Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

My sastun didn’t look anything like his small marble. I didn’t see how
I’d be able to twirl this chunk of crystal the way he twirled his.
“Can I use this to get answers the way you do?” I asked.
“Well, I’m not sure,” he said. “The sastun can take many forms. I once
had a sastun that I used only to see if a patient could be cured. It was thin as
a pencil with a dot in the middle that would stretch from end to end when a
patient who could not be cured held it in his hand. I once saw a blue sastun
on a necklace.”
“How do you know a stone is a sastun?”
“I know by looking at it,” he said. “It has light that sparkles when it
moves and you can peer into it as a mirror. You may find dots, lines,
crosses, Virgins, and rainbows that give you answers. If you have the lamp
to see it.”
“What do you mean by ‘lamp’?” I then asked.
“It’s something up here that’s a don,” he said tapping his forehead. “A
gift.”
Clearly Don Elijio had the gift. He regularly used his sastun to
determine if a patient’s illness was rooted in natural causes or from daño,
meaning brought on by spiritual forces. It was his sastun that carried
requests and prayers beyond the gossamer veil to the Maya Spirits. In using
it, he was carrying on an ancient tradition. Archaeologists had found sastuns
in the burials of Maya shamans in the abandoned ancient cities.
My image of a sastun was that of a supernatural hot line to the Spirits.
Don Elijio described it as a Stone of Light, Mirror of the Ages, Light of the
Ages, and Stone of the Ages. He also called it a “plaything of the Maya
Spirits.” He said they could be heard at night throwing a sastun back and
forth to each other across rushing rivers, which fail to drown out the
whirling sound of its fanciful flight.
The Spirits chose to whom to send the sastun. Some people prayed for a
sastun all their lives but never received one. “Others don’t know what it is
when it rolls by their feet while they’re playing in the sand,” Don Elijio
said. “Often it falls from the sky in front of someone. But many fear it and
try to throw it away. This is useless, as it will only come back.”
They fear it, as Jerónimo had, because of its drawing power. “When the
Spirits sent me my sastun, the people came from very far because it calls
them. Like me, it loves to work,” Panti told me happily.