The Flayed God: The Mythology of Mesoamerica - R book reviews

It's nice to find a scholarly text that really feeds you with its holistic sensibility. What's still rarer is when the brilliance of the method obliterates the old stale structures of traditional scholarship. That's what happens here. This book could have been written in chocolate -- it's intense, Mesoamerican, and an aphrodisiac for the mind.

* It seems abundantly clear, then, that the peoples of Mesoamerica, in a manner similar to those of the archaic civilizations of Old Europe and the Middle East, perceived an inner, spiritual reality as metaphorically underlying and supporting the perceptible reality of the everyday world in which they found themselves. This underlying reality was most apparent to them in the regularity of the cycles to which everything in the natural, temporal world seemed to conform. The calendars that they constructed to reveal this reality were thus, at their highest level, myths -- metaphoric constructs that revealed the underlying reality of the spirit -- rather than merely tools for measuring the passage of time in an essentially mechanical way. As each cycle was recorded and added to those already known, they must have felt they were coming closer and closer to a revelation of the essence of divinity, the very principle of spiritual order underlying the universe.

* It is important to realize that the mythic quality of this cyclical process was embodied in the conception of the Mesoamerican Mother Goddess and was therefore to be seen in all of her fantastically varied manifestations. She was the earth goddess, the fundamental creator and destroyer of life, both nourisher and protector of humanity, but simultaneously the embodiment of the forces of decline and death. Always closely associated with spinning and weaving, which represent the cyclical processes of life, death, and rebirth, the Mother Goddess weaves the masculine, vertical principle represented by the warp -- the active, direct principle associated with the light of the sun -- into the feminine, horizontal principle represented by the woof, the temporal and variable principle. The crossing of these two forms a union of opposites suggesting the duality of all life, a duality that grows from, depends upon, and will return to the underlying and essential unity of spirit.

* The Aztec god Xipe Totec, "Our Lord the Flayed One," although clearly a complex and multivocal symbolic entity, is, as we have seen, most fundamentally an embodiment of the concept of renewal and the promise of regeneration. He is depicted in this ceramic sculpture from Palma Cuata, Veracruz, a sculpture probably created in the Postclassic, with his face covered by a mask made from the taut skin of a sacrificial victim, a mask through which we can see the wearer's own living eyes and mouth, and he also wears the skin of the flayed one as a garment over the large part of his body. This is the typical "costume" of this god to whom the ritual and the hymn were dedicated at the time of the planting of the corn, and the costume refers directly to the ritual.

The Flayed God (The Mythology of Mesoamerica) Roberta H. and Peter T. Markman. HarperPerennial, 1994; ISBN 0-06-250749-4 $20 ($22.75 postpaid) from HarperCollins Publishers, Direct Mail, PO Box 588, Dunmore, PA 18512; 800/331-3761

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