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Zuñi Brujo

The Plagiarist

The Plagiarist

copypasty
I'd been reading B's _____ ___ ____ without any particular search in mind, when a relatively minor anecdote stopped me. It stayed with me for weeks. I couldn't get it out of my mind.

The anecdote was a case-history on which there was a conflict of morality. It concerned a Pueblo Indian who lived in Zuñi, New Mexico, in the nineteenth century. Like a Zen koan (which also originally meant "case history") the anecdote didn't have any single right answer but rather a number of possible meanings that kept drawing me deeper and deeper into the moral situation that was involved.
 
B wrote: "Most ethnologists have had...experiences in recognizing that persons who are put outside the pale of society with contempt are not those who would be placed there by another culture...

"The dilemma of such an individual is often most successfully solved by doing violence to his strongest natural impulses and accepting the role the culture honours. In case he is a person to whom social recognition is necessary it is ordinarily his only possible course."

She said the person concerned was one of the most striking individuals in Zuñi:
 
In a society that thoroughly distrusts authority of any sort, he had native personal magnetism that singled him out in any group. In a society that exalts moderation and the easiest way, he was turbulent and could act violently upon occasion. In a society that praises a pliant personality that "talks lots" --that is, that chatters in a friendly fashion-- he was scornful and aloof. Zuñi's only reaction to such personalities is to brand them as witches. He was said to have been peering through a window from outside, and this is a sure mark of a witch.
 
At any rate he got drunk one day and boasted that they could not kill him. He was taken before the war priests who hung him by his thumbs from the rafters till he should confess to his witchcraft. This is the usual procedure in a charge of witchcraft. However he dispatched a messenger to the government troops. When they came his shoulders were already crippled for life, and the officer of the law was left with no recourse but to imprison the war priests who had been responsible for the enormity.
 
One of these war priests was probably the most respected and important in recent Zuñi history and when he returned after imprisonment in the state penitentiary he never resumed his priestly offices. He regarded his power as broken. It was a revenge that is probably unique in Zuñi history. It involved, of course, a challenge to the priesthoods, against whom the witch by his act openly aligned himself.

The course of his life in the forty years that followed this defiance was not, however, what we might easily predict.
 
A witch is not barred from his membership in cult groups because he has been condemned, and the way to recognition lay through such activity. He possessed a remarkable verbal memory and a sweet singing voice. He learned unbelievable stores of mythology, of esoteric ritual, of cult songs. Many hundreds of pages of stories and ritual poetry were taken down from his dictation before he died, and he regarded his songs as much more extensive. He became indispensible in ceremonial life and before he died was the governor of Zuñi.
 
The congenital bent of his personality threw him into irreconcilable conflict with his society, and he solved his dilemma by turning an incidental talent to account. As we might well expect, he was not a happy man. As governor of Zuñi and high in his cult groups, a marked man in his community, he was obsessed by death. He was a cheated man in the midst of a mildly happy populace.

It is easy to imagine the life he might have lived among the Plains Indians where every institution favoured the traits that were native to him. The personal authority, the turbulence, the scorn, would all have been honoured in the career he could have made his own. The unhappiness that was inseparable from his temperament as a successful priest and governor of Zuñi would have had no place as a war chief of the Cheyenne; it was not a function of the traits of his native endowment but of the standards of the culture in which he found no outlet for his native responses."
 
When I first read this passage I felt a kind of eerie feeling --a feeling I might have had if I had passed in front of a strange mirror and suddenly seen a reflection of someone I'd never expected to see.
 
This Zuñi Indian was not exactly someone else. This was not just an isolated tribal incident going on here. This was something of universal importance happening. This was everyman. There is not a person alive who is not in some way or other in the kind of situation this "witch" was in. It was just that his circumstances were so exotic and so extreme one could now see it, by itself, out in the open.

The story was of a struggle between good and evil, but the koan it raised was, "Which was which?" Was this person really good or was he perhaps also evil?
 
At first reading he might seem a model of goodness, a lone virtuous man surrounded by wicked persecutors, but this was too facile. Circumstances of the story argued against it. One of his tormentors was "probably the most important and respected person in Zuñi history." If his tormentor was so evil why was he so respected? Was the whole Zuñi culture evil? That was ridiculous. There was a lot more to it than that.

I saw that the question was thrown off by a connotation of "witch." This word alone loaded the case against the priests since anyone who calls someone else a witch is obviously a bigoted persecutor. But did they really call him a witch? A witch is a Druid priestess reduced by legend to an old crone who wears a pointed black hat and rides a broomstick in front of the moon on Halloween. Was that what they were calling him?
 
In a koan-like recycling of the event in my mind, I came to think that Benedict had given the event an interpretation that didn't do it justice. She was finding stories to support her thesis that different cultures create different personality traits, which is important, and undoubtedly true. But this man was more than just a "misfit." There was something deeper than that going on.

"Misfit" is one of those words that seem to explain things but does not. "Misfit" says only that something is not explained. If he was a misfit why didn't he leave? What persuaded him to stay? It certainly wasn't timidity. And why did the citizens of Zuñi change their minds and make this former "witch" their governor? There's no indication that he changed or they changed. She said he turned "an incidental talent to account" in order to satisfy his need for social recognition. Probably so, but Zuñi or no Zuñi, it takes stronger social forces than a good singing voice and a need for social recognition to turn a misfit and torture victim into a governor.
 
How did he do it? What were his "powers"? Was there something special in the way Pueblo Indians think that after ten thousand years of continuous culture they would let a drunkard and a window-peeper get away with this?

I didn’t think so. I thought a better name for him might have been sorcerer, or shaman, or brujo, a Spanish term used extensively in that region that denotes a quite different kind of person. A brujo is not a semi-mythical, semi-comic figure that rides a broomstick but a real person who claims religious powers; who acts outside of and sometimes against the local church authorities.

This was not a case of priests persecuting an innocent person. This was a much deeper conflict between a priesthood and a shaman. A passage from the anthropologist, H., confirmed my idea:
 
Although in many primitive cultures there is a recognized division of function between priests and shamans, in the more highly developed cultures in which cults have become strongly organized churches, the priesthood fights an unrelenting war against shamans...Priests work in a rigorously structured hierarchy fixed in a firm set of traditions. Their power comes from and is vested in the organization itself. They constitute a religious bureaucracy.
 
Shamans, on the other hand, are arrant individualists. Each is on his own, undisciplined by bureaucratic control; hence a shaman is always a threat to the order of the organized church. In the view of the priests they are presumptive pretenders. Joan of Arc was a shaman for she communed directly with the angels of God. She steadfastly refused to recant and admit delusion and her martyrdom was ordained by the functionaries of the Church. The struggle between shaman and priest may well be a death struggle.
 
For weeks I returned to these questions before I saw that the key lay in the war priest's statement that his "powers had been broken." Something very grave had occurred. The priest refused to return to a priestly office after return from the penitentiary. What had occurred had been enormous.

I concluded that a huge battle had taken place for the entire mind and soul of Zuñi. The priests had proclaimed themselves good and the brujo evil. The brujo had proclaimed himself good and the priests evil. A showdown had occurred and the brujo had won!
 
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