Don Juan and the Sorcerer's Apprentice

Glendower: "I can call spirits from the vasty deep."

Hotspur: "Why, so can I, or so can any man; "But will they come when you do call for them?"

—Henry IV, Part I

THE Mexican border is a great divide. Below it, the accumulated structures of Western "rationality" waver and plunge. The familiar shapes of society — landlord and peasant, priest and politician — are laid over a stranger ground, the occult Mexico, with its brujos and carismaticos, its sorcerers and diviners. Some of their practices go back 2,000 and 3,000 years to the peyote and mush room...