The Six-Petalled Flower That Followed Me Across the Atlantic

What does a Scottish butter print have in common with a 17th-century Maya church?

Sometimes you find a thread without realizing you've already been holding the other end of it for years.

A few years ago, I was wandering around Uayma, a small Maya town in Yucatán, Mexico, when I visited the extraordinary church of Santo Domingo de Guzmán.

The church dates to around 1646, when Franciscan missionaries were working their way through Yucatán converting the Maya population to Christianity. Like many colonial churches in the region, it was built partly with stones taken from nearby Maya structures.

You can still see some of them embedded in the walls, their old carvings peeking rather defiantly out of the new religion built around them.

But there was something else about Uayma that fascinated me.

Flowers.

They are everywhere.

Six-petalled flowers cover the façade, surround windows and doors, climb the towers and continue inside the church. The design varies and becomes wonderfully elaborate, but again and again there is the same basic form: a central point surrounded by six radiating petals.

I photographed them because they were beautiful.

Then I went to Scotland.

A Very Peculiar Piece of Butter

While visiting a small museum of magic in Edinburgh, I came across two old wooden butter prints.

Butter prints were exactly what they sound like: carved wooden stamps pressed into freshly made butter to leave a decorative design.

Except these particular butter prints weren't described as merely decorative.

According to the museum label, people once believed witches could magically steal or curse butter and milk. These wooden blocks were therefore stamped into butter with a popular "Daisy Witch Mark" to protect it from bewitchment.

And there it was.

A six-petalled flower.

I knew I had seen it before.

Not in Scotland.

In Yucatán.

Suddenly I was looking at my photographs of Uayma very differently.

Pull the Thread

The six-petalled rosette, often called a hexafoil or daisy wheel, is ancient. Versions of it appear throughout Europe, including Spain, centuries before the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

It appears on houses, furniture, gravestones and churches.

And sometimes it appears in places where it seems to have served an apotropaic purpose, which is the scholarly word for something intended to protect against harmful supernatural influence.

That's what makes my Scottish butter prints so delightful.

Someone apparently believed another person could use magic to interfere with their butter.

Their solution?

Put magic on the butter.

Or at least something that looks suspiciously like it from our modern perspective.

A protective symbol was pressed directly into the food.

Folk magic protecting you from folk magic.

And that's when my thoughts wandered back across the Atlantic.

Uayma, 1646

When Santo Domingo de Guzmán was constructed, the Franciscan missionaries weren't entering a spiritually empty landscape.

Quite the opposite.

The Maya had extraordinarily sophisticated traditions involving medicinal plants, agricultural cycles, divination, astronomy, sacred landscapes, offerings, ancestors and relationships with beings inhabiting an invisible world.

Much of this was woven into ordinary life.

And much of it was exactly what the missionaries wanted to eliminate.

From the Christian perspective of the period, Indigenous gods and practices weren't simply alternative religious opinions. They could be classified as idolatry, superstition or even demonic influence.

Which sounds strangely familiar when you put Scotland and Yucatán beside one another.

In Europe, people maintained old traditions involving plants, charms, divination, agricultural cycles, livestock, healing and spirits.

Christian authorities could categorize some of those practices as witchcraft or superstition.

Across the Atlantic, Maya people maintained traditions involving plants, divination, agricultural cycles, healing, astronomy, spirits and sacred landscape.

Christian missionaries categorized many of those practices as idolatry and superstition.

Different cultures.

Different cosmologies.

But a remarkably similar argument over which ways of interacting with the invisible world were legitimate.

And somewhere in the middle of both stories sits a six-petalled flower.

Religion, Magic, and Who Gets to Name Them

This is where things become wonderfully uncomfortable.

Walk into a seventeenth-century church and you might encounter candles being burned, incense filling the air, sacred words being repeated, holy water being sprinkled, symbolic gestures being performed, sacred objects being handled and invisible beings being petitioned for protection, healing and assistance.

Walk outside the church and perform rituals involving candles, smoke, spoken charms, plants, water, offerings and invisible beings...

and suddenly someone might call it magic.

The actions aren't necessarily what separate religion from magic.

Often, authority does.

Who are you speaking to?

Where does the power supposedly come from?

And, perhaps most importantly, who gets to decide whether your relationship with the invisible world is holy or dangerous?

So, Were the Flowers at Uayma Protective?

I don't know.

And that's important.

I have found no seventeenth-century Franciscan document saying, "We covered the church at Uayma in six-petalled flowers to protect it from Indigenous spiritual practices."

The rosettes can also be understood within Christian and Marian symbolism, and a symbol doesn't have to possess only one meaning. A Marian symbol could itself be protective.

So I wouldn't call the flowers covering Uayma "witch marks."

But I can't quite dismiss the coincidence either.

The six-petalled rosette existed in Spain long before Uayma was built.

It appears in European Christian architecture.

It also appears in European protective traditions.

The Spanish carried the form across the Atlantic.

And around 1646, Franciscan missionaries built a church in the middle of an Indigenous Maya community, partly from the stones of the old Maya world they were attempting to replace.

Then they covered their new sacred space, inside and out, with six-petalled rosettes.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, essentially the same ancient geometric flower was being used to protect ordinary people and their belongings from dangerous supernatural influences.

Maybe the flowers at Uayma were simply beautiful.

Maybe they represented Mary.

Maybe they represented sacred order.

Maybe they protected.

Maybe, in the wonderfully untidy world of seventeenth-century belief, they did all of those things at once.

I don't know.

But I'll never look at that church quite the same way again.

All because, several thousand miles away, I happened to notice a flower pressed into a piece of butter.

Sometimes you pull a thread in Scotland and discover the other end has been waiting for you in Yucatán. 🌼

Wandering and Wondering,

laura