Watering the Tree of Life: Astronomy and the founding of Nahuatlaca culture

Watering the Tree of Life:

Astronomy and the founding of Nahuatlaca culture

Celestial, terrestrial, and human cycles are intertwined in that they reflect each other’s pacing: a woman’s life-giving time mirrors the Moon’s orbit around Earth of 28 days. The geometry of a human body and plant growth expresses the mathematics of the ratio between the orbits of Venus and Earth around the Sun. The number of days in a cycle of Venus from Morning to Evening Star is the human gestation sequence just before birth.

When Olmec and Maya spiritual representatives met to renew the Nahuatlaca world that had existed before the Nahui-Atl (Great Flood) they chose August 13, 3114 BC, the date when a Perseids meteor shower appears and when the Sun was in its zenith over that area. Later they would construct the city of Izapa there on August 13, 1359 BC, a city that expresses in the positions of its buildings the astronomy embodied in the Aztec Calendar. This construction pattern continued across Anahuac: Teotihuacan, Tollan, Mexico-Tenochtitlan, Chalchihuites, Chaco Canyon, Cahokia.

The Perseids meteor shower was chosen as a celestial marker because it symbolizes “watering of the Tree of Life.” As the shower happens, the meteorites appear to fall on the T-shaped constellation Cygnus. In Nahuatlaca cosmology Cygnus represents the Tree of Life. When the invocation of this astronomical event came in 3114 BC, another meaning was attached: the meteorites also represent corn seeds and Cygnus was a corn stalk, a new Tree of Life.

Carlos Aceves