Imagine your breath on a cold winter’s day, escaping your lips in a warm cloud and rising like whisps in the dense winter air. Or imagine the billowing smoke from a cigar, filled with shapes that seem to come alive, almost conscious, moving like the breath of a dragon, swirling in the air and seeping out into the surrounding atmosphere.
This is the Aliento del Inframundo, the Breath of the Underworld.
It creeps out from deep within the caves where the sacrifices were once made to the old gods and where the rivers of rain are kept. It comes with the falling of darkness over the land of the Maya, rising out from Xibalba, the abode of the Underworld gods.
I spoke to a local man name Oscar in the Maya ruins of Coba. He told me of things dangerous and vile, things one ought to be afraid of, things of ill intent. “The mal viento comes with the setting of the sun. It is the bad spirit-wind that causes fever and vomiting. It can bring on loss of vision and hearing and even madness and death. The only cure is to gain a powerful cleansing from a local shaman.”
This Breath of the Underworld, this mal viento, is not really a spirit nor is it linked to any human or animal. It is the ambience of the place, the atmosphere. It is the conscious elemental force of Nature. It is beyond the thought of any spirit of man.
“It is too dangerous to be in the ruins after dark,” Oscar insisted. “We stay inside, in the house, and don’t leave. We close the windows so the mal viento can’t come in the house.”
I asked Oscar if this bad spirit wind was everywhere in Mexico after dark, “No, it is here because we live among the ruins so close to the caves and the ancient powers,” he explained to me with a very serious look on his face.
The power of nature is not to be overlooked. The underworld is close-by in Coba. Caves dot the landscape offering entry to a vast system of water-filled tunnels that harbor portals to the nine levels of the Infumudo, the dark Maya path of pain. During the day, if you descend into one of the local caves, you can feel something lurking deep in the shadows just beyond your sight. Sometimes the air in the caves becomes so slight and thin that you must heed the warnings of the gods and leave, or you will not be able to breathe. I know. I have personally experienced this. (Read that amazing story here)
Interesting, isn’t it, that it was the loss of breath that threatened my wellbeing that sunny afternoon as I explored the caverns. And it is the Breath of the Underworld that has a sense of itself, conscious if you will, and comes rising from the depths when the sun leaves the sky.
“If you MUST leave your home after dark,” explained Oscar, a Maya man himself, “you take a piece of a ruda branch and put it in your pocket.” Ruda is a strong-smelling green herb that grows locally. It is used for medicinal teas and for cleansing ceremonies and protecting one's home from any ill energies. “The strong smell of the ruda will counteract the ill wind.”
Oscar was a kind and gental-man and I am thankful for his detailed information and passionate warning. We tend to think of these things as superstitions, but then, we do not live there, among the ruins and on the earth just above the cave-rivers. I respect Oscar’s warning. I have spent enough time in the channels that are the entrances to Underworld of the Maya. I have seen some odd things.
And so, I listen to the advice.
And I stay in the light.
Hugs and Butterflies,
laura
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