Sun and Earth Rulers Belize

Sun and Earth Rulers: What the Eyes Cannot See in Mesoamerica Author(s): Kay A.
Read Source: History of Religions, Vol. 34, No. 4, Representations of Rulers (May, 1995), pp. 351384 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1062953 . Accessed: 09/06/2013 16:11
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Kay A. Read
SUN AND EARTH RULERS: WHAT THE EYES CANNOT SEE IN MESOAMERICA
The power of human-made objects to manifest intense or "true"meaning has long been recognized by historians of religions,1 but only a few have explored the aesthetic natures of such objects or their ability to manifest beauty.2 Such a task is particularly complex from a comparative standpoint, for Western aesthetics alone has defined beauty in any number of ways. Kantians, for example, view beauty as transcendent, eternal, intrinsically nonpurposeful, and not concerned with the pragmatic. Some even carry this vision into a formalistic argument, suggesting that imagery itself constitutes the entire value and meaning of
I am in debt to Laura Grillo and Anna Peterson for their timely, careful, and critical readings of this article when it was in a far-from-acceptable state. Jason Gonzalez helped clarify a few technical confusions over Cuello. As always, Ian Evison offered his interest and thoughtful advice. And I thank Bruce Lincoln and the participantsin the Comparative Religion section at the American Academy of Religion's 1994 annual meeting entitled "Images of Rulership, Icons of Change: Comparative Studies in Aesthetics, Politics and Religious History."Their comments proved helpful for revising this effort and stimulating for futuredirections. If this work still has unacceptable elements, it is not any of these people's fault. A DePaul University research grant allowed me the necessary fieldwork, and a paid leave of absence gave me the time to do it. 1 See, e.g., Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Nonrational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Individual, (1923; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); or Mircea Eliade, "The Sacred and the Modern Artist," in Art, Creativity, and the Sacred, ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (New York: Crossroads, 1985), pp. 179-83. 2 See, e.g., Gerardusvan der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art, trans. David Green (New York: Rinehart & Winston, 1963); originally published as Wegen en Grenzen (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1948).
? 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0018-2710/95/3404-0003$01.00
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Sun and Earth Rulers
artwork;the forms themselves transcend the changing nature of human existence.3 Others see beautiful objects as the means for expressing the universal4 and/or as a route to pleasure,5 while still others describe aesthetic works as catharticin an Aristotelian mode or as intuitional and the source of authentic expression.6 However, few besides John Dewey have described beauty as firmly founded in experiences of the everyday, essentially changing, and inherently practical.7 Yet the visual statementsaboutrulershipat three archaeological sites in Mesoamerica seem to suggest some aesthetic ideas very similar to what Dewey proposed and, in addition, some new ideas that Western aestheticians appearto have missed altogether.Works from these three sites consist of both ordinary found objects and carefully designed and constructed ones. These objects are both visible to people living under the light of the sun and invisibly hidden underthe earth'ssurface. And in each case, the objects are carefully and progressively manipulatedthroughtime to align them with concrete, sometimes ferocious, powers in orderto shape the nature of rulership and, in turn, allow rulers to shape the changing forms of humanand cosmic existence. Moreover, such manipulativeacts had inherentlypragmaticfunctions. Although these archaeological examples of Mesoamerican royal aesthetics call into question a number of the many definitions of beauty proposed by Western philosophers, anything more than a brief consideration of such challenges is beyond the limited scope of this article.8My primary concern here is the particularaesthetic statements of rulership at the pre-Conquest sites of Cuello, an early pre-Classic Mayan site in
northern Belize (ca. 400 B.C.E.-250 C.E.); Palenque, a Classic Mayan site
in Chiapas (seventh to eighth centuries); and the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan, a late post-Classic Mexica (Aztec) site in the Valley of Mexico (fourteenth to sixteenth centuries).
3 See, e.g., Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1914); or Suzanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from "Philosophy in a New Key" (New York: Scribner, 1953). 4 See, e.g., Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 5 See, e.g., George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory, ed. William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (1896; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988). 6 See, e.g., Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, trans. Douglas Ainslie (1901; reprint, London: Macmillan, 1922). 7 John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; reprint, New York: Putnam's, 1980). 8 I am using a fairly standard definition of aesthetics as "of or pertaining to beauty." However, these Mesoamerican materials, my own former life as a fiberist and illustrator, and an initial encounter with the philosophy of Western aesthetics have led me to a less standardand, at this point, tentative definition of beauty as involving the creation of appropriate,transformative,sensual order.This is only a working definition, however, for the complex philosophic issues behind comparative aesthetics need to be explored further.
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After I consider some issues involving visual interpretation,the aesthetic evidence at each site will be the first focus: how that evidence involves both the visible and invisible, what its visually formal elements appearto be, the natureof its iconographic messages, and what the logic of its iconic themes might indicate. Then, I will explore how those visible and invisible aesthetic messages describe and even shape rulership at each site in ways unique to their particularcommunities yet shared by a larger Mesoamerican tradition.Finally, but very briefly, I will use these three differing, though similar, aesthetics of rulership, these visible and invisible material declarations about power, to suggest how these nonWestern examples can call a few Western notions about beauty into question.
THE VISIBLEAND THE INVISIBLE
Imagine a broad plaza lit by bright sunlight. A small, stepped pyramid with a thatched building atop its summit rises on its western side;9 its northern,eastern, and southern sides are borderedby more thatch-roofed houses. A flat, oval, undecoratedstone rests near this plaza's center. This is the central ritual area of Cuello, a prehistoric Mayan town located in what is now northern Belize. But this is not all there is in this bright patio, for beneath the things visible to one's physical eye lies much more that one must imagine with the mind's eye, things made invisible to the sunlit world above. There in the dark earth lie layers upon layers of buried bodies and bones, pots, shells, and beads,10 like invisible ghosts or shadowy memories hiding just under the plaza's floor (fig. 1). Imagine again, please, another plaza, this time hugging the sides of mountain ridges covered with dense tropical forests. On its northeastern side a brightly colored, many-stairedtemple rises; it is topped by a stone building covered with intricately carved friezes and capped by a tall roof comb. On its southeasternand northwesternsides are two shortertemples, each facing the other across the patio. Down the slope a bit and across a small stream, another magnificent temple rises, hugging the opposite ridge. Its wide, steep, frontal staircase faces slightly east of north. These temples are built in Palenque, the center dominatingthe southwesternregion of the classic Maya in what is now Chiapas, Mexico (fig. 2).11
9 Although it is possible that the pyramid had a flat roof rather than a thatched one, the thatched roof was far more common at this time and seems more likely. 10 Norman Hammond, Cuello: An Early Maya Communityin Belize (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1991). 11 Merle Greene Robertson, The Sculpture of Palenque, vols. 1 and 4 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983-1991); and Sylvanus G. Morley, George W. Brainerd, and Robert J. Sharer, The Ancient Maya, 4th ed. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983), p. 116.
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as burial m #2 , phase XI phase Vll
Cuello: AnMaya Early Press, 1991].)
Communityin Belize [Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity
Again, this is not all that is there. Deep inside this last temple, an incredibly carved sarcophagus lies darkly hidden, containing the remains of a man'sbody, richly adorned.In a box at his feet lie buried the jumbled bones of several more bodies.12 As before, all of this remains completely invisible to eyes belonging to the sunlit world above (fig. 3A).
12 Linda Schele and David Freidel, A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya (New York: Morrow, 1990), pp. 23-33, 469, n. 18.
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\,
The Temple of The Temple of the Cross The Palace
FIG.2.-Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico (seventh to eighth centuries), as seen from the steps of the Temple of the Foliate Cross. (Drawn from the author'sphotos.)
One last time, imagine a different ritual complex, a huge space enclosed by a wall and situated in the center of a giant city. From its eastern side rises an enormous, double-sided pyramid with two staircases leading up its face toward two painted temples perched above. In front of the great pyramid'snortherntemple rests a stone figure reclining on its back and holding a small bowl. A large, round, precisely carved stone lies flat at the base of the southern staircase. This is the Templo Mayor, located in the heart of Tenochtitlan, a bustling urban center of approximately 150,000-200,000, the heart and core of the post-Classic Mexica domain (figs. 4, 5).13 Yet again, this is not all. One must imagine what lies beneath, hidden from the sun. This pyramid covers many other pyramids, each one smaller, each one receding furtherback into the earth. Within the many layers of this great edifice are buried boxes and urns filled with hundreds upon hundreds of items: animal and human bones; shells and treasures
13 Elizabeth Hill Boone, ed., The Aztec TemploMayor (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1987); and Johanna Broda, David Carrasco, and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, The Great Templeof Tenochtitlan: Center and Periphery in the Aztec World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).
356
of LordPacal's lid. B, A stuccoportrait FIG. 3.-A, LordPacal's sarcophagus son, Lord Chan Bahlum (Palenque,Chiapas, seventh to eighth centuries). fromphotosin LindaScheleandMaryEllenMiller,TheBloodof Kings: (Drawn
Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art [New York: George Braziller in association with
the KimballArt Museum,FortWorth, Texas, 1986],p. 294, pl. 111;p. 64, fig.
I.la.)
from sea, lake, and stream; masks, incense burners, and other objects made of fine pottery,jade, and obsidian-all buried, all hidden from the light of day and people's physical eyes, with little hint of their existence, all perceivable only with the mind.14 That which is seen by the light of day or hidden by darknights of earth is the leitmotif of this study, for both the visible things of earth'ssurface and the invisible things of the underworldhelped form the shape of aesthetics at these three sites. This means that what the eyes cannot see is
14 Leonardo L6pez Lujan, Las ofrendas del Templo Mayor de Tenochtitlan (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, 1993).
357
in the Valleyof Mexico.B, of Tenochtitlan FIG. 4.-A, An artist's conception The TemploMayorwith the equinoctialsun. (Drawnfromthe author's photos andthe Museumof the TemploMayor, takenin the Museumof Anthropology MexicoCity.) absolutely necessary to an understandingof Mesoamerican concepts of beauty, to the various modes deemed appropriate for visual order. At each site, moreover, a particular sense of beauty incorporating the visible and invisible helped both to convey an ideal of and hint at the reality of rulershipand power; one can indeed speak of "aesthetics of rulership" at Cuello, Palenque, and Tenochtitlan.
SITES THREEVISIBLEAND INVISIBLE
Each one of these sites is distinctive, yet each is also part of the greater Mesoamericanhistorical continuum.But how one traces change, how one identifies the uniqueness of each site and its connections to the disconnections from a shared tradition, is not simple or straightforward.The MesoamericanarthistorianGeorge Kubleronce struggled with one of the really kinky issues that can muddle one's efforts at and interpretationof visual texts: an image can remain the same throughtime, but its meaning may change.15 This is especially importantto remember when working in pre-Conquest Mesoamerica, for often one's primary source materials consist only of images: images of buildings, sculptures, friezes, murals, burials, and occasionally even images of words. These are what Hiram
15 George Kubler, "Renascence and Disjunction in the Art of Mesoamerican Antiquity" in Ornament VIA(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania GraduateSchool of Fine Arts, 1977), 3:31-39.
358
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FIG.5.-A, The Coyolxauhqui stone at the base of the steps leading to the Huitzilopochtli side of the Templo Mayor. (Drawn from photos by Fernando Robles in Ruben Bonifaz Nunio, The Art in the Great Temple:Mexico-Tenochtitlan [Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, 1981], pp. 1731, figs. 1-6b.) B, The chacmool in front of the Tlaloc side of the Templo Mayor. (Drawn from a photo in Esther Pasztory,Aztec Art [New York: HarryN. Abrams, 1983], p. 181, pl. 29.) Woodward has called "mute texts," texts directly linked with neither written nor oral accounts explaining their meaning. If there exists no one to tell us, how can one know what these mean, much less how their meaning changes?16
16 Hiram W. Woodward, Jr.,"TheThai Chedi and the Problem of Stupa Interpretation," History of Religions 33, no. 1 (August 1993): 75.
359
But an overemphasis on the importance of verbal resources and the problemsof visual texts' changing meanings can createunnecessarycrises of interpretation-proverbial mountains out of molehills.17 Material remains,18after all, present at least an indirect reflection of human behavior,19for, just as people say things with the intention to convey particular messages, so too do people make things. There is a wealth of resources one can draw on to gain insight into those messages. Michael Baxandall has pointed out that not only may "bits of social practice or convention ... sharpenour perceptionof pictures"but also "the forms and styles of painting may sharpenour perception of the society."20This means that not only can resources that illuminate social practices help one interpret visual texts but also that analyses of a text's form and style can shed light on both its intentions and the social practices surrounding it.21 Even Kubler could agree with this.22 Ian Hodderonce remarkedthat"objects areonly mute when they are out of their'texts.'"23To transforma mute text into one that"speaks," one must use an enriched and expandedcontext. If one expands on Baxandall, then, a wide range of differentmaterials drawn from many resources, both ancient and modern, Mesoamerican and not, can serve as possible or even likely analogies for how humans behaved at these sites, what their social practices and conventions may have been, and what was distinctive and sharedin their aesthetics of rulership.Hoddernoted four such contextual relationshipsthat are helpful to consider: those between the moment and the long term, the individual and society, past and present contexts, and
17 Woodward,e.g., was very cautious with his interpretationof the Thai Chedi, carefully noting the lack of written documentation and resorting to the various names of the stuipa to furtherexplicate the building's significance. He concluded that its cosmological significance could not be supported, even though he liked that interpretation(ibid., pp. 71-91). While such caution is preferableto interpretationalflights of fancy, I wonder whether other nonverbaldocumentation, a visual treatmentof his verbal documentation,or a reasoned use of non-Thai analogies might not have been helpful in extending his interpretation.Moreover, his caution may not even be totally justified. Just because something is verbally presented does not ensure a transparencyof meaning, and much of what I suggest here for the interpretationof visual texts holds true for verbal texts. 18 "Materialremains"refers to all material culture, from household pottery and kitchen equipment to whole cities filled with buildings. Even books, the existence of which suggests the role of written words in a culture, constitute material remains. 19 Ian Hodder, "The Contextual Analysis of Symbolic Meanings,"in The Archaeology of Contextual Meanings, ed. Ian Hodder (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 2-3. 20 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 151. 21 Gregory Alles has used Michael Baxandall's dual approachto this problem of intention with success in his "Surface, Space, and Intention: The Parthenonand the Kandariya Mahadeva" History of Religions 28, no. 1 (August 1988): 3. 22 George Kubler, The Iconography of the Art of Teotihuacan, Studies in Archeology, no. 4 (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1967). 23 "Contextual Hodder, Analysis," p. 2.
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and interpretations.24 At the same time, it also is helpful to exinterpreter pand on the flip side of Baxandall's advice; the forms themselves also shape pictures of rulershipand should not be ignored. It is insufficient to interpretvisual texts as mere signifiers of human intentions and social practices.25An object'svisual forms can reflect humandesires and behavior while at the same time molding those desires and thatbehaviorinto new
shapes.26
All this is especially importantto remember if one also wants to note how meaning changes, how it becomes what Lindsay Jones has called an "event."27Jones suggests that a failure to understandthe complex relationships among the Mesoamerican sites of Chichen Itza, Tula (its apparent twin), and other contemporaneous urban centers resulted from interpreters'intense focus on identifying the " 'real'message" of a given piece of architecture. Noting Kubler's conundrum over change, Jones suggests that scholars should not preoccupy themselves with formal attributes as bearers of real meaning (something Kubler did to solve his own problem); they should concentrate instead on buildings as "ritualarchitecturalevents" in which humans "experience" the objects.28 Describing architectureas events is a wonderfully helpful stroke;however, it would be a mistake to equate formal attributeswith some frozen and unchanging "real meaning."Both formal attributesand their intrinsic meanings change throughtime; the visual attributesof objects as much as
While Hodder is a master of drawing connections between material text and context, he sometimes overemphasizes a narrowcontext with studies that are highly particularized and microscopic in range, thereby missing the depth a comparative study could bring. And although nothing in his method indicates that he ought not, he does not plumb the visually formal comparisons as much as he could, instead using things such as style as mere signifiers of human behavior, again in very narrowly constructed studies ("Contextual Analysis," and Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology [Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1991]). 26 The implication of this is, of course, that visual texts can become the tools rulers use to control and manipulate others in power struggles. While this is certainly an important and interesting issue, it is not the central issue of this article. 27 Lindsay Jones, "The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: A Reassessment of the Similitude between Tula, Hidalgo and Chichen Itza, Yucatan, PartI" History of Religions 32, no. 3 (February 1993): 213. 28 Lindsay Jones, "The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: A Reassessment of the Similitude between Tula, Hidalgo and Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Parts I, II," History of Religions 32, no. 3 (February 1993): 207-32; 32, no. 4 (May 1993): 315-42. Kubler tried to solve the problem of changing throughtime in a twofold manner.First, if time spans are not too long, one can assume a certain amount of continuity ("Renascence and Disjunction"). Otherwise, the best one can do is to "read"the visual as though it were a verbal text unto itself ("Renascence and Disjunction,"Iconography). But by focusing only on the formal aspects of a temporally distant text, Kubler sharply constricted the available resources to only the text's images and their immediate context and, therefore, severely restricted what the scholar was allowed to say about it. While this brings home the importance of a text's visual language, the approach also contributes to what I called above "crises of interpretation."
25
24 Ibid.
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what people do with them also constitute a record of experienced events. formal attributeswere alteredas GregoryAlles noted how the Parthenon's with it in interacted different ways; it gained, for example, a minpeople aret when it became a mosque.29This is not simply a case of static images versus dynamic human experiences (something Jones seems to imply) but a case of images continually shaping and being shaped by people's experienced interactions with an ever-changing, yet very real, material environment. All of the above authorsare at least partially right and, therefore, have something useful to offer. Both Kubler and Woodward are more or less right about the problems with mute texts.30 Kubler, however, misses the helpfulness of expanded contexts and comparative methods, while Woodwardmisses the usefulness of the visual natureof his visual texts. Hodderis right about the importanceof a text's "text,"although he misses the transformativeeffect of a text's visual forms. Jones is right about visual texts as events, although he, too, underplays the dynamic, transformative nature of their formal imagery. Finally, Baxandall is right about the need for using both social contexts to interpretvisual texts and visual texts to interpretsocial contexts, although his ideas of what constitutes an object'spotential context and, as with Hodderand Jones, the formative nature of its imagery need expanding. I will try to use these authors'positive suggestions as I explore the aesthetic messages reflected by the material remains at Cuello, Palenque, and Tenochtitlan. To do this, I will discuss, in order, each site on three often-interlocking levels: (a) the demarcationof an object, or the formal attributesof its visual elements, (b) its iconographic content, or the fixed meanings associated with the visual elements in its particular context, and (c) its iconological content, or the deeper logic of its forms and how that interacts with its larger physical, historical, and cultural contexts.31
Alles, p. 22. Kubler's particular voicing of the problem, as it appears here, emphasizes the changing nature of meaning contrasted to an unchanging nature of visual forms. This is an incomplete description of interpretationalproblems since imagery changes too, something I do not think Kubler would argue with. 31 Demarcationcan be compared with the early levels of linguistic translationswhen the formal attributesof the verbal text are being worked out (e.g., morphophonemiclevels). The iconographic and iconological levels, however, should not be comparedto either Saussurian (Hodder,"ContextualAnalysis,"pp. 2-3) or Peirceansign theory (Woodward[n. 16 above], pp. 72-75). I have never found either of these systems helpful, for both are based on an acceptance that some relationships of meaning are arbitrarywhile others are not. Elsewhere, I have suggested that all signs are metaphoric,just as are learning, understanding,and interpretation(Kay Read, "Binding Reeds and Burning Hearts: Mexica-Tenochca Concepts of Time and Sacrifice" [Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1991]). There are no humanconstructed significations that are governed by either totally arbitraryor completely indexical (causal) relationships. Even the form and signification of an apparently arbitrary word such as "dog" are shaped by a long culturalhistory and even photo-realistic paintings
30
29
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In so doing, I will drawon not only a wide range of contextual materials but also the visual forms themselves. There have been many systems developed to describe the formal elements used in visual thinking.32Visual traits such as composition (how the elements interrelate),repetition and variation, mass (weight and shape), line, dimensionality, and color are commonly resorted to both by artists and art historians in contemporary Western cultures to control and describe visual works; I, too, have found them helpful. Such formal elements must be noted by interpreters,for, just as verbal languages cannot exist without sound and syntax, visual languages cannot exist without shape, line, and composition.33 However, just as every spoken language has culturally narrowed its range to a limited and distinctive set of sounds,34 so too have visual languages narrowed their ranges. Color, for example, was used by preConquest Mesoamericans both on buildings and in manuscript painting, but it was used in a very limited way when compared with the enormous range of color subtleties developed by Western artists.35On the other hand, Mesoamericans seem to have developed two interrelated visual traits that contemporary Westerners have paid little or no attention to. For Mesoamericans, images carried concrete powers that
are shaped by a combination of visual determination and artistic choice. Nor should the iconological level be equated with Erwin Panofsky's use of that term. Not only was Panofsky too narrow in his interpretive approach and too focused on deciphering symbols (Alles, p. 2, n. 3), but his close association with Ernst Cassirer led him to posit a universal aesthetic, something I am trying to avoid (Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984]). 32 For a discussion of various visual properties see, e.g., Santayana [n. 5 above];
University of California Press, 1954); and Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958). For a more cognitively oriented approach, see George Lakoff, Women,Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 33 For two views on imagery as thought and language, see Arnheim, Visual Thinking (n. 4 above); and Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976). 34 Although babies begin life with an ability to mimic a huge range of sounds, they quickly limit this range to the sounds employed in the language they learn to speak. These sounds can be learned so well that many people, once past infancy, become unable to imitate the sounds of another language (Peter D. Eimas, "The Perception of Speech in Early Infancy," Scientific American 252, no. 1 [January 1985]: 46-52). Something similar is probably true of young children's visual training as well (Alexander Alland, Jr., Playing with Form: ChildrenDraw in Six Cultures [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983]). 35 Compare,e.g., the Munsell system of color cataloging, with its hundredsof hues, with the very limited range employed at Palenque (Robertson, Sculpture of Palenque [n. 11 above], fig. 93). Since color was not a very highly developed visual trait (they created only sparse permutations of just a few hues), and since much of it is faded or worn away from the Mesoamerican monuments and therefore difficult to judge, I will not discuss it here.
RudolfArnheim, Artand VisualPerception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye(Berkeley:
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helped determine their use and form, and (the leitmotif of this study) invisible forms played roles as important as visible ones.36
CUELLO
Cuello's plaza was built in a series of developmental stages, creating a center of power that helped define the community's rulership. During its first three phases, the plaza was a domestic patio, an open communal area surroundedby homes.37 Then, in phase IV, the body of a man between middle age and maturity was laid out in its center with a pot by his head and other small grave goods; evidence of domestic activity decreased. In phase V, a hiatus occurred, and domestic activity in the patio disappeared completely, although it continued in houses on the northern side. The frontage of all its previous buildings was ripped away and their superstructuresset on fire. This marked the beginning of a major building project in which the patio was enlarged into a raised plaza and a small pyramid constructed (fig. 1A). Through the years, the plaza and its pyramid were made taller and larger by encasing earlier layers in later ones. In the plaza's first layer, a mass burial was laid in its newly constructed base, which contained the bones of thirty-two individuals (fig. iB). In its center, two young males were seated; these were primary burials, in which the bodies had been buried only once. In their laps and by their feet lay body bundles of nine different men between youth and middle age. These bundles were secondary burials, in which the bodies had been buried at least once before and were already in some stage of decomposition. The bones were largely defleshed, and (since bone materials themselves can decompose quickly underthe right conditions) only fragments remained.38The rest of the bodies radiatedfrom the middle group. With the exception of one, all were males (also young to middle-aged),
The second trait, the visible and the invisible, has been used by other cultures, but not in the same way as the residents of Cuello, Palenque, and Tenochtitlanused it. Alles, while comparingthe Parthenonto the KandariyaMahadevi temple at Khajurajo,India, noted how the surface treatmentof Greek sculptures utilizes draperies to manifest the hidden human form beneath. In contrast, the figures at the Kandariya temple emphasize the bodies so strongly that nothing of what might be inside is revealed, as do the temples. The Parthenon's hidden interioris alreadymanifested on the surface, while the hidden space of the Kandariya is barely marked at all by its surface. The structuresat Cuello, Palenque, and Tenochtitlan are differentfrom the Parthenon,for little of the invisible, or hidden, inside is made visible, or manifest, on the outside. One has little hint of what lies beneath Cuello's plaza and almost no hint of what is buried inside the Templo Mayor. Palenque, like the Kandariyatemple, suggests what is beneath the Temple of Inscriptions, but, unlike the Hindu temple, allows one neither to enter nor see its guts; one can only imagine what was inside. 37 This information has been synthesized from Hammond (n. 10 above). 38 Secondary burials were common practice in the Americas, where it was often ritually important to deflesh the bones.
36
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and most were secondary burials.39Two carved bone tubes were placed with the two central bodies, each decorated with the pop design, the woven-reed mat motif that in later times was used widely as an iconographic insignia of rulership.40 In the layer from phase VII, a cache with three pots and several deer mandibleswas buried.In phase XI, a hole was cut into the floor of the platform above this cache, and another mass burial laid. This one contained fifteen fragmentedbodies. Again, two primaryburials of young males sat with body bundles in their laps and with other secondaryburials,all young and largely male, at their feet.41 Above this mass burial the undecorated stela wasplaced, markingthe center of the plaza and the frontof the small pyramid. There were also other caches in the platform,including a row of double, inverted pots running through it, north to south, which may have contained food. Many of the burials found in and around Cuello's platform had pots placed over people's heads, above their shoulders, or smashed on their bodies.43 Formally, the invisible objects buried in Cuello's plaza create a particular kind of dimensionality in which symmetry and balance are important compositional elements. Layering is a critical form of demarcation, the stacked, invisible guts of the plaza have been shaped by a vertical motion: the stela is on top of mass burial 2, which is on top of the deer mandible cache, which is over mass burial 1, which was placed above the first grave site (fig. 1). This verticality is combined with a horizontal element so that, except for the first grave, layers of roughly concentric burials give the whole design a three-dimensional effect. Although their centers do not overlap exactly, all the burials do. This indicates that, even though people could not see what was beneath the plaza's surface, they probably knew what was there, for they carefully coordinated their caches. This composition was made almost entirely with found objects. The pottery is often the same pottery made for everyday use. Humans bodies constitute the most dramatic manipulation of found objects, manipulation that probably involved ritual sacrifice, perhaps linked with war, since all individuals were largely healthy males from youth to middle age. If this was true, then they were killed, buried, defleshed, and finally reburied in their radial pattern in the platform. Ritual bloodletting was also practiced, for stingray spines and thin obsidian blades have come to light in a number of caches.
39 The lone female was a richly arrayed primary burial (Hammond, pp. 211-15). Ibid., pp. 183-84. The woven-reed mat design signified the ruler among the Maya, while a Mexican ruler was pictured sitting on a woven reed mat. 41 Of the fifteen burials,thirteenwere male; the other two were too fragmentedto identify. 42 Hammon, p. 50. 43 It is not clear whether the pots were smashed on purpose or crumbledduringthe burial.
40
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Two furtherformal attributesneed to be accounted for in this material. It is likely that bones, pots, and the other objects concentrated particular powers necessary to the life of the plaza. There are many analogies for this from both Meso- and North America, historically and ethnographically. The Mexica, for example, indicated the potency of an object by adding the prefix teo- to a word.44 Such a widespread phenomenon indicates an ancient tradition that may prove useful for interpretation,especially since the manipulation of visual elements appears intentional ratherthan random.The centering patternsof the burials suggest the centering of these powers and the necessity to take the invisible into account, for the powers shape the plaza's inner visual design, while the single, simple stela in the middle of the plaza hints at the invisible's presence. There are at least three iconological themes one might draw from this. First, destruction was perhaps instrumentalto creation. The old forms of the patio may have been burned and destroyed so that new forms could be created. Although only suggested by the evidence at Cuello, this theme was overtly central in the later Mayan and Mexican materials from Palenque and Tenochtitlan. Second, eating may also have been important as partof the destructive-creative process. The later Mexica equated sacrifice with eating; sacrificing something fed something else.45 Here at Cuello, ordinarypots used for food were buried with human sacrificial offerings, which suggests a metaphoric link between eating, death, and sacrifice. The deer mandibles and the pots over humanskulls (those parts that house the teeth) seem to reinforce this link; deer were hunted and killed as a major game animal, and teeth are the body parts that chew food cooked and contained in pots. One could ask whether the young men were hunted and killed like deer to serve as food for the plaza and its buildings, as the Mexica would have done.46 Third, the first burial of the elderly male suggests the importance of ancestry and kinship, for he appears as an importantindividual centrally
44 Kay Read, "Sacred Commoners: The Motion of Cosmic Powers in Mexica Rulership,"History of Religions 34, no. 1 (August 1994): 45-46. For the importance of powers manifested in concrete objects among the Mexica, see, e.g., Read, "Binding Reeds" (n. 31 above), pp. 272-76; Alfredo L6pez Austin, Los mitos del tlacuache: Caminos de la mitologia mesoamericana (Mexico City: Alianza Editorial M6xicana, 1990), pp. 177-79, and The Human Body and Ideology: Concepts of the Ancient Nahuas, trans. Thelma Ortiz de Montellano and Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 1:383; Jorge Klor de Alva, "Spiritual Warfarein Mexico: Christianity and the Aztecs" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1980), p. 66; Richard Townsend, State and Cosmos in the Art of Tenochtitlan (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Libraryand Collection, 1979), p. 28; Walter Krickeberg,Altmexickanische Kulturen (Berlin: Safari-Verlag, 1966), pp. 183-84; and Arild Hvidtfeldt, Teotl and Ixiptlatli: Some Central Conceptions in Ancient Mexican Religion (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1958), pp. 25-35. 45 Read, "Binding Reeds," pp. 248-58. 46 Ibid., pp. 249-52.
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placed in a domestic, family-based patio. Again, this is a widespread and important theme of later times; it was central at both Palenque and Tenochtitlan. Since both the base for the mass burials and the caches lie above this central male, forming the visual pivot for the earlier phases of the plaza, Cuello's ancient man could be serving as the founder of a new elite line. Did the heirs of this line assert their power to destroy, rebuild, and transformCuello after his death, drawing on the power of his remains, as was done at Palenque and Tenochtitlan? And did they continue feeding Cuello with the powers of sacrificial offerings gained in war, as was the practice at those later sites? Finally, all this suggests that rulership has its origin in the domestic sphere, an origin consistent with the marked ritual use of everyday found objects.47 While the formal attributesof the platform can be described and used to draw out some of the design's implications, the iconographic and iconological elements are more difficult to identify with any assurance. The pop-decorated bone tubes may representa fixed sign for rulership,but the bones, pots, and other offerings are less open to confident analysis. At Cuello, interpretation,like the bodies in its plaza, lies far in the shady past, and one's resource materials are greatly restrictedby long passages of time. It is probably appropriateeven to feel a bit frustratedwith the lack of strong evidence. Yet in spite of this frustration, Cuello does present some very suggestive materials when later sites such as Palenque and the Templo Mayor are taken into account, analogically providing the basis for intriguing conjectures.
PALENQUE
Palenque presents a very different vision. A wealth of visual materials, combined with iconographical and epigraphical texts, creates a much easier and richer situation.48 Fixed signs can be identified, and a logic of the icons built. What is only suggested at Cuello can be described with greater confidence at Palenque. One of its several loci held four temples-the Temple of Inscriptions and the three temples of the Cross Group-surrounded by a series of plazas and other buildings (fig. 2).49 One mounted the Temple of Inscriptions on a broad set of steep stairs.
47 In fact, domestic activities did not disappear, but continued, in houses on the northern side of the plaza. It also is noteworthy that the structure on top of the pyramid was probably quite similar to a thatch-roofed house. 48 Mayan panels and stelae contain a wealth of information that is both pictorial and glyphic. Some of the images come in the form of images that can be treated iconographically because their intentions are fixed, although they may not be related directly to speech. Other images have fixed meanings linked directly to speech patterns. This speechrelated or epigraphic material tells the tales of rulers and their families. Their genealogies, linked with calendrical dates, form a large partof the material, although political and ritual events of state are also mentioned. 49 Schele and Freidel (n. 12 above), pp. 216-61.
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A second, hidden set of stairs led down into the depths of the structure to the crypt of Lord Pacal, ruler of Palenque (615-683 C.E.). Intricately carved, this stone sarcophagus shows Pacal descending the tree that held up the western side of the cosmos (fig. 3A). He has just died and is entering the fleshless but toothy bone jaws of the underworldmonster. The Cross Group's three temples were built by Pacal's son and successor, Chan Bahlum (ruled 684-702 C.E.) (fig. 3B). This group coordinates Pacal's death and Chan Bahlum's accession and specific celestial motions. On the winter solstice, the sun rises behind the ridge in back of the Temple of the Foliated Cross, illuminating the Temple of the Sun. The Temple of the Sun contains epigraphic inscriptions and pictorial iconography associated with war, decapitation of captives, dynastic lineage rites, and an event in which the six-year-old Chan Bahlum was probably designated heir apparent.50On the solstice, the sun sets directly behind the west side of the Temple of Inscriptions, paralleling the hidden stairs leading to Pacal's tomb. As the sun dips behind the ridge in back of the temple, a beam of light passing to the right of a column in the Temple of the Cross spotlights a carved panel depicting God L, a major figure of the underworld. This panel pictures Pacal standing in the west and handing the scepter of rulership to his son, Chan Bahlum.51 One way to read this material is by recognizing its layers, or the way in which things are "stacked."52An intricate play between words and images is used to create messages of transformation.On the Temple of the Foliated Cross panel, Pacal stands on a ripe corn plant that rests on a conch shell, a sign of the underworld. The epigraphic text associated with this iconographic depiction suggests the deceased lord's passage into the realm of the dead. Like seeds of corn that must returnto the watery underworld, Pacal too must descend to that same realm to provide the seeds for future generations. Opposite him, Chan Bahlum stands atop a young corn plant that rests on a Cauac monster, another sign of the underworldand fertility. The epigraphic texts placed in the monster's eyes reads "the greening of corn seed."53Having been generated in the underworld, the new royal heir and the corn plant rise from the seed of the deceased.
John B. Carlson, "Astronomical Investigations and Site Orientation Influences at Palenque" in The Art, Iconography and Dynastic History of Palenque, Part III, ed. Merle Greene Robertson (Pebble Beach, Calif.: Pre-Columbia Art Research, Robert Louis Stevenson School, 1976), p. 111. 51 Ibid., pp. 108-11. 52 David A. Freidel, Maria Masucci, Susan Jaeger, and Robin A. Robertson, "The Bearer, the Burden and the Burnt: The Stacking Principle in the Iconography of the Late Preclassic Maya Lowlands," in Sixth Palenque Round Table, 1986, ed. Virginia M. Fields (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1991), pp. 175-83. 53 Ibid., pp. 176-77.
50
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Another way things are layered is by piling up and interlocking messages. Imagery is used to depict words that, together, create spoken phrases. Thomas Barthel has deciphered such messages interwoven with the imagery on the sides of Pacal's sarcophagus.54A series of male and female individuals, the members of Pacal's ancestral line, are depicted aroundthe four sides of his coffin.55Each wears a headdress shaped like a particularfruit tree. One reads this by identifying the visual-verbal puns depicted by the trees, whose individual names form rebuses; the people's bodies, hands, and fruit reveal a series of imaged words. Putting all these pictured words and rebuses together reveals a set of three related messages. First, the images by themselves present a picture of Pacal's ancestor. A second set of images gives a message of grief, while another intertwines with it to give a message about hope and transformation.The layering and stacking of images and words expresses the sadness felt over Pacal's descent into the mouth of the underworld and the hope for his generative transformationinto (literally) the family tree.56 The formal elements of the carvings and temples are sophisticated and complex.57 The buildings are nestled into the contours of the landscape (fig. 2) and skewed in often puzzling directions, although the directionality of the Cross Group and Temple of Inscriptions, at least, may be explained by known celestial patterns. And although the buildings are heavy, massive, and bulky and the compositions of the symmetrically designed panels of the Cross Group and Pacal's tomb display a strong, gridlike, cross-shaped tree in their centers (fig. 3A), none is rigid in feel, for there is much that is organic at this site. The panels' gridlike designs are almost completely dominated by lacy, linear patterns interweaving to form fluid shapes. Like the bulky mass of the temples softened by their intricate surfaces, the panels present an image of controlled, orderly, and interlocking organic harmony.Pacal and Chan Bahlum also are depicted in organic, lifelike, even individualistic terms; one even can speak of portraiturein this context (fig. 3B).58 And the buildings themselves conform to the terrestrialterrain of the mountains and celestial topography governed by the solstices. A repetition of visual shapes creates a patterned formalism, but the careful and often subtle variations on those
54 Thomas Barthel, "Mourningand Consolation: Themes of the Palenque Sarcophagus," Third Palenque Round Table, 1978, pt. 2, ed. Merle Greene Robertson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), pp. 81-90. 55 Schele and Freidel, p. 220. 56 Barthel suggests that the reading could be either "tree" or "rainbow"(p. 87). Given the tree's link to the ancestors' heads, the former translation seems more likely. 57 I use the term "sophisticated" here to describe the complexity and subtlety of these carvings and monuments. 58 One has the sense that one could identify these people by their portraits, especially with stucco sculptures and objects such as a jade mask buried with Pacal.
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forms creates complex layers of meaning. One sees this, for example, in the variations on the theme of corn beneath father's and son's feet and the variations on fruit trees around the sarcophagus sides, which integrate verbal messages into the visual composition. Many of the same formal devices and themes appearingat Cuello appear at Palenque, but in very different ways. Cuello's simple, concentric focus point is replacedat Palenqueby a cross arrangement whose potential hardness is softened and overcome by the organic flow of its intricately patternedsurfaces. As at Cuello, the invisible gives an added dimensionality to the entire composition. But at Cuello, the invisible beneath the earth was left largely invisible; here its visibility is directly referredto on earth'ssurface through pictorially repeated messages that say: Pacal has descended to the underworld,and Chan Bahlum has risen. A shaping similar to the layering of hidden powers at Cuello can be found on the panels at Palenque as well as in Pacal's tomb and its coordination with the celestial motions and terrestrialtopography.At Cuello, one reads the powers from bottom to top: the founder gives power to this spot that then is successively nourished through sacrifice. These sacrificial meals are marked only by a plain stela that helps center the plaza's concentrically composed sacrificial layers, even though they cannot be seen. However, one reads the powers embodied in the Temple of the Inscriptions from top to bottom: as the manifest power of the sun, Pacal descends along the trunkof the western tree into the jaws of the underworld. Recall too that, in an extraordinarilysophisticated manner, layering and stacking is also used as a syntactic principle by which the carved panels may be read, thereby making visible the sound messages that otherwise would be invisible. As at Cuello, themes of everyday processes of destructive eating and creative nourishmentare played out, yet in a far more developed manner. Each year, the sun ruler is destructively chewed by the underworld's jaws only to creatively generate in a new ruler, just as the nourishing corn is eaten by people to generate their daily lives. At Cuello, found objects such as everyday cooking pots, the jaws of deer, and the defleshed bones and skulls of humans were linked metaphorically to suggest that sacrifice was like eating. At Palenque, a similar theme is suggested, but this time with magnificently crafted murals. As with the sarcaphagus lid that depicts Pacal's death by eating, the wall panels reify the simple, everyday imagery of corn into an object of royal power. The ruler is simultaneously the corn and sun that nourish the world. While alive, he nourishes through his powers to sacrifice; when he dies, along with the sacrificial offerings at his feet, he is eaten by the fleshless jaws of earth. In life, he is visible like the sun; in death, he is invisible like seeds in the underworld.A message is suggested here: the underworldcreatively
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nourishes live things by destructively eating dead things. Perhapsthis is why, at Cuello, bones were defleshed in preliminaryburials before being buried a second time; they needed to be eaten first by the earth before they could effectively nourish the plaza. A major difference exists between the material evidence available to describe kinship at Cuello and Palenque. At Palenque, a genealogical line is fully developed; individuals are named, pictured, and held in memory. The cosmos flows through these ancestors who, the epigraphic texts tell us, can trace their heritage back to mythological parentage,cycles and cycles of time removed from the present.59At Cuello, its invisible founding ancestor gave birth to its ritual core with his death; little more than that can be suggested. However, at Palenque a whole line of specific ancestral powers is visually celebrated, with each person successively feeding life to the world with his or her death.
TENOCHTITLAN
Like the carved panels at Palenque, Tenochtitlan in the Mexican highlands also employs a gridlike pattern, but here it has become the central organizing principle for the whole city, with little to soften its features (fig. 4).60 The blocky structure of the great pyramid at its center, the Templo Mayor (or Great Temple), was so massive that it would have towered over the National Cathedralsitting just west of it in present-day Mexico City. The figure sitting in front of the temple atop its northern side (fig. 5B) lacks the organic grace and realism of the portraitsof Chan Bahlum (fig. 3B). Likewise, although skillfully and precisely carved, the panel at the base of the temple's southern side (fig. 5A) has a blocky feel when compared with the intricate lace of the Palenque panels (fig. 3A). What can be made of these obvious formal differences? Tenochtitlan'scentral ritual compound sat in the middle of the island on which the city was built, and the Templo Mayor sat in the center of the far eastern side of this district. The city was divided into four quarters. In the middle of each stood a small temple housing the patron god, the ancestral progenitor of the sector's inhabitants.All people in each sector were seen as genealogically related and could trace their heritage back to their patrongod, the deity that gave life, power, and direction to their existence. The southern side of the Great Temple housed the patron god to
59 George Kubler, "Mythological Ancestries in Classic Maya Inscriptions," Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, vol. 2, ed. Merle Greene Robertson (Pebble Beach, Calif.: Pre-Columbian Art Research, Robert Louis Stevenson School, 1974), pp. 23-43. 60 A similar contrast exists between the urbancenters of the Mexican highlands and the Mayan area throughouthistory. From its earliest days, e.g., a grid patterndominated Teotihuacan of the Mexican highlands, a city that preceded Tenochtitlan by a millennium. In contrast, a fluid, organic patterndominated Mayan cities, even during the period of Teotihuacan influence in the Mayan area.
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whom all Mexica were ultimately related, Huitzilopochtli. When warrior sacrifices were made in front of this temple, the bodies were decapitated, dismembered, and flung down the steps toward the large, round panel at its base. This panel depicted a similar conquest and sacrifice, that of Coyolxauhqui (fig. 5A), the sister of Huitzilopochtli.61 The northern side housed the god of rain and agriculturalfertility, Tlaloc (fig. 5B). Sacrificial hearts were placed in the bowl held ready in hands belonging to the figure resting in front of it. If rain were to come, the rain gods who released it from the mountains where it was held had to be fed, for everything was alive in this cosmos.62 The temple was rebuilt eleven times in a little over one hundredyears, each time by a ruler who had just gained power upon the death of the previous ruler. If a ruler was effective in war and governance, as was Ahuitzotl, a completely new structurewas built; if not, as with the failed Tizoc, a mere face-lift was performed.63It was at the dedication of his particularrebuilding that Ahuitzotl was said to have sacrificed astronomically huge numbers of captive warriors.64By sacrificing quantities of men captured in war, he nourished the concrete transformationof the temple; by changing the shape of the temple, he changed the shape of his power. Each rehabilitation project buried the previous one, creating a nesting composition in which the earliest building rested at both the center and bottom of the pyramid.When rebuildingoccurred,the stuff of the old pyramid was tossed into the construction as filler between the layers to be incorporatedinto the guts of this human-mademountain. Over one hundred caches have been unearthed in the foundations of this temple,65 each employing the powers of quite specific deities for particularpurposes, including dedications of the temple constructions, periods of first use, times of economic and political crises, rituals of social promotion, and funerals of elite individuals. Material remains of both the Pacific and Gulf, the entire Mexica domain, and ancient ancestors such as the Olmec were arrangedin the dark earth of this structure. Many skeletal remains have come to light; some are human, but most belong to a huge variety of animals, birds, and fish. Several funereal caches are located in the southern half of the temple in the vicinity of the house belonging to Huitzilopochtli. Urns of fine
61 Fray Bernardinode Sahagun, The Florentine Codex: A General History of the Things of New Spain, trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, Monographs of the School of American Research (Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research; Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1953-82), bk. 3, pt. 4, chap. 1, pp. 1-5. 62 Reeds" (n. 31 above), pp. 232-87. Read, 63 See "Binding Read, "Sacred Commoners"(n. 44 above), for a discussion of the lords Ahuitzotl and Tizoc. 64 Ibid., p. 41. 65 See L6pez Lujan (n. 14 above) for an excellent description of these caches.
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orange ceramics and of carved stone were buried in unmarkedholes dug into the temple floor while it was actively in use. Each urn contains the ashes and partially burnedremains of human bones;66 some also contain bloodletting instruments and other offerings such as bells and tubular objects carved in spirals. These contents were placed in the urns all at once.67 The centrality of some urns, placed in proximity to where the image of Huitzilopochtli would have been, suggests the extreme importance of their contents.68 According to Leonardo L6pez Lujan, the remains stored in the jars most central probably belonged to very high-born individuals. Mexica concepts of bodily powers help explain the function and powers of these urns. L6pez Austin describes the Mexica concept of the human body as filled with numerouspowers and forces.69 There were three main centers for animistic powers: the teyolia, which was located in the heart, the tonalli, which was located in the head but circulated with the blood, and the ihiyotl, which was located in the liver. At death, a person simply disintegrated. Each of the animistic centers of power transformedinto another kind of powerful entity, moving to a particularplace in the Mexica cosmos in order to serve some specific function.70 Drawing on L6pez Austin and basing his theory on a variety of early post-Conquestsources and currentethnographicmaterials,71 L6pez Lujan suggests that the spiral objects placed in the funerealurns were associated with the departureof the teyolia for Ilhuicatl (the land of the sky) and/or Mictlan (the land of death), two of the four lands to which these particular forces could go.72 It also can be suggested that the bits of bones and ashes saved in these urns served to attractthe bodily forces of tonalli after they
Unlike the people of Cuello or Palenque, the Mexica cremated their dead. Although the funereal caches were not layered, many of the caches were, which suggests that one could use stacking as a device for reading these. 68 L6pez Lujan, pp. 220-36, 348-52. 69 See L6pez Austin, HumanBody (n. 44 above), for a description of these bodily powers and forces. 70 For a description of these animistic centers and how they change, see ibid. For an expansion on the transformationalmotions in the Mexica cosmos, see Read, "Binding Reeds," and "Bones, Blood and Ancestors: Pre-Hispanic Origins to the Day of the Dead" (paper delivered at the symposium "Nahua Living Traditions of Central Mexico," Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, October 1993). 71 L6pez Lujan'scomplex discussion pieces together a coherent argumentconsistent with evidence drawn from a huge range of materials. He uses L6pez Austin's Human Body and such sources as Mixtec pictorial codices (a group contemporaneouswith the Mexica), Spanish chroniclers, post-Conquest pictorial codices, and ethnographic sources on the Maya. 72 L6pez Lujan, p. 236. There were four lands to which the teyolia could go at death. If death was caused by illness, the teyolia went to Mictlan, the land of death. If death was due to water-relatedcauses, the teyolia went to the land of the rain god (Tlalocan). The sky of the sun (Tonatiuh Ilhuicatl) was the destination for the teyolias belonging to men and women who fell in war and were sacrificed to the sun (there were instances of female warriors) and to women who died in childbirth (for they metaphorically fell in war). Finally, the land of the breast tree (Chichiualquauitl) was for the teyolias of babies who were still nursing. Apparently, a ruler's teyolia could divide and go to more than one place. 67
66
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had scatteredupon death, which turnedthese caches into powerful ancestral relics.73 The Templo Mayor's many invisible layers and its placement at the city's crossroadsin the primaryritualdistrict compose a centralized threedimensional shape. This highly focused composition creates an extreme centripetal force74 that goes well beyond the concentric force found at Cuello. Dark layer upon layer swallows the pyramid's central vertical axis, extending from the two most recent temples on its summit down into the earth through all the previous temples. In between these layers and in the foundations of the current and previous structureslie objects acquired from the oceans ringing the Mexica world, the lakes in its middle, ancestral civilizations now gone, and currentallies and conquests. This pyramid draws the whole cosmos into its heart. At the same time, there are two staircases leading to two temples on its top, one to the patronancestor, Huitzilopochtli, and one to the god of water, Tlaloc; the Templo Mayor's central pivot is a double one. This double axial force is increased even further by its solar orientations. The temple is centered on the eastern side of the ritual district, the side of the rising sun, for, as at Palenque, Mexica rulers were equated with that bright celestial object.75 Moreover, for an observer situated 142 meters away at the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, the rising of the equinoctial sun is framed by the notch between the two temples on its summit,76 the midpoint of solar motions (fig. 4B). The Templo Mayor's eastern heart marked the rising sun at the exact center of its journey.77 In contrast, at Palenque, the buildings were skewed in odd directions, and the Temple of Inscriptions and temples of the Cross Groupwere oriented to the winter solstice, the most southerly point of solar motions. The Mexica marked the sun's midpoint, while the inhabitants of Palenque marked an off-centered moment, arranging their structures to conform organically to several solar points during that event. There is no softening of the Templo Mayor's harsh centripetal order, as there was at Palenque. Set on an island in the middle of the flat, watery basin, the mass and bulk of the pyramid come close to dominating the
73Read,"Binding Reeds"chap.2, p. 158. 74DavidCarrasco, and the Ironyof Empire: Quetzalcoatl and the Myths,Prophecies, Aztec Tradition (Chicago:Universityof Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 182-83; Broda, andMatosMoctezuma Carrasco, (n. 13 above). 75Read,"Sacred Commoners" (n. 44 above),pp. 54-55. 76 Anthony F AveniandSharon L. Gibbs,"Onthe Orientation of Precolumbian BuildAmerican Mexico," 41, no. 4 (October1976):510-16; andAnings in Central Antiquity of TexasPress,1977),p. 7. thonyAveni,NativeAmerican (Austin: Astronomy University 77In the horizon-line the sun'smotionswere astronomy employedby Mesoamericans, marked fromthe south by notingthe pointsat whichit rose on the horizonas it traveled on the wintersolsticeto the north on the summer solstice.Theequinoctial risingsmarked betweenthe southerly and northerly by the TemploMayoroccurat the exact midpoint solsticerisings.
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landscape; Palenque's temples, however, conformed to the mountains' contours. One has the feeling that the Templo Mayor worked to declare its presence; it centers a centered universe. At Palenque, the buildings were woven into a multipatterneduniverse. Pacal and the sun mark the boundaries of this cosmos, not its axis; no single center exists. Like Cuello's plaza, the Templo Mayor serves as a pivotal point of power, and, like the plaza and its temple, the Great Temple also was built in layers. But the Templo Mayor'sscale is tremendouslymagnified. Cuello's plaza placed the community at the center of its particulartime period, which was given dimension throughlayers of objects buriedin the earth. Hidden there were objects of everyday existence drawn from the community, giving the plaza life and power. The Templo Mayor centers the whole cosmos through vast spans of time. Buried in its guts are both ordinaryfound objects and items as richly worked as those at Palenque; simple clay pottery and beads and skeletal remains of game animals and those living in swamp and sea lie side by side with exquisitely worked objects of ceramic, stone, andjade. If Palenquereifiedthings of the everyday with royal associations. Tenochtitlan uses both ordinary and finely crafted objects to recreate the entire, multifaceted cosmos. The three themes firstidentified at Cuello can be found here as well but, as at Palenque, in their own distinctive forms. The sacrificial destruction of bodies and blood helps creatively feed the cosmos, as it did at the other two sites. At Tenochtitlan,however, the sacrificial blood is equated with the waterof the sea, mountains,and underworld;in Nahuatl,teoatl (potent water) referredto both the sea and blood. One cache contained forty-two skeletons of children between the ages of two and six buried in five distinct layers. In its top level lay eleven jars adornedwith the face of Tlaloc, the rain god and guardianof mountains whose jarlike interiorscontained water. This unusual burial (no other exists like it, and animal remains far outnumberhumanin these caches) was probablycreated during a time of extreme crisis-the droughtof 1454, when children were sacrificed at the end of the dry season to feed the rain gods so they would have strength to release rain.78With all these animal and human skeletal remains, the depths of the Templo Mayor form a picture of the underworldin all its rotting, decaying, gastronomic variety.
Annually, children were sacrificed at the end of the dry season to nourish the rain gods so they might be able to release rain when the time came. During this drought, however, it appears an elaboration was made on this ritual in response to the extreme environmental conditions. See L6pez Lujan, pp. 192-205, 356; Johanna Broda, "Ciclos agricolas en el culto: Un problema de la correlaci6n del calendario Mexica," in Proceedings of Fortyfourth International Congress of Americanists, Manchester, 1982, ed. Norman Hammond (n.p.; reprinted in Calendars in Mesoamerica and Peru: Native Computations of Time, ed. Anthony Aveni and Gordon Brotherston [Oxford: B.A.R., 1983], pp. 145-64); and Fray Diego Duran, Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar, trans. Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), pp. 154-71.
78
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Elsewhere, I have described the Mexica world as a world based on transformation.This world was one in which the sacrificial destruction of eating nourished new forms that in turn were eaten to make more.79 The Mexica Fifth Age, called 4-Movement (4-Ollin), was put in motion by a series of transformative sacrifices that culminated in the killing of all the gods, including one who, before dying, changed himself into corn, a maguey cactus, and finally a salamander-each a key food. This Fifth Age was also fed and kept in motion by the hearts of sacrificial offerings placed in a bowl held expectantly by Tlaloc's man (fig. 5B). The layering of the Templo Mayor's "body" suggests such a transformative eating process as well. When Ahuitzotl became ruler, he transformedthe shape of the temple, establishing his power by creating a new layer; the stuff of Tizoc's layer was buried, forming the fill on which Ahuitzotl's contribution was built.80 The last ruler'sreign then lay in the rotting underworld of Tenochtitlan'smountain, forming the bodily guts of the new ruler'shegemony. In order to create itself, each new royal layer "ate"the previous layer, incorporating it in the viscera of its body. This recalls how Pacal's body was eaten by the underworld in order to generate the seeds of Chan Bahlum. The implication is that, with time, so too will the underworld eat Ahuitzotl. The most distinctive elements can be seen in the area of kinship, however. At Cuello, a single individual engendered the powers of the site. At Palenque, a whole line of distinct individuals, uniquely pictured,focused the powers of the community and coordinated them with the cosmos. At Tenochtitlan, rulers such as Ahuitzotl also coordinate the community with the cosmos, but kinship lines are engendered by patron deities, not people. No god oversees the handing on of rulership to a particularindividual here, as does God L at Palenque, and even the patron god must share the top of the temple with a god on whom the health of the cosmos depends. The quartersof the city were partof an interlockingkinship system that built toward Huitzilopochtli at its summit. But this was an interwoven net whose center was occupied by not one, but two, deities, one of which led to people, the other to the world'sfoodstuffs. Humans were not the focus of the burials either, for, while much has been made of human sacrifice among the Mexica, animal remains far outnumberhuman remains in the bowels of Tenochtitlan'stemple mountain. People were only a few of the woven knots in this cosmic web of existence; countless animals and a host of other powerful beings formed the many other knots.
79 Read, "Sacred Commoners,"and "Binding Reeds," chaps. 2, 4. Chapter4 has an expansion on the Mexica cosmos and their phagocentric concepts of sacrifice. EduardoMatos Moctezuma has also noted some cosmological implications of the Templo Mayor in his "The GreatTemple of Tenochtitlan," Scientific American 251, no. 2 (August 1984): 80-88. 80 See Read, "Sacred Commoners,"for a description of Tizoc's death, Ahuitzotl's coronation, and the nature of Mexica rulership and powers.
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This element of human anonymity also applies to rulers such as Ahuitzotl and Tizoc. The particular individuals who rule Tenochtitlan and its vast domain are not often visually noted. Spanish sources, such as those written by the Dominican friar Diego Duran,81tell a long historical tale of the exploits of individual Mexica rulers, but rarely does the Templo Mayor picture them; scholars today can coordinate these rulers with the temple's building phases primarilybecause of post-Conquest documents such as Duran's.82If one looks at only the Templo Mayor, however, a somewhat different picture appears. Although the remains of the Mexica rulers are buried there, they have been cremated, reduced to nothing but ashes and "hidden"83in unmarkedholes; they are beyond all possible identification, having disintegrated completely upon death. When rulersdo appear,they are schematized ratherthan individualized as in the portraitsat Palenque. On a plaque commemoratingthe royal coronation of Ahuitzotl, the dominantimage is a date glyph.84Here the rulers letting their blood for the earthappearas a kind of secondary description, almost like an afterthought.In service to a temporallyorderedcosmos that overshadows them, they must offer their potent water (teoatl) on schedule. The Mexica elite are anonymously given in service to a greatercosmos, but Mayan royal personalities circumscribea harmoniouslyorganic universe. This may explain the disappearanceof the Mayan stela cult, which was used to keep a permanent and accurate historical record of Mayan genealogies and royal events. Once the Classic Mayan rulers died off, it was no longer necessary to keep track of them, for they had been replacedby a differentkind of rulership.Historicaltime among the Classic Maya may have been directly tied to particularrulers.85 Tenochtitlan is making a statement about rulership that is quite distinct from the ones made at Palenque and Cuello and may even offer a different picture to that found in post-Conquest texts. Whatever powers this massive and dominating pyramid centered, it did so as a pyramid in the middle of an extensive and interlocking universe and not because of
81 Fray Diego Duran, The Aztecs: The History of the Indies of New Spain, trans. Doris Heyden and Fernando Horcasitas (New York: Orion, 1964; original MS, Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espaia e islas de la tierra firme, 1580-81 [National Library,Madrid]), and Historia de las Indias de Neuva Espana e islas de la tierra firme, ed. Angel Maria Garibay K., 2 vols. (Mexico City: Editorial Porria, 1984; original MSS, Libro de los ritos y ceremonias en lasfiestas de los dioses y celebracidn de ellas, 1576-79, El calendario antiguo, 1579, and Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espana e islas de la tierrafirme, 1580-81 [National Library,Madrid]). 82 See Read, "Sacred Commoners,"for a contrast between Spanish written and Mexican visual sources on rulership. 83 Nahuatl texts speak of the "hiddenness"(tlatia) of deceased rulers (see, e.g., Sahagun [n. 61 above], bk. 6, pt. 7, chap. 10, p. 47). 84 Read, "Sacred Commoners" p. 42, fig. 1. 85 A version of the "long count" continues into colonial times, but its characterand use are altered.
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any individual ruler.86At Tenochtitlan,rulers worked to keep the double pivots of a cosmos much greater than they moving and transforming in appropriateways. At Palenque, individual rulers bounded and shaped an orderly universe, giving it life and form. At Cuello, rulers nourished and ordered a changing community.
THREE VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE RULERS
Elsewhere, I proposed that a Mexica ruler was (a) a sacred commoner who (b) tried to manipulatepower effectively (but only with limited abilities) in order (c) to effect change in such a way that the various cosmic powers would remainfed and the humancommunity would be generously provided for. These were (d) moral tasks because they were necessary to communal survival and were among the responsibilities of the ruler, which were circumscribed by the various and differing human and nonhuman groups with which he (e) interacted in his cosmic community.87
TENOCHTITLAN
This definitionis largely supportedby the visual elements of Tenochtitlan. (a) The ruler was a sacred commoner who was not consideredparticularly extraordinary when compared with the other remains at the Templo Mayor. Although his remains may be important because they carried particularpowers, as an individual person he was not. He was no more than one small, invisible element in a large, interwoven cosmic grid. And even though a rulerembodied sacred powers, many other things (many of them quite ordinary)also embodied powers. Simply having power did not elevate one above the ordinary,althoughit did differentiateone from those with other kinds of powers. (e) A ruler interactedin his cosmic community, which is concretely buriedin all its varied and cosmic splendorat the Unlike Templo Mayor, visually arrangedby Tenochtitlan's grid pattern.88 at Palenque, Mexica rulers were not individually reified, although as at Palenque, a Mexica ruler'sinteractionswere still important.Elite remains were centrally placed at the GreatTemple, and, even if their burials were anonymous, an occasional plaque or carving did depict what they did. A ruler's tasks were moral, for he (d) had moral responsibilities to benefit both cosmos and society, among which was the requirement to sacrificially nourish the cosmos and to feed the populace. The remains
86 The same kind of anonymity has been found in the recent excavations at Teotihuacan. Only sacrificial burials have been found in the Quetzalcoatl temple, the most likely place for royal burials; no elite graves have appeared (Saburo Sugiyama, "Burials Dedicated to the Old Temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan,"American Antiquity 54, no. 1 [1989]: 85-106). 87 Read, "Sacred Commoners" p. 67. 88 This cosmic community was partially described in Read, "Sacred Commoners."
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of the Templo Mayor can offer indirect evidence for this ethical nature of sacrificial actions when its material remains are informed by other sources. Whetherwe agree with its purpose or not, the cache of children's skeletons, for example, was created for moral reasons.89Drought meant that the cosmos was drying up; as were its human inhabitants, it was dying from a lack of potent water (teoatl). It would have been wrong not to try to change this situation. (c) The ruler's purpose was to effect change. The multiple invisible layers of the temple suggest that rulers did act in order to effect change and that change was concretely molded by the transformationof the temple itself. (b) The ruler tried to manipulatepower effectively (but with only limited abilities). The carefully placed and arranged caches suggest that Mexica rulers also attemptedto manipulatepower effectively-how successfully is unknown from archaeological materials alone. Elsewhere, I described the limits on a ruler's power and how the failure of a ruler "would plunge him into the wet darkness of the underworld to be digested there along with all the other wet things."90The layers of the Templo Mayor portray this: Ahuitzotl's temple swallowed that of the failed Tizoc. And in the end, of course, all rulers must die, disintegrate, and disperse, remembered only by a few unnamed ashes and bones whose invisible powers work from the Great Temple's depths. The aesthetics of rulership at the Templo Mayor promotes a message about a rather invisible ruler who wields power, but this ruler does not shape the whole cosmos, as did the rulers at Palenque. The message given by the material remains describes someone who must deal effectively with a complex cosmos filled with tremendousforces. At the same time, these images reveal a recognition that not all rulers succeed. Given that such a visual message extols the ruler in ways similar to that of advertising or paid political announcements, this picture is really quite amazing in its restraint. After all, the rulers themselves paid for the building of the temples. One might expect them to take credit for their accomplishments and use the building to promote their success. Yet, the Templo Mayor extols the cosmos, not its human representatives. The Mexica were the center of an extensive and complex domain. But that domain was not held securely; rivals sat at every doorstep ready to challenge Tenochtitlan'shegemony.91The realities facing Mexica rulers
89 See L6pez Lujan (n. 14 above), pp. 192-205, 356, for an extensive list of supporting evidence suggesting reasons for creating this cache. 90 Read, "Sacred Commoners."Carrasco has also noted well the limited and vulnerable nature of Mexica rulership in his Quetzalcoatl (n. 74 above). 91 Although a careful translation of Nahuatl mythic texts shows that the Mexica solar pivot was not "wobbling," David Carrasco nevertheless has noted accurately the precariousness of their situation ("Star Gatherers and Wobbling Suns: Astral Symbolism in the Aztec Tradition," History of Religions 26, no. 3 [February 1987]: 279-94).
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were difficult, perhapseven impossible to surmount.This visual message of a largely invisible rulership may bespeak a reality that is more actual than the unreal idealism advertising campaigns usually promote, for the Great Temple spoke of a greatly threatening, yet very real, cosmos, not of great rulers maintaining stability in spite of all problems.
PALENQUE
The aesthetics of rulership at Palenque are quite different. By using the same description of rulership developed from the Mexica materials, one might locate some of those differences. (a) The ruler was a commoner who at Palenque was linked clearly with the sacred, although his status as a commoner may appearless obvious because it is buried (so to speak) in a reified symbolism of ordinary, common things. As in the Mexica cosmos, the world is filled with multiple powers that people, and particularly a ruler, must manipulate, but at Palenque some things of everyday status, such as corn, have now been elevated to a central position. While the ruler enjoys a particularly high status, that status is founded on everyday things to which everyone has access. All produce corn, but the ruler'sproduction involves socially based powers that are markedly distinctive. In other words, the ruler may be sacred, but so are ordinary things. As at Tenochtitlan, the difference is not between the sacred and the profane (or secular), for these are equated; rather,the difference lies between those who are socially elevated and those who are not. (b) The ruler tried to manipulatepower effectively (but with only limited abilities). A Palenque ruler wields the powers of those ordinary things to manipulate the universe and, as the epigraphic evidence tells us, to manipulate society. Glyphic texts describing the genealogical histories of Palenque'srulers share the surfaces of the panels with their visual depictions. These historical tales list the wars rulers fought, the alliances they built, and the political deals they made. The histories also suggest the potentially limited natureof royal manipulations. For, as did Ahuitzotl, Pacal and Chan Bahlum participated in a complex political situation in which other elite forces constantly lay at bay, challenging their authority. (c) The ruler'spurpose was to effect change. Pacal and Chan Bahlum lived in a dynamic context in which it was necessary to effect change, not only the cosmic and seasonal changes of the universe but also social and political changes. For if one's authorityis challenged, the status quo can be maintained only by changing those who wish to change one's authority. The glyphs extolling the events of rulership and the rulers' ancestral links tell a tale of successful political maneuvering that would make many a congressman jealous. Pacal inherited the throne from his mother, Lady Zac-Kuk, who had ruled before him. This was a violation
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of normal patrilineal descent that allowed a new patriline to gain control when Pacal ascended to the throne. Chan Bahlum's advertising campaign describing his royal inheritance from Pacal was probably designed to overcome some very real opposition to this relatively new status quo.92 (d) The ruler'stasks had a moral nature implied by the scenes of agriculturalfertility on the panels of the Foliated Cross, although the exact natureof fertility'smoralcharacteris difficultto identify because of a lack of further evidence. Part of Chan Bahlum's advertising apparently included stressing the cosmic natureof these tasks. (e) He interactedin his cosmic community. As the human equivalent of solar powers, the ruler was the ordering principle of Palenque's cosmos, the object that rolled through the underworld and over the sky, defining the boundaries and shape of the world. Palenque was a regionally important community that incorporated a heterogeneous population. It may be for this reason that its aesthetics of rulership appears so self-centered. The site surroundeditself with the protective bows and bends of the mountain ridges. The rulers also surrounded this cosmos as its protective boundary, creating an organic harmony; as the sun traveled through the lower and upper worlds and above Palenque, so too did rulers travel. One wonders whether Palenque did not need this message to create a stability able both to transformthe forces threatening the status quo and to unify its heterogeneous population, much as the imagery at Chichen Itza worked to create a message extolling the virtues of its much-needed unity.93
CUELLO
At Cuello, some of the basic foundations for rulership can be seen developing. (a) The ruler was a sacred commoner for whom the ordinary is the stuff of power, governance, and life. The plaza grows from a domestic patio, a family setting. The pyramid is topped by a houselike temple, and people continue to live their daily lives around this plaza even after it has been built and fed with sacrificial offerings. Those offered are symbolically associated with daily acts of eating and hunting. The founding ancestor, like everything in this community, was a part of this domestic setting. He held a special position, yet, at his death, he was buried invisibly in the earth, and the objects that, over time, were layered above him had their origins in that domestic setting. As at Tenochtitlan, having special powers or positions did not necessarily elevate one entirely above the ordinary. The sacred is equated with the profane; it is the social positions that differ.
92 Schele and Freidel (n. 12 above), pp. 216-61.
93 See Jones (nn. 27, 28 above).
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(b) One tried to manipulate power effectively (but with only limited abilities). At Cuello, powers were manipulatedto center and secure the community,presumablyby a ruler, if one recalls the tubes decoratedwith the pop motif, a sign of rulership.Just how effective these manipulations were is difficult to say. (c) The Cuello leader probably tried to effect change by manipulatingpowers, for a transformationclearly was accomplished after the death of the old ancestor. (d) This leader's tasks were moral. However, the moral natureof rulershipagain is difficult to define, although, as at Palenque and Tenochtitlan,it may be hinted at with possible metaphoric links between sacrifice and eating, especially if one draws analogies with evidence from later periods. (e) The leader interacted with his cosmic community. The interactive nature of a cosmic community is even more difficult to define from the material alone. The mere attempt to manipulate the powers embedded in the invisible offerings suggests some such communal relationship,however. Cuello was a small community that tended to emulate the communities around it. Its rebuilding projects coincided with a sudden rise in population. A more defined rulership, such as one centered on a founding ancestor, may have been needed to produce societal order under rapidly changing conditions. This community offers some potential insights into the development of rulership in Mesoamerica. The two mass sacrificial burials, for example, raise some interesting questions about tensions between communities. It is likely that the offerings were gained largely in war, yet the practice of secondary burials suggests that they may have been gained over time, for the bodies must have lain somewhere else for awhile. What, then, was the nature of war in this community if it was spread out over an extended period? These questions are difficult to answer, however, given the paucity of material remains.94
VISIBLEAND INVISIBLE AESTHETICS
In this study of three prehistoric sites separated by wide gaps of space and time, material remains (whether meager or not) have served as indirect indicators of human behavior and religious orientations only because these things have been considered in the detailed terms of their own formal visual elements and particularcontexts. This task has been aided by drawing analogies from a wide range of materials stretching well beyond each site's immediate context. Comparisons drawn among
94 Other issues are raised, too. For example, the richly adornedsingle woman in the first mass burialraises questions aboutgenderroles. LaterMexica materialsspeak of the very particularrole played by female warriors.Further,at Palenque, not only were there two women rulers, but it was a woman who helped put Pacal in office. Could this woman of Cuello have been societally importantin some way? See Cecelia Klein, "The Shield Woman:Resolution of an Aztec Gender Paradox,"in Current Topics in Aztec Studies: Essays in Honor of Dr. H. B. Nicholson, ed. Alana Cordy-Collins and Douglas Sharon (San Diego, Calif.: San Diego Museum of Man, 1993), pp. 39-64; and Schele and Freidel, pp. 216-61.
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Cuello, Palenque, and Tenochtitlan have suggested some continuous themes of rulershipand both variations on those sharedthemes and some very distinctive differences in rulership as it appears in each. Mute texts can speak, and, moreover, they can tell a tale of change through time. One way these mute texts speak is through the sites' aesthetics of rulership. In each, visual elements embodying power and manipulating things both visible and invisible send particularmessages about the potencies of rulers and their abilities to transformthe world. The powers of invisible forms shaped a central visual focus for all three aesthetic statements about rulership, but in different ways. At Cuello, the visible stela marked the invisible creative force of its plaza center. At Palenque, the visible indicated the invisible solar rulershipmoving deep in the earth.At Tenochtitlan,the structuralforce of invisible inner pyramids shaped the visible pyramid.The invisible was clearly powerful. At the same time, the visible was hardly banal, for it both manifested the invisible on earth's surface and sacrificially fed it.95 This human-made manifestation of beauty's visibly invisible powers at Cuello, Palenque, and Tenochtitlan was a practical matter, one that sometimes idealized rulers for purposes of political maneuvering and, at other times, dealt (often in ratherbloody ways) with difficult situations threatening the fabric of existence. Because of their stress on the ordinary,the invisible, and embodied powers, these Mesoamerican materials offer three areas of new possibilities that help stretch and alter contemporary ideas about aesthetics. The work of John Dewey also helps alter these ideas, although in each case one must move beyond his suggestions into new territory. First, in ways reminiscent of Dewey's recognition that aesthetics lies in the everyday, beauty of Cuello, Palenque, and Tenochtitlan is immanent, ordinary, and manipulable. Unlike aesthetic objects in Dewey's analysis, however, these visual forms were immanent, ordinary, and manipulable because they embodied specific and particular powers, whether they were pots and bones in a community plaza or grandtemples housing sculpted objects. These powers made objects subject to manipulation; by changing the forms of pots, bones, and temples, rulers could change powers these forms embodied. Many of the invisible objects used in these sites were ordinary and everyday. Things such as household
95In Mesoamerica, the sunandearthwerejoinedin a symbiotic muchlike relationship siamesetwins(see Read,"Binding Reeds"[n. 31 above],chap.4, and"Bones,Bloodand Ancestors" [n. 70 above]).So too wereinvisibleobjectsandvisible objectsjoined.The invisiblepoweredthe visible in the sameway thatthe earth(whereobjectswereburied) nourished thesunlitearth's surface to light).Thevisibleeven(where objectswerebrought whichproduced morevisiblethings.Hence,neituallybecameinvisiblefoodfortheearth, therthe visible northe invisiblecan be seen as banal,for eachis absolutely to necessary the other's life.
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pots, the bones of game animals, and corn were the stuff of beauty. Even rulershiphad its roots literally buried both historically and ideologically in the domestic sphere. While the powers were manipulated by dominant, elite classes, they were still powers of the world that lay around everyone, although access to them differed with the class. Both rulers and farmers, for example, wrestled with the power of corn, rulers in order to shape both cosmos and society and farmers in order to shape their larder. Such powers were hardly the transcendent powers of some extraordinary,sacred realm necessarily removed from people's common lives, whether they be elites or peasants. At these sites the sacred and the profane were equated. Second, if beauty for the Mesoamericans was not transcendent and extraordinary,neither was it eternal. The things of beauty not only could change but were consciously altered to effect changes in people's lived realities. As Dewey suggested, aesthetic experiences were dynamic; transformationwas the name of the game from Cuello to Tenochtitlan. However, although Dewey noted that growth was not simply pleasurable (for it involved struggle, conflict, and pain),96change at these three sites was more than simply unpleasant: it was downright bloody. At Cuello, the multilayered, sacrificially shaped plaza was built on the body of an invisible, dead ancestor and the purposefully burnedremains of his domestic setting, thus visibly shaping a new community through the destruction of the old. At Palenque, Pacal went to the underworld with his feet resting on the sacrificial remains of several human bodies. At the Templo Mayor, Ahuitzotl sacrificially swallowed the vanquished Tizoc's temple into the invisible interior of his own. This means that beauty was not only changing and dynamic but also had some quite nasty, but thoroughly practical, purposes. Through controlled, phagocentric destruction, the three sites and their objects were designed to function in the whole world (human and otherwise), altering circumstances there as needed. Moreover, beauty was both a transformational tool of rulers and a barometer of their powers' efficacy, an efficacy that admitted the necessity of destruction for creation, perhaps even destruction of the rulers themselves. Third, if beauty was not indifferent to the practical world, this was so because, for the Mesoamericans formally, all objects carried power, and the invisible played as importanta role as the visible. Moreover, invisibility is concrete in nature.The objects are there; they simply cannot be seen by human eyes, either because they have been hidden or because, like sounds, they are not visually perceivable unless somehow embodied. This means that beauty also is embodied. Because a person is animated
96
Dewey (n. 7 above), p. 41.
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by various bodily centers whose powers take new forms and serve new functions at death, the remains of the deceased are aesthetically arranged in burials in particularways to manipulate and take advantage of those powers. As Dewey suggested, no strict division exists between the material and the spiritual, between bodies and their animating powers. In Mesoamerica, however, this takes on a sense of vital life that moves well beyond Dewey's imaginings. There, beauty is neither an invisible spiritual matternor simply the exhilaratingand creative experience of growth; rather,it is embodied visibly in a huge variety of changing materialspirits that make bloody existence itself possible.98 In the dark Mesoamerican nights of earth, invisible but powerful objects shaped visible objects occupying earth'ssunlit surface. Rulers lived on this surface but often plunged into the depths to create aesthetically the shape of things to come. From this plunge into royal aesthetics, perhaps contemporary scholars also can begin shaping new ways of thinking about the nature of beauty and its visible and invisible powers. DePaul University
97 Ibid., p. 27. 98 I would suggest that the Mesoamerican situation moves beyond Dewey on this matter in that spirit equals matter. It is not just that powers are embodied by matter but that they are matter ("Binding Reeds," chap. 2).

Sun and Earth Rulers Belize

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Sun and Earth Rulers: What the Eyes Cannot See in Mesoamerica Author(s): Kay A.

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