by Fein, Judith
“Would you like to have him?”
I opened my wallet and then hesitated.
“I’m . . . not sure.”
“He may not be here later,” said the shopkeeper.
“Well . . . I’ll have to take that chance. I can’t really decide now.”
The third time, he was sitting in a room in the home of a Maya healer named José. José was a member of a cofradía, or religious brotherhood, and Maximon occupied the place of honor on an altar flanked by two Christ figures. He wore the same black, European garb, but he was also adorned with colorful textiles, and there were bottles of aguardiente at his feet. He had a big, unlit cigar in his mouth.
“Can you tell me about him, please,” I whispered to a Guatemalan man who had come for a healing.
“He’s a god, but he likes to smoke and drink like the rest of us.”
It was hard for me to understand this. A wooden god who smokes and drinks?
“Where does he come from?” I asked the man.
“Santiago Atitlán,” he answered, and so I went there.
Lake Atitlán is one of the jewels of Guatemala—a spectacular expanse of deep, blue water surrounded by three majestic, looming volcanoes: Toliman, Atitlán, and San Pedro. I took a boat to Santiago, a Maya village at an altitude of over 5,000 feet. Guided by a seven- or eight-year-old girl in worn and faded clothes, I wandered through hilly streets that were paved with uneven stones.
The young girl didn’t speak much, but focused on her task of getting me to a Maximon shrine. After about twenty minutes, she stopped in front of a low, cement house and gestured for me to go in. When I entered, I was not alone. There, in a small room, was a life-sized Maximon, and near him was his guardian, a member of the brotherhood of the Holy Cross. The guardian waved an incense burner made from an old coffee tin with punctured holes, filling the room with ribbons of copal smoke.
On cement benches that lined the wall facing Maximon, Maya people waited patiently and whispered in their K’iche’ language. When it was their turn, they made a cash offering of quetzals (Guatemalan currency), burned candles (different colors represent different favors that are requested), put cigarettes in Maximon’s mouth, and donated small bottles of alcohol. Some of the alcohol was poured into Maximon’s rigid, open mouth, and when the liquor began to dribble, the guardian lovingly mopped up the figure’s chin and neck.
A guide entered the room with a few Japanese visitors in tow, and we began to speak. He told me that Maximon is revered by Maya and many other people, and he may be the reincarnation of Maam, an ancient Maya god of the underworld. His name may come from this god, or perhaps it derives from “max,” which means “tobacco” in the Maya language. Alternately, his name may signify “bound with string or rope.”
More people arrived, offering more candles, more to drink, more to smoke—single cigars and cigarettes or whole boxes. The atmosphere got noisy, hazy, permeated with the smell of alcohol. The more people I questioned about Maximon, the more confused I became. He was a saint. A devil. The godfather or grandfather of the village who protected the inhabitants from evil and witches. A doctor. A trickster. A potent miracle worker and healer. An ancient Maya god synchretized with San Simon, or, perhaps, Judas Iscariot. A Maya leader who was hitched to a chair and burned by the Spanish in the middle of the sixteenth century. Pedro de Alvarado, the brutal conquistador who ravaged the Maya culture and people.
Maya supplicants bowed low in front of Maximon or got down on their knees praying. They implored him for food, health for a family member, crops, a safe voyage, success at selling in the market. Red candles were lit for love, white to protect the children, pink for health, and yellow for the elders. Some people spoke briefly, some for a long time. To them, Maximon was not a wooden figure—he was holy, someone in whom they believed, a miracle maker, a granter-of-wishes, an intimate god they could turn to in times of need.
“Did you make a donation and request something?” a woman asked me.
“I don’t have quetzales,” I replied.
“Maximon takes dollars too.”
I reached into my wallet, but I hesitated, as I had done in the store. I wasn’t ready to make an offering to Maximon because I didn’t really understand him. And then a man from Guatemala City came into the room. His English was almost perfect, he worked as a guide, and he had a Canadian couple in tow.
I listened carefully as he told them about Maximon.
“He is a divinity, but one who is very revered because he understands human vice and sin. He enjoys smoking, drinking, and carousing, just like people do.”
“Why do they worship someone like that?” asked the Canadian man.
“He forgives and offers hope to people, even to those who have done desperate or terrible things,” he answered. “Because he himself is a sinner, he is able to forgive.”
It was precisely the information I’d hoped for. Like every other human, I had done things wrong. Acted thoughtlessly. Missed opportunities when I could have done better. I had asked The Big One in the sky to excuse me, I had felt bad, guilty, remorseful over the course of my life. But I never had a chance to request absolution from a god with alcohol dribbling down his chin and rolled tobacco protruding from his mouth. I placed money in the offering box, lit a candle, and looked at Maximon. “I am sorry for anything I have ever done wrong,” I told him. “Can I sort of ask for global absolution instead of enumerating every petty error of the past?”
I looked up. Was it possible? I saw a twinkle in Maximon’s right eye, and I somehow knew I was forgiven, and I could go forward with a clean slate in life.
“Enjoy your booze and cigarettes,” I told him, as I exited the room. And I walked into the sunny outdoors, feeling like a better, lighter, happier person.
It didn’t take long to have a Maximon-induced experience in my own life. I have a friend who drinks, pops pills and has done a dance of death with heroin for years. He has been on and off the horse more times than a Pony Express rider. He recently told me about a serious relapse, and as he lacerated himself for his weakness, his worthlessness, and how he disappointed everyone around him, his eyes filled with tears.
I told him about the wooden god in Guatemala who drank and smoked, and how I learned in his shrine that perfection is a crazy dream, an ill-conceived illusion. To inhabit a human body is to be imperfect.
My friend looked at me and said, “There is a little voice that worms its way into my mind every time I give it space. It says ‘you are not good enough’ so often that I have come to believe it. I’m always comparing myself to others, and they always seem to be more productive and successful than I am.”
“Maximon thinks all of that is cabbage!” I said. It came out of me so suddenly that I was surprised. “You have vices and so does he. He accepts people the way they are: imperfect, trying their best but not always succeeding. I can understand why he’s a god in the Guatemalan pantheon. He’s willing to help anyone who asks him, without judgment. He’s not holier than thou and he doesn’t hold up a standard humans can’t achieve.”
My friend exploded in laughter. “Maybe I should keep my eye out for Maximon the next time I’m in a bar,” he said. “He’ll probably order a whiskey and light up a Cuban cigar.”
I recently heard that my friend has sworn off drinking and using again. Far away in Guatemala, Maximon, who is certainly swilling, is also smiling. And if this little-known god can forgive human error, I’m willing to wager that whatever God you pray to can too.
It’s called “La Tierra de Brujos”—the land of the witches. Juventino Rosas, a traditional agricultural town in Guanajuato state in Central Mexico, has a reputation for being home to good witches, bad witches, and folk healers. What all three have in common is that they work with energy—the unseen force that keeps every living thing functioning and connects all entities to each other. This energy goes by other names in different cultures, like chi, prana, or life force. Without energy, you and I would be big blobs of dead mat
ter.
The special power of brujos enables them to read, interpret, manipulate, and move energy. When something is amiss in an individual—physically, emotionally, or spiritually—the energy is thought to be blocked, and a powerful brujo knows how to move it.
The brujo tradition is handed down from parent to child or from teacher to student. Sometimes a brujo is self-taught; he or she gets a dream, a message, or a mysterious transmission of information about how to heal. And of course, as with any other profession, there are really gifted brujos and run-of-the-mill or even bogus brujos. Some are world-famous and others are only known to family, friends, and folks in the neighborhood.
Some witches are born with special aptitudes, as though their life mission is to be a brujo. But for those without the initial witchy spark, the techniques can also be taught.
Because energy work is so potent, it can be used for good or nefarious purposes: it can heal or it can harm. But it is only the healing that interests me, and I never bothered to find out much about the latter.
To be honest, saying that healing interests me is a gross understatement. It is a great, driving passion in my life.
My great-grandmother was a healer in a Russian shtetl, or village, and she did diagnosis by melting wax over a fire, molding it into a ball, and gazing into it. When she got a vision, she knew what to do to help the ailing person. Maybe it’s in my genes. Perhaps one day I’ll melt a candle and see a vision in wax. But, in the meantime, when I travel the world as a journalist, I track down indigenous healers and healing modalities that are rapidly disappearing. I don’t interview them to find out what they do and how they do it; that would be like asking Lance Armstrong to describe his cycling or Aretha to explain her singing. I request a private session so I can experience firsthand what each healer does. In most cases, they allow their work to be photographed and videotaped. I never take this for granted and am always grateful.
Eight years ago, when I was in Guanajuato state on assignment, I heard about the town of Juventino Rosas. It took several hours on a chicken bus to get there, and when I arrived, I asked a taxi driver who the best local healer was. I was directed to the home of Ana Maria de Vilar.
Arriving at the home of a healer is often an experience with ritualized frustration. This time was no different. I stood outside an iron gate for about fifteen minutes, alternately knocking and cowering from the ferocious barking of an unseen dog. Finally, a woman who seemed to be in her thirties walked slowly up to the gate.
“What do you want?” she asked, looking me up and down.
“I would like a limpia,” I said. I knew a bit about the Mexican tradition and understood that a limpia was supposed to clear or cleanse the energy field and get rid of negative influences.
Without another word, the woman disappeared. I waited another five minutes until she came back, opened the gate, and accompanied me into the healer’s house. A few minutes later, her mother, Ana, appeared. A plump, middle-aged Mexican curandera (healer), she wore a floral housedress and oversized glasses and had a warm, gentle, earth-mother kind of face. “What do you want?” she asked me.
“I would like a limpia,” I repeated.
“You will have to come back in three days,” Ana informed me.
Three days?! I thought. I just spent hours getting here on a chicken bus. I have to go back to my hotel and chicken-bus it back here in three days? Is she kidding? This is what I thought, but what I said was, “Yes, I will come back in three days.”
This has happened almost every time I’ve schlepped into the mountains, climbed down into valleys, or trekked through the jungle to find a healer. When I’ve found him or her, I’ve been told to come back several days later. I suppose it is some kind of initiation rite to separate the merely-curious from the seriously-intentioned.
That night, back at my hotel, after dusting myself off from the chicken bus which I had shared with fifteen cement bags, I had a strange dream. In it was the word “serpiente.” I was surprised to have a Spanish word pop into my nocturnal ramblings.
Three days later, as instructed, I arrived back at Juventino Rosas and went directly to Ana’s house. This time there was almost no waiting. Ana led me into her private chapel, or capilla, which was adjacent to her house. It was a rectangular-shaped room lined with beautiful, old, wooden Mexican string instruments, images and statues of Jesus, and many candles. Ana beckoned me to stand on a large, inlaid stone cross. She burned copal (an aromatic tree resin) over smoldering coals in a ceramic incensario and smoke filled the capilla. Instinctively I closed my eyes as Ana circled me and performed the limpia, waving herbs in the air and intoning a deep, heartfelt prayer.
Afterwards, I told her that I’d had a dream where the word “serpiente” appeared. She burst into tears. I had no idea what I had done, but I was sorry I had done it.
Ana summoned her two daughters. She said something about “serpiente” to them, and they also began to cry. I stood there watching them cry. “Lo siento,” I said, “I am really sorry.”
Ana reached out, patted me on my shoulder, and somehow I was able to understand that her husband, Pedro, had been a famous healer, and he had died a year and a half before. They were waiting for a sign from him, and that sign was the serpiente—the snake. Still crying, Ana went back into the capilla and emerged with a large, carved, wooden rain stick in the form of a snake. She presented it to me and insisted I take it. She said it was used to bring down the power of the moon during healings.
“We are connected forever,” Ana told me. “One day you will work with me as my assistant.”
And so there I was, six years later, at the Leon airport, looking around for a cab to take me back to Juventino Rosas. Someone called my name; I spun around, and was surprised to see Ana. Although she was in her late sixties and had serious health issues, she’d been standing there for three hours waiting to fetch her assistant. Ushering me into a cab, she insisted on paying, and we drove to her large, sprawling house.
Ana shared her home with eleven family members, and trying to understand Spanish with everyone talking at the same time was exhausting. I assumed that I would be sleeping on a couch in the television room, with no privacy or quiet time, but one of Ana’s daughters generously gave up her bedroom for me.
At ten A.M., every day, Ana received clients, many of whom had traveled hours to get there. Ana informed each client that I was her assistant, and every time she said it, I felt a wave of unreality tinged with fear. What in the world was I doing in a capilla in Central Mexico?
Each person or family group sat on a wooden bench in the capilla opposite Ana, who was on a chair. They spoke openly about their problems, which were a varied and complex combination of physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual symptoms. They ranged from drug addiction to a swollen arm that didn’t respond to medical treatment; from deep depression to headaches to stomach pain to rage at a cheating spouse.
Ana’s face was expressionless, professional and unjudgmental as she asked questions. Some of the clients were quite ill, and they had consulted with witches who had told them not to go to doctors.
Ana leaned over and whispered to me, “I need to give them permission to go to medical experts. It’s essential for their health.”
Often, Ana prescribed herbal drinks, herbal baths, and footbaths with ingredients like sarsaparilla, dandelion, and horsetail.
For many clients, Ana performed a limpia, as she had done for me, but this time she told me the names of the main herbs she used: sweet basil and pepper tree. She ran raw eggs over the bodies of a few, and showed me how to “read” the egg as she cracked it and plopped its contents into a glass of water. The way the yoke fell and the degree of cloudiness of the egg white were clues about a person’s state of health. Sometimes Ana burned little handmade candles, called “velas,” and each one represented different aspects of Jesus, saints, portals to the spiritual world, the clients, and others who were causing them problems. Often the diagnosis was “envidia”�
�someone was envious of the client, or sending bad energy. A limpia would help to remove that bad juju. Ana told her clients that she sometimes effected miraculous cures and healed physical ailments. But the body and soul are intertwined and often required healing on both the physical and spiritual planes. Her expertise was the spiritual.
One day, in between clients, Ana pulled out a shoebox full of black, red, and green candles. “You need to know about these,” she informed me.
“Ana . . . are these . . . are these . . . ?” I began, with a sense of foreboding.
“Yes, they are used for black magic,” she said.
“I’m not interested,” I protested.
“It is important,” she said.
“I can live a long and happy life without knowing anything about black magic.”
“This is part of your training.”
She calmly explained to me that it was essential for me to understand the objects. Although she, Ana, only practiced healing and white witchcraft, there were many practitioners of the black arts, and these were some of their tools. They cast spells, were able to hurt people physically and psychically, and they dealt with the devil.
“Why would anyone want to hurt someone else?” I asked.
“Because the dark forces are very powerful,” Ana replied. “People have been hurt or rejected by others, and they want to hurt them back. They pay a lot of money to witches for this. My husband Pedro, who learned his curanderismo from his Aztec and Chichimec ancestors and taught it to me, told me that you either work with God and forces of light or forces of darkness. You can’t do both. Some witches practice both, but I don’t. Like Pedro, I have chosen my way.”
Ana led me over to a shelf in the capilla and showed me old peso notes that were singed and burned.
“This came from a witch who practiced the dark arts,” she said. “She came into my capilla for a consultation and left me some money. When she had departed, the money spontaneously burst into flames.”
