Huizilopochtli, the tribal god of the Aztec, was closely associated with the sun. He was known as the Hummingbird of the South, and seated here in his regal hummingbird regalia, he carries a sunbeam, or fire-serpent, as a weapon (after Frya Diego Duran, Book of the Gods and Rites. Griffith Observatory)
{He is carrying the Pleiades serpent}
In a very similar way, the earth lodge of the Skidi Pawnee (who dwelt on the Great Plains of Nebraska) was also a mirror of the cosmos. Much of their religion involved the sky and the stars, and reports from Pawnee informants supply us with the meaning of at least some parts of the earth lodges. Their ceremonial sacrifice of a young woman captive to the "Morning Star," intended to renew the land's fertility, has stimulated considerable speculation of the astronomical identity of the Morning Star.
Each of these directions was associated-in the Pawnee vision of the world--with a particular tree, a particur animal, a particular phenomenon of weather, a particular season, a particular time of life, a particular star, and a particular color: northwest, yellow; southwest, white; northeast, black; and southeast, red. These are the same colors on the four specially marked central posts.
The Skidi Pawnee endowed four stars with special status as the four pillars of heaven. These were the four world quarter stars whose hands supported the sky while their feet were firmly planted on the ground. In terms of their Pawnee names we know them as Yellow Star, White Star, Big Black Meteoric Star, and Red Star. These stars have the same colors as the intercardinal directions and are the same as those directions. Here again the structural supports of the world--the pillars of heaven-- are the directions which organize the world. It is even more interesting that these dirctions are explicitly linked to the stars. Von Del Chamberlain, an astronomical researcher at the National Air and Space Museum and an expert in Pawnee sky lore, has plausibly identified the four world quarter stars:
Yellow Star Capella White Star Sirius Big Black Meteoric Star Vega Red Star AntaresKrupp 1983:237
Page one of the Codex Fejervary-Mayer screenfold combines cosmology and calendrics into a design based on forms similar to a pair of intersecting Maltese and St. Andrew's crosses. Direction symbolism orients the design with east on top. An eight pointed sun disk above a pyramid corresponds to sunrise, and the color of the border is red, a color associated with east in central Mexico. West, then, is the blue branch of the cross at the bottom. North, in yellow, is on the left, and south, in green, is on the right. Each zone contains a different kind of tree, growing from a different source, with a different bird at its summit and a different pair of attending gods on either side.
Four directions imply horizont orientation, but some of the symbols cue us to vertical organization as well. In the north toe bowl that harbors the tree has star of sky symbol in it and signifies the real above. On the right, in the south, the tree grows from the reptilian jaws of an earth monster. It is the portal to the realm below. Vertical structue is, of course, also a component of the native Mexican Cosmology.
Xiuhtecuhtli, the old Fire God and Year Lord, stand in the center square. He is the first of the 13 Lords of the Day and also the first of the nine Lords of the Night. If we imagine the real of day as a seven-level pyramid, the steps up one side and down the other total 13 and correspond to the Lords of the Day and also the first of the nine Lords of the Night...
References to Venus as early as 3000 BC are known from evidence at Uruk, an important early Sumerian city in southern Iraq. One clay tablet found at the site says "star Inanna," and another contains symbols for the words "star, setting sun, Inanna." Inanna is Venus, known later as Ishtar, and the Uruk tablets specify her celestial identity with the symbol for "star": an eight-pointed star. At this early stage the symbol seems to carry no more meaning than that, though it eventually evolves, in cuneiform writing, into a sign that means "god" and is placed before the actual names of deities. If the relationship between gods and the sky were not already expicit enough, this development in Mesopotamian writing would confirm it.
By the Kassite Dynasty, roughly 1600-1150 BC, the eight-pointed star had acquired a more specific meaning. It belonged to Ishtar, as Venus, and shows up on numberous Kudurru, or boundary stones, which were an innovation of the Kassite kings...
The emblem of Shamash is a four-pointed disk with undulating lines radiating intercardinally, and this is a standard Mesopotamian symbol for the sun. The wavy lines could be radiating sunlight, the "net"` of Shamash. For Sin, the stones have an obvious crescent moon, and the other large star--almost always with eight points--is Venus.