[Aztlan] SE/MESO retransmit

[Robert Hall]

Nick and Mike,
     I agree that precautions are necessary. Quite a few years back I was working in a fairly isolated former Indian mission town in Venezuela. One of the residents knew that I was making a special note of distinctive local usages of words and expressions. He began bringing me some real puzzlers, words that seemed to be in an archaic Spanish. The excitement waned when I discovered that he was picking words from a Latin Bible that he recognized as being cognate with Spanish words he knew.
     One of the genuine, I feel, substrates of mythic themes in the New World relate to the constellation Orion, which widely turns up in connection with stories about individuals who have lost a body part. For Greek Orion it was an eye. For Egyptian Osiris it was his penis. For the Navajo it was a scalp. For the Crow and Hidatsa it was a hand. In South America it was a leg. Though I know of no explicit connection with Orion, I would add to this list Tezcatlipoca. Tezcatliopoca lost his foot to the crocodilian Cipactli, who in turn lost his lower jaw, just as one of a set of South American twins lost his leg to a crocodilian, who in turn lost his lower jaw. The leg became Orion, the jaw the Hyades. In the case of Tezcatlipoca there is an implicit connection to Orion, however. In his guise as Mixcoatl Tezcatlipoca drilled the first fire. Orion is the firesticks constellation, of course. Bob Hall