from The Toe Bone and Tooth

lengthy selection from Martin Prechtel's The Toe Bone and Tooth, this one about the public tribunal of a prospective seminary student, Gaspar Culan, and the prosecution and defense of indigenous beliefs in Guatemala before the Civil War.

from The Toe Bone and the Tooth

Like a big city man on a date with a girl he thought he'd never get, Stan started off the first morning by boring the entire board of examining priests, the Bishop and one hundred and thirty monks and students by talking very slowly for an entire hour about himself and his mission.  As with anything that had poor Stan in it, there was a lot of sleeping going on, but he finally brought it all to a close, raising my blood pressure by introducing me with several derogatory remarks about my mixed heritage, calling my wife my "tortilla-making woman" because we weren't married in the church, while expressing his worries about my poor unbaptized older son, who ironically enough actually was baptized, and commenting on the "secret study" he thought I must be making of what he'd hoped was the dying practice of Mayan shamanism.
I let all his unkindness slide, for my goal was not to be right, but to get Gaspar and I back into the arms of the things he mocked, by which he'd never be held and myself away from this terrifying collective lack of vision.  So I thanked him as a brother and let Gaspar begin his charlanda, his discourse.
After standing like a rector, putting on his horn-rimmed eyeglasses, Padre pulled out a snap-ring binder from his backpack, unlocked a couple of laminated leaves and began speaking in a deep, aggressive, open-jawed, non-mayan voice, not unlike orphan Indians do when raised by Norwegiens or American missionaries; a voice that didn't match his face, a voice I'd never heard before.  Like a pushy socialist church historian, he cited the data of certain anthropologists and the conjectured opinions of some scholars about Mayan ritual, blaring on about the grandness of Mayan spirituality before they had become acquainted with the advantages of the modern Catholic church, which took the better part of an hour.  For the next hour, he expounded unimaginatively but with great detail on why he was disappointed with the Catholicism of the Spanish conquest and how all of what the Oklahoma Catholics were doing to rid the highlands of these vestiges of damaging spiritual superstitions and the people's persistent veneration of idols through their mistaken understanding of the statues of the Spanish catholic saints left over from the sixteenth century was very laudable and slowly having a positive effect, as far as he could see, and of which he was an avid supporter and so on, and so on and so on.
With his coffee cup held on his thigh, the Bishop tried to look as serious as his position demanded, but every hungry monk could tell he was pleased with this clear, positive delivery of his party policy by this prized Indian candidate.
I think there was a great longing for what they knew as God among most of the monks, seminarians and a couple of the priests, but for them God was not in the ground, in the whiskers of jaguars, or in the utterances of mad street women; God was only in the caring that humans had for one another and was therefore a deified institution.
The remainder of old boy curates from the American middle corridor, who were the hierarchy and core of judges here, feared what the others desired; God for them was a stack of rules and rightness, a place for their conquering football instincts to gain territory for the church.
Almost all the seminary students here were young Mayan men from various villages and linguistic tribes, some of the Quiche, Ixil, Mam, Cakchiquel, Kekchi, Pocomchi, Pokoman and Tzutujil and everyone of them spoke their mother tongue.
Made to stand as a crowd behind the seated bishop, Pachito and the old boys embedded in the couches, the only seminarians not present at this welcome flamboyant interruption to their predictable daily routine were the youths assigned that day to bake the bread and cook the meals, who every chance they could get joined the ranks of the wide-eyed, loyal audience, bronze-faced would-be priests with their delantales still tied on, everyone dispersing to eat their lunch when Pachito finally rang his little bell.
But in the afternoon the wrestling began and the first words that were aimed at Swordfighter's grandson came from a known enemy of the Bishop's, who, in tolerable Spanish with a bad Okie twng, matter-of-factly blurted out, "What about this image of San Simon you were out there worshiping?  He's anything but God; isn't he an image of the Devil?"
"I wasn't worshiping this idol," Padre retorted with his strange non-Indian voice still in place, "I was kneeling at its feet, praying to Jesus to help my people to see the way and come away from such things into our holy church.  What better place to do this, as Padre Francisco says," pointing to a very worried-looking Stan, "but in the very places where the people have laid their mistaken faith?"
Though I couldn't endorse either side of such an argument, as far as Christian spiritual wrestling went it seemed that Padre had the edge, but the big guy from Oklahoma who was sitting on the edge of the couch now wasn't about to give in.  "Even if we are to believe that you could keep your eye on Christ surrounded by such a presence of the Devil, isn't it true that the idol at whose feet you knelt is considered by your people to be a God and that anyone who worships him has more than one God, and don't they call this idol the 'horned one'?"
Finally, I found a loose brick in the wall of their mediocre dogma and in an attempt to earn and be a worthy keeper of the story of The Toe Bone and the Tooth, I spoke up not only in defense of Gaspar Culan, the Grandson of Swordfighter, but in defense of Holy Boy.
"This deity you speak about is indeed an ancient God," I finally spoke, my voice also not sounding entirely like my own, "But was never called 'horned one' by anybody until your religion showed up to show the people what to call him.  Before the coming of the Spaniards and the arrival of Catholic Christians he was called the Lord of White or the Clear Unblemished Boy or Holy Boy, all names still used today.  It was before this God of both human frailty and possibility that people had always gone for alleviation of their hard lives, as they still do today, and more importantly for you to recognize, they went to this Clear Youth to be given the blessing of forgiveness, the forgiveness that people are not so good at bestowing."
This large priest who I stopped short of calling Buba was getting fairly excited and, widening and bracing his seat, he severely crowded little Pachito, who sank back involuntarily into the hollow wake of cushions created by Buba's forward lurching.
"You're just trying to whitewash the Devil," he yelled out in his Oklahoma-accented Spanish, the Indian men wide-eyed and open-mouthed, taking it all in.
"Isn't it true," Buba continued, "That the Tzutujil and every other kind of sinner, go before this devil with pagan shamans, zajorines, to which they give all their hard-earned pay and sell their sins to this demon with tobacco and liquor, finery, money and licentious words for which he adopts their sins for them and which they continue making, so they can live in this world, unaccountable, having traded, like Mephistopheles, for an eternity in hell where this devil rules when they die.  Isn't this true?"
In a policy I learned from Chiviliu when he'd been confronted for his habits and understandings, I took up where I'd left off instead of biting on the barb and baited hook of his interruption.
"Before your people came here, I mean white folk from abroad, this God you call the 'horned one' was the Mayan equivalent of Jesus; an unmarried, magical boy whose annual sacrifice caused the world to flower and the earth to provide again; whose disappearance every year, like Jesus' crucifixion, caused the people to grieve and weep; whose tears fertilized the earth, his mother, whose womb brought fourth a new 'clear child,' like Maria does every winter..."
I hadn't wanted to explain the intricacies of how this deity transformed annually thirteen times, and how because there was no verb "to be" in Mayan language there was no issue of one-ness and because of that sometimes he was a woman, and that he was built of lighting thoughts and ropes of two hundred and sixty Gods of deified Time from the Tzututjil versions of the more generally known Mayan calendar, whose knots created a supernatural net of fire who were the stars, which in turn were the spark souls of a million types of life and life to come, but pushed by this angry, not very subtle Oklahoman enemy of the Bishop I proceeded, against my better judgement, to do exactly that.
The hundred nodding heads of young Indian novice priests, who recognized in what I'd said their own spiritual dilemmas, of wanting as Indians to love some part of their people's traditional ritual and faith, but having had it demonized or trivialized by the church who called their beliefs childish, upon hearing the Tzutujil version of the same, explained in terms of its splendor and spiritual depth, allowed little hairs of Indian pride and doubt about the Christians to be planted in their hearts, all of which now terrified the priests.
Buba, though seeming by then to be more of an embarrassing liability than an ally to the other curate's cause, was so wound up by the hatred he felt toward me personally and the ground he'd lost on my account that he now jumped to his feet and forgetting to speak in Spanish so everyone could understand, blurted out accusatorily in English while shaking his mutton-fisted arms my direction, "Then tell us, smart buy, if this manifestation of Satan, that you call 'the clear white child' is so glorious a thing, why is he known far and wide as 'Big Jew'?  Wasn't it the Jews that killed our Jesus?  Huh?"
Unaware that Pachito understood and spoke English as beautifully as he spoke his native Spanish, along with Latin, Greek, Italian and Cakchiquel, and I now listened as he very carefully translated what the American Buba priest had inquired into Spanish for the crowd, his eyes bugged out, eyebrows wrinkled up to his sweating, bald head, staring in horror at the Bishop, whose rising blood pressure was already in heaven and whose fist thumped his jittering thighs.
Padre froze with the rest, his arms folded looking straight down at the plastic desk, while I on the other hand responded before anyone could stop the session or interrupt, starting before the last words of Pachito's translation had dropped from the air.
"When the Spaniards came they were divided between clergy and civil colonial bureaucracy.  While different religious orders were assigned to different districts, here int he southern highlands the Franciscans won the appointment.
"After fifty years of force bullying, proselytizing, saying mass and instigating their cults of saints and cofradias, this more human-sounding Mayan Jesus, 'Clear White Youth,' was still just as difficult for the Franciscians to eradicate as he has been for all of you.
"When the Tzutujil people were increasingly punished and further harried for their veneration of this more visible of their many deties, they started calling him Saint Simon Judas Tadeos, considering him to be Jesus' older brother, which was further confused over time by the Spanish priests with Judas Iscariot, the one who sold your God's son to his persecutors.
"By the time of the Catholic Holy See, the Dominican Inquisition feared by all people far and wide, sent their anemic, sadistic officers to what is now known as Guatemala, they had as their prime directive to rid the Earth of all heretics, Protestants and heathens, all of which were known collectively as Jews.
"The Inquisition could not legally try Indians in their courts for heresy for the greater faith they showed for the 'Clear White Youth,' or San Simon, as his newer manifestation was called.
"This was because in the human ranking system of Europe, the Indians were ranked as a subhuman caste with a status equal to the beasts, which Christians, Protestants and Catholics alike saw as not having a soul and therefore exploitable as dead matter.
"Of course, everybody knew they were people, but they weren't legally people.  To make them into people legally, so the Inquisition could have domain over them all, the Holy See set about proving that Mayans were actually one of the lost tribes of ancient Jews, from the time of Gog and Magog,  before the Jews had a temple, much before they'd lost their temple and adopted Rabbinical Judaism.  If they could convincingly show that Mayans were genetic Jews, then the Inquisition could have them.
"So, like the council and Pilate that judged and sentenced Jesus, the Inquisition, just like you seem to be doing here, tried and sentenced the Mayan Jesus, proclaiming the 'Clean White Youth' to be the 'Gran Judio,' so they could eradicate their God for being a Jew and crucify the Mayans for being Jewish, forgetting of course that the Romans who later became the Roman Catholics crucified their Jesus who died not a Christian but an Aramaic-speaking Jewish Rabbi."
Then finishing up like I thought a lawyer might, I added in conclusion:
"If this council has been called to determine the purity of faith of the prospective priest Gaspar Culan by trying and passing judgement yet once again on another people's God, then I say that even if he had been worshiping what is holy at the foot of the Grand Jew, or the 'Clear White Youth,' or conversely if he was only accompanying his relatives who were, no matter how you cut it, you have all ended up looking a whole lot like a tribunal of jealous, unforgiving people trying Jesus all over again, instead of practicing trying to be like him.  In that light I submit that Gaspar Culan has as good a faith as anyone else in this carpeted room."
Though i was hungry and could have eaten, the dinner was late, for every single cook, monk, novice priest, student, delivery boy and visiting Indian parent had forgotten what they were doing and had converged into the crowd mesmerized by the argument, which at this point was immediately and emphatically halted by the Bishop, whose hierarchical cronies called for a huddle which all the priests jumped up to join, whispering like a football team after their last down who was going to have to punt, throughout which Gaspar and I uninvited, patiently waited.
When the knot of priests unfurled, Pachito loudly announced with his little bell and clipboard in his hand that Padre was exonerated and back in the graces of the Church and that two more days spent discussing what was obvious to everyone would be a waste of precious time away from their parishes and all our work.  Which meant to be, best of all, that tomorrow we could all go back home to our families in Atitlan.
In the months that followed more than sixty percent of the Mayan seminary students would have renounced their ambitions to pursue a catholic priesthood.  What had happened to them all, only they themselves could tell, but not a few of those young men ended up as left-wing guerrillas.

Heavier than Air

Heavier than Air

for Fritz Haber

He tautened, tightened and synched

the air, ratcheted in nitrogen and

found in the space the slow drop of ammonium

nitrate, the fuel that would keep a billion modern people from starving.

His glass of fine wine was lifted among

the highest societies a poor German Jew

from the country could pull himself up to,

but he yearned for higher air than the liquid

that shook life from the earth

to feed his generation of plants.

_________________________He longed for Goddom.

He rallied and lead a field of soldiers, squaring

off in the first big war of the modern

age. While Klimt painted the lovers softly, adoring eachother

in gold and maroon, Fritz Haber gave the order for the chlorine gas,

a similar invention to ammonium nitrate, to be let

loose slowly over the field at Ypres. It was early spring.

There must have been birds singing as the dawn broke.

Fog mixed with fog and heavier than air, gas

dropped into the trenches where men were lifted out of

their skins to the sensation of drowning on dry land, drowning

in their own lungs, heaving, convulsing, retching, tearing at their skin

falling back to the earth to feed the field with their blue bodies.

When he arrived home, his wife, a scientist surrounded

by men, said what he did was wrong. I don't know

what else she said before he left the next morning

to command troops and gas, before she walked into the garden

behind their house, before she rested a pistol to her chest, the

cold iron on the shallow part of her breast, before she aimed

straight for her own heart and fired, before he heard the sound,

found her body and took his pistol back, before he left her there

to get the train, before his young son wandered alone

in the garden, wondering what had happened to his mother,

his son who would years later walk down that same hedgerow

as his mother and end his candle with his own two fingers.

And after Fritz Haber tried and failed

to ransack gold from the saltwater of tides

to pay his part of the colossal debt of the Fatherland

he went toe-to-toe with the Nazi laws of

1934 and resigned rather than sack his

Jewish contemporaries, some of whom were no doubt

present the first time a pesticide was synthesized,

a pesticide easily lethal to humans. The chemists conspicuously

added a smell so farmers could avoid the toxic gas

but a later, more dedicated group of chemists

removed the smell, and updated the recipe name to Xyclon-B.

from The Serpent and the Rainbow ~Wade Davis

Have been studying up on zombies lately, owing to derrick jensen, and this led to a friend recommending The Serpent and the Rainbow, which has been exciting so far in its mix of anthropology and ethnobotany.  Following is when the lead character is close to a group ritual in Haiti.  I feel like scientists get a bit of a bad rap in this one, but i like the examination of the scientific belief system as a whole that ensues.  

~

I woke twice more before dawn, first to a cobalt sky and moonbeams lapping the bushes, heavy with moisture. In the moonlight the roots of the mapou were white, motionless, and seemingly cold. By the next time the stars had faded and light cracked the horizon. Venus had moved all the way across the sky, and now it too dimmed. I followed it until my eyes ached. A gray cloud crossed over its path, and when it was gone so was the planet. I stared and stared until I couldn't even see the sky. But it was hopeless. Venus was gone. It shouldn't have been. Astronomers know the amount of light reflected by the planet, and we should be able to see it, even in broad daylight. Some Indians can. And but a few hundred years ago, sailors from our own civilization navigated by it, following its path as easily by day as they did by night. It is simply a skill that we have lost, and I have often wondered why.

Though we frequently speak of the potential of the brain, in practice our mental capacity seems to be limited. Every human mind has the same latent capabilities, but for reasons that have always intrigued anthropologiests different peoples develop it in different ways, and distinctions, in effect, amount to unconscious cultural choices. There is a small isolated group of seminomadic Indians in the northwest Amazon whose technology is so rudimentary that until quite recently they used stone axes. Yet these same people possess a knowledge of the tropical forest that puts almost any biologist to shame. As children they learn to recognize such complex phenomena as floral pollination and fruit dispersal, to understand and accurately predict animal behavior, to anticipate the fruiting cycles of hundreds of forest trees. As adults their awareness is refined to an uncanny degree; at forty paces, for example, their hunters can smell animal urine and distinguish on the basis of scent alone which out of dozens of possible species left it. Such sensitivity is not an innate attribute of these people, any more than technological prowess is something inevitably and uniquely ours. Both are consequences of adaptive choices that resulted in the development of highly specialized but different mental skills, at the obvious expense of others. Within a culture, change also means choice. In our society, for example, we now think nothing about driving at high speeds down expressways, a task that involves countless rapid, unconscious sensory responses and decisions which, to say the least, would have intimidated our great-grandfathers. Yet in acquiring such dexterity, we have forfeited other skills like the ability to see Venus, to smell animals, to hear the weather change.

Perhaps our biggest choice came four centuries ago when we began to breed scientists. This was not something ancestors aimed for. It was a result of historical circumstances that produced a particular way of thinking that was not necessarily better than what had come before, only different. Every society, including our own, is moved by a fundamental quest for unity; a struggle to create order out of perceived disorder, integrity in the face of diversity, consistency in the face of anomaly. This vital urge to render coherent and intelligible models of the universe is at the root of all religion, philosophy, and, of course, science. What distinguishes scientific thinking from that of traditional and, as it often turns out, nonliterate cultures is the tendency of the latter to seek the shortest possible means to achieve total understanding of their world. The voudoun society, for example, spins a web of belief that is all-inclusive, that generates an illusion of total comprehension. No matter how an outsider might view it, for the individual member of that society the illusion holds, not because of coercive force, but simply because for him there is no other way. And what's more, the belief system works; it gives meaning to the universe.

Scientific thinking is quite the opposite. We explicitly deny such comprehensive visions, and instead deliberately divide our world, our perceptions, and our confusion into however many particles are necessary to achieve understanding according to the rules of our logic. We set things apart from each other, and then what we cannot explain we dismiss with euphemisms. For example, we could ask why a tree fell over in a storm and killed a pedestrian. The scientist might suggest that the trunk was rotten and the velocity of the wind was higher than usual. But when pressed to explain why it happened at the instant when that individual passed, we would undoubtedly hear words such as chance, coinci9dence, and fate; terms which, in and of themselves, are quite meaningless but which conveniently leave the issue open. For the voudounist, each detail in that progression of events would have a total, immediate, and satisfactory explanation within the parameters of his belief system.

For us to doubt the conclusions of the vodounist is expected, but it is nevertheless presumptuous. For one, their system works, at least for them. What's more, for most of us the basis for accepting the models and theories of our scientists is no more solid or objective than that of the vodounist who accepts the metaphysical theology of the houngan (voudoun healer). Few laymen know or even care to know the principles that guide science; we accept the results on faith, and like the peasant we simply defer to the accredited experts of the tradition., Yet we scientists work under the constraints of our own illusions. We assume that somehow we shall be able to divide the universe into enough infinitesimally small pieces, that somehow even according to our own rules we shall be able to comprehend these, and critically we assume that these particles, though extracted from the whole, will render meaningful conclusions about the totality. Perhaps most dangerously, we assume that in doing this, in making this kind of choice, we sacrifice nothing. But we do. I can no longer see Venus.