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

2: Visualizing the Sacred in the Ochpaniztli Festival

35 s w e e p in g t h e w ay Between ca. 1540 and 1600, Nahua tlacuilos created for the mendicant friars’ religious treatises a corpus of images depicting the eighteen monthly veintena feasts. The extant scenes range from expansive, dynamic imagery filled with celebratory figures engaged in ritual activities, seen in the Primeros Memoriales (fig. 2.13) created at the behest of Fray Sahagún, to sparer illustrations that represent priests, deity-effigies, and ceremonial celebrants arrayed in the attire of the patron gods. These include numerous examples, such as the related Codices Telleriano-Remensis and Vaticanus A/Ríos; the cognatic Codices Magliabechiano, Tudela, and Ixtlilxochitl; and the religious treatises and calendrical commentaries compiled by the Dominican friar Diego Durán and his Jesuit kinsman, Fray Juan de Tovar (figs. 2.1, 2.5–2.11). Another class of images represents only a single icon that stands for the festival as a whole, as seen in the so-called calendar wheels and in the colonial tribute lists that detail information Visualizing the Sacred in the Ochpaniztli Festival A version of this chapter was presented at the meeting of the Latin American Studies Associa­ tion, Montreal, Canada, September 2007. Travel to this conference was generously supported by the Professional Development Program of the College of Liberal Arts and the Department of Art at Colorado State University, for which I am grateful. 2 36 Visualizing the Sacred in the Ochpaniztli Festival about the tribute paid by subject provinces to the Mexica capital at Tenochtitlan (figs. 2.2–2.4). The splendid veintena imagery in the Codex Borbonicus was also created by native tlacuilos in this period, most likely in a context apart from the friars’ ethnohistories. Yet in spite of the wide array of pictorial sources available in the sixteenthcentury ethnohistoric manuscripts, most of the colonial veintena images have been mentioned only in passing—if at all—in studies of the annual festival cycle. In the particular case of Ochpaniztli, the crowded, complex imagery in the Codex Borbonicus (figs. 5.1–5.3) and, somewhat less frequently, Sahagún’s Primeros Memoriales (fig. 2.13) have received the most sustained attention. The less-complex images of Ochpaniztli—those depicting images of deity-effigies, a handful of ritual celebrants, or single icons—have not typically formed a major part of investigations into the nature and function of the festival. When scholars have discussed these simpler veintena scenes, it has often been in light of the still-unresolved debates, discussed in chapter 1, about whether or not pre-Columbian veintena illustrations existed. That is, although many of these sixteenth-century images of indigenous festivals and gods evoke native Mexican pictorial conventions, the extreme dearth of pre-Columbian materials with which to compare colonial manuscript imagery has raised significant problems of interpretation. It is unclear whether the extant colonial veintena images adapted a codified pre-Columbian tradition of recording veintena imagery in ritual handbooks or whether they represent the creation of new pictorial strategies for describing within a Christian context the outlawed pre-hispanic “idolatries.” In this context, most veintena scenes, particularly the sparer images, have therefore been considered primarily in terms of style, composition, and questions of authenticity and placed in dialogue with authoritative prototypes, either hypothetical preColumbian models or imported European sources.1 In these analyses, the contents of the sparer Ochpaniztli scenes have received comparatively little attention. But because this body of images describing prehispanic veintena dramas was apparently supplied by native Mexican manuscript painters, whose own proscribed rites and outlawed deities the colonial ethnohistories describe, the extant pictorial corpus represents a fundamental source of information about Nahua ceremonialism, notions of sacrality, and the function of sacred entities and images within indigenous ritual practice. In this chapter, I examine how the Mexican tlacuilos pictured the gods and rites of the Ochpaniztli festival and the ways in which varying viceregal beholders might have understood 37 Visualizing the Sacred in the Ochpaniztli Festival those images. My primary interest is to analyze the contents of the Ochpaniztli scenes, specifically in terms of the roles that sacred images and entities played in the enactment of Nahua rituals. To this end, I examine here the special emphasis that the illustrations give to the ceremonial implements, adornments, and paraphernalia of the patron deity. I propose that this emphasis is compelling when considered in light of aboriginal ceremonial practices whereby it was...