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The Nahua Hidden World Part 1: Books, Time, Body & Divination · The Occult Rejects

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen. What? What's going to happen?
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Something wonderful. What? I understand how you feel. You see,
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: it's all very clear to me now. Welcome to the
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: Occult Rejects. Today we are getting into a category of
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: objects that look familiar enough to fool us into thinking
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: we already understand them. There are certain objects from the
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: past that become almost impossible for us to understand because
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: their appearance convinces us that we already know what we
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: are looking at. And few historical objects suffer from that
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: problem more than the painted manuscripts of ancient and early
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  Speaker 1: colonial Mexico. Most of us have already seen pages from
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  Speaker 1: them at some point. Strange gods with enormous headdresses, Serpents
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  Speaker 1: curling around human figures, severed heads, footprints crossing the page,
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  Speaker 1: dots arranged beside symbols, temples burning, animals positioned beside day signs,
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  Speaker 1: figures painted red, black, blue, or yellow, and elaborate compositions
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  Speaker 1: that seem to operate somewhere between a picture, a map,
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  Speaker 1: a calendar, and a diagram. We call these things Aztec codices.
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  Speaker 1: Glance at them for a moment. and usually assume that
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  Speaker 1: we are looking at illustrated books explaining Aztec mythology. That
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  Speaker 1: description is not completely wrong, but it is so incomplete
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  Speaker 1: that it could prevent us from seeing what these manuscripts
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  Speaker 1: actually were. Some preserved political history, migration traditions, genealogy, tribute obligations,
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  Speaker 1: and land claims. Others recorded ritual cycles, divine identities, calendrical systems,
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  Speaker 1: and systems of divinations. Some were produced before the Spanish conquest,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: others were produced during the extraordinarily complicated century that followed,
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  Speaker 1: and still others preserved older indigenous information within manuscripts created
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: under Spanish colonial conditions. Their images were not simply decorations
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  Speaker 1: placed beside a written text. An image could itself convey linguistic, calendrical, numerical, geographical,
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  Speaker 1: or ritual information, while the arrangement of figures on the
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  Speaker 1: page could communicate relationships between that did not require an
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  Speaker 1: alphabetic sentence at all. In some cases, the manuscript was
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  Speaker 1: not merely describing a ritual or divinatory system from the outside.
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  Speaker 1: The manuscript itself was one of the instruments through which
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  Speaker 1: that system could be operated. That distinction is where our
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: investigation begins, because one of the most remarkable scenes preserved
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  Speaker 1: in the Florentine Codex shows the parents of a newborn
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  Speaker 1: child consulting a specialist associated with the tonal puale, the
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  Speaker 1: 260-day ritual calendar. The imagery has been indexed by the
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  Speaker 1: Digital Florentine Codex, with terms referring to the ritual calendar,
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  Speaker 1: the child's day sign, the tonopukwai, or divinatory specialist, the amoksli,
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  Speaker 1: or book, and the act of reading that book. The
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  Speaker 1: accompanying Nuwadil text explains that the parents summoned knowledgeable specialists
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  Speaker 1: so they could determine the quality of the day on
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  Speaker 1: which the child had been born. and that those specialists
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  Speaker 1: first asked carefully when the birth had taken place. That
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  Speaker 1: is an extraordinary scene because it immediately collapses several categories
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  Speaker 1: that we normally keep separate. A child has been born,
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  Speaker 1: but the birth is simultaneously a biological event, a social event,
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  Speaker 1: a calendrical event, and a potentially divinatory event. A book
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  Speaker 1: is present, but the book is simultaneously a visual document,
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  Speaker 1: a repository of inherited knowledge and a practical instrument. A
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  Speaker 1: specialist is present, but he is neither simply a priest,
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: nor simply an astrologer, nor simply a fortune teller in
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  Speaker 1: the modern sense. The day itself is present as more
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  Speaker 1: than a date, because the combination under which that child
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  Speaker 1: entered the world was believed to possess qualities that could
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  Speaker 1: be interpreted. Once we understand that, the phrase Aztec calendar
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  Speaker 1: suddenly becomes far too small for what we are dealing with.
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  Speaker 1: The question we are going to pursue throughout the first
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  Speaker 1: part is therefore not whether the Nuwaha had something that
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  Speaker 1: we can loosely call magic. That question is easy, and
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  Speaker 1: it becomes almost meaningless once we start forcing indigenous practices
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  Speaker 1: into European categories such as sorcery, astrology, divination, medicine, religion,
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  Speaker 1: and superstition. The more interesting question is how the Nahua
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  Speaker 1: believed information that was not immediately obvious could become knowable.
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  Speaker 1: How can somebody interpret the circumstances surrounding a birth? And
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  Speaker 1: how could time itself carry meaning in a way that
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  Speaker 1: affected the interpretation of that birth? Why might an unexpected
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  Speaker 1: animal entering a house be interpreted differently from the same
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  Speaker 1: animal encountered in a countryside? Why could an unexplained sound
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  Speaker 1: in the middle of the night become important? Why did
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: dreaming have to do with transformation in supernatural identity? What
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  Speaker 1: happened when the human person was not understood simply as
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  Speaker 1: a body containing a single soul, but through a much
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  Speaker 1: more complicated network involving heat, heart, breath, blood, fate, and
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  Speaker 1: relationships that could extend beyond the body's visible boundaries? Those
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  Speaker 1: questions take us much further than simply asking what gods
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  Speaker 1: the Aztecs worshipped. They take us into an entire philosophy
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  Speaker 1: of how the visible and invisible worlds intersected. Before we
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  Speaker 1: go there, we have to clean up the language, because
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  Speaker 1: even the word Aztec can distort the picture before we
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  Speaker 1: have started. The Mexica who founded and ruled from Tenochtitlan
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  Speaker 1: were Nahua people, but the word Nahua describes a much
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  Speaker 1: larger linguistic and cultural world. Nahuatl-speaking communities existed across central
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  Speaker 1: Mexico and numerous independent or competing political communities. And although
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  Speaker 1: the Mexica eventually became the dominant power within the triple
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  Speaker 1: alliance commonly called the Aztec Empire, they were not synonymous
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  Speaker 1: with every Nahuatl-speaking society around them. Texcoco was another major
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  Speaker 1: Nahua political and intellectual center. Cholula had enormous religious importance
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  Speaker 1: of its own, while smaller altapetl, or city-states, maintained local identities, histories, cults,
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  Speaker 1: and political interests that could overlap with larger Central Mexican
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  Speaker 1: traditions without being identical to them. This becomes important almost
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  Speaker 1: immediately when we begin using codices as evidence, because there
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  Speaker 1: has long been a bad habit of finding something somewhere
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  Speaker 1: in Central Mexico and automatically labeling it Aztec. The extraordinary
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  Speaker 1: divinatory manuscripts grouped by scholars under the label Borgia Group,
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  Speaker 1: for example, clearly belong within the religious and collegial culture
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  Speaker 1: of central Mexico, but their precise places of production and
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  Speaker 1: cultural affiliations have been debated for generations. It would therefore
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  Speaker 1: be reckless to take every image from one of those
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  Speaker 1: manuscripts and casually announce that it represents exactly what a
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  Speaker 1: priest in Tenochtitlan believed. The distinction might sound overly cautious,
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  Speaker 1: but we would immediately understand the problem if somebody treated
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  Speaker 1: every manuscript produced in medieval history or early modern Europe
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  Speaker 1: as evidence for a single thing called European religion. A
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  Speaker 1: Catholic devotional manuscript from Italy, an alchemical text from Germany,
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  Speaker 1: a Jewish mystical work from Prague, and a Protestant Bible
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  Speaker 1: printed in England all belong to European intellectual history, but
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  Speaker 1: collapsing them into one uniform religious tradition would destroy the
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  Speaker 1: very differences that make them historically meaningful. Central Mexico deserves
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  Speaker 1: the same care if we want its eternal differences to
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  Speaker 1: remain historically meaningful, rather than dissolving them into one convenient label.
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  Speaker 1: The broader term Nahua therefore gives us room to investigate
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  Speaker 1: the shared language, cosmology, and intellectual traditions running through numerous
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  Speaker 1: communities while still recognizing that those communities were not interchangeable.
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  Speaker 1: The Mexica will remain extremely important throughout this series because
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  Speaker 1: many surviving sources concern Tenochtitlan and its religious world, but
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  Speaker 1: we are not going to use Mexica Aztec, Nahua, and
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  Speaker 1: Central Mexican as if all four phrases mean exactly the
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  Speaker 1: same thing. There is another reason that distinction matters. The
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  Speaker 1: Nahua did not vanish when Tenochtitlan fell in 1521. Nahua
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  Speaker 1: continued to be spoken and Nahua authors, scribes, painters, nobles,
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  Speaker 1: legal advocates, and local officials continued producing an enormous written
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  Speaker 1: record during the colonial period. Some adopted alphabetic writing with
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  Speaker 1: extraordinary speed and used it to record wills, land disputes, histories, petitions,
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  Speaker 1: and community records. Indigenous pictorial conventions survived alongside European materials
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  Speaker 1: and techniques. Christian religious language became entangled with pre-existing Nahua vocabulary,
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: and manuscripts were produced that cannot honestly be described as
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  Speaker 1: purely pre-Hispanic or purely European in because he emerged from
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: the violent intellectual collision of both worlds. That collision is
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  Speaker 1: one of the central problems in everything we are about
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  Speaker 1: to do. Our richest source, the Florentine Codex, is a
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  Speaker 1: perfect example. Created during the 16th century under Franciscan Bernardino
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  Speaker 1: de Sahagin, it involved extensive collaboration with Nahuatl elders, intellectuals, scribes,
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  Speaker 1: and painters, and its 12 books preserve extraordinary information about God's, ceremonies,
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  Speaker 1: calendrical divination, omens, rhetoric, rulers, merchants, medicine, plants, animals, and
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  Speaker 1: the conquest itself. Yet Sahagun was also a Christian missionary
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  Speaker 1: who wanted to understand indigenous religion partly so Christianity could
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  Speaker 1: replace it. The resulting work therefore preserves enormous amounts of
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  Speaker 1: Nahua knowledge under simultaneously filtering that knowledge through a colonial
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  Speaker 1: Christian project. This matters enormously whenever we encounter words such
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  Speaker 1: as soul, devil, or superstition, witch, sorcerer or idol in
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  Speaker 1: older translations. Those words do not simply tell us what
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  Speaker 1: Nahuatl people thought. Sometimes they tell us how Europeans attempted
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  Speaker 1: to classify what Nahuatl people thought. The task is therefore
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  Speaker 1: not simply to read the Spanish description in and assume
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  Speaker 1: the classification is neutral, but to compare it with Nahuatl
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  Speaker 1: whenever possible and ask what conceptual translation is taking place.
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  Speaker 1: That problem becomes particularly important once we start talking about
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  Speaker 1: books themselves, because the word book also comes with assumptions
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  Speaker 1: that do not necessarily fit the objects we are studying.
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  Speaker 1: The classical Nahuatl word Amoxli can refer to a book
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  Speaker 1: or codex, but the material contained inside an Amoxli is
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  Speaker 1: does not behave like a modern alphabetic book in which
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  Speaker 1: images are usually secondary to the written sentences. Indigenous Central
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  Speaker 1: Mexican manuscripts could communicate through combinations of pictorial imagery, calendrical signs, numbers,
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  Speaker 1: glyphic place names, personal name signs, directional relationships, repeated visual conventions, and,
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  Speaker 1: in certain contexts, phonetic strategies in which visual components represented
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  Speaker 1: sounds rather than simply the objects they resembled. The people
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  Speaker 1: associated with producing this material are frequently referred to as telequilicu,
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: the plural of telequilo, or telequilo spelled T-L-A-H-C-U-L-O-H, a term
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  Speaker 1: that European dictionaries could translate with words corresponding to both
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  Speaker 1: painter and writer. That double meaning is not simply an
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  Speaker 1: accident of translation. It points toward a different intellectual relationship
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  Speaker 1: between image and text. When we say that somebody wrote
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  Speaker 1: a book, and somebody else illustrated it, we are describing
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  Speaker 1: a division of labor familiar to our culture. In Nahuatl
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  Speaker 1: manuscript culture, painting and writing could overlap so deeply that
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  Speaker 1: trying to force them apart can make the system harder
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  Speaker 1: to understand. A footprint printed across the page could communicate
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  Speaker 1: movement without requiring a sentence stating that somebody traveled from
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  Speaker 1: one place to another. A speech scroll emerging from somebody's
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  Speaker 1: mouth could indicate speech. A place could be identified through
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  Speaker 1: a glyph whose components encoded the not-well name of that location.
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  Speaker 1: A ruler could be accompanied by a sign that identified
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  Speaker 1: his personal name. Numerical dots, flags, or other conventions could
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  Speaker 1: convey quantity. Burning temples could communicate conquest, and day signs
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  Speaker 1: could establish a calendrical position, and the positioning of figures
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  Speaker 1: in relation to one another could communicate hierarchical, temporal, or
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  Speaker 1: ritual relationships. The extraordinary thing is that researchers are continuing
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  Speaker 1: to uncover just how linguistically sophisticated these visual systems could be.
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  Speaker 1: Recent scholarship has argued that images of central Mexican deities
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  Speaker 1: can contain what have been called embedded glottograms, visual components
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  Speaker 1: capable of encoding sounds associated with the deity's name. What
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  Speaker 1: we think we are seeing as an identifying costume element
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  Speaker 1: or symbolic attribute may therefore be doing several things simultaneously.
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  Speaker 1: helping identify the god visually, communicating the god's qualities, and
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  Speaker 1: contributing phonetic information to the god's written name. That possibility
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  Speaker 1: fundamentally changes the way we should look at these pages.
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  Speaker 1: We are not simply staring at religious artwork that happens
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  Speaker 1: to contain symbols. We may be looking at a visual
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  Speaker 1: linguistic construction in which the deity's body itself participates in
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  Speaker 1: the act of writing. This is one reason the codices
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  Speaker 1: can appear bewildering to somebody raised inside an alphabetic tradition.
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  Speaker 1: We instinctively search for the equivalent of a sentence because
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  Speaker 1: we have been trained to locate meaning primarily inside ordered
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  Speaker 1: strings of words. The page in front of us may
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  Speaker 1: instead be communicating through a network of relationships, and the
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  Speaker 1: reader's job is to recognize how the components work together.
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  Speaker 1: A sign's meaning may depend upon where it appears, what
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  Speaker 1: it accompanies, which direction it faces, which deity stands beside it,
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  Speaker 1: which numeral is attached to it, and what larger calendrical
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  Speaker 1: sequence contains it. In other words, the manuscript may not
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  Speaker 1: simply describe a relational universe, because its very structure may
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  Speaker 1: imitate one by distributing meaning across relationships rather than confining
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  Speaker 1: it to a linear sentence. This becomes even more important
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  Speaker 1: when we consider the survival of these books, because the
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  Speaker 1: handful of manuscripts that reached us did not all come
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  Speaker 1: from the same historical moment. Some were created in pre-conquest world,
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  Speaker 1: others emerged in the first generations after conquest, and many
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  Speaker 1: were produced in circumstances where indigenous and European systems of
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: writing were already interacting. The problem has always been deciding
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  Speaker 1: how far a particular manuscript can be trusted as evidence
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  Speaker 1: for practices that existed before Christianity transformed the intellectual landscape.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: One of the most interesting developments in this entire project
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  Speaker 1: occurred only recently. For many years, the date of the
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  Speaker 1: Tono Lomato de Orban, one of the surviving manuscripts connected
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  Speaker 1: with the 260-day ritual calendar, remained uncertain. It had at
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: various times been treated as potentially colonial, and its relationship
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  Speaker 1: to other divinatory codices were debated. In August 2026, Mexico's
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: National Institute of Anthropology and History announced results from an
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: interdisciplinary study including radiocarbon dating that supported a genuinely pre-Hispanic origin,
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  Speaker 1: proposing approximately 1494 as its date of manufacture, while acknowledging
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: the normal range of uncertainty surrounding carbon dating. The same
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: announcement described the manuscript as having been associated with divinatory
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: or mantic predictions and noted that it contains the 260-day Tonopuali,
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  Speaker 1: patron deities in the imagery connected with its 13-day divisions.
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  Speaker 1: That matters because the Tono Lomato de Orban is not
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: merely a colonial recollection of a lost divinatory tradition. According
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: to the new material evidence, we are dealing with a
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: manuscript whose origins extend back into the final decades before
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  Speaker 1: the Spanish invasion. And the thing encoded inside that manuscript
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: is where the entire Nahua system begins to change shape.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: Most modern people experience calendars as systems of organization. The
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: calendar tells us we are inside an abstract sequence. October 4th, 2026, Monday, Tuesday,
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: three weeks from now, last year, next year. Individual dates
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: acquire emotional meaning because something happens on them, but the
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: underlying units of time are generally assumed to be neutral.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: A minute occurring tomorrow is not cosmologically different from a
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: minute occurring next month, and nothing about being born on
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: a Wednesday rather than a Thursday is expected to shape
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: the structure of a character. the Tonopuale ask us to
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: imagine a radically different relationship with time. This ritual count
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: consisted of 260 unique combinations created through the continuous interaction
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: of 20 day signs and a repeating sequence of 13 numbers.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: Rather than simply progressing through 20 signs and starting over,
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: the numerical sequence and the sequence of day signs moved together,
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: generating combinations that did not repeat until the full cycle
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: of 260 days had been completed The cycle was organized
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: into 13-day units, conventionally called trecenas, and surviving divinatory manuscripts
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: associated patron beings and other symbolic elements with those calendrical periods.
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: INAH's catalog describes the Tonal Amato de Orban specifically as
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: a book of the count of the days and destinies,
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  Speaker 1: showing the patron deity of each trecena alongside numbered days
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  Speaker 1: and other associated figures. The important point is not merely mathematical,
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: but interpretive, because within this system, time itself possesses qualities,
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: and certain configurations could be regarded as more favorable or
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: dangerous than others. And those qualities could become relevant to decisions,
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: ritual actions, and, most importantly, for the story, the moment
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: of birth. This is the context in which the Tona
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: Pukwai becomes so important. Other translations often call this person
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: a soothsayer or a fortune teller. but those words immediately
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: evoke European street divination and can obscure the technical nature
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: of the role. The term refers to somebody knowledgeable in
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: ritual count, somebody capable of reading and interpreting the qualities
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: associated with particular day combinations. The Florentine Codex preserves a
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: remarkable passage describing parents summoning these specialists after their child's birth.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: According to the Nahuatl text, the specialist carefully asked exactly
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: when the child had been born so they could determine
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: what kind of day it had been. The accompanying image
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: makes the relationship between human life, calendar, and book almost
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: impossible to miss, because the scene itself is indexed with
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: the tonal powali, the child's towali, the specialist, the book,
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: and the act of reading it. Imagine what that means conceptually,
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: because the child's birth does not occur against an empty
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: backdrop called time. The child arrives inside a particular configuration
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: of time. and a trained specialist can examine that configuration
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: as meaningful information. This is where comparisons with astrology become tempting,
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: because a Western astrologer also asks when somebody was born
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: and then interprets the configuration associated with that moment. There
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: is a genuine structural resemblance there, but we should not
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: stop before turning resemblance into identity. Now our calendrical divination
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: does not require the 12 zodiac signs, planetary houses, or
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: Greco-Roman celestial mechanics of European astrology. Calling the system Aztec
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: astrology might help somebody understand that birth timing mattered, but
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: it also imports a conceptual framework that does not belong there.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: It is more accurate to call it what it is,
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: calendrical divination. The difference is important because the Tonopahwali tell
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: us something much deeper about Nahuatl cosmology than a superficial
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: comparison with horoscopes ever could. It suggests a universe in
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: which time is not simply measured but qualified, where the
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: moment in which something begins participates in the character of
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: what has begun. And once the calendar becomes connected to
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: the newborn child, we encounter the word Tonali, a term
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: so difficult to translate that almost any single English equivalent
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: destroys part of the conceptual field surrounding it. There is
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: one calendar correction worth making before we move on, because
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: even the familiar statement that the Nawa had two calendars
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: can become too neat. The standard modern explanation usually places
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: the 260-day Tonopuwali beside a 360-day annual calendar and then
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: explains how larger cycles emerge from their interactions. That model
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: is useful as an introduction, but philological work on 16th
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: century Nahuatl terminology suggests that indigenous timekeeping was not necessarily
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: organized through exactly the same categories later scholars created for it.
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: Gabriel Krul's study of Nahuatl calendrical terminology argues that the
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: sources distinguish at least three important counts rather than simply
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: two calendars. The Tonopahuali, the divinatory count of days, the
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: Senfo Puala Puali, the count organized through the 18 20-day
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: festival periods, and the Chutla Puali, a count of years.
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: Other scholarship likewise emphasizes that these counts could measure, name,
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: and qualify time in different ways rather than functioning as
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: two mechanical gears inside one master calendar. That distinction matters
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: for the argument we are making here because it reminds
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: us that calendar is another translation category. We hear the
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: word and imagine one object hanging on a wall that
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: tells us the date. Now our timekeeping could instead involve
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: overlapping counts used for different kinds of temporal knowledge, ritual festivals,
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: year names, auspicious or dangerous days, agricultural coordination, and divination.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: The point is not that the familiar 260 vs. 365
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: explanation is useless. It is that the actual indigenous vocabulary
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: wants us not to mistake a teaching diagram for the
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: whole intellectual system. And once we recognize that multiple ways
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: of counting time could coexist, the Tonopuahe becomes even more interesting.
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: It was not simply their calendar. It was one specialized
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: temporal technology within a wider ecology of counts, and its
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: particular power came from treating numbered days as qualitatively meaningful.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: From there, divination could move beyond the day count entirely
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: and into other procedures, including the casting of maize. The
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: Tonopuahe is the clearest doorway into Nawa divination, but it
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: should not leave us with the impression that reading the
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: hidden word meant doing only one thing with the calendar.
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: Mesoamerican divinatory practice included additional procedures, and one of the
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: most important for our purposes involved maize itself. Yolaú González
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: Torres surveyed traditions of divination by maize, in which kernels
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: were cast and the resulting configurations interpreted to answer questions
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: about illness, misfortune, missing people or objects, and future outcomes.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: The evidence comes from multiple Mesoamerican communities and periods, so
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: we should not collapse every example into one standardized Aztec technique.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: But the broader pattern matters. Ordinary agricultural material could become
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: a formal instrument of interpretation when manipulated according to inherited rules.
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: Araceli Rojas has shown us how useful this becomes for
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: understanding the older divinatory world. Her work among contemporary Ayuk
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: communities in Oaxaca documents maize seed casting operating alongside a
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: surviving 260-day calendar, and uses that living practice comparatively to
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: reconsider pre-colonial diviners, including specialists such as the Nawa Tonopukui
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: and the manuscripts associated with the Borgia group. That does
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: not mean a modern Ayyuk ceremony is a fossilized copy
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: of what somebody in Tenochtitlan did 500 years ago. It
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: means that the survival of multiple linked mantic technologies elsewhere
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: in Mesoamerica warns us against imagining the Tonopahuali as a
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: solitary machine functioning in isolation from diagnosis, healing, and other
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: forms of divination. And there is even more important correction here.
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: Divination was not always merely predictive. The system that identifies
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: danger can also prescribe a response. Elodie Dupay-Garcia's 2026 Reassessment
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: of Reverse of the Codex Gospi argues that imagery long
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: treated as difficult or secondary can be understood in relation
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: to offerings made to define effigies. Her larger proposal is
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: especially valuable for this episode. After obtaining information about future
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: circumstances through manipulation of the 260-day count, Ritual specialists could
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: consult manuscript knowledge for the offerings or procedures appropriate to
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: those circumstances and attempt to influence what happened next. That
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: changes the emotional logic of the whole system. A bad
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: configuration did not necessarily reduce a person to passive fatalism.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: Divination could create a sequence, identify the condition, interpret the danger,
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: determine an appropriate time or offering, and act. Prediction and
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: prescription could therefore belong to the same technology of interpretation.
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: The manuscript did not simply tell you what the word meant.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: In some contexts, it could help tell you what to
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: do about it. That distinction will matter throughout the rest
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: of this series, because it moves us away from the
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: cartoon image of ancient people helplessly obeying omens and towards
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: something more structurally interesting, a culture in which hidden information
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: could be diagnosed, classified, and answered through specialized practice. And
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: once a system like that becomes attached to the newborn child,
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: we encounter the word tonali, a term so difficult to
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: translate that almost any single English equivalent destroys part of
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: the conceptual field surrounding it. Popular introductions to Nahuatl religion
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: often explain tonali by calling it one of the three
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: souls supposedly possessed by every person. That translation is convenient
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: because Western audiences already understand what the word soul is
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: supposed to mean. But convenience can become a trap when
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: one English word covers a constellation of concepts that were
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: not separated in the same way within Nahuatl thought. The
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: word Tenali belongs to a linguistic family connected with warmth
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: and the shining of the sun, and its historical meanings
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: move through territories involving the day, solar heat, calendrical destiny, fortune,
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: personal vitality, and the condition of an individual. That mixture
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: is precisely what makes this concept interesting. We want one definition.
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: The source material keeps giving us relationships. The child is
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: born on a particular day whose calendrical identity participates in
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: the child's tonali, while a tonali simultaneously evokes heat and
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: solar warmth. So the newborn's physical vitality becomes conceptually entangled
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: with the structure of time itself. And evidence surrounding childbirth
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: makes the relationship with heat even more striking. Scholarship Examining
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: Early Nawa Sources has discussed accounts in which a newborn
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: remained associated with the household hearth during the first days
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: after birth, while restrictions were placed on removing fire from
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: the house because doing so was believed to threaten the
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: child's own heat or vital condition. The practice has been
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: interpreted in relation to the wider semantic and cosmological territory
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: surrounding Tonali. What I find fascinating here is that we
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: do not need to invent hidden neuroscience or mystical electricity
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: to understand why such a system might emerge. Because living
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: human bodies are warm while corpses become cold. Infants are
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: physically vulnerable to temperature loss, fever can transform consciousness and behavior,
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: fire protects and warms human communities, and the sun supplies
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: the most obvious source of heat in the visible world.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: Every culture can observe these relationships without possessing a thermometer
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: or modern physiology. The distinctly Nahuatl feature is what happens
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: when those observable facts become integrated into a cosmological system.
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: Heat is not merely measured as temperature. It can participate
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: in ideas about vitality, calendrical identity, and the constitution of
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: the person. The sun, the day, the hearth, and the
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: newborn are no longer independent subjects, because within this conceptual system,
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: they become connected parts of the same field of meaning.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: That is why translating Tonali simply as soul is so destructive.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: The word soul encourages us to imagine an invisible spiritual
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: person hidden somewhere inside the visible biological person. But Tonali
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: puts us outward toward the sun, the calendar, heat, birth,
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: and destiny while simultaneously pulling us inward toward bodily vitality.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: Rather than locating the individuality exclusively inside himself, the concept
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: places him within relationships that extend beyond his skin. That
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: brings us directly to the famous claim that Nahuatl people
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: possess three separate souls. because Tenali is usually placed beside
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: Teolea and Ihiyotl in a neat three-part diagram that has
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: circulated through both academic and popular writing for decades. The
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: diagram is memorable precisely because it is so neat, but
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: that neatness may also be one of the reasons we
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: should distrust it. One of the most influential reconstructions of
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: Nauwa ideas about the human person came from the great
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: historian Alfredo López-Austin. whose scholarship explored the relationship between body, cosmology, medicine,
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: and animating entities throughout ancient Mesoamerica. Within that reconstruction, three
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: components became particularly famous. Tonali, associated especially with the head, heat,
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: and destiny. Teolia, associated with the heart and personal life
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: or identity. And Ihi Yotul, associated with interior bodily processes,
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: breath-like forces, emotions, and the region of the liver. that
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: model became so influential that it eventually began appearing as
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: a straightforward fact. Search for the Aztec soul, and you
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: will frequently encounter diagrams displaying three bodily centers as though
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: we possess an indigenous anatomical manual explicitly stating that every
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: person contains exactly three supernatural substances located in exactly three organs.
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: That actual evidence is considerably more complicated than that tidy
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: diagram suggests. In 2018, scholars Justina Oko and Julia Majacek
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: published a major reassessment of teolia, examining the way the
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: term appears in early colonial Nahuatl and the enormous problem
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: created by Christian missionary translation. They found that teolia, Y-O-L-I-A,
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: was heavily used in Christian contexts to express ideas such
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: as soul and spirit, sometimes alongside the borrowed Spanish-derived word anima.
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: and they ultimately argued that the concept as it appears
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: in this form may have been an early colonial neologism
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: influenced by Christianity, rather than a securely documented pre-conquest soul
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: entity that can simply be projected backward unchanged. That does
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: not make Lopez Austin's entire reconstruction worthless, nor does it
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: prove that pre-Hispanic Nahua people possess no concepts connecting life, heart, breath,
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: or vitality. What it does is force us to acknowledge
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: how dangerous colonial translation can be. Imagine what happened intellectually
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: after the conquest, when Franciscan, Dominican, and other missionaries arrived
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: carrying a developed Christian theology in which human beings possessed souls,
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: sins required confession, demons tempted humanity, and salvation depended upon
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: entire vocabulary of invisible spiritual realities. Those missionaries began learning
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: Nawa'u so they could preach Christianity. Wainawa intellectuals learned Christian
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: concepts so they could translate, teach, negotiate, and survive within
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: the new colonial system. Both sides had to find words
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: for things that did not line up perfectly. Existing Nawa'u
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: words were stretched, new compounds were produced, Spanish words entered Nawa'u,
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: Christian concepts acquired indigenous vocabulary, and indigenous concepts were described
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: through Christian terminology. Then, centuries later, Historians opened those documents
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: and attempted to reconstruct a pre-Christian worldview hidden beneath those
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: layers of translation, which is an extraordinarily difficult problem. If
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: a 16th century Nahuatl text uses a particular word for soul,
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: we'll be looking at an ancient indigenous category preserved under
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: colonial rule, a pre-existing term whose meaning has shifted, or
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: a new expression deliberately created to translate Christian doctrine. Sometimes
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: the answer may be different from one text to another.
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: This is why we should stop saying that the Nawa
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: definitely possessed three souls, as though the question has been settled.
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: The controversy actually gives us something more interesting than a
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: tidy three-soul anatomy, because instead of forcing the evidence into
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: three fixed spiritual substances, the evidence suggests that Nawa ideas
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: about personhood involve numerous interacting bodily, social, environmental, and calendrical
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: relationships in which heat, the head, and the heart, blood, breath,
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: and internal bodily forces, birth timing, dreams, and community relationships
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: could all matter without needing to be reduced to exactly
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: three detachable soul substances. As we will shortly see, certain
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: traditions surrounding the Nuali could even extend aspects of identity
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: and power outside the ordinary visible body. For this episode,
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: I think the best way to describe that pattern is
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: the distributed person. I want to be clear that distributed
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: person is our analytical phrase, not a know-how term preserved
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: in a codex. I am using it because the familiar
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: western model of a biological body containing one detachable spirit
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: soul does not adequately describe the complexity we are seeing.
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: Now our personhood appears less like one invisible object hidden
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: in the body and more like a network of vital
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: conditions and relationships that participate in making the person who
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: they are. The heart gives us another example of this problem,
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: because in the Wa'au world, Yolo'u means heart, but the
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: heart existed simultaneously as anatomy and as an extraordinarily powerful
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: metaphor for interiority, character, courage, thought, emotion, and preciousness. Blood, etzli,
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: similarly existed as both literal bodily substance and a medium
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: of ritual meaning. The Florentine Codex preserves rhetorical pairings of
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: heart and blood in contexts associated with something deeply precious,
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: demonstrating that the organs and substance involved in sacrificial practice
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: cannot be understood solely through their biological function. That point
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: becomes essential when we reach human sacrifice in Part 2,
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: because the modern observer sees heart extraction and understandably sees
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: catastrophic violence. Biologically, that is precisely what it was, and
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: there is no reason to sanitize it. Yet, if our
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: historical explanation stops at violence, We have not explained why
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: the heart mattered. Within a ritual cosmology, the heart could
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: simultaneously be flesh, life, interiority, precious substance, and material entering
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: a relationship between human beings and divine forces. Blood presents
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: the same problem because to us, blood is tissue, plasma, cells, proteins,
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: oxygen transport, and immune function. To a ritual culture, it
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: can also become visible life leaving the body, a substance
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: deliberately offered, a marker of lineage, warfare, birth, injury, and mortality.
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: Self-bloodletting therefore transforms the body from something that merely performs
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: the ritual into something that supplies the ritual with material.
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: None of this means Nawa people failed to recognize ordinary
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: biological reality. They knew perfectly well that excessive bleeding could
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: kill somebody, that wounds hurt, and that bodies decayed. What
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: differs is the network of meanings constructed around those realities.
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: The same principle applies to breath, which is invisible, yet
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: it is one of the most obvious signs distinguishing the
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: living from the dead. It moves in and out of
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: the body without being seen, changes during fear and exertion,
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: and disappears when life ends. We should not be surprised
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: that breath-like concepts become connected with vitality and interior states.
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: Human physiology practically invites those metaphors. Heat works the same
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: way because the living body is warm while the corpse
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: becomes cold. The infant is vulnerable to cold, fever alters behavior,
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: fire can preserve life, and sunlight warms the body. These
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: are ordinary observations, but cosmology determines what those observations mean.
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: This is why the Nawa body becomes so interesting for us.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: The body is not simply an anatomical machine waiting to
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: be decoded by modern medicine. nor is it merely a
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: prison containing an immaterial ghost. It sits inside a network
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: containing physiology with time, environment, social identity, and sacred order.
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: Because sometimes meaningful information did not come from the body
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: or the calendar at all. Instead, the environment itself could
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: behave in ways that were strange enough to demand interpretation.
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: Book 5 of the Florentine Codex is one of the
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: strangest surviving windows into Nahuatl interpretation. because it deals extensively
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: with omens and prognostications, including events that could appear remarkably
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: mundane until they occurred in the wrong place, at the
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: wrong time, or under the wrong circumstances. That distinction is
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: critical because an animal simply existing in the countryside is
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: not necessarily a message. A familiar sound produced by an
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: obvious human source is not necessarily an omen. What becomes
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: significant is frequently the departure from expectations. the moment when
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: ordinary reality behaves in a way that appears out of place.
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: One of the most memorable examples is the Hualtapuzli, usually
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: translated as the night axe. The Florentine Codex describes people hearing,
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: during the deep quiet of night, a knocking or chopping
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: sound resembling somebody cutting wood. This sound was particularly associated
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: with temple personnel undertaking nocturnal offerings or penises in remote locations.
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: and the text presents it as an ominous experience capable
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: of producing considerable fear. There is something psychologically powerful about
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: that description even before any supernatural interpretation is added. Imagine
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: leaving a populated settlement during the night, entering a dark
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: environment while performing religious penance, having your visual field reduced
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: by darkness, knowing that you are outside the safety of
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: ordinary social space, and suddenly hearing the repeated impact of
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: an axe somewhere you cannot see. Modern neuroscience can tell
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: us many things about what happens next. Because auditory attention
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: can increase, sympathetic arousal can mobilize, heart rate can rise,
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: the brain can begin prioritizing ambiguous threat cues. Reduced visual
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: information can make auditory uncertainty more powerful. And expectation, together
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: with cultural training, can shape the interpretation of ambiguous stimuli.
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: All of that may explain aspects of the experience. but
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: it does not explain the meaning assigned to that experience
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: within Nahuatl culture. The important historical question is why that
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: particular unexplained sound became legible as important within Nahuatl culture.
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: The psychological mechanism producing fear is not the same thing
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: as the cultural system telling the frightened person what that
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: fear signifies. This distinction between mechanism and meaning is going
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: to become increasingly important in Part 2 when we begin
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: dealing with fasting, sleep disruption, darkness, mirrors, psychoactive plants, and
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: ritual pain. Modern neuroscience can help us understand what certain
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: practices do to perception and consciousness, but it cannot retroactively
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: tell us what the experience meant to a Nawa participant.
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: Another omen preserved in Book 5 demonstrates the importance of
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: location even more clearly. The text describes the epitel, the skunk,
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: entering or giving birth within a person's house. This could
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: be interpreted as an ominous sign connected with the potential
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: death of the householder, and the explanation explicitly notes that
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: the animal's expected habitat was outside human dwellings among fields, rocks, magwai,
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: and cactus. The same passage associates the animal with Tezcatlipoca
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: and provides an unforgettable description of the animal's defensive odor.
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: The interesting feature here is that the skunk has not
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: necessarily become ominous because skunks are evil. The skunk becomes
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: ominous because a boundary has been violated. The wild animal
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: is suddenly inside the house. Something expected to remain there
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: has crossed into here, and the altered relationship between creature
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: and place becomes information. This pattern gives us a useful
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: way to think about Nawa Omen interpretation without caricaturing it
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: as a random superstition. An anomalous event becomes culturally legible
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: because a community has inherited a framework explaining which deviations
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: matter and how they might be interpreted. For lack of
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: a better modern phrase, we might call this as semiotics
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: of reality, a system in which unusual events can function
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: as signs. The phrase is ours, not theirs, but it
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: captures something important. Meaning is generated through relationships between an event,
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: its context, and an established interpretive tradition. Notice how closely
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: this resembles what we already saw in the Codex, where
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: a glyph by itself does not always tell us everything,
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: because its position, neighboring signs, number, associated deity, and broader
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: arrangement all matter. Likewise, the animal by itself may not
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: constitute the omen, because its location, behavior, timing, and deviation
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: from expectation are what make the event culturally legible, turning
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: the world into something readable when relationships become significant. And
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: once reality can communicate through irregularities, dreams become impossible to ignore.
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: because dreams are perhaps the most universal human experience in
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: which the ordinary relationships defining reality collapse completely. Few Mesoamerican
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: concepts have suffered more abuse in modern occult writing than Nawali,
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: often rendered through Spanish-derived form Nawal. In popular treatments, the
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: definition is usually compressed into something like an Aztec witch
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: who can turn into an animal. And the animal is
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: frequently a jaguar because jaguars look appropriately mysterious and powerful.
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: There are genuine traditions of animal transformation involved in the
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: larger complex scholars call Novalismo. But reducing the subject to
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: a rare jaguar story misses almost everything that makes it
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: intellectually interesting. Roberto Martinez Gonzalez's major study, El Novalismo, demonstrates
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: just how wide the conceptual territory is. tracing relationships among
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: the Nuali, the human person, Tonali, heat, breath-like entities, birth, destiny,
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: animal or supernatural counterparts, dreams, transformation, ritual specialization, and the
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: wider Mesoamerican understanding of human identity. The central question should
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: therefore not be whether somebody literally transformed his biological body
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: into a jaguar in the way a modern fantasy film
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: depicts shapeshifting. That question forces indigenous traditions to defend themselves
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: against a standard of literalism they were never designed to satisfy.
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: The more interesting question is what it means for a
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: culture to conceptualize aspects of a person's identity or supernatural
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: capacity through a relationship with another being. That relationship might
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: involve an animal or a supernatural entity, might be connected
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: with the circumstances of birth, might become known through dreams,
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: and might be associated with ritual vocation or unusual power.
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: Depending upon the community and context, such a relationship could
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: be dangerous, protective, or something that resisted either simple category.
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: And because Mesoamerica contained enormous cultural and historical diversity, we
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: should not resist pretending that every community meant exactly the
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: same thing by every related term. Dreams become particularly important
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: because dreams already destabilize the boundaries of ordinary personhood without
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: requiring any theology whatsoever. Every night, a human being can
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: lie motionless in one location while experiencing himself traveling through
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: another world, speaking with dead relatives, confronting monsters, becoming another creature,
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: flying through the sky, or receiving information from beings that
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: do not exist within his waking environment. Modern neuroscience gives
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: us REM sleep, memory consolidation, emotional processing, eternally generated sensory imagery,
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: and changes in cortical activity. Those explanations are powerful. but
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: they still do not answer the ancient existential question of
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: where the dreamer believed they had been, a question human
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: cultures had to answer long before sleep laboratories existed. If
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: dreaming is interpreted as a domain in which aspects of
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: the self can counter beings or conditions inaccessible to waking consciousness,
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: then dreams become a natural arena for ideas surrounding transformation, doubles,
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: and supernatural vocation. Martinez-Gonzalez's study states, devotes substantial attention to
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: dream and transformation precisely because these traditions cannot be understood
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: simply by asking whether biological metamorphosis literally occurred. This is
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: where our idea of the distributed person becomes useful again.
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: If the person is not imagined as an isolated consciousness
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: sealed completely inside a biological body, then relationships with animals,
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: divine beings, calendar signs, and dream identities can participate in
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: what that person is. rather than functioning merely as poetic
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: symbols added from the outside. That does not mean the
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: Nawa lacked an ordinary distinction between a human being and
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: an animal, because obviously they did. The point is subtler.
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: Identity can have dimensions that extend beyond anatomical boundaries. The
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: same is true even in modern culture, although we usually
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: describe it metaphorically. Somebody can say that a family, profession, nation,
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: or religious community forms part of who they are, despite
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: none of those things being located inside their skull. The
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: difference is that many traditional cosmologies allow some external relationships
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: to possess a degree of ontological reality that modern secular
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: western thought usually refuses. Nowali traditions push us directly into
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: that territory while also leading us toward another problem. Because
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: if certain human beings possess unusual ritual or supernatural capacities,
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: what should we call those people? The answer is much
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: more complicated than the modern catch-all word shaman, because the
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: surviving sources preserve a range of specialists whose knowledge, authority, techniques,
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: and reputations were not interchangeable. In 1967, Alfredo Lopez Austin
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: published an article with one of the greatest titles in
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: the history of Nahuatl studies, 40 Classes of Magicians in
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: the Nahuatl World. His point was not that some Nahuatl
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: government office maintained an official registry containing exactly 40 magical professions.
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: He was attempting to classify the remarkable variety of people
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: described in the sources as possessing specialized knowledge or supernatural capabilities.
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: His own abstract emphasizes that the complexity of what he
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: termed magic in the Nawa world generated specialists in numerous
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: different supernatural procedures. The number itself should make us suspicious
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: of of every documentary narrator who casually says the Aztec Shaman.
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: There was no single role that neatly combined every practitioner
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: we might classify as healer, diviner, priest, herbalist, sorcerer, dream interpreter,
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: weather worker, transformation specialist, and diagnostician. The Florentine Codex itself
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: demonstrates that variety because Book 10 includes a chapter that
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: the Spanish and later English traditions categorize under labels such
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: as enchanters, sorcerers, and magicians, but the Nahuatl text presents
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: multiple distinct terms and differentiates. for example, between beneficial and
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: destructive forms of Nawali, while also identifying the Tenalpukwai among
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: the wider range of specialists. This creates an enormous translation problem,
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: because if somebody treats illness with herbs while also interpreting
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: its supernatural significance, should we call that person a physician
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: or a magician? If somebody predicts the qualities associated with
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: a child's birth through a codified kalingical system, should we
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: call them an astrologer, priest, mathematician, or fortune teller? If
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: somebody performs rituals intended to influence rainfall, are they practicing religion,
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: meteorological magic, or agricultural ritual? The problem becomes even more
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: obvious when somebody feared for causing illness through supernatural means
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: also knows medicinal plants capable of producing real pharmacological effects,
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: because our categories push us to choose among poisoner, sorcerer,
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: and pharmacist, when the historical role may cut across all three.
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: Our categories demand that we separate those roles because modern
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: Western institutions have spent centuries dividing knowledge into specialized departments
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: in which medicine and religion became distinct professions. Astronomy separated
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: from astrology, chemistry separated from alchemy, psychology acquired its own
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: institutional boundaries, and magic was pushed outside the accepted structure
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: of knowledge altogether. The Nahuatl did not inherit those exact borders.
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: which does not mean that they had no distinctions of
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: their own, because clearly they did. It means that their
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: distinctions were not necessarily the same ones inherited by modern
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: Western institutions. That is why the phrase Nawa magic has
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: to be used carefully. It can be useful as an
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: umbrella when we are talking to a modern audience, but
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: if we let it become the explanation, we flatten dozens
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: of indigenous categories into one European word. Spanish missionaries intensified
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: this problem because they arrived carrying their own theological taxonomy.
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: Practices could be classified as idolatry, sorcery, divination, superstition, or
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: demonic deception, according to Christian intellectual categories that had developed
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: during centuries of European theological debate. The Nahuatl deity might
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: become a demon in Spanish translation, even though the indigenous
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: term obviously did not mean a fallen Christian angel. A
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: divinatory specialist might become a soothsayer, and an indigenous ritual
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: could become superstition. Those translations tell us something important about
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: colonial Christianity, but they do not automatically tell us how
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: pre-conquest Nahuatl people classified themselves. That is why the Tenalpa
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: Kwai interests me so much. Unlike the generic word magician,
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: his role allows us to see an actual specialist interacting
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: with a structured body of knowledge. A child is born,
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: the parents seek an expert. The expert establishes the precise
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: time of birth, the calendrical configuration is interpreted, and a
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: manuscript can participate in that process. That is not a
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: random guessing, but a culturally formulized technology of interpretation, structured
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: through inherited knowledge, specialists, manuscripts, and rules. Whether its predictions
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: were objectively accurate according to modern statistical standards is a
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: separate question. The historical fact that matters first is that
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: the system contained rules, specialists, manuscripts, categories, and inherited procedures.
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: That is why I keep returning to the idea of
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: the Codex as technology. We hear the word technology in
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: imagined computers, engines, electrical systems, and machines, but technology in
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: the broader anthropological sense is organized technique embodied through tools
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: and knowledge, which means writing, compasses, musical notation, agriculture, and
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: calendars can all be understood as technologies without requiring electricity
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: or machinery. The divinatory manuscript used by a trained specialist
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: to interpret structured combinations of day signs and numbers also
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: functions as a technology, even if its output is not
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: electricity or mechanical motion but interpretation itself. That book alone
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: does not produce that interpretation anymore than handing somebody who
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: cannot read music a symphony score makes them a pianist.
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: The knowledge resides partly in the object and partly in
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: the trained human being capable of using it. That relationship
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: between manuscript and specialist is one of the most important
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: things we have uncovered because it begins connecting everything we
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: have discussed so far. The codex organizes relationships. The calendar
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: organizes relationships. The specialists interpret relationships. The newborn enters relationships
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: through the moment of birth. Tonali connects the individual with heat, time,
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: and solar qualities. Omens become meaningful through abnormal relationships among creature, place, sound,
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: and circumstance. and Noali traditions complicate the relationship between human
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: identity and beings outside the ordinary body. What begins to
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: emerge is therefore not merely a collection of unrelated superstitions,
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: but a repeated intellectual pattern in which meaning appears through relationships.
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: This is where I think we finally reach the central
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: argument of Part 1, and I want to make the
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: distinction between evidence and interpretation very explicit. No surviving Nawa
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: philosopher left us a manuscript saying that the universe is
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: an information system. And I would never put those words
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: in their mouths because that language belongs to us as
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: an analytical comparison rather than to the people whose worldview
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: we are reconstructing. Yet when we place the surviving practices
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: beside one another, a pattern becomes difficult to ignore. The
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: time of birth and the combination of number and day
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: sign can contain interpretable information. The codex can preserve and
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: organize that information. The body can communicate through heat, heart, blood, breath,
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: and condition. An unexpected animal or unexplained sound can become
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: meaningful information. A dream can become information. And relationships with
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: a Noali can communicate something about identity or supernatural capacity.
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: And specialized human beings exist precisely because not everybody possesses
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: the same ability to interpret all those signs. We might
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: therefore describe now our divinatory culture as involving a world
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: that could, under particular conditions, be read. Not everything was
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: a sign, and that distinction is important because if everything
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: means everything, interpretation becomes meaningless, and the category of omen
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: loses any analytical value. The interesting feature of the omen
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: material is that particular departures from ordinary expectation become significant.
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: The skunk in a field is not the same thing
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: as the skunk unexpectedly inside a house. The sound of
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: chopping wood produced by a visible person during the afternoon
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: is not equivalent to the mysterious chopping sound heard during
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: ritual activity in the dead of night. Context creates significance,
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: and the same principle appears inside the codex. A visual
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: sign does not float alone in an empty space. Its
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: meaning may change depending upon numeral, direction, associated deity, calendrical position,
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: and neighboring imagery. This gives us a remarkably coherent intellectual pattern.
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: Things mean something because of the relationship in which they appear.
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: That principle also helps explain why these manuscripts can feel
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: almost alien to modern readers. Alphabetic writing encourages us to
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: imagine meaning as a sequence in which we begin at
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: one point, move word by word across a line, reach
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: the end, drop to the next line, and continue allowing
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: meaning to unfold primarily through ordered syntax. A painting divinatory
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: manuscript can confront us with a page whose meaning is
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: distributed across space rather than confined to a sentence. The
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: eye moves among figures, numbers, signs, and orientations, and the
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: trained reader understands the network. The page therefore begins to
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: resemble the cosmology it encodes, because both are relational. The person, time, omen,
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: and even identity can acquire meaning through the networks in
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: which they are situated. And if we follow that logic
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: far enough, we arrive at a very different picture of
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: the human being from the one familiar to modern secular culture.
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: Modern neuroscience tends to locate the mechanisms supporting personal consciousness
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: overwhelmingly with the brain, and for very good empirical reasons,
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: because damage to particular brain systems can alter memory, changes
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: in neurotransmission can alter mood, destruction of neural tissue can
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: alter personality, and permanent loss of cerebral function eliminates the
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: behavioral capacities through which consciousness is ordinarily recognized. But culturally,
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: human beings have almost never restricted personhood exclusively to the
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: physical brain. Even today we say somebody has a broken heart,
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: describe courage as having heart, insist that somebody is in
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: our blood, talk about bad blood, hot blood, or cold blood,
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: and say that a person has lost their spirit, found themselves,
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: followed their heart, or experienced something in their bones, even
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: though modern physiology does not locate those psychological states literally
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: inside cardiac muscle, blood, or bone. Those expressions are remnants
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: of older bodily metaphors continuing inside a scientific society, and
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: they remind us how easily anatomical language can continue carrying
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: cultural meanings long after our explanatory models have changed. Now
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: our culture inhabited a world where bodily metaphors and cosmological
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: realities were even more deeply intertwined. The heart could both
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: be biological organ and interior center. Blood could be both
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: tissue and precious substance. Heat could be both physiological condition
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: and cosmological quality, and the day of birth could be
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: both chronology and destiny. The important lesson is therefore not
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: that Nawa Anatomy secretly anticipated modern science, but almost the opposite,
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: because it reminds us that human beings interpret biological experience
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: through culture. The nervous system makes fear possible while culture
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: helps determine what deserves to be feared. The brain generates dreams,
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: while culture helps determine whether those dreams are meaningless mental noise,
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: psychological symbolism, divine communication, or encounters with another layer of reality.
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: And the auditory system detects an unexplained nighttime sound, while
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: culture helps determine whether we call it an animal, an
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: acoustic illusion, a ghost, an omen, or Tezcatlipoca. The physical
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: phenomenon and the interpretation are different levels of explanation. And
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: once we keep those levels separate, we can finally compare
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: ancient ritual experience with modern science without insulting either one.
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: That becomes enormously important in part two, because everything we
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: have discussed so far has primarily involved interpreting information that appears.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: The calendar exists, the child is born, the omen occurs,
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: the dream happens, and the specialist reads what those circumstances
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: are believed to mean. But what happens when ritual is
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: deliberately constructed to alter the condition under which perception occurs?
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: combining fasting, wakefulness deep into the night, self-bloodletting, hours of
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: rhythmic movement, smoke-filled ritual space, restricted vision, psychoactive plants, and
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: in some circumstances, prolonged attention to a polished surface so
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: dark and reflective that ordinary visual perception begins struggling to
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: determine whether the image belongs to the world outside the
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: observer or to something emerging from inside the observer's own
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: visual system. That brings us toward one of the most
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: extraordinary figures in the Nahua religious world. But before we
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: reach him, there is one final caution we have to
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: carry with us. Almost everything in this episode sits inside
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: a historical paradox. We possess an enormous amount of detailed
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: information about Nahua religion, partly because Spanish missionaries worked obsessively
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: to understand it. And many of those missionaries want to
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: understand it precisely because they intended to destroy or replace it.
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: The Florentine Codex embodies that contradiction more clearly than almost
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: anything else. Without Sahagin's project and the Nawa intellectuals who
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: participated in it, we would have lost extraordinary amounts of linguistic, botanical, medical, ritual, historical,
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: and religious knowledge. At the same time, the project cannot
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: be removed from the Christian colonial world that made it possible.
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: That means every apparently simple claim has to pass through
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: several questions. Is the description coming from the Nawa'u column
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: or the Spanish column? Does the Spanish translation insert a
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: Christian category that the Nawa'u does not contain? Is the
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: informant describing something still practiced in the 16th century or
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: recalling a practice from before conquest? Has the meaning of
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: a Nawa'u word already shifted because Christian missionaries have begun
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: using it for decades? Is the image preserving an indigenous
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: visual convention introducing European artistic techniques or combining both? Was
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: the manuscript intended for indigenous readers, Spanish authorities, missionaries, or
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: multiple audiences at once? The recent debate over Teolia shows
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: exactly why this matters. The older three-souled reconstruction gave us
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: an elegant diagram, while newer linguistic analysis argues that one
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: of the central terms in that diagram may have taken
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: the form we know under colonial Christian influence. The correct
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: response is not to panic and conclude that nothing can
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: be known. The correct response is to become more precise
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: about degrees of certainty. We have very strong evidence that
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: calendrical divination existed because divinatory manuscripts survive and colonial Nawa'u
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: descriptions directly describe specialists reading the circumstances of birth. We
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: also have strong evidence surrounding Tonali and its relationship with day, heat,
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: and personal condition, documented omen traditions, extensive evidence for diverse
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: ritual specialists, and complicated but substantial traditions surrounding Nawali concepts,
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: while the places where the evidence becomes disputed should simply
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: be identified as disputed rather than smoothed over. That single
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: methodological decision will make this series stronger than 90% of
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: materials circulating online about Aztec occultism, because the goal is
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: not to make Nahuatl culture sound mysterious. It already is
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: mysterious enough when we tell the truth. We started this
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: episode with something that looked like a book and discovered
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: that the category of book was already inadequate. The Amoxili
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: could preserve a visual and linguistic system in which paintings, numbers, glyphs,
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: spatial relationships, and calendrical signs communicated together, while the Tlacuilo
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: occupied a role that does not divide cleanly into our
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: separate categories of artist and writer. The manuscript could contain
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: information that an untrained observer might not even recognize as writing,
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: and current scholarship continues uncovering linguistic mechanisms embedded inside imagery
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: that older researchers treated as purely pictorial. Then we watch
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: the book move from record to instrument. A child is born,
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: the parents seek specialists, the moment of birth is established,
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: and the ritual count is consulted. The 260-day Tonalpuali stops
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: being merely an Aztec calendar and reveals itself as a
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: structured system in which combinations of numbers and day signs
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: could possess qualities requiring interpretation. The Tonalamato de Orben, now
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: supported by new radiocarbon work as a pre-Hispanic manuscript dating
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: to approximately the late 15th century, gives us material evidence
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: that this divinatory technology genuinely existed before Spanish conquest rather
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: than surviving only through later colonial description. From there, the
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: argument moves from time into the body, where the distinction
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: between calendrical identity and physical vitality became increasingly difficult to
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: separate within the conceptual vocabulary we were examining. Tonali connected
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: us with a conceptual field involving day, solar heat, fortune, vitality,
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: and birth, and the old claim that the Nawa people
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: possessed exactly three souls began falling apart as soon as
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: we examined the linguistic evidence carefully. Rather than forcing the
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: person into a neat three-part spiritual anatomy, we found something
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: more interesting. A human being understood through relationships among heat, heart, blood, breath, identity, community,
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: calendrical circumstance, and forces whose boundaries did not necessarily stop
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: at the skin. From the body, the argument moved outward
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: again until the environment itself became readable under particular circumstances.
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: The night axe taught us that an unexplained sound could
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: become more than a sound when it occurred under particular
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: ritual conditions. The skunk entering the house taught us that
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: an ordinary animal could become extraordinary when it violated the
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: expected relationship between creature and place. The omen was not
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: simply an object, it was an event whose significance depended
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: upon context. Dreams extended that logic even further, because sleep
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: creates experiences in which the visible body remains in one
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: place while consciousness appears to travel somewhere else, encounter impossible beings,
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: or even become something other than itself. The broader traditions
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: surrounding the Nuali place transformation, animal counterparts, birth, destiny, dreams,
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: and specialized supernatural capacity into a conceptual world that cannot
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: be reduced to the cartoon image of an Aztec witch
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: physically turning into a jaguar. Finally, Lopez Austin's famous attempt
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: to classify 40 varieties of Nahuatl magical specialists destroyed the
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: notion that one word such as shaman can explain the
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: religious specialists of central Mexico. The source instead revealed different
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: people handling different forms of knowledge. some respected and some feared,
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: some connected with healing, some with divination, some with calendrical interpretation,
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: some with transformation, and some with activities that colonial authors
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: described as harmful sorcery. When all those pieces are placed together,
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: I think we finally see the underlying story. The Nawa
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: world preserves formal ways of deciding when an event, bodily condition, day, dream,
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: or anomaly might contain information beyond its obvious surface. The calendar, Manuscript, birth, body, omen,
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: and dream could all become objects of interpretation. And there
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: were specialists whose authority rested precisely upon knowing how to
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: perform those readings within inherited systems of knowledge. That does
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: not mean every Nawa person walked through life believing every noise, animal,
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: and dream was a supernatural message. It means their intellectual
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: world contains recognized systems for distinguishing ordinary events from potentially
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: meaningful ones. And those systems were embedded inside religion, ritual, medicine,
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: social authority, and inherited knowledge. That difference is enormous because
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: it separates a structured interpretive tradition from the caricature of
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: a population reacting superstitiously to every unusual event. Calling everything
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: superstition reduces each belief to an isolated absurdity in which
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: a strange animal supposedly means death, a birthday determines fate,
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: a noise in the woods predicts something and a dream
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: connects a person with another being, while the interpretive system
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: that makes those claims intelligible disappears from view. Placed individually
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: on a modern skeptic's table, each claim is easy to ridicule.
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: Placed back inside the culture that produced it, however, they
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: reveal a coherent question running underneath them all. What kinds
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: of relationships connect the visible world with information that is
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: not immediately visible? That is the question I think we
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: have actually been investigating, and it leaves us at exactly
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: the right point for part two, because everything we have
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: examined so far deals primarily with recognizing and interpreting signs
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: that appear within ordinary life. The next stage asks what
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: happens when human beings stop waiting for those signs and
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: begin deliberately modifying the body and sensory environment in order
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: to encounter something beyond ordinary perception. That means fasting, darkness,
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: night vigils, ritual exhaustion, repetitive movement, smoke, incense, bloodletting, pain,
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: psychoactive plants, and altered states of consciousness. It also means
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: material that may be almost perfectly designed to create ambiguity
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: and between visible reality and the mind interpreting it. Polished
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: black volcanic glass, obsidian, and standing directly behind that black
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: mirror is one of the most complex and unsettling divine
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: figures in central Mexican religion. A god associated with rulership, conflict, uncertainty, sorcery, destiny,
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: night and vision, whose name itself binds together an object
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: used for reflection with something that obscures sight rather than
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: clarifies it. Tezcatlapoca, the smoking mirror, and that is where
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: part two begins, because once we investigate the actual ritual
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: history of obsidian mirrors, we are going to discover something
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: that almost sounds fabricated until you follow the physical evidence
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: across the Atlantic. A Mexican obsidian mirror entered Europe after
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: the conquest, survived inside European collections, and eventually became associated
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: with one of the most famous figures in the entire
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: history of Western ceremonial magic, John Dee. so the same
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: material object has crossed between two completely different magical cosmologies.
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: The obvious temptation is to say that John Dee somehow
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: inherited Tezcatlipoca's magic, but the evidence does not allow us
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: to make that claim, and the real story is actually
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: more interesting than the fantasy. What we have is a
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: physical object whose biography connects indigenous Mexican ritual technology with
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: European occult history while preserving the enormous conceptual distance between
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 1: the two systems. Before we can understand why that matters,
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: we have to stand on the Mexican side of the
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: mirror first. We have to understand what people thought they
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: could see in darkness, what happened when ritual deliberately changed consciousness,
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: why blood and pain entered religious practice, what plants could
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: alter perception, and what death itself looked like in a
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: cosmology where the human person may never have been as
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: isolated from the surrounding universe as we imagine ourselves to be.
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: And that leaves us with the question hanging over everything
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: we have uncovered in Part 1 The Nawa clearly developed
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: sophisticated systems for reading a world filled with relationships among time, body, dream, animal, deity,
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: and sign. But in Part 2, we have to add
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: something more dangerous. What happens when you stop waiting for
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: the hidden world to speak and deliberately create the conditions
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: in which you expect it to answer? And that's the
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: end of another Occult Rejects. Hope you all enjoyed, and
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: until the next one.