The Solar Christ in Nahuatl Doctrinal Texts of Early Colonial Mexico

Abstract

The friars who ministered to the Nahua (Aztec) Indians incorporated into their Nahuatl teachings Old World symbolism which used the sun as a metaphor or type for Christ. The solar Christ had different connotations in Nahuatl because of differences between Christian and Nahua views of cosmology, morality, history, and the symbolism of sun and light. Indians today view Christ as a solar deity; Christian teaching may be one source of this identification. The Mendicant friars who converted the Indians of Mexico to Christianity after the Spanish Conquest left behind a large corpus of Christian doctrinal literature in Nahuatl and other Mesoamerican languages. These texts include sermons, catechisms, biblical excerpts, dialogues, hagiography, meditations, hymns, and confession manuals. They were written by friars conversant in the native languages, in collaboration with indigenous students who were educated in Spanish and Latin and who had considerable influence on the native-language texts. Because of their dominantly European content, these texts have received relatively little attention from ethnohistorians more interested in the indigenous side of Indian-Spanish contact. Thus these texts constitute a largely unexploited ethnohistorical resource of great value for interpreting colonial culture, particularly in regard to religion but also to language, political and social relations, and other aspects of Indian life. They provide a useful guide to the acculturative pressures operating upon native ideology. They may also help to establish more continuity between the indigenous beliefs and practices recorded in sixteenth-century ethnographic descriptions and those observed by ethnographers in the present. The doctrinal corpus is dominated by texts in the Nahuatl (Aztec) language. This extensive body of Nahua-Christian literature reveals precisely how Christianity was presented to the Nahuas, how Christian conEthnohistory 35:3 (Summer 1988). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc ooI4-I8o0/88/$i.5o. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.133 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 05:27:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Solar Christ in Nahuatl Doctrinal Texts cepts were translated and explained, and what elements of indigenous belief were carried over by the friars into what was, in effect, a Nahuatl interpretation of Christianity. Christian concepts picked up new meanings and symbolic associations as they were translated into Nahuatl; at the same time, the new contexts and modes of expression characteristic of Christian preaching began to influence the meanings of Nahuatl terms. Analysis of this hybrid literature helps to illuminate the true character of the so-called spiritual conquest. Christian doctrine was Nahuatized in the process of its accommodation to native categories of language and thought just as Christian personages and Christian rites took the place of the indigenous ones that most closely resembled them. This paper examines the treatment of one motif, Christ as the sun, in the colonial Mexican literature, and analyzes this motif in light of its Old World origins and its New World cultural setting. The use of this motif in the Nahuatl doctrinal writings of three prominent friars, the Franciscans fray Bernardino de Sahagun and fray Juan Bautista and the Augustinian fray Juan de la Anunciacion, is discussed. The Solar Christ in the Old World and the New The Christ-sun is by no means a common theme in the colonial literature, but it illustrates some interesting aspects of the translation process, including the very sensitive issue of idolatry. It is the sort of identification that one might expect the friars to avoid in the interest of preventing idolatry. Alternatively, the fact that they did use it might be seen as an attempt at planned syncretism, the fostering of identifications between indigenous and Christian figures as an easy way to bring the Indians into the church. In reality, though, the friars were neither so conscientious nor so crafty. They were simply employing an Old World motif, translating its terminology into Nahuatl and using it in traditional contexts. Formal Christian teaching did not necessarily contradict the Nahuas' own interpretations of Christianity; the difference between Old World and Nahua Christianity lay in the articulation of their respective worldviews and the way that metaphors operated within them. It is widely known that present-day Mesoamerican Indians view Christ as a solar deity (see, for example, Gossen 1974; Hunt 1977; Taggart I983; Vogt I969). This identification may look like a survival of indigenous solar worship, but in fact the identification was not inconsistent with sixteenth-century Christianity. For Christ to become identified with the sun was a logical response given the structure and character of the indigenous worldview; the argument here is not that the friars were responsible for this identification but only that theirs was one voice active in the intercultural dialogue within which this identification originated. 235 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.133 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 05:27:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms