by Hope MacLean
I repeated the question in order to make sure that he was not thinking of symbolic associations between colors and directions. He replied by elaborating on the theme of how the colors contact the shaman. He added the information that the shaman has colors also, which can communicate with the colors of the sacred sites.
HOPE: And it doesn’t make . . . for example, here is [the cardinal point in] the north, the south, Wirikuta, the ocean. There isn’t one color that is linked to each direction?
ELIGIO: Well, the colors, they have them there, those ones [that is, the sacred sites]. That is to say, those ones over there. In those places, that’s where they are. And the shaman has a color also. Well then, with those [colors] they [shaman and place] make contact. [makes “ssh” sound] At the moment that he is speaking. It is like electricity, right? To the four cardinal directions. For example, if I speak to the four cardinal directions, here from the center [makes “ssh” sound], it has to touch to the four points with this [sound of wind].
It is noteworthy here that Eligio refers to certain sounds as he describes the experience of receiving the colors. The anthropologist Marie-Françoise Guédon (personal communication) points out that sounds can be a component of altered states of consciousness and that certain characteristic sounds may accompany particular states. For example, an out-of-body state, which she experienced in a workshop, was accompanied by particular sounds. She later recognized these sounds in other descriptions of shamanic experiences, such as an Inuit description recorded by Knut Rasmussen. Since my interviews with Eligio were tape-recorded, the exact sounds he made are on tape. Verbally, I can describe them as hissing or “ssh”-ing sounds, like air coming out of a tire.
Referring to previous conversations on the combining of colors, I clarified that this is what happens when the shaman communicates with the directions. The channel of communication is open as long as the shaman sings. When he stops, the communication ceases. It reopens when he begins to sing again.
HOPE: And the shaman has colors also. His colors are talking to [the sacred sites?]
ELIGIO: In the moment, yes. In the moment. Because . . . it is coming to the takwatsi, the colors, the rays. It is those ones who hear the magical air [Sp: aigre mágico], yes.3
HOPE: And the rays . . . the colors are like rays that are arriving from those places to the shaman?
ELIGIO: Yes, to the shaman.
HOPE: From the different places. And they are colors, such as many different colors. They aren’t just one.
ELIGIO: No, [they are] different colors.
HOPE: As though combined?
ELIGIO: Combined, exactly. That’s how it is. They [the colors] have different powers. For that reason, they make contact.
Is there other research that records the idea of shamans using a language of color and song, or of deities communicating by these means? Is this concept unique to the Huichol? Probably not.
For example, in the description of Shipibo shamanism by Gebhart-Sayer (1985, 162), there are some significant similarities to Eligio’s perception. Shipibo shamans recounted that under the influence of ayahuasca, they saw luminous geometric configurations that took the form of designs. They also described this phenomenon as “rapidly flashing ‘sheets’ of designs” (167). The article mentions that colors play a role in these designs, but does not discuss which colors in detail or what they mean. There is one mention of red and black (155), a reference to “colored stripes” (157), and a description of the colored infill of design units (147), as well as several references to the brilliance or shininess of designs. In the past, her consultants had said that it was possible to read these designs as though they were words in a book. However, the knowledge of how to do this was passing away. She was told how this reading might be done (168), reading lines and motifs by starting at the lower right and tracing the meanders of the designs with a finger, but it seems as though the consultant did not tell her the meaning, and she was not sure whether it was still known. Her research provides another case in which there is a strong association of the idea of visual designs, light, and song with a form of language or meaning comprehensible to a shaman.
Eligio’s perspective on sacred colors and the cardinal directions also sheds a new light on the usual symbolism of the medicine wheel. Why would colors be associated with cardinal directions? Is it possible that the concept originated in the shamanic perception of multiple colors communicating from the sacred sites located in the cardinal directions? Perhaps later this became simplified and stereotyped as a single color for each direction.
What Color Perception Looks Like
Toward the end of our interviews, I asked Eligio to make me some yarn paintings. I did not request any particular topic. When I returned, one of the paintings he offered me was a painting of the colors as he sees them coming from a sacred site. The painting depicts a deity located in a cave with a spring in it. He called it Aariwameta. The cave is a sacred site where Huichol go to request powers, including the shamanic ability to heal as well as the ability to paint and draw well.
The painting shows the sun god floating on the surface of the water. Eligio explained that this image is what a person with shamanic vision sees upon looking into the water of the spring. All around the spring are jagged lines in colors of bluish purple and pink. He explained that this is how he sees the colors when they emanate from the sacred site.
Fig. 10.4. Eligio Carrillo Vicente, yarn painting of his vision of a face in the sacred spring of Aariwameta, 2000. 12” x 12” (30 x 30 cm). Communication takes the form of lines of light. Photo credit: Adrienne Herron.
I will not try here to “explain” or interpret his design. I note only that one of the amazing aspects of studying shamanism among the Huichol is their readiness to draw a picture of visionary experience for an anthropologist. Since I was having trouble imagining what the colors look like when they come to the shaman, Eligio helped out by making a yarn painting to show me. It is up to us, as anthropologists, to decide how we wish to interpret this very explicit demonstration of shamanic perception.
Eligio may be giving us some very important information about how shamans perceive and about what form of communication gods or spirits use. By listening closely to descriptions of shamanic experience and gathering comparative information, we may begin to comprehend the nature of this aspect of human perception. As Eligio said, “If you experience the colors, you will understand what they mean and what they are saying. If you have not experienced them, it is very difficult.”
If we look at Eligio’s discussion of sacred colors in a wider, cross-cultural perspective, his insights become even more tantalizing. There are many cryptic references to colors and spirituality in the anthropological literature. Often, they seem to be passing references to symbols, legends, or miscellaneous religious beliefs, with little explanation. But what if these color references were more than poetic metaphors? What if they were grounded in shamanic experience? That would give us a basis for interpreting their meaning as something more than fanciful creations of the human imagination. They may be expressions of a basic, underlying capacity of the human brain and of the trance experience.
In the following sections, I draw together miscellaneous references from the literature. I confine myself mainly to the Uto-Aztecans and to nearby cultures in the Southwest or Mesoamerica that may have exchanged ideas with the Uto-Aztecans. In a few cases, I draw in examples from more distant Native Americans if they illustrate strong connections. In this section, I am frankly doing some creative brainstorming, pulling together fragments of information from the literature. I suspect that there is much more to be learned about sacred colors if someone asks the right questions of the right consultants.
Sacred Colors and Uto-Aztecan Aesthetics
In her review of Uto-Aztecan imagery, Hill (1992) uses Claude Lévi-Strauss’s term “chromaticism” to refer to symbols that focus on color, light, and visual imagery. Chromatic symbols include “colored flowers and other brightly co
lored and iridescent natural phenomena, including dawn and sunset, rainbows, hummingbirds, butterflies and other colorful and iridescent insects, shells, crystals, and colored lights and flames” (117).
While chromatic symbolism is probably widespread throughout the Americas, it is found with special frequency in the songs of the Uto-Aztecans, whose significant themes include “the glitter of iridescence in the wings of hummingbirds, butterflies, and dragonflies and in precious stones and shells . . . [and] special qualities of light, such as blue or crimson” (Hill 1992, 118). The Yaqui, for example, sing of a spiritual Flower World, which “is a world of brilliant colors, where ‘the light glitters and shines through the water’ . . . especially . . . ‘light blue,’ the light of the early dawn” (119).
Hill found that chromatic symbols are associated with spiritual experience. In songs, references to colors, lights, and flowers signify spiritual qualities; they lift the reference from everyday experience to divine and visionary ones. She notes that visionary experiences from hallucinogens may be sources of chromatic imagery; other sources are dreams and the waking experience of the beauty of the natural landscape. She concludes: “The use of chromaticism in the construction of spirituality is so widespread that it must represent a very ancient level of religious thought” (1992, 118). She finds chromatic imagery particularly intense among the southern Uto-Aztecans of Mexico and Arizona, including the Huichol; its use dwindles among the most northerly Uto-Aztecans and some groups in California. The distribution of the imagery suggests that its use goes back several thousand years to Proto-Uto-Aztecan and may be linked to a similar complex found among the Maya farther south.
Eligio’s description of sacred colors ties closely into the Uto-Aztecan aesthetic of chromaticism. His discussion suggests one reason why color and light are associated symbolically with the spiritual. It is because they have their origins in the visionary experiences of the shamans. For example, Eligio described the sacred colors as lights or as brief, punctuated episodes of light that last as long as the shaman sings.
It would be interesting to find out whether other Uto-Aztecan groups share the Huichol view of colored lights as a language used by the gods. I suspect that the belief system may be there, at least among some groups. I have been struck by some similarities between the Huichol description of sacred colors and some accounts of shamanic perception among other Uto-Aztecan cultures, such as the Hopi, Yaqui, and Tohono O’odham (Papago), as the following examples demonstrate.
When seeking to purify himself after war, a Tohono O’odham man sat under a mesquite tree waiting for visions to come. A light came to him and told him what to do (Underhill 1979, 44). The shamans use crystals, which give them power. The crystals “are little shining things, as long as a finger joint, but they cast light like fire” (48). They are like shining stones that shamans may send out to light their way and that glow like a torch on lurking enemies or disease (Underhill 1938, 142).
Malotki and Gary (2001, 109) recorded a Hopi story about a witches’ dance. The sorcerers chanted a song:
There is no light
On my blue-green face paint,
There is no light.
Shine firelight on it.
The sorcerers’ face paint was not usually visible, but when the fire was stoked up, all their face paintings lit up and became clearly visible. They were repulsive and looked like skeletons. This is clearly the same concept as the Huichol view of colored lights (uxa) painted on peoples’ faces, which the shamans can see and which reveal people’s true characters (see Chapter 3).
The Yaqui’s spiritual Flower World is called the huya aniya. It is the world of the woods and mountains, still wild and untamed, where animals and other spirit beings live. In the heart of the mountains are snakes with rainbows (that is, multiple colors of light) on their foreheads, which can give spiritual power to human beings (Spicer 1980, 64). The power from the huya aniya is embodied in flowers (85), and the flowers are symbolized by the headdresses of multicolored ribbons worn by Matachin dancers.
The Huichol share with the Yaqui a belief that flowers are associated with the spiritual. During ceremonies, flowers are used as offerings (xuturi or ruturi) or to represent sacrifice (Lumholtz 1900, 202). For example, paper flowers are tied to the horns of a bull that is about to be sacrificed. Fluffy pink flowers (probably Pseudobombax palmeri) were tied to the offerings I saw during a Drum Ceremony in San Andrés.4 According to Bauml (1994, 71, 77ff), the Huichol attach a domesticated form of the Mexican marigold (Hui.: puuwari; Lat.: Tagetes erecta; Nahuatl: cempoalsuchitl) to the drumhead during the harvest ceremony. Negrĺn (1975, 35) says “xuturi” is the term used by the ancestral gods to refer to all Huichol adults, and one is reminded of the Aztec term “flowery wars,” which refers to wars waged to take captives for sacrifice.
The flower imagery extends into Huichol dress. The Huichol love to decorate their clothes with bands of embroidery in abstract or geometric patterns; they identify a number of patterns as “peyote flowers.” Other patterns are twining vines with or without flowers attached.
Flowers are brightly colored. Perhaps one of their properties is the ability to represent the visionary colors seen by the shamans. In the past, before the Huichol had easy access to colored beads and yarns, flowers may have been the most easily available means of representing the sacred colors.
Colorful Clothing and Vision
One more aspect of visionary experience is also linked to color. This is the link between color, clothing, and shamanic vision. Once again, it seems to cross cultural boundaries, since it not only is found among the Uto-Aztecans but also is widely distributed among other Native American groups.
I first perceived this link while participating in a pilgrimage to Wirikuta with Lupe’s family. We were standing, facing the east at sunrise, after a night of eating peyote. The mara’akame was facing east and praying, waving his feathered wand toward the horizon. I turned to a Huichol friend to say something.
“Hush,” he replied. “Don’t you see him coming?”
I followed his eyes, but saw only the shaman.
“There he is,” he said. “Here comes the mara’akame. It is the sun coming, walking across the desert towards us.”
I realized that the shaman was praying and speaking to the image of the sun as a shaman walking toward us out of the east.
Afterward, my friend elaborated: “The sun comes dressed in beautiful clothes. His clothes are all embroidered, just like the clothes the Huichol wear.”
There are strikingly similar references elsewhere in the anthropological literature. Other Native groups also assert that supernatural beings can appear as beautifully dressed humans. For example, a Hopi myth records that the spirit of the sun appeared to a boy, dressed in beautiful clothes and shimmering with color and light (Malotki and Gary 2001, 70): “It was a man, very handsome in appearance. He was dressed most beautifully and covered with colorful body paint. Each time he moved, bright light reflected from him. In addition, his breath exuded warmth.”
The Cree also describe the sun as a handsome man walking in the sky and beautifully dressed in a costume of many colors. When he enters the shaking tent, a ceremony for calling in spirits, there is “a beautiful clear light visible, through the covering” (Brown and Brightman 1988, 37, 41, 51). Farther south in Mexico, a Mazatec described the spirits of hallucinogenic mushrooms, who are like shadows or people seen during trance, dressed like the Mazatec but with brilliant multicolored clothing (Estrada 1981, 199).
This visionary experience is the Huichol explanation of why they wear beautifully embroidered and colored clothing. It is not just a love of color and decoration for its own sake, but rather because this is the way the gods appear, and the gods like to see the Huichol dressed the same way.
Vision as Synthetic Knowledge
In a discussion of Navajo ceremony, John Farella (1984, 9–14) proposes that there are three levels of knowledge underlying ceremonial practice.
» The
first level is rote. The person has learned how to carry out the ritual, but does not know why the activities are being carried out. Knowledge at this level leads to a preoccupation with taboo and making mistakes.
» The second level is ritual. The world is not seen as a given, but is subject to alteration. Ritual corrects mistakes and fixes things. If a ritual does not lead to a desired result, the assumption is that a mistake was made. This leads to a preoccupation with details, and can easily balloon into paranoia.
» The third level of knowledge is synthetic or theoretical. This level originates from the main principles underlying practice. The person knows why the ceremony takes a particular form and how to innovate and change it, depending on circumstances.
Farella concluded that when culture is lost, it is synthetic knowledge that goes first. As a result, the external forms of ceremony remain, but the understanding of why they exist is lost.
It seems to me that Eligio’s discussion of sacred colors is synthetic knowledge. He is describing the principles underlying Huichol color use and linking them to original shamanic experience. Aspects of color use such as the fuertebajito color system relate to the way shamans experience color as communication from the gods. Fuerte colors are those that the gods use to communicate with, while bajito colors have less of this magical power. Eligio’s choice of colors illustrates the shamanic visionary experience. His yarn painting reflects this deeper understanding, and this is what leads to his constant innovation in color.
Eligio seems more advanced than some other artists. Not all artists are shamans, nor do they all share visionary ability. For example, many artists understand the idea of fuerte and bajito colors and use them as a principle for painting. Nevertheless, their knowledge may be rote: they learn which colors are fuerte or bajito and then use them accordingly. I suspect that there is a “trickle down” effect whereby artists who are not visionary still derive images and color combinations from artists who are visionary. Thus, an artist such as Eligio can paint from firsthand experience, while others may paint from more general cultural knowledge about such experience.