Lord Eight Wind’s Introduction
Figure 6.1. Codex Zouche-Nuttall page 1 (British Museum folio no. 1), tableaux 1, 3, and 4. (© Trustees of the British Museum, The British Museum Company, Ltd.)
Although page 1 of Codex Zouche-Nuttall obverse has three tableaux, the single large tableau on page 2 is the dominant scene, with the page 1 tableaux subordinate to it. The five dates among the four tableaux on these two pages cover a span of fifty-two years, from AD 935 (Year 1 Reed Day 1 Alligator) to AD 987 (Year 1 Reed Day 1 Alligator). The date itself is metaphorically associated with “beginnings,” especially of dynasties (Furst 1978a:90–92). Four sites or locations are illustrated: Toto Cuee Cave (page 1, tableau 1), Yucuñudahui (Rain God Hill) (page 2, tableau 2), Apoala (page 1, tableau 3), and Monkey Hill/Suchixtlan/Cerro Jasmin (page 1, tableau 4).
Figure 6.2. Codex Zouche-Nuttall page 2 (British Museum folio no. 2), tableau 2 in this two-page sequence. (© Trustees of the British Museum, The British Museum Company, Ltd.)
Table 6.1. Sequenced Chronology and Reading Order of Zouche-Nuttall Obverse Pages 1 and 2
The introduction has one primary actor, Lord Eight Wind, and two secondary actors, Lords Twelve Alligator and Eleven Flower—all of whom face in the direction the pictograms are to be read (to the reader’s left). There are fourteen tertiary actors in the four tableaux, although none in the first. They function as ceremonial attendants who face against the reading direction, to the reader’s right.
The actions displayed on these two pages are: the births of Lord Eight Wind and Lord Twelve Alligator (page 1, tableau 1); Lord Eight Wind’s appearance at Apoala (page 1, tableau 3); Lord Eight Wind’s appearance at Monkey Hill (page 1, tableau 4); and the ordering ritual at Yucuñudahui conducted by Lord Eight Wind, Lord Twelve Alligator, and Lord Eleven Flower (page 2). On page 1, directly above the lower left-hand tableau (tableau 3) is a blank space. This is suspicious. Examination of high-resolution photographs from the British Museum under various filters discloses that this space once displayed a human figure, now erased (Johann Sawyer, pers. comm., 2008).
The recovery of Lord Eight Wind’s biography is complicated by the fact that the Mixtecs believe that all of their great ancestors, heroes, and lineage founders have supernatural qualities. This is surely the case with Lord Eight Wind. Ancestors are often called “gods” in the literature, when in point of fact they more resemble the concept of santos: holy and extraordinary people whose lives are embellished by supernatural deeds (Troike 1978:558). John Pohl (1994:55) writes: “In Pre-Columbian times the kings were the equivalent of saints. They bore titles of divinity and claimed sacred rights to control of the land by virtue of their direct ancestors, the nuu, who were born literally from specific geographical features (see Pohl and Byland 1990).”
The first two pages of Codex Zouche-Nuttall obverse are Lord Eight Wind’s introduction and deal with the first fifty-two years of his life, a period when he undertook and accomplished extraordinary deeds. By the time his biography resumes on page 5, after the War from Heaven (pages 3 and 4), he is beginning the second part of his life transformed as a mortal lineage founder. Because the codex is a Postclassic manuscript retrospectively recording Epiclassic events, he is called “Eight Wind” for the day of his supernatural birth from Toto Cuee Cave in the Cavua Colorado (Byland and Pohl 1994:88, 120). Subsequent appearances in the various tableaux show him emerging from cave openings, even in temples and other buildings.
Lord Eight Wind’s eagle costume identifies him as a specific kind of santo, a class of priest referred to as yaha yahui. These special wizards are said to have several extraordinary abilities: they can speak with the dead (Fray Antonio de los Reyes (1976 [1593]:79), control local economies, become invisible, and fly through both air and earth. As to this latter feat, one meaning of yaha is “eagle.” Lord Nine Wind Quetzalcoatl is seen in two of his forms as both yaha and yahui in Codex Vienna (page 48). These priests, sometimes symbolized by the maguey plant, are described as “fathers of the tribe or race” (Byland and Pohl 1994:88). Fray Gregorio Garcia (1729 [1607]:327–328) notes the legend of two brothers named Nine Wind—a legend that is preserved in Mixtec folklore. Although it is recorded as coming from two illiterate Mixtec farmers from the towns of San Juan and Santa Crux Mixtepec in 1976 (León-Portilla and Shorris 2001:619), it is actually preserved in a Spanish version in the Monastery of Cuilapa that is mentioned by Antonio de los Reyes (1976 [1593]). One brother—the older one, Nine Serpent Wind—could turn himself into an eagle and fly through the air. The younger brother, Nine Caverns Wind, could transform into a small winged serpent and fly with such skill that he could fly through rocks and walls. He could also be invisible. Clearly, Lord Eight Wind Eagle Flints partakes of some of these Nine Wind avatar characteristics, particularly in his ability to move through caves in the earth with great ease.
This is not a casual association. As demonstrated previously, from earliest times in Mesoamerica, caves are illustrated as portals to another world. In Middle Formative period Chalcatzingo, an Olmec influenced outlier, the earliest stone monuments show caves as entrances to the underworld and as the proper spheres of action for powerful elites with supernatural abilities (Grove 1987). Individuals who appear from, or who enact events in, caves have been variously labeled as wizards, priests, or shamans. Because Mesoamerican art tends to be thematically conservative but stylistically variable, it is not surprising to note that the prominent cave image at Chalcatzingo on Monument 9, dated at ca. 700–500 BC, is figured similarly to a prominent cave at another location in Codex Bodley (9-V), ca. AD 1500—almost two thousand years later.
Lord Eight Wind’s predominating association with caves as supernatural portals both qualifies his abilities and provides secure identification as a yaha yahui priest. This association persists until he reaches age sixty-nine, after which two tableaux do not display him with caves: page 5c, his marriage to Lady Ten Eagle, and page 7d, where he is shown in post-mortem events as though alive, and seated in the temple at Monkey Hill/Suchixtlan/Cerro Jasmin.
This particular site is identified in Codex Selden as a place with white flowers, and this is a known location in modern Oaxaca: Cerro Jasmin. Eight Wind’s site shown in Codex Selden (5-III) and Bodley (5–6) (Jansen and Jimenez 2005:37a) was known as Suchixtlan in Postclassic times, and the currently unknown site called “Monkey Hill” in the codices is likely in this same area. Therefore, all three locations are generally synonymous. The Codex Selden tableau names our protagonist “Lord Eight Wind Twenty,” and this is also the case in Codex Vienna (35a) when he attends the Tree-Birth ceremony at Apoala.
There are two reading orders possible for this two-page introduction. The first of them (see Pohl’s introduction to this volume) is by similarity of dates, which orders the tableau as page 1 tableau 1 dated Year 1 Reed 1 Alligator; then the tableau above it, dated 1 Reed 1 Alligator. This scheme then takes the next tableau on page 1, dated Year 7 Flint Day 1 Motion, and relates it to the topmost date on page 2, which is the same. The sequence then progresses to the central date on page 2, which is Year 3 Reed Day 4 Flint. The eye then logically proceeds to the first date on page 3, which is Year 3 Reed Day 6 Dog (Williams 1991:2b). These five dates among four tableaux can be expressed by number in reading order from right to left.
4. 7 Flint 1 Motion |
2. 1 Reed 1 Alligator |
5. 3 Reed 5 Motion |
3. 7 Flint 1 Motion |
|
1. 1 Reed 1 Alligator |
However, there is a chronological sequence to the dates that proposes a more sophisticated reading order less obvious to casual inspection, and I prefer this system. It follows a year-progression in the Mixtec calendar, cycle 2, and the European calendar dates are included to render this progression obvious (table 3.1). Expressed by chronological progression of years, this reading order is:
3. 7 Flint 1 Motion |
5. 1 Reed 1 Alligator |
2. 3 Reed 4 Motion |
4. 7 Flint 1 Motion |
|
1. 1 Reed 1 Alligator |
This second reading sequence is roughly circular or oval, beginning at the lower right of page 1 and ending at the upper right of that same page.
At first glance, this circular reading scheme seems unusual, but a similar pattern appears on page 19 in the second saga, and the final page of Zouche-Nuttall obverse has an identical pattern—beginning at the lower right and ending at the upper right. It is a way of setting a text sequence apart from what precedes and/or follows it. For this reason, we can see that pages 1 and 2 constitute Lord Eight Wind’s introduction and summarize a complete calendar cycle. Then the war story is told on pages 3 and 4, and Eight Wind’s biography is resumed on page 5.
In summary, the day 12 Alligator occurs once (day 200) in solar year 1 Reed, as does day Eight Wind (day 242), so Lord Eight Wind was born on the 242nd day in that year. These two pages provide a glimpse of the first fifty-two years of his life. He was born supernaturally from Toto Cuee Cave in AD 935; in his twenty-eighth year he was at Yucuñudahui; seventeen years later, at age forty-five, he went to Apoala; and seven years after that, at age fifty-two, he began his rule at Suchixtlan.
Lord Eight Wind’s identity and qualities provoke the reader’s curiosity and are proper subjects of investigation, enlarged and explained subsequently as the scribes reveal him to us. The first two pages of Codex Zouche-Nuttall obverse do state interesting and important things about Eight Wind during the first part of his life, when he functioned as a santo with the supernatural abilities of a yaha yahui priest.
Lord Eight Wind’s association with the pivotal lineage site of Apoala is prominent in two ways. First, we see his institution of the fire-drilling ordering ritual at Yucuñudahui. A similar ceremony is also an Apoala ritual (Furst 1978a:17b) pictured in Codex Vienna, page 18, Year 3 Reed Day 2 Grass to Year 7 Flint Day 1 Flower. The years in both codices are the same, but not the days; therefore, they are rituals specific to each location, and the metaphorical content carried in the 260-day sacred calendar differs between the two sites. Second, on page 1 in the Codex Zouche-Nuttall Apoala tableau, Eight Wind emerges from a cave in the river at Apoala. This is very likely a direct reference to Apoala as the co-source of this ritual. This tableau visually links to Codex Zouche-Nuttall page 18b, which shows a sacred fire-drilling bundle emerging from a cave in the river at Apoala. Thus Lord Eight Wind’s tableau at Apoala on Zouche-Nuttall page 1 may be read as an ideological statement indicating that both he and the fire-drilling bundle, with its associated ritual, are the same intrinsically as the one in Codex Vienna, but specifically tied to Yucuñudahui.
Another quality of Lord Eight Wind concerns his association with sacred plants used in ordering rituals. He raises a bundle of three plants over areas to be ordered in the Codex Vienna ceremonial scenes portraying these rituals (Vienna 22-1; Furst 1978a:229–256). Three plants are associated with Lord Eight Wind in the Zouche-Nuttall page 2 ordering ritual. One grows from the hill behind him and is the same as that portrayed in Codex Vienna, one is in his crown, and another grows from the hill before him. Yet another, fourth, sacred plant associated with ordering rituals is the maguey, which is displayed as part of Eight Wind’s costume and seems to grow from his throat (ZN page 2). In the final tableau on page 1, at Monkey Hill, Lord Eight Wind literally speaks or sings one of the sacred plants and another seems to grow from his body. I infer that Lord Eight Wind is the bundle of sacred plants, or that he embodies them intrinsically.1 We will see in Codex Zouche-Nuttall page 5 tableau 1 that the chief ordering ritual ceremonialist of Codex Vienna, Lord Two Dog, appears in a ceremony honoring Lord Eight Wind, thus showing Eight Wind in a superior position to one of the Apoala “gods,” Two Dog.
A third consideration regarding Lord Eight Wind’s metaphysical nature is his similarity to a prominent god, Lord Nine Wind Quetzalcoatl. While this will be examined more completely elsewhere, it is worth noting here that these two individuals shared the dignity of dual birth. That is to say, Lord Eight Wind was born from the earth and subsequently became one of the tree-born nobles at Apoala (Vienna 35). Codex Bodley (40-I) tells us that Lord Nine Wind Quetzalcoatl was born either from or on the earth at Temzacal, and Codex Vienna (48c) illustrates that he was subsequently born from a stone knife in the sky. The chronological events in the careers of these two men (or demigod and god) are also interrelated and will be examined in a later chapter.
There is no doubt about it: this two-page introduction and synopsis of Lord Eight Wind’s first fifty-two years is a wonder story. As an individual with supernatural abilities, he is intimately associated with caves and is able to move through the earth with apparent ease. His abilities at Yucuñudahui are recognized, and utilized by the holy place in the northern Mixteca—Apoala. Eight Wind enacts the ceremony for sanctifying the landscape there and generally, establishing though his own power and authority the all-important landscape resource, Rain God Hill (Yucuñudahui). This activity implies that Eight Wind has an intimacy with Dzaui, the rain god himself. When it is time to sanctify and unify the rain god’s landscape, Lord Eight Wind emerges from the earth there and embodies the sacred plants necessary to envivify the place for the benefit of his people. Dzaui is seldom personified as a complete anthropomorph in Mixtec manuscripts, but the god is seen in human form twice in Codex Zouche-Nuttall’s first eight pages. In one of these scenes he transforms Lord Eight Wind prior to the assumption of his career as lineage founder—a lineage which, by the way, endured for very nearly five hundred years and is well documented in Codex Selden.
Lord Eight Wind’s later life as a “natural” human being—his rule and lineage founding at Monkey Hill/Suchixtlan/Cerro Jasmin—is the subject of his continuing biography, which resumes on page 5. However, shortly after his arrival at Yucuñudahui in AD 963, the epic War from Heaven began, and that is the subject of pages 3 and 4.
1. Mayan kings dressed and represented themselves as maize plants, literally becoming the maize god.