Aztec Ceremonial Landscapes

6. Mapping the Ritual Landscape: Debt Payment to Tlaloc During the Month of Atlcahualo

6 Mapping the Ritual Landscape: Debt Payment to Tlaloc During the Month of Atlcahualo Anthony F. Aveni We are not to picture ancient cities to ourselves as anything like what we see in our day. We build a few houses; it is a village. Insensibly the number of houses increases. and it becomes a city; and finally, if there is occasion for it, we surround this with a wall. With the ancients, the city was never formed by degrees. by the slow increase ofthe number ofmen and houses. They founded a city at once, all entire in a day; but the elements of the city needed to be first ready, and this was the most difficult, and ordinarily the largest work. As soon as the families, the phratries. and the tribes had agreed to unite and have the same worship, they immediately founded the city as a sanctuary for this common worship, and thus the foundation of a city was always a religious act. - Fustel de Coulanges (1864: 134) ORIENTATION TO THE PROBLEM Working with other colleagues in the Mesoamerican Archive at Boulder . Colorado. over the past few years, I have tried to raise questions about the establishmenr of rhe grear cities of Mesoamerica: 1. Were the great centers of ancient Mesoamerica preplanncd (most particularly, Tenochtitlan and Tlatclolco)~ 2. Given the evidence in the ethnohistorica1 and archaeological record, together with the field study methods ofarchaeoastronomy, to what Mapping th. Ritua/Landscap. degree is it possible to specify that planning took place? 3. What motivating forces beyond the old dichotomy between economic determinism and religious interests can be posited to explain why Mexican centers were arranged as we find them? 4. Did ideas about organization. planning, and arrangement change and evolve? Can one perceive continuity and tradition in city planning? 5. What function did the mathematically (geometrically) expressible activities ofastronomy and calendar play in the planning, and what was the relationship of the calendrical activity in the center to that in the periphery? 6. What role did cosmogony or mythology of foundation play in determining the layout of the city? 7. What was the modus operandi for laying out the city? 8. Can the developmentofthe state be traced through the development of its astronomical and calendrical systems? 59 As these studies have proceeded and as they have been presented in papers that Calnek. Arnold. Broda. Townsend. and I read at annual confetences and in a paper that two colleagues and I (Aveni. Calnek & Hartung 1988) published. two realizations have emerged: 1. To understand the arrangement and planning in the ceremonial space ofTenochcitlan. one must become familiar with the landscape and the skyscape of both the ciry and the space in the Valley of Mexico that surrounds it. 2. One must appreciate that in Mexican mythology, prescriptions for ritual action in the urban center took place in the theater of this environment. Certain ritual events were required to take place in both the proper spatia/and tmlpora/order. We have adopted these two realizations as attitudes or orientations that guide us in our studies for very specific reasons: • The strong presence of a locative element in the foundation myth. which tells about situation and directionality ofelements ofthe built and natural environment • The spatial-temporal relationship between the shrine on Mt. Tlaloc (Durin 1971:155) on the visible horizon of Tenochtitlan and the Templo Mayor; furthermore. the connection of the axis between them and the solar orientation calendar 60 Anthony F. Aveni • General statements by Durin. and other chroniclers on the importance ofdirectionality, oosmic axes, the quadripartite division of the city, and the directions or doorvrays where the sun appears and disappears All three ofthese points have previously been documented in some detail (Aveni, Calnek & Hanung 1988). At issue in the present discussion is the degree to which the Mexican imperial state sought to regulate the timing (and spacing) ofthe rites to the gods. TRACKING THE ATLCAHUALO RITUAL In "The Environment as Ritual Theatet: Tenochtidan and Its Spatial Asides" (Aveni 1988), I made another attempt to climb up onro and survey the stage that once held the Mexican perfotmers. In the two winter seasons preceding the 1988 annual meeting of colleagues at the Mesoamerican Archives, I attempted to locate, visit, and provide descriptions ofthe actual places mentioned in one of the sets of tituals described in Sahagun (1950-1982, II:ch. 20 appendix) in which there is reason to think that...