A Conversation with Martin Prechtel

The Monthly Aspectarian: Martin, I know you've worked as a shaman healer and chief, and that you have a really interesting story. Why don't we just start out by giving me the short version?

Martin Prechtel: First of all, I'm from New Mexico and grew up on an Indian reservation. I don't want its name in print because they're very old-time, the most conservative of all . . . they haven't lost any of their old pre-European-contact ways. I grew up on that reservation because my mother was a teacher there. She herself was a Native American -- not a native United States American, but a native Canadian Indian, and my father is an Anglo whose parents are Swiss and Irish. I spoke the native tongue on the reservation, and Spanish and English, then later, Mayan.

When I was 20 or so, after my mother passed on, I was headed towards Mexico just to air out my mind from a bad marriage and all of the things that a young man tries to heroically achieve . . . failing at every single one of them. I went to Mexico just to try to cool out a little bit. I felt very, very comfortable there, and had a series of very interesting adventures -- some of which I had dreamed in actual sleeping dreams before I got there. These adventures ended up being a special kind of grooming for a shamanic initiation which I eventually received in Guatemala.

I ended up going to Guatemala totally by accident -- at least itseemed to me totally by accident! I guess the spirits had figured it out long ago. But I ended up in Guatemala in the beginning of the 1970s after just kind of meandering around for about a year and a half, getting lost and almost dying, and doing this, that and whatever. I ended up in a village called Santiago Atitlan, which is the village of Tzutijil, a form of southern Mayans -- of which there are only about 50,000. Most of the things that I deal with in doing my workshops come from the Mayan culture -- but there's a lot of Mayan cultures, thirty-five of them in Guatemala alone. In Mexico and Honduras and in other places, there are other Mayans and other beliefs.

When I got to the village, this old fellow named Nicholas was waiting for me. And he said, "Hey, Curly, how come you came so late? I've been waiting for you for two years. Don't be lazy, let's get to work!" So on the third day I was in the village, I became his friend and his apprentice, his novice, and eight years later took over everything that he did. He died a little after that. But in the meantime, I was -- well, it's not really like "student," because Indians don't do things like that. You don't just sign on. You're chosen. It isn't like you decide to have a career as a shaman! But this man was a famous shaman, medicine man. As a result, I became kind of a novelty in the village, but I married into the village and had two sons, actually three; one of them died, and two live sons who are still with me, and became a chief also.

A chief cannot be confused with being a shaman, because they're two different things. One is a public position and one is a private position. It's sort of like the difference between being a healer and being a leader. Since Americans don't have corresponding institutions, they usually think a shaman is a leader, but that's not so. No leadership thing in it at all. It's kind of a doctor, a spirit doctor or a fix-it man, whereas the leaders are more like priests. Anyway, I served as priest and leader for several years, too. I was initiated as a shaman and initiated into manhood also, and then I became initiator of young people.

There was at that time a war that ensued in Guatemala. I was going to stay, but before my teacher died, he asked me to leave so that I wouldn't get killed. He wanted me to carry the bundles and the knowledge that he had passed on to me. I went through a lot of troubles in getting my family out but we finally came to the States in the mid-'80s and just kind of starved for a while until Robert Bly and men like him found me out in the bushes after hearing about me and what I did. I slowly came to prominence as a healer and also as a leader.

TMA: Are you still in touch with the people in Guatemala?

MP: Yes, I stay in touch the best I can with the village, you better believe it.

TMA: But you don't have those duties any more?

MP: I have duties, but those duties are not always in the village. They have a belief that the world is changing in 2012, and that there's certain things that have to be maintained . . . in other words, what they call "ritually fed." I am the custodian of one of these things that is to be ritually fed as a virtual being. I take care of that -- and it doesn't matter where you are living when you do that, as long as the world is continually fed. There are thirteen others like myself who are doing the same.

TMA: Thirteen others out of the same group of Mayans?

MP: Well, it's all very secret.

TMA: How much about it can you say?

MP: Nothing! So we'll move on. Actually there's a book coming out next March where some of that is explained, but I don't like to explain it short, because unless the subtleties are in there, the rest of it becomes quite immaterial and it makes it trivialized -- and I don't want to do that. It's the most important thing in life, outside of the fact that I have a girlfriend now who is so magnificent that's made all that other stuff not so painful.

I came out of Guatemala in a time of pain, in a time of war, in a time of difficulty, and being the great warrior that I was, my teacher said, "No fighting for you, Jack. You have to carry this bundle with no weapons, and you can't fight their bullets." I had to walk through the destruction of 1,800 of our villagers and the deaths of 19 of my friends in 45 seconds, and me getting machine gunned in order to carry this bundle to safety in the United States. The things I offer the people in this country come at a very, very high price. Lots of people have died in the last four centuries to keep it alive.

In Guatemala, shamanism is actually on the books as being illegal, a federal offense. In 1968, [many] died for it. So it's not like something that is practiced openly like some sort of entertainment. It's a very serious endeavor. As I said, it's also not a career choice; you can't just choose to be one. You have to be chosen by your birth. So when I bring the things to the States, that's what it's all about.

I wasn't actually planning on [being a shaman] here in the States but my teacher, before he died, said that's a good thing to do over there, to teach certain things . . . but mostly, not so much to teach it, but to do what we do. In other words, like if a plumber comes to your house, he doesn't teach you how to be a plumber. He fixes the leaks. I'm like a spiritual leak fixer. I go fix the leak, but I don't tell everybody how to do it, because it's a lost art.

TMA: So what is the work you're doing here?

MP: That's another long story! One is to work with people who are ill. We use our old-time methods and being close to these bundles and to these spiritual things that we have. Another thing I do which is more well known is a lot of what you might call workshops. I don't like the word "workshop"; they're gatherings. People get together and we take their stories and their lives and their dreams and we put them into a village-like context. Each person's particular unique soul fits into an ecology that is very much like nature. You see, Mayans don't believe humans have human souls but that they have natural souls, nature souls, if you will. And so, for instance, if your soul was a certain kind of tree, and my soul was a certain kind of wind, and somebody else's soul was like a jaguar and another one's was like a deer, there's a symbiosis, sort of an ecology that works out in the village. Each one's uniqueness makes the village function instead of everybody being homogenized into one sort of way.

In the workshops, we take those kinds of stories and we make them into a unity so that each diverse thing becomes part of one thing, and that oneness, we call the third thing. It's neither just the spirit nor just the physical world, but it's the third beautiful thing that's called life that's born from chaos and order.

Taking that to the final conclusion is that it makes a big blessing and a big offering to feed the spirit itself. The modern idea is mostly concerned with what can I get for myself or what can I get for my family, whereas the Mayan's spirituality is based on distribution. It's based on taking a certain percentage of what you get from the spirit -- which would consider everything, including our lives -- and then we have to give back to the gods themselves, because the gods are hungry . . . and if they don't get fed, they can't do their jobs . . . just like we can't if we're not fed. We become malnutritioned. So the gods, when they haven't been fed -- and they have very rarely been fed in the modern world -- become very sick, or they get very grumpy and angry and make all these wars and all of this destruction we see around us. As long as they're being fed, then they're being maintained. When they're not being fed, then the culture goes awry and we need corrective rituals, which the shaman is the specialist for.

Once the corrective rituals have been invocated, then a maintenance way can set in, and that's what everybody's really after, I think -- to get a way of life that can be maintained spiritually instead of something that is constantly having to be corrected.

In the workshops, we try to do that in a sort of microcosmic way, where the people in these gatherings become like a little nomadic kind of village that comes together for a few days and we get to that happy place. Everybody, whatever is their pain, their happiness, their uniqueness, all of that becomes a vital part of that particular village at that point in time, so that their minds sort of wake and be [initiated].

Another thing I do is lead men's conferences all around the world, based on Robert Bly's and Michael Mead's type of things. We're doing these conferences in England and Australia and the United States and all around, and what we're using is basically the knowledge that I was able to participate in, of initiating men into adulthood. That has become very, very prominent and is really heartening. I'm also working with women on that, but it's a little bit slower -- mostly, of course, because I'm not a woman.

A fourth thing that's not as important probably, but is important to me, is I'm also a musician. I have several CDs out and do a lot of concerts around the world. I usually combine them with lectures and my workshop. You know: I have a lecture on Thursday, a concert on Friday and a workshop on the weekend, and Monday I fall apart and Tuesday I'm with my girlfriend all day and Wednesday I get ready to do the next week. And then I ride my horses all the time. I'm a good horseman.

TMA: I see you're doing a presentation on spiritualism and courtesy. How does courtesy figure into spirituality?

MP: Well, courtesy is the basis of all shamanism. If you take the word more in a pre-Renaissance sense, the idea of courtesy is the approach to spirit. In other words, the people don't own the spirit and they don't own their own spirit. So in order to get a spirit on your side, you have to be courteous. The whole idea of ceremonializing and "feeding" something, it's like courting a woman or courting a man. You're not just going to go up to some lady and put her in chains and throw her in your trunk then think she's going to love you. There's no way she's going to love you like that. But that's what people do to God. They just say, "This is mine, give me a new pick-up truck." And so courtesy comes in with the approach to spirit.

That's why in a ceremony we use certain words, certain songs, and a certain method of approach. Sometimes some ceremonies look just like a guy going courting. He'll have a big armload of flowers and candles and little gifts, and even chocolate -- Mayans invented chocolate -- and sugar, and all that, and we burn this and put this here and put that there and make these altars so that the spirit comes in the form that is different than this thundering god.

So the idea of a young man, especially men who court the spirit -- they usually court their own souls as they would court a bride. That's why then when they marry women they don't mistake the woman for the goddess and expect her to be all kinds of grandiose things that women can never be . . . except in isolated instances.

The idea of courtesy and the approach to life from the point of view of courting -- I think courtesy and courting go together -- is very much a Mayan concept because . . . they really don't live in a democracy and they don't live in tyranny. They live in what you might call kind of an animistic theocracy, where their own lives are paradigms of lives of deities. They live in a way of eloquence. The enforcement of eloquence by the elders upon the youth is not by force, but by the fact that the youth will never obtain from the elders what they want until they can speak deliciously and they can charm their way through without being insincere. That's where the courtly aspect comes in. There's a lot more to it, of course.

TMA: True courtesy wouldn't require a consciousness of being courteous.

MP: Yeah, absolutely. Of course. That's the bottom line. But the problem with the word "consciousness" is that it implies a whole lot of things that are very unconscious. It's a culture story, you know: you have to know who you're talking to. And how you say it.

TMA: What else would you like to say, or let people know about what you're doing?

MP: Mostly, I would like the people to know that what I'm doing is just there; it's not just something that can just be chosen.

The culture and the world as it is now is in a very interesting place. One place, I think, is very hopeful and in another place, destruction is very possible. At that kind of crossroads is the greatest opportunity of all: because it's like the time when a person is a teenager and falls in love. It's like an adolescent thing where there's a possibility that they're going to drive themselves over the cliff and kill themselves. There's also the possibility that the sort of sweet subversion of falling in love for the first time, feeling all these things and making all these discoveries, can possibly make an opening space for things that have been forgotten and thrown away long ago to come back in a new form. We like to say, maybe this is the time when the old tree trunk gets new sap and grows a new kind of flower that's never been seen before . . . because this is simultaneously a great time of opportunity and great time of possibility of destruction. People consciously making some sort of approach to life as opposed to just sitting and watching: "Well is it going to blow up or not?" If you look at the cities, you've got all these people who don't want to look at what's going on inside with the kids and all that . . . and these people are part of the problem.

The big thing I want to say is that spirituality is an extremely practical thing. It's not a thing that you choose to do on the weekends. Spirituality is the thing that has to come to some degree of social accountability, no matter what layer of life you're stuck in or aiming at. The main thing is to know is that spirituality is accountable to everyday life and it's only in everyday life that spirituality makes a difference. Otherwise, if spirituality is an entertainment or something that is removed from life itself, then it's ceases to become spiritual and it becomes entertainment.

I think spirituality is as essential as eating or holding hands or being warm in the winter or being together as a village. It's all in there. Among a million other things, that's one of the main things I'd like to say.

Martin Prechtel was raised on a reservation in New Mexico where his mother was an educator. Martin traveled to Guatemala in 1971 and was chosen by Mayan shaman Nicolas Chiviliu to be his student and to learn the ancient Mayan traditions. He became an initiated shaman in the mid 1970s and Head Young Men's Chief in 1978, serving different hierarchy posts in Santiago Atitlan in the Chiefdom hierarchy. As a shaman, he worked as a healer for 40,000 Tzutijil Mayans. As Chief, he has twelve sub-chiefs and had to initiate all eligible young men into manhood on long, ancient ceremonial events.

Next Article

Return to This Month's Index