Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky: Myths of Mexico. Copyright © 2018 by David Bowles. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent from the publisher, except for brief quotations for reviews. For further information, write Cinco Puntos Press, 701 Texas Avenue, El Paso, TX 79901; or call 1-915-838-1625.
FIRST EDITION
10987654321
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bowles, David, author.
Title: Feathered serpent, dark heart of sky: myths of Mexico / by David Bowles.
Description: First [edition]. | El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017021739 (print) | LCCN 2017035543 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-941026-73-1 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Indian mythology—Mexico.
Classification: LCC F1219.3.R38 (ebook) | LCC F1219.3.R38 B69 2017 (print) | DDC 972/.01—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017021739
Book and cover design by Sergio A. Gómez
All good things come from El Paso!
Para mi abuelo
MANUEL GARZA
que en paz descance.
Table of Contents
Introduction
The First Three Ages of the World
Convocation
Origins
The Heavens and the Underworld
The First Three Ages of the World
The Fourth Age and the Hero Twins
Convocation
The Hero Twins
The Fourth Sun and the Flood
The Fifth Age and the Reign of Demigods
Convocation
The Creation of Human Beings
The Fifth Sun and the Harbingers of Darkness
Lord Opossum Brings Fire to Humanity
Itzpapalotl and the Cloud Serpents
The Birth of Huitzilopochtli
The Toltecs and the Rise of Civilization
Convocation
Tollan and the Toltec Queens
The Brothers Incarnated
Tales of the Maya
Convocation
The Dwarf King of Uxmal
The Rise of Hunak Keel
Sak Nikte and the Fall of Chichen Itza
The Tale of Xtabay
Aztecs Ascendant
Convocation
The Mexica Exodus
Hapunda and the Lake
The Volcanoes
Tenochtitlan
Tlacaelel and the Rise of the Mexica
Conquest and Courage
Convocation
Malinalli and the Coming of Cortés
The Torture of Cuauhtemoc
The Anguish of Citlali
Erendira
Donaji
Guide to Pronunciation
Glossary
Notes on Sources
Bibliography
Introduction
Five hundred years ago, Mexico was quite different. The Triple Alliance of Anahuac—what we now call the Aztec Empire—dominated an area that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific coast. Arrayed all around them were dozens of other nations: the Maya, the Purepecha, Zapotecs, Yaqui, Huichol, Huastec, and Tarahumara, among many others. All of these peoples had different languages, gods, and traditions. Over the centuries, though, migration, trade, and conflict had spread certain common cultural traits widely.
Twenty million people lived in this land when the Spanish arrived in 1519. But the conquistadores were not interested in the cultural richness of Mexico. In their single-minded hunger for glory and gold, in their zealous drive to see the “Indians” kneel to the Christian god, the Spanish swept across the landscape with their steel swords, their guns, their armored horses. They also brought with them diseases that devastated the indigenous population.
It was genocide. Seventy-five years later, only one million people remained. Most of these survivors converted to Catholicism. Many blended with the Spanish colonists who came to occupy lands emptied by conquest. That fusion of races and ethnicities is called mestizaje. In time, a caste system was created to carefully separate this new hybrid population into special groups. Spaniards—both those born in Spain, peninsulares, and those born in Mexico, criollos—had the greatest rights and privileges. Below them others were ranked by how much Spanish blood ran through their veins: castizos (75%, with 25% indigenous), moriscos (75%, with 25% black), mestizos (50%, with 50% indigenous), mulattoes (50%, with 50% black). Pure indigenous and black individuals were at the very bottom of this social hierarchy.
As a result of this caste system, the sort of life a person had was essentially determined by the number of Spanish ancestors they laid claim to. Light skin and eyes, European features—such attributes brought advancement and opportunity. As a result, those who were products of mestizaje often turned away from their own native heritage and sought to be more like the Spanish conquerors, even oppressing people with less Spanish blood than they had.
Even after the caste system broke down and Mexico won its independence from Spain, traces of this old prejudice stubbornly survived. A fledgling Mexican identity was arising, however. The late 19th century saw a renewed interest in the pre-Colombian glories of the nation. But much had been lost. The few traditions that survived were diluted and fractured. And so they have remained, even down to my own generation.
By the time my grandfather Manuel Garza was born, his family’s indigenous past had been wiped away. They were Spanish-speaking Mexicans, then Mexican-American Texans, heirs to traditions from across the sea. Ranches and cattle were the lifeblood of their community in northern Mexico and deep South Texas.
Their norteño music and weekly mass were also European, if flavored with native spice. One of the worst insults was indio. Everyone swore their ancestors were pure Spanish.
Even though the stories my grandparents, aunts, and uncles told me when I was child were thick with local lore—strange boogeymen and wailing women—no trace remained of the old gods, the ancient priests, the vaunted heroes of Mexico’s pre-Colombian past.
In school, I was taught—like my father—the myths of the Norse, the Egyptians, the Romans, and especially the Greeks. I devoured the Odyssey, hungry for those Bronze-Age sensibilities, that interweaving of human and divine. On my own, I read other great epics of Western mythology: the Iliad, the Aeneid. I widened my net, plunged into India and its Ramayana, sought out the Sunjata of West Africa.
But it wasn’t until I took a world literature class in college that I read a single Aztec or Maya myth. Amazing. I had attended schools just miles from the Mexican border, but not one of my teachers had spoken of Quetzalcoatl or Itzamna, of Cihuacoatl or Ixchel. My family also knew nothing of these Mesocamerican gods.
Something important had been kept from me and other Mexican-American students. At first I was shocked and a bit angry. Yet who could I blame for five centuries of syncretism and erasure? Rather than lash out in response to the loss I felt, I began to scour the local libraries for every book I could find about pre-Colombian Mexican myths. In the end, I realized, it was my responsibility—knowing of this lack on my part—to reconnect with that forgotten past.
That duty to the history of one’s people has never been better expressed than in one of the few remaining poems of the Maya, from the colonial-era manuscript Songs of Dzitbalché:
It’s vital we never lose count
Of how many long generations
Have passed since the faraway age
When here in this land lived
Great and powerful men
Who lifted the walls of those cities—
The ancient, awesome ruins,
Pyramids rising like hills.
We try to determine their meaning
Here in our humbler towns,
A meaning that matters today,
One we draw from the signs
Those men of the Golden Age—
Men of this land, our forefathers—
Urged us to seek in the sky.
Consecrated to this task,
We turn our faces upward
As darkness slowly falls
From zenith to horizon
And fills the sky with stars
In which we scry our fate.
I found quite a lot of meaning in those scattered myths. They helped me through some very dark moments in my life. In time I became a school teacher, then a university professor. Though no standards required it, I did my best to share the heritage I had rediscovered with my students. My passion for our lost past drove me even further: I began to study Mayan and Nahuatl, wanting to decipher the original indigenous texts myself without the filter of a translator’s voice.
The difficulty was that so much had been destroyed. The Conquest not only decimated the native population of Mexico. It also eviscerated their literature, their history. Conquering soldiers and zealous priests had burned many of the indigenous manuscripts, and converted native minds shrugged off the lore of millennia. Though some Spaniards and mestizos sought to preserve what they could of the venerable old words, setting down songs and sayings using the foreign alphabet, the damage had been done.
Today, we cannot just pick up the indigenous equivalent of the Odyssey and read it—beyond the Popol Vuh, a Quiché Maya text from Guatemala, no such work has survived in Mesoamerica. What we have are stories and fragments of stories, preserved piecemeal across multiple codices and colonial histories or passed down word-of-mouth for centuries in remote communities.
As a result, the work of a chronicler or teacher is made very difficult: we have no cohesive narrative of Mexico’s mythic identity, no mythological history to rival other classical epics. As I pondered the dilemma, I saw a need for an exciting fusion of the different stories, one that could make Mesoamerican mythology come alive for a Western audience the way William Buck’s abridged take on the Ramayana did for Hindu epics, one that employs engaging, accessible, yet timeless language, much like Robert Fagles’ translations of the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid.
So I set out to write the book you hold in your hands.
Of course, I am hardly the first to retell these tales. The collections I found as a college freshman in different border libraries existed because of wonderful scholars and authors who gathered together written and orally transmitted myths and legends. What makes the present volume different is that—instead of telling the tales separately, discretely—I craft a single chronological narrative.
Drawing from a variety of sources (especially Nahuatl and Maya texts such as the Popol Vuh, Cantares Mexicanos, the Codex Chimalpopoca, Primeros Memoriales, and the Florentine Codex), this fresh take blurs the line between the legendary and the historical. My intent has been to stitch together myths and legends, organizing the tales so that they trace the mythic past of Mesoamerica from the creation of the world to the arrival of the Spanish.
As a Mexican-American author and translator, I see myself as one of many transmitters of tradition down the generations. My renditions treat these stories with respect and intimacy, as though they depict actual events. Because of the state of the existing lore, however, I have used several different techniques to create English-language versions. A few of the pieces are simply translated with some editorial adjustments to fit the larger narrative. Others are looser adaptations of myths and legends with some partial translation. Many are straight-up retellings, often of orally transmitted stories.
Quite a few of the myths are themselves syntheses of multiple sources, interwoven into a coherent narrative that I have quilted into the chronological sequence of the book itself. For the most part, I have synthesized several texts together from a single cultural tradition. A few times, however, I have blended Maya and Aztec cosmovisions wherever their overlap suggested an older Mesoamerican mythology from which both may have drawn. In such instances, I am not trying to erase the distinctiveness of the two very different cultures, but to reflect the hybrid mestizaje that has long been a characteristic of the Mexican identity.
I have provided notes on my sources and a comprehensive bibliography. My hope is that readers will become intrigued or excited by the mythological history I have woven and feel compelled to dive into the original texts as I once did, seeking to find some part of myself reflected in those ancient, enduring words.
DAVID BOWLES
August 22, 2016
The First Three Ages of the World
Convocation
Look upon our beloved Mexico. The ancient singers gave her such lovely names—
Navel of the Moon.
Foundation of Heaven.
Sea-Ringed World.
From jungle-thick peninsula and isthmus to misty highlands and hardy deserts, Mexico has cradled dozens of nations through the millennia, all worshipping the divine around them, shaping names and tales that echo one another while remaining distinct.
If you listen close, you can hear the voices of our ancestors, whispering down the long years in a hundred different tongues, urging us never to forget where we came from, how Mexico came to be, the price they paid to make us who we are.
Can you hear that ancient chorus, chanting to the rhythm of the wooden drum, accompanied by the throaty shrill of the conch? That is the flower song, the holy hymn. Listen closely, sisters and brothers: catch snatches of the melody. Let us sing the old thoughts with new words.
Can you see the looms of our grandmothers, shuttling out colors, the weft and woof of so many tribes? They unfurl through the ages, frayed or unraveled by time and conquest like well-worn, rainbowed rebozos. Take up the threads, each of you, and weave with me the multi-hued fabric of our history, from the obsidian darkness of the void to the flash of foreign steel upon these shores.
We start at the beginning.
Origins
The Dual God
There was never nothing.
Before you or I or anything else existed, the universe was filled with a mysterious vital force we call ku or teotl. Still and calm, this divine energy stirred slow, hushed murmurs spreading in languid ripples across the immeasurable expanse.
Then, at the very heart of the cosmos, the force compressed, coalescing into a powerful being of two complementary halves—what we might call male and female. This dual god, Ometeotl in the Nahua tongue, the ancients lovingly called our grandparents. Ometeotl began to dream and to speak to itself about those dreams, describing a vast world and multi-tiered sky, peopled with creatures so diverse and wonderful that the very thought of them brought joy to our grandparents’ hearts.
And there, in that primal place of authority at the center of everything, Ometeotl understood that it could be a mirror in which these dreams would be reflected, from which they would emerge into existence.
Though still one, its two halves became more distinct. For this reason, we give them both many names: Builder and Molder, Lord and Lady of the Two, Goddess and God Who Sustain Us, Matchmaker and Midwife, Grandmother and Grandfather. They pulled the vital force in two directions, molding it to form the vast cosmic sea below and the empty heavens above. From the very depths of the eternal waters, our grandparents drew a massive leviathan, Cipactli. With its knobby skin and razor-sharp teeth, the beast prowled the sea, a frightening mixture of reptile, amphibian, and fish. Always hungry, Cipactli would not remain still, but kept diving in search of food. Our grandparents, who had hoped to build a world atop the monster’s back, understood that creation was a more complex task than they had imagined.
They would need help to finish their work.
Time Lord and Old God
Perhaps formed from the cycling of endless currents in
the cosmic sea, another figure appeared, delighting Ometeotl. Turquoise-blue and very young, the newcomer wielded flinty stones in each hand, which he struck together, sending sparks and warmth throughout the universe. With his birth, time was set into motion at last, its interlocking gears slowly but ceaselessly marking the days and the years. As a result, our grandparents named him Xiuhtecuhtli—Lord of Time—and made him God of Fire.
Like Ometeotl, the Lord of Time had a dual nature: he could transform at will into his nahualli or spirit form, a dragon-like fire serpent whose coiling body matched the circular cycling of the ages. Eventually, as the complex wheels of time were deciphered, he would establish the two calendars that govern life in Mesoamerica: solar and sacred years, interlocking, ever-turning.
As the first year of our universe began to wind down, a change came over the Lord of Time: he began to grow weaker, to stoop over, to shamble slowly through the cosmos. His hair thinned, turned gray. His skin wrinkled and sagged. He became, in a word, old. Finally, this old god lay down, overcome by the shadow of something that had not yet entered the universe: death. But as the last flame of life flickered weakly in his soul, our divine grandparents, having learned the value of time, sacrificed a bit of the mysterious force from which they had formed themselves. Speeding that energy into the dying god, they restored his youthful vitality for another cycle. So it is that we renew every year by giving up something we hold dear, sending what little power we possess to the heart of the Lord of Time.
Brothers and Stewards of the Earth
Our grandparents realized that they could unfold themselves, bringing powerful, divine children into existence to assist them in creating and maintaining the world they had envisioned. First they brought two sons into existence, opposite but complementary forces: Feathered Serpent burst from the cosmic sea and took flight through the endless sky, his long body rippling with bright red, green, and blue plumes. Heart of Sky swirled to life in the heavens before dropping to the waters and spinning like a violent cyclone, dark smoke curling from the black mirror on his forehead. The two looked upon their dual parent and awaited instructions.