{"id":449,"date":"2005-06-06T01:56:00","date_gmt":"2005-06-06T01:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=449"},"modified":"2005-06-06T01:56:00","modified_gmt":"2005-06-06T01:56:00","slug":"ojo-de-dios","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=449","title":{"rendered":"Ojo de dios"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new issue, no. 65, of Shaman’s Drum<\/em><\/a> reprints a portion of Visions of a Huichol Shaman<\/em><\/a> by the anthropologist Peter Furst.<\/p>\n

Furst has spent much time among the Huicholes, who live in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental and who are sometimes considered one of the least-Christianized tribes. Their religious use of peyote gives us an idea of how it might have been used in pre-Conquest times. You can see historic film footage of Huichol peyoteros<\/em> in Phil Cousineau’s documentary on the Native American Church, The Peyote Road<\/em><\/a> (Kifaru Productions, 1994<\/a>).<\/p>\n

An exhibit of Huichol yarn paintings with shamanic themes<\/a> is now touring. If you live near Charlotte, North Carolina, go see it while you can<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Huichol people had been making art for a long time by pressing colored yarn onto a beeswax backing, usually on gourds. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Mexican curators and anthropologists encouraged the making of rectangular yarn paintings on wooden panels that could be framed and sold. Some artists developed narrative pictures based on shamanic journeys.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Another Huichol artifact was the yarn-wrapped cross, called a “god’s eye” by the early anthropologist Carl Lumholtz–Peter Furst considers that to be a misnomer and calls it a “four-directional protective prayer object.” A fancy example is shown here.<\/p>\n

Separated from the Huichol context, god’s-eyes became an icon of Southwestern-hippie decor in the mid-1960s. As I was starting high school, my stepfather was offered a high-level job in the New Mexico state education department, and I was all set to move to Santa Fe and decorate my white-walled bedroom with god’s-eyes. But he took a job in Jamaica instead, and we went there. Later, for many years a small god’s-eye, matchsticks wrapped with thread, hung from the rearview mirror of my faithful Ford F-100 pickup truck. I called it my “spiritual compass.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new issue, no. 65, of Shaman’s Drum reprints a portion of Visions of a Huichol Shaman by the anthropologist Peter Furst. Furst has spent much time among the Huicholes, who live in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental and who are sometimes considered one of the least-Christianized tribes. Their religious use of peyote gives us an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[32,11],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-new-mexico","tag-shamanism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-7f","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":269,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=269","url_meta":{"origin":449,"position":0},"title":"Peyote progress The Utah Supreme\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 25, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Peyote progress The Utah Supreme Court has decided that Native American Church members may use peyote even if they are not on the rolls of a federally recognized tribe. James Mooney, the NAC leader spectacularly busted a few years ago, is celebrating, but the feds, of course, see peyote as\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":552,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=552","url_meta":{"origin":449,"position":1},"title":"First peyote, now ayahuascaIt took\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 2, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"First peyote, now ayahuascaIt took decades of legal struggle for the Native American Church to receive a highly qualified exemption to federal drug law that permitted its members to use the entheogen peyote during the church's meetings.Now the Supreme Court is hearing argument in another case involving religion and an\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1105,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1105","url_meta":{"origin":449,"position":2},"title":"Pagans are not a Community nor a Tribe — Not Yet","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 6, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"The lively discussion at The Wild Hunt over \"moving on from Paganism\" should put an end to the notion that Pagans constitute a \"tribe\" or a \"community.\"Not yet, anyway. We are still part of modern society with its cafeteria spirituality.Many Pagans, such as Emma Restall Orr in her book that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Paganism\"","block_context":{"text":"Paganism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=paganism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":837,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=837","url_meta":{"origin":449,"position":3},"title":"The most controversial anthropologist","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 14, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"One episode of a BBC series called Tales from the Jungle on famous anthropologists examines the \"shamanthropologist\" Carlos Castaneda (d. 1998), appropriately described as the most controversial anthropologist ever.For those of us who can't watch the Beeb, it is available in segments from YouTube.There are also episodes on Bronislaw Malinowski\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"anthropology\"","block_context":{"text":"anthropology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=anthropology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":620,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=620","url_meta":{"origin":449,"position":4},"title":"Supremes uphold entheogenic churchEarlier post\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 21, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Supremes uphold entheogenic churchEarlier post here.The Supreme Court has upheld the right of followers of Uniao do Vegetal (UDV), a religion born in Brazil that uses ayahuasca as its sacrament, to use ayahuasca in the United States. The feds argued that preventing use of a \"controlled substance\" was more important\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":471,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=471","url_meta":{"origin":449,"position":5},"title":"Headstones and bureaucratsNon-Fluffy Wicca posts\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 21, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Headstones and bureaucratsNon-Fluffy Wicca posts about bureaucratic foot-dragging and stonewalling over the issue of headstones for Pagan military service members.Beginning in 1997 with a request by the Aquarian Tabernacle Church of Washington state, various Wiccan groups have requested a pentagram headstone for military cemeteries and been ignored or turned down\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}