Excerpt: José Fidencio Sintora Constantino, El Niño Fidencio

Another excerpt from my revised and much-expanded introduction to my translation of Francisco I. Madero's Spritist Manual (forthcoming in paperback, Kindle and iBook this year; the link goes to current first edition available only on Kindle). Francisco I. Madero was the leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico 1911-1913. As Mexican historian Enrique Krauze eloquently argues in his biography, Francisco I. Madero: Místico de la libertad, in the case of Madero, "Politics does not displace Spiritism, it is born of it." So, whatever one's personal opinion of Spiritism may be, Madero's Spiritist Manual of 1911 (written in 1909-1910), becomes a key document for understanding the Mexican Revolution.

Note: The excerpt refers to Pachita, the Mexican "psychic surgeon"-- another excerpt about her will be posted soon.

José Fidencio Sintora Constantino
El Niño Fidencio 

And then, as does anyone who explores Spiritism in 20^th century Mexico, I came to the enigma of José Fidencio Sintora Constantino, the “Niño Fidencio,” who laughingly predicted his own sudden death in 1938. As a healer, Fidencio is more famous than Teresa Urrea, the “Santa de Cabora.” Throughout the north of Mexico and in U.S. Chicano communities, it is not uncommon to see, right alongside those to Jesus, San Judas Tadeo (St. Jude Thaddeus), and, inevitably, Mexico’s patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe, candles, pictures, and even elaborate plastic flower-draped altars dedicated to Fidencio. Called niño or “child,” because of his high-pitched voice and

gentle, playful nature, as a boy, Fidencio was taken underwing by a German-born Spiritist named Teodoro von Wernich, who recognized and encouraged his development as a mediumistic healer. As news of Fidencio’s healing powers spread, increasing numbers of pilgrims arrived in his remote desert home in Espinazo, Nuevo León, so many that the place became a tent city, with its own post office, and far more substantial than Teresa Urrea’s colossal gatherings, or “romerías” of Mayo Indians, Yaquis and mestizos all yearning for her magic touch, that had so disturbed the Porfirian authorities. The apogee of Fidencio’s career came in 1928: President Plutarco Elías Calles, seeking healing for a skin ailment, pulled into Espinazo on his private train. 

Espinazo was not in my travel plans, but I was able to visit from my armchair by means of Juan Farré’s documentary, Niño Fidencio: de Roma a Espinazo. Ancient ranch people, their voices slow, eyes rheumy, remembered Fidencio, contradicting each other about the color of his skin. One said the Niño cured President Calles by slathering him in honey. The camera panned slowly over the jars immortalizing the tumors the Niño had extracted using his specially-chosen piece of broken glass. An old blind woman who had known Fidencio told the story of a boy who had been swimming in the ocean with two friends, and when the two were eaten by a whale, he was so shocked he could not longer speak. In Espinazo, Fidencio put him on a swing, pushing him so high he screamed and was cured. Another old woman said the Niño operated on cataracts using a razor blade. Another remembered that he fed the lepers boiled coyote and boiled vulture, but they all died anyway.

More techniques: the Niño would smack people with an apple or a tejocote. On others he would sick his mountain lion, a declawed pet named Concha. He might climb up onto a swing, holding a paralytic close to his heart, and then, when the swing stopped, the man would walk—said one devotee.

The variety in Fidencio’s repertoire seemed endless: plants and herbs and the Charquito, or “little puddle.” In a sunny contemporary scene in the Charquito, men who might have been truck drivers spread their arms wide and fell backwards; a circle of pilgrims, the water jostling above their their knees, held hands, closed their eyes and prayed. Zombie-like men, women, children, hair and faces covered in mud, sloshed through the waist-high murk. Alongside the Charquita, to the pound of drums, Aztec dancers with headdresses of quetzal feathers and rattles on their ankles stomped and whirled. On the ground, a teenager slowly rolled, over and over, his T-shirt becoming yellower and yellower with dirt.

Fidencio, said another of the old timers, knew he was going to die. But he said, “Don’t bury me right away because I am going to rise on the third day.” With the news of his death, pilgrims rushed in from all over northern Mexico and parts beyond to witness the miracle. But their “saint” did not revive, or at least, not in the way they were expecting. Some of the fidencistas believed they could now enter a trance and receive his spirit, so that, through them, the Niño could continue his work. These materias, or mediums, call themselves cajitas, or “little boxes,” and they wear white robes trimmed in gold and capes the colors of popsicles. Their modus operandi is to stand close to their patient, a hand on his shoulder, and whisper into his ear words of compassion and instruction in Fidencio’s babylike voice. I watched as they, too, shiny capes and all, waded into the Charquito. Someone dumped a bucket of mud over a child’s head. More men fell backwards, stiff as planks, splash, into the chocolately soup.

The film’s finale was rare footage, a scratchy black-and-white flickering, of Fidencio, from on high, pitching fruit at his followers; then, like a rock star, writhing over a mosh pit of their arms and, everywhere arising from that carpet-like tangle of humanity, hands, more hands, hands like hungry spiders on his hair, his hip, his shoulder, his foot.

Don Francisco I. Madero also became a healer who ministered to those too poor to pay a doctor, but no, he did not perform “psychic surgery” nor thrash around in a mud pit or chuck apples at anybody. He would employ simple hands-on healing and hypnotism, which he apparently learned from French books, and homeopathy, a German doctor’s innovation of treating illnesses with remedies of “like with like,” tiny white sugar pills infused with extremely  diluted substances.

When Madero boarded his ship to Mexico, neither Fidencio nor Pachita had yet been born. Teresa Urrea, the “Santa de Cabora,” heroine to the Tomochitecos, had just fled to Nogales, Arizona. Madero’s fellow mystics would prove to be a more educated, more literary-minded type: among them, Porfirio Díaz’s own Secretary of Foreign Relations, Ignacio Mariscal.

Onward now to Madero’s metaphysical odyssey. As you know, it is going to end in a slick of blood.

Copyright C.M. Mayo all rights reserved.

>Visit the book's webpage, with more excerpts, Q & A, and resources for researchers.

Francisco I. Madero's Commentary on the Baghavad-Gita (or Bhaghavad-Gita)

Vasconcelos

One of the most crucial things I discuss in the forthcoming revised and expanded introduction to my translation of Madero's Spiritist Manual of 1911 is his treatment of the Hindu holy book, the Baghavad-Gita (also spelled Bhagavad-Gita, and with or without the dash and various accents). Madero's commentary was originally published in the Mexican Spiritist magazine, Helios, Tomo VII, 1912-- while he was serving as President of Mexico-- and it is reprinted in José Vasconcelo's Estudios Indostánicos,  of which I found the third edition of 1938. Herewith Vasconcelos' introduction (in italics), then Madero's commentary, and finally, in italics again, Vasconcelos' conclusion. English translation coming ASAP.

(Note that Madero here refers to the warrior Bima, but used Bhima with the added "h" as his pen name for the Spiritist Manual. What was going on with that h, I have no idea. The bold text is as as I found it.)

Ya hemos indicado en los apuntes históricos que el Mahabharatta corresponde al segundo periódo del pensamiento indostánico. No se conoce la fecha del poema, pero por las doctrinas y referencias que contiene, se deduce que es posterior a los Upanishads y probablemente anterior al budismo. El episodio más importante del Mahabharatta es el libro conocido con el nombre Baghavad-Gita. Nada se sabe del autor de la obra sino que se llama Vyasa, un nombre, por lo demás, muy común en la literatura hindú. El poema está escrito en sánscrito.

Comienza con un diálogo entre Arjuna, el jefe de un ejército y Krishna, el dios que lo auxilia en la batalla. Los cuernos de la guerra han anunciado que va a comenzar el combate, las flechas comienzan a volar por el aire, y entonces Arhuja pide a Krishna que le permita ver el ejércit enemigo. Krishna interpone su carro luminoso y por un momento interrupte el combate. Arjuna pasa revista a sus enemigos. Allí esta Bima, su rival, fuerte y rodeado de atrevidos guerreros, acompañado de las tribus y de los mismos parientes y amigos de Arjuna. Al contemplar a todos estos hombres, Arjuna siente que no los odia, y se duele de tener que luchar con ellos;  vacila y pregunta a Krishna: ¿cómo podré yo cambatir contra Bima y Drona, si entre todos los hombres ellos son los más dignos de mi respeto? Preferiré mendigar mi pan por el mundo, antes que ser el asesino de estas gentes... No podría decir si es preferible que nos derrotan o qye nosotros los derrotemos. Pues los enemigos que allí nos esperan, con los pechos llenos de rencor, son los hijos del pueblo de Dhiritarashtra, si si hubieren de perecer por mi mano, yo no desearía vivir... no los combatiré...

Krishna contesta, haciendo ver a Arjuna la futilidad de la vida lo mismo que la imposibilidad de la muerte, la imposibilidad de matar el espíritu, etc. Le hacer ver también que si huye y no combate, el enemigo lo atribuirá a cobardía; en cambio, una vez iniciado el combate, si mueres, le dice Krishna, irás al cielo; y si vences, el mundo será tuyo. En el curso de su disertación, Krishna instruye al guerrero en las doctrinas del yoga activo y en la salvación que se logra mediante las acciones justas y el abandono de los deseos; le expone la doctrina de la reencarnación y de la liberación.

En el capítulo tercero, Krishna sigue su discurso, explicando la salvación que se logra por la ejecución adecuada de las acciones. En el cíatulo cuarto, se habla del conocimiento espiritual.

A partir de este capítulo cuarto, suspendo mis notas, remitiendo a los lectores al admirable texto original, que es muy fácil de obtener; pero quiero cerrar mi capítulo con un comentario que es quizás el primero que se escribió en México, del Baghavad-Gita;  un comentario que procede del extraordinario y nobilísimo espíritu, que enyre nosotros fue apóstol, pensador y presidente mártir, y que conocimos con el nombre terrestre de Francisco I. Madero. Del comentario de Madero posee sólo un fragmento, que dice textualmente:

"Este capítulo (el 4o.) trata de la verdadera devoción, en términos tales que merecen meditarse seriamente, porque demuestran cuán profundas y grandiosas son las enseñanzas del Baghavad-Gita; cuán amplio es su espíritu de tolerancia y cómo concuerda conlas enseñanzas de Jesús, quien consideraba como ley principal el amarnos los unos a los otros. Así el Baghavad-Gita dice en este capítulo, versículo 4, que el principal culto que debe rendirse al Ser Supremo y el camino que él conduce, consiste en refrenar los sentimientos, equilibrando el entendimiento y complaciéndose en el bien de todos los seres.

"Se vé, pues, que el  modo más eficaz de adorar a la divinidad es "complacerse en el bien de todos los seres", o lo que es lo mismo, amar a nuestros hermanos, como decía Jesús.
"Es indiscutible que también es necesario refrenar y dominar los sentidos, pues de otra manera los deseos y las pasiones nos ofuscan e impiden amar a nuestros semejantes y desear su bien.

"En los versículos 5 y 6 explícase que: "ardua por demás es la tarea de aquel cuya mente se halla fija en lo Inmanifestado"; refiriéndose a la gran dificultad que implica concentrar por completo la mente en lo divino y permanecer en constante meditación o adoración. Y en verdad, cualquiera que haya intendado concentrar su mente en ese sentido, habrá observado cuán pocos son los minutos en que se puede lograr  tal resultado, siendo casi imposible evitar que otros pensamientos vengan a perturbar y distraer la atención.
"Así dice que ese camino está lleno de dificultades, pero en cambio, no es indispensable tal práctica, sino que basta con renunciar en El todas sus acciones y que El constituya el idea supremo, para que lo salve sin tardanza del piélago de a muerte y de la existencia.
"Por renuncia en El de todas sus acciones, debe entenderse que todos nuestros actos deben tener un fin altruísta, un fin bueno; el de servir los designados de la Divinidad, trabajando en cualquier forma por acelerar la evolución de la humanidad y por ayudar a nuestros semejantes.

"Todas las acciones que tengan un fin de tal naturaleza y no busquen recompensa terrenal, sino que se ejecuten con el propósito de servir a la Divinidad, son las que más pesan en su balanza. 

"Los que obran de esta manera, indudablemente consideran a la Divinidad como su ideal supremo, puesto que sus principales aspiraciones consisten en colaborar de acuerdo con sus designios a la realización del grandioso plan Divino.

"En los versículos 8, 9, 10, 11 y 12 vuelven a expresarse las mismas ideas, considerando siempre superior a la renuncia las obras, al conocimiento, la práctica perserverante y a la meditación (Versículo 12).

"El versículo 8 recomienda la concentración de nuestra mente para adorar al Ser Supremo; pero como esto es muy difícil obtenerlo, según acabamos de exponer, entonces el versículo 9 recomienda toda clase de prácticas religiosas, las cuales ayudan a concentrar la atención y a aumentar la devoción. Si aun  esto se dificulta, recomiendo el versículo 10 dedicarse a ejecutar obras por consideración a El tan sólo. Como este concepto parace semejante al que se expresa en el versículo inmediato, consideramos que debe interpretarse en el sentido de: consagrarse al culto de la Divinidad, afiliándose en alguna sociedad u orden religiosa, puesto que un sacerdote de cualquier culto indudablemente se dedica a ejecutar obras por consideración a la Divinidad a cuyo servicio dedica todos sus esfuerzos desde el momento de su consagración.

"Por último, si aun esto no es posible, entonces recomienda refugiarse en El por medio de la Unión Espiritual, y, subyugándose a sí mismo, renunciando por completo al fruto de sus acciones.

"Todo esto puede efectuarse llevando la vida mundana, sin necesidad de recluírse en un claustro, no de abandonar la familia y las ocupaciones ordinarias. Es, por consiguiente, posible llegar al grado máximo de virtud y evolución que puede alcanzar el ser humano, dedicándose a la vida ordinaria, a la profesional, a la agricultura, a los negocios, a la política y a todas las ocupaciones que exige la moderna civilización, así como la constitución de un hogar y de una familia; basta para ello unirse espiritualmente con el Ser Supremo, es decir, llegar al resultado de que todos nuestros actos tengan un fin bueno y útil a la humanidad, o sea, que todos ellos estén en harmonia con el Plan Divino, porque tienden favorecer el bienestar del género humano y su evolución. Para lograr este resultado, es indispensable, como dice el mismo versículo, "subyugarse a sí mismo", porque de otra manera las pasiones nos impiden tener la serenidad de espíritu y la rectitud necesarias para obrar siempre bien.

"Por último, estando unificados espiritualmente con la Divinidad y habiéndonos subyugado a nosotros mismos, "debemos renunciar al fruto de nuestras acciones". Ya hemos explicado que por "renunciar al fruto de nuestras acciones" debe entenderse que al ejecutar cualquier acto meritorio no debemos hacerlo en vista de la recompensa que de él esperamos, sino por considerar que tal es nuestro deber y que de esa manera servimos al Ser Supremo: lo cual debe ser para nosotros la principal y la más honda de las aspiraciones. Servir a la Divinidad, convertirnos en agentes de su voluntad, en colaboradores, y buscar como recompensa la satisfacción qie se siente con la conciencia del deber cumplido, con la paz que se disfruta cuando ningún deseo ni pasión nos agita, tal debe ser nuestra aspiración suprema.

"El resto del capítulo expresa la idea de que los hombres de ideas benévolas, compasivos, indiferentes en medio del placer y del dolor, pacientes en las ofensas, contentos con su suerte, constantamente harmonizados dueños de sí mismos, firmes en sus resoluciones, con la mente y el discernimiento fijos únicamente en la Divinidad y devotos en ella, así como aquel que no turba al mundo ni por el mundo se ve turbado, que está libre de las emociones causados por la alegría, la cólera y el temor, etc., son dignos de la estimación, el aprecio y el afecto de la Divinidad.

"También son acreedores a este afecto los que se muestran iguales ante el amigo y el enemigo, indiferentes en el honor y en la ignominia, imperturbables a la alabanza y al vituperio, etc.

"Insistiendo sobre la idea ya expresada anteriormente, afirma que es el objeto de la predelicción del Ser Supremo, aquel que lleno de fe sigue la ley que confiere la inmortalidad (complacerse en el bien de todos los seres y renunciar en la Divinidad todas sus acciones), asimismo al que hace del Ser Supremo el más alto ideal de sus aspiraciones, idea que debe entenderse según la hemos expresado en los comentarios de este capítulo.

"Como se ve, son grandiosas todas las concepciones que encierra el Baghavad-Gita, y está muy lejos de recomendar esas prácticas supersticiosas tan en boga en la mayoría de las religiones, aun de las que actualemente profesan los pueblos civilizados, y, según las cuales se da más importancia a determinadas prácticas religiosas que al cumplimiento del deber, sin considerar que cumpliendo con el deber, es como se favorece en un plano más vasto y extenso el bienestar y progreso de la humanidad.

"Indudablemente un guerrero, que va a la lucha por el bien de sus semejantes, hace un acto más meritorio ante la Divinidad que el sacerdote que se dedica exclusivamente a sus prácticas religiosas ', sin unir a la oración la acción. Este sacerdote, si acaso, se limita a tener buenos deseos para la humanidad, si no es que, como acontece generalmente, piensa únicamente en la salvación de su propria alma, y con tal objeto e inspirado en un sentimiento egoísta, se dedica a las prácticas religiosas más extrañas.

"No queremos terminar el comentario de este capítulo dejando inadvertido el versículo 8o. en lo relacionado con la idea panteísta, pues viene a confirmar nuestras constantes observaciones sobre el Baghavad-Gita, y es que en esta obra no tienen cabida las ideas panteístas, contrariamente a las deducciones hechas por investigadores superficiales.
"En este versículo dice: "Fija, pues, tu mente en Mí, penetra en Mí tu entendimiento y sin duda alguna, después de tu muerte, viviras en Mí en las alturas."

"Vivirás en Mí en las alturas", no significa ir a absorbernos en el Ser Supremo y a formar parte de El mismo, sino que nos acercaremos a El, y llegando a identificarnose con sus designios, viviremos para El y dentro de El; pero siempre conservando nuestra propia individualidad, así como la inmensa y muy respetable distancia que nos separa de Aquél "que con una partícula de Sí mismo dio origen y actividad al Universo entero y sigue existiendo" (capítulo X, versículo 42).

"Por ese motivo, cada uno de nosotros, parte infinitesimal de ese Universo, no puede pretender llegar a ser tan alto como El, que lo creó con una partícula de Sí mismo.

"Nuestro destino es muy glorioso y muy alto el lugar que llegaremos a ocupar entre los que rodean al Ser Supremo y del gobierno del Universo; llegarán nuestras aspiraciones a confundirse con sus designios; pero por más que nos identifiquemos con el plan divino, nunca perderemos nuestro Yo, nunca llegaremos a ser parte del Dios, que no está integrado por millares de seres, sino que es Uno e Indivisible."

 Impresionante resulta imaginar los pensamientos de Madero cuando llegó a encontrarse en los campos mexicanos, en la situación de Arjuna dispuesto a combatir un ejército de enemigos que no odiaba, pero que era su deber destruír. Venció a esos enemigos, el Arjuna de México, en la noble lid de la fuerza, y después perdonóles con tierno espíritu cristiano; más para ser víctima de Judas, en la más negra y cruel de las tradiciones.

Related posts:
>Enter Allan Kardec, Chef du Spiritisme
>Madame Blavatsky, Messenger from the Mahatmas

Enter Allan Kardec, Chef du Spiritisme

Racing to meet the deadline.... I'm almost finished with my revised and expanded introduction to Spiritist Manual, my translation of Manual Espírita, the secret book of 1911 by Francisco I. Madero, leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico 1911-1913.  This excerpt mentions Swedenborg and the Fox sisters of Hydesville-- more about them anon.

Enter Allen Kardec, Chef du Spiritisme

Allan Kardec

Though an energetic evangelist, Francisco I. Madero schemed to hide his Spiritism from the public—his personal letters during his campaigns and his presidency make this clear—  and, over the several decades after his death, few Mexicans in public positions have had the incentive, the metaphysical context, or whatever wherewithal to begrudge more than a glancing mention of it. As early as 1915, any public discussion of Spiritism became taboo—historian Yolia Tortolero uses this word, and quite rightly, even while, as she also notes, Spiritism was being practiced “under cover by many public figures.” There is more to say about this thundering silence about Spiritism in Mexico, which, with a few notable exceptions, has persisted to this day, but to first properly comprehend the term we must hie back to Paris of 1891 and, reanimating our scene, let that page of La Revue Spirite fall. And another.

This magazine Pancho Madero is reading belongs to his father—though his mother and other family members are devout Catholics and, as he surely knows, the Pope had declared the main ritual of Spiritualism and its derivative, Spiritism, the séance, diabolical. Decades earlier, Pope Pius IX had slapped the works of Allan Kardec, founder of La Revue Spirite, on the Index, the Vatican’s list of prohibited books.

Allan Kardec: this elbow-sharp and magnetic nom de plume, supposedly taken from one of his other lifetimes as a Druid priest, belonged to a French educator named Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, who died in 1869. From his stern-looking portrait, with his knob-chin and kingly pose, one might take him for a mightily conservative banker. Kardec was an unlikely guru. According to his English translator, Anna Blackwell, he was “grave, slow of speech, unassuming in manner, yet not without a certain quiet dignity.” Further, and somewhat frighteningly, “he was never known to laugh.” Yet anyone who doubts his influence, from France to Mexico, Brazil to the Philippines, can visit Paris’s Père La Chaise cemetery and find, among the stone angels and sarcophagi and mausoleums of the likes of Chopin, Collette, Victor Hugo, La Fontaine and Molière, Kardec’s megalithic tomb ever-heaped with flowers.

Rivail had been educated by the Swiss Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who, radically for the time, emphasized freedom of thought and direct observation. According to John Warne Monroe in Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France, Rivail was a longtime student of mesmerism in 1853 when he learned of the strange phenomenon of the tables parlantes or table tipping, from a friend who said he had managed to induce a table to lift by itself off the ground and turn, and more: like the Fox sisters of Hydesville, he was communicating with spirits through the table by means of raps and knocks.

Though skeptical, Rivail determined to study this phenomenon. He soon moved on to observing mediumistic writing, in which two young mediums, the Mlles Baudin, would place their fingertips on a planchette, a triangular contraption with little wheels and a pencil attached, thus allowing spirits to answer his questions and offer messages in writing.

It was the spirit “Zéphyr” who assigned him the name Allan Kardec, and, along with other spirits, such a mass of teachings to solve “the controversial problem of humanity’s past and future,”  that Rivail turned it into a book—including additional information channeled by medium Célina Japhet. Published in 1857, Le Livre des Esprits, (The Book of the Spirits), concurrently with the levitating medium D.D. Homes’ visit to France, became a best-seller of its time, translated into multiple languages, and is still in print today. 

With down-to-earth language and easy-to-reference numbered questions and answers, The Book of the Spirits is a guide to nothing less than the universe and its laws, the nature of God, the spirit world and its relations with humanity. The concluding message, channeled from the spirit of Saint Augustine, calls for kindness and benevolence. It is this work that first spelled out the doctrine of Spiritism, which Kardec distinguishes from Spiritualism—the latter, according to him, simply the belief that there is more than physical matter— as a doctrine based on the specific nature of relations between the physical and spirit worlds. Spiritism’s most notable departure from Spiritualism is its assertion that spirits reincarnate as, in life after life, whether on Earth or some other planet, they evolve into ever greater states of consciousness.

This was the most modern of modern science, Kardec argued, for, as a scientist might peer through a microscope to see the detail in a leaf, so he could employ a medium to communicate with the spirit world. Through Ermance Dufaux, a teenaged medium famous for her channeled autobiography of Joan of Arc, a nameless spirit instructed Kardec to publish La Revue Spirite as soon as possible and using his own money and so, in 1858, he did. In 1861, Kardec published Le Livre des Médiums (The Book on Mediums), a how-to and advisory on the dangers of communicating with spirits based on his own and collagues’ experiences as well as more material channeled from spirits, among them Erastrus, Channing, “Spirit of Truth,” and Matthew. More followed: The Gospel Explained by Spirits (1864) ; Heaven and Hell (1865); and Genesis (1867), in addition to shorter works. 

This was the Swedenborg-sized pile that Pancho Madero, having finished with La Revue Spirite, ran to that magazine’s offices to purchase. In his words:

"I did not read [Kardec’s] books; I devoured them, for their doctrines were so rational, so beautiful, so new, they seduced me and ever since I consider myself a Spiritist." 

That is to say, Madero believed he had incarnated on this planet in order to help usher in a golden age, evangelist for the doctrine that was nothing less than, to quote Kardec in Genesis, “the pivot on which the human race will turn.”

Our Coahuilan prince has stepped onto his metaphysical Montgolfier, as it were. Soon he will be tossing sandbags overboard.

(Copyright © C.M. Mayo 2013, all rights reserved) 

>>Read more about the Spiritist Manual (website includes Q & A and resources for researchers)
>>Get the current edition on Kindle.

>>Read a previous excerpt on this blog, "Madame Blavatsky, Messenger from the Mahatmas"

Guest-blogger Children's Author Mary Lynn Patton with 5 Links on Mexico and E-Publishing

Mary Lynn Patton

Delighted to see Mary Lynn Patton's first two children's books, Sounds of Mexico and Sounds of Mexico Maya, up in the iBookstore with links from www.MaryLynnPattonBooks.com. As Mary Lynn writes:

"These two bilingual books star my canary, Pavarotti, who loves to sing along with the sounds of Mexico. He takes the reader on adventures set in the magical mountains of Tepoztlan in the first book and the sacred land of the Maya people in the second. I recall with a chuckle my first plea for your help in finding a publisher for these books and your suggestion to self-publish as an iBook (books with sound require a connection to iTunes so the Amazon/Kindle combination was not possible). My collaborators, illustrator Margarita Sada from Mexico City, Salvador Espinosa, sound engineer, and Judith Segura, translator, and I (all from Tepoztlan, Morelos home to the Canadian Mexican Literary Festival), worked together to publish. It was thrilling. By the second book we were becoming increasingly interactive in our presentation and for the third book we are considering the Read Aloud feature available in iBooks. I want a hard copy published book to hold in addition to these e-books but as the Madam herself asserts (Seven Reasons Why E-Books Will Be Big in Mexico) this works to reach readers here and now. A bit of research revealed the phenomenal escalating sales for e-books, $1.3 billion in 2012 (No, E-book Sales Are Not Declining). Mexico City has a new eBook publishing company called editorial-ink for digital books (www.editorial-ink.com) and a new digital library (http://goodereader.com/blog/most-popular-news/largest-childrens-library-in-mexico-opens-and-uses-3000-ebooks/). Children the world over from middle and upper class homes are receiving iPad minis in child-proof cases as their birthday surprise to download interactive books."

> Recent guest-bloggers here at Madam Mayo include novelists Victoria Wilcox, Amy Kwei, and Joanna Hershon. 
> Check out the complete archive of guest-blogs here.
P.S. My embryonic and to-be-frequently-updated list of recommended reading on Mexico is here.

Madame Blavatsky, Messenger from the Mahatmas

Racing to make a deadline with my publisher for the updated (revised and expanded) introduction to and translation of Manual Espírita, or Spiritist Manual of 1911 by Francisco I. Madero, leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico 1911-1913.

 (The first edition, with a brief introduction, is currently available on Kindle. The revised and expanded edition will be available as a Kindle and paperback.) Herewith an excerpt from the new section on the history of 19th century metaphysics:

Madame Blavatsky, Messenger from the Mahatmas

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

As Don Evaristo Madero cast his massive shadow over northern Mexico, so Helena Petrovna Blavatsky cast hers over metaphysically-minded Western civilization, that is to say, Europe, England, Australia, and the Americas, for she was the monumental figure of modern esotericism. (Not that that those two ever met. I am quite sure that if they had, any crockery in the vicinity would have exploded.)

She was fat and her eyes bulged. She swore like a stevedore, her tobacco was cheap, and the flower pots around her piled up with stubs. Madame Blavatsky had left her husband in Russia, first breaking a candlestick over his head, and then, before arriving to settle for a spell in New York, traveled to Central America, all over Europe, several times to Egypt (where, among other exploits, she disguised herself as a Muslim man and studied Coptic magic), and twice trekked into Tibet to attend a secret school led by enlighted sages called “mahatmas,” or “Great White Brothers.” She also claimed that, after her return to the West, she remained in telepathic communication with the mahatmas, who could also travel anywhere on earth and the universe by means of their astral bodies. 

A psychic medium and self-styled scholar, Madam Blavatsky exuded a charisma impossible to fathom. Her presence seemed to occasion fires, raps, knocks, tables rising from the floor, and messages in golden ink from the mahatmas dropping out of thin air. Her fellow Theosophist William Quan Judge recalled “marvels wholly unexplainable on the theory of jugglery,” including little orbs creeping over the furniture in her apartment in New York City and, as she sat in the parlor, a spoon flying into her hand all the way from the kitchen.

In a word, Madame Blavatsky made Cagliostro look like a pipqueak and Monsieur Kardec, for all his spirit world adventures via teenaged mediums, thoroughly bourgeois. 

For Madame Blavatsky, there were higher truths than Christianity and Spiritualism and its Johnny-come-lately offshoot, Spiritism; the Orient, wellspring of Buddhism and Hinduism, was the authentic source of spiritual knowledge. 

Now, to take an orbit-worthy leap over novel-length episodes—among them, Blavatsky’s meeting with Col. Henry Steel Olcott in the Vermont farmhouse of the Eddy brothers, mediums who brought forth such shades of the dead as a giant Winnebago chief, a squaw with her pet flying squirrel, and a naval officer in full dress with a sword— Blavatsky and Olcott founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. Not a religion, it was an association to promote religious universality, and that included Buddhism and Hinduism— which, as one might imagine, would not endear them to Christian missionaries and many of the colonial authorities. 

Our young Mexican Spiritist never joined, but he, like many outstanding figures whom we remember today, from inventor Thomas Edison to Paul Gaugin, novelist D.H. Lawrence and poet W.B. Yeats, and the leader of India’s independence movement, Mohandas Gandhi, were influenced by Madame Blavatsky, and, as we shall see in Madero’s case especially—  and crucially— the Theosophists’ enthusiasm for the Hindu wisdom book, The Bhagavad Gita. 

So before spiraling on to Mexico, we must slow for a moment to pack into another nutshell another ouevre. 

Blavatsky’s first book, Isis Unveiled, published in 1877 and still in print, was inspired, she claimed, by the mahatmas and is nothing less than, as the subtitle says, the Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. A decade later, in 1888, after she and Olcott had stirred up a Buddhist revival in Ceylon and removed the headquarters of the Theosophical Society to Adyar, near Madras in India, Blavatsky published her massive two volume The Secret Doctrine, also still in print, which provides the spiritual history of the cosmos and human life based on the stanzas of the Dyzan.

The first:

THE ETERNAL PARENT (SPACE), WRAPPED IN HER EVER INVISIBE ROBES, HAD SLUMBERED ONCE AGAIN FOR SEVEN ETERNITIES.

Another, number 40, plucked at random: 

THEN THE THIRD AND FOURTH (RACES) BECAME TALL WITH PRIDE. WE ARE THE KINGS, IT WAS SAID; WE ARE THE GODS.

No one had heard of the Dyzan, nor has any scholar yet found it. Blavatsky claimed that it was part of the commentary esoteric literature of Tibetan Buddhism and that she had memorized the stanzas as given to by her teacher in North India and Tibet, where she first arrived in the 1850s. That she, a European woman traveling solo, made it into Tibet at all might sound preposterous if not for the fact that, among other sightings, one Captain Charles Murray of the Bengal Army encountered her on the Sikkim border. According to Michael Gomes, editor of the abridged version of The Secret Doctrine, esoteric scholars have noted similarities of these stanzas to the literature of the Kalachakra, or “Wheel of Time,” the ancient Tibetan Buddhist esoteric scripture blending Hindu and Buddhist ideas. And the Kalachakra, by the way, is a living idea. A quick google search brought up a lengthy discussion by His Holiness the Dalai Lama on his website, http://www.dalailama.com/teachings/kalachakra-initiations, and a video tour of the fabulously intricate 3D structure of the Kalachakra Mandala, a visual representation of the teachings, made in honor of the Dalai Lama’s 2007 visit to Cornell University, at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~kb/mandala/  . (With the low-voiced chanting and clanging, it is all very wonderfully mesmerizing.)

What to conclude about the Dyzan? I am not planning to get a PhD in Tibetan Buddhist studies (not in this lifetime anyway), but I can stretch so far as to agree with Gomes, who concludes that, “[f]act or fiction, the stanzas [of the Dyzan] provide one of the greatest mythos of our time, whose influence on modern esotericism is undeniable.”

Copyright C.M. Mayo all rights reserved.

>>Read more about Francisco I. Madero's Spiritist Manual (including resources for researchers)

>>Read another excerpt, Enter Allan Kardec, Chef du Spiritsme

P.S. As a result of this unexpectedly Mount Everest-esque project, and a laptop crash, I have fallen woefully behind on the Marfa Mondays podcasts. But stay tuned... three fascinating interviews are almost ready to go: Dallas Baxter, founding editor of Cenizo Journal; Enrique Madrid of Redfern; and historian John Tutino, author of the magnificent Making a New World, are all almost ready to go. (Eleven posted so far, 13 to go.) 

Guest-blogger Victoria Wilcox with 5 Sites for Scarlett Fans

Victoria Wilcox

I am delighted to host guest-blogger Victoria Wilcox who has just published what promises to be a fascinating read, a novel based on the true story of Doc Holliday-- one wild dentist, I'll say. Usually we think of Doc out west, slinging a gun, but he hailed from the Old South and had some surprising connections there, as Wilcox explains. And she ought to know: not only did she write the novel about him, but she is founding director of Georgia’s Holliday-Dorsey-Fife House Museum, the antebellum home of the family of Doc Holliday. It was her work with the house that led to eighteen years of original research and inspired her novel trilogy, Southern Son: The Saga of Doc Holliday. Inheritance, the first book in the Southern Son saga was published this month by Knox Robinson Publishing. 

Ghosts of Gone With the Wind: 5 Sites for Scarlett Fans

by Victoria Wilcox

Who would have guessed, when I moved to Georgia hoping to find a few ghosts of Gone With the Wind, that my life would be forever haunted by Margaret Mitchell’s bestselling novel of the Old South?  I was just a fan like any other, having read the book a few times and watched the movie a few times more, the only exception between me and other fans being an interesting calendar connection: I was born on Margaret Mitchell’s birthday, November the 8^th.   But when my love of history and a project to save a Gone With the Wind style historic site led to my novel trilogy, Southern Son: The Saga of Doc Holliday, the epic story of the South’s most famous Western legend, our shared birthday began to seem downright spooky – November 8^th was also the date that Doc Holliday died.  

The historic site was the Holliday-Dorsey-Fife House, the antebellum home of Doc Holliday’s cousins in Fayetteville, Georgia, a classic white-columned Southern mansion where Doc played as a child, and where he began a young romance with his cousin Mattie Holliday, the girl who would become the model for Melanie in Gone With the Wind.  The Hollidays were kin to Margaret Mitchell, and she was said to have visited the house and suggested it as a filming site for the movie version of Tara.  The place is even mentioned in the first chapter of Gone With the Wind, as Scarlett O’Hara attended the Fayetteville Academy, a private school once housed there.  

While Scarlett was fictional, however, there was a real Southern belle who really went to the school and had a lot in common with Scarlett: they both lived on big cotton plantations in neighboring Clayton County, they both had feisty Irish fathers named Gerald, they both had genteel mothers who had green velvet drapes in their parlor windows, they both went to Atlanta during the Civil War and survived with a little bit of grace and a whole lot of “gumption.”  The real girl was Annie FitzGerald, and she was Margaret Mitchell’s grandmother.  

It’s no wonder Gone With the Wind seems so real to its readers.  There was a lot of truth behind its story of the Old South, and a better-than-fiction link to the Wild, Wild West.  These ghosts have a great story to tell!      

For more real tales of Gone With the Wind, check out the following five sites:

The Margaret Mitchell House Museum, the Atlanta apartment when the author typed her epic tale.

Scarlett O’Hara’s Atlanta, an interactive map that takes you into the 1860’s city.

Gone With the Wind Scrapbook, a fun collection of all things Scarlett.

Gone With the Wind Online Exhibit, movie memorabilia from the David O. Selznik collection at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Gone With the Wind Background from the AMC Filmsite Movie Review, gives a complete synopsis of the movie for who haven’t watched it but want to sound like they have.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + +
>Recent guest-blogs include Joanna Hershon with 5 links from A Dual Inheritance that Traverse the Globe and Amy Kwei with 5 recommended books on China.

>Click here for the complete archive of Madam Mayo's guest-blogs.

Cyberflanerie: San Miguel de Allende Edition

Patrice Wynne, owner of Abrazos in San Miguel de Allende

I love San Miguel de Allende because I have so many friends there and the arty vibe is delicious (and the food, too). Herewith a batch of SMA links:

My amiga Patrice Wynne, owner of Abrazos, is featured in this NYT article on retiring in Mexico.
I say she has it totally right.

News flash: El Centro de las Artes in San Miguel de Allende is getting a big boost from the Mexican government. This is going to be bodacious.

My amiga Dianne Romaine has a new blog about writing, playing music, and creating community in a Guanajuato barrio (a hop skip and a brinco from SMA)

Check out the website of Lulu Torbet, an amazing artist and (ghost writer too) with beautiful energy.

Sign up for the newsletter from the Galeria Atotonilco, you will be amazed. This is folk art above & beyond the stuff you'll find in tourist shops.

Maria Espinosa on memories of Mexico and writing a first novel.

My favorite San Miguel painters: Mariló Carral, Edgar Soberón, and Kelley Vandiver.

Listen in:

My talk for PEN San Miguel / Sol Literary Magazine in San Miguel's Teatro Angela Peralta, about a unique Egyptian-inspired teaching house on the US-Mexico border: A Visit to Swan House.  

And my other talk earlier last year on my translation of Spiritist Manual by Francisco I. Madero, leader of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. 

And (yep, I really do get to SMA), my talk on the novel based on the true story, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire.

My interview with Edward Swift, SMA resident, artist and author of many delightful books including one of my all-time favorite memoirs, My Grandfather's Finger. 

And finally, check out Sol, the magazine of literary writing from Mexico in English.

P.S. New on my webpage, an annotated list, embryonic and to-be-frequently updated, of recommended books on Mexico.

Yes, the Marfa Mondays podcasts will be resuming shortly.

Guest-blogger Amy Kwei, author of A Concubine for the Family, on 5 Recommended Books on China

Guest-blogging today is my fellow Women's National Book Association member, novelist Amy Kwei, author of the just-released A Concubine for the Family, which is based on an amazing true story of her own family. Here's what she has to say about it:

Imagine a wife lovingly gives a younger woman to her husband as a birthday present! A Concubine for the Family is a fictionalized account based upon this “true-life” event of my Chinese Grandmother's gift to ensure a male heir for the family. This is a story of feminine solidarity and heroism. 

The main characters belong to the Confucian elite and share the same family dominated values as many present-day leaders of Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. Simply written, the novel is divided into three “books”, and follows the fortunes of the “book-fragrant” Huang family from Hangzhou, China to Shanghai and Hong Kong in 1937 — 1941, when China was emerging into Westernization, the Sino-Japanese war and WWII.

The daily life and society of this household are steeped in the traditions of decency, nobility, loyalty and cunning maneuvers for survival. They give the reader an instant understanding of Chinese culture and how they differ from our own. Poetry, silk cultivation, foot-binding, acupuncture and opium addiction are intertwining threads throughout the book. The daughters bring comic relief. Two Americans, a children’s tutor and a visiting reporter, introduce conflicting Western values. 

The novel’s second “book” highlights episodes of great glamour, shrewd business and political intrigue occurring in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation. Book Three details the Huang family living in Hong Kong, under British colonialism. The novel holds promise to become a Chinese Downton Abbey. 

Want to learn more about China? Amy Kwei has recently read and warmly recommends:

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolo Guo.  A quick read and an edgy story of how the Chinese and Westerner differ in the concept of love. 

Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Live, Love and Language by Deborah Fallows. Humorous insights into the Chinese language.

China Airborn by James Fallows. Gives a good understanding of how China is investing a huge sum to jump-start its aerospace industry.  

Mother on Fire, by Sandra Tsing Loh. A fast, fun story that will irritate her parent. 

Busy working on the sequel to A Concubine for the Family — Under the Red Moon. Research readings include The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang.

+ + + +

Amy found out my blog after reading my note in the WNBA newsletter about my dad's book, Captured: The Forgotten Men of Guam, by Roger Mansell-- which does have quite a bit to do with China and she was kind enough to recommend it, also. 

Speaking of Iris Chang, my #1 book read in 2010 was Finding Iris Chang, a memoir by her close friend and fellow journalist / writer, Paula Kamen.

Interested in guest-blogging for "Madam Mayo" blog? Guidelines here. Archive of all previous guest-blog posts here.

So How's the Book Doing? (And how many books have you sold? And what was your print run?)

My amiga the crackerjack memoirist and writing teacher Sara Mansfield Taber has posted an oh-so-true toe-curling but chuckle-worthy blog post over at She Writes: "Writing Is a Humiliation Banquet."

It reminds me of how gallery owners complain that customers (more often lookyloos) don't know "gallery etiquette." It's the same with writers. People usually mean well when they ask, "So how's the book doing?" Though alas, this is often followed by the more knife-like, "How many books have you sold?" What they don't realize is that (in most instances) this is akin to asking someone who was just turned down for a long overdue promotion, or maybe even fired, "So how much do you make?" because, as Sara Taber so eloquently points out, the book is almost never doing as well as its author had hoped it would and for most literary books, earnings hover well below the level at which one might cobble together a non-food-stamps-worthy living. Furthermore, publishers report sales with such a long lag, one never really knows at any given moment. (True, one could check amazon.com sales reports but I have never done that because it's a self-torture fest and, for anyone focused on writing the next book, a mega time-suck.)

Herewith some of my favorite replies (and if you're an author with a book out, may they serve you):

(With a wink): I'm getting away with it... How about you?
(This is thanks to Paul Graybeal of Marfa's Moonlight Gemstones, by the way.)

(Breathily, Nancy Reaganqesque): Why my dear, that's like asking a woman her age! How have you been?

(Beaming, ready-to-judo): Oh, great! You know, I think everyone should write a book. Do you have a book you'd like to write?

(Shrugging, Jimmy Fallonesque): Well, I haven't moved full-time onto my yacht-- yet. But thanks for asking. How are you?

(Gleaming stare, revealing teeth): Very well... in fact... my doctor has been able to... reduce my meds... (Continue staring silently for three beats...) Just kidding! How are you?

Notice, the trick is to lob that conversational ball back into their court. Unless you might have something for them, e.g.,

Wonderfully! Thanks for asking! Oh, and by the way, I'll be doing an event at the bookstore next Thursday at 6 pm, it would be wonderful if you could come!

It's been such fun! Oh, and by the way, if it works for your book group / workshop / class, I'd be delighted to come talk about the book! 

The thing is, I don't think most people really care about one's answer; they're just asking to be polite, as they might ask about your kids (whom they don't know) or your kitchen remodeling project or even just chatting about the weather. And some friends really do care, they do mean well-- they're delighted to know a real-live-published author! They want to bask in your literary glamour and talk books! For those folks, the "I'm getting away with it," or "wonderfully, thanks for asking!" works fine. But then there are those, usually with a toe in the publishing business, or ambitious to write / publish themselves, who persist with the outrageous, "What was your print run?" Well, I say, bless 'em. Because they need blessing. I answer, "You know, I have no idea. I am so busy with my next book... " and when they insist (yikes, some of them do), "What do you mean, you don't know what was the print run?" I put on the Scarlett O'Hara:

"Why, golly gee, figures just go in one ear and out the other."

When a writer has spent several years working on a book she has more emotion invested in it than the casual reader would guess. So if it's another writer who is asking and your book is doing splendidly, why rub in the salt? Or, more likely, since your book isn't selling anything like Dan Brown's latest, make your neighbor (the divorce lawyer who is going to write a thriller "one day") view you with head-shaking pity?

But I don't find writing a "humiliation banquet," quite the contrary. I am grateful that I have the skill and (most days) focus to write and that, in one way or another, my work finds readers. I'm always happy to see more royalties but I don't measure my success as a writer by numbers alone. A single  reader who approaches my work in a spirit of respect and intellectual curiosity, and to whom my book makes a meaningful difference, is worth more to me than 10,000 readers who just want a beachside page-turner.

(Bless you all who write beachside page-turners! May you all live happily ever after on your yachts! But I don't read such books and wouldn't have the wherewithal to write one, and anyway, even if I had a hundred bagilliwillion bucks, I couldn't be bothered with a yacht. To start with, I'd have to insure the darned thing. What a bore!)

So how does one make a living? All I can say is, if you want to make a living writing literary books you'll need to be (a) very lucky (b) very persistent (c) very productive (d) very hard-headed and (e) totally flummoxed by shopping (except for books, of course). And by the way, most literary writers don't make a living from their books but from teaching, freelancing, editing, and/or other work / income.

The "humiliation banquet" comes with the promotion part... and for that, thank goodness for the vast and ever-growing literature on sports psychology!

P.S. Check out my podcast interview with Sara Mansfield Taber about her amazing memoir on "Conversations with Other Writers."

Recommended Reading on Mexico

New over at my home page, www.cmmayo.com-- in answer to the frequently asked question, what books can I recommend on Mexico? --  an embryonic and to-be-frequently updated list for English language readers, for both dyed-in-the-serape Mexicophiles and those encountering Mexico for the first time.

I'll be adding more commentary and more links as well.

P.S. Stay tuned for the Marfa Mondays podcasts, resuming shortly.