CONTEMPORARY ART Or T E HUICHOL INDIANS Or MEXICO H

the October gallery

SACRED VISIONS
Art of the Huichol Indians
23rd June - 31st July 1999 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 Occidental - 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 refuge.
Above: JOSE BENITEZ SANCHEZ, Kauyumari Intercedes with the Gods, 1999, coloured yarn on board, 120cm round Cover: ELIGIO CARRILLO VICENTE, The Gods of the Nierikas, 1995, coloured yarn on board, 60 x 60cm

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 periodicclly prompts smoll groups led by a maro'akame (shaman) to undertake a five hundred kilometre pilgrimage traditionally taking ninety days on foot - to the sacred desert homeland of Wirikuto (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 t o the spirit KauyumarL Elder Brother Deer. Tatewori 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 ledding 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 Wirikuta sprang 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 enlightenment and mystical union with the spirit realm. In the course of their spiritual quest to Wirikuta the pilgrims traverse a sacred terrain, pausing at pre-ordained sites to chant prayers, perform rites and pldce 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 ydrn 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

MOTAAOPOHUA, Huichol World Order, 1969, coloured yarn on board, 91 x 175cm

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 distinctively Huichol works could be exchanged in Tepic, Guadalajara and Mexico City for hard currency, something which, though little needed in the Huichol M A R I A N O V A L A D E Z , The Huichol shaman's Path of communities, where sharing and completion, coloured yarn on board, 60 x 60cm, exchange were the norm, became Private Collection 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, both for the beauty of their execution and the imaginative qualities of their design, and have since become much sought after. Though not themselves sacred objects the yarn paintings inherit the underlying form a n d imagery of the traditional nierikas. The nierika's central opening is considered to be a 'mirror' allowing access between this world a n d that separate reality thought to exist on the farther side. C o g n a t e 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 e a c h yarn painting radiates corresponds precisely to the nierika's central hole a n d directs attention towards the inner attributes, the hidden significance of the work. Thus Jose Benitez Sanchez' 'Kauyumari Intercedes with the Gods,' centres upon the sacred deer; Alejandro Lopez Torres' 'Jaguar Woman' indicates the pivotal importance of the shaman's power; a n d the frequently repeated central cactus design emphasises the peyote's special power to reveal the inner nature of things. With the centre point thus o c c u p i e d 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 emblems surrounding the central rosette are themselves nierikas ( e a c h containing others nested within) a n d e a c h descriptive of another facet of the inner/outer worlds: corn, flowers, peyote a n d 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 a b o u t the c o m m o n axis of the sacred fifth. Motaaopohua's superbly modern design of some thirty years a g o shows that the rhombus also is a variant of the nierika - a 'space' b o u n d e d on four sides, a growing seed, c a p a b l e of combination into other forms. These schematic

interrelations articulated between the rhombus, the quincunx, the hexagram a n d higher a g g r e g a t e forms clearly suggest a Huichol sacred geometry that defines t h e 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 of yarn paintings challenge the static limitations of t h e form by their use of bright colours arranged in organic patterns of growth that cause the eye, by saccidic motion, t o endow the painting with movement. Patterned like pre-Mandelbrot fractals the paintings c a n be read in two directions: radiating from the centre out or, beginning a t the border, spiralling in towards a c o m m o n nuclear source. This mimetic device conveys something of the pulsating colours a n d movement of the peyote vision, drawing the viewer into a subtle world of auras a n d energies emanating from a n d connecting together all living creatures. Since an innate reverence for a n d understanding of the w e b of mutual dependencies uniting all life-forms is an integral part of Huichol tradition, these designs, might be seen as pages surviving from a book of knowledge that we, in the west - in our haste t o plunder the planet - have lost the ability to decipher. Reading the Huichol scripts in one direction reveals t h e early history of our c o m m o n ancestry. Tracing the unfolding spiral in the other sense, w e read of the delicately interwoven w e b of life that, if w e assimilate something of t h e Huichol understanding, may enable us t o participate in writing t h e history of our c o m m o n future. (c) Gerard A. Houghton, May, 1999

ALEJANDRO LOPEZ TORRES, Jaguar Woman, 1997, coloured yarn on board, 60 x 60cm

Jaguar Head, 1995, coloured beads on wood,

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D e s i g n e d b y E l i s a b e t h L a l o u s c h e k Printed b y A r n i c a Fine Art Print Ltd P u b l i s h e d b y t h e O c t o b e r G a l l e r y , 1999 ISBN 1 8 9 9 5 4 2 13 2