Teōtl Pāntlitl: Divine Standards

Our ancestors took their forms from the living world, because there was nowhere else to take them from. A crest, a glyph, a shield: each one is a shape something alive arrived at first. So honoring where you come from and honoring what you come from were never two loyalties. The standard and the creature on it are one process arriving twice.

Teōtl is the Nahua name for that process: a single sacred energy that continuously makes and remakes everything there is, so that a stone, a bird and a person are not separate things it created but passing arrangements of it. The friars translated teōtl as dios, god, and in doing so turned a process into a person. That substitution is the argument of my work, performed once on an entire cosmology.

Pāntli is the banner, the standard carried upright at the head of a people so the people can find itself. Teōtl Pāntlitl holds both at once: the whole, and the mark one part of it makes to say it is here.

Eleven works at thirty by twenty-two inches, the scale a banner needs to be read across a room. Eight are laser cut from colored paper laid over a square of a second color. Three are painted.

The forms come from Totems, where each name paired a quality with an organism. Here the organism steps out of the title and the color steps in. The form never changed. What you call it did.