Soooo, Jen and I decided to have a Mayan cleansing ceremony for our house and selves. Our Spanish teacher, Maria Jose, (she comes to our house every Tuesday and Thursday to teach us Spanish) knew a Mayan woman who lives in Antigua that was willing to come and perform the ceremony.
In order for her to do that we had to collect a whole bunch of things for her to use in the ceremony. First, we had to buy bundles of 7 sacred herbs. We then needed to boil them and bathe in them while asking them to clean us for 7 days. (That swiftly became a pain in the butt..)
As I said, while bathing we were supposed to be calm and peaceful and ask the herbs to clean us and then thank them. But, whenever I was dumping smelly herb juice over myself all I could think of was this clip from Baby Mama (watch it to the end, you'll get it)
The weekend before the ceremony, Jen, me and Maria Jose went to the market in zone 1 get the rest of the stuff we needed. All in all, we had to get 5 different colored candles, 3 dozen tiny candles, incense, and incense swinger, charcoal and a terracotta plate. The market is a bit hectic and a kinda dangerous place for me to have out my camera. Hence the crappy camera angles (trying to be incognito).
All of our stuff, laid out artistically on the kitchen table with a lovely piece of traditional Guatemalan cloth behind it.
I didn't take any pictures of the actual ceremony because thats not exactly kosher...The Mayan lady was really nice and friendly (I was secretly scared she was going to summon the devil in our house or something, but after meeting her it was obvious she wasn't going to do that). She started by having us place four different colored candles in the four corners of our apartment. Then she walked around the entire house with the incense swinger and burnt incense while praying. She opened up every cupboard and cabinet and wafted smoke inside. While she was doing this, she had me and Jen sit in the living room and light dozens of tiny white and yellow candles and place them upright on plates. Later, she had us stand one by one in the living room while she wafted burning herbs over us and prayed for the ancestors and the spirits to cleanse us, our apartment and our lives. Finally we all sat down and she talked about our different personalities based on the Mayan calendar and talked about what problems the ancestors told her we were facing and gave a few suggestions for our lives.
The whole ceremony took almost three hours and was really, really interesting.
