From the Narrow Desert: Quetzalcoatl

Showing posts with label Quetzalcoatl. Show all posts

Saturday, December 31, 2022

The mirror, the snake-bird, and the man who raped a cloud

My last post, "Tezcatlipoca and John Dee," cited "The Voynich Manuscript," the 12th chapter in Terence McKenna's book The Archaic Revival. The next chapter, called "Wasson's Literary Precursors," quotes Food for Centaurs, a Robert Graves book I had never read, so I looked it up. Also relevant here is my October 13 post "Parrhesia, Nephele, and the Sumerian Sphinx," in which the synchronicity fairies brought to my attention the story of how Ixion, intending to rape Hera, instead raped a cloud:

Today, in the concluding chapter of Histoire de la magie, I encountered a passing reference to Ixion and how he attempted to rape Hera but was tricked by Zeus into assaulting a fake Hera made from a cloud. Having only the vaguest recollection of this particular myth, I looked it up to get the details. The Hera-shaped cloud apparently became in some way a real woman who went on to bear children to both Ixion and Athamas, and this cloud-woman's name was Nephele (from nephos, "cloud").

I found this in Food for Centaurs:

The Wassons reproduce in their book the illustration I discovered for them in the late Professor A. B. Cook's Zeus: an Etruscan mirror-back dating from 500 B.C., which shows the Greek hero Ixion tied to a wheel. No one had previously noticed the mushroom growing at Ixion's feet . . . . In punishment for Ixion's attempt to rape the Goddess Hera, her husband the Almighty God Zeus soon sent him spinning through space, spread-eagled to a fiery wheel. Yet meanwhile Ixion had, in his delirium, mistaken a cloud for Hera, and begotten on it a son named Centaurus; which same Centaurus (an aberrant, rather than a delinquent) is said to have later fathered the Hippo-Centaurs -- half men and half stallions -- be debauching a herd of Magnesian mares.

Note that illustration of Ixion and the mushroom (understood by both Graves and McKenna to be a psychedelic species) is from a mirror-back -- and my previous post dealt with Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec god whose name means Smoking Mirror, and the obsidian Aztec mirror used by John Dee. In my posts about Tezcatlipoca, I have always discussed him together with his brother Quetzalcoatl -- typically glossed as "Feathered Serpent," but also "quetzal-serpent," the quetzal being a type of bird.

This is from the very next paragraph in Food for Centaurs:

Ixion is wearing a pair of wings, and the mirror's circular border is decorated with a length of ivy. The wings plainly refer to the famous erotic charm mentioned by Theocritus, which made a member of the opposite sex fall madly in love with whoever tied a live wryneck to a fire-wheel -- the fire-wheel being an instrument for kindling fire by friction -- and sent it whizzing giddily around. . . . The wryneck (a peculiar bird, which hisses like a serpent) was sacred to the erotic God Dionysus, and gave him the surname 'Iynges' ('of the wryneck').

The wryneck is identified as "a peculiar bird, which hisses like a serpent." I looked it up on Wikipedia to see if it was at all closely related to the quetzal; it isn't, but the article notes the following:

These birds get their English name from their ability to turn their heads almost 180°. When disturbed at the nest, they use this snake-like head twisting and hissing as a threat display. It has occasionally been called "snake-bird" for that reason. . . . Its sound is described as a repetition of the sounds que, que, que, many times in succession, rapid at first, but gradually slowing and in a continually falling key.

"Snake-bird" is pretty close to being a calque of Quetzalcoatl -- and its call apparently resembles the first syllable of that god's name. This also ties in with recent owl syncs; the ability to turn its head an improbable number of degrees is a classic owl trait, and que is a Spanish word cognate with English who. Several posts here have linked the Latin qui, "who," with the call of the owl.

Tezcatlipoca and John Dee

A few days ago, on December 27, I posted "Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca," noting a synchronicity in which I encountered those two ancient Mexican deities -- the Feathered Serpent and the Smoking Mirror -- in a Whitley Strieber novel and then, shortly thereafter, on 4chan.

Yesterday, December 30, I was tutoring a young girl in English. Her textbook had a unit about chocolate and its history, which of course goes back to the xocolatl drunk by the kings and warriors of ancient Mexico. The text mentioned how Moctezuma II used to drink 50 cups of the stuff a day, and how the Spanish first encountered it after they invaded the Aztec capital. My student had lots of questions about this, wanting to know the name of the capital (Tenochtitlan) and the conqueror (Hernán Cortés) and how he had managed to conquer such a famously bloodthirsty people. I said historians generally attributed the Spanish victory to their use of guns, steel armor, and horses; but that it was probably not so much this technology in itself as the Aztec's awed reaction to it. They quickly lost hope and the will to fight, just as we might do faced with invading extraterrestrials wielding incomprehensibly powerful technology. I also mentioned that Moctezuma suspected Cortés might be one of the Mexican gods, and of course she wanted to know the god's name as well: Quetzalcoatl.

Later that evening, I read a bit of The Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna, the chapter on the Voynich manuscript. (The name has some resonance with me personally. Back when I was working for UPS, my coworkers called me "the Senator" because they thought my surname sounded similar to that of George Voinovich, who was one of the senators from Ohio at the time.) I was surprised to run into our old friend John Dee and his shew-stone.

The next important event in [Dee's] life with regard to the Voynich Manuscript, and one of the most puzzling events in the whole history of science, took place on an afternoon in July 1582. While in his study at Mortlake, John Dee was distracted by a brilliant light outside his window and stepped outside to receive from a creature he described as the Angel Gabriel a polished lens of New World obsidian, which he described in his diary thenceforward as "the Shew Stone." He was able, by meditating on this stone, to induce visions and dialogues with spirits, but this ability seemed to fade in the months after he received the stone . . . . (The Shew Stone is in the British Museum, where one can see it today.)

I had read an account of this event before, in Dwellers on the Threshold by Henry Davenport Adams, and had commented on it in my post "John Dee vs. Joseph Smith." Some of the details are different -- Adams says the angel was Uriel and that he appeared in November 1582 -- but it is obviously the same event they are describing. Adams describes the shew-stone as "a convex piece of crystal"; McKenna's more specific characterization of it as "New World obsidian" is highly relevant, since the obsidian mirror is the primary symbol of the New World deity Tezcatlipoca.

That Dee's shew-stone was in the British Museum was also news to me. I looked it up on the British Museum website (here), expecting something roughly similar to the seer-stones of Joseph Smith, but found that it is literally an Aztec obsidian mirror! McKenna is apparently confused in identifying it with the angelic shew-stone, since the mirror is flat and neither "a polished lens" nor "a convex piece of crystal."

The notes on the British Museum website say that the mirror is obsidian and of Aztec origin. It says that the mirror's leather case has the following inscription on it, taken from Samuel Butler's Hudibras and believed to have been written on the case by Horace Walpole:

Kelly did all his feats upon
The Devil's Looking Glass, a stone;
Where playing with him at Bo-peep,
He solv'd all problems ne'er so deep."

(Debbie will be interested in "Bo-peep," with its Heaven's Gate resonance.)

The BM website also notes:

Michael E. Smith who specialises in Aztec archaeology (The Aztecs - Blackwell Publishing) has an essay in progress on obsidian mirrors in museum collections for an edited volume of essays on Tezcatlipoca to be published by Univ of Colorado Press.

and:

This obsidian mirror featured in the British Museum exhibition 'Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler' (24 September 2009 - 24 January 2010).

So the connection with Tezcatlipoca and Moctezuma is undeniable.

In the image I have reproduced above, also from the BM website, Dee's obsidian mirror is shown together with three "magical discs"; the BM page for these objects notes that they "bear a striking similarity to the 'seals' for which the angel Uriel was said to give instructions to John Dee on Saturday 10 March 1582 as recorded by Dee in Ms Sloane 1388, fol.1or, British Library."

One also notes its general similarity to the famous Aztec Calendar Stone.

Speaking of calendars, I had an extremely complex and information-dense dream last night about three different calendars that were successively used by the ancient peoples of the Near East. These were shown to me visually, and explained verbally, in exhaustive detail -- but, maddeningly, I can remember only the vaguest outlines. The first calendar was called the Calendar of Life and was based on the planets rather than on the Sun and Moon. This was succeeded by a Calendar of Death, also called the Old Hebrew calendar, which I think was primarily solar and somehow emphasized by its nature and structure "the inevitability of entropy." These two were later integrated into the third calendar in the series, which is the Hebrew calendar as we know it today.

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca

On Boxing Day I began reading Omega Point, a Whitley Strieber novel I’d never read before. It’s set in the then-future 2020, when the Earth has entered the atmosphere of a supernova, the extinction of humanity is imminent, and the protagonists must invent time travel in time to save the species.

You think you know what to expect from a sci-fi setup of that kind — but then, in an utterly Strieberian twist, it quickly becomes apparent that each of the major characters, none of whom is Mexican, “is” in some sense the incarnation of a different ancient Mexican god. Dr. David Ford, the main protagonist is, naturally, Quetzalcoatl; and a baddie called Mack the Cat is Tezcatlipoca.

In Mexico City, in the embassy's garden, he had watched the gods dancing in the night sky, watched Tezcatlipoca shift from man to jaguar to serpent, taunting and raging at his brother Quetzalcoatl. In Egypt, Quetzalcoatl was Osiris, the god of resurrection, and Tezcatlipoca was his brother Set, who cut him into small pieces. The Bible called them Cain and Abel. In Judea, the light and dark brothers had been Jesus and Judas.

He identified with Tezcatlipoca, El Gato, the night cat roaming and changing, the shadow cat. That's where his nickname came from. Doing his work, he moved like a cat.

I’m only a third of the way through the book, and I’m not sure where the author is going with this, but it’s certainly unusual. (I note in passing that Quetzalcoatl being Jesus is a common Mormon folk belief, and that I myself have proposed that Abel was Osiris.)

Just after reading the passage quoted above, I put down the book and did a bit of browsing on 4chan. Someone had posted an /x/ thread called “ So Lucifer is Quetzalcoatl.” One of the replies was:

Once again, ol lucy does not have the copyright on scaly cylindrical bodies. Tezcatlipoca is what you are looking for.

Another character in the novel is named Caroline Light (as in Lucifer, “light-bearer”), and she, too, is secretly a member of the Mexican pantheon.

She was Citilalinique, the Lady of the Starry Skirt, and her work was to bring the light of understanding to an ignorant age. Light the bringer of light. Nominative determinism.

This led me to check the Wikipedia article on nominative determinism. In the background section, it explains how surnames originated and gives as an example that “John from Acton became John Acton.” The story in Omega Point takes place at the Acton Clinic, a high-end psychiatric institution founded by Herbert Acton.

Saturday, December 31, 2022

The mirror, the snake-bird, and the man who raped a cloud

Tezcatlipoca and John Dee

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca

Ace of Hearts