Mayan Shamanic Apprenticeship

Mayan woman weaver and shaman using backstrap loom

Ten years after my grandmother’s death I found myself in the Guatemalan highlands, a doctoral student in anthropology, married to another anthropologist. It was there that I once again entered the world of healers and shamans. I arrived with academic intentions. Like the good scientist I was trying hard to become, I spent my days studying the exterior layers of the K’iche’ Maya, photographing and tape-recording as people burned incense at outdoor shrines and danced to the music of flutes and marimbas. In an attempt to understand a group of spirit seekers, I attended a midnight séance, warning the medium in advance that I intended to watch and not participate. That night during the unexpectedly impressive ceremony I smelled a mysterious rancid odor and saw translucent blue-green balls of lightning circle the room. I felt something like electricity enter my stomach and even heard what sounded like the voice of my own dead father. But I was determined to record the event with the distant coolness of a scientific observer.

Not long afterward, however, I came down with the flu. A long way from conventional Western medical help, and giving in to a documentary urge, I hired a local Mayan healer. Don Andrés arrived wearing a wrinkled blue serge suit that hung loosely on his slender frame. His delicate aquiline nose and rose-brown face gave him an air of gentle strength, and I knew he’d recently served as mayor of his town. He set about work at once, dispensing advice about herbs and grasses, and touching my cheeks and neck with his hot hands in order to break my fever. Then he used divining crystals to uncover the source of my illness, taking on another persona as he did so. Giggling strangely and speaking in two voices—one feminine and compassionate and another masculine and stern—he said it was my rude behavior at the shrines that had brought down the wrath of the Holy World. For that transgression I would die and so would my husband, Dennis.

Stunned and scared at this pronouncement, we fled to the capital the next day. After a couple of days of intense coughing I slowly improved, and we decided to return to the village. Perhaps there was something Don Andrés could do to counteract our apparent fate. Indeed, he and his wife, Doña Talín, who was also a shaman, agreed to help us. We would spend the next nine months meeting with them every day, coming to understand the way they saw their world. They started by having us recount a dream; then, heeding their own dreams and intuitions, they went on to suggest that Dennis and I might learn to practice as healers. Don Andrés and Doña Talín had to ask permission of their ancestors, and Dennis and I had to wrestle with our doubts, but in the days and weeks that followed we did indeed cross the invisible line between scholars learning about a culture and apprentices learning how to perform within it. We were no longer ethnographers interviewing subjects; they made us the students. We stopped asking questions and put aside our translating, and they began to pass along little teaching lessons.

Gradually, we learned to enter and control our dreams in a kind of alert sleeping, and to share, interpret, and complete those dreams together. We studied astronomy, hands-on healing, and herbalism. Don Andrés helped us recognize different types of shrines and to pray correctly. He and Doña Talín sent us off to gather flowers and incense and taught us to calculate the Mayan calendar, which was crucial for divination. He showed us how to embrace casual but meaningful coincidences of inner and outer events, thus transcending and improving our emotional and intuitive selves. Finally, Don Andrés taught us about the vital energy that suffuses the material universe; he trained us in bodily awareness and emotional attunement—how to recognize the lightning in the body and the “speaking of blood,” manifestations of our connection with the cosmos. In this way we would be able to increase our energy and use it to heal others and ourselves. Our teachers took us to other communities and sent us to other shamans for examinations and to see if they agreed that we had the potential to join their ranks.

Our training ended with a final sharing of dreams that culminated in a gorgeous three-day initiation ceremony, during which Dennis and I joined a large group of other celebrants who had undergone similar training and were either receiving initiation as shamans or else renewing their commitment to the shamanic path. A huge feast followed this.

The true “graduation” test for Dennis and me came a few days later. The son of our teachers had recently married, and his father-in-law mysteriously had become paralyzed and mute. Doctors’ tests and treatments had had no effect. And Don Andrés and Doña Talín were similarly powerless; they were too close to the victim. Would we try to heal him? This would be the culmination of months of training in calendrical divination, visualization, the speaking of the blood, and the laying on of hands.

In a small room Dennis and I sat next to each other, opposite the sick man, with our new shaman’s bundles laid out in front of us. Dennis sensed immediately that the sickness did not come from an animal or from the cosmos but was human work; it was a kind of witchcraft. As he voiced this aloud, the paralyzed man seemed to smile, the first sign of movement anyone had noticed.

Dennis got up and put his hands on the man’s temples. He could feel the asymmetrical energy, how out of balance it was. Then I too stood up and described the energy I sensed. Suddenly the man began to speak, telling how Don Andrés and Doña Talín had deceived him about being Catholic, which they had never been. In a psychodynamic reaction his anger had gone deep into his body, freezing it. When he forgave the people who’d tricked him, his paralysis melted away. And our initiation was complete.

(continue with Feminine Traditions)