In 1972, during an anthropological expedition into the remote regions of the southern Huasteca in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, Alan Sandstrom witnessed a Nahua Indian religious ceremony rarely viewed by outsiders. As part of the proceedings, a ritual specialist cut a bundle of colored tissue papers into small, doll-like figures. Detailed, often fantastically elaborate, these images depicted spirit entities that the practitioner summoned and influenced for the benefit of humanity.
It makes me wonder if these are a depiction of the different types of inorganic beings.
[-]
u/TechnoMagical_Intent
2 points2021-02-02 17:51
Cool! And yes, it would be highly doubtful that the paper figures aren't depiction of inorganics. Whether the designs are from ancestral lore (based on the experience of a certain ancestor), or mnemonic tools for storytelling...they lay-out their mental landscape as it were, priming the mind for a structured perception of an inorganic being.
And the fact that it's paper which is ephemeral, and not more permanent like a typical petroglyph, also keys into perception being impermanent.
At least that's one informed possibility, from a western outsider!
[-]
u/danl999
6 points2021-02-02 18:25
Wow, that agrees with don Juan's description of the "Man of Knowledge"!
The remnants of which he said were still around in Mexico, but with no real understanding of what they do.
Perhaps those are the "sorcerers" some of our drug using crazy visitors talk about, being all over the place. The ritual ones, with no actual understanding.
According to don Juan, a "Man of Knowledge" was a sorcery guild member, probably from the Olmec empire or what came before it.
They could not see. The "knowledge" they had was for preparing objects, food, and dances, to be part of their religious ceremonies.
I suppose we might conclude, they were ritual sorcerers. Not seers.
Their doings probably involved paper making too! Assuming they beat the Chinese to the punch.
Certainly mask making.
I kind of wonder what sort of bakery goods they made (don Juan mentioned that), but I suppose we have our Easter cookies, and back around 2500BC they also had those Ishtar cookies that went along with grove worship.
In fact, if you think about Easter, a religious holiday with lots of symbolic objects to buy, you might have a better understanding of why there were sorcery guild members to make stuff for ceremonies, way back when. Western civilization had them too, long ago.
I wish I could get hold of one of those paper things!
My new inorganic being "Mystery" is a teacher par excellence. No tricks as with Fancy.
Just serious explaining. And no horizontal shifting. No shifting at all in fact. She just shows up and doesn't do anything but explain.
She could surely tell me a thing or two about the paper usage.
It's just light enough for IOBs to move around freely.
Maybe she'd do that for me.
Last night she was teaching me to feel the fibers on the right side of the stomach. You can create a "tickling" sensation there, with the hands nowhere near it. Over and over, it's reliable.
Part of Zuleica's technique is to feel that tickle, at least, when she taught Carlos.
But not when she taught others, so I suppose we don't have to "fold in half" in precisely the same way Carlos did.
I'm not giving up though.
[-]
u/TheSunAndTheShadow
3 points2021-02-02 19:28
Last night she was teaching me to feel the fibers on the right side of the stomach. You can create a "tickling" sensation there, with the hands nowhere near it. Over and over, it's reliable.
Yes, this is definitely possible! I have been doing something similar recently while doing the darkroom practice.
It was mentioned in one of the books, something about being able to project an appendage from the stomach area and to reach out and touch/feel things. I have been imagining something similar, but focus more on the feeling in my stomach than the visualization of it... and it does produce a subtle movement or tickling feeling.
I can't say anything dramatic has happened since adding this to my practice, but I feel like it's important in some way. It allows me to induce silence quicker, and I suspect it may be related to creating a dreaming double.
[-]
u/danl999
3 points2021-02-02 19:40
The fingers, especilaly the 2 smallest, can cast out a "cobweb", which can touch your knees from a distance of around 8 inches.
But the assemblage point has to be all the way at the end of the J curve or you are unlikely to be able to notice it.
And of course, when Carlos was tickling the second attention assemblage point, he felt like he was tickling himself.
So it's good for us to feel those sensations.
I sometimes think maybe that was the whole point of the finger wiggling.
To get real sensations involving the energy body.
You can also bring it out visually.
But I suppose that's what the Tensegrity is supposed to do. Make it visible.
[-]
u/TheSunAndTheShadow
2 points2021-02-02 21:09
After posting this, an older memory came back to me ...
About a year and 1/2 ago, I was having an unusually active period of lucid dreams. During this time, IOBs started appearing in a lot of them too.
So, I started to encourage this, and every night I would go to bed with the intent of learning more about them.
Thinking back now, a lot of the dreams were in locations from my childhood and/or around water, but otherwise, they were fairly insignificant. The curious thing about them was that IOBs would consistently appear.
At the height of it all, I had a dream where I was in a large conference-type room, like you would see in a hotel, and people were giving presentations on paranormal things. There was an old man, dressed in an all-white suit, sitting at a round table, and he invited me over.
He said he knew a lot about shadow people, and he had created a book about them and wanted my help to promote it. I opened it and realized it was a popup book!
Each IOB was cut out of paper and would expand as you opened each page. I was floored by the detail of it all, and by how many were in the book.
Soon after the dream ended, and I have never seen the old man since. The IOB sightings started to decrease too and my lucid dreaming period ended.
Anyway, I don't know if it means anything, but I thought it was an interesting parallel to the book I posted.
[-]
u/CruzWayne
1 points2021-02-02 23:28
Paper was so closely connected to Aztec and Maya religious practices that it too was systematically destroyed. Two sixteenth-century clerics, Fray Juan de Zumárraga and Fray Diego de Landa, played a major role in the destruction of native libraries. Soon after 1529, Zumárraga, bishop of Mexico, ordered the Aztec libraries emptied and the books brought to the town of Tlatelolco. “He then caused them to be piled up in a “mountain-heap”— as it is called by the Spanish writers themselves—in the market-place of Tlatelolco, and reduced them all to ashes!”
Diego de Landa arrived in 1549 and was assigned to work among the Mayas. He destroyed temples and searched out the sacred books. Finally in 1561 he located a great archive of sacred texts. He wrote:
“These people also used certain characters or letters with which they wrote in their books concerning ancient things and their sciences. With these figures and certain signs of the same types, they understood their things and explained and taught them. We found a great number of books of these letters and because they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil, we burned them all, which the people felt most deeply and which gave them much sorrow.”
I met a guy in Oaxaca once, a shaman of some sort, who said he'd seen an old Mayan library in a golden-walled cave somewhere near San Cristóbal. Maybe they haven't been totally destroyed, or maybe they've moved into the dreaming, like that city under Pátzcuaro.
[-]
u/danl999
3 points2021-02-03 16:46
I wrote to Alan Sandstrom, one of the authors. Had to go through a university, he wasn't listed for contact.
He recognized my father's name, and offered to answer a question for me.
Didn't know what it was though.
We'll see what happens when he's asked if any of the paper figures is intended to house spirits, and not in a ceremonial way.
Should be interesting.
[-]
u/TheSunAndTheShadow
1 points2021-02-03 18:07
Awesome! That will be interesting to hear about.
Thanks for doing that, and let us know what he says!
[-]
u/Revolutionary-Ad6582
2 points2021-02-05 10:44
He didn’t reply again after I told him what I wanted to know. My guess? He been under assault by angry Castaneda bad players for a very long time and if he smells more of it, he won’t answer. But he’s also old. Old people often have poor e contact manors.
[-]
u/danl999
5 points2021-02-05 16:11
Well, last night i posted on my cellphone that I didn't think he'd respond. But he did! Here's what he said, which encourages me to try to build one. I do believe Cholita could make it move if she took an interest.
Alan Sandstrom
Hi Daniel,
The question you bring up is not bizarre at all. Scholars have been looking for Asia-Mesoamerican connections for many years. There is a literature on the topic but no final conclusion to the question. I can say that Paul Tolstoy, a Canadian archaeologist, thinks that the bark cloth/paper complex found in Mexico (and about which my wife Pamela and I have written) may have come from southern China many thousands of years ago. If you are about to receive our book on the topic you will see the discussion and Tolstoy's publication listed in the bibliography.
The indigenous people in the area of Mexico where we have worked for many years cut small paper images of spirit entities for use in their ritual offerings. These are almost always small human figures with the hands by the sides of the head. Recently I found an article about an ethnic group in south China who also cut small images of spirit entities with the hands by the head. Here is the citation: Cauquelin, Josiane. 2002. "Chamanes et papiers découpés chez les Nung de Guangxi." Péninsule no. 44:127-42. The article is in French but you can see from the illustrations that the paper figures are almost identical. Are the two traditions connected? I can't be sure.
In terms of spirit containment, the Nahua, Otomi, and Tepehua people of northern Veracruz create complex displays of paper figures, palm and marigold adornments, candles, incense braziers, etc. that are encircled by a vine to which flowers have been attached. the purpose of the display is to contain and trap disease-causing spirit entities to cure patients. On occasion, the curer ties paper figures on the loop that encircles the display. I asked one what they were and the curer replied that they were "soldiers" whose role is to keep the disease entities within the circle.
Most people are unaware of the role of paper in the traditional civilizations of Mesoamerica. We have just had a book accepted for publication by the University Press of Colorado in which we describe and analyze five pilgrimages to the tops of sacred mountains. These sacred journeys are highly complex affairs with many ritual offerings dedicated at special sites. It is not unusual for the ritual specialists to cut more than 20,000 paper figures for each pilgrimage. This type of pilgrimage is found in Asia as well but again we cannot make direct connection between the traditions.
Good luck with your search.
All the best,
Alan
Alan R. Sandstrom, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology, Purdue University Fort Wayne
[-]
u/danl999
3 points2021-02-05 16:45
By the way, Cholita is a mail stealer. I had the book sent to our home, to see if she decides to "borrow" it.
She also makes fantastic paper art objects, some even sold in galleries in Los Angeles.
If she makes some of those, I wouldn't be surprised to see them walking around at night.
[-]
u/TheSunAndTheShadow
1 points2021-02-05 20:25
Nice, that is awesome that he responded. Thank you for posting it.
Recently I found an article about an ethnic group in south China who also cut small images of spirit entities with the hands by the head.
I asked one what they were and the curer replied that they were "soldiers" whose role is to keep the disease entities within the circle.
The purpose of the display is to contain and trap disease-causing spirit entities to cure patients.
All of this is very intriguing! I am going to have to look into this more.
We have just had a book accepted for publication by the University Press of Colorado in which we describe and analyze five pilgrimages to the tops of sacred mountains.
Did he mention the name of the book? I didn't see anything, at first glance, on their website. Anyway, will look out for it. It sounds interesting.
I came across a different book that he contributed too, while searching his name. It could be a good one too.
I'm waiting for him to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
When he took more than a day to reply, I figured he smelled a Castaneda rat, and blew me off.
Castaneda is HATED among many anthropologists.
You can even see it on wikipedia! They get in their little digs on the Toltec page, and such topics.
His book has "Nahua" in the title, so I figured he has had enough of lineage seeking crazy men.
Maybe his Castaneda detection radar (CCdar) isn't that good?
Or maybe he's not crazy angry at Carlos.
I posted his book on Facebook too and mentioned it to him. If he asks for the link, he'll get an eye full.
If he's not angry, I could probably ask him if you can chat too.
Authors of books on such obscure topics, probably don't mind people liking their work.
[-]
u/TechnoMagical_Intent
2 points2021-02-05 20:56
There's another South American author/professor who's writing a positive paper on Carlos and Nagualism titled "Carlos Castaneda and The Crack Between Worlds." He released a pre-print version last summer for review that is incomplete as of January, 2021.
My father had a theory that the Indians of southern California knew that you have to water crops, to grow food.
Sounds silly now, but it was controversial back then.
So he tried to prove you could grow miniature corn, which had been found in caves in the area, without watering it.
Out near desert springs.
Couldn't do it.
I was too young to pay attention, but I believe it really boiled down to one evil anthropologist at the top, who had control over everyone else.
And after he died, they discovered that not only were the Indians watering crops, but an entire valley of grass. They had a series of irrigation ditches.
When the settlers came in with cattle, they took it over thinking it wasn't owned by anyone.
One angry anthropologist at the top controlled the opinions of all below him.
[-]
u/danl999
4 points2021-02-06 00:42
Alan had more to say:
Alan Sandstrom
The paper figure book and our ethnography of the Huastecan Nahua have been out of print for a long time, but both are available for free on Internet Archive:
Corn is Our Blood: Culture and Ethnic Identity in a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village,
by Alan R. Sandstrom. Civilization of the American Indian Series, vol. 206.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991; Internet Archive online ed., 2012,
18 Comments
Here is an excerpt from the description ...
It makes me wonder if these are a depiction of the different types of inorganic beings.
Cool! And yes, it would be highly doubtful that the paper figures aren't depiction of inorganics. Whether the designs are from ancestral lore (based on the experience of a certain ancestor), or mnemonic tools for storytelling...they lay-out their mental landscape as it were, priming the mind for a structured perception of an inorganic being.
And the fact that it's paper which is ephemeral, and not more permanent like a typical petroglyph, also keys into perception being impermanent.
At least that's one informed possibility, from a western outsider!
Wow, that agrees with don Juan's description of the "Man of Knowledge"!
The remnants of which he said were still around in Mexico, but with no real understanding of what they do.
Perhaps those are the "sorcerers" some of our drug using crazy visitors talk about, being all over the place. The ritual ones, with no actual understanding.
According to don Juan, a "Man of Knowledge" was a sorcery guild member, probably from the Olmec empire or what came before it.
They could not see. The "knowledge" they had was for preparing objects, food, and dances, to be part of their religious ceremonies.
I suppose we might conclude, they were ritual sorcerers. Not seers.
Their doings probably involved paper making too! Assuming they beat the Chinese to the punch.
Certainly mask making.
I kind of wonder what sort of bakery goods they made (don Juan mentioned that), but I suppose we have our Easter cookies, and back around 2500BC they also had those Ishtar cookies that went along with grove worship.
In fact, if you think about Easter, a religious holiday with lots of symbolic objects to buy, you might have a better understanding of why there were sorcery guild members to make stuff for ceremonies, way back when. Western civilization had them too, long ago.
I wish I could get hold of one of those paper things!
My new inorganic being "Mystery" is a teacher par excellence. No tricks as with Fancy.
Just serious explaining. And no horizontal shifting. No shifting at all in fact. She just shows up and doesn't do anything but explain.
She could surely tell me a thing or two about the paper usage.
It's just light enough for IOBs to move around freely.
Maybe she'd do that for me.
Last night she was teaching me to feel the fibers on the right side of the stomach. You can create a "tickling" sensation there, with the hands nowhere near it. Over and over, it's reliable.
Part of Zuleica's technique is to feel that tickle, at least, when she taught Carlos.
But not when she taught others, so I suppose we don't have to "fold in half" in precisely the same way Carlos did.
I'm not giving up though.
Yes, this is definitely possible! I have been doing something similar recently while doing the darkroom practice.
It was mentioned in one of the books, something about being able to project an appendage from the stomach area and to reach out and touch/feel things. I have been imagining something similar, but focus more on the feeling in my stomach than the visualization of it... and it does produce a subtle movement or tickling feeling.
I can't say anything dramatic has happened since adding this to my practice, but I feel like it's important in some way. It allows me to induce silence quicker, and I suspect it may be related to creating a dreaming double.
The fingers, especilaly the 2 smallest, can cast out a "cobweb", which can touch your knees from a distance of around 8 inches.
But the assemblage point has to be all the way at the end of the J curve or you are unlikely to be able to notice it.
And of course, when Carlos was tickling the second attention assemblage point, he felt like he was tickling himself.
So it's good for us to feel those sensations.
I sometimes think maybe that was the whole point of the finger wiggling.
To get real sensations involving the energy body.
You can also bring it out visually.
But I suppose that's what the Tensegrity is supposed to do. Make it visible.
After posting this, an older memory came back to me ...
About a year and 1/2 ago, I was having an unusually active period of lucid dreams. During this time, IOBs started appearing in a lot of them too.
So, I started to encourage this, and every night I would go to bed with the intent of learning more about them.
Thinking back now, a lot of the dreams were in locations from my childhood and/or around water, but otherwise, they were fairly insignificant. The curious thing about them was that IOBs would consistently appear.
At the height of it all, I had a dream where I was in a large conference-type room, like you would see in a hotel, and people were giving presentations on paranormal things. There was an old man, dressed in an all-white suit, sitting at a round table, and he invited me over.
He said he knew a lot about shadow people, and he had created a book about them and wanted my help to promote it. I opened it and realized it was a popup book!
Each IOB was cut out of paper and would expand as you opened each page. I was floored by the detail of it all, and by how many were in the book.
Soon after the dream ended, and I have never seen the old man since. The IOB sightings started to decrease too and my lucid dreaming period ended.
Anyway, I don't know if it means anything, but I thought it was an interesting parallel to the book I posted.
I met a guy in Oaxaca once, a shaman of some sort, who said he'd seen an old Mayan library in a golden-walled cave somewhere near San Cristóbal. Maybe they haven't been totally destroyed, or maybe they've moved into the dreaming, like that city under Pátzcuaro.
I wrote to Alan Sandstrom, one of the authors. Had to go through a university, he wasn't listed for contact.
He recognized my father's name, and offered to answer a question for me.
Didn't know what it was though.
We'll see what happens when he's asked if any of the paper figures is intended to house spirits, and not in a ceremonial way.
Should be interesting.
Awesome! That will be interesting to hear about.
Thanks for doing that, and let us know what he says!
He didn’t reply again after I told him what I wanted to know. My guess? He been under assault by angry Castaneda bad players for a very long time and if he smells more of it, he won’t answer. But he’s also old. Old people often have poor e contact manors.
Well, last night i posted on my cellphone that I didn't think he'd respond. But he did! Here's what he said, which encourages me to try to build one. I do believe Cholita could make it move if she took an interest.
Alan Sandstrom
Hi Daniel,
The question you bring up is not bizarre at all. Scholars have been looking for Asia-Mesoamerican connections for many years. There is a literature on the topic but no final conclusion to the question. I can say that Paul Tolstoy, a Canadian archaeologist, thinks that the bark cloth/paper complex found in Mexico (and about which my wife Pamela and I have written) may have come from southern China many thousands of years ago. If you are about to receive our book on the topic you will see the discussion and Tolstoy's publication listed in the bibliography.
The indigenous people in the area of Mexico where we have worked for many years cut small paper images of spirit entities for use in their ritual offerings. These are almost always small human figures with the hands by the sides of the head. Recently I found an article about an ethnic group in south China who also cut small images of spirit entities with the hands by the head. Here is the citation: Cauquelin, Josiane. 2002. "Chamanes et papiers découpés chez les Nung de Guangxi." Péninsule no. 44:127-42. The article is in French but you can see from the illustrations that the paper figures are almost identical. Are the two traditions connected? I can't be sure.
In terms of spirit containment, the Nahua, Otomi, and Tepehua people of northern Veracruz create complex displays of paper figures, palm and marigold adornments, candles, incense braziers, etc. that are encircled by a vine to which flowers have been attached. the purpose of the display is to contain and trap disease-causing spirit entities to cure patients. On occasion, the curer ties paper figures on the loop that encircles the display. I asked one what they were and the curer replied that they were "soldiers" whose role is to keep the disease entities within the circle.
Most people are unaware of the role of paper in the traditional civilizations of Mesoamerica. We have just had a book accepted for publication by the University Press of Colorado in which we describe and analyze five pilgrimages to the tops of sacred mountains. These sacred journeys are highly complex affairs with many ritual offerings dedicated at special sites. It is not unusual for the ritual specialists to cut more than 20,000 paper figures for each pilgrimage. This type of pilgrimage is found in Asia as well but again we cannot make direct connection between the traditions.
Good luck with your search.
All the best,
Alan
Alan R. Sandstrom, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology, Purdue University Fort Wayne
By the way, Cholita is a mail stealer. I had the book sent to our home, to see if she decides to "borrow" it.
She also makes fantastic paper art objects, some even sold in galleries in Los Angeles.
If she makes some of those, I wouldn't be surprised to see them walking around at night.
Nice, that is awesome that he responded. Thank you for posting it.
All of this is very intriguing! I am going to have to look into this more.
Did he mention the name of the book? I didn't see anything, at first glance, on their website. Anyway, will look out for it. It sounds interesting.
I came across a different book that he contributed too, while searching his name. It could be a good one too.
https://upcolorado.com/university-press-of-colorado/item/3841-sorcery-in-mesoamerica
I'm waiting for him to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
When he took more than a day to reply, I figured he smelled a Castaneda rat, and blew me off.
Castaneda is HATED among many anthropologists.
You can even see it on wikipedia! They get in their little digs on the Toltec page, and such topics.
His book has "Nahua" in the title, so I figured he has had enough of lineage seeking crazy men.
Maybe his Castaneda detection radar (CCdar) isn't that good?
Or maybe he's not crazy angry at Carlos.
I posted his book on Facebook too and mentioned it to him. If he asks for the link, he'll get an eye full.
If he's not angry, I could probably ask him if you can chat too.
Authors of books on such obscure topics, probably don't mind people liking their work.
There's another South American author/professor who's writing a positive paper on Carlos and Nagualism titled "Carlos Castaneda and The Crack Between Worlds." He released a pre-print version last summer for review that is incomplete as of January, 2021.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342851661_Carlos_Castaneda_and_the_Crack_Between_Worlds
Maybe the old ones will die off?
My father had a theory that the Indians of southern California knew that you have to water crops, to grow food.
Sounds silly now, but it was controversial back then.
So he tried to prove you could grow miniature corn, which had been found in caves in the area, without watering it.
Out near desert springs.
Couldn't do it.
I was too young to pay attention, but I believe it really boiled down to one evil anthropologist at the top, who had control over everyone else.
And after he died, they discovered that not only were the Indians watering crops, but an entire valley of grass. They had a series of irrigation ditches.
When the settlers came in with cattle, they took it over thinking it wasn't owned by anyone.
One angry anthropologist at the top controlled the opinions of all below him.
Alan had more to say:
Alan Sandstrom
The paper figure book and our ethnography of the Huastecan Nahua have been out of print for a long time, but both are available for free on Internet Archive:
Corn is Our Blood: Culture and Ethnic Identity in a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village,
by Alan R. Sandstrom. Civilization of the American Indian Series, vol. 206.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991; Internet Archive online ed., 2012,
available at https://archive.org/details/cornisourbloodcu00sand.
Traditional Papermaking and Paper Cult Figures of Mexico,
by Alan R. Sandstrom and Pamela Effrein Sandstrom.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986; Internet Archive online ed., 2012,
available at https://archive.org/details/traditionalpape00sand.
Traditional Papermaking and Paper Cult Figures of Mexico, was was the original title of this user-deleted post. And the shared link was:
https://archive.org/details/traditionalpape00sand
https://web.archive.org/web/20210207130643/https://old.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/lb19qo/traditional_papermaking_and_paper_cult_figures_of/