Maya Medicine: Traditional Healing in Yucatán

4: Acquiring Curing Skills

 chapter four Acquiring Curing Skills Apart from the unique case of Don Aldo, who went to medical school as part of a Mexican government training program and later learned about plant medicine through exposure to Maya practitioners and books on European homeopathic remedies, the remaining six practitioners surveyed acquired their curing skills in one of two different ways. Three of them learned about curing from a knowledgeable older relative or friend of the family during a lengthy, gradual, and rather informal process that took place over a period of years. The other three learned how to cure through strikingly similar dreams, in which an elderly person of the same sex as the potential healer appeared nightly for a variable period of time and provided instruction until the dreamteacher pronounced them “ready to cure.” Although the curers surveyed for this book obviously represent a small sample, I was surprised to find that none of them had learned by apprenticing themselves to renowned (but unrelated) practitioners.This method of skill acquisition through apprenticeship was the preconceived model that I brought with me to this research, due perhaps in equal parts to ideas internalized from historical models of medieval European society, the books of Carlos Castañeda, and the existing literature on the subject. Redfield and Villa Rojas’ () work, Chan Kom: A MayaVillage, is a classic ethnography of a Yucatec Maya village. I suspect that what the authors recorded about curing in Chan Kom over sixty years ago was probably representative of curing in Pisté or any of the other small towns of Yucatan at that time. As previously mentioned in chapter , this is an essential part of their thesis; Chan Kom represented an archetype of all other towns in the area that were equally distant (in both a cultural and a geographical sense) from Mérida, the “modern” capital of Yucatan, and the tribally organized settlements of Quintana Roo. Redfield and Villa Rojas (:) noted a tendency for the hmen (which they translate variously as “shaman” and “priest”—the former term is more appropriate) to pass his vocation from father to son but also mentioned cases where “persons of seclusive or mystical temperament seek out famous shamans and become their apprentices.” They describe a formal period of training lasting one year, during which the student learned about orations, plant medicine, and diagnosing illness.The apprenticeship was then completed by an initiation ceremony. The latter acquisition pattern sounds similar to the process Arvigo () experienced more recently in Belize with   the elderly Maya curer Eligio Pantí. I have not encountered anything similar. My data are closer to the pattern described byWilliam F. Hanks. Although the focus of his work is linguistic, Hanks recorded the performances of a single shaman living near the town of Oxkutzcab and studied his practice between  and . Hanks (:) reports that“Yucatec shamans do not undergo standardized training” and may learn their skills through apprenticeships of variable lengths or by way of “dreams in which the individual travels to sacred places and has instructive encounters.” I here compare my findings to those presented in the above-named sources and to Redfield’s () work, The Folk Culture of Yucatan, because these are the main sources of information on Maya curing that are either relevant in geographical and cultural terms or deal with the role of the practitioner in a somewhat different, and much more recent, setting (in the case of Arvigo). Excepting the case of Don Aldo, whose extensive biomedical training sets him apart from the other curers and who will be discussed at the end of this chapter,theremainingpractitionerssurveyedlearnedtocurethroughanapprenticeship to an older curer or to a supernatural entity that recruited them throughdreams.Adiscussionoftheirindividualexperiencesfollows.Thosewho learned through dreams did not seek out any sort of“vision”; on the contrary, they were “chosen” to learn by supernatural beings. Those who learned from an elder mentioned necessity as a motivating force in their decision to learn how to cure. All practitioners stressed that they enjoyed learning their skills, regardless of how they did so. The following historias and quotes from individuals were drawn from tape-recorded interviews. Learning from Elders Don Pedro began learning how to use healing plants from his father when he was about twelve years old. He said that by that age, he was going about in the countryside with his father to make milpa and hunt. During the course of their daily work, his father taught him about“natural medicine.” Don Pedro’s father, in turn, had learned from...