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Don Patricio’s Dream
community is displacing that between humanity and the spirits as a
source of preoccupation and is therefore more often now subject to
the visionary scrutiny of shamans.
There is a further, deeper sense in which the subjective experience
of illness is something quite other than it used to be. Suffering is no
longer understood to result from one’s own actions as punishment for
violation of the sacred and forbidden, however unwitting. Now one
has done nothing wrong to incur the illness: one is instead the inno-
cent victim of a neighbor’s usually unprovoked, spontaneous envy.
Consequently, in contrast to the past, there is now no transgression
and, therefore, no redemption, no way to put things right again with
the offended party and source of one’s misfortune. To suffer in this
way, then, marks the awareness of radical evil. Even the imagery as-
sociated with soul loss has changed. In the past, divinations matched
to a patient’s memories of his or her actions prior to an illness event
led to the location of the missing soul, represented as trapped in one
of the many named sites of the sacred topography inhabited by spirit
beings. Lost souls used to be found on mountaintops and in caves and
streams. Today, the predicament of the soul caught in the snares of
sorcery often places it altogether “off the map” of those more prom-
inent, well-known features of the landscape. Instead, the soul is now
more likely discovered to be entrapped inside a tree trunk, in a ditch,
under a small rubbish heap, or simply wandering lost somewhere out
there in the jñá, or “wilderness,” in one of many hidden spots scat-
tered across an oneiric and discontinuous geography of nowheres. Al-
ternatively, in cases of mortal illness, dreams or divinations reveal that
the soul has been directly “delivered over to death,” with no hope of
rescue: the sorcerer has either buried the person’s soul in the grave-
yard or has affixed it to some macabre location at the shadowy bor-
ders of the cosmos, for example, crucified upon the “Black Cross in
the West.”
These ideas and experiences appear to represent a historically new
vector, at least in terms of the proportional and absolute number of
such cases and their directionality, of limiting or extreme representa-
tions that are extending the range of the Mazatec imagination about
the displacement of the soul. The presenting symptoms of soul loss
