He blew on it three more times, then placed it back into the jar. My crystal sat on the tabletop, while he twirled the jar around it, uttering a Mayan chant. I heard the word sastun and my name repeated several times.
He motioned for me to open my right palm to receive his sastun, just as I had seen him do with hundreds of patients. I took it in a loose fist and shook it like a pair of hot dice at a Las Vegas casino.
As I shook, I began to get nervous. Could Panti be wrong about this? If it is a sastun, why was it sent to me through such an ambiguous path? If it is a magical instrument, what am I to do with it?
Would the sastun draw patients to me? Did I want people seeking me out as they did him? How would I handle the types of cases that required a sastun?
I felt like turning and running away.
“Come to the doorway, where I can see,” said Panti, so excited he didn’t notice my confusion. “My eyes are terrible this week,” he continued. “I think I’ll be blind before long, then who will there be to pull me around?” he asked, not really waiting for a response.
I opened my trembling palm and he moved it back and forth until his sastun danced about on my clammy skin.
“It is done, my child. This is a sastun,” he said firmly. “The Maya Spirits have sent it to you. They have accepted you.”
I slumped onto a wooden stool and blankly watched him chant over my crystal in Mayan, moving his clay jarrito about it in some sort of merry, consecrating dance.
My thoughts tumbled over each other in an unruly frenzy. I was thrilled. I was frightened. I believed. I didn’t believe. Was this foolishness or guidance?
Closing my eyes for a moment, I leaned against the hot cement wall, drawing in a slow, deep breath and praying quietly, muttering holy words as fast as I could think them. All at once, a calm slowly draped over me like a protective cape, and I began to relax, letting my shoulders gently slide down the concrete. The words “Have faith…. Thy will be done,” seeped into my mind.
Jarring me out of my paralysis, I heard Panti’s raspy voice. “I’m enchanting this stone for you, Rosita, asking the Spirits to show you in a dream how you are to use it, read it, and care for it. A sastun demands much attention, you know.”
“I know, Don Elijio, that’s what I’m afraid of,” I mumbled.
“Afraid? Are you really, my daughter? Why?”
“Because I don’t think I can do what you do, papá.”
He waved away my objections. “Don’t think about all that. Day by day. Step by step, Rosita. You’ve already learned so much. I always tell people how quickly you learn. What would happen to me and my art were it not for you, child? Just think of that.”
I had thought of that, and the concept now seemed overwhelming. “The Spirits frighten me a little. Should I be afraid of them?”
“No, no. They are good friends, very gentle, wise, and loving,” he told me. “Have no fear, I know them well. They can be mischievous, but never intentionally harmful.”
Then the old man said, “You’ll be meeting the Spirits tonight.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Allspice Pimienta Gorda Pimenta dioica
The berries and leaves of this common tropical tree are used as a household tea to correct indigestion and childhood colic and to warm the body during cold weather. Women make a sitz bath of the leaves boiled in water to relieve menstrual cramps. The berry is a popular spice added to many local Belize dishes. The crushed berry is part of the ancient Maya embalming formula.
The Maya Spirits use dreams, Don Elijio told me, to communicate with people they have chosen as H’mens.
As a warning, so I wouldn’t be frightened by their arrival, he described the sensations I would experience—a sort of tugging and pulling just before the dream begins. “Sometimes it even feels like little gremlins are crawling all over you with furry bodies and bony hands. But don’t panic, whatever you do, because then the Spirits will leave.”
“What? Gremlins! Furry bodies! Bony fingers! In my sleep? Don Elijio, do they do that to you?” I could hear hysteria creeping into my voice.
“Yes, child, almost every night. I’m used to them now. Sometimes I tell them to go away and let an old man sleep. They come to look for companionship and to let me know that a dream is about to begin.”
He instructed me to say an Our Father if I felt afraid. It would protect me from the evil spirits, who also try to slip into dreams. “Now, they are frightening and evil, but that won’t happen if you do as I say.”
“What if I faint or scream out?”
“You won’t. Just have faith. Have faith. I’ll teach you a new prayer to empower your sastun. You will gaze into the crystal and say this prayer nine times every Friday ever after. While you pray, make the sign of the cross on both sides of the sastun, dipping your finger into a bit of rum.
“Sastun, sastun,” he chanted. “With your great power I ask that you tell me all I want to know. Teach me to understand the signs and visit me in all my dreams to give me the answers I seek. I have faith with all my heart that this sastun will answer my prayers. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.”
Before he died, Jerónimo had warned Panti that he would receive a dream visit from the Spirits after he received his sastun. Jerónimo had told him that dreams were the lines of communication the Spirits preferred and that every dream would leave him feeling like he would live forever. Jerónimo had also told him that he would never forget any instructions revealed in a dream.
Panti’s dream occurred the first night he slept with his sastun. After drifting off to sleep, he felt his hammock was being pulled from side to side by a pair of forceful and determined hands. He was frightened at first, but within an instant the dream vision began and his anxiety gave way to anticipation.
Suddenly, standing before him was an ancient Maya, striking and confident in a white tunic that barely brushed the tops of his knees. The robe was gathered at the waist with a belt dripping with regal strips of animal skins, glorious remnants of the revered jaguar. The Maya wore macasinas, a simple foot covering of rubber soles and straps coming up between the toes that fastened around the ankle. In the middle of his bare chest dangled a sparkling jade pendant, and crowning his head was a feathery headdress of large, brightly colored plumes.
Another Maya, wearing a simple cotton tunic, stood by him silently.
The first Maya clutched his carved staff, which resembled a writhing, menacing snake, and said, “Elijio Panti, we see you are working hard and we are pleased. We send you now this sastun to help your work. Use it to help people but do no harm with it. Wash it every Friday and use the following chant when you wish to ask it a question.”
The ancient Maya repeated the chant that enabled the sastun to be blessed and then taught Panti how to read the bubbles that would form inside the marble as answers to his probes. Before departing, the Maya told him that he and other Spirits would visit him often in the future.
As soon as he awoke the next morning, Panti realized that the ancient Maya was one of the Maya Spirits. Just as Jerónimo had promised, he recollected all the details of the dream, and he was filled with a sense of wonderment and well-being.
That morning Panti held his sastun, turning it, washing it, and rolling it about inside an old cup, making it twirl the way the Maya had showed him in the dream.
He was both excited and bewildered, but in his heart he knew he was worthy of the gift. He had not prayed for a sastun to bring him fame or great riches or to harm someone through its power to enchant. He had desired a sastun to be able to cure more of his patients’ ills.
This was not the first time that I’d heard Panti speak of his dream visions. Through dreams, the Spirits delivered valuable information to him. Whenever he was confused about a patient’s illness and didn’t know how to treat it, he consulted his sastun, asking the Spirits for their help. They often answered him through dreams, he said, showing him which plant to use, where to find it, how to use it, and what pra
yers to say in accompaniment.
“The next day I would grab my bag and my machete and go off to the mountains to hunt for that specific plant. And I always found it right where they said to look for it.”
This talk of gremlins, dreams, and ancient Mayas was making me more anxious about what lay ahead for me. I didn’t really know what to make of Don Elijio’s certainty that I would have a dream vision that night. By now I had tremendous faith in him and was sure that he had never lied to me. He seemed calm, so certain that the Spirits would visit and that I wouldn’t die of fright. I was not so sure, but I decided to accept what he said and have faith in his wisdom.
By now it was night. We ate a light meal of beans and tortillas. San Antonio reverberated with sounds of the night. Couples carrying boom boxes walked by on the road. Children cried and dogs barked. I could hear the verses of hallelujah echoing from the evangelical church nearby.
Panti was too excited to sleep. And I was too nervous. He lay in his hammock and I in mine, separated by the curtain. We talked through the doorway for hours before Don Elijio said it was time to sleep.
“You have to sleep if you want to have a dream,” he told me. “Remember to pray. Have faith, and the Spirits will speak to you tonight.”
His words echoed in my mind, as I curled up around my crystal in my hammock and prayed, whispering my new ensalmo over and over and making the sign of the cross over the stone as I had often seen him do.
I wasn’t afraid anymore, but I still had a hard time believing that Maya spirits would communicate with me through a tiny oracle that resembled an ordinary marble or a common piece of quartz, pretty as it was. Would the Maya Spirits have anything to say to me?
Did having a sastun mean that I was to become a H’men? I wondered. It was too much to grasp as I slipped off into a gentle sleep.
As the night approached dawn, I felt a powerful tugging on my hammock, jerking me violently from side to side. It was much stronger than I had expected.
Suddenly I was turned upside down, suspended in midair and looking down at the cement floor. I expected to drop out of my hammock at any moment. My heart was racing and pounding as if it too wanted to get up and run away. At the moment of greatest fear and panic, I remembered to say the Our Father, as Panti had told me to do. The hammock swung back down one last time, leaving me right side up, and the dream vision began.
I stood in the doorway of a compact but tidy room. My friend Thomm Noble was sitting at a desk in one corner, motioning for me to come in and sit down. “Come in, Rosita. It’s about your crystal.”
Across the desk sat a young Caucasian woman with a most pleasant and gentle countenance. She was looking intently into my eyes, offering her quiet support.
I took a seat in front of a small table, which had a glowing kerosene lamp on it.
“Look for a cross of light as you pray into the crystal, Rosita,” Thomm told me. “Repeat the Our Father nine times as you make your request. Wash the crystal on Fridays with rum, and keep it near you when you work with sick people. It will strengthen your work.”
He told me to look into the flame of the lamp before me on the table. In the light of the lamp, he said, I would see the same shimmering cross of rainbow-colored light that I was to search for in my sastun.
He turned down the flame so that I could look without getting burned. I bent over the lamp and peered into the brightness. I saw the cross take form.
When I regained consciousness in the morning, I jumped out of the hammock. Panti was at his table, waiting for me, and I immediately started telling him the details of my dream.
“The dream was teaching you how to reach the Spirits,” he explained as we talked.
For the remainder of the day, we were like two playful children with a secret, delightfully sharing our knowledge of the Spirits who preach in the night.
I also knew what he meant when he promised that when I awoke from a dream vision I would feel like I would live forever. That feeling remains with me, one of the most joyous I have ever known.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Rue Ruda Sink In Ruta graveolens
A cultivated herb found in most gardens of Central America. It is a panacea, an herb considered helpful in all human ailments. The aromatic leaves are used for stomach complaints, nervous disorders, painful periods, delayed or difficult childbirth, and epilepsy, and rue may be tried for any condition. Healers rely on rue in the treatment of all spiritual diseases, and it is one of the three plants that make up the protecciones. It should never be boiled but is rather squeezed fresh into water or tea.
While Panti was in the second hut massaging a patient’s belly, I sat at the crate table making amulets. It was stiflingly warm that day, and I’d dragged the table as close to the door as possible in the hopes of catching any breeze, however unlikely, that happened to flutter by.
Now that I had received my sastun, Panti had decided it was time for me to learn more about spiritual illnesses. That day, he put me to work making amulets, which he prescribed frequently to protect his patients against envy and black magic. I had seen him enchant these amulets with his sastun, then tell his patients to keep them close at all times, especially when they left the house or someone they didn’t trust came to visit. An amulet’s power lasts from about six months to one year before it needs to be reenchanted with the sastun.
Many patients came to him for relief from spiritual illnesses. It hadn’t always been that way, but as more people in the region turned to medical doctors for physical problems, his practice had changed. Aspirin and synthetic drugs were available in the remotest villages, so many people didn’t bother to seek out traditional medicines for physical problems any longer.
Panti had become famous throughout Central America for his skill in curing spiritual illnesses. Among traditional healers in Central America, there is a hierarchy. There are bonesetters, massage therapists, and snake doctors, who specialize in specific physical ailments. The next level consists of midwives, herbalists, and granny healers like Doña Juana, who are able to treat a variety of physical conditions. But there are very few of the doctor-priests, or H’mens, such as Panti, who in the Maya tradition are able to treat the mind, body, and soul, regardless if the ailment began in the belly or the disquieted soul.
In treating spiritual ailments Panti relied on the same formidable team he used with physical ailments: medicinal plants, prayers, and his sastun. However, the plants and prayers were more potent, and he guarded information about spiritual illnesses much more carefully than that about physical ailments.
The main ingredients he used were holy water from any Catholic church, an herb called Rue, and Copal incense, which he garnered from the resin of the sacred Copal tree.
Rue, known the world around as the Herb of Grace, has many uses in both physical and spiritual healing. It is a favorite household remedy for many ailments, but it is best known for its sure action against evil spirits. The Copal tree is considered a Spirit in its own right and is also capable of canceling out evil.
To this powerful mixture, Don Elijio added a white powder that was made from a calcium-based stone found at a sacred mountain in Guatemala. The stone was called Piedra de Esquipulas. It was named for the Christ of Esquipulas, the black Jesus, one of the many versions of Jesus Christ revered in Latin America.
To make an amulet, I placed a sprig of Rue, a chip of Copal incense, and a tiny piece of Esquipulas stone onto a small piece of Balsam bark. I folded a piece of black cotton around the contents, forming a neat little bundle, then sewed up the edges with black thread. It ended up looking like a lumpy pouch, one inch wide and two inches long.
Just as I was tearing a piece of black thread apart with my teeth, I saw a woman run into Panti’s yard. She looked agitated and was holding a badly bruised and swollen arm against her breasts. Her arm had begun to turn a grayish shade of blue.
I knew her. Her name was Carla, and she owned a bright blue house we regularly passed on our way to the bush. She a
lways waved at us, holding fresh-cut vegetables from her yard.
“I’ve come to see the old man because my life is not right,” she said breathlessly. Hearing a patient’s panicked voice, Panti popped his head out from behind the curtain, then came out to join us.
While she described her symptoms, Panti touched her pulse and nodded his head with increasing melodrama.
A week ago she had been waiting for her husband to come home for dinner, wondering why he was so late. “Suddenly, I felt very frightened, but I didn’t know why,” she recalled.
As she sat on her front porch brushing her hair and fretting, a warm wind came up from the field behind her house and whipped around to the front.
“The moment the wind blew over me, I felt a chill go through my body. I pushed my children inside and slammed all the doors and windows closed, but it was too late. In the morning my arm was as you see it now. What’s wrong with me, tato?”
He poked and jabbed at her swollen arm, leaving tiny, white impressions in her taut flesh. She winced in pain and squirmed in her seat. “It is the Hot Wind of the Maya, one of the Nine Malevolent Spirits. I haven’t seen that old goat for a long while now,” he exclaimed, spreading his leathery lips into an ample grin.
He motioned for me to check the pulse for myself. It was fat and rapid and felt as if it could jump out of its fleshy covering. An icy sensation ran up my arm.
The sastun is not the only way to determine whether an illness has a spiritual or physical cause. Panti also relied on the pulse for diagnosis, ascertaining its intensity and pace. A healthy person’s pulse is steady and moderate and is found at the wrist above the thumb. A sick person’s pulse can be thin and weak or fat and rapid. The higher up the arm the pulse is found, the more serious the ailment—whether physical or spiritual.
Panti also used the pulse in his treatments. He prayed into it, since he considered it a direct route to the blood, the essence of a person’s being.
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