Echo of soul maintenance7/22/2023 ![]() (“I’m working with women on that, too,” he says, “but it’s a little bit slower - mostly because I’m not a woman.”) He also leads workshops that help people reconnect with their own sense of place and the sacredness of ordinary life. Prechtel appears around the world at conferences on initiation for young men. In addition to his writing, Prechtel paints scenes from the daily activities and mythology of the Mayan people and is a musician who has recorded several CDs. In his most recent book, Long Life, Honey in the Heart (Tarcher), Prechtel describes the structure of the village, the Tzutujil priesthood, and everyday village life before the arrival of the death squads. He gives glimpses of his training, yet never reveals details that would allow readers to steal the Mayans’ spiritual traditions the way others have stolen their land. ![]() Prechtel is the author of Secrets of the Talking Jaguar (Tarcher), in which he writes - musically, clearly, and respectfully - about the indigenous traditions in Santiago Atitlán. with their children and currently lives not fifty miles from where he grew up. Prechtel brought his family to the U.S., where they “just kind of starved for a while until Robert Bly and men like him found me.” (Bly, a poet active in the men’s movement, has high praise for Prechtel, whom he describes as “a short kind of pony that gallops through the fields of human possibility with flowers dropping out of his mouth.”) Though Prechtel’ s wife decided to return to her native Guatemala, he remained in the U.S. He wanted me to carry on the knowledge that he had passed to me.” “I was going to stay,” he says, “but before my teacher died, he asked me to leave so that I wouldn’t get killed. Ultimately, Prechtel was forced to flee for his life. The ruling government - with its U.S.–backed death squads - had outlawed the thousand-year-old Mayan rites. Prechtel wanted to stay in Santiago Atitlán forever, but during the time that he lived there, Guatemala was in the throes of a brutal civil war. One of his duties as chief was to lead the young village men through their long initiations into adulthood. He also rose to the public office of Nabey Mam, or first chief. When Chiviliu died, Prechtel took his place, becoming shaman to nearly thirty thousand people. ![]() He married a local woman and had three sons, one of whom died. Though not a native, Prechtel became a full member of the village. (Women taught him at first, and because women and men talk differently, he was a great source of amusement when he began to speak in public.) He also had to learn the Tzutujil language. As a shaman, Prechtel would learn how to correct imbalances in people’s relationships with the ancestors and the spirits. Let’s get to work!” So began his apprenticeship to Nicolas Chiviliu, one of the greatest of the Tzutujil Mayan shamans. ![]() In Santiago Atitlán, a strange man came up to Prechtel and said, “What took you so long? For two years I’ve been calling you. The village was inhabited by the Tzutujil, one of many indigenous Mayan subcultures, each of which has its own distinct traditions, patterns of clothing, and language. He traveled around that country for more than a year before he came to a village called Santiago Atitlán. Seemingly by accident, he ended up going into Guatemala. In 1970, after his first marriage ended and his mother died, Prechtel went to Mexico to clear his head. This horrible syndrome had no use for the truly natural, the wild nature of all peoples.” Its infectious power had eaten the whites, too, and made them its obvious promoter. “The natives called it ‘white man ways,’ ” he says, “but it was more than that. “I spent the whole of my very early life,” he says, “in a state of weepy terror about the possibility of total annihilation of this beautiful world at the hands of a few white men who couldn’t understand the beauty we had in this way of life.” He began to work against this dangerous, beauty-killing power. Martín loved the culture there, and the land. His mother was a Canadian Indian who taught at the Pueblo school, and his father was a white paleontologist. Martín Prechtel was raised in New Mexico on a Pueblo Indian reservation where people still lived in old, pre-European ways.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |