Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

A week ago she had been waiting for her husband to come home for
dinner, wondering why he was so late. “Suddenly, I felt very frightened, but
I didn’t know why,” she recalled.
As she sat on her front porch brushing her hair and fretting, a warm
wind came up from the field behind her house and whipped around to the
front.
“The moment the wind blew over me, I felt a chill go through my body.
I pushed my children inside and slammed all the doors and windows closed,
but it was too late. In the morning my arm was as you see it now. What’s
wrong with me, tato?”
He poked and jabbed at her swollen arm, leaving tiny, white
impressions in her taut flesh. She winced in pain and squirmed in her seat.
“It is the Hot Wind of the Maya, one of the Nine Malevolent Spirits. I
haven’t seen that old goat for a long while now,” he exclaimed, spreading
his leathery lips into an ample grin.
He motioned for me to check the pulse for myself. It was fat and rapid
and felt as if it could jump out of its fleshy covering. An icy sensation ran
up my arm.
The sastun is not the only way to determine whether an illness has a
spiritual or physical cause. Panti also relied on the pulse for diagnosis,
ascertaining its intensity and pace. A healthy person’s pulse is steady and
moderate and is found at the wrist above the thumb. A sick person’s pulse
can be thin and weak or fat and rapid. The higher up the arm the pulse is
found, the more serious the ailment—whether physical or spiritual.
Panti also used the pulse in his treatments. He prayed into it, since he
considered it a direct route to the blood, the essence of a person’s being.
Carla turned in her chair, pulling at her arm, with tears streaming down
her round copper face. Panti began whispering his healing prayers under his
breath while blowing tenderly on her arm.
“Fill her bag with Zorillo, Skunk Root, Rosita,” he ordered, then turned
his attention back to Carla. “Start drinking the Zorillo tea tonight while
saying an Our Father. Rosita and I will bring the Tzibche plant to your
house tomorrow. We’ll add it to the Xiv we’re mixing up now. You’ll use it
for nine herbal steam baths.”
Reaching under his cluttered table, he pulled out a hand-sewn cloth bag,
which I recognized as Chinda’s handiwork. From the bag, he removed a
handful of dried, powdered Copal resin. He placed it on a piece of paper