First, it is important to note that the term teutl or teotl used to speak of the Spaniards as gods carries an ambivalence in that, according to the Franciscan Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, one of the greatest scholars of Nahuatl in the sixteenth century, it meant “cosa estremada en bien o en mal” (thing consummate in good or in evil). Sahagún lists as examples “teuhpiltzintli, niño o muj lindo: teuhpiltontli, muchacho muy traujeso, o malo” (teopiltzintli, a very handsome boy; teopiltontli, a very mischievous or bad boy; Sahagún, 1950—82: 1, 87). While tzintli marks a reverential, the diminutive tontli denotes contempt; however, both share the term teo-tl.
Second, observe that Quetzalcoatl is a god-man and that, accordingly, he participated in both the natural and the supernatural from within a spiritual economy in which these two discrete realms lacked the separation commonly attributed to them in post-Enlightenment Western discourse. I stress the notion of after the Enlightenment, because for the Spaniards of the sixteenth century God, the Virgin, or St. James were agents of history. Cortés’s silence could only be temporary because from within the spiritual economy of Catholicism Quetzalcoatl must be reduced to the status of devil, hardly a pagan deity that Cortés and his cohorts could identify with for long. This does not mean, of course, that Cortés would deny the centrality of Quetzalcoatl in the indigenous conceptualization of the invaders. In fact, Cortés knows that as long as Quetzalcoatl exists independently of the Spaniard’s reduction to expressions of the devil, the Nahuas retain their own world and thereby remain epistemologically inaccessible.
Third, in Nahuatl history and cosmology, regions of the world have different temporalities. As much as the voice of Motecuzoma might be distorted in Cortés’s representation in the language of chivalry novels, one can trace the voice of a Nahua. That is, this Nahua story carries an ontology and epistemology that will remain inaccessible to the ethnographic reductions of the missionaries. Thus we find in Chapter XXVII of Diego Durán’s History of the Indies of New Spain [Historia de las Indias de la Nueva España a e islas de Tierra Firme] an account of when the first Motecuzoma sent wizards, witches, and enchanters to Aztlan to learn about the land of the ancestors and to find out if Coatlicue, the mother of Huitzilopochtli, the main Mexican deity, was still alive (Durán, 1994: 212—22). When the wizards and enchanters arrive at the seven caves from where the Nahua ancestors had first departed, they invoke the “devil” and rub their skin with ointments that enable them to assume the forms of birds, wild cats, and other fierce animals so that they can travel through the wilderness that leads to the place were their ancestors originated. Once they cross the lands filled with dangers, they transform back into humans at the foothills of the caves of Culhuacan. The people from Aztlan approach them and are surprised to learn that the ancestors who led the Nahuas in their migration have died. The narrative goes on to reproduce the conversations they had, but let this brief account suffice as an example of multiple temporalities in Nahua geography. In short, there is nothing in Nahua cosmography that impedes the notion that Quetzalcoatl could still be alive and that the Spaniards could have issued from a place not unlike the Aztlan described in Duran’s Historia.
Fourth, one of the most compelling forms of epistemic violence resides precisely in undoing the belief in the power of enchanters, witches, and wizards. Thus, the Tlatelolca version of the conquest collected in Book 12 of the Florentine Codex emphasizes the fact that the wizards Motecuzoma sent to enchant the Spaniards failed. Note, however, that the informants continue to tell stories that implicate both the Nahuas and Spaniards in magical realms. If the inquiry requested that informants “tell the story of how they were conquered,” they respond with a story in which magic fails but continues to be integral to the narrative. As it were, it is a magical story of how magic failed. Wouldn’t the Spaniards be seen as extremely powerful teotl precisely because the power of native wizards, forms of teotl (which would include by definition anyone extremely good or bad, including Motecuzoma himself), did not affect them? In this process, wouldn’t St. James, the Virgin, and the rest of the Christian spirits, and for that matter “el diablo,” be variations of teotl? Wouldn’t the Nahua retain their epistemology and life forms to the extent that they continued to conceptualize the conquest in “magical” terms? Wouldn’t the ultimate conquest achieve its end when the Nahua would no longer tell stories of conquering teotl, but simply provide a narrative based on military superiority or the decimation of the population by epidemics? In answering these questions, shouldn’t we remain vigilant of the writing violence we may impose by insisting on the “rationality” of the Nahuas, who couldn’t have believed that the Spaniards were “gods”?
Writing that Converts
In itself the notion of converting someone to the Christian religion entails violence in that earlier beliefs must be discarded to give way to the new universal creed. It is not merely abandoning one creed for another, but reducing the other creed to falsity. There is a whole literature in indigenous languages that was devised to uproot and denigrate native spirituality. I choose spirituality to avoid the more specialized notion of religion. Spirituality does not necessarily entail a separate realm that one might define as secular. In the West, in the culture of the sixteenth-century missionaries, religion (and the discipline of theology) exists side by side with philosophy, art, literature, and science. For the missionaries of the sixteenth century, there is only one true religion: revealed Christianity in its Roman Catholic form. In addressing native spirituality, the first task was to define all native beliefs as superstitious, as induced by the trickeries of the devil, as idolatrous. It is only for scholars of post-Enlightenment religious studies that Mesoamerican life forms are understood as religion. In central Mexico, Franciscan missionaries wrote a most extensive ethnographic literature for conversion purposes. One could argue that the origins of religious studies should be traced back to conceptualization of another culture’s beliefs as an object study. And one should wonder if the supposedly value-free disciplines of religious studies has not carried a colonialist frame of reference in spite of their scientific intentions. It is not a symptom that one does theology when exploring one’s beliefs, but religious studies when studying religious phenomena that are not one’s own? Has not religious studies, much like anthropology, been linked to various form of imperialism and their civilizing missions? I can only raise these questions here.
The genres devised for converting Indians in the sixteenth century included treatises on demonology, exaltations to abandon their false gods, confessionals, catechisms, and spiritual exercises. In what follows I will limit myself to some generalities concerning Alonso de Molina’s Confesionario mayor en lengua mexicana y castellana (1569) and the group of texts by Bernardino de Sahagún commonly known as his “enciclo-pedia doctrina,” a doctrinal encyclopedia. I will argue, however, that the Exercicio quotidiano, which was found among the papers of the Chalcan historian Domingo Chimalpahin, suggests that it was written under the supervision of Dominican friars.
Molina’s Confesionario establishes the need that Indians become conscious of being sinners, it implants a new memory for the examination of one’s self. In one place it specifies that all humans sin at least seven times a day, but goes on to emphasize that these sin are, for the most part, venial rather than mortal. Indigenous subjects are under the obligation of learning to examine their conscience to discover sins. The confessional presents itself as a guide in which the Ten Commandments, the five senses, and the theological and cardinal virtues guide the penitent through an exhaustive account of his sins. It concludes with discussion of absolution and the required contrition for