01-01-2010, 12:00 AM
The Sun Interview April 2001 | issue 304
Saving The Indigenous Soul
An Interview With Martin Prechtel
by Derrick Jensen
www.derrickjensen.org
Martín Prechtel was raised in New Mexico on a Pueblo Indian reservation where people still lived in old, pre-European ways. His mother was a Canadian
Indian who taught at the Pueblo school, and his father was a white paleontologist. Martín loved the culture there, and the land. "I spent the whole of my
very early life," he says, "in a state of weepy terror about the possibility of total annihilation of this beautiful world at the hands of a few
white men who couldn't understand the beauty we had in this way of life." He began to work against this dangerous, beauty-killing power. "The
natives called it 'white man ways,'" he says, "but it was more than that. Its infectious power had eaten the whites, too, and made them its
obvious promoter. This horrible syndrome had no use for the truly natural, the wild nature of all peoples."
In 1970, after his first marriage ended and his mother died, Prechtel went to Mexico to clear his head. Seemingly by accident, he ended up going into
Guatemala. He traveled around that country for more than a year before he came to a village called Santiago Atitlán. The village was inhabited by the Tzutujil,
one of many indigenous Mayan subcultures, each of which has its own distinct traditions, patterns of clothing, and language.
In Santiago Atitlán, a strange man came up to Prechtel and said, "What took you so long? For two years I've been calling you. Let's get to
work!" So began his apprenticeship to Nicolas Chiviliu, one of the greatest of the Tzutujil Mayan shamans.
The apprenticeship lasted several years. As a shaman, Prechtel would learn how to correct imbalances in people's relationships with the ancestors
and the spirits. He also had to learn the Tzutujil language. (Women taught him at first, and because women and men talk differently, he was a great source of
amusement when he began to speak in public.)
Though not a native, Prechtel became a full member of the village. He married a local woman and had three sons, one of whom died. When Chiviliu died,
Prechtel took his place, becoming shaman to nearly thirty thousand people. He also rose to the public office of Nabey Mam, or first chief. One of his duties as
chief was to lead the young village men through their long initiations into adulthood.
Prechtel wanted to stay in Santiago Atitlán forever, but during the time that he lived there, Guatemala was in the throes of a brutal civil war. The
ruling government - with its U.S.-backed death squads - had outlawed the thousand-year-old Mayan rites. Ultimately, Prechtel was forced to flee for his life.
"I was going to stay," he says, "but before my teacher died, he asked me to leave so that I wouldn't get killed. He wanted me to carry on
the knowledge that he had passed to me."
Prechtel brought his family to the U.S., where they "just kind of starved for a while until Robert Bly and men like him found me." (Bly , a
poet active in the men's movement, has high praise for Prechtel, whom he describes as "a short kind of pony that gallops through the fields of human
possibility with flowers dropping out of his mouth.") Though Prechtel' s wife decided to return to her native Guatemala, he remained in the U.S. with
their children and currently lives not fifty miles from where he grew up.
Prechtel is the author of Secrets of the Talking Jaguar(Tarcher), in which
he writes - musically, clearly, and respectfully - about the indigenous traditions in Santiago Atitlán. He gives glimpses of his training, yet never reveals
details that would allow readers to steal the Mayans' spiritual traditions the way others have stolen their land. In his most recent book, Long Life, Honey in the Heart(Tarcher), Prechtel describes the structure of the village, the
Tzutujil priesthood, and everyday village life before the arrival of the death squads. In addition to his writing, Prechtel paints scenes from the daily
activities and mythology of the Mayan people and is a musician who has recorded several CDs.
Prechtel appears around the world at conferences on initiation for young men. ("I'm working with women on that, too," he says, "but
it's a little bit slower - mostly because I'm not a woman.") He also leads workshops that help people reconnect with their own sense of place and
the sacredness of ordinary life. "Spirituality is an extremely practical thing," he says. "It's not just something you choose to do on the
weekends. . . . It's an everyday thing, as essential as eating or holding hands or keeping warm in the winter."
When I went to interview Prechtel at his home in New Mexico, I was embarrassed to find that my tape recorder wasn't working. Fortunately, his
present wife, Hanna, had a recorder I could use. It worked for about forty minutes, then started to run backward. Martín apologized, saying this sort of thing
happened all the time. "I just seem to have this effect on machines," he said. "My dentist won't let me come in his front door anymore,
because I freeze up all his computers."
I made a note never to travel with him.
Hanna was able to coax the recorder to work again, and we finished the interview. My own tape recorder began working again the next morning, when I was
about seventy miles away.
Jensen: What is a shaman?
Prechtel: Shamans are sometimes considered healers or doctors, but really they are people who deal with the tears and holes we create in
the net of life, the damage that we all cause in our search for survival. In a sense, all of us - even the most untechnological, spiritual, and benign peoples
- are constantly wrecking the world. The question is: how do we respond to that destruction? If we respond as we do in modern culture, by ignoring the
spiritual debt that we create just by living, then that debt will come back to bite us, hard. But there are other ways to respond. One is to try to repay that
debt by giving gifts of beauty and praise to the sacred, to the invisible world that gives us life. Shamans deal with the problems that arise when we forget
the relationship that exists between us and the other world that feeds us, or when, for whatever reason, we don't feed the other world in return.
All of this may sound strange to modern, industrialized people, but for the majority of human history, shamans have simply been a part of ordinary life.
They exist all over the world. It seems strange to Westerners now because they have systematically devalued the other world and no longer deal with it as part
of their everyday lives.
Jensen: How are shamans from Siberia, for example, different from shamans in Guatemala?
Prechtel: There are as many different ways to be a shaman as there are different languages, but there's a commonality, as well, because
we're all standing on one earth, and there's water in the ocean wherever we go, and there's ground underneath us wherever we go. So we all have, on
some level, a commonality of experience. We are all still human beings. Some of us have buried our humanity deep inside, or medicated or anesthetized it, but
every person alive today, tribal or modern, primal or domesticated, has a soul that is original, natural, and, above all, indigenous in one way or another. The
indigenous soul of the modern person, though, either has been banished to the far reaches of the dream world or is under direct attack by the modern mind. The
more you consciously remember your indigenous soul, the more you physically remember it.
Shamans are all trying to put right the effects of normal human stupidity and repair relationships with the invisible sources of life. In many instances,
the ways in which they go about this are also similar. For example, the Siberians have a trance method of entering the other world that is similar to one used
in Africa.
Jensen: You've mentioned "the other world" a few times. Most modern people would not consciously acknowledge such a place.
What is the other world?
Prechtel: If this world were a tree, then the other world would be the roots - the part of the plant we can't see, but that puts the
sap into the tree's veins. The other world feeds this tangible world - the world that can feel pain, that can eat and drink, that can fail; the world that
goes around in cycles; the world where we die. The other world is what makes this world work. And the way we help the other world continue is by feeding it
with our beauty.
All human beings come from the other world, but we forget it a few months after we're born. This amnesia occurs because we are dazzled by the beauty and
physicality of this world. We spend the rest of our lives putting back together our memories of the other world, enough to serve the greater good and to teach
the new amnesiacs - the children - how to remember. Often, this lesson is taught during the initiation into adulthood.
The Mayans say that the other world sings us into being. We are its song. We're made of sound, and as the sound passes through the sieve between this
world and the other world, it takes the shape of birds, grass, tables - all these things are made of sound. Human beings, with our own sounds, can feed the
other world in return, to fatten those in the other world up, so they can continue to sing.
Jensen: Who are "they"?
Prechtel: All those beings who sing us alive. You could translate it as gods or as spirits. The Mayans simply call them
"they."
Jensen: There's an old Aztec saying I read years ago: "That we come to this earth to live is untrue. We come to sleep and to
dream." I wonder if you can help me understand it.
Prechtel: When you dream, you remember the other world, just as you did when you were a newborn baby. When you're awake, you're
part of the dream of the other world. In the "waking" state, I am supposed to dedicate a certain amount of time to feeding the world I've come
from. Similarly, when I die and leave this world and go on to the next, I'm supposed to feed this present dream with what I do in that one.
Dreaming is not about healing the person who's sleeping: it's about the person feeding the whole, remembering the other world, so that it can
continue. The New Age falls pretty flat with the Mayans, because, to them, self-discovery is good only if it helps you to feed the whole.
Jensen: Where does the Mayan concept of debt fit in?
Prechtel: As Christians are born with original sin, Mayans are born with original debt. In the Mayan worldview, we are all born owing a
spiritual debt to the other world for having created us, for having sung us into existence. It must be fed; otherwise, it's going to take its payment out
of our lives.
Jensen: How does one repay this debt?
Prechtel: You have to give a gift to that which gives you life. It's an actual payment in kind. That's the spiritual economy of a
village.
It's like my old teacher used to say: "You sit singing on a little rock in the middle of a pond, and your song makes a ripple that goes out to the
shores where the spirits live. When it hits the shore, it sends an echo back toward you. That echo is the spiritual nutrition." When you send out a gift,
you send it out in all directions at once. And then it comes back to you from all directions.
Jensen: It must end up being a complex pattern, because as you're sending your song out, your neighbors are also sending theirs out,
and you've got all these overlapping ripples.
Prechtel: It's an entangled net so enormous the mind cannot possibly comprehend it. No one knows what's connected to where.
Jensen: How does this relate to technology?
Prechtel: Technological inventions take from the earth but give nothing in return. Look at automobiles. They were, in a
sense, dreamed up over a period of time, with different people adding on to each other's dreams - or, if you prefer, adding on to each other's studies
and trials. But all along the way, very little, if anything, was given back to the hungry, invisible divinity that gave people the ability to invent those
cars. Now, in a healthy culture, that's where the shamans would come in, because with every invention comes a spiritual debt that must be paid, either
ritually, or else taken out of us in warfare, grief, or depression.
A knife, for instance, is a very minimal, almost primitive tool to people in a modern industrial society. But for the Mayan people, the spiritual debt that
must be paid for the creation of such a tool is great. To start with, the person who is going to make the knife has to build a fire hot enough to produce
coals. To pay for that, he's got to give a sacrificial gift to the fuel, to the fire.
Jensen: Like what?
Prechtel: Ideally, the gift should be something made by hand, which is the one thing humans have that spirits don't.
Once the fire is hot enough, the knife maker must smelt the iron ore out of the rock. The part that's left over, which gets thrown away in Western
culture, is the most holy part in shamanic rituals. What's left over represents the debt, the hollowness that's been carved out of the universe by
human ingenuity, and so must be refilled with human ingenuity. A ritual gift equal to the amount that was removed from the other world has to be put back to
make up for the wound caused to the divine. Human ingenuity is a wonderful thing, but only so long as it's used to feed the deities that give us the
ability to perform such extravagant feats in the first place.
So, just to get the iron, the shaman has to pay for the ore, the fire, the wind, and so on - not in dollars and cents, but in ritual activity equal to
what's been given. Then that iron must be made into steel, and the steel has to be hammered into the shape of a knife, sharpened, and tempered, and a
handle must be put on it. There is a deity to be fed for each part of the procedure. When the knife is finished, it is called the "tooth of earth."
It will cut wood, meat, and plants. But if the necessary sacrifices have been ignored in the name of rationalism, literalism, and human superiority, it will
cut humans instead.
All of those ritual gifts make the knife enormously "expensive," and make the process quite involved and time-consuming. The need for ritual makes
some things too spiritually expensive to bother with. That's why the Mayans didn't invent space shuttles or shopping malls or backhoes. They live as
they do not because it's a romantic way to live - it's not; it's enormously hard - but because it works.
Western culture believes that all material is dead, and so there is no debt incurred when human ingenuity removes something from the other world.
Consequently, we end up with shopping malls and space shuttles and other examples of "advanced" technology, while the spirits who give us the ability
to make those things are starving, becoming bony and thin, which is one reason why anorexia is such a problem: the young are acting out this image. The
universe is in a state of starvation and emotional grief because it has not been given what it needs in the form of ritual food and actual physical gifts. We
think we're getting away with something by stealing from the other side, but it all leads to violence. The Greek oracle at Delphi saw this a long time ago
and said, "Woe to humans, the invention of steel."
Jensen: Why does this theft lead to violence?
Prechtel: Though capable of feeding all creation, the spirit is not an omnipotent force, as Christianity would have us believe, but a
natural force of great subtlety. When its subtlety is trespassed on by the clumsiness of human greed and conceit, then both human and divine nature are
violated and made into hungry, devouring things. We become food for this monster our spiritual amnesia has created. The monster is fed by wars, psychological
depression, self-hate, and bad world-trade practices that export misery to other places.
We inflict violence upon each other as a way to replace what we steal from nature because we've forgotten this old deal that our ancestors signed so
long ago. Instead, we psychologize and objectify that relationship as a personal experience or pathology, rather than a spiritual obligation. At that point,
our approach to spirituality becomes rationalist armoring, a psychology of protection for the part of us that creates the greed monster, which causes us to
kill the world and each other. As individuals, we become depressed, because the beings of the other world take it out of our emotions.
Jensen: How so?
Prechtel: When we no longer maintain a relationship with the spirits, the spirits have to eat our psyches. And when the spirits are done
eating our psyches, they eat our bodies. And when they're done with that, they move on to the people close to us.
When you have a culture that has for centuries, or longer, ignored these relationships, depression becomes a way of life. We try to fix the depression
through technology, but that's never going to work. Nor will it work to plunder other cultures, nor to kill the planet. All that is just an attempt not to
be held accountable to the other world. If you're to succeed as a human being, you've got to live meaningfully, passionately, and fully, so that even
your death becomes a meaningful sacrifice to the spirits, feeding them. Everybody's death was a meaningful sacrifice until people started to become
"civilized" and began killing everybody else's gods in the name of monotheism. As you grow older, your life becomes more and more meaningful as a
sacrifice, because you give more and more gifts to the other world, and the spirits are better fed by your speech and prayers.
Jensen: How do you respond to someone who says that the notion of paying a debt to the spirit world for making a knife is just inefficient,
which is why we've wiped out all those cultures. In the time your group spends making one knife, my group will make three hundred knives and cut all your
throats.
Prechtel: If you take up that strategy, then you will have to live with the ghosts of those you've murdered - which means you've
got to make more and more knives, and you will become more and more depressed, all the while calling yourself "advanced" to rationalize your
predicament.
Jensen: What are these ghosts?
Prechtel: Before we talk any more about ghosts, we have to talk about ancestors, because the two are related.
Often, you'll hear that you have to honor your ancestors, but I believe it's much more complex than that. Our ancestors weren't necessarily very
smart. In many cases, they are the ones who left us this mess. Some of them were great, but others had huge prejudices. If these ancestors are given their due,
then you don't have to live out their prejudices in your own life. But if you don't give the ancestors something, if you simply say, "I'm
descended from these people, but they don't affect me very much; I'm a unique individual," then you're cursed to spend your life either
fighting your ancestors, or else riding the wave they started. You'll have to do that long before you can be yourself and pursue what you believe is worth
pursuing.
The Mayan way of dealing with this is to give the ancestors a place to live. You actually build houses for them - called "sleeping houses" - and
put your ancestors in there. The houses are small, because the ancestors don't take up any space, but they do need a designated place, just like anything
else. Then you feed your ancestors with words and eloquence. We all have old, forgotten languages that our languages are descended from, and many of these
languages are a great deal more ornate. But even with our current language, we still have the capacity to create strange, mysterious, poetic gifts to feed the
ancestors, so that we won't become depressed by their ghosts devouring our everyday lives.
If we can get past the prejudices of the last ten thousand years' worth of ancestors, then we can find our way back to our indigenous souls and culture,
where we are always at home and welcome.
Jensen: My ancestry is Danish, French, and Scottish, but I live in northern California, so how can I find my way back?
Prechtel: The problem is not that your ancestors migrated to North America but that, when they died, their debts were not properly paid
with beauty, grief, and language. Whenever someone dies, that person's spirit has to go on to the next world. If that person has not gone through an
initiation and remembered where she came from and what she must do to go on, then she won't know where to go. Also, when a person dies, her spirit must
return what has been taken out to feed her existence while she was on earth. All of the old burial rituals are about paying back the debt to the other world
and helping the spirit to move on.
One of the ways those who remain behind can help repay this spiritual debt is simply by missing the dead. Let's say your beloved grandmother dies. Some
might say you shouldn't weep, because she's going to "a better place," and weeping is just pure selfishness. But people's longing for
each other and for the terrain of home is so enormous that, if you do not weep to express it, you're poisoning the future with violence. If that longing is
not expressed as a loud, beautiful wail, a song, or a piece of art that's given as a gift to the spirits, then it will turn into violence against other
beings - and, more importantly, against the earth itself, because you will have no understanding of home. But if you are able to feed the other world with your
grief, then you can live where your dead are buried, and they will become a part of the landscape in a way.
Many old cultures had funeral arrangements whereby the dead were annually fed by the living for as long as fifty years, with the living giving ritual
payments back to the world and the earth for the debts incurred by the deceased. When that grief doesn't happen, the ancestors' ghosts begin to chase
the culture.
It's difficult enough when you have only a few dead people to mourn, but what happens when there are too many dead, when there is no time to mourn them
all? When you get not just one or two ghosts (which a shaman might be able to help you with), but hundreds, or thousands, or millions of ghosts, because not
just your ancestors, but the beings who have been trespassed against - the women who have been raped, the animals who have been slaughtered for no reason, the
ground that has been torn to shreds - have all become ghosts, too?
Jensen: Are you speaking metaphorically here?
Prechtel: No, I'm talking literally. The ghosts will actually chase you, and they always chase you toward the setting sun. That's
why all the great migrations of the past several thousand years have been to the west: because people are running away from the ghosts. The people stop and try
to live in a new place for a while, but the ghosts always catch up with them and create enormous wars and pain and problems, which feed the hungry hordes of
ghosts. Then the people continue on, always moving, never truly at home. Now we have an entire culture based on our fleeing or being devoured by
ghosts.
1 / 2 / next
(NICE--CLICKING PAGE 2 WILL GET YOU THE REST OF THIS IMPORTANT INTERVIEW)
Saving The Indigenous Soul
An Interview With Martin Prechtel
by Derrick Jensen
www.derrickjensen.org
Martín Prechtel was raised in New Mexico on a Pueblo Indian reservation where people still lived in old, pre-European ways. His mother was a Canadian
Indian who taught at the Pueblo school, and his father was a white paleontologist. Martín loved the culture there, and the land. "I spent the whole of my
very early life," he says, "in a state of weepy terror about the possibility of total annihilation of this beautiful world at the hands of a few
white men who couldn't understand the beauty we had in this way of life." He began to work against this dangerous, beauty-killing power. "The
natives called it 'white man ways,'" he says, "but it was more than that. Its infectious power had eaten the whites, too, and made them its
obvious promoter. This horrible syndrome had no use for the truly natural, the wild nature of all peoples."
In 1970, after his first marriage ended and his mother died, Prechtel went to Mexico to clear his head. Seemingly by accident, he ended up going into
Guatemala. He traveled around that country for more than a year before he came to a village called Santiago Atitlán. The village was inhabited by the Tzutujil,
one of many indigenous Mayan subcultures, each of which has its own distinct traditions, patterns of clothing, and language.
In Santiago Atitlán, a strange man came up to Prechtel and said, "What took you so long? For two years I've been calling you. Let's get to
work!" So began his apprenticeship to Nicolas Chiviliu, one of the greatest of the Tzutujil Mayan shamans.
The apprenticeship lasted several years. As a shaman, Prechtel would learn how to correct imbalances in people's relationships with the ancestors
and the spirits. He also had to learn the Tzutujil language. (Women taught him at first, and because women and men talk differently, he was a great source of
amusement when he began to speak in public.)
Though not a native, Prechtel became a full member of the village. He married a local woman and had three sons, one of whom died. When Chiviliu died,
Prechtel took his place, becoming shaman to nearly thirty thousand people. He also rose to the public office of Nabey Mam, or first chief. One of his duties as
chief was to lead the young village men through their long initiations into adulthood.
Prechtel wanted to stay in Santiago Atitlán forever, but during the time that he lived there, Guatemala was in the throes of a brutal civil war. The
ruling government - with its U.S.-backed death squads - had outlawed the thousand-year-old Mayan rites. Ultimately, Prechtel was forced to flee for his life.
"I was going to stay," he says, "but before my teacher died, he asked me to leave so that I wouldn't get killed. He wanted me to carry on
the knowledge that he had passed to me."
Prechtel brought his family to the U.S., where they "just kind of starved for a while until Robert Bly and men like him found me." (Bly , a
poet active in the men's movement, has high praise for Prechtel, whom he describes as "a short kind of pony that gallops through the fields of human
possibility with flowers dropping out of his mouth.") Though Prechtel' s wife decided to return to her native Guatemala, he remained in the U.S. with
their children and currently lives not fifty miles from where he grew up.
Prechtel is the author of Secrets of the Talking Jaguar(Tarcher), in which
he writes - musically, clearly, and respectfully - about the indigenous traditions in Santiago Atitlán. He gives glimpses of his training, yet never reveals
details that would allow readers to steal the Mayans' spiritual traditions the way others have stolen their land. In his most recent book, Long Life, Honey in the Heart(Tarcher), Prechtel describes the structure of the village, the
Tzutujil priesthood, and everyday village life before the arrival of the death squads. In addition to his writing, Prechtel paints scenes from the daily
activities and mythology of the Mayan people and is a musician who has recorded several CDs.
Prechtel appears around the world at conferences on initiation for young men. ("I'm working with women on that, too," he says, "but
it's a little bit slower - mostly because I'm not a woman.") He also leads workshops that help people reconnect with their own sense of place and
the sacredness of ordinary life. "Spirituality is an extremely practical thing," he says. "It's not just something you choose to do on the
weekends. . . . It's an everyday thing, as essential as eating or holding hands or keeping warm in the winter."
When I went to interview Prechtel at his home in New Mexico, I was embarrassed to find that my tape recorder wasn't working. Fortunately, his
present wife, Hanna, had a recorder I could use. It worked for about forty minutes, then started to run backward. Martín apologized, saying this sort of thing
happened all the time. "I just seem to have this effect on machines," he said. "My dentist won't let me come in his front door anymore,
because I freeze up all his computers."
I made a note never to travel with him.
Hanna was able to coax the recorder to work again, and we finished the interview. My own tape recorder began working again the next morning, when I was
about seventy miles away.
Jensen: What is a shaman?
Prechtel: Shamans are sometimes considered healers or doctors, but really they are people who deal with the tears and holes we create in
the net of life, the damage that we all cause in our search for survival. In a sense, all of us - even the most untechnological, spiritual, and benign peoples
- are constantly wrecking the world. The question is: how do we respond to that destruction? If we respond as we do in modern culture, by ignoring the
spiritual debt that we create just by living, then that debt will come back to bite us, hard. But there are other ways to respond. One is to try to repay that
debt by giving gifts of beauty and praise to the sacred, to the invisible world that gives us life. Shamans deal with the problems that arise when we forget
the relationship that exists between us and the other world that feeds us, or when, for whatever reason, we don't feed the other world in return.
All of this may sound strange to modern, industrialized people, but for the majority of human history, shamans have simply been a part of ordinary life.
They exist all over the world. It seems strange to Westerners now because they have systematically devalued the other world and no longer deal with it as part
of their everyday lives.
Jensen: How are shamans from Siberia, for example, different from shamans in Guatemala?
Prechtel: There are as many different ways to be a shaman as there are different languages, but there's a commonality, as well, because
we're all standing on one earth, and there's water in the ocean wherever we go, and there's ground underneath us wherever we go. So we all have, on
some level, a commonality of experience. We are all still human beings. Some of us have buried our humanity deep inside, or medicated or anesthetized it, but
every person alive today, tribal or modern, primal or domesticated, has a soul that is original, natural, and, above all, indigenous in one way or another. The
indigenous soul of the modern person, though, either has been banished to the far reaches of the dream world or is under direct attack by the modern mind. The
more you consciously remember your indigenous soul, the more you physically remember it.
Shamans are all trying to put right the effects of normal human stupidity and repair relationships with the invisible sources of life. In many instances,
the ways in which they go about this are also similar. For example, the Siberians have a trance method of entering the other world that is similar to one used
in Africa.
Jensen: You've mentioned "the other world" a few times. Most modern people would not consciously acknowledge such a place.
What is the other world?
Prechtel: If this world were a tree, then the other world would be the roots - the part of the plant we can't see, but that puts the
sap into the tree's veins. The other world feeds this tangible world - the world that can feel pain, that can eat and drink, that can fail; the world that
goes around in cycles; the world where we die. The other world is what makes this world work. And the way we help the other world continue is by feeding it
with our beauty.
All human beings come from the other world, but we forget it a few months after we're born. This amnesia occurs because we are dazzled by the beauty and
physicality of this world. We spend the rest of our lives putting back together our memories of the other world, enough to serve the greater good and to teach
the new amnesiacs - the children - how to remember. Often, this lesson is taught during the initiation into adulthood.
The Mayans say that the other world sings us into being. We are its song. We're made of sound, and as the sound passes through the sieve between this
world and the other world, it takes the shape of birds, grass, tables - all these things are made of sound. Human beings, with our own sounds, can feed the
other world in return, to fatten those in the other world up, so they can continue to sing.
Jensen: Who are "they"?
Prechtel: All those beings who sing us alive. You could translate it as gods or as spirits. The Mayans simply call them
"they."
Jensen: There's an old Aztec saying I read years ago: "That we come to this earth to live is untrue. We come to sleep and to
dream." I wonder if you can help me understand it.
Prechtel: When you dream, you remember the other world, just as you did when you were a newborn baby. When you're awake, you're
part of the dream of the other world. In the "waking" state, I am supposed to dedicate a certain amount of time to feeding the world I've come
from. Similarly, when I die and leave this world and go on to the next, I'm supposed to feed this present dream with what I do in that one.
Dreaming is not about healing the person who's sleeping: it's about the person feeding the whole, remembering the other world, so that it can
continue. The New Age falls pretty flat with the Mayans, because, to them, self-discovery is good only if it helps you to feed the whole.
Jensen: Where does the Mayan concept of debt fit in?
Prechtel: As Christians are born with original sin, Mayans are born with original debt. In the Mayan worldview, we are all born owing a
spiritual debt to the other world for having created us, for having sung us into existence. It must be fed; otherwise, it's going to take its payment out
of our lives.
Jensen: How does one repay this debt?
Prechtel: You have to give a gift to that which gives you life. It's an actual payment in kind. That's the spiritual economy of a
village.
It's like my old teacher used to say: "You sit singing on a little rock in the middle of a pond, and your song makes a ripple that goes out to the
shores where the spirits live. When it hits the shore, it sends an echo back toward you. That echo is the spiritual nutrition." When you send out a gift,
you send it out in all directions at once. And then it comes back to you from all directions.
Jensen: It must end up being a complex pattern, because as you're sending your song out, your neighbors are also sending theirs out,
and you've got all these overlapping ripples.
Prechtel: It's an entangled net so enormous the mind cannot possibly comprehend it. No one knows what's connected to where.
Jensen: How does this relate to technology?
Prechtel: Technological inventions take from the earth but give nothing in return. Look at automobiles. They were, in a
sense, dreamed up over a period of time, with different people adding on to each other's dreams - or, if you prefer, adding on to each other's studies
and trials. But all along the way, very little, if anything, was given back to the hungry, invisible divinity that gave people the ability to invent those
cars. Now, in a healthy culture, that's where the shamans would come in, because with every invention comes a spiritual debt that must be paid, either
ritually, or else taken out of us in warfare, grief, or depression.
A knife, for instance, is a very minimal, almost primitive tool to people in a modern industrial society. But for the Mayan people, the spiritual debt that
must be paid for the creation of such a tool is great. To start with, the person who is going to make the knife has to build a fire hot enough to produce
coals. To pay for that, he's got to give a sacrificial gift to the fuel, to the fire.
Jensen: Like what?
Prechtel: Ideally, the gift should be something made by hand, which is the one thing humans have that spirits don't.
Once the fire is hot enough, the knife maker must smelt the iron ore out of the rock. The part that's left over, which gets thrown away in Western
culture, is the most holy part in shamanic rituals. What's left over represents the debt, the hollowness that's been carved out of the universe by
human ingenuity, and so must be refilled with human ingenuity. A ritual gift equal to the amount that was removed from the other world has to be put back to
make up for the wound caused to the divine. Human ingenuity is a wonderful thing, but only so long as it's used to feed the deities that give us the
ability to perform such extravagant feats in the first place.
So, just to get the iron, the shaman has to pay for the ore, the fire, the wind, and so on - not in dollars and cents, but in ritual activity equal to
what's been given. Then that iron must be made into steel, and the steel has to be hammered into the shape of a knife, sharpened, and tempered, and a
handle must be put on it. There is a deity to be fed for each part of the procedure. When the knife is finished, it is called the "tooth of earth."
It will cut wood, meat, and plants. But if the necessary sacrifices have been ignored in the name of rationalism, literalism, and human superiority, it will
cut humans instead.
All of those ritual gifts make the knife enormously "expensive," and make the process quite involved and time-consuming. The need for ritual makes
some things too spiritually expensive to bother with. That's why the Mayans didn't invent space shuttles or shopping malls or backhoes. They live as
they do not because it's a romantic way to live - it's not; it's enormously hard - but because it works.
Western culture believes that all material is dead, and so there is no debt incurred when human ingenuity removes something from the other world.
Consequently, we end up with shopping malls and space shuttles and other examples of "advanced" technology, while the spirits who give us the ability
to make those things are starving, becoming bony and thin, which is one reason why anorexia is such a problem: the young are acting out this image. The
universe is in a state of starvation and emotional grief because it has not been given what it needs in the form of ritual food and actual physical gifts. We
think we're getting away with something by stealing from the other side, but it all leads to violence. The Greek oracle at Delphi saw this a long time ago
and said, "Woe to humans, the invention of steel."
Jensen: Why does this theft lead to violence?
Prechtel: Though capable of feeding all creation, the spirit is not an omnipotent force, as Christianity would have us believe, but a
natural force of great subtlety. When its subtlety is trespassed on by the clumsiness of human greed and conceit, then both human and divine nature are
violated and made into hungry, devouring things. We become food for this monster our spiritual amnesia has created. The monster is fed by wars, psychological
depression, self-hate, and bad world-trade practices that export misery to other places.
We inflict violence upon each other as a way to replace what we steal from nature because we've forgotten this old deal that our ancestors signed so
long ago. Instead, we psychologize and objectify that relationship as a personal experience or pathology, rather than a spiritual obligation. At that point,
our approach to spirituality becomes rationalist armoring, a psychology of protection for the part of us that creates the greed monster, which causes us to
kill the world and each other. As individuals, we become depressed, because the beings of the other world take it out of our emotions.
Jensen: How so?
Prechtel: When we no longer maintain a relationship with the spirits, the spirits have to eat our psyches. And when the spirits are done
eating our psyches, they eat our bodies. And when they're done with that, they move on to the people close to us.
When you have a culture that has for centuries, or longer, ignored these relationships, depression becomes a way of life. We try to fix the depression
through technology, but that's never going to work. Nor will it work to plunder other cultures, nor to kill the planet. All that is just an attempt not to
be held accountable to the other world. If you're to succeed as a human being, you've got to live meaningfully, passionately, and fully, so that even
your death becomes a meaningful sacrifice to the spirits, feeding them. Everybody's death was a meaningful sacrifice until people started to become
"civilized" and began killing everybody else's gods in the name of monotheism. As you grow older, your life becomes more and more meaningful as a
sacrifice, because you give more and more gifts to the other world, and the spirits are better fed by your speech and prayers.
Jensen: How do you respond to someone who says that the notion of paying a debt to the spirit world for making a knife is just inefficient,
which is why we've wiped out all those cultures. In the time your group spends making one knife, my group will make three hundred knives and cut all your
throats.
Prechtel: If you take up that strategy, then you will have to live with the ghosts of those you've murdered - which means you've
got to make more and more knives, and you will become more and more depressed, all the while calling yourself "advanced" to rationalize your
predicament.
Jensen: What are these ghosts?
Prechtel: Before we talk any more about ghosts, we have to talk about ancestors, because the two are related.
Often, you'll hear that you have to honor your ancestors, but I believe it's much more complex than that. Our ancestors weren't necessarily very
smart. In many cases, they are the ones who left us this mess. Some of them were great, but others had huge prejudices. If these ancestors are given their due,
then you don't have to live out their prejudices in your own life. But if you don't give the ancestors something, if you simply say, "I'm
descended from these people, but they don't affect me very much; I'm a unique individual," then you're cursed to spend your life either
fighting your ancestors, or else riding the wave they started. You'll have to do that long before you can be yourself and pursue what you believe is worth
pursuing.
The Mayan way of dealing with this is to give the ancestors a place to live. You actually build houses for them - called "sleeping houses" - and
put your ancestors in there. The houses are small, because the ancestors don't take up any space, but they do need a designated place, just like anything
else. Then you feed your ancestors with words and eloquence. We all have old, forgotten languages that our languages are descended from, and many of these
languages are a great deal more ornate. But even with our current language, we still have the capacity to create strange, mysterious, poetic gifts to feed the
ancestors, so that we won't become depressed by their ghosts devouring our everyday lives.
If we can get past the prejudices of the last ten thousand years' worth of ancestors, then we can find our way back to our indigenous souls and culture,
where we are always at home and welcome.
Jensen: My ancestry is Danish, French, and Scottish, but I live in northern California, so how can I find my way back?
Prechtel: The problem is not that your ancestors migrated to North America but that, when they died, their debts were not properly paid
with beauty, grief, and language. Whenever someone dies, that person's spirit has to go on to the next world. If that person has not gone through an
initiation and remembered where she came from and what she must do to go on, then she won't know where to go. Also, when a person dies, her spirit must
return what has been taken out to feed her existence while she was on earth. All of the old burial rituals are about paying back the debt to the other world
and helping the spirit to move on.
One of the ways those who remain behind can help repay this spiritual debt is simply by missing the dead. Let's say your beloved grandmother dies. Some
might say you shouldn't weep, because she's going to "a better place," and weeping is just pure selfishness. But people's longing for
each other and for the terrain of home is so enormous that, if you do not weep to express it, you're poisoning the future with violence. If that longing is
not expressed as a loud, beautiful wail, a song, or a piece of art that's given as a gift to the spirits, then it will turn into violence against other
beings - and, more importantly, against the earth itself, because you will have no understanding of home. But if you are able to feed the other world with your
grief, then you can live where your dead are buried, and they will become a part of the landscape in a way.
Many old cultures had funeral arrangements whereby the dead were annually fed by the living for as long as fifty years, with the living giving ritual
payments back to the world and the earth for the debts incurred by the deceased. When that grief doesn't happen, the ancestors' ghosts begin to chase
the culture.
It's difficult enough when you have only a few dead people to mourn, but what happens when there are too many dead, when there is no time to mourn them
all? When you get not just one or two ghosts (which a shaman might be able to help you with), but hundreds, or thousands, or millions of ghosts, because not
just your ancestors, but the beings who have been trespassed against - the women who have been raped, the animals who have been slaughtered for no reason, the
ground that has been torn to shreds - have all become ghosts, too?
Jensen: Are you speaking metaphorically here?
Prechtel: No, I'm talking literally. The ghosts will actually chase you, and they always chase you toward the setting sun. That's
why all the great migrations of the past several thousand years have been to the west: because people are running away from the ghosts. The people stop and try
to live in a new place for a while, but the ghosts always catch up with them and create enormous wars and pain and problems, which feed the hungry hordes of
ghosts. Then the people continue on, always moving, never truly at home. Now we have an entire culture based on our fleeing or being devoured by
ghosts.
1 / 2 / next
(NICE--CLICKING PAGE 2 WILL GET YOU THE REST OF THIS IMPORTANT INTERVIEW)