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188 chapter eight Curing Ceremony Spiders in Her Hair Grandmother Celia finds Spider near her hair, her long white hair, not yet braided for the day. She saves Spider and goes to shake it outside, where Wind takes it. Sun Dance Grandmother goes back to her braiding, and in her mirror she sees lots of little spiders in her white strands. Spider mother had had some babies on white hair woman, lots of little baby spiders clinging to her white strands. Grandmother Celia goes to Mexico to sacrifice. In the Mexican Sun Dance circle not far from the Teotihuacan Spiderwoman, where spiders hang from her hair, Grandmother Celia sees a circle of light, a web of light—Spiderwoman’s woven tress of prayers. At the tree of life, she saw strands of light attached to everyone in the Sun Dance circle and attaching to everything. “They were knitting a web. . . . These hilos (threads) just kept attaching to everyone. That is how I became godmother to the spiders.” The web of life, the circle of life, spun out this story (summarized from 2002 and 2009 interviews and oral tradition with Celia Perez-Boothe, Apache-Chicana elder and grandmother of the Mexican Sun Dance at Teotihuacan). In my time of quaking changes and cycles ending, she tells me: You stand alone at the center of the web. Spin out. All women are Spiderwoman . Mazatec ceremonial healer Maria Sabina says in her chanting prayers of the sacred mushroom, I am a woman who investigates (Estrada 1977, 166). Her prayers, which I have translated, infuse this storying here: I am a spirit woman (p. 80) I am a woman who cleans with herbs (p. 82) Curing Ceremony • 189 I am a woman who looks into the inside of things (p. 138) I am a woman who gives life (p. 135) In the matter of sweeping and Spider, let me begin from a particular corner, a corner of beginnings, where forms, forces, and functions meet. I gather up the dust, dead skin sloughed from liberated bodies, the heaviness of what has been let go. I will sweep in a particular count, at a particular time. It is time to sweep off those ideas of what is no longer useful, ideas of the dislocated original ones, dispojados, dispossessed of land, dislocated as Indians, disfigured and reconfigured beyond recognition in the discourse and definitions of what is or isn’t Indigenous. I gather up Indigeneity often no longer heard or seen in the language of what constitutes recognized Indians , except, largely, by those in the space of the unheard and the unseen who hear and see and experience that there is something old and alive in the still of being here in this time. In my re-search across time and spaces, I present another understanding of the phenomena found in ceremonial formulas of Spider that rethreads a web of meanings for today’s Red Medicine . I reweave the threads of life in different ceremonial configurations, sacred patterns reformulated to fit the appropriate curing rite. Knowledge as part of the living universe makes itself known; the teachings that are appropriate for the times become apparent. In my practices of looking at the Mesoamerican Spider in various symbols and expressions, I explore the meaning of her pre-Columbian representations , their latent potential and encoded presence in Red Medicine. The power of these symbols should be understood as more than myth or mythic. The power (of my concern here) is found in their ceremonial implications, their energetic capacities to affect healing and well-being as they help to activate and transmit the living universe, the aliveness of fire, water, wind, earth. As Celia Herrera Rodríguez instructs, calling the sacred directions is an act of historical consciousness (Pérez 2007). One that, I would add, is founded on relationships that recognize the aliveness of Life as the Great Mystery, the Great Spirit, what my elders taught me was the Great Power, or, as the Toltec philosophers left us, All That We Live For. So let us call the sacred directions—four, five, six, seven, ten—to gather knowledge beyond what we already know. I stand as my grandmother and grandfather did, drawing on the four winds facing the four corners, asking from all that surrounds me, above-below-within. As a practitioner of traditional medicine, I explore these symbols as medicinal texts that can help us to create self-determination when we establish a living relationship with the principles...

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