Sweeping the Way: Divine Transformation in the Aztec Festival of Ochpaniztli

S CONTENTS WEEPING THE WAY LIST OF FIGURES IX ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XI FOREWORD BY ELIZABETH HILL BOONE XV INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE 17 Sources for Ochpaniztli: Negotiating Text and Image in Early Colonial Mexican Manuscripts CHAPTER TWO 35 Visualizing the Sacred in the Ochpaniztli Festival CHAPTER THREE 69 Purification and Renewal during the Festival of Ochpaniztli CHAPTER FOUR 103 The Colonial Image of Tlazolteotl CHAPTER FIVE 123 Ochpaniztli in the Mexican Codex Borbonicus CONCLUSION 155 NOTES 167 BIBLIOGRAPHY 209 INDEX 223 vii SWEEPING THE WAY INTRODUCTION Perhaps no other aspect of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica has engendered more interest than the sanguinary practices for which the Mexica of central Mexico (the so-called Aztecs) are particularly infamous. Since the arrival in the early sixteenth century of Spanish conquistadors and, soon after, Spanish Christian missionaries, descriptions and depictions of human sacrifice have held a special place in the literature describing Mexico’s aboriginal inhabitants. Worried that the native population continued to practice “idolatrous” and sacrificial rites—perhaps even in the guise of Christian pageantry—the mendicant friars paid special attention to understanding indigenous ritual practices. To this end they initiated an extraordinary series of manuscripts, many of them illustrated, that aimed to document Mexican calendars, associated calendrical rituals, and the nature of the aboriginal “gods.” These sources span the first century of Spanish presence in central Mexico. Although some studies, like those of the famed Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, also exhibit marked interest in recording the substantial cultural achievements of pre-hispanic Mexico, these colonial accounts of indigenous sacred practices were intended particularly to serve as models by which the friars might better recognize and, therefore, more effectively extirpate any lingering idolatry.1 The series of eighteen spectacular, often grisly public festivals celebrated during the 365-day Mesoamerican year elicited particular attention from these Christian missionaries. This annual cycle, known as the xihuitl in Nahuatl (the lingua franca of central Mexico at the time of conquest), was observed across Mesoamerica. It comprised eighteen “monthly” periods that have been dubbed veintenas because of their twenty-day length, along with five uncertain, unnamed days known as the nemontemi. As scholars currently understand the cycle, each twenty-day period had its own particular festival enacted in elaborate public dramas. Some veintena feasts were devoted to rites propitiating agricultural entities like Tlaloc, an ancient earth deity linked with rain and storms, and Chicomecoatl, “Seven Serpent,” patroness of maize, queen of Mexican crops. Others had a more martial cast, as in the festival known as Tlacaxipehualiztli, the “Feast of the Flaying of Men,” which in the Mexica capital at Tenochtitlan (modern-day Mexico City) celebrated particularly the Mexican warrior class. This period involved dramatic gladiatorial combats in the city’s sacred precinct, along with human sacrifice, flaying, and the donning of those sacrificial victims’ flayed flesh. Still other rites were held in honor of special tutelary deities; in Tenochtitlan, this was so particularly for Huitzilopochtli, the Mexicas’ tribal deity of the sun and warfare. Incorporating human sacrifice, flaying, ritual cross-dressing, mock warfare, and elaborate sweeping and cleansing rites, the autumn celebration known as Ochpaniztli, “Sweeping the Way,” has proven to be among the most intriguing of these annual ritual dramas. The period was dedicated especially to a goddess of human sexuality and fertility known by a variety of epithets, including Toci, Teteoinnan, and Tlazolteotl. Physicians and midwives were among her devotees, along with parturients, adulterers, and diviners. During the Ochpaniztli proceed- ings, the power and presence of this sacred entity were evoked through various celebrants and effigies arrayed in the ritual attire of the goddess. She wore a head- dress of cotton, had rubber smeared on her mouth and cheeks, and typically bore ritual implements that included a straw broom and a shield. A Mexican woman arrayed in this paraphernalia was eventually killed, decapitated, and then flayed. In the aftermath of her death, other celebrants and/or inanimate armatures were adorned with her paraphernalia, now including the skin of the dead woman. Brooms played a significant role in this ceremony, “Sweeping the Way,” and were used in purification rites or wielded as blood-covered weapons by midwives en- gaged in mock battles. In Tenochtitlan, Ochpaniztli’s activities had sacred and mythic dimensions and, as I will suggest, its curative and cleansing aspects helped INTRODUCTION to reestablish cosmic and communal harmony. What is more, these aspects were intertwined with the more mundane realms of politics, militarism, and economics of the Mexica tribute empire. This study examines the extant corpus of representations, pictorial and textual, through which scholars have come to understand the annual Ochpaniztli celebration and its attendant deities. These sources were mostly created in the sixteenth century, in an unusual situation of collaboration and accommoda- tion between the Spanish Christian friars, at whose behest the chronicles were begun, and the native Nahuas whose outlawed rites and proscribed deities the manuscripts describe. They reframe and describe the pre-Columbian central Mexican Ochpaniztli celebration and its patron goddess in ways significant to both European colonists and aboriginal Mexicans. It is unclear, however, whether the extant colonial veintena illustrations are based on an indigenous tradition of illustrating the annual festivals from sources that are now lacking through accidents of survival or whether the form they take was a post-conquest invention. Thus, the particular problem of this study con- cerns how to effectively use these collaborative, colonial manuscripts to investi- gate pre-Columbian ritual. Given the longevity and sophistication of the pictorial manuscript tradition in Mexico and its continued importance into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in this study I propose to give more sustained empha- sis to the pictorial elements of the extant veintena corpus, privileging them as a fundamental source of information about the nature of Nahua ritual practices, concepts of the sacred, and the function of sacred images within a performative ritual context. The Spanish Christian missionaries’ reports on indigenous calendars and calendrical festivals were part of a much wider network of ethnohistoric chronicles delineating the political, economic, social, and religious structures of Spain’s new territories.2 They compiled these in the decades following the incursion by combined Spanish-native forces that had resulted in the siege and eventual de- mise of the Mexica capital at Tenochtitlan. The viceregal administration spon- sored the creation of a variety of documents intended to benefit secular and religious authorities alike, as Christian Spain brought the material goods, labor, and souls of indigenous Mesoamerica into her domain. The quotidian aspects of pre-Columbian life were the purview of documents created for the government INTRODUCTION of New Spain, as it sought to understand the nature, makeup, and extent of its new territorial holdings and its existing financial and governmental institutions. Maps and questionnaires established existing territorial boundaries, and tribute documents described the goods that had flowed from subject provinces into Tenochtitlan. Viceregal sociopolitical histories gave information about history, local rulers, the structures of rule and succession, warfare, and economics. Because the Church was concerned especially with understanding the nature of native ritual observances, the sixteenth-century mendicant friar-chroniclers composed lengthy commentaries describing aboriginal religious institutions and timekeeping systems, along with the rites, sacrifices, and sacred imagery that were associated with them. These are the particular focus of this investigation. The re- sultant treatises have long constituted an essential resource for modern scholars investigating pre-hispanic rituals and imagery. Important sources for understanding the annual cycle of veintena festivals include religious and historical accounts with textual descriptions of the festivals as well as glossed and annotated pictorial calendars that depict scenes of the festival’s performance and its ritual celebrants. Pictorial information also appears in quotidian documents including tribute lists and calendar wheels. It is by now well known that these ethnohistoric chronicles, compiled under the auspices of evangelizing friars, are beset by their significant biases and agen- das with regard to indigenous religion and ceremony, and by their substantial misapprehensions and misrepresentations of the nature of Mexica sacred entities. There also exists among the colonial texts a good deal of heterogeneity of detail: locales, patron deities, dates, and even some of the festival names vary widely from source to source. The textual sources are even further complicated by their synthetic, essentializing nature. Although pre-hispanic Mexico comprised myriad independent ethnicities and communities with a variety of distinct lin- guistic, cultural, and religious traditions, the friars tended to represent

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