“Hearing Things? Seeing Things? Many of Us Do?” was an Oliver Sacks’ article in the New York Times this week helping launch his book, “Hallucinations.” It points out that such phenomena are experienced by nearly all of us at some time in our lives – though we tend to keep that secret. Sacks is the much-acclaimed author, practitioner and professor of neurology and psychiatry, who has written 12 books regarding patients’ experiences with neurological disorders. His most well-known books: “Awakening” (made into a Oscar-nominated film, starring Robert de Niro and Robin Williams), “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” and “The Last Hippie,” also made into a film. He presently serves as both clinical professor of neurology and consulting neurologist at the center of the epilepsy at the New York University School of Medicine.
Possibly surprising some readers, the subject of his article was not about the seemingly endless and surreal U.S. political carnival in which one party persisted in running a campaign that insulted all who disagreed with the purity of extreme conservatism. That uncompromising political position embraced the denigration of the famous “47 percent” of the U.S. electorate, while attacking women’s reproductive freedom, indulging in fantasies about rape, and spouting poorly veiled species of racism. Tuesday’s re-election of Barak Obama surprised not a few on both sides by delivering such a denial to such hallucinations that many conservatives are calling for a retreat from such a rigidly hostile ideology.
Sacks, as a neurologist, of course deals with the disorder of hallucinations from a caregiver’s and medical researcher’s point of view. And unlike politically afflicted sufferers of this syndrome, his subjects are more modest and tolerant. Sacks provides convincing evidence that most hallucinating people (both the seemingly well and the unwell) go to great lengths to keep their condition secret.
He observes that in many other cultures “hallucinations have been regarded as gifts from deities and the Muses ...” But in “modern times and cultures” they tend to carry “an ominous significance in the public (and the medical) mind, as portents of severe mental or neurological disorders.” Many of us, he says, as we daydream, or “lie in bed with closed eyes, awaiting for sleep, have so-called hypnogogic hallucinations – geometric patterns, or faces, sometimes landscapes. Such patterns or scenes may be very elaborate, brilliantly colored and rapidly changing – people used to compare them to slide shows.” Or they may be barely glimpsed, infrequent, quickly disappearing, “apparitions.” Thus, for conventional, “modern” states of mind, tending to be free of any neurological disorder.However, for many (particularly older, more “traditional”) Mexican minds, such “appearances” occur frequently. On March 19, 2010, the Reuters news service ran an article regarding Mexican police in the northern part of this country seeking protection from “raging violence” along the U.S. border by using rituals from “Mexican witchcraft,” and often those originating in Haitian Voodoo and Cuban San the Reuters news service ran an article regarding Mexican police in the northern part of this country seeking protection from “raging violence” along the U.S. border by using rituals from “Mexican witchcraft,” and often those originating in Haitian Voodoo and Cuban Santeria. “Priests” were slaughtering chickens on full-moon nights along the beaches abutting Tijuana. They were smearing police with blood and using prayers to evoke spirits to guard the officers as drug cartels battled over smuggling routes into the United States. In June 2008, the Mexican media blossomed with stories attesting that when Martha Sahagun was a political worker for the National Action Party (PAN) helping Vicente Fox enhance his political career as governor of Guanajuato, and then as candidate for president, she was employing a Cuban santeria to prepare potions that she secretly gave to Fox aimed at helping her become his wife. That finally occurred in 2001, shortly after he became president. At the end of his six-year term, Sahagun de Fox launched a campaign, well-buttressed with witchcraft, aimed at making her husband’s successor. It didn’t work this time. But all of these “esoteric” strategies included “hallucinations” of some kind, reportedly seen by the brujos (witches or curers) as well as their patrons.
At a more mundane, but more widespread level, Mexicans, particularly in the campo, traditionally believed in the powers of “duendes”. The small elf-like beings were active year-round but especially during the rainy season. And while little has been publicly said of these “esoteric” beings in recent times, this year’s prolonged, drenching rainy season has brought them into notice. These small creatures reside in lush, dense underbrush and tight thickets of trees, often at the outskirts of communities. They also favor arroyos and mountainside pockets of foliage. They can be both benign and baleful, though in most peoples’ minds they are up to no good, often inflicting illness and trouble on those who vex them.
During most of my time in Mexico – until fairly recently – a belief in duendes was a basic assumption of life. It was a tradition to wear a miniature cloth sack around one’s neck, filled with garlic and tobacco, or other “protective” concoctions. Hallucinations were a significant part of Mexican folklore, predicting both benign and evil occurrences in the future. Among such people there were no such things as hallucinations – what was “seen” was real.
Once one gained the confidence of a Mexican friend, tales about people who suffered from “having duendes,” were revealed, all of them fascinating. For those unable to perceive this world, that “disability” placed us in a state of incompleteness. We were seen in the same light as many view someone who can’t read. A whole world is cut off.
Though much of Mexico’s folk cures have been absorbed and commercialized by conventional medicine, duendes (a causual factor) are another matter. While these small woodland creatures belong to a belief system eschewed by “educated” Mexicans, when faced by problems of health and heart which mainstream therapists can’t expeditiously cure, some “sophisticated” folks turn to their grandparents‘ “old-fashioned” therapies.
In the 1970s and ’80s, brujas were still being jailed for putting spells on people. And while not an aficionado of duendes, I’ve met brujas whose strange-seeming curing methods were effective, critically so in remote mountainous areas.
A typical example might be that of a youngster whose family lived at a modest mountainside rancho. The boy awoke one morning with a severe headache, high temperature, vomiting. Other symptoms: painful eyes and muscles, his brown skin turn a faint green.
At a pueblo Social Security clinic some distance away, a careless doctor prescribed a common medicine, and the boy got worse. His uncle, the head of the campesino family, condemned all “city” doctors to death. He took the boy to a female cousin’s tarpaper-roofed home in a tiny pueblo where she served as a family curer. After a rapid, extensive examination, she agreed that the youngster was enduendado – had fallen under the spell of duendes. To cure him, the bruja proceeded to “cleanse” the child.
She had him undress him to his shorts and hold a white egg in his right hand for five minutes. She then passed the egg over his body. Next, she used a mixture of leaves from her rudimentary pharmacy – herbabuena, albaca, altamiza, romero – to cleanse him. Next she “washed” him with tobacco smoke and sponged him with alcohol. He was put to bed and covered well. The egg was broken into in a glass of water which was placed on the floor under the bed. The mixture of leaves were spread under his pillow. By mid-afternoon, following a long sleep, the boy was beginning to recover. His mother, asked if she had every been cured in such a manner, said not since she was a child. She no longer believed in such cures. “If you don’t believe, it doesn’t serve,” she said.
In the United States, post election day, many people are examining favorite certainties that now seem to have been hallucinations to see if they still serve in a changing America.