Page:Stone of the Sun.djvu/75

 There are eight other wheels, a little smaller, with respect to which we find ourselves equally in ignorance.

p) We arrive at the famous serpents, the two serpents which border the relief. They have been described many times; but as their precise significance was unknown, the descriptions have been confined within the generality and vagueness suited to the uncertain and involve crass errors.

In a general way (and this is certain though vague) it has been said that they allude to time. The serpent was in fact, among the aborigines of Mexico as among the Egyptians, the symbol of time, most beautiful symbol in truth. They have been called the creative dualism, Cipactli and Oxomoco (the inventors of the calendar), xiuhcóatl or the diurnal celestial arch, the pendent of the zodiac, etc., etc. The scales of the bodies have been considered as conventionalizations of fire (not erroneously; but there is something more concrete in them), the specialty, the strange signs of the back of the figures, which have given rise to many extravagances, being taken for plumes, for flames, for a rain of fire, and so on at fancy.

As to the human heads inclosed in the throats of the serpents, the mode of interpretation has been most varied. While Dr. Valentini attributed them to the reformer of the chronology (Votan according to some authors), Don Alfredo Chavero affirms that they are Ometecuhtli, that is to say, that they relate to fire as creator or dios dos (two-god). This conception of duality has greatly preoccupied the archaeologists—now in a general and vague form calling the figures creative duality, and even double duality, or the tetranary concept (Mrs. Nuttall); or seeing in them the inventors of the calendar; now nocturnal deities (Peñafiel); now the earth and fire; now in other ways. Abadiano declared that they were the sun and the moon. Chavero, man of undoubted genius, arrived at the suggestion that they were Tonatiuh and Quetzalcóatl; although he did not give precision to the conception, or express the reasons or the combination, and thus remained in generalities and indetermination which say little. There have not been lacking those who in these heads have seen Huitzilopochtli himself.

Nothing of all this is encountered in these figures. They are the deities who preside over the chronological periods of 104 and 416 years, It is the same idea as that of the Gladiatorial Stone, of the “page of the Bacabs,” of the famous cross of the Codex Fejervary. The attributes of the heads permit clearly identifying them. One of the