This book aims to define the provenance and application of three foundation myths that expressed, and in part determined, the character of Mesoamerican civilization. Florescano begins with the Popol Vuh, the sixteenth-century Quiché Maya scripture, and interprets its account of the creation of humanity as an extended metaphor—traced in human terms—of the natural cycle of the planting, slow germination, and eventual growth of maize. He demonstrates that the passage through the dank underworld and the moment of “resurrection” were illustrated on Maya ceramics and, in symbolic terms, in Olmec stone carvings and jades. At the same time, he notes that rebirth depended on ritual combat and human sacrifice.
Florescano is at his most original when he argues that the primordial, ideal city of Tollan, which figured so prominently in Mexica myth, was the classic city of Teoti-huacán, and not (as Wigberto Jiménez Moreno asserted in 1941) Tula de Hidalgo, the...
