Thursday, 20 Sept. --- Hello Monterrey

As the plane circled over Monterrey, I had a good view of the beautiful green mountains surrounding this city, part of the Sierra Madre Oriental, and in particular the Cerro de la Silla (Saddle Mountain, so named for obvious reasons – see photo) which apparently dominates the view from every part of town.

While waiting in the snaking customs line to get my tourist card, I noticed a group of four Sikh men standing further back on the line, a bit too far for a conversation. I nodded and smiled, they did the same, and so, I suppose, officially began my interreligious experience in México.

Once past customs, I looked in vain for the person who was supposed to meet me and drive me to the hotel; there were several people bearing cards with names on them, but none were mine. My plane to Monterrey had been delayed for two hours, so I imagined that must have caused some hitch in the arrangements. The people at the information desk couldn’t help me, so I figured I’d just cruise the terminal (it’s not very big) and see what I’d come up with. Sure enough, a few minutes later I espied through the crowd some familiar turbaned heads and, along with them, a smartly-dressed young woman ushering them out the doors. (I have long ago learned that Sikh men, besides invariably being very gracious, devout and friendly people, also provide an invaluable service to the interfaith community as convenient points of reference, with their colorful turbans (dastaars) and full beards – when in doubt, look for the turbans!)

The young woman turned out to be Susana, my greeter, who was very relieved to see me since she wasn’t sure when my plane would arrive. We waited at the curb for a few minutes for our van to come, and there I also met Michelle, a very friendly Yoruban from Atlanta. On the ride into town, Susana told me that she’d be my personal assistant during my stay here, and would be glad to take me on whatever errands I needed to do once we got unloaded at the hotel.

The Holiday Inn Fundidora is a glitzy, modern hotel which is part of a complex of buildings designed to accommodate conferences, conventions and expositions. It includes, within short walking distance of each other, the hotel, the Cinterplex (a business and exposition center where most of the Encuentro’s events are taking place, alongside the Bridal Fair…), a huge auditorium, a modern multi-purpose arena (Black Eyed Peas, indoor soccer, assorted conventioneers), an arts center (currently featuring an exhibit entitled 'Isis and the Feathered Serpent' – think maybe I’ll go to that one…), a Sesame Street theme park, and last, but not even nearly least, a House of Parrots. It’s also the start of Paseo Santa Lucía, a modernistic walkway around an artificial river, which winds its way for a couple of miles into the center of the city.

After getting settled at the hotel, we had a dinner where everybody was introduced, we were given some necessary materials, and were told a bit about the next day’s events. We’ll be getting a private tour of the complex in the morning; then, in the afternoon, a group of indigenous peoples who have been walking for more than a week from various parts of México will arrive at Parque Fundidora, and we’ve been asked to greet them when they arrive. I’m really looking forward to that.

Friday, 21st September --- Ordinary start to an extraordinary day

Today was an intense, remarkable, unpredictable and confusing day, one of those where you can look back a dozen years hence and see how all manner of important changes in your life are so clearly traceable to that particular moment in time. Or maybe not (check back in twelve years and I’ll tell you for sure). Right now, though, it sure feels like something happened and is building up inside of me, though I haven’t had the time or the space to sit with it and really explore it, and realistically I might not be able to do so until I return to Glenwood.

It began ordinarily enough, with a private tour of the Cinterplex, a sprawling, multi-leveled building with vaulted ceilings. Most of the workshops and panels will be held in one very large hall which has been partitioned into several rooms, each capable of holding about 200-300 people. But they’re just partitions, with no ceilings, so it appears that there could be a lot of sound overlap between adjacent rooms – we’ll have to see… In between the tour and a brief orientation meeting, I made friends with Pal Ahluwalia, one of the Sikhs I’d met at the airport, who spends half the year teaching political science in Melbourne, and the other half at the University of California at San Diego.

Afterwards, most of us had lunch together in the hotel’s dining room – a typical buffet with the predictably bland American fare (it is, after all, a Holiday Inn), but just enough Mexican touches to make it tolerable.

At lunch, several of my tablemates asked me to tell them about my religious background. Over the years, the most effective way I’ve found to address such questions is to say that I practice one of the indigenous European pagan traditions. So many people have 'stuff' with the word 'pagan' that, used by itself, it can easily put people off. But the indigenous traditions are usually very much respected in the interreligious movement for what should be obvious reasons, and putting paganism in that context can help people look at us from a different, more accurate, and (apparently) often unexpected perspective.

After lunch, my 'assistant,' Susana, was supposed to take me somewhere to change some money and to buy a cheap cellphone that would work locally. She was not free, however, at the time when I was, so she asked her friend Silvia to take me on my errands instead. Silvia was very nice, and extremely patient while we dealt with a clerk at the cellphone store who couldn’t figure out how to sell me one that worked.

On the way back to the car, while walking through the shopping mall, I had an unexpected flashback to the days of my youth. I had stopped for a moment to look at something in a window while Silvia kept walking ahead. As I followed her, I noticed a bunch of young guys ogling her as she approached them, and sure enough, when she drew near them they started making kissing noises and whistling at her. I took a few quick steps to catch up to her, took her arm so they would know that she wasn’t unaccompanied, and turned around and looked straight at them. Immediately, the young guys lowered their heads and looked away, pretending they hadn’t been doing anything. I guess all those childhood lessons in Hispanic alpha male behavior never quite totally fade away…

Friday, 21st September --- At the Indigenous Walk

Soon after returning to the hotel, I heard drums outside my window, a likely sign that the Indigenous Walk people had arrived. I put on my Celtic robe, as I usually do at these events when I’m in 'official capacity' mode, and went out by the side of the Cinterplex.

Sure enough, amidst clouds of burning copal there were maybe a hundred people in various forms of traditional indigenous garb, most wearing ankle rattles apparently made from some sort of nut. Some were playing drums, others played flutes or a variety of stringed instruments; still others played bird-shaped whistles that made a loud, crackling sound unlike anything I’d ever heard. They represented many different cultures and regions of México – Rarámuris, Mayas, Wixarrikari (Huichols), Náhuatl, Zapotecs, Q’iché, and many others. Silvia came along with me, and lent me her camera for a while since I’d left mine behind. (For a 10 min. video of the Walk, go to http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=354279101937647341 )

People had formed themselves into three circles. The innermost one was mostly composed of the elders and leaders of the Walk, some of them quite aged. The second circle, perhaps a dozen feet away or so, appeared to include the remaining walkers, most of them First Nations people, though not all. The third and largest circle was the audience, everyone else who’d come to watch. Silvia and I stood in this outermost circle for a while next to a group of Buddhists and Sikhs, until someone came and asked us if we were presenters at the Encuentro. When we said yes, she asked us to step into the second circle.

The indigenous walkers would do a ceremonial dance or two, then a few different elders and leaders would speak, and the pattern would repeat. Most of the speakers touched on similar themes – the economic plight of their people; the erosion of their spiritual practices and their assimilation and secularization into mere folklore; the loss of their tribal lands; and the lack of support from government officials. A handful of women, who seemed to be Walk organizers, would move between the first and second circles, giving directions to the dancers and orchestrating the next round of speakers. One of them carried a wireless microphone which she used to announce whatever was about to happen next, and which she would hand to the speakers so they could be heard (an interesting juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern). Another, a woman dressed in a bright yellow dress, was at one point talking with a group of dancers, when she suddenly turned around and looked right at me with a puzzled expression, then went back to what she was doing.

A little later she joined the inner circle again so that I could barely see her, but soon it was her turn to address the crowd. She was introduced as Fabiola Poblano Ramos, and her message was not much different from what several previous speakers had said, but she expressed hers with such intensity, clarity, and poetic eloquence, that I spontaneously burst into tears. I wept not only for her people, but for mine, for those untold numbers of my European ancestors who lost all that they had – their spiritual practices, their homes, the lands on which their families had lived for hundreds of years – through coerced conversions, forced assimilation, enclosures, clearances, marginalization, the raising of alien temples upon their sacred ground, legal proscriptions against the use of their ancestral tongues, and the transformation of once-vital religious symbols into safe and meaningless bits of folkloric trivia. I wept for those who’d been imprisoned, tortured, and killed because they would not conform, and whose existence is even at this moment being denied by myopic scholars scrambling for a place on the latest, trendiest academic bandwagon.

I imagined them standing at a moment like this in their own history, facing extinction, facing oblivion. Perhaps they did not realize the imminent and devastating changes threatening their ancient ways. Perhaps – unlike the copper-skinned, feather-bedecked peoples standing before me, singing and dancing for their lives – most of my own paler ancestors could not read the cryptic writing on the blood-stained wall of history. But surely there had been some who could; surely there were those who’d had foresight of the inevitable. What did they think, at such a juncture? What did they feel? What might they have made of a gathering such as this one? They would have had no supportive circle of sympathetic onlookers to embrace them with solidarity; no kindly turbaned and saffron-robed travelers from distant lands to bear witness to their pleas. So I had no choice but to weep for my own lost ancestors, and for the tired but relentless women and men before me, struggling to retain their identity, refusing to join the ranks of the forgotten.

The tears passed, the event continued. A few minutes later, Fabiola made another of her rounds between the first and second circles. She passed by me, then suddenly wheeled around and came to where I was standing, reached out, and grabbed my hands. “Brother,” she asked me in Spanish, “why were you weeping?” She caught me completely by surprise – I couldn’t imagine how she’d noticed what had been going on with me from the place where she’d been standing in the inner circle.

So I introduced myself, explained what I was doing at the Encuentro, and told her about the complex of emotions I’d just been feeling. She listened carefully, not letting go of my hands, then told me to follow her and led me into the inner circle, toward an aged Indian woman.

The woman (I later learned that her Spanish name was Amalia Salas Casales) took my hands from Fabiola, gave me an encouraging and mostly toothless smile and told me, in Spanish, that I had been brought to this place for a reason, and that my troubles would be taken from me. She then placed her hands on each side of my head for a few moments, while she muttered some words in her native language, then slid them toward the back of my neck; finally, she placed her right hand on the top of my head.

Something happened. Something opened up, right where her hand was touching me. It was a very physical sensation, a feeling of something being pulled apart; almost as if someone were ripping off my skin under anaesthesia, so there was the sensation of pulling, but with no pain.

And then I saw it: an ear of corn growing right in the front of my head, and she was pulling the husk apart, exposing row after row of ripe, full kernels gleaming under the blistering sun, as bright and as yellow as Fabiola’s dress, until the entire, single horn of grain was laid bare.

And with the shedding of the husk came a release, a letting go, a sense of peace that felt very familiar, but which I hadn’t experienced for a very long time, and it brought with it a feeling of strength and centeredness, of fitness and belonging.

The entire thing took maybe a minute of linear time, but it felt like forever. Amalia said something else in her Indian language, then nodded at me in a way that conveyed both that everything would be fine, and that she was pleased with her own work. Then Fabiola took my hand again, and led me a bit further along the inner circle to stand in front of a tiny Wixarrika man wearing a blue tunic, who looked to be about a hundred years old, but had the kind of inquisitive, all-encompassing eyes that one mostly would see in a child.

I knew by the clothes he was wearing, and by the hat sitting on his head, that he was a mara’akame, a spirit singer, a sort of shaman (his Spanish name, I found out later, was Don Custodio Rivera de la Cruz). Fabiola bent down and spoke to him softly in the Huichol language, and he listened intently without ever once taking his eyes off me. When she was done, he nodded, reached up his hands to pull me down toward him, then brought his face very close to my forehead, as if he were examining something closely. Then he let go of me, stepped back, and nodded vigorously, then moved away. Finally, Fabiola brought me to an open space in the inner circle, and asked me to stay there while she went off to talk to some other people. Eventually, she returned and stayed by my side, occasionally taking my hand as if to reassure me.

The ceremony continued, with the dances and the speeches. Every so often, Fabiola would lean over and explain to me a little of what was going on. “This is a planting dance,” she’d say, “watch how the dancers’ feet land softly, not hard on the ground, and rub the soil to loosen it, to open the way for the seeds.” Or, “this dance is to honor the sun; when they leap, it’s as if they’re flying, to get closer to him.” At one point, a Wixarrika musician played his traditional violin, while the mara’akame sang one of their spirit songs in a very high-pitched, reedy, but totally mesmerizing voice.

The sun was overwhelming, and I was dehydrated and feeling a bit shaky. I was also becoming very aware of the time, since the opening plenary was about to start in less than an hour. Thankfully, the woman with the wireless microphone announced that the last of the marchers was about to speak, and that he would be followed by a small break before the second part of the program, which sounded as if it would be an open forum to discuss various issues relative to the First Peoples. An elderly Indian man stepped up and began to speak in Spanish; it didn’t appear that he would be talking for very long, so I figured I’d excuse myself and leave for the plenary as soon as he was done.

That’s when Fabiola asked me if I would address the gathering, tell them who I was, why I was there, just as I had told her. Again, she caught me completely by surprise. I said that I was very honored for her to ask me, but protested that I had nothing prepared to say, and that I didn’t really feel it was proper for me to speak, since I hadn’t taken part in the march. She grabbed both my hands, and very emphatically said something like, “You are our brother, and you belong here along with the rest of us. The spirits have brought you here for a purpose, and now they want you to speak to us. There is something important we must hear from you; all the elders agree that you must speak and give us a blessing.”

When she said the word 'blessing', I immediately thought of a brief one from Scotland that I could offer. But otherwise I was dumbstruck, literally couldn’t think of a thing to say, my mind went blank. The Indian man had begun to thank everybody, signaling that he was about to finish. I figured I might as well give it a try, and see if anything happened.

Then somebody led me to the center, and put the microphone in my hand. I don’t really know what I said, because all of a sudden my mouth opened and stuff came pouring out, and I only remember bits of it, and then there are bits that other people have told me. But I guess I introduced myself, and said in Spanish that I was at the Encuentro to talk about the indigenous European traditions; that I had been very deeply moved by their ceremonies and by their words, that I understood their plight, and my heart went out to them; that I knew many of them had European blood also running through their veins, and that I knew in many cases that blood had been forced on them violently through the rape or forced marriages to which their indigenous ancestors had been subjected, and that they might very well hate the European colonizers whose blood they carried; but that they should also know that blood connected them to even more remote ancestors from Europe who were also tribal peoples, who also venerated the Earth and the Sky like their Indian ancestors. I said that what European colonizers had done to to the First Peoples of the Americas, of Africa, and of other continents, they had done to their own people first; that very little of our ancient traditions had survived, so we had lost almost everything, only a few of the old languages remained, a great deal had been converted into soulless folklore; that we were barely hanging by a thread, that most everyone had long forgotten that our traditions had ever existed, or refused to believe that any had survived. But that the land and the fire and the moon, the mountains and the sun and the rivers had not forgotten us, and by not forgetting they helped us to remember, and, through that remembering, our ways could live again, for what is remembered is not lost. I called upon the various religious representatives present at the Encuentro to take active part in the preservation of indigenous traditions, and that preservation required much more than just words or apologies: among other things it required reparation, it required autonomy, and it required restitution, including the return to their sacred lands of ancestors whose remains were currently kept in coffins of glass in museums all over the world. I also said that, while no one has the authority to speak for all in our traditions, I felt confident that everyone in my community would join me in expressing to them our solidarity, our support, and our love; then I finished by offering them a brief Gaelic blessing of the sun, moon and stars. Or something like that.

Whatever it was I said must have been to their liking, since it was followed by a lot of shouting and whooping, the pounding of drums, and the blowing of whistles, horns and conch shells. Four of the elders, including the two who had interacted directly with me, came over and hugged me and stroked me, and Fabiola kept smiling and nodding. It was a very moving experience for me, and I feel that, for us, a bridge was crossed and an important connection was made.

The dances began anew, and I seized the moment to go sit on some steps and center myself a bit. A few minutes later, a white woman with short blond hair came and sat beside me, and thanked me for my remarks. She said her name was Helen Samuels, an Irish-American expatriate whose parents had moved to México during the McCarthy era, and she’s lived here ever since. She said that when I spoke my blessing, it was the first time she’d heard her ancestral language spoken in this country, and she was very glad that the 'European tribes' were represented at the event. Helen works with indigenous communities all over México, and helped to coordinate the Walk. She also works with gangs of punks in México City, and sees the gangs as instinctive attempts by these young people to find their own tribes. So, she takes them out of the city to visit indigenous villages, to stay and work with Indian peoples so they can see what a real tribe is like, and apparently, the young city punks go through very deep personal and spiritual transformations. I think this is a brilliant concept, and am delighted to have met Helen and to have had a chance to speak and connect with her. I’m hoping we’ll be able to meet again once I get down to México City.

Friday, 21st September --- Opening Plenary

So I hurry toward the Arena, where the opening plenary is about to begin, and run into a small group of Encuentro presenters, staff and volunteers, and tag along with them. The Parliament’s Mexican team has done a great job recruiting young (mostly in their early twenties, it seems) regiomontanos – the term people from Monterrey use to describe themselves – to volunteer for the event, and so far all the ones I’ve met have been very enthusiastic and solicitous.

A couple of the volunteers in our small group fall into step with me, and want to know about paganism, and what I’ll be talking about. “I’m here to tell you about your ancestors,” I reply, “your ancestors from Europe who were tribal peoples and venerated the Earth, just like your indigenous ancestors from this land.” Then I breathlessly give them the two-minute version (it’s really important to have a two-minute version) as we rush along to make the plenary in time.

“¡Qué padre!,” they exclaim. (¡Qué padre! – literally, 'what a father!' or 'how father!' – and its variant, muy padre – 'very father' – I soon learn, is the current slang expression of approval in vogue in Monterrey and, they tell me, all over México, similar to our 'cool,' 'awesome,' 'word,' 'wicked bitchin’,' or whatever happens to be in fashion nowadays in the States. Here, everybody uses it, and no, it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the conventional meaning of 'father' [end of Spanish lesson]).

We needn’t have hurried. Though we’re two minutes late, the plenary hasn’t started, and won’t start for another half hour. I sit with my two new young friends and, without my asking, they get me a couple of bottles of water, since I’m panting and dehydrated from standing in the sun for a few hours during the Walk ceremony. They want to keep talking about paganism, but Dena Fokas, the Parliament staffer who is helping to organize the Encuentro, sees me and asks me to move up to the second row, with the rest of the presenters.

From there, I get a pretty good ground-level view of the Arena Monterrey, and it looks quite a lot bigger than from the sides. The place seems to be only half full, but then somebody tells me that it holds about 18,000 people, so that means there could be close to10,000 attending an event that apparently has hardly been advertised – not bad.

The plenary finally begins, with the usual introduction of, and speeches by, various political dignitaries. Both the governor of Nuevo León (Monterrey’s province) and the Secretary for Religious Affairs underscore the point, in their remarks, that México is a secular country, with a constitution that establishes the separation of church and state, and equal rights – including religious rights – for all Mexicans.

They do so diplomatically, of course, so as not to unduly upset the Catholic hierarchy which wields such political and economic power in this land. Needless to say, they don’t mention that it’s one thing to have those rights in principle, and quite another to be able to actually exercise them (to a one, all of my Mexican pagan friends who’ve attempted to avail themselves of those rights – by trying to create pagan churches with legal standing, for instance – tell me they’ve been thwarted by government bureaucrats and by the actual regulations that define the establishment of religious entities, which are heavily based on the Catholic model. And not just pagans, but other small religious communities such as the Unitarian-Universalists and the Quakers, have had the same problems).

The governor is sitting in the front row, just two chairs away from me. As he returns after his speech, I lean over and tap him on the shoulder and tell him in Spanish how inspiring and welcome his stand in support of equal religious rights was, and that I hope he would be willing to champion the cause of minority religions should they encounter discrimination. He is startled, but like any good politician recovers quickly, thanks me, and assures me that he will do anything in his power to insure the religious rights of all Mexicans, and that, should I hear of anyone having such problems, to refer them to his Secretary for Religious Affairs. I thank him, we shake hands, and as he turns there is an immediate huddle of the advisers that flank him, surely wondering what the hairy man in the weird clothes had to say. There’s a lot of nodding, and the plenary resumes.

One of the speakers is the man in charge of the Dialogues section of the Forum, of which the Encuentro is the first; I've been told by several people that he seems to have some 'attitude' toward our event, and has been rather uncooperative. He greets everyone, then apologizes to all the Jews for the unfortunate scheduling of the event during Hannukah, but says it was unavoidable. Of course, it isn’t Hannukah, but Yom Kippur, a mistake that probably slides right by most of the audience who may have never met a Jew in their lives (not a lot of them in Monterrey, it seems…), much less be familiar with their religion and holy days. But it doesn’t for a second escape the notice of the presenters, among whom there is a lot of looking around and head-shaking. And, of course, he has not a word of apology to the pagans for holding the event over the autumnal equinox. The gentleman doesn’t know it, but he’s now scheduled to have a little chat with me a bit later on…

Bill Lesher, president of the Parliament’s board of trustees, gives a brief talk in his usual engaging, folksy style; then Dirk Ficca, the Parliament’s executive director, discusses the event at length, but reads his remarks completely in Spanish. I am so proud of him! Most Americans don’t seem to understand how very much it means to people from other lands when we make an attempt to communicate in their language. This is particularly true of Hispanics, and goes at least double for Mexicans, who generally feel slighted and put down by their northerly neighbors (I wonder why?)

I make a point of telling Dirk later on what a great thing he did. He blushes a little, then gives me a bit of a shy smile. “Was it really okay?,” he asks, “I thought I stumbled a lot.” I assure him that he did just fine, that to Hispanics, every little stumble and mispronunciation is actually something endearing, and that he won over a lot of people's good will tonight. As he walks away, he’s beaming, as well he should.

Then, all the presenters are invited to go up to the microphone, introduce ourselves, say where we’re from and what spiritual path we follow, then sit on a long row of chairs they have set up for us at the back of the stage. When my turn comes, I introduce myself in Spanish, which is what I’ll speak at all the events of the Encuentro. When I mention the part about 'indigenous pagan traditions of Europe', there is a noticeable stir among the audience, though it’s very hard to read the reaction, since there are very bright lights shining directly in my face. We sit up on the stage while a couple of other speakers address topics of relevance to the interreligious movement, then resume our places on the arena floor for the final event of the evening, an 'indigenous ceremony.'

It is fascinating – essentially, a reprise of what I had just witnessed barely an hour before, at the end of the Indigenous Walk outside the Forum: the clouds of burning copal; the blowing of bone whistles and conch shells; the painted, costumed dancers and drummers, both women and men, some wearing elaborate headdresses made of very long and multicolored plumes…

But something is different, something is missing – and then it hits me: there are no elders. Outside, there had been easily two-dozen or more people in their sixties or older, some of them quite aged. Here, onstage, the oldest person seems to be a man in his late thirties, perhaps early forties. Then I begin to notice other small, but telling details: here, all the dancers have lithe, athletic bodies, and their dancing is just a little too polished, too professional; and yet, occasionally I’ll catch one or another of them casting sidelong glances at the rest, as if to make sure they are in the right place, making the right moves. In contrast, among the dancers at the Walk there was a much greater variety of body types, and their dancing had seemed completely unselfconscious, yet totally focused, with the easy grace and confidence that comes from having performed the same movements over and over since childhood.

More than anything, though, the ceremony at the Walk had been charged by a raw, visceral, compelling power; what I am witnessing at the Arena is much more aesthetically pleasing, but has no power beyond its beauty.

The 'ceremony' on stage goes on for quite a while and – perhaps because I am now carefully looking for them – more revealing details emerge. At one point, the dancing stops and a couple of the dancers sing and speak, addressing the audience. Their voices, like their movements, are theatrical, professional, revealing the patterns and emphases so typical of Spanish oratory, which sound quite familiar to a native speaker like me, though they might easily go unnoticed by someone from a different culture. The speakers at the Walk had done so extemporaneously and totally from the heart, with the deep sincerity that grows from what is lived, and which casts a mantle of inconsequence over such concerns as proper grammar and clear enunciation. My thoughts go to that ancient, frail Wixarrika singer, with the voice that sounded like a wavering, withered string on a primitive violin, threatening to snap at any moment – surely he would not have passed whatever audition was required to stand upon this stage.

So here it is, plain as day, the contrast between traditional religious ritual on one hand, and artistic folkloric performance on the other. Surely, to most of the audience at the Arena – and almost certainly to my fellow presenters at the Encuentro – what we are witnessing onstage would appear to be 'the real thing;' and perhaps it truly moves and inspires them, making it, in effect, 'real.' Doubtlessly, I would have thought and felt exactly the same, had I not had the opportunity to experience something different, something which went beyond the 'reality' of the Arena stage.

This is what we lose through cultural erosion, through religious repression and marginalization, through a mindless drive toward a 'progress' solely defined by materialism and consumerism: we lose important levels of reality, we lose layers of experience and of meaning, we lose some of our deepest, most primal and direct connections to the Sacred.

I am reminded of The Witness, the brief but incisive parable by Jorge Luis Borges, and ask myself some of the same questions he raises: What dies with me, when I die? What is lost? What is forgotten? This subtle, but deeply meaningful distinction I have witnessed so clearly today between religion and folklore, between spirituality and performance – will it still be there for my grandchildren, yet unborn, to experience? (Because the telling of it is not enough, it must truly be experienced.) Or will one be subsumed by and disappear into the other, and be lost as so much else has been lost from so many other cultures, from so many other lands?

Finally, the plenary comes to a close. As we begin to exit or to mill about on the Arena floor, attendees and presenters alike, I espy the Director of Dialogues off in a corner, talking to an assistant. I make a beeline for him and, as soon as he’s free, introduce myself and ask him, as politely as I can, if he’s aware that he apologized for holding the event on the wrong Jewish holiday. He immediately winces – which tells me that probably some other presenter has beat me to the punch – and apologizes profusely for that. I inform him that this is, indeed, not just a sacred time for Jews, but for pagans as well, and that it would have been very nice if we could also have been included in his apology, since there had been some of us in the audience tonight. A glazed look comes over his eyes. “Pagans?,” he says, “What do you mean, pagans? There are no pagans in Monterrey!”

I’m about to give him the five-minute version, when I feel a tap at my elbow. It’s Eduardo, a local pagan university student with whom I’ve been corresponding, and had arranged to meet after the plenary. I decide I don’t really want to waste my time with the director, who seems rather close-minded, so I just say, “Pardon me, but this is one of those non-existent pagans from Monterrey that we were just talking about, and I must meet with him now, thank you for your time.” The director looks a little perturbed; I don’t think he’s having a very good night.

Eduardo and I start to chat, but we are interrupted by a small group of young people. They ask if I am the pagan presenter. When I say yes, they request to have their picture taken with me, which is fine, of course.

Eduardo and I resume our conversation, but almost immediately the previous scenario is repeated. May we have a picture with you? Yes, of course; pardon me for a moment, Eduardo. Here you go, nice to meet you. Now, where were we? Oh, sorry; yes, sure, a picture is fine. You, too? All right, wait one second…

And so it goes, for more than half an hour – one person after another, or groups of them, interrupting our conversation to have their picture taken with me. I’m so focused trying to juggle both things, that I don’t really pay attention to what is going on around me, but at some point, when I do, I have to stop in disbelief. The Arena is by now essentially empty but for a handful of Forum officials standing in a corner, and security guards who are busy ushering out the few remaining members of the audience. But there I am, on the Arena floor, still surrounded by somewhere between forty to fifty people waiting to get a picture with me.

I am stunned. Such a thing has not ever happened to me before in my life. This may be commonplace for rock stars, for famous actors, but not for the likes of me. There’s a brief moment of something like panic, because I don’t understand what’s going on, because this is so very strange and surreal. Then I catch a glimpse of the Director of Dialogues, still standing in the same corner where I left him. Some assistant is talking to him, but he’s looking straight at us, shaking his head, his mouth open, an incredulous expression on his face. I realize what he’s thinking: "are all of those people pagans?" Fine, let him think a little, it’ll be good for him…

So, I relax and go with the flow, bantering with the crowd amidst a succession of camera flashes, until I feel a hand firmly gripping my arm. It’s Susana, my assistant, coming to my rescue. She’ll tell me, a bit later, that she was up in the stands, looking for me to see if there was anything I needed, when she suddenly saw me down in the Arena, in the middle of what she described as “a sea of people.” She didn’t know what was going on, and feared that I might be in trouble, so she hurried down the steps to come to my aid.

I’m only too glad to see her. She tells those remaining in the crowd that I must leave now, but that I’ll be around all weekend if they didn’t get a chance to have a picture taken with me (I’m beginning to imagine what Brad Pitt's life must feel like, a very sobering thought…) She flies in her high heels up the steep Arena steps and I gladly follow along, a little shaken by what has just happened. When we get to the top we meet up with Silvia, who, along with their friend Miriam (another volunteer), has made arrangements for us to go out for dinner and drinks. They already have two of their cars waiting for us outside, and they take me to La Cañita, a Spanish restaurant in the Barrio Antiguo, the old part of town which is experiencing a revival as the trendy area for restaurants and nightlife.

There, in a blessedly calmer environment, they tease me mercilessly about my being a rock star (a spiritual rock star, one of them clarifies), about how they’re going to be my bodyguards for the rest of the weekend, and are going to start charging people money for getting their picture taken with me, and also will start charging for giving out their own autographs, since they fully expect to get famous by hanging around with me. It would be hilarious, if I weren’t still in a mild state of shock.

We order some food, and they tell the waiter that I am in desperate need of a vampiro, which seems to be their cocktail of choice. It turns out to be a sort of tequila-based Bloody Mary, an interesting combination of sweet and sour which can easily be downed too fast if one’s not careful. After a couple of those, and a variety of sausages, cheeses, and omelets, I finally start to feel a bit more settled.

But I am still bewildered by what just happened at the Arena, and ask my new friends, in all seriousness, if they have any idea why all those people had wanted to have their picture taken with me. I tell them that I've always found the popular fascination with 'celebrity' to be something puzzling and distasteful; and, while I've occasionally been in some small way on the receiving end of it within the pagan movement, it's usually made me feel uncomfortable, though at least there I could understand it, in that I've been around that community for a long time and so have built up some level of name-recognition, if nothing else. But what's so baffling about what happened tonight is that I’m completely unknown around these parts. It’s obviously not about me as an individual, I say. It’s not like I’m a famous author or anything like that; and I didn’t play any special role in the plenary, nor did I say or do anything noteworthy, other than introduce myself along with all the other presenters. I could imagine that the mere fact of being a presenter at this event could lead somebody to think I was somehow prominent, and I suppose it wouldn't have surprised me to get a couple of requests for a picture or an autograph, but not however many dozens there wound up being – that's what I still find so confusing.

Miriam, who’s an inveterate tease, replies that it must be that people saw me in their company, and therefore decided that I obviously have to be someone very special or important. Silvia says she doesn’t really know, but that clearly something unusual is going on: she saw small groups of people getting their photos taken with some of the other presenters, but nothing like what happened with me, where there were easily over a hundred. She also recognized some of the faces at the Arena from the ceremony at the Indigenous Walk, and wonders if, having heard my remarks there earlier, perhaps some of them had been talking about me and somehow the word had spread. Susana thinks that may be part of it, but that there’s something else going on; that, somehow, my being there represents something special to people, even if they don’t know what it is, but that they feel a need to respond to it.

“What do you think that might be?,” I ask her. “I'm not sure,” she says, “but when you first told me what paganism was, I got goosebumps and I had this sudden urge to hug you and to cry.”

As I am about to find out, she’s not far off the mark.

Saturday, 22 September 2007 --- Panels, Pagans and Plenaries…

Today began the actual presentations that make up the bulk of the schedule for the Encuentro. They will focus on three key themes, each of which will have several subtopics: Exploring Our Values, which will include introductions to the various spiritual traditions present here, the telling of life stories illustrating the essence of those traditions, and discussions about the values they engender; Matters of Life and Death, which will address reproductive issues, HIV/AIDS, armed conflict, and euthanasia; and Living Together, the most extensive of the three categories, encompassing topics such as poverty, the plight of indigenous peoples, globalization, family violence, the transmission of values, the role of religion in society, reclaiming a sense of the Sacred and respect for the natural world, etc. Most of these will take the form of panels, although there will be several expository workshops and a number of religious observances, ceremonies or meditations which will be held at the beginning of each day.

I took part in my first two panels today. Originally, I had only been scheduled for one, but yesterday they asked me if I’d mind doing an extra one, since one of the other presenters apparently had visa problems and could not attend at the last minute. The panels follow a pretty standard format, with the moderator giving a brief overview of the subject, to be followed by three panelists, each of whom speaks for about fifteen minutes, at which point the floor is opened for questions and comments from the audience.

My first panel, on Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred, was meant to address such questions as: Why should we care about the Earth’s ecology? If we knew that eventually technological innovations could sustain life on Earth indefinitely regardless of our impact on the environment, would we still have an obligation to protect the natural world? Should an obligation to protect the environment rely on a sense of reverence for nature? Or a sense of the sacred in nature? What do religious and spiritual traditions tell us about our duty to the natural world?

The panel was moderated by Nancy Martin, a professor of religious studies at Chapman University in southern California, who offered a very well-organized and insightful introduction. Unfortunately, the first panelist not only didn’t have a good grasp of the topic, but on top of that kept repeating certain statements ­ which he apparently found fascinating – for instance, that our bodies completely regenerate themselves every 7-8 years, so that over our lifetimes each one of us, in effect, winds up having several bodies instead of just one – though they were not particularly relevant. Moreover, he ran significantly over his allotted time, and twice ignored the moderator’s requests that he finish, so that the remaining panelist and I had to cut our remarks short, and had no time left to field questions from the audience. Not the best way to start, but those things happen.

As part of my remarks (and as I plan to do in my other panels), I made a point to spend a few minutes at the start giving some background about paganism in general, given all the misconceptions that people so often have (a two-to-five-minute version, again, comes in real handy). That also makes it easier to slide into the more defined themes of the panel in a way that clearly shows how pagan principles and values can address the specific questions being asked.

In this (very abbreviated) case, for instance, after giving the short introduction, I started by talking about how religions arise from interactions with that great Mystery that envelops us – the 'Sacred' in the panel’s title – and which various cultures have named Brahman, God, Wakan Tanka, Anam, Tao, etc., and evolve from there to provide the members of any given religion or culture with a way to relate in an ongoing basis to the Sacred. The nature of the Sacred is transpersonal, in the sense that it is not only greater than any individual person, but than humanity itself, as it includes far more than we can begin to perceive or comprehend. Over the course of time, however, many religions wind up placing considerably more emphasis on the human side of that relationship than on the Sacred, usually for laudable reasons such as addressing poverty, hunger, disease, violence, and other forms of suffering. But, depending on how they carry out that process, they risk losing their fundamental connection with the Sacred and becoming primarily social institutions, which in turn increases the chances that they’ll fall prey to other, less commendable human concerns such as politics, money, or even militarism. That dynamic has become particularly pronounced among the 'mainstream' religions of the Euro-American world.

So, how is it possible to reclaim the connection with the Sacred? The pagan traditions of Europe, as is true of most of the so-called 'indigenous' traditions from other parts of the world, offer a very fundamental and effective model – the essence of paganism is the direct experience of the Sacred through the natural world. Nature is a mirror of the Sacred: it includes us, but also transcends us; parts of it are perceptible to our senses, but as a whole it defies comprehension. When we find ourselves in a direct, deep connection with Nature – which is to speak about wilderness, because Nature, by definition, is untamed – it is almost impossible not to feel that profound and visceral sense of mystery, of awe, of wonder, and of connection with everything that characterizes the very experience of the Sacred. And this model is of particular value to our culture, in that mainstream 'Western' religions have long and often fostered a view of Nature as lowly, base and gross, something that a remote God put in the hands of humans to do with as we saw fit – a theological rationale to use (and abuse) the rest of the natural world for our convenience and profit, leading to the environmental disasters that we face today.

My presentation was very well received, and afterwards there were, again, a couple of dozen people wanting to talk and to have their picture taken with me. I was still not very comfortable with that, so I figured I might as well ask those who were there. “I’m happy to pose with you,” I told them, “but I’m nobody important, nobody famous. Why would all of you want your picture taken with me?” “Because we like you,” said a few of them. “Because you’re nice,” said others. That was sweet to hear, but not what I was looking for. Then this one young man spoke up: “It’s all of that, yes, but it’s really because we can’t believe you actually exist,” he said. “Yes, yes,” several of them joined in, “it’s because we want to make sure you’re real, so we can show our families.”

“What do you mean?,” I asked them half-jokingly. “Of course I’m real. You can see me, you can touch me, I’m just like you, just like everyone else here, nothing special, so what’s with all the pictures?” “No, no,” said the young man who’d spoken up, “there is something special about you, don’t you see? We didn’t know that we had European ancestors who were indigenous, who weren’t Christian. We didn’t even know that people like you existed. And by coming here, you’re giving us a piece of our heritage that we were missing, that we didn’t even know we had. So we’re very happy, and that’s why we want our pictures taken with you.”

At that moment, a young woman stepped forward. I had seen her the previous afternoon at the Walk; she had been one of the dancers, in her mid-twenties, I’d say, and my eyes kept drifting toward her during the ceremony, because her looks were so striking – her skin was a deep, dark bronze, and she had the fairly typical Mesoamerican aquiline nose, but the rest of her features were Caucasian, and her hair was blond and curly. “When you spoke yesterday outside,” she said, “and you talked about our European ancestors, and what had happened to them, I burst out crying, I couldn’t help it.” (I had noticed her doing so.) “Then I got a ride back to where I’m staying,” she went on, “and I cried some more, I cried myself to sleep. And while I was asleep I had the most beautiful dream – I dreamed that my Mexican Indian ancestors and my European ancestors were all embracing, and that they were all looking at me with big smiles. And when I woke up I felt so happy, and now I feel like something’s happened to me, like I’m complete, somehow.”

I was so moved that I really didn’t know what to say. How do you respond to something like that? Certainly no personal response would be suitable, because it wasn't personal – it had nothing to do with me as an individual, but rather, as Susana had sensed, with something greater, with something I represented for them, that put them in touch with a piece of themselves, with a part of their heritage that had been missing and that, upon being retrieved, clearly mattered a great deal. So I just shut up, smiled, and let the flashes flash, as many times as they wanted.

Later, over lunch, I had an interesting conversation with Nancy Martin. She said that, in the past, she and others in the interfaith movement have been turned off by some of the pagan presentations they have attended because they made us seem, as she put it, as if we were “playing at religion,” as if we were not taking our spirituality, or ourselves, seriously enough. But she added that putting it in the context of the indigenous Earth-centered traditions, as I had done, and emphasizing the ancestral connections and the relevance to environmental issues had helped her to understand paganism in a very different way, and to take it seriously. This was very welcome feedback, because it addressed certain concerns that I and some other pagans who are involved in the interfaith community have also had. It’s not really a question of how we 'present ourselves,' because it isn’t a question of mere appearances. Rather, it’s a question of what we choose to emphasize in our spiritual practices, in our spiritual lives, out of the wide-ranging gamut of possibilities to be found in the pagan traditions.

After lunch, I took part in my second panel of the day, on the Role of Religion and Spirituality in Society. This time, my fellow panelists were Fabián Salazar, a Catholic theologian from Colombia, and Princess Adetokunbo Abimbola, one-half of the Nigerian couple who are here representing the Yoruba religion. I was particularly interested in what she had to say, because I have noticed a scarcity of representatives from the African traditional religions at most interfaith events. The princess was very brief and soft-spoken in her remarks, but one thing she did mention was that, in Nigeria, the indigenous religion is not at all in danger of extinction; just the opposite, it is thriving, and stands on a par with Christianity and Islam. Another interesting point she made was that, in her country, it is very common for people to belong to and practice all three of the main religions, and that it is ironic sometimes when some Christian churches 'claim' a certain number of people as their own, ignoring the fact that most of those same people also consult babalawos and pray at the mosque.

This afternoon, the group of young Monterrey pagans with whom I’ve been corresponding for about a year had planned to meet at a park in the center of town. I’d been trying to arrange a ride there with one of the volunteers, but hadn’t had any success yet. Right after my second panel, a group of three young locals whom I remembered from the plenary the night before, and who’d been at my previous panel, approached me and said that they’d been interested in paganism for a while, had really liked what I’d had to say, and were wondering if I could put them in touch with some local people. “As a matter of fact…do you have a car?,” I asked. They did – funny how these things work out…

So the four of us squeezed into their vehicle and took off for Plaza Hidalgo, in the middle of which stands a huge fountain dedicated to Neptune, where I thought we were supposed to meet. There were several interesting groups of people gathered all along the fountain, but none that had the right 'vibe.' Finally, a couple of cell calls later, we all managed to find each other and repaired to a small café in the Barrio Antiguo.

The Monterrey pagans proved to be lovely people (did I mention they were young?). They’ve mostly communicated through an internet forum, and occasional face-to-face meetings, but some of them are now at the point of forming an actual working group. I asked them if there were others in this city, but they didn’t really seem to know. Unfortunately, my visit with them had to be brief, since my three companions and I needed to get back to the Forum for the evening’s plenary, which consisted of a Sacred Music concert. So, having had to cancel our food order, which was taking an inordinate amount of time (as seems to be par for the course here), we squeezed back into their tiny car, taking with us Paola, a new member of the Monterrey group, who was also interested in attending the plenary.

The concert was very nice – not quite as diverse in musical styles and cultures as the one we had in Barcelona in 2004, by the side of the basilica of the Sagrada Familia, but that was to be expected. It included Yoruban invocations by Wande Abimbola (the husband of Princess Adetokunbo); some traditional Indian dancing and ragas; a group of eight Sikhs, chanting along with tablas and a harmonium; Sheikh Suhail Assad, who sang verses from the chapter of the Koran that is devoted to Mary; and even a Mexican Seventh Day Adventist barbershop quartet (no, I’m not making this up…)

Afterwards, I ran into Paola, and grabbed a bite to eat with her. She’s a delightful person, with wide, wondering eyes that seem to want to swallow the world. She's attending college here, but her family is from Oaxaca, in southern México; her grandparents are indigenous people, who still speak the old language. She was very curious about my community, which I had mentioned during our brief meeting at the café. I told her about Rites of Spring, and her eyes got even wider. She said it sounded like something out of a fairy tale, like a dream. I told her she was right, that it was a dream that many of us have been dreaming together for close to thirty years. She wanted to know if she could come, if she could dream with us. I said yes, of course, that we’d welcome her with open arms; her eyes got very moist.

We said good-night. I went up to my room and lay in bed for a bit, going over the day’s events in my mind. I was recalling my conversation with Paola about Rites of Spring while drifting into sleep, and I dreamt of home.

Sunday, 23 September 2007 --- Another Round of Presentations, and Rumi Returns

Today I finally got to give my one-and-a-half hour presentation on paganism. Despite being relatively early in the morning (9AM) and on a Sunday, at a time when you’d expect most regiomontanos to be in church, the room was almost full, probably because in my previous panels and random conversations I’d been telling people that this was the thing to go to if they wanted to learn about our traditions a little more in depth.

This gave me a chance to address in greater detail some of the questions and comments that various people had raised in my previous presentations, chief among them the use of the word ‘pagan’. This is, of course, a very common and quite understandable concern which a lot of us have long ago learned to anticipate. The most effective way I’ve found to deal with it is to suggest that when people react at all negatively upon seeing or hearing the word ‘pagan’, what they are in fact experiencing at that very moment is the surfacing of a very old, inherited, internalized prejudice which more than likely they didn’t even know they had – a classist, cultural and religious prejudice which I, too, held once upon a time. Most often, people will not have thought of it in quite that way, and if it is presented in an evenhanded manner, without any sense of placing a guilt trip on them, they will generally be intrigued by the idea and open to considering it.

Then I go on to explain the origin of ‘pagan’ as a neutral term, in Roman times, to refer to the farming and herding peoples that lived beyond the walls of Rome, in rustic villages on the edge of the wilderness, and, by extension, their customs and traditions, and I also point out that the Latin name for such a village, pagus, from which ‘pagan’ derives, comes from the very same root as our word ‘pact’; hence, the original pagans were the ‘people of the soil’ or ‘people of the earth’, the ones who retained longest their pact or bond to the land. Then I move on to the later use by the Romans of ‘pagan’ as a pejorative label equivalent to the modern ‘rube’ or ‘hick’, and implying a general contempt toward their way of life, their spirituality, etc.; and, finally, to the eventual Christian adoption of that term, with an even more generalized negative or contemptuous meaning, to apply pretty much to anyone who wasn’t Christian, whether in Europe, or subsequently among the various indigenous populations colonized by the Europeans. In closing, I make the case that ‘paganism’ is simply the most accurate and useful generic label for the indigenous, pre-Christian traditions of Europe, and, in light of the information just provided, invite any of those present who may have had a negative reaction to that term to revise their perspective about it.

In my experience, most reasonable people, upon realizing that they’ve been harboring some sort of prejudiced view, are more than willing to be open-minded and let go of it. This is especially the case among members of the interreligious community, who are particularly sensitized to the harm that various forms of prejudice have caused, and continue to cause, around the world, and are keenly aware of the very common patterns of social injustice perpetrated by colonialists against the indigenous populations of every continent.

After my talk, probably close to twenty people mentioned how eye-opening it had been for them to think of their responses to the term ‘pagan’ as a form of prejudice. One particularly gratifying comment came from a middle-aged Catholic nun, who told me something like, “I am very involved in promoting diversity and social justice here in México, and I detest any form of prejudice, and take pride in being very open-minded and accepting. But that word ‘pagan’ has always bothered me, and I came here this morning prepared to be offended, and even to argue with you and to defend my religion. And if you had just talked about the original meaning of that word, I would still have argued semantics with you, and I would have told you that it didn’t have that meaning any more for most people, and that it simply wasn’t a good word to use. But by talking about prejudice, you made me look at it not as something external, like the meaning of a word, but as something much more personal and internal, like my own feelings, and where they were coming from. So I want to apologize to you and to your people because I’ve realized that I was, in fact, being very unfair and prejudiced toward you, and even if it was in thought and not in deed, it was still an injustice on my part, because I was still keeping alive in my heart some of the same prejudices that caused very real injustices to be committed against the indigenous tribes of Europe, in a way that sounds so similar to what’s happened here in my own country. Don’t get me wrong, I am a practicing Roman Catholic, and very proud of it, and I was born a Roman Catholic and expect to die a Roman Catholic. But there are some things that have been done in the name of my religion that I am not proud of, and today I found a little bit of that inside my heart, that I didn’t know was there, and that really bothered me. But now I can be rid of it, and even think that, despite being Catholic, maybe there is a small piece of me, after all, that is also pagan, and that makes me a little excited!”

As rewarding and delightful as that interaction was, the good feelings from it were soon tempered by one of the panelists at my next event, a discussion on ‘Religion and Values’, which struck the single discordant note among all my experiences at the Encuentro. The moderator began with a clear, comprehensive exposition of the importance of values as the actual practical manifestation of spiritual beliefs and concepts of the Sacred, the vehicle through which one’s spirituality is actually lived. But as soon as the panelist (a very conservative lay Catholic who apparently is something of a ‘religious media personality’ in México) spoke, he reminded me of several of the more dogmatic and self-righteous teachers I had as a schoolboy – unordained men who nevertheless adhered to a much stricter orthodoxy than did even the ordained clergy.

He immediately took umbrage at some of the terminology used by the moderator in his opening remarks, calling them intentionally vague and relativistic: “Hay que llamar al pan, pan, y al vino, vino,” he pronounced (“we have to call bread, bread, and wine, wine – the Spanish equivalent of ‘calling a spade a spade’, only somewhat more emphatic.) “What is all this talk about ‘spirituality’? The proper term is ‘religion,’ of which, as we well know, there is but a single true one. And what about this nonsense of ‘the Sacred’? The correct term is ‘God’ – singular, masculine, and almighty.” It went downhill from there…

The panel format which the Parliament adopted for the Encuentro hardly left any room for panelists to have much direct interaction with each other. I imagine this was a deliberate choice in order to minimize the possibility of confrontational exchanges – in its events, the Parliament always emphasizes the importance of sensitivity, respect, and positive dialogue among the various religions, yet knowing full well that this can be, at times, a very difficult standard to maintain. That was certainly one of those times for me, and, had the panel structure allowed greater interaction, I don’t know if I would have had the patience to refrain from challenging some of my co-panelist’s more offensive comments, even if only to point out the incongruity of adopting such a dismissive, disrespectful attitude at an event whose official theme was ‘With All Respect, in Every Respect’. Then again, there was probably not much point in engaging someone whose opening statement was, “I am going to be addressing my remarks exclusively to those here who are Catholic, or believers in the One True God” – not exactly the concept of ‘interfaith dialogue’ as it is generally understood.

Still, I was glad that there were people like this man at the Encuentro. One of the more common complaints voiced throughout the interfaith movement is that these gatherings typically draw only the more liberal or progressive members of the various religions, and that, for true dialogue to occur, and for real meaningful and lasting changes to take place, we must figure out ways to also engage the more conservative religious groups. Often, when conservatives or fundamentalists attend interfaith events, it is with the intention of proselytizing or of seeing ‘what the enemy is up to’, which, of course, can simply lead to greater polarization. But perhaps if more people like the panelist in question get some direct exposure to the interfaith movement, and are able to let go enough of their preconceptions or their cynicism toward points of view different from their own, an actual, fruitful dialogue can begin to develop.

In the afternoon, I attended the world premiere of the film ‘Rumi Returning’, a beautiful, sensuous film about the mystical Sufi poet, timed to coincide with the 800^th anniversary of his birth. The film features interviews with various Rumi scholars, and scenes from places where he lived, along with readings of his poetry. In these times, when there is so much misunderstanding and prejudice toward Muslims, this film highlights some of the most inspiring and profound elements of Islam – if nothing else, just experiencing the passion for the divine in Rumi’s poems can be enough to induce a sense of sacred ecstasy in anyone, regardless of their religion.

By the end of the movie, I realized just how tired and sleep-deprived I was, so I decided to skip the evening plenary and maybe get to sleep early for a change. When I got back to the hotel, though, I ran into my ‘Three Amigas,’ who invited me to go out for dinner with them. They took me to ‘El Rey del Cabrito,’ one of the best-known restaurants in Monterrey, which features the culinary specialty for which this region is renowned throughout México: goat.

The place was a trip – large, gaudy, and loud (not so much in a physical as in a psychic sense). There were stuffed animals of all kinds everywhere (I’m not talking about toys here, their taxidermy bill alone must have been astronomical…): antelope, rams, snakes, birds, goats, bears, squirrels, and, at the back of the ground floor, two African lions mounted as if they were fighting. The second floor (accessible via a tiny, wooden elevator that could scarcely fit the four of us) was a tad more sedate, commandeered by a huge bronze statue of a sitting Buddha. The food, though, was great; I’m generally not all that fond of goat meat, but this was easily the tastiest I’ve ever had.

By the time the Amigas drove me back to the hotel, I was definitely ready to hit the sack, especially since the next day, my first presentation was at 8:00 in the morning.

Monday, 24 September --- Final Day of the Encuentro: Ceremonies and Good-Night Blessings.

Each day at the Encuentro has begun with several of the presenters offering ‘observances’ – some sort of meditation or ceremony that could give people a taste of the actual practices of a particular religion – and, on this last day of the event, it was my turn to do so. I’d considered several different options before coming to Monterrey, most of which involved being out-of-doors, but had to discard them once I realized that the observances were also being held at the Cinterplex, and that there didn’t appear to be any other more ‘natural’ setting within easy walking distance.

It being eight o’clock on a Monday morning, I had expected a small turnout, but over fifty people showed up. The Catholic nun who’d been at my talk the previous morning was back, and this time she'd brought several other nuns along, as well as a small group of young seminarians. Paola, of the Monterrey pagan group, was there as well, and I recognized quite a few faces from some of my other presentations. There was also a bunch of new people, of course, and a handful of them who were early arrivals seemed a little apprehensive about taking part in a pagan ceremony, especially when I told them that it would be participatory and that I’d rather not have a lot of ‘observers,’ but they seemed to relax a bit once the nuns and the seminarians arrived, all eager to jump right in.

I started with a brief explanation of what we were about to do: a very simple ritual to begin the day by opening ourselves to an awareness of the sacred Earth, of our connection to her and to all of her forces, currents and beings, including each other. I talked a little bit about the significance of the circle and the four elements as symbols commonly found in pagan spirituality, and then I taught them Spanish versions of three chants that we often use in the EarthSpirit Community – Air I Am, We Are a Circle, and One With the Soul of the Earth – each accompanied by a simple and different dance. At first they were a bit tentative, but as we started to move, they became more and more animated (several of them, it turned out, could really sing, especially a couple of the seminarians), so by the time we finished by holding the last note of Unidos con el alma de la Madre Tierra… in multiple harmonies, just about everyone was wearing a huge smile, and as soon as we finished they all began enthusiastically embracing each other, and commenting on how beautiful the ceremony had been, and how wonderful they felt.

They kept me an extra half-hour after our time had ended, standing outside the room so the next speaker could get ready, while they carefully copied down the lyrics for the chants and asked a lot of other questions about paganism. On my way to the next event, as I hurried down the hall past the group of nuns, I overheard one of them talking about how there was nothing in those chants that anyone could object to if they tried to sing them in church, while another wondered about moving the pews out of the way so they could dance…

My next panel was another session of Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred, and it provided a good example of one of the invaluable dimensions of the interfaith movement – the many and important networking connections that can be made. In this case, one of my co-panelists was Israel Batista, a Methodist minister who is the secretary general of the Latin American Council of Churches. Israel is Cuban, but now lives in Quito, Ecuador. As it turns out, just a few weeks before the Encuentro I had helped to spread the news about a vicious assault on two leaders of the Zapara Indians, Gloria Ushigua (with whom I had personally worked in the past) and Rosa Gualinga in the northeast of Ecuador. I had been sharing the news about the attack against Gloria and Rosa with various religious representatives throughout the Encuentro, so, after the panel, I spoke with Israel about that incident and solicited his help, which he was most willing and eager to give; as a result, I was able to send Israel’s contact information to Gloria’s and Rosa’s friends in Puyo, and am now in the process of following up to see if anything was able to come of it. This has always been, for me, one of the most fulfilling aspects of the interfaith movement: to make those connections and utilize our collective resources to try to help where help is needed; and the real beauty of it is that our particular scenario – a Cuban Methodist minister and an American pagan priest working together in México on behalf of two Indian women in Ecuador – is not at all unusual, it’s the kind of thing that happens all the time.

My final panel, a repeat installment on the Role of Religion and Spirituality in Society was again moderated by Nancy Martin and included Swami Dayananda Saraswati, one of the world’s leading exponents of Advaita Vedanta, and Sheikh Suhail Assad, an Argentinian imam born of Lebanese parents, who now lives and teaches in Iran, but is also the spiritual guide for Muslim communities in nine Latin American countries, including México.

As Swami Dayananda explained it, Advaita Vedanta is, essentially, a way of spirituality through scholarship, in that it is centered in the profound study of the Vedas and, unlike other strands of Hinduism, does not at all emphasize the mystical experience. For Sheikh Assad, the essence of Islam is not merely a religion premised on beliefs, but a completely integrated way of life in which, ideally, there is no distinction between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular.’ He took the interesting position of advocating full freedom for the practice of all religions (and, in the process, discussed some of his ongoing efforts to insure religious rights for all in Iran) while supporting the validity – and in some cases, he stressed, the necessity – of theocratic governments. In his view, religion cannot have any real impact in society unless it is translated into law.

My own comments focused on the need for religious and spiritual traditions to not succumb to mere materialism and secularism, but, among their various functions, to serve in society as the keepers of an awareness of the Great Mystery, of the mystical experience which takes us beyond ordinary human existence and brings us to direct communion with the Sacred.

Clearly, our emphases were all quite distinct, and even seemingly divergent; but, unlike the conservative Catholic panelist the day before, everyone strove to articulate his position with a good deal of sensitivity and respect. I would have welcomed the opportunity, not so much to debate, but to explore more deeply these various points of view, but, again, the format didn’t really allow space for it. Nevertheless, the panel illustrated quite clearly the great diversity of religious and spiritual approaches found throughout the world, and the Parliament’s mission to bring them together in open and respectful dialogue.

Paola, the young Monterrey pagan, came to all of my presentations this morning, so after my last panel I took her out to lunch. She’s really a very interesting person, quite low-key and unassuming, but with a very observant and keen mind, and deeply open to new experiences. We talked for a couple of hours, and clearly the Encuentro is having a profound effect on her; it was delightful to listen to her talk about all the new and fascinating things she’s been discovering this weekend – almost like watching a flower open. I really like her, and hope we’ll stay in touch.

Right after lunch, the Three Amigas came by and took me out for a long drive throughout Monterrey, something they’d been promising me for a couple of days. We went all over the downtown, taking in such typical tourist sights as the cathedral, built in the early 1600s, and the famous Tower of Commerce, a huge red obelisk that has become the symbol of this city, and which has, at the top, a laser beam that during the night casts a spotlight on the various important landmarks. As part of the tour, they also took me to the suburbs, where the "real regiomontanos live," including a visit to a candy factory (really, a couple of large rooms in the back of a regular house) where a local family makes these caramel-based candies called glorias (‘glories’) which are traditional to this region and quite famous throughout México. I made sure to buy a basketful of them to take back home.

We returned to the hotel just in time for dinner. As I walked in, Emily Chou, one of the Parliament’s staffers, grabbed me and asked me if I would offer one of three blessings at the start of tonight’s closing plenary, which I gladly agreed to do. Then Nancy Martin invited me to join a small group at her table, composed of her husband, Joseph Runzo, who, like her, is a professor at Chapman University and co-director of the Global Ethics and Religion Forum; Katherine Marshall, until recently an executive officer of the World Bank, specializing in social policy and world poverty; and Tu Wei-ming, director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute and a leading proponent of Confucian humanism, who was in the middle of talking about the current state of Sino-Tibetan relations, and changing attitudes toward Tibet’s self-determination, the role of the Dalai Lama, etc. It was a fascinating discussion, an insider’s anecdotal view of the many facets of a very complex and delicate situation.

A little later I arrived at the Arena Monterrey, where things were almost ready for the closing plenary. They seated the three of us who were offering blessings in the front row, just a few chairs away from my old buddy, the governor of Nuevo León and his entourage. While we were waiting, I was introduced to Luis de la Cruz, a Wixarrika (Huichol) mara’akame (shaman) who would be offering a blessing at the end. This appeared to be the largest audience yet at the Arena, probably as a result of media and word-of-mouth reports having had enough of a chance to spread over the weekend.

The first blessing was offered by Sister Jayanti Kirplani, the European director of the Brahma Kumaris and their representative to the United Nations in Geneva. I had met her at the Chicago Parliament in 1993, and had the pleasure of getting to know her a little bit during the Assembly of Religious and Spiritual Leaders in Montserrat, prior to the 2004 Parliament. She led a short, but beautiful and soothing meditation, and was followed to the podium by Tu Wei-ming, whose offering, which quoted a passage from the Analects of Confucius, was more philosophical in tone.

When my turn came, I thanked them all in Spanish for their very warm hospitality, and told them that, on behalf of my community, I was going to offer them a Gaelic song of blessing and parting from the Highlands of Scotland that wishes them slàinte (health), sonas (happiness), and dòchas (hope), and reminds us, as we take our leave from each other, that even though we should find ourselves an ocean apart, we will remain united by the times we have spent together and by the bonds of kinship. And then I sang them Oidhche Mhath Leibh, Beannachd Leibh (‘Good-Night, and Blessings to You’).

When I finished, nothing at all happened – dead silence. Sometimes I go into a light trance when I sing that song, because of what it means to me, so I thought perhaps I had just tuned out the sounds. But as I moved away from the podium, the Arena remained completely silent. I was halfway across the stage when the place seemed to erupt all at once, as if somebody had just flipped a switch and turned up the volume full blast. I was a little confused by what was going on, but as I got off the stage all of these people were standing, clapping whistling, shouting. As I approached my seat, the governor rushed up to meet me and gave me a big, pumping handshake. “That was magic, my friend!,” he enthused. “You’re a druid! You’re a true druid!” I believe I may have blushed…

As I sat there, uninterested in the two or three political speeches that followed, I reflected on the kind of reaction that tonight’s crowd had to one brief, simple song that they could not even understand, but which somehow conveyed to them some sense of who we are, some sense of the beauty and spirituality of our traditions. Over the years I have encountered, a number of times, that kind of very strong, positive, even enthusiastic reaction from non-pagans to a taste of the Old Ways (though perhaps not quite as strongly as here in Monterrey), and, in thinking about it, I realized that, in most of those instances, what people responded to was something basic, something fundamentally simple and traditional which really communicates the essence of pagan spirituality. It seems to me that a lot of pagans today tend to focus far too much on external trappings or on modern, artificial notions of ‘how we are supposed to be’ which sometimes border on the dogmatic, and in the process wind up overlooking some of the most fundamental and compelling elements of the pagan traditions. Perhaps, occasionally, it takes others who may not even share our practices or beliefs, to mirror back to us some of what may be most meaningful in our own paths.

The plenary program continued with a montage of video images and interviews taken at the Encuentro, highlighting the diversity of spiritual paths that had been included. This was followed by a local mother-child duo performing traditional dances from India – the mother alone at first, then joined by her fourteen-year-old daughter. The dances themselves were quite beautiful to watch, but even more so was the layered, deeply loving relationship between the two women expressing itself through their movements. They were followed in turn by the evening’s keynote speaker, Swami Dayananda Saraswati, who spoke about the importance of interfaith encounters such as this one in promoting peace and understanding throughout the world. To close out the program, Don Luis de la Cruz, the mara’akame, offered us a traditional Wixarrika blessing to all the directions, using a ceremonial arrow which he dipped in water and then sprinkled all around. And then, finally, the World Interreligious Encounter came to a close.

I went back to the hotel with some of the Monterrey pagans to get a snack and some coffee. We were sitting in the lobby when I noticed Dirk Ficca, the Parliament’s executive director, walking by with a group of people. When Dirk saw me, he came straight over and gave me a big hug, saying, “That was really amazing tonight, my friend; you were really amazing!” I thanked him, but he went on: “Did you hear that silence after you finished? Ten thousand people, and not a sound – I heard that silence, that was really something!” Over the next couple of days, several of the other presenters and staff made similar comments; it was very gratifying to feel that I’d been able to convey a sense of pagan spirituality to such a large and diverse group of people.

As I bid good-night and good-bye to my new pagan friends from Monterrey, Paola said she had a small present for me and my community, and gave me a folded piece of paper. It conveyed a sweet message, which I include here in translation:

A gift. A true gift is a gesture, a voluntary expression of warmth, of love. Today I want to offer a small gift from my heart to Andras and to his community in gratitude for the gifts they have brought to my people and to me. For sharing their time, their experience, their solidarity and their kinship. For renewing the hope for the survival of the ancestral cultures and for helping us to open to new spiritual horizons that offer us more and better resources with which we may reconstruct our past, understand our present, and build the foundations for a more optimistic future. With much love and happiness I send you all a smile, hugs, and my very best wishes. In closing, I would like to share with you a remembrance and a poetic fragment that I wrote on December 31, 2006.

The remembrance: “One spring afternoon I saw, on the mountains, the clouds nestling together like sugar-covered candies, forming such a beautiful landscape that one could not tell where the sky ended and the earth began. The colorful ribbons of a huge rainbow combed from left to right the surface of the trees, and a soft rain caressed the glow of those of us who gazed upon it.”

The lyric fragment:

“The mountains
crumble where
the moon
laughs
and among clouds
I drop my petals
lightly.”

– Paola Rodríguez Cruz

Tuesday, 25 September 2007 --- A Gathering of ‘Experts’

Since earlier this year, the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions has been compiling a ‘State of the Interreligious Movement Report’ that would provide a comprehensive snapshot of where the interfaith community is at this juncture, and which could serve as a valuable resource for interreligious groups, organizers of interfaith events, academic researchers, funding organizations, etc. To take advantage of the presence of so many and diverse religious representatives in Monterrey, the Council organized a ‘Gathering of Experts’ – to be held over the two days following the Encuentro – in order to generate more material for the report.

I was one of those invited to participate, so on Tuesday and Wednesday, in sessions lasting from early morning to mid-afternoon, I joined some thirty other presenters for round-table discussions of such questions as: How do you define ‘religion’? Is there a presumed definition of ‘religion’ in the interreligious movement? Are there many such definitions? What has been the impact of modernity on contemporary religion? What should be the relationship between religions and political institutions? How do you determine who are legitimate representatives of religious traditions in interreligious work? What is the greatest challenge to religion in the twenty-first century?

As background for our discussions, we had read an article entitled The Interfaith Movement: An Incomplete Assessment by Kusumita Pedersen (one of my colleagues on the Parliament’s board of trustees), which had originally appeared in the January 2004 issue of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies and provides a good model for the kind of descriptive and evaluative report that the Council is preparing; and a thought-provoking essay by Parliament staffer Jeff Israel on What Counts as ‘Religion’ in the Interreligious Movement?, which analyzes five popular (and conflicting) definitions of religions: as channels of transcendent and universal truths, as convenient delusions, as moral communities, as personal experiences of the sacred, or as organized systems of meaning. Neither these classifications nor the questions posed above were to be interpreted as ‘correct’ or ‘definitive’ – their purpose was mainly to stimulate thought and generate discussion.

Dirk Ficca provided a brief but very clear articulation of the Parliament’s mission and philosophy. He noted that the Parliament’s job as an organization is not to advocate specific points of view or adjudicate disputes among the world’s religions, but rather to provide the environment where those ideas or conflicts can be openly and fairly discussed. He stressed that the Parliament seeks to promote harmony, rather than unity, among the world’s religions; convergence of ideas, not necessarily consensus; facilitation, rather than structure; and trust, rather than agreement.

He also did an outstanding job steering our conversations over those two days, as we brainstormed, asked questions of each other, and provided examples and models based on our own spiritual traditions. I won’t go into further detail about those discussions here, both because it would take up too much time and space, and also because the specifics really belong in the report, which is due to come out later this year. But I will say that, based on those talks and on what I’ve read so far, anyone who’s interested in interfaith relations should be sure to check the Parliament’s website in the upcoming months and get a copy, since it looks like it will be a comprehensive and valuable tool.

One section of the report will include listings of interfaith resources from the various religions represented, mostly culled from online sources. I was glad to have read the first draft of the report prior to the Encuentro, since we were listed in that section as 'Neo-Pagan and Wiccan' – an unsatisfactory though understandable classification given that, even among ourselves, there's no definitive consensus on taxonomy. There are Wiccans and Neo-Pagans in our community, to be sure, but then there are all those of us who aren't; to use those two designations automatically excludes all the thousands of pagans who don't fall under those categories. As I pointed out to the people drafting the report, to keep those classifications would be tantamount to saying 'Baptists and Mormons' instead of 'Christians'; that would probably not make the Catholics and the Presbyterians very happy. Thankfully, by the next draft the listing had been changed to simply read 'Pagan.'

Following today's meeting, the Parliament arranged for us a guided tour of one of the local museums. At breakfast this morning with Joe Runzo and Nancy Martin, they’d expressed an interest in having dinner someplace other than the hotel (but for a few Mexican touches, the food typically has been fairly bland American fare). I told them about El Rey del Cabrito, which piqued their interest, so we made plans to go there after the tour. I also told them about a different museum, which, as luck would have it, is featuring an exhibit of works by Frida Kahlo, one of my favorite painters, celebrating the hundredth anniversary of her birth, and that interested them as well (prior to my trip, I made plans to visit the Frida Kahlo Museum when I got to Mexico City, but this exhibit in Monterrey was an exciting, unexpected bonus).

Late afternoon, a chartered bus took us to the Museo de Historia Mexicana. The group of us in the photo taken at the entrance of the museum includes, from left to right: Bhai Sahib Mohinder Singh (Sikh), Seshagiri Rao (Hindu), Anop Vora (Jain), Raksha Shah (Jain), myself, Joseph Prabhu (Catholic), and William Lesher (Lutheran).

The exhibits were quite interesting, tracing the history of México by organizing it into four main stages – the Amerindian period from pre-history up to the arrival of the Spanish conquerors; the Virreinato de Nueva España (the Viceroyship of New Spain, which extended from what is now North Dakota to British Columbia, and all the lands directly south all the way to Costa Rica, also including Louisiana, Florida, and all the islands in the Caribbean as well as the Philippines, governed from Mexico City, and lasting from the early 1500s to the early 1800s – a fact which surprised some of my colleagues, since most Americans don’t seem to realize that, for quite a long time, more than half of what is now the U.S. was under Spanish rule from México); the XIX century, when México gained its independence from Spain; and, finally, modern México.

The tour was marred, however, by some of the references which our guide made toward the indigenous peoples of this land and their cultures (though I imagine that he was really just repeating what some museum curator had instructed him to say). The average tourist might have accepted his remarks at face value, but given the composition of our group, his narration came across as very bigoted and paternalistic. One of the delegates – a Catholic woman who works with indigenous communities in Oaxaca – was particularly incensed, and took it upon herself to give us a running ‘translation’ of the guide’s comments which reflected more accurately the realities of indigenous history, life and culture. Prior to my trip, several of my Mexican friends had warned me that Monterrey has a reputation in this country as a city that harbors substantial conservative and even racist elements, an opinion shared by many of my new regiomontano friends; the trip to this museum was the most glaring example of that attitude which I've yet encountered.

Nancy, Joe and I decided to skip what remained of the tour and go, instead, to the Kahlo exhibit, since we’d been told that the museum where it was being held was about to close. We walked for several blocks and finally came upon the MARCO, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, with more than an hour to go before closing time. I have been fascinated with Frida Kahlo since my early childhood, when I came across a photo of her in a magazine – probably while she was still alive – and couldn’t take my eyes off her for hours. I had never seen anyone like her before: not so much the physical landscape of her face (though that, in itself, was riveting enough) as the dark, mysterious, terrifying and impish beings that dwelt upon it; beings that, as a small child, I could not yet name, but which seduced and scared me just the same.

Kahlo, popularly called La paloma herida ('The Wounded Dove') in México, had a complicated and tragic existence (polio at 6; an autobus accident at 18 that left her broken and on the edge of death, followed by dozens of surgeries over the rest of her life; a tempestuous, love/hate marriage of 25 years to the famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera; several miscarriages, the eventual amputation of a leg, etc.) which kept her in constant physical and emotional suffering; yet, throughout it all, she was able to maintain a keen sense of humor and an insatiable lust for earthly pleasures. Perhaps more than any other artist, she was fearlessly willing to turn herself inside out. Her self-portraits, mostly in a style and palette reminiscent of her maternal indigenous roots, became an external reflection of her surrealistic interior universe, simultaneously beautiful, whimsical and gruesome – André Breton famously described her art as "a ribbon tied around a bomb." (Besides, you have to figure that anyone who was lovers with Diego Rivera, Josephine Baker, Georgia O’Keefe, Picasso, Chavela Vargas and Leon Trotsky must have had something very special going on…) Though she’s been well-known all along in the Hispanic world, Kahlo hadn’t received nearly as much notice in the U.S. until recent years, when the biographical movie Frida, which received several Academy Award nominations, propelled her into the mainstream pop culture (just having Salma Hayek, Chavela Vargas and Lila Downs all in the same film makes it worth watching!)

The exhibit at the MARCO (at least some of which will apparently tour the U.S.) included some of her most famous works, such as My Nurse and I, The Bus (the museum did not allow the taking of photographs inside the exhibit hall, but the shot on the right is of a cardboard representation of this painting on display at the entrance), The Broken Column, Frida and the Miscarriage, Without Hope, Henry Ford Hospital, A Few Small Nips, Flower of Life, The Dream, The Accident, and perhaps the best known of all, TheTwo Fridas.

One brilliant aspect of the exhibit, in addition to the paintings and sketches, was the 'letters room.' Just prior to the event, in August, there had been an announcement that some of Kahlo's letters to her physician, who was also her confidant, had been unsealed and would be published in a book entitled Mi doctorcito ('My Beloved Doctor,' the way in which she began all her correspondence to him). These letters reveal much more in depth some of the turmoil that fueled both her creativity and her suffering. In this one room, the museum exhibited several dozen of her letters to various people over the course of her life, including some of the ones found in the new book. The letters were inserted back-to-back inside thin panels of clear plexiglass, about two feet square, which hung in rows from long wires attached to the ceiling.

Given that the room was not particularly well lit, and that the letters were mostly written in Frida's own, fairly small hand, in order for people to read them they had to get right up close. That put each viewer literally just a few scant inches away from the person reading on the other side of the panel, though they couldn't really see each other because the letters blocked their view. So here were all of these people, reading the intimate correspondence of this most intimately revealing artist, while they themselves were standing in such intimate proximity to complete strangers, that they might as well have been dancing...

After the exhibit, Nancy, Joe and I walked a couple of blocks to El Rey del Cabrito, where we were joined a little later by Jesús Castillo Coronado, a very friendly Catholic theologian who was actually born in this city, but now lives and teaches in Belgium. Once again, the food was excellent, the tequila plentiful, and we enjoyed a very interesting and sociable dinner to close our last evening in Monterrey.

Wednesday, 26 September 2007 --- Adiós, Monterrey – Hola, Mexico City!

These last two days of meetings, besides providing the setting for some stimulating and productive discussions about the interreligious movement among the presenters at the Encuentro, also afforded us the opportunity to get to know each other better and a bit more casually.

I was glad, for instance, to be able to spend some time this morning talking with Bhai Sahib Mohinder Singh, who lives in Birmingham (in the U.K.) and is one of the worldwide leaders of the Sikh religion. We had ‘officially’ met a little over three years ago, at the 2004 Parliament in Barcelona, and he remembered me when we first ran into each other here and greeted me very warmly. I, of course, remembered him perfectly and with great fondness, as he was the driving force behind one of the most memorable and meaningful events of the Barcelona Parliament – the langar, a free vegetarian ritual meal which the Sikhs most generously provided during lunchtime every day over the course of the Parliament as a gift to the interfaith community, and in honor of the 400th anniversary of the compilation of the Adi Granth, the first part of the Guru Granth Sahib, the sacred Sikh scripture. (The photo on the left shows Selena Fox and Dennis Carpenter of Circle Sanctuary, and me, along with several members of the Barcelona pagan community at the Sikh langar.)

Indeed, the Sikhs’ generosity extended beyond the walls of the Barcelona Forum, where the Parliament was held. One of the more troubling issues surrounding that event was the eviction and displacement of several thousand people – mostly poor, tenement-dwelling immigrants and squatters – and the razing of their homes to pave the way for the various commercial buildings (hotels, convention center, concert hall, etc.) to be used by the Forum. Police barricades were deployed in an attempt to keep the remaining 'riff-raff' out of sight of Forum attendees and tourists, and when word about the langar spread throughout the city, and some of Barcelona’s poor went to the event to partake of the free meal, they were denied access by the Forum authorities. Nevertheless, the Sikhs dutifully took vats of food out beyond the Forum walls and fed them too.

I also had a conversation this morning with Jorge Manzano, a Jesuit priest who teaches philosophy at the University of Guadalajara and, from what several people here have told me, a liberal Catholic theologian who is very well-known and respected throughout México. Jorge was on one of the ‘Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred’ panels with me, and among his remarks he'd made several intriguing references to magic and mysticism which had left me curious to explore the subject a little more in depth with him. Today we had a spirited discussion that ranged from the writings of Carlos Castaneda, to the New Age movement as evidence of a hunger for the mystical experience that has not been sated by either science or materialism, to the growing diversity within Mexican society, and the complex plight of indigenous peoples in this country. I took the opportunity to tell him of very disturbing reports I’ve received from pagan friends in Guadalajara who’ve complained of religious discrimination and harassment by the authorities, to the extent of being blacklisted as members of ‘dangerous cults’ and risking random imprisonment or worse. Jorge listened very intently, and suggested that such extreme reactions are surely a symptom of the resistance that some Mexicans are experiencing toward becoming part of a more pluralistic society; he said he’d be glad to talk to my friends and see if he could be of any help.

After our closing meeting, and lunch, I said my farewells all around and went back to my room to finish the last bit of packing before leaving for Mexico City. Originally, I had thought of making the trip by bus, so I could at least see some of the countryside up close. It’s a twelve-hour ride from Monterrey, but first-class buses are fairly inexpensive and quite luxurious, so I thought it might be worth it; but then I found out that all the buses made the trip overnight, starting around 8 pm and therefore ruling out much sightseeing, so I decided at the last minute to catch a plane instead. As I was waiting in the hotel lobby for my ride to the airport, one of the Encuentro staffers came over very excitedly waving a couple of copies of that day’s newspaper, which had a color photo of me offering the blessing at the closing plenary – it was very sweet of her to hunt me down to give me the papers.

As it turned out, because I’d changed my plans so late, there had been no room for me in the van taking other presenters to the airport, so instead the Encuentro furnished me with a private car (a brand-new BMW, no less) and driver, so I had a very comfortable and leisurely ride to catch my plane. At the airport, I ran into Joseph Prabhu, another of my colleagues on the Parliament’s board and a professor of philosophy and comparative religion at California State University in Los Angeles, who, it turned out, was also going to Mexico City to give a talk, and was on the same flight.

As we lifted over El Cerro de la Silla, I mused a little on the events and experiences of the previous days, and on the new friendships I’d made during my stay in Monterrey. I was sure the next leg of my trip was going to be substantially different, though it was hard to predict exactly how; I had not been in Mexico City for a very long time, so, if nothing else, I expected to find that the place had changed a great deal. My musings were cut short, however, by the surprising brevity of the trip – it was supposed to take a little over an hour, but it seemed that, not quite forty minutes after take-off, we were getting ready to land.

The approach to Mexico City – or, as most Mexicans tend to call it, El DF (English speakers roughly pronounce it ‘Ell Day Effay’), short for El Distrito Federal, or the Federal District – was breathtaking. I had never seen it from the air before, and though I knew that it is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world, with some 25 million people spread over more than 11 thousand square kilometers (by comparison, greater New York City has about 18.5 million people and some 8600 km²), I was not prepared for how vast it seemed – even from the air, I couldn’t see where it ended.

I was met at the airport by Natris Branwen, a very friendly and solicitous Mexican pagan whom I’ve known for several years through the Internet. Natris is on the staff of CIDEHUM (the Circle for Humanistic Studies), a Gestalt therapy training institute, and when she heard that I was going to be in México, invited me to come to El DF to give a talk on paganism at their center. I helped Joseph to get a cab to the university where he was staying (getting on the right cab in Mexico City is quite important, not only to ensure that you arrive at your destination directly, but also safely…), and exchanged phone numbers and talked about possibly attending each other’s talks. Then Natris and her friend Raquel took me to my hotel, which was just a couple of blocks away from the Zócalo, the huge square at the very heart of the old part of the city.

The Hotel Catedral is small and modest, particularly in contrast to the place where I stayed in Monterrey. It’s on a fairly narrow one-way side street which was almost deserted when we arrived just after dark, though I was warned that during the day it would be so crowded with peddlers and passers-by that it would take a very long time to drive just a couple of blocks to the closest thoroughfare. I was also warned that it could be dangerous to walk in this area alone at night, though I did so several times and had no problem. But the hotel was very close to several of the places I wanted to visit, in addition to being clean, comfortable and serviceable, and – at a mere $50US a night – probably the best bargain in the center of town.

We had dinner at the hotel restaurant, where we were joined by Sara and Carlos, the couple who founded and direct CIDEHUM. I had a very nice mole poblano de guajolote (guajolote is the common term for ‘turkey’ in México, and yes, it carries the same derogatory connotation here that the English word has in the States…), and we talked about plans for the next day. We decided that they’d pick me up fairly early for a trip to Tula, so after they left I resisted the temptation to wander a bit by myself, and went to bed instead.

Thursday, 27 September 2007 --- Spanish Gold and Toltec Warriors

Natris, Sara, Carlos, and Sara’s sister Diana came by to pick me up a little after eight this morning, hoping to avoid the street congestion and get an early start. There wasn’t much happening outside yet, so we decided we could at least afford to have a cup of coffee at the hotel restaurant to tide us over until we stopped someplace for breakfast along the way; but, in just the twenty minutes or so that it took to drink our coffee and go get the car, the street outside the hotel underwent a remarkable transformation.

Vendors selling umbrellas, magazines, CDs, candy, flowers, clothes, toys, and all sorts of trinkets had begun to set up their portable booths not only on both sidewalks all the way down the street, but also right on the street itself, next to the sidewalks. There was now barely enough room for an average-sized car to squeeze through without hitting something or somebody, although, had such a mishap ensued, it could not possibly have caused very much damage, given that traffic was literally inching along due to the many shopping carts and basket-laden bicycles and scooters overflowing with merchandise and being maneuvered right down the middle of the road by yet more vendors – some of them children – looking for a vacant spot in which to set-up. Hundreds of people were starting to jam the place, some milling about the booths and tables, checking out the goods, while others, probably on their way to work, vainly strove to hurry through the constantly-shifting labyrinth of things and beings. I guess we should have skipped the coffee…

It took us quite a while to get out of Mexico City and onto the highway that would eventually take us to Tula. About an hour into the trip, we stopped for breakfast in the town of Tepotzotlán, at a restaurant felicitously named Casa Mago (‘House of the Magician’). After all the hotel food in Monterrey, I had resolved to eat nothing but authentic Mexican dishes for the remainder of my trip, so I ordered some huevos huitlacoche – soft scrambled eggs with, well, huitlacoche, which is a black, edible fungus that grows as a parasite on ears of maize. In the U.S., it is commonly called ‘corn smut’ and routinely destroyed as blight. The Mexican name comes from a náhuatl word meaning ‘excrement,’ though it has been considered a culinary delicacy in this land since at least the time of the Aztecs. It was quite savory, with a consistency similar to pâté and an earthy taste reminiscent of truffles that really brought out the flavor of the eggs; I bet it’d be really great in tamales – may have to have this again before going back to the States.

After breakfast, my hosts took me just down the block, for a brief visit to the Museo Nacional del Virreinato (The National Museum of the Viceroyship), the main tourist attraction in Tepotzotlán. It’s a small museum established in the mid-1960s, and housed within a 17th century church and school. The collection proved to be a blatant obeisance to the ‘splendor’ of the Spanish conquest of México, as evidenced by many of the pieces on display (note the mounted conquistador on the right, with his horse stomping upon an indigenous ‘prince’), the various dioramas, and the disingenuous iterations of the Spaniards’ eventual ‘party-line’ to retroactively rationalize their occupation of these lands and their savaging of the Aztecs – they had to do it in order to ‘liberate’ the other, smaller tribes from the yoke of the oppressive Aztec empire (ironically, this was the very same rationale used by the U.S. some 350 years later to justify the so-called ‘Spanish-American’ War). The most famous exhibits in the museum are the two retablos – huge, floor-to-ceiling altarpieces (each maybe 15’ wide by 20’ high), elaborately carved out of cedarwood and completely covered in 23.5-karat gold leaf. These structures, proudly identified as symbols of the ‘Spiritual Conquest’ of Nueva España (the Spanish colonial name for the lands under its control in North and Central America), are, without a doubt, masterful works of art. To me, though, that kind of ostentatious display of ecclesiastical wealth, especially in the midst of an indigenous population mired in poverty, disease and hunger, just seems unconscionable and immoral. Needless to say, I didn’t stay very long.

From there we went to Tula de Allende, a small town about 50 miles to the northwest of Mexico City in the state of Hidalgo, an area with abundant deposits of alabaster and obsidian, which some believe to be the site of the ancient Toltec city of Tollan, given mythical standing by the Aztecs. There’s a good deal of confusion and controversy surrounding this site (as there is in general with a lot of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican history, both because there were such complex interrelationships among the various peoples, and because the Spaniards destroyed most of the documentation that could have shed considerably more light on the subject). The prevailing current thought seems to be that the site at Tula was built by the Toltecs several hundred years before the Aztecs arrived and made it their own; then again, there are some very interesting similarities between this site and the Mayan remains at Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán which have raised a lot of questions and debate concerning their origins.

We started at the small museum in the Archaeological Zone, and procured the assistance of Macuilli Tecpactlzin, a very knowledgeable local guide, who gave us a running commentary on the various artifacts – including a ceremonial urn depicting the face of the rain-god Tlaloc (note the flowing rivers of 'tears' issuing from his eyes), as well as one of the earliest examples of a chacmool (a sideways-glancing, reclining guardian figure, usually bearing a bowl upon its chest wherein were placed the hearts of sacrificial victims) – and then led us out to the ruins. On the way there, he pointed out several examples of nopal, an edible cactus that has been of great importance in the history of México – it’s depicted on the national seal, and the Aztecs apparently considered it a symbol of everlasting life, since even when the plant dries out, a new one grows from it. The fruit of the nopal, called tuna (nothing to do with fish…) is sweet and widely used in Mexican cuisine.

Macuilli asked me to take special note of some white spots that could be found randomly on the surface of the nopal; those, he informed me, were examples of a parasitic insect that the Aztecs called nocheztli, but is commonly known in México as cochinil (‘cochineal,’ in English) which feeds and breeds on the cactus and exudes a white secretion to protect itself from predators and the sun. The cochinil produces a very durable, intensely bright red dye that was precious to the Aztecs as a symbol of life, given its resemblance to blood, and was used by them to paint their temples and other important buildings. Apparently they valued it so much that they often demanded tribute from some of the subservient tribes in cochinil, rather than gold or silver.

As we entered the archaeological site, we came upon a recessed, L-shaped field surrounded by a stone wall – a fairly typical arena for the playing of ullamalitzli, a pre-Columbian ballgame that seems to have been popular, in one version or another, among many indigenous peoples throughout Central America. To judge by how the game is played nowadays, it appears to have had elements similar to basketball, volleyball and soccer, with two teams vying for a hard and heavy rubber ball kept in play by being hit mostly with hips and forearms. But the game was much more than a sport, it was fundamentally a symbolic and ritualistic contest in which the players, at least on certain important occasions, were actually competing for their lives, with the losers being sacrificed at the end.

From there, we walked past a carved stone rampart, the Coatepantli, or Wall of Serpents, which shows depictions of gigantic rattlesnakes devouring human skeletal remains, as well as images of eagles and jaguars, symbols of warriorship among the Aztecs. It is topped by stylized spiral carvings of conchs, which are a symbol of Quetzalcóatl, the Feathered Serpent deity found throughout Mesoamerican mythology, and all along the wall one can still see faded splotches of cochinil paint from the Aztec era.

Just beyond the Coatepantli is the main attraction of the Tula site, a large, five-layer pyramid with typically tall, narrow steps. Macuilli advised us not to climb the steps straight up as if we were taking a regular set of stairs, a mistake which he said most people tend to make. According to him, extant carvings and paintings, as well as traditional lore, indicate that the steps should be managed in a diagonal, zig-zagging pattern, resembling the slithering movements of a serpent; he said that such an approach is much less strenuous and, in the end, faster, than going straight up or down.

Just as we reached the top of the pyramid, I noticed a small feather drifting toward the ground right in front of me; I caught it and instinctively looked up, but there were no birds flying overhead or even standing any place within sight, and there was no wind at the time, which made me wonder where the feather could have come from. Macuilli took notice, and asked me what I had; when I showed him, he said it must be some sort of sign, since, according to him, birds never came near the top of the pyramid, and he pointed out that there were no other feathers to be seen anywhere around us.

Upon this pyramid are the famous Atlantes de Tula – four large, carved basalt statues of Toltec warriors, about 15 feet tall, which, along with several other carved pillars, presumably supported a roof or some other structure (a lot of people don’t seem to realize that most of what remains of the Mesoamerican pyramids are really foundations upon which rested wooden buildings of one sort or another, long since destroyed). Apparently, there are some New Age types who hold that the statues at Tula represent beings from the fabled continent of Atlantis and are of extraterrestrial origin, to judge from the ‘space ray guns’ carved at their sides. In actuality, the ‘guns’ are really spear-throwers called átlatl (átl is the nahuátl word for ‘water’) – hence the name Atlantes – which were originally used for fishing and hunting, and subsequently as weapons.

On our way back to the parking lot, as we dawdled along a row of merchants displaying their wares, so I could buy a few souvenirs, I overheard Macuilli asking a couple of my companions if I was an anthropologist, because of some of the questions I had asked. As I finished shopping and rejoined them, they were in the process of explaining to him who I was and the purpose of my visit to México. Macuilli was very interested in hearing about my background and practices, and said that now that he knew what I did, it made sense to him why he’d had the impression that my catching that feather on top of the pyramid was some kind of sign.

He also wanted to know about the Encuentro in Monterrey, and became very animated when I mentioned the Indigenous Walk, and some of what I had experienced there. He really opened up then, and we carried a long and rambling conversation about indigenous rights, shamanism, Carlos Castaneda, the appropriation of indigenous ceremonies by ‘New Age White Indians’, etc. Even after reaching the parking lot, we kept talking for another hour or so. As we were saying good-bye, Macuilli invited me to come back to attend a private ceremony they were having in two days’ time; unfortunately, that was the night when my talk on paganism was scheduled, so I regretfully had to decline.

Speaking of Castaneda, on our way back to el DF, we stopped for a bit in Tula to get something to eat, and we walked right by the cathedral, which I remembered was mentioned in one of his books (I forget which) as the place where he supposedly met the Death Defier, a shape-shifting sorceress who had lived for hundreds of years. I poked my head in, but, alas, apparently she was out of town today.

Earlier in the day, while we were still in Mexico City, I had called Helen Samuels – the American woman I’d met at the Indigenous Walk – and left a message to see if there was any chance of our getting together. On the drive back to the hotel, and once again within cell phone range, I found she’d responded with an invitation to a small gathering in the city the following evening. We already had a trip planned to the basilica of Guadalupe and to the pyramids in Teotihuacan, but my hosts assured me it would not be a problem to arrange a visit with Helen at the end of the day.

Friday, 28 September 2007 --- A Drizzly Stroll Along the Avenue of the Dead

Today, my friends came for me right at 8:00 and we left the hotel immediately, managing to just beat the crazy sidewalk scene that had delayed us the previous morning, and we grabbed a quick Mexican breakfast at a coffee shop along the way to our eventual destination of Teotihuacan, the huge complex of pyramids and ruins – about 25 miles to the northeast of Mexico City – which once comprised the largest pre-Columbian city in Mesoamerica.

But we had another brief stop to make between breakfast and the pyramids: the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Catholic patroness of México. I had been to the old basilica many years ago, and was curious to see the ‘new’ one (built in the mid 1970s), since it was pretty much on the way. Besides, no matter your religion, it’s rather impolite to visit Mexico City without paying your respects to the Lady.

La Guadalupita, as she is fondly called here, stands at the very core of Mexican culture. In fact, people who say they venerate the Virgin have outnumbered Christians altogether in some opinion polls, underscoring a famous statement by the novelist Carlos Fuentes to the effect that, to be a Mexican, you don’t have to believe in God, but you do have to believe in her.

The legend goes that the Virgin Mary appeared to an Indian man named Juan Diego on a cool December morning barely ten years after Hernán Cortés had conquered the Mexica (Aztecs) in Tenochtitlan, the heart of what is now the Federal District, and asked him to tell the bishop to build her a church on the hill of Tepeyac where they were standing, overlooking the city. When the bishop asked for some kind of sign, Juan Diego met the Virgin again, and she instructed him to gather flowers from the hilltop, place them in his ayate (a sort of apron), and bring them to the bishop. Despite it being winter, he found flowers – Spanish roses, no less – blooming on the hill (a miracle), and when he unfurled his apron to give them to the bishop, they found that an image of the Virgin had formed on his ayate (another miracle). While the Virgin had Caucasian features, her skin was darker than that normally found on representations of Mary, so she became a powerful symbol for the indigenous people, who converted to Catholicism by the millions over the next few years. The original, miraculous image, cut out from Juan Diego’s ayate, hangs in the basilica and is the focus of constant peregrinations by the devout.

That’s the official Catholic story, taught to children not only in México, but all over the Hispanic world (though I vividly remember that, in the version I was told as a child in school, Juan Diego was an Indian boy, not a sixty-year-old man, when the Virgin appeared to him.) There is another, different story, of course. A lot of non-Catholics (and even some Catholics, including clergy) would point out, first of all, the similarities between the Virgin of Guadalupe and Tonantzin, the Aztec mother/lunar goddess with whom the hill of Tepeyac had long been associated. Many of them believe that the whole story was an elaborate plot by the Church to convert the Indians, that the picture was simply painted by a Spanish artist, and that Juan Diego was recruited (and paid handsomely) by the bishop to stage a charade. The Church certainly made syncretic associations of the Virgin and the saints with various pagan deities throughout Europe long before the colonization of the Americas, and the influence that la Guadalupita exerted on the indigenous populations was not only demonstrated by the huge numbers of conversions following her ‘appearance,’ but also by the fact that her image, painted on battle standards, was used by both Miguel Hidalgo and Emiliano Zapata, respectively, in the Mexican War of Independence and the Mexican Revolution to rally armies of mostly indigenous soldiers. The image of the Virgin has undergone limited photochemical analysis which seems to indicate that it was made with conventional materials and methods used by European artists in the 16th century, but the Church has also commissioned other tests which negate those findings and conclude that the materials and the process responsible for the image are of no known provenance, supporting the belief in its miraculous origin.

We parked in an underground garage about a block from the basilica, and, to get from the car to the stairs leading back up to the street, we had to pass through a conglomerate of religious goods stores, all seemingly selling the exact same things: pictures, statues, books, ashtrays, mugs, coasters, keychains – you name it – bearing the image of la Guadalupita. In truth, it seemed more like one gigantic store subdivided into maybe a dozen smaller ones, except that there didn’t seem to be any difference in the merchandise they were selling, and they were all interconnected. At any rate, there didn’t appear to be a way to get back outside without going through at least one of them – religious marketing at its most sophisticated…

As we entered the plaza, I saw the old colonial basilica directly in front of us, pretty much as I remembered it; to the left was the new building, much bigger and modern. The plaza was mostly deserted, though my friends told me that, toward the beginning of December, as the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe approaches, the place is overflowing with throngs of pilgrims from all parts of the country and beyond (many of them, like the man on the right, make the journey on their knees). They said that, in fact, one of the main reasons they’d had to build a new basilica was that the old one, built in the 17th century on weak foundations, had started sinking over the years from the weight of all the pilgrims that would crowd into it at various times of the year.

The new basilica is quite ample and modern, and apparently can hold more than 40,000 people at once during the major holidays. Just as we entered, a group of chasubled priests were processing in to say Mass for a couple of hundred faithful. The framed image of the Virgin was clearly visible hanging under a crucifix behind the main altar, with a Mexican flag draped beneath it, but there didn’t seem to be a way to get close enough to see her well – let alone take a picture – without getting up on the altar itself, which, of course, we weren’t about to do. But my friends took me to a side door which revealed that there was a gap maybe 15 feet wide between the rear of the main altar and the back wall where the image was hanging, a space that wasn’t at all noticeable if you looked at the altar from a distance. So we were literally about five feet behind and twelve feet below the priests celebrating Mass, and right beneath the image of la Guadalupita. Two short ‘moving sidewalks’ (the kind you’d find in airports) going slowly in different directions, enabled visitors to view the image closely, and at the same time prevented logjams – a very well-designed setup all around.

On our way back to the car, as we walked once again through the religious shops, one of my companions purchased a bag of unconsecrated communion hosts; apparently this is quite commonplace in Mexico City – however many hosts don’t get consecrated during Mass over the course of a week are simply bagged up and sold as snacks, which my friends happily consumed on the way to the pyramids.

Teotihuacan appears to have been the largest city in the Americas prior to the arrival of the Spanish conquerors, and perhaps the fifth or sixth largest in the world during its heyday, with more than a quarter million inhabitants. It’s been determined that the main parts of the city were built around the time of Christ (though there’s much debate as to the identity of its builders) and that it flourished for several centuries until the central section – including the three main pyramids, the temples, and the homes of the aristocracy – were burned and apparently abandoned around 750 C.E. Some scholars believe this was the result of an enemy attack, but others speculate it could have been due to a revolt by the lower classes, since they seem to have continued living in the remaining parts of the city for a couple hundred more years. It was subsequently taken over by the Toltecs, and finally by the Aztecs, who considered it the ‘home of the gods’.

As we entered the site, we were directly in front of what the Spaniards called la Ciudadela (‘the citadel’), a walled, recessed courtyard (estimated to have been large enough to hold the entire population of Teotihuacan within it in case of an enemy attack) fronted by four small pyramids and encompassing, toward the back, the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent god (in the photo at left, you can see two of the small frontal pyramids, and the top of Quetzalcoatl’s showing behind them in the distance). The Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent is not nearly as large as those of the Sun and the Moon, but it features more ornamentation, including stone heads of animals going up the central steps (which are much smaller than the steps of the other two pyramids), and carved heads of Quetzalcoatl and of the rain god, Tlaloc, along the sides.

To our left, extending for a couple of miles, was the Miccaotli, or, in Spanish, la Calzada de los muertos (the ‘Avenue of the Dead’, so called by the Aztecs because they thought the various small pyramids along its course were tombs) – a straight and wide boulevard leading almost due north, and ending at the foot of the Pyramid of the Moon. Apparently, the Avenue goes in the opposite direction for another three miles or so, but since that’s not the area of main archaeological interest, it hasn’t been as well-kept or defined as the northern end. For most of its upper stretch, the Avenue of the Dead is lined by stone embankments over a foot high, which has led some researchers to suspect that it might, at one point, have been filled with water – one very long reflecting pool that would have captured and mirrored the light of both Sun and Moon, to whom the two main pyramids were ostensibly dedicated, and which would have also served as part of an irrigation system to provide easy access to water to all parts of the city. One author has even suggested that it might have resembled Venice, with a multitude of shallow, crisscrossing canals.

We walked in the light rain along the Avenue of the Dead, and finally stood at the base of the Pyramid of the Sun, the third largest in the world. Like most of the other pyramids in México, it was built in the talud-tablero style: the talud is typically an inwardly-sloping platform upon which sits the tablero – a square or rectangular table which is in some cases slightly larger than its supporting talud, so that its edges protrude; each succesive talud-tablero is smaller than the one beneath it, creating the pyramidal shape. In Aztec times, the stones and adobe bricks from which the pyramid was built would have been covered with (presumably) white stucco painted with bright, colorful designs, and would have had a huge, roofed wooden temple at the very top – in other words, it (and the other pyramids) would have looked remarkably different from their current appearance.

The Pyramid of the Sun is about 250 feet high, which means that to get to the very top is the equivalent of climbing more than 20 ordinary flights of stairs; except that, in this case, the steps are not the usual 7 inches or so in height, but more like 12”-14” of bare, worn, uneven stone, and some of the steepest stairs have no handrails. When you add to this the fact that you’re standing at an altitude of almost a mile-and-a-half above sea level, where the air is fairly thin, the climb can be a daunting prospect for all but the most athletic. On top of everything else, on this particular day the persistent drizzle had rendered the steps quite slippery, and as a result two of my companions decided to forgo the climb altogether. The rest of us, using the zig-zagging approach that our guide had taught us the day before, made it to the top in about fifteen minutes – not bad considering that we had to stop a couple of times to catch our breaths, and were also slowed by the surprisingly large number of visitors on such a wet, unseasonably cold day.

The view from the top was stunning, despite the low clouds, rain and fog that limited the range of visibility; I can just imagine what one could see on a bright, sunny day. Today, the Teotihuacan with which most people are familiar is just the roughly two-mile long stretch from the Ciudadela to the Pyramid of the Moon, but that’s just a tiny fraction of the size the city would have had in its apogee, estimated at over 30 square miles. I have seen several different artists’ imagined renditions of Teotihuacan based on the archaeological information available, and one of the exhibits in the museum in Monterrey was a large diorama of the city. Standing on top of the pyramid, I tried to imagine the sights and sounds of what once was a teeming cosmopolitan center – the vast expanse of rectangular buildings, laid out in neat quadrants, spreading all over the valley, the marketplaces, the bustling crowds, the shouts of peddlers, the clouds of burning copal from all the various temples, in striking contrast to the silence and stillness of this place today.

Just fifteen minutes or so after we’d reached the top, a bus tour group joined us, and among them was my friend Joseph Prabhu, with whom I’d flown in from Monterrey. It was a very nice surprise, and we got into a spirited conversation about what each of us had been doing over the last couple of days in Mexico City. One of my companions took a photo of Joseph and me with the Pyramid of the Moon in the background. We also met a young woman from Barcelona, who had attended some of the Parliament events there in 2004, and who was very gratified to learn that both of us were quite familiar with her home town.

Eventually, we made our way back down to the Avenue of the Dead to join the rest of our party, and continued on to the Pyramid of the Moon, which is a bit smaller than the one we had just visited, but still considerably larger than the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent. The Pyramid of the Moon sits at the northernmost end of the Avenue of the Dead, and offers a very different perspective from that of the Pyramid of the Sun. We were not able to climb to the very top, since some of the steps were in bad shape and especially dangerous because of the rain, so access was prohibited beyond the first main platform. Still, we had a very good view of the length of the Avenue of the Dead, and of the various smaller pyramids and platforms alongside it.

Our last stop in Teotihuacan was the Temple of Quetzalpapalotl, the Feathered Butterfly, goddess of reincarnation and symbol of the spirits of the ancestors. Quetzalpapalotl was identified with the Monarch Butterfly, which migrates from the U.S. and Canada and arrives at its winter habitat in central México by the millions from mid to late October (interestingly, this is right around the time when Mesoamerican indigenous peoples celebrate their Day of the Dead.) The Temple of Quetzalpapalotl was the most colorful place we saw in Teotihuacan – lots of reds and pinks bringing out the details in intricately carved stone columns.

By the time we returned to the parking lot, we were pretty famished, so we stopped for an early dinner at a nearby restaurant. The waitress brought us the customary cortesía (‘courtesy’), a complimentary caballito (‘little horse’ – a small, narrow, elongated shot glass) brimming with tequila, and I ordered some mixiote, a sort of spicy Mexican haggis, which was delicious. During dinner, I called Helen Samuels to confirm that we’d be dropping by for a visit a little later, and to get directions.

The drive back to el DF was much quicker than we’d anticipated, and though it took us a little while to find the place where Helen’s gathering was being held, we made it with plenty of time. I was really looking forward to seeing her again, as she had felt very much like a kindred spirit during our brief encounter in Monterrey.

The place turned out to be this amazing, huge house in an otherwise unremarkable middle-class neighborhood in the southwestern part of the city. The house had a high concrete wall all around it, so we couldn’t see it at all until two massive steel gates were opened by remote control and we eventually managed an impossibly tight, 120-degree right turn off the very narrow street we were on, with a long line of cars impatiently waiting behind us.

Then we found ourselves inside a large, forested courtyard that already held perhaps two-dozen other vehicles. A beautiful, friendly dog came out to greet us, with Helen at his heels; she ushered us inside the fairly modern, multileveled building, with lots of picture windows and open spaces, and gorgeous works of art everywhere – many of them, as we soon learned, created by the owner of the house, an artist who had just spent more than twenty years trying to reproduce the brilliant, organic pigments that the Aztecs used in their paintings, and which she had recently begun to produce commercially. The place was full of all kinds of interesting people – musicians, environmentalists, visual artists, filmmakers, social activists, community organizers – most of whom seemed to be very close to one another. They reminded me so much of my own community, that I instantly felt right at home.

I spent a good bit of time talking with Helen about the Encuentro and about her various projects. She, along with some of the other people at the gathering, lives in an ecovillage just south of the city, which she invited me to visit in the next few days while I’m here, if I have the time. She very kindly gave me the gift of a 250-page book – compiled by Laura Valdés Kuri, one of the women present tonight – entitled Ecohábitat: Experiencias rumbo a la sustentabilidad (‘Ecohabitat: Experiences Toward Sustainability’), which features some of the people in her group and includes many beautiful color photographs illustrating their work in environmental education, alternative energy resources, organic farming, community development, earth spirituality, street theater, etc.

One of the people Helen wanted me to meet was Alberto Ruz Buenfil, who, from what I gathered, is one of the founders of her community; in Monterrey she had told me that I reminded her of him, that she had a feeling we did a very similar type of work – she referred to him as a 'shaman' – and that we'd get along famously. Alberto is the son of a very noted Mexican archaeologist who specialized in the Mayan civilization and discovered the tomb of the god-king Pakal the Great; he told me about accompanying his father on his digs throughout Central America, of the connections he made as a result with various indigenous peoples, and of his sense of how important it is to revive the spirit of tribal communities in Western culture.

I also had a chance to talk with Alice Klein, who is the publisher of NOW, Toronto's alternative weekly magazine which, as it turns out, I remembered reading when i was in that city last year in the summer. Alice's first film, Call of the Hummingbird, just came out in the spring and is having its Mexican premiere this weekend. The film is a documentary about an ecospiritual festival in Brazil – one of the events organized by Alberto and his nomadic caravan – and apparently includes some of the people gathered at the house tonight. She invited me to attend the first showing tomorrow, but unfortunately I can't do so because of my talk at CIDEH; there is another showing on Sunday, though, so I'll try to make that.

I thoroughly enjoyed my visit with these folks – they felt so much like my crowd, like family; several of them commented that they could have sworn they’d known me from before, and one young woman, in particular, told me something like, “I feel as if you were a distant uncle of mine, whom I’d heard a lot about, but had never met, and here you are, in the flesh.” As we said our good-byes, we exchanged names and e-mail addresses all around; I would definitely like to remain in touch with this group.

Saturday, 29 September 2007 --- My talk in Mexico City

Today was the day of my presentation at the Gestalt therapy center, so my Mexico City friends were quite busy with their preparations throughout most of the day and left me to my own devices for the morning and early afternoon. That was fine by me, since I thoroughly enjoy going off on my own to explore unfamiliar places, so I took an extensive walk all around the bustling side streets and eventually caught a cab for a very quick and cursory visit to the Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology) over by Chapultepec Park (the huge statue of the rain god Tláloc, shown in the picture on the left, sits outside the museum). The place is huge and amazing, and it would be easy to spend a couple of days carefully poring through all of the exhibits (among them the famous Piedra del Sol – the Aztec calendrical Sun Stone shown at the right), but knowing that I had very little time, I still wanted to get a taste of it, as I didn’t know if I’d get a chance to come back in the next few days.

Shortly upon returning to the hotel, Natris came by and took me to their center, which occupies a fairly modern, three-floor stucco house on the fringes of the business district. CIDEHUM, which is directed by Carlos and Sara, provides Gestalt therapy training as well as counseling services; while it doesn’t have any direct connection to paganism as such, a few of the staff members as well several of the students and clients do consider themselves to be pagan. By the time we arrived, Carlos and Sara were marshalling more than a dozen volunteers to decorate the place, prepare the food, set up the sound system, etc. This was the first time they’d organized an event of this nature, and they were going all out with the preparations. They insisted that I wear my robe, and the two of them and Natris dressed up in similar ritual fashion, and constructed an elaborate altar next to the stage. They had also printed three-color posters, buttons and t-shirts.

Despite their excitement, though, they were also rather concerned about attendance – about 50 people had contacted them to say they were planning to come, but that had been before a couple of local groups created some degree of controversy by publicly boycotting the talk. One of them wrote to me ahead of time to inform me of their decision and to reassure me that it was not at all directed at me personally; rather, they said their action was prompted by a concern that the CIDEHUM people lacked the ‘standing and qualifications to sponsor such an important conference by a well-known international elder’, and that it really should have been organized by ‘a much more established group.’ I wrote them back explaining that the organizers had been the only people who’d approached me in the year since I had sent out an announcement of my upcoming trip to México, that my accepting their very gracious invitation in no way meant that I was ‘taking sides’ with any one group over another, and I encouraged them to reconsider their decision, to attend the talk, and to catch me afterwards, as I would be very happy to meet with them.

The other boycotter was a local Wiccan high priestess who reputedly charges huge amounts of money for the public classes that she teaches; she summarily forbid all of her students to attend the event under threat of banishment, claiming that I was an impostor, that I wasn’t a member of the board of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, and that I was not a presenter at the Encuentro in Monterrey. My hosts, as might be expected, were quite distressed by all of this – concerned that I would be upset, worried that attendance might suffer significantly, and particularly incensed at the woman for openly lying: one of them even went so far as to post in several pagan and New Age forums the relevant URLs of both the Parliament and the Encuentro, in an indignant effort to ‘uphold my reputation.’

They finally calmed down a bit after I reassured them several times that I was not at all upset, that I had experienced this kind of thing many times over the years, understood the reasons why it happened, was not at all concerned about my reputation being sullied, and that it would not matter to me if even just ten people showed up, instead of fifty. When the time for the talk to start finally arrived, and they came to take me to the hall, they seemed much more relaxed and were smiling broadly: there were about seventy-five people waiting for us downstairs.

I had just expected to walk right into the room and sit down, but as I started to do so my hosts quickly grabbed me and asked me to wait; it turned out they had other, rather more formal, plans in mind. Sara, Carlos and Natris led me to a small alcove next to the stage, where we were joined by two young women and two young men, dressed to the nines, who were there to act as our respective escorts. An announcer – one of Carlos and Sara’s sons – let everyone know that the evening’s event was about to begin, and then, after a long dramatic pause, each of us, in turn, was loudly introduced by a staff-pounding herald, as our young escorts ushered us by the arm to our seats at a banner-draped table. Next, four torch-bearers called to the directions, Sara welcomed everyone on behalf of CIDEHUM, and the announcer introduced a local young man who played several musical pieces on a variety of indigenous wind instruments, including the Mexican version of a didjeridoo. Then the announcer introduced Carlos, who in turn introduced me. I had not anticipated anything resembling that level of formality, and that was certainly not the tone that I intended to convey in my talk, so after checking with Carlos and Natris to make sure they wouldn’t be offended, I just grabbed a chair and sat myself right at the edge of the stage.

Often, when I give a talk in that kind of a setting, I try to start by getting a sense of the audience’s composition; the fact that my participation in the Encuentro in Monterrey had been included in the publicity for this event gave me a good opening to ask how many different religions were represented tonight. As it turned out, just under half of the audience was pagan. Of the remainder, the great majority was (predictably) Catholic, with a few Protestants, one Jew, one Baha’i, and even one Jehovah’s Witness – that gave me a pretty good idea of what to talk about, and how.

As I had done at the Encuentro, I began by placing paganism in the context of the various indigenous traditions around the world, and gave a brief account of pagan cultures in pre-Christian times, and of how they came to be almost completely eradicated by the rise of Christianity, and pointed to specific similarities between what happened to pagan peoples in Europe and indigenous peoples in the Americas. Then I talked a bit about the ways that some pagan traditions were able to survive into the present, and moved from there to a discussion of the modern pagan movement and of the three main general currents that can be found within it: the traditional, as embodied by the random and mostly localized country-folk practices that managed to remain alive in places such as the Scottish Gàidhealtachd, Wales, Brittany, Lithuania, the Basque country, parts of Scandinavia, etc.; the reconstructionist efforts, primarily text-based, that seek to recreate modern versions of ancient traditions, such as various forms of ‘non-wiccan witchcraft’, Ásatrú, and Celtic Reconstructionism; and the eclectic approaches – including Wicca, neopaganism, Celtic shamanism, etc. – that borrow elements from many diverse sources to create new syntheses.

I gave some examples and told a few anecdotes from my own experiences in the pagan movement over the past forty years, and then spoke at some length about EarthSpirit while presenting a slide show, using it as a model to illustrate how we have attempted both to preserve and to develop pagan culture and community. I also included a bunch of slides of several Parliaments of the World’s Religions, as well as some from the Encuentro in Monterrey, to give them a taste of the work that we do within the interfaith movement. Originally, we had scheduled about a half hour afterwards for questions, but there were so many of those that we wound up going for more than twice that long, so that the whole presentation lasted close to three hours.

Our hosts had gone all out to provide a table full of many different and delicious antojitos (Mexican finger food) as well as several choices of wine, so as we nibbled and drank, many people came up to ask more questions or just to chat. I had the great pleasure of meeting several Mexican pagans with whom I’ve corresponded at various times over the years through the Internet. In particular, I was delighted to finally meet Carmen Orellana, founder of the Pagan Community of Mexico, an organization which offers classes, gatherings, rites of passage, etc., and which has been making efforts to gain legal status for paganism as a religion in this country. Though Carmen is only in her early thirties, she’s already kept the PCM going for some seven years, and just recently became the representative of the Pagan Federation International in México. Both Carmen and her group proved to be delightful people, and I am very much looking forward to seeing her again on Monday, when I hope we’ll have more time to talk in depth. I also met three students of the woman who had boycotted the talk; they were very upset with their teacher for telling them they couldn’t attend, so they decided to come anyway, and really enjoyed the evening. I was very grateful for all the really nice things people told me about my presentation, and once again was deeply struck by the great warmth and friendliness of the Mexican people.

Sunday, 30 September 2007 --- Hummingbirds, Blue Houses, and Crowded Markets

It was nice, once again, not to have to wake up and leave real early in the morning. Today I made the pleasant discovery that, in addition to the restaurant in the lobby, my hotel also has an open-air café on the roof, and that’s where I took my breakfast as well as a lovely view of the old city.

My friends came to pick me up around 11:30, and drove me to a fairly upscale part of town, to the theatre where Call of the Hummingbird was supposed to be playing. The young man at the ticket window, however, had no information about the film, and it took several phone calls for him to determine that, yes, indeed, the documentary would be shown as part of an unscheduled, unadvertised Sunday film festival, but not for another forty-five minutes (Carlos kept shaking his head and saying, with a rueful little smile, “This is the real México…This is the real México…”). So, we waited at a small café next to the theatre, where we had coffee and this delicious thing (I’m still not sure whether it was dessert or a cocktail…) made of very tart lemon sorbet mixed with tequila and just a touch of chile.

Predictably, there were very few people at the screening, though a bunch more came in after the lights had gone down. The film was a fascinating account, warts and all, of what happens when about a thousand people – mostly strangers speaking several different languages – gather to create an impromptu ecovillage over the course of thirteen days in a gorgeous but very rustic location in the Amazonian forest of Brazil during the fall of 2005. The film opens on an exciting, upbeat note as the activists, poets, musicians, artists, scientists, clowns, healers, and so on from various parts of the world – who seemingly make up the very diverse group of participants – set about the work of developing community. Things quickly start turning sour, though, as participants begin confronting the enormity of the details involved, and the many problems that arise, in attempting to organically develop a non-hierarchical structure that will allow them to function as a community. Alberto and his former partner, Liora Adler, who are clearly the ‘initiators’ of the event, execute the delicate dance of allowing things to happen as they will, while intervening occasionally when something starts to get out of hand. They stress the dynamics of consensus process, but as any of us who have worked with that approach can tell, it’s not an easy thing to implement quickly with a large group of strangers who are conditioned to function in other systems and modalities. The film is being advertised – quite accurately, in my opinion – as “Survivor for social change addicts.”

As we left the theatre, we ran into Alice Klein, who was coming in for the next screening and was very glad that we had been able to make it. We chatted briefly, and she very generously gave me a DVD of the film, which I’m thinking of showing at the next Rites of Spring.

My companions were totally fascinated by the documentary; they had never seen anything remotely comparable, and couldn’t stop discussing it from all different points of view: the film’s stated concept of ‘politicizing the spiritual and spiritualizing the political’; the huge amount of fun it must have been to run naked through woods and fields, and to take part in ceremonies in such beautiful and wild surroundings; the heart-warming and hopeful idealism so alive in the faces of the various ‘characters’; the insensitivity, selfishness and apathy that led to most of the problems encountered; the tantalizing notion of creating a truly communitarian society, with an egalitarian and participatory form of government that eschewed authoritarianism and emphasized fairness and cooperation; the focus on developing a way of life truly in harmony with the natural world.

I, too, found the film fascinating, but for rather different reasons. I had to explain to my friends that pretty much everything we’d just witnessed was extremely familiar to me – at times, painfully so – even if the specific details, the settings, or the degrees of involvement might have been somewhat different; that much of the work I had done over the past thirty-five years to try to develop spiritual community based on very similar premises had entailed a lot of the same processes, experiences, and problems; and that as part of that work I had had attended dozens of gatherings like the one in the film, some under even more trying circumstances.

This led to a long discussion about the development of paganism in the U.S., about EarthSpirit, Rites of Spring, Glenwood, Anamanta, and how all of it fit together. Toward the end of the conversation Natris told me that, whenever she had read any of the various comments I had made about my community over the years in some of the Hispanic pagan forums on the Internet, she assumed that I had been describing a fantasy or at least exaggerating a great deal, if not out-and-out lying; but that as she’d gotten to know me, she’d come to realize that I was just stating facts, even though it was still very hard for her to assimilate the reality of it all. Then, during the slide show I had presented last night, she had finally ‘gotten it’ and had been moved to tears by the realization that such people, events and places actually existed, though she could not imagine how the whole thing had possibly come into being. “Magic,” she said she had muttered to herself, “this could only happen through magic.”

But then, she figured she didn’t have the ability to work such magic, so she decided she might as well put it out of her head, because it was not something she could ever do. Now, though, she had gotten an earful from me about how very long and hard we had worked to develop our community, and had experienced a taste of it through the documentary, so she was feeling somewhat confused. Work was something she could do, she said, and would be willing to do, so if that was the key, then perhaps developing a pagan spiritual community here in México was not as remote a possibility as she had imagined. What did I think was more important, she asked – work or magic? I told her that, in my experience, they’re not two separate things, but that they really go together and are, in the end, one and the same. She and her friends exchanged some glances, which I didn't know how to interpret, and for the next hour or so we drove in complete silence.

Eventually we arrived at our next stopping point, the Frida Kahlo Museum or, as it is commonly known in México, la Casa Azul – the Blue House in Coyoacán where Frida was born, lived and died. My companions were already familiar with it, so they went off to have some more coffee and cigarettes (it seems Mexicans smoke almost as much as the French…) while I visited the house by myself. I guess the most accurate way to describe the place would be to say that it is, indeed, a museum dedicated to Frida Kahlo, though not so much to her art. There are a number of her works on exhibit, to be sure, but they tend to be early or minor paintings, or only sketches of some of her better known ones. But for this complex artist known primarily for her revealing self-depictions, the house itself has become one of her most intimate portraits – the photographs and newspaper clippings that chronicle her life; the paintings by other artists and the folk art she collected; the intense, passionate colors and shapes with which she surrounded herself; the lush courtyard with its pyramidal centerpiece, a shrine to her indigenous ancestors.

From the Blue House, my friends drove me for a couple of miles to the Mercado de Coyoacán, an open-air market mostly for arts and crafts that is held every weekend in the town’s main square. Coyoacán (the Hispanicized version of the náhuatl term coyohuacan – ‘the place of the coyotes’) was, in pre-colonial times, a settlement renowned for its skillful stone workers (the elaborately carved Piedra del Sol, the Aztec calendrical Sun Stone, reputedly was made by artisans from Coyoacán). During the era of colonization, it became one of the first towns chartered in México by the Spanish government, and eventually was absorbed into the Federal District as one of the southern suburbs of Mexico City. Still, it retains the architecture and much of the flavor of the type of colonial town that one is more likely to find far away from the big cities.

The market was a sumptuous feast for the senses – a myriad of colors, sounds, scents, textures, shapes, and tastes emanating from hundreds of temporary booths selling pottery, leather goods, clothes, indigenous musical instruments, bags, hats, baskets, hand-made sandals, toys, etc.; street performers ranging from jugglers, balloon artists and magicians to mariachi bands and indigenous folk ‘ritualists’; and food vendors featuring all manner of Mexican dishes and antojitos. I found it very difficult not to be overwhelmed by instant sensory overload, but I had hoped to purchase at least a few small gifts to bring back to my family, so I forced myself to plunge into the throng of thousands of shoppers – very few obvious tourists, I noticed – who made the narrow aisles of the market almost impassable.

My companions were very protective of me, constantly trying to surround me to ward off pickpockets, and obsessively haggling on my behalf to make sure I was being charged ‘Mexican prices.’ It was quite endearing, but also a bit stifling, so as soon as we stopped to get something to drink, I assured them that I’d had a good deal of experience throughout my life being in similar situations in various different countries, and that it also really wasn’t necessary to haggle a price of $0.25 US for a hand-made gourd rattle (which would have sold in the States for $10 at the minimum) when I could well afford to pay the equivalent 50 cents the merchant was asking. They grumbled a little, but reluctantly let me go off on my own, though a couple of them followed me pretty closely for a while to make sure I came to no harm. I have a fairly low tolerance for shopping as it is, so after an hour or thereabouts I was more than ready to go have dinner and return to the hotel.

Monday, 1 October 2007 --- Sweating it Out in México

When I was making plans for my Mexican trip, Natris mentioned that her group was interested in having me join them in a temazcal, a traditional Mexican steam bath very similar in some ways to the American Indian sweatlodges, though reportedly emphasizing its curative aspects much more than any spiritual symbolism. I have taken part in a variety of sweatlodge ceremonies over the years, and have led my share of European-style sweats, but had never participated in a traditional Mexican temazcal before, so I gladly took her up on her offer.

I knew a little about it, and was particularly intrigued by certain elements that seemed more similar to European sweating houses than the more familiar North American sweatlodges. Both the Lakota inipi and the pesuponk from the Northeast tribes, for instance, tend to be temporary structures built upon a framework of bent saplings and covered with blankets or animal skins, whereas the temazcal, like the Irish teach-an-alais or the Scottish cloghan, is typically a permanent structure built of dry or mortared stone (or, in México, sometimes made of adobe bricks) with an inner ledge that serves as a bench for the participants to sit upon (we are planning to build a Celtic-style sweat house at Glenwood, so I was particularly interested in examining their methods of construction). And, whereas North American sweatlodges are generally segregated by gender, with separate men’s and women’s sweats, and also traditionally exclude women in their menses altogether (or separate them from non-menstruating women in specially-designated moon lodges), the Mexican ceremonies, like the European, apparently include both genders and some of them allow menstruating women as well.

So this morning, Natris, Sara, Carlos, four women from their group, and Carmen Orellana met at my hotel and from there drove for a little over an hour to a rustic conference center on the outskirts of the city, to partake in the temazcal. The center turned out to be a sprawling compound with a small cottage where the caretaker lives, a larger meeting house that can comfortably fit several dozen people, a couple of small cabins that they rent out for retreats, and a fairly large outhouse with several stalls.

Behind the meeting house were nine small trapezoidal huts – each roughly five feet wide, four feet high, and perhaps another four feet deep – built of mortared brick and covered with peach-colored stucco on the outside. The only openings were a small hinged black wooden door, barely large enough for an adult to crawl through, and a tiny hole on the ceiling through which passed a plastic breathing tube, covered with heavy cloth wrapping on the outside so that the hut would be completely light-proof when the door was closed.

These, we were told, were ‘recapitulation huts’, dedicated to one of the sorceric practices espoused by Carlos Castaneda in his books, and perpetuated since his death by his followers as well as some of the other authors who have jumped on the ‘New Toltec’ bandwagon. Recapitulation involves letting go of the built-up patterns and perceptions surrounding traumatic events in our pasts, in order to retrieve the psychic energy that had been attached to those patterns. According to the people who run the center, those wishing to recapitulate enter the huts and stay in them for nine straight days, fasting and essentially deprived of most sensory stimulation. The little doors open once a day so that fresh water can be provided to the recapitulators, and to exchange the used ‘eliminatory bucket’ for a fresh one.

Finally, we were led to the other end of the center for our ceremony, but upon seeing what awaited us, it was very difficult for me to rein in my disappointment. Instead of a traditional Mexican temazcal, the people at the center had erected a typical Lakota-style sweatlodge, covered with several plastic tarps. A mound of very porous volcanic rocks were ‘cooking’ in the fire pit and Fernanda, the woman who would be leading the sweat, was busy gathering more wood for the fire along with her assistant. We did a round of introductions, and I used the opportunity to ask Fernanda to tell us a little about her background and what she was planning to do. She confirmed that, indeed, the sweatlodge would be a ‘modified’ version of the Lakota ceremony; when I asked her how she had learned that particular approach, she said she’d been taught it by a Mexican friend who had lived in the U.S. for some years.

This put me in a bit of a quandary. Over the years, I have participated in several sweatlodges similar to the one Fernanda was preparing for us; the quality of the experiences has varied widely, but none approached the fullness or the intensity of the two inipi ceremonies I’ve attended which were led by respected, traditional Lakota ceremonialists. More to the point, however, for the Lakota, the inipi is one of their most sacred rituals – perhaps second only in importance to the sun dance – and a lot of them vehemently resent its appropriation by people outside their culture who have not been duly trained and authorized as ceremonial leaders.

During the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, barely two months after the confederated Lakota, Dakota and Nakota nations had issued a ‘declaration of war’ against all who exploited their spirituality, I vividly remember a Lakota elder making a compelling analogy against the use of the inipi by non-Indians. He said, in effect, that if someone who was not an ordained Roman Catholic priest and did not understand a word of Latin – someone who wasn’t even a Catholic to begin with – grabbed a bunch of makeshift trappings and proposed to say the Latin Mass, there would be a huge outcry about the disrespect and desecration involved in such an act; he added that the very same thing would happen if a non-Jew grabbed a Hanukkah menorah and sang “Happy Birthday” or “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” each time he lit a candle. But, he complained, non-Indians think nothing of appropriating a sacred ceremony like the inipi, modifying it and using it in ways that are sacrilegious to his people, and then, when Indians protest such acts publicly, they are accused of being ethnocentric, belligerent and intractable. Of course, given that there’s nothing resembling an official ‘Lakota bureau of certification’ for sweat lodge leaders, it can be very difficult for non-Indians to know who is performing an authentic ceremony or not.

I have been aware of this situation for a long time (and have addressed it publicly many times, and continue to do so, at various pagan and non-pagan events where I have been a speaker), but, since listening to the impassioned pleas for support from Indian elders at the Chicago Parliament, I’ve become even more adamant about not participating in any Indian-style sweatlodge ceremony where I didn’t feel really sure about the authenticity of the person leading it – not an ideal solution, but it’s the most pragmatic one I’ve found.

Hence my dilemma: facing, on the one hand, the prospect of taking part in what clearly was going to be the kind of ‘appropriated’ sweatlodge that angered the Lakota and which I had resolved to avoid; and, on the other, the likelihood of upsetting and embarrassing my hosts who had been so kind and generous toward me, were unaware of the conflicts involved, and had arranged to have the ceremony with nothing but good intentions. In the end I decided to go through with the sweatlodge, out of consideration for my companions. It turned out to be, as I had expected, a very uneven and disappointing ceremony, but as it was the first sweatlodge experience for several of the people in the group, I had the opportunity to be of help when a couple of them had a rough time, so I was glad at least for that.

For a couple of hours, while the stones were heating, I was able to chat at greater length with Carmen Orellana. Our conversation confirmed the sense I’d had when I first met her a couple of nights ago: she’s a very pleasant and open person, intelligent, curious, and clearly very dedicated to bringing pagans together in México. As so often and unfortunately happens throughout the pagan movement, Carmen has come under a great deal of criticism, and even vicious attacks and threats, from other pagans as a result of her public efforts to develop community and to establish paganism as a legitimate religion in her country. We talked at great length about why such things happen, and I shared with her several examples of the similar kinds of situations that we’ve had to deal with over the years in EarthSpirit, as well as some of the ways we’ve found to handle them. She and her group remind me a lot of where we were some thirty years ago, and I look forward to remaining in touch with her, and to the possibility that our two communities might be able to collaborate in some joint projects.

Tuesday, 2 October 2007 --- ¡Adiós a México! – Witches, Temples, and Star-Crossed Lovers

On this, my last day in this beautiful and welcoming country, I woke up early and tried to get some packing done before Natris and Diana arrived to pick me up. The first thing on our agenda this morning was a visit to the notorious Mercado de Sonora, otherwise known as the Mercado de las brujas, the Witches’ Market. I had never been there, though I’d known about it for many years and had hoped to get a chance to see it sometime. In fact, as I was planning this trip, my children remembered that when the Harry Potter books first came out, and we’d all learned about Diagon Alley, I had mentioned that it sounded like a certain market in Mexico City and had told them that perhaps I’d take them there some day; well, I guess maybe not this time…

We squeezed into a tiny cab that zig-zagged its way through the early morning traffic with deft and exhilarating quickness, and left us with our pulses racing and feeling quite invigorated – who needs exercise, when you can just go for a rush-hour cab ride in Mexico City? The market turned out to be inside a city-block sized building in a part of town that apparently is not very frequented by tourists; indeed, according to my friends, even a lot of Mexicans stay clear off the area, particularly after dark.

The market building contains dozens of tiny shops, each brimming with various kinds of ‘magical merchandise’ – herbs, books, statues of various divinities and saints, incenses, necklaces, candles, oils, live birds, you name it – with a focus ranging from Mesoamerican brujería, to European witchcraft and ceremonial magic, to Santería, to generic occultism, tarot, astrology, etc.

It being still fairly early on a weekday, the place was not as busy as I imagined (and as my companions confirmed) it would be in the afternoon or on, say, a Saturday morning; but it still felt very crowded, both due to the incredible amounts of stuff on display everywhere, and because the relatively few customers had to wend and squeeze our way through the very narrow aisles that separated the rows of shops.

At every turn, merchants would literally reach out and grab passersby and try to pull us into their stores, always asking the exact same question: “¿Qué desea usted? ¿Qué desea usted?” A travel book would probably translate that as “What would you like?” or “What are you looking for?,” which, though accurate, can obscure the subtle meaning that such a query could have in a place as fanciful as the Witches’ Market. Literally, the question really means “What do you wish for?,” and it was abundantly clear, from all the conversations and transactions I overheard, that El mercado de las brujas is a place where you go in the hope of having your wishes, your aspirations and your dreams fulfilled – be it a love relationship, fame and fortune, the health of a sick loved one, a new job, fertility, or protection from your enemies; in short, the gamut of things that people commonly long for, regardless of their station in life. (Indeed, though most of those shopping at the market seemed – to judge by their appearances – to be of very modest means, there was at least one executive-type in Armani and leather briefcase, and I caught an occasional whiff of Chanel No. 5 here and there.)

Very prominent among the statues for sale were those of the Santa Muerte (Holy Death), a very interesting religious cult that developed in this city in the mid-1960s as a hybrid of survivals of indigenous ceremonies honoring the goddess of death Mictecacihuatl (patroness of Mexico’s famous celebration of El día de los muertos) and her consort Mictlantecuhtli, with elements of Roman Catholicism, in particular the apocalyptic writings of the Book of Revelations.

The Santa Muerte is typically depicted as a cloaked, hooded and bejeweled skeleton carrying a huge scythe, and often a rosary; her devotees frequently refer to her as La flaquita, a term of endearment meaning ‘the skinny one,’ for obvious reasons. Apparently, it has become the second most popular religion throughout México, to the extent that the Catholic hierarchy has issued numerous pronouncements warning Catholics against becoming involved with it in any way. I had expressed an interest in going to the Tepito neighborhood (barely a dozen blocks northeast of my hotel), reportedly the seat of the cult, where there is a large public shrine dedicated to the Santa Muerte which draws pilgrims from all over the country, just as Catholics peregrinate to the Basilica of Guadalupe. My friends, however, adamantly and emphatically refused to take me there, and insisted on a promise that I would not go on my own. It seems that the Santa Muerte has particularly attracted veneration from those who face violent deaths on a regular basis, and so has become the ‘official religion’ of gangs, drug dealers and sundry criminals who, as a result, have made Tepito their home base and have turned the neighborhood into one of the most dangerous places in all of México.

I had hoped to find at the Witches’ Market a few more small gifts to bring back home with me, and I did get a couple of pieces of pottery, several gourd rattles, some Day of the Dead decorations, and a pair of the ankle ‘bells’ used by Aztec dancers and ritualists, made from the nut casings of the chachayote tree and also known as ‘codos de fraile’ (‘friar’s elbows,’ because of their elbow-like shape). I also bought a huge bag of copal, the pungent incense used in indigenous ceremonies and which one could smell just about everywhere in the market. Copal is a resin that comes from the bursera tree, via a process quite similar to that used in New England to tap the sap of the maple trees; after the resin is collected, and solidifies, it is crushed into tiny pebbles which are burned in a fire or on charcoal blocks. The best grade of copal sells on the Internet for around $20US a pound, and for more than that in stores; I purchased two pounds of it at the Witches’ Market for fifty cents…

From the market, we took another cab to the Zócalo, the huge plaza that sits at the very heart of the oldest part of town; our destination was the Templo Mayor Museum, just a couple of short blocks away. While the Zócalo (officially known as the Plaza de la Constitución) is not nearly as big as the immense Macroplaza in Monterrey, it still remains one of the largest city squares in the world, and the buildings that surround it include the colonial-era cathedral, the presidential palace, and the city hall. In the center of the plaza stands a very tall pole bearing a gigantic Mexican flag (I estimated the pole to be about 150 feet high or more, and the flag is probably 25 feet high and 50 feet wide – I saw it being lowered one day around sunset, and it took several soldiers a full twenty minutes just to fold it).

When the band of Spanish conquistadores led by Hernán Cortés reached this place in the early 16th century, what is now the old part of Mexico City was Tenochtitlan, the island capital of the Aztec empire, located near the shore of a shallow lake in a valley surrounded by volcanoes, and connected to the mainland by several human-built causeways (most of the swampy lake was eventually filled after the Spanish conquest, and today a large section of Mexico City is, like Boston, sitting on landfill). The area immediately surrounding the Zócalo was the site of Motecuhzoma’s imperial palace as well as of the Teocalli or Templo Mayor – the great pyramidal temple of the Aztecs which stood approximately 60 meters tall (just slightly less than the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan), and was the central feature of a complex of buildings including several other smaller pyramids.

After Cortés captured and executed Motecuhzoma, was driven out of Tenochtitlan by the Aztecs, and then returned a year later with more troops to defeat Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec king, he destroyed the Templo Mayor and used its stones and bricks to start construction of the cathedral and the first colonial buildings. Over time, the Templo Mayor became the stuff of legends, its actual site unknown despite several archaeological attempts to discover it. Then, in the late 1970s, electric company workers digging in the area to lay down cable uncovered a large, round slab of stone bearing an intricately-carved depiction of one of the Aztecs’ central myths, known to have been closely related to the Templo Mayor. The subsequent razing and excavation of several city blocks just northeast of the cathedral unearthed the foundations of the temple and some of the other buildings, as well as many thousands of artifacts. The Museum of the Templo Mayor – a work in progress, as more excavations gradually take place – which was opened in the late 1980s, sounded extremely interesting, so I had put it high on my list of places to see during my stay in the city.

In August, as I was finalizing the details of my trip, I heard from my friend Traci Ardren, a Wiccan high priestess from Florida who is also a professor of anthropology specializing in Mesoamerican cultures (and who has authored seminal works on ancient Mayan women and on children in Mesoamerica), offering to put me in touch with a colleague who is one of the curators at the Templo Mayor Museum; it was an offer which I, of course, very eagerly and gratefully accepted. So, after a series of e-mails and phone messages, I was finally able to get in touch with Ximena Chávez Balderas, who, in addition to being the head of the Dept. for the Preservation of Cultural Assets at the museum, is also an award-winning archaeologist well-known in México for her work on Mesoamerican funeral rites and arts, and has in recent years been involved in the identification and preservation of ‘Pepita’, the mummified remains of a two-year-old girl who died approximately 2,300 years ago, and is the oldest mummy to be found in this country. Ximena very kindly offered to give us a private guided tour of the museum.

The first thing Ximena showed us was a model of what archaeologists believe the complex of buildings looked like at the time of Cortés’ arrival. The Templo Mayor itself consisted of two temples atop a large pyramid of seven layers which would have looked very similar to the ones in Teotihuacan, as the Aztecs considered the Toltec culture of that city to have been the epitome of an advanced civilization, and copied and assimilated many different elements from it. Of the two temples that crowned the pyramid, the one on the right was dedicated to Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec solar deity and also god of war, and the one on the left to Tláloc, the god of rain, highlighting the juxtaposition of the dry and rainy seasons which was central to the Aztecs’ mythos as well as their everyday lives.

One of the buildings in the Templo Mayor complex was the cuauhcalli or ‘Eagle Precint’, the home of the elite corps of Eagle Warriors who were in the personal service of the emperor, and Ximena showed us an impressive, life-size statue of such a warrior. We also saw an equally remarkable and huge (and, one of my friends thought, terrifying) statue of Mictlantecuhtli, the dreaded god of death and the underworld, as well as another statue of a chacmool very similar to the one we’d seen in Teotihuacan, though this one retained the ceremonial bowl in which the hearts of sacrificial victims were deposited.

Ximena also showed us the Stone of Coyolxauhqui, the rounded, 8-ton carved slab which conclusively revealed the location of the Templo Mayor. The stone depicts one of the chief agricultural and seasonal myths of the Aztecs, a myth that that was at the core of the ceremonies that took place at the Templo Mayor: Coatlicue, goddess of the land, finds a ball of hummingbird feathers on the ground, and gathers them up in her skirt. When one of the feathers impregnates her, her daughter Coyolxauhqui considers it a dishonor to her family and marshals her four-hundred brothers to accompany her to the mountain where their mother resides, so that they may kill the child and restore their honor.

At the very moment they arrive, Coatlicue births Huitzilopochtli fully-formed as an adult warrior. He proceeds to vanquish his brothers, and decapitates and dismembers Coyolxauhqui, hurling the pieces of her body to the foot of the mountain and her head to the sky, where she becomes the moon. Then Huitzilopochtli becomes the sun, and his 400 brothers turn into the southern stars.

Given its cosmological foundations, sacrificial rites were a central part of many of the ceremonies held at the Templo Mayor, to judge both from the (apparently much-exaggerated) accounts of the first Spanish conquerors as well as by the number of sacrificial human remains found at the site; among the artifacts on display at the museum, we saw a collection of flint and obsidian sacrificial blades as well as a large, rounded and carved stone upon which victims were laid out on their backs to facilitate the extraction of the heart or liver . Ximena discussed this topic with us at some length, given that nowadays, when someone says the word ‘Aztec,’ there tends to be an immediate and inevitable association with human sacrifice. She stressed, first of all, that this was not a practice exclusive to the Aztecs, that such sacrifices were found among many of the Mesoamerican indigenous cultures (as, indeed, they were found in many other ancient cultures throughout the world), and long predated the development of Aztec civilization.

Contrary to the popular stereotype of the Aztecs as a cruel, inhumane, bloodthirsty people who delighted in the wanton and constant mass slaughter of unwilling, helpless victims such as prisoners and slaves, human sacrifice had a very complex and specific purpose and place within their culture. Sacrifices mostly were held on each of the monthly holy days of the 18-month year; at the end of the 52-year cycles or ‘centuries’ as reckoned in the Aztec calendar; or during times of pronounced stress or danger, such as droughts, famines or wars (ironically, the mass sacrifices that so shocked and horrified the Spanish conquerors were likely prompted by their own arrival in Tenochtitlan).

For the Aztecs, blood was atl-tlachinolli, ‘water-made-of-fire’ or ‘precious water,’ the sacred food that nourished the gods and allowed the universe to continue functioning. According to their mythology, the gods had willingly and ceremonially taken their own lives in order to enter the spirit world in order to better help their people, but they needed the periodic offerings of ‘precious water’ to continue living – thus, the sacrifices were considered nextlahualli, the payment of the sacred debt the people owed the gods for their self-immolation.

Each deity required a different type of offering, so while it is obvious that some of the most defenseless members of their society – such as children, slaves and prisoners – were sacrificed to certain gods, others required the best warriors, the champion athletes, members of the aristocracy, etc. In some cases, elite individuals within Aztec society were chosen to ‘impersonate’ a particular deity over the span of a year, during which time, donning the garments and symbols of the embodied deity, they enjoyed all sorts of luxuries and were pampered in every way imaginable; at the end of their tenure, they willingly presented themselves at the temple to be sacrificially offered to their respective gods. To the Aztecs, being sacrificed to one of their deities appears to have been the greatest honor they could hope to attain. Even in the case of prisoners, the sacrificial victims may not have been completely unwilling. The Aztecs engaged with other tribes – by mutual agreement – in ‘flower wars,’ ceremonial skirmishes in which the goal was not so much to win the battle as it was for each side to capture opponents, who would subsequently be sacrificed to some deity who specifically required the blood of prisoners.

As fascinating as the museum is, Ximena told us that there still remains much more to be discovered – the original Templo Mayor complex was quite extensive, and a lot of it remains buried underneath original colonial buildings. This, of course, presents a very complicated dilemma for the Mexican people and their government: the Templo Mayor obviously has great archaeological and historical importance, but then again, so do the colonial edifices that have covered it for the past five-hundred years. What, where, and how much should be torn down is the subject of ongoing and very heated debates. According to Ximena, a very large obelisk was recently unearthed in a building behind the cathedral, so at least that looks like a promising site for further excavations and perhaps even for an extension of the museum itself.

I was very grateful to Ximena for her generosity with her time – our private tour with her lasted for over an hour-and-a-half, but I could easily have stayed much longer listening to her insightful and detailed explanations about Aztec culture, history and spirituality. After taking our leave from her, Natris and Diana walked me back to my hotel, with a quick stop so I could duck inside the presidential palace and take a photo of the famous and gigantic mural painted by Diego Rivera, depicting the history of México from the Spanish conquest until the modern era.

I bade a very fond good-bye to my two Mexican friends, and thanked them profusely for their boundless hospitality and kindness toward me during the past several days, and then went up to my room to leisurely finish packing. Upon arriving in Mexico City from Monterrey, I had gone to the Delta counter at the airport to verify the details of my return flight back to the States, and the attendant had given me a slip of paper listing the flight number and a departure time of 5:10, so I figured if I left the hotel around 2:00, that would give me plenty of time for the 45-minute ride to the airport, with enough to spare even if traffic was bad.

Just as I was about to shut down my laptop and bring my luggage downstairs, it occurred to me to check the Delta website to make sure the flight wasn’t delayed for some reason. To my dismay, I found that the departure time was not 5:10 but 15:10, or 3:10 pm – the woman at the airport had omitted one small but all-important number and now I barely had one hour to get my luggage downstairs, grab a cab for what could easily be a very slow, traffic-impaired ride to the airport, and catch an international flight.

In a frenzy, I called the main Delta office in the States, to see if there were any other options available to me, but my flight was the last one of the day and if I missed it I wouldn’t be able to leave until the next morning. The very solicitous agent suggested that I get to the airport as soon as possible, go right up to the counter without waiting in line, and show an agent the slip of paper (which, luckily, had the Delta logo on it) and explain the problem; she gave me her name and extension number and said that if I needed any help, I should have the agent call her and she’d try to straighten everything out.

The hotel staff was most understanding and cooperative; in the couple of minutes it took me to get downstairs, they had my bill all ready and only requiring my signature, and there was a taxi waiting outside. The cab driver was most sympathetic to my plight, and assured me he would do everything in his power to get me to the airport with enough time to catch my flight, despite the fact that there was a lot of traffic at the moment.

The cabbie proved to be as good his word – the ensuing ride to the airport was like something out of a Hollywood action movie: once, when we were stopped at a traffic light two cars away from the intersection where we were supposed to turn, he simply drove the cab over the curb and cut the corner on the sidewalk in order to make the turn, so we wouldn’t be delayed; another time, in stop-and-go heavy traffic, he suddenly turned and drove full-speed the wrong way down an empty one-way side street in order to get us to a larger avenue where the traffic was flowing smoothly. All the while, he railed loudly against the incompetence of people like the airport clerk who’d given me the wrong information; there were too many Mexicans like that today, he ranted, calling them lazy and ignorant, and uncaring that they were giving their country a bad reputation.

Despite the congested streets, we made it to the airport in 24 minutes, which, according to the driver, was by far his best time ever from the area of my hotel. By that point, I had exchanged back all my Mexican money, leaving me just enough for the estimated cab fare plus a reasonable tip, but I was so grateful to the driver that I gave him an extra $20US bill. His eyes got very big, and he even started to protest that it was too much, but being in such a rush, I just cut him off and thanked him again and grabbed my bags so I could get to the Delta counter as quickly as possible. But the driver insisted that I wait a moment, while he went and talked to one of the porters. The two of them quickly came over, grabbed my bags, and loaded them onto an otherwise-empty motorized luggage cart, one of the long ones which are normally meant to carry several dozen suitcases at once; whereupon the cab driver thanked me again, shook my hand vigorously, wished me a good flight, and earnestly bade me remember that not all Mexicans are as unreliable as the woman at the ticket counter.

The cart was not meant to carry passengers, but his friend the porter (who might well have been a relative, since the two of them seemed to have been taught to drive by the very same person…) insisted that we both squeeze in, each of us sitting with just one buttock resting on the driver’s seat and the rest of our bodies precariously hanging out the sides while he maneuvered the long and cumbersome vehicle through the busy terminal as fast as it would go, constantly honking the horn and loudly yelling at people to get out of the way.

When we finally reached the Delta counter, he told me to go on ahead and that he would bring my bags presently. I raced past the line of waiting travelers and breathlessly explained my problem to one of the agents, who perfunctorily said he couldn’t help me, that I was too late, and pointedly called for the next person in line to come up. The porter, who had just brought up my bags, whispered to me to stay right where I was. He went down to the end of the counter and disappeared from view around the corner; in a moment, he was walking back, speaking animatedly with another, older Delta agent – clearly the person in charge – who came over, literally elbowed the previous agent out of the way, and very courteously asked me to show him the slip of paper with the wrong departure time. He immediately apologized for the inconvenience, and personally handled my ticket and boarding pass and checked in my bags, and assured me that everything was all set and I could now just relax and wait for the plane to begin boarding in a few minutes. Needless to say, the porter also got a hefty tip…

As our plane took off, my heart skipped a beat when the pilot announced that those of us sitting on the right side of the plane would have a good view of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, the two majestic volcanoes (respectively, the second and third largest peaks in México) which stand some 40 miles toward the east and can often be seen along the horizon from the city. Unfortunately, during most of my stay the sky had been cloudy or there had been too much smog, so I hadn’t been able to see them. Despite the smog this afternoon, their distinctive outlines were quite visible from the plane, and brought back very old memories.

As a child, on a trip to México, my parents once took me to Puebla, a city further east where the volcanoes could be easily seen all the time, and while we were there they bought me a picture book that told the ancient myth of the two volcanoes, a story that became one of my most favorite and which I’ve never forgotten. It’s an Aztec version of the archetypal myth of the ‘doomed lovers’ found in folk tales and songs from so many different lands – from Pyramus and Thisbe to Tristan and Yseult, Romeo and Juliet, Annachie Gordon, etc. As the legend goes, Iztac (which means ‘white’ in náhuatl) was the daughter of the Aztec emperor, and the most beautiful and desirable woman among her people. She and Popoca (‘smoke’), a young warrior, were in love, but he was not of high enough rank to marry her. The emperor put Popoca in charge of a war band and sent him off to fight an enemy tribe, promising him that he could marry Iztac if he succeeded and became an Eagle Warrior. After he’d been away a while, a rival suitor brought the false news that Popoca had been killed in battle, which in turn caused Iztac to die of sorrow. Popoca returned victorious just as Iztac’s funeral rite was about to be held, and in his grief and rage, he stole her body and fled to the mountains, to ask that the gods bring them together again. He stayed by her side for a very long time, holding a flaming torch so that even the night could not keep him from gazing at his beloved. Eventually, the gods took pity on them, and made them part of the land, turning them into lofty mountains standing next to each other – Iztaccíhuatl (‘the white lady,’ often referred to as ‘the sleeping woman’ in México), a dormant volcano topped by a blanket of snow even in summer; and Popocatépetl (‘the smoking peak’), who frequently erupts in a fiery rage over the injustice that was done to them. It was by crossing the narrow valley which separates the mountainous lovers that, many centuries later, Hernán Cortés and his band of conquistadores gained access to Tenochtitlan, and radically transformed the course of Mexican history. (The painting on the right shows the best known – if much romanticized – depiction of the legend, done in the 1940s by the famous Mexican calendar artist Jesús Helguera).

As the plane headed north, and the silhouettes of the volcanoes slowly faded in the distance, I reflected upon my experiences of the past two weeks in this gorgeously rugged land so teeming with myth and wonder, home to a people in whom two very different, ancient cultures simultaneously blend and clash, and who are among the warmest, most open and hospitable souls I have had the pleasure to meet in my life.