In some cultures, Western concepts of paranormal are meaningless
Story & photos by David Schmidt
“Don’t tell me . . . you came here to try the mushrooms.” The Mazatec Indian man leaned against his pickup truck, 
glancing off into the mountain mist surrounding us.
“Thanks anyway,” I responded. “I’m more interested in the local folklore.”
He looked at me incredulously. “You sure? That’s what all the foreigners come here to do.”
In truth, I am deeply skeptical when it comes to outsiders trying to jump into indigenous shamanism. I have a difficult time imagining that an outsider can just insert himself into a particular culture, take a psychotropic substance and have anything remotely close to the experiences of an indigenous person who has been raised in that tradition. I was not impressed with Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, which I found to be nothing more than an entertaining account of one white man’s drug trips.
When Westerners idealize indigenous cultures, we run the grave risk of fetishizing cultural icons—turning them into add-ons for our own lives, failing to recognize how very different these worlds are from our own. This was made very clear to me during a visit to the Mixtec Indian hamlet of San Juan Coatzóspam.
On my way there, I happened to pass through the town of Huautla de Jiménez. Huautla is considered by many to be the hallucinogenic mushroom capital of Mexico, and was the hometown of María Sabina, a Mazatec shaman. Sabina spoke at length of the spiritual uses for the mushrooms native to her mountain town, eventually becoming a countercultural icon in the 1960s, reportedly visited by John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger. Since her death in 1985, an entire mushroom tourism industry has sprouted up like wild fungi after a rainstorm, and droves of foreigners regularly descend upon Huautla in search of hallucinogens.
At the time of my visit I knew nothing of this. I was drawn to the verdant Mexican mountains of Oaxaca by an interest in local lore and legends. My friends from Coatzóspam had told me fantastic tales from their hometown—supernatural accounts of ghosts, monsters, secret caves, spirits and little people—and I wanted to experience the folklore for myself. So off I went, notebook in hand, ready to engage the paranormal phenomena ostensibly taking place in this ancient land.
When I asked about legends, mysteries or the paranormal during my first week in town, however, I came up empty. It was always the same answer: “Strange things don’t happen in our town.” I couldn’t seem to find anyone who would cop to an experience of the supernatural kind. I began to wonder whether my friends had been pulling my leg with their tales of witches and apparitions.
Then one day while helping an elderly man work his coffee fields, as we chopped away at the brush with our machetes, Don Adán said casually, “Did you know that Sixto Pacheco met the Lord of the Mountain one time?”
“That he met who, exactly?”
Don Adán proceeded to tell me one of the most sublime, beautiful tales I’d ever heard. Sixto Pacheco, his neighbor, had met the Señor del Cerro, a legendary entity who is guardian of the mountain and rules an entire underground kingdom. The tale culminated in Sixto being brought into a parallel universe, somewhat akin to what Rip Van Winkle might have experienced.
I resisted the urge to shout, Why didn’t you mention this when I was asking you about strange stories a week ago? What part of “encountering an alternate world” isn’t paranormal to you? Yet, as I would find when other townspeople began to share their stories, there is nothing paranormal about these encounters. Within the Mixtec cosmology of Coatzóspam, these other worlds are seamlessly interwoven with our own. No Western concept of natural and supernatural, scientific and mythological, normal and paranormal exists. I had been asking the wrong question the entire time.
Weeks later, as I rode down the mountain in the back of a pickup truck past coffee fields, waterfalls and lush forests, I pondered the whole experience and how this cosmos is virtually inaccessible to a gringo like me. Maybe some tourists are transformed through their mushroom experiences. But this culture—every culture—holds entire worlds tucked away among the folds of its language, stories, myths and legends.
The experience of recognizing the sacred nature of these worlds, of honoring them without attempting intrusion, is itself transformative.
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