The Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations / A Comparative Research Based on a Study of the Ancient Mexican Religious, Sociological, and Calendrical Systems

by Zelia Nuttall

As I shall treat of the same subject more fully in another publication, [pg 176] I shall but briefly touch upon the intimate connection there existed between these calendar-signs and the twenty classes into which the population was strictly divided. It is known that an individual received the name of the day on which he was born and it is possible to prove that this determined his position in the commonwealth, his class and his future occupation. Each child was formally registered by the priestly statisticians at birth, and at about the age of six, when his name was sometimes changed, he entered one of the two educational establishments where he was brought up by the State, under the absolute control of the priesthood and rulers. It can be gleaned that one of the chief cares of the latter was to maintain the same average number of individuals in the distinct classes, to which the various forms of labor were allotted and who became in time identified with these. In order to keep the machinery of state in perfect adjustment, individuals had sometimes to be transferred from the class into which they were born, to another. In some cases this seems to have been arbitrarily ordered by the authorities, but the latter appear to have guided themselves by the position of the parents and to have established the custom that an individual might alternatively be transferred into the paternal or maternal class, but not into any other. As each class was, moreover, divided into an upper and lower one, it was possible for each person to elevate himself from the lower to the higher by individual merit or to incur abasement, for unworthy conduct, and being, as we have already seen, “reduced to the official rank of women.”

The direct outcome of such a form of organization was stringent laws governing marriage, it being expedient that certain classes only should intermarry, not only to avoid complications but also to ensure a certain degree of coöperation conducive to the prosperity of the State. In the tribal laws still existing amongst the native tribes of North America, I see the logical survivals of an ancient scheme of organization.

After gaining the above recognition of some of the actual duties of the priest-rulers of ancient Mexico, it is possible to understand the meaning of the native sentence, noted by Sahagun, that the native games of patolli and tlachtli constituted a practice in “the art of government.” From this it is clear that the former, played by two individuals with dice and markers upon a mat in the shape of a cross, and symbolical of the Four Quarters, was originally [pg 177] invented by the priest-rulers for an eminently practical purpose. The mat being an image of the quadruple state and its subdivisions, it was possible to make it serve as a register-board exhibiting the distribution of the population, the number of individuals in each class and its death and birth rates. We are informed that when parents, according to the inflexible law, carried their newborn child to the priest, he consulted his books full of day-signs and foretold what its future was to be.

A proof that it was the positions of the stars which determined the season and furnished the means of fixing a date, is furnished by the fact that the stars were also “consulted” and believed to exert an influence upon the destiny of the child.

The implicit faith in the predictions of the priests and in the absolute influence of the position of the heavenly bodies and the date of its birth upon the individual indicates that the parents were kept in ignorance as to the workings of the machinery of state and that the priesthood were reverenced for their power of prophecy. The belief that they could personally exercise a favorable influence over the destiny of the child seems also to have been encouraged in the parents, since an offering of gifts at the period of registration was customary. After the Conquest, when the native government had been completely broken up, and the enforced registration of birth and the prediction of the priest had utterly lost their original significance, native parents still consulted the surviving members of the priest-rulers; and these ancient statisticians, in order to gain a livelihood, continued to consult their books and uttered predictions as of yore, although their power to control their fulfilment had vanished forever. Ancient Mexico thus furnishes us with an interesting and instructive explanation of the origin of divinatory practices, prognostication at birth, etc. It shows us that, under the ancient form of established government, the sign of the date of a child's birth actually did control his future destiny, while it was unquestionably in the power of the priesthood, not only to predict his future, but also to exert a favorable or unfavorable influence upon it.

The above facts help us to understand the origin not only of divination, propitiation and the belief in the influence of day-signs, but also of the native games which became popular after the Conquest, when their original use and meaning had become obsolete.

Deferring further discussion of this interesting matter I will but [pg 178] draw attention to Mr. Stewart Culin's important study of “American Indian Games,”[43] which clearly establishes their “interrelation” and at the same time proves that they were based, as first distinctly insisted upon by Dr. Daniel G. Brinton, on the central idea and that of the four quarters of the world. Mr. Culin has gone so far as to fix the place of origin of the “platter or dice class of games which he has found recorded as existing among some 61 American tribes, in the arid region of the southwestern United States and Northern or Central Mexico,” and to conceive that “in ancient Mexico we find traces of its highest development.”

I place the utmost value upon Mr. Culin's painstaking and conscientious researches and regard them as strongly corroborating my views exposed in the preceding pages. His identification of the pictured diagram in the Féjérvary Codex, as the counting circuit of the Four Quarters, with a presiding god in the middle, as in Zuñi, does credit to his perspicacity. I agree with him in considering that this chart could have been employed after the Conquest for a game or for divination, but trust that, upon perusal of this paper, he will admit that primarily the Féjérvary diagram expressed the native scheme of government and the calendar, which was no other than a means of ruling the classes by binding each of these to a special day and totemic sign. Each of the twenty classes or clans had its day, known by a particular sign which was also its totemic mark. As the day-signs recurred periodically, the chief or head of each clan became its living representative, assumed a totemistic costume and became the “living image of the ancestral teotl,” or god of his people, of whose activity he rendered account to the central government. It is significant that the common native title for lords or chieftains was “tlatoque,” literally, “the speakers,” and that they were closely designated as the spokesmen of his people, who habitually kept silence in his presence.

The fact that the names and signs of the days are identical with the totemic tribal distinctions imposed for governmental reasons, is one which I shall proceed to demonstrate more fully. Meanwhile attention is now drawn to the chapter on the 7-day period in Dr. Daniel G. Brinton's “Native Calendar of Central America and Mexico,” in which he surmises that the tribal divisions of the Cakchiquels “were drawn from the numbers of the Calendar.”

According to the native records the institution of the Calendar was simultaneous with that of tribal organization and a minute study of both features reveals that it could not have been otherwise.