Visions
of a Huichol Shaman
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.
Peter T. Furst is the author of many books and essays on the
Huichol and is Research Associate at the University of Pennsylvania
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
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