In the heart of the Mayan hoopla about 2012 and thier long count calendar or 13 baktun, the Toltec’s have been overlooked. The word Toltec in Mesoamerican studies has been used in different ways by different scholars to refer to actual populations and polities of pre-Columbian central Mexico or to the mythical ancestors mentioned in the mythical/historical narratives of the Aztecs.
People like don Miguel Ruiz do not see the Toltec as a race or nation but “scientists and artists who formed a society to explore and conserve the spiritual knowledge and practices of the ancient ones.”
It is an ongoing debate whether the Toltecs can be understood to have formed an actual ethnic group at any point in Mesoamerican history or if they are mostly or only a product of Aztec myth. But, the scholars who have understood the Toltecs to have been an actual ethnic group often connect them to the archeological site of Tula, Hidalgo which is then supposed to have been the Tollan of Aztec myth.
But let us go on to the next word: nagual.
Nagual has a two sided meaning as well. In modern rural Mexico the nagual is often the same as “witches” or “brujos” who are thought to be able to shapeshift into animals at night (normally into an owl or bat). Others see naguals ass the wise masters with spiritual knowledge from the ancient of days.
The ancient prophet-ruler of the Toltecs, Quetzalcoatl (the Feathered Serpent). Spaniards made a slaughter of the Indians in the name of Christ, though His message was love, and so too had the Aztecs fallen away from the similar teachings of Quetzalcoatl. Quetzalcoatl’s message of love and wisdom is reflected in the following advice of an Aztec noble to his sons- “Take great pains to make yourselves friends of God who is in all parts, and is invisible and impalpable, and it is meet that you give Him all your heart and body”.
Quetzalcoatl delivered a message of love, forbidding the blood sacrifice, teaching of the One Supreme God, and giving the Toltecs many material things of their culture, such as the calendar. And it’s from that calendar that so much of the 2012 bruhaha has come.
Maybe we need a little more attention to the Toltecs and less about the Mayans. Maybe? 
One Comment
Very interesting, definitively to understand the present we have to revise the past