Teotl’s continual generating and regenerating of the cosmos is also a process of tireless self-transformation and retransformation. Aztec metaphysics commonly characterizes this transformation in two closely related, if not ultimately equivalent, ways: as a process of artistic creation and as a process of shamanic form-changing or shape-shifting. Teotl is the consummate cosmic artist-shaman. Let’s examine each.
The Aztecs saw teotl as a creative and artistic process since teotl endlessly fashions and refashions itself into and as the cosmos. Artistic creation is fundamentally transformative. The artist transforms disordered raw materials into well-ordered finished products: for example, raw cotton into woven fabric, words into song-poems, and mineral ore into jewelry. The artist also takes old objects and refashions them into new ones: for example, melting down old broken jewelry and refashioning it anew. Aztec metaphysics accordingly views the cosmos as teotl’s in xochitl in cuicatl (“flower and song”). In xochitl in cuicatl refers broadly to creative activity such as composing-singing poetry, weaving, goldsmithing, and painting-writing. Conquest-era Nahua philosopher-poets commonly characterized the cosmos as an amoxtli, or sacred book of paintings, and earthly existents as figures painted-written therein. Nezahualcoyotl declares:
You paint with flowers, with songs, Life Giver. You color the ones who’ll live on earth, you recite them in colors, and so you’re hatching eagles, jaguars, in your painting place [motlacuilolpani] . . .
Though we vassals are alive, we are mortal. All of us are to pass away, all of us are to die on earth. . .
Like paintings we’re destroyed, like flowers we wither on earth.87
A song-poem Leon-Portilla attributes to Aquiauhtzin characterizes the cosmos as a tlacuilocalitec (“house of paintings”).88 A song-poem attributed to Xayac-amach declares, “your home is here, in the midst of the paintings.”89 The contemporary Nahua poet, Natalio Hernandez Hernandez, expresses this idea as follows:
I sing to life, to man and to nature, the mother earth; because life is flower and it is song, it is in the end: flower and song.90
Aztec metaphysics also understands teotl’s continuing generation and regeneration of the cosmos in terms of shamanic transformation or form-changing. The cosmos is teotl’s nahual (nahualli or nagual) - that is, teotl’s “guise,” “transfiguration,” “double,” or “mask.” The word nahual derives from nahualli meaning both a form-changing shaman and the being into which a shaman transforms.91 The concept of a nahual has its roots in indigenous Mesoamerican notions of shamanic power and transformation. As a shaman possesses the power to transform him/herself into his nahual (say, a jaguar), so teotl possesses the power to transform itself into its nahual: the cosmos. The continual becoming of the cosmos along with its myriad characteristics and inhabitants are products of teotl’s continuing shamanic self-shape-shifting and self-transforming. Teotl is essentially transformative power and hence the quintessential transformer. As the ultimate shape shifter, Tezcatlipoca, “Lord of the Smoking Mirror,” exemplified this shamanic power.92
Are teotl’s transformations therefore deceptive? J. Richard Andrews and Ross Hassig reject Angel Marfa Garibay K.’s proposal that nahual is rooted in an archaic verb meaning “to dissemble, to deceive” along with the idea that a nahual is by definition deceptive. Nahualli is a patientive noun that derives from tla-ndhua, meaning “to interpose something between self and public, skin and outer clothing, man and gods, the natural and supernatural, and so forth.” A nahualli is simply “an entity that can be interposed.”93
Andrews and Hassig’s discussion suggests the need to be careful when thinking about masks and disguises. Raymond Fogelson writes about the traditions of Cherokee Booger masks and Iroquois (Seneca) False Faces as follows: “We do not understand the meaning of masks in these cultures if we treat their usage as analogous to our sense of masks as disguises, as distortions or caricatures that cover up a true reality hidden behind the mask.” In these traditions masks represent “temporary incarnation[s] of cosmic reality.”94 The Seneca, argues Sam Gill, refer to their masks as gagosa which simply means “face.”95 “False Faces,” the common name given to Seneca masks by outsiders, is therefore inaccurate and misleading. Seneca masks are living objects that “present and animate the real presence of the spirit.”96 They disclose and present a spirit, and are better thought of as guises than as disguises. The Seneca do not regard masks as coverings that are worn in order to hide, conceal, or deceive. The concept of being false or untrue plays no role. Similarly, in Hopi masking tradition the person who dons a mask is not regarded as someone impersonating a deity but as someone who loses his own personal identity in the process of becoming that deity.97 In sum, we cannot simply assume that Aztec philosophy understands masks as necessarily deceptive or as ontologically distinct from the person donning the mask.
We customarily think about masks as by definition deceptive and as ontologically distinct from the person donning the mask. We customarily think of masks as deceptive because we see masks as concealing the identity of their wearers. One hides behind a mask; one covers one’s face with a mask. Others are unable to recognize one’s identity because one interposes the mask between one’s face and them. This way of thinking about masks and masking presupposes a specific metaphysics, namely, one according to which mask and mask wearer are two ontologically distinct things. It presupposes, in other words, an ontological dualism. The epistemological phenomenon of deception is grounded in this dualistic ontology. One is able to cover and hide one’s face with a mask because mask and face are two distinct things.
This way of thinking about masks and masking, however, is not Aztec philosophy’s way. In brief, since Aztec philosophy is ontologically monistic and it is a fortiori precluded from thinking about masks as something ontologically distinct from teotl, teotl cannot be said to mask itself in a way that presupposes that teotl and mask are two distinct things. Teotl and mask must in the final analysis be identical with one another. Consequently, the epistemological phenomenon of deception cannot be explained metaphysically by appealing to a dualistic ontology consisting of “false” mask versus “true” wearer.
Since Aztec philosophy sees teotl’s generation and regeneration of the cosmos as a process of shamanic transformation, let’s turn to shamanism for further insight. When transforming himself into, say, a jaguar, a shaman does not simply assume the guise or external form of a jaguar. The shaman literally becomes a jaguar. Shaman and jaguar are one. And although the shaman’s human identity is obscure and difficult to recognize while a jaguar, this is not the result of his concealing his identity within or behind the mask of the jaguar.
Teotl’s relationship to the cosmos is analogous to the shaman’s relationship to the jaguar. From this interpretation several important consequences follow for our thinking about teotl’s relationship to the cosmos and its inhabitants. First, since a nahual is better understood as a guise that presents rather than as a disguise that misrepresents, to say that the cosmos and all its inhabitants are teotl’s nahual is not to say that they are nothing but illusion (or illusory). Similarly, to say this is not to say that teotl misrepresents itself to human beings in the guise of the cosmos. Teotl does not hide behind the mask of the cosmos as a Halloween trick-or-treater hides behind her witch mask. Teotl is one and the same with the cosmos.
Second, it is a mistake to think of a nahual as something ontologically distinct from the shaman who assumes it. Nahual and shaman are one. The shaman literally becomes a jaguar (his nahual). Teotl literally becomes the cosmos. To think otherwise is to commit Aztec metaphysics to an intolerable ontological dualism. Teotl and nahual (the cosmos) are numerically one and the same thing.
Third, just as it is a mistake to think the jaguar does not really exist because it is merely illusion (or illusory), so likewise it is a mistake to think that the cosmos does not really exist because it is merely illusion (or illusory). Both jaguar and cosmos are real; both exist.
Fourth, to claim that teotl is identical with its nahual (the cosmos) and to claim that nahuals are not deceptive is not to claim that humans recognize this identity, recognize the cosmos as teotl’s nahual, or recognize teotl in the cosmos by means of ordinary sense perception. We may express this point more sharply using the Western philosophical distinction between perception de re
(i. e., perception of the thing) and perception de dicto (i. e., perception under a description; perception that the thing is such-and-such; perception of what is said or of the proposition).98 Successful de re perception does not entail successful de dicto perception. For example, I may have seen de re President Obama entering a black limousine earlier today without having seen at the time that it was Obama, that is, without having seen Obama de dicto. What I saw de dicto was simply a tall, thin man entering a black limousine.
Applying this distinction to the present case, humans perceive teotl de re via ordinary sense perception. Why? Because according to ontological monism there exists only one thing to perceive de re: teotl. When humans look about themselves, there is only one thing: teotl. However, from this it does not follow that humans perceive teotl de dicto, that is, that they recognize what they see around themselves as teotl, as fitting the description of teotl, or that it is teotl. What they see de dicto are sun, birds, flowers, and flint knives. What they ordinarily see de dicto is teotl’s nahual. But since they do not know that the cosmos and teotl are one and the same (just as I did not know that the man entering the limousine and Obama were one and the same), they do not see de dicto teotl. Deception is thus understood epistemologically in terms of what a perceiver is able to recognize or discern when she perceives. Deception is not understood metaphysically in terms of the existence of two distinct things: mask and person behind the mask.
That Aztec metaphysics understands teotl in terms of shaman transformation and artistic creativity is not accidental, for shamanism and artistic creation commonly go hand-in-hand in Mesoamerica thought. Shamans commonly double as artists whose creations reflect their out-of-body visions. In their study of papermaking and cut-paper figures among contemporary Nahua, Otomf, and Tepehua peoples, Alan Sandstrom and Pamela Effrein Sandstrom discuss “shaman-artists” who create the various paper figures used in religious rituals.99 Regarded as a “person of knowledge” (tlamdtiquetl in modern Nahuatl), the shaman cuts paper figures that reflect his out-of-body visions of the life-and-death forces operating in the cosmos.100 The ritual efficacy of a shaman’s paper-cut figures depends largely upon the accuracy of his or her visions. Sandstrom and Sandstrom write, “No shaman can establish a positive reputation without first becoming a master paper cutter.”101 Stacy Schaefer explains how Wixarika women weavers conceive weaving as a shamanic-like creative process that relies upon the weaver’s out-of-body visions and apprehensions of sacred forces operating in the cosmos. Schaefer writes, “Weaving and shamanism share a basic element in common: transformation.”102
World History
