Los seres humanos creamos culturas. Observamos, pensamos, imaginamos, obramos, comunicamos nuestras experiencias... Somos variados. Construimos nuestra "realidad". Fabricamos opiniones y maneras distintas de narrar nuestras vivencias. Este espacio expone estudios y trabajos del campo de la antropología del bienestar y la salud así como de la antropología de la naturaleza, sus componentes y sus leyes mostrando diversas concepciones y acciones que en esos terrenos se pueden dar y llevar a cabo en las culturas y sociedades del mundo.

Foto: "Águila peleando con serpiente". Tatuaje clásico del artista: Alvar Mena (La barbería tatuajes. Salamanca)

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SEGUNDA ETAPA

jueves, 2 de marzo de 2017

The "Limpia" in the Mesoamerican Ethnomedicines

Authors: Alfonso J. Aparicio Mena & Francesco Di Ludovico

El siguiente texto está sacado de nuestro libro: The "Limpia" in the Mesoamerican Ethnomedicines que es una versión en lengua inglesa de trabajos homólogos en castellano con el fin de aproximar a los lectores en aquella lengua investigaciones sobre atenciones tradicionales en salud propias de las etnomedicinas y culturas mesoamericanas.

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INTRODUCTION.

"The different ways of understanding well–being1 in every cul- ture/society are related with the content of their own customs. In Meso- america2, people of the original traditions or the mestizos continue to perform their own practices to prevent and cure health3 troubles.
In past societies, as in the present ones, humans produced and built  up  systems  and ways  to  address  health  needs.  The so–called «shamanism» has been, and still is, a set of beliefs and worldviews based on the magical healing activity of a religious and wise person, the «shaman»4. Jacques Brosse summarizes that one of the main aims of this particular healer in society is to cure the sickness5. According to the nosological thought of many aboriginal people, ill health almost never has a primarily organic (physical–corporal) origin: it seems to be caused by the insertion of a “harmful element” or the «loss of the soul»6. In this way, the shaman will have the dual task of extracting the first element and getting back the second. Mircea Eliade emphasizes that one of the shaman’s missions (talking about shamans in different cultures around the world) was to give cohesion to the group, assuring it in every way7. In the interpretative study of researchers Jean Clottes and David Lewis– Williams about the drawings, paintings and sculptures of the Palaeo- lithic caves, they suggest the existence of shamans in prehistoric times8.
As known from documentary research (mainly Russian) carried out by Mircea Eliade about Asiatic and North–Asiatic shamanism, that system, as well as therapeutic, would be a way of organizing groups and communities in times when external menaces (natural, “supernatural” and humans) did not only threaten the balance and well–being of indi- viduals but also the stability and integrity of their groups. For Antony Tao, inside the Chinese archaic shamanism was born a speciality dedi- cated to therapy: the healing shamanism, from the time when societies became sedentary (beginning of the Neolithic Age, about 10,000 years
ago). From this kind of shamanism would come, later, the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)9. Analogies with the shamanism practiced in other Countries, though remote, are so obvious that some people speak about it as a distinctive phenomenon of human mental structure (therefore it is universal), or rather declare the existence of one place of ori- gin. From a strictly anthropological point of view, rather than defending the universal paradigms, we defend the particularities and all the ways that come from those cultures, which help explain the whole thing. We take into consideration the universal exemplars as information. We con- sider the idea of the same place of origin of shamanism, if we look around 180,000–200,000 years ago. The “new” human beings (where everybody comes from) may dispose of an original culture (in which we would include the structure of shamanism in all its complexity); this cultural structure would transport the shamanic organizational base worldwide. Mircea Eliade concludes that shamanism is a basic element in all the spiritual traditions on Earth. In my book «Cultura tradicional de salud y etnomedicina en Mesoamérica»10 I offer explanations and analysis about this ancient phenomenon.
Until the arrival of Europeans to America, Amerindian groups had different ways to cure, adapted to their beliefs and their worldview. The chronicles of Indians reported the characteristics of the world they found and discovered. Although they were influenced by their origin, their Christian–European thinking and the conditionings of the religious power imposed on them, they drew using words, all the magnificence of those cultures, as Fray Bernardino de Sahagún did11. In these ethnogra- phies, they related about healers and ways to cure; that is to say, they recounted about an entire organization of local therapeutic procedures.
In the book of chroniclers who speak of ethnomedicine there are valued features and relative elements of natural healing resources (mostly derived from plants; but also, minerals and animals). When Sa- hagún presents aspects of Aztec medicine, he talks about good and bad doctors, not just referring to the responsibility and the principles but al- so working methods and used sources. He is in the habit of associating the unnatural being to witchcraft or cultural (religious) symbolism, re- lated to the calendar, the divination, local tradition, etc.
Anna Reid writes about the Siberian shamanism pointing its slow recovery, similarly to other parts of culture of North–Asiatic people after the end of the “Soviet Empire”. Siberian shamans and eth- nodoctors (traditional medicine–men) suffered because of the advance of Tsarist Russia to the East; and again suffered when the Soviet system was imposed on native Siberians, an order based in a materialist culture of productive base12.
Ancient systems as shamanism, covered not only the health or- ganization in the communities but also other organizations such as “po- litical” or “economic” but linked to environmental balance and tradi- tions, which did not match with those systems that came much later such as capitalism or communism. Capitalism and communism have a common pillar inside their communicative constructions: science (meaning, anthropologically, as the cultural achievement of the “West- ern society”, not as “the logical order” where the whole civilization would have been, sooner or later, part of it, even if they did not have the experience of the previous ones). For that reason, shamanism and other cultural and organizational systems are coming into serious danger of extinction in the global world that has a Western cultural and organiza- tional system. These are ways of living that do not match; and if they still exist it is because of the protectoral policies and measures in the different Countries where they are legislated. In other cases involved, there are “insignificant” and isolated minorities, and they can even be exploited as exotic (and economic) targets for tourism or for a certain type of tourism.
As it happened in other parts of the world, Western Europe has followed its own path of development and progress. The rise of science was possible due to sociological and cultural reasons. Antony Tao states that the Greeks understood the universe as a whole world ordered by laws that humans were able to decipher and understand. The chemist Albert Hofmann remembers that Friedrich Nietzsche believed that what characterized the Greek mind from the beginning was the separate awareness of reality. Greece was the cradle of a worldview where the “self” (ego) felt separated from the external environment. Here, well ahead of other cultural areas, it was formed by the separation between the individual and the world. This duality, described by the physician and writer Gottfried Benn as «neurotic European destiny», has characte- rized a crucial European intellectual history and today it plays a deci- sive role. An ego that sees the world as external to himself, like an ob- ject; and this awareness, that makes reality an external element, has been the premise for the birth of Western science. In the early scientific works, the Greek cosmological theories of pre–Socratic philosophers, worked this objectificant view of reality. The men’s position against na- ture, which had a strong grip on it, was clearly formulated and philo- sophically founded for the first time by Descartes in the seventeenth century. Then in Europe there had been a type of research about nature, to objectify and measure it: this kind of investigation has permitted us to formulate scientific and chemical laws of the structure of material
world. That knowledge has made possible a previously unimaginable exploitation of nature and its forces. The current technological devel- opment and industrialization is derived from it in almost every aspect of life, offering to a segment of humanity an unexpected comfort and con- venience. But, at the same time, it was the beginning of a systematic de- struction of the natural environment. The damages caused by materialis- tic views of the world were more serious than the material damages themselves. The human had lost the link with the spiritual foundation of all divine beings. Unprotected, insecure and isolated, man faced only a lifeless environment, materialistic, chaotic and threatening. The germ of this dualistic view of reality began in the days of ancient Greece13.
From the elated Dionysian context arose the wisdom, that is the knowledge of the arcane and unfathomable. The wise (“the person who knows”) was not, in fact, the cult writer or the speech teller, but rather the mage/shaman, able to take a look, enlightening them, the darkness and mystery of the subtle “essences”. Thanks to his own surrender to nature, he became able to look into ineffable things, and then ready for screening it in order to tell it then, in human terms. Philosophy was ori- ginated by such conceived wisdom. From the Platonic “ideas” and the poetics of uncertainty, to the investigative analysis and Aristotelian ra- tionality. Then, that “love for wisdom”, once only doctrinal lucubration, was mixed in early Christian–religious thought,  but nevertheless   this remained free of Hermetic influences or Gnostic ones14.
Christianity, as Judaism, joined this cultural base, founded on the belief in a transcendent God, separated from nature. In fact, the Church took the biblical tradition of a demiurgic deity, masculine crea- tor, single and separated from His creatures, and perpetuated the dualis- tic and mechanistic conception born in Hellenic viewpoint; it proposed again the dichotomous Manichean pattern of good/evil, human/God, mind/matter, man/mind and divinity/matter. Given that one of the fun- damental principles of dogmatic and monotheistic Christianity is the in- scrutability of the divine nature, highlighting its trascendency and deny- ing its immanency, it is understandable that this religion from the be- ginning has been hostile to each ecstatic condition not mediated by academically religious representatives. The divine was displaced to Heaven and the pantheism was execrated, nature was feared and magic practice was stigmatized15.
Afterwards, in European cultures, nature was free of bonds and spiritual connections, ready to be studied by a no divinity–mediated thought. Nature became the object of careful study and “vivisection”. In the Middle–ages they started, although slowly and timidly, to use tech- niques16 and means to liberate the hidden forces of the Higher Powers, reporting to the Earth their sublime voice. This trend was expressed and tested in the Renaissance age. Then Enlightenment came and afterwards the Industrial Revolution. Europe became strong. The leading groups and the holders of money focused their interests, as in his time did the Crown of Castile, to other parts of the world. They found different people: people who did not speak like them, people that did not think like them, who did not see things as they did, they did not understand the disease and did not cure them as they did. As well as the Spanish did in America, other European Countries also imposed their powerful relationships to the new societies.
Science, as a part of European culture, has been taken as a mod- el of progress (evolution). Most of the positivist scientists have consi- dered a single line of human advancement in the world: theirs. It has been seen that people from other nations in a stage of development, la- beled, even by some scientists as “wild people”. As in Europe, specifi- cally Greece, in early Christianity, they demolished the temples of the pagan Mysteries (among them the best known are those of Delphi and Eleusis). A few centuries later, in the newly discovered America the same solicitous Christians destroyed the secret rites of the natives to finish those cults which gave way straight to the soul and the sacred. Nowadays, there has been created between the Western people, a sense of superiority based on those ideas. Roberto Fedeli tells us that episte- mology teaches, and the history of science confirms, that whenever  a man turns his gaze around himself, he manages to see only isolated parts of an indefinite  whole  universe;  we  can know the parts,  called «essences» by philosophers, only if we surrender totally to life and na- ture. The myth says that when God drove humans out of Paradise, He told them to subdue the world, and they could do so only by knowing the mechanisms of operation, attaching importance to the components, thus saying goodbye to essences. Then man learned that some parts had to be connected to others, so they could come up with something, not real but meaningful. Thus the history of science tells us how, time after time, the rational field, has always changed its own characteristics and forms. Thomas Kuhn has spoken of «paradigm», that is a shared value system that helps give meaning and shape to a set of data obtained from empirical observation. The psychodysleptic molecules of hallucinogen- ic plants, for example, have caused great anger to the austere method of science, so skilled in “dissection” but unaware about the “essences”17.
Medicine has become scientific and, therefore, the “best” model. However, anthropologists such as Malinowski, Franz Boas or Clifford Geertz have assessed the original contribution of members from differ- ent cultures. In order to know something about someone it is necessary not only to observe him, but we need also to listen to him. If we want to know another culture, as well as observing it and analyzing it from our point of view (outside it), it is necessary that the culture itself is ex- plained by its protagonists.
Amerindian and Asian traditional medicines “say” that to under- stand what happens to a patient we should allow him to speak about his illness, and the experience gained through this situation. Edward Bach18 said something like that 19 . In fact, the medical history that a sha- man/healer collects from the patients is well aware of the psychic aspect of their ailments even if they are referred to as purely physical. But sometimes the dialogue becomes difficult; the symptoms described are vague or symbolic, rare, strangely acute or incomprehensibly chronic. In these cases the shaman suspects a “magical” (or an insertion of mag- ic) origin of the illness. Often he will consume preparations of entheo- genic plants (“hallucinogens”), so that, under a condition of altered con- sciousness, “divine” visions (interpreted as ecstatic contemplations) suggest to him the cause or discomfort in the “worldly” regions where for a time his spirit lives, so that he can recover the patient’s “lost soul”. This treatment must be interpreted according to the Amerindian worldview and not according to the Western one. We can take the im- portant value of this mystical experience of unity (the unio mystica, which is to know the divinity and realize that is, from a monistic pers- pective, One–and–All), because it could be directed to the care of man- kind spiritually sick of a partial view, rational–materialist of the world. Because of the overcoming of the dualistic worldview, with the “disso- lution of ego” (which means knowing oneself intimately, the spirit, and finally understanding having a sacred nature) would be the foundation of healing and spiritual renewal of Western culture20.
Each ethnomedicine is located in a unique cultural context. Two lines of a cultural progress will never naturally converge at all, if no one handles them in order to make this possible. Science arose in Europe as an own fact for the European evolutionary path. But other people (Na- tive Americans, Asians, Africans) had no Greek culture, or Christianity, or Judaism, or Renaissance, or the French Enlightenment. That did (and does) not mean they were (or are) worth less than Europeans or Western people. It is a clear political issue.
The Polo brothers narrated wonders of progress in Asia when Europe was still living in the Middle–ages21. The chroniclers of the In- dias, intelligent and sensitive men of the time, were “astonished” when they beheld the amplitude of the cultures of the conquered people in America. It was Colonialism (speaking of Western Colonialism in gen- eral, not just the Iberian one) that broke the balanced development of non–Western people. It was that Colonialism which changed the course of socio–cultural evolution  lines of non–Western  people.  It was    the same Colonialism that produced the differences which generated an “in- feriority complex” on a large scale (among submitted peoples) while enhancing the colonizers’ cultural egos. The so–called «Third World» is an idiomatic expression coined by the dominant Western culture. It is a saying of gradation. The First World is the rich world, therefore, supe- rior, because it has power and money. The Second World is a hybrid half–developed, “bad sitting between two chairs”. The Third World is the one of the “miserable people” (a term with many interpretations, depending on the optical approach to understanding). Poverty, disease, hunger and all evils suffered by men, women and children of the “Third World” emerged after the human groups living in them ancient times were invaded and submitted by humans from faraway lands. These conditions should not be, then, specifically cultural, historical and orga- nizational but differ from those that led to the European scientific revo- lution22.
Nowadays, in general, they continue to give “help” to the Third World: welfare, that is an “assistance” volunteered by NGO’s, religious organizations and State agencies. Aid according to the opinion of many members of ethnic groups are unproductive, barren and unable to meet the organization of groups and indigenous people. Members of these societies wish:
1) to be respected and to be taken into consideration.
2) if aid is offered, this must be assessed, validated and managed from the local organizations themselves.
3) National Western health specialists have to be complemented by local specialists and ethnomedical people. Sometimes, they say: white people arrive with their ideas, their medicines and food for us, this, makes a huge difference between us and them.
South American Mapuches, Mayans from Chiapas, or Zapotec, Mixes, and Chatinos from Oaxaca would like to continue their self– organization, sharing with other groups and nations a design for a future in a plural, multicultural and peaceful society. For many it is like the imposition of force, the laws of others, the national education, the gov- ernment health facilities and their medicines. No local groups   helped them make such a development. There was no agreement. Native people say that everything that is decided should be the result of dialo- gue and compromise.
When Native Americans suffered the restructuring of their so- cieties from the fifteenth century; when new institutions imposed an or- der imported from Europe, then, the decay of the original groups began, away from the safe havens of their traditional organizations. Years and centuries passed in America. The union of the Spanish and American people created a new society, mixed, half–blooded, that was the conflu- ence of two distinct cultural and human sources. This society was de- veloped in urban areas, producing a kind of mixed ethnomedicine (such as the one we find today in the Sonora market in Mexico City). This culture of health is already a tradition in America. Moreover, the mod- ified indigenous groups continued their relatively original development in areas outside the cities, keeping with varying degrees of acculturation of their own therapeutic systems.
The conquest of Mesoamerica not only established the end of the Aztec State, at a political, social, organizational, ideological level, but also marked the end of cultural production and recording of know- ledge directly related to daily life and traditions under natural life and daily life of the Aztecs.
Right from that moment reminiscence and ideas will be col- lected and written. New experiences will be recorded, all within a new context constituted by the rulers and the ruled. This situation will affect native people and their life experiences, marked by the need of adjust- ment to new circumstances, the assimilation of them and the constant fear of the “white men”. Far from urban centers, in rural areas that are difficult to access, the ancient traditions will potentially survive. They were, unintentionally, favored by the Catholic religious system itself, because of its organization and structure, this situation indirectly contri- buted to the salvation of those traditions, most of them came to our days in the linkage of the word handed down from generation to generation. The Castilian–Spanish invasion had very negative consequences for Native Americans. However, the arrival of Europeans in the American land brought, at times, its positive cultural and material contribution. Appreciating many of the therapeutic powers of endemic plants and minerals, the most conciliatory conquerors encouraged the use of them.
Therefore, the acculturative process if just in a part disapproved the use of resources considered evil by some Hispanic puritanicals, on the other hand it allowed the continued use of many others in Mexico: curative plants with the same applications they had in ancient times, as well as many Iberian medicinal herbs (like Sage, Rue, Chamomile and Rose- mary) were exported.
Today the healing arts in Mexico are constituted by the summa- tion of medical concepts of Old and New Worlds. An anthropologically fascinating example of it is the comprehensive tool, called «parapher- nalia», the healer/shaman will get when visiting a patient; praying, he will place neatly on a colorful blanket: a set of wild herbs, candles and incense, crystals, shells and palm leaves, agave liquors, sacred images of virtuous pagans and Christian effigies, eagle feathers, scented   oils and rain water, colognes, paper butterflies and colored ribbons23.
The world we live in today presents another type of “colonial- ism” if we want to call it that, which is characterized by the substitution, super–position of leading ideas. Western culture imposes (its ideals, icons and commercial advertising, music...), through the phenomenon of globalization and internationalization, its powerful and moving dis- plays dominate, winning in all societies, imposing in local cultures, re- placing (at worst) or mixing with them (at best). Traditional medicines are medicines that emerged in societies and cultures with their own and differentiated traits, successfully used by members of these societies.
Representatives of medical anthropology such as Robert Hahn, Arthur Kleinman, Peter Brown and Byron Good understand that health and disease cannot be separated from their cultural contexts; and that therapeutic systems, traditional medical practices and modes of healing are the result of the adequacy of the attention to these contexts. When we talk about ideas of health/illness within the Mesoamerican society, we refer to representations of those facts in the minds of individuals and their community. We cannot make the mistake of applying our thinking and the organization of our thoughts to people who not only are    geographically far from us (Western people) on a cultural level24 but also on a historical one. Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán writes, referring to the Az- tecs: This medicine, essentially mystical, was described by the colonial religious as superstition and prelogical by the early twentieth century positivists. By classifying each other made explicable rationalizations in subjects who judged the phenomena of Indigenous culture, from the base of Western cultural ideas and values, but they are not right just because of it. Medicine considered from the point of view of its same context, accomplished the mission to reduce anxiety in the group itself and offer security and consistency. That was its specific role; anything more was just extra25.
The Westernization of the world is a palpable fact. The exten- sion of Western scientific medicine makes possible that many problems (understood within a global cultural context) can be addressed and solved, but not all of them. Some sicknesses as the «susto» or «Ma- puche kutran» (special infirmity, specifically understandable in the Ma- puche ethnic context, South America) they are diseases of indigenous nosology. «Qi’s block liver–gallbladder» is a syndrome defined in TCM as not necessarily coincident with a universally recognizable ill- ness according to Western science. Methods of healing as the «limpia» (Native American cultures) act differently in favor of the sick person from what pills do (in patented medicine). In both cases, the source and the way of healing fit to the patient’s socio–cultural context, to under- stand the disease (for him and the doctor), and how to counteract it. Means of treatment such as acupuncture (TCM) are not understood in its true dimension if they are studied from different perspectives from the ones forming their original context. Judging acupuncture from another cultural position (ex., scientific), necessarily implies compari- son. Considering that the starting position of the study, such as scientif- ic, as the “truth”, not understanding acupuncture in its original context, it will be only understood as a stimulating practice for a defensive reac- tion; it could be judged as a placebo. A “new” acupuncture will be discovered, an acupuncture different from its original context. And it will have made a genuine exercise of ethnocentrism. According to Geertz, we think it is opportune to approach the object we want to talk about26. This implies, inevitably, moving out of “our center”, going to know the object in its place, acknowledging it. It is a basic exercise in anthropol- ogy; and is a practice recommended in anthropology to any researcher (natural scientist or social scientist). So we understand that acupuncture or a Mesoamerican limpia have meanings related to their socio– historical and cultural contexts.
The Amerindian limpia and other ethnomedical procedures mean something beyond our own significant (exotic) projection, made from “our center”. If we get out from there, we will be free from an un- comfortable and outdated static position of observation, as well as the ethnocentric view, inadmissible in these times for any respectable re- searcher or cultural–scientific popularizer27.
Traditional medicines can be practiced alone or can be com- bined with each–other and also with scientific medicine. There may be cooperation between practitioners of both. Systems can also become original therapeutics inside intercultural systems when those who know and practice them tailored them to the specific people’s circumstances and their problems (related to the natural–biological, social and cultur- al). In the future we could have:
a)   A large global culture with varying cultural aspects that has been en- countered along the way.
b)    A multicultural international society (with a clear dominance of Western culture).
c)  A society characterized by multiculturalism.
d)  A vague dynamic characterized by a permanent change of the cultural fact.
In the meantime, traditional ethnomedicines are practiced; in fact, Mexican institutions preserved them as a part of an indigenous cul- ture. Some Mexican States (like Morelos, Nuevo León) recognize them as health laws; some others give them similar characterization (Oaxaca, Chiapas).
In China, in a large part of Asia and in a number of Countries in the world the TCM is successfully used. In India and Sri Lanka, Ayur- vedic medicine is used. In other areas of the world there are still living forms of healing perfectly valid in their context and out of them; in the same range as conventional Western medicine (the most widespread in the world).
As intercultural medicine (adapted by professionals and ethno- doctors from different cultural contexts) the most widely–known is Chinese medicine. But the dissemination of knowledge and its distribu- tion by the originating ethnomedical world are making known the traditional medical practices as important as those of Mexican indigenous groups (the use of temazcal28 , the herbology and limpias) or South American ones (herbology, limpias, etc.)29.
The investigation about the limpia corresponds to a part of my doctoral thesis research30, conducted in different parts of the Mexican States of México and Oaxaca in 2004, 2005 and 2006. In this investiga- tion I have added the contributions of the Italian physician and Ethnobotany researcher Francesco Di Ludovico, who is also familiar with these places as well as the herbalism of the ethnic groups that live there.
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1 We understand this «well–being» in a sense of “the state of a person which makes him sensitive of the good functioning of his own somatic and mental activity”. 2 It is defined «Mesoamerica» as the geographical region of similar histori-
cal and cultural characteristics, it is extended from central–northern Mexico to southern Nicaragua.
3 We consider «health» in its ample sense. Its ultimate meaning by the
World Health Organization includes not only the absence of disease, but also the presence of a balance between bodily and psychological components of the person. In the indigenous people, or also in the mestizos with ancient medical traditions and beliefs, “health” is even more, it is a dynamic balance between opposing compo- nents: corporal and mental functions, but also spiritual and religious, as well as natu- ral and supernatural, mystical and social.
4 The word «shaman» derives from the Siberian Tungus language, where the term šaman designated a person capable of fulfilling spiritual journeys in a state
of altered consciousness in way he/she could get to non–ordinary “worlds” to me- diate with the Higher Powers in order to benefit his/her community. It is interesting its etymon: of a probable origin Pali samana, it means “priest” and has the archaic Indo–Eurpean roots *sa– and *manu–, with the semantic meaning of “person who knows, wise man” (F. Di Ludovico; A. Aparicio, Le piante degli dèi. L’uso sacro degli allucinogeni vegetali: 117).
5 Cf. J. Brosse, Mitologia degli alberi. Dall’Eden al legno della croce.
6 We will talk later about this peculiar pathogenesis of indigenous nosology.
7 Cf. M. Eliade, El chamanismo y las técnicas arcaicas del éxtasis.
8 Cf. J. Clottes; D. Lewis–Williams, Los chamanes de la prehistoria.
9 Cf. A. Tao, Chamanisme et civilisation chinoise antique.
10 A. Aparicio, 2009, Trafford Publishing, Alberta, Canada.
11 Cf. B. De Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España.
12  Cf. A. Reid, El manto del chamán.
 13 Cf. A. Hofmann, I misteri di Eleusi: 10–11.
14 Cf. F. Di Ludovico; A. Aparicio, op. cit.: 34–35.
 15 Cf. F. Di Ludovico; A. Aparicio, op.cit.
16 Use of hallucinogenic plants (entheogens) to “see” the Gods and receive directly their messages, and theurgy to take advantage of the divine powers, hermet-
ism, Kabbalah and occultism. On behalf of religious criticism, all of this was placed into the esoteric realm of “magic” with a mysticism more tolerated in a sacred pers- pective.
17 Cf. R. Fedeli, in: A. Hofmann, I misteri di Eleusi.
18 English physician, born in the nineteenth century. Father of the so–called
«flower–therapy», his healing method uses the “energy” derived from alcoholic tinc- ture of flowers, of which “active principles” are present in homeopathic amounts but they are used in allopathic healing way. The flower–therapy is, indeed, aimed at ap- peasing the mental causes of psychosomatic diseases, opposing the “dire energy” arising from the mind.
19 Cf. E. Bach, La curación por las flores.
 20 Cf. F. Di Ludovico; A. Aparicio, op. cit.
21 Cf. M. Polo, Libro de las maravillas.
 22 Cf. A. Aparicio, Cultura tradicional de salud y Mesoamérica. Del cha- manismo arcaico a la etnomedicina.
 23 Cf. F. Di Ludovico, Il Giardino dei due mondi. Un viaggio nell’espe- rienza erboristica della Mesoamerica e dell’Italia.
 24 We do not talk about qualitative differences but only different levels of development.
25 Cf. G. Aguirre Beltrán, Medicina y magia. El proceso de aculturación en
la estructura colonial:
26 Cf. C. Geertz, a) La interpretación de las culturas; b) “Descripción densa: hacia una teoría interpretativa”, in: P. Bohannan, M. Glazer, Antropología, lecturas.
27 Cf. A. Aparicio, Etnomedicina en Mesoamérica Central.
28 Traditional mexican sweat bath or sweat house. You can read further down.
29  Cf. A. Aparicio, art.s cit.s.
30 Cultura tradicional de salud en Mesoamérica. Del chamanismo arcaico a la etnomedicina. Universidad de Salamanca, Spain. 2007.