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FAMSI © 2005: David Tavárez |
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Nicachi Songs: Zapotec Ritual Texts and Postclassic Ritual Knowledge in Colonial Oaxaca A preliminary analysis of the Zapotec songs of Villa Alta In order to highlight some of the features of the songs of Villa Alta, I will now refer to my translation of three of these songs. It should be stressed that these translations are a work in progress: they are based in the parsing of verbal and nominal constructions that are supported by at least one item of morphological or lexical evidence from colonial Zapotec sources–such as Córdova's 1578 dictionary, which has been digitalized by a group lead by Thomas Smith-Stark (see Smith-Stark et al. 1993, and Smith-Stark 1998 and 1999), Feria's 1567 Doctrina (Broadwell 2002), Pacheco de Silva's 1687 Nexitzo doctrine, Gaspar de los Reyes' 1704 grammar of Cajonos Zapotec, Levanto's 1776 catechism, Juan Martín's 1696 Nexitzo vocabulary, Pedro de la Cueva's Valley Zapotec doctrinal narratives, and a group of 17th and 18th-century testaments in Cajonos and Nexitzo Zapotec, and accompanied by a Spanish translation. Contemporary sources include the vocabularies and grammars of the Yatzachi El Bajo (Butler 1997), Yalálag (López and Newberg 1990) and Zoogocho (Long and Cruz 1999) Zapotec variants. The Christian clandestine songs of Villa Alta: Booklets 102 and 103 Booklet 102 contains three brief songs: a song that stresses the message that God gave his only son as savior to the world, a song that celebrates the Virgin Mary, and a song entitled "Sermon of St. Francis." Booklet 103 contains 13 songs that address redemption, the passion of Christ, the mysteries of the Virgin, and celebrates Christ, the Virgin Mary, the Three Wise Men, God the Father, and Saint John the Baptist. These songs display two features that are also found in the Nahua Cantares Mexicanos: stanza boundaries are always marked with nonsensical syllables, and the contents of the stanza are organized into a first section–which contains new information, and which we could call "verse," following Bierhorst's (1985) suggestion–and a second, highly repetitive section, which we could designate as "refrain." Since Booklet 102 and 103 contain songs in the Nexitzo Zapotec dialect, their geographical origin can be surmised through indirect evidence. In the legal records produced by Bishop Maldonado, there is only one instance in which the residents of a Nexitzo-speaking town mention the surrender of nicachi songs to ecclesiastical authorities: the confession in behalf of the people of Yalahui. On November 24, 1704, a communal confession signed by Yalahui town officials was presented to Judge Aragón y Alcántara. This confession stated that Juan Martín, son of Yalahui mayor Miguel Martín, owned "a booklet with teponaztli songs"; it was also reported that both Miguel and another town official had consulted this booklet. The Yalahui officials also confessed that no communal sacrifices had taken place in their town after the deaths of two of their "teachers of idolatry" 20 years earlier (AGI 882: 430r). While Juan and Miguel Martín were the last known owners of Booklets 102 and 103, it cannot be asserted that they were the authors of these songs. Although both booklets appear to have been composed by two similar hands, it may well be the case that these were copies of texts that were originally composed by the mid-seventeenth century. A substantial analysis and sample translations of this song corpus will appear in Tavárez 2006. A communal ritual genre of Late Postclassic origin: Booklets 100 and 101 The Zapotec songs from Booklets 100 and 101 have the best-documented context of production. On November 19, 1704, Fernando Lópes of Lachirioag appeared before an ecclesiastical judge, and presented him with "a book made of half a paper sheet, old and dirty, in which he said were contained the days for giving Gentile names…". This is an accurate depiction of Booklet 100, which also bears the legend "From Fernando Lópes of Lachirioag, who bought it from Pedro Vargas of Betaza." On the same date, Pedro Gonzalo of Lachirioag surrendered "a notebook with eight folios, which he said was for teponaztli songs." This description matches the physical appearance of Booklet 101. Although there is no biographical information about Pedro Gonzalo, the owner of Booklet 101, some information has survived about Fernando Lópes and Pedro de Vargas–the owners of Booklet 100. A collective confession identifies Fernando Lópes as one of the three leading "teachers of idolatries" who organized communal ritual practices in the town of Lachirioag, and Lópes stated he had bought his songbook from Pedro de Vargas of Betaza. This transfer was business as usual among Zapotec ritual specialists, who exchanged, copied, or bought booklets containing calendars and ritual songs throughout the 17th century in the parish of Sola and the province of Villa Alta (Tavárez 2002b, 2006). According to the testimony of Pedro's son Fabián de Vargas–who was an office holder in Betaza in 1703 as well as a ritual specialist–his father refused to teach him about divination practices, arguing that he was afraid of being discovered as a practitioner, and had decided instead to pass on his ritual knowledge to his oldest son. In spite of this, Fabián received instruction from other specialists, found a ritual text that belonged to his father sometime after his death in 1694, and eventually learned how to make sacrifices in private. In fact, many of the Villa Alta testimonies refer to a split between sacrificios de particulares, personal ritual practices–which were performed by common people, usually with the assistance of ritual practitioners–and sacrificios del común, or community sacrifices, which involved the playing of songs that were called cantos de teponastle–"wooden drum songs," or dij dola nicachi in Zapotec–performed before the entire town in an open space by singers and musicians called belao.
Structural features of the song corpus in Booklets 100 and 101 It may be argued that the structure of the cosmos and the structure of the 260-day ritual calendar were regarded as overlapping, interrelated arrangements by Mesoamerican priests and ritual specialists. In Postclassic times, one of the most succinct depictions of this interdigitation of space and time is perhaps the cover page of the Codex Fejérvary-Mayer, which shows Xiuhteuctli at the center of a diagram that contains the four cardinal directions in association with four respective trees and birds, and with specific day signs (Taube 2004). The Nahua, according to León-Portilla's (1974) interpretation of the well-known cosmological diagram from the Codex Ríos (Vaticanus A), believed in a cosmical order that contained 13 separate layers in the realm above Earth, and nine underworld layers. The cosmological beliefs of colonial Zapotec ritual specialists may be represented by one of the last pages of Calendar 11 from Villa Alta (see Figure 1, above): this drawing depicts the cosmos as an 19-level structure, with eight levels (represented by circles) between the House of the Underworld (yoo gabila) and the House of Earth (yoo yeche layo), and eight levels between the House of Earth and the House of the Sky (yoo yaba). The 260-day calendar is directly tied to these houses: in Calendar 11 and in a few of the 99 calendrical booklets from Villa Alta, it is stated that each of the 20 thirteen-day periods (trecenas) is linked with a revolving circuit through each of the three levels: Trecena 1 is associated with the House of Earth, Trecena 2 with the House of the Sky, Trecena 3 with the House of Earth, Trecena 4 with the House of the Underworld, Trecena 5 with the House of Earth, and so on until Trecena 20, yielding ten trecenas associated with Earth, and five trecenas each linked to Sky and the Underworld. 2 Furthermore, the 260 days of this count were also divided into four periods of 65 days each–called piyê in Valley Zapotec (Córdova 1578a: 115v) and goçio in Villa Alta–and each day was associated with one of four cardinal directions, which in the Villa Alta calendars were often transcribed as xilla, zobi, chaba/tzaba, and niti. As an example of some of these associations, Figure 2 shows a depiction of the first trecena in Calendar 85 of Villa Alta: the gloss on either side of the house drawn atop the list of 13 days (yagchilla, 1 Cayman, to queçee, 13 Reed) states that the trecena (llanij in Villa Alta, coçij in Valley Zapotec) is associated with the House of Earth (yoho lleo) and that this house "receives the turn/period" (ricij laza) 3 of the first 65-day division (goçio i) in the ritual calendar. The structure of Booklets 100 and 101 suggests that they contain two separate and complete song cycles that traverse, in a symbolic fashion, the cosmological layers depicted in Figure 1. Booklet 100 contains a total of 13 songs. The first nine songs have variable lengths (the longest has 26 stanzas; the shortest, five stanzas), and the song cycle ends with four shorter songs (each one to five stanzas in length), which are preceded by the label bego (which probably translates as "turtle"), and numbered one through four. Booklet 101 contains a cycle of nine songs whose length fluctuates between three and 15 stanzas. A possible interpretation of this arrangement is that Booklet 100 contains a nine-song cycle in which each song is associated with each of the levels between the House of the Underworld and the House of Earth, or the House of Earth and the House of the Sky; the four remaining shorter songs would be associated with the four "turtles" that hold up each of these three houses–which are rendered as circles in the Calendar 11 diagram depicted in Figure 1. Since Booklet 100, unlike Booklet 101, contains 24 separate references to gabila (the underworld) and six separate references to Becelao Dao–the main underworld deity, according to Córdova's informants–it is plausible that this song cycle is tied with a symbolic passage between the House of the Underworld and the House of Earth, or vice versa, and that the songs in Booklet 101, which contain three references to xana quebaa (Lord of the Sky), are connected with a journey between the House of Earth and the House of the Sky. However, this issue will not be solved until a full translation is completed. Although the translation of the songs contained in Booklets 100 and 103 is still in its early stages, it can be stated that these songs celebrate and propitiate a rather broad array of entities that fall into three broad categories: entities that share calendrical and personal names with Sierra Zapotec founding ancestors, Pan-Zapotec deities whose names were known to Córdova's informants in the Valley of Oaxaca and to the ritual specialist Diego Luis of San Miguel Sola, and local or calendrical entities whose names are not associated with either known founding ancestors or known Pan-Zapotec deities. The rest of this report will focus on the first two categories.
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