Don Juan stopped and looked at me as he did whenever he was waiting for my comments and questions. I had nothing to say. I did not understand the point he was trying to make.
“I’ve just told you the first abstract core,” he continued. “The only other thing I could add is that because of the man’s absolute unwillingness to understand, the spirit was forced to use trickery. And trickery became the essence of the sorcerers’ path. But that is another story.”
Don Juan explained that sorcerers understood this abstract core to be a blueprint for events, or a recurrent pattern that appeared every time intent was giving an indication of something meaningful. Abstract cores, then, were blueprints of complete chains of events.
He assured me that by means beyond comprehension, every detail of every abstract core reoccurred to every apprentice nagual. He further assured me that he had helped intent to involve me in all the abstract cores of sorcery in the same manner that his benefactor, the nagual Julian and all the naguals before him, had involved their apprentices. The process by which each apprentice nagual encountered the abstract cores created a series of accounts woven around those abstract cores incorporating the particular details of each apprentice’s personality and circumstances.
He said, for example, that I had my own story about the manifestations of the spirit, he had his, his benefactor had his own, so had the nagual that preceded him, and so on, and so forth.
“What is my story about the manifestations of the spirit?” I asked, somewhat mystified.
“If any warrior is aware of his stories it’s you,” he replied. “After all, you’ve been writing about them for years. But you didn’t notice the abstract cores because you are a practical man. You do everything only for the purpose of enhancing your practicality. Although you handled your stories to exhaustion you had no idea that there was an abstract core in them. Everything I’ve done appears to you, therefore, as an often-whimsical practical activity: teaching sorcery to a reluctant and, most of the time, stupid, apprentice. As long as you see it in those terms, the abstract cores will elude you.”
“You must forgive me, don Juan,” I said, “but your statements are very confusing. What are you saying?” “I’m trying to introduce the sorcery stories as a subject,” he replied. “I’ve never talked to you specifically about this topic because traditionally it’s left hidden. It is the spirit’s last artifice. It is said that when the apprentice understands the abstract cores it’s like the placing of the stone that caps and seals a pyramid.”
It was getting dark and it looked as though it was about to rain again. I worried that if the wind blew from east to west while it was raining, we were going to get soaked in that cave. I was sure don Juan was aware of that, but he seemed to ignore it.
“It won’t rain again until tomorrow morning,” he said.
Hearing my inner thoughts being answered made me jump involuntarily and hit the top of my head on the cave roof. It was a thud that sounded worse than it felt.
Don Juan held his sides laughing. After a while my head really began to hurt and I had to massage it. “Your company is as enjoyable to me as mine must have been to my benefactor,” he said and began to laugh again.
We were quiet for a few minutes. The silence around me was ominous. I fancied that I could hear the rustling of the low clouds as they descended on us from the higher mountains. Then I realized that what I was hearing was the soft wind. From my position in the shallow cave, it sounded like the whispering of human voices.
“I had the incredible good luck to be taught by two naguals,” don Juan said and broke the mesmeric grip the wind had on me at that moment. “One was, of course, my benefactor, the nagual Julian, and the other was his benefactor, the nagual Elías. My case was unique.”
“Why was your case unique?” I asked. “Because for generations naguals have gathered their apprentices years after their own teachers have left the world,” he explained. “Except my benefactor. I became the nagual Julian’s apprentice eight years before his benefactor left the world. I had eight years’ grace. It was the luckiest thing that could have happened to me, for I had the opportunity to be taught by two opposite temperaments. It was like being reared by a powerful father and an even more powerful grandfather who don’t see eye to eye. In such a contest, the grandfather always wins. So I’m properly the product of the nagual Elías’s teachings. I was closer to him not only in temperament but also in looks. I’d say that I owe him my fine tuning. However, the bulk of the work that went into turning me from a miserable being into an impeccable warrior I owe to my benefactor, the nagual Julian.”
“What was the nagual Julian like physically?” I
asked.
“Do you know that to this day it’s hard for me to visualize him?” don Juan said. “I know that sounds
absurd, but depending on his needs or the circumstances, he could be either young or old, handsome or homely, effete and weak or strong and virile, fat or slender, of medium height or extremely short.”
“Do you mean he was an actor acting out different roles with the aid of props?”
“No, there were no props involved and he was not merely an actor. He was, of course, a great actor in his own right, but that is different. The point is that he was capable of transforming himself and becoming all those diametrically opposed persons. Being a great actor enabled him to portray all the minute peculiarities of behavior that made each specific being real. Let us say that he was at ease in every change of being. As you are at ease in every change of clothes.”
Eagerly, I asked don Juan to tell me more about his benefactor’s transformations. He said that someone taught him how to elicit those transformations, but that to explain any further would force him to overlap into different stories.
“What did the nagual Julian look like when he wasn’t transforming himself?” I asked.
“Let’s say that before he became a nagual he was very slim and muscular,” don Juan said. “His hair was black, thick, and wavy. He had a long, fine nose, strong big white teeth, an oval face, strong jaw, and shiny dark-brown eyes. He was about five feet eight inches tall. He was not Indian or even a brown Mexican, but he was not Anglo white either. In fact, his complexion seemed to be like no one else’s, especially in his later years when his ever-changing complexion shifted constantly from dark to very light and back again to dark. When I first met him he was a light-brown old man, then as time went by, he became a light-skinned young man, perhaps only a few years older than me. I was twenty at that time. “But if the changes of his outer appearance were
astonishing,” don Juan went on, “the changes of mood and behavior that accompanied each transformation were even more astonishing. For example, when he was a fat young man, he was jolly and sensual. When he was a skinny old man, he was petty and vindictive. When he was a fat old man, he was the greatest imbecile there was.” “Was he ever himself?” I asked. “Not the way I am myself,” he replied. “Since I’m not interested in transformation I am always the same. But he was not like me at all.”
Don Juan looked at me as if he were assessing my inner strength. He smiled, shook his head from side to side and broke into a belly laugh. “What’s so funny, don Juan?” I asked. “The fact is that you’re still too prudish and stiff to appreciate fully the nature of my benefactor’s transformations and their total scope,” he said. “I only hope that when I tell you about them you don’t become morbidly obsessed.”
For some reason I suddenly became quite uncomfortable and had to change the subject.
“Why are the naguals called “benefactors’ and not simply teachers?” I asked nervously.
“Calling a nagual a benefactor is a gesture his apprentices make,” don Juan said. “A nagual creates an overwhelming feeling of gratitude in his disciples. After all, a nagual molds them and guides them through unimaginable areas.”
I remarked that to teach was in my opinion the greatest, most altruistic act anyone could perform for
another.
“For you, teaching is talking about patterns,” he said. “For a sorcerer, to teach is what a nagual does for his apprentices. For them he taps the prevailing force in the universe: intent—the force that changes and reorders things or keeps them as they are. The