Sweeping the Way: Divine Transformation in the Aztec Festival of Ochpaniztli

5: Ochpaniztli in theMexican Codex Borbonicus

123 s w e e p in g t h e w ay Scholars have long been intrigued by the representation of Ochpaniztli that appears in the veintena chapter of the Codex Borbonicus (figs. 5.1–5.3). This imagery falls within the third section of the manuscript (pp. 23–37), which appears to represent one full Mexican veintena cycle. On these pages, a series of complex, dramatic ceremonial activities and sacrifices are carried out in order to propitiate forces linked with maize, water, sustenance, and the earth’s fertility, forces that celebrants engaged through the medium of the sacred teixiptla. This teixiptla appears multiple times and in various manifestations throughout the imagery, perhaps most spectacularly situated atop a low pyramid at the center of an elaborate festival (fig. 5.2), wearing a flayed flesh and lavishly adorned with an enormous paper headdress bedecked with maize cobs, rosettes, and streamers. There is no doubt that this figure is central to the ceremony. Butwhatdivineforcedoesthissumptuouslyadornedteixiptlamanifest?Sheis certainly not Tlazolteotl, who is identified and pictured as the primary dedicatee of Ochpaniztli in the Mexican Codex Borbonicus 5 An early version of this chapter was presented at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in Denver,Colorado,in2001.IamgratefultotheOfficeofGraduateStudiesandtheDepartment of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico for a Research, Project, and Travel Grant that funded travel to that conference to present these findings. 124 Ochpaniztli in the Mexican Codex Borbonicus Ochpaniztli in most other veintena sources, and who is also present here, a small figure seated below the central platform, sporting the usual blackened mouth and holding aloft her broom. In spite of the central role accorded her in other colonial sources, the principal ceremonial figure of these events can be identified as another deity altogether: she is the maize goddess, manifested through the teixiptla wearing the flayed flesh of a human sacrificial victim. She embodies the powers of the earth to ensure or deny agricultural fertility and abundance, and she bears the name Chicomecoatl, a Nahuatl calendrical term that can be translated as “Seven Serpent.”1 She is accompanied by several attendants identifiable as the tlaloque, entities linked with Tlaloc, the ancient, pan-Mesoamerican deity of earth and water, as well as with the four cardinal directions. These Ochpaniztli rites focus on celebrations designed to propitiate these forces of earth and sky and are linked with intertwined realms of agricultural and human fecundity. It is clear that the purpose of the ceremonial activities pictured here is to activate the sacred landscape. However, the agrarian emphasis in this scene raises some significant problems of interpretation when comparing the imagery to the rest of the veintena corpus. The Borbonicus’s emphasis on Chicomecoatl and her tlaloque attendants is in marked contrast to the more usual dedication of Ochpaniztli to Tlazolteotl, with her links to human sexuality, parturition, and midwifery. Although human and agricultural fertility are certainly interrelated, these realms are not simply interchangeable. The evocation in this great ceremony of the maize goddess Chicomecoatl is quite specific to the ceremonial activities at hand. This chapter therefore attempts to understand the roles of Chicomecoatl and her rain-god attendants in the Codex Borbonicus version of Ochpaniztli. The veintena section of this manuscript has frequently been treated ahistorically, as a kind of generalized, prescriptive manual for a typical Mexican veintena year and—despite its uniqueness—this imagery regularly appears in modern scholarship as the prototypical example for understanding Ochpaniztli as a whole. But because, as other scholars have observed, the Codex Borbonicus itself provides historical and temporal specificity for its veintena chapter by including in its pages Mexican date glyphs for the years Two Reed and One Rabbit (from the fifty-twoyear count) (figs. 5.5 and 5.6), 2 I propose to frame the unusual contents of this Ochpaniztli scene as a set of historically specific events. These particular years were long associated with recurrent, devastating droughts and famines, episodes that are recorded in ethnohistoric accounts as well as in the archaeological record. Thus the propitiation of nature deities and forces linked with human sustenance, 125 Ochpaniztli in the Mexican Codex Borbonicus seen here, takes on particular relevance when considered in light of those historically based events. Furthermore, there is evidence that shrines dedicated to these gods were erected around the times of the terrible famines and that Chicomecoatl, Tlaloc, and the tlaloque were, together, invoked in potent orations uttered during times...