Excerpts from the Gods of Mexico by C. A. Burland, 1967
These are excepts from the book
The Gods of Mexico by C. A. Burland that I typed up and sent to JF Quackenbush for his notes.
"What was beyond the stars was a matter for theologians but everybody
believed that it must be the place of Ometecuhtli. There seems to be no
certainty thst this was part of the material universe."
Ometecuhtli = Lord of Duality = Ometeotl = God of Duality
"... Within the sphere of the universe all the powers of nature held sway.
They where divided by the four directs, and kept their positions in the
rythm of time. Beneath the realm of the sun, the moon and the planetary
spitits lay the earth, the Great Mother, and her consort Tlaltecuhtli, who
is often figured as a devouring grave. Beneath them was Mictlan, the land
of the dead. And then, running through the whole universe, extending from
the fireplace in the land of the dead through the fire in the homes of
eath, straight through to the pole of the heavens, was the strange central
spindle of the Fire God, Xiuhtecuhtli, who was in some ways a psychopomp,
taking souls to their final absorption and leading new souls into earth.
Within this closed universe it seems as if there might have been
continuous birth, continuous death, and a possibility, which is nowhere
made clear, that the souls of the dead may well have been taken by
Xiuhtecuhtli and returned to earth. And yet from time immorial the wise
men had realized that the closed universe was transcended by a supreme
deity whose only known contact with the human world was through the giving
of a soul to a human child. He it was who presided at every moment of
fertilization and at every birth. Yet there was no temple for him
anywehere on earth because he had no permanent place in the material
world."
I can only suppose that the temple Nezahualcoyotl built to Ometeotl was a
temple to another one of its avatars and not to it itself.
"... All the tribes, however acknowledged the celestial hierarchy in
which, under Ometecuhtli, the great spirit of this world was Tezcatlipoca,
faced by his opposite, Quetzalcoatl. This duality ran through the whole
world but the Mexicans had no sense of abstract good or evil as a modern
theologian might see it. The whole thing was a simple equivalence of
material pleasure or material pain. The religious man endeavoured to offer
pain advantageously, so that its opposite would come into being. The gods
offered the earth for men to live in, and in return demanded the offering
of human life. This range of alternating opposites applied to everything
in the universe. Thus all the powers of nature were living and dying in
rotation, rhythmically, and never at rest."
"... There was also, however, a much larger rhythm within which this whole
religion was contained. The philosophers and the higher priests knew that
the power of Tezcatlipoca would come to an end in the fullness of time,
only to be replaced by the more complete worship of Quetzalcoatl. They
were well aware that something similar had happened in the past, and that
the Toltecs had fallen after a changing of time in the magical calendar
which had reversed the relative positions of the gods. It is doubtful if
any of them had any clear idea of the length of the reign of the new
Quetzalcoatl. The Maya and, as far as we know the Maya alone, took
astrology to such astounding lengths that they were able to calculate
periods running into thousands of years in an infinitely complex and yet
really very practical astronomical calendar."
-C. A. Burland
The Gods of Mexico
1967
Posted by Eric Rosenfield at February 13, 2003 01:50 AM
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