The aphorism "You can't get something for nothing" is axiomatic in Western culture, supported by the laws of conservation of matter and energy. The most notable exception to the rule is provided by the God of the Old Testament, who created the world by simply uttering his thoughts. In Genesis it is written, "And God said, Let there be light; and there was light…. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters," and so God also created the solar system, plants, animals, and mankind, apparently from nothing but the exigency of his thoughts and speech. Some theologian might protest that the Old Testament narrative implies some preexisting essence that was expressed as a matter, but the common sense of the passage implies, at the very least, creation without source materials; God was fleshing out ideas, not extruding or reshaping matter.
But contrast the biblical account of creation with a myth found in various forms in many American Indian cultures. In this ancient tale, the world, items useful to mankind, and even humans themselves are created by the dismemberment of a water-dwelling spirit, often depicted concretely in a reptilian or amphibian form. As a point of reference, let us take the story told by priests of the complex Aztec theocracy.
In Aztec myth, the creature is the Tlaltecuhtli (Earth Lord) a toadlike female monster who lived in the divine water and was torn in two by the creator twins Tezcatlipoca (Smoking Mirror) and Quetzalcoatl (Plumed Serpent). Transforming themselves into serpents, the twins latched on to the extremities of the monster and, with one twin grasping the left forelimb and the other grasping the right hindlimb, they pulled her in two. The monster's upper half settled as the earth and the lower half became the heavens. If the order seems reversed and counterintuitive, because four-legged beings normally hold their heads higher than their hind parts, the mythical reversal of position doubtless held significance for Aztec theologians, perhaps of the same unfathomable order as the behavioral reversals of the Plains Indian contraries, who rode backward into battle.
It is from the parts of the earth monster's body that fruits and good things for mankind issue forth, but she withholds them unless she is soaked with blood and fed with human hearts. According to this view, the Aztec peoples themselves were formed from the congealing blood of the gods who committed auto-sacrifice. It was by way of repayment for these original acts of creation that the Aztec rationalized their notorious and bloody human sacrifices. The reciprocal relationship with their gods was more concrete than the spiritualized communions found in the Christian denominations; the Aztec formula was flesh for flesh and blood for blood. Apparently unable or unwilling to conceive of matter emerging from nothing, they established a law of conservation of spiritual matter and energy, which was acted out in rituals.
Reptilian Dismemberment Myths In Other Cultures
Even tribes deep in the Amazon forest appear to have derived their myths from original stories, or perhaps to have borrowed a few ripples of plot from the Aztec culture. Though the former seems far more likely we will probably never know the source of the motif with certainty. The story of mankind's origination from the blood of a god is told in a variant form by the Yanomamo Indians of the Orinoco River
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