**1. Introduction**

Unlike the Western world, where the past defines the preservation of future identities, Indigenous narratives tend to position alterity at the origin and destiny of spirit beings. In Andean myths, in which Tristan Platt [1] has recognized the presence of an "aggressive fetus," ancestors'souls are conceived as diminutive, pagan devils that enter the mother's womb to give life to human embryos, so that pregnancy is regarded as a process of conversion between pagan souls and Christian neonates. Similarly, the ancient Nahuas considered gestation largely equivalent to capturing a warrior on the battlefield, so each birth took the form of a belligerent operation between the midwife and the inhabitants of the underworld [2].<sup>1</sup> Known as *miquizpan*, "time of death," childbirth alluded to the ontological condition of the fetus, identified as an entity with a cold, dark nature that was still in the zone of *Mictlan*, that imagined underworld that was both the destination of the dead and the origin of future generations. In this way, while birth followed a process that began with the transformation of an enemy fetus and culminated in its integration into the

<sup>1</sup> In the sixteenth century, fray Bernardino de Sahagún recorded that "when the baby had arrived on earth, then the midwife shouted; she gave war cries, which meant that the little woman had fought a good battle, had been a brave warrior, had taken a captive, had captured a baby" (cited by [2]: 650; English from [3]: 167).

earthly world, death set in motion a new process of alteration in which the dead transitioned to a different condition.

Just as the place of origin, the mortuary destination was conceived as an otherworldly realm where the ordinary condition of human beings was altered. Depending on the trajectory marked by the individual's birth, the dead entered a world that was socially analogous to earthly communities, but that differed in principle in the ontological condition of its inhabitants. The variety of scenarios projected by the end of the life cycle, from Mictlan to the legendary kingdom of Tlalocan, offered a panorama of multiple universes that channeled humans to different mortuary destinations, each of which had an owner or lord of the place, local officials, and an undifferentiated group of auxiliary spirits from the earthly realm. According to the claims of the ancient inhabitants of Tlaxcala, commoners turned into weasels and beetles after death, while the leading officials became birds and clouds that aided water gods [4]. Sahagún's informants maintained that the dead were reborn in a state unlike their earlier condition,<sup>2</sup> which indicated that all beings underwent a discontinuous development that was reproduced with birth and death. If the result of this process was to turn into clouds, animals, or divinities, the modalities of this conversion could be summed up in that mechanism that constantly distinguished earlier states from later ones, in the same way, it discerned between places of origin and places of destination. Hence, fray Diego Durán, interested in the origin of peoples, expressed doubt over the capacity of their members to identify their own genealogy:

*There are some people who tell fables about this subject. To wit, some say that the Indians were born of pools and springs; others that they were born of caves still others, that they descended from the gods. All of this is clearly fabulous and shows that the natives themselves are ignorant of their origin and beginnings, inasmuch as they always profess to have come from strange lands ([5]: 4).*

Written in the mid-sixteenth century, with the vision of a man who recognized himself in his own lineage, the passage reveals two diametrically opposed conceptions of the origin and identity of the speakers. The idea that human beings came from an otherworldly realm, situated beyond the confines of humanity, clearly contrasted with the notion of a natural genealogy that traced a direct relationship between ancestors and descendants. Whereas Christian thought emphasized the continuity between the former and the latter, emphasizing the connection between origin and final destination, Indigenous thought insisted on marking their discontinuities, affirming that native populations emerged from caves and springs. Conceived as beings of a different nature, with dissimilar habits and dwelling places, the value of those populations was not measured by temporal continuity or genealogical identity, but rather by the alterity that defined their initial condition. More than a linear development between members of the same species, descendants took the form of a heterogeneous process between beings of a different nature, whose otherness made it possible to move between two divergent states. The incorporation of an enemy through gestation, as well as the uncertain origin of the ancestors allude, indeed, to a discontinuous process that made it possible to assert that forebears came from caves and neonates from the underworld. These "strange lands," as Durán referred to them, do not refer to faraway

<sup>2</sup> "For so was it said: 'When we die, it is not true that we die; for still we live, we are resurrected. We still live, we awaken"(Sahagún, *Códice Florentino*, book 10, chap. 29; English from [3]: 192)

*Cosmogonies of Alterity: Origin and Identity in Mesoamerican Narrative DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104496*

places, but rather to sites where alterity is possible, based on narratives that marked ruptures there, where Christian thought saw only continuities. Invisible to the Spaniards, another form of time was hidden in caves and springs, privileged places of contact that altered temporal meaning, because "There is frequent mention of peoples' perplexity upon returning to the earth's surface in a time period different from the one they had anticipated" ([6]: 78). Just as the figures of alterity could not be identified with a specific geography, those strange lands were not necessarily the product of a fictitious fable or an indifference to the past, but rather were the result of a conceptual process that sought the diversity of beings throughout space and time.

### **2. Alterity and dualism**

The reason why native populations come from caves, neonates from the underworld, and ancestors from strange or foreign lands can undoubtedly be sought in that specular world imagined as the symmetric inversion of the human world. The zone of the universe generally called "virtual world," "mirror world," or "realm of the deities" in Mesoamerican studies is referred to as *chalamal* by the Tzeltals, *elja tu'uk et* by the Mixes, and *ocse taltikpak* ("other world") by the Nahuas. Although on occasions it is conceived as an upper world and on others as a netherworld, its essential feature consists of duplicating earthly life and showing its possible alterity through the inversion of customary processes. According to Holland [7], the life cycle of the Tzotzil is diametrically opposed from the moment when a dead person enters the underworld sphere because the deceased begins a process of rejuvenation that inverts earthly life, passing from old age to infancy. Once the same number of years from the earlier cycle has passed, the spirit is allowed to return to the world of the living, on the condition it is reborn into another community. At the same time, the alteration is also reproduced in the animal kingdom, where souls return to earth and are reborn in the heart of the same species, provided that they modify their former gender [8]. Indigenous thought formulates in this way a recurring idea in Mesoamerican myths, in which the underworld is not only a site where genders and ages are distinguished, inverting their original position but also the place that permits the conversion of beings into the alterity that corresponds to them by nature.

Indigenous myths indeed seem to indicate that the genealogy of beings is an inherently discontinuous process. More than identity between successive generations, its narratives tend to trace an intermittent line between the sources of creation and the nature of creatures. Instead of establishing an equivalence between both, the narratives try to distinguish between the origin of the creation in such a way that one always produces a different entity. It is as if each creature was the bearer of its own alterity, in which mythological entities are presented as dual figures concurrently masculine and feminine, celestial and telluric. Diverse Mesoamerican myths allude to the native divinity as a split entity, related to the earth and water, which was simultaneously called *Tlalteutl* and *Cipactli*. The origin myth tells of the creation of mundane and divine beings as the result of a process of transformation through which this primordial, at once masculine and feminine being,<sup>3</sup> was split into two opposite halves

<sup>3</sup> "There was a goddess called Tlalteutl, which is the earth itself, which, according to them, had the shape of [a] man; others used to say it was a woman . . . Later they made the fish Cipactli the earth, which they called Tlalteutl, and they depict it as god of the earth"(*Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas* 1941: 18).

to give rise to a segmented universe, divided between the heaven and earth used in myths to explain its diversity, its order, and its movement. A paradigm of duality, *Tlalteutl* or *Cipactli*only intervenes in the Nahua cosmogony as the title alluding to the origin, genesis, and the beginning of things, whose fission defines the place of otherness in the overall design of the universe.

In Nahua cosmogony, origin myths not only pose the question of how to produce diversity based on unity, but also the possibility of favoring the former to the detriment of the latter. In proportion to the primordial unity divided into two, its parts are organized into two unequal segments that are as different from each other as light and darkness, drought and moisture, and high and low. Despite its apparent symmetry, several indications suggest that this local conception of dualism is not formulated in terms of peaceful equilibrium. Their myths implicitly proclaim that the poles organizing the universe—heaven and earth, hot and cold, male and female, and so on—are not equivalent in their terms, and they must instead be conceived as a division that emphasizes the predominance of one over the other, thus precluding the possible expression of symmetry in the identity of the opposing segments. According to Jacques Galinier [9], who has set out to examine Indigenous worldviews from the perspective of "asymmetric dualism," the division of the cosmos responds less to the logic of opposition between concepts and categories and more to a principle of subordination that "encompasses" the lower in the upper segment, although the former may have preeminence over the latter in its overall aspects. Although they may be twins in origin, the parts are gradually revealed as unequal and tend to be ordered in an alternate sequence of domains, so that each segment ultimately gives preeminence to its counterpart.

The tendency to separate what is integrated, dividing unity into differentiated segments is expressed with greater clarity in narratives associated with twins, as frequent in Mesoamerican mythology as in other Amerindian narratives. In origin myths, as Olivier [10] has observed, Pre-Columbian deities are almost always presented as divided entities in that they can integrate their own alterity in the form of a twin that plays the role of alter ego. Formed by the union of two animals, the celestial quetzal and the terrestrial serpent, the name of Quetzalcoatl also meant "Precious Twin" and was linked to the figure of Venus, a heavenly body that is also a twin in its double guise as the Morning and Evening Star. At the other extreme, forming an indissoluble pair, Tezcatlipoca was identified with a two-faced mirror in which men could see the reflection of their inevitable alterity, because it was "an instrument that distorted and amplified the differences between the two twins, one young and the other aged, each reflected in the two faces of the mirror" ([10]: 167). Although this image synthesizes the duality of humankind, including the universe it inhabits, it also reveals what Guilhem Olivier has referred to as an "unstable twinness," whose primary characteristic consisted of shunning identity between similar entities. Like those Amazonian myths that emphasize the disequilibrium of the parts, considering one twin strong and the other weak, one dark and the other white, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca switch their respective positions as their differences increase, in such a way that each alternatively assumed the role of Venus, the Sun, and the Moon, as the cosmogonic cycles evolved. In other words, "the twinness inherent to each deity was found in a state of perpetual disequilibrium" that gave rise to a new solar cycle (ibid.) as if the origin was the result of a constant alteration rather than of a uniform genesis.

On a more general level, Lévi-Strauss had noted that the dualism of Amerindian twins contrasts with the philosophical and ethical sources of Western thought. While

#### *Cosmogonies of Alterity: Origin and Identity in Mesoamerican Narrative DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104496*

Amerindian mythology sees duality in the form of antithesis, European narratives endeavored to extract a plausible synthesis from them. In Greco-Latin tradition, in which myths associated with Castor and Pollux underscored the similarity of their tastes and thoughts, considering the indivisible union between them, disequilibrium arose outside the identity characterizing the twins. Although born from different parents, one human and the other divine, the Dioscuri formed a unity that gravitated to harmony to the extent that the initial imbalance was suppressed to blur them—"everything occurs as if a constant tendency drove Indo-European thought to erase the difference between twins" Lévi-Strauss [11], promoting unity over diversity through this operation. The narrative from Classical Antiquity thus inverts Amerindian discourse, which begins with unity to seek progressive differences within it. The unstable twinness of the Mesoamerican universe culminates in the negation of absolute identity and it is in this sense divergent from the Indo-European perspective but analogous to that of so many Amerindian myths that organize the world through a series of polar oppositions, without the resulting parts ever taking on a true identity. In this "dualism in perpetual disequilibrium," as Lévi-Strauss [11] referred to it, it is not only possible to recognize the key to Amerindian thought, but also its propensity to openness, that space that dualism leaves open on the other side of the universe for identity to find its limit, eluding recognition of itself.

Just as the stories of twins, which contain their own alterity, Indigenous narratives propose similar origins and heterogeneous results in the creation process. Just as those who endeavor to avoid their similarities, the gods make an effort to create variations on a standard model and proceed to divide temporal unity into differentiated beings and segments in such a way that the inhabitants of an earlier era no longer correspond to the beings of the subsequent periods. Men and divinities participate in creation in a remarkable way—they are not content to reproduce the same essence that preceded them, instead, they opt to produce a difference within each unity and each work. Although this capacity to produce difference finds its clearest expression in an unstable dualism, its functioning demands that heterogeneous elements form part of the creation, for this to integrate the alterity corresponding to it by nature at its very heart. The conception of an entity will not, therefore, be that of a constant, indivisible identity endlessly reproduced throughout history, but rather that of an origin different from that of its own destiny. Indigenous narratives indeed contemplate the possibility of a foreign origin, external to the local genealogy, whose antecedents are generally situated in distant times and diverse places.

In this context, it is worth recalling that one of the foremost aspects of the conception of time among the ancient Nahuas was the division into eras known as "suns," alluding to essentially discontinuous periods culminating in later transformations. As López Austin [4] observed, "It was believed that the solar dominion had been given to several gods in succession and that the epoch of each one had ended in an imbalance leading to chaos, making a new creation of human beings necessary." Myths about the temporary succession, consecrated in the *Leyenda de los Soles*, not only claim that the creations followed an irregular sequence, marked by successive ruptures, but also that each period altered the physiognomy of earlier creatures—the different species of men gave rise to some beings transformed into monkeys, others into fish, and others into birds, through a substantial modification of their bodies and their alimentary habits. In this discontinuous process, subjected to a constant disequilibrium, contemporary humans only originated in the alterity that had characterized earlier generations, generally composed of dwarves or giants who were unsuccessful in transmitting their attributes to future generations.
