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Chicomoztoc, Tovar Manuscript fol. 1
The human body - as well as other elements in the environment such as trees and the parts of houses - had many associations for the ancient Nahua/Mexica/Aztecs with different levels and aspects of the cosmos. These parallels ‘impose a human order over reality in order to manage, sanction, and explain it’. We give just one example here, from the work of Alfredo López Austin...
‘Chicomoztoc is a secret term employed in magical conjurations to designate the body. That the body is called the name of the mythical place of origin of the Nahua peoples is due to the fact that the image of the mountain mother, ‘The place of the seven caves’, was compared to the body with its seven openings: two eye sockets, two nasal passages, the mouth, the anus, and the navel.’
Info from The Human Body and Ideology: Concepts of the Ancient Nahuas by Alfredo López Austin, translated by Thelma and Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, vol. 1, p. 163, University of Utah Press, 1988.
Picture from Tovar Manuscript, pl. I (original in the John Carter Brown Library, Rhode Island, USA); scanned from the ADEVA, Graz, Austria 1972 edition.
Chicomoztoc, Tovar Manuscript fol. 1