Mesoamerican cosmovision
The cosmovision of these societies was reflected in the ways in which they were organized, such as in their built environment and social hierarchies, as well as in their epistemologies and ontologies, including an understanding of their place within the cosmos or universe.
Elements of Mesoamerican cosmovision are reflected in pre-Columbian textual sources, such as the Popol Vuh and the Cuauhtinchan maps, the archeological record, as well as in the contemporary beliefs, values, and practices of Indigenous people, such as the Maya, Nahua, and Purépecha, as well as their descendants.
It has been argued that the Day of the Dead (Spanish: Día de los Muertos) ceremony exists as a legacy of Mesoamerican cosmovision.
Societies were organized around huge, urban ceremonial centers, which were in turn constructed to reflect the cosmos through architecture, placement with relation to celestial bodies, and artwork.
Mesoamericans, who viewed their landscape in terms of cardinal directions,[2] saw these urban centers as axis mundi, places where divine power reaches the earth, and is diffused from there.
[4] These centers held ritual events that gave people access to “making” or generating a world that aligned with cosmovision.
Throughout the Popol Vuh, the themes common to Mesoamerican cosmovision such as the concept of axis mundi, ritual sacrifice and ceremony, and duality and parallelism, are repeatedly presented.
If one considers the major urban centers throughout Mesoamerica, such as Copan, Tikal, Teotihuacan, and Tenochtitlan to name a few, it is possible to discern very obvious, shared characteristics.
These urban sites also centered the Mesoamerican world by providing places where rulers could give people in society physical, and ultimately spiritual, access to their cosmovision.
According to Elizabeth Boone's interpretation of the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan, cosmovision influenced the culture of Mesoamericans so heavily during the Colonial Period that they used their origin story as justification to claim native lands.
Rulers such as Ixtlilxóchitl II of Texcoco allied with the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, but by the early 1520s had come to realize "that his alliance with the Castilian intruders extended beyond the initial material exchanges, offers of wives and concubines, gifts of slaves, and payments of tribute.
The children Ixtlilxóchitl II had placed under the friars instruction "destroyed temples and drove the native priests out of their sacred grounds."
[8] By the 1520s and 1530s in Mesoamerica, millions of Indigenous people were being baptized, often collectively, while "makeshift churches began to appear atop temple ruins and young neophytes confiscated and desecrated images of local deities."
This violent process of conversion was historically chronicled as "a sudden Christian triumph over an entrenched and bloodthirsty paganism" or a total conquest of mostly passive Indigenous peoples.
However, more recent historians have determined that Spanish conquest was coercive, yet "incomplete," with some scholars "tending to see Catholicism as a thin veneer covering a still pagan Indian people.
As Crewe determines, "baptism acquired ever-greater relevance to indigenous efforts to stabilize a world that had been thrown into disorder."
For Indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica, preserving and continuing to practice their beliefs reflected in their cosmologies was not openly possible in the wake of Spanish colonization.
Fash, William, et al. “The House of New Fire at Teotihuacan and its Legacy in Mesoamerica.” The Art of Urbagnism: How Mesoamerican Kingdoms Represented Themselves in Architecture and Imagery.
