Global Courant 2023-05-23 16:00:56
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Episode 7: “A Prism.” At first, Faith thought Paulina gave her a hot news tip about psychics and scams. Years of research revealed otherwise.
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By the time I returned to Mexico in December 2010, I had already missed much of my life tia Martha’s last months of life.
She had breast cancer and had undergone several rounds of chemotherapy and a double mastectomy. She ate the healthiest, most organic raw diet possible and took conventional and homeopathic medicines between naps. But it wasn’t enough. Her cancer had spread throughout her body. We couldn’t do anything more.
I flew straight to her from my study abroad semester in France and walked into her room, where she was propped up on pillows and coughing blood. I tried to cheer her up by showing her all the nice hats I bought her. “What Linda!” she said as she put them on. She loved the way they looked, but gave me back each hat dejected. She knew she wouldn’t live to wear them.
That night my mom brought in a scruffy looking stranger who said he had a brujo. In Mexico, that’s basically a collective term for those who practice any kind of non-Catholic spiritual healing rituals, whether indigenous healers or fortune tellers. And this man’s dirty backpack was a grab bag full of spiritual rituals. It was overflowing with tarot cards, crystals, a Bible, feathers, rosaries, and shards of glass.
I was surprised and a little put off that my mother had brought him home tianguis, the open air market. At least I’d expected her to bring a priest—not that I’d have been thrilled to see him either. I was 20 years old and deep into my angry young adult atheist phase. I had grown up Catholic in Santa Cruz, a California hot spot for New Age hippies; by the time I was in college, I had already rejected both Catholicism and New Age spiritualism. I thought anything that wasn’t scientifically proven or logically obvious was hot crap.
And like many insufferably rebellious students, I was vocal about that. So as this man gave tarot readings to every member of my family, I watched closely, looking for ways to expose him. When it was my turn, he immediately knew I was a skeptic. He stroked my ego a bit and called me a freethinker, but I wouldn’t let flattery influence my opinion that this was all a waste of time. He tried, but in the end I got nothing out of the experience and he left.
My whole family had a little more energy than usual that night, even mine tia Martha. Everyone was talking about their interpretation of what the cards were telling them about themselves and their future. They compared notes, reflected on their memories, and even joked about changing careers or moving. Everyone was having a good time. Everyone but me.
When I think back to that night, I have a different perspective on why my mother brought this brujo. Being a scientist herself, I’m sure she didn’t think he could change the fact that my aunt died in front of us. But she was looking for hope, and that’s what he offered. My anxious 20-year-old self would have called his practice emotional manipulation at worst, a placebo at best. But what did that matter? My family needed something to believe in, if only for a night of relief.
And wasn’t that worth paying for?
Well, that depends on how much you pay and who you ask. For the 20-year-old me, any amount was too much to read. For the 32-year-old me, I saw the value of paying; it’s not like we skimped on her care to pay for this session.
The value of this kind of spiritual practice lies in the eye of the beholder. If you feel like you didn’t get anything out of it, then you didn’t. If you feel like you did, you did. There’s no way to prove it anyway.
There is danger in choosing a spiritual practice over a medical one. But my family didn’t rent brujo instead of turning to evidence-based cancer treatments. It was complementary. And he gave mine tia the opportunity to joyfully reflect on her life – not only on her approaching death, but on the whole meaning of her life.
Fortune tellers and other spiritual advisors are selling human connections and opportunities for introspection. And it’s possible to take advantage of that even when there’s nothing metaphysical going on.
That said, it’s still a business. And when money changes hands, it can cloud people’s motivations and open the door to exploitation.
Spiritualist and filmmaker George Eli acknowledges that some of his peers may focus too much on the money and not enough on the spiritual.
There is a market for telling people what they want to hear. … A lot of clients come to me and say they went to a psychic, and they paid thousands of dollars a month, and they never really got anything out of it.
— George Eli in “Foretold”
But George really believes in his practice, saying that many cynics he knows – even other Roma – are also true believers.
That’s the hardest thing to wrap my head around. If a fortune teller believes in their practice and acts in good faith And the customer benefits, what is the problem? Why is this spiritual practice given so much attention – more than, say, astrology, motivational speaking, and meditation retreats?
That sounds like racism to me. … I don’t know every individual case. Not me. But I know that if there’s one or two cases every three, four, five years, that’s in the press too. So that’s racism.
— George Eli in “Foretold”
— Jazmin Aguilera
Go even deeper
“I wouldn’t exist if my ancestors hadn’t practiced Drabarimos”, or spiritual medicine, writes George Eli. The Romani spiritualist explores how he got into his work and why his community and heritage have been so misunderstood.
