4
The Shamanistic Inner Vision

The mask Moctezuma presented to Cortés had a long history and a number of levels of symbolic meaning. In fact, the beginning of its history and the source of its meanings must be sought in a time long before any actual masks appear in the archaeological record as the roots of the ritual and symbolic use of masks characteristic of Mesoamerican religion are deep in the shamanistic base from which that religion grew. Throughout the long history of its development, it continually drew sustenance from the basic conceptions brought across the Bering Straits land bridge as early as 40,000 years ago by the first discoverers, explorers, and settlers of the New World and bequeathed by those first Americans to all the generations who were to follow them in the development of what was to become the indigenous thought of the high cultures of Mesoamerica. All the subtlety, intricacy, complexity, and beauty of the thought and ritual of the highly developed religious institutions of Mesoamerica at the time of that second contact with the Old World, known as the Conquest, can be seen as developments from the shamanic base, developments from that original archaic religious system built on the individual shaman's ability to break through the normally impenetrable barriers that separate the planes of matter and spirit. His was an ecstatic personal experience with practical uses for his people, the hunting and gathering, nomadic peoples of the Early Paleolithic and later times. As magician, diviner, or curer, he was uniquely capable of bridging the gap between the mundane lives of the people of his community and the mysteries of the invisible world which could give those lives purpose, direction, and meaning and through which the ailments and problems of the individuals and the community could be dealt with. Of course, the highly developed religions of the later civilizations of Mesoamerica no longer depended upon the central figure of the shaman and the trance through which he was able to enter the world of the spirit, but the outlines of that shadowy figure can still be seen in the basic assumptions and many of the practices of the religions he founded.

The significance of shamanism to Mesoamerican spiritual thought has been recognized both by those who study Mesoamerica and those who study mythology and religion generally. Campbell, for example, among the latter group, has pointed out that "in any broad review of the entire range of transformations of the life-structuring mythologies of the Native Americas, one outstanding feature becomes immediately apparent: the force, throughout, of shamanic influences."^[1] In this, he concurs with Eliade who, in his definitive study of shamanism, shows that "a certain form of shamanism spread through the two American continents with the first waves of immigrants."^[2] Among Mesoamericanists, Furst, who claims that the shamanic world view forms the basis of "mankind's oldest religion, the ultimate foundation from which arose the religions of the world,"^[3] notes that even the relatively late Aztec religion, which was certainly not dominated by the individual shaman and his trance, retained "powerful shamanistic elements"^[4] that were derived from the fundamental shamanic assumptions underlying Mesoamerican religious thought and practice. A brief treatment of those assumptions will illuminate their shamanic origin and, interestingly, suggest an important reason for the widespread mask use we have traced in Mesoamerican religious symbolism and ritual.

Perhaps the most fundamental assumption shared by shamanism and Mesoamerican religion holds that all phenomena in the world of nature are animated by a spiritual essence, the common possession of which renders insignificant our usual

distinctions between man and animal and even the organic and the inorganic. In the shamanic world, everything is alive and all life is part of one mysterious unity by virtue of its derivation from the spiritual source of life—the life-force. Thus, each living being is in this sense merely a momentary manifestation of that eternal force, a mask, as it were, both covering and revealing the mysterious force of life itself. Furthermore, the commonality of the life-force makes possible within the shamanic context the primordial capability of magical transformation; man and animal can assume each other's outer form to become the alter ego, an ability central to the pan-Mesoamerican concept of the nagual , which is discussed below. Through this form of transformation, the shaman can explore the myriad dimensions of the material and psychological worlds; and through the concomitant liberation from the limitations of his own body, he can take the first step toward the exploration of the worlds of the spirit, the proper domain of his own spiritual essence. The ritual use of mask and costume clearly derives, at least in part, from that concept of magical transformation: through the mask, the ritual performer changes his physical form to enter the world of the spirit in a way analogous to the shaman's magical transformation.

A second assumption of shamanism that underlies Mesoamerican religion follows directly from this first one. In the shamanic universe, the soul, or individual spiritual essence, is separable from the body in certain states or under certain conditions; the spirit can become autonomous and function free of the body. Man is thus not necessarily limited to or by his physical existence; he is capable of moving equally well in each of the two equivalent worlds of which he is a part—the natural and the spiritual. This equivalence of the worlds of matter and spirit makes the common distinctions between dream and experience, this world and the afterworld, the sacred and the profane, as insignificant as those between man and animal because the shaman demonstrates that the only true reality is spirit, albeit spirit that may be temporarily garbed in the material trappings of the world of nature. Just as the spirit of the shaman can transform itself into other forms of natural life, so it can leave the physical body entirely and "travel" unfettered in the spiritual realm. It is there, of course, that the shaman finds what is needed to cure the ailments and solve the problems of his people, one of his primary functions in a world that believed the cause of everything in nature was to be found in the world of the spirit. Thus, the physical being of the shaman, and of living things generally, was a "mask" placed on the spiritual essence, a "mask" that could be removed and left behind in the shaman's ecstatic journeys to the world of the spirit. The actual masks and costumes worn by shamans suggested symbolically the separability of the worlds of matter and spirit, and precisely this symbolic meaning of mask and costume was to remain constant throughout the development of Mesoamerican spirituality.

This belief in the separability of matter and spirit concurs with a third basic assumption of shamanism and of Mesoamerican religion—that the universe is essentially magical rather than bound by what we would call the laws of cause and effect as they operate in nature. Since material realities were the results of spiritual causes, to change material reality, the spiritual causes had to be found and addressed through ritual and/or shamanic visionary activity. The magical universe consisted of two levels of spiritual reality, one above and one below the earthly plane, a shamanic conception that directly prefigures the structure of the cosmos as it was seen at every stage of the development of Mesoamerican spiritual thought. The three levels are connected by a central axis, often represented by a world tree, "soul ladder," or stairway that links the planes of spirit and matter and provides the pathway for the shaman's spiritual journeys. Again, shamanism posits a universe in which matter and spirit are separate yet joined, and that union both makes possible and is symbolized by the spiritual travel of the shaman when he takes off the "mask" of his physical being.

These assumptions are the core of shamanism. They suggest the fundamental spirituality of man and provide a conceptual base for the belief that through appropriate rituals performed by one who, by heredity, divine election, or the manifestation of a proclivity for the sacred, has acquired the ability to shed his physical being to become "pure" spirit, all boundaries can be crossed so that the zones of profane space and time can be transcended and the essential order of the cosmos revealed. The shaman is thus the mediator between the visible and the unseen worlds, the point of contact of natural and supernatural forces. Significant among the supernatural forces are the figures of his ancestors, the clear embodiment of death and the life after death. In thus linking the natural with the supernatural, the material with the immaterial, and life with death, the shaman establishes an inner metaphysical vision of the primordial wholeness of cosmic reality. He, himself, has left his body through a symbolic death, traversed the realms of both life and death, and returned to tell the tale. As he returns from his visionary experience, he again puts on the "mask" of the material world so as to communicate that experience and share his vision of the world of the spirit with his community.

Black Elk, the visionary Native American of comparatively recent times, beautifully suggests the essence of this shamanic vision characteristic of the indigenous cultures of the Americas.

I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the

whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.^[5]

That "sacred manner" of seeing which reveals the mysterious unity, the "one circle," at the heart of things is the ecstatic vision of the shaman, and it is as central to Mesoamerican thought and ritual throughout its development as it was to Black Elk's somewhat different vision of reality.^[6] From that very sense of the spiritual unity of the cosmos, the cultures of Mesoamerica developed a religion that saw man's existence in essentially spiritual terms and that concentrated its ritual actions on symbolizing and breaking through the boundaries between the planes of matter and spirit through such means as the attainment of trancelike states induced by ritual privation, blood sacrifice, or the ingestion of hallucinogens; ritual human and animal sacrifice; and masked dance. As we have shown, even the sacred spaces in which these ritual activities took place were themselves symbolically "marked" by the use of masks to suggest the ultimately shamanistic idea of the separability of the worlds of spirit and matter. Underlying all these fundamental ritual practices we can see the vision so well described by Black Elk.

But it is not only in its shamanistic assumptions that we can find evidence of the shamanic base of Mesoamerican religion. Numerous clearly shamanic practices have been and continue to be integral parts of Mesoamerican religious activity. They can be seen in connection with funerary ritual, symbolic animal-human transformation, the attainment of trance states through the use of hallucinogens, and in the healing practices still associated with Mesoamerican spirituality. Evidence of all these practices can be found very early, but the earliest is, of course, fragmentary as a result of the destructiveness of man and nature through the course of the centuries and of the fact that archaeological research on Preceramic Mesoamerica is in its infancy. Significantly, however, MacNeish, one of the pioneers in that research, has found archaeological evidence to confirm that as early as the El Riego phase in the Tehuacán valley (ca. 6000 B.C.) there was "a complex burial ceremonialism that implied strong shamanistic leadership."^[7] Since, as we have seen, the shaman is intimately involved with death in his movement between this world and the afterworld and since burials often preserve archaeological material, it is not surprising that the early evidence of shamanic practices involves mortuary ceremonialism, the ritual involved with man's ultimate movement between the worlds of matter and spirit. That these very early shamanic burial customs persisted in central Mexico is indicated by the association between funerary ritual and male figurines dressed in shaggy costumes suggestive of the paraphernalia of the shaman as jaguar^[8] found at Tlatilco as early as 1500 B.C. and as late as A.D. 750 on a grander scale at Teotihuacán. Soustelle discusses the examples from Tlatilco and concludes that

certain individuals wore garments, ornaments, masks that set them apart; no doubt these individuals were "shamans," awesome figures, respected and feared, intermediaries between the human world and the supernatural forces whose powers lay in a domain somewhere between magic and religion. Such magician-priests still exist today in Indian communities.^[9]

Covarrubias also sees a funerary jaguar-shaman relationship in figurines from a Tlatilco burial. Each of the "shamans" is accompanied by a dwarf and each is wearing a small mask, some of the masks jaguarlike and others designed so that half portrays a contorted face with a hanging tongue and half is a human skull (pl. 52), together suggesting the duality of life and death,^[10] one of the fundamental assumptions of shamanism. That this symbol of the equivalence of life and death, matter and spirit is found in the shape of a ritual mask worn by a shamanic ritual figure further strengthens the contention that the cultures of Mesoamerica from very early times consciously used the mask as a primary symbol for the idea that the material and spiritual worlds coexist in such a way that the material world acts as a covering for the world of the spirit, a covering that can be penetrated through the symbolic death of the shaman's ecstatic trance. We can also see in these early symbols and ceremonies associated with death the roots of the complex system of communicating with the world of the spirit through human and animal sacrifice which was characteristic of the cultures of Mesoamerica. That system of communication, already suggested by the sacrificial victims in the El Riego phase of the Tehuacán valley, was perhaps a logical development from the deathlike trance of the shaman which enabled him to enter the world of the spirit. In both cases, a form of death was seen as the necessary prerequisite for the spiritual journey.

Evidence of this transformation, through death, from matter to spirit is complemented in the archaeological record of early Mesoamerica by widespread indications of another sort of transformation. As we have demonstrated in the section "Merging with the Ritual Mask," such masks from the earliest times give evidence of the merging of human and animal features in the process of the

transformation of matter into spirit through art and ritual. Numerous figurines from such Preclassic sites in the Valley of Mexico as Tlatilco, Tlapacoya, and Las Bocas; a good deal of Olmec sculpture both from the heartland on the Gulf coast and other sites ranging from Chiapas to Puebla; and a number of examples of the early sculptural art of Monte Albán, all roughly contemporary, depict or suggest such transformations of man into animal, often a jaguar or bird. Both of these creatures are associated with the shaman and both, as we have seen, are potent factors in Mesoamerican spiritual symbolism. Such a transformation, of course, suggests the shaman's ability to transcend the material world and to transform himself into other natural forms. This assumption of the outer form of an animal alter ego was no doubt "the most striking manifestation of his power"^[11] and was an integral part of his ability to enter the world of the spirit. Thus, the early masked rituals recorded by these ceramic and stone figures and those that followed them in the later cultures of Mesoamerica must often have effected a symbolic transformation of the essentially shamanic figure into his animal counterpart in the process of penetrating spiritual reality.

The jaguar, always important symbolically in Mesoamerica as we have seen in the context of rain, fertility, and rulership, is a key figure in these symbolic transformations, and linguistic studies showing that in some areas of the New World the words for jaguar and shaman are the same^[12] offer further evidence of shamanic transformation. And, significantly, the Aztec name for the shamanic sorcerer-priest-curer, nahualli, was the same as the word that denoted the animal alter ego into which the sorcerer could transform himself. These two linguistic connections between priest and animal underscore Furst's claim that the jaguar's importance throughout Mesoamerican symbolism is connected with the fact that it is interchangeable with, or a kind of alter ego of, men who possess supernatural powers.^[13] According to Eliade, the "mystical journeys [of the shaman] were undertaken by superhuman means and in regions inaccessible to mankind";^[14] thus, the magical transformation of the shaman into a bird or an animal that could move with superhuman speed would symbolically supply the powers needed to make the journey into that other realm of being.

Recent research indicates that both of these forms of transformation—from matter to spirit through a symbolic death and from man to animal—were often accomplished through the ingestion of psychotropic substances by which the shaman attained the necessary mystical, ecstatic state that would enable him to transcend human time and space and gain insight into the divine order. That research provides evidence of the use of hallucinogens early in the development of Mesoamerican religion. The abundant remains of Bufo marinus at San Lorenzo, for example, suggest that the Olmecs sought the hallucinogenic effects of eating these toads.^[15] Coe and other students of the Classic period Maya have found extensive evidence on painted ceramics of the practice of ritual hallucinogenic enemas, a practice that seems to have roots in the Preclassic.^[16] Furthermore, "the presence of mushroom stones and associated manos and metates in Middle and Late Preclassic caches and tombs indicates the existence of a widespread mushroom cult similar in concept, but not necessarily in performance, to that known [today] among the Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and Mixes of Oaxaca."^[17]

This fragmentary evidence of the shamanic use of hallucinogens in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica takes on its proper significance when we examine the use of hallucinogens among the Aztecs. Because Aztec thought is far better documented than that of any other pre-Columbian civilization, the use of hallucinogens, like many other areas of spiritual thought and practice, can be better understood within Aztec culture than in the cultures of Classic and Preclassic Mesoamerica. The evidence of their extensive ritual use of hallucinogens to command visions of destiny and to experience the order to be found in the unseen world no doubt indicates that we would find the use of hallucinogens equally pervasive in earlier cultures were similarly extensive evidence available. The Aztecs considered psychotropic plants sacred and magical, serving shamans, and even ordinary people, as a bridge to the world beyond.^[18] Providing the ability to enable man to communicate with the gods and thereby to increase his power of inner sight, such hallucinogens were important enough to be associated with the gods. Xochipilli, for example, was not only the god of flowers and spring, dance and rapture but patron deity of sacred hallucinogenic plants and the "flowery dream" they induced. He is often portrayed with "stylized depictions of the hallucinogenic mushroom" and "near realistic representations of Rivea corymbosa ," the morning glory, called ololiuhqui by the Aztecs, whose seeds are hallucinogenic, as well as tobacco and other hallucinogens,^[19] and in one of his most powerful representations he is depicted masked.

As such depictions indicate, many plants by which the shaman could induce his visions were included in the psychoactive pharmacopoeia discovered by the Spanish conquerors. In addition to sacred mushrooms, the morning glory, and a very potent species of tobacco called piciétl , there was peyote, a hallucinogen still widely used by the indigenous peoples of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States in ritual activity. Similarly, Durán tells of the Aztec use of teotlacualli, a divine brew made up of tobacco, crushed scorpions, live spiders, and centipedes which priests smeared on themselves and drank "to see visions."

He reports that "men smeared with this pitch became wizards or demons, capable of seeing and speaking to the devil himself."^[20] What seemed devilish to Durán, of course, was the plane of spiritual reality entered through the ecstatic trance of the shaman, the plane on which he could find spiritual knowledge.

The evidence of shamanic practices within Mesoamerican religion, then, clearly shows a shamanistic emphasis on transformation often accomplished through a hallucinogenic alteration of the mental state of the religious practitioner. As is the case with the traditional shaman of Siberia, in Mesoamerica these transformations often served the purpose of healing the physical and psychic ills of members of the community. A wealth of evidence, much too vast to cite here, points to this link between shamanism and Mesoamerican healing practices which existed from the earliest times and continues to the present day. Some representative examples, however, will suggest the nature of the connection. The Yucatec Maya Ritual of the Bacabs, which dates from pre-Columbian times, contains long incantations to be used by the healer in ridding the community of disease. Through this ritual, he could send the diseases inflicted by the underworld rulers on the race of men back through the entrance to a cave and thence to the underworld and the realm of death from which they came. And Landa, writing about the duties of Maya priests at the time of the Conquest, reports that they used knowledge drawn from the world of the spirit through shamanic means in the process of healing: "The chilánes were charged with giving to all those in the locality the oracles of the demon. . . . The sorcerers and physicians cured by means of bleeding at the part afflicted, casting lots for divination in their work, and other matters."^[21] Vogt's research among the contemporary Maya in Zinacantan has uncovered ample evidence of the continuation into the present time of similar shamanic healing rituals exemplified by what he calls "rituals of affliction."

Many of these ceremonies are focused upon an individual "patient" regarded as "ill." But the illness is rarely defined as a physiological malfunctioning per se; rather, the physiological symptoms are viewed as surface manifestations of a deeper etiology; for example, "the ancestral gods have knocked out part of his soul because he was fighting with his relatives."^[22]

Through divination, the Zinacantecan shaman determines the state of the patient's animal alter ego in the realm of the spirit and proceeds ritually to restore the animal to its proper position, thus curing the patient. In much the same way as in pre-Columbian times, "the patient's relationship with his social world is reordered and restored to equilibrium by the procedures of the ritual."^[23]

These shamanic healing practices were not limited to Maya Mesoamerica. In the Valley of Mexico, the Aztecs, too, placed great faith in the healing power of the sorcerer-priests who coexisted with the priests of the institutional religion of the temples. Generally referred to as shamans, these sorcerer-priests were the guardians of the physical and, to some extent, the psychic equilibrium of the community. According to Caso, each human imperfection was "transmuted [by the Aztecs] into a god capable of overcoming it."^[24] In this way, the imperfections and ailments became spiritually accessible to the shaman. Whether through animal transformation, by the imitation of animal voices, or by chanting incantations using the nahualtlatolli, or "disguised words," the shaman could enter the place and "time where everything was possible to elicit the supernatural power of the gods and their primordial handiwork in the restoration of the patients' health and equilibrium."^[25] This magical approach to healing is also evident in the belief that particular words could be pronounced by the shaman to control nature and cure the destructive imperfections plaguing a person or the whole community. These few representative indications of shamanic healing practices could be multiplied indefinitely, but they must serve here to indicate the widespread and long-lasting influence of shamanism on healing among the indigenous cultures of Mesoamerica.

Thus, the shamanic origin of Mesoamerican religion seems to be clearly indicated by many practices that derive from the fundamental assumptions of shamanism. More important than any of these particular forms of religious activity, however, is the fact that the way of seeing reality characteristic of Mesoamerican spirituality is the way of the shaman. In this connection, it is fascinating to note what seem to be indications of the shamanic origins of the gods of Mesoamerica, the metaphoric figures which inhabit and represent the spiritual realm, the true home of the spirit that animates man. In typical shamanic fashion, they are ranged on a number of levels of spiritual reality above and below the plane of earthly existence. Chief among the gods represented at the time of the Conquest in the Valley of Mexico, as we will show below, was Tezcatlipoca, whose cult at Texcoco "still retained echoes of an archaic, shamanic origin among the tribesmen of the north, embodied principally in a revered obsidian mirror, a magical artifact shamanistically used for divinatory scrying."^[26] Nicholson sees in that mirror "Tezcatlipoca's ultimate origins," the source of "his role as archsorcerer, associated with darkness, the night, and the jaguar, the were-animal par excellence of the Mesoamerican sorcerer-transformer."^[27] Seeing the mirror as central to Tezcatlipoca's identity and role suggests a relationship between that god and the iron-ore mirrors that dot the archaeo-

logical record as far back as the Olmecs.^[28] Perhaps even that early, they were associated with a prototypical Tezcatlipoca and with the shamanic ritual connected with him. Nicholson suggests a similar background for Ehécatl-Quetzalcóatl, Tezcatlipoca's polar opposite and complement, who "appears to have functioned both as a patron of the regular priesthood and of those practitioners of various techniques which most anthropologists would classify as shamans."^[29] These two important examples of the gods' origins in the shamanic past of Mesoamerican religion and myth suggest clearly the strength of the shaman's influence throughout the religion's long course of development and also provide a fascinating connection with the use of the mask as a metaphor within the Mesoamerican religious symbol system. Since the gods' origins were in the shamanic beginnings of Mesoamerican religion, their consistent depiction as masked human beings can be seen even more clearly as a metaphoric reference to their function in uniting the worlds of spirit and matter and in defining the spirit world through the symbolic features of the mask.

This influence also explains the pervasive symbolic and ritual use of masks in that religious development as the use of masks is a significant part of both the symbolism and ritual of shamanism. As Eliade points out, the mask of the shaman, the specialist of the sacred who has learned to move between the worlds of nature and spirit, "manifestly announces the incarnation of a mythical personage (ancestor, mythical animal, god). For its part, the costume transubstantiates the shaman, it transforms him, before all eyes, into a superhuman being."^[30] In ritual, the mask provides the shaman with one of the important means of accomplishing his essential function—the movement into the realm of the spirit. In a similar way, shamanic songs or incantations suggested that same transformation, as did even "disguised words" or the imitation of animal voices, which served as a "sign that the shaman can move freely through the three cosmic zones: underworld, earth, sky."^[31] The new, musiclike language of the liberated spirit of the shaman signified his movement away from the mundane world in his quest for sacred knowledge. These songs or chants are "a discipline of the interface between waking consciousness and night," the meeting point of the metaphoric equivalents of the worlds of nature and the spirit. Thus, the equation of masks with song by Levi-Strauss, though not in connection with shamanism, suggests again the central symbolic function of the mask within the shamanic context. He explains that

within culture, singing or chanting differs from the spoken language as culture differs from nature; whether sung or not, the sacred discourse of myth stands in the same contrast to profane discourse. Again, singing and musical instruments are often compared to masks; they are the acoustic equivalents of what actual masks represent on the plastic level .^[32]

Masks, then, are the visual equivalent of the song or chant of the shaman, and both mask and song are symbolic of the sacred discourse of myth created by the mind. All three—masks, song, and myth—are products of culture operating at its most profound level in a search for order in the invisible or spiritual world. Eliade's contention that the mask makes it possible for the shaman to transcend this life by enabling him "to become what he displays" and to exist as "the mythical ancestor portrayed by his mask"^[33] suggests precisely the necessary immersion in the sacred order of the world of the spirit. Through the mask and the song, the shaman is transformed into something other , and with the vision of an animal, ancestor, or god symbolically acquired through this transformation, he is able to see into the mysteries of the spiritual realm. "He in a manner reestablishes the situation that existed in illo tempore , in mythical times, when the divorce between man and the animal world had not yet occurred,"^[34] when the primordial order had not yet been hidden from man's view. Now outside of space and time, "he mystically unites himself with a sacred order of being, beyond the dimension of this or that person in this or that particular body."^[35] He is, in effect, reborn with the divine ability to see, behind the mask that both covers and reveals the essence of the cosmos, the divine order that alone can resolve the seeming chaos of the world of man. Thus, the mask is surely a clear reflection of and the perfect metaphor for this shamanic world view, and Mesoamerican spirituality reveals its great debt to shamanism in its pervasive symbolic and ritual use of the mask.

Wherever we look in our study of Mesoamerican spirituality, we come face to face with its shamanic ancestor. Whether we are considering the use of divination to understand the "augural significance of dreams"^[36] or noting that a burial ceremony provides a way of establishing contact with the ancestors who can show the way to the world of the spirit that they now inhabit; whether we find evidence of transformation into animals suggesting the transformative vision that provides the powers that are needed for the mystical journey or study healing accomplished by curers able to divine the cause of disease and find its cure in the spiritual realm; whether we find visionaries under the influence of hallucinogens predicting future events and establishing "auspicious times for the holy rites,"^[37] we are consistently seeing practices whose roots are deep in the shamanic base of Mesoamerican religion. They all derive from the fundamental shamanic conception of an underlying cosmic order, an order of the spirit—the "sacred hoop" described by Black Elk.

It was precisely this shamanistic transcendence

of all mundane distinctions between the sacred and the profane, inner and outer, man and animal, dream and reality, that enabled Mesoamerican man to feel at one with a universe that included all the anxieties of life and death in its mysterious complexity and to be initiated "by shamans into a system of philosophical, spiritual, and sociological symbols that institutes a moral order by resolving ontological paradoxes and dissolving existential barriers, thus eliminating the most painful and unpleasant aspects of human life"^[38] by putting them in their "proper" perspective. Perhaps the comfort of the shamanic world view through which "the Indians approached the phenomena of nature with a sense of participation"^[39] gave Mesoamerican man his first impulse to search in all the other areas of the cosmos for similar manifestations of the same phenomenon. And in addition to providing the impulse, it seems clear that shamanism also provided the conceptual framework for the magnificent cosmological structure that resulted from Mesoamerican man's spiritual search. The shamanic vision can be found in every aspect of Mesoamerican spiritual thought making up that structure: in the underlying temporal order of the universe demonstrated in both the solar cycles and the cycles of generation from birth to death to regeneration; in the spatial order derived from the regular movements of the heavenly bodies; in the mathematically expressed abstractions of eternal cyclical order found in the calendrical system; and most of all, in the understanding of divinity as the fundamental life-force that is, at the same time, the source of all order. Ultimately, this vision reveals itself in the symbolic use of the mask as the most important metaphor for the essentially shamanic presentation of the vision of inner reality to the outer world.