June 11, 2019

Jaguars Changing Spots

I seem to be at my stellar best when I’m boring folks with useless information—or at least with stuff they don’t give a rat’s patootie about. The following verbiage may well fall into both categories. And since it’s on the Internet, there’s the distinct possibility (but minuscule probability) of boring millions of readers to tears. What more could I hope for as I hold forth on jaguars’ spots? I bet you’ve never given that esoteric subject even a nanosecond’s thought.

But I have. For some years, as you likely don’t know, I’ve been drawing digital icons of Aztec deities for a coloring book called YE GODS! Since the jaguar is a major mythological figure for most of the ancient cultures of the Americas (see A Roar of Jaguars), I had to come to terms with how it was depicted in the iconography of those cultures. In fact, as the Lord of the Animals, the jaguar was my first try at digital drawing.

Already well versed in the iconography of the few Aztec codices that survived the Conquest of that empire by the Spanish, I wasn’t terribly impressed by their renderings of the unique and complex pattern of the jaguar’s pelt. For the most part the ancient Aztec artists made do with a simple scattering of spots looking a lot like those of the Old World leopard.In the Codex Borgia, a more elaborate picture-book, the pelt was sometimes depicted in greater complexity. I chose to use two of those stronger patterns for figures in my later icon of the deities of the moon, but the first pattern was just too weirdly abstract, if oddly more realistic.

For my first digital drawing (eventually used in the icon for OCELOTL), I pompously tried to reproduce a naturalistic jaguar pelt—and believe I did a decent job. It convinced me of the amazing power of computer imaging and kicked off the whole coloring book project. Having mastered the pattern, I used it also for a seat-cushion in the icon for the goddess CHANTICO (also see the icon for MICTLANTECUHTLI), and for a detail of a jaguar-warrior in that for the god CHALCHIUHTOTOLIN.

Chantico and Jaguar Warrior

At present I’m in the final throes of the icon for TEPEYOLLOTL (see The Divine Volcanoes), who is a were-jaguar (an anthropomorphic creature), appearing in a number of the codices.

Here comes another sneak preview. There are two jaguars in this icon. I chose to use the Nuttall jaguar, radically restructured, for the leaping one and the Vindobonensis figure as model for the god himself—with a pelt based on one of the Borgia examples.

Leaping Jaguar and Tepeyollotl

This illustration shows that I haven’t yet completed Tepeyollotl’s face, though I have already given him an aesthetic nose-job. While the open-ring pattern may not be any more naturalistic than the plain spots on the Vindobonensis model, I did that on purpose—for the coloring.

I’ve only given explicit directions for coloring the icons in a few cases. First, for the pelt in OCELOTL, I described the animal’s range of coloration from rusty gold to white. For the icon of EHECATL, I explained that scallop shells come in black, white, and all shades of the rainbow, though very dark and dusky like in the last hues of twilight. For TEPEYOLLOTL, I will direct the colorist to make those open rings various colors as in these almost hallucinatory images:

In this second Telleriano example, the spots are inexplicably green, and in the psychedelic Aubin figure red, blue, and gold. (By the way, the general Aubin style of illustration might most kindly be called “casual:” Note the incomplete claws, stubby tail, and curious wrinkles on its back.)

The rationale for vari-colored spots on my Tepeyollotl (which was completed in June 2019) is that, among several other mythical qualities, he’s the Lord of Jewels. Also, any deity worth its salt really should be hallucinatory, psychedelic, and/or surreal.

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May 29, 2019

The Divine Volcanoes Popocatepetl and Itzaccihuatl

For too long I’ve telling folks I’m still plugging away on Icon #17 for the YE GODS! coloring book, and now I can change my tune. At last I’m on the home stretch! Just one more vignette and the figure of Tepeyollotl Himself, the Heart of the Mountain. (I seem to have been keeping the deity itself for the last to be informed by the story of the surrounding details.)

So now it’s high time I give you something in the way of a sneak preview of #17: the Mountain. Actually it’s the two divine volcanoes that loom dangerously over Ciudad de México, deified as Popocatepetl (Smoking Mountain) and Itzaccihuatl (Obsidian Lady).

Popocatepetl and Itzaccihuatl

Here they are shown in the style of Codex Nuttall, Popocatepetl in its smoking majesty and Itzaccihuatl as a bonafide, stern-visaged goddess. Her codex model is iconographically notable being one of the few full-faced figures to be found in Aztec 2-D graphic art. The Maya also preferred profiles (those marvelous foreheads!). 3-D sculpture was of course a different story.

The stylized sigils appearing in each of the “hills” are authentic names of real places. Apart from the self-evident symbol for Popocatepetl, I don’t have a clue what places the others intend.

The above is my second treatment of the divine volcanoes. The first was for a vignette in Icon #7 Huitzilopochtli, Hummingbird of the South, showing the arrival of the Aztecs at Tenochtitlan:

Arrival of Aztecs at Tenochtitlan

In the upcoming icon, beneath these volcanoes resides the Heart of the Mountain. Don’t let this be a spoiler, but you need to know that Tepeyollotl, as most often depicted in the Aztec codices, will be a were-jaguar, an ancient mythological being with possible roots three thousand years before in Peru. Check out this boggling image of the Raimondi Stela from Chavín de Huantar.

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January 24, 2019

Aztec Icon #16 – TONATIUH and METZTLI, Deities of the Sun and Moon

It’s been about nine months since the last addition to my coloring book YE GODS! Icons of Aztec Deities, #15, Quiahuitl, God of Rain. After completing it back last April, I had to focus on setting up the two-month Ye Gods! exhibition in Santa Fe, as well as prepare and deliver several lectures. Then everything else, including work on my second memoir, had to be put on hold while I concentrated for three months on re-translating an opera from Russian (which will be produced by the New Orleans Opera in February, 2020). Meanwhile I also set up the exhibition for another month in nearby Española. Busy boy, no?

Finally by late November, I got back to drawing, and now I’m thrilled to announce that #16 is finished at last. (At first I thought it was Tecciztecatl and Metztli, Deities of the Moon, but much later I’ve now discovered that it is Tonatiuh and Metztli, Deities of the Sun and Moon.)

TONATIUH & METZTLI

At first I worte that Tecciztecatl {tek-seez-te-katł}, the son of Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue, is a god of hunters and appears as things shining in the night. In the Nahua cosmology, when Quetzalcoatl and Ehecatl created the current Fifth Sun, Tecciztecatl wanted to become the new sun, but he hesitated to jump into the sacred fire, whereupon the young god Nanahuatzin leapt into the flames to become Tonatiuh, the Fifth Sun. When Tecciztecatl followed, he took second place as the moon. Well, it turns out that the little guy throwing himself into the fire here is actually Nanahuatzin, and the male deity here is Tonatiuh, the sun, in the pair with the moon.

Metztli {mets-tłee} is the ancestral moon goddess probably inherited from ancient Teotihuacan and/or the Maya’s lunar goddess Ix Chel. Long after the Nahuas demoted Metztli to merely being the consort of Tecciztecatl (in Tonalamatl Aubin), and replaced her with Tecciztecatl in several other codices, the later Aztecs tried to replace her completely with (the severed head of) Coyolxauhqui, the sister dismembered by their supreme god Huitzilopochtli.

Tecciztecatl was stuck into the sacred calendar (tonalpohualli) as one of the patrons, frequently in the company of Tonatiuh, of the thirteen-day week One Death, which is shown in the encircling day-signs. It should be noted that there are thirteen days between the full and dark of the moon. The Mesoamerican cultures saw a rabbit in the full moon (top), and the serpent of the night devouring the rabbit (bottom) represents the dark of the moon. Incidentally, the nocturnal jaguar was closely connected with the moon, and the conch shell was the standard symbol of the moon.

I fired the drawing off to my dear friend Sagar in Bangladesh for him to work his vectorizing magic on it, and he did the trick. I’m currently (in January) posting the jpeg version with caption and sources on the coloring book page and have now (in April) have added the vectorized versions to the list of various sizes available for free download.

In my strict alphabetical sequence, the next deity to tackle is Tepeyollotl, Heart of the Mountain, who has several dramatic aspects. You can check out my earlier image of this god among the Aztec images from the old book on the calendar. If the creek don’t rise, I’d like to get his icon done by April. Once again meanwhile, in my multi-tasking fashion, I’ll be arranging more venues for the expanded exhibition and lectures—and forging onward in my memoir. Call me driven, but I’d love to finish that by next year.

October 18, 2018

Aztec Deities At It Again!

Announcement:

YE GODS! Icons of Aztec Deities

October 22 – November 16, 2018

NICK SALAZAR CENTER FOR THE ARTS

Northern New Mexico College

The Nick Salazar Center for the Arts in Española, New Mexico, presents an exhibition by local artist Richard Balthazar, who was formerly the Used Plant Man (or Iris Man) at the Santa Fe Farmers Market and once upon a time sold plants at the Española Farmers Market. Presented in large-scale format on vinyl banners, his 15 black and white drawings are designed for a coloring book, and prints for coloring and/or framing are available for free download from his website:

www.richardbalthazar.com.

Ehecatl, Aztec God of the Wind

The icons were drawn digitally (using a computer graphics program), allowing the artist to achieve a rare level of fine detail. The deities are so striking and startling that everyone will surely exclaim, “YE GODS!”

Essentially a crash course in Aztec myth, history, and culture, the deities are portrayed in their full contexts, in authentic Aztec iconography.

Each deity is accompanied by a description and images from the surviving Aztec codices (picture-books) that served as models or themes and show the authentic colors used by Aztec scribes.

Cultural and educational groups are cordially invited to contact Mr. Balthazar to arrange for tours of the exhibit and gallery talks on the mythology and history of the images.

For more information or tour arrangements, contact Richard Balthazar at rbalthazar@msn.com.

August 10, 2018

YE GODS! There Was a Ship…

It’s been a couple (few?) months since I raised a big whoop about my show of black and white Aztec icons (for a coloring book), and that’s what mostly has occupied me lo that many moons.

Richard Balthazar at opening of YE GODS!

Actually, June and July at my show were splendid! YE GODS! opened on June 1 with a wonderful crowd. There was delicious food (catered by my old Backstreet Bistro and spa buddy David Jacoby and his wife Melanie as our lovely “soda server”) and a marvelous group of female dancers, Danza Azteca, who blessed the icons (and me) and danced ceremonies around a big Aztec drum (the huehuetl). They even got some in the crowd to join in a friendship dance.

Throughout the run of the show I spent a couple hours each afternoon at El Museo Cultural (de Santa Fe), just to be there and talk to visitors—but also to give the inexhaustible Maria Martinez a bit of a break from staffing the gallery to attend to her many other duties around the nearly 2-acre cultural facility. She is the peaceful animus of the Museo, and I am deeply grateful for all her help and encouragement.

Entrance of Danza Azteca: David Jacoby and Maria Martinez on left, Concha Garcia y Allen center

By the way, the above photos are to be credited to my friend Seth Roffman, who is editor of “Greenfire Times.”

Visitation at the show was steady, even without publicity during July. I greatly enjoyed meeting folks of all walks—and bending their ears about the icons, their mythology, and elements of history. In particular, I stressed that only one icon in the show was actually a genuine Aztec deity (Huitzilopochtli). The rest were from long before the arrival of the Mexica (Aztecs), who simply adopted the culture, mythology, and cosmology of the peoples living there already.

What I enjoyed most of all was the series of 15 lectures I slapped together and delivered off the top of my head. Half were about the Aztec codices (picture books), showing pages and discussing their mythology, iconography, and social implications. The other half were focused on cultural and historical subjects that went from Aztec-specific through general Mesoamerican to all the Americas and then into probable interactions between those societies. I was blessed to have a corps of several interested listeners who came to most of my talks. After the finale on Codex Vindobonensis, six of them took me out to dinner, and we had a long, leisurely chat about our lives—and of course, some follow-up questions about the whole Aztec thing.

Now that it is over and the icons are stored in my garage, I’m intending to approach many places here in NM and around the country (and internationally?) about hanging YE GODS! It’s a fantastic educational (informational) show, after all, and I’d offer it to presenters free (charging only for the minimal shipping). I’d also be available to do my scalable series of lectures (for expenses), and presenters could sell the separate prints for coloring. WHAT A DEAL!

Meanwhile, several other things transpired. Most must wait for later posts, but I’ve totally got to let you know right now about another BIG DEAL! My memoir THERE WAS A SHIP can be reached by clicking here.

May 16, 2018

BIG WHOOP!

Time to make BIG WHOOPEE! After plugging away for over four years at drawing Aztec gods and goddesses for my coloring book, I’m having an exhibition of my fifteen epiphanies!

Here’s the flyer for the show with dates, location, and all that.

The large-scale icons (3’ x 4’) are black and white drawings, but I’ve put my colorful patron god Xochipilli on the flyer, poster, and show-banner to catch the eye. And of course, the Flower Prince has been my “insignia” for a long time, including on the banner for this website.

I know you all can’t come to Santa Fe for this art event of the century, but maybe some… In any case, let all your social media know about this great opportunity to see bona fide weirdness!

April 17, 2018

Aztec Icon #15 – QUIAHUITL, God of Rain

I’ve just checked the date when I posted Icon #14, Quetzalcoatl, for my serialized coloring book YE GODS! and must hang my head in shame that it’s taken me nearly six months to finish Icon #15, Quiahuitl, God of Rain. I understand that nobody out there has been waiting with baited breath to see my latest work of genius, but I managed to draw the earlier deities much more quickly, 14 of them in 3 ½ years. My excuses are that this past winter I spent a lot of time on my second memoir, and for what it’s worth, this icon turned out to be just about as detailed as Icon #11, Ocelotl (Jaguar). There’s a lot going on in it.

Quiahuitl, God of Rain

This icon is available as 8X10 with a caption/sources page by clicking here.

In the central image, Quiahuitl {kee-a-hweetł} is shown emerging from the Underworld, rising up out of the maw of the Earth Monster. The Aztecs understood that moisture mysteriously rises from the earth to the sky (the crest across the top), where the god turns it into rain. Every locale had its own Quiahuitl to conjure and appease, as indicated by drops falling on trees which symbolize the cardinal directions.

Quiahuitl is of crucial importance to the cultivation of maize, and the lower panel is a homage to that crop. In the center, the plant grows out of another Earth Monster, and on it perches a mythical bird, which is actually a motif inherited from the ancient Maya, Itzamnaaj—the Bird of the Sun. Just above it is another nod to the Maya, the head of a centipede which they saw as the face of the Underworld. On the left is Chicomecoatl (Seven Snake), chief of the several goddesses of maize, and on the right is Centeotl, the main god of maize.

But that’s not all. The four big dots indicate that the god is also a day-sign in the ritual calendar, Four Rain (Nahui Quiahuitl). You’ve already seen the same thing in the icons of Four Water, Four Wind, and Four Jaguar. I haven’t yet made it alphabetically to the god Tonatiuh and Four Earthquake, the Fifth Sun, our current era.

Anyway, Four Rain is the day-name of the earlier Third Sun (era), a paradise ruled by the Storm God Tlaloc. However, when Tezcatlipoca abducted his wife Xochiquetzal, Tlaloc destroyed that world in a rain of fire. Its poor humans were turned into butterflies, birds, dogs, and turkeys—which I rather doubt was a great deal of help in the rain of fire.

As I said before, there’s a lot going on in this icon, and there were times I wondered if I was ever going to complete it. Besides, all these past months we’ve been suffering severe drought, and I started to fear it was because I hadn’t finished the god’s icon. Well, I finally did it last night—and it still hasn’t rained! I’ve done what I could…

This morning I fired #15 off to my digital wizard in Bangladesh to be turned into a vector drawing, which will be added to the coloring book page. Then it will follow the other 14 to my print shop. At Santa Fe Signs & Images, they’re being printed on 3’ x 4’ vinyl banners for my upcoming exhibition.

NEWS FLASH!

I’ve recently arranged to have a show of my coloring book pages to be called YE GODS! Icons of Aztec Deities. It will be at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, opening June 1, 2018 and running through July 29. There’s much to be done in preparation, of course, and I’ve at least gotten calendar listings out to the media.

Now come the million details, and I seriously doubt that I’ll even get started on Icon #16, Tecciztecatl, God of the Moon, till later in the summer. According to the original project plan, I’ve still got 11 icons to go, which at this rate will take a minimum of three more years, maybe four. What the hell! I’ll only be 80!

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January 19, 2018

Aztec Gods of the Directions

When they founded Tenochtitlan c. 1325 CE, the Aztec barbarians adopted the traditional Mesoamerican temporal and spatial concepts of ceremonial calendar and cardinal directions.

The 260-day Aztec Turquoise Year or tonalpohualli (ceremonial count of days) is based on 20 numbered sets of 13 called trecenas, through which the 20 named days of the solar month are counted cyclically. That’s about as clearly as I can describe it. Some of the few surviving codices (ancient documents) include individual pages of the trecenas with their patron deities.

Some codices also have pages with the 260 days laid out in spreadsheet fashion with five rows of 52 columns in four sets of 13, Here’s a sample section from Codex Vaticanus laying out the first set of 13 columns (trecenas 1, 5, 9, 13 and 17):

First Section of Spreadsheet Calendar, Codex Vaticanus

One reads left to right starting with day One Crocodile on the bottom row at lower left; after counting the 52 days in that row, we come back to the second row from the bottom beginning with Reed. Repeating that process, the count returns to the first column to resume with the days One Snake, One Earthquake, and One Water. The blocks of four columns of five days repeat 13 times—only in varying internal sequences—symbolizing the four cardinal directions:

Vaticanus Day-Signs Corresponding to Cardinal Directions

Numbered per their position in the 20-day “month,” these are East: Crocodile, Snake, Water, Reed, Earthquake; North: Wind, Death, Dog, Jaguar, Flint; West: House, Deer, Monkey, Eagle, Rain; South: Lizard, Rabbit, Grass, Vulture, and Flower.

These four cardinal directions are also characterized by colors: East—red; North—black; West—white; and South—blue. This color scheme correlates to the emblematic colors of the Aztec gods of the directions: Xipe Totec, God of the East—the Red Tezcatlipoca; Tezcatlipoca, God of the North—the Black Tezcatlipoca; Quetzalcoatl, God of the West—the White Tezcatlipoca; and Huitzilopochtli, God of the South—the Blue Tezcatlipoca.

Aztec Gods of the Directions

The traditional spatial matrix inherited by the Aztecs also included a fifth direction—the Center—which they saw as ruled by Xiuhtecuhtli, the Lord of Fire/Turquoise.

Xiuhtecuhtli - Lord of the Turquoise - (God of Fire)

XIUHTECUHTLI, God of the Center

With the Mexica’s tribal War God Huitzilopochtli ruling the South, this is emphatically the Aztec empire’s imperial vision of the divine quartet/quintet. Wondering what earlier deity may have ruled the South before, I looked at p. 1 of Codex Fejervary-Mayer, a document thought to have originated in the Veracruz region. It lays out the directions with pairs of patrons, totemic trees, and birds. However here, it’s Tezcatlipoca dominating the Center. (Apologies for the scruffy image, but I’ve got neither time nor energy to “re-create” it.)

The Five Directions, Codex Fejervary-Mayer, p. 1

The orientation of the directions is a bit different than our common Eurocentric model, rotated one notch counterclockwise. Here East is at the top, West at the bottom; South is on the right, North on the left. Besides the totemic birds and trees, the busy diagram includes much calendrical symbolism, including the days of the directions, year-bearers, and what-not.

By the way, the South tree is a “sacred” Theobroma (Food of the Gods) cacao tree with its chocolate pods. The totem on the North is a spiky ceiba tree (Kapok) which the Maya saw as the great tree at the center of the world—connecting the Underworld and the Sky World (heavens), its trunk representing the world of humans, animals, etc.

The pairs of patron deities in each lobe include only two of our divine quartet of Tezcatlipocas. In the top East lobe, on the right stands Xipe Totec, our Red Tezcatlipoca, with his Flint headdress, and I’d bet his companion is the sun god Tonatiuh, god of the Fifth Sun. In the left North lobe, the upper deity is a simple version of our Black Tezcatlipoca, and the lower one looks like the mighty Tlaloc, God of Storms. The rest of the patrons are different.

The South lobe on the right tells us who must have ruled that direction before the Aztecs inserted their Huitzilopochtli: the upper Mictlantecuhtli, Lord of the Land of the Dead, and the lower Centeotl, God of Maize. The Aztecs gave them both the boot… In addition, the West lobe on the bottom holds no White Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, showing instead a surprising pair of patrons from pre-Aztec mythology. On the right (upside down) is Chalchiuhtlicue, the Jade Skirt, Goddess of Water, and on the left Tlazolteotl, Goddess of Filth, a major mother deity.

The reputedly misogynist Aztecs seem to have impeached these two great goddesses to install the famous Maya/Teotihuacan/Toltec Plumed Serpent as their deity of the West, as the White Tezcatlipoca. Speaking of misogyny, in another religious coup, the new empire tried to depose the Goddess of the Moon (Ixchel to the Maya and Metztli in Teotihuacan) from her traditional role as patron of the calendar’s Death Trecena and then made their own Tecciztecatl into the God of the Moon. (Metztli can still be seen in the calendar in Codex Telleriano-Remensis.)

The Aztecs were also conservative, if not reactionary, in other ways, like in celebrating their culture as the culmination of the “golden” ages of Teotihuacan and the Toltecs. Witness their great cult of Quetzalcoatl and abject “idolatry” of Tezcatlipoca, also inherited from the Toltecs. Since time immemorial, he and Quetzalcoatl were seen as each other’s twin and nemesis, and in their roster of the gods of the directions, the Aztecs enshrined that primordial conflict. That they apparently replaced the Smoking Mirror with Xiuhtecuhtli as God of the Center is surprising, and it’s even more so that they didn’t make Huitzilopochtli Center and give someone else South. But winners always get to write their own version of history—and religion.

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September 27, 2017

Aztec Icon #14 – QUETZALCOATL, Plumed Serpent

Sorry to take so long to finish the 14^th icon for my coloring book YE GODS! My work was delayed by that time-consuming thing called life. Anyway, the icon’s done and my digital wizard has turned it into vector drawings for free sizing. Here you have the most famous Aztec deity of all, QUETZALCOATL, the Plumed Serpent:

Quetzalcoatl, Plumed Serpent

QUETZALCOATL (Plumed Serpent) {ke-tsal-ko-atł} is the god of intelligence, learning, writing, arts and crafts, the calendar, priests, and merchants and was the bringer of maize to mankind. Opposed to human sacrifice, he is called the White Tezcatlipoca and is the 9^th lord of the day and god of the West. As the planet Venus, he is known as Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, the morning star, and his twin Xolotl is the evening star. He ruled the Second Sun (Four Wind) and created the current Fifth Sun (Four Earthquake) by using his own blood to give new life to the bones in Mictlan. He was known as Kukulcan to the Maya and a major deity in Teotihuacan, and Quetzalcoatl was the traditional name/title of the Toltec rulers of Tula.

This icon is available as 8X10 with a caption/sources page by clicking here. The freely sizable vector versions are available by clicking here.

By way of explaining this new icon, I must first thank Eliseo Rosales, a tattoo artist in California, for his suggestions, particularly for the design on the pedestal and for the important theme of maize.

The central figure of Quetzalcoatl is based on an image from Codex Borbonicus with details of costume and accoutrements mostly from Codex Magliabechiano, though the serpent on his back is adapted from those on the Stone of the Suns. Don’t be surprised by his beard, which occurs in other codex images: According to some, he was supposedly blond and white-skinned.

In his left hand, the deity holds the weapon known as Xiuhcoatl (Fire Serpent), and on his shield is his standard ‘cross’ symbol. His peaked cap of jaguar pelt is apparently a Huastec influence. Sprouting from his forehead is a ritual ‘blooming shinbone,’ the significance of which escapes me. The numeral by his left foot is Nine, of which he is the patron, and the day-sign One Reed directly over his head is his ceremonial day-name.

Now for the other motifs. The pedestal, as mentioned above, illustrates the depth of the history of the Plumed Serpent. It comes from the frieze on the Temple of Quetzalcoatl in Xochicalco (c. 1000 AD), which was a city/culture that arose in the aftermath of the Classic civilizations of the Maya and Teotihuacan. As evidence of his even deeper history, the two heads flanking his day-name are views of sculptures on the Temple of Quetzalcoatl in Teotihuacan (c. 600 AD). The paired feathered serpents on his either side are taken from Codex Borbonicus and Codex Telleriano-Remensis, and the paired quetzal birds are merely grace-notes.

The border design is adapted from one of his images in Codex Telleriano-Remensis. The day-signs embedded in it represent the ceremonial calendar which the deity brought into Mexico in the dim past. Each group of five days represents a direction in the Aztecs’ odd world-view. At the bottom is West, of which he is the patron. At the top is East, on the left North, and on the right South, the standard Aztec spatial orientation as it was also for the Maya.

Drawn respectively from the Cospi, Vaticanus, and Borgia codices, the standing deities in the upper section are: on the left, Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, Lord of the House of Dawn (as the Morning Star), on the right Xolotl (as the Evening Star), and at the top his nagual (manifestation) as Ehecatl, God of the Wind.

In the upper corners are scenes representing his gift of maize to mankind. On the left is Tlaloc, the Storm (Rain) God, nurturing the goddess of maize Chicomecoatl, and on the right is the goddess of flowing water Chalchiuhtlicue tending the god of maize Centeotl.

That’s all the mythology I could manage to cram into this icon. Surely it’s enough.

Another note of interest about Quetzalcoatl. In the September, 2017 issue of ANCIENT AMERICAN magazine, my article just appeared entitled “The Plumed Serpent in North America.” Click here to check out a copy.

April 6, 2017

Coloring Book Overhaul – The Aztec Icons

BIG NEWS FOR ALL YOU COLORING ENTHUSIASTS! Whether you’re new to this website, have just been keeping your eye on it, or have actually colored some of my unusual icons of Aztec deities, you’ll find my overhauled coloring book now has a lot more to offer.

There are 13 icons currently completed (but there will be 19 by May, 2020!), each is now accompanied by a page with its descriptive caption and full-color images from the Aztec Codices that served as models for drawing the icon. Those images will give a good idea of the varying styles of the ancient picture-books and maybe even suggest authentic colors to use in your own coloring.

Check out this example of the caption/model page for CHALCHIUTLICUE, the Jade Skirt.

caption-model page for Chalchiuhtlicue

As before, all the icons can be viewed or downloaded individually from the coloring book page, either as a pdf file with caption/models page or as freely sizable vector drawings. But now they are also all bundled together into an actual book: YE GODS! THE AZTEC ICONS.

But that’s almost the least of the overhauls. In addition to that book, there is now a major revision and expansion of the earlier catalog and appendix—a complete illustrated encyclopedia of essentially all the Aztec deities: YE GODS! THE AZTEC PANTHEON.

Its 88 alphabetical entries include some 1,300+ divinities (depending on how you count), and there’s usually an authentic image for each selected from the Aztec Codices. Again, the images illustrate their varying styles and provide even more suggestions for coloring the icons.

Here’s a sample page from the encyclopedia:

sample page – The Aztec Pantheon

Of itself, YE GODS! THE AZTEC PANTHEON amounts to a crash course in ancient Mexican mythology, history, culture, and art. YE GODS! THE AZTEC ICONS takes this another step further—into illustrating details of Aztec society.

For perhaps excessive example, with Huehuecoyotl, the Old Coyote, there are vignettes of people playing musical instruments, singing, and dancing; with Huitzilopochtli, Hummingbird of the South, there’s a pictorial narrative of the legendary migration of the Aztecs to Tenochtitlan; with Mictlantecuhtli, Lord of the Land of the Dead, there’s a vague map of the soul’s way to Mictlan; and with Patecatl, God of Medicine, there are scenes of medical practices and medicinal herbs. Each icon contains its own type of social commentary.

I haven’t quite started on Aztec Icon #14: Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, but hope to do so shortly. In the meantime, I’m working on yet a third component of my Aztec project, another section on the Aztec Codices themselves. It will be a description of and commentary on each of the 15 surviving picture-books, including sample pages and Internet sources to view the whole documents. I perhaps unrealistically hope to complete it in the next couple months, and guess what: I’ll call it YE GODS! THE AZTEC CODICES. Watch for a post announcing it.

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