The most authentic source of Mexican indigenous literature are the sixteenth-century painted books known as codices. A codice is a kind of manuscript using three different written forms: pictographs which are skilfully painted pictorial symbols, ideograms which are symbols for ideas, and some phonetic writing. Unfortunately, very few codices survived the Conquest. The first bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumarraga, collected the manuscript paintings and had them piled up in a ‘mountain-heap’ and burnt in the main market place in what American historian W.H. Prescott called the ‘holocaust of Zumarraga’. Others that were saved were sold as wrapping paper. Of the fifteen or so that survived, the majority are housed in European libraries and museums.

As well as the codices, other material was collected after the Conquest, principally by a Franciscan missionary named Bernardino de Sahagún, sometimes referred to as the first anthropologist. Sahagún spent many years collecting and recording information given to him by native elders about the pre-Columbian world – its history, mythology, rituals, religion, traditions, as well as poetry and songs. Although Sahagún initiated and directed the compilations, the interviewing of elders was actually conducted by younger native Indians, students of Sahagún who had learnt the Spanish alphabet. This allowed the bi-lingual post-Conquest generations of Indians to transcribe the pre­Conquest generation’s pictographs and spoken Nahuatl to a phonetic language on paper.

The transcribed interviews documented the myriad of Aztec-Nahua traditions, in particular religion and rituals. Sahagún’s contemporaries disapproved of the work, however, fearing it would promote native religion, and reported it to Phillip II of Spain. This resulted in a Royal Order prohibiting Sahagún from publishing his material. ‘And you are warned’, the Spanish monarch wrote, ‘absolutely not to allow any person to write concerning the superstitions and ways of life of these Indians in any language, for this is not proper to God’s service and to ours’.

Sahagún was ordered to hand over his documentation and it was not returned to him until thirty years later when, in his eighties, he finally sat down to write his twelve-volume General History of the Things of New Spain, based on his earlier research. However, Sahagún’s General History remained unpublished until nearly three centuries later. Even then, despite the interest aroused, censorship in effect prevailed. Sahagún’s History was not native literature as such; it was an edited and interpreted version of the interviews of the elders. No single text of direct indigenous authorship appeared until the nineteenth century.

Of course, this had a lot to do with the difficulty of translating the pictographs – a process called palaeography. A competent translation of Nahuatl poetry, for example, didn’t appear until the 1930s, palaeographed and translated by a Mexican priest and distinguished scholar of Nahuatl who later published a Nahuatl grammar book containing many ancient texts. Since then, a school of translators has slowly brought Nahuatl literature to the world. With this renewal of interest has come not only an appreciation of the literary merit of the ancient Nahuatl texts but also a serious study of the philosophy that lay behind them. In fact, any study of Nahuatl literature necessitates a simultaneous study of Nahuatl philosophy.

Within the Aztec empire two very different philosophies of life existed side by side: one which revolved around wars that ensured a constant supply of prisoners for sacrifice. The Aztecs believed themselves to be a chosen people, having the burdensome honour of maintaining cosmic harmony by feeding the sun the ‘precious liquid’ – human blood – without which the sun would not rise. The other, inherited from the much older Toltec empire, was based on the doctrines as taught and lived by the great sage Quetzalcoatl. In contrast with the war­like patron god of the Aztecs named Huitzilopochtli, the previous peace-loving ruler of the valley of Mexico, Quetzalcoatl, never practised human sacrifice because, according to a sixteenth-century Nahuatl text, ‘he loved his people so’.

These two belief systems were reflected most clearly in the Aztec education system which was compulsory for all children. There were two types of school. The majority of young people attended the school dedicated to Tezcatlipoca, identified with the warrior god Huitzilopochtli. Although students were instructed in moral and religious doctrine, the education was essentially practical. Boys were prepared for war and girls were taught weaving, embroidery, and how to perform the dances performed in the temples.

At the other school, students dedicated themselves to what we might call ‘higher learning’ in a sort of monastery environment, following the tradition of Quetzalcoatl, the symbol of wisdom and goodness. They practised penance and good manners, particularly good speaking or what we would call rhetoric, in the original sense of the word. They read the ‘book of years’ in which history was recorded through glyphs, and the ‘book of dreams’, which explained dream interpretation.

In many ways, these two schooling systems were in opposition. The popular and public religion of the Aztecs, often referred to as ‘militaristic mysticism’, contrasted starkly with the theological and philosophical speculations of that special class of skilled artists and sages, known as tlamatinime. Their philosophy, a kind of sceptical humanism that revolved around an aesthetic concept of the universe, shaped Nahuatl literature, particularly poetry.

In their role as philosophers as well as artists, the tlamatinime went in search of fuller and more satisfying explanations than those provided by traditional religion, questioning themselves long and hard, often in poetic form, about the purpose of life and the possibility of a hereafter, but always returning to the theme of the transient nature of existence and their own mortality. It seemed to them that human life only flourished for a moment and then disappeared forever, with no apparent meaning, as expressed by the fifteenth-century Aztec poet-king, Nezahualcoyotl:

Truly do we live on earth?

Not forever on earth; only a little while here.

Although it be jade, it will be broken,

Although it be gold, it is crushed,

Although it be quetzal feather, it is torn asunder.

Not forever on earth; only a little while here.

The sense of nothing on earth being stable or permanent greatly concerned the ancient Nahuatl philosophers, as did the impossibility of any clear image of the divine or of what lay beyond the obvious and earthly. They rejected the traditional notion of making offerings as a way of getting closer to the divine being:

Even though we may offer the Giver of Life

emeralds and fine ointments,

if with the offering of necklaces you are invoked,

with the strength of the eagle, of the tiger,

it may be that on earth no one speaks the truth.

The poetry of the tlamatinime constantly reiterates that, as there appeared to be no reason or purpose to life and no indication of what, if anything, came after, the possibility of finding meaning or truth was very limited.

The word ‘truth’ in Nahuatl has a different meaning to the word as we understand it. For us, truth is something that is scientifically correct, factual – not fictional. The word ‘truth’ in Nahuatl is derived from the same radical as ‘root’, so that truth means something that is firm, long-lasting, with strong foundations – literally ‘well-rooted’. Only that which lasts, which overcomes the transient, temporary nature of existence, is true. Truth is the foundation for something, the reason or the meaning for its existence. In this sense, nothing on earth could be ‘true’. Truth must lie beyond the earthly, in the realm of the metaphysical, in what could not be explained rationally, in the foundation of all created things, that which founded itself and on which every other reality rested. This was the origin of all things – the supreme being – referred to by the popular religion as the ‘Giver of Life’ and loosely described by the tlamatinime as that which is ‘above us, what is beyond’.

After much contemplation the tlamatinime concluded that only through intuition, metaphors, and symbols could a person find truth. And because all art – and in particular poetry – was considered to be the expression of intuition or something mysteriously understood it was therefore believed to be the way to true metaphysical knowledge. A way of seeing what was beyond seeing with the eyes or the intellect. A way of understanding the self as well as the universe and that which is ‘above and beyond us’. For this reason a sense of aesthetics, or more specifically a sense of the poetic, became central to the philosophy of the tlamatinime. They believed that through poetry, through its metaphors, its rhythms, images, and symbols, the true nature of reality might momentarily be grasped.

Metaphor was a particularly important characteristic of Nahuatl language and though, as was a sense of duality. Consequently the most particularly important concepts within the philosophy of the tlamatinime were often expressed by using two distinct qualities to create a metaphor for one idea or subject. The supreme being, the Giver of Life, named Ometeotl, was also known as the God of Duality. S/he was the female-male, ‘generating-conceiving cosmic principle’, and was described by the phrase ‘night and wind’, symbolising that which is as invisible as the night and as intangible as the wind – present yet transcendent. ‘Face and heart’ was the metaphor for a person or personality – face representing the individual’s identity and heart symbolising the human will and desires. ‘Black and red ink’ represented writing and wisdom. The metaphor for poetry and art in general was ‘flower and song’, which also meant ‘the only truth on earth’.

The image of the flower and son was constantly used in Nahuatl poetry. The origin of poetry, for instance, was questioned and answered thus:

Our priests, I ask of you:

From whence come the flowers that enrapture man?

The songs that intoxicate, the lovely songs?

 

Only from His home do they come, from the innermost part of heaven,

only from there comes the myriad of flowers …

Where the nectar of the flowers is found

the fragrant beauty of the flower is refined …

They interlace, they interweave;

among them sings, among them warbles the quetzal bird.

(From Aztec Thought and Culture by Miguel León-Portilla)

The origin of poetry was believed to be divine, born from heaven. This meant that true poetry could only be created with the help of divine inspiration, and the aspiring poet had to develop the divine spark that exists in the human heart. It was necessary to ‘dialogue with your own heart’, because the heart was the contact point with the divine. After much dialogue a person could develop a heart made divine, a yolteotl. With a ‘deified heart’, the artist would create works that act as a symbol or messenger for the world of the divine.

For a Christian the divine word is a work of God as reported in the scriptures, but for a Nahua philosopher the divine word was poetry. In this sense, ‘flower and song’ was the language that established dialogue between Creator and created:

Now do I hear the words of the coyolli bird

as he makes answer to the Giver of Life.

He goes his way singing, offering flowers.

And his words rain down

like jade and quetzal plumes.

 

Is that what pleases the Giver of Life?

Is that the only truth on earth?

The song that the bird offers to the Giver of Life is the response of a living creature to its creator, the sound of an instrument resounding with the divine breath of life. The ‘flower-songs’ of the human singer-poet are also a kind of human-divine duet. As Inga Clendinnen writes in her book Aztecs, ‘the song is actualized by the singer but it existed before his actualization as the creation of the divine maker. Bestowed by its creator, it is returned in performance’. The songs become ‘a dialogue between singer and deity’.

To the tlamatinime the ability to respond aesthetically was all important: a true aesthetic response was also a true prayer and therefore true worship. In this way, an aesthetic philosophy also became a theology and a religion. But was the religion of the tlamatinime so different to the original understanding of religion within a Christian culture? The Latin religio meant ‘obligation, bond, tie’ and came to mean ‘bond between human beings and the gods’. (I’d argue that this has been replaced with the modern, secular, and ugly ‘interconnectedness’.) To show its bond with, and obligation to, the Giver of Life, the bird sings. The obligation of the artist, according to Nahuatl philosophy, is to create art or ‘flower-songs’. Doing so not only creates beauty on earth but establishes a link between ourselves and our divine source. To be a true artist in the Nahua tradition it was necessary not only to be skilled but to develop the ability to create links, to reveal what was not normally perceptible, to strike that certain rhythm, that essential aesthetic principle which for the observers as well as for the artists would become a moment of revelation.

Perhaps such a moment was what prompted the German painter and engraver Albrecht Dürer to write in his diary in 1520, after first seeing native Mexican works of art brought to the Old World from the New World:

I have never seen anything in my whole life which has gladdened my heart like these things. In them I have found marvellously artistic objects and I have been amazed by the subtle creativity of the men of these strange, faraway lands.

(Quoted in Los Antiguos Mexicanos by Miguel León-Portilla)

Dürer’s reaction was exactly what a true Nahuatl artist would have intended. Art in the Nahuatl world was the language of the divine and all artwork contained a message aimed at the heart of the beholder – about the gods, about the real world that lay beyond the apparent world, about eternity. For the Nahuatl people this message was comprehensible because thanks to a free and obligatory education system, all young people were familiar with the religious doctrines and thought of the Nahuatl culture. This made art accessible to everyone, a language understood by all, if not practised by all. In our modern world, this doesn’t always happen. The artist is often marginalised and removed from the people. But in the Nahuatl world, an artist’s ambition, above all, was to ‘try to humanise people’s hearts and make them wise’, help them to discover their own truth or, as they described it, ‘their own roots on earth’ (Miguel León-Portilla).

In ancient Mexico, the scribe or tlacuilo was the highest among artists and was depended on by the community to make sense of life and give it meaning. S/he had a responsibility, a role that was essential, and central to that role was an ability to communicate with the divine, to communicate mystery, meaning, and truth. Miguel León-Portillo writes that, according to translations of Nahuatl codices, the tlacuilo was a ‘light, a torch … he comforts the heart, he comforts the people. He is the path, the true way for others.’ And so, although I suspect it is impossible to fully understand the Nahua concept of art, the function of the ancient Mexican codices and those who painted them is very clear. The codice itself was a symbol of wisdom and the scribe not only a craftsperson but also a sage, teacher, philosopher, painter, and composer.

How does the meaning of literature in that society compare with what it means now? It is certainly not a religion, although for some of us it may provide a kind of surrogate religion. It is sometimes an expression of a personal philosophy and occasionally a source of wisdom. But as often as not modern literature is used as a light entertainment just before sleep or when there’s nothing on the telly. And do modern writers have a meaning? Are we entertainers first and philosophers and teachers second? Or will we defy all definitions in the name of artistic independence and integrity? Although I am not advocating we become modern day tlacuilos I’d like to believe that the ancient Mexican scribes can encourage us to reflect on our role as writers and on the role of literature generally in a modern society. Does our literature serve as a way of bonding the community, not only with each other but with ‘that which is above and beyond’? In relation to the wider community, do we have a role outside the very small proportion of people who read books?

I would like to believe that writers held a significant and meaningful place in society in relation to the wider community, that we were somehow a little more involved in social, political, moral, and spiritual matters relevant to contemporary society. I’d like to feel that it would really make a big difference to Australia if all out writers disappeared tomorrow. I know it would make a difference to a limited few but would it mean anything to our politicians, to the powerful business corporations, to the millions who watch Hinch every night? As I think about this I can’t help remembering one afternoon when I was in Mexico City in and 1985.

It was the day that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, was released and during the afternoon peak hour the newsboys stood on the corners of the streets waving round the new novel and shouting: ‘Garcia Marquez’s latest book out now!’ I wonder if out country has a writer who means as much to Australians as Marquez means to Mexicans? Can we hope for the day when Peter Carey or Thea Astley will be sold from street corner newsstands?

In her essay, ‘The Writer’, Dorothy Green says:

In Anglo Saxon countries, writers are not held in particularly high regard unless they write books which make them a fortune, or win prizes abroad, or which attract sensational headlines in the press. What they write is rarely taken seriously enough nowadays to get them into trouble, except in certain states of North America and Australia. Governments in English­speaking countries do not often feel threatened by criticism from literati.

She goes on to suggest that, although ‘it would be foolish to imagine we had the right to tell authors what they ought or ought not to write about’, it might be time for writers to examine ‘in which direction their writing may be taking us: towards more participatory activity in our affairs or towards more passivity?’.

I would like to echo Dorothy Green in suggesting that Australian writers might profit from developing a more participatory role in our community and I hope that this essay might stimulate discussion about how that could be achieved. If it fails in that regard, I would at least hope that I have succeeded in arousing interest in Nahuatl literature and indigenous literature in general, which for so long has been suppressed or ignored. Perhaps part of a more participatory role for writers could begin within our own field with an active encouragement of lesser-known literary traditions. As English speakers and writers of the first world we are in a privileged position to help recognise the value of native literatures and assist, if appropriate, in their rescue.

In the case of Nahuatl literature it is ironic as well as indicative of ancient Mexican wisdom that, after so many years of native American culture being efficiently eroded away, one of the few truly authentic manifestations of pre-Hispanic Mexican culture to survive is Nahuatl poetry (as though proof of what the ancient Nahuatl sages believed).

Nezahualcoyotl again:

My flowers shall not cease to live;

my songs shall never end:

I, a singer, intone them;

They become scattered, they spread about.

Destined is my heart to vanish like the ever withering flowers?

What can my heart do? At least flowers, at least songs!