(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
vii
Contents
Editor's Foreword ix
Author's Note xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Preface xv
Chronology xxi
Chapter I. Introduction: Approaching Mesoamerican Religions 1
Inventions and Fantasies of Mesoamerica1
Sources for Understanding: The Ensemble Approach to Evidence 11
Religion as Worldmaking, Worldcentering, Worldrenewing 19
Chapter II. History and Cosmovision in Mesoamerican Religions 24
Plants and the Sacred Dead 27
The Olmec World: Jaguars and Giants in Stone 30
Astronomy and the Sacred Ball Game 35
The Classic Maya: Kings and Cosmic Trees 37
Teotihuacan: The Imperial Capital 40
Tollan: City of the Plumed Serpent 43
Aztec War, Cosmic Conflict 45
The Mesoamerican Cosmovision 51
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Religions of Mesoamerica
Chapter III. The Religion of the Aztecs: Ways of the Warrior, Words of the Sage 58
The Sacred Career of Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl 59
Cosmovision and the Human Body 65
Serpent Mountain: The Great Aztec Temple 70
Sacred Words 77
Rites of Renewal and Human Sacrifice 85
Chapter IV. Maya Religion: Cosmic Trees, Sacred Kings, and the Underworld 92
The Lost Civilization of the Maya 95
The Cosmic Tree 98
Sacred Kingship 103
The Calendar and the Regeneration of Time 113
The Ordeals of Xibalba 117
Chapter V. Mesoamerica as a New World: Colonialism and Religious Creativity 124
The Social and Symbolic Crisis of the Colonial New World 127
The Virgin of Guadalupe 135
The Peyote Hunt of the Huichol Indians 138
Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) 142
The Fiesta of Santiago Among the Tzurujil Maya 147
Conclusions 153
Notes 159
Glossary 165
Selected Reading List 172
ix
EDITOR'S FOREWORD
Religious Traditions of the World
One of human history's most fascinating aspects is the richness and variety of its religious traditions—from the earliest times to the present, in every area of the world. The ideal way to learn about all these religions would be to visit the homeland of each—to discuss the scriptures or myths with members of these traditions, explore their shrines and sacred places, view their customs and rituals. Few people have the luxury of leisure and money to take such trips, of course; nor are many prepared to make a systematic study of even those religions that are close at hand. Thus this series of books is a substitute for an around-the-world trip to many different religious traditions: it is an armchair pilgrimage through a number of traditions both distant and different from one another, as well as some situated close to one another in time, space, and religious commitment.
Individual volumes in this series focus on one or more religions, emphasizing the distinctiveness of each tradition while considering it within a comparative context. What links the volumes as a series is a shared concern for religious traditions and a common format for discussing them. Generally, each volume will explore the history of a tradition, interpret it as a unified set of religious beliefs and practices, and give examples of religious careers and typical practices. Individual volumes are self-contained treatments and can be taken up in any sequence. They are introductory, providing interested readers with an overall interpretation of religious traditions without presupposing prior knowledge.
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Religions of Mesoamerica
The author of each book combines special knowledge of a religious tradition with considerable experience in teaching and communicating an interpretation of that tradition. This special knowledge includes familiarity with various languages, investigation of religious texts and historical development, and direct contact with the peoples and practices under study. The authors have refined their special knowledge through many years of teaching and writing to frame a general interpretation of the tradition that is responsible to the best known facts and is readily available to the interested reader.
Let me join with the authors of the series in wishing you an enjoyable and profitable experience in learning about religious traditions of the world.
H. Byron Earhart Series Editor
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Author's Note
Throughout this book I use the spelling Moctezuma to refer to the Aztec rulers usually called, in English, Montezuma. There were two Moctezumas, Moctezuma Ilhuicamina 1440-1464 and Moaezuma Xocoyotzin 1502-1520. The Nahuatl spelling in the Florentine Codex is Motecuzoma, though some scholars use Moteuczomah while others use Moteuczoma. I am following the translation of Dibble and Anderson, who consistently use Moctezuma.
xiii
Acknowledgments
I want to thank the colleagues and friends who helped me during the writing of this book. They include Lois Middleton and Linda Cohen, who organized many important details of research; Peter van der Loo, Robert Carlsen, Carolyn Tate, and Anthony Aveni for advice on certain chapters; Scott Sessions for help with the codices; and Richard Griswold del Castillo and Jose (Dr. Loco) Cuellar for helping me direct the narrative for use in Chicano studies programs. William B. Taylor urged me to take a long second look at the presentation of, colonialism and syncretism. Michio Araki, from the University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan, opened the resources of the Institute of Philosophy to me during the early drafts of this book. I thank him and the students who assisted me in library research while in the land of the rising sun. I also remember Jane Marie Swanberg.
This work has also been enriched by a number of scholars, who participate in summer seminars at the Mesoamerican Archive. They include Elizabeth Boone, Robert Bye, Charles Long, Jane Day, Johanna Broda, Edward Calnek, Doris Heyden, Cecelia Klein, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Alfredo Lopez Austin, Edelmira Linares, H. B. Nicholson, Richard Townsend, Jorge Klor de Alva, Lawrence Desmond, and Lawrence Sullivan. Paul Wheatley's work has nurtured this project from the beginning. Finally, my gratitude extends to Raphael and Fletcher Lee Moses for their timely and generous support.
Davld Carrasco
Boulder, Colorado
and
Tsukuba, Japan
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Preface
Raise your spirit . . . Hear about the new discovery!
Peter Martyr, September 13, 1493
One of the momentous transformations in the history of the Western world took place on the shores and in the villages and cities of Mesoamerica between 1492 and 1521. This transformation was initiated with the voyages of Cristóbal Colón (we know him as
Christopher Columbus) and reached a culmination, of sorts, with the fall of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, in 1521. Within three quick decades the European image of the world was radically changed and a previously unimaginable universe—Nueva España, America, and above all, the New World—was discovered, invaded, and invented. As Tzvetan Todorov notes, the discovery and conquest of Mesoamerica was the "most astonishing encounter of our history," which "heralds our present identity" as citizens of the world and interpreters of culture. 1
We have the vantage point of a grand eyewitness account of a pivotal episode in this transformation provided by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a sergeant in Cortés’s invading army, who describes the Spanish entrada into the Aztec capital in 1519 this way:
During the morning we arrived at a broad causeway and continued our march towards Iztapalapa and when we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land and that straight and level causeway going towards Mexico, we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of the soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream.
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Once the Spaniards entered the city the palaces appeared even more amazing to their eyes.
How spacious and well built they were, of beautiful stone work and cedar wood, and the wood of other sweet scented trees, with great rooms and courts, wonderful to behold, covered with awnings of cotton cloth.
And the natural world of the city was also wonderful.
When we had looked well at all of this, we went to the orchard and garden, which was such a wonderful thing to see and walk in, that I was never tired of looking at the diversity of the trees, and noting the scent which each one had, and the paths full of roses and flowers, and the many fruit trees and native roses, and the pond of fresh water. There was another thing to observe, the great canoes were able to pass into the garden from the lake through an opening that had been made so that there was no need for their occupants to land. And all was cemented and very splendid with many kinds of stone (monuments) with pictures on them. . . I say again that I stood looking at it and thought that never in the world would there be discovered other lands such as these, for at that time there was no Peru, nor any thought of it. Of all these wonders that I then beheld today all is overthrown and lost, nothing left standing. 2
This and other eyewitness accounts show that the Spaniards were astonished by the architectural wonders, agricultural abundance, royal luxuries, ritual violence, social stratification, and spatial organization of the capital. To their great surprise Mesoamerica was an urban civilization organized by powerful, pervasive religious beliefs and practices.
Within eighteen months, however, distrust, intrigue, torture, murder, and conquest dominated the interaction between Spaniard and Aztec. The last Aztec ruler, Cuauhtemoc (Diving Eagle), surrendered to Cortés and his army of Spaniards and Indian allies on November 15, 1521, at the ceremonial center of Tlatelolco in the capital. The Aztec view of the events leading up to this terrible change appear in this native lament:
Broken spears lie in the road;
we have torn our hair in our grief.
The houses are roofless now, and their walls
are red with blood.
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We nave pounded our hands in despair
against the adobe walls,
for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead.
The shields of our warriors were its defense,
but they could not save it. . . .
They set a price on all of us
on the young men, the priests, the boys and the girls
the price of a poor man was only two handfuls of corn
or ten cakes made from mosses or twenty cakes
of salty couch-grass.
Gold, jade, rich cloths, quetzal feathers—
everything that once was precious was now considered
worthless. 3
In spite of the human devastation and cultural transformation brought on by the conquest and European colonialism, significant versions of the native images of space, time, the cosmos, social and economic relations, and the underworld are available to us.
[carrxvii.jpg]
These panels come from the Florentine Codex and they depict the suffering and medical care of smallpox victims. The Spanish brought to Mexico with them a number of foreign diseases that devastated the indigenous population in a very short time. Sahagun (Paso y Troncoso ed.)
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The archaeological, ethnohistorical, and literary evidence provides us with the eloquent statement that the story of Mesoamerican religions is the story of cities and symbols of cities. In fact Mesoamerica was a world organized by hundreds of carefully planned ceremonial centers and scores of monumental, even majestic cities and city-states. It is usually overlooked that Mesoamerica was one of the seven places on the globe—with China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus Valley, Nigeria, and Peru—where human culture managed the great transformation from pre-urban society to urban society. These urban societies, while different from one another in many ways, all developed traditions of art, symbolism, politics, and social organization that became the heart and nexus of human culture. It is also remarkable that in each of these seven cases of primary urban generation the societies at large were regulated and organized by monumental ceremonial centers that contained such architectural structures as temples, platform mounds, pyramids, palaces, terraces, staircases, courts, stelae, and spacious ritual precincts. 4
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The little footprints crossing the ancient Mesoamerican maps and the portrayal of ritual life in the art of various cities show that ancient peoples visited such places as Teotihuacan, Abode of the Gods; Xochicalco, Place of the House of Flowers; Chichen Itza, Mouth of the Well of the Itza; Colhuacan, Place of the Ancestors; Tollan, Place of Reeds; and Teocolhuacan, Place of the Divine Ancestors. In this way ancient Mesoamerican history is the story of people and their symbols moving to and from cities and their ceremonial centers.
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This urban image of place and action provides the plan for this book. The controlling idea for the entire study is that the ceremonial precincts of Mesoamerica were the centers and theaters for the acting out of religious and social life. These ceremonial centers served as powerful magnets attracting people, goods, authority, and sacred forces into their precincts, ceremonies, and marketplaces. Once within the power, drama, and order of the ceremonial center people and their goods underwent experiences that changed them and their sense of orientation and value. But these ceremonial centers, operating under the control of royal and priestly elites, also had a centrifugal force, which redistributed goods, values, and people outward into the society at large.
xix @@
The second important term in the subtitle is cosmovision, which mean's the ways in which Mesoamericans combined their cosmological notions relating to time and space into a structured and systematic worldview. This worldview included a strong sense of
parallelism between the celestial, supernatural forces of the cosmos (macrocosmos) and the biological, human patterns of life on earth (microcosmos). As we shall see, the spatial organization, architecture, and calendrical rituals of many ceremonial centers in Mesoamerican history expressed intimate parallels between the time and space of the deities and the time and space of humans and terrestrial beings. One of the most important points to understand at the outset is that in Mesoamerican religions time and space were inseparable realities.
Chapter 1 surveys the challenge of studying Mesoamerican religions and the rich ensemble of resources available for the study of Mesoamerican religions. It discusses three characteristics of religious history in Mesoamerica: worldmaking (cosmovision and sacred space), worldcentering (cosmovision and the human body), and worldrenewing (the ceremonial rejuvenation of time, human life, agriculture, and the gods). Chapter 2 develops a historic overview of the diversity and richness of major ceremonial centers and ritual traditions in Mesoamerican culture. It begins with the artistic and trading achievements of the Olmecs (1500-200 BCE); outlines the superb creativity of Classic Maya ceremonial life (200-900 CE); discusses the grand imperial capital of Teotihuacan (200-750 CE); outlines the utopian image of Quetzalcoatl's kingdom in Tollan (900-1200 CE); and ends with the religious world of the Aztec empire (1325-1521 CE). Chapter 3 focuses on the religion of the warrior: the power of ritual violence in Aztec religion expressed in the cult of the warrior, warrior kings, and the sacrificial ceremonies at the Great Aztec Temple of Tenochtitlan. This chapter also includes a discussion of the art of Aztec speech. Chapter 4 explores the "blood of kings," that is, the royal religion of Maya ceremonial settlements that were organized around the symbolism of the flowering sacred tree and the careers of royal families and their ancestors. In this discussion of the Maya achievement we will examine one of the most pervasive meanings of all Mesoamerican religions: the sacred powers of agricultural life. Chapter 5 summarizes several continuities and innovations in Mesoamerican religions during the colonial period and in contemporary communities. We will discuss the New World as a world of social and spiritual crisis for indigenous and mestizo (mixed Spanish/Indian parentage) peoples. We will look at an array of religious expressions of worldmaking (Huichol peyote hunt), worldcentering (Day of the Dead ceremonies), and worldrenewing (cults of Guadalupe and Santiago). In this array we will see clear examples of both religious pilgrimages and religious syncretism.
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Chronology of Mesoamerican Religions
30,000-6500 BCE
Groups of peoples from northeast Asia enter the Americas through Bering Strait land bridge bringing hunting cultures, shamanism, and animal ceremonialism.
6500-1500 BCE
Incipient agricultural development focusing on maize, beans and squashes, cotton, and chili peppers leads to village formation and the importance of religious cults associated with rain and fertility. Settlement in villages with ceremonial centers, burial mounds, and sacred rulers.
1500-900 BCE
Rise of Olmec civilization centered on eastern coast of Mesoamerica in humid lowlands of Veracruz and Tabasco and spreading into western and southern Mesoamerica. The appearance of monumental architecture characterized by a superb sculptural tradition in gigantic basalt monuments and miniature jade work.
xxii
Examples include the "Colossal Heads" of San Lorenzo and the hybrid art style of animal (jaguar, bird, reptile) and human forms demonstrating the importance of shamanic specialists. The rise of intense social stratification.
900-300 BCE
Florescence of Olmec cosmovision and ceremonial style throughout parts of Mesoamerica. Formation of the monumental ceremonial center of La Venta, where rich burials reveal intense social stratification. Proliferation of religious cults dedicated to gods of rain, fire, maize, Plumed Serpent, the Earth, and the Underworld.
600-300 BCE
Formation of monumental ceremonial center at Monte Albán in Oaxaca, with evidence of astronomical alignments of ceremonial buildings, elaborate public ceremonies, and royal tombs.
Rise of Iztapan civilization in Chiapas, where eighty pyramidal mounds, upright stelae, Long Count calendar dates, and writing appear, indicating that the Mesoamerican cosmovision is generalized.
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300 BCE-100 CE
Early formation of the Maya civilization in Petén area of south-central Mesoamerica. Sites at Uaxactun, Yaxchilán, El Mirador, and Tikal take shape.
200-900 CE
The Classic Period. Mesoamerican culture is integrated in a number of major areas: Teotihuacan in the central plateau, Maya cultures of the lowlands, and Monte Albán in Oaxaca.
100-700 CE
Teotihuacan becomes the imperial capital of an empire. This four-quartered city with towering pyramids, palaces, stairways, marketplaces, and monumental sculpture demonstrates that the cosmovision has become imprinted on the entire urban form. Cults of rain, war, jaguars, Feathered Serpent, stars develop. Also, the great ceremonial city of Cholula, organized by the largest pyramid on earth, develops during this period. Other important sites include Xochicalco and El Tajin.
300-900 CE
The extravagant cosmovision of the classic Maya develops in the lowlands. This cosmovision includes the Long Count calendar; intense presentation of royal families; complex writing system; and rich but scattered ceremonial centers at Tikal, Yaxchilan, Palenque, Uxmal, Copan, Quiriguá, and elsewhere are flourishing. The cosmovision of the cosmic tree, dynastic records, the journey through Xibalba, autosacrifice, and human sacrifice appear in iconography.
830-900 CE
Collapse of segments of Maya civilization
900-1500 CE
Post-Classic Mesoamerica. The rise and fall of the Toltec Empire and the development of the Aztec world. Also ceremonial centers at Mitla in Oaxaca and Chichén Itzá are flourishing.
900-1100 CE
The Toltec Empire centered at Tollan (Tula), famous for the Quetzalcoatl tradition. Iconography reveals presence of warrior cults, long-distance trading, and the prestige of having originated and perfected the arts, astronomy, and a cosmovision that influenced subsequent cultures.
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Chichén Itzá in Yucatan flourishes and integrates Toltec traditions.
1200-1350 CE
Migrating farmers and warriors move into the Lake Cultures of the central plateau, which have been developing during Teotihuacan and the Toltec Empire. Chichimecas (the Aztecs) partially assimilate with existing social patterns of farming, warfare, market exchange, and religious cults.
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1325 CE
Chichimecas (the Aztecs) settle the swampy island of Tenochtitlan led by their deity, Huitzilopochtli, in the form of an eagle. The settlement is eventually divided into four great quarters surrounding the temple Coatepec (Serpent Mountain), and over seventy-five ceremonial buildings. The cults of Tlaloc, god of agriculture and water, and Huitzilopochtli, god of war and tribute, are combined at the Great Temple.
1350 CE
Another Chichimec group settles the nearby island of Tlatelolco, which becomes the market center for the Lake Cultures. Also the site of a great ceremonial center.
1425-1428 CE
The Mexicas, under the leadership of warriors, lead the rebellion against the city-state of Azcapotzalco and form the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan. Tlacopan, and Texcoco, which rules central Mesoamerica.
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1440-1468 CE
The Aztec Tlatoani Moctezuma Ilhuicamina rules and expands Coatepec, the great temple, the monumental ceremonial center in the capital, the tribute network, and warfare efforts. Eventually the city is populated by over 200,000 people.
1473 CE
The Aztecs of Tenochtitlan impose their rule on Tlatelolco and take control of the great market system, solidifying the core of their empire.
1503 CE
Moctezuma Xocoyotzin comes to the throne.
1510 CE
Spaniards begin reconnaissance along East Coast in Mexico.
1521 CE
Tenochtitlan falls when Cuahutemoc surrenders to Cortés at Tlatelolco.
1531 CE
Juan Diego experiences the apparition of the virgin of Guadalupe at Tepeyac.
1737 CE
Virgin of Guadalupe made patronness of Mexico.
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1754 CE
Pope Benedict XIV officially recognizes Our Lady of Guadalupe.
1790 CE
Aztec calendar stone, also known as sun stone, discovered beneath the street in Mexico City.
[carrxxviii.jpg]
1
CHAPTER I
Introduction: Approaching Mesoamerican Religions
Inventions and Fantasies of Mesoamerica
Around 1510 a Spanish reconnaissance expedition from the island of Cuba made contact with a small group of Maya Indians on a beach bordering territory that the people called the Land of the Turkey and the Deer. Attempting to figure out their location the Spaniards shouted, "What is this place called?" The natives replied, "Uic athan," meaning, "We do not understand your words." In an ironic turn of meaning characteristic of many changes that were to follow, the Spaniards decided to call this area Yucatan, a place name that is now the permanent designation for this eastern part of Mesoamerica. 1
Mesoamerica is a term given by scholars to designate a geographical and cultural area covering the southern two-thirds of mainland Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and parts of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. In this area the powerful processes of urban generation began with sophisticated agricultural production in the second millennium BCE and ended with the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century CE. Extensive research shows that Mesoamerica was inhabited by a wide spectrum of social groups with various levels of social integration; but the permanent, extensive ceremonial centers at the heart of social worlds resembling small-scale city-states became the most powerful social unit in a few different regions beginning around 1500 BCE. It is also clear that the earliest and most influential institutions contributing to the organization of peoples into urban centers were sacred ceremonial precincts.
2
Therefore it is useful to approach the study of Mesoamerican religions through the continuous patterns and presence for cosmovision and ritual action created and celebrated within these ceremonial centers and their city-states.
As the naming of Yucatan suggests, however, knowledge of these places and peoples was subject to inventions and fantasies that have had long-term influences. Unless we acknowledge their presence, they can silently distort our understanding of religion in Mesoamerican cultures. In fact Mesoamerica was a powerful European fantasy long before it was mapped or lived in. It was believed to be at once the Garden of Eden and the land of wild men, monstrosities, and devil worship. As the quote that opens the preface to this book indicates, there was excitement and even euphoria in Europe at the news of Columbus's landfall. This excitement extended beyond the Italian humanist Peter Martyr, as indicated by the fact that Columbus's first letter to the crown was published nine times in 1493 and twenty times by 1500. However, it was not easy or comfortable for Europeans to fit the incredible news of entirely unknown lands, peoples, empires, souls, gold, into their intellectual horizon. America became, for centuries, a "strange new world" with different languages, customs, symbols, cuisines, philosophies, manners, and landscapes. Juxtaposed to Peter Martyr's happy announcement is the cleric Cornelius De Pauw's claim, three hundred years later, that the "discovery of the New World was the most calamitous event in human history." 2
Europeans struggled in diverse ways to observe, perceive, and understand the New World of America. In the process they produced many inventions and fantasies. The many inventions and fantasies concerning Mesoamerica can be divided into two groups: fantasies about Mesoamerican geography and inventions about the nature of human beings. It is important to review these fantasies and inventions before we study the religions of the Aztecs, Mayas, their neighbors, and contemporary religious expressions. This will help us see how Mesoamerican peoples and places were both attractive and threatening to European consciousness. It is important to be aware of this powerful ambivalence concerning religions and peoples in the New World so we can lessen its influence in our approach to Mesoamerican cultures, religious practices, and creativity. It is also important to recognize the religious themes that were woven into the European inventions about Mesoamerica.
3
[carr3.jpg]
This stylized map of the Aztec world depicts Tenochtitlan where an eagle is perched on a prickly pear cactus in the center of the four quadrants. Warriors with shields and flint-studded clubs are shown next to two conquered communities, represented by smoking temples and tilted and thatched roofs. From the Codex Mendoza, a post-conquest manuscript prepared by the first viceroy of New Spain.
Mesoamerica as an Earthly Paradise
From their first sightings of the "Indies" to the end of the sixteenth century, Europeans hoped they had discovered an earthly
4
paradise filled with the Garden of Eden, the Seven Enchanted Cities of Gold, and the Fountain of Youth. These wonderful images had been deposited in European traditions for centuries, and it made sense to compare the exotic reports of the explorers with these fabulous places. It is significant that two major English literary works, Shakespeare's The Tempest and Thomas More's Utopia, reflect the fantasy that Europe was going to be renewed and transformed for the good by the settlement of the New World. We see the energy of this fantasy in Miranda's lines to Prospero in the last scene of The Tempest. In describing her "vision of the island" (at once Naples and America) she states, .
MIRANDA: O Wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is.
O, brave new world, that has such people in't.
PROSPERO: Tis new to thee. (Act 5, Scene 1)
While classical and European society had long dreamed and written about ideal social societies where human possibility could be fulfilled, Thomas More's image of Utopia (meaning "good place" and "no place") reflects the renewed sense that the dream was about to be realized in America. In fact the narrator of Utopia, Ralph Hythloday, was portrayed as the companion of Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer who was credited with concluding in 1507 that the landmass of South America was not part of Asia, but was in fact a new continent. For this insight America was named after him.
The voyages of discovery stimulated both great interest and defensiveness on the part of Europeans, whose maps of geography and of humankind were being quickly and radically challenged. On the one hand there seemed to be "newness" coming in many forms. New lands, peoples, languages, colors, animals, vegetation, and religions were appearing on the European frontier. On the other hand these novelties appeared so "other," different, and—in Europeans' views—undeveloped that the Europeans felt the peoples of the New World of America had not evolved or progressed as they believed their own culture had.
All this evoked some important questions: What is a human being? What is the difference between a civilized and a barbaric language?
5
Is Europe the center of the world? We can see this new ambivalence in a passage from the 1512 edition of' Pomponius Mela's Cosmographia. The humanist Cochlaeus wrote in the Introduction,
In our lifetime, Amerigo Vespucci is said to have discovered that New World with ships belonging to the kings of Spain and Portugal; he sailed not only beyond the torrid zone but far beyond the Tropic of Capricorn. He says Africa stretches as far: and that his New World is quite distinct from it and bigger than our Europe. Whether this is true or a lie, it has nothing. . . to do with Cosmography and the knowledge of History. For the peoples and places of that continent are unknown and unnamed to us and sailings are only made there with the greatest dangers. Therefore it is of no interest to geographers at all. 3
In other words the discovery of a new continent was not about to alter the European map of the world as presented in school textbooks!
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The landscape of the islands near Mexico and the beauty of the South American mainland stimulated stories that the earthly paradise written of in the Bible and medieval books had finally been discovered. Reports passed through European capitals that the land was indeed inhabited by humans who had not changed since the time of Adam and Eve. A quarter of a century later, in central Mexico, these hopes took the form of a belief that a millennial kingdom ruled by priests who would convert the masses of natives into Christians was about to be established. Franciscan missionaries believed they faced the opportunity to create an earthly Christian community that would fulfill New Testament prophecies and herald the return of Jesus Christ on earth. The belief that the place of the Aztec capital was central to this biblical event was symbolized by the arrival, in a grand ceremony in the spring of 1524, of twelve Franciscan priests (referred to as the "apostles") into Mexico City. It was thought they were reenacting the presence of the twelve disciples on earth and heralding the dawn of a heavenly kingdom. In subsequent decades some members of this order organized their Indian followers (whom they considered "like angels" or "soft wax" waiting for the impression of Christ on their hearts) into utopian communities to prepare the way for the end of time and the Second Coming of Jesus.
6
A related belief, sometimes preached from pulpits in Mexico, was that the Apostle Thomas, the wandering disciple of Christ, had preached in Mexico fifteen centuries before, introducing Christian teachings that had subsequently been distorted with time. Both the hope in a millennial kingdom and the belief that Saint Thomas had preached in the New World centuries before reflected the primary attitude of the Catholic church toward the native peoples. They were "souls to be saved" in a global process of conversion.
The Mesoamerican landscape was also considered an abundant resource of gold. The desire for wealth resulted in extraordinary fantasies and tragedies in the settling of New Spain. Stories of El Dorado (cities of silver and gold), and rumors of Moctezuma's buried treasure motivated otherwise rational human beings to face immense challenges and dangers in search of mineral resources for a luxurious and powerful life. Consider this eyewitness account made by Aztec survivors of the conquest.
And when they were given these presents (of gold, quetzal feathers, and golden necklaces), the Spaniards burst into smiles; their eyes shone with pleasure; they were delighted by them. They picked up the gold and fingered it like monkeys; they seemed to be transported by joy, as if their hearts were illumined and made new.
The truth is that they longed and lusted for gold. Their bodies swelled with greed, and their hunger was ravenous. They hungered like pigs for the gold . . . They were like one who speaks a barbarous tongue: everything they said was in a barbarous tongue. 4
This belief in Moctezuma's treasure of gold resurfaced again in Mexico City in 1982, when rumors spread that the archaeologists excavating the Great Aztec Temple had found the gold and were keeping it secret.
The Noble Savage/Wild Man
The most influential and degrading fantasy was the belief in the natural inferiority of the Indians. Some Europeans believed that the indigenous peoples were halfway between beasts and humans. American Indians were portrayed, in the first decades after the discovery of the New World, as cannibals, sexually promiscuous, lawless, and misdirected by pagan gods.
7
They were, in short, humans, but wild humans whose evolution and development had taken a very different direction than did the civilizations that led to European cultures.
Other Europeans, however, argued that while these beings were indeed savages, they had not yet suffered the debilitating effects of civilization associated with greed, cruelty, and bad manners. Rather than being a wild human race they felt that the Indians were noble and pure in their hearts but still savages. Research has taught us that both these images, the wild man and the noble savage, were already deeply embedded in the European mind before Mesoamerica was discovered.
A third response to the natives of Mesoamerica became apparent as the sixteenth century unfolded and more contact between the Old World and the New World took place. A number of Spaniards realized that a complex mystery, a radically different world, was being revealed, which demanded careful and sustained analysis. This group became determined to discover where the Indians fit into the scheme of creation, society, and religion. For all three groups of European interpreters, Mesoamerica became the big screen upon which Europeans could either project these fantasies and at the same time believe these projections were realities, or carry out their comparative experiments in thinking and classification.
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Treatment of native peoples became so brutal and dehumanizing, justified in part by these racial stereotypes, that in 1550 Charles V of Spain suspended all expeditions to America and summoned into session a junta of foremost theologians. This Council of the Fourteen, in Valladolid, Spain, was called to consider a debate on the question of whether it is "lawful for the King to wage war on the Indians before preaching the faith to them in order to subject them to his rule, so that afterwards, they may more easily be instructed in the faith." 5 The debate focused on two major questions: (1) What is the true nature of the Indian? and (2) Could Europeans justifiably use coercion, violence, and war to eliminate Indian religions and force the people to become Christians and obey the Spaniards?
This "Great Debate," as Lewis Hanke calls it in Aristotle and the American Indians, set in motion the written expression of ideas and racial prejudices that some people still use today in naming and interpreting Native American life and culture.
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At the heart of this conflict was a religious bias that Aztec and Maya religions were "ancient idolatries and false religion with which the devil was worshiped until the Holy Gospel was brought to this land."6
On one side of the debate was the Spanish philosopher Juan Gines de Sepulveda, admirer of Cortes, friend of Erasmus, and translator of Aristotle's Poetics into Latin. He argued in a five-hundred-page treatise that the Indians were "as inferior to Spaniards . . . as children to adults, as women to men. . . . as great a difference between them. . . as monkeys to men."7 Therefore the natural condition of the Indians was social slavery and obedience to the more rational Europeans. In other words Indians, by nature, not as a result of military weakness, deserved an eternally inferior social position in the New World. Further, any Indian refusal to obedience and the acceptance of a life of servitude was seen as the reasonable basis for using force, violence, and warfare against them. Lodged within this argument of Aristotelian logic is a destructive, grandiose conception of European superiority, perfection, and virtue. Conquerors never had it so good!
The Indian side was taken by the Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas (no native Mesoamericans were present), who had served as the Bishop of Chiapas while ministering in Maya communities. His extensive defense of the Indians contains aggressive discussions of such categories as "barbarian," "city," "Christian,"
"language," and "natural slavery" as a means to argue that preconquest Indian societies met all the Aristotelian criteria for a civil society. He argued that the people he saw every day were rational beings and should be brought to Christianity through persuasion, not violence. "Every man can become a Christian," he argued, because they already displayed a "wild" Christianity. Therefore there was no basis for a just war against the natives. Las Casas advanced the idea—which astonished many Spaniards during his day—that the American Indians compared favorably with peoples in ancient Old World civilizations, were eminently rational beings, and in fact fulfilled every one of Aristotle's requirements for the good life. He even argued that the Greeks and Romans were inferior to the Indians in child rearing, education of children, marriage arrangements, law, and architecture, and that the Indians were in some ways superior to the Spaniards.
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Two points must be made about the way this kind of debate influences our attempts to understand the aesthetic, ritual, and cosmovision of Mesoamerican religions. First, a terrible alienation has already been set in motion whenever a society debates whether others "are human and do we have the right to kill them?" Subsequent generations are faced with the task of either elaborating these positions, or eliminating them so genuine methods of understanding and caring for the "others" can be developed. These debates in Spain, and in New Spain during the sixteenth century, took place long before the settlements of the New England colonies. The categories, prejudices, and cliches about Mesoamerican peoples were often the basis for the attitudes and policies of discrimination later developed toward American Indians in North America. Second, even though we may all wish to side with las Casas, it must be noted that both he and Sepulveda argued that the Indians must be changed into Christians in order to take a fully human place in society. Las Casas argued that the most impressive feature of the Indians was their similarity to Christians! Neither the priest nor the philosopher displayed a fundamental ability to appreciate these peoples for their own cultural style and content. Yet it is important to repeat that there were a number of people like las Casas and especially Jose de Acosta, author of a remarkable work, Historia Natural y Moral de las Indies, who did believe in the essential sameness of all human minds and made admirable efforts to figure out how the Indian world worked and how it could be reasonably related to the European worldview and life-style.
Clearly all European involvements with Mesoamerican cultures were not negative. While there were widespread attempts to degrade Indian art, clothes, cuisine, length of hair, and so on, there were also expressions of curiosity and admiration among a number of theologians, artists, and priests. Subsequent centuries have shown a remarkable interest in Mesoamerican art, politics, social structure, and religious practices. As Benjamin Keen has shown in The Aztec Image in Western Thought, Mesoamerica has been much on the minds of playwrights, poets, novelists, and painters as well as scholars. Among the significant cultural figures who have been drawn to Mesoamerican cultures for political, cultural, and intellectual materials are the German naturalist, traveler, and statesman Alexander von Humboldt; philosopher and writer Johann Gottfried von Herder;
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anthropologist E. B. Tylor; poet and critic Heinrich Heine, poet William Carlos Williams, English poet John Dryden; Napoleon Bonaparte; writer Hart Crane, and others.
Two Controversies
Two major controversies have been advanced in recent years, allowing for more fruitful understanding of the Mayas, the Aztecs, and their precursors. The first was whether or not Mesoamerican peoples attained a level of social and symbolic complexity associated with urban civilizations. The second was why human sacrifice and cannibalism took place on such a large scale.
Each of these issues, one concerning the social organization of Mesoamerica, the other concerning the ritual traditions of the Aztecs and Mayas, has involved heated and sometimes fantastic formulations. For instance in his article, "Montezuma's Dinner," written in 1876, one of the founders of cultural anthropology, Lewis H. Morgan, claimed that the Aztecs were "still a breech cloth people wearing the rag of barbarism as the unmistakable evidence of their condition." The intellectual milieu of Morgan's generation was inspired by the evolutionary framework of Charles Darwin and his followers, some of whom attempted to extend the new picture of biological development to the development of societies. Morgan had developed a scheme of human society's progress through three stages—savage, barbarism, and civilized—and argued that the Aztecs and their neighbors had only developed to the stage of barbarism. He argued that the Aztec palaces described by Hernan Cortes and Bernal Díaz del Castillo were, according to Morgan (who could see it all more clearly 350 years later), "joint tenement houses" that "reflected the weakness of the Indian family and ability to face alone the struggle of life." That the barbarian chief Moctezuma might have eaten on a tablecloth scandalized Morgan, who wrote, "There was neither a political society nor a state, nor any civilization in America, when it was discovered and excluding the Eskimo, but one race of Indians, the Red Race." 8
Although Morgan's thesis was very influential well into the twentieth century, subsequent research by archaeologists and ethnohistorians have shown that it is not a question of whether Native Americans developed cities or not, but of what kinds of cities they did develop.
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In fact scholars have discovered a number of striking similarities between Mesoamerican cities and the urban civilizations of China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Nigeria, and Peru.
More recently, in 1979, a furious controversy broke out in academic journals and books concerning what Marvin Harris called the "Cannibal Kingdom" of the Aztecs. Again, as in Morgan's day, the general intellectual atmosphere influenced the interpretation of the specifics of Mesoamerican culture in a distorted fashion. Anthropological literature in the 1970s was awash with the theory of cultural materialism, an approach that tended to reduce cultural developments to the material conditions and forces in society. At the center of this debate were the extraordinary ritual practices of bloodletting, human sacrifice, and ritual cannibalism practiced by Mesoamerican peoples. The debate divided into two camps: (1) the ecological explanation, which stated that "they ate humans for protein and profit"; and (2) the cultural explanation, which stated that "they were ritually exchanging gifts in the forms of thighs, hearts, skulls, and blood." But neither of these approaches was solidly based on Aztec or Maya conceptions of matter, the human body, or human/deity relations. As we shall see Mesoamerican religions were animated, in part, by ritual bloodletting and the sacrifice of human beings, who were ritually transformed into deities. But neither of these explanations was based on a secure understanding of what these peoples actually did and what they meant when they did it. We will study these unusual practices in chapters 3 and 4.
Sources for Understanding: The Ensemble Approach to Evidence
In 1982 a Mexican journalist visiting France was given permission to study the' Aztec ritual manuscript the Tonalamatl Aubin in the confines of the rare books room at the National Library in Paris. With a certain stealth and unusual luck he stole the manuscript from the museum and fled to Yucatan, Mexico, where he was eventually tracked down by Interpol. He announced in the newspapers that the precious manuscript had been illegally taken from Mexico in 1840 and that he had returned an indigenous treasure to its homeland.
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While the two governments disputed the rightful ownership of the Aubin the journalist became something of a national hero. Today the manuscript is in Biblioteca Nacional in Mexico City.
The cultural pride associated with the recovery of the Tonalamatl Aubin symbolizes some of the problems and possibilities facing the study of Mesoamerican religions. On the one hand we are faced with the scattered remnants of the pictorial, archaeological, and literary evidence. Hernan Cortes's march from Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz to Tenochtitlan was punctuated with the defacing, whitewashing, and removal of religious monuments and images. In case after case the Spaniards destroyed the images of deities and ceremonial life, replacing them with Christian crosses on the spot. Later, in 1535, the apostolic inquisitor of Mexico, Juan de Zumarraga, ordered the collection and destruction of the pictorial records belonging to the Nahuatl cultural capital of Texcoco. Tradition tells us that the beautiful painted historical, ritual, and genealogical screenfolds were gathered into a huge pile in the local marketplace, set afire, and turned to ashes. It is a bitter fact that of the hundreds of pictorial manuscripts extant in Mesoamerica in 1517 only eleven remain today.
On the other hand extensive archaeological discoveries, excellent reproductions of the existing pictorials, recent translations of Maya script and Nahuatl documents, and an abundance of ethnohistorical writings composed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provide us with revealing accounts of religious patterns and practices from a variety of local city-states in different parts of Mesoamerica. In addition there are millions of Nahuatl- and Maya-speaking people alive today who know elements of the ancient cosmovision and practice religious rituals in ceremonial centers that have dimensions of pre-Hispanic symbolism.
Given this abundant evidence the most useful approach to the study of Mesoamerican religions is an ensemble approach: the integration of a variety of types of evidence including pictorial manuscripts like the Codex Borgia and Codex Mendoza; ritual objects like the masks and statues of the Great Aztec Temple; the Aztec Calendar Stone; myths like the Leyenda de los Soles or the teocuitl (divine song) of the birth of the Aztec war god Huitzilopochtli; carvings like the reliefs from the Maya cities of Yaxchilán and Palenque;
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archaeological material such as the excavations at Copan, Tlatelolco, Teotihuacan, Cacaxtla, or Rio Azul; ethnohistorical descriptions such as those found in Diego de Landa's Relación de las Cosas de Yucatan, Diego Duran's Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar, or extensive mythologies found, for instance, in the Maya book Popul Vuh. Rather than approaching religion from the privileged position of the star performance of one text, say a pictorial manuscript or a Spanish eyewitness account, we will combine four kinds of evidence: archaeological records, literary testimony, pictorial manuscripts, and contemporary fieldwork reports.
Archaeological Records
Archaeological discoveries have uncovered major ritual artifacts and large portions of ceremonial centers from numerous Mesoamerican cultures during the last three hundred years. In 1790, for instance, the Great Aztec Calendar Stone was uncovered below a street in Mexico City revealing the Aztec cosmogony, or story of the ages of the universe. Later, in 1841, John L. Stephens and Frank Catherwood, after exploring and drawing a number of Maya ceremonial centers long abandoned and covered by the jungle, published Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, Mexico. They startled the English-speaking world with their reports of pyramids, tombs, ball courts, and huge statues of lavishly dressed lords and gods. Stephens actually purchased the ruins of the ancient city of Copan for thirty-five dollars! In 1810 Alexander von Humboldt published valuable paintings and reports of his visits to numerous Mexican ruins and awakened in German universities and other parts of Europe a real interest in visiting and studying Mesoamerican society. Between 1900 and 1915 Mexican archaeologists uncovered the great pyramids of Teotihuacan, showing the truly monumental nature of an ancient capital. In the following decades Mexican archaeologists discovered tombs, temples, pyramids, ball courts, and palaces in such cities as Monte Alban, Xochicalco, Quirigua, Palenque, Tikal, Tula, Copan, Yaxchilan, and El Mirador. During the last twenty years a veritable revolution in our view of the ancient Maya has been accomplished, in part through archaeological and iconographic analysis of sculptured images and written inscriptions.
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Information about the daily life, political alliances, astronomical influences, crafts, dynastic privilege, and cosmovision of the Classic Maya is increasing every month. Another major development has been the excellent reproductions of the Mixtec pictorials by publishing houses in Europe. Each of these discoveries has yielded extensive information on the cities, architecture, and ritual actions in Mesoamerica.
Among the most significant archaeological discoveries in this century, reflecting the interplay between the religious imagination and urban centers, was the 1978 to 1983 excavation of the Great Aztec Temple of Tenochtitlan in Mexico City. This temple, called Coatepec or Mountain of the Serpent, was located in the center of the ancient capital. But it was not only the political and symbolic center of the Aztec empire, it was also one of the end products of a thousand years of temple architecture, religious symbolism, and ritual construction. For five years truly fabulous discoveries startled public and scholars alike as some seven thousand ritual objects were excavated within the eleven enlargements of the temple situated in the heart of Mexico City. Most of these treasures were obtained from offeratory caches including effigies of deities, ritual masks, sacrificial knives, jade beads, marine animals and seashells, human sacrifices, and major and minor sculptures, which were deposited together with an enormous amount of animal species. Significantly, a large percentage of these objects came from distant regions of the empire as well as the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. The study of this temple will serve as one of the focusing lenses for our vision and understanding of the ways communities, cities, and even empires were organized by a religious cosmovision. And in the Maya areas a series of remarkable excavations at Rio Azul and Tikal are changing the way we understand the purpose and meaning of the pyramids and tombs, which organize much of the Maya ceremonial world.
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Another exciting development is the recent decipherment of Maya writing and iconography. The so-called Mysterious Maya of the third to ninth centuries CE achieved an elaborate writing system combining phonetic and ideographic script in inscriptions that covered temples, stairways, reliefs, pictorial manuscripts, stelae (upright stones in ceremonial centers), and vases. Scholars have discovered that the Maya carved vivid narratives showing the powerful interaction of their gods, mythical time, agricultural cycles, dynasties, ancestors, and ritual life in numerous ceremonial centers.
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These elaborate narratives, not unlike episodes in a play, show fantastic scenes of bloodletting, descent into the underworld, and the enthronement of royal figures at the cosmic tree. This material shows how the sanctified character of kingship and social stratification played a major role in Mesoamerican religions.
Literary Testimony
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In addition to the remains of ceremonial centers and the iconography of the writing systems that survived the conquest, the student is fortunate to have a series of valued translations of selected written documents from the colonial period, including such rich accounts as the Popul Vuh or Book of Council of the Quiché Maya, Landa's Relación de las Cosas de Yucatan, The Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin of the Yucatan Maya, the Anales do Cuauhtitlan, the Leyenda de los Soles, the Codex Cantares Mexicanos, and the Florentine Codex from the Aztec region. Each of these documents, originally written in Quiché Maya or Nahuatl and Spanish (after the conquest), respectively, contain abundant information about the religious symbols and rites, and views of warfare, kingship, and human destiny on earth and in the afterlife as perceived in Aztec and Maya religion. For instance, this passage about the Dual God, Ometeotl, expresses one of the major elements of central Mesoamerican cosmovision:
And the Toltecs knew
that many are the heavens.
They said there are twelve superimposed divisions.
There dwells the true god and his consort.
The celestial god is called the Lord of Duality.
And his consort is called the Lady of Duality, the celestial Lady
which means
he is king, he is Lord, above the twelve heavens.
In the place of sovereignty, in the place of sovereignty, we rule;
my supreme Lord so commands.
Mirror which illumines things.
Now they will join us, now they are prepared.
Drink, drink!
The God of Duality is at work,
Creator of men,
mirror which illumines things. 9
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Here we see two major notions: (1) the organization of the cosmos into thirteen levels (the Dual God occupies the thirteenth); and (2) the division of the cosmos into a dual supernatural reality, male and female, which gives light and understanding (illumines things) to the world.
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Of extraordinary value for the study of Maya religion is the Popul Vuh, an 8,500-line document containing creation myths, sacred histories, and descriptions of ritual performance, representing a long tradition of Maya religious thought. We see that in Maya mythology the cosmos was created as an extensive ritual performance. "It takes a long performance and account to complete the emergence of all the sky-earth" within a four-quartered world, which was animated through the continual process of "sowing and dawning," that is, planting and harvesting, burial and rebirth, sunset and sunrise. This pattern of planting and rebirth, so vital to the Maya mentality, was also expressed in the periodic rebirth of the cosmos, which passed through four (or six) ages. In the Popul Vuh these cycles of repeated cosmic creations and destructions are the setting in which a number of heroes and characters face ordeals and fabulous transformations in journeys through, among other places, Xibalba, the Maya underworld. We meet such characters as Heart of Heaven, Crunching Jaguar, Maker of the Blue Green Plate, Blood Woman, Raw Thunderbolt, Plumed Serpent, and the Jaguar Twins, who perpetuated the sowing and dawning of the Maya world through their actions and misdeeds. Study of the post-conquest Popul Vuh as well as the Books of Chilam Balam (books of the Spokesman of the Jaguar), and recent research in contemporary Maya and Mixtec communities herald an awareness that the religious worldviews of the Maya and the Mixtec were not destroyed at the conquest. As we shall see in chapter 5 a number of ritual practices similar to those of the ancient Maya are still carried out today.
The major role played by war and the warrior in the religious worldview of Mesoamerica is richly portrayed in monumental architecture and small sculptured objects as well as pictorial and literary documents. In most parts of Mesoamerica, war and the aesthetic, ritual character of the warrior was overtly religious. Great care was given to regulate, through art and aesthetic expression, the profound transformation a human being underwent in training, costuming, combat, victory, defeat, sacrifice, and the afterlife.
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These actions were guided by a cosmovision saturated with military motifs. For instance the patron deity of the Aztecs, Huitzilopochtli, was the model warrior who, after being magically dressed in his power costume, slew hundreds of enemy deities at the sacred mountain at the center of the world. It was "said that he set men's hearts on fire and gave them courage for war." 10 The religious significance of war in Aztec thought is shown when the birth of this god is immediately followed by his transformation into a ferocious warrior.
Perhaps die richest resource for the study of central Mesoamerican religions is the Florentine Codex, a twelve-volume encyclopedic study carried out by the Franciscan priest Bernardino de Sahagun within decades after the fall of the Aztec capital. Gods, ceremonies, creation myths, costumes, royalty, animals, medical practices, and the cosmic meaning of the human body are presented in rich and vivid detail. For instance we have many descriptions of how teotl (gods, in Nahuatl) and teotl ixiptla (human images of gods) were dressed for their ceremonial events. Here is a description of how the ixiptla of Xilonen, goddess of the tender maize, was dressed.
On the tenth day, then the woman (who was the likeness of) Xilonen died. Her face was painted in two colors; she was yellow about her lips, she was chili-red on her forehead. Her paper cap had ears at the four corners; it had quetzal feathers in the form of maize tassels; (she wore) a plaited neck band. Her neck piece consisted of many strings of green stone; a golden disc went over it. (She had) her shift with the water lily (flower and leaf design), and she had her skirt with the water lily (flower and leaf design. She had) her obsidian sandals, her carmine-colored sandals. Her shield and her rattle stick were chili-red. In four directions she entered. . . 11
In this description we see that the image of the goddess is a living symbol of fertility and powerful objects (obsidian) that, like corn, come out of the earth.
Another important resource combining literary and pictorial information are the Relaciones Geographica, which described political, social, and geographical realities of pre-Hispanic and colonial society. Often, these documents included maps painted in native and colonial styles.
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Pictorial Manuscripts
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The most beautiful resources for the study of Mesoamerican religions are the eleven surviving preconquest pictorials drawn and painted on bark or deerskin. These colorful documents show that Mesoamerican peoples conceived of time and space as thoroughly intertwined. It was the function of ritual life acted out in the ceremonial centers to regulate and restore the detailed interaction of spatial directions, colors, and towns with time periods, anniversaries, births, deaths, journeys, ancestors, and war.
These documents and the sculptured tradition clearly indicate that there were different degrees of writing in Mesoamerican culture, including a spectrum moving from pictorial signs to phonetic scripts. In central Mexico screenfolds and codices show that the cosmological, genealogical, ritual, and historical information was communicated to the community by a combination of pictorial sign and oral interpreter who used images as the basis for verbal presentation. In this way they were storybooks; pictorial books used for the oral description and interpretation of genealogies, town histories, astronomical events, and ritual prescriptions. The pictorial signs and phonetic syllabary depicting the gods, nature, places, kings, warriors, bodily parts, and ritual objects were combined with oral traditions to direct ritual life in all its aspects. This communication of cosmovision and ceremonial life was controlled by the ruling classes.
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These documents, plus the remarkable postconquest pictorials (with commentaries in Spanish and sometimes Italian) such as the Codex Mendoza, display a powerful obsession with the cycles of agriculture and stars (macrocosmos and microcosmos) and the forces and meaning of sacred time and sacred place. Time was closely observed and each day was considered loaded with celestial and divine influences that determined the inner character and destiny of a person and actions carried out at specific times. This pattern of timekeeping is displayed in the puzzling manuscript called the Dresden Codex, a ritual almanac depicting the detailed intimacy of humans, deities, and celestial bodies.
Contemporary Fieldwork Reports
A fourth resource for the study of Mesoamerican religions is contemporary fieldwork carried out in many indigenous communities.
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New studies into the calendars, processions, mythology, dream life, healing practices, clothes, market systems, and syncretistic cults reveal both continuities with and changes from the pre-Columbian world.
Given this remarkable ensemble of resources for approaching Mesoamerican religions, what was the religious character of the ancient world of ceremonial centers?
Religion as Worldmaking, Worldcentering, Worldrenewing
As we look at the map of Mesoamerican traditions we see the many locations of different cultures and ceremonial centers. In fact Mesoamerican history was characterized by an eccentric periodicity of creativity, stability, and settlement. The urban tradition was not controlled by one or even several capitals during its distinguished history. Ecological variation and instability as well as intense competition between city-states resulted in periodic collapses of regional capitals, followed by periods of reorganization in which particular ceremonial capitals dominated specific regions. This pattern of order / collapse / recentering / order /collapse and so on was stabilized by certain distinguished periods of creative order. These periods and places of creative order include the Olmecs (1200-300 BCE); Iztapan Culture (300 BCE-100 CE); Classic Maya (200-900 CE); Kaminaljuyu (500 BCE-800 CE); Monte Alban (350-1200 CE): Mixtec (1200-1521 CE); Toltec (1000-1250 CE): and Aztec (1300-1521 CE).
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What was the social and religious character of these major periods of cultural integration? In all the cultures listed above three essential processes animated the world of the ceremonial center: worldmaking, worldcentering, and worldrenewing. These processes often interacted to form the religious traditions of Mesoamerican capitals.
Worldmaking
In every case society was organized by and around ceremonial centers modeled on a vision of the structure of the universe. The model of the structure of the universe was contained in the treasured mythology of each community, which told how the world was made and how supernatural forces organized the cosmos.
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These ceremonial centers controlled what one scholar has called an ecological complex consisting of agricultural production and technological potentials, including art, trading networks, and movements in human population. Each such community, called (in the Aztec world) a tlatocayotl (domain of the tlatoani or chief speaker), had a ceremonial precinct, often with monumental architecture that served as the ritual theater for acting out the ways in which the world was made and would be remade. Each of the ceremonial centers was a pivot of the universe, acting as a magnet drawing all manner of goods, peoples, and powers into its space.
An example of this magnetic power is described in the sixteenth-century Spanish eyewitness account of Díaz del Castillo:
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To go back to the facts, it seems to me that the circuit of the great pyramid was equal to that of six large town lots, such as they measure in this country, and from below up to where a small tower stood, where they kept their idols, it narrowed. . . There was a report that at the time they began to build that great pyramid, all the inhabitants of that mighty city had placed as offerings in the foundation, gold and silver and pearls and precious stones, and had bathed them with blood of the many Indian prisoners of war who were sacrificed, and had placed there every sort and kind of seed that the land produces, so that their Idols should insure victories and riches, and large crops. 12
By giving precious offerings to the axis mundi, the center of the world of the community, their world got made and remade in terms of agriculture and war.
Perhaps the best example of worldmaking I can use to clarify the term comes from the Aztec myth of the creation of the Fifth Age, the age in which they lived. We are told that before the present world was made, "When no sun had shown and no dawn had broken," the gods gathered in the great ceremonial city of Teotihuacan (Abode of the Gods) to create a new sun. For four days they did penances in the cosmic darkness around a divine fire, which was burning for the duration. Two deities, Nanauatzin (the Pimply One) and Tecuciztecatl (Lord of the Snails) hurled themselves into the fire. The gods sat looking in all directions to see the sun rise. One god, Quetzalcoatl, faced toward the east and there the sun rose: The world was now made.
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[carr21.jpg]
An artist's reconstruction of the Maya ceremonial center, called the Acropolis, at Copán during the Late Classic period. (From An Album of Maya Architecture by Tatiana Proskouriakoff. New edition copyright @ 1963 by the University of Oklahoma Press.)
A ceremonial center (Teotihuacan) and a celestial event (sunrise) are linked and aligned uniting heaven and earth. But it was still not centered. The sun was not on its course through the sky, because "when the sun burst forth, he appeared to be red; he kept swaying from side to side." The world has been made with the appearance of the sun, but it had no stability, no process, no center. It has been made through sacrifice, but as we shall see, the world still needed to be centered.
Worldcentering
The cultural world was made and ordered at the ceremonial centers through the creative work of human beings. Human beings acted as the "centering" agents of cultural and religious life in two decisive ways. First, the human body was considered the nexus and unifying structure of the universe. In cosmology, ritual, social structure, and art it is a religious conception of the human body that gives Mesoamerican religions a powerful focus.
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Second, the world was centered through the work of sacred specialists and royal lineages. Each of these communities operated under the religious authority of an elite corps of priests, rulers, and warriors, who controlled the ritual actions and social groups of farmers, warriors, artists, astronomers, builders, traders, and commoners. This elite community took charge of the goods, peoples, and powers who were drawn into the villages, cities, and capitals and redistributed them according to their own needs. While these leadership groups also insured the well-being of the masses by dispensing food and technology, organizing rituals, and warfare, they made decisive moves to increase their own luxuries and powers in a highly disproportionate way. This led to an extraordinary focus on elite human beings.
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Let's return to the myth of the creation of the Fifth Age. How did the cosmos become "centered"? That is, how did it find a pattern, orbit, process? Faced with the threatening condition in which the sun "could only remain still and motionless," the remaining gods committed themselves to a course of action that had a profound influence on the human communities that were created later. One elite god, Ecatl, was chosen to sacrifice all the remaining gods to set the sun in motion. Afterward he "arose and exerted himself fiercely and violently as he blew. At once he could move him, who thereupon went on his way" (that is, the sun moved along its orbit). It is through further sacrifice of extraordinary beings that the world becomes centered and regular as the sun moves along its path, dividing time into night and day.
Worldrenewal
The entire style of life of these hierarchical societies was organized by a worldview emphasizing the daily, monthly, and yearly rejuvenation of society and the cosmos. This rejuvenation depended on a complicated range of ritual performances that replayed the myths and images of the origins and transformations of the cosmos and its many parts. These rituals and mythic traditions were not mere repetitions of ancient ways. New rituals and mythic stories were produced to respond to ecological, social, and economic changes and crises.
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The priests, operating within the sacred confines of their ceremonial centers, used complex calendar systems, divination, and stargazing to direct these extraordinary public rituals to communicate the structure and dynamics of the universe. As we shall see in several upcoming chapters, astronomy played a major role in the calendrical, ritual, and military traditions of Mesoamerica. As with the celestial cycles, so the world of the humans, animals, and plants was renewed constantly within a tight system of ritual displays, pilgrimages, dances, songs, combats, sacrifices, and coronations.
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And just as the cosmos was made (sunrise) and centered (sunpath) through sacrifice, so it is renewed through daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly sacrifices of different kinds. These sacrifices take many forms, including bleeding, heart sacrifice, drinking, sexual abstinence, and expending your money on food for the Day of the Dead.
These three major elements of the ceremonial center and celestialevent (worldmaking), human creativity and sacrifice in the hands of an elite (worldcentering), and the commitment to rejuvenation (worldrenewing) will guide the discussion in each of the subsequent chapters. Let us now turn to the history of Mesoamerican religions in order to view its chronology and creative periods.
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CHAPTER II
History and Cosmovision in Mesoamerican Religions
And so then they put into words
the Creation,
the shaping
of our first mother and father.
Only yellow corn
and white corn were their bodies.
Only food were the legs
and arms of man.
Popul Vuh 1
In many ways Mesoamerica is the most different of the world's early civilizations. It arose in a land where communication was exceptionally difficult and natural disaster was frequent; its occupants had a wealth of domestic plants but few domestic animals. This meant that not only economics but also the metaphors of daily life, or of religion and politics, were different from those of other civilizations: there could neither be "a bull of heaven" nor a "lamb of God" in ancient Mexico. For all these reasons, Mesoamerica is a critical case for developing and evaluating general ideas about world view as a context for understanding the developing cultural complexity and for the importance of what we term "religion" in the rise of the first hierarchical polities.
Henry T. Wright 2
Where did the peoples and cultures of Mesoamerica originate? This question has challenged scholar and layperson alike from the earliest contacts with indigenous American peoples to the twentieth century. Theologians in the sixteenth century, shocked by the sudden appearance of masses of peoples never before imagined, asked, "Are they descendants of Adam and Eve?" Some Europeans, troubled by how to treat the Indians, wondered, "When Christ died for the sins of humankind, did he also die for the natives of America?"
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In anthropological terms Europeans asked, "How do we take people who are scarcely human, or only half human, and teach them to become fully human, as we are?" Central to these questions was the search for the original geographical and cultural homeland of the Aztecs, Mayas, and their ancestors.
Within academic studies it was once thought that native Mesoamericans migrated from Egypt, bringing artistic, political, and religious ideas and symbols with them. The fact that both civilizations produced what appear to be pyramids and hieroglyphics was used to argue that Mesoamerican culture originated in the Old World and traveled to the Americas by various means. Other scholars have argued that they came from Asia, either sailing in Kon-Tiki-like boats across the Pacific or gradually migrating down the western coast of America, bringing elements of civilization that served as the basis for the ceremonial centers, calendars, and rituals of the Mayas and Aztecs. Recently some scholars have argued that Asian cultures strongly influenced the Costa Rican area of Mesoamerica, bringing Buddhist artistic and theological traditions to the New World three thousand years ago. This type of approach, called the diffusionist approach, argues that the great civilizations of the Americas were developed by migrating peoples who left original centers of cultures and transplanted the roots of civilization (monumental architecture, writing, calendrics) in American soil. This approach is largely based on a series of similarities (pyramids, art motifs, toys, cotton) found in Cambodia, India, China, and the Americas.
One extreme example of diffusionist thought very popular in the nineteenth century claimed that the lost continent of Atlantis or Mu was the original home of ancient American civilizations. Using Plato's description of the sinking of the legendary continent of Atlantis, proponents of the submerged continent theory argued that the aboriginal Americans saved themselves in the nick of time and brought to America their great civilization. An English nobleman, Lord Kingsborough, spent much of his family fortune trying to demonstrate that the native inhabitants of Mesoamerica were the descendants of the thirteen lost tribes of Israel. Perhaps the most fantastic formulation, popular in the twentieth century, is Erik von Daniken's claim that ancient astronauts brought the genius of extraterrestrial civilizations to ancient Mesoamerica.
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The theory of cultural diffusion raises many interesting questions for the researcher interested in tracing the history of ancient transportation and communication patterns. But similarities in cultures do not demonstrate close or significant contact. This is especially the case when we realize that not a single object from Asian cultures has been discovered in the Americas. And many objects vital in Old World culture, such as the wheel, the cart, the plough, iron, and stringed instruments, are missing in the pre-Columbian New World.
In the case of the Americas such ridiculous formulations as von Daniken's, Kingsborough's, and some others may conceal a powerful ethnocentric bias. The implication of some diffusionist interpretations is that Native Americans were not capable of achieving extraordinary levels of cultural creativity on their own but needed the stimulus and remnants of superior foreigners to become civilized.
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Scholars have clearly shown that Mesoamerican civilizations, in fact all New World civilizations and cultures, developed as a result of cultural creativity indigenous to the Americas. This is not to deny that impressive similarities between Old and New World cultures exist. Monumental architectural structures, which we refer to as pyramids, existed in Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico, Guatemala, and other parts of Mesoamerica. But the so-called pyramids of Mesoamerica were actually huge platforms constructed to support temples, which together served as theatrical stages upon which were acted out the pomp, cosmovision, and political spectacles of the city. It is true that some Mesoamerican pyramid/temples served (as in the case of Egypt) as royal tombs and monuments to ancestors, but it is more likely that they were primarily places of public performance of religious ceremonies linking the living and the dead in a day-to-day fashion. Also, in Mesoamerica, specific pyramid/temples could be utilized by successive rulers for exterior displays of cosmovision and politics as well as for interior burials of individuals and treasure.
Another major difference between the monumental cities of the Old and New Worlds was the intricate and widespread 260-day ritual calendar so influential among many Mesoamerican peoples. Although it appears that limited contact between Asian cultures and the peoples of Mesoamerica took place, the Olmecs, Huastecs, Mayas, Tlaxcalans, Toltecs, Mixtecs, Otomis, Aztecs, and all other indigenous cultures developed their own cultural processes independent of significant contributions from outside civilizations.
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These cultural processes were concentrated and crystallized in the numerous ceremonial centers, city-states, and cosmovisions that organized Mesoamerican society.
In this chapter we will present an overview of the history of Mesoamerican religions from two points of view. We will describe the patterns of worldmaking, worldcentering, and worldrenewing in chronological order beginning with the rise of agriculture, proceeding through the three major stages of historical development called the Formative Period (1800 BCE-200 CE), the Classic Period (200-900 CE), and the Post-Classic Period (900-1500 CE). And we will also emphasize the creative moments and major contributions to the formation of Mesoamerican religions.
Plants and the Sacred Dead
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Mesoamerica was a geographical and cultural area covering the southern two-thirds of Mexico and significant portions of Central America. In this extensive region human populations developed intensive agricultures, which served as the partial basis for the rise of urban civilizations. It is evident that human populations from northeast Asia (groups of Mongoloid peoples) entered the New World as early as 50,000 BCE and as late as the time of Christ over and along the Bering Strait land bridge that connected Siberia and Alaska. These hunting and gathering peoples migrated southward and eventually reached the Basin of Mexico by 20,000 BCE. They carried a circumpolar and circumboreal hunting culture into the Americas, which included shamanism and ceremonial ties to animals and their spirits. Various human physical types speaking many languages migrated into North America and Mesoamerica; over 250 languages for the area covering Mexico and Guatemala have been identified.
As these peoples moved into Mesoamerica, they encountered a geography of contrasts and wonders, highlands and lowlands, with an astonishing variety of ecosystems. High mountain ranges, periodically volcanic, form high valley systems and plateaus where major cultural centers developed at different periods in history. These high, mountainous areas sweep down on the eastern and western sides into lowland areas that give way to the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, and the Pacific Ocean.
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One writer has compared sections of Mesoamerica to the shape of a pyramid with temples and open spaces on top. The plateaus and high valleys as well as the fertile areas of the lowlands served as important centers of pre-Hispanic cultures.
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The most creative cultural event in the pre-urban history of Mesoamerica was the control of food energy contained in plants. As the quotation that begins this chapter indicates, the natives compared the creation of human life with the creation of corn: The substance of the human body consisted of yellow and white corn! The domestication of agriculture, fundamental to the eventual rise of permanent villages, ceremonial centers, and social differentiation developed slowly between 6500 BCE and 2000 BCE as peoples learned to plant and harvest corn, beans, squash, avocados, cotton, and chilies. All of these plants were perceived as imbued with sacred powers and came to play important roles in the mythology, calendar, ritual, costumes, ancestor worship, and performances of Mesoamerican religions. Centuries later, in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, corn was one of the rewards for the good citizen who acted diligently. In the ceremony Teotleco (The Gods Arrive) the ritual begins when a priest provided
a small basket of dried grains of maize, or else four ears of maize: in some places, three ears of maize; if [the householders] were very poor, it was two ears of maize that he gave them. . . . And no one just idly ate the maize toasted on the embers; only those who were diligent, acceptable, careful, wakeful, who trusted not too much their own diligence. 3
Archaeologists have discerned that during the last part of these agricultural periods people developed some of the ritual relationships to the human body that eventually became central to the religions of numerous Mesoamerican peoples. These included shamanism, special offerings to the dead, the dismemberment of human beings, sacrifice, and cremation. Cultures practiced rituals dedicated to the hunting and restoration of animals and their spirits as well as to the planting, fertilization, and harvesting of plants. It appears that some powerful beliefs in the longevity of the human spirit and an afterlife were present. Some humans were buried with companions whose involuntary death provided assistance to the leader or master in the world of supernatural entities.
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Around 2500 BCE multiple forms of ritual and domestic pottery, including cooking utensils, clay figurines of women, animals, and deities, were developed in central Mexico; and by 1800 BCE the stage was set for what Eric Wolf called "villages and holy towns," in which some of the basic cultural religious patterns for the next three thousand years were established.
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The subsequent period of cultural history has been designated by historians as the Formative Period (see Chronology). Between 1800 BCE and 200 CE cultures began to form permanent ceremonial centers containing impressive monumental, ceremonial architecture including pyramids, palaces, tombs, and spacious outdoor ritual precincts. It was within these sacred precincts, examples of what we have called worldmaking, that ritual performances were acted out and directed by priestly elites who managed the integration of economic, political, artistic, astronomical, and spiritual forces. One pervasive performance was ritual dancing in community ceremonial centers. Archaeologists working in Oaxaca, Mexico, have uncovered figurines depicting dance societies as well as conch-shell trumpets and turtle-shell drums dating from 1200 BCE to 600 BCE. The dancers are dressed as fantastic animals and as jaguars, birds, and pumas reflecting the sacralization of human-animal relationship. Dance societies dressed in these animal motifs were active when the Spaniards arrived and are still performing in indigenous communities and for tourists today.
It is also apparent that important private and public ceremonies of ritual bloodletting were carried out. We know that in the Classic (200-900CE) and Post-Classic (900-1500 CE) periods priests drew blood from tongues, earlobes, thighs, and sexual organs using fish spines, maguey thorns, obsidian blades, or, in the case of Mayan lords, knotted strings of thorns. Some of these bloodletting instruments have been found in ruins of private households of public ceremonial precincts in Oaxaca between 1200 BCE and 600 BCE. These discoveries indicate that ceremonial centers were within domestic dwellings as well as in the larger community spaces. 4
It is also important that a number of public ceremonial buildings in the Oaxaca region share astronomical orientations (that is, they are aligned toward horizon points where sun, moon, Venus, or other celestial bodies appear) with ceremonial structures hundreds of miles away.
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This indicates a shared cosmovision that influenced ceremonial architecture and ritual very early in Mesoamerican history. This combination of ceremonial center (microcosmos) and astronomical event (macrocosmos) is what helps create order in the world.
The art and architecture of the earliest Mesoamerican civilization, called the Olmecs by archaeologists, shows that religious ideas and symbols were not only mental activities, but rather tied up with daily work, trade, social order, and warfare.
The Olmec World: Jaguars and Giants in Stone
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One of the real challenges for students of religion in general and Mesoamerica in particular is to understand cultures that did not produce what we consider writing. Many Mesoamerican cultures were primarily oral in their modes of expression. Others, such as the Mixtec, the Maya, and the Aztec, produced pictorial systems with varying degrees of symbolic expressions including pictograms, ideograms, and phonetic script. The range of expression in Mesoamerica is so complex and varied that it has challenged scholars to rethink the category of "writing" and to reevaluate the status of cultural superiority that has too long accompanied it.
In addition to the important task of interpreting oral traditions, we are often faced with the need to work with "mute texts"—stones, sacred stones, ceremonial architecture, pottery, and even human and animal bones. The most vivid example of this situation is the Olmec culture (Olmec means "people from the land of the rubber trees"), whose scattered ceremonial centers took shape around 1800 BCE and collapsed by 300 BCE. The name Olmec was used by an indigenous group living in this area at the time of the conquest. It is not known what the ancient community called itself.
The social history of permanent Mesoamerican ceremonial centers begins around 1800 BCE with the rise of the Olmec Style of art and architecture found in a variety of sacred precincts and caves, originating in the lowland regions of southern Vera Cruz and western Tabasco near the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. This region is one of the richest archaeological zones in the world, probably having the highest density of sites per square mile in all of Mesoamerica.
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One of many colossal basalt heads carved by the Olmecs at ceremonial centers on Mexico's gulf coast. This monolith is nearly three meters in height and was transported over fifty miles from its quarry site. Monument 1 from San Lorenzo, c. 1200 BCE. (Photograph courtesy of Michael Coe.)
Called the "Mother Culture" of later Mesoamerican civilizations by the Mexican artist and scholar Miguel Covarrubias, the Olmecs set in motion certain religious patterns that were elaborated and developed by later peoples. Evidence of these patterns is found in a glorious tradition of stone carvings, rock paintings, and religious imagery for us to admire and interpret.
The most impressive pattern of Olmec culture was the manner in which the earth was reshaped as a means of religious expression. The Olmec media for art and symbolic expression were jade, basalt, clay, and the earth itself in the forms of caves, hills, and artificial volcanoes such as was used at La Venta to represent an earth pyramid.
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This stone carving depicts a person seated in a stylized cave, symbolizing the earthmonster. The emerging scroll represents wind or the sound of thunder, while precious raindrops, representing fertility, fall from the clouds. Monument 1 EI-Rey, Chalcatzingo, Morelos, Mexico c. 600 BCE. (Courtesy of Michael Coe.)
Each of these media was transformed to represent the realities of social hierarchy and religious imagination. Caves became the setting for cave paintings and rituals of mythic events while cliffs became the place of carvings of human-animal-spirit relations. The ceremonial centers were assemblages of sacred spaces made of redesigned earthly materials arranged on and within the earth. This tie to the earth is reflected in Olmec mythology expressing themes of emergence from caves, human-jaguar transformation, and the relations of animals to rulers. We can see the tissues of nature-human relations in the bas relief from Chalcatzingo where an Olmec ruler or man-god is seated in a cave holding a box surrounded by clouds, water, jade (circular motifs), vegetation, and the stone representing the earth itself. And in at least one case, archaeologists have found large mosaics layed out to form a jaguar mask buried in multiple layers beneath the surface of the earth.
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The Olmec heartland of the coastal region has been compared to the "fertile crescent" of Mesopotamia due to its extraordinary potential for corn farming and its rich supply of fish, aquatic birds, frogs, and toads. In this region of abundant natural resources the Olmecs built permanent ceremonial centers accompanied by an alluring art style appearing in jade miniatures, pottery, stelae (upright standing stones with carved imagery), and large sculpture. The culture managed to spread its religious political and. artistic conceptions up into the central Mexican highlands, into the western lowlands, and as far south as El Salvador through the control of long-distance trade routes and exploration.
Although we cannot tell if the Olmecs achieved territorial control over large parts of Mesoamerica, it is clear that their artistic and conceptual style was spread far and wide. This style included the ritual calendar and ritual burials, and a profound relationship with animals whose visages permeate their art. In fact Olmec ceremonial centers were ornamented with a number of fantastic religious motifs depicting animal-human relations. Such combinations as human-jaguar, jaguar-bird, bird-jaguar-caiman (alligator), jaguar-caiman-fish, and caiman-human appear in different sites. Rattlesnakes, fer-de-lances, harpy eagles, and monkeys were also considered manifestations of the sacred sky, earth, and underworld. It is possible that these carefully carved, sometimes precious stone images reflect the belief in spirit helpers who took the form of powerful, aggressive, even dangerous animals serving in the practice of shamans. We know from later Maya and Aztec periods that real and fantastic animals or entities became intimately associated with all individuals. They could function as the spiritual guides of sacred specialists, warriors, priests, and the ruling class.
One site that depicts early conceptions of Mesoamerican deities was San Lorenzo, which was fully formed by 1200 BCE. It was suddenly destroyed around 900 BCE, when many of its religious and historical images were mutilated and buried. In addition to the over two hundred ceremonial mounds identified at this site, the most astonishing discovery was the six colossal stone heads carved with powerful simplicity depicting individual human faces with mongoloid features, each wearing a helmet like headgear.
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Up to nine feet in height, weighing 40 tons, these heads, along with a number of other huge stone monuments, are carved from rocks in the Tuxtla mountains over 45 miles from the site. Their transportation to San Lorenzo over land and water, as well as their artistic sophistication, reflects both a complex level of social organization and a deep concern for religious symbolism. It is difficult to understand the meaning of these giant stone heads, which were in some cases lined up at the edge of a ceremonial area. It has been suggested that they represent the heads of dead warriors or portraits of rulers, whose images guarded the sacred precincts from invaders. It is likely that they represent the Olmec concern with royal genealogy by memorializing rulers who appear as gigantic beings influencing daily life.
Another impressive site is the ceremonial center of La Venta, where jaguar motifs and giant heads sculpted in stone embroider a small, swampy, stoneless island. In the heart of this carefully planned site stands Mesoamerica's first great pyramid. It is a fluted, cone-shaped natural structure 420 feet in diameter and 100 feet high, with its outward surface consisting of alternating rises and depressions that give it the appearance of a volcano. Nearby, archaeologists found the buried remains of two juveniles heavily covered with thick cinnabar pigment accompanied by offerings of jade beads and stingray spines. This ceremonious concern for the dead buried near the heart of the sacred precinct shows a special relation between certain human groups and the axis mundi. This combination of human and temple at the heart of a settlement indicates the early pattern of what we have called worldcentering. In a number of later cultures the royal dead were buried in tombs within the sacred precincts, suggesting a special relation between sacred space, ceremonial structures, the earth, the dead, and the underworld. A number of other spectacular caches, perhaps offerings to the gods, containing jade, jaguar mosaics, and pierced concave mirrors made of Iron ore, were excavated at La Venta.
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One of the greatest religious achievements of Mesoamerica was the invention of a ritual calendar of extraordinary accuracy. At a third major site, Tres Zapotes, all of the Olmec artistic and religious characteristics, plus one, were combined in the sacred center.
The most famous monument of Tres Zapotes is called stela C. It contains a jaguar monster mask on one side and a column of bars and dot numerals on the other. However, it has been determined that this is a post-Olmec monument containing bars and dots that have been deciphered as the date 31 BCE.
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The suggestion is that the Olmec and not the Maya, as previously thought, invented, toward the end of their history, the great calendar system called the long count, which was instrumental in organizing ritual and social life in parts of Mesoamerica.
Astronomy and the Sacred Ball Game
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One of the most intriguing types of ceremonial centers was the sacred ball court (tlachco in Nahuatl, Pok-ta-pok in Maya) where the ball game was played. Spread throughout Mesoamerica, this ritual tradition has one of its most impressive expressions at the site of El Tajin in modern-day Vera Cruz, where it was developed as a major cosmic symbol between 200 CE and 500 CE. Typically the game was played on a ball court laid out like a capital letter I with a central narrow gallery or playing court leading at both ends to short perpendicular spaces. This was a stylized representation of the four-quartered universe joined by the central or fifth region. The court and the game constituted a cosmogram (image of the cosmos) and religious drama. Detailed carvings of the ball game ritual from El Tajin show the dress, action, and religious meaning of this game. It appeared that on certain occasions the losing warriors, or at least a representative, was publicly and ritually sacrificed and beheaded in the shrine.
Later, in Aztec times, it appears that the playing court represented the narrow passageway of the underworld through which the sun traveled at night. The game represented a cosmic struggle between competing factions to see which group could bring the sun out of the underworld by hitting the ball through one of the two perforated rings on the sides of the court. The ball court, then, is a kind of temple in which the solar drama is acted out in human time and space. The sacrifice of the losing player may represent the offering of energy in the form of blood and human life in order to give birth to the new sun.
Fortunately the Dominican priest Diego Duran, who lived in New Spain between 1545 and 1588, asked his native parishioners about the native ball game. He wrote,
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So that we can understand its form and begin to appreciate the skill and dexterity with which this game was played, it must be noted that ball courts existed in all the illustrious, civilized, and powerful cities and towns, in those ruled by either the community or the lords, the latter stressing [the game] inordinately. A regular competition existed between the two [types of communities]. [The ball courts] were enclosed with ornate and handsomely carved walls. The interior floor was of stucco, finely polished and decorated with figures of the god and demons to whom the game was dedicated and whom the players held to be their patrons in that sport. These ball courts were larger in some places than in others.
Duran describes the walls, sculptures, and crowds this way:
The height of the wall was anywhere between eight and eleven feet high, running all around [the court]. Because of heathen custom, around [the wall] were planted wild palms or trees which give red seeds, whose wood is soft and light. Crucifixes and carved images are made of it today. The surrounding walls were adorned with merlons or stone statues, all spaced out. [These places] became filled to bursting when there was a game of all the lords, when warlike activities ceased, owing to truces or other causes, thus permitting [the games]. 5
Two other important religious innovations, astronomical alignments and pictorial narratives, took place by the time the ceremonial centers of Monte Albán (600-300 BCE) and Izapa (200 BCE-l00 CE) were formed. At the heart of over two hundred permanent sites near the present-day city of Oaxaca in southern Mexico stood the elaborately built Zapotec hilltop center of Monte Albán. It consisted of temples, courtyards, ball courts, and tombs for elites scattered throughout the site. Among its many characteristics are the alignment of buildings with particular astronomical events plus the appearance of writing and the elaboration of the long count calendar system. Several buildings were built so as to face a particular horizon appearance of a celestial body or a constellation. This relationship of the orientation of ceremonial buildings to astronomical events such as the solstices, equinoxes, and Venus cycles is of major importance in our understanding of cosmovision. It shows that early in the architectural record Mesoamericans were expressing the conviction that human and cultural spaces (such as homes, pyramids, temples, ball courts) had to be in tune or aligned with celestial bodies and their patterns.
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A ceremonial ball court of the Late Classic Maya site of Copan, in Honduras. (Courtesy of Linda Schele, photographer.)
This integration of sky and earth and human society in Mesoamerica has been intensely studied by archaeoastronomers such as Anthony Aveni who has shown that in some cases ceremonial buildings were constructed to mark the passage of Venus from its first to its last appearance in the Venus cycle, above the horizon. We will see more of this relationship of stargazing and temple alignment in later cultures.
Recently archaeologists have realized that Iztapa, in Guatemala, which contained over seventy-five pyramid mounds and a large number of stone stelae, was a major transition point between the Olmec style and the Maya achievement. Of particular importance are the pictorial narratives, stories carved in stone depicting human and celestial forces. We see humans and deities involved in battles, sacrifices (including decapitation), and rituals, all associated with a stylized sacred world tree. Many of these religious ideas and actions were to find their most brilliant expression among the Classic Maya, who now entered the stage.
The Classic Maya: Kings and Cosmic Trees
The astonishing achievements of the Classic Maya civilization have inspired awe and admiration in all who come to study them.
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A number of religious innovations appear to crystallize in Maya society becween 200 CE and 900 CE, a period designated as the Classic Maya. Among the major elements of the Maya achievement were the mathematically ingenious calendar; lavishly decorated ceremonial centers; a heightened conception of the royal person; writing; and a complex mythology of the underworld and cosmic regeneration. It is also amazing that these city-states and achievements developed in the forests and Jungle environments, where civilizations have usually had a difficult time taking hold. Called the "Mysterious Maya" for generations, they were once believed to have been a peace-loving civilization of stargazing priests whose theological vision should be imitated by modern people. Recent studies have revealed a more typical civilization motivated by warfare, the desire to dominate hierarchies, elaborate ceremonies associated with lineage and ancestors and complex esoteric religious ideas. One of the greatest mysteries about the Classic Mayas is the Maya collapse: the rapid and near total collapse of many of their ceremonial centers during the short period of 830 CE to 930 CE. It appears that a pervasive series of crises shattered the Maya world, stimulated by interlocking collapses in the agricultural, ceremonial, and political systems that held the society together.
The character of the Classic Maya world is well represented in a small jade plaque discovered in 1864 by workmen digging a canal in eastern Guatemala. Called the Leiden Plate because eventually it was taken to Leiden, Holland, this 8½ -inch object contains two typical images of Maya life. On one side we find a long count calendar date corresponding to 320 CE, while on the other side we see an extravagantly dressed Maya lord stepping on a midget-sized captive cowering underneath him. This combination of sacred time, warfare, and social hierarchy carved in fine jade illustrates the integration of vital elements of the Maya achievement.
One of the most creative religious achievements of the Classic Maya was the long count calendar. Although this calendric system had earlier origins based on intense astronomical observations, it was the Maya who elaborated the cosmological conviction that human life would be most favorable if it mirrored the mathematically expressible cycles of the heavens.
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This painted wall depicts the arraignment of prisoners by a victorious procession of elites and warriors. The prisoners are being tortured by having their fingernails plucked before their final sacrifice. Structure 1, Room 2, Bonampak, Chiapas, Mexico, 8th century CE. (Photograph courtesy of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. Photograph by F. P. Orchard.)
As a means of recording important human events and attuning human order to the celestial order, the Maya developed a calendar system with many different counts including the Tzolkin (260-day count related to human gestation), the Hactb (365-day count related to solar cycle), the Long Count (related to ancestor worship and lineages), the calendar round (a 52-year cycle), the Lords of the Night (nine-day interval), and the lunar cycle. The largest count in this system was the Long Count, which measured each day from the beginning date of the present cosmic era in 3114 BCE and prophesied its end on December 23, 2012. Each day was measured by a system of five subunits and enabled the priest to compute dates in colossal cycles going back to at least nine million years BCE as marked on inscriptions in several ceremonial centers. 6 Mathematicians have pointed out that an understanding of the concept zero is necessary for such computations. The Maya marked these days so they could be in conscious contact with the sacred forces appearing in the terrestrial world at carefully determined intervals. Unfortunately this calendar system largely faded from use, excerpt in scattered parts of Yucatan, after the Classic Maya society collapsed.
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The social style of this universe appears in the murals of Bon ampak ("city of painted walls"), which were discovered by accident in 1948. A photographer following a jungle deer saw it go into a small temple barely visible in the overgrowth. Once within he was surprised to find murals covering the walls and ceilings of three rooms depicting the formal aspects of Maya court life and a series of scenes of bloodlettmg, warfare, human sacrifice, ceremomial processions, and dances on pyramids, all surrounded by astronomical and calendrical signs. In one alluring scene a procession of deity impersonators dressed as animals (crocodiles, crabs, jaguars) accompany a musical ensemble preparing to process.
During this long period of cultural creativity the Maya elaborated a profound religious cosmovision based on the "symbolism of the center." The Maya believed the world was centered by a combination of the sacred flowering cosmic tree and the royal person
(Mah K'ina, great sun lord), both linked to the world of ancestors. This cosmovision is made clearest at the beautiful site of Palenque, where pictorial programs, carved on a series of ceremonial temples and buildings, show how the royal families ruled, communicated with gods, died, and passed power from the dead to the living and rejuvenated the agricultural world. As we shall see in chapter 4, the Maya lords had a grandiose conception of their role in sacred history. Let us now move over 400 miles to the north where the imperial capital of Teotihuacan was constructed.
Teotihuacan: The Imperial Capital
The most frequently visited archaeological site in the Americas is Teotihuacan, known to most people as the "pyramids." Located in the central highlands 30 miles northeast of present-day Mexico City, Teotihuacan (as known to the Aztecs five hundred years after the city collapsed) means "the place where one becomes deified." Not only did it contain monumental architecture, but it was also designed as a gigantic image of the cosmos. At its peak, around 500 CE, Teotihuacan was populated by over 200,000 people who shared in the prestige of a capital that influenced many cities and towns within and beyond the central plateau of Mexico.
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Surprisingly, Teotihuacan had its beginnings in a cave. This greatest of classic cities, with its immense towering pyramids of the sun and moon, elaborate ceremonial courtyards, and residential palaces (the city contains over seventy-five temples), originated underground at the mouth of a well. Recent excavations show that directly under the Pyramid of the Sun lie the remains of an ancient tunnel and shrine area, which was an early, if not the original, sacred center for ritual and perhaps the goal of pilgrimages. Throughout Mesoamerican history caves are valued as the place of origins of ancestral peoples and the openings to the powers and gods of the underworld. Like the city that was to spread out above it, this cave was artificially reshaped and decorated into the form of a four-petaled flower. In some of the later paintings and pictorial narratives the Mesoamerican cosmos is symbolized by a four-petaled flower representing the division of space into four cardinal regions around a center. It is possible that the cave was Teotihuacan's earliest imago mundi, or sacred image of the cosmos.
The entire city of Teotihuacan was laid out by its planners and architects as a four-part imitation of the cosmos. In this way it was not only a container of religious symbolism, it was itself a religious symbol. The city's hundreds of residential, ritual, and craft buildings followed a grid pattern that was organized by two main avenues: the Street of the Dead (over 2,000 meters long) and the East West Avenue, which crossed at right angles in the center of the city dividing it into four huge quadrants. It is important to note that a number of natural features such as creeks and hills were altered to conform to this scheme.
This layout had clear linkages to astronomical events. The great stairway of the Pyramid of the Sun, for example, faces a westerly point on the horizon where the Pleiades, called Tianquitzli, meaning "marketplace" (or Miec meaning "heap") by later Nahuatl people, sat directly in front of it. What exact religious moment in the city's calendar this day signified may never be clear; but it is obvious that there was a noble attempt to achieve a harmony, and to express that harmony publicly between the great pyramid and celestial patterns. This is also demonstrated by the fact that the Pleiades made its first yearly appearance above the horizon before the sun rose on the day it passed through the zenith.
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The Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan. This monumental structure dominated the ceremonial center and imperial capital of the Valley of Mexico from CE 200 until CE 750. In the foreground are platforms along the Street of the Dead that supported the smaller temples and dwellings. At the height of its urban expansion (300-600 CE), Teotihuacan rivaled the most populated of Old World cities. (Photograph courtesy of Lawrence G. Desmond.)
It is likely that these two stellar events, key to the cosmovision of so many Mesoamerican cultures, signaled the moment when the elites organized the masses of people to ritually prepare for the new agricultural season.
The art of Teotihuacan also reveals an abundance of cults dedicated to the activities of warfare, titular deities, fertility, ball games, dynastic rulers and burials. The earlier evidence of these religious themes that we have studied now takes center stage in the evidence at Teotihuacan. And although we have no written material and very limited oral tradition directly related to Teotihuacan, it appears that deities which in later cultures are identified as Quetzalcoatl (the Feathered Serpent), Tlaloc (the Rain God), Xipe Totec (the God of Vegetation), and Xochiquetzal (the Goddess of Sexuality) were highly revered in the great capital.
It is clear that later cultures, especially the Aztecs, looked to Teotihuacan as the Place of Origins. They claimed in their sacred history that the Fifth Sun, the Aztec Era, was born out of sacrificial fire in the great city at the beginning of time.
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The story of the creation of the Fifth Age of the cosmos, the age of the Aztecs begins:
It is told that when yet [all] was in darkness, when yet no sun had shown and no dawn had broken—it is said—the gods gathered themselves there at Teotihuacan. They spoke. . . "Who will take it upon himself to be the sun, to bring the dawn?" 7
Teotihuacan's monumental magnificence, precise spatial order, exuberant craft and market systems, and sacred prestige helped make this city the center of an expanding, pulsating empire. Although its position of absolute dominance over many other cities appears to have lasted for less than two hundred years, its status as the center for this region of the Mesoamerican world cannot be limited to the time when its art styles were imitated. For Teotihuacan was the first true capital, the first great place in central Mexico,
where a fully integrated, rich, and well-fed society operated under the authority of supernatural forces and cosmo-magical formulas.
Tollan: City of the Plumed Serpent
Quetzalcoatl was looked upon as a god. He was worshiped and prayed to in former times in Tollan, and there his temple stood: very high, very tall. Extremely tall, extremely high. 8
This passage, recited by an Aztec elder to the Spanish priest-researcher Bernardino de Sahagun, refers to one of the most creative periods of the history of Mesoamerican religions, namely the Toltec empire. In Aztec times (1325-1521 CE) young people were educated about the cultural brilliance and religious genius of the ancient kingdom of Tollan (Place of Reeds) ruled by the priest-king Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl (Our Young Prince the Plumed Serpent), who was a devotee of the great god Quetzalcoatl. Following the rapid eighth-century collapse of Teotihuacan as the center of the Mesoamerican world, the "Great Tollan" was formed, consisting of over twenty sizable settlements surrounding the capital of Tollan, also called Tula.
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According to the sacred history taught in Aztec calmecacs or schools, Tollan existed in a golden age where agricultural abundance, technological excellence, artistic perfection, and spiritual genius were united under the patronage of the great divine being, Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent. Tollan was inhabited by the legendary Toltecs, whose very name signified artistic excellence. They were remembered as
very wise. Their works were all good, all perfect, all wonderful, all miraculous, their houses beautiful, tiled in mosaics, smooth stuccoed, very marvelous. 9
In this settirig of cultural genius and economic stability, the Toltecs invented the calendar,
originated the year count, they established the way in which the night, the day would work. . . they discerned the orbits of the stars. . . 10
and invented rituals of divination. Of course we have already seen that many of these cultural forms were invented and developed a millennium before the Toltecs. But with the rapid collapse of earlier cultures these traditions were periodically reinvented and developed. Also, in Aztec times, all societies seeking prestige claimed their descent from the Toltec lineage.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following works: The Broken Spears, by Miguel Leon-Portilla, copyright @ 1962 by Beacon Press; reprinted by permission of Beacon Press. Native Mesoamerican Spirituality, edited by Miguel Leon-Portilla, copyright @ 1980 by Paulist Press; used by permission of Paulist Press. People of the Bat, edited by Carol Karasik, copyright @ 1988 by the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.c.; reproduced by permission of the Smithsonian Institution Press. Popul Voh, copyright @ 1985 by Dennis Tedlock; reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Florentine Codex; General History of the Things of New Spain by Bernardo de Sahagun, translated by Arthur S. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, copyright @ 1981 by University of Utah Press; used with permission.
RELIGIONS OF MESOAMERICA: Cosmovision and Ceremonial Centers. Copyright @ 1990 by David Carrasco. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper-Collins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carrasco, David.
Religions of Mesoamerica: cosmovision and ceremonial centers /David Carrasco. - 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-06-061325-4
1. Aztecs-Religion and mythology. 2. Mayas-Religion and mythology. 3. Aztecs-Antiquities. 4. Mayas-Antiquities. 5. Mexico-Antiquities. 1. Title.
F1219.76.R45C372 1990
299'.792—dc20 89-45990
CIP
98 99 00 01 RRD(H) 9