Hello,
As usual around this time of the year, I do something to bring this thread back to the top, so people interested in a Mexican’s view of Our Lady of Guadalupe may have something to read.
This year, I am going attempt to sketch an interpretation of the graphic elements in the image of the tilma itself, from the point of view of the Aztec culture.
The first thing I am going to mention is that the Aztecs were a very graphic culture. This should not be hard to understand to the Eastern Christian mentality. The Aztec “codex” is functionally equivalent to the Eastern “icon” in religious and cultural contexts. It is not just a picture, but actually a story-telling object of devotion and knowledge.
The Aztecs were highly educated, all children went to school and learned how to read and write a codex, so these pictograms were both the Icon and the Scripture of their religion. An important element in Aztec codex writing is that the codex would normally express not only the timing of the story, but also its geographic placement.
Now, we also need to understand a little bit better the Aztec religion. The common understanding is that Aztecs were polytheists, in the same sense as the ancient Greeks or Romans were. This is not precise. The various Aztec “gods” were understood to be expressions or emanations of the One True God, Teotl. Aztec polytheism was closer to Hinduism, in this regard.
Yes, there were human sacrifices, but they were not understood as a way to appease an adverse deity, but rather as a way to repay the sacrifices God/the gods made in favor of the world: The sun rose every morning to give light and warmth, but in order to do that, it had to die and shed its blood every evening (hence the red evening sky).
Finally, the Aztec cosmovision was firmly planted in dualism: Night and Day, Male and Female, Heaven and Earth. All things had two elements in mutual opposition and tension (that is way all representations of Teotl are dual in one way or another, but that is not in contradiction to Teotl’s unity – somewhat analogous to the Christian notion of One God who is a Trinity).
The first symbol I want to talk about is called the “Nahui-Ollin”, literally that means Four-Movement and it is in reference to the Aztec belief that they were living in the 5th era of the world, with 4 previous eras ending in cosmic cataclysm.
The symbol has a number of variants, but in its purest form looks like this:
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Linked Image]
This is the Aztec’s expression of their macro-cosmos: God, represented by the circle in the middle is the center of everything. God is dual, that is why the circle is divided in half, the top part is plain, that represents the sun and the bottom part has an inner circle because two concentric circles represent a star, symbol of the night. The two round shapes at the right and the left of the central circle symbolizes God’s embrace of all.
At the top, there is a chevron shape pointing upwards, this represents the dawn, the East, the chevron represents the divine light received from the rising sun.
At the bottom, the symbol of a war shield with the symbol of a star represents the sun’s combat during the day that ends with sunset, when the sun sheds its blood to give life to the next day.
The four square shapes represent the four past eras, epochs or movements of history, also embraced by God.
This symbol is also an expression of the Aztec’s micro-cosmos: At the center of the human body there is the heart, where God lives and which expresses the totality of the person. Above the heart, the head is where God sheds His light, life and wisdom on us, beneath the heart are the reproductive organs, with which we give life to the next generation and the four squares are our four limbs with which we move and work.
With this introductory material, we are ready to take a look at the tilma itself.
Stay tuned!
Shalom,
Memo
