Edward Absethe ultimate “master/owners of the land” in the Sierra, and divine stew-
ards of the people’s prosperity. Is Don Patricio not asserting his right
to cut the coffee, that is, to work with me, in effect exchanging a cul-
tural property, his shamanic knowledge, for cash? Is he not disputing
the figure of cultural conscience’s command by insisting that, yes, the
land belongs to the “master/owner” but that it is he who planted and
worked the coffee and so he may cut it if he pleases? Don Patricio rec-
ognizes a cultural patrimony, symbolized by the land, which among
Mazatecs is transferred through patrilineal inheritance—and, in this
case, Don Patricio came to his shamanic vocation just as he came into
possession of his land, that is, as passed down from his father, and be-
fore that to his father from his grandfather—as belonging to some-
thing bigger than and beyond himself, perhaps to the Mazatecs as a
people, or to the Mazatec “Geist.” However, he is the one who culti-
vated his own branch of knowledge, and so it is his to harvest and to
sell. The dream episode is thus an assertion of Don Patricio’s sense of
individual entitlement as against the restrictive claims of a partially
internalized cultural conscience. We recognize in this an echo of his
earlier confrontation with Don Nicolas in which Don Patricio gave a
defiant reply similar to the one in the dream.
The same theme of ambivalence and internal conflict is represented
in the final scene of the dream. Don Patricio is walking up a muddy
road. This is an unmistakable conventional image from Mazatec sha-
manic initiatory visions, an ordeal of temptation presenting the choice
between two roads that lead either to benevolent virtue in healing prac-
tice or to illegitimate accumulation of wealth and ultimate damnation
in the practice of sorcery. As one shaman described the correct choice:
“On the straight road we find just a quiet path, upon which only the
sound of birds, the continuous babbling of a stream, the murmur of
a river, like a new dawn, is heard, that and the songs and conversa-
tions of angels.” The evil way, in contrast, is visualized as a miry and
wide road of soft and deep mud.
Again, then, Don Patricio’s “selling” of his knowledge to me pro-
vokes him to question whether he has thus entered into an immoral
undertaking. The concluding incident of the dream is when he finds
me, Eduardo, standing at the top of the road and beyond the mud,