Because I don’t socialize much, I am learning about fascinating Texas Tech faculty whom I never met despite my 35 years working there. I already devoted a post to one of these, the Christian-Shaman-Psychologist Bradford Keeney, and now I find that William Holden, whose name I heard throughout those years, wrote the primary biography in English of Teresa Urrea, the so-called “Joan of Arc of the Americas.”
She is another intriguing part of the strangeness at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. Half-native American, half-aristocratic Spanish in origin, she at sixteen was finally acknowledged by her father and almost immediately underwent the kind of illness that leads to becoming a shaman. Based on that and on training as a curandera, she became a miraculous healer with hundreds of patients a day, to whom she preached the right of native Americans to the land. Although her preaching was of love and equality rather than violence, she became the inspiration for a a rebellion and was exiled from Mexico to the United States.
Brandon Bayne’s article “From saint to seeker: Teresa Urrea’s search for a place of her own” shows that Teresa was connected to the fin-de-siécle ambience of Theosophy, itself linked to the Spiritualist movement in that the rise of Scientific Materialism made people expect materially verifiable miracles as a proof of religious claims. Already in Mexico, there was a Spiritist at the hacienda where she was raised. In America, she began to add some Theosophical Society jargon to her interviews and went on a road trip of healings, which she eventually hoped would take her to India to study Buddhism, yet she was widely venerated as an (unofficial) Catholic Saint. She married, the next day her husband tried to kill her and was taken to an asylum; she later had a baby by her teenaged translator, and died at 33 (as did Jesus).
Not surprisingly, her story has often been retold, most recently with Luis Urrea’s novels The Hummingbird’s Daughter and The Queen of America, which I have finally finished. What is at issue is how the Unconscious manifests. In Mexico, people interpreted her in terms of the stereotype of the saint, which Urrea sometimes uses, e.g., her sweat smelling of roses, her selfless devotion to the poor, her courage against oppression, her almost ceaseless prayers and sense of closeness to God. Particularly, after her coming to America, this stereotype diverges from her behavior, which, however, still remained highly altruistic. Whereas Urrea records startling healings performed at a single touch, Bayne emphasizes that the most detailed record of one showed her spending a half hour in massage on one patient. It, however, comes from after her arrival in America, when Urrea depicts her healing powers as declining. In other words, stories of the magical are more extreme in credulous cultures, but is this because belief makes great miracles possible or because events are exaggerated to fit local assumptions?
Holistic Unconscious: 