OF OUTSTANDING INTEREST TO me was the trip commissioned by Peter Crookston to study the predicament of the Huichols of the Sierra Madre of Mexico, who had come under the threat of invasions promoted by mining interests regarding them as little more than a nuisance. This turned out to be something of an adventure.
I had already spent several months of 1969 travelling in Mexico, and had run into a band of these rarely seen Indians—befeathered from head to foot and with bows in their hands—when a bus I had been travelling on broke down in the small town of Tepic. Someone told me the Indians lived at the top of the Sierra Madre, about nine days away by mule. They were carrying out some strange ceremony that had flowed into the road, with the traffic missing them as best it could. I got off the bus, made further enquiries and stayed in Tepic that night. Here I further learned that these were the only Indians north of the Amazon who had kept intact their tribal structure and most of their ancient customs, and that they lived in the highest valleys of the sierra where they had managed to keep up the resistance to the Spanish invaders until 150 years after the conquest had been completed elsewhere throughout the New World.
I was determined to know more about these people and was directed to Padre Ernesto Loéra, the Franciscan in charge of the shrine of Zapópan, near Guadalajara, regarded as the Mexican equivalent of Lourdes. The shaman, or leader, of the Huichol people was persuaded to assist him as a healer during the annual festival. Loéra, an educated man, said the healing skills the shaman had demonstrated were phenomenal. ‘Ramon Medina uses spittle and incantations to cure anything that doesn’t call for surgery. Antibiotics don’t come into it.’ He urged me to track down Medina and persuade him to take me to the sierra. ‘Don’t forget the bodyguards,’ the Padre said, ‘also a good automatic rifle. They kill you as soon as look at you up there.’ He added that he himself always made sure to take his trusty old Winchester repeater when engaged on his religious endeavours in the local mountains.
I had flown back to London and told Peter about the Huichols. A week later I returned to Mexico with the photographer David Montgomery, who certainly had little idea of what he was letting himself in for. Having started the ball rolling with Padre Ernesto, it was now only necessary to secure the blessing of Dr Ramos, head of the Institute Indigenista, at first sight a somewhat austere if impressive figure seated behind an enormous desk beneath the double-headed eagle of the Republic. Dr Ramos looked at David’s abundant hair and black shirt with pearl buttons, and asked in Spanish, ‘Is he a hippy?’ I replied, ‘Absolutely,’ and suddenly the Doctor’s wary expression broke into delight. ‘My daughter adores the Beatles … Of course you may go.’ Ramon Medina happened to be in Tepic at that time, and an appointment with him at the Institute was fixed for that afternoon.
The shaman arrived punctually, a remarkable figure even in Tepic where there were plenty of Indians on the streets and not a few of them in bizarre regalia. He was a man of about forty with a small, brown smiling face and penetrating eyes. In his cotton shirt and trousers embroidered with deer, eagles and jaguars, and his wide hat decorated with pendant ornaments, he dominated the discreet environment of the Institute’s office. He spoke a hundred or so words of Spanish that seemed enough to get by. We asked him if he would go to the sierra with us, and with Dr Ramos nodding approval in the background, he said, ‘Of course,’ adding that we could leave there and then if we wished. I told him we would like to depart on the first plane with free seats. As it happened, one was taking off at six the next morning, and it was this that we boarded. It proved to be a ramshackle single-engined aircraft piloted by a man who had only half his original face left. Several crash landings in areas where airstrips did not exist had resulted in extensive plastic surgery. Despite his notoriously great spiritual powers, the shaman some no more trust in providence than the Padre and some concern that neither David nor I was armed.
We landed on a tongue of tableland across a low precipice and bumped to a standstill. Here the pilot deposited us and, smiling a goodbye with one side of his mouth, took off. We were in the clearing of a forest of oaks, with orchids hanging like coloured ribbons from their branches. The shaman found an automatic pistol in the nest of feathers at his waist, held it out and I took it reluctantly. I cocked it but found that the trigger was so stiff that even under the pressure of both forefingers it could not be discharged. I handed it back and his smile saddened. He now explained that we must walk in single file, distanced from each other by about ten paces to reduce the likelihood of becoming eliminated in a single fusillade from behind one of the many huge boulders strewn about this landscape. With this began the least relaxed three days of my life, by comparison with which the equivalent time spent on the beach-head at Salerno in 1943 seemed relatively calm.
Eight miles away, a Catholic mission with which Padre Loéra had some connection had established itself in a Huichol village which it had promptly renamed Santa Clara. We made our way towards it, much slowed down by the desirability of giving suspicious boulders and trees a wide berth, and we reached the village after a trek of about five hours.
Set among dramatic scenery, the mission was staffed by a single priest, Padre Joaquin, with the support of a dozen or so nuns. Life here must have resembled that of an outpost on the American frontier at its wildest in the early part of the last century. Part of the mission had been destroyed by fire in an attack by the Huichols two years before, during which the nuns had kept up, as we learned, brisk and continuous rifle-fire from the narrow windows. The shaman slipped away quietly as soon as the building came in sight. He was known to be strongly opposed to the missionary presence and warned us that it would do our cause no good to be seen with him. However, we had been spotted from afar and Padre Joaquin received us coldly. Nevertheless we were permitted to sleep in an outbuilding, and although we made it clear that we had brought food with us, we were served by silent and unsmiling nuns with bowlfuls of atole—a sweet cornflour gruel—tortillas and a bean-stew; all of it delicious.
It was now early evening, with a resplendent sky full of toucans and parakeets, and soft lemon light. The little Indian girls in the care of the mission had finished their domestic chores and the boys had come down from the forest dragging wood on their sledges for the fires. What astounded me was that the Franciscans had allowed them to dress in Indian style in tunics embroidered with pagan symbols and gods that had assumed cavorting animal form. Some of the boys had brought guitars and Huichol violins, and we were treated to an enthusiastic serenade, which was accompanied by the girls’ pentatonic humming.
The joyful atmosphere at Santa Clara was quite new to me. At best, mission camps—of which I have seen a number—are solemn places from which the elements of pleasure are firmly excluded. Here music and laughter were everywhere to be heard, and although a largely Welsh Baptist upbringing has left me unable to cope with religion in general, I realised how lucky these little Huichols were to have been taken into the care of the Catholics, rather than that of one of the ethnocidal Protestant sects. Only the shaman regarded this situation with gloom, insisting that the policy at Santa Clara was to encourage marriages between pure Indians and mestizos in the knowledge that the offspring of such unions would be brought up in the Christian faith and thus lost to the Indian community.
The night was exceedingly cold and we were awakened at about 3am by the intense surrounding activity. It was the Huichol custom to take a dip at this hour and the women were already in the freezing river. Such dousings, Ramon later informed us, fostered the sexual coldness much appreciated by the Huichols in their womenfolk.
The shaman appeared at dawn surrounded by adult Indians, and, selecting a spot just outside the mission boundary, began the lengthy and complicated ritual involved in helping the sun to rise. This was achieved with the aid of two wands with feathered ends, waved energetically while the shaman prayed in a loud, insistent voice. Slowly the mountain tops lightened, then glowed—a result acclaimed by general murmurs of relief.
Ramon had disquieting news. Four days prior to our arrival a Huichol living in the village’s outskirts had been murdered. He explained that it had been no ordinary killing because of the ritualistic nature of the crime, which involved hanging the victim by a rope in which no knots were used. This showed that the murder was intended as a warning to the community. Such acts of pure terror in which robbery was not involved seemed to strengthen Padre Ernesto’s theory that hired killers had been enlisted by the mining interests.
The shaman, who would clearly have been a prime target in a full-scale terrorist campaign, now seemed eager to leave Santa Clara and recommended a visit to San Andrea, the ceremonial capital of the Huichols where the annual festival was to be held on the coming Sunday. There would be archery, he said, music performed on ancient instruments, dancing, the drinking of great quantities of tesguino—the Huichol ceremonial beer—and even a bull sacrifice, to be paid for by a general contribution of several hours’ work.
We therefore set out on another gruelling single-file walk, and some hours later San Andrea came into sight. It comprised fifteen stone-built houses enclosing a square. None of the houses was occupied, the shaman said, and the village served only as a meeting place for Huichol living in remote areas in the sierra, and for discussions of tribal policy, the punishment of law-breakers according to tribal custom, and fiestas of the kind we had come to witness. Of the promised fiesta there was no sign whatever. In the centre of the empty square stood a post to which, said the shaman, deflowerers of virgins were tied to be flogged. Under this the topiri—the village policeman who did the flogging—lay asleep. The shaman woke him and was told that the fiesta had been called off as a result of someone’s unfavourable dream. Ramon asked for the tatuan, (the village headman) and the topiri told him he had gone off to look after his garden. He himself was tired after an unpleasant experience, he said. Being questioned about this, the topiri said that he had only recently been elected to his position, which offered no remuneration while imposing many onerous duties. As was the democratic Huichol custom, he had not been informed of his candidature in advance, and had only been persuaded to accept the nomination after a short spell of imprisonment without food. Huichol justice was immediate and stern, Ramon explained, and then, always eager to promote our journalistic interests, he asked if there were any prisoners available to be photographed. These, apparently, would be kept in stocks in a dark hole somewhere about the place. The topiri told him with obvious regret that there were none. If we came back in a week or two, he said, he might be able to help us.
David Montgomery was now in difficulties. He was extremely agreeable and accommodating, and had a notably equable temperament. He lived happily with his wife and produced photographs of outstanding artistic quality in a studio at the back of Victoria station, where he was assisted by a hard-working staff—all of whom, remarkably enough, were Mormons. From this stress-free environment he had allowed himself suddenly to be snatched away and dumped among the urgencies of the high sierra, where he had rapidly learned that life was held cheap. Now, surprisingly, we were to learn from the topiri that a murder had recently been committed in San Andrea, too. There are long delays between death and burial among the Huichols due to the many preliminaries required for the soul’s successful entry into the after-life. The victim in this case had died from multiple bullet wounds, and had been wrapped in all the finery that could be found and strung up out of the way in as cool a place as possible under the roof rafters of one of the houses, where decomposition had long since set in. I was now obliged to ask David to photograph this scene, and although he made no demur he told me that he had never seen a dead body and was a little afraid that he might faint. I assured him that I would hold him up if this happened, and the photo was taken.
No sooner was this crisis behind us and we had returned to the centre of the village, than we were confronted with the spectacle of a grim-faced mestizo armed with a powerful rifle standing at bay while Indians who had appeared as if from nowhere closed in on him. Several of these held their bows at the ready. There was a general belief, shared emphatically by Ramon Medina, that this was a bandit who had been stalking us and followed us into what had appeared to him a deserted village. The man’s rifle was taken from him, and the topiri, unwinding the sacred cord of office carried round his waist, tied him up. Messengers were sent to fetch the tatuan and the members of his council back from their fields, and a trial began. The intruder could offer no convincing account of his background, recent activities or threatening presence on an Indian reservation. In an attempt to rebut the charge of banditry he removed his shirt to display a wound like a purple mouth in the stomach—produced by the exit of a dumdum bullet—and the tiny white circle in his back where the bullet had entered. He had suffered this a year before, he said, in an attack from ambush along the trail we had come down, but his argument that no man with such a wound could be other than innocent failed to impress.
A brief and perfunctory trial followed. The shaman called a verdict of guilty, with which the tatuan seemed unable to agree. The shaman had told us that should the case go against the man he was likely to be executed on the spot—shot to death with arrows. I warned David of this possibility, suggesting that the best thing we could do was to walk away from the scene as quickly as possible. But in ten minutes it was all over with the intruder released for lack of sufficient evidence—of which, as I saw it, there was none at all. He was given back his gun but as a concession to the shaman’s objections the bullets were confiscated.
After that we set out on the hard slog back to Santa Clara, going as fast as we could because at all costs, Ramon insisted, we must be out of the sierra before dark. Reaching the Nautla Gorge where the Huichol idols are stored in a cave no white is supposed ever to have seen, we threw ourselves down to rest. The mission was only a half-hour’s scramble down the mountainside, and already the sun had fallen behind the peaks.
By this time our relationship with the shaman had grown close and he chose this moment to create us honorary compañeros of the Huichol people, formally inviting us to set out with him on annual pilgrimage which would start in twenty-five days’ time. For the sixth time Ramon would lead his people at the head of four captains, across mountain and desert for twenty days to Rial Catorce in the high desert of San Luis Potosí. We would march rapidly, he said, in single file, carrying nothing but bows, sacred tobacco, holy water and ritual implements, sustained on the journey by the virtue engendered by our own austerities.
Huichols regard peyote as deer that have transformed themselves by magic into sacred cactus, Ramon explained. The peyote would therefore not be simply collected during the pilgrimage, but hunted with bows and arrows, and would be prayed and sung to before being eaten. Then, renewed by the visions we had imbibed and with our faces painted with symbols of victory, we would set out again on the long march back to the Sierra Madre, sure of our reward of a long and good life.
This was the substance translated from the verbal surrealism of what the shaman offered. He took out the ballpoint pen he carried wrapped up with his pistol in his satchel and drew us as stiff little figures strutting happily through a forest of symbols towards Wirikuta, the sacred peyote country at the end of the pilgrimage. Now, in studying these naive sketches, I remembered the shaman’s fame as the artist of the ‘yarn-paintings’, based upon votive offerings made at the Huichol shrines of which Padre Ernesto had collected a number of examples at Zapopán. We nodded, smiled and pretended agreement with the shaman’s advance planning, and followed the adventures of the manikins representing us among the foxes, the giant centipedes and the enchanted deer peopling the deserts of San Luis Potosi we were to cross. If we found it impossible at such short notice to make our arrangements for the coming pilgrimage, the shaman assured us, the invitation could be renewed next year.
We went back to England, and my article on the Huichol Indians appeared in April 1970. As the months passed, something I had almost dismissed from my mind reappeared and began to take on form and credibility and a kind of urgency. The shaman, I now realised, had half-opened a door to the purest of adventures. How could I possibly hold back? I wrote to him at Zapopán, and then care of Dr Ramos. There followed a long silence before the news reached me that Ramon Medina was dead—killed by persons unknown within weeks of our leaving Mexico.