Title: La imagen de Cocijo y el lenguaje visual antiguo mexicano
Description: Iconographic study on the Pre-Columbian water/rain deity Cocijo (Zapoteco) also known as Tlaloc (Nahuatl) and Chaac (Maya). In 1986, Rubén Bonifaz Nuño (1923-2013) formulated an iconographic and textual hypothesis about the Mexican ancient cosmogonic thought, which re-shaped our overview of what we now call Mesoamerica (Image of Tláloc, UNAM). Through rigorous research organized in two arguments, this author found Tlaloc represents, in fact, an ancient cosmogonic myth that attributed to humans the detonating role of universal creation, and whose body was made arise the Earth and the sky, i.e., everything created. Taking as a basis the Cosmogonica hypothesis since 2006, Octavio Quesada has confirmed and extended his conclusions by demonstrating, first, the occurrence in the divine images of a group of abstract signs that, together with the previously studied naturalistic signs, he suggest, constitute a single system of visual communication. This hypothesis was subsequently confirmed in the Olmec culture and was shown to be active among the Maya to raise the image of Chaac. The present work describes a set of constituent relationships of its syntax, and an attempt to understand the way in which the meaning is integrated into these images. But the operating system in different cultures, and especially the reiteration of the same main plastic discourse, Tlaloc, indicate that all these cultures, different as they were in their origins, initial ethnicity and languages, would have used the same system of beliefs. "All of them - concludes the author - from the Olmecs to the Mexica would have formed a single great civilization, richly diverse, organically integrated, millennial, of universal aspirations fulfilled, soaring from the human supreme value."
Subjects: Cosmogony, Indian art, Indians of Mexico, Religion, Zapotec Indians, Antiquities
Places: Mexico