Introduction

Empire, Globalization, and the Comparative Study of Religions

The “discovery” of America by Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries meant, as never before, the irruption of an absolute otherness in European consciousness. And yet, American reality has traditionally been less appreciated than that of Africa or Southeast Asia, for example, in the human sciences’ conceptual models and narrative strategies, as well as in the discussion of its epistemological foundations (Klor de Alva, 1988). On the other hand, from the perspective of classical studies, there has been almost no comparison of the diverse aspects of religious contact that characterized the ancient Mediterranean ecumene and those that affected the Spanish colonies in America, aside from a few notable exceptions (Gruzinski & Rouveret, 1976; Webster, 1997, 2001). Our research project has attempted to fill this gap and to achieve a deeper comprehension of the respective historical realities within the imperial framework of “world history” by studying colonialism in the “long” Roman Empire and in Spanish Mesoamerica through the filter of religious practice. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the West was forced to rethink its own logic due to the “discovery” of America and the invention of the printing press, there was also a rediscovery of classical antiquity.

There are historical movements and events that may be considered as global phenomena, owing to their broad scope. Examples include the spread of Buddhism, the Mongol expansion under Genghis Khan, the Norse colonization of the North Atlantic rim, and the Austronesian colonization of the western Pacific islands. Indeed, ten centuries ago Norsemen established a settlement in what is now Newfoundland, Canada (Ingstad & Ingstad, 2000), while at approximately the same time, Austronesian seafarers appear to have interacted with native peoples on the Pacific coast of South America, introducing Polynesian domestic fowl and other elements of their culture, possibly including boat-manufacturing technology (Storey et al., 2007; Storey & Matisoo-Smith, 2014). These commercial or cultural networks, however, are insufficient to support the notion of an “early globalization” in the full sense of the phrase, because they lack the key element that made globalization possible five centuries later: the emergence of a political, commercial, and cultural network spanning two vast expanses of the world ocean, uniting the Mediterranean region with America and eastern Asia (Wolf, 1997).

From that time on, an early globalization was underway, including the establishment of a complex trade system among all continents (Hausberger, 2018). This process, carried out by the Iberian powers, was completed in the brief period of three decades, from the arrival of Columbus to America in 1492 to the global circumnavigation begun by Magellan and completed by Elcano in 1522 (Yun-Casalilla, 2019). Gruzinski (2004, 2018) has pointed out that globalization had its roots in the sixteenth century and that the reality of living with people arriving from different continents came from Iberian culture, from the Spaniards and Portuguese that created cities with people from Europe, America, Africa, and Asia. As Jean Fernel wrote around 1530, “Our age today is doing things of which antiquity did not dream . . . a new globe has been given to us by the navigators of our time” (K. Jennings, 2011, p. 212).

One aspect of globalization is that the world is seen as a single interconnected territory where, in addition to the human migrations, emphasis is placed on cultural transmission and on the exchange and appropriation of material and cultural goods that intersect on a planetary scale, with colonial contacts as a privileged field of analysis (Gosden, 2004; Pagden, 1993). MacCormack (2007), referring to the Andean region, explains that

the emergence of the land of Peru, understood both geographically and conceptually, reveals the classical and Roman themes that pervade our texts to have been more than instruments of description and analysis. Rather, they also became constituents of collective consciousness and identity. (p. xv)

The Spanish colonists were aware that the Roman Empire had united the diverse peoples of the Iberian Peninsula through processes of “Romanization,” so that the model of Rome not only permitted the recognition of the Inca Empire as an imperial state, but at the same time the Roman Empire was seen as a model and precedent of the Spanish Empire itself, as MacCormack (2007, p. xviii) pointed out. Similar approximations were undertaken in Lupher’s (2006) work Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America and in Pohl and Lyons’s (2016) introduction to the recent collective volume, Altera Roma: Art and Empire from Mérida to Mexico.

In the book we are presenting here, the point of departure is also the concept of empire, widely used in the description of political, social, or economic entities from antiquity to the present (Alcock et al., 2001; Arnason & Raaflaub, 2011; Eisenstadt, 1993; Finer, 1997; Motyl, 2001), together with another concept that we believe equally important, that of globalization (Conrad, 2017; Gills & Thompson, 2006; Hausberger, 2018; Sachsenmaier, 2011), specifically religious globalization.

Recently four models of interaction in the sphere of polytheistic religious systems have been distinguished (Burkert, 2000, p. 2). The first is the translation, or adaptation, between divine names as a result of cultural proximity (Bettini, 2014; Chiai, Häussler, & Kunst, 2012; Colin, Huck, & Vanséveren, 2015). The second is the transfer of images from one system to another—which can give rise to some strange and creative misunderstandings (White, 2006). The third is the personal mobility of cult actors in the Old World, from the Isiac priests to magicians or ritual specialists, or Judeo-Christian apostles like Paul. The final model is that of collective migrations, with their inherent processes of colonization, such as the colonization of the Mediterranean world by the Phoenicians and Greeks, or the population movements within the Assyrian, Persian, and Roman empires. All of these models may also be observed in Mesoamerica at the time of Spanish conquest and colonization.

A similarity between the Roman Empire and that of the Aztecs in Mesoamerica is that they were initially city-states that developed into territorial states, in the first case through the conquest of Italy and the victory over Carthage and the Greco-Hellenistic kingdoms, and in the second case from the Triple Alliance created in 1428 between Mexico Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan, although in Mesoamerica there was nothing comparable to the collective concession of citizenship that we know in the Roman world (Scheidel, 2016, pp. 26–27; M. Smith, 2000). And of course there is a notable difference between the processes of interreligious contact that take place in the ancient world, and more specifically in the Roman Empire, and those that take place in Mesoamerica at the time of the conquest and colonization by the Spanish. While in the first case the polytheistic systems characterized both the religion of the colonial power and those of the dominated countries (until Christianity managed to become the exclusive religion of the state, which did not happen until the end of the fourth century with the Edict of Thessalonica promulgated by Theodosius), the Spanish monarchy that carried out the conquest of Mesoamerica was characterized by a religious monotheism that imbued the colonizing enterprise with an evangelizing mission that was totally absent from the Roman interventions in the Mediterranean. The Romans never tried to export their religious system to the subjugated peoples (Ando, 2007), let alone extend their religion by force of arms, given the inclusive nature of the polytheistic systems (Bettini, 2014). This does not imply that the landscape of the various areas in which religious Romanization took place was not changed by the architectural monumentalization of the Capitolia (temples of the triad formed by Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva) and the temples of the imperial cult, a truly cohesive element in very diverse spaces and social realities (Ando, 2000; Pollini, 2012).

The perspective of globalization and the transformations of ethnic identity within the Mediterranean world system—defined first by the cultural koiné of the Hellenistic world, then by the Roman Empire, responds to an attempt to describe processes of increasing interconnectivity between diverse regions and localities.2 It would be a mistake, however, to think that these processes necessarily lead to a cultural unity in which the dominant culture eventually replaces local cultures. On the contrary, there is a paradox inherent to globalization, in the sense that the processes that accentuate cultural homogenization through the incorporation of things and ideas pertaining to the “global culture” ultimately include the transformation of these things and ideas, and their assimilation into subordinate cultures, to the point where they end up affirming local identity. Thus globalization is a dual process, implying both the universalization of the particular and the particularization of the universal (van Alten, 2017, p. 87).3 In any case, religion plays an essential role as a medium of cultural dialogue (Geertz, 1993, pp. 87–125; Rives, 2000; Rüpke, 2011) and in redefining the place of the individual in a changing world (Stek, 2009).

Together with the parameters of empire and globalization, and intimately bound up with them, this book approaches the concept of religion from a postcolonial perspective, as a colonial device (Botta & Ferrara, 2016) that in the globalized framework inherent to the Age of Discovery inspired different processes of “spiritual conquest” through which the colonists attempted to transform native mentality (Gruzinski, 2004). Clearly, throughout these processes language is a key element for establishing the conditions in which the dominant and subordinate groups negotiated meanings, conventions, or stereotypes regarding religion. It is also important to deal with the matter of the circulation of knowledge, because the European literary tradition was adapted to the very different cultural realities of America (Botta & Ferrara, 2016, pp. 531–532).

It is not accidental that the period of the colonization of Mesoamerica was also that of the “invention” of religion as a globalized concept (Borgeaud, 2004; Nongbri, 2013; Stroumsa, 2010). Jonathan Smith (2014) points out that the concept of religion, as an anthropological rather than a theological category, arose as a result of the encounter between Columbus and the American Indians. A similar comparison was made by O’Gorman (1958/1984), when he distinguished between finding that which was sought and the invention, a posteriori, of an unexpected novelty.4 The importance of religion in cultural encounters (Alvar, 1991; Bernand and Gruzinski, 1993; Bitterly, 1989; Cruz Andreotti, 2019; Cushner, 2006; Davidann and Gilbert, 2013; Flütcher, 2017; Graulich, 1994; Levitin, 2018) seems obvious, as “of all the objective elements, which define civilization, the most important usually is religion . . . To a very large degree, the major civilizations in human history have been closely identified with the world’s great religions” (Huntington, 1996, p. 42).5 Religion is not merely confined to the constitution of culture and civilization. In fact, it is often the reason for the encounters between cultures and civilizations (Sacco, 2019, p. 70). In those encounters the cross went hand in hand with the sword, as explained by Jesuit priest José de Acosta in the late sixteenth century (De Acosta, as cited in Sacco, 2019, pp. 81–82):

Dos cosas que parecían entre sí tan dispares, como son la difusión del Evangelio de la paz y la extensión de la espada de la guerra, no sé porque nuestra época ha hallado no solo la manera de juntarlas, sino aun de hacerlas depender necesario y legalmente una de otra. Es verdad que la condición de los bárbaros que habitan este Nuevo Mundo por lo común es tal que a no ser que se les obligue como a bestias, apenas habría esperanza o nunca jamás llegarán a humanizarse y a alcanzar la libertad de los hijos de Díos [sic]. Mas, por otra parte, se proclama que la fe misma es un don de Díos y no es obra de los hombres, y que por su misma razón de ser es tan libre que totalmente logra destruirla quien intenta imponerla a la fuerza.

[Two things that seemed so different from each other, such as the spreading of the Gospel of peace and the extension of the sword of war, I don’t know why our era has found not only a way to bring them together, but even to make them necessarily and legally dependent on each other. It is true that the condition of the barbarians who inhabit this New World is usually such that unless they are forced like beasts, there would hardly be any hope or they would never be humanized nor attain freedom as children of God. But, on the other hand, it is proclaimed that faith itself is a gift of God and is not the work of men, and that by its very reason for existence it is so free that it is totally destroyed by those who try to impose it by force.]6

As Huntington (1996, p. 50) points out, the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas, values, or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.

The contributions to this book propose to use the comparative method as a point of departure, rather than a point of arrival (Scheid & Svenbro, 1997), for conceptualizing historical differences, since the objective of historical comparison is to attain a deeper understanding of cultural specificities.7 We use the comparative method to gain a better knowledge of a concrete historical situation. To quote T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding,

Of course comparative history takes many forms, and comparative historians by and large have different goals and apply different techniques, tending to focus on

“analytical comparisons” between equivalent units (say, the Roman and Aztec Empires) in order to identify factors that help to explain common or contrasting patterns or occurrences . . . comparative history uses case-based comparisons to investigate historical variation and to devise causal explanations of particular overcomes. (Scheidel, 2016, pp. 21–22)

We try to carry out a comparison that is at once globalizing and differentiating (Tilly, 1984). As Momigliano (1966) points out, “comparative anthropology is more likely to indicate alternative possibilities of interpretation for the evidence we have than to supplement the evidence we have not” (p. 581). Or, in Smith’s (1990) words,

comparison does not necessarily tell us how things ‘are’ . . . like models and metaphors, comparison tells us how things might be conceived, how they might be ‘redescribed’. . . . Comparison provides the means by which we ‘re-vision’ phenomena as our data in order to solve our theoretical problems. (p. 52)

Smith (1990, p. 99) has pointed out that comparison, understood in a strict sense, “always take place in relationship to a ‘third term’—a taxon or pattern—which prevents the implication (or subsequent proposition) of borrowing or influence,” especially if one considers the potential of ethnographic comparandum to rectify historical themes and the acritical perpetuation of theological bias as well as the fallacy of emic interpretation. We deceive ourselves when we imagine ourselves to be working on historical or textual materials purely in indigenous terms, as if it were possible to adopt the viewpoints of ancient cultures. Our translations and interpretations remove indigenous perspectives from their world and insert them into a modern context in which only through comparison can they acquire discursive significance (Frankfurter, 2012, pp. 84, 88).

But our intention in this book is not to carry out a systematic or “hard” comparison between realities or processes in Mesoamerica and the ancient world, especially the Roman Empire, around a series of previously established “third terms.” Rather, we are interested in carrying out a “weak comparison” (Lincoln, 2018) from the outset, one which meets the four requirements set out by Lincoln to limit the dangers of an excessively ambitious aim: a comparison that (1) affects a small number of cases, (2) is interested in both similarities and differences, (3) recognizes the similar value of the data, and (4) takes into account the contexts in a systematic way. Our comparison is “weak” precisely because of the relative novelty of the topic, which, with the exception of the book edited by Pohl and Lyons (2016), had not been addressed to date.8 We therefore advocate, to a certain extent, a constructive comparison of “comparing the incomparable,” of building comparable objects. As Detienne (2001, p. 9) points out, “how can we decide in advance what is comparable if not through an implicit value judgment that already seems to rule out the possibility of building what may be ‘comparable’?”

Contributions

The first chapter, by Greg Woolf, compares modes of cultural and religious interaction in different historical contexts. He employs, as a third category in the historical comparison, the concept of middle ground, developed by White (1991) in his study of the interactions between Europeans and Indians in the Great Lakes region, from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Gosden (2004) uses the concept of middle ground in his tripartite taxonomy of colonialisms, together with what he calls terra nullius, in which colonizers possess an overwhelming force (the conquest of Mesoamerica is given as an example of this category), and colonialism within a shared cultural milieu, where there is little cultural distinction between colonizing and colonized peoples. For Gosden, the middle ground is an intermediate category, where there is an uneven balance of power, albeit without the presence of an overwhelming force. This approach, despite White’s reservations, can be useful for the analysis of cultural encounters in colonial contexts, because it transcends the dichotomy of Indians and Europeans while focusing on modes of negotiation and communication as well as the mutual misunderstandings that arose from interactions in colonial contexts and resulted in new meanings. Woolf shows that the kinds of middle grounds that emerged in the Roman expansion and in the colonization of Mesoamerica, while different from the situation in the Great Lakes, are comparable. The Romans lacked the technological advantages of the Spaniards in Mesoamerica, and in contrast to the radically different culture encountered by Iberian colonists, they operated within a more or less familiar ecumene; while the Roman conquests were violent, they did not provoke the radical transformations that were imposed upon the natives of Mesoamerica by the Spanish colonists. Woolf emphasizes the importance of ritual mediation in the case of Rome, owing to a long tradition of accommodations between distinct polytheistic systems; religious authority was exercised through locally controlled ritual, while missionary activity was practically nonexistent. In the case of New Spain, there were also intermediate spaces in which productive misunderstandings, and the intentional manipulation of symbols, emerged through ritual mediation. For these reasons Woolf questions the application of Gosden’s category of terra nullius in America.

György Németh’s contribution explores the transition or conversion from paganism to Christianity, a slow process in which Christians continued to make use of local iconography, though some of these symbols might not be compatible with the new religion. Many Christian amulets contain vestiges of pagan magic, and this also occurs with curse tablets, even though their manufacture and use implied a conflict with Christian values.9 The sanctuary of Anna Perenna in Rome is particularly relevant to this topic: there, six lead containers bear representations of anthropo-zoomorphic demons associated with alphabetic inscriptions in Greek, including references to Jesus Christ. Curse tablets, found in places like Bath, show that pagans and Christians shared the same places of worship. The biography of Saint Hilarion, composed by Saint Hieronymus in the late fourth century, tells of Hilarion’s role in countering a curse that had partially paralyzed a charioteer and of his use of magic to influence the outcome of chariot races in Gaza, revealing the early Christians’ belief in the power of magicians in spite of the prohibition by the Council of Laodicea against the practice of magic by clerics. The persistence of traditional magic in Hungary until recent times is documented, including folk advocations of Mother Earth or Babba Mária (Beautiful Mary) to play the role of the pagan goddess Boldogasszony. This process shows a striking resemblance to what happened in New Spain, where the ancient Nahua goddess Tonantzin was identified with the Virgin Mary.

The next two chapters are transitional in the thematic sequence of this book, encompassing both of the historical horizons that are compared here, the Roman Empire and the Spanish colonial empire in Mesoamerica, dealing with specific aspects of religious ritual and ideology. In the first of these, Francisco Marco Simón approaches the theme of human sacrifice as a sign of extreme religious otherness, in both classical antiquity and in the colonization of New Spain (in this sense, this topic constitutes the “third term” background to the construction of religious alterity in both the ancient and modern worlds). This topic has received renewed attention in the last few years, with interpretations that do not always coincide, and is the most characteristic feature of the religion of the “other” in these historical contexts. Three different horizons and representations are contemplated. The first is that of classical Greco-Latin authors, who made this theme the paradigm of barbarism. The second is that of early Christian authors, for whom it epitomized traditional religions, encompassed by the denigrating term paganism. The third is that of the missionaries of New Spain, with their goal of converting the natives of Mesoamerica to their brand of Christianity. The ancient authors emphasized the otherness (xénos) and illegitimacy (ánomos) of this extraordinary ritual, remitting it to a remote past that had been transcended and assigning its practice to very different peoples: the Tauri from Pontus, the Egyptians (through the figure of Busiris), the Celts, the Carthaginians, and the Scythians. Documental evidence, however, testifies to the reality of this ritual in exceptional circumstances in the Roman Empire, including references to the burials of Gauls and Greeks in the Forum Boarium of Rome. Recent archaeological discoveries also suggest that human sacrifice was practiced occasionally in the Roman Empire, for example in Verulanium, Britannia. From the paleo-Christian perspective, human sacrifice was no longer seen as a cultural distinction, or an example of moral degradation, but rather as an essential feature permeating traditional religious systems. The same thing occurs in the Spanish colonists’ view of native Mesoamerican religion, which highlights child sacrifice, cannibalism, or sexual degeneration as significant features. Archaeology confirms certain differences in the ritual praxis of the Old World and Mesoamerica: compared to its elusiveness in the archaeological record of the Greco-Latin domain, human sacrifice played a fundamental role in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. There are, however, certain common elements in the ancient, paleo-Christian, and Mesoamerican conceptions, for example the notion of self-sacrifice as a means to access a higher reality for the renewal of cosmic forces, the ritual of symbolic theophagy, and the treatment of the physical remains of Christian martyrs and of Mesoamerican sacrificial victims.

In the following chapter, Lorenzo Pérez Yarza analyses solar deities as essential elements of a different “third category” for understanding religious processes in imperial contexts. The Aztec god Huitzilopochtli, prominent in central Mexican myth and ritual, and the Roman solar deity, including the imperial manifestation of Sol Invictus, appear as key elements in imperial ideology in the times preceding the evangelization of Mesoamerica and the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Both deities have a special relation with the state, and both legitimized the power of the ruler. In the Spanish colony, a series of ancient symbolic assimilations, such as the representation of Christ-Helios in a mosaic in the Vatican, or references to Dies Solis or Dominus Dei, justify the use of solar imagery as a metaphor to express the divine horizon in Christianity and as an instrument of acculturation in New Spain, comprehensible to both the European missionaries and native neophytes.10

The next two chapters present opposing viewpoints of the intercultural dynamics in the Spanish colony in Mesoamerica. The first reveals how various European writers and illustrators represented the native warriors of America from a Christian perspective, while the second shows a central Mexican indigenous perspective, using ancestral visual language to depict the changing geopolitical, social, and cultural landscape. Both views reveal the strategies employed by the sixteenth-century authors in the negotiation of political power and identity in the diverse society that was emerging in the colonial milieu of New Spain as Indians and Spaniards looked at each other across an ethnic divide.

Paolo Taviani scrutinizes the image of the enemy warrior in the early European chronicles of the Spanish conquest. He notes a substantial change in the religious implications of imperial warfare in the fourth century CE, with the emperors Constantine and Theodosius, when military victory was interpreted as a manifestation of the will of God. The Christian Empire was seen as the instrument of annihilation of the false deities of defeated peoples. Humanity was divided into two classes: those who acted in the name of God and those who opposed him. These two classes corresponded to the Empire and its enemies, both external and internal: heretics, rebels, pagans, and barbarians. This theological conception of war dates to the Old Testament, adding the universal expansion of the Christian faith to Roman empire-building, battling the milites Diaboli with prayer and combat. With these premises, Taviani proposes to interpret the images of the warriors encountered by the Spanish colonists in America. In the earliest accounts, from Columbus to Cabeza de Vaca, the naivety of the Indians is emphasized. With official chronicler Fernández de Oviedo, a stereotype emerges linking indigenous Americans with the Devil by highlighting practices such as idolatry, cannibalism, and sexuality as well as a natural resistance to the Christian faith. Ultimately, most colonial sources, including Cortés, Díaz del Castillo, and Las Casas, rarely express the stereotype of the Indian warrior possessed by the Devil. This is not so much due to the stereotype falling out of fashion, according to Taviani, nor to the lack of a credible military threat from the Indians—they had repeatedly placed the Europeans in difficult, even deadly situations—but to the need to exploit the natives as a labor force. The symbolic solution was to depict diabolical influence in the context of idolatrous ceremonies, including cannibalism and free love. The image of the Indian that reached Europe was that of an extremely barbarous people, but one that could easily be dominated.

The Huamantla Map is the focus of the contribution by David Charles Wright-Carr, a study of how Spanish colonization and religious imposition were seen and interpreted from a native perspective. This pictorial manuscript, which is painted on an exceptionally large rectangle of bark paper and complemented by alphabetic glosses, was produced during the late sixteenth century in an Otomi town in eastern Tlaxcala, Mexico. Within a cartographic structure, events from cosmogonic and historical narrative traditions are depicted, woven together by paths of footprints representing migrations, by trails of blood, and by depictions of people and events such as war and human sacrifice. Materials, content, and formal aspects are essentially within the indigenous tradition of graphic communication, on the blurry boundary between the Western categories of iconography and writing. At the same time, the depiction of Spanish colonists and the use of alphabetic signs in numerous glosses written in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, reveal a degree of familiarity with European culture and an acknowledgment of the realities of imperial globalization. This document was painted at a crucial period in the history of Huamantla, when the town was emerging as a regional capital and the founding of a Franciscan missionary establishment contributed to the town’s newfound political status. The map was painted by the lords of Huamantla as a tool for the negotiation of power and as an act of cultural resistance, drawing on historical narrative and ethnic identity to claim a privileged role in the emerging multicultural and globalized social order. Wright-Carr’s chapter provides balance within the structure of this collective volume, making it clear that native Mesoamericans possessed an ancient and sophisticated cultural tradition comparable to that of Europe in spite of its radical otherness, and showing that the concept of “conquest,” used often in the historiography of New Spain, oversimplifies the complex sociocultural interactions of early colonial central Mexico.

The four chapters that follow coincide in the analysis of the construction and the representation of Mesoamerican otherness by Franciscan missionaries, with Friar Bernardino de Sahagún as a pivotal figure. Here we enter an area characteristic of the middle ground in these colonial encounters, a “third space” (Bhabha, 1994), distinct from I and you, where communication, dialogue, and negotiation take place between colonizers and the colonized. This is the semiotic space of cultural interaction, where diverse elements and hybrid narrative forms coexist and where a “rhetoric of negotiation of the sacred towards a shared narrative” (Zinni, 2014) unfolds through novel strategies. As the Spanish grammarian Antonio de Nebrija (1492) wrote in the prologue of his grammar of the Castilian language, “siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio” [language has always been the companion of empire] (f. a.iir). The struggle for political and cultural control in America was, in part, the struggle for linguistic supremacy. Hence the importance of the work of the mendicant friars and the recognition by the Jesuit priest José de Acosta, and eventually by royal officials, that the use of indigenous languages was the only means to achieve something resembling an authentic evangelization (Pagden, 1993; Wright-Carr, 2007).

The first chapter in this thematic block is by Sergio Botta, who studies the construction by the Franciscans of comparative strategies that would allow the inclusion of elements of Mesoamerican religion in the Christian worldview, in a process that implied a third term in the sense suggested by Smith (1990, p. 51): the premise of the universality of the Christian idea of God for comparing and confronting these two different worlds. For this undertaking, the text by Augustine of Hippo, De Civitate Dei, was of crucial importance, making possible the comparison of the “polytheistic” gods of classical antiquity with the deities of the natives of New Spain.11 In this comparative endeavor, Botta traces the development of a global theory of religion during early modern history, while noting the differences in the use made of the Augustinian arguments by two influential Franciscans, Bernardino de Sahagún and Juan de Torquemada. The first of these authors shows a balance between rhetorical and structural functions: he uses Augustine’s authority to justify his missionary project, while explaining the errors of the Indians to a European audience; his reconstruction provides a useful representation of Mesoamerican religion, inventing a pantheon of twelve deities, similar to the Varronian model that was deconstructed by Augustine. Torquemada, on the other hand, constructs a global model of idolatry, in which Mesoamerican polytheism is seen as a New World manifestation of a stage in the religious development of peoples throughout the world, in which the worship of idols is a natural condition in the absence of the grace of God.

The second contribution on the Franciscan missionary enterprise in New Spain is by Guilhem Olivier, who examines Sahagún’s views on Nahua astrology and divination. To this end, he compares Greco-Roman tradition with Mesoamerican divinatory practice. The pagan gods, expelled from the Old World by the advance of Christianity, took refuge in the Indies, where they continued to deceive its population, according to the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas’s (1967, pp. 428–429) suspicions in the sixteenth century. This is the explanatory basis of the similarities in the divinatory practices of pagan antiquity and Mesoamerica. The Catholic Church disapproved of soothsaying in general as an undesirable aspect of paganism, although its attitude toward such practices changed over the centuries, assuming an ambiguous position on practices like “natural astrology.” When Friar Bernardino de Sahagún writes about Nahua knowledge of the stars, he relates this tradition to European astrology. At the same time, he condemns the use of the tōnalpōhualli, the 260-day divinatory calendar, citing its pagan origins and the lack of a natural basis. Olivier explores the origins in the writings of Augustine and Isidore of Seville of Sahagún’s arguments against native divination, and cites the possible influence of European models, such as the repertorios de los tiempos (almanacs), in his description of the tōnalpōhualli, as both systems include predictions made at birth regarding a child’s destiny. An attempt is made to understand Sahagún’s insistence on the description and condemnation of the native divinatory calendar, especially his emphasis on avoiding its continued use in the baptism of children. Finally, Olivier looks at an unusual episode in the cross-cultural dialogue between the Franciscan and his neophytes, the description of the ill-omened bug called the pīnāhuiztli, illustrating the ambiguity of Christian responses to Mesoamerican divinatory practices as well as the friars’ doubts regarding the capacity of the Indians to become Christians.

In the third contribution focusing on the missionary doctrine of the Franciscan friars, María Celia Fontana Calvo examines the theme of the millennial kingdom in an iconographic program painted in the portería (vestibule) of the Franciscan Convent of Saint Gabriel in the municipality of San Pedro Cholula, Puebla. The mural paintings respond to the alternate function of the portería as a confessional for the sick and dying, to whom it offers an image of hope in their spiritual salvation. The author identifies and interprets the principal elements of the murals, which include a wooded landscape, a colonnade covered with vegetation, and a frieze running around the upper part of the walls combining elements from classical and biblical traditions with details derived from native Mesoamerican culture. Fontana Calvo interprets this iconographic program as an eschatological episode, referring to the expectation of the first resurrection after the opening of the fifth seal of the Apocalypse, reserved here for the indigenous converts who have witnessed the faith of Christ (Revelation 6.9). Thus, the mural proclaims the promise of a millennial kingdom for the deceased indigenous Christians, with the characteristics of peace announced in the messianic prophecy of Isaiah (11.6–9), including Jesse’s tree, prominently placed as an allusion to the divine presence. Fontana dates the execution of this mural program to the final third of the sixteenth century, when the indigenous population was suffering from a catastrophic demographic collapse brought on by epidemics and the burden of colonial exploitation at the hands of the Spanish colonists. It is especially interesting that the converted natives are glorified in the Roman way through the elements of the imago cliptea sarcophagus, because, like the Romans, they are considered gentiles, but from the New World.

In the fourth and final chapter of this set, Martin Devecka uses Sahagún’s Florentine Codex (1979) to illustrate how the Christian worldview of Spanish friars and priests was an obstacle to the antiquarian interest and aesthetic appreciation of the sculptural and pictorial creations of the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. In the same period that witnessed the conquest and colonization of New Spain, European scholars developed an antiquarian interest in the artistic expressions of classical antiquity, but this tendency failed to take root in Mesoamerica, as native material culture was associated with pagan idolatry and was seen as “masks for the Devil.” This study is centered on Sahagún’s discussion of the tezcatetl (mirror stones) used in divinatory practices by the Aztecs, seen by the Christian missionaries as “embodied demons.” Both the immediacy of the cultural clash brought about by the Spanish conquest and the tenuous status of the natives’ conversion meant that a genuine antiquarian appreciation of such precious objects would have to wait until the eighteenth century.

Final Considerations

The research compiled in this book supports the comparison of key elements in two processes of religious globalization separated by more than a millennium: one in the Old World, in the setting of the Roman Empire, and the other in the New World, in Spain’s colonies in America. The correspondences and divergences revealed through this comparison have provided material for a productive conversation among specialists in classical scholarship and Mesoamerican studies, a fruitful interdisciplinary discussion involving ideas from history, anthropology, archaeology, art history, and philology. Recurring themes include the role of religion in processes of imperial domination; its use as an instrument of resistance, reinforcing and transforming the collective identities of the conquered; the imposition, appropriation, incorporation, and adaptation of various elements of religious systems by hegemonic groups and subaltern peoples; the creative misunderstandings that can arise on the middle ground, where power, ideology, and identity are negotiated; the rejection by Christianity of ritual violence—human sacrifice—and the use of this rejection by Christians as a pretext for inflicting other kinds of violence against peoples thus classified as “barbarian,” “pagan,” or “diabolical.”

A third process, not explicitly discussed here but impossible to ignore despite its apparent but illusory absence, is our present-day reality, in which hegemonic forces contend for dominance in the world arena while institutionalized religions and local ritual traditions play significant roles in day-to-day social and cultural interaction, and in the negotiation of personal and collective identities. Each generation of historians performs a creative reinterpretation of the documental and archaeological record while its particular present shapes its vision of the past, determining a unique historiographic style, flavoring both content and form. Our twenty-first-century perspective—which in the case of this book might be considered global, considering the diverse backgrounds of the authors—provides a sympathetic vantage point for discussing and attempting to decipher past processes of social communication in multicultural contexts.

Notes

References