Version 2007.02.24

## “The Witch's Dream: A Healer's Way of Knowledge” - ©1985 by Florinda Donner-Grau

### Chapter 3

Never had I realized how sheltered my life had been.

In a hotel room in Caracas, alone and without any idea of what to do next, I came to experience first hand the solitariness Florinda had talked about.

My parents were not in Venezuela at the time, and I was unable to contact my brothers by telephone.

All I felt like doing was sitting on the hotel bed and watching TV. I didn't want to touch my suitcase. I even thought of taking the plane back to Los Angeles.

Only after tremendous effort did I begin to unpack.

Neatly tucked inside a pair of folded slacks I found a piece of paper with Florinda's handwriting. I read it avidly.

Don't worry about details. Details tend to adjust themselves to serve the circumstances if one has conviction. Your plans should be as follows. Pick anything and call that the beginning. Then go and face the beginning. Once you are face to face with the beginning, let it take you wherever it may. I trust that your convictions won't let you pick a capricious beginning. Be realistic and frugal, so as to select wisely. Do it now!!

P.S. Anything would do for a start.

Possessed by Florinda's decisiveness, I picked up the phone, and dialed the number of an old friend of mine: I was not sure she would still be in Caracas.

The polite lady who answered the phone gave me other possible numbers to call because my friend was no longer at that address.

I called all of them, for I could no longer stop. The beginning was taking hold of me.

Finally I located a married couple I knew from childhood; my parents' friends.

They wanted to see me immediately, but they were going to a wedding in an hour, so they insisted on taking me along. They assured me it was all right.

At the wedding I met an ex-Jesuit priest, who was an amateur anthropologist.

We talked for hours on end. I told him of my interest in anthropological studies.

As if he had been waiting for me to say a magical word, he began to expound on the controversial value of folk healers, and the social role they play in their societies.

I had not mentioned healers or healing in general as a possible topic for my study, although it was foremost in my mind.

Instead of feeling happy that he seemed to be addressing himself to my inner thoughts, I was filled with an apprehension that verged on fear.

When he told me that I should not go to the town of Sortes, even though it was purported to be the center of spiritualism in western Venezuela, I felt genuinely annoyed with him.

He seemed to be anticipating me at every turn. It was precisely to that small town that I had planned to go if nothing else happened.

I was just about to excuse myself and leave the party, when he said in quite a loud tone that I should seriously consider going to the town of Curmina, in northern Venezuela, where I could have phenomenal success because the town was a new, true center of spiritualism and healing.

"I don't know how I know it, but I know you're dying to be with the witches of Curmina," he said in a dry, matter-of-fact tone.

He took a piece of paper, and drew a map of the region.

He gave me exact distances in kilometers from Caracas to the various points in the area where he said spiritualists, sorcerers, witches, and healers lived.

He placed special emphasis on one name: Mercedes Peralta. He underlined it and, totally unaware of it, first encircled it, then drew a heavy square around it and boxed it in.

"She's a spiritualist, a witch, and a healer," he said smiling at me. "Be sure you go and see her, will you?"

I knew what he was talking about. Under Florinda's guidance, I had met and worked with spiritualists, sorcerers, witches, and healers in northern Mexico and among the Latino population of southern California.

From the very beginning Florinda classified them.

Spiritualists are practitioners who entreat the spirits of saints or devils to intercede for them, with a higher order, on behalf of their patients.

Their function is to get in touch with spirits and interpret their advice. The advice is obtained in meetings during which spirits are called.

Sorcerers and witches are practitioners who affect their patients directly.

Through their knowledge of occult arts, they bring unknown and unpredictable elements to bear on the two kinds of people who come to see them: patients in search of help; and clients in search of their witchcraft services.

Healers are practitioners who strive exclusively to restore health and well-being.

Florinda made sure she added to her classification the possible combinations of all three.

In a joking way, but in all seriousness, she claimed that in matters of restoring health, I was predisposed to believe that non-Western healing practices were more holistic than Western medicine.

She made it clear that I was wrong.

Healing, Florinda said, depended on the practitioner and not on a body of knowledge.

Florinda maintained that there was no such thing as non-Western healing practices.

Healing, unlike medicine, was not a formalized discipline.

She used to tease that in my own way, I was as prejudiced as those who believe that if a patient is cured by means of medicinal plants, massages, or incantations, either the disease was psychosomatic or the cure was the result of a lucky accident that the practitioner did not understand.

Florinda was convinced that a person who successfully restored health, whether a doctor or a folk healer, was someone who could alter the body's fundamental feelings about itself and the body's link with the world- that is, someone who offered the body, as well as the mind, new possibilities so that the habitual mold to which body and mind had learned to conform could be systematically broken down.

Other dimensions of awareness would then become accessible, and the commonsense expectations of disease and health could become transformed as new bodily meanings became crystalized.

Florinda had laughed when I expressed genuine surprise upon hearing such thoughts which were revolutionary to me at the time.

She told me that everything she said stemmed from the knowledge she shared with her companions in the nagual's world.

Having followed the instructions in Florinda's note, I let the situation guide me: I let it develop with minimal interference on my part.

I felt I had to go to Curmina, and look up the woman that the ex-Jesuit priest had talked about.

When I first arrived at Mercedes Peralta's house, I did not have to wait long in the shadowy corridor before a voice called me from behind the curtain directly in front of me that served as a door.

I climbed the two steps leading to a large, dimly lit room that smelled of cigar smoke and ammonia.

Several candles, burning on a massive altar that stood against the far wall, illuminated the figurines and pictures of saints arranged around the blue-robed Virgin of Coromoto.

It was a finely carved statue with red smiling lips, rouged cheeks, and eyes that seemed to fix me with a benign, forgiving gaze.

I stepped closer.

In the corner, almost hidden between the altar and a high rectangular table, sat Mercedes Peralta.

She appeared to be asleep, with her head resting against the back of her chair; her eyes closed.

She looked extremely old.

I had never seen such a face. Even in its restful immobility, it revealed a frightening strength.

The glow of the candles, rather than softening her sharply chiseled features, only accentuated the determination etched in the network of wrinkles.

Slowly, she opened her eyes.

They were large and almond shaped. The whites of her eyes were slightly discolored.

At first her eyes were almost blank, but then they became alive and stared at me with the unnerving directness of a child.

Seconds passed and gradually under her unwavering gaze, which was neither friendly nor unfriendly, I began to feel uncomfortable.

"Good afternoon, dona Mercedes," I greeted her before I started to lose all my courage and run out of the house.

"My name is Florinda Donner, and I am going to be very direct so as not to waste your valuable time."

She blinked repeatedly, adjusting her eyes to look at me.

"I've come to Venezuela to study healing methods," I went on, gaining confidence. "I study at a university in the United States, but I truly would like to be a healer. I can pay you if you take me as your student. But even if you don't take me as your student, I can pay you for any information you would give me."

The old woman did not say a word.

She motioned me to sit down on a stool, then rose and gazed at a metal instrument on the table. There was a comical expression on her face as she turned to look at me.

"What is that apparatus?" I asked daringly.

"It's a nautical compass," she said casually. "It tells me all kinds of things."

She picked it up and placed it on the topmost shelf of a glass cabinet that stood against the opposite wall.

Apparently struck by a funny thought, she began to laugh. "I'm going to make something clear to you right now," she said.

"Yes, I'll give you all kinds of information about healing, not because you ask me, but because you're lucky: I already know that for sure.

"What I don't know is if you're strong as well."

The old woman was silent, then she spoke again in a forced whisper without looking at me; her attention on something inside the glass cabinet.

"Luck and strength are all that count in everything," she said.

"I knew the night I saw you by the plaza that you are lucky, and that you were looking for me."

"I don't understand what you're talking about," I said.

Mercedes Peralta turned to face me, then laughed in such a discordant manner that I felt certain she was mad. She opened her mouth so wide I could see the few molars she still had left.

She stopped abruptly, sat on her chair, and insisted that she had seen me exactly two weeks ago late at night in the plaza.

She had been with a friend, she explained, who was driving her home from a seance that had taken place in one of the coastal towns.

Although her friend had been baffled to see me alone so late at night, she herself had not been in the least surprised. "You reminded me instantly of someone I once knew," she said. "It was past midnight. You smiled at me."

I did not remember seeing her, or being alone in the plaza at that hour.

But it could have been that she had seen me the night I had arrived from Caracas. After waiting in vain for the week-long rain to stop, I had finally risked the drive from Caracas to Curmina.

I knew full well that there would be landslides: It turned out that instead of the usual two hours, the drive took me four.

By the time I had arrived, the whole town was asleep, and I had trouble finding the hostel near the plaza, which had also been recommended to me by the former priest.

Mystified by her insistence that she knew I was coming to see her, I told her about him and what he had said to me at the wedding in Caracas.

"He was quite insistent that I look you up," I said. "He mentioned that your ancestors were sorcerers and healers- famous during colonial times, and that they were persecuted by the Holy Inquisition."

A flicker of surprise widened her eyes slightly. "Did you know that in those days accused witches were sent to Cartagena in Colombia to be tried?" she asked and immediately went on to say, "Venezuela wasn't important enough to have an Inquisitorial tribunal."

She paused and, looking straight into my eyes, asked, "Where had you originally planned to study healing methods?"

"In the state of Yaracuy," I said vaguely.

"Sortes?" she inquired. "Maria Lionza?"

I nodded.

Sortes is the town where the cult of Maria Lionza is centered.

Maria Lionza is said to have been born of an Indian princess and a Spanish conquistador, and she is purported to have had supernatural powers.

Today, she is revered by thousands in Venezuela as a saintly miraculous woman.

"But I took the ex-priest's advice and came to Curmina instead," I said.

"I've already talked with two women healers. Both agreed that you're the most knowledgeable; the only one who could explain healing matters to me."

I talked about the methods I wanted to follow, making it all up on the spur of the moment: direct observation, and participation in some of the healing sessions while tape recording them- and, most important of all, systematic interviewing of the patients I observed.

The old woman nodded, giggling from time to time.

To my great surprise, she was totally amenable to my proposed methods. She proudly informed me that years ago she had been interviewed by a psychologist from a university in Caracas, who had stayed for a week right there in her house.

"To make it easier for you," she suggested, "you can come and live with us. We have plenty of rooms in the house."

I accepted her invitation, but told her that I had planned to stay for at least six months in the area.

She seemed unperturbed. As far as she was concerned, I could stay for years.

"I'm glad you're here, Musiua," she added softly.

I smiled. Although born and raised in Venezuela, I have been called a musiua (moo-see-yua) all my life.

It is usually a derogatory term, but depending on the tone in which it is said, it can be turned into a rather affectionate expression referring to anyone who is blond and blue-eyed.