Really? A giant, black, Jaguar materialised from the south face of the Chichen Itza pyramid and thundered across the ground to devour you?

On one level, it’s a preposterous thing to write; on another, it’s the heart of the matter.

“If you can’t let go,” Jerome had said, under the quiet shadows of the one silent place in the hotel grounds, “then you’ll get little, apart from academic worth, from Chichen Itza.”

Manuel had moved his guided group on, away from the the place of the first sighting of the temple complex, and to the fabled ‘ball court’, leaving a solitary figure staring at the pyramid, from which the jaguar that was filling his perception had emerged.

They had split time, the Shaman and Manuel, the gentle guide; had opened a door of perception known about but never personally experienced in this form. I had, as I wrote in the last part of this narrative, resisted many of the ideas of shamanism, not because they were suspect, but because they used a symbol system with which I was not comfortable. But that said more about me than the system.

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