myths symbols sandplay

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Telling The Story: Textiles

Woven textiles have long incorporated color and symbol to tell myths and legends. From the straightforward woven scenes on tapestries to the symbols and patterns woven into textiles, people have captured their myths and stories in hangings, clothing, and funerary cloths.

 

One hundred and fifty-six miles south of Lima, Peru, the Paracas people used alpaca wool woven on cotton warps beginning around 3000 BC. They produced complex woven textiles embellished with embroidery, braid, and fringe. Some weavings featured the spirits and demons of Paracas mythology. The Paracas people also created brightly colored and geometrically patterned burial cloths. Fortunately, many beautiful textiles were well preserved due to the hot and arid climate of western Peru. Although the Paracas people created intricate and vividly color textiles, woven from threads colored by indigo, plant dye, and cochneal, little is known of their everyday life.

  Border from an embroidered mantle, 200 BC – AD 600, Paracas

From: www.britishmuseum.org/research/research_projects/all_current_projects/

andean_textiles/textiles_from_the_andes.aspx

 

In the area near Chiapas, Mexico, Mayan weavers pray to saints for skill and grace to weave. Weavers select from hundreds of symbols, used in combination, to tell a mythological drama. In Mayan myth, the Goddess of the Moon taught women to weave sacred designs. The weavers tell the story of their culture through their weaving. Their skill is found on textiles used for rituals, ceremonial practices, and traditional dress.

Mayan symbolism:

Diamonds represent the Universe and the path of the sun in its daily movement. The small diamond at the top is the east. The small diamond at the bottom is the west. The large diamond in the center is the sun at noon, resting in the center of its daily journey.

 

The tail of a scorpion.

 

The Earthlord, “saint” of the underworld.

 

The toad that sings at the mouth of the Earthlord’s mountain cave.

Mayan symbolism from: www.flmnh.edu/maya/maya7.htm

 

 

 

 

 

 

Telling The Story: Sand Painting

According to Philip, in Mythology, there are many ways to tell a story. Many myths "are ‘told’ through ritual, dance, or art rather than through narrative storytelling. In the chantways of the Native American Navajo, sand painting, song, prayer, dance, and ritual combine to relive complex myths, which are remembered not only for their story content but for their healing spiritual power". In many cultures costumes worn by dancers, body painting, and woven textiles are also used to tell stories.

Native American Navajo chantways include complex and sacred sand paintings. The chantways are ceremonies in which skilled painters create complex pictures, with colored sand, under the direction of a "singer" who is in charge of the ritual. The family sponsoring the ceremony gathers the colored pigments. A mortar and pestle is used to grind sandstone, chalk, charcoal, cornmeal, and dried flower petals into fine powders to be carefully trickled onto the sand (earth mother).

An average sand painting takes six men about four hours. These temporary altars are sprinkled with pollen by the singer and then destroyed as part of the healing ritual. The grains are swept onto a blanket and then released to the wind. There are over a thousand types of sand paintings; very few are remembered today. The more frequently created chantways include: The Beauty Chant and sand painting (coiled snakes around a center coiled snake), The Blessing-way (to ensure blessing and the sanctity of the earth), and The Healing-way (a secret oral tradition where the singer decides on the chant and the sand painting to fit the needs of the patient).

 

Tibetan sand paintings, or dul-tson-kyil-khor (mandala from colored powder), are sacred works of art created in the form of a mandala or cosmogram. Powdered, dyed marble is applied with a special metal funnel, known as a chang-bu, forming ritual diagrams that are made up of geometric figures, both counterbalanced and concentric. These mandalas are used for contemplation and concentration. Made up of outer, inner, and secret symbols, the archetypal images restore balance and activate archetypal energies. The outer aspects represent the outer world in divine form, the inner aspects symbolize the transformation into enlightened mind, and the secret aspects represent the primordial balance of body and mind. The creation of dul-tson-kyil-kor results of the purification and healing of these three levels or aspects.

Images and symbols used include the cardinal points, a protective barrier, and the colors black – the east and the wind, red – the south and fire, white – the north and water, and yellow – the west and the earth. Ritual music may accompany the creation of the mandala. When it is complete, the grains are swept into a jar, taken to nearby water, and poured into the water source to carry healing energies to the world. The common goals of the Navajo and Tibetan rituals are to reinstate balance and harmony and to restore the relationship with the self.

 

Philip, N., Mythology:An Illustrated Guide, Barnes & Noble Books, New York, 1998

New Blog Posts

Upcoming posts will include information about the telling of stories and the many ways tales are told: dance, ritual, textile patterns, painting, and sand painting. In Native American Navajo "storytelling" using sand painting, it is not the story content but the healing spiritual power that is most important. May sandtray work offer therapy clients a similar experience.

Sand paintings, as created by Native American Navajo Indians, were not made to be an "art object," but rather were made as part of an elaborate healing ritual or ceremony. The artist, or in the Navajo context, the medicine man, would use naturally colored grains of sand, and pour them by hand to create these elaborate "paintings". Quote from artsology.com

http://www.artsology.com/navajo-sand-painting