THE Mexican border is a great divide. Below it, the accumulated
structures of Western "rationality" waver and plunge. The familiar
shapes of society - landlord and peasant, priest and politician - are laid over
a stranger ground, the occult Mexico, with its brujos and carismaticos, its
sorcerers and diviners. Some of their practices go back 2,000 and 3,000 years
to the peyote and mushroom and morning glory cults of the ancient Aztecs and
Toltecs. Four centuries of Catholic repression in the name of faith and reason
have reduced the old ways to a subculture, ridiculed and persecuted. Yet in a
country of 53 million, where many village marketplaces have their sellers of
curative herbs, peyote buttons or dried hummingbirds, the sorcerer's world is
still tenacious. Its cults have long been a matter of interest to
anthropologists. But five years ago, it could hardly have been guessed that a
master's thesis on this recondite subject, published under the conservative
imprint of the University of California Press, would become one of the
bestselling books of the early '70s.
Time Magazine.
March 5th, 1973.
