Welcome to The Temple of Sacred Fire Healing.
The Temple is a non-profit organization dedicated to authenticating, preserving, and safeguarding traditional spiritual healing paths. Our mission is to ensure that the healers who walk these paths are trained in the time-honored ways passed down by experienced and capable elders and that they uphold the highest ethical standards in their practice.
With the wisdom of the elders who have joined us in this mission, the Temple serves as a home for what we describe as the Sacred Fire Healing Wisdom Traditions, which have been passed down from generation to generation.
Presently the Temple offers three seminaries each rooted in the following healing traditions:
- Plant Spirit Medicine of the Eliot Cowan Lineage,
- Huichol (Wixárika) Grupo Tatewarí-Mara’akame Lineage affiliate with the community of San Andrés Cohamiata, and the
- Nahua Tepahtiani tradition of Don Lucio Campos of Nepopualco, now Tepoztlan, Mexico.
Each of these seminaries are elder administered, and guided, ensuring that the teachings, apprenticing, or training and initiations are in alignment with their respective traditions. These rigorous and sacred programs are designed to:
- Provide a legal and spiritual framework that supports certified healers as lawful practitioners of an authentic, recognized spiritual healing path.
- Protect those seeking healing by ensuring that they are served ethically, with integrity, and with a commitment to their well-being.
After completing a rigorous multi-year apprenticeship, mentorship and initiation, candidates may apply to the Temple of Sacred Fire Healing for Certification. A council of Elders will carefully review each candidate’s readiness. When certification is granted, the healer is formally inducted as one of the following:
- Plant Spirit Medicine Lay Spiritual Healer
- Mara’akame Cleric (Huichol Tradition)
- Tepahtiani Cleric (Nahua Tradition)
These healers pledge to serve their communities through healing, wisdom, and spiritual counsel, anchored in the sacred wisdom of their traditions.
Our Present Traditional Healing Paths
Wixárika (Huichol) Mara’akate (plural)
The mara’akate—medicine people of the Wixárika (Huichol) tradition—are initiated in one of the most ancient living spiritual healing paths on Earth. Rooted in the remote Sierra Madre of northwestern Mexico, this tradition is guided by Tatewarí (Grandfather Fire), the original teacher of the shamans along with Don José Sandoval de la Cruz and now Don Efrén Gonzalez Carrillo supporting Don David Wiley of Tepoztlan, Mexico. These healers dedicate their lives to serving others and community, maintaining sacred vows, and faithfully embodying the teachings of their elders. Through their healing work, they help resolve health difficulties, spiritual challenges and guide people in reconnecting to their place life.
Plant Spirit Medicine
Plant Spirit Medicine (PSM) is a comprehensive system of healing that incorporates the spirit of plants in order to bring balance to a person’s body, mind, and spirit. Recognizing that all illness begins with internal imbalance, Plant Spirit Medicine treats the root cause of imbalance and is thereby able to restore people to wholeness and improve their quality of life.
Healers in this tradition understand that plants, like humans, possess spirit — and that spirit has the extraordinary ability to touch, heal, and transform the human heart. Through this medicine, people are gently returned to harmony with themselves, their communities, and the natural world.
Nahua Tepahtiani
The path of a Tepahtiani Cleric begins with a lifelong commitment of service to the Weather Beings—powerful forces of Nature central to the Nahua peoples of the central highlands of Mexico. Initiates first walk as quiapaquiz (callers of sky-waters) or tiempero (workers of the rain seasons). As a Tepahtiani, their sacred charge is to address the spiritual root causes of illness and disconnection, working to restore balance and r the intricate tapestry of life. This tradition, passed down through the lineage of Don Lucio Campos Elizalde, continues today under the guidance of elder Don David Wiley who received Don Lucio’s altar in before his passing in 2005.
Our Mission
The Temple of Sacred Fire Healing exists to serve, protect, and honor the living traditions of ancestral healing. Our mission is to:
- Support the introduction and flourishing of authentic traditional healing ways—bringing them forward into the modern world to help humanity to reestablish a vital spiritual awareness and connection in with our living Divine, natural world.
- Preserve these sacred healing perspectives, methods and approaches for future generations. We recognize the profound long periods of time and care it took to develop these healing traditions and how easily this priceless wisdom can be lost.
- Uphold the integrity of these healing lineages by ensuring that the healers adhere to the traditional time proven methods, protocols and ethical standards that have been passed down through generations. This not only helps to maintain the integrity and authenticity of these healing practices but also fosters a deep respect for the cultural and spiritual heritage they represent.
- Ensure ethical conduct among certified healers, guided by integrity, humility and a steadfast commitment to the well-being of those they serve.
The Temple of Sacred Fire Healing was founded through the guidance and inspiration of Grandfather Fire—the living expression of Fire and source of divine wisdom in many ancestral traditions.
Since time immemorial, human beings have gathered around Sacred Fire to seek counsel, receive teachings, and reconnect with the rhythms of life. Across cultures and continents, our spiritual ancestors lived in relationship with Fire as a living, conscious presence—one who illuminates, transforms, and blesses.
The sacred healing traditions upheld by the Temple are rooted in this enduring relationship with Grandfather Fire.
Healers and clerics trained within these lineages devote themselves to serving their communities through time-honored practices such as shamanic healing, spiritual counsel, and sacred rituals—including marriage, baptism, and funerary rites. Their work helps restore a balanced, reciprocal relationship between human beings and the Living, Divine Natural World—so that individuals and communities alike may receive Nature’s healing and blessings.
The Tuki & The Mayoria
The Temple of Sacred Fire Healing supports two living and divine expressions, the Tuki and the Mayoria, on the sacred ceremonial land of Casa Xiuhtecuhtli in Tepoztlan Mexico. These temples are not merely symbolic structure; they are conscious beings, “brought into life” according to ancient tradition, serving as vessels for divine presence and community renewal.
The Tuki – Temple of the Huichol (Wixárika) Tradition
In the Huichol tradition, the Tuki is the traditional ceremonial temple, a home for the recognized god-expressions to assemble and be present for rituals, healing work, council work and special community engagements. Although at first glance it may appear to people outside the tradition that’s it’s just another thatched roof adobe building. However, the Tuki is designed and built as sacred architecture. Everything about it, from the choice of materials, to the orientation of the posts that hold up the roof or the doors are based on instructions provided many hundreds of years ago that express the full Huichol cosmology of when the Sun asked for its creation so that sacred work could be conducted and to keep the people in connection with Him and the gods. At Casa Xiuhtecuhtli, our ceremonial land in Tepoztlán, the Temple and its guardian, known as a Tsaurixika, along with the tradition’s practitioners care for their Tuki, considered a powerful being living and breathing, bringing blessings to all those who gather within.
The Mayoria
The Mayoría is the Nahua ceremonial temple for the Quiapaquiz (callers of sky water) or graniceros (in Spanish) the Weather Working lineage transmitted by Don Lució Campos Elizalde, which also includes those who will go the arduous training to become tepahtianimeh (shamanic/spiritual healers). The ceremonial temple was created in their classic open style of previous pre-Hispanic temples with pre-Hispanic representations, or “glyphs” seen in many original fresco paintings of the Nahua, introducing the major divine gods and goddesses that support their work.
Throughout the year, they conduct ceremonies for the village to bring the rains during the growing season, protect the crops and give gratitude for the bounty provided by the rains. This also produces a renewal in relationship with these powerful, living forces for the local “workers” but also for those quiapaquiz and tepahtianimeh that travel from far away who bring these blessings back to their hometowns and cities.
To learn more about the work of the quiapaquiz of this lineage and their click here.
