Cognitive process of prehispanic fantastic language and its interpretation in the origin of Mixtitlan

Abstract

A selection of historic and literary texts give rise to Mixtitlan, a Nahua word meaning «between clouds», a work by the composer Carlos Cruz de Castro where the first meeting of Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma and the ceremonies in his honour are narrated, confusing the conqueror’s arrival with that of Quetzalcoatl. Typical in those rituals is the «guerra florida», a human sacrifice collected in the XVIth century codices, and also the structural axis, in time and space, of Julio Cortázar’s tale The Night Face-Up. The fantastic nature of the so-called prehispanic relaciones reveals here their presence beyond the historic and literary context in a cognitive process overlapping reality and fantasy translated into sound speech.