(The food in the indigenous offerings of gratitude to the airs)
Very close to the first harvests, when the tender ears adorn the cornfield, when our peasants travel their fields thanking nature for the gift for their families, ancestral rites arise to correspond to the lords of the air.
They are real and they are alive; the rites of gratitude, such as the propitiatory, spiritual elevation and contact with the underworld are products of the cosmovision of our Nahua communities, which in their deep respect and love of nature, offer and worship the elements whose names are mentioned and again in his acts of veneration: Tlalli, the earth; Ehecatl, the wind; Atl, water and Tetl, fire.
For them, each of the elements has life, because what is alive responds and shows its existence, like the products that nature offers: a healthy crop and a chiquihuite full of tortillas, its corn bread, produced by Tlalli, watered by Atl thanks to the clouds that Ehecatl, the wind, transported to the cornfield so that after the harvest it was cooked by Tetl.
Although the elements provide us with all their benefits, they can also cause great calamities in plantings, health and even in the minds of people; everything depends on your response to men, that is why you have to show them respect and veneration.
From August 15 and until the eve of San Miguel Arcangel, in the community of Cuentepec, 30 family plots, holders of the sacred stones where the airs or lords of the rain inhabit, will be the scene of the huentles or offering to the airs, where the families, guided by the Tlapatike, main healer, with a difference of two days, will place food offerings (tamales of three types, green mole and tepache) flowers of San Miguel in small figures and a necklace, pulque and a tamal (special food for the airs) that contains the head of a rooster with the beak filled with tobacco, which is placed in front of the sacred stone. The food must be ready at dawn, to begin the ritual of the offering that the Tlapatike performs. While the lords of the air eat, no member of the family should see them or are in danger of getting ill from bad air. At about seven o’clock in the morning, the food is divided among the family, who consume them calmly, having fulfilled their duty to the air.
We thank the teacher Sergio Martínez for the wonderful testimony of his photography.
PHOTO: Offering or smelling of gratitude to the gentlemen of the air, with its sacred stone, in Cuentepec, Morelos. Photo courtesy of maestro Sergio Martínez.
