Much of the pre-Hispanic history of Mexico has filtered down to us through the writings of Spanish, Mestizo, and Indian chroniclers and historians. I include Guatemala here because of the importance of the Quiche and Cakchiquel historical and religious documents. Prior to the Spanish Conquest native historians preserved their history through the use of pictographic, ideographic, and phonetic codices or books. In the case of the Maya we have hieroglyphic inscriptions which can now be read as history. However, in this present series we shall be looking mainly at post-Conquest secular and religious writers who recorded pre-Hispanic languages, cultures, and religions, particularly with regard to the Aztecs and the Maya. However, given the basic political and religious motivations of the Spanish Conquistadors to conquer and the missionary priests to convert, we have to ask how accurate is our current picture of pre-Hispanic Mexico and Guatemala based on these possibly biased sources.
Throughout the writings of the Franciscan and Dominican missionaries we come across strong interjections expressing their abhorrence of native religion and customs and asserting their determination to root out the last vestige of idolatry among the ignorant benighted natives. Needless to say neither the Spanish civil authorities nor the priests really understood the true nature of the religious concepts they set out to destroy. Recent research in comparative religion has provided us with deeper insights into the nature of indigenous Mesoamerican religions resulting in a much different interpretation than that presented by these early writers.
In fact there is good reason to believe that in spite of all that was lost or deliberately destroyed during the Conquest we can still reconstruct a reasonably accurate picture of pre-Hispanic history and religion on this basis. Admittedly many large gaps remain in our knowledge of pre-Hispanic Mexico and Guatemala which can never be filled. However, early in the colonial history of New Spain missionary writers lamented the slow progress of Christianization and recognized the need to identify and prevent idolatrous practices and beliefs among their Indian converts. The primary purpose of the missionaries in New Spain was to complete the Spanish military conquest with the spiritual conquest of Indian souls. For this reason alone they would have taken great care to describe native religious and practices in some detail. Nevertheless, it must always be borne in mind that even the renowned Sahagún, who has left us such a detailed account of the classical Aztecs that he is described as the founder of American ethnography, did not come to Mexico to learn the Aztec religion but to destroy it. With these reservations in mind we can begin our survey of the life and works of the individual chroniclers and historians of early Mexico, who may be divided into two classes, secular and religious.
Secular writing includes the letters of Cortés to the Spanish emperor Charles V and the historical account of the Conquest from one of Cortes=s soldiers, Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Some missionary-priests also produced essentially non-religious documents, such as the didactic Aztec exhortations recorded by Andrés de Olmos and the Apologetica Historia of Bartolomé de Las Casas, a strong supporter and apologist for the natives of New Spain. Indeed some early chroniclers and historians wrote in the native historical tradition to such an extent that they must be regarded as primary sources. Such was Diego Durán, a Dominican friar who came to New Spain as a child and grew up in Mexico speaking Nahuatl. He was so thoroughly mystified by certain Aztec beliefs and practices because they were so close to his own that he thought it must be the work of the Devil.
In general, religious writers, such as Diego de Landa for the Maya and AMotolinia@ for the Aztecs, wrote more with a view to justifying their self-imposed mission to identify and eradicate what they regarded as superstition and idolatry, although they too covered many other aspects of pre-Hispanic native cultures. On the other hand the Indian point of view is represented by the works of Indian and Mestizo writers, such as Ixtlilxochitl, an Aztec chief of Texcoco, who supported Cortés in the conquest of rival Aztecs in neighboring Tenochtitlan, and Tezozomoc, a descendant of Moctezuma, who wrote an epic account of the Aztec migration in Nahuatl. These are just a few of the early chroniclers and historians important for the reconstruction of pre-Hispanic culture, in particular Mesoamerican religious concepts.
In subsequent issues we shall look at some of these early writers on Mexico in terms of their lives and works and their contribution to our knowledge of pre-Hispanic Mexico. Since so much of this early writing is devoted to the history of the missionaries themselves it is essential to separate genuine native tradition from Spanish influence in order to assess the intellectual and spiritual achievements of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
