1
The Mask as the God
God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and want. But he undergoes transformations, just as [a neutral base], when it is mixed with a fragrance, is named according to the particular savor [introduced].
—Heraclitus[1]
God, for Heraclitus, was the name for the spiritual force undergirding reality and disclosing itself in the wide variety of earthly states that were nothing more than its fleeting manifestations. The peoples of Mesoamerica held a similar view; for them, the vitality of the natural world had its source in the world of the spirit, the domain of the mysterious life-force. This force was the ground of being, the animating and ordering principle that explained every aspect of earthly life. Originating in the shamanistic heritage of Mesoamerican religion, this basic belief led to a consistent emphasis on inner/outer, spirit/matter dichotomies as a means of explaining the order apparent in nature, and for that reason, Mesoamerican spiritual thought betrays a fascination with "inner" things: the heart of man symbolized the life-force within him and was sacrificially offered to the gods, the "heart" of the earth reached through caves and through the temples that were artificial caves, and the "heart" of the heavens reached by ascending mountains or man-made pyramids. This fundamental inner/outer paradigm, then, placed "god," or the creative life-force, at the core of the cosmos and saw the natural world as its "mask."
But in the most profound sense, the mask reveals rather than disguises; through "reading" the symbolic features of the "mask" of nature, man could perceive the relationship of those features to the creative life-force at the heart of the cosmos. And nowhere was this metaphorical function of the mask more significant than in the construction of the multiplicity of symbolic supernatural entities, each carefully identified by a characteristic mask and costume, which the conquering Spaniards called gods. These were not, however, independent deities as the Spaniards thought but rather the symbolic "names" for momentary manifestations of that underlying spiritual force showing itself in terms of a particular life process, and they existed in the same way as the forces and states they represented. Rain, for example, exists eternally only in the sense that it is a recurring part of the process through which life continues; in another sense, however, rain does not exist when it is not raining. Thus, the "gods"' moments of existence would recur periodically as the eternal spiritual force regularly "unfolded" itself into the contingent world of nature according to the laws of the cycles that had their source in the mysterious order of the creative life-force. Metaphorically, then, the life-force functioned by putting on and taking off the various "masks" through which it worked in the world of nature. The "gods" were direct expressions of the spiritual force clothed in finery drawn from the world of nature and thus could be seen as mediating between the worlds of spirit and matter.
Edmund Leach has designed a structural model, which he does not apply to Mesoamerica, that explains such mediation:
Religious belief is everywhere tied in with the discrimination between living and dead. Logically, life is simply the binary antithesis of death;the two concepts are the opposite sides of the same penny; we cannot have either without the other. But religion always tries to separate the two. To do this it creates a hypothetical "other world" which is the antithesis of "this world. " In this world life and death are inseparable; in the other world they are separate. This
world is inhabited by imperfect mortal men; the other world is inhabited by immortal non-men (gods). The category god is thus constructed as the binary antithesis of man. But this is inconvenient. A remote god in another world may be logically sensible, but it is emotionally unsatisfying. To be useful, gods must be near at hand, so religion sets about reconstructing a continuum between this world and the other world. But note how it is done. The gap between the two logically distinct categories, this world/other world, is filled in with tabooed ambiguity. The gap is bridged by supernatural beings of a highly ambiguous kind—incarnate deities, virgin mothers, supernatural monsters which are half man/half beast. These marginal, ambiguous creatures are specifically credited with the power of mediating between gods and men. They are the objects of the most intense taboos, more sacred than the gods themselves. In an objective sense, as distinct from theoretical theology, it is the Virgin Mary, human mother of God, who is the principal object of devotion in the Catholic church .[2]
Suggesting all of the elements contained so economically in the metaphor of the mask, this model describes the Mesoamerican method of mediation marvelously, especially since it focuses on the binary discrimination between life and death, an opposition at the heart of Mesoamerican spiritual thought. For Mesoamerica, the world of the spirit, mysterious and inaccessible, was synonymous with the life-force, while the world of nature was inextricably involved with death. Permanence was found in the other world; this world offered only change culminating in death, which permitted entrance to the other, an entrance characterized as deification in the case of great leaders and culture heroes. This fundamental distinction between life and death, spirit and matter, permanence and flux threads its way through Mesoamerican thought from the earliest times to the time of the Conquest: at the beginning of the development of Mesoamerican spirituality, that distinction was basic to shamanism with the shaman as the mediator between the worlds, and in the last phase of autonomous indigenous thought, that same distinction was at the heart of a religious and philosophical genre of Aztec poetry. One Aztec poet addressing this theme wrote,
Let us consider things as lent to us, O friends;
only in passing are we here on earth;
tomorrow or the day after,
as Your heart desires, Giver of Life,
we shall go, my friends, to His home.
The conclusion was inescapable that "beyond is the place where one lives."[3] Permanence was to be found in the world of the spirit; this world offered flux ending in death.
But as Leach points out, the gap between the two worlds must be bridged to explain the existence of life and spirit, even though transitory, in this one and to enable man to participate in a ritual relationship with the source of the spirit that animates him. These two points of contact are made in theological thought and in ritual; in both cases, the mode of contact between the two in Mesoamerica is aptly characterized in Leach's analysis, and in both cases, the mask was of central importance to this mediation. Theologically, Mesoamerican thought posited a creator god devoid of characteristics except that of creativity itself located in the "center" of that other, spiritual world. This god, Ometeotl among the Aztecs and Hunab Ku among the Maya, for example, was "a remote god in another world," rarely represented in figural form and playing little part in ritual.
The characteristic Mesoamerican metaphor of "unfolding" through which the creative force put on a variety of "masks" denoting the specific roles it played in the world resulted in the elaborate system of "gods" who could mediate between the creativity of an Ometeotl or Hunab Ku and the created world of man. That transformational unfolding allowed the original creative force to produce "gods" in sets of four, each associated with a particular relationship between nature and spirit, and each of these often further unfolded into a series of aspects. In the terms of Aztec religion, the variant of Mesoamerican religious thought about which we have the most specific information, those four gods, each an aspect of the quadripartite Tezcatlipoca, were the red Tezcatlipoca who was Xipe or Camaxtli-Mixcóatl, the black Tezcatlipoca commonly known simply as Tezcatlipoca, the blue Tezcatlipoca who was identified as Huitzilopochtli, and Quetzalcóatl who was probably a white Tezcatlipoca. Each was characterized by facial painting and costume that served as a "mask" covering and giving a specific identity to the underlying creative force of Ometeotl. Because Xipe and the Tezcatlipoca/Quetzalcóatl duality are far too complex to consider here, we will use Huitzilopochtli and his related manifestations to illustrate briefly the use of the "mask" of costume to define spiritual entities in the process of reconstructing "a continuum between this world and the other world."
Huitzilopochtli (literally, Hummingbird on the Left) is an especially good symbol of mediation since he had particularly strong ties to each of these two worlds. Both as one of the four Tezcatlipocas and as the one associated with the blue sky of the day and thus with the sun, which throughout Mesoamerican history was consistently seen as the source of and metaphor for life, he had a strong link to the creative power of Ometeotl. However, he was very much involved in earthly affairs. As the tutelary god of the Aztecs, he led them on the
mythical journey from their humble beginnings in Aztlán to the heights of imperial splendor at Tenochtitlán. Like the other gods, Huitzilopochtli was always depicted in the codices (pl. 1) and described in the chronicles in terms of his "mask," his characteristic facial painting, costume, and accoutrements. These identifying items were not selected arbitrarily; they symbolized his roles in Aztec myth, thought, and society by pointing clearly to his links with Ometeotl, on the one hand, and the Aztec state, on the other.
The most obvious features of his costume are those that identified him with his namesake the hummingbird, such as, in the codices, a device worn on his back or, according to Diego Durán,
a rich headdress in the shape of a bird's beak. . . . The beak which supported the headdress of the god was of brilliant gold wrought in imitation of the [hummingbird]. . . . The feathers of the headdress came from green birds. [The idol] wore a green mantle and over this mantle, hanging from the neck, an apron or covering made of rich green feathers, adorned with gold .[4]
Durán relates these visual references to rebirth and the seasonal cycle paralleling the emphasis in the mythic account of Huitzilopochtli's birth and defense of his mother, Coatlicue, from the assault of Coyolxauhqui and her followers, which also suggested the cyclical nature of the sun's daily rebirth, its creating the "life" of day after the "death" of night. This emphasis on rebirth fit well with the Mexican belief, recorded by Bernardino de Sahagún, that the hummingbird, Huitzilopochtli's nahualli, the animal into which he could transform himself and who shared his identity, "died in the dry season, attached itself by its bill to the bark of a tree, where it hung until the beginning of the rainy season when it came to life once more."[5]
The concept of rebirth, of course, relates directly to the creativity of Ometeotl, and the association with Ometeotl represented in myth by Huitzilopochtli's unfolding from the creator god as one of the four Tezcatlipocas was suggested visually by facial painting; the ultimate unity of the four Tezcatlipocas can be seen in the fact that the face of each of them is striped with horizontal bands. In the case of Huitzilopochtli, the bands are alternately blue and yellow, representing the daytime sky and the light of the sun, thereby suggesting again the creativity of Ometeotl. According to the sixteenth-century Relación de Texcoco, this facial painting was represented in sculpture, none of which survives, by precious turquoise and gold mosaic, after the fashion, no doubt, of the extant mosaic masks. This sky/sun association was also suggested by his blue sandals and gold bracelets as well as by his being "seated in a blue bower or adorned with blue cotinga-feather earplugs."[6]
Pl. 1.
Huitzilopochtli, from the Codex Borbonicus (reproduced with the
permission of Siglo Veintiuno Editores, S.A., México).
But these links to Ometeotl and the creative power of the life-force relate only to one side of the dichotomy bridged by Huitzilopochtli. His blue staff was central to the imagery delineating his symbolic function as war god and leader of the Aztec state, for that staff represented the fire serpent, xiuhcóatl , with which he "pierced Coyolxauhqui, and then quickly struck off her head" in the myth of his birth. "His shield [named] teueuelli , and his darts, and his dart thrower, all blue, named xiuatlatl ,"[7] derived from the same myth and suggested again his association with war. His shield was adorned with a quincunx composed of five tufts of eagle feathers. From it "hung yellow feathers as a sort of border; from the top of the shield, a golden banner. Extending from the handle were four arrows. These were the insignia sent from heaven to the Mexicas, and it was through these symbols that these valorous people won great victories in their ancient wars."[8] Thus the items he carried suggested his function as deified leader of the Aztec state, his "preeminently warlike associations [that] were conveyed by such metaphors as 'the eagle' or 'the bird of darts."'
And these associations, in turn, are related to his identity as the hummingbird through which he is linked to various other birds, "the blue Heron bird, the lucid Macaw, and the precious Heron"[9] but primarily the high-flying, powerful eagle, the bird most closely related to the sun and to warriors, Huitzilopochtli's dual role in the myth of his birth. And his identification as an eagle also suggested the other myth in which he figured prominently, the myth of the birth of the Aztec state. That myth recorded his telling the wandering Aztecs,
In truth I will lead thee to the place to which thou art to go; I will appear in the guise of a white eagle . . . go then, watching me only, and when I arrive there, I will alight . . . so presently make my temple, my home, my bed of
grass, there where I was lifted up to fly, and there the people shall make their home.[10]
The myth was of great importance in symbolically characterizing the Aztec state. In following the eagle, the Aztecs were following the sun, which gave their history the aura of a divine mission; they were not only the people who followed the eagle but the People of the Sun. In their wandering movement from north to south, they were not invading new territory to which they had no claim but returning to Huitzilopochtli's home, where he "was lifted up to fly." He was, after all, Hummingbird on the Left, and Left meant South to a people who determined directions by facing in the direction of the path of the sun. Thus, they were returning to the birthplace of Huitzilopochtli in something akin both to a seasonal (and thus cyclical) migration and a return to their ancestral lands. In following the sun, they were following the eagle, and the eagle symbolized the warrior aspect of Huitzilopochtli shown in his fearlessly routing his sister and her followers in their assault on Coatlicue, their mother. As the myth leads one to suspect, there is some evidence that Huitzilopochtli was not only linked to the eagle and the sun but was intimately connected with an early or legendary leader of the Aztecs, a leader deified at his death in the time-honored Mesoamerican fashion. Such a leader might well have been associated with Huitzilopochtli since, as Sahagún suggests, the souls of dead warriors are "metamorphosed into various kinds of birds of rich plumage and brilliant color which go about drawing the sweet from the flowers of the sky, as do the hummingbirds upon earth."[11] For all these reasons, expressed in myth but functioning to support the practices of the Aztec state, Huitzilopochtli was "the divine embodiment of the ideal Mexica warrior-leader: young, valiant, all-triumphant,"[12] an "embodiment" symbolized by his "mask" of facial painting, costume, and accoutrements.
Thus, for Aztec Mexico, Huitzilopochtli simultaneously symbolized the creative power of the world of the spirit and the imperial power of the Aztec state. For that reason, he was seen as a manifestation of Ometeotl, as "the greatest divinity of all, . . . the only one called Lord of Created Things and The Almighty."[13] That exalted status, celebrated by the details of his costume signifying the link between the creative life-force and the Aztec state, was also revealed by the sacrificial ritual performed periodically in the temple of Huitzilopochtli atop the pyramid of the Templo Mayor in the Aztec capital. In mythic terms, such a sacrifice of the hearts and blood of men was necessary to provide the nourishment necessary to ensure the daily rebirth of the sun. The mythic equation suggested that the sun's creating life for man must be reciprocated by man's providing life for the sun. "Human sacrifice was an alchemy by which life was made out of death,"[14] and as the People of the Sun, the Aztecs had a divinely imposed responsibility to perform that alchemy. As modern scholars have pointed out, however, that duty coincided nicely with the militaristic nature of the Aztec state; warfare could be seen as providing captives for the divinely required sacrifices while it also extended the dominions under Aztec sway and reinforced Aztec power. Human sacrifice took on its all-important role in Aztec society precisely because it met both mythic and political needs. That Huitzilopochtli was the primary focus of this sacrificial ritual demonstrates his importance to the Aztecs in the symbolic mediation between the worlds of spirit and matter; he was for them a particular way of understanding natural facts in spiritual terms and is thus a good example for us of the specific way in which Mesoamerican spiritual thought bridged the gap between spirit and nature.
Huitzilopochtli demonstrates, just as Leach suggests, that "the gap between the two logically distinct categories, this world/other world," is bridged by beings who have, so to speak, one foot in each of the worlds. In their Mesoamerican incarnations they are composite beings who, on examination, generally turn out to be human beings wearing masks and costumes comprised of the features of a variety of natural beings combined in unnatural, that is, "monstrous," ways. Thus are created the "supernatural monsters" to which Leach refers. This disguise or "mask" is the visual representation of the logical construct by which the particular continuum between the two worlds, which is what each god becomes, is reconstructed. Significantly, this "reconstruction" takes elements of living beings from the created world of nature and uses those elements in a mythic process of creation that imitates the original work of the creator god. These elements are combined to form the mask, costume, and ornamentation of the god, then placed on a human being who thus represents the life-force underlying and expressing itself in the set of specific items that form its identity. The god is always identified by a mask or characteristic facial painting, a specific costume, and the objects he carries. The visual image created by combining these things is essentially a myth.
Just as what is commonly called a myth—a narrative recounting the symbolic actions of a god—is made up of specific items—actions and events—arranged in a particular order and meant to be understood symbolically as an expression of the identity and function of the god, so the Mesoamerican visual statement uses specific items—features, masks, attire—combined in a plastic rather than narrative fashion to similarly specify that identity and function. Seen in this light, those particular items function in the same way as the natural items appearing in mythic narratives. As Claude Lévi-Strauss says of the use of characteristics of
particular birds in the myths of the Iban of South Borneo,
It is obvious that the same characteristics could have been given a different meaning and that different characteristics of the same birds could have been chosen instead. . . . Arbitrary as it seems when only its individual terms are considered, the system becomes coherent when it is seen as a whole set. . . . When one takes account of the wealth and diversity of the raw material, only a few of the innumerable possible elements of which are made use of in the system, there can be no doubt that a considerable number of other systems of the same type would have been equally coherent and that no one of them is predestined to be chosen by all societies and all civilizations. The terms never have any intrinsic significance. Their meaning is one of "position "—a function of the history and cultural context on the one hand and of the structural system in which they are called upon to appear on the other.[15]
By "reading" the visual myth that each god's appearance represents historically and structurally, we can understand the nature and function both of that particular god and of the creative process underlying the creation of all of the gods making up the Mesoamerican mythic system, for it is surely true, as Fray Durán commented, that "each of these ornaments had its significance and connection with pagan beliefs."[16]
Thus, Huitzilopochtli, as represented in Aztec art, must be seen as a visual myth designed to be "read" so that his image might communicate specific information about the world of the spirit to those who understood it and impress with its grandeur those who did not understand the more sophisticated levels of metaphoric meaning. It was designed to mediate for those "readers" between their world and the otherwise inaccessible world of the spirit. The figure of Huitzilopochtli is, in that sense, a typical product of the dialectical process by which Mesoamerican man created the continuum whereby he could transcend mundane reality and commune with the gods.
But it is important to emphasize that the set of symbols used to designate a particular god was not fixed; a good deal of variation was possible. Huitzilopochtli could "wear" his hummingbird nahualli as a headdress, as a back device, or not at all. His shield could be decorated with a quincunx of feathers or remain plain.[17] These are but two of the many possible variations of the basic symbols suggesting the fluidity of the concept of the god. Rather than being a fixed, static entity in the minds of those who manipulated the symbol system, each god was clearly a set of traits, each to be "used" as it was needed. This use of various traits is illustrated by the characteristic manipulation of a deity's image during the feast of Izcalli. Twice
they took out of the temple an image of the deity to whom it was consecrated: once adorned with a turquoise mask and with quetzal feathers, and once with a mask of red coral and black obsidian, and with macaw feathers. . . . Seler explains that this double adornment "symbolized the sprouting and maturing of the maize."[18]
Furthermore, the gods were also fluid in the sense that their identities often merged, overlapped, and folded into one another. As we saw above, the facial painting of each of the aspects of the quadripartite Tezcatlipoca indicated both their unity, in that they shared the same design, and their individual identities, in that each wore the design in colors appropriate to his particular function. While linked in this way to the other Tezcatlipocas, Huitzilopochtli was also linked to a series of gods who seemed to unfold from him and who shared his particular symbols. Paynal, for example, wore "the hummingbird disguise"[19] and represented Huitzilopochtli in ritual. Tlacahuepan and Teicauhtzin, among others, "seem merely to express aspects of his supernatural personality."[20] And as Alfonso Caso points out, Huitzilopochtli was also "an incarnation of the sun" and in that sense an aspect of Tonatiuh, the sun god, but his important symbolic use of the fire serpent, xiuhc6atl, suggested a relationship with Xiuhtecuhtli, god of fire.[21]
In addition to these mythic connections with other gods, there is the connection with Tlaloc, the old god of rain and lightning, suggested by their placement side by side in the twin temples atop the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlán, the symbolic center of the universe "from which the heavenly or upper plane and the plane of the Underworld begin and the four directions of the universe originate."[22] This placement suggests the dialectical method by which the Aztecs symbolically dealt with natural and spiritual forces. In one sense, Tlaloc was an agricultural force while Huitzilopochtli was concerned with the human forces of war. However, both rain (Tlaloc) and sun (Huitzilopochtli) were necessary for the growth of the crops and the maintenance of life. Similarly, Tlaloc as the old god who had existed from time immemorial in the Valley of Mexico could be seen as opposed to Huitzilopochtli, the young god who came to the Valley of Mexico with the Aztecs. But their placement together would suggest that they both served as patron gods of the Aztecs, comprising a unity transcending the opposed realities for which they stood individually. That larger unity, according to Pasztory, defined the Aztec self-image:
The migration manuscripts emphasize that the Aztecs were outsiders of humble origin who
prevailed because of their god, their perseverance, and their military powers. . . . These manuscripts answer the question "who are we, " with "we are the descendants of nomads led by Huitzilopochtli." The sculptures and architecture in Teotihuacán and Toltec style represent the Aztecs as upholders of ancient traditions. They answer the question "who are we" by saying "we are the legitimate successors of the Toltecs and their god Tlaloc. "[ 23]
Significantly, a similar set of relationships of opposition and concurrence could be worked out with all of the other major gods of the Aztecs.
From all of this we must conclude that the Mesoamerican system of "gods" is to be seen as a totality. Each of the individual gods is, in essence, a set of symbols, and these individual symbol sets merge to form what is typically, if misleadingly, referred to as a "pantheon." The term is misleading because it suggests a group of fixed individual deities, such as those of the Greeks or Romans from whom the concept is derived, each with an existence independent of the pantheon. The nature of the Aztec gods specifically and those of Mesoamerica generally, however, is different. They exist only as part of the relatively fluid set of relationships of spiritual "facts" which results from the Mesoamerican process of creation, which we have characterized as "unfolding," through which the life-force radiates outward from its source in the world of the spirit. The symbols that make up each of the "gods" is, in that very specific sense, a mask that specifies the particular aspect of the life-force, the particular "line of radiation," being addressed.
Although he does not apply his insight to Mesoamerica, Lévi-Strauss suggests the essence of the process involved in the construction and elaboration of this system of mediating entities throughout the long history of Mesoamerican spiritual thought. Speaking of the natural source of the images man combines to make the supernatural meaningful and accessible, he says, "even when raised to that human level which alone can make them intelligible, man's relations with his natural environment remain objects of thought: man never perceives them passively; having reduced them to concepts, he compounds them in order to arrive at a system." In other words, man analyzes his environment, isolates its component parts, and rearranges them in logical, but nonnatural, combinations. Thus, it is a mistake "to think that natural phenomena are what myths seek to explain when they are rather the medium through which myths try to explain facts which are themselves not of a natural but logical order."[24] If myth is defined to include "images, rites, ceremonies, and symbols" that demonstrate "the inner meaning of the universe and of human life,"[25] the "supernatural monsters" of Mesoamerican spiritual thought reveal themselves as logically constructed compounds of natural facts; each masked "god" is actually a "system" designed to explain a "fact" of the world of spirit.
Taken together, these masked and costumed figures comprise a complete system of mediation, logically constructed and ordered, that renders the essential reality of the world of the spirit comprehensible in the terms of the contingent reality man experiences in the world of nature. Another insight of Lévi-Strauss clarifies the process of construction.
The dialectic of superstructure, like that of language, consists in setting up constitutive units(which, for this purpose, have to be defined unequivocally, that is, by contrasting them in pairs) so as to be able by means of them to elaborate a system which plays the part of a synthesizing operator between ideas and facts, thereby turning the latter into signs . The mind thus passes from empirical diversity to conceptual simplicity and then from conceptual simplicity to meaningful synthesis.[26]
Each of the mask and costume elements must be seen as a constitutive unit in this sense, becoming a sign of something else in the simplification of nature's diversity by the order-making mind of man through the construction of a new, nonnatural order revealing the supernatural order at the heart of the world of nature. Thus, while each of the elements comprising the mask is a constitutive unit, one can also see each masked figure as a unit in the whole of the system that mediates between nature and spirit.
As our analysis of Huitzilopochtli makes clear, an understanding of the nature of any of the myriad Mesoamerican "gods" must come from a reading of the visual myth each presents. Each "constitutive unit" of the myth must be related to its sources in Mesoamerican spiritual thought, and the resulting combination of spiritual ideas will then "define" the god in question. Such a reading of the visual myth of Huitzilopochtli is relatively easy because the items that make up the "mask" he wears were provided by the Aztecs about whose thought we are relatively well informed. While the interpretive process becomes somewhat more difficult when we turn to those "gods" whose existence can be traced at least to the Preclassic, the method remains the same because the process of the "gods"' creation was demonstrably the same. To understand any of the Mesoamerican gods, we must read the constitutive units of which they are comprised; in this sense, the gods are the masks, and the masks are the gods.
The Mask As Metaphor
The Olmec Were-Jaguar
From the standpoint of Aztec civilization, Huitzilopochtli is of major importance, but from a
broader perspective encompassing all of Mesoamerica and adding the temporal dimension that allows a view ranging back as far as archaeology permits us to see, Huitzilopochtli pales into insignificance; he was only a god of the Aztecs. But the figure with whom he shared the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlán suffers no such fate. Tlaloc, the god of rain, associated always with storms and lightning, has his roots deep in the Mesoamerican past. To understand the complex of symbols comprising his characteristic mask is to understand something fundamental about Mesoamerican spiritual thought, because that mask has its readily identifiable counterpart in every civilization that played a role in Mesoamerican culture and because, like Tlaloc, the figure identified by the rain god mask is in every case involved not only with the provision of the life-sustaining rain but also with divinely ordained rulership and several other equally fundamental themes of Mesoamerican spirituality. Thus, the mask of the rain god provides a particularly good example of the way Mesoamerica as a whole constructed metaphorical masks to delineate its gods.
Tlaloc, the Aztec incarnation of the complex of symbols associated with rain, is the rain god we know most about because, as with Huitzilopochtli, we have the evidence of the codices and the chronicles to supplement and clarify the information we can glean from the remains of art and architecture. The earlier civilizations of the Classic and Preclassic periods left us no such explanatory material. But although there has been some dispute about whether it is possible to use the information regarding Aztec culture to explain symbolic visual images from earlier cultures,[27] our analysis of rain god imagery that follows suggests that this particular complex of images can be traced from its origins in the relatively dim past to the time of the Conquest. It is undeniable[28] that certain symbolic visual traits occur in combinations consistently connected with rain. At times, it is possible to "read" the meanings of particular symbols even from very early times, and when it is possible, these meanings coincide remarkably well with those suggested by working backward from later times. Mesoamerica, after all, was one culture, however complex, with one mythological tradition. The complexity of cultural development over a large geographic area and a time span of three thousand years will necessarily cause difficulties for our full comprehension of its fundamental unifying themes, but the unity is always tantalizingly present; we must attempt to find it amid the artifacts archaeology provides for us.
What is easiest to demonstrate about the continuity of Mesoamerican spirituality from the earliest times is that the characteristic Mesoamerican way of constructing "gods," or masks, by combining a variety of natural items, that is, constitutive units, in unnatural ways begins very early and that certain combinations recur from those early times until the Conquest. The mask associated with the complex process of the provision of water by the gods, a process involving caves, underground springs, and cenotes as well as rain with its accompanying thunder and lightning is a case in point; the remarkable similarities in imagery in the features of the masks of the rain gods, a term we will use to denote this whole complex of associated meanings, created by each of the cultures of the Classic period in Mesoamerica certainly suggest the existence of a shared prototype in earlier, Preclassic times.[29]
That prototype can be found in the first high civilization in Mesoamerica—that of the Olmecs. This argument was made clearly and forcefully as early as 1946 by Miguel Covarrubias, who constructed a chart (pl. 2) showing "the 'Olmec' influence in the evolution of the jaguar mask into the various rain gods—the Maya Chaac, the Tajin of Veracruz, the Tlaloc of the Mexican Plateau, and the Cosijo of Oaxaca."[30] But the tremendous number of archaeological discoveries and the equally large body of scholarly thought devoted to the Mesoamerican material since Covarrubias advanced this idea have revealed levels of complexity neither he nor anyone else imagined at that time. It is therefore doubly remarkable and a tribute to his deep intuitive understanding of the spiritual art of Mesoamerica that the Covarrubias hypothesis has held up quite well. That hypothesis, however, must now be understood in the light of more recent developments, which necessitates an explanation of recent thought regarding Olmec spirituality in general which, however, has clear implications concerning the fundamental nature of Mesoamerican spiritual art of all periods. That done, we can return more meaningfully to the features of the Olmec mask associated with rain.
Covarrubias, in addition to seeing the jaguar as involved with rain, believed that the jaguar "dominated" the art of the Olmecs and that "this jaguar fixation must have had a religious motivation."[31] As his chart suggests, however, it is not the jaguar himself who dominates Olmec art but rather the composite being who has come to be known as the were-jaguar, a creature combining human and jaguar traits. As Ignacio Bernal notes, "when one attempts to classify human Olmec figures, without realizing it one passes to jaguar figures. Human countenances gradually acquire feline features. Then they become half and half, and finally they turn into jaguars. . . . What is important is the intimate connection between the man and the animal."[32]
The contentions of both Covarrubias and Bernal must be further qualified by acknowledging the hypothesis of Coe and Joralemon regarding the Olmec gods, a hypothesis based on a recently dis-
Pl. 2.
Covarrubias' graphic representation of the evolution of the mask of the Rain God
from an Olmec source, which we designate Rain God C, through the Oaxacan Cocijo, in the
left-hand column, the Tlaloc of central Mexico in the next column, followed by the
Gulf coast rain gods and finally, those of the Maya in the right-hand column.
covered Olmec sculpture, the Lord of Las Limas (pl. 3). As Coe noted, the knees and shoulders of the seated figure are incised with "line drawings," in typical Olmec style, of masked faces. Joralemon later discovered another mask incised on the figure's face which, with the mask "worn" by the infant, brought the total of distinctly different masked faces to six. After a great deal of analysis of the corpus of Olmec art by Joralemon, he and Coe have argued "that the Las Limas figure depicts the Olmec prototypes of gods worshiped in Postclassic Mexico" and that "Olmec religion was principally based on the worship of the six gods whose images are carved on the Las Limas Figure." Furthermore, Joralemon concluded that
the primary concern of Olmec religious art is the representation of creatures that are biologically impossible. Such mythological beings exist in the mind of man, not in the world of nature. Natural creatures were used as sources of characteristics that could be disassociated from their biological contexts and recombined into non-natural, composite forms. A survey of iconographic compositions indicates that Olmec religious symbolism is derived from a wide variety of animal species.[33]
Thus, Coe and Joralemon would probably not agree with Covarrubias's contention that the jaguar dominated Olmec religious art, but they continue to believe, as Covarrubias did, that there is a demonstrable continuity linking Olmec and Aztec gods.
Predictably, their theory caused tremendous controversy. Some objected to the argument from the analogy with Aztec and even more recent spiritual traditions; Beatriz de la Fuente, for example, objected to Coe's identifications on the grounds that they were
based on a comparison of the Aztec with the Olmec, the cultures having between them a span of some 2000 to 2500 years. They seek explanations for ancient forms in activities or beliefs of present-day peoples, whose societies have, furthermore, suffered the inevitable effects that result from the clash of native and western cultures .[34]
Another form of objection concerned the equation of certain traits with certain fixed and specifically defined gods. Contending that Joralemon had artificially isolated and emphasized certain visual features at the expense of others and neglected to pay sufficient attention to the complexity and fluidity of the combinations of features, Anatole Po-
Pl. 3.
The "Lord of Las Limas," Olmec sculpture from Las Limas,
Veracruz; dimly discernible in this photograph are the masked
faces incised on the figure's face, shoulders, and knees; the
face of the child held by the figure is an excellent example
of our Rain God CJ (Museo de Antropologia de Xalapa).
horilenko maintained that "there are no Olmec compositions which consistently depict recurring combinations of the same referential signs. . . . For instance, a four-pointed flaming eyebrow is not exclusively and consistently used with a jaguar mouth showing slit fangs and an egg-tooth. "[ 35] Thus, both de la Fuente and Pohorilenko suggest, in rather different ways, that the Coe-Joralemon hypothesis is too rigid, too specific in its identification of the gods of the Olmecs.
Accepting these objections, however, neither invalidates nor trivializes the fundamental insight at the heart of the argument advanced by Coe and Joralemon: Olmec religious art, rather than betraying a fixation on the jaguar, presents a variety of composite beings, each delineated in a characteristic mask and each a symbolic construct derived from a variety of natural creatures. Furthermore, these varied figures must be seen as the component parts of an all-inclusive system that mediated between man and the powerful forces originating in the world of the spirit. While it is possible to feel that the identification of specific Olmec figures with specific Aztec gods is unwarranted, it seems unarguable that, as Coe and Joralemon have allowed us to see, the Olmecs created a mediating system of gods to establish a relationship between man and the world of the spirit in precisely the same manner as did the Aztecs, their distant Mesoamerican heirs. There is, then, a demonstrable continuity linking Olmec and Aztec spiritual thought. In fact, the Olmecs are the likely originators of this characteristic Mesoamerican practice of creating a spiritual system composed of a large number of interrelated "gods," each of which is represented by a mask and costume made up of symbolic features. The seemingly endless parade of Mesoamerican gods tricked out in their fantastic regalia probably begins at La Venta.
These gods can be seen in Olmec religious art, but when one looks closely at the way they are depicted, the identification of particular clusters of features as specific, recurring deities does not seem as simple as the Coe-Joralemon hypothesis suggests. Two sorts of complexity must be reckoned with. First, three distinct categories of figures exist in Olmec art despite the fact that some figures straddle the boundary between two categories. Only one of these categories is made up of figures that stand as metaphors for the supernatural, that is, the Olmec "gods." Second, even within that category, there are, as Pohorilenko points out, a very large number of combinations of the basic repertory of symbolic features.
The first of these levels of complexity is easiest to deal with. Although all Olmec art is essentially religious,[36] that religiosity expresses itself in three different ways, sharing only a fascination with natural forms, especially the form of the human body. The first category glories in the presentation of the human form and countenance in all its ideal beauty. Perhaps the best example of this is the sculpture from San Antonio Plaza, Veracruz, which is often called The Wrestler. Its sensitively realized dynamic pose and clearly but delicately delineated physical features reveal the Olmec artist's desire and ability to idealize the human body as a purely natural form of beauty almost spiritual in its compelling vitality. And that elusive spirituality is also hinted at by the slightly downturned mouth suggestive, of course, of the symbolic were-jaguar. The well-known colossal heads and the characteristic jade and jadeite masks, both realistic enough to suggest portraits,[37] often evoke the ideal beauty of the human countenance and similarly hint at man's basically spiritual nature.
Opposed to these realistic depictions of human features, a second category of Olmec art depicts fantastic composite beings whose faces are masks comprised of natural features combined in strikingly nonnatural ways, denizens of the world of the spirit rather than the world of nature. Though the human body provides the basic form for the sculptures, they are clearly not human. San Lorenzo Monument 52 (pl. 4), which is analyzed in detail below, serves as an excellent example of the type. Everything about it—its combination of fa-
Pl. 4.
Monument 52, San Lorenzo, our "Rain God CJ"
(Museo Nacional de Antropologia, México).
cial features, its human body with nonhuman hands and feet, and its stylized form and unnatural proportions—proclaims it a mythological creature rather than a natural one. As anyone even slightly familiar with Olmec art is aware, such composite beings, once thought to be primarily were-jaguars, are so frequently depicted as to be practically characteristic of that art. These composite beings are, collectively, the Olmec metaphor for the domain of the spirit, a domain that could be conceptualized only by departing from the order inherent in the natural world. No doubt the Olmecs, like their Mesoamerican heirs, saw a creator god, their prototype of an Ometeotl, in this spiritual realm, a creator who was not depicted, a force so essentially spiritual that it could not be encompassed and ordered by human thought. The mythological creatures who populate Olmec art are the "unfoldings" of this spiritual essence.[38]
Significantly, there is a third category of Olmec artistic representation that mediates between the first two diametrically opposed categories. It depicts realistic human beings, as does the first type of Olmec art, but they are masked and costumed to resemble the mythological creatures of the second type. Mural I of Oxtotitlán, Guerrero (pl. 5), provides the clearest representation of such a figure. The seated man is depicted x-ray fashion, as the Maya were to do later,[39] disclosing the realistically rendered human being within the fantastic birdlike disguise. These are ritual figures, and we will explore their symbolic dimensions in the later discussion of the mask in ritual.
These three categories of Olmec figural representation—human, mythological, and ritual—reveal an Olmec conception of the universe basically the same as, and thus the logical prototype of those of, the later cultures of Mesoamerica delineated in the second part of this study. For the Olmecs, the world of nature, symbolized in art by the realistically rendered human figure, was imagined as the binary opposite of the world of the spirit, symbolized by the composite beings. The masked ritual figures show man's way of mediating between those two opposed realms. Though her analysis of Olmec art is quite different from ours, de la Fuente grasps the essential nature of that art: "The human figure, the gravitational center of almost all the forms of Olmec art, appears in this art with different metaphysical definitions which, at their extreme, seem to repeat . . the entire order of the universe."[40] Thus, this symbolic art allowed the Olmecs to represent their conception of the cosmic
Pl. 5.
Mural I, Oxtotitlán, Guerrero displaying the x-ray convention
which allows the simultaneous depiction of the features of the wearer
of the ritual mask and of the features of the mask itself
(drawing by David Grove, reproduced by permission).
structure in visual form by symbolically reordering the materials of nature.
Distinguishing carefully between the three different categories of the art through which the O1mecs represented the tripartite cosmic structure allows our discussion of the gods to focus on those works of art representing the fantastic composite beings who symbolized the forces of the world of the spirit. But there is another form of complexity that must also be acknowledged: as Pohorilenko pointed out, the features of these composite beings are not characterized by a limited number of combinations of the same symbolic features. On the contrary, though the total number of features is not great, they are combined in what often seems to the would-be iconographer an endless series of combinations. In view of the limited state of our present knowledge of Olmec spiritual thought—Jacques Soustelle says, "We are overawed by the immense depths of our ignorance"[41] —we believe it would be impossible to determine which of those combinations, if any, the Olmec priesthood identified as named deities. When we think of how little we know of Olmec thought in comparison to the relative wealth of information we have about Aztec spirituality and then realize that even with the knowledge of Aztec spiritual thought provided by the codices and chronicles, there is still a great deal of uncertainty involved in the identification of many Aztec gods represented in art,[42] our difficulties become clear. Fortunately, what we do know of Aztec art can help us to understand their distant forebears.
Our brief analysis of Huitzilopochtli revealed that not all of the symbols associated with him by the Aztec priesthood need be present in any particular depiction of him and, furthermore, that it was possible within the Aztec symbol system to create figures combining the features usually associated with particular gods. We term these combinations "secondary masks" and will discuss them in the conclusion to our consideration of the mask as metaphor for the gods. The Aztec system was an extremely complex one built up—like the calendrical systems of Mesoamerica—through the permutation of a limited set of symbolic features through the range of their possible combinations. If the Olmec system was similarly constructed, and the evidence suggests overwhelmingly that it was, it seems unlikely that, lacking codices and chronicles or other explanatory material, we will ever be able to reconstruct the system as it would have been understood by the Olmec priest.
This is not to say, however, that we cannot "read" particular symbolic features and understand the general ritual or mythological function they probably served. This then enables us to understand the more complex meaning that a cluster of individual symbolic features could carry, but the more complex the configuration, the more general our understanding is likely to be. Thus, a number of such clusters can be shown to refer generally to rain and lightning, vegetation and fertility, and divinely ordained leadership. It is no doubt true that each of the configurations conveyed a particular shade of meaning to the Olmec priest, and it is certainly possible that each of them was a particular "god." It is equally possible, however, that many of them were aspects of one basic spiritual essence, particular manifestations of a single "god." And it is also possible that none of them was thought of as a god at all but rather as a collection of spiritual "facts" joined together temporarily to make a mythological or ritual statement. It is therefore difficult to talk about the gods of the Olmec but not nearly so difficult to discuss the ways the 01mecs symbolized the forces they identified with the world of the spirit. Through an analysis of the individual features that occur on the symbolic masks, we can begin to understand at least this much about Olmec spiritual thought.
Thus, to return finally to our discussion of the mask representing the rain god, we can concur with Covarrubias, Bernal, and Coe and Joralemon that a mask combining particular features drawn from nature was associated by the Olmecs with the provision of the life-maintaining rain from the world of the spirit. We, and most other scholars who have studied Olmec art, would further agree that the particular "god" associated with rain is a were-jaguar,[43] that is, a mask dominated by the characteristically feline mouth with downturned corners beneath a pug nose. But this general agreement comes to an end when specific masks are discussed. The particular were-jaguar depicted at the bottom of Covarrubias's chart as the archetypical rain god, a stone mask or face panel now in the American Museum of Natural History in New York (pl. 6), differs in several symbolic features from the were-jaguar identified as the Rain God by Coe and Joralemon, a composite figure typified by the were-jaguar child held by the Las Limas figure (pl. 3) and seen clearly on San Lorenzo Monument 52 (pl. 4). Those differences account for Joralemon's seeing the Covarrubias mask (which we will call Rain God C) as representing his God I,[44] "the Olmec Dragon," rather than the Rain God he and Coe have designated as God IV (which we will call Rain God CJ).
These differences should not, however, obscure some fundamental similarities. Both Rain God C and Rain God CJ have generally rectangular faces with cleft heads, pug noses, heavy upper lips, and downturned mouths showing toothless gums. They differ in their ears or ear coverings—C's are long, narrow, and plain while CJ's are long, narrow, and wavy; in their eyebrows—C's are the so-called flame eyebrows while CJ's are nonexistent, replaced by a headband with markings which is part of a headdress; and in their eyes—C's are trough
Pl. 6.
Olmec stone mask, probably architectural, our "Rain God C"
(American Museum of Natural History, New York).
shaped and turned downward at the sides while CJ's are almond shaped and turned upward; CJ wears the typical Olmec St. Andrew's cross as a pectoral while C, being only a mask, of course has no pectoral. Perhaps significantly, the tops of the heads of the two are similar as are the bottoms, that is, the mouth areas. The differences occur in the middle zone of the faces. And it seems even more significant that, to a casual glance, the similarities are far more apparent than the differences; the two faces seem clearly to be variations on a single theme, perhaps the variations that would identify the aspects of a quadripartite god. We believe that an analysis of their symbolic features will demonstrate that a casual glance does in fact reveal an essential truth and that the symbolic features all refer to fertility connected with rain.
Beginning at the top, the first symbol is the cleft head, which Coe and Joralemon evidently do not see as diagnostic since each of their six gods is sometimes depicted with a cleft head and sometimes without. The presence or absence of the cleft, in the light of our earlier analysis of the four Tezcatlipocas whose faces are fundamentally similar with minor variations to indicate their distinct identities, is a tantalizing suggestion that these symbolic faces might also be manifestations of a quadripartite god. Whether this is true or not, however, when one examines the occurrence of the cleft head in Olmec art,[45] several significant facts emerge. First, cleft heads seem to occur only on masks that contain other clearly symbolic features and not on the relatively naturalistic masks and sculpture. This, incidentally, is not true of the symbolic were-jaguar mouth. Second, the cleft appears in two opposed forms, either empty or with vegetation appearing to emerge or grow from it. Third, the empty cleft seems to be found in certain contexts, the vegetal cleft in others. Votive axes were often carved with their upper halves as were-jaguars with cleft heads, but the clefts are always empty.[46] Celts, however, are often decorated with incised masks; when those masks are cleft-headed, the clefts are vegetal. Thus, the appearance of the cleft seems to follow a pattern. These facts would indicate that the presence or absence of the cleft and the form it takes have sufficient symbolic importance to be governed by rules and that it makes a significant contribution to the overall meaning of the symbolic cluster in which it appears.
That the cleft has symbolic importance is further suggested by the fact that it appears only on masks containing other clearly symbolic features and not on the more naturalistic ones. But to understand its function, we must first decipher its symbolic meaning.[47] The fact that the cleft is often depicted with vegetation, probably corn, sprouting from it suggests fertility, and the associations of the other symbolic features on the masks on which it is found with water surely support that connection. As the source of the growing corn plant, it suggests the "opening" in the earth from which life emerges, the symbolic point at which the corn, the plant from which man was originally formed and which was given by the gods as the proper food for man and thus a symbol of life and fertility, can emerge from the world of the spirit to sustain mankind on the earthly plane.
That symbolic connection is reinforced by the fact that the V-shaped cleft, or inverted triangle, has been since paleolithic times a specifically female symbol representing, in human terms, the point of origin of life. Peter Furst discusses the occurrence of this motif in the much later Mixtec codices as a means of identifying these Olmec clefts with "a kind of cosmic vaginal passage through which plants or ancestors emerge from the underworld" and laments the "enormous span of time dividing them" as possibly calling into question the validity of reading Olmec symbols with this Mixtec "language."[48] However, Carlo Gay's discussion of the highly symbolic designs found in pictographic form in shallow caves associated with the Olmec fertility shrine at Chalcatzingo would seem to lay that objection to rest, if indeed these pictographs are contemporary with the Olmec art found at that site.[49] He records the occurrence of "triangle and slit signs [that] are among the most graphic of vulval representations"
among the many sexually related symbols in those pictographs found at a site obviously dedicated to fertility,[50] signs that are identical in shape to the cleft in the were-jaguar head.
That a sexual symbol would occur on the head of a composite being generally seen as remarkably childlike or sexless is perhaps not so strange. The spiritual thought of Mesoamerica is, in a sense, fundamentally sexual in nature. Its ideas regarding the transformative nature of creation through unfolding, which we will delineate in our consideration of the entrance of the life-force into the world of nature (Part II), surely parallel the natural, sexual process of regeneration. Its persistent emphasis on duality—opposites coming together to form a unity—has one of its most obvious examples in the sexual act. Its emphasis on caves as places of origin must surely be connected with the emergence of the child from the womb as the final result of the sexual act.[51] And its common conception of the fertile earth as female clearly has a sexual origin. But the conventions governing Mesoamerican spiritual art did not allow direct expression of this sexual metaphor. Generally speaking, though there are notable exceptions, throughout the development of Mesoamerican art and thought any depiction of sexual organs or the sexual act was taboo. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that sexual symbols should appear in disguised ways. Although not overtly sexual, the cleft head carries the sexual meaning: it symbolizes creation, especially as that creation takes the form of agricultural fertility, but by extension it can refer to any related instance of life entering the world in the cycle of life and death. Perhaps the vegetal cleft refers directly to agricultural fertility and the empty cleft to the concept of birth and rebirth in a more general sense, especially as it relates to such state-related matters as rulership and sacrifice.
The fertility theme is also the focus of the other symbol the two rain god masks share, the characteristic were-jaguar mouth. The mouth is, of course, far more striking than the cleft, so striking that it has come to be seen as characteristic of Olmec art generally. But before discussing the complex set of symbolic associations it makes, it might be well to clarify what it is since there have been numerous suggestions that it is not a jaguar mouth or even feline. Peter Furst and Alison Kennedy claim that what is represented is the toothless mouth of a toad, the fitting representative of the earth. Terry Stucker and others and David Grove see the mouth as sometimes crocodilian, and Karl Luckert, who sees the facial configuration as that of a serpent, goes even further by claiming that not only is this mouth not that of a jaguar but, aside from three figures, there are no jaguar representations at all in Olmec art.[52] In our view, however, and that of most other Mesoamericanists, the typical were-jaguar mouth is just that, the mouth of a jaguar with some features exaggerated for symbolic reasons and some modified to fit the human facial configuration. The heavy pug nose that is an integral part of the configuration and the general frontal flatness of the mouth segment are typically feline and not at all serpentlike. Furthermore, when the body of the figure on which the mouth is generally found is taken into account, both the posture and numerous anatomical details suggest the jaguar. In addition, the jaguar is indisputably represented with reasonable frequency in Olmec art,[53] and it is an important symbolic creature in every Mesoamerican culture that succeeded the Olmecs and was used by each of them as a source of attributes for its gods. And there are several Olmec sculptures that clearly combine the features of the feline with those of man and that depict the characteristic mask.
But it is important to recognize that while the jaguar is the most likely source of the nose/mouth configuration, that facial feature is a highly multivocal symbol that has meanings other than those related to the creature from whom it was taken. Two of those other meanings can be seen in Monument I (pl. 7) from the Olmec fertility shrine of Chalcatzingo which depicts a figure holding a ceremonial bar signifying rulership seated within a stylized cave mouth that lies under three stylized clouds from which raindrops are falling. The clouds themselves bear a striking resemblance to the heavy upper lip of the were-jaguar mouth, and the cave is that very mouth represented in profile, as is made clear by the appearance above it of an eye bearing the Olmec St. Andrew's cross on its eye-
Pl. 7.
Monument I, "El Rey," Chalcatzingo, Morelos (drawing by Frances Pratt,
reproduced by permission of Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, Graz, Austria).
ball, the same cross found on the pectoral of Rain God CJ and occasionally found on one or both eyes of were-jaguar masks. A further indication that this cave is to be seen as a mouth are the "speech scrolls" issuing from it in typical Mesoamerican fashion.
The identification of the cavity as a mouth is strengthened by another bit of evidence external to the relief itself. A freestanding monument found at Chalcatzingo, Monument 9 (pl. 8), is a frontal view of the were-jaguar mouth/cave represented in profile in Monument I. It has the same eyes and the same ridged mouth with vegetation sprouting from its "clefts" in a fashion reminiscent of the cleft heads, and further suggesting the close relationship between the two symbolic works is the apparent use of Monument 9. According to Grove, the carved slab, when erected for ritual use on the most important platform mound at Chalcatzingo, was designed to be entered: "The interior of the mouth is an actual cruciform opening which passes completely through the rock slab. Interestingly, the base of this opening is slightly worn down, as if people or objects had passed through the mouth as parts of rituals associated with the monument."[54] It replicated the natural cave and allowed the ritual "cave" to be entered through the mouth of the composite being representing the world of the spirit, which the ritual enabled man to contact. The seated figure depicted in Monument I has entered that same liminal zone from which issues the "speech" of the supernatural. Thus, the relief designated Monument I relates the cave to the rain cloud by visually associating both of them with the were-jaguar mouth.
Such an association of caves and clouds seems as strange to us as it did to Evon Vogt when he encountered it in his work with the present-day Maya of Zinacantan. But he learned that in the context of the Mesoamerican environment, it is not so strange.
Pl. 8.
Monument 9, Chalcatzingo, Morelos (MunsonWilliams-Proctor Institute,
Utica, New York; photograph courtesy of that institution).
I have had a number of interesting conversations in which I have attempted to convince Zinacantecos that lightning does not come out of caves and go up into the sky and that clouds form in the air. One of these arguments took place in Paste [ * ]as I stood on the rim with an informant, and we watched the clouds and lightning in a storm in the lowlands some thousands of feet below us. I finally had to concede that, given the empirical evidence available to Zinacantecos living in their highland Chiapas terrain, their explanation does make sense. For, as the clouds formed rapidly in the air and then poured up and over the highland ridges . . . they did give the appearance of coming up from caves on the slopes of the Chiapas highlands. Furthermore, since we were standing some thousands of feet above a tropical storm that developed in the late afternoon, I had to concede that it was difficult to tell whether the lightning was triggered off in the air and then struck downward to the ground, or was coming from the ground and going up into the air as the Zinacantecos believe.[55]
The Olmec connection between caves and clouds apparent on Monument I indicates that today's Zinacantecos have a belief system rooted deep in the past. And that Olmec connection between caves and clouds and the were-jaguar mouth clearly worked in reverse as well; the shape of the mouth called to the Olmec mind caves and rain clouds as well as jaguars.
The connection at Chalcatzingo between these elements is supported by the existence there of numerous miniature, artificial "cavities" linked by a system of miniature carved drain channels[56] evidently designed for the symbolic movement of water in the ritual reenactment at this fertility shrine of the provision of water by the gods. There is also a curious relief carving, Monument 4, that depicts a feline creature, perhaps devouring a man, associated with a branched design that might represent "the pattern of watercourses of the valley north of Chalcatzingo"[57] which would thus flow symbolically from the mouth of the "jaguar." This concern with systems through which water flows is not an isolated phenomenon; the Olmec cave-shrine at Juxtlahuaca, Guerrero, exhibits a comparable, though different, system. These symbolic structures, and others no doubt yet to be found in
the caves of Guerrero, were perhaps the first instances of the jaguar mouth/cave/drain combination that finds its most celebrated example in the carved drain running the length of the cave under the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán.
Even more significant for our discussion of the Olmec rain god is the fact that the symbolic use of a system of drains also occurs at all four of the major sites in the Olmec heartland on the Gulf coast, though not in association, so far as we know, with caves. "The complex of artificial lagoons or water tanks on the plateau top and the drain systems associated with them form one of the most unusual aspects of San Lorenzo architecture," according to Richard Diehl, and from an archaeological point of view
the association of Monuments 9 and 52, both of which depict water-related symbolism, with the drain system, the geometric shapes of some of the lagoons, and the fact that the scarce and expensive basalt was used for the drain system instead of wood, all suggest that the system had more than a strictly utilitarian meaning to the Olmec.[58]
All of this, of course, suggests ritual use in the reenactment of the gods' provision of water. Although there are no caves associated with this man-made system of drains and lagoons at San Lorenzo, the fact that the drain channels were carefully covered and that they emptied into the lagoons suggests they may have been used symbolically to recreate the emergence of water from the "heart" of the earth in the fashion of an underground spring feeding a pool of water. One thinks in this connection of the cenotes held sacred by the Maya of the Yucatán.
It is quite significant that the were-jaguar mouth is also linked to this symbol of the gods' provision of water since Monument 52 (pl. 4), one of the primary images bearing the mask of Rain God CJ, "was discovered at the head of the principal drainage system."[59] Further suggesting its relationship to the drain system, the back of the sculpture is fashioned in exactly the same U-shaped form as the basalt stones of which the drain system was constructed. Symbolically, both the drain and the god are "conduits" for the movement of water, the fluid needed to maintain life, from the world of the spirit to the world of man. Whether as the cave mouth or the point at which an underground spring bubbled to the surface, the were-jaguar mouth was surely seen by the Olmecs as the liminal point of mediation between the source of spiritual nourishment located within the essentially female earth and the world of man that existed on the earth's surface. And that mouth was a primary feature of many of the symbolic masks constructed by the Olmecs, masks that, in what was to become the time-honored Mesoamerican fashion, designated the point of contact between the world of nature and the world of spirit, the interface between man and the gods.
But why connect the jaguar with rain? The connection might seem an unlikely one to the modern scholar who probably has never encountered a jaguar outside a book, movie, or zoo and surely hopes never to do so. Similarly, the scholar has been sheltered to some extent by the conveniences of modern urban life from the terrible reality of brutal storms and floods, on the one hand, and drought, on the other. In this respect, the inhabitants of the jungles and forests of Preclassic Mesoamerica knew far more than we do about both jaguars and rain from personal experience as well as from the shared experiences of their group, knowledge that no doubt suggested numerous possible connections between the two. They would have known that the jaguar truly was the lord of the Mesoamerican jungle: it is the largest cat in the western hemisphere, weighing as much as 300 pounds and measuring up to 9 feet in length and almost 3 feet in height at the shoulder[60] and because of its size and power, has no natural enemies. Two other creatures used symbolically by the Olmecs, the crocodilian and the snake, might kill young jaguars, "but adult jaguars regularly hunt full-grown caimans as food" and hunt and eat the giant anaconda.[61] The Olmecs might have had an even stronger reason to respect the jaguar than the fact that it preyed on the most powerful creatures in its habitat. According to a modern guide to game animals,
the jaguar is the only cat in the Western Hemisphere that may turn into an habitual man-eater. There are two reasons for this. One is the jaguar's large size and superior strength. . . . The second reason is that most jaguars live in areas where the natives do not possess firearms. Although the jaguar often has been killed with spears and bows and arrows, it takes an expert hunter to do it."[62]
The formidable power of the jaguar, then, was impressive enough to have served as the basis of a symbolism that continued to exist until the Conquest and to some extent continues even today. As Eduard Seler points out, "the jaguar was to the Mexicans first of all the strong, the brave beast, the companion of the eagle; quauhtli-océlotl 'eagle and jaguar' is the conventional designation for the brave warriors."[63]
The jaguar must also have seemed almost supernatural in its typically feline ability to move almost noiselessly despite its great size and in its surprising ability to move equally well on land, in water, and in the air.
The jaguar is the most arboreal of the larger cats. It climbs easily and well. . . . At those times of the year when its jungle home turns into a huge flooded land, the jaguar takes to the trees and may actually travel long dis-
tances hunting for food without descending. Water holds no fear for the jaguar, and it swims well and fast, frequently crossing very wide rivers. On the ground, jaguars walk, trot, bound and leap. Their speed is great for a short, dashing attack.[64]
These qualities explain why, as Covarrubias discovered, "even today the Indians regard the jaguar with superstitious awe; subconsciously they refer to it as The Jaguar, not as one of a species, but as a sort of supernatural, fearsome spirit."[65]
The storms that lash the Gulf coast—the nortes during the winter months which can bring winds up to 150 kilometers per hour, making coastal navigation impossible, and the hurricanes of late summer and fall with wind velocities over 180 kilometers per hour and tremendous amounts of rain producing destructive floods[66] —make it possible to appreciate the range of possible connections between rain and the jaguar. Rain for the Olmecs was not April showers. In the Veracruz heartland it fell throughout the year and was often accompanied by tremendously destructive storms. Even without the storms, the quantity of rainfall could cause disastrous flooding.[67] In the central highlands, the other area in which a substantial amount of symbolic Olmec art depicting the were-jaguar is found, the more common Mexican rainfall pattern prevails; there are distinct dry and rainy seasons. In that area, a lack of rain at the right time can cause the death of the corn by which man survives. The destruction caused by drought, though different from that wrought by a hurricane and flooding, is just as devastating. The problem for man in these environments is not to "bring rain" as many people think. Rather, man must attempt to bring the elemental forces represented by rain and storm under human control, reduce them to an order that will make the orderly life of culture possible. This, for early man, could only be accomplished through ritual that would enable him to interact with the source of all order, the underlying, otherwise unreachable realm of the spirit.
The ritual control of the rain-related forces probably involved the jaguar because it was the animal equivalent of the storm, equally powerful, equally sudden in its attack, equally destructive of human life and order. Furthermore, the jaguar was at home both in water and in the trees from which it was able to fall, like the storm, on its prey. Like the storm, it was a force that revealed itself in the natural world outside man's control, a force that could be seen as symbolically at the apex of the "unordered," wild forces of nature. By creating the were-jaguar mask, the Olmecs combined the creature who epitomized the forces of nature with man, the epitome of the force of culture. In typical Lévi-Straussian fashion, they created the were-jaguar mask as the dialectical resolution of the binary opposition between the untamed forces of nature and the controlled force of man. While the jaguar hunts with natural weapons (teeth and claws), lives entirely from hunting, and eats his prey raw, man hunts with artificial weapons for food that is a supplement to his staple diet derived from cultivation and eats his food cooked. The jaguar, though generally remaining in the same area, seldom has a den, "usually curling up to sleep in some dense tangle or blowdown,"[68] while man constructs a dwelling and returns to it each night. The jaguar acts instinctively while man can act rationally. In a sense, then, man and jaguar are equal opposites, and the were-jaguar by virtue of combining the force of man with the forces of nature brings together both aspects of the life-force in a being who can thus mediate between man and the origin of that force. By donning the mask in ritual to become that being, man could bring the otherwise destructive elemental forces under control so that they might aid in the maintenance of life by providing the rain in moderation so that the corn would grow and his own life would be maintained.
Thus, the were-jaguar mouth makes symbolic sense, but a glance at that mouth on Rain Gods C (pl. 6) and CJ (pl. 4) reveals a remarkable difference between image and reality; these were-jaguar mouths are toothless. The significance of this is made more apparent by the fact that although there are a great number of fanged were-jaguar mouths in Olmec art, Covarrubias and Coe and Joralemon have selected toothless images to represent the rain god. That this selection is correct is suggested, at least in the case of Rain God CJ, by the water associations of Monument 52. The lack of fangs might suggest visually the association with caves that would be somewhat more difficult to see were the mouths fanged, but the toothless mouth also carries other connotations linked in Mesoamerican thought to rain. The were-jaguar mask is often called a baby-faced mask, the reason for which can be seen in the more naturalistic faces that bear the same toothless were-jaguar mouth that we see here. In the context of the puffy cheeks and chubby facial configuration of those faces, the mouth looks like that of a pouting infant. When the face is found on a body with infantile features, as it often is, the designation seems even more apt. The child held by the Lord of Las Limas (pl. 3) is just such a figure and is, significantly, another primary image of Rain God CJ.
The association of infant and were-jaguar mouth inevitably brings to mind the ritual sacrifice of children to the rain god by both the Postclassic Maya and the peoples of central Mexico, a characteristic form of sacrifice that may well have a prototype in Olmec thought and ritual, as the seemingly lifeless body of the infant held by the Las Limas figure suggests. Most commentators explain this form of sacrifice in the terms suggested by Sahagún, as a form of sympathetic magic where-
by the tears of the children cause the rain, that is, "tears" of the gods, to fall.[69] And Thompson suggests that the rain gods "liked all things small";[70] their "helpers," the tlaloques or chacs , like today's chaneques , were thought of as dwarfs, though not children.[71] In addition to these connections between small children and rain, however, one might also see in this ritual the return of a child to the womb of the earth from which he has only recently emerged. Such an interpretation would accord with one of the means of sacrificial death—drowning in such a manner that the bodies never again rose to the surface—as well as the burial rather than cremation of the bodies of victims sacrificed in other ways to Tlaloc. The common Mesoamerican conception of the sacrificial victim as the bearer of a message to the gods would seem to support this interpretation, as would the symbolic identification of caves as both the womb of the earth and the source of rain and lightning. The lifeless body of the were-jaguar child held by the Las Limas figure whose infantile features are often found on Olmec figures would thus symbolically unite these diverse ideas.
These symbolic connections between the were-jaguar mouth and caves and infants help to explain the difficulty scholars have had in identifying the natural origin of the mouth. Though we feel certain that it is feline in origin, the natural form has been modified to suggest its symbolic multivocality by making visual reference to other rain-related symbols. The complexity of the symbolic structure lying behind the outward form is typical of the Mesoamerican way of constructing complex symbols by combining a number of symbolic details drawn from nature in a metaphoric, emphatically nonnatural structure. As we will explain in detail below, the life-force enters the world of man through transformation, and the construction of the mythic symbol illustrates that transformative process. The source of the water that nourishes natural life on the earthly plane is to be found in the world of the spirit, but the essence of spirit cannot be visualized. Hence the intermediary stage represented by the combination of natural features in a nonnatural, "spiritual" form. Through the mediation of that form—the symbolic were-jaguar mouth in this case—energy, in the form of rain, can flow from the world of the spirit to the world of man. Thus, the appearance of the toothless variant of the were-jaguar mouth on an Olmec mask, especially in conjunction with the cleft head, would connote fertility generally and rain specifically. It is especially interesting, then, that Coe and Joralemon and Covarrubias selected such masks as images of the Olmec rain god. Although neither explain in detail their reasons for associating the toothless mouth with rain, their remarkable familiarity with Mesoamerican religious symbols probably led them to do so intuitively. As we have shown, they had good reason to make that connection.
Although the similarities between these two faces indicate without a doubt that they are both concerned with the symbolic representation of forces associated with rain and fertility, there are important differences that indicate that Olmec symbolic art was not made up of a small number of static combinations of symbols endlessly repeated; it exhibits a large range of symbolic figures created by combining in different ways details drawn from the basic inventory of symbols. Thus, when viewing any collection of Olmec art, we are always involved in the fascination of theme and variation. Far removed in time and culture from the creators of this body of art, it is impossible for us to say with any precision what shades of meaning were conveyed to the Olmec cognoscenti by these variations, but we can say with certainty that such a body of symbolic art has the capacity to communicate sophisticated and complex spiritual ideas with precision. Such an art begins the heritage that came to fruition, for example, in the monumental Aztec Coatlicue (pl. 9) and on the lid of Pacal's sarcophagus at Palenque (pl. 10), both of which, as we will demonstrate, are complex symbolic structures that must be "read," item by item, if they are to reveal their profound meanings.
When we look again at the masks of the rain god, this time seeking variation, the variations we find form a fascinating pattern that holds constant the symbolic motifs of the toothless were-jaguar mouth at the bottom of the face and the cleft at the
Pl. 9.
Coatlicue, Tenochtitlán
(Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico).
Pl. 10.
Relief carving on the cover of the sarcophagus of Pacal,
Temple of Inscriptions, Palenque (Photograph by Merle Greene Robertson
and Lee Hocker, reproduced by permission).
top while varying the treatment of the area between them. Taking care to deal only with masks representing mythological creatures—which can be distinguished from human representations with symbolic mouths by their frontal flatness, rectangular rather than ovoid shape, and symbolic cleft—we can see that the variation involves a progression from simple to complex and is accomplished by adding features to the basic mask. An excellent example of that basic mask can be seen in the headdress of a figure found at the summit of the volcano at San Martin Pajapán (pl. 11), one of the Tuxtla Mountains held sacred by the Olmecs. Its mountaintop placement, like that of rain god figures throughout Mesoamerican history, suggests clearly its function. The mask's almost square, flat shape, its pronounced cleft and symbolic mouth, and its almond-shaped eyes set at an angle to the horizontal line of the mask all contrast markedly with the human face below it and indicate clearly its symbolic nature. This is the symbol of the rain god—as identified by Coe and Joralemon, Covarrubias, and our own analysis—reduced to its essentials. The same mask also appears at La Venta in Monument 44, a head that is all that remains of a figure that must have been almost identical to that of San Martín Pajapán,[72] and on a small greenstone object from Ejido Ojoshal, Tabasco.[73]
Pl. 11.
Olmec Kneeling Figure,
San Martin Pajapán, Veracruz
(Museo de Antropologia de Xalapa).
The simplest variation on the basic theme involves the addition of eyebrows and changes in the shape of the eyes. The eyebrows are all the so-called flame eyebrows, and the mask Covarrubias identifies as the rain god, our Rain God C, displays them in one of their several variant forms. Masks displaying these eyebrows are commonly found on celts and votive axes carved to represent the figure of the rain god, but the same mask can also perhaps be seen on a sarcophagus found at La Venta.[74] The mask on the sarcophagus might have had a dangling, bifid tongue, a development of the rain god we will see clearly in all of the later rain gods of the Classic period, which would suggest a connection with the serpent. Such a connection may also be suggested by the eyebrows since, as several scholars have felt, these are probably better interpreted as feathers or plumes than as flames. If they are so interpreted, the composite mask reveals avian connotations and would suggest an Olmec
version—perhaps the original version—of the jaguar/bird/serpent symbolism associated with the lightning, wind, and rain of the storms through which water was provided by the gods for man. Just as there are variants of the flame eyebrows, there are also variants of eye shape in the masks with plume eyebrows. Some continue to display the almond-shaped eye of the basic mask, but others have rectangular, trough-shaped eyes, some of which are turned down in an L-shaped fashion at the outer edge. It is quite likely that the particular combination of eye and eyebrow—and all possible combinations seem to exist—meant something specific, now forever lost, to the Olmec priest.
At the succeeding levels of complexity, other items are added to the mask. The first of these is a headband with symbolic markings which covers whatever eyebrows the figure might be imagined to have. Perhaps attached to this headband are elaborate wavy ear coverings, which are long and narrow and similar to those often depicted in Aztec art, the design of which might well suggest water. Such a combination of headband and ear coverings is worn by the child held by the Las Limas figure (pl. 3), a primary image of Rain God CJ, as well as by an iconographically equivalent standing figure holding a child now in the Brooklyn Museum and can also be seen on several carved celts from the Olmec heartland. The final addition to the basic concept is that illustrated by Monument 52 from San Lorenzo (pl. 4), another primary image of Rain God CJ. In addition to the headband with ear coverings, this figure wears a headdress with a pair of presumably symbolic markings prominently displayed. Like the design on the ear coverings, these markings might also suggest water.[75] Since this image of Rain God CJ was found at the head of the system of ritual water channels at San Lorenzo, the symbols it carries likely relate to the gods' provision of water not by rain but directly from the earth in the manner of the cenotes and of underground springs bubbling to the surface.
Interestingly, however, a stone object from Tlacotepec, Guerrero, an area with caves but no cenotes, displays, in very different form, the same combination of mask and headdress. This suggests that the symbolic reference must be wider than one resting on an interpretation of the San Lorenzo figure. But whatever the precise meaning of each of the symbolic details of the many variants of the mask, it is clear that while all of the combinations refer to rain, each particular image has a different inflection symbolized by the individual combination of features drawn from the basic inventory. Perhaps each figure deals symbolically with a different part of what is, after all, quite a complex process, or perhaps one of the features—the mouth, for example—is significant enough to embody the basic meaning of any figure on which it appears.
But as we suggested at the outset of this lengthy discussion of the mask we call the Olmec rain god, that particular point of contact with the world of the spirit symbolized more than the provision of the life-maintaining rain. For the Olmecs, as for all the peoples of Mesoamerica who were to follow them, the mask that symbolically identified the rain god was simultaneously involved with the metaphorical delineation of the essentially sacred nature of what we would call profane power and thus demonstrated the intimate relationship between spiritual and worldly leadership which has always intrigued and puzzled students of the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations.[76] Although we will not attempt at this point to define precisely that relationship, it seems clear that the Olmecs believed, as did the Aztecs and all the civilizations between the two, that their rulers were provided by the gods and returned at death to the realm of the gods, the world of the spirit. In the exercise of profane power, these rulers spoke for the gods and provided an essentially spiritual order for the world of nature in which humanity was embedded. That spiritual function was symbolized in Olmec art by the were-jaguar mask, which also symbolized rain.
The origin of this fascinating three-way connection between rain, rulers, and jaguars cannot be discovered for us by archaeology, but it seems reasonable to suppose that that enduring link was forged in the Preceramic phase of the development of Mesoamerican culture, probably in the period of transition from the nomadic existence of hunting-gathering groups to the settled life associated with the beginnings of agriculture. It was at this time, perhaps, that the jaguar, the hunter's greatest adversary, became involved in Mesoamerican man's symbolization of the twin requirements for maintaining the communal life both based on and necessary for raising crops—a settled society and regularly timed rainfall. As we have demonstrated above, the were-jaguar mask metaphorically resolved the binary opposition between "wild" nature and the control necessary for the development of human culture. By uniting the equal opposites of the jaguar, the epitome of nature, and man, the epitome of culture, the were-jaguar mask provided the focal point for the ritual through which the gods' provision of rain could be harmonized with the needs of the crops that were to sustain human life and provide the basis for the existence of human culture.
Similarly, social harmony could be achieved through the rulership of a particular man sent by the gods to "take over the burden, . . . devote thyself to the great bundle, the great carrying frame, the governed."[77] In that sense, at least, the ruler is the equivalent of the rain. Both are sent by the gods, both are necessary parts of the framework within which the common man can sustain his life, and thus both are prerequisites for the life of
culture. The Quiché Maya creation myth embodied in the Popol Vuh is both fascinating and instructive in this regard since even though it is a post-Conquest document recording Postclassic beliefs, it clearly relates rain and rulers, sustenance and governance in its delineation of the creation of humanity, which is, of course, essentially a definition of what it means to be human. In the myth, man is finally created after three previous failures, two of which depict the newly created would-be man as incapable of attaining human status and relegate him to the status of "wild" animal. The meaning of these two failures is clear: true humanity can exist only in the context of culture, defined in the myth as the binary opposite of nature.
The second of those two cases—the wooden men who ultimately become monkeys—is especially intriguing since the myth takes care to differentiate between the forces of nature and those of culture. The wooden men are destroyed as humans and thus relegated to animal status by the forces of untamed nature—"The black rainstorm began, rain all day and all night. Into their houses came the animals, small and great"—and, separately, by the forces of culture—"Their faces were crushed by things of wood and stone. Everything spoke: their water jars, their tortilla griddles, their plates, their cooking pots, their dogs, their grinding stones, each and every thing crushed their faces."[78] The opposed forces of nature and culture act in destructive harmony on this occasion, but the myth makes clear that it is the task of human society, through ritual and the efforts of the ruler, to harmonize those forces, as Olmec art much earlier similarly harmonized the faces of jaguar and man in the metaphorical were-jaguar mask. This harmony, now constructive rather than destructive, is precisely the theme of the gods' fourth and final attempt to create man.
[They] sought and discovered what was needed for human flesh. It was only a short while before the sun, moon, and stars were to appear above the Makers and Modelers. Broken Place, Bitter Water Place is the name: the yellow corn, white corn came from there.
And these are the names of the animals who brought the food: fox, coyote, parrot, crow. There were four animals who brought the news of the ears of yellow corn and white corn. They were coming from over there at Broken Place, they showed the way to the break.
And this was when they found the staple foods. And these were the ingredients for the flesh of the human work, of the human design, and the water was for the blood. It became human blood and corn was also used by the Bearer, Begetter.
And so they were happy over the provisions of the good mountain, filled with sweet things, thick with yellow corn, white corn, and thick with pataxte and cacao, countless zapotes, anonas, jocotes, nances, matasanos, sweets—the rich foods filling up the citadel named Broken Place, Bitter Water Place. All the edible fruits were there; small staples, great staples, small plants, great plants. The way was shown by the animals.
And then the yellow corn and white corn were ground, and Xmucane did the grinding nine times. Corn was used, along with the water she rinsed her ands with, for the creation of grease; it became human fat when it was worked by the Bearer, Begetter, Sovereign Plumed Serpent as they are called.
After that they put it into words:
the making, the modeling of our first mother-father,
with yellow corn, white corn alone for the flesh,
food alone for the human legs and arms,
for our first fathers, the four human works.[79]
The creation of man is intimately connected here with the origins of agriculture, that is, with the "discovery" of corn at Broken Place. Broken Place, translated by Munro Edmonson as Cleft,[80] is symbolically the point at which man's sustenance, the corn, emerges from the world of the spirit into the natural world. This place-name in the Popol Vuh is thus the equivalent of the visual clefts found in the Postclassic Mixtec codices, and both symbols are related, as we have demonstrated above, to the symbolic cleft on the Olmec were-jaguar masks from which, of course, corn is often depicted emerging. But corn, as Mesoamerica well knew, is a cultivated plant, not a wild one, and the import of the myth in this regard is clear. Man exists in culture, not as a wild animal; the animals find the corn, but man is formed from it. Only within the context of culture can man make use of plants and water, his symbolic flesh and blood, to sustain his individual life and the life of the community without which truly human life would be impossible. And communities implied rulers to the Mesoamerican mind. The Popol Vuh makes this quite clear.
These are the names of the first people who were made and modeled.
This is the first person: Jaguar Quitze.
And now the second: Jaguar Night.
And now the third: Mahucutah.
And the fourth: True Jaguar.
And these are the names of our first mother- fathers.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And then their wives and women came into being.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Celebrated Seahouse is the name of the wife of Jaguar Quitze.
Prawn House is the name of the wife of Jaguar Night.
Hummingbird House is the name of the wife of Mahucutah.
Macaw House is the name of the wife of True Jaguar.
So these are the names of their wives, who became ladies of rank, giving birth to the people of the tribes, small and great.
And this is our root, we who are the Quiché people.[81]
The mythical ancestors, the mother-fathers, the Lords of the Quiche, are the root of the Quiché people, their means of attachment to the source of their sustenance in the world of the spirit. These mythical beings are symbolically both male and female, matter and spirit, temporal and eternal, human and divine, and thus unite, precisely in the manner of the were-jaguar mask, the whole series of opposed categories that define god and man, categories that metaphorically find their meeting place in these "first people." These are the first rulers, the progenitors of and the models for all the Lords of the Quiché who are to follow them. Through their wives, they unite metaphorically the two aspects of the enveloping world of the spirit with the earthly plane on which man lives and on which they rule: Sea and Prawn suggest the watery underworld, equivalent in Maya thought to the cave, while Macaw and Hummingbird suggest the airy upper world. And all of them are married to and thus complement the Jaguar-three of the four Lords' names—the creature of the earth in this set of symbolic oppositions. The primary function of the ruler, then, is here defined through the metaphor of the three-layered cosmos fundamental to shamanistic thought as the uniting of matter and spirit.
Clifford Geertz explores this symbolic function in "Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power":
At the political center of any complexly organized society ... there is both a governing elite and a set of symbolic forms expressing the fact that it is in truth governing. . . . [Such elites] justify their existence and order their actions in terms of a collection of stories, ceremonies, insignia, formalities, and appurtenances that they have either inherited or, in more revolutionary situations, invented. It is these—crowns and coronations, limousines and conferences—that mark the center as center and give what goes on there its aura of being not merely important but in some odd fashion connected with the way the world is built. The gravity of high politics and the solemnity of high worship spring from liker impulses than might first appear.[82]
When we discuss Olmec society, of course, crowns become headdresses and we must do without limousines, but the principle remains operative; here too, as early as 1200 B.C., we see carved in stone by Olmec sculptors the evidence of an elite at the center of things defining its position and function through "a set of symbolic forms" that thoroughly interweave "the gravity of high politics and the solemnity of high worship."
Strange as it might seem, the clearest expression of this fundamental theme of Olmec art appears not in the Olmec heartland on the Gulf coast but hundreds of miles away in the central highlands at Chalcatzingo, Morelos. Perhaps Grove is correct in contending that the art created on the Olmec "frontier," as he calls it, made graphically clear the ideas that "are abstracted in Gulf coast monuments" in order to instruct a populace not conversant with those concepts,[83] but whatever the reason, the thematic interweaving of high politics and high worship, of the rain god and the ruler, is nowhere more apparent than in Monument I at Chalcatzingo (pl. 7), a relief carving fittingly called El Rey by today's villagers. As we indicated above, Monument I depicts a figure holding a ceremonial bar seated within a stylized cave/jaguar mouth from which issue speech scrolls. On the one hand, the seated figure is clearly associated with the rain god by the stylized raindrops, identical to those falling from the clouds, decorating his costume and headdress and by his location within the mouth of the cave/jaguar, but, on the other hand, he is identified as a ruler by the ceremonial bar he holds and, perhaps, by the headdress he wears.
What might seem to be two conflicting thematic motifs in this relief can be resolved into one: we see here the Olmec identification of ruler and rain god. Monument I, according to Grove and Gillespie, "depicts a person seated within a cave, source of both water and supernatural power." That person, they believe, "was a revered ancestor rather than merely a generalized 'rain god."' But the location of the relief "above the site on the main rainwater channel," which would cause "the torrent of water rushing down the mountain" to appear "to come directly from this revered ancestor,"[84] and the evidence of the symbols on the relief suggest overwhelmingly that the "revered ancestor" or, perhaps, current ruler is to be equated metaphorically with the rain. The speech symbolized by the scrolls emanating from the cave mouth would seem to be either his speech or speech concerning him, and that speech is symbolically equated with the issue of the mouthlike rain clouds—the raindrops—with which his costume and headdress are also decorated. The ruler depicted here is symbolically equivalent to the rain, as is the "speech"—his rule—that issues from him, and thus from the gods. That speech sustains the life of the ruled as does the rain that gives life to the corn that nourishes man. While the relief was no doubt intended by its creators to commemorate a particular ruler
or to indicate their reverence for the supernatural power that provided the rain or, perhaps, to do both, its primary significance for us is to indicate the identification in the Olmec mind of those two motifs.
Another sculpture at Chalcatzingo, a fragment of a freestanding relief or stela, depicts a strikingly similar motif but in a form that relates it directly to the sculptures of the Olmec heartland we have discussed and helps, in the process, to clarify their meaning. This sculpture, Monument 13, depicts a seated or kneeling figure, remarkably similar in posture to the San Martin Pajapán figure (pl. 11), within a stylized cave/jaguar mouth identical to the empty cave/mouth of Monument 9 (pl. 8). The figure within this mouth suggests that the empty mouth of Monument 9 was occupied by a living figure, probably that of the ruler, in a ritual that legitimized his rule by relating it to the provision of rain. Both the rain and the ruler would thus be seen metaphorically as emanations of the world of the spirit. Furthermore, both Monuments 9 and 13 are frontal views of the mouth depicted in profile in Monument I, the mouth in which the seated figure fittingly designated El Rey is found, suggesting the importance of this theme in the art of Chalcatzingo.
But that theme is not restricted to Chalcatzingo and the Olmec frontier. It occurs with equal frequency, though somewhat more subtly, in the art of the Gulf coast Olmec heartland, as the striking similarity between the figure depicted in relief on Chalcatzingo's Monument 13 and the sculpted figure found atop the volcano of San Martin Pajapán indicates. Both are depicted in the same posture, a posture clearly indicated by the continuous curve described by the back, shoulders, and arms; both wear a headdress bent back and cleft; both have a mouth suggesting the were-jaguar configuration, but neither is an extreme version of that mouth; and both have their hands resting on a barlike object in front of them, an object that is probably a ceremonial bar and thus a symbolic indication of rulership. Furthermore, both are associated with a clearly symbolic version of the were-jaguar mouth: Monument 13's figure is seated within it and the San Martin Pajapán figure carries it in his headdress. Were Monument 13 not a fragment, we might see an even greater similarity because we would then know what the front of the seated figure's headdress looked like. But even without that knowledge, we can say the existing similarities are so striking as to demonstrate that the carver of the Chalcatzingo relief was depicting the same thematic motif, and that motif clearly relates rulership to rain.
That relationship can also be seen in the complex of symbols depicted in several variant forms on the monumental sculptures called altars, but which more likely served as thrones, found throughout the heartland and at Chalcatzingo and depicted in a painting on the cliff face above a cave-shrine at Oxtotitlán, Guerrero. These "altars" are massive rectangular tablelike forms with tops extending beyond large pedestal bases. Altar 4 from La Venta (pl. 12), the most fascinating of them from our point of view in this discussion, depicts on the face of its pedestal, below the protruding ledge of its top, a figure in high relief wearing a headdress, cape, and pectoral ornament. He is seated crosslegged within the stylized mouth of a were-jaguar, a mouth remarkably similar to the mouths on the Chalcatzingo reliefs. Above the mouth on the face of the ledge appears the upper jaw, fanged and decorated with the St. Andrew's cross, and the eyes, with a cleft between them, of the were-jaguar. Interestingly, though the body of the emerging figure is quite realistically human, the face, though now mutilated, seems also to suggest the were-jaguar. Bent forward slightly, the figure grasps a rope that runs along the base of the altar and is tied to realistically depicted human figures on either side. Those familiar with later Maya symbolism would be inclined to see the figures on the sides as captives suggesting the dominance of the lord seated in the niche.[85] But the figures on the sides are not bound, as captives typically are in Maya art, and may symbolize kinship ties resulting in alliances with the domains of other lords[86] or the common Maya theme of accession. In any case, it seems clear that the symbolic meaning of the rope is related in some way to earthly rulership and equally clear from the altar as a whole that rulership is to be thought of as fundamentally connected with the rain suggested by the were-jaguar/cave mouth motif. That this complex of ideas was also present at the Olmec site of San Lorenzo is indicated by Monument 14, an altar that is now heavily mutilated but which seems to have been virtually identical to La Venta Altar 4.
Other Gulf coast altars, La Venta Altars 2 and 5 and San Lorenzo Monument 20, express the same symbolic meaning in a different way by depicting a seated figure in a cave/mouth niche holding a seemingly lifeless infant. The infant is probably always the were-jaguar figure we have called Rain God CJ[87] so that the symbolic motif is identical to that of the Lord of Las Limas (pl. 3). Altar 5 of La Venta is the least mutilated of this group, and it, like Altar 4, bears figures on the sides (pl. 13); each of the figures wears an elaborate headdress and holds a were-jaguar infant or dwarf, but one who is very much alive in contrast to the lifeless infant held by the central figure. That contrast might very well suggest that the central infant represents a sacrifice, an offering to the rain god, while the four infants or dwarves on the sides represent the quadripartite helpers of the rain god—the Olmec prototype of the later chacs of the Maya or tlaloques of central Mexico. The elaborate headdresses of the
Pl. 12.
Altar 4, La Venta (Parque Museo de La Venta).
Pl. 13.
Altar 5, La Venta, side view (Parque Museo de La Venta).
figures holding the infants as well as their realistic features, in contrast with the were-jaguar features of the infants or dwarfs, suggest that they are depictions of past or present rulers, thus tying rain and rulership together in still another fashion. And just as the rope on Altar 4 may represent kinship ties, the infant on Altar 5 may also suggest "the basic concept of royal descent and lineage."[88] The Olmec altars, then, symbolically link Olmec rulers to the provision of rain from the realm of the spirit, the entrance to which is represented by the niche in the altar symbolizing simultaneously the were-jaguar mouth and the cave. Thus, in an almost literal sense, the altars were "masks" placed on the earth to allow the ritual entrance into the world of the spirit from which the power wielded by the temporal ruler must ultimately flow. That power was legitimized by virtue of its emergence, through the mask, from the world of the spirit.
For the Olmecs, then, the were-jaguar mask of what we have been calling the rain god served to delineate the mode of entrance into this world of the force that ultimately sustained human life. All of the images of that mask which we have discussed, taken together, demonstrate the fluid and flexible nature of the mask as a symbol for the Olmecs and the sophisticated way in which they manipulated that symbol. As our analysis makes clear, the mask provided the iconographic core of the symbolism of bodily form and regalia through which the Olmecs, like all the peoples of Mesoamerica who were to follow them, communicated spiritual facts. The range of mask types, of which the toothless or fanged, cleft-headed were-jaguar is but a small part, revealed by the body of Olmec art as well as the variety of ritual uses of those masks makes clear that this communication was capable of handling a broad range of connections between man and the life-force and also suggests that the Olmecs, like all of their Mesoamerican successors, conceived of their gods as quadripartite beings. Were this the case, the subtler variations between masks with the same cleft head and toothless mouth might well represent individual units of a four-part structure. The pervasive use of the St. Andrew's cross in Olmec art, a use seen often in the symbolic markings on headband, pectoral, and headdress of these figures, and even in the fanged mouth of Altar 4, probably indicates that very quadriplicity. That cross is, after all, a variation of the quincunx, a four-part figure reminiscent of those used throughout Mesoamerican history to represent the "shapes" of time, space, and the gods. Perhaps, then, we should be considering the masks, rather than the mask, of the rain god in Olmec art.
Whether one or four, however, what is abundantly clear is that the Olmecs used the metaphor of the mask, in this case the cleft-headed, toothless were-jaguar mask, as a means of understanding the way in which the life-force—the ground of their being and all being—provided both the water that caused the corn to grow and the rulers who established an order of the spirit in the world of nature. The mask provided for them a symbolic means of constructing a mediating system of gods that allowed that life-force to "unfold" into man's world.
The Mask As Metaphor
Cocijo
Though the particular mask that the Olmecs used to designate that point of contact with the world of the spirit disappeared with the death of Olmec culture, it lived on in altered form within the religious art of each of the major cultures of the Classic period as an integral part of a system delineated through a variety of similarly constructed masks through which each of those cultures mediated between the worlds of nature and the spirit. As Covarrubias's chart (pl. 2) demonstrates, those cultures used the features of the Olmec mask, modified in their own ways, to symbolize the provision of the life-sustaining rain and divinely ordained rulership from the world of the spirit. Those modifications that distinguish each of the major Classic period rain gods—Cocijo, Tlaloc, and Chac—resulted from the particular means by which the Olmec culture was transmitted to its Classic period heirs.
That this transmission did, in fact, take place is now generally accepted by Mesoamerican scholars; as Covarrubias suggested in 1957, the Olmec was the "mother culture" that gave birth to the great Classic period cultures of Mesoamerica.[89] Or to put it more precisely, Olmec influence operating on the village cultures of various areas of Mesoamerica "played the role of a catalyst. It led to decisive steps forward, or quickened the pace of progress ... [by implanting] religious ideas and rough ideas of social structures that germinated, flowered, and bore fruit in the classic era."[90] But this general agreement among scholars does not extend to a unanimity of opinion as to the means of cultural transmission. Covarrubias seems to have imagined an Olmec empire, "a form of incipient theocracy by which they dominated a large population of peasant serfs, the peoples of the Preclassic cultures, a system that later prevailed all over Middle America and replaced the simple communalistic system of small autonomous peasant villages."[91] Others, no doubt thinking of the clearly religious art that betrays the Olmec presence, believed that Olmec warriors "paved the way for missionaries who spread the cult of the Olmec jaguar god."[92]
But the intensive research effort in the last twenty years directed toward understanding the development of the Preclassic cultures of the highlands of Mexico suggests that trade rather than
colonizing or proselytizing was the primary motivating force,[93] especially that trade through which the Olmecs acquired the goods necessary for religious art and ritual—such things as "obsidian, jade, turquoise, iron pigments, iron ores, mica, mollusk shell, turtle shell, fish and stingray spines, and shark teeth."[94] At site after site outside the Olmec heartland on the Gulf coast, there seems to have been a relatively small number of Olmecs living with a large group of local people, presumably to direct the acquisition of the needed goods. Grove concludes that even Chalcatzingo, the highlands site with the most extensive evidence of an Olmec presence, was not an Olmec city but merely served as a "gateway city" through which the Olmec funneled "the supply of status goods" acquired from the village cultures.[95] Archaeological data regarding numerous other Preclassic sites also suggests either an Olmec presence or significant Olmec contact related to precisely this sort of trade.[96]
The archaeological evidence also suggests that the extensive contact with or even the permanent presence in these early villages of representatives of a significantly more sophisticated culture had a predictable effect. Symbolic forms in art and ritual, the maintenance of which were the fundamental reason for the Olmec presence, flowed from the more sophisticated group to the less sophisticated one, a movement encouraged by the fact that both cultures were rooted in and grew from the same shamanic base whose fundamental assumptions we will describe at length below. Thus, the Olmec culture in the heartland became the model to be emulated by the village cultures. There is evidence of this sort of relationship on both sides. Philip Drucker argues convincingly that a number of Gulf coast monuments depict contact with outsiders, presumably leaders from one or another of these villages. "These foreign visitors," he goes on to say,
may well have been honored by being shown the splendors of La Venta—the ceremonials and the monuments—[and] . . . may have been impressed enough to want to emulate their hosts, and were lent (or given?) Olmec sculptors to do some carving for them; or they arranged for some of their personnel to be trained by Olmec sculptors.[97]
As for the other side of the relationship, Robert Drennan concludes that in the Valley of Oaxaca from 1150-850 B.C., Olmec symbolism was intimately involved with "ritual activity accompanying the emergence of larger-scale, ranked society." These Olmec symbols were derived from "a network of interregional contacts through which were transmitted several kinds of ritual objects and materials together with symbols of probable religious meaning."[98] Thus, Drennan would seem to be describing the effect on the receiving group of precisely the contact described by Drucker. Although Drennan's dates would make this particular example of that connection impossible since the scenes Drucker describes are to be found on monuments carved several hundred years later, the general principle nevertheless seems valid: Olmec symbolism derived from Olmec contact was used pervasively, not only in Oaxaca but in village cultures in a number of Mesoamerican areas, both to make clear and to support the status of rulers and religious functionaries in those village cultures. The masks of the gods of the village cultures came to have Olmec features.
But it is equally clear that this influence operated during a limited period and that it did not change completely the art style or belief structure of the local group. Thus, Olmec symbolism was superimposed on preexisting local cultures with indigenous beliefs, ritual, and artistic style. Concerning the central Mexican highlands, for example, Grove notes that Chalcatzingo "was not an Olmec colony. The vast majority of the site's artifacts show that in basic cultural details it was central Mexican and non-Olmec."[99] Similarly, according to Louise Paradis, "Olmec-related artifacts have now been found in an archaeological context in Guerrero . . .imbedded in a local cultural tradition that has nothing to do with the one commonly labeled Olmec."[100] And according to Coe in his study of the material from such sites as Tlatilco, Las Bocas, and Tlapacoya, "there are manifestly two distinct artistic traditions during the Middle Preclassic in the highlands—one Olmec and the other indigenous."[101] These Olmec artifacts constitute the evidence that remains of the use by the leaders of these cultures of Olmec symbols, beliefs, and, probably, connections to consolidate their status, and this was also true in the Valley of Oaxaca. Most objects carrying Olmec symbols discovered in Oaxaca were for ritual use and "functioned to connect those who were entitled to use them to the ultimate sacred propositions of Olmec religion"; in other words, these individuals were marked as the descendants of the gods, indicating that "a major reason for the diffusion of the Olmec art style throughout Mesoamerica was the increased need for mechanisms of sanctification in various regions owing to internal social evolution."'[102] The "mechanisms" used were Olmec because the Olmecs had developed them for precisely the same purpose from precisely the same set of underlying assumptions about man, the gods, and the relationship between them.
As the Olmec art style and the underlying belief system it expressed diffused throughout Mesoamerica in this way, a similar phenomenon occurred in each of the areas to which it spread. Rather than supplanting the indigenous style and belief system, the Olmec system first coexisted but ultimately fused with the local system. This fusion of religious ideas and symbols can be seen generally in the development of mask symbolism and
specifically in the evolution of the mask of the rain god which we can trace from the Olmecs, through the village cultures, and into the Classic cultures that grew from those village cultures as a result of the Olmec "catalyst." Of the three clear-cut routes of this complex development, we will consider first the Valley of Oaxaca and its development in the Classic period of the great civilization centered on Monte Albán, for which its version of the were-jaguar mask continued to symbolize both rain and rulership as it had for the Olmecs. Next we will explore the central Mexican highlands and the development of that mask, primarily as a symbol of rain, in the Classic period culture of Teotihuacán and in the Postclassic Toltec, Aztec, and Mixtec cultures. Finally, we will trace the development of the rain god by the Maya, primarily as a symbol of rulership, first at Izapa and Kaminaljuyú, then in the lowland culture of the Classic period, and finally in the Yucatán.
We have chosen to look at Oaxaca first both because its rain god, Cocijo, was the first post-Olmec rain god to appear and because the rain god of no culture shows clearer evidence of its Olmec heritage than that Cocijo of the Zapotec culture of the Valley of Oaxaca, which constructed the mountaintop urban center of Monte Albán at about 550 B.C. and from that remarkable site "dominated the Valley of Oaxaca for more than 1000 years."[103] The similarities between Cocijo and his Olmec ancestor are both visual and conceptual. The visual similarities can be seen at a glance: both have symbolic headdresses, exaggerated eyebrows, distinctive ear ornamentation, and, most important, a were-jaguar mouth. The conceptual similarities are equally clear though they cannot be seen. Both Cocijo and the Olmec rain god are actually a range of symbolic variations of a basic mask with each of the variant forms being a particular combination of symbolic features designed to convey a particular aspect of the supernatural force, in this case, rain and rulership, that we are calling a god. In addition, in both cases, the rain god exists as an integral part of a system of such gods, each a similarly constructed but differently detailed mask, by which their creators symbolized the systematic totality of the world of the spirit. Thus, the Zapotec system in general and the features of Cocijo in particular were rooted firmly in the Olmec past.
As Covarrubias's chart (pl. 2) makes clear, however, the most immediately apparent similarity of the mask of Cocijo to its Olmec ancestors is the were-jaguar mouth. This mouth is commonly depicted in Zapotec art, often but not always in the Cocijo mask, but nowhere can it be seen more clearly and its development traced more easily than on the so-called funerary urns characteristic of the culture of Monte Albán. Present in all the phases of development of that culture, these ceramic urns are generally found in tombs, but they "occur as offerings in temples and caches as well."[104] What, if anything, the urns originally held is unknown, but that is perhaps unimportant since their primary function seems to have been to support a representation of the face or entire body of a human being or a god with either the person or the god wearing a variety of clearly symbolic items such as masks, headdresses, pectorals, ear flares, and clothing.
As is the case with much symbolic Mesoamerican art, the identity of these figures and the meaning of their symbolic regalia have proven very difficult for scholars to interpret. One of the problems of interpretation is general: those who have viewed Mesoamerican art from a European perspective—from the Spaniards of the sixteenth century to the scholars of the present—have had great difficulty distinguishing between gods and human beings, and the tendency from the beginning has been to see almost all figures as gods even though the art makes clear distinctions between creatures of myth and those of the natural world, distinctions that we have seen in Olmec art and that we will discuss at length in our discussion of the mask in ritual. In the case of Oaxaca, this difficulty is compounded by the fact that little is known about Zapotec religion before the Conquest. No codices survive, and the basic sources of the little information we have are the reports of the Spanish friars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, among which are to be found lists of what the friars took to be gods. Unfortunately, it now appears that the friars confused two very different spiritual categories. On the one hand, there were the composite beings, such as the rain god, symbolizing forces originating in the world of the spirit. These composite beings were involved in myth and ritual throughout the area, as the widespread representations of Cocijo, for example, suggest. On the other hand, each local area had deified the ancestors of local leaders, and there were, of course, a multiplicity of such "deities" in the valley at any given time.
Using one of the lists of the friars as a guide and creating new categories, that is, new "gods," when they needed them, Caso and Bernal in their monumental 1952 classification of the urns, Urnas de Oaxaca, attempted to identify the figures on the urns, figures they assumed were gods. The result was a large number of so-called gods, many of them no doubt actually deified ancestors, a number that has grown larger as more urns are studied. In his 1966 study that categorizes urns not recorded by Caso and Bernal, Frank Boos says that by that time "the figures . . . appear to fall into 44 primary categories [most of them gods], which at once subdivide into 138 subcategories."[105] Truly a bewildering variety of gods. But taking into account the results of recent scholarship makes it clear that we must distinguish, as we did with Olmec sculpture,
between those urns that depict composite masks made up of features taken from a variety of natural creatures, that is, masks representing creatures of myth, and the urns that depict human beings either unadorned or wearing elaborate symbolic regalia.[106] In our discussion of the symbolic masks that are the gods of Monte Albán, we will concentrate on the urns, and related art, that depict the composite masks—the fantastic creatures of Mesoamerican myth.
And on such urns no god was depicted more often than Cocijo. The earliest depictions of his characteristic mask, in the period from 500 to 200 B.C., designated Monte Albán I, establish the basic characteristics that remain constant to his representations in the last phase of Zapotec development before the Conquest. The urns of Monte Albán I indicate clearly the Olmec influence, but research has shown that this influence was the result of a conscious revival of a style adopted by the earlier village cultures rather than the result of a continuing tradition. The period of Olmec contact was roughly from 1150 to 850 B.C., and after that time, the use of Olmec symbolism in the art and ritual of the Valley of Oaxaca waned for several hundred years[107] until, by the beginning of Monte Albán I in 500 B.C., Olmec symbols are no longer found. However, such symbolic Olmec forms as were—jaguar mouths and flame eyebrows reappear late in that period at about 300 B.C. "in what must have been a conscious revival" that interpreted these symbols in ways indigenous to the Valley of Oaxaca on ceramic objects completely uncharacteristic of Olmec forms. As John Paddock puts it in discussing three such pieces, "somebody in the Valley of Oaxaca had a total understanding of O1mec style in a cultural setting that was no longer Olmec."[108] The transition from the Olmec were-jaguar rain god to Cocijo had been made. And this transition marks an important point in any study of the development of the rain god in Mesoamerica; we now have, for the first time, a name for that supernatural concept.
An examination of one of the earliest Cocijo urns (pl. 14), a marvelously simple, beautiful realization of the essential form, shows clearly the Oaxacan reinterpretation of the Olmec heritage.[109] The general appearance of these early Cocijo is very similar, for example, to San Lorenzo Monument 52 (pl. 4), our Rain God CJ. Both are easily distinguished from representations of human beings by their pudgy, relatively rectangular, and frontally flat faces surmounted by similarly shaped headdresses with incised symbolic markings. In both, the ears, eyes, and mouth are emphasized by their symbolic treatment, but the most immediately apparent similarity is the mouth; Cocijo's protruding upper lip surmounted by a pug nose graphically indicates his were—jaguar origins. But this feline mouth is different in two respects. First, it has teeth, but not the fangs often seen in Olmec representations. These protrude, in the manner of human buckteeth, directly under the extended lip. A far more striking difference, however, is the exaggerated bifid tongue that emerges from just under those teeth. This is the tongue of a serpent and marks the beginning of the association of the serpent with the jaguar in a mask symbolizing rain.[110]
Pl. 14.
Cocijo, funerary urn, Monte Albán I
(Museo Nacional de Antropologia, México).
And there are other differences as well. Even this early Cocijo has notably non-Olmec eyebrows, which in the course of the development of Cocijo's mask through the centuries, evolve into a Tlaloc-like "goggle" form, perhaps due to the influence of Teotihuacán. These early eyebrows are rather crescent shaped and puffy and carry an incised design suggesting the bifurcation of the tongue. The headdress, too, is distinctly non-Olmec in shape and in the designs incised on it. The central design is a rudimentary glyph C, a common feature of Cocijo headdresses and a widely used symbol in Zapotec art. Although neither the meaning nor the referent of the glyph to the Zapotecs is at all clear, in its earliest form, the form suggested here, it seems to depict a vase "seen in cross section and having a
horizontal band . . . often decorated with undulations that represent water"[111] and suggest the serpent. This would seem a fitting design for a rain god, and the fact that Caso and Bernal, at least, see that design as evolving into a stylized jaguar mouth[112] makes it all the more fitting. Seemingly rising from the glyph is another repetition of the bifurcated tongue element, this time with the implied cleft in the tongue at the same spot as the cleft in the headdress of the Olmec Monument 52 and all the other cleft-headed were-jaguars. While the facial configuration and the mouth of the O1mec were-jaguar remain, the tongue of the serpent has now appeared on the mask of the rain god, creating a link between the jaguar and the serpent which was to endure.
But why connect the serpent to rain? Some of the reasons are obvious. As Seler points out, the serpent's "peculiar form and mode of locomotion" suggest water and lightning,[113] as is made clear by the use of an undulating line to represent both water and the serpent in Mesoamerica generally and in the Valley of Oaxaca specifically and by such concepts as the fire serpent carried by the Tlaloc of the highland Mexican cultures which represents lightning.[114] Lightning is no doubt suggested by the way the serpent strikes its prey, but it is also traditionally connected with the flickering tongue of the serpent, and it is, of course, precisely that tongue that is the symbolic detail used in the mask of Cocijo. Beyond these fairly obvious connections, however, another stands out clearly. As we will demonstrate in Part II, the logic underlying blood sacrifice involves reciprocation, in this case the provision of mankind's most precious fluid, blood, to the gods in ritual reciprocation for the provision of their most precious fluid, water, to humanity. Just as water sustains life, blood symbolizes life. And as the blood in the form of snakes rising from the necks of both the massive decapitated Aztec Coatlicue (pl. 9) and the decapitated ball players depicted on the Lapida de Aparicio and on the reliefs of the ball court at Chichén Itzá, for example, reveal, the snake symbolized the blood of life to the Mesoamerican mind. Thus, the serpent represents sacrificial blood, the mythic equivalent of the rains.
But there is still another, quite different, way in which the serpent's shape contributed to its symbolic connection with rain. In Mesoamerica, as elsewhere in the world, the serpent is vitally linked to the earth's fertility, and that fertility, of course, depends upon rain. The serpent's phallic shape and its entrance into the female earth both suggest the human sexual metaphor through which agricultural fertility was symbolically rendered, and that phallic suggestion is made even stronger by the use of the tongue, another common symbol for the phallus, as the symbolic reference to the snake on the Cocijo mask. And more fascinating is the fact that this is a bifid, or cleft, tongue, a detail commonly exaggerated on the Cocijo masks which coincides nicely with the female sexual connotations of the cleft in earlier Olmec art. Thus, the cleft tongue in itself brings together fundamentally male and female sexual symbols in a mask symbolically related to fertility, and that tongue reinforces, then, the symbolic connection of the serpent to sexual, and thus agricultural, fertility. Just as the "opposed" male and female principles are united on the symbolic tongue, a union that in nature creates new life, so the Cocijo mask unites the "opposed" worlds of spirit and matter to provide the sustenance for that life.
Very closely related to the sexual metaphor with its emphasis on the creation of life is the serpent's shedding its skin to be "born anew," a rebirth mythically analogous to the seed's sprouting to renew the earth's vegetation with the coming of the rains. In the serpent, Mesoamerican man could see the endless cycle of existence: first death, but then rebirth as the orderly cosmic processes sustained his individual life through the annual renewal of his sustenance, the corn, which was symbolically man's flesh, the mythic equivalent of life itself. What Heinrich Zimmer says of Indian spiritual thought is equally true of Mesoamerica: "the serpent is life-force in the sphere of life-matter. The snake is supposed to be of tenacious vitality; it rejuvenates itself by sloughing off its skin.[115] That Mesoamerican mythic thought was aware of this symbolic dimension of the serpent is apparent in the Aztec hymn to Xipe Tótec which uses the snake metaphor in exactly this way. The hymn says that "the fire serpent hath been made a quetzal serpent.[116] As Pasztory points out,
the fire serpent, Xiuhcóatl, signified the dry season, and this mythical beast was believed to carry the hot, daytime sun across the sky; the quetzal serpent, Quetzalcóatl, is a metaphoric reference to the earth covered by a green mantle of vegetation in the rainy season. Xiuhcóatl and Quetzalcóatl were gods rather than mythical creatures, two visual metaphors that illustrated the alternating seasons in time and the transformations of the earth's surface.[117]
And both, of course, were linked to the snake, cóatl, and to the ultimately spiritual process that guaranteed fertility. It is no doubt also significant that this line occurs in the hymn to Xipe Tótec, Our Lord the Flayed One, in whose ritual priests donned the flayed skins of sacrificial victims to become the metaphorical equivalent, as is the snake, of the dead seed that carries new life within it (see below).
The metaphorical use of the snake to suggest rebirth was not limited to the Valley of Mex-
ico. Merle Robertson's study of the Maya art of Palenque reveals a similar metaphor at work. At Palenque,
red seems to have represented the living world, the world of humans and the environment in which they lived. Certain parts of serpents were assigned the color red—scales, teeth, tongue and sometimes beards. This may have been because these were considered the "humanlike" living parts of serpents that die or are shed, and then are renewed (reborn) by the growing of new parts.[118]
Perhaps not coincidentally, red is fundamentally related both to Xipe who was for the Aztecs the red aspect of the quadripartite Tezcatlipoca and to death, as the red pigment, often cinnabar, lavishly spread over burials throughout Mesoamerican history attests. And as if to underscore the connection between the serpent and the rebirth that follows death in the endless cycle of life, the ceramic tube connecting the womb-shaped tomb of Pacal in the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque to the temple above is "both an umbilical cord proclaiming the lineage rites and a serpent.[119]
It is important to remember that all of these symbolic uses of the serpent to suggest renewal through a series of metaphors related to the emergence of life from within the womb, the seed, or the dead skin exist within a mythological tradition that uses the mask as a metaphorical means of emphasizing inner/outer, spirit/matter oppositions at every turn. Within such a tradition, it is no surprise to find the snake playing a vital symbolic role. Turner speaks of snake symbolism elsewhere in the world as one means of representing "logically antithetical processes of death and growth" which he characterizes as "liminal: that which is neither this nor that, and yet is both."[120] And a fascinating hint that Mesoamerican snake symbolism relates precisely to the liminal point at which life and death, inner and outer, spirit and matter come together is the fact that the part of the snake chosen to represent the creature as a whole is the tongue, exactly the part that emerges from within the body and the part that functions, in human terms, most significantly in the speech that allows the communication of inner realities to the external world. In Mesoamerican art, tongues and speech scrolls frequently emerge from mouths; they are the inner made outer in the same symbolic way that the mask makes inner reality visible by placing the inner, true face over the outer, physical face.
The liminal role of the snake in Mesoamerican symbolism is no doubt partially the result of its being an anomalous creature, one that is difficult to fit into the categories into which human beings divide the living creatures of the world. For this reason, among others, it has universally provoked the awe that allows it to function as a sacred symbol.[121] For Christians, of course, it is the epitome of evil, and in its ability to penetrate into the earth, it suggests Satan and the nether regions. In pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, however, its anomalous character suggested the whole of the spiritual realm, both the netherworld and its complementary opposite, the heavens, as Quetzalcóatl, for example, indicates. Nowhere is the snake's symbolic role in linking the earth's surface to the enveloping spiritual realm made clearer than in the great serpents that flank the stairways of pyramids at Teotihuacán's Ciudadela and Tenochtitlán's Templo Mayor and in those serpents that flank the doorways of temples at Chichén Itzá and presumably did so at Tula. Just as the pyramid stairway joins earth to heaven and the temple doorway links the surface to the heart of the earth, so the serpent symbolizes man's ability, through mythic art and ritual, to move from the surface of the earth to these spiritual realms, the ultimate source of his life on earth.
For all these reasons, the snake is the fitting companion to the jaguar in the mask of the rain god. For the peoples of the highlands, the rattlesnake, in particular, can be seen as the equivalent of the jaguar in the lowlands. Each represented in its environment that aspect of nature beyond man's power to control by normal means, the reason, no doubt, for the Zapotec's seeing the snake as a particularly disastrous omen.[122] As Ruz points out, "the deification of the serpent is easy to understand in regions where this animal abounds; the fear inspired by the deadliness of its poison, and in spite of its fragile aspect, the silence and quickness of its movements, all suggest a supernatural power.[123] Thus, the snake, like the jaguar and ultimately the rains, represents a disruptive force that man cannot control through normal means, a force that can only be brought into harmony with man's life in culture through myth and ritual. That fusion, as we have shown above in the case of the jaguar, is accomplished symbolically by constructing a mask made up of the features of man and serpent which unites those opposed forces in a representation of the harmony ultimately found only in the world of the spirit. Through the mask man can transcend nature and participate in the force that alone can control snake, jaguar, and rain.
We can now return to our consideration of the urns representing Cocijo with an understanding of the significance of the serpent's tongue emerging from the mouth of the mask, but while that symbolic tongue remains a constant part of Cocijo's features, other symbolic details are transformed to create a number of variations on the basic theme enunciated by the mouth. The headdress, for example, exists in a number of forms, the most common of which displays the glyph C. At times, the glyph has what might be interpreted as two streams of water flowing from the top of the vaselike form in what is probably a visual reference to the pan-
Mesoamerican notion that the rain is stored in great urns from which it is spilled onto the earth, a reference repeated in varying forms in connection with the rain gods of all the Classic period cultures. These streams are often superimposed on a background of plumes (pl. 15) that, especially in the light of a similar use of plumes in connection with a serpent face during the same period of time at Teotihuacán, are a tantalizing suggestion of the plumed serpent that is directly related in the Valley of Mexico to the storm's winds that sweep the roads clear for the coming of the rains and thus to fertility. Other Cocijos wear a simple, hatlike headdress also found on many other figures represented on the urns. It is often incised with striations and sometimes bears a glyph. Still others have headdresses bearing corncobs and, perhaps, stylized representations of parts of the corn plant which rather obviously refer to a particular aspect of Cocijo's function.
The treatment of the eyes also varies somewhat but not as significantly as the headdress. Most Cocijo masks have eyes bracketed by U-shaped elements underneath and similar elements, raised in the center to form a stepped fret, as eyebrows. The eyebrows may well be a stylization of the bifurcated tongue design on the puffy eyebrows of the early urn we examined above and thus a continuing reference to the serpent qualities of Cocijo. It is also quite possible that the bracketing of the eyes on the Cocijo mask is related to the so-called goggle eyes of Tlaloc, a motif also related to the serpent. But a similar treatment of the eyes of relatively realistic jaguars from the Valley of Oaxaca suggests the alternative possibility of were-jaguar symbolism in this element. There are slight variations of the basic theme: occasionally, the outer edges of the lower brackets are hook-shaped, a motif found on other urn figures as well. In fact, virtually all the masks of the figures representing the gods on the urns of the Valley of Oaxaca have one variation or another of the basic bracket pattern, and the symbolic significance of this is made clear by the consistent occurrence of a particular variation with a particular type of mask. In this case, the stepped fret of the top element occurs generally on Cocijo masks and not on others.
Thus, the existence of the basic mouth in connection with a limited number of variations in eyes and headdress, as well as in pectorals and costume, reveals the fundamental debt of the peoples of the Valley of Oaxaca to their spiritual ancestors on the Gulf Coast. Following the Olmec lead, they developed a system for symbolizing their gods, that is, the forces emanating from the world of the spirit, by combining a relatively small number of symbolic traits as facial features in a mask that delineates the spiritual forces underlying and sustaining the natural world. Varying those features through the range of their possible combinations made it possible to specify the particular aspect of the spiritual force in question—in this case, the provision of water to sustain man's crops and his life—and thus to communicate with a great deal of precision information about man's relationship to the gods. The Cocijo urns thus comprise a system with "a set of attributes (e.g., water, corn, lightning) that define the supernatural force or set of forces depicted."[124]
Pl. 15.
Cocijo wearing a Glyph C headdress, funerary urn,
Monte Albán III (American Museum of Natural History, New York).
It is clear that this system was fully developed quite early in the history of the Zapotec culture of Monte Albán since its basic symbolic features changed very little over the thousand-year development of that culture despite the fact that the style of the urns changed dramatically, reflecting the changing society; as the society became larger and more stratified, religious symbolism became more conventional and more ornate.[125] As Covarrubias puts it, the simple vases of Monte Albán I (pl. 14) became "increasingly more elaborate in period II, majestic and imposing in size and design; becoming more and more ornate and formalized in period III; reaching a frankly baroque flamboyancy that sinks suddenly into complete decadence in period IV."[126] It is no doubt more than coincidental that the point of most abrupt change which occurred
between periods II and III was also the time of Monte Albán's most significant contact with Teotihuacán.[127] But even though that influence may well have affected the style of the urns, the fundamentally Zapotec symbolism embodied in the mask of Cocijo changed very little.
Although there is no question that that symbolism was fundamentally related to rain, it is evidently true that Cocijo was a god of the lightning that the Zapotecs saw as the operative force in splitting the clouds to release the needed rain.[128] That concept of an operative force, with its clear implications of creative power, may explain the close relationship between Cocijo and the earthly rulers of the Zapotec people. The power these rulers wielded was derived from the gods, and upon their death, they "became gods" through whose mediation mortal men could approach the essence of divinity.[129] Such a conception of rulership no doubt accounts for the great number of urns depicting human beings wearing headdresses displaying the mask of Cocijo, a way of displaying a mask in ritual regalia which we saw earlier with the O1mecs and one which we will explore at length in our consideration of ritual mask use, and for the incorporation of the name of the rain and lightning god in the names of some of the rulers.
Cocijo's power and significance is also demonstrated in his close relationship to the calendar that charted the motion of time, a motion directly revelatory of the essence of divinity to the Mesoamerican mind. In the Valley of Oaxaca, both the 365-day solar calendar and the 260-day sacred calendar were divided into units designated with Cocijo's name. The solar "year could be divided several ways, the most common being a contrast between a dry season, cocijobáa , and a rainy season, cocijoquije ." In this case, the reason for the designation cocijo seems clear since the distinction between the seasons relates to rain, but "the term cocijo was also used for units of the pije [the 260-day calendar], but in this case the division was into 4 cocijo of 65 days each."[130] This division seems to have no obvious basis in Cocijo's function as a rain god, and for that very reason it reveals clearly the power attributed to him: just as he was the operative force in providing the rain, he was also the force that moved the calendar, that is, time, through its endless cycles, a fundamental relationship to time shared, as we shall see, by Tlaloc. And Cocijo, like all of the rain gods of the Classic and Postclassic cultures of Mesoamerica, was quadripartite—mysteriously one and four simultaneously. Interestingly, this concept is given symbolic form in ceramic pieces with Cocijo attached to four or five linked vessels that suggest visually his quadriplicity with the fifth vessel, when present, marking the center position of the quincunx.[131] As the calendar divisions suggest, he was the force of time and its periods as well; he was the essence of life and its existence in time and space; he was the one and the many. A number of qualities of the Olmec rain god suggested precisely this quadriplicity, and it is significant that the first descendant of that Olmec ancestor manifests it so fully and strongly.
Thus, the mask of Cocijo symbolically unites diverse elements from the world of nature to suggest the attributes of one of the fundamental supernatural powers through which that natural world exists. The significance of that supernatural force to the Zapotecs is clearly indicated both by the tremendous number of Cocijo representations created by them in their long history and by the fact that the basic symbolic form stayed virtually the same over that time span while both the form of the society and the style of its religious art changed tremendously.
The Mask As Metaphor
The Teotihuacán Tlaloc
When we turn from the Valley of Oaxaca to the Valley of Mexico, we move from the realm of Cocijo to the territory of Tlaloc, his younger but far better known "brother." While representations of Cocijo are found as early as Monte Albán I (500-300 B.C.), no full image of the mask of Tlaloc has been found before the Tzacualli phase at Teotihuacán (A.D. 1-150). Significantly, that first, almost sketchlike image appears on an effigy urn,[132] numerous examples of which are found in the archaeological record throughout the history of the Valley of Mexico. Often associated with burials, these urns no doubt had a ritual function since they are similar to those frequently depicted in the hands of painted and sculpted images of Tlaloc; in these depictions, the urns are the containers from which the waters are dispensed by the god, an obvious visual reference to the pan-Mesoamerican mythic attribution of the rains to the urns of the rain god. It is a measure of the fundamental importance of the concept being represented that this early "sketch" reveals, except for its lack of fangs, the mask's essential symbolic configuration, which was to remain the same, in form as well as meaning, through violent social upheavals for 1,500 years until the Conquest and which, we suggest in the final section of this volume, continues to exist in somewhat modified form even today. Thus, that mask of the rain god we call Tlaloc, its Aztec name, "clearly constitutes one of the most generally accepted cases of long-term iconographic continuity in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. Nearly every student appears to regard the earlier images [i.e., those of Teotihuacán] as directly ancestral to the historic Tlaloc" identified by the Spaniards at the time of the Conquest.[133]
As with Cocijo at Monte Alban, the essential
features of Tlaloc coalesced to form that composite mask during the transition from the Preclassic to the Classic period, a stage marked
in central highland Mexico . . . by the coming of age of the largest city of pre-Columbian America, Teotihuacán. It was the dominant political and religious center in the Basin of Mexico for more than five centuries, during which time it exerted far-reaching influences that radiated in various directions over ancient trade routes as far as the Maya area.[134]
The development of that city and its far-flung relations with other areas of Mesoamerica is fundamentally bound up with the symbolic elaboration of the mask of the rain god which moved over those trade routes to appear throughout Mesoamerica[135] as the symbol of Teotihuacán, which was "emphatically the city of Tlaloc."[136] Like Cocijo, Tlaloc was essentially related to lightning and through lightning to both power and the orderly passage of time, as the central image of the god we will discuss demonstrates. Holding a flowing urn displaying the mask of Tlaloc topped by the year sign in one hand and a lightning symbol in the other, he effectively relates sustenance, time, and power in a single compelling image. Through the mask of that god, the massive material entity that was the city thus acknowledged its indebtedness to the world of the spirit, which provided both the order and the sustenance through which its life was maintained.
That Tlaloc can be seen to have been symbolically and conceptually, although not visually, identical to Cocijo strongly suggests their common derivation from an Olmec model, and there are other strong suggestions of Olmec influence at Teotihuacán. "One cannot avoid the impression that in many respects, particularly the abundance of shells and other coastal symbols, the entire Teotihuacán complex was in a sense what might be termed 'Gulf oriented"' as a result of the O1mec "inspiration,"[137] but the precise way in which that inspiration manifested itself in the transition from the Olmec were-jaguar through the village cultures to the Tlaloc of Teotihuacán, often associated symbolically with those "shells and other coastal symbols," is not completely clear. As we have shown, the Olmecs, through relations based fundamentally on trade, exerted a profound influence on those village cultures, an influence that in Oaxaca resulted in the fusion of Olmec with indigenous beliefs and iconography in general and in the development of the Cocijo mask in particular.
There is some evidence of similar developments in the art of the village cultures presumably responsible for the development of the urban center of Teotihuacán:[138] a number of images suggest the Olmec were-jaguar and prefigure the Tlaloc mask. A late Preclassic "proto-Tlaloc effigy" urn from Tlapacoya,[139] for example, displays a distinctly O1mec mouth, a result of the Olmec influence in the middle Preclassic. [140] And, as Grove points out,
a Middle Preclassic goggle-eyed Tlaloc face exists among the paintings at Oxtotitlán cave. A more tenuous example occurs at the extreme top of the Cerro de la Cantera, Chalcatzingo, while several other Tlaloc paintings, also possibly Middle Preclassic, exist at the same site, ... suggesting that the goggle-eyed Tlaloc visage is part of the indigenous altiplano belief system which in the Middle Preclassic had fused with the [Olmec] belief system penetrating into the altiplano from the Gulf coast.[141]
The coexistence of such Tlaloc-related images with clearly Olmec art at each of these sites marks a point of fusion of the Olmec were-jaguar with the indigenous god-mask since none of the Tlalocs are full representations of the later mask[142] and since the Olmec were-jaguar does not exist in highland art after this period. The bulbous or "goggle" eyes, probably a symbolic feature indigenous to the Valley of Mexico or the result of Zapotec influence, which Grove sees as characteristic of Tlaloc's mask, are also found on the composite masks of other gods at Teotihuacán, indicating that they do not identify Tlaloc unless they are present on a mask with Tlaloc's mouth, a mouth clearly derived from the Olmec were-jaguar.[143] Thus, the Tlaloc mask exemplifies the fusion of indigenous and Olmec motifs, but it also illustrates the complexity of the iconographic systems involved.
And there is another form of complexity that makes understanding the development of the mask of the rain god in the Valley of Mexico difficult. While the art of Teotihuacán with its constant visual references to water surely indicates that "the cult of the rain god was supreme,"[144] not all of the masked figures associated with water and fertility in that art are clearly Tlaloc, although some have features more closely related to the Tlaloc mask than others. The situation has provoked the predictable controversy among Mesoamericanists. Many scholars, especially those in Mexico, hold to the view that all iconographic motifs related to water are also related to Tlaloc. This includes such seemingly diverse elements as "the jaguar, serpent, owl, quetzal, butterfly, bifurcated tongue, water lily, triple-shell symbol, spider, eye-of-the-reptile symbol, cross, and the year sign."[145] Kubler, despite his unwillingness to identify these traits by the Aztec name Tlaloc of over a thousand years later, holds a similar view. At Teotihuacán, he says, "the rain-god cluster is most common, with five or six variants in the representation of the deity, under reptile, jaguar, starfish, flower, and warrior aspects."[146] Pasztory, however, has suggested that such all-inclusive categories "are cumbersome in their breadth."[147] As she demonstrates in her study and as we will demonstrate in a somewhat different way below, it is possible to be more precise:
there is a particular mask with a particular combination of features which can be identified as the essential Tlaloc.
But it is not a simple matter of agreeing with Pasztory and disagreeing with Kubler and the Mexican scholars. The complexity arises from the fact that both are correct. In the case of the rain god, for example, a particular image fusing symbolic references to all of the facets of the world of the spirit for which his mask stands as the metaphor can be identified as central to the grouping of images of Tlaloc to be found in the art of Teotihuacán, but, significantly, there are many variants of this essential Tlaloc mask, all of which were no doubt seen at Teotihuacán as aspects of the god. These aspects of the unitary Tlaloc as well as the aspects of the other gods of Teotihuacán were depicted in stone carvings, ceramics, and paintings, but nowhere were they more beautifully detailed and colorfully rendered than in the murals decorating the inner and outer walls of the city which delineated the full spectrum of the supernatural as it existed for the Teotihuacanos. Of course, relatively little of that spiritual art has been preserved; we must try to imagine its magnificence from the fragments remaining.
For the citizen of Teotihuacán, that spectrum filled his every waking moment, and no doubt his dreams as well, since the city in which he lived was literally covered with painted murals and relief carvings depicting the masks of the gods and symbolically arrayed priests enacting rituals dedicated to those gods, paintings that adorned the inner walls of the apartment compounds and temples as well as the facades of buildings and pyramids. The most magnificent lined Teotihuacán's Via Sacra, the north-south Avenue of the Dead lies in front of the Pyramid of the Sun and connects the Ciudadela at the heart of the city with the Pyramid of the Moon and the Quetzalpapálotl Palace. Along this mural-lined, sacred avenue, which, as we will explain, expressed in its orientation the relationship between man and god by symbolically becoming the vertical axis that joined the world of man to the enveloping world of the spirit, the ritual processions of masked performers, symbolically costumed priests, and musicians with flutes, horns, and drums often made their way. The fragments of the murals that remain allow us to imagine the spectacular beauty and profound significance of those processions in that sacred space. At the height of its magnificence and power, Teotihuacán must truly have seemed the city of the gods that the Aztecs, its distant heirs, thought it had been. And Tlaloc, depicted in those murals in all his varying aspects, was chief among the gods of that painted city.
All that remains of that beauty and significance are the fragmentary murals,[148] but even in their present state they suggest the vitality of the spiritual thought embodied in them by their creators and their function as the "channel of communication" of that thought from the priests to the populace.[149] "Every wall is, as it were, a page out of a unique and splendid codex," which, were it intact, would "hold the key to the spiritual structure of Mesoamerica," according to Séjourné.[150] But unfortunately that "mural codex," as we might call it, is not intact. And even if it were, we would have great difficulty reading its images since they lack even the glyphic notations that accompany the images of the Maya. Lacking such explanatory glosses, we must try to understand the system underlying these images, their organizing principle, which alone can enable us to understand the relationship between them as the Teotihuacano would have, even though we can never hope to understand them in all the intricate detail meaningful only to the initiate. Interestingly, Kubler approaches the Teotihuacán mural codex in exactly this way.
Within each mural composition, a principal theme or figure is evident, enriched by associated figures and by meaningful frames suggesting a recital of the powers of the deity, together with petitions to be granted by the god. We can assume that the images of Teotihuacán designate complex liturgical comparisons, where powers, forces, and presences are evoked in metaphors and images.[ 151]
He suggests that these metaphors and images be grouped thematically to reveal their full significance, a principle that, when coupled with Pasztory's identification of specific images as central to the symbolization of particular gods, provides something like the key Séjourné mentions and indicates the extent to which the mask did function as the central metaphor in the thought of Teotihuacán. Thus, we can identify a particular mask that expresses symbolically the full range of "powers" associated with a specific god as the central image of the god and use it to understand the numerous variant forms that address particular aspects of that full range of power.
Each of the "gods" of Teotihuacán is thus really an elaborate system of god-masks in which each particular mask delineates an aspect of the supernatural continuum identified by the name of that god. The system that is each god is embodied visually in the series of variations of the central mask achieved through the permutation of several symbolic features through the range of their possible combinations, the archetypical Mesoamerican method of systematizing spiritual reality seen in its clearest form in the calendrical systems. Together, all of these variant forms must have been combined in the Teotihuacán imagination to form one mask, the true mask of the god, its essential form that could exist only in the mind—the embodiment within each human being of the world of
the spirit. Just as the multiplicity of being in the world of nature had its source in a spiritual unity and could only be fully understood in terms of that unity mysteriously existing in and through the multiplicity of the created world, so the mask of the god was imagined as a unity but depicted in all its variant forms in an attempt to capture in paint, stone, and ceramic the fullness of that elusive spiritual conception. The mask embodying the "central image" of the god was the closest actual image to the conception, which by its very nature could exist only in the minds of the seers of Teotihuacán.[152]
The first task facing anyone who would understand the Teotihuacán conception of Tlaloc, then, is the identification of a central image of the god in the art of that city. As we suggested above, Pasztory has identified that central mask by working backward from the masks we know were Tlaloc, those Aztec representations identified as such by the Spanish at the time of the Conquest. Following Hermann Beyer,[153] she selects as representative of the god those images of Tlaloc on page 27 of the Aztec-era Codex Borgia (colorplate 1), figures that have "goggled eyes and curving upper lips with fangs, who from one hand pour water from effigy vessels representing themselves and in the other hold an adze and a serpent representing lightning."[154] The images on this page of the codex serve nicely to identify the essential Tlaloc since they relate the god both to water and to the cyclical movement of time, a connection always fundamental to the rain god of the Valley of Mexico. There are five differently costumed Tlalocs, one in each corner and one in the center, which illustrate the Mesoamerican identification of time and space since, seen as a spatial image, they depict each of the four directions and the center. But seen as a temporal image, they depict each of the four points in the daily cycle of the sun and the center around which the sun symbolically moves (see p. 121). The temporal interpretation is further strengthened by the function of this page within the codex which, according to Seler, is to represent the quadripartite divisions of the 260-day sacred calendar and of the 52-year cycle[155] and thus to establish an order for the ritual life of the society. These images, then, in bringing together rain and the orderly passage of time, illustrate the Mesoamerican view of the essential order of the universe through which man's life was maintained and on which man's ritual life must be patterned. These are certainly among the most significant images of Tlaloc in Mesoamerican spiritual art, and we will return to them below in our discussion of the Aztec concept of the god.[156] It is therefore a remarkable, almost incredible, indication of the great significance of this particular image of the god that there are iconographically equivalent figures in the Teotihuacán murals painted a thousand years earlier and equally remarkable that actual effigy vessels, such as the vase we mentioned above from the Tzacualli phase, similar to those held by the Tlalocs of the murals and codices, appear continuously in the archeological record of the Valley of Mexico from the time of Teotihuacán to the Conquest.
If, at the height of Teotihuacán's glory a thousand years before Aztec priests were using the Codex Borgia's esoteric lore for divination and prophecy, we were to have wandered into the apartment compound of Tetitla not very far from the center of the city, we would have found that same image of the masked figure of Tlaloc painted on the lower register of an inner wall near the ceremonial patio of the complex containing the small pyramidal altar, or adoratorio. The image is still there today (colorplate 2a) although the painter, priests, and worshipers are gone, as are the beliefs that bound them together in their ritual activities in that sacred space. Séjourné, who directed the excavation of Tetitla, calls that image a Lightning Tlaloc[157] because it holds in its right hand an undulating spear prefiguring the lightning serpent of later times held by the Codex Borgia Tlalocs. Its left hand clutches an effigy urn with a mask identical to that of the figure holding it, an urn like those from which water pours in other Teotihuacàn images. Though the masks are the same, the headdress surmounting the mask on the urn differs from that of the figure holding it in being "a stylized year sign" made up of "a rectangular panel topped by a triangle between two volutes."[158] This clearly connects this Tlaloc symbolically with the orderly movement of time and, again, with the Codex Borgia Tlalocs as well as with other Aztec Tlalocs who often wear a similar headdress. The headdress worn by the figure holding the effigy vase is mostly gone now, but what remains suggests the plumed headdress with a rectangular headband often seen on Teotihuacàn figures related to fertility.
All of these features, however, find their true significance in the mask-face they frame, and the most striking feature of that mask is the mouth with its curving, pronounced upper lip reminiscent in its prominence and stylization of the Olmec were-jaguar. Under the lip, the gum protrudes and from it come five fangs, the two outer ones long and curving back, the three center ones shorter; that these are the fangs of the jaguar is made clear in the numerous depictions of jaguars with similar fangs in the mural art of Teotihuacàn. From beneath the fangs, in place of a tongue, emerges a stylized water lily with a flower bud on either side, a symbolic motif common in the art of the Maya and one that, by its trilobed form, suggests the bifurcated tongue of Cocijo, a tongue that is, in fact, found on other Teotihuacán images of Tlaloc which lack the water lily. While that tongue is clearly the tongue of the serpent, it is also depicted
in the art of Teotihuacán on the figures of jaguars, thereby suggesting again the symbolic relationship between those two creatures. Thus, the water lily and tongue motifs relate Tlaloc to the Olmec rain god in their jaguar connotations but also to his Maya and Zapotec analogs through the Maya water lily and Cocijo's serpent tongue.[159] On either side of and slightly above the mouth are the exaggerated ear flares composed of two concentric circles which are depicted on long, narrow ear coverings attached to the headdress, ear coverings similar to those worn by San Lorenzo Monument 52 (pl. 4), the Olmec Rain God CJ. Still higher than the ear flares and directly above the mouth are the typical goggle eyes of Tlaloc, with what is perhaps the suggestion of an actual eye within them. The "goggles" are also concentric circles and echo visually the ear flares as well as the eyes of the Cocijo mask.
This, then, is the central image of Tlaloc, identifiable by its symbolic reference to the essential powers of the god and to the rain gods of the other cultures to which it is related. It is significant that this particular mask, like many of the other Tlaloc masks in the art of Teotihuacán, has been stylized to the point of depicting only mouth, ears, and eyes—a stylization with enormous symbolic overtones regarding the interaction of the gods with the world of man and nature. Since each of the forms of which it is composed are found separately in the art of Teotihuacán, each of them must be seen as individually symbolic, and their combination in a single mask results in a symbolic statement that is, at least in one sense, the "sum" of those individual meanings. If one feature were changed, as we will show, the statement would be different. Significantly, each of those separate forms making up the mask represents one of the sensory organs through which human beings relate the external reality of nature to their own inner being and, conversely, in speech and through the expressions of mouth and eyes, communicate their own inner realities to the external world. These organs and the signs that represent them in the symbolic art of Teotihuacán refer directly, then, to that liminal point at which inner and outer, matter and spirit merge, a constant symbolic preoccupation of Mesoamerican art for which the mask is the primary metaphor and one often associated, as we have shown, with the rain god. In its stylization, then, the Tetitla Tlaloc serves also as a central image of the god by emphasizing the symbolic features of his mask. It is as close as human creativity can come to rendering "the thing itself," the true image of the god, the precise delineation of that particular meeting place of spirit and matter.
Thus, the centrality of this image of Tlaloc, like that of the Codex Borgia images, results from its bringing together symbolically all of the essential qualities of Tlaloc as we know them from the tradition in which he exists: his role as rain in the provision of sustenance, his role as lightning with its implications of the power of rulership, and his role as the driving force behind the orderly movement of time. But there are countless other images of Tlaloc in the art of Teotihuacán, and those other images are variants of this central one, each, no doubt, with its own precise meaning to the priesthood.[160]
A number of those other Tlaloc images are very closely related to the Tetitla Tlaloc. One of them (colorplate 2b) is crucially and centrally placed in the border between the upper and lower parts of the Tepantitla mural (colorplate 3), which we will discuss at length, and is virtually identical to the Tetitla Tlaloc, with one important difference: instead of holding an effigy urn in one hand and a lightning-spear in the other, this Tlaloc holds in both hands effigy urns from which water flows. This iconographic shift surely suggests a change of emphasis; the Tepantitla Tlaloc is concerned primarily with the provision of rain, an emphasis borne out by the mural as a whole, which is perhaps the most extensive and intricate treatment in Mesoamerican art of a ritual involving the provision of water by the world of the spirit to maintain human life on the terrestrial plane. In addition, a profile view of the same Tlaloc, this time a full standing figure, can be seen on a mural fragment now in a private collection.[161] Since the figure is facing left, the painting emphasizes the effigy urn held facing the viewer in its right hand, and in this painting, it is quite clear that the urn is meant to symbolize a container of rain since we see streams of water pouring from it. Still other images of this Tlaloc exist with varying headdresses and holding various symbolic items in mural fragments at Tetitla[162] and at Zacuala, one of them holding a corn plant in a configuration to be repeated until the time of the Aztecs.[163] Similar Tlalocs are found on ceramic figures and figurines,[164] on painted and molded vessels,[165] and on actual effigy vessels found with burials at Teotihuacán.[166]
While all of these Tlaloc masks have a mouth whose upper lip turns under the two elongated outer fangs to join the lower lip, there is another distinctive Tlaloc mouth treatment that seems visually to be derived from merging those two outer fangs with the upper lip, resulting in a lip that looks rather like a handlebar mustache and is not connected to the lower lip, a common feature of post-Teotihuacán Tlalocs and, in fact, much more like that on the Codex Borgia Tlalocs than is the lip of the Tetitla Tlaloc we and Pasztory see as the central image of Tlaloc at Teotihuacán.[167] From beneath that upper lip extends a row of three or four teeth or fangs, usually straight and of the same length. In some depictions of that mouth, an elongated bifurcated tongue, the tongue of the serpent, emerges beneath the fangs. The serpentine tongue in these images replaces the water lily extending from the mouth of the Tetitla Tlaloc, a substitu-
tion that is no doubt symbolically significant since we know of no Tlaloc image with both a tongue and a water lily. While the water lily seems clearly to relate to the god's provision of water since it is generally found in the context of symbolic allusions to rain, the meaning of the bifurcated tongue is more complex. Pasztory sees it as connected "with water and warfare and [sees] a possible relationship with a sacrificial warrior cult,"[168] primarily because it occurs in the border of a mural at the apartment compound of Atetelco containing warriors and a number of allusions to sacrifice, one of which is a jaguar with a bifurcated tongue, a speech scroll, and what is thought to be a representation of a bleeding human heart just outside its mouth. That this is related to sacrifice seems clear, even though the precise significance of the union of jaguar, serpent, and human heart is elusive.
The connection between the Tlaloc with the bifurcated tongue and sacrifice occurs in other contexts as well, though these contexts are not connected with warfare. That Tlaloc is clearly depicted, for example, on a tripod vessel found in Burial 2 at Zacuala[169] alternating with representations of Xipe, a figure also related fundamentally to human sacrifice, in this case, however, as it is related to fertility. The same mask is depicted on a fragment of another tripod vessel[170] alternating with temples on platforms depicted so as to emphasize the stairway and temple entrance, thereby suggesting the sacrificial ritual that in later times would have taken place in precisely that sacred context. Thus, it seems reasonable to relate the tongue to sacrifice on the basis of these examples since, as we have demonstrated above in our discussion of the mask of Cocijo, the serpent is symbolically related to sacrificial blood in later Mesoamerican art, as the massive Aztec Coatlicue created by the heirs of the spiritual thought of Teotihuacán so impressively demonstrates.[171] It seems likely, then, that the serpent-tongued Tlaloc mask is to be found in contexts associated with sacrificial fertility ritual, and as we have shown, this symbolic connection with sacrifice is but one of many connections between the snake and fertility which are ample reason for providing the god of rain with a serpent's tongue.
That alternation between the serpent's tongue and the water lily is symbolically significant, but even a casual glance at the metaphoric cluster of Tlaloc masks that define the god in the art of Teotihuacán will suggest that that is not the only symbolic variation of the configuration of the mouth of that mask. An interesting example of those variations and their possible meaning can be seen in a series of four different depictions of Tlaloc on almenas, or merlons, found in varying locations at Teotihuacán. Designed to line the edges of flat roofs in the manner of battlements, such merlons would have seemed to look down on the ritual activity taking place in the patios and plazas beneath them, seemingly an ideal placement for images of the rain god.
The most abstract of the four (pl. 16) is a stylized depiction of only the upper lip, fangs, and tongue of the mask, indicating clearly that that combination, in itself, had a significant symbolic meaning surely related to the mouth's function in expressing the "inner" reality of people and gods. This variant of the mouth has the "handlebar mustache" upper lip with four long fangs, all of them straight, projecting beneath it. A second version (pl. 17), which is somewhat more realistic but still quite stylized, depicts the face of Tlaloc within a starfish, one of many uses of marine life in conjunction with Tlaloc at Teotihuacán to suggest water. Though this mask also has the handlebar mustache upper lip and an exaggerated bifid tongue, the fangs differ from those on the first example; this Tlaloc has the two long, backward-curving outer fangs enclosing three shorter ones of the Tetitla Tlaloc. But it is interesting and perhaps significant that in an almost identical depiction of this same combination of starfish and Tlaloc in the border of a mural in the Palace of Jaguars,[172] the mask, in every other respect identical to this one, has the turned-under upper lip of the Tetitla Tlaloc.
And the mouth with the handlebar mustache upper lip also exists without the tongue, as can be seen on the other two merlons, perhaps the most
Pl. 16.
Stylized Tlaloc mouth, relief on a merlon, Teotihuacán
(Museo Nacional de Antropología, México).
Pl. 17.
The face of Tlaloc within a starfish, symbolic of water,
relief on a merlon, Quetzalpapálotl Palace, Teotihuacán
(Museo Nacional de Antropologia, México).
fascinating of which is the one now in the Teotihuacán museum (colorplate 4) which suggests the face of Tlaloc by displaying "goggles," ear flares, nose, and mouth on a flat surface. The handlebar mustache upper lip in this case has three long, tapering fangs reminiscent of those common in depictions of the rain god in the art of Veracruz. The lower border of the merlon might be meant to suggest a bifurcated tongue, but in place of the tongue is an unusual design suggesting vegetation, perhaps the cornstalk often associated with Tlaloc. Also depicted are the hands of the god, and from these hands drops of water fall to the world of man below, suggesting that this mask's combination of features refers to rain and fertility.
A fourth version of the mouth, somewhat more realistic still, is found on a merlon similarly displaying a headdress, goggle eyes, ear flares, and a beaded necklace (pl. 18). Though the mouth of this mask seems different from that of the preceding Tlaloc at first glance, it is essentially similar. In this version, the upper lip has become a bar, slightly raised at either end to suggest the upturned ends of the more elaborate upper lips, from which descend three short, stubby fangs, the central one straight, the outer two curved slightly back in what might be seen as a further stylization of the Tlaloc mouth. And the mouth of this Tlaloc has no suggestion of a tongue or vegetation symbol at all. That this extreme stylization of the upper lip is a significant one is suggested by the fact that it is found on both the Tepantitla and Ciudadela masks which we will examine below.
Pl. 18.
Tlaloc, relief on a merlon, Teotihuacán
(Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico).
These four Tlaloc masks carved on merlons, then, illustrate clearly the possibilities of variation in one of the features—the mouth—of the Tlaloc mask. The shape of the upper lip can be either turned under or curved up; the fangs, which can vary in number from three to seven, can be straight and of the same length or the two outer ones can be curved back and longer than the inner ones; and there can be a tongue or a water lily or nothing at all protruding from the mouth. A series of Tlaloc masks constructed through the permutation of the variations in each of these three features—lip, fangs, and tongue—through all their possible combinations would be very large, and when one adds the possible variations of eye and ear form, headdresses, costume, and paraphernalia, the number of possible variations of the Tlaloc mask becomes truly mind boggling. Of course, not all of these po-
tential Tlaloc masks exist in the fragmentary body of Teotihuacán art that now remains, but a significant number do, and certainly many more did exist. There are, then, many more masks of Tlaloc in the art of Teotihuacán than we can discuss here. But such a discussion, while interesting, is not necessary since the variation exemplified by the masks we have discussed, all of them clear examples of Tlaloc as almost all scholars would agree, reveals the underlying principle governing the construction and functioning of the mask and costume as vehicles of metaphorical communication in the art of Teotihuacán. Each of these potential masks formed by the permutation of symbolic features of Tlaloc is to be seen as an aspect of the unitary Tlaloc mask that could exist only in the spiritual imagination of the seers of Teotihuacán, an aspect created by combining particular features of the god to make a precise symbolic statement. Thus, it seems clear that if we are to come to an understanding of the spiritual thought of Teotihuacán, we must understand this fundamental principle by which that thought was formulated and communicated.
Such an understanding also enables us to establish the identity of a number of images that, while containing some of the features of the central Tlaloc mask, also contain others so unusual that scholars have not been able to agree as to the identity of the god being represented. The importance of establishing that identity can be seen in the fact that two of those masks are very significant symbolic aspects of the two most important and celebrated works of painting and sculpture at Teotihuacán: the Tlalocan patio mural at the apartment compound of Tepantitla and the frieze decorating the Temple of Quetzalcóatl in the Ciudadela. If we are to understand the complex symbolic meaning expressed by the interrelationship of a number of symbols in works such as these, we must understand first the masks and other symbols of which they are composed and then the symbolic meaning resulting from their combination. The individual masks, like themes in a symphony or characters in a novel, can be understood fully only in the context of the work as a whole. Perhaps because these particular masks were meant to function within such complex works, they are almost unique and therefore occupy a place at the outer limit of the continuum of masks created by varying the symbolic features of Tlaloc and have been difficult to interpret precisely for that reason.
As we have said, the key to resolving the difficulty lies in understanding the underlying principle by which the masks and the figures wearing them are constructed, and that principle is an extension of the method of varying individual symbolic features which accounts for the range of Tlaloc masks. The god we call Tlaloc was actually a series of variations of a central mask, a metaphoric cluster of god-masks, and there were, of course, other clusters of masks constructed in the same way to represent other gods. Just as each of the gods of Teotihuacán is actually a continuum of masks, so the complete system comprised of the totality of these god-masks is also a continuum as one god shades into another, creating the "secondary" masks we discuss below. This shading is accomplished in a variety of ways in the religious art of Mesoamerica, all of them involving the varying of symbolic details of mask and costume, and the two works of art we are now considering exemplify two of those ways.
The most complex of the two is the mural at Tepantitla. Found on the right half of the east wall of the "Tlalocan" patio, "the most sumptuously painted patio in all of Teotihuacán,"[173] this mural is really two related paintings, one above the other, framed and separated from each other by a highly symbolic decorative border. Restored and reconstructed by Villagra, whose copy of the reconstruction can be seen in the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City (colorplate 3), it is now the most complete one of six such formally similar but probably thematically different pairs that originally decorated the walls of the patio. When one looks at this pair of paintings, it is readily apparent that although the upper and lower paintings are quite different from one another, they are symbolically and visually unified by the images that form a central vertical axis for the composition as a whole.
But a casual glance would find more difference than similarity in them. The upper painting has a large central figure, either a god or an impersonator, wearing a mask and a headdress that displays a bird mask probably representing a quetzal. The figure is depicted frontally either atop or partially obscured by a base or temple platform containing a "mouth" from which streams of water are flowing. From behind the figure, seeming almost to grow from its headdress, rises a treelike form made up of entwined vines or streams of liquid. This central figure is flanked by two priests shown in profile who wear headdresses identical to that worn by the god and from whose hands flow streams of water. Behind the priests, plants, perhaps corn, grow from the streams of water flowing from the mouth in the base in front of or beneath the god. Visually, the "tree," the god, and the base, taken together, dominate the painting so completely that the overall impression is almost that of a painting of a single figure. The lower painting, however, has no such central figure but depicts a large number of small figures seemingly scattered at random over its surface. Although there is a central hill or mountain at the base of the painting containing a symbolic cave or mouth from which two streams of water flow, this painting does not concentrate the viewer's attention but rather diffuses it over the entire painted surface.
Different as the overall effect of the upper and
lower paintings is, a careful look reveals an important visual link between them as the mountain of the lower painting occurs directly underneath the central figure of the upper painting and repeats that figure's triangular form. Although the form of the god is visually more complex than that of the mountain, connecting the small triangle above the eyes of the god's headdress with the edges of the base allows one to realize the figure's essential triangularity. In addition, both the mountain and the god are a bluish gray, and both are depicted on an identical maroon ground. Furthermore, both contain a mouth or cave-shaped form from which flow waters that divide into two streams to form the baselines of their respective paintings. Thus, the repetition of the figure of the god by the upward-thrusting mountain of the lower painting provides a vertical emphasis counteracting the horizontal band created by the frame and bottom line of the upper painting which separates the two.
Strangely enough, however, the band that separates them provides visually the strongest evidence of their thematic connection, for in it, directly between the god of the upper painting and the mountain of the lower, is an image of Tlaloc (colorplate 2b) holding two vases from which flow the streams of water that make up the painting's frame. Virtually identical to the Tetitla Tlaloc, which we have identified as the central image of the god in the art of Teotihuacán, this Tlaloc functions almost as a title indicating the thematic significance of the mural, a theme repeated in the streams of liquid that make up the "tree" and symbolically flow from the hands of the priests in the upper painting and from the cave/mouths of both paintings; in the drops of water falling from the hands of the god and from the branches of the "tree"; and in the fact that the lower painting depicts the paradise of the rain god, the spiritual realm called Tlalocan by the Aztecs.[174]
Taking our cue from that centrally placed Tlaloc mask, when we look again at the vertical axis of the paintings, we see a virtual pillar of masks and mask parts, all of them variations on the theme announced by that central mask. Above the "tree" of the upper painting are two of the many profile views of the central Tlaloc mask which occur in the border framing the pictures.[175] Immediately below the "tree" is the goggle-eyed bird mask displayed in the headdress of the god, and immediately below that is the mask of the god represented by the central figure, a mask quite similar, except for the eyes, to the conventional Tlaloc mask. It is no doubt significant that while the bird mask in the headdress has the goggle eyes generally associated with Tlaloc, the mask of the god does not; or to put it another way, the two masks, taken together, display all of the individual characteristics of the mask of Tlaloc. Below the mask of the god, the mouth in the base in front of or below the god is depicted as an upper lip quite similar to the handlebar mustache upper lip characteristic of some Tlaloc masks, though not the masks of this painting. Directly beneath that mouth is the central image of Tlaloc in the frame, and this image holds two effigy vases that carry identical Tlaloc masks. Below that Tlaloc at the base of the painting is the cave/mouth of the mountain. If we include the two mouths as partial masks, there are nine symbolic masks in the vertical axis of the painting, all of them related in one way or another to the mask of Tlaloc. It is reasonable to conclude from this plethora of masks that Tlaloc provides the theme of the symbolic painting and that the variations on that theme enunciated by the variant masks serve to modify the thematic statement in order to communicate a specific spiritual reality related to the powers generally symbolized by the mask of Tlaloc.
In the light of that obvious thematic centrality of Tlaloc to the mural, it seems strange that the most dominant figure in the mural, the central depiction of the god in the upper painting, is not clearly an image of Tlaloc[176] although possessing some of that god's attributes. The mask worn by the god, like the Tlaloc mask below it but unlike the bird mask in its headdress, has a fanged mouth, ear flares, and eyes in the standard Tlaloc configuration. The Tlaloc theme is also suggested by the bifurcated tongue-like form representing streams of water which descends from the mouth—Tlaloc's serpentine tongue modified to harmonize with the numerous other representations of flowing water in the mural. These streams, like the ones below them in this painting and in the frame, contain starfish forms that, along with other representations of marine life, are linked elsewhere in the art of Teotihuacán to Tlaloc. The shape of the mouth of this mask is also related to other Tlaloc masks, but unlike the Tlaloc in the frame below whose mouth has an upper lip turned under the outer fangs, this mask has a variant of the handlebar mustache upper lip, a stylized version almost identical in shape to that worn by the Tlaloc on the last of the merlons we discussed above (pl. 18), but quite different from the mouth below it in the base. Slightly above the mouth on either side of the mask are the typical Tlaloc ear flares, each composed of two concentric circles.
But with the ear flares, the symbolic features that constitute the Tlaloc theme end. Slightly above these ear flares and directly over the mouth are a pair of eyes quite different from the goggle eyes of the typical Tlaloc mask. Somewhat smaller than Tlaloc's, these have circles representing the eyes framed by "concentric" diamonds on a horizontal band interspersed with vertical lines, giving the effect of a bar across the upper portion of the face rather than the twin circle image associated with Tlaloc. While this eye band is not at all typi-
cal of the Tlaloc mask, it is, as Séjourné points out, commonly seen as the decorative band on the braziers carried on the heads of images of the old fire god (pl. 19), known among the Aztecs as Huehuetéotl or Xiuhtecuhtli. Transplanted to the mask of Tlaloc, its purpose is clearly to link the attributes of that god to Tlaloc, a linkage supported by a number of other references to fire in the mural. The god wears what seems to be a "large yellow (fire-colored) wig"[177] and above that wig a headdress displaying a goggle-eyed bird mask also probably related to fire since an almost identical mask in four representations adorns an incensario found at La Ventilla which was no doubt used, as such incensarios typically were, to burn copal or other incense as an offering to the gods. And this bird mask is quite similar to the masks depicted both frontally and in profile on the columns of the Quetzalpapálotl Palace[178] whose relationship to the butterfly suggests a fundamental symbolic connection with fire. Thus, the masks in the upper painting seem to have as their primary purpose the connection of Tlaloc to Huehuetéotl and the unification of the seemingly opposed forces of fire and water.
That symbolic connection in the upper painting is particularly intriguing because the lower painting makes the same symbolic connection in an entirely different way. As we will demonstrate in our discussion in Part II of the relationship between the Mesoamerican perception of spatial order and the central metaphor of the mask, the cave/mountain image of the lower painting refers specifically to the cave underneath the nearby Pyramid of the Sun, a cave of enormous symbolic significance and almost certainly the scene of ritual reenactments of the coming of the rains. According to René Millon, "offerings of iridescent shell surrounded by an enormous quantity of tiny fish bones" were found in fire pits near the center of the cave, and the fires in which the fish and shell were burned as offerings were, "together with water made to flow artificially, the most essential part of" the cave's ritual, suggesting in several ways a symbolic "union of fire and water,"[179] precisely, of course, the union achieved in the mask of the upper painting. The common purpose of the two paintings thus is to depict the union of these opposed forces and to refer directly to the ritual through which man celebrated that unity. While the upper painting depicts a stylized ritual scene similar to those depicted in the later codices, many of which show priests wearing symbolic headdresses containing masks alongside a single masked god or god impersonator symbolizing the focal point of the ritual, the lower painting refers directly to the ritual use of the cave lying under the Pyramid of the Sun. It is fascinating to realize that the upper scene may well depict, relatively realistically, the ritual preceding the coming of the rains actually enacted at the mouth of that cave so long ago.
Pl. 19.
Huehuetéotl, stone brazier, Teotihuacán
(Museo Nacional de Antropologia, México).
It seems clear, then, that both paintings refer to the symbolic and ritual union of fire and water depicted metaphorically in the mask of the central figure of the upper painting. Séjourné suggests its meaning:
The dynamics of the union of two opposites is at the basis of all creation, spiritual as well as material. The body "buds and flowers" only when the spirit has been through the fire of sacrifice; in the same way the Earth gives fruit only when it is penetrated by solar heat, transmuted by rain. That is to say, the creative element is not either heat or water alone, but a balance between the two.[ 180]
And this union is also suggested by the lightning serpent often held by images of Tlaloc. In later Aztec mythic thought, that serpent was known as Xiuhcóatl and was intimately related to Xiuhtecuhtli, the god of fire. And Xiuhtecuhtli, of course, was the Aztec manifestation of the Teotihuacán fire god on whose brazier the diamond-shaped eyes of the god of the Tepantitla mural are found. Significantly, however, Xiuhtecuhtli was also associated with the calendar. He was "lord of the year" and "the god of the center position in relation to the four cardinal points of the compass,"[181] a position with important calendrical implications as we have suggested above in connection with the Codex Borgia Tlalocs. Thus, the relationship of fire and water in the mask at Tepantitla has metaphoric implications regarding both fertility and
time, and a moment's thought suggests the relationship of those two concepts in the ritual ensuring the regular coming of the rains.
A related symbolic suggestion can be seen in the presence of great numbers of butterflies in both the upper border and the lower painting. In the art of Teotihuacán, "this brilliant insect is fire,"[182] and throughout Mesoamerica fire was the symbol par excellence of transformation. It is therefore no surprise to find symbolic references to butterflies on the incensarios of Teotihuacán or to see butterflies related to Tlaloc, since for the peoples of Mesoamerica it was through the process of transformation that the world of the spirit entered into the contingent world of man, creating and sustaining life as we know it. Metaphorically, Tlaloc became rain, exemplifying the manner in which the gods transformed spirit, that is, themselves, into matter, and fire allowed man to reciprocate by transforming matter into spirit. The fire "dematerialized" the substance of the offering and allowed its essence to return to the realm of spirit from which it came, a process that reversed and thus completed the provision of sustenance for the world of man by the world of the spirit. This ritual burning sent clouds of smoke into the air, reenacting the coming of the rain clouds which would initiate another cycle of the endless process in which life was constantly poised between creation and destruction.
That the relationship between these two concepts is metaphorically expressed most precisely and economically in the construction of the mask of the central figure makes clear the reason for the departure from the conventional mask of Tlaloc by the creators of this mural. The principle underlying the construction of the mask is basically the same as the principle by which the individual masks of Tlaloc are constructed, but in this case, it is used to create a continuum of gods by combining their symbolic features. This mask illustrates the fact that the gods were not seen as precisely defined individual entities but shaded into one another as they reached the "limits" of the particular areas of spiritual concern for which they stood as symbols.
Another significant and quite unusual Tlaloc mask exemplifying the same underlying structural principle indicates that the Tepantitla mural is typical rather than a unique case. This Tlaloc is found on the decorative frieze of the pyramidal Temple of Quetzalcóatl in the centrally located compound the Spanish called the Ciudadela. The frieze (pl. 20), which originally covered the pyramid's surface, is described by Nicholson as "one of the greatest tours de force of monumental stone sculpture in world history." He sees in its "powerful, massive" carving "the essential qualities of the classic Teotihuacán sculptural style."[183] Those superlatives suggest the significance of the frieze, as does the striking thematic unity of its symbolic reliefs, which are divided into six bands, one on each of the pyramid's six levels. Each of these bands has two registers, the lower one on a sloping talud and the upper one on a vertical tablero. Unlike the talud and tablero of the Tepantitla mural, however, these two registers are fundamentally similar as both of them depict the undulating bodies of rattlesnakes. While the talud displays only the snake, on the tablero's undulating serpent are superimposed alternating full-round composite masks of plumed serpents and, strangely in the midst of all of these serpents, Tlalocs. Not only do the composite masks of Tlaloc seem out of place in this serpentine context but their abstract, geometric, "flat" appearance seems designed to call attention to their difference from the naturalistic masks of the plumed serpent which project from the frieze. And, as if to call further attention to the Tlaloc theme, depicted within the sinuous undulations of the serpents' bodies are seashells realistic enough "to permit precise zoological identification."[184]
Although these Tlaloc masks were obviously designed to bring that god immediately to mind, they are quite different from the central image of Tlaloc at Teotihuacán. Viewed frontally, they look like Tlaloc because they present exactly the configuration of shapes found on other masks of the rain god. The upper portion of the mask contains two pairs of concentric circles arranged in the same format as Tlaloc's goggle eyes and ear flares. Below those circles is a projecting horizontal bar, somewhat reminiscent of the highly stylized handlebar mustache upper lip, with two fangs projecting downward from its outer edges. And underneath this projection, on the same plane as the concentric circles, another upper lip appears also in the form of a horizontal bar from which project four curving fangs in a clear variant of the Tlaloc mouth. Obvious as the reference to Tlaloc is, however, the differences between this mask and the typical Tlaloc are equally striking. A second glance reveals, for example, that the "goggle eyes" are not eyes at all. The concentric circles in the position normally assigned to the ear flares are actually the eyes of the mask, and the circles above them which would normally be eyes are merely decorative embellishments placed over the skin of the forehead, the unusual texture of which can be seen within them. The mouth, too, is strange as it is actually two mouths, one superimposed on the other in the manner of a buccal mask. As in the case of the Tepantitla mask, then, we have a Tlaloc modified thematically to contribute to the symbolic statement of a complex work of art.
The point of the modifications is quite clear from a profile view of the Tlaloc mask and even clearer when one includes in that view a profile of the plumed serpent mask next to it (pl. 20) which reveals the striking fact that the eyes and eyebrows of the two masks are quite unusual and virtually identical. Both have an identically shaped round
Pl. 20.
Profile views of Tlaloc and Plumed Serpent heads on the frieze of the facade of the Ciudadela,
Teotihuacán and Plumed Serpent heads lining the stairway.
"goggle" around each eye surmounted by a large, seemingly scaly eyebrow that drops down on the outside of the eye and then sweeps back along the side of the mask to form a spiral. The similarity in the eye treatment allows one to see a similarity in the shapes of the projecting mouths although they are far from identical. In profile, then, these two masks, which seem completely different from one another when viewed from the front, are actually two versions of the same thing,[185] making clear the reason for the change in position of this Tlaloc's eyes. Through the sophisticated manipulation of frontal and profile views, the creator of the frieze was able to connect Tlaloc with the plumed serpent, known in later times as Quetzalcóatl, in order to make a complex symbolic statement that unites those two god-masks to present a larger spiritual reality; the seemingly separate gods must be seen as parts of a continuum, precisely as we saw the gods of the Tepantitla mural, although the symbolic depictions of the relationship are achieved in somewhat different ways in the two works of art. But here Tlaloc's position vis-à-vis the other god is reversed. Despite the obvious importance of Tlaloc at Teotihuacán, the serpent symbolism of the frieze as well as the plumed serpent heads that line the stairway ramps suggest that the rain god here is subordinate to the theme announced by the plumed serpent.
And what is that theme? The most obvious answer is fertility. The undulating serpent bodies, the seashells, and the masks themselves all combine to suggest that the crops that sustain man's life are themselves nourished by the water provided by the gods. In addition to the fundamental fertility associations of Quetzalcóatl and Tlaloc, vegetation is suggested both by the unusual texture of the Tlaloc mask which may well suggest corn, perhaps the reason for H. B. Nicholson's suggestion that it "may be a Teotihuacán version of a Monte Albán maize deity,"[186] and the peculiarly leaflike plumes of the serpent. In addition, a frontal view of the plumed serpent masks emphasizes the fertility-related bifurcated tongue and the jaguarlike pug nose that is depicted as an inversion of the form of the tongue. Emphasized by being framed between these two potent symbols and the front fangs on either side is the circular hole of the mouth. Such a strange emphasis on the mouth opening may well be related to the later Ehécatl, an aspect of the feathered serpent, Quetzalcóatl, who blew the winds that cleared the roads for the coming of the rain through his buccal birdmask. Mythically, Tlaloc and Ehécatl working in tandem provided man's
sustenance, and it is therefore tempting to relate this plumed serpent to that later aspect of Quetzalcóatl. From that point of view, we could see the frieze as symbolically relating two opposed forces, as did the Tepantitla mural, from the union of which comes fertility and human life. Such an interpretation is tempting precisely because it reflects the paradigmatic Mesoamerican conception of the cycle of life.
But there is another symbolic suggestion here as well, for the serpent is also the quintessential Mesoamerican symbol for sacrificial blood, and these two quite different serpent-related masks superimposed on the serpent bodies may well symbolize another unity born of the merging of opposites. Tlaloc as metaphor for the rain and the plumed serpent as metaphor here for sacrificial blood suggest the cyclical process through which life is maintained: in return for the provision of the life-giving rain by the gods, man must provide the sacrificial blood that metaphorically nourishes the gods. It is significant in this regard that atop the pyramid, "a layer of human bones beneath a layer of seashells was discovered,[187] and "shells and numerous vessels representing the water deity," the urns in which the Tlaloc of myth stored the rain, were found in burials at the base of the stairway.[188] Such an interpretation would make sense of the numerous references to fertility in the frieze and to the obvious "double meaning" of the serpents' undulating bodies.
To return for a moment to the mural at Tepantitla, not very far from the Ciudadela, it is interesting to note that despite its utterly different appearance from the Ciudadela frieze, there are remarkable and perhaps significant similarities between them. Séjourné's description of the "frame" of the mural suggests one of them. "This charming image of creation," she says, "is enclosed in a rectangle formed by two serpents intertwined and covered with signs of water and heads of Tlaloc."[189] The intertwined serpents are distinguished from each other by being different colors and thus, for Séjourné, represent different elemental forces. Similarly, the two streams that make up the "tree" rising behind the central figure of the upper painting are different colors and intertwined in such a way as to make obvious the intention to depict a union of opposites. Thus, the mural, in a manner remarkably similar to that of the frieze, depicts fertility flowing from the symbolic merging of opposed elemental forces, and the red color of one of the streams of the tree may well be a reference to the sacrificial blood by which man reciprocates for the gift of the gods.
Such an interpretation of the two works of art would place them both at the liminal meeting point of the realms of spirit and matter, that point in ritual and art where man touches god. In ritual and through art, man is able to function momentarily on the level of god and thus to bring into his world the spiritual essence of life. Significantly, both the placement of the Temple of Quetzalcóatl within the compound of the Ciudadela and the decoration of the pyramid further develop that symbolism of the meeting place of spirit and matter. Situated facing the courtyard of the Ciudadela, the positive upward thrust of the pyramid balances the negative "sunken" space of the court, a balancing repeated in the configuration of the Pyramid of the Moon and its plaza and surely the symbolic equivalent of the combination of cave and pyramid at the nearby Pyramid of the Sun. In each of these cases, the emphasis on the penetration into the upper and lower realms of the spirit defines man's position in the world of nature. As if to emphasize that theme, the stairway that led to the temple divides the face of the pyramid fronting the courtyard. The ramps on either side of that stairway are lined with plumed serpent heads like those on the frieze indicating the dedication of the temple to Quetzalcóatl and prefiguring the symbolic use of serpents to flank temple doorways and pyramid stairways elsewhere at Teotihuacán as well as by the later cultures of the Valley of Mexico. This use of the serpent to define the liminal meeting place of spirit and matter coincides with the serpent symbolism associated with blood sacrifice since it was up these pyramid stairways, after all, that the sacrificial victim made his way to the temple where his spirit was freed by the act of sacrifice to return to its home and his body, now merely matter, released to tumble back down that same stairway to be reunited with the earth.
This symbolic concern with the meeting point of spirit and matter is further indicated by the location of the Temple of Quetzalcóatl within the compound of the Ciudadela, a compound that, as we will show in our discussion of the Mesoamerican perception of the sacred spatial order, stands at the central point of the grid system according to which Teotihuacán was laid out, at the intersection of the main east-west avenue and the Avenue of the Dead, which runs north and south. The Ciudadela thus marks the ultimate union of opposites by defining the center point of the quincunx formed by these two avenues, a quincunx that by its replication of the four-part figure symbolizing the sacred "shape" of space and time defines the ultimately sacred nature of the city. The central point of this quincunx would have been seen as the symbolic center of the universe, the point at which the vertical axis of the world of the spirit, symbolized here by the Via Sacra of the Avenue of the Dead, met the horizontal axis of the natural world, the east-west avenue in this case. That central point naturally would have been, as Millon believes the Ciudadela was, the "sacred setting" for the city's political center, which was, in fact and in the minds of its rulers, the center from which the influence of Teotihuacán radiated to every corner
of the known world. And for the same reason it was "the setting for the celebration of elaborate calendrical rituals" probably led by rulers seen as "the embodiment of the religion of Teotihuacán" since "the Teotihuacán polity was undoubtedly sacralized."[190] The Ciudadela was symbolically the very center, both spiritually and physically, of Teotihuacán.
We must conclude, then, that fertility was not the only issue of this symbolic meeting of man with god. As we might expect from the intimate relationship between the god of rain and the symbolism of rulership in the art of the Olmec "mother culture" as well as in the roughly contemporary Zapotec art of Monte Albán, the Tlaloc masks in this central place suggest the provision by the gods of divinely ordained rulers as well as man's sustenance. It is significant in this regard that the composite masks of Quetzalcóatl as well as those of Tlaloc both have jaguar characteristics as the symbolism of the jaguar was intimately related to rulership by both the Olmecs and the Zapotecs. But both of these masks have serpent characteristics as well, and the serpent, especially the plumed serpent, has strong connections in later Mesoamerican symbolism with rulership, a symbolism often expressed in the metaphoric connection of the serpent and lightning. We saw precisely this relationship in the art of the Zapotecs, and the Tetitla Tlaloc with his lightning spear shaped as an undulating serpent indicates that the same connection was perceived at Teotihuacán. By the time of the Toltecs, in fact, the plumed serpent is thought to have supplanted the jaguar as the symbol of kingship, and Quetzalcóatl's fertility symbolism had been relegated to Ehécatl.
But at Teotihuacán, Tlaloc was still the divine force from which the earthly ruler drew his mandate. Wigberto Jiménez Moreno characterizes what we would also see as the legitimizing role of the Teotihuacán Tlaloc nicely. He sees the ruler's authority as
deriving from the fact that he personified the god of lightning and rain, Tlaloc-Quetzalcóatl. Indeed, one source tells us that Tlaloc was a lord of the quinametin, the "giants" whom I have identified (1945) with the Teotihuacanos. This could be understood to mean that the most venerated god in the Teotihuacán culture was personified by the ruler-priest, who would appear as Tlaloc's living image.[191]
Given the Ciudadela's symbolic identity as the center of the universe and its actual role as the locus of sacralized political power at Teotihuacán, it is to be expected that the art of that compound would symbolize the divine basis of what we today call secular power. And the burials with seashells were probably related to the ritual involving the accession of a new human wielder of that essentially divine power, a man within whom the later Aztecs would say the god would "hide himself." It would be hard to imagine a better metaphor for that relationship than the shells, which had the virtue of suggesting fertility as well.
Ultimately, then, the masks of the frieze of the Temple of Quetzalcóatl symbolize the relationship between the realm of the spirit and the world of man and suggest that life is made possible in this world through the continuous intervention of that other realm. In the final analysis, what is provided is order, the order of civilized life made possible by agricultural fertility and symbolized by and inherent in the ruler; the spatial order derived from the central point "of ontological transition between the supernatural world and the world of men," a point symbolized at Teotihuacán by "the Temple of Quetzalcóatl [which] probably functioned not only as the opening toward the supernatural world of the vertical, but also as the pivot of the horizontal sociopolitical cosmos";[192] and the temporal order symbolized by the compound of the Ciudadela itself. According to Kubler, "the three groups of four secondary platforms surrounding the main pyramid in the principal court recall the calendrical division of the Middle American cycle of fiftytwo years into four parts of thirteen years each,"[193] a division that, according to Seler, is one of the primary concerns of the page on which the Codex Borgia Tlalocs are depicted.[194] In addition, within the boundary marked by these platforms, the courtyard facing the pyramid "was probably used for rituals of a calendrical nature."[195] The calendrical significance of the pyramid itself is suggested by the widely held view that it originally displayed from 360 to 366 composite masks, numbers of clear calendrical significance and a fact that would link it to the Pyramid of the Niches at El Tajín as a calendrically symbolic structure. It is quite significant from our point of view that all of these connections between the Ciudadela and the temporal order find their primary symbol in the composite mask of Tlaloc. As Roman Piña-Chan points out, "this deity can be considered the Lord of Time, of the annual cycle which nourishes vegetation and life, on the basis of the interwoven triangle and rectangle, the symbol of the year, in his headdress."[196]
Thus, it all comes together in the mask. The composite masks of Tlaloc and Quetzalcóatl on the frieze carry in their symbolism all of the meanings elaborated by the other symbols on the frieze and by the compound's structures, ritual use, design, and siting. What Henri Stierlin says of the masks of Tlaloc here can surely be extended to encompass the metaphoric construction of all the masks of the gods by the "learned clerics" of Teotihuacán:
The abstract nature of the representational modes resulted in what can only be called graphic symbols that are replete with significance for those who beheld them. In this sense it was the expression of a sacerdotal body, the
reflection of a caste of learned clerics concerned with elaborating the concepts of a pantheon in which the forces of the universe are personified.[197]
These graphic symbols recorded the speculative thought of that sacerdotal body, "a well-integrated cosmic vision" that Jiménez Moreno has likened in its sophistication to the Summa of Saint Thomas, expressing "a religious doctrine and a very coherent and harmonious philosophy [capable of] fostering the architectural, sculptural, and pictorial creations."[198] And as we have seen, the mask, especially the mask of the rain god we call Tlaloc, served as the central symbol in the elaboration and expression of that profound body of spiritual thought.
We do not know the name of Teotihuacán's Saint Thomas or, more appropriately, Aristotle or Plato, nor even the language he spoke, but the evidence compels us to acknowledge the existence of such seminal thinkers there and allows us to savor the subtlety and originality of the small portion of their thought we are able to know. The evidence we have examined here, the complex multivocality of the symbolic mask of Tlaloc, is clearly but a small part of the profound body of thought characteristic of that highly developed society, which
was unquestionably the preeminent ritual center of its time in Mesoamerica. It seems to have been the most important center of trade and to have had the most important marketplace. It was the largest and most highly differentiated craft center. In size, numbers, and density, it was the greatest urban center and perhaps the most complexly stratified society of its time in Mesoamerica. It was the seat of an increasingly powerful state that appears to have extended its domination over wider and wider areas. . . . Indeed, it appears to have been the most highly urbanized center of its time in the New World.[199]
The Mask As Metaphor
Tlaloc from the Fall of Teotihuacán to Tenochtitlán
What happened to the speculative thought of Teotihuacán during the decline and after the fall in A.D. 750? Evidence of philosophical activity is difficult to detect archaeologically under the best of circumstances, and the widespread social, political, and military chaos that must have resulted has left little record for the archaeologists. Consequently, our understanding of that period is as murky as our understanding of the reasons for the fall of such a mighty society. But in the limited area of our concern with the development of the mask of the rain god, one thing is absolutely clear: Tlaloc survived, essentially unchanged, the fall of the culture that conceived him. Whether that survival was owing to the survival of the priestly tradition of Teotihuacán among those who found refuge elsewhere or to the use of Teotihuacán's symbols by newcomers on the scene eager to legitimize their own power by association with the fallen grandeur of Teotihuacán is uncertain. But whatever the historical process that brought it about, the development of the rain god of the Valley of Mexico followed precisely the same course as the parallel development of Cocijo in the Valley of Oaxaca, although the cataclysmic social changes of the Valley of Mexico have no real parallel in Oaxaca. Fixed in form and meaning early in the Classic period, the symbol system of Tlaloc, like that of Cocijo, remained essentially unchanged.
That stability is remarkable in view of the developments in the Valley of Mexico which brought influences from all over Mesoamerica to bear on the area. According to Diehl, the vacuum created by the fall of Teotihuacán "was soon filled by at least two, and possibly four, centers" in and on the periphery of the valley. Tula and Cholula were most involved, with Tula ultimately gaining the ascendancy, but Xochicalco and El Tajín, as well as Cacaxtla, "reached their highest developments at this time" and played a role in the politics of the region which is not yet clearly understood.[200] That it was a time of ferment is indicated archaeologically by the fact that "these centers ... seem to combine architectural and artistic forms drawn from both highland and lowland Mesoamerica."[201]
At Xochicalco, for example, the pottery recovered archaeologically suggests that it was "the northwestern frontier outpost for a Maya cultural tradition"[202] while "the sculptural style . . . is clearly linked to Teotihuacán, on the one hand, and to Monte Albán, on the other. It also is obviously connected with the 'Ñuiñe' tradition of northern Oaxaca-southern Puebla"[203] associated with the Mixtecs. This sculptural tradition is best represented in two examples from the site. Perhaps best known and certainly the most impressive is the decorative frieze on the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent, a frieze depicting undulating feathered serpents within whose coils are interspersed seashells and seated priests wearing feathered serpent headdresses. Although in appearance it is quite different from the frieze on the Temple of Quetzalcóatl at Teotihuacán, the iconographic similarities are unmistakable. It is significant, however, that here the feathered serpent does not share the frieze with Tlaloc.
But Tlaloc does appear in the other well-known example of Xochicalco art. In 1961, three stelae that had been ritually broken and interred under the floor of a temple were discovered. Covered on all four surfaces by symbolic motifs and glyphs, each of them has a central face on the front surface. Two of the three depict a face emerging from the
mouth of a jaguar or serpent mask, a mask that, with its bifurcated tongue and that same motif inverted to form nostrils, looks very much like the frontal view of the feathered serpent masks on the Temple of Quetzalcóatl at Teotihuacán. These faces have been widely interpreted as Quetzalcóatl, but the four short teeth with outcurving fangs on either side in the mouth of the mask above the emerging face are those of Tlaloc, as is proven by the other stela, Stela 2 (pl. 21), which displays the mask of Tlaloc, with the same teeth, in its center. This Tlaloc is remarkably similar to the central image of Tlaloc at Teotihuacán in its mouth and teeth, its goggle eyes, and the water lily dangling from its mouth. Like the Tlaloc mask found on urns at Teotihuacán, this mask wears a year-sign headdress, a motif repeated twice on the rear of the stela, and in the only significant difference from the Teotihuacán images, has a pendant dangling from the center of each circular ear flare. To carry the similarity to Teotihuacán a step further, immediately beneath this Tlaloc mask on the lower third of the stela is a representation of the Tlaloc mouth virtually identical to that on the first of the Teotihuacán merlons discussed above (pl. 16). Though this stela, like the other two, "bears columns of glyphs pertaining to names, places, motions, and dates, reminiscent both of Classic Maya and Monte Albán inscriptions,"[204] the Tlaloc it displays as its raison d'être is the Tlaloc of Teotihuacán.[205]
Pl. 21.
Stela 2, Xochicalco (Museo Nacional de Antropologia, México).
Tlaloc appears in a similar way at the most recently recognized late Classic period site in the region, the fortified, mountaintop center of Cacaxtla celebrated for its two groups of mural paintings discovered in 1975 which are a striking mixture of the styles of Xochicalco, Teotihuacán, Veracruz, and the Maya.[206] One of these two groups is composed of the four murals found in Structure A, each a large painting of a single human figure wearing an animal or bird costume, and in each case the head of the human figure emerges from the open mouth of the animal or bird, a motif we will explore at length in the discussion of the ritual use of the mask. Of particular interest to us at this point is the painting on the north door jamb (pl. 22) of a figure iconographically similar to the Teotihuacán Tlaloc. The man depicted either wears a jaguar costume or is emerging from the open mouth of a jaguar, an ambiguity that results from the fact that the hands and feet of the figure are the paws of a jaguar rather than the human hands and feet customarily depicted when human beings wear costumes in Mesoamerican art. The jaguar head from which the human head emerges itself wears a headdress composed of the upper jaw and head of a saurian creature iconographically similar to the headdress worn by the Sowing Priests at Teotihuacán (pl. 38). The most striking connection with Teotihuacán, however, is that the figure holds a stylized serpent in one hand and clutches a Tlaloc effigy urn from which water flows under the other arm—exactly the accoutrements of the earlier Lightning Tlaloc at Teotihuacán (colorplate 2a) and of the later Codex Borgia Tlalocs (colorplate 1). But the figure could hardly appear less similar to those figures. Stylistically, it is Maya, strongly recalling the figures of Bonampak in its realistic features, graceful pose, and curvilinear style.[207] And its most striking symbolic feature, clearly related to fertility, has no counterpart at Teotihuacán; this is what seems to be a flowering vine springing from the abdomen of the figure rendered in a style reminiscent of the interlocking scrollwork characteristic of El Tajin. Whether this standing figure with all its fertility symbolism is meant to represent Tlaloc or to connect the representation of a ruler with the legitimizing symbols of that god as Pasztory and Donald McVicker argue,[208] the fact re-
Pl. 22.
"Tlaloc," mural painting, Cacaxtla. mains that the Teotihuacán Tlaloc depicted
on the typical urn continues its symbolic existence at Cacaxtla.
mains that the Teotihuacán Tlaloc depicted on the typical urn continues its symbolic existence at Cacaxtla
The case for the continuity of Tlaloc at Cholula is different since no major painting or sculpture depicting the god has yet been discovered there. It is generally felt, however, that the distinctive art style of the Postclassic period known as the Mixteca-Puebla either originated at or developed in conjunction with Cholula,[209] and most of the art of Postclassic central Mexico falls within what H. B. Nicholson, in discussing Aztec sculpture, calls "a broadly conceived Mixteca-Puebla stylistic universe,"[210] a style particularly associated with the art in which the Postclassic Mixtecs recorded their spiritual thought. In terms of our concern with Tlaloc, it is significant that although the Mixtecs were primarily located in Oaxaca, their rain god was not the Cocijo of the Zapotecs but was called "Zaaguy or Zavui (literally, 'rain')"[211] and depicted in images identical to Tlaloc. Although Mixtec scholars insist that there are significant differences between Mixtec spiritual thought and that of the Valley of Mexico,[212] the images through which that thought is expressed are virtually the same as are at least some of the meanings.
In the light of the connection between Tlaloc and rulership, Mary Elizabeth Smith's comments on the Mixtec codex known as the Vienna obverse are significant:
The deity motif that occurs most frequently in the names of persons who are historical and neither priests nor mythological personages is the rain deity known in Nahuatl as Tlaloc and in Mixtec as Dzavui. This deity is part of the names of 56 different rulers in the Mixtec genealogies. The prevalence of the rain deity motif in Mixtec names is not surprising because the Mixtec people call themselves in their own language ñuu dzavui, or "the people of the rain deity. "[213]
Her comment makes clear the reason for the abundance of similar images of the rain god in Mixtec art-in the other codices, on small greenstone figurines known as peñates (pl. 23), and on ceramic incense burners and xantiles.[214] In fact, the rain god is so fundamental to the art of the Mixtecs that Covarrubias sees the motif of the mouth and goggle eye in profile as a basic ideographic and decorative element.[215] Although "the most challenging problem connected with Mixteca-Puebla is still that of the precise time and place of its emergence as a clearly recognizable stylistic-iconographic tradition,"[216] it seems likely that Cholula was directly involved and was responsible for the movement of Teotihuacán's Tlaloc to Oaxaca under the name of Zavui.
Important as Xochicalco, Cacaxtla, and Cholula are to the later development of Tlaloc, the artists
Pl. 23.
Tlaloc, Mixtec peñate
(Museo Nacional de Antropologia, México).
and thinkers most directly responsible for the transmission of the Teotihuacán Tlaloc to the Aztec culture that dominated the Valley of Mexico at the time of the Conquest were the Toltecs of Tula. The chain of events that led to their assumption of the mantle of Teotihuacán in the Valley of Mexico is not clearly understood but probably involves the migration to Tula of groups carrying the culture of Teotihuacán.
They are referred to as wisemen, leaders, priests, merchants, and craftsmen; in other words, bearers of the Mesoamerican elite tradition. The sources indicate that they spoke Náhuatl, Popolaca, Mixtec, Mazatec, and Maya. This linguistic diversity suggests that they were not a single ethnic group but rather "civilized people" who migrated to Tula . . . when their home communities declined in power and importance.. . . . The prosperity they helped to create attracted more migrants and Tula soon became the New Teotihuacán .[217]
And as Diehl's summary of developments suggests, the symbolism of this New Teotihuacán was the one associated with the original Teotihuacán. While much has been made of the dominant symbolic role at Tula of Quetzalcóatl,[218] scant attention has been paid to the numerous images of the mask of Tlaloc there. This is strange since Tlaloc was of major importance at Teotihuacán, the source of the Toltec heritage, and, as Pasztory points out, "the god most frequently represented in Aztec art,"[219] the ultimate beneficiary of that heritage. And as we would expect, the evidence of Toltec art shows that the mask of Tlaloc was important at Tula. The recent excavations at that site directed by Diehl, for example, unearthed a small temple whose associated artifacts indicate that it was "devoted to the Tlaloc cult." Located near a large temple mound in the residential Canal Locality, the small Tlaloc temple would seem to have little relevance to Tlaloc's fertility associations, but Diehl suggests that the residential area may have been inhabited by priests who served the large temple and that the smaller Tlaloc temple may have been "a personal shrine for worship of their own tutelary god."[220] If so, Tlaloc survived at Tula in a privileged position and continued to demonstrate the connections with the priesthood he had at Teotihuacán due to his role in the provision of the order necessary for the maintenance of civilized life.
This supposition might suggest a reexamination of one of the better-known symbolic artworks at Tula. The frieze on the pyramid called the Temple of Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, the aspect of Quetzalcóatl related to Venus as morning star, contains among other relief carvings a number of depictions of a face emerging from the open jaws of what appears to be a jaguar with a plumed headdress, the teeth of Tlaloc, and a bifurcated tongue (pl. 24). The emerging face consists only of goggle eyes, circular ear flares, and a large nose from which hangs a decorative pendant covering the mouth. The eyes and ears are those of the Teotihuacán Tlaloc, and the pendant is identical to those commonly seen in the art of Teotihuacán, especially on braziers, which are generally identified as butterflies. If this mask were found at Teotihuacán, it would be identified immediately as Tlaloc wearing a butterfly nose pendant. Strangely, however, at Tula it is seen as "Quetzalcóatl in the guise of Venus the Morning Star"[221] or, even more strangely, as "Quetzalcóatl in the guise of Tlaloc emerging from the jaws of a plumed serpent."[222] One suspects that such identifications are the result of the importance Quetzalcóatl is presumed to have had at Tula rather than an examination of the details of the relief. A similar Tlaloc can be seen in the headdress of a warrior depicted on a stela now in the Tula museum, and this one is surely Tlaloc since he wears no pendant covering his mouth, the mouth of Tlaloc. And should there be any doubt about the importance of Tlaloc, the numerous effigy urns, braziers, and figurines bearing his mask at Tula, the New Teotihuacán, would surely lay that doubt to rest.
Thus, even a brief consideration of the images of the mask of Tlaloc created outside of Teotihuacán during the decline and after the fall of that great city demonstrates that that god continued to be of fundamental symbolic importance in the area. In speaking of the relative importance at this time of Tlaloc vis-à-vis Quetzalcóatl, Davies says,
one should not exaggerate the degree to which Tlaloc suffered a decline. He still figures quite prominently in Xochicalco and even in Chichén Itzá; moreover it is Tlaloc rather than Quetzalcóatl who prevails in the designs of Plumbate pottery, the great trade ware of the Early Postclassic era.[223]
This type of pottery is generally associated with elites and ritual. The manifestations of Tlaloc in the lengthy period between the decline and fall of Teotihuacán and the rise to preeminence in the Valley of Mexico of Aztec Tenochtitlán are often associated with the art of the ruling class as well as with that of the farmers whose crops depended on the fertility associated with Tlaloc. The simple figurines, urns, and braziers were no doubt used in fertility ritual, but the stela at Xochicalco, the mural at Cacaxtla, the relief at Tula, and the plumbate pottery throughout the region served a different function. And that function of the mask of Tlaloc continued with even greater importance at Tenochtitlán, for in the Aztec capital Tlaloc shared the temple atop the Templo Mayor, the central temple of the ceremonial center of the city, with Huitzilopochtli, the tutelary god of the Aztecs.
Although the documentary sources dating to the
Pl. 24
The face of Tlaloc emerging from a jaguar's mouth wearing a butterfly nose pendant, relief on Pyramid B, Tula.
time of the Conquest stress the importance of Huitzilopochtli, the recent excavations at the Templo Mayor tell a different story.
A quick review of the materials found in the Templo Mayor offerings forces us to see the importance of the god Tlaloc, present in stone masks, stone figurines, and pottery . . . [and symbolically alluded to by] a great quantity and variety of biological remains such as snails, shells, coral, fish, birds, turtles coming from both coasts. Moreover, there are symbols associated with the god, such as the presence of canoes and stone serpents. One can affirm without doubt that the vast majority of the material found was associated with Tlaloc .[224]
The essential reason for the importance of Tlaloc at the Templo Mayor, which was for the Aztecs "the fundamental center where all sacred power is concentrated,"[225] was the attempt by the Aztec ruling elite to identify themselves with and carry forward in time the sacralized political tradition of the Valley of Mexico which had its origin at Teotihuacán and a subsequent period of development among the Toltecs at Tula. For the Aztecs,
the "Toltec" past was crystallized around the figure of the god Tlaloc who shared the twin pyramid with Huitzilopochtli. . . . A striking aspect of the Aztec attitude to Tlaloc, as revealed by the Templo Mayor excavations, is how much of the offerings buried in the temple were dedicated to Tlaloc and how many representations of him exist in stone and clay. Tlaloc, as deity of the earth, also occurs on the underside of important sculptures, such as the Coatlicue, where he was not visible to anyone. The concern with the power of Tlaloc was therefore not merely a theatrical display for the sake of politics but also a demonstration of what the elite believed to be a historical and religious truth. Tlaloc was the personification of the past in the present.
While the Temple of Huitzilopochtli atop the Templo Mayor suggests that the Aztecs thought of themselves as "the descendants of nomads led by Huitzilopochtli," Tlaloc's temple reveals an opposed self-image that was equally true: "we are the legitimate successors of the Toltecs and their god Tlaloc."[226] And while the Aztecs as the nomadic followers of Huitzilopochtli formed a warrior state that maintained its power through the sacrifice of countless victims on the sacrificial stone still in place in the Temple of Huitzilopochtli, those same Aztecs, as the "successors of the Toltecs," were more inclined to philosophical speculation and artistic expression. Sahagún reveals the Aztec view of that heritage:
These Toltecs were very religious men, great lovers of the truth,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
These Toltecs were very wise;
it was their custom to converse with their own hearts.
They began the year count,
the counting of days and destinies.
In the Aztec expression of those truths of the heart, "the true artist . . . works like a Toltec." He "draws out all from his heart" and "works with delight; makes things with calm, with sagacity."[227] Thus, the Aztecs saw themselves as the carriers of the tradition that began at Teotihuacán and that they identified as Toltec. H. B. Nicholson describes their system of philosophical speculation and artistic expression precisely in that way as
a final precipitate of the ceaseless flow of iconographic development and change stretching over a period of more than two millennia from the Early Preclassic to the Conquest. No system, therefore, probably better epitomizes the whole intricate fabric of Mesoamerican symbolism, the tangible graphic expression of the religious ideologies that played such a pervasive role in Mesoamerican civilization .[228]
It therefore follows that the meanings associated with the mask of Tlaloc in that system are the result of the centuries-long development of that symbolic mask which we have traced in this study. And in that sense at least, the mask of Tlaloc symbolizes the system as a whole.
Significantly, among "the most spectacular" of the ceramic finds at the Templo Mayor, "a center dedicated to the major gods of the Aztec state cult, " is a pair of almost identical Tlaloc effigy urns (pl. 25) similar in design to those carried by the Tlalocs of the Teotihuacán and Cacaxtla murals and to those found in burials and offerings from the Preclassic period on. These two were found separately in Offerings 21 and 56, but each contained three oyster shells,[229] aquatic symbols related to Tlaloc. An iconographically similar ceramic urn was found in Offering 31,[230] and a sculpted stone version was found in Offering 17.[231] These urns surely indicate the persistence of the view that the rain, Tlaloc's water, was stored in great urns that were thus the source of fertility, and the symbols composing the masks on them suggest their roots in the preceding cultures.
Pl. 25.
Tlaloc urn, Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlàn.
(Museo del Templo Mayor, Mèxico).
The goggle eyes of the masks on the urns are those of the Teotihuacàn Tlaloc; however, in all four of the masks, those eyes are surmounted by eyebrows that entwine to form the nose, a familiar motif in Aztec images of Tlaloc which, as a number of those images makes clear, represents serpents. According to Seler, a sculpture now in Berlin has a face "made up of the twinings of two serpents," and he concluded that Tlaloc's typical goggle eyes and upper lip were derived from that original conception.[232] But as we have seen, those features were already part of the earliest Tlaloc images, long before entwined serpents made their appearance on the mask. Furthermore, as these urns demonstrate, the serpents form the eyebrows and nose; the goggle eyes remain under those eyebrows. It seems likely that the Aztecs devised this eyebrow/nose configuration as another means of suggesting the serpent symbolism manifested in the bifurcated tongue associated with Tlaloc from the earliest times. And like the eyebrows, the ear flares on these masks also differ from those found on the Teotihuacán Tlaloc; they are a rectangular variant of those circular ones and have pendants similar to the pendants on the mask on Xochicalco Stela 2 (pl. 21) hanging from their centers. But the all-important symbolic mouths are those of Teotihuacán. The masks on the three ceramic urns have their upper and lower lips joined to form an oval mouth from which two outer fangs, with no teeth between them, protrude; below the mouth is the suggestion of a bifurcated tongue. The mask on the stone urn, in contrast, displays the more typical Tlaloc handlebar mustache upper lip from beneath which protrude four curving fangs; this mask has no tongue.[233] Thus, the two mouth treatments found at Teotihuacán continue to occur at Tenochtitlán.
The more common of the two, by far, is the "handlebar mustache" type. It is generally found on the numerous stone figurines of the god carved by the Aztecs and is the mouth seen on the god in the codices, where the mask is almost always depicted in profile. As it is quite similar to the mask
depicted on the Mixtec peñates (pl. 23) and as it is found in the codices of Mixtec origin, it may have traveled from Teotihuacán to the Mixtecs and from that culture to the Aztecs.[234] These urns, then, display masks that have features associated with all of the cultures and art styles derived from Teotihuacán. The Aztecs, in achieving a Teotihuacán-like hegemony over the peoples of the Valley of Mexico and related areas, seem also to have reunited, symbolically, the features of the mask of Tlaloc.
And the reverse is also true. The Tlaloc whose images we find at Tenochtitlán can be found throughout the Valley of Mexico and in politically related areas such as Veracruz, Puebla, Oaxaca, and Guerrero during the Aztec period. In Veracruz, for example, where Tlaloc images are practically nonexistent in the Classic period, stone and ceramic figures with the mask of the Aztec Tlaloc have been found at a number of Postclassic sites. Castillo de Teayo provides an apt example since a number of stone sculptures bearing Tlaloc masks have been found there. One of them, a relief carving of the god on a tall, narrow slab, has a mask virtually identical to that found on the stone urn of the Templo Mayor. The figure wears a headdress displaying the year sign, indicating the continuity of that aspect of the Teotihuacán Tlaloc as well. But fertility continues to be Tlaloc's primary symbolic concern, as another relief carving from the same site (pl. 26) indicates. It depicts, very much in the style of the codices, Tlaloc holding a cornstalk and facing another fertility-related figure. These representations of the mask of the god all display the handlebar mustache mouth, but a large, striking ceramic incensario from central Veracruz now in the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City illustrates the existence in Veracruz of the oval-mouthed Tlaloc mask as well.
And in Puebla and Oaxaca, the Mixtec images of Tlaloc originating in the late Classic period continued to be produced during the time of the Aztecs. The iconography of those images finds its most complex statement in the pre-Conquest codices in the Mixteca-Puebla style probably associated with that area, and it is in one of these codices, in fact, that Pasztory finds the central image of the Postclassic Tlaloc. The images of the god in his characteristic mask on page 27 of the Codex Borgia (colorplate 1) make clear his great significance in the philosophical speculation involved with calendrical studies by the priesthood. Seler describes and then analyzes these images.
We see, one in each of the four corners of the picture, four images of Tlaloc which designate the four cardinal points. The fifth image in the
Pl. 26.
Tlaloc holding a corn stalk and facing another fertility related figure, relief carving, Castillo de Teayo, Veracruz
(Museo de Antropologia de Xalapa).
center naturally corresponds to the fifth region of the world, the center or the vertical axis... It is likely that images of Tlaloc were chosen to represent the cardinal points because the god of rain rules over all. Because of this relationship between the god of rain and the four cardinal points, the Zapotec calendar designates the initial days of the four quarters of the tonalámatl by the names of Cocijo, god of rain, or pitao, "the great" or "the god." We may surmise that it was extremely important in the picture we are discussing to connect man's well-being to the significance of the four periods and the years characterized by the four distinct signs corresponding to the cardinal points.
But a further suggestion of Seler's indicates just how important these images in particular were.
To the ancient seers it must have seemed marvelous that of the twenty day-signs, only four fell on the initial days of the years, but we can imagine that they considered as a veritable mystery the division of the 52 year cycle ... into four quarters, each of which had as its initial day a day numbered 1 which had one of those same four day-signs in the proper sequence. Thus the 52 year cycle was automatically ordered in accord with the four cardinal points in the same way that the tonalámatl . . . organized itself into four sections similarly corresponding to the four directions. And this division of the 52 year cycle in accord with the four cardinal points is what is represented on page 27 of our manuscript.[235]
On this page is recorded, then, the central mystery of the division of the essential unity of the cosmos into the quadripartite form of the world of man. The images here reproduce what we will describe below as the essential "shape" of the space-time continuum as perceived by the sages of Mesoamerica. The significance of Tlaloc serving as the vehicle for the expression of this mystery is enormous, but another aspect of the page suggests that his image is even more significant. While the four images of Tlaloc representing the cardinal points, that is, the world of nature, each wears a mask helmet representing another symbolic identity, the Tlaloc of the center who represents the all-important vertical axis of the spirit wears no such mask. He is the essential Tlaloc, the "thing itself," as close as man can come to depicting the essential reality of the world of the spirit.
And these images of Tlaloc are virtually identical to those of Tenochtitlán, as are those from Veracruz, so it seems reasonable to conclude that the Tlaloc mask we find of such importance at Tenochtitlán's Templo Mayor was of equal importance throughout the area influenced by the power that ruled there. What H. B. Nicholson says generally of that Aztec influence applies remarkably well to the mask of Tlaloc. The Aztecs, he says, "clearly shared the majority of their fundamental ideological and socio-political patterns with most of their neighbors, both those subject to their greater military power and those who had successfully withstood it."[236]
That the masks depicted on the urns of the Templo Mayor and reproduced so widely actually were conceived as masks is made clear by the form of their appearance on another type of ceramic sculpture—the large ceremonial incensarios that "stood at the top of the balustrades of pyramid stairways"[237] to house the burning copal which symbolized the transformation of matter to spirit and created the clouds of smoke that would call forth the rain clouds, which would in turn transform spirit into the nourishing reality of corn. Several of these large incensarios display a human figure wearing a Tlaloc mask in such a way that the man's face is clearly visible beneath the mask (pl. 27), a form of great symbolic importance in Mesoamerican art which will be discussed in our consideration of the ritual use of the mask. In the case of these incensarios, the visibility of both face and mask would suggest the same matter-spirit dichotomy as the fire that burned within the image of the man-god.
These incensarios symbolically link fire and water in their concern with the provision of man's sustenance, a linkage we saw earlier at Teotihuacán in the Tlalocan mural (colorplate 3). That this is not a coincidental connection is suggested by the discovery of another figure at the Templo Mayor which makes that same connection in the context of a clear reference to the art of Teotihuacán. It is a sculpture that "copies stone braziers from the Classic Teotihuacán period . . in the form of an old god carrying a vessel on its head,"[238] but in this case, the Aztec sculptor partially covers the old god's face with the goggles and buccal mask of Tlaloc to create precisely the same symbolic linkage of fire and water differently symbolized by the mask of the central figure of the Tlalocan mural at Teotihuacán. This reference to Teotihuacán is reinforced by the reference of the form; this image of the old god of fire, Huehuetéotl, is unusual in Aztec art but was quite common at Teotihuacán (pl. 19). After creating this archaic form in what must have been a conscious allusion, the sculptor made clear with the addition of the mask of Tlaloc in a peculiarly Aztec version that his intention was not to copy the past but to interpret it for his own time. The goggles and the mouth of this mask are rectangular rather than circular and oval, and the other details of the sculpture complement these "Aztec" touches, touches that can also be seen on an Aztec Chac Mool, which similarly copies a Toltec form. While the sides of the brazier carry the diamond eye and bar design found at Teotihuacán and used in the Tlalocan mural to symbolize fire, the top is
Pl. 27.
Ritual figure wearing a mask of Tlaloc, Aztec incensario,
Azcapotzalco (Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico).
sealed and decorated with "snails, whirlpools, and water motifs," thereby uniting fire with water by placing aquatic symbols precisely where the mind expects fire. And the elbows and knees of the figure are uncharacteristically decorated with Tlaloc-like masks of the "handlebar mustache" variety.[239] This figure, like the Tlalocan mural figure, is a virtual hymn to creativity in its linkage of an aspect of the creator god to the god who assures the creativity of the earth and in its uniting of the fire that "spiritualizes" matter with the water that "materializes" spirit. If this figure originally found its place in a temple dedicated to Tlaloc, as seems likely, it would have stressed the breadth of the symbolic range of that god in the thought of Aztec Tenochtitlán.[240]
The recently uncovered second temple of the Templo Mayor also provides us with another "mask" of Tlaloc, this one in the most abstract possible form but also reminiscent of Teotihuacán. Behind the Chac Mool on the narrow walls flanking the entrance to the interior of the small temple are mural paintings of a seemingly abstract design (colorplate 5a). Although there are traces of blue paint above suggesting a portion of the mural now lost, what remains is a band of white concentric circles set on a black ground immediately above a blue band containing black circles, both of which are above a solid red band. These horizontal bands surmount a row of alternating black and white vertical stripes. The location of this painting suggests that the Aztec artist has "deconstructed" the Tlaloc mask and then constructed an abstract representation of its symbolic elements—Tlaloc's goggle eyes and fangs—to flank the "mouth" of the temple of the god. Interestingly, a similar composition of these elements is to be found in a mural on Teotihuacán's sacred Avenue of the Dead (colorplate 5b) painted almost a millennium earlier. In that earlier version, the vertical lines are wavy, probably suggesting water in this city overwhelmingly concerned with Tlaloc, and superimposed on the mural is the figure of a jaguar, the creature associated with the god of rain from the beginning of Mesoamerican thought.
The serpent symbolism evident in the mask of Tlaloc has led to the suggestion that "the Aztec Tlaloc is no longer feline; fundamentally his nahual is the serpent. The jaguar of the hot lowlands does not represent Tlaloc in the highlands,"[241] so that by the time of the Aztecs, the jaguar was fundamentally associated with the earth god and with Tezcatlipoca rather than with Tlaloc. While it is certainly true that the jaguar was of great symbolic importance and that its symbolism did encompass the caves of the earth god and the mysterious darkness of the night associated with Tezcatlipoca, it is equally true that the jaguar maintains its fundamental relationship to Tlaloc at Tenochtitlán. Although the eyes of the Aztec Tlaloc are symbolically associated with the serpent, the mouth and fangs of Tlaloc are those of the jaguar, as we have demonstrated in our discussion of the Teotihuacán Tlaloc. And the recent excavations at the Templo Mayor have added further evidence of the symbolic relationship between the jaguar and Tlaloc, for "among the offerings are numerous jaguar skulls, some of which carry egg-sized jade stones (a symbol of life and regeneration) in their mouths; even a complete skeleton of a jaguar was found placed on top of other offerings dedicated to Tlaloc."[242] The remains of that jaguar testify to the direct line of continuity linking the Olmec were-jaguar mask to the Aztec Tlaloc presiding over the imperial state conquered by Cortés.
The Mask As Metaphor
Chac
A consideration of the Maya use of the mask as a metaphor for the rain god is somewhat more difficult. That there are masks of the rain god is clear: any visitor to the archaeological sites of the Yucatán finds masks of Chac forming the doorways, lining the stairways, marking the corners, and embellishing the facades of ancient pyramids and temples. But lowland Yucatán is only one part of Maya
territory, and most of the masks we see are from relatively late in the development of Maya civilization. It is somewhat more difficult to isolate a mask of the rain god in the Classic period, especially in the highlands, and yet the antecedents of the Chac masks of the late Classic and Postclassic Yucatán seem to be found in Preclassic developments in those distant highlands and on the Pacific slope. And a difficulty of another sort arises from the fact that the rain god of the codices, presumably of Postclassic Yucatec origin, is a man, or four men, with exaggerated and distorted facial features but not a mask. These difficulties are compounded by the paucity of knowledge of Maya religion available to modern scholars. Nevertheless, we feel that a case can be made for the existence among the Maya of a metaphorical mask of the rain god, a mask that, like those of Oaxaca and central Mexico, carries with it connotations of fertility and divinely ordained rulership, and that, like those other metaphorical masks, was derived from an Olmec original.
The case for an Olmec source of Chac was made early. Covarrubias's chart (pl. 2) traces Chac's descent from the Olmec were-jaguar, and J. E. S. Thompson, who saw serpent rather than jaguar associations, believed that the Maya rain cult, "with world color and directional features and with quadripartite deities deriving from or fused with snakes, had developed in all its essentials in the Formative period, probably as an Olmec creation."[243] Not until recently, however, did scholars begin to understand the precise means of transmission of the were-jaguar mask to the Maya. While still not as clear as it might be, it now seems that
Classic Maya civilization's Olmec ancestry is traceable through the Izapan culture, which spread through the Intermediate Zone and much of the Maya Highlands in the late Preclassic period. Olmec art preshadows Izapan art in subject matter, in style, and even in specific iconographic elements. . . . In a very real sense, Maya symbol systems began with Izapan culture, which in turn has an obvious Olmec ancestry.[244]
While Olmec influence can also be seen in the lowlands of the Petén and Belize (Olmec-related objects from as early as 1000 B.C. appear at Seibal, Xoc, and Cuello),[245] Izapan art, characteristic of sites on the Pacific slope and in the highlands, seems to be the link between the Olmec were-jaguar and Chac.
Among other human and composite beings depicted in the relief carvings of Izapa "is what may be called the 'Long-lipped God.' This being has an immensely extended upper lip and flaring nostril and is surely a development of the old Olmec were-jaguar, the god of rain and lightning." This god "becomes transformed into the Maya rain god Chac."[246] And Izapan art displays other symbols associated with later rain gods as well—fangs protruding from the corners of the mouth à la Tlaloc and Chac and bifurcated tongues like those of Cocijo—though not in the context of the long-lipped mask. In profile, that mask (pl. 28) shows obvious similarities to the Olmec were-jaguar mask because in both cases symbolic attention is focused on the exaggerated upper lip. While the exaggeration of the Izapan upper lip is greater than that found on most Olmec were-jaguar masks, a number of stone masks have an upper, "jaguar" lip elongated so as to protrude well beyond the plane of the face.[247]
There are other signs of continuity between Olmec and Izapan art directly related to the mask of the rain god. Significantly, the long-lipped god of Izapan art is found primarily on stelae presumably associated with rulership. The Olmecs began the
Pl. 28.
Stela 11, Kaminaljuyú depicting a masked ritual figure
whose face is visible within the mask
(after Gay 1971, fig. 14; reproduced by permission).
long Mesoamerican tradition of carving and setting up stone stelae, a tradition that was to reach its apex among the Classic Maya. From its Olmec inception, that tradition was dedicated to the portrayal of rulers, and the Olmecs often indicated the ruler's status on the stelae in the same way they symbolized it on the throne/altars: a number of the earliest stelae depict a figure or figures associated with rulership within the open mouth of a jaguar. The Olmec Stelae A and D from Tres Zapotes depict this motif most clearly; both frame scenes involving what seem to be rulers and warriors within the jaw of a jaguar.[248]
La Venta Stela 2 (pl. 29), discussed below, lacks the jaguar mouth "frame" but also relates the jaguar mask to rulership. This stela depicts a standing figure holding a ceremonial bar and wearing an elaborate headdress displaying prominently a common Olmec abstract motif that Joralemon calls the "four dots and bar symbol" representing a mask.[249] The headdress is depicted with a curving lower edge that seems to disappear behind the figure, creating a clear visual reference to the cave/niches of the altars and uniting this stela with those monuments that legitimize the ruler by associating him with the were-jaguar mouth. For the O1mecs, then, the stelae, like the altars, provided a means of defining, through the symbolic use of the mask, the spiritual nature of temporal power. And that use of the stela passed to Izapa and ultimately became one of the primary features of the cult of the divine ruler among the Maya.
The Izapan-style Stela 11 (pl. 28) from the highlands site of Kaminaljuyú brings together the mask of the long-lipped god and the stela tradition by depicting a man, presumably a ruler, wearing what Coe describes as "a series of grotesque masks of Izapan long-lipped gods"[250] to indicate his exalted status. There are four masks in this "series." One of them covers his face, and another is in his headdress. Above his head "floats" a third, downward-peering mask prefiguring the Classic Maya convention of representing the ancestor of the current ruler, and a fourth mask with a long bifurcated tongue marked with what may well be water symbols hangs from his belt. Somewhat different from each other, these four masks share the emphasis on the exaggerated upper lip derived from the Olmec tradition, and there are other, equally clear references to that mask tradition. The ruler's x-ray style depiction within the mask is similar to that of the ruler atop the throne/altar in the Olmec painting at Oxtotitlán (pl. 5) and represents a symbolically important convention in the depiction of masked figures which we will discuss in the context of masked ritual below. In another similarity to that painting, this figure stands atop a stylized jaguar mouth, the symbolic equivalent of the mouth on the Olmec throne/altars and stelae from which rulers symbolically emerge from the world of the spirit to provide a sacred order for the world of man.
Pl. 29.
Stela 2, La Venta (Parque Museo de La Venta).
This stela is but one indication of the exaltation of the ruler at Kaminaljuyú; another can be seen in the elaborate burials uncovered there. These burials were located within pyramidal temple platforms, anticipating the later Maya practice, and in one of them,
the corpse was wrapped in finery and covered from head to toe with cinnabar pigment, then laid on a wooden litter and lowered into the tomb. Both sacrificed adults and children accompanied the illustrious dead, together with offerings of astonishing richness and profusion. . . . Among the finery recovered were the remains of a mask or headdress of jade plaques perhaps once fixed to a background of wood.[251]
Also in that tomb was a soapstone urn similar to the Tlaloc urns displaying a face with an Olmec-like were-jaguar mouth. In life, as depicted on the stela, and in death, the mask symbolized the divine status of the ruler in Preclassic Kaminaljuyú as it did earlier for the Olmecs and would soon do for the Maya. That aspect of the symbolism of the were-jaguar mask would be the dominant one in Maya art, although its association with rain and fertility was always just beneath the surface.
We do not know the name of the deity symbolized by that mask of the long-lipped god of Izapa, but we do know that the Classic-period god in whose mask Maya rulers often displayed themselves was one of the quadripartite Chacs, Chac Xib Chac by name. In a fascinating symbolic shift, the elongated lip of the Izapan god at times becomes an elongated nose or both lip and nose are elongated.[252] Throughout the Classic period, that long-lipped or long-nosed mask and the accoutrements of Chac Xib Chac are worn by living Maya rulers and accompany them in death. On Tikal's Stela 31 (pl. 30), for example, which depicts the accession rites in A.D. 445 of the ruler Maya scholars have named Stormy Sky, a downward-peering "floating image" like that above the figure on Ka-
Pl. 30.
Stela 31, Tikal, front and sides
(drawing by William R. Coe, reproduced by permission of The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania).
minaljuyú Stela 11 appears over Stormy Sky's head. It is a manifestation of his dead father, the previous king, called Curl Snout[253] because his upper lip is elongated like the Izapan lips but turned upward in this case. Above and below his disembodied head, however, are long-nosed masks, "one of the earliest known examples of the Maya rain deity much later known as Chac."[254] And Stormy Sky himself wears a buccal mask with a long upturned lip like that worn by Curl Snout and also displays masks with exaggerated noses in his headdress and on his belt. Both the headdress and belt masks, like those of Curl Snout above, display a backward-curving spiral at the corner of the mouth very similar to the fangs protruding from the corners of the mouths of the later Chacs. Similar images of Chac Xib Chac were worn on pectorals and suspended from symbolic ceremonial belts worn by kings throughout the Classic period.[255]
This symbolic identification of the ruler with Chac through the use of the mask continues later in the Classic period. A late Classic figurine illustrated by Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller wears a costume of Chac Xib Chac which is "standard for Maya rulers" and "identical to costumes worn by rulers on Dos Pilas Stelae 1 and 17."[256] And one of the better-known rulers of the late Classic, Yaxchilán's Bird Jaguar, is depicted on Stela 11 from that site (pl. 31) in an X-ray image discussed in the following section. Portrayed in ritual "directly preparatory" to his accession, he manifests himself as Chac Xib Chac[257] in a mask with an elongated nose, the suggestion of an elongated upper lip, and a spiral device at the corner of the mouth.
These images of living rulers have their counterparts in the tombs of dead rulers. The early Classic period Kendal Tomb in northern Belize, for example, has yielded jade artifacts—a pectoral, an ear flare, and an ax-that "reveal that the ruler... went to his grave dressed in the costume of the god Chac Xib Chac."[258] And the association of Chac with burials can also be seen in the stuccoed wooden figures of the god found in a Classic period tomb at Tikal[259] which display enormously elongated upper lips and noses that have merged in a single projecting form. This association of the mask of Chac with death reveals the Maya belief in regeneration. The king died to the world of nature only to "become a god," to merge with the life-force of which he was the representative and for which he was the conduit in his stay on earth. This belief is captured in the image on a carved limestone panel from Palenque which depicts Kan Xul, dead king of that city, dancing "out of Xibalbá wearing the costume of Chac Xib Chac." The text on this
apotheosis tablet . . . begins by recalling the ritual, on February 8, A.D. 657, in which Kan Xul was named as the kexol, the "replacement," of a dead ancestor of the same name who had died on February 10, A.D. 565, ninety-two years earlier. It ends with the rebirth of Kan Xul on November 24, A.D. 722 after his sacrificial death at Tonina.[260]
Pl. 31.
Stela 11, Yaxchilán, rear face (from The Rise and Fall
of Maya Civilization, by J. Eric S. Thompson.
Copyright 1954, 1966 by the University of Oklahoma Press).
Death has been defeated, and the cycle of life through which the life-force manifests itself continues its eternal movement. The mask of Chac and the dance of Kan Xul are marvelously symbolic of this victory and of the continuity demonstrated in the person of the ruler who is "replacing" his predecessor as a new manifestation of the eternal god whose mask they wear and are.
This belief is also expressed through the mask and figure of Chac on the painted ceramics characteristically associated with late Classic burials in the southern lowlands and north along the Caribbean coast into the Yucatán. These ceramics are closely allied stylistically and iconographically to
the somewhat later codices that are presumably also of Yucatán origin. A remarkable example of that ceramic tradition is an "extraordinary plate [that] presents a conceptual cosmological model of the Maya universe that is without previous precedent in the ceramic medium" (colorplate 6) in the form of "the resurrection of a personage (if not Venus) . . . linked to a visual observation of the first appearance of Venus as the Evening Star (a Water Lily Jaguar) on the night of October 24, A.D. 775."[261] In the center of the plate appears Chac Xib Chac rising from Xibalbá through the waters that separate that realm of the spirit from the world of nature.
His face is the god's distinctive mask with its exaggerated nose, elongated upper lip, curving fangs, and distinctive eye and ear treatment reminiscent of Cocijo and Tlaloc. This is the Chac of the later codices and the mask that decorates the contemporaneous architecture of the northern lowlands. Growing from the top of his head is the World Tree, the branches of which "are transformed into the bloody body of the Vision Serpent." Above and below the god, painted on the angled walls of the plate, can be seen the enveloping world of the spirit; "in the lower border, the skeletal Maw of the Underworld encloses bloody water; in the upper half of the border, the Celestial Monster arches around the rim of the plate forming the dome of heaven."
This single image encompasses the entire Maya cosmos and synthesizes all of the imagery that was integral to the lives and functions of kings. It explains the rationale behind accession, the role of bloodletting, the nature of the vision produced, the necessity of sacrifice, the inevitability of death and the possibility of renewal. . . . To the Maya, this plate held a symbolic depiction of the fundamental causal forces of the universe, exactly as the equation e = mc2symbolically represents our understanding of the physical forces that structure our universe.[262]
The symbolism of this plate offers eloquent testimony to the central role played by the mask of the god in delineating metaphorically the relationship between man and the world of the spirit for the Maya. Its central image refers simultaneously to Venus emerging from "death" as the Evening Star, Chac in his association with the cyclical rebirth of vegetation, and the unknown ruling "personage" who had, like Kan Xul, vanquished death to merge with the life-force.
Not only does this image of Chac tell us a great deal about Maya thought but in an almost unbelievable way it also suggests the extent to which that thought shared its fundamental assumptions with the spiritual thought of the other great Classic period civilizations. Although the image on this plate is completely different visually from the scene depicted on the upper half of the Tlalocan mural at Teotihuacán (colorplate 3), the iconographic parallels are striking. In both cases, an image of the rain god is central and water flows beneath him. And in both cases, this water separates him from the world of the spirit. In both images, a stylized tree from which liquid flows seems to emerge from his head, and in both cases, liquid flows from his hands. These similarities in detail reveal the essential similarity: in both, the figure of the rain god with his characteristic mask is central to a composition that symbolically depicts the gods, impersonated in ritual by priests or kings (or priest-kings), as the conduits through which the life-sustaining forces of the world of the spirit enter the world of man. Similarly, the reciprocal sacrifice required of man is noted in both. While the Maya plate, unlike the mural, refers centrally to Venus and astronomical cycles, in typically Maya fashion, and the Teotihuacán mural's central reference to the union of fire and water has no counterpart on the plate, the imagery of both of these important pictorial statements connects the mask of the god of rain to the eternal elemental processes manifested in the cycle of life driven by the life-force.
Significantly, the image of Chac on the Maya plate is Chac Xib Chac, "the name that is used for God B in the Dresden Codex and documented in colonial sources. In Postclassic cosmology, there were four Chacs assigned to the four directions. The chief among them was Chac Xib Chac, the Red Chac of the east."[263] That eastern aspect of the quadripartite Chac is naturally associated with regeneration since the eastern horizon is the location of the sun's daily rebirth, and red, as we have seen, is associated with the sacrificial blood that man must shed to ensure the continuation of the cycle of generation and regeneration. But in addition to that, the Chac of the plate is the "chief" Chac, the essential Chac, the god who, like the Tlaloc and Tezcatlipoca of central Mexico, unfolds into aspects, each of which are still the god. Tezcatlipoca, as we have seen, was both the unitary god and one of the aspects. The same situation seems to exist here. It is particularly interesting that "the other three Chacs have not yet been identified with specific Classic period images";[264] perhaps they, like the other three aspects of Tezcatlipoca, have other identities. Whatever the case, it is significant that the unfolding of Chac parallels that of the gods of central Mexico just as the mask of Chac parallels that of his central Mexican "brother."
Those parallels are firmly rooted in Maya history as well as in their common Olmec origin. The mask of Tlaloc and other indicators of a central Mexican presence appeared in the Classic period when "from a base at Kaminaljuyú, Teotihuacanos developed economic ties with a few centers in the southern lowlands."[265] One of these centers was Tikal, and Stela 31 from that site (pl. 30) which, as
we have seen, presents "one of the earliest known examples" of Chac worn in the headdresses of the ruler, Stormy Sky, and his father, Curl Snout, shows that ruler "flanked by two men dressed in the manner of Highland Mexicans" carrying shields decorated with Tlaloc-like masks.[266] As Clemency Coggins demonstrates, the Tlaloc mask was symbolic of Mexican influence in the spiritually significant areas of calendrical thought and ritual,[267] but "Tlaloc imagery was soon Mayanized to conflate with the Maya long-nosed rain and storm personification later known as Chac."[268] And Tikal was not the only example of this use of Tlaloc; there are similar allusions to Tlaloc in depictions of Bird Jaguar at Yaxchilán, another ruler also connected with Chac.[269] The striking similarities between the Chac of the late Classic plate and the Tlaloc of the Teotihuacán mural are clearly not coincidental.
The late Classic period also saw the development of the architecture of the regional societies of the northern lowlands, an architecture that used the mask to an unprecedented degree. Large public buildings in the Rio Bec, Chenes, and Puuc regions were similarly embellished with mosaic masks of Chac, masks that "most closely resemble the long-nosed 'Chacs' of the Maya Postclassic manuscripts or codices."[270] Made up, mosaic style, of separately carved elements, these masks decorated the facades of the buildings, marked their corners, and delineated the liminal importance of the temple doorways and the pyramid stairways. The large mosaic mask that surmounts a doorway in the east facade of the palace at the Puuc site of Labná (colorplate 7) provides an excellent example of the type. Clearly identifiable as Chac by its elongated, upturned nose (on which is inscribed a Maya date equivalent to A.D. 862), it contains features characteristic of that god as well as reminiscent of the other Classic period rain gods. Immediately below that characteristic nose is a mustachelike element representing the two curving or spiral fangs that typically protrude from the corners of Chac's mouth, but in this case, the similarity to Tlaloc's "handlebar mustache" upper lip is striking. The mouth, with its teeth flanked by outturned fangs, is also similar to the Tlaloc mouth, although the lower teeth are characteristic of Chac. The roughly rectangular eyes are also typical of the Chac mask, though they are similar to Cocijo's eyes, but the ear flares are again somewhat reminiscent of Tlaloc. Such a mask as this, then, illustrates clearly the iconographic interconnectedness of the masks of the rain god in the Classic period, due in great part to their common Olmec ancestry.
The symbolic use of such masks will be discussed in our consideration of architectural masks, but it is important to note here Rosemary Sharp's contention that the quadriplicity of the Chacs was used as "a cosmological model" by the peoples of the Yucatán on which to base their political system and that "the conflation of sacred and secular systems was manifested in an artistic form which combined particularly potent natural symbols with a quadripartite plan for the limitation of power." Whether or not she is correct in her contention that rulers were "rotated" on the basis of this cosmological model, the multiplicity of Chac masks on public buildings surely supports her contention that "like Oaxacan Cocijos," and, we might add, the Olmec were-jaguar, "Chacs imply a great deal more than rain."[271] They connote the inherent orderliness of life and are intimately related to rulership.
These late Classic period mosaic Chac masks as well as the Chac depicted on the painted ceramic funerary plate and others on ceramic vessels are no doubt similar to those that must have been depicted in codices at the time. Unfortunately, none of those codices has survived; we have only four Postclassic works, all of them Yucatec, that contain Chacs whose masklike faces are clearly derived from the earlier models. In the Codex Dresden, the most complete of the four, representations of Chac vastly outnumber those of other gods. They are depicted with masklike faces characterized by long noses and fangs curving backward from the corners of their mouths. These Chacs appear most frequently in sections devoted to "problems of farmers—the weather and the crops."[272] This clearly indicates that despite its intimate connections with rulers, the mask of Chac retained its primary association with rain and fertility without losing its ability to delineate symbolically the essential nature of reality.
One group of Chacs enthroned on their directional trees are followed by a fifth Chac seated in a sort of cave or underground chamber with the glyphic label yolcab, "in the heart of the earth" (Codex Dresden, 29a-30a). Directional trees are of this world, so the center is a spot below the center of the world .[273]
These five Chacs (pl. 32), like the five Tlalocs on page 27 of the Codex Borgia, reproduce the sacred shape of space and time and in doing so reveal their use by the Maya sages as a means of understanding and expressing metaphorically the most profound of mysteries. In this, they are essentially similar to the masks of Tlaloc and Cocijo.
But while Chac seems to have continued his existence undisturbed in the Postclassic codices, developments in the Yucatán forced his mask to coexist with that of Tlaloc on the facades of temples and elsewhere. Although its extent, dating, and precise nature are uncertain, there was an intrusion into the northern lowlands, particularly evident in the architecture of Chichén Itzá, of the artistic forms and presumably the belief system and political organization of the dominant power in central Mexico, Toltec Tula. And with their ar-
Pl. 32.
Chacs, Dresden Codex (from Thompson 1972, 29A and 30A, reproduced by permission of The American Philosophical Society).
chitectural style, the Toltecs brought their gods. Best known of the "new" gods in the Yucatán was Kukulcán, the Yucatec variant of Quetzalcóatl, but masks of Tlaloc also appear. At Uxmal, for example, "on the north range of the Monjas quadrangle ... a pile of Chac masks is surmounted by a Tlaloc," and in the Balankanche Cave near Chichén Itzá, a large shrine surrounded by Tlaloc effigy vessels testifies to the presence of the Mexican rain god.[274]
But Chac survived this challenge by Tlaloc as he survived the smaller but comparable intrusion of the alien god-mask during the Classic period in the southern lowlands. His survival can be seen clearly in the plethora of long-nosed fanged faces on the ceramic urns, figurines, and incensarios produced late in the Postclassic at Mayapán. Although such ceramics are often associated with Tlaloc, these depict Chac. One of the similar effigy urns found in the Balankanche Cave (pl. 33) demonstrates the means of that survival. The face on the urn has many of the features of Tlaloc; we see clearly the goggle eyes, the circular ear flares, and the handlebar-mustache upper lip from which protrude Tlaloc's typical fangs. But the nose on the urn is the nose of Chac, and extending from the sides of that nose is the same spiral design that appeared under the nose of the Labná mosaic mask, a stylized version of the fangs of Chac. Significantly, the urn is painted half blue—the color of Tlaloc's urns—and half red—the color of Chac Xib Chac. After centuries of separate development from its Olmec beginning, the features of the rain god are reunited in this urn, which was fittingly found "deep in the cave"[275] from which could emerge the life-sustaining water from the realm of the spirit. Thus, the essential unity of the masks of the rain god of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica can be seen in this simple but striking urn that metaphorically holds both the rain god's waters and a key to our understanding of his mask.
Pl. 33.
Chac/Tlaloc, painted ceramic urn, Balankanche Cave, Yucatan
(Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico).
The Structure of the Mask
The key that that simple Maya pot so effortlessly holds is the very structure by which the gods—or masks—of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica were constructed. Built on the armature of the human face, these god-masks were created by replacing the human features, often through the use of partial masks, with features drawn from a number of other natural creatures. In this way were created Leach's "supernatural monsters" (see above) capable of mediating between man and the otherwise inaccessible world of the spirit. As the rain god has shown us, the features replaced were few, and the number of features in the repertoire used to replace them really quite limited. The human forehead could be cleft, the eyes could be "ringed" or "bracketed" in several possible ways, the nose could be elongated and turned up or down, the ears could be decorated with flares of various shapes, the flesh of the face could be colored and patterned, and the features of the mouth could be varied.
The variations involving the mouth were the most important. They are the most striking visually and consequently seem to be the most significant iconographically. Tlaloc is most easily identified by his "handlebar mustache" and fangs, Cocijo by his upper lip and bifurcated tongue, Chac by his elongated upper lip or nose and curving fangs, and their common ancestor, the Olmec were-jaguar, by his jaguar-derived mouth from which all these later features came. This careful attention to the symbolism of the mouth is typical of Mesoamerican god-mask construction and no doubt reflects an awareness of the importance of the mouth in expressing inner—and therefore metaphorically spiritual—realities. For the mask is a metaphor. It converts the human face, itself a primary symbol of identity, into a visual symbol of inner reality. In making the inner outwardly visible, the mask exemplifies the inner/outer duality at the heart of Mesoamerican spiritual thought and reveals the most fundamental purpose of life in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica: to convert the material of this world into spirit or, as we shall see in our consideration of transformation, to create, as the Aztecs put it, a face expressive of the "deified heart" within.
The primary purpose of our lengthy consideration of the mask of the god of rain was not, however, the enumeration of its symbolic features. Beneath those features, as we have shown, is the system according to which they are selected and combined, a system that generates masks as metaphors for spiritual realities. The mask of the rain god is the perfect vehicle for an exploration of that system since it provides the most easily seen continuity from the earliest times to the Conquest and because the symbolic dimensions of that mask in each of its Mesoamerican incarnations are relatively clear. Directly related to the provision of rain by the gods, the mask is also associated with fertility, rulership, and the structure of time. Thus, it played a fundamental role in Mesoamerican spiritual thought, which accounts for the relative ease with which its development can be traced. Its fundamental nature is underscored by the fact that in all of the cultures for which there is evidence, the mask of the rain god is quadripartite in itself, that is, Cocijo, Tlaloc, and Chac unfold into four Cocijos, Tlalocs, and Chacs with directional, temporal, calendrical, and color associations. This is not true in the same way of any other god-mask. Tezcatlipoca, for the Aztecs, is quadripartite, of course, but his "unfoldings" are different; they are other gods with other names and functions. Because it symbolized the most fundamental order, or "shape," of reality, the development of the mask of the rain god, as we have seen, is intimately related to the development of urban civilization and speculative thought during the Classic period.
The fact that the rain god's mask was a fundamental vehicle of Mesoamerican spiritual thought also assures that conclusions drawn from an analysis of its systematic construction will be applicable to all the other metaphorical god-masks constructed during the course of the development of the profound and complex spiritual thought of Mesoamerica. And there were many others. So many that scholarship has had tremendous difficulty in identifying them and understanding their meanings. That difficulty has its primary source, we feel, in the failure to understand a fundamental fact about the system within which those god-masks exist. As we will show clearly in the second section of this study, the essence of the world of the spirit, the life-force, manifests itself in this world through a process of unfolding through which certain primary manifestations of the spirit become accessible to man through ritual. On the basis of what we have learned from the rain god, it is apparent that these manifestations have a relatively fixed and permanent identity and are generally well understood by modern scholarship. In Aztec terms, the four Tezcatlipocas-Tezcatlipoca, Xipe Tótec, Huitzilopochtli, and Quetzalcóatl—and the quadripartite Tlaloc are good examples of such primary manifestations, and each of them is readily identified by a characteristic "mask" made up of an actual mask or distinctive face painting and articles of costume.
We can call such masks as these primary masks since they identify the primary manifestations of the spirit, and our study of the mask of Tlaloc, probably the best example of such a primary mask, enables us to identify several of their fundamental characteristics. First, they demonstrate continuity in time. Although each of the constituent cultures of the Mesoamerican tradition has its own version of the mask, those versions are visually and conceptually closely related. Second, they are multi-
vocal. They unite in one symbolic image a cluster of related mythic themes; the mask of the rain god, for example, symbolizes rain and lightning, fertility, divinely ordained rulership, and the driving force of time in a single image. Third, they unite microcosmic and macrocosmic manifestations of the spirit; the rain god's mask, for example, ties the macrocosmic rain to the microcosmic blood, the macrocosmic spiritual order of the gods to the microcosmic social order of the ruler. These primary god-masks are as close as the Mesoamerican spiritual tradition comes to the creation of "gods," that is, fixed and therefore stable combinations of spiritual qualities.
We have delineated the rain god mask's symbolic features and the spiritual concepts for which it was the metaphor. Other primary masks can be identified, and detailed studies of their development would make a better understanding of their metaphorical range and meaning possible. Such a mask as the bird-billed Aztec Ehécatl, for example, has analogs in other cultures, and it is clearly multivocal. Directly related to the wind that "clears the roads for the coming of the rains," it symbolizes, by extension, both fertility and the human breath, symbol of human life. In its combination of the creature of the air, the bird, with the creature of the earth, the serpent, it relates fertility to sacrifice, life to death. Thus, it is no surprise that its aspects, the Mexican Quetzalcóatl and the Maya Kukulcán, symbolize the creative principle and relate that macrocosmic principle to its microcosmic manifestation in rulership. The mask combining bird and serpent, then, has all the characteristics of a primary mask.
There are a number of other primary god-masks depicted in the spiritual art of Mesoamerica. The hook-beaked bird so important in the art of Teotihuacán appears frequently as a mask element in the art of other cultures and may well be part of another primary mask. And there are other possibilities. The stripe through the eye characteristic of the Aztec Xipe Tótec and present in Mesoamerican art from the time of the Olmecs may constitute the major element of another primary mask, as Coe and Joralemon claim,[276] but understanding Xipe Tótec requires dealing with the ritual mask made of flayed human skin and, perhaps, differentiating that mask from the symbolic mask of the god—a difficult task. Similarly, the old, wrinkled face that in Aztec thought was the "mask" of Huehuetéotl, who is intimately related to Xiuhtecuhtli, fire, can be traced through Mesoamerican art and is often associated with the masklike "diamond-eye" motif encountered at Teotihuacán. And another, even more intriguing symbolic form is the "smoking mirror" associated in the Valley of Mexico with Tezcatlipoca who wears it as a pectoral and in the Maya codices with the similar God K in whose forehead it can be seen. Not a mask but a reflection of the face, or "mask," of the viewer, such mirrors are found archaeologically from the time of the Olmecs to the Conquest in ritual contexts. The central role of the face in all of these symbolic constructs indicates again the metaphorical significance of the mask and suggests the variety of ways that metaphor can be applied.
But not all of the god-masks encountered in Mesoamerican spiritual art are primary masks, in the sense that we are using the term, and unfortunately the other type of god-mask, which we will call secondary, has not been so well understood. Unlike the primary masks, these masks do not have fixed, recurring features. Rather, they are particular, often unique, combinations of features designed to make a particular mythic or ritual statement and have no continuing existence apart from that. The mask of the central figure in the Tlalocan mural at the apartment compound of Tepantitla at Teotihuacán (colorplate 3) provides an excellent example. By combining the diamond eyes of the old god of fire with the mouth of Tlaloc, that mask unites the opposed forces of fire and water as a metaphorical statement of the necessity of sacrifice and death, that is, the "spiritualization" of matter symbolized by fire, for the continuation of life, that is, the "materialization" of spirit symbolized by water. As the mural makes clear, this metaphorical statement provided the focal point for a particular ritual presided over by this mask, and its combination of features existed at Teotihuacán only in and for that ritual. In it, we can see the characteristics of the secondary masks. First, they are composed of features taken from two or more primary masks and are created to link the fundamental areas of spiritual concern designated by those primary masks. Second, they are unique or infrequently seen combinations of features. These secondary masks, we feel, are better regarded as ritual statements than as gods since they have no existence beyond the particular myth or ritual in which they function.
These secondary masks provide one of the greatest sources of confusion in the discussion of Mesoamerican spiritual thought as their status is not generally understood. The key to understanding them, as we have shown, lies in an understanding of the nature of the system of spiritual thought by which they are generated and in which they exist. Perhaps this has been difficult for modern scholars because our materialistic assumptions and scientific procedure are too distant from the assumptions and procedure of those who developed the system. We insist that each mask, each "god," have a fixed, permanent identity, that it be a "thing" in a world of comparable "things" so that it can be defined and classified by our science and stored neatly away in the proper bin. Unfortunately, such an approach is not consistent with the basic assumptions underlying Mesoamerican
thought. As we will show, that system was one based on the idea that ultimate reality was to be found in the world of the spirit. The material reality of this world, the reality seen as fundamental by modern man, was for that system an ephemeral, kaleidoscopic projection of a mysterious spiritual reality that man could comprehend only partially and express only through metaphor, most fundamentally in the system of masks we have described. While the primary masks provide a few fixed reference points, the secondary masks that fill Mesoamerican art reveal the fluidity of that world of the spirit as they attempt to capture the momentary, visionary connections between the fundamental truths expressed by the primary masks. Their basic quality is their evanescence, and we will not understand them until we accept that evanescence.
In the final analysis, a full understanding of both primary and secondary masks can come only from an understanding of the system that generates the masks of the gods and within which they function; the individual god-masks cannot be understood in isolation through an enumeration of their features or characteristics. Our consideration of the mask of the rain god clarifies the basic tenets of that system and the demonstrable consistency in the development of that mask of the rain god proves beyond any reasonable doubt the existence of that essential system. Jacobsen, in his exemplary work on Mesopotamian religion, suggests that in the study of such material as this,
ultimately, the coherence of our data must be our guide. True meanings illuminate their contexts and these contexts support each other effortlessly. False meanings jar, stop, and lead no further. It is by attention to such arrests, by not forcing, but by being open to and seeking other possibilities, that one may eventually understand—recreate, as it were—the world of the ancients. For the world of the ancients was, as all cultures, an autonomous system of delicately interrelated meanings in which every part was dependent on every other part and ultimately meaningful only in the total context of meaning of the system to which it belonged. Understanding it is not unlike entering the world of poetry, [where, as E. M. Forster puts it,] . . . "we have entered a universe that only answers to its own laws, supports itself, internally coheres, and has a new standard of truth.[277]
It was on the basis of those laws that the sages and visionary artists of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica constructed the metaphorical masks we have examined as part of their "attempt to convert the body into a hieroglyph for the mystic formula"[278] that would reveal to them the mysteries of the gods. We look ever so carefully at those masks in our attempt to understand them, but, ironically, the creators of the masks looked through them. As Joseph Campbell points out in a discussion of Christian mythology, "the first step to mystical realization is the leaving of such a defined god for an experience of transcendence, disengaging the ethnic from the elementary idea, for any god who is not transparent to transcendence is an idol, and its worship is idolatry. "[279] The sages and artists of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica were not idolators, and we must endeavor to avoid that sin as well.