Pampering a Mysterious Deity with Presents and Rum

By Manuel Roig-Franzia Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, September 26, 2007; Page A14

SANTIAGO ATITLAN, Guatemala

The shaman looked annoyed. Slivers of light cut through cracks in the thin wooden walls of the house at the end of a slippery mud street, illuminating his glare of disapproval. The kids in the back of the tiny room were giggling, but for the shaman this was a solemn moment. The look he shot them shut them up.

It was 1:15 p.m., time to worship the statue of Maximón,

a squat, roughly carved wooden deity beloved here by those who believe in his power to grant favors and feared for punishing those who do not pay him proper respect. Maximón, pronounced maw-she-MAWN, occupies a space between the polar tugs of Guatemalan spiritual life, Catholicism and evangelism, neither of which approves of him. His origins are a mystery. Some say he is a modern version of a long-forgotten Mayan god. Others say he represents a martyred holy man. Still others merely shrug their shoulders.

Great gusts of smoke rose out of the metal bucket the shaman filled with burning incense. The bucket swung back and forth, and the shaman began to pray in the Mayan Tzutujil dialect. Strands of Christmas tree lights, slung over a separate, glass-encased statue, twinkled. A pinwheel of flashing lights spun round and round. Incongruously, the notes of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” slipped tinnily out of a palm-size speaker dangling from the wall.

Ten minutes into the ceremony, at 1:25 p.m., Marcelino Mura reached for the hand of his wife, Maria, and they shifted their weight on bent knees. The Muras once lived humbly but say they have prospered in the eight years since they began making an annual pilgrimage to pay tribute to Maximón in this village propped on a steep hill overlooking Lake Atitlan.

“I used to work in the fields; there was no shade. It was so hard,” Marcelino Mura whispered to one of the visitors crammed into a space fast filling with cough-inducing smoke. “Now I have my own restaurant. Thanks to Maximón.”

Francisco Miranda, a member of the cofradia, an informal religious group that cares for Maximón, jumped to his feet. Miranda has a place of honor in the room. Maximón has resided in this private home since the Christian Holy Week. The statue will stay there until next Holy Week, when it will move to another private home, where the owners will enjoy the offerings of rum, cigarettes, money and clothing, right along with the statue.

Miranda had spotted something amiss. The cigarette in Maximón’s mouth was almost burned through and a droopy tube of ash looked as if it was at its breaking point. Miranda tapped the ash into a tray and fished another cigarette out of his pocket. He replaced the old cigarette and lit the new one.

“I pray for this man’s business,” the shaman intoned.

A spigot gushed in an adjoining room at 1:40 p.m. Miranda glanced back, catching a glimpse of a man ripping off his shirt and washing his underarms beneath the stream of water. Maximón may be getting his tribute in one room, but life goes on in the rest of the house.

Three barefoot children with dirt-smudged faces and stained clothes sucked on candies outside the doorway. The street children of Santiago Atitlan have become Maximón’s ushers over the years, leading Guatemalans and tourists to him. No sign announces Maximón’s home, but his supposedly secret location really isn’t much of a secret. Everyone here knows where he resides.

By 2 p.m., Miranda had determined that Maximón was thirsty. He dug under a table and pulled out a bottle of rum. He carefully removed the burning cigarette — Maximón’s fourth in 45 minutes — and tipped the bottle. Rum splashed off the wooden lips, cascading over the 10 quetzal notes clipped to Maximón’s scarf and into a kerchief Miranda held beneath Maximón’s chin.

Miranda reached forward to take a wad of bills from Mura, scooting aside three pairs of fancy leather shoes that Mura had brought as an offering after noticing the day before that Maximón was shoeless.

Smoke thickened, blanketing the dried plants suspended from the ceiling. The shaman, barely visible in the fog of burning incense, kept up the pendulum motion of his incense bucket.

“I pray for this man’s and this woman’s health,” he said.

Ten minutes later, at 2:15 p.m., Miranda once again sought to slake Maximóns prodigious thirst. He gestured to a boy who had just wandered into the room. The boy clenched his teeth and struggled to untwist the cap on a flask-size bottle of rum. Defeated, he handed the bottle to Miranda.

Miranda strained but couldn’t get it open either, passing it off to an older man who had been watching with an air of detached amusement.

The man swiftly unloosed the cap. Miranda stepped over five empties on the floor and in seconds rum was splashing over Maximón’s lips again.

Existential Wonder

A couple of weeks ago, Adamus told me he had gotten a dog at the pound, a Lab mix named Dusty. He said I should definitely meet her.

Cool with me, I adore dogs.

Yesterday he brought her over. I gasped when she walked through the front door. It was my Goldie (that’s her in the picture).

Yes, my dog who died last year.

This is Goldie in a new body. Slightly smaller, but very similar build. Identical face and smile. Darker coat. Same tail.

OK, I can cope with outward similarities and chalk it up to the breed, though Lab-Whippet mixes are surely not too common.

But when she got in, she immediately jumped up and started kissing me insistently on the mouth. Then she stopped and rolled at my feet, the way Goldie did. Then, when I was sitting down, she stood and put her paws on my shoulders and kept staring into my eyes, then nuzzled me and kissed me more. As if to say, “You remember me, don’t you?”

So many other behaviors. The way she moved around the dining room table in a particular way. The way when she met Mom, she immediately rolled her head and shoulders into her lap the way Goldie used to do. The way she kept going to the kitchen and standing at the place where we used to keep her food and water bowls.

Adamus is a Buddhist at heart. I asked him about reincarnation. He said, “I knew that when I had her home less than one day, never even having met Goldie [italics mine]. I think it was her looking at me knowingly as though she had not met me but knew me.”

When I asked how he sensed it, he said, “My constant tripping over the name Dusty and mistakenly using ‘Goldie.’ And a persistent feeling this was the dog to bring home for more than just her being a good dog. She was not just the right dog. She was/is THE dog. And then I had to bring her to see you today. HAD to. I wanted to but Lee [his wife] insisted I HAD to.”

Later I asked Mom if Dusty “seemed familiar.” She’s a die-hard traditionalist, no woo-woo Eastern beliefs for her. She said, “That was Goldie, wasn’t it? I just wanted to keep her, to send him home without her. I know it was wrong of me. It was just so wonderful having her back.”

I’m getting shivers again, just recounting the story.

So that’s been my weekend.

Jewish Shamanism . . . on TV?

by Abe Novick, special to the (Baltimore) Jewish Times

It was cable TV that came out of the gate early this summer. While the networks were gearing up for the fall, it launched a number of new shows. One of them was “Saving Grace.”

While the term grace is usually thought of in a Christian context, the word is actually derived from the Hebrew Bible as chesed. Though “Saving Chesed” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, according to the show’s creator, “Saving Grace” is a show about a woman who talks to an angel.

Creator Nancy Miller explains that the angel, Earl, is non-denominational. “He speaks to Grace in the language she grew up in. Grace came from a Catholic family, so he speaks in the language that she would understand,” Ms. Miller said. “As we go on, you’re going to find out that Earl is a last chance angel to a Jewish guy, and speaks from that culture to him. Later on, you’re going to find out that Earl is a last chance angel to someone who is Muslim. So he speaks that language to him.”

In addition to the cable stations, the networks also are channeling the spiritual and confronting the eschatological.

On Monday nights, NBC will air a show called “Journeyman” about a San Francisco newspaper reporter who travels through time and gets reunited with his long-lost fiancé who died in a mysterious plane crash. Interestingly, in Zoharic and Lurianic Kabbalah, communing with the dead is an act called yichud, and is a ritual that Rabbi Isaac Luria, one of the most influential men in the history of Jewish mysticism who lived during the 16th century, often performed at the grave.

Also, on ABC this fall will be “Pushing Daisies,” a show about Ned, a pie maker with a mysterious ability to make the dead live again. The gift is not without its complications, however; if he touches this being a second time, they’ll be dead permanently. If they live for more than 60 seconds, somebody else nearby will die.

While that may sound like a weirdly morbid game show, Ned actually resembles a shaman, again a concept not without Jewish roots. If it seems like a lot of hocus-pocus, according to Rabbi Gershon Winkler, author of several books on the subject of Jewish mysticism, “Shamanism and sorcery are not antithetical to the Hebrew Scriptures.”

In his book “Magic of the Ordinary,” Rabbi Winkler writes, “The notion of Jewish shamanism may seem like an oxymoron to a lot of people, but it happens to be an integral part of the Jewish tradition that has been suppressed for centuries.”

While this may seem foreign to Jews of the 21st century, the reason is that it was associated with devils and demons and suppressed by the Catholic Church.

“Christians considered the Jew as the magician par excellence, a reputation that ultimately turned against them since, as practitioners of the occult, they were regarded by the church as demonic,” according to Rabbi Winkler.

In another of his books, “Dybbuk: A Glimpse of the Supernatural in Jewish Tradition,” he speaks to the issue of why now we see this trend toward the occult and a resurgence of interest in the supernatural. According to Rabbi Winkler, “A major factor behind modern man’s renewed flirtation with the occult is his quest for meaning in life.”

He says: “Trapped, the human creature opts for the achievement of powers outside the realm of the natural world.”

TV as Bible

In light of the events of the past six years, as 9/11 poked a hole between East and West, media analysts and television critics have noted the shifts in the wider cultural landscape and have remarked on its reflection through the medium of television.

David Zurawik, author of The Jews of Prime Time and television critic at The (Baltimore) Sun, says, “The reason it’s happening now is the post-9/11 jitters. There’s this sense that in America we don’t know what’s going on. I think there’s a tremendous uncertainty in this country, a tremendous underlying anxiety. There hasn’t been this kind of anxiety since the Great Depression and World War II.”

Interestingly, it was during that very time when the fantastic era of comic books was first created, and the comic book hero was born. I brought up the issue that was still unresolved for me with Mr. Zurawik, though, that 9/11 was six years ago. Why was this new metaphysical phenomenon taking shape on fall TV in 2007?

I then shared with him a book that describes the era we are living in, while depicting the period during the birth of the comic book. About halfway into Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, there’s a passage where things change. Mr. Chabon has one of the main characters, Joe, and the creator of “The Escapist” transform, from fighting the forces of the Iron Chain, in battles that were increasingly grotesque and ornate “grinding Adolf Hitler’s empire into paste,” to creating a creature of the Other World.

Mr. Chabon has Joe create Luna Moth, “a creature of the night and of mystic regions where evil worked by means of spells and curses instead of bullets, torpedoes, or shells. Luna fought in the wonderworld against specters and demons.”

I wondered aloud, “So as we’ve gone from television shows like 24 and Rescue Me to this new season filled with fantasy, are we seeing a similar kind of transformation take place, a tipping point — a metamorphosis?”

I ran this notion and the passage from Mr. Chabon’s book by Mr. Zurawik, and he agreed, summing up the point simply, “For a while, Osama bin Laden was real. Now, he’s a phantom we can’t catch.”

That seemed to explain so much. He then added, picking up on the hero idea again, “There’s something otherworldly we have to try to attach ourselves to, for strength or purpose or for a reason to go on, so as not to be defeated.”

He likened our time to the Cold War of the ‘50s, a time like today when we lived with anxiety and a threat that wasn’t fully manifested. The show that summed up the era for Mr. Zurawik was none other than Superman, and the other was The Lone Ranger, a variation on a theme but with a different genre — the Western. “Together,” he said, “they combined the two great frontiers — the Space Age and the frontier.”

A former colleague of Mr. Zurawik, Diane Winston, who is now a Knight chair in media and religion at the University of Southern California, lent an additional perspective.

“The popularity of Westerns in [the 1950s] spoke to the Cold War mentality of good guys/bad guys, and the Americans as heroes who were strong and tough and macho in a cowboy way,” she said. “We had a more conventional view of religion than today, when we’re much more interested in spirituality.”

I asked her about shows like Heroes that tap into that sense of both the hero and the otherworldly and have led to this new slew of fall shows that portray humans with extraordinary powers.

“Everyday, people find a new reason to be overwhelmed,” Ms. Winston said, “whether it’s the bridge collapsing or talk about earthquakes in California. We live in what feels to be uncertain times, all with the backdrop of 9/11. These things give us a sense of our own mortality and vulnerability.

“When we look to be entertained, we want to be soothed and calmed, we want to see things that make us feel as if people can triumph over death. All these supernatural shows feature heroes who can control what’s going on. They speak to our deepest needs and fears.”

I asked Ms. Winston if she sees these stories having deeper roots, mythical ones that go back to the Bible. Her immediate reply was, “I think television is the contemporary equivalent of the Bible. Not that television supersedes the Bible, but at a time when biblical language sounds foreign to us, we find similar stories of heroism, suffering, sacrifice on television, and they are like biblical morality stories.”

Indeed, finding pop culture’s pulse in the Bible is, and has been, more prevalent than a lot of us think. For example, you may not think a show about a vampire has much to do with Judaism. But it does on a few levels.

CBS’s Moonlight will be about a city-dwelling vampire who attempts to resist his urge to kill and drink the blood of humans, but instead decides to help them. As it turns out, the earliest reference to a vampire is in the Bible. And, of course, one who tries to help people is practicing tikkun olam, repairing the world.

Helping to tie the thread together in these particular shows was something interesting that Rabbi Winkler told me. “There are many stories about the living dead in the Zohar,” he said. “As for chesed, it is the ancient act of taking care of the dead. You’re not going to get a ‘thank-you’ from the dead. It’s altruistic, unconditional love.”

Why all the interest now with such notions? “The obsession with the occult is a response trying to understand the great mystery of suffering of the innocent,” he replied. “In our own time, every human being is thirsting for something beyond what is tangible, because everything is becoming too tangible, too instant, too accessible, and the soul is searching for mystery.”

Scanning over the television landscape this fall, what’s coming in clearly and noticeably is we are tuning in a new frequency. It’s a channel that’s projecting our collective psyche with shows that are far from reality TV, but instead cable and the networks have aimed their satellite dishes toward a higher orbit, one that’s closer to God, steeped in spirituality and, in many ways, grounded in Judaism.