Sacred Visions - Art of the Huichol Indians - an October Gallery exhibition
The Gods of the Niericas: Eligio Carillo
One
of the oldest indigenous Mesoamerican societies to survive into the modern era
from pre-Columbian times, the Huichol Indians provide a living link with the
early history of mankind's common ancestry, in that they combine elements of
migratory hunting and gathering groups with those of sedentary agricultural
societies. The survival of this ancient culture with its core belief system and
traditions virtually unchanged over millennia, is partly explained by the
Huichol's having escaped the persecutions of the Spanish Conquest by migrating
South from their ancestral homelands into the natural fortress of the Sierra
Madre Occcidental - a remote and inaccessible chain of mountains stretching in a
sweeping crescent down the western flank of northern Mexico. Today an estimated
eighteen thousand Huichols live in small, self-sustaining settlements scattered
amongst some four hundred thousand hectares of mountainous land divided by deep
canyons and dangerous rivers. The protection of these virtually impassable
mountains and ravines afforded the Huichol people their strongest defence
against outside intervention, and, by fostering an extraordinary degree of
self-sufficiency, allowed the culture to flourish in the elevated seclusion of
their mountain eyries.
The
Huichol live in a close reciprocal relation with the environment cultivating a
variety of crops including beans, squash and the staple, corn. In common with
many shamanistic societies, Huichol beliefs and ritual practices centre upon the
necessity of maintaining an essential balance between the interlocking realms of
the plants, animals, ancestors and spirits that surround and intersect the plane
of human existence. This necessity periodically prompts small groups led by a
mara'akame (shaman) to undertake a five hundred kilometre pilgrimage -
traditionally taking ninety days on foot - to the sacred desert homeland of Wiracuta
(Land of the Flowers) where the participants re-enact the ancient drama of
their tribal origins. It was there that Tatewari,
(Grandfather Fire) the greatest spirit and patron of all shamans, introduced the
Huichol people to the spirit Kauyámari,
Elder Brother Deer. Tatewari
taught that the deer is a divine animal which, when hunted in a ritual manner,
offers its blood to "feed" the young corn shoots, thereby assuring an
abundant harvest. To the Huichol, the venerated deer is associated with the
crucially important cycle of water. Failure to hunt the deer ceremonially would
break the long-established covenant between man and the gods leading inevitably
to drought, crop failure, starvation for both man and deer and ultimately to the
catastrophic unravelling of the natural order. In the tracks left by Elder
Brother Deer
in Wiracuta
sprung a magical gift of the gods, the sacred peyote
cactus, which, at the climax of the pilgrimage, is symbolically
"hunted" - with bow and arrow - before being harvested. When ingested
as a ritual sacrament, the peyote's
bitter flesh, containing the powerful psychotropic agent mescaline, causes
the pilgrims to see marvellously colourful visions, experienced as moments of
mystical union with the spirit realm.
In the
course of their spiritual quest to Wiracuta,
the pilgrims traverse a sacred topography, pausing at pre-ordained sites to
chant prayers, perform rites and place small votive tablets, called nierikas,
as offerings to the spirits. A nierika
is made of a round or square piece of wood pierced through the centre, the hole
often containing a mirror. This ritual object is then covered in beeswax into
which coloured yarn is pressed in simple designs that represent in outline the
supplicant's prayers. Over many centuries the nierikas
became the templates upon which the essential symbols of the Huichol cosmology
were elaborated and transmitted, creating an iconic vocabulary - set in the five
sacred colours of red, white, black, yellow and blue - capable of expressing
visually the complex of relations binding the worlds of gods and man. In the
early 1960s, as the Huichol found themselves drawn inexorably into the modern
world, larger yarn "paintings" based on these traditional tablets were
developed. These wholly original and distinctive paintings could be exchanged,
in the larger cities of Tepic, Guadalajara and Mexico, for hard currency,
something which, though little needed in the highly self-sufficient Huichol
communities, became increasingly necessary when dealing with the outside world.
With the introduction of commercial yarns broadening the range of available
colours, these highly original works made a striking impression on the
non-indigenous people who saw them for the first time both for the beauty of
their execution and the imaginative qualities of their design.
Though not
themselves sacred objects the yarn paintings inherit the underlying form and
imagery of the traditional nierikas.
The nierikas central opening is
considered to be a 'mirror' allowing access between this world and that separate
reality thought to exist on the farther side. Cognate with the word iruka
meaning 'countenance' or 'face,' a nierika
represents the outward surface of a thing - its 'face' or external
characteristics. The nucleus from which each yarn painting radiates corresponds
precisely to the nierika's central
hole and directs attention towards the inner attributes, the hidden qualities of
the work. Thus Jose Benitez Sanchez' 'Nierika' centres upon the sacred deer;
Alejandro Lopez Torres' 'Jaguar Woman' signifies the pivotal importance of the
shaman's power and the frequently repeated central cactus design emphasises the
peyote's special power to reveal the inner nature of things through visions.
With the centre point thus occupied the abstract geometric works naturally
resolve into quincuncial designs, as in Eligio Carillo's elegant The Gods of the Nierikas. More than merely symmetrical repetitions,
however, the four circular forms surrounding the central rosette are themselves nierikas
(each containing others nested within) and each descriptive of another facet of
the inner/outer worlds: corn, flowers, peyote and the spiral image of the coiled
serpent - the provider of rain. Between this tetrad of secondary nierikas
four spirits arranged at the cardinal points outline a second tetrad rotating
about the common axis of the sacred fifth. Motaaopohua's superb design of some
thirty years ago shows that the rhombus also is a variant of the
nierika - a 'space' bounded on four sides, a growing seed, capable of
combination into other forms. These schematic interrelations articulated between
the rhombus, the quincunx, the hexagram and higher aggregate forms clearly
suggest a Huichol sacred geometry that defines the co-ordinates of a reality as
multi-faceted as that offered for contemplation by the mandala
of oriental tradition.
Both
the narrative and geometric style yarn paintings challenge the static
limitations of the form by their use of bright colours arranged in organic
patterns of growth that cause the eye, by saccidic motion, to endow the painting
with movement. Patterned like pre-Mandelbrot fractals the paintings can be read
in two directions: radiating from the centre out or, beginning at the border,
spiralling in towards a common nuclear source. This mimetic device conveys
something of the pulsating colours and movement of the peyote vision, drawing
the viewer into a subtle world of auras and energies emanating from and
connecting together all living creatures. Since an innate reverence for and
understanding of the web of mutual dependencies uniting all life-forms is an
integral part of Huichol tradition, these designs might be seen as loose leaves
surviving from a book of knowledge that we in the west - in our haste to plunder
the planet's resources - have lost the ability to decipher. Reading the Huichol
spiral script in one direction reveals something of the early history of our
common ancestry. Tracing the evolving spiral in the other sense, we read of the
delicately interwoven web of life that, if we assimilate something of the
Huichol world-view, may enable us to participate fully in writing the history of
our common future.
© Gerard A. Houghton, May, 1999