Craig Berry

Mixcoatl was an Aztec deity, the father (according to some versions of the story) of Quetzalcoatl. The word literally means "cloud snake". Here's Mixcoatl dancing with Coyolxahqui, the goddess of the Moon, over Westwood.

I hang out on a couple of mailing lists used by professionals in the fields of mesoamerican archaeology and linguistics.  It's wonderfully exciting to watch as field research combines with energetic discussion to yield new discoveries.  Every now and then I get the nerve to contribute an idea; so far I haven't been told to get lost. :)

Right now, on one of those lists, there is a vigorous debate under way about the nature of Maya counting, particularly with regard to calendrics.  Not surprisingly, this arose from yet another post regarding the upcoming completion of the current Maya calendar cycle in 2012.

One key point in this discussion concerns the nature of "zero" in the Maya counting system.  Famously, the concept of "zero" as a number emerged in mesoamerica much earlier than in eurasia.  But it turns out that the Maya concept of zero was a bit different from our culture's version.  To us, numbers form an infinite line, marked at regular intervals by the integers.  One can start at 1, move one position to the right, and find 2.  Start at 1 and move the same distance to the left, and you'll arrive at 0; one further to the left is -1, and so forth.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the Maya zero was never used in this kind of linear counting.  Positional notation was never used for any quantity other than time, and no  codices or monuments record a quantity of zero for anything.  The idea of zero only appears in dates, as part of the five-place positional notation that measures time as a series of cycles, building in groups of 13 and 20.

However, all of these counts, at all levels of the calendar system, are cyclic rather than linear.  So even though mathematically the "zero" glyph is clearly treated like our own zero, its meaning is also "fullness" or "completion" -- because the beginning of that zero point on a given cycle also marks the completion of the previous cycle.

Think about watching a digital clock count up toward midnight using 24-hour (military) time.  The sequence is 23:58, 23:59, 00:00.  That last value, midnight, is simultaneously the end of the previous day and the beginning of the new one.  In the former role, one can imagine calling it 24:00, which would be equivalent to 00:00 of the following day.

And that's where it gets interesting, because the Maya, on the two monuments we have that mention the beginning of the current baktun cycle, both call that starting date 13.0.0.0.0 rather than 0.0.0.0.0, as one might expect.  It seems as if they recorded some cycle closings as if they were one past the previous cycle (like 24:00 in my time example) rather than the beginning of a new cycle.

There's something elusive here, some very different way of conceptualizing time and counting, tantalizingly close to being revealed, but maddeningly hard to pin down.  But just seeing that there are different ways to think about such seemingly fundamental concepts is exhilirating.  This is why I love learning.

The Other Conquest, the movie I've been wanting everyone I know to see for most of a decade, is finally coming out on DVD on October 16!  (Need to get home to check out what daysign that is.)

I love having interests that cause me to receive emails with titles like "The Snake Hemipenis in Mesoamerican Art".  (Is that a hemipenis on your ritual apron, or are you just slightly glad to see me?)

Initiations at LVX Lodge went beautifully on Saturday.  Along with a great batch of candidates and a stellar set of officers, the Lodge's cantankerous air conditioning system met the challenge of a Valley summer day quite well.  This is in marked contrast to last summer, when we nearly killed most of Grand Lodge by hosting their annual meeting in our space during 120-degree, high-humidity weather at a time when the air conditioning was just barely moving air, much less chilling it.

Meanwhile, I've managed to learn enough about VB.Net to untangle the Premiere Psychics site.  This is a relatively new business started by a friend, and they got started on the wrong foot with their website.  It's nice being able to combine helping them out with learning a new set of technologies.

I went into this project prejudiced against Microsoft and all its works, but I resolved to keep an open mind and see if perhaps the common wisdom in the Java community was mistaken.  I have concluded that no, the common wisdom is spot on.  While .Net does some things much better than any Java toolkit (e.g., "hot" deployment of code updates to a running server), the only IDE choice you have is Visual Studio, and Visual Studio works extremely hard to force you into bad design and coding practices.  I routinely have to override its default choices to make things work the way a web application should.  Now that I've worked out how to do such overrides, I can make it behave without much effort, but I shudder to think of all the bad code being generated by less experienced developers.  Oh, and the server side engine (ASP.Net) takes valid markup (under HTML 4.01 Transitional) and rewrites it to make it invalid.  That completely ticks me off.

I'm currently enjoying a linguistic discussion on one of my Aztec-scholarship mailing lists in which the verb "to vomit" has been chosen to illustrate an odd conjugation pattern. When I finally get that time machine and zip back to Tenochtitlan in 1490 or so, I'm sure that my knowledge of the word "nimoizohtla" ("I vomit on myself") will gain me instant respect, or at least convince people to stay a safe distance away from me.

The cool thing is that I've finally studied enough Nahuatl that I can see and hear the parts of that word as meaningful units. I didn't know the "to vomit" stem "izohtla" before, but "ni" indicates a first-person agent and "mo" is the first-person reflexive. So I parsed "nimo-" as "I do (something) to myself" without even thinking about it.

I love the feeling of finally getting enough of a subject into my head to start doing useful, interesting things with it. Like throwing up on myself.

This photograph was posted to one of the Mesoamerican-studies mailing lists I read. It shows a quetzal in flight. As the the person who posted it says,

Take a look at this and never doubt again why the feathered serpent deity, the quetzal, and its feathers were so venerated. It really is a snake and a bird combined.

My personal symbolic work incorporates Aztec mythology and mysticism, along with an eclectic stewpot of other traditions. In particular, the figure of Quetzalcoatl resonates for me. Like most of the mesoamerican gods, he is a complex and contradictory figure. Our knowledge of pre-Conquest Aztec culture is pathetically meager, and it's impossible to tell how accurate or biased our views of it may be. It could well be that there is a coherent synthesis of Quetzalcoatl which the priests of Tenochtitlan held as an esoteric secret, and which has been lost forever.

However, I find it more likely that the apparent confusion of Quetzalcoatl's mythology reflects the actual pre-Conquest situation. Quetzalcoatl is a very old god, revered in one form or another by cultures from the Yucatan clear up to Sonora over at least two thousand years. This provided plenty of opportunity for regional and temporal variation in mythology. I'm sure the legends of Quetzalcoatl diverged and recombined dozens of times to produce the complex narratives recorded in the surviving codices, and in the scholarly works of Sahagun, Duran, and other sympathetic Spanish priests.

Of all Quetzalcoatl's surviving myths, the legend of Tula is (for me) the most compelling. Quetzalcoatl Ce Acatl Topiltzin ("Plumed Serpent, One Reed, Our Prince") was the divine king of the semi-legendary city of Tula, regarded as the fountainhead of all later art and science. The term "Tolteca" means "of the people of Tula", and it is a measure of the power of the legend of Tula that the greatest compliment an Aztec artist could receive was to be called "Tolteca".

Quetzalcoatl presided over the greatest flowering of Tula, but his arch-rival Tezcatlipoca tricked him into a sin so great that he abdicated his rule and left the city, to either die on the Carribean shore, or sail into the east, promising to return. The golden age over which he presided soon ended as civil war tore apart Tula's empire.

There is an archetype complex of which Quetzalcoatl is my favorite example -- the leader with an impossible but beautiful dream, who succeeds for a time only to see his dream fall to ruin. Frequently he is killed or otherwise silenced as part of the general collapse. Jesus is an obvious example; others include King Arthur, John Lennon, and Mahatma Gandhi.

Interestingly, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's classic novel The Mote in God's Eye incorporates this archetype as the central myth of an alien civilization. Translating for humans, the Moties name him "Crazy Eddie". Crazy Eddie is the innovator whose ideas are truly good and even noble; alas, he always manages to try to implement them at the worst possible moment, tipping precarious situations into disaster. One of the Moties explains (quoting from memory) "When a city has grown dangerously crowded, and every available vehicle is working full time moving food in and waste out, it is Crazy Eddie who leads the movers of garbage on a strike for better working conditions."

I'm writing all this because the Quetzalcoatl Ce Acatl Topiltzin (or Crazy Eddie) archetype is very much on my mind today. I was hoping putting this into words would trigger useful associations in my mind, and indeed it has. Thanks for coming along for the ride. :)

Though it be jade, it will be shattered
Though it be gold, it will be broken
Though it be quetzal feathers, it will be torn.
  —Nezahualcoyotl

One of the aspects of Aztec religious philosophy with which I connect most strongly is the identification of beauty with transience. This is not quite the same as the Buddhist advice to avoid attachment; rather than standing aloof from impermanent creation, the Aztec approach was to enjoy and cherish the things of the world because they are transient, to enjoy their fragile beauty with a special urgency and poignancy derived from the certainty of their destruction. The Nahuatl idiom for transcendent beauty is "in xochitl, in cuicatl", which means "flowers and song" -- which of course are both beautiful and ephermeral.

I've quoted Nezahualcoyotl's words above countless times, but last night I was treated to an unwelcome demonstration of their truth. I tried to take off my sweater, forgetting that I was wearing my favorite jade necklace over it. The stress broke the chain, and the pendant fell to the hard tile floor and shattered into at least a dozen fragments; I still haven't found them all, I'm sure.

This particular pendant had a special symbolic significance to me, as I associated its colors (the green of the jade, and the blue of a small aquamarine set above it) and its shape (a graceful open-centered oval) with Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec deity for whom I feel a special affinity. Thus the experience was doubly painful for me.

Still, it would be hard to ask for a more pointed reminder of the reality of a principle which is easy to keep at arm's length when expressed as lofty poetry. I'm taking this as a lesson, and trying not to grumble too much.

Thank you, fraterseraphino, for nearly triggering coffee-related keyboard damage by pointing out this.

laurellady just informed me that there's a Mexican woman on some show she's watching whose parents named her Tonantzin.  I'm all for recovering the lost glories of Aztec culture, but somehow I think naming a baby daughter "Our Honored Mother" wasn't a common practice in Tenochtitlan.

I gave my talk on "The Myths of Quetzalcoatl" at LVX last night, and I was really happy with how it went.  People were energetic and engaged, asking lots of good questions.  Best of all, people really seemed to get involved in the Tula story; there were even a few gasps at the climax.  The Tula myth was pretty much the top of my narrative arc for the night, so I was especially hoping that it would come out right.  And the final part, tracing the identifications of Cortez with Quetzalcoatl and Quetzalcoatl with St. Thomas, had the desired "wow!" effect.  All in all, a good night.  (The Huaxtec hat bit fell flat, though.  Need to work out how to tell that better next time.)

Meanwhile, my long-term financial plan hit a happy milestone today.  It's a long, slow push, but it's beginning to pay off.  If only I understood that ten or twenty years ago...

Helping that process along is a change in my company's benefits plan which becomes effective on May 1, which will add dental and vision care to our health coverage.  That's a huge help; we've been avoiding non-critical dentist visits because we have to pay for them out of pocket, and a single crisis last year (L's root canal) set me back nearly a thousand bucks.  But the cost for insuring the family by myself, without benefit of a company plan, was even worse than that in the long term under most reasonable scenarios.  I'm glad that in eleven days I will no longer have to worry about that particular threat hanging over my head.

You know you're having an interesting life when, for half a minute, you really can't remember if your talk tomorrow evening is going to be the long one on Quetzalcoatl or the shorter one on Simon Magus. Whee!  (It's the Simon Magus one tomorrow, by the way; I'm not doing "The Myths of Quetzalcoatl" until the Tuesday after next.)

Speaking of Quetzalcoatl, I've been following this story on a Mesoamerican anthropology list for a few weeks, but now it's in the mainstream press: A very significant pyramid has been discovered under a suburb of Mexico City, dating from a culture transitional between those of Teotihuacan and Tollan. The former city, long abandoned in classic Aztec times, was mythically identified as the site of the creation of our present world; the latter was the hub of the empire which ruled the Valley of Mexico just before the Nahua culture which came to include the Aztecs (Mexica), and was said to have been ruled by Quetzalcoatl Ce Acatl Topiltzin, an avatar or incarnation of the divine Quetzalcoatl.  The Aztecs identified Tollan as the locus of a lost golden age of art and prosperity, and created elaborate mythological "proofs" of their being the true heirs to that legacy.  The highest praise one could give an Aztec artist was to call him or her "Tolteca".

It will be fun trying to wind this discovery into my Quetzalcoatl talk.  Alas, I have about seven hours of material so far, and two hours to work with, so it may not make the cut.  But perhaps I can just do a brief aside.  Those who have attended my classes know how crisp and disciplined I am about limiting digressions. :)

The Aztec civil calendar consisted of 18 "months" of 20 days each. This left an inconvenient remainder of five days before the cycle began again. The Aztecs considered these days ill-aspected, and laid low through them, avoiding major actions or decisions until the new year began. Their name for these days is perfect: nemontemi, or "useless days".

I think we should adopt this very useful name (in either Nahuatl or English) for the period between Christmas and New Year's Day. Most people are either off work or not doing much at work, everyone is exhausted from the holiday rush, and the general atmosphere combines weariness with expectation.

I am observing the Useless Days by taking time off work (other than a brief meeting I dropped by for yesterday), sleeping late, and working on various OTO web projects. Tonight I will be heading out for dinner and Mass practice with z111. Tomorrow night we bid farewell to the nemontemi and to the (very) vulgar year 2005 with anubis75, lady_saffir, and whatever other weirdos they've gathered for the festivities.

2005 has had its ups and downs, but on the whole I'll give it a solid B. I have high hopes for doing better next year. (And Rhapsody cooperates by playing just the right music for this musing...)

I am currently reading Eating Landscape by Philip Arnold, a student of Mesoamerican religion and culture.  In this book he attempts to understand what little we know of Aztec ritual in terms of a ceremonial and mythological relationship with the Valley of Mexico, very much tied to the particular geographic features, weather patterns, and ecology of that small region.  He concentrates his analysis on Tlaloc, the god of rain and fertility, one of the two gods (with Huitzilopochtli) at the center (literally and figuratively) of Aztec ritual practice.

Unfortunately, the author is enamored of the language of postmodern deconstructionist criticism; if I had a dollar for every time he uses the word "hermeneutic", next month's rent would probably be covered.  I'm sure this jargon works extremely well for certain scholars, but for me it always feels like I have to decrypt every sentence before I read it.

If that's all there were to it I'd have given up 20 pages in.  But there are some nuggets of gold among the postmodern lead.  For example, he points out a fascinating distinction between "locative" and "utopian" religions (and religious elements).  Locative religions are bound to particular places; holy mountains, specific temples, sacred cities.  Utopian (in the original sense of "no place") religions are bound only to cosmic or ubiquitous principles.  Not surprisingly, settled and insular peoples -- agrarian cultures, in general -- tend to have locative religions, while nomadic or wide-spread cultures tend toward utopian religion.  Individual cultures can swing from one to the other over time; consider the Jews before entering Palestine (utopian), during the period of temple worship (locative), and after the diaspora (utopian).

The Aztec situation was fascinating in this regard in that the bulk of the Nahua population in the valley (including the Mexica after a few generations there) were very much settled agrarians, and practiced a religion very much localized to (and identified with) the features of the Valley of Mexico.  But the northern "Chichimeca" (nomadic barbarians), including the Mexica who came to rule the valley, worshiped utopian solar and stellar gods.  Thus, the religious practice of their empire blended the two, with the supreme symbol of this blending being the presence of two separate shrines atop the Great Pyramid: one to the locative fertility god Tlaloc, one to the utopian war god Huitzilopochtli.

This book is not a good place to start if you're curious about Aztec religion.  But if you're already familiar with the basics and want to dig deeper, this book is worth reading.  Just bring along your Postmodernese-English phrasebook.