Customer Reviews

A War Of Witches: A Journey Into The Underworld Of The Contemporary Aztecs

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For anyone who wants an idea of what Carlos Castaneda's work might have been like if he had written real ethnographical accounts of sorcery and "dreaming" as practiced by followers of ancient Mexican traditions, I strongly recommend this book. It's also a colorful and intriguing story of revenge, murder and the impact of cultural upheavals spanning a period of over sixty years.

Knab was an anthropology professor in the early 70s at the National University of Mexico doing fieldwork in a small village in the Sierra de Puebla when he encountered authentic brujas and brujos who followed ancient traditions of sorcery and dreaming dating back to at least the Aztecs.

Unlike Castaneda, Prof. Knab is fluent in Nahuatl, and records the actual ancient terms used for various practices, and for regions of the dreaming world--Talocan or Tlalocan--that witches need to visit to help cure their patients, or to inflict harm on their opponents and other witches. He also faithfully records and translates his Nahuatl conversations with his two primary informants, an elderly man and woman of the village--Innocente and Rubia--who had both practiced curing and witchcraft for over 50 years. Unlike the supposed metaphysical and philosophical discourses of don Juan (especially in Castaneda's later books), these conversations are what one would expect of someone coming from this kind of cultural milieu.

Probably the most fascinating aspect of the book for Castaneda readers is the detailed descriptions of dream journeys that Prof. Knab is instructed in by his two informants. These sections of the book describe a realm that has a geography and consistent features that have supposedly been experienced by generations of Aztec-descended brujos.

Knab's instruction and interaction with his informants described in the books takes place over a three-year period, from the fall of 1974 to the fall of 1977, but it also eventually leads him to unravel a dark tale of witchcraft and intrigue in the same region in the 1920s that ultimately led to dozens of deaths attributed to witchcraft. These killings, which occurred over a period of about a decade, were ultimately brought to an end only when the townspeople literally crucified one of the alleged witches.

This book contains invaluable information about crucial elements of Aztec ritual life, including those of the tonalli, nahualli, the animal guardians, and the great flower of darkness, the Talocan ; there are many wonderful descriptions of the syncretic blend of the pre-Colombian and the Catholic and quite specific descriptions of the ancient technique of Dreaming, used to navigate in the harsh and often unforgiving underworld. The story is told by a master raconteur who introduces us to two wily and remarkable teachers of the old ways, Inocente and Rubia. In a masterful sweep of the history of a small town in the Sierra de Puebla we get to see their roles in the havoc caused by the tension between the indigenous peasants and the mestizo rulers in which the former's only defense were the ancient techniques of "snuffing the candles of the unjust". K's prose allows the reader to revel in the evocative beauty of Nahuatl and it evokes one's respect and affection for the people he is writing about (in short, this is anthropology at its best). I recommend the book to people interested in exploring the thin line between the real and the imaginary, reality and dreams, and to those who like to witness how the new world and the old world can meet in the spirit of respect, strength and mutual enrichment.

This is the tale of a very science-minded anthropologist who begins a long and ultimately life-changing spiritual journey, under the tutelage of an elderly Curandera. He learns to accomodate his scientific beliefs with the reality he encounters as a healer in this ancient tradition, just as his teacher accommodates her ancient faith with Catholic beliefs.

It provides a window into the form that the Aztec spirit world takes (and how its priest/esses approach that world), as well as demonstrating how we in the modern world can coexist with the sacred and the secular.

The author, Dr. Knab, believes a great many things. He provides the reader no particular reason to believe them, but he sure does. For example, when a child's ill health and malaise is said by the author to look like "a classic case of soul loss," one understands remotely that he really does believe in such things, as if he were an anthropologist who really had come to believe that photographs can steal the soul.

Of course, he is not completely credulous, this is a man of SCIENCE, I shouldn't caricature him as believing that photographs steal your soul. That would be absurd. He simply believes that witches can steal your soul.

Unless you have a curandero, such as Dr Knab himself, to protect you from the witches and their soul-stealing ways. He has, the book jacket boasts, become a curandero himself. He is, shall we say, a very empathetic anthropologist. One wonders if he would have adopted the beliefs of the cargo cults if he had happened to study them. One is glad that he didn't decide to study, say, the Klan or the Khmer Rouge.

At any rate, the book is filled with the decade-old memories of tales told of half-century-old memories and rumors of events claimed to be literally true. Their truth is important--if this is just folklore, then the whole crux of the book is undermined, namely, that he has uncovered real Aztec witchcraft being carried out.

Within the frame tale of Knab's learning the ways of dreaming and curing is the historical tale that needs to be true--basically a murderous feud in which the murders were done with exotic techniques such as the "shadow of death," the "jaguar's claw" and so on--the classic stuff of delightful B-movies. Towards the end, as the 'revelations' come tumbling out too quickly to follow or to care about, the author summarizes one of the versions of these tales in a sentence that I found hilarious, as it basically summarized the storytelling method of this book: "The tale was fantastic but probably quite accurate." No further comment. Say what? Why quite accurate? What could it possibly be about the tale of witchings and murders he has just recounted that would make it seem any more accurate than any other version that he might have heard? He does not say. What details had the ring of truth for him? He does not say.

He does not say WHY that particular version seemed accurate, he just says it must have been accurate. He provides the answer without ever really delving into the question. He doesn't inquire into the accuracy of what he has heard, he just announces it.

Well, he may have thought it had the ring of truth, but for me, nothing in this book had the ring of truth.

It had the ring of delusion.

A wonderful, involving journey into the midst of a modern Aztec blood fued. Knab does a sensational job of keeping this story very technical while at the same time creating a very tangible sense of dread and even terror.

When Timothy Knab visits the small village of Sierra de Puebla he encounters ancient Aztec beliefs and traditions that are still being practiced today. Despite the fact that many of the villagers claim that "all the witches died years ago", he finds that quite a few of the villagers participate in what many would call witchcraft. And many of the people depend on these practicioners for healing and for justice.

Knab's journey takes him to the Aztec underworld, a mirror-like world beneath our own, where he finds his nagual, or animal counterpart, gains support from lost souls, and confronts the afterlife. Here, one gets the sense of how the Mesoamerican cultures relate to the afterlife and the supernatural--the line that separates the two worlds are blurred and thin.

As Knab's story is told, a dark history of the village unfolds that involves the War of Witches--an incident in which many of the townspeople are reluctant to talk about.

Highly recommended.

This book has many parallels with the writings of Carlos Castaneda such as The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, The Original Teachings in a Deluxe 30th Anniversary Edition and Separate Reality. Both authors were anthropologists and studied Mesoamerican old shamanism and witchcraft as it was still practiced in Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s. Both authors study and describe a similar underworld, world of dreams, and the supernatural.

However, Carlos Castaneda is a far superior writer. He is a gripping story teller. His main mentor, Don Juan, jumps out of every page with vivid mythical proportion. Their counterparts, Rubia and Inocente, in this book really pale by comparison. They are dying or delirious elderly beings far from the top of their game. They go on and on about speculative and boring dream interpretations. As a result, the story has a hard time getting off the ground. The second half of the book gets more interesting as it reaches back into the past when Rubia and Inocente were more vibrant and human. Their struggle in defending the agricultural culture of their village against the greedy economic interest of usurping outsiders (coffee growers) is pretty good. But, this may be too late for many readers.

Giving Knab the benefit of the doubt, maybe the difference between Castaneda and Knab is the difference between fantasy and reality. We all know Castaneda's writings are most controversial and not well accepted in anthropological circles. In other words, anthropologists have accused Castaneda of making it all up. Knab's writing so far has not suffered such an ill fate. The Acknowledgment section of the book suggests Knab is on strong scholar footing. But, is Knab's book more credible than Castaneda's because of his lack of relative notoriety? I can't readily answer this question. At this stage, I may accept that Castaneda is a far more entertaining fiction writer. Meanwhile, Knab's duller prose may be better grounded in reality. Sometimes that's just the way it is. Reality is a bit duller than fiction.

Picking this book off the book shelf, I began to read this purely because of the fact I wanted to broden my reading selections and read about something I have never read before. I was astonished to discover the immense liking I developed for the story Knab told of the modern Aztecs. I am not an anthropologist at all, but if a 15 year old teen can like a book like this, then it must be good! It was a history book, murder story, mystery story, and personal narrative all in one, and a true story to top it off!!

This is an excellent book, written by a legitimate anthropologist. During his stay in Mexico, Timothy Knab learned from an old curandera, a wise woman or healer of sorts, who springs from a tradition of fusing Native American shamanism of the Aztecs with the mysticism of the Catholic Church brought over by the Spaniards. This is an excellent book, showing the modern day Aztecs and their religious beliefs from the perspective of a westerner. An excellent read, even if you know almost nothing about the Aztecs.

I was actually assigned this book for my Sociology of Religion class. I'm not one for reading... in fact I rarely read anything, and when I do it's because I need to. This on the other hand I couldn't stop reading. Read it within a few days which is probably a record for me. lol

Take it from me. I hate reading, but I couldn't stop reading this! Awesome book!