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

4: The Colonial Image of Tlazolteotl

103 s w e e p in g t h e w ay Introduction Failing to grasp the significance of the regalia-laden teixiptla as the means by which ritual celebrants encountered the divine, the Spanish Christian friars did not give substantial attention in their veintena accounts to elucidating the functions and associations of the sacred raiment. They did understand, however, the power that the gods had and that it was present in the deity-images that appeared to them to be “idols.” Accordingly, the missionary-scribes described at length the nature and realms of the Mexican gods, as they understood them, in a variety of ethnohistoric texts, including deity-catalogs, divinatory almanacs, veintena treatises , and historical chronicles, and detailed their ceremonial roles in the veintena celebrations. In developing strategies through which to describe these aboriginal sacred entities, practices, and “idolatries,” the friar-chroniclers frequently turned The Colonial Image of Tlazolteotl Parts of this chapter were presented at the meetings of the Latin American Studies Association, Dallas, March 2003; and the Sixteenth Century Studies Association, Pitts­burgh, October 2003. Travel to both conferences was generously supported by the Pro­fessional Development ProgramoftheCollegeofLiberalArtsandtheDepartmentofArtatColoradoStateUniversity, for which I am grateful. 4 104 The Colonial Image of Tlazolteotl to familiar traditions to explain their foreign, ambivalent nature, as scholars have long recognized. Thus the poetic Nahuatl epithets and metaphors describing numinous, sacred entities and the forces of earth and sky—the teteo­­—became a series of distinct appellations for individual, anthropomorphic gods within a Mexican pantheon. The missionaries framed these discrete Mexican gods, in turn, as if they were tidy equivalents to Judeo-Christian or Classical antique models. In so doing, however, the missionary-chroniclers often oversimplified or even radically transformed the fluid, polysemic nature of the supernatural forces that animated the Mexican cosmos. This chapter therefore examines how the sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury ethnohistoric sources constitute the identity of the Ochpaniztli festival’s patron goddess. The veintena texts provide a variety of appellations to identify this patroness, including Toci, Teteoinnan, and Tlazolteotl. Although these terms all identify what is probably one and the same entity, the friars tended to treat this particular group of Nahuatl epithets as if they were the names of distinct deities, as Cecelia Klein and Charlene Villaseñor Black have observed.1 It is especially important to consider the long-term ramifications of the friars’ interpretations, because in their textual accounts, as I discuss in this chapter, they proceeded to describe the various monikers in terms of the specific realms and associations that they believed each “goddess” to have had. In what follows, I argue two main points. First, I suggest that the pictorial evidence belies the fracturing of Tlazolteotl’s identity that we encounter in the ethnohistoric texts. Analysis of the pictorial representations in the colonial manuscripts labeled with these various monikers reveals that there is no clear reason for separating the various appellations into discrete identities, since in this case none of the sacred gear can be used as a diagnostic marker securely distinguishing one “goddess” from another. And as I have suggested in preceding chapters, these items of ritual attire were especially linked with intertwined realms of human sexuality, filth and purification, cleansing, and protection and are better examined in terms of those complex domains wherein supplicants directly engaged the powers of this goddess. Second, I hope to show that the friars’ textual discussions of these various Nahuatl epithets ultimately fragmented the identity of the goddess by compartmentalizing these various epithets within polarized Christian categories of “good” and “evil.”2 Thus Toci, “Our Grandmother,” and Teteoinnan, “Mother of the Gods,” became intertwined and even interchangeable names for a noble, 105 The Colonial Image of Tlazolteotl benevolent mother-goddess figure, whereas Tlazolteotl, the “Filth Deity,” was treated very differently, described by the Spanish Christian friar-chroniclers in wholly negative terms. But this was the result not only of an interpretive strategy, broadly realized, that rendered foreign Mexican gods in familiar European terms but also of particular, local circumstances surrounding contemporary Nahua Christian devotional practices. That is, it seems likely that a Spanish monastic would have found the dangerously sexual Tlazolteotl, “Filth Deity,” impossibly disruptive to the benign mother-goddess ideal embodied by the “Mother of the Gods” and “Our Grandmother.” And keeping these particular entities separate may have taken on special urgency within the context of Christian evangelization in Mexico in the last decades of...