The Weaver Woman

The Maya were aware of the astronomy school in Teotihuacán. They have a monster female called the Earth Goddess. She has long extended eyes and is looking at a ball-shaped form in her hand.(Madrid 32)

A serpent wrapped around a spindle makes up her headdress while a serpent with two rattles in the tail is used as a belt. The netted navel (here as the many veined placenta) pours out water. This set of symbols describes this goddess not as birth and death concepts, but as geography.

The extended eye refers to the star-gazing of astronomy as found in the Madrid 34. The illustration there shows a man sitting in a dark room or cave and looking out at the stars with an eye much like a crab eye at the end of the stalk.

The spindle in the headdress is thought to refer to the spider which symbolizes weaving or creation and also refers to the Aztec Earth lord, which I believe we can interpolate as Coatlicue. This is not as complex as it appears to be. As geography, it is fairly simple to understand.

Before the geography is described, one must understand that a university system was as necessary in the "New World" as it was in the Old World. The logical place for such a school was the center of the land, in the Aztec Altiplano.

The Aztec University system appears to be part of the Tepantitla complex at Teotihuacán. This is not something that is expected since it is difficult to imagine such "primitive" cultures as the Meso-Americans to have what we consider to be an educational system, much less a university version of education.

But one must consider higher education as part of the Meso-American tradition simply because both their mathematics and astronomy are accurate enough to compete with our computerized systems today. A strong education base had to be part of their cultural background. The priesthood and their school called the Calamec was thought to be the only school system available.

In the Nuttall Codex (p. xv), yodzo is a Mixtec word for "plain" and also for "feathers." the Plain of Coixtlahuaca or Yodzo Coo is translated as "Plain of the Serpent" and is represented by a serpent on a kind of feather mantle" (Caso 1965;951). Women wove cloth. Therefore, a female earth goddess must have woven the mantle of the serpent, as the Plain called Yodzo Coo, which is actually the alluvial earth as it passes underground through the volcanoes which form the southern rim of the Altiplano, and create (even today) with alluvial soils, the fertile plains to the south of the mountain range.

With the serpent and the spindle together in the headdress, it is saying that this is the woman who does the weaving for the serpent. The fact that the woman has the eyes of an astronomer tells us that there is a school of astronomy in the area where the weaving occurs.

The location of this school of learning (spider concept of weaving words that create a learning situation), is shown by the veined placenta and the water emerging from it.

It tells us that the school was located in the "navel of the world." The navel of the world was the Lake called Texcoco, where two important cities existed: Tenochtitlán and Teotihuacán.

The picture above this goddess weaver-lady shows the fire serpent who returned to the skies, the flaming star with a great cutting knife, and the split head god. (Madrid 32) The split head god indicates the sheer thrust between Popocatepetl and Ixtaccíhuatl at the southern rim of the Altiplano.

We have a lot to learn about the culture of the Meso-American world and although religion was a major part of their world, there were many other elements of learning that they appreciated and used. Their pictures are strange to us, but the symbols can be translated into any language of the world without losing the concepts behind them.