(Please read from the start)
“Totonac women were expert weavers and embroiderers; they dressed grandly and braided their hair with feathers. The Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún stated that, in all aspects of their appearance, the women were "quite elegant", women wore skirts (embroidered for the nobles) and a small triangular poncho covering the breasts. Noble women wore shell and jade necklaces and earrings and often tattooed their faces with red ink. Married women wore their hair in the Nahuatl fashion while peasant women wore their hair long. Likewise, the noble men dressed well, adorning themselves with multicolored cloaks, loin cloths, necklaces, arm bands, lip plugs and devices made of the prized quetzal feathers. Hair was kept long with a thick tuft of hair on the top tied up with a ribbon.”
>> The society has its own colors. Different from the “artisans” Toltecs we saw earlier. Here we have cultivators and weavers.
“Religion
Most present-day Totonacs are Roman Catholic. However, their Christian practice is often mixed with vestiges of their traditional religion, a notable instance being la Costumbre, a survival of an old rite of sacrifice in which various seeds are mixed with earth and the blood of fowls and dispersed over the planting fields.[4]
The traditional religion was described in the early 1960s by the French ethnographer, Alain Ichon.[5] No other major essay on Totonac religion has been found. Mother goddesses played a very important role in Totonac belief, since each person's soul is made by them.[6] If a newly born child dies, its soul "does not go to the west, the place of the dead, but to the east with the Mothers".[7] Ichon has also preserved for posterity an important myth regarding a maize deity, a culture hero with counterparts among most other cultures of the Gulf Coast and possibly also represented by the Classic Maya maize god. As to traditional curers, it is believed that they "are born during a storm, under the protection of thunder. They think that a lightning bolt strikes the house of a new-born baby …, and makes it … under its possession.”
>> This is amazing! Why? Because ancient Egyptians used to bury their dead on the West side of the Nile because they used to believe the gates of the underworld were in the West. I always assumed this was done because of the sun’s course in the sky, as in rising in the East and setting in the West. I wonder if this is simply caused by observing a natural phenomenon or if it has another root.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totonac_culture
“The Totonac culture or Totonec culture was a culture that existed among the indigenous Mesoamerican Totonac people who lived mainly in Veracruz and northern Puebla. Originally, they formed a confederation of cities, but, in later times, it seems that they were organized in three dominions: North, South and Serran.[1] Its economy was agricultural and commercial. They had large urban centers such as: El Tajín (300-1200), which represents the height of the Totonac culture, Papantla (900-1519) and Cempoala (900-1519).
The three centers or three hearts of their culture stand out for the very varied ceramics, the stone sculpture, the monumental architecture and advanced urban conception of the cities. Advances and perfection of forms achieved in the production of yokes, palms, axes, snakes, smiley faces and monumental mud sculptures are admirable.”
>> A visual comparison shows similarities between the Totonac statue I’ve attached a picture of to this post and the clothing (mostly the earrings) of some African Tribes – as well as the priests in the movie 10 000 B.C. (page 203).
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