The Shaman's Cross: Memoirs of a Journey in Aztec Spirituality

By Edgar Martin del Campo

Living for several months among Aztec and Otomí villages in Veracruz, anthropologist Edgar Martín del Campo discovered a native spirituality with deep connections to Mexico’s ancient civilizations. His memoir tells of the profound wisdoms he received while exploring their supernatural world, through revelations that would forever change his life.

With vivid details that are grounded in professional anthropology, "The Shaman’s Cross" is one of the most authentic and comprehensive personal accounts of Mesoamerican spirituality, with comparisons across Mexico’s Precolumbian, colonial, and modern epochs. It provides valuable lessons on the modern relevance and responsibilities of indigenous knowledge.

shamanscross.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483515694

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PART 1: SEED

Like us, the wind is also one of the people. Even when we don’t know it, he is watching us. – Albín

The Huasteca

August 30, 2004. I begin this tale on a wrong turn in Mexico City. Veracruz’ capital, Xalapa, and all of the cities to its south or east were accessible from Mexico City’s eastern bus station, where I had arrived via taxi, but it did not offer routes to the state’s northern points such as Papantla or Poza Rica, as I would soon discover.

Another taxicab drove me through the dense urban thicket from the east station to the north one. A bus bound for the gulf town of Tuxpan, Veracruz departed at 1:30. Because I had arrived just beforehand, I hoped my two suitcases were loaded on time.

Dotted with the occasional rows of maguey plants whose succulent leaves curved outward so heavily that they folded under the weight, the esplanade of the dry highlands northeast of Mexico City rose to the low, rounded hills contouring the horizon. The paved highway extended out to it in an almost straight line. An isolated tor sharply jutted from the earth at one end and smoothly waved back into it at the other.

The bus’s northeast path ascended into the narrow roads that wound tightly around the steepening edges of the Sierra Oriental mountain ranges which for centuries separated the Huasteca lowlands from Central Mexico. Ancient parabolic mountains blended into each other to form a barrier of impenetrably forested slopes. Beyond the thick of pine and oak, rivers coursed from the lucid Necaxa reservoir at the slopes’ bottom. These mountains have been the homes for some of the most isolated indigenous societies in Mexican history, including the Sierra Nahuat, Otomí, Totonac, and the aptly-named Tepehua or ‘Mountain Owner’ tribes.

Before European contact the Aztecs had tried to conquer the Huaxtec Maya civilization for whom the Huasteca region was named, but its topographical inaccessibility and a tenacious Huaxtec army prevented a complete victory. By the late fifteenth century Aztec peoples did eventually settle into the region’s southern portion. My plan was to elucidate the supernatural world of their Huasteca descendants.

As the bus descended into the southern fringe of the Huasteca, the sun dissolved behind the perennial haze that capped the northern Sierra range. It approached the coastal city of Tuxpan. All I knew of this port city was that it was the provenience for a Huaxtec rain god sculpture on display in the Xalapa Anthropology Museum and that by sunset I should transfer buses here to reach San Sebastián, a one-motel town south of the Tantoyuca county seat.

This second bus was of two-star quality and still had all of its seats intact. An open window near my seat drew in a chilly wind. Condensed humidity seeped through faults in the ceiling and dripped onto my laptop, which I had ordered only three weeks prior. The restroom was either locked or jammed, and whatever must have died in there, based on its rancid smell, could not be removed.

The bus had apparently arrived into San Sébas! San Sébas! Had it? Where were the town lights aside from the small bulb illuminating the bus transfer entrance? What or who was out there in the dark? I reconsidered disembarking here, not sure of the presence of a motel, so I paid for the remaining route to Tantoyuca where lodging was more certain.

After half a day of travel, I picked up my luggage and arrived at the motel by 10:30. The light from a single hanging bulb was absorbed by the motel room’s forest green walls, as was much of the August swelter. Toilets with hinged seats could be found among the luxury hotels in the Huasteca, but not at this motel on the city’s outskirts. Here, the ambience was of light highway traffic, faint Mexican pop, and humming cricket songs. For eleven dollars my room provided a meager shower, a flushing toilet, and a queen-sized bed. It sufficed.

Midnight came. Within my curtained motel room, I faced north—or at least my closest estimation of it—to perform my devotion to the gods of the new day’s Aztec sign. Immediately after the devotion I found a power socket near the top of one of the walls. So I could find power here in the Huasteca, I thought, if I would know where to look. But for now I was just relieved to finally rest my body. That my laptop still functioned after its recent exposure let me sleep well for this first night.

Altepetl

I awoke by 9:00. Yesterday’s thick sheet of black became the morning’s white sunlight. Across the street I breakfasted on scrambled eggs with tangy orange chorizo.

Back in the room I rearranged my luggage, which comprised a year’s supply of work clothing, music CDs, grooming supplies, academic books, and field equipment. This all fit into a wheeled suitcase, a plastic sports bag, a small tote, and a laptop backpack less than a week old. Carrying it all required a careful balance of the weight upon my shoulders for all the baggage but my suitcase, which I could wheel from its handle unless steps were involved. To carry the suitcase down the motel stairs, I had to focus the remaining strength of my forearms as my back bore the rest of the load. It was always a clumsy matter, but it saved trips and ensured that nothing got stolen.

The morning heat crawled over me as I waited in front of the motel for the next microbus to Tlamachiliz, which I rode for an hour to a small town. Only one paved road crossed it—the highway that connected Tlamachiliz to San Sebastián. All the other roads were packed in uneven dirt, including the one that branched off from the highway toward Tenamitl, my destination of Altepetl, and the remote mountains beyond them.

To these people I must have been the oddest sight: a light-skinned foreigner, likely the default gringo, burdened with enough luggage to permanently settle in the vicinity, as I awaited the bus to Tenamitl. It was stranger still, almost unprecedent, that I would speak Nahuatl, which only dark-skinned people should know.

I waited at the intersection for the bus. The rising heat and humidity from the morning peaked with a downpour that I evaded by seeking shelter under an awning at the entrance of a nearby shop. I waited. The rains stopped. I waited. The only other regular public transports from Tlamachiliz to the mountains were canvassed, benched pickups that left the county seat only four times a day. To all vehicles that turned at this intersection, I asked whether they stopped at the entrance of Altepetl, but none did. So I continued to wait. Three hours passed. The bus finally arrived.

This bus was bound for the city of Las Palmas, but it ran through stretches of rural dirt roads between it and Tonalá, a small town neighboring Tlamachiliz. It was a one-star repainted American school bus with a leaking roof, jammed windows, a muddied aisle, several seats either missing or torn. The rest was covered in dust and inscribed with marker graffiti describing such matters as who were puto ‘whores,’ who was riding, and how shoddily the buses were kept. These kind of buses and the open pickups were the only public transportation in these Mexican hinterlands.

The intersection toward the north end of Tenamitl, where I had stepped out, branched off to three major destinations: to the south, the mountains of the spirits; to the east, the route to Las Palmas; and to the north, the road returning to the highway. Despite the centrality of this village and the important roads meeting at its north end, private transports were rare; most were typically trucks owned by teachers and herdsmen. I wasn’t sure how long my next wait for transportation would last, considering that it was already 3:30 and the final public transport had probably already passed Tenamitl for the mountains. The dirt roads were littered with puddles around which I was maneuvering my suitcase. A walk to Altepetl was unfeasible, especially for wheeling my luggage through the intractable mud. With less of a burden and drier roads, the walk would have lasted thirty-five minutes. I stood at the crossroads, uncomfortably empty for these afternoon hours. Moist breezes cooled the overcast sky.

Not long into my wait, I met a young man who introduced himself only as Rafael; it would not be until March that I realized he was the Pentecostal pastor in Tenamitl and that he had moved to the village not much earlier than myself. Now it was telling that many of the people I encountered on this first field day would count among my greatest allies or my staunchest opponents. This pastor would belong to the latter, arguably even my arch-nemesis, but I will return to this later.

His hair was shiny and combed back, and he wore a clean buttoned shirt and black trousers upon a slim, upright posture. His grooming and complexion were quite distinct from most of the other residents of Tenamitl, for his skin was light for a Mestizo—the Mexican miscegenation of Spanish and native roots. Thick Arab eyebrows crossed over dark Spanish eyes and a steep Aztec nose. He was likely awaiting a ride, too.

I’m trying to get to Altepetl, I told him. Are you going out that way?

Rafael gave me a humble, dimpled smile. No, but I know someone who can get you there! Please give me a minute, and I’ll go call him for you. He sprinted down the road.

How very pleasant! I thought. The pastor’s contact promptly picked me up with his van. The drive to Altepetl took less than five minutes. The road intersected at a T at the community’s southeast corner, the eastbound road leading to the mountains and the westbound passing along the village’s southern boundary. Because my memory of the layout was spotty, we asked for the house of my host, the ceremonial worker José. Many of the elder men had two names: one comprised of the birth name, middle name, and the family names from both parents, and the second taken as an adult nickname. José was of the latter. When the driver and I arrived at José’s yard—a plot of brown earth sustaining a few fruit trees, enclosed with a wire fence and opening with a wide wooden gate—the driver could then speak of the charge for the transportation: one hundred pesos, close to nine dollars. I froze upon hearing it. The January ride was free! I mentally protested. That was when I learned to always ask in Mexico for the charge first. Jesus Christ.

Worse still, I had only several bills of two hundred pesos, but not enough small currency to produce one hundred—nor could the driver make change. Teo, the Otomí elder and among the people from whom I most desired to learn, was seated at the pavilion toward the west side of the front yard. María, José’s wife, came out of the one-story house. There was no time for Hello! How have you been? I’m jubilant to see you again! Is your husband here? Piali, I said in greeting, Do you have a hundred?

María reentered the house and came back with a hundred pesos, not an insignificant expense. I would remunerate her and José as soon as I could break a bill, but for now I paid the driver. He left the luggage at the porch space and returned to Tenamitl.

Enter Bicho. He had already been in the yard, but did not approach me until after the driver had left. He hobbled over with a plastic bottle in his hand, which contained a sugar cane distillate popularly known as aguardiente, ‘burning water.’ From the bottle it smells of crisp rum, but from a drunkard’s breath it is like rancid punch. The breath came in near and far as Bicho swayed, and I could see one upper incisor jutting diagonally from the gum where there should have been two. He explained to me what aguardiente was and then offered me a swig of his bottle, a common way to reinforce social bonds among the men of these rural communities. Thus the bottle passes many lips, though I neither understood nor appreciated its significance then.

Aguardieeennnte is what makes me like this. Lovely. Loan me some pesos so that I can have some more. A perfunctory act of charity so that you can go on poisoning yourself with this addiction? Buddhism calls it idiot compassion. I was therefore hesitant, but I also did not want to violate local rules for reciprocity. To improve my standing as a newcomer in the community, I could spare ten pesos from the mound of Mexican coinage in my pockets, and so I produced a ten-peso coin. Then he wanted more. If I concede to another donation, I thought, he will just ask for more and more, and he will not go away. And others might come expecting the same. I told him that, first of all, I had just given him ten pesos, and I did not have much more money left.

Not much else in Bicho’s speech was intelligible, and he noticed that I could not follow it. Perhaps it was laden with too much slang in Spanish or Nahuatl for which I was scarcely prepared, or a sloppy fusion of the two languages more readily spoken when inebriated. Whatever it was, I reaffirmed that he had already had enough from me. He then broke into tears and mumbled in a loud, lachrymose voice—he must have deemed me stingy. I at least understood his last drooled word: "Tipobres!" ‘We are poor!’ Now this language fusion made sense; the Nahua use this foreign word for poverty because they didn’t have such a concept until the Spanish arrived.

Will every day be like this? Will I be broke from all these requests before October? The Nahua destitution already sickened me on my first day in the field. It smelled of various things that are brown.

Exit Bicho. He was in his mid-twenties, which was all I knew of this man. This encounter was one of the only two I would have with him, for he bore little on my research other than to remind me how many here drank to allay their sense of poverty.

José

Bicho had left. Now I could settle.

The house had three main entrances: one through the kitchen space and two at flanking ends of the central room, which contained the bed where José and María slept, the domestic altar, the entertainment electronics, and a dining table. It connected to four smaller rooms, two of which were frequently used as guest rooms for their many visitors, and the other two stored ritual supplies and old books. The floor was a hard surface of baked earth with a few flaws, and most of the rooms were built from baked mud plastered over a frame of halved bamboo stalks. The kitchen walls were made simply from bamboo mounted upon a wire frame, and its floor was raw, trampled soil. Although now it seemed like a house extension, it was probably the original edifice. A single roof of thick cardboard tiling covered all the rooms, spanning a fifty- by twenty-foot space. Most indigenous peoples of Mexico would call this home. For the next few months I would, too.

My bedroom space was … economical. It measured seven by five feet, and the bed, a twin-sized mattress upon a roped cot, took half of that space. I laid my bags in a row along the opposite wall, leaving only a small walkway between them and the bed. At the end of the walkway, a flimsy wooden door, assembled from several boards horizontally nailed to a wood-beam frame, peeked out to the backyard, where a couple of orange trees stood within the wired-fence space. It barely staved off a snarling dog that would occasionally attempt a night entry during my first weeks.

María offered me a bowl of black bean soup with a stack of tortillas that I eagerly ate. José was away, most likely at one of his two milpa farm plots.

I kept company with Teo, whom I hadn’t seen in a year. I told my compadre, ‘The boy should be here by today or tomorrow,’ he whistled through jaws missing front teeth. He was an old wanderer who frequented Nahua communities around Tlamachiliz, despite his origins from Hníní, an Otomí village a day’s walk to the south. He embodied the Mexican "indio: illiterate, fluent in a native language and passable in Spanish, clad in wrinkled white pajamas and frayed leather sandals, and capped with short white hair. It was in his antiquity and the ancient world he came from, one immersed in spiritual beings whom he could importune with the proper ritual prayers and implements, that his healing talent sprung. Tales spoke of him and others from Hníní who doused forest fires and quenched droughts within minutes after ritually invoking storms. It will rain because I say it will rain, he told me, as if by normal consequence. Mm-hmm." Where maize and other crops are essential to life, such abilities receive supreme respect.

Teo usually dwelled at the house of one of his compadre partners for several days at a time, and then traveled to other villages as his services were requested. He occasionally visited his own home in Hníní, but it was the Nahua people who most readily sought his services. He would be staying at José’s for a few days, for his present business was to heal an elderly man from the south end of the village. Hopefully we could see each other often, for I wanted to learn more about the supernatural world and the Otomí language.

Well into the night, José returned to the house and greeted me with an exuberant "Pialiii!" He smiled to see me again, our first reunion since my January visit, and he hugged me with a strength that belied his age. He was about sixty, but his exact age was unclear because the dates on his birth certificate and its official copy were two years apart, and he did not observe his birthday. And in any case his only slightly graying hair, along with his perennial farm labor gave him the build and complexion of a man ten years younger. His smile folded his skin into large ridges and flashed his perfect teeth.

Although José didn’t host me when I first visited Altepetl a year ago, he saw that I was avidly participating in a cleansing ceremony that Teo was conducting at his house then, and I was even attempting to pray in English, Spanish, and an honorific style of Mexica Nahuatl. I had returned last January to participate in the New Year’s ceremony José conducted at his house and upon the mountain at the village’s south side—for the prosperity of the community and the abundance of their horticulture throughout 2004. José had singled me out from other anthropology students who had visited here as someone who had the capacity, devotion, and motivation to train in costumbre. This led to my return to study it.

José now led me into the kitchen, where we sat on small wooden chairs facing the warm hearth-pit dug into the earthen floor. In Spanish with a voice that connoted rolling ash, he began, Are you interested in Teo’s work or of mine?

Both, I answered.

I’m not obliging you to any such ritual work, but you shouldn’t miss the opportunity to talk with Teo tomorrow morning. I don’t know when he’s returning to Altepetl. You could speak with me any time, but not so with Teo.

He then asked me a hazy riddle: With what would you begin, and with what would you leave? Into what do you enter, into what do you leave?

While I don’t have your education, nor can I write like you, I do have the commitment and the devotion for costumbre in my ears, heart, and body, he said as he slowly pointed to his head and heart. "Though I have these skills, could you do the work? Could you learn to work with the scissors?" Here he was referring to cutting the curandero healers’ ritual paper figurines, renowned across the region. It’s too much to do by myself. Now there was much I could’ve told other visitors, but they weren’t ready, so I’d said little. I’ll tell you anything because I see you mastering costumbre. You could even reach Teo’s level. Now that would be something, I thought.

With what would I begin? Into what do I enter? Even as I was quick to seize José’s tutelage, I did remain reserved. A chance to train in the rites would have improved my access to the very information I had come to document on the supernatural world: realms, souls, spirits, witches … and gods. But not just for academic purpose had I wished to follow the sacred in Mesoamerica. I wanted to pray to the gods. Here was my first call to apprentice from the Aztecs themselves. It was one of my greatest precedents. But was I ready for that kind of responsibility? Was I ready for the risks?

A truism of the study of magic is that knowledge is power, and sorcery is the most extreme example of this relation. To even possess the gnosis of magical power is to be able to wield it, for the good or bad it could do. Those who possess such knowledge—or are at least believed to—are feared for the sorcery that they could exert upon others: to wither crops, inflict illness, instigate conflicts, or cause any other such misfortunes upon one’s victims. The naïve exploration of such knowledge for academic purposes is difficult to conceive among those who live with its menace, given that no magic is free from the lure of abuse.

Knowledge of magic means entering its circles of power, and anyone who would know something of the powers of healing and sorcery would be by definition an invested party among their agents. Any who would become a curandero in the Huasteca Veracruzana must risk the ire of the witches into whose domain he or she would be intruding. José did know enough to perform as a curandero, for he had the knowledge up here, in his head; but he chose to simply conduct agrarian ceremonies as a xochitlalketl flower setter, perhaps to avoid such risks of witchcraft affliction—or accusation. To start safely, I told José that I could commit to documenting costumbre and paying attention to the cutting of the paper effigies, but I’d need to consider a full apprenticeship. I was but a kernel of maize, just popped off the cob and handed to the soil. I could at least sleep on it tonight and aid with the preparations tomorrow.

Between eleven and midnight, after a long day of travel and settlement in Altepetl, I crawled beneath my bed’s fine-mesh netted canopy, suspended from a rope over the mattress, and nestled myself between a plunging mattress and a soft linen blanket. Sleep fell on me like the bed’s scent of musty wool.

Curandero

Early the next morning I stepped into the central room. Upon the altar table a white illuminator candle was burning in a tall, flared glass, and a bunch of variegated leaves stood within another glass on the table. An array of small, faded paintings of Jesus, Mary, and several saints hung on the wall behind the table; and a green cross stood on the floor beneath it. Within twenty minutes dawn broke. María had stepped out to buy sweetbread, so in her absence our breakfast was simple: thin, round María cookies with a cup of sweet coffee boiled over the hearth fire. Teo said that today would warm and that, although others said that it would not rain, he was certain that it would.

Later that day José, Teo, and I were sitting around the dining table in the central room and, as many men do when socializing after noon, imbibing beer. Sol is the only brand in Altepetl. As José and Teo were men with whom I could drink, I did so, and well. I took four small bottles of the clear beer, 1.3 liters all together, which almost floored me. So I returned to my bed and napped it off, and dreamt of a theater. Backstage an actor prepared to rehearse his lines, and he evoked them sounding like Teo in prayer.

I then awoke to Teo orating in Spanish for the elderly couple who had come to the house. I slowly stepped into the room and took a seat, and upon seeing me sit Teo chuckled—a curious break in his otherwise solemn composure for his benediction. In Spanish he invoked the Virgin, Saint Michael, Saint James, and other saints, and then switched to Otomí, through which he invoked the indigenous chthonic gods such as water, lightning, and earth. I knew only a smattering of Otomí vocabulary, certainly more than most of the local Nahua, but whatever Teo had to say in Otomí was for himself and his gods. He then reverted back to Spanish, in order to list the ceremonial items that the couple should provide for the healing: several types of plant materials, sheets of coarse industrial paper, candles, and a live chicken. It would all cost two hundred pesos, approximately eighteen dollars. In order to begin the ritual preparations, Teo accompanied the couple as they returned to their house. José and I had our own tasks, such as gathering the plant materials from the nearby lands.

After they left, José instructed me, Sometimes people are afflicted because others desire it. Sometimes, if you hit a person, it may provoke an act of sorcery against you. But it can also be unprovoked when it is motivated by envy. There is a lot of envy here. Illness from a natural cause could be treated through natural means, such as herbal or clinical medicines. Illness from a supernatural agent is of a different type, and it could stem from intake of a wind spirit, the separation of one’s tonalli soul, or a sortilege upon it. And a witchcraft spell is especially contagious, for it may target not only a specific victim but can also extend to afflict their spouse, children, lands, livestock—anything in which the victim was emotionally or economically invested. Only supernatural measures, as directed by a healer, may counteract a supernatural illness.

Into a sisal-woven morral bag I collected my digital voice recorder, my notebook, and my umbrella because I had assumed that we would be meeting the couple and Teo afterward. José led me to the fences that separated the village roads from the family-owned lands to the north. We climbed over the fence with a crude ladder assembled from thick branches. The walk took us through grazing pastures and orange orchards that flaunted the use of state-apportioned lands for market-food production. Since the day had been quite warm, I wore one of my numerous T-shirts, but it did not serve me well as a chill blew in. The sky was overcast, and clouds were darkening to the northeast.

We arrived at a grassy enclosure dotted with banana, palm, and guaje trees (with their dangling seed pods), mud patches, and cattle dung. A small thatched arbor built from branches stood at the south end, into which peons could retreat to wait out flash rains. José picked up a forked branch and shaved off its slender compound leaves with his machete. He raised the branch from its longer arm, so that the shorter arm could hook down the central rachis from a nearby feather palm called koyolli, which was named for the tough seed husk that encases its fleshy kernel like a circular bell around a metal bead.

We were not harvesting koyolli fruit, however. José separated the long individual leaves from the rachis. We needed a hundred and fifty for the ceremony, but we had to first remove the sharp spine at the base of each leaf. Some spines were ostensibly long, up to two inches, but others were negligibly small and so could be left in the leaf.

José was wearing tall galoshes, so he waded through the muddier parts of the enclosure to gather other plants. I was wearing thin hiking boots that soaked more readily, so I awaited him at the short log bench beneath the arbor’s heavy, thatched shade. My pen had fallen, lost among the grasses, so I couldn’t use the time to write notes, and my recorder could store only up to twenty-two minutes of high-quality sound, for which I was saving to record Teo’s incantations. On the log bench was the largest ant I had ever