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Don Patricio’s Dream
On the one hand, they speak as if this were the result of inelucta-
ble natural processes of entropy, a measure of the diminishing good
available in the universe with the passage of time. On the other hand,
such speculations are almost always peppered with insinuations of the
role taken by irresponsible and unthinking human agency in hastening
rather than forestalling such an inevitable fate of the world, mixing
their nostalgia with remorse. Natural and social explanations are in-
tertwined in their blaming the meagerness of harvests also on the fact
that the people no longer carry out the proper sacrificial fertility ritu-
als for cornfields. And this, in turn, they say has happened—not only
because many shamans have lost the knowledge necessary to perform
these rituals—but, more importantly, because people are afraid that
if they were to perform these rites, they would incur their neighbors’
envy, with dire consequences for their crops and family.
It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance in the past
of the agrarian dimension of shamanic practice now virtually lost. In-
deed, the abundance of vegetal metaphors in contemporary shamanic
curing ritual discourse—a range of human–plant analogies used to de-
scribe actual or desired states and attributes of persons undergoing
treatments—suggests that this aspect of shamanic practice, ritual spe-
cialists’ contribution to agricultural reproduction, was in some way
fundamental to the Mazatec shamanic complex. Until recent decades,
an annual round of ritual interventions, prayers, offerings, animal sac-
rifice, and so on, that focused on the cornfield and directed toward
nature gods and spirits, such as the Lord of Thunder and the Own-
ers of the Earth, was observed in adherence to the traditional Maza-
tec calendar, or Chan-chaon-yoma—a system of time reckoning con-
sisting of eighteen counts, or veintenas, of twenty days each (plus an
extra count of five inauspicious days at the end of the year)—which
scheduled both farmers’ labors and associated collective rituals pre-
sided over by shamans (Weitlaner and Weitlaner 1946 ; Cowan 1946 ,
37 – 38 ; Carrera and Van Doesburg 1992 ).
At the same time that shamanic activity has withdrawn from corn-
fields, shamans’ divined attribution of affliction has changed. In the
past, more severe cases of illnesses and suffering were most often at-
tributed to spirits associated with the sacred topography, nature spir-
