Native Sacred
-A place of beauty in the making, as opposed to the beauty made.
-Elite residents worked with the Life-Giver to negotiate everlasting but mortal deliverance from earthy suffering.
-Mortals could and should not enter the sacred.
-Sacred enters individual.
Motifs - narratives - "song of wind" - fauna, wildlife - the architecture anticipates the arrival of the sacred.
Flowers rain down - images/motifs of flowers spread over walls and ceilings.
Flowers spread fragrance.
importance of flowers - song, painted, crafted, carved - summon divine to ritual arena.
Images painted and carved - depict humans with flowers flowing from mouth or musical instrument.
Floral friezes often frame thematic murals - recall tapestries and carpets and decor that characterize outdoor processional and dance areas.
Also included garland, crowns, posies and song/music flower songs
Other iconographic elements included with flower friezes - medallions, classical urns, cherubs and put, birds and animal and mythical monsters.
Friezes highly rhythmic in form visually - perceived as drumbeats.
Repetition plays into this.
The formal order of friezes reflect the formal elements of dance.
Images echo costumes used in dance.
Example of dance - costumes (eagles, lions, tigers, monkeys, birds, dogs, bat).
Trees laden with sweet-smelling flowers.
Boys dresses as birds descended from trees while elders danced. Boys wore gold bells on ankles and wrists. Sucked dew from flowers in trees.
Color
Blue and Red - two vital fluids of the cosmos - Water and Blood
Black and Red - chromatic metaphor for sacred metaphor.
Despite the availability of extensive range of pigments these colors dominate.
Mapping - churches consistently represented as blue and red places.
Blue - turquoise-blue
Red- red-brown
"Like sentinels, they speak as glyphic morphemes of the nature of the place we are about to access: "This is the place of the blue and the red flowers; this is the place of the source of life."
16th century Indian Mexico
Image of Christianity was not copied - rather read and rewritten.
Churches perceived as the living replicas of the landscapes/ out sacred features.
Ayaucalli - "mist house", a temple or group of temples dedicated the rain deities.
Oyoalli - hollow, pear or almond shaped create ornament, associated with pulque gods, possibly used as a rattle instrument
Tzoalli - mixture of amaranth seed with honey or maize flower used to make effigies of deities and other sacred things.
Xonecuilli - "twisted foot", name give to ritual "breads", often in shape of "S" to represent lightning or in the shape of a butterfly, name of a star of constellation.
