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Long Life, Honey in the Heart: A Story of Initiation and Eloquence From the Shores of a Mayan Lake
A memoir by the author of Secrets of the Talking Jaguar describes growing up in Guatemala during a vicious civil war, his participation in traditional Maya religious rites, and the rich influence of Mayan religion and society in a world of political intrigue and social upheaval. 12,000 first printing.
362 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
28 people are currently reading
549 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 - 24 of 24 reviews
February 3, 2017
A beautiful depiction of the lives and culture of the Maya of Santiago near Lake Atitlán in Guatemala - but not without flaws.
Prechtel has a tendency to idealise the Mayan culture he has come in contact with. He is largely uncritical and accepting of the rituals and beliefs he is presented - the one exception being the brutal stoning of a man by the wider village. Even still, this incident is soon forgotten. I would expect he had more experiences in this vein - a few references are also made to domestic violence, but usually to highlight how rare these instances are.
The book functions as Prechtel's love-note to the village, ritual and culture. As such, the darker side of village life remains largely unexamined. On the other hand Prechtel is content to present a particularly dark caricature of 'Western civilisation', which in his view is all violence and destruction. Certainly these elements are present and of immense concern - but do they accurately represent the entirety of Western culture?
By my nature I'm wary of the idealisation of indigenous and native cultures, and reductionist explanations of the woes of the West.
Prechtel talks in very general terms about the isolation, violence, apathy and depression of modern man, and for this makes a connection to our lack of initiation, and our disconnection with the female aspects of nature - an interesting idea, and certainly worth deeper analysis than is given in the few dozen pages of the afterword and parting essay. I would have liked to have seen his analysis and contrast with 'Western civilization' given more depth.
As for the narrative itself: at times it drags, particularly in labored descriptions of rituals. Other times it feels rushed (compare the length of the courting and initiation rituals versus the violent political change that visits the village, or the few short pages of reflection on the experience of the book in the afterword).
The pacing mightn't be perfect, but Pretchel has a powerful way of writing, and his experiences of Santiago are well worth reliving. At its best, 'Long Life, Honey In The Heart' is a powerful and beautiful demonstration of how ritual symbolic life can feed a community, and a valuable meditation on the spiritual imagination of humanity. He has done well to capture very atypical experiences and subject matter.
Prechtel has a tendency to idealise the Mayan culture he has come in contact with. He is largely uncritical and accepting of the rituals and beliefs he is presented - the one exception being the brutal stoning of a man by the wider village. Even still, this incident is soon forgotten. I would expect he had more experiences in this vein - a few references are also made to domestic violence, but usually to highlight how rare these instances are.
The book functions as Prechtel's love-note to the village, ritual and culture. As such, the darker side of village life remains largely unexamined. On the other hand Prechtel is content to present a particularly dark caricature of 'Western civilisation', which in his view is all violence and destruction. Certainly these elements are present and of immense concern - but do they accurately represent the entirety of Western culture?
By my nature I'm wary of the idealisation of indigenous and native cultures, and reductionist explanations of the woes of the West.
Prechtel talks in very general terms about the isolation, violence, apathy and depression of modern man, and for this makes a connection to our lack of initiation, and our disconnection with the female aspects of nature - an interesting idea, and certainly worth deeper analysis than is given in the few dozen pages of the afterword and parting essay. I would have liked to have seen his analysis and contrast with 'Western civilization' given more depth.
As for the narrative itself: at times it drags, particularly in labored descriptions of rituals. Other times it feels rushed (compare the length of the courting and initiation rituals versus the violent political change that visits the village, or the few short pages of reflection on the experience of the book in the afterword).
The pacing mightn't be perfect, but Pretchel has a powerful way of writing, and his experiences of Santiago are well worth reliving. At its best, 'Long Life, Honey In The Heart' is a powerful and beautiful demonstration of how ritual symbolic life can feed a community, and a valuable meditation on the spiritual imagination of humanity. He has done well to capture very atypical experiences and subject matter.
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January 6, 2025Long Life, Honey in the Heart, No Evil, Thirteen Thank-yous.
To understand the full magnificence with which the old Tzutujil Maya were able to keep their life-promoting ritual institutions during the horrible trauma of the European interruption of this culture, we have to first understand what happened to the Spanish before they invaded what is now called the Americas.
During the medieval period, in the Iberian Peninsula in what is now Spain and Portugal, several distinct cultures came to their flowering peaks side by side. Under the protection of the Spanish Muslim caliphate, literature, water technology, mathematics, medicine, agriculture, horse breeding, architecture, astronomy, building methods, alchemy, textile dyeing and weaving, library science, and, above all, a rare and fluid spirituality bubbled and cooked in a creative foment of curiosity and imagination of a kind never before seen in Europe.
Spain was not a country then. But in the south in Andalusia, a group of diverse city-states and districts, though officially under the domain of the Arab Muslims, eventually formed a loose confederation. Like Costa Rica and Switzerland of the past, this area became a place where free-thinking people, artists, and mystics sought sanctuary. In these small and magical kingdoms ruled by powerful kings and queens, there was a minimum of organized violence. This was all the more astounding considering the violence that surrounded them in other parts of the world, and the atrocity-filled centuries the Christian Crusades in Jerusalem against Islam and the Jews. Muslim Spain had miraculously escaped much of that horror and had actually been able to remain neutral to some degree.
A diversity of cultures such as the Gallego Celts, Andalusi Berber, Iberian Phoenicians, Italic culture, Muslim Arabs, the pre-Catholic primitive Christians, Gnostic Christians, Persians, Sephardic Jews, to name the better known, were permitted to flourish in city-states such as Granada, Cordova, Seville, Cadiz. These cultures freely added to one another without having to melt into each other except where they did so of their own accord. When this happened, there emerged far richer hybrids, and the little cities of the mountains and coasts became kingdoms of legend and imagination. It was here that the Grail stories were born. Writings of both distant and local tradition, religion, and language were cherished and translated into a mountain of interesting books, well tended by the Sephardic Jews, who had always been scholars, The Iberian Peninsula was the safest kingdom in the Western or Eastern Hemisphere of the time. Women could walk the streets at night in safety and foreign travelers didn't worry much when traveling from city to city because they could live on the hospitality of the curious princes and knowledge seekers they found there.
After Europe's last Middle Eastern Crusade failed and lost momentum, thousands and thousands of European men who for years had lived by violence and heroic crisis and who had a homeless existence returned to northern Visigoth Spain, France, Germany, Italy, and other Christian countries. Muslim Spain gave sanctuary to many dissident Crusaders who, having learned a great deal of wisdom and having grown accustomed to the civilized garden life of the Middle Eastern civilization, found it intolerable to continue living in the dog-eat-dog harshness of Catholic Europe.
Most Crusaders returning from a life of war, however, found no place for themselves, and lived landless and purposeless. The Catholic pope was quick to take advantage of the violence that had now become a part of the people, seeing these unemployed soldiers as a means to stamp out all of the enemies of the "true faith" and Rome's centralized kingdom. By reorganizing returning Crusaders into glorified goon squads, Rome set the frustrated defeated knights onto their own people, massacring millions of Cathars, troubadours, and many others. When they had finished this internal Crusade against the "heretics," the formerly flourishing earth and culture of southern France, from Provence to the Pyrenees, was a razed, smoldering, depopulated desolation, utterly devoid of resources.
Once Rome had reconsolidated its political and religious power base in this area, it was time to launch a new Crusade against Islam. This time the target would be Spain. Coming from a culture with no vision of personal or spiritual freedom, and having been traumatized for generations by a life of violence and emotional numbness in service to and angry God, the northern Visigoth Christians vented the fury of their inferiority complexes further and further south until two centuries later they'd rendered Spain a poor, ruined, raped land, united under one God and two Chrisitan sovereigns.
Gone was pluralism, gone was free thinking, literacy, safety, abundance, and beauty. Gone was money, gone were the rich human resources of Andalusi culture.
By the 1400s, Spain was so far in debt that it had stretched out its fleets of ships all over the world, searching for peoples to overrun, enslave, and plunder to feed the monster of an unnaturally synthesized, top-heavy kingdom. England, France, Holland, and Portugal did the exact same thing.
In 1524 when the first Spaniards arrived in what is now Guatemala, they came in on a tornado of shame, hatred, and a numbness from centuries of wars with their own people, wars that had originated with other traumatized people like themselves. Generations ago they had forgotten what it meant to be truly at home in the natural earth.
Deranged and damaged from generations of violence and cultural misunderstandings in their own lands, with elders who couldn't remember life without the violating and mining mentality of war, these invaders of Native America were worse than blind to the excellence of the cultures that they found there. They could not understand the hearts, subtle beliefs, and strong tribal identities of the peoples they overran in search of Spain's artificially enforced identity.
As far as the Mayans were concerned, this was simply uninitiated behavior. Spain was a melancholy and depressed country that, like all conquering entities, was being eaten by all the ghosts it had created through all the killing wars waged on its own people. Essentially, Spain sought to export this kind of domestic depression and self-violence onto what they rationalized as "lesser" peoples. by taking the gold and abundance of these peoples and hollowing them out, just as they had done with the Spanish Moors and Jews, they sought to fill the empty hole in Spain caused by the erosion of their own nation's soul due to self-violence. Ironically, large groups of Spanish citizens, Jews, and dissidents emigrated to the "New World" to escape this repression, only to reestablish the same syndrome out of old habit. All those countries who wanted to be powerful by enslaving and conquering others were mostly one-God people. This imperial concept came from having no true parents, no true initiations for the young, and a culture that promoted an empty grandiosity that covered up a mass cultural depression that was only sometimes successfully exported to their subject colonies. pp.50-53
I'd fallen in love with the Heart of Food-Water ever since Chiv had brought me here five years earlier. But like anything you love, you have to first learn her language before you're allowed inside her heart.
The secrets of this carefully wrapped pre-Christian, Seed Heart of Abundance lived inside Mayan language reserved for the priests and initiates of the Bundle itself. I'd have to become one of four students who would serve for four years, learning all the dances, origin stories, and ritual procedures of the bundle before I'd be allowed to really look inside. Though we had been promised great mystery and ceremonial vision, one whole year still remained until we'd be called on by Chiviliu, the Rain Priest, the Prophet, the Chief of Axuan and his Xuo, to ritually initiate us into the secrets of the Bundle of Food and Water. -p.63
Calmed a bit, I was listening, and I replied, "We have to wait four years to see what they demanded to see in the blink of an eye, and then they went off joking as if they'd just seen something unimpressive, something they already knew. Why do we have to wait if you just let anybody else treat it like a piece of junk?"
Chiv had digested enough to get in on the conversation by now. "Look, son, for years we people of the Canyon Village, the Temple of Birds, have had to deal with people from other countries, whites from the cities and all kinds of people who always wanted what we have. It's getting worse all the time, and up till now the spirits have protected themselves. People from the outside want to take apart our bundles to see what's in them. You can take one apart in a second, but you see nothing. The only way to "see" what's in the bundle is to learn slowly how to put it together and how to take care of it, like an egg, for instance. If you want to see why the mother bird thinks her eggs are so precious, like our village loves its bundles, then you could break the egg. All you would see is mucus and yolk. But if you initiates sit, hatch, maintain, and care for the egg without breaking it, you will see in the end what an egg is all about. An egg is really a bird, and a bird that can lay another egg. To hatch an egg and raise that hatchling so that it can fly takes time, care, and worry. That's initiation.
"By looking in the bundles those people saw 'nothing,' and, seeing nothing, they took nothing away with them. Like most of the greedy peoples of the earth, when they heard rumors about the most precious thing our village had, they assumed it must be gold, material wealth, or who knows what. They wanted to make sure we 'poor' little Indians didn't possess something that these big politicians didn't already have, something that had somehow missed the avaricious scrutiny of the previous oppressors.
"And mark this: If they had seen any worth in our bundle, they would have connived to own it or just stolen it at gunpoint. But since what is in our bundle cannot be seen without going the route of learning, they saw nothing. "You have to go the route, boys. This means that by going the four years you learn how to see 'nothing' in a substantial way. What is in the bundle is in the seeing. We are not so primitive as to think that the bundle is the power, it is simply a home for the power to be seen. The bundle is a throne, and it takes four years for our poor human eyes to see the spirit sitting there.
"All of our bundles contain ordinary things that, when seen in ritual context, become the extraordinary things they really are. Our everyday human struggle for food and life tends to sprinkle a dust of commonness on the world. Our ceremonies 'repolish' the spirits, make it so we can see the holiness of what surrounds us every day. The Spirits are big and they've always made it so that we have to go the full route of learning to see what's really in there. Everybody else who takes the shortcut will not see. You will see in time, boys. Don't be scared off the nest by some clumsy hunters; be patient and courageous like mother birds and hatch the spirit."
What Chiv was saying was very beautiful and true, but part of me believed that this was just a quaint comeback to avoid telling us the truth. But old Chiv was right. The Old Jaguar man was right. The old men and women of the hierarchy were right, for when the time came for us to see what was in the bundle, it was so beautiful as to be indescribable. Like all those who came before me, I promised not to tell what I saw, and I won't. pp.73-74
To understand the full magnificence with which the old Tzutujil Maya were able to keep their life-promoting ritual institutions during the horrible trauma of the European interruption of this culture, we have to first understand what happened to the Spanish before they invaded what is now called the Americas.
During the medieval period, in the Iberian Peninsula in what is now Spain and Portugal, several distinct cultures came to their flowering peaks side by side. Under the protection of the Spanish Muslim caliphate, literature, water technology, mathematics, medicine, agriculture, horse breeding, architecture, astronomy, building methods, alchemy, textile dyeing and weaving, library science, and, above all, a rare and fluid spirituality bubbled and cooked in a creative foment of curiosity and imagination of a kind never before seen in Europe.
Spain was not a country then. But in the south in Andalusia, a group of diverse city-states and districts, though officially under the domain of the Arab Muslims, eventually formed a loose confederation. Like Costa Rica and Switzerland of the past, this area became a place where free-thinking people, artists, and mystics sought sanctuary. In these small and magical kingdoms ruled by powerful kings and queens, there was a minimum of organized violence. This was all the more astounding considering the violence that surrounded them in other parts of the world, and the atrocity-filled centuries the Christian Crusades in Jerusalem against Islam and the Jews. Muslim Spain had miraculously escaped much of that horror and had actually been able to remain neutral to some degree.
A diversity of cultures such as the Gallego Celts, Andalusi Berber, Iberian Phoenicians, Italic culture, Muslim Arabs, the pre-Catholic primitive Christians, Gnostic Christians, Persians, Sephardic Jews, to name the better known, were permitted to flourish in city-states such as Granada, Cordova, Seville, Cadiz. These cultures freely added to one another without having to melt into each other except where they did so of their own accord. When this happened, there emerged far richer hybrids, and the little cities of the mountains and coasts became kingdoms of legend and imagination. It was here that the Grail stories were born. Writings of both distant and local tradition, religion, and language were cherished and translated into a mountain of interesting books, well tended by the Sephardic Jews, who had always been scholars, The Iberian Peninsula was the safest kingdom in the Western or Eastern Hemisphere of the time. Women could walk the streets at night in safety and foreign travelers didn't worry much when traveling from city to city because they could live on the hospitality of the curious princes and knowledge seekers they found there.
After Europe's last Middle Eastern Crusade failed and lost momentum, thousands and thousands of European men who for years had lived by violence and heroic crisis and who had a homeless existence returned to northern Visigoth Spain, France, Germany, Italy, and other Christian countries. Muslim Spain gave sanctuary to many dissident Crusaders who, having learned a great deal of wisdom and having grown accustomed to the civilized garden life of the Middle Eastern civilization, found it intolerable to continue living in the dog-eat-dog harshness of Catholic Europe.
Most Crusaders returning from a life of war, however, found no place for themselves, and lived landless and purposeless. The Catholic pope was quick to take advantage of the violence that had now become a part of the people, seeing these unemployed soldiers as a means to stamp out all of the enemies of the "true faith" and Rome's centralized kingdom. By reorganizing returning Crusaders into glorified goon squads, Rome set the frustrated defeated knights onto their own people, massacring millions of Cathars, troubadours, and many others. When they had finished this internal Crusade against the "heretics," the formerly flourishing earth and culture of southern France, from Provence to the Pyrenees, was a razed, smoldering, depopulated desolation, utterly devoid of resources.
Once Rome had reconsolidated its political and religious power base in this area, it was time to launch a new Crusade against Islam. This time the target would be Spain. Coming from a culture with no vision of personal or spiritual freedom, and having been traumatized for generations by a life of violence and emotional numbness in service to and angry God, the northern Visigoth Christians vented the fury of their inferiority complexes further and further south until two centuries later they'd rendered Spain a poor, ruined, raped land, united under one God and two Chrisitan sovereigns.
Gone was pluralism, gone was free thinking, literacy, safety, abundance, and beauty. Gone was money, gone were the rich human resources of Andalusi culture.
By the 1400s, Spain was so far in debt that it had stretched out its fleets of ships all over the world, searching for peoples to overrun, enslave, and plunder to feed the monster of an unnaturally synthesized, top-heavy kingdom. England, France, Holland, and Portugal did the exact same thing.
In 1524 when the first Spaniards arrived in what is now Guatemala, they came in on a tornado of shame, hatred, and a numbness from centuries of wars with their own people, wars that had originated with other traumatized people like themselves. Generations ago they had forgotten what it meant to be truly at home in the natural earth.
Deranged and damaged from generations of violence and cultural misunderstandings in their own lands, with elders who couldn't remember life without the violating and mining mentality of war, these invaders of Native America were worse than blind to the excellence of the cultures that they found there. They could not understand the hearts, subtle beliefs, and strong tribal identities of the peoples they overran in search of Spain's artificially enforced identity.
As far as the Mayans were concerned, this was simply uninitiated behavior. Spain was a melancholy and depressed country that, like all conquering entities, was being eaten by all the ghosts it had created through all the killing wars waged on its own people. Essentially, Spain sought to export this kind of domestic depression and self-violence onto what they rationalized as "lesser" peoples. by taking the gold and abundance of these peoples and hollowing them out, just as they had done with the Spanish Moors and Jews, they sought to fill the empty hole in Spain caused by the erosion of their own nation's soul due to self-violence. Ironically, large groups of Spanish citizens, Jews, and dissidents emigrated to the "New World" to escape this repression, only to reestablish the same syndrome out of old habit. All those countries who wanted to be powerful by enslaving and conquering others were mostly one-God people. This imperial concept came from having no true parents, no true initiations for the young, and a culture that promoted an empty grandiosity that covered up a mass cultural depression that was only sometimes successfully exported to their subject colonies. pp.50-53
I'd fallen in love with the Heart of Food-Water ever since Chiv had brought me here five years earlier. But like anything you love, you have to first learn her language before you're allowed inside her heart.
The secrets of this carefully wrapped pre-Christian, Seed Heart of Abundance lived inside Mayan language reserved for the priests and initiates of the Bundle itself. I'd have to become one of four students who would serve for four years, learning all the dances, origin stories, and ritual procedures of the bundle before I'd be allowed to really look inside. Though we had been promised great mystery and ceremonial vision, one whole year still remained until we'd be called on by Chiviliu, the Rain Priest, the Prophet, the Chief of Axuan and his Xuo, to ritually initiate us into the secrets of the Bundle of Food and Water. -p.63
Calmed a bit, I was listening, and I replied, "We have to wait four years to see what they demanded to see in the blink of an eye, and then they went off joking as if they'd just seen something unimpressive, something they already knew. Why do we have to wait if you just let anybody else treat it like a piece of junk?"
Chiv had digested enough to get in on the conversation by now. "Look, son, for years we people of the Canyon Village, the Temple of Birds, have had to deal with people from other countries, whites from the cities and all kinds of people who always wanted what we have. It's getting worse all the time, and up till now the spirits have protected themselves. People from the outside want to take apart our bundles to see what's in them. You can take one apart in a second, but you see nothing. The only way to "see" what's in the bundle is to learn slowly how to put it together and how to take care of it, like an egg, for instance. If you want to see why the mother bird thinks her eggs are so precious, like our village loves its bundles, then you could break the egg. All you would see is mucus and yolk. But if you initiates sit, hatch, maintain, and care for the egg without breaking it, you will see in the end what an egg is all about. An egg is really a bird, and a bird that can lay another egg. To hatch an egg and raise that hatchling so that it can fly takes time, care, and worry. That's initiation.
"By looking in the bundles those people saw 'nothing,' and, seeing nothing, they took nothing away with them. Like most of the greedy peoples of the earth, when they heard rumors about the most precious thing our village had, they assumed it must be gold, material wealth, or who knows what. They wanted to make sure we 'poor' little Indians didn't possess something that these big politicians didn't already have, something that had somehow missed the avaricious scrutiny of the previous oppressors.
"And mark this: If they had seen any worth in our bundle, they would have connived to own it or just stolen it at gunpoint. But since what is in our bundle cannot be seen without going the route of learning, they saw nothing. "You have to go the route, boys. This means that by going the four years you learn how to see 'nothing' in a substantial way. What is in the bundle is in the seeing. We are not so primitive as to think that the bundle is the power, it is simply a home for the power to be seen. The bundle is a throne, and it takes four years for our poor human eyes to see the spirit sitting there.
"All of our bundles contain ordinary things that, when seen in ritual context, become the extraordinary things they really are. Our everyday human struggle for food and life tends to sprinkle a dust of commonness on the world. Our ceremonies 'repolish' the spirits, make it so we can see the holiness of what surrounds us every day. The Spirits are big and they've always made it so that we have to go the full route of learning to see what's really in there. Everybody else who takes the shortcut will not see. You will see in time, boys. Don't be scared off the nest by some clumsy hunters; be patient and courageous like mother birds and hatch the spirit."
What Chiv was saying was very beautiful and true, but part of me believed that this was just a quaint comeback to avoid telling us the truth. But old Chiv was right. The Old Jaguar man was right. The old men and women of the hierarchy were right, for when the time came for us to see what was in the bundle, it was so beautiful as to be indescribable. Like all those who came before me, I promised not to tell what I saw, and I won't. pp.73-74
July 5, 2017
Yes, I loved this book! Prechtel writes with such imagery, compassion, spirit, and heart. Plus each chapter begins with a segment from his wealth of drawings of Mayan people and their culture. Prechtel grew up on an Indian reservation in New Mexico and subsequently moved to Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala. He became a member of the Mayan community with whom he lived as well as learning to play ancient flute melodies that were used for rituals, marrying a Mayan woman and having children, and serving as a chief and shaman. He describes courting and initiation rituals with deep spiritual and life-giving meanings. In the end, though, he details the governmental overthrow of the Mayans and their ancient and deeply-rooted spiritual beliefs. This is a powerful book that leads me to wonder whether North Americans could benefit from a closer connection to their families, communities, the natural world, and the magic that weaves through it all.
June 2, 2022
The author is an American who ended up living in a Maya village in Guatemala for a couple decades. He became a trusted member of the tribe and one of its chiefs. This book recounts village life and Maya customs, especially the initiation rituals for boys. It ends in heartbreak, when the Guatemala civil war violently ends traditional Maya life, forcing the author to flee back to the US to save his life. A very moving story told with heart, followed by an essay about what modern Americans can learn from "simpler" civilizations.
December 2, 2018
It was a good book. Very poetic, very gentle with its elegance. It was deeply moving and profound. I did get however a bit of superstition in his writing. It was superstitious. I believe in everything he says. I believe in the Mayan ways and I support his ideas. I can't really judge a book by content in a non-fiction book because A Martin didn't really have much of a say, but regardless of everything, this book is worth your time. The lives of the Tzutujil maya are incredible. Their understand of the universe and the natural world profound and their inspiring wisdom is thought provoking. If you're interested in Tribal life, Mysticism, Shamanism, Native Anthropology, Sacred Ceremony or anything of the like I recommend this book for you.
July 24, 2021
An essential read in these times of spiritual forgetfulness and modern violence. Written in an exquisite and colorful language, it's a book that connects the reader to the indigenous soul that is part of the human experience. It's one of the most important books that I've read, not because it offers a glimpse on a lost world, but because it shows what can be born again today. I actually warmly recommend each and every book written by Martin Prechtel.
January 24, 2022
Wow, honestly takes my breath away. So deeply incredible to read the stories of this ancient, rich, now dismantled, Guatemalan Mayan tribe, thick in culture and ritual, dripping with wisdom, love, connection. It almost doesn’t feel real, yet it is the most real honey in the heart. I mourn for the retreat of that village, but rejoice in their stories and the seed of possibility. Highly recommend for those interested
May 16, 2023
Beautiful and timeless book about community, initiation, and the challenges and joys of life. This book offers delicious nourishment for the soul. A refreshing view on life from the perspective of a strong and intact indigenous community full of wisdom. Highly recommend!
January 2, 2025
picked this up in guatemala because i wanted to read something by a guatemalan author that took place in guatemala - was cool to read about the lake while i was looking at it in real life, but became really boring and confusing halfway thru
February 25, 2020
A lyrically beautiful view into a spiritual journey. To say much more would spoil the experience of the reader. This is a must read for any spiritual seeker.
September 1, 2024
A profound book of life changing insights and stories.
December 20, 2009
This book was absolutely amazing. The language in it can break your heart and heal it in the same sentence. I really appreciated how we were let into a world that most people will never see. What a beautiful way to live and to view the world. I hope that I am able to read this book again and again just because I really felt GOOD reading it (I can only say this for a few other books in my collection). My only regret is that it took me so long to read it since I've been so busy, so I read it in little disconnected chunks.
I also read this book since I'm currently living in Honduras and wanted to know at least about ONE particular sub-group of the Mayan people. I often gained some insights into central american culture (not sure if they took it directly from the Maya or not), but the way they described the cacophonous "resolution" of arguments sounded a lot like the way many of our Honduran staff meetings are run... everyone shouts out their opinion over each other and then miraculously things are decided... apparently everyone has this talent of simultaneously hearing and talking, which I don't think I have as a north american!!
Anyway, HIGHLY fascinating book, absolutely BEAUTIFUL, HIGHLY recommended to anyone into anthropology, indigenous issues, or just the poetry and beauty of everyday life.
I also read this book since I'm currently living in Honduras and wanted to know at least about ONE particular sub-group of the Mayan people. I often gained some insights into central american culture (not sure if they took it directly from the Maya or not), but the way they described the cacophonous "resolution" of arguments sounded a lot like the way many of our Honduran staff meetings are run... everyone shouts out their opinion over each other and then miraculously things are decided... apparently everyone has this talent of simultaneously hearing and talking, which I don't think I have as a north american!!
Anyway, HIGHLY fascinating book, absolutely BEAUTIFUL, HIGHLY recommended to anyone into anthropology, indigenous issues, or just the poetry and beauty of everyday life.
March 15, 2013
A sequel to Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, this book is equally fascinating and beautifully written. It gives such insight into the living culture of the Mayans of Santiago Atitlan - a cualture that we could all learn so much from. It highlights the importance of giving young people something to strive for, something to aspire to, so that they are turned into heroes and heroines instead of delinquents.
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...
October 2, 2008
This book was great in that it was like an anthropological journey into the heart of Mayan culture. This book is the 2nd in a trilogy. It was important to read, I found it to be rich in knowledge and a little dry compared to his other books. I still recommend reading it because it is an important part of the trilogy.
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July 12, 2009If I wanted to pick favorites, I'd point to this book as one of them. An epic of tale, who I feel honors the teenage struggle, overlooked by the "modern" world. Still even when modern culture would deny us a respect for initiation, we search to find and understand our hearts anyway. And this book, tells of such a search.
September 16, 2012
Martin Prechtel is an amazing writer. I began reading this book while experiencing a Mayan initiation ceremony first hand in Vermont this summer, then finished it after I got back home. What a great way to read this book. I can't imagine reading it cold without any idea what you were reading about.
November 13, 2015
So heart filled; the words are like honey to the soul and the stories so rich it is as if you are eating from a buffet of the most decadent storytelling. Prechtel is a master at weaving together a story that tears your heart apart, leaves you longing for more and fills your soul with beauty. The saga continues to pour from his pen and I cannot drink it in fast enough.
December 19, 2007
Written about a time not so long ago but somehow like a thousand years ago, before the Maya of Guatamala were changes and removed from their ancient culture. Autobiographical. Lovely, such beauty. Sad, such loss.
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.
December 24, 2008
Beautiful beautiful.
May 29, 2020
This book is so amazingly, heartbreakingly beautiful. I cannot physically wait to read his other work.
September 10, 2016
Brilliant story telling, amazing explanations, brought me a new understanding of effusive.
April 19, 2016
Oh dear. The image of the writer and the participants being on some sort of drugs, come to mind throughout the book...
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