COATLICUE

Coatlicue is the mother of the gods. She is called by many names and appears in many forms as “Mother of The Southern Stars” and “Our Grandmother”. She is called Tonantzin, “Our Reverend Mother” as the embodiment of the feminine force and mother of us all. Wikipedia says “The title is particularly believed to refer to Mother Earth and, among Catholics, nowadays denotes the Virgin Mary”. Kiva Rose Hardin, a medicine woman from New Mexico says, “To many the Virgin of Guadalupe is seen as a living manifestation of the americas, an embodiment of the land itself rather than a symbol of religious authority…” She is also called “Snake”, “Goddess of Sustenance” and “Mother of Corn” as well as “Seven Flowers” and “Woman of Precious Stone”.

HEART OF TONANTZIN

Coatlicue is the earth. She is a name for this earth. She is Tonantzin, our mother. She is the creator and destroyer of form. As a baby twists in the birth canal in a spiral moving toward the light, she spits out creation in an undulating spiral of magma and intention. Michael Schneider, the visionary mathematician and teacher says ”nature comes about by whirling into manifestation”.

An emerging form is a morass of currents, cross currents, and chemical and physical imperatives. They move into archetypal forms created by the stress of birth and the edge where “the implicate order” meets the “real world”. The most efficient 3 dimensional form to channel stress from cross currents, inertia and the demands of existing as matter is the spiral. The forces which form a spiral exist as a 5 fold geometric matrix of influences including ability to withstand and/or channel stress as weight of force, ability to channel or create motive force by efficient distribution of energy, structural integrity and evolutionary capability.

The spiral is the secret hidden in the internal martial arts. Raven feels it in the uprushing air. We wake up on another curve of a widening spiral wondering
why everything seems so alive.   Michael Schneider describes the activity inside a spiral as a “rocking rhythm of a vortex street”. Maybe that’s why it feels a little wild out here.

 

 

The animal tracks we see in the arroyo are all contained in the form of the pentad which is the geometric form that symbolizes or is a glyph representing the spiral vortex which is the actual living moving pattern. The esoteric implication of the “stations of the cross” refer to these evolutionary stages in the spiritualization of matter or an evolving conciousness alive within the matrix, the body of Coatlicue, the being who is the mother and progenitor of this all.

The spiral of forms emerging as the body of the mother is endowed with her qualities. They are her attributes as “Seven Flowers”, “Woman of Precious Stone” as well as many other names and forms.  Coatlicue/Tonantzin/Guadalupe appears in many costumes (trajes tipicas) as a personage and as many forms and names in the matter (mater) making up our material world.  John Mini, whose book, “The Aztec Virgin” is an eye opening look into Aztec cosmology and the new age of flowers foretold by Aztec prophesy calls Coatlicue/Tonantzin/Guadalupe “the dance nothingness does to create the world of form”.

Here she is as Tlaliyob, “EARTH HEART”

 

Detail of “EARTH HEART”

Here as Tezcat Lipoca, “SMOKING MIRROR”