Civilization

The Nahua

The Nahuatl-speaking peoples of central Mexico, the broad nation of which the Aztecs were one branch, and the bearers of a religious world that outlived the empire.

A word came before the people. Nahuatl — the speech the Spanish would learn to call the Mexican language — carried inside itself a claim about its own nature: that it was the clear speech, the audible and intelligible one, against the babble of those who could not be understood. To speak it well was to be a person of a certain kind, schooled, well-rooted, possessed of a face and a heart. The peoples who spoke it did not, at first, think of themselves as a single nation. They were the people of this city and that lake, of this lineage and that valley, rivals and trading partners and tributaries to one another across the highland basin. What they shared was the speech, and with the speech a calendar, a pantheon, a cosmology, and a way of reading the day a child was born. The name later scholarship gives the whole — the Nahua — is a name for everyone who carried that world in that language, of whom the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, the people history remembers as the Aztecs, were one branch among many.

The people of the clear speech

The Nahuatl language belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family, whose other members range north into the deserts of what is now the United States. By the reckoning of the archaeology and the linguistics together, the ancestors of the Nahua came from the arid north — Aridoamerica — and entered central Mexico not in one movement but in waves over centuries, the Nahuatl-speakers splitting from their northern kin and moving south into the lake-strewn Basin of Mexico from around the middle of the first millennium. They came late into a land already old. Civilizations had risen and fallen in the valley before them: the immense city at Teotihuacan, abandoned and ruinous by the time the Nahua arrived, which they did not build and could not name except as the place where the gods were made; and after it the Toltec capital at Tula, whose memory the Nahua kept as the fountainhead of every civilized art. To be heir of the Toltecs — to possess toltecayotl, Toltec-ness, the condition of the artist and the sage — was the highest pedigree a Nahua lord could claim, and the dynasties of the latecomer city-states married into the surviving Toltec line precisely to claim it. The Toltecs themselves are normally taken to have been Nahua, so that the inheritance was in part the people inheriting from an earlier self.

The unit of Nahua political life was the altepetl — literally “the water, the mountain,” a difrasismo that named a self-governing community bound to its founding hill and spring, with its own lord, its own patron god, its own quarter-divisions and its own claim to the land. The Basin of Mexico held dozens of them, jostling and allying and conquering by turns. The Tepanecs held the western shore from Azcapotzalco; the Acolhua held the east from Texcoco; the Xochimilca held the southern lakes; and the Mexica, arriving last and poorest, settled on a marshy island and within a few generations made it the center of the largest tributary empire Mesoamerica had seen. To the east, beyond the volcanoes, the Tlaxcalans — Nahua like the rest, speaking the same tongue and keeping the same gods — held out as an independent confederacy the Mexica never subdued. The point that the later word Nahua preserves is that all of these were one people in everything but allegiance. A Mexica and a Tlaxcalan who met on the battlefield as mortal enemies could each have understood every word the other said, prayed to the same Tlaloc for rain, and read the same sign over a newborn child. The empire of Tenochtitlan was a Nahua project imposed on other Nahua, and on the Otomí and Huastec and Mixtec peoples beyond them — not the expansion of a people into foreigners so much as the conquest of a nation by one of its own towns.

A page of the Codex Borbonicus, a Nahua ritual-divinatory screenfold of the early sixteenth century, showing the day-count and its presiding powers. Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée nationale, Paris; public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

A shared world, carried in one language

What the speech carried was a cosmos. Across the Nahua altepetl, however bitterly divided, ran a single account of where the world came from and how long it might last — the doctrine of the suns. There had been worlds before this one, four of them, each presided over by a power and each destroyed: by jaguars, by wind, by a rain of fire, by a flood, the survivors of each turned to monkeys or birds or fish. The present world is the fifth, and it was made when the assembled gods gathered in the darkness at ruined Teotihuacan and one of their number, the small and sickly Nanahuatzin, threw himself into a fire to rise as Tonatiuh, the sun. But the new sun would not move until the others gave their own blood and death to set it going. So the cosmos runs on a debt. The sun moves because the gods died to move it, and it keeps moving only so long as that death is repaid — the obligation the Nahua named nextlahualli, the payment of what is owed. The fullest theology of this world, the gods and the debt and the sacrifice that discharged it, belongs to the religion itself; what matters here is that it was not the private creed of one city but the common inheritance of the language, the same in Tenochtitlan and Texcoco and Tlaxcala, carved into the great basalt disk now called the Sun Stone and equally legible to any Nahua who looked at it.

Time itself was double, and the doubling was shared. Every Nahua community kept two interlocking calendars. The first was the tonalpohualli, the count of the day-signs — two hundred and sixty days made by running twenty named signs against the numbers one to thirteen, a cycle with no relation to the sun or the seasons, a pure reckoning of destiny. The day on which a person was born under this count fixed the tonalli, the share of heat and fate lodged in the head, and a specialist read it: a child born under a fortunate sign would prosper, one born under a heavy sign might have its naming-day shifted to a better one nearby. The second calendar was the xiuhpohualli, the count of the year — three hundred and sixty-five days in eighteen months of twenty, with five empty and unlucky days at the end, governing the great seasonal festivals of planting and harvest and the feasts of the gods. The two cycles meshed like gears and came back into alignment only once every fifty-two years, and the night they did so was the most dangerous in the Nahua world: the fear that the sun would not rise again, met by the rite in which every fire in the land was put out and a single new flame kindled to carry the world across into the next bundle of years.

The gods were many and they were everywhere, and they were the same gods. Tlaloc the rain, lord of the mountains where the water is kept, was perhaps the oldest and most universally served, older than the Mexica and older than the Toltec name; his were the child-offerings made on the cold peaks so that the rain would come. Tezcatlipoca the Smoking Mirror, the night sky and the arbitrary power that gives and takes rule, was the god of contingency itself, worshipped by lord and slave alike. Quetzalcoatl the Feathered Serpent, the breath-wind and the morning star and the patron of the priesthood and the calendar, was the culture-bringer who in one cycle of stories descended to the land of the dead to gather the bones of the people of the former worlds and gave his own blood to quicken them — so that humankind itself was penanced into being. Above and behind the named powers stood the duality at the root of things, the lord and lady of our flesh and sustenance, the self-engendering pair from which the opposed forces of the world descended; a strand of twentieth-century scholarship gathered this principle under the single name Ometeotl, though the word is vanishingly rare in the old sources and the consolidation is largely a modern act. The one god who belonged to the Mexica alone, and not to the Nahua at large, was Huitzilopochtli the Hummingbird of the South — the patron the Mexica carried out of their northern homeland and made the sun-warrior of their empire. That a single tribal god could be raised over the shared pantheon is itself a measure of how much the imperial religion of Tenochtitlan was a Mexica overlay on a Nahua foundation that long predated it.

Flower and song

The Nahua did not write treatises. They thought in poetry, and they had a name for the highest activity of the mind: in xochitl in cuicatl, the flower and the song — two images yoked to name a third thing, which was poetry, philosophy, and truth-bearing speech all at once. The makers of it were the tlamatinime, the knowers of things, who composed and performed verse of extraordinary gravity on the one subject the cosmology forced upon them: that nothing on the earth’s surface endures. The Nahua called that surface tlalticpac, and the proverb said it was slick, it was slippery there. Friendship, beauty, lordship, the green of the maize, life itself — all of it borrowed for a moment and given back. The songs ask whether anything at all is true on the earth, whether one even really lives, and answer, again and again, that we come only to dream; and then sing anyway, because the singing is the one offering the slippery earth allows. Around this body of verse a single figure gathered: Nezahualcoyotl of Texcoco, the poet-king and engineer of the lake-works, to whom a strand of near-monotheistic devotion to an invisible giver of life was later attributed — though the historical poet behind the songs is hard to recover, his image heavily reshaped by his own Christianized descendants after the conquest.

Alongside the songs ran the huehuetlahtolli, the “ancient discourse” — the stylized orations of moral and political life, the words a father spoke to a son and a midwife to a newborn and the great lords at the installation of a king. These were the ethics of the slippery earth made audible: the counsel to walk the well-rooted middle way, to acquire in ixtli in yollotl, a face and a heart, the formed countenance and firm will that the schools — the calmecac of the nobility, the telpochcalli of the commoners — existed to grow. The flower and song and the ancient word together are the nearest thing the Nahua left to a philosophy in their own voice, and the fact that so much of it survives is owed to a paradox that runs through everything known of this people.

The conquest and the catastrophe

In the spring of 1519 Hernán Cortés landed on the Gulf coast with a few hundred men, and within two years the Mexica empire was gone. The story is often told as the marvel of a few Europeans toppling a great state, but the Nahua world destroyed itself as much as it was destroyed. Cortés could not have taken Tenochtitlan without the tens of thousands of Nahua warriors who marched with him — above all the Tlaxcalans, the unconquered Nahua republic that had resisted the Mexica for generations and now saw in the strangers the instrument of an old enmity. The fall of Tenochtitlan on the 13th of August, 1521, after a siege that starved and burned the island city, was as much a Nahua civil war won by Tenochtitlan’s Nahua enemies as it was a Spanish conquest. And the decisive weapon was neither steel nor allies but disease: smallpox, arriving in 1520, swept through a population with no immunity to it and killed a great part of the Mexica — including the emperor’s successor — in the months when the city most needed to fight. Wave upon wave of epidemic over the century that followed reduced the Indigenous population of central Mexico by figures that are debated but are without dispute catastrophic, a demographic collapse among the worst in recorded history.

What the catastrophe destroyed was the Mexica state. It did not destroy the Nahua people, and it did not destroy their language. The altepetl survived the conquest as units of colonial administration; Nahua lords kept their lands and titles for generations; Nahuatl went on being spoken, and was now written, by Nahua scribes, in the Roman alphabet the friars taught them — so that the largest body of Indigenous-language documentation in the Americas, wills and land-records and town-council minutes and lawsuits, is in Nahua hands writing Nahuatl about their own affairs. The people of the clear speech did not vanish in 1521. They were conquered, and they went on.

The Sahagún paradox and the friars’ great work

The deepest knowledge of the old Nahua world comes from the institution that set out to abolish it. In the decades after the conquest the Franciscans, bent on conversion and so on understanding what they meant to replace, undertook to record the ancestral religion in detail — and the greatest of these projects was the labor of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and his Nahua collaborators, the bilingual Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España now called the Florentine Codex, completed about 1577. Sahagún’s stated aim was frankly that of a physician who must know a disease to cure it: one cannot extirpate idolatry, he reasoned, without first knowing it. Yet the method produced something far beyond a confessor’s handbook. The codex was built over three decades from the testimony of surviving Nahua elders, gathered and organized and written down in Nahuatl by a team of Nahua scholars trained at the college at Tlatelolco — Antonio Valeriano, Alonso Vegerano, Martín Jacobita and others, trilingual humanists who interviewed their elders, set the Nahuatl in one column, a Spanish gloss that often censors and abbreviates it in another, and painted more than two thousand images in a third. The result is a twelve-book encyclopedia of the Nahua world in the Nahua’s own language, and it is the foundation of nearly everything that can be said about the religion of the Aztecs.

The paradox is exact and must be held without flinching. The fullest record of a sacred world was made in order to destroy that world, by missionaries who succeeded; and yet it was made with, and substantially by, the very people whose ancestors’ knowledge it preserved, who were not passive informants but co-authors deciding what to render legible and what to allegorize and what to leave out. The book that was an instrument of conversion is also the great act of Nahua self-documentation. To read it, and the related compilation of the Dominican Diego Durán, is to read at once a monument of Nahua memory and a colonial artifact shaped by the Church that commissioned it — a source that one must trust and distrust in the same motion, and which Britannica fairly calls the foundation of modern knowledge of Sahagún’s subjects. Every confident statement about Aztec religion rests on a document made under the Cross, in the conquest’s shadow, by the conquered.

The earth-mother behind the Virgin

The most striking survival is the one hardest to pin down. North of the old island city rose the hill of Tepeyac, where, Sahagún records, the Nahua had worshipped a mother-goddess they called Tonantzin, Our Sacred Mother — an earth-and-fertility power to whom pilgrims came. On that same hill, within a generation of the conquest, the apparition of the Virgin Mary to the Nahua convert Juan Diego was reported, and the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe rose where the goddess had stood. The Nahua pilgrims kept coming, and kept calling the Virgin by the old name, Tonantzin — to Sahagún’s alarm, who saw in it not conversion but the old devotion wearing a new face. Whether Guadalupe is the earth-mother survived under a Christian image, or a Christian devotion that merely borrowed her hill, is a continuity much discussed and not finally settled; what is plain in the record from Sahagún forward is that the Nahua received the new faith through the grammar of the old, and that the most powerful religious symbol of modern Mexico stands on a Nahua sacred hill under a Nahua maternal name. The same pattern runs through the village fiestas of the Nahua highlands, where the saints of the Catholic calendar took up the offices of the old day-powers, and the cycle of festivals tracks a year older than the Church.

The 1531 image of Our Lady of Guadalupe Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose shrine at Tepeyac rose on the hill where the Nahua had venerated the mother-goddess Tonantzin. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

A living people

The Nahua are not a vanished race, and the past tense in which their religion is usually described belongs to that religion and not to them. Nahuatl is, by the Mexican census of 2020, the most widely spoken Indigenous language in the country — about 1.65 million speakers, more than a hundred thousand of them speaking no Spanish at all — across communities in Puebla, Veracruz, Guerrero, Hidalgo, San Luis Potosí and beyond. The figure is conservative: discrimination drives many bilingual Nahua to decline the label in a census, so the living language reaches further than the count records. It is a language with a literature five centuries old in the Roman alphabet and older still in the painted books, now taught in schools and written in newspapers and sung in new songs. The communities that speak it sustain forms of healing, devotion, and observance continuous with what the old codices record — the calling-home of a frightened tonalli, the cargo-offices of the fiesta, the reckoning of lucky and unlucky days — woven through and around the Catholicism that was meant to replace them.

The colossal basalt statue of the goddess Coatlicue The colossal statue of Coatlicue, the serpent-skirted earth-mother, unearthed in Mexico City in 1790 — one face of the maternal power the Nahua never wholly relinquished. National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City; public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

There is a particular dignity in this that the conquest narrative obscures. The Mexica empire fell, as empires do, and its fall was hastened by other Nahua who had every reason to want it gone. But the empire was never the people. The people were the speakers of the clear speech, scattered across the highlands in their water-and-mountain towns long before Tenochtitlan rose and long after it burned — heirs of the Toltecs by their own reckoning, keepers of the count of days and the flower and the song, carriers of a world that one of their cities built an empire upon and the rest of them survived. The Aztecs ended in 1521. The Nahua are still here, still speaking, in a tongue that names itself the clear one, and still, in a thousand quiet observances, reading the day a child was born.