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5 6 d a n c e i n t h e w r i t i n g s o f f r i a r b e r n a r d i n o d e s a h a g ú n the sacrifices of representation Three It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahag ún (1499–1590) to our understanding of the Aztec past. In the mid-sixteenth century, Sahagún embarked upon a systematic study of the Aztec world that culminated in several manuscripts, most notably the General History of the Things of New Spain (Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España), more popularly known as the Florentine Codex. The Florentine Codex is arguably the most important colonial source for the indigenous world, not only because of the breadth and depth of the information it contains about Aztec history and culture, but also because of the origin of its information. For this project Sahagún extensively interviewed a select group of elite native “informants” regarding nearly every aspect of the Aztec world. Along with his four native assistants, Sahagún compiled, edited, and translated the informants’ testimony to form the twelve volumes of the codex, each of which is dedicated to a specific aspect of Aztec thought and culture : the origins of the gods, dynastic history, rhetoric and moral philosophy, astronomy and nature, and the conquest, among other topics. The codex includes the most extensive information we have about Aztec ritual and dance. Scholars have examined countless topics covered within the Florentine Codex, yet until now there has been no study of the role of dancing in the text or in the Sahaguntine corpus at large, which is curious, given that Sahagún’s informants reference dance at least as often as, and by some measure more than, they do other aspects of Aztec ritual, including human sacrifice, a topic that has dominated popular and scholarly writing about the Aztec. This chapter will redress that oversight by examining the visual and written representations of dance in the Florentine Codex and related texts. Dance is a topic touched upon in almost all of the twelve books of the Florentine Codex. In the course of their interviews, the native informants discussed the role of dance in relation to the Aztec gods and their origins (bk. 1, “The Gods,” and bk. 3, “The Origins of the Gods”); its role in divination and omens (bk. 4, “The Soothsayers”); the configuration of music and dance in riddles (bk. 6, “Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy ”); its place in astronomical rites (bk. 7, “The Sun, Moon, Stars, and the Binding of the Years”); dance as a factor in the Aztec social world, especially among the ruling and merchant classes (bk. 8, “Kings and Lords,” and bk. 9, “The Merchants”); comparisons of foreign dances (bk. 10, “The People”); and the role of dance in the Spanish conquest (bk. 12, “The Conquest”).¹ Not surprisingly, the most extensive verbal and visual descriptions of dance appear in book 2, “The Ceremonies,” one of the earliest cross-cultural studies of ritual. Sahagún described its subject as the “calendar, festivals, and ceremonies, sacrifices, and d a n c e i n t h e w r i t i n g s o f f r i a r b e r n a r d i n o d e s a h a g ú n 5 7 solemnities that these natives of New Spain made in honor of their Gods.”² As the list of overlapping yet distinct topics indexed by its title suggests, the book casts a wide net to capture the complex range of rites that constituted the primary topic of the book, the eighteen month–long Aztec ceremonies—the elaborate sacred spectacles staged in and around the Aztec ceremonial center of Tenochtitlan. Each of these ceremonies involved sacrifices to a specific god, often in the form of human victims serving as “payment” for continued divine protection from the persistent threats of annihilation. Some of the most compelling yet confusing descriptions of dance emerge in the informants’ accounts of these human sacrifice rituals. This is especially true of the choreographies involving ixiptlas —human “representations” of Aztec deities. Most ixiptlas were slaves or captured warriors who were forced to represent specific Aztec gods via ritual dress, masks, props, speech, and dance, and then ritually sacrificed by ceremonial priests. The informants...

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