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The Toe Bone and the Tooth: An Ancient Mayan Story Relived in Modern Times: Leaving Home to Come Home
A survivor of the horrors of Guatemalan death squads casts his own story against the backdrop of an ancient Mayan myth, showing readers how use the powerful story as a metaphor for their own lives.
- GenresIndigenous
368 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2002
5 people are currently reading
152 people want to read
About the author
Martin Prechtel
29 books183 followersA master of eloquence and innovative language, Martín Prechtel is a leading thinker, writer and teacher whose work, both written and oral, hopes to promote the subtlety, irony and pre-modern vitality hidden in any living language. As a half blood Native American with a Pueblo Indian upbringing, his life took him from New Mexico to the village of Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala. There becoming a full village member of the Tzutujil Mayan population, he eventually served as a principal in that body of village leaders responsible for instructing the young people in the meanings of their ancient stories through the rituals of adult rights of passage. Once again residing in his native New Mexico, Martín teaches at his international school Bolad’s Kitchen. Through story, music, ritual and writing, Martín helps people in many lands to retain their diversity while remembering their own sense of place in the daily sacred through the search for the Indigenous Soul.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
May 1, 2009
I've read a lot of books, so I get excited when I stumble upon an author who blows the lid off narrative style. Just when I think nothing new can be done, a master story teller like Martin Prechtel shows up with a book woven together so tightly and intricately that my head spins, I forget where I am, and somehow it all comes full circle. This is such a cool book. Much is based on the author's real life, which is hard to believe, but true. It's an adventure and I loved it.
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February 29, 2024Like all natives as they traveled in those days, traditionalists at least, I was utterly borne along, painlessly, inside the story itself, which I knew better than I knew my heart, for every inch of ground we crossed was named and claimed by a piece of the story which ran in image through the landscape of one's spiritual seeing like a deer made of memory, whose traveling was a kind of remembering that put the world together as it ran through the story, over the story, who was the story; whose trail and track once remembered enough to follow, left its footprints written somehow in the face of the one who was seeing the story in the land. This deep sparkle and intensity the story left in one's eyes was an indigenous thing, and that look is what some religions wanted scared out of our faces just as corporate farming had begun to plow it out of the land itself.
To the Tzutujil, the earth was made of sacred nouns, whose trees were active verbs, fertilized and held together by possessive pronouns of the shifting wind. When all the words were put together, the world became a herd of spoken stories who needed divine remembering and creative oral storytellers to keep these trees and winds from falling into manicured dogmatic ruts.
When they altered the indigenous names of the hills, rivers, trees, flowers, canyons, caves and plains, all of which the Tzutujil knew as words with meanings from one or many stories, these religions seemed to be ordering the land not to speak its native tongue or not to speak at all, implying that both the land and its people needed saving instead of being small eloquent parts of the land's native story.
By reassigning the places of our world with titles familiar to themselves, calling the "Cliffs of Black Coyote" the Mount of Calvary or turning the "Mountain of the Goddess' Sweeping" Sinai or the"Canyon of the People of the Bats" into the Road to Nazareth, they sought to replace our ancient oral God-stories with a single written, historical, human-centered tale imported from another suffering and anciently ravaged land, whose poor people had lost themselves when they discarded their real old stories at the frightened insistence of a small desperate group of their own relatives, who having become spiritually exhausted and enslaved became neurotically addicted to the uplifting convenience and re-establishing of self-esteem provided by an exclusive oneness that promised to transport them from the misery of their human-caused depression.
By forcing their single story of another people forced to flee their home and diversity upon our Earth, renaming all her places with names either too corny and short or with meanings too far away and mythologically buried, these so-called modern religions verbally dismembered our stories which effectively dismembered the Earth for their allowing it, it having been given to them as dead matter in their story for them to do with as they please.
(pp171-72)
To the Tzutujil, the earth was made of sacred nouns, whose trees were active verbs, fertilized and held together by possessive pronouns of the shifting wind. When all the words were put together, the world became a herd of spoken stories who needed divine remembering and creative oral storytellers to keep these trees and winds from falling into manicured dogmatic ruts.
When they altered the indigenous names of the hills, rivers, trees, flowers, canyons, caves and plains, all of which the Tzutujil knew as words with meanings from one or many stories, these religions seemed to be ordering the land not to speak its native tongue or not to speak at all, implying that both the land and its people needed saving instead of being small eloquent parts of the land's native story.
By reassigning the places of our world with titles familiar to themselves, calling the "Cliffs of Black Coyote" the Mount of Calvary or turning the "Mountain of the Goddess' Sweeping" Sinai or the"Canyon of the People of the Bats" into the Road to Nazareth, they sought to replace our ancient oral God-stories with a single written, historical, human-centered tale imported from another suffering and anciently ravaged land, whose poor people had lost themselves when they discarded their real old stories at the frightened insistence of a small desperate group of their own relatives, who having become spiritually exhausted and enslaved became neurotically addicted to the uplifting convenience and re-establishing of self-esteem provided by an exclusive oneness that promised to transport them from the misery of their human-caused depression.
By forcing their single story of another people forced to flee their home and diversity upon our Earth, renaming all her places with names either too corny and short or with meanings too far away and mythologically buried, these so-called modern religions verbally dismembered our stories which effectively dismembered the Earth for their allowing it, it having been given to them as dead matter in their story for them to do with as they please.
(pp171-72)
April 21, 2021
A very good book with a very distinguished writing style which I enjoyed reading and had a fun time understanding what was going on: the plot is amazing in terms of the structure of the text, as well as it opens a completely new world to me about something I have never even heard about!
October 4, 2016
This third tale in Martin Prechtel's autobiographical stories of life in the Guatemalan Mayan village of Santiago Atitlan is a story of homecoming woven intricately within, between and around the ancient Mayan teaching myth of the Toe Bone and the Tooth. It is an epic tale of how he was torn from his integral place in the heart of a living, thriving indigenous culture and tossed back into his native United States to protect his wife, his children, and the gifts of knowledge that were entrusted to him by the people with whom he lived for 10 years in Atitlan.
For those willing to provide a good workout to less active parts of their brain, they will be rewarded with a sumptuous tale that teaches much about life and about what life is asking of us. Don't take exception to the intricacies and circuitousness of Prechtel's writing style .. stick with it and let the writing do the work of excavating a refleshingly vibrant understanding that isn't held hostage by the verb "to be" and its inherently static binary thinking .. let it lead you to places where language is truly living and jumping - as Martin Prechtel so beautifully writes in the introduction of his book Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: "I felt that when one wrote, the writing itself should "be" what one wrote. The words were not components of a dead vehicle, but live matter. Language written had to be language that, in its speaking, became, in the manner the words were written, the very thing that would otherwise be written about. One did not write about a horse; one wrote a horse into view, and then as the horse charge off the page into the grassy pastures of the reader's soul, one had to stand back, make room, or be trampled."
The tales he tells are from an oral culture that would never write down anything so precious as one of it's most valuable teaching myths because to do so would mean that it would be imprisoned by the words on the page and would never be free to run around in the grassy pastures of our souls. So Martin Prechtel's decision to find a way to bend English to do the bidding of spinning a tale as rich as this has been an ongoing journey since his first book Secrets of the Talking Jaguar. What these tales offer is a furtive glimpse into an almost unimaginable world of what life could be like for us and has been like for many people over the world. These are stories of depth and connection and meaning making that connect the living with the dead and the seen with the unseen.
It's a tale for the hardy and the adventurous and for those whose souls have always known that life held more than the bland, gray-faced world of corporate consumerism.
For those willing to provide a good workout to less active parts of their brain, they will be rewarded with a sumptuous tale that teaches much about life and about what life is asking of us. Don't take exception to the intricacies and circuitousness of Prechtel's writing style .. stick with it and let the writing do the work of excavating a refleshingly vibrant understanding that isn't held hostage by the verb "to be" and its inherently static binary thinking .. let it lead you to places where language is truly living and jumping - as Martin Prechtel so beautifully writes in the introduction of his book Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: "I felt that when one wrote, the writing itself should "be" what one wrote. The words were not components of a dead vehicle, but live matter. Language written had to be language that, in its speaking, became, in the manner the words were written, the very thing that would otherwise be written about. One did not write about a horse; one wrote a horse into view, and then as the horse charge off the page into the grassy pastures of the reader's soul, one had to stand back, make room, or be trampled."
The tales he tells are from an oral culture that would never write down anything so precious as one of it's most valuable teaching myths because to do so would mean that it would be imprisoned by the words on the page and would never be free to run around in the grassy pastures of our souls. So Martin Prechtel's decision to find a way to bend English to do the bidding of spinning a tale as rich as this has been an ongoing journey since his first book Secrets of the Talking Jaguar. What these tales offer is a furtive glimpse into an almost unimaginable world of what life could be like for us and has been like for many people over the world. These are stories of depth and connection and meaning making that connect the living with the dead and the seen with the unseen.
It's a tale for the hardy and the adventurous and for those whose souls have always known that life held more than the bland, gray-faced world of corporate consumerism.
September 5, 2008
I love Pretchel's tales of his life with the indigenous Tzutujil Mayan in Guatemala... I've since heard, not surprisingly, that he is a very controversial figure. So be it. His story (embellished, biased, whatever) is a great lovely adventure, filled with magic, shamanism and spirit. Beautiful. I've read all his books and wish there were a dozen more...
April 29, 2023
I highly recommend all of Martin Prechtel's books. My favorite nonfiction storyteller who expresses a lyrically beautiful; full, authentic, integral life. Martin illustrates admirable talent, embodying an exemplary way of being in this world in interrelation to the spirit world.
October 30, 2007
I'm reading this feast of beauty for maybe the 5th time now....
March 22, 2009
I didn't finish this book. The Mayan story part was very interesting, but the writer needs a lot of work. The man loves commas and lists of things. It is a poorly written book.
November 15, 2010
Fascinating. My only quibble is that the writing style could get pretty convoluted sometimes.
February 21, 2011
A little hard to get into but otherwise a great spiritual journey.
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November 25, 2015I rated and reviewed this book on LibraryThing: http://www.librarything.com/profile_r...
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews