A Nahuatl song, glorifying war as the very fulfillment of the American dream, captures the smugness of a great people in an impregnable city:
Proud of itself
is the city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.
Here no one fears to die in war.
This is our glory.
This is Your command,
oh giver of Life!
Have this in mind, oh princes,
do not forget it.
Who could conquer Tenochtitlan?
Who could shake the foundation of heaven?
With our arrows,
with our shields,
the city exists,
Mexico-Tenochtitlan remains.
Cantares Mexicanos, fol. 19 v.-20 r, in Miguel Leon-Portilla, Pre-Columbian Literatures of Mexico, 87.
"Songs proclaiming the glory and power of the Aztecs frequently reach an almost mystical exaltation," 86. It is a voice singing eerily from the dust--a voice of warning from the ancient peoples of America to the usurpers of their proud place.
Such boasting is a leitmotif in the Book of Mormon. This great city Jerusalem, or that great city Zarahemla, or this great city Ammonihah united stand as impregnable as heaven and earth to all contest human or divine. The theme of impregnability goes hand-in-hand with the book's insistence on destruction. As Hugh Nibley would tell his classes, that associated theme sounds its trumpet blast in the very first chapter of Nephi (verse 4): "The great city Jerusalem must be destroyed!" For a sense of how destruction goes on to weave its pattern throughout the entire book, he advised us to consult the concordance--and to be prepared for a shock.
It is Civilization versus God and repentance. Civilization, the state of the great City, must fall in her unrepentant pride (see Revelation 18). The idea reaches a fever pitch in Helaman 13:12-14: "Yea, wo unto this great city of Zarahemla. . . yea, wo unto this great city. . . this great city. . .this great city. . . yea, wo be unto this great city." It is the Echo of History.
The elites of mighty Ammonihah slap Alma with their stolid refrain, "Who is God, that sendeth no more authority than one man [or one General Authority or one Church] among this people," and ream him out with their cant about their own particular little city and their own particularly novel, lovely, rational ideology being as lasting as earth itself:
Who art thou? And for that matter: Who is God?
"Who art thou? Suppose ye that we shall believe the testimony of one man, although he should preach unto us that the earth should pass away?
Now they understood not the words which they spake; for they knew not that the earth should pass away.
And they said also: We will not believe thy words if thou shouldst prophesy that this great city should be destroyed in one day.
Now they knew not that God could do such marvelous works."
(Alma 9:2-5).
That part about "one day" sums up the degree to which man will tempt God.
In due time--or ten chapters' space--"the people of Ammonihah were destroyed; yea, every living soul of the Ammonihahites was destroyed, and also their great city, which they said God could not destroy, because of its greatness.
But behold, in one day it was left desolate; and the carcasses were mangled by dogs and wild beasts of the wilderness" (Alma 19:9-10).
That last detail shows one everlasting irony: ever that great city stood, even at her peak, at the borders of man and beast--in reach of the wild.
"Nothing beside remains," though its infamy persists:
"And it was called Desolation of Nehors; for they were of the profession of Nehor, who were slain; and their lands remained desolate" (Alma 19: 11).
Perhaps the great lesson about civilization in the Book of Mormon is the utter unawareness of the inevitable fall--the great lesson of never learning the lesson at all, despite all the learned "profession."
For, but a few years later, we hear the Nephite boast sounded again:
Why do you suffer this man to revile against us?
For behold he doth condemn all this people, even unto destruction;
yea, and also that these our great cities shall be taken from us, that we shall have no place in them.
And now we know that this is impossible, for behold, we are powerful, and our cities great, therefore our enemies can have no power over us (Helaman 8:5-6).
One sentence, surcharged with irony, should haunt the memory of every reader of the Book of Mormon:
"And now we know that this is impossible."
It does not take the Lord long to respond.
The Lord acknowledges the great city, even while mocking her wearying pretense:
"Yea, wo unto this great city of Zarahemla. . . yea, wo unto this great city. . . this great city. . . this great city. . . yea, wo be unto this great city" (Helaman 13).
Behold, that great city Zarahemla have I burned with fire . . .
And behold, that great city Moroni have I caused to be sunk in the depths of the sea. . .
And behold, that great city Moronihah have I covered with earth.
(3 Nephi 9: 3-5)
Where is mercy? comes the plea. My question is Where is Moronihah? Have you never, in the quiet of a big-city library, contemplated the whereabouts of Alexandria's bookshelf?
There can be no greater irony in the modern history of the Americas than the refrain:
Who could conquer Tenochtitlan?
Who could shake the foundation of heaven?
Speaking of the Great Cities of world civilization, the living Prophet, Thomas S. Monson, concludes:
"In the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security and a comfortable life; and they lost all--comfort and security and freedom."
"Must we learn such costly lessons over and over again? Times change, but truth persists. When we fail to profit from the experiences of the past, we are doomed to repeat them with all their heartache, suffering, and anguish. Haven't we the wisdom to obey Him who knows the beginning from the end?" ("The World Needs Pioneers Today," Ensign, July 2013). "Doomed?" Doomed.
We remember, too, how the people of that great city Ammonihah, the Nephite answer to Bunyan's Vanity Fair and the Revelator's Babylon, longed to undermine the freedoms of lesser, more complacent cities, cities of the ancient, Pre-Columbian American dream:
"They do study at this time that they may destroy the liberty of thy people" (Alma 8:17).
That line of study suddenly becomes the most popular major of every stripe of partisan in Syria, Russia, Egypt, Washington DC, or Venezuela today. But complacency undoes the studious proud and the lazy ignorant alike.
Caught up in their studious dream, lost in their agenda, assured of their power, "in one day," from blue sky to "in Mexico night is falling," the moment of repentance passed. When the sun set, it was not "Like a shield that descends"--"eagles" and "jaguars" to the contrary.
(See additional verses of the triumphant song, Pre-Columbian Literatures of Mexico, 86).
The site of the lost city, Mexico-Tenochtitlan, nearly the world's greatest city its its time, now also hosts earth's largest city. Together with all other great cities of the world, that Great City Mexico, or that Great City America, again attests, re-born, the struggle between God and Civilization, between the intricacies of ideology and agenda and the simplicities of repentance.
Notes
Elder L. Tom Perry, "Obedience through Our Faithfulness," April 2014, General Conference: "While some very intelligent and insightful people might believe our more complex time demands ever more complex solutions, I am far from convinced they are right. Rather, I am of the frame of mind that today's complexity demands greater simplicity."
Showing posts with label Aztecs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aztecs. Show all posts
Saturday, May 31, 2014
Friday, September 27, 2013
"In Their Ships They Came"--Enlarging Our Memories through the Book of Mormon
"Though it be jade it falls apart, though it be gold it wears away"--what then of books, so easily set aside?
Yet I will recall with joy a book of Nahuatl poetry and a king who sang of the ephemeral nature of life on earth, a place we never felt to be our true home anyhow: "Somewhere else is the place of life. There I want to go, there surely I will sing. . ."
The title escapes me now; the author--who could dispute the matter?--Miguel Leon-Portilla.
I had forgotten Leon-Portilla until just the other day when, on a quest for American lore, I pulled a little book from the stacks: Los antiguos mexicanos a través de sus crónicas y cantares (1961). .
Sus cantares: I found myself swept away by a brisk measure of song, and swept out to sea:
Llegaron, vinieron. . .
Por el agua en sus barcas vinieron.
They arrived, they came. . .
Over the water in their ships they came,
in many groups.
And it was there they arrived, at water's edge,
on the north coast.
And that very place where they beached their ships
is Panutla,
which means: the place where one goes over the waters,
and we still call it Panutla today.
The song of the sea runs on--I have neither the right nor the skill to put into English what Leon-Portilla so finely puts into Spanish. . .
A footnote leads us to the original Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica: Sahagun's Codice Matritense de la Real Academia. Sahagun's Aztec students recorded the verses.
Sahagun, the Florentine Codex. . . I had heard these names all my life. Just months ago I first held in my hands the volumes of the Codex; still I knew nothing of the Matritense.
The latter codex, in two folio volumes, is housed in Madrid's Real Biblioteca. There is no need to visit the palace library today: La Biblioteca Digital de Mexico proffers a digital image. On folio 191, recto et verso, penned in Nahuatl with a ready hand, the words of the poets appear. These words, we are told, all have to do with the archaic, a "distant time, which nobody now can tell, nor nobody now remember."
"Trailing clouds of glory," their "life's Star" came long, long ago from another home: seas and skies commingle into "this great deep."
Emergence and Migration sum up the American story from the beginning of time--and forever after. The Book of Mormon relates the tale of "a lost and fallen people," in fact whole nations, who, as "wanderers in a strange land," seem constantly to find themselves in the act of getting lost in the American labyrinth before being discovered all over again by yet another wandering band.
"Because we shall not live here, we shall not remain here. We shall go in search of a land."
The Toltecs and the Mexica, "born at sea," are "Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird."
"What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands/ What water lapping the bow."
Anything more? Yes, they came to an in-between place, a paradisaical land they called Tamoanchan. Golden Tamoanchan was no lasting city. There the lovely Xochiquetzal (Precious Flower) once tore "a floral spray" from a forbidden tree and, for the deed, "was cast out of Tamoanchan" (Burr Cartwright Brundage, The Phoenix of the Western World: Quetzalcoatl and the Sky Religion, 41). Bountiful Tamoanchan remains nature's "hardest hue to hold."
Nezahualcoyotl and Robert Frost impart one song:
"Nothing gold can stay."
Can anything stay? A trace of the song persists in the Codice Matritense: "the traditions of their fathers," "a small degree of knowledge," a scent on the breeze, "What images return."
Yet the book itself, says Jacob, "must perish and vanish away":
"Though it be jade it perishes, though it be gold it vanishes away."
"Take these plates." Take up their imperative. Plates of gold "must retain their brightness"--and, brightly, "enlarge the memory."
"But whatsoever things we write upon anything save it be upon plates must perish and vanish away; but we can write a few words upon plates, which will give our children, and also our beloved brethren, a small degree of knowledge concerning us, or concerning their fathers—" (Jacob 4:2).
"Take these plates."
Notes
"Though it be jade": attributed to King Nezahualcoyotl; Miguel Leon-Portilla (ed.), Native American Spirituality: Ancient Myths, Discourses, Stories, Doctrines, Hymns, Poems, 241 (from Collection of Mexican Songs [Cantares Mexicanos], National Library of Mexico, fol. 17. r.). In Book of Mormon idiom we might say: Though it be jade it perishes, though it be gold it vanishes away.
"Somewhere else is the place of life", Nahuatl poem, Miguel Leon-Portilla, Pre-Columbian Literatures of Mexico, 86.
Seafaring Narrative: Miguel Leon-Portilla, Los Antiguos Mexicanos, 21-22.
The same day I found Leon-Portilla's little book, I had, by coincidence, been reading Hugh Nibley's comments about the Mexica sea crossing, as found in similar records. I had often read these comments but had never yet done any independent searching. (I still recommend Hugh Nibley, The World of the Jaredites, Appendix One).
Then just yesterday I opened with joy Professor John Leon Sorenson's hefty new tome, Mormon's Codex. I quickly turned to the chapter on transoceanic crossings to early America and found six pages of primary sources from Mesoamerica detailing legendary voyages of origin. Six pages--astonishing! I wished to see what Sorenson had to say about Leon-Portilla and the Codice Matritense, and unsurprisingly, Sorenson reproduces on page 163 the very story found in the Matritense, though here rendered in the narrative prose translation provided by Leon-Portilla, "Pre-Hispanic Literature," in Handbook of Middle American Indians, Gordon F. Ekholm and Ignacio Bernal (eds.), 10:455. (Whether the narrative should be considered Nahuatl prose or poetry remains to be seen; I wish to look more deeply into the question.)
A reference to the same article, "Pre-Hispanic Literature," can also be found in John L. Sorenson's and Martin H. Raish's two volume bibliography, Pre-Columbian Contact with the Americas across the Ocean. I have also now read Sorenson's still valuable 1955 article on the same theme; he does not yet mention the Matritense, but what a wealth of other material!
Codices matritenses de la Real Biblioteca, fol. 191 r. and v.
http://bdmx.mx/sahagun_matritenses_1.php.
"Because we shall not live here," Codice Matrilense (Leon-Portilla, 23), said of the place Xomiltepec, where they arrived after leaving Tamoanchan. Leaving Xomiltepec, they traveled to Teotihuacan.
Burr Cartwright Brundage, The Phoenix of the Western World: Quetzalcoatl and the Sky Religion, 41.
Robert Frost: "Nothing Gold Can Stay"
Nezahualcoyotl: Nahuatl songs, recorded after the Spanish Conquest, and attributed to King Nezahaulcoyotl. We don't know whether the king wrote the songs or whether they serve to memorialize him.
"wanderers in a strange land": Alma 13:23; Alma 26:36; Jacob 7:26
"Trailing clouds of glory"; "life's Star": Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"
"this great deep": Ether 2:25
"born at sea": "called Marina because I was born at sea"; Shakespeare, Pericles
"glitter with the glory of the hummingbird" = "death" (and also = Huitzilopochtli, the patron god of the Mexica (Hummingbird of the South), who led them from Aztlan to the Valley of Mexico): T.S. Eliot, "Marina"
"the traditions of their fathers": Book of Mormon, passim
"a small degree of knowledge": Jacob 4:2
"What images return": T.S. Eliot, "Marina"
"What seas what shores": T.S. Eliot, "Marina"
"no lasting city": Hebrews
"Take these plates": Jacob 7:27
"must retain their brightness": Alma 37:5
"enlarged the memory": Alma 37:8
Additional Notes
1) And then there is South America. A study released just this year shows a genetic match between Japan, Korea, and a portion of the population of coastal Ecuador. The explanation? The authors point the reader back to Dr. Betty J. Meggers's research linking Japan's Jomon Culture with the ancient Valdivia Culture of coastal Ecuador. It seems Jomon fishermen did cross the Pacific long, long ago. They too came.
2) I would also point the curious to the online essays of Ronald A. Barnett, especially "Reinventing the Aztecs." Barnett tackles the tough questions that Amos Segara, John Bierhorst (a genius), Gertrudis Payas, etc., have raised about the interpretation of Nahua poetry and philosophy, particularly as that has been mediated by Angel Maria Garibay and his student Miguel Leon-Portilla (see Payas, Meta 49:3 (2004), 544-561). Of course we do not know whether King Nezahualcoyotl composed the poems attributed to him but recorded after the Conquest, nor can anybody fully sort out their meaning and purpose (see Jongsoo Lee, The Allure of Nezahualcoyotl, and especially, his quotations of Louise Burkhart). Riveting remain the words Non Nezahualcoyotzin, ni cuicanitl (I am Nezahualcoyotl, I am the singer).
Whether the colonial era Nahuatl and Spanish records represent the true intellectual and religious history of the Mexica culture may be debated forever. These are voices from the dust and the record perishes at the touch. The Book of Mormon shines brightly--"the most correct book on earth."
Yet I will recall with joy a book of Nahuatl poetry and a king who sang of the ephemeral nature of life on earth, a place we never felt to be our true home anyhow: "Somewhere else is the place of life. There I want to go, there surely I will sing. . ."
The title escapes me now; the author--who could dispute the matter?--Miguel Leon-Portilla.
I had forgotten Leon-Portilla until just the other day when, on a quest for American lore, I pulled a little book from the stacks: Los antiguos mexicanos a través de sus crónicas y cantares (1961). .
Sus cantares: I found myself swept away by a brisk measure of song, and swept out to sea:
Llegaron, vinieron. . .
Por el agua en sus barcas vinieron.
They arrived, they came. . .
Over the water in their ships they came,
in many groups.
And it was there they arrived, at water's edge,
on the north coast.
And that very place where they beached their ships
is Panutla,
which means: the place where one goes over the waters,
and we still call it Panutla today.
The song of the sea runs on--I have neither the right nor the skill to put into English what Leon-Portilla so finely puts into Spanish. . .
A footnote leads us to the original Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica: Sahagun's Codice Matritense de la Real Academia. Sahagun's Aztec students recorded the verses.
Sahagun, the Florentine Codex. . . I had heard these names all my life. Just months ago I first held in my hands the volumes of the Codex; still I knew nothing of the Matritense.
The latter codex, in two folio volumes, is housed in Madrid's Real Biblioteca. There is no need to visit the palace library today: La Biblioteca Digital de Mexico proffers a digital image. On folio 191, recto et verso, penned in Nahuatl with a ready hand, the words of the poets appear. These words, we are told, all have to do with the archaic, a "distant time, which nobody now can tell, nor nobody now remember."
"Trailing clouds of glory," their "life's Star" came long, long ago from another home: seas and skies commingle into "this great deep."
Emergence and Migration sum up the American story from the beginning of time--and forever after. The Book of Mormon relates the tale of "a lost and fallen people," in fact whole nations, who, as "wanderers in a strange land," seem constantly to find themselves in the act of getting lost in the American labyrinth before being discovered all over again by yet another wandering band.
"Because we shall not live here, we shall not remain here. We shall go in search of a land."
The Toltecs and the Mexica, "born at sea," are "Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird."
"What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands/ What water lapping the bow."
Anything more? Yes, they came to an in-between place, a paradisaical land they called Tamoanchan. Golden Tamoanchan was no lasting city. There the lovely Xochiquetzal (Precious Flower) once tore "a floral spray" from a forbidden tree and, for the deed, "was cast out of Tamoanchan" (Burr Cartwright Brundage, The Phoenix of the Western World: Quetzalcoatl and the Sky Religion, 41). Bountiful Tamoanchan remains nature's "hardest hue to hold."
Nezahualcoyotl and Robert Frost impart one song:
"Nothing gold can stay."
Can anything stay? A trace of the song persists in the Codice Matritense: "the traditions of their fathers," "a small degree of knowledge," a scent on the breeze, "What images return."
Yet the book itself, says Jacob, "must perish and vanish away":
"Though it be jade it perishes, though it be gold it vanishes away."
"Take these plates." Take up their imperative. Plates of gold "must retain their brightness"--and, brightly, "enlarge the memory."
"But whatsoever things we write upon anything save it be upon plates must perish and vanish away; but we can write a few words upon plates, which will give our children, and also our beloved brethren, a small degree of knowledge concerning us, or concerning their fathers—" (Jacob 4:2).
"Take these plates."
Notes
"Though it be jade": attributed to King Nezahualcoyotl; Miguel Leon-Portilla (ed.), Native American Spirituality: Ancient Myths, Discourses, Stories, Doctrines, Hymns, Poems, 241 (from Collection of Mexican Songs [Cantares Mexicanos], National Library of Mexico, fol. 17. r.). In Book of Mormon idiom we might say: Though it be jade it perishes, though it be gold it vanishes away.
"Somewhere else is the place of life", Nahuatl poem, Miguel Leon-Portilla, Pre-Columbian Literatures of Mexico, 86.
Seafaring Narrative: Miguel Leon-Portilla, Los Antiguos Mexicanos, 21-22.
The same day I found Leon-Portilla's little book, I had, by coincidence, been reading Hugh Nibley's comments about the Mexica sea crossing, as found in similar records. I had often read these comments but had never yet done any independent searching. (I still recommend Hugh Nibley, The World of the Jaredites, Appendix One).
Then just yesterday I opened with joy Professor John Leon Sorenson's hefty new tome, Mormon's Codex. I quickly turned to the chapter on transoceanic crossings to early America and found six pages of primary sources from Mesoamerica detailing legendary voyages of origin. Six pages--astonishing! I wished to see what Sorenson had to say about Leon-Portilla and the Codice Matritense, and unsurprisingly, Sorenson reproduces on page 163 the very story found in the Matritense, though here rendered in the narrative prose translation provided by Leon-Portilla, "Pre-Hispanic Literature," in Handbook of Middle American Indians, Gordon F. Ekholm and Ignacio Bernal (eds.), 10:455. (Whether the narrative should be considered Nahuatl prose or poetry remains to be seen; I wish to look more deeply into the question.)
A reference to the same article, "Pre-Hispanic Literature," can also be found in John L. Sorenson's and Martin H. Raish's two volume bibliography, Pre-Columbian Contact with the Americas across the Ocean. I have also now read Sorenson's still valuable 1955 article on the same theme; he does not yet mention the Matritense, but what a wealth of other material!
Codices matritenses de la Real Biblioteca, fol. 191 r. and v.
http://bdmx.mx/sahagun_matritenses_1.php.
"Because we shall not live here," Codice Matrilense (Leon-Portilla, 23), said of the place Xomiltepec, where they arrived after leaving Tamoanchan. Leaving Xomiltepec, they traveled to Teotihuacan.
Burr Cartwright Brundage, The Phoenix of the Western World: Quetzalcoatl and the Sky Religion, 41.
Robert Frost: "Nothing Gold Can Stay"
Nezahualcoyotl: Nahuatl songs, recorded after the Spanish Conquest, and attributed to King Nezahaulcoyotl. We don't know whether the king wrote the songs or whether they serve to memorialize him.
"wanderers in a strange land": Alma 13:23; Alma 26:36; Jacob 7:26
"Trailing clouds of glory"; "life's Star": Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"
"this great deep": Ether 2:25
"born at sea": "called Marina because I was born at sea"; Shakespeare, Pericles
"glitter with the glory of the hummingbird" = "death" (and also = Huitzilopochtli, the patron god of the Mexica (Hummingbird of the South), who led them from Aztlan to the Valley of Mexico): T.S. Eliot, "Marina"
"the traditions of their fathers": Book of Mormon, passim
"a small degree of knowledge": Jacob 4:2
"What images return": T.S. Eliot, "Marina"
"What seas what shores": T.S. Eliot, "Marina"
"no lasting city": Hebrews
"Take these plates": Jacob 7:27
"must retain their brightness": Alma 37:5
"enlarged the memory": Alma 37:8
Additional Notes
1) And then there is South America. A study released just this year shows a genetic match between Japan, Korea, and a portion of the population of coastal Ecuador. The explanation? The authors point the reader back to Dr. Betty J. Meggers's research linking Japan's Jomon Culture with the ancient Valdivia Culture of coastal Ecuador. It seems Jomon fishermen did cross the Pacific long, long ago. They too came.
2) I would also point the curious to the online essays of Ronald A. Barnett, especially "Reinventing the Aztecs." Barnett tackles the tough questions that Amos Segara, John Bierhorst (a genius), Gertrudis Payas, etc., have raised about the interpretation of Nahua poetry and philosophy, particularly as that has been mediated by Angel Maria Garibay and his student Miguel Leon-Portilla (see Payas, Meta 49:3 (2004), 544-561). Of course we do not know whether King Nezahualcoyotl composed the poems attributed to him but recorded after the Conquest, nor can anybody fully sort out their meaning and purpose (see Jongsoo Lee, The Allure of Nezahualcoyotl, and especially, his quotations of Louise Burkhart). Riveting remain the words Non Nezahualcoyotzin, ni cuicanitl (I am Nezahualcoyotl, I am the singer).
Whether the colonial era Nahuatl and Spanish records represent the true intellectual and religious history of the Mexica culture may be debated forever. These are voices from the dust and the record perishes at the touch. The Book of Mormon shines brightly--"the most correct book on earth."
3) There number over one million Latter-day Saints in Mexico and Central America. No household throughout the length and breadth of Latin America should long remain without a copy of the Book of Mormon. No effort should be spared in making the book generally available; besides, gone forever is the notion that the extant record of ancient America, whether written or material artifact, lends no witness to the Book of Mormon, itself Another Testament of Jesus Christ.
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