The Sacred Art of Brujeria: A Path of Healing & Magic

By Katrina Rasbold

Answer Brujería's Call and Become a Magical Healer

Featuring hands-on exercises, simple techniques, and how-to instruction from a professional bruja, this beginner-friendly guide is the best choice for understanding and practicing Brujería—the healing witchcraft of Mexico and the American Southwest. The Sacred Art of Brujería is adapted from a twelve-month series of classes and presents a wide variety of topics, including magical tools, the body's energetic systems, and effective spellcasting.

This practical book covers everything from the history and divine figures of Brujería to the healing, protection, and money magic that you can use in daily life. Explore power words and breath work, treat spiritual maladies, perform different types of limpias (cleansings and clearings), and learn about Brujería as a business. Katrina Rasbold gives you an insider's look at this sacred practice and how it helps others as well as yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide
• Release date: Jun 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9780738762999

Katrina Rasbold

Katrina Rasbold is a practicing bruja, rootworker, Tarotologist, teacher, and author of over thirty published books who has been active in the magical arts since 1982. In 1997, she and her husband, Eric, founded the CUSP spiritual path, now practiced worldwide. Katrina has presented at California festivals for more than two decades and is a founding member and president of North Western Circles Association. She is also a frequent presenter at Pantheacon.

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INTRODUCTION

Ilive in the world as a bruja, the Spanish word for female witch, and each day as I work magic for the benefit of others, as I open my shop door in the morning and lock it at night, I do so with humble appreciation for the culture that created this magical system. The long journey that brought me to this practice began the day that my first mentor literally landed on my doorstep and told me it was the path I was born to follow, and encouraged me to start walking.

Being a bruja is not just about being a witch in the most general of terms. Brujería is its own practice, akin to the folk magic forms of Witchcraft in the European tradition and southwestern cousin to Hoodoo and other Conjure traditions, but with its own structure, purpose, and practices. It is specifically the Hispanic form of Witchcraft, born of the culture itself with its current form deriving from thousands of years of unbroken lineage and practice. Brujería is not merely Witchcraft as the word directly translates to English, but is a folk magic system specific to the culture. It shares some modalities with other traditions and yet has its own representation of the Craft.

I am not Mexican. I am a Caucasian woman from a predominantly Scotch-Irish family. I was born in Kentucky, which is far from Mexico both geographically and culturally. I left in 1978. I traveled the world with my first husband, who was in the US Air Force, and studied magic in the Marianas Islands, in England, and throughout the United States. During that time, I experienced magical practices through the eyes of many cultures and, although they were fascinating and I studied them academically, those traditions were not my path. I never imagined then, or at any time in my decades of magical study and practice, that it would be Brujería that would call me as the path I would ultimately embrace.

I walk in this world of Brujería by invitation, not only from the gods and from God, but from the three mentors who taught me: two brujos and a bruja. I resisted coming to the bruja’s sacred space, concerned over potential accusations of appropriation. My respect for the culture that I engage every day is profound and the thought of offending anyone who is ancestrally or geographically entitled to it shadowed my practice for years, no matter how many people I helped. It is a reality that fortunately does not seek me out very often anymore. Each day, I am a bruja, whether I like it or not (I do) and whether my critics like it or not (they typically do not).

The people I helped over the past years showed no hesitancy over the fact that I was white. They needed someone to help them, to channel God and magic into their despair, and I did that for them.

The mentors who trained me, sometimes patiently and other times, not so much, did not care that I was white. Back then, I fussed about my skin color and heritage far more than they ever did. One even said, You worry about this so much that I get tired of hearing about it. At least it will keep you humble.

It is true that I voiced my concerns repeatedly. I told them I did not want to appropriate what was not mine to use. I thought surely the language barrier must be a problem or perhaps I was not expressing myself effectively when I lamented that I was not Mexican. That I was not Hispanic. That I had no ancestral claim to what they were teaching me to do.

They told me to stop making excuses and to do the work.

They told me that I was mired in ego.

They said that ego is what tells you to care about what others think of you more than what you are put on the earth to do, even though you are doing the will of God.

They told me I was allowing fear to control and limit me.

They said that fear is what tells you that you will not be accepted. Fear shows you illusions, causing you to believe you cannot do what you know in your heart you can do … what God insists that you do.

One told me that anyone who truly matters in this process doesn’t care, and anyone who cares doesn’t matter. They said that my practice was between me and Brujería, between me and God.

Another told me that when we are cut, the blood that comes out, whether it is Hispanic blood or Scotch-Irish blood, is red. When we die and the fleshy vehicle we drove around here on earth dissolves into the ground, our bones look alike. Our blood and our bones and our spirits do not care. Only our fearful, defensive minds care. Only our egos care.

Another told me that people may have an opinion about who practices Brujería, but they do not get to choose this. God chooses. Brujería itself chooses and it cares little about what mere mortals think of the choices it makes.

I frequently use that phrase with my students. Brujería chooses.

Brujería chooses whom it will call. Once you are called, Brujería exposes your deepest frailties and your strongest weaknesses; it forces you to confront every inner demon that inhibits your forward progress. It is like leveling up on a video game where you defeat each ever-stronger opponent in turn until you meet the Big Boss. Like a hazing or an initiation, you fight off your inner demons one by one until there is no longer fear and there is no longer ego. There is only Brujería.

Of course, there are practical modalities we work to master in Brujería. We learn to construct the most effective power grids for any situation. We learn to effectively interpret candle burns and how to blend herbs, oils, and salts into a powerful ritual bath. Like any branch of Witchcraft, we study the techniques and we learn the modalities, but the real training happens inside, away from the worktables and altars.

Back in the early 2010s, I had a little magic shop in the middle of a gigantic swap meet. It was a real brick-and-mortar shop with doors we could lock, which was unheard of in that venue of pop-ups, tarps, and folding tables. Our shop was tiny, maybe 300 square feet, if that. We made the most of vertical displays and scrunched in as much inventory as we could.

One day, a woman who did not speak English came into our shop. My husband speaks Spanish conversationally and after talking with her a bit, he interpreted that she wanted me to cleanse her. I took out my white sage stick, my holy water, and my stones and began working on her intuitively as I had done with many others before. Just then, another vendor at the swap meet walked by and looked in our door, seeing what I was doing. He and I were on casual, friendly terms. He came in and pretended to look around the shop, but I could tell something was on his mind.

I finished up with the lady and she seemed pleased with the results. I was glad I did whatever it was she needed me to do, despite our language barrier. Through my husband, she asked how much she owed me. I shrugged and said, Cinco (five dollars). She pushed a ten into my hands and refused her change.

The vendor, a large Mexican dude in a tie-dye shirt and gym shorts, came up to me, cocked his head toward the departing woman, and said, What were you doing with her?

I looked at him skeptically, unsure exactly sure what he was asking or even why.

I was cleansing her, I said, carefully watching his reaction. Sort of a smudging, if you know what that is, but more intense.

You were doing a limpia.

A what?

A limpia. You were doing a limpia on her. Are you a curandera or a bruja or something?

I knew what bruja meant. This was before I knew all the cultural connotations of bruja and to me, the word just meant witch. I had identified as a witch for more than half my life, so I latched onto it.

Yeah, I guess I am a bruja. I have been for years.

Who trained you? he asked.

My mind was reeling and I fought back feelings of annoyance. We were back to this again. For the whole of my years as a witch, there was little more irritating to me than the pedigree effect of needing to provide line and verse of your lineage to anyone who asked. Apparently, this was a cross-cultural phenomenon.

No one, I said, telling him the truth. I mean, I have training, but it did not include what I was doing to cleanse the woman. The most we do is wave a sage stick at someone as they are coming into ritual. We don’t do what I was doing and look intuitively for energy imbalances and congestions, for attachments, and things like that. I have just always done that on my own.

"Mija, you are a bruja, he said. You’re right."

That is how he became my teacher. He never cared that I worked with a generational coven in England or with the Druids in Devore, California, or that I managed my own covens for more than twenty years. My magical lineage did not impress him. He cared about what I did with the healing process. He cared about my relationship to certain herbs and stones.

My next mentor did not know my first mentor personally, but came into my shop and after talking with me for a while and throwing around a few buzz words, he decided he wanted to teach me. I was not really in the market for another instructor, but he was pushy about it and I figured I would rather know more than less, so I started learning with Don Francisco. He was not as jolly as my first teacher and looked like a wizened old cowboy, complete with the oversized hat and boots. He taught me about the discipline of the practice and how to interact with clients.

Doña Marta was a Guatemalan woman who was diminutive in size, but not in presence. She had a ready, broad smile and a good heart. She taught me about the concept of healing the whole client, carefully examining not just the obvious or known presentation of symptoms, but looking deeper into the client’s physical, psychological, social, and mental health to see how the known circumstances may be informed by the ones unseen, as she called them.

Her focus was on the client’s relationship with what they considered holy and sacred. She taught me about the saints and how we use them and the biblical Scriptures in our magical work. In addition to the canonized saints, she taught me about the folk saints and their vital role in the Hispanic community, including Santa Muerte, who quickly became my own patron saint.

These three people were instrumental in my training as a bruja and they are the reason why I am here today, writing these words. Each day, I offer my respect and gratitude to the path that called me and the mentors who accepted and guided me. Me. A little Kentucky girl who is now an old woman living in California, practicing from a beautiful mountain location and working hard to remember that Brujería chooses and for whatever glorious, inexplicable, amazing, damning reason, it chose me.

Well over a year ago, Santa Muerte tapped me to begin teaching Brujería classes. Again, I worried about the calling. I worried that the art would not translate out to a larger group of people. Traditionally, we teach the techniques in an apprenticeship arrangement as a one-on-one process. Brujería is a healing practice and in order for an apprentice to learn what they need to know, the right clients must walk through the door. You cannot teach tonali retrieval, the calling back of a lost piece of the soul, to an apprentice if you do not encounter a client who needs this type of healing.

It is like teaching someone to drive a car. You can describe to them how an internal combustion engine works. You can tell them about how the clutch engages the transmission and how much oil the car needs and when.

Until they sit in the seat and drive, however, they will not be a real driver. In fact, until they sit in the seat and drive the car for quite some time, they will not be a good driver. They must learn how to manage an accident and how to behave when a cop pulls them over for blowing through a stop sign. They must know what it feels like to run out of gas on a deserted road before they truly understand the value of keeping the gas tank happy. Brujería is the same, and I worried that I would be unable to convey the information adequately in a classroom setting, much less an online setting. Brujería is experiential, not academic, and I hesitated when I got the call to teach.

I worried about putting myself out there as a white woman teaching Brujería. It’s one thing to heal, but quite another to teach as an authority

Nevertheless, Santa Muerte persisted.

My mentors gave me the blessing to teach and take on apprentices when I moved out of their tutelage years ago. I said goodbye as, one by one, they left the country not long after the 2016 election. They are no longer here for me to contact and ask for guidance, but I hear each of them in my head. One line stood out to me:

If God led you to it, you’ve got to do it.

So I did it. I put out the call and waited to see what would happen. I prayed and offered that if I were not meant to do this that no one would step forward. The response was overwhelming. People turned out in droves for the classes and, proving the premise that Brujería chooses, it was not for everyone.

In the first class of my year-long Brujería series, I bring up what I call magical tourism, which is when practitioners go from tradition to tradition, picking up techniques that work for them and incorporating them into an amalgam practice without ever fully immersing into the culture that birthed the techniques. Magical tourism is rampant in Western practice and, sure, a few people came to the classes because it was something new that they had not yet experienced. They imagined they would pick up a few new tools for their magical toolbox and move on and some did.

When I considered students for this class series, I did not take everyone who wished to attend. Applicants filled out a substantial form to apply for consideration as a student, but truth be told, I was only deeply interested in one question on the application which was the last one: Why do you want to take this class series?

For those who said things like, I want to come up in power and I think this will help me do that or I have never heard of Brujería before and want to see what it is like or I am trying out several different traditions to find one that fits, I replied with a polite rejection.

I zeroed in on responses that sounded like, I am drawn to this and I do not know why, and, When I was young, my grandmother was a curandera and I want to know more about what she did, and, Brujería was always considered something evil in my home. I want to know what it is really about.

For some students, the premise of a magical practice that focused on clients rather than on themselves proved unfulfilling. Not everyone is cut out for magical servitude and for being more of a conduit than a cause, but Brujería is just that. There is no room for ego and no time for posturing. There is work to be done. For others, working magic to heal and benefit others was exactly what they felt called to do.

One of my mentors summed it up when he said, "Regardless

Reviews for The Sacred Art of Brujeria

[jasmine · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is one of the BEST brujeria books that I’ve ever read, it’s very thorough and informative. Although some of the reviewers “claim” that Katrina is essentially “appropriating” Mexican brujeria, but she was taught by a culturally connected brujo who noticed that she had a “don” (gift) and he taught her what he knew. This is a wonderful book and very well written.

[Kaley · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is my 3rd Katrina Rasbold book, and I just love her writing. She does a great job explaining some of the roles of a bruja/o, and pays respect to the culture that took her in as one of their own. Great read!

[ASLI MASUCCI · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I have always liked Katrina's books but this was really bad. How could someone adopt something from Catholic faith after being a with for sooo long?? And, l am not even highlighting that brujeria isn't even related to her lineage. Plus, the examples of folk saints she gave were convicted with rape, murder and so forth...

[M Martinez · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Horrible written someone cosplaying understanding of Brujaria and not an actual culturally connected Brujo