PART II
METAPHORIC REFLECTIONS OF THE COSMIC ORDER

4
The Shamanistic Inner Vision

The mask Moctezuma presented to Cortés had a long history and a number of levels of symbolic meaning. In fact, the beginning of its history and the source of its meanings must be sought in a time long before any actual masks appear in the archaeological record as the roots of the ritual and symbolic use of masks characteristic of Mesoamerican religion are deep in the shamanistic base from which that religion grew. Throughout the long history of its development, it continually drew sustenance from the basic conceptions brought across the Bering Straits land bridge as early as 40,000 years ago by the first discoverers, explorers, and settlers of the New World and bequeathed by those first Americans to all the generations who were to follow them in the development of what was to become the indigenous thought of the high cultures of Mesoamerica. All the subtlety, intricacy, complexity, and beauty of the thought and ritual of the highly developed religious institutions of Mesoamerica at the time of that second contact with the Old World, known as the Conquest, can be seen as developments from the shamanic base, developments from that original archaic religious system built on the individual shaman's ability to break through the normally impenetrable barriers that separate the planes of matter and spirit. His was an ecstatic personal experience with practical uses for his people, the hunting and gathering, nomadic peoples of the Early Paleolithic and later times. As magician, diviner, or curer, he was uniquely capable of bridging the gap between the mundane lives of the people of his community and the mysteries of the invisible world which could give those lives purpose, direction, and meaning and through which the ailments and problems of the individuals and the community could be dealt with. Of course, the highly developed religions of the later civilizations of Mesoamerica no longer depended upon the central figure of the shaman and the trance through which he was able to enter the world of the spirit, but the outlines of that shadowy figure can still be seen in the basic assumptions and many of the practices of the religions he founded.

The significance of shamanism to Mesoamerican spiritual thought has been recognized both by those who study Mesoamerica and those who study mythology and religion generally. Campbell, for example, among the latter group, has pointed out that "in any broad review of the entire range of transformations of the life-structuring mythologies of the Native Americas, one outstanding feature becomes immediately apparent: the force, throughout, of shamanic influences."^[1] In this, he concurs with Eliade who, in his definitive study of shamanism, shows that "a certain form of shamanism spread through the two American continents with the first waves of immigrants."^[2] Among Mesoamericanists, Furst, who claims that the shamanic world view forms the basis of "mankind's oldest religion, the ultimate foundation from which arose the religions of the world,"^[3] notes that even the relatively late Aztec religion, which was certainly not dominated by the individual shaman and his trance, retained "powerful shamanistic elements"^[4] that were derived from the fundamental shamanic assumptions underlying Mesoamerican religious thought and practice. A brief treatment of those assumptions will illuminate their shamanic origin and, interestingly, suggest an important reason for the widespread mask use we have traced in Mesoamerican religious symbolism and ritual.

Perhaps the most fundamental assumption shared by shamanism and Mesoamerican religion holds that all phenomena in the world of nature are animated by a spiritual essence, the common possession of which renders insignificant our usual

distinctions between man and animal and even the organic and the inorganic. In the shamanic world, everything is alive and all life is part of one mysterious unity by virtue of its derivation from the spiritual source of life—the life-force. Thus, each living being is in this sense merely a momentary manifestation of that eternal force, a mask, as it were, both covering and revealing the mysterious force of life itself. Furthermore, the commonality of the life-force makes possible within the shamanic context the primordial capability of magical transformation; man and animal can assume each other's outer form to become the alter ego, an ability central to the pan-Mesoamerican concept of the nagual , which is discussed below. Through this form of transformation, the shaman can explore the myriad dimensions of the material and psychological worlds; and through the concomitant liberation from the limitations of his own body, he can take the first step toward the exploration of the worlds of the spirit, the proper domain of his own spiritual essence. The ritual use of mask and costume clearly derives, at least in part, from that concept of magical transformation: through the mask, the ritual performer changes his physical form to enter the world of the spirit in a way analogous to the shaman's magical transformation.

A second assumption of shamanism that underlies Mesoamerican religion follows directly from this first one. In the shamanic universe, the soul, or individual spiritual essence, is separable from the body in certain states or under certain conditions; the spirit can become autonomous and function free of the body. Man is thus not necessarily limited to or by his physical existence; he is capable of moving equally well in each of the two equivalent worlds of which he is a part—the natural and the spiritual. This equivalence of the worlds of matter and spirit makes the common distinctions between dream and experience, this world and the afterworld, the sacred and the profane, as insignificant as those between man and animal because the shaman demonstrates that the only true reality is spirit, albeit spirit that may be temporarily garbed in the material trappings of the world of nature. Just as the spirit of the shaman can transform itself into other forms of natural life, so it can leave the physical body entirely and "travel" unfettered in the spiritual realm. It is there, of course, that the shaman finds what is needed to cure the ailments and solve the problems of his people, one of his primary functions in a world that believed the cause of everything in nature was to be found in the world of the spirit. Thus, the physical being of the shaman, and of living things generally, was a "mask" placed on the spiritual essence, a "mask" that could be removed and left behind in the shaman's ecstatic journeys to the world of the spirit. The actual masks and costumes worn by shamans suggested symbolically the separability of the worlds of matter and spirit, and precisely this symbolic meaning of mask and costume was to remain constant throughout the development of Mesoamerican spirituality.

This belief in the separability of matter and spirit concurs with a third basic assumption of shamanism and of Mesoamerican religion—that the universe is essentially magical rather than bound by what we would call the laws of cause and effect as they operate in nature. Since material realities were the results of spiritual causes, to change material reality, the spiritual causes had to be found and addressed through ritual and/or shamanic visionary activity. The magical universe consisted of two levels of spiritual reality, one above and one below the earthly plane, a shamanic conception that directly prefigures the structure of the cosmos as it was seen at every stage of the development of Mesoamerican spiritual thought. The three levels are connected by a central axis, often represented by a world tree, "soul ladder," or stairway that links the planes of spirit and matter and provides the pathway for the shaman's spiritual journeys. Again, shamanism posits a universe in which matter and spirit are separate yet joined, and that union both makes possible and is symbolized by the spiritual travel of the shaman when he takes off the "mask" of his physical being.

These assumptions are the core of shamanism. They suggest the fundamental spirituality of man and provide a conceptual base for the belief that through appropriate rituals performed by one who, by heredity, divine election, or the manifestation of a proclivity for the sacred, has acquired the ability to shed his physical being to become "pure" spirit, all boundaries can be crossed so that the zones of profane space and time can be transcended and the essential order of the cosmos revealed. The shaman is thus the mediator between the visible and the unseen worlds, the point of contact of natural and supernatural forces. Significant among the supernatural forces are the figures of his ancestors, the clear embodiment of death and the life after death. In thus linking the natural with the supernatural, the material with the immaterial, and life with death, the shaman establishes an inner metaphysical vision of the primordial wholeness of cosmic reality. He, himself, has left his body through a symbolic death, traversed the realms of both life and death, and returned to tell the tale. As he returns from his visionary experience, he again puts on the "mask" of the material world so as to communicate that experience and share his vision of the world of the spirit with his community.

Black Elk, the visionary Native American of comparatively recent times, beautifully suggests the essence of this shamanic vision characteristic of the indigenous cultures of the Americas.

I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the

whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.^[5]

That "sacred manner" of seeing which reveals the mysterious unity, the "one circle," at the heart of things is the ecstatic vision of the shaman, and it is as central to Mesoamerican thought and ritual throughout its development as it was to Black Elk's somewhat different vision of reality.^[6] From that very sense of the spiritual unity of the cosmos, the cultures of Mesoamerica developed a religion that saw man's existence in essentially spiritual terms and that concentrated its ritual actions on symbolizing and breaking through the boundaries between the planes of matter and spirit through such means as the attainment of trancelike states induced by ritual privation, blood sacrifice, or the ingestion of hallucinogens; ritual human and animal sacrifice; and masked dance. As we have shown, even the sacred spaces in which these ritual activities took place were themselves symbolically "marked" by the use of masks to suggest the ultimately shamanistic idea of the separability of the worlds of spirit and matter. Underlying all these fundamental ritual practices we can see the vision so well described by Black Elk.

But it is not only in its shamanistic assumptions that we can find evidence of the shamanic base of Mesoamerican religion. Numerous clearly shamanic practices have been and continue to be integral parts of Mesoamerican religious activity. They can be seen in connection with funerary ritual, symbolic animal-human transformation, the attainment of trance states through the use of hallucinogens, and in the healing practices still associated with Mesoamerican spirituality. Evidence of all these practices can be found very early, but the earliest is, of course, fragmentary as a result of the destructiveness of man and nature through the course of the centuries and of the fact that archaeological research on Preceramic Mesoamerica is in its infancy. Significantly, however, MacNeish, one of the pioneers in that research, has found archaeological evidence to confirm that as early as the El Riego phase in the Tehuacán valley (ca. 6000 B.C.) there was "a complex burial ceremonialism that implied strong shamanistic leadership."^[7] Since, as we have seen, the shaman is intimately involved with death in his movement between this world and the afterworld and since burials often preserve archaeological material, it is not surprising that the early evidence of shamanic practices involves mortuary ceremonialism, the ritual involved with man's ultimate movement between the worlds of matter and spirit. That these very early shamanic burial customs persisted in central Mexico is indicated by the association between funerary ritual and male figurines dressed in shaggy costumes suggestive of the paraphernalia of the shaman as jaguar^[8] found at Tlatilco as early as 1500 B.C. and as late as A.D. 750 on a grander scale at Teotihuacán. Soustelle discusses the examples from Tlatilco and concludes that

certain individuals wore garments, ornaments, masks that set them apart; no doubt these individuals were "shamans," awesome figures, respected and feared, intermediaries between the human world and the supernatural forces whose powers lay in a domain somewhere between magic and religion. Such magician-priests still exist today in Indian communities.^[9]

Covarrubias also sees a funerary jaguar-shaman relationship in figurines from a Tlatilco burial. Each of the "shamans" is accompanied by a dwarf and each is wearing a small mask, some of the masks jaguarlike and others designed so that half portrays a contorted face with a hanging tongue and half is a human skull (pl. 52), together suggesting the duality of life and death,^[10] one of the fundamental assumptions of shamanism. That this symbol of the equivalence of life and death, matter and spirit is found in the shape of a ritual mask worn by a shamanic ritual figure further strengthens the contention that the cultures of Mesoamerica from very early times consciously used the mask as a primary symbol for the idea that the material and spiritual worlds coexist in such a way that the material world acts as a covering for the world of the spirit, a covering that can be penetrated through the symbolic death of the shaman's ecstatic trance. We can also see in these early symbols and ceremonies associated with death the roots of the complex system of communicating with the world of the spirit through human and animal sacrifice which was characteristic of the cultures of Mesoamerica. That system of communication, already suggested by the sacrificial victims in the El Riego phase of the Tehuacán valley, was perhaps a logical development from the deathlike trance of the shaman which enabled him to enter the world of the spirit. In both cases, a form of death was seen as the necessary prerequisite for the spiritual journey.

Evidence of this transformation, through death, from matter to spirit is complemented in the archaeological record of early Mesoamerica by widespread indications of another sort of transformation. As we have demonstrated in the section "Merging with the Ritual Mask," such masks from the earliest times give evidence of the merging of human and animal features in the process of the

transformation of matter into spirit through art and ritual. Numerous figurines from such Preclassic sites in the Valley of Mexico as Tlatilco, Tlapacoya, and Las Bocas; a good deal of Olmec sculpture both from the heartland on the Gulf coast and other sites ranging from Chiapas to Puebla; and a number of examples of the early sculptural art of Monte Albán, all roughly contemporary, depict or suggest such transformations of man into animal, often a jaguar or bird. Both of these creatures are associated with the shaman and both, as we have seen, are potent factors in Mesoamerican spiritual symbolism. Such a transformation, of course, suggests the shaman's ability to transcend the material world and to transform himself into other natural forms. This assumption of the outer form of an animal alter ego was no doubt "the most striking manifestation of his power"^[11] and was an integral part of his ability to enter the world of the spirit. Thus, the early masked rituals recorded by these ceramic and stone figures and those that followed them in the later cultures of Mesoamerica must often have effected a symbolic transformation of the essentially shamanic figure into his animal counterpart in the process of penetrating spiritual reality.

The jaguar, always important symbolically in Mesoamerica as we have seen in the context of rain, fertility, and rulership, is a key figure in these symbolic transformations, and linguistic studies showing that in some areas of the New World the words for jaguar and shaman are the same^[12] offer further evidence of shamanic transformation. And, significantly, the Aztec name for the shamanic sorcerer-priest-curer, nahualli, was the same as the word that denoted the animal alter ego into which the sorcerer could transform himself. These two linguistic connections between priest and animal underscore Furst's claim that the jaguar's importance throughout Mesoamerican symbolism is connected with the fact that it is interchangeable with, or a kind of alter ego of, men who possess supernatural powers.^[13] According to Eliade, the "mystical journeys [of the shaman] were undertaken by superhuman means and in regions inaccessible to mankind";^[14] thus, the magical transformation of the shaman into a bird or an animal that could move with superhuman speed would symbolically supply the powers needed to make the journey into that other realm of being.

Recent research indicates that both of these forms of transformation—from matter to spirit through a symbolic death and from man to animal—were often accomplished through the ingestion of psychotropic substances by which the shaman attained the necessary mystical, ecstatic state that would enable him to transcend human time and space and gain insight into the divine order. That research provides evidence of the use of hallucinogens early in the development of Mesoamerican religion. The abundant remains of Bufo marinus at San Lorenzo, for example, suggest that the Olmecs sought the hallucinogenic effects of eating these toads.^[15] Coe and other students of the Classic period Maya have found extensive evidence on painted ceramics of the practice of ritual hallucinogenic enemas, a practice that seems to have roots in the Preclassic.^[16] Furthermore, "the presence of mushroom stones and associated manos and metates in Middle and Late Preclassic caches and tombs indicates the existence of a widespread mushroom cult similar in concept, but not necessarily in performance, to that known [today] among the Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and Mixes of Oaxaca."^[17]

This fragmentary evidence of the shamanic use of hallucinogens in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica takes on its proper significance when we examine the use of hallucinogens among the Aztecs. Because Aztec thought is far better documented than that of any other pre-Columbian civilization, the use of hallucinogens, like many other areas of spiritual thought and practice, can be better understood within Aztec culture than in the cultures of Classic and Preclassic Mesoamerica. The evidence of their extensive ritual use of hallucinogens to command visions of destiny and to experience the order to be found in the unseen world no doubt indicates that we would find the use of hallucinogens equally pervasive in earlier cultures were similarly extensive evidence available. The Aztecs considered psychotropic plants sacred and magical, serving shamans, and even ordinary people, as a bridge to the world beyond.^[18] Providing the ability to enable man to communicate with the gods and thereby to increase his power of inner sight, such hallucinogens were important enough to be associated with the gods. Xochipilli, for example, was not only the god of flowers and spring, dance and rapture but patron deity of sacred hallucinogenic plants and the "flowery dream" they induced. He is often portrayed with "stylized depictions of the hallucinogenic mushroom" and "near realistic representations of Rivea corymbosa ," the morning glory, called ololiuhqui by the Aztecs, whose seeds are hallucinogenic, as well as tobacco and other hallucinogens,^[19] and in one of his most powerful representations he is depicted masked.

As such depictions indicate, many plants by which the shaman could induce his visions were included in the psychoactive pharmacopoeia discovered by the Spanish conquerors. In addition to sacred mushrooms, the morning glory, and a very potent species of tobacco called piciétl , there was peyote, a hallucinogen still widely used by the indigenous peoples of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States in ritual activity. Similarly, Durán tells of the Aztec use of teotlacualli, a divine brew made up of tobacco, crushed scorpions, live spiders, and centipedes which priests smeared on themselves and drank "to see visions."

He reports that "men smeared with this pitch became wizards or demons, capable of seeing and speaking to the devil himself."^[20] What seemed devilish to Durán, of course, was the plane of spiritual reality entered through the ecstatic trance of the shaman, the plane on which he could find spiritual knowledge.

The evidence of shamanic practices within Mesoamerican religion, then, clearly shows a shamanistic emphasis on transformation often accomplished through a hallucinogenic alteration of the mental state of the religious practitioner. As is the case with the traditional shaman of Siberia, in Mesoamerica these transformations often served the purpose of healing the physical and psychic ills of members of the community. A wealth of evidence, much too vast to cite here, points to this link between shamanism and Mesoamerican healing practices which existed from the earliest times and continues to the present day. Some representative examples, however, will suggest the nature of the connection. The Yucatec Maya Ritual of the Bacabs, which dates from pre-Columbian times, contains long incantations to be used by the healer in ridding the community of disease. Through this ritual, he could send the diseases inflicted by the underworld rulers on the race of men back through the entrance to a cave and thence to the underworld and the realm of death from which they came. And Landa, writing about the duties of Maya priests at the time of the Conquest, reports that they used knowledge drawn from the world of the spirit through shamanic means in the process of healing: "The chilánes were charged with giving to all those in the locality the oracles of the demon. . . . The sorcerers and physicians cured by means of bleeding at the part afflicted, casting lots for divination in their work, and other matters."^[21] Vogt's research among the contemporary Maya in Zinacantan has uncovered ample evidence of the continuation into the present time of similar shamanic healing rituals exemplified by what he calls "rituals of affliction."

Many of these ceremonies are focused upon an individual "patient" regarded as "ill." But the illness is rarely defined as a physiological malfunctioning per se; rather, the physiological symptoms are viewed as surface manifestations of a deeper etiology; for example, "the ancestral gods have knocked out part of his soul because he was fighting with his relatives."^[22]

Through divination, the Zinacantecan shaman determines the state of the patient's animal alter ego in the realm of the spirit and proceeds ritually to restore the animal to its proper position, thus curing the patient. In much the same way as in pre-Columbian times, "the patient's relationship with his social world is reordered and restored to equilibrium by the procedures of the ritual."^[23]

These shamanic healing practices were not limited to Maya Mesoamerica. In the Valley of Mexico, the Aztecs, too, placed great faith in the healing power of the sorcerer-priests who coexisted with the priests of the institutional religion of the temples. Generally referred to as shamans, these sorcerer-priests were the guardians of the physical and, to some extent, the psychic equilibrium of the community. According to Caso, each human imperfection was "transmuted [by the Aztecs] into a god capable of overcoming it."^[24] In this way, the imperfections and ailments became spiritually accessible to the shaman. Whether through animal transformation, by the imitation of animal voices, or by chanting incantations using the nahualtlatolli, or "disguised words," the shaman could enter the place and "time where everything was possible to elicit the supernatural power of the gods and their primordial handiwork in the restoration of the patients' health and equilibrium."^[25] This magical approach to healing is also evident in the belief that particular words could be pronounced by the shaman to control nature and cure the destructive imperfections plaguing a person or the whole community. These few representative indications of shamanic healing practices could be multiplied indefinitely, but they must serve here to indicate the widespread and long-lasting influence of shamanism on healing among the indigenous cultures of Mesoamerica.

Thus, the shamanic origin of Mesoamerican religion seems to be clearly indicated by many practices that derive from the fundamental assumptions of shamanism. More important than any of these particular forms of religious activity, however, is the fact that the way of seeing reality characteristic of Mesoamerican spirituality is the way of the shaman. In this connection, it is fascinating to note what seem to be indications of the shamanic origins of the gods of Mesoamerica, the metaphoric figures which inhabit and represent the spiritual realm, the true home of the spirit that animates man. In typical shamanic fashion, they are ranged on a number of levels of spiritual reality above and below the plane of earthly existence. Chief among the gods represented at the time of the Conquest in the Valley of Mexico, as we will show below, was Tezcatlipoca, whose cult at Texcoco "still retained echoes of an archaic, shamanic origin among the tribesmen of the north, embodied principally in a revered obsidian mirror, a magical artifact shamanistically used for divinatory scrying."^[26] Nicholson sees in that mirror "Tezcatlipoca's ultimate origins," the source of "his role as archsorcerer, associated with darkness, the night, and the jaguar, the were-animal par excellence of the Mesoamerican sorcerer-transformer."^[27] Seeing the mirror as central to Tezcatlipoca's identity and role suggests a relationship between that god and the iron-ore mirrors that dot the archaeo-

logical record as far back as the Olmecs.^[28] Perhaps even that early, they were associated with a prototypical Tezcatlipoca and with the shamanic ritual connected with him. Nicholson suggests a similar background for Ehécatl-Quetzalcóatl, Tezcatlipoca's polar opposite and complement, who "appears to have functioned both as a patron of the regular priesthood and of those practitioners of various techniques which most anthropologists would classify as shamans."^[29] These two important examples of the gods' origins in the shamanic past of Mesoamerican religion and myth suggest clearly the strength of the shaman's influence throughout the religion's long course of development and also provide a fascinating connection with the use of the mask as a metaphor within the Mesoamerican religious symbol system. Since the gods' origins were in the shamanic beginnings of Mesoamerican religion, their consistent depiction as masked human beings can be seen even more clearly as a metaphoric reference to their function in uniting the worlds of spirit and matter and in defining the spirit world through the symbolic features of the mask.

This influence also explains the pervasive symbolic and ritual use of masks in that religious development as the use of masks is a significant part of both the symbolism and ritual of shamanism. As Eliade points out, the mask of the shaman, the specialist of the sacred who has learned to move between the worlds of nature and spirit, "manifestly announces the incarnation of a mythical personage (ancestor, mythical animal, god). For its part, the costume transubstantiates the shaman, it transforms him, before all eyes, into a superhuman being."^[30] In ritual, the mask provides the shaman with one of the important means of accomplishing his essential function—the movement into the realm of the spirit. In a similar way, shamanic songs or incantations suggested that same transformation, as did even "disguised words" or the imitation of animal voices, which served as a "sign that the shaman can move freely through the three cosmic zones: underworld, earth, sky."^[31] The new, musiclike language of the liberated spirit of the shaman signified his movement away from the mundane world in his quest for sacred knowledge. These songs or chants are "a discipline of the interface between waking consciousness and night," the meeting point of the metaphoric equivalents of the worlds of nature and the spirit. Thus, the equation of masks with song by Levi-Strauss, though not in connection with shamanism, suggests again the central symbolic function of the mask within the shamanic context. He explains that

within culture, singing or chanting differs from the spoken language as culture differs from nature; whether sung or not, the sacred discourse of myth stands in the same contrast to profane discourse. Again, singing and musical instruments are often compared to masks; they are the acoustic equivalents of what actual masks represent on the plastic level .^[32]

Masks, then, are the visual equivalent of the song or chant of the shaman, and both mask and song are symbolic of the sacred discourse of myth created by the mind. All three—masks, song, and myth—are products of culture operating at its most profound level in a search for order in the invisible or spiritual world. Eliade's contention that the mask makes it possible for the shaman to transcend this life by enabling him "to become what he displays" and to exist as "the mythical ancestor portrayed by his mask"^[33] suggests precisely the necessary immersion in the sacred order of the world of the spirit. Through the mask and the song, the shaman is transformed into something other , and with the vision of an animal, ancestor, or god symbolically acquired through this transformation, he is able to see into the mysteries of the spiritual realm. "He in a manner reestablishes the situation that existed in illo tempore , in mythical times, when the divorce between man and the animal world had not yet occurred,"^[34] when the primordial order had not yet been hidden from man's view. Now outside of space and time, "he mystically unites himself with a sacred order of being, beyond the dimension of this or that person in this or that particular body."^[35] He is, in effect, reborn with the divine ability to see, behind the mask that both covers and reveals the essence of the cosmos, the divine order that alone can resolve the seeming chaos of the world of man. Thus, the mask is surely a clear reflection of and the perfect metaphor for this shamanic world view, and Mesoamerican spirituality reveals its great debt to shamanism in its pervasive symbolic and ritual use of the mask.

Wherever we look in our study of Mesoamerican spirituality, we come face to face with its shamanic ancestor. Whether we are considering the use of divination to understand the "augural significance of dreams"^[36] or noting that a burial ceremony provides a way of establishing contact with the ancestors who can show the way to the world of the spirit that they now inhabit; whether we find evidence of transformation into animals suggesting the transformative vision that provides the powers that are needed for the mystical journey or study healing accomplished by curers able to divine the cause of disease and find its cure in the spiritual realm; whether we find visionaries under the influence of hallucinogens predicting future events and establishing "auspicious times for the holy rites,"^[37] we are consistently seeing practices whose roots are deep in the shamanic base of Mesoamerican religion. They all derive from the fundamental shamanic conception of an underlying cosmic order, an order of the spirit—the "sacred hoop" described by Black Elk.

It was precisely this shamanistic transcendence

of all mundane distinctions between the sacred and the profane, inner and outer, man and animal, dream and reality, that enabled Mesoamerican man to feel at one with a universe that included all the anxieties of life and death in its mysterious complexity and to be initiated "by shamans into a system of philosophical, spiritual, and sociological symbols that institutes a moral order by resolving ontological paradoxes and dissolving existential barriers, thus eliminating the most painful and unpleasant aspects of human life"^[38] by putting them in their "proper" perspective. Perhaps the comfort of the shamanic world view through which "the Indians approached the phenomena of nature with a sense of participation"^[39] gave Mesoamerican man his first impulse to search in all the other areas of the cosmos for similar manifestations of the same phenomenon. And in addition to providing the impulse, it seems clear that shamanism also provided the conceptual framework for the magnificent cosmological structure that resulted from Mesoamerican man's spiritual search. The shamanic vision can be found in every aspect of Mesoamerican spiritual thought making up that structure: in the underlying temporal order of the universe demonstrated in both the solar cycles and the cycles of generation from birth to death to regeneration; in the spatial order derived from the regular movements of the heavenly bodies; in the mathematically expressed abstractions of eternal cyclical order found in the calendrical system; and most of all, in the understanding of divinity as the fundamental life-force that is, at the same time, the source of all order. Ultimately, this vision reveals itself in the symbolic use of the mask as the most important metaphor for the essentially shamanic presentation of the vision of inner reality to the outer world.

5
The Temporal Order

The Solar Cycles

While the inner vision of the shaman surely showed the way to the essential truth for those who shaped the spiritual thought of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica through the centuries of its development, these speculative thinkers went far beyond their Siberian shamanic forebears in drawing out the mythic, philosophic, and theological implications of that vision. The shamanic world view posited a cosmos governed by an underlying spiritual order growing out of the mythical spiritual unity of all things which both caused and explained the myriad, seemingly disconnected "facts" of the material world, but the causes and explanations characteristic of the prototypical shamanism of the hunting and gathering peoples of Siberia were mystically simple and direct, those perceived by and applicable to the individual in a small group. The spiritual thought of Mesoamerica gradually evolved from that shamanic base into an intricate, subtle, and complex depiction of the revelation of the spiritual order of the cosmos in the world of man. Still apparent in the now centuries-old fragments of that highly developed thought is the sense of wonder with which those inquisitive minds responded to the indications of inherent orderliness which the shamanic vision allowed them to see in the seemingly chaotic world confronting them.

That wonder, as we shall see, is often expressed through the use of the mask as a metaphor for the way in which the harmonious vitality of the life-force underlies the chaotic life of the world of nature. The metaphor of the mask suggests that the natural world, the "mask" in this case, not only covers the animating force of the spirit but also expresses its "true face." Thus, the natural world was seen as symbolic, as pointing, in a way understood by the initiated, to the underlying harmony of the spirit. Those who understood the symbols of the mask could "read" its meaning; the false face became the true face in much the same way the donning of the ritual mask allowed the wearer to express his "true" inner spirit. Although this underlying order was suggested by many kinds of natural "facts," nowhere was it clearer to the seers of Mesoamerica than in the regularity of the numerous cycles through which time seemed to move. Nothing drew their attention more powerfully than this cyclic time; its regularity must have seemed to them nothing less than the force of life itself, the spiritual essence of the cosmos at work. Through the understanding of those cycles, the Mesoamerican sages could figuratively remove the mask of nature, which in all other ways covered the workings of the spirit, and get at the thing itself.

The clearest, and no doubt the first recognized, evidence of this cyclic regularity was apparent in the movement of the sun. That the sun's movement should provide the key to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos makes sense in two quite different ways. First, the most apparent regularity in the external world of nature is provided by the sun's daily rising and setting around which human beings have always organized their lives as it bears an organic relationship to the rhythmic cycle of sleep and waking built into their own bodies. To this organic regularity, however, the shamanistic cultures of Mesoamerica added a second way of seeing the significance of that daily cycle. The endless alternation of day and night no doubt seemed the natural counterpart of and the perfect metaphor for the dualistic nature of the cosmos they envisioned. The presence of the sun during the day must have seemed naturally to represent the waking world of daily existence, sentient activity, logical thought, and physical life. The absence of the sun at night represented the complementary oppo-

site, sleep, which replaced the sentient activity of the daytime world with the fantastic imaginings of dreams, mental rather than physical activity, and the temporary and highly symbolic "death" of the waking person. The daily movement of the sun thus divided the natural world in the same way man felt himself to be divided: into matter and spirit, visible and invisible, living and dead. Tied to the sun's movements, man alternated between his waking, "real" self and his sleeping, dreaming, "spirit" self. This dichotomy within man's very nature, of course, is the same one expressed in the split masks, half-living and half-skeletal, found in Preclassic burials in the Valley of Mexico (pl. 52) which clearly image forth a shamanistic view of life and death as parts of an endless cycle, parts that exist in actuality or in potential at all times. Just as the ability of the shaman to enter the world of death at will suggests the unity of the two states, so the cyclic alternation symbolized by the sun's movement unified those opposed states. That cycle, then, could be seen as an expression of the mystic order of the spirit that alone could make comprehensible the seemingly anarchic diversity of earthly life.

In addition to this daily solar regularity, Mesoamerican thinkers early became aware of and fascinated by the other cycles of the sun. They charted the annual movement of sunrise and sunset along the horizon which resulted in the equinoxes and solstices and noted the regular coming and going of the two instances of the sun's zenith passage each year. The solar cycles were so basic to the concept of time throughout Mesoamerica that among the Maya, for example, the word for sun, kin, also means both day and time.^[1] In fact, the day, the most obvious unit of time measured out by the sun, was the smallest unit of time measured in Mesoamerica and was the fundamental unit on which the Maya constructed all the other cycles of time with which they were concerned.^[2] The Toltecs and other later groups in the Valley of Mexico saw the solar year as the basic unit, perhaps because their northern origins made them more concerned than the Maya with the annual cycle of seasonal change.^[3] The significant fact, however, is that a unit derived from solar movement was used throughout Mesoamerica as the foundation of an elaborate calendrical system designated to chart and understand the force of the spirit as it worked in the natural world.

That such solar observation is of great antiquity in Mesoamerica and that its practice continued with the same intensity until the time of the Conquest (and, in fact, is still practiced by some contemporary Indian groups) can be seen in both the archaeological and written record that survived the Conquest. The great ceremonial centers constructed by the various cultures of Mesoamerica as focal points of the ritual through which they interacted with the natural and supernatural forces of the cosmos were, from the earliest times, laid out on the basis of horizon sightings of solar positions and often contained structures that were designed or oriented to make precise solar and other astronomical observations for ritual purposes. In the Maya Petén, for example, the early pyramid Structure E-VII Sub at Uaxactún

was the western point in group E from which sunrise was observed on the east, marked by three small temples. These temples were aligned on an eastern platform in a north-south line; their northern and southern locations were determined by sunrise at the summer and winter solstices, whereas the location of the central temple was set by sunrise at the equinoxes. . . . Thus Str. E-VII Sub was the viewing point in a solar . . . observatory.^[4]

Built during the late Preclassic, this complex served as a model for "at least a dozen sites within a 100 kilometer radius of Uaxactún"^[5] and indicates the early importance of solar observation among the Maya. In the Valley of Oaxaca, according to Anthony Aveni, the curiously shaped structure called Mound J built during Monte Albán I (ca. 250 B.C.) was probably used to sight the star Capella, which was used as an "announcer star" for the "imminent passage of the sun across the zenith." The passage could then be observed using a vertical shaft bored into a subterranean chamber aligned with Mound J.^[6] Structures similarly suited to astronomical observation of significant moments in the various cycles of the sun are found throughout Mesoamerica. The best known is probably the Caracol at Chichén Itzá, and others have been found at such sites as Mayapán, Uxmal, Paalmul, and Puerto Rico.^[7] Significantly, most of the structures probably related to solar observation are ornamented with huge stucco or mosaic masks that seem to denote the importance of the structures and to suggest their role in the solar observation that uncovered the spiritual order of the universe and in the ritual activity through which man harmonized his existence with that universal order.

Such structures were used in laying out the ceremonial centers of which they were a part, and the "cross petroglyphs" found at Teotihuacán evidently served the same purpose there. These markers consist of two concentric circles centered on a cross, the design indicated by a series of holes pecked into a stucco floor or rock. The first such petroglyph was found in a building next to the Pyramid of the Sun, and others were subsequently found at locations suggesting their use by the architects of Teotihuacán to determine the baselines of the grid pattern strictly adhered to throughout the centuries-long construction of the city. The location of the petroglyphs and the resulting location of the baselines indicate that the grid was oriented according to horizon sightings of celestial phenom-

ena related to solar cycles.^[8] This solar connection can also be seen in the design of the petroglyph, a quartered circle, found in many contexts and variations throughout Mesoamerica, most of which refer to cycles of time, generally solar cycles.^[9] These other symbolic uses of the design suggest that the cross petroglyphs of Teotihuacán were more than surveyor's base marks. They were, symbolically, the order of the city and the order of the cosmos, which it was intended to replicate. As we demonstrate below, they referred directly to the meeting place at Teotihuacán of the worlds of spirit and matter. Just as the rising and setting of the sun on the horizon symbolically denoted that meeting, the line of the cross petroglyph representing the sun's course was bisected by a line perpendicular to it, a line creating the universally symbolic cross designating the center of the universe.

That intersection of the central axis of the universe with the earthly plane marks the point at which the shamanic movement between the worlds of matter and spirit is possible. Hence, the cross petroglyph and the city itself must be seen as symbolic constructions placed on the earth so as to reveal the underlying spiritual order, an order seen most clearly in the essentially spiritual annual cycle of the sun from which the quartered circle was derived.^[10] Seen in that way, the cross petroglyph and the city are "masks" placed on material reality, not to cover it but to reveal its spiritual essence—precisely, of course, the function of the shamanistically conceived ritual mask throughout Mesoamerican history. Similar petroglyphs used for the same purpose have been found at widely scattered sites from Zacatecas to Guatemala, most of which had been influenced by Teotihuacán,^[11] suggesting the fundamental importance of that symbolic use of the solar cycles as the very fact of diffusion indicates the significance of the design to the people employing it. The structures of ceremonial centers throughout Mesoamerica, then, both in their siting and functions demonstrate the fundamental concern of the builders with the ways in which the regularity of solar movement betrayed the order inherent in the spiritual underpinnings of the natural world.

Further evidence of the concern of Mesoamerican thinkers with the regularities of the cycles of the sun can be seen in the calendrical systems that must have existed well before the Preclassic. The full extent of that calendrical system, one unsurpassed in intricacy and complexity, will be discussed below, but a significant part of the system was, as we would expect, a solar calendar. Made up of 360 days divided into eighteen "months" of twenty days with five "unlucky" days added to complete a 365-day cycle, it was called the xihuitl in central Mexico and the haab by the Maya and provided one of the foundations of the larger calendrical systems. Evidence from Oaxaca suggests it was already in use in the early Preclassic. ^[12] And we also have evidence of the early existence of one of these larger systems. Called the long count, it computed dates from a presumably mythical starting point corresponding to 3113 B.C. (according to the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation), dates that were recorded on monuments by the Maya and before them by the Olmecs, the probable originators of the system.^[13] A number of those dates suggest the antiquity of this elaborate system, among them the date on Stela 2 at Chiapa de Corzo which corresponds to 36 B.C., that of Stela C at Tres Zapotes corresponding to 31 B.C., and the date on the Tuxtla Statuette which corresponds to A.D. 162.^[14] Obviously, the systematic solar observations on which the original solar calendar and its elaborate variations were founded must have begun in remote antiquity and been dutifully continued until the Conquest with the numerous dates and calculations of early times no doubt written on perishable materials such as wood, skin, and bark paper. Were these to have survived, they would have testified to the ancient and enduring Mesoamerican fascination with the connection between the regular movement of the sun and the orderly progression of time.

The written evidence that does survive in the codices, the screenfold painted books used for a variety of divinatory and pedagogical functions by the priests and shamans of the various pre-Columbian cultures, suggests in several ways the importance the recording of data related to the solar cycles had in the latter stages of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican development. Many of the Mexican codices contain solar calendars charting the movement of the year through the regular succession of the veintena festivals, the great ritual feasts that ordered the movement of time by denoting the end of each of the eighteen twenty-day periods of the solar year. Fittingly, then, the sun ordered the ritual life of the cultures of central Mexico, a ritual life designed to harmonize man's existence with the life-force symbolized by the sun. The few surviving codices of the Maya are astronomical in nature and offer a rather different sort of testimony to the importance of the sun and its cycles to Mesoamerican spiritual thought as they contain a great deal of astronomical information regarding the cycles of the moon and Venus as well as tables used to predict the possibility of eclipses, all of which were related to solar movement.

Thus, the written evidence of pre-Columbian thought coincides with the evidence from the archaeological record to indicate clearly that the various cycles of the sun were seen throughout Mesoamerica as embodying the spiritual order of the universe. They revealed a unity at the heart of all matter and the way in which the spiritual force emanating from that mystical unity operated in the world of nature. Rather than imagining a god

separate from his creation, the thinkers of Mesoamerica conceived of the divine as the life-force itself, constantly creating, ordering, and sustaining the world.

That force, embodied in and exemplified by the cycles of the sun, not only symbolized the workings of the spirit as it ordered the universe through the magic of time but was also the creator of life, a creation also linked metaphorically to the solar cycles. The sun, as a symbol of the mystical life-force, was seen as the source of all life, a cyclic source that made creation an ongoing process rather than a unique event.

Far from imagining a sure and stable world, far from believing that it had always existed or had been created once and for all until at last the time should come for it to end, . . . man [was seen] as placed, "descended" (the Aztec verb "temo" means both "to be born" and "to descend"), in a fragile universe subject to a cyclical state of flux, and each cycle [was seen] as crashing to an end in a dramatic upheaval.^[15]

This cyclic process of creation and destruction is recorded in the pan-Mesoamerican myth cycle of the Four (or Five) Suns which identifies each stage in the ongoing process of creation as a sun, one stage in a solar cycle. The basic myth is simple; in its Aztec version, the present age, that of man and historical time, is the Fifth Sun. The first of the four preceding periods, the First Sun, identified by the calendric name 4 Océlotl, or 4 Jaguar, saw the creation of a race of giants whose food was acorns. That age ended with their being devoured by jaguars, often a symbol of the night sky and thus the dark forces of the universe. The Second Sun, 4 Ehécatl, or 4 Wind, peopled by humans subsisting on piñion nuts, ended with a devastating hurricane that transformed the people who survived it into monkeys. This age was associated with Quetzalcóatl in his aspect of wind god, Ehécatl. The Third Sun, 4 Quiáhuitl, or 4 Rain, was naturally associated with Tlaloc and had a population of children whose food was a water plant. It was destroyed by a rain of fire from the sky and eruptions of volcanoes from within the earth with the surviving inhabitants changed into turkeys. The Fourth Sun, 4 Atl, or 4 Water, was populated by humans whose food was another wild water plant. It was destroyed by floods, as its association with Chalchiúhtlicue, the goddess of bodies of water, would suggest. The survivors of the destruction appropriately became fish. The present world age, the Fifth Sun, 4 Ollin, or 4 Motion, is destined to meet its end by earthquake.

This basic myth, so clear and direct on the surface, is fascinating in its subtle interweaving of the shamanistic idea of the life-force with the Mesoamerican conception of the solar cycles as representative of the inherent order of that essentially spiritual life-force. Both the daily and annual cycle of the sun are basic to the myth's conception of creation. The concept of five successive suns suggests the diurnal cycle of the sun with the awakening of life in the morning of each day and the "death" of life at day's end, a suggestion emphasized in the destruction of the First Sun by the jaguar, a symbol of the night. Just as awakening from sleep provides a model for creation, so the "awakening" of plant life in the spring provides another basic metaphor suggested by the care with which the myth specifies the sustenance provided for humanity in each of the world ages; it is always a plant that springs from the earth itself to provide nourishment. Thus, the earth functions as a repository of the life-force, which is "awakened" by the solar cycle in the spring in order to create the life that in turn sustains human life. The significance of the sun is underscored by the identification of corn in the present world age as the divine sustenance of humanity, suggesting at once the Indian's almost mystical reverence for that grain and the process of growing it, the reciprocal relationship between humanity, nature, and the gods, and the relationship between the life cycle of the individual plant and the sun, a connection that pervades the mystical attitude toward corn in the mythologies of Mesoamerica. The myth of the Five Suns thus directly involves the cycles of the sun in the generation of life on the earthly plane by the life-force that lies at the heart of the universal order.

But the solar cycles are only part of a larger conception of creation. Life in the Fifth Sun is created by Quetzalcóatl from bones and ashes of the previous population which he was able to gather during a shamanlike journey to the underworld, the hidden world of the spirit entered only through a symbolic death to the world of nature. The shamanic nature of this creation is further suggested by the metaphoric reference to the belief that the life-force in the creatures of this earth resides in the bones, the "seeds" from which new life can grow. To create that life, Quetzalcóatl pierced his penis and mixed the blood resulting from that autosacrificial act with the pulverized bone and ash from the underworld. Symbolically, his creative act unites the shamanistic belief that the bones are the repository of the life-force with the Mesoamerican view that blood represents the essence of life, a view especially clear in this case since the blood is drawn from his penis, the source of semen, man's reproductive fluid. Creation is seen in a series of organic metaphors bringing together seeds and bones, the sun and birth, man and plants in a complex web of meaning suggesting the equivalence of all life in the world of the spirit, which underlies and sustains the world of nature. Life in this world, the myth suggests, must be understood in terms of that underlying spirit.

The evidence we have of Maya thought reveals a remarkably similar cyclic conception. In the

Popol Vuh , the mythic history of the Quiché Maya of highland Guatemala, the creation of life, or "the emergence of all the sky-earth," is described as

the fourfold siding, fourfold cornering,
measuring, fourfold staking,
halving the cord, stretching the cord
in the sky, on the earth,
the four sides, the four corners.

In other words, a quadripartite creation

by the Maker, Modeler,
mother-father of life, of humankind,
giver of breath, giver of heart,
bearer, upbringer in the light that lasts
of those born in the light;
worrier, knower of everything, whatever there is:
sky-earth, lake-sea.^[16]

Attempting to create man, the gods three times formed creatures incapable of proper worship; only on the fourth try were they successful. First, birds and animals were created, but they could not speak to worship their creators "and so their flesh was brought low"; they were condemned thereafter to be killed for food. The second attempt resulted in men made from "earth and mud," but it was equally unsuccessful because they had misshapen, crumbling bodies; their speech was senseless so that they, too, were incapable of the worship required by their creators. After destroying these men, the gods next fashioned "manikins, woodcarvings, talking, speaking there on the face of the earth," but their speech was equally useless because "there was nothing in their hearts and nothing in their minds, no memory" of their creators. These manikins were destroyed by a flood and the combined efforts of the animals, plants, utensils, and natural objects they had ungratefully used. Those surviving the destruction became the present-day monkeys.^[17]

Following this third unsuccessful creation, the Popol Vuh narrates the lengthy exploits of the Hero Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque in the underworld, exploits comparable in mythic function to Quetzalcóatl's shamanic descent into the underworld in the cosmogony of central Mexico (significantly, one of the meanings of Quetzalcóatl is "Precious Twin"). Following those exploits, historical man, the Quiché, was created from the life-giving corn and thereby linked to the annual seasonal cycle. "They were good people, handsome," and "they gave thanks for having been made." But this time the gods had succeeded too well. These men were godlike: they could see and understand everything. In order to put them into their proper relationship to their makers, "they were blinded as the face of a mirror is breathed upon. Their eyes were weakened. . . . And such was the loss of the means of understanding, along with the means of knowing everything, by the four [original] humans."^[18]

Although neither the account in the Popol Vuh nor the similar account in The Annals of the Cakchiquels, the neighbors and enemies of the Quiché Maya, suggests the eventual destruction of the present world age, there is a reference to such a destruction by Mercedarian friar Luis Carrillo de San Vicente, who said in 1563 that the Indians of highland Guatemala believed in the coming destruction of the Spaniards by the gods, after which "these gods must send another new sun which would give light to him who followed them, and the people would recover in their generation and would possess their land in peace and tranquility."^[19] This belief indicates the close similarity between the cycles of the Maya cosmogony and those of central Mexico. Miguel Le6n-Portilla points out that essential similarity when he writes that for the Maya, "kin, sun-day-time, is a primary reality, divine and limitless. Kin embraces all cycles and all the cosmic ages. . . . Because of this, texts such as the Popol Vuh speak of the 'suns' or ages, past and present."^[20] Robert Bruce makes that idea even clearer. The Popol Vuh, he says, consists of "the same cycle running over and over," and that cycle is "the basic cycle, the solar cycle [that] pervades all Maya thought."^[21] Thus, both the Popol Vuh and the Aztec myth depict a reality grounded in the spirit whose essential order is revealed by the cycles of the sun. It is no wonder that throughout Mesoamerica even today, Indians who think of themselves as Christians identify Christ, whose death allowed him to enter the world of the spirit, with the sun as the very epitome of the spirit as it moves in the world of nature.

The Mesoamerican fascination with the sun is further shown by the fact that insofar as the thinkers of Mesoamerica were interested in other celestial bodies, they were almost exclusively interested in those whose cyclic movements were apparently related to the sun. Thus, the two other bodies most often of concern were the moon and Venus. In view of the important role the moon plays in many mythologies, it perhaps seems strange that, as Beyer observed, the moon played a relatively "insignificant role in the mythological system encountered by the conquistadores."^[22] Two myths from central Mexico at the time of the Conquest indicate clearly that whatever importance the moon had derived from its role in a predominantly solar drama.

The first of these myths depicts the creation of the current sun and moon shortly after the beginning of the present world age. In one of its versions, two gods—Nanahuatzin, poor and syphilitic, and Tecciztécatl, wealthy, handsome, and boastful—volunteer to throw themselves into a great fire in a sacred brazier which will purify and allow them to ascend as the sun and light the world. Tecciztécatl proves too cowardly to leap, but Nanahuatzin does and rises gloriously as the sun. Following Nanahuatzin's success, Tecciztécatl musters

his courage, immolates himself, and becomes the moon. True to his boastful nature, Tecciztécatl at first shines as brightly as the sun, but the remaining gods throw a rabbit in his face (what European culture sees as the image of an old man on the face of the moon was seen throughout Mesoamerica as a rabbit) to dim him to his present paleness.^[23] In addition to the obvious oppositional relationship of the sun and moon—one the ruler of the day sky, the other of the night; one bright, the other pale; one retaining a consistent shape, the other changing—this myth suggests other oppositions that would have been of particular importance to the Aztecs, who saw themselves as the people of the sun, a warrior sun who symbolically led their nation. Nanahuatzin, ugly and disfigured on the surface, embodied the inner virtues they prized: courage, modesty, dedication; Tecciztécatl, superficially handsome and seemingly brave, was actually a cowardly braggart. The myth finds reality beneath the surface of appearances, and the fact that this truth is contained in a myth concerned with the creation of the sun and moon is amazingly appropriate as the sun and its various cyclic movements, including the cycle in which the moon participates, provided an understanding of and a metaphor for the underlying order of the cosmos for the Mesoamerican mind. As the myth suggests, the inner truth is most significant; one must look beneath the surface of reality in this more profound sense to understand the essential meaning of the world of appearances.

The second myth also delineates the basic opposition between the sun and moon within the cycle of day and night. Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec tutelary god, was said to have been conceived by Coatlicue, the earth goddess, when "a ball of fine feathers" fell on her. Her pregnancy was seen as shameful by her children, Coyolxauhqui and the four hundred (i.e., countless) gods of the south, and they resolved to kill her. Huitzilopochtli, still in her womb, vowed to protect his mother. As the four hundred, led by Coyolxauhqui, approached, Huitzilopochtli, born at that moment, struck her with his fire serpent and cut off her head. Her body "went rolling down the hill, it fell to pieces," and her destruction was followed by Huitzilopochtli's routing her four hundred followers and arraying himself in their ornaments.^[24] As numerous commentators from Eduard Seler and Walter Krickeberg on have said, this myth clearly depicts the daily birth of the sun and the consequent "destruction" of the moon and stars as the sun replaces them in the sky. The dismemberment of Coyolxauhqui also suggests the moon's various phases as it waxes and wanes as well as its disappearance between cycles.

This myth also depicts the sun, with the virtues of the warrior, in opposition to the moon, this time female, which lacks them: Huitzilopochtli defends his mother, Coyolxauhqui betrays her; he stands alone bravely, she acts only with many followers. But here the implications go much deeper. Significantly, the moon is here depicted as female, and much of the myth's meaning turns on that opposition between male and female. For example, the myth portrays Huitzilopochtli's vowing to defend his mother as taking place while he is still in her womb, making clear that his birth from the female immediately precedes his destruction of his female sibling, an act in structural opposition to his birth: a female gives him birth; he takes a female life. But the Aztecs knew that with the coming of night he too would be destroyed, metaphorically, by being swallowed by the female earth. This further reversal (he destroys a female and is then destroyed by one) suggests the nature of the cycle in which the sun and the moon exist and also suggests the nature of cosmic reality, which both creates and destroys life, a cyclic reality also connected with the sun in the creation myth of the Five Suns.

The recent discovery of the monumental Coyolxauhqui stone (pl. 59) at the base of the pyramid of the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlán confirms this thesis and suggests several other implications as well. The stone depicting the dismembered goddess was uncovered at the foot of the stairway leading up to the Temple of Huitzilopochtli atop the pyramid, a placement recalling the myth in which her body rolls down the hill and falls to pieces. When the sun is at its midday height, suggested by the temple at the top of the pyramid, the moon will be in the depths of the underworld, the land of the dead. But the Aztecs knew that just as the coming of the night would reverse those positions and states, so their own individual vitality, their nation's preeminent position in the Valley of Mexico, and the world age—the Fifth Sun—in which they lived would all eventually perish in the cyclic flux of the cosmos, only to be reborn, though perhaps in a different form. Thus, the killing of Coyolxauhqui paradoxically guarantees the rebirth of Huitzilopochtli and the continuation of the cosmic cycle of life, just as the sacrifice of captured warriors on the stone found by archaeologists still in place in the Temple of Huitzilopochtli and the rolling of their dead bodies down the pyramid to the stone of Coyolxauhqui at the base was seen by the Aztecs as vital to the continuation of their life and the life of the sun.

It is interesting that Huitzilopochtli's temple shared the top of the pyramid with the Temple of Tlaloc. Tlaloc, the god of rain, and the female Coyolxauhqui both have an association with fertility that opposes them to Huitzilopochtli, who is, after all, a male war god. But the myth suggests again the alternation that characterizes the daily cycle of the sun and the moon. Although associated in one sense with fertility, both Tlaloc and Coyolxauhqui also have a destructive aspect. Co-

Pl. 59.
Coyolxauhqui, Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlán
(Museo del Templo Mayor, México).

yolxauhqui's role in the myth is destructive, not creative, and Tlaloc's rain could fall in the destructive torrents of a tropical storm. In both of these cases, Huitzilopochtli can be seen again in an opposing, but this time creative, role—that of the defender of his mother and as the life-giving sun. On a profound level, then, the myth of the destruction of the moon by the sun is clearly meant to delineate the cyclic alternation between life and death, creation and destruction which seemed to the Mesoamerican mind to characterize the rhythmic movement of the cosmic cycles for which the sun provided a metaphor. The two opposed forces become one within the cycle just as the feathered headdress of Coyolxauhqui on the monumental relief at the Templo Mayor (pl. 59) suggests her ultimate union with Huitzilopochtli, her brother, "the divine eagle of the sky." The feathers are "signs of the union consummated through sacrifice" and illuminate "the manifest duality that reveals the essential unity of the god and the victim,"^[25] of the sun and the moon, of life and death—the unity originally perceived by the shamanic forebears of Mesoamerica and the same unity celebrated by the metaphoric use of the ritual mask to symbolize the union of matter and spirit.

Both of these myths depict the moon as subordinate to the sun, and in both myths, the underlying meaning reinforces that subordination. For the Aztecs, the moon was not important in itself but only as its opposition could be seen to clarify the sun's role and symbolic meaning. The situation among the Maya was much the same. In the Popol Vuh, at the end of the underworld adventures of the Hero Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque, "the two boys ascended ... straight on into the sky, and the sun belongs to one and the moon to the other,"^[26] a parallel to the Aztec myth of Nanahuatzin and Tecciztécatl at least in the fact that two male gods are transformed. But as in the Valley of Mexico, myths also exist among the Maya which depict the moon as female in relation to a male sun. According to Thompson, they are the norm and for contemporary Maya groups, at least, usually depict the sun and often a brother, Venus, hunting to provide food for the family. But the old woman at home, often their grandmother but always the moon, "gives all the meat they bring home to her lover. The children learn this, slay her lover, and trick the old woman into eating part of his body. She tries to kill the children, but they triumph . . . and kill her."^[27] This generalized version has interesting structural similarities with the Huitzilopochtli Coyolxauhqui myth, which, with its wide distribution with many variants among the contemporary Maya, indicate its pre-Columbian origin. Both myths depict the sun as a male child in the position of supporting the ideal of sexual virtue, both depict the moon as female and as betraying a parent or child, and both, of course, depict the destruction of the moon by the sun. The emphasis on sexuality in the Maya myth parallels the emphasis on birth in the Aztec version; both focus on generation and death, and, by implication, regeneration. Thus, it is fair to say that both call attention to the basic cyclic alternation between opposed states in the cosmos and to the unity underlying and governing the cycle.

The emphasis on the regularity of the solar and lunar cycles in the understanding of the cosmic unity would seem to indicate a need to deal with the phenomena of eclipses since they are clearly disruptions of those all-important cycles, and Mesoamerica did deal with them at some length. The suggestion in the Maya myth that the moon eats part of the body of her lover (alter ego of the sun?) is interesting in this context. A passage from the Chilam Balam of Chumayel describing the disastrous events of Katun 8 Ahau reads: "Then the face of the sun was eaten; then the face of the sun was darkened; then its face was extinguished,"^[28] which is echoed by the Chorti Maya belief that an eclipse is caused by the god Ah Ciliz becoming angry and eating the sun.^[29] Though these are post-Conquest beliefs, they reflect the pre-Columbian fascination with and fear of eclipses. Throughout pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, it was believed that both solar and lunar eclipses were disastrous portents signaling destruction, possibly even the end of the world, that is, the present world age or "Sun," just as the setting of the sun ended the day and the disappearance of the moon "destroyed" the night. The Maya Dresden Codex contains tables used to predict the dates of possible eclipses, tables that reflect the

working out by the Maya of the complex cycles that governed them. Given the cosmic importance Mesoamerica attributed to the cycles of the sun and, to a lesser extent, the moon, any interruption of them would seem to shake the very foundation of the universe. Interestingly, the Maya attempted to secure that foundation by finding a regularity in the occurrence of these seemingly unpredictable events, thereby including them within the cyclic nature of reality. Everything, they must have believed, when properly understood manifested the order derived from the spiritual unity underlying all reality.

The only other celestial body with which the peoples of Mesoamerica were greatly concerned was Venus. It is "the only one of the planets for which we can be absolutely sure the Maya made calculations"^[30] and probably the only one that played a major role in central Mexican mythology. The reason for this, according to Aveni, is that "besides Mercury it is the only bright planet that appears closely attached to and obviously influenced physically by the sun."^[31] This apparent "attachment" derives from the fact that its solar orbit lies between the earth's orbit and the sun. From the vantage point of the earth, Venus's movement can be divided into four distinct periods: (1) the period of inferior conjunction—an 8-day period when Venus is directly between the sun and the earth and thus invisible because of the sun's glare; (2) the period in which it is the morning star—a 263-day period during which the planet is most brilliant and rises before the sun in the eastern sky, at first only a moment before the sun, the annual moment of heliacal rising after inferior conjunction of utmost importance to Maya astronomers, and then for longer periods each day, the last and longest being about three hours; (3) the period of superior conjunction—a 50-day period during which the sun is between Venus and the earth; (4) the period in which it is the evening star—a 263-day period in which it is visible for a short time in the western sky after sunset, each day for a shorter period of time until inferior conjunction occurs and the cycle begins again. "The long-term motion of Venus can thus be described as an oscillation about the sun, the planet never straying far from its dazzling celestial superior."^[32]

Not only was Venus tied visually to the sun but there were numerical relationships as well which fascinated the Mesoamericans. It was known throughout Mesoamerica that the synodic period described above took "584 days, the nearest whole number to its actual average value, 583.92 days and that 5 × 584 = 8 × 365 so that 5 synodic periods of Venus exactly correspond to 8 solar years."^[33] In addition, there were further numerical correspondences, which are discussed below in connection with the 260-day calendar. Suffice it to say that the apparently eccentric motion of Venus actually meshed with the all-important solar cycles in a number of ways, suggesting again the basic order underlying the apparent randomness of the cosmos.

Among the Maya, "the main function of the study of Venus seems to have been to be able to predict the time of the feared heliacal rising after inferior conjunction," which could cause sickness, death, and destruction.^[34] These dire predictions parallel those seen in the Codex Borgia of the Valley of Mexico,^[35] and it seems likely that the Maya got these ideas from central Mexico^[36] where the period of inferior conjunction was associated with Quetzalcóatl. Both mythologically and historically, in different contexts, his disappearance and reappearance under changed circumstances is central to his story. According to the Anales de Quauhtitlán ,

at the time when the planet was visible in the sky (as evening star) Quetzalcóatl died. And when Quetzalcóatl was dead he was not seen for four days; they say that then he dwelt in the underworld, and for four more days he was bone (that is, he was emaciated, he was weak); not until eight days had passed did the great star appear; that is, as the morning star. They said that then Quetzalcóatl ascended the throne as god .^[37]

Quetzalcoatl's rebirth in shamanic fashion—from the bone as seed—thus accords with the sacred heliacal rising of Venus after inferior conjunction, when its rising first heralds the rising of the sun in the east (the direction of regeneration) and his death with the disappearance of the western, evening star, itself a symbol of the death of the sun. Quetzalcóatl's very name, translated as "Precious Twin" as well as "Feathered Serpent," suggests this connection with the two aspects of Venus. According to Seler, the Codex Borgia includes "myths concerning the wanderings of the divinity [of the morning star] through the underworld kingdoms of night and darkness" during the period of inferior conjunction which are similar to the wanderings of the Hero Twins in the Popol Vuh ,^[38] wanderings that Coe sees as "an astral myth concerning the Morning and Evening Stars."^[39] Thus, it is the period of inferior conjunction, when Venus seems to merge with the sun, and the following heliacal rising, when its rebirth heralds the rebirth of the sun, that fascinated Mesoamericans, a fascination clearly due to the interplay of Venus and the sun.

Surely, then, it is clear that when the seers of Mesoamerica looked to the heavens they saw a cosmic order revealed in the myriad, intricate cycles that meshed with the regular movement of the sun. This order became the basis of myths and rituals, the calendar that organized the ritual year, and the principle from which was derived the orientation of the great ceremonial centers in which those rituals took place. Everywhere one turns, one finds evidence in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica of the at-

tempt to replicate the order of the sun's cycles in man's earthly world and through that replication to understand the workings of the inner life of the cosmos, an understanding fundamental to Mesoamerican cosmology and cosmogony and an understanding for which the mask stood as metaphor.

Generation, Death, and Regeneration

The regular cycles of the sun not only revealed the cosmic order but suggested, just as surely, an orderliness in man's life and in the world he inhabited: implicit in the regularity of the solar cycle was the entire mystery of death and rebirth, the cycle of regeneration as it was manifested in the natural world. As Eliade puts it, "generation, death, and regeneration were understood as the three moments of one and the same mystery, and the entire spiritual effort of archaic man went to show that there must be no caesuras between these moments. . . . The movement, the regeneration continues perpetually."^[40] And as Mesoamerican man looked at his world, the mystery of renewal was everywhere before him: the cycle of the sun as it moved from its zenith to the horizon and disappeared into the chaos of the night always to return from that chaos to be reborn; the changes in the moon as it gradually moved from its creation as the new moon to its growth as a full moon, diminishing to a final "death" before its reappearance once again as the new creation; the changes in the season from the periods of fullness to those of disintegration before a renewal of the cycle; the various stages in the process of the growth of his plants from the "dead seed" to the fully mature fruits; and even such a small thing as the life cycles of the snake and the butterfly with moments of "rebirth" punctuating the stages of development. Life could be counted on not to end; it was always in the process of transformation. And every stage of that process, including a symbolic, if not real, return to the "precosmogonic" chaos^[41] through night and the dry season and even death, was an essential aspect of the mystery.

Through this process of regeneration manifested in the annual renewal of plant life, the gods provided sustenance for humanity, and ritual reciprocation was required. "Each stage of the farming round was a religious celebration^[42] of the divinely ordained mystery of "generation, death, and regeneration" in the sowing, nurturing, and reaping of the agricultural cycle. Thus, throughout Mesoamerica, ritual imitated nature and reflected the seasonal changes by "depicting the life cycle of domestic plants as well as their mythic prototype, the primordial course of events on the divine plane."^[43] The rituals marked not only the transition from seed to maturity but, in their calendrical regularity, the very movement of time itself. Durán was aware of this ritual purpose as he lamented the destruction of the records that told of the calendar that

taught the Indian nations the days on which they were to sow, reap, till the land, cultivate corn, weed, harvest, store, shell the ears of corn, sow beans and flaxseed. . . . I suspect that regarding these things the natives still follow the ancient laws and that they await the correct time according to the calendrical symbols.^{[ 44]}

Corn, mankind's proper sustenance, was the focal point of this ritual cycle and was regarded as divine throughout Mesoamerica. Thompson points out that "in Mexican allegorical writing jade is the ear of corn before it ripens, and like the green corn, it is hidden within the rocks from which it is born and becomes divine. . . . The maize god always has long hair, perhaps derived from the beard of the maize in its husk."^[45] Even today among the Lacandones, Bruce reports that the basic cycle of time is not related as much to the sun or to human life as it is to

the corn, so inseparably linked with the life of the Mayas. The dry, apparently dead grains are buried in the spring. . . . The plants grow from tender, green youth to maturity and are then called to descend to their destiny in the shadows. The plants wither, they are "decapitated" or harvested, shelled, cooked, ground and eaten—though a few grains are saved. Fire (Venus, the Morning Star) clears the earth into which the seeds are cast and buried. Then the cycle begins anew.^[46]

Applied metaphorically to man's life, the cyclical pattern of the corn promises the immortality of regeneration, a promise especially clear to the agricultural communities of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica as "the milpa cycle runs many times during the lifetime of a man, which has the same characteristics." The cycle of the corn teaches the same lesson as the cycle of the sun: all that is to come has already been; "more correctly, 'it simply is"'^[47] in the vast cyclic drama of the cosmos.

The Aztec god Xipe Tótec, although clearly a complex and multivocal symbolic entity, embodies this concept; representing spring, the time of renewal, he is shown wearing the skin of a sacrificial victim as a garment (pl. 47). In the ritual dedicated to him and enacted at the time of the planting of the corn, a priest donned the skin of a victim, representing in this sense the dead covering of the earth in the dry season of winter before the new vegetation bursts forth in spring. As with the more usual ritual mask wearer, that priest represented the life-force existing eternally at the spiritual core of the cosmos and in his ritual emergence from the dead skin demonstrated graphically life's emergence from death in the cyclic round of cosmic

time. Thus, Xipe Tótec was the divine embodiment of life emerging from the dead land, of the new plant sprouting from the "dead" seed. It followed that "the land of the dead is the place where we all lose our outer skin or covering," a fundamental concept "contained in the phrase Ximoan, Ximoayan, which describes the process of removing the bark from trees and is thus closely related to the idea of the god who flays the dead man of his skin."^[48] In the cyclical pattern, death is always a beginning, a rite of passage, a transition to a spiritual mode of being,^[49] and an essential stage preceding regeneration in the transformational process. Thus, the development of the life-force within each human being paralleled the sacred movement of time. The rhythms of life on earth as manifested in the succession of the seasons, the annual cycles of plant regeneration, and the individual life that encompassed birth, growth, procreation, and death were intimately parallel to those of the heavens,^[50] a parallelism that gave a divine aura to the human processes.

These fundamental ideas grew from the shamanic base of Mesoamerican religion with its emphasis on transformation, and that shamanic world view included the idea that "the essential life force characteristically resides in the bones. . . . [Consequently] humans and animals are reborn from their bones,"^[51] which, like seeds, are the very source of life. Thus, Jill Furst contends that in the Mixtec Codex Vindobonensis, "some, if not all, skeletal figures . . .were deities with generative and life-sustaining functions," and her reading of the codex shows that skeletonization "symbolizes not death, but life-giving and life sustaining qualities." ^[52] This, of course, is the same metaphoric message carried by Xipe Tótec: death is properly seen as the precursor, or perhaps even the cause, of life. The striking visual image on Izapa Stela 50 (pl. 60) depicting what appears to be a small human figure attached to an umbilical cord emerging from the abdomen of a seated, masked skeletal figure puts this idea in its clearest symbolic form. There are, of course, many other manifestations of the belief that life is born from death. There is a scene in the Codex Borgia, for example, showing the copulation of the god and goddess of death, a depiction of "death in the act of giving life, . . . perfectly natural for a world that sees death as only another form of life."^[53] And Francis Robicsek and Donald Hales identify many "resurrection events" on Maya funeral vessels; one shows "a young male rising from a skull, an event that can only mean emergence from death to life."^[54] Still another connection between bones and rebirth can be seen in Ruz's suggestion that throughout the Maya lowlands, from the earliest times red pigment was used to cover bones and offerings because red, which "was associated with east where the sun is reborn every morning, may also have been a symbol of resurrec-

Pl. 60.
Stela 50, Izapa (Museo Nacional de Antropologia, México).

tion for men."^[55] Ancestor worship shows yet another aspect of the concept. Among the Maya, as we have seen, dead members of the elite, especially rulers, "from whose race they sprang in the first place" were apotheosized as divinities.^[56] And this belief was shared by those in central Mexico, as can be seen in a passage from the Codex Matritensis:

For this reason the ancient ones said
he who has died, he becomes a god.
They said: "He became a god there,"
which means that he died.^[57]

The life-force never dies; it moves in a cycle from ancestors to descendants, joining them in a spiritual pattern essentially the same as the one traced by the sun as it moves from its zenith to the underworld below and rises again as well as the one manifested in the "dead" seed sprouting new life.

These beliefs account for several of the burial practices found in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. The fact that tombs were placed under and near temples, as at Monte Albán and throughout Maya Mesoamerica, suggests that when the hereditary elite died, they moved from earthly to spiritual leadership. Since "the ancestral dead were considered to be assimilated to the cosmos,"^[58] they could function as intermediaries with the divine and thus maintain a connection with their living descendants.^[59] So sure were the Maya that the dead person continued to live in altered form that not only food but "objects which belonged to him and which

characterized his office or rank and, sometimes, his sex and age" were buried with him. The jade bead characteristically found in the mouth of the deceased in Maya burials as well as those of the Zapotecs and Mixtecs "confirms the writings of the chroniclers of the Spanish Conquest when they refer to the belief of the Mayas and the Mexicans that jade was the currency to obtain foodstuffs and to facilitate one's entrance into the next world."^[60] The tomb itself often "replicated the palace, so that the ruler could continue to enjoy those prerogatives which were his in life."^[61] Others were buried in natural caves because, as we have seen, the cave was metaphorically the womb of the earth, the place of rebirth.^[62] And the assumption that death precedes life is also to be found at the heart of the mythological tradition of Mesoamerica. The narratives of the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh and those detailing the activities of Quetzalcóatl as the evening star place the return from death at the symbolic center of their tales. Clearly, the number of ways in which the belief in regeneration was expressed throughout Mesoamerica from the earliest times, ways to which we have only briefly alluded here, suggests the fundamental nature of that belief.

The Temple of Inscriptions at the Maya site of Palenque contains a stunning expression of the parallels we have been discussing as it brings together a number of sun-related cycles referring to regeneration on a number of metaphoric levelsthe growth of corn, the transfiguration of ancestors, the movement of power from the dead ancestor to the living ruler, all of them affirmations of the belief that life will come from death. At Palenque, we can see the political implications of this world view: many of the monuments containing images related to cyclical regeneration are dedicated to the dynasty of which Pacal, ruler of Palenque from A.D. 615 to 683, was a member. The relief on the lid of the sarcophagus (pl. 10) in which he was buried in the tomb within the Temple of Inscriptions, for example, contains several images identifying him with the symbol of the setting sun, the Quadripartite Monster, with whom he is "metaphorically equivalent" at the time of his death. This equivalency inevitably suggests his rebirth with the rising sun as does the jade effigy of the sun god placed in his tomb.^[63] Just above this scene is a youth in a reclining position whose body lies "upon various objects, two of which are symbols associated with death (the sea shell and a sign that looks like a percentage symbol), while the other two, on the contrary, suggest germination and life (a grain of corn and a flower or perhaps an ear of corn)."^[64]

Thus, the earth not only takes life but generates it as well. According to Kubler, the corn symbolism is "metaphor or allegory for renewal in death, whereby the grown corn and the dead ruler are equated as temporal expressions promising spiritual continuity despite the death of the body," and he notes that Thompson also sees a metaphor of resurrection but sees the scene as "ritualistic," perhaps having "no reference to the buried chief."^[65] And although Coe, Robertson, and Schele and Miller all see this plant as a world tree rather than corn, they too agree that the theme of the relief is resurrection.^[66] Robertson, for example, sees the plant as the sacred ceiba tree reaching from a cave in the underworld through the middle world of the earth's surface to the heavens, a graphic image of transcendence,^[67] while Ruz takes a more philosophical view of resurrection:

The youth resting on the head of the earth monster must at the same time be man fated to return one day to earth and the corn whose grain must be buried in order to germinate. The cruciform motif upon which the man fixes his gaze so fervently is the young corn which with the help of man and the elements rises out of the earth to serve once more as food for humanity. To the Maya, the idea of resurrection of corn would be associated with the resurrection of man himself and the frame of astronomical signs around the scene symbolizing the eternal skies would give cosmic significance to the perpetual cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth of beings on the earth.^[68]

He is convinced that the figure is not that of the buried ruler (he maintains that the Maya would have thought more symbolically) but probably represents either humanity or the corn, often symbolized by a young man.^[69] Westheim adds the dimension of the sacrifice, noting that the seed must die so that the plant may sprout, thereby indicating that "constant renewal of the cosmos was possible only through human sacrifice, just as the continued existence of the human race was ensured only through the constant rebirth of the maize."^[70] Although these major commentators on pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilization offer different interpretations of the scene, the common denominator is the theme of the rising, falling, and regenerative pattern of the sun, here particularly applied to the regeneration of political power. Thus, even in the affairs of state, the principle of regeneration, intimately related to the cyclical movement of the sun through the heavens, is operative.

And other manifestations of the symbolism of regeneration can be seen in the tomb at Palenque. Both Franz Termer and Ruz have noted the unusual shape of the cavity that held the body, describing it "as a stylized representation of the womb. Burial in such a cavity would be a return to the mother by association of the concepts of mother and earth, sources of life."^[71] The belief that the dead and the living communicate with each other is graphically represented by the hollow plas-

ter tube replicating the umbilical cord, which, in the form of a serpent, itself a symbol of regeneration, goes from the sarcophagus, following the stairway, up to the floor of the temple and thus provides a physical symbol of the spiritual link between the two realms. The red paint with which the crypt was covered, as we have seen, is a color associated with the east, the region from which the reborn sun appears after its return from the land of the dead, and here, as elsewhere among the Maya, is a symbol of regeneration and "an augury of immortality."^[72] But perhaps the most fascinating suggestion of regeneration can be seen in the way the Maya

manipulated architecture so that the movement of the universe confirmed the assertions of mythology. Just as the sun begins its movement northward following the winter solstice, the dead, after the defeat of death, will rise from Xibalbá to take up residence in the northern sky, around the fixed point of the North Star. Pacal, confident of defeating death, has made north his destination: His head was placed in the north end of the coffin, and the World Tree on the lid points north, although Pacal himself is depicted in his southward fall. Just as the sun returns from the underworld at dawn, and as it begins its northward journey after the solstice, Pacal has prefigured his return from the southbound journey to Xibalbá.^[73]

John Henderson points out that those observing the actual movement of the sun at Palenque would have visual proof of the phenomenon.

The sun itself appeared to confirm these symbolic associations. As the sun sets on the day of the winter solstice, when it is lowest and weakest, its last light shines through a notch in the ridge behind the Temple of Inscriptions, spotlighting the succession scenes in the Temple of the Cross. . . . Observers in the Palace saw the sun, sinking below the Temple of Inscriptions, follow an oblique path along the line of the stair to Pacal's tomb. Symbolically, the dying sun confirmed the succession of Chan Bahlum, then entered the underworld through Pacal's tomb. No more dramatic statement of the supernatural foundation of the authority of Palenque's ruling line is imaginable .^[74]

Thus, both art and nature confirmed without question the Maya belief that life must follow death. The message was clear: "A king dies, but a god is born."^[75] And as our discussion of the mask placed over the once-living face of Pacal as he was put in that sarcophagus made clear, the features of the dead man, through the metaphoric agency of the mask, became the eternal features of the deified ancestor. His inner reality had become "outer" in the most significant and final way.

The expression of the theme of resurrection in visual images is not limited to the Maya. One of the most important monumental sculptures of central Mexico, the Aztec Coatlicue (pl. 9), "says" the same thing. Although these two masterpieces were created centuries apart by different cultures, all of the imagery associated with Palenque's Temple of Inscriptions seems to be telescoped symbolically into this Aztec representation of the earth goddess which, according to Fernández,

symbolizes the earth, but also the sun, moon, spring, rain, light, life, death, the necessity of human sacrifice, humanity, the gods, the heavens, and the supreme creator: the dual principle. Further it represents the stars, Venus and... Mictlantecutli, the Lord of the Night and the World of the Dead. His is the realm to which the sun retires to die in the evening and wage its battle with the stars to rise again the following day. Coatlicue, then, is a complete view of the cosmos carved in stone. . . . It makes one conscious of the mystery of life and death. ^[76]

The sculpture is a visual myth clearly related to the ritual involving the great mother goddess, a ritual in which a woman impersonating her was sacrificed to reenact her death, the propitiation of the earth, and her rebirth. This festival took place near the time of the harvest when the earth itself, having been renewed through death, would again provide the nourishment for life. Both Coatlicue and the earth granted everything with generous hands but demanded it back in repayment; and like the sun, they were both creator and destroyer. All of this is magnificently symbolized by the colossal sculpture of Coatlicue now in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City: she wears a skirt of braided serpents and a necklace of alternating human hands and hearts with a human skull pendant. She is decapitated as were those sacrificed to her, and two streams of blood in the form of two serpents flow from her neck. Facing this figure, overpowering both in size and imagery, the observer must agree with Westheim that "there is no story; there is no action. [She stands] in majestic calm, immobile, impassive—a fact and a certainty."^[77] And with Caso: "This figure does not represent a being but an idea.^[78] She is a metaphoric image of the womb and the tomb of all life and simultaneously the embodiment of the cyclical pattern that unites them.

That certainty of death and regeneration, of the cyclical nature of the universe, was at the very core of the Mesoamerican world view. What Bruce says of the Maya is equally true of the other peoples of Mesoamerica: "The solar cycle pervades all Maya thought and cosmology. . . . It is the basic nature, not only of 'time,' but of Reality itself."^[79] And that basic cycle provided Mesoamerica with a framework for thought; all the elemental processes of life

were cast in that mold—the stages in the growth of the corn from seed to harvest, the stages in the development of human life, the necessity of sacrifice to guarantee the continuation of life, and the ultimate unity of life and death manifested politically at Palenque, verbally in the experiences of the Hero Twins in the Popol Vuh and the tales of Quetzalcóatl, and visually in the sculptures of Coatlicue and Pacal's tomb.

But the awareness of this underlying unity did not negate the awe with which Mesoamerican man viewed the mystery of death. That mystery suggested the sacred nature of the cycle which transcended earthly matters and made man aware of his contingent nature. Joseph Campbell uses the metaphor of the mask to place the words of an Aztec poet in context: "Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? 'How many can say,' asks the Aztec poet, 'that there is, or is not, a truth beyond?'

We merely dream, we only rise from a dream
It is all as a dream."^[80]

Another poem from the same body of late Aztec poetry, however, using the metaphoric identification of flower and song with poetry itself, was able to lift the mask and find beneath it the assurance of "a truth beyond."

O friends, let us rejoice,
let us embrace one another.
We walk the flowering earth.
Nothing can bring an end here
to flowers and songs,
they are perpetuated in the house
of the Giver of Life.^[81]

6
The Spatial Order

Not only were the cyclic processes of the cosmos seen by Mesoamerican man as underlying his own life and the life of his divinely ordained sustenance, corn, but the temporal order apparent in those processes was integrally related to the spatial order he perceived both in the world around him and in the hidden world of the spirit. That spatial order united matter and spirit just as the temporal order united man's life with the spiritual life of the cosmos, and both were linked to the cycles of the sun. And just as the temporal order was intimately related to, and perhaps derived from, the various solar cycles carefully observed and charted by Mesoamerican thinkers, the spatial order was directly related to the diurnal passage of the sun from sunrise on the eastern horizon to its highest point at midday, from there to sunset on the western horizon, and then to a point at the lowest depth of its passage through the underworld from which it returned to the eastern horizon to begin the cycle again. The daily path traced by the sun's passage can be visualized as either a circle or a square drawn on a plane perpendicular to the surface of the earth (fig. 3). Drawing two lines through the figure, one connecting East (the point of sunrise) and West (sunset) and the other connecting the zenith (high noon) and the nadir (midnight), locates the center, which is the point of the observer as well as the point—symbolically the world center—around which the sun revolves.

In addition to thus locating the mythic cosmic center, the two intersecting lines define two other mythologically crucial dimensions. The line connecting the highest and lowest points is a familiar feature in any shamanistic religion; it is the central axis of the universe which "is conceived as having these three levels—sky, earth, underworld—. . . three great cosmic regions which," according to Eliade, "can be successively traversed because they

Fig. 3.
The shape of Time and Space.

are linked together by this central axis." The symbolic location of this axis on the earthly plane, the center of the Mesoamerican figure we have been discussing, is therefore

an "opening," a "hole"; it is through this hole that the gods descend to earth and the dead to the subterranean regions; it is through the same hole that the soul of the shaman in ecstasy can fly up or down in the course of his celestial or infernal journeys. . . . [It is thus] the site of a possible break-through in plane.^[1]

It is a manifestation of the sacred, which is not of this earth. This shamanistic view of the importance of the center as a place of mediation between the planes of the sacred and secular accounts for the Mesoamerican attribution of sacredness to mountaintops and caves and for the practice of building pyramids topped with temples (architectural realizations of the basic figure we are discussing) and creating temples that are artificial caves. In these temples, symbolically located on the world axis and on planes above and below the earth, the priests could fulfill what was earlier the function of the shaman—the mediation between this world and the world of the spirit. Thus, it is no accident that the other line drawn through the figure derived from the sun's path, the line connecting East and West, effectively defines this world, the world of the earth's surface, man's world of life and eventual death which is bounded by the point at which the sun "dies" in the west and passes into the underworld, the necessary prelude to its rebirth at the opposing point on the eastern horizon. The cross created by the intersection of these two lines is the quincunx, a cross with arms of equal length whose central point joins the points of equal importance at the ends of each of the four arms. Ubiquitous in Mesoamerica, the five points of the quincunx symbolize the earth and the cosmos, life and motion, and the endless cyclic whirling of time.

If the quincunx thus derived from the solar course is rotated in a northerly direction on its eastwest axis by 90 degrees so that it lies flat on the earth rather than being perpendicular to it, the terminal points of the quincunx become East, North, West, and South, and lines running from the center to each of those points divide the surface of the earth into four quadrants, thereby creating a very different symbolic definition of the same figure (fig. 3). There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the Mesoamerican conception of the order of earthly space is based on exactly that mental "rotation" of the path marked out by the course of the sun^[2] which resulted in a mental image of the earth as a plane, a landmass, either square, circular, or fourlobed, "resembling our four-leafed clover.^[3] This landmass was metaphorically conceived as a crocodilian or toadlike monster floating in water which merged with the sky at the horizons to enclose the earth in an "envelope" of spirit represented by the water underneath and the sky above. The Maya visualized this concept as a house, "the roof and walls of which were formed by four giant iguanas, upright but with their heads downward, each with its own world direction and color. "^[4] This enclosing spirit was Itzamná, Iguana House, the ultimate spiritual essence.

The sacredness of the "enclosure" of the earth is also suggested by the fact that throughout Mesoamerica, each of the points marking the ends of the arms of the quincunx, that is, each of the cardinal directions, had a series of sacred associations: with a certain color, a particular tree, a specific bird and animal, and a god functioning as a sky-bearer. In addition, this directional system had temporal implications as each cardinal point was associated with a season of the year and with specific time units—days, weeks, months, years, and even longer units—in each of the calendric systems making up the basic cycle of time. The whole system is incredibly intricate and complex, varying slightly in its details from area to area, but it surely indicates that the solar path Coggins calls "the shape of time," borrowing Kubler's metaphor,^[5] must also be seen as the "shape" of both earthly and spiritual space. This multivocality of the symbolic quincunx suggests the essential point: throughout Mesoamerica, both space and time were seen as manifestations of a fundamental cosmic order underlying all reality, an order that expressed itself in space and time but was itself beyond space and time. And the center of the quincunx marked the center of the world, the navel of the universe, where man emerged from and therefore could return into the plane of the spiritual to experience that basic order directly.

Wherever the quincunx is found in Mesoamerica—in hieroglyphic writing, on sculpture, on the walls of temples, and, as we have seen, pecked into stucco floors and rocks—it always refers to this basic order of space and time. Of course, the figure carried various specific meanings at various times and places (fig. 4), but the ultimate referent is always the same. The Maya glyph for Kin , for example, which means "sun-day-time" and therefore indicates the "primary reality, divine and limitless,"^[6] is such a figure, as is the Kan cross found at Monte Albán and seen by Caso as representing the solar year.^[7]Lamat , the Maya glyph for Venus, is also a quincunx due, no doubt, to the Maya fascination with the sun-related cycles of that planet. The crossed band element, "which among the Maya appears in celestial bands, whatever its other meanings might be," has the same shape as well. It and the Kin sign and Lamat glyph were in use by the Olmecs as early as 900 B.C.,^[8] suggesting the great antiquity of this symbolic association of the quincunx with time.

In addition, the glyph representing the completion of a katun , a cycle of twenty solar years, is "the most complicated of the Maya quadripartite glyphs" and is similar in form to the flower symbol found at Teotihuacán "which may also refer to calendric completion."^[9] That these time-related figures have a spatial component is suggested by the various depictions of the ritual calendar found in such writings as the Mixtec Codex FejérváryMayer, the Yucatec Maya Madrid Codex, and the Book of Chilam Balam of Kaua , also from the Yucatán and dating from about the time of the Conquest.^[10] The Aztec calendar reproduced by Durán^[11]

Fig. 4.
The Quincunx Variously Applied: a. Monte Albán Kan cross; b. Maya Kin glyph; c. Maya Lamat glyph;
d. Teotihuacán flower sign; e. Maya katun completion sign; f. Teotihuacán pecked cross;
g. Maya calendar from the Book of Chilam Balam of Kaua; h. Maya calendar from the Madrid Codex;
i. Aztec calendar from Durán; j. Mixtec calendar from the Codex Féjérvary-Mayer (a-e after Coggins 1980,
figs. 2a-d; f after Aveni 1980, fig. 71a;g-j after Aveni 1980, fig. 57).

is a quincunx with the 52-year cycle "divided into four parts of thirteen years each, each part associated with a cardinal direction." The years progress in a counterclockwise, that is, sunwise, direction, and the figure is oriented, as always in Mesoamerica, with east, the place of birth or beginning, at the top. As if to indicate the many solar references in this graphic version of the calendar, the center of the circle contains a picture of the sun. This quincunx thus merges space and time and does it in portraying the 52-year cycle, the most significant and widespread of the calendrical cycles of Mesoamerica.

So important was this symbol of the ultimate temporal and spatial order to the peoples of ancient Mesoamerica that they placed it on the very earth itself in the arrangement of their cities. At Teotihuacán, for example, a quincunx is formed by the intersection of the Street of the Dead with the main east-west avenue, an intersection intended to divide the city into the four-quadrant design rigidly adhered to during the centuries of its

growth. All the evidence suggests that this design was a conscious replication of the sacred figure. Millon believes, for example, that the Ciudadela, which is located at this intersection, the very center of the city, was the political and religious center of Teotihuacán,^[12] so that just as the center point of the quincunx joins the east-west, earthly axis and the zenith-nadir, spiritual axis, the Ciudadela "joins" the secular and sacred functions of the urban center. The north-south line of the quincunx that formed the city was what we now call the Street of the Dead, and just as the north-south line corresponds to the zenith-nadir line of the sunderived quincunx which connects the planes of the spiritual world with the material world, so at Teotihuacán the Street of the Dead was a Via Sacra lined with temples, fronting the all-important Pyramid of the Sun and ending in the courtyard of the Pyramid of the Moon. The street was intended to "overwhelm the viewer, to impress upon him the power and the glory of the gods of Teotihuacán and their earthly representatives."^[13] This design was laid out using the cross petroglyphs (fig. 4) that are themselves the familiar quincunx.

These petroglyphs are found all over Mesoamerica at sites laid out according to the same directional orientation and general plan as Teotihuacán, which obviously functioned as a sacred model. The last to follow this model was Tenochtitlán where four avenues led from the gates of the ceremonial precinct in the center of the island city to the cardinal directions, thus marking out the quadrants. Each quadrant had its own ceremonial and political center,^[14] indicating that the quadripartite division of the city had both sacred and secular significance and that the religious and political worlds were united in the symbolic form of the quincunx here as they were much earlier at Teotihuacán. Thus, "the structure of the universe was conceived as the model for social space at Tenochtitlán. . . . The circuits defining the boundaries of social space replicated the geometric structure that the universe was thought to have."^[15] Throughout the development of Mesoamerican civilization, the "pervasive [worldwide] tendency to dramatize the cosmogony by constructing on earth a reduced version of the cosmos, usually in the form of a state capital,"^[16] gave cities the sacred form of the quincunx, using them as "masks" to cover the randomly arranged natural features of the earth with an artificial symbolic construct revealing the underlying spiritual order of the cosmos.

The structures with especially sacred functions were often located in a sacred precinct at the center of the city which was, like the Ciudadela, symbolically "the center of the world, the point of intersection of all the world's paths, both terrestrial and celestial,"^[17] the point at which the breakthrough in plane of which Eliade spoke was possible and therefore the location of the temple in which the priest or ruler could communicate with the world of the spirit. Typically, throughout Mesoamerica, more than anywhere else in the world, these temples were located atop pyramids that in their very structure replicated the sacred form of the universe. Viewed in profile, the pyramid emphasized three of the four points marking the sun's daily passage, the two horizon points and the zenith position symbolizing the heavens which was, appropriately, the location of the temple. One of the ways of visualizing the celestial world of the spirit throughout Mesoamerica confirms this identification of the pyramid with the path of the sun. The Maya, for example, believed the heavens

rose in six steps from the eastern horizon to the zenith, following the sun god as he moved across the sky, and then descended in six more steps to the western horizon. Below the horizon, on into the underworld, there were four more steps down to the nadir, then four back up to the eastern horizon.

The profile of the pyramid on earth atop an imagined inverted pyramid underground creates again the sacred quincunx. In fact, Hammond continues, "the design of the twin-pyramid groups at Tikal may epitomize the solar cycle through day and night."^[18] According to Krickeberg, the peoples of Postclassic central Mexico shared this association of the pyramidal shape with the "shape" of the sun's path.

The sky was conceived of in the form of five or seven superimposed layers which decrease in length as they proceed upward. Depicted graphically in two dimensions, they form a stepped triangle with its apex at the top. The earth was similarly disposed in a series of five layers which two-dimensionally took the form of an inverted stepped triangle.^[19]

This conception is also embodied in Aztec ritual and can be seen in at least two different festivals celebrated during the solar year. Twice during the year, on March 17 and December 2 of our calendar, the Aztec day 4 Motion occurred, and on those days, festivals were celebrated to honor the present world age, that of the Fifth Sun, whose name (i.e., birthdate) was 4 Motion. At these festivals, a captive was prepared for sacrifice, given numerous sacred objects, and ritually instructed to deliver them to "our god," the sun. After hearing the message he was to deliver, he began to ascend the pyramid, "little by little, pausing at each step . . to illustrate the movement of the sun by going up little by little, imitating [the sun's] course here upon the earth." Reaching the top, he placed himself in the center of the Cuauhxicalli, in this case the monumental Stone of Tizoc, the top of which is covered with solar symbols, delivered his message, and was sacrificed. Durán says that "the hour had been cal-

culated so artfully that by the time the man had finished his ascent to the place of sacrifice it was high noon."^[20]

In addition to marking the dates of the sun's birth with festivals and sacrifice, the Aztecs also celebrated the sun's zenith passage following the winter solstice with the Feast of Tóxcatl,^[21] one of the veintena festivals marking the end of each of the eighteen months of the solar year, this particular one honoring Tezcatlipoca, the highest of the ritual gods, the one from whom the others derived and, in that sense at least, an equivalent of the sun. During this festival, a young impersonator of the god who "had been honored and revered as the god himself" for the past year was sacrificed at high noon (again, after a ritual ascent of the pyramid), his heart offered to the sun, and his body rolled down the steps of the pyramid.^[22] As his body tumbled down the pyramid, the sun "fell" from the zenith position and began a new cycle, which would end a year later. A new impersonator of the god was selected at this time as well, one who would ascend to the zenith of the pyramid in a year's time to meet his death in another reenactment of the sacred annual cycle of the sun. As each of these men who impersonated the god and "became" the sun climbed the steps of the pyramid in the annual rite, the quincunx itself came to life in the ritual enacted on the pyramid's staircase.

Their ritual ascent indicates the tremendous symbolic importance of the steps leading to the top of the pyramid which is still felt by the present-day Tzotzil Maya for whom "the sacred mountains symbolize the sky, and to ascend one is tantamount to rising into the heavens. . . . [The mountains] are imagined as linked from top to bottom by a huge stairway, in many ways suggesting the ancient Maya pyramids."^[23] Eliade suggests that "the act of climbing or ascending [universally] symbolizes the way towards the absolute reality ." A stairway, he says, "gives plastic expression to the break through the planes necessitated by the passage from one mode of being to another,"^[24] from the natural world symbolized by the surface of the earth to the enveloping world of the spirit.

But the stairway suggests another way of seeing the pyramid as a quincunx since many Mesoamerican pyramids have square bases and stairways leading up each of the four sides. Such a pyramid seen from directly above as a two-dimensional figure would look exactly like the graphic depictions of calendars found in the codices. Seen in that way, the stairways would take on an even greater significance, becoming the arms of the quincunx and leading from the sacred cardinal points to the center, which symbolized the central axis of the cosmos. Thus, in climbing the stairway, the impersonator approached ever closer to the point of passage to another plane of reality. Not surprisingly, then, those stairways are often flanked with masks (pls. 20, 49) as if to emphasize their significance. The Preclassic Maya Structure E-VII Sub at Uaxactúin provides an early example of this form, and the fact that it was probably the viewing point in a solar observatory designed to chart the annual cycles of the sun suggests that its design symbolized the cycles of time and space by taking the "shape" of those cycles.

Similarly square-based pyramids are found everywhere in Mesoamerica, and the form is often used for small platforms with four stairways located within the confines of the centrally located ceremonial precinct, examples of which are found at such widely scattered major sites as Teotihuacán, Monte Albán, Tula, Chichén Itzá, and Tenochtitlán and at numerous smaller sites. These platforms, often called dance platforms by archaeologists, were used for ritual activity, frequently calendric in nature, and thus the shape of the quincunx would seem again to fit the use of the structure. For these reasons, it seems at least possible that the basic pyramidal form, varied in countless ways throughout Mesoamerica but always associated with the sacred, was derived from the quincunx, a possibility suggested by their shared fundamental association with the underlying cosmic order from which grew space and time and which required ritual reenactment of its sacred processes.

The Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán is a particularly significant example as it was "perhaps the greatest single construction project in Mesoamerican history"^[25] and perhaps the most sacred. From the time of its building at about A.D. 100 until the Conquest, long after Teotihuacán had fallen and been abandoned, it served as the focal point of pilgrimages, its sacred quality undoubtedly connected, both as cause and effect, with Teotihuacan's dominance of much of Mesoamerica at the height of its power. For the later Aztecs, inheritors of the religious traditions of the Valley of Mexico, Teotihuacán was "the place where the gods were made," the site of their manifestation on the earthly plane. Perhaps their gods really were "made" there.

At least four [mural] paintings at Teotihuacán seem to have elements of the Fifth Sun creation myth. If this belief was espoused at Teotihuacán and related to "the day that 'time began,'"^{[ 26]}it could represent a crucial system of beliefs and rituals that transformed the city's shrines and temples into great pilgrimage centers. Teotihuacán's distinctive east of north orientation [which was the model for the orientation of ceremonial centers all over Mesoamerica]^{[ 27]}would have commemorated when time began, because Teotihuacán would have been where time bega n.^[28]

Thus, the Pyramid of the Sun seems to have been connected throughout the history of the Valley of Mexico with the fundamental Mesoamerican sense

of the cosmic order as it manifests itself in space and time. Why this is so, why a pyramid of such magnitude was built where and when it was built, why it was built in one long burst of construction rather than being the result of successive rebuildings of an originally small structure as is more characteristic of Mesoamerica, and why it was oriented as it was are all questions that have been endlessly debated. While it is clear that there is no single answer that will fully resolve these questions, the discovery by Ernesto Taboada in 1971 of the entrance to a natural cave at the foot of the main stairway of the pyramid provides at least the framework for an answer, which connects caves and pyramids on the basis of their both being penetrations into the enveloping spiritual realm accessible only on the vertical cosmic axis.

As an understanding of the answer to those questions requires an understanding of the Mesoamerican symbolic conception of the cave, we will explain that conception briefly before returning to our consideration of the pyramid. Caves, like mountaintops, have always been venerated and used for ritual in Mesoamerica; archaeological evidence of such ritual activity goes back to the Preceramic period,^[29] and both caves and mountains continue to be held sacred by Mesoamerican Indians thousands of years later.^[30] It is undoubtedly this attribution of sacredness to those natural features which led to their use as models in the construction of artificial sacred spaces—the mountain became the pyramid; the cave became the temple—and they were perceived as sacred by a people whose shamanistic world view posited a "layered" reality because they are natural penetrations into the planes of the spirit providing a "god-given" means of communication between humanity and that world of the spirit. They are thus highly liminal places, to use the term Turner borrows from van Gennep's studies of rites of passage. He defines liminality as the state of being "betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. . . . Thus, liminality is frequently likened to being in the womb, . . . to darkness, . . . and to an eclipse of the sun or moon."^[31] While Turner uses the term to describe a part of the ritual process, as we have in our discussion of masked ritual, it seems a particularly appropriate term to describe the Mesoamerican perception of the position of the mountaintop or cave "betwixt and between" the earth and the heavens or the earth and the underworld. The fact that the cave was and still is used for rites of passage in Mesoamerica^[32] suggests a continued awareness of this liminality. Temples located at these liminal points were appropriate for the oracles who could penetrate into the "will" of the world of the spirit^[33] and the priests who could mediate between the planes of matter and spirit; there the gods could be petitioned, and there they would respond.

This petitioning was often for the rain sent by the gods to ensure the survival of life on earth, and the same temples were used for sacrifices providing the gods the sacred fluid, blood, that sustained them. The mythic equation is clear; the gods gave the nourishing liquid they possessed in return for man's sacred fluid, which "nourished" them. These gifts were exchanged at the liminal locations always associated with rain in Mesoamerica: the mountain "penetrates into the sky whence came the winds, rains, storms, and lightning,"^[34] while the cave often contains springs where water arises from within the earth, from the spiritual plane of the underworld, as a direct "communication" from the gods. Today's Maya, for example, still believe that mountains are actually hollow and filled with water that can be reached through caves^[35] and that water from springs found deep in caves is "virgin," still close to the original source of all water and thus ritually pure.^[36]

Such beliefs explain the ubiquitous association of caves with rain, lightning, and thunder throughout Mesoamerica.^[37] The gods of rain—especially the Maya Chac and Tlaloc in central Mexico—are associated with caves, and Tlaloc's pervasive connection with the jaguar, a creature always related in the Mesoamerican mind to the earth, caves, and transformation, further strengthens the link between rain and caves and indicates again their fundamental sacredness. In addition, the sun in its night journey through the underworld was thought of as a jaguar,^[38] thus providing yet another link with Tlaloc, whose name, according to Durán, meant Path under the Earth or Long Cave,^[39] suggesting that solar night journey and further linking the god of rain to the cave, the symbolic source of all water.

The vital agricultural role of water was no doubt partially responsible for the Mesoamerican association of caves with fertility, but the identification of the cave as the womb of the female earth^[40] suggests another reason for that belief. Not only does the seed sprout from the earth and grow with the aid of water into the corn that the gods have provided as man's sustenance but a widespread Mesoamerican origin myth held that man himself, in the beginning, emerged from the maternal earth. Its Aztec version at the time of the Conquest designated Chicomoztoc, Seven Caves, as the place of that emergence, while "the jaguar mouth from which the man with the 'baby' emerges" on the Olmec altar/thrones (pl. 12) was perhaps the earliest mythic "statement" of this belief. This metaphorical identification of the cave with the womb is but another way of describing the emergence of matter from spirit, of man from the gods. The cave becomes the liminal point of transformation where the planes of spirit and matter touch and a basic symbol of creation in the shamanistic, transformative sense understood throughout Mesoamerica. In fact, the transformation through fire by which the

sun and moon were created in the cosmogony of central Mexico has a variant that places the site of that transformative creation in a cave.^[41]

Following this logic, then, the place of emergence becomes the place of return. In death, man is returned to the earth by burial, often in caves, signifying a return to the underworld, the world of spirit, from whence he came.^[42] Often, this connection with death made the cave a focal point of the ritual associated with the veneration of the ancestors who provided a link between this world and the world of spirit,^[43] suggesting again the cyclic nature of Mesoamerican thought, which constantly links birth and death. Just as birth provided a passage from that other plane of existence to this one, death completed the cycle by providing the passage back. As the cave served as an entrance to the world of the spirit through death, it was thought of as an entrance to the underworld in a more general sense. Among the Maya, caves were "pathways to Xibalbá,"^[44] and the Nahua-speaking people of the Sierra de Puebla, the heirs of the traditions of the Aztecs, still believe that "the paradisiacal underworld . . . of Talocan as [the Aztec] Tlalocan is called in the Sierra de Puebla . . . is entered through places called encantas , caves, which are entries to the ideal world."^[45]

That this symbolic linkage of places above and below the surface of the earth accounted in part for the layout of the ceremonial centers of Mesoamerica is evident in both the earliest and the latest of those sacred precincts. By 1000 B.C., that symbolic passage from mountaintop to cave, that is, from zenith to nadir, had already been recreated in the 01mec ceremonial center of La Venta. There were, of course, neither mountains nor caves on the island in the Gulf coast swamp on which this early ceremonial center was built, but its conical, probably fluted pyramid seems an obvious attempt to replicate the volcanic cones of the nearby Tuxtlas, which the Olmecs held sacred. After building the pyramid, "along the central line which forms the axis of La Venta the Olmecs made great offerings and left the famous mosaic floors representing jaguar faces. These mosaics were not left visible; they were covered [i.e., buried ] immediately after they were laid down."^[46] Numerous Olmec sculptures identify jaguar mouths with the openings of caves, a symbolic association that continued throughout Mesoamerican history, so it seems probable that these mosaics functioned symbolically as entrances to the underworld, and their placement on the central, north-south axis in literal and symbolic opposition to the pyramid suggests exactly the same zenith-nadir relationship as that of mountaintops and caves. And it is now clear, according to Johanna Broda, that the Aztec pyramid at Tenochtitlán known as the Templo Mayor was conceptually the same. "The temple itself was a sacred mountain covering the sacred waters like a cave."^[47]

Returning now to our discussion of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán, the sacredness of the cave in Mesoamerican thought lends substance to Millon's contention that the pyramid "must be where it is because the cave is there";^[48] the pyramid was constructed to form the zenith that would complement the nadir of the cave and replicate on the earth the sacred cosmic axis.

The existence of the cave must have been known when the pyramid was built, inasmuch as the entrance to the 103 meter long tunnel coincides with the middle of the pyramid's original central stairway . .. and the tunnel itself ends in a series of chambers almost directly under the center of the pyramid .^[49]

The location of the cave and the obvious desire to make the "entrances" and centers of cave and pyramid coincide seems to account for the location and orientation of the pyramid; the magnitude of the pyramid and its construction in one prolonged burst of sacred energy must have been a result of the belief that "the cave below it was the most sacred of sacred places. . . . The rituals performed in the cave must have celebrated a system of myth and belief of transcendent importance."^[50]

Both the natural characteristics of the cave and the modifications the Teotihuacanos made to it give reason for this belief. The cave itself "is a natural formation, the result of a lava flow that occurred more than a million years ago. As it flowed into the Teotihuacán Valley, bubbles were formed, and when new lava flowed over them, the bubbles remained as subterranean caves."^[51] The shape of the cave is that of a long tube culminating in a chamber considerably wider than the tubelike passage. The shape is suggestive of the womb and vagina and would surely have suggested the mythic cave of origin to the Teotihuacanos. The cave runs in an east-west direction, opening to the west, and as does the Pyramid of the Sun, the opening of the cave faces the setting sun directly on the ritually important days of zenith passage.^[52] Thus, it is a long cave that naturally recreates the sun's path under the earth, and as Durán indicated, Tlaloc's name meant Path Under the Earth or Long Cave to the Aztecs who inherited the culture of Teotihuacán, and the rituals conducted in the cave (discussed below) suggest the significance of this connection.

All these natural characteristics of the cave must have given it the highest sacred character, and the modifications that were made enhanced these characteristics. The chamber at the end of the cave was given a four-lobed shape that looks very much like the shape of the calendars in the later codices as well as the caves of origin also depicted in those codices. This quincunxlike shape was oriented to the cardinal directions just as the city itself was divided into quadrants by the avenues running in the cardinal directions. The end

chamber must have "constituted the sancta sanctorum ,"^[53] and it was reshaped to give it the symbolic form of the cosmic cycles to the veneration of which it was no doubt dedicated. In addition to these alterations, the shaft of the cave was modified to give it "a more sinuous appearance than it originally had."^[54] But perhaps the most significant alteration was the addition of a series of artificial drain channels to allow water to be made to flow from the end chamber to the mouth of the cave. Although it was once thought that the cave was originally the site of a natural spring, according to Millon, "we now know that water did not ever flow naturally in the cave" so that the symbolic connection between caves and the origin of water had to be made by man. As Millon concludes, "everything that was done to the cave and in the cave proclaims ritual,"^[55] ritual based on man's symbolic recreation of the work of the gods which, according to Eliade, "is efficacious in the measure in which it reproduces the work of the gods, i.e., the cosmogony."^[56]

Although we can never know the exact nature of the ritual carried out in that cave so long ago, the people of Teotihuacán have left us some tantalizing clues. The clearest of all is the water channel they constructed through which water, which had been carried into the cave, could have been made to flow out the mouth of the cave. Such a ritual would have been consistent with the pervasive Mesoamerican belief that caves penetrated symbolically to the original source of all water in being a reenactment of the original provision of water by the gods, a reenactment designed, of course, to assure the coming of the rains with the beginning of the rainy season. Such an interpretation of the physical facts of the cave accords amazingly well with the scenes depicted in the mural found at the Tepantitla apartment compound (colorplate 3) near the cave. As we have shown, the upper half of the mural depicts a deity or deity impersonator who unites the symbolic attributes of the gods of rain and fire to suggest the reciprocal relationship between man and the gods which ensures fertility and the continuation of life.

The upper painting abounds with allusions to water, an emphasis also found in the lower panel of the mural, which refers directly to the cave under the Pyramid of the Sun. In the center of a scene generally interpreted as Tlalocan, the paradise of the rain god, stands a pyramidal hill that contains the mouth of a cave from which emerges a stream of water that divides to flow in either direction along the base of the scene, nourishing the plants growing luxuriantly there. After thus fulfilling their function, the streams disappear into holes in the earth guarded or represented by toads. The similarities between the painting and the actual pyramid and cave are too great to ignore. In both, the mouth of the cave is at the center of the base of the pyramidal structure; in both, water flows from the mouth of the cave and brings fertility and agricultural abundance to the land; both are sacred and fundamentally associated with ritual. Further support for this interpretation comes from the most recent excavations, which uncovered within the cave "offerings of fragments of iridescent shell surrounded by an enormous quantity of tiny fish bones," the remnants of ritually burned fish;^[57] the association of aquatic creatures with water symbols is a common motif in the murals and relief sculpture at Teotihuacán and suggests the ritual use of the cave in calendrically determined rain petitioning ceremonies, and the ritual burning fits perfectly with the allusion to the god of fire in the mask of the figure in the upper mural. Were we to have been present in ancient Teotihuacán on the day of the ceremony at the beginning of the rainy season, we might well have seen a priest impersonating the deity in the mural's upper scene calling forth the waters from the sancta sanctorum inside the cave in a ritual reenactment of the original work of the gods in providing water to ensure the fertility on which life depended. Thus, the solar ceremonies connected with the ritual probably performed on the staircase and in the temple atop the Pyramid of the Sun symbolically merged with the fertility ceremonies associated with the cave in a vast cycle imitating and guaranteeing the continuance of the cosmic cycles of time and space of which earthly life was the product and on which it depended.

The building of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán thus provides a significant example of the way the peoples of Mesoamerica combined their view of cosmic order, their art and architecture, and their ritual practice in the imposition of form on nature. Of course, they would have seen themselves as merely making apparent the implicit inner form rather than imposing one in their linking the center of the natural cave to the center of the man-made pyramid and using the resulting configuration as the center of ritual reenactment of the cosmogonic forces. The form they used was, for them, the basic form of the cosmos, a form that existed before space and time and from which space and time were derived. And that derivation of both space and time from a common source is no doubt the fundamental reason for their linkage in Mesoamerican thought. That they are both expressions of an underlying spiritual order is further suggested by their probable derivation from and constant association with the course of the sun, the ultimate symbol of spirit and the ultimate source of order.

7
The Mathematical Order

The peoples of Mesoamerica very early found clues to the mysteries of the cosmos in the order observable in the visible phenomena of the universe, clues that led them to an understanding of the cyclical movement of time, which they saw as a key to the basic rhythm of the universe. Such an insight was a natural result of the shamanic base of Mesoamerican thought which suggested that ultimate reality was to be found in the unseen world of the spirit. The material world "masked" that unseen world but in such a way the features of the mask—the phenomena of the natural world of time and space—revealed, when properly understood, the realities of the spirit. Thus, the spiritual essence of such observable phenomena as the cycles of the sun, the changes in the moon, and the movement of the stars and planets could be captured in abstract calendrical systems that charted the movement of essentially spiritual cyclical reality. These initially rudimentary systems grew in complexity as they were related mathematically to each other, and that growing complexity, in turn, fostered the profound pan-Mesoamerican effort to understand the relationship of every conceivable aspect of time to every other as those relationships manifested the ultimate reality of time—"something coming from the divinity and somehow part of its very being."^[1]

According to a myth retold in the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel , the twenty days making up the uinal, the Maya name for the twenty-day unit of which the solar calendar was composed throughout Mesoamerica, were created and named by the gods even before heaven and earth came into being:

Every day is set in order
according to the count,
beginning in the east,
as it is arranged.^[2]

Insight into the essence of the arrangement of the universe could therefore come through an understanding of "the count" and of the system by which it was "set in order" as the system according to which time moved must have preceded the existence of time itself and thus must be—or issue directly from—the ultimate creative power itself. No wonder, then, that "the counting and periodization of time, and the endowing of time with religious and ritual meaning, is [so fundamental as to be] a characteristic feature of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica,"^[3] and no wonder that both the days and numbers that were the units of this counting and periodization were seen as sacred in themselves. The days were seen as living gods^[4] closely linked to the fate of men and nations as were the numbers by which the days were designated.^[5] The latter were, if anything, more sacred than the units of time because numbers could be manipulated mathematically, a process that must have seemed to the thinkers of early Mesoamerica to capture the essence of the workings of the divine system ordering the cosmos.

Given that attribution of supernatural status to the mathematical manipulation of the units of time and space comprising natural reality, it is not surprising that very early in its development, during the time of the Olmecs at the very latest, Mesoamerica saw the creation of a purely abstract calendar tied to no natural cycle, a calendar that, in the Mesoamerican mind, perhaps complemented the solar calendar in the same way that the realm of the spirit complemented the natural world. The calendar itself was essentially mathematical in its permutation of two different time sequences against

each other, one consisting of twenty named days, each symbolized by a day-sign, and the other of thirteen numbered days. The two sequences ran simultaneously so that any given day was designated by one of the twenty names and one of the thirteen numbers, making possible 260 different combinations within the sacred cycle. It thus took 260 days before the same combination of day-sign and number reappeared.

Why the 260-day period was selected is not known and will probably never be known for certain. That there is no obvious correspondence to any important observable cycle of time is suggested by the fact that no other civilization in the world used a 260-day cycle as the basis for a calendar.^[6] There are, however, a variety of natural cycles that coincide fairly well with the calendar's 260-day period. Some of these are astronomical cycles. Aveni, for example, suggests that "the actual appearance interval of Venus as morning and evening star is close to 260 days (263 days on the average), Mars' synodic period is exactly three cycles of 260 days," and 260 is close to numbers used in predicting possible eclipses.^[7] Biologically, the number is also close to the gestation period for humans, and Barbara Tedlock's research among the contemporary highland Maya suggests that possible base.^[8] None of these cycles, however, has gained acceptance as the foundation of the calendar. Henderson suggests the most widely held view: the 260-day period may simply be an artifact of the permutation of its two subcycles; thirteen and twenty are numbers of considerable ritual and symbolic importance throughout Mesoamerica. There is no compelling reason to suppose that 260 is significant in its own right.^[9] Thus, the calendar may well have been essentially mathematical; given the astronomical, numerological, and biological coincidences, regardless of its origin, the number probably grew to be significant precisely because it reflected so many of nature's cycles.^[10] These coincidences no doubt suggested to the Mesoamerican mind that a mathematical key to the various cycles that embodied the fundmental order of their world had been discovered, a key revealing the order of time itself and one that enabled man to give appropriate form to the essence of time, which was beyond visual reality. The elimination of the connection with visible phenomena characteristic of the solar calendar must have made this system seem a purer, more direct conceptualization of the sacred knowledge of ultimate reality, a means of lifting the mask covering the world of the spirit.

Modern scholarship has not discovered the original sacred calendar; we have only a series of variants presumably derived from an ancient prototype. These variants include the Aztec version known as the tonalpohualli, literally meaning "the count of day-signs," the Yucatec Maya version that is often referred to as the tzolkin by scholars although we do not know what the Maya called it, and the most ancient of them, the Zapotec variant known as the piye. In all of its local embodiments, however, it was a sacred calendar used for divination and prophecy and thus complemented the solar calendar used to regulate both the more mundane affairs of life and the grand ritual cycle that allowed earthly life to be led in harmony with the cosmic order.

While the origin of the 260-day sacred calendar remains obscure, its importance can be seen in its persistence. Although undoubtedly in use much earlier, it first appears archaeologically in Oaxaca during the sixth century before Christ where it is "still used today . . . after 2600 years have elapsed."^[11] That its survival is due to its essentially religious nature is suggested by the fact that although the symbols for the day names varied somewhat throughout Mesoamerica, the 260-day calendar seems to have preserved its original sacred significance and divinatory importance in whatever variation it appeared.^[12] Thus, both its nature and continuity suggest that "knowledge of time was the root of theological thought"^[13] throughout Mesoamerica.

Satterthwaite's observation that the complexity of the Mesoamerican calendrical system "exceeds the needs of time measurement in affairs of daily life or the recording of history in the ordinary sense"^[14] is clearly an understatement and suggests that the Mesoamerican concern with calendars ultimately had little to do with our concept of time measurement. Their fascination grew from the conviction that the various cycles of time revealed the inner workings of the essentially spiritual universe that shaped the world of nature. As Schele and Miller put it in their study of the Classic period Maya, "The Maya watched the heavens with committed concentration, not so that farmers knew when to plant (they already knew), but so as to detect the repetitive patterns against which history could take form."^[15] Those patterns could be charted in the calendars and used to prophesy the future. And since, as we have seen among the Maya, the most important aspect of kin was its cyclic nature, the past also became a "clue to the present and both could be used to project the future," thereby "adding a divinatory or astrological quality to the Maya concept of time."^[16] Past and future became one since "it is not memory that remembers the past, but the past that returns."^[17] History was certain to repeat itself; knowing the past and understanding calendrical lore would allow man to divine the future.^[18]

But the 260-day calendar was obviously too intricate for the common man to interpret with confidence; the sacred nature of the work required the efforts of those closer to the gods. It became the function of a special group of priests, the tonalpouhqui in central Mexico, for example, to interpret the signs of the tonalpohualli^[19] as they were

found in the books containing the various specific versions, the tonalámatl. Schooled in the ancient myths and religious doctrine, such priests throughout Mesoamerica used their knowledge to calculate what was to come; "with mathematical precision they made adjustments to set their measures of time in accord with the changing reality of the universe."^[20] They announced their prophecies at the festivals and other ceremonies and indicated which days were propitious for naming a child, celebrating a wedding, healing a patient, sowing and reaping, or even beginning a war. Society looked to them for direction, and they provided it by interpreting the sacred calendar.

Working with such a complex instrument was not an easy task. The priests were required to determine the augury of each of the 260 days of the sacred round since the essence of the day (kinh, among the Maya) was in itself the prophecy (also kinh).^[21] "Once all the influences and interrelationships were fathomed . . the key to the whole ordered scheme of existence" became apparent.^[22] But that was easier said than done. As each of the 260 days was identified by a sign and a number, and each number from 1 to 13 was associated with a god, each day took on the sacred association of the number it bore.^[23] In addition, each day-sign was also associated with a god so that the significance of the day was determined by the combination of the two. But the task was still more difficult, for

each of the 20 periods of 13 days ("weeks") . . . also had a patron god. Moreover, each 13day cycle was accompanied by a sacred volatile. Again, each of the 13 volatiles had a patron god, because these flyers were theriomorphic aspects (theophanies) of the gods. Moreover, the 260-day cycle had a list of deities of the night, which were also patrons of 9 of the day periods.^[24]

Each of these symbolic entities had a prognosticatory value so that priestly divination necessarily involved not only the possession of a large body of knowledge but the ability to understand or intuit the significance of a given entity's symbolic influence on the others associated with a particular date. Thus, the 260-day sacred calender must have "followed an internal logic of allusion and connotations, which was ambiguously structured to allow for intuition in the divinatory horoscope arts, but which also reflected the mysteries of the gods' multiple identities and of astronomical configurations."^[25] In short, the calendar was an interface between man's world and the underlying world of the spirit, and the calendar priests, working with what León-Portilla has justly called "a most unusual religio-mathematical vision of the universe, the fruit of highly refined and precise minds,"^[26] were approaching as close as possible to divinity itself.

It is no wonder, then, that the complexity exceeded the needs of time measurement and the recording of history and no wonder that the priests became increasingly more powerful and important in the development of the culture.^[27] Astronomy became astrology and was used to chart the course of the nation and to guide the lives of individuals. Scholars differ as to whether Mesoamerican man felt trapped by the signs, or was confident that he himself was capable of changing their portent, or felt optimistic that the cyclical and regenerative nature of the cosmos would eventually effect a movement paralleling the sun's journey away from the dark back into the light.^[28] Whatever the case, however, each person knew that by virtue of having been born on a particular day of the calendar, he was linked to the supreme order of the cosmos. There is very early evidence on the Danzante sculptures of Monte Albán that people's names were taken from the day names of their birthdate in the sacred calendar,^[29] thus indicating a relationship that continued throughout Mesoamerican history between one's very identity and the destiny determined by the augury of the day; "as the Popol Vuh economically expresses it: 'one's day, one's birth' was identical with his destiny."^[30] Every aspect of life from the realm of the individual to the arena of nations, from the mundane to the sacred, from the specific to the archetypal was included in the complex structure of the calendrical system. In its entirety, it gave abstract form to Mesoamerican religious belief as well as the individual's fears and ideals. It united the past, present, and future and unified the "emotional vision of the religious cosmology"^[31] with the mathematical genius of a people. It pulled all knowledge into a multifaceted view of the basic vision with each aspect of the cosmos in its ordered place. Whether it augured well or not in particular cases, its very existence provided reassurance that the universe was indeed in order.

The 260-day calendar reflects the Mesoamerican fascination with cycles as it is a created cycle rather than an observed one. Yet another indication of this fascination can be seen in the integration of individual cycles to form larger and larger, more and more intricate ones. The Maya codices reveal the significance of the 260-day sacred calendar in this effort; they embody one vast divinatory scheme and seek a single goal: to establish an order to human existence by bringing the naturally occurring astronomical cycles into accord with that 260-day calendar. This fundamental unit of time lies at the foundation of every almanac in the codices.^[32]

The 260-day calendar itself is, of course, the result of two units of time, the 13- and 20-day periods, running concurrently, and in a similar permutation, the 260-day sacred calendar ran simultaneously with the 365-day solar year to create a 52-solar-year cycle at the completion of which the

beginning date of each calendar again fell on the same date. That mathematically derived 52-year cycle was of great importance throughout Mesoamerica. Called the Calendar Round by Maya scholars, it was of such significance to the Maya that they never indicated dates in heiroglyphic texts or historical documents by the solar year designation alone. Most often, the date was specified by its designation in the Calendar Round. The Aztecs, following the traditions of their predecessors in the Valley of Mexico, referred to the 52-year cycle as a bundle of years or, according to Durán, "a Perfect Circle of Years."^[33] The perfection referred to, of course, is the perfection of the completed cycle, and this moment of completion was both a moment of renewal—the beginning of a new cycleand a potential moment of disaster—the end of the old cycle—since the Aztecs believed that the continuance of the present world age was at that moment in jeopardy.

The importance of the 52-year cycle is nowhere seen more clearly than in the belief that the most important date of all, the end of the cycle of the Fifth Sun, could come only at the end of one of these Perfect Circles. According to Sahagún, the night preceding the inauguration of the new 52-year cycle was filled with anxiety as the priests appointed to that function watched the stars of the constellation Tianquiztli, which we call the Pleiades, for a sign indicating the continuation of the world. "When they saw that they had now passed the zenith, they knew that the movements of the heavens had not ceased and that the end of the world [i.e., the present world age] was not then."^[34] Then the inhabitants of the Aztec nation could rekindle their fires, put out in ritual compliance with the end of the cycle, and breathe a collective sigh of relief with the knowledge that life would continue on its present course for another 52 years, a knowledge based on the perfection of the 52-year cycle, which merged the observable, natural cycle of the 365-day solar year with the abstract, spiritual cycle of the 260-day sacred calendar. That merging of the two orders had divinatory implications as well since each of the days of the solar calendar's months was identified with a different deity who influenced its meaning. Thus, each individual day of the 52-year cycle had a somewhat different meaning within the system of divination based on these calendrical cycles; a system aptly characterized as "an intricate mechanism in which each part can influence all the others."^[35]

Mesoamerican observers were also aware of other cycles mathematically congruent with the 260-day cycle of the sacred calendar. Venus completed 65 of its cycles every 104 solar years, a doubling of the 52-year cycle called huehueliztli, an old age, by the Aztecs who regarded it as significant^[36] because it merged again the 260-day cycle with the cycles observable in the heavens. In the Maya codices, the same tendency can be seen:

In the lunar tables a count of 46 Tzolkins is necessary to create a re-entering moon-phase cycle which fits the possible occurrence of eclipses. The 1,820-day count in the Paris zodiacal table and the 780-day count of the Mars table were probably both chosen because they are exact multiples of the 260-day count.^[37]

In addition to all of these cycles, the Maya created an even grander one by merging the solar year with the cycles of creation. Called the Long Count by Maya scholars, this cycle calculated time from a base point in the past which was the beginning of the present world age. According to the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation, this date was August 12, 3113 B.C., from which point in time the present age would last a little over 5,000 years.^[38] The Long Count used a number of units of increasing size based on the solar day and the solar year to make these calculations. The smallest unit was the day, and twenty days combined to form a uinal. Eighteen of these monthlike units formed a tun or year. Twenty tuns made up a katun, and twenty katuns a baktun. There is some disagreement about the existence of larger named units, but large periods of time were measured; periods of millions of years into the past and future were recorded on Classic period monuments. For us, however, the important point is that the Long Count was used "to record the number of days elapsed since the beginning of the current 'Great Cycle'"^[39] and was, therefore, another indication of the penchant of Mesoamerican seers to build larger and more complex cycles by combining cycles they were already familiar with. Although the great length of the Long Count might lead us to see it as manifesting a linear concept of time rather than a cyclical one, we know that the Maya did not see it in that way.

In their inscriptions they made a concerted effort to underscore the essential symmetry of time by emphasizing cyclic repetition of time and event. The actions of contemporary kings were declared to be the same as those of their near and remote ancestors and the same as those of the gods tens of thousands-even millions of years—in the past.^[40]

Although the 260-day cycle is very important throughout Mesoamerica, it is interesting and perhaps significant that the two larger cycles we have discussed—the 52-year cycle and the Long Count—share only an association with the solar calendar. In that sense, at least, the sun can be seen again at the very center of Mesoamerican spiritual thought, with its basic cycles of the day and year lying at the heart of Mesoamerican cosmology.

In a fascinating way, this ancient cosmological system shares at least one fundamental assumption

with modern physics despite their totally different purposes. As Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman put it, mathematics provides physics with its only method of understanding the fundamental laws of the physical world. And mathematics similarly provided Mesoamerican spiritual thought with its primary method of comprehending the fundamental laws of the spiritual world. For this reason, "no other ancient culture was able to formulate, as they did, such a number of units of measurement and categories or so many mathematical relations for framing, with a tireless desire for exactitude, the cyclic reality of time."^[41] The difference, of course, between our physics and their religion is that we want physical laws and they wanted spiritual ones. But to satisfy their desire, they devised what was the most advanced mathematics in the world at the time, one that used a notational system with place value and the concept of zero. Using only three symbols, this system could, and did, write numbers in the hundreds of millions. With it, the thinkers of Mesoamerica could chart and integrate the regular cycles of time in which their very existence was embedded and thus gain fundamental insight into the most sacred processes of the cosmos. What Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend say of the ancient peoples of Europe and the Middle East seems even truer of their counterparts in Mesoamerica. Our forebears, they say, built

time into a structure, cyclic time: along with it came their creative idea of Number as the secret of things. . . . Cosmological Time, the "dance of stars" as Plato called it, was not a mere angular measure, an empty container, as it has now become, the container of so-called history; that is, of frightful and meaningless surprises that people have resigned themselves to calling the fait accompli. It was felt to be potent enough to control events inflexibly, as it molded them to its sequences in a cosmic manifold in which past and future called to each other, deep calling to deep. The awesome Measure repeated and echoed the structure in many ways, gave Time the scansion, the inexorable decisions through which an instant "fell due." Those interlocking Measures were endowed with such a transcendent dignity as to give a foundation to reality that all of modern Physics cannot achieve; for, unlike physics, they conveyed the first idea of "what it is to be, " and what they focused on became by contrast almost a blend of past and future, so that Time tended to be essentially oracular.^[42]

It seems abundantly clear, then, that the peoples of Mesoamerica, in a manner similar to the archaic civilizations of Old Europe and the Middle East, perceived an inner, spiritual reality as metaphorically underlying and supporting the perceptible reality of the everyday world in which they found themselves. This underlying reality was most apparent to them in the regularity of the cycles to which everything in the natural, temporal world seemed to conform. The number and variety of the cycles for which we have evidence of their calculating is striking. In connection with the sun alone, they concerned themselves with the cycle of day and night, the annual cycle of the solstices and equinoxes which was the cycle of seasonal change, the regular occurrence of two zenith passages a year, and probably the regular cycle of dates of potential solar eclipse. They calculated the cycles of the moon as well, both the cycle of lunations and of dates of potential lunar eclipse. With its complex cycle of appearance and reappearance in a changed aspect, Venus fascinated them, and they calculated its periods as well as the moments of its clearest interaction with the sun. And there is evidence that they were interested in the cycles of Mars and perhaps Mercury and Jupiter as well. They also calculated the positions of certain stars in relation to the rising of the sun during the course of the solar year. And it was not only the cycles observable in the heavens which fascinated them. The well-known Mesoamerican obsession with death is, as we have seen, really an obsession with the cycle of life, death, and rebirth which they saw in the corn and in themselves as well as in the heavens. Literally everywhere they looked, both in the heavens and on earth, they saw reality in cyclical motion. In addition to these observable cycles that were charted and calculated and interpreted, the ancient thinkers of Mesoamerica created a cycle based on the permutation of two numerical sequences, thirteen and twenty, and combined their cycle with the cosmic cycles they had observed. With each cycle added to those already known, they must have felt they were coming closer and closer to the essence of divinity, the very principle of spiritual order underlying the universe.

Through the creation of their profound and complex calendrical system, the seers of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica were able to look behind the mask of nature to see the face of divinity itself; and through modern scholarship's study of the system they constructed from what they saw there, "if we look carefully, we can gain a tantalizing glimpse of the supreme mental genius of these people."^[43] Hermann Hesse in his greatest novel, Magister Ludi, describes the Glass Bead Game, his metaphor for the supreme intellectual construct capable of revealing the spiritual unity of all experience:

In the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, . . . every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. . . .

[Each] was, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.^[44]

One cannot help but believe that the shapers of the calendrical system of Mesoamerica would have seen in Hesse's metaphor the perfect description of their profound work.

8
The Life-Force
Source of All Order

All of the strands of Mesoamerican cosmological thought we have discussed have in common a constant attempt to penetrate beneath the surface of life and experience to an inner reality from which the visible world and its endless variety of shapes and forms emanate. Through their ecstatic shamanistic vision and their awareness of the regular, and hence prophetic, cycles of nature, Mesoamerican seers were able to lift the mask of the natural world and discern the features of that sanctified world. The complexity of the seemingly chaotic world the mask of nature presented as reality thus resolved itself into an orderly set of patterns governed by spiritual laws. Proof of the ultimate order of the cosmos came, for example, from their discovery that the annual cycle of the seasons, the organic cycle of plant growth, and the annual astronomical cycle of the sun really merged to form a single cycle governing agricultural activities and their accompanying ritual. Similarly, the solar year, the 260-day sacred year, and the Venus "year" merged to form another ritually significant cycle. Thus, ever-greater and more inclusive systems were formed, a process resulting finally in the metaphoric elaboration of an all-encompassing cosmic system that seemed to their minds capable of sustaining man's existence by generating the spiritual energy necessary to maintain the motion, or life, that characterized the cycles. Just as the heart's pumping of blood through the body symbolized life to the peoples of Mesoamerica, so the divine energy at the heart of this intricately cyclical cosmic system, an energy to which hearts and blood were sacrificed throughout Mesoamerican history, was seen as the vital force of the universe. And this vital force, to those profound thinkers, was the very essence of divinity—what we would call the godhead.

The history of Mesoamerican speculative thought, if it could ever be written, would chart the course of the development of this fundamental conception from its presumptive place of origin at La Venta 3,000 years ago to its final development at Tenochtitlán in the mid-fifteenth century, the time of the Conquest. By that time, this cosmological system had been fully developed by Mesoamerican philosophers and theologians from the assumptions implicit in the world view brought to this continent millennia earlier by its first inhabitants. But that history will never be written because the cultures of Mesoamerica preserved no detailed record of their speculative thought. Mesoamerica's Platos and Aristotles consigned their thought to an essentially oral tradition aided by various forms of glyphic writing,^[1] a tradition destroyed by the Conquest. We are left with only tantalizing suggestions of the power and beauty of the fundamental conceptions that shaped it.

It is fascinating to observe Mesoamerican scholars grappling with the problem of defining those conceptions. From Seler's monumental studies at the turn of the century to the work of Beyer, Caso, León-Portilla, Hvidtfeldt, Nicholson, and Thompson to the more contemporary work of such scholars as Hunt, Flannery, Marcus, Pasztory, and Schele and Miller, a relatively consistent view of the basic tenets of Mesoamerican cosmological thought emerges, but that view is often couched in strikingly different terms. All of these scholars suggest the existence of something akin to a divine essence that provided the foundation for all reality and manifested itself in the vast number of so-called gods making up the Mesoamerican "pantheon." As Eva Hunt describes it, "Reality, nature, and experience were nothing but multiple manifestations of a single unity of being. God was both the one and the many. Thus the deities were but his multiple personifications, his partial unfold-

ings into perceptible experience."^[2] She calls this system of beliefs pantheism as does Beyer in speaking of the god of fire,^[3] but he also sees Tonacatecuhtli, the old creator god, as "a substitute for monotheism,"^[4] whatever, precisely, that might mean. In speaking of the Maya, Thompson also uses the term monotheism but is similarly hesitant, saying that "there is some evidence for something approaching monotheism among the ruling class during the Classic period."^[5] Caso, too, flirts with monotheism.

The origin of all things was a single dual principle, masculine and feminine, that had created the gods, the world, and man. . . . If this is not a true monotheistic attitude because it still acknowledges the existence and worship of other gods, it does indicate that . . . the philosophical desire for unity had already appeared.^{[ 6]}

Pasztory, however, in speaking of the same dual principle, contends that it "might seem in opposition to polytheistic belief, but such is not the case. Implicit in the view that all nature is animated spiritual power is the idea of unity within multiplicity."^[7] Thus, pantheism, monotheism, and polytheism have all been used to designate the same set of beliefs; and Arild Hvidtfeldt borrows the term mana from Melanesia in his statement of an essentially similar view.^[8]

We are fortunate that the use by scholars of such diverse terms, some of them contradictory, suggests a great deal more disagreement about Mesoamerican religion than actually exists. The problem of terminology arises at least in part from the attempt to use terms descriptive of European, Middle Eastern, and Far Eastern religious concepts for a unique religious structure that grew independently from those religions. Perhaps the best solution to this problem is simply to describe the features of Mesoamerican cosmological thought without characterizing those beliefs with a label. H. B. Nicholson, for example, simply notes that Aztec religious thinkers may have seen Ometeotl as a fundamental divinity of which "all the deities may have been considered merely aspects."^[9] Irene Nicholson concurs, stating "that the many gods were only manifestations of one and the same all-powerful deity" and concluding that Aztec poetry contains "ample evidence to support this view."^[10] Thus, León-Portilla's advice "to outline a specific interpretation of Nahuatl thought"^[11] instead of using broad descriptive terms seems well founded and equally applicable to Mesoamerican thought as a whole.

At least two profound difficulties lie in the way of following this advice, however. First, of course, is the problem of reducing to a concept a culture's most fundamental notions about the ultimate ground of being, what India's Kena Upanishad describes, after all, as "what cannot be spoken with words, but that whereby words are spoken. ... What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think. . . . What cannot be seen with the eye, but that whereby the eye can see. . . . What cannot be heard with the ear, but that whereby the ear can hear."^[12] By its very nature, the ground of being cannot be conceptualized by beings in time, neither those of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica nor those who study its thought. What mankind has always done is to create metaphors based on local experience to communicate the particular culture's limited perception of that reality. But as those who study literature and the arts know full well, a metaphor communicates in a way fundamentally different from the way of rational discourse in which speculative thought is generally embodied. The metaphor momentarily fuses two disparate areas of experience, in this case, allowing man's experience to provide the terms for a description of the ground of that experience.

These metaphoric descriptions, both visual and verbal, when taken together comprise a mythology, defined by Joseph Campbell as "an organization of symbolic images and narratives metaphoric of the possibilities of human experience and development in a given culture at a given time."^[13] It is the task of the visionary creative mind, then, to draw those images from a mystical experience of the essence of divinity, an essence that can only be recreated through metaphor. As Campbell says, "As far as I know, in the myths themselves the origins of their symbols and cults have always been attributed to individual visionaries—dreamers, shamans, spiritual heroes, prophets, and divine incarnations."^[14] The mythology comprised of those metaphoric images is capable of creating "an epiphany beyond words" ^{[ 15]} embodying the fundamental cosmological thought of a culture in its most basic form. The rational discourse of speculative thought attempts, however, to characterize the "meaning" of the metaphor in abstract terms, a profoundly difficult task.

Such a characterization is extremely difficult even when the area being studied is very fully known and the nuances of symbolic meaning are clear—our culture's attempt to reduce the central mystery of Christianity to concepts would provide an apt example of those difficulties—but that difficulty is multiplied when the area of study is little-known. That is precisely the second problem in conceptualizing the fundamental beliefs underlying Mesoamerican cosmological thought. We are studying, after all, the religion of a civilization that created the fabulously complex series of metaphors we have described to embody its essentially religious concepts of space and time, life and death, and the relationship between man and god but a civilization that did not record its speculative thought. We know that such thought existed, but we do not know the terms in which it was cast.

Consequently, we must describe it with terms derived from the descriptions of other systems of thought, leading to the bewildering array of terms. León-Portilla is clearly correct in calling for a "specific interpretation" of Mesoamerican thought.

The widespread agreement of Mesoamerican scholars suggests that such an interpretation must rest on the fundamental conception of the godhead as an incorporeal essence, simultaneously transcendent and immanent, giving rise to and sustaining all reality. Precisely such a conception is found at the heart of the best-documented cosmological thought in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Among the Nahua peoples of the Valley of Mexico at the time of the Conquest,

perhaps evolving out of the sun and earth cults, the belief in an all-begetting Father and a universal Mother, as a supreme dual deity, came into being. Without losing his unity in that the ancient hymns always invoke him in the singular, this deity was known as Ometeotl, 'The Dual God,' He and She of our Flesh, Tonacatecuhtli and Tonacacihuatl, who in a mysterious cosmic coition originated all that exists.^[16]

The simultaneous unity and duality of Ometeotl is of the same order of mystery as the Christian Trinity; the difference between the two can be seen in the Mesoamerican use of the natural, sexual metaphor of the union of the two sexes in one creative being. Such a union suggests the basic nature of the duality at the heart of Mesoamerican thought; it is always the duality of the cyclical, regenerative forces of the natural world. Male and female are "opposed" forces merging to create life. That this metaphor suggested a continuous and therefore cyclic "act" of creation is perhaps most clearly seen in the words addressed by Aztec midwives to newborn children:

Thy beloved father, the master, the lord of the near, of the nigh, the creator of men, the maker of men, hath sent thee; thou hast come to reach the earth.^[17]

In a similar way, life itself is opposed to death, the two merging to form the cyclical reality of all existence for the peoples of Mesoamerica—the reality of human life, the life of the corn, the life of the sun, and the life of the cosmos. Thus, out of the unity of the divine essence, the "opposed" forces of male and female mysteriously emerge to create a world in their image, a creation metaphorically likened to birth through its use of the human process of reproduction as a paradigm but which is perhaps better described by León-Portilla and Hunt as "an unfolding," that is, a manifestation on other levels of reality of the multiplicity inherent in the essence of divinity, "the self-transformation of an originally undifferentiated, all-generating divine Substance."^[18] This is a familiar mythological metaphor, but it takes on particular inflections in its American incarnations. As Campbell points out in a study of Navajo ritual, "in all mythology the several aspects of the divinity may separate into independent personages. Since the Navaho emphasis is upon the color-inflections of the four quarters, the divinities have a way of appearing suddenly fourfold, then suddenly singlefold again."^[19]

That Navajo conception no doubt has roots in the high cultures of the Valley of Mexico before the Conquest since for the Aztecs, for example, the unfolding of the unitary divine essence into male and female entities who exist simultaneously with the unitary Ometeotl is followed by a further unfolding that brings into being Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror, generally considered the most significant and most powerful of the gods. But just as Ometeotl, the ultimate ground of being, is at once unitary and dual, Tezcatlipoca is similarly mysteriously unitary, dual, and quadripartite. As half of a duality, Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror, finds his opposite in Tezcatlanextia, Mirror Which Illumines. Tezcatlipoca is thus associated with the night with its obscured vision, while Tezcatlanextia is linked to the day illumined by the sun. The fact that "Tezcatlipoca and Tezcatlanextia (double mirror which envelops all things with darkness by night and illumines them by day) constituted a double title for Ometeotl in the remotest times of Nahuatl culture"^[20] makes clear the nature of the process we have characterized as unfolding. Tezcatlipoca is both created by and identical to Ometeotl. He is a manifestation of the divine essence characterized as Ometeotl on another plane. Significantly perhaps, the Ometeotl duality uses the union of the male and female as its metaphor for creativity, while the Tezcatlipoca duality uses the union of day and night. These are, of course, the two clearest manifestations of cyclical rebirth in human life.

But Tezcatlipoca is, in addition, quadripartite—a quadripartite manifestation of the divine, each of whose four aspects is associated with a color, a cardinal direction, and a separate deity; he is defined, in short, by precisely the same four-part figure we have discussed earlier as the fundamental space-time paradigm. The symbolic meaning is clear: in that sense, at least, Tezcatlipoca is the created world. Each of the four separate deities may thus be seen as a manifestation of Tezcatlipoca, and as such, each shares with him the creativity characteristic of Ometeotl but on still another plane. These four deities are Quetzalcóatl, the white Tezcatlipoca who is associated with the west and who was widely seen as the creator of human life; Xipe Tótec, the red Tezcatlipoca associated with the east and the creative power that provided man's sustenance, the corn; Huitzilopochtli, the blue Tezcatlipoca, the warrior of the south who was responsible for the creation and maintenance of the Aztec

state; and the black Tezcatlipoca, the warrior of the north who is Tezcatlipoca himself who thus exists as the unitary being who unfolds into four, as one unit of a duality, and as one of the four divisions of Tezcatlipoca.

The quadripartite nature of Tezcatlipoca is also characterized by duality, opposing aspects merging to form a unity. As one of the four divisions of the unitary Tezcatlipoca, the black Tezcatlipoca is opposed in different ways to each of the others. In his role as the nocturnal sun of the underworld, the black Tezcatlipoca is opposed to Huitzilopochtli, who is associated with the blue sky of the daytime sun, and his similar opposition to Quetzalcóatl, the morning star, is recounted in one of the basic Nahua myths. As a warrior, Tezcatlipoca plays an opposed role to that of Xipe, the fertility god. But in each case, both he and the god to whom he is opposed are integral parts of the unitary Tezcatlipoca from whom they "unfolded." But there is still more oppositional structure here. The south-north, zenith-nadir vertical axis of the space-time paradigm is anchored by Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca—warrior gods concerned with the cosmic power underlying the course of the sun. It is to Huitzilopochtli in his temple at the zenith or "southernmost" point of the pyramid, after all, that hearts were offered to maintain the vitality of that same sun. The east-west, horizontal axis of the paradigm, the axis that defines the earthly state, is anchored by Quetzalcóatl and Xipe Tótec, both associated with the creation and maintenance of human life on the earthly plane. These oppositions that give "shape" to Tezcatlipoca's quadripartite nature therefore also suggest the cyclical merging of opposed forces which underlies all of Mesoamerican cosmological thought.

Further confirming the closeness of the black Tezcatlipoca to the essence of divinity is the fact that in each of these relationships of structural opposition, he is associated with night or death, both evocative to the Mesoamerican mind of the mystery enshrouding the essence of divinity. One of the names given the black Tezcatlipoca, Yohualli, means night, and when this aspect of the black Tezcatlipoca is opposed to the aspect of Quetzalcóatl referring to the wind, Ehécatl, the title Yohualli-Ehécatl, an appellation of the unitary Tezcatlipoca, is created, a title that is the equivalent of Tloque Nahuaque, another of Tezcatlipoca's "names," meaning "the one who is the very being of all things, preserving and sustaining them,"^[21] that is, the designation of Ometeotl referring to him as the ultimate ground of being. The name Yohualli-Ehécatl, as Sahagún indicates, "symbolically means 'invisible' (like the night) and 'intangible' (like the wind)" and refers to the "invisible and impalpable reality" of the essence of divinity.^[22]

The association of the black Tezcatlipoca with north reinforces this identification of Tezcatlipoca with Ometeotl. As we have seen, north as a cardinal point was the equivalent in the Mesoamerican mind of the nadir position of the sun, which in turn symbolized the subterranean realm of the spirit. Ometeotl, the essence of divinity, was thought to be found in Omeyocán, the Place of Duality, the highest of the celestial levels and the spiritual counterpart of the sun's zenith position. Thus, "Ometeotl was merged with the sun god, Tonatiuh, the symbol of godhead par excellence ,"^{[ 23]} so that Tezcatlipoca can be seen as the complementary opposite and thus the fulfillment of Ometeotl. In a number of ways, then, it can be seen that the unitary Tezcatlipoca is actually a manifestation of the abstract Ometeotl, and in the same way the Black Tezcatlipoca is a manifestation of the unitary Tezcatlipoca. This majestic metaphor that depicts the divine essence manifesting itself through successive unfoldings into human reality defined, for the cultures of the Valley of Mexico, the relationship between man and god.

A part of that definition involves the demarcation of various levels of spiritual reality. Ometeotl was "the personification of godhead in the abstract."^[24] No idols were made of his figure, and he was not the focus of ritual activity. Tezcatlipoca, while having many of the same functions as Ometeotl and even being designated by many of the same names, existed on a less abstract level and was thus more accessible to man. His image is often found in religious art, and he was impersonated in ritual and addressed in prayer. In the same way, the black Tezcatlipoca is a manifestation of the Tezcatlipoca essence on still another level. Each unfolding of the divine essence thus creates another level of spiritual being, and each succeeding level is somewhat more accessible through ritual. Thus, all of these so-called gods are ultimately manifestations of a single divine essence rather than having the wholly independent existence that the idea of a god often suggests. They are perhaps best thought of as serving specific ritual functions and allowing the definition of specific spiritual realities and are thus spiritual "facts" of a very different sort from the gods imagined by the Spaniards of the Conquest. To see them as their creators did, we must understand this Mesoamerican conception of the world of the spirit.

As one would expect, a fundamentally similar conception prevailed among the Maya. In the Yucatán and perhaps elsewhere, Hunab Ku was believed to be "the only live and true god. . . . He had no image because they said that being incorporeal, he could not be pictured."^[25] Like Ometeotl, Hunab Ku created ritually accessible deities but was not himself the focus of ritual, and directly paralleling the conceptions of central Mexico, Hunab Ku gave rise to Itzamná, a quadripartite deity. This unfolding was sometimes seen as a birth, Itzamná being "worshipped as the son or solar manifestation of

the supreme and only god, Hunab Ku."^[26] Itzamná, like Tezcatlipoca, was associated with colors and directions: the red Itzamná with the east, the white with the north, the black with the west, and the yellow with the south. In addition, Itzamná, as we have seen, literally means Iguana House, and the quadripartite deity was imagined as four iguanas standing upright at the cardinal points, each forming one of the walls of the "house" of the universe, with their heads together composing the roof. Thus, "Itzma Na, 'Iguana House,' is in effect the Maya universe"^[27] in the same way that Tezcatlipoca was the four-part space-time paradigm. Seen in another way, Itzamná was a dual god representing the "opposed" realities of earth and sky; his earth aspect was Itzam Cab (the name Itzamná referred to the celestial aspect), paralleling again the central Mexican conception of Tezcatlipoca unfolding into aspects, one of which is Tezcatlipoca. According to Thompson, "the Itzam in their celestial aspect are senders of rain to earth, in their terrestrial aspect they are the soil in which all vegetation has its being, and now they receive that rain which formerly they dispensed from on high."^[28] They are, then, the very process of life itself as well as the cosmos that encloses that life-force.

Clearly, then, the peoples of the two culture areas of Mesoamerica about which our knowledge is most complete, the Valley of Mexico and the Maya region, especially the Yucatán, held the same basic conception of godhead and its manifestation in the worlds of spirit and matter. Both conceived of a divine essence or spirit temporally and spatially coterminous with the universe, which was by its very nature the life-force itself as well as the motion that signified life. It is fascinating to note here that while the evidence of speculative thought among the Zapotecs of Oaxaca is exceedingly scanty, Joyce Marcus is able to contend, in the currently definitive work on the region, that while the Zapotecs were not monotheistic, "they did recognize a supreme being who was without beginning or end, 'who created everything but was not himself created,' but he was so infinite and incorporeal that no images were ever made of him."^[29] This would accord with Boos's observation that certain symbols on Zapotec urns "implied the presence of a hidden, anonymous god, of whom the figure on the brazier or urn was a mere manifestation. "^[30]

Thus, it seems reasonable to assume that this conception of godhead was Pan-Mesoamerican, that were our knowledge of other areas, Veracruz, for example, more complete, we would find similar ideas of a divine essence manifesting itself through a process of unfolding into levels of reality that man could approach through ritual. And not only was this fundamental religious conception found throughout Mesoamerica, Joralemon also feels that at least a part of it can be traced back in time to the Olmecs. Itzamná, he holds, "is entirely homologous with the Olmec dragon." Both are associated with the heavens and rain as well as the earth and fertility; "both function as fire gods and both are closely related to kingship and royal lineage."^[31] Furthermore, it would seem likely that if the O1mecs did in fact have a counterpart to Itzamná, they probably also conceived of a divine essence from which this deity unfolded, a conception that clearly seems to underlie Mesoamerican cosmological thought in every phase of its development and that may well have an Olmec origin as the hints of quadriplicity in Olmec masks suggest.

Understanding this basic principle of divinity unfolding itself into the world makes clear the reason for the existence of the seemingly innumerable gods of the Mesoamerican pantheon. Rather than being gods, each with an independent existence, related to each other in a pantheon as the Spanish believed since they applied to Mesoamerican religion a model derived from Greek and Roman religion (the form of paganism they already knew, or thought they knew), these "gods" were actually manifestations of the essence of divinity called into "existence" for specific ritual functions and fading back into the generalized world of the spirit at other times.^[32] While there may have been "among the uneducated classes a tendency to exaggerate polytheism by conceiving of as gods what, to the priests, were only manifestations or attributes of one god,"^[33] priestly thought saw mankind as immersed in a world of spirit that could take on a seemingly endless number of specific shapes and forms called gods. As Townsend says,

There is a rainbow-like quality to these supposed gods of Mesoamerica; the closer one searches for a personal identity so vividly displayed by the anthropomorphic deities of the Mediterranean world, the more evanescent and immaterial they become, dissolved in mists of allusion and allegory with which Mexica poets and sculptors expressed their sense of the miraculous in the world about them.^[34]

Many of these so-called gods, especially those that played a large part in the ritual life of the common man, were no doubt abstractions of natural forces;^[35] often, in fact, "metaphoric cult names [that] were regarded by the Spanish as the specific names of gods and goddesses . . . do not seem to describe supernatural personages as much as they seem directly to describe natural phenomena, period, without the idea of an intermediary god or goddess."^[36] These cult names designated "the very forces of nature with which peasants are so respectfully intimate"^[37] but were also, as Beyer suggests, "religious and philosophical ideas of a much more highly advanced level" among the priestly class.^[38] Thus, the "gods" described by the Spanish chroniclers were the multitudinous gods of the common man; the spiritual conceptions of the religious and

philosophical thinkers of Mesoamerica are hidden behind and within those chronicles of the popular religion; and it is the task of modern analysis of the myths and rituals of Mesoamerican spirituality to bring them forth.

But that can be done only through an understanding of the system in which these gods function, a system that the peoples of Mesoamerica believed to be driven by a dynamic, spiritual force operating in and on all aspects of the seen and unseen world.

Since the divine reality was multiple, fluid, encompassing the whole, its aspects were changing images, dynamic, never frozen, but constantly being recreated, redefined. This fluidity was a culturally defined mystery of the nature of divinity itself. Therefore, it was expressed in the dynamic ever-changing aspects of the multiple "deities" that embodied it .^[39]

This state of kaleidoscopic change was not as bewildering as it might seem, however, as it was governed by the constancy of the divine essence or spirit that manifested itself through each of the transformations composing that fluidity. This divine essence, as we have suggested earlier, was the life-force itself, that mysterious force which showed itself in every aspect of the cosmos. Everything, for the peoples of Mesoamerica, was charged with the vitality emanating from that life-force, and therefore everything could be seen as a manifestation, created through transformation, of it. Thus, the most profound mystery in Mesoamerican spiritual thought is the conception of that essence as simultaneously separate from the world and the most fundamental force in the world. In its existence in the world, it wore the "mask" of this world's beings, and it was only in that "masked" form that it could be approached.

9
Transformation
Manifesting the Life-Force

For the Mesoamerican seer, "cosmic creation is not something that happened only once: it has to happen constantly, over and over again. Every day is a day of creation"^[1] because each day, each moment, in fact, the immanent life-force clothes itself anew in the finery of the gods and in the things of this world. It does so through the mystery of transformation and through that mystery is simultaneously the one and the many, the eternal and the temporal. In a very important sense, the entire effort of Mesoamerican spiritual thought is dedicated to the delineation through metaphor of the various specific processes of that mystery of transformation.

In the ninth chapter of the sixth book of the General History of the Things of New Spain , Sahagún's informants give us

the words which the ruler spoke when he had been installed as ruler, to entreat Tezcatlipoca because of having installed him as ruler, and to ask his help and his revelation, that the ruler might fulfill his mission. Very many are his words of humility.

"O master, 0 our lord, 0 lord of the near, of the nigh, 0 night, 0 wind, thou hast inclined thy heart. Perhaps thou hast mistaken me for another, I who am a commoner; I who am a laborer. In excrement, in filth hath my lifetime been. . . . Why? For what reason? It is perhaps my desert, my merit that thou takest me from the excrement, from the filth, that thou placest me on the reed mat, on the reed seat?

"Who am I? Who do I think I am that thou movest me among, thou bringest me among, thou countest me with thy acquaintances, thy friends, thy chosen ones, those who have desert, those who have merit? Just so were they by nature; so were they born to rule; thou has opened their eyes, thou hast opened their ears. And thou hast taken possession of them, thou hast inspired them. Just so were they created, so were they sent here. They were born at a time, they were bathed at a time, their daysigns were such that they would become lords, would become rulers. It is said that they will become thy backrests, thy flutes. Thou wilt have them replace thee, thou wilt have them substitute for thee, thou wilt hide thyself in them; from within them thou wilt speak; they will pronounce for thee—those who will help, those who will place on the left, who will place in obsidian sandals, and who will pronounce for thy progenitor, the mother of the gods, the father of the gods, Ueuetèotl, who is set in the center of the hearth, in the turquoise enclosure, Xiuhtecutli, who batheth the people, washeth the people, and who determineth, who concedeth the destruction, the exaltation of the vassals, of the common folk."^[2]

This remarkable ritual entreaty outlines one of those transformational processes, in this case involving rulership, through which Ometeotl, the divine essence, referred to here as "thy progenitor," that is, the creator of Tezcatlipoca, manifests itself in human life. That divine essence, seen here in two of its aspects, is the creative principle—"the mother of the gods, the father of the gods"—as well as the life-force itself represented as Ueuetéotl, the old god who is "life-giving warmth, the vivifying principle, . . . the sacred perpetual fire."^[3] The outline of that transformational process is suggested in the newly installed ruler's depiction of himself as one of those who will "pronounce for thee," that is, Tezcatlipoca, and simultaneously "pronounce for thy progenitor," that is, Ometeotl. Significantly, it is Tezcatlipoca, the manifestation of the divine essence approachable through ritual, who is addressed, but it is also significant that the new ruler is not to be seen as a human being ad-

dressing a god from whom he is essentially separate. Rather, he is one of a line of rulers who, in some mysterious sense, shelters the god: "thou wilt hide thyself in them; from within them thou wilt speak." Thus "thy progenitor," who is located at "the center of the hearth, in the turquoise enclosure," a metaphoric reference to what is elsewhere referred to as "the navel of the earth," the symbolic center of the earth from which the primary axes of time and space radiate, manifests itself successively and simultaneously as the allpowerful Tezcatlipoca, as the earthly plane itself, and as the earthly ruler. It is important to note that the ritual entreaty takes care to indicate that this transformational process functions systematically. Rulers were not selected on the whim of a capricious god; rather, "their day-signs [in the tonalpohualli] were such that they would become lords, would become rulers." Thus the gods, the earthly realm in all of its spatial-temporal complexity, and the earthly ruler are all to be seen as systematic transformations of the essence of divinity.

Schele and Miller identify this same process in Maya ritual art depicting the bloodletting and vision quests of Maya nobles. "Images of these rites show humans wearing full-body costumes, including masks, to transform themselves symbolically into gods. These scenes do not appear to represent playacting but, rather, a true transformation into a divine being."^[4] No matter that from the Maya point of view the transformation is reversed—the god is transformed into a human being. It is remarkably clear that the divine essence, constant and unchanging, enters the world of nature by transformation. Thus, paradoxically, the godhead is at once transcendent and immanent, continually "unfolding" and evolving, revealing itself successively to man in changing images he calls "gods" and rulers.

Such a use of the mask as a ritual agent of transformation is described clearly by a modern Hopi who has participated in the Hopi kachina ceremonies, which are now believed to have arisen as the result of diffusion from central Mexico in Toltec times.

What happens to a man when he is a performer is that if he understands the essence of the kachina, when he dons the mask, he loses his identity and actually becomes what he is representing. . . . The spiritual fulfillment of a man depends on how he is able to project himself into the spiritual world as he performs. He really doesn't perform for the third parties who form the audience. Rather the audience becomes his personal self. He tries to express to himself his own conceptions about the spiritual ideals that he sees in the kachina. He is able to do so behind the mask because he has lost his personal identity.^[5]

That simple last sentence expresses both the power and the essence of the Native American system of religious thought as it embodies the inherent potential of transformation. The power is also suggested by the remarkable ability of that system—whose roots we can dimly discern in the shamanism of the Preceramic period and whose fully elaborated, sophisticated body of thought we can perceive at the height of the development of the cultures of Mesoamerica—to survive in indigenous ritual and belief throughout the Americas. The Aztec ruler, the Maya noble, and the Hopi kachina dancer have all been transformed through ritual to another level of existence; they are functioning on a sacred, spiritual plane. They have "become" gods, or gods have "become" them. Our language has difficulty expressing the concept as it is clear that "becoming" in this sense has both diachronic and synchronic meanings; it means both changing from one state to another as well as functioning on one of several levels, all of which exist simultaneously.

It is in this latter sense that the Hopi loss of personal identity is primarily meant. "By donning the kachina mask, a Hopi gives life and action to the mask, thus making the kachina essence present in material form. . . . By wearing the kachina mask, the Hopi manifests the sacred. He becomes the sacred kachina, yet continues to be himself."^[6] This is perhaps the most essential form of transformation—one that does not require abandoning one state for another but allows them all to exist simultaneously. Such a view sees life as a matter of the constant interpenetration of different planes of existence, a concept that is difficult for us to grasp because we tend to conceive of reality as linear and to think in that fashion. For us, one state of being gives way to another as on a journey one place after another is reached. Our conception of reality limits the idea of transformation to its simplest level, while the Mesoamerican conception expands the range of transformational possibilities tremendously. Soustelle puts it well:

The world is a system of symbols—colors, time, the orientation of space, stars, gods, historical events—all having a certain interacting relationship. We are not faced with a long series of ratiocinations, but rather with a continuous and reciprocal complex of the various aspects of a whole.^[7]

Thus, transformation is not only the essential process by which everything man perceives is revealed but also a basic characteristic of existence, and man is not only the recipient of life through the mystery of transformation but he must play his part in the transformational drama through ritual. It is no wonder, then, that the mask, a visual symbol of and an important agent in the transformative process as we have seen, became a central metaphor in Mesoamerican spiritual thought.

That the concept of transformation is basic to

Mesoamerican spiritual thought can be seen in those characteristics of that thought that we have thus far examined. First, the shamanistic inner vision from which that thought grows sees magical transformation as the method by which man can interact with the enveloping world of the spirit. By changing into an animal or by being catapulted through his trance into a level of consciousness, a mythical time or place, or a spiritual zone not accessible to the ordinary person, the shaman could transcend his human limitations and gain insight into the cosmic order. In the world of the shaman, the elements that constituted man, nature, and the spiritual world were readily interchangeable. This basic assumption with all its transformational implications was at the heart of Mesoamerican spiritual thought, in which, as Townsend puts it, "the boundaries between objective and perceptive become blurred, dream and reality are one, and everything is alive and intimately relatable."^[8]

Second, the temporal order manifested in the solar cycles, the other astronomical cycles, and the cycles of generation, death, and regeneration seemed proof to the Mesoamerican mind that there is no death in the world, only transformation; there is no end to life, only changing forms, changing masks placed on the eternal and unchanging essence of life. The transformative process is conceptualized in Mesoamerican thought as the orderly movement of time through recurring cycles. Life, which is always in motion, is born from death and returns to death to complete the cycle. Great men, at death, are transformed into gods, their divine power taking on a different form; when the common man dies, he, like the corn that nourished him, returns his life-force to its source, which in turn creates new life.

Third, the spatial order derived from the regular movements of the heavenly bodies suggests a different kind of transformation—that of the macrocosmic order into a pattern for the microcosm seen in the replication on earth of the heavenly pattern in the siting and architecture of the great cities and ritual centers, from La Venta in 1200 B.C. to Tenochtitlán in A.D. 1400. In addition to reproducing the divine "shape" of space and time in their architecture, the creators of those heavenly patterns on earth were continually fascinated with the points of transition from the earthly plane to the realms of the spirit above and below that plane, liminal points locating in space what are essentially temporal experiences, such as death itself, which mark the precise moment of transformation. These places were to be found in nature in caves or on mountaintops, both of which were used as settings for the ritual that marked the transition between matter and spirit, between life and death. Thus, the physical features of the earth itself, features replicated in sacred architecture and marked by masks, were seen as agents of transformation throughout Mesoamerica.

Fourth, the calendars of Mesoamerica embody in abstract form the whole process of transformation; they depict graphically the movement of time through the many phases of its process, each metaphorically expressed by the face of a god and the sign of the day. Through his understanding of that abstract movement, man could harmonize his existence with the underlying cosmic order through divination and ritual. The moments of transformation in man's microcosmic life—his own birth, initiation, and death; the corn's planting and harvesting; his ruler's ascension and death—could be given their proper place in the orderly, recurring transformative process of the cosmos through the calendars that give form to the Mesoamerican realization that the essence of time, change and transformation, could be mathematically charted and understood.

Fifth, all of these manifestations of the basic process of transformation, we have shown, had their source in a unitary divine essence that, through the transformative process of "unfolding," mysteriously became an elaborate system of "gods." These "god identities" were not always transformed temporally, that is, first one and then another in a diachronic process, but often exhibited a synchronic totality, being both states simultaneously. The Mesoamerican "god image" is thus essentially a set of symbols, each of which can exist simultaneously in many relationships, that "unfolds" as different and separate identities. The kaleidoscopic pantheon is the result of transformations of the divine essence, which "works" through the transformation of itself into the worlds of the gods and of space and time.

A fundamental premise of Mesoamerican spiritual thought, then, was the interchangeability through transformation of the inanimate, the human, and the divine as all were ultimately transformations of the same unchanging essence. Through these symbolic transformations, the very structure and order of the universe could be understood and human life could be harmonized with the sacred order. Since this transformative process is fundamental, it is not surprising that we find transformation rather than creation ex nihilo at the heart of the Mesoamerican mythological tradition. Just as the world of the spirit enters man's world through the various transformative processes we have cited above, so the original creation of matter from spirit was accomplished through transformation. In Aztec myth, for example, natural phenomena metaphorically come into being as a result of transformation: trees, flowers, and herbs from the hair of the Earth Monster; flowers and grass from her skin; wells, springs, and small caves from her eyes; rivers and large caves from her mouth; moun-

tain valleys from her nose; and mountains from her shoulders. And as we have seen, it is transformation rather than creation that is responsible for the birth of the sun as the result of the god Nanahuatzin leaping courageously into the great fire and becoming the sun. Man himself was created, according to one widely accepted mythological version, as the result of the transformation of the bones and ashes of earlier generations by Quetzalcóatl and his nahualli, or alter ego, who went into the underworld to collect them and then, by dripping over them blood ritually extracted from his penis, transformed them into the first male and female from whom all mankind was born.^[9] The import of the myths is clear: through the process of transformation, the divine essence manifests itself as the created world, a world that seems material but is essentially spirit.

As it is with man's world, so it is with man himself. True to its shamanic base, Mesoamerican spiritual thought sees man as spirit temporarily and tenuously housed in a material body. "Soul loss" is a constant possibility, and curers from pre-Columbian times to the present have been called on to reunite body and spirit.^[10] That spirit/matter dichotomy is represented metaphorically throughout the history of Mesoamerica and for most indigenous groups today by the belief that each person has a companion animal who somehow "shares" his soul. This animal is sometimes thought to be living in the temporal world but is more often thought to exist in the world of the spirit—often, significantly, inside mountains. Vogt vividly describes this concept in its present formulation in the Maya community of Zinacantan.

Rising up 9,200 feet to the east of the ceremonial center of Zinacantan is a majestic volcano called BANKILAL MUK'TA VIZ (Senior Large Mountain). Within this mountain a series of supernatural corrals house the approximately 11,400 wild animal companions of the Zinacantecos, one for each person. The corrals contain jaguars, coyotes, ocelots, and smaller animals such as opossums and squirrels. There is no abstract term in Tzotzil for these animals; CON is the general noun for "animal, " and using the adjectival form one refers to "the animal of so-and-so" as "SCANUL---" when talking about one's animal companion. These animals are watered, fed, and cared for by the ancestral gods, under the general supervision of the Grand Alcalde, who is the divine counterpart of the highest ranking member of the religious hierarchy in Zinacantan. His home is located inside the mountain and his household cross is the shrine that Zinacantecos visit in the course of rituals on top of the mountain. A Zinacanteco and his animal companion are linked by a single innate soul. When the ancestors install a C'ULEL in the embryo of a Zinacanteco, they simultaneously install the same innate soul in the embryo of an animal. The moment the Zinacanteco is born, the animal is also born. Throughout their lives, whatever happens to either human or animal also happens to his alter ego. . . . It is usually during childhood or early adulthood that a person discovers what kind of animal companion he has. He receives this knowledge either in a dream, when his innate soul "sees" its companion, or from a shaman, when an illness is diagnosed.^[11]

Clearly, the Zinacanteco sees himself as living simultaneously on the surface of the earth as a physical being and within the mountain as a spiritual being. The relative importance of the two forms of being can be gauged from his defining the significant problems that might beset him on the surface of the earth as soluble, in shamanic fashion, only within the mountain. What we would take to be physical, psychological, or social problems are seen in Zinacantan as spiritual problems. It is one's spirit—self—not his physical being—that must be healed. The lack of an abstract term in their language for these animal companions as a group seems to suggest that the identity of person and animal is so close that the animal companion cannot readily be thought of as an independent entity; it is a metaphor for the spirit and remains, among the Zinacantecos and other indigenous groups, transparent to transcendence. James Dow suggests the significance of this belief in his discussion of shamanic healing practices among the Otomi of the Sierra de Puebla.

These concepts [of the tonal and nagual] have a profundity that is not immediately apparent. They link man to nature and recognize that his fate is like that of other animals. They also proclaim that his fate depends on conflicts waged in a special mythic world, the world of the tonales and naguales. Where is this world? The Otomi talk about it being in the mountains, which are governed by an order of nature that is different from the order of humans.^[12]

Although today's Zinacantecos and Otomis are nominally Christian, this metaphor for their spiritual selves, like many of their other beliefs and rites, obviously has a pre-Columbian origin. The original concept is best understood today as it existed among the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of the Valley of Mexico since that form was documented best by the Spanish conquerors. Called the nahualli in Nahuatl, the companion animal of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica had more clearly defined transformational qualities than exist today in communities such as Zinacantan, although other indigenous groups retain the idea of magical transformation. So much were those qualities a part of the original concept that, according to George Foster, nahualli "originally referred to the sor-

cerer in his transformation as his guardian animal, whereas the guardian animal itself was designated by the word tonalli or tonal."^[13] That potential of transformation from a person to his nagual or nahualli strongly suggests their interrelated destinies, but there is an even stronger implication of that interrelationship when the guardian animal is referred to as the tonal or tonalli since the latter term makes the obvious association with the 260day calendar, the tonalpohualli, which, as we have shown, indicated a person's destiny by virtue of the signs and gods associated with his day of birth and with his name day. Thus, the idea of the companion animal was intimately associated with the divinatory calendar and its implicit assumption that a person's destiny was not to be found in this world but in an understanding of his spirit-self, represented metaphorically by the companion animal.

While the average person had one nagual, the early Spaniards reported that men with power often had several nagual forms and that such men were thought to be able to assume the physical form of a companion animal.^[14] In such cases, the one being transformed and the image into which he was transformed were considered so much a part of each other that among the Aztecs the people capable of such transformation were themselves called naguales.^{[ 15]} The sorcerer's knowledge of the world of the spirit thus was thought to enable him to transform his physical being into his spirit-self to bring the power of the world of the spirit, for good or ill,^[16] into the physical world.

Brundage contends that nahualli is derived from nahualtia , meaning "to hide, covering one's self or putting on a mask."^[17] Although other derivations have been suggested, the connection between the mask and the nagual is thought provoking. The relationship between the animal companion and the person is much the same as that between the wearer of the ritual mask and the mask itself. Both the mask and the physical body cover or "hide" the animating spirit represented by the ritual participant and the nagual, and both allow that underlying spirit to express itself in the world of space and time. This, of course, is the same metaphor (though not the same Nahuatl term) used for precisely the same conception in the newly installed ruler's ritual entreaty we quoted above. In each of these cases, the significant part of the human being is the spirit, while the temporal, physical being is merely the final transformation, a body that serves to shelter, for a time, the spirit within. It is fascinating to note that even the gods themselves had naguals, which indicates in still another way their kaleidoscopic nature. Rather than being tied to a single identity, they were capable of transforming themselves into their naguals to manifest other possibilities, and if Boos is correct in his assessment of the images on the urns of Monte Albán, even the naguals of the gods themselves have naguals.^[18] The transformative possibilities are endless.

Mesoamerican man found various means of moving from one plane of existence to another, of moving from the surface of life inward. As we suggested in our discussions of the calendar and the nagual, magic and divination were used to uncover a different kind of reality, one in which the spirit and the man, the magician and the disguise became strangely unified and, finally, interchangeable. As we have seen in the case of the shamanic trance, this unity was often achieved through some form of hallucinatory state induced by psychotropic substances; in this visionary state, the supernatural world could be entered. For the Maya, and probably for other cultures, bloodletting served a similar purpose in the transformational process; loss of blood produced visions that brought kings into direct contact with their ancestors and with the gods. The Hauberg Stela provides a fascinating example of this process in its depiction of the ritual bloodletting preceding by fifty-two days the accession of Bac-T'ul to the throne. The soon-to-be-installed ruler is not shown drawing his own blood but rather "in the midst of his vision, frozen between the natural and supernatural worlds,"^[19] or, as we might put it, transformed from his physical being into spirit.

The act of blood sacrifice provides the most dramatic illustration of the use of ritual to incarnate the supernatural. A great deal has been written about sacrificial practices in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, especially among the Aztecs, and it seems clear that the mythological equation represented by the sacrificial act is an integral part of the transformative relationship between matter and spirit. So fundamental is sacrifice to this conception that the extant creation myths for each of the cultures of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica all charge mankind with the ritual duty of sacrifice. As we have seen, Aztec myth depicts man's creation as the result of an autosacrificial act by Quetzalcóatl. That this idea is fundamental to the Aztec conception of Quetzalcóatl is demonstrated by his often being depicted in the codices holding a bone or a thorn used to draw blood, a clear reference to his sprinkling his own blood on the bones of past generations he had gathered in the underworld to transform them into the first man and woman, thereby creating mankind. The myth demonstrates the dependence of mankind on the sacrifice of the god for its existence and suggests the reciprocal human duty of sacrifice, a duty that is the reenactment of the gods' sacrifice in the creation of the sun: "This was the voluntary sacrifice of the assembled gods, to provide the freshly created sun with nourishment. In performing this self-immolation, the gods set an example for man to follow for all time."^[20]

That the same reciprocal relationship was seen by the Maya is illustrated both in their buildings and in their myths. Speaking of Structure 22 at Copán, Schele and Miller point out that

the facade of the structure once featured a great reptilian monster mouth at its entrance. The lords stepped onto his lower jaw and then passed through the mouth of a great Bicephalic Monster to enter the inner sanctum, a room probably designed for ritual bloodletting. While the nobility let blood in the inner sanctum, maize flourished on the exterior of the building, suggesting that the king's most potent substance, his blood, flowed to fertilize and regenerate nature itself.^[21]

Thus, the king, or priest, entered symbolically into the world of the spirit to give his blood so that the gods would respond with man's sustenance. The same motif appears in the Popol Vuh, where the gods' intention is to create "a giver of praise, giver of respect, provider, nurturer." The import of this is made clear when man is finally created and begins to proliferate: "And this is our root, we who are the Quiché people. And there came to be a crowd of penitents and sacrificers,"^[22] a "crowd" made up of the historic Quiché lineages, which are then enumerated.

The Mixtec creation myth, brief as it is, makes the ritual duty of sacrifice equally clear. In that account, two gods, male and female, who share the name 1-Deer and who "are said to have been the beginning of all the other gods . . . became visible" and created "two male children."^[23] Among other things, these children pierced their ears and tongues "so that the drops of blood would come out," which they then offered as "a sacred and holy thing," doing so "in order to oblige" the gods who created them.^[24] These actions are surely intended as a model for proper conduct for the human beings who were then "restored to life."^[25] The various creation myths thus agreed that sacrifice of human blood was a ritual duty. Metaphorically, the sacrifice of life's blood, that is, returning life to its spiritual source, was necessary for the continuation of the endless cycle of transformations through which life was constantly created and maintained. Man, helpless without the gods, must sacrifice his blood in return for their continuing help "to make the rain fall, the corn grow, an illness to disappear."^[26] There was no doubt that

the machinery of the world, the movement of the sun, the succession of the seasons cannot continue and last unless they [the gods] are nourished on the vital energy contained in "the precious water," chalchiuatl; in other words, human blood. The reality we see and touch is merely a fragile veil that may be torn at any minute and reveal the monsters of dusk and decline.^[27]

Reading any account of Mesoamerican ritual activity makes chillingly clear that the blood needed to maintain the universal system was provided. There seem to be endless numbers of sacrificial rituals running the gamut from symbolic bloodletting and animal sacrifice to autosacrifice to the ultimate sacrifice of human life itself. Autosacrifice, as depicted in the Aztec and Mixtec creation myths, was most common. Throughout Mesoamerica, the bleeding of ears, tongues, and genital organs by members of the priesthood was a daily ritual occurrence, sometimes reaching ghastly proportions. "In a certain Mixtec province," for example, "even the bleeding of the genital organ was practiced by passing cords as long as fifteen to twenty yards through it."^[28]

One might say, however, that "if autosacrifice was the most common form of blood offering, human sacrifice was the most holy,"^[29] for it involved the sacrifice of life to life. We see such sacrifice as the killing, or even slaughter, of human victims for the gods, but to understand human sacrifice in Mesoamerican terms, we must see it, for the moment at least, as they did, and their intent "was to sacrifice an image of the god to the god."^[30] A vital part of the sacrificial ritual, therefore, involved a symbolic transformation of the sacrificial victim into the god, a transformation metaphorically possible because man was both spirit and matter and could, through ritual, "become" spirit. "Accordingly, not only was the correct godly attire important, but also the sex, age, physical condition, and proper emotional attitude of the deity impersonator. . . . All the sixteenth century reports make it clear that the victim became the god to whom he was sacrificed,"^[31] costume and the physical body functioning as the ritual mask in making the inner reality outer, spiritualizing the physical. The actual sacrifice was the logical final step; the "mask" of the physical body was removed, leaving the spirit to travel to its proper home, the realm of the gods.

Aztec ritual life was "enormously complex. A prodigious amount of time, energy, and wealth was expended in ceremonial activities, . . . and some type of death sacrifice normally accompanied all important rituals." In the course of this ritual life, "human sacrifice was practiced on a scale not even approached by any other ritual system in the history of the world."^[32] The ritual year was based primarily on the solar calendar with its eighteen "months" of twenty days, and each of these twenty-day periods was marked by an elaborate public ceremony generally celebrating the stage in the agricultural cycle which had been reached. Since each of these veintena ceremonies celebrated fertility, sacrifice played a key role, but the sacrifice was performed in accordance with the particular aspect of the agricultural cycle being cele-

brated. Durán presents a telling example in his description of the harvest festival of Ochpaniztli, which means "Sweeping of the Roads," a name symbolic of the clearing of the way for the passage of the gods associated with agricultural fertility. The festival celebrated both the earth's provision of man's sustenance and the return of the dead stalks to the earth so that the renewal of life in the spring might take place. For this festival, a woman was chosen to represent the earth-mother goddess Toci, Mother of the Gods, Heart of the Earth, and was transformed into that goddess not only by being "garbed exactly as the goddess" but also by being made godlike in other ways. After being "purified and washed," she was "given the name of the goddess Toci, . . . consecrated to avoid all sin or transgression, [and] locked up and kept carefully in a cage" for twenty days to ensure her abstention from all carnal sin. In addition, "she was made to dance and rejoice" so that "all could see her and worship her as a divinity"; she was encouraged to be joyful and happy in the manner of the gods. In fact, "the people held her to be the Mother of the Gods and revered her, respected and honored her as if she had been the goddess herself," as, ritually, she was.^[33] The elaborate ritual preparation for the sacrificial ritual itself had symbolically transformed the woman from matter to spirit.

After her sacrificial death, the culmination of her transformation into the god, a further transformation took place. The skin was removed from her dead body "from the middle of the thigh upward as far as the elbows. A man appointed for this purpose was made to don the skin so as to represent the goddess again." Still later in the ceremony, he who was transformed into the goddess stripped himself and bestowed his goddess regalia on a straw figure, which resulted in the transformation of that figure into the goddess—a total of three incarnations of the goddess through transformation in a single festival. And each transformation of the goddess marked a stage in the all-important transformation of the ripened corn from the earth to man and back to the earth in the continuation of the cycle. Each of the celebrations involving human sacrifice similarly made clear the importance of transformation in its own particular way as each demonstrated a particular stage in the process of the transformation of energy from the heart of the cosmic realm into the natural world. Ritual provided the necessary catalyst for that transformation.

Nor are such examples confined to the Aztecs. Until recently, it was widely believed that the Maya were peace-loving philosophers and agriculturalists who did not practice human sacrifice. Recent scholarship has revised that view substantially, and nowhere is the revision more striking than in the current view of Maya ritual sacrifice. Coe provides a dramatic statement of the new perspective.

It is common among Maya archaeologists, not exactly the most imaginative of the anthropological profession, to think of their subject matter in terms of trade, agriculture, class structure, and all the other trappings of modern materialist-determinist scholarship. On the other side, the late Eric Thompson, who certainly did have imagination, conceived of his ancient Maya as though they were good High Church Angelicans attending Evensong at King's College. I doubt that either of these two schools of thought would feel at home among the real Maya as shown on a vase like Princeton 20: impersonators of bloodcurdling monsters from the depths of Xibalbá, poised in expectation of the human decapitation they are about to witness, on the verge of a dance to the music of throbbing drums, rattles, and turtle shell, and the doleful sound of wooden trumpets and conch shells. I have always thought that if I were a Mesoamerican captive destined for sacrifice, I would rather have been in the hands of the supposedly bloodthirsty Aztec than in the custody of the "peaceloving" Maya.^[34]

And archaeologists have unearthed Classic period "decapitated burials"^[35] and stelae depicting rulers wearing as trophies the heads struck off their captives in the sacrificial ritual Coe vividly recreates. The title of a recent work on the Classic period Maya, The Blood of Kings , illustrates this new view and details, among other things, the part that sacrifice played in ritual. "By the Early Classic period, the transformation of humans into kings had been formalized into a precise ritual consisting of several stages that seems to have been used at most sites."^[36] Significantly, one stage of that ritual process through which a prince became a king and thus gained access to the realm of the spirit required the sacrifice of human blood, which, as among the Aztecs, was the most sacred of all sanctifications. Throughout Mesoamerica, blood was life, and it fueled the transformative processes of the cosmos. As the Popol Vuh puts it, man was created by the gods to be their provider and nourisher. By giving his blood in reciprocity for having been created through the gods' sacrifice, man ensured the continuation of life's endless series of cyclical transformations. Mysteriously, then, death itself was ultimately transformed by death; the one sacrificed did not die but merged with the source of all life.

While self-induced hallucinatory states and blood sacrifice served Mesoamerica as ritual means of transforming matter into spirit, perhaps the most obvious as well as the most profound means of such transformation was provided by the works of art expressing a spiritual reality created throughout the history of Mesoamerica. Such a work of art captures a natural image, not for its own sake but as an ex-

pression of a spiritual state. It reverses, in a sense, the creative process through which the natural object was created. Rather than transforming spirit into matter, the work of art uses matter to reveal spirit. Clearly, we cannot examine here all the art of Mesoamerica to demonstrate this transformative process, but perhaps an exploration of the use of a small but particularly fascinating set of images, one ripe with transformative implications, will illustrate the Mesoamerican use of art as a means of penetrating the wall between matter and spirit, between man and the gods.

Throughout the development of Mesoamerican art, the image of the butterfly recurs, albeit not with tremendous frequency, and often it is associated with fire. In Aztec art, for example, flames may be depicted in the shape of butterflies, a single image that links two natural forms of transformation. That simple Aztec image has roots deep in the history of Mesoamerican art, roots no doubt originating in the life cycle of the butterfly, as Janet Berlo points out in her study of Teotihuacán iconography.

The butterfly is a natural choice for a transformational symbol. During its life it changes from caterpillar to pupa wrapped in hard chrysalis, to butterfly: a process of birth, apparent death, and resurrection as an elegant airborne creature. Fire, too, is a transforming process: fire feeds on natural materials, turning them to ash. In Mesoamerica's traditional system of slash and burn agriculture, fire transforms wild forest into workable milpa. Butterfly symbolism on incensarios relates directly to the fire offering within the censer. The burning of offerings is a concrete manifestation of natural powers of transformation, the butterfly symbolism a metaphorical one. To the Teotihuacano, the butterfly surely was an emblem of the soul as it was for the later Aztecs.^{[ 37]}

The censers, usually displaying the mask of a human face recessed within a shrine, were ritual vessels of transformation related to "the god of fire [who] undoubtedly represents one of the oldest conceptions of Mesoamerican man. He was the god of the center position in relation to the four cardinal points of the compass, just as the tlecuil, or brazier for kindling fire, was the center of the indigenous home and temple."^[38] All movement or change symbolically originates in the motionless center, just as fire itself causes the transformation of whatever it touches. Fire always had this symbolic meaning for Mesoamerican man, due, no doubt, to its association with the life-giving power of the sun. The Mixtec name for the fire serpent, for example, is yavui, meaning transformer or wizard, a definition "similar to the Aztec conception of this supernatural being," as Sahagún indicates that the xiuhcóatl, "a figure of a dragon, with fire shooting from its mouth, was the insignia of Huitzilopochtli [always associated with the sun] and of the wizard, or transforming shaman."^[39] And fire, of course, was the agent of transformation in the creation of the sun as the gods, in the Aztec myth, leaped into the transformative fire.

The butterfly, as Berlo suggests, is found in abundance on the ceramic incense burners of Teotihuacán because it has much in common with fire; they both manifest the ultimately shamanic idea that death is part of the process of transformation and thus the beginning of life. Seler explains that the butterfly,

the fluttering one, was a symbol of fire and is therefore also a part of the symbol, which composed of the picture of water and of fire was for the Mexicans both a verbal and pictorial expression of war. As animal of the fire god the butterfly was also the symbol of the ancients, i.e., the dead ancestors, but not of the ordinary dead, who live beyond the great water, in Chicunauhmictlán, in the inmost depths of the earth, from where—once safely conveyed thence—they never return .^[40]

In at least two ways, then, the image of the butterfly was associated with the ultimate transformation of death. It was connected with war and frequently used to symbolize the souls of dead warriors^[41] whose spirits, like those of the dead ancestral kings, returned to earth transformed as butterflies and hummingbirds.^[42] That the emphasis was clearly on transformation is also suggested by an interesting connection with the daily cycle of the sun. The spirits of the dead warriors are butterflies of the day charged with assisting the sun as it moves through the heavens, whereas the spirits of women who died in childbirth, also considered to be warriors, must assist the sun as it makes its nightly journey through the underworld. They are butterflies of the night associated with the moon.^[43] Thus, the image of the butterfly, like most of the symbolic images in Mesoamerican art, has a range of transformational implications. This suggests that the highly metaphorical religious art of Mesoamerica is itself an instrument of transformation.

While many of the works of Mesoamerican art in museums and private collections are better considered examples of craft, the great works of that tradition, like those of all artistic traditions, were created by visionary artists able to capture the spiritual truth at the heart of their tradition in the malleable materials and fleeting images of the earthly world. Such an artist is characterized in an Aztec poem as a "stealer of songs" from the gods^[44] and by Sahagún as one who "teaches the clay to lie" and thereby "creates life."^[45] The truly creative artist, as James Joyce put it in his usual punning way, "creates life out of life" by embodying the spirit of life in the material of his art. Neither Joyce

nor Sahagún were speaking of art as a realistic reproduction of the things of this earth but rather as the human alternative to the divine creative process. Even though Mesoamerican art is essentially religious and always aware that "the beautiful songs come from another world,"^[46] its subject is frequently art itself, art as a metaphor for the cosmic creativity that shapes and maintains life.

The artist: a Toltec, disciple, resourceful, diverse, restless.
The true artist, capable, well trained, expert;
he converses with his heart, finds things with his mind.
The true artist draws from his heart; he works with delight;
does things calmly, with feeling; works like a Toltec;
invents things, works skillfully, creates; he arranges things;
adorns them; reconciles them.^[47]

Like the life-force itself—the creator gods of the Popol Vuh , for example, who created man from corn—the artist creates by transforming reality. By shaping his materials and by manipulating the symbols of his society, he can provide the metaphors that reconcile the sacred with the profane by recreating in miniature the cosmic order. And the mystery at the heart of the cosmic creation can be understood through its metaphoric re-creation by the visionary artist in the images—visual, musical, and literary—in and through which myths exist and "delight." As Joseph Campbell puts it,

It has always been the business of the great seers (known to India as "rishis," in biblical terms as "prophets," to primitive folk as "shamans, " and in our own day [and, we might add, in Mesoamerica before the Conquest] as "poets" and "artists") to . . . recognize through the veil of nature, as viewed in the science of their times, the radiance, terrible yet gentle, of the dark, unspeakable light beyond, and through their words and images to reveal the sense of the vast silence that is the ground of us all and of all beings.^[48]

The visionary artist metaphorically provides that "vast silence" a voice, a theme often found in Aztec poetry:

The flowers sprout, they are fresh, they grow;
they open their blossoms,
and from within emerge the flowers of song;
among men You scatter them, You send them.
You are the singer!^[49]

As "flower and song" is the standard Aztec metaphor for poetry, it is strikingly clear that the poet here considers himself the vehicle for images and rhythms originating in the creative force at the heart of the cosmos. Through him, that cosmic force, the "You" of the poem, can "scatter" its truths among men, can somehow transform its mysterious being into the beauty of life on the earthly plane. Another Aztec poem enunciates the theme clearly:

With flowers you write,
O Giver of Life;
With songs You give color,
with songs You shade
those who must live on the earth.

Later you will destroy eagles and ocelots;
we live only in Your book of paintings,
here, on the earth.

With black ink You will blot out
all that was friendship,
brotherhood, nobility.

You give shading
to those who must live on the earth.
We live only in Your book of paintings
here on the earth.^[50]

Using the metaphors of both poetry and painting, the poet suggests that the transformational relationship between temporal reality and the creator of that reality is the same as the relationship between the artist and his work. Life is to the creator what the poem is to the poet or the painting to the painter. Thus, through the poet's and painter's creations, we can see and understand more clearly the cosmic creation. But, of course, the ultimate creative force, the ground of our being, is finally beyond the comprehension of temporal beings. Its "black ink," a symbolic reference to Tezcatlipoca and to the writing that contains esoteric knowledge of the sacred mysteries as well as to its more obvious associations, will "blot out" our lives. Though everything on the earthly plane—eagles and ocelots, which is to say, bravery in war; friendship and brotherhood and nobility; and man himself—must perish, the life-force manifested in the things of the earth and in artistic creation will continue.

My flowers will not come to an end,
my songs will not come to an end,
|I, the singer, raise them up;
they are scattered, they are bestowed.
Even though flowers on earth
may wither and yellow,
they will be carried there,
to the interior of the house
of the bird with the golden feathers.^[51]

Thus, the creative force can be embodied in artistic creation and take on the eternal life of its source, or as the poem elegantly puts it, "be carried there, to the interior of the house of the bird with the golden feathers." The creative impulse in mankind, expressed most clearly in artistic creation, is mysteriously part of the cosmic creative force, and that cosmic force expresses itself through the vi-

sionary artist. One is inevitably reminded here of another great American poet, Walt Whitman, who used a similar metaphor in Leaves of Grass to express the same enduring truth: "I permit to speak at every hazard, / Nature without check with original energy."^[52] "Original energy," for Whitman, had its source in that cosmic creative force, and as that energy manifested itself in his poetry, the poetry, like that of the Aztec poet, was eternal.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.^[53]

Whitman's buoyant optimism is not shared by his Aztec counterpart, but their sense of themselves as creative artists is remarkably similar and indicative of the many ways in which Mesoamerican thought is not as far removed from ours as we often think. Both see themselves as vehicles for the expression of an impulse mysteriously originating in the ground of being. In both cases, organic metaphors—flower and song, grass—are used to embody the creative process, and both therefore suggest that the entire process is a natural one: it is a matter of transforming energy from one level of nature—the ground of being, which is spirit—to another—the material world of space and time. For both of them, the artist served as the agent of that transformation.

Sahagún's description of the feather artist carries this theme a step further.

Amantècatl; the feather artist.
He is whole; he has a face and a heart.
The good feather artist is skillful,
is master of himself; it is his duty
to harmonize the desires of the people.^[54]

The phrase "face and heart," often encountered in Nahuatl texts, carries a complex metaphoric meaning based on the conception of the beating heart (yollotl , derived from the same root as ollin , meaning movement) as the symbol of the dynamic center of the person, and the face (ixe or ixtli , not simply the physical face visible to others) as expressive of his being in the deepest sense. The physical face, therefore, had the metaphoric potential to signify one's true face by manifesting those characteristics that made him "whole," that is, unique and well integrated, as a result of the transformative process by which the outer appearance came to reflect the inner, spiritual being. When this integration had been achieved, a person was said to have a "deified heart" and to be "master of himself." It is no wonder, then, that an important goal of Aztec education was to teach a person to create such a "deified heart," thus enabling him to develop his innate spiritual potential by becoming "one who divines things with his heart,"^[55] one who infuses ordinary experience with spiritual energy. Precisely, of course, the task of the artist.

It would follow that, as León-Portilla puts it, "if the good artist is master of himself and possesses a face and a heart, he will be able to achieve what is the proper end of art: 'to humanize the desires of the people,' that is, to help others to understand things human and divine, and to behave in a truly human way."^[56] Behaving in such a way would be the result of understanding one's essentially spiritual nature and allowing that nature to express itself in the world of space and time, thereby transforming the material world into spirit. Thus, the Aztec poet, like his predecessors in the earlier cultures of Mesoamerica, was the messenger of the spirit, the transformer who had himself been transformed:

God has sent me as a messenger.
I am transformed into a poem.^[57]

That transformation can stand as a symbol here for the entire effort of Mesoamerican spiritual thought—to embody in a system of metaphors the various ways in which the ground of all being manifested itself through transformation as the earth and the heavens and all they contained. This magnificent system of metaphors, far more complex than we have been able to suggest here, reveals clearly that for Mesoamerica all of reality—inner and outer, microcosmic and macrocosmic, natural and supernatural, earthly, subterranean, and celestial—formed one system, a system whose existence betrayed itself in the order that could be found behind the apparent chaos of the world of nature.

10
Coda II: The Mask as Metaphor

The system of metaphoric images that we find embodied in Mesoamerican art has as its function the revelation of inner truth through outward forms. Worldly images and materials are combined, often in distinctly unnatural ways, in each work of art as a way of allowing the underlying, otherwise unseen order of the universe to appear in this world. The relationship between physical and spiritual in that art is the same relationship defined for Aztec society by the concept of the deified heart according to which one could, and should, use his physical being to express his true, spiritual being. In that way, the material world could be transformed into spirit.

The raison d'être of the mask is, of course, to transform. It is a visual metaphor bringing together wearer and identity in an "instantaneous fusion of two separated realms of experience in one illuminating, iconic, encapsulating image."^[1] In pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and still today among indigenous groups, the image on the mask was chosen by the wearer or his society to replace the "image on the body" because it was spiritually significant. Such a use of metaphoric images, Jamake Highwater says, is "one of the central ways by which humankind ritualizes experience and gains personal and tribal access to the ineffable, . . . the unspeakable and ultimate substance of reality."^[2] Thus, according to Campbell, masks "touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion^[3] and point "directly to a relationship between two terms , the one empirical, the other metaphysical; the latter being, absolutely and forever and from every conceivable human standpoint, unknowable."^[4]

The mask, then, stands as a metaphoric recreation of what cannot otherwise be known and as such becomes the symbolic equivalent of the world of nature that "covers" the animating spirit just as the ritual mask covers the wearer who animates it. It is fascinating, and a testament to the fascination produced by the idea of the mask, that we find in one of the most significant passages in Herman Melville's Moby Dick a similar insight into the nature of the mask and its metaphoric role. Trying to explain the whale's responsibility for his rage and his unquenchable drive to get beyond the mask that the whale represents to him so as to confront the order of the universe that both lies beyond it and is given material form through it, Ahab says,

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.^[5]

For Ahab, nature expresses spirit in much the same way it did for the cultures of Mesoamerica which used the mask as a central metaphor for the transformative relationship between matter and spirit. For them, the mask, as a symbolic covering of a spiritually important substance, served as a method of transforming the accidental to the essential, the ordinary to the extraordinary, the natural to the supernatural.

Schele and Miller in their recent study of the Maya recreate the thinking of a Maya lord, and in

that recreation suggest both the symbolic power and the metaphoric character of the mask for the peoples of Mesoamerica.

The style of this jade mask is clearly Olmec and would have been recognized as such by the Maya. It is possible that the identity of the portrait was still remembered in Maya times, but more likely the person portrayed was perceived to be from a legendary time. . . . A Maya lord, drawn perhaps to the immediacy and lifelike quality of the portrait, used this mask. Two glyphs, probably his own name, were carved on each flange, but only the left pair now survives. The way these two glyphs are drawn—backward so that they face toward the Olmec portrait—reveals the attitude of the Maya toward this object. By setting his name upon this heirloom, he claimed the Olmec portrait as his own, perhaps as a declaration of his identity with the kings of antiquity and as a means of controlling the sacred power stored in this extraordinary object.^[6]

Indeed, he may have claimed the Olmec portrait as his own especially in the sense that it revealed his true, spiritual identity as man and ruler. By wearing this mask as a pectoral, that Maya lord was asserting his true identity. And just as that mask could reach across centuries of time to join Olmec and Maya, so the masks of Mesoamerica, properly regarded, can speak to us about the spiritual lives of their creators who used those masks as well as the concept of the mask to stand as a metaphor for their relationship to all they held most sacred.