Translation:True History of the Profound Mexico/8
7. THE TOLTECS.
Generally those who have written ancient Mexico history are foreigners, who from an eurocentric point of view and an inexplicable and presumed cultural superiority, have always judged our differences with the European culture as shortcomings. What is not like them is less than them, in their opinion. This biased study of our history has been "plotted" as personal scientific booty for each of the foreign researchers and their Mexican disciples. This is why concepts such as "the Aztec civilization, the Mayan civilization, the Zapotec civilization", etc., are maintained, as if they were different cultural structures and civilizations.
“It is forgotten that a culture forms an organic unity and that, therefore, should be studied from its center and not from one of its peripheral aspects. The concept of life is the "center" of every culture. Above all the ideas about the origin, the meaning and the lasting value of human existence, is what reveal the special genius of a culture. These ideas are the result of a form of existential consciousness of man in the cosmos; this is the reason why time erodes them only superficially." (Mircea Eliade. 1962)[1]
The dominant culture has not tried to comprehensively explained itself, not only the Anahuac civilization, but all native cultures throughout the Americas as a single continental civilization, multiplicity of cultures in time and space, but all firmly bound by a philosophical-cultural matrix. Thus they have been studied by foreign scholars and their Mexican disciples, each researched as an isolated culture and not, as a macro civilizing project that has gathered many peoples and cultures of the Americas over eight millennia.
"Indeed many of the Toltec
were painters,Codices writers, sculptors,
worked wood and stone,
they built houses and palaces,
they were feather artists, potters...”
“The Toltec were very rich,
were happy,
never had poverty nor sadness...”
“The Toltec were experienced,
used to engage in dialogue with their own heart.
Knew the stars experimentally,
gave them names.
They knew their influences,
they knew well how the sky works,
how it turns..."
(Sahagún informers)[2]
The ancient history of Mexico can easily be understood, as the Cem Anahuac people shared development, with three major periods: Preclassical, Classical and Postclassical. And with three cultures, all born from the same civilization, which influenced or were the most representative of the development of each period, although not the only ones. For the Preclassical was the Olmec culture, for the Classical the Toltec culture, and Mexica or Aztec culture in the Postclassical.
"A paradigm of any other Tollan (City A.N.) was for Mexicans what was known about Teotihuacan. Its large seemed constructed by giants and thus spoke of them in amazement, as well as of the roads and other venues of the city. A yuhcatiliztli <existing in a determined fashion> reached its peak in Teotihuacan, it was an authentic Toltecáyotl, work of the scholars that ruled there, <who had knowledge of hidden things, holders of tradition, founders of towns and lordships...>." (Miguel Leon Portilla. 1980)
The Classical period and the Toltec represent the greatest splendor era in ancient Mexico. The Toltec from Teotihuacan spread the Toltecáyotl knowledge to all Anahuac research centers. This is confirmed by the Teotihuacan influence in the archaeological remains of buildings, ceramics and frescoes of the classical in the cultural universe formed in the Anahuac. The Toltec expanded their wisdom through all the Cem Anahuac and provided civilization its greatest apogee. These more than a thousand years of splendor were not achieved through weapons, as there was a total peace. Nor was it the product of economic domination, because the use of cocoa as currency and the rise of commerce occurred with the Aztecs in the decadent period. It is better understood as a process of increased production of knowledge and its expansion to all corners of the known world.
"But rather is an indication that the root of all Mesoamerican religions [philosophies – Author’s note] is the same, and not that Teotihuacan imposed their gods on the gods of the other Nations. It is, however curious, for example, that the influence or the Teotihuacan conquest towards the end of Monte Alban II, appears within that culture a proliferation of previously unknown gods and that many of them are Teotihuacan gods. The same thing seems to happen in Guerrero and possibly in Veracruz.” [Ignacio Bernal. 1965.][3]
It is more likely that the Toltec, more than a "culture", was a knowledge degree of the wise men and women of the millenary ancient Mexico and that Teotihuacán was the generator and irradiator center of Toltecáyotl for all the Cem Anahuac.
It surprises today, to find peoples such as the Tacuates in Oaxaca and the Maya in the Yucatan Peninsula, and cannot find Toltec people in the ethnic mosaic of the country.
In the same Cem Anahuac historical memory, the Toltecs are recognized as precursors of ancestral knowledge and wisdom.
"When it was still night,
when there was no day,
when there was not even light,
they got together,
the gods were invoked
there in Teotihuacan.”
“The Toltec had the advantage
at all times,
until they approached the chichimeca land.
It cannot be remembered
how long they walked.
They came from the interior of the plains,
between the rocks.
There they saw seven caves,
and turned these caves into temples,
their place of pleading.
And the Toltec
were always ahead."
[Sahagún Informers.]
"It is surprising not to find the background of the main factors of a civilization whose rules, in essence will remain intact until the Spanish conquest. But if it is difficult to admit that cultural traits —as some architectural features, the orientation of their buildings or the particularities of their sculpture and painting— have been able to assume, from their inception, a definitive character, it is even more difficult to imagine the emergence, in a perfect state, of the thought system which is at its base." (Laurette Séjourné. 1957)[4]
If the Olmec culture is the Mother culture, the Toltec culture represented the wisdom flourishing of ancient Mexico wisdom and is the most valuable legacy of our old grandparents, just as the Greco Roman period was for Europe. After it’s mysterious and until today, inexplicable disappearance, the peoples who succeeded them in the postclassical period, always tried to place their origin on the Toltec lineage. The Toltec and Quetzalcoatl are the wisdom and deepest spirituality expression of our civilization.
"As Quetzalcoatl teaches that human greatness lies in the consciousness of a higher order, its effigy cannot be other than the symbol of that truth and the serpent feathers representing it, should speak of the spirit which allows man - a man whose body, as that of a reptile, crawls in dust – to know the superhuman joy of creation, thus constituting an ode to the sovereign inner freedom. This hypothesis is confirmed, in addition, by the Nahuatl symbolism, in which the snake shapes matter - its association with earth divinities is constant - and the bird, to heaven. Quetzalcoatl is therefore the sign which contains the revelation of the celestial origin of human beings... Thus, far from invoking coarse polytheistic beliefs, the Teotihuacan term evokes the concept of human divinity and points out that the city of the gods was nothing but the site where the snake miraculously learned to fly; that is, where the individual reaches the category of celestial being, from internal elevation." (Laurette Séjourné. 1957)
In fact, one of the great mysteries of history, not only in ancient Mexico, but of humanity itself, was the amazing and inexplicable disappearance of the Toltec in the Anahuac in less than one generation.
It is not known why they did it, but in the mid-9th century CE, centuries-old buildings were destroyed stone by stone and then they were completely covered with dirt. This phenomenon was not an isolated or regional event. On the contrary, it was a coordinated and concerted action in all knowledge centers, called today "archeological" sites. From north to south and from east to west. In less than 50 years they disappeared and what is also amazing, is that there are no archaeological traces of a migration and much less their reappearance elsewhere in the Anahuac. Literally human beings living in what we now call archaeological sites disappeared without leaving any trace, and specialists call it the collapse of the late classical.
- ↑ Mircea Eliade (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈmirt͡ʃe̯a eliˈade]; March 13 [O.S. February 28] 1907 – April 22, 1986) was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most influential contributions to religious studies was his theory of Eternal Return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but, at least to the minds of the religious, actually participate in them.
- ↑ Bernardino de Sahagún (1499 – October 23, 1590) was a Franciscan friar, missionary priest and pioneering ethnographer participating in the Catholic evangelization of colonial New Spain (now Mexico). He was born in what is now Spain in 1499, travelled to New Spain in 1529, and spent more than 50 years interviewing and documenting Aztec beliefs, culture and natural history. His primary motivation was to evangelize indigenous Mesoamerican peoples and most of his writings were devoted to this end, yet his extraordinary work documenting indigenous worldview and culture has earned him the title “the first anthropologist.” He is best known as the author of La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva Espana (in English: the General History of the Things of New Spain, hereafter shortened to Historia General). Historia General is commonly referred to as The Florentine Codex, named after its current location.
- ↑ Ignacio Bernal (February 13, 1910 in Paris - January 24, 1992 in Mexico City) was an eminent Mexican anthropologist and archaeologist. Bernal excavated much of Monte Albán, originally starting as a student of Alfonso Caso, and later led major archeological projects at Teotihuacan. In 1965 he excavated Dainzú. He was the director of Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology 1962-68 and again 1970-77. He was awarded the Premio Nacional in 1969. He was a founding member of the Third World Academy of Sciences in 1983.
- ↑ Laurette Séjourné (1911 - May 25, 2003) was a French archeologist and ethnologist best known for her involvement in the emancipation of the Mexican Indian and her study of the civilizations of Teotihuacan and of the Aztecs. She became known to a wider public through her 1957 publication on the cosmology and religion of the Toltecs and Aztecs, translated into English as Burning Water: Thought and Religion in Ancient Mexico. While betraying the influence of the historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, its main focus is the figure of Tollan's priestly king, Quetzalcoatl, and his teachings.