Arnold Lebeuf, Professor Emeritus. Jagiellonian University, Krakow.
Identifying the central figure of the Piedra del Sol.
The central and most important piece at the Museum of Anthropology and History in Mexico City, known as the "Piedra del Sol" or the "Calendario Azteca", is one of the most important artistic creations of the Aztecs and has been the subject of countless studies. If you type these words into the Internet, you'll come up with several million references. Let us not exaggerate, but apart from the separate words "piedra" and "Sol", the names of restaurants and hotels, coins and sales of various objects decorated with a representation of this work, there are probably several thousand references that deal directly with this monument, and there must be several hundred articles written and published that deal directly with it. Among these, there is certainly no shortage of highly debatable or far-fetched studies and hypotheses, but there are also scientific, documented, logical and acceptable studies that at the very least deserve attention and critical reading. I will not go into all the elements and details of this complex composition here, but would just like to review the problem of identifying the central figure of this bas-relief on a discoid monolith. Generally speaking, this figure has been identified as the face of the sun, hence its more common name of "Piedra del Sol", but other researchers have already suggested that it represents a "nocturnal sun" or "sun of the underworld". Still others have recognised it as "Tlaltecuhtli", in other words, a chtonian goddess, god or goddess of the earth, of the subterranean world, a telluric goddess who is both generative and fertile, but also fearsome, cruel and ferocious.
I completely agree with this last interpretation. For me, the central figure of the 'Piedra del Sol' represents the face of Tlatecuhtli. All we have to do is compare its elements with those of other representations of this goddess that have been identified as such and accepted without opposition. These are arguments that I feel are worth reiterating after a few other rare authors, in particular Carlos Navarrete and Doris Heyden, especially as José Alvaro Barrera's very important discovery of the very large representation of Tlaltecuhtli at the foot of the Templo Mayor in 2006 confirms this interpretation.
However, there is another way of arriving at this same conclusion, reinforcing and confirming it. The "Piedra del Sol" does not represent the Sun, but rather the five Suns of Aztec cosmology.
4-Ocelotl; 4-Ehecatl; 4-Quiahuitl; 4-Atl; 4-Ollin. Each of these suns lasts for 1040 years, making a total of 5200 years. Each Sun is named by the day of the 260-day almanac during which that day cannot be the day of an eclipse, i.e. the Sun of such a name cannot be eclipsed or defeated for 1040 years. With this reform of the ancient cosmology of four suns, the Aztecs projected that their fifth sun, Sun 4-Ollin, would last over a thousand years. This reform and its illustration by the "Piedra del Sol" were ideological and political in nature, the affirmation of an invincible imperial destiny. The other important implication of this system is that the 5200-year cycle was known throughout central Mexico, and not just among the Maya in the form of the Long Count.
The central figure in the Stone of the Five Suns is therefore Tlaltecuhtli, the earth that engulfs the sun in the West and brings it back to life when it rises in the East, but which also sometimes devours it in mid-sky, at which point it goes into eclipse.
I want to illustrate and show the internal logic of this system in the hope of motivating a critical discussion of this hypothesis.
