Effects On Native American Life

Obsidian Butterfly by Octavio Paz

This particular story points to the previous grandeur of the life of Indians and their religion, positing the hope that Itzpapálotl would cheer up the lives of the people again whom Paz champions, the poor and the disenfranchised in particular, he looked to call to memory the things he saw as vital to the Identity of Mexican, the return of the phantoms, for example, whose religious spirit informs the halls of the palace in "Phantom Palace."

 The great prose poem by Octavio is a lament of the goddess Itzpapálotl, Obsidian Butterfly - goddess of war and also goddess of childbirth. It is like a butterfly with jaguar claws: curious embodiment of life and violence.  The poem sings his defeat, eclipsed by the arrival of a new religion. Traces of their presence remain. There are still women in northern Mexico that put a piece of obsidian under their tongue when giving birth to save their children from potential deformities, not really knowing anything about the origin of this custom. The myths associated with obsidian are twofold. On the one hand the well-polished obsidian was used as a mirror and thought it was crystallized in the soul of the blue rock, on the other served as carved obsidian arrowheads, axes and knives used in sacrificial rites (Sahagún, 112).

The manuscript began to take shape as a visual complement of the poem, juxtaposing signs and images, incorporating ancient and contemporary symbols. Octavio made a special recording reading his poem, the album was published with the manuscript. Having developed various icons and images in the codex, there was a feeling that some of them should be explored in other media. So they started making different versions, first in sculpture, and then painting, collages and reliefs (Jason, 67).

That forced us to ponder the relationship between art of past and present - one of the major issues of concern to contemporary art. What was the art? What is it? How does it become? Is there such thing as progress in art? Of course the visual languages ??come and go and we must take into account that the concept of art is fairly recent in our history as image makers. We can speak of progress in the history of ideas and many other things, but neither art nor the emotions and our sense of wonder are the subject of that concept. Art is prone to transformations, mutations. Interprets, sublimating and expressing the world around you. Our vision of the past is necessarily an interpretation as seen through a lens tinted translation, and often not very sharp focus. The original context and although we miss your light surrounds us, it is difficult to distinguish the things it illuminates (Karl, 89).

'The past is a foreign country' LP Hartley said. It is a sentiment of modern times. In the ancient world there was no such distinction. The past was an actual thing. The work he did around the Obsidian Butterfly was an evocation of a past seen from this, and a search of the unexpected ways that one is leaking into the other. Images were similar to symbols of the rain god Tlaloc in car ...