The Fate of Earthly Things

According to colonial historiography, in 1519 the Aztecs identified the Spaniards as “gods” (Nahuatl teteoh), an equivocation that eventually precipitated the fall of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. The subject of the conquistadors’ apotheosis has been hotly debated by scholars, especially since the divinization of European invaders would become a reiterated motif of the colonial enterprise around the globe. While the early ecclesiastical chroniclers saw in Hernán Cortés’s purported apotheosis a blasphemous proposition of misguided idolaters, many contemporary postcolonial scholars merely read it as a devious discourse of colonial manipulation. Both assessments stem from an erroneous understanding of the Aztec worldview, which was radically distinct from our own. In this book Molly H. Bassett at last provides a path to understand better the specifically Aztec characteristics of the teteoh and their ritual “embodiments.” Her interdisciplinary approach is comprehensive: with a solid grounding in Nahuatl-language etymology and philology, Bassett combines the perspectives of iconography, linguistics, religious studies, and her own ethnographic fieldwork to analyze three fundamental categories of the sacred in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, all of which were interrelated through ritual action: teotl (god), teixiptla (skin, or localized embodiment, of a teotl), and tlaquimilloli (bundle of a teotl’s relics).The book’s introduction examines the “spectrum of animacy” (195) of the contemporary Eastern Nahua—a nondualistic worldview in which every phenomenon has a degree of animacy and can manifest a recognizably divine personality. While historically determined, the modern Nahua animistic universe remains distinctly Mesoamerican and thus has Aztec precedents in the religious categories that are Bassett’s object of study.Chapter 1 examines the extensively documented identification of Cortés with Quetzalcoatl and the modern scholarly debates about the episode. Bassett argues that the identification of the Spaniards as teteoh was perfectly coherent with the Aztec worldview, in which everything was animated and subject to apotheosis by means of ritual action. Chapter 2 discusses the Nahuatl scholarship around the concepts of teotl and teixiptla. Bassett criticizes Arild Hvidtfeldt and many of his epigones, who universalized the concept of teotl with the language of religious studies without attending to its cultural specificity. Bassett convincingly argues that the Aztec concept of teotl must be understood in its own context—indeed as a specific category of the sacred. Chapter 3 uses a philological approach to study the meaning of teotl and its derivations in the Florentine Codex. Bassett proposes that any understanding of teotl should invoke five fundamental properties: a teotl has (1) axcaitl (possessions); (2) tonalli (heat, fate, etc.); (3) neixcahuilli (exclusive occupation); (4) a teotl is mahuiztic (marvelous, awesome); (5) it is tlazohca (beloved). Chapter 4 examines the category of the teixiptla. Through a semiotic analysis, Bassett defines the teixiptla as the localized embodiment of a conceptual teotl. Through proper ritual investiture, a teotl was turned into a teixiptla—a localized embodiment that now appeared as an object of devotion, be it as a statue, an image, or a living human embodiment. The chapter includes an examination of the tlaquimilolli, the bundle containing the relics of a tutelary deity and the most numinous manifestation of the local teotl.Bassett’s reassessment of the Aztec deities and the dynamics of their social and ritual manifestations opens a new paradigm in the field of Aztec studies. Her work, however, has some notable shortcomings. For instance, she fails to analyze the concept of tecuhtli (Lord), which was indeed fundamental to the Aztec characterization of teotl. She also fails to consider ritual blood offerings, an omission that limits her understanding of the mechanisms of animacy of the Aztec teteoh. Nevertheless, this book is a timely and substantial contribution to the study of Aztec religion

Apotheosis · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Historiography · Literature · Nahuatl · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Latin American history and culture · Philosophy