Does one really have to fret about enlightenment?

Does one really have to fret
about enlightenment?
No matter what road I travel
I’m going home
                              Shinso

For the Huichol art is prayer, direct communication with and participation in the sacred realm. This is why art, religion, and we’ll see later, drugs, they all constitute a part of a great wholesome, a cosmogony that is one of the most interesting anthropological treasures of México.

The Huichol Indians are in the Mexico’s Sierra Madre, they live in Nayarit, Jalisco, Zacatecas and Durango. Is thought that Huichol is a corruption of the word Wixáritari, their language is called wikarika. Although the Indians have been dealing with a process of slow and gradual mexicanisation, their life is a continuous chain of ritual and devotional exercises for the gods that lie everywhere, in threes, hills, lakes and even stones. Tatewari, our Grandfather Fire; Káuyúmarie, the Blue Deer; and Tate Ikukurú Uimári, the Mother of Maize, are among the most important of the Huichol gods.

As stated before, the Huichols use their art craft as a mean of coding and channelling all their sacred knowledge, insuring the continuity and survival of the legacy left to them by theirs pre-Columbian mystical ancestors. Crafts that go from the skilled weavings and embroidery of the Huichol women; to the decorative art of stringing tiny coloured beads for earrings, bracelets, necklaces. But also there is one kind of art that is more votive, or offertory. Canvas and big sized figures covered by tiny beads of extremely bright contrasting colours pressed, meditatively one by one, into a surface coated with beeswax. In their structure and encoded messages they remind us pretty much the sacred patterns of the ancient mandalas, used in both Buddhist and Hinduism as an artistic representation of the world, but is also a religious and meditative instrument. Just as the art of the Huichol.

Fray Bernardino Sahagún, Francisco Hernández and Jacinto de la Serna made evident the narcotic and heady properties of teonanactl «meat of the gods». They write about hallucinations, multicoloured dreams followed sometimes by demoniacal visions, hilarity, excitation, drowsiness or lethargy. Fray B. Sahagún, famous historian of the “discovery” of México, has consecrated some lines comparing the properties of teonanactls utilised by the Aztecs, with the cactus peyotl (peyote) discovered, probably, by the Otomí. «The chichimecas prefer the peyote before wine or mushrooms», stated Sahagún. Nowadays we have evidence of pieces of peyote of 7,000 years of antiquity.
An inscription in a votive canvas about a Huichol child versed: “The children take an imaginary trip to the land of peyote at the feast of the corn and squash. They sit out in the sun on the laps of their mothers while the shaman recounts the entire imaginary pilgrimage”; in the canvas a beautiful butterfly of astonishing colours symbolically leads them to Wirikuta, their spiritual land of origin. The hallucinogenic cactus is found in the desert, 3oo miles northeast from the Huichol truly homeland, considered by them a pilgrimage to their own beginning and primeval origin. A yearly pilgrimage is the climax of the Huichol religious life.

Peyote contains the non-addictive drug mescaline. In their visions the Huichol frequently “meet” the Gods that reveal their knowledge in mysterious ways, in a divine and earthly rooted fashion for them. The ritual is a magical trip into the beginning of time, is going back and being a contemporary of the ancient Gods and their games, a psychedelic sacred realm sometimes, were is possible living present with sacred perceptions without boundaries too. Is thought that in this journey they reach awareness of being and feeling from a superior state of mind, both mental and emotional utter development manifest finally, and they all welcome you to the Wixáritari supernatural realm.

In 1571, through the Inquisition, these practices were observed as diabolical. In 1620, peyote was totally prohibited for its “satanic” properties. Today its recollection is permitted to the Indians that demonstrate to have at least 25% of Indian blood —Tarahumara, Huicholes and Coras—. In the recent past the clerical authorities couldn’t conceive a mind-altering substance that expanded the state of consciousness so much, capable of dealing with sickness and death caused —as the pre-Colombian people thought— by supernatural forces that surround us and haunted the Spaniards too. Today 500,000 members of the Native American Church and the Peyote Way Church of God use it regularly in their religious (sectarian?) practices. Back to México, at the desert in 'Real de Catorce', the gathering stills takes place everyday, the quest for the peyote experience is now an extended desire for many men, and the desert has been experimenting serious problems of shortage of this rare cactus. The last 30 years of pilgrimage to the magical land of peyote is the main reason.


Por Alberto Noriega del Castillo para L.L.A.H, te quiero brother ahí lo editas y le quitas y pones lo que tú veas. Yo lo acabaré de dejar a mi manera y lo subiré al blog. Te mando lo mejor y vamos a seguir con estos temas que se me dan bien y disfruto escribiendo sobre esto. Tú lo sabes. Pero no está muy editado. Cuidado.