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The Flute Calls: Totonac Voladores: Ritual Fliers of Mexico
| Article
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19308 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1991 |
4,286 Words |
| Author
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S. Jeffrey K. Wilkerson
S. Jeffrey K. Wilkerson is director of the Institute for
Cultural Ecology of the Tropics. He has researched Latin
American anthropology, history, art history, archaeology, and
cultural ecology for the past twenty-eight years and conducts
annual field projects in the tropical rain forest areas of
Central America and Mexico. A resident of Mexico, he has
extensively studied the Totonac Indians of eastern Mexico. A
profile of Wilkerson appeared in Life and Ideals in the June
1990 issue of THE WORLD & I. |
One hundred and forty feet above ground, atop the giant metal pole that stands in front of the church in the eastern Mexican city of Papantla, the leader of a troupe of Voladores (fliers) performs a prolonged musical invocation. The musician-dancer at first is seated, but soon he stands erect upon the wood capstan that covers the pole point. Simultaneously playing both the flute and drum, he begins a rigorous foot-stomping dance and faces the four cardinal points in succession. On that lonely, elevated pedestal, no more than a foot in diameter, he continues his devotional dance and music. Turning about rapidly, and with perfect balance, he sounds vigorous steps with stiff leather-soled boots and ends each musical segment by bowing reverently on one foot toward the appropriate sacred direction.
Seated around him, upon thin bars of wood forming a square frame suspended from the capstan, the four other participants await the invocation's end. Each volador is tethered to the pole by a single rope at the waist. When the required ceremonial entreaties to the directions are completed, the leader sits once more on the capstan top and begins a different son (tune). At that signal, and in perfect unison, the fliers fall backward over their seats and plunge into the open air.
The capstan, pulled by the fliers' combined weight as the ropes unwrap from where they were coiled about the pole, begins to rotate, swinging them further and further outward. The voladores' richly decorated costumes and streaming ribbons promote a sense of supernatural flight. Swirling about the pole on the gradually unwinding ropes, their gentle descent to the earth is accompanied by the penetrating sounds of the shrill flute and pounding drum. Airborne for several minutes (their flight can last from three to eight minutes), the voladores have once again reaffirmed a complex ritual that has survived, essentially intact, for most of the last thousand years.
A history of wealth and religious devotion
To fly is not an aspiration restricted to modern man. The concept has been a matter of great human fascination, even obsession, since remote antiquity. Its achievement, or perhaps more frequently the failure to achieve it, has often been interpreted as the result of divine providence in fable and mythology worldwide. Not infrequently, the effort itself has been imbued with sacred overtones and thought to be obtainable only through fervent ceremony and extreme individual devotion. The heavens have beckoned not only to the classical civilizations of the Old World but
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