Chapter 17: Xochipilli

The Secret Teaching of the Nahuas

In the museum of Anthropology and History in Mexico City is found Xochipilli seated upon a beautifully carved basalt cube. He has his knees up high and his legs crossed like the cross of Saint Andrew, his hands above his knees with their respective index fingers and thumbs in contact. His sight is toward the infinite. He wears great earrings made of jade and an armored chest with tassels that end as tiger claws or serpent fangs; upon the center of his armor are shown two suns with a big half moon upon each one of them. He has bracelets and kneecaps that are finished as six-petaled flowers; leg-armor with claws which bind his ankles, and upon his leg-armor there are two bellflowers whose corollas spread downward, one with six seeds and the other with fire. He is wearing cactlis whose lashes are gracefully knotted upon his feet.

Xochipilli: xochitl, “flower” ; pilli, “principal”; god of agriculture, flowers, music, song, poetry, and dance. “Flowers and chants are the most elevated things that exist on the earth for entering into the ambits of the truth;” this is what the tlamatinime taught in the calmecac.⁠¹ Therefore, all their philosophy is tinted with the purest poetic tinge. The face of Xochipilli is impassive, yet his heart overflows with happiness.

The annals state that Sun-4-Air, or Ehecatonatinuh, is Quetzalcoatl, the luminous dragon, hermaphrodite god of the winds that blows from the east throughout the four cardinal points. His consort or equal is Cihuacoatl, the woman-serpent. Quetzalcoatl arrived from Venus and returned to Venus. Therefore, when the Sun is still over the horizon irradiating its last rays of gold, the afternoon star, the soul of Quetzalcoatl, starts to shine with its first trembling light.

After the Sun-4-Ocelotl, Quetzalcoatl bled his phallus and made penance with Apantecuhtli, Huictlolinqui, Tepanquezqui, Tlallamanac, and Tzotenco to create the human beings who would populate Anahuac anew. Such a sacrifice was performed in Tamoanchan (“house from where we descended”) and made possible the entrance of life within the bones of the giants who were devoured by the tigers, and who were brought by Quetzalcoatl from Mictlan. Human beings are the fruits of the sacrifice of the gods. They earned them through their sacrifice; therefore they call them Macehualli (“those who are deserving”).

Two Xiuhcoatl face each other on the lower part of the Aztec calendar. The faces of two personages appear within their jaws. The one on the right is wearing the same crown, the same nose ring, and the same earrings of Tonatiuh. This double personage is Quetzalcoatl, who is united by his flinted tongue to his consort or equal, Cihuacoatl, who wears a labret and covers her face with a veil. They are the fallen ones, Adam and Eve, fallen because of their transgression of the law of God: Thou shalt not fornicate.

The Nahuas only adopted ideographic writing to transmit their philosophy to us; this is why they had to carve so many sculptures in order to speak, in each one of them, about the attributes of the Divine Couple, Father and Mother of all gods and humans.

Quetzalcoatl is the Cosmic Christ who incarnated among the Nahuas to teach them how to live in accordance with the laws of God and to give them his message of triumph:

Quetzalcoatl projects himself into Xochipilli, who has the symbol of this great deity upon his chest. The feline claws, on the tassels of his breastplate, are the same ones that are scratching hearts at the side of the face of Tonatiuh; this is a symbol of the sacrifice of emotions in the initiate; it is impossible to reach God without such a sacrifice.

The crowds of the Nahua religion celebrated the festivity of Xochilhutl; during the four days prior, it was obligatory to only eat cornbread made without salt once per day, and if you were married, to sleep separated from your spouse. On the fifth day they publicly offered to Xochipilli dances and chants accompanied with teponaztli and drums, recently cut flowers of ovation, and breads with bees’ honey, within which they placed an obsidian butterfly, a symbol of the believer’s soul.

Xochiquetzal

Xochiquetzal is the goddess of love, the consort or equal of Xochipilli, whose haven is in the Tamoanchan, the deposit of the universal waters of life that in the man is in his zoosperms. Tamoanchan is a paradisiacal place carpeted with flowers, rivers, and blue fountains. The xochitlicacan tree grows in the Tamoanchan; it is such a marvelous tree that lovers standing under the shelter of its branches and touching its flowers is enough for them to become eternally happy.

Never has any man seen this deity; nonetheless, the Nahuas represented her young and beautiful with her hair over her shoulders and graceful bangs on her forehead, red leather bracelets with protruding tufts of quetzalli feathers, earrings of gold in her ears, a small jewel of the same metal in her nose, a blue blouse embroidered with flowers and multicolored feathers, and a polychrome skirt and bunches of fragrant roses in her hands.

Her temple was inside the Major Temple of Tenochtitlan, and although small, it displayed carpets embroidered with precious feathers and golden ornaments. Xochiquetzal had the power of forgiveness. Pregnant women, after having had a lustrum bath, went to her temple to confess their sins and to ask her forgiveness and help; however, if the sins were very great, then an effigy, molded in amethyst paper (ficus petiolaris) bearing the likeness of the penitent, was burned at the feet of this deity.

A ceremony offered to Xochipilli had a place in the calmecac: calli: “house”; mecatl: “cable, rope; long and narrow corridor within the interior rooms of a building.” Eleven children, all of them children of nobility, while forming a circle, performed chants and dances; when dancing, they went three steps to the front and three steps in reverse, six times; at the same time, they gracefully waved their hands. A child kneeled in front of the fire that burned on the altar; he silently prayed for the daily bread, and another child remained on guard standing at the entrance of the temple.

This ceremony lasted for the duration of the children’s dances, and was supposed to be celebrated on the first night when the fine silver sickle of the new moon appeared in the sky. The director of the calmecac, standing between the child who prayed and the dancers, with his forehead toward the altar and with his face impassive as the face of Xochipilli, collected the vibrations from the children’s praying, from the chants, and from the dances; and while raising his dark hands, which now resembled a flower, toward the heavens, silently pronounced the mystical and ineffable word that designates, defines, and creates, and that the children pronounced in chorus:

DANTER-ILOMBER-BIR

Not like those gluttonous, disobedient, and spoiled children, but like those children who are humble and confident in their parents, who give them everything that they need.

Wisdom is love. Xochipilli dwells in the world of love, music, and beauty. His face, rosy as the dawn, and his blond hair give him an ineffable and sublime child-like presence. Art is the positive expression of the mind. Intellect is the negative expression of the mind. All adepts have cultivated the fine arts.

We can invoke Xochipilli on Fridays from 10:00 p.m. to Saturdays at 2:00 a.m. He makes the wheel of retribution spin in favor of those who ask him and who also deserve it. Yet, he profits by every service, because he cannot violate the law.

In the interior of the Temple of the Sun, the Ocelot Knights and the Cuauhtli Knights celebrated another ceremony on the first Thursday of the new moon; they attired themselves in helmets made with the shapes of tiger and eagle heads; all of them wore on their necks tufts made with feathers of quetzalli, a symbol of the fight that they have to sustain against evil on the Earth; they also held in one of their hands a bouquet of roses, and on the other a mace covered with tiger skin and eagle feathers, a symbol of power; they also had bracelets on their wrists and armor on their calves. There were dances and ritualistic chants in this ceremony, and one of the tlamatinime (“mirror honored in itself, an organ of contemplation, concentrated vision of the world of things”) finished the ceremony with the following prayer:

Practice

Each Thursday, after a prayer (whichever you might be familiar with) to God and to the masters, you must start the study of the chapter that corresponds to that particular week. After you finish studying, sit down comfortably on a chair; this chair must be the one which you commonly use in the sanctum sanctorum of your home, which you must not use for other purposes. Relax your whole body; let your mind go blank for a few minutes and become totally quiet. After you have achieved it, expand your consciousness from within to without; see from within how your consciousness expands upward, downward, sideward, all ways around your body. See with your consciousness the color of your shirt, of your tie, of your suit, and of your shoes. Be aware that your body is relaxed and in a static position. Observe how your room, furniture, and pictures are arranged; you must identify everything before extending your awareness to the streets of the whole city where you live; identify them, feel how the vehicles run, and likewise, expand and expand your consciousness more and more until it embraces the whole Earth. Afterward, extend your awareness to space without limits, where the suns and sidereal worlds move.

This exercise must last one hour and be performed for thirty days, except for Sundays.