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

1: Sources for Ochpaniztli: Negotiating Text and Image in Early Colonial Mexican Manuscripts

17 s w e e p in g t h e w ay Spanish Christian friar-chroniclers compiling descriptions of Mesoamerican calendars and their associated rituals frequently turned directly to native Nahuas for whatever information, local manuscripts, and artistry they might be willing to provide. Although little is known about their particular identity or training, these indigenous collaborators played a crucial role in creating the colonial ethnohistories . Their investigations into Mesoamerican calendars and calendrical rituals required that, together, Spanish mendicant friar-chroniclers and Nahua scribes and artists confronted and negotiated an ancient, highly sophisticated manuscript tradition. Many of the Ochpaniztli illustrations were executed using conventions that evoke native Mexican pictorial traditions; however, the extreme dearth of pre-Columbian calendrical materials depicting the full 365-day solar year makes it extremely difficult to fully assess the relationship of these viceregal images to pre-hispanic manuscript traditions. Modern investigations of veintena celebrations like the Ochpaniztli festival consequently depend largely on the colonial sources compiled at the behest of the Christian friars. It may therefore be useful to begin by considering the historical character of the extant veintena sources and the contexts that fostered their production. This chapter seeks to situate the corpus of Ochpaniztli illustrations within its larger post-conquest milieu. It begins Sources for Ochpaniztli: Negotiating Text and Image in Early Colonial Mexican Manuscripts 1 18 Sources for Ochpaniztli: Negotiating Text and Image broadly, introducing some of the major calendrical traditions that existed at the time the Spanish arrived in central Mexico. It then considers the colonial nature of the extant veintena imagery and some of the substantial difficulties inherent in investigating pre-hispanic rituals and sacred entities using these sources. Confronting and Transforming Mesoamerican Calendars The Xiuhmolpilli It is hard to overstate the significance to native Mexicans of calendrical cycles and, by extension, the sophisticated pictorials that recorded them. As presently understood, there were numerous timekeeping systems in use throughout Meso­ america, and these were quite ancient.1 Although basic calendrical structures are largely shared across Mesoamerica, I will focus on the terms and systems pertinent to the Nahua of central Mexico. Among the major calendars was a count of fifty-two solar years, known as the xiuhmolpilli, or “binding of the years.” This was conceptualized as a discrete but incessantly repeating unit akin to our notion of a century. The fifty-two-year count was used in central Mexico in pre-hispanic annals-style manuscripts to archive historical information, probably dealing primarily with local historical events and political issues. As James Lockhart notes, colonial Nahuatl sources call these annals xiupohualli, “year count” or “year relation,” as well as xiuhtlacuilolli, “year writing,” and (ce)xiuhamatl, “(each) year paper.”2 Information pertinent to this calendar was structured in pre-Columbian pictorials in a fairly straightforward manner by a series of fifty-two individual year-names formed by a permutation of the numbers 1–13 with four particular day-names (which are known in this context as the “yearbearers”): Rabbit (tochtli), Reed (acatl), Flint (tecpatl), and House (calli). The annals use this fifty-two-year count as a continuous register of dates to arrange information in a linear, chronological fashion and generally emphasize the importance of locating major actors and singular events within measurable, dated time. Although there are no extant pre-conquest annals, the genre is known from post-conquest documents and descriptions and continued to be an important local historical form. Annals were produced in both pictorial and textual form after the conquest by Nahua, mestizo, and Spanish historians. The native painters of the historical section in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis of the mid-1550s to early 1560s adapt its pictorial forms to the European codex format and place pre- 19 Sources for Ochpaniztli: Negotiating Text and Image conquest history on a continuum with the viceregal and Christian institutions of the sixteenth century (fig. 1.1).3 Other sources transcribe pictorial annals in a textual format, as in the sixteenth-century “Annals of Cuauhtitlan.”4 Lockhart asserts that in these post-conquest documents, “the home unit becomes not only 1.1 1520–1531, Historical annals of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, folio 44r (Bib­ lio­thèque nationale de France) 20 Sources for Ochpaniztli: Negotiating Text and Image the main topic but the vantage point from which anything else that comes up is viewed,” since the annals tend to emphasize mainly locally specific information about individual persons, events, and...