Animal Offerings and Auguries

In the eyes of colonial evangelizers such as Fería, however, such practices represented the fundamental differences between Christianity and Zapotec religion. Continuing with the opening libana, he declared to the Doctrina’s students “how without foundation your ancient religion was, for it only concerned corporeal things … when you blood-let from your tongues and ears, when the priests of the temples of the devil sacrificed men” it was only to “petition your false gods … to be free from sickness and to live long in this world” (1567: fol. 4v). The true Christian faith however, in Fería’s terms, pertained to men’s immaterial, eternal souls. He then addresses the creation of animal life under mankind’s dominion, insisting that “it is only God, by whose orders the land produces maize, beans, squashes, vegetables, fruit trees; and the animals whose meat we eat,” which along with all the land and sea “is ours: and God created it for us” (fol. 10–10v). Fería also saw a chasm between Zapotec ceremony and Catholic sacraments, contrasting the sacrifice of lowly beasts “dogs, hens, and other animals” with the Eucharist, which is “not a sacrifice of dogs, but rather the body and blood of our savior” (fol. 81v). To him, bènizàa “idolatry” was based on ignorance of the true natural hierarchy created by God, which led them to the even more heinous sins of murder and diabolical worship.

Another Indigenous belief complex that appeared to subvert Christian natural order was the power of animals to portend the future. The Florentine Codex, Book V details the various tetzahuitl (omens) by which Nahuas made prognostications, many of which featured animals linked to deities or supernatural figures. For instance, a horned or screech owl landing on one’s roof or even hearing them cry out at night heralded destruction and death, since they came as envoys of Mictlantecuhtli (lord of the underworld) (Sahagún 1979: 161–3). Likewise, the weasel brought “woe and affliction,” while the pinauiliztli beetle could be either a dreadful or opportune omen, and the skunk was a manifestation of the divinity Tezcatlipoca himself (its foul-smelling spray was the divinity breaking wind) (165; 169–70; 171). Book V also explains that a swarm of ants in one’s home, a harbinger of torment and death, was sent as a magical attack by an “inhuman” malefactor – the tlacatecolotl (173). Local linguistic records indicate that Oaxacan cultures also considered certain animals as presages of fortune. Córdoba’s Zapotec Vocabulario not only includes an entry for the noun “omen” (pijzi, pijze, peezi) but even phrases for interpreting specific animal auguries (1578: fol. 13). Among others, “to watch [as prophecy] what the bird that sings or the snake does,” “to predict what the animal omen sees, what must happen and come to that person or home,” and even a particular species that was an “omen for travelers, a bird that sings if they will encounter highwaymen” called the “huija, because it sings like that, huija huija” (fol. 13). Beliefs in animal omens seemingly extended across multiple ethnolinguistic groups in Oaxaca, since Fray Francisco de Alvarado’s Castilian-Mixtec dictionary also includes a term for an omen (“ñena”) and even “an ominous bird” (“quete ñena”) (1593: fols. 40, 94). The notion that certain animals acted as spiritual signals, surfaced from colonial Nahua, Zapotec, Mixtec, and Chinantec communities alike, in the questions and responses of confession manuals.

In 1728 the cura (parish priest) of Yólox, a Chinantec-speaking region of Oaxaca, Nicolás de la Barreda responded to criticism from the Bishop of Oaxaca Ángel de Maldonado for failing to provide the Eucharist to his congregants, by insisting that they could not rightly receive the Sacraments until their vices of inebriation and superstition were extirpated. For, under the present state of affairs, “the Indians would be little more than animals and the curas would be justified in not permitting them to take Communion” (Cline 1960: 23). Just before his death a few weeks later, Bishop Maldonado commissioned a catechism in the language to facilitate the necessary instruction. The result was Barreda’s Doctrina christiana en lengua chinanteca, añadida la explicación de los principales misterios de la fee (1730), which provided a condensed confessionary to perform before the Eucharist, so that his congregants’ souls were not degraded almost to the level of animals by their sins and the body and blood of Christ was not, in turn, degraded by their consumption. Here, Barreda queries: “have you believed in animals such as the Tecolote, bird, and other animals?” then “have you believed in what you have dreamt …?” (1730: fol. 10v). That he chose the Nahuatl term tecolotl for owl in the Spanish text may be owed both to the spread of Nahuatl as a lingua franca throughout New Spain and to Barreda’s use of other Nahuatl catechisms as models for this project. Yet the question suggests local conceptions of animal auguries and their connections with dreams, since Barreda would be unlikely to highlight it in the confessionary, had he not observed some parallel beliefs among Chinantec populations.

Questions about animal omens are common across nearly all the catechisms and confessionaries reviewed here. One of the earliest examples, Molina’s 1578 Nahuatl Confessionario, asks the confessant: “do you believe in dreams or by chance do you have as omens the screech owl, the horned owl, the weasel, the pinauiztli [chafer beetle], and the tlalacatl [ant], the skunk’s spray in your house, the threads of spider webs when they sometimes pass over your eyes?” Evidently, Molina was well informed by his Nahua assistants, since every creature he lists features as an omen in Book V of the Florentine Codex, indicating his understanding (and disapproval) of animals’ power to express cosmic forces, be controlled by ritual specialists, or even manifest Indigenous divinities themselves. Later Nahuatl doctrinal manuals contain similar, if less detailed, queries. Fray Martín de León’s Camino del cielo en lengua mexicana (1611) asks the confessant “have you believed in dreams or in omens of horned owls or screech owls, or of another type of animal, saying that they announce your death or misfortune?” (fol. 123v). While León likely referenced earlier confessionaries such as Molina’s, he may also have identified these animal auguries among the “idolatry, superstition” he found during his visita in 1610 (fol. 5). Don Alva followed suit too, asking “have you believed in dreams, in peyote, ololiuhqui, in fire, in horned owls, screech owls, snakes …?” (fol. 15v). Although Alva does not directly refer to the animals as omens, their relation to hallucinogens used for divination suggests a connection to portents of the future, while owls appear once more as a most spiritually consequential creature. Finally, the confessionary within fray Francisco de Lorra Baquio’s 1634 sacramental manual also questions “do you believe in or have as an omen the owl when it cries? Or the screech owl when it shouts and makes noise with its wings? Or if not, the beetle when you come across it? Or the squirrel? Or the fox?” (fol. 48). References to owls and beetles are consistent with Molina’s edition, while the squirrel and fox seem to be local variations that Baquio observed as parish priest in central Mexico.

The Doctrina translated into the Mazahua language by Diego de Nájera Yanguas, parish priest of Xocotitlan (northeast from the Valley of Mexico) does not specify any animals but does probe whether the confessant has “believed in omens” and then if they “believed in what you have dreamed” (1675: fol. 17). Premonition and divination through dreams were at best superstition and at worst acts of diabolical witchcraft, according to most Iberian and colonial clerical understandings. Spanish demonologist Martín de Castañega theorized that it was the Devil’s influence on witches’ dreams that made them experience their impossible transformations into animal forms and flights through the air. Meanwhile, in central Mexican and Oaxacan cultures, human spirits were especially disposed to wander from the body and potentially inhabit an animal during sleep, which the nahualli and equivalent specialists could consciously control (López-Austin 1988: 369–73; Martínez González 2011: 145). The overlap of ominous species and animal transformation specialists’ typical forms – particularly the owl and weasel, both attributed to the commoner nahualli and tlacatecolotl in the Florentine Codex – suggests an even deeper connection between colonial Nahua beliefs in dreams, animal auguries, and models of interspecies mutability, whether or not the confessors were fully aware of it.

Despite his diatribes against Zapotec idolatry for its fundamental misunderstanding of divine and natural order, Fería states that among the situations in which it would be appropriate for his catechumen to make the sign of the cross, was if “some animal that they had as an omen may cross before you, then at that hour cross yourself so that our lord protects you” (1567: fol. 18). Ironically, the Doctrina may have reaffirmed Zapotec beliefs in animal portents, confirming that certain creatures indeed spelled danger and required protection from the Christian God. Placing questions about omens and dreams within sections concerning the First Commandment (Thou shalt have no other Gods before me) in many of the confessionaries, also recognized and to some extent affirmed the reality of animal portents and their connection with rival non-Christian spiritual forces within nature. Again, clergy unintentionally provided Indigenous audiences with opportunities to reinterpret Catholic dogma using their imaginative inheritance.