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8 The Festival of the Sweeping of the Roads Mexica military traditions, whether displayed in flowery wars or angry wars, helped to shape the visual spectacle of early colonial festivals of reconquest. Closer to the subsequent tradition of Mexican moros y cristianos, however, were the scripted battles embedded in Tenochtitlan’s festivals of human sacrifice, for these involved impersonation, costume, script, dance, and a festive context that flowed through the streets and surrounding countryside, engaging all the senses. Many scholars have noted the theatricality of the Mexica festivals. Davíd Carrasco describes them as “grand theatrical displays,” and Johanna Broda writes of Mexica “myth” being “enacted . . . in an overwhelming theatrical setting.” Inga Clendinnen , too, writes that Mexica ritual “was a highly elastic and dynamic expressive mode, more street theatre than museum piece,” and observes of “the great sensory assault of full Mexica ceremonial” that its priestly organizers were “contriving, by very different means, the kind of delirium we associate not with high reverence but with carnival.” Acknowledging both the art and the horror of the Mexica festivals and of the “theatrical battles between mock gods and mock soldiers” that they included , Hugh Thomas writes aptly of “astonishing, often splendid, and sometimes beautiful barbarities.”1 The Mexica calendar was divided into eighteen months of twenty days apiece, with five days that were deemed “not worth counting” closing each year as a kind of temporal no-man’s-land. Each month was named after its dominant festival. The major mock battles of the Mexica ritual calendar were concentrated in the second, eleventh, and fifteenth months. In a ceremonial calendar that “was built out of the swing of the seasons, marking the transitions out of the time of agricultural growth into the season of war,”2 these festivals measured the season of war. Thus, Ochpaniztli (the Festival of the Sweeping of the Roads) fell in the eleventh month, which began in late August or early September; it ended the agricultural half of the year, presaged the harvest, and opened the season of war. Panquetzaliztli (the Festival of the Raising of the Banners) fell in the fifteenth month, which began in November, and marked the midpoint of the bellicose season. And, Tlacaxipeualiztli (the Festival of the Flaying of Men) fell in the second month, which began in late February or early March, closing the season of war with a prolific sacrifice of captives . Then, the planting was once again prepared and rain awaited. We will consider these festivals in the order of their progress through the season of war.3 Our task is complicated by the fact that the two primary sixteenth-century sources of information on Mexica ritual, Bernardino de Sahagún’s General History of the Things of New Spain and Diego Durán’s History of the Indies of New Spain, resist 74 combination into a single, coherent narrative. Each refers to events that the other omits, and the two narratives lack sufficient points of cross-reference for a fully satisfactory synthesis. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Sahagún’s Spanish text is a paraphrase of and interpolated commentary on his Nahuatl original , known as the Florentine Codex; that each version contains details that the other lacks; and that Sahagún resisted the temptation to reduce the accounts provided by his various informants to a single, internally consistent narrative. Moreover, Durán’s synchronic account of Mexica calendar rituals in the first volume of his History is sometimes complicated, if not contradicted, by specific instances that he describes in his diachronic account of Mexica history in the second volume. Finally, we are dealing with the memories of old men, filtered through the grid of Spanish inquiry, of what life was like before the trauma of the conquest. Nevertheless, recent excavations of the Great Temple have shown the Spanish chronicles to be surprisingly reliable.4 And the wealth of data they contain on preHispanic ritual exceeds, in both quantity and quality, what little we know of moros y cristianos in Spain before the fifteenth century. Nor should we forget that Cortés’s expedition, while still enjoying more or less friendly relations with the Mexica, was based in Tenochtitlan from November 1519 to June 1520. There the Spaniards saw (and would later remember) some of the last full stagings of the Mexica calendar festivals, including two of the three that concern us, Panquetzalitzli and Tlacaxipeualiztli. The chroniclers’ informants offered the friars only the...

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