Manzanillo Sun article

Volcano of Fire

2017 February 2017 History Kirby Vickery

By Kirby Vickery from the February 2017 Edition

I wanted to be able to tie in Aztec mythology into to the eruptions of Volcán de Colima which is also known as Volcán de Fuego in recognition of its almost constant eruptions of late. I didn’t find what I was looking for but have found some interesting facts that I can give.

In the Aztec creation saga, we are in the fifth world. The other four were created then destroyed before true man came along. The God of Fire, also known as the Turquoise Lord or Lord of the Volcano actually has two names. The old guy’s name is Huchueteotl and he is the oldest god in the Aztec pantheon of gods. According to the Florentine Codex, he is considered as the mother and father of all the Aztec gods. You have to remember the duality of their gods being masculine and feminine at the same time. His other name is Xiuhtecuhtli in his younger state and was usually represented by a face of turquoise.

From another Codex, this duality is exemplified by the very first Aztec god that created itself. Ometecuhtli, the Lord of Duality, and Omecihuatl, Lady of Duality, came to be as one. This gives the good and bad and male/female to all the Aztec gods. This god gave birth to four others named Huiziopochtli, Quet zacoatl, Tezcatlipoca and Xipe Totec. It was these four that created the world while each of them represented a cardinal direction.

Xipe Totec was the god of the east. He represented agriculture, disease, spring, vegetation, goldsmiths, silversmiths, liberation and the seasons, as well as pimples and eye diseases. He connected agricultural and the renewal of life in living things and flayed himself to give food to humanity. Without his skin, he was depicted as a golden god. Xipe Totec was supposed to have been the god that invented war.

[At this point in the creation of the world, there are several different accounts and I have picked some – sorta.] Huitzilopochtli and Quetzalcoatl teamed up to make the first world and the first thing they created was fire. Then they set out to create hu-manity and chose Tezcatlipoca to be sacrificed as the source of light because the world was in darkness and needed a sun. The problem was that Tezcatlipoca only had the power to become a half sun. When he was sacrificed, his blood dropped on a mass of ground up bones of the ground and two gods sprung up. They were the first man and woman , named Oxomoco and Cipactonal respectively.

In later myths, the four gods who created the world, Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli and Xipe Totec were re-ferred to respectively as the Black, the White, the Blue and the Red Tezcatlipoca. The four Tezcatlipocas were the sons of Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl, lady and lord of the duality, and were the creators of all the other gods, as well as the world and all humanity.

During this, a fight transpired between Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca. Quetzalcoatl was the victor, but Tezcatlipoca takes revenge by sending jaguars on Earth to destroy the giants. Thus, came an end to the first sun.

There is some conflict concerning the reality of these giants. They were the people created in the first sun but kept falling off the edge of the dearth, into the sea where they were all eaten by the sea creatures created either by a crocodile-like water creature named Cipactli and the rain god Tlaloc and his wife Chalchiuhtlicue. One supposedly survived and, as a result, fathered a race of over eight-foot giants which keep popping up in various archeological sites, expeditions and other places such as in the Bible as Goliath.

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