Weaving and Dreaming Among the Living Maya
By Barbara Tedlock, Ph.D.
The world of the living Maya is notable for its natural beauty, cultural antiquity, and internal complexity. Within just a few square kilometers, one encounters more geographical and cultural diversity than is found within many nations. Maya towns that were already ancient when the Spaniards invaded the New World continue to be inhabited. Dynamic, vibrant textile art has persisted among Maya peoples for more than two thousand years. This art speaks silently but expressively, building layer upon layer of meaning. Women who work on the backstrap looms of their ancestors create rich brocades that combine strands of personal history, ethnic and regional identity, and ancient mythology and cosmology.
The mythic origin of weaving, as recounted today in Guatemala, took place in the chilly cloud forests of the Verapaz region. When the goddess Ixchel noticed that people were shivering, she took pity upon them and decided to show a woman how to make clothing. While she was setting up her backstrap loom in the woman’s courtyard, she noticed a spider weaving its web and told the woman to watch carefully how the spider worked. Today some of the women’s blouses are made by a gauze technique: the warp threads are concentrically arranged and then interlaced with the weft, creating a garment resembling the network of threads in a spider web. Such blouses are worn outside the skirt rather than tucked in, resembling the way orb webs are draped over plants.
During the pre-Hispanic period, textiles provided clothing as well as a medium of exchange, tribute payment, and gift-giving. Cotton and agave fibers were both used, but cotton became the fiber of choice during the colonial period. The Spaniards introduced sheep, the processes for spinning and weaving wool, and the treadle loom. Wherever warm garments and blankets were necessary, Mayas made woolen textiles. Most Maya clothing today, however, is still produced on backstrap looms, using handspun cotton thread.
Perhaps the technique backstrap weavers enjoy most is brocading, in which supplementary wefts are interlaced with the warps to create designs. This is an art in which images are painted with a rainbow of yarns, and it is one of the most deeply rooted continuities of Maya culture.
Weaving with a blackstrap loom requires a tree for anchoring one end of the loom. The rope that ties the loom to the tree and the umbilical cord are known by one and the same word in the Tz’utujil Maya language.
As the ancient art of Maya weaving enters the twenty-first century, it continues to function as a key social and economic activity. It enables the more than seven million living Mayas to provide food and clothing for their families and textiles for the global economy. Throughout southern Mexico and Guatemala, weaving cooperatives have helped to preserve and revive the ancient patterns and special techniques of backstrap-loom weaving.
With the ongoing revitalization of Maya religious rituals requiring special cloth and clothing, the textile arts of southern Mexico and Central America continue to be a vital ethnic marker. Wearing hand-woven cotton cloth, Mayas say, “puts them in the form of their ancestors” who visit them during dreams and waking visions. In Maya culture today, dreams and visions provide a valuable source of information about ongoing spiritual phenomena as well as bring intuition and artistic creativity.
Dreams that begin as personal experiences may shift during dream telling, illustrating and performing as a cosmic doorway into another dimension of reality. Dream images, like images reflected in a pond or a mirror, are both there and not there. If I look in a mirror, I see that I am there, in the mirror, but then I realize that I am also not there, in the mirror. It is this doubling that is central to the act of imagination that occurs in dreaming.
Dreams and visions exist in a sacred space located between the tangible and the intangible, the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible. The reality of this sanctuary that mystics everywhere perceive is created through the process of living in and dialoguing with the world. Among the Maya the conversation rapidly moves from the dream as a personal entity to dream as an interactive social process. Such enhanced dreaming experiences can open cosmic doorways. This is a theory of dreaming that insists on moving beyond being into becoming.
When we connect ourselves spiritually to dream beings, they bestow their other-than-human wisdom upon us, giving us an enhanced personal identity. Since a new-born Mayan baby is born “empty” of personality, pressure is exerted upon young children to get them to learn about the spiritual world in order “to fill their emptiness.” This is accomplished through learning traditional stories and developing a loving relationship with dream images. In this way children become proficient at a special state of awareness half-way between waking and sleeping consciousness that has come to be known worldwide as a form of “lucid dreaming,” which often leads to out-of-body experiences.
Within Mayan traditions, the key moment of awareness or “lucidity,” is described as the result of an interior dialogue between different parts of the self. The dreamer is simultaneously cognizant of being asleep and removed from the external world and of being awake and receptive to the inner world. At this crossover point between sleeping and waking, there are complex sensual overlappings—visual, auditory, and tactile—as the lucid dream emerges like a brocaded image from within the dream landscape. This new dream element, which interrupts the imagery and narrative flow of an ongoing dream, fuses dreamer to dreamscape in such a way that it may be experienced as fearful or joyful and causes an out-of-body experience and an awakening.
A Tzotzil Maya flower vender and weaver reported that during a recent dream she went outside to gather wood. Upon finding a pine stump, she dug up the roots, bound the wood, and started home. She came to a fence, put her wood down, then flew off until she became fearful, and flew back to her wood pile. She then woke up somewhat within her dream and went outside her house to pick up the wood and realized she wasn’t flying any more. “It seemed as if it were already light and as if I were on the earth’s surface. It didn’t seem as if I were in my dream anymore. I looked at the wood again and suddenly woke up!”
In Mayan societies dreaming and waking realities are not compartmentalized worlds but rather overlapped experiences. Dreams provide an arena in which human beings come into intimate contact with fused natural and spiritual worlds. This commonly occurs when one is fully within the landscape and social action of dreaming but on the edge of waking consciousness. All of a sudden one realizes that one is awakening to the outer world but still engaged within the deepest images of the human soul.
Today Mayans use the cultivation of lucid dreaming combined with ancient divinatory practices as a way to gain access to their past and autonomy for their future. Children are trained to be more self-reliant through developing a spiritual personality. Such enhanced awareness of the self, leading to contemplation and mental alertness during dreaming, can produce powerful life-changing dreams. In turn this psychic experience encourages dreamers to move beyond perceiving dreams as static beings, entities, or mythic texts into experiencing dreams as a powerful process of becoming within the landscape of the soul.
Barbara & Dennis Tedlock will be leading a workshop December 9-11. Click for more info.
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