Mad Jesus: The Final Testament of a Huichol Messiah from Northern Mexico (review)

The author of this book, Timothy Knab, was a full-time participant in the U.S. counter-culture of the 1960s who took refuge from American police oppression at the latter part of the decade in Mexico City. There he fell in with group of Huichol Indian artisans, among them the so-called "Mad Jesus." What follows is his personal journey among the Huichols, both in the capital city where he studied anthropology and the homeland of the natives where he ingested peyote in hopes of entering their inner worlds. (He claims that he did so.) The author's story is well told but less than instructive or satisfying than it might be because he gives us few new and meaningful insights into Huichol culture, and only superficial observations into how the extraordinary encounter with the native peoples molded his thinking and his life.

No doubt, the "Mad Jesus," whose name was Chucho, was a disturbed person given to heavy drinking, fits of rage, and religious rantings tinged with both Huichol and Christian spirituality. Whether he was insane or not is another question. Chucho was also extremely talented at designing those famous Huichol wool paintings made by pressing yarn into wax. He also knew how to market his product for a substantial profit and could organize others to do the same. As might be expected, little is known of his parents and childhood. A friend of the author who had studied with Eric Fromm declared Chucho to be "very much isolated not only from his own culture but meaningful human relationships" (p. 147), but such diagnosis neither consigns him to insanity nor earmarks his character and temperament.

At one point, Knab, an admitted agnostic, affirms that Chucho sees himself as a John the Baptist figure. In other places, the Huichol becomes a returning cultural hero, perhaps Jesus Himself, fulfilling a promise to set things right for a beleaguered people. These sorts of informed assertions are interesting and important, but they need to be dissected and analyzed as Eric Van Young does so brilliantly with the "Mad Messiah" of Durango (see his acclaimed The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810-1821 [2001])or as Michael Adas well manages in Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Against the European Colonial Order (1979) when comparing messianic movements in countries colonized by Europeans. There are deeply rooted traditions behind these latter-day messiahs like Chucho. In his case, one would do well to tie in the case of an extraordinary predecessor, "El Indio" Mariano, who donned a religious persona and led an uprising in Tepic which involved Huichols among others against the Spanish colonial regime from 1810 to 1802.

Knab had a frightening, near fatal, experience with Chucho in 1972, when the Huichol tried to toss the inquisitive investigator off the roof of a twelve-story Mexico City building. That incident severed the relationship between the two men for good. Knob lost interest in pursuing the native's life story. Thirty years later the author read in an irresponsible sensationalist newspaper that a cult of drug-crazed Huichols headed by an individual who called himself Jesus Christ had been obliterated by police in Nayarit. He suspected that the leader might have been Chucho. The author's ensuing detective work uncovers a gruesome tale about the demise of the cult but hardly settles questions about the activities and personality of its master. In our own culture, David Koresch, James Jones, John Brown, and many other angry, intemperate, spiritually inspired leaders have been labeled "mad," but who's to say?