Aztec Priests

Analyzing and understanding the Aztec view of the cosmos is critical to extracting meaning from their texts, symbols, and belief system.  The entire Aztec world view is constructed from that foundation, with myriad variations and overlapping concepts.  The fullness and intricacy of Mexica spirituality linked the world of heaven to the success (or failure) of mankind; it could "web the space between the mundane and the supramundane, lacing the world of ritual to the world of the everyday, and each to the sacred."  Religious symbolism, published to the population of the Central Valley of Mexico through art, literature, and ceremony, was an attempt to unify the people behind the central authority.

This study employs a conjunctive, interdisciplinary approach to contemporary iconographic, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence to shed light on the role of religious specialists and religious practice in Maya society of the Classic Period (A.D. 250 - 900). Its central contribution is a thematic model of Classic Maya priesthood.

While the existence of priests in Classic society has been questioned—and while some have seen the religious specialists and political leaders of the period as shamans—this study finds evidence for an elect group of professional worshippers who constituted a ‘class apart’, wearing distinctive vestments, propitiating deities in temples, producing liturgical documents (codices), and performing community-wide services on a regular, calendrical basis. Such traits are all characteristic of priests in universal comparison. Priests occupied various ranked offices since at least the outset of the Late Classic Period (A.D. 600), including: (1) ajk’uhuun or “worshipper”, a propitiator of deities and keeper of codices, but also a court chaplain (parallel to the Colonial Yucatec ajk’ìin); (2) yajawk’ahk’ or “fire's vassal”, primarily a warrior priest, but also responsible for incense ceremonies (parallel to the Aztec tlenamácac “fire priest”); and; (3) ti’sakhuun “speaker of/for the white headband”, a prophet and oracular priest (cognate with the Colonial Yucatec chi’laan), intermediary betweens humans and gods, and also a spokesman for the king. Importantly, a number of prominent ixajk’uhuun or “priestesses” are also known from the second half of the Late Classic Period (A.D. 700 - 800).

The existence of a Classic Maya priesthood reveals hitherto unsuspected dimensions of the social, political and economic organization of Maya society.  Like their Postclassic and Modern descendants, Classic priests were more than esteemed religious specialists, scribes and teachers; they also wielded considerable political and economic power. They commissioned their own monuments and temples, governed their own segmentary lineage compounds, and even acted as regents or stewards for young rulers. 

While most priests acknowledged subordination to their k’uhulajaw or “holy lord”—himself the divine king and ex officio high priest—this information could be suppressed in private documents, and some priests served multiple rulers in turn. As such, the monumental commissions of priests and other non-royal nobles comprise a crucial, nominally independent register of historical information which reveal emic dimensions of resistance to royal ideology, and which can be profitably compared and contrasted with “official” royal history.

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, UNCED), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, held 3rd-14th June 1992, launched the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which operates through its annual roadshow the UN Conference of Parties (COP) that seeks to establish sustainable management of the global climate system.

The  'Earth Summit' by UN in 1992 brought the problems  in climate to the attention of even some of the world's most remote and isolated nations. One of these nations was the Hopi Nation in Arizona, a non-sovereign nation - which the UN labels as 'indigenous peoples'. In a long chain of events beginning from the League of Nations' decision in 1926 to deny the First Nations of Americas and the small island nations' representation in that international forum, its successor the United Nations, turned down four attempts by the Hopi Nation to raise the issue between 1948 and 1992. Finally, in the immediate aftermath of the Rio Earth Summit (1992), the United Nations Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar authorised the Hopi Nation to table the matter to the floor of UN General Assembly 10th-11th December 1992.

The First Nations of Americas Ethnoclimatology Motion and the Tradition-Keepers ('Faith-Keepers') background to that motion is elaborated here in this UNFCCC submission with further points were raised in 1st-2nd October 2018 at CRIAS conference. This contextualises the First Nations of Americas UN General Assembly Investigation Request 101292 which was the Concluding Plea of the World Indigenous Peoples' Joint Summit with the United Nations Parties ('Member States') Delegations to open the first UN Year of the Indigenous People (1993) to other ethnoclimatologies appearing world wide. The Geophysical Annotations were discussed at the Cochabamba-Tiquipaya Climate Summit (CMPCC1) in aftermath of the collapsed Copenhagen Climate Summit COP15 (2009) with the request from the UNESCO Delegation of the Plurinational State of Bolivia on 7th January 2010 and His Excellency President Evo Morales Ayma.

The key tenents of the Geophysical Annotations being:

(1) A signal noise from a substantial radiocarbon-dilution effect due to major sea level retreats and rises during the Ice Ages that depressurised methane clathrates - releasing copious amounts of methane and carbon dioxide into air from depressurised seabed clathrates and also from thawing terra firma permafrost; this results in regressive, or sideway, 14C  readings in tree rings ("tree rings in a wrong order"). Thus, the Ice Ages era (the last glacial maxium to holocene thermal maximum period) cores of the tree trunks can appear substantially 14C-younger than the tree trunks' latest (outermost) tree-rings which cannot be the case due to the extreme steadiness of the radiocarbon's decay rate.

(2) Methane accumulates to upper troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere: hence any methane signature in the ice cores is only from methane-in-transit. Additionally the global warming episode that ended the ice ages had heavy methane loads that warmed and melted away most of the era's recent ice surfaces, thus obliterating the-then-most recently laid down snow stratum (leaving behind the earlier less methane rich snow layers). This caused incomplete records (time gaps) in the ice cores, and hence "global warming" always appears "before" higher atmospheric CO2 or CH4 levels (hence appearing as if them being 'respondents', rather than the drivers of climate warning).

(3) Noting that the partial melting equations can also be run inverse direction, it is proposed that the Pleistocene glaciations resulted in damage to Peridotite which partially melted producing basalt deposition in a large scale onto the seafloor in vast effusive eruptions with field emission of heat rather than radial spot emission of heat like in modern-day Surtseyan eruptions that have only a minimal heat crossing to sea surface due to small spatial extent of hot subsea surface. The vaporisation of sea water in field emission is vast due to spatial extent of hot subsea surface greatly exceeding the thickness of overlying water column, leading to runaway snowfalls. This caused an inflated size hydrological cycle which effectively washed out atmosphere-generated radiocarbon while geological seabed-associated depressurised carbon-12 was being released en masse leading to negligible carbon-14 readings (the radiocarbon-dilution effect by the Pleistocene's hydrological cycle / sea bed depressurisation).

On these three premises, the First Nations of Americans Ethnoclimatology Motion at the United Nations General Assembly on 10th-11th December 1992 is proposed as a variant possibility to the climate theories advocated aggressively by the Western Group of Nations and their influential academia. Its implications to present-day climate change suggest that the Polar Ice Caps will continue on their much-faster-than-anticipated loss trajectory to violent collapses. This aspect was highlighted in Sea Research Society's Evidence Giving at the UK Houses of Parliament in Environmental Audit Committee evidence giving on 5th and 24th April 2017. The urgency of situation is underlined by the fact that despite world-wide economic shut down by covid-19, carbon dioxide has continued its rapid rise to 417 parts per million indicating that time to act is running out as the remaining North Pole marine ice cap is soon to melt away and then destabilise the surrounding glaciers post Arctic sea ice (most notably the Greenland Ice Sheet).