Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Throwback: Hunab Ku, Ometeotl, & the Vocabulary of Conquest!

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Throwback: Hunab Ku, Ometeotl, & the Vocabulary of Conquest! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:00
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• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: Now, on with the show.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: You must excuse me.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: I've grown quite well.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: This hasn't been easy, I know.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: But you've learned a lesson.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: A lesson in honesty.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Honesty to yourself and honesty to others.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: That lesson will stand you in good step on your money.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think we've all learned a good lesson.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: I've always heard that honesty is the best policy.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm catching on a why that's some why that's some why that's some.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yamalino Chimen, and welcome to Tales from Mastlantis, the show where we explore Mesoamerican pseudo-history, new age nonsense, and other stories of adventure.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_04: And Ruben Ariano, also known as Tlacatica.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: Episode 2 Hunabku, Hometeo, and the Vocabulary of Conquest.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: In 1524, twelve Franciscan missionaries were sent to Mexico from Spain to convert the previously unknown indigenous people to Catholicism.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: To help facilitate this, the Spaniards constructed the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tla del Olco in 1536, where young indigenous nobles were trained in Catholic doctrine and taught to read and write using the Latin alphabet.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: These nobles held valuable insight into Mesoamerican cosmovision and helped determine how to manipulate it to serve the missionizing process.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: These indigenous aides would often use Mesoamerican vocabulary and concepts when attempting to translate Catholicism into indigenous terms.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: Pre-existing names such as Ipan Nemwani, he by whom one lives, Thlokenawake, possessor of the near, possessor of the surrounding, Teyokoyani, creator of people, and others were repurposed to represent the concepts of God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and other aspects of Christian belief.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: When there were no pre-existing indigenous names to properly convey a desired Catholic principle, indigenous aides created new terms and expressions known as neologisms in their language that could adequately carry the necessary meaning.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: So basically they they drew from pre-existing ideas and glossed them with Catholic principles, right?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: For example, the words Teotlashkali, sacred tortilla, and istak tlashkalcintli, little white tortilla, were both used to identify the Eucharist.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: As a result, an entirely new vocabulary to convert Mesoamericans to Catholicism was born.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: We refer to this appropriation and invention of indigenous terms in the service of religious conversion as the vocabulary of conquest.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: Hunabku was created for Real's Dictionary of Motu to introduce monotheism to the Maya people.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_02: In it, Hunabku is defined as the only living and true God, also the greatest of the gods of the people of Yucatan.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_04: He had no form because they said that he could not be represented as he was incorporeal.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: Sadly, the colonial origin of this term is often ignored or forgotten, and Hunabku has been mistakenly accepted by many as a legitimate pre-conquest Maya concept.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: As we shall soon see, this was only the beginning of a long and winding journey for the imaginary deity.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: Hunabku was repopularized in the 1950s by Domingo Martinez Paredes, a native speaker of Yucateco and professor at UNAM.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: In his 1964 book, Hunabku, Síntesis del Pensamiento Filosófico Maya, Paredes refers to Hunabku as the only giver of movement and measurement, and uses Hunapku to promote the idea that the Maya were a monotheistic people.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: Paredes was a member of the Movimiento Confederado Restaurador de la Cultura de Anahuac, or MCRCA, a Mexican nationalist organization with a reputation for spreading pseudo-historical accounts of Mexico's indigenous past.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: As a native Maya speaker, Paredes was unique among MCRCA membership, a fact he used to bolster credibility for his more outlandish claims regarding Maya history.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: In addition to promoting the fictional Hunabku, Paredes claimed that the Maya originated from a long-lost island that sunk in the Gulf of Mexico, that the word Jehovah comes from the Maya word for egg, and that Jesus Christ spoke Maya while dying on the cross.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: So obviously, this guy was, you know, a little out there.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_02: He was on to something.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: Or on something.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: The myth of Hunabku underwent yet another transformation, thanks to New Age author and artist Jose Arguez.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: In 1987, Arguez published his book, The Mayan Factor, featuring an image that he claimed represented Hunabku.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: This symbol is a Mexica design from the Codex Maglia Bechillano, so it's not Maya.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: Argüez modified this image by turning it into a circle and then changing the colors to black and white, creating something that resembles the Chinese yin and yang.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: Today this image can be seen on t-shirts, murals, jewelry, and tattoos.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: Unfortunately, most remain ignorant of what this alleged depiction of Hunapku truly is.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: A new age distortion of a Meshika design promoting a Catholic principle under an invented Maya name.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: Man, that's some uh contortions there.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a hell of an onion to uh to cut through.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_02: Ome Teot.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_02: Perhaps the most notorious example of the vocabulary of conquest is the alleged Mexica deity known as Ome Teot.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: Most students of Mesoamerican history were introduced to the idea of Ometeot through the writings of Miguel León Portilla and Ágel Maria Garibe.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_02: Both Portilla and Garibe promoted the use of Ometeot as a way of fusing the concepts of the creator couple, Ometecutli and Ome Siwat, into a singular creator god of the Mexica.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: In his book Aztec Philosophy, Portilla describes Ometeot as the god of duality and the true God through which all that exists is conceived and begotten.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: However, many Mesoamericanist scholars consider Leon Portilla and Garibe's translations of classical Nahuatl texts unreliable, especially regarding the elusive Ometeot.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: For example, on more than one occasion Portilla replaces the god of Christianity with Ometeo when no such reference to the alleged Mexica deity appears in the original Nahuat text.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: In Garibé's 1979 translation of Andrei Tevet's Histoire du Mechique, he takes the sentence.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_04: In the 13th and final, there was a god named Teotli, which means two gods, and a goddess named Omesintal, which means two goddesses.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be back after a quick break.
• 9:26
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• 9:32
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• 10:00
  SPEAKER_02: And now, on with the show.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: And he transforms that sentence into.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_04: In the 13th and highest, there was a god named Ometeo, which means two gods, and a goddess named Omesinta, which means two goddesses.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: So when we take Tvet's passage into context, it is clear he is referring to the creator couple, Omete Gudli and Omesiwa, who are said to reside in the 13th celestial level of the Mexica cosmos.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: Gadi Be simply introduced Ometeo into the sentence out of thin air.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_02: Interestingly, this mention of Ometeot is removed from the 1985 edition and replaced with Omete Kudli.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_02: So it seems like whoever did this updated edition saw the mistake and corrected it.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: So that's an interesting little side note.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_02: Why did Portilla and Garibe feel it necessary to invent descriptions of Ometeo where none existed?
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_02: One would assume that abundant resources regarding Ometeo would be available for Portilla and Garibe to draw from.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: After all, wouldn't the supreme god of the Mexica appear everywhere, considering its alleged importance within Mexica cosmovision?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_02: However, Ometeo never appears in any pre-Guau Democ sources.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_04: As Professor Richard Haley notes, Ometeo is found as members of its cult insist everywhere.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_04: Everywhere that is, except in the primary sources.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_04: That's a good burn.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: We assert that the Catholic invention of Ometeot can be traced directly to the Italian text found on Folio 1V of the Codex Rios.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: This codex, which has been substantially modified by European interpretation, was likely created in 1549.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: It is here we find the only reference to a Mexica deity or even vaguely similar to Hometeo.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: The text describes a deity called Home Teule as the creator of everything, the first cause, which sounds suspiciously like the god of the Bible.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: The text is accompanied by a drawing of this Home Teule.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: However, an iconographic analysis identifies the figure as Tonakatekutli, the male aspect of the sacred creator couple, Tonakatekutli and Tonaka Siwa, known as the Lord and Lady of our sustenance.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: In this instance, the author of the Codex Rios separated the concept of Tonakatekutli from his female counterpart, thereby eliminating the feminine aspect of the dualistic Mexica cosmovision.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_02: The author then renamed Tonakatekutli Ometeule, which would later become glossed as Ometeot by Portilla and Garibe, and described this newly minted concept as the creator of everything, the first cause, called by another name Ometeule, which is to say something like Lord of Three Merits or Lord of Three.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_02: Now, this is an interesting choice considering that Ome in Nahuatl is the number two, not three.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: It appears that Ometeot or Ometeule is yet another Catholic invention designed to introduce the monotheistic God of the Bible, along with the Holy Trinity, into the Mesoamerican mindset.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: It appears that Portian Garibe took the Catholic fiction of a monotheistic supreme creator god of the Mexica and just ran with it, creating an entire academic tradition and careers along the way.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: So what are we to do with concepts like Hunabku and Omenteot?
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: Can these terms be disentangled from their colonialist roots and given new life with new meaning?
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: Or is their elimination a natural byproduct of our decolonial struggle?
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_02: As I see it, I have inherited a cultural legacy far more meaningful, impactful, and powerful than any Catholic invention.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: Embracing terms like hunabku and ometeot is a rejection of this cultural legacy in exchange for something shallow and artificial.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: I don't find strength in the linguistic fabrications of men who would destroy my culture.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_02: I find strength in the traditions of my ancestors.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: And if we're going to speak with the vocabulary of decolonization, we need to discard the language of colonizers.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_02: And uh when you look at the way that this word is described, the way it's being described in all of these texts, it's obvious that they're referring to the monotheistic God of the Bible.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's just a substitute.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, you know, actually, I I recently uh did a paper that's going to be published soon on dansa and and uh sort of try to make some connections uh between um how the dansa well I don't get too much into how dansa emerged here in the US.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_04: There's a lot of studies already that have been done, really good ones about that, but I sort of try to I use that as a bridge to go into the more sort of historical analysis of of the dansa conchera.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_04: And at the end of the paper, towards the end, I I introduce a little bit about how the mexica dansa sort of gets uh introduced and how it's part of that that uh ever-changing evolutionary process of the danza.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_04: And in it I explain how else Dios, which is what the concheros uh usually say in the danzantes tradicionales, the steca chichi mecha types, yeah, will say at the end of a danza or as a salute, you know, it's like saying, órale, el es Dios, you know, compadrito, comadrita, things like that, right?
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_04: And the mexicas, in their attempt, you know, to uh reject and to sort of purify uh the dansa to its so-called uh pre-quatemuk roots, right?
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_04: They replaced elecidos with ometeot.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and so that's where that comes from in terms of like uh why so many people in in Kabulis and a lot of dance circles use it today, even including some tradicional circles, you might hear someone who maybe 15 years ago, 20 years ago was saying Elesios, they might now say ometeot because it was a reaction that gets absorbed into the the general dance culture, and now it's just part of the the you know the the dance milieu.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_04: So it's it's it's interesting because ometeo, I mean, going back to what you were saying about how it's uh uh what do we do with it?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_04: What do we do with these with these concepts of Hunapku and Ometeot?
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_04: Because they're so ingrained now in the tradition of uh either whether it's a dansa tradition or even in the mechikayo tradition, right?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_04: You know, um there's there's people who are part of dansa today that are you know maybe half our age, who've only been dancing for five to ten years, right?
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_04: And they they've learned all this stuff as as uh and and they've uh uh they've sort of incorporated it into their lexicon, assuming that these are ancient traditions that go back to you know before the invasion uh of the Spanish, and without realizing that a lot of the stuff is just recent invention, right?
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it is what's known as an invented tradition, actually.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be back after a quick break.
• 18:41
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• 18:45
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• 18:49
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• 18:58
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• 19:03
  SPEAKER_02: Now, back to the show.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, and invent so what is what is the difference between an invented tradition and say, for example, calling something a pseudo-historical concept?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: So um well actually I'm glad you brought this up, Dr.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: Ariano.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so pseudo history, for the sake of our listeners, pseudo history would be a deliberate distortion or misrepresentation of history in order to advance some sort of uh agenda, usually a political agenda, right?
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: Not always, but usually a political agenda.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: In a broad sense, that's what pseudo history.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_04: Well, pseudo history also plays a large role in um the emergence of uh nationalism.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_04: Oh yeah, especially of of the extreme right type of nationalism.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_02: So then a uh an invented tradition um is basically when somebody makes up a tradition, which is nothing wrong with that, right?
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: All traditions are are made up, they're all invented, but they're not traditions that evolved organically from within a community, they're traditions that were made up to serve a certain purpose, but they're given the veneer of being ancient.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_02: Like whoever made up this tradition claims that it is actually an ancient tradition, even though it's very, very modern.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_04: And we have a very good example of of something like this.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_04: If if uh our listeners would um are interested in in learning more about this, uh there was a uh a recent article in Mexico News Daily, I think I shared it with you uh recently, where it talks about an invented tradition basically that only goes back to maybe 30 years, uh, called El Leñero, and it's uh or elito event.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_04: And leñero is in reference to leña as in firewood.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_04: And so it's a very very interesting tradition.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_04: If uh the our listeners are interested, they can go and look it up.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_04: But I'll put it in the uh I'll put it in the show notes.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_04: This this tradition is very recent, but it has it's it's it's it's an organic tradition that emerged within the some of the uh communities that are that are considered original uh Mexica or Nahua Pueblos uh that surround uh modern day Mexico City.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_04: And these people are descendants of those original peoples, and they decided as a reaction to environmental stress uh and and uh uh illegal logging that was being done in the surrounding mountains of their communities, they decided to invent this tradition to pay homage and respect to the spirits of the mountain and the trees, and they go into the the mountains uh and and what the old Wood or dying trees and and then use that for firewood throughout the year for special ceremonies, and then they go back and they replant trees to replace the ones that have been logged illegally or have uh have died.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_04: That's and so this so this is an invented tradition that is serving the purpose for the community, right?
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_04: And this is different from from say creating uh an entire deity whole cloth based on someone's erroneous interpretation of the sources, right?
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: So like an invented tradition isn't necessarily a negative thing, right?
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: In many ways, it can be a positive theme.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: Right, exactly.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's just who what was the intent behind doing it and how is it being presented to people?
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_02: I read that article, and the people are very um they're very open about it being new.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_04: They don't make any claims to antiquity, they don't try to, you know, pose as these uh ultra, you know, um righteous indigenous people that you know have this uh long-standing tradition that was in secret.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it's always there's always a secret involved, and there's always a group of very mysterious council of mysterious elders that are hidden somewhere that no one really knows about, and there's just only a select few, and you have to pay homage to me because I have that connection to those elder.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_04: You know, no, these people are very open about this.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_04: Is just a communal event that we're doing, and we're you know, they're very upfront about what the purpose of it is, and they make no uh you know presumptions about it, right?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_02: Well, in um in the Huasteca, I learned about another invented tradition that takes place there that goes uh that involves uh the A de Muertos.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_02: And what happened was is the youth, the Nahua youth of these communities were kind of upset uh that their relatives who were seen as like bad people, you know, maybe they were drug dealers or whatever, you know, they did something that that was seen as as negative.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_02: Their images were not being uh involved in the Dia de Muertos celebrations or commemorations, like all of the bad people were being left out, and the young the the young guys, the the younger Nawas were bugged by this.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_02: So they started their own tradition specifically for the departed, you know, quote unquote bad people.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: And they figured, well, they you know, these are our relatives, you know, I knew these guys, um, they deserve to be honored too.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so they started this separate tradition.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: And because of this, the elders in the community didn't want to teach them the appropriate dances that were involved, so these kids made up their own.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: Made up their own dances, they made up their own dances, they made up their own tradition, and it's got a purpose, and it's it evolved organically from this community.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I saw a video of it, and it's awesome, it's such a cool event.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: And um San Guerrero?
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh in uh Veracruz.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: Veracruz in the Huasteca region.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I don't know, I just thought it was awesome.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, again, going back to that point, just because it's an invented tradition, just because we call something an invented tradition, it's not like a judgment call.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: Or, you know, we're passing judgment on it as being something negative or positive.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_02: We're just calling it what it is, you know.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_04: Well, okay, so that brings up another point with Hunapku no Mateo.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_04: These were one dates to the colonial period.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_04: It had a an agenda, it had uh it was a political agenda, even though it was guised under the rubric of uh Catholicism and the church and spirituality and religion, and it was it was very political.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_04: It was about stripping the power from the indigenous people, you know, colonizing them, colonizing their land, their their minds, their their forms of of spirituality, right?
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_04: So you take something like that that gets repurposed by Paredes through the MCRCA.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_04: And then you have Ometeo, which interestingly enough, I went back and I looked at Mexicayot, the book that was published by Nieva Lopez's uh sister, um Iskalocin, right?
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_04: And this is a book that was produced and it encapsulates uh the philosophy of uh uh Rodolfo Nieva Lopez, who was the leader of the MCRCA, right?
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_04: And and nowhere in the entire book, the the the original copy is from 1969.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_04: I'm looking at the 2009 third edition.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_04: I do have the original, but I have that one put up because it's uh very fragile at this point.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's it's not bound very well.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and but I'm looking at the 2009 edition, there's there's this is the third edition.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_04: Uh they did another one in 1991.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_04: And the only the closest thing that I see that resembles ometeot is omellot or omellot in a creadora, right?
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_04: Ome dos yo ser o esencia, and then the TL, decinencia sustantiva, omeyot.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm thinking, if ometeot was such an important concept, you know, you would think that you know Neva Lopez would have known about it.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_04: This is a guy who is basically borrowing a lot of ideas from people before him, especially Juan Luna Cárdenas, whom uh um uh I think we we should probably do a show on him at some point, predates Neva Lopez.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_04: And I don't think even uh Luna Cárdenas ever mentioned Ometeo in any of his writings.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_04: I don't think so either, right?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_04: And it's not until we get into uh to um Portillas' book, originally published in 1956, where we get this introduction of Ometeo, right?
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_04: And so we have two concepts that are basically, and and we have to wonder what was Bortillas purpose in introducing this concept.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_04: Was I mean he was an academic, he was a professor, um, and so why what was it in you know what was his purpose for inventing this this thing?
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_04: Did he misread the was he trying so hard, as you mentioned?
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_04: Was he trying so hard to uh uh sort of uh vindicate Aztic uh the Aztec Pantheon, the Mexica pantheon, by you know, uh sort of uh uh comparing it to his own, I guess I'm not sure if he was a Catholic or a Christian, but to the monotheistic tradition that premium Yeah, it seems like he was viewing all of these things through a monotheistic lens, right?
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_04: And so, and so one was political in the colonial sense, and the other one is I mean, Portilla.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know how to frame that.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_04: What what was what would be a lot of people?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it could have been tied to um just nationalism, like trans uplift, you know, this idea of of the Mexica people as being very sophisticated and and having uh a cosmovision on par with everybody else, right?
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_04: So so I guess in the broad sense, we we can place both of these Hunabku and Amateur as political concepts that were invented for specific purposes that have sort of a political nature and almost uh in one case it's more nationalistic with with Portilla.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_04: Is that what I mean?
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I I I think that's a fair assessment.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, so now that we've gotten to that that assessment and going back to the question, what do we do with these concepts since they were originally invented, but then they get repurposed through the danza tradition, through the mexicayo tradition for something that is um more revolutionary in a sense, right?
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_04: Because especially the dance mexicas, when when they're reacting to the danza tradicional, that they're reacting, they're coming of age.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_04: This starts in the 70s, obviously, but in the 90s you get a resurgence of this stuff, especially during like you know, the movimiento zapatista that emerges in 1994, and as well as in Mexico, things were happening in the US.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, you know, in my article that I also point to how danza in the US really begins to rise in the mid to late 90s as a result of uh the quincentennial celebration of Columbus and the reaction to that, and also to the Zapatistas in '94.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_04: And and those two events help push danza in the US among a newfound breed of young Mexican Americans who begin to not just call themselves Chicanos, but other calling themselves Mexicas as well.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_02: That's my story right there.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: I I got into danza because I saw a group of danzantes at a 1992 uh event, you know, at a like a 500 years of resistance type of event that was put on at UNM.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: There were a group of danzantes there, and you know, you hear the drum, you smell the copal.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, wow, man, I want to be part of this.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_02: So that's that was like my entry point into this whole way of thinking and to calling myself Mexica and and you know, just getting really involved with uh with the that tradition.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I I think he nailed it right there.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_04: So what do you say to someone, for example, that says, I acknowledge what you're saying about Hunabku and Numateod being invented traditions, but over the years they've been repurposed and transformed into something that is akin to uh uh I mean invented in the sense that they were uh pseudo-historical, right?
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_04: The original sense, but now they get repurposed and and they become part of this new tradition that is that is organic, that is also the sort of being molded and and and adapted by people on the ground to suit their own localized uh purposes, whether it be a spiritual one, whether it be a political one.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_04: And and and someone who comes at it from that perspective and says, well, you know, what you're saying might be true.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe these are invented whole cloth traditions or or or ideas, but now they have a completely different meaning for us.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and and people actually they do, they come to me and and say that.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I I just try not to be judgmental, you know, like look, I this is your life, man.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_02: I I don't care what what words you use.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_02: I always tell people, you know, I'm a pantheistic atheist.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_02: So when I participate in ceremony, I have my own personal reasons for participating in that ceremony.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, we've sat me in ceremony with Gnostics, with you know, agnostics, with Christians, with Catholics, you know, what I I don't ask people what what their personal beliefs are, but we come together for the purpose of the ceremony, and there's a greater purpose involved, right?
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: Which is cultural continuity, maintaining community, and just coming together for a good purpose.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_02: So I really don't I'm not gonna judge people for using these words or continuing to use these words.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: Personally, you know, just it's just my inquisitive nature as a researcher and as an archaeologist and ethnohistorian, you're a historian, to to get to the roots of these things.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: I I want to know.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_02: I want to know where these things come from.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_02: These things matter to me.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_02: So honestly, I don't I don't think they're gonna go away.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's uh unless even if Leon Portilla came out and said, Hey guys, I I made all of that up.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry about that.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_04: Too late for that now.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's too late for that now.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like you said, like somebody gets into danza, they learn almost well, this is what you say, and this is why you say it, because in it's an ancient concept.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: So they're like, Yeah, right on, and they think they're doing something good, and then to have somebody come up to them and be like, nah, you're full of shit, kid.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's not gonna win any fans.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_04: You don't know the half of it, man.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_02: So I think it's important to tell people I think we have an ethical and moral obligation to tell people where these things come from, right?
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm not gonna try to force people to to uh to stop saying these things that bring them comfort, you know, especially terms like that, they're fairly uh innocuous.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_04: Inocuous, yeah.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I mean, I I get your point, and and and I think the issue with me is when I get people and and it hasn't happened in a while, but you know, early on when we were first beginning to sort of explore these things and going back to what you were saying, you know, the reason why we do this is not to sort of um uh put people down or to try to discourage people from believing what you know to each his own.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_04: People will believe what they want to believe, but you know, me and you we're like, well, what where does this actually come from?
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_04: Like, what's the source?
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_04: You know, who uh is the first person that we know of in at least the in our tradition that begins to promote these things and and and so on and so forth.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_04: And I've had people come up to me, you know, and tell me that you know that I'm I'm putting our people down.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, you know, why why are you trying to, you know, um uh sort of defame our culture or whatnot?
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm like, no, you're you're not getting it.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_04: That's not my purpose here.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not, I mean, you can continue to believe what you whatever you want to believe.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_04: I'm just telling you that as far as my research, it's led me to this conclusion.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_04: I'm just sharing it with you.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_04: You can accept it or you can reject it.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_04: That's up to you, right?
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_02: Do with this information what you will, but it's my obligation to put this information out there.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: That's the way I see it.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and it's funny because I always joke with people, we can um if people ever do you know come around to rejecting these terms, we could make a lot of money by opening up a tattoo shop and fixing everybody's uh Hunabku tattoos.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_02: It would be easy fixes, you know, just square them off so that they're not a circle and make it black and yellow instead of black and white.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_04: You're forgetting that that's the whole point of hunapku, is it's uh squaring that circle.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_04: That's where it comes from from Le Plan Jon.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_04: Remember that?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_04: But it is but it is basically in his book, in his book, uh, and the one that you talk about, uh what is it?
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_04: He basically, um, for lack of a better term, plagiarized he he draws a lot from Le Plan John.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: Le Plan John.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_02: And if for people who aren't familiar, Le Plan John was an amateur archaeologist and occultist.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_02: Occultist who went to Mexico and in the 19th century.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, you know, to his credit, Le Plan John was working at a time when archaeology was still uh undefined as to the discipline itself.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_04: It was all over the place.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_04: So to say that he was amateur, I mean, they were all amateurs at that point.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, that's fair.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_04: But but he had some very interesting interpretations that led back to what you were saying, a lot of occultists sort of or fringe ideas.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_04: Not all of them were occult, like he believed in uh the these ideas of like mass catastrophes uh having occurred, uh some of these which don't have any scientific proof or backing behind them.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's it's from his idea that the Maya basically came from Atlantis, right?
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_02: Domingo Martinez Paredes borrows from that, borrows from him, exactly, and um even his symbol for Hunabku is like he straight up jacks from uh from Leplonjon.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_02: From Le Plonjong, and it is based on that idea of squaring the circle, squaring the plan.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: And we also need to realize that um I don't know if Leplonjon was, but Paredes was a uh uh Mason.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_02: Mason.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_02: So he took a lot of those ideas of you know referring to Hunakgu as the primary mover, you know.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_02: Oh these are all Masonic principles exactly that's that's very Masonic.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_02: So he um he drew from a lot of different things, and this was common of the MCRCA.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_02: They would go through and just draw from everything but legitimate archaeological and historical.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's not hard.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_02: If you live in Mexico, it is not difficult to go to an indigenous community and learn from an indigenous community, yeah.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, this this ultranationalism that the MCRCA was on, it was more built around that idea of Mexico as this great, you know, uh indigenous uh nation.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_02: Metropole.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that um it it they they basically glorified and romanticized Mexico's indigenous past, but at the expense of Mexico's indigenous present.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_02: That was sort of emblematic of the nationalism that was going on at the time.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_04: And and we're gonna do a show on on him and the MCRCA separately so we can discuss these things.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_04: But yeah, there's um in my dissertation, uh I sort of look at what Vasconcelos was doing and his ideas of La Raza Cosmica and sort of compare them to the ideas of Fanuna Carolas, which who was a contemporary of Vasconcelos and who predates um Nieva Lopez's uh ideas, whom Nieva Lopez borrowed from, and I compare them and I basically uh explain how they're both uh two sides of the same coin, except one is uh Hispanophilophilia perspective, the other one's more of an indigenous perspective, but they're both ultranationalists' ideologies.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, for sure.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um getting back to your question, what do we do with these things?
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I don't know, I don't know if it's necessarily um my position to say what to do with these things.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's up to everybody.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: The magic was in you all the time, Billy.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_02: The magic wasn't in Ometeo.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_04: All we want to do is offer a public service announcement, you know, to all you Mexicas out there, you know, you Dan Santes, uh Kalpuli members, uh indigenous people, whatever label you apply to yourself, which is you know all fine and dandy.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_04: But if you accept the term Ometeor or Hunabku as concepts that are meaningful to you, that's you know, that's that's your prerogative.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_04: We're just here to, you know, uh show you know people interested in these things that you know everything has a provenance, and some of these things have dubious provenances, like these two terms.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_02: I would I I just want to encourage people to um, you know, think critically, you know, use skeptical inquiry and develop scientific literacy.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_02: Those are my my three uh takeaways.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_02: The the three things that I would like to impart is to encourage people to uh apply a critical lens.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you're listening to this right now, don't take our words for it.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I'll look into what we're saying.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_02: You know, do your own research.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_02: There's a uh a paper that I could really I highly recommend called Translation in Historiography: the Garibe León Portilla Complex and the Making of a Pre-Hispanic Past by Gertrudis Payas.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's a really, really good analysis of the dubious translations that Garibe and Leon Portilla have put out over the years.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's the uh the paper uh destronando ometeot by Makulska.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody should read that.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_02: That's a really good one.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, uh they go in deep, and I encourage people to look into these things, you know, because people, when I bring up that ometeo is probably not an actual pre-Quatemo concept, people freak out, like, how dare you say that?
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, dude, what I'm saying isn't even considered controversial within Mesoamericanist circles.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_02: Like, people have been critiquing these ideas for a very, very long time.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's just that when you're in the Mexicayo, you were actively discouraged from doing research outside of As they say, no le rasques.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_04: Because, you know, once you start scratching, you get beneath the surface and you realize that there's nothing there.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, in my in the first edition of Our Slippery Earth, I put like, you know, I don't outright say that this was an invention.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_02: I just I I put it out as a question.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I don't know where Leon Portilla got this from.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_02: But now that I've done more research in the second edition of the book, I'm gonna lay out a lot more evidence as to why I believe Portilla just made it up.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_04: Which is the the consensus, I mean but by most uh people who are interested in the in the subject who've studied it, I think the consensus is that there's no there's really no evidence that the even the word ometeo uh existed prior to uh Portilla, right?
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, because if if ometeo was such a uh an important concept, why isn't it so ubiquitous in all the sources?
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_04: Why isn't it everywhere?
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_04: Why isn't it everywhere?
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_04: Why is it Portilla?
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, it it's almost like uh uh Nieva Lopez and his uh Cocina de Anahua Declaration of Guajemog.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_04: Like, if it was so important, how come it doesn't exist prior to his supposed, you know, exposition of it, you know, in 1964 or whatever?
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it's it's kind of like the same the same idea in a sense, right?
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_04: The secret knowledge that someone holds, and all of a sudden they're ready to expose it to the world and look at me, you know.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: Well, before you get too far into that, we're gonna do that as a separate episode.
• 44:04
  unknown: Right.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you everyone, dear listeners, for joining us on this exploration of Mesoamerican pseudo history, invented traditions, and new age nonsense.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_02: I am your host, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_02: And this is Tlacateka.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_02: Hope you guys enjoyed this episode.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_02: And we'll see you next time.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_02: Remember, folks, the truth is like medicine.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't always taste good, but it's always good for you.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_02: Dimo Itase.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_04: Oh my dear.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for listening to Tales from Oslantis, a project of the Chimali Institute of Mesoamerican Arts.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_02: If you enjoy the show, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_02: You can do this by visiting tales from Oclantis.com and clicking support the podcast.
• 45:03
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• 45:08
  SPEAKER_02: Until next time, Timo Itase.