Visions of a Huichol Shaman

by Peter T. Furst

The brilliant visionary yarn paintings of the shaman-artist Jose Benitez Sanchez emerge transformed into two-dimensional form from fleeting, sublime visionary experiences triggered by the complex chemistry of the divine peyote cactus. Benitez's visions are of the Huichol universe in Mexico's rugged Sierra Madre Occidental, as that world came into being in the First Times of creation and transformation and in the ongoing magic of a natural environment that is alive and without firm boundaries between the here and now and the ancestral past.

Modern yarn paintings—more than 30 in the University of Pennsylvania Museum's collection are illustrated here—have their roots in the sacred art of communication with numberless male and female ancestors and native deities, related in the two remarkable Huichol origin myths also presented here to shed some light on Native American culture and provide some understanding of the religious experience that informs it.

Paperback

First published December 1, 2003

Reviews

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw this exhibit at the U Penn Museum of Anthropology & Archaeology a few years ago. I hadn't heard of yarn paintings at the time, and the banner outside the museum advertising it looked intriguing, bright and joyously complicated, and as I work nearby I went to the show on my lunchbreak. After the show I had to drag my animate carcass back to work; inwardly salivating over my own impotent peyote dreams. It's hard returning to paper drudgery when all you want to do is trip and play (very seriously) in the sun with colorful yarns. So I went back, twice, shedding my daily world of pointless paper for an hour to visually bask in wild Mexican visions.

The author of the book was a pioneer in the academic-type study of entheogens, and was instrumental back in the 1960's in persuading Huichol Shamans to use native yarn painting (up until then mostly decorative) to record peyote visions. The work in the show was by a second generation Huichol yarn painter, Jose Benitez Sanchez, who is now considered the master of the art.

The culture that spawned these paintings is a culture with much basis in peyote visions. It's a culture where living mythologies still inform day to day life. But the artists don't make these paintings while tripping. The paintings are the products of an entire culture infused with peyote visions as guiding principles, and the shaman-artists are just the ones with the manual skill to represent those visions. Things seen and experienced by shamans while on peyote have served to create a new logic, a new language, that is used while not under the influence, by others who have never eaten peyote. Peyote is a reminder that reality is enormous, much larger than the mundane things of this world, and the infusion of the culture with peyote logic is a tangible example of "God" at work in this world.

The paintings themselves are very controlled and sober-seeming, with simple skewed symmetry used to great compositional effect, but are extremely dense with detail and have an overall swarming feel, as if an over-populated underworld is continually pressing up through the earth. There are numerous cultural tropes used - like peyote buttons of course, but also hummingbirds, deer, embryo thingies and pollywog sperms, butterflies, fire, etc. Each has a specific cultural significance and are strategically used in the paintings to create cosmogonic visions and a representation of nature that is infused with permeable borders between this and other worlds. Staring at these paintings one can begin to see how the material world is dense with the unseen, and how forces seen in peyote visions are real forces that are continuously swelling and breathing and impregnating the world that our everyday eyes see.

Since seeing the show I've learned how popular these paintings are in the art market, and how the said market is saturated with forgeries. Too bad, but typical.

[Dash · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book features the yarn paintings of the Huichol Shaman, Jose Benitez Sanchez. It does a good job of presenting them in their proper context and briefly deals with the endangered nature of the traditional religion of the Huichol people and their sacramental plant, the peyote cacti. Due to environmental, cultural and economic factors, the Huichol's traditional ways of knowledge, healing and divination have been marginalized. To make matters worse, grazing of livestock and amateur peyote enthusiasts have endangered the survival of an already rate cacti in its native habitat.

The first time I saw a Huichol yarn painting, I was blown away - these images are striking and visionary in nature. The Huichol Shamans use brightly colored yarn which is pressed into a beeswax layer on a board backing to represent visions and communications from animal spirits while in a trance induced by ingesting peyote in a ritual setting. The lessons and parables which are communicated via the communion with the plant spirit are translated into a visual art form that is beautiful. I see something new each time I look at these yarn paintings, and they take on an entirely new dimension when viewed under the right circumstances and/or state of mind.

To anyone who has not yet viewed a Huichol yarn painting, I would encourage you to seek some out. Just do a google search for "Huichol yarn painting" and you will find many resources online. This book is one of the best art books I have acquired in the past year and I cherish it! It is not large, and I am left wanting more, but the contents are wonderful enough to easily warrant five stars, in my opinion.

On a side note, if you are interested in peyote conservation, please support the Peyote Way Church and other peyote and cacti conservation efforts. Too many people plunder the natural wonders of our world without giving anything back. I endeavor to be one of the contributors that leaves things better off rather than worse!