Secrets of the Talking Jaguar

"Delicious, melancholy, lovely, full of flowers, mystery, laughter, and an extraordinary amount of suffering: if Guatemala were a woman, not a man alive wouldn't be lovesick for her." So begins Martín Prechtel's account of his fourteen-year love affair with a Tzutujil Mayan village on the shores of Guatemala's Lake Atitlán. Prechtel, who grew up on a Pueblo Indian reservation in New Mexico, wandered as a young man through the brilliant landscapes of Mexico and Guatemala. Drawn in his dreams to the traditional Mayan community of Santiago Atitlán, he carved out a life for himself among the villagers: "A clannish, talkative, proud, spiritual people addicted to alaughter ... who have always craftily guarded from outsiders all that they are and all that they know." Though an outsider himself, Prechtel was adopted as an apprentice by a powerful, ancient shaman named Nicolas Chiviliu Tacaxoy. He married a Mayan woman and became a village chief and famous shaman in his own right, entrusted with the rich legacy of Atitlán's ancient Mayan heritage and its deepest cultural traditions. In Secreets of the Talking Jaguar, Prechtel brings to vivid life the sights, sounds, scents and colours of the village: it's magical personalities; its beauty, its material poverty and spiritual wealth; its eight-hundred-year-old rituals juxtaposed with quintessential small-town gossip and passions. In a tale filled with enchantment, danger, rich cultural descriptions, shamanic rivalry and hope, Prechctel takes us into the heart of lboth untamed nature and intimate community life. His spellbinding narrative compellingly explores the complexity and joy of contemporary Mayan villange life - a culture that is fast disappearing in the wake of modernism. Although many books have been written about the ancient Maya, recording their own history goes against sacred Mayan tradition. But now, in Secretes of the Talking Jaguar, Martín Prechtel has documented the first ever insider's view of the Mayan spiritual and philosophical universe. Full of compassion, humor, and wisdom, his unforgettable account reads like the most gripping adventure novel. Yet every word is true.