Latin-American Mythology. Hartley Burr Alexander
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the nights, and the hours, and to calculate the movements of the heavens by the movements of the stars; they affirmed that Ometecutli and Omeciuatl rule over the twelve heavens and the earth, and are procreators of all life below. There is some ground for believing that with this there was associated a belief in twelve corresponding under-worlds, for Seler30 plausibly argues that the five-and-twenty divine pairs of Codex Vaticanus B represent twelve pairs of rulers of hours of the day, twelve of hours of the night, and one intermediate. However, the arrangement which Seler finds predominating is that of thirteen Lords of the Day and nine Lords of the Night—implying a commingling of the two systems—and this scheme (the day-hour lords following the Aubin Tonalamatl and the Codex Borbonicus, as Seler interprets them) he reconstructs dial-fashion, as follows:
But the gods are patrons not only of the celestial worlds and of the underworlds, hours of the day and of the night; they are also rulers and tutelaries of the quarters of earth and heaven, and of the numerous divisions and periods of time involved in the complicated Mexican calendar. The influences of the cosmos were conceived to vary not merely with the seasonal or solar year of 365 days, but also with the Tonalamatl (a calendric period of 13 x 20, or 260, days); again with a 584-day period of the phases of Venus; and finally with the cycles formed by measuring these periods into one another. Here, it is evident, we are in the presence not only of a scheme capable of utilizing an extensive pantheon, but of one having divinatory possibilities second to no astrology.
As such it was used by the Mexican priests, and various codices, or pinturas, preserved from the general destruction of Aztec manuscripts are nothing but calendric charts to calculate days for feasts and days auspicious or inauspicious for enterprise. In one of these, the Codex Ferjérváry-Mayer, the first sheet is devoted to a figure in the general form of a cross pattée combined with an X, or St. Andrew's cross. This figure, as explained by Seler,31 affords a graphic illustration of Aztec ideas. It represents the five regions of the world and their deities, the good and bad days of the Tonalamatl, the nine Lords of the Night, and the four trees (in form like tau-crosses) which rise into the quarters of heaven, perhaps as its support. In the Middle Place, the pou sto, is the red image of Xiuhtecutli, the Fire-Deity—"the Mother, the Father of the Gods, who dwells in the navel of the Earth"—armed with spears and spear-thrower, while from the divinity's body four streams of blood flow to the four cardinal points, terminating in symbols appropriate to these points—East, a yellow hand typifying the sun's ray; North, the stump of a leg, symbol of Tezcatlipoca as Mictlantecutli, lord of the underworld; West, where the sun dies, the vertebrae and ribs of a skeleton; South, Tezcatlipoca as lord of the air, with featherdown in his head-gear. The arms of the St. Andrew's cross terminate in birds—quetzal, macaw, eagle, parrot—bearing shields upon which are depicted the four day-signs after which the years are named (because, in sequence, they fall on the first day of the year), each year being brought into relation with a correspondingly symbolized world-quarter; within each arm of the cross, below the day-sign, is a sign denoting plenty or famine. But the main part of the design, about the centre, is occupied with symbols of the quarters of the heavens. In each section is a T-shaped tree, surmounted by a bird, with tutelary deities on either side of the trunk. Above, framed in red, the tree rises from an image of the sun, set on a temple, while a quetzal bird surmounts it; the gods on either side are (left) Itztli, the Stone-Knife God, and (right) Tonatiuh, the Sun; the whole symbolizes the tree which rises into the eastern heavens. The trapezoid opposite this, coloured blue, symbol of the west, contains a thorn-tree rising from the body of the dragon of the eclipse (for the heavens descend to darkness in this region) and surmounted by a humming-bird, which, according to Aztec belief, dies with the dry and revives with the rainy season; the attendant deities are Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of flowing water, and the earth goddess Tlazolteotl, deity of dirt and of sin. To the right, framed in yellow, a thorny tree rises from a dish containing emblems of expiation, while an eagle surmounts it; the attendants are Tlaloc, the rain-god, and Tepeyollotl, the Heart of the Mountains, Voice of the Jaguar—all a token of the northern heavens. Opposite this is a green trapezoid containing a parrot-surmounted tree rising from the jaws of the Earth, and having, on one side, Cinteotl, the maize-god, and on the other, Mictlantecutli, the divinity of death. The nine deities, he of the centre and the four pairs, form the group of los Señores de la Noche ("the Lords of Night"); while the whole figure symbolizes the orientation of the world-powers in space and time—years and Tonalamatls, earth-realms and sky-realms.
PLATE VI.
First page of the Codex Ferjérváry-Mayer, representing the five regions of the world and their tutelary deities. Seler's interpretation of this figure is given, in brief, on pages 55-56 of this book.
The recurrence of cross-forms in this and similar pictures is striking: the Greek cross, the tau-cross, St. Andrew's cross. The Codex Vaticanus B contains a series of symbols of the trees of the quarters approximating the Roman cross in form, suggesting the cross-figured tablets of Palenque. In the analogous series of the Codex Borgia, each tree issues from the recumbent body of an earth divinity or underworld deity, each surmounted by a heaven-bird; and again all are cruciform. There is also a tree of the Middle Place in the series, rising from the body of the Earth Goddess, who is masked with a death's head and lies upon the spines of a crocodile—"the fish from which Earth was made"—surmounted by the quetzal bird (Pharomacrus mocinno), whose green and flowing tail-plumage is the symbol of fructifying moisture and responding fertility—"already has it changed to quetzal feathers, already all has become green, already the rainy time is here!" About the stem of the tree are the circles of the world-encompassing sea, and on either side of it, springing also from the body of the goddess, are two great ears of maize. The attendant or tutelar deities in this image are Quetzalcoatl ("the green Feather-Snake"), god of the winds, and Macuilxochitl ("the Five Flowers"), the divinity of music and dancing. Another series of figures in this same Codex represent the gods of the quarters as caryatid-like upbearers of the skies—Quetzalcoatl of the east; Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec war-god, of the south; Tlauizcalpantecutli, Venus as Evening Star, of the west; Mictlantecutli, the death-god, of the north. All these, however, are only a few of the many examples of the multifarious cosmic and calendric arrangements of the gods of the Aztec pantheon.
IV. THE GREAT GODS32
On the cosmic and astral side the regnant powers of the Aztec pantheon are the Gaping Jaws of Earth; the Sea as a circumambient Great Serpent; and the Death's-Head God of the Underworld; while above are the Sun wearing a collar of life-giving rays; the Moon represented as marked by a rabbit (for in Mexican myth the Moon shone as brightly as the Sun till the latter darkened his rival by casting a rabbit upon his face); and finally the Great Star, "Lord in the House of Dawn," the planet Venus, characteristically shown with a body streaked red and white, now Morning Star, now Evening Star. The Sun and Venus are far more important than the Moon, for the reason that their periods (365 and 584 days respectively), along with the Tonalamatl (260 days), form the foundation for calendric computations. The regents of the quarters of space and of the divisions of time are ranged in numerous and complex groups under these deities of the cosmos.
But the divinities who are thus important cosmically are not in like measure important politically, nor indeed mythologically, since the great gods of the Aztec, like those of other consciously political peoples, were those that presided over the activities of statecraft—war and agriculture and political destiny. In the Aztec capital the central teocalli was the shrine of Huitzilopochtli, the war-god and national deity of the ruling tribe. The teocalli above the market-place, which Bernal Diaz describes, was devoted to Coatlicue, the mother of the war-god, to Tezcatlipoca, the omnipotent divinity of all the Nahua tribes, and, in a second shrine, to Tlaloc, the rain-god, whose cult, according to tradition, was older than the coming of the first