Foreword by F. Lawrence Fleming:
Although don Juan categorized his benefactor as a diablero, he never mentioned the place where he had acquired his knowledge, nor did he identify his teacher. In fact, don Juan disclosed very little about his personal life. All he said was that he had been born in the Southwest in 1891; that he had spent nearly all his life in Mexico; that in 1900 his family was exiled by the Mexican government to central Mexico along with thousands of other Sonoran Indians; and that he had lived in central and southern Mexico until 1940. Thus, as don Juan had travelled a great deal, his knowledge may have been the product of many influences. And although he regarded himself as an Indian from Sonora, I was not sure whether to place the context of his knowledge totally in the culture of the Sonoran Indians. But it is not my intention here to determine his precise cultural milieu. [Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, University of California Press (1968), p. 5.]
It is certainly a curious circumstance that the graduate student of anthropology, Carlos Castaneda, has nothing more to tell us concerning his primary informant’s personal history following innumerable interviews with his informant in the course of more than four years of intermittent fieldwork in Mexico. However, it is possible, perhaps even probable, that don Juan, the informant, simply did not wish to divulge any more about his past than what he inadvertently revealed from time to time during his conversations with Carlos Castaneda. Fortunately, Castaneda was somewhat more generous in 1968 with R. Gordon Wasson than he was with all his other readers.
Wasson had sent a letter to Carlos Castaneda on the 26th of August, 1968, a few months after The Teachings of Don Juan was first published by the University of California Press. The text of this letter is reproduced in full below:
Dear Mr. Castaneda,
I have been asked to review The Teachings of Don Juan for [the journal] Economic Botany. I have read it and am impressed by the quality of the writing and the hallucinogenic effects you have had. Perhaps you are not overwhelmed with letters from strangers and you can discuss with me the use of the mushrooms by don Juan.
My professional life has been chiefly concerned with the hallucinogenic effects of the Mexican “sacred mushrooms.” It was my wife and I who publicized the rediscovery of the cult in Oaxaca, and it was on my invitation to Professor Roger Heim that he came over and studied them with us. We three have written books about them and innumerable articles.
Am I right in concluding from your narrative that you never gathered the mushrooms, nor indeed ever saw a whole specimen? In the book they are always in powder, perhaps already mixed with other ingredients, are they not? Don Juan carried the powder around his neck in a sack. When he utilized them, they were smoked. Once you embarked (p. 63) on a trip to Chihuahua for honguitos, but your quest turned out to be for mescalito. When you first mention the mushrooms they are “possibly” Psilocybe mexicana (p.7), but later they are that species. Did you satisfy yourself that you were dealing with Psilocybe mexicana? This mushroom would normally, in don Juan’s hands, macerate into shreds, rather than a powder, whereas the hallucinogenic puffballs used in certain spots in the Mixteca [Lycoperdon mixtecorum] would give a powder. Do you know where your mushrooms grew, whether in pastures, corn fields, bovine dung, on the trunks of dying trees, or elsewhere?
Don Juan (I assume that this was a name adopted by you to save him from pestering) seems to have spoken perfect Spanish and to have lived in many places—the U.S. and southern Mexico, perhaps elsewhere, as well as Sonora and Chihuahua. What is his cultural provenience? Is he pure Yaqui? Or has his personality been shaped to a noticeable extent by the influences of the foreign places where he has been? May he have been influenced by the Indians of Oaxaca, in the remote parts of that state, and there learned to know the mushrooms? I ask this because the use of the hallucinogenic mushrooms has never previously been reported in Sonora or Chihuahua. In fact, they have never been found there, and one would think that if specimens were found, in the arid conditions prevailing in those states, it would be hard to find enough for ceremonial use, or at any rate to count on finding enough. There may be restricted areas known to the Indians where the Indians might expect to find them, places well-watered and fertile. Perhaps the species is one not yet known to science and that grows in arid country. It would be thrilling if you could pursue this further and make a discovery. The practice of smoking the mushroom powder is hitherto unknown to me. Had you brought back the powder, or the mixture in which the mushroom powder was an ingredient, we might have identified the species under the microscope, since there must have been spores present, and if the species is a known one, the spore suffices to place it. We now have almost a score of hallucinogenic species from Mexico.
Will there be a Spanish edition of the book? You gave a few translations, but there were many times when I was hungry for more. “A man of knowledge”—did don Juan say “hombre de conocimientos” or simply “un hombre que sabe”? In Mazatec a curandero is cho’ta’chi’ne’, “one who knows.” Was don Juan bilingual, or was he better in Spanish than in Yaqui? Did you gather in your field notes the Yaqui equivalents of the terms he used? It would be fascinating to study with a linguist proficient in Yaqui the meaning of those terms. Did you ever tell your readers whether he could read and write in Spanish? How did he ordinarily make his living? His esoteric knowledge must have been his vocation, but he must have had a bread-and-butter occupation. I take it that you yourself are a fully acculturated “gringo” since you spell your name “Castaneda” rather than Castañeda in the Spanish way.
Sincerely yours,
R. Gordon Wasson
[R. Gordon Wasson, Letter to Carlos Castaneda dated 26 August 1968, Botany Library of Oakes Ames, Harvard University: W1.1 Folder 139.]
Carlos Castaneda replied to Wasson’s letter, the text of which has been reproduced above, on the 6th of September, 1968. The text of this reply letter is also reproduced in full below:
Dear Mr. Wasson,
It was indeed a great pleasure to receive your letter. I am very familiar with your professional contributions in the field of hallucinogenic mushrooms, thus, I couldn’t be more honored with the opportunity of discussing this topic with you.
You must bear in mind, however, that I am not an authority, and that my knowledge is limited strictly to the ethnographic data I have collected.
First of all I should tell you that my fieldwork—and I have already stated this in the introduction of my book—was done under very constricting conditions. It was never an anthropological work proper; my work was rather an inquiry product of my own interest, and since my interest is “content” and “meaning” I became absorbed in the innuendos that made don Juan’s system of beliefs, disregarding to a large extent data which dealt with specific ethnographic details.
Since I was dealing with a dramatic and serious system of beliefs I have purposely blurred in my book more of such ethnographic details, thus compounding the vagueness in one letter without going back first to re-establish a better ethnographic context. However, I will try the best way I can to answer your questions in the order in which you have written them.
Q: Am I right in concluding from your narrative that you never gathered the mushrooms, nor indeed ever saw a whole specimen?
I have gathered the mushrooms myself. I have held perhaps hundreds of specimens in my hands. Don Juan and I made yearly trips to collect them in the mountains Southwest and Northwest of Valle Nacional in the state of Oaxaca. I have deleted in my book all specific details about those trips and all the specific details about the collecting process.
Don Juan expressed himself very strongly against my desire to include those descriptions as part of my book. He did not object to my revealing specific details about collecting peyote or jimson weed on the grounds that the deity in peyote was a protector, therefore accessible to every man, and the power in jimson weed was not his ally (alidado). The power in the mushrooms, however, was his ally and as such was above everything else. And that entailed a total secrecy about specific processes.
Q: Did you satisfy yourself that you were dealing with Psilocybe mexicana?
No. My botanical identification was a tentative one, and terribly unsophisticated at that. In my book, it appears as though the mushrooms were Psilocybe mexicana, that is, I am afraid, an editorial error. I should have carried the assertion that it was a tentative classification all the way through, since I have never been completely convinced that it was. The particular species used by don Juan looked like the Psilocybe mexicana pictures I have seen.
A member of the Pharmacology Dept. at UCLA also showed me some specimens that he had, and based on that I concluded that I was dealing with that species. However, it never turned into powder upon being handled. Don Juan picked it always with his left hand, transferred it to his right hand, and then put it inside a small, narrow gourd. The mushroom would then disintegrate into fine shreds, but never into powder, as it was forced gently inside.
Q: Do you know where the mushrooms grew?
We found them growing on dead trunks of trees, but more often on decomposed remains of dead shrubs.
Q: What is don Juan’s cultural provenience?
Don Juan is, in my judgement, a marginal man who has been forged by multiple forces outside the purely Yaqui culture, His name is really Juan. I tried to find a substitute name to use in my book, but I couldn’t conceive him in any other way except as don Juan. He is not a pure Yaqui, that is, his mother was a Yuma Indian, and he was born in Arizona. His mixed origin seems to have rendered him as a marginal man from the beginning.
He lived in Arizona the first years of his life and then moved to Sonora when he was perhaps six or seven years old. He lived there for a while, I am not sure whether with both parents or just with his father. That was the time of the great Yaqui upheavals and don Juan and his family were picked up by the Mexican armed forces and were deported to the state of Veracruz. Don Juan later moved to the area of “el Valle Nacional” where he lived for over thirty years. It is my belief that he moved there with his teacher, who must have been Mazateco. So far I have not been able to determine who his teacher was, or where he did learn to be a brujo, yet the mere fact that I have to take him every year to Oaxaca to collect mushrooms should be a serious clue as to where he learned, at least, about mushrooms.
As you can see, it is impossible for me at this point to determine with certainty his cultural provenience, except in a guessing manner. However, the subtitle of my book is “A Yaqui Way of Knowledge.” This is another mistake in which I became involved due to my lack of experience in matters of publications. The Editorial Committee of the University of California Press suggested upon accepting my manuscript for publication, that the word Yaqui should be included in the title in order to place the book ethnographically. They had not read the manuscript but they concluded that I had said that don Juan was a Yaqui, which was true, but I had never meant that don Juan was a product of the Yaqui culture, As appears to be the case now judging from the title of the book. Don Juan considered himself to be a Yaqui and seemed to have deep ties with the Yaquis of Sonora. However, it has become obvious to me now that those ties were only a surface affiliation.
I am not familiar with whether or not the hallucinogenic mushrooms grow in the arid regions of Sonora and Chihuahua. Don Juan has never looked for them there to my knowledge. Yet he has asserted repeatedly that once a man learns to command the power in them, the mushrooms can grow any place the man wants, that is, they grow by themselves without his direct intervention.
The first time in my life I saw the mushrooms was in Durango. I thought we were going to look for “honguitos” but we wound up collecting peyote in Chihuahua. At that time I saw quite a few, perhaps ten or twelve. Don Juan said they were only a token, and that there were not enough to make use of them. At that time he also told me that we had to make a trip to Oaxaca to find the right number of mushrooms.
In 1964 I found one specimen myself in the Santa Monica mountains here in Los Angeles. I took it to the laboratory at UCLA but through carelessness they lost it before identifying it. It was strikingly obvious to me that it was one of the mushrooms used by don Juan; he naturally interpreted the event of finding it as an omen that I was on my way to learning, but my subsequent actions, such as picking it and leaving it with strangers, reassured him, he said, of my utterly fumbling nature.
Q: Have you brought back the powder, or the mixture in which the mushroom powder was an ingredient?
No. However, I am sure I could obtain a very small amount of it, perhaps a dab of it. If that would be enough to examine it under the microscope I can send it to you by the end of this year.
Q: Will there be a Spanish edition of the book?
I hope the University of California Press will consider that a possibility. My notes are all in Spanish. In fact this book was almost an English version of a Spanish manuscript.
Q: Did don Juan say “un hombre de conocimiento” or simply “un hombre que sabe”?
You have given me here the most fascinating piece of information. To define the conditions of being, or the stage of learning “man of knowledge” don Juan used the terms “Hombre de conocimiento,” “hombre que sabe,” and “uno que sabe.” I have preferred the term “man of knowledge” because it is more concrete than “one who knows.”
I have taken some parts of my notes in Spanish dealing with “el hombre que sabe” and I have included them here. I hope they are legible. These sheets are a direct transcription of the even more illegible direct notes I took while don Juan talked to me. As a rule I always rewrote my notes immediately so I wouldn’t lose the freshness and the flare of don Juan’s statements and thoughts.
Q: Was don Juan bilingual, or was he better in Spanish than in Yaqui?
Don Juan speaks Spanish so fluently that I am willing to believe that his command of Spanish is better than any other language he knows. But he speaks also Yaqui, Yuma, and Mazatec. I have reasons to believe that he also speaks English, or at least he understands it perfectly, although I have never heard him using it.
Q: Did you gather in your field notes the Yaqui equivalents of the terms he used?
I have some terms which are not Spanish, but too few to make a serious study. Our conversations were conducted strictly in Spanish and the few foreign terms are not all Yaqui words.
Q: Do you ever tell your readers whether he could read and write in Spanish?
He reads very well; I have never seen him writing though. For a long time I thought he was illiterate, this misjudgement on my part was the result of our differences in emphasis. I stress areas of behavior which are thoroughly irrelevant to him, and vice versa. This cognitive difference between us is the theme I am striving to develop in the biography of don Juan which I am writing now.
There is not much to tell about myself. My home was in Sao Paulo, Brazil, but I went to school in Buenos Aires, Argentina, before I came to this country. My full name is Carlos Aranha. Following the Latin traditions adds to one’s name the mother’s last name, so when I came to the United States I became Carlos A. Castaneda. Then I dropped the A. The name belonged to my grandfather who was from Sicily. I don’t know how it was originally, but he himself altered it to Castaneda to suit his fancy.
I hope I have answered clearly all your questions. Thank you for your letter.
Sincerely yours,
Carlo Castaneda
[Carlos Castaneda, Letter to R. Gordon Wasson dated 6 September 1968, Botany Library of Oakes Ames, Harvard University: W1.1 Folder 139.]
In Castaneda’s reply letter to Gordon Wasson, we find a considerable amount of information that cannot be gleaned from reading his published works. Most important is, of course, that the letter, and the copies of 12 pages of field notes which accompanied the letter, rather firmly support the contention that the character “don Juan” in the books by Carlos Castaneda had been a real person, not an entirely fictional character.
The pages of field notes that Castaneda xeroxed for Wasson’s benefit appear to have been authentic field documents, and not literary forgeries. From these pages, two important details concerning don Juan’s personal history would seem evident. Firstly, don Juan explains that he went to live with his benefactor when he was just a boy, and that he did not leave his benefactor’s house until he had become an adult and his benefactor had died. (Mi benefactor me llevo a su casa de chico nunca salí hasta que me hiso hombre . . . Me fui de ahí cuando el murió . . . En ese tiempo había mucha necesedad y el me cuido como a su propio hijo.) This is gainsaid in Castaneda’s published works where don Juan is said to have first met his benefactor when he was 20 years old. Secondly, we learn that don Juan lived in the vicinity of the Yaqui town of Vícam in the state of Sonora, Mexico, in a house from which the Bacatete mountains were clearly visible. (Don Juan se acostó contra el horcon de la ramada y miro hacia los cerros del bacatete en la distancia.) Castaneda does not disclose in his published works the specific town in Sonora that he visited in order to interview don Juan.
In the letter itself, Castaneda answers Wasson’s question concerning don Juan’s cultural provenience, and here we learn some important details that concern don Juan’s personal history that are not really made evident in Castaneda’s published works. Don Juan was born in Arizona Territory of mixed parentage: his father was a Yaqui Indian from Sonora, Mexico, while his mother was a Yuma Indian from Arizona. He lived his early years in Arizona Territory, but the family eventually moved to Sonora, Mexico. At the age of eleven, Juan was deported by the Mexican government to the state of Veracruz, along with thousands of other Yaqui Indians. (Castaneda claimed that the deportation occurred in 1900, but this cannot be historically accurate; it must have occurred in 1902, the year that the deportation of Yaqui Indians to slave labor in the southern part of Mexico was first implemented.) While still a boy, he was apprenticed to a Mazatec sorcerer, who lived in the municipality of San Juan Bautista Valle Nacional in the northern part of the state of Oaxaca. Don Juan had lived in the Estado de Oaxaca for over thirty years when he decided to move to the Valle del Yaqui in the state of Sonora. In the field notes, mention is made of a daughter-in-law, so we may safely say that don Juan relocated from Oaxaca together with his wife and at least one of their grown children.
The most important question is, of course, whether or not Castaneda in his reply letter was giving Wasson accurate information concerning don Juan’s cultural provenience. I think that most people nowadays, at least, those who are interested in trying to understand the literary works of Carlos Castaneda, have realized that a very considerable amount of what that author wrote in his books was almost pure fabrication. I say “almost” pure because, in my estimation, the twelve sheets of field notes that Castaneda sent to R. Gordon Wasson along with other more circumstantial evidence, shows beyond a reasonable doubt that Castaneda did actually work with a Mexican Indian sorcerer named Juan in the early 1960s. And so yes, I do believe that we can trust the information in Castaneda’s reply letter that concerns don Juan’s cultural provenience. Castaneda was truthfully giving Wasson all—or at least most—of what he actually knew about don Juan’s personal history. This happy circumstance does not, however, absolve Castaneda from his guilt in giving Wasson false information by deliberately continuing to lie about the entheogenic uses of psilocybin mushrooms. The following is what he wrote in his books concerning the “fabrication” of the smoking mixture don Juan purportedly called “el humito:”
Saturday, 27 January 1962 As soon as I got to his house this morning don Juan told me he was going to show me how to prepare the smoke mixture. We walked to the hills and went quite a way into one of the canyons. He stopped next to a tall, slender bush whose colour contrasted markedly with that of the surrounding vegetation. The chaparral around the bush was yellowish, but the bush was bright green. “From this little tree you must take the leaves and the flowers,” he said. “The right time to pick them is All Souls’ Day [el dia de las animus].” He took out his knife and chopped off the end of a thin branch. He chose another similar branch and also chopped off its tip. He repeated this operation until he had a handful of branch tips. Then he sat down on the ground. “Look here,” he said. “I have cut all the branches above the fork made by two or more leaves and the stem. Do you see? They are all the same. I have used only the tip of each branch, where the leaves are fresh and tender. Now we must look for a shaded place.” We walked until he seemed to have found what he was looking for. He took a long string from his pocket and tied it to the trunk and the lower branches of two bushes, making a kind of clothesline on which he hung the branch tips upside down. He arranged them along the string in a neat fashion; hooked by the fork between the leaves and the stem, they resembled a long row of green horsemen. “One must see that the leaves dry in the shade,” he said. “The place must be secluded and difficult to get to. That way the leaves are protected. They must be left to dry in a place where it would be almost impossible to find them. After they have dried, they must be put in a bundle and sealed.” He picked up the leaves from the string and threw them into the nearby shrubs. Apparently, he had intended only to show me the procedure. We continued walking and he picked three different flowers, saying they were part of the ingredients and were supposed to be gathered at the same time. But the flowers had to be put in separate clay pots and dried in darkness; a lid had to be placed on each pot so the flowers would turn mouldy inside the container. He said the function of the leaves and the flowers was to sweeten the smoke mixture. We came out of the canyon and walked towards the riverbed. After a long detour we returned to his house. Late in the evening we sat in his own room, a thing he rarely allowed me to do, and he told me about the final ingredient of the mixture, the mushrooms. “The real secret of the mixture lies in the mushrooms,” he said. “They are the most difficult ingredient to collect. The trip to the place where they grow is long and dangerous, and to select the right variety is even more perilous. There are other kinds of mushrooms growing alongside which are of no use; they would spoil the good ones if they were dried together. It takes time to know the mushrooms well in order not to make a mistake. Serious harm will result from using the wrong kind – harm to the man and to the pipe. I know of men who have dropped dead from using the foul smoke. “As soon as the mushrooms are picked they are put inside a gourd, so there is no way to recheck them. You see, they have to be torn to shreds in order to make them go through the narrow neck of the gourd.” “How long do you keep the mushrooms inside the gourd?” “For a year. All the other ingredients are also sealed for a year. Then equal parts of them are measured and ground separately into a very fine powder. The little mushrooms don’t have to be ground because they become a very fine dust by themselves; all one needs to do is to mash the chunks. Four parts of mushrooms are added to one part of all the other ingredients together.
[Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, University of California Press (1968), pp. 79-81.]
Don Juan’s procedure to utilize the mushrooms was to let them dry into a fine powder inside a small gourd. He kept the gourd sealed for a year and then mixed the fine powder with five other dry plants and produced a mixture for smoking in a pipe . . . The process of “smoking” consisted of ingesting the fine mushroom powder, which did not incinerate, and inhaling the smoke of the other five plants that made up the mixture.
[Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan, Simon & Schuster (1971), p. 12.]
No wonder R. Gordon Wasson had thought something was amiss! It’s true, don Juan was schooled in sorcery by a Mazatec brujo in the state of Oaxaca—if we are to believe Castaneda—and because of this particular schooling he would not only have known about the teonanácatl (i.e., the genus: Psilocybe) mushrooms, he would undoubtedly have been versed in their use for healing and sorcery. However, if the above is true, then it only makes matters worse with regard to the credulity of Castaneda’s description of don Juan’s procedure in fabricating the smoking mixture.
To begin with, don Juan apparently gathers at least four of the flowers for the mixture from the shrubland close to where he lives in the Sonoran Desert, which is a very different biotope from that of the Sierra Mazateca in the state of Oaxaca, where we may assume the recipe for the smoking mixture would have originated. The ideal time of the year to gather these ingredients, he says, is on All Souls’ Day (2nd of November), which is rather late in the year to expect to find any kind of flowers, anywhere in Mexico. In the narrative, he shows Carlos the procedure that must be followed on 27 January 1962, which is rather early in the year to be picking four different kinds of flowers. Most chaparral plants flower between March and September.
Even more damning for the credulity of Castaneda’s narrative are the hallucinogenic mushrooms themselves. Castaneda tells Wasson that he is not sure about the species of don Juan’s honguitos, but that they appear to be lignicolous, and very similar in appearance to Psilocybe mexicana. (If don Juan had actually used a mushroom of this description for his smoking mixture, it would probably have been Psilocybe aztecorum.) Don Juan and Carlos have to travel to the state of Oaxaca in order to gather the mushrooms. Once gathered, the mushrooms are shredded and then sealed inside a gourd, after which they are kept for one year. The problem is: No known species of the genus Psilocybe naturally disintegrates into a fine powder upon drying out. As a matter of fact, it is practically impossible to grind dried mushrooms into a fine powder unless they have lost all their moisture content. In order to get the mushrooms to reach such a state of dryness, it would be necessary to make use of an oven or a desiccator. In addition, the dried mushrooms, whether or not they have been reduced to a powder, incinerate entirely once ignited; however, if they had been reduced to a fine powder and packed into the bowl of a smoking pipe, it would have been difficult, not to say impossible, to get the powder to burn in a manner that would permit the smoke and/or the powder to be inhaled or ingested through the stem of the pipe—the powder itself would effectively block any passage of air through the pipe. Finely chopped dry mushrooms, on the other hand, especially when mixed with dried leaves and flowers, would have burned in the pipe without any difficulty; however, the psilocybin in the mushrooms would have degraded in the heat of combustion, and very little or none of it would have been inhaled by the smoker.
R. Gordon Wasson wrote in his review of The Teachings of Don Juan that he had contacted the author to get some clarification because he had “smelled a hoax.” I think that what he had smelled was the acrid fumes from don Juan’s non-existent smoking mixture—a true hoax. With more perseverance, Wasson would also have caught the whiff of freshly harvested jimson weed—another hoax. If one were to take The teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda and delete everything in it that has to do with either sacred mushrooms or jimson weed, what would remain of the book? A very short paper concerning the philosophical ramblings of an elderly Indian whom Castaneda had approached in the bus depot in Nogales, Arizona, with the hope of obtaining some information on the use of peyote among the Indians of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico—but a paper that is simply not long enough or detailed enough to constitute an academic thesis or monograph, and probably not reader-friendly enough to be the makings of a bestseller. All the same, the man whom Carlos Castaneda, in his books, had called don Juan Matus appears to have been a real person. He was living in the Valle del Yaqui in Sonora, Mexico, in 1940, but he was not a Yaqui man of knowledge; he was a Mazatec man of knowledge, and Jean Bassett Johnson, who was working on his doctoral thesis in a neighbouring town, would have given his right leg to have met and interviewed the man. The academic paper which follows is one that Jean Bassett Johnson actually did write. I feel that I owe it to him to include his paper here in exchange for the privilege of having borrowed his personage for the wholly fictional paper Healing and Sorcery in Indigenous Mexico, which—I wish to once again reassure you—he did not write. I have changed the format of Jean’s original publication, and I have removed the footnotes and the bibliography, in order to enhance its readability for the layperson. The original publication which includes the footnotes and bibliography can be downloaded from:
https://www.samorini.it/doc1/alt_aut/ek/johnson-the-elements-of-mazatec-witchcraft.pdf
The Elements of Mazatec Witchcraft
by Jean Bassett Johnson
University of California, Berkeley
Introduction:
The present short study proposes to give a body of new data collected recently from a little-known group inhabiting a portion of the northeastern corner of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. In addition to these data, a limited amount of comparative material will be presented, with the purpose of pointing out the general unity of witchcraft beliefs and practices in the region conceived as a cultural entity. The new data were collected during the summer of 1938 by a small party of which the writer was a member. Thanks are due the Instituto Panamericano de Geographia e Historia of Mexico for financial assistance.
The Mazatecs number, according to the latest census figures, 55, 343 individuals. The percentage of monolinguality is 81.76. In the entire Republic this figure is exceeded only by that of the Choles, who have a monolinguality of more than 89 percent. There are two dialects spoken in the Mazatec territory, the so-called Mazateco-Popoloca dialect, and the Mazateco-Huautla dialect, called Izcateco by Belmar. Roughly speaking, the former dialect is spoken by those who inhabit the hot, low-lying tierra caliente, while the latter is found in the cooler, mountainous, coffee-growing region known as the tierra templada.
In territories adjacent to the Mazatec are found Chinantec, Aztec, Mixtec, Cuicatec, and Zapotec-speaking peoples. These share with the Mazatec and with each other a basic complex of traits relating to every phase of life. This is most apparent in the several cases of “border” towns inhabited by two language groups. Because witchcraft is present and practiced extensively throughout the entire region, and because the data, although scant enough, are comparatively full for that phase of life, some of those data will be briefly presented here.
The following information on the practice of curing by witchcraft was obtained in the Mazatec town of Huautla de Jimenez. The brujo (witch) was first contacted through the good offices of Sr. D. Jose Dorantes, a Mazatec merchant of Huautla. The pretext given to the brujo was that one of the members of the party had a sick relative in Mexico City. After nearly a week’s, delay the brujo agreed to take the case, and after several discussions with us as to the nature of the ailment, he arranged a meeting with us. The meeting took place at his home on Saturday, July 16, and lasted from ten P. M. to two A. M. There were eight people present at the ceremony, including the members of the party, Sr. Dorantes, the brujo, and his wife. The brujo’s wife was apparently asleep, although she occasionally sat up and interjected a remark.
The brujo is an old man, certainly at least seventy years of age. Aside from wearing high, buttoned shoes and a wide brimmed felt hat, he appears like other townspeople. He has a slight case of pinto, and is somewhat palsied. He speaks no Spanish.
The brujo sat in front of a small low table. Above the table were two of the customary religious prints in color. On the table was a Mixtec basket containing six eggs. Also neatly arranged on the table were 48 maize kernels, a candle, a red paper package containing tobaco molido, scissors, white cotton string, a guaje (gourd vessel) also containing tobaco molido, a small square of bark paper, a paper parcel of copal, and a large red and blue guacamaya feather. On a wall shelf to the left of the table stood a night light and a lighted candle; and a large number of large mushrooms, wrapped in banana leaves. There were also two dried orchids, and a short staff entwined with dried yellow flowers. Under the table was a goblet shaped copal burner of the usual size and shape.
Procedure
I. The brujo asked the symptoms of the disease, although not in great detail, as these had already been explained at former meetings.
2. He chewed three mushrooms, and a stick of some unknown · substance.
3. He took the six eggs from the basket, and placed them in two rows on the table. There were two turkey eggs, two speckled hen eggs, and two plain white hen eggs.
4. He invoked St. Peter and St. Paul, followed by a large number of other saints and local virgenes, including those of Guadalupe, La Soledad de Oaxaca, and the Virgin of Chihuahua.
5. He instructed the relative of the sick person to place a piece of copal in her right hand, while she repeated the name of the sick person. She then placed the pieces of copal in the burner and,
6. The brujo added copal dust and lit it. He asked where the patient was born and where the afterbirth was buried. He said that disease came from a dry wind, aire.
8. He made the sign of the Cross and invoked the spirit of the sick person.
9. He invoked large numbers of saints in a rambling repetitive prayer not unlike a litany, which was followed by an invocation of the dueños, (reyes) of the rocks, rivers, mountain, thunder, earth, stars, plants, sun, moon, and la’a, a species of mountain-dwelling dwarf.
10. He then prayed directly to God, saying “King of—?”, and to San Antonio, a prayer of supplication. He picked up the maize kernels.
II. He made four twisting signs over the table, as if about to cast dice, and saying, “In the name of the Father. Son, Holy Ghost, and Blessed Trinity.”
12. He scattered the 48 kernels over the table. Some fell on the dirt floor, were picked up and laid on the edge of the table. Pausing a little, as though in deep concentration, he read the pattern, and divined as follows;
1st throw: “Confusion—science is uncertain if it can assist.”
13. More prayers, much as above, but comparatively short.
2nd throw: “Still confused, but a little clearer.”
14. Long prayers, with further invocations of everybody already mentioned; prayers to the chief saints, and to God, Son, and Trinity, etc. He implored them for aid as though he were already supported by the lesser saints, that is, on the intercession principle. “San __ says, and San __ says,” etc.
3rd throw: “Possible hope.”
4th throw: “Death. I can see the funeral. The spirits are not with me, but hope is not entirely lacking.”
5th throw: “If you believe and have faith, there is hope.”
6th throw: “She is already much better, but you must have faith in me.”
7th throw: “She is now well, and you can send a telegram to prove it!”
The old man said that he had cured since he was thirteen years old, and was now over seventy. He added that the science he practiced was very old, came from the antepasados, and descended from father to son. During the ceremony he burned copal three times, at first on the floor between his legs, and later holding the burner in his hand. He smoked a cigar between invocations and casting the maize.
The brujo said that every word spoken with sincerity was heard by Heaven, and that all the objects on the table represented the Powers, which are like a bank upon which one could draw, if one had something upon which to draw. He said that he was able to draw upon the Powers, even though unable to read, write, or speak other languages.
Questioned as to the significance of the objects upon the table, the brujo said that the prayer is written on the bark paper with the guacamaya feather. To further aid the cure, he said that he would pray in the church and burn candles. Questioned again as to whether we could do anything further to aid the cure, he promised instructions later. The following evening, he brought six little parcels of eggs, cacao, copal, feathers, and bark paper. Each parcel was separately wrapped in brown paper, and contained an egg, two or three cacao beans, copal, and a tiny feather wrapped in a small piece of bark paper. These were to be buried in the patio of the home of the patient, oriented east and west.
In addition to the above method of curing by intercessory prayer, maize divination, and egg parcels, the widespread practice of curing by suction is very common in the Mazatec region. A type of witchcraft is also practiced in church by a body of professional brujos, either male or female, whose practices strongly resemble those of the Aztec huehuete. Their procedure consists of praying or interceding for or against a person. These brujos have a special method of diagnosis and treatment of disease, which consists principally of “laying on hands.” They also bless and sell bunches of shrubs which they rub over the images of the saints. By this means, some of the magical power of the saints becomes resident in the shrubs. The services of the magic prayer-makers, exclusive of the cost of the candles with which they must be supplied, is nominal. Depending upon such factors as the type of the case, and the length of the prayer demanded, the service may cost anywhere from ten or fifteen centavos to one or two pesos. This is much cheaper than the charges of the brujos who divine with maize and make the egg parcels; their charge is seldom less than five or six pesos.
In addition to the above methods, which may cause sickness or death as well as cure, there is another type of “black” witchcraft practiced by a particular type of brujo. This practice consists of an invocation and spell which causes a piece of rope or vine to become a serpent when it is thrown in the direction of the enemy. It then goes to the enemy and destroys him.
From the town of San Cristobal Mazatlan, the legendary capital of the Mazatecs, comes the information concerning an especial type of supernatural enchantment. This is caused by dwarfs of the mountains, the la’a, little old men who appear at twelve noon and midnight. They have the faces of little boys, but they are old and very strong. They seize upon a passerby, throw him down, and put a strong spell on him. There is an especial type of brujería (witchcraft) to cure this sort of enchantment; if one is not speedily cured, one will die.
There is yet another type of dwarf, namely, the chikushi, who live in caves in the mountains. People go to the caves and make sacrifices to them; if one is ill, one sacrifices a turkey.
The use of the parcel with the egg, copal, etc., is found in Mazatlan, although the bark paper is not ordinarily used. In its place the corn husk is used, known by its Aztec name, tolomaxtle. The bark paper, however, is known in Mazatlan, and comes from a tree bearing the Aztec names of Yulusuchil, Yuluxuchil, Soloxuchil, and Xoloxochil. In the Mazatec dialect of Mazatlan, the tree is called tishu. The meaning of the apparatus of curing was given as follows: cacao represents wealth, eggs represent strength, the feather represents the witness (Sp. testigo), and the bark paper or corn husk represents the vow, (Sp. promesa).
Mushrooms are also eaten by the brujos of Mazatlan, as is -general throughout the entire Mazatec area. Many varieties are eaten, among which the most common are the following:
1. Hongitos de San Ysidro, the “little mushrooms of San Ysidro”, which are called in Mazatec steyi and tsami’ye.
2. Desbarrancadera, in Mazatec, tsamiktshu. These are very small mushrooms.
3. The tsamikindi, which are smallest of all the narcotic mushrooms eaten by the brujos.
While the brujo is under the influence of the narcotic mushroom, it is the mushroom which speaks, and not the brujo. During this time, the brujo stays with his patient. They are alone in a corner of the house. The brujo sings, dances, and prays while under the influence of the mushroom. He would go mad if he took more than six mushrooms, and the patient would die. The brujo calls upon all the saints, and tells where the harm befell the patient. He then orders the egg, copal, etc., to be buried in the house, oriented east and west. Aguardiente is frequently buried with the parcel. The patient must go on a diet for fifty days, and practice continence during this time. The lack of a cure is attributed to a breach of these restrictions. Both sexes practice witchcraft throughout the region. Certain persons are able to send the “spirit” of a man into a deer; when the deer is killed, the man dies.
Methods of maize divination vary with the individual diviner. The reading of the pattern of the cast maize is generally the basis for the divination. In Mazatlan there is an extraordinary variation of this: the maize kernels are thrown upon twenty cards bearing animal pictures. The pattern is interpreted from a cuaderno, a notebook which may be obtained in any store.
Throughout the whole of the Mazatec area, the articles of witchcraft, save the mushrooms, are sold openly in the markets. The entire complex, that is, eggs, feathers, copal, cacao, and bark paper, are generally sold together. They are quite expensive: large feathers cost from twenty to fifty centavos, bark paper about thirty centavos for a piece 4″ x 6″, while cacao and copal are usually sold two beans or pieces for one centavo. There are two grades of bark paper, the coarse grade, which is cheaper, and the fine grade, which is more expensive.
From the Mazateco-Popoloca towns of S. Pedro Ixcatlan and San Jose Independencia comes the following information regarding curing and witchcraft.
“The witch puts down a petate, and over it a white cotton cloth. Around the sheet he places. small antique figures. Then he casts the maize three or four times and divines according to the pattern. Sometimes the pattern says that it is necessary to kill two chickens. They kill the chickens and throw them upon the cloth. If they jump around a great deal, the person will get better. Then they make a broth (of the chickens), and call in four witnesses, who eat the broth at the comers of the cloth. Afterward, they take a leaf of cacao, and put in eggs, and make a parcel with cacao and a little feather of the guacamaya. Cacao indicates money which the patient pays. They also put in a stem of bamboo, which indicates aguardiente. The egg indicates strength. They wrap up the eggs, etc., in parcels, and bury them where there are crossroads, or where the sick person is, or they hide them. The bones of the chickens are buried. They use 24 kernels of maize. They take them from the middle of the ear; the ear has twelve rows of kernels. The witch speaks his own (special) language.”
“They have in the center of the cloth a little figure, and they cast shells sometimes. Then they kneel down in an especial way around the little figure.”
“In order to make rain, the witch goes to the mountains, where there are springs. He enters a cave, praying. He brings one or two turkeys. When he enters the cave, it thunders, because the spirits are angry. It is said that the thunder is caused by little old men. The witch sprinkles water about so that it will rain. He leaves the birds alive there, as a token of payment. Chickens also are taken.”
“When witches are curing, they call upon the Lord of the mountains, of the earth, of the water, of the sun, etc.”
“When a person dies, they collect a seed called ‘Alegria,’ and put a little bunch of them with the corpse. This indicates money in the other world, so that the dead person will not die of hunger.
“To find a lost animal or object, one takes some mushrooms at night. One commences to speak (after falling asleep). It is not permitted to keep an animal around which might cry out and disturb the sleeper, who goes on speaking while another person listens. The sleeper tells where the lost animal or thing is, and the next day there it is when they go to find it. In addition to the mushrooms, some people use a seed called semilla de la Virgen, others use hierba Maria.”
“The people also fear the Masters of the earth, who live underground. Each place also has its spirit, and these spirits are able to kill those who have annoyed them.”
“At night, persons’ real names are not said. They are called by the name of any object whatsoever, for example, “chair,” “table,” etc. If real names were used, one would become ill—the masters of the mountains would take one’s fortune, cause one to become ill, and one would die.”
“When the owl cries in the night, someone is going to die.”
“Witches powder the claws of the tigre and make a drink of it, which they give to the sick person whom they are curing.”
From the foregoing data, the essential unity and cohesiveness of the witchcraft beliefs and practices in the Mazatec territory is readily seen; and it is also possible to show a similar unity between the practices of the Mazatec and those of peoples in adjoining regions. It will not be difficult to show that practically every element, viewed singly in its occurrence among the Mazatec, also occurs among the majority of the other groups, although the significance of any given element may vary to a considerable degree as it is traced from group to group.
To the south and east, immediately adjoining the Mazatec territory, are the Cuicatecs. They are a small group, numbering 9,221; only 62.29 percent of the group are monolingual. Those who are known as witches have a certain knowledge of the herbs of the fields, and are equipped with bits of cork, crystals, marbles, beans, feathers, little idols of stone, herbs, etc. The witches practice as doctors and diviners, and earn honoraria, and it is believed that they can cause sickness in other persons by their black arts. In order to cause a person to become ill, they take a gift to the “Lord of the mountain,” which consists of a chicken, eggs; bamboo tubes of tepache, candles, and copal. These the witches leave on the mountain. In order to cure, they suck, and extract from the patient beans, hairs, fish-bones, etc. In cases of serious illness, they also take a gift to the “Lord of the mountain,” and if the patient dies, the witches disclaim the fault, saying that the aire was very strong.
They believe in the evil eye. In Teutila they believe in naguales, and in the owl as a bird of evil omen. He who carries with him a guacamaya feather will have luck with women. Pisiete is prepared in the following manner in Teutila: a leaf of fresh tobacco is well ground, mixed with a handful of lime, and sometimes a clove of garlic is added. This is sprinkled about where they work, in order to repel serpents or other venomous creatures. The same preparation serves to bewitch an enemy. The powdered pisiete is taken in the mouth and blown toward the enemy; it is believed that thus the enemy becomes sick or dies. If the bewitched one notices that someone has blown toward him, he can protect himself by drawing a line in the earth and spitting in the line, this being sufficient to protect him from danger.
Concerning agricultural sacrifice among the Cuicatecs, it is stated that in San Andrés Teotilalpam they still sacrifice animals in the fields in order to obtain a good harvest. Dogs are turkeys are the victims. The dogs are burned alive, and the turkeys are decapitated, and the seed and agricultural implements are sprinkled with their blood.
The pisiete mentioned above figured in the curing ceremony described from Huautla de Jimenez; it was also prescribed by the brujo as a part of the treatment, and was to be administered to the patient by “pricking it in the veins.” We listed the substance as tobaco molido. Starr, in his Notes upon the Huautla district, states that “Pisiete is a green powder of the leaves of a plant. It is universally carried in little gourds which are fastened on the girdle. It is used by the people to take away fatigue and also in brujería. In brujería it is used to protect against witchcraft and to cause witchcraft. It is used in brujería before the sun rises; a pinch is placed between the lower lip and the teeth, a sip of wine is taken, and formulae repeated. It was impossible to gain the formulae.”
Bauer also mentions the use of pisiete among the Mazatecs, as does Seler, who renders it by the proper Aztec name, picietz.
Sacrifice to ensure fertility of the fields also occurs among the Mazatec, according to Starr, and according to the same author, similar practices occur among the Mixe. Parsons, speaking of the Zapotec, states that “At Santo Domingo in time of drought an offering of turkeys and bread is made to the Earth. The turkeys are killed on the mountain, Cerro Pelón, for the blood to soak into the ground, four turkeys, two male, two female.” And, “Within a few miles of the town of Villa Alta we found among the Zapotec plenty of evidence to show the survival of ancient religious rites. Among certain pre-Cartesian ruins on the top of a hill venerated as “the hill which is good,” we noticed curious holes in the ground, in the pedestal of a cross, and in the base of an ancient stone wall. In these holes we found eggs, flowers, little circles or rings of bread, cacao beans, and other objects deposited as offerings. Moreover, a strong odor of blood and the peculiar blackness and consistency of the earth within the holes pointed to a sacrifice recently performed. Large piles of turkey feathers which lay scattered around proved conclusively that turkeys had been the victims.”
Gillow remarks that the Mixes sacrifice in eaves, and Beals reports similar practices among the same group. Cave sacrifice is a feature of wide distribution and considerable significance. Among the Tlaxcallans there are “rain-bringers, Kiatlaske or Tesitlaske,” who bring gifts to the caverns of Malintze. The Aztecs went to “a cave of the Cu called Topico” in procession, where they left the skins of certain sacrificed victims as offerings. The Cuicatecs also sacrifice in caves, while the Mitla farmers sacrifice to Lightning in his cave in the mountain region to the north of Mitla. Another custom widespread throughout Southern Mexico is the worship of and sacrifice to the mountain deities, known to the Mazatecs as the “Senor del Cerro.” The “Lords of the Mountains” play an important role in witchcraft, and indeed are the central figure in Cuicatec witchcraft; he lives on the Cerro Chere.
The “Lords of the Mountains” are particularly important in the selection of witches, for not everyone can be a witch; special talents and gifts belong thereto, which the “Lords of the Mountains” grant only to their favorites. Such gifts are the power to work miracles, and a kind of bodily invulnerability or resistance. So that they may prove themselves, the incipient witches must voluntarily, and more frequently, involuntarily, undergo ordeals. If people are doubtful that the candidate is worthy to be a witch, the candidate may be seized by several sturdy fellows and assaulted with machetes. If he lives, nothing can equal the devout worship with which the proven witch is honored.
The belief in cave and mountain dwelling dwarfs is almost as widespread as the custom of cave sacrifice, and in some instances, is connected with it. Parsons mentions a type of dwarf among the Zapotec which closely resembles the description of the la’a among the Mazatec.
Divining with maize is universal in Southern Mexico, and innumerable variations in details exist. The number of kernels employed is the most variable factor, and consequently has a purely arbitrary significance in the several cases.
Divination with chickens or turkeys seems to have a somewhat more limited distribution. Data are available which show that this type of divination occurs not only among the Mazatec, but also among the Chinantec, and among the Zapotec of Mitla, where the bruja kills a chicken upon a cross drawn upon the ground; if it dies with its head toward the east, the patient will recover.
Parcels of various objects, such as eggs, copal, feathers, cacao, etc., are buried for various purposes among the Cuicatec, the Mixe, and the Zapotec. The offering generally has the purposes of warding off or curing illness, or of satisfying the earth. Starr, however, states that the Mazatec bewitch others by taking three feathers and three cacao beans to a brujo, who buries them on the property of the victim before sunrise. Bauer records in detail two cases of the use of the curing parcel among the Mazatec, one from the Mazateco-Popoloca district around the Rio Tonto, and the other from Huautla. In the former case, one egg, seven pieces of white bark paper, seven pieces of brown bark paper seven colored parrot feathers, many cacao beans and pieces of copal were grouped around the egg with a corn husk or a banana leaf, and tied around both ends with the inner bark of a tree. While the bundle is being prepared, the witch repeats the necessary prayers, and the person then buries it in a convenient place, in the fields, or in the house. In the fields, it is frequently buried in the four comers and in the middle, and serves to keep drouth away, and ensure a good harvest. The bundle may be used for good or evil.
According to the Huautla practice described by Bauer, the bundle must be made where the witch does his work, that is, at the bedside of the patient. The egg is placed on the floor so that the pointed end points toward the patient. Five cacao beans and five tiny feather bundles are grouped on each side of the egg. The feathers are tiny, not large, as those at Rio Tonto; they are wrapped in a tiny piece of the fibrous bark of the mulberry tree, so that only the ends of the feathers protrude, and tied with bark string. The ten cacao beans and the ten feather bundles are equally separated on both sides of the egg, so that the points of the feathers lie next to the point of the egg. The witch then lights ten copal pieces and prays. After this, he wraps the parcel in a banana leaf, and buries it loosely under the bed of the patient, without stamping the earth down tightly. There it remains until the sick person recovers, when it is dug up, wrapped in fresh banana leaves, and buried again near the house, or hung up in a nearby tree to ward off evil spirits. The bark paper represents clothing, the white type, shirts, the brown, the outer garments; the feathers represent decoration, the cacao, money. Bauer also noticed the occurrence of soul-loss among the Mazatec; the soul is recaptured in a large jar at the place of its loss, as among the Zapotec.
The Mazatec share with all the surrounding peoples the general belief in the nagual in some form or another. According to Diaz, the territory of the Mazatec was known as the “Land of the deer,” because there were great numbers of tame deer which were venerated as gods, and could not be hunted. In former times, each cacique took for himself a sacred animal which was honored as a god. The general nagual belief extends to the Quiches of Guatemala. The Mazatec also share the general Central American belief in the owl (Sp. tecolote, lechuza), as a bird of evil omen.
Copal is used by the Mazatec not only in witchcraft and curing, but in all other religious ceremonies as well, a trait likewise shared with Central America generally. The Zapotecs, in addition to using copal in the above-mentioned ways, also bury it, as do the Mazatec, and use it in a peculiar form of divination as well. The copal is burned in a bowl of water, and thus a significant figure is formed on its underside.
Cacao in brujería invariably has the connotation of wealth, undoubtedly because of its Pre-Conquest use as a medium of exchange. Among the Zapotec, cacao is offered to the earth, and at various shrines, while the Mazatec inter it with the dead.
Plumes of brilliantly colored tropical birds, principally the quetzal and the guacamaya, were an essential part of every religious ceremony of the Aztecs. The merchants and the travellers went to the greatest pains to “find out where the feathers (plumes), and the precious stones can be had.” In ancient times, plumes were similarly used by the Zapotec, as well as by the groups further to the south. Seier gives interesting details concerning the connection of the guacamaya plume with the Aztec calendar and gods.
Paper must have been a commodity desired second only to plumes and precious stones. Its only use among the Aztecs was ceremonial, and it was indispensable as an article of adornment. It was used in penitential rites, as crowns for the images of gods, the god of the merchants was covered with paper, and paper was covered with ulli, liquid rubber, and used in sacrifices. The victims were frequently covered and clothed with paper, priests customarily wore undergarments of paper, it was burned with copal, and offered with plumes. Copal was frequently kept in paper pouches, and it was variously painted for different ceremonies. There were many grades and types of paper, known by various names, (amateteuitl, tetenitl, etc.), and tremendous quantities were used. In certain feasts for Vitzilopuchtli, the god of war, pieces of paper 20 fathoms long, 1 fathom wide, and 1 finger thick were used. The paper was made from several plants. Maguey paper was perhaps the most common, while those types of paper made from the bark of trees were more costly. The amate tree supplied the bark for most of the true bark paper.
Starr refers to modem bark paper-making among the Otomis. The bark is beaten with a stone, and is made by the women with some attempt at secrecy. It is used only for brujería, and little figures are cut from it. Today the paper is known as cua-ámatl in Aztec. Lopez y Fuentes describes its use as follows, “He observed that the earth in the patio had been recently removed, and digging, he disinterred three little figures of cua-ámatl, completely stuck through with spines. Moreover, he took out three eggs, painted black, and three cempoalxóchitl, the flower of death.”
Mr. Rodney Gallop has observed and collected similar figures of bark paper among the Otomi of the state of Puebla. Parsons reports one occurrence of the use of the muiieco in bewitching among the Zapotec, but so far as is now known the bark paper is made in the rancherias, and brought to town to be sold in the markets. The entire tree is cut down, the trunk conveniently sectioned, and the bark beaten until it lifts away from the wood. No especial beater is used; any hard stick of wood will serve. The use of various magical plants to find lost objects is not restricted to the Mazatec alone; the Zapotec use a plant called “bador, the little children,” which is administered in the same way as yerba Maria by the Mazatec. The leaf is beaten well, and a tea made thereof. It is probable that the Chinantec use it, since it is well known to those who live in the vicinity of Ojitlan. The Aztecs used narcotic plants in a similar way. The use of a semi-divine mushroom seems to be today confined exclusively to the Mazatec territory, although in former times it undoubtedly had a much wider distribution. The Aztecs knew these mushrooms under the Nahuatl term, teonanacatl, “divine mushroom.” Simeon, deriving his information from Sahagun, states the following, “Teonanacatl. Espece de petit champignon qui a mauvais gout, enivre et cause des hallucinations; il est medicinal contre les fievres et la goutte.” Further data on this most interesting feature of Mazatec witchcraft are scanty. Apparently the Zapotec do not use mushrooms, and the Cuicatec, although they know of their use among their neighbors, do not themselves employ mushrooms.
The wide distribution and similarity of the idea of intercession with the saints and souls, who are addressed by persons knowing the “Words of Power,” in the Middle American area is highly significant. Furthermore, it is generally believed that the saints and souls may be coerced into doing evil as well as good. This pattern of invocatory ceremonialism revolves about the principle of magical coercion of the gods, and is perhaps one of the most fundamental Middle American traits.
Conclusions:
In dealing with the non-material aspects of modem Middle American cultures, there are found three comparatively distinct strata, firstly, the European overlay, more or less completely acculturated to the indigenous mass, secondly, the great body of indigenous beliefs and practices which exhibit some sort of a fundamental unity throughout the entire area, and thirdly, variations and especial local developments of these indigenous beliefs among the individual groups. A fourth and minor group is formed of variations upon of the European overlay.
Nowhere, naturally, does the European overlay appear so obviously as in the more superficial aspects of the religious life. In the beginnings of the process, the acculturation was forced, but after the first great cut into the pattern of aboriginal theopathy, acculturation proceeded almost without conscious effort. Thus, the Catholic saints have fallen heir to the attributes of their pagan predecessors, and in religious tales which have been told by the aborigines for two or more centuries there is seen the final product of this process of acculturation, which strove to express unfamiliar action in a familiar locale and idiom. Then, too, the Huautla brujo’s explanation of the bark paper and the feather in the curing apparatus seems to be an obvious and traditional rationalization, a reconciliation of the old to the new, which represents a completed line of acculturation. Yet, curiously enough, the other three articles of the curing parcel retain their aboriginal connotation.
A few examples of fundamental aboriginal beliefs have already been mentioned; were the data sufficient, it would be possible to multiply them almost indefinitely. A basic fact concerning them, however, is readily perceived, namely, that in the relation of belief to demonstration of that belief, the belief is the constant, while the manifestation is the variable. A case in point is the ceremony preliminary to the well-known Totonac game of Volador, as it is played in Papantla. Here, “an old woman, the so-called bruja (witch) makes offerings of copal, aguardiente, and a fowl, which are placed in the hole when the pole is put in position.”
All the basic elements of the curing parcel as occurring among the Mazatec were known to most of the groups of Middle America, but so far as is now known, only the Mazatec use them all in the characteristic manner previously described. This indicates, perhaps, not only an ancient and continued diffusion, but a high degree of selective acculturation as well. The difference in the sum total of culture in all its aspects, from group to group in Middle America, was comparatively so small as to permit readily the diffusion and acceptance of almost any given culture trait. While this does not hold for the calendar with all its complicated ramifications, or for highly technical processes, yet it is particularly applicable in the realm of non-material culture of an unsophisticated nature.
Concerning the mechanics of this widespread and continuous diffusion, Sahagun remarks that the merchants among the Aztecs “travelled over the whole land, bartering, trading, buying in some place and selling in another what they had purchased. They also travel through towns, along the seashore, and in the interior. There isn’t a place they do not visit, they are very sly in their deals with strangers in learning their languages, as well as in their tactics.” A second great center of trading and of “travellers” was and is the Zapotecan area. Thus was long range diffusion effected; but of greater significance in the long run was the great volume of short range trading, that is, between village and village, and between directly adjoining localities, as is the custom today. In such a way, both material objects, and to a lesser extent, their non-material aspects as well, were diffused, but were always incorporated into the body of the recipient culture with great variability and a high degree of adaptive acculturation. For example, the Mazatec have a simplified agricultural calendar, shorn of the greater part of its mythological significance, while the nearby Cuicatec, and the central and northwestern Chinantec have none, although they know of its use among their neighbors. The Mazatec curing parcel, with all its elements, then, seems to represent a very localized adoption and fusion of certain fundamental elements of great antiquity and wide distribution in Middle America.