Article suitable for older students

Superstitious? (9)

20th Aug 2021

Partial solar eclipse, Codex Telleriano Remensis fol. 40v (detail)

An enquirer recently wrote in to ask us: ‘Did the Aztecs have any specific superstitions around eclipses? Many Mexicans are aware of present superstitions around eclipses, especially those for pregnant women. For example wearing red underwear, safety pins, carrying scissors, or tying a red ribbon over your navel. Is it possible any of these superstitions had origins in prehispanic times? Thank you in advance!’ (Answer compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

We recommend two excellent and authoritative sources on this, one primary and one secondary. The first is the Florentine Codex compiled by Bernardino de Sahagún with Nahua informants. The whole of Book 7 is about astrological phenomena, with references to eclipses of both sun and moon. In the case of solar eclipses there is a blunt general warning ‘If the eclipse of the sun is complete, it will be dark forever!’ In the case of lunar eclipses, the bad news is specifically targeted at pregnant women: ‘When the moon eclipsed, his face grew dark and sooty; blackness and darkness spread. When this came to pass, women with child feared evil; they thought it portentous; they were terrified [lest], perchance, their [unborn] children might be changed into mice; each of their children might turn into a mouse...’
Book 5 contains a short chapter on ‘the woman with child’, and the text is explicit: ‘When a woman was with child during an eclipse of the sun or moon, she might not look at it. It was said that if she saw it, her child would be hairlipped.’ it goes on to extend the warning: ‘Before her child had been formed as a being, they restrained [any of] them, when the moon arose, from looking up at it. They said to them: “Do not look at the moon! Your children will suffer sickness of the heart, or else will be hairlipped!”’
The solution, apparently, was relatively painless: for the woman to place an obsidian blade on her bosom: ‘it was said that thereby her child would not be hairlipped.’

The second(ary) source is the book by one of Mexico’s most eminent historians, Alfredo López Austin, The Rabbit on the Face of the Moon, which contains an entire chapter on eclipses. After establishing that eclipses have always been viewed with caution and fear the world over (‘The coupling of the human and the celestial domains makes the looming shadow an omen of disaster’), he shows how the same was very much the case in ancient Mesoamerica, certainly amongst the Mexica (Aztecs) and the Classic Maya - the latter having the skill and experience to predict eclipses, as shown in the still extant Dresden Codex.
’One of the principal harmful effects attributed to eclipses was the harelip. The belief probably came from the widely held concept that a harelip was produced by the action of a luminous lunar substance that had spilled over the earth from on high.

‘The moon was a container. This is clearly shown in the ancient pictographic codices, which portray the vessel in cross-section with a liquid content. In some images a rabbit or sometimes a flint knife [pic 3] sits on top of the liquid. As a container, the moon both holds and releases. It retains when it is solid. It is empty when it gives off almost no light. It retains in the dry season; it spills out in the rainy season...
’The moon releases its liquid, which is light, which is crying, which is rain. That is the reason why, in many native beliefs, earthly beings, trees, intestinal worms, harvests, domestic animals, and even human beings contain a smaller or a greater amount of water according to the phases of the moon. For people who believe in these lunar attributes, there are logical practical consequences. For example, it is not a good idea to cut down a tree when its trunk is filled with water...

‘An eclipse of the moon represented a violent, extraordinary rupture, which for a moment stopped the full moon in order to spill its liquid, in one stroke, over the earth. An eclipse of the sun was the momentary domination of the sun by the empty moon, which diminished or negated the solar light’s contrary and equalising power over the earth. Eclipses injected a large quantity of lunar liquid into worldly beings, either because the water-light of the full moon spilled all at once during the lunar eclipse or because, during a solar eclipse, the water-light that spilled during the full moon was strengthened by the weakening of the opposing force of the sun. In either case, the rabbit takes possession of weaker beings, those who are just being formed...’

Info sources:-
• The Florentine Codex, Book 5 - The Omens (appendix) and Book 7 - The Sun, Moon, and Stars, and the Binding of the Years, trans. Dibble & Anderson, University of Utah, 1981
• The Rabbit on the Face of the Moon: Mythology in the Mesoamerican Tradition by Alfredo López Austin, trans. Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano and Thelma Ortiz de Montellano, University of Utah Pres, 1996.

Picture sources:-
• Main pic and pic 4: images scanned from our own copy of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, facsimile edition - Eloise Quiñones Keber, University of Texas Press, 1995
• Pic 1: Image scanned from our own copy of Primeros Memoriales by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, facsimile edition, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 1993
• Pic 2: image from the Florentine Codex scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994.