greater protection or more powerful healer than the plant! So why would I need to hit participants with sticks – and interrupt their healings by doing so?
Ruben is a historian and regards my approach as form of evolution which gives people the healing they need through the correct ceremonies for our times. But it is also a de-evolution because so many rituals and objects have been artificially added to San Pedro mesas and ceremonies through the influence of the Spanish Catholics.
Before the Spanish came to Peru, Andeans believed in Inti, the god of the sun, and Pachamama, the Earth, so their rituals were simpler and needed fewer symbols, appeasements to God, or ways to keep evil at bay. The idea of guilt and a God who needed appeasing arrived with the Catholics and it was they who made our ancestors change their rituals or be killed. Before this, they were more natural and flowing.
So what I do may be an evolution, as Ruben calls it, but it is also a return to what was always done. It is as if we have evolved backwards rather than forwards in time!
Is your decision to hold ceremonies in the day instead of at night part of this ‘backwards evolution’ too?
Ruben holds his ceremonies at night and that is how he taught me, but as I grew in my understanding of San Pedro, night ceremonies – for practical as well as spiritual reasons – became another thing that did not really work for me.
Perhaps it is to do with the Spanish again and their Catholic notions of guilt and “suffering for our sins” that most San Pedro ceremonies are held at night! I always found it so cold and uncomfortable that I could never really relax enough to receive