INTO THE UNKNOWN

He had to sacrifice his custard creams, but a trek with Mexico’s Huichol people gave Benedict Allen a glimpse of Heaven on Earth

There’s something to be said for going unnoticed – for being the woman or man ignored by those pushier individuals who exert their will over the rest of us. And perhaps that’s what Montezuma II, supreme ruler of the Aztecs, thought to himself as the conquistadors, and even his own people, plotted to do him in. “Drat!” I expect he muttered as Cortés, for one, readied his sword: there would be no more nice human sacrifices, no more juicy hearts cut out by a lovely obsidian knife and still pumping as they were presented to the heavens. The Aztecs had built great pyramids and risen to great power – and that power had attracted the attention of the next conquerors along.

Meanwhile, forgotten on the empire’s outskirts, were others more humble, vassals who served up the occasional tribute but generally were ignored; for they had nothing to offer but their meagre, scattered population and their dust. Yet it is they, not the Aztecs, who live on in Mexico to this day. Five centuries ago, the Huichol people shrank back as the Spanish advanced. Quietly they retreated to the highlands – just a handful sneaking back down again, year on year, to revisit their patch of desert.

I undertook the journey with them, once. It was quite a schlep. “Also, you will not eat in daytime hours,” a helpful Huichol called Remigio explained to me in broken English, confiscating my custard creams as we prepared to set out. “And you only go wee-wees out of sight.” For Wirikuta, our destination, was also home to the gods left behind and, in order to be acceptable in their sight, we must detach ourselves from the attributes of mere mortals.

“What else do we have to give up?” I asked warily, because everyone else looked rather more tough than me – they had skin like old buffalo leather and wore only tunics that resembled scanty pyjamas, despite the chill. “We give up approximately everything,” murmured Remigio with a rather forlorn air, and off we plodded down through the clouds of the Sierra Madre Occidental, occasionally casting aside the obstructive barbed wire fences of the Mexican farmers – stubbornly referred to as “Spaniards”.

Each evening, instead of concen

As I chewed the peyote the pebbles around me began to chirrup; I felt I was in a fish tank

trating on replacing our lost calories and fluids, as one might on a more conventional hike, the Huichol priest, or marakate, began instructing us on the names we must now use for the familiar objects we passed. The sun would be called the Moon, the rattlesnakes would be rabbits…

Three weeks on we were still doing this – loosening our hold on the material world in order to enter another – and by now some of us were somewhat light-headed and tetchy. Finally, we arrived – in the middle of absolutely nowhere. No wonder the Aztecs left the Huichol alone: the one worldly possession no one had seen fit to forgo was their pliers, which now suddenly appeared from everyone’s tunics and were deployed with alacrity to extract the spikes of those splendid cacti you normally see only in cowboy films.

It was time to seek out the peyote – the little succulent which we Westerners call hallucinogenic but that is actually, according to the Huichol, planted by the feet of the deer god Kauyamari – for he is a heavenly messenger, and peyote our doorway to the realm of the immortals.

And I might have learnt a good deal more – but before I knew it, the marakate was off his head and another pilgrim was being held down because he hadn’t renounced all earthly things. “Forgot about his wife,” murmured Remigio as he too drifted off to the gods. And now it was my turn.

At first, as I chewed the peyote the pebbles around me began to chirrup. Next, the world slowed and the air thickened; I felt I was in a fish tank. The scant bushes swayed like waterweeds and my mind swayed too. But slowly I began to experience a strange affinity with things around me.

For the sacred deer messenger – or just the peyote – had cleared the divisions that exist between plant and animal, between sky and Earth.

This Wirikuta might now appear to me like the inside of someone’s unusual aquarium, but it felt like Heaven. Because it was Heaven – at least to the Huichol. And when we eventually did stagger out of the place, we had been reminded of the eternal and reassuring truth: that the meek it is who shall inherit the Earth.

g ‘Quite a schlep’: the Huichol people on their annual pilgrimage from the highlands to the desert