Life is a Trip (10 page)

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 purpo
s
es: 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 unde
r
statement. 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 a
l
ways 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 d
i
rected to the home of Ana Maria de Vilar.

Arriving at the home of a healer is often an experience with ritualized frustr
a
tion. 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 u
n
seen 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, a
p
peared. 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 chic
k
en 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, woo
d
en 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 pe
r
formed 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” a
p
peared. 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 u
n
derstand that her husband, Pedro, had been a famous hea
l
er, 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 pr
e
sented it to me and insisted I take it. She said it was used to bring down the po
w
er 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 assi
s
tant. 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 e
x
hausting. I assumed that I would be sleeping on a couch in the telev
i
sion 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 d
o
ing in a capilla in Central Mex
i
co?

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 spi
r
itual symptoms. They ranged from drug addiction to a swollen arm that didn’t r
e
spond to medical trea
t
ment; 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 pe
r
mission to go to medical experts. It’s essential for their health.”

Often, Ana prescribed herbal drinks, herbal baths, and footbaths with ingred
i
ents 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 spi
r
itual 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 ma
g
ic.”

“This is part of your training.”

She calmly explained to me that it was essential for me to understand the o
b
jects. 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 mo
n
ey 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 witc
h
es 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.”

Then Ana went to another shelf with envelopes that were stuffed with hu
n
dreds of photos. People had sent them from around the world so she could practice long-distance healing.

“This is my way,” she said. “I pray for them.”

My job in the capilla
varied according to the client. Sometimes I handed Ana the incense burner or brought her the incense. Often I just sat next to her and she instructed me about the candles, the eggs, the incense, the herbs, or prayers.

One night, when the family was watching TV, I asked Ana why she didn’t use a snake rain stick for healing. She confessed that since she had given hers to me six years before, she never got a new one. The next day, I took a bus to a nearby town and trekked from shop to shop, searching to no avail for a replacement rain stick. As night fell, I visited one last shop and there it was. When I gave it to Ana, I e
x
pressed a wish to learn how to use it to pull down the power of the moon. Ana grew silent. I dropped the subject.

For one week, I was in a constant state of overload and mental exhaustion from the language difficulty, but on the eighth day, there was a linguistic miracle: at six A.M. I awoke suddenly able to understand about seventy percent of what was going on. (Speaking, however, was still difficult.) At seven A.M., Ana announced I was g
o
ing on a trip with her. A taxi was waiting in front of the door. We got in, and it was not until we reached the outskirts of Juventino Rosas that Ana said she was taking me to some sacred places for healers and witches. I laughed and said I was ready for the Witch Tour.

For about an hour we rode towards San Miguel de Allende, finally stopping at Santa Cruz de Puerto Calderón. “This is one of the sacred portals,” Ana explained, walking us into a small chapel where we were greeted by a curandera. The woman had sad, sad eyes and was draped in a
serape
. Four years before, the holy cross in the chapel, which had been there since 1531, was stolen. The woman said she hadn’t been able to sleep, drink, or eat normally since. She told us that the cross came from a time when the Indians were at war with the Spanish conquerors. There was an awful battle nearby, with thousands of Indian and Spanish dead on the battlefield. After the battle, the Indians saw the apparition of a holy cross in the sky, and they understood the po
w
er of the religion to which the Spanish had tried to forcibly convert them. They set up the cross as a shrine and eventually a capilla was built there.