Ivory laden, pristine, an angel draped in oblivion

She winced at the bellows of obsidian-clawed butterflies

The scowls of the filth eaters;

The laments of swamp grass twisted with flowers,

As the cries of her daughters echoed.

“The eagle descended but the Jaguar remains”

In the dark places

Ravines and caves, the nooks, crannies

Where time grinds bones to dust

Old brujas cried

“The earth mother tried but eventually her Castilian flowers died”

She looked upon them.

A sight beheld more than seen.

Quetzalcoatl had genuflected before her precious bone white countenance

And the mothers who prayed in the old ways

Tlamatinime, brujas, and slaves

“For this stalk you defied me”

She whispered about the withering maize to Quetzalcoatl

And his precious twin.

“The Maize became man and they wither and die, scream and cry while you deny them the knowledge you supplied them, until the bones return from where you obtained them.

Though you paid your manda for them, you abandoned them and again to me do my children return”

Certainly we do not believe that our gods are dead

Not in Querétaro or Guanajuato,

Or throughout la gran Chichimeca

Not even in the ashes of Tenochtitlan

We recovered their bones in our goddess of death

On altares of family witches speaking whispers that heal the deaf.

She who glows in the dark of her own manto

Towering above Doña Queto’s teocalli in Tepito

While reigning beneath it.

Beneath us.

She lives between my breaths

We are one at my inhale, and ending an embrace every exhale.

De a hueso.

Dios te salve, Santísima Muerte llena eres de gracia, mis difuntos están contigo

Bendita tú eres entre todos tus creyentes

Y bendito es el beso de tu Santa guadaña

Santa Muerte madre de las tumbas protégenos a nosotros, tus devotos, ahora y en la h

ora de nuestra santa muerte. Amén.

Empacho is not a folk disease or a culture bound syndrome. Nor is it food stuck to your intestinal wall, impaction, or any other general digestive distress. The latter, stuck food, was the feeling; while the former are the symptoms.

Spanish view (the Greek humoral theory)

Under the Hippocratic - Galenic framework the stomach was the center where the body's inner heat continued to cook the food in a process called,pepsis, that facilitated healthy digestion. Disruption of this process resulted in illnesses like empacho. 

Under the Greek humoral theory the body consists of four humors; blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile . These four humors are placed on top of two binary axes; hot/cold and dry/wet (the four modalities)

• Blood: hot and wet (air)

• Phlegm: cold and wet (water)

• Yellow bile: hot and dry (fire)

• Black bile: cold and dry (earth)

Empacho was classified as a cold/wet sickness. Therefore it needed to be heated up and dried in order to achieve balance.

The stagnant material caught up in the block, lo empachado, corrupted the healthy flow of the humors. 

It was largely treated with herbal teas, purgatives, laxatives, and massages designed to break the raw food from the intestinal wall 

Mexica view (las tres almas)

The native Mexican medical framework consisted of three animating forces, three souls that made up the biology of man.

• Tonali (destiny/head)

• Teyolia (heart of the soul/heart)

• Ihiyotl (breath of the soul abdomen and liver)

The interplay of these three souls determine one's life, in sickness or health.

Ihiyotl, the breath of the soul, comes from the word for breathe or exhale and is the seat of both dreams and desires. From ihiyotl comes the ethereal realm of primal witchcraft, the speaking into existence of a desire; from ihiyotl disfunction comes empacho.

The Mexica physician viewed the breath of the soul as the function and flow of life's raw atmospheric energy.  Less tangible than blood but of equal and complimentary importance. Breath is to blood as wind is to rain. 

This soul was both spiritual and physical like the air which is both biological and atmospheric. There is life and death in the full function of a breath and likewise there is breath and digestion, dual poles of the same energy.

Breath represents life or death and primal emotion; they  manifest as rage (coraje), fear (susto), fight or flight or freeze 

Digestion represents survival and sustenance, the physical version of oxygen's ethereal essence 

The seat of Ihiyotl is the liver (they agreed with Hippocrates on this point). 

The Mexica understood that the liver maintains homeostasis in the chemicals of the body. It maintains the flow of waste and by its dual existence nutrients .

They said it was in charge of courage. Heroic courage, the kind that can do the impossible.The kind that comes from blood that flows. 

The liver converts glucose into glycogen to provide the instant energy of a mother saving her newborn from certain death.

They also codified passions with metabolism.

Greed and lust are only an imbalance of survival instincts centered around resources.

The difference between western hemispheric (Native American) and eastern hemispheric (European) medicine is that eastern knowledge has always excluded what it couldn't explain; where western medicine documents what it can't explain and studies its results without passion or prejudice.

Our Medicine includes seven directions (space) with three souls to experience one destiny (time) who not only drew a correlation from the material to the spiritual but searched for its dual pole to balance, preferably from the spiritual first, the energy in question.

So to the tlamatinime of Anahuac empacho was a disharmony in the entire balance of your body, as symbolized by the homeostasis and internal waste and nutrient distribution system that is the liver.

This is tied to base emotions like rage, nervousness, and fright. It manifests as mood swings, heightened anxiety, lack of focus, lethargy.

While parts of the Greek system (the four biles) have been debunked, the huehuepahtli (Mexica medicine), is still on par with modern medicine.

The Gut-Brain Axis or GBA is a neural communication network between the gut and the brain. Disruptions in the GBA have been proven to cause IBS, IBD, anxiety and depression, which is directly in line with the three animating forces framework and the indigenous view of empacho.

The cures developed by indigenous medicine included sobada (of the Ihiyotl area,intestinal tract, instead of the pinching and dislodging massages of Spain), the temazcal (sweat lodge) and prayer and self evaluation to avoid stress and lessen over emotional reactions 

Curanderos view

Syncretism is not strictly religious or linguistic but in regards to colonial Mexico, medical as well. For healers caught by the wrong Spaniard (the one who didn't need healing), it was a capital offense.  Therefore in order to save themselves and their descendants,they hid our knowledge inside of their superstition.

As I noted the sobada underwent a change in technique under indigenous medicine, instead of the massage breaking off a non-existent piece of raw food off one's intestinal walls, the massage was centered around the shape of ihiyotl, the breath of the soul; digestion of the body.

The definition however retained the Spanish habit if you will.  But the practice was ritualized in the Curandero communities more so than it had been in Spain, where it was considered a medical condition.

The Curandero knew there was a spirit, so to speak, at work and he blended the four modalities of hot and cold and dry and wet and blended them with the movements of the alma (ihiyotl/sobada), the knowledge of the four directions, European iconography and African ritual magic form;  especially in the sciences of making caminos of European saints and concepts and working with muertos.

They did this in the very loose way of the tradition of whispers that was and is the spiritual institution of Mexican brujeria. The only way it could survive.

And it survived from their expert hands to the first hands I knew that could brave hellfire to get my tortilla del calenton.

Grammas view

I interviewed my tia over a folk healing she received from my grandmother. She had no memory and I remembered every word of it. I had remembered from when she had first told me when I was about 9. But she kind of shooed me away and said “no”. Offended almost, under the surface but definite aversion to the concept of the question.

I didn't press. I know how the living corpus of Curanderisimo (Toltecayotl) operates.

Of night and wind.

I just had to wait for night to fall. 

When it wasn't so bright and intrusive. Mellow, dark, like a secret.

“Mijo. I do remember that you are right. She used remojos and cured me of empacho when I was very little.”

I remembered it better, I never forgot it.

My tia was placed on her bed.

Abuela was praying to the santos.

She came in and la persigno her whole body; en el nombre del padre, hijo, y espíritu santo and applied holy water to the crown of the head, the inside of her elbows, hands, gut, and bottoms of her feet.

She then applied volcanico to her whole upper body, with a special attention to her stomach and lungs. “She rubbed around my stomach, like this” and she traced her entire intestinal tract.  She also indicated in her back where her lungs were.

 Tia was severely asthmatic and often hospitalized.

“Linda had told me” my tia said  “it was horrible. It was. She wrapped my legs in towels and they were steaming. She prayed a whole rosary and then brought some fresh hot towels and I had to sleep like that “

She was cured though.

The condition for which my tia was being cured was not technically empacho. It was a bronchial issue. 

My grandmother called it empacho because the technique was the same (and so was the alma).

My grandmother didn't pinch at the back or do those toxic potions that in my experience are employed by charlatans.

She called on God's permission to address the Santos and employed any combination of her spiritual court to the ase, poder, fe, of her hand and used her love (her heart/ her being) to charge all instruments to her intention.

This was not a Spanish practice.

The Spaniard did not hold a mass for indigestion; it is the Native and the African who include the spirit in our medicines.

Yet she did en El nombre del padre, hijo y el espíritu santo and with saints went to calm her overly anxious, sickly, terrified daughter. By allowing her to suffer the dreaded remojos she knew was coming because my mom was teasing her.

Then she did the sign of the cross over her entire body like a priest blessing his congregation. The love she is broadcasting from her heart as love for her children and fear in the power of Jesus is moving in the direction of a much older cosmos.

Before the coming of the spaniards or the birth of Jesus Christ the cross has been a symbol of the four directions of the universe and it still is.

My tia was being centered with the cosmos of the Tolteca -Chichimeca in order to restore balance to her souls breath.

The holy water was then applied to the points in her body Curanderos and Mexica priests universally connect with entry ways to one's tonali (highest alma).

Volcanico is a Mexican aciete you can by at a tiendita or botanica to cure pain. It's a strong ointment.

It's called volcanico because it burns.

In conjunction with the remojos she was essentially creating a sweat lodge (temazcal) in her bedroom.

And it worked because the understanding of the connection between your heart and the heart of creation and that duality works in shadow and light.

The power of my ancestors is that their truths don't need your beliefs to exist; the power of my grandmother is that her beliefs went beyond the truths she accepted.

You will see as you get to know my abuela better. She has many sides. All of them fascinating. And to me a survival story of a civilization.

If you want to dig deeper into the living corpus of that tradition. Like and subscribe if this journey calls to your core.

Coali tonali humanity from the message that vibrates in time.

Yauhyauhqui Tezcatlipoca 

The second son, Yayauqui Tezcatlipoca, was the most formidable—the primary force of authority because he was born between the others, born of the black. Some would call him Tezcatlipoca proper, father of sorcerers, the black mirror who plays with our senses and logic one against the other in a way that has framed him as a mercurial god; but nothing is further from his essence (or closer). Not only are his moves planned; it was the first plan, God's plan. The explosion of Tezcatlanextia was the action, but the plan—turning hydrogen into earth, a gas to a solid—was the first alchemy.

Ometeotl was and is everything; Tezcatlipoca, as the black, is seemingly nothing. Nothing convinced everything that it was nothing but countless different somethings, allowing Ometeotl to experience. 

His shadow, his smoke, pulled at the solidity of expansion as antimatter or dark energy, seeming to work against the light of his brother. But what is a brilliant work of art without contours? This dual essence is what our Tlamatinime learned from the smokey mirror, which is to say man learned of Ometeotl from Tezcatlipoca, as Tezcatlipoca.

Being born between the completion of existential foundation (the birth of the four brothers) gave him the power of being the center of all energies—meaning the power of all energy, as the dual point of an energy is its most powerful position. The Jaguar at the crossroads.

 Potentially, you can become either extreme: love or hate, life or death; it's like owning a little piece of each.

So when they say he had more power and authority, it was because of his balance. To the mortal eye, this ability was (is) magic. How can one bring peace from war through treason, or make hate love, or slaves kings? His first layer is mystery, and his first-born are sorcerers.

The night is a time of remembrance of when all was nothing before Tezcatlanextia’s birth. How can one remember before he existed? His path is one of night and death. But for every horror story upon which he prowls, there are civilizations who owe their transformation from chattel to ruler to his beneficence. The Xicanotl descend from such a people.

Ehecatl Yohuali 

It would be more effective to watch smoke dissipate or the sunset and moon rise than read a thousand essays on this aspect of the black. Ethereal like the wind and unknowable like the night, Ehecatl Yohuali is less wordy than intuition. But just as forewarning; often with more miraculous results.

Ehecatl Yohuali is the body moving just the right way, at the right time, with no conscious effort, to dodge the arrow. Instinct par excellence, a reward for trusting in nature.

Rustling footsteps crushing earth underfoot; you don’t question who, a blowing night wind reveals a refuge between reeds and earth at night that saves your life. You go to it, without involving your mind. The quicker you show him you know his language the more he will speak. In all his degrees he is partial to sorcerers.

The dead thud of the gavel of natural justice. The ruthlessness of nocturnal nature whose bell tolls hollow, emptying one of all pretense. There can be no curse without blessing, or blessing without curse.

The thing about smoke, if you watch it, is it doesn’t go away as much as reality settles back into the illusion of solidity. This night wind aspect of Tezcatlipoca is his most ethereal; night whispers that saved a fledgling species under a moon that gave them council and refuge. Stars that taught them destiny—all under the shiny astral coat of the night sky.

Tepeyolotl

This was the form Tezcatlipoca first worshipped by man: the Jaguar God of the Olmecah and Mayah of Veracruz. The deep caverns of the mountain from which the echo finds its path to rebirth in the darkest of blackness and deepest of depths. 

He doesn’t rule like a lion; that beast forewarns and forearms any prey in its path. The Jaguar is different. Its roar is a pant as teeth meet flesh and life meets with its own death.

Our seers learned of the nocturnal world and the path of the moon and stars and Venus (evening star) from watching the coat of the ancient black Mexican Jaguar in humanity’s youth in Anahuac. Tepeyolotl represents the night sky, the depths of the night (as the eighth Lord of the night), the path of the northern and southern stars, divination, astrology, and sacrifice or the trading of ethereal energy for material benefits (Nagualis/brujos). 

On this point of his spectrum, he reigns as the gateway to the supernatural.

They found him on ancient vision quests by master nagualis, and of course, brave warriors all; they sought the power of the night and went to the deepest caverns and found the heart of the mountain, and in the echoes, spoke with a God who would make man the revered speaker for nature to the cosmos. In him, the naguali’s thoughts are echoed back as actions, and the fear of the night became apprenticeship serving the darkest of paths. The mountains represent a form of heaven on earth, a mysterious place of powerful animals. A fraternity of the nocturnal animal; king among them were the sorcerers of the night. Tepeyolotl answered them in their own echo every night in the 8th hour, and could prove the fragility of man’s mortality with tectonic evidence—the earthquakes of Anahuac.

Titlacahuan Tezcatlipoca 

He of whom we are slaves, whimsically treacherous master of all fates. Benefactor of kings; patron of slaves. This degree of Yauhyauhqui’s spectrum is the fearsome half of awesome. He is depicted as a giant, the harbinger of societal collapse, velocity in the twist of fate. He who rolls us in his palms like pebbles. In Tezcatlipoca’s role as destiny, 

Titlacahuan is the fate point of the spectrum. Fate is less glorious, more primal. Foxhole faith and miracle cures shine alive among the lifeless others to whom the roll of the pebble wasn’t glorious. He is master of both.

Titlacahuan empowered the Toltecah in Tollan as he did the Chicomoztoca Azteca in Aztlan, and to both, was the harbinger of their collapse. Channeled through his chief naguali, Ome Acatl, he initiated the demise of Ce Acatl Topilitzin - the trickster who poisoned his drink before his disgrace and allowed the collapse of Tollan in the aftermath.

 In Aztlan, he was patron of the Chicomoztoca Azteca ruling class. He was also, by nature of himself, patron of slaves—in this case, the Mexitin, the despised of Aztlan. It was Titlacahuan moving his great palm that rolled the Mexitin from societal dregs to god bearers (teomama: original Chichimecah priests who carried the image of Huitzilopochtli) to the Mexica triple alliance who ruled Anahuac as an Empire.

The birth of Ome Acatl here represents the birth of worshipping as an earth science or sorcery. However, it was early in the spiritual development of man, so there was far less control over the tonali or Ase, if you will. It was far more worshipful. Titlacahuan cannot be controlled by man or his ritual; it is an impossibility to his nature. Most asked for life or death favors, prostrated at midnight offering blood from their tongues and fingertips for what he might do for them. It gives an air of unblemished lambs and rosarios sung in the tune of abuelas chicanas y naguali curanderas. But some, under the expert tutelage of the wisdom encapsulated in the tonali Ome Acatl by the living man who manifested godhood through it, have asked and achieved powerful dones from the master of fate. They would be wise to remember Aztlan from the perspective of its former rulers.

Mictlantlampa: memory

The black Tezcatlipoca represents a darkness so complete that not even the sun, who visits every quadrant but the cold north, can penetrate. Many describe it as despair, but it is the inverted fire of creation—Death. 

Mictlantlampa was the quadrant of creation he claimed for himself. Land in the direction of the realm of the dead. Such was the darkness of Yayauqui that death chose its kingdom there. The fiery drive of Xipe Totec is driven in part by the fear of that northern darkness contracting his expansion back to nothingness.

There is also a benefit to said darkness. It is from the analysis of death and loss and dark times that we constructed lasting survival as a species. Our loved ones created darkness in our life when they died, so they live on in our memory—the true ancestral realm. It was from memory and analysis that generations were able to become civilizations. The memories passed down create a corpus we call tradition, and it is all accessed in the dark. We do not fear darkness or death; we analyze it and honor it in our traditions as the only wisdom.

Neh huemchihua Yauhyauhqui Tezcatlipoca

Please like and subscribe if you like this series and want it to continue. Next we will be exploring our own crucified Savior, Quetzalcoatl.

Between the Tigris and Euphrates like so many other human firsts, in Sumeria they crafted the city -state and the Akaddians established empire; but the ambition of men who would build a tower to rival heaven attracted envy and the first case of the condition my abuela calls ojo.

It was in Mesopotamia that it was first diagnosed as a physio spiritual condition; the evil eye.

My jefe didn't believe in it. I knew it was real, grandmother had cured me of it.

“Nombre mijo, tenias el flu. No existe una enfermedad que solo se pegue a los Mexicanos, como sabe la enfermedad que no soy gringo ? Porque tiene ojo.” jaja.

• Mesopotamia

Chale jeffito it wasn't just us, 5000 years ago they built stone idols and clay tablets emblazoned with an eye to ward off igi hul ; the evil face in Mesopotamia.

They believed it was consciously employed by sorcerers. Therefore their cures were more like defences, stone idols and tablets.

An Ugarit incantation from 1300 B.C.E. reads

The eye of the potter - return it to thee

The eye of the tax collector - return it to thee

Who is it that has looked upon me

Let it not be satisfied by my flesh

Let it not drink my blood

As for the eye that looked

Let it return to he who looked

• Greco-Roman

The Greco-Roman influence enhanced the medicine. Plato and Plutarch even offered scientific explanations for vaskonia in the theory of extremission. It proposed that the eye not only received light but emitted it and purportedly evil as well.

While the Mesopatamian sought to deflect the gaze, Greco-Roman magick with its phallic idols and grotesque totems sought to break the concentration and will of the assailant thereby nullifying the curse.

Their most profound contribution came from the phthnos study. The Greek word phthnos means envy. The philosophers and priests realized that nothing is so black and white as good and evil. The act may have been evil but its motivation was envy.

• Spanish

The envious eye of the Mediterranean soon found its way to the Iberian peninsula on trade ships and found a new home.

In the Spain of the time the folk disease flourished in a land ripe for envy. In the glory of the reconquista the disparity of elite and commoner created a chasm of greed, filled by envy until titles of paper nobility without the estate put Cortez on a boat with a dream and an envious gaze. That gaze would arrive on the shores of Anahuac as Mal de ojo in 1519.

“You mean to tell me” my jefe continued “que estos gringos con todo su dinero y educación no sabían los secretos médicos del huevo?” he said, making fun of me.

But the answer is no.

• Indigenous Mexican

When the Spaniard arrived and established New Spain the disease of old Spain had come with them like a sea fairing vagabond

“The Spaniards appeared to be very delighted, they seized upon the gold like monkeys, their faces flushed. Their thirst for gold was insatiable.” -Florentine codex

The tlamatinime described a physical reaction and obsession, with their seizing and flushed faces, that rang of the windows to the sorcerer's soul in the fertile crescent conception of the condition. The Wisemen took note.

Soon Spanish doñas were scouring Haciendas for Indian women behind the backs of their husbands. Soon after that there was no need to hide it.

The Mexica medics (tlamatinime) assessed the condition and its history in Toltec fashion. They saw the hilga finger gesture and other gorgonian techniques as obsolete. If it didn't save Rome from burning they thought a new approach wise.

Their first contribution was with the azabache (jet stone) amulet Spain brought from sufi Moors.

Probably because it resembled the obsidian of their own altars and they saw a method of deflection not found in the other phallic symbols.

They concluded that deflection while possible was more like treating a symptom. The Tlamatinime decreed that what was thought to be evil was envy; what was thought of as a cure was only an escalation of tensions by delaying an evil or misdirecting it to the vulnerable and innocent.

The black azabache stone was fit with a red string. The red summoning the mirror of the red Tezcatlipoca to blind the envious eye.

Another technique was the ojo de venado or the deer's eye, a miracle of sympathetic magic.

The seers of the fallen Cemanahuac were of the most formidable in the world; they charted the entire course of Venus without telescopes and learned domestication and husbandry from the moon

They knew that the cures of the old world were really attacks disguised as defense and the ricochet of these treatments had harmed their societies in the long run.

They looked to nature, the physical version of God and found Mazatl, the deer, gracefully and elegantly existing in the liminal areas between metropolitan cities and the wild.

It's survival they felt was rooted in the guardian glare of their eye. Periphery heavy and furtive, it surveyed the landscape for threats unmatched.

The tale of the blue deer or the venado azul of the Huichol people of Mexico adds another layer; positioning the deer as cunning. The trickster who brought humanity back to gods they had left.

They endowed the Macuna seed with the tonali of Mazatl after seeing how it resembled the nahual they needed for the cure. And sealing it with the mirror that illuminates (Tezcatlanextia) red string they created a powerful amulet that out performed their Greco-Roman roman designs so that the hilga and its ilk soon vanished from the landscape.

To the Mexica it was still like replacing aspirin with Vicodin and they continued in research.

My grandmother was a devout Catholic. She may have taken her daughter to a curandera once out of necessity, her remedies were performed at home by her with Jesus. I say that to illustrate the masterful codifying by the tlamatinime of a paradigm of healing in the reward of their research la limpia.

Their final conclusion I believe was aided by African slaves who had been imported from Cuba because the same method of passing an egg over the body exists in modern day Lucumi and curanderisimo to heal the same affliction.

In the ceremony a raw egg is passed over the body. In the Mexican version the sign of the cross is made at the crown of the head, the palms, the elbow joints, the bottom of the feet and the stomach. All spots the tlamatinime marked as entry ways to one's tonali.

Like my grandmother, Spanish doñas didn't want the stench of Anahuac's nature posing as her past on their sanctified skin. So the tlamatinime put the medicine in the movements.

The client is placed in the middle of the room. Most of the time on a bed. This action is centering the patient with the cosmos, in the center of the four directions.

Then the egg, el milagroso huevo, as my Jefe called it dripping burla, was used to do what old world medicine never could; apply the wisdom of their philosophy with their spirituality.

They knew of adages like the best way to defeat an enemy is make him an ally and the best war is one you don't have to fight, but themselves coming from a broken home who just freed themselves from the Moorish yoke, they were more accustomed to an eye for an eye or fight fire with fire. The Mexican Indian chose to fight fire with water. Where the Spanish chose to deflect or send back the evil intentions, the Anahuaco chose to absorb and he used the unhatched egg experiencing death before life as a bridge to the spirit world to rid our plane of the sickness.

And 500 years later I'm here to testify that if the Spanish medicine was aspirin and el ojo de venado was pain meds, la limpia was an operation of the spirit.

If you would like this series on the roots of Mexican folk magic to continue let me

know by liking and subscribing.

Coali tonali.

Auburn and deep, a wombs bloody tears

Cascading a mountain slick with serpents.

Deep as secrets.

The dying to the dead.

In the blackness of nothingness a universe, a cosmic battle, a mind.

From the heart of the Wiseman to the face of the warrior it has been told, it has been said

The daughter coveted her inheritance.

She who glows in the dark, reigns in the night,

Manifesting our desires in four hundred sparkling ways.

Looked to her mother, the darkest of all caverns, holder of the secrets of the dying and the dead

Even the bones that resurrected them.

She saw will, where before it was desire.

Her golden hue boiled blood red over a portent filled night.

Sent fire and flint knives and spells from the earth

Sent famine and death and floods over hearths

Sent diseases and earthquakes and storms for their worth

As paynal warns the mother of her…

“Coyolxauqui comes, I hear her golden bells.

Her four hundred come. The night only grows darker oh mother of mine” (Tonantzin)

Blue and green to the left of the sun a hummingbird stirs in the earth mothers blood.

Arise as an eagle

Arise as the sun

Arise as a mind

Who's will stands in front.

The hummingbird stands with fire in hand

The four hundred flee and are torn into strands

The princess her flowery death brings the day.

The day brings the destinies space and time slay.

The deaths bring traditions of flowery songs

That vibrate in time

To forever belong.

I sing of a god.

Flowers for the sun.

A song for the will

May tomorrow be done.

Neh huemchihua Huitzilopochtli

Quitate de entremetido abuela would chide me.

Not nosey but entre y metido, putting myself in the middle or seeking attention.

Chale gramma, no tengo la culpa. She didn't understand enough English to understand the exchanges  but didn't like the confidence of the body language or sureness of the tone. Kids don't talk to adults that way. It's disrespectful and she wasn't going to have doña such and such saying que los ñietos de Estella son pero traviesos. That's why god invented chingasos but because of my jefa and Tia, who outranked me,not her, she relented with gringos and Chicanos pochos and spared the rod.

But when I heard that phrase entremetido I felt the sting of injustice. Cuz neta I wasn't doing anything but what I felt I had to.

Por ejemplo, I took a chingaso for this one, Gramma was holding court around the comal, one of her comadres was coming to her for advice, council really,my grandmother's prayers had healed before.

 “dale’ otra novena a la virgencita”  buela said stirring her caldo.

Even the menudo she watched on the stove instead of la vecina's demeanor was in the middle. Chicano Menudo; posole y menudo mezclado.

But I saw both.

When she told that lady to pray that lady exhaled to a tune I've heard and she had her hand over her head like when we are giving gramma a headache. 

That low exhale was the same one my gramma didn't hear when me, my siblings , or my mom did it to her. The lady was tired of praying with no results. She was at her wits end.

I said “ No Gramma she needs you to show her how you wash la virgen in holy water and sing to her and kiss her feet when she has to do what you say.” 

Or more to the point of my opening.

We were hosting a priest from Mexico for our church and the grown ups were listening but not listening, they were letting him talk. Understanding isn't our din, obedience is. I on the other hand heard him saying God was a jealous God, jealous for our love.

Buela was cooking but my mom and tia was out there smiling and nodding like agreement achieved salvation. I was listening and he knew it.

Afterwards I lingered

“padre” I kind of whispered and only braved that because he was young. He watched me with kind eyes. There was a gravity to my call, an urgency ; he felt it. He lowered not only his tone but his demeanor. He could sense it was a question meant for God from me, therefore, private. His eyes urged me on.

“Is it ok to be jealous”

“Soy humano hijo, de carne, I have jealous moments but the Lord teaches not to cover” he looked at me with a wry smile “but God didn't mean jealousy like that”

“ But, he killed for it so he is jealous.” My eyebrows raised his wry smile “is Jesus like God”

“Jesus is God mijo.”

“ How can we not be jealous then and still be Christ like?”

 I was eight. His jaw fell. 

I swear my grandmother could smell the sacrilege spoiling the aroma of her carne guisado because she yelled for me. She counted mom, thenTia. I wasn't accounted for , probably de entremetido.

He never got a chance to answer but I didn't look back. It was God, Gramma, Raza but Gramma spoke for God.

That was the year I realized I was the smartest person in my house ; it was bone chilling. They were playing for keeps in my America.

My grandmother led our family ; an inherited matriarchy whose crest was the invisibility of the marginalized.  Between colony and unequal society, put in the middle, and finding a way to choose neither. It was sorcery. But the spell was losing its charm and gringolandia was encroaching.

I remember going to the shoe store with my Jefe.

I remember it was one of the first times I had seen him so I guess gringo ways had encroached through her magic before, but I didn't want to be there. It felt like everyone was mad at me for going except my mom. Grammas anger was foreboding.

The parking lot was full of the infamous gringo. We lived in a black neighborhood and I went to a black school. I lived in a Mexican house and went to a Mexican church. I didn't know many whites except teachers but I had heard.

Gramma said to be invisible but my dad ain't get the memo. He was defiantly Mexican as only a Chicano could be, from tejana to buckle to botas.

We were not invisible . Then again we never were buela, that wasn't a gift it was a license. 

But Gramma knew things and did things in the middle of many worlds but all of them invisible to this one. This world was too visible to me. I seen the snickers and gawks. Curiosity ranging from innocent to ghastly. I noticed the hustle and bustle lull as we entered the store but most of all, the smiling long haired teenager standing next to the severely postured gringo who breathed like he owned the air. His smile wasn't good natured.

“Look it's the three amigos but it's only two” he yelled. Jefe ain't notice. He started singing la cucaracha my dad turn around  “PenDECKo” he say trying to say pendejo. Dad noticed.

He wasn't saying much so he may be obeying gramnas rules but his soft shoe hit kind of flat. He wasn't smiling, but he wasn't looking mean. It made me uneasy. 

The kid ain't noticed;  by then he's flailing about screeching the same impish chant.”penDECKo”. It was grating and hideous to me. I looked down unsure of what to do. Afraid and ashamed because I knew what I was supposed to do, I knew what I wanted to do, but I couldn't or wouldn't however you view it. 

He kept screeching it and the sound was worse than the beating I was sure  awaited us in the near, unpredictable, and loud future .

I didn't know what to do with my hands or head or anything that moved.  I remember pacing in place to his jagged and fearsome serenade while my dad didn't move an uncomfortable inch. He looked like he was inspecting a horse or playing what's the clouds in a sky only he could see.

The kid was none the wiser. I'm sure that was normal for him.

We picked some horrible thing with two straps on the front and the kid and his dad were checking out in the aisle next to us.

He started again. This time my dad didn't look up.

The theatrics got louder and his dance got goofier and we paid and left.

As we were walking away my dad stopped like he forgot something and went up to the kid and put a hand on his chest and one on his back and stopped him mid jump to smile at him and when the kid focused in on his eyes my dad told him “chinga tu Madre eh?” Then let him go. His father still didn't look up but some of the air seemed to have transferred to us. He was no longer smiling.

I was proud of my dad and as I strutted out I turned around and caught his father's eye. He hadn't given ground, he leased the land with hate.

I never should've looked back.

That was Friday. I can't say for sure but I went to sleep that night hoping spider man was gonna be the Saturday matinee jale on tv. They rotated that, the hulk, and some kung fu show. Me and my carnal used to pray for that, literally. Before I went to sleep I would pray Antonio Aguilar wouldn't wake me up with the sound of fregando. Fregando is defined as buela yelling at our lazy, gringo asses, jefa ain't no sleeping in because of la cruda, tia no reading, and definitely us no spider man.

I didn't pray for spider man that night though ;

I just thought of that man’s eyes. There was a rage there I couldn't know you would think , but I knew one thing, what my dad did felt right. More than right, necessary, but what my grandmother taught, it was real in that man’s eyes.

My grandmother was Tejana, she had known valientes who were hung or knew of it, heard of it, over un cafecito y tamal like the Chicano flower and song , los cuentos, she shared with me. Those weren't stories, they were scriptures.

I could see; the eyes on the fire breathing hound chasing her sister home for sneaking out and the eyes of the Texas ranger tying the noose of Juan Crow over my neck.

I thought about that gaze far into what shoulda been sound sleep but when I rose I was sure that hate like that couldn't let its prey escape. Wouldn't. Then I thought about his face as we were breaking the threshold. Not anger, not rage, but certainty. Resolve. His America would take care of it, he was sure. His America would take care of it.

The thought soured my stomach in a real way. I put it out of my head because I heard no noise.

No rancherras, boleros, or chingasos flying. The coast seemed clear.

My stomach bubbled. I looked at the bathroom door, maybe if I poop - then I heard the spidey intro .

Chingado.

So I don't have super hearing but when I'm anxious I have a laser-like focus. My carnal was already on the tv, big ass bowl of cereal. I was lying to myself that my stomach wasn't hurting, I did not want cereal. My carnal had cereal though so I got cereal.

When I went into the kitchen I focused on my grandmother's hands and how they brushed across her apron, her one hand on the table supported by a knuckle and a finger and thumb. There was pressure in that triangle. She whipped whispers at my jeffita from pursed lips 

As I was getting cereal I looked to my mom and her head was down. I heard the word viejo.

My grandmother definitely was upset about me running the streets with my Jefe. He was the older married man who took advantage of her naive, divorced twice, ingenue daughter. She pronounced viejo, sin cariño.

As far as I knew nobody knew about the shoe store thing, I was gonna like this vato. But I didn't like the situation and then my grandmother started shaking her finger at my mom and the infamous por andar atras ese hombre (sung to the melody of viejo) and I saw the eyes and the smile, except it wasn't satisfied it was crazed this time; and I puked on the trastero.

I remember shivering and being wrapped in a blanket, I was sweating too but I don't think I had a fever. Whatever it was the look on my mom and tias face said they were out of their depth.

“Por andar de callejera atrás de ese viejjo” she paused like she had expressed a complete thought. And then she passed the sentence  “me lo han dado ojo” I had caught the evil eye.

It was then the scene changed.

My mother and aunt were no longer subversive gringa forces but acolytes attending their bruja mayor.

It was a hushed procession of agua bendita, rosarios, and a bowl with a huevo in it  . My grandmother started chanting a prayer I knew well in a way but had never heard in another.

The melody was primal; vengeance and survival in the same curse. It hung in the air like a horrible secret; there was pain and knowing in it: “ Ave Maria llena de gracia”  she was reminding her of the labor pain not the finished labor; “El señor esta con tigo” was an accusation from the serpent under her foot .

Your son was God yet the men who come in his name cause us to flee as if Herod still sought our young.

“ Bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres y bendita es la fruta de tu vientre Jesus” 

An homage, a flower and song from a woman from a long line of tortilla makers, from corn to flour the same tortilla, who had witnessed the power and grace of God in the person of Jesus Christ , yet was more saying orale to her comadre and reminding her she's just like her friend from the wedding. 

And she repeated this litany, this opera, this tragic ballet over and over, each repetition further from mother Spain until finally it was as serpentine ecstatic as a frenzied tribal ceremony , all the while warming the egg in her hand.

The room got very hot, I saw red; I began sweating profusely as though the sickness ran from Mary, Jesus, and my grandmother's commands.

When she finished the ceremony she cracked the egg and I not only heard it I felt it; when the yolk hit the bowl it was black as the coming night and I felt like the first day of spring.

The good feelings wouldn't last.

There is a bond between curandera y curado that exists in an infinite moment, an energetic snapshot in the cosmos and the core of the person. Forever is the fabric of every second we spent together in the ancestral realm of the old medicine. She urged me not to look back at the yolk ,which I did ,and commanded me not to look back to our past. Which had been present with us, independent from but alongside, the procession of the saints.

But I did look.

I saw the cold black of that yoke and the ancient copal replacing Iberian incense. I saw it then and forever.

I saw abuela.  That's what I tried to tell her when I started watching her more and asked her what she was saying to the saint statues when she cleaned them with such a powerful cariño . It reminded me of her bathing me as a child in a pulpy, vibrating memory. A memory of thighs I never knew.

Porque les das dulce I would ask or some such question about invisible traditions with ancestors we weren't supposed to admit to 

Her stare grew colder with every attempt until finally one day walking into church I revolted. I had already told her I didn't want to go to church and was annoying her in the car. On the way in I said “why are we going to a Roman Catholic Church if we are Mexicans”.

She slapped me. 

It was then that I knew my gramnas magic worked but that neither of us knew why and I also knew that I would do anything to protect us from this cold world and go anywhere to find that magic that freed me from the hate if only for a night. And like me, it lived in the middle, where she had placed me.

Obsidian hearted men are loved by flacas y Bella's.

Catrinas’ corsets becomes mantas

Hand fans, guadañas

Pero no te aguites, solo descansas

You never embraced the shadows?

You never felt her embrace you?

You ain't lived till you died vato;

Them dark cloaks only died and never lived, gacho.

she’ll hold out a shadowy finger;

Mighty though slight

Guide you over volcanic glass if she has to

And swallow the stars from the night

She treasured your buela's laugh at the sight of your first tear 

She brought her back everytime que una vela prendias

But life's dark; a la neta you probably ain't even see her

Don't trip one day we'll all be her

No hay que pantallar where nothing shines holmes.

except her precious bones.

Huesos that gods beg for.

Tomas, Severiana, Ramon, Estella, Kiko, Kiko, Linda

Make the fabric of her cold northern kingdom

Of the shadows.

I have always preferred corn tortillas to flour. It was a preference I rarely voiced; my abuela made flour tortillas of legendary status in our community and to favor the earthy, honest, pull of maíz felt like a quiet heresy.

Yet, the flavor called to me. It didn't taste familiar; it was familiar. It was an ancestral memory reawakening on the tongue. Corn was the foundation of real western civilization and our contribution to the world and not just from the tortillas it would create but the civilizations it spawned.

It was the mothers of the ancient Olmecah along the Balsas river, who by watching and feeling the moon and her cycles, first domesticated the maiz I would come to be made from, but it was my mother's mother that brought them to me.And though I preferred corn tortillas to harina, my grandmother no hacia just tortillas ,she gave me the wisdom of a thousand lifetimes in every flakey crumb of its rich and cosmic density.

Her molcajete was the well of tlaloc as the peppers in the air would burn my eyes and nose; I would stay glued to her cuentas of brujas trading eyes and men shrinking to 6 inches on a bar top until she noticed I was in pain y me corria a punto de chingaso por pendejo. You know how it is, brown mothers love hard

She loved my mother the same way but my mother loved different. She was different, my grandmother was from a time when a Mexican couldn't be an American; my mother came from a time where you had no choice.

The pueblo that had crossed the border with her parents hadn't fully survived the trip to middle America outside of the four walled Mexico my grandmother presided over.

The problem with Mexico being in our house is that jurisdiction was much smaller than the world around us and my mother got married and pregnant, maybe not in that order , twice, but the third time (me) was the charm.

At the time of said charm my Jefe was married with a full blown family. In our small Midwestern town and our smaller Mexican community it was the stuff of vendettas.

My Jefe married my mom when I was 11 and that's how I migrated to the United States from my grammas custody. She wasn't happy about my new diplomatic status and less happy with the fact that her word wasn't final over me.

I'm not sure how I felt about it but I'm sure I was a little scared. When I was leaving for Texas to visit my dad's parents Gramma was less than pleased and pergsina’d the shit outta of me before I left.

She was powerful. I had heard her steely Rosario's castigate even santos for being too slow in miracles. So it helped because it had to and off I went.

When I arrived en el valluco I was struck by the Mexicaness of the America around me and further more my small, dark Indian Grandmother who I had never met.

Gramma at home was an alabaster skinned woman with Andalusian and Arab effects to her face. This grandmother looked more like me and was also making tortillas or what I thought must be tortillas. The process looked the same, but the masa no era harina, it was magic. Eran de maiz.

Her brown hands kneaded the golden alive masa as if those hands performed the same ritual to create the sun. The pride of a forgotten nation swelled inside as I imbibed the ancestral stew of primal firsts.

I was struck by the contrasts casted by the same energy.

They were both Mexican women of Tejana stock who made tortillas. One brown and from Mexico who made hers of corn; one light and American by birth who made hers of flour

My gramma at home however made tortillas that were apart from ingredients; flour or corn if they came from her hand they were real and perfect. The hyperbole is truly humility, when I wax poetic about the buttery hechizo of her comal. Chale I've never had their equal.

But she had never made me corn from her own hand.

When I bit into my paternal grandmother's corn tortilla I felt ashamed for loving hers in a way equal from just a bite.

I felt at home and like I didn't belong at the same time, though I was used to that, being Chicano, I hated myself for the part of me that swooned over that foreign tortilla.

But no tortilla can be foreign, not to us.

It was neither an easy or fruitful process for ancient Mexicans to domesticate the wild teosinte to reap corn in the tropical lowlands of ancient Mexico. It was painstaking and multi generational, some estimates put it at a nine thousand year process.

Nine thousand years from mother to daughter to some of the greatest civilizations the world has seen is an ingenuity that can bridge the gaps between maiz and harina and Mexican and American and hopefully my grandchildren will say it bridged the gap between all my hal

ves.

Ojala.

Before I continue with this presentation on Xicano cosmology I want to take some time to address my own face and heart in regards to this work and all works that become of my flowers.

I do not claim an ancient unbroken lineage of Anahuaco priests or deny conjecture of my own in this work.

There is plenty of conjecture in this and any piece that claims to speak for or descend from the Mexican diaspora.

 As colonized people the question of cultural faith and ancestral continuity was a dangerous one only alluded to never asked. The corpus of the civilization I am presenting has never been bound or rendered in the red and black inks of our grandfather's wisest children but instead as a tradition of whispers, only experienced in a sociocultural spiritual way for generations of Chicanos like their Mestizo ancestors before them.

However, the Anahuaco native is the best documented indigenous civilization in the world so the extent of the necessity of conjecture is far less than the historical approach to Meso American spirituality in the United States.

What began I'm sure as conjecture who's impetus I can identify with, the need for the ancestral voice of the Mexican people to the hemisphere, and not the syncretized version but the sovereign thought of the native Meso American. And so you draw some conclusions to create an equality between you and the rest of the world.

You make congruous points with all the recognized civilizations of the world, like Europe, China, and Africa , creating a version of their civilizations to justify your own.

The new age Toltec movement has done this with Eastern philosophy and modern behavioral therapy, Radicalized prison indigenists and the brown rage their movements harness did it with structuring a belief system of brown supremacy modeled after the Nation of Islam structure. And while I will say they have their place in the development of healing historical trauma they should not be the final destination.

When I first learned that I was an Indian and that the Spanish language, culture, and colonial identity was forced on me and I had been none the wiser, I was incensed. I rage studied and learned every graphic detail I could about the so-called conquest of Anahuac. I needed that rage and fire to fuel the big bang of my universe and the Xipe Totec (rebirth) of my ancient self and the drive to achieve it.

But when we were children we behaved as children…

Today the world and its information age has whittled down the need for reenvisioning any timbre of the ancestral song.

This work is based primarily on documented historical Native Anahuaco voices and the codexes they prepared for the Spanish clergy.

Secondarily on the traditions of the curandero and brujeria Xicano institutions and lastly on my own conjecture. 

This conjecture will be more in the form of creating a definitive narrative in order to found the corpus of Xicanayotl, so I may make static relationships that are fluid like the ancestry of deities and stories of their creations and exploits. I may swap a few minor deities around for philosophical congruency but I will not mislead you nor dishonor the traditions my soul has needed revived since they were first declared dead on August 13, 1521 or Matlactli ye Coatl.

(I will *all my conjecture points, neta.)

Now back to the lesson.

When I stated that the  Xicano's gnostic penchant and his faith in the creation was enough for his survival I don't think it was clear and further obscured by how the lesson ended analogizing the 4 Tezcatlipocas with the big bang.

Chicanos are a spiritual people. Our mestizo parents taught us ancestral magic in Catholic habits. Not only do Chicanos with close Mexican roots know the inner workings of witchcraft and soothsaying we know that to some degree it works. 

The trust we have in the creation to be enough came from intimate knowledge we had of the expansive nature of the forces that are more phenomenon than God and our ancestral knowledge of working with said forces. We didn't use Ometeotl because as the highest principle he cannot be used but only adhered to, we certainly did not say that we didn't need the forces of creation.

So in this work we will begin the study of the Chichimeca Teotls and the first born red took to the east…

Tlauhtlauhqui Tezcatlipoca:

Tlauhtlauhqui Tezcatlipoca was the name given to him by Ometeotl. The red Tezcatlipoca. Bursting forth as the first element, fire and the first direction, east.

Just as one drop of water is the ocean on a dry earth so is the red to fire. He is the initial spark to the big bang as well as the explosion itself. But the essence called forth wasn't only a spark, but the first spark. Bloody rebellion, spontaneous combustion. He retains the fight or flight moment of a man “seeing red” in an explosive instant; that energy that only exists to expend itself; it would die to live. And does so, over and over again.

*Take the first spark portion of Tlauhtlauhqui. Look at a fire starting and spreading. The aggressiveness of the first spark is emulated by every spark that wishes to become a flame.

The sparks that die weaken the surface and lead to an aid in the catching of the fire, in effect being reborn for his valor as a warrior.*

The fire we are speaking of is raging and cataclysmic, blinding.

*The degree is symbolized in the Chicano tradition of the red azabache that wards off mal de ojo. The principle is Tlauhtlauhqui blinding the envy of that person's eyes (desires).*

The Xicano has learned from the curanderas that the Tezcatlipocas are more spectrum of power than gods in any conventional sense of the word,it would be more accurate to say that* Teotl derives their foundation from the 4,but still must be treated with a superstitious respect to keep strong forces cool, specifically in this case.

In the West African tradition of Ifa the color red is shared by two Orisha, Shango and Elegba. Both are tempered, Shango with the white banner of Obatala and Elegba with the black cloak of the unseen to the red seen. They both are tempering the volatile energy.

The work is similar to how his more famous brother, Tezcatlipoca, works smoke in that same dynamic  over the blinding mirror that is him.

I am not suggesting they are in any way analogous or versions of each other. They are all three, the red Tezcatlipoca, Elegba, and Shango, separate entities. 

I am speaking of codifying. I personally, like our Xicanotl  and Mexica spirituality historically, learned of this process from West Africa via the island of Cuba, actually incorporating alongside (not with)our traditional Anahuaco and so called Mestizo beliefs. 

But the babalaos that came hostage on Spanish ships became allies with our Anahuaco ancestors and they aided them in codifying natural forces and other forms of earth science, among them the archetype of red.

Passion. Intensity, anger, fear; all emotions connected to the fight or flight or freeze reflex or survival.

This intense and primal  force was not only a phenomenon but also physical space. In the quadriform universe he took the East before even the sun fully formed.

Tezcatlanextia: mirror which illumines things

The next degree on the spectrum is a very old name for this force. The Tolteca -Chichimeca used it as a juxtaposition for his more famous brother the smokey mirror he was Tezcatlanextia, the mirror that illuminates.

Less primal than the red but no less searing the illumination of this powerful force is the clarity Tezcatlipocas smoke distorts in his sorcery.

Tezcatlanextia is the absolute truth of any object  it surveys. His are the uncomfortable, pit of the stomach truths a man faces to become a warrior.

The kind of truth that makes a lie feel merciful.

This fiery mirror of clarity is the honesty of  a life or death struggle. A desperate vision,without pretenses or bias, just truth. The Xicano warrior strives to face this blinding illumination free of fear and consult with his face and heart which is to say find the courage and skill to outwardly be what inwardly am.

Mixcoatl: the hunt

Mixcoatl, most famous for being the father of Ce Acatltzin, Quetzalcoatl in the flesh, he was god of the hunt and identified with the milky way and survival strategies.

*This is the terrestrial version of the red Tezcatlipoca. Under its jurisdiction is self preservation and the beginning of ancestral DNA.

As a Xicano, I am heir apparent to the corpus of Toltecayotl. This is no set of rituals, it is the human drive honed to survive most visible in the modern Mexican work ethic, The origin of that drive lies in a story that goes against science in the face of faith.

I recognize that modern DNA affirms the bearing strait migration theory more than any other theory for the origins of the American Indian. I understand the implications however, my grandmother healed me from what a doctor would have called a stomach flu in one ceremony that left a jet black yoke; as brown people of the hemisphere magic is an integral part of our realism. 

I have seen and heard on more than one occasion by indigenous traditional wise men, one Mayan, one Mexica that the bearing straight theory is rejected by our grandfathers, it has been told and it has been said that we have always been here.

My face and heart are in conflict because as a Xicanotl I must accept science as a standard both in its material existence, like technological advances, as I do in her ethereal existence, such as faith healing and soothsaying.

I bridge them by a premise filled with prefaces. either Man evolved separately on all continents or the group who had evolved post ice age were our ancestors and through early cohabitation our genetics received the East Asian market because Mixcoatl is the resource protection and species survival of early man.*

The Milky Way seemed a beacon of hope, a cloud at night made of stars and moons and planets. They would learn much from them after they stood the test of natural selection. The Ancient grandfathers discovered fire and being safe from the diurnal predators and keeping the nocturnal at Bay in order to strategize. Through raids on animal nests with the torch of el rojo or blinding a predator, the light of the night sky and the cosmic ballet within her were the bases of our survival.

 Camaxtli:: son of the hunt

*Camaxtli represents the actual human race that survived because of the lessons of the Mixcoatl epoch (hunting and gathering) and their human journey as the early Chichimeca now established as the dominant species.*

In essence camaxtli is codifying survival strategies in ritual .

The stories of Camaxtli as chief god of the Tlaxcaltecah are further proof of the humanity of this god.

The Tlaxcaltecah represent the first Chichimeca tribe to leave the seven caves which fits in with Tlauhtlauhquis essence of firstness.

 Xipe Totec: Man made of maize

From the our grandfather's face it has been told to our warriors hearts it has been told, Xipe Totec ruled justly over his people when a great famine hit during the course of the famine while under great starvation Xipe sustained his people with bits of himself until he had become the people's sustenance, he sacrificed himself for the honor of feeding his people .

Unlike Camaxtli, Xipe Totec is an evolution of energy. From out of the epoch of Camaxtli man went from prey to predator with hunting, strategies, rudimentary nocturnal farming, and balancing one's face and heart a new phase of humanity began in meso America and it began with corn.

It was the domestication of corn that took us from hunter gatherer to agriculturist, to botanist, to astronomist, to tlamatinime to Teotl all by harnessing the fear of the unknown and instinct as guides to a reborn tomorrow.

Coali tonali beautiful brown people.

In tloque in nahuaque. Ilpalnemohuani, 

Totecuyo in ilhuicahua, in Tlactipac, in Mictlan. Moyucoyatzin; ayac oquiyocoya,,

 ayac oquiyocani.

That which gives depth to all proximity and expanse to all that lay beyond, life source to creation and force of all cosmic order, terrestrial balance, and afterlife dimension. That, which created itself from itself, generated by nothing or for nothing .

Ometeotl: colonial interpretation

Lord of Duality, gravity behind reciprocity; father God of the gospel of Jesus and dead god from the land of our mother.

Ometeotl was more thoroughly divided under the colonial system than in precolumbian thought, maybe because of their seeming gnostic approach to Ometeotl in the Anahuac before Cortez. 

He wasn't appealed to directly, he was too high a tone for the frequency of the spirit so to speak. Knowledge of him was enough because he was at the root of understanding all other forces/gods. 

But in the interviews of Sahagun knowledge that was considered obscured was highlighted, mainly the Lord and lady aspect or Ometecuhtli y Omecihuatl or the Lord and lady of duality.

The colonial bruja mayores and curanderas and naguali women agreed on the male/female dichotomy of the man and wife being the perfect paradigm to borrow from the divine tonali of creation, since the strain of colonial life had itself been the impetus for prayers to the highest of heavens without former protocols, and the strain came bearing the name of one of its Quetzalcoatls, Jesus of Nazareth and they instituted it, as a decree that can be heard now from the  new age Toltec retreats of the industrially rich as their ted talk closes to the traditional Anahuaco of the land passing the talking feather.

Ometeotl.

Ometeotl: Xicano synthesis:

The unseen mover. The thought of the creator (Omecihuatl) that brought us from nothing and the force of the creator (Ometecuhtli) that gave us everything.

Out of respect for her sacrifice, for giving birth is always painful, and awe of his power and authority as witnessed in physical, objective reality, we acknowledge your presence and thank you for your example but trust in your creation to have been created sufficient to guide us.

You can end prayers with Ometeotl or be an atheist, it's power is beyond our reach and her laws are beyond our reality.

The Xicano is a Jaguar gnostic in this respect.

The four son's of Ometeotl: original orientation:

From the thirteenth and highest heaven, Ometecuhtlli and Omecihuatl had four sons to establish order in and as the universe.

The first one took to the east, the red region of  Tlapcopan or Tlahuiztlampa. He was born red; Tlauhtlauhqui Tezcatlipoca he was called forth as.

He is also Tezcatlanextia, mirror which illumines, and Xipe Totec.

The second was born with more power and authority because he was born in the middle, he was born black.He set Mictlan in the north and rules from its cold darkness, Yauyauqui Tezcatlipoca they called him and he who formed with creation.

Towards the setting sun in the white region of the women,  Cihuatlampa it was called, Ehecatl -Quetzalcoatl rules from.

From the south came the smallest of them all. Called forth as Mexi he was also called Omitecuhtli, warrior king of Huitzahna the bluish green  area to the left of the sun. God of the Mexica, Huitzilopochtli 

This conception and birth was the friction or impetus for chemical realities that brought forth physical and non physical realities as endowed by Ometecuhtlli and Omecihuatl.

The four sons of Ometeotl: colonial interpretation:

• Xipe Totec - the East, sunrise, (the regeneration each morning of the sun for battle), rebirth. The color red. The element of fire 

• Tezcatlipoca - The north, Mictlan (the realm of the dead), the night sky, transformation. The color black. The element of earth.

• Quetzalcoatl: the west, the sunset,  the planet Venus and cosmic intelligence . The color white the element of air.

• Huitzilopochtli: The southern direction of Huitztlampa, the solar zenith, cosmic will and the element of water.

The works of Sahagun and other missionaries and even indigenous colonial Mexica of the time, coined indigenous letrados, like Fernando de alva Ixtlixochitl, Chimalpahin, and Hernando Tezozomoc, have long been maligned by indigenists for a baptized Mexicayotl or for Christianizing indigenous concepts but in effect the opposite was true.

The difference between traditional perspectives among a sovereign people and colonized ones is the heirarchy disappears.

The last 13 Tlamatinime left, for not only the Mexica they called Mestizo but the curanderos and tlamatinime to come the cliff notes for how to resurrect dead gods.

It was the obscure truths and their purposes in myth packaged together accessible for any eyes that could see.

The curanderos linked Xipe Totec with the resurrected christ. Honor to the red blood shed of his essence can be seen in the beautifully gruesome demonstrations of faith during la semana Santa in Mexico; self cruxifixxions and Pilgrims making incredible journeys on their knees arriving to basilicas across the nation with flayed knees reminiscent of a Anahuac valley princess.

Tezcatlipoca became Satan which echoes through the caulderons of Catemaco, the famous verscruzeño city of witches, today .

Quetzalcoatl became synonymous with Jesus on the mount and San Tomas Aquinas and Huitzilopochtli, saint Michael.

The four sons of Tezcatlipoca: Xicanotl synthesis:

The Xicanotl stands on the shoulders of Meso American spiritual giants. From Mayan Balaams to brujas del rancho we have taken the best from all the worlds we are made of to survive the world we are in.

As I stated Xicanos are gnostics and skeptics precisely because of our deep respect and adherence to our Anahuaco culture that is based on the principle of duality, meaning every truth is some one's lie. Ideologies can hide from your logic but results reveal objective fact.

And what history has rewarded our research with is this: the foundations of the Tolteca - Chichimeca corpus are invaluable cuz they are eyewitness accounts to creation some argue.

The Colonial blueprint and the works of the Mexica and so called Mestizo Tlamatinime and later the Mexican bruja are precious and true and building blocks for the building of a sixth Xicano sun.

I am a practitioner of several of the earth sciences in the bundle called the three headed serpent but ,to the Xicano, the birth of the Tezcatlipocas is not magic at all but science .

The fire of Xipe Totec is the explosion of the big bang, the earth of Tezcatlipoca are the gaseous orbs that would become planets, you can see the logic in the smokey mirror iconography. Quetzalcoatl’s air is the cooling winds of motion and the cooling down of the planets.

Lastly the warrior Huitzilopochtli went to war with the universe as water protecting the life to be under his defensive shell.

The Xicano realized at the feet of ancestors great and ancient and modern teachers that what el Señor manifested had an order, a sequence and a purpose, that was codified in order to preserve the knowledge of manifestation.

This is not the manifestation of the new age Toltecs who have repackaged Castañeda with psycho therapy techniques to enrich themselves while appropriating a culture who is in a 500 year war with genocide, while doing nothing to aid them. Not the people dying in the mountains or the paisas and Xicanos being killed in American streets.

This is the manifestation self created by Ometeotl to create the universe. On a cosmic level those building blocks are Xipe Totec, Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, and Huitzilopochtli but within the human faculties those forces are recognized as Drive, analysis (memory), Intelligence, and will .

Joe was a man to us, but willy boy, Davey, and Jim eran ladrones.

Red flags and bloody intentions 

Viva Mexico cabrones.

I remember.

When you say it you spray it

“You will not replace us”

I can hardly believe that when raza works for Ice

Santa Anna probably got bone spurs on the march

But Benito is our Zapoteca Christ

I remember the Alamo 

Do you?

La villita te recordo huh?

Talking bout “ where were you born”

Wrong stereo type

This ain't Cheech we gangland Mexicans

Might be your country but it's our barrio

Just like that fort you tried to commandeer 

Now you’s can't leave

U ‘member

I do.

You strive to live a good life; we thirst for a good death

So you call our life crazy 

We’re humble but truxa

You think I walk staring down cuz I'm submitting

And I am, but not to you, to the eagle knights teaching

The future is a myth, and the past is a legend

I'm a warrior, I only have the present.

I looked forward enough to see it coming and back just to check you ain't creepin 

I'm focused on the only thing I'm sure of, the now

And now it's your fort I'm trapped in and I hear the dogs and hoses approaching

But what happens when you take what's mine and call it home?

I remember 

Spanish hearts palpitated in full view of their Christian brothers

Cortez had to burn the boats, I remember 

America first

was Mexico.

Just like it was to El Californio

Them Cholos been the vanguard since before America was me.

I remember the Alamo hijuesu chingada madre, do you?

Chicano is a race, nationality, tribe, and indigenous resistance movement  from the moment you are born Mexican in America.

The Chicano, if he allows himself to be defined, doesn't have a native claim on any land or ancestry to speak of; he denies what he sees in the mirror and the American gringo, and surely the Spaniard before him, do not count him as a part of their bloodline 

While the Xicano who defines himself, knows he is Anahuaco the same as our Olmec grandmothers, Xicano like the child soldiers pouring out of east LA schools yelling brown is beautiful, and fighting for his Xicano life in every American moment.

It ain't by choice either. His otherness in any environment from the hood to the burbs; hasta en el rancho, is a palpable reality of his existence. He's either a pocho who wants to be  black or white to Mexicanos or a messikin or wetback to Americans. 

Now there will be push back, most loudly by the defined Chicanos, so I ask them, if it wasn't true , why did it feel that way? And if they say it didn't ask the brown skin ones.

I would be in a store or something with my grandmother and I dreaded it. I knew her Spanish was going to be loud and I knew everybody was going to stare. And I knew those looks.

They came at Parent teacher conferences from a teacher I always found mean without motive, after my grandmother had to have all  her words translated.

They came from the police pulling over my Jefe in an IROC del àno and hearing his accent.

I had seen them and a few times even heard them.

“If their not gonna learn the language you could think they could at least shut up in public’

“I know and look at them there are so many”

Said two older white women, ancestors of the karen. 

I felt them before I heard them and when I heard them I turned around to look at their faces. I shouldn't have.

My grandfather was here undocumented before he fought in world war two receiving two purple hearts and a medal of valor and a plantation owner in the south made him eat from the garbage at the threat of deportation. His sense of duty was such to his family 

Would you feel American if that was your America and I don't mean literally; Chicanos are US citizens but culturally which is to say personally as it relates to your identity; Or would you feel like a dark skinned native watching a western in the west?

En el l otro lado, culturally they aren't much better but they don't hold the power over us that the US does and the generality in that respect is much more loose fitting than it is for the American.

Countriless as we may be in the national culture, we are extremely proud of where we are from inside of the borders.. 

East Los, Little village, Westside San Antonio, southwest Detroit, the list goes. Our neighborhoods become our patrias and our homeboys become our countrymen.

One result of this that I've lived as a resident of a little city, big town, barrio is, in  smaller cities across the country where the barrios aren't as old and integrated into the culture of the city, like LA or Chicago or Mexicans ain't the majority like Houston or the Valle, the tribalism becomes smaller and tighter knit and more dangerous. 

It's as if the Chicano fights with desperation in these places and the effect of it is an overly traumatized subculture of an already marginalized group.

What the plantation owner did to my grandfather was a twitch of colonial impulses they would give into by the time the barrio was ready for me.

The point is that barrios are violent because they are poor and marginalized; they are patrolled and operated like they are reservations at best, colonies at worst,  but without the federal designation our recognized native brother in the north gets.

Ours isn't on paper so it's easier to violate. More palpable for PR

The same was done to us with civil rights, they used us to boost the white numbers and classified Mexicans as whites in the forties and fifties  ( they actually still do this with the prison census inside) but never treated us white, even if some of us were, and while  Jim Crow was never officially declared in the American southwest, the Klan lynched, the Texas rangers wantonly killed, a group of sailors attacked young pachuccos in their own barrios and the signs where my Jefe grew up en el valluco.read: “ no dogs or Mexicans.”

Mestizo is not a race but they tell us it's ours. It is a classification like the several we have been given throughout the diaspora; Mejicano, Mexicano, Latino, Hispanic, Mexican American. 

All in the attempt to convince us we are not who we have always been.

The same people described by Columbus as copper colored saints and Cortez ,as having surpassed Greece in civilization, are us and that is a fact that has never changed.

Cortez got off the boat with 500 Spaniards to a conservative 20 million meso American native inhabitants. He couldn't enmejorar la raza enough to genetically, socially or in any other way change the status or the identity of the subjects he was not too busy to label, and he didn't.

European contact did not change the heart of this hemisphere nor the face of Anahuac;

It only changed the diplomatic status of a colonized people to varying degrees in order to maintain power over an actively rebelling people (sanitized history books made an ongoing guerilla war look like a docile surrender) and play one over the other in their mess of a caste system. A fox-like  madness they insisted on. 

Some of the poor fatherless sons of Indian mothers and dark skinned bastardos on the hacienda accepted their terms and fathered the classification of mestizo becoming not an ancestor but a co conspirator in identicide.

Us, the children of those American Indians don't need to seek what tribe we belong to but behold the tribe we became.

Xicanayotl is a civilization, it's language is calo, it's religion, is a reflection of the people; the three headed serpent:  mystic folk Christianity and Afro Caribbean spiritual traditions as arms of the core spiritual body which is the Huehuepahtli (the old medicine) or Mexicayotl. 

If we place a special emphasis on the Mexicayotl over other indigenous traditions it is because as orphans robbed of our birth right but loyal to our identity, we claim the height of our sovereign existence. We believe it is the right of the children  of fallen empires.

Also,and in some ways more importantly, because of our Chicano history, the name of the Mexica peoples was changed to Mexicano because they decided that is how it should be pronounced. Being Chicanos we are partial to that.

They tried to tell us who we were, what to think, how to see ourselves, and what we could become in the militant birth of our Xicano nation.

The gringo education system tried to not only tell brown children in East LA who they were in society,but who they could become.

It's not that they didn't want them to model themselves after the philosophers, statesmen, and master architects of their ancestors, they didn't even want them to know they existed.

Instead of Nezhualcoyotl,Tlacaelel, Tlatoani Ahuitzotl, it was service jobs and manual labor dreams. The consensus of our invisibility on the hemisphere and civilization as an import was a feature of the institutional racism that is the truly lasting thing that came off of those boats 

What they call Western civilization stems from their old concept of the world.  Before us. Without a western hemisphere, Europe and the Mediterranean are the west in comparison to other eastern big civilizations. However we did exist for millennia, civilized in a culture of balance and warrior hood and we never stopped existing, we still exist. Our tribe is Chicano.

If Malinche was the mother, Juan Diego was the father of the man who declared himself mestizo.

The shame instilled in us from the cruelty of their ever expanding cast systems created obsession over European genetics and religion.

These two factors, Malintzin and her fabled progeny that explained away the population disparity that would have to be accounted for and conquered for the Mestizo people to be half Spanish and Juan Diego, the religious incentive for converting not only to Catholicism but hispanicism, in a zealous fashion, were the true birth of the people they called mestizo.

The birth of the Chicano was a migration propelled by the violent wind that swept through Mexico in 1910 tearing land deed from thief and revolutionary from war criminal.

They tried to maintain the humility and kindness of their Mexican villages in American cities steeped in racial hatred.

It made them good targets and bad role models for the American born progeny who would only know their parents' humble and kind villages in sermons aimed at them and their gringo ways.

While outside they received sneers and looks I'm sure I've seen in department stores assuring them they were not gringo enough, they rebelled from the fold of mestizo Mexico and her quiet suffering; with zoot suits and fedoras they proclaimed themselves Pachuccos.

They didn't invite any attack. These brown men simply asserted their supposed American freedom of less expression than existence and they were forced to kill for it and they did, a blood offering in the name of another painful birth in our history.

The Founding of our nation was march 1st 1968.

The Children of Pachuccos demanded we be allowed to recognize and be ourselves. They won the educational leg of that fight and in that vein I invite you to educate yourself on yourself.

In Miguel Leon Portilla seminal classic Aztec thought and culture, he says “they never understood us and we never understood them” speaking of the native and European to the Chicano I say “we never understood us”

That is the Chicano polemic.