Clodomira, the Spirit of the Prickly Pear Cactus – A New Myth in Search of its Mythology

 

Around the Mediterranean where I spent my early years, in addition to citrus fruits, yellow and red dates, one of our joys as kids was to pick the needely and juicy fruits of a cactus. I did not know its scientific name was Opunta ficus-indica, nor did I know in the west they were called Prickly Pear cacti. I knew the French name only – Figiuer de Barbarie.

Now as a resident of the high desert of Arizona, this same cactus gives me plenty of joy when I am in the open country. I have learned how Native Americans have used the cactus and its fruit (called tuna or pear) for food, its needles as medical instrument, its juice as medicine and made containers out of the dried fleshy pads or calododes.

There is also mythology associated with many cacti, including the Prickly Pear. Here is one such Aztec myth ⁽¹⁾:

“One Aztec myth says that Huitzilopochtli (god of war and the Sun) killed his own older sister, flinging her head into the sky where she became the goddess of the Moon! But her son Copil vowed revenge. In an epic battle, the war god ripped out Copil's heart and threw it into Lake Texcoco where it landed on an island and grew into a prickly-pear cactus, Opuntia ficus-indica. This cactus has large red fruits, almost the shape and size of a human heart...”

 Here is a photo of the Prickly Pear cactus with its fruit:

So, when I saw a few Prickly Pear pads broken and dried in the desert sun after the wild peccaries had eaten them, I decided to create my own myth with a painting!

 

I usually have a general idea of the theme before I start painting. This time I had none. I just started painting a face and quickly realised that it became a face showing wonder, perhaps apprehension, but also a certain calm. I think it was the shape of the lips compared to the shape of the nose that rendered this face neither a female nor a male face. Just humankind.

Here is the start of the painting always on preserved hare skin:

 

After a few tries, I chose hare fur and crow feathers to give that face a "perimeter", and an earring  along with a few turquoise stones and quartz for a necklace and pendant:

Perfect, now I had to create the myth as this person was experiencing it.

I looked at the Prickly Pear pads I had collected. One was totally dried, the other almost so:

 

I chose the dried one.

Next, I had to figure out what that face was looking towards. And it was then that I remembered seeing fog around the Prickly Pear pads early in the mornings during the rainy season we call monsoon in Arizona.

And fog became smoke, and smoke unleashed a spirit out of the cactus!

Here is the “Spirit of the Prickly Pear”. I used dabs of paint for her hair instead of applying the acrylic paint with my painting knife. I get better pointed edges that way which gives the “spirit” out in a swirling turbulence of smoky fog out of a break in the cactus pad a more phantasmagoric appearance:

 

The final touches made this painting a totally unplanned composition.  There may be a myth, somewhere, about the spirit in a cactus that is released when the cactus breaks a pad, although I have not read about such an event.

For now, this painting depicts my own private myth, and I gave the cactus Spirit a name – Clodomira.

 

(1)    https://www.franstallings.com/web/Environmentor/PricklyPear

 

January 18, 2022

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2022