In order to comprehend this, however, it is first necessary to study carefully the myths relating to its origin. Torquemada (lib. vi, chap. 41) cites the authority of Friar Andreas de Olmos for the following native account of the creation of man, which was differently recounted to him in each province. He states that the majority of the natives, however, agreed that “there was in heaven a god named ‘Shining Star’ (Citlal-Tonac) and a goddess named ‘She of the starry skirt’ (Citlal-Cue), who gave birth to a flint knife (Tecpatl). Their other children, startled at this, cast the flint down from the sky. It fell to earth at the place named ‘Seven caves’ and ‘produced 1,600 gods and goddesses,’ ” a figure of speech which evidently expressed the idea that, in coming in forcible contact with the soil the flint gave forth sparks innumerable which conveyed vitality to numberless beings. It is evidently the same idea of “life sparks” being called into existence by the union of [pg 055] heaven and earth which underlies the Texcocan version of the creation of man recorded as follows by Torquemada (op. et loc. cit.). “The sun ... shot an arrow towards the land of Acolma near the boundary of Texcoco. This made a hole in the ground whence issued the first man....”
Figure 25.
The illustrated version of the above myths, given in the Vatican Codex i, designates the celestial progenitor of human life as Quetzalcoatl, also named Tonaca-Tecuhtli=the lord of our subsistence, Chicome-xochitl=“Seven roses or flowers” and Citlalla-Tonalla=“The Milky Way,” literally, The shining stars. The dual divinity is figured (fig. [25], no. 4) as two persons with the shaft of an arrow over each of their heads and with the symbol Tecpatl=flint, between them as the issue of their union. In the Borgian Codex (fig. [25], no. 1), a barbed arrowpoint, instead of the Tecpatl, figures between the celestial parents. Their union is symbolized by a covering, the shape of which, in further representations (fig. [25], nos. 3 and 5) in the same MS., offers resemblance to the tau-shaped windows which are such a common feature in Maya and also in Pueblo architecture (fig. [25], no. 2b). The preceding data, which could be amplified, seem to show that the natives associated the tau-shape not merely with the idea of the Male and Female principles, but also with the Above and the Below, or Heaven (air and water) and Earth (earth and fire). I shall have occasion, further on, to refer again to the symbolism of the native tau.
The above illustrations, however, definitely prove that the flint knife and the arrow (with a flint point, presumably), were indiscriminately designated as the medium by means of which the spark of life was created and imparted to earth-born beings.
It will be proved further that, at the period of the Conquest, the arrow was revered as an image of life-producing force in Yucatan and Mexico. The flint knife cased in wrappings was called “the son” of Cihuacoatl, the earth-mother, and was regarded as her [pg 056] special symbol. It is significant, therefore, to find that it was the emblem of office of one of the two high priests, who alone employed it, as a sacrificial knife, in performing his awful duty of immolating human victims.
The fact that the cane-shaft of an arrow figures above the head of the celestial couple in the Vatican Codex is particularly interesting because the name Ome-Acatl=Two-Cane, is given as the name of a divinity by Sahagun (book i, chap. 15) and that the ceremony of kindling the New Fire, at the commencement of a cycle of years was also associated with the calendar sign Ome-Acatl (Sahagun, book vii, chap. 10).
At a certain festival images of Omacatl were manufactured and carried by the devout to their houses in order to receive from them “blessings and multiplication of possessions” (Sahagun, book ii, chap. 19).
I draw attention to the fact that life is supposed to have proceeded from the union of stellar divinities, that the Tecpatl and flint are the well-known symbols for the North and Fire and that the Vatican commentator identifies the celestial parent as “Seven-Flowers.” What is more, Duran (vol. i, pp. 8 and 9) relates that the native race was organized into seven separate tribes and that these “claimed to have come out of ‘seven caves’ (Chicom-oztoc) which were situated in Teo-Culhuacan or Aztlan ‘a land of which all men know that it is in the North.’ ” Now Teo-Culhuacan is composed of the word Teotl, which designated the stars, the sun, the gods and, by extension, something divine or celestial. Culhua (cf. Coloa) means something bent over or recurved, or the action of describing a circle by moving around something, and can means “the place of” in Nahuatl. This locality is represented in the picture-writings by a strange and impossible mountain with a recurved summit (fig. [26], no. 1). Aztlan literally means “the land of whiteness, brightness, light.” In Duran's Atlas the seven caves are represented as containing men and women—the progenitors of the seven tribes. The order in which these are described, in the Mexican myth, as having issued from the caves, is instructive and sheds light upon the provenance and purpose of the tradition. It represents the Mexicans as the superior predestined race who remained in their cave the “longest, by divine command,” their “god having promised them this land.” The tradition relates that six tribes reached and settled down in the central plateau of Mexico, [pg 057] 302 years before the Aztecs arrived, under the leadership of Huitzilopochtli an oracular divinity, whose commandments were transmitted to the people by four priests (Duran, chap. ii).