Mind and Body in Early China: Beyond

Orientalism and the Myth of Holism

Edward Slingerland
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i

Mind and Body in Early China

ii
iii

Mind and Body

in Early China
Beyond Orientalism and the Myth
of Holism
zz
EDWARD SLINGERLAND

1
iv

1
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ISBN 978–​0–​19–​084230–​7

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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

v

Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Notes on Translations xiii

Introduction 1

1. The Myth of Holism in Early China 22

Neo-​Orientalist Conceptions of Chinese Holism 24
Ideograph versus Logograph 31
Concrete versus Abstract 33
Immanent versus Transcendent 34
Cause versus Resonance 35
Reality versus Appearance 36
Essence versus Process 38
Strong Mind-​Body Holism 39
Lack of Psychological Interiority 45
No Conception of the Individual 47
No Conception of the Soul, Afterlife, or “Other World” 49
Internal Evidence against the General Myth of Holism 50
External Evidence against the General Myth of Holism 56
A Preview of the Case against Strong Mind-​Body Holism 61

PART I. Qualitative Approaches to Concepts of Mind and Body

2. Soul and Body: Traditional Archaeological and Textual Evidence for

Soul-​Body Dualism 65
Afterlife Beliefs in the Archaeological Record 66
vi

vi Contents

Textual Accounts of the Afterlife and Soul-​Body Dualism 75

Soul-​Body Dualism 75
The Otherworldly Nature of the Soul(s): “Spirit” (shen 神),
Hun 魂 and Po 魄 85
This World and The Next: The Sacred and the Transcendent
in Early China 93

3. Mind-​Body Dualism in the Textual Record 100

The Metaphysical Xin 心 100
Xin 心 versus the Body (xing 形, shen 身, ti 體) 101
Xin versus the Physical Organs 106
Xin and the Soul: Consciousness, Free Will,
and Personal Identity 111
Xin as Ruler of the Self 115
Xin as Immaterial Mover 117
Xin as Locus of Reflection, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility 121
Xin and Psychological Interiority 127
From Qualitative to Quantitative 138

PART II. Quantitative Approaches to Concepts of Mind and Body

4. Embracing the Digital Humanities: New Methods for Analyzing

Texts and Sharing Scholarly Knowledge 143
Basic Quantitative Methods: Keyword Lists and
Team-​Based Coding 145
Simple Surveys: Online Concordances
(We Have Them, Let’s Use Them) 146
More Elaborate Techniques: Team-​Based Qualitative Coding 150
New Ways of “Reading” Texts: Semi-​and Fully Automated
Textual Analysis 161
Collocation Analysis 164
Collocation Analysis, Step 1: Semantic Benchmarking 167
Collocation Analysis, Step 2: Applying the Benchmarks
to Xin versus Other Organs 175
Hierarchical Cluster Analysis 180
Topic Modeling 187
vi

Contents vii

New Modes of Scholarly Dissemination: Large-​Scale

Databases 192
Digital Humanities: Methodological and
Theoretical Reflections 206
Dumb Machines versus Smart People 207
The Tyranny of Categories, Questionnaires, and Click-​Boxes 211
Embracing the Digital Humanities 213
From Internal to External Evidence 215

PART III. Methodological Issues in the Interpretation of Textual Corpora

5. Hermeneutical Constraints: Minds in Our Bodies and

Our Feet on the Ground 219
Shared Folk Cognition as Hermeneutical Starting Point 220
Theory of Mind (ToM) 221
The Folk Are Not Cartesians: “Weak” Mind-​Body Dualism 231
Inner and Outer: The Container Self and the Role of
Metaphor 239
Theory of Mind and Religious Belief 248
Supernatural Agents 248
Afterlife and Soul Beliefs 253
Promiscuous Teleology 257
Religiosity and the Theory of Mind Spectrum 259
Embodied Cognition and the Comparative Project 262
A Naturalistic Hermeneutic 267

6. Hermeneutical Excesses: Interpretive Missteps and

the Essentialist Trap 270
Interpretive Missteps 271
The Slide from Difference to Différance 271
Caricature versus Caricature: Ancient Chinese Essence and
The Western Strawman 273
Theological Incorrectness 279
Mistaking Argument for Assumption 284
Fallacy of the Single Meaning and Persuasive Translation 288
Keeping Scholarship and Theology Separate 290
vi

viii Contents

Learning From, Without Essentializing 295

Individual versus Society 296
Mind versus Body 300
Reason versus Emotion, Knowing
How versus Knowing That 301
Comparative Thought and Psychic Unity 304

Conclusion: Naturalistic Hermeneutics and the End of Orientalism 308

Enough of Gavagai: We Are All Homo sapiens 309
Taking the Sciences Seriously: Regaining Our Status as a
Wissenschaft 313
Taking the Humanities Seriously: Becoming Full Partners in
Academic Debates 318
Beyond Neo-​Orientalism 322

References 327
Index 365
ix

Acknowledgments

I have been working on this book in one form or another for over a
decade. Other projects or commitments have often pulled me away, but have
also allowed me to return to the topic with new insights or methods. One
consequence of the long gestation of this work is a hazy memory of its de-
velopment and trajectory. I began speaking about this topic as far back as
2008. Although I made some effort to take notes along the way, writing these
acknowledgements in 2018 I am certain to omit or overlook contributions,
and for this I apologize in advance.
Over the years, I have benefited greatly from audience feedback at the
venues where I have presented aspects of this work, including Ca’Foscari
in Venice (2009), Collège de France (2010), Princeton University (2010),
University of Texas Austin (2011), Sun Yat-​Sen University, Guangzhou (2011),
Aarhus University (2012), University of Chicago (2017), the Central European
University in Budapest (2017), Sungkyunkwan University and Chonnam
National University in South Korea (2017), Arizona State University (2017),
the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion (2011), Association
for Asian Studies (2011 and 2013), American Philosophical Association
Annual Meeting (Pacific Division) (2010), International Association for the
Cognitive Science of Religion (2011), and Society for Personality and Social
Psychology (2011), the International Association for the History of Religion
20th Quinquennial World Congress (2010), the Conference on Theology
and Cognition, Religion and Theology Project (Oxford 2010), and the Jacob
Marschak Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Mathematics in the Behavioral
Sciences, University of California-​Los Angeles (2012).
In particular, I’d like to thank Paul Goldin, Anne Cheng, Attilio Andreini,
Michael Puett, Martin Kern, Ben Elman, Willard Peterson, Joseph Henrich,
Ara Norenzayan, ZHU Jing, Haun Saussy, Curie Virág, Hanoch Ben-​Yami,
Youngsun Back, Randolph Nesse, and Roger Ames for comments that have
x

x Acknowledgments

helped me hone or improve my arguments. Thanks also to Zev Handel for

advice on the history of dongxi 東西, Kuan-​Yun (Kevin) Huang for help with
rendering some lines from the All Things Flow into Physical Form (fanwu
liuxing 凡物流形) text, Kristin Laurin for steering me toward references on
individualism and socioeconomic status, and Bruce Rusk for advice on online
textual databases. Among my colleagues, my greatest thanks go to Maddalena
Poli, who provided detailed comments on the entire manuscript and too
many helpful suggestions to individually acknowledge. Intellectual laziness
or stubbornness prevented me from adopting all of her suggestions, and she
bears no responsibility for remaining errors or omissions. The manuscript
was also greatly improved in response to comments from anonymous readers
at Oxford University Press; one reader, in particular, provided extremely
helpful and detailed feedback and suggestions. Finally, although I entirely
disagree with his conclusion and many of his specific claims (as I make clear
in the pages below), Pan Dawei’s recent (2017) critique of my 2013 Journal
of the American Academy of Religion article, also in part a response to our
conversations in Guangzhou in 2011, forced me to re-​think and clarify several
aspects of my argument, for which I am grateful.
My literature review was greatly helped by RA assistance from my former
students Julia Vorontsova, Allen Chen and Robin Curtis. Robin Curtis also
provided RA support in the preparation of the on-​line indices and figures
and tables for this book, and Clayton Ashton, Jennifer Ritchie and Abraham
de Jesus served as the RA coders on our large-​scale qualitative text analysis
study. It is also important to acknowledge that the quantitative studies first
reported in Slingerland and Chudek 2011b and Slingerland et al. 2017 were
the result of collaboration with my colleagues Maciej Chudek, Ryan Nichols
and Kristoffer Nielbo, with crucial support from Carson Logan, and some-
thing far beyond my own capabilities. Ryan Nichols, in particular, kept these
projects moving forward. And thanks to Cynthia Read at OUP for her in-
terest in the book, Patterson Lamb for excellent copyediting, and Suganya
Elango and Hannah Campeanu for seeing it through production.
Large portions of Slingerland 2013a, Slingerland and Chudek 2011b, and
Slingerland et al. 2017 are reproduced in this work. The early research for
this project was supported by an individual Insights grants from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as the Canada
Research Chairs program. An individual grant from the John Templeton
Foundation funded the project reported in Slingerland and Chudek 2011b,
and a large Partnership Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada, on which I was the principal investigator,
xi

Acknowledgments xi

funded the large-​scale, automated textual analysis projects and also allowed
Ryan Nichols to spend a year at the University of British Columbia to help
with our projects.
Most of the write-​up of this book took place in a beautiful study at
the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS),
where I was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow from 2015 to 2016.
It was thoroughly enjoyable to return after years of Bay Area exile, and
I had months of stimulating and helpful conversations with other CASBS
fellows about this project, in particular Chengyang Li, Michael Lempert,
Anna Sun, Daniel Bell, Andrew Chignell, Jamie Jones and David Wong.
Thanks also to Natasha Iskander (a former Stanford undergrad classmate!)
for both friendship and helping me to realize that impenetrably convoluted
French prose is sometimes just impenetrably convoluted prose. Finally, in-
nate human promiscuous teleology (see ­chapter 5) makes it impossible for
me not to think it significant that Edward Saïd worked on Orientalism
while a Fellow (1975–​1976) at CASBS. I hope that my work can also help
to break down cultural essentialistic views of the Other and allow us to en-
gage more productively and accurately with the worldviews of temporally
or geographically distant cultures.
xi
xi

Note on Translations

Translations from Chinese texts cited are my own unless

otherwise noted, but they are keyed to the most commonly used English
translations in cases where the chapter number alone is not useful or stan-
dardized passage numberings are not established (e.g., the Xunzi, Zhuangzi,
Lüshi Chunqiu). I have not provided references for the Chinese original text
because, in my view, the ease of finding Chinese passages instantly through
the variety of available online corpora makes the practice common in my
graduate school days—​keying Chinese passages to the standard Harvard-​
Yanching print concordance—​obsolete.
xvi
1

Introduction

Imagine a written language in which one could express oneself di-

rectly in pictures, bypassing the dry medium of words—​even thought itself—​
to directly capture the essence of reality. Picture a culture free of the tension
between emotion and reason, individual and collectivity, where one is able to
dwell in prelapsarian harmony with the natural and social worlds—​indeed,
where the very distinction between nature and culture, animal and human,
self and other itself dissolves. Try thinking yourself into a mindset where
time, space, logic, categorization, and causality as we know them hold no
sway. Take a walk, if you dare, in an alternative “ethnoscape” or culturéalité, “a
scape-​like reality whose space is not objective, geographical, or mathematical
but is more like that of a chora that exists without the help of limits between
what is ‘real’ (here and for ‘us’) and unreal (real only for ‘the others’)” (Botz-​
Bornstein 2006: 167).
It is feverish imaginings such as these that frame the myth of Chinese
(or more generally “Eastern”) holism. “Holism” here refers to an absence of
dualisms or dichotomies, such as mind-​body, subject-​object, or emotion-​
reason, that are thought to uniquely characterize “Western” thought. As
I argue in the pages below, the Chinese holist myth can be classified as a
subspecies of the broader Orientalism so famously documented by Saïd
(1978). The heady cocktail of holism and linguistic-​cultural constructivism
that is still quite common in Asian studies has certainly taken older forms of
Orientalism to new levels of verbal absurdity. The basic content claims of the
holist position, however, have remained more or less constant since the sev-
enteenth century, when secondhand accounts of Confucian thought penned
by Jesuit priests captured the minds of European philosophers and artists.1

1. See Jensen 1998 and Saussy 2001 on the early reception of Confucianism in Europe.
2

2 MIN D AN D BOD Y IN EARLY CHINA

From the very beginning, holistic Orientalism has come in two distinct
forms, embracing the same basic content claims but imbuing them with op-
posite normative valuations. Hegel and Montesquieu, for instance, believed
that the holistic nature of Chinese thought rendered the Chinese people
psychologically and politically infantile. The “servile consciousness” of the
Chinese, Hegel explained, was the mark of a spiritually immature people, one
which “has not yet matured itself so far as to recognize distinctions” (Hegel
1899/​2007: 138). On the other hand, thinkers such as Leibniz and Voltaire
came to see Chinese mind-​body holism, including its supposed lack of dis-
tinction between the secular and religious, as precisely the medicine needed
to jolt sick European thought out of its doldrums. Voltaire held up Chinese
thought as an existence proof that one could have a robust ethics without re-
ligion, while Leibniz saw a resonance between Chinese matter-​spirit holism
and his own anti-​Cartesian arguments.2 As Zhang Longxi observes, “How
the Other is viewed, whether it is regarded with admiration or looked down
upon with contempt, does change from one form of the dichotomy to an-
other . . . but the perennial dichotomy itself seems seldom to relax its grip on
people’s minds in the perpetuation of cultural myths” (L. Zhang 1998: 55).
Michael Puett has also noted this dynamic at work in the contrast between
Max Weber’s and Marcel Granet’s characterizations of China: “Granet’s
presentation of ‘Chinese thought’ is in its general outlines quite similar to
Weber’s view of Confucianism, with the crucial difference that what Weber
saw as restricting the full development of rationality is the very thing Granet
celebrated as part of the genius of Chinese thinking” (Puett 2002: 8).3
One of the odd features of the modern Academy is the fact that while the
negative side of such cultural essentialism has been singled out and rejected as
pernicious Orientalism, its normatively positive manifestation has continued
to flourish. What I have come to think of as “Hegel with a happy face” can
be traced, in its most recent incarnation, from the early European philosophes
to scholars such as Lévy-​ Bruhl and Granet (Lévy-​ Bruhl 1922, Granet
1934) straight down to prominent contemporary scholars of Chinese thought
such as Roger Ames, Henry Rosemony Jr., and François Jullien (Rosemont &

2. See Cook & Rosemont 1994 and Ames 2011: 5–​8 on Leibniz and his reception of Chinese
thought.
3. Also cf. Heiner Roetz’s point that “the positive outlook of the Enlightenment, and the
negative one of Montesquieu and the German Idealists, mark two ideal types of Western
interpretations of China. They have remained fundamental also for later assessments, even if
the various authors are not necessarily aware of the heritage” (Roetz 1993a: 10).
3

Introduction 3

Ames 2009, Jullien 2007a) in the West, as well as Zhang Xuezhi 張學智 (X.
Zhang 2005) or Tang Yijie (Tang 2007) in Chinese-​language scholarship.4
Since the 1970s or so, Orientalism has in addition taken a postmodernist or
poststructuralist turn, acquiring a theoretical foundation in the form of rad-
ical social or linguistic constructivist views of the human self. The resulting
potent cocktail of French theory and cultural essentialism currently holds a
surprisingly large swath of Asian and comparative cultural studies in its grip.5
Of course, Orientalism also appears front and center in French poststruc-
turalist thought itself. Japan plays the role of the incommensurable Other in
Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs (Barthes 1970/​1982). Foucault famously
uses Borges’s “Chinese encyclopedia” to illustrate the absolute barriers to
thinking oneself into a different “order of things” (Foucault 1966/​1970), and
Derrida portrays the Chinese ideograph as evidence of a civilization that has
escaped logocentrism (Derrida 1967/​1998). As Zhang Longxi (2010) has
noted, theorists such as Foucault and Derrida “use China or Chinese writing
to contrast with the West, and to highlight cultural differences as some sort
of impossible place, as ‘heterotopia’ or the ultimate ‘différance’ ” (L. Zhang
2010: 344). Rey Chow sees Derrida’s fetishization of the Chinese ideogram as
simply a more academically refined version of the sort of racism and cultural
essentialism informing more common stereotypes about “the Chinese”:

Translated into the context of high theory and philosophy, “inscrutable

Chinese” is no longer simply the enigmatic exterior of the oriental but
also an entire language and culture reduced to (sur)face, image and
ideogram. . . . The face of the Chinese person and the face of Chinese
writing thus converge in what must now be seen as a composite verbal
stereotype—​the other face—​that stigmatizes another culture as at
once corporeally and linguistically intractable. (Chow 2001: 72)

It may not be surprising to have East Asia caricatured in this way by French
theorists with little or no knowledge of the region, its history, or its lan-
guages. What should be more troubling is how such Orientalism continues

4. See Roetz 1993a (esp. chs. 1–​2), Puett 2001: 4–​20, Billeter 2006, Cheng 2009, McDonald
2009, Saussy 2001, and L. Zhang 1998 on the continued dangers of Orientalist, cultural essen-
tialism in contemporary Chinese studies, critiques that I draw upon in the pages that follow.
5. On radical cultural difference as the assumed starting point in Asian comparative studies, see
Zhang Longxi 1998 and David Buck 1991; also see Eske Møllgaard’s lamentations concerning
the pernicious effect of “the present postmodern climate of the Western academy” on the study
of Chinese thought (Møllgaard 2007: 5).
4

4 MIN D AN D BOD Y IN EARLY CHINA

to pervade the writing of scholars who actually know something about “the
East.” François Jullien, for instance, characterizes his exploration of Chinese
thought in Le Détour et L’Accès ( Jullien 1995a) as “a voyage to the far-​off land
of subtlety,” a journey that, through its stark contrasts, will allow us to “retrace
Western thought” ( Jullien 2000: 10).6
The combination of the simple intercultural ignorance that generated
classic Orientalism with the cultural and linguistic relativism of poststructur-
alist thought creates especially fertile ground for mystification and caricature.
Anyone you ask in the humanities will happily inform you that postmod-
ernism is passé, and few, if any, scholars self-​identify as postmodernists. It is
nonetheless the norm, in fields such as religious or Asian studies, for work to
be grounded in the assumption of radical social constructivism—​linguistic,
cultural, or both—​that is arguably the defining feature of postmodernism
(Slingerland 2008b: ch. 2). This assumption is foregrounded in scholars such
as Jullien, who observes that “the fabric of our thought . . . is woven by Indo-​
European languages” ( Jullien 1995b: 18). In one of his trademark rhetorical
moves—​soberly denouncing an intellectually flawed practice before gleefully
indulging in it himself7—​he notes in a discussion of Chinese ontology that,
though he is “usually suspicious” of orientalist character fetishization, “this
time it seems incontestable”: “What Westerners translate as thing (an individ-
ualizing notion) means east-​west in Chinese; and what Westerners translate
as landscape (a unitary term) means mountains-​waters in Chinese” ( Jullien
2000: 376). In his view, this bit of linguistic evidence proves his claim that the
Chinese inhabited a world without discrete entities.8

6. As Haun Saussy observes, “Jullien’s China is what we might call an ‘own other,’ a reversed
image of his Europe” (Saussy 2001: 111). Saussy describes an alternation in the West between
“postmodern praise and modern contempt (or patronizing indulgence)” of China, a pat-
tern that resembles the oscillation between normatively positive and negative versions of
Orientalism discussed above.
7. Cf. the statement, “Let me say that I am not extrapolating some overall unity to a body of
thought seen from a distance from the texts under examination. Nor do I regard it as somehow
eternal, ignoring its extreme diversity or historical development” ( Jullien 2007b: 9–​10). This
disclaimer precedes an entire book devoted to attributing an unchanging, monolithic view to
a culture based on fragments of a single text seen in occasional glimpses. Or consider Jullien’s
discussion of the American missionary Arthur Smith, where he notes disapprovingly that in
Smith’s writings, “The Chinese are . . . placed in the role of the other par excellence, to serve
conveniently as the diametric opposite of Westerners” (2000: 17). The same, of course, can be
said of Jullien’s oeuvre.
8. It should be noted that, sloppy folk etymology aside, this is an exceedingly odd argu-
ment. Dongxi 東西 (“thing”) is a neologism introduced into the Mandarin dialect sometime
around the Ming Dynasty; classical Chinese (the period Jullien is ostensibly focused on) had
5

Introduction 5

Despite the troubling fact that his work is required reading for French
public schoolchildren, my primary concern in writing this book does not re-
volve around flamboyant figures such as Jullien, who are typically dismissed by
more rigorous scholars.9 What I see as a much greater and pervasive problem
in our field is that strong cultural or linguistic relativism often simply lurks
in the background of modern scholarship as a basic interpretative assump-
tion, a starting point for otherwise sober, careful sinologists. A well-​known
2006 monograph by Mark Edward Lewis, focused on “the way in which early
Chinese constructed the space they inhabited” (Lewis 2006: 1), goes on to
describe the physical body in early China as an apparently arbitrarily chosen,
culturally constructed “marker of supreme value” (20), and the bodily surface
as a constantly “fluid and shifting . . . zone of exchange” (61). Considering
the obvious and intuitive importance of the body as a locus for value and
discrete individuality in most Western traditions, this suggests that the early
Chinese inhabited an intellectual milieu where the concepts of body, mind,
and self-​other boundaries were quite alien to our own. Similarly, in his work
on the concept of the animal in early China, Roel Sterckx states as a matter of
common knowledge that “notions of humanity and animality, like the con-
cept of nature itself, are to be perceived as cultural constructs . . . variable and
historically contingent” (Sterckx 2002: 15–​16). The natural world itself, he
declares, is “a negotiated reality” (16).
For people who did not spend their formative intellectual years drinking
deeply from the well of French theory, these are strange and dubious claims.
Common sense is, of course, far from an infallible guide to reliable knowl­
edge. In this case, however, our naïve intuitions are actually reinforced by our

the eminently individualized, even countable (there are 10,000 of them!), term wu 物, and
southern Chinese dialects continue to use compounds involving wu 物 to this day. Moreover,
it is not at all clear that dongxi originated as a compound of “east” (dong 東) and “west” (xi 西)
rather than entirely different words that were merely homophonous with “east” and “west.”
(Thanks to Zev Handel [personal communication] for reflections on this topic.) So perhaps it
is only Mandarin speakers who became holistic sometime around the late fourteenth century.
Evidence is rarely allowed to get in the way of a good Jullien argument, however, and this quo-
tation is a paradigmatic example of the manner in which old-​fashioned Orientalism gets woven
together with more contemporary views of linguistic relativism.
9. The best-​known critique of Jullien is the Swiss scholar Jean François Billeter’s short, lucid,
and devastating Contre François Jullien (Billeter 2006). Anne Cheng, one of the most prom-
inent defenders of evidence and reason in the French sinological world, is also an inveterate
critic of Jullien’s work, although not typically by name. He is, for instance, clearly the target of
the complaint voiced in her inaugural lecture at the Collège de France about an essentializing
style of Orientalism that tends to put Chinese thought in a museum [muséifier] and reduce it
to the role of “the Other” (Cheng 2009: 37).
6

6 MIN D AN D BOD Y IN EARLY CHINA

current best empirical models of the world. As I discuss in ­chapters 1 and 5,

there is a large body of evidence suggesting that, for instance, a clear body-​
world boundary is a basic requirement for physiological homeostasis, which
in turn is a fundamental condition of biological life. Cross-​cultural psycho-
logical evidence suggests that human beings, whatever their particular cultural
narratives, distinguish between “human beings” (which may only pick out
fellow tribe members, not the class of organisms we would now term Homo
sapiens) and nonhuman animals, and perceive artifacts and other cultural
products as qualitatively different, in both origin and nature, from biological
species and the natural world more generally. This is obviously to some extent
debatable. There are disagreements within the field of social psychology, for
instance, concerning the universality of the “folk” human-​animal distinction,
and as historians we know that the precise outlines of these distinctions vary
from culture to culture and time to time.10 Nonetheless, it is, in my view, to
our detriment that we start with facile assumptions of radical cultural differ-
ence, completely uninformed by relevant literature on precisely these topics
in various branches of the empirical sciences.
As those of us who study texts for a living are well aware, the course of an
interpretative journey is strongly determined by its starting point. One need
not share all of the ontological assumptions of the German hermeneuts in
order to appreciate their analysis of how Vorhabe (“pre-​assumptions”) inevi-
tably shape the hermeneutic project (Gadamer 1960/​2004). One of the main
arguments of this book is that, for several decades at least, most students
of early China have been approaching the texts of this tradition with an
empirically unjustifiable set of background assumptions that have caused
them to systematically exaggerate the exoticism, as well as the internal uni-
formity, of early Chinese thought. Against the background of strong social
constructivism, the idea of a radically Other, monolithically holistic China
actually makes good sense. Early Chinese thinkers were writing in the same
language, classical Chinese. If language determines thought, they must all
have thought more or less the same things. The same would be true, mu-
tatis mutandis, of the ancient Greeks, and their descendent users of Indo-​
European languages.

10. As G. E. R. Lloyd has observed (Lloyd 2007), it is also the case that in many areas of human
cognition and perception, it is not simple universality that we find, but more typically a small
palette of variation from culture to culture, or language to language. That this constrained
variation does not in any way invalidate “universalist” claims about human cognition is an ar-
gument I will return to in the Conclusion.
7

Introduction 7

The problem is that radical social constructivism is contradicted by our

current best knowledge of how human beings think and act, as well as how
they construct and transmit culture.11 The starting point of the current work
is that we are not disembodied minds swimming in a sea of abstract signs
or symbols but rather embodied animals. We inherit from the past not only
culture but also genes. As a result, we enter the world endowed with rich
structures of prelinguistic and precultural cognition, structures that help to
determine what kind of cultural knowledge we can acquire, how we distin-
guish relevant information from background noise, and how cultural forms
are shaped in the first place. Language does not determine thought. Words
generally reference prelinguistic, analogue concepts, and these concepts
themselves are imagistic and somatic. While there is indeed a powerful feed-
back loop between language and thought, with culturally acquired concepts
and linguistic terms often focusing our attention in particular directions and
shaping our reasoning processes in specific ways, we are by no means inmates
of some inescapable “prisonhouse of language.”
Space considerations make it impossible in this book to rehearse in de-
tail the evidence behind the claim that our cognition is fundamentally
“embodied.”12 I do, however, give case examples in the chapters that follow
of how empirical work on human cognition belies any strong cultural con-
structivist account with regard to the specifics of holistic claims about China.
Given the topic of this book, concepts of mind and body in early China,
I particularly focus on a massive body of evidence suggesting that human
beings are innate mind-​body dualists, intuitively seeing “mind”-​possessing
agents as fundamentally different from inert objects, and mental causation as
distinct from physical causation. This folk dualism is not Cartesian substance

11. I have made this case in great detail in previous work (Slingerland 2008b: ch. 3). I reference
some of these arguments at various points in the pages below and also revisit the literature on
some relevant topics, but refer readers to Slingerland 2008b for a more thorough and system-
atic treatment of this subject.
12. Slingerland 2008b was inspired by works such as Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby 1992, and
Pinker 2002—​early, influential pushbacks against extreme culture constructivism. Almost two
decades into the twenty-​first century, the accumulated evidence against the “blank slate” or
strong social constructivist view of the human mind is overwhelming and as definitive as any
position in science, such as climate change or evolution. A sense of the current state of the field
can be found in such outlets as the Journal of Cognition and Culture, Human Nature, Cognitive
Science, Cognition, Human Nature or Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Carruthers, Laurence, &
Stich 2005, 2007, 2008 also give a helpful overview in three edited volumes. The essays in
Slingerland & Collard 2012a provide an account of a “second wave” of science-​humanities con-
silience (Slingerland & Collard 2012b) that puts culture and the explanatory power of human-​
level concepts more in the foreground than some earlier models.
8

8 MIN D AN D BOD Y IN EARLY CHINA

dualism—​that is, predicating an inviolable, hermetic ontological distinction

between mind and body—​although it arguably served as raw material for
thinkers such as Descartes to construct their (ultimately counterintuitive)
philosophical positions. It is best thought of as “weak” dualism. Our sepa-
rate cognitive systems for processing agents and objects cause us to see mind
and body as somehow qualitatively distinct and in at least potential tension—​
hence the “dualism.”13 At the same time, people throughout time and across
the world have recognized that body and mind interact.14 Drinking alcohol,
an eminently bodily act, befuddles the mind. Worry or grief can under-
mine or destroy one’s bodily health. Moreover, there is a host of capacities
or functions that are hard to classify as purely “mental” or “physical,” such as
habits or addictions to alcohol or drugs.
This conceptual confusion and complexity arguably reflects a tension be-
tween our innate intuitive cognition, which “wants” to cut the world up into
minds and bodies, and the way in which the world actually works. Mind-​body
dualism is almost certainly wrong as an account of reality.15 To the best of
our knowledge, human beings are unified body-​mind systems, not ghosts in
the machine. In an important sense, it is nonsensical to talk about a “mind”
that is somehow distinct from a “body.” This is only one of many ways in
which our innate cognitive tendencies, which evolved to facilitate survival
and reproduction, do not necessarily give us an accurate picture of the world.
As I argue in more detail below, our tendency to see agents as distinct from

13. Pace Pan Dawei, who in a recent critique of my position argues that nothing but sharp,
ontological mind-​body dualism counts as a “dualism,” and any view allowing for intermediate
cases or phenomena must be considered “holistic” (Pan 2017: 1021). In one odd comment, Pan
summarizes his position as arguing that “the xin was different from the rest of the body, but
not as different as Slingerland assumes” (Pan 2017: 1023). All that mind-​body dualism requires
is that the lexical item(s) that map on best to the English word mind (in the case of classical
Chinese, xin) be considered as “different from the body,” whether the referent of the term is
conceptualized as residing physically in the body or not. I return to this topic in c­ hapter 5.
14. The recognition that mind and body interact is sometimes cited by defenders of strong ho-
lism as something unique to China, or to traditional Chinese medicine (e.g., Ishida 1989, Yu
2009, Pan 2017), which is clearly absurd. The dangers of caricaturing entire cultures, as well as
the kernel of truth when it comes to relative emphases in particular cultures at certain periods,
is discussed in more detail in ­chapter 6.
15. This is obviously a topic of some dispute, with some philosophers and cognitive scientists
(Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers, arguably John Searle, depending on how one reads him) con-
tinuing to argue that consciousness is an irreducible component of the universe, while others
(Daniel Dennett, Paul Churchland, Owen Flanagan) see no principled barriers to a physicalist
explanation of consciousness. I lean toward the latter camp, and it is certainly the case that our
best current medical accounts of the self assume a thoroughly holistic, materialist model. See
Slingerland 2008b: ch. 6, and the works cited there, for more on this topic.
9

Introduction 9

objects, and driven by invisible and immaterial forces such as intentions or

willpower, appears to be a cognitive shortcut that allows us to better predict
the actions of other humans. This was a crucial survival skill in the complex
social world in which human beings evolved. It does not, however, require
that “intentions” or “free will” be genuinely causal forces in the world. In the
same way, our color perception causes us to see ripe strawberries as deliciously
red, despite the fact that these colors do not objectively “exist” in the world,
but are rather the product of the light-​reflective properties of certain chemi-
cals interacting with our species-​specific perceptual system.
A central irony of the argument of this book is that it is precisely our innate
(and probably mistaken) mind-​body dualism that causes us to portray early
China as exotically holistic. When we see minds as independent of bodies and
physical causation, it is natural also to see cultures, which are essentially large
collections of minds and mental products, as equally free and sui generis. If
cultures are caused only by themselves, radical incommensurability should be the
rule rather than the exception. This leads naturally to the sort of anything-​goes
social constructivism that currently dominates most disciplines in the human-
ities, where it makes perfect sense for China (or “the East”) to be monolithi-
cally uniform and radically different from ourselves. Voilà the Dualistic West
and the Holistic East. On the other hand, adopting a truly holistic stance—​that
is, beginning our analysis from the standpoint of embodied cognition, and fol-
lowing an integrated science-​humanities approach to studying human thought
and culture—​frees us from the grip of cultural essentialism, allowing us to move
beyond Orientalism once and for all. Culture is physical, not ghostly. Culture
does not float independently in a realm of disembodied discourse but consists
of artifacts, marks on writing surfaces, the built environment, altered landscapes,
modified bodies, sound waves in the air, and configurations of neurons in indi-
vidual human brains. While it has its own independent chain of transmission
and evolutionary dynamics, it is produced by, constrained by, and in constant
interaction with the physical world and innate human cognition.
When it comes to the study of early China, we need to acknowledge that
the early Chinese were fellow Homo sapiens, with bodies and minds very much
like ours, moving through a physical/​cultural world that, because of conver-
gent cultural evolution,16 was broadly similar to ours. They developed distinc-
tive cultural ideas and practices, but these cultural forms remained ultimately

16. “Convergent evolution” most commonly refers to the process by which completely ge-
netically unrelated organisms develop very similar traits, behaviors, or appearances because
of similar adaptive pressures. Think about the bodily forms of the shark and the dolphin, ge-
netically completely unrelated organisms but both shaped by the demands of moving quickly
10

10 MIN D AN D BOD Y IN EARLY CHINA

grounded in shared human cognitive structures and adaptive challenges, This,

indeed, is why we, as scholars, can come to understand them in the first place.
Moreover, as embodied beings produced by an extremely complex interplay
of individual genetic endowments, idiosyncratic developmental trajectories,
and exposure to a wide variety of local cultural inputs, the early Chinese
were a diverse bunch of people—​again, much like ourselves. As one finds in
any collection of intelligent human beings, their shared, intuitive cognitive
assumptions provided the background for endless disagreements about the
details. What is the relationship of nature to culture? What is the proper role
of the mind or heart-​mind (xin 心)? How distinct are humans from animals
(or are they distinct at all)? What is the role of past cultural traditions in a
proper human life? What is the relationship of the individual to society? No
one who has read Warring States Chinese texts can be unaware that there is no
single “Chinese” answer to any of these questions, which served as the foci of
philosophical debates that continue down to the present day.17
Similarly, once we abandon the faith that “Westerners” are brainwashed
by logocentrism or the myth of the disembodied self, we create space to recog-
nize that Leibniz is not Descartes, nor is Aristotle Plato. Western philosophers,
whether in ancient Greece or modern Europe, are just as diverse in viewpoint
and background assumptions as the Warring States Chinese. They also focus
their attention on many of the same debates, since organisms with similar
cognitive and behavioral tendencies will tend to face similar, and recurrent,
challenges when it comes to understanding themselves and living together
in large-​scale societies. Equally important, it needs to be acknowledged that
elite philosophers do not necessarily represent the views of ordinary people,
and that—​even within an individual mind—​explicit doctrine may contradict
implicit assumption. A diversity of viewpoints typically exists even within a
single person, let alone a culture as a whole.

***
and efficiently through water. Cultural evolution can also converge, with historically unre-
lated cultures developing similar or identical tools (the sewing needle, boats, spears), practices
(sacrifices to the ancestors, adulthood initiation ceremonies), or social institutions (marriage,
monarchy) in response to an analogous convergence of innate cognition and environmental
adaptive pressures.
17. See Goldin 2015 for a similar argument that early Chinese thinkers had a diversity of views
about the relationship of mind to body, and ones that also may have diverged widely from
less educated or affluent members of society. Also note Michael Puett’s critique of the manner
in which stereotypes about an unchanging, eternal China obscure the fact that there was a
great deal of debate in early China concerning the relationship of nature to culture (Puett
2001: 4–​12).
1

Introduction 11

In this book, I intend to use claims about the supposedly holistic nature
of Chinese conceptions of mind and body as a specific case example of how
the Orientalist-​essentialist view of China leads us astray. It is contradicted
not only by the texts themselves but also by our current best knowledge of the
nature of human cognition.
In ­chapter 1, I begin by exploring and documenting the pervasiveness of
the “myth of holism” in scholarship on early China, focusing on Western-​
language work but noting the degree to which it also pervades scholarship in
China. The myth of holism is the idea that some essential Chinese holism can
serve as a corrective to an equally essentialized Western dualism. I use “myth”
in the sense intended by Paul Goldin in his 2008 piece, “The Myth That
China Has No Creation Myth” (Goldin 2008): as a faith-​like commitment
that displays impressive immunity to counterevidence.18 In that work, Goldin
documents the widespread presence of creation myths in early Chinese
writings, stubbornly overlooked because they conflict with “the mythic vi-
sion of China as the Place Where Everything Is Different” (26). Although
the specific term “holism” is not always used by proponents of the myth, the
structural claims are always the same: various sorts of dualisms endemic to
Western thought are entirely absent in Chinese thought.
Chapter 1 discusses the various manifestations of this myth of holism, but
ultimately focuses on that of mind and body, the primary topic of this book.
I have elected to focus on mind-​body concepts because this binary in partic-
ular tends to be the locus of holistic claims about early China and therefore
serves as a helpful lens for viewing holism in general. I characterize what I refer
to as the radical, or “strong,” mind-​body holist position, which holds that any
sort of distinction between mind and body is entirely foreign to early Chinese
thought. Typically piggybacking on the mind-​body holist position are claims
about various other “Western” mind-​related ideas that the Chinese lacked: a
sense of psychological interiority, a notion of individuality, or the concept of
an afterlife. These assertions are also examined. The chapter concludes with
a brief review of both textual and extra-​textual evidence against the various
flavors of holist claims about early China. I note that, in the face of such ev-
idence, holism does seem to function as a “myth,” in the sense of appealing

18. An illustration of the evidence-​resistant nature of the myth of mind-​body holism is the fact
that a book chapter by Goldin (Goldin 2003) published fifteen years ago, and demonstrating
very clearly the presence of strong mind-​body dualism in pre-​Qin texts such as the Zhuangzi
and Xunzi, appears to have had little if any impact on proponents of strong mind-​body holism.
A similar observation could be made concerning Puett’s reflections on nature and culture, or
tradition and innovation, in pre-​Buddhist China.
12

12 MIN D AN D BOD Y IN EARLY CHINA

to people despite being contradicted by experience or facts on the ground.

A reasonable conclusion is that it would behoove us, as both scholars and
teachers, to approach the texts that we study armed with an empirically re-
sponsible, broadly informed picture of the structure and dynamics of general
human cognition and culture.
Chapters 2 through 4 are intended to bolster this claim in detail by
turning to the specific case example of mind-​body dualism. I document im-
plicit and explicit views on mind-​body relations in early China with the goal
of demonstrating that—​despite their variety—​none can reasonably be said
to reflect a strongly holist position. This leaves considerable room for debate
about the precise nature of any particular view. As Lisa Raphals has recently
argued, both ancient China and ancient Greece are characterized by various,
and mutually inconsistent, views on topics such as mind and body or the soul
and immortality (Raphals 2017). My point is merely that none of these views
are intelligible except against the background of (at least implicit) “weak”
mind-​body dualism. “Weak” dualism, unlike Cartesian dualism, does not
entail that mind and body partake of distinct ontological realms. It none-
theless sees them as fundamentally, qualitatively distinct in a way that sin-
gles out “mind” as something to uniquely contrast with the physical body. It
also privileges “mind” over all other human capacities. While strong holism
would predict that all aspects of the human unity—​thoughts, desires, snot,
digestion, breathing, running, the spleen, hair growth—​should be seen as
equally physical and also equally worthy of attention, weak dualism would
predict that a dualism between two very specific aspects of the self—​the phys-
ical and the mental—​would be a central, and particularly fraught, theme in
early Chinese thought. My argument is that this is what we see when we turn
our attention to early China. My broader purpose is using this debunking of
strong mind-​body holism to discredit strong holist claims in general, as well
as the neo-​Orientalism of which they are part.
In ­chapter 2, I begin my qualitative critique by examining the notion
of soul-​body dualism, which I see as an outgrowth of mind-​body dualism.
Walking the reader through a body of archaeological and textual evidence,
I argue that it suggests that the early Chinese were treating their dead,
thinking about the afterlife, and waxing philosophical against a set of back-
ground assumptions that had to have included some form of soul-​body du-
alism.19 The early Chinese appear to have distinguished between a relatively

19. In part reacting to my earlier work on this topic (Slingerland 2013a), Raphals comes to a sim-
ilar conclusion, arguing that the somewhat vague and weakly theorized views of immortality
13

Introduction 13

corporeal, physical body and a relatively incorporeal soul (or set of souls).
The former was part of a material, visible world and was viewed ultimately as
peripheral to the essence of one’s personal identity. The latter—​closely linked
to the “mind” and one’s personal essence—​was the focus of ancestor cults,
sacrifices, and oracles, and partook of an invisible, numinous world, quali-
tatively distinct from our own. The “specialness” of the next world and the
beings that inhabited it lent to them, and to items and practices associated
with them, a degree of numinosity that is not at all alien to conceptions of the
holy or sacred in Judeo-​Christian traditions.
Chapter 2 concludes with the argument that soul-​body dualism—​or even
more complicated models, where the body is contrasted to both mind and
soul, or with multiple souls—​is ultimately parasitic on basic mind-​body du-
alism, which sees mental states or consciousness as somehow qualitatively
distinct from the material world of things. In ­chapter 3, I therefore turn to
documenting the claim that the early Chinese were at least “weak” mind-​body
dualists. Unlike strict Cartesianism, weak mind-​body dualism involves the
conception that mind and body are functionally and qualitatively distinct,
although potentially overlapping at points. Whatever their views vis-​à-​vis ho-
lism versus dualism, any scholar of early China would agree that if there were
a word that corresponded to the English mind, it would be xin 心. Derived
from a graph that appears to depict the physical organ of the heart, xin serves
in early Chinese texts as the locus of emotions, desires, and thoughts, and
is translated variously as “heart,” “heart-​mind,” “mind.” In ­chapter 3, I review
what I see as overwhelming evidence that despite its at least notional loca-
tion in the physical self, the xin 心 is portrayed in pre-​Qin (221 bce) texts
as qualitatively different from the body. It is frequently contrasted with the
most common terms for the physical body (xing 形, ti 體, shen 身),20 both
explicitly and implicitly. It is linked to the soul and personal essence, viewed

we find in certain ancient Greek and Chinese thinkers “can coexist with mind-​body holism, al-
beit not in its strongest forms” (Raphals 2017: 170). It is only these strong forms of mind-​body
holism that are my target in this book.
20. Although there are differences in the semantic ranges of these three terms, they are the most
common terms that refer to the physical body, and the ones pressed into service when the body
is being contrasted with some other component of the self. I have excluded from the analyses
in this book more rare, and semantically more specialized, terms for the body such as qu 軀 or
gong 躬, which Deborah Sommer defines, respectively, as the “dysfunctional mortal coil of the
petty person” and “the body of displayed ritual conduct” (Sommer 2008: 294). On the var-
ious terms for the body in Warring State thought and their semantic overlaps and differences,
the most complete and helpful account is Sommer 2008, although Sommer takes these se-
mantic distinctions as reflecting conceptual and metaphysically realities in a much stronger
14

14 MIN D AN D BOD Y IN EARLY CHINA

as somehow nonmaterial or metaphysical, and seen as qualitatively distinct

among all of the organs of the body, with unique (and apparently “super-​
material”) powers of causation.
In ­chapters 2 and 3 I remain within the stylistic boundaries of the disci-
pline, employing my textual evidence in a more traditional manner. That is,
in response to claims about the soul or xin with which I disagree, I marshal
a certain number of passages that I believe contradict said claims, along with
qualitative interpretations of these passages. In ­chapter 4, I move on to dis-
cuss some of the problems with this manner of presenting evidence and ex-
plore the potential of quantitative analysis. One obvious potential problem
in qualitative analyses is the danger of cherry-​picking. I believe that the bits
of archaeological evidence and the textual passages that I review in ­chapters 2
and 3 provide a fair and comprehensive picture of soul-​body and mind-​body
conceptions in early China. Moreover, I believe that the evidence I present
in these chapters is more representative of the early Chinese worldview than
what I see as the marginal, and often oddly interpreted, passages deployed by
my hermeneutic opponents. It is, though, perfectly possible—​indeed, rather
likely, given basic human cognitive biases—​that both my selection and pres­
entation of evidence in these chapters is colored by my argumentative aims
In ­chapter 4 I confront this issue head-​on, arguing that we in the human-
ities have much to gain by supplementing our traditional qualitative methods
with quantitative methods, especially quantitative analysis combined with
digital humanities techniques. “Digital humanities” (DH) has become an an-
noyingly ubiquitous buzzword in the Academy. It is difficult to find a provost
in the developed world who is not eager to throw mountains of money at any
project flying the DH banner, often without having a clear sense of what DH
entails or why we might need it. Given the limitations to date of many DH
projects, humanities scholars might be forgiven for seeing such approaches
as somewhat gimmicky and of unclear usefulness for historians of religion or
philosophy. There are also quite legitimate worries about the promotion of
DH being used as a smokescreen for cutting funding for genuine humanities
scholarship, or for cretinizing what it means to engage with and comprehend
a text. In this chapter I argue, however, that it would be a mistake to allow
such concerns to cause us to ignore the enormous potential of digital human-
ities approaches. It should bother us that the manner in which we marshal

sense than I would deem warranted. Also see Sivin 1995b: 14 and most recently “Analysis of ti
‘體’, shen ‘身’, xing ‘形’ as the notions of body and person,” in Poli 2016. On xing 形, also see
Pregadio 2004.
15

Introduction 15

our supporting textual evidence, or share our considered view of the historical
record, has not changed much in the last millennium or two, despite the fact
that we now have access to entirely unprecedented, digital tools.
The vast majority of the received corpus of traditional Chinese texts, as
well as other important textual corpora, is now available in searchable, online
form. To date, these digital corpora have tended to be used as merely glorified
concordances. Even the most basic functionality of such sites, the ability to
quickly and easily marshal an exhaustive list of passages containing particular
keywords, is almost completely unutilized in our field. Similarly, we still dis-
seminate our views of the historical record—​for example, the degree to which
early China embraced mind-​body dualism—​in ways that have remained
mostly unchanged by the digital revolution: in densely argued journal articles
and monographs, with varying degrees of engagement with what is typically
a fairly circumscribed survey of other scholarship on the topic. While many
scholars now read journal articles and even monographs in electronic form,
in the humanities only very occasional use is made of the novel affordances
offered by the digital medium, such as keyword searches or other forms of
automated secondary literature surveys.
Chapter 4 makes the case for the usefulness of digital humanities techniques
by applying them to the analysis of soul-​body and mind-​body concepts in
early China. I begin with the most obvious and intuitive use for digital cor-
pora, the ability to produce comprehensive passage lists containing keywords
or combination of keywords. I also describe more elaborate methods for
not only pulling comprehensive passages lists from corpora but also getting
a more objective sense of their proper interpretation by employing teams of
coders, measuring intercoder reliability, and subjecting the results to proper
statistical analysis. The core of ­chapter 4 is dedicated to a set of innovative
and powerful methodologies that involve fully automated, statistical analyses
of massive amounts of text (“distant reading”; Moretti 2013), including topic
modeling, hierarchical clustering, and collocation analysis. These methods
pick out statistically unlikely co-​occurrences of words in a corpus or track sys-
tematic relationships between key terms. I report the results of several auto-
mated textual analysis studies run on a massive corpus of early Chinese texts
(Slingerland et al. 2017), all of which serve to corroborate the position that
the Chinese were at least “weak” mind-​body dualists.
Finally, with regard to the issue of the dissemination of scholarly opinion
in our digital age, I turn to the case example of the Database of Religious
History (DRH; http://​religiondatabase.org/​). A web-​based, digital human-
ities response to the challenge of accurately tracking scholarly opinion in
16

16 MIN D AN D BOD Y IN EARLY CHINA

our age of information overload, the DRH represents a new technology for
disseminating, codifying, and visualizing academic scholarly opinion, pro-
viding an instant snapshot of the range of scholarly opinion on a wide range
of topics. While the DRH is only in the very early stages of data gathering,
I present a snapshot of scholarly opinion as currently represented in the data-
base that overwhelmingly sees “body-​spirit” dualism as a feature of religions
from around the world and throughout history, including ancient East Asia.
I also argue that consulting and contributing to digital humanities platforms
such as the DRH need to become an increasingly normative practice if we
are to continue to make accurate generalizations about the state of scholar-
ship in our fields. Finally, ­chapter 4 concludes with a general discussion of
the theoretical and methodological issues surrounding big data approaches to
texts and humanistic scholarship, and an argument that—​used cautiously and
judiciously—​they can be of immense help to humanities scholars.
Applying big data, intercoder reliability, and quantitative analytic
methods to the reading of texts or using database approaches to share re-
search results both represent ways in which engaging with the sciences and
digital humanities can be helpful for our field. In these cases, we are bor-
rowing methodologies that originated in the sciences. Another way in which
the sciences can be helpful is by providing actual content knowledge about
domains that are of concern to us. The third part of this book, focused on
broader hermeneutical issues, begins with a case for keeping our interpreta-
tive work firmly grounded in our current best empirical knowledge about
human cognition and culture.
There are many aspects of human cognition, and the ways in which cog-
nition and culture interact, that have been carefully studied for decades in
various branches of the cognitive sciences. The scientific opinion concerning
most specific topics is in constant motion, but—​as noted above—​the broader
consensus that has emerged is that human beings are not blank slates, and
that culture and language do not completely structure human thought and
behavior. Since the 1960s and ’70s, strong cultural constructivism has been
the starting point for most interpretative journeys in the humanities, and ex-
pectations for finding radical, even incommensurable, difference therefore
the norm. If language structures our thought all the way down, how could
the early Chinese not have been “a different order of humanity” (Ames
1993b: 149), given their odd script and radically different spoken languages?
Once we toss strong social constructivism into the intellectual dustbin where
it belongs, however, we can begin our reading of texts instead firmly grounded
in our embodied reality, viewing texts from other cultures—​however initially
17

Introduction 17

odd they might appear—​as products of fellow Homo sapiens, who share with
us many basic features of cognition. This is the topic of ­chapter 5.
When it comes to the issue of mind-​body concepts, a large (and growing)
body of cross-​cultural evidence suggests that dividing the world into quali-
tatively distinct “agents” (minds) and physical objects is a human cognitive
universal. Cross-​culturally, and from an extremely early age, humans see in-
tentional causation as fundamentally distinct from physical, billiard-​ball
causation. This, in turn, causes people to see minds and bodies (or any other
physical objects) as qualitatively different. By the age of four or five, children
are able to explicitly model “false beliefs”—​that is, mental representations of
other agents that do not correspond to the reality of the situation. This then
becomes the basis of language-​and culture-​dependent learning processes that
result in the ability to use and understand sarcasm and irony, or to quickly and
intuitively make use of recursive levels of knowledge (X knows that Y [erro-
neously] believes that Z is ignorant of A). These “Theory of Mind” (ToM)
or mentalizing abilities have an increasingly well understood genetic basis,
are localized in the same regions of the brain cross-​culturally, and are clearly
adaptations to the complexities of social living. They are thus the foundation
of the ability of Homo sapiens to occupy its unique evolutionary niche, that of
the “hyper-​social” ape.
In this chapter, I also discuss how historical knowledge and humanistic
expertise can, and should, contribute to the cognitive sciences. In the case of
universal “folk” mind-​body dualism, the early Chinese conceptions of mind-​
body (and mind-​body-​soul) relations can help us think more clearly about
the nature of this dualism. Much of the early cognitive scientific literature
on the topic has seen the folk as Cartesian dualists (e.g., Bloom 2004). What
the early Chinese case suggests, in contrast, is that we are not Cartesians, and
moreover not necessarily even dualists, since the body is often contrasted in
early Chinese texts with both the soul and the mind. This more complex pic-
ture actually accords with some more recent results in the folk dualism empir-
ical literature and helps us to better interpret such results.
Moving on, I turn to subclaims of the strong holist position, such as the
idea that the early Chinese lacked any sense of psychological interiority,
reviewing evidence that humans universally expect intentional agents to have
internal motives and thoughts that are not necessarily perceivable from the
outside. It is moreover apparent that bodily based individuality, as well as an
intuitive sense of bodies as containers, is grounded in the most fundamental
aspects of life itself. Finally, intuitive mind-​body dualism also reliably kicks off
beliefs and behaviors that we tend to classify as “religious,” such as a concept
18

18 MIN D AN D BOD Y IN EARLY CHINA

of soul(s) and the afterlife, the idea that things happen for a reason, or belief
in the existence of supernatural agents. The fact that we find such phenomena
in early China is therefore not surprising, nor is it the result of somehow im-
posing a Judeo-​Christian worldview on prostrate colonial subalterns.
After reviewing some of the empirical evidence for the above claims, I argue
that this should exert some constraint on how we interpret early Chinese texts.
If mind-​body dualism appears to be a cognitive universal for Homo sapiens,
and the early Chinese were Homo sapiens, it would be extremely surprising if
dualism were completely alien to them. Maybe it was, in which case the cur-
rent cognitive scientific consensus needs to be revisited. This would, inciden-
tally, be very exciting, and take a long time to sort out. Anyone who has made
it as far as c­ hapter 5, however, will be unlikely to reach this conclusion, and
my hope is that the cognitive scientific evidence presented here will dispel any
lingering affection for the mind-​body holist claim. I conclude the chapter by
trying to disentangle an evolutionary approach to culture, grounded in gene-​
culture coevolution, from “evolutionism,” a completely unrelated view that
human cultures all over the world and throughout history have been gradually
converging on some Northern European, Protestant ideal. An evolutionary,
rather than evolutionist, approach can serve as the theoretical foundation for
a what I term “naturalistic hermeneutics,” an approach to the interpretation
of texts and other cultures that takes place against the background assump-
tion of embodied commonality.
Given the massive evidence—​textual, archaeological, psychological—​
against strongly holistic claims about early China, most of which has been
available for some time, how did scholarship on the topic go so far awry?
Chapter 6 attempts to address this question by identifying a variety of more
specific errors or excesses of interpretation—​besides the most fundamental
one of ignoring our embodied nature—​that contribute to exaggerated claims
of cultural difference. These include the rhetorical move that I call “the slide
from difference to différance.” The slide involves scholars making otherwise
reasonable observations about specific differences between, say, a partic-
ular Chinese thinker and a particular Western thinker, then concluding by
making dramatic, all-​encompassing claims concerning radical cultural differ-
ence that go beyond their own evidence. Other common moves include com-
paring strawman to strawman, mistaking argument for assumption, forcing
unitary translations on specific Chinese terms, or prioritizing theological or
ethical goals over scholarly accuracy. All of these interpretative excesses are
ultimately motivated and licensed by the assumption of radical cultural es-
sentialism. Jettisoning this assumption allows us to perceive and discuss more
19

Introduction 19

accurately the textual and archaeological evidence that we have spent our
careers learning to comprehend and interpret.
Myths tend to persist when they both serve a function in the mental
economy of a culture or discipline and have at their foundation a kernel of
truth. In the latter half of ­chapter 6, I explore the manner in which students
of comparative thought, as well as researchers in the cognitive sciences, have
much to learn from a more reasonable view of “holistic” China. In this con-
text, I also discuss the manner in which religion scholars and other humanists
can, and should, play an important role in helping cognitive scientists to
think through their categories and get beyond often quite historically and
culturally parochial models of human cognition. For instance, early Chinese
views concerning some sort of ontological continuity—​whether between this
world and the next, or between mind and body—​help us get a more accurate
fix on “folk” notions, and are actually more in accord with our best contem-
porary scientific knowledge. Early Chinese views on the absence of a razor-​
sharp distinction between emotions and reason also look quite prescient
from a modern perspective.
This is not of merely historical interest. Precisely because they were
working with more psychologically realistic views of the nature of the self,
we have much to learn from early Chinese thinkers. Despite my critiques of
their overall arguments and approaches, scholars such as Roger Ames, the late
Henry Rosemont Jr., and François Jullien do have a point that early Chinese
conceptions of the self—​and we should acknowledge that there are many of
them—​present us with models of mind-​body, reason-​emotion, and individual-​
society relations that provide edifying contrasts to the disembodied, hyper-​
rationalist models that have dominated recent Western philosophical
thinking. This has implications that go far beyond philosophy or religion,
since these psychologically unrealistic models coming out of philosophy have
had, and continue to have, deleterious impacts on legal, political, and edu-
cational policy (Slingerland 2011b, 2011c). They also played a role in sending
so-​called first generation cognitive science down some ultimately dead-​end
paths, an influence that the field as a whole has only recently recovered from.
In these respects, engaging with early Chinese models of the self can serve as
an important, substantive corrective to recent philosophical-​religious excesses
and wrong turns. The ability to learn from other religious and philosophical
traditions without essentializing them offers the most promising way forward
for comparative thought and the study of culture in general.
The observations made in ­chapter 6 lead naturally to themes addressed
in the Conclusion. One is that science-​humanities integration needs to be
20

20 MIN D AN D BOD Y IN EARLY CHINA

bi-​directional (Slingerland & Collard 2012b). In the wake my 2008 mono-

graph that ended up being entitled, What Science Offers the Humanities, many
of my colleagues asked me why I did not address the equally urgent question
of what the humanities offer the sciences. It is, in fact, this latter question that
has in recent years moved to the center of my research. Cognitive scientists
are becoming increasingly interested in studying topics that have tradition-
ally fallen under the purview of the humanities, such as religion or morality.
With some rare exceptions, they typically approach these subjects as if no one
in the humanities has ever written or thought anything useful on the topic.
The more thin-​skinned among us humanists may attribute this to scientific
hubris, but in my experience it is more commonly the product of simple igno-
rance. The all-​too-​common response among my colleagues, when confronted
by such ignorance, is to issue a derisive snort and walk away. This is neither
constructive nor in our long-​term interest as part of the Academy. By gaining
a basic familiarity with what our colleagues on the other side of campus are
doing, we can help them do it better; this sort of engagement will also force
scientists, and university administrators (who more often than not come from
the sciences), how and where humanistic expertise is relevant.
Putting an end to Orientalism, in all of its forms, represents merely one
dimension of a broader, and badly needed, reengagement with reality on the
part of humanities scholars. Strong social constructivism is simply dead in
the water as a respectable intellectual or empirical position, and humanities
scholars need to finally realize this and free ourselves from its limiting em-
brace. Besides its internal incoherence, radical social constructivism is entirely
contradicted by our most basic knowledge about how the human body-​brain
works or how cultural information is created, communicated, and stored. The
diaphanous, suggestive but ultimately incomprehensible prose that French
theory brought so into fashion in the 1970s–​’90s serves only to obscure weak
arguments or unsupportable claims. We should be suspicious of arguments
made without much in the way of supporting textual evidence and begin
thinking about supplementing our usual qualitative techniques with methods
drawn from other disciplines.
I feel strongly that comparative religion, Asian studies, and cultural
studies more generally are in active danger unless we can put radical social
constructivism and anti-​scientism behind us. Under their influence, our
rhetorical styles and modes of engaging with evidence have diverged not
only from the sciences but also from the general public. The way out of
the “crisis” in the humanities is not retrenchment, defensiveness, or super-
ciliousness but rather deeper engagement with the broader academy and
21

Introduction 21

general public. This book is specifically focused on concepts of mind and

body in early China. More broadly, it aims to use this topic as a lens to il-
lustrate the benefits, when it comes to the study of early Chinese thought,
of moving beyond Orientalism and myths of cultural essentialism. At
the most general level, however, my argument is that humanities scholars
should make more of an effort to raise their heads above the parapets of
their individual disciplines, and even the core humanities themselves, to
see how their specialist knowledge fits into the broader framework of
scholarly and human knowledge. And we need to do so sooner rather than
later if we feel that the humanities are meaningful, useful, and worthy of
our most enthusiastic support, as they surely are.
2

The Myth of Holism in Early China

Commenting on the widespread contemporary misapprehension that

Chinese writing consists of pure ideograms, “a model for a universal language
which should reach the mind through the eyes, without the aid of articulate
sounds,” the French-​American linguist and jurist Peter Stephen Du Ponceau
observed:

These enthusiastic opinions were introduced into Europe by the

Catholic missionaries, about the middle of the last century. Those ven-
erable men imbibed them from the Chinese literati, whose national
vanity is without bounds. They were received as sacred oracles, and
spread rapidly among the learned, who, like other men, are apt to be
smitten by the wonderful. Even in this enlightened age these opinions
are yet supported . . . by men whose judgment in other matters in enti-
tled to the respect of all. (Du Ponceau 1838: 7–​8)

One could not wish for a more insightful characterization of what we would
today term “Orientalism” as an intellectual trend, one grounded in the basic
human tendency to be “smitten by the wonderful.” Du Ponceau’s words also
strongly resonate today. Over one hundred and fifty years later, Michael Puett
found himself struggling, in his The Ambivalence of Creation (2001), with pre-
cisely this sort of enthusiastic, but fundamentally inaccurate, opinion. Puett’s
target was the manner in which early Enlightenment portrayals of a natural,
static China contrasting with an artificial, dynamic West have continued to
misinform modern scholarship on China, by envisioning a China that “pos-
ited no break from the world of nature” (14), and where thinkers supposedly
never confronted the sorts of distinctions—​nature/​culture, divine/​human,
creation/​continuity—​so basic to Near Eastern and Greek thought (12–​16).
23

The Myth of Holism in Early China 23

While Puett was specifically concerned with undermining the claim

that the nature-​culture distinction is completely foreign to “holistic” China,
nature-​culture holism is merely one facet of the broader holism that is com-
monly attributed to China or “the East.” In To Become a God (2002), Puett
subsequently traces this theme from Marcel Granet and Joseph Needham
through Frederick Mote, K. C. Chang, A. C. Graham, and David Hall and
Roger Ames (Puett 2002: 14–​18). Needham, for instance, referred to a par-
ticularly Chinese mode of thought that he labeled “coordinative thinking”:

In coordinative thinking, conceptions are not subsumed under one

another, but placed side by side in a pattern, and things influence one
another not by acts of mechanical causation, but by a kind of “induc-
tance.” . . . The key word in Chinese thought is Order and above all
Pattern (and, if I may whisper it for the first time, Organism). The sym-
bolic correlations or correspondences all formed part of one colossal
pattern. Things behaved in a particular way not necessarily because of
prior actions or impulsions of other things, but because their position
in the ever-​moving cyclical universe was such that they were endowed
with intrinsic natures which made that behavior inevitable for them.
If they did not behave in those particular ways they would lose their
relational positions in the whole (which made them what they were),
and turn into something other than themselves. They were thus parts
in existential dependence upon the whole world-​organism. And they
reacted upon one another not so much by mechanical impulsion or
causation as by a kind of mysterious resonance. (Needham 1956: 281)

In Needham’s view, this distinctive mode of Chinese thinking, whereby

everything in the universe is linked in a kind of “mysterious resonance,” is a
consequence of a strongly holistic worldview that also precluded the devel-
opment of other sorts of distinctions taken for granted in Indo-​Iranian or
Abrahamic faiths. “There was not such thing as an ‘other world’ in ancient
Chinese thought at all—​no heaven or hell, no creator God, and no expected
end of the universe once it had emerged from primeval chaos,” he writes. “All
was natural, and within Nature” (Needham 1974: 98).
Another lineage of holistic thinking about China is traced by Miranda
Brown, who links the idea of a particularly Chinese, holistic mode of thought
in modern sinology to Lucien Lévy-​Bruhl’s account of “primitive” thought,
which lacks anything like “our” concepts of causation, mind-​body dualism,
logic, time, abstraction, or analysis (Brown 2006: 224–​230).
24

24 Min d an d Bod y in Early China

Primitive perception is fundamentally mystic on account of the mystic

nature of the collective representations which form an integral part of
every perception. Ours has ceased to be so, at any rate with regard to
most of the objects that surround us. Nothing appears alike to them
and to us. For people like ourselves, speaking the language familiar
to us, there is insurmountable difficulty in entering into their way of
thinking. The longer we live among them, the more we approximate
their mental attitude, and the more we realize how impossible it is to
yield to their mental attitude entirely. (Lévy-​Bruhl 1926/​1985: 44–​45;
translation modified from Brown 2006: 225).

In Lévy-​Bruhl’s earlier views, the difference between “primitive” thought and

our own represents an ultimately insurmountable obstacle. Brown points out,
however, that—​partially in response to the strong critiques his cultural essen-
tialism provoked—​Lévy-​Bruhl retreated somewhat from this position in his
later works, where he instead tended to portray different modes of thought
as differences of degree (Brown 2006: 230). Similarly, the conception of the
holism that was formulated by sinologists such as Marcel Granet, Needham,
or A. C. Graham was not absolutist in terms of its essentialism. Granet, for
instance, spoke of Chinese holism as one of the tradition’s “guiding princi-
ples or ideas” (les idées directrices). “Rather than representing the difference
between Chinese and European thought in terms of ideal types or mentali-
ties,” Brown notes, “this decision allowed Granet to explain the difference in
terms of the relative prevalence of certain ideas or habits of thought within
each respective tradition” (234–​235). Although he also famously contrasted
correlative, holistic Chinese thought with analytic Western philosophy, A. C.
Graham similarly acknowledged that the differences he described were more
matters of relative prevalence, or layers of theorizing, than incommensurable
mentalités (Graham 1986: 1–​2, 6–​7, 23).

Neo-​Orientalist Conceptions of Chinese Holism

These earlier forms of Chinese holism were less extreme and culturally essen-
tializing primarily because they were formulated by scholars who, though
acutely aware of cultural variation, at some level still embraced a kind of psy-
chological universalism. Despite important differences in cultural worldview
between, say, early China and ancient Greece, they were both formulated by
human beings, endowed with similar natures, and struggling with analogous
problems. This common-​sense view of human nature and cultural difference,
25

The Myth of Holism in Early China 25

still widespread outside of modern humanities departments, is of course now

dismissed within our fields as horribly naïve, even colonialist. In the past few
decades, as extreme linguistic or social constructivism has become orthodoxy
in most sectors of the humanities (Slingerland 2008b: ch. 2), holistic claims
have taken a correspondingly more extreme and essentializing turn. If human
beings are the products of culture and language, all the way down, talk of
“prevalence” gives way to totalizing accounts of cultural incommensurability.
The cocktail of cultural essentialism and good old-​fashioned Orientalism that
typically informs modern accounts of Chinese holism is what I will be refer-
ring to as “neo-​Orientalism.”
As one might expect, French social constructivist theorists themselves
luxuriate in neo-​Orientalism. Despite insincere disclaimers,1 it is no acci-
dent that the “Orient,” in the form of Japan, is chosen to play the role of the
incommensurable Other in Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs (1970). In Of
Grammatology (Derrida 1967/​1998), Derrida looks to the Chinese ideogram
as a radically different alternative to the logocentric prison of Western lan-
guages. As Jane Geaney observes, “Although [Derrida] mocks the idea of a
graph having a ‘symbolic’ relationship to a ‘reality singular and unique like
itself ’, he seems to speculate without irony about Chinese writing as a ‘move-
ment of civilization outside all logocentrism’ ” (Geaney 2010: 251).2 Perhaps
most famously, Foucault uses Borges’s humorous “Chinese encyclopedia” to—​
apparently quite seriously—​illustrate the absolute barriers to thinking oneself
into a different “order of things.” In this “certain Chinese encyclopedia,”

animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed,
(c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f ) fabulous, (g) stray dogs,
(h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable,

1. For example, “Orient and Occident cannot be taken here as ‘realities’ to be compared and
contrasted. . . . I am not lovingly gazing toward an Oriental essence—​to me the Orient is a
matter of indifference, merely providing a reserve of features whose manipulation—​whose
invented interplay—​allows me to ‘entertain’ the idea of an unheard-​of symbolic system, one
altogether detached from our own” (Barthes 1970/​1982: 3). If this were actually true, one won-
ders why Barthes could not have located a suitable “reserve of features” (une réserve de traits)
somewhere closer to home—​suburban Paris, perhaps. Despite his claims to contrary, what
Barthes really sees in Japan is “the possibility of a difference, of a mutation, of a revolution
in the propriety of symbolic systems” (3–​4) provided by a culture so radically different from
our own.
2. On Derrida and his use of China, see also Chow 2001. Compare, as well, Foucault’s char-
acterization of the Chinese language: “Even its writing does not reproduce the fugitive flight
of the voice in horizontal lines; it erects the motionless and still-​recognizable images of things
themselves in vertical columns” (Foucault 1966/​1970: xix).
26

26 Min d an d Bod y in Early China

(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just
broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

Ignoring the satirical intention of this passage, Foucault portrays it as the ex-
pression of not only “the exotic charm of another system of thought” but also
“the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that” (Foucault
1966/​1970: xv).3 “At the other extremity of the world we inhabit,” Foucault
declares, China represents “a culture entirely devoted to the ordering of space,
but one that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of
the categories that make it possible for us to name, speak and think” (xix).4
These accounts of China represent a particularly strong form of what
Zhang Longxi has called “the myth of the Other” (1998: ch. 1) that has
come to permeate large sectors of contemporary sinology.5 Writing in 1991,
David Buck, editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, observed that “relativist
interpretations are advanced with much more frequency among Asianists,
and indeed in the JAS’s pages, than universalist ideas” (Buck 1991: 32). This
trend (of which Buck approved) nicely tracks the increasing dominance of
strong social constructivist ideologies in Asian Language and East Asian
Studies departments in both North America and Europe, which in terms of
theoretical fashions typically lag other humanistic fields by a decade or so.6
An illustrative example of how strong cultural constructivism and myths
of radical otherness permeate modern scholarship on China is the editor’s
introduction to Chun-​chieh Huang and Erik Zürcher’s volume, Time and
Space in Chinese Culture (Huang & Zürcher 1995). One might be forgiven for
thinking there should be fundamental cross-​cultural (indeed, cross-​species)
similarities in the way that individuals experience such basic dimensions of
existence as time and space. Organisms throughout the animal and plant

3. See the discussion of this passage from Foucault, and the original context in Borges’s writings,
in Zhang 1998: 19–​24.
4. Like Barthes and Derrida, Foucault hedges his neo-​Orientalism by assigning it to “our
dreamworld” (xix), not wanting to commit to making any actual claims about any actual place.
Also like the others, this does not prevent him from enthusiastically embracing and deploying
such claims.
5. Also see Haun Saussy on the use of China as “a negative portrait of ourselves” (Saussy
2001: 112) by French sinologists such as François Jullien, or the inveterate Jullien critic, Jean-​
François Billeter, on “le mythe de l’altérnité de la Chine” (Billeter 2006: 9).
6. An English PhD candidate writing a dissertation on the singer Madonna’s oeuvre has a lot
more spare time to read Theory than someone who needs to master modern and classical
Chinese, Japanese, and perhaps another Asian language.
27

The Myth of Holism in Early China 27

worlds organize their behavior around regular diurnal and annual rhythms,
and physical space as well seems to be cognitively processed by, and to exert
similar constraints on, a wide variety of creatures in the world.
Huang and Zürcher are eager to disabuse us of such naïve notions. Their
volume “tells a great story of how peculiarly, concretely Chinese the notions
of ‘time’ and ‘space’ are in Chinese culture and, conversely, how these partic-
ularly Chinese notions of time and space mold a grand living tradition called
Chinese culture” (3). While they agree with Kant that time and space are
forms of human understanding, they refuse to recognize them as transcen-
dental categories, because there is no universality in human experience, only
particularity. Time and space are “forms,” but these “forms of our thinking
and experience are themselves concretely and variously crafted by our various
cultural modes of thinking and behaving” (4). Every dimension of human
experience is determined by culture, “the womb of our being ‘human’, the uni-
verse of discourse in which our experience makes sense and distinguishes itself
as humanly meaningful, not a mere spewing forth of animality” (4). We are
confidently assured that “there are as many kinds of forms of space and time
as there are cultures” (4), and that “one of the peculiar modes of human living
in the world is the Chinese culture, a thoroughly concrete and reasonable
culture” (4).
What makes Chinese notions of space and time so “reasonable” is that
they are immanent and historical, not “ready-​made in the Platonic heaven of
theoretical abstraction” but “developed out of the vicissitudes of our life” (9).
In a later piece on the same theme, Huang explains that

time in China is not clock time (chromos) but humanly lived time. . . .
Time in Chinese culture is situational timeliness (similar to Kairos),
not of impersonal events but of a humanly shaped milieu, the vectoral
nisus (shi 勢) pulsating in the lives and performances of historical
individuals. (Huang 2006: 20)

This idea of history as “humanly lived time” is portrayed as radically different

from “Western causal explanation, [where] history is a mechanical push and
pull of social, political and economic forces. In contrast, Chinese history is
personal, with human agency blending in with and influencing, if not cre-
ating, these factors” (25).
This view of “the” Chinese concept of time as radically different from
“ours” is commonly encountered in the field, and is often linked to the nature
of the Chinese language. “The Chinese language has no conjugation,” declares
28

28 Min d an d Bod y in Early China

François Jullien. “This plain, brute fact is of immense consequence. For this
reason, the Chinese are not led to separate between tenses/​times (temps), as is
implied in the process of conjugation. Moreover, the Chinese are therefore
not led to think of time (le temps) as a general kind, nor to think about its
composition” ( Jullien 2001: 30; emphasis in the original). Unlike the heirs
of Greek thought, who think of the world as composed of discrete objects
moving through space, and of time as reflecting the movement of these
objects through space, the Chinese dwell in an ever-​present “moment” of ho-
listically lived reality.

Chinese thought allows us to see something that can serve as the

starting point for a whole new way of seeing the world. The idea of
the moment (shi 時) does not allow itself to be categorized or pigeon-​
holed under the concept of time. Far from being an element constitu-
tive of something else, or at least something that can be understood
discretely (as a component, such as an instant in time), the moment
induces an alternative point of view and participates in an alternative
path of thought: a line of demarcation is created, a point of cleavage
appears, upon which one can apply the lever to set back in motion and
genuinely shift the question of time. ( Jullien 2001: 121)

Whereas the Western conception of time has given rise to a metaphysics in

which objects are imprisoned in their isolation, Chinese thinkers have been
able to avoid what Jullien clearly views as a profound conceptual, and perhaps
moral, mistake. Chinese thought

in all of its thousand years of development, has never deployed—​it

never had to deploy—​the concept of time: the “path” never ceases to
dwell in, and thereby constitute, beings and situations, but these were
never envisioned except as being carried along by their own propen-
sity.7 There is, in Chinese, no notion of archetypical forms, but only of
that which “takes form” (xing 形) in realizing itself—​the term itself is
also a verb. ( Jullien 2001: 121)

7. “Le ‘passage’ ne cesse d’y habiter, et par là de constituer, les etres et les situations, et ceux-​ci
ne sont jamais envisageables que portés par leur propension.” To my mind, this line is equally
elusive in the original.
29

The Myth of Holism in Early China 29

Chinese time, apparently like the Dude in the Coen brothers’ The Big
Lebowski (1998), does not move or flow, or cause things to move or flow. It
simply abides.8
We see in these examples all of the central features of the neo-​Orientalist
stance:

• Extreme linguistic or social constructivism. The Chinese language is fun-

damentally different from Western languages, determining corresponding
incommensurabilities in thought patterns.
• Claims about abstract concepts being expressed in the style of extraordi-
narily elusive—​one might be tempted to say incomprehensible—​language
that is also characteristic of much postmodernist writing. Being freed from
the confines of Western logic also liberates one from norms of clear com-
munication or bourgeois notions of intelligibility.
• Critiques of Plato and/​or Enlightenment thinkers. Particular philosoph-
ical positions in ancient Greece or Enlightenment Europe—​themselves
often caricatured—​stand in for all of Western thought, throughout its en-
tire history.
• Cultures as monolithic and timeless. “Chinese” culture and thought are
uniform and eternal, taking shape in the mists of (presumably) the Shang
Dynasty and remaining constant until the present day. Mutatis mutandis,
the same holds for Western thought.
• Chinese culture as concrete and strongly holistic. This monolithic Chinese
culture is portrayed as uniquely and strongly holistic or concrete, and
contrasted with a dualistic and abstract West.
• The Chinese “Other” as normatively superior. Western dualism and ab-
straction is inherently bad, typically for reasons that are not explicitly clar-
ified or defended by the authors but are assumed to be shared by the reader.
The implicit claim is that Chinese holism is “wholesome,” engaged with
the world, unlike the bloodless abstraction of Western dualism that has
led to science, disenchantment, isolation, neo-​liberalism, the WTO, and
other ills of the modern world. This represents merely a slight reworking

8. Jinmei Yuan similarly links the distinctive Chinese conception of time to the grammar of
Chinese (“Chinese verbs have no particular tense” [Yuan 2006: 136]) and portrays it as the
foundation for an incommensurable system of metaphysics and logic. “Chinese logic is struc-
tured in the present time or the time of the now. This time is subjective time and ‘spreads out’
to more than one possible world” (136).
30

30 Min d an d Bod y in Early China

of the Noble Savage myth that has maintained a hold on the minds of
European intellectuals for centuries.9

The contrast of the lived wholeness of Chinese timeliness to the brutal abstrac-
tion of Western clock time is one manifestation of what I will be calling the
“myth of holism” in early China. Roger Ames, perhaps the most prominent
spokesperson for the position in English-​language scholarship, opens a recent
piece with the observation that “it is a commonplace. . . . to observe that fa-
miliar dualisms that would separate theory from practice and the formal from
the informal are anathema to the holistic, aesthetic cosmology that serves as
interpretative context for the classical Chinese canons” (Ames 2016: 37). In
earlier work, he grounds the structure of the “familiar” or Western forms of
dualism in a basic metaphysics that underlies both ancient Greek and later
Christian thought:

A dualism exists in ex nihilo doctrines because a fundamentally inde-

terminate, unconditioned power is posited as determining the essential
meaning and order of the world. It is a “dualism” because of the rad-
ical separation between the transcendent and nondependent creative
source, and the determinate and dependent object of its creation. . . .
This dualism, in many various forms, has been a prevailing force in the
development of Western-​style cosmogonies. (Ames 1993a: 159)

Such dualism is to be contrasted with Chinese aestheticism or “polarism,” which

has been a major principle of explanation in the initial formulation

and evolution of classical Chinese metaphysics. By “polarism,” I am
referring to a symbiosis: the unity of two organismic processes which
require each other as a necessary condition for being what they are. In
this paradigm, each existent is auto-​generative and self-​determinate.

9. See Buruma & Margalit 2004 for a history of what they term “Occidentalism,” the carica-
ture and normative critique of Western modernism that has its roots in Western Romanticism
but was then exported and reimported through various complex dynamics. As they note, “The
West was the source of the Enlightenment and its secular, liberal offshoots, but also of its
frequently poisonous antidotes. In a way, Occidentalism can be compared to those colorful
textiles exported from France to Tahiti, where they were adopted as native dress, only to be
depicted by Gauguin and others as a typical example of tropical exoticism” (6). Also see Gere
2009 for a revealing account of how the culture of ancient Crete has at times played an analo-
gous role to Orientalized China in Western classical studies.
Another random document with
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home of the maize-plant, and of the deities producing it, and also of the Gods of
Procreation. It was the Region of the Evening Star, Tlauizcalpantecutli, the planet
Venus. In Codex Borgia (sheets 43–46) we seem to see a subdivision of the
Western region into North, South, and West. This region may also be collated with
Tamoanchan, the paradisaical land of abundant maize, where the maize goddess
Tlazolteotl gave birth to her son Centeotl.

Mictlampa, “Region of the Dead,” also falls to be noticed in the section on “heaven
and hell.” Symbolically it is the region of drought.

[Contents]

THE SUPPORTERS OF THE HEAVENS

Just as we gain light upon the subject of the Mexican idea of the universe from
Maya sources, so do we find a similar correspondence in the beliefs of the two
races as regards the conception that the heavens were supported by certain
deities. Thus the Maya believed that the heavens were upheld by four gods called
Bacabs, and we find pictures in the Mexican Codices which depict certain deities
upholding both the heavens and the earth. On sheets 49–52 of Codex Borgia
(upper half) are seen the gods of the four quarters and the four supporters of the
sky, which last are Tlauizcalpantecutli, [61]the Sun-god, Quetzalcoatl, and
Mictlantecutli. On sheets 19–23 of Codex Vaticanus B the four upholders of the
heavens are given as Tlauizcalpantecutli, Uitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, and
Mictlantecutli, and the four terrestrial gods as Xipe Totec, Mictlantecutli, Xochipilli,
and Centeotl. The first four are shown upholding the starry firmament, so that we
are left in no doubt as regards the existence of such a conception as the support of
the heavens by certain gods. The close correspondence between the personnel of
the sky-bearers in the two MSS. proves a fairly universal acceptance of the belief,
especially as Xipe Totec, and Tonatiuh the Sun-god have much in common. 32

[Contents]

THE AZTEC HEAVENS

According to ancient Mexican belief various destinations awaited the dead. Warriors
slain in battle repaired to the region of the sun, where they dwelt in bliss with the
deity who presided over that luminary. Sacrificed captives also fared thence. These
followed the sun in his daily course, crying aloud and beating upon their shields,
and fighting sham battles. “It is also said,” writes Sahagun in his History of the
Affairs of New Spain (Appendix to bk. iii, ch. 3), “that in this heaven are trees and
forests of divers sorts. The offerings which the living of this world make to the dead
duly arrive at their destination, and are received in this heaven. After four years of
sojourn in that place the souls of the dead are changed into divers species of birds
having rich plumage of the most brilliant colours.” These were known as
tzintzonme 33 (“little bird which flies from place to place”), and they flitted from
blossom to blossom on earth as well as in heaven, sucking the rich fragrance from
the tropical blooms of the deep Valleys of Anahuac. This region is the Ciutlampa,
and perhaps the Tamoanchan alluded to above.

Tlalocan.—An even more material paradise was presided over by the water-god or
deity of moisture, Tlaloc. Sahagun [62]calls this a “terrestrial paradise,” “where they
feign that there is surfeit of pleasure and refreshment, void, for a space, of torment.”
In that delectable region there is plenteousness of green maize, of calabashes,
pepper, tomatoes, haricots, and it is fulfilled with variegated blossoms. There dwell
the god Tlaloc and his followers. The persons who gain admittance to this paradise
are those who have been slain by lightning or thunderbolt, the leprous and the
dropsical—those whose deaths have in any way been caused through the agency
of water—for Tlaloc is god of that element. Existence there is perpetual. The
paradise of Tlaloc was situated in the east in a climate of eternal summer.

Homeyoca.—The interpreter of the Codex Vaticanus A states that the abode of the
Creator of the Universe, Tonacatecutli, was Homeyoca or Homeiocan, “place of the
Holy Trinity.” The etymology is vague, but would appear to apply to duality rather
than trinity, a suggestion which is buttressed by the androgynous character of the
creative deities. In an accompanying picture he points out the various departments
of this heaven as “the Red Heaven,” “the Yellow Heaven,” “the White Heaven.”
Young children, he says, went to a specific paradise, but it was thought that they
would return to re-people the world after the third destruction. They were nourished
by a milk-giving tree round which they were seated, getting suck from the branches.

But we have glimpses here and there in Aztec literature of a much more elaborate
series of heavens, thirteen in number. The first contained certain planets, the
second was the home of the Tzitzimimê, who included many of the great gods, the
third that of the Centzon Mimixcoa, or star-warriors, who were many-coloured—
yellow, black, white, red, blue—and provided the sun with food in the shape of
blood. The fourth was inhabited by birds, the fifth by fire-snakes (perhaps comets),
the sixth was the home of the winds, the seventh harboured dust, and in the eighth
dwelt the gods. The remainder were placed at the disposal of the high primal and
creative gods Tonacatecutli and his spouse Tonacaciuatl, [63]whose abode proper
was in the thirteenth and highest heaven. 34

[Contents]

MICTLAMPA AS HADES

The Hades of the Aztec race was Mictlampa, presided over by Mictlantecutli (Lord
of Mictlampa) and his spouse (Mictecaciuatl). The souls of the defunct who fared
thither were those who died of disease, chiefs, great personages, or humbler folk.
On the day of death the priest harangued the deceased, telling him that he was
about to go to a region “where there is neither light nor window,” and where all was
shadow, a veritable land of gloom, the passage to which swarmed with grisly forms
inimical to the soul. It was a vast, trackless, and gloomy desert, having nine
divisions, of which the last, Chiconahuimictlan, was the abode of the lord of the
place. Rank and privilege would appear to have been maintained even in this dark
realm, although all offerings to the dead must first be inspected by Mictlantecutli
himself ere being passed on to their proper owners. Sahagun states that four years
were occupied in journeying to Mictlampa, evidently an error for four days, as
elsewhere he says that the former period was spent within the regions of the dead.
The journey thence was replete with terrors. Says the interpreter of the Codex
Vaticanus A: “In this region of hell they supposed that there existed four gods, or
principal demons, one of whom was superior, whom they called Zitzimatl, who is the
same as Miquitlamtecotl, the great god of hell. Yzpuzteque, the lame demon, was
he who appeared in the streets with the feet of a cock. Nextepehua was the
scatterer of ashes, Contemoque signifies he who descends headforemost; an
allusion being made to the etymology which learned men assign to the name of the
Devil, which signifies deorsum cadens, which mode of descent after souls they
attribute to him from this name and Zon. Yzpuzteque is he whose abode is in the
streets, the same as Satan, he who on a sudden appears sideways. It appears that
they [64]have been acquainted with the Holy Scriptures, although clearer arguments
in proof of this fact are adduced in the course of the following pages. They say that
these four gods or demons have goddesses.”
These and other dread beings, according to the same MS., rendered the hellward
journey terrible in the extreme, and an attempt was made to mitigate the terrors of
the passage between the two worlds by means of passports of much the same
character as the spells in the Egyptian “Book of the Dead,” which franked the soul
past the numerous demons and dangers which awaited it. The first paper served to
pass him by two mountains which threatened to clash together and crush him. The
second saved him from the maw of a huge snake. Others helped him to face the
lurking terrors of eight deserts and eight hills, and to avoid the grim crocodile
Xochitonal. A wind of sharp flint knives then attacked him. Lastly he came to the
river Chiconahuopan (Nine Waters), which he crossed on the back of a red-
coloured dog which accompanied him and which was killed for that purpose by
having an arrow thrust down its throat. It is not clear whether this dog acted as a
guide to Mictlampa, or whether it preceded the soul, but it would seem that its
master found it awaiting him when he came to the banks of the river, in the passage
of which it assisted him. It kept its vigil on the opposite bank, however, and had to
swim the river ere it could reach him.

The deceased then came before Mictlantecutli, to whom he made suitable gifts—
cotton, perfumes, and a mantle. He was told to which sphere he must go. It is
obvious that Mictlampa was not so much a place of punishment as a place of the
dead, a Hades, where the souls of the good and evil were alike consigned. Its
locality is partially fixed, for it is “the place where the sun slept,” and, like the
Egyptian Amenti, it was therefore antipodean, or occupied the centre of the earth.
After a four years’ sojourn in this dark monarchy the soul was supposed to come to
a place where, according to the interpreter of the Codex Vaticanus, it enjoyed a
measure of rest. [65]

1 Translation in Kingsborough, vol. vi, p. 198. ↑

2 Op. cit., p. 207. ↑
3 L. Spence, The Popol Vuh (1908), description of bk. i; Brasseur de Bourbourg, Le Vuh Popol,
Paris, 1861. ↑
4 An important work republished with a Latin translation by Dr. W. Lehmann under the title of
Traditions des anciens Mexicains (Jour. Soc. Amer. Paris, n.s., vol. iii. Paris, 1906. pp. 239–
298). ↑
5 Kingsborough’s translation, vol. vi, p. 171. ↑
6 Chavero’s edition, Mexico, 1892, p. 21. ↑
7 See the Popol Vuh, bk. i., for a Quiche analogy to this tale of human degradation. ↑
8 Chavero’s edition, Mexico, 1891, pp. ii ff. ↑
9 Hist. de Tlaxcala, in Ternaux-Compan’s Voyages, tom. lxxxvi, p. 5; also edition by A. Chavero,
Mexico, 1892. ↑
10 Hist. Antigua de Mexico, bk. i, c. 4. ↑
11 First Relacion. ↑
12 Historia Eccles. ↑
13 A variant myth makes Quetzalcoatl the god who seeks bones in the underworld from which to
make the human race. As he returns, the bones drop to earth and quails gnaw them. Ciuacoatl
pounds them into a paste from which men are formed. The Anales de Quauhtitlan makes the gods
create man from the cinders of the worlds destroyed in the four epochs. ↑
14 Probably because of his status as god of twins and of duplicates of all kinds. ↑
15Obviously this sacred bundle is in the same category with the “medicine-bundle” of the North
American Indian tribes, and it would seem that from such a form certain of the Mexican gods
were evolved. ↑
16 Bk. vii, c. 2. ↑
17 For further information regarding this incident see Boturini, Idea, section iii, 14, “Tlatocaocelotl.” ↑
18 These metamorphoses, or at least the first two, are obviously founded upon Xolotl’s dual
characteristic as a twin. The resemblance between his name and that of the little amphibious
animal axolotl is due to the monstrous character of both. ↑
19 Hist. du Tlaxcallan in Ternaux-Compan’s Nouvelles Annales des Voyages (tom. xcix, p. 129). ↑
20 Hist. Antig. de Mexico, tom. i, p. 7. ↑
21 Storia Antica del Messico, tom. ii, p. 7. ↑
22 Hist. Eccles, p. 81. ↑
23 Curtin, Creation Myths of Primitive America, Intro., p. 35. ↑
24 Relaciones (Chavero’s edition; Mexico, 1891), p. 11. Hist. Chichimeca (Chavero’s edition; Mexico,
1892), p. 21. ↑
25 Among the American races the soul was thought of as residing in the bones. See Brinton, Myths
of the New World, pp. 295 ff., 299, 321. ↑
26 Anales de Quauhtitlan. ↑
27 Translation of interpretation in Kingsborough, vol. vi, p. 127. ↑
28 P. 120. ↑
29 See Rady y Delgado’s reproduction of this Codex, Madrid, 1892. ↑
30 The colours associated with the points of the compass were: East, yellow; north, red; west, blue;
south, white. ↑
31 For the further relation of the gods to time and space see the appendix on the tonalamatl. ↑
32 See myth of the creation of the four supporters, supra. ↑
33 Humming-birds. The warriors seem to have been metamorphosed into the naualli or bird-disguise
of Uitzilopochtli, the humming-bird god of war. ↑
34 Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas. I believe these different heavens to have resulted
from the clashing and mingling of rival cults. ↑
[Contents]
CHAPTER III
 THE GREAT GODS

[Contents]

METHOD OF TREATMENT

In the section descriptive of the gods, each divinity is dealt with separately. The need
for system and orderly arrangement in the study of Mexican Mythology is clamant. In
the hope that future students of the subject may be spared the Herculean task of
separating the mythology of the Mexican people from their history, I have thought it
best to arrange my material in as systematic a fashion as its complex character
permits.

The plan employed is a simple one. I have prefaced the description of each god with a
table containing the following information concerning him: Area of Worship, Name,
Minor Names, Relationship, Calendar-place, Compass-direction, Symbol, Festivals. In
some cases where, for example, a god has no festival or no minor names, the item
relating to such information is, of course, absent.

The description proper of each deity begins with an account of his Aspect and Insignia,
as observed in the several codices and paintings, manuscripts, vases, or statuary. 1 A
section is devoted to festivals celebrated in his honour, another deals with the
priesthood specially attendant on him, and a further paragraph with the temples in
which he was worshipped. There follows a précis of all known myths relating to him. In
certain instances, too, hymns and prayers offered up to [66]him are quoted. The last
section deals with his nature and status, so far as I have been able to elucidate these.

[Contents]

UITZILOPOCHTLI = “HUMMING-BIRD WIZARD”

Area of Worship: Mexico.

Minor Names:
Tetzateotl—“Terrible God.”
Tetzahuitl—“The Raging.”
Ilhuicatl Xoxouhqui—“The Blue Heaven.”
Mexitli—“Hare of the Maguey.”
Compass Directions: The South; upper region.
Festivals:
Toxcatl, the fifth month; first of tlaxochimaco, the ninth month.
Panquetzaliztli, the fifteenth month.
Movable feast ce tecpatl.
Relationships:
Son of Coatlicue.
Brother of the Centzonuitznaua.
Brother of Coyolxauhqui.
One of the Tzitzimimê.

Uitzilopochtli.

(From Codex Borbonicus, sheet 34.)

 Paynal. “Messenger” of
Uitzilopochtli. Uitzilopochtli (after Duran).

(Sahagun MS.)

UITZILOPOCHTLI.

ASPECT AND INSIGNIA

Face-paint.—Blue and yellow horizontal stripes, the yellow known as piloechinolli

(“face-painting of children”) made of children’s excrement, in allusion, perhaps, to his
character of a young or new-born god. He occasionally wears the stellar mask, 2 like
Mixcoatl and Camaxtli.

Body-paint.—Blue.

Dress.—Usually the humming-bird mantle, pictographic of his name. His head is

surmounted by a panache of feathers. On his breast is a white ring made from a
mussel-shell, like those of Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipocâ, and Paynal, which is called
eteocuitlaanauauh (“his golden ring”) or eltezcatl (“his breast mirror”). Perhaps the best
representation of him is in Codex Borbonicus (sheet 34). [67]
Weapons.—Shield (teueuelli), made of reeds, with eagle’s down adhering to it in five
places in the form of a quincunx. He carries spears tipped with tufts of down instead of
stone points (tlauacomalli), the weapons of those doomed to a gladiatorial death, the
fire-snake xiuhcoatl as an atlatl, or spear-thrower, and the bow, which he was
supposed to have invented or introduced into Mexico. The flag held by him on some
occasions represents the panquetzaliztli festival in Codices Telleriano-Remensis and
Vaticanus A.

COYOLXAUHQUI, SISTER OF UITZILOPOCHTLI.

(See p. 324.)

Variations.—He is frequently to be observed wearing the insignia of the stellar gods of

war and hunting (Mixcoatl, Camaxtli).

According to Seler (Commentary on the Codex Vaticanus B, p. 91), Uitzilopochtli

figures in that MS. as showing “in a general way the devices and the dress-badges of
the fire-god,” differing, however, in colour and painting. When found along with
Tezcatlipocâ as Ruler of the Southern Heaven, in Codex Fejérváry-Mayer (sheet 25),
he is seated on a jaguar-skin seat, enveloped in a long robe of a light blue colour, with
balls of downy feathers. He wears the aztaxelli or forked heron-feather ornament on his
head and has the yellow face-paint alluded to above. In the Sahagun MS. (Bib. del
Palacio) he is represented as wearing on his back the “dragon’s head” alluded to in the
text. In the Duran MS. (2 o, plate 2 a), drawn by a European hand, the humming-bird
headdress forms a helmet-mask, and in the Codex Ramirez (Juan de Tobar), in which
the figure is Europeanized almost out of recognition, the same is the case, but the
shield-marking is incorrect, consisting as it does of seven tufts of down instead of five.

Clavigero (tom. ii, pp. 17–19) says of Uitzilopochtli’s insignia: “Upon his head he carried
a beautiful crest, shaped like the beak of a bird, upon his neck a collar shaped like ten
figures of the human heart. His statue was of an enormous size, in the posture of a
man seated on a blue-coloured bench, from the four corners of which issued four
snakes. His forehead was blue, but his face was covered with a golden mask, while
another of the same kind covered [68]the back of his head. In his hand he carried a
large blue, twisted club, in his left a shield in which appeared five balls of feathers
disposed in the form of a cross, and from the upper part of the shield rose a golden flag
with four arrows, which the Mexicans believed to have been sent to them from heaven.
His body was girt with a large golden snake, and adorned with lesser figures of animals
made of gold and precious stones, which ornaments and insignia had each their
peculiar meaning.”

Acosta says of his appearance: “The chiefest idoll of Mexico was, as I have sayde,
Vitziliputzli. It was an image of wood like to a man, set upon a stoole of the coloure of
azure, in a brankard or litter, in every corner was a piece of wood in forme of a
serpent’s head. The stoole signified that he was set in heaven. This idol had all the
forehead azure, and had a band of azure under the nose from one ear to another.
Upon his head he had a rich plume of feathers like to the beak of a small bird, the
which was covered on the top with gold burnished very brown. He had in his left hand a
small target, with the figures of five pineapples made of white feathers set in a cross.
And from above issued forth a crest of gold, and at his sides hee hadde foure dartes,
which (the Mexicaines say) had been sent from heaven which shall be spoken of. In his
right hand he had an azured staff cutte in the fashion of a waving snake. All those
ornaments with the rest hee had, carried his sence as the Mexicaines doe shew.” 3

Solis writes of his aspect as follows: “Opposite … sat Huitzilopochtli, on a throne

supported by a blue globe. From this, supposed to represent the heavens, projected
four staves with serpents’ heads, by which the priests carried the god when he was
brought before the public. The image bore upon its head a bird of wrought plumes,
whose beak and crest were of burnished gold. The feathers expressed horrid cruelty,
and were made still more ghastly by two strips of blue, one on the brow and the other
on the nose. Its [69]right hand leaned, as on a staff, upon a crooked serpent. Upon the
left arm was a buckler bearing five white plums, arranged in the form of a cross, and
the hand grasped four arrows, venerated as heaven-descended.” 4

Herrera says that his idol was a gigantic image of stone, covered with a lawn called
nacar, beset with pearls, precious stones, and pieces of gold. It had for a girdle great
snakes of gold, and a counterfeit visor with eyes of glass. 5

Torquemada writes: “In his right hand a dart or long blue pole, in the left a shield, his
face barred with lines of blue. His forehead was decorated with a tuft of green feathers,
his left leg was lean and feathered, and both thighs and arms were barred with blue.” 6

The Sahagun MS. states that “he wears a panache of yellow parrot feathers stuck
together, and having a bunch of quetzal-feathers at the tip. His espitzalli is over his
forehead. The face or mask is striped in various colours, and the ear-plug is made of
the feathers of the blue cotinga. On his back is the fire-snake dress and on his arm he
has a quetzal-feather. At the back he is girded with a blue net cloth, and his leg is
striped with blue. Bells and shells decorate his feet, and he is shod with sandals of the
type usually worn by persons of high degree. His shield is the teueuelli with a bundle of
arrows without points stuck in it, and in one hand he holds a serpent-staff.”

Sahagun (c. xxii, bk. iv) describes the insignia employed at the god’s festival of ce
tecpatl. These were the quetzalquemitl, or mantle of green quetzal-feathers, the
tozquemitl, the mantle made of the yellow feathers of the toztli, a bird of the parrot
species, the Uitzitzilquemitl, or mantle of humming-bird’s feathers, “and others less
rich.”

FESTIVALS

The first festival of Uitzilopochtli was the tlaxochimaco, of which Sahagun says: “The
ninth month was styled [70]tlaxochimaco. A festival was held on the first day of this
month in honour of Huitzilopochtli, god of war, when he was offered the first flowers of
the year. The night before this festival everybody killed chickens and dogs with which to
make tamalli and other things good to eat. Very soon after the first glimmerings of dawn
on the day of the festival, the attendants of the idols adorned the statue of
Huitzilopochtli with flowers. The images of the other gods were decked with garlands
and wreaths of flowers, and the same was done to all the other idols of the calpulli 7 and
telpochcalli. 8 The calpixque, 9 the principal people, and the macehualli 10 covered the
statues in their houses with flowers. These preparations being completed, the viands
prepared during the previous night were partaken of, and shortly after this repast a
dance was engaged in, in which the nobles mingled with the women, taking them by
the hand, and even going the length of embracing them by placing their arms round
their necks. The usual movements of the areyto 11 were not performed, the dancers
moving step by step, to the strains of the musicians and singers, who stood, some
distance away, at the foot of a round altar called momoztli. They sang thus until night,
not only in the courts of the temples, but also in the houses of people of rank and of the
macehualli, while the aged of both sexes indulged deeply in pulque; but young people
were not permitted to touch it, and anyone allowing them to drink it was severely
punished.”

Toxcatl.—For this festival see under Tezcatlipocâ, to whom it was also and more
especially sacred.

Panquetzalitztli.—The following account of this festival is summarized from Sahagun’s

pages: For twenty-four days prior to the incidence of the festival the priests did
penitence. They hung branches upon the oratories and shrines of the gods of the
mountains, and green reeds and leaves of the maguey-plant. At the end of the
quecholli festival everyone [71]took to dancing and singing, especially to the song or
hymn of Uitzilopochtli. Nine days before the sacrifice those doomed to die bathed in the
fountain called Uitzilotl (humming-bird water) in the village of Uitzilopochco. The old
men went to seek nine bunches of the leaves of the tree called aueuetl (“old one of the
waters”—the Cupressus distica). The faces of the doomed ones were painted in the
colours of the god, yellow and blue in transverse bands, and adorned with his insignia.

After five days of penitential exercises mingled with dancing and singing, and on the
day before the festival, the captives rose with dawn and betook themselves to the
houses of those who had dedicated them to the slaughter, preceded by a man carrying
a vessel full of black ink or red ochre or blue tincture. On arriving at the houses of those
who had devoted them to death, they dipped their hands in the vessel and pressed
them on the gates and the pillars of the dwelling, so that the imprint remained. 12 They
then entered the kitchen of the house and walked several times round the furnace.
Then they marched in procession to the temple, accompanied by porters bearing rich
attire, which the captives donned. The hair was then taken from their heads to be kept
“as a relic.” They were then given cylindrical cakes to eat, which must be held on the
point of a maguey thorn and not between the fingers. With the dawn of day the god
Paynal, the herald of Uitzilopochtli, descended from the temple of Uitzilopochtli. Four
captives were then slain, two in honour of “the god Oappatzan.” Paynal, borne by four
“necromancers,” then took the road to Tlatelolco, whence he passed to Nonoalco, the
priest of the temple there receiving him with the representative of the god Quauitlicac,
“his companion” (see “Myths”). The images were then carried to Tlaxotlan and
Popotlan, where other captives were slain. Then the procession took its way to
Chapultepec, passing the hill of that name and crossing [72]the little river Izquitlan, at
the temple of which other captives called Izquiteca (“who eat roasted maize”) were
sacrificed. They then crossed to the right under Coyoacan, passing by way of
Tepetocan to Acachinanco.

During the time they made this progress the slaves who were about to die engaged in a
skirmish. They divided themselves into two parties, the Uitznauatl (“They of the Thorny
Wizard”), the other unnamed. The former seem to have been professional soldiers
armed with mock weapons; the others slaves, armed with maquahuitls, wooden swords
set with obsidian flakes. On Paynal’s return those who watched them from the summit
of the temple, seeing the banner of the god (epaniztli), cried out, “Mexicans, cease your
strife, the lord Paynal has come.” The warriors in the patrol of Paynal then rushed to
the summit of the temple, where they arrived in a breathless condition. They placed
their idol beside the paste image of Uitzilopochtli. Their ears were pierced by the priest.
They descended again, carrying an image of Uitzilopochtli made of paste, which they
divided, each bearing his own portion to his own house, where he made festival with
his parents and neighbours. A tour of the temple was then made, the captives walking
in front.

A priest then descended from the summit of the temple bearing a sheaf of white papers
in his hand, which he held up to the four cardinal points in turn, afterwards throwing
them into a mortar called quauhxicalco 13 (“cup of the eagles”). He was followed by
another holding a very long pine-torch called xiuhcoatl (“fire-snake”), shaped like fire.
(This was the fire-snake weapon with which one of Uitzilopochtli’s followers had killed
his rebellious sister Coyolxauhqui). This was cast burning into the vessel containing the
papers, which were consumed. Paynal reappeared, and the slaves were sacrificed
according to rank to the sound of conch-shells. All then returned home, where octli of
special strength was drunk, festivities engaged in, and presents of [73]wearing apparel
distributed to friends and dependants (bk. ii, c. 34).

This festival took place at the period of the winter solstice, when the sun has removed
farthest to the south. The burning of the papers by the xiuhcoatl, and the fact that the
fire-festival of the new period of fifty-two years, the making of the new fire, was usually
postponed to coincide with it, show it to be a fire-feast; for in his “avatar” of the sun
Uitzilopochtli was a fire-god.

Torquemada states that the priest of Quetzalcoatl hurled a dart into the breast of the
paste image of Uitzilopochtli, which fell. He then pulled the “heart” out of it, giving it to
the king. The body was then divided among the men, no woman being allowed to eat of
it. The ceremony was called teoqualo, i.e. “god is eaten.” 14

MYTHS
Regarding Uitzilopochtli, Clavigero says: “Huitzilopochtli, or Mexitli, was the god of war;
the deity the most honoured by the Mexicans, and their chief protector. Of this god
some said he was a pure spirit, others that he was born of a woman, but without the
assistance of a man, and described his birth in the following manner: There lived, said
they, in Coatepec, a place near to the ancient city of Tula, a woman called Coatlicue,
mother of the Centzonhuiznahuas, who was extremely devoted to the worship of the
gods. One day, as she was employed, according to her usual custom, in walking in the
temple, she beheld descending in the air a ball made of various feathers. She seized it
and kept it in her bosom, intending afterwards to employ the feathers in decoration of
the altar; but when she wanted it after her walk was at an end she could not find it, at
which she was extremely surprised, and her wonder was very greatly increased when
she began to perceive from that moment that she was pregnant. Her pregnancy
advanced till it was discovered by her children, who, although they could not
themselves suspect their mother’s virtue, yet fearing [74]the disgrace she would suffer
upon her delivery, determined to prevent it by putting her to death. They could not take
their resolution so secretly as to conceal it from their mother, who, while she was in
deep affliction at the thought of dying by the hands of her own children, heard an
unexpected voice issue from her womb, saying, ‘Be not afraid, mother, I shall save you
with the greatest honour to yourself and glory to me.’

“Her hard-hearted sons, guided and encouraged by their sister Cojolxauhqui, who had
been the most keenly bent upon the deed, were now just upon the point of executing
their purpose, when Huitzilopochtli was born, with a shield in his left hand, a spear in
his right, and a crest of green feathers on his head; his left leg adorned with feathers,
and his face, arms, and thighs streaked with blue lines. As soon as he came into the
world he displayed a twisted pine, and commanded one of his soldiers, called
Tochchancalqui, to fell with it Cojolxauhqui, as the one who had been the most guilty;
and he himself attacked the rest with so much fury that, in spite of their efforts, their
arms, or their entreaties, he killed them all, plundered their houses, and presented the
spoils to his mother. Mankind were so terrified by this event, that from that time they
called him Tetzahuitl (terror) and Tetzauhteotl (terrible god).

“This was the god who, as they said, becoming the protector of the Mexicans,
conducted them for so many years in their pilgrimage, and at length settled them where
they afterwards founded the great city of Mexico. They raised to him that superb
temple, so much celebrated, even by the Spaniards, in which were annually holden
three solemn festivals in the fifth, ninth, and fifteenth months; besides those kept every
four years, every thirteen years, and at the beginning of every century. His statue was
of gigantic size, in the posture of a man seated on a blue-coloured bench, from the four
corners of which issued four huge snakes. His forehead was blue, but his face was
covered with a golden mask, while another of the same kind covered the back of his
head. Upon his head he carried a beautiful [75]crest, shaped like the beak of a bird;
upon his neck a collar consisting of ten figures of the human heart; in his right hand a
large blue, twisted club; in his left a shield, on which appeared five balls of feathers
disposed in the form of a cross, and from the upper part of the shield rose a golden flag
with four arrows, which the Mexicans pretended to have been sent to them from
heaven to perform those glorious actions which we have seen in their history. His body
was girt with a large golden snake and adorned with lesser figures of animals made of
gold and precious stones, which ornaments and insignia had each their peculiar
meaning. They never deliberated upon making war without imploring the protection of
this god, with prayers and sacrifices; and offered up a greater number of human victims
to him than to any other of the gods.” 15

Boturini says of this god: “While the Mexicans were pushing their conquests and their
advance toward the country now occupied by them, they had a very renowned captain,
or leader, called Huitziton. He it was that in these long and perilous journeys through
unknown lands, sparing himself no fatigue, took care of the Mexicans. The fable says
of him that, being full of years and wisdom, he was one night caught up in sight of his
army and of all his people, and presented to the god Tezauhteotl, that is to say the
Frightful God, who, being in the shape of a horrible dragon, commanded him to be
seated at his right hand, saying: ‘Welcome, O valiant captain; very grateful am I for thy
fidelity in my service and in governing my people. It is time that thou shouldest rest,
since thou art already old, and since thy great deeds raise thee up to the fellowship of
the immortal gods. Return then to thy sons and tell them not to be afflicted if in future
they cannot see thee as a mortal man; for from the nine heavens thou shalt look down
propitious upon them. And not only that, but also, when I strip the vestments of
humanity from thee, I will leave to thine afflicted and orphan people thy bones and thy
skull so that they may be comforted in their sorrow, and may [76]consult thy relics as to
the road they have to follow: and in due time the land shall be shown them that I have
destined for them, a land in which they shall hold wide empire, being respected of the
other nations.’

“Huitziton did according to these instructions, and after a sorrowful interview with his
people, disappeared, carried away by the gods. The weeping Mexicans remained with
the skull and bones of their beloved captain, which they carried with them till they
arrived in New Spain, and at the place where they built the great city of Tenochtitlan, or
Mexico. All this time the devil spoke to them through this skull of Huitziton, often asking
for the immolation of men and women, from which thing originated those bloody
sacrifices, practised afterwards by this nation with so much cruelty on prisoners of war.
This deity was called, in early as well as in later times, Huitzilopochtli—for the principal
men believed that he was seated at the left hand of Tezcatlipocâ—a name derived from
the original name Huitziton, and from the word mapoche, ‘left hand.’ ” 16
Sahagun says of Uitzilopochtli that, being originally a man, he was a sort of Hercules,
of great strength and warlike, a great destroyer of towns and slayer of men. In war he
had been a living fire, very terrible to his adversaries; and the device he bore was a
dragon’s head, frightful in the extreme, and casting fire out of its mouth. A great wizard
he had been, and sorcerer, transforming himself into the shape of divers birds and
beasts. While he lived, the Mexicans esteemed this man very highly for his strength
and dexterity in war, and when he died they honoured him as a god, offering slaves,
and sacrificing them in his presence. And they looked to it that those slaves were well
fed and well decorated with such ornaments as were in use, with earrings and visors;
all for the greater honour of the god. In Tlaxcala also they had a deity called Camaxtli,
who was similar to this Huitzilopochtli. 17

The myth of Uitzilopochtli, as given by Sahagun, may be condensed as follows: [77]

Under the shadow of the mountain of Coatepec, near the Toltec city of Tollan, there
dwelt a pious widow called Coatlicue, the mother of a tribe of Indians called
Centzonuitznaua, who had a daughter called Coyolxauhqui, and who daily repaired to
a small hill with the intention of offering up prayers to the gods in a penitent spirit of
piety. Whilst occupied in her devotions one day she was surprised by a small ball of
brilliantly coloured feathers falling upon her from on high. She was pleased by the
bright variety of its hues and placed it in her bosom, intending to offer it up to the Sun-
god. Some time afterwards she learnt that she was to become the mother of another
child. Her sons, hearing of this, rained abuse upon her, being incited to humiliate her in
every possible way by their sister Coyolxauhqui.

Coatlicue went about in fear and anxiety; but the spirit of her unborn infant came and
spoke to her and gave her words of encouragement, soothing her troubled heart. Her
sons, however, were resolved to wipe out what they considered an insult to their race
by the death of their mother, and took counsel with one another to slay her. They attired
themselves in their war-gear, and arranged their hair after the manner of warriors going
to battle. But one of their number, Quauitlicac, relented and confessed the perfidy of his
brothers to the still unborn Uitzilopochtli, who replied to him: “O uncle, 18 hearken
attentively to what I have to say to you. I am fully informed of what is going to happen.”
With the intention of slaying their mother, the Indians went in search of her. At their
head marched their sister, Coyolxauhqui. They were armed to the teeth, and carried
bundles of darts, with which they intended to kill the luckless Coatlicue.

Quauitlicac climbed the mountain to acquaint Uitzilopochtli with the news that his
brothers were approaching to kill their mother.

“Mark well where they are at,” replied the infant god. “To what place have they
advanced?” [78]
“To Tzompantitlan,” responded Quauitlicac.

Later on Uitzilopochtli asked: “Where may they be now?”

“At Coaxalco,” was the reply.

Once more Uitzilopochtli asked to what point his enemies had advanced.

“They are now at Petlac,” Quauitlicac replied.

Quauitlicac later informed them that his brothers and sister had arrived at the middle of
the mountain. At the moment they arrived Uitzilopochtli was born, attired in full war
panoply. He ordered one named Tochâncalqui (inhabitant of our house) to attack his
sister with the fire-snake xiuhcoatl, and with a blow he shattered Coyolxauhqui in
pieces. Her head rested upon the mountain of Coatepec. The infant god then pursued
his brethren four times round the mountain. Several fell into the lake and were
drowned. Others he slew, only a few escaped, and these were banished to Uitzlampa
in the south. 19

Torquemada says of Uitzilopochtli: “Huitzilopochtli, the ancient god and guide of the
Mexicans, is a name variously derived. Some say it is composed of two words: huitzilin,
‘a humming-bird,’ and tlahuipuchtli, ‘a sorcerer that spits fire.’ Others say that the
second part of the name comes not from tlahuipuchtli, but from opuchtli, that is, ‘the left
hand’; so that the whole name, Huitzilopochtli, would mean ‘the shining-feathered left
hand.’ For this idol was decorated with rich and resplendent feathers on the left arm.
And this god it was that led out the Mexicans from their own land and brought them into
Anahuac.

“Some held him to be a purely spiritual being, others affirmed that he had been born of
a woman, and related his history after the following fashion: Near the city of Tulla there
is a mountain called Coatepec, that is to say the Mountain of the Snake, where a
woman lived, named Coatlicue or Snake-petticoat. She was the mother of many sons
called Centzunhuitznahua, and of a daughter whose name was Coyolxauhqui.
Coatlicue was very devout and careful in [79]the service of the gods, and she occupied
herself ordinarily in sweeping and cleaning the sacred places of that mountain. It
happened that one day, occupied with these duties, she saw a little ball of feathers
floating down to her through the air, which she taking, as we have already related,
found herself in a short time pregnant.

“Upon this all her children conspired against her to slay her, and came armed against
her, the daughter Coyolxauhqui being the ringleader and most violent of all. Then,
immediately, Huitzilopochtli was born, fully armed, having a shield called teuehueli in
his left hand, in his right a dart, or long blue pole, and all his face barred over with lines
of the same colour. His forehead was decorated with a great tuft of green feathers, his
left leg was lean and feathered, and both thighs and the arms barred with blue. He then
caused to appear a serpent made of torches, teas, called xiuhcoatl; and he ordered a
soldier called Tochaucalqui to light this serpent, and taking it with him to embrace
Coyolxauhqui. From this embrace the matricidal daughter immediately died, and
Huitzilopochtli himself slew all her brethren and took their spoil, enriching his mother
therewith. After this he was surnamed Tetzahuitl, that is to say Fright, or Amazement,
and held as a god, born of a mother without a father—as the great god of battles, for in
these his worshippers found him very favourable to them.” 20

“Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas.” 21—Collecting and summarizing the
scattered notices regarding Uitzilopochtli in the above-named work, we find it stated
that he was the fourth and youngest son of Tonacatecutli and Tonacaciuatl, his elder
brothers being the Red Tezcatlipocâ, the Black Tezcatlipocâ, and Quetzalcoatl.
Uitzilopochtli is here also called Omitecatl, “and for another name Magueycoatl (Snake
of the Maguey). He was called Ochilobos (the Spanish rendering of Uitzilopochtli)
because he was left-handed and was chief god to those of Mexico and their god of war.
He was born without flesh but with bones, and thus he remained six hundred years, in
which nothing [80]was made, ‘neither the gods nor their father.’ Taking counsel with
Quetzalcoatl, they fashioned the sun, then they made a man, Oxomoco, and a woman,
Cipactonal, commanding him to till the earth and her to spin and weave, and created
other things.”

HYMNS

In the Sahagun MS. the following hymns or songs relate to Uitzilopochtli:—

THE SONG OF UITZILOPOCHTLI

Uitzilopochtli the warrior, no one is my equal;

Not in vain have I put on the vestment of yellow feathers,
For through me the sun has risen (i.e. the time of sacrifice appears).

II
 The man out of the cold land knew (through him) a baneful omen.
He had taken a foot from the man out of the cold land.

III

In the place of Tlaxotlan, the feathers were distributed

With which the war chieftains stuck themselves.
My God is named Tepanquizqui (“He who overcomes the people”).

IV

He makes himself feared, the god of Tlaxotlan,

Dust whirls upon the God of Tlaxotlan,
Dust whirls upon him.

Our enemies, the people from Amantlan, assemble; meet me there.

So will in their own house the enemy be. Meet me there.

VI

Our enemies the people of Pipitlan assemble; meet me there.

So will in their own house the enemy be.

This song is probably a chant sung before sacrifice to the god. The line “He had taken
a foot from the man out of the cold land” seems to allude to the maiming of one of the
gods by Uitzilopochtli, or is symbolic of the punishment of a human enemy by rendering
him unfit for war through the [81]amputation of one of his feet. Tezcatlipocâ, one of
whose names was Yaotzin, “the enemy,” is frequently represented as having but one
foot, and the phrase “the man from the cold land,” i.e. the North, applies almost
certainly to him. The rest of the song relates to the peoples with whom the Mexicans
were frequently at war.

SONG OF THE SHIELD

 I

In his shield of the young wife the great warrior chieftain was born.
In his shield of the young wife (or maid) the great warrior chieftain was born.

II

He who gained his heroic title on the serpent mountain

In his (warrior) face-painting, (and with the shield) teueuelli.
No one in truth rises.
The earth quakes
As he put on his (warrior) face-painting (and his shield) teueuelli.

The first couplet is obscure to me, and seems to refer to a lost myth, which perhaps
stated that the god was born of a virgin. The second strophe, of course, relates to the
slaughter by Uitzilopochtli of his brothers the Centzonuitznaua.

PRIESTHOOD

The high priest of Uitzilopochtli was called Totec tlamacazque, who also bore the name
of Quetzalcoatl (an honorary title, originating out of the belief that the god of that name
was regarded as the prototype of all religious orders), and who, along with the Tlaloc
tlamacazque, occupied the chief religious office in Mexico. He was selected for his
piety and general fitness. 22

TEMPLE

Acosta describes Uitzilopochtli’s great temple at Mexico as follows: “There was in

Mexico this Cu, the famous Temple of Vitziliputzli, it had a very great circuite, and within
a faire Court. It was built of great stones, in fashion [82]of snakes tied one to another,
and the circuite was called Coatepantli, which is, a circuite of snakes: vppon the toppe
of every chamber and oratorie where the Idolls were, was a fine piller wrought with
small stones, blacke as ieate, set in goodly order, the ground raised vp with white and
red, which below gave a great light. Vpon the top of the pillar were battlements very
artificially made, wrought like snailes (caracoles), supported by two Indians of stone,
sitting, holding candlesticks in their hands, the which were like Croisants garnished and
enriched at the ends, with yellow and greene feathers and long fringes of the same.
Within the circuite of this court there were many chambers of religious men, and others
that were appointed for the service of the Priests and Popes, for so they call the
soveraigne Priests which serve the Idoll.

“There were foure gates or entries, at the east, west, north, and south; at every one of
these gates beganne a fair cawsey of two or three leagues long. There was in the
midst of the lake where the citie of Mexico is built, four large cawseies in crosse, which
did much to beautify it; vpon every portall or entry was a God or Idoll having the visage
turned to the causey, right against the Temple gate of Vitziliputzli. There were thirtie
steppes of thirtie fadome long, and they divided from the circuit of the court by a streete
that went betwixt them; vpon the toppe of these steppes there was a walke thirtie foote
broad, all plaistered with chalke, in the midst of which walke was a Palisado artificially
made of very high trees, planted in order a fadome one from another. These trees were
very bigge, and all pierced with small holes from the foote to the top, and there were
roddes did runne from one tree to another, to the which were chained or tied many
dead mens heades. Vpon every rod were twentie sculles, and these ranckes of sculles
continue from the foote to the toppe of the tree. This Palisado was full of dead mens
sculls from one end to the other, the which was a wonderfull mournefull sight and full of
horror. These were the heads of such as had beene sacrificed; for after they were dead
and had eaten the flesh, the head was [83]delivered to the Ministers of the Temple,
which tied them in this sort vntil they fell off by morcells; and then had they a care to set
others in their places. Vpon the toppe of the temple were two stones or chappells, and
in them were the two Idolls which I have spoken of, Vitziliputzli, and his companion
Tlaloc. These Chappells were carved and graven very artificially, and so high, that to
ascend vp to it, there was a staire of stone of sixscore steppes. Before these
Chambers or Chappells, there was a Court of fortie foot square, in the midst thereof,
was a high stone of five hand breadth, poynted in fashion of a Pyramide, it was placed
there for the sacrificing of men; for being laid on their backes, it made their bodies to
bend, and so they did open them and pull out their hearts, as I shall shew heereafter.” 23

NATURE AND STATUS

Prolonged deliberation upon the nature of Uitzilopochtli has led me to the conclusion
that he was originally a personification of the maguey-plant (Agave americana). The
grounds upon which I base this hypothesis are as follows: A certain variety of the
maguey-plant, or metl, was known to the Aztecâ of Mexico-Tenochtitlan as Uitzitzilteutli,
or “beak of the humming-bird,” probably because of the resemblance the long spiky
thorns (uitztli) with which it is covered bear to the sharp beak of that bird (the uitzitzilin),
which suspends its tiny, web-like nest from the leaves of the plant in question. The
connection of Uitzilopochtli with the maguey-plant is also proved by at least two of his
subsidiary titles. Thus in the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas 24 he is alluded
to as Magueycoatl, “Serpent of the Maguey,” and he was also known as Mexitli, or
“Hare of the Maguey,” a title from which one of the quarters of Tenochtitlan, and later
the entire city, took its name of Mexico. At the panquetzaliztli festival held in his honour,
the warriors who skirmished on his side in mimicry of his combat with the
[84]Centzonuitznaua were said to take the part of Uitznauatl, 25 or “Thorn that speaks
oracularly.” In certain of the place-names which are hieroglyphically figured in the
codices, too, the element of his name is depicted as a maguey-plant. Sahagun further
states that the proprietors of the maguey plantations and the publicans who sold octli or
pulque cut their plants so that they might yield their juice during the sign ce tecpatl, the
movable feast of Uitzilopochtli, in the belief that, were they tapped at this time, they
would yield abundantly. 26

Etymologically, there is good evidence that Uitzilopochtli originally represented the

maguey. The word uitztli means “thorn,” and appears in such compounds as
Uitzlampa, “Place of Thorns” (the South), and Uitznauatl, “The Thorn that speaks,”
which, as we have seen, was another, and probably an older, title of the god. Uitzoctli,
too, as Seler has indicated, 27 means “pricking pulque,” newly fermented octli. It would
seem, then, that the name Uitzilopochtli, until now generally translated as “Humming-
bird-to-the-left,” and rendered by Seler “Humming-bird of the South,” must possess
another significance for us. Opochtli certainly means both “south” and “left,” but it also
means “wizard,” as in the compound tlahuipuchtli, “wizard who spits fire,” instanced by
Torquemada, 28 who states that some persons derived the god’s name from that word,
combined with uitzilinin, “a humming-bird.” 29 It is easy to see how the god came to be
associated with the humming-bird, which suspends its nest from the foliage of the
maguey. It [85]would appear to the Mexicans to emerge from the leaves of that plant,
and would come to be regarded as the form which the maguey-spirit took. Indeed, the
humming-bird dress or disguise is that in which Uitzilopochtli is almost invariably
represented in the codices. It was in the shape of a humming-bird that the god was
said to have led the Aztecâ from their ancient home to the Valley of Anahuac, and his
flights would probably be considered ominous and suggestive to augurs, like those of
the Latin Picus. But it is possible that a certain degree of confusion arose between the
elements uitzilinin (humming-bird) and uitztli (thorn), that this assisted the belief that he
took the shape of a humming-bird and that the explanatory myth of the hero-god
Uitziton refers to this bird in an anthropomorphic shape.

These facts lead me to infer that the name implies “Humming-bird Wizard,” for
Uitzilopochtli was, as Sahagun says, 30 “a necromancer and friend of disguises,” and
wizards are universally conceived of as “sinister,” which English word means both “on
the left hand” and “inauspicious,” and “malign,” as does the Latin word from which it is
derived. The same holds good of the Mexican word. The sub-titles of the god,
Uitznauatl and Magueycoatl, show—the first, that the ideas of sorcery and oracular
speech were connected with him; and the second, that he was of a serpentine or
venomous disposition, like the liquor distilled from the plant over which he presided, the
intoxicating qualities of which were regarded as inducing prophetic inspiration.

That the maguey-plant entered into Uitzilopochtli’s insignia seems probable from the
circumstance that at his festival in the month toxcatl his dough image was surmounted
by a flint knife half covered with blood. 31 In the codices the sacrificial stone knife is
frequently depicted as growing in plant-like bundles out of the ground, this artistic and
conventional form bearing a close resemblance to the maguey plant, with the spines of
which the Mexican priests pierced their tongues and ears to procure a blood-offering.

His primary character notwithstanding, Uitzilopochtli in [86]later times came to possess

a very different significance for the Mexicans of Tenochtitlan—such a significance, in
short, as the development of their religious conceptions demanded. Thus we find him at
the period of the Spanish Conquest possessing solar characteristics and a place in the
Mexican pantheon which, if not the most important, had essentially the greatest local
significance in the city of Tenochtitlan, of which he was the tutelary god. His status in
the days of the second Motecuhzoma is, perhaps, most clearly illustrated by the
circumstances of his myth as given by Sahagun, which is obviously ætiological and
exhibits the influences both of priestly contrivance and popular imagination. His mother,
Coatlicue, has been elsewhere in this work identified with the earth, but in the myth is
euhemerized as a pious widow. That she was originally one of those mountain
goddesses, like Xochiquetzal, from whose sacred heights the rain descended to the
parched fields of Mexico, seems plain from the name of her abode, Coatepetl (“Serpent
Mountain”), the serpents of which her skirt is composed, being symbolical, perhaps, of
the numerous streams flowing from the tarns or pools situated on its lower acclivities.
That such a mountain actually existed in the vicinity of Tollan is proved by the
statement of Sahagun. Uitzilopochtli is the sun which rises out of the mountain, 32 or is
born from it, fully armed with the xiuhcoatl, or fire-snake (the red dawn), with which he
slays his sister Coyolxauhqui, the moon, whose lunar attributes are clearly defined in
her face-painting, which comprises half-moons and a shell-motif, a lunar symbol. Her
nose-plate is also the half-moon symbol. The Centzonuitznaua, or “Four Hundred
Southerners,” are the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. These the new-born god puts
to flight with ease. 33 If further verification of what is obviously [87]a most artificial and
operose myth is required, it is only necessary to indicate that one of the subsidiary
names of Uitzilopochtli, as recorded by Sahagun, was Ilhuicatl Xoxouhqui, “The Blue
Heaven,” the expanse of the sky, showing that, like many another sun-god, he typified
the blue vault of heaven. 34 Acosta, too, states that the azure colour of his throne
signified “that he sat in the heavens.” 35 But the myth possesses an allegorical as well
as an ætiological character. Thus Coatlicue, the earth, is fructified by the ball of
humming-birds’ feathers, that is, by the humming-bird itself, which, in Mexico, is the
means of fructifying the plants, its movements causing the transfer of the pollen from
the stamens to the germ-cells.

How, then, may we reconcile the primitive fetish of the maguey-plant with the later solar
deity? In my view the course of development of the concept of Uitzilopochtli is much
the same as that of the Hellenic god Apollo, who, originally a spirit of the apple-tree, 36
came in like manner [88]to be regarded as the god of the sun. But, to adhere to the
Mexican concept, the sun was regarded by the peoples of Anahuac as the great eater
of hearts and drinker of blood. These must be obtained for him by war, or he would
perish, and all creation along with him. Uitzilopochtli, as the spirit of the maguey-plant,
was the tribal fetish of the Aztecâ, and therefore their natural leader in battle. The
connection is obvious and does not require to be laboured. Because of his tribal
leadership in war, a governance of which Mexican myth and history bear eloquent
testimony, he became confounded with the luminary which demanded blood and lived
by human strife.

The solar connection of the octli liquor yielded by his plant is also most clear. Says
Duran 37: “The octli was a favourite offering to the gods, and especially to the god of fire.
Sometimes it was placed before a fire in vases; sometimes it was scattered upon the
flames with a brush (aspergillum?); at other times it was poured out around the fire-
place.” Fire is, of course, a surrogate of the sun, and Seler has already identified
Uitzilopochtli as a fire-god in virtue of his status as a sun-deity, 38 showing that the
drilling of the solar fire before the beginning of the new cycle of fifty-two years was
deferred until the panquetzalitztli, the great feast of Uitzilopochtli. Jacinto de la Serna,
too, says that the octli ritual invoked the “shining Rose; light-giving Rose, to receive
and rejoice my heart before the god.” The “rose,” of course, referring to the fire or sun.
It would seem, however, that before he became confounded or identified with the sun,
Uitzilopochtli may have possessed a lunar significance, and this may have obtained in
the period while yet the calendar was reckoned upon a lunar basis and its solar
connection still remained undefined. The name Mexitli, which has already been
remarked upon, and which means “Hare of the Maguey” appears to place Uitzilopochtli
upon a level with the other gods of octli, if not to class him as one of these. It bears a
suspicious [89]resemblance, too, to the name of the Moon-god, Metztli. The hare or
rabbit in Mexico was invariably associated both with the moon and the octli-gods,
whose chief characteristic, perhaps, is the lunar nose-plate. But among many of the
native tribes of North America the hare or rabbit is the representative of the sun or the
dawn, under the names of Michabo, Manibozho, Wabos, and so forth, being described
in myth as a warrior, hero-god and culture-bringer. Perhaps the Nahua, while still in a
more northern region where the agave was unknown to them, worshipped the rabbit of
the sun or moon, and on establishing themselves in a region where the maguey was
one of the salient features in the landscape, fused his myth with that of a newly-
acquired fetish, discarding later the more ancient belief, or retaining but a confused
memory of it. But this train of reasoning lacks evidence to support it. Nor need the
consideration of Uitzilopochtli’s serpent-form detain us long. I think I see in the myth
which recounts how the Aztecâ, on settling in Tenochtitlan, beheld an eagle perched on
a cactus with a serpent in its talons, some relation to Uitzilopochtli, but what it precisely
portends is still obscure to me. In any case the symbol of the eagle enters into his
insignia, as does that of the serpent. We will recall that he was known as
Magueycoatl, 39 “Serpent of the Maguey.” Again the solar character of the serpent in
America, as elsewhere, readily accounts for his later connection with it, and for the
prevalence of serpentine forms in his insignia and temple. But I confess that these two
points of contact with the serpent do not altogether satisfy me as regards the god’s
connection with it, nor does the fact of the serpentine character of his mother commend
itself to me as altogether explanatory of this, and I think we must look to Uitzilopochtli’s
nature as a wizard or sorcerer to enlighten us upon this point. Jacinto de la Serna 40
states that in his time some of the Mexican conjurers used a wand around which was
fastened a living [90]serpent, in much the same way as the priests of the Pueblo Indians
do at the present day; and as the great invisible medicine man of the tribe,
Uitzilopochtli may have been thought of as doing the same. “Who is a manito?” asks
the Meda chant of the Algonquins. “He,” is the reply, “who walketh with a serpent, he is
a manito.” For the connection of the Indian magicians with the serpent the reader is
referred to the pages of Brinton. 41

In many lands the serpent is the symbol of reproductive power and has a phallic
significance. In Mexico he casts his winter skin near the time of Uitzilopochtli’s first
festival, about the beginning of the rainy season. Moreover, this reptile is connected
with soothsaying, and in this respect resembles the god.

His myths, as well as his status in Mexico-Tenochtitlan, of which he was the tutelary
deity, make it plain that Uitzilopochtli was a tribal god of the Aztecâ, their national god
par excellence. The brave Quauhtemoc, the last native defender of the city, imagined
himself invincible when armed with the bow and arrows of Uitzilopochtli, and we know
that the advice of the oracle of that deity was sought by the Mexicans when hard
pressed by the Conquistadores.

Nor is there any dubiety regarding his character as a god of war. This may have arisen
from the circumstance that he presided over the liquor which was given to the troops
when about to engage in battle, or, as has been said, may have followed his promotion
to the rank of sun-god, the deity of human sacrifice, the god who demanded human
hearts and blood. A larger number of captives were devoted to him than to any other
divinity, and as the waging of war was the only means by which so many victims might
be procured, the sun would naturally become the great patron of strife.
As the sun is the great central cause of all agricultural success, so Uitzilopochtli came
to be looked upon as one of the promoters of plant growth, as is witnessed by his
festivals, which synchronize with the first rainfall of the year, the [91]growth of plant life,
and the end of the fruitful season, when, in the form of a paste image, the god was
slain. He is thus the sun of the season of plenty, as his “brother” Tezcatlipocâ
represents that of sereness and drought. He is the “young warrior” of the South, who
drives away the evil spirits of the dry season and causes the land to rejoice.

[Contents]

TEZCATLIPOCÂ = “FIERY MIRROR”

Area of Worship: Nahua territory generally, with extension into Central America
(as Hurakan).
Minor Names:
Titlacahuan—“He whose slaves we are.”
Yaotl—“Enemy.”
Yaomauitl—“Dreaded Enemy.”
Chico Yaotl—“Enemy on one side.”
Necoc Yaotl—“Enemy on both sides.”
Moyocoyotzin—“Capricious Lord.”
Uitznahuac Yaotl—“Warrior in the Southern House or Temple.”
Tlacochcalco Yaotl—“Warrior in the (Northern) Spear House.”
Telpochtli—“The Youth.”
Neçaualpilli—“Fasting Lord.”
Itztli—“Obsidian.”
Festivals: Toxcatl, teotleco, and the movable feasts ce miquiztli, ce malinalli, and
ome coatl.
Compass Directions: North and south in different aspects. Guardian of the fifth
quarter, “the below and above.”
Calendar Place: Ruler of the 18th day, tecpatl; ruler of the second tonalamatl
quarter, the region of the north; as Itztli, second of the nine lords of the night; ruler
of the 13th day-count acatl.
Symbol: The smoking or fiery mirror; the obsidian knife.

ASPECT AND INSIGNIA

Codex Borgia.—By far the best representation of Tezcatlipocâ in any of the
manuscripts is that to be found on page 17 of Codex Borgia, where he is seen in
connection with the insignia of the twenty calendric days. The picture on the lower right
portion of page 21 is without these symbols, but is almost identical with the former
figure. The god wears the black body-paint of a priest, and his face-painting is similar to
that of Uitzilopochtli, that is, it consists of [92]black horizontal stripes upon a yellow
ground, the latter having the same origin as in the case of Uitzilopochtli. From his back
rises a very large and elaborate bunch of feather plumes, which arches itself over his
head. His hair, dressed in a manner which resembles the “night-hair” of Mictlantecutli,
is ornamented with feather-balls as indicating his sacrificial character, and in the picture
on page 21 several of these depend from his side-locks. He wears the white ring
(anauatl) on his breast, and a short tunic, seemingly covered with stellar devices. His
right foot ends in the smoking mirror symbolic of his name and in which he was
supposed to observe the actions of humanity, and on page 21 he carries the jaguar-
skin purse in which the priests placed copal for incense. In his left hand he holds a
shield, the field of which is a tawny yellow in colour, traversed by two white stripes, and
a paper banner. On page 3 the god is shown in a springing attitude. He wears the face
and body-paint characteristic of him, and the warrior’s headdress, with hair tousled on
one side, and the blue nasal rod, with square plaque, falling over the mouth. At the side
of the head is the fiery mirror which gives him his name. On page 14 he is seen
wearing on his breast, and fastened to two strong red leather straps, the white ring
teocuitlaanauatl, an ornament resembling a large, round eye. On his back is a feather
device known as the “quetzal feather-pot.” The right foot, as in other pictures of him, is
replaced by a small fiery mirror and his left by an obsidian knife.

THE RED AND BLACK TEZCATLIPOCÂS.

(Codex Borgia, sheet 21.)

Codex Borbonicus.—In this manuscript Tezcatlipocâ is depicted with the yellow-and-

black face-painting, but in his form as a black god. At his forehead is the smoking
mirror, on his back the large quetzal-feather ornament with a banner, on his breast the
anauatl, and round his loins the hip-cloth, with a bordering of red eyes. On his feet he