«The Sun Is Eaten»: Representations, Practices, and Symbolisms of Solar Eclipse among Ancient Nahuas and Other Mesoamerican Groups

Abstract

This article is aimed at explaining the conceptions of the eclipse of the sun among prehispanic Nahuas, through the colonial written and pictorial sources. Although the starting point are ancient Nahuas and the main corpus comes from them, there is a strong support in ancient as well as present day Mayan data. Such support is also found in ethnographies of various contemporary Indian groups, and my own field work among Nahuas of Pahuatlan, in Sierra Norte de Puebla. Thus, it is offered a big picture of this phenomenon. The article explains the way in which an eclipse of the sun was represented, the various agents involved in it, the ritual practices implemented by Nahuas and other ethnic groups to reduce the attack suffered by this luminary, as well as the damaging effects produced by the eclipse. At the end, a hypothesis is advanced of the symbolical nature of an eclipse, based mainly on ethnographic data.