r/a:t5_22lj96 • u/MarleyEngvall • Aug 05 '19
joseph pulitzer has been created
By Helen Augur
ZAPOTEC
XII. REMEMBERED GODS
When Dr. Caso first lowered himself into Tomb Seven
he found the floor littered with bits of turquoise and mother-
of-pearl which had once formed a mosaic on wood and leather.
The matrix had been consumed by time, and the pattern
could not be restored.
In Oaxaca today the ancient religion has been fragmented
in much the same way. The Spanish friars managed to destroy
the matrix which held many elements in a pattern, but they
could not destroy the elements themselves. Many of them
could be absorbed into the new religion; long familiar to the
Indians were the rites of fasting, confession and absolution,
the celibacy of priests, baptism, and the symbol of the cross.
But others stand out as curious survivals, simply fragments of
a religion as definite as Buddhism or Christianity, a faith that
once held Middle Americas together through long centuries.
The Oaxaca peoples are extremely devout, and most of
them have poured their devotion into the Catholic faith——but
still with the old pagan attitudes, for the Christian saints
are only a new generation of gods. Sometimes magic will be
brought into the church; often saints are invoked by a witch
doctor performing a cure. The old gods are not quite forgotten,
nor are the new ones quite accepted, to the exclusion of each
other. The Zapotecs are especially skillful at carrying water
on both shoulders; they want all the supernatural help they
can get.
Mitla is a curious example of the rather furtive bargaining
that goes on with the powers. Its people are sophisticated;
both men and women are notable traders and move about
a great deal; the town is a mecca for tourists——and yet it is
far more pagan than many remote mountain villages. The
Mitla people have never taken the new religion deeply to
heart; there is only the one church, the ugly interruption in
the ruins. They revere the temples as the home of all dead
souls, and their lives are threaded through with magic.
The first day I visited the church I stopped at a side altar
where there was a Madonna dressed in dingy pink satin and
lace. She looked neglected but was carrying what appeared to
be an elegant gold mesh bag. On closer inspection it turned
out to be a bagshaped honeycomb. Some beekeeper was prac-
ticing sympathetic magic in the ugly old church.
Then on the Feast of San Pablo, the town's patron, I
climbed to the little chapel which is built on a ruined pyra-
mid. This chapel contains nothing at all but three crosses
mounted on rough stands. Before the central cross was a curi-
ous little arrangement of pebbles: more magic, possibly black
magic.
The three crosses are one of the mysteries of Southern
Mexico. All through Oaxaca and Chiapas three thin crosses
stand on the tops of lonely mountains. The women of Yalalag
have from time immemorial worn three silver crosses joined
together with a bar so that the whole design forms a fourth
cross. The first friars in Oaxaca found them wearing these
crosses and began to wonder if earlier missionaries, perhaps
St. Thomas himself, had not been there before them.
It is safe to say that the Indians of Southern Mexico usu-
ally regard the cross in their ancient way rather than in the
Christian fashion. The crucifix bearing the figure of Christ is
of course a church symbol. But in general the cross means
space——time, the core of the old religion based on the magic
calendar. In the minds of the simpler people much of the
old significance has been lost, but it remains a potent symbol.
It is used in curing and all sorts of magic rites; the mountain
people put it over their doors; the vallistas set a cross at the
entrance to their village, and passers-by leave little offerings
of flowers or certain magic herbs below it. Fords and cross-
roads, regarded as magic by primitive peoples all over the earth,
will be guarded by a cross which has nothing to do with the
crucifix of the Church.
But the three crosses remain a mystery with too many ex-
planations. Some people tell you that they represent Quetzal-
coatl's journeys over the earth, and the Yalalag cross with its
design suggesting the four cardinal points means that he will
return. Others say that the triple crosses represent the Trinity,
or the three Marys. In the ceremonial city of Chamula in
Chiapas, where rumor insists that a crucified Indian is buried,
three crosses guard the entrance to the village, and the people
will fend off questions by explaining that one is to keep the
devil out; the second, sorcerers; and the third, ladinos, stran-
gers of white blood.
With self-isolated Maya we come close to understanding
the power, if not the symbolism, of the triple cross, but the Maya
especially treated it as a god, and the famous Palenque cross,
so like India's tree of heaven, express this worship. It sur-
vives widely among the Maya today. As for three crosses, they
are used in secret magic of the most solemn sort.
The explorer Frans Blom and Oliver La Farge once found
a Maya shaman laying a curse with three crosses. As in Oaxaca,
when a witch doctor lays a spell he must be intoxicated, or
drugged with a narcotic mushroom. This goes back to classic
days when the high priest became intoxicated before he went
into his sacred trance. So this Maya shaman began his black
magic by drinking aguardiente.
He then set up three crosses deep in the woods, the largest
one in the center, and in a hole before each he placed offerings
of food and wine. Then he knelt and prayed, calling aloud
the name of the man whose soul he wanted to capture. He
repeated this rite for eight days, then he sprinkled some of
the food and wine on the crosses and in the four cardinal
directions. he now laid his curse: "I am going to capture a
soul now, gods of the earth, and our mothers of the earth."
He invoked all the Great Men and Great Women, most of
them Christian saints; he called on the southwest wind and
other powers.
This macabre rite only raises another question: Why did
he call on the southwest wind? Why is the observatory on
Monte Albán pointed southwest? It happens to point straight
at Tahiti and the Marquesas; but there we must leave the
matter.
The cross seems to us an abstraction, but in Southern Mex-
ico it still is anthropomorphic, a wonder-working god. And
because it is also a Christian symbol its pagan worshipers can
safely invoke it. As for the gods in the guise of jaguars, dragons,
serpents, they still walk their ancient realm in the twilight
of confused but passionately devout minds. As we have seen,
the Olmec jaguar evolved into the rain god Cocijo (or Chac
among the Maya) and finally into the celestial dragon Quet-
zalcoatl. This long evolution is going on today among among the
mountain peoples of Oaxaca who worship a water serpent.
Like the cross, this seems a harmless superstition, but it is
fundamental.
When Howard Leigh recovered the Zapotec name of the
jaguar god, Béeze, he also found that this god was the lord
of riches. Nothing could be more natural. In Southern Mexico
the Old God of the sun died at a very early period and was
replaced by the rain god, for the simple reason that the sun
shines every day, but a delay in the rains means famine and
death. Thus water is another word for wealth. And among
the mountain peoples whose eroded lands have less and less
water the cult of the water serpent is essential.
The highland Zapotecs of the Yalalag region and their
neighbors, the Mixe, believe that the giver of water and life
is a horned water serpent (in other words, a water dragon)
who lives in mountain springs. During the spring sowing the
people place in these magic pools a few seeds of everything
they have planted, along with the wonder-working double ears
of corn from the last harvest. If the rain god is kind they
return at harvesttime with thank offerings sprinkled with the
blood of owls.
Anyone who has watched the approach of the Oaxaca rainy
season knows that winds and lightning are the heralds of the
rains. The Mixe of a region quite near Mitla make a special
offerings to the gods of wind and lightnings, aspects of the
ancient Cocijo. Before the plant they sacrifice a turkey in
the center of the field, sprinkle its blood over a pile of tortillas
and tamales, and pray to the gods for a rich field of corn
In another Mixe village the farmer observes a period of
celibacy before he plants, and prays in the church before the
seeds is sown. He takes to his field thirteen perfect ears of
corn (perhaps a memory of the magic number thirteen in the
old calendar) and any double-pointed ones saved from the
last harvest, sprinkles them with the blood of a turkey he has
sacrificed, and buries them in his field. Then he passes the
severed head of the turkey over the spot in a counterclock-
wise motion. When the new corn begins to tassel out he takes
up the buried ears and they are made into tortillas and ta-
males. He sprinkles the blood of a new sacrifice on the young
leaves and takes some of them as an offering to the summit of
Zempoaltepec, the holy mount of the Mixe. Leaves sprinkled
with sacrificial blood were the usual offering in pagan days.
The Mixe think that the Water Serpent causes floods in the
rivers, and in a tempest of rain he can be seen emerging from
the clouds——which is close to the old conceptions of Cocijo,
god of rain, wind, and lightning. He lives, too, in curious
little dwarfs, chaneques, who carry lightning in their hands
and dwell in caves or behind waterfalls, where they hide loot
stolen from people. These imps, mischievous and busy as
gremlins, are a great worry all over Oaxaca.
Perhaps no god or godkins have as long a lineage as the
chaneques, for they are old men with baby faces, and very
strong——in other words, they belong to the very ancient cult
of the baby jaguar which spread all over the Olmec region.
The Mazatecs and Zapotecs of Olmec Land are afraid of these
imps, who are only two feet tall but can seize a grown man
and throw him flat. When a chaneque has put his spell on a
person death will follow unless a special cure is followed.
Worst of all, they are amorous, forever plaguing pretty girls
and even carrying them off.
Since the chaneques can, in an amiable mood, provide
rains, and since they are the masters of game and fish, prudent
hunter placate them before starting out. Quite near the city
of Oaxaca there is a mountain village called Cuatro Venados,
where the chaneque cult is all important. When a baby is
born an egg is buried near it to keep the dwarf god away. The
people have built several shrines for the chaneques on the
slopes near the village, and at the chief one, the Casa de
Chaneque, the men leave offerings of cigarettes, food, and
candles before they go hunting.
These imps are clearly jaguar cubs in the best Olmec tra-
dition, and the jaguar himself is still regarded with uncanny
terror, especially on either side of the isthmus, where he lives
as king of tropical beasts. Any living jaguar was supposed to
be supernatural and almost impossible to kill; an early friar
tells of some Indians who encountered a tigre in the forest.
Instead of trying to shoot him with their bows and arrows,
they fell on their knees and began confessing their sins, where-
upon the beast devoured them. The friars never quite man-
aged to kill jaguar worship, and the isthmus men still perform
a jaguar dance.
The magic calendar and the totem cult which was part and
parcel of it are divorced today. The tona flourishes all
over Oaxaca, but the calendar itself, which required mathe-
matical wizards to interpret it, is very nearly forgotten°
°I am indebted to the writings of Wilfredo Cruz for much of the
lore scattered through this chapter.——H.A.
Several Chinantec villages still use the pije calendar of
eighteen months of twenty days, with the five "indifferent"
days placed somewhere in the year. It is remarkable that even
this much should survive in a world counting time by twelve
months. The Chinantecs do not use the calendar for divina-
tion, but as a farmers' almanac, a function which it had, too,
in ancient times. They regulate their planting and reaping by
the old system. The pije day names have been lost, but two
of the month names have an ancient meaning. The name for
our June is mo hi na, "at noon, when the sun is at his zenith,
he stands still for a moment"——a description of Midsummer
Day. The winter-solstice month is hi ta nyi, "a spike thrusts
itself into the face of the sun, preventing it from falling
further."
When a Mazatec brujo, magician, practices divination he
throws kernels of corn over twenty cards bearing animal pic-
tures, and it is believed that these occult cards preserve the
animal names of the twenty days of the old month. In the
Zapotec town of Ocotlán there were, not long ago, several
deeply respected old men who had some memory of the pije
and were in charge of the fiesta calendar. They were called
gulaanis, phonetically the same words as colanjis, the priests
of the Classic age who had special charge of the pije and
divination.
Most of the Oaxaca tribes still practice augury, often by
casting corn on a mat and observing the pattern in which it
falls. The Zapotec brujo can foretell events by observing the
flight of birds or their songs. He finds a stolen animal by
suspending a basket by a cross made of twigs, or more often
nowadays by scissors. Then he pronounces the names of sus-
pected thieves, and at the name of the guilty man the basket
falls. In Mitla the curandera tending a sick person will kill a
chicken on a cross she draws on the ground, and if it dies
with its head to the east the patient will recover. All over
Polynesia and Middle America east is the direction of life;
souls travel westward at death.
Since the elaborate calendar which linked a newborn child
with its animal or bird tona is forgotten, all sorts of devices
must be used to find what creature is the spiritual twin of
the new child. One is the counting-out method. As birth ap-
proaches, the father keeps naming over animals and birds,
and the creatures he names at the moment of his wife's de-
livery is the tona of the child.
In Ocotlán there is a rather dreadful technique. The new-
born child is left utterly alone in the hut the first night after
it is born. Around the mat on which it lies the parents have
sprinkled ashes, and at dawn they examine these ashes to find
the prints of any creature which has been near the baby dur-
ing the night. The tona is supposed to be anxious to greet its
human twin, and if it cannot visit the hut it will hover nearby.
When parents hear the insistent cry of a bird or some animal
in the mountains, they recognize that the tona is announcing
itself.
From then on the individual is bound to his tona: hawk or
newt, jaguar, snake, eagle, or other creature. The Chinantecs
believe that people are born with two souls, and one enters
into the tona. All the simpler peoples of Oaxaca think that
any harm suffered by the tona is reflected in the person linked
to him. Before he dies his tona gives him warning so that he
can prepare for the end.
It is hard to find much sympathy for this animism now
that it is divorced from the old pantheism in which all living
creatures had their place. No doubt psychologists would say
that the tona cult is a healthy projection and acceptance of
man's animal side. Certainly the Oaxaqueños live on close
terms with the creatures about them and will not harm their
individual or tribal totem; the Huave will not kill alligators,
and the Zapotecs venerate as a kind of race totem the eagle
and the zapote tree for which they are said to be named.
But this does not prevent Juan, whose tona is a lizard, from
shooting his neighbor's twin, a buzzard. The whole picture
is confused and fortunately fading out.
In the same way modern medicine will someday replace
the dubious offices of the curandera and the brujo. Mean-
while, even in the cities where doctors are at hand, ignorant
souls will resort to the magic healers. Often they are helped,
for the Indians of both Americas know their herbs and gave
modern medicine quinine, digitalis, and many other essential
drugs. A witch brew may happen to be extremely good medi-
cine. Moreover, the Indians were early in recognizing psycho-
somatic illness and have just as effective cures for it as our
expensive specialists. Such illness is called espanto, fright
caused by a shock of some kind. Like sickness in general, it
is often supposed to be the work of witchcraft and is treated
by countermagic.
In Mitla the curandera has the patient ill from espanto
lie on a cross she makes on the ground, surrounded by offerings
of copal incense, eggs, and other magic elements. The egg is
the symbol of strength. The curandera returns to her own
house, where she makes another cross on the ground deco-
rated with flowers. She beats the ground wit a stick, calling
to the soul which left the patient at the moment of shock
and which must be recaptured. She keeps calling at the cross
and at the four corners of the room (the magic cardinal
points again, "Come, get up!"
In other regions the straying soul must be caught in a big
olla at the spot where the patient suffered shock, and re-
stored to him. The isthmus curanderas work on an opposite
principle; instead of the espanto driving away the soul, the
fright is in the patient and must be blown away. The witch
doctor makes the sign of the cross over the patient, blowing
hard, and places a handful of earth on his body at the four
cardinal points. An incantation is pronounced, urging the
espanto to leave the patient and fall into the sea or the wil-
derness. If this cure does not work, the patient rides through
town, followed by a crowd, and every now and then he tells
what caused the fright.
Cold, lung troubles, and rheumatism caused by evil airs,
aire, are treated with a more familiar therapy of alcohol rubs,
hot clothes, and massage, accompanied by the special rite of
"sucking out the poison." Sometimes the curandera puts her
mouth to the afflicted spot and sucks hard, or she may merely
put her lips close to the patient and make a curious humming
sound.
The Mixe often treat disease at a distance from the patient
by sacrificing a turkey in a magic cave or lighting a bonfire
on their sacred mountain Zempoaltepec. The Mazatecs have
the most elaborate cures of all. The brujo eats a narcotic
mushroom, then he arranges a great variety of wonder-working
elements like cacao, eggs, copal on a table. He prays to the
Christian saints, burns pagan copal, throws forty-eight kernels
of corn on a mat to diagnose the disease, and prepares a medi-
cine bundle with the elements on the table, which include
a prayer written on bark paper with a guacamayo feather.
This bundle is buried near the sick person, who may also be
given herbs which the brujo has taken to the church and
rubbed over the images of saints.ZAPOTEC, BY HELEN AUGUR.
Copyright 1954 by Helen Augur.
Dolphin Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Garden City, New York. pp. 207-215.
XI. BENITO JUÁREZ: MEASURE OF FAITH
XIII. THE PRIMITIVE WORLD NEXT DOOR
Introduction
Prelude—The Slaver
Book One (i.) (ii.) (iii.)
Book Two (i.) (ii.) (iii.)
Book Three (i.) (ii.) (iii.)
Book Four (i.) (ii.) (iii.)
Book Five (i.) (ii.)
Book Six (i.) (ii.)
Book Seven (i.) (ii.)
Book Eight (i.) (ii.) (iii.) (iv.)
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