Nahuas

One year we're basically looking at the mushroom traditions of central Mexico by Gonzales Mariscal, Guzola, Martinez, Osiris, and Maria de Carmen Marcil.

And so these are basically common traditions that we know a lot about Maria Sabina, not as much about the Nahua traditions.

Basically, they have these practices.

You have purification beforehand, steam baths, abstaining from sex sometime for up to weeks, and fasting.

That was the measurement, up to four cups for those who were on duty, priests, warriors, elders.

Why 52? Why elders have to be 52? Because for the Aztecs in Nahua, a century had 52 years.

So anyone who had passed a full era was, by default, allowed to drink alcohol.

to keep warm, to make them feel well, to remember if they get drunk, they could remember their early years.

And low over the distant peaks, a single star is already showing.

This was an hour the Nahua peoples of ancient Mexico, among them the Mexica, whom we usually call the Aztecs, knew well.

The threshold between the world of light and the world of darkness The moment when the sun went down into the underworld, to travel through it during the night and rise again at dawn.

They had a map of where the sun went.

The most important is the great work of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún.

The General History of the Things of New Spain, known as the Florentine Codex.

Sahagún spent decades, with the help of Aztec elders and of young Nahuatl scholars trained in his school, gathering and writing down in Nahuatl everything he could learn about Aztec religion and life.

And in the third book of his history, there is an appendix on where the dead went and on the funeral customs of the Aztecs, which is the fullest account we have of the journey to Mixtlan.

As the ages progress, the condition of humanity declines rather than advances.

And then the Nahua tradition gives us one of the most dramatic versions of all because the earlier worlds actually end in different catastrophes.

The Leyenda de los Soles, the Legend of the Suns, belongs to the manuscript complex generally known as the Codex Chimalpopoca.

The Nahuatl manuscript began to be written in the 16th century, and later scholars and translators, including Primo Feliciano Velazquez, Walter Lehman, and Miguel Leon Portilla, worked with the text.

The National Autonomous University of Mexico now provides the Anales de Cualtitlan and Leyenda de los Soles together with Velázquez's Spanish translation and facsimiles, so the manuscript history and actual Nahuatl material can be examined directly, rather than known only through modern retellings.

The earlier suns end through different forms of destruction, and the inhabitants change with them.

Jaguars, wind, fire, and water appear in the catastrophe sequence, while some former humans become animals after the destruction of their world.

And there it is again, the same strange, biological-looking operation we saw in Mesopotamia, but expressed through completely different gods and a completely different culture.

In sacred Incan and Aztec tradition, human blood was integral to their rituals.

In both Aztec or Nahua and Incan traditions, blood was not viewed merely as a bodily fluid or a medium of death.

It was understood as a sacred living substance, a concentrated form of vital energy.

This quality is called tonai in Nahuatl, which translates to essential life force.

and it was a fundamental currency of cosmic exchange.

It was recognized that the gods sacrificed themselves to create the fifth sun, the current evolutionary period, the earth and humanity.

Um, and so, and, and so like, that's a, that's a little bit there, but yeah, it was propaganda, but also, uh, it was an act of indigenous agency and later myth-making because also not only was it used to justify the conquest and the colonial ruling, but it also played into European literary tropes of heroic conquerors, defeating monsters, idolaters, and, and almost set the pace for European colonization of the Americas as a whole, because it likes, it set up the depiction of, of native American spirituality as idolatry and demonic and all that kind of stuff.

And the other thing too is, and this is the part where things get kind of interesting, is that it wasn't necessarily one-sided because there's some post-conquest pictorial or alphabetic sources in Nahua that were produced under colonial supervision that actually echoed or magnified sacrifice stories, either as like conversion narratives or something else, like trying to like show like trying to shape the power and fear of this period in different ways.

So it seems like even some Now what people at the time tried to amplify the stories to for other ends.

So it's like it's even more complicated than just like a straight up colonial thing as like, you know, there were still native just like, yeah, we did this because I mean, even after the conquest, like there were still like there were still as tech nobility that had to that they needed to work with.

Mycelium Youth Network integrates traditional ecological knowledge, ancestral inheritance, climate solutions, and social-emotional learning to empower youth to imagine and then build a future that they would desire, not just one that they fear.

Lil Milagro is a movement leader and activist of Nahuatl people descent with 20 plus years of experience decolonizing education, bringing about environmental justice and food sovereignty and union democracy, and organizing labor.

If you are wondering how to meet young people where they are, if you want to understand how games can save the world, if you avoid climate action because you feel like you don't have skills or expertise, or if you're wondering how to make social-emotional learning more applicable to a wider variety of students who worry about climate change, then this is a great episode for you.

Let's dive in.