Dreaming the Future Closer

I’ve been reading Jacques Soustelle’s Daily Life of the Aztecs.  Besides making me sorely miss the days when scholars wrote with an easy, thorough learnedness, it provides a fascinating snapshot “of a civilization in in full progression,” of a city that was not “one of those rich, sophisticated and ossified cities which are the elegant tombs in which their own civilization stiffens as it dies” (33-34). 

It’s vibrant, but tangled, the unsettled problems of its ascension visible in its social structure.  What Soustelle details is not a unitary society joined by common interest, but a patchwork slowly being sewn together with conquest.  Of greatest interest to me at the moment, is the religious dimension of it. 

There’s a powerful war machine driving the empire, no doubt, with Uitzilopochtli, “solar god of war” (52-53), at its heart.  Like a proper war machine, though, it does not just serve the Mexica tribe at the center of the empire. It serves to bring in new blood (literally and figuratively) by granting any man within the expanding empire an opportunity for wealth and honor by serving the empire in war, by bringing captives for sacrifice. 

But then there Tlaloc, “the old rain-god and god of the farmer’s plenty” (53), who serves as the center of the agricultural world on which the military one depends.  Tlaloc is, symbolically at least, Uitzilopochtli’s equal, a second center around which the empire organized.  We see in Tlaloc’s presence the shape of the early empire, of the truce between soldier and peasant, even if at times that may have been a truce in the heart of a man who was both soldier and peasant.

More fascinating still, though, is the religious diversity that exists outside these two poles, in traditions that were maintained through lineage rather than warrior prowess.  The pochteca, the traders affliliated with largest corporate commercial ventures, “had their own gods, their own feasts, and they worshipped in their own manner, for during their long journeys they had no priests but themselves” (61).

The craftspeople, from diverse and sometimes recently conquered cities, in turn held their own traditions.  The goldsmiths had “Xipe Totec” with his own temple, “Yapico” (67).  The featherworkers, too, “held their own feast…of their local god and of the four other gods and two goddesses of their guild” (68). 

The spiritual diversity reflected a cultural diversity, the relative independence of different ritual practitioners from each other a sign of the relative degree of integration of the group within the empire.  But what I find most interesting is that the most intensely imperial face of Aztec religion was also the most open, the most permeable, the most ‘democratic.’

The imperial religion, embodied most clearly in Uitzilopochtli and Tlaloc were democratic, open and appealing to the citizenry as a whole.  A commoner, dedicated to the flowery war of Uitzilopochtli, could rise up in the society.  Tlaloc’s worship, for those who did not gain military fame and wealth, supported their basic life’s work: working the land. 

They also served as two centers around which the worship of other gods and goddesses became imperial.  The temple quarter of Tenochtitlan saw the two temple overseeing a much larger network of worship that was, through its association with the growing administrative complexity of the city, more ‘democratic.’  The imperial religion, like the society as a whole, became less about a shared blood lineage than about a shared investment in the success of the empire.

I suspect, in contrast, the less integrated, less imperial, aspects of religion, the lineage-centric faiths of the traders, of the craftsman, were not thereby static by comparison.  But they could only grow through an extension of kinship, of marriage and adoption (and the many variations of fictive kinship).

And yet, in the wake of the Aztec Empire’s rapid demise, it is not the imperial faith that survives.  It’s the local faiths, the faiths of isolated tribes never conquered by the Aztecs, and the faith of the lineage lines, that remain and survive. 

The dwindling traditionalism described by Stanzione in Rituals of Sacrifice has clear ties to the sort of religion Soustelle describes among the pochteca.  Because it is smaller, because it depends less on the success of an empire, it endures beyond it.  Many such traditionalisms did just die out, like the Aztec’s imperial faith, but, still, some did not.  Some survived and adapted.  And yet, the empire’s existence provided an important, perhaps essential, medium through which to proliferate.

There’s something really interesting there, though I’m not quite ready to make sense of what that is.  I just want to flag that, set the bookmark to come back to this.