Page 503 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

Tonatiuh, whose attributes had been usurped by face of the earth had a fifth "direction/' the
the tutelary divinity Huitzilopochtli. The Aztec center, the conceptual location of the three-
astronomer-priests used a solar year of exactly stoned hearth in every woman's household and
365 days (rather than the true tropical year of the domain of Huehueteotl, the old fire god.
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365 /4 days), consisting of eighteen months of There were two additional directions, the above
20 days each, plus 5 extra nameless days on and the below.
which it was extremely unlucky to be born. In a way the Aztec universe was like the
Although the xihuitl (365-day year) must Ptolemaic, with the above being layered into
always have run ahead of the true year, the thirteen heavens, and the below into nine
monthly ceremonies, which took place on a vast underworlds. According to the Codex Rios, a
scale in capital cities like Tenochtitlan, were post-conquest book on European paper, each
closely related to the agricultural cycle and to heaven was the abode and path of various celes-
the alternation of dry and wet seasons. From tial phenomena: the moon and the rain god
the terse accounts in the known sources there is Tlaloc inhabited the first heaven, the Milky
no way to re-create the drama and magnificence Way the second, the sun god Tonatiuh the
of these festivals, with their communal dances, third, and so on. Over all, in the thirteenth
music, costumes, and sacrifices. It is clear that heaven, was Ometeotl, the dual god of all
great celebrations, such as the springtime feasts creation.
in honor of the flayed god, Xipe Totec, must The sun, either as Tonatiuh or his avatar
have involved tens of thousands of participants Huitzilopochtli, was a major focal point of Aztec
in the streets and plazas of the Aztec capital. life; the right-hand or south side of the great
As in the rest of Mesoamerica, the xihuitl temple in Tenochtitlan was dedicated to his
permutated with the tonalpohualli to produce worship. As the solar orb rose in the sky each
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a calendar round of fifty-two years. Each of dawn, it was conducted to its noontime position
these years was named for a particular day in by a Xiuhcoatl (fire serpent), with upturned
the tonalpohualli, and only four of the twenty snout embellished with the seven stars of the
fig. 5. Schematic Diagram of the Sacred Calendar day signs —Reed, Flint, House, and Rabbit— Pleiades and back emitting flames (cat. 388).
could be "year bearers/' Unlike the Maya, the Thereupon the five sinister cihuateteo
Aztecs lacked an unbroken day-to-day count (goddesses), the souls of women who had died
from a single point in the past, so that all of in childbirth, rose up from the western horizon
their history and mythology was embedded in to conduct the sun on its afternoon journey
going back into the Formative Period of this recurrent fifty-two-year calendar, leading (cat. 370). Night marked the death of the sun
Mesoamerican cultural history, the tonalpo- to much confusion among modern historians and its voyage through the underworld; only
hualli was so fundamental that not only men trying to deal with the Aztec past: we are told the continued sacrifice of captive warriors
but even gods were named by the day on which in which year an event occurred, but not in would ensure that the fiery orb would rise again
they had been born. which calendar round it fell. in the east.
Each tonalpohualli day was assigned in a As the late Jacques Soustelle has observed, As the sun represented maleness and the
counterclockwise succession to a cardinal direc- "At bottom the ancient Mexicans had no real warrior principle, so the moon stood for every-
tion and to a specific color, thus describing a confidence in the future/' 12 and this anxiety was thing female. The mythological underpinning
ritual circuit through space and time. Since each nowhere so manifest as in the ceremonies mark- for this belief was the Coatepec legend of the
day sign and its corresponding coefficient had ing the close of a calendar round (always in a triumph of Huitzilopochtli over Coyolxauhqui,
an augury—either favorable, unlucky, or neu- year 2 Reed, the sign of Tezcatlipoca), when a the moon. The Aztecs had an entire complex of
tral—the tonalpohualli provided the fortune of symbolic bundle of reeds representing the old female divinities with lunar attributes: young
every individual Aztec and of the gods as well. years would be buried like a dead man. All the goddesses such as Xochiquetzal ("flower
The calendric machinery was extraordinarily fires throughout the empire were extinguished, plume"), the goddess of love and Tezcatlipoca's
complex. The 260 days were grouped into 13- and the fire priests gathered on the Hill of the mistress, represented the waxing moon, while
day weeks, each beginning with the coefficient Star to watch if the Pleiades crossed the zenith. aged goddesses stood for the waning one. Asso-
i and each with its own prognostication and If they did, the universe would continue for ciated with this female pantheon were skills
presiding deities. Those born under the sign i another calendar round; the new fire would be generally assigned in Mesoamerica to the
Dog, for example, would become rich, while kindled in the breast of a slain captive, and the female sex, such as weaving, curing, and mid-
those born under i Monkey would be brave but smoldering embers carried out into the world. wifery. The breaking of the somewhat purita-
die in battle. Each night had its own supernat- The Aztecs shared the color-direction concept nical norms of Aztec behavior was considered
ural patron in a succession of nine lords of with most other Mesoamerican groups and with the domain of these divinities. Drunkenness, for
the night; there were thirteen lords of the day many North American tribes. Each of the four example, was often punished by death, yet the
as well. directions had a color (among the Aztecs, east maguey wine itself was under the care of the
All this knowledge was recorded in screenfold was white; north, the direction of death, was goddess Mayahuel and closely associated with
books kept under the care of the priests, who black; west was red; and south blue). There the rabbit, whose form the Aztec saw on the
directed the tonalpohualli rituals. The grandest were also a host of other associations. Thus each face of the moon.
of the ceremonies were geared to the annual cardinal point had a certain kind of tree, on the Third in brightness among the heavenly
movements of the sun, which had its own god, top of which perched a specified bird. The sur- bodies, the inner planet Venus was closely

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