16
History of
Brujer’a/Curanderismo
The Mexican-American magical paths are different from Granny Magic and Hoodoo in one very distinct way. The Scotch-Irish immigrated here of their own will and, as such, were forced to adapt their folk magic practices to a foreign environment. The Africans were kidnapped and relocated to America against their will and, as such, were forced to adapt their folk magic practices to a foreign environment.
In contrast, those we now call Mexican-Americans were always here and their practice continued uninterrupted for centuries in what would become the United States. Originally, Mexico included parts of modern-day Oregon, California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Texas, and as far east as Lousiana, as well as small parts of Colorado and Wyoming. Most of the southwestern United States was Mexico until 1848 when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo created the borders that we recognize today.
The changes brought about when this treaty was signed meant that people who had been Mexican before were now Americans. Other than the fact that slavery was illegal in Mexico and women were allowed to own land, which was not the case in the United States, life did not change much for the residents of those areas. They were still the people indigenous to the land who practiced the ancestral healing techniques, some of which originated in the ancient Aztec cultures.
Native Americans have lived in what is now California for more than 13,000–15,000 years, with an estimated population of around 300,000 at the time of the Spanish invasion of 1519. Archeological evidence indicates that Native American tribes lived in what is now New Mexico as far back as 9200 BC.
The Spanish conquest brought an influx of Mexican and Spanish immigrants to what is now California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. They co-mingled with the Native American populations there, sharing herbal and ritual healing practices that dated back to the Toltec empire of AD 387. The terrain, wildlife, and botanical environment of the western United States resembled that of Mexico, so the level of adaptation was far less extreme than that of the creators of Hoodoo or Granny Magic. The ancient practices transferred and blended almost seamlessly, creating an uninterrupted historical flow.
Mexico, including the parts of it that extended into the present-day United States, did not suffer political and religious demonization of magical practice until the Spanish invasion. Without the oppression of the Roman influence and its denigration of non-Christian supernatural practice, the cultural norm of Mexico embraced rituals, herb lore, advanced healing practices, and a copious amount of human sacrifice to keep the rain coming to nourish the grain crops.
In Mexico, the primary religious rites came from sun worshippers and rain worshippers, each of which demanded an impressive quantity of fresh human hearts and human blood. The rain cults equated the amount of human and animal blood that flowed to the amount of rain they would receive for their crops. Since they lived in a desert, rain was vital to their survival. They believed that if they stopped offering the sacrifices to feed the gods, the gods would die and take the rain with them.
The Goddess Coatlicue, for instance, is an earth goddess who created all celestial bodies: the moon, the stars, and the sun. She wears a necklace of human hearts and hands. Her body is made entirely of serpents. The Aztecs recognized her as a cannibalistic deity who was particularly fond of human hearts to eat and add to her fashion accessories.
In the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, we see an elaborate ritual to the Goddess Kali Ma, in which a priest removes the heart of a victim to offer to the goddess. Although Kali Ma is, in fact, a Hindu deity, she is equated with Coatlicue.
According to mythology, the Gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca ripped apart the Earth Goddess Cipactli, a reptilian dragon beast, to create the world using her body parts. To repay her for her sacrifice, the Aztecs consoled her with frequent offerings of human blood and hearts.
The Montezuma dynasty encouraged the practice of human sacrifice and used the offerings to leverage divine favor. They created unprecedented displays of architecture in the form of palaces, temples, and great canals, as well as extending the Aztec dominion ever beyond its boundaries.
By the time the Spanish conquered the Aztec Empire, there were too many people practicing these historical magical techniques for the conquistadors to effectively force conversion to Christianity, the religion of the conquerors.
Instead, the Spanish priests employed an “assimilate rather than eliminate” approach. Not all the Aztec gods demanded human sacrifice or blood offerings like the ones worshipped by the conquered regime. The Spanish priests brought attention back to the more benevolent Aztec gods and gradually equated them with the Catholic saints. This reprieve from ongoing human sacrifice demanded by the previous ruling paradigm was well-received by the masses, which allowed the syncretized blend to quickly spread throughout the country.
The people indigenous to Mexico had no conflict with the Catholic saints and quickly integrated them into their existing pantheon of holy figures. They understood that they could honor their gods just as well if they aligned them with similar Spanish holy figures. The veneration of the Blessed Mother in the form of the Virgin Mary took hold, and to this day, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the most common presentation of the Virgin Mary in Mexico, remains its most celebrated and popular holy figure.
Thinking they were invading a barbaric and primitive culture, the Spanish conquistadors were surprised to find a sophisticated and systematic socialized health-care system, complete with hospitals manned by healers armed with an advanced knowledge of herbal healing and an impressive body of medicinal research. Although many of the hospitals were destroyed in the conquest, the medical networks remained intact and continue through to the present time.
Expanding this herbal and ritual-based health care system, the Spaniards added Judeo-Christian scriptures as magical incantations, as well as the use of the crucifix and images of saints as magical talismans. Numbers routinely used for magical rituals—such as how many times to perform a spell or how long to keep a ritual going—are 3, 7, 9, 11, and 13, all of which are Judeo-Christian magical numerical concepts.
The Spanish introduced the Greek humoral medical perspectives to Curanderismo, as well as Arabic medicinal practices from the Moors and elements of medieval and post-medieval European Witchcraft. In fact, the Spanish priests and healers who came to Mexico during and after the conquest found that many of their magico-religious beliefs resembled those of the Aztec people. This compatibility of practice further assisted the assimilation of the two cultures.
European Witchcraft interjected the concept of humans controlling supernatural forces, rather than the other way around. The Hispanic-Arabic system of healing brought the wisdom of treating the mind, body, and spirit with harmonic balance and connecting the process of healing to the existing environment in a holistic fashion. These two factors were influential in solidifying what would become the long-term perspectives of both Brujería and Curanderismo.
In addition to the numbers used, the Judeo-Christian concept that humans can heal in the name of God just as Christ instructed his disciples to do, became a primary aspect of Curanderismo. Curanderos tap into supernatural power—meaning God in their theology—through prayer, visualization, incantations, and ritual, then use the synergistic power created by that engagement to heal.
From an occultist perspective of the practice, both the brujas and the curanderas see, influence, and communicate with supernatural beings such as spirits and angels. This is one of the many historical and modern distinctions between the bruja and the curandera. The bruja supposedly accesses her supernatural power through the Christian devil and the curandera from the Christian god. The curandero heals, while the brujo harms. Malevolent spirits create discord and benevolent spirits bless. This duality of light and dark between the two roles is persistent and greatly informs overall public opinion, when again, the practices are almost identical when we strip away the kneejerk societal biases.
This multiculturally influenced healing system migrated over centuries into what would become the western and southwestern United States, and blended with the practices of Native Americans local to the area, ultimately creating the Brujería and Curanderismo of the United States today.
Unfortunately, the lack of pre-conquest documentation muddies the perception of which current practices came from which culture, so what is left is informed speculation. Additionally, from a philosophical perspective, most of the primary influences in Mexican magic and healing were remarkably akin to one another. This overlapping and cooperative integration allowed for a mutually-informative blend of practices, but creates a challenge in fully identifying the distinct contribution of each culture.
Even after the Louisiana Purchase redefined the boundaries of the United States, in many areas of the Southwest, larger towns in Mexico were geographically closer than larger towns in the United States. This led Mexican people living in the United States to seek out medical care from the curanderas of Mexico, not only because it was their familiar and societal norm, but also because they were the nearest medical assistance. In the vast, sparsely populated spaces between towns during the 1800–1900s, the curandera was often the only option for medical care. As insurance and immigration considerations took hold, health care became even more restricted, especially for undocumented people of Mexican heritage in the United States.
Now, as they did throughout the past, curanderos and brujos serve the rural poor, addressing both the spiritual and physical aspects of healing. In each path, the training is academic and experiential, drawing on the vast body of herbal healing lore from the Aztec and Mayan healers, with North American Native American influences, as well as the many cross-cultural components brought to Mexico by the Spanish.
Curanderismo is nothing if not adaptable, and from its prehistoric origins to its modern presentation, it demonstrates an eagerness to soak up new information. Contemporary curanderas welcome scientific medical knowledge and use it alongside their traditional healing practices. The curandera works effectively with scientific-based medicine, and although the Westernized medical industry may criticize the curandero for giving equal significance to the psychological, social, and spiritual aspects of healing, the curandera ridicules Westernized medicine for its lack of attention to this vital part of the curative process.
The history of Curanderismo and its darker sibling, Brujería, is as old as Mexico itself and parallels the cultural, religious, and historical progress of Mexican-Americans into the current time. Each of the earliest Mexican immigrants who moved north into the wilds of what is now the southwestern and western United States brought a part of Curanderismo and Brujería with them. Now those practices flourish in any part of the United States where Mexican-American communities exist. You may not see it, especially if you are not in the culture, but it is there. It is always there.