“We eat of the earth then the earth eats us”: The concept of nature in pre-Hispanic Nahua thought

James Maffie

Resumen


Conquest-Era Nahua thought founded its concept of nature upon a monistic metaphysics that maintained that there exists only one thing: a dynamic, vital, vivifying, and perpetually self-generating and self-regenerating sacred energy or force. Nature is generated by this force, from this force, as one aspect, facet, or moment of its eternal self-regeneration. Nature is accordingly processive and alive with sacred energy. All things in nature are organically interdependent upon one another, and all are bound by relationships of mutual reciprocity. Human beings are thoroughgoingly natural creatures, and hence wholly implicated within these interdependencies and relationships of mutual reciprocity. In short, humans are in the world as well as of the world.

 

Key words: Nature, Nahua cosmovision, pantheism, monism, interdependance, sacred energy, self-generation reciprocity.

 


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Referencias


From a song sung by the contemporary Nahuas of San Miguel in the Sierra dePuebla, from Timothy Knab, “Words great and small: Sierra Nahuatl narrative discourse in everyday life,” unpublished manuscript, quoted in Johanna Broda, “Templo mayor as ritual space,” in The Great Temple of Tenochtitlan: Center and Periphery in the Aztec World, Johanna Broda, Davd Carrasco, and Eduardo Moctezuma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p.107. I am indebted to James Boyd, Willard Gingerich, Grant Lee, and Helmut Wautischer for invaluable input.

Quoted in Barbara Deloria, Kristen Foehner, and Sam Scinta (eds), Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr., Reader (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1999), p.356; see also pp.40-60. See also: Vine Deloria, Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1994); Leroy N. Meyer and Tony Ramirez, “Wakinyan Hotan: The Inscrutability of Lakota/Dakota Metaphysics,” in S. O’Meara and D.A. West (eds), From Our Eyes: Learning from Indigenous People (Toronto: Garamound Press, 1966), pp.89-105.

Ibid. David Hall characterizes qi in classical Chinese metaphysics in a strikingly similar terms (David Hall, “Just how provincial is Western Philosophy?, ’Truth’ in comparative context,” Social Epistemology 15 (4) (2001): 285-298).

Elizabeth Hill Boone, The Aztec World (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 1994), p.105. Boone likens teotl to the Polynesian notion of mana. See also: Arild Hvitfeldt, Teotl and Ixiplatli: Some Central Conceptions in Ancient Mexican Religion, Niels Haisland trans. (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1958); Peter T. Markman and Roberta H. Markman, Masks of the Spirit: Image and Metaphor in Mesoamerica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); H.B. Nicholson, “Religion in Pre-Hispanic Central Mexico”, in Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol.10, G. Ekholm and I. Bernal (eds.) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), pp.395-446; Richard F. Townsend, State and Cosmos in the Art of Tenochtitlan, Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture, no. 20 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1979); and Richard F. Townsend, The Aztecs (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972).

Jorge Klor de Alva, “Christianity and the Aztecs,” San Jose Studies 5 (1979): 7.

Irene Nicholson, Firefly in the Night: A Study of Ancient Mexican Poetry & Symbolism (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), p.63f. See also: Alfonso Caso, The Aztecs: People of the Sun, Lowell Dunham (trans.) (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958); Eva Hunt, The Transformation of the Hummingbird: Cultural Roots of a Zinacatecan Mythical Poem (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); and Nicholson (1971).

Quoted in Alan R. Sandstrom, Corn Is Our Blood: Culture and Ethnic Identity in a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), p.239.

5. See: Caso (1958); Louise M. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989); Gary Gossen, “Mesoamerican ideas as foundation for regional synthesis”, in Symbol and Meaning Beyond the Closed Community: Essays in Mesoamerican Ideas, Gary Gossen (ed) (Albany: Institute for Mesamerican Studies, 1986), pp.1-8; Alfredo Lopez Austin, The Human Body and Ideology: Concepts of the Ancient Nahuas, vol. I and II, Thelma Ortiz de Montellano and Bernard Ortiz de Montellano (trans.) (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988); Miguel Leon-Portilla, La filosofia nahuatl: Estudiada en sus fuentes (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1993); Dennis Tedlock, (trans. & ed.), Popul Vuh: A Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life (New York: Simion & Schuster, 1985).

For duality in Mesoamerican art, see: Esther Pasztory, Aztec Art (New York: Harry Abrams, 1983); Jacques Soustelle, Daily Life of the Aztecs on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest, Patrick O’Brien (trans.) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961).

For further discussion, see James Maffie, “Why care about Nezahualcoyotl?: Veritism and Nahua Philosophy,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 32 (2002):7393.

Pace Leon-Portilla (1993). I adapt this definition of pantheism from Michael P. Levine, Pantheism: A Non-theistic Concept of Deity (London: Routledge, 1994). Levine (pp.96,102) argues that pantheists are committed to the metaphysical immanence of the sacred but are not necessarily committed to epistemological immanence of the sacred in the sense that the sacred is knowable either easily or even in principle. He cites Spinoza as a pantheist who rejects the epistemological immanence of the sacred. Leon-Portilla (1993) apparently believes that metaphysical immanence entails epistemological immanence, and concludes that Nahua metaphysics cannot be pantheistic since the sacred is epistemologically transcendent. I find Leon-Portilla’s argument unsound since it rests upon a mistaken premise.

Hunt (1977: 55f. brackets mine).

Sandstrom (1991: 138).

Quoted in Sandstrom (1991: 229).

See: Peter T. Furst, “Shamanistic survivals in Mesoamerican religion,” Actas del XLI Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, vol. III (Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Anthropologia e Historia, 1976), 149-157; Willard Gingerich, “’Chipahuacanemliztli, The Purifed Life,’ in the Discourses of Book VI, Florentine Codex”, in Smoke and Mist: Mesoamerican Studies in Memory of Thelma D. Sullivan, Part II, J. Kathryn Josserand and Karen Dakin (eds) (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1988), pp. 517-44; Nicholson (1971); Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano, Aztec Medicine, Health and Nutrition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

Cantares mexicanos fol.10 r., translation by Miguel Leon-Portilla, Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), p.282.

Cantares mexicanos fol.11 v., translation by Leon-Portilla (1992:228)

Romances de los señores de Nueva España, fol. 35 r., translation by Leon-Portilla (1992:83).

Cantares mexicanos fol. 10 r., translation by Leon-Portilla (1992:221), bracketed translation mine.

The following is indebted to: David Carrasco, Religions of Mesoamerica: Cosmovision and Ceremonial Centers (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990); Jill Leslie McKeever Furst, The Natural History of the Soul in Ancient Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Lopez Austin (1988); Leon-Portilla (1993); and Sandstrom (1991).

Carrasco (1990:69).

Sandstrom (1991:258).

I borrow this definition of animism from Levine (1994:114). Levine cogentlyargues that animism and pantheism are not incompatible. If Levine is correct, then there is plenty conceptual space for the Nahua’s view of nature to be animistic and pantheistic. Sandstrom’s remarks (1991:258) suggests that same.

See Burkhart (1989).

This attitude survives today among contemporary Nahuas. According toSandstrom (1991:67,341), contemporary Nahuas seek through ritual and other means to enter into balance and harmony with nature, not control or dominate it.

Johannes Wilbert, “Eschatology in a participatory universe: Destines of thesoul among the Warao Indians of Venezuela”, in Death and the Afterlife in Pre-Columbian America, Elizabeth Benson (ed.) (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1975), pp.163-189.

See Broda (1987); Carrasco and Sessions (1998), and Philip P. Arnold, Eating Landscape: Aztec and European Occupation of Tlalocan (Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1998).

Although a “Thou”, teotl is not an intentional agent in the modern Western sense. I borrow this terminology from Henri Frankfurt and H.A. Frankfurt, “Myth and reality.” In The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, Henri Frankfurt, H.A. Frankfurt, John Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, and William A. Irwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), pp.3-30.

Sandstrom (1991:255).

See Anthony Aveni, Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980); Johanna Broda, “Astronomy, cosmovision, and ideology in Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica”, in Anthony F. Aveni and Gary Urton (eds), Ethnoastronomy and Archeoastronomy in the American Tropics (New York: Annals of New York Academy of Science, vol. 385, 1982), pp.81-110; and Ortiz de Montellano (1990).

See: Arnold (1998); Broda (1982,1987); Burkhart (1989); Jorge Klor de Alva,“Aztec spirituality and Nahuatized Christianity”, in South and Meso-American Spirituality, Gary Gossen (ed) (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1993), pp.173-197; Leon-Portilla (1993); Leon-Portilla, “Those made worthy by sacrifice”, in Gossen (ed) op.cit, pp.41-64; and David Carrasco with Scott Sessions, Daily Life of the Aztecs (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998).

Timothy J. Knab, “Metaphors, concepts, and coherence in Aztec”, in GaryGossen (ed) (1986), p.46. For a related yet slightly different perspective, see Kay A. Read, Time and Sacrifice in the Aztec Cosmos (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

See note num. 1.

The following draws from: Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, Robert M. Wallace trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press, 1952); John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Books, 1948); Joseph Rouse, “Philosophy of science and the persistent narratives of modernity”, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 22 (1991):141-162; and Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper Collins, 1980).


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