Biidau Guciù: the great spirit of lightning/thunder

Size: 60x100cm 

Weaver: Juan Mendoza/Juain Rubeæz

Price: $200USD

Materials and methods: criollo sheep wool hand dyed with colorfast aniline dyes using an exhaustive method. Handwoven on a Zapotec style loom of the 16th century adapted from European styles. Woven using a 7 threads per inch reed. 

Design, patterns and symbols. 

This rug in inspired in the representations of Biidau Guciù known as Pitao Cocijo in the literature. Bii (wind, spirit) dau (divine, inmensity) Biidau is the great spirit in our cosmovission and Guciù means lightning/thunder. The anthropomorphization of the great forces of nature and the cosmos should not be interpreted as an idolatry but rather as a way of relating and understanding such forces in the way the shape life on earth. The anthropomorphization of Biidau Guciù is even more accentuated due to the art trends of the 1960's when these designs were begining to be woven to appeal to tourists passing over Teotitlan and exploring the ancient archeological wonders of Oaxaca. Biidau Guciù is depicted sitting on a sacred mountain, we call mountains Daiín, which can be understood as Sacred Elder. In our cosmovission, mountains have a direct relationship with lightning and thunder in that Mountains takes us closer to the sky to offer our prayers and also atracting the lightning that announces the rains. During earhtquakes, mountains roar like thunder thus the elders studied the earthquakes that precede the rainy seasons as a way to predict the quantity and quality of rains. The great spirit of the lightning appears in this rug holding the glyph heart of the mountain in the right hand and elevating it towards the sky while wearing a headdress of the cosmic Makaw that will take the prayers to the sun.  

In these relationship we note the interaction of earth and cosmic energies that make life on earth possible, the great spirit of lightning elevates the mountain towards the sky to regulate the lightning and thunder that will bring the rains. We know from Owens et al. research that lightning rates are 50% higher when the sun's magnetic field points towards the earth than when it points away. Babak et al. (2019) carries on computer simulations on the "Efects of Earth's magnetic field on prerequisites of lightning initiation in Thunderstorm", they found that the effect of the Earth's magenetic field on charged hydrometeors might be one of the mechanisms of forming a thunderstorm's charge structure and lightning inititation.  Hereby we see that the ancestors were right in noticing the interactions of the sun's electromagnetic field and the earth's own magnefic fiend in the formation of lightning and they measured and analysed these energy interactions without high processing computing power or sattelite data. Their ways of perception were subtle but advanced. Our spacecraft (earth) carries withing it's own life monitoring systems, we can see this in other studies where rain "prophets" in native cultures can predict rain patters with 95 to 98% accuracy compared to modern weather prediction systems. 

Finally, Biidau Guciù is framed with an agave pattern from which we distilled the Niísduuvbadau (Mezcal), the sacred spirit used to communicate with the great spirit. At the beginning and ending of the rug we can see a stripe of the life and death cycle symbol; the duality from which we can begin to understand this mortal dream.