9
Transformation
Manifesting the Life-Force

For the Mesoamerican seer, "cosmic creation is not something that happened only once: it has to happen constantly, over and over again. Every day is a day of creation"^[1] because each day, each moment, in fact, the immanent life-force clothes itself anew in the finery of the gods and in the things of this world. It does so through the mystery of transformation and through that mystery is simultaneously the one and the many, the eternal and the temporal. In a very important sense, the entire effort of Mesoamerican spiritual thought is dedicated to the delineation through metaphor of the various specific processes of that mystery of transformation.

In the ninth chapter of the sixth book of the General History of the Things of New Spain , Sahagún's informants give us

the words which the ruler spoke when he had been installed as ruler, to entreat Tezcatlipoca because of having installed him as ruler, and to ask his help and his revelation, that the ruler might fulfill his mission. Very many are his words of humility.

"O master, 0 our lord, 0 lord of the near, of the nigh, 0 night, 0 wind, thou hast inclined thy heart. Perhaps thou hast mistaken me for another, I who am a commoner; I who am a laborer. In excrement, in filth hath my lifetime been. . . . Why? For what reason? It is perhaps my desert, my merit that thou takest me from the excrement, from the filth, that thou placest me on the reed mat, on the reed seat?

"Who am I? Who do I think I am that thou movest me among, thou bringest me among, thou countest me with thy acquaintances, thy friends, thy chosen ones, those who have desert, those who have merit? Just so were they by nature; so were they born to rule; thou has opened their eyes, thou hast opened their ears. And thou hast taken possession of them, thou hast inspired them. Just so were they created, so were they sent here. They were born at a time, they were bathed at a time, their daysigns were such that they would become lords, would become rulers. It is said that they will become thy backrests, thy flutes. Thou wilt have them replace thee, thou wilt have them substitute for thee, thou wilt hide thyself in them; from within them thou wilt speak; they will pronounce for thee—those who will help, those who will place on the left, who will place in obsidian sandals, and who will pronounce for thy progenitor, the mother of the gods, the father of the gods, Ueuetèotl, who is set in the center of the hearth, in the turquoise enclosure, Xiuhtecutli, who batheth the people, washeth the people, and who determineth, who concedeth the destruction, the exaltation of the vassals, of the common folk."^[2]

This remarkable ritual entreaty outlines one of those transformational processes, in this case involving rulership, through which Ometeotl, the divine essence, referred to here as "thy progenitor," that is, the creator of Tezcatlipoca, manifests itself in human life. That divine essence, seen here in two of its aspects, is the creative principle—"the mother of the gods, the father of the gods"—as well as the life-force itself represented as Ueuetéotl, the old god who is "life-giving warmth, the vivifying principle, . . . the sacred perpetual fire."^[3] The outline of that transformational process is suggested in the newly installed ruler's depiction of himself as one of those who will "pronounce for thee," that is, Tezcatlipoca, and simultaneously "pronounce for thy progenitor," that is, Ometeotl. Significantly, it is Tezcatlipoca, the manifestation of the divine essence approachable through ritual, who is addressed, but it is also significant that the new ruler is not to be seen as a human being ad-

dressing a god from whom he is essentially separate. Rather, he is one of a line of rulers who, in some mysterious sense, shelters the god: "thou wilt hide thyself in them; from within them thou wilt speak." Thus "thy progenitor," who is located at "the center of the hearth, in the turquoise enclosure," a metaphoric reference to what is elsewhere referred to as "the navel of the earth," the symbolic center of the earth from which the primary axes of time and space radiate, manifests itself successively and simultaneously as the allpowerful Tezcatlipoca, as the earthly plane itself, and as the earthly ruler. It is important to note that the ritual entreaty takes care to indicate that this transformational process functions systematically. Rulers were not selected on the whim of a capricious god; rather, "their day-signs [in the tonalpohualli] were such that they would become lords, would become rulers." Thus the gods, the earthly realm in all of its spatial-temporal complexity, and the earthly ruler are all to be seen as systematic transformations of the essence of divinity.

Schele and Miller identify this same process in Maya ritual art depicting the bloodletting and vision quests of Maya nobles. "Images of these rites show humans wearing full-body costumes, including masks, to transform themselves symbolically into gods. These scenes do not appear to represent playacting but, rather, a true transformation into a divine being."^[4] No matter that from the Maya point of view the transformation is reversed—the god is transformed into a human being. It is remarkably clear that the divine essence, constant and unchanging, enters the world of nature by transformation. Thus, paradoxically, the godhead is at once transcendent and immanent, continually "unfolding" and evolving, revealing itself successively to man in changing images he calls "gods" and rulers.

Such a use of the mask as a ritual agent of transformation is described clearly by a modern Hopi who has participated in the Hopi kachina ceremonies, which are now believed to have arisen as the result of diffusion from central Mexico in Toltec times.

What happens to a man when he is a performer is that if he understands the essence of the kachina, when he dons the mask, he loses his identity and actually becomes what he is representing. . . . The spiritual fulfillment of a man depends on how he is able to project himself into the spiritual world as he performs. He really doesn't perform for the third parties who form the audience. Rather the audience becomes his personal self. He tries to express to himself his own conceptions about the spiritual ideals that he sees in the kachina. He is able to do so behind the mask because he has lost his personal identity.^[5]

That simple last sentence expresses both the power and the essence of the Native American system of religious thought as it embodies the inherent potential of transformation. The power is also suggested by the remarkable ability of that system—whose roots we can dimly discern in the shamanism of the Preceramic period and whose fully elaborated, sophisticated body of thought we can perceive at the height of the development of the cultures of Mesoamerica—to survive in indigenous ritual and belief throughout the Americas. The Aztec ruler, the Maya noble, and the Hopi kachina dancer have all been transformed through ritual to another level of existence; they are functioning on a sacred, spiritual plane. They have "become" gods, or gods have "become" them. Our language has difficulty expressing the concept as it is clear that "becoming" in this sense has both diachronic and synchronic meanings; it means both changing from one state to another as well as functioning on one of several levels, all of which exist simultaneously.

It is in this latter sense that the Hopi loss of personal identity is primarily meant. "By donning the kachina mask, a Hopi gives life and action to the mask, thus making the kachina essence present in material form. . . . By wearing the kachina mask, the Hopi manifests the sacred. He becomes the sacred kachina, yet continues to be himself."^[6] This is perhaps the most essential form of transformation—one that does not require abandoning one state for another but allows them all to exist simultaneously. Such a view sees life as a matter of the constant interpenetration of different planes of existence, a concept that is difficult for us to grasp because we tend to conceive of reality as linear and to think in that fashion. For us, one state of being gives way to another as on a journey one place after another is reached. Our conception of reality limits the idea of transformation to its simplest level, while the Mesoamerican conception expands the range of transformational possibilities tremendously. Soustelle puts it well:

The world is a system of symbols—colors, time, the orientation of space, stars, gods, historical events—all having a certain interacting relationship. We are not faced with a long series of ratiocinations, but rather with a continuous and reciprocal complex of the various aspects of a whole.^[7]

Thus, transformation is not only the essential process by which everything man perceives is revealed but also a basic characteristic of existence, and man is not only the recipient of life through the mystery of transformation but he must play his part in the transformational drama through ritual. It is no wonder, then, that the mask, a visual symbol of and an important agent in the transformative process as we have seen, became a central metaphor in Mesoamerican spiritual thought.

That the concept of transformation is basic to

Mesoamerican spiritual thought can be seen in those characteristics of that thought that we have thus far examined. First, the shamanistic inner vision from which that thought grows sees magical transformation as the method by which man can interact with the enveloping world of the spirit. By changing into an animal or by being catapulted through his trance into a level of consciousness, a mythical time or place, or a spiritual zone not accessible to the ordinary person, the shaman could transcend his human limitations and gain insight into the cosmic order. In the world of the shaman, the elements that constituted man, nature, and the spiritual world were readily interchangeable. This basic assumption with all its transformational implications was at the heart of Mesoamerican spiritual thought, in which, as Townsend puts it, "the boundaries between objective and perceptive become blurred, dream and reality are one, and everything is alive and intimately relatable."^[8]

Second, the temporal order manifested in the solar cycles, the other astronomical cycles, and the cycles of generation, death, and regeneration seemed proof to the Mesoamerican mind that there is no death in the world, only transformation; there is no end to life, only changing forms, changing masks placed on the eternal and unchanging essence of life. The transformative process is conceptualized in Mesoamerican thought as the orderly movement of time through recurring cycles. Life, which is always in motion, is born from death and returns to death to complete the cycle. Great men, at death, are transformed into gods, their divine power taking on a different form; when the common man dies, he, like the corn that nourished him, returns his life-force to its source, which in turn creates new life.

Third, the spatial order derived from the regular movements of the heavenly bodies suggests a different kind of transformation—that of the macrocosmic order into a pattern for the microcosm seen in the replication on earth of the heavenly pattern in the siting and architecture of the great cities and ritual centers, from La Venta in 1200 B.C. to Tenochtitlán in A.D. 1400. In addition to reproducing the divine "shape" of space and time in their architecture, the creators of those heavenly patterns on earth were continually fascinated with the points of transition from the earthly plane to the realms of the spirit above and below that plane, liminal points locating in space what are essentially temporal experiences, such as death itself, which mark the precise moment of transformation. These places were to be found in nature in caves or on mountaintops, both of which were used as settings for the ritual that marked the transition between matter and spirit, between life and death. Thus, the physical features of the earth itself, features replicated in sacred architecture and marked by masks, were seen as agents of transformation throughout Mesoamerica.

Fourth, the calendars of Mesoamerica embody in abstract form the whole process of transformation; they depict graphically the movement of time through the many phases of its process, each metaphorically expressed by the face of a god and the sign of the day. Through his understanding of that abstract movement, man could harmonize his existence with the underlying cosmic order through divination and ritual. The moments of transformation in man's microcosmic life—his own birth, initiation, and death; the corn's planting and harvesting; his ruler's ascension and death—could be given their proper place in the orderly, recurring transformative process of the cosmos through the calendars that give form to the Mesoamerican realization that the essence of time, change and transformation, could be mathematically charted and understood.

Fifth, all of these manifestations of the basic process of transformation, we have shown, had their source in a unitary divine essence that, through the transformative process of "unfolding," mysteriously became an elaborate system of "gods." These "god identities" were not always transformed temporally, that is, first one and then another in a diachronic process, but often exhibited a synchronic totality, being both states simultaneously. The Mesoamerican "god image" is thus essentially a set of symbols, each of which can exist simultaneously in many relationships, that "unfolds" as different and separate identities. The kaleidoscopic pantheon is the result of transformations of the divine essence, which "works" through the transformation of itself into the worlds of the gods and of space and time.

A fundamental premise of Mesoamerican spiritual thought, then, was the interchangeability through transformation of the inanimate, the human, and the divine as all were ultimately transformations of the same unchanging essence. Through these symbolic transformations, the very structure and order of the universe could be understood and human life could be harmonized with the sacred order. Since this transformative process is fundamental, it is not surprising that we find transformation rather than creation ex nihilo at the heart of the Mesoamerican mythological tradition. Just as the world of the spirit enters man's world through the various transformative processes we have cited above, so the original creation of matter from spirit was accomplished through transformation. In Aztec myth, for example, natural phenomena metaphorically come into being as a result of transformation: trees, flowers, and herbs from the hair of the Earth Monster; flowers and grass from her skin; wells, springs, and small caves from her eyes; rivers and large caves from her mouth; moun-

tain valleys from her nose; and mountains from her shoulders. And as we have seen, it is transformation rather than creation that is responsible for the birth of the sun as the result of the god Nanahuatzin leaping courageously into the great fire and becoming the sun. Man himself was created, according to one widely accepted mythological version, as the result of the transformation of the bones and ashes of earlier generations by Quetzalcóatl and his nahualli, or alter ego, who went into the underworld to collect them and then, by dripping over them blood ritually extracted from his penis, transformed them into the first male and female from whom all mankind was born.^[9] The import of the myths is clear: through the process of transformation, the divine essence manifests itself as the created world, a world that seems material but is essentially spirit.

As it is with man's world, so it is with man himself. True to its shamanic base, Mesoamerican spiritual thought sees man as spirit temporarily and tenuously housed in a material body. "Soul loss" is a constant possibility, and curers from pre-Columbian times to the present have been called on to reunite body and spirit.^[10] That spirit/matter dichotomy is represented metaphorically throughout the history of Mesoamerica and for most indigenous groups today by the belief that each person has a companion animal who somehow "shares" his soul. This animal is sometimes thought to be living in the temporal world but is more often thought to exist in the world of the spirit—often, significantly, inside mountains. Vogt vividly describes this concept in its present formulation in the Maya community of Zinacantan.

Rising up 9,200 feet to the east of the ceremonial center of Zinacantan is a majestic volcano called BANKILAL MUK'TA VIZ (Senior Large Mountain). Within this mountain a series of supernatural corrals house the approximately 11,400 wild animal companions of the Zinacantecos, one for each person. The corrals contain jaguars, coyotes, ocelots, and smaller animals such as opossums and squirrels. There is no abstract term in Tzotzil for these animals; CON is the general noun for "animal, " and using the adjectival form one refers to "the animal of so-and-so" as "SCANUL---" when talking about one's animal companion. These animals are watered, fed, and cared for by the ancestral gods, under the general supervision of the Grand Alcalde, who is the divine counterpart of the highest ranking member of the religious hierarchy in Zinacantan. His home is located inside the mountain and his household cross is the shrine that Zinacantecos visit in the course of rituals on top of the mountain. A Zinacanteco and his animal companion are linked by a single innate soul. When the ancestors install a C'ULEL in the embryo of a Zinacanteco, they simultaneously install the same innate soul in the embryo of an animal. The moment the Zinacanteco is born, the animal is also born. Throughout their lives, whatever happens to either human or animal also happens to his alter ego. . . . It is usually during childhood or early adulthood that a person discovers what kind of animal companion he has. He receives this knowledge either in a dream, when his innate soul "sees" its companion, or from a shaman, when an illness is diagnosed.^[11]

Clearly, the Zinacanteco sees himself as living simultaneously on the surface of the earth as a physical being and within the mountain as a spiritual being. The relative importance of the two forms of being can be gauged from his defining the significant problems that might beset him on the surface of the earth as soluble, in shamanic fashion, only within the mountain. What we would take to be physical, psychological, or social problems are seen in Zinacantan as spiritual problems. It is one's spirit—self—not his physical being—that must be healed. The lack of an abstract term in their language for these animal companions as a group seems to suggest that the identity of person and animal is so close that the animal companion cannot readily be thought of as an independent entity; it is a metaphor for the spirit and remains, among the Zinacantecos and other indigenous groups, transparent to transcendence. James Dow suggests the significance of this belief in his discussion of shamanic healing practices among the Otomi of the Sierra de Puebla.

These concepts [of the tonal and nagual] have a profundity that is not immediately apparent. They link man to nature and recognize that his fate is like that of other animals. They also proclaim that his fate depends on conflicts waged in a special mythic world, the world of the tonales and naguales. Where is this world? The Otomi talk about it being in the mountains, which are governed by an order of nature that is different from the order of humans.^[12]

Although today's Zinacantecos and Otomis are nominally Christian, this metaphor for their spiritual selves, like many of their other beliefs and rites, obviously has a pre-Columbian origin. The original concept is best understood today as it existed among the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of the Valley of Mexico since that form was documented best by the Spanish conquerors. Called the nahualli in Nahuatl, the companion animal of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica had more clearly defined transformational qualities than exist today in communities such as Zinacantan, although other indigenous groups retain the idea of magical transformation. So much were those qualities a part of the original concept that, according to George Foster, nahualli "originally referred to the sor-

cerer in his transformation as his guardian animal, whereas the guardian animal itself was designated by the word tonalli or tonal."^[13] That potential of transformation from a person to his nagual or nahualli strongly suggests their interrelated destinies, but there is an even stronger implication of that interrelationship when the guardian animal is referred to as the tonal or tonalli since the latter term makes the obvious association with the 260day calendar, the tonalpohualli, which, as we have shown, indicated a person's destiny by virtue of the signs and gods associated with his day of birth and with his name day. Thus, the idea of the companion animal was intimately associated with the divinatory calendar and its implicit assumption that a person's destiny was not to be found in this world but in an understanding of his spirit-self, represented metaphorically by the companion animal.

While the average person had one nagual, the early Spaniards reported that men with power often had several nagual forms and that such men were thought to be able to assume the physical form of a companion animal.^[14] In such cases, the one being transformed and the image into which he was transformed were considered so much a part of each other that among the Aztecs the people capable of such transformation were themselves called naguales.^{[ 15]} The sorcerer's knowledge of the world of the spirit thus was thought to enable him to transform his physical being into his spirit-self to bring the power of the world of the spirit, for good or ill,^[16] into the physical world.

Brundage contends that nahualli is derived from nahualtia , meaning "to hide, covering one's self or putting on a mask."^[17] Although other derivations have been suggested, the connection between the mask and the nagual is thought provoking. The relationship between the animal companion and the person is much the same as that between the wearer of the ritual mask and the mask itself. Both the mask and the physical body cover or "hide" the animating spirit represented by the ritual participant and the nagual, and both allow that underlying spirit to express itself in the world of space and time. This, of course, is the same metaphor (though not the same Nahuatl term) used for precisely the same conception in the newly installed ruler's ritual entreaty we quoted above. In each of these cases, the significant part of the human being is the spirit, while the temporal, physical being is merely the final transformation, a body that serves to shelter, for a time, the spirit within. It is fascinating to note that even the gods themselves had naguals, which indicates in still another way their kaleidoscopic nature. Rather than being tied to a single identity, they were capable of transforming themselves into their naguals to manifest other possibilities, and if Boos is correct in his assessment of the images on the urns of Monte Albán, even the naguals of the gods themselves have naguals.^[18] The transformative possibilities are endless.

Mesoamerican man found various means of moving from one plane of existence to another, of moving from the surface of life inward. As we suggested in our discussions of the calendar and the nagual, magic and divination were used to uncover a different kind of reality, one in which the spirit and the man, the magician and the disguise became strangely unified and, finally, interchangeable. As we have seen in the case of the shamanic trance, this unity was often achieved through some form of hallucinatory state induced by psychotropic substances; in this visionary state, the supernatural world could be entered. For the Maya, and probably for other cultures, bloodletting served a similar purpose in the transformational process; loss of blood produced visions that brought kings into direct contact with their ancestors and with the gods. The Hauberg Stela provides a fascinating example of this process in its depiction of the ritual bloodletting preceding by fifty-two days the accession of Bac-T'ul to the throne. The soon-to-be-installed ruler is not shown drawing his own blood but rather "in the midst of his vision, frozen between the natural and supernatural worlds,"^[19] or, as we might put it, transformed from his physical being into spirit.

The act of blood sacrifice provides the most dramatic illustration of the use of ritual to incarnate the supernatural. A great deal has been written about sacrificial practices in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, especially among the Aztecs, and it seems clear that the mythological equation represented by the sacrificial act is an integral part of the transformative relationship between matter and spirit. So fundamental is sacrifice to this conception that the extant creation myths for each of the cultures of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica all charge mankind with the ritual duty of sacrifice. As we have seen, Aztec myth depicts man's creation as the result of an autosacrificial act by Quetzalcóatl. That this idea is fundamental to the Aztec conception of Quetzalcóatl is demonstrated by his often being depicted in the codices holding a bone or a thorn used to draw blood, a clear reference to his sprinkling his own blood on the bones of past generations he had gathered in the underworld to transform them into the first man and woman, thereby creating mankind. The myth demonstrates the dependence of mankind on the sacrifice of the god for its existence and suggests the reciprocal human duty of sacrifice, a duty that is the reenactment of the gods' sacrifice in the creation of the sun: "This was the voluntary sacrifice of the assembled gods, to provide the freshly created sun with nourishment. In performing this self-immolation, the gods set an example for man to follow for all time."^[20]

That the same reciprocal relationship was seen by the Maya is illustrated both in their buildings and in their myths. Speaking of Structure 22 at Copán, Schele and Miller point out that

the facade of the structure once featured a great reptilian monster mouth at its entrance. The lords stepped onto his lower jaw and then passed through the mouth of a great Bicephalic Monster to enter the inner sanctum, a room probably designed for ritual bloodletting. While the nobility let blood in the inner sanctum, maize flourished on the exterior of the building, suggesting that the king's most potent substance, his blood, flowed to fertilize and regenerate nature itself.^[21]

Thus, the king, or priest, entered symbolically into the world of the spirit to give his blood so that the gods would respond with man's sustenance. The same motif appears in the Popol Vuh, where the gods' intention is to create "a giver of praise, giver of respect, provider, nurturer." The import of this is made clear when man is finally created and begins to proliferate: "And this is our root, we who are the Quiché people. And there came to be a crowd of penitents and sacrificers,"^[22] a "crowd" made up of the historic Quiché lineages, which are then enumerated.

The Mixtec creation myth, brief as it is, makes the ritual duty of sacrifice equally clear. In that account, two gods, male and female, who share the name 1-Deer and who "are said to have been the beginning of all the other gods . . . became visible" and created "two male children."^[23] Among other things, these children pierced their ears and tongues "so that the drops of blood would come out," which they then offered as "a sacred and holy thing," doing so "in order to oblige" the gods who created them.^[24] These actions are surely intended as a model for proper conduct for the human beings who were then "restored to life."^[25] The various creation myths thus agreed that sacrifice of human blood was a ritual duty. Metaphorically, the sacrifice of life's blood, that is, returning life to its spiritual source, was necessary for the continuation of the endless cycle of transformations through which life was constantly created and maintained. Man, helpless without the gods, must sacrifice his blood in return for their continuing help "to make the rain fall, the corn grow, an illness to disappear."^[26] There was no doubt that

the machinery of the world, the movement of the sun, the succession of the seasons cannot continue and last unless they [the gods] are nourished on the vital energy contained in "the precious water," chalchiuatl; in other words, human blood. The reality we see and touch is merely a fragile veil that may be torn at any minute and reveal the monsters of dusk and decline.^[27]

Reading any account of Mesoamerican ritual activity makes chillingly clear that the blood needed to maintain the universal system was provided. There seem to be endless numbers of sacrificial rituals running the gamut from symbolic bloodletting and animal sacrifice to autosacrifice to the ultimate sacrifice of human life itself. Autosacrifice, as depicted in the Aztec and Mixtec creation myths, was most common. Throughout Mesoamerica, the bleeding of ears, tongues, and genital organs by members of the priesthood was a daily ritual occurrence, sometimes reaching ghastly proportions. "In a certain Mixtec province," for example, "even the bleeding of the genital organ was practiced by passing cords as long as fifteen to twenty yards through it."^[28]

One might say, however, that "if autosacrifice was the most common form of blood offering, human sacrifice was the most holy,"^[29] for it involved the sacrifice of life to life. We see such sacrifice as the killing, or even slaughter, of human victims for the gods, but to understand human sacrifice in Mesoamerican terms, we must see it, for the moment at least, as they did, and their intent "was to sacrifice an image of the god to the god."^[30] A vital part of the sacrificial ritual, therefore, involved a symbolic transformation of the sacrificial victim into the god, a transformation metaphorically possible because man was both spirit and matter and could, through ritual, "become" spirit. "Accordingly, not only was the correct godly attire important, but also the sex, age, physical condition, and proper emotional attitude of the deity impersonator. . . . All the sixteenth century reports make it clear that the victim became the god to whom he was sacrificed,"^[31] costume and the physical body functioning as the ritual mask in making the inner reality outer, spiritualizing the physical. The actual sacrifice was the logical final step; the "mask" of the physical body was removed, leaving the spirit to travel to its proper home, the realm of the gods.

Aztec ritual life was "enormously complex. A prodigious amount of time, energy, and wealth was expended in ceremonial activities, . . . and some type of death sacrifice normally accompanied all important rituals." In the course of this ritual life, "human sacrifice was practiced on a scale not even approached by any other ritual system in the history of the world."^[32] The ritual year was based primarily on the solar calendar with its eighteen "months" of twenty days, and each of these twenty-day periods was marked by an elaborate public ceremony generally celebrating the stage in the agricultural cycle which had been reached. Since each of these veintena ceremonies celebrated fertility, sacrifice played a key role, but the sacrifice was performed in accordance with the particular aspect of the agricultural cycle being cele-

brated. Durán presents a telling example in his description of the harvest festival of Ochpaniztli, which means "Sweeping of the Roads," a name symbolic of the clearing of the way for the passage of the gods associated with agricultural fertility. The festival celebrated both the earth's provision of man's sustenance and the return of the dead stalks to the earth so that the renewal of life in the spring might take place. For this festival, a woman was chosen to represent the earth-mother goddess Toci, Mother of the Gods, Heart of the Earth, and was transformed into that goddess not only by being "garbed exactly as the goddess" but also by being made godlike in other ways. After being "purified and washed," she was "given the name of the goddess Toci, . . . consecrated to avoid all sin or transgression, [and] locked up and kept carefully in a cage" for twenty days to ensure her abstention from all carnal sin. In addition, "she was made to dance and rejoice" so that "all could see her and worship her as a divinity"; she was encouraged to be joyful and happy in the manner of the gods. In fact, "the people held her to be the Mother of the Gods and revered her, respected and honored her as if she had been the goddess herself," as, ritually, she was.^[33] The elaborate ritual preparation for the sacrificial ritual itself had symbolically transformed the woman from matter to spirit.

After her sacrificial death, the culmination of her transformation into the god, a further transformation took place. The skin was removed from her dead body "from the middle of the thigh upward as far as the elbows. A man appointed for this purpose was made to don the skin so as to represent the goddess again." Still later in the ceremony, he who was transformed into the goddess stripped himself and bestowed his goddess regalia on a straw figure, which resulted in the transformation of that figure into the goddess—a total of three incarnations of the goddess through transformation in a single festival. And each transformation of the goddess marked a stage in the all-important transformation of the ripened corn from the earth to man and back to the earth in the continuation of the cycle. Each of the celebrations involving human sacrifice similarly made clear the importance of transformation in its own particular way as each demonstrated a particular stage in the process of the transformation of energy from the heart of the cosmic realm into the natural world. Ritual provided the necessary catalyst for that transformation.

Nor are such examples confined to the Aztecs. Until recently, it was widely believed that the Maya were peace-loving philosophers and agriculturalists who did not practice human sacrifice. Recent scholarship has revised that view substantially, and nowhere is the revision more striking than in the current view of Maya ritual sacrifice. Coe provides a dramatic statement of the new perspective.

It is common among Maya archaeologists, not exactly the most imaginative of the anthropological profession, to think of their subject matter in terms of trade, agriculture, class structure, and all the other trappings of modern materialist-determinist scholarship. On the other side, the late Eric Thompson, who certainly did have imagination, conceived of his ancient Maya as though they were good High Church Angelicans attending Evensong at King's College. I doubt that either of these two schools of thought would feel at home among the real Maya as shown on a vase like Princeton 20: impersonators of bloodcurdling monsters from the depths of Xibalbá, poised in expectation of the human decapitation they are about to witness, on the verge of a dance to the music of throbbing drums, rattles, and turtle shell, and the doleful sound of wooden trumpets and conch shells. I have always thought that if I were a Mesoamerican captive destined for sacrifice, I would rather have been in the hands of the supposedly bloodthirsty Aztec than in the custody of the "peaceloving" Maya.^[34]

And archaeologists have unearthed Classic period "decapitated burials"^[35] and stelae depicting rulers wearing as trophies the heads struck off their captives in the sacrificial ritual Coe vividly recreates. The title of a recent work on the Classic period Maya, The Blood of Kings , illustrates this new view and details, among other things, the part that sacrifice played in ritual. "By the Early Classic period, the transformation of humans into kings had been formalized into a precise ritual consisting of several stages that seems to have been used at most sites."^[36] Significantly, one stage of that ritual process through which a prince became a king and thus gained access to the realm of the spirit required the sacrifice of human blood, which, as among the Aztecs, was the most sacred of all sanctifications. Throughout Mesoamerica, blood was life, and it fueled the transformative processes of the cosmos. As the Popol Vuh puts it, man was created by the gods to be their provider and nourisher. By giving his blood in reciprocity for having been created through the gods' sacrifice, man ensured the continuation of life's endless series of cyclical transformations. Mysteriously, then, death itself was ultimately transformed by death; the one sacrificed did not die but merged with the source of all life.

While self-induced hallucinatory states and blood sacrifice served Mesoamerica as ritual means of transforming matter into spirit, perhaps the most obvious as well as the most profound means of such transformation was provided by the works of art expressing a spiritual reality created throughout the history of Mesoamerica. Such a work of art captures a natural image, not for its own sake but as an ex-

pression of a spiritual state. It reverses, in a sense, the creative process through which the natural object was created. Rather than transforming spirit into matter, the work of art uses matter to reveal spirit. Clearly, we cannot examine here all the art of Mesoamerica to demonstrate this transformative process, but perhaps an exploration of the use of a small but particularly fascinating set of images, one ripe with transformative implications, will illustrate the Mesoamerican use of art as a means of penetrating the wall between matter and spirit, between man and the gods.

Throughout the development of Mesoamerican art, the image of the butterfly recurs, albeit not with tremendous frequency, and often it is associated with fire. In Aztec art, for example, flames may be depicted in the shape of butterflies, a single image that links two natural forms of transformation. That simple Aztec image has roots deep in the history of Mesoamerican art, roots no doubt originating in the life cycle of the butterfly, as Janet Berlo points out in her study of Teotihuacán iconography.

The butterfly is a natural choice for a transformational symbol. During its life it changes from caterpillar to pupa wrapped in hard chrysalis, to butterfly: a process of birth, apparent death, and resurrection as an elegant airborne creature. Fire, too, is a transforming process: fire feeds on natural materials, turning them to ash. In Mesoamerica's traditional system of slash and burn agriculture, fire transforms wild forest into workable milpa. Butterfly symbolism on incensarios relates directly to the fire offering within the censer. The burning of offerings is a concrete manifestation of natural powers of transformation, the butterfly symbolism a metaphorical one. To the Teotihuacano, the butterfly surely was an emblem of the soul as it was for the later Aztecs.^{[ 37]}

The censers, usually displaying the mask of a human face recessed within a shrine, were ritual vessels of transformation related to "the god of fire [who] undoubtedly represents one of the oldest conceptions of Mesoamerican man. He was the god of the center position in relation to the four cardinal points of the compass, just as the tlecuil, or brazier for kindling fire, was the center of the indigenous home and temple."^[38] All movement or change symbolically originates in the motionless center, just as fire itself causes the transformation of whatever it touches. Fire always had this symbolic meaning for Mesoamerican man, due, no doubt, to its association with the life-giving power of the sun. The Mixtec name for the fire serpent, for example, is yavui, meaning transformer or wizard, a definition "similar to the Aztec conception of this supernatural being," as Sahagún indicates that the xiuhcóatl, "a figure of a dragon, with fire shooting from its mouth, was the insignia of Huitzilopochtli [always associated with the sun] and of the wizard, or transforming shaman."^[39] And fire, of course, was the agent of transformation in the creation of the sun as the gods, in the Aztec myth, leaped into the transformative fire.

The butterfly, as Berlo suggests, is found in abundance on the ceramic incense burners of Teotihuacán because it has much in common with fire; they both manifest the ultimately shamanic idea that death is part of the process of transformation and thus the beginning of life. Seler explains that the butterfly,

the fluttering one, was a symbol of fire and is therefore also a part of the symbol, which composed of the picture of water and of fire was for the Mexicans both a verbal and pictorial expression of war. As animal of the fire god the butterfly was also the symbol of the ancients, i.e., the dead ancestors, but not of the ordinary dead, who live beyond the great water, in Chicunauhmictlán, in the inmost depths of the earth, from where—once safely conveyed thence—they never return .^[40]

In at least two ways, then, the image of the butterfly was associated with the ultimate transformation of death. It was connected with war and frequently used to symbolize the souls of dead warriors^[41] whose spirits, like those of the dead ancestral kings, returned to earth transformed as butterflies and hummingbirds.^[42] That the emphasis was clearly on transformation is also suggested by an interesting connection with the daily cycle of the sun. The spirits of the dead warriors are butterflies of the day charged with assisting the sun as it moves through the heavens, whereas the spirits of women who died in childbirth, also considered to be warriors, must assist the sun as it makes its nightly journey through the underworld. They are butterflies of the night associated with the moon.^[43] Thus, the image of the butterfly, like most of the symbolic images in Mesoamerican art, has a range of transformational implications. This suggests that the highly metaphorical religious art of Mesoamerica is itself an instrument of transformation.

While many of the works of Mesoamerican art in museums and private collections are better considered examples of craft, the great works of that tradition, like those of all artistic traditions, were created by visionary artists able to capture the spiritual truth at the heart of their tradition in the malleable materials and fleeting images of the earthly world. Such an artist is characterized in an Aztec poem as a "stealer of songs" from the gods^[44] and by Sahagún as one who "teaches the clay to lie" and thereby "creates life."^[45] The truly creative artist, as James Joyce put it in his usual punning way, "creates life out of life" by embodying the spirit of life in the material of his art. Neither Joyce

nor Sahagún were speaking of art as a realistic reproduction of the things of this earth but rather as the human alternative to the divine creative process. Even though Mesoamerican art is essentially religious and always aware that "the beautiful songs come from another world,"^[46] its subject is frequently art itself, art as a metaphor for the cosmic creativity that shapes and maintains life.

The artist: a Toltec, disciple, resourceful, diverse, restless.
The true artist, capable, well trained, expert;
he converses with his heart, finds things with his mind.
The true artist draws from his heart; he works with delight;
does things calmly, with feeling; works like a Toltec;
invents things, works skillfully, creates; he arranges things;
adorns them; reconciles them.^[47]

Like the life-force itself—the creator gods of the Popol Vuh , for example, who created man from corn—the artist creates by transforming reality. By shaping his materials and by manipulating the symbols of his society, he can provide the metaphors that reconcile the sacred with the profane by recreating in miniature the cosmic order. And the mystery at the heart of the cosmic creation can be understood through its metaphoric re-creation by the visionary artist in the images—visual, musical, and literary—in and through which myths exist and "delight." As Joseph Campbell puts it,

It has always been the business of the great seers (known to India as "rishis," in biblical terms as "prophets," to primitive folk as "shamans, " and in our own day [and, we might add, in Mesoamerica before the Conquest] as "poets" and "artists") to . . . recognize through the veil of nature, as viewed in the science of their times, the radiance, terrible yet gentle, of the dark, unspeakable light beyond, and through their words and images to reveal the sense of the vast silence that is the ground of us all and of all beings.^[48]

The visionary artist metaphorically provides that "vast silence" a voice, a theme often found in Aztec poetry:

The flowers sprout, they are fresh, they grow;
they open their blossoms,
and from within emerge the flowers of song;
among men You scatter them, You send them.
You are the singer!^[49]

As "flower and song" is the standard Aztec metaphor for poetry, it is strikingly clear that the poet here considers himself the vehicle for images and rhythms originating in the creative force at the heart of the cosmos. Through him, that cosmic force, the "You" of the poem, can "scatter" its truths among men, can somehow transform its mysterious being into the beauty of life on the earthly plane. Another Aztec poem enunciates the theme clearly:

With flowers you write,
O Giver of Life;
With songs You give color,
with songs You shade
those who must live on the earth.

Later you will destroy eagles and ocelots;
we live only in Your book of paintings,
here, on the earth.

With black ink You will blot out
all that was friendship,
brotherhood, nobility.

You give shading
to those who must live on the earth.
We live only in Your book of paintings
here on the earth.^[50]

Using the metaphors of both poetry and painting, the poet suggests that the transformational relationship between temporal reality and the creator of that reality is the same as the relationship between the artist and his work. Life is to the creator what the poem is to the poet or the painting to the painter. Thus, through the poet's and painter's creations, we can see and understand more clearly the cosmic creation. But, of course, the ultimate creative force, the ground of our being, is finally beyond the comprehension of temporal beings. Its "black ink," a symbolic reference to Tezcatlipoca and to the writing that contains esoteric knowledge of the sacred mysteries as well as to its more obvious associations, will "blot out" our lives. Though everything on the earthly plane—eagles and ocelots, which is to say, bravery in war; friendship and brotherhood and nobility; and man himself—must perish, the life-force manifested in the things of the earth and in artistic creation will continue.

My flowers will not come to an end,
my songs will not come to an end,
|I, the singer, raise them up;
they are scattered, they are bestowed.
Even though flowers on earth
may wither and yellow,
they will be carried there,
to the interior of the house
of the bird with the golden feathers.^[51]

Thus, the creative force can be embodied in artistic creation and take on the eternal life of its source, or as the poem elegantly puts it, "be carried there, to the interior of the house of the bird with the golden feathers." The creative impulse in mankind, expressed most clearly in artistic creation, is mysteriously part of the cosmic creative force, and that cosmic force expresses itself through the vi-

sionary artist. One is inevitably reminded here of another great American poet, Walt Whitman, who used a similar metaphor in Leaves of Grass to express the same enduring truth: "I permit to speak at every hazard, / Nature without check with original energy."^[52] "Original energy," for Whitman, had its source in that cosmic creative force, and as that energy manifested itself in his poetry, the poetry, like that of the Aztec poet, was eternal.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.^[53]

Whitman's buoyant optimism is not shared by his Aztec counterpart, but their sense of themselves as creative artists is remarkably similar and indicative of the many ways in which Mesoamerican thought is not as far removed from ours as we often think. Both see themselves as vehicles for the expression of an impulse mysteriously originating in the ground of being. In both cases, organic metaphors—flower and song, grass—are used to embody the creative process, and both therefore suggest that the entire process is a natural one: it is a matter of transforming energy from one level of nature—the ground of being, which is spirit—to another—the material world of space and time. For both of them, the artist served as the agent of that transformation.

Sahagún's description of the feather artist carries this theme a step further.

Amantècatl; the feather artist.
He is whole; he has a face and a heart.
The good feather artist is skillful,
is master of himself; it is his duty
to harmonize the desires of the people.^[54]

The phrase "face and heart," often encountered in Nahuatl texts, carries a complex metaphoric meaning based on the conception of the beating heart (yollotl , derived from the same root as ollin , meaning movement) as the symbol of the dynamic center of the person, and the face (ixe or ixtli , not simply the physical face visible to others) as expressive of his being in the deepest sense. The physical face, therefore, had the metaphoric potential to signify one's true face by manifesting those characteristics that made him "whole," that is, unique and well integrated, as a result of the transformative process by which the outer appearance came to reflect the inner, spiritual being. When this integration had been achieved, a person was said to have a "deified heart" and to be "master of himself." It is no wonder, then, that an important goal of Aztec education was to teach a person to create such a "deified heart," thus enabling him to develop his innate spiritual potential by becoming "one who divines things with his heart,"^[55] one who infuses ordinary experience with spiritual energy. Precisely, of course, the task of the artist.

It would follow that, as León-Portilla puts it, "if the good artist is master of himself and possesses a face and a heart, he will be able to achieve what is the proper end of art: 'to humanize the desires of the people,' that is, to help others to understand things human and divine, and to behave in a truly human way."^[56] Behaving in such a way would be the result of understanding one's essentially spiritual nature and allowing that nature to express itself in the world of space and time, thereby transforming the material world into spirit. Thus, the Aztec poet, like his predecessors in the earlier cultures of Mesoamerica, was the messenger of the spirit, the transformer who had himself been transformed:

God has sent me as a messenger.
I am transformed into a poem.^[57]

That transformation can stand as a symbol here for the entire effort of Mesoamerican spiritual thought—to embody in a system of metaphors the various ways in which the ground of all being manifested itself through transformation as the earth and the heavens and all they contained. This magnificent system of metaphors, far more complex than we have been able to suggest here, reveals clearly that for Mesoamerica all of reality—inner and outer, microcosmic and macrocosmic, natural and supernatural, earthly, subterranean, and celestial—formed one system, a system whose existence betrayed itself in the order that could be found behind the apparent chaos of the world of nature.