Moral Thinking and Ethics in Prehispanic Nahuatl Culture

MORAL THINKING AND ETHICS IN PREHISPANIC NAHUATL CULTURE

Carlos Viesca T., MD, PhD, Department of History and Philosophy of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, and Postgraduate Program on Medical Humanities, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)

Prehispanic Mesoamerican cultures were heavily disqualified after the bloody conquest at hands of Spaniards in the first half of the Sixteenth century and the destruction of their social order and its main cultural manifestations. The ancestral religion was proscribed and substituted by Christian dogma and was only after a fifty years fight that the Pope and the Spanish King sanctioned the integral humanity of Mexican Indians and recognized their ontological quality of rational beings.

In this optics ancient religion, politeist, was declared false and vicious, a devil’s fake.

The priests and intellectuals suspected to be demons agents and the cultural frame devised as an artifact oriented to promote that vicious social order.

The construction of a national identity developed from the second half of the Eighteenth century have incorporate among his basic elements the memory of ancient, prehispanic cultures, signifying differences between Mexican people and European and North

American counterparts. The results, an imaginary which constitutes a referential frame, certainly very distant from the prehispanic realities, brings in fact the necessity to know these cultures and the rescue of an historical tradition, a revival of a distant past. It is only in this way that the codex, the early colonial chronicles, some of them transcriptions of ancient documents or written records of an oral tradition, some product of the curiosity of friars, some more coming from the rescue by indigenous aristocracy descendants of their ancestors traditions and documents. Provided with all this information and surviving as a good quantity of ideological interpretations, these historical sources give us the possibility to build the prehispanic cultures as an epistemic subject. The immediate consequence is the possibility to reconstruct a hypothetical endocultural image and start a dialogue oriented towards the recognition of their components and their intrinsic significance. Is in this way that mainly in the last century second half, the work of scholars like Miguel León Portilla, Alfredo López Austin,

Mercedes de la Garza, Patrick Johanson, Charles Dibble and Arthur Anderson, Thelma

Sullivan, Georges Baudot, Laurette Sejourné, Jacques Soustelle, Alfonso Caso, Justino

Fernández, Eduard Seler, Leonhard Schultz Jena, Fernando Martínez Cortés, Luis

Alberto Vargas, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, Carlos

Viesca T., and many others, have established the existence of an original world view which gives substance to a Philosophy provided with ontological and ethical concepts, a

Theology, an Astronomy with astrological implications, a particular view of the nature, of the human beings, the human body, a medicine and so on.

In this text, I intent to present a resume of the various representations of the Human beings as integrated in a cosmic order, participating in its preservation and good course, giving moral responses to the essential question as is their presence and subsistence in the world. So, I invite you to explore the main tracts of the nahuatl prehispanic worldview, the concepts of humanity as developed from the creational myths, the astral body and its significance, the corporeal body and its moral implications and the moral and ethical frame provided by socially legitimized habits, norms and moral philosophical concepts.

The World View

The first work to do was recover the cosmogony and cosmological concepts of

Mesoamerican prehispanic cultures in order to investigate the world view owned by their representatives. It is a primordial importance matter because every nuclear concept and tract constitutive of the imaginary dimension of man and world is rooted deeply in it. Creation of universe and all its creatures was conceived as a direct act of gods. In the most remote origin, of a god which involves in itself an androgyne, dual nature. His name was Ometéotl, that is the Dual Lord, Dual God. His feminine counterpart was

Omecíhuatl, the Dual Lady, remembering the same feature. They created in first place an intimate space, their own house, called Omeyocan, “The place in the heart of

Duality”. Its site was a “no place” in physical terms until they start creating other houses for their sons and their wives, always in couples. In that same moment the space, the cosmic space, appears as a real entity in the measure of the creation of several floors and the corresponding habitations. The disposition of cosmic bodies was distributed in a vertical way, in floors, everyone below the previous one, being the original Ometéotl place the highest one. Náhuatl philosophers, tlamatinime, asked about the situation of that place, the Omeyocan, in the real disposition of universe. In poems registered in he middle sixteenth century they expresses their doubts: “¿Where we could go? [What is]

The way of the Duality God ¿It is your home the place of those without flesh? ¿May be inside the heaven? ¿or o only here, in the earth is the place of those without flesh?

(Manuscrito de Cantares Mexicanos, fol. 35v). Finally, the relevant fact is that Ometéotl is omnipresent and could be assimilated as a celestial god, but not only in a simple expression but the very God reigning over the twelve heavens, he is nelli teotl, the original principle from which everything existing is generated and conceived, his existence is valid outside time and space (León Portilla, La Filosofía nahuatl, p.151-

52). In synthesis, Ometeotl is Lord and Lady of duality; Lord and Lady of our flesh, our sustento (Tonacatecuhtli, and Tonacacíhuatl); Fateher and Mother of the gods, the old god (in teteu inan and in teteu ita, Huehuetéotl); God of Fire (Xiuhtecuhtli), He who lives in place where is the navel of the eternal fire (tlexico); is the mirror of night and day (Tezcatlipoca, Tezcatlanextia); is the aster who makes shine everything, the luminous stars shirt (Citlallátonac, Citlkainicue); Lord of Water, He who has the solar bright of jade (Chalchiutlatónac, Chalchiuhtlicue); He who is our mother, our father (in

Tonan, in Tota). All this items configure jointly the image and main functions of

Ometéotl. This view has been interpreted by Hermann Beyer ( Das aztekische

Göterbild, p.116) and León Portilla as a strong evidence of the conception of Unity in

God provided with a multiplicity of appearances.

The gods and godesses

All the gods, indeed, were conceived as direct descendants of the primeval couple and always, as I’ve said, were thought as existing and living jointly with his feminine counterpart. This situation was also valid in the death people realm, including in it the underworld couple: Mictlantecuhtli and Mictecacíhuatl, Lord and Lady of the Death.

The diverse gods and goddesses had definite functions. For example, Tláloc, the rain god, but really involved in a more complex set of activities, was responsible for the preservation of life in its most diverse forms, and consequently of the creation and care of all kind of seeds and embryos. He is also the protector deity of agriculture and crops and an essentially direct his power towards beneficent actions and, also when sends illnesses, the final goal is distinguish the sick people which are converted in their representatives and intermediaries. In the same way He is the lord of some animals and a definite group of plants, some defined in virtue of their habitat, aquatic species, some by their medicinal properties, some more for their psychotropic effects. His wife,

Chalchiuhtlicue, was charged with the management of subterranean and running water, both, |jointly, were very significant figures for human life and were its symbolic protectors. Live in a mythical place, the Tlalocan, situated on the top of the high mountains, habitually surrounded by clouds, where they take care of all the souls of the creatures which will come to earth to animate newborn men, animals and plants. In fact they were very well defined protector deities, and in that way became the ideal image of good progenitors.

This image was a fundamental tract in all Mesoamerican cultures, from the mysterious olmecs to the peoples living in this area at Spanish conquest time. The primary duality,

Ometeotl and Omecóhuatl were always considered as exemplar father and mother. They take care of all their creatures, give home to each one of their descendants and were continually and eternally concerned about the correct cosmic order. Tlaloc and

Chalchiuhtlicue embodied this same function in the central part of the universe, that one where humans inhabit.

The significance of this characteristic can’t be minimized because it defined and legitimized the role of a well conformed family in the correct course of social life. Daily life was imbued by religion in all its components, in every one of his manifestations, and gods and goddesses living an exemplar family life constituted their absolute referential frame for human morality.

Creation of men

Ometeotl, as duality is the original creator of manhood, he is teyocoyani, inventor of men. Brother and sister of gods and goddesses were the first humans, also a couple,

Oxomoco and Cipactonal. They were created in the highest of heavens, in Omeyocan, and lived there for a while, until their parents ask them about the necessity to select a place to live, and they selected the central floor, that which is now the earth’s surface.

Only then start the story of humans as independent but interdependent creatures. They go to their new home and start knowing the place, its surroundings and accumulate knowledge, they invented the recording of time, the calendar, agriculture, the art of writing…And then, the gods became full of jealousy and decide to blind them, to impossibility them to acquire more knowledge, and they pleaded for maintain this capability and prefer be finite, not immortal, in a way that their knowledge will be limited as a natural consequence of its temporal limitation. They refer to be mortals than lost their senses and their primeval curiosity and capacity to accumulate and develop knowledge. From this moment came also the possibility to discriminate good and evil, and the birth of moral conscience.

After this original definition, came a series of changes. Two creator gods, Quetzalcóatl and Tezcatlipoca, were charged with the mission to create the very space where human beings will live. So, Quetzalcóatl take cipactli, the earth’s monster, and bending his body over itself, gave form to a space between his tail and his body and in this space create four heavens, the central heavens, where after little time will be put the sun, the moon, the stars, leaving one of them to Tláloc and the place where eggs, embryos of every creature pertaining to the center were conserved waiting for the correct moment to go to earth surface and birth there. On this central region of the universe humanity was created in four successive turns. Four suns were also successively created to illuminate and warm these new creatures. Each time the gods discovered that their new creatures have serious defects and destroy them in order to create a new humanity. So, the first humans, those of the first suns, were drowned by catastrophic inundations, burned by a rain of fire and put to death by winds and the survivors were converted in monkeys.

Finally, Quetzalcóatl decide travel to the Underworld, ask o the God of Death for some bones of human ancestors and after some adventures and setbacks he was successful in creating the new humanity from those pulverized bones mixed with his own blood, obtained pricking his penis. These new humans were better than their ancestors because they assumed the responsibility to worship and pray to the gods and collaborate with them in supporting the cosmic order and promoting the continuity of life (Leyenda de los soles). In maya tradition, this last creation was resolved making the men of maize, giving them in this way a body manifesting a close continuity with another forms of life, mainly with that which provides humanity with their most precious aliment (de la

Garza).

Human body and cosmic structure

Created by the gods, humanity is a very reflex of their creators and of the organized universe. Finally, the gods made everything at their own image, natural things, all of them beings in a magical world, in the way that they build their homes, their surroundings and the spiritual cohort of their inhabitants, their servers and messagers.

But also gave to men a body structure resuming the cosmos, the cosmic disposition of celestial bodies. The worldview of all Mesoamerican prehispanc peoples conceived the universe as a serie of parallel floors disposed over a vertical central axis. The central one was the earth surface, and there were nine upper floors, the heavens, and nine underworlds. To these it is necessary add four more heavens, those of Tlaloc, the Sun, the Moon and the stars, all of them pertaining to the center, to the earth realm, and created when humans goes to inhabit it. Corresponding to it, human body had horizontal plans distributed along the vertebral column, being the diaphragm equivalent to earth, above it the heavens, with the heart as the sun traveling in the heaven and the liver representing the nocturnal sun, which walks under the earth going up at dawn. The lungs represent the upper space, filled with air and serving as a communication device with the higher heavens identified inside the skull and, at the top of it, trough the occipital fontanela in little children and the consolidated suture in adults, with the upper sections of universe. In a mirrored disposition, under diaphragm, abdominal and pelvic cavities correspond with the underworlds and give access to them trough anus, vagina, perineal floor and the foot soles. This disposition becoming coherent when people seats in the floor with the legs bended over the abdomen and foots are maintained on the ground aside the body.

This imaginary correspondence between human body and universe structure is a very important feature because from it derives to humans the absolute necessity to interact with all the creatures, not only the earthly creatures but also with celestial and underworld beings. This is consequently an important fact to moral dimensions of human activities, which not only were related to anther people, but extended to other inhabitants of earth, heavens and underworlds.

Man and gods at work

Created by gods, disposing a body similar to that of them, provided with an ancestral curiosity to observe and understand everything, humanity plays a particular role in the cosmic life. Human beings are in some part responsible to cooperate with the gods in the preservation and development of the functionality of the diverse cosmic areas and also to support the life of the gods. The gods live in the measure the humans maintain an adequate cult to them and contribute with their correct living ways and sacrifices to provide them with nutrients and conserve them happy. Inversely, the satisfied gods will correspond by means of protecting and giving them long life and health or, at least, permit them participate in some forms of cosmic life.

Men were intended firstly to be a warrior and a good sequence in their life was to be dead in battle, in the gladiator ceremony, or in the sacrifice stone. Those warriors had the warranty that their teyolia, the soul seated in the heart, will accompany the sun in his curse from dawn to the highest part of the heaven. So, they contribute with their blood and their bravery to give life and restore the sun strength. In a similar way, women, destined to reproduction, to conception and childbirth, when across the pregnancy and, mainly, in the process of childbirth died, they reach an equivalent category to warriors. The explanation of this was that the woman who perishes bringing a new child to this world was similar to the warrior who loses his life in combat: she falls struggling. In this case, these women will travel with the sun from zenith to dusk, to the very moment when the heavenly body enters in the earth profundities. In this way, women can attain the category of goddesses trough be converted in gifts to the gods as Johansson has accurately proposed (Johansson, 2012). The term cihuateteo, which signifies women – goddesses, is clear and indicates this new ontological status which, being only temporal and not infinite anyway concedes them a special dimension.

Other group which accedes also to new ontological properties was that of children who died before their purification. Their souls will go to the Tlalocan, the Taloc, the rain god, paradise and will be there, attached to a marvelous tree which leaves resembles tits, sucking delicious milk until they will be required for coming back to earth to be conceived and developed in a new child.

Also in Tlaloc’s paradise were received all the people who suffered any ailment attributed to this god and died to this cause. Among those illnesses or accidents are dropsy, to be drowned or be reached by a bolt of lightning. They will live there, in

Tlalocan a plentiful life, provided with everything: maize, fruits, beans and some psychotropic plants to be eaten; with songs and melodies to sing…

View as a whole, these groups of individuals played a significant role. They were looked as an example for common people, representing the accomplishment of a mission, like to be a successful warrior or a successful childbearing woman, surrounded by a halo of dignity when death surprises them in carrying out their duty. It is obvious, they represented a moral achievement. The rain god selected people were different.

They were distinguished and only those who survive the thunderbolt stroke and accept to work as Tlaloc aids and servers, controlling winds and hail storms, rain and dryness, good and bad harvests, illness and health and, in this way become “curious and good people”, beneficent and full of dignity. Until today, all over the central Mexican highplanes, these Tlaloc priests remain present, working and covering all these functions and they are considered as high esteem people. They are called quiaquiaztli or graniceros.

Related directly to the gods which they served, some priests had the responsibility and obligation to diagnose and treat some specific illnesses. Among them are Tezcatlipoca priests, provided with wide powers and special abilities to heal or harm. They receive a careful and complete education on all the evident and occult aspects of their lord and learn how interact with the night powers, with underworld people, how induce in themselves the transformation in were owls, in were jaguars. In contrast, they learn also the medical management of epidemics, of madness and possession by other malignant spirits.

Also there were the Ixtlilton priests. Ixtlilton was a deity represented as a little boy identifiable by his black face. He, as it is easy suppose, was a healer god to children, mainly in diarrhea cases and his procedures was always directed to protect children. So,

Ixtlilton was a definite benevolent deity and their priests worked in diagnoses of ingestion of contaminate water by children and the provision to them of water which reflects the children face when he looks its surface inside a big pitcher, obviously a very clean water and, aside another plant remedies, prescribing it as the only thing to drink.

The very existence of these kind of people and their social presence and influence are sufficient to testify on the moral dimension existence at the core of these cultures.

Excellence in their involvements, compromise with the gods trough following the established criteria towards their cult and the interaction serving them as their selected assistants. Finally, the most sanguinary gods were at last protective for their people and expects in return they behave close to their good behavior rules.

The moral building of man actions (Huehuetlatolli)

Society and social life have as referential frame the prescribed necessity to cooperate in the cosmic order conservation trough rituals and prayers and participation in multiple religious events, but, first at all, developing a correct way of life. Social rules were numerous and directed to any imaginable aspect of daily life. As expected, a primary referent was the family life attributed to the first divine couple and all morality derived from the close performance of each one of the prescribed rules and its transmission to the new generations.

Fortunately, We dispose of some texts, coming from the 16th century but which information will be dated at least to Toltec culture if not to Teotihuacan, that is from five to tenth centuries before, full of behavior prescriptions, educative discourses and detailed descriptions about what was expected of boys and girls, of young people of both sexes, of adults of different social classes, of old people, of rulers and warriors, priests and laymen, craftsmen and common people. These collections were recorded under the form of counsels expressed by mothers and fathers, old people, representative people, priests, midwifes, etcetera, and were generically called huehuetlatolli, that is the ancestors, the old people words. The most important of them are in the sixth book of

Florentine Codex by Bernardino de Sahagún and in the parallel part of his Historia

General de las Cosas de la Nueva España. Other collections are those attributed to fray

Andrés de Olmos and preserved by fray Juan Bautista, another Franciscan friar, at e end of this same century.

Starting with some counsels related to biocultural events, We can observe fine reflections related to sexual behavior, pregnancy, childbirth, neonatal attention…

Bernardino de Sahagún texts describing professional activities and other offices as practiced in prehispanic Mexico are precise and adopt a very peculiar feature when describe the actions characterizing the good and bad practices in both orders a moral one, and that of knowledge of the craft secrets. In general, Sahagún informants attribute moral qualities to nobility, but when spoke on common people always make distinctions between good or bad painter, canter, or physician, between virtuous and vicious maidens, young men, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers. But we need have in mind some differences when these criteria are applied to different kind of persons. For example, describing potters the distinction is related to their abilities: “The good potter

[is] a skilled man with clay…a knowing man, an artist. He is skilled with his hands. The bad potter [is] silly, stupid, torpid” (Sahagún, Florentine Codex, X, 12, p.43); the tailor and the spinner were characterized in a similar way (Ibid. X, 10, p.35). In the same way, medicine seller, called panamacani, ”is a knower of herbs, a knower of roots, a physician…” (Ibid., X, 24, p. 85), and his virtue was conceived as the capacity to prescribe a treatment, leaving aside any possible relation with other cultural aspects involving the presence of ancient gods or spiritual entities and limiting it to a technical knowledge. It is possible that from these days and perhaps from very remote traditions medicinal herbs sellers represented a lower social strata compared with wise men

(tlamatinme), priests charged to cure some special ailments and true physicians (titici).

Instead, defining feather seller the main tract of the bad seller was to be fraudulent and the bad seller of cast metals “[is] a deceiver – a man who shines up, who rubs an unguent over – who cleans up the metals. He deceives, he deludes…” (Ibid. X, 16, p.60) or the good noble woman is “a modest woman, a true woman, accomplished in the ways of woman…is venerable, respectable…esteemed, kind, contrite…one who belittles no one, who treats others with tenderness” contrasting the bad one who is “wrathful, an evildoer, one who is overcome with hatred – pugnacious, revolting…” (Ibid., X, 13, p.

A majority of the descriptions of people characteristics are conducted in these terms, but the male and female physicians (titici), and the wise men (tlamatinime), were not only divided in good and bad by their dexterity but also contrasted with enchanters

(tetlachihuani), sorcerers (nanahualti), magicians, (texixicoani), but, unexpectedly, all of them were also divided between good or bad sorcerers, enchanters, magicians and it is necessary consider as an open possibility that all those forty kinds of professionals to intervene on the supernatural realm were so classified. This possibility breaks completely the western tradition distinction between good and bad professionals or craftsman based only in their technical expertise and force us the consideration of a legitimate practice involving gods and spirits, black and white magic or an exercise of power directed towards the manipulation of supernatural beings and energies which definitory criteria were efficiency, yes, but efficiency as present in any of all these possibilities.

It is a very interesting matter, because in all the ancient cultures was perfectly understood that knowledge related to illness and health could be employed to benefit or to harm. Precisely is this fact, the possession of power and the possibility to act accordingly to it, one of the most relevant factors to explain the mixed sentiments of reverence and fear inspired by healers and medicine man to their patients. In the legal regulations dictated by Nezahualcóyotl in Texcoco at the middle of fourteenth century, sorcery and witchcraft were also condemned. The inclusion in a legal code of harming through medico – magical practices is a clear evidence of a change directed to reduce the scope of medical practice, leaving aside the possibility and power to harm and directing their actions to benefit patients. The moral and ethical consequences of similar situations have been registered and analyzed in studies on Hippocratic, ancient Chinese and Ayurvedic medicines, and recently, in Ancient Egypt medical practice, considering the abdication of the capacity to harm as a central characteristic of medicine as it is and will be practiced in developed cultures. But also we need to have in mind the fact that

Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, the chronicler who consigns these data, himself a descendant of the

Texcoco kings, was also the son of a Spanish conqueror and was educated in both cultural traditions and then we can’t be sure if he modify some information searching legitimate his indigenous traditions before the New Spain society where he lived.

Going back to Sahagun’s texts and the Huehuetlatolli collections arrived until our days, let me expose some of the main characteristics considered by them as important, as definitory of the different classes of people related to healing practices. Starting with wise man, the good wise man “…is exemplary. He possesses writings; he owns books.

Is the tradition, the road; a leader of men, a rower, a companion, a bearing of responsibility…an instructor worthy of confidence, deserving credibility, deserving of faith…He lights the world for one; he knows the land of dead; he is dignified, unreviled…He reassures, calms, helps. He serves as a physician; he makes one whole”, and the bad one is “a stupid physician, silly, decrepit…vainglorious…a retender of wisdom,…vain…a sorcerer, a soothsayer, a medicine man, a remover of intrusive objects from people…causes ills, leads into evil; he kills; he destroys people; devastates lands, destroys by sorcery” (Ibíd., X, 8, p.29-30). It seems to me interesting detach the fact that, in this last text, the nahuatl word ticitl has been translated as “medicine man”, but the original text doesn’t make any distinction nor add another word or at least a prefix or a suffix to this word, but simply employ it to denominate the true physician, which is the object of the immediate paragraph. It is important because it demonstrates that as late as 1570s the words ticitl (singular) or titici (plural) were employed to design physicians in the absolute sense of the term and there was not a distinction between them and European physicians beyond the imposition defined by the dominant culture.

Anyway, was only after the deadly cocoliztli epidemic of 1576 to 1580 when the indigenous population decreased importantly and there were not more mexica (Aztec) kings in Tlatelolco and the Imperial College of Cruz lost all its importance and titici goes quickly to become healers or medicine man.

But to this moment we only review the related data to the wise men, tlamatinime (pl), and detached their capacity to heal and their presence as medical practitioners. Their excellence was attributed to their wide knowledge about gods, man, nature and cosmic relations and to their moral dimension. They were conceived as persons – in the full sense of the word – which activity conduces always to benefit and, also when they cause harm to someone, finally that action will derive in a major good to the same individual or to the collectivity. When they appear as physicians, they are persons of trust, counselors, instructors “worthy of confidence, deserving of credibility, deserving of faith…- and a little later adds – deserving to be considered as a physician…” (Florentine

Codex, X, 8, p. 29) Then, he is not a physician in the strict significance of the term, but heals some special problems, “he lights the world for one”, may be those which involves difficult decisions or requires communication with the spiritual world.

The common physician is described as “a curer of people, a restorer, a provider of health”, apparently limiting his activity to technical aspects (Florentine Codex, X,8, p.

30). But, some lines below, when speaking about the “bad physician”, after describing all sorts of ineptitude effects, Sahagún informants, all of them indigenous physicians, enumerate activities related with ancient tradition activities and then, in 1560s, identified as sorcery. For example, they cited soothsaying, casting of lots, diagnosing by means of knots, this last a practice consisting in made prognosis, not diagnosis, considering the disposition of the knots made on a rope in relation with the sick proportions. All of them were legitimate practices in prehispanic times and persisted in the same ways among indigenous after the Spanish conquest. But also were mentioned bewitching and sorcery. Apparently it seems establish its between a socially considered moral practice or medicine and bad, immoral practices considered jointly with ignorance.

But Sahagún have for us a surprise. In the nine chapter of the same Book X he speak of enchanters, sorcerers and magicians and also considered good and bad people excepting the tlacatecolotl, owl - man, term translated by Dibble and Anderson as “te possessed one”, which by definition were bad people, It is precise remember that in all indigenous texts tlacatecolotl is a man which could transform himself in animal, mainly an owl or a turkey, both of them elated to Tezcatlipoca, the god of destruction, of dark powers. But, I insist, when mentions nahualli (naoalli), which also signifies “the person who become the disguise of another one”, in this case an animal which becomes the man or woman who takes its form or a man or animal that takes the form and dresses of a god or supernatural being.

Laws and Morality

Reinforcing the moral dimension attained by imitation of adults, mainly old people, good conduct and education, all ancient chroniclers coincide about the existence of laws and justice tribunals, in general presided by the king, denominated among nahuatl peoples tlatoani, that is “that one who possess the voice, the words”. The most appreciated collection of laws is associated with e name of Nezahualcóyotl, tlatoani of

Texcoco, and is constituted by around eighty laws, the majority of them prescribing loud punishments to the transgressors. Considered by the 16th century historians as a proof of civility, for us represents a testimony of moral concerns considered to have a major importance by prehispanic societies. The punished faults are the consequence of ignore the moral rules which was supposed were inculcated in every people since childhood. Stole was punished, especially when involved violence, but mainly in the countryside, where stole only seven maize cobs was punished with death, and so on.

This fact was justified on the consideration that in rural areas stole basic nutriments is a big crime. Adultery and homosexuality were punished in the same way and drunkness, outside the religious and civil celebrations, was followed by cutting all his or her hair and expulsed from the communal life, if the punished was common people, and with death if noble (Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, II: 101-105).

The division between god and bad people and the evidence of legal prescriptions lead us to another important fact: the clear separation between noble people (pipiltin) and commons (macehualtin). The noble person, called only tlacatl (human) in Florentine

Codex (X,4, p. 15) is defined as good when “loving, merciful, compassionate…he benefits others…” and the good ruler (qualli tlatoani) takes as his characteristics “… carry his subjects in his arms…takes responsibilities, assumes burdens…” his rule is dignified with a moral dimension, in contrast with the bad ruler, qualified as a crazy people, tlaueliloc, that one which has lost his reason, his heart. Noble people was considered as necessarily possessing a n oble way of life, to be humble, serious, modest, god of hearth, chaste, wise and prudent (Florentine Codex, X, 4, p.16), but some of them were mentioned as Tetzon, literally that one who possesses his own hair, is another way to call one proceeding from noble lineage; in this case, his main and most appreciated qualities were to be a follower “of an exemplary life, a taker of the good example of others…sets forth e exemplary life.”(Florentine Codex, X, 5, p.19). A thing to be remarked is the reference to hair. In fact, those which has been made prisoners, were taken by their hair by his captors and the slaves also lost their hair property, but also was a common belief that animical strength and the capacity to be in contact with the gods or with the malignant entities were trough the occipital cowlick.

To have a face, to have a heart

In this moral landscape, the daily work to promote human qualities was intense. Every people needs to realize a continuous and big effort to build his essential humanity and in the precise moment when she or he achieves in this effort, was considered as someone that acquired a face and a heart. In this metaphoric image is contained the essence of prehispanic Mexican humanism

Man and Life. An ultimate moral responsibility

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