Point South Mexico - Real Estate and Lifestyle Magazine

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially in the hands of a person with a personal agenda or a particular theory to promote. This is especially true of people who write popular articles about ancient Mexico. In a recent magazine article the author advanced the theory that the Spaniards forced thousands of Indians to bury the pyramids and other stone monuments of the Maya with dirt. The theory is apparently based on the writer's observation that small artifacts in and around the archaeological site of Chichen Itza in Yucatan are not covered by dirt, whereas Maya pyramids and large stone structures have to be excavated by archaeologists. The writer asks how we know that the Maya civilization ‘disappeared' 500 years or so earlier than the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadors in Yucatan. And why should we trust Spanish records or archaeologists on this point? Are they hiding something from us?

The early history of Mexico is often told in terms of Conquest, Secular Conquest by Cortes and his soldiers and Spiritual Conquest by the Spanish missionaries. Unfortunately the story is told mainly from the point of view of the so-called conquerors. The invaders justified the overthrow of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan by reason of the European concept of the Aright of discovery and conquest. After the defeat of the Muslims in 1492 Spain had the greatest war machine in Europe. Under the Catholic despots Ferdinand and Isabella the Spaniards had both secular and religious motives for territorial expansion. Ferdinand wanted a new route to the East for spices, silks, gold, slaves, and other trading commodities, Isabella wanted souls for the Catholic church. The stage was set for the double conquest not only of Mexico but of all of Middle America, including Guatemala.

La Malinche. or Marina, her Christian name, has drawn both criticism and praise. As Cortes's interpreter during the Spanish Conquest of Mexico in 1521 she acted as an intermediary between the invading Spaniards and the Indians. To some she is a heroine, a symbol of the mestizo peoples of modern Mexico, to others a harlot and betrayer of her own people. In fact Marina's actual contribution to the overthrow of the Aztec empire is somewhat debatable. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one of the Conquistadors, praises this enigmatic woman highly, but in his letters to Emperor Charles V Cortes himself hardly ever mentions her.

Heroic narrative which tells of the brave deeds of warriors and semi-divine heroes is found in many societies around the world from earliest times onwards. Behind most of these epic poems and prose sagas is the memory of some kind of Heroic Age in the far distant past. Sometimes the heroic past is conceived of as a series of Ages, often beginning with an account of creation and proceeding through successive Ages down to the present. In the classical Aztec version the Fifth Age or Sun is the present age in which we now live. The Aztec Calendar Stone embodies the Five Suns in stone, while the Legend of the Suns in the Anales de Cuauhtitlan, an important historical source in Classical Nahuatl, is a more or less parallel written version of the same. While this is probably the best known version of the theme of the successive Suns or Ages in ancient Mexico it is not the only one.

In different cultures around the world we find creation stories involving a series of Ages or Suns preceding our own era, often expressed in the form of epic poems and sagas. First, we shall look at the Leyenda de los Soles or Aztec Legend of the Suns. The clearest version is contained in the anonymous Anales de Cuauhtitlan, an important Nahuatl document written around 1558. The story of the Five Suns symbolizes the Aztec cosmogony accounting for the creation of the universe and the world in which the Aztecs lived at the time of the Spanish Conquest. But there are difficulties. The Aztec pantheon was vast and complex and deities revealed multiple personalities. The structure of the Nahuatl language differs significantly from English. Moreover, the ancient Aztecs had a very different world outlook from our own. Consequently, different translators sometimes produce readings of the same text that are so different one from another that the casual readers might think they were translations of different texts. The following summary is based on several of these interpretations.