The sanguinyu or Kristang Seraphic aesthetic is primarily used to depict Kabesa, Ka-Kabesa and Ka-Kabeliang of the Kristang people, as well as to a lesser extent very individuated Kapitang or Elders, Xamang-Krismatrang, members of a Kabesa’s Dragonsguard or other leaders within the community. The aesthetic consists of depicting the individual with wings, whether angelic, demonic, dragonic, faerie, or any of other form or variant, a cowboy, cowgirl and cowhand hat indexing a leadership role, and optionally a halo and/or fire or a glow surrounding the individual’s body.
Sanguinyu is creolised out of a hybridisation of Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Sinitic and animist traditions that Kristang is descended from, and serves to remind the individual of their own superhuman commitments and abilities as Kabesa, the luminosity and numinosity that they often inadvertently end up displaying for other people in the community and beyond it, and the deep connection to Gaia and the living universe that enables the Kabesa to have such effects on reality.
For Kabesa or other leaders of the community who are especially body positive or in touch with their sensuality, physicality and/or sexuality as a primary component of their leadership role, Sanguinyu finally also reminds both them and the entire community of the sacredness of the body, and the tremendous responsibility that being so body positive also necessarily entails an awareness of, since the community has already previously struggled with intense projections about being too hedonistic, hypersexual or superficial.
Sanguinyu finally subverts decades and centuries of occluded sexual abuse within the community, as well as projections that Kristang people could never actually be holy or sacred as a result of all of this; it seeks to engender unconditional dignity and self-regard in terms of the body and of how one sees and appreciates one’s own body, and again therefore supports the community in processing intense intergenerational trauma as a result.
