Inert, as earth with its rocks can be — and all those crevices that run in sedimentary layers piled on top of each other. Friable of course, I was — not in places, but as a whole — from my first moment of contact with this terrible mountain which I am sure had raised barriers against me to prevent me from entering. And since I was up there the supernatural no longer seems to me something so extraordinary that I cannot say that I was, in the literal sense of the word, bewitched.
To take a step was for me no longer to take a step, but to feel where I was carrying my head. Can you understand this? Limbs which obey one after the other, and which one moves forward one after the other; and the vertical position above the earth which must be maintained. For the head, overflowing with waves, the head which can no longer control its whirling, the head feels all the whirling energies of the earth below, which bewilder it and keep it from remaining erect.
Twenty-eight days of this heavy captivity, this ill-assembled heap of organs which I was and which I had the impression of witnessing like a vast landscape of ice on the point of breaking up.
The hold was therefore upon me, so terrible that to go from the house of the Indian to a tree located a few steps away required more than courage, required summoning the reserve forces of a truly desperate will. For to have come this far, to find myself at last on the threshold of an encounter and of this place from which I expected so many revelations, and to feel so lost, so abandoned, so deposed. Had I ever known joy, had there ever in the world been a sensation which was not one of anguish or of irremissible despair; had I ever been in a state other than that interstitial pain which every night pursued me? Was there anything for me which was not at the gate of death, and could there be found at least one body, a single human body which escaped my perpetual crucifixion?
It required, of course, an act of the will for me to believe that something was going to happen. And all this, for what? For a dance, for a rite of lost Indians who no longer even know who they are or where they come from and who, when you question them, answer with tales whose connection and secret they have lost.
After an exhaustion so cruel, I repeat, that I can no longer believe that I was not in fact bewitched, that these barriers of disintegration and cataclysms that I had felt rising in me were not the result of an intelligent and organized premeditation, I had reached one of the last places in the world where the dance of healing by Peyote still exists, or at least the place where it was invented. And what was it then, what false presentiment, what illusory and artificial intuition caused me to expect some sort of liberation for my body and also and above all a force, an illumination throughout the reaches of my inner landscape, which I felt at that precise minute to be beyond any kind of dimensions?
Twenty-eight days since this inexplicable torment had begun. And twelve days since I had come to this isolated corner of the earth, this tiny compartment in the vast mountain, waiting on the good will of my sorcerers.
Why was it that each time, as at this moment, I felt myself touching on a vitally important phase of my existence, I did not come to it with a whole organism? Why this terrible sensation of loss, of a void to be filled, of an event that miscarries? To be sure, I would see the sorcerers carry out their rite; but in what way would this rite profit me? I would see them. I would be rewarded for this long patience which nothing until then had been able to discourage. Nothing: neither the terrible road, nor the voyage with a body which was intelligent but dissonant and which had to be dragged, which had to be almost killed to prevent it from revolting; nor nature with her sudden storms which surround us with their nets of thunder; nor that long night filled with spasms in which I had seen a young Indian scratch himself in a dream with a kind of hostile frenzy in exactly the places where these spasms seized me — and he said, he who scarcely knew me from the day before, "Ah, let him suffer all the evil that may befall him." Peyote, as I knew, was not made for whites. It was necessary at all costs to prevent me from obtaining a cure by this rite which was created to act on the very nature of the spirits. And a white, for these red men, is one whom the spirits have abandoned. If it was I who benefited from the rite, it meant so much lost for themselves, with their intelligent sheathing of spirit.
So much lost for the spirits. So many spirits that could not be utilized again.
And then there is the matter of Tesguino, that alcohol which requires eight days of fermentation in the jars — and there aren't that many jars or that many arms ready to grind the corn.
Once the alcohol has been drunk, the sorcerers of Peyote become useless and a whole new preparation becomes necessary. But a man of these tribes had died when I arrived at the village, and it was necessary that the rite, the priests, the alcohol, the crosses, the mirrors, the rasps, the jars, and all that extraordinary paraphernalia of the Peyote dance be requisitioned for the benefit of the man who had died.
For now that he was dead his double could not wait for these evil spirits to be neutralized.
And after twenty-eight days of waiting, I now had to endure, throughout one long week, an incredible comedy. All over the mountain there was a hysterical coming and going of messengers who were presumably being sent to the sorcerers. But after the messengers had left, the sorcerers would arrive in person, amazed that nothing was ready. And I discovered that I had been tricked.
They brought me priests who heal with dreams, and who speak after they have dreamed.
"Those of Ciguri [Peyote dance] not good," they said. "They do not work. Take these." And they pushed toward me some old men who suddenly broke in two, clicking their amulets strangely under their robes. And I saw that these were not sorcerers but magicians. And I learned, moreover, that these false priests were intimate friends of death.
One day this commotion died down without protests, without arguments, without fresh promises on my part. As if all this had been part of the rite and as if the performance had lasted long enough.
I had not come to the heart of the mountain of these Tarahumara Indians to look for memories of painting. I had suffered enough, it seems to me, to be rewarded with a little reality.
However, as the daylight faded, a vision confronted my eyes.
I saw before me the nativity of Hieronymus Bosch, with everything in order and oriented in space, the old porch with its collapsing boards in front of the stable, the flame of the infant king glowing to the left amid the animals, the scattered farms, and the shepherds; and in the foreground other animals bleating, and to the right the dancer kings. The kings, with their crowns of mirrors on their heads and their rectangular purple cloaks on their backs, to my right in the painting, like the magi of Hieronymous Bosch. And suddenly as I turned around doubting to the last minute that I would ever see my sorcerers arrive I saw them coming down the mountain leaning on huge staffs, their women carrying huge baskets, the servants armed with bundles of crosses like firewood, and mirrors that glittered like segments of sky amid all this apparatus of crosses, pikes, shovels, and tree trunks stripped of their branches. And all these people were bent under the weight of this extraordinary apparatus, and the wives of the sorcerers, like their men, were also leaning on huge staffs a head taller than they were.
Wood fires rose on all sides toward the sky. Below, the dances had already begun; and at the sight of this beauty at last realized, this beauty of glowing imaginations, like voices in an illuminated dungeon, I felt that my effort had not been in vain.
Above, on the slopes of the enormous mountain which descended toward the village in tiers, a circle had been drawn on the ground. Already the women, kneeling in front of their metates [stone basins], were grinding the Peyote with a kind of scrupulous violence. The priests began to trample the circle. They trampled it carefully and in all directions; and in the middle of the circle they kindled a fire that the wind from above sucked up in whorls.
During the day two young goats had been killed. And now I saw, on a branchless tree trunk that had also been carved in the shape of a cross, the lungs and hearts of the animals trembling in the night wind.
Another tree trunk had been placed near the first, and the fire that had been lighted in the middle of the circle drew from it at every moment innumerable flashes of light, something like a fire seen through a pile of thick glasses. When I approached in order to discern the nature of this burning center, I perceived an incredible network of tiny bells, some of silver, others of horn, attached to leather straps which were also awaiting the moment for their ritual use.
On the side where the sun rises they drove into the ground ten crosses of unequal height but arranged in a symmetrical pattern; and to each cross they attached a mirror.
Twenty-eight days of this horrible waiting after the dangerous withdrawal were now culminating in a circle peopled with beings, here represented by ten crosses.
Ten, of the number of ten, like the invisible masters of Peyote, in the Sierra.
And among these ten: the male principle of nature, which the Indians call San Ignacio, and its female, San Nicolas.
Around this circle is a zone of moral abandonment in which no Indian would venture: it is told that birds who stray into this circle fall, and that pregnant women feel their embryos rot inside them.
There is a history of the world in the circle of this dance, compressed between two suns, the one that sets and the one that rises. And it is when the sun sets that the sorcerers enter the circle, and that the dancer with the six hundred bells (three hundred of horn and three hundred of silver) utters his coyote's howl in the forest.
The dancer enters and leaves, and yet he does not leave the circle. He moves forward deliberately into evil. He immerses himself in it with a kind of terrible courage, in a rhythm which above the dance seems to depict the illness. And one seems to see him alternately emerging and disappearing in a movement which evokes one knows not what obscure tantalizations. He enters and leaves: "leaves the daylight, in the first chapter," as is said of man's double in The Egyptian Book of the Dead. For this advance into the illness is a voyage, a descent in order to re-emerge into the daylight. He turns in a circle in the direction of the wings of the swastika, always from right to left, and from the top.
He leaps with his army of bells, like an agglomeration of dazed bees caked together in a crackling and tempestuous disorder.
Ten crosses in the circle and ten mirrors. One beam with three sorcerers on it. Four priests (two males and two females).
The epileptic dancer, and myself, for whom the rite was being performed.
At the foot of each sorcerer, one hole, at the foot of which the male and female principles in nature, represented by the hermaphroditic roots of the Peyote plant (Peyote, we know, has the shape of the male and female sexual organs combined), lie dormant in matter, that is, in the concrete.
And the hole, with a wooden or earthen basin inverted over it, represents rather well the globe of the world. On the basin, the sorcerers grate the mixture or the dislocation of the two principles, and they grate them in the abstract, that is, in principle.
Whereas below, these two principles, incarnated, repose in matter, that is, in the concrete.
And all night long the sorcerers reestablish the lost relationships with triangular gestures that strangely cut off the spatial perspective.
Between the two suns, twelve tempos in twelve phases. And the circular movement of everything that swarms around the fire, within the sacred limits of the circle: the dancer, the rasps, the sorcerers.
After each phase, the sorcerers were eager to perform the physical proof of the rite, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the operation. Hieratic, ritual, sacerdotal, there they stand, lined up on their beam, rocking their rasps, like babies. From what idea of a lost formality do they derive the sense of these bows, these nods, this circular movement in which they count their steps, cross themselves in front of the fire, salute one another, and leave?
So they get up, perform the bows I have mentioned, some like men on crutches, others like sawed-off robots. They step outside the circle. But once they have left the circle, before they are a yard outside it, these priests who walk between two suns have suddenly become men again, that is, abject organisms who must be cleansed, whom this rite is designed to cleanse. They behave like well-diggers, these priests, some kind of night laborers created to piss and to relieve themselves. They piss, fart, and relieve themselves with terrible thunderous noises; and to hear them one would think that they had set out to level the real thunder, to reduce it to their need for abasement.
Of the three sorcerers who were there, two, the two smallest and shortest, had had the right to handle the rasp for three years (for the right to handle the rasp is acquired, and in fact this right determines the nobility of the caste of the Peyote sorcerers among the Tarahumara Indians); and the third had had the right for ten years. And I must admit that it was the one most experienced in the rite who pissed the best and who farted the loudest and most expressively.
And a few moments later the same man, with the pride of this manner of crude purgation, began to spit. He spat after drinking the Peyote, as we all did. For after the twelve phases of the dance had been performed, and since dawn was about to break, we were passed the ground Peyote, which was like a kind of muddy gruel; and in front of each of us a new hole was dug to receive the spit from our mouths, which contact with the Peyote had henceforth made sacred.
"Spit," the dancer told me, "but as deep in the ground as possible, for no particle of Ciguri must ever emerge again." And it was the sorcerer who had grown old in the harness who spat most abundantly and with the largest and most compact gobs. And the other sorcerers and the dancer, gathered in a circle around the hole, had come to admire him.
After I had spat, I fell to the ground, overcome with drowsiness. The dancer in front of me passed back and forth endlessly, turning and crying unnecessarily, because he had discovered that his cry pleased me.
"Get up, man, get up," he shouted each time he passed me, with diminishing effect. Aroused and staggering, I was led toward the crosses for the final cure, in which the sorcerers shake the rasp on the very head of the patient.
Thus I took part in the rite of water, the rite of the blows on the skull, the rite of that kind of mutual cure which the participants give each other, the rite of immoderate ablutions.
They uttered strange words over my head while sprinkling me with water; then they sprinkled each other nervously, for the mixture of corn liquor and Peyote was beginning to make them wild.
And it was with these final movements that the Peyote dance ended. The Peyote dance is contained in a rasp, in this wood steeped in time which has absorbed the secret salts of the earth. In this wand that is held out and withdrawn lies the curative power of this rite, which is so remote and which must be hunted down like a beast in the forest.
There is an out-of-the-way spot in the high Mexican Sierra where these rasps seemingly abound. They sleep there, waiting for the predestined man to discover them and bring them into the light of day.
When a Tarahumara sorcerer dies, he takes leave of his rasp with infinitely more sorrow than he feels in leaving his body; and his descendants and intimates take the rasp away and bury it in this sacred corner of the forest.
When a Tarahumara Indian believes that he is called upon to handle the rasp and distribute the cure, he goes to spend a week in the forest at Easter time every year for three years. It is there, they say, that the invisible master of Peyote speaks to him with his nine advisers, and that he passes the secret on to him. And he emerges with the rasp properly macerated.
Carved out of the wood of a tree that grew in warm soil, gray as iron ore, it carries notches on its length and signs at its two extremities, four triangles with one point for the male principle and two points for the female of nature, made divine.
One notch for every year the sorcerer was alive after he had acquired the right to handle the rasp and had become a master capable of performing those acts of exorcism which pull the elements apart.
And this is precisely the aspect of this mysterious tradition which I did not succeed in penetrating. For the Peyote sorcerers seem truly to have gained something at the end of their three years' retreat in the forest.
There is a mystery here which the Tarahumara sorcerers have until now jealously guarded. Of what they have acquired in addition, what they have recovered, if you will, no Tarahumara Indian who is not a member of the aristocracy of the sect seems to have the slightest idea. And as for the sorcerers themselves, on this point they are resolutely silent.
What is the singular word, the lost word which the master of Peyote communicates to them? And why does it take the Tarahumara sorcerers three years to be able to handle the rasp, with which, it must be admitted, they perform some very curious auscultations?
What is it, then, which they have wrested from the forest, and which the forest yields to them so slowly?
In short, what has been communicated to them which is not contained in the external apparatus of the rite, and which neither the piercing cries of the dancer, nor his dance, which goes back and forth like a kind of epileptic pendulum, nor the circle, nor the fire in the middle of the circle, nor the crosses with their mirrors in which the distorted heads of the sorcerers alternately swell and disappear into the flames of the fire, nor the night wind that speaks and blows on the mirrors, nor the chant of the sorcerers rocking their rasps, that astonishingly vulnerable and intimate chant, can succeed in explaining?
They had laid me on the ground at the foot of that enormous beam on which the three sorcerers were sitting during the dances.
On the ground, so that the rite would fall on me, so that the fire, the chants, the cries, the dance, and the night itself, like a living, human vault, would turn over me. There was this rolling vault, this physical arrangement of cries, tones, steps, chants. But above everything, beyond everything, the impression that kept recurring that behind all this, greater than all this and beyond it, there was concealed something else: the principle.
I did not renounce as a group those dangerous dissociations which Peyote seems to provoke and which I had pursued for twenty years by other means; I did not mount my horse with a body pulled out of itself, which the withdrawal, to which I had abandoned myself, deprived henceforth of its essential reflexes; I was not that man of stone whom it required two men to turn into a man on horseback: and who was mounted on and dismounted from the horse like a broken robot — and once I was on the horse, they placed my hands on the reins, and they also had to close my fingers around the reins, for left to myself it was only too clear that I had lost the use of them; I had not conquered by force of mind that invincible organic hostility in which it was I who no longer wanted to function, only to bring back a collection of outworn imageries from which the age, true to its own system, would at most derive ideas for advertisements and models for clothing designers. It was now necessary that what lay hidden behind this heavy grinding which reduces dawn to darkness, that this thing be pulled out, and that it serve, that it serve precisely by my crucifixion.
To this I knew that my physical destiny was irrevocably bound.
I was ready for all the burns, and I awaited the first fruits of the fire in view of a conflagration that would soon be generalized.