The Nuhus:
Their Origin

The Colombino-Becker Codex was a complete surprise to me. I went into the Maya Meeting at UTA this year (1999) without any hope of using what I had already learned. Yet, within the first few pages, we found three mummy bundles with feet, one of which carries the name Three Flint. The dead were dressed in their best ceremonial clothing and drawn in a seated position. Their eyes were closed (as dead) but they had sandals on their feet.

That first afternoon, after passing over these mummies with little interest, I went home disappointed. However, on that first day, we had also received some extra research papers to help us understand what we were trying to reading. During dinner, I leafed through the papers listlessly. There was another mummy drawn on those pages. He also was of no interest to me. A different page showed caves and strange light sources that came out of those caves. Now, that was something I could use, I thought.

The next morning, on the way to school, a bolt of lightning hit with a thud! Why did I not see it before? The second mummy figure had no feet! A simple detail that informs us of a major difference between the two drawings. It is that the mummies with feet were real, live human beings who died at the end of their alloted time. On the other hand, the bundles without feet, including that of Huitzilopochtli who could speak, but not walk, were never human beings in any form. They were instead, objects treated as "sacred" or "belonging to the gods." They were not necessarily "gods." Basically, I had written a similar conclusion after last year's Maya Meeting.

I had concluded last year, that the "nuhus" were part of a meteorite storm that struck the Americas, leaving magnetic (magic) stones and pebbles in the mountains and on the plains. This would explain the continuing myth about the strange lights seen near the sacred caves in the mountains. Streaks of light which come from the Orionids, Perseids, or Leonids would be the yahui who are thought to leave the caves at night. It was time to get out my word processor. As usual, I duplicated the earlier article I had written about the Nuhus and the Cavemen. (It is easier that way to set up a new web site article. As I began to write, it was clearly an article about the Mixtec class and it had nothing to do with the Nuhus. Saving it, I opened this new text in Netscape. The second bolt of lightning hit with a bigger thud! I had forgotten to remove the graphic at its beginning.

Looking me square in the eye with its singular circular red and white eyeball (which indicates a star) was Tlaloc as the Rain God day sign. He wore a red and white bow on his head. The red and white bow is one of the symbols used for the Red and White Bundles and for the presence of the Nuhus. The "noso" ("ndodo") or "nuhu" in the Nuyoo dialect, "maintains a vast store house of wealth" and is assocated with a yahui or priest who in the Codex Telleriano Remensis is connected to celestial bodies as fire-serpents glossed there ascometas.(Pohl, John, et. al. "Religion, Economy, and Factionalism in Mixtec Boundary Zones" in Códices y Documentos sobre México, Segundo Simposio, Vol. I. p. 210 and p. 215.) The Aztec Tlaloc was believed to reside in mountain caves which were "miraculous treasure houses filled with wealth and prosperity.(Miller and Taube, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, p. 166) This gives us a reference point that is stronger than just the bundles and spears of the Selden Codex.

Both the Mixtec and the Aztec tales of Tlaloc and the caves are identical. If a meteorite hit the mountainside, it could create a cave, large or small depending on the structure of the mountain. As a magnetic stone named Huitzilopochtli found in Curl Mountain Cave, it would indicate north or "speak". Without feet, he was carried on the back of a person during the migration to Texcoco and Tenochtitlan.

A magnet (stone or metal) has the ability to "speak." But not in our terminology. We understand the word "speak" is an indication of sound emitted from the mouth of a person or an animal. It seems that in the ancient Mesoamerican world, the scrolls coming out of a mouth as "speak" only implied a transmission of information. In this instance, a raw magnet would indicate the direction North. Its opposite end would then indicate South.

Electrically, I am told that this sequence can be reversed, but since high end technology was not a part of the Mesoamerican culture we can ignore this statement. Whether the Mesoamericans were drawing a tree, or a skull or a stone, scrolls which came from the representation of a mouth on the same, implied only a transmission of information. Objects which did not have feet could not walk under their own power, hence it is unlikely that they were human.