I mean, the Mesoamerican tradition, is really humanity.
It's a snake that has wings.
We are mortals, we are close to the Earth, but we have wings
and we can fly in our mind, in our spirit,
we can be different places.
And that's the tremendous dilemma of humans, isn't it?
We want to transcend our mortality.
And so then, in this case, Quetzalcoatl.
I want to read a letter that I wrote to a person that
lived in Mexico.
I was a Fulbright scholar from Stanford University--
I ended up at Stanford, you know,
and after going to East LA Junior College and Cal State
Long Beach, I ended up studying at Stanford.
And they sent me for one year and a half
as a Fulbright scholar to Mexico.
Better?
Yeah.
Nice.
Yeah.
And I came to a manuscript in Mexico City that was written
by Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón.
This was a priest that lived in Mexico in the 16th century.
And he had spent 10 years basically
gathering poems, spells, invocations, and different--
it was a way to try to suppress the Mesoamerican
tradition in 1629.
For 10 years he did this.
He did horrible things to the Indians.
And he will go to houses and he will claim that he will be sick
and he will ask for the healer to do something to him.
And the healer wanted to do-- they wouldn't-- they knew that
he was a priest, and they didn't want to do that.
And then he will say, please, help me.
And so the healer will have compassion
and they will do some remedies and some invocations.
And then he will call the Spanish authorities
and they will be all arrested because this
was against the Catholic faith that was imposed on Mexico.
And so I call it "Era Un Cabrón."
[LAUGHTER] SOB.
But you know what?
I believe I'm a descendant from de Alarcón.
OK?
And so what I did, 400 years later,
was to go to the library, opened his manuscript,
they has 700 different spells, retrieve
of some of those spells, and then undo
what has been done to us.
So reclaim the Mesoamerican tradition, 100 years later,
and to say I wanted to redeem my ancestors.
So I'm going to read a letter that I wrote to Hernando Ruiz
de Alarcón, who lived in 1643--
excuse me, 1587 to 1648.
I will read the first-- the letter in Spanish
and then read the English translation.
Ololiuqui are magical seeds.
That if you take your ololiuqui, you'll
be talking to the gods for a whole week.