Infusions of Healing: A Treasury of Mexican-American Herbal Remedies - Brossura

Davidow, Joie

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0684854163 ISBN 13: 9780684854168

Casa editrice: Atria, 1999

Riassunto

An accessible guide to the vast treasures of Mexican indigenous herbal healing offers treatments for a host of common ailments, using teas, liniments, compresses, salves, and soothing baths for headaches, fevers, colds, digestive problems, and menstrual cramps. Original. 20,000 first printing.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Joie Davidow, an award-winning journalist, was a founder of the L.A. Weekly, L.A. Style magazine and Sí, a national Latino lifestyle publication, and is coeditor with Esmeralda Santiago of two anthologies, Las Christmas: Favorite Latino Authors Share Their Holiday Memories and Las Mamis: Favorite Latino Authors Remember Their Mothers. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Part I: Five Centuries of Healing

¿Qué mágicas infusiones

de indios herbolarios

de mi patria, entre mis letras

el hechizo derramaron?

What are these magical infusions

of the Indian herbalists of my homeland,

that spill enchantment

over my pages?

-- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695)

Traditional Mexican-American medicine is un rico menudo, a rich stew, with a long list of ingredients: sixteenth-century Arab and European herbal medicines, ideas that date back to Hippocrates, twentieth-century patent medicines, plant medicines from Africa, herbal wisdom from North American native tribes. But the key ingredient is as old as Mesoamerica -- the living legacy of the Aztecs, remnants of a vast treasury of herbal knowledge that has nearly vanished.

War Of The Worlds

When Hernando Cortés and his 553 men landed at Vera Cruz in 1519, they came face-to-face with a culture so vastly different from the one they had left in Europe, it was as though they had traveled by spaceship to a distant galaxy. The people of the Aztec empire viewed reality from a perspective that was almost incomprehensible to the Spanish. And the Aztecs were equally confounded by the Spaniards, whom they regarded as half gods, half monsters.

It could be argued that the more advanced culture lost the war, that the Spanish did not bring civilization to the New World but effectively demolished it. The Aztecs reigned for little more than a century, but during those decades, through constant warfare that expanded the boundaries of the empire from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific and trade routes that extended south through Honduras and Nicaragua, they acquired much of the collective knowledge of all the Mesoamerican peoples, inheriting the cultures of the Toltec, the Zapotec, the Mixtec, the Huaxtec, the Maya.

They were extraordinary astronomers who had developed a yearly calendar accurate within eleven minutes, and charted the movements of the stars, using only their own eyes to scan the skies. They were advanced mathematicians, spectacular craftsmen, accomplished architects and engineers. The Aztecs were artists -- musicians, painters, sculptors, dancers. All members of the elite classes were poets. They valued skill with words as highly as skill with weapons and considered both to be necessary attributes. Vast libraries housed exquisitely painted fanlike volumes of fig-bark paper in which they recorded their philosophy, history, religion, literature, law, and scientific findings.

The conquistadors, marching into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, were so overwhelmed by its splendor that they asked one another if they were dreaming. Crossing a wide causeway they entered a city of vast plazas, fountains, sculpture, and architecture of heroic proportions brightly decorated with colorful murals and glyphs. Floating gardens swayed in the lagoon. Flowering vines cascaded over the terraces of the townhouses. In one of his historic long letters to the king of Spain, Cortés expressed fear that no one would believe his description of a city so full of wonder that even the conquistadors themselves could hardly grasp what they were seeing. It has been called the Venice of the Americas because, like Venice, it was a magnificent city built on a series of canals. But it was more beautiful than Venice in one very important aspect: It was clean. So clean that a Spanish chronicler remarked that walking its streets he was "in no more danger of soiling his feet than he was of soiling his hands." A thousand workers washed and swept the streets and plazas each day. Clean water was brought into the city through aqueducts. Human waste was picked up from the houses daily, and public toilet facilities were placed at intervals along the great causeways that led into the city.

The Aztecs were meticulously clean in their person as well. They were offended by body odor, bathed daily, and used herbal deodorants and breath fresheners. Middle-class houses had private bathrooms, and there were public bathhouses throughout the city. Motecuhzoma II had more than a hundred bathrooms in his vast palace. He reportedly bathed and changed his clothes several times a day, never wearing a garment more than once.

The great capitals of Europe at that time, and for centuries afterward, were full of filth and misery. The rat-infested alleys were strewn with garbage and human waste. Chamber pots were emptied onto the streets, and clean running water was not even conceived of. The old adage that a man takes three baths in his lifetime, one at birth, one on his wedding day, and the last when he is a corpse about to be buried, was not far from the truth. The Spanish conquistadors were impressed that the Mexicans always greeted them by fumigating them with incense, which they took as a great honor. But we can only imagine what these men, unwashed and sweating in their heavy clothing and armor, must have smelled like to their fastidious hosts.

The Aztecs and the Spanish viewed one another with horror and awe, and each saw the face of a barbarian.

The Glory of the Ancient Gardens

If their civilization had not been destroyed during the conquest, the Aztecs, like the Chinese, might have made a great contribution to the world through their vast and ancient knowledge of herbal medicine. Within its borders, Mexico has arguably the greatest variety of plant life on earth. Its geography includes rugged mountain ranges and lush valleys, tropical jungles on the Caribbean coast and arid deserts that stretch to the Pacific in the north. The Aztecs had survived centuries of wandering from one terrain to another before founding their capital at Tenochtitlán. They had, of necessity, become expert botanists during their travels, forced to use whatever they could find growing around them for both food and medicine.

As the empire prospered, they became magnificent horticulturalists. In 1467 the great Motecuhzoma's grandfather, Motecuhzoma I, established an immense botanical garden at Huaxtepec, which his grandson later revived. It may well have been the first botanical garden on earth, and the most extensive collection of plants the world had ever seen. Trees, shrubs, herbs, and flowers were imported from all over the empire, along with gardeners trained in tending them. There were nearly two thousand varieties of plants in the garden -- fruit trees, orchids from the tropics, stands of ahuehuete cypress -- all artfully arranged to provide pleasure to the senses and planted for fragrance and color, light and shade. Pools, waterfalls, fountains, an aviary full of colorful exotic birds, and a zoo graced the grounds.

Although the garden at Huaxtepec was the largest in the empire, Motecuhzoma II also maintained a luxuriant garden at his palace in Tenochtitlán, another just outside the capital in the hills of Chapultepec, and yet another at the suburban palace in Ixtapalapa. In the allied state of Texcoco, the great "poet king," Nezahualcóyotl, maintained a glorious garden of his own. The Texcocan king was devoted to the study of plants and commissioned artists to paint examples of the various species for his library.

In all these gardens, medicinal plants were cultivated and studied. Aztec doctors used the gardens as laboratories, conducting experiments subsidized by the nobility and by the imperial government. The medicinal plants grown in the gardens were intended for the medical needs of the nobility, but commoners were invited to be treated at the gardens free of charge, in exchange for reporting the results to the medical researchers who practiced there.

Basic knowledge of herbal medicine was common. Nearly every family grew its own herbs and vegetables in a garden called xochichinancalli, literally "flower place enclosed by reeds." Even in the cities, families maintained roof gardens where they grew plants for food, medicine, and ornament.

Decades after the fall of the Aztec empire, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who had been a soldier in the company of Cortés, remembered the gardens at Ixtapalapa in his memoir, The True Story of the Conquest of New Spain. "I could not get enough of it, of the variety of the trees and the aroma that each one had, of the terraces full of roses and other flowers, and the many fruits of the land...and I say again that as I stood there admiring it all, I did not believe that in the world there was any land such as this one....Now all this is fallen, lost. None of it remains," he wrote sadly.

In the final assault on Tenochtitlán most of this glorious city was destroyed. What was left of the Aztec civilization was soon attacked by the Church. In 1528 the first archbishop of Mexico, Don Juan de Zumárraga, in his zealous determination to wipe out all traces of pagan religious practices, ordered the destruction of every book, every codex, every scrap of a hieroglyph. The great libraries of Texcoco, with their wealth of information about the medicinal plants, were piled onto an enormous bonfire. Spanish soldiers were instructed to seek out every book they could find to add to the pyre. It was a fervent reflection of what was going on in Spain at the time. Twenty years earlier, hot on the heels of the expulsion of the Moors, the Grand Inquisitor, Cardinal Ximenes, had ordered the same fate for every Arabic manuscript in Granada.

But in New Spain the Church must have been even more compelled to vanquish the demon, who they thought must be everywhere. The Spanish clergy saw a hellish, godless land where the people worshiped hideous idols to whom they offered bloody human sacrifice. The Church soon realized that every trace of Aztec culture would have to be demolished, because Aztec religion pervaded all of it.

The Fifth Sun

The Aztec practice of medicine, like every other aspect of Aztec life, was inseparable from their concept of the cosmos and their religious beliefs. Their very word for doctor, tepati, was derived from teo, sacred, and patli, medicine.

Religious mythology varied from region to region, but at the basis of Mesoamerican belief systems was the notion that the earth had been destroyed and recreated four times. The Aztecs believed that the first world was destroyed by ocelots, the second by hurricanes, the third by fiery rain, the fourth by floods. During the time of each of these four worlds, one of the sun gods reigned, each corresponding to one of the four elements: earth, wind, fire, and water. According to this system, we are now living in the fifth incarnation of the world, which is destined to be destroyed by earthquakes.

It was the Aztecs' mission to postpone this inevitable fifth cataclysm through their efforts on earth. All the previous worlds had been destroyed by warring gods. It was the job of the Aztecs to make sure that the current sun god, Tonatiuh, was kept well fed and in place so that the fifth world could continue.

There are many variations of the Aztec creation story, but it most commonly goes something like this: The gods built the current world in darkness. When their work was complete, the gods still felt lonely. They missed men and women, all of whom had perished in the destruction of the fourth world and whose remains were now in the lower region of Mictlán, which was presided over by the god and goddess Mictecacíhuatl and Mictlantecuhtli. So the plumed serpent god, Quetzalcóatl, journeyed down to the underworld to retrieve the bones of humanity. Mictecacíhuatl and Mictlantecuhtli agreed to release the bones, but then they tricked Quetzalcóatl by frightening him on his way back to the heavens. Quetzalcóatl dropped his bag of bones, and they all shattered. The poor god wept bitter tears. When he arrived at the celestial level of Tamoanchan, the place of birth, he didn't know what to say to his fellow gods. It was decided that the bones should be ground into powder. Then the gods pierced their male organs with maguey thorns so that they bled, and they sprinkled the powdered bones with their own blood. From this they made a paste, which they fashioned into human forms. Because they had been pasted together with shattered bones, these new men and women were weak, subject to death and disease. This fifth incarnation of humanity was a combination of the earthly, the old bones, and the divine, the blood of the gods. The gods had sacrificed their blood to recreate humanity, and now mankind would be forever in their debt, obliged to make blood sacrifices of their own in retribution. But man's debt to the gods was even greater. Humanity also owed the gods for the sun and the moon.

The earth had been recreated and repeopled, but all was still in darkness. So the gods gathered in the sacred city of Teotihuacán, where they built a big bonfire. In order to create a new sun to light the world, one of the gods would have to sacrifice himself by jumping into the fire. For four days the gods sat by this divine hearth, the teotexcalli. Nanahuatzin, a poor little pimply-faced god, volunteered to sacrifice himself. But the wealthy god, Tecuciztécatl, claimed precedence. Four times the wealthy god stepped up to the flames, but each time he lost his courage and stepped back again. At last it was the little pimply-faced god's turn. He stepped up to the fire and without hesitating leapt in. Great flames rose up, igniting the heavens in an explosion of red. The gods looked up to see the god Nanahuatzin emerge in the east. The new sun had risen.

Now Tecuciztécatl, the wealthy god, was ashamed and hurled himself into the bonfire. But by this time the fire was dying down, so the wealthy god burned slowly, emerging as the sun's pale reflection, the moon. The other gods looking on were so disgusted by the wealthy god's cowardly behavior, they threw a rabbit at him. When the Aztecs looked up at the moon, they saw on its surface the face of a rabbit where we see the face of a man.

Now the sun was in the sky, but it stood still. The gods asked it, "Why aren't you moving?" To which the sun replied, "Because I demand your kingdom and your blood." Hearing this, the gods fell down at once, sacrificing themselves to become the stars. But this still wasn't enough to keep the sun moving through the sky. It was now the job of mankind to make sure that the sun had enough energy to rise and set by feeding it with blood sacrifices.

According to the Judeo-Christian belief, humanity entrusts the world to an almighty God. We depend on God and are grateful for the earthly treasure that has been given to us. But the Aztecs' relationship with their gods was interdependent. The continued existence of the sun and moon, wind and rain, depended on mankind's ability to feed and appease the gods. At any time the gods could destroy the world just as they had done four times before. The Aztecs believed that they had been chosen to keep the gods well fed and happy. It was their mission to postpone the inevitable fifth cataclysm. Theirs was the struggle of good over evil, of light over darkness.

The Aztecs, like the Spanish, used their religious convictions to justify their imperialistic wars. The Aztecs went to war on the premise that it was their sacred duty to take captives for sacrifice to the gods. The Spanish went to war with the holy mission of proselytizing the Catholic faith, on the premise that it was their sacred duty to save the heathens. In very different ways they each made holy offerings of the souls of the people they vanquished.

Kingdoms of the Cosmos

Western thought divides the natural from the supernatural, the miraculous from the ordinary, but to the Aztec mind it was all one and the same. The visible and the inv...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Atria
• Data di pubblicazione: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0684854163
• ISBN 13: 9780684854168
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 368