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| Animals and Ancient Mexicans |
June 29th, 2003.
By Professor Fabio Cupul
University of Guadalajara Puerto Vallarta Campus
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Human beings define themselves, and
their place in the world, integrating or opposing themselves
to other inhabitants of the universe. In ancient times,
those inhabitants were essentially animals, with which
they established psychological and emotional links.
Most Mesoamerican people had daily interactions with
wildlife, beneficial and destructive, where they had
the opportunity to observe and get to know their habits.
 The
close relationship that ancient peoples had with nature
led them to consider animals as possessing a special
relationship with the divine, something that granted
them an important place in their myths and legends.
It also turned them into symbols of values and nodal
categories (links with other symbols), in representations
of the culture’s ideas.
Among those many animals with great
mythic weight, we encounter the dog. This domestic animal
played an important part in the ancient Aztec calendar.
It was the representative of the tenth day of that calendar.
Also, the dogs of ancient Mexicans (called itzcuintli)
were hairless and generally the males were castrated
and fattened to be used as food. Curiously enough, people
born on the day 4 Dog, were considered as carriers of
the gift to growing dogs and as such, they would never
lack their daily food.
In the Maya religion, the snake stands
out for its extraordinary qualities. They instilled
both admiration and fear, for their speed and agility,
despite the fact that they had no feet, their forked
tongue, their fixed gaze -due to the fact that they
have no eyelids, and most of all, their remarkable vitality,
as evidenced by the periodical renewal of their skin.
They can also go for extended periods of time without
food or drink. They continue to grow throughout their
lives and demonstrate an exceptional resistance to dying
even when they are fatally wounded. They have very peculiar
ways to mate and most of all, they resemble a phallus,
the beginning of life by excellence. Also, one of the
best known representations of the supreme god of the
Mayas, Kukulcan, was in the shape of the feathered serpent.
On the other hand, there is no question
that the deer plays a unique and fundamental role in
the religious life of Wixaritari or Huichol communities.
If its blood is the main offering to the gods and the
primary medium of making things sacred, the deer by
itself is a divine entity that is represented in multiple
versions and evoked in all types of rituals. Also, to
them the deer offers itself as an indispensable game
to allow human beings to recharge the world with that
vital energy that guarantees their life on earth.
But then according to Maya and Aztec
mythology, the souls that left from the mouths of the
dead carried javelins to face the various tests required
before reaching their final resting place and they were
accompanied by the shadow of their favorite dog. Those
tests consisted in: a passage between two dangerous
rocks, fighting a serpent, confronting a crocodile,
crossing eight deserts and eight mountains, overcoming
a whirlwind powerful enough to pass through solid rock,
as well as a series of demons that blocked their way.
The hummingbird with its diminutive
size, its brilliant feathers and its fast, erratic flight,
is one of the most famous birds in Mesoamerican beliefs.
It was identified with blood and war. In fact, ritual
sacrifices were compared with the sucking action made
by hummingbirds while they feed on the nectar of flowers.
For the Aztecs, Huitzilopochtli, their patron god whose
name means the “left hummingbird”, was conceived
as one of the most aggressive and ferocious deities
because of the tenacity demonstrated by those minuscule
birds. It was also believed that the souls of warriors
who had died in combat were transferred into the body
of hummingbirds.
 The
royal eagle played a legendary role in the foundation
of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. According
to the myth, the Aztecs founded their capital in the
place where an eagle would be found perched on a cactus.
That place was Tenochtitlán, “the place
of the cactus in the stone”.
Finally, the shark, a creature considered
terrifying by most people, was deified by the ancient
Olmecs. They would frequently capture sharks to pull
their teeth out and include them in their ritual offerings,
like those found in the excavations of the Templo Mayor
in Mexico City. Furthermore, when they did not have
any recently caught sharks, they would adorn their offerings
with fossilized teeth of those marvelous animals.
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