From Dream To Memory: A Psycho-Historical Introduction to Nahuatl Myth And Moral Philosophy
Document Type
Dissertation
Publication Date
1977
Abstract
The Americas begin with the transcriptions of Nahuatl oral texts in north-central Mesoamerica. These 16th century texts contain the most extensive literary corpus recorded to date in any indigenous North American language, but they have never been analyzed in any systematic way as literary documents. This study examines key myth, narrative, and didactic texts in an attempt to reconstruct the sense of self, time, history, and morality in the Nahuatl civilization at the eve of the conquest. The impulse to read a contemporary sense of history into these texts has obscured most previous efforts to recover this Weltanschauung. Myth interpretation has been limited by naturalist and historical systems of reference. This study examines, in four chapters, the following material: (1) Myths of Beginning; (2) Sacred Hymns and Prayers; (3) The narrative cycles of Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli; (4) the Huehuetlatolli discourses. (1) A survey of the full Nahuatl mythic landscape as described in the History of the Mexicans Through Their Paintings MS demonstrates that the fundamental paradigm of the culture is supplied by the Five Ages myth. A structural comparison of six primary versions of the myth reveals three doctrinal-regional variations and demonstrates that, instead of describing stages of human cultural development as believed, they are textual devices for the spatialization of time, tools for centering the psyche about a mythic, cyclical definition of time whose image is the quincunx. This cosmological model could almost serve as an allegory of Jung's analytical system of the psyche. The tonalpoalli calendar system breaks down this cyclical vision of time into patterns of human destiny. But for the 16th century Nahua this vision was the lost illo tempore of a people he called the "Toltecs," a harmony which had been destroyed by a new death-oriented, linear time inspired by the restless and aggressive Chichimec peoples. The elaborate New Fire Ceremony, initiated at Xochicalco about 1100 A.D. and enacted every 52 years thereafter, was a nostalgic attempt to reassert the validity of mythic time in the face of the new historical time. (2) The Hymn and Prayer to Tlaloc and the Hymn to Chicomecoatl demonstrate the doctrines of human survival as "loan" of the god and man's physical interchange with the vegetable world. Hymns to Teteo Innan, Cihuacoatl, and Chimalpanecatl, related to several narrative texts, reveal a continuity of development from an ancient earth-mother numen to the "terrible mother" of the Aztecs, Coatlicue. A previously incorrectly translated myth from the Legend of Suns MS, Xiuhnel and Mimich, demonstrates the psychogenesis of sacrifice for Chichimec peoples in an exaggerated masculine fantasy of vagina dentata. The Prayers to Tezcatlipoca of the Florentine Codex show that the vaguely monotheistic doctrines evolved by late Nahuatl poets derive not from the high "Toltec" traditions as supposed, but from the rude theology of the Chichimecs. (3) The terms of the "tragedy" of Quetzalcoatl can only be completely understood in reference to the dialectic between mythic and historical time. Naturalist and historical interpretations of this myth both fail as ultimate terms but support this dialectical understanding of the dilemma to which the Nahua saw himself doomed: a permanent suspension between the stable mythic time of Quetzalcoatl and the dynamic death-pursuing time of Tezcatlipoca. The migration myth of the Mexica as preserved in the Mexicayotl Chronicle is a charter myth of Huitzilopochtli consciousness, an image of the dynamics of origin with which the Mexica-Aztecs explained and justified their precipitous rise to power. Comparison with the narratives of Quetzalcoatl reveals the usurpation of divine attributes by Huitzilopochtli as part of the revisionism of King Itzcoatl after 1430, and the guilt inherent in this action played a key role in the fatal ambivalence before Cortes. (4) The moral philosophy of the Nahuas receives its fullest expression in the so-called Huehuetlatolli texts of the Olmos and Sahagun collections, the former partially and the latter almost totally valid as pre-Hispanic witnesses. These discourses describe man's condition as simultaneously free and determined and outline an ethic intended to control the quality of his freedom. The goal of this system is the chipahuacanemiliztli or "life of righteousness" whose ideal is expressed metaphorically as the paradoxical qualities of childlike innocence and mountain-climber's discretion. Discourse 17 of the Sahagdn collection provides a three-part summary of the entire ethic which orders it into obligations of spiritual, social, and personal degree. Fate, defined according to the concept of birth-merit, turns out to be less rigid and doom-ridden than often pictured. Three appendices provide an anthology of myth, hymn, and narrative texts; a discussion of Nahuatl doctrines of after-life; and an extensive annotated bibliography of 20 primary Nahuatl MSS listing all publications of facsimile, paleography, and translation of each MS.
MSU Digital Commons Citation
Gingerich, Willard P., "From Dream To Memory: A Psycho-Historical Introduction to Nahuatl Myth And Moral Philosophy" (1977). Department of English Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works. 120.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/english-facpubs/120
Published Citation
Gingerich, Willard P. From Dream To Memory: A Psycho-historical Introduction To Nahuatl Myth And Moral Philosophy, University of Connecticut, United States -- Connecticut, 1977.