In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food by Stewart Lee Allen Page A

one thing, his pants didn’t fit. He also seemed tipsy, at least judging by the incomprehensible mix of Quecha (the native Inca language) and Spanish that he mumbled out of the corner of his crooked mouth. In fact, his whole face looked vaguely out of kilter. Nor did his office décor help—nothing but two rickety wooden stools and a table covered with dirty leaves. Every other witch doctor I’d visited had displayed a healthy supply of gods and talismans. Hell, I thought, if the walls had been painted white instead of raw cement I could have been in the office of a Western doctor, God forbid. The most impressive thing about Villanova was how he got his pet to drink the beer. He held the animal by the skin around its shoulders and, when it was time to administer a chug, pulled back on the skin to force its little mouth open. Then he dunked its head straight into the mug. The guinea pig had a helluva foam mustache, but in minutes they’d gone through half a large bottle of
Cuzco cerveza
, although I couldn’t say whether Señor Villanova or the pig had done most of the drinking.
    He explained tomorrow’s procedure to me. First, he would enchant his pig and rub it over my naked body so it could absorb my illness. This normally kills the beast; then, amid prayers and chanting, Villanova would cut it in half to examine the inner organs for signs indicating the best way to heal me. Villanova compared it to taking an X ray without the dangers of radiation.
    Very Etruscan, I thought. Straight out of
Bella Tuscany
. I asked Villanova if he’d ever heard of Tuscany. Frances Mayes? Risotto? He didn’t seem to understand, so I pulled out a picture of the Piacenza liver, a two-hundred-pound, three-dimensional bronze reproduction of a sheep’s liver made by the Romans around the second century B.C. to teach priests how to prophesize in the Tuscan way. It shows forty-four sections, each of which is sacred to a particular divinity. The idea was to look for prophetic polyps. A distended gallbladder, for instance, was considered propitious for war because martial gods like Hercle (Hercules) dominated the area. I presume that’s why we used to say, “she’s got a lotta gall” about someone with an unusually fiery temperament, but I could be mistaken.
    I told Señor Villanova all about the Etruscans. I waved my Xerox of the Piacenza liver at him and asked if
curandernos
had similar learning aids. But my Spanish must not have been up to the task, because he just gave me a pitying look.
    “Please stay calm,
señor.
” He patted me on the shoulder. “When you come back tomorrow you will see my wife. She specializes in these kinds of conditions.” Then he poured us both out a glass of the beer. “I suggest you drink this,” he said, gulping his down. “It will make you feel much better.”
    The Romans came to depend on the Etruscan prophets in much the same way we depend on tabloid journalists. It was a haruspex named Spurinna who came up with the famous “Beware the Ides of March!” headline, and Caesar’s personal priests warned him to stay home the day Brutus struck because they had disemboweled an animal without a heart. The flavor of these rites is captured nicely by the Roman chronicler Silicus Italicus in a scene in which the great general Hannibal consults a
haruspice
(a female haruspex) prior to declaring war on Rome. The divination takes place in a blood-splattered cave full of hissing gases and wailing spirits. “Then a black victim was sacrificed to the goddess of triple shape; and the priestess, seeking an oracle, quickly opened the still-breathing body and questioned the spirit, as it fled from the inward parts that she had laid bare in haste.” Consulting the entrails she plops on the table, the priestess prophesies, “I see the Aetolian field covered far and wide with soldiers’ corpses, and lakes red with Trojan blood . . . the river Po runs blood.” She was describing the events of the Second Punic War,