Aztec star-gazing

[Richard Haly]

> My question was just about the very names of the planets (if known), not
> about which authorities support that names themselve

Greetings:

I would argue that the difference proposed above - names of the planets vs.
authorities which give those names - is a false one and a dangerous one. Al=
l
knowledge is social and it makes a very big difference as to who says what
when. And it makes even more difference when 1/ we are discussing people wh=
o
are dead and could only leave records through Franciscan documents or other
colonial sources, (Sahag=FAn sez Tezcatlipoca =3D Jupiter, etc) 2/ when the
people are living and known to us through ethnographers some of whom speak
Nahuatl, some don't, all of whom have a particular perspective, and 3/ when
Mexican nationalism has done it's own fair share of invention re. indigenou=
s
culture, creating a "Classical" past not to mention "Classical" Nahuatl.
(This latter is particularly odd as Nahuatl today is less distant from the
Nahuatl of the early colonial period than English is from Elizabethan times=
.
Shakespeare is not "Classical" English.) The point is that sources matter.
LOTS. It is not the point to say that source-x is biased. (All sources and
all interpreters are biased.) The point is "how to read through that
bias/perspective in order to decide what is reliable and what is not."

Even the names of planets as gods is a tricky issue if one bothers to ask
what gods are, i.e. what they do in a particular culture in certain times,
places. Early colonial sources (Cortes' letters & Bernal D=EDaz, Mendieta)
refer to the Nahuas calling them "gods." Well, this has done a lot to makin=
g
Nahuas into a benighted lot, given such an error. However, if one bothers t=
o
question our own assumption of what a "god" is, or, better, what a
"teotl/teule" is, then we find that Nahuas themselves called their own
rulers "teotl" and had numerous practices which enforced this identificatio=
n
(not looking directly at the ruler as one does not look directly at the sun=
,
etc.) This changes matters considerably. It "humanizes gods" while at the
same time "deifying rulers." Because many people think about other cultures
in translation, often things are translated too soon, i.e. teotl into "god"
or "god" into "planet" leaving a cognitive dissonance between cultures and
thereby making the "other" exotic. If the ruler =3D the sun (cf. abundant
evidence in "refranes" in Book 3 of Florentine Codex - "New Sun =3D New ruler=
"
etc.) then maybe even such things as "feeding the sun" - the ostensible
reason behind human sacrifice - takes on new meaning, i.e. makes more sense=
,
if we were to think of it as "feeding the ruler" i.e. supplying the ruler
with goods/commodities.

Re. "star-gazing" one must ask what it is and why Mesoamericans did it and
do it when they do. The reasons are not the same as those of us working,
say, with Hubble. Nor are they the same as those of the 16th Spaniards who
recorded these Nahua practices. Recall that neither Spaniards nor Nahua nor
many researchers doubt their own cosmology. If I were to go into downtown
Boulder and meet an alien, we'd talk about his/her/? arrival in terms of th=
e
speed of light and red shift because that is the way our culture does it.
Similarly, 16th century (and later) Spaniards knew that the universe had
thirteen layers from the four elements to the moon to planets, to empyrean,
and so on. When asking Nahua about this they were not interested in Nahua
cosmology but in fitting Nahua names into Spanish (true and unexamined)
categories. If we want to think of the Hero Twins as Venus and the Sun or a=
s
the Sun and Moon, we're only perpetuating such misunderstandings unless we
ask what heroes are, what twins are, what Venus is, what the sun is and wha=
t
these relations imply. We need context to make sense. Are there any good
writings that have done this with the Greeks and Romans? as "Classical"
Greece and Rome is likewise the invention of a later culture. Greek
"mythology" was certainly not as "literary" when it was oral and still
practiced.

So, as Ralph Linton has it, "The last thing a fish sees is the water." and
as Walt Kelly has it, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

I think what Dr. Carlson is pointing out is that without examining the
assumptions made by the sources we cannot understand much. Nothing simple.
Everything complex, ambiguous and always engaging.

Best,

Richard Haly