Mexico, Tenancingo Degollado, : Real de Catorce II About Town

The afternoon of our arrival we took a tour about the town with Roy Rogers as our guide. It seems Europeans come to Real de Catorce much more than North Americans. Germans, Swiss, French, Italian, and English are frequent visitors. They come for the spirit of the place,, and the "Willys Tours" into the desert. There are excursions down from the azure sky into the bajia way below in 70's era Willys Jeeps,, to partake of peyote.

Willys

Peyote or Peyotl

How old is the Peyote cult? In Raramuri country in Chihuahua carvings in lava rock have been found indicating ceremonial use of peyote. Contextual discoveries, that is among other artifacts, in caves in Texas of actual specimens of peyote indicate that its use is at least 3000 years old. Spanish friars who first entered this region noted peyote use among the Chichimecas. The Huichols, the indigenous people who presently inhabit the region, that is San Luis Potosi to Nayarit, still use the drug liberally as a sacrament. Peyote fortifies them in their prolonged rituals. Peyote gives them the spritual and physical strength to withstand their pilgrimages to the pacific coast. However these days it is more common to make the pilgrimmage by bus.

I must speak of Wirikuta, a sacred Huichol site in San Luis Potosi because a part of Real de Catorce lies within Wirikuta. It is one of the most important sites of the indigenous people, The Wixarika or (Huichol). These native americans have preserved their spiritual identity practicing their cultural and religious tradition for thousands of years.They believe that in Wirikuta, their sacred land, creation originated and it is within this territory of more than 320,000 acres that the different huichol communities make pilgrimages. The Huichols recreate the journey made by their spiritual ancestors in their own version of The Garden Of Eden. In this vast consecrated desert called Wirikuta, Jicuri, or peyote provides a sacred window,, a hallowed "seeing".
A modern Huichol shaman expressed it as follows: "One day all will be as you have seen it there, in Wirikuta. The First People will come back. The fields will be pure and crystalline, all this is not clear to me, but in five more years I will know it, through more revelations. The world will end, and the unity will be here again. But only for pure Huichol."

Peyote images show up everywhere here, even, to my surprise, on the church gate. One sees images of the cactus in huichol masks, crosses, artwork. It seems inseparable from the local culture.

Church gate adorned with peyote.

This fantastic huichol mural, made of colored threads by a local shaman, exalts peyote. The border is of peyote and the center of the eagles is peyote. See if you can pick out others. It describes a huichol creation myth.

There are two directions in Real de Catorce,, up or down. With Gerino we went up first and then moved towards the pantheon and the site of the Capilla de Guadalupe dating from 1668 or so which overlooks the tombs in the graveyard and the Potosinian Desert or bajia 2000 meters below. It is a place of tranquility and perfect light.

Capilla de Guadalupe

From the Chapel of Guadalupe towards the desert.

View to the desert below El Palenque in Real de Catorce. The desert plain far below is part of Wirikuta.

La Caja de Caridad

In La Capilla de Guadalupe we met the sextant and his wife. Nice couple, simple and close to the end of all of it all. They invited us into a room beside the altar to see La Caja de Caridad (Charity Box). This is a coffin for the poor. The deceased was placed in this coffin for the short trip from the church to the gravesite. The body was emptied into the grave and the Caja de Caridad saved for another muerto.

The mountains about us were bald except for some low lying clumps of plants. Gerino told us that when the land was in the hands of the Huichol,, before the spanish conquest and the silver gush, the landscape was forested. The miners supposedly took it all for the kilns that smelted ore. It's difficult to imagine now that this was once woods. There is hardly any soil now just bare rock that looks silvery from a distance. Deserts are so fragile,,, really so are most places in Mexico with a monsoon climate. It takes longer in this type of climate with scarcity and abundance for a forest to achieve status. There are drastic consequences when old growth is abruptly removed. The trees which served as the "big brothers" for the the next generation leave the new growth open to severe conditions,, so much so that the babies die with the loss of humidity once held beneath the crowns of the larger older trees. In order to replace a forest in the desert it must take more than one lifetime. Santo Desierto, a lovely national forest in Tenancingo is populated by large oaks and ocotes among many other species. There are prohibitions against cutting therefore the forest floor is humid most of the year so the next generation of trees lie in comfortable wait until a larger tree is struck by lightning or old age and falls leaving the sun to cajole them into vertical movement.
We passed La Plaza Del Toros, a large ring of stone used for bullfights, and the recently restored Palenque used for cockfights, which was unfortunately closed. We stopped at a bar to get out of the sun and try a local mezcal schmoozeing with the owner. Once Real was all about silver,, now it's all about tourism,,, which after all is cleaner,,, like an after-burner. One can see immediately by looking at the stones that this place had a different geologic past,,, a proterozoic history molten and stirred by the massive ladle of Hephaestus. There are lajas of alazarin cimson, vitreous dark limestone, and stone that resembles wood with wavy grains. We visited a few sleepy tiendas to view the local wares. There were pyrites, crystals, crosses made of old Real de Catorce beams, and a few wood stoves, then we continued on to our hotel. We promised to meet Germino early the next morning out front of the hotel to climb on the old road to the Ciudad de Las Fantasmas. After we left him we walked a bit to the nearby Parroquia de La Purisima Concepcion.