By Catherine R. DiCesare
Incorporating human sacrifice, flaying, and ridicule battle, the pre-Columbian Mexican rite often called Ochpaniztli, or "Sweeping," has lengthy attracted realization. even though among the finest identified of eighteen annual Aztec ceremonies, Ochpaniztli's importance has however been poorly understood. Ochpaniztli is understood typically from early colonial illustrated manuscripts produced in cross-cultural collaboration among Spanish missionary-chroniclers and local Mexican informants and artists. even supposing students ordinarily privilege the manuscripts' textual descriptions, Sweeping the way in which examines the basic position in their pictorial components, which considerably extend the knowledge inside the texts. DiCesare emphasizes the primacy of the regalia, ritual implements, and adornments of the pageant patroness because the aspect of intersection among sacred cosmic forces and ceremonial celebrants. The institutions of those paraphernalia point out that Ochpaniztli used to be a interval of purification rituals designed to remodel and shield person and communal our bodies alike. Spanish friars have been not able to understand the complicated nature of the festival's patroness, finally fragmenting her identification into different types assembly their expectancies, which keeps to vex sleek investigations. Sweeping the best way addresses myriad problems with translation and transformation in pre-Columbian and post-conquest Mexico, as Christian friars and local Mexicans jointly negotiated a posh physique of data approximately outlawed ritual practices and proscribed sacred entities.
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Extra resources for Sweeping the Way: Divine Transformation in the Aztec Festival of Ochpaniztli (Mesoamerican Worlds: from the Olmecs to the Danzantes)
Sample text
Scenes of the veintena feasts make up the third of its four sections (pp. 23–37). Although textual descriptions have done much to clarify the contents of this chapter, direct comparisons between textual accounts of the veintenas and the Borbonicus images have also been problematic and even misleading, since much of the pictorial imagery represents ritual activities and celebratory foci that do not precisely accord with any particular account. 40 In spite of this, as Christopher Couch observes, “[r]ather than focussing on the unique characteristics of the Borbonicus illustrations, previous studies have tended to treat them as though they were illustrations of the later textual accounts.
These scholars contend that “the manipulation, articulation, and refinement of notational methods for the vague year point to an unnoticed phenomenon of early colonial life. ”67 Expanding on the comments of Kubler and Gibson, Betty Ann Brown examines the entire array of extant colonial veintena feast illustrations and concludes that a codified aboriginal pictorial tradition for depicting the annual calendar did not exist before the Spanish arrival. Brown posits that the Spanish chroniclers themselves developed a formalized structure, informed particularly by European calendrical practices and examples, through which to describe heterogeneous calendrical information they received from informants in a variety of locales and over an extended chronological period.
The theme of transformation 14 Introduction plays an especially important role in this analysis as a fundamental component of the Ochpaniztli rituals. For the friars, the enactment of these calendrical rituals was framed by the specter of pagan, classical-style gods and demons. In chapter 4, I argue that the particular goddess evoked and celebrated during Ochpaniztli also became inextricably bound up with the friars’ significant anxieties and misapprehensions about Mexican “idolatry,” such that they ultimately transformed the goddess’s complex identity as a signifier of multiple cosmic and earthly forces to a univalent symbol of benevolent motherhood, or else of debauchery and depraved, libidinous behavior.
