A myth from the Aztec creation cycle, the mythology of bones, and what it might mean to be in service to life today.
“I have come here only to sing.”–
Motenhuatzin, poet from Tlaxcala who witnessed the fall of the Aztecs
Transcript of Precious Bones: Aztec mythology in the 5th world
Hello, and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and why myth matters to your life today. I’m your host and personal mythologist Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle.
A few months after I moved to Joshua Tree and the Mojave Desert, I found the intact skeleton of a very small snake under a creosote bush. Well, almost intact. The head was gone. Still, the animal was easy to identify from the bones and the sinuous shape carved in the sand. The spine broke into three curving pieces when I picked it up. Later, I laid the bones out on my kitchen windowsill, as a reminder of how life goes for each of us, and an invitation to the departed to inform me with snake wisdom.
The lifecycle of snakes has carried the imperative to make wholesale changes to grow and renew the self in the human imagination for longer than anyone can know. All creatures shed skin cells but snakes are the only creatures that shed their skin whole. They undertake the task whenever their skin is too small, worn out, or invaded by parasites.
When I found the snake skeleton, I was shedding some old skin myself.
Bones are fairly common in the desert. This place quickly strips things down to their essence. I’ve met many other desert dwellers who, like me, respond to the totemic power of bones. They can make your heart leap.
In mythology, and so in life, there are two schools of thought about bones. Some people avoid contact with bones. They are considered polluting because they are associated with death. Although death is unavoidable, to voluntarily interact with the evidence violates the divide between the living and those who have passed into the other world. This they say, is unnatural and can be dangerous.
Others believe that bones have power that should be welcomed. The relative durability of bones after the physical death of the body points to the possibility that something else endures and may have existence after death. In the mythological traditions that honor bones in this way, bones are often thought to contain the essence of the creature, the personality. The immortal part of a person is housed in the bones. This is the idea behind reliquaries and the preservation of bone fragment of saints and enlightened teachers, for example.
The inclusion of bones in sacrificial rites appears in many mythological traditions. Burning the bones of the human or animal sacrificed added weight to that act, because the personality of the individual clings to the bones. It’s possible that our word “bonfire” was originally “bone fire.”
As is often the case with mythic perspectives, the fear of bones that I mentioned, and belief in their powerful connection to the personality or soul of the departed, and to visions of the afterlife, can co-exist.
I want to tell you a story today from Aztec creation mythology that involves bones. But first, let me share one more idea about the power of bones that you will hear in this Aztec myth: bones as the material necessary for resurrection or the mythic reanimation of the dead.
This idea was important in prehistoric hunting societies. When an animal was killed, the skeleton was carefully laid out so the animal would return. This act was a pact between the hunter and the hunted, a respectful enactment of the great truth that each of us eats for a limited life and then becomes food. We are all part of this great cycle.
You also find this idea in Norse mythology. The god Thor shared a meal of goat with a human family. Later, he brought the goat back to life but the animal limped because the host’s son had sucked the marrow from a leg bone. We’re told that Thor was angry about this treatment of the bones.
The Latin word for bone is “os,” as in osteoporosis and osteoarthritis. The word refers to the skeleton and also to your soul, metaphorically imagined as a seed or stone in the manner of trees and stone fruits, like plums and apricots. Can you imagine the essence of your personality as a seed? If you are open to the idea that some aspect of your being will survive the death of your body, have you ever imagined it to be something similar to a peach pit? What is your image of an eternal soul?
This might seem like a question of little consequence in our time, but I wonder. When you talk about the limits of an outgrown paradigm or the need for a new story, you are talking about the quest for new images; images that become metaphors that become the structure, and that carry the values, of the new narrative. This is why the arts, and the artists, are so important.
What might happen if the notion of soul and spirit and personality were metaphorically and literally linked to the material world, springing from it and beyond it? Could this lead you to a deeper awareness of your kinship with your body, the earth, and all of the others who live here with you?
You might hold that question and some of these ideas about bones in mind as I tell you the Aztec creation myth called “The Cosmic Ages, the Rescue of the Precious Bones.” I recommend the book “Native Mesoamerican Spirituality” edited by Miguel Leon-Portilla. This collection of Pre-Columbian spiritual texts includes myths and stories, the work of poets and sages, a brief historical survey, and other information about Mesoamerican culture.
Now, I invite you to relax and enter into the meditative space of this story with me. Let the story take you where you need to go right now. Notice what you notice, as these details are an opening into what this story holds for you.
“The Cosmic Ages, and the Rescue of the Precious Bones.”
The Source and Creator, the Lord and Lady of Duality, the begetting father and universal mother who have always been, gave birth in the beginning, to the rest of a pantheon of gods. They had four sons. One was white, one was black, one was red, and one was blue. The white son was Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent. Quetzalcoatl was the god of life, of light, and the winds. The black son was Tezcatlipoca, the Jaguar, also called the smoking mirror. Tezcatlipoca was a sorcerer, associated with night and with obsidian. The hard, reflective face of his obsidian mirror let him see into the future. The red son, Xipe Totec, the Quail, was the god of agriculture, vegetation, and rebirth. The blue son, Huitzilopochtli, the Hummingbird, was god of fire, war, and the Sun.
These four gods were supposed to work together to create all that is Earth, sky, and human beings. At first they did, long enough anyway, to make an earth and a tiny little sun. It wasn’t much. Tezcatlipoca decided that he should be the sun.
He grabbed the tiny little sun and turned it around his middle. The rest of the gods thought this might be okay. They proceeded to the task of making people. The people they created were giants. These giants ate acorns from trees. This was a dangerous endeavor. If you fell down, you couldn’t get back up. And there was another problem. When the sun got to the top of the sky the earth was very dark, because the sun was way too small and these people were too big.
After some time, Quetzalcoatl decided changes should be made. He chased Tezcatlipoca with a big stick. He knocked him out of the sky and Tezcatlipoca fell into the ocean, where he changed into a Jaguar. Jaguars ate all of the giant people, and that was the end of world one.
Now, Quetzalcoatl decided to be the sun. This was called the Wind Sun. The people under this sun only had pine nuts to eat. Over time the people lost interest in honoring the gods. Tezcatlipoca turned the people into monkeys. Then he took his form as a jaguar and ran up behind the Wind Sun and kicked it out of the sky. This caused a huge windstorm that uprooted trees and wrecked everything. All of the people blew away except for a very few. They remained as monkeys.
Now the second sun and the second world were gone. The Rain God decided to get involved and he became the Rain Sun. But Tezcatlipoca seduced the Rain God’s wife. The Rain God let his grief overtake him and he neglected to send any rain. The earth dried out and the people couldn’t find anything to eat except for river corn, which is not the same thing as the corn that we know today. It wasn’t very good and the people suffered.
So, Quetzalcoatl sent a shower of fire and hot stones down that burned the earth. The flames were so hot and so high that even the sun was burnt. The few people who escaped this horrendous fire were changed. They ran all over the blackened Earth in the form of turkeys.
Now, Quetzalcoatl asked the wife of the Rain God to become the fourth sun. She agreed to do this and became the Water Sun. There were many people this time, but they still had nothing to eat because it rained all of the time. Tezcatlipoca told the wife of the Rain God that she was a phony goddess with no real love for the people, and she cried and cried and these tears pelted the earth.
One year there was so much rain that the rivers flooded. They rose over the tops of the mountains. Everything was drowned except for a few people who were changed into fish. It rained so hard that the sky fell down on to the earth.
When it finally stopped raining, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca each took a corner of the sky. They turned themselves into trees. The sky was slowly pushed back up into its rightful position above the earth as they grew. When this was done, the two gods let go of the sky. They reclaimed their spirit form and marched around proclaiming themselves the rulers of all they could see.
This was the beginning of the fifth world. Our world. When it came into being the spirits were troubled because it was very dry, and there weren’t any people. While the gods were thinking about this, Quetzalcoatl went down to the land of the dead to see about the bones of the humans who went before. He went to the Lord and the Lady of the Dead and said, “Those are very precious bones that you are keeping. I would like to have them.”
“Why?” asked the Lord of the Dead. “Why do you want the bones?” “The spirits are worried” Quetzalcoatl replied, “and they keep asking who is going to be the people. All of the gods are concerned that somebody should be living on Earth.” “Very well” said the Lord of the Dead. “If you sound my conch shell and go around my domain four times, you can have the bones.”
Now, the conch shell had no holes in it.
Quetzalcoatl called the worms to make holes in it for him. Then he called bees and wasps to fly inside and buzz and make a sound in the shell. With this in hand, he circled the domain of the dead four times. When he heard the sound, the Lord of the Dead said, “Okay, very well go ahead, take the bones.” But privately he said to his servants, “People of Mictlan, you can’t let Quetzalcoatl take those bones.”
Quetzalcoatl said, “Oh, I’m going to take possession of them.” But he told his Alter ego, his spirit helper, to go tell the dead, the people of Mictlan, that he would not take them. His Alter ego said loudly, “I won’t take the bones after all.” The servants of the Lord of the Dead heard him and said loudly, “He says he won’t take them.”
Then Quetzalcoatl went and gathered up the bones. The bones of the men were together on one side, and the bones of the women were together on the other side. Quetzalcoatl made them into a bundle and carried them off. Now the Lord of the Dead asked his servants again, “Are you sure Quetzalcoatl is not carrying away those bones? I want you to go and dig a big hole.” They went and dug a big deep hole. When Quetzalcoatl came, he was frightened by quail who scattered from the bushes. He stumbled and fell into the hole. He fell down as if he were dead.
The precious bones were scattered. The quail chewed and gnawed on them.
After a while, Quetzalcoatl woke up. He came back to his senses after the fall. When he saw what had happened to the bones, he was full of grief. He asked his Alter ego, “What should I do now?” “This has not gone so well” his Alter ego said, “but let’s continue. Make the best of it and see what happens.”
Quetzalcoatl gathered all the bones and put them back into a bundle. He carried them back up to the surface of the earth.
When he got there, all of the other gods and goddesses gathered. Quilaztli, the Mother Young goddess who helps plants grow, took the bones. She ground them into a fine powder in an earthen tub, and Quetzalcoatl bled on them. He bled on the powdered bones from his penis. The other gods joined in.
From this paste of old bones and the blood of the gods, people like us were born. In the darkness between the fourth and the fifth suns, human beings like us were created. “If we bleed for them,” said the gods, “then they will bleed for us.”
—-
Thoughts about bones brought me to this Aztec myth today, along with the recent celebration of Dio de Los Muertos, The Day of Dead, the annual celebration of ancestors and the life sustaining connection between this plane and the great beyond. Now as I sit with the story, the closing words reverberate: “If we bleed for them,” said the gods, “then they will bleed for us.”
The Aztecs believed that they were the chosen people of the Sun. They devoted a substantial amount of energy to ceremonial warfare to procure sacrificial victims, believing that the blood of those sacrificed would aid the Sun in his perpetual battle with darkness and complete oblivion. They believed that they could help maintain this fifth world.
In a related myth of the five suns, the gods decide that whoever among them becomes the 5th sun in this 5th world, our world—must sacrifice himself by jumping into a huge bonfire. Nanahuatzin, an old god with great humility, answers this call. He becomes the 5th sun and the Aztec Sun God who received their sacrifices. This god’s willing self-sacrifice reinforced the necessity for human beings to do the same.
The rite of blood sacrifice, especially human sacrifice, as practiced by the Aztecs and other cultures in times past, seems like gruesome evidence of myth gone wrong, of a mythic cosmology that has rightly been replaced by enlightened science. The likelihood that some sacrificial victims were unwilling makes the old practice particularly horrible, doesn’t it? To have your heart cut out with an obsidian knife sounds grim enough, and what if you were powerless to stop it? Choice, the power of personal choice, is often the difference between a hero and a victim.
By Marcelosan -wikimedia commons
Another difference is the meaning attached to the sacrifice, that is, the story that is told about it. Through our stories we recognize, remember, honor, and give significance. The Aztecs exalted death on the battlefield, also the deaths of their sacrificial victims and of women who died in childbirth. In their view, these lives were given in service to life, to sustain the foundation of all that is necessary and beautiful. Existence itself.
Aztec culture was brutal and yet the people and the perspectives in Aztec, Toltec, and other Mesoamerican societies were varied, even opposing, as they are in today’s societies. Despite the officially sanctioned agenda of the state, so to speak, people questioned. As Fernando Horcasitas explains, the artistic, cultural, and spiritual works that have survived reveal “a puzzled, meditative people,” people concerned with beauty, friendship, poetic expression, and the existential questions of life.
Existential questions. What could it mean to be in service to life in these times? How many lives are sacrificed today, do you think, to the modern gods of efficiency, consumerism, and convenience? How do we acknowledge our victims? Existential questions, my friend, that outlive every culture, every nation. I think we’re called to grapple with them and find new answers. I feel this stirring in my bones.
I want to end this questioning for now with from a poem from the book I mentioned. It’s by a sage named Ayocuan. He lived in the highlands of central Mexico in the 15th century. Here are the last stanzas of a poem known to us as “The Poems of Ayocuan.”
“Let us enjoy, O friends,
here we can embrace.
We stroll now over the flowery earth.
No one here can do away
with the flowers and the songs,
they will endure in the house of the Giver of Life.
Here on earth is the region of the fleeting moment.
Is it also thus in the place
Where-in-some-way-one-lives?
Is one happy there?
Is there friendship?
Or is it only here on earth
we came to know our faces?”
—Ayocuan, excerpted from “The Poems of Ayocuan”
To know our faces my friend, to know what and who, we are. This is the fundamental purpose of our myths and our myth-making. And, on that note…
Today, November 4th, is a big day. Step Into the Fairy Glen, a self-guided online course in story work and the symbolic life has begun. This course is inexpensive, accessible, powerful, and fun– and it’s not too late to enroll. Head over to my website mythicmojo.com, before midnight tomorrow, Nov 5th, and click the link to find further details and enrollment.
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And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Thank you so much for listening. Take good care of yourself, and until next time, happy mythmaking and keep the mystery in your life alive.
Link to Native Meso-American Spirituality edited by edited by Miguel Léon-Portilla
