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LA LEY DEL CENTRO

El JEROGLÍFICO NAHUATL más familiar es una figura que, bajo infinitas variantes, está formada siempre por CUATRO PUNTOS UNIFICADOS POR UN CENTRO, disposición llamada en quincunce. Como lo demostró también Eduard Seler, el cinco es la cifra del centro y éste a su vez, constituye el punto de contacto del cielo y de la tierra. Para mayor exactitud, el QUINCUNCE designa además LA PIEDRA PRECIOSA que simboliza el corazón, lugar de encuentro de los principios opuestos.

He aquí entonces reunidos en un signo todas las características del QUINTO SOL –EL CORAZÓN DEL CIELO–, expresadas por la mitología.

Así como los mitos, la SIMBÓLICA TEOTIHUACANA expresa entonces el concepto de los cuatro elementos primordiales salvados por un centro unificador, concepto que constituye el núcleo mismo del PENSAMIENTO NAHUATL y que determinó sus más importantes expresiones. Como lo subraya Alfonso Caso, “esta idea fundamental de los cuatro puntos cardinales y de la región central (abajo y arriba) que da la quinta región, o sea la región central, se encuentra en todas las manifestaciones religiosas del pueblo azteca”.

source: https://xochipilli.wordpress.com/tag/cosmogenesis/

Formas teotihuacanas en El Salvador: una vasija con la estrella de cinco puntas en el Museo Nacional de Antropología David J. Guzmán

María Elena Ruiz Gallut*

Men running in line through a sandy landscape, each carrying a bag or folded cloth, constitute a common subject of Moche phase IV fine line ceramics. They carry no weapons and lack warrior dress; they wear a loincloth or kilt but no shirt or tunic. They are most often depicted as a human body with the head of a bird or animal. The typical runner headdress has the head of an animal, usually a fox or feline, in front of a vertical plaque. Headdress plaques usually alternate round and trapezoidal shapes. This headdress can appear along as a ceramic motif. All carry a bag of folded cloth presumably full of Lima beans.

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Each of these examples of “Bird Runners” share the same common characteristics. Each carries a bag of beans, loincloth or kilt but no shirt or tunic, no weapons, fox headdress and alternating round and trapezoidal crowns. The fact that these runners are predominantly human in bird form has a not so hidden meaning. Birds are swift, moving from location to location quickly, a natural choice for ceremonial runners. The choice of a winged messenger is echoed in ancient Greece and Rome in the personae of Hermes and Mercury respectively. Hermes is considered a god of transitions and boundaries. He is described as quick and cunning, moving freely between the worlds of the mortal and divine. He is also portrayed as an emissary and messenger of the gods.

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The destinies of pop Though with a thousand provisos, child psychologists advise parents to be truthful with kids, whose imagination, left unconstrained, can nourish overwhelming fears. The very fact of knowing the truth can make the world seem less scary. Maybe the need to defuse fear is also behind the naïve 'war rugs' made during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Women took the rug looms left intact by the troops and reinvented an economy, selling carpet-souvenirs to the occupying soldiers depicting weapons, helicopters, bombs from the sky and the omnipresent Kalashnikovs. After the disintegration of traditional social structures caused by the war, the carpets were the visual proof of an iconographic coup. The interesting thing about these carpets is that the medium used is not at all neutral with respect to the message. The typical stylized imagery of the carpet softens the aggressive character of the military objects and reworks them, in a genre comparable to Pop Art. More than one thread connects the carpets of Caturegli and Formica to the naïve carpets of the Afghan women: the choice of being mute witnesses of time, without hiding the truth; the end of the carpet as a tamed, decorative element, its emancipation from obsessive repetition of pleasant themes; its use as a framing of reality, like a column in a newspaper. As we know, the mixture of planes between cultured art and popular art can generate an ironic eff ect. This irony is there, in the carpets of Caturegli and Formica. They urge us to put ourselves in parentheses, to step back and get a new perspective on individual concerns, thanks to a wider view of planetary crises. True, their research plays with disconcerting themes, but the eff ect seems to be soothing for contemporary anxieties. And this is because it moves from a hard aesthetic of confl ict to a soft aesthetic of awareness. Their carpets contain the germs of contemporary confl icts, but also the antibodies we need to combat them. At this point one aspect must be clarifi ed. The essence of Pop Art is to transform everyday objects and images, familiar, already digested, into art, without any eff ort on the part of the viewer. The images of Caturegli and Formica, on the other hand, work on the level of the distant, or more precisely the near-butunknown. They seem mysterious, and even when they are as normal as the tracks of a tire, they require an eff ort to understand, study and decipher them. They have nothing to do with politics, consumption, the star system, war and violence tout court; they have to do with the philosophical bases of life, the mind, ancient civilizations. They raise questions, some of which are destined to remain without answers. 

Carpets are very common items. But it has never really been clear if their decorations, so confi dently woven and intertwined, have a religious, symbolic or simply practical origin. Anthropology does not fully clarify the matter, and historians simply focus on classifying colors, techniques, ethnic signs. Personally, though, I have always had the impression that carpets, apart from their geographical source, have a much more complex origin, not connected with their religious or secular use, but instead with the representation of cosmic vibrations or information. I sense that the carpet (like a big ear) can directly record from the ground on which it is spread. The mysterious intertwinings of carpets seem, in fact, to record forms of mystical thought that spring spontaneously from the infi nite, ritualized but always varied repetition of their weave. A sort of cognitive, reiterative, exploratory structure that is born in the dark mazes of a collective mind, that refl ects on the expansion of the cosmos. Something like the visions of a blind man, who describes a universe he has never seen. Like the visible circles on water, the carpet records invisible circles and forms, following logical theorems that cannot be deciphered, conceived by some theoretical physicist who investigates unexplored levels of the world and knowledge. I think Caturegli and Formica approach this mysteric-scientifi c dimension of carpets, interpreting them as deep genetic diagrams or the memory of faraway superfi cial tracks (villages, or tires). Somehow, in fact, their carpets are no longer carpets, because they are not just carpets but refl ections on the permanence of decorative diagrams within the logic of nature, science and technology. Carpets, then, as sensitive surfaces that record some kind of inexplicable harmonies, reproducing them not as decorations but as sacred patterns, as deep information that only the textile surface, in contact with the ground, is able to transmit. Andrea Branzi