Myths, Rituals, and Characters III: Iconography and Imagery Today

Published August 2, 2022

By José Arturo Morales Tirado

In this rich Frontier of the Tierra Adentro (Mexico’s interior central highlands), as we’ve seen, our natural and cultural heritage has been simmering between encounters and disagreements, aggressive and cordial, in various spaces and with different ethnic groups from this continent, including Mexico, and the diverse Mesoamerican ethnic groups, from Europe and the whole world.

Without a doubt, San Miguel de Allende has been at the epicenter of this complex and wonderful process for at least the last five centuries. Syncretism, the mosaic of diverse perceptions of reality, is part of the fascination or magic of this place and its community. Using the tools of reason and observation, cosmovision and worldview, and religion, the community has consolidated its knowledge through diverse languages: spoken, written, and unwritten. The unique personality has been formed by the temperament and character of our society in the Frontera Tierra Adentro (Inland Frontier). It has developed through languages ​​that communicate with a sense of belonging the identity of our territory’s myths, rituals, and characters, with its diverse ecosystems and multi-ethnic community, using codes, symbols, iconography, imagery, and even physiography.

About 2,500 years ago, the process began in our region with the language of the Chupícuaro culture and their Mesoamerican contemporaries. Language was their most complex and precise weapon to understand and project their reality. They used it to mold their mind and perceptions, which then transferred into their concepts, cosmoview, and religion and projected into their myths, rituals, and characters. And communication was not only among other humans but also with the stones, forests, wetlands, canyons, water, plants, animals, and, of course, with the souls of the perceived environment, including the caves, springs, the earth, and, of course, the infinite firmament. In short, they connected with the underworld and the vault of heaven.

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