Ancient Mesoamerica and its Transformations

From earliest times the Mesoamerican archaeological record bespeaks highly stratified societies in sharp contrast to the generally mobile and egalitarian cultures of North America (with conspicuous exceptions like the Pacific Northwest). Corresponding to this hierarchical social structure was a tightly centralized religion whose priests sometimes wielded overt political authority. Their central function was perpetuation of cosmic and social order through performance of seasonal rituals for an elaborate pantheon of gods in a continual effort to make the universe "routine and predictable" (Wolf, 84). Intermeshed with a highly accurate solar calendar developed by the Olmec and Maya was a sacred calendar of two hundred sixty days; the priests, who alone knew its intricacies, were the indispensable interpreters of divine order.

Seasonal festivals were correlated with the solar year; only their cor-

rect performance—with increasing bloodshed—"assured the regular succession of the seasons, the coming of the rains, the springing of the plants . . . and the resurrection of the sun" (J. Soustelle, 147). The second calendar, the Aztec tonalamatl, was mainly used to divine the destiny of individuals born on particular days. Every human being, Soustelle writes (114–15), "was governed by predestination; neither his life nor his after-life was in his own hands, and determinism ruled every phase of his short stay on earth." There was no apparent place for personal vision when whatever would be was immutably established, nor anything that a quest could accomplish or alter.

Yet this seemingly rigid universe was extremely precarious. Even before the cataclysm of Spanish conquest, ancient Mesoamericans knew how suddenly worldly glory could pass, as city after splendid city fell to ruin. The legend of the exile and expected return of Quetzalcoatl—the ancient plumed-serpent god identified with a Toltec king who tried to abolish human sacrifices to him—suggests both a challenge to the bleak determinism of this homicidal religion and the lingering possibility of seeking an alternative to it: a possibility ironically culminating in the disastrous identification of Quetzalcoatl with Cortés.

The universe was in continual peril. Our world of the fifth sun, the Aztec believed, will be destroyed like its four predecessors; all the rituals of the calendrical round can only defer the sun's extinction, after a fiftytwo year cycle, bringing the world to an end. The world's instability troubled the poet-king of Texcoco, Nezahualcoyotl: "What does your mind seek? Where is your heart?" he asked in the perplexity of an inchoate quest that could find no place to begin: "Can anything be found on earth?" (León-Portilla, 4–5). Among his Aztec allies, human sacrifice in mounting numbers was the only conceivable response to the insecurity of a continually threatened world (J. Soustelle, 99).

If ritual coercion is one response to the uncertainties of a world never fully conformable to human need, incorporation of more flexible means of transcendence through personal communication with the divine is another. In most North American tribes, even when ritualized cults arose the shaman either performed their rites or remained dominant among those who did. Only in the Pueblos and tribes influenced by them was shaman clearly subordinated to priest, though even here (with the possible exception of Hopi) he found a place as a member of a curing or clown society, providing an institutionalized alternative from within.

E. Parsons (1933b, 613) suggests important parallels between Aztec and Pueblo religious practices both in impersonation of gods and organization of curing societies. It would not be surprising, then, if curers of shamanic origin marginally eluded the despotism of priestly ritual in ancient Mesoamerica also. Very little is known of these putative figures,

however, since the Spanish friars who remain our principal source of information (along with archaeological excavation and a few codices in native languages) were concerned primarily with recording—and extirpating—the priestly religion which they saw as the devil's work. To what extent shamanic practices provided alternatives to the deathly rigidity of a fatalistic ritualism therefore remains uncertain.

A few sixteenth-century sources hint at Mayan and Aztec religious specialists other than priests. The Yucatec Mayan chilans, "mouthpieces" of the gods whom Bishop Landa mentions, may have been, Tozzer suggests (112), diviners who read the tonalamatls, or horoscopes; but a visionary component is unmistakable in a manuscript telling how the prophet Chilam Balam retired to a room where he lay in a trance while the spirit perched on the ridgepole of the house spoke to him (Roys 1967, 182). Even if the chilan was "a kind of visionary shaman who received messages from the gods while in a state of trance" (Coe, 154), however, he had been so subordinated to priestly ritual that in times of crisis he might, Landa tells us (Tozzer, 115), order human sacrifice.

Only after the Spanish conquest did the legendary Chilam Balam, who was said to have foretold it, achieve a posthumous fame outlasting the priesthood. As for the curers, whom Landa also mentions, they may have cast lots, or kernels of maize, to make prognoses—like the divine soothsayers of the Popol Vuh (36), the mythological epic of the Quiche Maya, who "could tell the future by throwing beans"—sucked disease objects, applied herbal remedies, and recited magical incantations (Roys 1965), but there is little suggestion of anything resembling visionary quests. Among the Aztec, as among the Hopi, it was to sorcerers (nahualli ), who could change themselves into animals and kill from afar (J. Soustelle, 57), rather than to doctors that the remnants of shamanism appear to have been mainly consigned. Here was no visionary alternative to the lethal exactions of ritual but only the dark underside of a shamanism placed effectively outside the pale of officially sanctioned religion.

One means of transcending an intolerable present was through hallucinogens, widely known in ancient as in modern Middle America. The "divine food" of the Aztec described by Durán (115–16) was brewed from ashes of poisonous beasts, pulverized with tobacco, live scorpions, spiders, and centipedes, and topped with ground morning-glory seed, "which the natives apply to their bodies and drink to see visions." Besides tobacco and morning-glory seed (ololiuhqui ), which intoxicates those who imbibe it and makes them "see visions and fearful things" (Sahagún, 3:40), ancient Mexican hallucinogens included the sacred mushrooms known as teonacatl (3:293) or nanacatl (3:40). The effect of these, too, in Sahagún's meticulous descriptions, was far from uniformly emancipatory: "Some saw in a vision that they were dying, and wept, others saw

that some wild beast was eating them, others that they were taking captives in war," and so forth.

Another visionary agent, the cactus peyotl, generated "fearful or ludicrous visions" in those who ate or drank it (3:292). We have no clear reason to believe that any of these played a role, at the time of the conquest, in shamanistic rites distinguishable from black magic. On the tenuous basis of accounts by disapproving Spanish friars, indeed, it would seem that such substances did not provide a liberating alternative communication with the beyond so much as they confirmed the nightmarish closure relentlessly affirmed by the murderous rites of the priestly religion—that grim cult which Brundage (1979, 186) calls "a staged hallucination," surely the most nightmarish of all. This fanatically ritualized Aztec culture epitomizes a self-enclosed world with no effective means of transcendence, a world so rigidly organized as to preclude any possibility of a quest for something beyond it, and thus a world doomed less from without than from within: a world that fascinates us, as it did the conquistadors and friars, by being so grotesque a reflection of our own.

In modern Middle America there is no aboriginal culture wholly uninfluenced by Catholic Christianity. From the time of the Spanish Conquest, however, observers have noted that obliteration of pre-Columbian religions by worship of Christ and the saints was far from complete. "I believe that, incited by the cursed devil," Friar Durán regretfully wrote (152–53), ". . . these wretched Indians remain confused and are neither fish nor fowl in matters of the faith." In the following century, Jacinto de la Serna more stridently lamented that the unrepentant Indians, "the better to dissemble their poisonous deception, . . . revere Christ Our Lord and His most holy Mother and the saints (some of whom they hold as gods) while worshiping their idols at the same time" (G. Soustelle, 192). Clearly, pagan beliefs and practices had not altogether vanished—how could they?—with the advent of a zealous new faith.

Yet only in isolated pockets of Mexico, mainly mountainous regions on the fringes of ancient Mesoamerican culture, did a few scattered groups openly reject the Christian sacraments after their conquest, and even these inevitably absorbed many Christian beliefs. Nor could the systematic deception feared by Serna, or the "cabalistic guild" romantically imagined by Brinton (37), with its lascivious "bands of naked Nagualists" (57), plausibly have survived for long among a large segment of the population. Instead, the new missionary faith assimilated, in different degrees, pre-Columbian practices that survived—often in strange guises—through increasing toleration by priests who preferred an imperfect Catholicism to none. Thus the deeply venerated Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, incorporated traits of the Aztec

Mother Goddess Tonantzin (see Lafaye). Rites similar to confession and baptism could continue in the new religion, and even the cross might be simultaneously Christian and "pagan."

The extent of religious fusion varied greatly even in relatively homogeneous areas, as Redfield demonstrated for the Yucatec Maya (1941). For the most part—except in cities where pagan rites survived only as "superstitions," or a few remote tribes stubbornly resistant to Christianity—elements have inseparably mingled. In Mayan areas a long tradition of coexistence prevails: the Chorti of Guatemala, Wisdom writes (1940, 18), recognize no "difference of origin of any religious or ceremonial elements in the culture." In formerly Aztec realms of central Mexico, indigenous elements were more completely suppressed, surviving mainly in curing rites. Widespread substitution of saints for gods has not meant equation between them, as in some Haitian and Brazilian cults; rather, G. Soustelle writes (191) of the Nahuatl village of Tequila, they have "taken the place of ancient divinities," thereby filling the void their departure left behind.

Extensive though such religious fusion has been among descendants of ancient Mayans and Mexicans, in some cases ethnography has revealed an indigenous substratum hardly affected by Christianity. The Zinacantecos of Chiapas, Vogt writes (1970, 12), "were Maya tribesmen with a Spanish Catholic veneer" of increasingly evident thinness. Especially among Mayan peoples, large elements of indigenous ritual, ecclesiastical hierarchies, and even (as La Farge and Byers discovered in Jacaltenango, Guatemala) calendrical lore have survived. Indeed, from researches in nearby Santa Eulalia, La Farge (161–62) found indications that the tonalamatl calendar of 260 days was known to the common people. And local systems of annually rotated offices, or cargos, combining ceremonial and secular administration, function much like the native hierarchies they replaced (see Carrasco 1961).

Native rites of priestly origin complement Catholic ceremonies by asserting the need for control of a partly predictable world. But other surviving pagan rites are mainly associated with the limitless domain beyond this imperfectly closed circle, the unpredictable domain of the wild called in Spanish el monte . Traces of hunting rites to appease supernatural owners of natural phenomena survive among long-agricultural Mayan peoples (La Farge and Byers, 132; Wisdom, 72), and centuries of calendrical rites have not wholly suppressed the interdependence between humans and the undomesticated beings that surround them on the open margins of a world finally beyond their control.

In barren northern Mexico and southern Arizona, the Mayo and Yaqui (known together as the Cáhita), who lay outside the ancient Mesoamerican sphere, continue to practice, despite fervent devotion to Chris-

tianity, a "Religion of the Woods," in Beals's phrase (1945a, 190), associated with hunting ritual, witches and wizards, disease and its cure. Neither Jesus as curer nor Saints attired in Yaqui garb wholly displaced the unbaptized ancestral spirits of the Monte, the source of mysterious music for pascola dances. These spirits, Spicer recounts (1954, 123), "are around and about eternally in a sort of 'other world' which surrounds and yet is an integral part of the world in which baptized Yaquis live"—a menacing other world beckoning, like goat-footed Pan or the Erl-king, beyond the given world we insistently ritualize to make it safely, if never wholly, our own.

Still more significant than survival of particular spirits is this fundamental opposition between the given world and "the other" beyond yet inseparable from it. In Yaqui belief, as Spicer analyzes it (1980, 64–66), the huya aniya, the "tree-world" of the monte, embraced the yo aniya, the ancient realm of nature spirits who conveyed their transformative power through unsolicited dreams. After the coming of the Jesuits and the imposition of town life, the once all-embracing huya aniya "became the other world, the wild world surrounding the towns,"^[1] to whose geometrically ordered structure it was consistently opposed. In contrast to the predictable regularity of work and ritual, the uncontrollable power of the huya aniya came unexpectedly to individuals from "a world where there was much uncertainty, where there was much over which men had no control, concerning which there were no well-defined rules." The segregation between the realms was never complete: what remained was an "oppositional integration," as Spicer calls it (1980, 70), involving continual interaction between the regular and the wild, the closed and the open, the fixed communal pattern of ritual repetition and the unpredictable individual variation of shamanic vision which transcends and potentially transforms it. In this dynamic opposition, as we have seen, the spiritual quest is always latent.

[1] The huya aniya may recall the vague "nonordinary reality" supposedly revealed by the Yaqui brujo Don Juan, according to Castaneda's increasingly dubious accounts. Yet peyote, datura, and mushrooms, by whose aid Don Juan and his pupil allegedly attained this condition, are not reported by reliable ethnographers to be used by the Yaqui for visionary purposes, as peyote is by the Huichol and Tarahumara. According to Beals (1945a, 195), peyote was unknown in any form, and toloache (datura) used externally only, as a medicine. In a caustic 1972 New York Times review of Castaneda's second volume, La Barre, author of The Peyote Cult, found Castaneda's epistemology "too noodleheaded and naive to merit comment. . . . The total effect is self-dramatizing and vague, and Castañeda curiously manages to be at once disingenuous and naive. Even as belles lettres the book is wanting, for the writing is pretentious." The Times substituted a reviewer who could not "even begin to point out all the delights to be found in these books" (which by then were three), and who lauded "the excellence of Castañeda's writing" (La Barre 1975, 271–73).