Shamanism in Mexico: city dwellers who took up the path, and a warning from anthropologists

Tatiana Solana grew up in an agnostic household and never took first communion. At 45, the owner of an organic products shop in Mexico City keeps on her home altar a mesa, the cloth bundle she received at the end of a three-year initiation in the Andes, and says she believes in God without a shadow of doubt. The turning point, she says, came after a car accident that nearly killed her.

She is one of the voices in the eighth chapter of Conversos, a documentary series by TV UNAM, the broadcaster of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, about Mexicans who left the religion they were born into for another.

Who is a shaman

The anthropologists in the film define the shaman as a kind of cosmic diplomat who mediates conflicts between humans and non-humans: deities, the dead, the owners of nature. The word comes from Siberia and, in Mexico, came to be used without discrimination, because not every healer is a shaman. In Otomí communities of the Huasteca, those who know how to heal also know how to cause illness, and cut-paper figures are "activated" with blood.

From nagualism to the New Age

The film traces the history. In the colonial period, nagualism was persecuted and equated with European witchcraft; later it was downgraded to superstition. In 1951, the Romanian historian Mircea Eliade published the book that defined shamanism as an archaic technique of ecstasy, and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s blended that reading with Hindu, Buddhist and Amerindian elements, including the use of psychoactive plants.

The new paths

Alongside Tatiana are followers of "Mexicanidad", a movement officially registered as a church, for which the Sun is father, the Earth is mother and the Moon is grandmother. Young people dance as "solar warriors" and play ulama, a pre-Hispanic ball game in which the ball is struck only with the hip. A theatre group blends Mexica dance steps with a Buddhist dance.

What to keep in mind

The episode gives room both to the converts' faith and to criticism. One anthropologist describes the "à la carte" shamanism of tourist towns such as Tepoztlán and San Cristóbal de las Casas, where many people go to hear what they want to hear. The claim, made in the film, that alternative medicines have proved effective in many societies comes with no studies to back it.

It is worth watching because a single film rarely lets both believers and scholars speak, without mocking one or silencing the other.