The following article is excerpted from Fate Fortune and Mysticism in the Peruvian Amazon, available from Inner Traditions.
The naipes are used often by
folk healers who cure with herbs or psychedelic plants in a society in which
witchcraft beliefs exist and people often expect that illness is caused by the
evil will of others. The cards become a psychological adjunct to a healer's
therapy, a sort of intake procedure to learn more about a client so that the
healer can appear to be omnipotent and replete with knowledge and power. We
cannot talk about the naipes as a divination technique without understanding
the context in which these cards are used, particularly among the urban poor of
Belen, who live in abject poverty in their shantytown. Healers are able to
manipulate situations of misfortune that dog the steps of the urban poor as the
healers diagnose illness and misfortune, appearing all-powerful and worthy of
their fees.
I first ran into the naipes in
Peru when, as a graduate student, I was sent by the Institute of Social
Psychiatry at San Marcos University on the north coast of Peru to a special village,
Salas, an hour and a half outside of Chiclayo. It was said that there more than
a hundred folk healers used, in healing rituals, the San Pedro cactus laden
with mescaline. Attending a healing ceremony one night in Salas, I heard a folk
healer tell his wife to bring the naipes down to the area where the patients
were seated. Having a long-term interest in fortune-telling, I asked the healer
to tell me more about the naipes. He brushed me off, but this sparked my
interest, which had been dormant for a number of years. When I arrived in Peru,
I was game for divination techniques. In the marketplace in the nearby city of
Chiclayo, an hour away from Salas, I purchased a pamphlet said to be written by
Napoleon's spiritual adviser, Madame LeNormand, as well as other leaflets
without attribution of an author. Some of the other pamphlets were said to be Italian,
French, or Spanish in origin.
Madame LeNormand was born in a small village in France in 1773
and arrived in Paris when she was twenty-one years old. She opened a salon and
read the fortunes of a number of highly placed individuals who were
politically active in the French Revolution, including Robespierre. Apparently,
Josephine de Beauharnais, later married to Napoleon Bonaparte, was one of her
clients, and Madame Marie was reputed to have regularly read the naipes for
Napoleon.
Most of the booklets
based on her system agree on basic principles. Certain days of the week are
most propitious for a reading — Friday, Saturday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, for example.
The client must cut the cards only with the left hand, which is nearest to the
heart, or else the fortune obtained is thought not to be accurate. The person
who takes it upon himself to read the cards must be sincere and strong and not
frivolous. This card reader should also be observant and wash his hands and
face before using the cards. Dropping a card while reading a fortune is said to
bring bad luck. The system provided by Madame LeNormand was reprinted in four
additional booklets. It is not the actual content of the system that is
important to analyze. If we can get to the heart of the divining cards by using
a rational mathematical probability statistic and examine the technique in
light of what I have called an "ethno-projective device," we can
learn a good deal about traditional folk psychotherapy.
The naipes help healers to tap in
to the causality of illness while, at the same time, allowing them to present
themselves as all-powerful. This cannot help but dispel fear, anxiety, and
self-doubts in their patients and provide a high expectation of cure. This
personal influence of healers increases their manipulation of the patients'
anxieties and provides a path toward eventual cure.
Witchcraft Beliefs and Illness
The residents of Belen
recognize and openly discuss illness they believe to be caused by the malice of
others. This becomes important in understanding the motivation of Beleños to
seek out their fortune and often to discover who has caused them to be bewitched.
Informants speak of malice everywhere-for instance, the evil will of neighbors
and relatives who frequently seek out a witch to cause harm. Healers who use
the hallucinogenic plant ayahuasca receive visits from patients who not only
want to be healed from an illness but also may want to bewitch someone in
particular for purposes of revenge. Some curanderos reject the
proposition to do evil, but others specialize in the use of these hallucinogens
for that purpose — the brujo (witch) is socially
shunned and secretive. Many ayahuasca healers themselves read the naipes at an
initial interview of a client who is readying to take the hallucinogenic purge.
This is done in order to get an idea of the stress facing the client. Again and
again, I observed men and women talking out loud during a reading, exclaiming
that such and such a misfortune would be laid at the feet of a mother-in-law,
an envious neighbor, and the like, making it easy to see just what stresses
were present in that person's interpersonal environment.
Regarding witches, this class of
individuals was known to harm others. Unlike African societies, in which
witchcraft was suspected but never proved, in the Amazon, these witches are
ready to take hard cash in advance to harm a client's enemy. They keep a little
book in which they write down the details of the psychic "hit." Listed below
are the main illnesses suffered by the Beleños, which often propelled them to
seek help, first by a curioso, who reads the
naipes, and subsequently by an ayahuasca healer to reverse the magical spell
and return it to the perpetrator.
Susto
This illness is found
throughout Peru and Latin America and includes many cases of a profound alteration
of metabolism or nervous disorders. It originates in a violent impression of
fear. Many people believe that susto has a supernatural
origin, which is produced when a person's soul magically separates from the
body.
Daño
This is an illness that is believed
to be due to a witchcraft hex. Daño has various symptoms
and chronic development. It can be caused by motives of vengeance or envy. In
the Amazon, it is believed that daño is caused by a powerful medicine thrown on
the threshold of a house in the early hours of the dawn. It can cause a period
of bad luck, called saladera. Witches use ayahuasca, the plant
hallucinogen, to cause this illness. The ayahuasquero claims to fly
through the air and cause incurable illnesses and horrible misfortunes to his client's
enemies. Some believe that witches control a series of spirits, whom they call
upon to cause the evil. Still others believe that a thorn can be sent through
the air, like a lance, toward an enemy. The witch is paid in advance on behalf
of the vengeful client.
Pulsario
This illness is marked by
symptoms of anxiety, hyperactivity, and inquietude without precise causes. In
general, it attacks women. Sometimes it is experienced as a tumor localized in
the mouth of the stomach. It is a hard mass that can cause pain, anguish, or
anger that cannot be expressed.
Despecho
This is the rancor that a
person feels toward another, which can provide the necessary motivation to seek
out a witch. Like daño, various bodily pains are attributed to the malice of
one person against another.
Mal de Ojo
This syndrome is found
throughout the Peruvian Amazon and all of Latin America, and is known in
English as the evil eye. It includes symptoms of nausea,
vomiting, diarrhea, fevers, weight loss, insomnia, and depression. It is
motivated by envy and afflicts children and adults whose personal beauty has
caused them to be victims of the evil eye. Beleños believe that their neighbors
or relatives envy whatever good fortune they may have. Anything can attract
envy — a light-skinned complexion, appearance of good health, indications that a
person is eating well, and so forth. A person can provoke the malice of others
if he has an amorous spouse or if his house is free from rancor. The naipes
reading functions as a diagnostic tool as much for the client as for the
ayahuasquero. Clearly, the client has his suspicions, but the answer to one of
the three questions posed by the client toward the end of the reading generally
confirms his suspicions as to the cause of an illness. In Western medicine, we
expect an answer to the questions "How did my body break down?" "What are the
mechanisms?" "What medicine/technology must I engage in order to get better?"
In Peru, there is a different focus among the urban poor. The questions they
ask include, "Why am I ill, as opposed to someone else?" "Who is the
perpetrator who has caused my body to break down in one way or another?" "Why
me?" Any diagnostic tool such as the naipes reading or an ayahuasca session can
be called upon. The role of the ayahuasca healer is to return the evil to the
perpetrator before beginning to treat the illness. This explains the haste with
which people want their fortunes told: Tell me now, right now!
Historical Data on the Naipes
Printed playing cards have been
traced by Alfred Kroeber, one of the important founders of anthropology, to
tenth-century China, and they appear four centuries later, almost simultaneously,
in several European countries such as Italy, France, Germany, and Spain.
Kroeber suggested that either the Mongols or the Muslims might have transmitted
such cards from China to Christian nations, despite the fact that Islam forbids
all gambling. Another theory, mentioned already, is that Hindustani-speaking
Gypsies, according to Papus and Levi, brought the cards from India to Europe. A
game of French playing cards called tarot, used in divination and popular during
the Middle Ages, was believed to have resulted from an adaptation of a card
game called naibi (also referred to as nayb
and known in Italy in the fourteenth century), to which was added a series of
point cards. There are many theories about the origin of the naipes, some
linking the cards to the minor arcana of the tarot or the esoteric
Jewish kabbalah traditions. In the naipes deck, there are three picture cards
in each of four suites: the King, the Caballo (Horse), and the Sota (Page). The
Pages are used to represent women, and the Caballo and King represent men with
different traits and characteristics. The Jack in Western card decks is
replaced by the Sota (Page). The twenty-two major tarot cards are said to be
related to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
If we turn to the dictionary
of the Royal Spanish Academy, the term naipes is etymologically
derived from the Arab word naib, "he who represents,"
or laib,
"he who plays." Mention of the cards occurs in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries and may have been introduced into Europe by the Crusaders. The game
of naipes was said to symbolize the feudal structure of society. By 1377, the
naipes were in wide use. The Gypsies were the first to use the cards for
divination. If playing cards used in divination were known in fourteenth-century
Spain, it would not be at all difficult, despite the lack of historical
documentation, to trace the movement of such divinatory aids to Spanish
America. Certainly, the Conquest period was a time in which men seeking
adventure and wealth in unknown lands might be expected to take gaming cards
along with them. A deck of forty or forty-eight cards, small and easily portable,
without doubt found its way into the Hispanic world at the time of the sixteenth-century
Conquest. On a trip to Argentina in 1968, I was fortunate to visit the National
History Museum in Buenos Aires, where I held in my palm a very early deck of
naipes, hand painted on parchment material, small enough to fit into someone's
pocket or baggage.
A famous historian of Peru with
Spanish and Incan heritage, Garcilaso de la Vega, published a drawing that
shows abuses practiced by members of the clergy who gamed at cards. Still in
the realm of speculation, we can only surmise that these cards became absorbed
into Peruvian folk-healing practices. Today these cards are used throughout
Latin America, not only for fortune-telling but also for entertainment and
gambling.
Folk Medicine and the
Naipes
Folk healers such as those in
Peru treat many psychosomatic disorders. Native healers are most effective when
there are psychosomatic and other psychological components to illness that have
been precipitated by social complications. Such folk healers may be in a
position to be more effective if their training and judgment from past
experience predispose them toward a higher expectation of emotionally and
culturally precipitated illness. Native healers have prestige, and they offer
reassurance and suggestions to their patients. Any divinatory technique such as
that of the naipes can tap in to culturally induced stresses, which contribute
to illness. A healer who utilizes a technique such as the naipes can remove
from the sick person agency and responsibility for a decision and cast it upon
the heavens. If the healer is able to manipulate the divinatory technique in a
clever manner, he can understand the source of the disorder, which can be part
of conflict-filled and anxiety-laden social relations.
What is clear is that the naipes
are not simple amusement for the clients but rather are used by them and
healers as a diagnostic technique, especially when most clients believe that
illness is caused by evil willing or witchcraft machinations on the part of
"others." The healers manipulate a category that I call misfortune cards to
plumb the depths of interpersonal conflicts, material loss, and sickness or
death of loved ones to make their diagnosis.
Teaser image by rahego, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
