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Meeting the Gods: Apotheoses and Exchanges of the Early Encounter
Abstract
In November 1519, Motēuczōma Xōcoyōtl, Marina/Malīntzin and Hernán Cortés met, conversed, and exchanged gifts. According to Cortés's letters to Charles V, Motēuczōma identified him as a returned ancestral chieftain (often
considered to be the deity Quetzalcōātl). By reading the accounts of their gift exchange as mythohistorical texts presenting a uniquely contact perspective, we may gain insight into how both parties negotiated linguistic, cultural, and religious differences in order to shape the
situation each in his best interest. The visual record of their exchange suggests that Motēuczōma gave Cortés the vestments of the gods in order to transform him into a tēīxīptla, a localized deity embodiment, as a precursor to possible sacrifice.
Alphabetic accounts of their meeting describe Mesoamericans identifying Cortés and his companions as tēteoh (deities), a concept Cortés accepts insofar as it advances his military, political, and economic agendas. I argue that understanding these texts as mythohistories
with contact perspectives complicates—or perhaps clarifies—their reading by acknowledging that they both betray Mesoamericans and belie Europeans.
Recent scholarship on the Spanish invasion of the New World has brought under scrutiny the historiographic theme of apotheosis—the notion that Indigenous peoples regarded the invaders as gods or godlike beings and that such beliefs influenced their responses. This article examines the question by focusing on Pedro de Alvarado, a leading member of Hernán Cortés’s contingent, who was known as Tonatiuh—a Nahuatl word that designated the sun, the day, and the sun god. Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Guatemala used the name during the invasion, and Nahua, K’iche’, and Kaqchikel authors employed it frequently in later writings that variously hinted at, endorsed, or questioned Alvarado’s associations with the sun god. Rather than an imposition resulting from Spanish teachings, the association of Alvarado with the sun god derived from Mesoamerican beliefs about the rise and fall of successive eras, which provided Indigenous paradigms to explain the Spanish invasion.
This chapter evaluates Chimalpahin's modification to the manuscript of Historia de las Indias y Conquista de México. It analyzes Chimalpahin's motivation for producing this manuscript and suggests that his “hybrid” La Conquista is the sole extant attempt by a colonial American indigenous author to appropriate and modify a historical narrative by a Spanish chronicler about the Americas. This chapter also argues that Chimalpahin approached Francisco López de Gómara's La Conquista as an important chronicle about the defeat of Mexico Tenochtitlan that needed to be copied, amended, and preserved.
This volume presents the story of Hernando Cortés' conquest of Mexico, as recounted by a contemporary Spanish historian and edited by Mexico's premier Nahua historian. Francisco López de Gómara's monumental Historia de las Indias y Conquista de México was published in 1552 to instant success. Despite being banned from the Americas by Prince Philip of Spain, La conquista fell into the hands of the seventeenth-century Nahua historian Chimalpahin, who took it upon himself to make a copy of the tome. As he copied, Chimalpahin rewrote large sections of La conquista, adding information about Emperor Moctezuma and other key indigenous people who participated in those first encounters. This book is thus not only the first complete modern English translation of López de Gómara's La conquista, an invaluable source in itself of information about the conquest and native peoples; it also adds Chimalpahin's unique perspective of Nahua culture to what has traditionally been a very Hispanic portrayal of the conquest.
The Conquest of Mexico, the encounter and confrontation of two civilizations, and the beginning of a New World were events of momentous historical impor-tance.1 Beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing to the present, Western accounts have tended to create what Matthew Restall has called "a mythic narrative of Conquest" (Restall 2003:18, Chapter 5, this volume). According to this narrative, elements and events are set up so that they lead inexorably to European victory, giving "an explanation that ultimately testifies to the civiliza-tional superiority of the Spaniards, a glorification of Cortés and an endorsement of the myth that a few great and exceptional men made the Conquest possible" (Restall 2003:18). The power and pervasiveness of this mythic narrative have tended to obscure our understanding and appreciation of indigenous views of the Conquest, such as those present in the works created by the Nahua of central Mexico, who wrote extensively on this subject (León-Portilla 1962; Lockhart 1993). 2 With the European invasion, the Nahua experienced a true apocalypse: war, famine, and disease, followed by the imposition of a new social system that featured forced labor, abuse, and an insulting misunderstanding of their culture. In the face of these enormous challenges, the Nahua painter-writers (tlacuilome), in their role as preservers of knowledge and tradition (tlamatinime), created their own histories of the Conquest. One of the most important works in this tradition is "The Book of the Conquest of Mexico," preserved in Book 12 of Bernardino de Sahagún's sixteenth-century Historia General de las Cosas de la Nueva España, also known as the Florentine Codex.3.
Colonial Nahuas used their forms of expressive culture-plays, rituals, art, historiography, and others-to encode responses to the Spanish Conquest and its aftermath. These symbolic responses were often subtle and veiled, as Spanish cultural artifacts were recast into native forms that bore secondary levels of meaning in addition to the overt, surface meanings continuous with their European sources. Taking as a point of departure the Kislak Conquest of Mexico painting of the initial meeting between Hernán Cortés and Moteuczoma, in this chapter I explore the significance of this particular moment in the narrative of Conquest for both Spaniards and Nahuas (plate 3). I suggest that its iconic status as a point of juncture between two clashing cultures was such that it was symbolically replayed in other formats. Specifically, the Nahua author (or authors) of a colonial drama about the meeting between King Herod and the three Magi saw a connection between that narrative from the Gospel of Matthew and the pivotal meeting between Spanish and Aztec leaders in his (or their) own people's recent history. The drama implies a critique of both Cortés and Moteuczoma and offers the three Magi as more positive, alternative models of ancestral Nahua leaders.
The Aztec Conquest has long been depicted as a struggle between two towering historical figures-Cortés and Moteuczoma. The "noble, valiant Cortés" was contrasted with a "timorous, cowardly" Moteuczoma in the earliest Hispanic narratives of the Conquest written only a few decades after the 1521 fall of the Aztec capital city, Tenochtitlan (Clendinnen 1991:65; e.g., see López de Gómara 1964:179). William Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) further personified the clash between the Old and New Worlds in terms of the contrariety of these two leaders, the European and the Indian, such that the former, by dint of cultural superiority, was bound to emerge victorious. This attitude not only continues to permeate current perspectives on the Conquest (Clendinnen 1991:65; Lockhart 1993:17; see, e.g., Collis 1954; Thomas 1993), but it has been generalized to all of Latin America in the form of the "conquistador-myth: the notion that Spaniards displaced incumbent elites in the early modern New World because they were in some sense better, or better equipped, technically, morally or intellectually" (Fernández-Armesto 1992:288). But in the case of Mexico, there is another side to the story: Cortés cannot truly monopolize the credit for victory because Moteuczoma is equally awarded the blame for the Aztec defeat. Tis is a curious phenomenon, well-known to Conquest historians, but it has not received proper attention (Fernández-Armesto 1992:288).
When Western scholars write about non-Western societies, do they inevitably perpetuate the myths of European imperialism? Can they ever articulate the meanings and logics of non-Western peoples? Who has the right to speak for whom? Questions such as these are debated in this text. Marshall Sahlins addresses these issues head on, while building a case for the ability of anthropologists working in the Western tradition to understand other cultures. In recent years, these questions have arisen in debates over the death and deification of Captain James Cook on Hawaii Island in 1779. Did the Hawaiians truly receive Cook as a manifestation of their own god Lono? Or were they too pragmatic, too worldly-wise to accept the foreigner as a god? Moreover, can a "non-native" scholar give voice to a "native" point of view? This volume seeks to go far beyond specialized debates about the alleged superiority of Western traditions. The culmination of Sahlins's ethnohistorical research on Hawaii, is a reaffirmation for understanding difference.
A sixteenth-century manuscript known as the Florentine Codex is an outstanding example of graphic pluralism in early colonial Mexico. The codex consists of twelve books on many aspects of Nahua culture and language, presented in parallel columns of Náhuatl-and Castilian-language alphabetic text, including many illustrations drawn by Nahua artists. The twelfth and final book treats the Spanishled war on Mexico-Tenochtitlan. This book is by far the most extensive indigenous account of that war, or any other war between Native American and European peoples, for that matter. This essay considers the manuscript as three separate texts, examines differences among the three, and offers new insights into Nahua memories of the conquest of Mexico.
Common Knowledge 10.3 (2004) 463-484
My subject is the cosmological setting of an indigenous Amazonian model of the self. I will examine two major contexts, shamanism and warfare, in which "self" and "other" develop especially complex relations. Shamanism deals with the relation between humans and nonhumans; and in warfare, a human other, an "enemy," is used to bring a "self" into existence. I will deliberately use a set of traditional dichotomies (I mean, in the tradition of modernity) as both heuristic instruments and foils: nature/culture, subject/object, production/exchange, and so forth. This very crude technique for setting off the distinctive features of Amazonian cosmologies carries the obvious risk of distortion, since it is unlikely that any nonmodern cosmology can be adequately described either by means of such conceptual polarities or as a simple negation of them (as if the only point of a nonmodern cosmology were to stand in opposition to our oppositions). But the technique does have the advantage of showing how unstable and problematic those polarities can be made to appear, once they have been forced to bear "unnatural" interpretations and unexpected rearrangements.
If there is one virtually universal Amerindian notion, it is that of an original state of nondifferentiation between humans and animals, as described in mythology. Myths are filled with beings whose form, name, and behavior inextricably mix human and animal attributes in a common context of intercommunicability, identical to that which defines the present-day intrahuman world. Amerindian myths speak of a state of being where self and other interpenetrate, submerged in the same immanent, presubjective and preobjective milieu, the end of which is precisely what the mythology sets out to tell. This end is, of course, the well-known separation of "culture" and "nature"—of human and nonhuman—that Claude Lévi-Strauss has shown to be the central theme of Amerindian mythology and which he deems to be a cultural universal.
In some respects, the Amerindian separation between humans and animals may be seen as an analogue of our "nature/culture" distinction; there is, however, at least one crucial difference between the Amerindian and modern, popular Western versions. In the former case, the separation was not brought about by a process of differentiating the human from the animal, as in our own evolutionist "scientific" mythology. For Amazonian peoples, the original common condition of both humans and animals is not animality but, rather, humanity. The great separation reveals not so much culture distinguishing itself from nature as nature distancing itself from culture: the myths tell how animals lost the qualities inherited or retained by humans. Humans are those...
This article argues that, contrary to popular opinion, there is little evidence that the indigenous people of Mexico ever believed that Hernando Cortés and his men were gods, and that there is no meaningful evidence that any story about the god Quetzalcoatl's returning from the East in 1519 ever existed prior to the conquest. In order to dismantle the contruct, the origins and durability of the myth are explained, and then an alternate explanation is offered as to what the indigenous were in fact thinking at the point of contact.
Mexico City: Editorial Leyenda
- Alvarado Tezozómoc
After exchanging necklaces, Chimalpahin (but not López de Gómara) lists luxury items Motēuczōma displayed for Cortés, including “many round feather shields of many colors and designs… many bracelets, feather ornaments, and other insignia… [and] beautiful mats…
- Schroeder
The Solitude of Latin America. Nobel Prize Lecture 1982
- García Márquez
- Gabriel
Austin: The University of
- Gary Urton