Kindred Spirits or Separate Souls
Central Mexican Nahuas, as well as Zapotecs and other ethno-linguistic groups of Oaxaca, understood all (or most) of the cosmos to be animated by a singular divine force. In Nahuatl, this was known as teotl, which missionaries translated as “god” but, as Eleanor Wake notes in her exposition of Nahua ritual, is better approximated to the “numinous” and “sacred”; a “life-force present in greater and lesser measures in minerals, plants, animals, and humans” (2016: 35). Analytic philosopher James Maffie even contends that within elite Aztec-Mexica metaphysics, teotl was the single ontological category that constituted the entire cosmos itself (2015: 27). Indigenous Oaxacan cosmovisions involved similar concepts of universal animating forces. Archaeologists and ethnohistorians Ronald Spores and Andrew K. Balkansky pinpoint the ñudzahui peoples’ (commonly known as Mixtecs) concept of ini as the “essential spirit or essence of life” that manifested all throughout the natural world, from deities to humans, animals, rain, and lightning (2013: 128–9). The bènizàa concept of pèe surfaces in early colonial texts, which according to archaeologist Joyce Marcus was “the vital force that made all living things move,” manifesting with special power in (super)natural phenomena such as divinities, lightning, and fire (2010: 174). Mesoamerican religions did not necessarily divide these spiritual energies from human bodies either. This is most apparent in the ancient Nahua conceptions that humans were animated by three soul-like entities residing within different body parts: the tonalli in the top of the head, the teyolía in the heart, and ihiyotl in the liver (Furst 1995; López-Austin 1988: 369). Those animistic entities could also temporarily detach from a person’s physical form, enter the bodies of other animals, and in the case of ritual specialists known as a nahualli, could consciously inhabit that creature, transforming themselves into the animal (Martínez González 2011: 245–435). For the Nahuas, along with Oaxacan societies who held similar notions of spirit projection and inter-species transformation by ritual specialists (identified as a xicani in Zapotec and a yahui in Mixtec sources), integration between bodies and souls, and slippages between humans and other animals occurred in line with rather than contrary to their natural-cosmic order (Jansen 1997: 74–5; Urcid 2001: 206–7).
Mesoamerican cosmovisions come into stark contrast with the oppositions between worldly animal bodies and rational human spirits posed by fray Fería. Certainly, the human-animal dichotomy was not created by New Spanish clergy but was rather endemic within Christian thought. Particularly in Scholastic theology that drew heavily from Aristotelian philosophy via St. Augustine, who defined humans as “a rational soul using a mortal and earthly body” – a soul that “irrational animals” lacked (Augustine 2018: 52). Concerns over crossing the borders between man and beast were enduring too, as medieval theologians including St. Thomas Aquinas argued that animals’ irrationality predisposed them to vices of the flesh, such that succumbing to one’s carnal desires threatened “the very foundation of humanness: reason” (Tortorici 2018: 132). However, Spanish definitions of rationality and humanity took on new meanings in the American context. Infamously, royal jurist Juan Gines de Sepúlveda deployed Aristotle and Augustine’s definitions to argue that the “Indians” were not truly rational humans like Spaniards (evidenced by their “diabolical” religious practices) and therefore “natural slaves” to the colonists. Although, as historian Abel A. Alves explores, early modern Hispanic attitudes toward both Indigenous humans and nonhuman animals could vary widely, colonists largely treated native and European fauna as resources to exploit, which they mirrored in the forced labor and enslavement of Indigenous and African descent populations (2011: 42–4; 71–112). This was a central component of the colonial paradox: to deny these peoples full humanity in practice, while Spanish claims to the Americas (established by the Papal Bull of 1493) explicitly rested upon their responsibility to Christianize the inhabitants of the Indies as members of humankind (Davenport 1917: 71–8).
The radically different understandings of their own spiritual composition posed a critical challenge in communication between the priesthood of New Spain and the people whose souls they were tasked to save. Missionaries had initially found parallels between the Christian ascetic tradition that positioned bodily and material desires (along with the devil) as the principal enemies of the soul, and some Indigenous ritual practices of fasting and sexual abstinence (Burkhart 1989: 18). However, as Native neophytes persisted with discernibly non-Christian devotions after the first decades of evangelization, the clergy’s need to tackle their underlying belief systems became increasingly apparent. The fact that Indigenous terms for humankind, their souls, and animal life also remained deeply embedded within Native cosmovisions, emerges in clerical efforts to avoid or redefine them. In his Castilian-Zapotec dictionary, Fray Juan de Córdova translates the term “peni, peniàti” as “rational animal, see man and woman” and “máni, mane” as “irrational animal, all kinds,” while the Zapotec words simply refer to humans and other animals (1578: fol. 10v). Where these linguistic and doctrinal manuals differ is also telling. While Córdoba’s dictionary includes the terms “pèe, lachi, pénepaa” under the entry for “anima de alguno” (someone’s soul) (fol. 10v), Fería exclusively uses “anima” in the Zapotec passages of his Doctrina. Similarly, in his comprehensive Castilian-Nahuatl dictionary, the pioneering Franciscan missionary Alonso de Molina provides multiple Nahuatl translations “tetonal, teyolia, teyolitia, totonal, toyoha” for “anima o alma,” but avoids those terms in his 1578 Nahuatl catechism (Molina 1571: fol. 10v; Molina 1675: fols. 3v–4). Historian Peter Sigal identifies this difference in Molina’s works, noting that while Spanish and creole clergy were reluctant to use Nahuatl terms for the soul, Christianized Nahuas such as chronicler don Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc used teyolía and ánima synonymously (2011: 93–4). The only Nahuatl doctrinal text to translate “anima” into an autochthonous term was by don Bartolomé de Alva, a mestizo priest of Nahua heritage, who used teyolía throughout his 1634 confessionary, seemingly confident that by then, Nahuas could differentiate its meaning in a Christian context.
Choices to avoid Indigenous terms for spirits were purposeful, since clergy translated many other Christian concepts into words that had similar but not identical connotations in the Native language. Fería used the terms “lichibezeloo” for hell and “bezeloo” for the devil, based on the name of a Zapotec divinity (1567: fols. 15, 22). Meanwhile, Molina and other missionaries in central Mexico used the title of the Nahua underworld, mictlan, to denote the Christian hell and the term tlacatecolotl (the particularly malevolent type of nahualli ritual specialist who adopted animal guises, which translates directly to “human-owl”) for the devil (Cervantes 1994; Sousa 2002). These selections, especially tlacatecolotl, had substantial implications and repercussions that we will return to shortly. The above renditions expose clerical attempts to eradicate Indigenous people’s continued conceptual connections between human spirits, human bodies, and other animals. Yet their efficacy may well have been limited by other rhetorical techniques used within different or even the very same doctrinal manuals.