From Temple to Pyramid

The very designation of Mexica sacred architecture as “pyramids” is already an antiquarian gesture, one that integrates them into a European history of building as analogues to the ancient Egyptian monuments at which Greco-Roman writers since Herodotus had marveled. The first Europeans to encounter these structures drew different comparisons. While soldiers like Bernal Díaz del Castillo, speaking casually, analogized them to the fairy castles of medieval romance, Cortés (1993), whose overriding interest in his Cartas de Relación [Letters of Relation] is to win sympathy and legitimacy for his unauthorized expedition into Mexico, compared them to mosques instead. In Mexico Tenochtitlan, he writes, there are “many mosques or houses for their idols,” buildings thus athetized as inimical to the Christian faith which are, nonetheless, “very beautiful structures.”2

“Antiquarian” engagement with Aztec religious architecture on the part of European observers thus begins even before that architecture had been effectively rendered “past” by Cortés’s depredations. The Islamic comparison, which might well be read as an assertion of the “contemporaneity” of these Mexica buildings, which it nonetheless characterizes as belonging to a religious other, takes on a chronological dimension as well as soon as Cortés starts comparing them to the “gran torre de Sevilla” [the great tower of Seville]. By thus localizing the point of comparison, Cortés sets these American “mosques” in the frame of the Reconquest of southern Spain, completed only a few decades before. With the arrival of Cardinal Cisneros at Granada and the institution of forced conversion of the Muslims remaining there, the last of the mosques in Andalusia had been postdated as obsolete religious buildings some years before the departure of Cortés from Spain for the New World. They had been destroyed or converted into churches—a fate many temples in America were to share.3

That Cortés saw the sacred architecture of Mexico as ripe for conversion into churches on analogy with what the Catholic Monarchs had done in Granada is amply borne out by his treatment of these buildings on the road to Mexico Tenochtitlan. His men threw down cult statues wherever they were able to lay hands on them, putting up altars and crosses in their place. In the first two years of Spanish contact with Central Mexican religious architecture, the conquistadors’ program was to convert rather than destroy. This project of conversion still demanded that the Mexica temples be represented, like the mosques of Andalusia, as having been rendered obsolete by Christian conquest. Cortés writes to displace these buildings into a very recent past.4

This is denial of coevalness for a practical purpose, that of characterizing the Mexica and their neighbors as legal targets for conquest, in much the same way that the Muslim kingdoms of southern Spain had been. A generation later and with different aims in mind, Bartolomé de Las Casas would radically expand the chronological gap separating the Spanish invaders from an indigenous architecture that, under Spanish compulsion, had fallen into disuse. Las Casas’s procedure throughout the Apologética Historia Sumaria [Apologetic Summary History] (1992) is to redescribe the natives of the Americas according to parallels with Greco-Roman civilization, a strategy that both secures their status as a “civilized people” and works to neutralize their superseded polytheisms. Characteristically, he is one of the first writers to draw a link between Egyptian pyramids and Mesoamerican temples. A comparison that seems obvious to modern eyes still strikes him as in need of explanation:

The tower of this temple somewhat resembles pyramids. For whoever does not know what that is, it will not be unpleasant to explain. It was a high mountain, marvelously worked out of brick, of the shape of a grain heap or a kindled flame . . . that begins thick at the bottom and reduces its thickness as it rises, until it ends in a point. . . . some of these were triangular or of three corners, others of four. . . . some lasted 1,000 years or, according to other authorities, more than 3,400 years, during which time these buildings neither collapsed nor crumbled. (Vol. 2, p. 548)

Las Casas brings a substantial erudition to bear (Isidore of Seville, Pliny the Elder, Diodorus Siculus, and Herodotus) in helping his readers to imagine an unfamiliar form of building with reference to another kind of architecture that, though also outside the experience of most European readers, has at least been well documented in a classical textual tradition that remains within their reach.5

His aim in so doing is not only descriptive. He also wants us to see these buildings, which were active sites of worship and sacrifice just decades before he wrote the Apologética Historia Sumaria, as age-old monuments to dead founders and heroes. They conform to a type of ancient building that had proven able to endure for thousands of years, honoring men (monumentally) rather than gods (idolatrously). This categorization, which certainly serves Las Casas’s apologetic purpose by disconnecting the tzacualli that remain intact from the stain of human sacrifice and idolatry, would produce a lexicon for discussing Mexica religious architecture that has endured to the present day.

The movement from mosques to pyramids is a movement into the past, the transformation of the Mexica from a just-defeated enemy into a dead civilization. Las Casas’s Egyptianism elevates Mexica civilization to the status of a “classical” culture at the cost of radically ejecting it from the present. Given Egypt’s noted double valence in Renaissance culture—as a place at once superseded and home to all manner of secret Hermetic knowledge—the depiction by Las Casas of Mexico Tenochtitlan as an Egypt of the New World is double-edged: in the case of Egypt, the past is by no means necessarily inferior. It is, however, past. Las Casas defends the peoples of the New World at the cost of deculturing them or of leaving them with nothing but the legacy of an antiquity which he has invented. For Las Casas, the pyramid is an architectural category that absorbs all the temples of New Spain from the Yucatán Peninsula to central Mexico; he makes no stylistic or historical distinction here between the buildings of the Mexica and those of the Toltec or the Maya before them.6

Cortés, Las Casas, and other Spaniards writing about the pyramids of Mexico understood these structures within a framework of religious difference: the pyramids articulated (a now past) attachment to an alien (and now extinct) religion. Displaced to pre-Reconquest Andalusia or to antediluvian Egypt, they could be understood in an antiquarian mode precisely by way of the obsolescence that these comparisons expressed. The abandoned temples of Mexico were monuments, not to a form of ritual life that had ceased but to the cessation of that life. The important thing for the Spanish was that all this architecture that had served as settings for monstrous sacrifices terminated under Christian rule (as Marco Simón highlights in his contribution to this volume).

The Small Things of New Spain

In the Valley of Mexico, at least, few would question the effectiveness of Spanish authority in ending the sacrificial rituals once associated with the pyramids. At smaller scales, legal intervention was much less straightforwardly effective: As Klor de Alva (1980) and others have thoroughly documented, parts of Mexica “private” religion survived the conquest and were supplemented by downscale “privatizations” of preconquest rituals. The material culture that accompanied these practices remained for the most part beneath the notice both of religious authorities and of European antiquarianism. Though they did so in a way that blurred indigenous chronological distinctions, European writers did at least locate Mexican pyramids in a history of forms to which Old World architecture also belonged. Fragments and rocks, by contrast, come to be treated by European observers as belonging to natural history.7

The European writers who placed any aesthetic value at all on indigenous Mexica mastery of form can be counted on one hand. Aside from, again, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who compares the painters and feather workers of Mexico Tenochtitlan to Michelangelo and Apelles, there is only Albrecht Dürer, who encounters the treasures of Mexico by chance on a journey through Belgium in 1520: an exuberant voice crying out in the wilderness. He declares that the sculptures he has seen—a golden Sun and a silver Moon, among other items—are precious things worth thousands of florins apiece, much more than their weight in metal. The Habsburg treasury, assessing their value not as art objects but as bulk metal, had the pieces melted down.8

This was the fate of most Mexica craft production in metal that made its way to Europe, not for lack of interest on the part of the priests and inquisitors, whose job it was to ensure the authenticity of native conversions to Christianity during the first decades of the conquest. They rightly perceived that statues or even fragments of statues had been saved by Mexica notables from desecration by the Spaniards, and they supposed that these remnants were still being worshipped in private ritual settings. There are records of Mexica being tried for the crime of using spolia from preconquest temples to build their houses; the identification of these blocks as spolia supposes at least some capacity on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities to recognize preconquest sculptural forms. This practical knowledge comes close to achieving an antiquarian dimension in the writings of Friar Toribio de Benevente Motolinía, one of the twelve Franciscans who reached Mexico in 1524, who explicitly confronts the problem of “converted” Mexica secretly worshipping small or fragmentary idols. He conjectures that the reason those idols, still being confiscated in his own day, show a deteriorated surface is that they have been hidden underground: the inquisitor becomes an archaeologist. And yet, as Giuseppe Marcocci (2017) remarks in a study of this aspect of Motolinía’s career, the friar never suspects that these objects appear aged because they are in fact ancient. For Motolinía too, in the end, the idol has no history.9

Yet that very word, “idol,” applied almost universally by Spanish writers to New World statuary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, conceals a deeper and more significant misunderstanding. “Idol” is of course a term with a long history in Christian European thought: it marks almost the beginning and end of Christian “art criticism” through the medieval period. One term among many in the Greco-Roman vocabulary for discussing statuary, it was appropriated by Jewish and Christian writers as a key word for describing “pagan” cult images. These writers asserted that the key concepts for understanding such images were form and resemblance, not numen—at least not in the positive sense their worshippers supposed. Cult statuary captured the faces of ancient kings who had been misunderstood as gods; if these stone shells hosted a divine presence, that was only because they served as passing abodes for demons.10

In a late antique as well as a Renaissance context, the Christian emphasis on formal resemblance was polemical: to highlight a false outer form was at the same time to characterize pagan cult images as “hollow,” and thus to devalue the precious materials out of which they were often made. This legacy, which conquistador and friar alike brought with them to Mexico, distracted Spanish observers from the essential role that material played in the sacralization of Mexica cult images. Once shattered, those images were thought to be “dead and gone”—except insofar as fragments still bearing traces of an identifiable form were secreted away and circulated among private residences.11

The Mexica were unsurprisingly more sensitive to the formal traces visible in these fragments. Excavations at the Templo Mayor, the Great Temple in Mexico City, have revealed that spolia from Teotihuacan and elsewhere were a major object of donation to the gods of Mexico Tenochtitlan—deliberately imported, at great cost of effort for the more massive pieces, and deposited among the treasures of the Templo Mayor or placed on its exterior as adornment. The value of such pieces lay in their antiquity, not as such but as bearers of form imposed by human hands. For the preconquest Mexica, this was a “classical” art. The Nahuatl word for “craftsmanship,” tōltēcāyōtl, implies for what it designates an origin in the ancient Tolteca culture of which the fragments deposited in the Templo Mayor were relics.12

A fascinating and much-discussed passage in book 11 of Bernardo de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex (1979) records the misrecognition of such relic-seeking on the part of a European writer for whom indigenous antiquarianism was unpalatable. Sahagún’s Castilian text describes an indigenous method of searching for precious stones, which release a visible vapor near sunrise; he comments that expert gem-seekers often discover boxes of stone in which precious stones have been hidden. The Nahuatl text from which Sahagún’s commentary has been derived, however, also remarks that these stones may be “ye tlayecchihualli,” already crafted, or “ye petlahualli,” already polished. Both terms are elsewhere associated with human craft production, and they suggest that the objects of description here are not raw materials but fragments or relics (Vol. 3, ff. 354v–356r [11.8.1]).13

That distinction, however, belongs to a Spanish conceptual apparatus; the Mexica saw form and material as interwoven, not opposed. Mexica sculptors created sacred images not only by manipulating form, but also (and perhaps more importantly) by selecting materials. Their choice of material conveyed important iconographic information about the numen they were representing, to be sure, but it was also felt, by Mexica viewers, to bring about the presence of the numen in the resulting representation. For Mexica artists and audiences, the stones used in sculpture possessed a history and an animacy of their own that inhered in them whether or not they formed part of a sculptural whole. In an account that deftly interweaves modern Nahua religious practice with evidence from the decades following the conquest, the anthropologist Molly Bassett (2015) has shown that not only the form but the surface of Mexica sacred images was essential in securing the real presence of the gods. These surfaces, called īīxiptlah in Nahuatl, were understood not as images but as skins: the verbal root of the phrase signifies flaying, as literalized for instance in the case of Xipe Totec, “Our Lord the Flayed One.” Such a “divine skin,” which dressed a statue (or even a human!) in order to make a living god, could be identified primarily on the basis of the materials out of which it had been made.14

Among the most important such materials were several that, by their names alone, indicate a numinous presence that transcends human application of form. Teōtetl, or jet, is a combination of the Nahuatl word for “stone,” tetl, compounded with the root teō, indicating divine belonging or origin. Teōxihuitl, or “turquoise,” represents the fusion of the same prefix with a Nahuatl word meaning “flame”; we should envision a blue fire, frozen in stone. Teōcuitlatl, meaning “gold” or “silver,” is to modern readers the most surprising of all these collocations: the prefix for divinity appears here again, now combined with a Nahuatl word meaning “excrement.”15

All these stones were particularly valued by the Mexica as components in divine skins, or tēīxiptlahhuān: the stones were the matter that made the skin divine. Consider a face mask, now in the British Museum (figure 10.1), of Tezcatlipoca or Tlaloc, composed out of alternating stripes of jet, teōtetl, and fine turquoise, teōxihuitl; about the material of the eyes, one of several designated as “mirror stone” in Nahuatl, I shall have more to say later. The striped pattern identifying this mask as imaging a god exists as an interplay of two materials that are themselves already numinous. The striped face of a god can not be made from just any stones.16

The Nahuatl data on which the preceding analysis is based come from the Florentine Codex, a collaborative production of Sahagún and several indigenous informants that offers a compendious description of the human and natural resources of the Valle de Mexico. The eleventh book in particular outlines the natural history of the region, a project for which there were numerous classical antecedents available. As Angel Maria Garibay has shown, one major model adopted by Sahagún was Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis [Natural History] (1952–1962). Book 11 of the Florentine Codex follows an abbreviated rubric generated from books 8–37 of Pliny’s work, thereby treating animals, vegetables, and minerals. My interest here is in the last of these categories, which fills the final half of book 11. In particular, I want to highlight Sahagún’s suppression of certain aspects of Pliny’s own rubric—suppression that amounts to a kind of censorship of indigenous ideas about the connection between material and artistic rendering of form.17

Sahagún’s compendium of Mexica vocabulary for, and attitudes about, precious stones in fact contains almost no reference whatsoever to the formal applications by which these stones might be made part of a larger art object. Pliny, by contrast, is above all interested in just this question: he dedicates nearly half of the thirty-third book of the Natural History to explaining the use of gold, its coinage as money, and the history that led to its being used for this purpose. On these topics, and particularly as concerns the history of Roman coinage, Pliny provides a great deal of valuable antiquarian information for which we have no other source. Gold in Rome has tyrannical beginnings: Tarquinius Priscus was the first to honor his son’s first kill in battle with a golden amulet, a gesture fossilized in the golden bullae worn by the sons of equites in Pliny’s own day. He argues, by reference to historical accounts, that gold was rare in Rome before the third century BCE, when it began to be worn in the form of rings; no Roman thought to coin it until almost the turn of the second century. The account continues in some detail: a narrative not only of metals and their properties but of the culturally specific forms to which these give rise.18

Pliny treats gold as a material invested with a representational and formal history; Sahagún does not. It would be naive of us to credit Sahagún’s choice to a concern for brevity in this digressive, twelve-book compendium. I suspect, rather, that Sahagún felt gold had no formal history worth knowing in this New World context. The conquistadors and administrators who made their fortunes by melting down indigenous ornaments and statuary into ingots, as well as the Spanish Crown whose treasuries those ingots then filled, would doubtless have agreed with Sahagún on this point. Sahagún and his fellow missionaries had another reason to leave the art history of the Indies unwritten: for them, such a history would have been nothing but a repository of dangerous idols.

The interplay between images and idolatry in the Florentine Codex is complex and difficult to summarize. One of the most visually striking and well-known sections of the codex is the list of Mexica deities at the beginning of book 1, which offers an illustration of each god with his or her associated iconography. While much has been written about this inventory as a means of assimilating Mexica religion to European categories and rendering it comprehensible via a kind of interpretatio Romana, scholars have had less to say about the sources and functions of the images it contains (figure 10.2). In fact, even this basic question remains unanswered: what are these pictures pictures of? At least one possibility is easily rejected: comparison with surviving Mexica sacred statuary shows that Sahagún’s illustrations cannot be taken as documentary images of an art-historical nature. A stylistic gap separates them, too, from the preconquest codex paintings which they more nearly resemble. The artists’ application of musculature to the bare limbs of these deities shows a clear affinity with contemporary trends in European art and marks the images out as hybrid productions, the purpose of which is not so much to document any existing image as to offer an iconographic prototype by reference to which images of a god might be recognized as such. The early modern handbooks of Greco-Roman mythography chronicled by Jacques Seznec (1995) offer a suggestive parallel. There, too, images offer a sense of pure form: rather than representing or repeating any particular artwork, they offer an index according to which other images can be recognized and evaluated.19

The first book of the Florentine Codex thus reveals a template for recognizing idols but hides the idols themselves. This historical flattening proves diagnostic for the rest of the codex as well. I suspect that Sahagún saw the history of Mexica sculptural forms as either not worth mentioning or unmentionable.

I can validate these suspicions with reference to another set of materials for which Pliny, again, provides a deep history of forms. I mean marble, the material substrate of Roman idolatry par excellence. Pliny treats this stone in book 36 of the Natural History, where he elaborates an account of its mining and origin into the oldest surviving full-blown history of art. From its opening, a diatribe against the luxurious marble columns installed in the house of Marcus Scaurus, Pliny writes with consistent reference to artefacts then still existing—many of them, as he points out, on view at Rome. There one can see a Venus by Phidias which points to the moment at which marble statuary was invented; there, too, a Ceres by Praxiteles, a Diana by Timotheus, and so on. Pliny places these treasures of Rome’s imperial museum in a history of style that attaches them to their places and times of origin. Otherwise, these statues would remain so many membra disjecta [dispersed fragments] washed up on Roman shores. For Pliny, an account of the nature of marble could hardly have been complete without a parallel account of its formal applications in the crafting of cult and secular images.20

The corresponding rubric appears in Sahagún’s Florentine Codex (1979, Vol. 3, ff. 361v–363r, 386v–387v [11.8.5]), where his informants are invited to discuss piedras comunes [ordinary stones]. The Nahuatl columns of this notionally bilingual manuscript list a variety of rocks that can be worked. By stark contrast with Pliny’s elaborately detailed discussion, however, Sahagún’s text rarely give us a sense of what might be made from these stones. About the lone exception, metlatetl, we are told that it can be used to craft metates or hand-mills. This is analytically obvious from the name of the stone: metlatl, “hand-mill,” plus tetl, “stone.”21

The Nahuatl text of the Florentine Codex is accompanied by a running commentary in Castilian which is, for the most part, a translation. On some occasions, however, the contents of the Castilian and Nahuatl texts diverge wildly. Of one of the chapters describing various classes of stones, in fact, Sahagún (1979, Vol. 3, ff. 386v–387v [11.12.7]) translates nothing but the title. On these pages, the column in Castilian contains an apologetic account of a preconquest religious festival that the Mexica have kept up even after their notional Christianization. Sahagún claims that the festival, now conducted without the sacrifices and other ritual concomitants that had distinguished it of old, no longer has any religious content: it has become a commercial occasion, like the fairs of Europe, motivated by avarice rather than idolatry.

While Sahagún’s essay offers a great deal of antiquarian information about preconquest ritual practice, as well as a revealing apology for Augustinian conversion methods, it says nothing at all about piedras comunes. Given that the Nahuatl here contains nothing particularly scandalous, the most probable explanation for Sahagún’s failure to translate it is that he felt it to be of too little interest to a Castilian-speaking audience. By undoing Pliny’s interweaving of natural and cultural history, Sahagún produces a text that can have nothing but a lexicographic value, and only for students of Nahuatl; he thus replaces it, on the Castilian side, with an essay in religious history that will be edifying for Mexico’s secular governors as well.

To indicate the extent to which Sahagún’s approach is an anachronism against the background of sixteenth-century European thought, it would suffice to set the text just discussed in comparison with the opening chapters of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550/1998), which give at least a formally analogous conspectus of the piedras comunes used by stoneworkers of Vasari’s day and in classical antiquity. There, Vasari not only treats each stone according to its physical properties and affordances, but enumerates—sometimes, as in the case of travertine, for example, at great length—the formal uses to which it has been put in the past. If a given type stone is—according to a Renaissance pattern of thought articulated most famously by Michelangelo—a kind of material summation of formal potentials, those potentials are also given and circumscribed by the formal uses to which that stone has already been put. For Vasari and his contemporary interlocutors, the “natural history” of a stone is inextricably also a history of forms.22

That the same was true in a slightly different sense for Sahagún’s Mexica informants, I have already suggested. Nahuatl speakers had a sense of the “nature” of gold and silver, teōcuitlatl, that was strongly colored by the form in which they natively appeared—as resembling excrement or diarrhea, divine in origin. For formal reasons, the Mexica understood these metals as numinous and fit for use in the more intensely numinous tēīxiptlahhuān or skins of the gods. Nature and art are, if not identical, at least inseparable.23

I conclude this section with an example that will make my point more emphatically. The importance of mirrors (tezcatl) in Nahua cosmology and myth has often been noticed by modern scholars. Tezcatlipoca, the major antagonistic deity in the Mexica pantheon, bears a name that means “smoking mirror” and, in preconquest depictions, often wears mirrors as part of his iconographic ensemble. Some accounts describe the Sun after midday as a reflection of the morning Sun in a cosmic mirror. Mexica cosmology contains many such mirrors: writers in the immediate postconquest period describe the Earth, the sky, and the sea as vast reflective surfaces. Several of the omens which are supposed to have warned Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin about the coming of the Spaniards arrived via mirrors: on the sky, on the ground, or on the head of a bird. It would be safe to say that mirrors are a major structuring device in the Mexica world-picture.24

Practically all Mexica mirrors were made from burnished stone; what kind varied by region and by function. The Florentine Codex embraces all such stones under one heading, identified in the Castilian column as “stone from which mirrors are made” and in the Nahuatl column simply as “mirror” (Vol. 3, ff. 361v–362r [11.8.5]). The Aztec category “mirror stone” embraces a broad range of minerals, likely including both iron pyrite (fool’s gold) and hematite as well as some types of obsidian. However, Sahagún’s Nahuatl-speaking informants draw strong distinctions within the category “mirror-stone” on something like a formal basis. There are light (pyritic) mirrors which are good to look into, noble mirrors, the mirrors of rulers. There are also black (hematite? obsidian?) mirrors, bad mirrors, mirrors that distort, that “contend with one’s face” (Vol. 3, ff. 361v–362r [11.8.5]). This second class of mirrors not only reflects form, but even transforms and creates it: the dark [tlāltic] mirror is negatively defined, in this text, by its failure to deliver a “true reflection.”25

Yet we know that some mirrors functioned precisely thus in preconquest Mexica ritual: as tools of divination that showed the experienced viewer, not his own face, but something else entirely. Dark mirrors could reveal the future, the past, or faraway places through rites that continued to be practiced—and persecuted—under Spanish rule. These “smoking mirrors” recapitulated on a human scale the enormous, creative mirrors out of which, in Mexica cosmology, the world itself was composed (Taube, 1992, pp. 193–198).

The form of the mirror was understood by Sahagún’s Nahua informants to be so closely imbricated within its material substrate that they deployed a category of mineral—the “mirror stone,” tezcatetl—defined solely by its ability to produce a reflective surface. Like Vasari and Pliny, they were thus conceiving and categorizing materials in terms not of their “objective” mineral qualities but of a formal potential embodied in past usages of those materials. “Mirror stone,” like Pliny’s gold and marble, is a category with an antiquarian dimension, one which however remains unexplored in Sahagún’s manuscript. That it remains unexplored is diagnostic of a blindness, pervasive in the Castilian text of book 11 of the Florentine Codex, to the role played in preconquest craft production by the stones that it catalogs. Sahagún could have shown a greater sensitivity to indigenous use of those stones by including in the codex account a history of style for which Pliny’s Natural History provided several obvious precedents. It only remains to offer an explanation why he failed to do so.

Conclusion

Sahagún was not alone among Spanish observers in being unable to integrate the Mexica culture of materials into a generalized history of forms that would embrace both the New World and the Old, but his failure is all the more conspicuous for his reliance on classical models that showed the way toward accomplishing this project. While sixteenth-century European witnesses grasped the “pastness” of indigenous temple architecture, they did not go on to develop an antiquarianism that could categorize and characterize Mexica art objects and materials on smaller scales.

The reasons for this, I think, have everything to do with religion. As I have already suggested, the friars and priests who might have been in a position to produce antiquarian research on a microscale saw the objects of that research as embodied demons, not as the dazzling artworks for which a distant, accidental observer like Albrecht Dürer was able to take them. The neutral gaze of the art historian—developed in Europe, as Christopher Wood has argued, at the cost of a desacralization of certain holy images that had at an earlier period been understood as offering a true record of Jesus’s or Mary’s face—was not yet available to friars, who still saw Mexica craft objects as masks for the Devil (Nagel and Wood, 2010, pp. 347–363).

We might further speculate, as the anthropologist Byron Hamann has suggested in another context, that Nahua informants had no interest in supplying the Spanish with antiquarian information that would only have been used to suppress the small-scale ritual practices that they had been able to preserve under colonial rule. The Spanish archaeologists mentioned by Motolinía in a passage that I have discussed above used what knowledge of Mexica sculpture they possessed not to locate that sculpture within a historical sequence but to root out examples of it and destroy them. Mexica witnesses for whom these statues were more than idols might understandably, then, have been reluctant to sharpen the sensibilities of their rulers. If the Florentine Codex was a collaborative production, then its failure to develop into more than a “materialistic” natural history is also a collaborative result.26

That failure and the forms of cooperation that produced it are both emblematic of the conditions under which religious “contact” took place during the first century of Spanish rule in Mexico. The fairy-tale enchantments to which Díaz del Castillo and his fellow soldiers had proven so susceptible were now either destroyed—in which case they could indeed be understood, correctly, as belonging to the past—or, if they persisted, were looked upon by the Spanish, not as objects with histories, but as troubling signs that they still lived in a demon-haunted world.

Notes

References