Sebastian’s Gift: A Maya Ontology of Spirit

Beginning in the late 1970s, anthropologist William Hanks spent years working in Oxkutzcab, Yucatán, where a chance conversation with Maya ritual expert and healer Sebastián Castillo Mo (known as Don Chabo) grew into an extraordinary relationship. Seeing that his knowledge needed to live beyond his own lifetime, Don Chabo took Hanks on as an apprentice, intentionally teaching him the parts of his practice that could be passed on.

In a deeply personal lecture, Hanks takes us inside that apprenticeship and the world Don Chabo shared with him: a world inhabited by humans, spirits, and other beings, in which words, gestures, places, and ritual actions carried profound power. Hanks will reflect on how Don Chabo taught, what he believed could and could not be transmitted, and what it means to carry another person's knowledge after they are gone.

Part remembrance, part exploration of Maya spiritual practice, the evening offers a rare window into a relationship that changed both teacher and student.

From Dr. Hanks:
In the course of ethnographic fieldwork in the municipio of Oxkutzcab, Yucatan, between 1977 and 1996, I came to work very closely with a Maya hmèen ritual expert, shaman (lit. 'do-er'), named Sebastian Castillo Mo, known locally as Don Chabo (deceased 1996). What started as a fortuitous conversation developed into an apprenticeship in which Don Chabo explicitly undertook to teach me the teachable parts of his frankly charismatic practice, in order that the knowledge be passed on and live on after his own death. This lecture aims to give the audience a sense of the world of being and beings that Don Chabo lived in, a deeply spiritual world organized around basic principles, occupied by human, spirit, and 'natural' beings. It unfolds in three parts: (1) the relationship between Don Chabo and me, including notes on Don Chabo’s teaching style, (2) a brief sketch of some of his main commitments regarding the spatiotemporal organization of the world of being, and (3) a selective sketch of the verbal and corporeal register in which he moved spirits.

Photo: Don Chabo casts offeratory atole at thanksgiving ceremony, facing East amidst young corn plants, Mani Yucatan ca. 1990. Courtesy of William Hanks.