While some other Mexican pilgrimages involve self-flagellation and suffering, with penitents hobbling on bleeding knees, pilgrims to Chalma pray through dancing. All the babies in our family have been thrown in the spring water but it doesn't harm them. We are praying for work and good health. In a sign of the ritual's joyful spirit, pilgrims buy a crown of flowers and dance as they offer up prayers. Then grannies join babies and couples to bathe in the icy waters.
Women hang umbilical cords in small bags on the tree to give thanks for a successful birth.
The pilgrimage ends in the church at Chalma a short distance up the road. Prehispanic Indians Worshiped at Chalma Chalma was a place of worship long before the 1521 Spanish conquest imposed Catholicism on Mexico. The god was variously identified with a deity of human destiny or of the night, sometimes taking the form of a jaguar, or with the god of war, depending on different Indian oral traditions. Few of the pilgrims who pray at Chalma today actually know the origin of the legend. He has made the pilgrimage three times.