Tall Candle, 1-5


p. 3 a visit to a living female saint

"[Her mother, a Tarahumara woman,] once took my mother to see Teresa, the Saint of Cabora ... . [The Tarahumara woman] believed in the saint".

pp. 10-11 suawa`ka & sierpa

p. 10

"argolitos (called suawa`ka ...) in Yaqui ... come from another world, traveling through the air so fast you just see a little light and hear a "whoosh."

p. 11

If he comes close, you can see a long rope trailing behind.


Sierpas are creatures that live in caves and caverns, growing bigger and bigger. They were once people who committed incest ... . When they get very large they leave their caves and go to the sea with a terrible roar. The earth shakes. ... Once they go to the sea, they never return to their cave. ...


All argolitos carry long ropes coiled over their shoulder. ... . ... the chivatero [goatherder] ... was the son-in-law of the rain."

pp. 11-13 wondre-working crystal ball transported by whirlwind

p. 11

""it is magic." {Referring to a bean or kernel miraculous found on one's body; apparently placed thereat while hypnotized by a crystalball-controlling plant-spirit. How that miracle-worker achieved this ability :} He told me that ... he went to a spring ..., and in the bottom of the spring ... he saw one round

p. 12

... and crystal clear ... . ... Since then he always carried the crystal marble, and when he had it he could do wonderful tricks. ...

[The demise of this miracle-worker :] The boss man said, "... I saw something like a whirlwind where ... was working. When I went to the place, he was dead. But he was not hurt." We ... all ... heard what the boss man said. My father ... said ... " ... I guess that is what the whirlwind was; the Devil came and got the marble." ...

p. 13

I said, "That man {viz., the Devil} comes to see me every night ... . ... He shows me many wonderful things each night." ... it was true."

p. 18 cure by sucking; exorcism of a ghost

"To cure a bewitched person, he sucked the affected part of the body, removing ... some ... thing, which he put in a glass of water to which he added chiltipiquines (small, hot chilis)."

{Evidently, the spirit doing the curing is a chili-plant spirit.}

"A ghost scared her; she ran ... crying out that a skeleton had climbed on her shoulders. No one else saw it.

{There is a Bauddha story of a land where men are carried on the shoulders of women.}

Mari`a ... began gathering the ingredients for the remedy. ... The last thing she did was to shave up some Brazil wood ... and make the bright red drink ... . My grandmother's treatment was good".

{Apparently, the spirit of the Brazil tree assisted in the remedy.}

p. 20 witching-olla

"The way the witching olla was prepared ..., was to take a little olla and put in

all sorts of thorns, ...

poisonous herbs,

toloache (jimsonweed),

the milk of the howocuta bush,

some leaves from the Don Juan plant,

{Personification of this plant is evidently the source of Carlos Castan~eda's character "Don Juan"; apparently a correlative of the plant "Mari-Juana".}

and maybe some ground-up roots of a plant the Yaquis call ochani.

The olla is put out in the bush, up in the fork of a tree. In two or three days it starts to boil, and on the sixth night it explodes with colored lights like firecrackers."

"Once we came upon an olla sitting in the fork of a mesquite tree. ...

When ... and I found the olla, it was boiling strongly, giving off a terrible stench. I am sure it was almost ready to explode ... . ...

Pimas and Papagos make these "firecracker" witching ollas. Years later ... around Yuma,

lights could be seen in the sky almost every night, and my Papago friends told me they were caused by witching ollas."

{like unto skyrockets?}

p. 22 Spaniards are bewitched

"We would take a branch of the Don Juan plant ..., put it on the ground, and throw mesquite thorns at it, like darts. The Don Juan plant is soft, and the thorns could stick into it.

We also made mud figures (monitos de lodo), called them Mexicans {Spaniards, not "Mexicans" -- the only true Mexica being Nahuatl, Aztec}, and

shot them down with ... blow guns made out of lengths of carrizo cane."

{In tropical countries, blowguns are employed mainly to shoot down monkeys out of trees : so, Spaniards are here being aequated with monkeys, fit only to be killed.}

p. 22 throat-ailment is cured

"She often had to cure ..., who was subject to the throat ailment that has killed so many Yaquis. When he lost his voice, ... would gather chollas, pound them until she had a soapy substance that she put in hot water, and give the mixture to ... for three days, and his voice would be all right again."

p. 24 prophecies by a sabio

"a great sabio lived in Ranchito at that time, although he belonged to the pueblo to Vicam. His name was Jose` Mari`a No`teme, and

he was very, very old.

{"I>itoi ... was ... a very old man" (L&LP&PI, p. 309).}

No one slept when he talked, and he would talk all night long. When he arrived, ... he blew ... to the east, then to the north, west, and south. Jose` Mari`a No`teme told us of many things that would happen in the future; nearly all the things he said have come true and all of his predictions will come to pass in due time. ... He said the Yaquis would someday return to their rightful land, and they have.

He said that the Yaqui River would dry up, as it has, due to a big dam that took all the water out of our river ... .

He said there would be carriages that ran without mules, and soon we saw automobiles.

He told of big things that would fly like birds. ... Everyone was terrified of the [ae:ro]plane, but I knew what it was because Jose` Mari`a No`teme had said it would come.

He spoke of big iron balls that would fall from the sky ..., and there are bombs. ...

Many people say that all these same things were said long ago, before there was a Yaqui tribe, by the palo seco. The older people said that there used to be many great sabios among the Yaquis".

pp. 24-5 father was newsbringer from the guerrillas, and grandmother was news source to (spy for) the guerrillas

p. 24

"My father, Miguel, slipped in a night every few weeks, bringing news of people in the Sierra,

p. 25

and mama grande would pass along this information to their relatives in town. One of the people who often came to see mama grande was ... the torocoyori brother of Jose[`] Gonza`lez, who was at that time living with my mother at the Copete Mine. He would tell mama grande when the soldiers were going to round up Yaqui ..., and she would ... hide me ... . He would tell her when certain ... mountains were to be [invaded by the governmental military] ..., and she would send word to the Sierra Yaquis to leave that part of the mountains for a while."

{Torocoyori were paid agents of the government. Some of them (as in this case) were double-agents, spies for the rebels who were publicly working for, but effectively infiltrating, the government only in order to obtain secret information about governmental anti-guerrilla plans, in order to convey such information to the guerrillas privately. There were many such double-agents in Vietnam infiltrating the U.S. military during the Vietnam conflict, who were publicly being paid by the U.S. military, but privately conveying to the rebels (Viet-Cong) secret information about U.S. military anti-guerilla plans : such information was highly useful in thwarting and eventually overthrowing U.S.-supported systematic oppression of the working-class there -- soon almost every U.S. Army patrol into the hinterland was being efficiently ambushed, until at length the terrified U.S. military forces were withdrawn in abject disgrace from that now-liberated country.}

pp. 28-9 events of 1904 to 1910 in Sonora

p. 28

"Hacienda slaves were freed in the 1910 revolution, and there are stories about the freed slaves turning on their overseers and the hacienda owners".


"One Yaqui woman in Guaymas was very important to the Yaquis being deported. Her name was Matilde Anciano. ... She persuaded the soldiers to free a number of [Yaki-s]. ... After she died in 1908, there was no one to talk for the Yaquis at Guaymas.


They say she was a marimacha, preferring young girls {young women} to men, and I guess that is true."

{Perhaps tribadic women tend to be more resolutely opposed to atrocities than other women.}


"It was also in 1904 that a young man named ... burned himself up. ... I think the reason ... is because the maestros, in every ceremony, tell everyone that ... they will have to burn for salvation. I have heard of other Yaquis who burned themselves up for salvation." {I.e., for salvation of the Yaki folk from being oppressed by the hypocritical greed-maddened ploutokratic ruling-class of Spaniards.}

{In Vietnam there were many people who, in protest against U.S.-organized atrocities, deliberately killed themselves by incinerating their own bodies. This had no discernable effect on the reprobate conscience of vicious American aggressors, however.}


Late in 1904, my father, Miguel, got word that Governor ... {a most notorious persecutor against the Yaki} would be at Gavila`n on a certain day. He and ...

p. 29

found a good place to hide near the road, and when the governor ... passed by, they shot."

{If more indigenes had done this, oppression would have ceased sooner than it did.}

p. 39 rabbits & deer who are themselves brujos (animal-nahual/nagual of a hominoid brujo?)

"He shot an unusually large rabbit about six times, and it would not die. ... In about two weeks he died. ...

{I myself one evening in our yard (in rural GA) saw a rabbit which I thought was material until it started ascending at an oblique angleinto the air (whereupon I realized that it must have been praeternatural).}

If a rabbit shakes its ears from side to side, you should not shoot it, or it will make you sick and maybe kill you ... . ... Deer with red and black hooves are brujos. Rabbits with worms (gusanos) in their neck are brujos."

p. 40 a guerrilla couple

"... ... of Torim was a Yaqui soldier[ess]. Everyone called her the Sen~ora of the Sierra. She was married to ... ..., a Yaqui captain, also from Torim. These two always walked together in the Sierra ... . They came to Tucson for supplies in 1907 and again in 1912. Both times they stayed at our house because they were old friends of my father's from the Sierra and from Torim."

p. 44 seeing a bulto

"About dark one evening ... I saw a bulto (apparition or ghost) walk out of the trees ahead. ... The bulto walked in front of me until I got within sight of home, and then disappeared."

p. 44-5 bewitching-to-death, by lifting him aloft at a truce-conference, a notorious Spaniard persecutor of the Yaki

p. 44

"General Luis Bule and Captain Santiago Veteme, Yaquis, stood on either side of I... and Captain Francisco (Chico) Preciado stood behind him. Yaqui soldiers were told to surrender ... . ...


General Bule and Chico Preciado picked I... up by his arms ... . ... was so scared ... . ...

{cf. the lifting aloft of a wooden idol of a saint in QD, p. 191}

p. 45

The scare that I... received at Pitahaya eventually killed him. A bad scare ... medical doctors are unable to cure ..., as it is not a natural sickness. ... He died ... somewhere around Mazatla`n."

{Perhaps the hoisting aloft of idols can enable a deadly bewitching-power.}

QD = Heather Valencia & Rolly Kent : Queen of Dreams. Simon & Schuster, NY, 1991.

p. 46-7 new praesident of the country; freeing of slaves

p. 46

"Porfirio Di`az had been run out of the country. Madero was president. The Yaquis had helped him to be president because he said he was for the

p. 47

Indians ... . ... The ... torocoyoris who had been informing on other Yaquis to the ... federal officials were very sorry to hear that the Yaqui slaves were freed."

pp. 50-1 father's woman-friend in the Sierra

p. 50

"In 1914 my father decided to go to the Sierra again. ...

p. 51

This time he took along combs, ribbons, scissors, needles, thread, and cloth for ..., a mountain woman he had lived with on his 1912 trip."

p. 51 El juez justo {cf. "Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgement" (Euangelion according to Ioannes 7:24)}

"I once had a copy of El justo juez, but I did not like it. You have to say the long oraciones all the way through without any mistakes, or else it backfires. People who are able to recite them have great protection, especially on dark nights."

http://forum.luckymojo.com/working-with-just-judge-justo-juez--t9140s30.html

http://www.hechizos.us/tag/oracion-del-santo-justo-juez/

http://larosa.bligoo.es/content/view/5298836/La-oracion-milagrosa-del-Justo-Juez.html#.Urssf9JDtqB

pp. 52-3 move to another house after a death

p. 52

"Yaquis do not like to live where someone has died. Sometimes the ghost of the dead person will come back to the same family, and most people are afraid of ghosts. Therefore ...

p. 53

we moved to a new house which we built about one-half mile to the north of the first, closer to the river."

pp. 54-5 & 59 his girl-friends

p. 54

"I was getting only three or four hours of sleep each night, but I never seemed to get tired. ...

p. 55

They thought, too, that I was going to see the girls. I was going to see them. ...

{These "girls" (the same ones as mentioned on p. 59) must have been in possession of miraculous powers, wherewith they lessened his need for sleep.}

p. 59

I had five Mexican {Spanish} girl friends in Sasco ... . One said, "... Why did you marry that fool girl? She is like an alligator!" The next day I saw another, and she said, "... Why did you marry that wildcat?""

{Perhaps these "girl friends" expected him formally to introduce the woman, whom he had married in the church, to them, commanding her to respect and to honor them as superior in nature to her. (The wild animals may be mentioned as indications (hints) that absence of appropriate respect is similar to the attitude of untamed beasts.)}

p. 60 after an accident injuring his body (and from which his relatives had been told by the medic that he would die) : apparition of praeternatural woman (goddess) who therewith recovered him from the proximity of death

"I dreamed that a beautiful woman, dressed completely in white, was standing at my feet.

... she said, "you will live. Look at this tooth." ... it was my tooth that she showed me."

[cf. p. 91 infra : "he took out all my teeth"]

p. 65 must not view interrment of kinfolk's corpse

"We all followed, walking, to the cemetery. When we got there, the family went some distance from the graves, because it is bad luck for a relative to see a body {corpse} put in a grave."

pp. 71 & 83 trickery by priests; his belief in magic

p. 71

"The first [Catholic] priests to the Yaquis long ago tricked the Yaquis into having [Catholic-style] fiestas and believing in [the Catholic] God."

p. 83

"I never did go to the church. The reason was, I did not believe in the church ... . I believed only in magic".


Jane Holden Kelley & William Curry Holden : The Tall Candle : the personal chronicle of a Yaqui Indian. U of NE Pr, Lincoln, 1971.