Nowadays the native peoples call this: In Totan, In Totah, Our Mother, Our
Father. They also called it Teteo Inan, Teteo Itah, as a duality that generates
the elements of nature and that generates also through themselves other dualities.
Arturo Meza (Writer
and Scholar from Mexico City)
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Tonacayotl, our sustenance
One of the oldest cosmic myths of the Nahuatl culture--the invention
of corn.
Quetzalcoatl, the cultural hero that
symbolizes the wisdom of Tloque Nahuaque or Supreme God, owner of the near
and together, found the red ant and asked where he could find the corn.
The ant led him there and Quetzalcoatl was transformed into a black ant in
order
to be able to enter the Mound of our Substenance.
Quetzalcoatl took the corn and put it on the lips of the first human
beings, Oxomoco y Cipactonal. He gave them corn to eat so that they
would become
strong. They knew that it wouldn’t be enough to have a few kernels,
instead they would need to possess corn in abundance in order to cultivate
it and to assure its existence forever in the lives of men.
So then the Tlaloques which symbolize rain and who live in the tallest
parts of the mountains, respond quickly to the four corners of the
universe, and
they all come down to give life to the corn with their rain. At the
same time, Nanáhuatl threw a lightning bolt which opened the Mound
of Our Sustenance forever.
From here the corn came forth in all its colors--white, dark, yellow
and red; the beans, the chia, the bledos, and in a word, all that constitutes
our sustenance.
Miguel Leon-Portilla (Writer
and Scholar from Mexico City)
