New Mexican author Martin Prechtel’s The Toe Bone and the Tooth combines the autobiographical account of his efforts to escape from Guatemala during that country’s civil war in the 1980s with an ancient Mayan myth, demonstrating it as a universal pattern for everyone's life, and attempts to show how understanding ancient myths can ensure our spiritual survival in today’s world without stories.
After a year of traveling through Guatemala in 1970, Prechtel made his home in a small village near Lake Atitlan inhabited by the Tzutujil, one of numerous Maya sub-cultures. Upon entering the village, he was approached by a respected shaman who reportedly stated: "What took you so long? For two years I’ve been calling you. Let’s get to work!" Here began his indoctrination and eventual loving acceptance of Mayan mythology, which led recently to his founding of the “new and long desired school” Bolad’s Kitchen, whose mssion statement, as posted on its website, begins with a single multifaceted sentence evocative of Prechtel’s bejeweled lyricism: “Teaching forgotten things, endangered excellent knowledges, but above all a grand overview of human history as seen from a particular Martín Prechtel way in the search for a comprehension regarding the survival of unique and unsuspected manifestations of the Indigenous Soul in overlooked pockets of peaceful living during isolated times throughout the world as well as the worldwide historical displacement of indigenous people, plant and animal life-ways and the subsequent survival of core vestiges of these deep life and culture respecting understandings that still live in various everyday life styles among many of today’s mixed peoples and ecosystems.”
The myth of the toe bone and the tooth is meant to be spoken and heard and was preserved and conveyed in this form for generations. It recounts the introduction of corn to Central America following the turbulent romance of a human named Raggedy Boy and a dismembered goddess called the Water-skirted Beauty who he tries to reassemble from the drops of her in every living thing. Another narrative tells the history of the myth’s setting, the village of Santiago Atitlan, and the multiple hardships undergone by Prechtel as a non-native resident, including political and religious repression and an incident at the book’s conclusion, where Prechtel and his family are forced to leave Guatemala at gunpoint by government troops.
After becoming a full village member of the Tzutujil Mayan population, Prechtel served as a principal village leader responsible for instructing the young in the meanings of ancient stories through the rituals of adult rites of passage. Through story, music, ritual and writing, his aim is to help multiple cultures retain their diversity while remembering their own sense of place in the daily sacred through the search for the Indigenous Soul. “A people who do not want this kind of education are a drifting ship of sleeping orphans,” he says. “But orphans can wake up and those who do, hungry for this kind of education, could apply themselves to it and replant the world with life-giving culture.”
Comments