Pictorial History · Pictorial History in Mesoamerican Religions

Pictorial History in Mesoamerican Religions

European intellectuals since antiquity have been debating about the relation(s) between thinking and language. Rooted in these discourses, most modern academic theories on writing systems state that only phonographic writing, expressing thoughts via the transcription of language, is “true” writing, sufficiently abstract to allow intellectual precision and rationality. Based on these assessments, the intellectual and cultural supremacy of (modern) Europe over cultures without phonographic script seemed only natural. Accordingly, the pictorial writing system used by the pre-Hispanic Aztec society in the Central Highlands of Mexico has mostly been declassified by European conquestadores and scholars as an evolutionary primitive, preliminary stage of writing. Thus, it has not been taken seriously as the highly advanced form of visual communication that it was. The project’s key objective was to look at Aztec forms of visual, material, and performative discourse with a fresh perspective and to contextualise it within the general culture of the Aztecs. The Aztecs had perceived the world as filled with many divine forces that interact constantly and dynamically with each other. They were sure that in order to survive and flourish, humanity needed to understand the principles of these dynamics, adjust to them and influence them to their own favour. In their writings, the Aztecs articulated their knowledge about these principles and about life and cosmos in general, articulated their specific cultural sense of reality. The project set out to explore this sense of reality and to explore how the Aztecs’ particular form of visual communication was able to express it efficiently. The journey to find answers to these fundamental research questions included several steps. First, the scholarly literature on Aztec culture and religion was comprehensively studied. Comparing this literature with the surviving pre-Hispanic and colonial primary sources, it soon became clear that our understanding of Aztec cosmovision needs fundamental revision. Many scholars had detected a fundamental duality between transcendence and materiality in Aztec thought. This, however, turned out to be a Eurocentric projection. Instead, the Aztecs believed in an essential materiality of all forces within the cosmos, including the forces manifesting as anthropomorphic deities. The world as we grasp it with our senses was made up of these forces, presenting different essences in a myriad of ways. Differences in colour, shape, and texture in the inanimate world and differences in behaviour patterns, emotions, and personalities in the animate world were explained by the inherent workings of these fundamentally differing, but interacting and fluidly intermingling forces. In a second step, this sense of reality was brought into relation with the Aztec writing system. Challenging our European cultural categories, the Aztecs did not distinguish between writing and painting, between writing and art. They combined focus on cognitive content (as in European writing systems) with aesthetic effects on the “reader” (as in European art). “Reading” of the manuscripts was a multi-sensorial act combining complex oral recitations, singing, body performances and dances in the ritual interpretation of the “texts.” Based on this insight, the primary sources were searched for traces enabling us to reconstruct the Aztecs’ own hermeneutics. That is, in what way their writing system expressed their cosmovision, their knowledge about the underlying principles of reality and how the “reader” should understand these contents of the “texts.” In a further step, recent academic theories about embodied knowledge and embodied rationality were applied in order to understand better this form of writing from our point of view. As a result, the Aztec writing system turns out to be much better suited to express their form of knowledge than phonographic writing. Since the Aztecs believed the cosmic forces to be fundamentally material and manifesting in the forms and shapes graspable by the senses, the complicated matrix of intermingling forces could be understand much more easily, more comprehensively and in a more direct way in ideographic writing. The Aztec form of knowledge does not correspond to the typically European idea of the disembodied mind grasping the transcendent essence of reality independently from bodily, sensorial input. Despite this difference, the Aztec knowledge is no less rational or intellectually advanced than European knowledge systems. As a conclusion, we must reflect our European basic concepts of reality and challenge the idea of their universality and supremacy, in order to understand the Aztec world better and to do justice to them. Seen from a broader socio-economic perspective, the results of the project contribute to several important debates: (1) Engaging with Aztec culture, including religion and a writing system fundamentally different from our own, helps to preserve the cultural diversity of our planet in the light of increasing homogenisation. (2) Questioning ethnocentrism in our perspectives of Mesoamerican cultures triggers another step towards overcoming intellectual colonialism. (3) Analysing pictorial writing systems contributes to the fundamental debate on the relation of thought and language as well as provides basic knowledge on non-phonographic communications systems, which have become so important in an increasingly globalising world.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union