[Aztlan] Once more, "silly question."

[Robert Hall]

I have been disappointed by, though not entirely surprised by, some of the response to Martha Noyes’ "silly question." Though presented as cautionary tales, the response does not, as Martha has pointed out, reveal much interest in such questions as, "Is the mythical Aztlan to be sought among the stars in the northern night sky?"
  
In the 1961 Spanish translation of his Las Antiguas Culturas Mexicanas, Walter Krickeberg expressed the idea place-of-origin = place-of-destination when writing that Aztlan was "simplemente una proyecciÓn del lugar de residencia histÓrico de los aztecas a una regiÓn lejana y a un pasado nebuloso. Pues lo que cuentan las leyendas sobre AztlÁn corresponde exactamente a la situaciÓn en que se hallaban los aztecas cuando habitaban la ciudad de Tenochtitlan. AztlÁn tambiÉn es una isla en medio de un lago rodeado de carrizos y cubiertos de chinampas, surcado por pescadores y cazadores de aves lacustres, y en cuya orilla se levanta el cerro de Colhuacan (‘lugar de los nietos-sobrinos’, es decir de los que tienen antepasados), . . . " (p. 42). The idea was old even in Krickeberg’s time, however.
  
Another example recalling the idea place-of-origin = place-of-destination can be found among the Skidi (Skiri) band of Pawnees in the Central Plains. The Skidis perceived a one-to-one correspondence between the relative locations of their villages and the relative locations of the stars in the sky that had given the villages certain sacred bundles (see Von Del Chamberlain, When Stars Came Down to Earth, pp. 122-126, for citations). The peopling of the earth by Pawnees was made possible when Morning Star mated with Evening Star to produce the first Pawnee, a girl, and Sun and Moon mated to produce the second Pawnee, a boy. This is part of the origin myth of the Skidi Captive Maiden Sacrifice, which is the Pawnee version of the Mexican scaffold or arrow sacrifice.
   
  The scaffold sacrifice was practiced by the Skidi with lethal outcome until 1838 and until 1915 without the deaths (see my Archaeology of the Soul, chapt. 11, for details and citations). The point I wish to call attention to here is that certain activities in the ritual proceeded in a direction contrary to the direction required for other, more worldly, Skidi activities for the reason, I have argued, that the sacrifice replicated an event in the night sky, where things can be the reverse of things on earth. "The difference, as I see it, is that the Morning Star sacrifice represented an event that took place in the mythic past among the stars in the night sky before the stars colonized the earth below.The [for example] agricultural rituals took place in current time. The night sky being equivalent to the underworld, the order of directions [in the sacrifice] was reversed" (see Soul, p. 133 and chapt. 16 passim for citations).
  
There are many sociological explanations for reverse behavior, but there is, I believe, more fundamental explanatory power in its common association with the closely related concepts of death and/or the underworld and/or the night sky. One Mesoamerican example is the reversal of motions in Mixe ritual when carried out for the lord of the underworld (Frank Lipp, The Mixe of Oaxaca, p. 57). Another example relevant to the problem of Aztlan and the night sky is that of the reverse speech connected with the annual pilgrimage of the Huichols to Wirikuta, the Huichol homeland and home of the ancestral gods.
   
  The Huichol pilgrimage was a ritual return to a place beyond a gate of clashing clouds during which pilgrims took on the identities of supernaturals associated with Huichol origins and symbolically returned to a primal state. This pilgrimage was a rite of renewal during which there was an important element of reverse behavior and personification of gods from the time of origins. Though not explicitly identified with the underworld or with the night, Wirikuta does come across as a mythical otherworld, implicitly in the sky (Where the Clouds Open), associated with an original Huichol habitat . 
  
The Huichols were Uto-Aztecan in language and originally hunter-gatherers, i.e Chichimec in the broader sense. While speech reversal may serve a social need "to reinforce the general quality of metamorphosis in the peyote quest" (Peter Furst, Flesh of the Gods, p, 155n), it can also be seen as a legitimate clue to a lost Chichimec cosmology which once called for an original homeland in the night sky, much as Zelia Nuttall proposed in 1901 for Aztlan.
  
If I appear to be overly persistent on this topic it is because of a promise I made earlier this year at a session honoring me on the occasion of my eightieth birthday. In my response I pointed out that many people, myself included, have ideas that may not find acceptance for at least a hundred years. In the remainder of my lifetime I could, however, try to awaken interest in certain promising ideas that had already languished for their hundred years.
   
  Bob Hall