HEALING WITH A CURANDERO
The Healing Ceremony with the Curandero was most interesting, dear readers. A Curandero himself is very interesting, I think, because he is a combination of priest, midwife, healer, spiritual leader, and seer. Now if he could cook and do minor household repairs, I think he would be about perfect for a husband, don’t you think so?
Our Curandero was, our guide informed us, a Curandero of great importance and power. He came from a town eight hours away, high in the Andes Mountains at an elevation of 14,000 feet.
The special hat he wears used to be exclusively for Curanderos, but with the advent of tourist
commercialism, that type of hat became a favorite souvenir. The color of the Curandero’s blanket tells
us where he is from.
Our guide practices the Inca religion and told us we would be participating in a real healing and cleansing ceremony. In essence, the Curandero assembles the offerings on his blanket, then blesses them and arranges them on a square of fabric or paper that will become the offering to be burned.
We all sat on simple wooden benches under a canopy tented with thatch. The Curandero sat cross- legged on a blanket before us. He started to chant and make various incantations in the Quechuan language as he assembled the offerings.
Our guide translated. “Pacha Mama is hungry in the spring, and needs to be fed. All the sacrificial items will be laid out in a specific order for specific significance. He will blow on all the items to bless them. He will chew the coca leaf.”
While the Curandero was chewing the coca leaf, our guide gave us an impromptu lecture about coca and
U.S. imperialism. The coca leaf, she said, was always used for medicine and rituals for their people. Today it is very hard to grow coca or anything else in the Andean highlands because the U.S. sprayed the area so heavily with pesticides. Now there are mountainsides where nothing at all can grow. Bolivia did not accept U.S. “help”, so they can still grow coca, and Peru must import coca from there.
Well, I saw Myrtle getting hot under the collar, and she was muttering, “Yeah, they sprayed the HELL out of those mountainsides, those imperialist pigs!” Again I was quite shocked at Myrtle’s blatant disregard for her dear Miss Manners.
But thankfully her curiosity overcame her anger at U.S. imperialism as our guide explained that there are 12 alkaloids in a coca leaf and only one of those makes cocaine. The rest are beneficial for human
health. The guide’s mother, for example, does not have any aches and pains or any of the problems that
the guide herself has, because her mother chewed coca leaf all her life.
It takes one TON of coca leaves to make 2 pounds of cocaine. I was happy to hear that because for sure neither Myrtle nor I could be tempted into trying to smuggle some back to the U.S. Get thee behind me, Satan!
Anyway, the Curandero blessed the coca leaves and gave each of us three of them as he prayed to the wind and the mountains to heal us and our brothers and sisters. We were to chew one of the coca leaves to remove our health problems.
Then the Curandero continued to assemble the offerings: rice, sugar, mother corn, lima beans, fish, garbanzo beans, peanuts, coca seeds, amaranth, green coca leaves, a feather from a condor to take worshippers to the spiritual level, rainbow colors, the
fetus of a llama, incense, animal crackers, sweets, cookies, straw, shells, St. Nicholas, sugar, molasses, a magnet for money, sage, a gold bar, and a lucky red Amazon bean. The guide explained that if you carry one of these small red beans in your pocket, you will always have money in your wallet. I saw Myrtle staring intently at that lucky red jungle bean.
The Curandero continued his incantations about silver and gold as an offering to Pacha Mama, the sacred lake, the winds, all deities. He poured wine over the four corners for the elements and the three points for the Inca trinity. Then we all spit out our leaves and gave them to the Curandero.
Our group was completely silent, and I realized that by this time my mouth was so numb I couldn’t have
spoken if I wanted to. Nevertheless, we were to start chewing our second and third leaves.
Our Curandero placed our chewed leaves in a special formation on the blanket offerings. Then he wrapped everything up in white paper, sprinkled everything with the sacred chicha beer, and blew on the flute to end the blessing.
Then each of us stood in turn to blow three times on the offering and to accept the healing blessing from the Curandero.
In the meantime, our guide was preparing a fire in the fire pit. The Curandero took our offering to the fire, blessed the fire with the wine, and placed our offering on the small logs, where it started to burn. Then one by one we all spit our last two chewed coca leaves on to the fire, where they sizzled and snapped a bit and generated smoke that rose straight up, a good sign.
This ended our Curandero Healing Ceremony to cleanse us and remove our health problems. We all seemed a bit dazed as we thanked the Curandero and gave him an offering of money before following him and our guide from the tent.
Then I saw Myrtle stay behind and grab a stick and before I could stop her, she was beating at the burning offering. I just KNEW she was trying to find that lucky red bean. I hissed at her, which was a little difficult since my tongue was so thick from the coca leaf that it just wanted to lie in my mouth like a
giant slug, “Stop it! You’re ruining my chance for good health, you idiot. Stop it!”
Well, she didn’t find the bean and finally let me drag her away. But the fire pit area looked like a great wind had come through, and I just knew that all of us were doomed because of Myrtle’s greed.
My revenge, such as it was, came a few days later when she was the first in our group to get sick. That backfired on me because, as you might guess, I caught it from her. I’m talking, of course, about Montezuma’s Revenge, or, because we are in South America and not Central America, what should
probably be called Pachacutiq’s Revenge.
When I tried to rub it in that Myrtle was the first to experience this marvelous Revenge, she distracted me, as usual, with all this stuff about Pachacutiq, who, to tell you the truth, I knew nothing about before that.
I guess dear old Pachacutiq is considered the greatest of all the Inca rulers, and he is glorified in many South American myths, legends, and tales, as well as with statues and tapestries.
His full name is Pachakutiq Inka Yupanki, which means “he who shakes the earth with honor.”
Well, he shook up those Incas, all right. He started flinging them far and wide over those mountains as he relocated them into all the far corners of his new empire that he had divided into four quadrants.
So he is, of course, the founder of the Inca Empire, and it is he who built many of the most notable Inca structures, like Sacsayhuaman and Machu Picchu that we have already talked about.
Anyway, as you can imagine, with all this distraction from Myrtle, my sought-after revenge fell a little flat.
To be continued…