Boundaries of Beastly Behavior
New Spanish doctrinal manuals employed depictions of animals to articulate Christian virtues of the soul and vices of the flesh; drawing upon deep cultural legacies from the Physiologus of early Christian Alexandria to Medieval European bestiaries, which used real and mythical creatures to express moral lessons from Scripture (McCulloch 1962: 19–20). Within these often intricately illuminated manuscripts, animals such as snakes, laden with Biblical symbolism, embodied all the gravest spiritual transgressions (Moral 2021: 10–12). Continuing these visual motifs alongside the Aquinian tradition, Molina’s confession manual includes a print depicting the seven mortal sins as a chimerical monster, its main head that of a ram-horned lion, sprouting seven more heads with bull horns and serpent tongues from the neck to represent each sin (Molina 1578: fol. 8). Zeb Torotici’s exploration of “unnatural” sexuality in colonial Latin America provides another striking example of this fear that sin made humans “metaphorically, become animal” in a 1691 sermon by Jesuit priest Juan Martínez de la Parra, which visualized lust as having “snakes for hair, the forehead of a goat, the eyes of a toad, the ears of an ass” along with other animal parts (Tortorici 2018: 132). Due to colonial perceptions of Indigenous, African, and multi-ethnic peoples as inherently less rational, the perceived danger of their monstrous metamorphosis was even greater, so that “in this sense, race itself is an index of animality” (132). As this chapter will examine below, beliefs in the shapeshifting abilities of ritual specialists such as the nahualli meant that clergy were also particularly concerned by Indigenous potential to undergo more literal transformations from man to beast.
We find some especially explicit attempts to enforce divisions between rational human virtue and irrational animal vice in the work of don Bartolomé de Alva, the mestizo scholar, secular priest, and brother of chronicler don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl. In his Nahuatl Confessionario, padre Alva uses vivid animal metaphors to admonish Nahua confessants against alcoholic excess, especially pulque-drinking, as it drew people into sin, causing them to be “converted into beasts … rid of your reason and natural light of knowledge that the Sovereign God gave you” (1593: fol. 17v). For Alva, humankind’s position atop the natural hierarchy, granted by God and defined by their rationality, was threatened by inebriation and the degraded behavior that it encouraged. In light of his noble Nahua heritage (descended from the lords of Texcoco and penultimate Mexica ruler Cuitlahuac) and skill in the grammatical complexities of Nahuatl, Alva’s translations of such metaphors are also revealing. The Nahuatl text reads “amech manenencatilia,” meaning “you [plural] will be caused to be like a four-legged animal,” from manenenque-the term for quadrupeds (literally “those who walk on their hands”) (Molina 1571: fol. 52). Although the Nahuatl language did not express the same notions of beastliness, Molina found that an appropriate translation for “beastly man” in his Vocabulario was “tlacamaçatl” (human-deer), which reflected the deer’s status as an archetypal animal symbolizing incivility and sexual excess (Olivier 2015: 186–8). Nahua audiences could therefore, whether Alva intended or not, understand this reference to quadrupeds when describing drunkards “converted into beasts” through their own associations between deer and socially transgressive behavior.
Alva uses further bestial imagery to describe intoxication, decrying in the Nahuatl text, “if he [the drunkard] goes following along the road he stirs and upsets himself like a snake, throwing up at and shooting poison at other people’s honor, or like a dog who goes dragging his poisonous spittle down the street, there being no animal as proud [or] as disturbed as him…he does not care for his soul” (1593: fol. 30). The graphic scene continues, as the drunkard then “vomits on himself, wetting himself with his [own] vomit and urine like a pig and a four-legged animal. And if somewhere on the road he falls down, he disgusts the whole altepetl [town] there, even the animals are just scandalized by him” (fol. 31). Finally, the drunkard might meet their end by drowning in some water and when he is found later, people exclaim “how swelled up he was, like a dog!” (fol. 31v). Notably, half of the animals used to depict the rage and downfall of drunkards (serpents and dogs), were also typical forms of nanahualtin (plural nahualli) who were born as commoners or behaved antisocially (Sahagún 1979: 41–3; Sahagún 1981: 31). As such, Bartolomé de Alva’s Confessionario expressed Christian notions of animal inferiority and vice in ways that connected to Nahua frameworks of animality, which rested less on distinct ontological categories or innate spiritual-intellectual faculties than specific socially, morally, and cosmically disordered behavior. While attempting to affirm a Christian sacred-natural hierarchy, this religious pedagogy left ample openings for Indigenous reinterpretations.