With Aztec Religion and Art of Writing: Investigating Embodied Meaning, Indigenous Semiotics, and the Nahua Sense of Reality, Isabel Laack makes a significant contribution to Mesoamerican scholarship. It is different from other books on Aztec religion in many ways. When I first read the manuscript, I was intrigued by its original title, Aztec Sacred Scripture? Searching for Their Sense of Reality, which included a glyph—a question mark—in its title! I read her question mark as a serious invitation to travel along as she negotiates her way through the Nahua writing system, the heated debates about Aztec philosophy, European-based theories of religion, and her delight in being part of what has been called the “aesthetic turn” in scholarship. This book is a brilliant, multilayered “thought experiment meant to change the habitual thought patterns we typically use alongside the concept of religion.” Laack means the study of religion in general and Aztec religion in particular.
What readers will find attractive is Laack’s combination of intellectual courage (she dwells within the pictorials as an outsider, jumps in and swings away at the León-Portilla/Bierhorst debate), her self-critical awareness about her methods, and a pragmatism about the much wider cultural task she believes we readers of the Aztecs must engage in. For Laack, the question mark swings both ways—in her direction and ours. On the one hand, she writes:
“This research study is concerned with the ancient Nahuas’ sense of reality—their cosmovision, ontology, epistemology, philosophy, and religion—with a particular focus on their writing system. This includes the search for Indigenous semiotic theories about the relationship between written visual communication and reality as well as an interpretation of how the writing system worked, as seen from a contemporary perspective. My viewpoint on these topics is shaped by my particular academic training: the secular study of religion in general and the study of the aesthetics of religion in particular.”
Notice the key phrases here—“concerned with,” “search for,” “interpretation of”—her synonyms for the opening glyph. She is searching for “Indigenous semiotic theories” about Aztec writing not as an art form per se but as a key to their sense of reality as it is understood, somewhat nebulously, through our sense of reality. On the other hand, even while the book bears down, section after section, in the search for the “Nahuas themselves,” Laack links this to combatting the ecological and cultural dangers of the contemporary thrust of globally reducing the diversity of the earth and peoples, that is, the Others. She writes about her book:
In twelve systematic and well-written chapters, Laack seeks the alternative by showing solidarity with writers of the “material turn and aesthetic turn” in the study of religion and culture. Laack’s commitment to the “aesthetic turn” developed when she wrote her PhD thesis about religion and music in contemporary spirituality in Glastonbury, England (Laack 2011). She was drawn to “a small group of scholars of religion in Germany and Switzerland [who] started to rediscover the role of the aesthetics of religion” and argued for establishing the Aesthetics of Religion as a new theoretical and analytical approach within Religionswissenschaft, the scientific study of religion.
This insistence on a multidisciplinary method came, in part, from the value she found in Vincent Wimbush’s flexible and fruitful approach to the category of scriptures, and she summarizes her main takeaway with these words:
“In his view, scriptures are writings that have become authoritative in their respective tradition, perform a centering function within them, construct meaning, and are constituted by important material and interpretative text practices (see Wimbush 2008b: 67).”
Focus on the phrase “interpretive text practices,” because Laack translates it to include Nahua pictorial writing and its intensively emotional ceremonial cycles as one key to understanding Aztec scriptural forms, lives, powers, and meanings. The Nahua pictography practices were an efficient system for “communicating complex, nonlinguistic kinds of meaning and knowledge about reality,” while their ceremonies and rituals provided knowledge about the human body as an element of the cosmic body and its many parts and sections. And, like the glyph in her original title, she presents many questions for readers, including:
“How did the Nahuas relate writing to reality? What role did they give manuscripts, paper, writing, and themselves as human beings in the unceasing flow of cosmological forces? What happened in the act of painting and writing? Did they have concepts of (“sacred”?) scribal creativity? What role did they give the bodily senses in their epistemology and in their beliefs about how to understand reality and how to express these insights in writing? What did they think about the proper method for interpreting their writings? What types of hermeneutics and semiotics did they have? In what way are “religious” views of the cosmos interrelated with their concepts of scripture, hermeneutics, and semiotics?”
To aid her, and us, in this quest, she travels with a diversity of scholars: Walter Mignolo, Alfredo López Austin, John Bierhorst, James Maffie, Inga Clendinnen, Elizabeth H. Boone, Ninian Smart, and Miguel León-Portilla. Some of their ideas she embraces, some she does not. She also takes stands and manages to play fair with opponents and those who have not yet caught up to the “aesthetic and material turn.” She knows that the task of “writing history in a postcolonial way after historiography’s crisis of representation and attempting to understand the bygone culture of the pre-Hispanic Nahuas is no easy endeavor.” But she gives it her total effort, and I especially like this illuminating summary of what she has discovered about the Nahua cosmos: “Conveying this kaleidoscopic nature and complex web of relationships, the Nahuas played with semblances and references in their cultural media, including their elaborate rituals.” Rituals were the art of the Nahuas, and art was ritually expressed. Laack shows clearly that throughout the Nahua world the deities played major roles, and so their presences, powers, and semi-Otherness animated the writing system—those colorful strings of glyphs found in manuscripts and speech acts, and on sculptures, costumes, and pottery. Deities embedded in aesthetic and material culture animated the Nahua world so that its many moving parts kept moving.
In other words, according to Laack, the Nahuas knew that if they wanted to find the “really real,” they had to create art and writing as well as act out the beauty of those messages in their dances. When they did all that, they came to know their gods firsthand, face-to-face, and center-to-periphery. But this knowledge was in the forms of both question marks and exclamation points. That is the sense of reality that Isabel Laack has opened for us.
Davíd Carrasco
Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America
Harvard University