Five Isomeric Designs and Pueblo Philosophy
THE IDENTICAL, MIRROR IMAGES OF ISOMERIC DESIGN REVEAL FASCINATING INSIGHTS ON PUEBLO ART AND CULTURE.
The identical, mirror images of isomeric design reveal fascinating insights on Pueblo art and culture.
Woven clothing, baskets, and pottery vessels were all essential technologies that made the Ancestral Pueblo way of life possible, so it seems only natural that potters would have called attention to the unity of these various industries. In this article, we connect pottery and weaving with Pueblo philosophy and social history to explore deeper layers of meaning of isomeric design in Ancestral Pueblo culture.
Philosophical concepts in contemporary Pueblo culture provide hints of the deeper significance of isomeric designs. Writings by Pueblo scholars, such as the late Rina Swentzell (1990), explain that Pueblo people conceive of reality as involving a spiritual world that is complementary and consubstantial with the physical world. In some communities this idea is expressed via the concept of water-windbreath. Breath is the movement of air in and out of an animate being; wind demonstrates the animacy of the larger world; and water in its various forms is the ultimate source of animacy.
In this way of thinking, water is especially important because, in addition to being the source of life, a still body of water creates a window to the spirit world, which is viewed as a mirror image of the physical world. Consider what happens when one looks at the surface of a body of water on a calm day. What one will see is the surrounding landscape reflected in the water. However, this reflection does not match the world above exactly. Rather, it is a mirror image in which spatial relationships appear reversed, or opposite, to the way they are in the physical world.
This phenomenon of mirror-image reflection is apparent in a wider range of bodily experiences. If you look at your shadow on the wall of a canyon, for example, you will see a mirror image of yourself looking back at you. Your right hand in this world is the left hand of your shadow on the rocks. And, of course, you will see the same phenomenon even more clearly if you look at your reflection in a lake—if you raise your right hand in greeting, you will see your reflection in the water waving its left hand back at you. And if you walk across wet sand, the print of your left foot will be of a right foot, from the perspective of the sand looking back at you.
Mirror-image reflection is apparent even in the sky. In the northern hemisphere, the sun rises each morning in the east, then travels upward and
southward until noon before turning downward and northward until it sets in the west each evening. During the night, the sun continues moving beneath the surface of the earth in the north, only to reappear on the eastern horizon the next morning. However, when one is inside a building with a skylight, such as a kiva, the beam of light cast by the sun inside the building moves opposite to the way it does in the world outside. In the morning, the sunbeam passing through the roof hatch projects an image of the sun on the west wall of the kiva. Then as the day progresses, the image moves downward and northward until noon, at which time it reverses and moves upward and southward until the evening, when the image sets along the east wall. In short, the sunbeams inside the kiva move in a mirror image of the sun in the sky. The same thing also happens with the sunbeams that penetrate the surface of a lake, and this phenomenon likely lies behind Pueblo conceptions of the kiva as a microcosm of the spirit world from which people emerged in the beginning.
A Tewa story illustrates the way contemporary Pueblo people conceive of kivas and lakes as portals to the spirit world. In this story, Cactus Flower Girl runs away from home with Spider Grandmother after being scolded for misbehavior. According to the version recorded by Elsie Clews Parsons in the 1920s, “Soon they reached the edge of a lake. In the middle of the lake were two poles coming out of the water. As they watched, the poles grew higher and higher, soon there was a big ladder coming out of the water. This was a kiva, and out of it was a good-looking woman.” The story explicitly equates the surface of a lake with a portal to the spirit world. The Tewa term for the roof hole of a kiva, p’o:kwikhoyi, or “Lake roof hole,”
further demonstrates that this story presents a widely understood and longstanding conception in Pueblo culture. The kiva represents the spirit world beneath the reflective surface of a lake.
Pueblo people use the phenomenon of mirrorimage reflection to conceptualize the relationship between the spirit world and the physical world. In this construal of reality, the spirit world is a mirror image of the physical world, and one can contact this world at any number of places where water stands still— whether this is in the form of clouds and snow on mountains and hills, pools of water at mountain lakes, marshes or springs, moist caves, or even subterranean kivas. As water circulates through the physical world, so does animacy flow through both worlds.
This idea is expressed today in a variety of ritual practices. For example, when Pueblo men prepare for ceremonies they often cover their hands with wet white clay so that they can “lay the fog,” making contact with the spirit world through their actions. The idea seems to be that the point of contact between the physical world and the spirit world is a wet surface, of a lake or of wet hands.
Archaeological evidence further suggests that these understandings have significant time depth. For example, they are reflected in the variety of ways the tau shape is employed in Ancestral Pueblo design. This shape is found on the handles of mugs used for drinking liquids and on the backs of effigy vessels depicting waterfowl which can travel between the sky, the surface of a lake, and the world beneath. Tau-shaped doors are also common in Ancestral Pueblo architecture, primarily at thresholds between the inner world of the house and the outer world beyond. Such transition points are thus marked with a symbol of clouds or fog. Finally, a kiva from southeastern Utah explicitly connects the tau shape with the transition between the physical world and
the spirit world. Owing to the low roof of the alcove in this location, the builders created a side entrance to the kiva through a dark recess at the back of the cave. This threshold, through which people passed from the outside world to the spirit world, was a tau-shaped opening. These various bits of evidence support the notion that contemporary conceptions of the spirit world as a mirror image of the physical world have been a part of Pueblo philosophy since at least the Great Pueblo Period.
We believe the logic of mirror-image reflection is also embedded in isomeric design. Indeed, isomers are themselves an additional form of mirror imaging. As we have shown throughout this book, isomeric designs are designs in which the negative, unpainted space has a shape complementary to the positive, painted space. The inspiration for these optical illusions probably originated in weaving, but it is important to note that these designs often create mirror images as well.
In the case of liminal-space isomers, the liminal space can be viewed as the “moist” point of contact between isomeric designs in bi-fold rotation that reflect the complementary, mirror-image reality of the physical and spiritual worlds. This relationship is especially apparent when one of the painted elements is solid and the other hatched, as on the Puerco Blackon-red bowl discussed previously.
In the case of painted-and-unpainted isomers, the process of creating the painted design also creates a mirror image, unpainted design that interdigitates with the painted elements and thus reflects the consubstantiality of the physical and spiritual worlds.
Finally, incomplete-element and tessellated isomers both involve interacting isomeric elements that are connected by liminal unpainted spaces. Importantly, it is the unpainted liminal spaces, and not the painted figures, that do the work of “weaving” the isomers together. Although we are not sure if these relationships between painted design and concepts emanating from mirror images were ever discussed explicitly, we feel the popularity of isomeric designs must have derived, at least in part, from the way they alluded to and reinforced the simultaneity and consubstantiality of the physical and spiritual worlds
and their watery points of near contact as implied by the experiential properties of reflection.
Even if isomeric designs do reflect the spiritual realities we have discussed above, this does not, by itself, explain why such designs became so popular during the Great Pueblo Period. Part of the answer surely lies in the coincidental timing of the innovations that created isomeric patterns in weaving, as discussed in the previous chapter. But we think there is also a deeper reason that is related to the emergence of large-scale social organization during the Great Pueblo Period. Once again, the best place to begin in building this argument is with contemporary Pueblo ideas.
Today, Pueblo people view the various forms of water as sentient beings that impinge on human affairs. For example, clouds have the capacity to bring life through the transport of water from the mountains down to fields, streams, and villages, and clouds are normally accompanied by wind, indicating that they are alive. Clouds exist and can be seen and felt, but not grasped, even when they pass by as fog. And clouds vary in the ways they move and the kind of rain they bring, and thus have personalities.
The ancestors of Ancestral Pueblo people were hunters and gatherers. Hunting and gathering people depend on plants that have adapted to specific environments through natural selection over long periods of time. As a result, their food resources are not very sensitive to the whims of the weather, and the forces that produce weather are thus not of critical importance. Pueblo food crops, on the other hand, derive from wild plants that originated in tropical regions of Mexico. As a result, for an agricultural people living in a semiarid plateau, weather can make the difference between abundance and starvation, and in this setting one would expect an intense interest in understanding what causes weather and in influencing it, if possible.
In this context, Pueblo people came to understand weather as a phenomenon that emanates from ancestral spirit-beings who have become clouds. These beings, often referred to as katsinas or kachinas, watch over the people and signal their approval of the community’s behavior by bringing moisture and their disapproval by withholding it. What the ancestral rain beings desire most in people’s behavior is the proper performance of public rituals, prayers, and songs, and adherence by individuals to the communal values of the Pueblo. As Sekaquaptewa, Hill, and Washburn explain in the book Hopi Katsina Songs, “The katsinas promise in their songs that, in return for the people’s sincere prayers and moral living, they will come as clouds, thunder, lightning and rain. By this means, the planted fields of the people will bloom, the yellow jackets and butterflies will flutter about pollinating the flowers, and the people will sing and dance with happiness at these signs of the promise of new life.” Importantly, Pueblo people understand that the ancestral rain beings can see the true, internal mental states of community members regardless of their outward behavior. So, if the community is being monitored by these beings the people cannot receive their approval by just “going through the motions.” Rather, each person’s heart and mind must generate
respectful and helpful thoughts for one’s surroundings and for other people. In this way, the spiritual world of thought, in each person and in larger natural forces, influences the state of the physical world.
It is important to emphasize the real-world, practical benefits this philosophy generates in a community that depends upon cooperation among its members to maintain itself, whether through sharing with those in need, participating in community work projects, or the fair exchange of goods and services. The philosophical and ceremonial life of Pueblo people is designed to bring the desired state of the spirit world into being, and in so doing they also encourage the mirror image of this desired state to occur in the human community. In this way, Pueblo conceptions of the spirit world have practical benefits for real Pueblo communities which help them to survive and thrive.
We suspect that the emergence of isomeric designs in Ancestral Pueblo pottery reflects the initial crystallization of these philosophical ideas which made it possible for large groups of people, many of whom were not relatives, to live and work together. Experimental research by psychologist Ara Norenzayan (2013) shows that people generally behave more cooperatively when they are being watched by others, or feel that they are being watched, even if by purely spiritual beings.
So it would seem that the emergence of isomeric designs, which emphasize the coexistence of the seen and unseen world, each the complementary mirror image of the other, was part of this process of recognizing the forces that produce a properly
functioning universe and creating a society that took these forces into account in its activities. In our view, isomeric designs, which were first noticed in specific weaving techniques, became a powerful expression of, and aid to memory for, the accumulating philosophical and practical knowledge that made Ancestral Pueblo society possible.
If this is the case, why did Pueblo potters stop painting isomeric designs after 1300 CE, despite the continued relevance of the knowledge they seem to materialize? We suspect the answer lies in the transformation in Pueblo life that occurred in the thirteenth century CE. We have emphasized positive aspects of social and technological developments during the Great Pueblo Period, but it is important to acknowledge that there were also darker aspects of these developments. Archaeological studies show, for example, that substantial material inequalities emerged during this period. Very few people lived in the great houses in Chaco Canyon, but those who did ate better food and could command resources and labor from much farther afield than the average person. Stories maintained in Pueblo and Navajo communities also allude to excessive gambling and slavery in Chaco Canyon. These bits of evidence suggest that material inequality was a growing problem in Ancestral Pueblo society. Given this, the pattern of change in material culture associated with the thirteenth century migrations and reorganizations of Pueblo society suggests one of its underlying goals was to resolve some of these problems.
The archaeological record shows that, as Pueblo people left their ancestral homes for the Rio Grande and Little Colorado drainages, many things that had previously been hidden were revealed to public view. Community ceremonies that had occurred inside great kivas for many centuries came to be performed in plazas where all, including the clouds, could see the assembled community. Also, the smaller kivas in which private rituals occurred were moved from the interiors of great houses to the centers of plazas, where the comings and goings of the participants were also visible to the entire community and its spiritual counterparts.
Finally, mural painting and rock art shifted to explicit anthropomorphic representation of sentient natural forces, especially cloud beings (katsinas). And in many communities it became possible for these natural forces to inhabit community members directly through donning of the appropriate katsina mask. The pattern of change in these activities suggests that prior to 1300 CE the ancestral spirit beings, and the activities that people undertook to influence them, had been largely hidden in Ancestral Pueblo society; and that one of the changes people desired at this time was for these beings, and the activities through which people develop relationships with them, to be more visible and open. To the extent that isomeric designs were associated with the old society, and the old way of thinking, they would have been discouraged. In this way, a paradigmatic expression of these core ideas could have faded from use, even as many of the ideas themselves continued to influence Pueblo culture in other ways down to the present.