#coca divination

Today -- blue florescent hummingbirds, wild plants, rain.  

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I had a coca reading yesterday. The new friend that I met on the way to San Blas suggested we do a divination trade: I read his tarot cards and he read the coca leaves for me. But before we could read the coca leaves we needed to go to the “witch market”, as he called it, to buy new leaves, especially for me, my family and my health. So we decided to meet up near El Mercado de San Pedro Sunday morning.

  On my way to the market, there was this man sitting just beyond the archway into the plaza with something very strange displayed in front of him. It was this thick and heavy dark earthy spiraling bark-like substance about an inch thick and spiraled about five feet along the cobblestones in front of him. The man was working with a part of it, using his knife to cut and extract a deep red juice from it, which poured into a bowl between his feet. I was floored. What. In the good green earth. Is that?

  I squatted next to him and he told me its name, Sangre de Grado, blood of the dragon. I asked for a taste – he put the dark red juice on my finger. It was incredibly astringent; made my mouth pucker and skin shiver. He poured some of the liquid onto his hand, “mira, mira”, rubbed it in and scraped it off with his blade, forming a light pink foam-like substance that he said would help heal wounds. Apparently its been used in the jungle for many thousands of years. The man said it was also good to heal ulcers in the stomach. After doing a brief google search about Sangre de Grado, it seems that its uses range from acne treatment to soothing a sore throat.

  It was good to see Pacco, a familiar face, in a place so unfamiliar. We walked behind that main market to the streets where it seem like most of the common folk do their shopping. It was packed with people. People selling and people buying. Clothes, flowers, food, trinkets. We swam through the crowds to a few places he knew to buy good coca, most of which were closed, maybe because it was Sunday. He pointed out the witch stops to me, for if I came back I would know where they were. We finally found a lady with three huge bags of coca in front of her. Apparently, they were all different kinds, but I couldn’t really tell a difference. Pacco bought a bag and off we went.

  Before the reading, he took me on historical tour of Cusco, of the Incan remains and cosmology within the city. There’s a rock in one of the walls, famous for its 12 edges. But before we got there, Paco showed me a stone with 13 edges and said, “Everyone is so excited about the stone with 12 edges, but here is one with 13 and no one knows about it.” He also showed me the alleged smallest stone of the walls, that helps form a kind of swastika, all smooth from the probably millions of fingers that have touched it. He took me to the wall of seven serpents and to the place where the serpent, puma and condor were shaped into the wall out of huge stones. The whole city of Cusco is shaped like a puma and there is a temple right where the puma’s genitals would be. He took me there too. It was a tall wall, made of classic Incan masonry, with seemingly darker stones. I had a déjà vu moment.

  Finally, after my forehead, nose, chin and chest were thoroughly burned by the sun, we went inside to do the coca ritual. It was a ritual indeed – he set up the altar, honored the directions, the sacreds of Andean cosmology, and included his Q’ero textiles. He introduced the practice, how he learned from his grandmother when he was very young, and the importance of the leaves in depth, saying how the leaves were like the tears of the sun and had many uses for medicine, divination, religion, and textiles. He said I could ask anything I wanted to, so I asked three questions and watched intently how he extracted meaning from the way the leaves fell. I asked about studying plants and the leaves fell in a way that indicated good fortune and una camina sagrada, a sacred walk, to the chakana, the iconic symbol of the Andes symbolic of the three worlds, sacred medicine, and the cosmos. Like the trunk of a tree, my study of plants would hold space for learning much more.