#“this appears to be an Aztec Quetzalcoatl”

[talonabraxas]

Ouroboros

Ouroboros meaning and origin

The ouroboros symbol, often depicted as a snake eating its tail to form a circle, is one of the oldest and most recurring motifs in the mythology and iconography of various cultures around the world. Next, I will tell you about some of the most notable origins and meanings of ouroboros in different cultures:

Ancient Egypt: One of the first known records of the ouroboros comes from ancient Egypt, where it was associated with the serpent Uraeus, a protective deity represented as a cobra. Ouroboros was related to the cycle of life, death and renewal, and was often found in amulets and funerary jewelry. It was also linked to the idea of ​​eternity and the unity of time.

Ancient Greece: In Greek mythology, the ouroboros is sometimes associated with the serpent Ladon, who guarded the Garden of the Hesperides and is often depicted as a serpent eating its own tail. This symbol is related to the idea of ​​constant regeneration and the infinite cycle of nature.

India: In Hindu tradition, the ouroboros is found in the image of the Ouroboros Ananta Shesha, the cosmic serpent that supports the god Vishnu as he floats in the cosmic ocean. This snake represents eternal time and the infinite cycle of creation and destruction in the universe.

Alchemy: During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the ouroboros became an important symbol in alchemy. It represented the union of opposites, such as the masculine principle (the Sun) and the feminine principle (the Moon), and symbolized transmutation and the search for the philosopher's stone, which conferred immortality.

Other cultures: The ouroboros also appears in Chinese mythology, where it is known as the "Jade Dragon." Additionally, it is found in Mesoamerican cultures such as the Aztec, where it is associated with the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl.

The general meaning of the ouroboros is the idea of ​​an eternal cycle, renewal, the unity of opposites and eternity. It is also interpreted as a symbol of self-reflection and self-transcendence, where the individual seeks understanding and wisdom by exploring their own limitations and potentials.

Overall, the paradox of the ouroboros challenges our conventional understanding of time, renewal, and the relationship between opposites. It invites contemplation and reflection on the interconnectedness of all things and the complex nature of existence. The paradox inherent in the symbol has made it a powerful and enduring motif in various cultures and philosophical traditions.

In summary, the ouroboros is an ancient and universal symbol that has evolved throughout human history and culture, representing profound concepts related to the cyclical nature of life and the pursuit of wisdom and transcendence. His legacy endures to this day as a reminder of the richness and depth of human symbolic thought.

[ashanimus]

white people shut the everloving fuck up about what appropriating peoples culture means challenge and just enjoy your goddamn sparkle dragons

[neil-gaiman]

Stop me if you've answered these kinds of questions before:

I loved reading the graphic novel adaptation of American Gods. I was wondering if there were any particular reasons why there were no indigenous spiritual figures that to make an appearance in the story, like Glooskap or Nanabozho from Wabanaki/Anishinaabe legends, or Mexican deities like the Aztec Quetzalcoatl, or the Mayan Kinich Ahau?

Was it due to a lack of available research material at the time of writing? Concerns about presentation? Time constraints? Did they just not fit into the story you were trying to tell?

I hope this doesn't come off as leading or accusative, it's not meant to be. I was just curious. I would love to hear your perspective on this, as the author.

I think you may have missed Wisakedjak, who is there and vital to the story.

There are a number of Mexican and Mayan deities in the book, but they are described and not named.

[raisha-gs]

A little something I had on the backburner since December. As you guys know, The Casagrandes Movie was teased early last month, and it showed Ronnie Anne and a unnamed new character in a Mayan (or Aztec?) temple. 

Naturally I was inspired to draw said character who, according to the rumormill, is named Punguari. But it did get me thinking, The Loud House movie had some fantastical elements in it, most prominently, the Loch Loud Dragon. So would it be a stretch to imagine that a mythical creature would appear in the Casagrandes Movie as well?

Well, that's the gist of this artwork: Ronnie Anne and Punguari encountering a Quetzalcoatl with the later defending the former with her magic. That's right, I'm willing to bet that the new girl is probably gonna have powers of some kind.

Anyway, this is just speculation on my part, and we won't know until a trailer of some kind is revealed. Watch as this post ages poorly. lol

And yes, I'll be making a bingo card just like the last movie.

[sapphyreopal5]

A monarch butterfly flies around my body this morning. And, then, when I open my Tumblr app, I see the photos of monarch butterflies without even searching for it. (Ps. It is the first post I see in my Tumblr acc.)

Hello Anon, so I see you may have found my page due to tags like divine signs, synchronicities, etc. I don't know what is currently happening in your life but this is what I could find regarding the spiritual meanings of the monarch butterfly, which is said to be the king of butterflies. Universally, butterflies in many cultures are seen as messengers of those who have passed from this physical life. Note that all animal/insect/plant signs can have individual meanings to us all depending on our own experiences, culture, species and therefore appearances, etc. For example, some non migrating Monarch Butterfly populations travel to Florida due to the tropical milkweed found throughout southern Florida. Other Monarch populations may travel to coastal California to spend the winter there. Western Monarch populations don't travel in large groups. The Monarch Butterfly can travel as long as 200 miles a day and can fly at higher altitudes, due to them flying through the Rocky Mountains.

More notably so, some of the Monarch Butterfly populations are known for traveling to what's known as the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico and tend to arrive there close to when the Day of the Dead/Día de los Muertos is celebrated throughout Mexico. What sets the Monarch Butterfly apart (especially the migratory populations) from other butterflies is the very long migration from throughout the United States and southern Canada to this very same place in Mexico; the monarch's dangerous and long migration to this sanctuary can in ways be a message to remain steadfast even when facing difficult circumstances in life. Many butterflies unfortunately do not survive this long trip.

On another note regarding the symbolism of the Monarch Butterfly in Central America, the Aztec cult of the feathered serpent deity Quetzalcoatl was said to require the sacrifice of hummingbirds and butterflies. I bring this up because interestingly enough, the temple of Quetzalcoatl in Teotihuacan, Mexico is about 2 and a half hours away from this butterfly reserve.

According to well+good, seeing a monarch butterfly fluttering around you as you described may point to major internal changes you will soon discover. Having one land on you can mean you are ready for changes to happen and are on the right path. The Monarch can represent a need to trust the journey, trust the process of this upcoming internal transformation (or what is already happening). Overall the Monarch butterfly is a sign of strength, endurance, spirituality, trust, transformation, evolution, and strengthening your beliefs.

Unfortunately, Monarch populations have seen a great decline since the 1990s due to pesticide use, elimination of milkweed vegetation, climate change and overall logging and construction development that result in the shrinking of Monarch overwintering sites. Los Angeles saw under 2,000 Monarchs in 2020 and for years before under 30,000, according to the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. For some encouraging news in 2021 however, they counted over 100,000 Monarchs the highest they had seen in years. Still, in winter 2023-2024 there were 59% less East Migratory Monarchs in the Mexican butterfly reserve compared to the previous year.

Perhaps this encounter of yours with the Monarch Butterfly along with the first post on Tumblr you saw featuring a Monarch Butterfly could mean also that the deity Quetzalcoatl is trying to speak to you. If you are able to do so, also consider having a butterfly garden to help with the butterfly populations as well?

Thanks for the ask Anon. I always love hearing about signs like this happening back to back, as this is a divine sign of good things if you ask me ♥

[dailydemonspotlight]

Xiuhtecuhtli - Day 87

Race: Yoma

Alignment: Neutral-Law

August 6th, 2024

Fire is a fact of life for many cultures around the globe- a source of heat and warmth may become a source of life in the coldest nights, and flame is needed to cook away the imperfections of food, per instance. This, naturally, would lead to the reverence of fire being a common idea in many old-world religions and traditions, as its importance cannot go understated. This was an especially important fact in the Mesoamericas, however, as food without fire was rare, and the arid climates made flames spread fast- it was as revered as it was feared. This, predictably, led to the lack of understanding regarding fire transforming into, what else, but a representation of that fire itself, as unpredictable as it was important. This deity, at least to the Aztecs, took the form of today's Demon of the Day: Xiuhtecuhtli, the Turquoise Lord.

Strangely in contrast to his role as a god of fire, Xiuhtecuhtli was a rather down-to-earth deity, though one filled with youthful vigor. This was likely due to the fact that he represented more than just fire, however- he represented several important aspects of light itself, such as the daytime, warmth, the hearth, the afterlife, volcanoes, and he was referred to with many names as well- Cuezaltzin and Ixcozauhqui, per instance. While typically portrayed as a young god, ironically he's one of the oldest gods in the Pantheon, typically portrayed alongside and identified with the elder god of fire Huehueteotl, one of the eldest gods in the Aztec pantheon.

Xiuhtecuhtli was a rather important god, though not one counted among the commonly cited main four of Huitzilopochtli, Tonatiuh, Tlaloc, and Quetzalcoatl. However, this doesn't make his role in many stories irrelevant, as he was still a figure who held great importance to the day-to-day life of many Aztecs. After all, as the creator of flame and light, he also was commonly cited as the creator of none other than life itself, though this appears to be rather contested- it may have been Huehueteotl who did so, and interpretations may change based on if one conflates Xiuhtecuhtli with Huehueteotl or not. What Xiuhtecuhtli also did, however, was protect human life from its end, and this one is far harder to dispute.

At the end of the Aztec calendar, Xiuhtecuhtli would preside over a great festival known as the New Fire Ceremony to ensure the sun could continue its cycle without being consumed by the darkness. During this festival, held to ensure the successful renewal of the sun (it's a long story), all fires were put out, all idols were cleansed, and a group of priests would reside atop Citlaltepec, waiting for the stars to align. When the stars did, and the Yohualtecuhtli star shone brightly in the middle of the sky, a priest would cut out a sacrifice's heart then set a flame in the now-empty chest cavity of the sacrifice. This is, rather obviously, a part of where the whole perception of sacrifices in Aztec culture came from, though it was far from the only sacrifice focused ritual, but I'm getting ahead of myself. After this fire would be lit, it would be used to relight all fireplaces throughout the city.

This was an incredibly important ritual, and one that Xiuhtecuhtli had reign over to ensure the next part of the Aztec cycle of life. This all points to a great amount of importance itself being placed upon this deity, as well as fire itself, as it was believed this ritual could be used, if successful, to prevent the incursion of monsters from the dark that would slaughter the Aztec people. Far more rituals throughout the culture did appear to be focused around sacrifice, though the Aztecs were far from a simple blood mongering group who killed for the sake of sacrificing. The importance of these rituals, these sacrifices, and the cost of human life actually shows that they had respect for their fellow man. Still, blood sacrifices weren't good, and I hope that isn't controversial, it's just that they were a product of their time.

Xiuhtecuhtli was also commonly represented with the color turquoise, and this ties into his design, oddly enough. In SMT, a great pillar of fire pierces through a turquoise mask to represent the deity, and this is a surprisingly faithful image to his depictions, especially in the form of the mask itself, though it does take some creative liberties. However, this design is fantastic, and I wish I got to see it in 3D. Maybe next game...

[victorluvsalice]

Hi all -- I'm on vacation this week, and I wanted to share with you some shots of my trip earlier today to Roger Williams Park Zoo to look at their "Dragons & Mythical Creatures" exhibit! This is a special exhibit running until August 11th where they've set up a bunch of simple animatronics of various mythical creatures from around the world around their Wetlands Trail path. The animatronics are a bit goofy, as you can probably see from the above pictures, but they were still fun to look at, and I had a good time going through and looking at them all with my folks. :) In order of their appearance in the photoset above, we have --

-->An alicorn (winged unicorn) right at the entrance

-->A siren by the lake -- they actually had three mermaids, but the other two were the traditional lovely ladies, so I decided to prioritize getting a picture of the one with the goofiest smile XD

-->Your traditional European dragon, who roared with glowing eyes

-->The Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, depicted in feathered serpent form wrapped around a pyramid

-->The Ninki Nanka, a West African beast with the face of a horse, the neck of a giraffe, and the body of a crocodile, which lives in muddy mangroves and according to the Limba people in Sierra Leone, causes thunder and lightning -- as you can see, this one has a horn for extra value

-->An Egyptian Sphinx sporting the traditional Egyptian funerary mask for pharaohs -- honestly, between that technicolor mask and the way it was wiggling its head, it was one of the most off-putting exhibits there

-->A Japanese kappa, a mischievous creature that here appears as a turtle standing upright with a vicious-looking beak and a divot on the top of its head -- I believe that divot is supposed to hold water, and if you can trick them into bowing to you, the water will flow out and they'll lose a lot of their powers

-->A Japanese Kasa-obake, which is an old and neglected umbrella that has picked up a spirit and become a mischievous ghost with a long tongue and a single eye. ...I will admit, I immediately accused it of being a Pokemon. XD

-->A traditional griffin, with the white feathered head, wings, and talons of an eagle and the body of a lion -- I especially like this one because it includes feathered ears as well, something you don't see on a lot of griffins -- but that you do see on the GRYPHON in the original Alice books!

-->A yeti -- who you may recognize as Bumble from the Rankin-Bass stop motion Christmas films, because apparently the park couldn't resist

-->FUCKING CTHULHU. With his head out of proportion to the rest of his body. If you're wondering what the hell he's doing here, Roger Williams Park Zoo is in Providence, Rhode Island, which just so happens to be the birthplace of HP Lovecraft. I guess they felt they had to. XD

[coochiequeens]

Anthropologist Zelia Nuttall transformed the way we think of ancient Mesoamerica

An illustration of the Aztec calendar stone surrounds a young portrait of anthropologist Zelia Nuttall. “Mrs. Nuttall’s investigations of the Mexican calendar appear to furnish for the first time a satisfactory key,” wrote one leading scholar.Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University

By Merilee Grindle

Author, In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl: Zelia Nuttall and the Search for Mexico’s Ancient Civilizations

On a bright day early in 1885, Zelia Nuttall was strolling around the ancient ruins of Teotihuacán, the enormous ceremonial site north of Mexico City. Not yet 30, Zelia had a deep interest in the history of Mexico, and now, with her marriage in ruins and her future uncertain, she was on a trip with her mother, Magdalena; her brother George; and her 3-year-old daughter, Nadine, to distract her from her worries.

The site, which covered eight square miles, had once been home to the predecessors of the Aztecs. It included about 2,000 dwellings along with temples, plazas and pyramids where they charted the stars and made offerings to the sun and moon. As Zelia admired the impressive buildings, some shrouded in dirt and vegetation, she reached down and collected a few pieces of pottery from the dusty soil. They were plentiful and easy to find with a few brushes of her hand.

The moment she picked up those artifacts would prove to be pivotal in the life and long career of this trailblazing anthropologist. Over the next 50 years, Zelia’s careful study of artifacts would challenge the way people thought of Mesoamerican history. She was the first to decode the Aztec calendar and identify the purposes of ancient adornments and weapons. She untangled the organization of commercial networks and transcribed ancient songs. She found clues about the ancient Americas all over the world: Once, deep in the stacks of the British Museum, she found an Indigenous pictorial history that predated the Spanish conquest; skilled at interpreting Aztec drawings and symbols, and having taught herself Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs and their predecessors, she was the first to transcribe and translate this and other ancient manuscripts.

A 19th-century engraving of the pyramids of Teotihuacan. The Pyramid of the Sun was restored in 1910, on the centennial of the Mexican War of Independence. Bridgeman Images

She also served as a bridge between the United States and Mexico, living in both countries and working with leading national institutions in each. At a time when many scholars spun elaborate and unfounded theories based on 19th-century views of race, Zelia looked at the evidence and made concrete connections based on scientific observations. By the time she died, in 1933, she had published three books and more than 75 articles.

Yet during her lifetime, she was sometimes called an antiquarian, a folklorist or a “lady scientist.” When she died, scholarly journals and some newspapers ran notices and obituaries. After that, she largely passed from the public’s eye.

Today, anthropologists often have specialized expertise. But in the 19th century, anthropology was not yet a discipline with its own paradigms, methods and boundaries. Most of its practitioners were self-taught or served as apprentices to a handful of recognized experts. Many such “amateurs” made important contributions to the field. And many of them were women.

She was born in 1857 to a wealthy family in San Francisco, then a fast-growing city of about 50,000 people. Near the shore, ships mired in mud—many abandoned by crews eager to make their fortunes in the gold fields—served as hostels to a restless, sometimes violent and mostly male population. Other adventurers found uncertain homes in hastily built hotels and rooming houses. But the city was also an exciting international settlement. Ships arrived daily from across the Pacific, Panama and the east via Cape Horn.

Her well-appointed household stood apart from the city’s wilder quarters, but the people who lived there reflected San Francisco’s international character. Her mother, Magdalena Parrott Nuttall, herself the daughter of an American businessman and a Mexican woman, spoke Spanish, and her grandfather, who lived nearby, employed a French lady’s maid; a nursemaid from New York; a chambermaid, laundress, housekeeper, coachman and groom from Ireland; a steward from Switzerland; a cook and additional servants from France; and nine day laborers from China.

When Zelia was 8, her family left San Francisco for Europe. Along with her older brother, Juanito, and her younger siblings Carmelita and George, Zelia and her parents set off for Ireland, her father’s native land. Over the course of 11 years, the Nuttalls made their way to London, Paris, the South of France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. Throughout that time, Zelia was educated largely by governesses and tutors, with some formal schooling in Dresden and London. But her time overseas shaped her interest in ancient history and expanded her language skills, as she added French, German and Italian to her fluent Spanish. All of this expansion thrilled her mind, but it also made her feel increasingly out of step with the expectations for young women of her age. “My ideas and opinions form themselves I don’t know how, and I sometimes am astonished at the determined ideas I have!” she wrote in a November 1875 letter.

She took refuge in singing and tried to be pleased with the few social events she attended. Photos from the time show Zelia as an attractive young woman with large, dark eyes, arched eyebrows and stylishly arranged hair. Nevertheless, she was unhappy. “I was infinitely disgusted with some of the idiotic specimens of mankind I danced with,” she wrote in an 1876 letter after a party.

The Nuttalls returned to San Francisco in 1876, when she was nearly 20. Two years later, she met a young French anthropologist, Alphonse Pinart, already celebrated in his mid-20s as an explorer and linguist. He had been to Alaska, Arizona, Canada, Maine, Russia and the South Sea Islands. Pinart may have led the family to understand that he was wealthy. In fact, he was almost penniless, having already spent his significant inheritance.

They were married at the Nuttall home on May 10, 1880. During the next year and a half, the couple traveled to Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Mexico. Pinart introduced Zelia to a burgeoning academic literature in ethnology and archaeology, and she began to understand the theories of linguistics. She found 16th-century Spanish hardly a challenge as she consulted annotated codices—pictorial documents that traced pre-Columbian genealogies and conquests in Mesoamerica. While Pinart dashed from project to project and roamed widely among countries, tribes and languages, Zelia began to demonstrate an intellectual style that was more focused and precise.

Despite the excitement of discovery, something began to go wrong in the marriage. Hints of Zelia’s distress can be found in her effusive letters home. There was, for example, the shipboard admission that her husband was less attentive than she had anticipated. She noted that he was “so quiet and undemonstrative” that it was hard to imagine they were newly married. Some fellow passengers thought they were brother and sister—an odd assumption to make, even in Victorian times, about newlyweds.

By contrast, Zelia is nowhere to be found in Pinart’s surviving correspondence. On April 6, 1881, she gave birth to a daughter, Roberta, who lived only 11 days. To add to this melancholy time, her beloved father died in May, leaving her doubly devastated. A letter Pinart wrote to a friend just a few months later from Cuba appeared on stationery with a black border, signifying mourning, but he made no reference to his wife, her father or their child.

Zelia found solace in learning about her heritage when she and Pinart traveled to Mexico in 1881. She was eager to see her mother’s homeland and to hone her understanding of its pre-Columbian cultures. While Pinart carried out his own research, she began to learn Nahuatl, and she toured villages where dialects of the language were still spoken and ruins where the marks of the past could still be found.

The couple returned to San Francisco on December 6, 1881. By then, Zelia was pregnant again. In late January, Pinart set out to spend several months in Guatemala, Nicaragua and Panama, while Zelia awaited the birth of her second child, Nadine, at her mother’s house.

What finally drove Zelia to sue for divorce, on the grounds of cruelty and neglect, remains elusive. She may have felt that Pinart had married her for access to her family’s fortune. Many years later, she angrily informed Nadine that Pinart had spent the $9,000 she had inherited from her father as well as her marriage settlement. When the money was gone, and when her family was firm that he shouldn’t expect any more, he abandoned his wife and child. Once Zelia demanded a separation, he did not contest it, though obtaining the divorce was a long process that started soon after the couple’s return from their travels and didn’t conclude until 1888.

In later life, Nadine Nuttall Pinart would reflect on how much it had cost her to grow up without a father. “From the time before I can remember, he was taboo to me,” she wrote in a 1961 letter to Ross Parmenter, a New York Times editor who wrote numerous books about Mexico and developed a fascination with Zelia Nuttall. “I was frightened by the violent scoldings I got for mentioning his name. Later, I compromised with myself and when asked about him quietly said, ‘I never knew him!’ I realized that people thought he was dead and were sorry for me and said no more. In those days it was a disgrace to have a divorced mother.”

If the period between 1881 and 1888, when Zelia finalized her divorce, was fraught with tension and heartache, this was also when she set about redefining herself as a woman with a vocation. She spent five months in Mexico with her mother, her daughter and her brother between December 1884 and April 1885, visiting Cuernavaca, Mexico City and Toluca, and exploring archaeological ruins. It was during this time that Zelia made her fateful winter visit to Teotihuacan and acquired her first artifacts.

The pieces of pottery she picked up that day were small terra-cotta heads. They were abundant in the area among the pyramids. At the time, the site was still being used as farmland, and the artifacts came to the surface during ploughing. The heads themselves were an inch or two long, with flat backs and a neck attached. Scholars before Zelia—Americans, Europeans and Mexicans—had mused creatively about such relics, describing differences in their facial features and the variety of headdresses they had sported. Drawing on 19th-century fascination with the topic of race, the French archaeologist Désiré Charnay became convinced that he could see in them African, Chinese and Greek facial features. Charnay mused: Had their creators migrated from Africa, Asia or Europe? And if racial identity was a marker of human development, as many believed at the time, what might this curious mixture of features reveal about civilizations in the Americas?

This kind of thinking was typical. Mistaken ideas about Darwinism led many Western scholars to believe that civilizations evolved along a linear, hierarchical path, from primitive villages to ancient kingdoms to modern industrial and urban societies. Not surprisingly, they used this to legitimize beliefs about the superiority of the white race.

Zelia Nuttall divided her collection of terra-cotta heads into three classes. The first included rudimentary efforts to represent a human face (as seen above, far left). The second class (including the bald second head from the left above) had holes for attaching earrings and other ornaments. The third category included the rest of the heads pictured here, sporting what Zelia called “a confusing variety of peculiar and not ungraceful headdresses.” Public Domain

Zelia generally accepted her era’s assumptions about race and class, and she was comfortable with her elite status and its privileges. Yet in her research, she did not categorize civilizations as primitive, savage or barbaric, as other scholars did, nor did she indulge in racial theories of cultural development. Instead, she sought to sweep aside this kind of speculation and replace it with observation and reason.

The more Zelia examined her terra-cotta heads, the more she realized she needed guidance from someone who had more experience in the study of antiquity than she had. At the time, there were no departments of anthropology in colleges or universities, no degrees to be earned, no clear routes to building a career. To pursue her burgeoning interest in the ancient civilizations of Mexico, and to decipher the meaning of an assortment of terra-cotta heads, she contacted Frederic Ward Putnam, the curator of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and a leading expert on Mesoamerica. He agreed to meet her in the fall of 1885. The meeting was all she hoped for: Putnam warmed to her work and encouraged her to follow her intuitive grasp of how to observe and interpret evidence.

Putnam’s regard for women’s intellectual capacities was clear. He was one of a small number of Harvard researchers who gave lectures at “the Annex,” an institution established for women who had passed the college’s admissions test but were not allowed to attend classes or earn a degree. (The Harvard Annex eventually became Radcliffe College.) He hired a resourceful administrative staff of women and encouraged them to play a role in managing the museum. He also had a “correspondence school,” which he conducted through a widespread exchange of letters. As he once wrote, “Several of my best students are women, who have become widely known by their thorough and important works and publications; and this I consider as high an honor as could be accorded to me.”

Within months of their first encounter, in late 1885, Putnam asked Zelia to become a special assistant in Mexican archaeology for the Peabody. Less than a year later, in the annual report of the Peabody Museum, he wrote about her appointment in glowing terms: “Familiar with the Nahuatl language … and with an exceptional talent for linguistics and archaeology, as well as being thoroughly informed in all the early native and Spanish writings relating to Mexico and its people, Mrs. Nuttall enters the study with a preparation as remarkable as it is exceptional.”

With guidance from Putnam, Zelia wrote an investigation of the terra-cotta heads, her first published scientific report, which appeared in the spring 1886 issue of the American Journal of Archaeology. “At the first glance,” she wrote, “the multitude and variety of these heads are confusing; but after prolonged observation, they seem to naturally distribute themselves into three large and well-defined Classes.”

Each class, she theorized, had been created at a different time and represented a different stage in the culture. The first class contained “primary and crude attempts at the representation of a human face.” The second class included the first efforts at artistry. Her inspection revealed “holes, notches and lines,” suggesting ways in which tiny headdresses, feathers or beads could have been attached to the heads, and noted traces of several colors of paint and different kinds of clay.

The third class was the most important, Zelia argued, because of the quality of the molding and carving. This class had “modifications of feature sufficient to give every specimen an individuality of its own,” she wrote. “The faces are invariably in repose, in some the eyes are closed … faces young and smooth, others very elongated, some with sunken cheeks, others with wrinkles.”

By comparing these terra-cotta heads with ancient pictographs and writings, she showed that some of the heads represented children while others depicted young men, warriors or elders. Others showed the distinct hairstyles described in the writings of Bernardino de Sahagún, a 16th-century Franciscan friar who spent 50 years studying the Aztec culture, language and history. “The noblewomen used to wear their hair hanging to the waist, or to the shoulders only. Others wore it long over the temples and ears only,” Sahagún had written. “Others entwined their hair with black cotton-thread and wore these twists about the head, forming two little horns above the forehead. Others have longer hair and cut its ends equally, as an embellishment, so that, when it is twisted and tied up, it looked as though it were all of the same length; and other women have their whole heads shorn or clipped.”

These concrete observations allowed Zelia to challenge popular ideas about the supposed African, Asian, European or Egyptian origins of the “races” in the Americas. For example, by studying the ornamentation the heads displayed, she was able to identify the person or god each artifact represented and interpret its ritual or symbolic purpose. One clearly corresponded with Tlaloc, the pan-Mesoamerican god of rain, who had been shown in the pictographs with a curved band above the mouth and circles around the eyes. Another head, molded with a turban-like cap, corresponded with the goddess Centeotl; Zelia speculated that the clay turbans once had real feathers attached. She also noted the significance of various poses. “In the picture-writings, closed eyes invariably convey the idea of death,” she wrote.

The article revealed how Zelia intended to be seen as a scholar. First, she made it clear that she had read what others had written. Then she revealed that she would go beyond existing speculation to answer questions that had puzzled others; hers was to be original and important work.

In 1892, Zelia presented a paper in Spain about the Aztec calendar stone. Buried during the destruction of the Aztec Empire, the calendar stone had been unearthed in December 1790, when repairs were being made to the Zócalo, Mexico City’s central plaza. The sculpted stone, some 12 feet in diameter and weighing 25 tons, became a popular attraction exhibited in the Mexico City Cathedral, steps from where it had been found. Antonio de León y Gama, a Mexican astronomer, mathematician and archaeologist, had written about its discovery and praised the intelligence of the Aztecs who had created it. Alexander von Humboldt, who saw the stone when he visited Mexico in 1803-1804, included a drawing in his Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, published in 1810, and encouraged Mexican intellectuals to study the meaning of its concentric circles and numerous glyphs. Many others took on its puzzles in the years that followed.

At the time of Zelia’s presentation, the Mexican upper classes were carefully crafting a new national image—a story that would allow Mexico to take its place among the modern nations of the world. The Aztecs, Maya, Olmecs, Toltecs, Zapotecs and other cultures had left their imprints throughout the country in magnificent temples, enigmatic statues, gold jewelry, jade figurines and painted murals. This history was reclaimed as a national heritage every bit as glorious as those of Greece and Rome. A statue of Cuauhtémoc, the Aztec king who resisted Cortés, took its place on Mexico City’s elegant Paseo de la Reforma in 1887. The calendar stone had been installed in a place of honor in the National Museum in 1885. But little was known about the actual customs and beliefs of those ancient people.

The Aztec calendar stone, a central focus of Zelia’s research, has been on display at Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology since 1885. Alamy

With her extraordinary knowledge of surviving codices, Zelia offered a novel “reading” of the giant calendar stone that had stumped others and provided new insights into the annual and seasonal cycles of daily life in ancient Mexico, illuminating the cosmology, agriculture and trade patterns of the Aztecs. She presented another version of the paper at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

Zelia returned to Mexico City in February 1902, and after a personal audience with Mexican President José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz, arranged by the U.S. ambassador, she embarked on a spree of travel to archaeological sites she had long wanted to visit. In May, she and 20-year-old Nadine joined friends at the Oaxacan ruins at Mitla, a religious center, where the “place of the dead” harbored both Mixtec and Zapotec art and architecture. On this dry, high plain ringed by mountains, Zelia strolled across vast stone patios, inspected the elaborate geometric friezes that lined and decorated them, explored temples and imagined a sophisticated society of kings, priests, nobles, artisans and farmers.

When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico in the 16th century, the Aztec Empire dominated the area. This map of its largest city, Tenochtitlan (now the historic center of Mexico City), was printed in 1524 in Nuremberg, Germany, likely based on a drawing by one of Hernán Cortés’ men. It shows the city’s elaborate network of roads, bridges and canals, complete with aqueducts and bathhouses. The Spaniards executed the last Aztec ruler, Moctezuma II Xocoyotzin, and forced his people to convert to Catholicism. Alamy

Zelia was welcomed into the international community of anthropologists in Mexico. She and Nadine traveled in the Yucatán with the young American anthropologist Alfred Tozzer, where they were beset by frequent rain and terrible roads. Arriving tired and wet in a small town, Tozzer, who would one day chair Harvard’s department of anthropology, was impressed by the women’s resilience. “Imagine the picture,” he wrote to his family on April 8, 1902. “Mrs. Nuttall, never accustomed to roughing it, a woman entertained by the crowned heads of Europe, sitting at a bench with the top part of my pajamas on drinking chocolate and her daughter with a flannel shirt of mine on doing the same.”

After a few months, Zelia and her daughter returned to Mexico City and purchased a mansion they called Casa Alvarado, in the upscale suburb of Coyoacán. The grand house never failed to impress. Frederick Starr, an anthropologist from the University of Chicago, was one of many who found the palace beautiful and restful: “We rode out to Coyoacán where we found Mrs. Nuttall and her daughter really charmingly situated. The color decoration is simple and strong. Nasturtiums are handsomely used in the patio and balcony effects. … While Mrs. Nuttall dressed, Miss Nuttall showed us through the garden, where a real transformation has been effected.”

Living in Mexico energized Zelia. In addition to her affiliation with Harvard, she had funding to travel and collect artifacts for the Department of Anthropology at the University of California. “With me here, in touch with the government and people, I think that American institutions can but profit and that I can do some good in advancing Science in this country,” she confided to Putnam.

Impressed by her knowledge of the country’s past, public officials and foreign visitors came to see her and listened carefully as she led them around her home and garden, explaining the collection she was busy assembling. Her garden, patio and verandas were home to an increasingly large number of stone artifacts, a beautiful carving of the serpent god Quetzalcóatl, revered for his wisdom, among them. She took up “digging” near Casa Alvarado, an activity one guest later recalled fondly. “Every morning after breakfast Mrs. Nuttall would give me a trowel and a bucket. She herself was equipped with a sort of short-handled spade, and we would go out into the surrounding country and ‘dig.’ We mostly found broken pieces of pottery, but she seemed to think some of them were significant, if not valuable. … She was a very handsome woman and very charming. She lived in great style, with many Mexican servants.”

The Codex Borgia, an accordion-folded document of Aztec life, was brought to Europe during the Spanish colonial period. Made of animal skins and stretching 36 feet when unfolded, the codex catalogs different units of time and the deities associated with them. It also includes astrological predictions once used for arranging marriages. Zelia drew on the codex to help her decode the Aztec calendar. Courtesy Ziereis Facsimiles

A section from the Codex Borgia

Zelia continued to travel throughout the country. She found a 14-page codex painted on deerskin, with commentary in Nahuatl, that she believed so valuable that she bought it with her own money, selling some of her possessions to afford it. “Owing to my residence here I must keep it a profound secret that I possess and sent out of the country this Codex,” she wrote to Putnam.

While she was not above smuggling treasures out of Mexico, Zelia also worked in the National Museum, contributing to its displays and archives, and she became an honorary professor of the institution.

Zelia had never owned a home until she bought Casa Alvarado in 1902. In a letter, she described the property as “a beautiful old place with extensive gardens.” Smithsonian Archives

Her Sunday teas at Casa Alvarado were a study in salon orchestration. “She would have 30 or 40 people and she would change the groups she invited,” one visitor recalled. “Sometimes they were all people who knew each other. Or else she would bring people together she wanted to introduce to each other. They weren’t like old-style Mexican parties, with all the women on one side and men on the other. The men and women were mixed together.”

According to an oft-repeated legend, at one of her soirées, she advanced to welcome an eminent guest just as her voluminous Victorian drawers came loose and dropped to her ankles. She calmly stepped out of them and proceeded as if nothing had happened. Zelia was, above all, self-confident.

Zelia Nuttall left Mexico during the early months of 1910 and did not return to her beloved Casa Alvarado for seven years. Throughout that time, Mexico was in the midst of a violent revolution. As many as two million people lost their lives in the ten-year conflict, and the country’s infrastructure was reduced to tatters. Even after the end of the most extensive violence, turmoil erupted sporadically until the late 1920s.

By then, visitors to Casa Alvarado agreed that Zelia was rooted in a bygone era. She was a middle-aged woman with thick glasses who favored shawls, laces and jet beads. Her palace was still filled with stuff only a Victorian could accumulate, but Mexico was telling new stories about itself.

The writer D.H. Lawrence used Zelia as a model for a fictional character—“an elderly woman, rather like a Conquistador herself in her black silk dress and her little black shoulder-shawl.” Antropo Wiki

The elites of the previous generation had asserted that descendants of the Aztec, Maya and other civilizations deteriorated into poverty and abandon. Young artists and intellectuals now rejected this belief. In Diego Rivera’s vast public murals, he showed the people of Mexico being ground into poverty and submission by Spanish conquistadors, a rapacious church, foreign capitalism, the army and cruel politicians. Quetzalcóatl replaced Santa Claus at the National Stadium; Chapultepec Park hosted Mexico Night.

Zelia did not like the revolution and she did not approve of what came after it. She did not celebrate the masses; she believed in hierarchy and a natural order of classes and races. Yet she was determined to be relevant to a new era in Mexico. Casa Alvarado became a meeting place for politicians, journalists, writers and social scientists from Mexico and abroad, many of whom came to witness the possibilities of change in the aftermath of a people’s revolution.

Nevertheless, the stubborn elegance of Casa Alvarado in the 1920s was clear testimony that Zelia was not willing to give up her lifestyle. When the French American painter Jean Charlot was a guest at one of Zelia’s teas, he was aghast at the Mexican servants in white gloves.

When Zelia Nuttall died in 1933, the U.S. consul in Mexico City wrote to Nadine—by then a 51-year-old widow living in Cambridge, England—assuring her that they’d given her mother a tasteful funeral. “Your Mother was very highly thought of here, as evidenced by the floral offerings and the number of her friends who came to the funeral service at the cemetery, it being estimated that about one hundred persons were present.”

By that time, the field of anthropology was dramatically changing, becoming more systematic and organized. Those who entered the field in the 1920s and 1930s built expertise in the classroom and under supervision in the field, passing a variety of tests and milestones determined by academic experts and acquiring a credential as proof of the right to pursue these inquiries. With these rigorous new standards, they asserted their superiority as scholars over those of Zelia’s generation.

Researchers thought this item at Vienna’s Museum of Ethnology was a “Moorish hat” before Zelia identified it as a Mesoamerican headdress. Alamy

Yet Alfred Tozzer, in his memorial in the journal American Anthropologist, reflected that Zelia “was a remarkable example of 19th-century versatility.” She was wrong in some of her overarching theories. For instance, she fallaciously argued that ancient Phoenician travelers had carried their culture to Mesoamerica. But she was right about many other things. Through her letters, articles and books, we can trace what she got right and what she got wrong as a scholar, and we can follow her as she moved from one research obsession to the next.

Her private life is harder to grasp. Among all the artifacts, there is little about the quips and gossip she exchanged with friends, the piano music she liked to play and sing. We cannot know what was in the boxes of papers in the cellar of Casa Alvarado that were burned in the housecleaning undertaken by its new tenants. We cannot retrieve personal and public documents lost in the San Francisco earthquake in 1906.

What we do know is that she had to make sacrifices, often very personal ones. We can feel her vulnerability, uncertainty, anger and embarrassment in the letters she wrote, as well as her self-assuredness. It required unusual self-discipline to learn so many languages and to gain a mastery of ancient pictographs. Her almost constant travels imperiled her health even while they advanced her vast network of friends, colleagues and patrons. But she continued to work, and that work helped establish the foundation on which many others now build.

A single mother pursuing a career while looking after a family in a man’s world: In some ways, Zelia Nuttall was a very modern woman.

Adapted from In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl: Zelia Nuttall and the Search for Mexico’s Ancient Civilizations by Merilee Grindle, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2023 by Merilee Grindle. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

[santoschristos]

"All religious forms are manifestations of the great cosmic, universal, infinite religion latent in every atom of the cosmos." --Samael Aun Weor - The Perfect Matrimony

Any genuine religion, mystical tradition, or type of spirituality is an attempt to communicate something of value and importance, which is that there is a purpose to life that one can experience for oneself.

The main traditions that we study here are Hinduism, Judaism, and the reform of those religions which came later, which are Buddhism and Christianity. We study all religions, but these are the four main ones we are interested in.

There are people all over the world that study the religion that they grew up with, or the religion that they became attracted to during their life. All of those traditions are very beautiful and have a great deal of knowledge that they express to humanity.

But unfortunately, people do not see religions for what they truly are. Over many centuries, religions have become a mere belief, something that people follow, respect, study and believe in, but rarely experience. It is very rare, sadly, to find anyone who has true experience of what the religions are teaching. Yet, that is their purpose: to guide us to experience what they teach.

In this tradition, the experience of religion is our primary goal. Our primary interest is learning the practical value of each religion.

Now in the case of Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity, all of them in their essence teach exactly the same thing. On the surface they can appear different, but in their heart they are exactly the same.

They are attempting to convey the experience of a higher way of living, something that cannot be communicated in words. Each religion is like the expression of direct mystical experience with the divine.

Jesus was a vessel for that spirit which came in order to teach the same thing, the same religion, the same truth in different places. As an example: in India we find the Lord Krishna, who taught the same truth, in different levels of course, according to its own vessel. The vessel of Krishna who is one with that Spirit and is that same Spirit itself is the Bodhisattva; the Bodhisattva of Krishna is of course Arjuna, who we find in the Bhagadvad Gita.

Arjuna is the one who is talking to the Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, but you have to understand that Arjuna is the bodhisattva of Krishna. So, Krishna is the master of Arjuna. Krishna is the master and Arjuna is the Bodhisattva, who is learning from him and is at the same time teaching to others through the same.

The thing is that when we talk about this spiritual prophecy, or this intelligence that is able to incarnate in many places in order to establish the religion or the way to union with God of that time and place, this concept is understood in the western world, through the Bible, but in a very incomplete way.

Indeed, in the West there is a lot of ignorance related with this spirit, because in many different places this spirit has received many names. Among the Tibetans, for instance, Christ is known as Avalokiteshvara; you find that name in the Buddhist Pantheon.

Among the Taoists you find Kwan Yin. Kwan Yin is of course, according to the Tao, the “subtle voice,” or the “sweet voice,” in other words, the verb, the word, Logos.

Among the Mayans, they call this spirit, Kukulkan. The word “Kukul” means bird and “Kan” means serpent. So, when you say Kukulkan, this means the “bird-serpent.” That spirit, the “bird-serpent” in Aztec language or Nahua, is Quetzalcoatl.

There among the Peruvians, the Incas of Peru they call him Viracocha. Viracocha is the same Vishnu, the Lord. Of course, Chokmah חכמה, in the Kabbalah as you know means “Wisdom” and this is related with this spirit of wisdom.

All religions are precious stones strung on the golden thread of Divinity.

All religions conserve the eternal values. False religions do not exist.

All religions are necessary; all religions fulfill their mission in life.

It is absurd to state that our neighbor’s religion is useless and that only ours is authentic. If the neighbor’s religion is not good then my religion is not good either because the values are always the same.

It is stupid to state that the religion of the indigenous tribes of America is idolatry because they too have the right to say that our religion is idolatry. If we laugh at them, they can also laugh at us. If we say that they adore or that they adored idols, then they too can say that we adore idols.

We cannot discredit the religion of others without discrediting ours as well because the principles are always the same. All religions have the same principles.

Under the sun, every religion is born, grows, develops, multiplies into many sects, and dies. This is how it has always been and will always be.

Religious principles never die. The religious forms can die, but the religious principles, in other words, the eternal values, can never die. They continue; they are re-dressed with new forms.

Religion is inherent to life in the same manner that humidity is to water.

It is worthwhile to study all religions. The comparative study of religions leads one to comprehend that all religions conserve the eternal values, that no religion is false, that all are true.

The word religion comes from the Latin word religare, which implies “to link or bind or union of the Soul to God."

"As the blazing fire reduces wood to ashes; similarly, the fire of Self-knowledge reduces all bonds of karma to ashes..." --Krishna - Bhagavad-gita 4:36-37

The eternal values embodied in the world's religions express the essential requirements for the consciousness to enter into the light and fully realize the purpose of living.

In other words, the heart message of every religion seeks to awaken the consciousness and eliminate suffering, so that the eternal light may be known through our own direct experience.

"Truth is one; sages call it by various names." -- Rig Veda

Original Post by Mac Fion

[hplovecraftmuseum]

Lovecraft and animals, Part 7: Snakes - Snakes did not become particularly important in Lovecraft's tales until fairly late in his career (since Lovecraft considered himself a gentleman amateur 'man of letters', using the term 'career' might have been distasteful for him). The 'Father of all serpents' first appeared in his ghost writing/revision work. THE CURSE OF YIG and THE MOUND, both featured references to 'Yig'. Though there was some uncertainty as to who really coined the name (Lovecraft or his client) in his letters to other writer friends Lovecraft claimed that he himself came up with the name and concept of Yig. Yig is never actually featured in any Lovecraft story in the same way as Great Cthulhu. We do not get a detailed discription of him either. We might assume that since the stories that carry his name most abundantly are connected to the American West and it's pre - Anglo inhabitants that Yig is perhaps the original entity around which all First Nations Snake-God myths were born. The Aztec diety Quetzalcoatl would be a prime example. A snake-like bundle of hair that can move about even after it is cut from a woman's head shows up in the particularly dreadful tale, MEDUSA'S COIL. Lovecraft penned this abomination for Zealia Bishop but the story did not see publication until after his death. (1940. Weird Tales) Of all Lovecraft works written for clients seeking to develop a career as professional writers, MEDUSA'S COIL has got to be one of the most rediculous! Still, Lovecraft injects references to Cthulhu - called Clooloo here, as well as Shub-Niggurath and R'lyeh. Interestingly Lovecraft also makes mention here of the author of the fabled book, Les Chants de Maldoror, also known as Maldoror by a young Frenchman who called himself 'Comte de Lautremont'. Les Chants de Maldoror was written between 1868 and 1869 and was highly influential for the Surrealist School of artists and poets of the 1930s. Lovecraft admitted in letters that he had read parts of Maldoror on several occasions. HPL also knew of Salvador Dali's early works. Apparently Lovecraft was not particularly impressed with Surrealism in general, however. Lastly Lovecraft makes a passing reference to 'the serpent-men of Valusia in one of his later tales. This brief mention was a tip of the hat to Lovecraft's writer pal, Robert E. Howard. Howard and Lovecraft never met, but they corresponded by mail for many years until Howard's death by suicide on June 11, 1936. Howard is best known today for his virtual 'invention' of the Sword and Sorcery genre of imaginative writing. He was the creator of the famed barbarian King, Conan. Lovecraft made mention of a number of his writer friend's fictitious gods and monsters as his own mock mythology/cosmic religion developed, most importantly Clark Ashton Smith's whom Lovecraft admired greatly. (Exhibit 415)

[wei75631]

P6 Idea - 22 Dragon Veins

First let's talk about dragon veins. They are formed from the collective subconscious of extinct creatures on the earth, and they have always supported the balance of this world. After the protagonist completes certain tasks and the dragon veins enter into a contract, the dragon veins will reside in the protagonist's body and allow the protagonist to give birth to a "cosmic egg" that symbolizes motherhood. As the protagonist takes care of the cosmic egg, it will turn into a persona.

The personas hatched from the cosmic egg are a mixture of their own mythological images and Mesozoic reptilians. The arrangement of the 22 Arcana is as follows:

The Fool - Yam, the sea god in Ugaritic mythology - A dromaeosaur covered in ocean-style armor

The Magician - Aitvaras, the fire spirit in Lithuanian folklore - An oviraptor dressed as a wizard with hands on fire

The Priestess - Kuraokami, the water goddess in Japanese mythology - An elegant plesiosaur wrapped in Shinto relics

The Empress - Meretseger, the winged snake goddess in Egyptian mythology - Archaeopteryx in ancient Egyptian style

The Emperor - Yatonokami, the horned snake god in Japanese mythology - A stegosaur decorated with cold weapons from the Jomon period

The Hierophant - Itzamna, the lizard god in Mayan mythology - A sauropod made of Mayan architectural stones

The Lovers - Melusine, the winged human-snake fairy from French folklore - A petite pterosaur with a draconic fairy sculpture on its tail

The Chariot - Tarasque, the monster suppressed by a saint in French legend - An ankylosaur assembled from a round tank and turret

Justice - Mushussu, the hybrids appearing on decorations in ancient Mesopotamia - Shringasaurus decorated with snake, ram, lion, eagle and scorpion armors

The Hermit - Fafnir, the dwarf who transformed into dragon in Norse mythology - An megalania wearing dragon-shaped armor

Fortune - Illuyanka, the sea serpent in Hittite mythology - Mosasaurus with cyberpunk style

Strength - Vrtra, the powerful monster in Hindu mythology - A tyrannosaur that blends into the truck and keeps smoking

The Hanged Man - Python, the big snake killed by Apollo in Greek mythology - Titanoboa with steampunk elements

Death - Crom Cruach, the heretic god in Celtic mythology - Triceratops with steam train and gothic decoration

Temperance - Nyami Nyami, the snake god of the Zambezi River - A spinosaur with Gaigan elements

The Devil - Apophis, the evil snake god in Egyptian mythology - A giant cobra made of dark energy

The Tower - Fernyiges, the cunning black dragon in Hungarian folklore - A wise stygimoloch wearing a black cloak

The Star - Yurlungur, the rainbow serpent in Australian Aboriginal mythology - Prehistoric salamander in Aboriginal totem style

The Moon - Bakunawa, the sea dragon that swallowed the moon in Philippine mythology - Ichthyosaur composed of moon-shaped luminous wooden boards

The Sun - Quetzalcoatl, the greatest god in Aztec mythology - A giant pterosaur in the style of a fighter jet and Rodan

Judgement - Kur, the dragon that symbolizes the underworld in Mesopotamian mythology - Countless dragon veins and sharp metals piled up to form a Daikajiu like Godzilla

As for "The World", I'm keeping it secret for the time being in order not to prevent the plot from leaking out.

[diarythebookwyrm]

Insane Shit I was Taught as a Mormon (in no particular order)

That all indigenous people in North America were actually Jews who sailed from somewhere in the Middle East all the way to somewhere in either South, Central, or North America in 600 BC.

That somehow these Jews started out white (which...is like Jesus being white, but sure Jan) and then as they became more "sinful" they became darker skinned.

Oh, and by 300 AD all the Nephites (the "white and delightsome" and "holy" people) were killed in a battle with the Lamanites (the sinful and darkskinned people) with only one Nephite left named Moroni who buried an abridged history carved on gold plates, a special translation stone called the Urim and Thumim in a hill in New York State for Joseph Smith, Jr. to find in 1823

That Joseph Smith, Jr. translated the Book of Mormon by "wearing" the Urim and Thumim, which were supposedly a breastplate with lenses set into the shoulders like some weird goggles that you could adjust. (This was official Church History until the last like...twenty years or so, when they finally started admitting how he really "translated" the gold plates. I'll go into that later)

More under the cut, because there's a Lot of Weird Shit

That Joseph Smith, Jr. and Oliver Cowdery received the Aaronic (or "lesser") priesthood by a river in Philadelphia from the spirit of John the Baptist, and then the Melchizedek (or "higher") priesthood by that same river from Peter, James and John (yes, Jesus' companions/disciples).

That Quetzalcoatl was actually how the Aztecs explained Jesus Christ coming to the New World during the three days before he appeared to his apostles in Jerusalem. I wish I was making this one up.

That there were three Nephites who were basically the New World Peter, James and John who told Jesus they wanted to "tarry" on earth until the second coming. This is such a Thing (TM) among Mormons that ppl claim to this day to have had interactions with the Three Nephites. like it's wild how much they buy into this, along with the idea that John the Beloved is still walking around. There's a whole ass Christmas book (with included musical accompaniment CD--yes, really--because everyone has A Song) about a woman discovering the True Meaning of Christmas (TM) by being a caretaker nurse to a guy who claims to be John the Beloved that's written by a popular Mormon musician.

That Joseph Smith, Jr. only ever had three "extra" wives, because he didn't really want to practice polygamy, but God made him do it.

That Joseph Smith, Jr. was killed for being the True Voice of God, and not because he was a lying, narcissistic sack of shit. (more on that later)

That God is an alien (they don't say that but come on) who lives on a Star/Planet (they use the term star, but there's no way anything lives on a star) called Kolob. There's a whole ass hymn that they just straight up only sing in church on rare occasions that's all about how God lives on Kolob. The reason they don't sing it? because they KNOW how insane it sounds, and they don't want people to know just how fucking weird they are.

That if you are a Truly Good Mormon in life and get all your appropriate ordinances done (like being married in the Temple. you legit cannot enter Super Heaven without that), then you go to Super Heaven The Celestial Kingdom. And if you are the Specialist Boi (it's almost certainly gonna be all men lbr) then you go to the Highest Level of Super Heaven the Celestial Kingdom and get your own planet to be God for.

That there are three tiers of Heaven. Terrestrial (for those who did okay for being not Mormon Godless Heathens), Telestial (for those who Did Accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, but weren't quite Special Enough for Super Heaven), and Celestial aka Super Heaven.

That Adam (as in Adam and Eve) was actually the Archangel Michael given a human body because he was a Super Special Boi who helped God and Jesus create the world.

Lies I Learned the Truth of Once I Put in Minimal Effort:

That the Urim and Thumim weren't real. The way Joseph Smith actually "translated" the Book of Mormon was by putting a "seer stone" in a hat, putting his face in the hat to seal out all the light, and "seeing" the words printed on the stone. This was also a scam he used several years before he started "translating" to find hidden treasure. He was arrested for fraud for doing this in Philadelphia, which was why his future father-in-law didn't want Emma Hale (later Emma Smith) to marry Joseph in the first place.

The seer stone looked like this:

That Joseph Smith didn't just have three "bonus wives" who were poor women with no man to financially support them, but actually closer to 35. At least eleven of these wives were teenagers when he coerced them into marrying him. At least two were polyandrous, where Joseph coerced both the woman and her legal husband into letting him marry the woman in question. The youngest and most scandalous of these girls was Helen Mar Kimball, who was fourteen. Several of these women then went on to marry Brigham Young, who had a total of fifty-six wives.

Joseph claimed that he was "encouraged" to practice polygamy by an angel with a "drawn sword" and used this to coerce the young women and girls into accepting his proposal.

That Joseph wasn't killed for being The One True Prophet, but for the rumors of him being a polygamist who married children. He was arrested for destroying a federally owned printing press where a former Mormon was printing pamphlets about the girls Joseph Smith was forcing to marry him. The mob that came to Carthage Jail were there because they heard the rumors and wanted to get rid of a pervert, basically.

The Mormon Church lies about a lot of their history. And even when they do finally admit the truth about it, they hide it so you have to really go hunting for the proof in their "approved" sites.

[highly-important]

Exploring Zonai Art

Just some misc musings. Putting under a tag for spoilers

There is definitely a visual connection between the Captain Constructs and the Bargainer statues, right? The cone head and vertical stacked eyes. The warrior constructs are meant to evoke death.

One thing is I am not sure if the bargainer statues are made by the Zonai or just discovered by them. To me, they look intentionally different from other Zonai art. The bargainer statue in Great Abandoned Central Mine looks like it is being excavated. If this is the case, the warrior constructs are built in the likeness of the Bargainers.

The eye in the bargainer statue looks like it might be a proto version of the Sheikah eye.  The gossip stones might also be related to bargainer statues.

The Goddess statues are associated with light and life. They might be dual opposites to the Bargainer statues. (The big Bargainer in the Grand Central Mine is also directly below the Temple of Time.)

The friendly constructs have lightbloom motifs on them, the life/light opposing the  death/darkness. (Later, Zelda also gets lightbloom earrings symbolizing her role and abilities.)

On Link, the Depths Gear looks almost like a ritual executioner hood. Zant’s helmet in Twilight Princess has the same conical shape, but could also just be a coincidence.

From a real-world art direction standpoint, the Zonai art makes a lot of references to Indigenous Latin American imagery. The Constructs reference the jade mosaic and tusk shapes seen in Aztec death masks.

There are also references to the Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent that represents heaven and earth. The Quetzalcoatl is a synthesis of  opposites, representing the destructive and developing nature of the earth, the snake, and the fertile and rendering forces of the heavens, the bird. 

The Zonai dragon statues usually have two heads, and often appear as circles, maybe representing a cycle of birth and destruction.

I haven’t beat TOTK yet so I don’t know where the story is going, but the dual opposites of life/death, heaven/earth, male/female, light/dark all thematically play a huge role in the art, story, and design of this game.

 This TikTok user does a better job of exploring other Latin American art references in TOTK than I can.

[veale2006-blog]

Feathered Serpent The earliest representations of feathered serpents appear in the Olmec culture (c. 1400–400 BC. The Olmec culture predates the Maya and the Aztec. This cultural enclave extended from the Gulf of Mexico to Nicaragua. Most surviving representations in Olmec art, such as Monument 19 at La Venta, and a painting in the Juxtlahuaca cave, show the Feathered Serpent as a crested rattlesnake, sometimes with feathers covering the body and legs, and often close to humans. It is believed that Olmec supernatural entities such as the feathered serpent were the forerunners of many later Mesoamerican deities, although experts disagree on the feathered serpent's religious importance to the Olmec. H.B. Nicholson notes that as early as the Middle Formative (Preclassic) in the Olmec tradition, images of serpents with avian characteristics were often represented in several types of artifacts and monuments. This composite creature, who has been denominated the “Avian Serpent” and “Olmec God VII,” appears to constitute an earlier form of the later full-fledged Feathered Serpent, the rattlesnake covered with feathers, probably with at least some of the same celestial and fertility connotations.

The pantheon of the people of Teotihuacan (200 BC – 700 AD) also featured a feathered serpent, shown most prominently on the Temple of the Feathered Serpent (dated 150–200 AD). The pyramid was built southeast of the intersection of the avenue of the dead and the east-end avenue. Several feathered serpent representations appear on the building, many of them including full-body profiles and feathered serpent heads. The sculptures utilize practices such as relief carving to create complex ornate compositions. Head carvings of the Feathered Serpent have been frequently found around the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent.

While the feathered serpent has been a common theme in different Mesoamerican works, it is frequently and most commonly reflected in the architecture of Mesoamerican culture. Some common techniques used to incorporate imagery of the Feathered Serpent into this architecture is relief carving, which involves “a sculpture with figures that protrude from a background while still being attached to it” and normally combined with tenoned heads, which are large pieces of stone carved but have a peg of sorts to insert them into the wall area, adding more depth and details to the architecture. Other Mesoamerican structures, such as the ones in Tula, the capital of the later Toltecs (950–1150 AD), also featured profiles of feathered serpents..

The Aztec feathered serpent deity known as Quetzalcoatl is known from several Aztec codices, such as the Florentine codex, as well as from the records of the Spanish conquistadors. Quetzalcoatl was known as the deity of wind and rain, bringer of knowledge, the inventor of books, and associated with the planet Venus.

The corresponding Mayan god Kukulkan was rare in the Classic era Maya civilization. However, in the Popol Vuh, the K'iche' feathered serpent god Tepeu Q'uq'umatz is the creator of the cosmos.

Along with the feathered serpent deity, several other serpent gods existed in the pantheon of Mesoamerican gods with similar traits, all of which had an important role in the cultural development of Mesoamerican cultures. The evidence of the importance of these deities to Mesoamerican culture lies in the architecture left from these civilizations and the rituals surrounding them.

[blooming-grove]

a latine voter here: its not that quetzalcoatl is a dragon but more that quetzalcoatl can very easily fit into the category depending on how you define dragon imo? like if you were to ask me to list dragons i would probably not immediately say quetzalcoatl, but like, feathered serpent deity is really giving dragon, yknwo?

Answering this now since the fiona vs Quetzalcoatl poll is over (n im extremely surprised he won in the end like i really thought fiona would be the final round vs ace ppl irl) anyways

I agree!! Quetzalcoatl to me and many others is not a dragon but a feathered serpent n deity.

For me in particular I didnt see the relation of Quetzalcoatl being added as a dragon and a dragon species? type? sub-type? until it started appearing in media like video games and anime. Not that they appear often or are popular enough for it imo but in the few ones its more in the dragon dep. or divine dep. (bonus points for showing my bestie anime dragon girl Quetzalcoatl* to induce dmg)

*if ur curious i showed her both Lucoa from Dragon Maid** and Quetzalcoatl FGO **I wanna say search Lucoa out of ur own will but id rather not send minors that could be reading this towards that anime so trust me when i say her designs is a fanservice big breasted character type and her dragon form imo resembles more a chinese dragon without limbs and shitty wings. I also think it gets included into the dragon category bc it helps fill a gap in like "world dragons" if that makes sense. If you told me a giant reptile with wings id be yeah sure thats a dragon bc it fits.

But idk if its bc i grew up with subeta that has a feathered serpent pet species I would again not think yeah thats a dragon but yeah thats a snake.

Actually when i saw the coatls from fr i did not make the immediate connection at ALL (also fandomwise i saw them linked more to cats so i was like yeah makes sense KLJHLDKFJSAHLKJGH)

Now i gotta show one of my favorite designs in modern media for Quetzalcoatl comes from Las Leyendas***. LOOK AT THIS MAN!!! ITS SO COOL AND POWERFUL!!

***Las Leyendas was a very good show dripping with pride for its roots but i have to mention that they did have an episode with a w*ndigo and its been a long time so i cannot remember if there were other insensitive depictions of other cultures.

In this show he's the big bad but he's a complex deity he's the god of the wind and fertility!! and crops!! He's complex!! But he's not a dragon.... to me.

Now all this said and done take my opinion with a grain of salt because, while I am latine I am not of Aztec Descent or Mexican (my bestie is tho and when i asked they too didn't consider Quetzalcoatl a dragon but a serpent). In general I am always overjoyed n excited to just see him and just latam pantheon/characters around. I had slightly more typed but i had to retype this like 3 times bc tumblr didnt save. I really do appreciate the ask i was excited when i got it n wanted to respond immediately thank you for sharing!!

[thewapolls]

IZAMNA was actually a pretty reasonable flub for once, because I dunno how easy it would have been in 1996 to link the Japanese phonetics i-za-mu-na[イザムナ] to a romanized version of ITZAMNA. Itzamna is the mayan sky god. He's not normally a "serpent" per say, but he is at times depicted as a caiman, so maybe there's a bit of linguistic drift that gets us to this worm thing design? I dunno.

TAILMOOZE yet another baffling product of the original WA localization team. The name in question is meant to be TAMMUZ, the Hebrew name of the Sumerian deity, Dumuzid. It joins the likes of Humbaba, Nergal and Marduk, in WA's cast of Mesopotamian mythic figures. In spite of the name though, I'm not actually familiar with any lore that would tie him to this weird bug/serpent looking design.

(ya know for a moment I thought maybe these two models were unofficially related, but the more I looked into it the more I'm certain that's not the case. So they're just here because they're both wormy guys with big flayed out wing bits up top.)

LINDWURM a european folk monster that runs a pretty wide gamut from just a snake to monstrous serpent to winged and/or legged dragon. As tends to be the case with the slurry of european cultures it eventually absorbs/gets absorbed into a variety of other ideas and so has overlaps with WYVERNs and even the GUIVRE that we saw a few polls back.

COUATL by itself is the Nahuatl word for "serpent" but given the character model having feathered wings, and the general context it's clearly a reference to Quetzalcoatl, the "feathered serpent", Aztec hero and creator god.

TYPHON monstrous giant serpent and child of titans, an adversary of the gods in Greek mythology. With his wife Echidna father to a whole brood of other legendary monsters. The WA2 model where he appears as one of a quartet of rare elemental monsters in the Ley Point dungeons representing Wind, is inexplicably the basis of the reprised ...ZEIN monsters in WA3.

SHELZAURUS super oddball for this group of otherwise very well grounded references. It's just "Shell" and "-saurus" and the only thing I can find it some obscure card from the Miracle of the Zone(MOZ) tcg from the 90s.

YURLUNGUR, originally butchered in localization as URUNGE, the Yurlungur, aka The Rainbow Serpent, is a mythic creature and deity figure from Australian aboriginal faiths. (for lack of a better image I'm just using SMT's gummyworm ass looking art for the reference down below)

URANEUS is a weird one. First instinct is to assume it's a reference to Uranus/Ouranos, the Greco-Roman sky god. But oddly the specific Japanese u-ra-e-nu-su[ウラエヌス] isn't how they'd approximate that. What it does match is the spelling of an enemy robot in Giant Robo. Despite the perfect match however, the robot and the monster appear to have nothing in common designwise.

SQUIRM So, funny enough while the name is very likely a reference to the 1976 horror movie, Squirm, the model design itself appears to be a throwback to the kaiju Battra, tied to Mothra lore in the Godzilla movies.

GRABOID I mentioned in the boss tournament trivia is the monster from the Tremors movies.

NAK given the context of big serpents I have to assume this is supposed to be Nak[นาค] as in the Thai Buddhist variation on the Hindu Naga[नाग].