"In much wisdom is much grief" says the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, "and he that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow." There is much wisdom, grief, knowledge, sorrow, and finally joy in Martin Prechtel's new book. You don't have to read his previous three, *Secrets of the Talking Jaguar,* *Long Life, Honey in the Heart,* and *The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun* to understand and appreciate the message of *The Toe Bone and the Tooth* - but it helps.This is a story about keeping the Great Story alive - "An Ancient Mayan Story Relived in Modern Times: Leaving Home to Come Home."
It starts out with Martin's return to Guatamala in 1992 after many years in exile from his adopted country, where his village of Santiago Atitlan had been destroyed and 1800 of his friends and villagers slaughtered by American-backed death squads in the 1980s. He was picked up at the airport by three teenage boys (who had been small children when the devastation took place) and smuggled back to the village under a truckload of Mayan squashes. Along the way, the boys were eager to hear the story of the Toe Bone and Tooth that had been outlawed (as well as their language) by the various and many invaders of their country. Landmarks of the Story were everywhere (much as Australian Dreamtime stories are dependent on the land for the telling).
Martin was welcomed in Santiago Atitlan as the Shaman and healer that he was for many years. He had had a Mayan wife and three sons there (one son died) and his little family had barely escaped with their lives.
The ancient story of the Toe Bone and Tooth is inserted here - the Story of a mortal, Raggedy Boy, who fell in love with the Water Goddess, the story of her death after bearing him two corn children and being forgotten when her husband returned to the mortal world. When he did remember her through dreams, he had to re-member her, gathering her bones with the help of Coyote (who had the toe bone and tooth) and descending into the underworld to retrieve her heart. He was helped by an old magical couple. Re-membered, she became an ordinary woman and he became an ordinary man, and from them, all humans are descended.
The next few chapters chronicle the story of Martin's first arrival in Santiago Atitlan - how he'd been lost in a blizzard in his American homeland of Northern New Mexico in his youth, and how he was saved by a mare named Morningstar and an old Spanish lady who cured him of an almost fatal fever with bear grease and herbs. During his convalescence, he had 11 dreams of Santiago Atitlan and Nicolas Chiviliu Tacaxoy, who was to become his teacher, friend and mentor and who had called him through dreams for three years before he finally arrived in the village. Says Prechtel, "Though I was blond and born far away, we were the old and young generation of throwbacks from other times and layers of existence in which a humble dynasty of people in service to the remembrance of the Dismembered Goddess was continued from century to century."
Another chapter tells of Martin's defense of a young Mayan seminary student, Gaspar Culan, who was accused of worshipping idols because he had participated in an ancient Mayan sacred ceremony involving Holy Boy, whom the Catholic Church had branded as a devil but is actually a Christ figure. Martin (who speaks English, Spanish, and Mayan fluently) was to be Gaspar's advocate. Holy Boy had been called a Jew by the Church. Martin pointed out that they had dubbed the deity a Jew (and a devil) because Jews were at least considered to be human and therefore were subject to the 16th Century Inquisition. Mayans hadn't been considered people before that, so if their God was a Jew, the Inquisition could persecute and prosecute them. Martin won his case, and Culan was ordained as the first Mayan Catholic priest.
Several chapters are devoted to the Prechtel family's nothing-short-of-miraculous escape from Guatamala. Martin's teacher had ordered Martin to stay alive at all costs so that he might carry the seed of the story to the U.S. and preserve it for the Mayans whose history and culture had been outlawed.
When Martin got back to the U.S. and his old homeland in New Mexico, he and his family lived in poverty and difficulties for several years, but in Santa Fe he met a homeless couple who were like the old couple in the Story. Here, the narrative goes into the third person as the old couple tell Martin's story and do for him what he had done for countless people in his life - re-membered him for the holy amnesiacs (all of us). Martin's story mirrors the Great Story - "the story of ordinary people, extraordinarily in love and the story of the struggle of what it takes to be graced with such love is the story from which all humans are descended."
The author dedicates this book to the "deer-eyed daughter of the mountain, the mother of the great diversity" and to "all those peoples, plants and animals who have been and continue to be forcibly uprooted, rerouted, relocated, corralled, cut, branded, burnt out, burned down, burnt up, crushed, eradicated or driven from their homes in infinite diasporas of all types, to live where they may be unwelcome, while still trying to keep alive their seed capsules of cultural memory in hopes to regrow a home again. May their descendants be carved by the inherited grief of their ancestral loss to become feeders of what is holy in the ground, dedicated to something bigger than their need for justice and the pursuit of revenge."
This is a fantastic, exciting but true story, and in my opinion, this is a life-changing book. Read it!
