Exploring Huichol Art: The Spiritual Journey of Yarn Paintings
The Huichol's Sacred Pilgrimage to Virikuta
A traveler crossing the region of San Luis Potosì or venturing near Real de Catorce in western Mexico may happen to see a ramshackle truck unloading, amid the apparent nothingness of the motorway, groups of Indio farmers who walk away, some wearing old jeans, faded T-shirts and sombreros, others dressed in richly cross-stitched garments and hats made of woven palm leaves. Following those tough feet in primitive sandals of pre-Colombian type or modern sneakers, we discover that they sometimes stop at unlikely places, such as a junction or a lay-by, that are related to the sacred geography of the Huichol’s pilgrimage to Virikuta, the “Field of Flowers”, the land of Peyote (Ikuri), the desert between Zacatecas and San Luis Potosì, to pray, recite ancient stories and sing: “Virikota, Virikota, who knows why/ the roses are weeping?/ who could know?/who could guess?” like the Macarame Hilario, Eusebio and Antonio. The Huichol ingest peyote during these pilgrimages, which leads them into spiritual realms and inspires their art. The Huichol, who call themselves Wixalika (the Prophets or Healers), are between ten and fourteen thousand in number, and they belong, like their Cora neighbors, to the to-Aztec language family; they live in the mountains of the Western Sierra Madre in the Mexican States of Jalisco and Nayarit. Many scientists believe that they are relative newcomers in this region and, therefore, are only partially related to the archeological cultures of this region; coming from the north, where they lived as nomadic hunters and gatherers, they arrived in the South, where they learned agriculture from the local sedentary populations. On the contrary, others consider them the successors of the northwestern archeological cultures called Jalisco and Nayarit. They have cultural connections with the Aztecs, who came from northern Mexico too, but also with several populations living in the region, as well as with the Pueblo and the Pima-Papago of the south-west of the United States, with whom they probably had commercial and cultural contacts since the 1st century AD. Peyote, a small cactus native to Northern Mexico, plays a crucial role in their religious beliefs and artistic inspiration.
The Origins and Cultural Connections of the Huichol
They are known mainly because of the central rite of their religion, the annual pilgrimage which takes them from their ranchos scattered in the Sierra, but also from the communities in Tepic, Guadalajara and other cities, including Mexico City, to search for the Peyote cactus in the Virikuta desert, the spiritual heart of their religious geography. According to Furst (1978), one thing is certain: The Peyote-centered component of the Huichol religious ideology can have its origin only in the north, not only because they perform their pilgrimage in this direction, but also because the sacred hallucinogenic cactus, which evokes intense emotions (the Peyote is “resplendent essence, plant of the true life”) and inspires so much of the sacred as well as the decorative art of the Huichol, has no other original or modern distribution than the central and northern desert, from San Luis Potosì to the valley of the Rio Grande. The Huichol create their yarn paintings by pressing yarn into a mixture of pine resin and beeswax spread on a board.
Initially, these yarn paintings were largely decorative, sold in government crafts shops to bring income to the community. However, over time, the artists realized the potential of yarn paintings to tell stories and myths and record sacred visions, leading to a shift in their purpose and meaning.
Huichol Art: The Significance of Yarn Paintings
For the Huichol, art is functional as well as beautiful, it is prayer and direct communication with the sacred, used to ask for the prosperity of harvests, flocks, individuals and the group, and this can be seen in any object of daily use, as well as during the preparation of ritual objects to be carried during the pilgrimage and in the popular art form of yarn painting or pictures made of threads, similar in its technique if not in its materials to the Mixtec feather mosaic; yarn painting has been developed in the last forty years and has taken the name of Nearika (Nealika, Nierika), a Huichol word that refers to many types of ritual art, whether having or not a function of communication with the divine. According to Furst, this word can be interpreted as likeness, face, appearance, image, shield surface, representation, emblem, or painting. The original sacred Nearika, a flat, round piece of wood with colored threads pressed into wax constituting a picture, and the painted round stones, seats of the gods, called Tukipa, are precursors of the square or rectangular modern yarn painting, a commercial art object that is very popular among tourists as well as among serious collectors and museum curators, and which is produced in large numbers by Huichol artists living in the great cities or spending much time there, since only in the city they can get hold of the wooden boards, which are too bulky for transport. The process of creating yarn paintings involves an artist spreading beeswax on a board, sketching out a design, and then filling it in by pressing brightly colored yarns into the wax. Using colored yarn has allowed for more elaborate designs and brighter colors in modern Huichol art. Huichol yarn art, developed in the 1950s, represents the tribe's deep connection with their ancestors and nature deities.
Ramòn Medina Silva: Pioneer of Huichol Yarn Painting
Although other artists have become as famous and moderately wealthy, the pioneer was Ramòn Medina Silva (1926-71), an informer and friend of the anthropologists Peter T. Furst and Barbara G. Myerhoff. Furst (1978) remembers Ramòn as the true innovator of this form of art, the one who, based only on a minor input by the anthropologist and the orders of the University of California, transformed the paintings that reproduced sacred and decorative symbols without any connection, “into a form of narrative artifice, a kind of pictography that makes it possible to recognize and recite a sacred tradition”. For the collection of the university’s Cultural History Museum, Ramòn produced a series of four yarn paintings, a two-dimensional representation of the orally transmitted drama of the battle won by Kayumari, the Peyote, against Kieri, the “Wind Tree”, i.e. the evil sorcerer Datura. This is probably a representation of a religious reform, where the Huichol, at some point of their history, abandoned for Peyote the cult of Datura, called Toloache by the Aztecs, which grows in a territory that extends to California and the south-west of the USA, and of its relative, Solandra. In the first yarn painting, only the Solanacea appears, in the second one the Datura is represented in its botanical form and as Kieri bewitching a woman to make her believe that the “Wind Tree” is edible like tortillas or sacred tamales of deer meat; in the third painting, Kayumari, with deer horns - the deer is another aspect of Peyote - attacks Kieri, and in the fourth Kieri is hit by five (a holy number) arrows in her breast, and dies spitting out stripes of colored sparks representing illness and misfortune, being finally transformed back into a plant, the Wind Tree. Ramòn's contributions significantly enriched the diversity of Huichol artwork, showcasing the intricate and symbolic nature of their cultural expressions.
Among Ramòn’s yarn paintings, there is also one which shows the initiation of Barbara Myerhoff, who is given the name of a divinity during the 1966 pilgrimage; after the death of Ramòn, who was a shaman (maracame) as well as the grandson of a great shaman, the activity was taken over by his wife and assistant Guadalupe. As a Huichol shaman, Ramòn's visionary artworks, particularly the nierika yarn paintings, reflected the Huichol people's sacred visions and traditional stories. Although maracame women are rare, Ramòn himself was the brother of one of the few maracame women who had some reputation in her community. Because of the strict separation of tasks, the ritual activity is rarely open to women, who however can become curanderas, produce through stitching, weaving, and decoration with pearls many objects used by the shaman, as well as participate in the economic activity. Guadalupe decided to continue, reproducing yarn paintings based on drawings by her husband, or creating on her own, like the painting that shows Furst being given the name of a divinity during a pilgrimage around 1965, now in the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.
Another yarn painting by Guadalupe based on a design by Ramòn is the one called “How the Husband Assists the Wife During Childbirth”, Exposed in the same museum, which unfortunately appears in black and white in the catalog of the exposition “Art of the Huichol Indians”, which has been on tour from San Francisco to Chicago to New York between 1978 and 1980. According to Huichol tradition, when a woman was giving birth to her first child, the husband squatted between the roof rafters or on a tree’s branches directly above her, with ropes attached to his scrotum. According to the picture’s caption, during her labour the wife vigorously pulled on the ropes, thus allowing the husband to share the painful, yet finally joyful, experience of childbirth.
The Symbolism and Techniques in Huichol Yarn Paintings
On these representations, where colored threads follow a pattern engraved with a knife or a screwdriver in a layer of beeswax and resin, the vivid colors have particular meanings: red is the color of blood and of the rising sun, black represents death and the darkness of the west, where the sun sinks into the underworld, green is the color of growing nature, the vital regenerating power of the northern light, while blue stands for the wisdom and knowledge emanating from the south. Yellow is the color of fire, Grandfather Tatewari, teacher of the shamans and center of the human spirit, and white is the color of the sacred clouds that bring the rain, but also the color of the deer’s tail, the representative of Great-Grandfather Deer Tail. The deer is an incarnation of the Divine. Brightly colored yarns are crucial in these yarn paintings, adding to their vividness and symbolic depth. These artworks record the Huichol people's sacred visions, reflecting their shamanic experiences and myths. It is important to remember that this form of art, however commercial, in its style still respects conventions of shamanic art that date back to the Upper Paleolithic, such as the skeletal representation, i.e. showing shamans, sacred animals, plants, and divinities as if seen by X-ray vision, based on the widespread belief that the bones are the seat of life and that rebirth depends on their respectful handling, as if they were the “seeds” of a fruit tree, which are also called “bones” throughout Central America. This X-ray perspective can be seen, among others, in the work of another great artist, José Benitez Sanchez, e. g. in “Where the Offerings are Made in the Sea”, also at the San Francisco Fine Arts Museum, showing the offerings made periodically by the shaman to Our Mother Haramara, the Pacific Ocean, which being located in the west also represents the direction of the dead, or the powerful “Deer Hunt for Sacifice” in the same museum, where two deer, the most divine of animals, closely identified with Peyote, are represented with their skeleton visible. These depictions often highlight the Huichol's spiritual relationship with their ancestors and nature deities. The various stages of the agricultural process are shown in the yarn painting by Crescéncio Pérez Robles “Tatei Urianaka, Goddes of the Earth, Ready for Planting”, which has a blue background, while in “The Power of the Wind Tree (Kieri)”, which shows a disturbing purple background, Hakatemi comes back to the subject of the dangerous Datura, to whom the Huichol make offerings to keep evil away, even after Kieri’s defeat.
The Commercialization and Survival of Huichol Artists
The first major yarn painting exposition was organized in Guadalajara in 1962, and today the great variety of natural and synthetic commercial yarns, with their vivid colors, allows the creation of extraordinarily colorful compositions, narrating the shamanic visions and the myths of the Huichol. The yarn paintings are not just a sought-after acquisition for connoisseurs, but they also represent an adaptation to modern times by these timid Indians, whose solitude is ever more besieged by the market society. Bead art has also become a significant part of their artistic expression, allowing for more elaborate designs and the decoration of various forms. For centuries protected by their inaccessible Sierras, The Huichol have been reached by roads and airstrips and have followed the steps of their pre-Colombian merchant ancestors, going to the cities themselves to sell their goods or their arms, having been pushed away from a land that cannot anymore sustain the growing population. Already at the end of the 60s, Virikuta was threatened by the Hippies, as it is today by non-Indian New Agers, who, by their mass consumption, are destroying the spiritual “source of life” that is Ikuri, the Peyote, a cactus that grows very slowly and only within a limited area. Kayumari, the Peyote Deer, explores the sacred desert and prepares it for the arrival of the pilgrims, according to the words of José Benitez Sanchez, the Deer who is also the maize and the meat of the animal itself, an intermediary between the shaman and the ancestors, the Elder Brother. And Sanchez is echoed by the last verses of the second Peyote song by the Maracame Antonio Bautista Carillo of Las Guayabas: “There is the sacred itari / and laying on the itari / rests Our Brother / Tamaz Kayumari”.
As Furst remembers, there are two parties, those who want to “save” the Huichol from modernity by complete isolation, and those who want to “let them alone”, free to act as they please. Mariano Valadez, Eligio Carrillo, Gabriel Bautista Rogelio, Gabriel Parada Muñoz and many other yarn painters, who are selling their work also through the Internet, are there to testify that the Huichol artisans are perfectly able to survive, just as they have always done during the 500 years of the Conquista.
