The Snake Guy

Mexico City, Mexico

My mom had asked me to visit the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe and take a picture of Saint Juan Diego's tilma (cloak). It's the most visited Catholic pilgrimage site in the world. So I hopped on the metro and headed towards La Villa, a.k.a. Basilica City.

The metro in Mexico City is amazing. It's outrageously cheap - 5 pesos, which is slightly more than a quarter. Some poor worker has the unenviable job of sitting in a booth and tearing off raffle-esque tickets all day while people rapidly fire off numbers at her. 4. 10. 15. 1. A metro ticket gives you unlimited transfers to anywhere in Mexico City.

For some transfers you may have to walk up to a mile through tunnels. On this outing I unwittingly stumbled into El Túnel de la Ciencia, which is a stretch of tunnel lined with black panels decorated by the constellations of the night sky. All the lights are blue and it's super trippy.

Outside of the La Villa metro station I stopped to watch a magic show. A skinny guy was sitting on a 5-gallon bucket. In front of him was a large snake coiled up and not moving. On the ground was a semi-circle of tarot cards. A small circle of people had stopped to watch him, and I joined them.

He was talking pretty quickly and I couldn't understand what he was saying. Occasionally he would pour water from a large jug to make a semi-circle of water on the street around him. After a few minutes of this he passed out one card from a deck to everyone in the crowd.

Five minutes later he put on a blindfold and sat on his bucket so that his back was facing the crowd. At this point a different stockier guy took control of the crowd, encouraging more people to join the circle and distributing more cards. The stocky guy picked up the snake, which at this point was revealed to be alive, and handed it to the blindfolded man, who held it up in two hands like an offering.

We were told to hold our cards on our foreheads with only the backs showing, and this is when the real act began.

The stocky man walked around the crowd calling out articles of clothing. The blindfolded man would then respond in a monotone chanting cant the color. This man's shirt? The spirit tells me this man is wearing a green shirt. This woman's earring?

After several rounds of this, the stocky man would pick a person and ask what card they had. The blindfolded man would correctly identify the card they were holding. Then the stocky man would give the person a tiny figurine and tell them what I think was some kind of horoscope or prognostication.

By this point it was starting to feel less like a magic trick and more like some kind of creepy cult demonstration. I was uncomfortable because I couldn't follow all the Spanish and didn't want to accidentally agree to something costly. After the figurines came out one man set his card down and left. I followed him.

The stocky man tried to stop me. You want to have bad health and a bad life? You know this is horrible luck to leave during the ceremony? Yeah that's okay.

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The story of the Lady of Guadalupe concerns a supposed miracle in the 1600s in which the Virgin Mary appeared to a peasant and told him to build a church at the site of the apparition. She appeared a few times, saved the peasant's uncle's life, and told him to bring some non-native roses to the arch-bishop. When he emptied the roses from his cloak in front of the arch-bishop, they found the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe imprinted on the fabric. This image is now popular on backpacks, t-shirts, telephone cases, and a bottle-opener I had for years but lost somewhere in Mexico.

La Villa refers to the small town they have built around the basilica. There are about 10 different churches, because the 14 masses a day in the 10,000 seat basilica obviously aren't sufficient. Also a museum, a bunch of papal statues, and at any given time about 100,000 Catholics. The cloak itself looks like a painting and is inside a gilded frame on display inside the basilica.

Given that there must be like 40 masses a day in the La Villa, I imagine they have a small army of priests on retainer. I wonder what those parties are like.

I didn't stay in La Villa too long. I snapped a few photos for my mom and skedaddled. On my way back I passed a bunch of stores selling Virgin Mary memorabilia, a McDonalds, and also the snake guy and his assistant starting up a new performance. I wondered, what's creepier, the arcanic and surely fraudulent snake guy? Or the wildly popular and surely fraudulent magic cloak?