:: Xochipilli ::

2CB    Blood    Xochipilli    Moonchild    Lucifer    Neurocosmic    Form    Coatlicue

:: 2012 :: 50cm x 50cm :: Acrylics, Inks and Markers on Canvas ::
:: Partially completed live at Elixir Of Life, London, 7 April 2012 ::

Xochipilli is famous as the Aztec 'Prince of Flowers', Lord of Psychedelic Plants and Master of Sacred Visions, but this understanding of him, made well-known in Visionary culture, eclipses his deeper nature. For Xochipilli was also Macuilxochitl - Five Flower - and was thus patron of five magical phenomena...

- Psychedelic Plants & Sacred Visions (Flowers of the Earth)
- Dance & Chanting
- Poetry (called 'Flowers and Song' in Aztec metaphor)
- Recently departed souls (often depicted as butterflies) and the near afterlife
- Male homosexuality and male prostitutes (and suddenly the name 'Prince of Flowers' delightfully takes on another, perhaps more effeminate meaning)

We see that Xochipilli's domain is Liminality, the edge between two worlds: sacred plants that allow one to cross over into godly realms, dances of ecstasy in which one can embody the gods, poetry which calls that-which-is-not into existence, the recent dead who yet hover on the edge and await their union with the Great Collective Animism... ...and us Queers, ever on the edge, ever liminal, at once desired and undesirable, we too live under Xochipilli's sway. It is even more strange to think of Xochipilli when one remembers that homosexual acts were illegal in the Mexica state centred upon Tenochtitlan.

And here is strangely remembered a truly ancient reality: the link between liminality, vision and homosexuality. For it has been said the world over, from Siberia to Native America, from secret cults in West Africa to Polynesia, that a shaman can be powerful if he is male, but rarer and more powerful is the female shaman. But rarest and most powerful and even dangerous of all is the Queer Shaman: the homosexual, the transsexual. We're born under Xochipilli. He is the patron of all that is illegal, all that is ecstatic in the truest sense of the word (ek-stasis), all that is beyond. Part Dionysos, part Hermes, part Janus, but queerer by far than any of those.

Xochipilli

I will sing to you Xochipilli
Fivefold liminal Macuilxochitl

I will go to your house
and lay flowers upon your altar
I will place them upon me
I will drink of your sap
and I will envision you

I will go to your house
and dance movements of love
I will caress the air
your hands guide my body
and I will entertain you

I will go to your house
and chant flowers and song
leaves of poetry in the air
your mouth and mine entwined
and I will kiss you

 

I will go to your house
and lay naked upon your inner sanctum
I will be taken, you and I as One
penetrated by your vision
and I will become you

I will go to your house
and shed tears upon your grave
I will become a butterfly
our souls singing again
and I will die with you

I will sing to you Xochipilli
Fivefold liminal Macuilxochitl

---

I was born on the day Five Flower,
I live under you and I die under you,
I love under you and I fuck under you.
Through you I can become, can go beyond:
Oh Xochipilli, I am your house!

Detail 1

Detail 2

Detail 3

Detail 4

Detail 5

 

 

Copyright (c) 2002-2023 Bruce Rimell : All images, artwork, and words on this site
are copyrighted to Bruce Rimell and may not be reproduced in any form unless stated otherwise.