“Metziliapán”: Pre-Hispanic Works Inspired by Lake Texcoco

This introductory room will present viewers with the world of the Aztecs, also known as the Mexicas, as they understood the mythical waters of Lake Texcoco. Metziliapán, also known as Moon Lake, was a symbolic representation of birth, life, death, and the center of the Mexica universe (axis mundi). Throughout Mesoamerican cultures, water deities often held the most important position in the pantheon incorporating ideas of nature as culture. The Mexica, like their predecessors, based their belief system on reciprocal relationships, called tlatlatlaqualiliztli, or “the nourishment of the gods with the blood of sacrifice.” In its most extreme interpretation, the covenant culminated in human sacrifice. “Those adults who were selected to impersonate the gods died voluntarily,” Vanderbilt archaeologist Markus Eberl said. “By nourishing the gods with their blood, they returned the gift of life that the gods had bestowed on them at birth.” By exploring a series of sculptures and codices produced by the Mexica, we can explore the ideas of reciprocity and their debt to the earth. Considering these objects as media allows for investigation on how visual culture can communicate and cross spaces and time. Furthermore, through analyzing the waters gods and the reciprocal exchange between the celestial and the human, we can argue that these exchanges form as a type of transmission and storage, components that are vital to our understanding of media. As argued by John Durham Peters, we often think of media as environments, the reverse is just as true environments are media. Peters theorizes that media are more than carriers of messages: they are the very infrastructures combining nature and culture that allow human life to thrive. He suggests that our modern concept of media is an extension of early practices tied to civilization making such as the creating language, establishing religion, reading the stars and building calendars: “Media shows up wherever we humans face the unmanageable mortality of our material existence... media lifts us to out of time by providing a symbolic world that can store and process data, in the widest sense of that word” (50). Therefore, by considering media as an infrastructure that facilitates the relations between people with themselves, others, and the natural world, we can approach Pre-Hispanic visual culture in this same lens. Lastly presented are explorations of how the Mexica located their identity as interconnected with the waters of Lake Texcoco.