Cleansing Rites of Curanderismo: Limpias Espirituales of Ancient Mesoamerican Shamans - Erika Buenaflor M.A. J.D. 2018
An Introduction to Limpias and Curanderismo
I weave back my disassociated identities moving forward in unity and wholeness.
Riding the undulating serpent.
La Xicana, who long ago reclaimed a dynamic and eclectic identity that was hers to shape and adore.
La Feminista, who now no longer pokes at, or intends to destabilize normative androcentric mores; this is simply incidental; her essence, presence, often stirs and shakes, it just does.
La Curandera, who understands the illusory paradoxical nature of attaching to defined identities; her appropriation and negotiation of identities is a way of communicating, embracing, and weaving back all dissociated parts of herself into her sacred heart.
ERIKA BUENAFLOR
This book is an ofrenda (offering) of love. The material draws from over twenty years of practicing as a curandera; studying with curanderas/os and shamans in the Yucatán peninsula, the Sacred Valley of Peru, and a few botanicas in Los Angeles; and my graduate research on curanderismo and ancient Mesoamerican religious and shamanic practices.*1
This book focuses on limpias, which are Latin American curanderismo cleansing rites that can clear, heal, and revitalize the mind, body, spirit, spaces, and situations, as well as facilitate soul retrieval—recovering sacred essence energy that has left the body as a result of trauma. Limpias can also cleanse on the levels of different but interconnected dimensions, realities, and spaces.
Limpias typically incorporate holistic healing practices, including, for example, the use of plants and meditative remedies. They can also be shamanic in nature, as the curandera/o often knows, sees, or senses energies around the subtle energetic bodies and can journey to different states of reality or consciousness to track and clear the issues that have caused disturbances. These aspects take practice and trust in our intuition, but after many limpias, subtle energies become easier to manage. Limpias can also draw from magical practices in order to change a likely but unwanted outcome to an ideal one. Limpias are incredibly practical in that their sacred tools and methods are very accessible and effective, even for complete novices. Limpias are the most common rites within curanderismo because of their high utility; they facilitate holistic cleansing, healing, positive transformation, renewal, and rejuvenation.
This book provides the fundamental building blocks for the most prevalent types of limpias. It also provides examples of how they have helped my clients to attract ideal situations; heal from various forms of depression, insomnia, anxiety, and other types of illnesses; and experience what some would call miracles. I will explain what curanderismo is in more detail below. But for now, it is sufficient to know that curanderismo is a Latin American shamanic healing practice whose foundations lie in ancient Mesoamerican shamanic traditions.
In this book, I trace limpia ceremonies to the ancient Mesoamerica shamans, particularly those of the Mexica, also known as the Aztecs, and Yucatec Maya of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. My most influential mentors came from the Yucatán. They had either lived there all of their lives, or they had moved there at some point; at any rate, they were familiar with both Maya and Mexica or Nahua curanderismo and shamanic practices.*2 I focus on these two ancient indigenous peoples, the Mexica and Yucatec Maya, because my mentors identified with these traditions and taught me their modern practices.
The different limpia traditions, and their ways of understanding, are as diverse as the thousands of indigenous peoples that have existed in the Americas. Clean lines of continuity between ancient and modern traditions definitely do not exist. These traditions often comprise jagged and idiosyncratic discontinuities of consciousness. Nonetheless, there are shared underlying methods, values, beliefs, and goals that have continued.1
There are three intertwined reasons for tracing limpia rites to their ancient Mesoamerican roots. First of all, being versed in the roots of a particular shamanic or healing practice enables the practitioner to be more comfortable and fluent in it, thereby making the practices more potent. I will explore the limpia processes and tools that the ancient Mexica and Yucatec Maya understood to procure cleansings, healings, purification, rebirth, birth, and revitalization. These processes were not necessarily seen as being linear in the sense that one process would result in a healing while another would facilitate a purification. Rather, limpia rites were often imbued with multivalent meanings and expressions; they could facilitate healings, purifications, births, and rebirths all at the same time. By tracing these roots, I hope to improve the ability of both novices and advanced practitioners to conduct effective limpias.
Secondly, tracing curanderismo practices to their ancient Mesoamerican roots allows us to reclaim indigenous healing methods that have historically been derided, ridiculed, and misappropriated. Reclaiming histories, ancestral medicines, and wisdom is often a critical component in the soul retrieval process for most modern Western peoples, who typically have no connections to ancestral medicines and wisdom and often feel disconnected as a result. This reclaiming is medicine in itself, and it can inspire us to weave our disassociated ancestral wisdom back into our heritage, as well as learn from, respect, and honor indigenous traditions.
Finally, intertwined in these goals is to enact the potential healing power of epistemology; claiming these histories as being worthy of being examined, further explored, and produced, embodying the power and right to choose how we shape and identify ourselves and our stories. Be shaped by someone or something else, or choose to shape yourself— limpia lesson number one.
After I trace the most prevalent limpia practices to their ancient roots, I discuss how these traditions have influenced my own methods. I also explain how to conduct limpias and what should be considered when using each method and its related tools. In addition, I share how limpias have helped change the lives of my clients and myself.
It has been argued that the term shaman is a Western-constructed term that is inappropriate for describing practitioners of the sacred traditions of indigenous peoples because it essentializes these traditions and obscures their rich diversities. This reductionism can also perpetuate racist views and understandings of the indigenous person as a “noble savage.”2 Although shaman and shamanic are not always the preferred terms among some scholars, I use them because they can also denote fluidity and dynamism.
I use the term shaman to describe those among the ancient Mexica and Yucatec Maya peoples who could enact sacred and magical rites of cleansing, birthing, rebirthing, purification, and rejuvenation, and could see beyond the veils of different realities—the predecessors of curanderas/os. I use the term shamanic to describe the rites they engaged in. This is not to say, however, that every ancient Mesoamerican shaman could perform all the limpia rites described herein, or would have performed them in the same manner. There were hundreds of different kinds of ancient Mexica and Yucatec Maya shamans with different specialties. Nevertheless, because the critical study and categorizing of their specialties is fairly recent and ongoing, until I am aware of a more specific name, I will use the term shaman to identify these ancient curanderas/os and shamanic to describe their rites.
BOOK SECTIONS AND CHAPTERS
The first section of the book encompasses the first three chapters and examines who and what influenced my practice as a curandera, as well as the sources I relied on. The first chapter discusses how I met my most influential mentors, the catastrophic accident and other events that inspired me to fully embrace becoming a curandera, and why I sought out ancient Mesoamerican limpia practices. The second chapter describes the Mexica and the Maya people of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in terms of their dominant religious beliefs, calendrical systems and ceremonies, and shamanic trades. The third chapter explains the precontact and postcontact sources I relied on to examine the limpia rites of these peoples and acknowledges both the strengths and limitations of these sources.
The second section, comprising the last five chapters, discusses the most common types of limpias performed by contemporary curanderas/os. Each chapter is broken into three parts: (1) a discussion of the ancient Yucatec Maya and Mexica limpia rites; (2) an account of how these ancient practices influenced my own practice; and (3) an explanation of how to conduct limpias. The specific rites and tools that I trace and explore encompass: platicas (heart-straightening talks), fire and water ceremonies, sweeping rites, and methods of activating and vivifying sacred spaces for conducting limpias.
WHAT IS CURANDERISMO?
This perspective and introduction on curanderismo comes from the sacred heart of a Xicana curandera who has been on a quest to understand herself, what has or had compromised her, what drives her questions, and what she chooses to be now. And as a Xicana, lovingly welcoming back the fragmented parts of herself into her sacred heart— La India, La Española, La Mexicana, La Americana, La Africana . . .
The root word of curanderismo, curar, means to heal. A curandera is a female healer, and a curandero is a male healer. A curandera/o is someone who heals on a holistic level—mind, body, spirit, and soul. We generally approach healing by integrating an understanding of the soul and spirit with that of the body and mind.
We curanderas/os are trained to work with the person on a holistic level and often use many tools to do so: our hands, our intuition, the spoken word, and the power of the mind. Nonetheless, there are some curanderas/os who specialize in the use of one particular tool. The following are some of the more common specialties.
Sobaderas/os
Sobaderas/os are known for using massage and acupressure points.*3 But sobaderismo treatments are not simply intended to relax the body or to heal it of physical aches and pains. Rather they are intended to release many kinds of wounds—emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical— that may be stuck in the cellular body, spirit, and soul. A loving touch generally tends to melt hardness and stubbornness and can be incredibly effective in facilitating a limpia or soul retrieval.
One curandera who mentored me taught me to use massage and acupressure points to facilitate limpias and release energetic and physical ailments from my body. After a major hiking accident that broke many of my bones from the head down and placed me in a wheelchair for almost a year, I used the sobaderismo techniques that she taught me to relieve any pain and ensure that my muscles would not atrophy. I was able to walk with a completely normal gait in less than two weeks, after having been in a wheelchair for almost a year. Of course, I also applied many other tools I had learned from curanderas/os and shamans during my initial years of training; training that has been a continuous and ongoing process. But sobaderismo techniques were essential for helping me to walk normally again.
For the sobaderismo treatments I provide, I move stuck energies from the body using particular strokes, charged essential oils, and hot stones and crystals; then I release this energy with my intention and place pressure on particular acupressure points to facilitate a release. I have had clients begin to spontaneously cry or laugh as this energy is released from their bodies. Afterwards, they tell me that they feel physically, emotionally, and spiritually calm and rejuvenated.
Parteras/os
There are some curanderas/os who act as parteras/os (midwives). Parterismo is a distinct specialty in that most curanderas/os are not necessarily trained to work as midwives. Parteras/os provide prenatal and postnatal support for the mother, and sometimes for the entire family. Parteras/os act as dietitians, counselors, healers, doctors, and nurses to ensure the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being of both the mother and her baby. They talk to the baby and the mother during and after the pregnancy. Parteras/os are typically familiar with massage and herbs, use their intuition quite frequently, and may work with other tools as well.
Along with prescribing particular foods, drinks, and plants, parteras/os may also advise the mother about how to protect herself and her baby from unwanted energies that could have adverse effects on them. A partera/o may advise that the mother stay indoors during an eclipse. If an expecting mother goes out at night during a full moon, she is to place a red yarn that has been tied three times in her bra. If she believes that she will be around negativity, she should tie a red yarn around her belly. Parteras/os also give massages to the mother to ensure that the baby is being formed in the right position and is in constant preparation for the actual delivery.
This tradition goes back to ancient Mesoamerica. Parteras/os would give sobaderismo treatments both inside and outside the temāzcalli (sweat lodge in Nahuatl).*4 In fact, recruiting a partera/o was an endeavor that involved the parents and grandparents-to-be, and took place over a ceremonial feast. The partera/o was thought to be highly responsible for ensuring the health of the baby and mother.
During one of my mentorships in Bacalar in the Yucatán, when it was still a sleepy little town, I had the honor of experiencing a temazcal ceremony with an old partero named Pedro. After my first ceremony, I struck up a conversation with this very sweet man and learned of his specialty. I became incredibly curious, particularly because he was the first Maya partero I had ever met. When I asked him if there were any issues because he was a male delivering babies, he gave no indication that being a male partero was of any consequence. After his nonchalant response, I did not give a second thought to his gender; I was more interested in any stories he had to share. Pedro had spent decades delivering babies in temazcales. According to him, the family of the mother, the elders in particular, would be in the temazcal when the mother was in labor. They would sing songs and play the drum to honor and welcome the birth of the baby. Herbs were chosen to ensure a graceful outcome for the delivery and were integral to facilitating the well-being of the baby and mother during the process.
My interactions with Pedro showed that he was knowledgeable about plant medicines and their preparation. One lady from our group was experiencing severe nausea. He made a fresh tea blend of lavender, basil, oregano, and cinnamon sticks, which more or less instantly alleviated her dizziness and nausea. He also made a salve for me of spearmint, camphor, yarrow, and aloe vera, which relieved the itchiness and swelling I had from a bug bite. When I asked him about his training in working and healing with plants, he said that these remedies were common knowledge. But he had received special training from his mother, who was the partera that trained him, in working with plants to heal most of the common illnesses pregnant women may experience.
Yerberas/os
Yerberas/os are curanderas/o who work principally with plant medicine. The name is derived from yerba, which can refer to an herb, a weed, or a plant. Many yerberas/os know how to heal and work with flowers, fruit, weeds, tree bark, vines, leaves, vegetables, flowers, fungi, cacti, and succulents. Most yerberas/os know the healing and magical properties of hundreds of plants, possibly even thousands.
Some practitioners may work strictly with plants that grow in their area, often because they have established a particular relationship with the soul essence of these plants. This relationship may have developed from a diet whereby the yerbera/o ingests the plant, prays, and calls forward its essence repeatedly for a certain number of specified days. The soul essence teaches the yerbera/o where to find the plants, when and how to pick them, and how to prepare them. There are also some rites that require plants to be fresh and harvested at a certain time of the day or night, which also makes it necessary to work with local plants.
While in Lamanai, Belize, I had the honor of meeting a yerbero whose local medicinal plants were located in a lush jungle. When I took a walk with him in the jungle, he began by welcoming me and inviting me to join him in a prayer and tobacco offering for the plants. He could identify the healing properties of hundreds of different plants and knew how to prepare medicines from them. Over dinner, he told me that his greatest teachers have been the plants themselves. As a young man, he had a teacher that taught him how to begin spotting, picking, and preparing plants for medicinal and magical purposes. He would go with his teacher to spot the terrain where they grew, and the teacher taught him where to cut them so that there would be more for him to pick later. He watched and helped his teacher heal hundreds of people from many different types of illnesses with plant preparations. But his teacher particularly stressed how to listen and connect with the spirit of the plants, because they would teach him more than he ever could. Praying with, walking, and meditating with the spirit of plants were essential for him in developing his connection with their soul essence.
My connection and work with plants has developed and evolved throughout the years. My first plant mixture was with rosewater when I was five, a gift for my mom. Then, when I was eight, I felt it necessary to steep bougainvillea in warm water and add lime for my sore throat. It turns out that bougainvillea flowers have been used by many curanderas/os for colds and sore throats. I dabbled a little here and there, and throughout the years I made various herbal and flower remedies to heal the body, spirit, and soul. During my quarterly trips to the Yucatán, where I received the bulk of my training, I always offered to help and pick up any necessary plants, either at the open-air market or from my mentors’ backyards. Typically, in exchange for lending a helping hand, the curandera/o was willing to teach me what the plants were being used for and how to prepare them for many things, such as sweats, magical preparations, limpias, and healing remedies.
Throughout the years, as a curandera, I continued my training in working and healing with plants. Eventually I began my own healing garden, and dove deeper into connecting with the soul essence of plants and welcoming them in to teach me. The plants I work with regularly have been and continue to be some of my greatest teachers. At my yerberismo classes, we cover different topics, such as ceremonies for connecting with the essence spirit of each plant; the plants’ magical and spiritual qualities; how to create magical and healing oils, tinctures, salves, ointments, liniments, and poultices; when and how to pick and prepare plant mixtures in relation to the time of day or night, the specific day, and the phase of the moon; and how and where to store plants. At each class, I always have my students work with plants to make tools, such as complex tea blends, tinctures, bolsas poderosas (magical power bags), smudge bundles, salves, ointments, oils, and blends for baños (spiritual baths). This way, they get firsthand experience working and healing with plants. Although I know a thing or two about these subjects, it is not necessarily my specialty, so I do not identify myself as a yerbera.
There are other curanderas, such as consejeras/os, who principally use spiritual counseling to heal; espiritualistas/os, who connect with deceased spirits; mentalistas, who work solely with the power of the mind to heal; perfumeras/os, who use the scent of plants to heal and work magic; santeras/os, who work with the Santería religion to heal and cleanse; and hueseras/os, bonesetters, who work with broken and injured bones. Many other curanderas/os no doubt identify themselves or are identified by different names throughout Latin America.
Research in the American Southwest on curanderismo identifies another type of specialty, the “total curandero,” one who is skilled at all of the specialties. Perhaps this label was appropriate when the Southwest was mainly composed of Mexican-Americans, but it is arguably outdated as a result of globalization and immigration. I am unsure whether a Peruvian, Cuban, or Puerto Rican curandera/o would be skilled at all of the same specialties as a Xicana/o curandera/o or vice versa.
CURANDERISMO AND ITS ROOTS
Curanderismo has evolved as a dynamic and eclectic practice. Scholars point out that curanderismo is rooted in Mesoamerican practices, African medicine, Spanish spiritual theories, Judeo-Christian beliefs, early Arabic medicine and health practices, Greek humoral medicine revived during the Spanish Renaissance, and, later, European witchcraft and African medicine.3 These complex processes of negotiating and appropriating beliefs and practices often allowed Mesoamerican peoples to continue to practice rites postcontact that were already familiar to them in varying degrees, prior to the arrival of the Spaniards.*5 But the question that is often left unanswered is, Which specific curing practices have their roots in ancient Mesoamerica?
Typically, what is discussed are the early Spanish influences on indigenous curing rites and beliefs. For example, many scholars who have written about the origins and development of curanderismo state that the Spanish theory of humors influenced the practice of curanderismo early on. This theory, which can be ultimately traced back to the Greek physician Hippocrates in the fifth century BCE, identified four humors: (1) blood; (2) phlegm; (3) yellow bile; and (4) black bile. Sickness developed when one of these humors was out of equilibrium with the others, and it was the healer’s job to ascertain the imbalance and correct it. Certain physical conditions were treated with the application of heat or cold, for example.4
Some scholars, such as George Foster, assert that the influence of Spanish medical theory is so great that it is difficult to discern what is truly Mesoamerican in origin with regard to the sixteenth-century medicinal documents written by indigenous scholars. Foster further claims that indigenous scholars had been trained using European books and were therefore influenced by Hippocratic-Galenic humoral theory, so references to a “hot” or “cold” remedy should not be considered indigenous. Unfortunately, this line of thinking has influenced the study of curanderismo, particularly as it relates to its Mesoamerican origins.5
Mesoamerican scholars, such as Alfredo López Austin and Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano, however, have critically compared many early ethnohistorical records and disagree with this dehistoricization. Ortiz de Montellano points out that Francisco Hernández, King Phillip’s appointed physician sent to conduct scientific investigation in the Americas in 1570, often criticized Mesoamerican healers for misclassifying or mislabeling plants in relation to hot-cold applications. For example, when classifying memeyas, plants that secrete a milky juice, he claims that they are certainly of a hot and dry nature and disagrees with the Mexica’s classification of them as being cold and fighting against fevers. His criticisms of the hot-cold applications make no sense unless the indigenous peoples also had their own system of applying “hot” or “cold” labels.6
In the Florentine Codex, Friar Bernardino de Sahagún, sixteenth-century ethnographer, discusses how the Mexica treated certain illnesses with hot and cold therapies. When discussing a constant cough, he notes that one should abstain from fruit and other cold food and should only drink hot beverages.7 If they were healing an infected knee, for example, they would take the humor, or phlegm, out and place a poultice of powdered toloa foliage on the knee.8 In Primeros Memoriales, Sahagún also lists different cures for humoral imbalances such as bloody phlegm, white phlegm, and yellow phlegm.9
Many hot-cold designations were also related to the loss and gain of tonalli, a particular type of soul piece or sacred essence energy, an exclusively precontact Mesoamerican concept.10 The loss of tonalli, for example, was regarded as the result of a hot and cold opposition.11 Tonalli was regarded as an impersonal regenerative energy, composed of heat and light, that circulated throughout the cosmos, and one of three animating energies possessed by humans.12 As an energy within humans, it was a regenerative inner life force that provided vigor, heat, strength, and growth and was determined by the character or sign of the day under which one was born. This inner life force was primarily received from the sun. The more tonalli something contained, the hotter it was; the less tonalli, the colder it was. In fact, every situation of fear produced a feeling of coldness.13 A loss of tonalli caused a state of coldness in the person, which could lead to severe illnesses, and sometimes death. A retrieval of the tonalli, performed by a shaman called the tetonalmacani, often incorporated hot and cold treatments.
A comparative critical rereading of these early documents suggests that the understanding of hot-cold applications in curing traditions can be directly traced to ancient Mesoamerican practices. This is not to say that Spanish humoral theory couldn’t have influenced curanderismo. But before immediately assuming that Spanish humoral theory actually influenced curanderismo curing practices, the focus should be spatially and temporally contextualized with special attention to the quality of interactions and instructions between them. While there were a select few to whom the Spaniards taught their healing theories and practices, the sources suggest that most curanderismo shamanic curing practices can be traced to ancient Mesoamerica.
In this book, I intend to explore the largely neglected contexts of ancient Mesoamerican limpia rites. I consider, when appropriate and available, the ritual and theatrical space in which they were performed. In addition, I also focus on their polysemic nature and on their consequent transformative power in healing, purification, birth, rebirth, and revitalization. I will then expand on what we can learn from these ancient practices and how they have influenced my own methods.