The New Age and the awakening of a decolonial consciousness from Mexico

Abstract

This article underlines another aspect of New Age spirituality developed in Mexico: although emerging from the Global North, it is also a matrix that gives value to those elements excluded by modernity and produces decolonial critiques and deconstructions from the Global South. The authors analyse four strands of neo-Mexican spirituality in which the decolonial perspective is corroborated: (1) the rise of post-national ethnic nations; (2) the criticism of patriarchy and the emergence of ecofeminist spiritualities; (3) the critique of capitalism and the alternatives of sustainable economy; and (4) the consumption of sacred plants and medicines as a spot where the struggle of indigenous ontologies and modern epistemologies takes place.

Major studies have characterised New Age spirituality as a global market (Bowman, 1999; Hanegraaff, 2001; Van Hove, 1999; York, 2009). We do not deny that the market is a global orientation of spirituality as it is a fact that alternative spirituality circuits represent, in addition to an alternative way of life, an alternative consumption: natural, holistic, spiritual, light, and so on. The commodification of the New Age caused its followers to reject that label and prefer to be recognised as neo-pagans (as happens with different circles of practitioners of pre-Christian spiritualities in Europe), and in a similar way in Mexico, a hybrid movement was born, recognised as neo-Mexicanity, which will be discussed in this article. These spiritualities also provide a way of life with an ethical horizon that inspires social, ecological, and even political movements (Heelas, 2008). In this article, we want to show their decolonising potential as another strand of global spirituality.

Most of the authors who have set the tone for sociological theory addressing New Age spirituality come from cosmopolitan centres located in the North Atlantic coordinates (especially the United States, England, France) from where tribes of spiritual seekers emerged in search of alternatives to modern, Western mentality and institutions. These counter-cultural quests undertook a directionality from West to East and from North to South. Spiritual seekers are cosmopolitan agents who travel around the world moved by the desire to encounter the other, the non-Western, the non-modern, and the non-capitalist. The cosmopolitans – according to Hannerz (2014) – share an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness towards plural cultural experiences that provide ways out of the materialistic and instrumental values of capitalism.

In 2004, we undertook a research project on the transnationalisation of the Conchera-Aztec ritual dance, a tradition that is part of the current syncretic system of popular Catholicism, valued by nationalist intellectuals for the rescue of cultural and spiritual Mexican roots. Since the 1980s, it has been sought by New Age movements (González Torres, 2005) as a reservoir of pre-Hispanic and therefore pre-Christian rituals and conceptions (similar to what happened with the Celts in Europe).

Neo-Mexicanity is a hybrid spiritual movement and is part of a global network where neo-pagan, environmentalist, New Age, paindian and ecofeminist circuits intersect. Our project consisted of a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995) following the leaders who brought this Mexican-origin movement to other countries, such as the United States, Spain and Brazil. The ethnography included interviews and participant observation of key ceremonies where indigenous leaders (medicine men, dance captains and shamans) and cosmopolitan agents (gurus, coaches, teachers and spiritual seekers) converged, generating alliances between them. ¹

Csordas (2009) established that ‘religious globalizations is not a one-way street from center to periphery’ (p. 8). From the Global South, an ‘inverted globalization’ was unleashed, meaning ‘a multidimensional process, with religion, popular cultures, politics and economics as necessarily coeval and intimately intertwined, as they are in the lives of actors responsible for bringing about globalisation in the first place’ (Csordas, 2009: 3).

Mexico attracts cosmopolitan spiritual seekers because of the exoticisation of pre-Hispanic civilisations as places of safeguarding initiatory knowledge; the neo-shamanic and psychonautical route; and the living indigenous cultures that preserve to this day cherished ceremonies, medicines and knowledge to reconnect with what the capitalist West denied and despised. Therefore, our study is not about Mexico, but from Mexico as a hotpoint in the global spiritual network. It offers an alternative to observe the hybridising effects between cosmopolitan New Age cultures and colonial, original, indigenous or native cultures. We are also interested in recognising their impact on post-colonial disputes in the Global South. The argument is that such cultural hybridisation (García Canclini, 1989) that amalgamated in neo-Mexican spiritualities led to the awakening of new post-colonial disputes that animate projects and activisms with decolonising utopian horizons (Bhabha, 2011).

During the research, we observed effects of cultural hybridization, and we questioned ourselves about the meanings they entail: Do they contribute to essentialize new spiritual expressions as if they were ancestral traditions? Or by extracting them from their ethnic and community contexts, do they dilute traditional contents? Or by placing cultural goods in mercantile circuits, do they turn them into mere merchandise? Or because of the local political context, does it revitalise collectives and political identities that are redefined in the face of post-colonial approaches? What we found was that the meanings of these effects are not mutually exclusive, but rather ambivalent and have paradoxical consequences. Globalisation reactivates centre/periphery hierarchies, but above all, it introduces an unstable phase where the ‘flows between fields of activity, practices, knowledge, narratives whether economic, political and cultural overlap, opening the way to new paradoxical conditions’ (Santos, 2009: 271).

Neomexicanism: a Mexican New Age spirituality

There are studies that show the national and regional variations of New Age spirituality in Latin America. All agree that they originally promoted techniques taken from the ancient religions of the East (especially Buddhism). A common element is that the New Age movement energised the circuit of alternative therapies and that at present, more than a movement, it represents a cultural ethos present in society (Guerriero et al., 2016). The New Age developed sensibility based on the holistic principle that promoted a ‘syncretism in movement’ (Amaral, 1999). This syncretism should be understood as a global process, as cultural goods are internationalised and de-ethnocentrised at the same time (Robertson, 1995).

For example, in Argentina, it was promoted mainly by members of the school of Esalen, California (Carozzi, 1999), and found fertile ground to articulate itself in the therapeutic circuits. Later it had an unprecedented incorporation in national politics influenced by the movement ‘The Art of Living’ (Viotti and Funes, 2015); in Brazil, it arrived hand in hand with the ‘Movimiento do Potencial Humano’ and merged early with the spiritualist schools of Kardecist origin (Amaral, 1999; Camurça, 2016), and later with the rituality of ayahuasca (Santana de Rose and Langdon, 2013).

In Mexico, it was mainly spread by an iniciatic school of French origin – the Great Universal Brotherhood (GFU) – that promoted its hybridisation with living indigenous traditions. These two strands generated two ramifications that, although they maintain points of contact, are not free of tensions. We refer to neo-Mexicanism (Mexicanized hybridised version) and Camino Rojo or Red Path (Painindianist version).

In fact, GFU was founded by Reynaud de la Ferrière, ² who spread the idea of the displacement of the energetic pole from the East towards Latin America. At the end of the 1980s, his successor Domingo Días Porta encouraged initiatory seekers to discover the secret wisdoms practised in the living traditions of the indigenous people of America and led to the founding of various neo-Mexican movements.

Neomexicanism is a hybrid spiritual-cultural movement based on the recovery of pre-Hispanic cultures that are re-signified and reappropriated in New Age terms (De la Torre and Gutiérrez Zúñiga, 2011; González Torres, 2005). It mystifies and idealises pre-Hispanic culture and certain indigenous expressions as ways into ancestral wisdom, into reconnecting to nature and the universe or into the search for achieving inner perfection.

It began in the 1980s, in the big cities of Mexico, and was made up of middle-class people (professionals, artists and university academics) who identified themselves with cultural movements aimed at recovering indigenous and prehispanic cosmologies but also at ecological, hippies and New Age religious-type groups.

There are different schools and leaderships within Neo-Mexicanism. The Reginos were inspired by the book of ‘‘Regina’’ by Mexican guru Antonio Velasco Piña, a member of the GFU, in which the rescue of the spirit of pre-Hispanic and indigenous Mexico was re-signified under keys of meaning taken from Tibetan Buddhism. The Rainbow Tribes is a global movement that established its base in Huehuecoyotl, Morelos, under the leadership of Alberto Ruz, promoter of global networks and Rainbow eco-sustainable communities in Latin America. It propagated a new planetary eco-spiritual consciousness that articulated indigenous communities with artists, intellectuals, environmentalists, practitioners of global neo-pagan and New Age networks. The Rainbow caravans set in motion a dynamic of hybrid cultural pollination, as well as functioning as an articulator to glocalise the most isolated indigenous communities that are today connected in a global spiritual-environmentalist network (De la Torre, 2014; Gutiérrez Zúñiga, 2018).

Under Dias Porta’s leadership, alliances were established that articulated different paths such as ritual exchanges between Lakota and neo-Mexican leaders. From this arose a pan-Indianist movement called Camino Rojo (Red Path) led by Díaz Tepankali, who organised the Caravan of Peace and Dignity, a continental march of indigenous leaders who made themselves heard as spokespersons of the original peoples to counteract the colonialist discourse of the Bicentenary of the Discovery of America in 1992. From the Caravan, which travelled across America, connecting indigenous leaders, the Mexican-Lakota movement was transnationalised, blurring its roots to internationalise it as a neo-pagan and pan-Indianist movement for the rescue of a global shamanic spirituality. The indigenous as an initiatory route promised to discover ways of life to solve the environmental problems that threaten the world.

The circulation of shamanic ceremonies intensified a ceremonial exchange between newagers and indigenous ritual specialists, ceremonies, power plants and traditional healing techniques that catapulted into global holistic spirituality networks. Transnational circulation also occurred from South to North. Their decontextualisation freed them from the traditional processes of authentication and permission, allowing them to be used with other intentions in new circuits and foreign contexts.

In the following, we will describe how, since the 2000s, Neo-Mexicanism has been bifurcating towards new tendencies linked to a dynamic of post-colonial critique of Western knowledge, of the patriarchal structures of indigenous movements and of Mexicanism. We will do so by focusing on four aspects of Neo-Mexican spirituality: (1) the rise of post-national ethnic nations; (2) the criticism of patriarchy and the emergence of ecofeminist spiritualities; (3) the critique of capitalism and the alternatives of sustainable economy; (4) sacred plants and medicines: the struggle of indigenous ontologies and modern epistemologies.

The rise of post-national ethnic nations

Neo-Mexican followers are not Indians: They are not part of a community with a distinct language, they do not live on the margins of progress and nor do they respond to the rules and duties of an ethnic community. They belong to urban middle classes that claim the indigenous origin of Mexican culture, and many of them are migrants to the United States (mainly in the south). They are hybrid subjects who reinvent their ethnic lineage through practices and rituals of indigenous origin, recovered and largely reinvented.

The mission of these groups is to rescue a tradition denied by Catholicism and modernity and to claim the existence of original nations that question both the ideology and the geopolitical limits of modern nation states (Mexican and US American). The main traditions rescued are ritual Aztec dance, the ritual celebrations at ancient Indian dwellings − now protected as archaeological sites − herbal medicine and healing sweat-lodges or temazcals, the Nahuatl language and philosophy, the cultivation of native maize and the preservation of indigenous sacred territories against concessions to transnational companies seeking to exploit mining, water or soil through agro-industries.

They observe the Aztec calendar to which they have added key dates in accordance with their political-cultural project of decolonising historical memory. They have created new ‘prehispanic’ commemorations instead of patriotic dates promoted by the Mexican state exalting mestizaje. For example, on 12 October, the day on which the Western calendar celebrates Columbus Day, they commemorate the genocide caused by the Spanish conquest. They have also created a ritual system for life-cycle events (equivalent of baptism, marriage and funeral). In this ritual recreation, the Aztec conchero dance is very important. It is a practice of pre-Hispanic origin recreated as part of popular Catholicism during the colony, whose secular continuity was understood by the intellectuals of Mexicanism as proof of the vitality of indigenous cultures and therefore taken as the basis for their cultural project. This dance has undergone a process of decatholicisation (references to Christs, Saints and Virgins, uprooting of Catholic ritual paraphernalia and its calendar) and indigenous essentialisation, recreating, for example, the chants in Nahuatl, the natural materials for the dancers’ costumes, the musical instruments and the references to the indigenous cosmovision – especially of Nahuatl origin – such as Tonantzin (Mother Earth) or Ometéotl (the dual principle of life). The popular Catholic tradition has been converted into a Mexica dance (De la Torre and Gutiérrez Zúñiga, 2017). The performance of dances in scenarios such as city squares, museums or archaeological sites allows the experience of recreating an indigenous heritage and defend a project of nation with ancestral roots. In this way, Neo-Mexicanism can be understood as a movement that, by reclaiming indigenous heritage, fights for the decolonisation of national culture and, at the same time, contributes to the creation of a post-colonial ethnonation in tension with the nationalism promoted by the Mexican state.

For its part, the Mexicanism and Neo-Mexicanism movement in the United States follows this same decolonising orientation from new contexts. This movement was linked to the important Chicano movement that fought for the civil and labour rights of Mexican workers in the cities of the border states of California, Texas and New Mexico since the 1970s. Its ideology of vindicating the indigenous as the essence of Mexicanness allowed it to connect with both the population of Hispanic or indigenous origin living in the Southern United States. We have the Kumeais, for example, who live there since before the annexation of these territories (that were part of New Spain and Mexico until 1848), and many Mexican migrant workers, most of them illegal, expelled from Mexico throughout the 20th century due to their conditions of poverty or marginality. Both populations were excluded from the project of nationhood promoted by the modern Mexican state. At the same time, this pro-indigenous orientation provided bridges of contact with the counter-cultural fronts that both the African American population and the Native Americans were fighting in the United States for the recognition of their political and cultural citizenship. It allowed for an insertion within the national formation of the United States that has generated a matrix of difference based on ethnicity (Segato, 2007). Being Mexican is equivalent to a distinct ethnic belonging, and in this case, an ethnicity whose quality of ‘original people’ accredits its right to territory beyond the borders of the modern states. The practice of dance, which includes the experience of the rhythm of music produced with ancestral instruments, makeup and indigenous attire constitute an embodied experience of ‘being Indian’. Along with the Chicano muralist expressions, it has become a tool for the appropriation of territory and the affirmation of their right to be different (De la Torre and Gutiérrez Zúñiga, 2012, 2013).

Mexicanism movement has contributed to the creation of an imagined nation (Anderson, 1993), called Aztlán, whose territory transcends the binational border and links Mexico with the southern United States, which is inhabited by a people or ‘race’ (according to Chicano discourse). Aztlán constitutes, from the experience of those displaced from their place of origin either by migration or by the establishment of modern binational borders, a post-colonial ethnonation, in tension with both the Mexican and the North American state.

Ecofeminist spiritualities: a criticism of patriarchy

Since the early 21st Century, Neo-Mexicanism has become increasingly female, making the spirituality networks an alternative to the women’s movement. The spirituality of sacred femininity has been resignifying and resymbolising the rituals of Neo-Mexicanism, especially circular dances, Red Tents, temazcal, women’s circles and the maintenance of traditional medicine. ³

In the 1980s, both the traditional Conchera-Aztec ritual dance groups that were central to the recovery of ancestral Mexica culture and even most of the esoteric schools had male leadership, a discourse of gender segmentation and also reproduced patriarchal powers, structures and hierarchies. In the cherished Siux-Lakota tradition, something similar happened: The recognition of leadership was given to the Medicine Men and not to women healers or midwives; in addition, there were restrictions for women to participate in the inipis or temazcales (sweat-tent rituals) during their menstruation period. Until then, the emphasis in rituals was centred on a conception of sacrificial offerings to nature. The value of resistance and the strengthening of the will were established in order to form spiritual warriors, values that were complemented by masculinity.

Since the 1990s, as the New Age narrative expanded, new values such as femininity, spirituality, nature, magical and intuitive knowledge would predominate, and a feminisation of Neo-Mexicanism began (De la Torre, 2019). This fusion gradually changed the traditional meanings: first by opening the way to female leadership (called the Grandmothers), to groups and circles that were purely feminine, and then to the creation of a new feminist movement. ⁴ During the circles, ceremonies originally borrowed from the Neo-Mexicanism movement are performed with new meanings akin to what they think as nature’s feminine spirituality.

The unique feature of these corporeal rituals is their focus on nature’s female essence or energy, especially fertility as an attribute of female nature. These rituals activate somatic modes of attention (Csordas, 1993) in order to foster acceptance of women’s biological functions, their hormonal cycles and their corporeality. In this process, the sacred nature of female reproductive organs (uterus, vagina, ovaries, womb) is emphasized and incorporated in narratives that address women’s daily issues, concerns, emotions, and their particular way of thinking and interacting with society (De la Torre, 2019).

These rituals re-semanticise indigenous or ancestral ritual ceremonies and symbols and allows experiences of the female sacred bond to the Mother Earth (understood as Gaia, Tonatzin or Pachamama) and to the lunar cycles (no longer solar) expressed in the bodies and sexuality of women. For its part, contact with the pre-Hispanic legacy and the indigenous world was a way to reconnect with the sacred feminine forces of the pre-Christian worldviews known as pagan.

The work of two women recognised as grandmothers stands out: Grandmother Margarita who undertook the movement of the ‘awakening of the feminine’ and who has been recognised in the global network as a guide of the spiritual movement of femininity; and Grandmother Esperanza, who is known for founding women’s circles in different countries of the world: Spain, Italy, Canada, Argentina and Colombia. Both founded the red tents also known as moon tents, inipis dedicated to reconnecting with menstrual cycles and the sacred feminine. Breaking the taboo of menstrual blood is an exercise in patriarchal deconstruction. Even women’s leadership has rebranded Red Path as Ruby Path, and the sweat tents are referred to as red tents (in a reference to menstrual blood). ‘Moon tents’ is the term used for the temazcal exclusively for women; menstruation can be referred to as ‘moon’; and the full moon can be called the ‘red moon’ in reference to menstruation (Valdés Padilla, 2018).

For example, the collective Ixchel promotes valuing sexuality, organising women’s circles where they talk about intimacy, build a sense of sisterhood, work to re-symbolise menstruation and even sacralise menstrual blood by participating in blood sowing rituals. The collective develops an educational project to heal the sexuality of many women. They give workshops on menstruation, conscious fertility, contraception and sexuality. They have also been important promoters of the use of the menstrual cup, which provides an ecological alternative to the use of towels and which has spread among the network of women’s spiritual circles. They celebrate rituals with red tents that are temazcals during the full moon cycle of the women, and they advise the formation of other women’s circles not only in Mexico but also in South America.

According to Valdés Padilla, it is a daily exercise of decolonisation of culture and patriarchal power mainly through a reconnection both with the body and with indigenous traditions that allow the female body to inhabit in harmony with nature. Indigenous ontology does not observe oppositions between body and spirit and between culture and nature. Healing is experienced in ritual ceremonies through which women connect spiritually and emotionally with their menstrual cycles in opposition to the domination they experience in gynaecological medicine. Unlike traditional feminist movements that strive to depatriarchalise the state, spiritual circles aim to depatriarchalise women’s bodies.

Women’s circles linked to Neo-Mexicanism seek to create new representations of femininity through spiritual rituals that foster the physical experience of ‘gendered spiritualities’ (McGuire, 2008). The aim is to create a space for women to know themselves by sharing with other women but also a space of individual awareness in which a woman understands her place in the social, spiritual and biological realm (Ramírez, 2017: 8).

The Reginas movement has the goal of the awakening of the Sacred feminine consciousness by decolonising women’s bodies. ⁵ The Reginas was drawn to the traditional dances due to

their profound religiousness, their devotion to the saints and their rituals that pass onto them a millennial knowledge, making them the heirs of an ancient tradition that must be learned in order to renew the cosmic energy that traveled from Tibet to Mexico (González Torres, 2005: 171).

Patricia Ríos, a spiritual chief in Guadalajara city, put together her own hybridity by taking elements from the Tibetan interpretation of Mexican vernacular traditions (Conchera-Aztec dances), from the Chicano political movement, from the Siux-Lakota line of spirituality and from the indian spirituality transmitted by the communities created by Dias Porta, calles ‘maises’. She gave an interpretative twist to the peace marches of the Lakota tradition by considering them as reikis to Mother Earth and by incorporating the Conchera-Aztec dances to perform a pilgrimage to unblock the energy flows of the city. For her, the significance of the rituals she leads is to awaken the consciousness of the sacred feminine (De la Torre and Gutiérrez Zúñiga, 2017).

One of the utopias shared by women in the circle is that of ‘decolonising’ areas that have been professionalised as part of rational, instrumental thought as well as ‘depatriarchizing’ social spheres, which involve the development of alternative, intuitive approaches within the circles.

The critique of capitalism and the alternatives of sustainable economy

A central aspect of the New Age in the South is that the spiritual search is linked to the construction of ‘another world’ as an alternative to the ‘western technological society’, which together with the capitalist market system produces exclusion and exploitation of the planet. We will look at one of the oldests and more complex experiments of utopian community building and sustainable economy in Latin America, created by Alberto Ruz. He is the founder of the utopian community Huehuecóyotl, in Morelos, Mexico, since 1982 inspired by Deep Ecology, the bioregional perspective and the Rainbow Meetings. ⁶ As a result of his career, Alberto is currently a node actor linking the Reginos Circles, The Americas Bio-regional Council, Iberoamerican Light Network, Eco-villages global network and Rainbow Family, among many others.

The ecovillage proposal seeks a radical transformation of the relationship between humans and nature, conceived according to the New Age perspective as Mother Earth and named in Mexico as the Aztec deity Tonantzin, or Tonantzin-Guadalupe, due to the syncretisation of these figures during the colonising process. Thinking of nature as sacred is the opposite of thinking of it as a provider of raw materials. It is not only an anti-capitalist proposal but also about achieving a transformation of our paradigm of thought: from individualism towards collective responsibility, from anthropocentrism (a perspective that places humans as superior beings, which is predominant in Abrahamic religions and in Western thoughts that found instrumental rationality) towards biocentrism (a perspective that recognises the differences between the different beings of nature, even in terms of evolutionary difference, but not in terms of superiority) (Bellomo, 2019). It is about recognising the complexity of the interrelationship between humans and non-humans and also about reversing human colonisation of the planet. This explains the importance of experimenting with self-sustaining technologies with the permaculture approach for generation of food, energy or housing, as well as new forms of exchange of products and services as an alternative to the market (e.g. barter in kind, or the creation of alternative currencies) and new forms of social organisation based on equality and cooperation.

The eco-villages are linked through the Global Ecovillages Network. But since 1991, Alberto Ruz and the Guardianes de la Tierra (Earth watch) organisation have promoted periodic regional meetings called ‘Councils of Visions’ to generate a perspective in which the visions of different traditions and movements in the ecological, artistic and traditional areas of different places in Latin America and Spain are brought together. According to Ruz, it is ‘council of councils’, knowing that the figure of the council of elders or wise men is the legitimate authority of different indigenous traditions, with the aspiration that the ‘people of respect’ of all the cultures of the earth will have a voice equal to that of the larger nations, which impose their colonial vision from organisations such as the UN. (Interview with Alberto Ruz by Renée de la Torre and Cristina Gutiérrez, Huehuecóyotl, 2–4 October 2012).

These councils have varied in their organisation, structure and priorities over the course of 16 editions. It is relevant to observe its capacity to connect the practical, spiritual and political dimensions of its actions and to do so in a conscious and deliberate way: Various rituals reinvented from indigenous traditions in Mexico (such as the temazcal or sweat lodge, or the hunting peyote) are oriented towards generating experiences of connection between personal healing and the healing of the relationships of the subject, with the healing of the planet. The cultivation of maize is taught, while it is ritually revered as the sacred foundation of our existence as a people, and concrete projects for the defence of their native varieties are also encouraged through, for example, cyber activism campaigns against extractivist transnational companies. As with maize, the various animal, plant and mineral species of the planet are ritually honoured during the Vision Councils, and symbolic acts of reparation are performed to repair the damage they have suffered when they are extracted, often destroyed and used as inputs in production processes, or contaminated, such as water and soil. Aware of the performative capacity of the rituals, the organisers intensively promote conscious eating, recycling and the use of dry toilets during the councils, extending these ecological practices of daily use in the eco-villages among all participants (Gutiérrez Zúñiga, 2018). ⁷

According to Bruno Latour’s perspective on the ecological worldview, the planetary entity named by Lovelock as Gaia (and incorporated in Latin America as Pachamama and Tonantzin) is ‘a cosmological (or better yet, cosmopolitical) term’ that offers the possibility of re-establishing continuity between the planetary scale of ecological disaster and our local scale of understanding, experience and action. It may help to recompose us as a body politic capable of taking responsibility for the foreseeable end of the anthropocene (Latour, 2011: 74). These initiatives are renewing and reinvigorating from the South the more counter-cultural strand of New Age spiritualities, attracting new generations of young people to radical critical thinking and the search for an alternative world and new forms of citizenship.

Sacred plants: the struggle of indigenous ontologies and modern epistemologies

The hybridisation of ceremonies and culture around power plants generates ambivalent effects around colonisation and decolonisation. Their different modes of appropriation – and not necessarily their national, ethnic or class identity – antagonise positions between natives, New Mexicans and cosmopolitan consumers.

The shamanic path has attracted the attention of New Agers to Mexico, mainly linked to the ritual ingestion of psychotropic plants. Mexico is the country with the highest number of natural hallucinogens in the world (De la Garza, 2012). These plants are central to several indigenous cultures (Schultes and Hofmann, 2000) and for the neo-shamans ceremonies.

Mexico has become a focus of attraction for cosmopolitan New Age seekers of mainly shamanic experiences and learning. Different medicine men, power plants, rituals or ceremonies related to shamanism have been extracted from their traditional contexts and have been reconverted into merchandise or offers that circulate in the neo-shamanic, psychonautical and therapeutic New Age networks.

Mexico spreads ancestral rituals inherited from its ancient inhabitants such as the consecration of peyote, circular dances, temazcal (sweat-lodges), sacred chants, candles and, above all, the shamanic initiation rituals and the ‘Alliance of medicines’ systematised in the Red Path of Itzachilatlán.

The New Age circulation has energised cultural and spiritual exchanges between ayahuasca and peyote in Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Brazil. This exchange has increased, as both plants and ritual specialists circulate from one place to another. For example, Amazonian ayahuasca shamanism is increasingly practised in Mexico in ritual contexts of peyote consumption and is resemanticised according to the codes of Mexican shamanism. On the other hand, the rituals of the crescent moon or the Inipi steam bath from the Siux-Lakota culture are incorporated through the Camino Vermelho (Red Path) into the ayahuasca intake sessions in Brazil.

On the other hand, Red Path (Camino Rojo) has become the initiatory access for neo-shamans all over Latin America, and even Europe and North America. Although the main leader are Chicanos, who learned the sacred rites from the Native American tradition, many of them reside in Mexico. The Red Path communities have disseminated in different Latin American countries a wide range of workshops, rituals and narratives of Panindian and neo-Pagan spirituality.

The shamanic dispositive is an appreciated and valued knowledge, with social prestige, which offers a profession in the New Age therapeutic circuits (Scuro, 2018). This also generates commodification dynamics that turn cultural agents and their rituals into merchandise.

Ritual and therapeutic experimentation with power plants at sacred sites has prompted a spiritual tourism which impacts on the gentrification ⁸ of ancient indigenous villages where native people have maintained and preserved in a purer way their cosmovisions related to the sacredness of the forces and entities of nature. But at the same time, there are also those cosmopolitan agents who oppose both bionatural ⁹ and cultural extractivism extractivism for mercantile interest.

We detected two different ways of access to the ingestion of sacred plants and exchange with the native cultures of Mexico, where tensions between native populations and consumers can be detected with paradoxical effects.

Carlos Castaneda (1969) popularised the ingestion of peyote and the participation in shamanistic rituals of the Huichol people. Carlos Castaneda’s literature on the teachings of Don Juan has led by the hand to spiritual seekers who seek to draw from the shamanic path. On the one hand, Castaneda has made Mexico a very important place in the realisation of Universal spirituality (Galovic, 2002: 443). This has contributed to exoticizing of certain ethnic groups and medicine men valued as New Age shamans. One of the most attractive elements are the power plants abound in this region recognised by New Age spiritual seekers as sacred medicines capable of holistic healing that includes the body-soul-spirit performing a decolonisation of Western medical science. In this sense, they recognise other non-Western ontologies on a par.

But at the same time, shamanism has activated a mystical-initiated tourism to ritual centres, such as Wirikuta: the ceremonial centre of peyote pilgrimage of the Wixarricas (commonly known as Huicholes) in Mexico. For example, one of the most famous places among the pyschedelic travellers is Wirikuta (sacred territory of peyote hunting). Mystic tourists come to reach a consciousness-enhancing experience, to achieve a vision with the spirits of nature and even to initiate themselves as new shamans.

Tourism has intensified to such a degree that it jeopardises the preservation of the plant and the performance of sacred ritual. The newagers are not always aware that with their consumption, they contribute to the gentrification and biocultural extractivism of what they considered pure and ancestral. These actions have become a risk to the survival of the sacred cactus and to its ancestral culture. At the same time, because Wirikuta represents an ideal of New Age spirituality and psychonautics, a group of artists and intellectuals have been mobilised to carry out actions (festivals and rallies) in defence of the territory and therefore defend it as a universal spiritual heritage that protects ancestral knowledge linked to the safeguarding of enchanted nature. However, for the indigenous people, it is part of their own culture, and although there are mara’akate (shamans) who are valued as the ‘guardians of peyote’ and as the last medicine men who make their ritual offerings a means of survival, there are also those in the community who accuse them of selling their gods (Arriaga and Negrín, 2018). This tension opposes the individual vision of Western spiritual consumption vs the harmonic vision between supernatural powers, nature and the health of the community.

Another paradoxical case is the magic mushrooms of Maria Sabina (indigenous healer) famous for her psychedelic trips. Since the 60s, her village, Huahutla, in the Mazateca mountains has become the destination of hippies, newagers and psychonauts for the ingestion of magic mushrooms. María Sabina died in 1985, but until now, she is the symbol of decriminalisation of drugs campaign (Piña, 2021). Both mushrooms, their extracted substances and their ritual specialists circulate into global networks, as is the case of Doña Julia (local healer) who is part of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers (Rodríguez, 2013: 129). This global circulation contributes to a cultural redefinition and new uses (Kopytoff, 1991: 93). On the one hand, there is an increasingly more commercial use (involving pharmaceutical companies with an interest in commercialising psilocybin) and more individual use (offering psychedelic travel ceremonies and spiritual tourism to Huautla). Tourism contributes to the gentrification of the village, as mestizo consumption has made the mushroom more expensive, making it less and less accessible for local ritual use.

Psychedelic culture transforms local narratives, their sense of community incorporation, the uses and their relationship with the mushrooms and, above all, the ritual specialists stop being community healers to be shamans in global New Age initiation ceremonies. Piña (2021) gave an account of how an ontological tension was established between mestizo consumption and indigenous ceremony, since for the former, mushrooms are superhuman acting beings that inhabit their mountains, rivers and caves and communicate with the Mazatecs. Mushrooms are recognised as children, with social attributes and healing agency. In contrast, mestizo epistemology is mononaturalist (as defined by Latour, 2014: 52), as it is based on the dichotomy of man/nature, where nature is objectified in a pretended universality of biological and physical laws. This encounter, on the one hand, hybridises and, from the psychonauts, establishes an epistemological turn that looks to other epistemologies, although its individualistic vision contradicts the communitarian vision of Mazatec culture. On the other hand, by placing mushrooms in the sights of scientific studies, the contradictions between an animist ontology of nature (typical of the Mazatec) and a mononaturalist ontology that is present in the epistemology of modern science and that legitimises the pretence of mercantile extractivism of the American and European pharmaceutical industry are energised.

Conclusion

The global market paradigm implicitly carries a directionality from the centres to the peripheries and attends to the analysis of capitalist domination. However, by pursuing a study that aims at cognitive polycentrism, it can be recognised that domination does not only exclude (just as the market does not only extract) but also generates interactions and cultural exchanges. In peripheral contexts this exchange produces the emergence of hybrid and creative resistances (Bhabha, 2011) that can be understood as signs of post-colonial counter-modernity.

In these contexts, recognised by Santos (2016), as Global Souths, the cultural hybridisation generated by the global market of spirituality drives alternative projects to invert the sense of the coloniality of knowledge by undertaking symbolic appropriations in the opposite direction of the colonial routes and meanings. The emergence of spiritual movements that circulate, nourish and constitute the global New Age offer from South to North open new gaps of decolonisation and establish alternative ways of participating under models of collaboration that reduce historical asymmetries capable of generating intermediate passages (in-between, Bhabha, 2011), although this does not mean that they transform the structure of the directionality of historically established colonialism. Decolonisation is not the property of the colonised; it is an exercise in post-colonial critique that subverts the categories of cultural, ethnic or racial differentiation that have supported cultural inequality. Therefore, it is neither intrinsic nor exclusive to an ethnic group, social class or nationality. Cultural appropriations can produce ambivalent effects, some with a colonial extractivist sense, others with a critical sense of colonial deconstruction.

Neo-Mexicanism offers a reconnection with urban utopian community projects, with environmentalist projects, with therapeutic circuits offering holistic healing, with circles of female sacredness that developed ritual experiences to depatriarchalise the body, relationships and even the inherited traditions so valued by Mexicanity. Neo-Mexicanity represents a syncretic circuit where New Age spirituality movements converged with the esoteric schools of Mexicanism, spiritual seekers with shamans and traditional healers, power plants and their guardians were sought by psychonauts and psychedelics, grandmothers and midwives by alternative feminists, medicine men by transpersonal psychology therapists. These confluences were the devices for forming novel syntheses and new hybrids.

The communities that make up the neo-Mexican network are not social movements that aim to revolutionise today’s world; nor do they define themselves in terms of conventional ideologies, such as right-left, progressive-conservative. They are not even compatible with feminism, as they proclaim a sacred femininity that recovers the traditional values of femininity. They recognise the authority of grandparents and indigenous uses and customs. They seek alternative consumption but do not renounce being consumers. They seek to isolate themselves and reconnect with nature but only achieve this by maintaining their relationship with the world through the Internet.

In short, ‘they subvert the forms of homogeneity and cultural uniformities’ (Santos, 2009: 281). This capacity to articulate oppositions is contradictory but not politically irrelevant. They are subjects of enunciation of difference (Bhabha, 2011) that are constituted through hybrid identifications that break with the units and with the homogenisation of the colonising discourses of gender, race, ethnicity and nation.