domingo, 12 de marzo de 2017
Nuevo epígrafe en la sección páginas
Estimados lectores, inauguramos nuevo espacio en las páginas, columna a la derecha del blog,donde podrán seguir interesantes artículos sobre la interpretación humana de los animales. Esperando que sea de su agrado les animamos a conocerlo. Sólo tienen que apretar con el cursor sobre el epígrafe: "LA VISIÓN DE LOS ANIMALES" (antropología de los animales/ etnozoología). Gracias.
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.
Publicado en:
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
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.
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.
___________________________________________________
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.
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