ixtlahua/debt

[John F. Schwaller]

Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 09:22:05 -0700
Subject: Re: ixtlahua/debt
From: richard haly <Richard.Haly at colorado.edu>
To: Frances Karttunen <karttu at nantucket.net>, <nahuat-l at mrs.umn.edu>


I can likewise take issue with most representations of sacrifice as
debt-payement to gods when concepts such as debt, payment, and gods go
unexamined. From my research, nextlahualiztli makes most sense as payment to
the rulers (likewise teotl). When people say that the Aztecs thought the
Spaniards were "gods" - teules- it makes them (the Aztecs) seem pretty
credulous when we think of "gods" in any Judeo-Christian manner.
Nonetheless, when one considers that they called their own rulers "gods" and
treated them as such - not looking in to the brightness of the face of the
emperor/sun - then any debt-payment to gods can be a debt-payment to
rulers. All sacrifice phenomena - and all festival and pilgrimage phenomena
as well - make much more sense when one tries to understand them in this
world and not in some metaphysical or "religious" way. (Religious is in
quotation marks because most people think religion is about "spiritual"
stuff and not "material" stuff because that is what their own religions have
told them. That is not the case in a culture of embodied ancestors -
Mesoamerica, for one.) Sacrifice is much more like kula-exchange among
Trobriand islanders. An explanation of sacrifice whose dynamics do not rely
on metaphysical language or a transcendent agent has a greater chance of
making real sense.

Richard