The Shaman's Mirror

by Hope MacLean

  I found one hint that something like yarn painting might exist elsewhere. James Faris reproduced a long myth from the Nightway, a Navajo ceremony. The myth was dictated by Hosteen Klah, one of the Navajo’s most knowledgeable singers. In Klah’s version, Spider Woman taught Dreamer Boy to make string pictures.

  Though the gods were in a hurry, she [Spider Woman] insisted that the Dreamer learn how to make the pictures and the Spider Woman and Man made the boy sit down on the floor and made string pictures all over him from feet to head, treating him with the string pictures in the same way that the Medicine Man would with the sandpainting. They made thirty-two string pictures over the boy and after the treatment the boy took a piece of string and after making each string picture four times he had learned them all by heart. There are songs about this part of the story. (1990, 206)

  There is no further description of how the string pictures were made or what they depicted. The fact that they were taught by a deity and have a power to cure equal to that of a sand painting shows that they were conceptualized as powerful ceremonial objects. The myth sanctions the transfer of knowledge from a supernatural to a quasi-human hero, but I have not found any other reference to Navajo using string pictures in ceremonies.

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  To summarize, a sacred yarn painting is a prayer for power, as Lumholtz and Zingg understood it to be. However, Eligio’s discussion is much more subtle and nuanced than Lumholtz’s or Zingg’s straightforward equivalence between making an image and prayer. This complexity is one reason I have quoted Eligio’s statements so extensively. He draws in many more ideas and talks about the artist’s relationship with the gods and the ways that the gods and shamans communicate. He sees the nierika as a vehicle for power, since the spirit comes and suffuses the object with its power. The artist who is visionary makes a representation of the powers and colors of the spirit in his or her painting. However, the shaman can also see the colors a person has and can use them to read the person’s state of development and relationship with the deities. The sacred yarn paintings are powerful magical objects, saturated with the energies of the gods and capable of transmitting life force to the maker. They require ritual observance to make and must be given away at a sacred site and not kept in the maker’s house.

  What then happened to these potent offerings when the Huichol began to make them for sale?

  The family of Guadalupe de la Cruz Ríos circling the fire during a ceremony in the desert of Wirikuta. Photo credit: Hope MacLean.

  José Isabel (Chavelo) González de la Cruz, yarn painting, 2000. 12” × 12” (30 × 30 cm). The colored lines at the top represent the sacred words (niwetari) of the sun god. Their colors are remarkably similar to the Pantone colors selected by Eligio Carrillo. Photo credit: Adrienne Herron.

  Eligio Carrillo Vicente, yarn painting of a mandala nierika, 2002. 24” × 24” (60 × 60 cm). The painting shows multicolored deer spirits, like those in the author’s dream. Photo credit: Hope MacLean.

  Eligio Carrillo Vicente, yarn painting of his vision of a face in the sacred spring of Aariwameta, 2000. 12” × 12” (30 × 30 cm). Communication takes the form of lines of light. Photo credit: Adrienne Herron.

  Urra Temai, an early yarn painting of the myth of birth of the sun god at Reunar, c. 1975. 24” × 24” (60 × 60 cm). Multicolored rays of life energy (kupuri) radiate from the volcano, which is in Wirikuta. Photo credit: David E. Young.

  Eligio Carrillo completing a yarn painting, 2005. The Huichol say that the colors in their clothes replicate the colors of the clothes the gods wear. The gods are pleased when they see humans wear the same kinds of clothes that they do. Photo credit: Hope MacLean.

  Santos Daniel Carrillo Jiménez, yarn painting of a shaman curing a patient who appears very pale and weak, 2005. 8” × 8” (20 × 20 cm). One technique for combining colors is to move through a gradation of colors, such as pale yellow moving to dark yellow in the flowers, and the dark red moving through pinks to white in the figure of the shaman. Color combining of this type became increasingly popular in yarn paintings of the 1990s, particularly among artists from the Huichol community of San Andrés. Photo credit: Adrienne Herron.

  Unknown artist, yarn painting of the spiritual power of shamans, 2005. 12” × 12” (30 × 30 cm). The image is painted in the style of José Benítez Sánchez. Photo credit: Adrienne Herron.

  Santos Daniel Carrillo Jiménez, yarn painting, c. 1996. 15 ¾” × 15 ¾” (40 × 40 cm). Colored lights of the fire surround the deer god, Tamatsi Kauyumari. According to Eligio Carrillo, this is a visionary experience seen by shamans. Photo credit: Hope MacLean.

  Unknown artist, embroidery, c. 1996. Cotton manta cloth, acrylic yarn, thread. The vibrant colors of Huichol embroidery suggest the vibrating, kaleidoscopic colors that many people report seeing during peyote visions. Photo credit: Adrienne Herron.

  Fabian González Ríos, yarn paint-ing, 2005. 4” × 4” (10 × 10 cm). When the shaman beats the drum, lightning comes out of the drum at night. This painting illustrates that visionary experience. Photo credit: Adrienne Herron.

  Unknown artist, yarn painting of a goddess giving birth to all the animals, 2005. 15 ¾” × 15 ¾” (40 × 40 cm). This is a variation on a famous painting by Mariano Valadez. Photo credit: Hope MacLean.

  The shaman Tacho Pérez Robles brushing a patient with his shaman’s plumes (muwieri) while Guadalupe de la Cruz Ríos watches, 1990. Photo credit: Hope MacLean.

  Pantone colors (marked with dots) that Eligio Carrillo selected as representing the sacred colors he sees in communications from the gods, 2010. Photo credit: Adrienne Herron.

  Bautista Cervantes family, yarn painting, 2000. 12” × 12” (30 × 30 cm). This group of Tepehuane began to make yarn paintings in the 1990s. Photo credit: Adrienne Herron.

  Eligio Carrillo Vicente, yarn painting, 2000. 12” × 12” (30 × 30 cm). According to Eligio, the power of Tamatsi Kauyumari entered the painting once he applied the sacred colors and made the image. Photo credit: Adrienne Herron.

  Eligio Carrillo Vicente, yarn painting of the sacred site where uxa grows, 2007. 24” × 24” (60 × 60 cm). Uxa is the yellow root used for face paintings. The shaman prays for the power it bestows on his shaman’s basket (takwatsi). Photo credit: Adrienne Herron.

  Unknown artist, wooden log drum with yarn-painted decoration, c. 1994. Wooden drum, yarn, beeswax, deer-hide cover, feathers, huastecomate gourd, wooden sticks (possibly brazilwood). The yarn cross or god’s eye (tsikürü), a rattle, and a shaman’s plume are all used in the Drum Ceremony. The shaman plays the drum and symbolically flies the spirits of the young children to Wirikuta. Photo credit: Hope MacLean.

  José Isabel (Chavelo) González de la Cruz, yarn paint-ing, 2002. 12” × 12” (30 × 30 cm). The twelve colored lines represent the staircase to be climbed (the annual pilgrimages to make) in order to reach the altar of the deer god and thereby complete one’s journey to become a mara’akame. Photo credit: Adrienne Herron.

  Modesto Rivera Lemus, large cosmological yarn painting of the everyday world being interpenetrated by the spiritual world, 1994. 48” × 48” (120 × 120 cm). Photo credit: Hope MacLean.

  A Huichol artist using a needle to apply beads to a wooden eclipse plaque while waiting for customers in the plaza of Tepic, 2005. Photo credit: Hope MacLean.

  Miguel Silverio Evangelista; wood, glass beads, beeswax; 2005. 10 ¾” × 9 ¾12;” (27.4 × 32.5 cm). The Huichol now press beads into wax to make many commercial products, such as this beaded eclipse. Note the small dots of contrast color and the use of traditional sym-bols such as deer. Photo credit: Adrienne Herron.

  An offering of prayer arrows and a gourd bowl with coins, given to the statue of Coatlicue in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Photo credit: Hope MacLean.

  Eligio Carrillo Vicente, yarn painting of the sun god, 1994. 24” (60 cm) in diameter. The deity appears as a human figure in the zenith of the blue sky at midday. The image is painted in fuerte colors, representi
ng the strength of the sun. Photo credit: Hope MacLean.

  6

  commercialization of the nierika

  Who first had the idea of transforming the Huichol’s small sacred offerings into a commercial art? When, how, and why did it happen? There were no definitive answers to these questions when I began my research.

  I found several versions of the story, but few details. According to Negrĺn (1979, 26), a Mexican anthropologist named Alfonso Soto Soria was the first to exhibit and sell yarn paintings. Negrĺn stated: “Yarn boards first appeared on the market in 1951, when Professor Alfonso Soto Soria held an exhibition of them in Guadalajara in Mexico.” Salomón Nahmad (1972, 157, 162) stated the first exhibition was held in 1954 at the Museo Nacional de Artes e Industrias Populares.

  To shed light on this question, I located Professor Soto Soria in Mexico City in 1996 and recorded his version of the story. He told me that he was the guilty party (“Yo soy el culpable”) in the transformation of yarn paintings from sacred to commercial art. Soto Soria reminded me that after the Mexican Revolution, there was a growing interest in the arts of the common people.

  To understand the birth of Huichol yarn painting, I realized that I had to look at the broader picture of Mexican policy on arts and indigenous culture. During and after the Mexican Revolution, intellectuals and artists such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were part of a political movement that celebrated the indigenous roots of Mexican and mestizo culture. After President Obregón took office in 1921, he and José Vasconcelas, his minister of education, initiated a program to restore Mexico’s pride in itself. Believing that the country could find its personality in indigenous arts and culture, they sponsored open-air schools to teach folklore and popular arts. Artists such as Rufino Tamayo and Miguel Covarrubias volunteered as teachers (Williams 1994, 12).

  Yet even by the 1920s, there was concern that traditional crafts were becoming decadent because of a burgeoning tourist trade. Therefore, the Ministry of Education sponsored a program to revive traditional crafts in indigenous communities. For example, René d’Harnoncourt worked with the painter Roberto Montenegro to revive the almost-extinct lacquer trade in Olinala as a viable community business. They took good pieces of old lacquer to the village and encouraged the elders to make them again and to teach the young people. Later, the ministry hired d’Harnoncourt to find other ways to preserve traditional folk arts and make them economically fruitful (Schrader 1983, 126).

  Fig. 6.1. Alfonso Soto Soria, the Mexican anthropologist who fostered the invention of modern yarn paintings, 1996. Photo credit: Hope MacLean.

  Meanwhile, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow, was anxious to improve U.S.-Mexican relations by changing the popular image of Mexico. He approached Robert de Forest, the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and, through him, the Carnegie Corporation, which agreed to finance a collection of Mexican folk art. D’Harnoncourt was hired, and spent 1930 putting together a collection of 1,200 objects, which were exhibited by the Ministry of Education in Mexico City. Then the exhibition was taken to the United States. It opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, then made a triumphant tour of fourteen other cities (Schrader 1983, 124–128; Kaplan 1993; Delpar 2000, 544–547). D’Harnoncourt moved to the United States and became director of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board (part of the U.S. Department of the Interior) in the 1930s.

  Building on this momentum, Mexico went on to establish a Museum of Folk Arts (Museo Nacional de Artes e Industrias Populares) in Mexico City. Here, Soto Soria took up the story and told me that in the 1940s, the museum’s initial goal was to make an inventory of all the folk arts being made in the republic. The museum’s director, Daniel Rubĺn de la Borbolla, hired fieldworkers, including Soto Soria, who was then a twenty-eight-year-old anthropologist. Soto Soria was assigned to explore the mountains of northwest Mexico in order to discover what arts were still being made there. He was asked to investigate all the indigenous arts of Northwest Mexico, including those made by groups such as the Cora, Huichol, Tepehuane, and Tarahumara. However, he found the Huichol’s artistic production so rich and varied that he concentrated on them and brought back examples of weaving, embroidery, and sacred offerings.

  Soto Soria took copies of Lumholtz’s and Zingg’s books with him to use as guides to discover which kinds of arts were still being made. Lumholtz included illustrations of small boards that were decorated with yarn and used as offerings to be taken to caves and sacred sites hidden away in the mountains. Therefore, Soto Soria asked the Huichol to bring him examples of these offerings or to make him some. He specifically asked for yarn paintings. On his next trip, the Huichol brought him small paintings made on boards taken from wooden soapboxes or on very rough pieces of wood with the bark still on them. These had designs made of yarn glued with beeswax. The designs were abstract or symbolic, but the whole group understood them.

  In 1954, the Museum of Folk Arts exhibited his collection—apparently the first display of Huichol art ever held—and published a catalogue. Soto Soria had a copy of the catalogue, now rare, and I made a photocopy of it. Several yarn paintings are illustrated: one has a design of a spoked figure surrounding a mirror, and others have designs of deer (Museo Nacional de Artes e Industrias Populares 1954, 47, 57). Most of the text and illustrations from the catalogue were republished a year later in the popular Mexican magazine Artes de México (Soto Soria 1955). Raúl Kamffer visited Soto Soria at the museum and watched a Huichol from San Andrés “sticking colored yarn on a waxed board, designing a curious eagle with two heads, one normal and the other in the shape of a cross” (1957, 13).

  Then, by a twist of fate, the sacred offerings were transformed into a commercial art. The governor of the state of Jalisco was an erudite writer named Augustĺn Yáñez, who shared the interest of other Mexican artists in indigenous arts. He admired the exhibition so much that he decided to award a prestigious art prize to the Huichol artisans. Since the prize was normally given to a Western artist, Yáñez needed to justify his choice. He decided to hold a second exhibition of Huichol art, but in a form that would appeal to Western tastes. He felt that the people of Guadalajara would appreciate the colors the Huichol used, but that the paintings were too small. He provided Soto Soria with an airplane and materials and asked him to persuade the Huichol to produce larger paintings that could be exhibited. Soto Soria flew to Tuxpan, Jalisco, which had an airstrip by then. There he enlisted the help of a local leader (he remembered the name, Guadalupe Cruz), who soon organized a group of fifteen or twenty Huichol men to make paintings. Their productions were the first modern yarn paintings designed to conform to Western concepts of art—that is, the paintings were flat and decorated on one side only so that they could hang on a wall.

  These paintings were shown in an exhibition in Guadalajara in the late 1950s, about four years after the first exhibition. (Soto Soria was not sure of the exact date.) Yáñez’s support and the exhibition made the paintings popular, and stores in Guadalajara began to sell them, as did the Museum of Folk Arts in Mexico City. So the modern commercial yarn painting was born.

  As an aside, I will mention that Governor Yáñez’s agenda may have been more political than Soto Soria’s story indicates. The states of Jalisco and Nayarit had a long-standing political battle over the border between them, particularly where it runs through the canyon of Camotlán. Nayarit backed the mestizo ranchers who claimed the region for that state. Yáñez was offering political support to Pedro de Haro and the Huichol of Tuxpan and San Sebastián, who claimed the land for Jalisco. (The controversy is described in Rojas [1993, 180ff]). Yáñez’s backing of a Huichol art movement may have been part of a political strategy to win public support and interest for the Huichol generally.

  Soto Soria went on to say that the first paintings Yáñez commissioned were done on thick wooden boards so that they would replicate the look of traditional paintings. He took about 150 12” x 16” (30 x 40 cm) boards strapped to the undercarriage of the p
lane on the flight into the mountains. The wood was so heavy that the plane had to make two trips. Later, someone from the Museo de Artes Populares had the idea of asking the Huichol to use plywood rather than lumber. The museum was trying to find ways to help the Huichol develop a viable art business and felt that the paintings would be easier to sell if they were lighter. This advice was part of a conscious museum program to improve the economic plight of impoverished indigenous peoples. Governor Yáñez may also have wanted to promote economic development in Jalisco, and this practical reason may have been part of his motivation for sponsoring an exhibition.

  While the development of displayable paintings may have resulted from creative brainstorming, the commercialization of yarn paintings was no accident. The museum had a mandate to preserve traditional folk arts, and part of that mandate was to develop folk arts as a business (Williams 1994, 191). The staff was concerned that the public did not generally appreciate crafts and so paid little for them. The craftspeople had little incentive to do their best work, since they could not make a living from time-consuming artisanry. Therefore, the museum hoped to encourage both art and artists by exhibiting the works and fostering appreciation for the skill involved. The museum also had a store, which sold high-quality crafts on the theory that the best way of preserving crafts was to pay artists well for good work and give them reliable markets for their wares.