Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

and made life hard for him.” It was true, and some in the audience shifted
uncomfortably in their seats. I delivered a eulogy. Dr. Palacio spoke of Don
Elijio’s contribution to the people of Belize and the importance of
preserving the national patrimony through traditional healing knowledge.
One of the Evangelical ministers gave an hour-long sermon. The marimba
band played a lively tune. I closed the lid to Don Eligio’s coffin and said
good-bye for the last time. Six men lifted his casket and carried it a few
hundred yards over the white marl road to the little wooden church painted
a bright Caribbean blue. After the service, he was laid to rest in the San
Antonio graveyard next to his wife and daughter.
Over the next weeks, many friends came to Ix Chel Farm, our home on
the other side of the Macal River, to offer support and condolences. I vowed
to perform nine Primicias to the Maya Spirits in memory of Don Elijio. In
spite of the frantic activity, I was able to fulfill the promise in ten days,
sometimes with friends and at other times alone. The Primicias were all
performed in the old Healer’s Hut on the farm, just a few yards from the
end of the Rainforest Medicine Trail we had built so that visitors from
Belize and other countries could learn about some of Belize’s medicinal
plant treasures to better understand the value of the rainforest. The hut was
a typical Maya thatch and stick house, modeled after the hut in which I first
found Don Elijio in 1983.
During those ten days and nine Primicias, there were several dreamvisions,
but two were the most memorable. On the third night of his passing
and after the second Primicia, the first dream occurred: I am gazing at a
map of the Americas. I see an endless march of indigenous people moving
slowly toward Belize. They are all on foot walking from the United States,
Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, and even as far
south as Argentina and Brazil. They wear feather headdresses, jade
pendants, and jaguar-skin pelts on earth-colored bodies. They pound on
drums, blow on flutes and horns, and shake gourd rattles. The music is not
funereal, but bouncing and joyful. One man, his face painted bright red,
steps out of the parade and faces me. He has long, sleek black hair; bangs
cut straight across his forehead. He wears only a red embroidered loincloth
and, across his chest, a rough piece of palm frond from the cohune tree
hung from strips of vine. On the brown frond, written in white letters, are
the words, AMAZONIAN SIDE. The man smiles and looks at me tenderly. Then,
suddenly, the Amazonian Indian and I are in a dank, dark room that