30 May 2025 / 10 House
What’s up (top)?
Our friend Gael Ollivier has come up trumps again with a perceptive little piece on the cardinal directions and their orientation in the Aztec/Mexica world...
What’s up (top)? If you were an Aztec... not North!
I’ve often found the name of Huitzilopochtli translated as “Hummingbird from the South, or from the left”, a fact which made me feel a little bit puzzled, because I just didn’t see how the south and the left could be matched.
So I was really happy when I came across a line in Soustelle’s book El Universo Azteca which shed some light on the matter. According to him “...ancient (Aztec) books represent the world as a cross, with the East on the upper side, and the South on the left” (p.13). (I guess my book must have a typo because when you put the South on the left, what you get on top is the West, not the East!)
The east on top... go figure!
I grew curious. What would one of our maps look like oriented that way? So I turned one around and stared at it. It looked wrong, very wrong. But why?
The answer was simple, yet challenging: because we take for granted that things are just the way we think they are!
However, different people, in different times and places, have their very own perspective on life. And I think this little piece of information comes to show that if we allow ourselves to open up to different perspectives, we will have a more lively approach to other people’s experiences.
Hummingbird mystery solved!
Comments (5)
gaelitabis
13th May 2010
Now, doing some further reading, I’ve come to realize that the map is wrong althogether. The mesoamerican perception of “cardinal points” was oriented more like an “X” than the regular cross we think of.
Just look at the codex illustration, there it is!
gaelitabis
13th May 2010
I never really gave it much thought; I just chose an image randomly and had it altered to give it the thumb-up (in this case, Tezcatlipoca). I’d make a lousy art designer, wouldn’t I?
tecpaocelotl
11th Jan 2010
Also, that third image is an image of Tezcatlipoca, not Huitzilopochtli.
Mexicolore
Yes I noticed that too (promise!) - I just thought perhaps Gael had chosen the image because the deity appears to be giving a thumbs-up signal!
Tecpaocelotl
10th Jan 2010
Forgot to add that the East (Taixpan) is the forehead.
Tecpaocelotl
10th Jan 2010
I always thought the translation of name of Huitzilopochtli was always mistranslated since the Nahuatl word for North is opochmaypa which also represents the left hand and yecmaypa is the South which represents the right hand.
The reason why the East is on top is because that’s where the sun rose.
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