Quotes from _The Flower and the Scorpion_ #20

"Figure 5 shows Tlazolteotl's position in the Ochpaniztli ritual. This was an annual event in which entire communities came out to dance, engage in mock battles, and sweep the community. Nahuas [sic] viewed the ritual as purifying the community and preparing the people for war; it thus was central to the maintenance of the city-state: it maintained the city's internal hierarchy and also established divisions between insiders and outsiders."

Quotes from _The Flower and the Scorpion_ #19

"Since femininity controlled the sexual sphere (as it controlled the earth), Nahuas [sic] viewed goddesses, women, feminine males, and female animals as those who policed the sexual boundaries between moderation and excess."

Quotes from _The Flower and the Scorpion_ #18

"Here, Tlazolteotl through her loincloth and skirt, and her ambiguously gendered name, presents within her own self the complementarity of male and female-the necessity of having both genders within in order to accomplish the activities that the Nahuas desired her to accomplish."

Quotes from _The Flower and the Scorpion_ #17

"In the Borgia Codex we find an image (figure 3) in which Tlazolteotl gives birth to a glyph of a flower, symbolizing Tlazolteotl as the mother of fertility and sexual excess. Several other elements of this image are noteworthy. First, and most immediately apparent, Tlazolteotl is naked except for her headgear and her necklace, her nakedness signifying sexual excess, since this is what the nudity of women in preconquest manuscripts scripts always appears to have signified. Second, Tlazolteotl's headdress and earrings are made of a spindle and unspun cotton, signifying her as the goddess of spinning cotton. Third, her right foot sits on a flint knife, an implement used in blood sacrifice. Fourth, her legs are tied, either with rope or with two snakes whose heads do not appear; the act of tying Tlazolteotl presents her as a deity linked with the earth. Finally, Tlazolteotl has no navel, perhaps suggesting divine birth.
The image is part of a set of images of divination, so we should note here that the elements connected to Tlazolteotl's body, such as the flower and the flint knife, are day signs within the Nahua calendar. Tlazolteotl in this image is the patroness of these particular day signs, so she modifies the days in some way, leading to prognostications. In other words, one might suggest that somebody born on the particular day that Tlazolteotl controls would engage in sexually excessive activities.
In another preconquest image (figure 4), from the Codex Laud, we find Tlazolteotl handing a child to a female death figure. Tlazolteotl was a goddess closely linked with childbirth, and this image represents the dangers involved in the birth process. We also see that Tlazolteotl wears a snake as a belt. Nahua lore envisioned the snake as signifying sexual excess and as a phallic symbol; Nahuas also linked it with the tlazolli complex, as they envisioned the snake as one of the key powerful and dangerous animals emanating from the dirt of the earth. In this image, Tlazolteotl is topless, but she wears two bottom garments: the loincloth of a man and the skirt of a woman. A third preconquest image (figure 5), from the Codex Fejevary Mayer, shows Tlazolteotl holding two brooms, signifying her role as the goddess in charge of cleaning trash. In this image, Tlazolteotl, again topless, wears two snakes, both wrapped around her, one with a head emanating from her mouth, the other with a head coming out from beneath her skirt. The phallic implications seem clear.
These three preconquest images, taken together, signify three elements of Tlazolteotl's preconquest identity that are important for my methodological discussion: her gender, her sexual role, and her ritual purpose. In two of these illustrations, Tlazolteotl's image signifies gender ambiguity in a traditional Nahua frame. In all preconquest Nahua iconography, men are identified by the presence of a loincloth, a phallic image designed to allude symbolically to the presence of the penis.  But in figure 4 Tlazolteotl wears a loincloth and a skirt, which, as we shall see, is not an uncommon occurrence for a powerful goddess; in figure 5 the snake emanating from beneath Tlazolteotl's skirt suggests the presence of a phallus. Further, the name Tlazolteotl, literally translated as "deity of trash;' has an ambiguous gender, and both boys and girls could be named Tlazolteotl. Could Tlazolteotl have been a deity who signified both male and female? If so, how can we deem her a goddess? How can we even use gendered pronouns to describe Tlazolteotl?"

Quotes from _The Flower and the Scorpion_ #16

"Instead, we find at least three different identifying categories [related to sexuality/gender], all of which changed through time. Those categories include one that we can associate with a particular type of act, one related to aesthetics and gender comportment, and one that we cannot identify."

Sadly, though I think Pete does pick these categories out and discuss them, I think he lacks a bit of organizational magick to really tie them into this sentence and to let everything kind of cohere.

Quotes from _The Flower and the Scorpion_ #15

"Rituals performed before the conquest, often produced by the nobles of the city, focused extensively on promoting fertility. In doing so, the ritual practitioners radically altered the human body so as to produce the liminal body, the body that existed in between the human and the divine. This liminal body incorporated the masculine and the feminine in one body."

Quotes from _The Flower and the Scorpion_ #14

"I note the close association between scorpions and other "animals of the dirt" with the tlazolli complex. The "dirty" animals played a major role in ritual discourse, at least when that discourse invoked tlazolli. In an image from a preconquest codex (see figure 2), a feared cihuateotl (plural, cihuateteo), a woman who has died in childbirth, has a centipede emanating from her mouth. Nahuas [sic] feared her for her ability to spill tlazolli out into the social sphere, thus killing people, particularly children.
. . .
Finally, she wears both a loincloth and a skirt. Only Nahua men wore loincloths, and the images always picture Nahua commoner men in loincloths, while women wore and were pictured in skirts. This signified the cihuateteo as in-between figures, ambiguous entities that always skirted around the edges of life and death, human and god, man and woman. This liminality is the key component of the entire tlazolli complex, and indeed of Nahua sexuality itself.
Tlazolli first relates to trash. Second, it forms excrement, waste. Third, it creates life through its use in fertility (fertilizing the crops). Fourth, it takes life, allowing a gateway to death. Fifth, it is specifically gendered: the Nahuas link tlazolli to women and femininity, but also to an indeterminate, in-between notion, perhaps moving femininity beyond gender. Finally, as Burkhart points out, tlazolli signifies chaos."

That last paragraph, though, should be tremendously useful to me as a way to explain to folk what tlazolli is (and thus who Tlazolteotl is).  It's a thing I understand implicitly, but which other people seem to have trouble clicking with, and this paragraph succinctly and quickly hits six important and seemingly different elements of the concept!  Thank you, Pete!

Also, "perhaps moving femininity beyond gender"?  As a coercively-assigned-male-at-birth transfeminine nonbinary genderqueer (who is not a woman), these five words have excited me more than almost anything in this book has!

Alsoalso, this section has left me wondering how I can bring the cihuateteo into my practice more.  Are there good rituals, prayers, places, stories for them?  I will need to do more research!

Quotes from _The Flower and the Scorpion_ #13

"We can think of the tlazolli complex in a schematic form as an intersecting matrix with four vectors: household (feminine) labor, the earth, pleasure, and ritual."


A matrix (the word-choice is itself fascinating, as it recalls a Gloria Anzaldua poem about Tlazolteotl!) that Pete Sigal then almost entirely leaves behind for the rest of the book, ignoring both household labor AND the earth in his analysis.

There are times when I really wish that academics would read their introductions >.<

Quotes from _The Flower and the Scorpion_ #12

"The Nahuas [sic] did not privilege vaginal intercourse as the only or even the primary intimate act needed to produce a child, and they thus connected many other elements with the continuity of life."

Quotes from _The Flower and the Scorpion_ #11

"In the Nahua universe, tlazolli always interfered with daily productivity. A commoner could never engage in his or her standard pursuits without regularly coming into contact with tlazolli. The commoner man, by farming the earth, contacted the tlazolli on a regular basis: the earth itself, the fertilizer used in conjunction with the planting, the dirt left on the harvested maize. The commoner woman, when in the household, came into contact with the tlazolli in her daily ritual of sweeping but also in her maintenance of the hearth, when she cleaned the dirt off the wood, and in her cooking activities. And all people, commoners and nobles, came into contact with excrement."

If the Catholics who taught me for seventeen years were right that God [sic] is omnipresent, than what conclusion must I draw from my own particular observations (and then backed up by this quotation) then that God is tlazolli, God is trash, God is shit?  Tlazocamati, Tlazolteotl!

Quotes from The Flower and the Scorpion #10

"So when Nahuas [sic] discussed tlazolli, they did so not to eliminate all tlazolli from life but rather to control the placement of the undigested remainders: the forces that created tlazolli formed a necessary part of life and needed appropriate respect, but they could not and should not be unleashed in an uncontrolled manner into the community."

Quotes from _The Flower and the Scorpion_ #9

"[F]rom the fertile earth-itself made up of tlazolli-emanated all life forces."

Quotes from _The Flower and the Scorpion_ #8

"The process of living inevitably brought one into contact with tlazolli. Maize grew from the mud, from the body of the tainted earth deity. One linked oneself with the earth by eating cultivated foods and also by acts of tlalticpaccayotl, 'earthliness'-sexual activity.The souls of unweaned children free from these contaminations could go back up to the creator deity's heaven; others were in effect claimed by the earth and had to go down into mictlan [the land of the dead, the underworld]."

Quotes from The Flower and the Scorpion #7

"The trash, rubbish, and excrement that make up the tlazolli complex signified to the Nahuas a disruption to the cleanliness needed to function. This disruption was a necessary part of life, but it required care so that the trash did not take over."

Quotes from The Flower and the Scorpion #6

"In general, tlazolli consists of little bits and pieces of things, which might once have belonged somewhere but now, through processes of decay, deterioration, or digestion, have become formless and unconnected; these fragments are now scattered about, interfering with things that are new and tidy."

Quotes from The Flower and the Scorpion #5

"The tlazolli complex links closely with the notion that while excess is necessary for the continuation of the community, ritual practitioners must always work to control the nature of the tlazolli or else the community will become infused with excess and disease."

This is beautifully similar to many discourses about fire and even to thematics of things like Western or noir movies!

It also seems to resonate with my assertion that only the filthy can wash away the filth, for the dirtying is the same magickal act as the cleaning.

Quotes from The Flower and the Scorpion #4

"Simply put, Nahuas did not believe that sexual activity, or any other activity based on human choice, could place them in spiritual danger. Rather, the only things that could influence one's position in relation to the gods were carefully honed skills and particular types of luck."

Rotwork might be particularly interested in this quotation, as they have been delving into an antihumanist perspective of late, thanks to their own reading (Straw Dogs, by ???).

I see this differently, though, not anti-humanist but a "new" humanism.  It is not our activities or our choices or our morality that might influence our position with the gods or the afterlife or whatnot -- and in fact it accepts the anti-humanist positioning of luck and fate! -- but our skills might be what our place in the cosmos is based upon.  It also, obvi, resonates with the classical Greek concept of arete and, possibly, Diuus Imperator Hadrianus's devoted worship of Disciplina.

Quote from The Flower and the Scorpion #3

"While the flower will remain partially unknowable, knowable, an entity that exceeds our ability to understand Nahua discourse course in a foreign cultural framework, I will show that it primarily related lated to intimate connections with others and itself signified fertility in all of its forms.
From the root xoch:
Xochitl. flower
Xochtia. to utter witticisms or make people laugh
Xochuia. to enchant, bewitch, or seduce a woman"

This one is just a quick linguistic note, one of two I've found in the text so far that points at a group of words related by stem as a way of getting at what might be called a subverbal meaning complex (I'm certain there's a better technical term for this), or a "root meaning".  It seems that "xoch" doesn't just mean "flower", despite the -itl suffix just meaning, essentially, "this is a noun".  The -tia suffix, for example, is causative, so xochtia means "to make people xoch, to cause xoch-ing".  The idea and the image of a flower doesn't just mean that thing in the garden with the pretty petals.  It's a much larger associative symbol-set.

Like any and all languages, of course, including English and Spanish.

Quotes from The Flower and Scorpion #2

"According to Nahua cosmology humans came upon the earth, created by the gods after several attempts. These humans needed to respect the gods by performing ritual ceremonies designed to move time forward and thus allow for the continued survival of the deities. These humans had bodies made up of a variety of substances that could be exchanged at particular (ritually important) moments. Moreover, the human body always maintained a very close connection to both the natural world and the world of the gods. Hence a Nahua could not view the human body in isolation from the existence of the gods or from the centrality of plants, animals, and the earth. And humans could also alter their bodies, though only in ritually appropriate ways, and only with the support of the gods."

Still from the first few pages, this quotation oddly seems much more in line with other interpretations I have read -- primarily those of Miguel Léon-Portilla, who it would seem might be closer to the Nahua cultural strand than Pete Sigal -- than later in the book, where Pete presents a much more Freudian interpretation of Nahua ceremony, ritual, and (especially) sacrifice.  He describes these things later in the book not as moving time forward (which would vibe with Miguel's interpretations of the centrality of ollin/motion and seemingly the etymological connections between teyolia/lifeforce, yollotl/heart, and ollin), but as renewal of fertility by engaging with necessary-but-dangerous excess and also as Freudian castration play, gender inversion, and the power of being "penetrated" (even if by a tecpatl/knife rather than a tepolli/penis).  It's very confusing.

But this one paragraph does seem like a nice little summation about the role of humans in the Nahua cosmology; I don't recall Miguel ever providing anything so succinctly broad, so I will be using this until I can find something better . . .

Quotes from The Flower and the Scorpion #1

"Tlazolteotl's image appears above the small door to the steam bath (temazcal) -- Tlazolteotl, the "deity of trash;' guarded the steam bath because she, along with a series of related fertility goddesses, controlled the process in which individuals cleansed themselves, both metaphorically, through ritual, and literally, through washing ing one's body.  The Nahuas [sic] did not distinguish between the metaphorical and literal cleanings, because when one cleaned oneself, one also kept at bay all of the other things signified by the term tlazolli"

Later posts in this series will include a wee bit of commentary on why I pulled whatever quotation I am posting out of the text, but this one from the first few pages really seems to need little if any comment.

Chalca Cihuacuicatl ("The Chalca Woman's Song") sung to the Mexica tlatoani (ruler) Axayacatl 15 years after the Mexica conquered Chalco

Please do not stick your hand in my skirts,
Little boy,
King,
Little Axayacatl,
Perhaps I am painted,
My little hand is itching,
Again and again
You want to seize my breast,
Even my heart.

Now perhaps you will ruin my body painting.
You will lie watching
The coming of the green quechol bird flower.
I will put you inside of me.
Your chin lies there.
I will rock you in my arms.

It is a quetzal popcorn flower,
A flamingo raven flower.
You lie on your flower-strewn mat.
It lies there inside . . . no longer.

A Quick Note About the Book I'm Reading

This Pete Sigal guy is getting a little too Freudian in his description of the New Fire Ceremony/the Bundling of Our Years. I've been enjoying some of his insights into Tlazolteotl and trash-and-dust and the gender of the gods, but I'm finding Miguel Leon-Portilla's interpretations of sacrifice much more compelling (and even believable).

Although I will say, I'm finding myself fascinated by the resonances of Sigal's perspectives with some of the thematics of Western movies (and maybe even a chunk of noir movies, too) -- the gun is the only thing that can protect civilization from barbarians (interpreted both racistically as Indians, yes, but particularly as bandits and criminals and thugs) but anyone wielding the gun is himself [sic] barbaric. This is very similar to Sigal's claims about how the Nahua view/ed fertility, trash-and-dust, excess, fire, gender, et cetera.

Remember

Remember Palmyra. Remember almost 1900 years of history, now gone -- Bel's temple has been destroyed now, too. Remember Ba'al Shemim and Bel, two great gods perhaps now homeless. Give them a home. Resist Daesh's unIslamic attempts to wipe our collective polytheistic pasts from the world. Resist the Sixth Great Extinction's extension into the noosphere -- I don't know how I can save the animals, but praise and honoring and worship and storytelling and prayer and altars and shrines and memory (simple memory! Mnemosyne's small, important gift!) might save the gods.

Tess Dawson said that [n]o matter how powerless we feel at seeing this rampant horrific destruction and violation, we have the two powers that matter most: Memory and Devotion. We should use them well. These are the two ways we can feed the gods -- who have existence and agency well removed from anything we humans might do, thank you very much! But they are still creatures of the noosphere. Their substance is stories and relationships and rituals and songs and poems and dance and all that memetic stuff (they are independent beings like us, only they have memes where we have genes, you see) -- and the gods need them very very much right now. Please feed them, I beg of you. Just as animals are independent sovereign beings nonetheless being killed in vast numbers by us humans, so it is true of the gods, for the noosphere is as much part of the ecosystem as the biosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the lithosphere, the magnetosphere . . .

‪#‎thisiswhyweneedpolytheism #deityconservationeffort‬ #fuckyourairearthfirewater #wehaveatmosbioshydroslithospedosmagnetosnoos #andtheyallmakeuptheoikos

Ba'al Zebub, may you join with Bel Marduk (who, it is to be hoped, shall confuse Daesh for the primordial dragon Tiamat and utterly kill them in the same way) and with Ba'al Shemin and with al-Lat and with all the others in these vengeance efforts.  may all they do be made dust, and may it happen soon.

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Reading List

My current spiritual reading is The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture by Pete Sigal.

I think, since that book is focused on Tlazolteotl, I will progress through the mup pantheon in reverse alphabetical order, each deity in turn as a focus for my spiritual reading, interspersed with texts about monasticism in various traditions. Thus, the list as it stands is (NOTA BENE:  The vast majority of these books I do not yet own; some of them can be acquired legally ior illegally from the net, but not all -- if anyone wants to buy me a gift, buy me the next on the list!):

Catholic Monasticism: The Carmelite Rule of St. Albert
Pombagira:  Pomba Gira & the Quimbanda of Mbumba Nzila, by Nicholaj de Marcos Frisvold
Orthodox Monasticism: The Rule, by St. Pachomius the Great
Melek Ta'us:
Hindu Monasticism: Upadesasahasri, by Sri Adi Shankara
Inanna:
Buddhist Monasticism: Vinaya Pitaka
Hoor-paar-kraat: The Equinox Volume I, Number 1
Jewish Monasticism: Nazir, in the Mishnah and/or Talmud
Hermaphroditos:
Taoist Monasticism: Xuen Feng Qing Hui Lu
Eris:  Zen Without Zen Masters, by the Count of Five
Catholic Monasticism: The Seven Storey Mountain, by Thomas Merton
Azathoth:
Orthodox Monasticism
Ardhanarishvara:  Skanda Purana
Hindu Monasticism:
Antinous:  Beloved and God, by Royston Lambert
Buddhist Monasticism:
Deep Reality: Quantum Psychology, by Robert Anton Wilson
Jewish Monasticism:
Lacuna: On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems, by Kurt Godel
Taoist Monasticism:

Antarctica Expedition, Panhyle, and dies mortus Willi Ninja sanctus

Today plays host to three mup holidays:

1) On this day in 1930, Miskatonic University sent its first expedition to explore Antarctica, who were the first modern humans to discover -- and be killed by -- the Elder Things.  Its a minor holiday, but let it be one in which the most ancient of histories resurfaces, and let us all be as lucky as Doctor William Dyer when it does.

Or, if you're feeling nasty, think of today as the day the ancient (but far less ancient than an Elder Thing city or the overthrow of the Elder Thing overlords by the biorobotic super-eukaryotic shoggoths!) histories destroyed and defiled by Daesh rise to wreak upon them the same insanity and death the Elder Thing city dealt to that ill-starred Miskatonic expedition.  Ba'al Shemim and Bel will have their way with you, Daesh, I can assure you of that.

2) Like every 2nd day of the month, today is the day to honor Panhyle, the transmale member of the Tetrad+++.  I will be reading Merri-Todd's hymn to him tonight with my Antinous prayer as my honoring of him.

3) the dies mortus of Willi Ninja sanctus, the inventor of voguing.  In his honor, I post these videos:

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And 27 years after that first video was shot, voguing led to this:
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Atrocities (Trigger Warning)

"Atrocities"
by Siegfried Sassoon sanctus (ICIISAP), 1919

You bragged how once in savage mood
Your men butchered some Saxon prisoners; that was good.
I trust you felt no pity as they stood
Patient and cowed and scared as prisoners should.
How did you kill them? speak now, don’t be shy,
You know I love to hear how Germans die
Downstairs in dug-outs, ‘Camerad!” they cry;
And squeal like stoats when bombs begin to fly.
I’m proud of you; perhaps you’ll feel as brave
Alone in no-man’s land when no one can shield you from the horror of the night.
There’s blood upon your hands
Now go out and fight.
I hope those Huns will haunt you with their screams
And make you gulp their blood in ghoulish dreams.
You’re great at murder; tell me, can you fight?