MOCHE; A PERUVIAN COASTAL COMMUNITi-— GILUX 



117 



he customary or folkloristic beliefs and practices 



he Mocheros. 

 The practice of brujcria is not, of course, confined 

 to Moche. The casting of spells and the curing of 

 them goes back both into Inca culture and into pre- 

 Conquest Spanish tradition. Undoubtedly the Mochi- 

 cas practiced and believed in something similar. At 

 the present time both brujeria and curandismo are 

 illegal and frowned upon by the authorities, especially 

 the former, a fact which renders their investigation in 

 a situation like that of Moche doubly difficult, because 

 it adds legal sanction to the natural reticence of the 

 practitioner with a vested interest in his knowledge 

 and manipulations. Although these "superstitious" 

 practices are forbidden by law, they are, as previously 

 stated, extensively practiced, and the legal sanction is 

 rather more of a potential than an actual threat. Rela- 

 tively few arrests and trials have taken place in recent 

 years, and the general practice of the police is to act 

 only upon specific complaint, when a general hulla- 

 balloo or scandal breaks, out, or when a person seems 

 to have died as a result of the ministrations. Never- 

 theless, the practitioners do not take unnecessary 

 chances and are suspicious of any investigation until 

 their confidence has been won, which is a fairly long 

 process in some cases. I myself succeeded in estab- 

 lishing good relations with only one hrujo and one 

 cnrandcra, and for many weeks I despaired of being 

 able to accomplish this. I have personally watched 

 their various ceremonies and have held long discus- 

 sions with them on all phases of their work. How- 

 ever, each practitioner has specialties of his own ; 

 information from the two informants mentioned, 

 therefore, does not necessarily represent the complete 

 range of practices in Moche. Although this has to 

 some extent been supplemented by information and 

 experiences profifered by laymen of the community, 

 I am not bv anv means sure that my informants have 

 exhausted their knowledge for my benefit. There 

 may be certain special secrets which only years of 

 association with the practitioners would bring out. 

 In this respect, however, the material at hand seems 

 to check well enough with such published data as 

 exists, the best two sources for which are Valdizan 

 and Maldonado (1922), and Camino Calderon's fic- 

 tionalized presentation of 1942. 



It would be possible to write an entire volume on 

 native medicine and magical curing in Moche. The 

 following pages present only the highlights of even 

 that material which I have at hand. A more extended 

 exposition awaits a later opportunity. Much of the 



unused material at hand should be followed up by 

 longer period of investigation, not only from the an- 

 thropological point of view, but also medically and 

 psycliiatrically. The "superstitions" of the common 

 people of the Peruvian coast are not mere ethnological 

 curiosities but form a setting for customary action 

 and thought which is extremely important for the 

 interpretation and understanding of Peruvian culture 

 as a whole. It also seems possible that a close study 

 of the native materia medlca and the techniques of its 

 use might lead to discoveries of therapeutic impor- 

 tance to somatic as well as to psychological medicine, 

 which could be generalized to medical practice in 

 other parts of the world. 



BRUJERlA^s 



In Moche, as in most parts of Peru, there are 

 two kinds of brujeria. good and bad, or white and 

 black, with their corresponding practitioners. Ac- 

 cording to my information, which for reasons men- 

 tioned above, may not be complete, there are in the 

 community at least seven persons frequently men- 

 tioned as brujos (experts in or practitioners of bru- 

 jeria). Five of these are regarded as bad brujos, 

 usually called maleros or hechiceros, and only two 

 are good brujos, sometiines called brujos curandcros, 

 or brujos buenos. Three of the brujos are women, 

 and they are all said to be bad. I had at least a 

 speaking acquaintance with all of these individuals, 

 but I was intimately friendly with only two, and only 

 one of these discussed and demonstrated his brujeria 

 to me with freedom. This man is a good brujo. who 

 has studied his craft among the great experts of the 

 art in Salas. My impression is that there are actu- 

 ally only three professional brujos living in Moche 

 itself. All of these are men. Two are good brujos, 



■^■'' V.'e shall u?e the Spanish word brujeria, henceforward without 

 italics. It is pronounced, as "Time Magazine" might say, "broo-her- 

 EE-ah," rhyming with English "diarrhea." Although this Spanish 

 word is usually translated as "witchcraft" or "sorcery," these two 

 English words have wider and more uncertain connotations for modern 

 American readers than has "brujeria" for residents of Moche. Pos- 

 sibly this is because the witchcraft of North American tradition repre- 

 sented a historical complex (compounded of English and North Euro- 

 pean elements, involved with Reformation and Puritan formulations) 

 distinct from those which are the historical sources for Peruvian 

 coastal beliefs and practices (derived from aboriginal Indian, Spanish, 

 Arabic antecedents, involved with the Inquisition, etc.). "Magic" 

 in its anthropological connotation would he satisfactory except that 

 the Spanish equivalent, mapia, is used in a different sense than is 

 "brujeria" in Moche. "Shamanism" would likewise be satisfactory 

 except for the fact that it is generally used to refer to usages un- 

 touched by so-called higher religions involving belief in God or gods 

 and to usages entirely "primitive," i. e., representative of cultures 

 basically unmodified by literate civilizations. Moche brujeria, on the 

 contrary, involves certain aspects of the Catholic region and is also 

 compounded, not only of "primitive" but also of Western elements. 



