Aztecs and Zapotecs: The Day of the Dead and the Cosmic Phantoms of Malcolm Lowry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On the basis of a recent field-trip to Mexico, this paper advances the thesis of my 2009 Malcolm Lowry Centenary International Conference paper on ‘Souls and Shamans’ presented at UBC, Vancouver which considered the cultural, psychological, and spiritual links between Lowry’s cosmic, terrestrial, subterranean, and aquatic world-views. In assessing the interface between the material and spiritual domains perceived by both the Aztecs and the Oaxacan Zapotecs, it examines the subconscious dimensions of the Mexican Day of the Dead festival witnessed by Malcolm Lowry in 1936. It investigates anthropological, cultural, and ethnographic influences, dating back to pre-Columbian, Mesoamerican rituals, reflected in Under the Volcano (1947), Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid (1968), La Mordida (1996), and The Forest Path to the Spring (1961). In establishing Lowry’s preoccupation with seeking atonement with the spirits of the dead and his recognition of the need to repent for the debts of the past and for the sins of mankind, synergies are made with the cosmic, shamanic, and animist concepts of the universe, expressed by the divine consciousness of the Aztec and Zapotec civilizations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".