Reshaping the world: debates on Mesoamerican cosmologies reopens the question of how indigenous Mesoamerican societies thought, and think, about the organisation and interrelationships of the human and supernatural worlds. Since the work of Eduard Seler (Reference Seler1907) in the early twentieth century, scholars have usually understood traditional Mesoamerican cosmologies as both directional and layered—the earth divided into four quarters and a centre, the heavens and the underworld into multiple fixed strata. Reshaping the world challenges the second part of that model, calling into question both the existence of a universal Mesoamerican cosmological model and the importance of vertically arranged layers above and below the earth.
An in-depth introduction by editor Ana Díaz lays out the volume's scope, aims and overall thesis: that divisions of cosmological spaces were, and are, not fixed in Mesoamerican thought, but are reconfigured in different times and cultures and for different ritual and rhetorical purposes. The following nine information-packed chapters are divided into three sections. The first section deals with the structures of Mesoamerican cosmoi, focusing on the problem of Seler's (Reference Seler1907) multi-layered model vs alternatives in which the heavens and underworld may be conceived of as bodies or, like the Earth, as broad regions containing horizontally disposed locations. In Chapter 1, Jesper Nielsen and Toke Sellner Reunert accept the overall model of a universe with three layers—sky, earth and underworld—but argue that their subdivision into further internal layers does not derive from indigenous Mesoamerican conceptions of the world. They make a persuasive case that such sub-layers were introduced to Mesoamerican cosmologies in the wake of the Spanish conquest, and that they have subsequently and inappropriately been applied to other Mesoamerican cultures and time periods. Chapter 2, by Sergio Botta, turns its focus to the “hybrid cosmology” (p. 71) of the post-conquest Codex Vaticanus A, which informed both seventeenth-century European conceptions of Mesoamerican thought and Seler's (Reference Seler1907) reconstruction of Nahua cosmology. The third chapter, by Díaz, presents the argument that makes this book necessary: that there was no single pan-Mesoamerican model of the cosmos that remained stable over the long term, but that local cosmologies described social and spiritual connections between the community and other cosmic places. Here, Díaz focuses on the sky, making the case that this upper world could take on a variety of forms—a wide country, a threshold, a living body—depending on the visible condition of the sky and on local traditions.
The second section of the book investigates reformulations of Mesoamerican cosmologies in colonial and contemporary contexts. In Chapter 4, Gabrielle Vail mines Postclassic and Colonial manuscripts to compare terms in Yucatec Maya for supernatural entities and places before and after the Conquest, documenting the transformation of pre-Hispanic deities (k'uh) into angels or demons, and the reconfiguration of mythic space in indigenous documents influenced by Christianity. Next, David Távarez finds just the kind of multi-layered heaven and underworld rejected by other authors in this volume, in a corpus of Zapotec ritual manuscripts from the turn of the eighteenth century, with the days of the 260-day calendar distributed among the layers of the earth and the worlds above and below it. In the sixth chapter, Kerry Hull presents aspects of Ch'orti’ cosmology, as described by contemporary Ch'orti’ communities, which strongly affect both daily life and formal religious ritual.
The third section is the most disparate in its themes, presenting three essays that could have stood alone as independent articles. In Chapter 7, Alexandre Tokovinine investigates the relationship between political authority and spatially and temporally distant places in Classic Maya hieroglyphic texts. He finds that there are no references in that corpus to distance as such, nor to any explicit layering of the heavens or underworld—only emphases on centrality, elapsed time and a directionality in which the same supernatural places could be assigned to different quarters of the world, or the same cardinal directions associated with different kingdoms. A chapter by Katarzyna Mikulska next extends the arguments of other contributors by challenging even the idea that Mesoamerican cosmologies consistently included a tripartite division among heaven, earth and the underworld. Instead she proposes that the salient division is between the earthly and supernatural worlds, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the realm of humans. Finally, Johannes Neurath explores contemporary Wixarika (Huichol) cosmology, finding a three-way division among the earthly world; the solar world of the sky, constituted through repeated, transformative, ritual acts; and the watery underworld, with which humans interact mainly through various kinds of exchange. These cosmic regions and the stories and rituals associated with them map onto the seasons of the Wixarika year, so that there are times and circumstances when interactions with non-Wixarika people are appropriate, and others when rituals of ongoing creation require exclusion and ingroup solidarity.
The essays here rely on a variety of sources, from contemporary ethnography (in Hull's and Neurath's contributions) to sixteenth- through eighteenth-century books and manuscripts. Only Tokovinine's chapter delves deeply into earlier sources: the Classic hieroglyphic inscriptions of the Maya lowlands. Reshaping the world is an important and valuable resource as it stands, but it would have been more so with the inclusion of one or two additional chapters focusing on evidence from non-Maya regions before the Postclassic period.
This book is exactly what it says on the tin. To its credit, it does not advocate a synoptic view of Mesoamerican cosmology to replace Seler's (Reference Seler1907) model. Instead, some of the authors present multiple, local cosmologies from different traditions, and several of the contributors who do propose a pan-Mesoamerican cosmological model with regional variations fundamentally disagree with each other about what that model looked like. The effect is to challenge—successfully, in my view—some ideas about traditional cosmology that have hitherto been fundamental to Mesoamerican studies. Notably, quadripartite divisions of the universe stand up much better to the authors’ scrutiny than do multi-layered cosmologies, a point of agreement in a volume characterised by diversity of opinion.
Reshaping the world is aimed at serious scholars already equipped with substantial background knowledge about Mesoamerican cultures and the history of scholarship on them. I recommend it for anyone who does, or aspires to do, professional work in the ancient or modern indigenous societies of the region, but the problems it investigates are especially salient for art historians and museum professionals.
