America had many fairly advanced civilizations at the time of the arrival of the whites. The Incas, for example, were dominated by totalitarianism with strong social programs in the spirit of the twentieth century. And the Aztecs had a rich spiritual life. Their ideas about gods were as complex as ancient Greek or ancient Egyptian, but we still know less about them on average.
How the warrior gods argued about which object to be born from
The supreme goddess Coatlicue, who wore clothes made of snakes (this, in fact, is what her name says), was the venerable widow of the late sun god, and also a mother of many children. She gave birth to four hundred sons-stars and the daughter of Koyolshauka (“Golden Bells”), the moon. And then one day she shoved a ball of hummingbird feathers behind her skirt, which fell on her from the sky. The ball disappeared, and the goddess found herself pregnant.
The torso of Coatlicue, almost like the Indian goddess Kali, is decorated with severed arms and a skull.
This is not the case when a mother becomes pregnant from extraneous feathers, Koyolshawki reasoned, and persuaded the brothers to kill the mother who had disgraced the family. The fact that Koyolshawki's mother herself conceived from an obsidian knife did not bother her. But when the children surrounded the supreme goddess to kill her, Huitzilopochtli escaped from the womb of Coatlicue, the new sun god, cut his sister into pieces with a fiery serpent in his hand and threw his head into the sky. Now at nights Koyolshawki shines from there.
Interestingly, both brother and sister were both warriors. Coyolshawks are portrayed in a helmet, with snakes on their arms and around the waist, with a bare chest - referring to the European gods, she is compared with Artemis-Diana, who was one of the lunar deities and ran through the forests armed and bare-breasted. Huitzilopochtli is responsible not only for the sunlight on earth, but also for the war, and he is portrayed in full military attire.
Koyolshawki walked hung with snakes. By the way, the gods could use snakes as a weapon.
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It is believed that the myth of replacing the old sun god with a new one, with a period when there was no sun at all, is the memory of a giant meteorite that blazed so much in the sky that it obscured the light of the sun, and after the fall of which the sky was covered with a veil of - for the fires that started on the ground. In addition, the motive when one god somehow kills another is the memory of how the new cult supplanted the old one. Probably, before the rise of Huitzilopochtli, Koyolshawki could have played the role of the goddess of war - such goddesses were among many peoples.
Coatlicue herself is the goddess of the earth, the sun jumps out of her to defeat the moon and the stars, that is, drive the night away. In addition, she was the goddess of agriculture and flowering and the goddess of death.
Some more gods with snakes
The god Miscoatl ("Cloud Serpent") was responsible, like Coyolshawki, for the Milky Way, but was also a pole star and commanded the clouds. He was taken into the pantheon of the Aztecs from the Otomi and Chichimec peoples, with whom the Aztecs had many contacts. Miscoatl was the god of the hunt, he not only controlled storms and thunderstorms, but also threw lightning - they were his arrows. It was Miscoatl who threw a mysterious ball of feathers from the sky to Coatlicue, dreaming that she would give birth to a child from him.
Miscoatl, god of storms and lightning.
The fact is that Miscoatl also had a legal wife, so he could not directly commit fornication. The wife-goddess was called Chimalma (“With a shield in hand”). For a long time she could not give birth to a child for her husband, until she prayed on the altar of her future son, who was destined to be a great god, and learned that in order to conceive, she had to swallow a green stone. After spending the night with her husband, having eaten the stone in advance, she was able to give birth to Quetzalcoatl ("Feathered Serpent"), one of the main god of the Aztecs. By the way, among the Aztecs, a woman was rewarded for a successful birth in the same way as a man after a battle, and during childbirth they were given pain relievers.
Initially, Quetzalcoatl was opposed to other gods, because he had to sacrifice not people, but birds and hummingbirds. But then the cult came to the generally accepted norm, and in honor of God they began to calmly kill relatives.
Quetzalcoatl did not have a human appearance for a very long time, and in general he was at first a small god of fertility.
Quetzalcoatl considered himself so ugly that he did not remove his beard, growing it to hide his face, and wore a white mask. Due to the legend that Quetzalcoatl began to rule the Aztecs in human form, and then left them on a boat, the Aztecs first mistook Cortez for a god who decided to return.
According to legend, in his human form, an ugly but kind god taught the Aztecs mathematics, medicine, astronomy, weaving and writing. To convince the Aztecs not to sacrifice people anymore, Quetzalcoatl pricked himself with a sharp thorn and released divine blood, which was supposed to be enough blood for all sacrifices ahead.
Cortez's conquest of the Aztecs through the eyes of the artist Carlos Esquivel and Rivas.
Many believe that the incarnated Quetzalcoatl was in fact - or, more precisely, some man of a radically different culture introduced himself as the local most mysterious god. Some are sure that it was a Scandinavian who converted to Christianity and accidentally found himself on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico after long and hard wanderings as a result of a shipwreck or an epidemic on board. Others believe that he was an alien and managed to fly away to his home planet later.
Surprisingly, in any case, the most warlike and most peaceful deities of the Aztecs, Huitzilopochtli and Quetzalcoatl, are paternal brothers.
Huitzilopochtli was a sun god, but with skin the color of the sky.
Your own Anubis and what happened to the man-eating butterfly
Coatlicue had a son, Cholotl, a guide to the world of the dead. Sometimes he was portrayed as a walking skeleton, and sometimes … as a man with a dog's head. Almost like Anubis. Sholotl was also one of the thunder gods, the god of misfortune and disaster, the patron saint of twins and the game of ball. He also served his brother the sun, accompanying his first part of the journey from underground to heaven and carrying out his errands as a messenger.
One of the two lunar deities (among the Aztecs, the deities often duplicated each other, since they were taken from the conquered or just neighboring peoples), Meztli, had a peculiarity: he could be a young handsome man or … an equally young beautiful woman. It is not clear who was undecided: the Aztecs or Meztli himself. In any case, the name of Mexico is most likely derived from the name of this deity.
The usual image of the deity Meztli. Apparently, the artists did not know whether to draw a girl or a young man, and were twisted by symbols and allegories.
Another understudy god is Tonatiu. He was the god of war and the sun, so it's not hard to guess who he duplicated. It's okay, they didn't push against Huitzilopochtli: the Aztecs very gracefully solved the problem of identical gods, announcing that different ones ruled in different eras. Tonatiu is walking across the sky right now, and Huitzilopochtli was a little early.
However, Tonatiu became a sun god immediately after the creation of the world. Then the deities gathered to decide which of them would become the sun and which would become the moon. For this, a fire was lit: whoever jumps will receive a position. One of the gods, suffering from a severe, debilitating skin disease, decided first. He jumped into the fire and turned into the sun god Tonatiu.
Another deity, Texistekal, also decided to throw himself into the fire after Tonatiu's courageous act and as a result became the deity of the moon Metztli. And, by the way, he turned from an old man into a fellow. Or a red girl. As already mentioned, he was undecided. For a long time, the moon, moreover, shone just as brightly as the sun, preventing people from sleeping, so I had to throw a rabbit at it.
Eekatl taught people to love. By the way, he has a duck beak.
One of the incarnations of Quetzalcoatl was the wind god Eekatl. He moves the Sun across the sky with his breath, and it was he who brought love into the world. Before Eekatl fell in love with a mortal woman, people did not know love.
One of the most ancient gods is Shiutekutli. He is the god of time, and also of fire. Moreover, both domestic and underground fire, in volcanoes, and … falling from the sky. Probably, his last hypostasis is also associated with the memory of the fall of the meteorite.
Heavenly paradise among the Aztecs was ruled by the goddess of fate, Itzpapalotl ("Obsidian butterfly"). Like a butterfly, she is armed with obsidian blades at the edges of her wings, as a woman - powerful claws; it is likely that this goddess was originally very warlike and patronized the hunt. She had a knife for her tongue and a magic invisibility cloak.
Itzpapalotl.
Once an unpleasant story happened to her: with a certain friend, she appeared in the form of deer to two star gods. One of these gods copulated with a friend of Itzpapalotl, who, of course, before turned into a woman, and then ate her (and it seems, also like a woman, without turning into a deer). But the chosen one Itzpapalotl, the second of the gods, turned out to be a very nervous person. After looking at all this, he lit a fire, jumped into it and died.
The butterfly goddess went crazy with grief, and then - either out of pity, or because such an opportunity presented itself - was killed by the fire god. According to another version, Miscoatl killed her under completely different circumstances, because she killed his brothers-stars and ate them. After that, he burned her body and drew a strip around her eyes with ash.
If it happened in the book of our day, it would have turned out, of course, that Miscoatl misunderstood the sight of the goddess standing over the roasted corpse of his brother-star, but the Aztecs had just two different stories.
Lilith Mazikina
