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How is such particular symbolism derived and recovered in practice during research? Is it from surrounding writing? How explicit is it? I mean, how do we know

• AlotOfReading 4y ago
  The prickly pear thing is pretty straightforward, it's part of the founding myth of Tenochtitlan and the Aztec empire. When the Mexica were wandering from Aztlan, they had a battle where they cut out the heart of a demigod named Copil and threw it into Lake Texcoco, where it grows into a prickly pear. Awhile later, the Aztecs are ready to settle down and their patron deity Huitzilopochtli told them to look for the eagle eating a snake. Eventually they come to the lake and see an eagle sitting on Copil's cactus heart eating a snake, so that's where they founded Tenochtitlan and where the Mexican flag comes from. There's no single way we figure out symbolism though. Sometimes it's pretty obvious, like Copil's heart. Sometimes you can just ask people (ethnographic analogy). In other cases people use the symbol as a reference to the deity and you figure it out from context. Sometimes writings and rituals straight up say it, or you can figure it out from related cultures. And sometimes it's basically a pun, where the words/symbols look or sound like something else associated with the deity. The biblical name of Adam vs Adamah (dirt/earth) is a more familiar example of the last one.