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Christian Texts forAztecs

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Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico

JAIME LARA ......

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lara, Jaime, 1947– Christian texts for Aztecs : art and liturgy in colonial Mexico / Jaime Lara. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.  -13: 978-0-268-03379-8 (cloth : alk. paper)   -10: 0-268-03379- (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Aztecs—Missions. 2. Aztecs—Religion. 3. Missions, Spanish—Mexico—History. 4. Catholic Church—Missions— Mexico—History. 5. Liturgical adaptation. 6. Christianity and culture —Mexico. I. Title.    1219.3. 59 37 2008 266'.208997452— dc22 2007050453

∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

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Introduction

The greatest thing since the creation of the world, save the nation Nahuas, and it was their language that the mendicant Incarnation and death of Him who created it, is the dis- missionaries—Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians— covery of the Indies that are thus called the New World. adopted as the lingua franca of the evangelization enterprise.1 —Francisco López de Gómara, 1551 In the study of the New World, and especially in the interpretation of the conquest and evangelization, it has been easy to take sides and to paint individuals and events in either black T G L or white, as does Francisco López de Gómara, quoted in the epigraph above.2 In approaching the topic of this book, I shall This book is about the visual imagination and about worship, attempt to create a via media between a type of extremism that the worship that the early Catholic missionaries to New Spain was typical of nineteenth-century positivism and twentieth- (colonial Mexico) imported, imposed, and reinvented with the century reactionism but that goes back to even more remote cooperation, creativity, and even impetus of the native popu- times. lations, principally the Aztecs. Also known as the Mexica (the Already in the sixteenth century, Fray Bartolomé de las term they used for themselves), these Mesoamerican people Casas (d. 1566), the Dominican bishop of Chiapas (Mexico), of the fourteenth, ﬁfteenth, and sixteenth centuries inhabited was giving root to what would become the infamous “Black the central plateau around Lake Texcoco and the sacred me- Legend” in his account, The Destruction of the Indies (1524), of tropolis of Tenochtitlan, the site of present-day Mexico City. the Spanish invasion and mistreatment of the native peoples. As speakers of the Nahuatl tongue, they also carry the desig- Las Casas was rightly concerned to unmask the cruelty of the

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Spanish landholders and their brutal exploitation of the native nation, and as the arm of Catholic orthodoxy in a world of Prot- population. He was particularly anxious to prove to the Holy estant heretics. In the mid-nineteenth century the American Roman Emperor and king of Spain, Charles V, and to the papacy, historian William Hickling Prescott wrote in a similar but less that Amerindians were human beings and not soulless beasts of religious vein about the glories of Spanish bravery in the face of burden; but Spain’s enemies would exploit his writing for their the barbarity of the uncivilized Aztec Indians. In 1843, after own use.3 The anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish English soon dis- spending two years in Mexico, he published his influential His- covered a treasure trove of propaganda in Las Casas’s critique, tory of the Conquest of Mexico, which was to become the standard translating it with the inflammatory title An account of the first textbook on the topic for more than a century. voyages and discoveries made by the Spaniards in America: containing In a way similar to its black counterpart, the White Leg- the most exact relation hitherto publish’d, of their unparallel’d cruel- end also credits all creative activity to the enterprise of the Eu- ties on the Indians, in the destruction of above forty millions of people: ropean clerics; a view that likewise cannot be sustained today. with the propositions offer’d to the King of Spain to prevent the further The White Legend is perhaps most identified with the French ruin of the West-Indies, by . . . an eye-witness of their cruelties; il- scholar Robert Ricard. In 1933 Ricard published his seminal lustrated with [wood]cuts.4 In addition to the text, what made the work, La conquête spirituelle du Mexique. It was groundbreaking narrative so potent and emotional as propaganda were Theodor and offered a wealth of primary and secondary sources for in- de Bry’s fanciful engravings of Spanish cruelty.5 For most of the vestigation. But Ricard was writing from a very Eurocentric sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the tone of in- perspective. His interest lay in Christian missionary technique,8 terpretation of the conquest of America was divided according as the English subtitle evidences: An Essay on the Apostolate and to national lines, with the English, Dutch, French, and Spanish the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain. defending their respective colonizing and civilizing of the “bar- On the subject of missiology Ricard excelled, but owing to this barians” while condemning the same activities in their political European focus he almost completely omitted the native voices enemies. Stephanie Wood has convincingly demonstrated that, extant in Nahuatl written documents and occasionally glimpsed while appearing to sympathize with native peoples as down- even in the mendicant chronicles themselves.9 Ricard also tended trodden masses, the proponents of the Black Legend actually to be somewhat naive in estimating the success of the evan- give them very little if any agency as intelligent human beings gelization process, taking the mendicants’ glowing evaluation or active players. Thus, she says, the legend and its modern ver- at face value while typifying the Amerindians in passive terms sions perpetuate the attribution of all significant activity to the and emphasizing what he saw as their quick acquiescence to conquerors and typify natives as passive or silent victims, a view the new religion.10 Ricard did not read Nahuatl or any other in- that cannot be sustained today.6 digenous language, and by 1933 only a few translations had ap- At the other end of this interpretive spectrum we might peared; hence, although noble in its conception and concerned speak of a “White Legend.”7 Certainly López de Gómara and for matters of religion and worship, his work is one-sided and the Spanish chroniclers of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- incomplete.11 turies stand in this line of thought. Written almost exclusively Initial rejection of the Eurocentrism of Robert Ricard and by clerics actively involved in the christianization of native his followers, and a move toward a more nuanced “Gray Leg- peoples, the chronicles reveal an initial exuberance and opti- end,” came from Charles Gibson’s work in the 1960s on the sur- mism about bringing the “true faith” to the Amerindian gen- vival of Aztec culture under Spanish domination. He and others tiles; but they soon took a darker turn when it was realized that like him developed a hermeneutic of suspicion regarding the ob- the evangelization had mixed results and questionable suc- jectivity of the mendicant chroniclers. By comparing the friars’ cesses. If these histories of the early years were permitted to overly optimistic evaluation with the contrasting voices of native be published (quite a few were not), it was because they upheld documents and performance, they were able to detect evidence Spain’s nationalistic pride as a morally and culturally superior of occasional outright resistance or, more commonly, negotiated

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accommodation between pre-Contact religious practices and they rarely if ever thought of themselves in terms of “van- later Christian practices (fig. I.1). Thomas Lucas simply calls quished” or “conquered.”14 Fig. I.1 this “a recognition of the inevitable dialectic of acculturation.”12 Colonial Mexico is fascinating and complex precisely be- The Lienzo de Tlaxcala, c. 1555, copy of the lost Historians and anthropologists like Miguel León-Portilla, cause mutually alien peoples were attempting to make sense of original. Plate 1: Opening David Carrasco, James Lockhart, William Taylor, Louise Burk- one another and of their new habitation of the same space. Both scene of the four princely hart, Serge Gruzinski, Stephanie Wood, and Jorge Klor de Alva sides of an admittedly unequal dialogue were bringing their houses of Tlaxcala and the representatives of the have given us a wealth of factual and interpretive information cultural filters, prejudices, and presuppositions through which Spanish Crown. Elements about native peoples and their religious expression at the time they scrutinized the new and strange other. Neither side was of European and native of the Contact. They have also attempted to look at the Euro- dispassionately objective; both had something to gain or to lose pictographic representation pean conquistadors and missionaries through the eyes of native in the transaction.15 They could not do otherwise. To expect have been combined. The scene in the lower center Americans—to the extent that that is possible. Their findings late medieval Franciscan friars to have appreciated Mexica recounts the miraculous have demonstrated many more shades of gray, various levels of human sacrifice or ritual cannibalism in terms of reciprocity in apparition of a cross and acceptance and rejection of Christianity that went largely un- a cosmic balancing act, and not through their Christian filter the instruments of Christ’s Passion in Tlaxcala. (From noticed by defenders of the White Legend, and that would have of good and evil, is just as ludicrous as to expect the Aztecs to Alfredo Chavero, Homenaje been unintelligible to proponents of the Black Legend.13 In- have instinctively embraced Aristotelian philosophy with its al Cristobal Colón, 1892. deed, from the pictographic or written texts created by native categories of person, free will, and individual responsibility. Public domain.) people in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, it appears that The Christian dualism of good and evil, or God versus Satan,

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was just as abstruse to the Aztecs as the My use of “Gray Legend” is, of course, a metaphor for a via Aztec duality of male-female divinities with media between the dichotomy of the skeptical and the credulous. their amoral benign-hostile qualities was Wood complements my monochromatic figure of speech with a to the Spaniards (fig. I.2). However, in New metaphor of her own in her desire to “reweave many separate Spain such ontological and philosophical skeins of this riotously colored intellectual tapestry” that is the differences did not annul interaction, creative history of Spanish-Aztec interaction.20 Interestingly enough, responses, and adjustments to the changed many of the native pictorial documents were indeed lienzos, that and changing situation. Probably the human is, woven cotton sheets or tapestries with colorful painted fig- trait of curiosity on both sides of the Contact ures; so her fabric metaphor is quite apt to the topic at hand. had much to do with this. Both sides engaged By using such metaphors we may better appreciate the cultural in borrowing and lending, which was inter- differences and discontinuity but also the religious similarities, nalized and interpreted in action and reac- “grammatical compatibility,” and “successful adjustments.”21 tion.16 In spite of the obvious brute force and political hegemony of the Spanish, the Na- huas were not rendered passive; they spoke M  D and interacted politically and religiously.17 Colonial circumstances made unequal part- Christianity lives supremely from the imagination. ners in cultural intercourse, but indigenous peoples were far —Paul Avis, God and the Creative Imagination Fig. I.2 more than mere victims. The data prove that they were pro- Monolithic statue of active in the inculturation process and that their ethos had ac- the Aztec earth goddess 18 ffi Coatlicue, She of the tually prepared them well for the cultural exchange. One aspect of the a nity between the Nahuas and the friars Serpent Skirt, mother I wish to advance the conversation by focusing on ex- was the structure of native American and European linguis- of Huitzilopochtli. ternal religious behavior, on what I identify as the practice or tics and imagery, namely, the use of metaphoric language and Height, eight feet. performance of worship by native peoples. This is an aspect visual metaphor.22 Metaphor and paradigm are basic compo- Museo de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City. of religion that must be distinguished from private internal nents of our ordinary conceptual system in terms of which we (Photo by author.) conviction—a very Protestant notion and one to which we have perceive, think, and act; both are models of interpretation by no access. I therefore wish to move beyond the black/white which a people give meaning to their lives. They are ways in dichotomy that has so often typified the conversation: either which the mind explores reality and orders experience, using an immediate and uncritical acceptance of Christianity by the intuitive comparisons whereby the less familiar is assimilated indigenous population (a missiological approach typical of the to the more familiar and the unknown to the known. Through early twentieth century) or a covert rejection by Amerindians metaphor the chaos of experience is reduced to meaningful who were “thumbing their noses at the Christian God” (an patterns; thus many diverse experiences of everyday life can anthropological approach typical of the second half of the be related to one another on the basis of a single metaphor twentieth century). Louise Burkhart speaks for many a recent that provides a model basic to all such experience.23 We can, scholar in indicating a new direction in Mexican studies: “For- then, speak of “root metaphors,” the basic analogues or para- tunately, scholarship on colonial Mesoamerican religion is mov- digms by which societies construct world hypotheses and meta- ing . . . beyond syncretism: beyond the ‘mix and match model’ narratives, fundamental clues and loci of cultural meaning. Or of colonial religion as a bricolage of traits easily compartmen- put in another way, “Cultures survive because their metaphors talized as ‘native’ or ‘Christian,’ beyond a search for pagan sur- work”; and root metaphors work through rituals.24 vivals, beyond a dichotomy between spiritual conquest and na- Aztec metaphors (machiotlahtolli, literally, “sign-speech”) tive resistance.”19 worked by revealing that every human action could be described

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in terms of a natural phenomenon. To speak in lofty words and have known well (fig. I.3). Fray Pedro de Gante (d. 1572), an mellifluous tones, for example, was “to scatter precious jade artist–lay brother, may have even brought some smaller ver- stones,” while to indoctrinate by way of paradigm or exemplar sions of these panel paintings with him from Ghent in 1523. was “to see in a mirror.” Mexica cosmic space could be delimited I would like to use this diptych precisely as a metaphor, both in terms of a solar metaphor: from “where the sun rises” to for what I intend to do in the following pages and for what was “where the sun goes down.”25 But in temporal terms the Aztec occurring in sixteenth-century New Spain. world also existed from “the rising of the sun to its setting,” and Diptychs had a practical, political, and liturgical origin. In when the last sun had gone down so would human existence.26 the Greco-Roman world, a diptych was originally a device made As in all religious societies, their time and space focused on a from two wooden panels hinged together and waxed on the mythic center, a cosmic hot spot, an originating point, a holy inside. A scribe could take notes in the soft wax with a stylus metropolis, a symbolic “Jerusalem” of their own—Tenochtitlan. and then erase them by rubbing the wax off or applying more; Similarly, the Nahua practice of human sacrifice, as a world- it was an ancient version of the modern notepad. The late an- maintaining activity, was a self-evident metaphor in the real tique period saw the creation of consular diptychs, hinged ivory order of existence.27 If one looked around at living matter, one panels that were gifts of the high and mighty, most often im- saw that plants gave themselves up to animals, animals gave perial consuls, who frequently had themselves depicted on the themselves as food to humans, and, logically, humans should covers. Like the earlier models, they were practical items but give themselves as sustenance to the gods. Within its presumed could also be political gifts, like today’s pen-and-pencil sets. horizon, the paradigm made sense of reality and offered a model The practice of using diptychs came into the Church’s liturgy for action as a root metaphor.28 In fact, Mesoamericanists agree because they could be employed to record on facing pages the that the unifying metaphors among the Mexica were ones that names of the living and the dead who were being commemo- derived from the sun and, relatedly, from blood.29 Solar and san- rated at any given service, and they could be changed daily. guinal metaphors were so intertwined that it is hard at times to Eventually the word diptych was applied to the two prayers distinguish the two. Though they were not the only metaphors themselves that were recited respectively for the living and the used, they were so central that they can be related to all others dead during the Eucharistic Prayer of the Mass.32 The consu- either as originating or as organizing principles. lar diptychs with images and the liturgical diptychs with suppli- For Christians like the mendicant missionaries to the New cations became, in turn, the predecessors of the late medieval World, the primary root metaphor has always been that of the diptych paintings. human body.30 This unprecedented trope was lodged not in re- Diptych paintings are meant to be read together as com- curring cycles of nature but in an incarnation of the invisible and plementary images for meditation or veneration; but each panel inconceivable Deity in time and space in one Jesus of Nazareth. can often stand independently. In van der Weyden’s work the In its most powerful manifestation, the metaphor took the car- two panels, taken together, form a perfect square six feet by nal form of the “Body of Christ” (to use Saint Paul’s words)— six feet. The right panel can stand alone as a crucifixion scene, a Body that could be dined upon at a table around which sat the while the left panel can also stand alone for the knowledgeable same Body, a new corporation of people. This corporeal meta- believer as the image of the Sorrowful Virgin comforted by phor acted as a filter through which the entire world could be Saint John the beloved disciple—a common devotional theme viewed and comprehended; and like the root metaphor of the of the time. Of course, the left panel with the Virgin and Saint Nahua, it was implicitly connected with the body’s blood—as John only reaches its full impact when seen in relation to Christ we shall soon see.31 on the cross, when the eye travels back and forth between the The body-blood metaphor is graphically demonstrated two images to vicariously participate in the emotion of a mo- in Roger van der Weyden’s diptych of the Crucifixion (1464), a ment frozen in time. The continuous wall behind the figures style of Flemish art that the first friars in the New World would links the two elements and implies a continuity of shared space;

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Fig. I.3 Roger van der Weyden, Cruciﬁxion with the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist Mourning, c. 1460. Oil on wood. (The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.)

this is confirmed by the subtle detail of the Virgin’s robe, which interpreted by Flemish painters not so much as the result of a penetrates into the crucifixion panel. sudden gust of wind or of the reputed earthquake but rather as Van der Weyden was not only a master of early Netherlan- a symbol of divine potency: in his agony and death Christ is not dish realism but also of disguised symbolism, which is evident defeated but releases a power of salvation into the world and in his liturgical and timeless treatment of the story.33 One has foreshadows his rising from the dead.34 We shall see below that to ask where the event is happening, because it is not the fa- a similar desire to display potencia will be a feature of Hispano- miliar Golgotha locale. The wall may refer to the historical fact Indian depictions of the Crucified. that the hill of Calvary was outside the city walls of Jerusalem, My reason for this discussion of Roger van der Weyden’s but the place has been deliberately dislocated. Yes, there are ele- diptych painting is, in part, to draw attention to the visual meta- ments of naturalism, like the rocky terrain in the foreground, phors and the symbolic pan-temporal thinking so typical of late but the background shows us that we are either standing in medieval religious people, like the mendicant friars who labored front of the stone rood screen of a late medieval church in which in Mesoamerica. But the paired images also act as a metaphor the rood figures have suddenly come to life; or we are witness- for my treatment of the material at hand because this tome is ing a liturgical pageant wherein contemporary actors are por- a diptych to my earlier book, City, Temple, Stage: Eschatological traying the sacred characters against the background of the Architecture and Liturgical Theatrics in New Spain.35 Like the dip- walls of some Flemish city. (In other versions of this Good Fri- tychs of late antiquity, these two texts concern both a political day story, van der Weyden sets the cross against the backdrop event (the conquest/Contact) and a liturgical-religious event of a Jerusalem cityscape in the obvious guise of a northern (the evangelization). Like van der Weyden’s painted panels, each European town with Gothic spires.) The cosmic event has been of the volumes can stand alone as a discrete investigation of freed from its restriction to Palestine in the first century of the sixteenth-century Mexico, but ideally they should be read as common era to exist pan-temporally and pan-spatially in any complementary to one another. time and place—even in Mesoamerica. The two red tapestries In City, Temple, Stage I proposed that the evangelization hanging behind the figures not only make their bodies and pos- of New Spain was accomplished in large part on the level of a tures stand out; the pleats and fringes show that these are li- change of metaphors and symbols important to the Mexica and turgical paraments that have been in storage and only recently to European Christians, some of which were so similar that a unfolded for this event. transition from one to the other was easily accomplished. I sug- The human bodies also tell stories. The Virgin swoons gested that, in light of this symbolic proximity, much less of the backward in anguish (creating a wonderful S-curve that con- pre-Hispanic religion was destroyed and much more was re- trasts with the verticals of the cross and fabric panels), only cycled because it was relatively easily christianized by a change to be caught in the arms of Saint John in a foreshadowing of in Aztec root metaphors. This had much to do with the wealth of the pietà pose that she will later take with her son. Does Mary complementary symbols gleaned from the Bible and from teoyo- wring her hands in a display of grief, or is she engaged in an ism (the name that modern historians give to Mexica religion)36 act of supplication and prayer, as a model for the viewer? Van and with the dynamic qualities of rituals and theatrics in both der Weyden allows for both readings. Likewise, there are sym- cultures. I therefore began by looking at cities, both Mesoameri- bolic details in the right panel. Blood flows down from Christ’s can and European, and observed how they acted as hagiopoli— side under the loincloth to the groin area. This is not just the sacred metropolises—and meta-symbols of societies and em- result of gravity but deliberately calls attention to the fact that pires. In Spanish America the new urbanizations were meant Christ’s first wound as an infant (the circumcision) and his last to replicate the biblical New Jerusalem with all its glitter and wound as an adult have completed his autosacrifice and brought sparkle, and with high hopes for a religious utopia in a New him full circle to a new beginning; scholars call this the “blood- World that was also understood to be the locus of the beginning hyphen.” Similarly, the “flying loincloth” appears to have been of the end of the world.37

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The heart of City, Temple, Stage was the more than two hun- Fig. I.4 dred fifty catechumenal centers of mid-sixteenth-century New Aztec shield stone from Spain constructed according to a design that incorporated in- the Temple of the Sun, now buried beneath the digenous temple layout as well as Temple of Jerusalem details Sagrario Chapel of the as described in the Bible. These large-scale architectural con- Cathedral of Mexico structions acted as “great stone texts of the Spanish-Indian City. (Photo by author.) encounter.”38 Erroneously called “fortress monasteries,” these complexes combined a church, an open chapel that doubled as a theater, outdoor chapels for processions in an atrium with a monumental cross, and a friary. They were a cooperative build- ing effort on the part of Amerindians and European clergy, and Fig. I.5 often the pride and joy of the Indian pueblo.39 Like so many Cholula, Puebla. The Great Pyramid, now other aspects of indigenized Christianity, they sat both literally covered by vegetation and metaphorically on top of the old religion (fig. I.4), and they and crowned by the altered the Mesoamerican skyline forever (fig. I.5).40 I looked church of La Virgen de los Remedios. at each of the component parts and examined its pre-Contact (Photo by author.) origins in either Amerindian architecture or that of the Old World. I also suggested models for the individual parts based on the medieval understanding of metaphor and biblical prece- dent. I completed the study by investigating European stage sets and dramas as a visual source for components of the evangelization compounds. Religious theatrical performances were common to both Aztec teoyoism and medieval Catholicism, and they appear to have been the most entertaining and successful aspects of the culture contact. Cities, temple-churches, and theatrical stages thus became documents of intercultural dialogue, and I looked at them si- multaneously as architectural constructions, copies of revered originals, and metaphors for larger ideas. Each entity was en- coded with a wealth of religious associations in different but potentially complementary ways that eventually made conflu- ence and convergence possible.41 As in van der Weyden’s diptych of the crucifixion, biblical elements of the New Jerusalem, or the Temple of Solomon, or the Holy Sepulcher were ex- tracted from their historically limited time and place and relo- cated in sixteenth-century New Spain for a people new to the faith. In City, Temple, Stage I concluded that enacted worship had a more profound impact on the emerging societies than political hegemony, and this is the theme I now wish to examine in greater depth in the facing panel of my diptych: Christian Texts for Aztecs.

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V T

Part of my interest here is in Christian missionary texts used for the conversion and liturgical life of the Nahua-speaking natives of central Mexico, printed books in black and red movable type, an invention of fifteenth-century Europeans. Of course, the Aztecs had sacred scriptures and their own system of pictorial writing in similar colors in screenfold books (fig. I.6). For the Nahua, sacral writing was in tlilli in tlapalli, the painted “Red and the Black” of their pictographic codices; that expression could denote hallowed script and sacred speech, as well as being a metaphor for knowledge or wisdom.42 When the natives looked over the shoulders of the friars to inspect their leather- bound and gilt-trimmed books, as they no doubt did, they spied the very same sacred colors: black type with rubrication on Fig. I.6 white paper, frequently accompanied by black and red images. Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, Mixtec-Puebla style screenfold book, a divinatory almanac, c. 1400–1521. This was the standard visual format of printed missals, bre- Liverpool Museum, MS Mayer 12014. (Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY.) viaries, catechisms, and the ritual books used so pervasively in America, all of which became the new “Red and the Black,” the new wisdom of the new religion.43 (The phrase was also adopted for the four Gospels and the writings of the Hebrew prophets.)44 Gazing upon these sacred colors, the friars chanted, processed, and performed rituals—as had the Aztec priests in their temples (figs. I.7, 2.5, 2.9, 3.1, 3.19, 6.3, 8.13). In addition to these printed texts, I want to include here the material culture and visual texts of the first evangelization. Academic scholarship, with its Western bias toward logos, has tended to privilege the written word over the spoken, depicted, or enacted word; this imbalance needs to be corrected if we are to understand the Contact period.45 For visual readers of pic- tographs and ideographs, like the Nahuas, the picture was truly worth a thousand words, and they expected texts to be images.46 When shown pages of printed type by Hernán Cortés, the reac- tion of the Aztec literati was, “Why do they not speak?” meaning why are there no readable icons? As Kay Read astutely com- ments in examining Aztec codices: “Images ‘speak’ and ‘talk,’ which makes it possible to ‘read’ these visual ‘texts.’ By so doing, [we] note the similarities between verbal and visual forms of expression. . . .Visual communication, like verbal communica- Fig. I.7 tion, is discourse—a human capacity to systematically order, Alberto Castellani, Missale Romanum, 1506. Crucifixion woodcut for the Good Friday service. reorder, and communicate those orders to others.”47 (Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.)

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Fig. I.8 Lienzo de Tlaxcala. Scene of the attack on Hernán Cortés and his Tlaxcalan allies. In the background, paintings of the Virgin and of the Cruciﬁxion are set on ﬁre. (From Alfredo Chavero, Homenaje al Cristobal Colón, 1892. Public domain.)

Fig. I.9 Codex Aubin, almanac. In the year 1521 (III House) a Spanish galleon is spotted and the Spanish invade; in 1524 (VI Flint): “Now begins the divine word, the thing of God, when the fathers taught us.” A friar preaches to three Indians from a portable pulpit. (The British Museum, London, MS Add. 31219. Photo from Historie de la Nation Mexicaine, ed. J. M. A. Aubin, 1893. Public domain.)

Stephanie Wood says essentially the same thing through her even the viceroy stands on a lower level than the native judge analysis of visual and graphic texts created by native peoples, (figs. I.10, I.11).50 something that I wish to do for liturgical practice in the follow- It would be ideal, as Wood states, to have a chronological ing pages. In many cases the early painted codices speak louder catalogue of these pictorial images in order to determine how than the written glosses or explanatory narratives. They de- they evolved over time, but unfortunately most pictorial manu- pict the Europeans neither as gods nor as demons. Spaniards scripts are difficult to date with precision, as are most colonial may have exotic clothing and headgear, or ride strange ani- texts. Even with the advent of alphabetic writing, the tlacuilos mals, but they are presented as mortals of the same stature and (scribe-painters), whether notaries or other educated members prowess as native warriors (fig. I.8).48 What is especially note- of indigenous communities, continued to produce pictorial docu- worthy is the ease with which images of the newcomers enter ments into the nineteenth century. “The challenge,” she says, the native almanacs, as if their arrival were just one of several “is to interpret the images as they were intended by the artists events that year, or as if they were just one more military pres- who painted them and as they might have been read by in- ence in a world of militaristic ethnicities (fig. I.9).49 In some digenous audiences, bearing in mind whenever possible the con- codices, like the Codex Tlatelolco, Spaniards are portrayed as text that produced each pictorial.”51 For example, native tlac- puny in comparison to the native lords; and in the Codex Reese uilos frequently depict ecclesiastics, a frequency that suggests

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Fig. I.10 Codex Tlatelolco, almanac. Panel for the year 1565 with the seated native ruler of Tlatelolco wearing the blue Aztec miter. He may have been the donor of the eucharistic tabernacle seen behind him that is crowned by green feathers. Native warriors, with spear and shield, are rendered large, while Spaniards on horseback are diminutive. (Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City, MS 35–39. Used with permission.)

importance and possibly respect, but por- trayals of friars or bishops rarely convey individual identity in a precise manner, pre- ferring to present emblematic accoutrements such as miter, staff, or vestments that clarify the figure’s legitimacy. In the Codex Yanhuit- lan, written in Oaxaca in the 1550s (fig. I.12), the friar is drawn oversized and seated in comparison to the two native lords who are standing. As Wood notes, the friar’s size does not render him godlike; rather it shows that he was probably writing to the viceroy or the Crown on behalf of the lords, and therefore accorded a status that not even the civil au- thorities receive in the codex.52 In a similar vein the anthropologist Clif- ford Geertz cautions the explorer of an alien culture, like the sixteenth-century Mexica, to approach that culture with humility and to acknowledge the incompleteness of any picture of it: “Cul- Fig. I.11 tural analysis is, or should be, guessing at meanings, assert- Codex Reese, mid- ing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from sixteenth-century land map on maguey fiber. the better guesses, not discovering the ‘Continent of Meaning’ 53 Detail of Viceroy and mapping its bloodless landscape.” In the following pages fig I.12 Velasco conversing with I hope to make some educated but documented guesses, espe- Codex Yanhuitlan, c. 1550. Plate 29: Fray Domingo de Santa María, O.P., a native lord. (Courtesy cially regarding the ability of images and ritual performance to writes in the presence of two native lords of Tepozcolula, Oaxaca. of the Beinecke Rare Biblioteca Lafragua, Puebla. (Courtesy of Mtro. Manuel Santiago, Book and Manuscript convey and complement sociotheological meanings and to get director.) Library, Yale at the affective life of a neo-Christian community. Both provide University.) what Geertz has called “cultural thickness,” and they help us to recognize and appreciate the richness of society’s mixtures and the neo-Christians with all its color and ceremony, not to write synthetizations.54 a diachronic history of sixteenth-century Mexico. To the pos- Multivalent images—from indigenous codices, woodblock sible disappointment of some readers, I avoid attempting a strict prints, copper engravings, painted murals, carved sculpture, and chronological survey of the liturgical practices, as if there had the like—therefore supplement, amplify, and clarify the written been a lineal evolution or a rigid uniformity among the three re- word. They also demonstrate how Christianity and its liturgical ligious orders across the continent and the century. Neither the worship were contextualized and adapted to the Nahua ethos. I friars’ memoirs nor the later writings of Nahua-Christian histo- examine both discursive texts and pictorial texts, and attempt rians offer us a single consistent view of sacramental practice. to read them together. My treatment of the codices is selective Much of what was attempted appears localized, spontaneous, and necessarily concise; for that reason the reader is directed and reactive to the moment or to the circumstance, guided more to the bibliography for a fuller treatment of each codex. My in- by the creativity of a particular individual, like Sahagún, or of a terest here is to visualize and to bring to life the worship of particular group, like the native catechists in the field. For the

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most part, I limit my survey to the Nahuatl-speaking region of In chapter 6 I focus on processional liturgies and show how central Mexico, aware that it remains for other scholars to ex- important they were in the culture of Iberia and in the kines- amine liturgical practices among ethnic and linguistic groups thetic religious life of the Aztecs. Processional rituals were ap- like the Maya, Tarascans, Otomí, Mixtec, Huascas, and Chichi- pealing to both Nahua and Spaniard, particularly the theatri- mecas.55 It also belongs to others to analyze in detail the vari- calized processions of the feast of Corpus Christi, the subject of ous colonial codices that I examine here in summary fashion for chapter 7. Corpus Christi proved an effective ritual substitute their liturgical or evangelistic interest. for the Amerindian cult of the sun, one that afforded the Nahuas In chapter 1 I examine notions of conversion in the Old a public space to enact both their own chosen identity and the World of Europe and aspects of the culture contact of Chris- special identity that the friars hoped they would assume in the tianity with non-Hellenistic peoples. Liturgical worship usually future. went hand in hand with missionary activity. Here I want to em- Chapter 8 invites a look at the more entertaining and mate- phasize that conversion always had a much different meaning rial side of the Catholic liturgy as it was enacted in New Spain. from intellectual illumination or “personal conviction.”56 I also Liturgical artifacts and props were the most tactile elements of want to highlight the fact that medieval processes of evange- the new religion that were put into the hands of native Ameri- lization were highly tactile and sensorial, and acted as prece- cans, and it seems that they relished their use. The stuff of ma- dents for what was attempted with the Amerindians in New terial culture also gave the neophyte a sense of ownership of Spain; the friars brought these medieval techniques with them Christianity, and provided a tangible bridge between what was to the New World. familiar in both religious systems. These objects have proven In chapter 2 I look at the late medieval liturgy in Eu- some of the most lasting elements of the evangelization pro- rope on the eve of the age of discovery and note Spain’s unique cesses and are still in use today in Mexican popular religiosity. position, especially its initial attempts to incorporate Arabic- In chapter 9 I enter the terrain of informed speculation speaking peoples into Christian life and culture. Here I hope to to look at the importance of the human heart and blood—as show that the discovery and evangelization of America co- physical realities and as metaphors—in teoyoism and Catholi- incided with attempts at the Church’s institutional and liturgi- cism. Here, as elsewhere, I make use of recycled Mexica words, cal reform, and that these were, in part, a result of new culture metaphors, and artifacts to suggest that the notions of human contact and missionary activity. In chapter 3 I address the ver- sacrifice and religious cannibalism were reappropriated by the bal talents of the mendicant friars as orators and the medieval friars and their native assistants to apply now to the unique precedents for visual preaching. Here we see that the friars came sacrifice of Christ on the cross and to his sacramental body. well equipped to deal with the unlettered—but extraordinarily I further propose that the Nahua ethos and the way in which visually literate—peoples of the New World. the evangelization proceeded explain why Christ crucified is so Chapters 4 and 5 assemble the relevant texts pertaining evidently the root metaphor and central icon of Mexican Ca- to the seven sacraments and how they were presented and ad- tholicism today. ministered among the Mesoamericans. Here we see that there The conclusion suggests that relatively little of the old were pre-Columbian practices that prepared the Amerindians, Aztec religion was destroyed while much more was “recycled” in a sense, for the Catholic sacraments and sacramentals. The because it was relatively easily christianized by a modification in illustrations—from colonial codices, architecture, and mural metaphors, visual and verbal. The friars were surprisingly cre- paintings—flesh out the spatial context for the administration ative and, for the most part, successful in what they attempted of the sacraments and devotions, and how they might have ap- to do in partnership with the Nahua Christians. The evange- peared to native and European alike. Several appendixes sup- lization of New Spain was a laboratory in the inculturation and plement these chapters with additional textual material from contextualization of Christianity and its liturgy, a fascinating Latin, Spanish, and Nahuatl sources. experiment whose effects linger to this day.

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