The Fate of Earthly Things: Aztec Gods and God-Bodies by Molly H. Bassett (review)

Molly Bassett’s well-crafted book surpasses all earlier attempts to pin down just what the Aztecs meant by teotl (pl. teteo) and teixiptla (pl. teixiptlahuan). Although scholars typically translate these terms as, respectively, “god” or “deity,” and “image” or “impersonator,” most recognize that the concepts carry nuances not adequately captured by these English words. The identities of deities are fluid and linked to natural phenomena; images and ritual impersonators become not mere representations but the actual being they represent. As these concepts are key to any analysis of Aztec (or Postclassic Nahua) religion and its descendant forms down to the present day, this study will be an important source for all students of Nahua religion.

Bassett brings in a third concept, tlaquimilolli, or sacred bundles, to help delineate what the gods were and how they materially manifested themselves. By comparing how all three terms are used in the Florentine Codex and other early sources, building on earlier studies such as those of Arild Hvidtfeldt and Inga Clendinnen, participating in the contemporary Nahua Chicomexochitl ritual, studying levels of animacy in contemporary Nahuatl usage, and drawing carefully on comparative data, Bassett comes to a number of convincing conclusions. She confirms that teteo are appropriately seen as “gods,” but qualifies their definition with five necessary attributes: a teotl has a particular domain and possessions (axcaitl), certain prerogatives or privileges (tonalli), a specialization (neixcahuilli), the quality of wondrousness (mahuiztic), and the quality of preciousness (tlazohca). This is a reasonable characterization and, I suggest, applicable to colonial saints even though Nahuas were taught not to call them teteo. Indeed, while processes of colonial re-evaluation already occurring in such sources as the Florentine are not Bassett’s focus, her work can help us understand changes and continuities in Nahua views of the sacred.

With morphemes meaning “face” and “flayed skin,” teixiptla means something like “a surface-flayed thing” (p. 132). Inherently possessed, like body parts in Nahuatl, it cannot exist apart from the entity it embodies. Bassett fixes on “localized embodiment” as the best English gloss for the concept, appropriate for human actors as well as statues. The process of constructing, adorning, and interacting with these embodiments rendered them animate, in ways not well documented but analogous to contemporary rituals that turn paper cutouts into animate divinities. From Alfred Gell she takes the notion of “distributed personhood,” which conveys the way the gods’ insignia are not metonyms for the embodied entities but detachable pieces of them. This is a good way to understand the ritual importance of vestments and accoutrements throughout Nahua history.

Teixiptlahuan have faces and, especially, eyes that return their devotees’ gaze, but they are temporary, constructed and disassembled (or sacrificed). Sacred bundles, which conceal god-parts in wrappings that do not look like or at anyone, manifest the ongoing materiality of certain gods. Bassett defines the Aztec gods as “imaginal” beings; she also notes their identification with water, mountains, maize, and other pieces of the world. But I still have difficulty grasping precisely how and where gods existed when not embodied in a bundle or a teixiptla. They were in people’s heads, yes, and out in the world, in some immanent and perhaps less animate way, but nonetheless physically real. They continue, somewhat, to elude us.

Early in the book Bassett revisits the Cortés-as-returning-Quetzalcoatl chestnut. She follows recent scholarship in treating the story as an early postconquest invention, but also examines the precious accoutrements that Motecuhzoma reportedly sent to Cortés. She suggests that Cortés was being treated not as one deity or another, but as a potential teixiptla, someone who could be made to embody a god—and then be sacrificed. Things turned out differently. Nahuas succumbed to colonial rule and to the processes of inscription from which Bassett recovers their subtle and sophisticated notions of the...