be a girl, or a boy, be it for one

reason or another, she transforms it. The sex is changed and a boy comes out as a girl, or a girl as a boy. This happens in those same five minutes when the woman

is still in pain; it is because Tatéi Niwetúkame is transforming the little girl into a

little boy. Or it may be the other way. If the baby is being transformed by Tatéi Ni­ wetúkame, it comes out different. Because things are not the same as before. Its sex

has been changed. But if Our Mother has transformed the sexes of the child, the little boy can be born with a little girl’s face. Because it was first a little girl. For that

reason there are many Huichols among us who are almost like women in their faces.

They have faces that are soft like a woman’s. But then when it is born it goes, with all its thinking, with its crown on the head, that soft spot where the bone grows, where

the life ofthe soul is. With its wrist bands, its ankle bands, its sandals. In everything

it is fully Huichol.

Ramón now turned to perils to the soul and the nature of what Huichols call küpüri, the general meaning of which seems to be the vital principle of the self located at the top of the head at the level of the anterior fontanel or tonsure. The loss of this vital principle, through an accident or theft by an itáuki, a kind of emissary dispatched by a shaman in his negative role as sorcerer which has the form of a small malignant animal, the affected individual suffers the equivalent of “soul loss,” in

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Huichol called kupiiripiya or kupiiricuiniya (Stacy B. Schaefer, personal communication 2004). Ramón: All during the life of the person, la vida, the life, lives in the head. It is the soft spot,

the crown of the head. It is the same thing, the crown and the life, which we call küpüri. Küpüri, that is the crown, the life of the soul. The life of the soul of the man lives in the head. And the same forthe woman. Becausethat is where we think. If one receives a blow on the head, one cannot think. One becomes unconscious. The one

that has lost his thinking does not know what to do. He does not know that his life

has been lifted from him, from up there in the crown of his head. He does not know what he is doing. The life force, it is as though it were connected to one by a fine

thread. It is like a spider’s silk, this thread. That is what it is like, like the web of the spider. When one is asleep, the life can leave the body. It can leave and roam about.

It roams about this way and that. But it does not wander far away. But even if it does

not wander far away, it is possible for a sorcerer, or some animal that has been sent by a sorcerer [the itáuki], to capture that soul.

The man wakes up ill in the morning. He does not know what happened. Then

they call the mara’akáme. He goes about searching for that life, that soul, to bring

it back. If he does not find it, the man dies. We have many barrancas in our country. When one goes out to cut firewood orto clear brush for planting, it happens that one

can trip over a stone. One falls and then goes rolling down, down, down. One falls there and one hits one’s head on a rock. Then the küpüri, that which is the soft spot

on the head, the crown of the head that is the life of the soul, falls to one side. The küpüri falls and is frightened.

One lies there and one cannot think. One is not dead and one is not asleep. But

one lies there, not moving. Then after a while one gets up from there, feeling bad. One feels very ill, because one does not know what happened. One does not know

about one’s head. One cannot think properly. One has no thoughts. One is out of one’s mind, as one says. One walks off-balance. It is because everything fell. One gets up after a time, but one does not feel well. One walks and walks, one climbs up there not feeling well. The head aches. One returns home but cannot do anything. One lies there,

feeling ill. Then the relatives go to the mara’akáme. They say to him, “Well, this and

that happened to our relative. This man fell. This one fell in such and such a place.” The mara’akáme then comes to the injured man’s rancho, carrying his takwátsi. He

takes his takwátsi, his basket, into the xiriki.

Treatment and cure depend, of course, on proper diagnosis. So far, the shaman knows only that the patient has stumbled and fallen. From the fact that he is unconscious, or in a stupor, he may assume that the worst has occurred—that the patient has lost his vital essence, his küpüri.

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But since the patient is still alive, he also knows that the küpüri has not yet become permanently separated from its owner, that is, the metaphori­ cal lifeline between them has not yet been severed by a sorcerer or by an animal. It is not enough, however, for the shaman to know that a fall has occurred and that the küpüri has been lost or mislaid. He must divine how, why, and precisely where the man fell so that he may take the proper course of action to neutralize and cure the effects of the accidental spill­ ing of the vital essence (which Ramón in this account frequently called simply la vida, the life). Once he has completed all the ritual preliminar­ ies and has obtained the agreement of help from the relevant deities and from Káuyumari, the mara’akáme sets out to discover where “the life” has been dropped and what has happened to it while the injured man made his way home. Ramón: The mara’akáme follows that life, to see where it was lost. To see where it is lying,

frightened. Where it is in danger. The mara’akáme goes walking along the trail,

where the man walked. He listens with his arrows, with his feathers. He goes search­

ing, searching. He goes listening, to see where that life was dropped. He goes with his thoughts, his own life force, on the journey to discover. Searching, listening and listening, until he arrives where the man tripped and rolled over into the barranca.

Where that man fell down. And even if it is a perilous place full of sharp rocks, full

of dangerous animals, with scorpions and snakes, the mara’akáme is not afraid. He

goes looking down there, looking and looking. Even if he were to fall down and hurt himself, the mara’akáme must not be afraid. Even if there are dangerous animals

there, he must not be afraid. He goes looking, listening, listening with his arrows, in his heart. He goes looking to see where he can hear it. Because the life of that man begins to cry as we cry. As one cries when one is lost, lost far away in the barranca where

one cannot find his way back. There one says, “Oh, oh, where am I? What am I doing here? What shall I do? Where shall I go? I am lost here.” One cries and one whim­ pers. That is how the life, the soul ofthe man, also cries. And the mara’akáme, he lis­

tens for all that. He comes closer and it begins to whimper. It hisses and whistles like

a soft wind. It hisses softly, in the same manner in which Tatewari hisses when he is first lit, when the wood that is his food is not dry. It hisses and whistles like that. The mara’akáme listens to this sound with his feathers, with his arrows. Then

he goes there very carefully, very slowly. He may find the life under a branch, or under a leaf, or under a small stone as he walks there on the ground. That life, it is

only as small as the smallest insect, the smallest tick. That is how small it is. So the

mara’akáme comes close, there where that life is whistling. And he whistles back, very softly, so that the life can hear him. That is how they call out to one another.

Wherever that life is, that is where the mara’akáme goes to look for it. Then with his

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feathers, with his power, he calls out to Tatéi Niwetúkame. He calls to her and asks if

it is possible to lift him up. To lift up that life. He calls to Tatéi Niwetúkame because

she is in charge of all the children. It is she who put that life into that person [before he was born]. Then she says, “Yes, why not? Of course.” She tells the mara’akáme,

“Lift him up quickly before some animal comes and eats him up. Lift him up before some sorcerer comes and takes him.” Because if an animal eats it up, that man dies.

Or if a sorcerer comes to take it, he becomes sick, each day he becomes more sick and then he dies. Then the mara’akáme takes a little wad of cotton. He has brought this wad

which is like cotton to lift up that life, to protect it. He lifts the life up with his plumes, carefully, carefully. On the tips of his feathers, very slowly, very carefully, he lifts it up. It is very small, that life, tiny, tiny. So small one can hardly see it. He takes that life

and wraps it up in the cotton. He has a small reed, a piece of cane that is hollow. He

puts the küpüri inside, he puts that life inside there, in the center. Then he closes it up with cotton. Each end he closes up in this manner. Then he places it inside his

takwátsi. He puts the life inside the takwátsi and closes it up. Very carefully he ties it. Then he takes it away. Then the mara’akáme goes walking, walking. He returns to the house where the

sick man is lying. He brings him into the xiriki. There he lies inside, that man who lost his life. Then the mara’akáme takes out the life from the hollow reed. He puts it on the man, he puts that life on the crown of the head, where the baby has the soft

spot. He puts it there, inside the head. And that little wad of cotton that contains the

life, that also goes inside. The cotton disappears inside the head with the life. And the man comes back to life again.

At this point Ramón’s narrative shifts from the successful cure of what we would interpret as concussion, and he as soul loss, to the post­ mortem ceremony Huichols call, in translation, “Time to Say Farewell.” This important rite was briefly mentioned by Preuss and more recently described in rich detail by Marina Anguiano, the same Mexican anthro­ pologist with whom I collaborated on the description and analysis of ceremony called Tatéi Neixa, “Our Mother the Drum,” of which one function, apart from the festive reception of the first ripe squash and their identification with young children, is the children’s inculcation with the Wirikúta tradition (Anguiano and Furst 1978; Anguiano 1996). Back to Ramón: Now that life force, that soul is a small shiny insect, a luminous little fly, pure, pure, almost transparent. The soul does not wish to be captured, but the mara’akáme blurs its vision by shining his feathers into the soul’s eyes. Then it is as if the soul

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becomes drunk. Then that life says, “Well, yes, I will come to my relatives but they

must all be together. I want all my brothers to come, all my relatives.” Then the mara’akáme tells them, if that soul was a woman, “She says she will

come but she did not want to come.” And they are all very sad and they cry. They cry

at seeing that she did not want to come. They are all very sad. Everything she had in life, her loom, her bags, her clothes, her sandals, her hat, her wrist bands, her neck­

lace, her rings, everything is placed there on the platform of cane. The offering place. Everything. If she had a cow, or two or three lambs, or a goat, everything is tied up

there. If she had a small horse, they saddle it and bring it there. So that the life of the woman will come and see all this. Then they pray for her and also to Our Father Sun and the Fire, Tatewari, Our Grandfather. They all pray and say, “Let her come and see

us. We want to see her.” That is what they say to the Sun. And the Sun hears that and

says, “She will come.” Then she comes. The mara’akáme feels it with his muviéri and he calls her from a distance. He calls to her from a distance of about fifty meters from where he is standing next to Tatewari, next to the fire. Then she comes closer

and closer. Then he catches the soul, that life, with the tip of his feathers. Then after

catching it in his hand, all her relatives hear her. They greet her, that little fly. They greet her and take her hand. As you would a person, they feed her what she

wants. They give her everything there, all those things she liked best in her life. A very

little of everything, of little tortillas, and tamales, and nawá [tesgüino, maize beer], and deer meat soup. Everything, everything. It takes from two to three minutes and

she bids them farewell. “Now, brothers, sisters, sons, I am leaving.” Then she goes crying and the mara’akáme begins to cry. And he says, “She is bidding all of them farewell now, as she will not return.”

The mara’akáme begins to weep and all of them cry, her brothers, her husband, all cry. And she bids them farewell and the mara’akáme walks away with her, about

ten or fifteen meters, and she goes. She goes flying there from the hand of the mara’akáme. And he assists her, he helps her to go. He accompanies her a little part

of the way so that the life of the woman will travel in safety. And all of them cry, those relatives who have assembled there to see her, because she has gone away from them and goes to relive its life. All of it.

Ramon’s narrative now turned to the long trail that leads to the Land of the Dead. But now the traveling soul is burdened by the physical evi­ dence of her or his sexual life: penises by the woman, vulvas by the man. No punishment is implied; on the contrary, when the soul arrives at the rancho or ranchería where her or his deceased relatives are waiting, it flings the disembodied sexual organs into a great tree (either the zalate [wild fig] or a generalized tree of life growing in the underworld), serving to knock down the fruit to feed and to be fermented into an alcoholic

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drink with which to intoxicate the assembled deceased and their newly arrived guest in a welcoming celebration. I recorded and published Ramón’s funerary narrative in 1967. Twenty-three years later the Mexican journal Tlalocan resumed publi­ cation after a long hiatus following the untimely death of its founding editor, Fernando Horcasitas. In the United States, Fernando, who was fluent in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, was best known for his and Doris Heyden’s splendid translation into English of Fray Diego Durán’s Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar (1971). In these pages we will meet him again as the author of a valuable but little-known cross-cultural study of the dog as genetrix of a new human race after the universal flood that drowned a previous world (see Chapter 8). I happened to be in Santa Fe when Jill Furst called to tell me about a wholly unexpected Hopi parallel to the climax of Ramón’s narration, published in the first issue of the revived Mexican journal. The Hopi tale of a journey to the land of the dead was one of many recorded by Edward Kennard on Second Mesa, Arizona, in 1934-35 and 1938-39, but had never before been published. It tells of a brother and sister who once lived at Oraibi. They preferred each other’s company to that of others and refused even to participate in the social dances. The brother would go running and take ritual baths all by himself. But what he really wanted was to visit the land of the dead. He prayed to Father Sun for help, and the Sun god agreed, instructing him to make many prayer feathers while smoking the ritual tobacco and to go to sleep on the fifth night without telling anyone other than his sister of his plans. And so he sets out in the company of the Sun. The journey is long and difficult, and at different points along the way he encounters many people, women and men, who are also trying to reach the land of the dead. They have difficulty doing so, however, because like the souls in Ramón’s Huichol narrative, they are burdened with the disembodied sexual organs of the opposite gender. To quote from Kennard’s story:

Continuing like that they came to Awatowi. They climbed up there. “All right, you must look. They are coming along,” he (the Sun God) said to him. He looked out. A big cloud was approaching. Once more he advised him: “Again you must not say anything to them (the dead).” They came up to them. There were women who had no clothes. Some had carrying baskets on their backs, and others were carrying penises on their backs. Women who had husbands from men who were already married were carrying baskets. They

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held up their carrying baskets with the string wrapped around their hair.... And others as many women as had intercourse with married men were carrying penises on their backs. Whoever she wanted very badly, that one was hanging in front from their forehead.... “All right. You will look again. Over there again. Those are the men,” he (the Sun) said to him. Continuing that way, they came upon them, too. They went the same way, too. Boys who had married men for wives had carrying baskets on their backs. And the men, however many girls they had, also had their vulvas similarly carried on their backs. (Kennard 1989:159-161)

The Hopi story has the flavor of punishment for moral infractions, and so does the Huichol tale. Ramón wanted me to understand that the sexual organs the female and male souls must carry were not those of husbands or wives but the organs of those with whom the two sexes had premarital, adulterous, or incestuous relationships. But in the Huichol version there is a useful, not to say essential, role for the disembodied organs that is lacking in the Hopi tale—although we do not know how much might have dropped out of the Hopi myth by the time of Kennard’s visit. Ramon’s narrative continues: Well, it is this way. It is one of those things that comes down to us from ancient

times. It is something we Huichols still do. Because one must know this thing cor­

rectly, so that nothing shall disappear. Because it is that when a person dies, when one of us Huichols dies, there must be this ceremony. It is the mara’akáme who makes this thing; he makes it five days

after the person dies. In these times not all mara’akáte know how to do it well. It

must be done well, from the beginning of the man’s life to when it leaves him. Be­ cause it is then that the soul, the life that is the küpüri, begins to walk. It is then that it

goes on this journey. And the mara’akáme must know how to do this thing, in order to be able to follow the trail on which the deceased one walks. From the time he was

born. He must follow him, from when he began to feed on his mother’s breast. From

the time he began to crawl. From the time he was weaned. When he worked in the

field. When he hunted the deer. All this should be known to the mara’akáme. Well, this thing is like this. From the time he came out from his mother's body,

the mara’akáme must know who it was who formed him. Who it was that helped to bring him into this world. Tatéi Niwetúkame, she is the Mother of the children. It is

she who put the life into him. And those others, Tatewari, orTakutsi Nakawé, or Tatéi

’Utuanáka, orTayaupá [Father Sun].

i88

Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams They say to him, one to other, “Well, yes, it was I. It was I who brought him into

the world.” So then one says to the mara’akáme, “Well, I brought him into this world

so that he could enjoy life many days. So that he could live many days.” And it is the same if it was a woman who died. How he lived, how she lived. One tells all that is known of that person. How he was revived when the scorpion stung him. How he was ill and the mara’akáme cured him. All that which happened to him.

It is then that the mara’akáme calls Waxiewe to help him. Waxiewe, that is the

soul catcher. He who has a noose. A sling to catch the soul as it wanders after death.

For five days it wanders. One dies in this world and then one wanders. First one trav­ els along the path one has taken through life, from the day one was born. First one

sees all that, the soul sees it all. One goes in drunkenness, one goes with women, one dances to music, one gambles, one works, one goes hunting the deer, one sup­

ports oneself well or not well. All as it was. And the mara’akáme understands every­ thing. He knows these things.

He speaks of them, he sings of everything. He knows all these things. He goes

knowing ofthem with his arrows, with his feathers. The life ofthe man who is dying,

it goes following his path of life. There is a woman, one he has known. Suddenly there is a wind, it lifts her skirts. She feels it, cold.

She says, “Ah, there was a cold wind.” But it was only the life of this man, see­ ing if she is as he knew her. The man has died and the mara’akáme recalls every­ thing. Everything he recalls as that man’s soul travels along the path of his life. The

mara’akáme says to him, “You were born at such and such a time.” He tells him

this. He speaks to it. He says, “Oh yes, and how many times did your mother speak to you in such and such a way? How many times did she caress you?" Ah, he says, his mother cared for him much when he was ill. She called the mara’akáme so that

he might be cured. The mara’akáme made his cure, and the mother, she paid him

by making something for him. Perhaps arrows, decorated with fine yarn and good

feathers. Or something else. If not that, perhaps a measure of maize. Or some cen­

tavos. Or something else. So the mara’akáme goes saying these things as he travels after the soul of the one who has died.

Ah, he is a child. Then the child begins to walk. He falls. He gets up. He crawls. And the mother says, “Right here now my son can walk. Look how he walks. It is well.

We must leave him to try his legs, to try that which he has within him.” So then he begins to walk to and fro. Then his father picks him up. He says to him, “Come with me, my son. My little

son is strong. Let us go to work. Let us go clear the brush so that he may see how one

does these things. So that he may learn to do them well. Let us cut down the brush with the machete, with the ax. Let us go chop wood. Let us go there and bring back those things which one needs in our house. You will see how it is done. So that when

you grow big you will know how to support yourself.” So the father speaks to him. And that soul, the life of the dead man that has left his head, he goes there, seeing

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all these things. Seeing how it was all his life. Then the mara’akáme says, “Well, I

have to follow his trail to see which path he took.” He follows that life to see if he can catch up with it. Well, we live in this world and one does things in one's life. Good things, bad things. One grows, one lives, one dies. And the soul, the life, follows that path from

the day he was born. He sees himself clearly. The father says, “Ah now. That boy has

grown up. He has done this thing with this and that girl. Let us ask for that girl so that he can marry her.” So they ask for the girl. They are married and everything be­

gins for him. He begins to work, to clear the brush, to burn it, to plant his maize, to build his house. All this he does so he can support his family. And the mara’akáme

goes there, following these trails, following everything. He follows his path of life. Everything, everything, everywhere, everywhere. The time when he was growing up. The time when he hunted the deer. The time when he took his dogs to run after the

deer. The time he set up his noose traps. The time he spoke to the deer. The time when he used its blood, as is our custom. All those customs we have from ancient

times. All these the life ofthe soul ofthe dead man follows. And the mara’akáme fol­ lows him, looking for everything well.

Then the soul arrives where the xápa is, the giant tree that is the wild fig we have. And then it comes to the five stones. The soul arrives there and steps on these

stones. The soul stomps on them and it makes a ringing sound, and all those over there, underneath, hear this. Ah, they know he is coming. And that noise, the stomp­

ing, is heard over there. Then there is a joyful shout, because they know that he is coming. The others that are waiting down there yell with joy because he is coming. Then it arrives at a

fork in the path, one to the left and the other to the right.

There is some agreement here between Ramón’s account and Preuss’s abbreviated version of the mortuary chant. The soul can now continue on its way, taking the right-hand path if the deceased “had a Huichol heart” or the left if he or she committed some serious offense, such as incest or sexual relations with a non-Huichol. Huichols stress “the pu­ rity of our Huichol blood,” and there seems to be general agreement that they should marry only among themselves. According to Ramón, a child is formed in the womb from the flesh of both parents in equal parts (a reflection of bilateral descent?), but its blood “is the blood of all the Huichols who have come before. Not just the father and the mother, but all the ancient, ancient Huichols, the pure black blood of the Huichol Indians.” I did not know enough at the time to ask him to elaborate, but in retrospect, and after reading Stacy’s splendid book, To Think with a Good Heart: Wixárika Women, Weavers, and Shamans (2002), it seems clear that he was talking about what Huichols call “heart-memory,” the

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idea that Huichols are born with a common cultural heritage contained in their heart and blood. He continues: The path to the left, that is the road of the vecinos (lit. “neighbors,” non-Huichols).

It is the path of those that have led a bad life. It is the path of the Huichol who has

enjoyed a vecino woman. That should not done. It is the road of a Huichol girl who has had relations with a Spaniard [Mexican]. That should not be done. If she has taken pleasure with a Spaniard, she goes to the left, down, down, down those five

steps. It is the road of Huichols who have had relations with a sister, or a brother, who have done these things with their sister or an aunt. It is all these who travel the

road to the left. Then he keeps on walking and arrives over there, but only if he had taken plea­

sure with a Spanish woman, and he comes to where there is a long thorn. If he has enjoyed the body of that woman or if he has had intercourse with a close relative, there they knock him down, those other souls. Those others knock him down and

they put that thorn into him, into his anus, and they hold him there over the fire as if

to roast him. It is to purify him. Then they take him out of there and he is frightened

of that. He is walking there, carrying many vaginas, all those which he enjoyed in life. If he is a man, he has had all these relations with women. All those vaginas one has been inside, these one carries in one’s arms. The soul carries all that and he is very tired. But in spite of that, he comes to where there are clashing mountains. He is

very frightened because he heard them crashing together.

As a virtually universal motif, Ramon’s clashing mountains or rocks require some comment. The perilous gateway on the path of the Huichol soul has its analog in the Clashing Clouds on the way to Wirikúta, but as rocks or mountains that incessantly pound against each other it is also part of Aztec tradition. For the Aztecs it is one of the several stations through which the soul has to pass on is journey to Mictlan, the land of the dead (Sahagún i952:Book IILqi). It is also illustrated in the central Mexican Codex Vaticanas A (Seler ipóodViy). Eliade (1964:485-486) calls this the motif of the Symplegades, the Clashing Islands of Greek my­ thology. It is found, in one or another form, in many parts of the world in funerary, initiatory, and heroic mythologies. These, in any event, are frequently so closely related that they coalesce. Candidate shamans, like mythical heroes and the dead on their way to the underworld, often find themselves in apparently desperate situations, such as having to discover a narrow passage in the sky before it closes, or passing between the snap­ ping jaw of monstrous animals, dancing reeds with razor-sharp edges, clashing clouds, fiery solar rays, thrashing serpents, and the like. These

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and similar themes, writes Eliade, were properly recognized by Ananda K. Coomeraswamy (1946) in an essay on the Symplegades motif as ex­ pressing the need to transcend opposites, to abolish the polarity of the human condition, in order to gain ultimate reality: “Whoever would transfer from this to the Otherworld, or return, must do so through the undimensional and timeless interval that divides related but contrary forces, between which, if one is to pass at all, it must be ‘instantly’” (Coomeraswamy 1946:486). The “paradoxical” passage emphatically testifies that he who succeeds in accomplishing it has transcended the human condition; he is a shaman, a hero, or a “spirit,” and indeed it can be accomplished only by one who is “spirit.” We return to Ramón: They are hard and sharp, those clashing rocks. One is on the right of him, and the other is on the other side. They come together, these rocks, hitting hard against each

other. And when one has done something bad of the sort of which I told you, when

one has had relations with those forbidden to one, these rocks try to catch one as one tries to pass through there. They come together with much force, those rocks, clashing together with much noise, catching the soul as it tries to walk there. And he wants to pass and he cannot. But in spite of his fear he goes there, walking quickly. Then he goes on walking. And he comes there, and once he arrives they put him

inside a big vessel in hot water. The water is bad water, it smells of bad things. It is

full of slime, full of worms. They say to him, “Ah, put your head in there, that water is fine, it is good to drink. It is like a crystal, that water, all clear. It is good for your

thirst.” For the soul is very tired, it is very thirsty. And that dead one, he is placed inside the hot water. Then they take him out. He comes out saying, “Oh, oh, how ter­ rible. My whole body is hurting me now." It is because ofthat water. Hot steam rises

from it. It hurts much, that hot water, as he travels down there. And then one comes to the place where there is a corral, where one is bitten,

where one is kicked. It is that the vecino women one has enjoyed have become mules, mules with saddles, with a bridle. If one has taken pleasure with the body of

a Spanish [meaning vecino] woman, he arrives there in the corral where one sees

them again. But it is that these women are not women as one has known them. They are just mules. They look fine, those mules, they are big, they are strong, they are beautiful. But no, they are ferocious animals. One cannot control them. He arrives

there, one’s life arrives there and then one of them says, “Come, little one, as I was the first one for you.” It is as if a Spanish woman is speaking. But no, it is a mule, a woman who has become a mule. Then they throw him down on the ground. They stomp over him, they kill him. Then he gets up. He says, “Ah no, here it is bad. I am leaving here.” If it is a

woman, that soul, that life, goes walkingthere; if she has enjoyed foreign men, those

mules are men. They are machos, as one says. They kick her, they step all over her,

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they kill her. One of them says, “Ah, come over here, I am that man who enjoyed you.” But it is a mule that is speaking there. They stomp on her, they kill her there in

that corral. And she says, “Oh, this is not good for me. I am leaving here." On the proper path it is not as it was on that other one. Here one walks if one is

a good Huichol. It may be that one has been on that other road, that one on the other

side. Or it may be that one has taken only one step along it. One has looked down there, down to that corral. But no, one says to oneself, this is not good. This path is not good to take. If one is Huichol, one does not take that road. It is only when

one has acted badly, in the manner of which I told you. One looks, down, one sees how it is on that road which goes to the left. Then one turns to take that other road. Ah, there are many things here on that road which one must pass. These things one passes after one has made that noise, after one has stomped on the black rocks so that those over there know one is coming. First one comes to where there is a dog. It is a male dog. It is black, that little

dog, with a white spot on its throat. It stands there, that dog, as if it is tied up. It is barking there. It is as if it wants to bite that soul as it tries to pass. One asks permis­

sion of that dog to pass, because there is water over there. One must pass through that water. And that little dog says to the soul: “Oh, I am so hungry. Why were you

mean to me over there? You did not feed me well. You would eat in front of me. You

would let me be hungry as you ate your tortillas, as you ate your maize. As you ate your beans you let me starve. And now you want me to open this way for you? How

can you expect such a thing? You would throw stones at me. You would beat me. Oh

no, I shall not make way for you. On the contrary, I shall perhaps bite you.” That is why, when one of us dies, we make little tortillas for him to take along,

little thick tortillas. They are put in a bag, he puts them in a bag which he carries. So that he can feed that dog. Be it a man or a woman who died, that soul brings those

tortillas to feed the dog. Because the dog says to that soul, “Give me something to

eat now, so that I may let you pass.” And that soul takes out some of this food and gives it to the dog. Because that

poor little dog is hungry. It is from ancient times, when it died, that little dog. It

died and then it remained there, to stand watch on that road. Then the man or the

woman, the life ofthe man or the woman who died, takes the tortillas out ofthe bag.

Five little tortillas, made from the five colors of maize. The soul takes out the food and gives it to the little dog.

The dog is busy eating and right away that soul leaves. Right away, as the dog is

busy eating, the soul can pass and it keeps on eating.

The tradition of the dog as guardian of the underworld is not limited to the Indian Americas. In the circum-Pacific area it is often also associ­ ated with the motif of the dog as ancestor. She is certainly that for the

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Huichols. We recall that in the deluge tradition a little she-dog transforms into a woman when the skin she has temporarily shed is burned to prevent her from resuming her canine identity (see Chapter 8). With Watákame, Clearer of Fields, as her mate, she becomes the founding mother of a new human race and, by extension, associates the ancestors of the Huichols with the assorted peoples of the arid north, their own ancestors included, whom the Aztecs called “Chichimecas,” meaning—what else?—lineage of the dog. As the soul continues on its journey, it encounters several other ani­ mals that initially bar its way. The first is a crow that tells the soul it didn’t like being chased away when the maize was ready for harvesting. But it is the second, Opossum, that really counts, because as the animal that stole fire from its guardians in the underworld and gave it to the people, it has an honored place in Huichol oral tradition and in the tuki, the circular temple. To continue with Ramon’s narrative: He walks through there, that soul, and he comes to where the crow is. That is the crow that roams our fields when we are ready to pick the maize. The crow wants to

steal our maize and we are angry at him for this. For this reason we have someone who waits in the field so he can chase the crows away. We say, “You ugly crow, only doing damage." So we speak in this world, not knowing that it is over there that one

has to pay. That is why the crow sits there, eating in front of us. He sits there eating well, that crow. His tortillas, his beans, his chile made in a bowl which is especially for that purpose (Huichol sunáme, Mexican-Spanish molcajete, from the Nahuatl

molcaxitl). Eating there very peacefully, very contented, belching. And we walking there with hunger, carrying that load. That life asks the crow

for some food but the crow tells him: “No, I won’t give you any. You see, you did

not feed me over there, you would not let me eat. You said I was a thief, that I stole things from your field. You said I was damaging your maize. You said this, that, and the other. Now I will not feed you as you did not feed me over there. I will not give you tortillas or anything.”

So that life says, “Very well, if that is how it is.” The soul tells that crow, “If that is how you are, very well, don’t give me anything." And that life keeps on walking,

carrying all those things, all those vaginas, or all those things of the man, whichever

it may be. All those things one has enjoyed over there. Then he comes to where there is Opossum. He arrives there and Opossum

says, “Open your mouth.” He says to that soul, “Let me see now, didn’t you eat me?” And there where he arrives, he opens his mouth and sees whether he has been eaten by that man, by that woman. Those dead ones. Opossum says, “If you have eaten

me over there, I am going to put you in a trap.”

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Opossum has a trap there, a big stone, a flat one, very heavy. That stone is held

up by a small stick, to catch the one who has eaten his meat. But when one has not eaten the meat of Opossum, nothing happens to him. He passes through the trap,

safely. Do you know why Opossum defends himself in this manner? Because he is

sacred. It is he who obtained Tatewari for everyone. It is because of this that we live. That is why he defends his rights.

What Ramón is referring to here is a version of the story of the theft of fire, in which Opossum, the lowliest of the animal people who then populated the world, succeeds where higher-ranking ones have failed and returned empty-handed from the quest for fire. Opossum volunteers and succeeds in tricking the underworld guardians of fire by snatching a burn­ ing coal with his prehensile tail and escaping with it hidden in his pouch. He is pursued by the guardians of fire, who cut him into little pieces and leave him for dead. But he puts himself back together and, his tormenters having missed the bit of red-hot wood in his pouch, returns to the middle world, where his compatriots greet him as a hero. Thus, instead of being despised for smelling bad and eating offal, Opossum becomes sacred, his flesh is made taboo, and an honored place is made for him in the temple. Ramón once again: In this manner Opossum punishes those who have eaten his meat. He has his

trap there, on that path where the soul travels. That one who ate Opossum’s meat, he walks there and then the stone falls on him. It presses down on that person,

hard. Opossum lets it fall. And that life says, “Oh, oh, this hurts much." And Opos­ sum says, “That is the way it hurt me when you were eating me. Every time you bit

into my meat, it hurt me. It hurts you now? Well, it hurt me, too." So Opossum

advises him. But since many have never eaten Opossum meat, many pass through there without harm. But some remain there a while. Because one must not eat Opos­

sum's meat. It is sacred. Then that soul goes walking and walking. Very tired, very

tired. Carrying all those things of the woman, all those things ofthe man, whichever it may be.

Let us say it is a woman. Well, then, a woman is born. She is a little girl and one sees her with much affection. All love her for the reason that she will be good for man, to grind the maize, to make his tortillas. To do for him all his life as he does for

her. And then when she begins to walk, it is she who does her parents’ bidding. It is the same for the boy. Be it a girl or a boy, it is the same. Well, then, they take good care of her so that she will not fail in one manner or another. So that she will not

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commit some errors. So that she will not do these things with some boy when she is too young. But then, as one says, their custom comes to them. They are transformed. And then they begin to dream things. In this manner things come to their minds and

one watches them much. Métsa [the Moon] comes to them, as one says. Then one watches over her, more or less until she is fifteen, sixteen. Well, then she begins to do

these things with some man. She takes pleasure with this man and that, even when

she is married. This happens. These things are transgressions, but there are many women who get crazy notions. They do these things very much. I tell these things

to you because all this comes back to them when they die. It is that when they die, when she is going to die, that woman remains there without speaking. Many hours,

sometimes twenty-four hours. Just breathing a little in the heart. Because she has committed many errors with those different persons. The woman should take care

of herself, as it is said. But no, in this way the woman is not as true as is the man.

Needless to say, Huichol women would hardly agree with this male­ centered view, as indeed was the case with Lupe, who, listening, burst into sardonic laughter. Ramón frequently insisted that Huichol women are sexually more aggressive than men and that men could endure sexual deprivation with greater equanimity and for longer periods than women. Other men agreed. Whether any of this is founded on fact is, of course, extremely doubtful. Ramón: For that reason some women take longer to die, because they see all that they have done when they were young girls, when they were alone. That is what appears before them at the time when they were dying. They see all that, they retrace all their steps

through life. Well, there are women who do not know howto behave. In that manner she has more transgressions than we men. Because they should take care of themselves. Well, when they die, whoever brought them into this world, those great ones, they

say to her, “Look, why did you enjoy so many ofthe men’s things?” And then the Old One puts out his arms, or if it is one of Our Mothers, she puts out her arms, and

they show the amount of the men’s things she has taken pleasure with. To commit

so many errors! And the poor woman has to carry all this. The poor woman, the life of that woman, goes tired, tired, tired, saying, “Oh, how tired I am, having to carry

so many things.” And they say to her, “Well, that is your pleasure. That is what you wanted to do over there where you lived.” They say, “Well, look, why did you want so

many things? You kept at it, you kept at it. Now you must take the whole bunch.”

That is how they speak to her. They say to her, “You used to say over there that you were never going to get tired of men's things. So this is your pleasure now.” So

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there goes that poor woman's life, carrying all that. And the mara’akáme, he follows here. So that he can catch that soul.

It is all the same, for the woman and for the man. They have to carry all the things they took pleasure with. They walk and walk, carrying it all. If it is a woman,

she arrives there at the place of the black rocks. She arrives very tired. And she gath­ ers together her bunch and throws them down there. But they tell her not to throw

them away. If it is a man, he tries to throw it all away, just like the woman. But they tell him, “No, do not throw that away. It was your pleasure, gather them up.” So they gather them up. That woman picks them up one by one. She puts them in her cape.

It is the cape which Huichol women wear. Thirsty, hungry, they have to carry these things until they arrive over there.

Well, the life of the man walks here with all those vaginas. All those women he

has enjoyed. And the woman walks there with all these penises. All those that have taken pleasure with her. Then they come to a place where there is a worm of a light color. It is a large

whitish worm, there on the ground. It has legs, this worm. And that white worm says to them, “Do you not remember me? I was the first one whose body you enjoyed.

Come and embrace me." She says to him, “Look, I was the first one you took plea­

sure with when you were new.” It is the woman who took him when he was new, as

one says. But it is not a woman. It is a fat white insect living there in the earth. And the mara’akáme, he sees all that, he follows all that as he goes there, going after that

soul. All that he says as he walks there, that soul, the mara’akáme is repeating. And he keeps on walking, walking, walking, to see where the soul is going. And the soul

catcher, that one with the noose, he is there also. He is there to help the mara’akáme, so that he can catch that soul where it should be caught. And with the woman it is just the same. If it is a woman, that life, then that white worm says to her, “Come and embrace me, my little one. I am that man you enjoyed

when you were new. I am that man with whom you took your pleasure.’’ But it is only

a worm. It changes into something else.

The symbolism of sexual indiscretion here closely resembles that of the Aztecs, though for the latter it seems not to be related to the journey of the soul through the underworld. In trying to explain the nature of the “white worm,” Ramón referred to it as nixtiquil, a borrowing from the Nahuatl, and described it as “large worm that lives in the earth. It is a symbol which we use for when a boy becomes a man and then he takes his pleasure with a girl, as one does. Or when a girl-child is transformed in­ side, when she becomes a woman, and then she takes her pleasure with a man.” Sahagún (i^ójiBook XL99) describes the nextecuilin (or nesticuil, nixticuilin, etc.) as follows: “It is like all the cinocuilin, ashen, chalky, greenbacked, its dwelling in the earth, in the earth it hatches, it lives. It

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eats earth. When it does not rain, it attacks the maize stalks; it cuts them at the root. And although there are its legs, it sometimes travels only by going on its back. So for that reason one who is not discreet is called nextecuilin: because he does not live as everyone [else] lives.” Although it is often quite colorful and not, as described here, pale or whitish, some of this sounds like the subterranean Jerusalem cricket (Stenopelmatus fuscus}, a large member of the cricket family found in the western and southwestern United States and Mexico. Mexicans call it niño de la tierra, for its large and shiny head. There is a widespread belief that it is deadly poisonous, a reputation that, although its powerful jaws can inflict a painful bite, is wholly undeserved. It feeds on live and dead vegetation and makes a sound like the shaman’s drum, something that a Huichol would hardly have missed. Ramón: Well, then that life goes walking. He leaves that worm, he doesn't pay any attention

to him. He arrives there were there are two pools of water. One of them very clear, like crystal, the other full of worms, full of many things. He is wanting to reach that

water, that fine water. But they tell him, “No, drink from this one.” And he is given water to drink, full ofworms, ugly, foul-smelling, smelling like leaves that have fallen

in there from the trees. Evil-smelling, with many things in it, with many earthworms. They say to that life, “Ah, you want clean water, clear, beautiful. Well, drink this, this is clean.” But what they drink there is not good. Well, that life goes on walking, thirsty, tired, very tired. Very hungry. If it is a

woman, always with her hands full of those things, those men’s things she carries. And with the man it is the same.

Well, that life comes over there where they are waiting for him. And he yells,

that life, he yells and he calls out to those others who have died before him. That is

where the tree is, that large tree, that which is called xápa. It is the wild fig tree. They are héwixi, ancient, ancient people. They are waiting there for that life. They have souls just as we have but they are the ancient ones, those that have gone over there

before. They are as they are. That is what they are there for, waiting to make those ceremonies with that life.

So that life calls out, “Brothers, sisters, I, too, am coming where you are. I am going over there.” Then those others there become happy. They say, “Oh, fine, here comes my brother. My brother is coming.” And they say, “Ah, it is my sister who is

coming.” Whichever it may be, that is how they call out: “My brother, my sister, is coming.”

They are shouting, “Ah, now we are going to eat! Ah, now we are going to eat those fruits that are on that tree.”

Then someone plays his violin, if he has such a thing. He plays this song that those others over there can hear it. They hear and they say, “Oh, he is coming now.

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Now let us go and eat. We are very hungry. Surely he is coming, surely we are going to eat now."

Very well. Then after taking five steps he comes to the tree, which is a very large wild fig tree. Then that man who is carrying the vaginas of the women he enjoyed

tells his brothers, “Yes, my brothers, now we are going to eat.” If it is three women he

has enjoyed in his life, or four, or five, however many it may be, he has these things with him. He carries them all in his hand. He says, “Yes, my brothers, now I am going to throw these women’s things into the tree." He says to them all, “I am going to throw them as one throws a stone. I will throw one up there to see how many of

those fruits will fall down from that tree.” So he speaks.

This part of the story recalls the Christian tradition that he “that overcometh” will be given “to eat of the Tree of Life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God” (Revelations of St. John, II. 7, quoted in Coomeraswamy 1946:488). It is doubtful, however, that the Huichol fig tree owes anything to Christian sources. Either as tree of life or as sha­ manic tree as axis mundi, the wild fig is embedded not only in Huichol cosmology and several myths but has very wide distribution in the Indian Americas as well as the Old World. The violin mentioned in the narrative is, of course, of European origin. The linguist Joseph Grimes (personal communication 1966) suggests that the small, crudely made but aston­ ishingly effective violins and guitars used by the Huichols reached them rather early after the conquest, that is, long before the colonial authori­ ties established civic, religious, and military control over the Huichol and Cora territories in the Sierra Madre Occidental in 1722. The melodies played on them are based on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish carols adapted to the Huichol musical idiom and sense of rhythm. One other point: drinking from a vat or pool of filthy water repeats one of the already mentioned ordeals on the left-hand path. The frustrated as well as successful quest for a “Water of Life” is a common theme on the mythic journey through the underworld (Coomeraswamy 1946). This, however, should not be confused with the “Water of Life” in Kwakiutl and other Northwest Coast traditions recorded by Boas, Hunt, and Curtis. Rein­ forced during pregnancy by enormous quantities of the growth hormone called gonadotropine, this Water of Life reveals itself to be a metaphor for life-restoring and transformative human urine (Furst 1990). We re­ turn to Ramón: He says to them, “Ah yes, now I do have something to throw at those fruit, some­ thing I can throw up there." And then he throws those things at the fruit. He strikes

the tree with those vaginas and then they start to fall. Many fruit fall down there.

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After throwing the first vagina, he throws the rest to one side. He leaves them there, all in one heap. They're where those others have thrown them, those that came

before. There is a pile of them there, some dressed, some without a thing on, some well covered—well, there is this pile of vaginas. He leaves them there, lying where

he threw them. Well, that woman, that life ofthat woman, she arrived there in the same manner.

There where the tree is, where they are waiting. It is very large, that tree, very high,

with five branches and five roots. It has many fruits, that tree. There where she ar­ rives, that woman’s life makes a sound. It is a sound like that made by the dove. She calls out, “Kukurukú, kukurukú!" And the boys with whom she has taken pleasure hear her and they clap their hands together and say, “She has come now.” All those

that are over there hear her and say, “Ah, our sister, she has come.”

Then she takes the man’s thing and she throws it at the tree. She throws it at those fruits and as the thing is very big, many fruits fall down. She says, “Ah, this

was good. It throws down much.” Then she says, “And here is another one. And an­ other and another.” Five throws with strong sticks, those men’s things. The woman

throws them up there. And the others she throws away. They remain there. There in

that pile, that pile of men’s things. Where the tree is.

And all those who are waiting there, they shout, “Ah, now we are going to eat!” And they eat there, they eat those fruits which have fallen down from that tree. The life ofthat man, and of that woman, they have knocked down those fruits. Now they all eat there together.

Well, then. They arrive where they are dancing, those who have died before. They are dancing there to the music of the Huichol violin. He arrives and there are many

pretty Huichol girls there, fully adorned, very well painted on their faces. All are danc­ ing around Tatewari, some drinking, some already drunk. Some are there already

wanting to fight because they have drunk so much. And the one who is playing for them, his hand is almost breaking from playing so much. And the one who is sing­ ing there, drunk from having drunk so much, he is close to Tatewari, very close, very

close, because he does not know where he is going from having drunk so much.

And that life arrives over there and his brothers embrace him. They say to him,

“Come, brother, let us go dance, let us follow the dancing.” So he gives five turns around the fire, dancingthere in a circle as one does on this earth.

And that woman, that girl, in the same manner. She arrives and all embrace

her, her brothers, her sisters, all of them just as we do here. In the same manner over there. She asks, “You there, did you come first?” He says, “Well, yes." She says,

“Come and embrace me. You know I am yours and you are mine.” And he says, “Well, then, if that is how it is." And he says, “Come, let us dance.” They go danc­ ing, dancing, dancing, to the music of the Huichol violin. It is exactly as it is with

the man. Then they go on, first to this ceremony, then to that. It is that they are going to

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the ceremonies of the héwixi, who came before. All those dances are the same, only they are ancient. He goes to the ceremony of the parched maize, there where they

are around Tatewari. Again he gives five turns around the fire. There they eat the peyote. They grind the peyote and they mix it with water. They grind it in a special way and they mix it and then they drink it. They eat it and they drink it. And they drink the

nawá, they drink and drink and drink. And they sing their song, “Ah, our brother, now you have arrived and here we are dancing, dancing well.” So they sing and he gives five turns around Tatewari. Then he travels again, walking, walking. He comes to the ceremony which is

called Dance of the Spindlewhorls. There one drinks much nawá again, nawá, nawá,

nawá, as one does over here. They are singing, “Dance, dance, dance, you spindle­ whorls.” This is danced in a quarry of stones, the stones from which one makes the

tepári (stone disk) of Tatewari. He makes another five turns there. He drinks nawá. He eats fish soup with those others. He eats deer soup with those others. And the same with the woman. And they go to the place where they are dancing the Dance of the Nanáwata,

which is like the fifth place where they dance. One, two, three, four, five—all those ancient ceremonies. There they dance the nanáwata, there they throw the balls of

yarn. It is very ancient, this dance. That is why we still have this ceremony, because it comes down from ancient times.

He gives five turns, dancing the nanáwata. He continues there, dancing and

dancing. They are all together there, throwing those balls of yarn back and forth. And he is drinking there, drinking the nawá as one does. And they drink tsinári [Mexican-Spanish atole, from the Nahuatl atolli] of maize of five colors, drinking a drink made from chocolate. He is going to and fro, very drunk. One of them speaks to him, saying, “Ah, my brother, why have you taken so

long, why have you not come before?” And he says, “Well, it is this way and that, that is why.” And the same with the woman. They say to her, “Ah, my sister, we waited and

waited and you did not come. Now you have come at last.” And she says, “Yes, I have come at last.” Well, then the mara’akáme and the soul catcher, that one we call Waxiewe, they

are waiting there, trying to catch that life. Ah, he is ready to fall down as he dances there with those others. He says to them, “My brothers, I am enjoying myself very

much.” He says this to them as he dances there with a pretty girl at his side. And that woman also, she is enjoying all that, dancing with all those boys who have gone before. Then the mara’akáme speaks to the soul catcher, “Now is the time.” They are

ready to catch him. All this the mara’akáme sees, all this he tells the relatives as they wait there for that life.

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And if that life is a man, the mara’akáme says to those relatives, “Have you

brought the five thorns of which I told you, those five thorns of the acacia?” And

if it is a woman, he says, “Have you brought me those five burrs of which I spoke? Because it is time now.” And they say to him, “Yes, mara’akáme, we have brought

those things as you asked.” And with that he takes those five thorns, or those five burrs, whichever it may be, and he throws them there at the feet ofthe one who is dancing down there. That one dances and dances and then he jumps. He jumps up and down—ah,

one pierces his foot! He cries out, “A thorn has pierced my foot! A thorn has pricked me. Let go of me, let go of me!” And those girls who are holding his hands, they let

loose. He says, “My brothers, my sisters, come and help me, something is stuck in my foot." The girls let go of him and he sits down there to take it out of his foot. And if

it is a woman, she sits there to take away those burrs the mara’akáme threw at her. It is then that the mara’akáme says, “Waxiewe, it is time for that thing as it was

arranged.” And Waxiewe, the one who is helping the mara’akáme down there, he throws his noose, catching that life.

All this the mara’akáme tells them, as they wait up there. He describes it well,

as it happens. The mara’akáme and the soul catcher, they secure the noose around that life. With his power, with his arrows, with his colors, they blur the vision of that

soul so that it cannot see well. He has that power, because it has been given to him byTatewari, by Káuyumari.

Then he calls a wasp, a black wasp. It is like the wasp we have in this world. He

calls this wasp so that with the help of its feathers it can pick up the life of that man, if it be a man, or that woman, if that is what it is. There are five ofthese wasps, in five

colors: red, blue, white, yellow, and black. Well, that wasp lifts him up. With the help of the plumes of the mara’akáme,

that life is lifted up from there. It has been purified of everything. He arrives pure. Then the mara’akáme says to him, “Now we are taking you there where you lived in

this world so that your relatives can see you. They need you. They have food for you. They have killed a cow. They have fish, and a hen. They have brought you much to

eat. They have sugarcane there, and coffee. They have meat for you, turkey, maize,

many things. They have nawá for you because they are waiting there for you. Why

don’t you go?" The mara’akáme speaks to that life over there, so that all can hear him. But he does not want to come.

Then the mara’akáme speaks to the Sun. He says, “You with your power, he

does not want to come.” And that life says to them, “No, I do not want to go there. My brothers did not love me over there where I was. My wife would quarrel with me. My sisters, they quarreled with me. Therefore I will not go there.”

It is now that the mara’akáme informs the assembled relatives awaiting

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the “life’s” final visit that it is reluctant to appear, and everyone bursts into tears. However, the shaman tells them, it might be persuaded other­ wise if it were offered a small drink of nawá. If it nevertheless still resists, the mara’akáme calls on Káuyumari to assist him. As Ramón put it: The relatives give some of the nawá in a gourd bowl and using his plumes, the

mara’akáme gives it to the life. Ah, with that nawá he begins to change his mind. Drinking some of the nawá he begins to waver.

Káuyumari aids all that with his power. He throws many colors at that life so that it will change its mind. He erases all that which troubles the soul so that it will

change its mind, so that it will agree to appear there before everyone, so that all can greet it there, so that it will leave from there as it should [in its new manifestation as

a luminous fly].

About eighteen months before these interviews about the soul and its chthonic journey, Ramón’s father died of what was apparently ter­ minal tuberculosis, along with the effects of old age. Ramón had taken the dying old man out of a Guadalajara hospital and the two had headed for Paso de los Muertos, in the Huichol rural colony on the lower Rio Lerma in Nayarit, where Kuka, the wife he had deserted years before and Ramón’s and his sister Concha’s blind shaman mother, had her rancho. According to Ramón, his mother and Concha, who was also a practicing mara’akáme, had preserved the sacred muviéri and other power objects of his paternal grandfather, who had been a well-known mara’akáme. Ramón’s father did not want to die among strangers in the city but among his own people, where he could be sure the proper mortuary ceremonies would be held to send his soul to the afterworld. Ramón and his now very frail father made it as far as a place called Cofradía, Jalisco, and here, a ten-hour ride on horseback still separating them from Paso de los Muertos, the old man could go no farther. He died in the house of a vecino (mestizo) acquaintance and was buried near the town. The soul­ catching ceremony was held, as he had requested, on land Ramón and an uncle owned at Paso de los Muertos. For years Ramón’s attitude toward his father had been one of ambiv­ alence and even bitterness, because when Ramón was still a young boy his father had left Kuka and the children to fend for themselves, the life of privation and poverty Ramón described in one of his autobiographical sketches (see Chapter i). With the passage of time, and especially since the old man’s death, Ramón said he had begun to understand that his desertion was caused largely by loss of hope—there was never enough

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arable land to go around in their native San Sebastián, in part because the land was so rugged, in part because of unchecked and illegal land invasions by mestizos. And then came the bloody Cristero Rebellion, virtual civil war in the Sierra, and the flight to the lowlands. In later years Ramón saw his father off and on, and when the old man finally arrived in Guadalajara, obviously very ill, Ramón went to see him in the hospi­ tal. One time he returned from a visit to the sickbed very agitated and troubled. When pressed he said his father had scolded him for “revealing things one should not talk about to others.” Later he told us that his fa­ ther had come to understand his motives and said that when he died, he would return to “guard me well.” It turned out that this referred to what Ramón was about to tell us now, that in Huichol belief five years after death the essential life force, or what we might call the soul, can rejoin the living in the form of a rock crystal, or some other small, oddly shaped and colored stone, there­ after serving to give counsel and protection to the living through their shaman. In this form it is called by a new name. No longer küpüri, literally “fuzzy hairs,” in reference to its location at the “soft spot” or crown on the head, or, postmortem, xáipi’iyári (xáipi = “fly or flying insect,” ’iyári = “heart or essence”), it is now, variously, tewari, “grandfather”; uquiyári, “guardian, protector”; or ’uru’iyári and ’urukáme, from ’uru, “arrow.” The latter, roughly meaning “arrow person,” refers to the com­ pound hunting and ceremonial arrow to which a small cotton wrapping or miniature bundle containing a bamboo tube with the life force as rock crystal is attached. At either end the tube is closed off with a wad of wild cotton from the cottonwood tree, replicating the tube in which the soul as firefly is entrapped and returned to the land of the dead in the Huichol version of the well-known Orpheus tradition, first recorded by a Span­ ish colonial priest in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. I should also note that the several dances mentioned by Ramón in his narrative replicate those encountered by Watákame, the lone human survivor of a universal flood, his little dog companion, and Takutsi Nakawé, the white-haired Great-grandmother goddess of the earth, fertility, and re­ generation (see Chapter 8). Ramón emphasized that not all souls come back as rock crystals, nor would it be considered especially desirable that they do so. Unmentioned was what the French anthropologist Michel Perrin reported, that “crys­ tallization of the soul” can also be experienced by someone still alive, though surely more rarely (Perrin 1996). Ramón:

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Only the life that is sixty, seventy years old, the old people, those with wisdom, come back. Not those who died at twenty-five, or at thirty, those not. Because they are not yet complete, they are not wise, they are not mara’akáte or other wise people. They do not have the complete years, they are incomplete. Those more than fifty, those yes. They have experience, wisdom, knowledge. These come back after five years. Men that are sturdy, that have learned well, that have taken heed, with much energy and strength, their thoughts filled with much wisdom. And the same for women,

women who are wise, who have gone for the peyote [in Wirikuta], who have had that knowledge, all these, yes.

My father will soon have been dead for two years. Then the third, the fourth, and at the fifth year, one will catch his soul then. It will come back to us because my

father, even though he deserted my mother, he has this knowledge, this wisdom. He

knows all those things. And my grandfather, the mara’akáme, my uncle has him. His soul has already

been caught, and it is where my uncle lives, on his rancho.

My uncle has him because he was left in charge of my grandfather’s soul. The life of my grandfather called out to him from over there, when it was formed out of his bones, and so it is my uncle who has him. And once we catch my father we are going to place him together in the xiriki, my

grandfather and my father. And when my mother passes away—she is over seventy

now, I don’t know exactly, but she is very old—when she has died, we will also catch her soul after five years. Because my mother thinks very much with her head. Very

much. We will catch her soul and put them together. All these together because they have much knowledge, they have thought very

much. But boys and girls, twenty, thirty, no. What thoughts could such young ones have?

The following is Ramón’s account of the formation of the life force, or soul, into a rock crystal, the manner in which “the life” of the deceased manifests its desire to rejoin the relatives on earth, and the rituals that must be observed to facilitate its return and reincorporation into the com­ munity as a spirit watching over and guarding the living. Ramón’s narra­ tive is an “inside view” of events during a mortuary ritual my Mexican colleague and long-time friend Marina Anguiano Fernández observed and published in English translation as “Miiiiqui Cuevixa: ‘Time to Bid the Dead Farewell’” (Anguiano Fernández 1996), and about which Pre­ uss also wrote, likewise from the point of view of the sympathetic and insightful observer. As Ramón explained it to me, Huichols conceive of rock crystals as the transparent consolidation of the bones that contain the life force.

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Huichols share with other Mesoamerican Indians, including the Maya of highland Guatemala, and many other indigenous peoples, the concept of the bones as the seat of life and source of resurrection or rebirth. Why the bones? I can think of no better answer than the one the German eth­ nologist Leonhard Schultze Jena (1933), who studied the religion of the Quiché Maya of highland Guatemala in the 1920s, heard from a Maya shaman: Look at the avocado, he was told. Its flesh decays but its hueso (bone) survives, and it is from this that the new tree grows. Hueso is what Mexicans and Guatemalans call the large hard seed of avocados, peaches, or apricots, in place of semilla, seed. It makes perfect sense, of course. I should also note that Huichols are hardly alone in identifying rock or quartz crystals with the ancestors. Much the same has been reported from Aboriginal Australia, Siberia, and South America. The similarity between Huichol and South American beliefs about the power of rock crystals was noted by the late Rafael Karsten, who took his information on the Huichols from Lumholtz: Mountain crystals, precious stones, and other stones of unusual color are among the commonest charms in South America. Won­ derful powers are generally ascribed to them, and they are part of the special property of the medicine men and sorcerers. In many cases it is quite clear that the magical virtues of such stones are in­ timately connected with the widespread belief in mountain spirits, which... are often identified with the disembodied souls of medicine men. The idea prevailing among the primitive Huichols of Mexico is characteristic on this point. They say that the mountain crystals are mysterious persons, dead or living, and the sorcerers have crystal­ lized them after making them pass through the air. They call these crystals ancestors, and believe that they will bring them good luck in hunting. (Karsten 1964:35-36)

Walter Roth (1915:290-291, 330-331) reported that the gourd rattle {maraca) of the Arawakan shamans in Guyana was usually filled with white quartz crystals believed to be of supernatural origin. For curing and other ceremonies, the piai (shaman) shakes his rattle to invoke his helping spirits, just as do the Warao shamans in the Orinoco Delta of Venezuela. Chanting and blowing tobacco smoke, the shaman inserts white quartz crystals into slits cut in his calabash rattle, addressing each in turn as “my karéko [spirit] son,” “my karéko wife,” and so forth, thereby establishing a kin relationship between himself and a whole

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family of spirit helpers that resides in the rattle and, when he shakes and twirls the instrument, prove to be more powerful than the spirits of dis­ ease (Wilbert 1973-74: 90-93). Here is how Ramón described the consolidation or transformation of the life force, or soul, into a rock crystal and its “capture” by the fam­ ily shaman: This is the rest ofthe story ofthe soul. One says, that life says, “Well, they have made the ceremony. They have done it well. Now five more years await me. To collect the remains of my life, so that I may be all complete. So that all my remains may unite."

The life says this about all those things that are left behind on earth. The re­ mains are the bones, all of them. All ofthese bones that were left in the earth, buried

in the earth. Little by little they begin to form, these little bones begin to form.

The remains of the bones go there in order to re-form themselves. To begin to re-form themselves every year, a little every year, because at the end of the five years

there begins to form a little crystal, very small, little crystals. Very pretty, shining with colors, very transparent. In a special form, with colors, a little blue, a little red, a little

white, but small. To become ’urukáme. ’Urukáme has powers like other gods in order

to help the relatives. That is what he wants. It is that this little crystal contains all that pertains to the life, that pertains to

that man who died. When he went away he came out like a little luminous fly. All his relatives see him there as a luminous fly, flying away from there after the mara’akáme catches him. Butthen when he comes back he does not appear as a little fly. Rather it is called 'urukáme. It is tewari [grandfather], 'urukáme ortewari, it is the same.

For this reason, because it has the form ofthe pure crystalline bones ofthe life. It begins to form in those five years and then, at the end of five years, he says, “Ah, they want to have me here in the house of my relatives.’’ And in the fifth year he says,

“Well then, if I am well re-formed here, you can catch me as ’urukáme.” This is how he speaks to the mara’akáme. He tells the mara’akáme that he is reshaping himself

so that he can catch him. He says, “I am reshaping myself so that you can catch me

as 'urukáme. So that they can keep me there in their home. To become complete, all complete.” Because that is how he does this thing, with five little arrows, like the stings

of a wasp. The wasp has such a tiny little transparent arrow with which to sting. 'Urukáme forms this in the same manner. All crystalline. And then the 'urukáme can throw an arrow at him, at one of his relatives. In the ears, in his throat or somewhere.

He goes to bed at night, and then at eleven or midnight, or whenever it may be, it is

suddenly as if an arrow comes to him. The arrow falls into his ears or his throat, or

else in the stomach, or else in the heart, or else in the head. That little arrow sent by his relatives.

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Figure 23. In Huichol belief the life force residing in the bones consolidates into a tiny rock crystal. The family shaman makes it into a miniature power bundle of seed cotton from the cottonwood tree and a wrapping of embroidered cloth that, attached to a com­ pound hunting arrow (‘uru), serves as the shaman’s guardian spirit and adviser. The one shown here is from an ’urukáme that was made for Lumholtz. Courtesy American Museum of Natural His­ tory, New York. And then they go to the mara’akáme. They say, “Oh, I have an earache, I hear

a hissing sound in my ears, a noise in here, and it does not let me sleep.” Or, “I am

bleeding. It hurts very much.” They give him medicine. They put herbs in there, they put something in there to calm the ache but it does not calm it. Then they go to the mara’akáme. The relative says, “I am going to the mara’akáme to see what will

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Peyote Dreams

happen. To see what is happening because I do not believe that this is only a pain. It is not a pain that comes to one all of a sudden. No." Then they go to the mara’akáme, and he says to the mara’akáme, “Please cure

me." Whether it is a little boy or a little girl or an older person, that is how one does this. And the mara’akáme says, “I will do it if it is necessary. I will see if it is neces­

sary.” . If it is not necessary he does not sing. And if it is necessary he sings all night.

Just from seeing this person, this child or that girl or that man, just from examining him with his eyes, with his power, he sees what that is, what causes that pain. And then he says, “Ah, this is ’urukáme. He has sent an arrow to his relatives so that in

this manner they will know that he is complete.” This means that this little rock crys­ tal is complete, that he wants them to receive him, that he wants the mara’akáme to

catch him. And then the mara’akáme says, “This and that is what it is.” And he, with his

powers, with his magic and with everything, he takes out that little arrow, whatever it may be. He takes it out, he sucks it out, wherever it may be—in the ear or in the stomach or in the throat, wherever it is he takes it out. It is like an arrow of sickness. He locates it at that spot, wherever the pain may be, and then he sucks there and takes out that little arrow. And then after taking it out he has it in his hand. It

is transparent, crystalline, resembling the little bone of a fish, or the little bone of a snake, or the lance of a wasp, or a large wasp. And then he says, “Oh, this has been sent down by that life. Now it has formed itself as ’urukáme. Now he wants us to

make his little house, his little home and his arrow.” And they make his little arrow. First they cut the part that is made out of reed,

a hollow reed. And they make the point which fits into it, the point that is made out

of brazilwood. And then after they have made this arrow of hollow reed and brazil­ wood, they place bird feathers on it. The feather of the [red-tailed] hawk. And so they

form it well. And at the end they make a little cut, as one does with an arrow. And he asks that they bring him a little bit of cotton from a tree. Because there is

a special kind of tree which has seeds in which there is some of that cotton. They go and collect some of this cotton and they begin to pull it apart and they take the seeds out. That is done so that it can cover that little rock crystal which is ’urukáme.

And then after that he says, “Go and make a kau’xé," which is a little piece of

weaving. And on top of that weaving they put a design, beautiful designs. And then he says, “From this design you make a zigzag design which is like lightning, when

lightning falls." And they make this little covering as he has told them to do. And then he [the animating force or soul] says to the mara’akáme, “Now make

my xiriki [ancestor god house], standing apart, because that is where I wish to be. And my niwetári [altar], and my tepári [stone disk] and my ’uwéni.”

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For deities, especially Tatewari, miniature replicas of the full-size ’uwéni, the high-backed armchair of shamans and elders woven of reeds and wooden supports, are placed in the xiriki, the rancho oratory or ancestor god house, or the tuki, the circular community temple. In the Huichol myth of the birth of the Sun, after his explosive emergence from a now-long-dead volcano, the Sun god rises into the sky to begin his tra­ jectory from east to west. But he is so tired from his difficult journey from west to east through the underworld that he begins to sink back down, scorching the earth and threatening to burn up all life. Tatewari, who presided over the Sun god’s birth, orders an ’uwéni to be made on which the Sun may be seated while traveling through the sky at the proper dis­ tance from earth. The miniature ’uwéni for the deity is placed on either the niwetári, the ceremonial shelf or altar, or the tepári, the circular stone disk covering the center hole. The provision of a miniature ’uwéni for the life force or soul of an ancestor as ’urukáme, arrow person, emphasizes not only its identity as a powerful divine being but also its identification with the shaman. Ramón: Then the mara’akáme begins to sing. He chants and chants. With his power, with his

magic, he talks to the Sun, to the Fire. He speaks to all of them there with the help

of Káuyumari. Káuyumari speaks to them, all of them. They say, “Everything is ready. What he asked to be made for him, all that is waiting. Now the relatives have already made everything.”

Very well. After his arrow is made, it is placed inside the xiriki, which is a small

house with a roof made of dry grass. After that they place the niwetári inside it. And

on it they place a small gourd bowl which is called xukúri [Spanish-Mexican jicara, from the Nahuatlx/ca///]. And they place that there with his arrowand they have there

a tiny reed which is hollow and that is where the cotton is placed. And the weaving, the little piece of woven cloth. And once they have put those things there, then after

this offering they place a small gourd there, a little one filled with nawá.

Nowadays most xirikis, the ancestor god houses or family oratories that are an integral part of virtually every one of the widely scattered Huichol farmsteads, are rectangular and often appear outwardly very much like an ordinary dwelling. But as late as the end of the nineteenth century they were round or oval, and even today some have the same cir­ cular floor plan as the aboriginal temple, the tuki, or “great house.” The xiriki is the focus of much family ritual, as it is also the meeting place of the ancestor and nature deities when the family shaman summons them

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to join the ceremony. This does not just replicate what goes on in the community’s aboriginal temple; rather, I am convinced, the tuki, which embodies the Huichol conception of the cosmos, is nothing else than the older xiriki writ large. It should also be noted that where there is no tuki, ceremonial life centers on the xiriki. Ramón: And then about one in the morning, if the wife of that soul is still living, the

mara’akáme tells her to go inside with her cape. Inside there she places her cape, with the xukúri on it. She remains there kneeling inside the xiriki.

And the mara’akáme, with his power, stands up where he is seated by the fire, by Tatewari. He stands up there and he tells him, “Look, 'urukáme, I am coming to

meet you. I am going to take the opportunity to meet you with my arrows. On those arrows, the mara’akáme holds a nieríka which is made of vines [or reeds] found in the barranca. They make it of woven string, they put woven string on top of those

vines, with a design, and with this the mara’akáme covers himself. He protects him­ self, so that the 'urukáme will not send an arrow at him to injure him or overpower

him. So that the Sun will not send an arrow [of sickness] at him. The mara’akáme protects himself with that.

The nature and function of the nieríka requires some comments. Its meaning is “face” or “aspect,” originally of one or another deity, in this case the Sun. These complex and often very beautiful objects of colored yarn ingeniously interwoven into flat symbolic designs with thin strips of split reed or vine were erroneously identified as “back shields” by Lumholtz (1900), but in the context above, at least, they serve a protective or prophylactic purpose in that they shield the shaman against the “arrows of sickness” of either the returning soul in its form as rock crystal or the Sun god, or both. The former seems to be dangerous so long as he re­ mains by the side of the Sun, the latter because he appears unwilling to let the soul or life force return without at least some resistance. Nierikas also have other forms. In recent years the term has come to be applied to yarn paintings, in their original decorative form, but more so those that since the mid-1960s illustrate sacred myths or depict the artist’s visions. Ramón continues: And then from a distance he begins to call that life, that little crystal that came

together, that formed itself from those little bones. And Káuyumari, he helps the

mara’akáme to do this thing. Because Káuyumari, with his power, lets him take that

away. He lets the mara’akáme take that soul from the Sun. Yes, he is the stronger. He talks to him as if you and I are talking. With the same confidence Káuyumari makes

Huichol Traditions of the Soul

2.11

and unmakes [transforms]. With the power of his horns he does these things. Káuyu­

mari Máxa Kwaxi, that is Our Elder Brother, a tiny little deer. And the mara’akáme speaks to him. Only he can see him. He is the only one who sees him and sees how

he does these things. That is the reason the mara’akáme goes to him, so that Káuyu-

mari can return him, that he can bring back that life as he desires. It is that those rays of the Sun are very strong. His arrows come at you, at the mara’akáme, as he goes there looking how he can capture that soul, that life. And for that reason Káuyumari comes. He opens the way for the mara’akáme with his horns. He pushes aside those rays of the Sun, those arrows. He speaks to the Sun: “Do me your favor of putting your rays to this side and that. The mara’akáme

is blinded by those rays. He cannot see.” For this reason he pushes those rays aside

with his horns. He opens the way for the mara’akáme because he is the Deer, he

belongs to Tatewari, the Mara’akáme. And it is really so, he is stronger than the Sun. Káuyumari has more powerthan the Sun. In a way the power is the same, but as they get along so well, Káuyumari is stronger. Because when the Sun asks Káuyumari to do something for him, Káuyumari does it, and then the Sun cannot refuse to do as Káuyumari asks. And that is why he has the power to push the rays aside with his

horns. And as I said, from that distance the mara’akáme begins to call. Calling and call­

ing he goes there. First he jumps, ’urukáme gives a jump. He gives a jump and the mara’akáme sustains him. Then he jumps again and he holds him up again. And at

the third jump he holds him up again, and then the fourth, again, and at the fifth jump he meets him with his muviéri. He meets him, but far away, far away. About twenty-five meters now, far away. In the wind he comes, through the air he comes. And from where the mara’akáme

stands, over there, as he is standing this way, from far away he covers it with his plumes. All this he says in his chanting. He says, "There it goes, I am throwing it at you," and he shakes it over there, he shakes his arrows, he shakes them in this manner over there, there into the xiriki. He throws it in there, where she is waiting

for him. And that woman, or whoever it may be, she feels her relative. She feels some­ thing cold coming over her body. Inside her she feels this, there where she is kneel­

ing inside the xiriki. A little cold, a little cold, but it is really that it has fallen in there now. It has fallen inside the gourd, there where the nawá is, it has fallen in there in the form of a crystal. And then she begins to cry. His wife or relative, whoever it may be, she begins to cry. She says, “Ah, the Sun has let him come back to us. We have been able to see

him again. Even if it is not his body as he was before, with this it is enough and his life will be by our side.” So she begins to venerate there, and the mara’akáme also and the relatives, all

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Figure 24. The Sun has let the rock crystal-soul in his care fall to earth for the sha­

man to dream and find. The use of footprints to indicate a journey dates back to the Aztecs. To reach the crystal beckoning to him like a bright star, the shaman must pass safely through a fiery curtain of the Sun’s rays and overcome other ordeals. Surround­ ing the scene are the mountains on the edges of the earth. Yarn painting by Ramón Medirá, 1970. the relatives who are there waiting for him. And then the mara’akáme gives some

of his arrows to his assistant and he says to him, “Go inside the xiriki where it is ar­ ranged.” And then he spits on his arrows to prepare them. He makes a cold magic so that he [the soul] will not escape. And then the assistant goes inside the xiriki and he

comes to the gourd full of nawá. And then he lowers the plume of the mara’akáme

[the muvieri] and lowers it and lowers it and lowers it until it reaches the bottom of

the gourd. Five times he does this. This is to see that he has really come down. And since he has divined that he has come down, he leaves him in there and covers the

gourd with the nawá and that ’urukáme inside. He covers it with the arrows of the mara’akáme. And he tells the woman that he has covered him so that he will not escape, and he says to her, “Now you have it there on the niwetári.” And then they

go outside. And outside, seated on his ’uwéni, the mara’akáme begins to chant again. And he chants and chants and then that little rock crystal which he has captured in this

Huichol Traditions of the Soul

2-13

manner begins to speak. He speaks because he has come to his relatives. He tells

the mara’akáme that they should tend to his needs as it should be. He asks them to

forgive him because he has sent that illness to that person. Because it was only that he wanted to tell them that he was coming, that he was complete.

And then he says, that life, that little rock crystal, says to the mara’akáme, “Let

them prepare the incense in the incense burner, the sacred incense. And all those other things, as it should be done.” And he says to him, “Well, I have arrived and my

relatives are going to make the effort to do all those things." And in the morning the mara’akáme tells this to another person. He tells the other person these things so that no one will think that there has been an error. He

tells another person to go inside and bring out the gourd bowl with the nawá, in which there is that little stone, that little rock crystal. He brings it out and places it

next to the takwátsi Káuyumari. Then they bring out another gourd bowl, one that is empty. And he pours the nawá into that other one, little by little. And they have the arrow ready, where he has placed the cotton. And the kau’xé, the weaving, which is

the little covering. And after they have poured out all the nawá into the little gourd, then they pour it onto the cotton. And the little crystal falls there—little, very beauti­

ful, very shiny. Transparent, with many colors. And they, very rapidly they wrap it up, inside the cotton. And they put it inside the small hollow reed he has prepared. And once it is inside the kau’xé, there [attached] on the arrow, it is truly ’urukáme. Then

they put it away in there, in the xiriki.

A personal anecdote: In March 1967 Salomón Nahmad took my wife and me up to the comunidad indígena of San Andrés Cohamiata to make arrangements with the Huichol authorities for a field school for UCLA graduate students in ethnology and public health. The man to see was a respected elder I have mentioned before, a mara’akáme named Nicolás Carrillo de la Cruz, ’Colas for short. For whatever reason, he and I hit it off. During the summer I was able to spend a good deal of time with this grand old man. His clothes might have been threadbare, but his knowl­ edge and prestige were great. I was quite surprised and honored that only a day after we arrived in San Andrés and had settled the question of the field school, he invited us to be his guests in his rancho (actually, with its several dwellings and xiriki, a ranchería), right in the middle of the peyote and parching of the maize ceremony. I had my camera, and he said to go ahead and photograph anything I wanted to. The next morning he asked me to come join him in his xiriki. There was light only from the doorway, but once my eyes had become adjusted to the semi-darkness, I could make out the ceremonial objects on the bamboo altar, the niwetári, suspended from the roof against the back wall. By the door there was

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Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams

Figure 25. The great shaman ’Colas, surrounded by his extended family in the midst

of a peyote and parched maize ceremony. The popped kernels represent rain clouds. San Andrés Cohamiata, Jalisco, March 1967.

a rough wooden bench, and he sat me down on it beside him. Hanging from the niwetári was a rolled-up and obviously quite old set of deer snares of cactus fiber. Snaring or trapping deer after running it down used to be the preferred, not to say mandatory, way of hunting that sacred animal, the idea being that not a drop of its precious and powerful blood, required for anointing ceremonial objects and images of the ancestor and nature deities, be needlessly spilled. I could also make out bundles of unlit wax candles, a few white ones of commercial wax and a few brown ones obviously homemade from the wax of the stingless Mexican bee, one of Mexico’s few preconquest domesticated animals, which Huichols keep in hives of hollowed-out logs for both honey and wax. There was also a woolen shoulder bag bulging with peyotes that ’Colas said he had brought back from his last pilgrimage to Wirikúta. For a while we just sat quietly, with ’Colas inhaling the smoke from a cigarette I gave him. But then without preliminaries he did something that really startled me and that I could only take as an honor I had done noth­ ing to deserve. I had noticed the several arrows with ’urukáme bundles attached that stuck out of the thatch a foot or so from my head. From Ramón I knew how highly esteemed, sacred, and powerful these are to

Figure 26. ’Colas, holding a sacred gourd bowl with sanctified water in his right

hand, raises his muviéri, the power arrow with its bundle of feathers of the red-tailed hawk and other special birds to assist the Sun god to rise above the eastern horizon. San Andrés Cohamiata, Sierra Madre Occidental, March 1967.

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Huichols, especially shamans. So I had quickly looked away without saying or asking anything. Now ’Colas reached around me and pulled an ’urukáme from the thatch. He stroked it and then handed it to me, gesturing that I should open the cloth wrapping of the little bundle tied lengthwise to the shaft and see what was inside. I did, with trembling fingers. Inside, encased in fluffy whitish cotton from the cottonwood tree, was not the hollow reed I had been led to expect but a small rock crystal with a reddish hue not much larger than the head of a kitchen match. “’Urukáme?” I asked, and ’Colas, looking pleased, took it from me, re­ tied its woven covering of manta cloth decorated with faded red crossstitch embroidery, and handed the arrow back, indicating that he meant for me to keep it as a gift—in exchange for more tobacco. I am a lifelong nonsmoker, but from my one field experience in 1964 among the Warao Indians of the Orinoco Delta, I knew how highly Indian people value tobacco and I often carried cigarettes to give as gifts. I handed ’Colas an almost full pack but made it clear that there was just no way I could take something so sacred and full of power as, quite literally, one of his ances­ tors. So I very carefully stuck the arrow back in the thatch. Once we had established that I was not being rude but only respect­ ful, ’Colas went to his niwetári and in exchange for the cigarettes gave me a prayer arrow and a peyote cactus. At the time I was not aware that an ’urukáme’s power fades over the years until there is none left and it is replaced. Almost certainly ’Colas’s gift was one of these and there was no need to be squeamish. The following year, 1968,1 borrowed an ’urukáme and some other objects in the Lumholtz collection in the American Museum of Natu­ ral History for an exhibition of Ramon’s storytelling yarn paintings and other Huichol arts and artifacts I was putting together for the Los Ange­ les County Museum of Natural History (Furst 1968). Supposedly Lumholtz’s ’urukáme was not the real thing but a replica made for him. But to all appearances it had everything that distinguishes a real one: a com­ pound arrow with a hardwood point, the small bamboo tube that had been missing from ’Colas’s ’urukáme, the same bed of seed cotton from the cottonwood tree and miniature piece of embroidered manta (cotton cloth), and, most important, a real rock crystal. Ramón once more: When they have put it away, then they leave, some going to one place, others to put

up the deer snares. And then on that day they drive the deer and soon they catch a deer by the neck and he cries. And once the owner of the deer snares arrives there,

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he says, “Ah, this was good, this turned out well.” And he speaks to that deer, he tells him why it is that he died for his brothers. Then when the deer has died they bring it to the rancho. And one receives it

there, all the relatives receive it, now that he is dead. And then they give him to drink, they give nawá to that deer that has died. They take the nawá which they have poured

out into the gourd, the nawá which received the soul, and they pour some on the

deer. And all the relatives stick their fingers into the nawá and then they put the nawá

on their fingers inside the mouth of the deer. All of them do this. They give him that because it is sacred, that nawá is sacred, and so is the deer. After they have given the deer to drink, they all stroke part of the deer. They touch the deer, they stroke his back from the head down, all the way down to the tail.

They stroke it and then they rub themselves, they rub part ofthat on their own chest.

They all do this, all of them. And the owner of the deer snare [i.e., the rancho elder,

who is usually also the family shaman] comes close and drinks the nawá, the nawá in which the little crystal was. In which it was caught. It is he who drinks all this nawá.

And after the nawá has been drunk, they go inside, into the xiriki. And then the

relatives pray for him, some crying happy because he has come and they saw him again, others crying because they thought they would never see him again and now

he has cometo them. And after this they make offerings to him, tsinári [sour atole] and hamu’itsi

[white atole], made of maize, and small tortillas, made of the maize of five colors.

There they place these things. As if he were still alive, as if he were going to eat, just the same as before. They do this in the same manner. Then he says, 'urukáme says, “Look, this thing is very difficult, with much

work to do. Don't go committing any errors, tomorrow or the day after, do not have difficulties or anything, because otherwise I will go back. Anyway, the Sun can pick

me up and carry me away up there.” He gives this advice to the relatives and the mara’akáme hears all this and he

tells them all this. Because what the life ofthat soul is saying the mara’akáme hears, and he tells it to the relatives. The relatives come to the mara’akáme and he, with his power, tells them. He spits on his arrows and it is as if he were securely tied there, all

the things as they should be. And those deer snares that were used to catch the deer, they place them in there

as an offering. And they tell that soul, “’Urukáme, these deer snares we want to

give to you, the deer snares are going to be there, hanging on this post.” They keep them hanging there because every time there is a need for these deer snares for the ceremonies, it is certain that he will give them a little deer, two or three little deer,

according to their need. It is very certain that he will do this.

And there he remains sustaining himselfwith a little blood ofthe deer. When they kill a deer, they immediately give him of its blood. They give the blood to ’urukáme.

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They place ¡ton the arrow, that which has the crystal in there inside the kau’xé. In this manner it sustains itself. Tomorrow or the day after, or whenever his wife passes away, and her relatives are left there, or if they died, it remains in there for those that come after her. They

will take that over from them, all of them entirely in the same manner. All ofthe close relatives in the same way. For this reason he has come.

‘Urukáme has power like other gods. It is just the same, in order to help the

relatives. In the manner that he and the mara’akáme speak to each other. Or they speak together with Káuyumari. Káuyumari speaks to ’urukáme and then he tells the

mara’akáme. Or they speak directly, whichever it may be. They talk in this manner and they say whatever they want to say. They say what the relatives should do. They tell the mara’akáme how the relatives should do this and that and the other, how one

does these things in the proper manner, as it was done before. How is it that ’urukáme does these things? ’Urukáme is as if you bring advice to the relatives in council. To explain to them how to direct the authentic, the original things. What the customs are, the ancient customs one must follow.

He tells all that to the mara’akáme so that he can let his relatives know all this. It is for the thoughts and the hearts of his relatives. So that they can think and that they will know in what manner to live, in what manner to work, forthat is what it is. That is

what the rock crystal does. It has this power like Tatewari, like theSun. Hecompletes

this power with the five bones that come together, that have come together as he

re-formed himself. That thing is made up of pure bones, purely of little bones, put together. They have come together, these little bones, all ofthem forming into ’urukáme. That is the ultimate form ofthe life of that ancestor who died.

8

How the World Was Destroyed by Water and Dog Woman Gave Birth to a New Human Race

Indian peoples of the Great Lakes region tell of a universal deluge that starts not with endless rain but with a ball game be­ tween the underwater monsters and a culture hero variously known as Nanabozho, Manabozho, Manabush, or Great Hare. When he beats them, they become so angry that they flood the entire world. To save him­ self, Manabozho, whose other, complementary side is that of Trickster, as universal in world mythology as the deluge, climbs a pine tree. To keep pace with the swiftly rising waters, Manabozho pulls up on the pine tree’s crown to make it taller. True to his Trickster nature, he has to defecate, and his excrement starts floating closer and closer to his mouth and nose. Just in time the waters subside and dry earth makes its reappearance. Thus he can go on doing good and playing the tricks that, like those of other tricksters, more often than not backfire on himself. On the other side of the world the Wawelak Sisters of Australian Aborigine mythology cross the lake that is home to the great rain serpent. This great serpentine monster becomes so enraged by a drop of their menstrual blood that falls in the water that, thrashing wildly, she floods and drowns the world. Eventually the earth dries out and life resumes, and the brothers of the vanished sisters search for them. In the mythology of the Aztecs of Mexico a great flood is the last of four successive cataclysmic destructions and re-creations of previous world eras. We live in the fifth and present age, which is destined to be swallowed by a giant earthquake—a dire prediction that can hardly be of comfort to the inhabitants of earthquake-prone Mexico and California. he

T

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Of course, life has to go on and few of the hundreds of versions of the deluge in the Indian Americas and elsewhere fail to account for the rebirth of a human race through divine intervention, magical transfor­ mation, or the rescue from the rising waters of one or two inhabitants of a previous creation. The Huichols are no exception. Their version has as mythic progenetrix a little dog that, by shedding her skin, transforms into a woman and so becomes the mother of a new human race and the Huichols them­ selves. Like the flood myth and the culture hero as trickster, the dog as ancestor is also not unique to the Huichols. As for an animal that, having assumed human form by removing its pelt and remaining human when its outer covering, its “form soul,” so to speak, is destroyed, the little dog of the Huichol flood myth has metaphorical cousins on the ground, in the sea, and in the air. Of these, the best known is perhaps Snow Maiden, the theft of whose feathers by a human lover transforms her from swan or snow goose into a woman; she resumes her original form when her sisters drop new feathers to her on their annual migrations. The little female dog of Huichol mythology has no such luck, but she does have the consolation of being adopted into the crowded pantheon of ancestor and nature deities as Xutúri ’iwiékame, the Mother goddess of children. For many people who share the Judeo-Christian traditon, the account of the great deluge that drowned the world and of Noah and the pairs of animals that saved themselves from drowning by dutifully marching up the plank into a giant ark is solely a legacy of the Old Testament. Part of it is that, surely, but the basic deluge myth, however it may be locally elaborated, is actually well nigh universal, as much a part of the origin traditions of the first inhabitants of Australia and their modern descen­ dants as of the indigenous peoples of Indian North and South America. One thing is clear: excluding those with traces of Noah, the numer­ ous aboriginal myths of a great flood in the Indian Americas predate the arrival of Europeans and the introduction of Christianity by, presumably, many millennia. Why virtually the entire human race shares this myth has been the subject of endless speculation; one intriguing theory takes it back to the end of the last Ice Age, when the great glaciers melted and the resulting rise of the sea level by two or three hundred feet drowned land bridges between continents and islands as well as vast low-lying coastal plains. That would take the tradition back ten thousand years and more; very likely it is far older still. Be that as it may, in many of these stories the higher powers save

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one or two individuals, human and animal, who, once dry land reap­ pears, will be responsible for repopulating the earth. In Mesoamerica the watery cataclysm belongs to a cycle of cosmic destructions and re­ creations; in Aztec tradition it is the last before the present age and will be succeeded by a final destruction by giant earthquakes. In any event, humanity or something like it is repeatedly destroyed and then re-created by the gods or culture heroes, along with other life forms and natural fea­ tures. In other creation stories half the original human population may be transformed into the animals of land and sea on whom the lives of the other half will depend in the future. In contrast to the biblical tradition, few of the dozens of versions that have been recorded in the Indian Americas bother with explanations or give specific causes for the cataclysmic flood. Some may attribute the deluge to an act of hubris, a trickster’s prank, revenge for some slight, or a taboo violation such as incest. More rarely, the cause may be divine disappointment with the gods’ own handiwork, or what humanity made of it. One example can be found in the Quiché-Maya epic known as the Popol Vuh (lit. “Book of the Mat,” the mat, which is woven of many strands, being a metaphor for the community). In an episode that appears to telescope several successive creations and destructions, an early race of bloodless, sweatless men and women the gods had fashioned of wood and pith, respectively, is unable to think or speak, and hence is incapable of offering sustenance and proper veneration to a deity called Heart of Heaven. To destroy this failed creation the gods send a flood accompa­ nied by fierce animals, cause tools and implements and even houses to rise up against their owners, and finally turn the miserable survivors of this cosmic holocaust into monkeys (Tedlock 1985:83-84). The motif of tools and implements turning on their owners has close analogies in South American mythology. It is even depicted in fine-line painting on Moche stirrup vessels dating to the mid-first millennium A.D. Most interesting in the present context, it also occurs in at least one of the several Huichol versions of the myth of the universal deluge recorded over the last century, a topic to be explored in these pages. More com­ monly, in New World deluge myths the waters simply rise, precipitously or gradually, without explanation. Having been forewarned, one or more individuals save themselves by such means as transformation, climbing trees or high cliffs, or tying their canoes to the highest peaks. Pueblo In­ dians can even show you the scratch marks of people desperately clawing their way up a mountain peak to escape the ever higher waters. The flood as divine punishment for human transgression is probably

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not aboriginal but was added to indigenous flood myths after the intro­ duction among New World peoples of the biblical tradition. In some cases, as in certain Mexican Indian tales that mention Abel’s murder by Cain or an act of cannibalism (a favorite target, real or imagined, of early missionary zeal as sins for which God drowned the world), European in­ fluence is self-evident. But even where guilt and sin as triggers for the del­ uge have been reclothed in native, preconquest categories, their biblical and European origin is unmistakable. Needless to say, the story of Noah and the flood must have rung a familiar bell for the indigenous inhabit­ ants when they heard it from the friars. They, in turn, always on the look­ out for the “footprint of God” in Native American soil, took the flood myths to be further evidence that the “Indians” had once been Christians who were seduced away from the True Faith by the Evil One, and needed only to be guided back to Truth for their souls to be saved. The other pos­ sibility that was very much on the minds of some of the sixteenth-century missionary fathers was that the Indians were really the descendants of the fabled Lost Tribes of Israel. If so, their stories of a flood that destroyed the world were nothing more than fanciful memories of the common Old Testament tradition. For his master’s thesis at Mexico City College (now the Universidad de las Américas), the late Fernando Horcasitas, a Mexican scholar who was conversant in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, and who until his untimely death served as editor of the Mexican journal Tlalocan, exam­ ined sixty-three early colonial and contemporary variants of the Mesoamerican flood myth and came up with these categories: A. Myths in which the world is destroyed by a flood from which a num­ ber of human beings were able to escape, later to repopulate the world. Fourteen of the sixty-three traditions fall into this category, including Nahua, Maya, Otomi, Zapotee, Trique, Mixtee, Tarascan, and Quiché versions. B. Myths in which no one escaped when the world was destroyed by water. Twelve myths, ten collected among Nahua-speakers and two Maya, fall into this category. C. Myths—no fewer than twenty out of the total—in which the world is destroyed by water, from which some people manage to escape, only to be turned into animals when they light a fire without divine per­ mission. This group includes only one sixteenth-century central Mex­ ican—that is, Nahuatl—version (from the Leyenda de los Soles); all the rest are contemporary, including seven Tarascan, four Popoluca, two Choi, two Quiché (of the Popol Vuh story mentioned above),

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two Tzeltal, one Totonac, and one Zapotee. Horcasitas (1953:31) be­ lieves, however, that the Quichean Popol Vuh and Zapotee versions differ sufficiently to cause some doubt because, as mentioned, the former includes a motif of houses, weapons, tools, and implements coming alive and turning on their owners that is also found in South America. D. The flood myths that form this group are of immediate relevance to the present essay. All share the motif of the destruction of the world by an unexplained flood, from which only one man and a young bitch dog, assisted by a supernatural being, are able to escape in a sealed box or dugout canoe. After the waters have subsided, exposing dry land, the man begins to clear land for a maize field. On returning home, he discovers that although his only companion is the dog, tortillas and other foods normally the province of women have been prepared in his absence. He spies on his dwelling—either a rockshel­ ter or a hut—and discovers that his mysterious housekeeper is the dog transformed into a woman by shedding her skin. He burns the skin, thereby preventing her from turning back into a dog. Together they repopulate the world. Published texts of the dog-wife tradition examined by Horcasitas include four Huichol, one Tepecano, three Totonac, two Tlapanec, one Popoluca, and one Choi version. The dog-wife is thus as widely shared across boundaries of language and culture as, we can safely assume, it is across time and geographical distance. E. This last group includes those Mesoamerican flood myths that, even though their core motif—the drowning of the earth—is indigenous, are essentially biblical: a man who is specifically identified as Noah is warned by God that the world is about to be destroyed by a flood. He builds an ark and fills it with animals. When the waters have re­ treated, he sends birds to test the reemerging earth for wetness. Some birds return, others do not. As Horcasitas points out, elements of this frankly biblical tradition can be found to one or another degree in many of the indigenous deluge myths that otherwise fall into the preceding categories. For the Huichols, the myth of the deluge and the transformation of the dog can almost be characterized as the central cosmogonic myth, ac­ counting as it does for their very existence in the ancient and the contem­ porary world. Also, some Huichols identify Dog Woman as the young Mother goddess Xutúri ’iwiékame, the Huichol counterpart of the Aztec

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Xochiquetzal (“Precious Flower”). In this connection it should be noted that in a central Mexican flood tradition cited by Francisco Javier Clavi­ jero (1944:1:273), the mass of humanity is destroyed, leaving only one human pair, a male named Teocipactli (or Coxcox), and a female, Xochi­ quetzal, whose children, born without voices, are later taught to speak by a dove (Horcasitas 1953:22). In a Huichol tradition of the origin of maize agriculture the dove is the divine Mother of Maize in her animal form, and she leads a young man named Watákame, Clearer of Fields, to her rancho, where she gives him one of her daughters, Blue Maize Girl, who is also the young Maize goddess Niwétsika, as his wife. Significantly, Niwétsika was born in Wirikúta, the sacred country of the peyote, in the north-central high desert in what is now the state of San Luis Potosi, and it is here that she returns when her mother-in-law fails to accord her the respect to which, as the sacred sustenance, she is entitled. This links maize, the principal sustenance for the body, inextricably to peyote, the principal sustenance for the spirit. The Huichol flood myth Lumholtz published more than a century ago in Unknown Mexico (1902) was the first to reach the outside world and hence can serve as a kind of standard for comparison for subsequent versions collected from Huichol consultants. What I find really remark­ able is that the story dictated by Ramón is basically the same as that recorded by Lumholtz, an impressive example of ideological stability, the more so when we recall that Ramón was nonliterate and thus was unfa­ miliar with Lumholtz’s published version. According to Lumholtz, a man preparing the ground for sowing finds the trees he has cut raised up again overnight. He conceals himself to see who is canceling out all his labors and discovers that it is none other than the aged earth goddess Grandmother Nakawé herself. She tells him he is exerting himself for nothing because a great flood is about to cover the earth. She instructs him to make a wooden box and fill it with the seeds of the principal food plants, fire, squash stems to light and keep the fire going, and a black female dog. The box with its precious cargo and Nakawé seated on top float on the waters for five years, and when at last they subside, the man resumes his work of clearing trees and brush to make a maize field. He and his canine companion live all alone in a cave. But each night when he returns he finds tortillas and other foods prepared for him. He hides to see who is grinding maize and making tor­ tillas and discovers that the little black dog has transformed herself into a woman by taking off her skin. To prevent her from changing back into her dog form, he burns the skin in the fire, and when she cries out in pain

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from the heat, he cools her down in the white nixtamal water (from the Nahuatl nextli, “ashes,” and tamalli, “tamale”) in which the maize has been softened. Together they repopulate the world. Since Lumholtz, essentially the same story has been collected among the Huichols by, among others, Preuss, who also recorded a similar ver­ sion among the neighboring Coras (1908,1912); Zingg (1938); McIntosh (1945); Benítez (1968, 1974); and myself in collaboration with Barbara Myerhoff. Huichol mythology in general is marked by heterogeneity, not only between versions of the same oral tradition collected in different parts of the Huichol territory but even within the same comunidad, and no two shamans, even from the same area, are likely to agree on a single rendition of a particular tale. And yet there are close correspondences between all known versions of the Huichol flood and dog-woman myth, no matter when or where they were recorded. To expect or insist on orthodoxy in Huichol spirituality is to betray an inability to divorce oneself from Western, Judeo-Christian categories and mindset. There is no dogma, no single “correct” version of any one myth or ceremonial. Of course, the same applies to any “tribal” society, which is why there are almost always several versions of even the most sacred oral tradition. For Huichols there is no one correct form of the peyote quest that every peyotero must follow, or even of the charter myth that provides its rationale, itinerary, and individual or collective actions. That one specialist in the sacred performs a rite or sings a chant one way does not mean that a different sort of performance is in error. The children’s ceremony that to Lumholtz signified the celebration of the first fruits can in another time and place have as its principal or additional aim the inculcation of children under age five with the sacred geography of the peyote tradition, without one invalidating or cancel­ ing out the other. Real peyote may be used in one rite, maize tortillas or deer meat employed as metaphors for the sacred cactus in the same ritual elsewhere, without their conceptual identity having to be made explicit for the native audience. In the chanting of a sacred story, “He went there. Having gone there, he did it. Having done it, he said, ‘Well, if that is how it is,’” may provide the initiated listener with all the requisite detail to identify who did what, where, and why, while leaving the outsider utterly mystified. Another performer of ritual or storyteller may clothe such bare bones with a wealth of descriptive detail that leaves the audience slapping their thighs with pleasure or weeping with compassion. There are many truths, surely as many as there are Huichols trained and versed in the sacred, and perhaps even as many as there are speakers of Huichol, but

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in any event too many to be encompassed in any one version of sacred histories or their enactment in ritual. Whether in the mountains or among so-called urban Huichols, it is evident that what we call “Huichol culture” has many faces, that, as already noted, Huichol ritual and myth are characterized by heterogene­ ity, and that the different cultural subsystems, no less than the different comunidades that make up the territory as a whole, have become differ­ ently acculturated and have responded differently to the pressures and influences of the outside world. There is always the danger, therefore, that the intruder into the Huichol universe, be it in the Sierra or the urban Huichol microcosm, will become so engrossed in what may be local or even individual rather than generalized cultural phenomena that they may be taken as typical for Huichol society as a whole. That is one of the problems with Lumholtz’s interpretations of Huichol “symbolism”: we do not know to what degree they reflect an individual’s rather than the community’s ideas. Not surprisingly, then, we find in the anthropological literature, at one extreme, impressions of a culture utterly mystical and spiritual, as though each of its thousands of members participated equally in the rich symbolic world and mystique of the shaman. At the other extreme, the same society may appear as little more than Mexican peas­ ants in colorful dress, with a religion more Catholic than aboriginal, and economic, social, and political institutions little different than those of the surrounding rural mestizo world. Extremes of this sort are artifacts, models constructed by outside observers, rather less with real materials than with their own particular philosophical orientations, motivations, and even personalities. That said, it is nevertheless an inescapable fact that however ideal­ ized the culture of the religious specialist, “aboriginal” Huichol religion and ritual have retained their cohesion and integrity to a remarkable degree, despite sporadic, and later more intensive, interaction between the ancestral Huichols and the colonial Spanish and other Indian peoples on the fringes of the western frontier from the 1530s on, and despite the accelerating contemporary impact of the larger society on the Huichol socioeconomic universe. When reading their flood myth, then, we must remember that the Huichols, more than any other Mesoamerican popu­ lation, including those with whom they share the myth in some of its salient details, have successfully resisted the transformation of their tra­ ditional religion, rituals, symbolism, and oral literature into the syncre­ tistic blend of aboriginal and Catholic elements that is characteristic of most of Indian Mexico. Some Christian observances have been added,

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though not without considerable modification, to the annual ceremonial cycle. But, for the most part, this has not been at the expense of truly in­ digenous observances that, if not purely prehispanic, nevertheless exhibit an unmistakably aboriginal, even preconquest, flavor. Still, we must acknowledge that however aboriginal it may appear to us, the intellectual culture—that is, world view, sacred traditions, ritual, and so forth—is a product of history, recent as well as ancient. Thus it re­ flects not only preconquest survivals but also their successive reformula­ tions and reinterpretations, as well as accretions. Huichol ceremonialism and its underlying ideology are not changeless fossils of a distant past but living and flexible systems with a remarkable capacity to adjust to change and still retain their essential integrity. Ramón, who shared with us over several days in 1966 this story of the great flood and the transformation of a little black she-dog into the Mother of the Huichol people and, by extension, the mythological founding mother of all the north Mexican peoples, including their own ancestors, whom the Aztecs called Chichimecas, meaning “lineage of the dog,” was a himself an exemplar of cultural openness reinforced by pride in “being Huichol.” This is Ramon’s version of the waters that drowned the world and how life began anew: All this is far behind us, long gone. But as the talking remains from these times, those very ancient times, repeating and repeating everything, from one to the other, our great-grandparents, our grandparents, our fathers, our mothers, everyone, that

is why we know it. Everything from those ancient times. Why it is still known.

Now we are going to follow the story of the flood, of the ancient times when

Nakawé was on this earth, when the lake [ocean] came to this world, when there was rain, rain, rain. We will follow the ancient words. In those ancient times of which we speak there was one we call Watákame. Watákame, that means clearer of the fields. And that Watákame is the laborer of

the world. That is how we call him. One who cleared the fields, who cut the brush, the trees, everything. Who cut them and burnt them. Who reburnt them a second

time, to make that land ready for sowing. In that manner he established it for us, he the worker of the maize fields, of the cleared ground. He was born for that reason.

He was created by Our Father [Sun], Our Grandfather [Fire], by Takutsi Nakawé, the

white-haired one who walks all alone in this world, there in the barrancas. Now this Watákame established himself. He obtained an ax and he went, very

early, very early, to clear the ground. He took himself off so that there would be

maize, so that there would be squash, so that there would be beans—well, all that we need for our nourishment. He was all alone there, Watákame. He made his little

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house there, he made his tortillas there, all alone. He ground [maize] there, alone.

He washed his metate there, alone. All alone, one man alone. He took himself off like that so as to enable us to support ourselves, we who are the indigenous Huichol Mexicans. In order to teach us how to clear our fields, to work. He made his gordas, he made his tortillas there, very early in the morning. No

one to help him. He said, “Ah, I will make a gorda, I will make a tortilla.” He made his tortillas, he made his gorditas, he made his pinole. Ah, poor man, he ate all alone. Then he went back to clearing the fields. Every­ thing he cut, all the underbrush, all those trees. Well, he chopped them up with his

machete, with his ax. But it was not a machete as we use now. It was not made of iron and those things. All he had was an ax of stone, pure stone, like those we find nowa­

days in our fields, of such a size that he used it as a machete. A machete of stone. Nowadays one uses axes of iron and such. But no, in those days, those ancient days

of our history, there was purely stone. In my country one still sees such axes of stone. They are from that ancient time. And with these things this man cleared the fields.

He did this for one day. He did this for two days, for three. After three days he

arrived there in the morning, very early. All was grown back, restored, everything he

had cut. Trees, brush, bushes, sticks. All was reborn. He had done it well. He felt he had slashed it, cut it up. Again it was sprouted up, very green, eh? He said, "What

happened here?” He said, “Well, I went working in order to feed myself, in order to

sustain myself. Why such a thing?” So he spoke, that worker of the brush. He said, “Daily, daily I came here. Now everything is sprouted up again. All complete. In what

anguish am I left!” Again he went to cut it all. All was cut well. It was cleared. He went there and did

this thing. He accomplished it well. The next day, in the morning, early, he went. It

was the same, he found it all risen up again. In the afternoon he went. And the next day, very early, he came. It was the same. Just as it had been before, just the same.

Everything sprouted up again. Everything, everything. He cried. Tears came. He said,

“Ah, who will touch me with luck? How am I going to feed myself? How am I going to be the laborer of the world here?” All alone he consoled himself, saying, “Well, look, I am going to make myself the opportunity to spy. To see who this is who walks here,

making my work all sprout up again, making it all come to nothing.” Well, he went. He began to clear the fields again, clearing, clearing, clearing.

Then he went in the afternoon. Again clearing, clearing. And in the morning, very early he came. And it was just the same. Just the same as he had done for four days. All the same, everything set upright again. Everything sprouted up. He said, “Ah, why should this be? Why should it be?” Well, why should he work? It was all for nothing. Then he began to clear it again. He went on for about five

hours, clearing the field there. Then he retired about one hundred meters. He retired for about one hundred meters, he hid there, this man who was Watákame, the one

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who is the laborer of the world. Watákame. And then he said, “I will sit here.” There

was a stump there; he sat himself down and hid himself. He was seated there look­ ing, eh?

Takutsi Nakawé arrived there with her staff. Now a clearing separated them. Now half a clearing separated them. She with her staff, her kwarére, which is her staff, and her muxixi, which is to say her sash, she raised it up again. There one saw

the one who raised it up again. One had felled something, one raised it up again. Ahhhhhh: a pain came from his head. Never had he seen that one before.

He said, “Well, if this is my destiny.” He was angry, this man. He said to her, he said to this little white-haired old one,

“Why do you do this?” He said to her, “I have worked here, one day, two days, three

days, four. Here I come daily, and everything is the same.” He did not know for what motive she did this. He said, “I want you to show me, I want you to tell me, for what

motive, in what manner it is happening that I come here each day and everything is

the same.” She said, “Well, grandson, this is why I do not let you clear your fields, for this

reason and that. You are going to lose all your work here. Maybe you do not know it.” She said to him, “Well, yes, my good man, you are a good worker here in this world.

But this is going to happen. You are going to lose all your work. Maybe you do not

know this," Takutsi said to Watákame. “There are going to be these rains, during ten days.” Then she said to him, “We are going to do this thing. You who are the laborer of the clearing of the fields, of the trees that are here in this world.” She said, “Now I am going to show you that there is a tree, a xápa tree [wild

fig, genus Ficus], which is especially good for what I tell you you must do. You must

make a box, like a canoe, that is good for floating on this lake that will inundate the

world.” “Well, and where is this?”

“You climb straight up on your right hand, where there is a tree that gives little balls like this.” “Very well. What am I going to do?”

“Take your ax which is made of stone, take your machete which is made of

stone. Take it with you and chop it down. I give you five days in which to do it. I am going to be coming here daily.” “Very well.” She said to him, “There is going to be a rain. We will have to swim. We will have

to travel in the water. We have put those ancient Indians, those that were long ago Huichol Indians, from long ago in their places, wherever they belong. Those moun­

tains are there from ancient times, they are there so that we can put those ancient Indians there, in their proper places.” Well, he took his little ax, this Watákame. He went home. He arrived there and

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Figure 27. “Idol” of Great-grandmother Nakawé with her magical staff made from an upside-down bamboo root, created for Lumholtz in the 1890s. H. 14%." Courtesy American Museum of Natural History, New York, #65/1554.

began to think. He thought, “How will it be a good way to do this, this canoe? How will I make it?" Thus he thought to himself. Then he returned there, he went back to

his work. He walked about two hours. He arrived where the tree was, but he could not think of a way to chop it down. It was a very large tree, very large, the royal tree, a tree like a king. He arrived. And the tree had five branches, roots everywhere, five [aerial] roots. “How is a good way to do it?” And he called out, “Oh, if Takutsi were only here. If Takutsi were only here to tell me how!”

She found him there. She arrived with her power. She said, “Yes, here it is, as I told you.”

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“Yes, very well.” And in that moment she told him, “First you cut out this root, and then you cut out this root, and then you cut this other one, and following that you cut this other one." Then he started chopping the roots. He started chopping down the roots. One,

two, three, four. Four roots he chopped. And she with her sash that is called muxi,

muxixi it is called, using her sash she made that tree bend over. But not even she with

her power, with her muxixi, could make that big tree fall down. So he chopped the other root, the center one, the one that goes straight down. And then it fell down. Then she said, “Now square it there, you block out the heart, only the heart of

the tree. And on this side you also block out the heart so that the heart goes straight

in the center, so only the heart remains.”

So he squared it on one end, and he squared it on the other end. He began to chop. He began to cut it. She said, “Now take all of this out from the inside, hollow

it out inside, so that it will contain all of the seeds there are. From the guamuchil, the mango, the plum, the maize of five colors, the squash, the beans, all that will fit

there. And also Our Grandfather [Fire], And also you, clearer of the fields. And also the dog that I have there, the little black she-dog. In order to save all this from this

great water which is going to be.” She said, “And you make a little oar so that I can go rowing, in order that I see

straight ahead, on the right hand, on the other hand, to the four directions of the wind.”

“Very well.” He began to work. He worked, he worked, he worked, this laborer of the world

who is Watákame. “Ayyyyy, such sweat, ay, such work. How am I going to do this?” He hollowed it out. He left only the heart.

Takutsi arrived. “How is this work?” “It seems it is going well.”

“Very well. Now you make a little hole, a little hole there, so you can put a rope

there to tie it.” The rain was beginning. Little by little, everything was clouding up. Itwas begin­ ning to darken there, all around them. “Oh, oh, this is going to be my destiny!” Then the next day. "How is the work going? We are at the fourth day.”

“It is going well.” “Now you will go and bring me all the seeds there are so that we can plant all of them.” “Very well.” He went there. He gathered up all the seeds there are. Then he gathered up ani­ mals. He finished with the bird that cries “kui-kui." That one of a thousand colors. Very well. She came back on the fifth day. It was roaring, that great water was

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roaring. The mountains were falling down. The rain was coming. She said, “It is here

now. Now the time has come when we must leave. We must travel to the top of the

mountain.” There where Our Mother Haramara [the Pacific Ocean] has her abode, from there it was roaring. Now the animals came, the snake animals, lizards, iguanas, scorpion, haxi, who is the alligator, tatsiuwa, this one is the shark. All came there;

they were all gathered there. The Haramara jumped up from here, here, here, and

here, in the four winds. All of it, all the lake was water meeting together. The waters ofthe four winds.

She said, “Bring me everything.” She was already loading that hollow box, in order to save all that. She had her black dog. She said to them, she said to the little

black she-dog, “Now all of you come over here, let us go.” Then she said, “Now all

the animals which have existed since ancient times.” But already all of them, most of them, were drowning. Others were swimming in the lake. Other animals were eating each other, all wrapped up in snakes. He did

not know what to do. She said, “Now we are going.” She said, “Light that squash stem.” He, Watákame, took out a strike-a-light. He lit it, one, two, three, four, five times. The fifth time he lit it. Five squash stems, to feed Tatewari. She sealed it well

with mud. She said, “"Now let us go, let us go in this direction.”

They were well sealed in that log of xápa wood. Well sealed, dry inside that canoe. Takutsi sitting on top, using her little paddle. Then they went this way and that, there where the ancient Indians lived in that time long ago, where they had their societies. They existed in caves. They had no houses, only caves, large walls that were bored out of the earth. That’s where they lived there in that time long ago.

Where they arrived in that society, they found them making thread, some danc­

ing, others weaving in ancient times, weaving. Making cuadros [pictures, yarn paint­

ings] like those we make now. Others making tsikúri [thread crosses, Lumholtz’s misnamed “eyes of god”]. From that time comes this thing, from ancient times.

They only spun, spun, spun, using the spindlewhorl. It is also called uitsiku, made in

ancient times from stone which was bored out. These little stones with holes, they

used them as we do spindlewhorls now. Before and after they were using spindle­ whorls, and from there all of this comes.

Some were working at this when a wind arrived, there, in that society. Ah, that

wind left Watákame like a corpse, because he did not know it. A wind, bitter, bitter, bitter, bitter. It took his breath away from him. That is to say, a wind, a bitter wind

which we call tsihuitutuerica, which means a very bitter, ugly wind. Very ugly from ancient times.

She said, Takutsi Nakawé said, “Well, let’s go.” They turned around and went to the other side.

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They arrived there on the other side. Another society from ancient times was there. Some dancing, that which is called nanáwata. Others dancing what is called

namáwita. Others dancing tupuxa. Dancing ipuri, which means danceable ipuri from an­ cient times. That is because to dance ipuri one throws a ball, a ball of yarn. They

named this ipuri. To this they danced there, in that society where they arrived. They

availed themselves of th i s dance. After they arrived there, in a little time a wind came. Ah, that wind, chile-hot, chile-hot, chile-hot, chile-hot. A wind to suffocate them. In this state no one could

dance, no one could walk. And now that great water, that great lake came on them. And the animals that were eating each other. Those that were biting each other, bit­

ing, biting, those wolves, those animals in the water. Zassss! And that canoe, would it roll? Would it overturn? Would it not overturn? Ah, all

falls into the waves of that water, there in that society, those poor ones. They tried to escape as they could. They could not find a place to escape it, all was water. Wher­

ever one looked in this world, the whole world. And the mountains falling down, all

of them, all the mountains. Those mountains fell down. Well, they turned around again, for they could not bear it there. They could not

drive away the pestilence of that chile-hot wind. There it was, chile-hot, everything. Well, they came and they arrived at this side. They arrived where it is called

Unaxikeri. There they were. Unáxa, Re’unar, which is in Wirikúta, in Real de Catorce. With their little light lit. Here and there. It went out. They lit another. It went out and they lit another. She said, Takutsi said, “Well, let us go.”

Thus they went. Having gone they went down [west]. They arrived where Tsi-

wetúni is, Tsiwetúni, this spirit. Tsiwetúni he is called, the one who guards the souls. Tsiwetúni it is called. This one is the spirit when a soul, a man or a woman, dies; they

call out for this Tsiwetúni in order to catch that little fly that is the soul, when they make the novenario. That is what Tsiwetúni is for, the spirit of the souls, the god of

the souls when the shaman guides them, when the shaman catches that little shin­

ing soul-fly so that it remains there, in that other world, with its companions, eating

peyote there, drinking nawá there, eating tortillas there, gorditas, happy, happy [see

Chapter 7]. Well, they arrived there. One [Tsiwetúni] said, “What are you doing over here?”

She said, “Well, we are going this way and that in order to see where the canoe can take us. We are seeing if we can find a place that is dry. We have been on the way one day, two days, three days, three days here and there.”

Well, then they began to see all those ancient ones there, those who before then were losing themselves [that is, were wandering about because they had not yet

been assigned their places]. Some shouting, "Tsinarita, tsinarita, tsinarita, tsinarita—

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aaaa—aaoo—aaooooo!" Frightened, everyone there. They were frightened of the great water, that lake which had brought them there. Then Takutsi Nakawé said, “Is

that where we are going to be lost, all of us? What will be the best way to do it?”

One said, Tsiwetúni said, “Do not worry.” He said to them, one said, “Do not

worry.” Tsiwetúni, this one is called, do you know which it is? It is a large stone which is in the middle of the sea, in Our Mother Haramara, who knows what length, a

large, large stone, very steep, tall, in the middle of the sea. That one is Tsiwetúni. Tsiwetúni, who rules there in the sea.

Well, in this momentthey were wishing, they were hoping. In just that moment they began to get needles. Needles, needles, needles, needles came on the wind. All

of that wind was loaded with needles [spines], tucked up with them. It brought all this, that wind. And that white-haired one had a cape, Takutsi Nakawé had a cape. It is called kauxére [Nahuatl: quechquemitl, triangular overblouse that in preconquest

times was limited to goddesses and nobility]. Takutsi kauxére, that means cape of

Takutsi. Thick, that cape, well woven, it is woven on a loom. With this cape one was going to cover oneself up. One could do no less than to cover oneself up very well.

Why? Because the needles, those spines, they were the spines of all the spiny plants there are, they were of huixapoles, they were of haratadera, they were the spines of

huixáxi, they were the spines of tepáne, they were the spines of crucilla, they were the spines of all the spines there are. All were falling, falling, falling on top of them. Some pricking them on one side, others on the other side. And they, they couldn’t

find out why! They covered themselves all up. [Although Ramón’s account is mainly concerned with the flooding ofthe earth

that in the Aztec tradition called Leyenda de los Soles is the most recent of the cata­ clysms that each ended one ofthe previous world eras, or “Suns,” his mention of

chile-hot wind and flying cactus spines clearly links his Huichol version to the central Mexican tradition.]

“Ah,” they said, “let’s go, for here we are not permitted." They went. They did not know. That canoe, would it turn over? Would it not turn over? Would Dios Fuego, Our Grandfather, would he be extinguished? Whoosh, whoosh?

They arrived there, floating on the water. Up, up, up. They had come up to

the sky, floating. Having gone there, they were floating, floating, clanging against the sky. Ah, that one who is the laborer of the world, Watákame, he was close to crying. Frightened. For he would not have believed it before. Ah, he was thinking in those

days of working to support himself. No, it was not possible. For it was Takutsi Na­ kawé who had advised him. As she had said it would be. And the canoe was going over the waves, over the waves.

Ah, Takutsi knew. She already knew in what manner they were going to be de­

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livered. In what manner they were going to get out of it. From the lake and from the flood. Then they went directly ahead, upward. They arrived at Katau Matemani, which

is to say harbor or shelter, there where the other water is. They went. All was flooded.

They arrived there. Then one said, “Here it will be good, to know where we are going to remain.” It was the fourth day. "Well,” one said, “this thing is now going to be finished.” They waited, they went waiting twenty-four hours. They came there, and there

would not be any more problems. Ah, now that was a thing that was special for our

birth, for our people, for our customs. Everything that has significance for us. Every­ thing. There it was. Well, they came. And meanwhile the water, that great water, down, down, down.

Lower, lower, lower, lower. They arrived there at Unáxa [Re'unar, Rau’unar, Burnt Mountain, extinct vol­ cano in Wirikúta from which the Sun was born]. They stopped. The canoe was going

down, little by little, down, down, down, until it came down at Unáxa. And there, there, there, finishing itself off now, the last squash stem was burning, it was giving

them light, it was finishing itself off. It was feeding Tatewari, and now it was finishing itself off. Then Takutsi Nakawé came down from there, from the top of the box. It seems that she stopped there, and there is her track, the track of Takutsi Nakawé, the track where she stopped on the ground. When it warmed up, when it heated up there, it

was solidified in the ground. Because it was tender, tender, that ground. She stepped

down and sank down. Then Takutsi Nakawé took out her foot, she stepped thus: “Ah, we are going to have to wait a little bit, it is still tender. That is how it is. We can’t

get out.” And there is the track of Takutsi Nakawé, the track of her foot is there. It is

called the Track ofTakutsi, the Sandal ofTakutsi. Well, they waited another little time. And another. And in a little while she went

again to see. Then she stepped—no, it was no good. And then one said, “Now, yes,

laborer, it is good. You, laborer of the world, now it is time for you to put yourself to clearing the fields and your work.”

Very well. Watákame went out from there. There he was provided with his place. Where his place is. Where his field is. Ah, Dios Sol would know how to arrange it

further. Those venerated ones, those gods, because they would be the ancient ones,

always following the same custom. And then Takutsi came down from her canoe with her muxixi, her sash. Raising

her long muxixi, the birds were remade. There go the birds, the shrimp, the fish, every­ thing that is edible. Everything, everything. She raised her muxixi, saying now, “Here

straight ahead you stay. You will know where you are going.” And then she raised her

muxixi with all the animals, all of them. She makes and unmakes [transforms], she

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remade them all. She only shook it thus, she shook it thus—animals began to fly out. And those shrimp and those fish, many animals, and all to make their places. And

the river, that is why the river has shrimp, that is why it has fish, that is why there are many animals. Because Takutsi Nakawé arranged them. She arranged them in that

way, in ancient times.

Well, one had begun. Then one said, “Now here go avocados, bananas, guamuchiles, plums, chiles, tomatoes, everything, everything.” All were raised up thus.

Tsokauxére, tsokauxe they called it, which is to say one who brings out her outer garments. That one brings her ornaments, her káuxe. That which one has brought,

brought here in the canoe, it looks well. Nakawé laid it down thus. Then one said, “Here, this thing, I am going to sprinkle this thing with water.”

Cuamuchiles, plums, and everything, she sprinkled with water, she sprinkled wher­ ever. That’s why these things are, wherever, bananas, avocados, well, everything she sprinkled.

And then she returned and took forth the flowers. Pretty flowers of all kinds.

Zampual (Nahuatl zempoalli, “marigolds”), ah yes, those are really our special flowers, for the maize, the colored maize. And these are special for our ceremo­

nies. A very special thing, from ancient times. Zampual, they are called, zampual pu'urare. And then zinnias. Zinnia is called téiwari tutu [that is, especially for the ceremonies]. And then one grasped them and said, “I give these to Xutúri ’iwiékame, who is

the little black she-dog. Now that is how it is going to be. You will do this way and that way. Because tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or the day after, you will be

given something. You will be given a gift. You will have someone who will do for you.

So that all the people will benefit from it.” This is how she spoke to Watákame, the laborer of the world.

“Very well.” And then one went. One said, “Now I am going. Now that I have delivered you,

now I am going.” And now one went, singing a pretty little song. The song says,

Now all those are free, Those from ancient times, In order that they can live, In order that they can follow their customs. The song says,

/ am going happy, Because all came out well. Now I am going, going,

How the World Was Destroyed

*37

Coing to my barranca [Teakáta], To my land. To my place. Now I am going. Then one grasped her muxixi. One went, little by little, singing this pretty song.

That means,

Ah, my home is very pretty, A very red house that is cliffs, Very red, very pretty, There where you find Takutsi Nakawé. Where Takutsi still lives, there in a cave that is especially for her. Where one goes

to pay one's respects, to that which is called Teakáta [in] Santa Catarina. Ah, there she went, to her place, the one who had put everything, everything in its place. The one who had ordered everything that is in this world. When one goes there, when one has no transgressions of any kind, one sees her, combing her hair.

The people come, thus she is passing hertime, Takutsi combing her hair. Her hair is very white, white, white, that ancient one. White her hair, all of it, very white, all of it.

The one who measured it, who put everything in its place. And that other one, that one who was Watákame, he was clearing the ground now as he walked. He was clearing the brush for a field, one day, another day, a third day. Early in the morning he went, in the afternoon he went. Clearing, clearing, clear­

ing. Because he was already the laborer of the world. All alone he was. Only he and the little black dog, the little black bitch-dog. His

only companion was that little dog, the one who emerged from the canoe. No one to help him, no one. Each day he went, early, early. Each day he arrived there, at his little house. It was only a little house, made from brush and stones. He arrived at his house. Something happened! What? In his house he found some little tortillas, well made, pretty. Cooked beans and everything. This was some­ thing to reflect on. He was reflecting on everything. Because there had been no

woman there in his house, only the little black bitch-dog and himself. Only that little

dog, left behind when he went to clear the fields. He asked, “How can this be?” Well, then he thought about this. He would spy there on his house, to see how

this could be. Then he began to watch there, to hide himself and spy on his own house. In the morning he said, “Well, I am going.” The little black she-dog, she went, going and coming, running to and fro, barking. Then she returned to the house.

Now he went, Watákame went. He walked there. At about one hundred meters

he sat down, concealing himself so as to spy on his house. He made himself unseen,

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well hidden. To see why he was finding these gordas, a little hot, eh? Well made, all well made. Cooked beans. Tortillas, everything very pretty. Ah, who was doing this work? Thus he sat spying in that place. He said, “Well, we will see.”

Now when he looked he saw that little black bitch-dog. She was coming out of

the house, cautious. Very contented, eh? She was looking, examining. To see where

her owner went. Then she went inside. And after a time when she was inside, in a

little while, a girl came out. A girl, very pretty, well painted, with painted cheeks. She was not wearing any clothes, she was without covering, naked. Well painted

she came out of there, carrying her gourd for water. From there she was going to the spring in the arroyo to fetch water. She wanted that water to start grinding there in the house, on her metate. And that one sitting there watching, he asked himself, “Who could it be? From

where could this one have come? How could it be? I am all alone,” he was saying, “only I and that little black she-dog left for me by Takutsi. There is no woman here.” He asked Takutsi. Takutsi makes and unmakes, Takutsi Nakawé. Takutsi said,

“Why don’t you look?” Ah, he went back there, inside. He looked and looked. He went there behind the metate. The mano [grinding stone] was there, lying straight, resting on the metate. And there behind the metate was the skin, the skin of that

little black she-dog. The skin was thrown off there. The water was there, the nixtamal water, white from the lime to soak with the maize, white from wetting the metate, the water the women use to wet the metate when they grind the maize for masa [tortilla

dough]. It comes to us from ancient time. That man, Watákame, he took the skin and put it in the water. Then he dried it. After it was dry he threw it into Tatewari, he threw it into the fire to burn it. Ah, that

poor little bitch-dog! He burned her skin. It happened thus. Imagine, that one, that poor girl down there in the arroyo drawing water, sire

felt it. She began to cry, “Ay, ay, ay, ay, you are burning me! Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, you are burning me!” Thus she cried, coming on the run. She arrived there where her skin was burning in there, burning away, in the flower ofTatewari. That is how she arrived

there, that pretty girl, very pretty. But without anything, without anything at all to cover her. Nothing but her gourd, nothing more. Well, imagine. One was ashamed there—he was the owner of the little black

bitch-dog, eh? Then the man grabbed that water, he threw it at her in order to erase all that heat from her. To make her cool. And for that reason we are made this way, dark, dark skin, very pretty, because from that ancient times comes our race. Be­ cause that man, Watákame, the clearer of the fields, he became her husband, from

that time. And she, the one who was transformed, she became his wife. They en­

joyed each other. Then she had children, one child, two, three, four. Our Mother

Xutúri 'iwiékame, Our Mother, mother of the children, all of them. Then she went to Wirikúta, later they went to Wirikuta.

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Think of him. He comes to be the laborer of the world, there. The clearer of the

fields, the sower, the burner for a second time, the cleaner of the fields, the cleaner of

the maize. Because when he was born, he was alone, alone. As if to say a tree is born, a tree born alone, thus. In order to be there, to establish it for us.

There he worked. One day, two days, three days, four. Ah, how could he do so

much, man? Five days! How much work! He with his power did it. One finger would make a person, a person would spring from his finger. Another finger, another per­

son. All his fingers. And from his feet. When he needed helpers, he with his power made many people from his hair. One year, two years, three, four, five. In five years

he had many helpers. And his wife, Our Mother, the mother of the indigenous Mexican Huichols, she sat there thinking, “From where could so many have come?” She spoke in this man­

ner. Then she began to make many, many tortillas. She ground her masa, she made her tsinári [sour atole], ancient, ancient atole, without sweetness, without anything. White atole. This was their ancient nourishment. She there, making many tortillas,

eh? To feed all those helpers. To feed those children she had, those first Huichol

people, our fathers, our mothers. Watákame, Xutúri ’iwiékame, our ancient Father, our ancient Mother. That is the history of how one delivered us, in orderthat all the indigenous Mexi­

can Huichol Indians could live, and also that we could acquaint ourselves with every­ thing, how everything came to be. These things, these customs are our history. That is all.

9

The Half-Bad Káuyumari: A Huichol Version of the Pan-Native American Trickster-Culture Hero

might never have heard about the “medio-malo,” or half-bad, side of the Huichol culture hero Elder Brother Káuyumari from Ramón had he not one day tried, half-seriously, to explain away his having stood us up for several days by admitting that he was “half-bad” just like Elder Brother. That he didn’t show up when he said he would was actually my fault, for having given him rather than Lupe the money for a half dozen of the yarn paintings with which he illustrated his nar­ ratives and which I was acquiring for UCLA. With quite a few pesos in hand, he, ever the convivial host, had treated some Huichol “cousins,” who had stopped by his and Lupe’s little rancho on their way from the Sierra to the city, to a tour of his favorite cantinas. His having to explain what he meant by being medio-malo like Elder Brother was how we got to hear about Káuyumari and his hundred­ meter-long penis and a few other misadventures that were not all that different from the ones that other Native Americans attribute to their culture heroes. Barbara briefly referred to that side of Káuyumari in her Ph.D. dissertation and her book on the 1966 peyote hunt. I shelved the subject for another time. A few years later during a stay in Mexico City I went to visit Fer­ nando Benítez, the Mexican essayist and author of, among other works, the five-volume Los Indios de México (1968-80), of which volume 2 is devoted entirely to the Huichols. We exchanged anecdotes about Ramón, who in 1967 had served as Benitez’s guide, interpreter, and narrator of arbara and i

B

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Huichol myths during the latter’s travels through the Huichol territory, and our respective impressions of the peyote pilgrimage. He showed me his copy of Zingg’s The Huichols: Primitive Artists, and I was duly im­ pressed. Having been unable to find a publisher in the United States in the depths of the Great Depression for so massive and densely written a manuscript on a small Indian tribe in the mountains of Mexico, Zingg had taken it to Germany and had it printed and bound there with private funds in an edition of one thousand. The publisher, G. E. Stechert, sent a few advance copies to American reviewers and universities, but the bulk of the edition went down to the bottom of the Atlantic in the first days of World War II with the ship that was to deliver it to Stechert’s New York office. When I rose to say goodbye, Benítez walked me to the door and to my surprise handed me his copy as a gift, because, he said, he had writ­ ten all he ever would about the Huichols and didn’t need it anymore. A gracious and generous man, indeed. The book, I should add, now has a happy home in the rare books collection of the Laboratory of Anthropol­ ogy, my academic home in Santa Fe. During his narrations of Huichol myths and his own philosophical musings Ramón occasionally lapsed into his native Huichol instead of Spanish. And of course, when he or Lupe sang for us it was always in Huichol. We didn’t understand a word, but that was all right, because Joseph Grimes of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Mexico City had told us he would gladly translate anything like that into English. He and his wife had spent many years in the Huichol comunidad indígena of Guadalupe Ocotán to acquire fluency in the language, and they wanted to hear some of Ramon’s dictations to see if his narrative style in Spanish was anything like what it would have been in Huichol. It was, remark­ ably so. We had asked Ramón what Káuyumari’s name meant in Spanish, but he was no help. We also asked Joe, and he told us it meant something like “he who does not know himself,” a rendering he and his Huichol collaborators also used in the analytical Huichol-Spanish dictionary they published in 1981. As it happens, “not knowing himself” is also said of tricksters in other Native American settings. Now with Benitez’s copy of Zingg’s book at hand I looked to see if he had recorded anything like Ramon’s stories about Káuyumari. Lo and behold, on pp. 360-365 I found Káuyumari (Kauymáli in Zingg’s spelling) described exactly as Ramón had done: the “half-bad” trickster­ culture hero on whom Huichols were said to model themselves because

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they too considered themselves “half-bad.” And there were footnotes that referred to longer texts in his manuscript of Huichol myths. A bit of anthropological history is in order here. Entitled “Huichol Mythology,” the manuscript is the property of the Laboratory of An­ thropology, which, together with Zingg’s alma mater, the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago, funded his Huichol field project in 1934-3 5. Chicago sponsored the first half with matching funds. The Lab, as it is generally known, took over on January 1, 1935, again with matching funds—no mean achievement by its director, Jesse Nusbaum, at a time when money for research was virtually unobtainable. Zingg (who died in 1957 at age fifty-seven) received a salary of $166.66 a month, minuscule by today’s standards, but this was the Depression, and besides, it was more or less equal to the salary of an assistant profes­ sor, that is, if he or she could even find academic employment. In fact, it exceeded that of Nusbaum. The Lab also covered all of Zingg’s expenses. These included the costs of the large collection of art and artifacts he was making for the Lab; negative film and the processing and printing of what amounted almost to a photographic ethnography; and taking the newly elected indigenous governor and other officials of the community’s civil-religious government to Mexico City to meet with President Lázaro Cárdenas and ask his help in securing title to Tuxpan’s lands. This last made him so popular with his hosts in Tuxpan de Bolaños that one of their number, Juan Real, not himself a shaman but with an extraordinary command of his own versions of Huichol myths, agreed to share them with Zingg. He dictated in Spanish, and Zingg tried as best he could to keep up with the often rapid-fire narrations by taking notes di­ rectly in English. After his return to the United States he expanded these into a 3 70-page typewritten manuscript. Almost seventy years after Zingg completed his mythology manu­ script, and after several unsuccessful attempts over the decades to find someone to publish it, there is now a printed edition from the University of Arizona Press, edited by Jay C. Fikes, Phil C. Weigand, and the latter’s wife, Acelia Garcia de Weigand (Zingg 2004). Ordinarily it would be greeted as a welcome addition to the growing body of Huichol literature. Unfortunately, there is so much wrong with it that one has to agree with the reviewer who recommended that the serious student is better off relying on the unpublished manuscript at the Laboratory of Anthropology (MacLean 2005a). I will confine myself to a few major problems. First, there is nowhere—not in the acknowledg­ ments, nor the introduction, nor even the very skimpy bibliography—a

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mention of the Lab, either as the editors’ source of the manuscript, which it was, or as co-sponsor with the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago of Zingg’s Huichol project of 1934-35. Chicago supported Zingg financially in the first half of his project from a gift and matching funds; from September 1, 1935, and through the writing of the mythology manuscript, Zingg was a salaried employee of the Lab, again with a private gift of one thousand dollars and matching funds from the Rockefellers. The large collection of Huichol art and artifacts is men­ tioned, but not for whom he made it (the Lab) nor where it might be seen. Not crediting the Lab and Chicago for their financial support happens to violate a long-standing agreement, preserved in the Lab’s archive, that any publication resulting from the Huichol project was obliged to ac­ knowledge this support. Zingg observed it scrupulously in the foreword to his book. Nor is the published version faithful to the original: gone are the ab­ stracts with which Zingg introduced each myth, presumably to help the uninitiated reader negotiate the thicket of unfamiliar and unpronounce­ able names and mystifying magical events and doings. The manuscript, a photocopy of which Fikes, in a letter to the Lab dated November 8,1994, and preserved in its files, confirms was “graciously given” to him in 1981, has footnotes at the bottom of each page, to a total of more than a thou­ sand. Almost all tie the manuscript to the published ethnography (Zingg 1938). Making sense of the notes presupposes access to the book, which is difficult, if not impossible, to find. That the editors banished the notes from their original context to the back of the volume makes their use even more problematical. Then there are errors of fact or interpretation. I have already dealt with the claims (p. xv), unsupported by evidence of any kind, that Huichol culture, “with its distinctive circular temples... has existed in the Chapalagana River basin since about zoo A.D.” and that these “circular temples are derived from circular temples belonging to the ‘Teuchitlán Tradition,”’ a favorite construct of Weigand’s. That the Huichols are supposed to have copied their most sacred architecture from someone to whom they had no connection insults their own sense of cosmic structure, spirituality, and genius. Of factual errors, three stand out: the population estimate for the year 2000 of “ten to fifteen thousand” (p. iv) is thirty to forty years out of date; the most recent national census gives the figure as 43,000. The claim (p. xvi) that to become a healer a Huichol has to have given five years of service to the temple, and double that to “qualify” for the vocation of singer of the myths, is without foundation. There is no such orthodoxy. True, five

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years or even more of temple service are expected of certain religious cargos (obligations), such as that of Keeper of the Votive Bowls, deco­ rated gourds Huichols take to be the most beautiful and effective forms of prayer, particularly directed, as images of the womb, to the female divini­ ties. What is expected of the shaman as healer and as ritualist and singer on the level of the extended family, or even a larger community—in addi­ tion to an understanding of the causes and cures of illness, knowledge of the medicinal flora, psychological insight, command of the vast body of sacred oral traditions, and proper performance of the rituals—is that he or she will have gone on a minimum of five peyote pilgrimages, the more the better. Then there is the confusion over the language of dictation: on p. xxxiii we are told that the myths were “dictated and transcribed in Spanish.” Not so, according to Zingg himself (1938diii), who writes that he took down Juan Real’s Spanish dictation “directly in English.” This raises the question how much of the end product is Juan Real and how much the ethnographer. Finally, the unauthorized use of over forty of Zingg’s Huichol photo­ graphs (and many more in a Spanish translation published by the editors in 1998) at first presented the library and archive staff (and me) with something of a mystery. Receipts from 1934-35 preserved in the Lab’s ar­ chive show all of Zingg’s photographic expenses, including negative film, processing, and printing to have been covered by the Lab, even while Chicago was still supporting him. From this it follows—and is the Lab’s position—that it, and hence the Museum of New Mexico, is their right­ ful owner. Publishers normally require proof that authors have rights to illustrations they intend to use. There is here none of the usual statement of credit and permission. This is not unimportant, because as a photographic ethnography of a Huichol community in 1934-35 the images are obviously not only of cul­ tural but of historical value. In fact, there is no other collection like it. For several weeks after publication of the book I followed up the editors’ ex­ planation in their acknowledgments of how the photographs came into their possession. What I found varies considerably from their version. According to the editors, after the late archaeologist J. Charles Kelley, “located” them—no hint where—he “entrusted” them for “safekeep­ ing” to the Amerind Foundation: “We appreciate the confidence Charles DiPeso, Director of the Amarind Foundation, placed in the Weigands by giving them all of Zingg’s photos,” to the tune of several hundred prints. Whatever DiPeso’s motivation, it turns out that what the Weigands got were not originals but prints made from copy negatives. How, when,

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and why J. Charles came into possession of Zingg’s original album is unknown, although it was probably in Santa Fe in the 1950s, when there was no archive and the Lab’s very survival was in question. Rather than having been passed to the Amerind, and from it to the Weigands, Zingg’s photo collection is to this day where it has been for decades: in J. Charles’s personal library, which after his death his wife, Ellen, donated to the Great Bend Research Center of Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas, his last academic home, and now hers (Ellen Kelley, personal com­ munication 2005). After some back-and-forth e-mailing between her, J. Charles’s colleague Carroll Riley, and myself, she solved the mystery of the copy negatives and prints in the Amerind’s archive: searching one day through her husband’s correspondence, she found letters dating to 1965 about a loan of Zingg’s album to allow DiPeso to make copies for his library, after which he promptly returned it. That explains why John Ware, the Amerind’s present director, found 35-mm negatives and a faithful copy of Zingg’s old album, complete with penciled captions, in his library. DiPeso may have made two sets of prints, of which one set remains at the Amerind in Foundation in Dragoon, Arizona, the other presumably being the one that came into the Weigands’ possession. In any event, it is copies, not originals, which illustrate the book and which, according to the editors, are now preserved as a study collection at the Colegio de Michoacán. But copies or originals, they should not have been published without permission. As is often the case, truth turns out to be more interesting than fiction. In 1976 or 1977 Laura Holt, who had recently joined the Lab as its librarian, made a photocopy of Zingg’s manuscript for me (as the library has done for many years for any interested researcher). This gave me a chance to read, among other versions of Huichol myths, the full texts of the adventures and misadventures of Zingg’s “half-bad” Káuyumari. As expected, they differed in detail and style from Ramón’s, but there were also similarities. Most interesting was learning that Huichols widely sep­ arated in time and space shared the tradition of the two sides, less anti­ thetical than complementary, of a mythic benefactor whom at least some take to be both role model and reflection of themselves. Of the many ancestor and nature deities of the Huichols, none is more complex and harder to classify than Káuyumari. Culture hero, personi­ fied deer, peyote, transformer, spirit helper of Tatewari, intermediary and messenger between the people and the higher beings, psychopomp,

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originator of many of the power objects and the ceremonies in which they are used, and much else, Tamatsi (Our Elder Brother) Káuyumari is the indispensable participant in all Huichol ritual. For this he has to make a journey of some three hundred miles, for his home is not with the Huichols in the Sierra Madre Occidental but, signifi­ cantly, in Wirikúta, the sacred peyote country in distant San Luis Potosi. But of course this is a magical flight, accomplished in an instant, not a journey by foot or mechanical conveyance, like a peyote pilgrimage. As psychopomp, guide of the soul on its postmortem journey, he may as­ sume the personality of Irumári (Iromári) or Ixumári, whom Huichols identify as Káuyumari’s other self, his shadow or nocturnal aspect. It is tempting to interpret this as a former identification with Venus as Eve­ ning Star. If so, this too is no longer explicit. Grimes et al. (1981:147) translate Ixumári as “spattered, or covered, with mud,” recalling the mud-coated “clowns” who reside in and periodically emerge from the underworld in Pueblo ceremonial. As for Káuyumari, Grimes and his Huichol collaborators in this worthy linguistic enterprise (1981:24) give the meaning of his name as “he, or one, who does not know himself.” As we shall see, not “knowing” who he is is not uncommon among Native American culture heroes. Káuyumari also guides the mara’akáme and the peyoteros on the hunt for the divine Deer-Peyote. Wirikúta, of course, does not appear as such on Mexican maps. But it is firmly fixed in the topography of the sacred, indelibly imprinted on the Huichol mind from early childhood. Physically, it coincides roughly with the colonial silver mining district in San Luis Potosi called Real de Catorce. In the sacred geography, Wirikúta overlaps with Paritsiye, the land of light, or dawn, to which the Sun Father travels below ground after he descends in the west and from where he reappears each morning to commence his trajectory across the heavens. The precondition for the Sun’s ascent, so Huichols say, is that there be at least one mara’akáme somewhere who sings and gestures Father Sun into the sky with the feathers of his muviéri, in emulation of Tatewari, who did this when the solar god was born for the first time. Recalling a similar tradition of the Mexica (Aztecs), in the stories we call myths but which for Huichols are their sacred histories, the Sun was transformed from a lonesome and sickly boy to one of the great gods through an act of fiery self-sacrifice. He then traveled below ground through many dangerous obstacles to be reborn in Wirikúta/Paritsíye. The locale from which he emerged and rose into the sky in a fiery eruption was a now-long-extinct volcano called Re’unar (Rau’unar) in Huichol and Cerro Quemado in Spanish. Both have the meaning of “Burned Mountain.”

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Figure 28. Mask made from the face skin of a deer with antlers attached represents

the culture hero, the Deer Person Káuyumari, in the Huichol temple.

Káuyumari himself shades into the object of the sacred hunt in Wirikúta, the deer that manifests itself as the peyote cactus (or, alter­ nately, from whose tracks and antlers the first peyote sprouted). Thus he is both hunter and hunted. Peyote is the divine ecstatic intoxicant by which Huichols obtain access to the spirit world. Some Huichols identify the Peyote-Deer as Wawatsári, first among the deer people and hence a kind of master, or spirit owner, of the species. Káuyumari also merges with him, as he does, in some mythic and ritual contexts, with Tatutsi Máxa Kwaxi (pronounced Mazra Kwazri), Great-grandfather Deer Tail. Preuss, who spent nine months in the Chapalagana Huichol coun­ try in 1906 studying the language and recording, in longhand and on wax cylinders, sacred literature and chants, saw Káuyumari as the per­ sonified Morning Star, the Huichol equivalent of the central Mexican Quetzalcoatl, or the Cora culture hero Hatsikan. But if Preuss’s infor­ mants identified him as such, it seems not to be general belief today. More to the point, as mentioned above, Preuss was the first ethnographer to

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recognize that, like so many culture heroes throughout the Indian Ameri­ cas, Káuyumari had another side to his personality, antithetical at first sight to his many positive aspects but actually complementary: that of trickster and sexual clown. Of this, more below. In addition to deer antlers or a mask made from the facial skin of a deer, Káuyumari is physically represented in certain power objects, in particular the takwátsi. This is the oblong, plaited, and tightly lidded basket in which shamans keep their feathered wands (muviéris), prayer arrows, and other ritual and magical paraphernalia. These specialized baskets are virtually indistinguishable from those of the Piman-speaking Papago, or Tohono O’odham, of Arizona. Because of its association with the Huichol culture hero, one name of this specialized container is takwátsi Káuyumari, or, alternately, Káuyumari muviériya: “Káuyu­ mari muviériya is what the basket is called when it contains the sacred muviéris, and Káuyumari Tuki, that is the heart of the smallest deer,” is how Ramón explained it to Benítez (1968:453). Ramón added that the basket embodies Káuyumari’s wisdom and knowledge and that it is he who, immanent in the sacred basket, sings during the ceremonies and curing rites, with the shaman giving him voice. There is reason to believe that both the plaited shaman’s basket and the traditional plaited Huichol sandal (kakai), which differed from the footgear of the Aztecs and other prehispanic peoples in that it did not cover the foot or protect the heel but consisted only of a sole secured by a long strap wound around the ankle or halfway up the calf, are a common Desert Culture heritage. In former times the Huichol kakai was made of yucca or palm fiber, resembling those excavated in Basketmaker and ancestral Pueblo sites. In the time of Lumholtz sandals of this type were already becoming obsolete, worn only by shamans on the occasion of the peyote ceremony and some other rites of the annual ceremonial cycle, or used as offerings to ancestors and deities, while everyday sandals were made from oxhide shaped to the foot. Nowadays they are mostly cut from old rubber tires, although occasionally a mother or father weaves miniature kakai made on the old Desert Culture model as prayers for children or divine protection on long journeys, such as the peyote hunt. In his positive aspects Káuyumari resembles the Mixtec culture hero, whose calendrical name is 9 Wind, as he is represented in the late precon­ quest pictorial manuscript known as Codex Vienna, or more correctly Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I (J. L. Furst 1978). Káuyumari does not share 9 Wind’s Quetzalcóatl-like features, however, or the similar at­ tributes of Ehécatl, the Aztec wind god. Winds are generally regarded as

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dangerous by the Huichols, if not downright evil, as they also were by the Mexica and still are by many modern Nahua. These negative attributes are not associated with Káuyumari, however, nor, for that matter, do they seem to have been with the Mixtec 9 Wind. Nevertheless, wind does seem to be an aspect of Káuyumari, for in one of the myths recorded by Zingg in 1934, the culture hero travels in the form of wind as a messenger of the Sun, before he changed his allegiance from the Sun Father to the Mothers of Rain and Terrestrial Water. Is Káuyumari a “god” in the Judeo-Christian sense, or as this is un­ derstood among the Huichols, that is, one of the higher beings Zingg (1938:360) calls the “great gods”? Zingg thinks not, and he makes a distinction between “the great gods,” such as Tatewari and Great-grand­ mother Nakawé, the old white-haired goddess of the fertile earth, growth, and creation, and those mythological heroes who, “while sacred, are not deified into complete divinity.” Among these he counts Káuyumari. There is no word for “god” as such in the Huichol language. Collec­ tively, the ancestor and/or nature deities are known as kakauyarite (sing. kakauyari) and individually addressed by ritual kin terms prefaced by ta, “our.” As Zingg (1938) has noted, in the numerous myths dictated to him by his Huichol informant Juan Real, Káuyumari’s name is mentioned only once in a list of deities. Still, there is no question that Káuyumari occupies one of the premier positions among the higher powers, those with the capacity to affect the fate of human beings. He is both highly respected and revered as a central and indispensable figure in Huichol re­ ligion and ritual, not “holy” in the Judeo-Christian sense but very sacred, “muy delicado,” as Huichols say in Spanish, even as they also tell many stories from the First Times in which he is a source of amusement for the pranks he plays on others or that are played on him.

Concepts ofthe Sacred With respect to the idea of something, or someone, being “sacred,” as Káuyumari certainly is, Myerhoff (1974:74-75) has a useful definition: The Huichol notion of the sacred is difficult for a Westerner to grasp. It seems to embrace above all the concept of attaining wholeness and harmony. To be in accord with one another, with oneself, with one’s customs—this is the state of being a proper Huichol and it is sacred. It is a dynamic condition of balance in which opposites exist without neutralizing each other, a tension between components that

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does not blur their essential separateness.... The sacred is a natural condition for the “true Huichol.” It flows in and out of the mundane with a continuity that seems at odds with the concept of sacred as “set apart” and “special.” The sacred for the Huichols is continu­ ous with the mundane in that it is within the very fabric of everyday concerns and everyday life lived as it is supposed to be.

Myerhoff had it right: what Huichols mean when they try to tell you, in Spanish, that something or someone is “sacred,” is at least in part rather like what Navajos mean by hozho, to be in balance, to walk in beauty. Indeed, it is difficult to find anything in the natural or social land­ scape that is strictly secular or mundane under any and all circumstances. Depending on context, objects, people, animals, relationships, anything at all, can be either “sacred” or “profane,” or both. The kakauyarite, or gods, are always sacred and never everyday, of course. I should note here that in the absence of a term for “God” or “god,” when Huichols want to convey the idea in Spanish, they employ a Huicholized form of Dios. But traditional Huichols—as opposed to those more influenced than others by missionary teachings—do not so charac­ terize any of the members of their crowded pantheon, and certainly not Káuyumari. Rather, as already mentioned, they are the kakauyári(-te, -ixi), an apparently archaic term for those who established the world, were the first to hunt the divine peyote cactus when it appeared to them in the form of a deer, and live among the Huichols embodied in sacred mountains, rocks, caves, and other prominent features in the Sierra Madre Occidental and the peyote desert far to the east. Kakauyári has defied translation, although Grimes is probably right when he suggests that it is a compound based on kakai, sandal, with a meaning something like “our sandal-straps,” perhaps in the sense of “that which binds us to the earth” (Grimes et al. 1981). In a very real sense we are prisoners of our language, and so, inexact though it is, “gods” (in the Aztec, or Greco-Roman and Egyptian, rather than the Judeo-Christian, sense) comes as close for our purposes as we can hope to get to how Huichols conceive of the divine ancestors and the personifications of rain, sun, fire, clouds, water holes, food plants, deer and other animals, and so on that they address by ritual kinship terms. We should remember, however, that what Zingg calls the “great gods,” the divine personifications of natural phenomena and ancestors, are the same kinds of primordial shamans, transformers, and magicians that can be found in other Native American religions.

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Transformation vs. Creation ex N¡hiIo It is difficult to find such a thing as creation from nothing in the aborigi­ nal (as opposed to the syncretistic, Christian-influenced) world views of Native American peoples generally. The same applies to the Huichols. In the Native American literature this or that culture hero—Coyote in California, for example—may be credited with having “created” a host of phenomena, including people, but on closer examination their acts of “creation” are actually transformations. In most aboriginal origin myths matter preexisted in some other form, and the world as we see it today, an earlier world as the remote ancestors who were animal people expe­ rienced it, and even older mythic worlds that suffered cyclical destruc­ tions are the result of magical metamorphosis, or death and rebirth, not creation in the biblical sense. There is therefore no “creator” in the ab­ original Huichol “pantheon,” with or without a capital C. Indeed, if the term were applicable to any member of the vast array of male and female Huichol nature and ancestor deities and spirit “owners” of animals and plants, it would have to be Takutsi Nakawé. As we saw in Chapter 8, it was she who, once the earth had dried out after the universal deluge, used her power staff and woven sash to give substance and sentience to new animals and plants. To a large degree this aged goddess combines in her person aspects of other, more youthful, personifications of the earth, the earth’s generative powers, and the major food plants, especially maize. Thus she resembles the earth mother goddesses of the Mexica and the Puebloan Southwest. But in the final analysis we find Nakawé, too, to be a great shaman-transformer, facilitator of the creative urge, rather than a creator ex nihilo in the sense of the Judeo-Christian deity. This is true as well of her Cora counterpart, who is generally simply called “Grandmother.” Although we lack a comparable Huichol tradition, in a Cora creation chant published by Preuss (1912:601-603), it is Grand­ mother who, in that primordial time when the earth was still covered by water, “creates” the first beings, the rain goddesses, and the clouds that embody them. For her raw material she uses “unspun cotton” (clearly not a wild or domesticated plant of the genus Gossypium but the soft, white, cotton-like fibers attached to the seeds of the cottonwood tree), into which, in the manner of the shaman blowing on the patient, she puts the breath of life. It is this Grandmother goddess, too, who, by another act of magical transformation, constructs the earth. She does so by flat­ tening a ball of mud the rain goddesses brought up at her direction from the bottom of the sea and floating it on the waters of the primordial sea

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on a four-directional thread cross. This is the first tsikúri, Lumholtz’s misnamed “eye of god.” Again on her instructions, the Cora culture hero, the Morning Star, constructs this primordial thread cross from a pair of sticks laid crosswise and wound round and round with strands of Grandmother’s long hair. On this she places animals and plants. But that, too, is transformation from one form of matter to another rather than “creation.” I stress the absence from aboriginal Huichol religion of a “Creator” in the biblical sense because there is a good chance that with increas­ ingly pervasive missionary influence, fundamentalist Protestant as well as traditional Catholic, we may find the Káuyumari of old, the one whom Zingg’s Huichol friends (and mine) called “half-bad,” being recast from ambiguous, dualistic culture hero cum trickster into a Creator who is omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient. There is already literature in which he is so described, never mind that Preuss long ago recognized his dualistic trickster aspect, that thirty years later Zingg’s Huichol informant Juan Real reconfirmed it with oral traditions, and that after another three decades had passed, so did our friend Ramón. Clearly it is the responsi­ bility of students of Huichol culture to be very clear in their own minds, and to make clear to their readers, that if there is a “new” Káuyumari, he is not the Káuyumari of old but the product of religious syncretism and acculturation. It goes without saying that such a Káuyumari would never, ever do the kinds of naughty things that have entertained and instructed Native American audiences from the Arctic to the Tierra del Fuego for untold millennia.

Káuyumari in the Light of Pan-Native American Trickster Traditions If most of what has thus far been said about Káuyumari is culture-specific, especially his function as culture hero, the other, complementary side of his complex personality, that of sometime deceiver, prankster, and foolish sexual clown, places him squarely within the greater pan-Native Ameri­ can trickster tradition. In his classic form, the trickster is the culture hero in his all-toohuman aspect: buffoon and sexual clown, divine prankster who cannot resist playing hilarious (or, sometimes, nefarious) tricks on others but who also cannot prevent his pranks from backfiring on himself. In these respects Káuyumari is a perfect fit with such well-documented creator­ culture hero-tricksters, distant in space but conceptually remarkably

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close, as, say, Raven on the Northwest Coast, Manabozho (Manabush) of the Ojibway (Chippewa) and their Algonquin relatives in the Great Lakes region, and Coyote, that best-documented and most widely dis­ tributed of all North American trickster-culture heroes. Among the Porno in California, to cite one case, Coyote is both the great benefactor who, by means of transformation and magic, “creates” the earth, sun, moon, ocean, fish, land animals, human beings, vegetal and other food­ stuffs, implements, streams, lakes, and so on, and who institutes, among many other customs, rituals, doctoring, divorce, the dance house, sweat lodge, and cremation burial. But, as Káuyumari does in a myth recorded by Zingg, Coyote also brings death to the people. A prank that backfires causes the deluge that destroys the world. Another burns the world. He tricks his mother-in-law, seduces pretty women, burns the dance house he created, tricks Skunk, Ground Squirrel, Falcon, and Thunder’s wife, and, like Káuyumari, is himself tricked in turn by those he deceived (Barrett 1933)As is clear from Radin’s classic study (1956) of the Native American trickster, for Indian people there is never anything incongruous or ir­ reconcilable in two such apparently contradictory aspects, and certainly nothing that detracts from the positive and sacred qualities of the culture hero or the respect in which he is held. Like night and day, life and death, sickness and health, creation and destruction, these are simply givens, two sides of the same coin. Like their many counterparts throughout the Americas, Raven, Manabozho, and Coyote are, on the one hand, classic tricksters, on the other every bit as endowed with positive powers and as respected as Káuyumari. All are divine benefactors of humanity, teachers of the sacred arts, and yet at the same time fully as capable as any human being of rascally and amoral, libidinous behavior, as much the object of ridicule as, in other contexts, of reverence and thanksgiving. Though there is obviously no direct connection, one model with which Káuyumari accords particularly well is Manabozho/Mánabush/ Wenebozho, the Algonquin trickster-culture hero. Like Káuyumari, he established the principal elements of the native religion, especially the Midi, or Grand Medicine Society, and its rituals and graded shamanistic societies. Although in his animal manifestation he is Great Hare, like the Káuyumari of Zingg’s trickster stories he is closely associated with the Wolf People, to the point of joining a pack of timber wolves and traveling and hunting deer with them. He becomes uncle to the younger wolves, of whom one, white in color and called Little Wolf, becomes his inseparable companion until he is drowned by the dangerous underwater manidos.

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It is they who caused the waters to rise and drown the earth. Manabush saved himself by climbing a tall pine. But the waters kept rising and he had to pull up mightily on the crown to keep it, and his nose and mouth, above the water line. It was almost up to his mouth when he felt irresist­ ibly compelled to defecate and to his dismay saw his own excrement floating up right under his nose. In other stories he falls headlong into his own excrement. Yet it is this same slightly ridiculous being who teaches the people the rites of initiation into the different grades of the Grand Medicine Soci­ ety and its other rituals and beliefs and who even brings down from the celestial realm of the Supreme Manido the Society’s sacred blue brush­ work wigwam in which the Mide initiations are conducted. Zingg saw in the two sides of Káuyumari a projection by Huichols of their own contradictory, or “half-bad,” personality:

The trickster is identified with the coyote among many tribes; but among the Huichols he is spoken of as the Elder-brother of the wolves. The Huichol trickster is kauymáli, the culture hero, who taught the Huichols almost everything that they know. He does not appear as a god in the mythology because most of his supernatural powers are given to him temporarily so that he can serve as the mes­ senger of the great gods. It is only by one of his tricks that he gets himself worshipped or made an object of prayer. As Santo Cristo is considered to be the culture hero of the Mexicans because he established all their customs, so kauymáli is the culture hero of the Huichols. As such he is clearly a projection of the Huichols by themselves. Like the Huichol ideal of a smart and clever lad among themselves, kauymáli is a roguish Puck-like figure always up to tricks and is occasionally outsmarted. (Zingg 1938:361)

Preuss on Káuyumari As mentioned earlier, the first ethnologist to recognize the ambiguity in Káuyumari—on the one hand, the generous benefactor and teacher, that is, all the sacred qualities enumerated earlier, and on the other a lazy, self-indulgent, oversexed, and untrustworthy rascal—was not Zingg but Preuss. During his nine months with the Huichols in 1906 Preuss amassed a comprehensive collection of sacred myths and chants. Unfor­ tunately the main body of his work, a manuscript of sixty-nine texts with

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interlinear translations and free renderings into German, ready for publi­ cation before his death in 1938, was destroyed in the bombing of Berlin. What survives from the Huichol portion of his Sierra Madre expedition are several long essays he contributed to scholarly German journals, some written while he was still in Mexico, others following his return to Berlin (Preuss 1907a, 1907b, 1908, 1909, 1996). Preuss’s only Ph.D. student, Elsa Ziehm, published a history and ethnomusicological analysis of the Huichol recordings in the third of her three edited volumes of Preuss’s Nahua texts from San Pedro Jicora, Durango (Ziehm 1968-76). That some of the delicate wax cylinders suf­ fered damage over the years, and others disappeared, is less surprising than that any survived at all, for, having survived the Nazis, they were taken to the Soviet Union as temporary spoils of war, spending several years in involuntary exile at the Linguistic Institute in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) before being returned, via East Berlin, to Preuss’s old institu­ tion, the Museum für Vólkerkunde in Berlin-Dahlem. I was never able to get an unequivocal yes to Preuss’s astral identifica­ tion of Káuyumari as the Morning Star from my Huichol acquaintances, but Preuss may well have been right. But these are other issues. More to the point is Preuss’s recognition of Káuyumari’s two sides as complemen­ tary opposites rather than intractable black-white oppositions. Nor does there seem to have been in his day what we are beginning to see today: a semi- or even a complete separation of the trickster aspect from that of the benefactor, and the latter’s reinterpretation as a unidimensional, all-good, all-seeing, even omniscient and omnipresent, creator god with Christ-like attributes, in place of the ambiguity that was the hallmark of the aboriginal Huichol culture hero—as, indeed, it was, and continues to be, of the larger pre- or non-Christian world view. Preuss saw Káuyumari for what he was: the typical North American culture hero cum trickster, whose apparent negatives were as essential to the whole as his positive as­ pects. He refers to him as a “loser Schalk," a frivolous, dissolute, naughty rascal and buffoon who would rather sleep and play than leave his home at the eastern end of the world to do his duty in the ceremonies. We do not know whether Preuss’s lost collection of Huichol myths and chants included stories of Káuyumari as trickster comparable to those recorded by Zingg in the 1930s and by Myerhoff and myself in the 1960s. But in 1909, following his return to Germany, he published an essay in which the all-too-human side of Káuyumari’s ambiguous personality is immediately apparent and his permanent residence in the peyote country firmly established. What we have here—in the context of a comparison

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of the performance style of the Huichol shaman-singer with that of the Indo-European epic known as the Rig Veda—is the only published first­ hand record of a little-known but absolutely essential verbal drama: the formal summoning of Káuyumari from his home in Wirikúta to the Sierra Madre Occidental, for his presence is essential at every ceremony, be it a curing rite for an individual or one of the major observances of the annual ceremonial cycle. An outsider might notice nothing beyond mo­ notonous solitary chanting by the shaman-singer, when the mara’akáme is actually engaged in spirited dialogues between a whole company of actors. There is first of all Tatewari, divine patron of shaman-singers like himself, with whose personality he merges his own and in whose stead he sings. There are the rain goddesses of the eastern end of the world, on whom he—or, more correctly, Tatewari—calls for assistance. There is Káuyumari himself, and there is the shaman’s muviéri, his arrow-shaped wand with its free-swinging feather bundle, objects that we would clas­ sify as “inanimate” but that for Huichols are sensate beings capable of thought and action. It is solely the mara’akáme who, by giving them voice, makes each of these participants come alive for the audience. First he calls on Tatewari to assist him. Tatewari—the great Mara’akáme of the mythic First Times— informs him that he cannot do it alone but requires the presence and participation of Káuyumari, who is his messenger and chief spirit helper. The rest of this opening drama is about locating Káuyumari in his home in the distant east, on or in the hill that bears his name, and persuading him ever more urgently to bestir himself and come to the community or family requiring his presence. Because the shaman’s feathers, his muviéri, are animate beings, he can send them flying magically through the air to Káuyumari’s “rancho” in Wirikúta. They find him lying asleep concealed by the darkness of his dwelling. But he cannot hide from the magical feathers. They tickle him awake and he protests. They tickle him again. He feigns sleep. They speak to him: Come with us, the people await you. Káuyumari knows full well that without him the ceremony cannot begin. Yet he resists. He invokes one excuse after another for not being able or not wanting to rise from his bed. He has a pain and a weakness in the head. He is suffering from sore feet and diarrhea. Or the sexual charms his wife offers him just as he is about to set out for the Huichol country are irresistible. At Tatewari’s urging the rain goddesses add their voices: Come, get up, the people are waiting for you. Finally he runs out of excuses and agrees to make the journey, if

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not necessarily with good grace. His wife sees to it that he is properly dressed and adorned and is armed with his obligatory bow and arrows. She warns him to go straight to the Huichol country and not tarry along the way with pretty girls, as he is wont to do (and as, indeed, he does frequently in the mythology). Still he resists a little. The more graphic the shaman’s recitation, the greater the entertainment, and the greater also the mara’akáme’s renown as divinely inspired raconteur. Delighted laughter greets his words as he describes how Tatewari, at last losing all patience with Káuyumari, grabs him by the hair and drags him from east to west into the presence of the shaman and his audience. Only then can the ceremony begin. These chanted dialogues can involve as many as five sets of actors, including, first of all, the singing shaman himself; his divine tutelary, Tatewari; the magical parrot and hawk feathers of his muviéri; the rain goddesses who reside in the eastern part of the universe; and, of course, Káuyumari himself. Sometimes, when Káuyumari is particularly stub­ born, Tatewari may even press other members of the pantheon into ser­ vice. If nothing else, this should effectively end any notion that Huichols unaffected by Christian missionary instruction see in him an all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing, and omnipresent Creator.

Narrative Style in Huichol Ritual As for the style of the performance, Preuss points out that no matter how many speaking parts there are, it is always the shaman-singer alone who performs them all, never with more than nominal encouragement from the assistants who sit at his side. This contrasts with the ceremony proper, when, typically, they repeat his words each time he pauses for breath. Actually, there are other occasions when the officiating shaman-singer alone gives voice to different actors in a sacred drama. So, for example, in the performance of the farewell ceremony for the deceased, he speaks, or sings, as the soul; as Káuyumari (or his alter ego, Irumári) in his function as psychopomp narrating the soul’s chthonic journey and its temporary return to its former abode for a final goodbye; as the ancestors watching the soul’s progress and waiting to celebrate its arrival in the underworld with dancing, peyote, and fermented drink; as the dog and the opossum guarding the trail; and, of course, as the soul itself (see Chapter 7). Preuss explains the phenomenon of a single actor taking on several speaking roles—both among the Huichols in Mexico and in India in the dramatization of the Rig Veda—as having developed out of an original

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storytelling form. Whether or not that is the only explanation, it is true that the mara’akáme’s performance as leader of the ceremonies, here as elsewhere, is virtually all verbal, with nothing being acted out by him except for occasional gestures with his muviéri, rising to face the cardinal directions, or, in another instance observed by Preuss, joining for a few minutes in the frenetic Dance of the Deer at the conclusion of the peyote ceremony. Parenthetically, it is interesting to note that he also interjects descrip­ tive passages to help the audience “see” what is going on. This is not al­ together necessary, because the elliptical style of the chant notwithstand­ ing, the participants in the culture, having heard it all before, know very well what is going on. “He went there,” “having arrived he picked it up,” “having done it he said ‘I have done it well,’” and similar phrases may be impenetrable to us, but to Huichols the context in which they are spoken or chanted conveys a wealth of information. But it is more fun to have it explained again. And of course there are always children present who need to fix it in their heads. This can go on for quite a while, Preuss not­ ing that the actual dialogues that bring about Káuyumari’s participation in the ceremony are fourteen times as long as the excerpts he published. No one is in a hurry, and there is no fixed time for the main part of the ceremony to begin. That is why the shaman can have his feathers scold Káuyumari repeatedly for his laziness, for his refusal to help the people, for his whining and babbling: “Why do you speak so fast?” the feathers demand of him. “Don’t talk so much!” The people have done everything right, they say, they have made your prayer arrow, they have hunted deer for you, don’t be so lazy, now it is your turn to help them. And so he does. That people can laugh at the antics of a divine being even as they thank him for his gifts and expect him to protect them and bestow health, fertility, and the good things of life may strike us as strange and incon­ gruous. But it is one of the salient characteristics of the religious imagi­ nation and behavior of the Huichols that during even the most solemn and sacred of ceremonies people may suddenly break into laughter at whatever strikes them as funny. For example, there was a moment on the 1966 peyote pilgrimage Barbara Myerhoff and I had the good fortune to observe when, during a particularly solemn commemoration of some event on the primordial peyote hunt of the ancestors, the peyoteros, of whom some had actually been weeping, broke into fits of uproarious laughter when a live coal exploded from the fire and singed a large hole in the brand-new pants of one of their number. This was an elderly, and clearly very poor, man who had gone to considerable expense to dress up

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in a new outfit for the occasion. He was not hurt and he took the insult to his clothing with a broad smile, shrugging it off as an “arrow” sent by the ancestors, perhaps by Tatewari, perhaps by Káuyumari, to remind him of his ritual obligations. The others, still laughing, offered encouragement, and the ceremony resumed in its former solemnity. Seeing humor in serious situations, greeting misfortune with laughter, even in the midst of sacred proceedings—these behaviors, so incongru­ ous to us, are true not just of Huichols but of other indigenous peoples for whom many phenomena have built into them their opposite, where the good and the bad, like the solemn and the hilarious, are never, as they are for us, irreconcilable oppositions.

Káuyumari as Elder Brother Wolf In Ramón Medina’s stories of Káuyumari and his bad behavior he is not specifically identified with any animal other than deer. But as noted earlier, in some of Zingg’s trickster tales Káuyumari appears as “Elder Brother Wolf,” though not permanently. In one of Juan Real’s myths the Sun god transforms Káuyumari from wolf into deer—and not just one deer but two, to see whether the water goddesses, his adversaries in a primordial contest for supremacy, would recognize what manner of ani­ mals there were. After the Sun had determined Káuyumari’s physical and metaphysical place in the world, he transformed him into a pair of deer. Káuyumari traveled to the four corners of the earth and to the sea to learn the secrets of the paraphernalia the water goddesses were using. With the help of the Sun’s own paraphernalia, that is, his muviéri, the antlers of the two deer that were Káuyumari were able to communicate with the votive bowls owned by the Mothers of Rain. As a reward, the Sun gave the rock that was the place of his (the Sun’s) birth for Káuyumari’s use as a rancho. Then, to fool the rain goddesses, the two deer that were Káuyumari leapt into the sea and emerged transformed into two small stones. The stones traveled to a cliff near Santa Catarina, in the Huichol Sierra, where they lived with five rattlesnakes, an adder, and the paraphernalia of the Sun. The Sun told Káuyumari to collect the saliva of the snakes and anoint himself with it. Thus he would make himself very sacred. Káuyumari did as he was told and, after biting off the rattles of the five rattlesnakes, anointed himself with their blood as well. This made him so sacred that the Sun told him he had to remain there for five months without touching a woman or eating salt. If he failed in his vows he would become withered on one side. Knowing his weakness, one of the water goddesses transformed

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herself into Moon Woman, Metséla. Beautifully dressed, she approached Káuyumari and offered herself to him. She tested him several times and finally caused him to dream of intercourse with her. This happened while he was singing sacred songs and should have been dreaming of the revela­ tions of the Sun. Thus the rain goddesses won the first victory. But in the end it availed them little in their contest with the Sun.

Wolf or Coyote? I think Zingg’s suggestion that Káuyumari in his manifestation as wolf links him to the widespread Coyote complex north of the border may well be right. It occurred to me as well when I first read Zingg’s typewrit­ ten manuscript in the library of the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe. This was because in some of the narratives collected by Preuss among the Cora and the Nahua-speaking “Mexicanos” in southern Durango, Coyote is also the trickster and, even more often, the hapless buffoon (Preuss 1912; Ziehm 1968-76). Zingg’s insight makes scientific as well as conceptual and literary sense. The coyote, Canis latrans, a native of arid northern Mexico and parts of the United States, especially the Southwest, who is also known as prairie wolf, is essentially only a smaller species of wolf (Canis lupus). The difference between C. latrans and C. lupus is mostly one of size rather than appearance, behavior, and social organization, and where the two species inhabit the same environment they sometimes interbreed, just as in some North American Indian myths they collaborate with one another. In the above-mentioned Coyote tales of the Porno, for example, Coyote joins Wolf in making people out of painted sticks and placing them inside dwellings or the sweat house. In another tale it is Wolf who instructs Coyote in how to transform sticks into human beings. In return, Coyote makes Wolf into the chief of the deer hunters, after which Wolf instructs the people in how many deer to kill (Barrett 1933:65, 67, 85). Depending on supply and the stature of one or the other of the parents, or both, their cubs sometimes reach a size so close to that of regular wolves as to be mistaken for the latter. Linking Káuyumari as Wolf with the wider Coyote complex raises some intriguing linguistic questions. Although Juan Real dictated the myths to Zingg in Spanish, there is no Spanish original because Zingg gave them a running translation into English, making notes as fast as he could to keep up with the narrator. After his return to the United States he expanded the notes into a typewritten manuscript. So how much of

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the mythology is Juan Real and how much Zingg? An example: in Span­ ish wolf is lobo, in Huichol üráve. But üráve can also mean fox or dog. The Huichol word for coyote (itself derived from the Nahuatl coyotl) is yávi (yáve), with cauxai (fox), üráve (wolf), and süvü (dog) given as synonyms by Grimes et al. (1981:127). In other words, both the term for wolf, üráve, and that for coyote, yávi, can be used generically for sev­ eral members of the genus Canis. So what would Zingg’s “Elder Brother Wolf” have been in the Huichol original—Tamatsi Üráve or Tamatsi Yávi? Or does it matter?

“He Who Does Not Know Himself” The irreverent, mischievous, and libidinous aspect of Káuyumari is to some degree implicit in his name—that is, if Grimes is right in rendering it as “he who does not know himself” (Grimes et al. 1981:24). Diguet translates the name as sly, wily, or roguish. Another meaning that at­ taches to him, mentioned to Myerhoff (1974:85) by Ramón, is “one who makes others crazy.” Ramón was our source for a number of stories about Káuyumari as sexual clown who often outsmarts himself. But even in this guise there is a serious and positive purpose to him. For some of his doings clearly benefit the pre-Huichol animal people who preceded the human race and thus, ultimately, the modern Huichols as well. Yet Ramón wanted us to understand that the culture hero did these outrageous things when he was “half-bad,” before the great ancestor deities, in particular Takutsi Nakawé and the Sun Father, made him sacred and he came to “see him­ self as he was.” This suggests that the milieu in which Ramón assimilated and pondered these myths was already entering a kind of in-between stage, the beginnings of a gradual process leading to the splitting off of the culture bringer from his trickster aspect, which, as we shall see, is typically grounded in a hunting and gathering way of life. The processes involved in this kind of natural evolution have been discussed in the lit­ erature on the trickster, and as they are very much to the point in relation to the Huichols, I return to them in the concluding section of this chapter. While for Ramón there was apparently a cutoff point between Káuyumari’s adventures as trickster and his assumption of full status as benefactor, Zingg (1938:234) wrote that Káuyumari “is spoken of as very delicate” precisely because he was “half-bad,” and also because it was he who, through one of his transgressions, brought death to the Huichols. But the contradiction between these views is more apparent than real.

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Trickster-Culture Hero as Speculum Mentis In contrast to Preuss, in whose surviving work on the Huichols we have only a few allusions to Káuyumari’s trickster aspect, there is a whole series of typical trickster tales in Zingg’s collection of Huichol myths. That there is no “logical” sequence in these Káuyumari trickster stories, or that some appear incompatible with others, need not concern us. One does not expect “logic” in myths, our own or those of others. Barrett (1933:9-10) made very much the same observation about his Pomo Coy­ ote trickster tales, which often appear to have no connection with one another. Furthermore, one version of a myth is not more “correct” than another, for it is in the nature of myth that no one story can encompass all of the truth. It is not too much to say that without appreciation of Káuyumari’s complex and ambivalent character, without acceptance of his apparently contradictory sides as a given, it is not really possible to understand, even imperfectly (and we can never aspire to more than that), Huichol intel­ lectual culture and religion, or the way Huichols who are committed, as was Ramón, to the old traditions (and, like him and many shamans, possessed of a philosophical bent of mind) see themselves. It is much to Zingg’s credit that he saw this clearly. So, more recently, does a German ethnographer, Christina Hell. A student of Otto Zerries in Munich, she sees no contradiction between Káuyumari’s eroticism and other tricksterish behaviors and his function as culture hero, benefactor, and guardian spirit. On the contrary, it is precisely the apparent antagonism between these different aspects that constitutes the principal characteristic of the trickster-transformer. As the one figure who most engages the imagination of the Huichols, she writes, Káuyumari “constitutes a so-called speculum mentis or speculum imaginatis, as this is understood by Radin (1954)” (Hell 1988; my trans­ lation). She notes the cumulative evidence for the trickster side of Káuyu­ mari, especially Zingg’s assessment that the Huichols see in this appar­ ently contradictory figure a projection, or “collective personification,” of themselves, one that at the same time functions as a model for their social behavior: even his unbridled eroticism mirrors that of the Huichols themselves. If one accepts Radin’s proposition that the trickster myths can be seen as an attempt to master internal and external problems, in­ cluding those that afflict the Huichols today, she writes, one might expect that, apart from archaic or “archetypal” conflicts, they give expression to very concrete motives. Here she points to the Káuyumari-as-trickster

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tales of obviously recent origin, in which he is alternately bested by and bests mestizos as representatives of the dominant culture. Such tales, she writes, characterized as they are by irony directed against the hero but also by a desire for retribution that may not be immediately apparent, may help the Huichols cope with their daily confrontations with alien cultural influences, the process of acculturation, and their relationship to the mestizos. The gods give Káuyumari permission to exact revenge for wrongs, and avenge himself he does. Having been wronged, in one story of obvi­ ous colonial origin, by an evil wind spirit called Hortiman, Káuyumari disguises himself as a shepherd and kills Hortiman’s entire herd of sheep. At the same time, the old earth goddess Nakawé condemns Hortiman to remain forever more an evil wind. His spirit continues to roam, so the Huichols say, causing illness and death: “Through Cauyumari’s ven­ geance and the poetic justice of the god, in the end the upper hand was dealt to the Huichols, notwithstanding the damage they suffered, despite the loss of respect from the ‘civilized’ world” (Hell 1988:261). There is much with which to take issue in Hell’s book, particularly her ill-conceived attempt to best Myerhoff with a different interpreta­ tion of the Huichol deer-maize-peyote complex (Myerhoff 1974). But on the question of why Káuyumari must be—indeed, can only be—seen as a trickster, her ideas seem to me right on the mark. But then, she comes out of a school of German ethnology that stresses broad knowledge and comparative no less than particularistic studies. One of the principal ex­ ponents of this school has been her own teacher, some of whose most significant contributions have been on the cultural history, contemporary functions, and often contradictory natures of the spirit masters of animal and plant species in tropical South America (Zerries 1954, 1964). In Hell’s view Káuyumari, in his own contradictory character that manifests a genius sufficiently powerful to embrace the entire universe, in his divine and human traits, his altruism and selfishness, demonstrates the basic conception of Huichols of the “nature of being,” inclusive of humanity as such. But more than that, reconciling within himself the contradictions, he constitutes the connecting link between the polar worlds of a short-lived, constantly changing, earthly-material reality and a metaphysical world that functions according to an eternally valid order. As she sees him, insofar as Káuyumari is at once human, animal, plant, and sacred transformer-creator, he symbolizes that superior spirit that integrates the life of the individual and society with its everyday problems and conflicts into the all-encompassing divine existence: “For

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Cauyumari, by way of the mythical function that made him into a mirror image of the human being, to demonstrate at one and the same time the superiority of the cosmic order, seems only logical. In the final analysis, it is this that testifies to the ideology and ritual of the Huichols” (Hell 1988:264-265; my translation).

Káuyumari and Phallic Gigantism No story better illustrates Káuyumari’s libidinous nature than that of the trickster-culture hero as the possessor of a greatly elongated penis and its misuse by him to the displeasure of the ancestor deities. The motif of the giant, snake-like phallus is not limited to the Huichols. Rather, it has a very wide, not to say pan-Native American, distribution, having been documented from the Great Lakes and the Plateau in the north to at least the Gran Chaco in the south. Huichol variants were collected both by Zingg more than seventy years ago and by Myerhoff and me in the 1960s. All have the typical ending of a morality tale: the gods are angered by Káuyumari’s amoral behavior and, quite literally, cause him to be cut down to size. The following is a version Ramón shared with us: Káuyumari’s penis grew to very great length, perhaps fifty meters, perhaps a hun­ dred meters. It was so long that he had to wind it several times around himself and

carry the remaining length in a basket on his back. One time he was overtaken by nightfall as he walked in this way through the

countryside. “I must find a place to sleep,” he said to himself, and soon he came to a rancho. Inside was a man with four daughters. Káuyumari begged the owner for

a little place to lay his head. The man looked him over and said, “I know what you intend to do. You are planning to impregnate my daughters.” “No, no," protested Káuyumari, “I only want to find a little place to sleep.” So he spoke. Reluctantly the

man agreed. But he instructed Káuyumari to sleep against one wall, a long distance from his daughters.

Káuyumari lay there thinking and thinking how he might sleep with those attrac­ tive girls. Late in the night, while the father and his daughters were fast asleep, he took his penis out of the basket and sent it slithering snake-like across the floor to

where the girls lay asleep. He entered the first one. She said, “Oh, I feel something inside me!” Then it went out from there and crawled like a snake across the floor to

the second woman. When he entered her, she said, “Oh, I feel something inside of me.” And so it went with the third woman and the fourth. When his thing returned

he rolled it up and put it back in the basket. Then he went to sleep. The next morning all four women felt themselves to be with child. The angry

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father scolded Káuyumari and accused him ofviolating his promise. Káuyumari vig­

orously denied that he had moved from his place du ring the night. It must have been some other person, he told the father, because I never stirred. Then he fled from the

house before the father could beat him. After walking for a time he arrived where there was another girl. She was Rock Woman. She warned him that it might go badly with him if he attempted to sleep

with her. But he did not listen and entered her anyway. When he was inside her, Rock

Woman transformed into a high cliff and her vagina, which was a cleft in the rock, closed tightly. He was stuck. He remained there hanging head down, suspended from his long member. Káuyumari cried for help. He was seen by Nakawé. But she was angry with him

for his antics and did not come to his aid. Then the Sun god saw it. He was also

angry with Káuyumari for his foolishness. Lifting his arm and bringing the edge

of his palm sharply down on Káuyumari’s member, he cut him loose. Káuyumari tumbled head-down from the cliff. When he hit bottom and got up, he saw that his organ was now only of average size. It was no longer a hundred meters long. That is why nowadays the organs ofthe men are only of normal length.

Three decades earlier Zingg collected a variant of the same tale in Tuxpan de Bolaños:

The worst of his tricks to backfire was when Nakawé put him under a vow of continence and then prolonged his penis to a length of a hundred meters. This he had to carry wrapped around his waist like a girdle, with the large surplus length rolled up in a basket carried on his back. For one with the roguish character of Kauymáli, the temptation was terrific to take advantage of his magical endowment even at a distance of a hundred meters by approaching sleeping women.... The rain-goddesses had correctly gauged his weakness and prepared for it by having as one of those sleeping women a temporary form taken by a huge and high cliff. No sooner had intercourse started than she instantly changed back into the form of a cliff. Kauymáli was left dangling haplessly from the middle of the cliff.... It was the kindly Buzzard, at the command of Nakawé, who cut him down and brought him down gently. (Zingg 1938:362) As noted, the basic theme of the trickster-culture hero’s super-long penis has an impressively wide distribution. Radin (1956) noted that while the North American trickster is physically ill-defined, without fixed

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form or proportions, he is frequently endowed with outsize genitalia. In fact, uncannily like Káuyumari in the stories collected by Zingg and our­ selves, the Winnebago and Great Lakes Algonquin tricksters have a penis of such stupendous length that they have to wind it around their middles like a belt and put what is left in a box or basket they carry on their backs. In Radin’s Winnebago trickster tales there is even an old woman, remi­ niscent of Nakawé, who tries to free his overlong penis from the vagina of the chief’s daughter by jabbing it repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, with an awl. It is only when he probes a hole in a tree with his giant-length organ that Chipmunk succeeds in gnawing it down to normal size (Radin 1956:18-29, 38-40). It is at this point that his aspect of transformer and benefactor of humankind as originator of basic foods comes into play. Here the trickster-culture hero is seen to function as one of the so-called dema dei­ ties, those beings whose dismembered body parts transform into features of the environment and the useful plants. Contemplating what is left of his splendid penis, the Winnebago trickster-transformer cries out:

“Oh, of what a wonderful organ he has deprived me! But why do I speak thus? I will make objects out of the pieces for human beings to use.” Then he took the end of his penis, the part that has no foreskin, and declared, “This is what human beings will call the “lily-of-thelake. ” This he threw in a lake near by. Then he took the other pieces, declaring in turn: This the people will call potatoes; this the people will call turnips; this the people will call artichokes; this the people will call ground-beans; this the people will call dog-teeth; this the people will call sharp-claws; this the people will call rice.” All these pieces he threw into the water. Finally he took the end of his penis and declared, “This the people will call pond-lily.” He was referring to the square part of the end of his penis. What was left of his penis was not very long. When, at last, he started off again, he left behind him the box in which he had until then kept his penis coiled up. And this is the reason our penis has its present shape. It is because of these happenings that the penis is short. Had the chipmunk not gnawed off Trickster’s penis our penis would have the appearance that Trickster’s first had. It was so large that he had to carry it on his back.... Thus it is said. (Radin 1956:38-40) This characteristic also adheres to many of the South American bush spirits discussed by Zerries (1954:270-271). As for the dismemberment of

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the giant penis and its transformation into useful plants in Radin’s Win­ nebago collection, one cannot help but wonder whether, in the Huichol case, we actually have the whole story or whether there was here too a dema element that has been lost. Considering the trickster’s complemen­ tary aspect as transformer-benefactor, and all the dema-type stories in the Indian Americas and elsewhere, it is not inconceivable that when the Sun god, or Nakawé, or Buzzard, or whoever, cut Káuyumari’s virile member down to normal size, useful plants sprang up where the pieces hit the ground. The oversized phallus also appears in South American trickster­ culture hero stories. So, for example, it can be found in many variants in the massive collection of myths and tales entitled Folk Literature of South American Indians, published in twenty-four volumes by the Latin American Center of the University of California at Los Angeles under the editorship of Johannes Wilbert and Karin Simoneau. The societies cov­ ered in this remarkable compendium—a monument to Native American literary genius not likely ever to be equaled—shared similar economies based entirely, or largely, on hunting and collecting wild foodstuffs. This, as we shall see, is an important point to remember in considering the probable origins and evolution of the trickster-culture hero motif in the Americas. The following is a Niklavé version from the Gran Chaco (Wil­ bert and Simoneau 1987:281-282):

Once there was a man [Cufalh, the Niklavé hero and trickster] who had a huge phallus. He would wrap it around his waist about three times because it was so very long. He turned himself into a girl, a very pretty one, and now he had a girl’s face. Actually he was not a girl; he was a man. All the girls accompanied him. There was a dance going on, and he went to it.... When they left the dance, he said: “Let’s go to sleep now.” The girls did not all sleep together. The twelve-year-olds slept in one part, and the sixteen-year-olds in another. “Well, this sister of ours has to sleep with us,” said the sixteen-year-olds. But after a while the man said: “No, I’d better go over where the girls my age are. I’m going to sleep in their midst. You have to take good care of me, because there are many men around looking for sexual adventures, and I’m afraid they will violate me.” Then he thought: “I wonder what time it is.” Around midnight, when all the girls were sleeping soundly, he deflowered them all. He unwrapped his penis and introduced it into all of their vaginas, all of them.

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The motif of the stupendously long penis, especially as it pertains to the culture hero as trickster and sexual clown, is prominent also in the Puebloan Southwest. Here past and present overlap or blend as seam­ lessly into one another as does the peyote hunt. I am indebted to J. J. Brody for a reference to Kokopelli (in his aboriginal form, rather than more recent versions, which combine characteristics of several beings) in the living traditions of the Hopis and in the pictorial art of the Mimbres culture, which flourished in New Mexico during the thirteenth and four­ teenth centuries A.D. The Hopis tell a story in which Kokopelli sends his long penis from one mesa to another in order to have intercourse with a woman he has seen relieving herself. Compare this with a pictorial Mim­ bres bowl excavated ca. 1929 in the Galaz site and now in the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis to which Brody drew my attention. Here we see a large male with rays coming from his head and an enormously elongated penis ending in a snake head supported by three nude little men. Even closer to the Hopi tradition (and Ramón’s) is another Mimbres bowl, said to have been found in the Mimbres Valley, just across the Mexican border, in the William Palmer Collection of the Hudson Museum of the University of Maine. Here the monstrously long penis is shown snaking its way from its owner on the left-hand side in the interior of the bowl into the vagina of a woman with a startled expression on her face on the right-hand side. This monster penis, too, is supported by diminutive helpers. Several other Mimbres bowls with related scenes are known, including one in the Hudson Mu­ seum collection depicting a woodpecker working away at the monster penis, perhaps to cut it down to normal size, as Buzzard does in Zingg’s version.

Trickster-Transformer-Culture Hero: Past, Present, and Future How did the trickster-transformer come to be? An old theory, proposed by Daniel Brinton (1896), saw the trickster as a “degeneration” of an older heroic deity, but this idea was rejected by Boas, Lowie, and Radin (Ricketts 1966). In fact, Boas and Lowie suggested that the trickster character is older than the regular culture hero. Radin looked closely at trickster tales, especially those of the Winnebago, and concluded that by openly contradicting the values of the society, the trickster stories func­ tioned, among other things, as a satirical form of social protest (Basso 1987:5)When we look at Káuyumari in light of these studies, Radin’s conclu­

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sions are especially to the point. As Ellen Basso notes in the introduction to her study of trickster figures in the oral traditions of the Kalapalo of Amazonia, Radin saw the trickster’s behavior as originally undifferenti­ ated and instinctual, a mark of desocialization, but becoming historical when, at the end of the cycle, he learns who he is. To quote Radin, “he suddenly recollected the purpose for which he had been sent to the earth by the Earthmaker.” This brings to mind Grimes’s translation of Káuyu­ mari’s name as “he who does not know himself.” Certainly the following passage from Radin’s classic work, The Trickster, applies also to the “half-bad” Káuyumari: Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control. He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions, yet through his actions all values come into being. (Radin i956:ix)

Worth quoting here also is this description of the trickster-culture hero figure by Mac Linscott Ricketts (1966:327):

This “trickster-transformer-culture hero” (or “trickster-fixer,” for short) is a problem because he combines in one personage no less than two and sometimes three or more seemingly different and con­ trary roles. Oftentimes he is the maker of the earth and/or he is the one who changes the chaotic myth-world into the ordered creation of today; he is the slayer of monsters, the thief of daylight, fire, water, and the like for the benefit of man; he is the teacher of cultural skills and customs; but he is also a prankster who is grossly erotic, insatia­ bly hungry, inordinately vain, deceitful, and cunning toward friends as well as foes; a restless wanderer upon the face of the earth; and a blunderer who is often the victim of his own tricks and follies. I would also like briefly to cite Victor Barnouw on the role of Wenebojo (Manabush, Manabozho), because after what was said ear­ lier, the degree to which the Algonquin and Huichol figures overlap is immediately obvious. Wenebojo is neither human nor deity, Barnouw writes (1977:51-52), but something of both. He assumes many forms in the course of a single story—beaver, tree stump, snake, old lady. He

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creates the world we live in and thus is something of a deity, but he is also something of a crybaby. He seems to fall into Lévi-Strauss’s category of mediators between men and gods. Wenebojo’s actions are not to be taken as models for imitation but, rather, often suggest behavior that is to be avoided, although, as noted earlier, at least some Huichols see themselves in Káuyumari’s “half-bad” side. It must be said that Huichols are hardly unanimous on the nature and doings of Káuyumari. Indeed, if it is correct to suggest that there are at least as many versions of Huichol religion as there are Huichols with access to the sacred, the same might be said of Káuyumari. There are many Káuyumaris, and all have their part in making up the whole, however much may have been lost or shifted in emphasis in the course of the centuries. There is no question that Huichols given, as was Ramón, to philosophizing about their religion have wrestled with the seeming con­ tradiction, and will continue to do so, especially if, or when, Christianity achieves greater penetration into the Huichol world view than it has in the past. Hell (1988:252) even found it conceivable that “in the future Santo Christo and Cauyumari will merge into one and the same being.” If not in so many words, that has already happened in some recent writings on the Huichols. Clearly there is no understanding here of how Huichols, or other indigenous peoples with similar culture heroes cum tricksters, think about complementarities and about both negative and positive as­ pects in one and the same being. In the Western mindset, as in Western religion, it is either one or the other, either creator and “tutelary spirit” or trickster, but never both at one and the same time. Are there circumstances other than inroads from Christianity that might contribute to the gradual division of Káuyumari into two or more characters, one the sacred being without faults or blemishes, the other, or others, with the qualities of the mischief-making trickster? The answer is, yes, of course. The fact is that this has not occurred just with Káuyu­ mari. Other former trickster-culture heroes in the Indian Americas have reemerged in the literature in almost Christ-like forms—all-powerful, all­ good, all-seeing, all-beneficent, with not a breath of scandal adhering to their personalities, while the trickster stories become associated with the devil or some other alien being. As an agency in the weakening of the trickster aspect, Ricketts (1966:328) put stress less on Christianity than on socioeconomic transformations. For him the trickster preeminently belongs to the pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer past. Generally speaking, Ricketts wrote,

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the more strongly the tribe has been influenced by an agricultural way of life, the less important is the place of the trickster-figure in the total mythology of the tribe, and the more he tends to be known only as a trickster. This fact alone would seem to indicate that he is an extremely archaic figure, belonging to the culture of primitive hunters and gatherers, and other evidence also points in this direc­ tion. In the Southwest and Southeast, where the agricultural influ­ ence is strong, the figure is almost entirely “trickster.” (1966:328)

To which Barnouw (1977:51) adds, “This points to his archaic nature, related to a hunting-gathering way of life. Our own version (that of the Chippewa culture hero-trickster Wenebojo) is in the archaic hunting­ gathering tradition.” Ricketts (1966:329) notes that Boas concluded from his studies of the trickster-culture hero that “the trickster elements were the most primitive aspects of the character in question,” and that the complex figure combining the aspects of both culture bringer and trickster had evolved from “an earlier character who was basically self­ centered, amoral, and motivated by no higher impulses than his own desires.... In the more highly developed phases of Indian mythology, the culture hero became a figure separate from the trickster; but in many cases the complete separation had not yet taken place, Boas thought. Thus the trickster and heroic elements are found mingled inconsistently in one personage.” Ricketts is somewhat critical of Boas’s assessment because, he writes, it was founded “more on a theory of progress than upon factual data.” The fact is that “nowhere do we find a trickster who is not also, in some respects, a culture hero” (1966:329). And that is true, above all, in hunt­ ing and gathering cultures. In my own view there is little question that the half-bad, half­ good Káuyumari of the modern Huichols is rooted in their own preagricultural past, or at least in that portion of their composite ancestry that, at the time of the Spanish invasion, still retained a nomadic, or semi-sedentary, way of life as primarily hunters and collectors of wild foods, with some seasonal horticulture. Groups identifiable as Huichols (“Guisóles,” etc.) are consistently described in the earliest Spanish docu­ ments as “primitive” semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers who augmented their subsistence on wild foods with limited, part-time horticulture, and as related to and allied with the Chichimec Guachichiles (Gerhard 1982). If Ricketts, Radin, Barnouw, and other scholars are surely right

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in assigning the trickster-transformer-culture hero figure generally to an “archaic,” or pre-agricultural, past, it follows that his survival among the Huichols adds to the cumulative evidence for a relatively recent desert hunter-gatherer component in the compound ancestry of this Utonahuan people, the more so in that Káuyumari is Deer, ideologically and econom­ ically the most important game animal. And Deer, in turn, is the avatar of the ecstatic intoxicant hikuri, the peyote cactus, the sacred focus of Huichol spirituality. It goes without saying that the Káuyumari of the contemporary Huichols, whether or not he retains aspects of the trickster, need not be identical with the Káuyumari of five hundred or a thousand years ago. If there were Huichols in the sixteenth century who were still semi-nomadic hunters, even if all ancestral Huichols lived by hunting and gathering, their modern descendants are predominantly agricultural, relying on maize as their basic and most sacred staple, augmented whenever pos­ sible by game and wild food plants. But there are certain caveats. Huichol agriculture—or, more correctly, horticulture—is even now largely at an incipient, slash-and-burn, digging-stick stage. Furthermore, its success, the growth of the cultigens, is emotionally and symbolically linked to— indeed, directly dependent on—success in hunting. Káuyumari is very much tied into the mythology, symbolism, and rituals essential to success in both these aspects of Huichol subsistence. Without his beneficial powers, the brush and trees cannot be suc­ cessfully cleared and the coamil (milpa, maize field) planted. Nor would it thrive. Without him the maize—itself the child of peyote—would not come up, or the ears would surely wither on the stalk. This multiple in­ terdependence is implied also in the conception of Wirikúta as the place not only of the divine ancestors but of both Káuyumari, who has his rancho on a hill that bears his name, and Niwétsika, the divine Mother of Maize. At the same time, Káuyumari is himself Deer, so that in the pey­ ote hunt, where his presence is symbolized by the antlers carried by the leader, he is both hunter and prey. In one of his guises he is even Master of the Deer Species and, sometimes, spirit owner of all game. Hunting deer has been the essential prerequisite for agricultural activities: whether the hunt came off well, whether there was deer blood with which to anoint the prayer offerings and the fruits of the field was dependent on Káuyu­ mari. So, ultimately, is the hunt for the peyote, the metaphorical deer. And hunting peyote, in turn, guarantees the coming of the life-giving rains and thus the proper alternation of the seasons. One thing is self­

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evident: without Káuyumari and his participation, there can be no pri­ vate or public ritual, no ceremony, no shamanic curing of the sick.

Wrestling with Contradictions Thus far the Huichols have been successful in maintaining both systems, growing food and hunting and collecting it. The planting of maize and its harvest and the hunting of game and the gathering of wild foods, to­ gether with all the rituals that pertain to them, are complementary halves that make up the whole of Huichol subsistence. But thanks to the replacement by firearms of the traditional bow and arrows and noose traps, an increasing human population, and a shrink­ ing environment, in terms of both size and natural resources, deer and even rabbits, another focus of a sacred hunt, have become scarce and are threatening to disappear altogether. In some parts of the Sierra deer are already virtually extinct. The bull has replaced the traditional deer in many ritual contexts. However successfully Huichols may have been able to integrate cattle and other domestic animals into the traditional scheme, the integration is not complete: some Huichols even deny that domestic animals are endowed with the same kind of souls as are indig­ enous wild creatures. Also, cattle are wealth, and sacrificing a bull entails expenses not present in the ritual slaying of deer. The peyote hunt, too, has been under increasing pressure from many sides, not least the fallout in Mexico from the ill-conceived “war on drugs” north of the border, as well as increasing privatization and fenc­ ing of lands through which the peyoteros have freely moved for centuries. And added to Catholic efforts there is the growing influence of evangeli­ cal missionaries with funds coming from the United States. The Christian idea of what the sacred and the supernatural are supposed to be like is hardly compatible with a great and sacred benefactor of humanity whose other side is a roguish prankster with an overactive libido. Even if most Huichols remain to this day remarkably true to their traditional religion, the annual ritual cycle, and the sacred oral tradi­ tions, the inroads Christianity of all stripes has made, and continues to make, are increasingly apparent. How Káuyumari is understood and represented, by Huichols themselves and by outsiders with their own religious agenda, may thus not be only a matter of distance from an “ar­ chaic” or desert hunting way of life. Finally, Káuyumari as transformer-culture hero whose other, com­ plementary, side is that of buffoon is, to me, more profoundly religious

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and more authentically Huichol—indeed, more truly Native American— than he could ever be as a unidimensional Good Shepherd or Light of the World. He is a universal figure, and Ricketts’s observations on the trickster-fixer of North American Indians apply no less to his Huichol counterpart. As Ricketts sees it, the trickster is the personification of all the human traits raised to their highest degree. People are sexual, the trickster is oversexed. People are slow to learn from their errors, the trickster makes the same mistakes over and over. Human life is hard, but life also has its joys and pleasures, and while the trickster is always being buffeted about, he also enjoys life and comes up laughing. Laughter, he continues, has an important place in our lives—indeed, it is one of our saving graces: The trickster is the embodiment of humor—all kinds of humor. He plays tricks on others, he ridicules sacred customs, he breaks taboos, he boasts when he should blush, he is the world’s greatest clown, and he can laugh at himself. For the religious viewpoint which the trickster represents, laughter has a religious value and function. In laughing at the incredible antics of the trickster, the people laugh at themselves. The myths of the trickster enabled the Indians to laugh off their failures in hunting, in fighting, in romance, and in combat­ ing the limitations imposed upon them by their environment, since they saw in the trickster how foolish man is, and how useless it is to take life too seriously. (Ricketts 1966:347)

Zingg said it first, but it was also my impression that every Huichol who thinks about these things may well see himself in Káuyumari—not a unidimensional Christ-like Káuyumari but the Káuyumari of old—one who, like himself, is just as capable of being “bad” as “good.” If Káuyu­ mari is indeed fated, in the course of religious acculturation, to be per­ manently, and not just situationally, stripped of his “archaic,” or preagricultural, complementary functions that have served Huichols so well in the past, if he loses his complex personality and ultimately merges with Santo Cristo, the culture hero of the increasingly intrusive mestizo neighbors of the Huichols, it is hardly conceivable that someone else in the mythology will not take up the slack. And I expect that, given the fer­ tile religious imagination of the Huichols and their ingenuity in making changed conditions work for them, the new composite culture hero will himself be credited with doings as outlandish, as humorous, and as far

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removed from the New Testament as are those attributed to Jesucristo in Zingg’s collection of Huichol stories. In one way or another, whether as a single being or in several guises, and notwithstanding missionary opposition to his continued presence or predictions of his inevitable demise, I feel the Huichol trickster­ transformer-culture hero will retain some of his old vitality, eroticism and all. Not because the Huichols cling to outmoded concepts but be­ cause he reflects themselves, and because this seemingly contradictory figure out of an “archaic” past answers so well to some of humanity’s most deeply felt needs in the present. Perhaps most important, he makes us laugh. And for Huichols, laughter is at least as much religious as is the ceremonial weeping that punctuates many of their rituals.

1O

Child Saint into Child Shaman, Cathedra into ’Uwéni: How the Huichols Adapted and Transformed Some Catholic Icons into Their Own

Ramón defended the exclusive validity and superiority of traditional Huichol religion versus that of the padres, to claim that the Huichols alone among Mexican Indians were com­ pletely immune to centuries of Christian teachings and control would be naive. Religious syncretism is a fact. There is just much less of it among the Huichols than almost anywhere in the indigenous Mesoamerican countryside. Lupe was no less committed to the many male and female ancestor and nature deities and to the historic truth of the oral traditions. And yet she treasured a battered color print of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Mexican version of the Mother of Christ for whom she was named and whom Mexican Indians have ever since the Spanish invasion taken to be one of their own. Penetration by a few intrepid friars of the rugged Huichol country began not long after the brutal invasion and conquest of western Mexico under the unspeakable Ñuño Beltrán de Guzmán. But these were brief visitations, with little impact on the indigenous population until 1722, when the colonial authorities finally achieved a measure of civil, mili­ tary, and religious control over the Sierra Madre Occidental. The Span­ ish built churches and established governmental and ceremonial centers in the Huichol country, as they did among the nearby Coras. But the Huichol settlement pattern of widely scattered, independent nuclear and extended family ranchos and rancherías, each with its own ancestor “god house” or family oratory, favored resistance to Catholic intrusion and owever resolutely

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conversion. So did a tendency to pack up and retreat into less accessible country rather than submit to outside pressure, and above all a strong and continuing commitment to aboriginal religion, spirituality, the sea­ sonal ceremonies, and the sacred peyote as the ecstatic-visionary intoxi­ cant that made the unseen visible. Nor should we underrate the influence of an unusually high proportion of shamans, the religious specialists, healers, and guardians of the ancestral lore. This is not to say that Huichols did not also adopt and assimilate those foreign elements that they found useful and that fit into their own material culture and, to some degree, their intellectual culture. On the material level, metal tools, wax candles, cross-stitch embroidery, stringed instruments, and Spanish round dances recast in the Huichols’ own musi­ cal idiom made their way into the Sierra even before 1722. The Mexican anthropologist Jesús Jauregui (1989) has traced Huichol fascination with mariachi music back to the early twentieth century, though it never re­ placed or modified their own musical traditions. In fact, if you ask people in Tepic, the capital of Nayarit, “Who are the best mariachis?” you may well be told, “Los Huicholes.” Relations between the Catholic and indigenous religions were not without conflict and tension. But even a limited presence of Catholic clergy was the exception rather than the rule, and some parts of the terri­ tory did not, and still do not, see a priest from one end of the year to the other. Yet Huichols adopted some Catholic symbols and saints as their own. The Franciscans were unable to do away with the annual round of community-wide indigenous ceremonies, much less those grounded in the family and its ancestor god house. But they succeeded in getting the people to accept Holy Week and other Catholic observances into their own ceremonial cycle, but as additions, not replacements. These have be­ come so “Huicholized” that a visiting Catholic from, say, Boston, much less Rome, would have trouble recognizing them as dramatizations of the New Testament. What follows is a case study of the processes by which a popular Mex­ ican Catholic saint came to be adopted into Huichol oral tradition, not as himself but transformed beyond immediate recognition into someone with whom Huichols could readily identify: the culture hero Káuyumari transformed into an especially gifted pre-adolescent “child shaman.” He makes his appearance in several of the myths dictated to Zingg by Juan Real. There is much that appears to be idiosyncratic in the manuscript. But there is also occasional overlap with other published versions; in any case, but for Juan Real’s stories in Zingg’s mythology manuscript (1935),

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and the abstracts of these he included in his book (1938), the “child sha­ man” would most likely have slipped into obscurity as a strictly local phenomenon. Nor would I have been able to follow his trail through the process of syncretism.

Zingg’s “Christian” and “Aboriginal” Myth Cycles Zingg divided his “Huichol Mythology” into two sections of unequal length. The first and longer is devoted to “aboriginal” stories, the sec­ ond to what he called the “Christian Myth Cycle.” Relating as it does to celebrations of Christmas, Easter, and other Christian observances, it consists of imaginative versions of the Gospels. Like other indigenous peoples in the colonial era, the Huichols reworked these from stories they heard not only from missionaries with doubtful, if any, linguistic skills but also through the double filter of Christianized Tlaxcalans and other Nahuatl-speaking central Mexican transplants into the Sierra. So here you have Tlaxcalan Indians passing their reworked renderings of the New Testament on to an audience of other Indians who spoke neither the Nahuatl of the Tlaxcalans nor very much of the Spanish that functioned as an imperfect lingua franca for both the newcomers and the resident population. A typical result Barbara and I heard from Ramón in 1965, which corresponds to Zingg’s then thirty-year-old version, is this one of the final days of Jesucristo: having been betrayed to his pursuers by the bark of a little dog, Jesus, who had secured his place as culture hero to the Mexicans by winning a violin-playing contest, transformed himself into an eagle and flew to Mexico City to buy nails and a hammer for his own crucifixion. Ramón called his pursuers “Julios” (Judéos, Jews). When I asked who these “Julios” were, he said, “An Indian tribe that did not want him as their king because they already had a queen.” And who was their “queen”? The Virgin of Guadalupe! Saints, cattle, burros, chickens, and material objects, including the violin and guitar that, homemade, soon became indispensable to Huichol ceremonial as well as social life, reached the Huichols in the two centu­ ries between the Spanish invasion in the sixteenth century and the as­ sumption of Spanish civil and military control over the Huichol and Cora territories in 1722. These and a few other foreign elements show up in some of Zingg’s “aboriginal” texts as well. Nevertheless, although the “Christian” and the traditional chants form part of the repertory of the same shaman-singers, they are kept separate, both in the mythology and in the annual ritual cycle, just as Zingg himself made a separation be­ tween the two sets of narratives dictated to him by Juan Real.

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The intellectual culture of Tuxpan de Bolaños, which in Zingg’s day had only recently been reoccupied by Huichols after a period of exile, was far more influenced by missionary teachings than, say, San Andrés Cohamiata, the comunidad indígena with which I became acquainted in 1967. Still, it was my first impression of Zingg’s aboriginal texts that with some exceptions these were reasonably free of Catholic elements. But in thinking about them more I began to wonder whether that was really the case or whether, like some ceremonial practices of the contem­ porary Maya whose origins Victoria Bricker (1981) has traced to Span­ ish Catholic sources, some of Zingg’s apparently indigenous mythology might not also be traceable to Catholic sources, and if so, which. I was thinking especially of the sudden appearance of a “child shaman” who alone among his fellow shamans, the ancestral “god people,” was able to cure smallpox. And smallpox, of course, was one of the scourges inflicted upon the unfortunate Indians by the European invaders. One does not have to accept the case Bricker makes in its entirety to give her credit for shaking up some long-held preconceptions and forcing students of in­ digenous religion and ritual, ethnohistorians, and folklorists to consider whether something that at first appears to be purely aboriginal may not in fact have only been recast in an indigenous mold.

The Culture Hero as “Child-Shaman” In one of the earliest myths of what Zingg calls the Sun Cycle, the cul­ ture hero Káuyumari (spelled Kauymáli by Zingg) is suddenly a child­ shaman: powerful, wise, and miracle-working, but still a child rather than the adult male semi-divine messenger between people and the deities he is elsewhere in the manuscript. The Zingg myths endow the child-shaman with a grasp of the causes of personal and cosmic calamity, and the power to heal sickness and put the universe back in working order, so far beyond his tender years that the wisest elders among the primordial “god-people,” though themselves shamans, stand in awe. In the next series of stories he reassumes his adult role. Then suddenly he reappears once more as child-shaman, expert in the causes and cures of disease that defy the knowledge and curing skills of far more experienced shamans. Johannes Neurath, a leading Mexican ethnographer of the Huichols, author of Las Fiestas de la Casa Grande (2002), and curator of the Sala Gran Nayar at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, tells me that there are Huichol shamans who believe themselves, and are be­ lieved by their fellows, to have been born fully completed. They are thus

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able to begin practicing even in their formative years. That much is surely aboriginal. But Zingg’s, or Juan Real’s, “child-shaman” is a transforma­ tion of the culture hero. Also, his power over the Old World disease of smallpox, always disfiguring and more often than not fatal, suggested a degree of religious syncretism, at least in oral tradition. So if we can ac­ cept that this child-shaman is not truly aboriginal, how did he become part of the non-Christian mythology? What were his sources? How far back did this metamorphosis of Káuyumari go? And is there some rela­ tionship between the child-shaman and the sometime manifestation in the form of a little child of kiéri, the solanaceous plant that is primarily a species of Solandra but can also be Datura inoxia and that Huichols respect but at the same time fear as a dangerous sorcerer, capable of bewitching people and even killing them? No doubt kiéri’s ambivalent reputation as sorcerer and antagonist of peyote reflects in part the very real dangers to mental health and even life that the tropane alkaloids in Solandra and Datura share with some other members of the Solanaceae and that have long played a role in ritual intoxication and indigenous medicine (Furst 1976:134-145, 1995:43-57; Furst and Myerhoff 1966; Knab 1977; Yasumoto 1996). And yet kiéri as child seems to carry none of the negative baggage of the adult kiéri. Once I began to suspect that Zingg’s child-shaman might be an extraHuichol addition to an aboriginal origin mythology (which in any event is anything but unified), it was inevitable that not only central Mexican but also colonial and more recent Christian sources be considered. As it turned out, a convincing case can be made for overlapping origins of the child-shaman in the Gospels and the Mexican saint cult. An unexpected bonus was identifying the likely inspiration also for the ’uwéni, the dis­ tinctive high-backed armchair of shamans, elders, and gods, whose de­ sign is specific to the Huichols and which, despite lack of a prototype in prehispanic furniture, I had long assumed to be purely indigenous. I no longer think so. Finally, the powerful meanings Huichols attach to the sandal (Mexican-Spanish huarache, Huichol kakai) were also found to enter the picture, reinforcing the putative foreign origins of Zingg’s child­ shaman in some surprising ways and with interesting ramifications for Huichol ancestry.

The Child-Shaman in the Myths of Sun and Maize In Zingg’s version of the birth of the Sun, the Sun Father, weary from his long journey through the underworld, suddenly falls from the zenith into the sea. The world is plunged into darkness. Fierce nocturnal animals

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reign supreme. At the end of five days the Sun climbs up again “and there shone in the full splendor of the finest Huichol man’s costume.” The other “god-people” wonder why the Sun had been away so long. Káuyumari tells them that the Sun lacked a shaman’s chair, ’uwéni, that would carry him safely across the sky. Because none of the gods know how to construct one, they ask Káuyumari to do so. It takes him five days to sing one into existence. In the meantime the god-people fall victim to a great sickness. After all the remedies fail, the primordial shaman, Tatewari, informs the patients that the Sun god has commanded a child­ shaman to sing the curing song. It is now that the previously adult culture hero appears suddenly as a child. He is so young and small that he feels ashamed before the old god: “He was not even big enough to fill the shaman’s chair,” says the myth. The child-shaman takes the shaman’s chair and places it in the center of the dancing patio. The other myth tellers (divine shamans) fall silent to listen to the boy, who informs them that he has come not because he wished to but because he was ordered to. He hardly knows how to dream, he says, because he is only a child, fit for nothing but pity. Indeed, Grandfather Fire has to sit beside him so that others would not say he was a fool and his myth telling good for nothing. At dusk the child-shaman begins to narrate the myth of the Sun, for the god-people were dying from the disease with no relief whatever. The great gods sit in shamans’ chairs on all sides of the child-shaman, but his ’uwéni is designated as a god’s seat. He sings and sings until his singing and dreaming reveal what sacrifices have to be made to effect a cure. “The older ones took his words,” says the myth, “because they knew he was better than they. ” He orders a deer to be hunted and when it arrives he brings it choco­ late, bread, grape wine, and two large candles, which he lights and, to­ gether with paper flowers and silk ribbons, places on the antlers. At the orders of the Sun god a shiny effigy of a jaguar covered with tin foil is made and placed on an altar. Thus, while the child-shaman continues to sing, the Sun god is pleased and the god-people are cured of the great sickness. The epidemic disease that Huichol myths usually associate with the Sun is smallpox. Unknown in the Americas before the European inva­ sion, this terrible scourge, to which the indigenous populations had no immunity and, along with measles and other imported epidemic diseases, killed them by the millions, struck the Huichols repeatedly during the colonial era and even as recently as the 1930s. The disease from which the god-people were cured is not specifically identified as such in this

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story, but there is little doubt that what is implied is an outbreak of small­ pox. That Huichols blame it on the Sun is probably due to the fact that the blisters of sunburn resemble those of this foreign disease. Explicit or not, it is clearly this from which the child-shaman cures the deified ances­ tors. If we can accept the historicity of this aspect of the child-shaman myth, it will help anchor its genesis in a historic framework. After the god-people had been cured, the child-shaman told the elders the amount of payment he should receive for his singing. But there was no way he could be paid what his singing was really worth, for he had saved the lives of all the god-people. As a token payment, however, they should give him the equivalent of fifty dollars. The elders gladly agreed and gathered it up in cash as well as goods. The foreign elements in the story are immediately obvious. Candles, money, paper flowers, tin foil, grape wine, silk ribbons, even chocolate— these are all the sorts of manufactured goods with which Mexican people customarily honor the images of the saints and pay them for favors asked or received. That much of the story is clearly of recent origin, an example of Christian overlay on a much older indigenous tradition, one of the several versions of the Huichol myth of the birth of the Sun that itself appears to owe much to central Mexican sources. Chocolate, which is native to Mexico, would appear to be the one exception, but before the conquest it was consumed as a beverage, not hardened into bars. Then, for many more pages Kauymáli/Káuyumari is again the adult culture hero and/or trickster, until we meet him one more time—in the myth of the origin of maize and the human race—again as a powerful child-shaman, a child “without sin,” who cures where others more expe­ rienced than he have failed. Here is Zingg’s story: One day the Sun Father leaves beautiful flowers in the patio of the young Maize goddess. When she puts the flowers in her skirt to show her mother, they disappear and instead she finds herself pregnant. Five days later she is ready to deliver. But the child fails to come out and her labor continues for five more days. The god-people come out of the primordial ocean to help, but no one knows how to deliver the child. No one, that is, and I quote, but “a child-shaman, Kauymáli, who thought he could deliver the child, because he had no sin.” The Sun god instructs the child-shaman in what to do and he arranges for the ceremonial bathing of mother and infant and all the sacrifices of food and other offerings. Five days later the baby becomes very sick. The child-shaman asks the Sun god how to cure it and is told to take the little patient to the

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home of a powerful lizard shaman who lives in the water. Lizard has five sons who are all great curing shamans. One after the other they and their father try in all-night ceremonies to cure the baby. All fail. The baby, now very emaciated, is near death. But, says the myth, “the best curer was the child-shaman, Kauymáli. He knew all the time how to cure the child. He knew how to sing, dance, and perform cures.” And cure the baby he did: “Kauymáli ate a little,” continues the myth, “and then sat there, thinking how he would cure with his tobacco gourds, his plumes, and his full festal array. ‘Our tata (the Sun-father) is looking at me,’ he said to himself. T will go alone, and leave all this finery behind.’ When he arrived at the child’s side, he saw how thin and feverish it was. First he sat down and talked to the mother. He told her that he was sent by Tata Dios (the Sun).” Here a footnote by Zingg explains that the Huichols “commonly identify the Christian God, Tata Dios, God the Father, with the Sun.” The way Káuyumari cures the child was the familiar shamanic method of sucking different disease-causing agents from its body—a maize ker­ nel from the stomach, a live stone from the foot, bloody foam from the head, a cactus spine from the breast—and by blowing his own spittle on its body. He repeats this on the second day and the third, altogether for five days. He also orders many votive offerings to be made for the gods, especially the Sun. The little baby alternately gets worse and better until finally it is cured. In fifteen more days it becomes an adult and wants sex. But there are no women for him to marry, only his own sisters. The gods decree it is all right for them to marry and have intercourse. Fifteen days later they have their first child, and then many more, who also marry their siblings until they have populated the earth. But the vaginas of these women, who had animal form but human personalities, all have teeth in them. This not being satisfactory, the gods decide to put an end to it and with Káuyumari’s help make a new race of people. This being one Huichol reference to the widespread vagina dentata myth in the Zingg collection, I want to mention another, clearly related. This one comes from Ramón’s personal inventory of Huichol oral tradi­ tions, and it, too, has Káuyumari involved in the making of a new human race, although this time more directly: Káuyumari, in his manifestation as Sacred Deer, attempts intercourse with a Deer Woman and finds him­ self injured by the teeth in her vagina. The ancestral deities instruct him to use his antlers to grind out the teeth lining the vaginas of all the Deer

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Women. This makes intercourse without injury possible and results in the propagation of a new race of people. With new humans in place, Zingg’s story has the miracle-working child-shaman disappear from the scene, having been replaced just as sud­ denly by the wise, powerful, and sexual adult culture hero whose other aspect is once more that of libidinous trickster.

New Testament Imagery and the Child-Shaman in Huichol Oral Tradition If, as I believe, the child-shaman who astounds the elders with his wis­ dom and cures smallpox and other scourges is not aboriginal, how did he get into Huichol mythology? What might have been his sources? In an essay on the Huichols published in 1901, the redoubtable pioneer Mesoamericanist Eduard Seler provides one clue. In the Libro segundo de la Crónica Miscelánea de Jalisco, published in the eighteenth century, Seler writes, Fray Antonio Tello quotes Don Francisco Pantécatl, the cacique of Acaponeta, a town in Jalisco not far from Wixárika (Huichol) terri­ tory, to the effect that the local Indian tribes worship a trinity consisting, in first place, of a child-god called Teopiltzintli, Nahuatl for divine or holy noble child (teo - “divine,” pilli = “noble,” tzintli = “child”), ac­ companied by a supreme sky and creator god and an eternally youthful heavenly virgin. According to the cacique, they learned about the divine child from a wise Indian by the name of Cunanemeti. Cunanemeti was said to have been the deified leader of a passing party of central Mexi­ cans, whom I assume to have been some of the Christianized Nahuatlspeakers the Spaniards transplanted to western Mexico to help protect the frontier against incursions by Chichimecs and other Indians not yet brought under Spanish control. Some of these central Mexicans were later also settled in the country of the Wixáritari, or Huichols, and their immediate neighbors. As was the case also in the Pueblo country of New Mexico, it was inevitable that these newcomers should leave some im­ print—from their own mythic past, like the myth of the transformation of a young boy into the Sun god through an act of fiery self-sacrifice, or, however ill-digested, assimilated from their Spanish masters—on the oral traditions, ritual practices, and material culture of the inhabitants of the Sierra Madre Occidental. The divine trinity with the Holy Child at its center could only have originated in missionary teachings that here, as elsewhere in Spanish and Portuguese America, were reinforced by the numerous printed images of

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the Holy Family and other New Testament figures with which the friars sought to overcome the barrier of language and culture in their efforts to convert the Indians. That aspect of conversion efforts not being well known, it is worth noting here: religious prints were sent to New Spain and other parts of Spanish and Portuguese America in large numbers from Flanders, Germany, and Spain beginning as early as the first half of the sixteenth century. The prominent printing house of Plantin in An­ twerp, for example, supplied Spain from the time of Philip II (1556-98) not only with bibles and religious texts but also with thousands of devo­ tional prints, many of which were sent from Cádiz and Seville to New Spain (Lange 1991:64-65). In 1798 the Bavarian printer Alois Senefelder invented lithography, an inexpensive process of reproduction that quickly gained popularity throughout Europe. In 1826 Claudio Linati, an Italian artist trained in Paris, introduced it into Mexico, and soon thereafter Mexican print shops were themselves turning out religious prints in com­ petition with, and often pirated from, the Europeans (Lange 1991). The European prints, mostly copied from religious paintings, were not only employed to help convert the indigenous population but also reproduced on canvas by Mexican and other Latin American painters and, in the thousands, on tin retablos and láminas (devotional paintings) by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexican folk artists (Lange 1991; Giffords 1991:33-63). The idea of a powerful child-god, then, seems to have been current in western Mexico already by the sixteenth century. We were talking this over when Jill Furst suggested another possible model, or reinforcement, for the child-shaman in Zingg’s Huichol mythology: the preadolescent Jesus in the Temple at Jerusalem, preaching to the elders. Early European woodcuts and engravings, including a much-copied one by Albrecht Dürer, depict the young Jesus seated in the cathedra, the chair of eccle­ siastical authority, surrounded by elders who, like the Huichol “god­ people,” are astonished by the future Savior’s knowledge and wisdom far beyond the youth’s tender years. As noted above, such religious prints were mass-produced in Europe and exported as visual aids for missionizing the benighted heathens of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies.

Enter the Mexican Cult of the Niño de Atocha These two popular images—the Holy Family and the child Jesus preach­ ing in the Temple at Jerusalem—may indeed have played a part in creat­ ing the Huichol child-shaman. But there may have been an even closer

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source in both time and space, originating not across the Atlantic but in nearby Zacatecas, and not in the sixteenth but the nineteenth century: the Holy Child as the Santo Niño de Atocha, miracle-working peripatetic preadolescent healer of illness and patron of silversmiths and silver min­ ers, traveling merchants, and, most important, religious pilgrims. The birthplace and center of the popular and widespread cult of the Santo Niño de Atocha was Plateros, meaning silversmiths or silver workers, from plata = “silver,” a settlement of silver miners and silverworking craftsmen located close to Fresnillo, Zacatecas. Contrary to re­ ceived wisdom, it was not inspired by the medieval apparition known as the Holy Child of Prague. Nor is this Niño identical with the infant Jesus as the Spanish Niño Cautivo, protector of prisoners, whose distin­ guishing attributes are the fetters or leg irons his image in Spain holds in his hands or that are clamped to his ankles. Occasionally one sees these also in láminas, tin paintings, or carved statuettes of the Santo Niño de Atocha. How that came about was explained in the 1970s by the late Yvonne Lange (1978), then director of the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She demonstrated that the Santo Niño de Ato­ cha, unlike the Santo Niño Cautivo, was not, as long assumed, a Spanish import but rather Mexican-born and bred—and not so very long ago at that, for the first miracle attributed to him dates only to 1829. One pos­ sible source for the confusion with the “Captive Child,” who is indeed of Spanish origin, she suggested, is a statue of the latter in the La Antigua chapel of the Cathedral in Mexico City. This image was being carried to New Spain in 1622 by Don Francisco Sandoval y Zapata as a gift from the Cathedral of Seville when he and the Child were captured by the Moors and taken to Algiers. According to Lange (1978:5), “Don Fran­ cisco died there. Later, the Cathedral of Mexico ransomed the remains of Don Francisco and the statue of The Child from the Moors. Hence the name ‘Captive’... .1 believe that the similarity in name of ‘Santo Niño’ in the title of both the Santo Niño Cautivo and Santo Niño de Atocha favored the transfer of the important attribute of the leg-irons of the Holy Child captured by the Moors to the newer cult of the Santo Niño de Atocha.” This iconographic overlap notwithstanding, she writes, they “represent two distinct devotions to the Christ Child.” From Plateros the cult of the Santo Niño de Atocha spread through­ out the former Spanish territories in North and South America, includ­ ing New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. Immigrants from Mexico to the United States then brought it to more northerly cities with large Latino

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populations, such as Chicago. In the early 1920s it was even exported to Spain, an unusual instance of a transplantation of a Catholic image from the New World to the Old instead of the common postconquest flow from the Old to the New. According to Lange’s (1978:4-5) reconstruction, it was a Friar P. Getino, provincial of the Spanish Province of the Order of Preachers, who “introduced the cult of the Santo Niño de Atocha from Mexico to the Dominican convent in Madrid, because the statue brought from Mexico has been documented as having been there from 1926, when a Cofradía del Niño de Atocha was launched in Madrid to promote its veneration, until 1936, when the church was destroyed by fire during the Spanish civil war.” Although the Dominicans never revived official ven­ eration of the Child, writes Lange, plaster statues of the Santo Niño de Atocha “in different sizes and styles, continue to be available in Madrid shops selling religious imagery.... This implies that, by later taking root in Spain, it reversed the accepted trend of religious traditions which have always been more apt to cross the Atlantic from east to west.” This, then, is “one of those exceptional cases where religious beliefs from the New World have been transplanted to the Old.” In northern New Mexico the old Spanish settlement of Chimayo and the chapel dedicated to the Santo Niño around 1857 beside its famous church is the center of the cult in the United States, annually drawing thousands of the devout. Many of the pilgrims leave offerings of baby shoes (to replace those the Niño wears out on his pilgrimages and cur­ ing journeys), as well as crutches and canes discarded by those the Santo Niño is believed to have cured of paralysis, arthritis, fractures, and other afflictions. The child saint has also taken hold among some indigenous southwestern peoples, especially those of Zuñi Pueblo, in the western part of New Mexico. But here the saint has been transformed from male to female, at least for the Zuñís, if not Hispanic Catholics (Nunn 1993).

The Santo Niño as Traveling Pilgrim and Healer Let’s look at how the Niño is commonly represented in nineteenth-century Mexican religious folk art, for this bears directly on the Huichol connec­ tion. Dressed like a late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century pilgrim, he is seated in a high-backed armchair. He wears a broad-brimmed hat usually decorated with feathers and on his feet are sandals of simple design. They, too, tie into the proposed Huichol connection and, as we shall see, even have certain implications for Huichol origins. He usually holds a traveler’s staff, from which hangs an hourglass-shaped water

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gourd. This is the very type of gourd which Huichols consider sacred and which one Huichol tradition recorded by Diguet in the 1890s connects functionally to the origin of the peyote cactus. The feathers with which the wide-brimmed pilgrim’s hat of the Niño de Atocha is almost always embellished in Mexican folk art are of con­ siderable interest here. Huichols who have participated in a peyote pil­ grimage are entitled to decorate the hats they weave themselves of palm or yucca fiber, or purchase from Mexican sources, with the feathers of the turkey and other birds considered sacred. Turkey, or Turkey Person, became sacred because as one of the primordial animal people who wit­ nessed the birth of the Sun, it was he who gave the newborn solar deity one of his names, Tayaupá (Our Father) by crying tau-tau-tau when he was born in a fiery volcanic eruption and his companions were debating what to name him. Alternatively, the Sun is addressed as Tawerikúa, Our Eagle. The practice of decorating the hat with feathers, in this case of the turkey as bird of the Sun, to distinguish the veteran peyotero from the novice, cannot be very old, however, for Huichols have been wearing hats in place of, or along with, headbands only since the last decade or two of the nineteenth century. Indeed, some shamans even now prefer the headband to the hat when conducting ceremonies. There is a place in Spain called Atocha, located close to, and now a suburb of, Madrid. There is also a Virgin of Atocha, who, with the Holy Child seated on her left knee, was venerated there, reportedly since the thirteenth century. Atocha is a Spanish term of Arabic origin meaning “grass.” According to Lange (1978:7), “it may be translated as feather grass or Spanish grass hemp. The name became attached to a hermitage dedicated to the Virgin Mary because it stood in a field of such grass.” The Dominican church and convent established at Atocha in 1523 was elevated in 1901 to the status of Real Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Ato­ cha. This Virgin’s cult was taken to New Spain and established there not long after the Spanish invasion. A church dedicated to El Santo Cristo de los Plateros was erected in the silver mining area near Fresnillo in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and an effigy of the Virgin of Atocha placed in one of its side chapels as a gift to the community from a local landowner. It was not a replica of the original three-dimensional Virgin, however, but a dressed mannequin to one of whose hands the Holy Child was pegged. The Child attracted special attention from the beginning because on sacred occa­ sions, such as Noche Buena, Christmas Eve, it was detached from the statue to receive special adoration (Lange 1978:3).

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Apparently, early in the nineteenth century the child became perma­ nently detached and placed in a chair, to be worshiped as the Santo Niño de Atocha (Thompson 1994:3). Miracles attributed to him followed soon thereafter. According to Thompson, these early miracles were recorded by a Don Calixto Aguirre in the form of a novena, with one miracle for each of the nine days, the first dating to 1829 and the last describing the miraculous cure, in 1841, of the novena’s author.

Mechanisms of Diffusion, Assimilation, and Transformation What might have been the route by which this imagery became embed­ ded in Huichol mythology as the culture hero in the form of a miracleworking child-shaman? As it happens, the Fresnillo region has tradition­ ally been visited and traversed by Huichols on their peyote pilgrimages, as well as on trading expeditions between the Sierra and the adjacent countryside. In fact, it is said to have been one of the stopping places of the divine ancestors who established, or reestablished, the traditional peyote hunt tradition in the First Times (Furst 1972; Myerhoff 1974). In a founding myth of the peyote quest dictated in 1966 by Ramón, it also figures expressly as a very dangerous place, where Huichols had bet­ ter travel under cover of darkness lest they be captured and enslaved in the silver mines. This dire fate must have befallen many an Indian who ventured out of the comparative safety of the Sierra Madre Occidental during the colonial era. It is also likely that in the nineteenth century, when conditions had improved somewhat, some Huichols sought work in the silver mines for pay and so would naturally have been drawn to the image and stories of a Holy Child who, himself a pilgrim, healed the afflicted and protected miners and religious pilgrims from harm. Of equal, if not greater, significance is the fact that in 1903 friars of the Josephine Order took over the Sanctuary of Plateros and ran it and a school for Indian children from the Sierra and the surrounding area until 1919. According to Thompson (1994:5), they also carried their faith, along with printed images and the story of the Santo Niño and his miracle cures, into the mountains and canyons of the Huichol country, which lies just to the west of Fresnillo. “I like to imagine,” he writes, “that when the Huichols first looked at a print of the Santo Niño de Atocha brought by the Josephine Fathers, they recognized him as a young peyote pilgrim.” And no wonder: was his hat not decorated with feathers like those that distinguish the veteran peyotero from the matewáme (the Huichol term for novice peyotero)? Did he not carry the sacred double water gourd? And were his sandals not like those Huichols themselves wear?

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In the years since, the cult has not only grown but spread far from its point of origin. According to Thompson, the number of annual pilgrim­ ages to the Plateros sanctuary has grown to more than five hundred, with an estimated two million pilgrims paying their respects and praying to the Niño. He has even been adopted into Cuba’s Santería religion, or Way of the Saints, which has its roots in the African-derived slave reli­ gions of the colonial period and the nineteenth century, and, ultimately, in the religion of the Yoruba.

From Cathedra to ’uwéni If Thompson is right—and I think he is—about the Huichols recognizing one of their own in the iconography of the Santo Niño as pilgrim, there can be no doubt that both the chair in which he is habitually seated and the sandals he wears on his feet figure into the equation. Let us first consider the chair. In the innumerable prints, paintings, and three-dimensional carvings of the Santo Niño de Atocha, he invari­ ably sits in a high-backed armchair, a piece of miniature furniture obvi­ ously modeled on the cathedra, the Latin word from which we get our English “chair” but which in Catholic terminology refers to the highbacked armchair serving as the official throne of the bishop and other ecclesiastical authority (hence “cathedral” for the official seat of the di­ ocesan bishop). The Franciscans introduced the cathedra to the Huichols in the 1720s, when they constructed churches in the newly established comunidades indígenas and reinforced their verbal instruction with reli­ gious prints. As we recall, the child-shaman of Juan Real’s myths is seated in a “god’s chair,” by which Huichols mean an ’uwéni. The “god’s chair” is modeled on a regular shaman’s chair, only much smaller. Like Lumholtz’s illustration of a chair dedicated to Tatewari, it is usually made for a par­ ticular deity. The question is, did the Catholic cathedra inspire the Huichol ’uwéni? This had not occurred to me before, but there is reason to believe it did. The ’uwéni, which has a circular rather than a rectangular seat, arm­ rests, and a high back, is reserved for prominent persons, such as ran­ cho elders, but it is preeminently the seat from which the mara’akáme, the shaman, conducts religious and curing ceremonies for the family or the wider community. In the version of the birth of the Sun Father re­ corded for us by Ramón, Tatewari instructed the animal people who witnessed the Sun Father’s birth to make such a chair for the newborn

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Figure 29. ’Uwéni, the high-backed armchair of native materials from which shamans and elders conduct ceremo­ nies and official business. The ’uwéni may owe its form to the Catholic cathedra. Its complex aboriginal symbolism includes supports in back and front that are alternately “strong” and “weak,” a manifestation of the unity of opposites.

Sun to use on his journey across the sky. Echoing the well-known cen­ tral Mexican tradition, the Huichol tale has a youth transforming into the Sun god after a fiery self-sacrifice in the west, from where he travels through the underworld to be reborn in the east from Re’unar, Burned Mountain, an extinct volcano located in Wirikúta. When he emerges he is so exhausted by his subterranean travel that he threatens to sink back

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down and incinerate the earth and all life on it. He does indeed sink down, the earth starts to shrivel from his heat, and animals and plants are close to death. The ’uwéni, constructed in this version by Tatewari, or at his direction, lifts him to a safe distance from thé earth and bears him across the sky vault to resume his circular trajectory. Ever since, gifts and petitions to the deities have included miniature ’uwénis that range from crude assemblages of sticks, carved wood, or a soft volcanic stone a few inches high, like those in the Preuss collection in Berlin’s Museum für Vólkerkunde (Schaefer and Furst 1996:118, Figure 20), to elaborate models indistinguishable except in size from the full-sized prototype used primarily by shamans. Tiny ’uwénis, cut from cardboard or assembled from little twigs tied together, are sometimes also attached, along with other symbols, to the prayer arrows Huichols deposit in sacred places. It is this type of chair, then, from which Káuyumari, transmogrified into the child-shaman but still so small that, to quote Zingg’s myth, he did not even fill the seat, spoke and sang to the god-people, cured them of small­ pox, and sang the curing chant for the sick child. To repeat, I had long assumed this piece of sacred furniture to be of purely indigenous origin and probably quite ancient. What I should have remembered is that there is no prototype for it in precolumbian furniture. There is simply no such thing as a high-backed armchair in preconquest Mesoamerica, either for domestic use or as a seat of authority for priests, nobles, or rulers. In the central Mexican and Mixtec pictorial codices of the late Postclassic and early postconquest era, and on Classic Maya figure-painted pottery and carved stelae, rulers, nobles, and priests, in­ cluding the Aztec ruler Mocetuzoma, are invariably seated on woven mats (petate in Mexican-Spanish, from the Nahuatl petatl) or, in Maya art, on a raised dais without back or arms that is sometimes covered with a jaguar skin. It is thus reasonable to assume that no matter how indigenous its ap­ pearance, symbolism, and construction, the ’uwéni is in fact an adapta­ tion of the cathedra, the high-backed armchair of ecclesiastical authority, with which Huichols must first have become familiar at the same time they assimilated to their own repertoire of sacred objects considered in­ dispensable to indigenous ritual such novelties as the homemade violin and guitar and the beeswax candle. I don’t think it is pure coincidence that just as the child-shaman “was not even big enough to fill the shaman’s chair,” so the Santo Niño is often dwarfed by the armchair in which he is seated in the many painted, carved, and printed images circulating in Mexico and elsewhere in the Hispanic Catholic world.

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The Sandal as Footgear and Metaphor This brings us back to the Santo Niño’s sandals and the larger question of the meaning of sandals in Huichol ideology. And that meaning looms very large indeed. In nineteenth-century tin paintings of the Santo Niño his usual footgear is not the typical Mexican huarache, which encloses the foot, but a simple sole held to the foot by a thong across the big toe and in back by a longer strap wound around the ankle. This is obviously not the old central Mexican sandal from which the huarache is derived and which protected the heel with a high leather guard. Toltec sandals and those of other indigenous civilizations followed more or less the same pattern. The Santo Niño’s sandal looks like those worn by some saints in Renaissance paintings, but it also closely resembles those worn nowadays by the Huichols. Indigenous Wixárika footgear now consists of a sole cut to the outline of the foot, usually from a piece of rubber tire; before old tires were traded into the Sierra for recycling, these sandals were made from oxhide. Like the Santo Niño’s, it is held to the foot by a loop around the big toe and straps wound around the ankle, sometimes circling halfway up the calf. The similarity is too striking not to have been immediately noticed when Huichols came face to face with the Holy Child of Atocha. As Lumholtz (1900:183) noted in his American Museum monograph on Huichol symbolism, in the materials employed, though not the form, the simple leather sole then in use was actually a late-nineteenth-century innovation, modeled on an earlier type made from plaited and matted palm or yucca leaves. Toe string and leg strap were also fashioned from these materials. This type of sandal of what Lumholtz called “the ancient pattern” had gone out of style for daily wear by the 1890s. At that time, however, it still survived as ceremonial footgear that was worn by the officiating shaman at the peyote ceremony and that also served as proper gifts to the gods. Lumholtz collected two of these full-sized palm- or yucca-leaf sandals, both for the left foot, from the temple of Las Guayabas, near the ceremonial center of San Andrés Cohamiata. Like other Huichol artifacts he collected, they are preserved in the American Museum of Natural His­ tory in New York. The ethnographic and ethnohistoric significance of Lumholtz’s obser­ vation cannot be overemphasized. As Zingg (1938:611-614) remarked, the woven sandals that served as offerings to the deities and that sha­ mans still wore on ceremonial occasions toward the end of the nineteenth

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century bear, like those Lumholtz brought back from Las Guayabas, a strong resemblance in form, technique, and raw material to many of the hundreds excavated over the past century from Basketmaker and ances­ tral Pueblo sites in the Southwest. What Zingg could not have known is that they also fit the pattern of even earlier examples from Desert Culture rockshelters in the Trans-Pecos region of southern Texas and northern Coahuila. The southwestern and Desert Culture sandals have, like their nineteenth-century Huichol counterparts, the single toe string and the cords that held the back of the sandal to the ankle, without any covering for the foot and lacking the Aztec-style heel guard. In other words, the traditional Huichol yucca- or palm-fiber sandal, and the modern san­ dal derived from it, belong squarely in the Greater Desert Culture tradi­ tion, from the nomadic hunters and food collectors of the Trans-Pecos country and the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts and the arid highlands of north-central Mexico, to the sedentary Basketmakers and ancestral Pueblo farmers and potters in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. True, the two Huichol yucca sandals collected by Lumholtz show less care and skill in their craftsmanship than many Basketmaker and ancient Pueblo examples in museum collections, which, in addition to a few virtually in­ distinguishable from those in Lumholtz’s monograph, include some that are beautifully woven and even decorated. Because no Huichol fiber sandals older than the late nineteenth cen­ tury survive, we will never know whether the Wixáritari of an earlier time lavished as much care on their woven or plaited footgear as did the ancestral Pueblos and Basketmakers. However, the highly developed skills and aesthetics of contemporary Huichol women weavers, amply documented by Schaefer (1989a, 1989b, 1993, 2002), suggest that they did. Thus the debasement of Huichol sandal-weaving skill suggested by Lumholtz’s examples is likely a function of the shift in nonceremonial footwear from yucca fiber to oxhide. The old-style woven sandal, in turn, survives only as ephemeral prayer offering. As footgear it occurs solely in the context of rituals that, like the peyote ceremonies, seem to recall, or reaffirm, an ancestral connection to the north-central high desert. I find it curious that except for Lumholtz and Zingg, the striking resemblance of pre-1900 Wixárika yucca fiber sandals to those excavated in Basket­ maker, ancestral Pueblo, and north-central Mexican and Trans-Pecos Desert Culture sites, and the relevance of that resemblance to unresolved questions of where to look for Huichol origins, has received no notice in the Huichol literature. Miniature sandals are still favorite offerings to the Huichol gods (al­

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though they are now rarely plaited from palm leaf, as they still were in Zingg’s day). Zingg (1938:611-612) explains their significance as fol­ lows: The Huichol gods not only need tiny chairs, dishes, “beds,” etc., but also require small-size sandals of woven palm leaf, roughly reminis­ cent of the most widely distributed pattern of sandal in the wide­ spread Basket-Maker archaeological horizon far to the North in the United States. The votive sandal, woven by the Huichols, seems clearly to be a survival in the conservative medium of sacred cer­ emony of an ancient pattern of foot-wear, now displaced among the tribe by the raw-hide sandal, as Lumholtz suggests.

And further (pp. 613-614):

What makes the tiny votive sandal so appropriate a hanging for the prayer-arrows, is that it aids the arrow in a very special way in communicating with the gods.... The tiny votive sandal helps communicate the prayer to the god addressed by the Huichol artist because the stomping of the sandals in the peyote dance as well as in the dance of the ceremony to prepare the soil for seed is a sort of primitive Morse-code wireless to the gods.... This ability through stomping of the sandals in the dance (which is done with as great a clatter as the dancers’ thin-shod feet can make) to communicate with the gods, makes the ancient pattern of the sandal in miniature a votive hanging par excellence.... The sandal has other contexts in Huichol mythology of even greater mystical power, but of less mystical use. The culture hero of the Huichols, Kauymáli, says that he was born of the sandal of the Sun-father. [The god] Komateáme was similarly born from the sandal of Grandmother Growth. The latter has the power to cause thunder by the sound of her sandal. Is it coincidence that baby shoes and sandals are considered to be the most effective and appropriate gifts to the Santo Niño de Atocha? The little chapel in which his image sits in Chimayo, in northern New Mexico, is full of crutches discarded by grateful worshipers and piles of baby shoes and sandals placed there to keep the Niño from hurting his feet on his pilgrimages to heal the sick. There is also the name by which the Huichols refer to the gods and

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the deified ancestors: kakaiyarite (or kakauyarite) or kakaiyarixi. Kakai is the Wixárika (Huichol) term for sandal, specifically the type described above. The meaning of the ending is problematic; Joseph E. Grimes, the foremost non-Huichol authority on the language, once suggested to me that it may refer to the straps that hold the sole to the foot, perhaps in the sense of “the straps that connect us to our ancestors.” By defining the di­ vine ancestors and the nature deities by the most fundamental, the most basic part of a man’s outfit, his sandals, they also distinguished them unmistakably from other Indian people with different kinds of footgear. These might have been Huastecs, the northernmost representatives of the Maya languages, whose eastward intrusion into what the Huichols consider their very own peyote country in San Luis Potosi is archaeologically documented. They might even have been Nahuatl-speaking central Mexicans, who not long before the Spanish invasion had pushed north into the same region. Clearly the last word is not in on the complex symbolism of the oldstyle Huichol sandal or its association with ancestors who almost cer­ tainly belonged to the greater Desert Culture tradition. Most likely these were, as long ago proposed by Diguet and later by Mason and others, the Guachichil, desert hunter-gatherers who once inhabited much of what is now the state of San Luis Potosi, including the peyote country the Huichols call Wirikúta. Huichol intellectual and material culture as we know it today is woven together of many strands. Some, even many, of these have retained their original color and twist, while others take some work to unravel. From some that were added after the Spanish, with their central Mexican Indian converts, their missions, their saints, their system of civil-religious governing authorities, and their material culture, took formal control of the Cora and Huichol territories in 1722, Wixárika literary genius wove the motifs, composite chants, narratives, and rituals of what Zingg called the “Christian Myth Cycle.” But as we have seen, in some instances that are not quite as immediately apparent as, say, the violin, or the wax candle, which is now indispensable to aboriginal ritual (and which the Wixárika have adopted into their own language as katira, from the Span­ ish candela), they also intruded into Zingg’s “Aboriginal Myth Cycle,” as well as adding to the material culture of Huichol shamanism.

Afterword

for the Huichols since I first met Ramón and Lupe. Ramón died in 1971 at age forty-six at the hands of a cousin heavily intoxicated on tesgüíno. Years later Lupe told me Ramón put a curse on him before he passed away. And sure enough, the cousin, whom Lupe’s nephews pursued and delivered, slightly the worse for wear, to the police in Tepic, one day fell off a ladder in the Nayarit state prison and broke his neck. Lupe was sure that it was Ramon’s curse and a spirit power that lived on even from the grave that did his imprisoned cousin in. She went several more times to Wirikúta, more, certainly, than the minimum of five expected of a would-be shaman. She sometimes chanted with the tepu, the upright drum made from a hollowed-out log with three attached legs and a head of deerskin. If she wanted one day to become a mara’akáme like Ramón and her grandfather, she did not make it and never claimed to have completed. Despite several infirmities, from fail­ ing eyesight and congestive heart failure to the rheumatoid arthritis that had plagued her even when I first got to know her, she lived well into her eighties, holding on to the dying light until 1998. She lost all her teeth but was fitted without charge with a new set by a Santa Fe dentist who was greatly impressed with this remarkable Native American woman. A pair of drugstore glasses improved her eyesight enough for her to continue what she did all her life: make art. One of her last masterworks was a bag she made for me, embroidered all over with peyote plants in dark green and a bright green one at upper right she said represented the Mother of

M

uch has changed

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Peyote. With her income she bought some well-watered land with fruit trees as a homestead for herself and members of her numerous extended family, not in the Sierra but in Nayarit, near Santa María de Oro. She will always be remembered with love by all those fortunate to have known her, beginning with myself. In the meantime many more families and individuals have left the Sierra Madre Occidental to make a new life for themselves in a grow­ ing number of rural and urban colonies and enclaves, including the new hillside urban comunidad indígena of Tsitákua, overlooking Tepic, with its own annually elected indigenous government. Many more people are now engaged in the arts and crafts, which also means more disposable income. There are now Huichols with degrees in anthropology and lin­ guistics who do their own ethnographies. Others have entered the profes­ sions, including education and medicine. The total number of Huicholspeakers has increased substantially, both in the mountains and in the lowlands. In the 1960s the best estimate was 10,000 to 15,000 Huichols. The national census for 1990 increased that figure to 20,000 over the age of five. By the time of the 2000 census, the total number of Huichol men, women, and children had jumped to 43,000. If that seems a bit high, there is no doubt that improved access to medical care and antibiotics, with the resulting dramatic reduction in infant mortality, and new eco­ nomic possibilities and sources of income, have led to a substantial popu­ lation increase. But whether in the mountains or in the new colonies in the lowlands, the traditional rituals are alive and people continue to band together for the journey to Wirikúta, ideally under the sponsorship of the community temple, or if none exists, a xiriki, the family ancestor god house. One serious negative is that despite protective legislation, peyoteros are sometimes accosted by police or soldiers and their harvests of the cactus confiscated, an obvious fallout of the so-called war on drugs north of the border. Nevertheless, peyote pilgrimages are now more frequent than they were in the past. At least that is the impression shared with me by Johannes Neurath, the Austrian-born curator of the Sala Gran Nayar, with its Huichol and Cora exhibits in the ethnology section in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, and author of an authoritative firsthand study of the Huichol temple and its rituals (2002). The reason: probably because with more disposable income, whether they remain in their traditional territory in the Sierra or have moved, temporarily or even permanently, to the nearby cities and countryside, Huichols can bet­ ter afford than in the past the time, expense, and expenditure of physical and mental energy required of the peyotero. This brings to mind what Salomón Nahmad has said on the subject

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of acculturation in a concluding essay in Stacy Schaefer’s and my People of the Peyote: Huichol Indian History, Religion, and Survival (1996):

Openness to the ways and beliefs of others may be typical of the Huichol way, but not always and not everywhere, even outside the Huichol country proper.... This is a phenomenon you see also in urban areas, among many of the so-called urban Huichols. I have long been convinced that this is, in any event, a false category, be­ cause all that is “urban” about them is that they make their lives in an urban environment—but as Huichols, not as acculturated, or even acculturating, people trying to become mestizo. Look at Tepic, for example. There is a sizeable colony there now of puros Huicholes, as they say of themselves, and they hold on as hard as they can to their fiestas and their ceremonies. They even have their own tuki, built with the help of José Benítez Sánchez. This artist is himself an example of this trend to become more Huichol, not less, in the face of the larger society. The same thing was true three decades ago of Ramón Medina.... To me, this is enormously significant, something anthropologists are going to have to learn to understand. All the old assumptions about how acculturation proceeds, and all the old cat­ egories, fall by the wayside, because they do not work anymore. In actuality, they never did. What we see now, far more clearly than before, is that it is precisely those Huichols who have moved into urban environments, with greater opportunities and access to knowledge and economic means, who have the greatest motivation for remaining Huichol. In my experience, it is actually precisely these, who have more money in their pockets and who are in daily contact with the larger society, rather than those who are poor and isolated, that have greater recourse to ways of developing and maintaining resistance to acculturative pressures, and a greater consciousness and respect for their own parental culture. (Nahmad 1996:493-494) When I first went to the Huichol comunidad indígena of San Andrés Cohamiata in March 1967 to make arrangements for a summer field program for graduate students in anthropology and public health, it was typical of others in the Huichol territory: a few scattered buildings; a casa real for the business of the annually elected indigenous authorities; a government store that sold staples at controlled and very low prices; a decrepit one-room jail with wooden stocks for miscreants dating to colonial times; an INI boarding school (where in the absence for summer

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Afterword

vacation of grade school students, our own group from UCLA slept on cots under blankets well dusted with DDT against fleas); an old stone church and, nearby, the community temple; and so on. Of permanent residents there were but a handful. In 1967 Salomón Nahmad offered to supply the community with a gasoline-powered generator with which to light up the government quarters and perhaps even the tuki. ’Colas listened politely and told the then director of the Huichol-Cora Coordinating Center of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista in Tepic that he would call a council of the elders to consider the offer. We were almost ready to leave for the airstrip to board the little plane for the return to Tepic when ’Colas appeared with the answer: we thank you and el presidente de la república for your generous offer, but we must decline. Such a machine is expensive to maintain and it makes much noise, so much that we would not be able to hear the voices of the birds nor even the words of our ancestors. So we prefer Tatewari to give us light as well as warmth. Salomón said he understood, and off we went in ’Colas’s company to the plane awaiting us on San Andrés’s unpaved runway. How very different things are today, Stacy Schaefer tells us in her splendid ethnography of the art and ideology of weaving and its relation­ ship to shamanism, To Think with a Good Heart: Wixárika Women, Weavers, and Shamans (2002:264-265):

In San Andrés and San José.. .the mountain quiet is frequently dis­ turbed by the sound of gas-powered vehicles, the blare of radios and cassette tapes, and, on festive occasions in San Andrés, by live music played by Wixárika mariachis. A bi-weekly bus owned by the Unión de Comunidades Indígenas Huicholes (UCIH) and operated by a local San Andrés man provides land transportation to neigh­ boring mestizo and Indian towns. Small two-prop airplanes, larger DC3S, Lear jets and helicopters frequently land on the San Andrés dirtway, bringing the outside world into the community. Mexican politicians, government employees, Catholic and other Christian missionaries, tourists, spiritual seekers, indigenous peoples from the Americas, filmmakers and journalists, representatives of national and international development agencies, as well as anthropologists from around the world swoop in on this community.... Although the visits by these outsiders have a definite impact on San Andrés, I continue to be amazed at the resilience of the local people and their ability to maintain community autonomy.

Acknowledgments

It is with thanks that I acknowledge the courtesy of several pubI lishers and individuals who granted permission to use or adapt essays of mine that originally appeared in their publications over a period of thirty years. James Wood and the University of New Mexico Press have my appreciation for agreeing to the use of contributions to People of the Peyote: Huichol Indian History, Religion, and Survival (1996), edited by Stacy B. Schaefer and myself. So does Waveland Press for permission for use of my description and analysis of a 1968 Huichol peyote pilgrim­ age in its revised and enlarged 1990 edition of Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens, first published by Praeger in 1972. Special thanks to Johannes Wilbert, and the Instituto Caribe de Antropología y Sociología and its journal Antropológica, which early on in my anthro­ pological career published an article by the late Barbara G. Myerhoff and myself on a conflict to the death between the solanaceous “sorcerer-god plant” Kiéri and the culture hero Káuyumari, and its possible significance for Huichol religious history, relevant excerpts from which appear in these pages. Crossroad Publishing Company kindly permitted my use in this book of “Huichol Cosmogony: How the World Was Destroyed by Water and Dog Woman Gave Birth to the Human Race,” included in South and Meso-American Native Spirituality (1993), volume 4 of World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest. My ap­ preciation, too, to the Journal of Latin American Lore, published by the UCLA Latin American Center under Wilbert’s long-time editorship, for

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the use in these pages of two essays triggered by Zingg’s myths, one on Káuyumari as trickster, the other on the adaptation and transformation of certain Catholic icons into Huichol intellectual and material culture.