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Ahuehuete tree, from the Florentine Codex, Book XI (Click on image to enlarge) |
What better first example than an Aztec saying about one’s parents? The metaphor of a tree is a natural one: for the Aztecs the term ‘tree trunk’ (cuauhtlactli) was also used to refer to a human torso*, a tree was called Tota (‘Our father’), trees - like flowers and plants - were considered to have souls, and it had long been a serious criminal offence to cut down a living tree, without permission of the community.
A mother, a father is as
a foundation, and a covering
like the silk cotton tree, the cypress tree.
They afford shadow, shade, shadowing
as a cool bower, as a spindle.
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The ‘Arbol del Tule’ outside Oaxaca City - the stoutest tree in the world! (Click on image to enlarge) |
Book 11 of the Florentine Codex expands on this with its description of the cypress tree, called ahuehuetl in Náhuatl or ahuehuete today in Mexican Spanish -
It is large, high, thick, shady, shadowy. There is constant entering into its shade; under it one is shaded. It is said that a mother, a father become the silk cotton tree, the cypress. It shades things, it forms a shadow... It takes the form of a spindle whorl. It thickens, extends its branches, extends branches everywhere, forms foliage. It sheds foliage, it sheds butterfly-like leaves. It towers above, it excels.
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An Aztec musician plays under the ‘Tota’ tree, Atlas de Durán folio 263v (Click on image to enlarge) |
The ahuehuetl was a favourite tree for Mexica palace and formal city gardens: fast-growing relatives of the redwood, these huge trees could reach a height of 200 feet and were splendid in their rich green finery.
No tree in the world offers more protection under its branches than the spectacular 2,000-year-old cypress known as the Arbol del Tule, just outside Oaxaca City, southern Mexico. It has the stoutest trunk (with a circumference of almost 120 feet) in the world!
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What can YOU see in the Tule Tree?! It’s famous for the myriad figures people see in its gigantic trunk... (Click on image to enlarge) |
Quote from Of the Manners of Speaking That the Old Ones Had: The Metaphors of Andrés de Olmos in the TULAL Manuscript (1547/1992).
Info from Everyday Life of the Aztecs by Warwick Bray, 1968, Florentine Codex: Book 11 - Earthly Things by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, translated by Charles Dibble and Arthur Anderson, 1963, Mitología y Simbolismo de la Flora en el México Prehispánico by Doris Heyden, 1983, and Aztec Medicine, Health and Nutrition by Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, 1990.
Picture sources:-
• Photos of figures in the National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City, by Ana Laura Landa/Mexicolore.
• Illustration from the Florentine Codex scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994.
• Photo of the Arbol del Tule from Wikipedia
• Illustration from the Atlas de Durán, public domain.
• Photo of the Tule tree by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore
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