RITES OF PASSAGE: MESOAMERICAN RITES

In Mesoamerica, the most human of all religious rituals, rites of passage, mark people's changing relationships with their fellow human and nonhuman beings. Points in the life cycle most stressed include birth, marriage, and death. Rites, however, mark many other transitions, including children's and adolescents' development, the transition from illness to health, and initiation into new careers. Communities small and large also celebrate rites that move human corporate bodies from one status to another. Finally, because both the cosmos itself and those things that inhabit it are also considered living beings analogous to humans, even cosmic entities such as the sun move through transitory moments celebrated as rites of passage.

Historical Documentation

Mesoamerica's long history dates back to approximately twenty-three thousand years ago. Fairly secure archaeological dating techniques have been able to place humans in the region at that point, although some suggest an even earlier occupation. After a very long and slow period of development, four cultures in particular have played formative roles: the Olmec (c. 2250–300 bce); the Oaxaca (c. 1400 bce–present); the Mexican highlands people (c. 1200 bce–present); and the Maya (c. 400 bce–present). The Spanish Conquest in 1521 produced a cataclysmic change in the region, destroying almost all indigenous pictorial documents and wreaking havoc on architectural, sculptural, and other material remains. The conquerors sought radical cultural and religious change as well, working hard to turn indigenous Mesoamericans into Spanish-like Catholics. However, this venture was not as successful, so the cultural and spiritual conquests of New Spain proved less complete than the political and material ones.

Historical records in the modern sense for anything prior to the Spanish Conquest are largely lacking. This does not mean indigenous history was not recorded. Mesoamericans kept records not in script but in pictorial, partly hieroglyphic, partly phonetic forms of writing, sometimes inscribed on stone stelae (stone slabs), buildings that were used ritually, and often in screen-folded books, the last of which the Spanish mostly destroyed. Hence, what scholars know about cultural practices before the Conquest relies almost exclusively on material remains, and what they know after it relies heavily on documents influenced, collected, or written by the Spanish.

Although written records prove both scarce and difficult, because the cultural and spiritual conquests were never complete, in the early twenty-first century one often can find strong continuity among historical and contemporary versions of various indigenous religious traditions, especially in those areas removed from the centers of Conquest. This means that what scholars now know about Mesoamerican rites of passage depends on four broad sources of information: material remains from before and after the Conquest, accounts commissioned and sometimes written by the Spanish conquerors, historical documents and travelers' accounts produced in the years since the Conquest, and ethnographic and indigenous reports of living traditions. Thorough investigations of both historical and living traditions rely on all four, for none alone can either account for the disruption of the Conquest or present a picture with any depth.

Besides marking birth, marriage, and death as the key points in a person's life, all rites tend to take a very long view of these and other transitions. Rites of passage mark human life stages, among other events. The Mexica (Aztecs) said that life was divided into four broad periods: childhood; puberty; maturity; and old age, a sequence echoed by many other Mesoamerican groups. However, Alfredo López Austin (1988) reports that, within these four, the Mexica used many words that made much finer distinctions, such as a baby in the uterus; a nursing infant; a person under or over six years of age; a youthful, then nubile male or female; early and advances middle age; early and advanced old age; and more. Clearly, one's particular life stage was noted with precision. Moreover, the words seem to say that life continuously changes and is far more complicated than simply getting born, growing up, becoming old, and dying.

Life's continuous changes are similarly expressed in the structure of Mesoamerican rites of passage. These rituals say that change never stops, and moreover, major change takes a particularly long time; in fact, it takes one's whole life span and more. Mesoamerican rites reflect the ongoing nature of all transitions in a way that extends considerably the classic three-stage model advanced by Arnold van Gennep in 1909. Van Gennep proposed that life changes are marked by rituals that: (1) separate the individual in transition; (2) restructure that individual to effect the change; (3) end by reintegrating him or her back into the community transformed by his or her new status. One must understand van Gennep, however, in the most expansive manner possible when considering Mesoamerican rites. These are not simple discrete rituals that move through just three stages (no matter how complex those stages might be) and end at the third with the reintegration of the individual into his or her community in his or her new status; rites of passage in Mesoamerica never quite end.

Each ritual of status change and reintegration is also an anticipation of the next transformation and therefore must be seen as multiple sets of van Gennep's three ritual steps strung together, each set of three moving to another set of three on the ritual's "string," none ever quite ending. In this way, the person moves through and toward his or her life changes, recognizing life's innate transitory character. In Mesoamerican rites, one may gain a new status, but that status is always temporary, to be enhanced or replaced by the next new status. Sixteenth-century Mexica birth rituals, for example, did not simply mark the new status of a baby in a community and then end. They began with early pregnancy; marked pregnancy's later stages; structured birth itself, including the possibility of death; and if successful, named the baby. But even then, the naming ceremony didn't just celebrate the birth and introduce the child to the family; it also explicitly anticipated future rites tying the child to its community, such as schooling, marriage, parenthood, and death. These birth rites recognized one's whole life and beyond by symbolically referencing future rites. Moreover, when their times came, those future rites referred back to the previous ones. It becomes difficult to separate one of these moments from the rest, for ultimately all are connected, even if some major changes like birth, marriage, or death are particularly noted.

An ancient 260-day divinitory calendar, dating back at least to the seventh-century bce, determined everything from naming a child, determining her or his occupation, and deciding when he or she would marry to deciding the time for installing rulers and for making good trips, successful business deals, and victorious wars. All Mesoamerican rites of passage were, and many still are, set by this calendar, and most share a similar ongoing, transitory character. Nevertheless, rites can vary considerably in their details regionally and throughout history.

Examples of Mesoamerican Rites of Passage

Mexica noble birth rituals are among some of the most extensive and poignant appearing in the sixteenth-century resources. Their sympathetic Spanish reporter, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, took particular interest in the numerous and lengthy formal speeches made throughout by the family members, the young mother, and the midwife. This series of formal rituals began with the first knowledge of pregnancy. Gathered for a meal and speeches, the relatives noted that the Lord of the Near and Nigh had placed a "precious necklace, a precious feather" within the young woman. They wondered if this impending birth worried their dead ancestors, those who had gone to "the water," "the cave," "the land of the dead," those who had departed but nevertheless might yet be present. Since the godly creator couple, Ometecutli and Omecihuatl, had instructed that a child be born, the speakers now must warn the young woman to not lift heavy objects and advise the young parents about sexual matters. They reminded them that they now had become protectors like the "silk cotton wood and cypress trees" that shield people. With pregnancy, the couple took from their ancestors the carrying frame, the burden of mother and fatherhood. The new mother thanked her parents for all the suffering that she had put them through, noting that now it was her turn. So began the long difficult road to bringing forth and fostering a new life.

In the seventh or eighth month, similar rites were performed with a midwife who introduced the young woman to the sweat bath. There, the midwife called on various godly powers, including those of healing, motherhood in general, mothers who had died in childbirth, and the night, and she massaged the young woman vigorously. She also advised her at length on what she should and should not do to assure a safe birth. During birth—the most dangerous moment in the whole ongoing ritualized event—godly powers that would help the girl were enlisted as well as those that would help should death occur. Birth was a battle with the young women warriors in pursuit of their children. The goddess Cihuacoatl, who assisted the second in command of all the Mexica, also assisted the midwife with her war strategy. Male warriors sacrificed in state rituals became gods who captured the sun from the land of the dead at daybreak, carrying it to the sky's roof; women who died in childbirth's sacrificial battles became goddesses who captured the sun from the male warriors at noon, carrying it back to the western house at dusk. But if a birth was successful, the midwife gave war whoops to celebrate the victory.

A baby girl's umbilical cord was given to Ometecutli and Omecihuatl and buried in the corner of the house, for she would become the hearth, the cook, the spinner, and the weaver. A baby boy's was given to the Lord and Lady of the Healing Night (the sweat bath), the Earth Lord, and the Sun and was buried in a battlefield by seasoned warriors, for that was his destiny. The family named the child within a week or two on a day propitious for its future character, and before it crawled, they promised it to one of the schools for religious training—which taught boys and girls in separate institutions—or to one that trained boys for warfare. A babe thus was brought into an extended family, which included living and deceased generations, and dedicated to the community, society, and cosmos in which it lived. Its past, present, and future combined to assist the production of a healthy child and future family member and citizen. In a similar fashion, the child would be sent off to school, into marriage, and eventual ancestorhood.

Other Mesoamerican groups celebrated and continue to celebrate similar, yet different, birth rites. The sixteenth-century Maya placed the goddess Ix Chel's image under women's beds to induce pregnancy and, as did the Mexica, named their babies on propitious days. Seventeenth-century Zapotec families in Oaxaca fortified their newborns by fasting for three days and abstaining from sex for twenty. When forty days had passed, the family took the child, along with its godparents, to be baptized in the church. As the Mexica baby was dedicated to its future school, so too the Zapotec child was dedicated to the church in which it would be trained. And in the early twenty-first century in Guatemala, the Quiché Maya say that the divinatory calendar that has determined all rites of passage for centuries marks passage of the same amount of time that it takes for the gestation of a baby.

Mesoamericans also mark children's developmental stages. In the sixteenth century, Yucatec Maya dedicated their children when they were old enough to be carried on the hip: three months for girls, probably because the hearth fire had three stones, and four for boys, because a cornfield had four corners. Godparents were ceremonially introduced to the child, taking up the task of helping with its development. Every four years, the Mexica dedicated their very young children along with honorary aunts and uncles, who later would introduce them to school. The children were symbolically singed or cooked over the fire and stretched so that they would grow tall. At the celebration, the new aunts and uncles carried the children on their backs or, if the children were old enough, danced with them.

Clothes and hair often marked childhood stages. Yucatec children ran naked until they were about five years old, when little boys began wearing a cloth like their fathers and little girls a skirt like their mothers. A boy received a small white bead to wear in his hair, and a girl received a string with a red shell, which was tied around her waist. They wore these until puberty. A little Otomí girl wore her hair very short, then shoulder-length with bangs when older, and bound it on her head after she herself had become a mother. A little Mexica boy sported a shorn head, but at age ten he was allowed to grow a tuft until he had captured his first warrior at about age fifteen, when his hair was cut to hang long over the right ear. His grandfather warned him to quickly capture another or else he would continue to wear his hair like a girl. Scarification on one breast and hip marked a young Mexica girl ready for school, and a lip plug marked a young boy. Each was ceremonially advised on proper behavior and the expectations of their large families before embarking on their formal education. Mexica youths remained guarded in the schools until marriage moved them from childhood to adulthood. Yucatec youths could not marry until their childhood adornments were formally removed from them in a ceremony. These ceremonies, however, were not necessarily performed at puberty but at an older stage of childhood just before puberty. And they were not performed individually but in a community of children close in age. They married only when their parents deemed it appropriate.

Marriage, not puberty, often officially moved youth into adulthood and almost always allied the two families. After ceremonially informing his schoolmaster, a Mexica boy's family carefully chose his mate, and a matchmaker ritually negotiated the union. On a calendrically propitious day, a matron of her own family carried the bride on her back to her new family home. Surrounding her on this sad, scary trip of leave-taking were all her female relatives with whom she had lived. The mothers each dressed their respective new child-in-law, and then an elderly day keeper (diviner) literally tied the knot by tying their capes together. After the elderly matchmakers put the couple in their wedding bed, they guarded their door through the night, all the while getting drunk. Yucatec Maya, however, could betroth their children when they were young, becoming honorary in-laws until the two actually married. The groom lived with and worked for the bride's family for five to six years.

Contemporary Nahua men, ancestors of the ancient Mexica, also use matchmakers to negotiate a marriage. The groom must pay for the entire process and so sometimes must postpone marriage. The marriage alliance is negotiated over much food and alcohol, and a generous gift of more food and drink seals the deal. During the twenty-four-hour ceremony, they stage mock displays of anger, which are smoothed over, indicating the two families' peaceful union to come. A sacred web of incense woven around the couple and their godparents finalizes the alliance, and the godparents dance with dough images of their future children.

The elderly play many key roles in these ceremonies, and death marks their transition to ancestorhood, beginning a continuous flow of sacred powers between the dead and the living. According to David Friedel and Linda Schele, the sarcophagus lid of the seventh-century Maya Lord Pacal of Palenque, Mexico, shows the dead ruler sliding down the Milky Way into the underworld's skeletal jaws. At each winter solstice's sunset, a flash of light illuminated a frieze depicting the deceased Pacal handing on the leadership to his son Chan Balum. After traveling through the underworld, Pacal will emerge at dawn as the new ancestral sun warming the earth. Some Mexica dead were sent to the underworld "place where no smoke escapes, the place of no chimney" in rites that extended over as much as five years. Repeated cremations moved these dead to beyond the "wide waters" in the Land of the Dead, carried there by a small yellow dog. In the case of a ruler, elaborate rituals reestablished the state's relations with both their alliances and enemies. In the 1930s the Panajachel Maya dead traveled through the underworld to emerge as stars, and before birth, their babies lived as stars following the sun. The twenty-first-century Maya of Yalcoba say that their deserving deceased relatives appear at dawn and dusk as pink clouds floating in the still skies.

Both cosmic and human rites marked the transitional nature of all existence. The Mexica ritual that gave birth to a new sun every 52 solar years—just when 73 rounds of the 260-day calendar had ended—acted as a cosmic transformative rite of passage. The sun was birthed in a series of steps that never quite ended, thereby anticipating its continuing life and eventual death. Even suns in the Mexica world were born, lived, and died according to the ongoing calendrical patterns governing all transitions. Similarly, Quiché day keepers—those who count the sun's days—receive their calling and are trained and initiated in an extended series of rituals closely following the same calendar. Moreover, the initial rite is not necessarily their last. Even as they perform rites of passage for others, they can train further, going through more rites of their own. And so human life continues as the cosmos continues, transiting from one stage to another and on.

Bibliography

The highly readable Rites of Passage by Arnold van Gennep and translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle Caffee (London, 1909) is probably the seminal work on the nature of rites of passage. Expanding on van Gennep's idea of liminality, Victor Turner explores rites of passage as a social drama of Hidalgo men and as examples of communitas in Mexican and other pilgrimages in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974).

An extraordinarily rich source of information on the Mexica (Aztecs) was compiled by a sixteenth-century Franciscan father, Bernardino de Sahagún, in his Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble as Florentine Codex: A General History of the Things of New Spain, 13 vols. (Santa Fe, N. Mex., 1950–1982). Although information pertaining to rites of passage is spread throughout almost all the volumes, Book 6 contains particularly extensive material on pregnancy, childbirth, and childhood. Representing Aztec Ritual: Performance, Text, and Image in the Work of Sahagún, edited by Eloise Quiñones Keber (Boulder, Colo., 2002), pp. 143–174, offers a number of useful individual articles on Nahua ritual found in the corpus of Sahagún. Alfredo López Austin presents a detailed picture of Aztec or Nahua cosmic, religious, and physiological ideas, including a complete list of life-stage terms, in The Human Body and Ideology: Concepts of the Ancient Nahuas, translated by Thelma Ortiz de Montellano and Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City, Utah, 1988). Kay Read's Time and Sacrifice in the Aztec Cosmos (Bloomington, Ind., 1998) offers a comprehensive discussion of the transitional nature of Aztec cosmology and a description of the solar rite of passage. Equally useful is Davíd Carrasco's retrospective City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization (Boston, 1999), which gathers articles spanning over fifteen years and exploring topics ranging from cosmology to ritual. In 1566 Fray Diego de Landa described a number of rites, primarily of the Yucatec Maya, in his Yucatan before and after the Conquest, translated by William Gates in 1937 (New York, 1978). One of the few sources on religion in Oaxaca, including information on rites of passage, is José Alcina Franch's Calendario y religión entre los Zapotecos (Mexico City, 1993), which explores religion and calendrics among the seventeenth-century Zapotec.

James Taggart's Nahuat Myth and Social Structure (Austin, Tex., 1983) presents limited descriptions of contemporary Nahuat marriage ceremonies. Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman's Path by David Freidel, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker (New York, 1993) offers a comprehensive picture of Maya cosmology with information on death and the afterlife sprinkled throughout. Barbara Tedlock's Time and the Highland Maya (Albuquerque, N. Mex., 1992) gives ample examples of initiation rites of Quiché Maya ritual specialists, includes information on some other rites, and explains the 260-day ritual calendar. Rituals of Sacrifice: Walking the Face of the Earth on the Sacred Path of the Sun: A Journey through the Tz'utujil Maya World of Santiago Atitlán by Vincent James Stanzione (Albuquerque, N. Mex., 2003) is an excellent book on the rituals of the Tz'utujil, another contemporary Maya group.

Kay A. Read (2005)