The fact that nepantla motion-change is fundamental to the cosmos and the fact that the Fifth Age is a grand weaving-in-progress accords well with the claim that Aztec metaphysics conceives the Fifth Age as a woven house or container (calli): “bounded, defined, and contained by long, thin, essentially supple objects of a basically cord-like form.”89 According to Simeon, malinalli grass was plaited or braided “without doubt for the construction of houses” ((“ trenjada sin dudapara la construccion de casas”).9° The festival ofTititl further supports the idea that Aztec metaphysics conceives the Fifth Age as formed at least partly by the stretching of twisted cords or spun threads along a loom frame or house frame. As we saw in chapter 6, Sahagun’s informants reported, “The people of old. . . thought and took as truth that the heavens were just like a house; it stood resting in every direction, and it extended reaching to the water. It was as if the water walls were joined to it.”91 Common Aztec wattle-and-daub houses are constructed by interweaving warp (vertical poles and stakes) and weft (horizontal supple reeds) components. The Florentine Codex (Book XI) contains several relevant illustrations. Illustration 902 depicts a wattle-and-daub straw house that Sahagun’s informants describe as “a reed hut (tolxacalli) or grass hut (zacaxalli), etc., mud-plastered, with chinks filled.”92 Illustration 405 shows the wall beams of a house joined together with X-shaped, intercrossing grass cords.93 Klein reports contemporary Mayas describing the walls of their houses as “woven or braided” and “interwoven as in a braid or mat.”94 Mesoamerican houses, especially wattle-and-daub houses, are literally woven together using twisted cords and vines.
The notion that the Fifth Age is a woven house also accords with chapter i’s claim that Aztec metaphysics is nonhierarchical. A woven house is ontologically homogenous since its layers consists of qualitatively identical stuff. Upper and lower layers are constructed from one and the same thing: cane, twining, and mud. The notion that the Fifth Age is a woven house also accords with chapter 5’s claim that vital forces and energies circulate vertically throughout the cosmos by means of malinalli-twisted-spun channels (called “the malinalli” by Lopez Austin and Carrasco).95 The malinalli serve as vertical spun filaments connecting various parts of the cosmic house.
World History
