In this book, we will look at the philosophical thought of the region of Mesoamerica, specifically during the period prior to the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century CE. Mesoamerica is a historically interlinked region in the southern portion of North America, running from north of the central Mexican valley (where cities like Teotihuacan played a major early role) to the southern Maya area, in modern-day Honduras and El Salvador. Some more specific definitions of the region take it to be bounded in the north by the Sinaloa River in current day northwestern Mexico and in the south by the Ulua River in current day Honduras.Footnote ¹ While there is no official boundary of Mesoamerica adopted by everyone, this book will treat the central Mexican valley and the end of the Maya region in the south as the boundaries. Within this region, numerous cultures and traditions, many of which were historically linked, thrived for thousands of years prior to the arrival of the Spanish. By this time, numerous empires had arisen and fallen in the region, and broad ranging cultural traditions could be found throughout the region. Numerous political, scientific, religious, literary, and philosophical traditions thrived in the region.

Right away, then, we have to ask the question: What happened to these philosophical traditions and many of the other elements of Mesoamerican cultures? Why did these not become a part of the narrative of the West after European arrival and colonization? There are numerous answers here. One is that these traditions (as was inevitable) did become part of the broader cultural tradition, but were never credited with such or celebrated, and so consequently faded into the background, unrecognized. The enormous contributions of Mesoamerican society to what we know as “Western” culture were simply taken unattributed, similar to the work of slaves in the Americas, which is attributed to Europeans when it is attributed at all. Thus, we have to do more work, to go beneath the surface, in order to find the truth about the source of many aspects of current Western tradition. Despite what we think, the “Western tradition,” in science, philosophy, literature, and other aspects, is not all the heritage of the Greeks, Romans, and Western Europeans.Footnote ² Another part of the answer is that many aspects of Mesoamerican culture were suppressed and destroyed by the Spanish, even as they were namelessly integrated into aspects of Latin American and European culture. As zealous as missionaries can be (whether of the religious, political, or other varieties), ideas tend to be impossible to stop. We can only ever succeed at relabeling them. Once seen, an idea cannot be unseen. One of the things I hope the reader learns from this book is just how much of Mesoamerican philosophy is already recognizable – this is in large part because of its largely unattributed influence on the thought of the West. The differences between the culture and ideas of Euro-America (including Latin America) and those of Europe prior to the contact with the Americas are based not on innovation by crafty and brilliant Europeans, but rather on the ways in which the old ideas of Europe and the old ideas of the Americas cross-pollenated to create new ideas.

Readers who are familiar with philosophy (and even those who are not) will, and should, recognize certain ideas discussed in this book. Hopefully after reading it, however, you will recognize many of those ideas as originating in Mesoamerica.

The best known cultures and philosophical traditions in Mesoamerica are, of course, those of the Maya and Aztec (Nahua), and those two traditions are the most prominent in this book. As we will see, both of these cultures were (and are) very broad in scope, so much so that it makes most sense to refer to each of them as a cluster of related cultures and traditions. This is to some extent more the case for the Maya than for the Aztecs, as the Aztec Empire represented a large and vast political entity, having control over all the people who referred to themselves as Nahua, in a way no single Maya state ever had over all people associated with Maya languages. Nonetheless, even in the case of the Aztecs, the empire contained numerous peoples with their own cultures, languages, and traditions, tied together by the thread of the empire (in much the same way as various peoples of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa were once tied together by Rome or various peoples in East Asia were tied together by the Han, Tang, or Ming Dynasties of China). Taking the Maya region as an example, the area from southeastern Mexico through western Honduras and El Salvador is home to numerous different peoples from a number of linguistically related but distinct cultures. There is as much diversity in this region as in other areas in the world of similar size, if not more. There is no single Maya language – rather, the Maya languages are a family of languages, including ones such as K’iche’ and Yucatec Maya, which are discussed throughout the book. In the pre-Spanish period, there was (as explained further in the following text) a glyphic written form for Maya languages that could serve as a kind of lingua franca for the region (much like Chinese characters for China and historically much of the rest of east Asia).

In addition to the enormously rich Maya and Aztec traditions, however, there were a number of other lesser known peoples with rich philosophical, religious, and historical traditions, such as the Zapotec, Mixtec, and even more ancient groups such as the Izapan civilizations like the Olmec. These traditions are covered in this book as well. The hope is that the reader will come away with an understanding of the enormous breadth, diversity, and power of Mesoamerican philosophical traditions, as well as a sense of their importance as part of the history of philosophy. While I do not want to treat precolonial Mesoamerican thought as monolithic, even within the different cultural groups, much of the focus in this book is on shared features found in a variety of Mesoamerican traditions, as well as on particular views developed within each tradition.

Despite the cultural diversity of the area, Mesoamerica as an idea largely came into existence due to shared cultural features throughout the region, that made it possible to refer to this area as roughly one “culturally interactive area.”Footnote ³

The philosophical traditions of Mesoamerica discussed in this book span from the beginnings of important cultural productions of the Olmec in the “preclassic” or “formative” period of Mesoamerican history (roughly 2000 BCE to 250 CE) through the Maya and Aztec traditions as we find them during Spanish contact at the end of the Postclassic period (900–1521 CE). While the focus of this book is mainly on precolonial Mesoamerican thought (although some of the texts we will investigate were written after Spanish contact, and almost certainly influenced to some extent by Spanish ideas), it is wrong to say that the Mesoamerican philosophical traditions (or cultures) disappeared or collapsed after Spanish colonization. Native Mesoamerican ideas and traditions continued to flourish, in new forms as well in some of the same ones, through syncretic combinations of Mesoamerican and Spanish ideas, ones that created part of the world we know today as Latin America. Latin American philosophy as it exists today is not an importation or imposition of European thought on the Americas, but rather a synthesis of indigenous American, European, African, and other traditions (just as is Anglo-American thought).

Figure 0.1 Map of Mesoamerica

A brief historical overview can be helpful here for placing the various traditions and periods discussed throughout the book in their proper historical contexts. The oldest cultural traditions in Mesoamerica that we have access to through material culture go back to about 2000 BCE, when new forms of settlement based on agriculture, particularly concerning cultivation of maize (a staple crop that plays a major role in Mesoamerican self-conception) and ceramic construction originate in the region.Footnote ⁴ This took place particularly along the area of land today known as the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (named after a mainly Zapotec town along the coast in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, whose own name derives from Nahuatl – we will get into the issues of empire in due course).Footnote ⁵

The first major Mesoamerican culture to emerge in this formative period after 2000 BCE, in this same Isthmian region, was that of the Olmec – perhaps the best known and most studied of early Mesoamerican cultures. The Olmec culture developed along the northern isthmus, on the Gulf coast of present-day Mexico, and was the first in the region to display evidence of the kind of social stratification and specialization found in large-scale societies.Footnote ⁶ Our understanding of the Olmec comes from a number of archaeological sites at ancient cities in the region where Olmec society developed, particularly the sites of La Venta and Tres Zapotes, close to the Gulf shore, and San Lorenzo, further inland on the Isthmus.

Olmec innovations influenced numerous later cultures and traditions in the region. Some of the major features of Mesoamerican culture associated with people such as the Maya and Aztec can be traced back to Olmec origins, and in the region around the Isthmian Gulf Coast.

While the diversity of Mesoamerica, in terms of cultures and even philosophical traditions, is truly immense (particularly for such a relatively small region), I focus in this book on a handful of representative traditions for which we have a great deal of material, and which have been sufficiently studied by anthropologists, linguists, art historians, sociologists, and others to give us an understanding of the shape of these traditions before the period of Spanish contact. I focus mainly on the Maya and Aztec traditions, because we have the greatest amount of textual and other sources for these traditions, but I also discuss the important Mixtec and Zapotec traditions. There are certainly many other traditions, including philosophical traditions, represented in Mesoamerica. It is only due to the limitations of space that I don’t cover other Mesoamerican traditions (though I do on occasion mention some of them in the chapters ahead). So readers should certainly not take their exclusion as demonstrating that the traditions not covered here are not or were not important parts of the broader Mesoamerican tradition.

This all prompts the question: Why these specific traditions, if they are but a few among a broader array of important philosophical traditions? There are several reasons for this. First, while “importance” is very much a subjective matter, and is based on the perceived value of a thing (and surely all of these traditions have value), a few Mesoamerican traditions were more influential than others in terms of their reach and extent. The latter is an objective historical fact. That Maya and Aztec cultures each had a larger reach and more regional influence than the culture of the Otomi, for example, is a matter of the military might, social influence via trade and migration, and other nonnormative features of the people in these cultures, rather than a matter of the superiority of their ideas. When it comes to world civilizations, we too often conflate the latter with the former. The influence of a philosophical system is most often due to historical, political, and economic accidents, rather than philosophical value. This is because aptness or truth of philosophical systems does not lend competitive advantage to a society that produced the system, so any success of the society in question cannot be attributed to its philosophical tradition. This is all the more reason why we should seek out the philosophical systems of lesser known and lesser studied traditions. Why, in the West, is the thought of Greece, Rome, and selected parts of Western Europe more prominent or well known? Throughout the history of philosophy in the modern Western academy, many have tried to construct after-the-fact justifications about the superiority of these systems to other global traditions (or more often still, simply ignored these traditions), but this is done without properly investigating these other traditions and systems to which the aforesaid traditions are supposedly superior.Footnote ⁷ While few today would likely use the reasoning of these earlier scholars, their views have become embedded in philosophy’s self-conception, and thus numerous global traditions are still neglected in the study of philosophy in the West.Footnote ⁸ We cannot, as pointed out above, rely on the fact that the British Empire successfully colonized much of the world as any piece of evidence whatsoever for the truth or superiority of its philosophical traditions. Likewise, the fact that the Aztecs controlled an extensive empire does not make their philosophical thought any more interesting, valuable, or true than that of the Zapotec or Mixtec, whose states never achieved such a scale. We would easily recognize the poverty of such a line of reasoning in another context. Should we take the scientific thought of the class bully as superior to that of the physics nerd because the former beat up the latter and took his lunch money? Should we conclude (as people in society often do) that CEOs must be far more intelligent than philosophy professors, because the former are making money and the latter are not? This is to conflate two separate issues. Why should we suspect that the features of a culture that lead it to be successful in forming empire are features that would lead it to forming accurate or insightful philosophical thought? We all know that philosophers rarely make excellent conquerors.

The answer to the question, then, of “why these traditions?” is simply that the traditions covered in this book are the most well known and widespread in the region. There is much more written about and known by scholars about them. They are fascinating and important philosophical traditions, even if they are not more important than others in the region. And these traditions share many features with other traditions in the region, as well as with each other, as we will see. There is a “family resemblance” between Mesoamerican traditions. Indeed, the same reasons we can define the region as a cultural area are the reasons we can take the philosophical traditions of the region as representing one overarching philosophical tradition. Maya, Aztec, and Zapotec thought resemble one another as much as do the culturally related traditions of Europe and the Middle East, or China, Korea, and Japan. In this book, I look at both specific issues within the thought of each of these groups, as well as overarching shared features of all of them, so as to illuminate not only the philosophy of Maya, Aztec, and other traditions, but Mesoamerican Philosophy more broadly.

In a brief history we must also try to see the broad-brush, big picture of the region. As discussed above, the Olmec developed innovations in material and intellectual culture, particularly concerning new forms of political structure, calendrics, and language (at least, this is what we have access to through the material record – they likely contributed more than just this to later cultural traditions in the region). The traditions discussed in this book represent four of the five linguistic families of Mesoamerica: Mixe-Zoquean (OlmecFootnote ⁹), Oto-Manquean (Zapotec, Mixtec), Mayan, and Uto-Aztecan (Aztec). These cultures also remain among the largest in the present-day region, and thus have the greatest extent of available sources – written, traditional, material, and oral. In the remaining part of this section, I offer a brief historical overview of each tradition, situating it with respect to its overall development in the area as well as its relationship to the other traditions discussed in this book.

Olmec

The Olmec culture developed along the Gulf Coast of the Isthmus, with the earliest development of the kind of ceremonial centers, featuring large-scale architecture, that becomes key to Mesoamerican societies, beginning around 1400 BCE. Connected to these centers, the Olmec developed new styles of art and reshaping of their world, most famously represented in the enormous head sculptures of basalt found at the site of La Venta, one of the central sites of the Olmec. La Venta, like other important Olmec sites, was a settlement with a ceremonial structure at its core (in this case the large building referred to today as “The Great Pyramid”), following a standard that would be represented by cities throughout Mesoamerica and throughout the rest of its history (and similar to what we find in numerous other cultures – think of the medieval European town with a church or cathedral at its heart, the temples at the heart of ancient Athens on the Acropolis, or the mosque and palace directly at the center of the round city of Abbasid Baghdad). Though the Olmec head sculptures are perhaps the most famous constructions associated with the Olmec, these were not carved until around the ninth century BCE, well after the earliest developments in Olmec innovation. It was in early centers such as San Lorenzo where the first Olmec developments were found. It was, however, at La Venta where Olmec development and construction seems to have reached its pinnacle. The styles of art and construction here seem to have set the stage for almost all of Mesoamerican culture to follow, which is why the Olmec are considered by many the formative precursor or originator of Mesoamerican culture.

There are still unresolved questions concerning just who the Olmecs were, what language they spoke, or their relation to later groups. Many maintain they were a Mixe-Zoquean group, speaking a language in the family of the current languages used in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec where key Olmec sites are found. While the sites associated by most scholars with the Olmec people themselves are found in the northern part of the isthmus toward the Gulf Coast, Olmec style art and artifacts are found in a far wider area dating back to the Preclassic period, stretching from central Mexico to Guatemala. The scope and early date of Olmec influence suggests that this culture had a formative influence on the wider culture of Mesoamerica, possibly responsible for a number of the similarities we see in different cultures and traditions of the region (even though these traditions continued to influence one another throughout history). While some account for the wide spread of Olmec styles by claiming that the Olmecs migrated to these areas, a more likely explanation is the influence of Olmec culture and styles throughout the region, through trade and other cultural interactions.

One of the features of Olmec cultural production that we see throughout Mesoamerican traditions is the system of calendrics devised in the isthmus. The famous “Long Count” calendar adopted and perfected by the Maya had its origins with the Olmec, as well as possibly a number of other ritual calendric systems widely used in Mesoamerica. As we will see with later cultures, many Mesoamerican groups used multiple ritual and agricultural calendars alongside one another. Part of the explanation for this may have been the coordinated influence and synthesis of a number of different cultural practices and calendars. As we will see, one of the most unique features of Mesoamerica is the immense diversity represented in such a relatively small area. As mentioned above, we find five different language families represented in the region, as well as a few isolate languages (that is, languages that cannot be linked to other language families, and thus represent their own distinct family). To give a comparative sense of diversity, in the entirety of Europe we find only three language families, Indo-European (now the most widely distributed language family in the world, to which the vast majority of European languages including English and the Romance languages belong, as well as Persian and Indian languages), Finno-Ugric, and Basque.

In addition to the calendar, styles of construction, burials, and a number of key Olmec ideas represented in early imagery and text (such as conception of gods and the notion of the animal companion or co-essence that became the basis for embedded identity)Footnote ¹⁰ had enormous and lasting influence on Mesoamerican traditions (we will see details of these views in Chapter 4). We have access to Olmec thought not through text, as we do in the case of some other Mesoamerican traditions, but through aspects of material culture and recognition of features of later systems influenced by Olmec ideas. The Olmec developed a robust material culture that we have been able to access via archaeological research, and the key to understanding Olmec thought comes through being able to interpret material culture.

It is with the Olmec that we can recognize the earliest strain of the Mesoamerican philosophical tradition more broadly. This is not necessarily (or even likely) because the Olmec were the first people in Mesoamerica to do philosophy or to think in philosophical ways. It is simply that the Olmec had the earliest material culture still accessible to us, which allows us to understand something of their philosophical thought. Another reason why we can consider the Olmec to have constructed the foundation of the Mesoamerican philosophical tradition is that their culture went on to influence those of almost every other tradition discussed in the book. In this sense, perhaps the Olmec represent the root from which the Mesoamerican traditions grow.

Maya

The Maya cultures are among the best-known groups in the Mesoamerican world, and are distributed over a large swathe of the region, from southern Mexico to western El Salvador and Honduras. It is the Maya who have the best-known and most developed writing system in the Americas, and whose culture in many ways represented an intellectual peak in broader Mesoamerican cultures during the so-called “Classic” and “Postclassic” periods. While the Maya are best known in contemporary “Western” culture for their calendric system, particularly the so-called “Long Count” calendar, and their glyphic written language, understanding of which had been basically lost in the early colonial period right up until the twentieth century (and parts of it remain undeciphered still today), there are many important aspects of Maya tradition that are less studied, and that are crucial to understanding Maya philosophical traditions.

While we often treat the Maya as a single culture or people, there is not, and never was, a single linguistically or culturally unified “pan-Maya” people. Still, there are important cultural features that can be found throughout the Maya region, enough for us to be able to consider Maya philosophy and culture a coherent and distinct tradition. Indeed, the glyphic written language itself links numerous linguistic areas in the Maya region. One interesting feature of Classic Maya written language is that it is portable between languages, much like Chinese characters. That is, glyphs are not tied to phonetics, and can be read in a number of different ways, making it possible to read them in numerous languages. Thus, speakers of two different Maya languages may have had a hard time understanding one another, but might both understand the written glyphs. Despite this, Mayan glyphs did have a phonetic element in addition to logographic elements. These phonetic elements sometimes varied according to region, depending on how people in that region said a word, and sometimes did not (as is the case with many Chinese characters used throughout East Asia). Like Chinese characters, Maya glyphs were constructed of both logographic and phonetic elements. The phonetic elements were not, for the most part, determinative – that is, one cannot look at a glyph (or a Chinese character) and determine what sound the character corresponds to just on the basis of its phonetic element. One can often guess the sound of the world based on this element, but it is not determined in the same way that fully phonetic written languages such as Spanish are, in which letters are connected to specific sounds. (English is a special case, because even though it is phonetically rendered, letters are not consistently connected to particular sounds as they are in many other phonetically rendered languages).

The earliest developments of Maya culture building toward the flourishing intellectual culture of the Classic Period began in the southern highlands, during the “Preclassic” period, when cities such as Kaminaljuyu (modern day Guatemala City) rose in the period after 1500 BCE, roughly contemporary with some of the main Olmec cities. During the later years of the Kaminaljuyu power, toward the beginning of the Classic Period when larger power centers began to rise in the central lowlands to the north, there may have been some connection to and influence by the massive central Mexican city center of Teotihuacan, which came to occupy a central role in Mesoamerican culture. There are notable similarities between artifacts at Kaminaljuyu and that of Teotihuacan, one of the most influential cities in Mesoamerican culture. Teotihucaan lies in the central valley of Mexico (just north of modern day Mexico City, the Tenochtitlan of the Aztecs), at the very center of the region known as Mesoamerica. While relatively little is known of the people who inhabited Teotihuacan at its height in the late Maya Preclassic and early Classic Period, from around the beginning of the Common Era to 350 CE (and this rise of Teotihuacan may have been linked to developments in the Maya world that brought about the changes and innovations that mark what we refer to as the Classic Period), there are clear lines of influence between Teotihuacan and the Maya cities during this period.

The Classic Period began with the rise of regional power and cultural development of the city-states of the southern lowlands, from cities like Tikal in current day central Guatemala and Palenque in southern Mexico to Copan in current day western Honduras. The contemporary names for these cities are not those the Classic Period Maya used, but thanks to the decipherment of many of the Classic glyphs, we have some idea of what the original names of these cities were (in meaning if not perfectly in phonetics).

In these cities of the Classic Period, we find the rise of the conception of the ajaw (ruler)Footnote ¹¹ as object of centralized power and religious devotion. The elevation of the role of the ruler to political and spiritual significance inaugurates a period of development of new construction, art forms, and ideas, with the ruler central to many of the state-sponsored constructions that have stood through time. Most of the textual and artistic material available to us today through monumental construction in the Classic Period refers to the rulers and their history, as well as to religion through discussion of the rulers’ connection to the gods. While rulers loom large in Classic Period text and imagery, this is likely because most of what we can access today is connected to rulers, as the monuments for rulers were built to last, carved in stone, in the stelae and architecture of the cities. Other lasting material sources, such as pottery, wall paintings, and the small number of printed texts remaining from close to this period, show us the intellectual world beyond the rulers, and demonstrate that though rulers had an important cultural role to play, they did not dominate Maya intellectual life in the way it appears if we only look at the monumental texts and artwork. Nonetheless, the Classic Period is defined in terms of the histories and accounts of the kings of the lowland Maya city-states, as it in this period that we have well-defined historical accounts, and a clear difference from what we find in surrounding periods in this regard, though we see aspects of it on the edges of the Preclassic and into the Postclassic as well.

Toward the end of the Classic Period, there was a major population and power shift away from the southern lowland cities northward into the Yucatan. This period is associated with the so-called Maya “collapse,” and the abandonment of the vast city centers of the southern lowlands. While scholars still vigorously debate the causes of this collapse and just what happened during this period to lead to the abandonment of these cities, we clearly see a decline in the south, and a corresponding rise to dominance of Yucatan cities like Chichen Itza. In the northern lowland cities during the Postclassic, similarities with central Mexican culture became more pronounced, suggesting connections with cities of the central Mexican valley. Though scholars do not have a good handle on the directions in which the influence mainly flowed, it is likely, as is the case in any cultural interaction, that there was influence in both directions, and that what we find in both the Yucatan and central Mexico in and after this time was the result of hybridization of ideas, rather than the imposition of one culture on the other.

Toward the end of the Postclassic Period, after the influence of the Yucatan cities had waned and the powerful empire of the Aztecs centered at Tenochtitlan in the central Mexican valley came to be the center of political and cultural gravity in much of Mesoamerica, the large ships of the Spanish first appeared off the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. The arrival of the Spanish, and the subsequent wars of conquest, plagues, and reorganization of the political and religious structure of the Mesoamerican world, radically changed the history of the region. Still, the colonial period and the importation of Spanish ideas and culture did not eliminate or subvert the culture and thought of Mesoamerica. As hard as the Spanish tried to convert the people of Mesoamerica to Spanish ways of living, thinking, and being, these ways remained. The colonial Spanish, in their zeal for their own religion and culture, failed to understand that culture and ideas can never be suppressed or eliminated, they can only be modified and augmented. One can never undo or unlearn ideas. While certain outward forms may be suppressed, how can we un-alter worldviews or conceptual schemes shaped by particular ideas? How can we negate the effect that ideas had have? I may forget or otherwise lose some of the things I’ve encountered and learned over the years, but how can I lose or forget the ways these ideas shaped my experience and thinking? Ideas have an indelible effect on mind and development, just as physical objects have effect on the world. And just as we can destroy an object but can never destroy the effect that the object had on the world, and thus can never erase it as such, the same is true, of ideas. Maybe if everyone who encountered a particular idea died without imparting it to another, if we had a case of spontaneous cultural extinction, an idea might go out of existence for all intents and purposes. But this was certainly not the case with the Maya or any other people of Mesoamerica. Thus, while Mesoamerica largely took on Christianity, the Spanish language, and numerous cultural aspects of Europe, the native ideas of Mesoamerica remained, and the culture of the region became a hybridization of Mesoamerican and Spanish ideas and cultural elements. We see the early form of this hybridization in texts such as the K’iche’ Maya Popol Vuh, a rich philosophical text to which I devote a great deal of attention in this book. While early Maya ideas are found throughout the text, in many parts of the text we see the influence of Christianity, and an interpretation of earlier Maya ideas through the intellectual framework of Spanish Christianity. But just as Maya and Mesoamerican ideas were not left unchanged in the introduction of Spanish ideas to Mesoamerica, Christian and Spanish ideas were not left unchanged either. While we recognize and study the changes that Spanish ideas made to Mesoamerica, we often neglect the ways Mesoamerican thought changed Spanish, Christian, and more broadly European culture. This is largely because European texts and self-conception prevented Europeans from attributing the changes in their own culture to Mesoamerican ideas. Historical investigation of these ideas and the changes in Spanish and Christian intellectual culture in the sixteenth century and onward can reveal to us the unattributed influence of Mesoamerican culture. The difference between Spanish and Mesoamerican culture in this period is not that one influenced the other without reciprocal influence, but that only one was willing to attribute the sources of influence to the other. The Spanish were convinced of the superiority of their religion and culture, and were thus unwilling to admit any influence from Mesoamerica as influence. Given that God had established this religion and this way of life, they believed, any changes must have come from the Spanish themselves and from Christianity itself, not from the people and ideas of Mesoamerica. Thus, Mesoamerican ideas were absorbed yet not attributed, like an act of cultural plagiarism. Just as in the case of the central Mexican cities and the Maya cities of the Yucatan in the Postclassic Period, we should always expect influence to move in both directions in any exchange between people. When we find similarities between Maya ideas in the Popol Vuh and other texts and the ideas of Spanish Christianity, we should ask ourselves not only whether this represents Spanish and Christian influence on the Maya, but whether the similarity between these ideas and our association of them with Christianity represents Maya influence on Christianity.

Aztec

The people known by many today as the “Aztec” are more properly referred to as the Nahua, a large group of related people speaking versions of the Nahuatl language, of which there are numerous dialects. Unlike the Maya languages, Nahuatl does not represent a language family, rather Nahuatl is part of the broader Uto-Aztecan language family. The distribution and reach of Nahua culture at its peak, however, was roughly similar to that of the various Maya groups in the Classic Period. The best-known and most prominent of the various Nahua groups were the Mexica people, associated with the city-state of Tenochtitlan (current day Mexico City). This city headed the alliance of three central Mexican city-states, which in turn comprised the core of the Aztec Empire that began in the early fifteenth century and held central influence in the region for the next hundred years, until its destruction by the Spanish in 1521.

The Nahua, while associated most closely with the central Mexican valley that became their homeland and center of power, migrated from what is now northern Mexico around the time of the flourishing of the southern lowland cities of the Maya region during the Maya Classic Period, in the sixth century CE.Footnote ¹² The Uto-Aztecan languages originated in roughly this region, in the desert of current day northwest Mexico and southwest United States. Uto-Aztecan speakers traveled north and south, to become people as diverse and widely distributed as the Aztec and Pipil (Nawat) in the south and the Comanche, Dine (Navajo) and Paiute in the North. Thus, Uto-Aztecan languages are spoken today in an area spanning from Idaho and Wyoming to El Salvador, down much of the length of Western North America.

Most of the Aztec thought available to us in writing comes from the period of empire, and around the colonial Spanish period. Nahua people certainly did philosophy and thought about their world in the period before the rise of the Aztec Empire, but it was with this political unit that the textual tradition associated with the Aztecs that we have today took form. Some have argued that Nahuatl speaking people had a significant influence on language and culture far before this time, hypothesizing that we find Nahuatl origins of terms in Classic Mayan languages, for example (see Macri and Looper). The earliest Nahuatl writing to which we have access comes from the imperial period around the time of Spanish contact, such as the texts known today as the Codex Boturini, Codex Xolotl, and Codex Mendoza, dating to 1541 (Mendoza) and earlier. As with Maya texts, Nahuatl codices in the original precolonial language likely existed in greater numbers, but were not kept and did not endure well in the conditions of Mesoamerica. And unlike the Classic Maya, the Aztecs did not tend to include text in their monumental stone construction, a medium that lasts much longer than paper. However, there is one feature of Aztec history that leads to our having a much more robust textual picture of Aztec culture during its height. Many Nahuatl texts and traditions were written in texts in Latin script during the period after Spanish contact. When the Spanish arrived in Mesoamerica, the Aztec culture of central Mexico was flourishing, and literate professional classes were around to record Aztec thought, which was kept in these new forms, in phonetic Latin script, and saved in forms common to the Spanish.

The written script of the Nahuatl language itself prior to Spanish contact was a very different writing system from the one we are familiar with. While it was much more like Classic Mayan, or even Classical Chinese than it was like phonetically rendered languages such as Spanish or English, it also differed from Classic Mayan. Unlike Mayan languages, which were rendered in a combination of logographic and phonetic elements (similar to Chinese characters), Nahuatl writing was more purely a form of “sign writing,” in which ideographs dominated rather than phonetic symbols. There has been discussion of Nahuatl writing moving toward developing phoneticsFootnote ¹³, but this seems to me to presume the superiority of phonetics in writing, which is far from obvious. The development of written languages like that of China and the Maya seem to tell against this. While early Chinese characters and forms of Maya glyphs were complicated, simplified versions were eventually made that allowed for faster and more condensed expression. There is no particular reason to think that Nahuatl writing would have moved in a phonetic rather than a simplified ideographic direction. In many ways, ideographs are far more useful for writing, particularly in a multilingual area. They allow, as we also see in Chinese, for the mutual written intelligibility of different languages (assuming grammatical differences can be bridged). Ideographic script is “portable” between languages in a way phonetic script is not, and thus has distinct advantages in particular situations. A written language can thus serve as a lingua franca uniting a region, even in the absence of shared spoken languages – something that cannot happen with phonetic script. This (I suspect) is part of the reason why we find such continued linguistic diversity across Mesoamerica even with the existence of vast networks, empires, and cultural areas – a situation we do not find with Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic languages, where written intelligibility requires spoken facility.

The fact that humans can separate visual and spoken language, using them for different purposes, shows that the possibility of developing in these independent ways is open (as we see in historical examples). The nature of Mesoamerican written languages, as discussed later in this book, is important to understand to grasp some important features of Mesoamerican Philosophy. While perhaps language does not fully determine the ways we think, the shape and format of our language almost certainly suggests certain ideas, and makes some more natural to have than others. It is one among many features that shape and contribute to the ways humans think about the world.

Aztec Philosophy has become the most natural Mesoamerican tradition (along with Maya Philosophy) for philosophers and intellectual historians to access, because of this written tradition. In the case of the Aztecs, we have a wealth of Nahuatl-language literature in Latin script as well as Nahuatl writing dating to the early colonial period and the time of the end of the Aztec Empire. This is indeed a rich source to draw from for understanding Aztec Philosophy. I argue in the next chapter, however, that we should expand our conception of where philosophy is found to nontextual sources as well, such as artwork, construction, oral tradition, and cultural practices. When we do this, a rich vista of philosophy opens up before us that we do not otherwise recognize. And there are particular reasons for some philosophy being done outside of texts, as we will see in discussions of the Maya tradition. Performance was a central part of philosophy throughout Mesoamerica, and performance happens in person, through speech and movement. There may be a textual layer to a performance, just as there is usually a script for a play or film, but just as often the performance is passed through practice and personal transmission, like religious ceremonies. Trying to make sense of a Catholic mass through a written description will be difficult and inadequate – one has to learn much of it through experiencing the ritual. Likewise, engagement with the visual, oral, and performance aspects of Mesoamerican philosophy opens up new possibilities and new information. That said, in this book, the five traditions I focus on are all connected to textual traditions, as philosophers (including myself) are most accustomed to dealing with textual traditions. I will also discuss nontextual aspects of these traditions, but we stick fairly closely here to text. This should be understood as a first step toward understanding Mesoamerican philosophical traditions. In order to understand these traditions fully, philosophers will need to learn new methods of engaging with material culture and cultural practices. We will need to learn skills from anthropologists, sociologists, and art historians (among others) as part of our own professional toolkit. This kind of borrowing from other fields is not something foreign to philosophers. We have seen ourselves as linked to the sciences and science-related fields for many years. In the “analytic” tradition of philosophy that predominates in the Anglo-American world, it is not at all unusual to find philosophers adopting the tools of mathematicians, linguists, or physicists. As an undergraduate I took a course in philosophy that covered quantum mechanics, using the mathematical tools of physicists, and another in philosophy of neuroscience, using the analytical tools of biologists and psychologists. These courses would not at all have been out of place in departments of physics, biology, or psychology. This is all seen as central to philosophy. I took courses in graduate school that were cross-listed with mathematics and linguistics. Yet, I never saw a course in philosophy in which the methods of archaeology, art history, sociology, or religious studies were used. Part of what is going on here has to do with the “self-image” of contemporary Western (particularly “analytic”) philosophy, which tends to see itself as more akin to the empirical sciences such as physics, biology, and off-branches such as mathematics than to literature, performance, religion, or culture.

Thus, while I stay fairly close to the textual philosophical tradition in this book, I both suggest and point the way toward other ways of accessing philosophical thought in Mesoamerica. To become better historians of philosophy with respect to the Mesoamerican traditions, we need to become familiar with and gain facility in the techniques and tools of people in fields not often associated with philosophy, particularly archaeology, art history, and sociology.

Aztec intellectual culture at the beginning of the colonial period and in the closing years of the Empire was flourishing, and we have a wealth of Nahuatl texts from which to gain an understanding of this thought. As with colonial period Maya texts, there are influences from Spanish thought and European thought more broadly (as there are in the other direction), but we find here the people of a flourishing culture speaking for themselves in accessible language that for the “Western” tradition was our earliest contact with a Mesoamerican tradition. We have to remember that while the Classic Maya philosophical texts are older than the Nahuatl texts, the rendering of Nahuatl texts in Latin script since the colonial period has meant that these texts have been “accessible” to the West for far longer than the Classic Maya texts. Since people were using Nahuatl writing itself at the beginning of European contact, this script has also long been better understood. Today, much of Classic Maya written language has been deciphered, but it has only been in the last 60 years or so that this has happened. This is because by the time the Spanish arrived in Mesoamerica and texts were rendered in Maya languages in Latin script, much of the knowledge of Classic glyphic script was lost, and the rest died out with the rise of the use of Latin script.

The history of the roughly hundred years of the Aztec Empire is well known, and better attested in text than any other history of a people in the Americas with the exception of certain Maya states. This history (or rather mytho-history in the case of origins) begins with the Mexica’s migration to the central Mexican valley. According to legend, the people originated in the land of “Aztlan” (the word that forms the basis of “Aztec”). This semi-mythical origin place of the Mexica was associated with a special destiny of its inhabitants in their migration to central Mexico, to a “promised land” associated with prophecies and the divine mission of the Mexica people. The Aztec histories discuss a long migration of the Mexica people, under the rulership and guidance of Huitzilopochtli, who was both god and “earthly” ruler (an association commonly made in Mesoamerican thought and crucial to understanding its philosophy).Footnote ¹⁴ After a long migration, the Mexica founded the city of Tenochitlan on an island, in the lower portion of the large Lake Texcoco. This lake no longer exists, having been drained nearly completely dry over the long period of colonial rule, through massive drainage projects that reduced and eventually eliminated it; it is the remnants of this lake on which the modern day Mexico City sits. The establishment of Tenochitlan is a story that loomed large in the imagination of the Mexica people’s association with the city, and its importance can still be seen today. According to the story, the people of the region to which the Mexica had moved were hostile to the Mexica and attempted to drive them away, led by Copil, the nephew of Huitzilopochtli, the son of his sister Malinoxochitl, a vicious magician who was effectively exiled by Huitziilopochtli and then became the founder of a related people. Huitzilopochtli commanded his people to defeat Copil and in return bring him back Copil’s heart, and on receiving the heart, the god ordered a priest to throw it into Lake Texcoco. After this followed more warfare between the Mexica and the people of this area, who still struggled to drive the Mexica off. The Mexica suffered a number of defeats, and were on the verge of collapse, when they discovered the signs foretold by their god that marked the place of the promised land they would call their own, capped by the discovery of the heart of Copil, sitting on a stone in the center of Lake Texoco. A prickly pear had sprouted from the stone, and an eagle sat perched on the plant. This was the prophetic sign the Mexica had sought, and here they knew they had finally found their new homeland. Tenochtitlan was founded on this spot, and the name glyph for the city incorporated this image. Today, this image can be found at the center of the flag of Mexico – the eagle holding in its beak a serpent, a colonial innovation on the original symbol, of the eagle holding a symbol of power and warfare, the atl tlachinolli, which represents fire and water, in its beak.

The establishment of Tenochtitlan was the beginning of Aztec history proper. In its early years, through the reign of its first king Acamapichtli, who reigned between 1375 and 1395 CE, Tenochtitlan was hardly the major power it became later. It was a small city-state beset on all sides by more powerful neighbors, who levied heavy taxes on the Mexica state in lieu of driving it off. This situation led to the near impoverishment of the Mexica state by the end of Acamapichtli’s reign. In the following years, the position of the Mexica improved, as alliances were secured with the dominant Azcapotzalco state, a nearby city-state and center of the Tepanec Empire, through marriage of the Tepanec ruler’s daughter into the Mexica royal family. This connection led to the improvement of Mexica fortunes, but also to the resentment of numerous factions within Azcapotzalco. The ruling council of the city, going against the wishes of their king, had the Mexica ruler and his son killed, which plunged the Mexica into a new crisis.

It was the next act that formed the foundation for the empire that would rise from Tenochtitlan. The next ruler, Itzcoatl created an alliance with two other nearby cities, Tetzcoco and Tlacopan, in order to generate the economic and military power to have a chance of resistance to the Tepanecs – a chance that none of the cities had on its own. The new “triple alliance” not only successfully resisted Tepanec power, but invaded and destroyed the city of Azcapotzalco, bringing the Tepanec Empire to a close and establishing a new regional power that would expand its influence and power throughout the wider region – the Aztec Empire. In the following years and under successive rulers the Aztecs would expand their domain, colonizing a number of areas throughout central Mexico and eventually beyond. Under the rulership of Motecuhzoma I (r. 1440–1469 CE), the empire expanded its scope, and the Mexica became the dominant member of the triple alliance. Motecuhzoma’s expansion of the Aztec Empire through military dominance set the stage for a prolonged period of peaceful development, during which many of the elements of Aztec culture encountered in their philosophical thought developed.

The next series of kings to lead the Empire continued its expansion, which culminated under the rule of Motecuhzoma II, who was ruler when the Spanish arrived in central Mexico in 1517, with the first expeditions to the region. Motecuhzoma knew about the movements of the Spanish visitors and had them tracked over the few years they returned to the region, until he finally came personally into contact with them on the arrival of Hernan Cortes at Tenochtitlan in 1519. In the ensuing struggle between the Aztecs and the Spanish, Motecuhzoma was captured and eventually killed in the fighting that led to the Spanish retreat from Tenochtitlan. In an eerie echo of the Aztecs’ own conquest of the Tepanec Empire, the Spanish formed an alliance with the people of Tlaxcala against the Aztecs, which ultimately led to the downfall of Tenochtitlan and the Aztec Empire.

While the story of the fall of the empire and the Spanish conquest has been presented as a story of the total superiority and dominance of the Spanish over the natives of central Mexico, the true story, as we see in brief from the above, is far more complicated than that. Just like the Aztecs themselves, the Spanish needed to ally themselves with other local groups in order to take down the Aztec Empire. And like the Aztecs, they eventually came to dominate this alliance, writing history in ways that elevated them, just as the Aztecs and others had before them. Accounts such as that of the Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (The True History of the Conquest of New Spain) of Bernal Díaz del Castillo mythologize the Spanish role in the fall of the Aztec Empire. Spanish history of the establishment of “Nueva España” turns out to be no more or less mythical than origin accounts of many other peoples, groups, and empires around the world. What we find in these accounts is a blend of history, myth, self-aggrandizement, and imperial/colonial propaganda.

Zapotec, Mixtec

The Zapotec and Mixtec were two other Mesoamerican cultures which developed systems of writing, and to which reference will occasionally be made in this book. The Zapotec society developed in the southern Oaxaca valley, in what is now southern Mexico, and the earliest known structures associated with the Zapotecs in the region are connected to the site of the highland city of Monte Albán, the most powerful city center of the Zapotec between its time of establishment around 500 BCE through the next 1000 years or so, to around 700 CE, when, similar to the Maya Classic Period city states of the time, it was abandoned. This suggests that whatever causes led to the Late Classic Maya “collapse” were not limited to the Maya, but also affected Monte Albán. While activity and inhabitation continued to some extent at the site in the years after this, up till the arrival of the Spanish, this occupation was on a far smaller scale.

Archaeologists mark five phases of development at Monte Albán, I-V, spanning the nearly 2000 years of the history of occupation of the site before the arrival of the Spanish. The Zapotec empire reached its largest extent during the Monte Albán II period, around the second century CE. Early Zapotec writing has been found dating back to the sixth century BCE, thus making Zapotec writing perhaps the earliest writing system in Mesoamerica. It is difficult to know exactly when writing originated in this region, but it was already established by the sixth century BCE, in a Zapotec form.Footnote ¹⁵ This writing style was used in the Zapotec region until around the end of the first millennium CE, when other writing systems came into use with the political decline of Monte Albán during the beginning of the Monte Albán IV period (900–1350 CE). Writing in general seems to have declined during this period as well, with few examples of these new hybrid styles in the Zapotec region. This style drawing on Mixtec forms of writing was more widespread in the region during this period. While Zapotec writing declined in this period, there were almost certainly influences from Zapotec on the hybrid Mixtec style writing that became more common in the wider region.

Zapotec texts are few, just as in the case of other early writing systems. As in the Maya case, many of those that exist are inscriptions on architecture and stelae. We also have, as in the case of other Mesoamerican traditions, colonial period texts written in Latin script, that give us some additional sense of precolonial Zapotec ideas. And of course, as in the case of the other traditions mentioned, we also have access to contemporary views and practices, and what these might tell us about the past. We have to demonstrate caution with this, as Zapotec culture and philosophical tradition, like that of any other part of the world, is not static and stuck in time. We can expect the views of today to be as different from those of the precolonial ancestors of the Zapotec as the views of English people today are from those of their distant ancestors.

In the tenth century CE, the influence of Monte Alban waned, and other cities in the region filled the political gap left by this retreat. A number of the distinctive features of earlier Zapotec culture merged with first Mixtec and then Nahua/Aztec features, including language and writing. The Mixtecs move into the Zapotec region, including Monte Albán, in the years following the decline of the Zapotec city in the tenth century, and for the remaining history of the Zapotec before the Spanish arrival in the sixteenth century, they are engaged in conflict with both Mixtec and Aztec groups. While the Aztec Empire came to dominate the region in the early fifteenth century, the Zapotecs maintained a separate kingdom and successfully resisted Aztec domination until the opening years of the sixteenth century, when the Aztec expansion with the rulers Ahuitzotl and then Motecuhzoma II finally overcame the Zapotec resistance.

The Mixtec society developed very close to the area of the Zapotec region, in what is today Oaxaca. This relatively small region is one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse in Mesoamerica and in the world. The reasons for this are not altogether clear, though the terrain of the region, between numerous mountain ranges and the sea, and its location seemingly at a crossroad between a number of different cultural regions, may have something to do with this. Because of this, a number of different groups were able to be relatively isolated for long periods in this region despite being relatively close to one another. Numerous language families can be found in this tiny region, as well as a number of languages representing isolates, not linked to any known language family.

The Mixtec society developed centralized settlement around the beginning of the first millennium CE, with the city center today known as Yucuita becoming one of the first developed city centers in the Mixtec region. As described above, the Mixtec come to engage with the Zapotec, the Aztec, and other people in the region in the years after 1000 CE. The Mixtec developed their own writing system, which became influential through the wider region, and is similar to writing systems like that of the Aztecs, with which there were almost certainly connections. Six precolonial Mixtec codices are known today.

Mesoamerica in the History of Philosophy

The history of Mesoamerican cultures intersects with that of Europe and the “West” more generally beginning in the sixteenth century, with the Spanish arrival in the Americas. While we tend to think of the history and intellectual traditions of Europe and the colonial world in the last 500 years as a solely European construction, this is far from the truth. As is well known, many of the physical resources that made the Spanish Empire possible came from the Americas, including Mesoamerica. Spanish influence on Mesoamerica is well known and oft discussed, but Mesoamerican influence on Europe tends to be neglected or denied. No cultural exchange, even ones between conqueror and conquered, is one-way. It is no coincidence that the periods of cultural and intellectual growth and innovation in Europe (as elsewhere in the world) happened at the same time people in the region made contact with and learned from those in other areas of the world. If the Spanish encounter with Mesoamerica radically changed the latter, it also radically changed the former.

Mesoamerican traditions are not as “foreign” as we think. We tend to think of our tradition (in the Western academy) as “Euro-American” only because we have ignored the fact that much of what constitutes it does not have a European origin at all. The Western tradition is not solely (or not even mainly, if we go back far enough) a European construct, it’s just that it’s only the European figures we choose to give credit for it. In the case of almost everyone else, ideas were taken but the originators were neglected and forgotten. This, I think, is the true harm of “cultural appropriation” (even though I think much of our current discourse about that idea is badly flawed). There’s nothing wrong with taking ideas – ideas can’t be stopped, and can’t be owned. Rather, the problem is misattribution of the sources of our ideas, and the way that serves (often intentionally) to belittle certain cultures and lionize others. Thus, the history of ideas in the West has been one focused on the West, and with the contributions of the rest of the world to the ideas “of” the West edited out. If philosophers have a responsibility to seek truth, then we also have a responsibility to correct this long lived but inaccurate view of the history of “Western thought.”

Part of what is necessary here is to engage with ideas in their historical contexts, and with an eye toward understanding where these ideas originated, how, and what their purposes were. Having this historical context is independently important to help us understand what a given historical tradition, thinker, or text aimed to do, but it is also important in helping us to see what the true origins of ideas are, what the influences between cultures was, and the ways in which numerous traditions we often take as distinct are linked, and often intimately linked. To do this, we must look beyond the ahistorical approach to texts. We have to do more than simply pull arguments and positions that seem appealing to us out of texts, with no context and no evidence for reading the texts the ways we do. This is not to say that the purely ahistorical approach is illegitimate, but it holds dangers, particularly as a way of engaging in the history of philosophy. The historical background sketched in this chapter, although too brief to give more than a rudimentary understanding of the history and culture of these Mesoamerican traditions, is a necessary starting point for understanding the Mesoamerican philosophical traditions themselves.

Further Reading

There are a number of excellent works dealing with the historical, cultural, and philosophical background sketched briefly above. For fuller and in-depth accounts of what is briefly sketched here, see Adams and MacLeod, eds., Cambridge History of the Native People of the Americas, Volume II: Mesoamerica, Part 1; Sharer, The Ancient Maya, 6th edition; Nichols and Alegría, The Oxford Handbook of the Aztecs; Joyce, Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and Chatinos: Ancient Peoples of Southern Mexico. For excellent shorter overviews aimed at a more general audience, see Soustelle, The Olmecs: The Oldest Civilization in Mexico, Coe and Houston, The Maya, 9th edition; Foster, Handbook to Life in the Ancient Maya World; Coe and Koontz, Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs, 8th edition; Carrasco, The Aztecs: A Very Short Introduction; Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs; McKillop, The Ancient Maya: New Perspectives. Full publication details for all of these works can be found in the bibliography.