[Aztlan] Night sky, creation, and reversals.

[Robert Hall]

I joined Aztlan only months ago after discovering it while googling Aztlan on the web. It has taken me a while to learn the protocol but listeros have been very forgiving and I thank them for that. I share their confusion when threads become unraveled and subject headings change as communications build one upon the other. I am therefore going to return to the original idea of Aztlan as a mythic homeland in the night sky, look again at where we have been, and attempt to show how the Maya area, Central Mexico, and the U.S.(my special area) interrelate in the matter of the cosmology and the Creation. 
  
We began with Zelia Nuttall’s 1901 suggestion that Chicoztomac, the seven caves from which the Chichimec ancestors of the Aztecs, and there the homeland Aztlan was in the northern night sky and connected to the Big Dipper constellation. I have since found notes indicating that in 1912 Konrad Theodor Preuss also suggested that Aztlan was in the night sky. This is said to be in a book Die Nayarit-Expedition. I. Die Religion der Cora-Indianer. Leipzig. Preuss’s idea is cited by Walter Krickeberg in his article "El juego de pelota mesoamericano y su simbolismo religioso," pp. 191-313 of Traducciones Mesoamericanistas, Mexico, D.F. 1966. Krickeberg gives a page "XXXI" for the reference in Preuss. 
  
I followed this by pointing to a certain reversed direction of action followed by the Skidi Pawnees during a ritual that dramatized an event in the night sky before the celestial ancestors of the Skidis descended to earth and compared this to speech reversal by Huichol pilgrims trekking to find peyote in an area perceived as a place of origin implicitly in the sky because it was beyond the clouds.
  
I commented that the night sky was widely perceived as the equivalent of the underworld and that reverse behavior was often associated with these two spheres, as it also often was with ritual associated with death. There is a good illustration of this cosmology on pp. 173-177 of Mischa Titiev’s Old Oraibi (Peabody Museum, Harvard, 1944). An important point is that not only were day and night reversed in the upper and lower worlds in Hopi thought, the seasons and winter and summer solstice points on the horizon were perceived as well to be the reverse in the underworld of what they were in the upper world. Importantly, the nether world was associated with fertility and germination, hence creation, not merely with death. 
  
It has long been known that the Mesoamerican 365-day calendar drifts away from the tropical year of 365.2422 days through a cycle of 1507 tropical years or 1508 haab. After 754 haab a haab day that had been associated with the summer solstice would then be associated with the winter solstice. The days of birth of the gods of the Palenque Triad are not only close in time to the day of November nadir passage of the sun at Palenque but also in time almost exactly one-half solar drift cycle later than the date of May zenith passage for the latitude of Palenque in the first year of the Maya era. With respect to the seasons, time was reversed.
  
Within any given year November nadir passage of the sun comes approximately one-half year after the May zenith passage and the February nadir passage approximately one-half year after the August zenith passage. The August 11 zenith passage in 3114 B.C. provided the base date for the Maya era and Long Count, or it is commonly accepted as a zenith passage date. Nadir passage cannot be witnessed, only calculated. If calculated by counting one-half year from August 11, nadir passage would have been celebrated on February 10. If calculated from the azimuths of the sun on the horizon at the time of zenith passage, a more sophisticated technique, nadir passage would have been more like February 7-8.
  It is well known that the Chortis of Guatemala celebrate February 8 not only as the beginning of their agricultural year but also as the occasion for a dramatization of the Chorti Creation At the latitude of the Chortis the sun makes its nadir passage on February 8. The Chorti calendar is unique among modern Maya calendars in that in it the 260-day sacred year begins anew each year on February 8. This combination of February 8 and the day 1 Imix appears again implicitly in the Madrid Codex. 
  
Two almanacs from the Madrid Codex have been dated by Victoria and Harvey Bricker (1998) as beginning, one, on August 9, 924, which is 13 Ik 10 Ceh in the Classic calendar, and a second on October 26, 924, which is 13 Ahau 8 Pax in the Classic calendar. Each of these dates falls in the same Classic calendar year in which February 8 coincides with a day 1 Imix. The exact date is 1 Imix 9 Zip, February 8, 924. Furthermore, the haab date 9 Zip itself has a ritual association. On another such day 9 Zip in the sixteenth century Bishop Landa reported that Yucatec fishermen "blessed a tall and thick pole, and set it upright" (Tozzer 1941:155-156). The hunters began with a dance on 7 Zip in the Mayapan calendar, which was 8 Zip in the Classic calendar), that was followed on the next day by the raising of the pole on 9 Zip (Classic). This strongly suggests Postclassic memories of a much earlier, I would suggest even Preclassic, Creation drama once timed for February nadir passage of
 the sun, one involving a symbolic World Tree. 
  
February 3 (584283 correlation) was the second day of Creation in the Creation story read from the inscriptions, as presented in Maya Cosmos. On this day, as interpreted by Freidel, Schele, and Parker, the World Tree was raised. The first day of Creation was 542 days earlier on August 11, 3114 B.C., when the fabled three hearthstones were laid.
  
Returning to the Madrid Codex, if one move back from 13 Ik 10 Ceh, August 9, 924, by exactly two solar drift cycles, one arrives at 13 Ik 10 Ceh, August 11, 2091 B.C. If one then moves farther back by 182 days or one-half year one arrives at 13 Ahau 8 Zip, February 10, 2091 B.C. The following day is, of course, 1 Imix 9 Zip. (Calendar Round days of this era must necessarily be projected backward because the 260-day and 365-day years had not yet come on the scene.) 
  
February 10, 2091 B.C., is a date I ran upon ten years ago through an entirely different and independent line of reasoning. An argument for this as the base date for a pre-Long Count calendar is presented in my chapter "A Comparison of Some North American and Mesoamerican Cosmologies and Their Ritual Expressions" in Explorations in American Archaeology, Mark G. Plew, ed., pp. 55-88 (Lanham, 1998). This is a paper in which I explore the kinship of ritual from the Maya area to the U.S. Plains through the commonality of poles and trees as metaphors of the Milky Way as a Spirit Trail. The evidence presented above from the Chortis and Yucatecs, integrated through the Madrid text, suggests that the Maya Creation story of the inscriptions was not merely a story but was once also the charter myth for ritual activity in real time.
  
The Maya World Tree aka Milky Way compares with Central Mexican Mixcoatl aka Cloud Serpent aka Milky Way aka Xocotl pole (segun Sahagun) and with mourning poles in the United States as Spirit Trails. The competitive climbing of the Xocotl pole in the Aztec Feast of the Dead compares with the competitive climbing of the mourning pole in the Algonquian Feast of the Dead and served the purpose, I would say, of aiding the spirit in its journey along the Spirit Trail through imitative magic.
  
The cosmic hearth in the Maya Creation story from the inscriptions compares with the sacred hearth used in the furnace sacrifice accompanying the raising of the Xocotl pole and with the graves next to the mourning poles in the U.S. A hearth is not a grave, of course, unless the hearth is one used for cremation, and this could return us to the topic of reverse behavior. Among the California Pomos in mourning ceremonies the ghosts of the cremated dead were personified by "ash ghosts" who practiced speech reversal, saying east for west, and contrary behavior, entering ceremonial chambers backward, and disdained heat, handling hot objects with impunity and engaging in contests of endurance in sweat baths (S.A. Barrett, Ceremonies of the Pomo Indians, Berkeley, 1917). Apotheosis, anyone? Bob Hall