Nicachi Songs: Zapotec Ritual Texts and Postclassic Ritual Knowledge in Colonial Oaxaca

Preliminary conclusions

The translation of Booklets 100 and 101 from Betaza and Lachirioag is still in its initial stages, but it promises to yield a wealth of information about their local cosmologies. In turn, these cosmologies may bear a number of structural, semantic, and symbolic parallels with the various reconstructions of pan-Zapotec religious practices proposed by Flannery and Marcus (1983), Marcus and Flannery (1996), Sellen (2002), Smith-Stark (1999), Urcid (2001), and other researchers. My preliminary findings embrace a middle ground of sorts in this rather complex epistemic panorama. Instead of proposing a cosmology dominated by local or regional deified ancestors, or a pantheon composed of Classic and Postclassic Pan-Mesoamerican deities, the cosmological order evoked by these songs resembles the intricate cosmological arrangements depicted in the Popol Vuh (particularly in the Tedlock 1994 translation), in which creator deities, entities associated with specific realms (sky and the underworld), and a range of superhuman entities are linked both with major cosmological events–such as the triumph of the realm of the sky over that of the underworld–and with foundational events relating to local mythohistorical narratives. This "middle ground" approach is inspired in part by Urcid's (2005: 27-28) reading of Zapotec elite tomb narratives as representing individuals that have both a historically situated identity, as well as divine attributes achieved through deity impersonation practices. In other words, the Zapotec cosmovisión reflected in the Villa Alta songs includes a complex and perhaps shifting constellation of deified founding ancestors, Zapotec deities with likely historical ties to other Mesoamerican deities, and calendrical entities, among other influential entities.

We can now assert that knowledgeable colonial Zapotec ritual specialists carried out propitiatory acts in behalf of both local founding ancestors and ancient Zapotec deities, some of which resemble deity complexes worshipped in Classic and Postclassic times throughout Mesoamerica. Some of these songs describe kinship links between Zapotec deities and local founding ancestors, as illustrated by the genealogical links between Great Beginning 8/11 Dew and Lord 1 Cayman. Furthermore, there may be a number of key symbolic links between a three-tiered cosmos, dates in the 260-day ritual calendar, and the propitiation of both founding ancestors and ancient deities. The surviving evidence about the specificity of these associations, however, poses significant analytical challenges which will only be addressed through further linguistic research on the colonial variants of Cajonos and Nexitzo Zapotec, and through the interpretation of ethnohistoric evidence regarding social organization, land tenure, and ritual practices that may be obtained from the unusually diverse range of texts in Zapotec and Spanish generated by indigenous writers and their neighbors in 17^th-century Villa Alta.

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