Not-so-Lost World

When you leave the main highway and turn on to New Mexico's High Road, heading east into the hills, you enter a world where birds speak Spanish, apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe appear in trees and on walls, statues and paintings possess magical powers which enable them to heal the afflicted, and above all, where the natural world is a conscious organism, capable of communicating with the beings living in it, rather than a bundle of related but discrete objects and phenomena.

For people raised and schooled in a tradition that rationally analyzes the world, approaching it with scientific skepticism, the parallel world of the High Road seems strange, primitive, and, for some, the product of backward and ignorant superstition. To the city-bred and university-trained, it seems like a lost and ancient world, like the one the ancestors of the Brothers Grimm lived in, which generated the magical stories they told.

Contrary to what we might believe, though, the magical and luminous world of these Hispanicized Indians is neither lost nor remote. Variations of it still prevail among the great majority of the earth's people, in Latin America, where a mystical Christianity still dominates the lives of the most indigenous part of the population; in Africa, where Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing religion; and throughout South and Southeast Asia, where the traditional Hindu and Buddhist faiths are expressed largely through images, magical rituals, and relics.

The world of the High Road is still very much alive and close at hand. It's just slightly out of place in a secular, cynical, and increasingly demoralized and self destructive cultural environment like that of the United States in 2005.

I fully experience that other world when I walk into the old Spanish mission churches at Chimayo and Las Trampas. At Chimayo, the entire grounds of the sanctuary seem inhabited by spirits, and one should not visit there without eating a little of the holy dirt, thus taking away and incorporating some of that energy. For some reason, the otherworldly feeling is even stronger when I enter the astonishingly beautiful, pristine, and remarkably preserved church at the little village of Las Trampas.

For the natives of these hills, spirituality is not something a person seeks or tries to attain. It's the natural state of affairs, into which one is born, and he or she can either accept it or not.

Pictures of Las Trampas and Chimayo are here.