Martín Prechtel is an American writer, artist and teacher who, by his own account, lived for over a decade amongst the Tz’utujil Maya of Santiago Atitlán in Guatemala, a farming people, trained there with a village shaman and served the village as a shaman himself, until the civil war drove him out in the 1980s. He now teaches at his school, Bolad’s Kitchen, in New Mexico, and his best-known theme is that modern cultures have lost the communal arts of grief and praise. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his view that grief is healthy and necessary, and differs from him on psychotherapy and on method.
Who is Martín Prechtel? #
A writer, artist and teacher, born in 1951, who grew up on Santo Domingo Pueblo in New Mexico, where he learned the Keres language as well as English. Around 1970 he travelled south through Mexico to Guatemala and settled near Lake Atitlán. He studied with the Tz’utujil shaman Nicolás Chiviliu Tacaxoy and learned the Tz’utujil language, and he writes that after Chiviliu’s death he became a spiritual leader in the village and took a chief’s role, leading the initiation of young men. These roles are his own account, and Wikipedia marks them as such. As the violence of the Guatemalan civil war reached the highland Maya villages, he and his family fled to the United States in 1984.1
The poet Robert Bly introduced him to workshop audiences and wrote the foreword to his first book. His books include Secrets of the Talking Jaguar (1998), Long Life, Honey in the Heart (1999), The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun (2001; North Atlantic edition 2005), The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic (2012), The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise (2015) and Rescuing the Light (2021). At his home near Ojo Caliente in New Mexico he runs a school he calls Bolad’s Kitchen.1
What does he teach about grief and praise? #
That they are one movement, not two stages. His thesis is that “all people need to relearn and reestablish the now diminished and hidden arts of Grief and Praise, for one without the other is not possible.”2 Grief, for him, is what living beings feel when what or whom they love dies or disappears, and he separates it sharply from disappointment, the feeling of not getting what we wanted.3 Grieving someone is itself a way of honouring them, and in his words “Grief is praise of those we have lost.” To weep and wail for the dead is to praise both them and the life that let us love them enough to feel the loss.4
He sets this against the history of Europe. He quotes a decree of the Third Council of Toledo, in 589, forbidding the burial songs “commonly sung for the dead” and the family following the body, “beating their breast”, and contrasts it with a scene from Santiago Atitlán in which a man whose brother had just been killed grieves loudly in the street whilst his neighbours watch over him.4 For someone grieving without a village, he describes a companion he calls the designated “non-griever”, a person who looks after the griever’s sleep, food, rest and safety without trying to cure them, “for grief is not an illness”.5 He closes the book on praise as something lived every day, since “Praise is not a goal, but the constant purpose of being alive.”6
What happens, in his view, when grief is not done? #
The dead cannot leave, and the living pay for it. In the Tz’utujil understanding he describes, the soul of someone who has died needs the grief and ritual of the living to carry it across to the next world. A soul left unmourned turns back, and its unhoused presence enters the living as a chronic condition the Tz’utujil call Fright, xibanel; he links this, down the generations, to addiction.7
He applies the same idea to whole cultures. Ungrieved war becomes a weight that demands new wars, and a soldier praised for killing is never helped to grieve for the person killed, or for the person he used to be.8 In a Yurok story he retells, money itself begins as grief put off, shells paid for a killing to be hidden away so that looking at them brings back the loss.9
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism meet his work? #
Above all in seeing grief as healthy. In Therapeutic Shamanism grief is a natural and necessary part of healing, not something anyone needs rescuing from. Waves of overwhelming grief a year after a death are normal, the process takes time, and it cannot be rushed without a cost. Grief is never to be taken out of someone in shamanic extraction work, because it is a healthy part of them, and taking it away would in effect create soul loss or Power-loss.10 Lament-singing is an ancient practice for healing the trauma of grief, one that hunter-gatherer cultures the world over would have known, and in a healing journey a practitioner can ask their Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer Human Guides to help with it.10 See What does animism teach about grief?
The two also meet over the dead. Psychopomping, helping the dead move on, is one of the essential roles of the shaman in any tribal culture, and hunter-gatherer peoples took great care that their dead departed and did not stay amongst the living.11 Prechtel’s account of the unmourned soul that turns back to trouble the living is close to the Therapeutic Shamanism picture of the unquiet deadUnquiet dead. The middle-world self become ghost: the ego that, having no body left to anchor it, lingers among the living instead of moving on to the Land of the Dead. Unhealthy for the living, and moved on by psychopomping. More about this. In his account, though, it is the whole village, by grieving, that helps the soul across, whereas in Therapeutic Shamanism moving the dead on is the work of the practitioner and their GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this. See Who are the unquiet dead, and are ghosts real?
The Tz’utujil are farmers, so his picture is of a farming people’s ways, not a hunter-gatherer one, and the teaching above about laments and the dead rests on hunter-gatherer peoples.
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism differ from him? #
On psychotherapy, first. Prechtel is sharply critical of the therapeutic frame. Writing of soldiers back from war, he says that therapy is expected to “fix” the damage, “but therapy is only triage to keep people functioning in the ‘front lines’” of the culture that harmed them.8 Therapeutic Shamanism takes the opposite course and joins shamanic work with psychotherapy, on the observation that spiritual people of every tradition need good psychotherapy as much as anyone else.12 See What can psychotherapy and shamanism offer each other, and where should they remain different?
On method, second. Much of what Prechtel offers is village ritual, and his book describes a ritual for grieving alone at the sea. Therapeutic Shamanism works mainly through journeys to the Lower-World and the help of the Guides, and aims to keep its practice culturally non-specific. See Is Western shamanism cultural appropriation?
Is his account of village life his own? #
It rests on his own experience and his own word, and reviewers have noted both its warmth and its colouring. Reviewing Secrets of the Talking Jaguar in 1998, Publishers Weekly called it an “engaging first book” and said that, whilst his view “seems at times romanticized”, his picture of village life is “so beautifully drawn that his delight in their culture becomes contagious”.13 Separately, the Wikipedia article on him notes that his accounts of his parentage and of his roles in the village rest on his own word.1 Prechtel, for his part, writes as someone who lived that life from the inside, naming the village, the people, his teacher and the Tz’utujil words for grief and Fright, and describing himself as one of the Tz’utujil “of whom I used to be a part”.14
