Aztec and Maya Apocalypses: Old World Tales of Doom in a New World Setting by Mark Z. Christensen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Aztec and Maya Apocalypses: Old World Tales of Doom in a New World Setting by Mark Z. Christensen Amara Solari Aztec and Maya Apocalypses: Old World Tales of Doom in a New World Setting. By Mark Z. Christensen (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. 2022. Pp. xii, 252. $55.00. ISBN: 978-0-806-19035-8.) Writing amid our current apocalypse, the global COVID-19 pandemic, historian Mark Z. Christensen has offered a complete reimagining of the fundamental role the idea of “Doomsday” played in the Christianization of the Indigenous populations [End Page 223] of the American continents in the early modern period. The author—an ethnohistorian who is renowned for his translation abilities in both colonial Nahuatl (the Aztec language) and Yucatec Mayan (the Mayan dialect spoken in most of the Yucatan Peninsula)—clearly outlines in his Introduction three goals for his tome. His overarching goal is to translate and analyze relatively obscure eschatological texts, composed in these two Indigenous languages, to convey their creative adaptation to serve the idiosyncratic spiritual needs of the evangelical endeavors in New Spain. Secondly, Christensen strives to complicate the historiographical tendency to approach native responses to Christianity in one of two modes: to assume the wholesale adoption of the European religion, or on the more extreme end of this continuum, envision that all Indigenous interpretations of Christianity were inherently subversive. Christensen’s approach is much more nuanced than either of these, as he stresses the importance of a scholarly appreciation of both contributing religious traditions, an academic method that ultimately allows for Indigenous Christianity to be the result of active and ongoing negotiations between Indigenous neophytes and their resident friars. The importance of Christensen’s approach cannot be overstated as it serves to reinscribe agency onto native communities of New Spain. His final articulated goal is to offer his readers English translations of his textual source base. After providing an overview of Spanish and Mesoamerican worldviews of the early modern period, Christensen spends his first body chapter succinctly synthesizing contemporaneous eschatology, explaining how and why millenarianism was a pragmatic worldview for the Spaniards responsible for New World conquests of both territory and of souls. Thereafter, Christensen craftily organizes the remaining chapters along an eschatological chronology. Chapter 2 turns to the topics of the first judgement, limbo, and purgatory, using Juan Bautista Viseo’s Confesario (1599), Ignacio de Paredes’s Promptuario (1759), Juan Coronel’s Discursos (1620), and the anonymous Sermones en lengua Maya (18th century) to analyze how these moments of “personal apocalypses” were conveyed to Nahuatl and Mayan-speaking audiences. Chapter 3 moves on to the Apocalypse proper, providing translations of such important texts as the “Fifteen Signs” from an anonymous Maya sermons copybook (which can be partially correlated with texts and images from the 15th-century German book, Der Antichrist und die fünfzehn Zeichen) and Bautista’s Nahuatl Sermonario (1606). Personal resurrection following the Final Judgement is the topic of the next Chapter, which analyzes the Seven Articles in the Dominican Martín de León’s Camino de cielo (1611) and in Coronel’s Discursos predicables. Chapter 5 finishes the body chapters, focused on four texts (Fabián de Aquino’s 16th-century copybook, Coronel’s Discursos and Discursos predicables, and the “Teabo Manuscript”), which describe heaven and hell. This book is a welcome and overdue addition to the academic subfields of Latin American religious studies and ethnohistory; Christensen’s analytically rich translations of Nahuatl and Mayan documents are a true gift. It also bears noting that beyond the relatively small circle of Mesoamerican ethnohistorians, this book speaks to the larger field of Catholic studies, evidencing, as it does, one of the most [End Page 224] creative examples of religious localization and native negotiation in global history. Moreover, this text could be easily incorporated into an undergraduate or graduate syllabus as Christensen’s conversational writing style makes for a very enjoyable read, despite his apocalyptic subject matter. [End Page 225] Amara Solari The Pennsylvania State University Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press ...