**3. Incorporating the enemy**

The transformations that took place over time found similar correspondences in spatial displacement. The story of migrations in Mesoamerica indeed supports the hypothesis that all displacement was conceived of as a form of alterity, in that it modified the initial identity of the protagonists. In Highland Guatemala, the mythical migration toward the east was generally accompanied by an additional value—its meaning consisted of a circular journey of a ceremonial nature, originally undertaken by tutelary deities, who set out from the Quiché region and covered a part of southeastern Mexico (see **Figure 1**). Through this trajectory, the ancient progenitors successfully legitimated Quiché control over other populations in the highlands, because the circular journey justified the existence of new military techniques, the presence of deities imported from Tula, and the exercise of shamanic powers learned during the pilgrimage. According to the *Título de Totonicapán*, "all the signs of sovereignty were joined and brought by those who were from where the sun rises," in an extremely broad list of exotic objects that included shells, animal bones, bird feathers, and a variety of musical instruments. These objects, imported from abroad along with the nine tutelary divinities, clearly indicated that the ancient progenitors had assimilated

**Figure 1.** *Quiché migration routes (XI–XIII centuries). Source: Piel [12].*

#### *Cosmogonies of Alterity: Origin and Identity in Mesoamerican Narrative DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104496*

shamanic knowledge, in addition to a new political organization, a new spirituality, and a complex ritual procedures alien to local culture.

As Craveri [13] has noted, the assimilation of outsider elements in the very cultural scheme makes it possible to interpret the Mexicanization of Highland Guatemala as "a process actively developed by the very Quiché groups, more than the passive assimilation of cultural patterns imposed by foreign conquerors." The openness to outsider elements was in fact established in the ancient rivalry between Quichés and Rabinals, whose relations were made explicit in that fifteenth-century document that theatrically narrated the conflicts of *Rabinal Achí*, the antagonist of Quiché territory who ends up sacrificing its ruler. According to the plot of the work, Rabinal Achí not only conceded to his adversary the virtues corresponding to his military posts, such as valor, drive, and wisdom, but also sees in him the presence of an indispensable foreigner. In his *Grammaire de la langue quiché*, published in 1862, Brasseur de Bourbourg reproduces the terms with which Rabinal Achí addresses the sacrificed ruler:

*I will recommend to the brave, the warrior that he not make noise, that he not move, that he enter the grand palace, the big house, because there he is esteemed and honored, in the grand palace, in the big house, because he has twelve elder brothers and twelve younger brothers, the guardians of the treasure, of the precious objects. He has not yet manifested his presence, his appearance. Is this the brave [one] who came to complement them, to perfect them, in the grand palace, in the big house? ([14]: 78)*

Although it is possible to recognize in this drama an unusual vision of the enemy, whose figure plays a preponderant role, it is possible to identify in the text a general operation that turns alterity into an indispensable mechanism. Between identity and alterity, the text opts for a disconcerting realization—it grants difference with the capacity to forge an identity that remains inherently empty. As those Amerindian myths that grant a place to outsider figures from the moment of their creation, the place of the other was already in some way prefigured in thought that contemplated its existence as a necessity, indispensable for an open dualism of figures that are both alien and familiar. More than a threat, the enemy is presented for Rabinal Achí as a favorable solution, as he perfects and complements the enclosure that receives him, where he is "esteemed and honored" by brothers who have ultimately integrated him into their own lineage. In an ontology in which the other is not only conceivable but also indispensable [15], the outer world assumes a preeminence that can only be measured in the variety of elements it supplies to its counterpart.

Faced with the encounter of the Spanish and Indigenous worlds, historians have noted that neither native resistance nor absolute conversion can fully explain the conquest process. In the Caribbean zone, shortly after the initial contact, the Mayas of Cozumel followed the instructions of the new invaders and kept watch over the images of Christianity, taking part in the encounter with Spanish ships with the figure of the Virgin Mary on board their canoes. Farris [16] has pointed out that even Maya towns not under Spanish control invited Catholic priests to give their blessings to the inhabitants and they maintained Christian crosses at the heart of their own communities. Following this logic, the Mexicas of the highlands asked Cortés to intercede with his god to make it rain, and for this purpose, they placed images of the cross and the Virgin among the idols in the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan [17]. None of the chronicles mention reactions of opposition, acts of resistance, or Indigenous responses that denounced the sacrilegious character of those images. Instead of opposing the

profanation of their temples, in the mid-sixteenth century, all Indigenous homes wished to possess an image from the Christian book of saints, just as its members assumed the names and attire of the foreign enemies. Around 1575, as Lockhart [18] has noted, it was rare for an indigenous home to lack Spanish objects or products, from fig trees to crates, metal axes, and knives. Beyond their obvious utility, European apparel was incorporated into Indigenous homes with the same natural ease as the saints that occupied the heart of their communities, where there was usually a "house" to shelter them.

It is significant that the purpose of those constructions, known as *santocalli* ("saint's house"), was not to perform ceremonies, but rather to provide a residence for foreign effigies, which later became the emblem identifying each community. The data examined by Lockhart indicates, however, that the incorporation of the new figures, represented in saints, archangels, and virgins, was in some way subject to oneiric intentions, through which the nature of the chosen was revealed. According to the legend of Sula, in the vicinity of Chalco, the selection of the patron saint had not been the result of a conscious process, but rather of a dream shared by two elders of the community who assumed the task of seeking the new patron saint of the community on their dream journeys: "Sleeping on the matter, each had a dream in which Santiago appeared in great splendor, declared himself to be from Persia (i.e., far away), and announced that he would be Sula's saint" ([18]: 236). As many elements benefited communities, and like origin myths, the saints were almost always beings who came from distant places and conferred their name to towns, prompting a change from their ancient identities. While some settlements acquired the status of *santopan* ("where there is a saint"), others conferred the new visitors with the function of granting a new name to ancient towns, modifying the identity that previously defined them.

Accounts from the colonial period tend to insist that the guests in the local church, populated by foreign images and effigies, came from places different from that the enclosures that now housed them. Just as their own parishioners, who were born in caves or springs, the saints came from faraway places and in that sense foreign figures that moved from the outside to the heart of communities in New Spain. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Nahuas of Zitlatla deemed their patron saint had undertaken a journey up from the Costa Grande to the Montaña of Guerrero, choosing their community as his permanent residence [19]. Instead of insisting on his vernacular origin, as in the case of Spanish communities, the Nahuas reaffirmed the value of their images in the distance that separated them, marking in their origin myths the essential difference between sites of origin and destination. The accounts of "traveling saints," numerous examples of which exist, not only show a constant narrative throughout the colonial period but also reveal that Indigenous thought inverted the process of Spanish identity. While this started from a place of origin, from which it expanded to faraway confines, native identity is shaped by way of an inverse operation, in which it attracts elements and entities of diverse origin, whether exotic apparel or foreign saints, to its center. More than the effect of religious syncretism, the process of assimilation displays a different disposition toward the outer world, given that it ceases to function as a threat to become a necessary source of resources. In the mid-sixteenth century, to paraphrase the brilliant observation of Viveiros de Castro [15] on the Tupinambá of colonial Brazil, the Nahuas were already a consumer society that willingly incorporated readily available objects and images, even when they represented emblems of foreign enemies.

#### *Cosmogonies of Alterity: Origin and Identity in Mesoamerican Narrative DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104496*

Several researchers have noted that the evangelization of New Spain was practiced on a population that had already been accustomed to syncretic processes and religious condensations for centuries [20, 21], in an interethnic context in which the flow of images, objects, and concepts was no doubt frequent. But this incessant trade, made in daily transactions and reciprocal exchanges, does not explain the value that Indigenous narratives give to external components, whose emblems displace elements from earlier traditions with relative ease. Just as their predecessors, who tended to return to battles with the effigies of defeated towns to employ them for ceremonial purposes, the Indigenous people of New Spain integrated into their core the images of their new enemies, granting them a similar ceremonial value and placing them at the center of their own communities. Incorporating foreign elements indeed seems to be a regular procedure reproduced before and after the colonial period, as if local institutions demanded the establishment of exogenous components. In this process, as noted by Hernández Dávila [22], syncretism ceases to be a failed operation to instead become a logical consequence of cultural contact, because it provided pieces contemplated in space that were inevitably required. If it is possible to identify the common factor of Nahua ontology in this operation, it is also possible to recognize in it the "openness to the other" in which Lévi-Strauss [11] saw the key to Amerindian thought.

### **4. Foreign souls and local temples**

In a recent study, Pedro Pitarch [23] has made the observation that Indigenous souls personify the antithesis of local identities. Instead of prolonging similarities between body and spirit, the Tzeltals of Cancun opt to define their interiority through soul entities that are different from the perspective of corporeal identity. As wild animals, atmospheric phenomena, or anthropomorphic figures that take on the physiognomy of ancient colonizers, souls are defined by being elements that dwell in other bodies, in principle different from the corporeal space containing them. Indeed, despite the fact that the repertoire of possibilities is extremely broad, the common denominator of these spiritual beings is that they do not participate in the Indigenous condition of their bearers. Entities known as *lab*, as well as the soul contained in human hearts, assume the appearance of foreign effigies distanced from the Indigenous model and instead take on the features of their ancient invaders. Whether animals, meteors, or anthropomorphic figures, the *lab* refers to conduct and physiognomies that are typically Spanish and that arose only during the colonial period, as in the case of priests and scribes who ultimately became integrated into the imaginary repertoire of Tzeltal souls.

The Indigenous model thus inverts the Western conception of the person. Not only does it avoid equating the humanity of bodies with the humanity of souls, but it also postulates that the latter form an essentially heterogeneous group that comes from the exterior world. Although the Tzeltals tend to distinguish between the plane of interiority and that of exteriority, the Indigenous response is to affirm their interiority is an external reality, in the sense that souls are deep down foreign entities, and accordingly, intrusive elements in the space containing them. Pitarch suggests that the dualism between the body and soul, marked by the ontological difference of its components, finds its correspondence in a social model common to numerous Mesoamerican communities, where Spanish churches and town halls occupy the center of inhabited space, while the outer perimeter houses the Indigenous component of the town. As is the case of souls within the body, vestiges of colonial history are situated

inside the interior of the place, as spiritual centers that originated in the initial contact with Europeans. The general conclusion does not, therefore, consist of supposing that the formation of contemporary bodies and towns is only the product of a colonial process, but rather of noticing that the "transcendental premise for the constitution of the Indigenous person and society is the interiorized presence of foreign enemies" ([23]: 35). Instead of expressing the cultural continuity of their own past, the center of bodies and spaces is defined by the interior world alien to their development, and thus external to the vernacular traditions that we tend to employ to delimit our own identities and our own genealogies.

Therefore, it is not by chance that ancient constructions functioned by means of similar principles, according to internal legacies composed of elements imported from the exterior, in the form of burials or offerings. Prior to the conquest, in the ancient capital of Tenochtitlan, temples tended to house objects of diverse provenance that were joined with human and animal bone remains, in diverse complexes including figurines and ornaments, ceramic vessels, semiprecious stones, seashells, and pieces produced by earlier societies or from faraway sites. What is striking is the interior diversity of the precincts that contrasts with the relative homogeneity of temples, generally pyramidal structures with ascending stairways and platforms, as well as the fact that most of the offerings originated in radically different settings from the locations that would ultimately house them. According to the estimates of Matos Moctezuma [24], 80% of the offerings from the *Templo Mayor* came from regions other than the Central Highlands of Tenochtitlan, primarily from the modern-day states of Puebla, Oaxaca, and Guerrero, as well as coastal zones of the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico. Although these products were deposited in the interior of a precinct that represented the center of the universe, situated more than two thousand meters above sea level, it was not a function of their similarities with local nature and culture, because numerous offerings contained fish, birds, and reptiles not native to the environs of the Mexica capital. López Luján [25] has noted that some manufactured objects, such as Olmec and Teotihuacan masks, had been made by cultures and civilizations separated by centuries from the Mexica Empire, which tended to extract offerings from tombs of foreign societies to integrate them into their ritual repertoires (**Figures 2** and **3**).

Some interpretations indicate that the offerings deposited in the *Templo Mayor*, whose structure was conceived as a cosmic mountain, were conceptually equivalent in Indigenous thought to seeds, fulfilling the same regenerative function as bones and ashes [26]. In this regard, it is worth recalling that the ancient Nahuas thought of hills as storage vessels from which new populations were born, so that after birth, peoples emerged and proceeded to build pyramids essentially analogous to fertile mountains [27]. Consequently, in its capacity as a cave or "sacred mountain," the pyramid of the Templo Mayor was a cavity that not only brought objects together but also harnessed symbolic "seeds," in other words the sources of entities that would come to life after passing through their inevitable transformation. López Austin and López Luján [28] have also proposed that these seeds, simultaneously understood as hearts or inner soul entities, were actually "souls" of the creatures deposited in the heart of the sacred precinct. Alien to the space containing them, their diversity was akin to the strange interior nature in which Pitarch has seen the enigma of Tzeltal souls, whose figures reveal the image of uncommon professions, exotic animals, and foreign enemies.

The explorations conducted in the late 1970s confirmed what colonial sources had indicated earlier regarding the pyramid of the Templo Mayor as a dual structure with twin temples at the summit. Although both spaces were west-facing, the southern

*Cosmogonies of Alterity: Origin and Identity in Mesoamerican Narrative DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104496*

**Figure 2.** *Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan Durán Codex (1587).*

temple was consecrated to Huitzilopochtli, the deity associated with warfare and hunting that had guided the Mexicas on their long pilgrimages. According to the principle of duality, the opposite side was dedicated to Tlaloc, an ancient local divinity that differed from his counterpart in his agricultural and pluvial character, closely tied to the Olmec and Teotihuacan horizons. As in the case of Amerindian twins, the asymmetry of Mesoamerican dualism granted singular preeminence to the foreign deity, outside the local pantheon, and thus designated the temple with his name ("*Cu de Huichilobos*" or "*Huitzilopochtli Temple*"), granting his chapel greater attributes and dimensions than the space dedicated to the local deity. The preeminence of the foreign

#### **Figure 3.**

*Offering in Templo Mayor with more than four thousand organic remains Source: Gaceta UNAM, Junio 22, 2020 https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=APqWBvZwmfNB5xd72ygjgwJO2dt\_Su5ug:1646254055321&source= univ&tbm=isch&q=dibujos+del+te mplo+mayor+con+ofrendas&fir=g8iuw5PZxdp6CM%252CHFMi1ayUzq NdsM%252C\_%253B0FISXE VLTT7LeM%252CHFMi1ayUzqNdsM%252C\_%253BNM\_HI5jU6EmCcM% 252CzahGtipgKD2IQM%25 2C\_%253B4- oekYAifMQAnM%252CzahGtipgKD2IQM%252C\_%253BY64 nn0S4ixyKlM%252CJwnu89e2FNkLlM% 252C\_%253BKeDvluT8UEhzwM%252CmztBTC0nAer3uM% 252C\_%253B6Q JmPV9pn1FOBM%252C GHsQCr\_PDuC4XM%252C\_%253Bbsga8zFITygLWM%252CM FGmGCOSSPL8KM%252C\_%253BfMEb DjZv0GmAyM%252Crb5GHJAlXQ4niM%252C\_%253B32effuy ourwXDM%252CAWbfciZuTWa0HM% 252C\_&usg=AI4\_- kT22uJxbMSVMW5auoeqMbpqKuyBxg&sa= X&ved=2ahUKEwinm7Whpqj2AhUDJEQIHdjdDhEQjJkE egQIBBAC&biw=1600&bih=757&dpr=1.*

god can also be noted in a document describing incidents prior to the construction of the temple, which tells of the journey of a Mexica explorer in the interior of a spring near the lake zone, where Tlaloc confers the space to the new divinity and confirms his will to grant him a place at the heart of his domains. According to the descriptions in the *Códice Aubin*, the ancient rain god, owner of hills and springs, addressed Axolohuan as follows:

*Now my son Huitzilopochtli has come. This is his home. He is the only one to be loved, and he will remain with me in this world* (*Códice Aubin, cited in [25]: 91).*

Through this recognition, Tlaloc not only confirmed the ancient Mesoamerican propensity to convert an outsider into a familiar entity, but it also reproduced in an almost literal way the terms that Rabinal Achí sheltered his enemy in the "grand palace," as cited earlier. Just as in the story between Quichés and Rabinals, the local deity indeed incorporated into the center of his territory a warrior who came from the outside, calling him "my son," in the same way that the Maya ruler counseled his adversary to enter the "big house," where he had "twelve elder brothers and twelve younger brothers," to "complement them" and "perfect them." The mechanism of alterity inherently operates in both cases, as outsiders to the local group occupy the interior of precincts and tend to generate an unstable twinness, allowing each unity to successively alternate the sphere of its domains. Ideologically, as López Austin [4] has observed, the predomination of divinities was based on the temporal character of its powers so that a new character could justify his presence by claiming the end of the previous era, as was no doubt the case at that time of the Mexica divinity occupying its new precinct.

The fact that the gods did not have absolute individuality, because they fused and split with the same ease that their attributes shifted reveals an unstable identity that

#### *Cosmogonies of Alterity: Origin and Identity in Mesoamerican Narrative DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104496*

oscillated between different figures and opened the possibility of identifying themselves, even with their adversaries. Consequently, it was not strange for local authorities to assume the identity of the patron god of their enemies, wearing its emblems and accouterments,4 instead of adhering to the affiliation between creatures and creators, exclusive to societies accustomed to monotheism. Accustomed instead to metamorphosis, uncertain origins, and variable identities, gods and creatures periodically practiced change of skin, perhaps with the intention of observing things from the enemy's viewpoint. The custom of covering the body with the skin of captives, common during celebrations dedicated to Xipe Totec, was in this sense analogous to certain narratives whose characters tended to wrap themselves in the skins of jaguars and other predators, because in these cases "the transformation, the barriers of human perception are broken, and he sees in wild animals much more than others perceive" ([25]: 435). In both circumstances, indeed, the main objective consisted of obtaining the enemy's skin and employing it as an instrument of perception, thus fulfilling a function similar to that of body paint and facial perforations, above all if one considers that "drilling with eyes" and "opening up ears" were actions that implied a form of learning.5

In this context, the notion of *ixiptla* takes on particular importance, as well as semantic displacements stemming from its essential root. Although the term referred equally to the image of a deity, the human being who represented it, and the sacrificial victim who donned its attributes, its derivations came from the particle *xip* that indicated "skin," "husk," or "covering" [25, 30]. Hence the word was employed to identify the officiants who wore divine attire, alluding to a personification that was covered with the vestments of a being alien to the wearer's condition. According to the translation that Dehouve [29] offers, the notion of *ixiptla* can be understood as wrapping the organs of sight, hearing, and the voice, insofar as it implies covering oneself with the accouterments of a god and seeing, hearing, and speaking as the god. Consequently, the term suppressed the distance between representation and the represented, between the personifying being and the personified entity, given that the former was conceived as the substance of an outer physiognomy that guarded an inner god beneath the skin, like those Teotihuacan figurines that housed in their body a multiplicity of foreign beings, appropriately known as "host figures" (**Figures 4** and **5**). These figures were indeed hosts of alterity, receptacles of human and animal forms that sheltered within them a variable number of diminutive effigies, turning them into covers of an interiorized collectivity.

What is it that these figures actually contain? As if each character were the carrier of their own underworld, these pre-Hispanic figures do not seem to express the indivisible unity of the person as much as its divisible and fragmentary character. In contrast to deities, which tended to display their interiority on the skin, host figures adopt a human appearance and they display a relatively uniform physiognomy, although they hide within them a multiplicity of inner essences. The variation of forms makes it possible, however, to suppose that each essence had its outer manifestation and that the variable group constituted a true acquisition, in the sense of a

<sup>4</sup> As Guilhem Olivier has observed, the connections between Mexica identity and that of their enemies are evident in the enthronement of the Mexica *tlatoani*, designated "our beast, our enemy" (*totequacauh, toyaouh*), who was also said to speak "in a foreign language." From there "the fact that the Mexica *tlatoani* adopted the identity of the god of his principal enemies to ritually generate Huitzilopochtli-Yaotl" takes on greater meaning ([2]: 652–653).

<sup>5</sup> According to Dehouve, this proposal is fully confirmed by texts in Nahuatl, from which it can be inferred that "drilling with eyes, opening up ears" meant "to educate" ([29]: 78).

#### **Figure 4.**

*Host figure of Teotihuacán Classic period (250–650 d.c) Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Mexico.*

foreign element whose essence was incorporated into inner powers. Thus, the figures housed in the interior of the bodies are of a nature distinct from that of their hosts, and in some cases, as the first figure displays, they come from faraway regions ethnically differentiated from Teotihuacan culture.<sup>6</sup> The precedence of interior figures, as well as their variable and heterogeneous character, indicate that Mesoamerican dualism conceived alterity as a constituent part of personhood, generally divided into a recognizable physiognomy and an interiority alien to its condition.

The notion of internal alterity, which in the West appears around the late nineteenth century in the form of an unconscious enemy, designates the configuration of a subject divided into a known exterior and an unknown interior.<sup>7</sup> However, whereas according to Freudian theory, the unconscious is *the other of oneself* [32], whose

<sup>6</sup> In a typically Teotihuacan style, the motifs that decorate **Figure 4**, with seated figures at both ends and seen in profile, are instead of Maya origin and thus are different from the outer body that housing them. <sup>7</sup> As is known, the critique of the subject was one of the essential reflections in the work of Freud, who considered the principal enemy of the subject was the subject himself. With the idea of the unconsciousenemy, as Laplantine [31] notes, "psychoanalysis introduces the contradiction and the negativity of this notion, that cannot have anything to do with identity matters," because the subject ceases to be owner of himself.

*Cosmogonies of Alterity: Origin and Identity in Mesoamerican Narrative DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104496*

#### **Figure 5.**

*Host figure of Teotihuacan style Classic period (250–600 d.c) Museo Regional de Antropología Palacio Cantón Mérida.*

primordial function consists of betraying the intentions of consciousness, Indigenous souls are presented as instruments of collaboration that always lend weight to the individual, whether as devices of protection or as a means of dialogue with the outside. In comparison to the unconscious, an inexhaustible source of unease and an obstacle to perception, the internal components of the person tend to be instruments of a vision that aspires to be in different places and to perceive the "cosmos" from variable perspectives. Therefore, the Indigenous version of alterity proposes traveling a path parallel to that of psychoanalytic theory; instead of reducing the interior sphere, diminishing its effects on the exterior, the receptor spaces incorporate foreign segments and proceed to multiply their quantity and their source to see things from the viewpoint of their enemies. The "discourse of the Other" is not, in this case, the interpretation that subverts the speaker's narrative, but rather the necessary condition of dialogue with the underworld, whose inhabitants produce a discourse that is, by nature, distinct. If shamanism and psychoanalysis share a commonality, as Claude Lévi-Strauss [33–36] proposed, that field must be sought beyond the formal operations of myths to decipher, among other things, their inevitable ontology.
