The Taproot Podcast - 🛕James Maffie on Aztec Philosophy, Mythology and Metaphysics

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

Read More of Dr. Maffie's work on Aztec Culture Here: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/interview-with-james-maffie-on-aztec-philosophy-mythology-metaphysics/   Watch The video Interview Here: https://youtu.be/v01RnqA-yHk   Dr. James Maffie, author of "Aztec Philosophy," shared his insights into the complex and fascinating world of Aztec metaphysics. Dr. Maffie explained that the Aztec worldview centers around the concept of "teotl," a constant energy in motion that permeates all aspects of the universe. This energy manifests in three primary patterns: "olin" (bouncing, oscillating motion), "malinalli" (spiraling, twisting motion), and "nepantla" (back-and-forth, weaving motion). These patterns are evident in various facets of Aztec culture, from art and architecture to rituals and social interactions. Dr. Maffie emphasized that understanding these fundamental concepts is crucial to grasping the Aztec perspective on the interconnectedness of all things. One of the key points discussed in the interview was the role of sacrifice in Aztec culture. Dr. Maffie clarified that sacrifice was not merely a means of appeasing the gods, but rather a way for the Aztecs to participate in the cyclical process of life and death. This understanding of sacrifice as a necessary part of the cosmic balance sheds light on the Aztec worldview and their relationship with the divine. Dr. Maffie also touched on the importance of spoken words and the use of psychotropic substances in Aztec spiritual practices. The Aztecs believed in the power of language to transmit life energy and communicate with divine forces. Additionally, the use of substances such as peyote and Jameson weed facilitated oracular conversations with the gods, allowing the Aztecs to seek guidance and enlist the cooperation of other-than-human persons in their endeavors. Throughout the interview, Dr. Maffie provided a wealth of information on Aztec philosophy, dispelling misconceptions and offering a nuanced understanding of their worldview. He also shared details about his upcoming works, which will explore topics such as the Aztec skull rack as a cosmic maize field and the living nature of images in Aztec codices. This interview serves as an excellent introduction to the complex and often misunderstood world of Aztec philosophy. Dr. Maffie's expertise and engaging explanations make the subject accessible to a wide audience, inviting readers to delve deeper into this fascinating aspect of Mesoamerican culture. #AztecPhilosophy #JamesMaffie #Teotl #AztecMetaphysics #Olin #Malinalli #Nepantla #AztecCulture #AztecArt #AztecArchitecture #AztecRituals #AztecSacrifice #LifeAndDeath #CosmicBalance #AztecWorldview   Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Podcast Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/GetTherapyBirmingham/feed.xml Taproot Therapy Collective 2025 Shady Crest Drive | Hoover, Alabama 35216 Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone] Email: [e-mail]

well hi so i'm uh here with uh professor uh dr james maffey who's uh the author of a book we reviewed a long time ago that I probably should have done this back when I read it two or three years back. So it'd be a little fresher on my mind. But Aztec Philosophy, which is interesting. So you have,

and I was wanting to bring my copy to show it off, but I'm noticing it's on the shelf right behind you with the cover visible. So I'm glad that we can see it. And I'd love to hear uh some of your your your book like one of the reasons i was so like interested by it is like i was a comparative religion guy at swanee and then like now i'm more of a jungian leaning therapist i do some more i think the newer neurology is actually

validating the older yungian phenomenology in a way that we probably won't rewind the clock and give anybody the credit they deserve but um so i'm always into that stuff and i love mythology and um but aztec mythology was always kind of hard for me to intuitively get because there were so many like cultural distinctions you know some of that regional some of that economic that they just look different and that affects culture differently and reading your book it's like oh that's it like this is the thing that makes the art make sense this is the thing that makes the ritual make sense this is the thing that makes economy make sense um so the title like when you named it aztec philosophy was that

kind of a practical thing and that you were trained in philosophy and wanted to publish there or uh because it more of is kind of about metaphysics almost or a cultural kind of a practical thing and that you were trained in philosophy and wanted to publish there or because it more of is kind of about metaphysics almost or a cultural kind of assumption what was can you tell us about your process and writing that and conceiving of the book um i mean the book is about metaphysics but metaphysics is a chapter of philosophy but the book didn't get the title aztec Metaphysics because the publisher thought no one would read it. So that's why I've had the broader title. And that's why in the introduction, I make it clear that the book is addressing specifically the metaphysics and that in a subsequent book, I'll address the ethics. Well, a lot of some people may not be familiar a ton you know with all of aztec culture

so i guess and correct me where i'm wrong here because most of the stuff i've read about you know it's not i may be mispronouncing something or i may not grasp it perfectly but you know the aztec is actually the military you know imperial class of the of an empire we use it to refer to a whole civilization but the mexico and the nahua are going to be am i saying this correctly uh yeah it should be machica machica okay nahua yeah so and could you tell us a little bit about that cultural group just the structure of the empire before you get into you know the uh the philosophy part um well the aztec is a word that was uh given it's a european no word i mean it's not it's a not what derived not what is the language of the aztec or the mexica or more broadly there's a

whole ethnic group who are not what speakers and they are collectively referred to as the Nahwas or the Nahwas. And a German named von Humboldt decided to name them the Aztecs because they had mythically originated in a place called Aztlan, which is mythically northwest Mexico, Southwest USA. And that is, in fact, where the people who we call the Aztecs, but they're properly the Mexica, they originated from. They and a lot of other Nahuatl speakers migrated down from that area of the Southwest US, Northwest Mexico in the 14th century. The language itself, Nahuatl, is part of what linguists call the Uto-Aztecan language. It's related to Luiseno, Cahuilla, Ute, Paiute, Comanche, and Hopi.

So there's a whole language group there. And within Mexico, it's related to Huichol and Cora as well, and all the way down to San Salvador, El Salvador, the Pipil, which is an Uto-Aztecan language. So Nahua, that language became the lingua franca of the Mexica or the Aztec Empire. So the Mexica were one specific group who followed a guy named Tenocha. And their capital city on the island was called Tenochtitlan after him. But they were not the only Nahua speakers. So as I said, scholars refer to this whole sort of cultural linguistic group of people as the Nahw speakers from around the Great Basin

and the highlands of Mexico, that lake area, where like one to two million people, Nahua speakers lived. So the Aztecs weren't just, they were one of many groups who were Nahua speakers. They happened to be a foreign part of what's called the Triple Alliance with two other city states um but yeah and so a lot of the aztec culture that people are familiar with is probably like the what we would imagine of like human sacrifice festivals pyramids um and a lot of that stuff i think seems kind of alien until you understand some cultural assumptions because i was always

like reading trying to make those make sense and some of the theories i just didn't really find plausible at all like there was somebody you know in the 70s that wrote a paper was like well they just didn't have a lot of meat right they kind of had to eat people and it was like well yeah i don't know i mean there's ducks there's other stuff you know there there were some there were some um other people that were like well you know the religion was so strong that the people who were getting captured in the flower wars really wanted to be sacrificed they thought it was great yet they did tend to side with cortez and say we don't like the aztecs so i had a hard time kind of buying that but i think your book makes a lot of the like assumptions that seem bizarre to us moderns or people that are coming from a more western background

make a ton of sense that this concept of Teot is like this energy that is constantly sort of roiling and devouring and sustaining itself and that everything that the Aztecs are doing is a reenactment of that sort of implicit assumption about the way the universe works. I mean you call it being on slippery earth.

We're always trying to you know we're just a small stumble away from the sun not coming up or water not being wet or fire not being hot or food not digesting that you're sort of in conversation with roiling energy with your entire culture your architecture your your language you know i don't know as much about the language as you do, but is there a reflection there? A reflection of what? Like the concept of the teot that you talk about and the way that language is. Yeah, language actually is a way of transmitting life energy or teot.

And the principal way actually for the Mexica and other Mesoamerican peoples as well, the principal way of what we would call worshipping or honoring or revering the deities, who are actually not sort of deities in the Western sense, is through song and poetry, through the spoken word. So words are powerful, unlike we think sticks and stones will break your bones, but words never hurt you for them was actually are causally potent yeah so the principal way of worshiping the deities is actually through song spoken word what we would call prayer and then that's and this is made very clear in a kichemaya text called the popuh, in which the gods there create human beings who can speak properly because it's only through proper speech that humans can properly nourish and refuel and sustain the so-called gods. So on this view, I mean, those things we call gods are in fact dependent upon human beings. So there's a symbiotic relationship between

humans and so-called deities it's actually the metaphysics is a form of pantheism where it's just one thing teo it's powerful it's sacred it's all encompassing everything is ultimately one with it and what we call deities are simply what some anthropologists call other-than-human persons, a little less derogatory than non-humans. But so there are all these other-than-human persons in the world, tables, chairs, cats, dogs, trees, lakes, mountains. And some of those are also people like Quetzalcoatl or Tlaloc, who are typically described as deities, but they're just simply more powerful than human persons. So they create us, but they create us in order to nourish them, because they're exhausted after creating the world.

So we're created and we're born inde indebted to them because we owe our life and our existence to them so we then gift back to them various things spoken word poetry song music burning copal incense human hearts and flesh to be sure as well as

tortillas amaranth bill figures a variety of foodstuffs okay right um and they then then re-nourish us through the revitalization of of nature's maze through agriculture so there's a mutual there's a symbiotic relationship between humans and the so-called deities. We depend upon them and they depend upon us. So there's a very dramatic contrast with the notion of a god. I think even in like Greek, Roman, and Abrahamic religions, the gods are not dependent upon human beings. This whole idea is modeled upon the symbiotic relationship between cultivated maize and human beings.

Maize cannot reproduce without human intervention. If you look at a dried up maize husk, I mean, the corn kernels, the seeds in there are trapped inside that husk and they cannot get out. For maize to reproduce, it requires human intervention. For us to reproduce, we need maze intervention, so to speak. We need to consume maze. So maze and human beings are symbiotic. They're mutually interdependent. And that's the Mashika's model for the relationship between humans and the gods, and actually humans and the whole cosmos. The cosmos cannot reproduce without human beings nourishing it, and we cannot

reproduce without the cosmos nourishing us. So when it comes to any sort of notion of we think of there a sacred profane God versus human distinction, it falls apart because ultimately we eat the gods in the form of peas in water, and they eat us in the form of our blood or our flesh. So we eat godly stuff. They eat humanly stuff and you are what you eat. That makes us very, very actually at the end of the day, um, identical on speaking in terms of what we're made out of. We're interlinked, interlinked that all of the different aspects of creation are always connected to the next one. Not just interlinked, but made up of the same stuff.

Right. So there's no nature, super nature distinction. It cuts between that. That's one of these dualisms we get out of Western philosophy. It almost feels like quantum physics, part of it. Well, yes. I mean, I don't know enough to intelligently address that, but a lot of people would say so. Yeah. There's some really good work done by an Andeanist named Marisol de la Cadena. She wrote a book called Earth Beings. She discusses a very similar notion in indigenousean indigenous andean philosophy and she does appeal to contemporary quantum mechanics so you end up if you follow kind of math or neurology

too far to one direction you sort of end up in metaphor and and away from numbers in a way that makes the empiricists sort of frustrated i think yeah yeah true enough well i mean there's like a present tenseness to the kind of religious process you're describing that is not really in other cultures i mean there's if you look at greek or norse or something i mean there's like a history where the gods did a bunch of stuff and then they quit and now they've sort of gone to another place and we still have to sometimes beg them to deign to notice us or show that we remember them to not get punished. But it isn't part of every part of life. You know, it isn't part of food.

It isn't part of art. It isn't part of culture in this way that you describe it being in the book. And to me, like Aztec architecture was almost kind of like overwhelming to look at. Like when you look at the pictures, it's like pictures within pictures within pictures like it looks like a magic eye there's a serpent wrapped around the whole building with the serpent so big that the pieces of the serpent are making this tableau but then in that tableau there's other little things and so i always thought you know when i was younger well that's just how they did architecture but you go back to the olmecs and the toltecs the empires before that and the architecture looks greek almost like the figure the wrestler they excavated i mean it's very kind

of traditional so do you think that architecture is a reflection of the kind of metaphysics you're describing that all of this stuff is interlinked and put together i mean things like the moon disc that they excavated and tanakti clan i mean that looks like a picasso painting it looks like guernica or something you know like in a way that you know it took us hundreds of years to rediscover that kind of impressionistic felt uh sense of art yeah yeah yeah um i mean i think i my sense is that the sort of metaphysics that i'm attributing to the Aztecs is actually deeply entrenched within and widely spread within Mesoamerica. So it would be there in the Olmecs, the Toltecs, Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and Maya as well. I know there's not a lot of historical record left. Aztecs are trying to link their leaders to the leaders of the past

empire for legitimacy and things but i mean from your impression you know you can't say anything super uh concrete a lot of the time but from your impression why is the aztec art architecture so different than olmec's toltecs if that uh metaphysical assumption was not changed i guess i mean there isn't that much toltec art around and it doesn't strike me as all that dissimilar actually um actually and a lot of the uh aztec art is modeled directly after the toltec art because they did visit Tula, the archaeological remains of Tolan or where the Toltecs were. And there's lots of art within the so-called sacred precinct, the ceremonial center of Tenochtitlan that's modeled closely after it.

So I don't think there's a, I mean, there's a big difference. Olmecs. I mean, yeah, I, other than that, I can't really, I don't know why they are different.

Um, their explanation would be that what we're calling art is in fact, not art. It's in fact alive. Um, the whole notion of attributing to other cultures a western notion of art is basically misguided um those things are all living persons um there's a very famous well not so very film that i when i was at visited the humboldt Forum in Berlin last summer.

There's a quote from a film, I believe it translates, it's a French film made in the 50s. The French title translates as something like, Even Statues Die. And there was a quote from it right next to the Benin Bronzes that the Humboldt Forum owns. And it says, when men die, right, it's quote, when men die, they become history. When statues die, they become art.

So there's this idea that all these things are alive and that they're living, and that when they get conquered and colonized, we come in and go, oh, no, that's art, because we're unwilling to see that what you that dismembered figure at the bottom there is actually probably still alive and was alive in some sense for the aztecs but paintings sculptures these things are all alive and this tends to be pretty much a what we call new world wide phenomenon that native people see even geometric figures as sort of, in some sense, vivifying and alive.

Some patterns are compatible with you eat out of a bowl with certain patterns. You don't eat out of a bowl with other patterns. The pattern has a causal effect upon things. And so in a sense, it's energized and vivifying as well. And so, yeah, back to why the Aztecs would claim that they're painting their gods the way they do, they're building their buildings the way they do because they've been told to do so. It's not simply a matter of artistic convention or style, individual whimsy.

The gods don't let you depict them any, just any way willy nilly. There's a specific way in which they want you to do that. So the sculptor, the artist, the painter has these communications, conversations with the gods, and the gods tell them how they wish to be presented, not re-presented, but presented, because the god there in all its fullness. The analogy that will come most to mind for us is,

think about the Eucharist and communion for Catholics, right? You eat the wafer, that is Jesus's flesh. You drink the wine, that is Jesus's blood. Protestants take over and it becomes symbolic of Jesus's flesh, symbolic of Jesus's blood. But for the Catholics, especially pre-Reformation Catholics, I mean, it's there, and Jesus is in there, and Jesus' flesh and his essence is in there.

Analogously for the Meshika, a statue of, let's say, Tlaloc or Quetzalcoatl, Quetzalcoatl is right there. That is Quetzalcoatl. Quetzalcoatl is right there. That is Quetzalcoatl. It's not a representation, picture of, depiction of, symbol of Quetzalcoatl. It is Quetzalcoatl. And you can talk with him one-on-one. So they are presentations, not re-presentations. This whole notion of everything being a symbol or a picture of, a of a representative of is all comes out of the reformate the Protestant Reformation and semiotics, which comes out of that as well. So. For them, this stuff is not strictly speaking art, just other persons made out of stone or ink and paper or aid. well a lot that jumps out there that's fascinating i

mean firstly that quote that you share seems like you found something that was incredibly in keeping with the philosophy behind your book in that museum that's that's a really beautiful statement and two it sounds like you know the communion is a lot more of a ritual it is a communing with but it doesn't change and it's not up to the participant what it looks like. What you're describing about being told by the gods what kind of art they want to make sounds like a pretty poetic description of intuition, you know. Yeah, well, they wouldn't call it intuition because they would call it oracular communication. Yeah, well, I think some jungians would maybe call intuition that too uh who would uh some jungian analysts yeah well yeah i mean if if your worldview assumes

the world view of modern natural science then yeah all of this talk has to be recast in terms of intuitions or stuff in the head or symbols. I don't know about the de-romanticization of nature that happens. Weber talks about it and others. With modern science, qualities, colors, tastes, sounds, the magical, all of that, which is even within European metaphysics, pre-Galileo, pre-natural science, all of that just gets sucked out of nature and put into our heads. It's all up here now. It's not out there because the only thing out there is physics, right? A world matter in motion with quantitative properties alone yeah oh yeah i'm so i'm not gonna go with you yeah with you to union land or freudian land or semiotics land because

i'm i'm not so much interested in explaining in some sort of scientific or Western sense why they think what they do. I'm trying to understand, in fact, what they do think. Sure. And then if you want to explain it this other way, that's fine. But I devote myself to trying to get in their heads and understanding what's going on. Yeah, no, and I'm not at all trying to pull you out of that experience i just know a lot of uh especially older unions that are kind of part of the transpersonal um psychology movement view the self not really as an individual but as a part of systems interacting with the world and

and also interacting with the body it's more um for that kind of academic psychology, I think, unfortunately, views the body as this go-kart that carries the brain around and the brain does all the thinking in it. We might as well just pluck it out and put it in the jar because that's all we are. There are alternative psychologies today that are popping up as we try and do things. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. alternative psychologies today that are popping up as we try and do things. Yeah. Fair enough. Um, but so you, Tia,

you say in the book has kind of three main manifestations that sometimes overlapped and interact. Could you, could you go through those manifestations of the energy that, cause I think those are important, um, you know, ways to, to help understand what your,

what your point is there. Sure. So tailed is this sort of constant energy in motion always changing always becoming always moving always processing so that foundation gives you a pantheism it also gives you what western philosophers call a process metaphysics that the basic stuff of the universe is are processes not things right and this contrasts with the dominant mode in western philosophy starting with plato at least that the building blocks of the world are things of one kind or another that are permanent you

know they can be atoms for plato they be forms. We could think they're substances, entities, things. But the world, the furniture of the universe consists of things. Process metaphysics argues that the furniture, if that's appropriate of the universe, are processes. Parades, seasons, rainfalls, waterfalls, floodings, things going on. So the world is always moving always changing always transforming into something else so the three patterns that that pale adopts um in this and motion here also includes change right we think of motion as just going from point a to point b but if you go back to aristotle changing through let's get moving through your the life cycle from point A to point B. But if you go back to Aristotle, changing through, let's say,

moving through the life cycle from infancy to young adulthood to old age, that's a kind of movement. So they agree on that. So there's not only physical movement from point A to point B, but there's also motion in the sense of going through a life change, you know, aiding, dying, life renewal. So there's three patterns. One is called Olin. And so it is the kind of motion which is exhibited by a bouncing ball. It's sort of, is this parabolic like that?

As I recall, yeah. Boun sort of, uh, per is this parabolic like that? As I recall. Yeah. Um, bouncing ball, beating heart. It's also the, the motion through the four stages of our life cycle. So there's a kind of specific motion and they depicted in a particular kind of way.

So it's like an oscillation almost. Yeah. It's bouncing between two. And the sun going up and down and up and down, up and over, up and over, up and over the surface of the earth. That is the pattern or how Teot moves in that particular way. Would any kind of philosophical or natural paradox be seen as that? I know you don't mention

that in the book but it was a question paradoxes yeah the idea that you have two things that are paradoxical but both true or something is that ever brought up in a any kind of cultural or i don't think so not least concerning olin okay i was just curious yeah um then there's another kind of motion change, pattern of motion change, right? It's different, not a different kind of energy, but a different pattern of this Taoist constant moving and becoming,

which is spiraling, when they call that Malanali. And that's the pattern of energy it takes for transmitting energy between levels of the cosmos, the levels of the universe. So if I want to get energy going up to, if I want to transmit life energy to the gods

up since they reside above me, I spin it, I order it, I do that. And that is how energy is transmitted from below the earth to the surface of the earth above the earth you said that was how they viewed digestion was a whirling of food right fire is conceived as that and they see fire as a act as a as a burning as i was wondering if some of the sacrifice rituals couldn't almost be like a reverse digestion that you're taking a living thing and spiraling it back up into this cosmic energy to feed the gods um yeah yeah i mean i don't know about reverse digestion but in

i mean i'm thinking of you take the food and you put it into the person to make the person uh sort of taking the food out of the person to put it back into the yeah well it's i mean reverse just to say that it's cyclical, right? You're always, we're always meant to be recycling the life energies, which the gods have given us, recycling them back to them. So yeah, you're right. One of the more sort of dramatic examples is there's so-called gladiator stone. You can look it up, but it's once again not appropriately called that

but it's a was a circular um like a pedestal on which uh captured warrior would uh engage in combat ritual combat but it was they had actual weapons with mashika warriors um and what they would do is spin them around. They'd rotate around, round and round this circular pedestal. And in the process also try to kill them at first, but just do what they would call stripe them, to nick them so that he would bleed and spread his blood around this thing. And this thing actually, the word for it is the word for a spindle whorl. And the spindle whorl, as you know, is the heavy weight you put in the word for a spindle whorl and the spindle whorl as you know is the heavy weight you put in the bottle of bottom of a spindle rod when you're spinning raw cotton into

um fun cotton and it's a way of ordering so what they did was they spun them around like this and that would in fact transmit the energy in his blood up to the cosmos so yeah that's one of the ways they recycle it um well i think when someone's saying oh this is so alien and bizarre and brutal or something but when you're understanding these assumptions as that the universe excuse me is always being sustained by itself and going through these things and it's our job to sustain it i mean you're just taking the heart back out of the body giving it back to the gods unfortunately this guy lost the flower war now and then later that will be me and there was a sense of being um comfortable even if the

individual maybe didn't like it the society was comfortable and natural with it as just this inevitable thing that's kind of going to happen anyway you know i'm thinking of that like what is it in the bhagavad-gita um where the line where the guy's like i don't really want to fight all these people like it just seems like a mean thing to kill all of them and you know she was says even without your sword behold i have become time even without your sword all of these men will crumble and turn into dust what you do is nothing you know yeah i can see that yeah i mean i mean there's but there's not an eventuality in the aztec case at least to the extent i understand the eventuality in the example you just gave this stuff isn't going to happen eventually unless i mean because human beings actually need to intervene yeah beyond the continuing existence of the cosmos

i mean all of nature as we would call it requires human participation and intervention and i'm not whereas human beings created specifically for that job. That's our, that's our purpose. Um, so I'm not trying to compare it to Hinduism in that way, but I do want to try and reach the person who still is not, uh,

feels disconnected from, um, this set of assumptions as, as part of, yeah, something that they can understand. For sure. I mean, and I, you know, I think it would be mistaken to think that everybody was on board, especially, I mean, especially some of the victims or heart donors, unwilling heart

donors. The warriors, you're right. I mean, that was part of a, you know, warrior cult, military cult. That was part of the honor. You either die in the battlefield or die on the sacrificial stone. And they had a, you know, if they died that way, they had a very honorable post-mortem existence of accompanying the sun for several years every morning and then eventually becoming monarch butterflies. Um, so, but for the rest of their, there were people who had not chattel slavery, but people who had been bought maybe because they owed a lot of money. And those people could be sold to someone else for a sacrifice. And I'm sure they weren't keen on it um well i know campbell

used to say that all mythology has to do with you know uh dealing with guilt or shame i don't know that'd go that far but a lot of it is us kind of trying to have a story about things that we have to do anyway and i mean it was an empire and and when the empires empires work by expanding and then when they hit a uh either geologue or geographic or cultural or economic boundary where they can't expand anymore either the empire falls or the front comes home and that front is coming home you have to have some sort of sustaining game where the empire can imperialize itself and these flower wars were basically a way to continue to have we're going to go out we're going to kill the dark bad scary other we're

going to bring it back in except well they're just kind of symbolic of that actually these are football games you know we're gonna we're gonna because the point of the flower wars was not to go out and kill a bunch of people it was to capture them that's what you got rewarded for and then the other side felt the same way right it wasn't one way street their flower wars with the people from tlachcala right they went out in order to seize aztec warriors for the very same purpose so it was a mutually agreed upon thing it wasn't just the aztecs terrorizing the plush the tlachca takens are you familiar with like uh the way the role that football plays in the american south you know the sec have you at least heard of this religious experience that

we do no i haven't if you ever uh i i'm not a huge football fan other than i like cultural anthropology but i if you ever get a chance to come to alabama and see what a game is like in tuscaloosa i wonder if you don't think about the flower wars and the wrong day i mean it's a bloodletting sport is it it i and i don't mean just in the violence but i mean the cultural role where it's like you when i i told my wife when she moved from indiana like when you go to your school the elementary school kids are going to say who do you go for and that means which football team do you like? And they're going to form an opinion of you based on what you say and have an animosity to that you're going to be like, no, no, no, it's okay

because she doesn't like conflict. And then I took her to Tuscaloosa to see a game when she was looking at the quad and they've rented out for an insane amount of money, just a teeny tiny little square on the grass. And people who don't have a ticket to the game, this isn't the stadium, this is the quad of the college, have brought their entire living room, a generator, their lamp, their couch, their big screen, their barbecue grill, and they're just sitting

in a recreation of their living room closer to Mecca. Where you can hear the roar of the stadium with a slight delay on your TV and coming directly from the stadium behind you that you don't have a ticket to get into. Wow. So I don't know.

It makes a lot of your book reminded me of that. A lot of, a lot of us culture. I should get the third pattern since you're at the third one. It's down that rabbit hole. Yeah. And it's back and forth motion. It's the motion between, I mean, actually in battle, right?

A thrust Perry, thrust Perry, thrust Perry. It's the motion involved in weaving. It's the motion back forth,, forth involved in sexual intercourse. It's a motion that the Meshika see as creating this in-between space, not in a liminal negative way, but it's in a positive way that in this in-between space, something new is created. A third thing, a tertium quid is created between sexual intercourse. That third thing is created as a child and also a union between these two people, which otherwise doesn't exist. And when it comes to weaving, weaving together,

warp and weft creates this new thing, a woven shirt, right? And that is one of the most powerful ones because that's involved in balancing. So it's that back forth, back forth, which actually is then also typified in the constant gifting, re-gifting, re-gifting, gifting, re-gifting between humans and gods. They gift us life. We give them life. When you accept a gift, you're obliged to re-gift. So there's this constant sort of back-forth, back-forth mutuality of gifting. I gift you, you gift me. I gift you, you gift me. I invite you to dinner. If you're good manners, you invite me back over to dinner. We go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And that creates this unity of interrelatedness between humans and gods. But it also is the model for all human interactions, this mutual gifting.

Teachers gift life energy to their students. They're therefore indebted, and they are obliged to re-gift something back to their teachers. Parents gift their children lives. Children are obliged to re-gift by taking care of them in their old age. So this notion of this mutual exchange, re-gifting and re-gifting of life energy is very, very central to human, inter-human relationships and human divine relationships as well. And that's the third kind of motion and so this one actually is very defining of the the cosmos itself because the aztecs see the cosmos basically as a woven fabric and it's woven through all these various kinds of actions of human beings and interactions um so despite the aztecs reputation as being bloodthirsty warrior cult i

mean one of the the basic metaphors and but i don't think it is a metaphor that's our talk is that the cosmos is this weaving in progress this back forth back forth between between polarities male female male female life male, female, life, death, life, death, hot, cold, day, night, day, night, winter, summer, winter, summer. You want to keep that back and forth going in this balanced way, and that maintains the cosmos in a balanced state. It almost sounds like a description of philosophy itself, too. One person has this discourse with this other person,

another thing is created the thesis yeah synthesis yeah yeah i mean it's also very similar to taoism you probably heard you already um these dualities these polarities are like yin yang they're mutually arising mutually interdependent um death arises from life life arises from death you can't be alive without killing something and you can't be dead unless you are alive so there's there's this notion that these dualities or polarities go back and forth and back and forth and that they form a unified duality or a dual unity they don't disappear but they form this tertium quid, this third thing. And so that's very, very fundamental to it, maintaining this circulation, this cyclical day-night, day-night, day-night, winter-summer, winter-summer, male-female, male-female, life-death, life-death, just going on and on. And that's what the cosmos is, this cyclical alternation between these mutually rising, mutually interdependent polarities or dualities.

And the idea that you could have something like life without death, eternal life, Christian style is just quite literally nonsensical. It's conceptually absurd. It's like being a brother, an only child and a brother, right? You can't be a brother unless you have a brother, right? And having, or having God be just a man is just as incoherent as a single child brother. Because reproduction requires male-female interaction, right? So how could you possibly just have a male create the universe by himself? It literally makes no sense.

Yeah. They don't see the disconnection of opposites or time in the way that a lot of other... No. Do you think some of that was influenced by there being less written language, accessible, that most interaction is verbal that the civilization is smaller do you see any kind of cultural reality reinforcing that belief or just kind

of a product of the culture that didn't come from anything between looking for the outside explanation i mean i think it all it goes back to maize agriculture humans can reproduce without maize maize can reproduce without humans right that is like the keystone to understanding how they can see the universe and that's shared throughout mesoamerica that the the fundamentalness of the human maize relationship um the mayas of many argue do to have a re a written language and embrace the same idea so i don't think it's the dominance of orality which explains it yeah and maze is so important to just why the civilization was able to be there if you go further north in america you're not you're spending all your time kind of hunting and gathering not going to, but you don't have the luxury of building a pyramid just with time,

but you also may have to move from the place where you built it. So that. Yeah. But you get May's agriculture in North America. They did. Cahokia.

You got lots of large ceremonial centers, Chaco Canyon going on Canyon to shave Cahokia. I live close to Moundville. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I mean, so they may have, I mean,

it strikes me that Cahokia had to be largely maize dependent. Anytime you have a settled existence, you're a farmer. You're farming. And maize is there. And maize traveled down to Maize traveled down to South America and up to North America. It is, I guess,

just talk with a guy who told me that he thinks that maize went down to the Andes and then a different species went back up north. So it's a really complicated history. But yeah, I think people, humans in the Americas is what ended up transforming something called cc play which is basically a wild grass seed into what we think of as

maize about 6 000 years ago the corn started off about that big it was a little kind of fat wheat berries yeah yeah at best well and it's across all of north and south america but the ability to farm it and the quantity to have the surplus really was kind of a luxury of that region and and some of that was agricultural the farmland and the weather patterns and all that but other parts of it and maybe access to certain varieties of it where they didn't know, have that ability. But there's also the Aztecs ability to like soaking maize in lye to create harmony and preserving and just things that were a technological product that had not really traveled that far. I mean,

I think it was throughout the Americas. Everybody. Harmony was everywhere. It was associated with Southern. If I'm not mistaken is hominy huh i don't know that one specifically i have to look that up yeah no i mean it's europeans when they brought it back to europe didn't know they needed to soak it in lime and ended up i forget the name of the disease that you get from niacin deficiency i'm not soaking scurvy is it scurvy i know that's vitamin c deficiency i don't know

and um and it took them a while to figure it out so no i don't know how they discover that but the making of what's called nishtamol is is yeah it's i think it's all over. Okay. I always associated that Aztec, the Mesoamerican region, with just increased output agriculture. Well, they do have increased output. I mean, that's true. And especially the Aztecs had. But, I mean, as you said, anytime you have settled existence and then have the, what, can afford the surplus labor to be building monumental architecture you've got production which exceeds a certain level so you're absolutely right um but i mean that's also true of the andes yeah yeah and yeah mound culture cahokia i don't know if it's

apocryphal because i you know i'm not an academic and so I don't have to cite sources and things. No one's going to give me an F, but if I get it wrong. But I had like a history teacher a long time ago tell me about some story where the Spanish were like, show us the gods. Whereas whether the gods were the gods and they like take them to some statue or carving and the Spanish smashed it. And the Aztecs are just kind of blasé and they're like look at the gods and they're like no the gods are not here and then they they think they're lied to or something and they're like where are they what are the gods and the aztecs just think they're stupid they're like this is what they look like here you go here's the picture

of the process and the spanish keep trying to deface these things and then they're not they don't understand because they're trying to, they think it's like stepping on the cross or breaking an idol. And the Aztecs are just kind of like, this is a blueprint of the universe, man. Like, and you're,

you're tearing up a piece of paper. I don't, I don't understand what you want me to do. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I don't know that story. It may not be true. It may be a,

an allegorical they wouldn't be very happy about you coming in and smashing the statue if the statue in fact were a presentation rather than just a picture but that destroying the statue would by no means destroying the god right i mean take tlaloc right who's associated with rain you know water um ice hailstorms thunder lightning i mean all of tlaloc is in all of those in all of those exemplifications all everywhere all at once in different times and places so all of Tlaloc's in a rainstorm in Alabama while also all of Tlaloc is in a rainstorm in North Dakota so if you could rewind time and go live in the Aztec empire you think you'd do that uh yeah uh i mean just as for an exploratory thing for a couple weeks yeah i'd like to do that especially if i were uh an elite priest maybe or an elite person i you know i think the life

of commoners was hard they worked hard maize agriculture is a demanding life um personally i wouldn't have wanted to be a warrior um it's just not my thing um so yeah i could see doing it um yeah i mean but i mean i can say that about just about everywhere i think would you i don't know i don't i don't know there's something about the veil to me that seems scary there like i kind of like the veil of yeah time of uncertainty that i can talk about this and intuitively interact with it but if you really go back if you really know and you see something i don't know i feel like there's something about that scares me huh yeah i think it'd be neat i'm intriguing i mean i guess we're assuming that I retain all my current sensibilities and stuff

so that when I saw part sacrifice, I would be appalled and, um, and yeah, that would be hard to watch for sure. Don't want to meet your heroes or in this case, your academic area. Yeah.

I don't know. um i i think like conspiracy theory is fascinating though i don't really go in for it and a lot of pseudo archaeology is always like caught up in conspiracy theory a ton of the time that yeah you know some combination of aliens and 5g and pyramids and and stuff but i i'm curious like i know that there's the toltec story that they have basically the toltec empire falls apart when one of the emperors is drinking too much and they put him on a boat and send him to north america i mean do you think that him and that retinue got up there do you think that there's anything that you know i've heard people before because a lot of it on its face it just fails conceptually but the people that say like well the reason why in the four corners you end up with things that you don't associate with um a lot of north american um uh culture just all end up

there like cannibalism and architecture and and different things is because this toltec emperor went up there and introduced this information i don't really believe that that's plausible but it's one of the only ones that on on the face of it i can't say well that's wrong for this fundamental yeah i've yeah i've never heard never heard i mean i know of the story of a guy named quetzalcoatliltzin, who was the ruler of Tolan, the Toltec emperor, and that he allegedly had too much pulque to drink and, I guess, attempted to seduce his sister. But then he left voluntarily in shame to the east. And then that gets turned into this idea that Cortez is, the children, the grandchildren of the elite of various other city-states in the area who are out to make the aztecs look bad horrific stupid um and that's it's a spanish claim to throw over the empire if he's an emperor coming back to what it's a beneficial

story to cortez that that he's returning it's true but i mean i if it looks post-facto, post-conquest sort of is a post-facto sort of justification rather than one that was there before. Most of the, you know, there are all these omens that Moctezuma II supposedly saw, you know, birds with this, blah, blah, blah. But scholars have examined those and those are straight out of medieval Europe. And then so somebody wrote up these things and said, oh yeah, and the Aztecs thought that too. So you have to be very, very careful with the sources because like I say, a lot of the sources are written and that's important because not everybody could write even after the invasion, only the elite, the sons, and maybe the daughters, but probably after the invasion only the elite the sons and maybe the daughters but probably just the sons of the elite of various city-states were brought in by the

franciscans and taught how to read and write taught spanish and latin and they tended to write stories which were self-serving because now i mean in a lot of ways, the social, political, economic structure of New Spain remained the same when it was Tenochtitlan, when it was the Aztec Empire. We just had a new boss in town. The Spanish emperor was now the top dog rather than the platuani, the ruler of the Aztec Empire. But so all the nobility are trying to suck up, maintain. They live a rather lavish lifestyle they live off the the labor of the commoners who are the maize farmers and they want to retain all of that so they're trying to suck up to the king and the spaniards didn't you

know there's this jockeying for position and power taking place and they don't want to be reduced to commoners they're writing things that make their ancestors look smart and not barbarous it was the aztecs who did all that horrible stuff um or just very yeah it's the sources are very dicey so you have to be that's that makes sense i never thought about the post and the post invasion politics of trying to play spanish politics with your own history as a as a mesoamerican that's yeah yeah do you the the hinge point in history where cortez basically breaks the rules and invades without permission i mean it's kind of amazing what that he even was able to do that with so few people and that almost didn't happen for a lot of reasons i mean they came after

him for trying to the spanish came after the spanish came after him for trying to break the rules you know but if he doesn't do that what do you think happens i mean it's likely that at some point somebody goes in they do that empire does fall i mean how long do you think they get and what do you think that changes if cortez is just deleted from the record and you have ships knocking around across the caribbean discovering stuff yeah it appears as if if it weren't him it would have been somebody else um the you know the people the tributaries of the aztecs, right? All these smaller city-states around, you know, the greater Mexico were not happy. No colonized people are happy having to pay tribute to an imperial power.

There were the flower wars, but not everybody engaged in those. But they weren't happy. So sooner or later, someone would have done the same divide and conquer sort of strategy. I mean, and you got to remember that they all saw themselves, what scholars call it, micropatriotism in Mexico, that people identify with a city as opposed to the nation and cream is kind of like that if you ever go to austria austria is kind of like that if you ever go to austria they want you to be into their team and their beer and their region there's but they don't really like the the bigger austria they just yeah i mean like so uh so they didn't all see themselves as like we're indigenous people we have to unite to expel the foreigner they saw themselves as i'm from tlascala i'm from cholula i'm from here there right and there was just like

let's get rid of the aztecs this guy promises to do it but then unfortunately you know the ideal state which i think they thought was going to result, didn't happen because they just got sucked within the Spanish Empire and probably poorly treated as they were before. Probably even worse. Sure. The death toll after the conquest. It was horrific. Yeah.

And there's also, right, breaking up of communities, forcing them into encomiendas or forced plantation systems, what's called reducciones. Yeah, so they all... I don't know the name of the movement. The only reason I know about it is because there was a... The guy who catered my grad party at Suwannee had this collection of artwork,

but he was telling me that it was like the Spanish had taught um you know first generation um people after the conquest to paint european style and they could understand the proportion and the perspective and the math of it but they couldn't ever get them to get european color so it would be these pictures of like um basically noble women and babies and things but the colors it's hard to describe because you can't say oh they're breaking one rule but it was like the whole notion of how you colored it didn't look like that period that your brain wanted to say oh that's what this is it had a kind of blending of earth tones that just was kind of atypical i forget the name of it that's

the only place i've ever encountered it was he was showing me his some of his collection but boy yeah i don't know i just yeah i can't say anything like that there's all these parts of our culture we just can't even see you know see them like in that way but yeah is there anywhere we don't get is there anything you feel like is an important uh thing something you want to jump back to or a piece that i i don't um uh yeah i don't yeah no i think we've covered things i mean i think i mean i guess the the sort of obsessive focusing upon human sacrifice is not very helpful. I mean, it's there. I think we attribute more centrality to it than they did. These ceremonies lasted an entire month. They're extremely religious people. When the Franciscans arrived, they were like, wow, these people are more religious than Europeans are.

They just happen to have been tricked by the devil. we got to switch out the devil with jesus but i mean so there are lots of things going on and the heart sacrifice was one part of it undeniably so um the notion The notion of sacrifice itself doesn't quite apply because it literally means to make sacred, sacra facere. And for them, everything already is sacred. So that whole notion of doesn't apply. I mean, you can just see that in lots of cases, unwilling heart donors gifting their life energies to the cosmos um but it's not just this slavish thing like oh we got to appease the gods are they gonna kill us and punish us that's all abrahamic um there's yeah the the perception that westerners have that if they didn't kill the person the sun wouldn't come up. I think the fear of the sun not coming up.

Your book does a great job of saying that this is a reenactment of a reenactment of a reenactment of the processes of the universe. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's true that the sun won't, but it isn't because the sun's pissed off. And it's like, F you guys, I'm not going to rise today. It's like the sun just starved to death. The sun doesn't have the energy to be reborn in every morning unless we feed it. So, I mean, it's really a very sort of basic sort of agricultural or horticultural model of humans and nature interacting and we have to gift back to it in order for it to gift us um and you know contemporary not what speakers in mexico would argue that western culture isn't doing a very good job of that that climate change they're very much aware of it as dirt farmers, is the result of a gross imbalance, a failure to reciprocate, that give and take, give back, I give to you, you give to me.

So that's really where all of that gory, horrid stuff is coming from, is this that we have to kiff back to keep the thing going. And there's probably a political element too, that we tend to punch down on ancient empires, bloodiness, or fixate on their bloody aspects to overlook where modern empires are extremely bloody. Yeah. We don't need to state the obvious. The elephant room. No good lord no um yeah they i mean from the get-go the spaniards were out to present new world people as cannibals um sodomites um i what else those were enough to condemn them to death right yeah we're always making other people out to be bloody and we're sacred and holy and we respect and revere like blah, blah,

blah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, this has been a wonderful conversation with you. I really appreciate your time. Um,

and I wish that I had been, had a podcast, you know, three, four years ago when I first picked up your, picked up your book, you want us to say anything about the next one or you got anything in the works that you want us to link to?

I'll definitely link to where the book can be purchased you have a website or any other kind of web presence where you'd like me to direct people unfortunately i'm not digital savvy enough to have a website okay um i can send you some articles to some articles on an ethics so right now i'm working on, well, you're probably familiar with, well, the skull rack, right?

Well, I'm arguing that in fact, it's a, it's a Mays field. And that it's not, I mean, the standard interpretation is going to be that it's like this gory trophy display.

It's there to like intimidate everybody oh we aztecs are bad mofos look at all these heads we've accumulated and it's not that at all i mean it may have that effect on some people but it's only because the thing itself is inherently powerful and it's powerful because those skulls are conceived as maze kernels and so the whole thing is basically a cosmic milpa and then the end stage of all the processes going on in this the ceremonial precinct this the center of the of chinoche titlan um and those are seeds about to be reseeded to regenerate nature. Working on a book which argues that I got too many things going on. Images in the codices,

these books like this, that these are in fact alive. They're not just painted representations or depictions or symbols or pictures they are living beings and that person who knows what they're doing interacts with these it's this is an oracular device you take the requisite psychotropic substance peyote um ulu ulu i never um Olo Olo Lee I never pronounce this word Jimson Weed um

and you can talk with these people so they're not this is another example of when statues die they become art

this when these die they become images for art historians well and that's what a lot of modern scholarship feels like cave

paintings would have been used for prehistorically that the fire animates the animal you paint or the shaman ritual. And sometimes maybe you find the right thing to be a little under the influence of a psychedelic. Yep. You go and you talk to them. So would that be on vellum or on the wall?

You're saying that you would open the book and take in the gypsum weed and you would see. No, you go to one page at a time. Yeah. Um, and vellum it's on, sometimes it's on paper. Sometimes it's on deer skin. Yeah. And the, and the, the, the picture is alive. It just isn't going to talk to you until you take the right substance.

Yeah. And yeah, you got to prepare yourself. Not anybody can walk in and start talking. You to be trained you have to know you have to go through various sorts of what we would rituals like abstinence um sexual abstinence fasting perhaps self-bloodletting various ways in which they would describe as deserving or meriting conversation. You have to make yourself worthy of talking with the gods on that page. And then you take the relevant entheogen and you can have, and it's an oracular conversation. You talk to them typically,

right? These were used for, you know, you're going to want to go to war, go on a military expedition, a mercantile expedition, want to get married. You go to what we call diviner and say, look at it. When's a good time to do that? Was today a good time to do that? And so you talk to that person and he then does all of those things and talks to these persons. They say, nah, it's not a very good day.

Or if you want us to cooperate, you're going to have to gift a certain sort of things. So it's a matter of enlisting these other than human persons, enlisting them in your practical endeavors so that they're on your side, not sort of opposing you. Wow. So you have oh yeah gift them right so that they gift you back the cooperation you desire yeah but you're interacting with a vast series of processes almost like some people use tarot or something like that in order to get outside of yeah yeah i don't know a lot about tarol but different forces yeah i don't know i think a lot

of the a lot of the uh historic use and more so than we think about and then the modern use is not really to see the future to do divination it's just to understand yourself and your life as a series of forces and then get outside of your own head about that enough to get them on your side you know or yeah make them conscious of yeah depending on your languages yeah this isn't about divining the future this is about yeah figuring out who are the players today right that's that's a really beautiful uh description and i best of luck with your work we look forward to your work on ethics and also um the you know the the the living art.

Yeah, living art. You got titles? You know what you're going to call them? How far along are you through that? Well, the Skolrak is something like, I guess I can't give it a Nahua name in a book because nobody will know what it is. Skolrak as, I can't even say Milpa. I'm going to have to say it's Cosmic Mazefield, something like that.

The one is Conversing with Time, Aztec. Forget my, I've got a title, I don't know. All right. Well, good luck. I'll never look at a corn kernel, the same again. Okay, well, and if you ever, when those come out or when you, when you got a date on that,

if you ever want to come back and promote something in a year or so, you know, please, please send me an email. Okay. I'll let you know if I ever get down to Alabama. Eclipse in a minute In a time Occupied in a minute