Journal of Latin American Lore 15:2 (1989)
The Loom and Time
in the Huichol World
STACY SCHAEFFER
University of California, Los Angeles


In ancient times, after the great flood, Takutsi Nakave, the Huichol goddess of creation, formed the world and all that exists today. She learned how to weave from the spider who carries a ball of yarn on its back and makes its webs facing the rising sun. Takutsi Nakave taught the Earth Goddess, Utuanaka, how to weave so that she and the other gods may find a path to the sacred peyote deseirt of Virikuta. There, in Virikuta, where the deer, corn, and peyote are united, is where Huichols today go seeking visions and meaning to their existence in the universe.

As Geertz (1973:5) writes in his concept of culture, man "and woman" as human animals are suspended in webs of significance they themselves have spun. This imagery is particularly fitting in the weaving tradition of the Huichol Indians of the Sierra Madre Occidental in Mexico, where temporal and spatial elements are visually portrayed as interwoven into layers of meaning important to all members of this culture. On the back strap loom, thoughts and beliefs are given substance as they are created and bounded in time in a woven fabric.

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