Page:Stone of the Sun.djvu/29

 that which adorns the central Tonatiuh in the figure to the left. The ear ornament possesses distinctive value in the representations of deities. More is not necessary for our purpose; it suffices to affirm that the sun is the star represented in this figure.

What star can it be that the other serpent symbolizes? It is not necessary to meditate long in order to understand it: it is Quetzalcóatl or Venus, the beautiful twin or the plumed serpent, a deity often actually represented in this latter form. Symmetry compelled the artifice of representing by another plumed serpent the corresponding solar cycle; furthermore, the serpent involves the general symbolization of time. The face of Quetzalcóatl wears a net, adornment lacking to that of Tonatiuh; it has no ear ornament, and the sign placed before the nose, now badly defaced and difficult to determine, was without doubt that distinctive of the divinity; yet it appears as if it were 1-cane, unlike the double one of the sun, which gives us one of the names hast known of the personage, Ce ácatl (1-cane), the day of his birth.

The figures identified, it is not difficult to state what chronological period is symbolized in the reunion of the tongues, that is to say, of the respective lights of the stars. It is the huehuetiliztli, the sacred cycle of 104 years, indicate in the wrinkled face of the central Tonatiuh; it is the period at whose end the deified celestial bodies return to occupy a certain position in space and the tables of the respective calendars adjust themselves, attaining harmonious development.

Profound the thought of the astronomer-director of the monument! Here is the form in which the relief expresses it: chronology is born from the movements and relative situation of two stars. In the development of their harmonious revolution, they engender chronological cycles equal as to the time of their termination, but distinct in that which concerns their origin, since the deities who determine them are diverse. Hour after hour the apparent march of the sun and of Venus through the heavens are scrutinized and scrupulously noted in the respective calendars, which advance, one ever upon the other, until 37,960 days course by, an exact cycle, and then the sacred book (teoamaoxtli) complete their round, coinciding with mathematical precision in number and symbol in the thirteens and the twenties of that marvelous arrangement.

Fact in truth surprising: in that same moment the stars approach each other in the celestial vault. If the preceding huehuetiliztli began coincidently with the matutinal apparition of Venus, another time