The Nahua Perception of Death and its Influence on the Mexican Phoenix Freya Abbas
C
ertain forms of art are privileged in society in the sense that they may be able to express feelings that would otherwise be considered shocking and inappropriate by the elite. Art that can easily be dismissed as pure emotion or fantasy is in a unique position which allows it to object readily accepted beliefs in society. The place of troubadour poetry in New Spain is one example, as the genre puts a distance between the speaker and the subject that permits the speaker to show exaggerated displays of emotion. The lyrical tradition of the exaltation of the beloved even protects female writers like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, allowing her to express romantic desire for another woman in a strictly Catholic society (Powell 9). This can be observed in her elegy for the vicereine Leonor Carreto, which the traditional scholarly interpretation aims to situate in the larger history of lyric poetry that began with Sappho. Critics have noticed lyric conventions in the elegy, such as the unrestrained passion for the object of the mourner’s adoration and the anguish felt by Carreto’s passing. Yet the status of the lyric genre in New Spain provided Sor Juana the freedom to not only write about romantic desire, but also speak of controversial theological perspectives, such as presenting the very different Indigenous Nahua and Catholic views on death as complementary, rather than opposing forces. Even in a genre associated with passion and unbridled emotion, Sor Juana still engages with logic and reason to entertain complex philosophical and theological points about death. The scholarly focus on the themes of grief and love in the elegy for Leonor Carreto may overlook the poem’s theological arguments. The elegy contains an attempt to reconcile two different ideas on death, the Nahua and the Catholic belief system. In Nahua metaphysics, death deals with everyone fairly and equally. It is inevitable, natural, and viewed as a part of life rather than as the binary opposite of life. This is made most obvious by the Aztec beliefs of the afterlife, as “They believed that a man’s final destiny was determined, not on the basis of his moral conduct in life, but on the nature of his death,” (Portilla 127). Those who died of old age went to a place called Mictlan to live as skeletons, while those who died of drowning went to Tlalocan to live with the rain god, and so on. One can see how this contrasts with the Catholic view of death, which is seen as the opposite of life, can be reversed by a miracle, and does not treat everyone equally, as God must judge everyone to determine if they are deserving of heaven or hell. In the elegy, imagery representing the Catholic view of life and death as binary opposites is used as is an allusion to the Nahua goddess of death and her impartial treatment of those who die. These views are united and presented as two halves of one whole later on in the poem. Sor Juana’s passionate elegy for the vicereine represents the speaker reconciling two different belief systems surrounding death; the Catholic view that death is the opposite of life and affects people differently based on their deeds, and the Nahua view that death is a part
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