Secrets of The Talking Jaguar: Memoirs from the Living Heart of a Mayan Village Book

Secrets of the Talking Jaguar will be equally fascinating for anthropologists and New Age seekers. This intensely readable book is the autobiographical account of a young sharman in the Tzutujil Mayan village of Santiago Atitlán in Guatemala. Born in New Mexico, Martín Prechtel arrived in his twenties in Atitlán, where he was immediately apprenticed to the aged shaman Nicolas Chiviliu Tacoxoy. "I don't know why people in modern life want to be shamans," Prechtel writes. "There's nothing romantic about it. We just go around capturing monsters, resweetening the earth and making people's memories taste good again." The Tzutujil language reveals how this was a world astonishingly different from Western culture. "The Tzutujil don't have a real word for "door", but they do have a good word for "doorway" ... Doorways were for letting things in or letting them out, not for keeping things in or keeping things out like doors did." Prechtel's teacher Chiv is the real heart of this book, "the last great bastion of traditional Tzutujil culture holding back the tyranny of 20th-century civilisation". After he died, aged 97, Guatemala fell apart. For his own safety, Martín Prechtel learned in Atitlán is not all lost; he now practices and lectures on shamanism in the USA. --David V. BarrettRead More