Prechtel, Martín

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PRECHTEL, Martín

PERSONAL:

Born in NM; married third wife Hanna Keller. Education: Attended St. Johns College, Santa Fe.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Prechtel, P.O. Box 28474, Santa Fe, NM 87592.

CAREER:

Writer, artist, musician, and teacher.

WRITINGS:

Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: A Mayan Shaman's Journey to the Heart of the Indigenous Soul, Jeremy P. Tarcher (New York, NY), 1998.

Long Life, Honey in the Heart: A Story of Initiation and Eloquence from the Shores of a Mayan Lake, Jeremy P. Tarcher (New York, NY), 1999.

The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun: Ecstasy and Time, Yellow Moon Press (Cambridge, MA), 2001.

The Toe Bone and the Tooth, Thorsons (London, England), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS:

Martín Prechtel's books recount the path of his life, from growing up on a reservation in New Mexico to becoming the spiritual leader of a Tzutujil Mayan village in Guatemala. His writings explore the traditions of that village, and describe the survival of what he terms "the indigenous soul." Prechtel's first book, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: A Mayan Shaman's Journey to the Heart of the Indigenous Soul, describes his initiation as a shaman; his second book, Long Life, Honey in the Heart, focuses on rites undertaken in his village. The third of Prechtel's autobiographical works, The Toe Bone and the Tooth, weaves Mayan myth with the story of his departure from war-torn Gautemala to the United States, where he now resides.

Prechtel was born to an Irish-Swiss paleontologist and a Canadian Indian teacher and activist; he grew up on a Pueblo Indian reservation in New Mexico. After the death of his mother, Prechtel traveled extensively in Mexico and Guatemala, and when he happened upon the village of Santiago Atitlán, a man approached him and told him he had been waiting for him. This man, Nicholas Chiviliu, a Tzutujil Mayan shaman, made Prechtel his apprentice, and Prechtel gained positions of increasing leadership in the village. In an interview with Derrick Jensen for the Sun Online, Prechtel explained: "I lived in Santiago Atitlán, in Guatemala, for many years and made my life there. I was married, with children. Then, when the U.S.-backed death squads came, more than eighteen hundred villagers were killed within seven years: shot, beaten, tortured, poisoned, chopped up, starved to death in holes, beheaded, disappeared. This took place in a village where, prior to 1979, most people had never heard a gunshot. I had a price on my head and was almost killed on three different occasions in the 1980s. I returned to the U.S. and brought my family with me." When Prechtel returned to the United States with few resources, he met poet Robert Bly, who helped him and was an early admirer.

Prechtel has gone on to become an author, teacher, and storyteller whose books are studied in several college classrooms. He takes great interest in "giving his books to people in prison, and talking with homeless people," according to Carolyn Burdet in Kindred Spirit. He gives workshops throughout the world.

In his online interview with Jensen, Prechtel stated: "In a sense, all of us—even the most untechnological, spiritual, and benign peoples—are constantly wrecking the world. The question is: how do we respond to that destruction? If we respond as we do in modern culture, by ignoring the spiritual debt that we create just by living, then that debt will come back to bite us, hard. But there are other ways to respond. One is to try to repay that debt by giving gifts of beauty and praise to the sacred, to the invisible world that gives us life."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Kindred Spirit, spring, 2003, Carolyn Burdet, interview with Prechtel and review of The Toe Bone and the Tooth, p. 22.

Library Journal, July, 1998, Elizabeth Salt, review of Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: A Mayan Shaman's Journey to the Heart of the Indigenous Soul, p. 94; December, 1999, Joan W. Gartland, review of Long Life, Honey in the Heart: A Story of Initiation and Eloquence from the Shores of a Mayan Lake, p. 148; February, 2003, Debbie Bogenschutz, review of The Toe Bone and the Tooth, p. 145.