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Did the Mexica have prayers they said before or after a hunt?

Mexica hunters head off on a ceremonial hunt during the festival of Quecholli; ‘Primeros Memoriales’ fol. 252r

ORIGINAL QUESTION received from - and thanks to - Elizabeth Zamudio: Did the Mexica have prayers they said before or after a hunt? If so, are they still known? (Answered by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

Yes, definitely! All the available evidence points to this, even though we rely on indirect 16th and 17th century sources.
In his description of the major annual festival Quecholli (main picture), dedicated to the ancient patron god of hunting Camaxtli, Fray Diego Durán, in his Historia de las indias de Nueva España, points to the ritual focus on nature and wildlife:-
’[They made a] great celebration in the mountains of all the land... invoking the clouds, the winds, the earth, the water, the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, the trees, plants and bushes; the hillsides and gullies, mountains and plains; snakes, lizards, tigers and lions, and all manner of beasts’ (Broda 1991: 105).
It’s worth pointing out, incidentally, that some scholars believe the sacred hunt symbolised warfare: this is inferred by Durán when he states that ‘they did not on this day sacrifice men, but only animals, and thus the game served as victims to the gods’ (ibid).

A later (1629) work, the Treatise on the Superstitions of the Natives of This New Spain by the Spanish priest Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, records specific details of ‘the charms and spells which are used to hunt deer with nooses, and the great superstitions which surround this’, as well as the ‘superstitions of the archers, and the spells that they use’, ‘spells and words which they use to hunt other kinds of animals’...
However, a casual reading of the - extraordinarily lengthy - hunting ‘invocations, spells and chants’ (which we believe more than cover the term ‘prayers’) leaves one perplexed: they seem to have nothing to do with hunting, and instead are a jumble of bizarre metaphors, expressions of personal woe, references to family members, and a host of seemingly meaningless and random utterances such as ‘I have quickened the walled gate’, ‘Gone is my salt’, ‘In which he makes your hair stand out awry’...
It takes guidance from world-class scholars Michael Coe and Gordon Whittaker to appreciate that the language used by Ruiz de Alarcón’s Nahua informants is nahuallatolli or ‘disguised language’. Who would have thought, for example, that ‘My mother Earth-thumper’ actually means the earth’s surface, ‘Priest Nine-Pounded’ refers to tobacco, ‘the walled gate’ means nooses, ‘Your belted blouses, your grackle feathers’ means the net thrown over the trapped deer, ‘Those of the Five Signs’ refer to the hunter’s fingers, and so on...

‘The form of the spells,’ explain Coe and Whittaker quoting Alfredo López Austin, ‘is unvarying. The sorcerer - whether traveller, farmer, hunter, fisherman or ticitl [doctor] - opens by declaring himself to be a god, most often the god Tezcatlipoca under his various epithets; by this he indicates his power over the forces that he wishes to dominate. Then, he calls forth favourable beings, mentioning various titles, and curses hostile ones in the same way, almost always with the respect of one who considers himself a kinsman, through his supernatural power, of all of the inhabitants of that magic world.’
Ruiz de Alarcón tells us that the prayers begin in the hunter’s own home, which has to be ‘prepared for success’, by sweeping and arranging it, setting the fire and the three hearthstones, readying the (deer) trap, which involves gathering up the tobacco (also used in hunting rattlesnakes), fire and nooses. A spell is then cast on the cords of the nooses. The hunter then ‘departs for the wilderness’, where prayers are offered followed by the ‘spell and charms of the net and nooses’.

The spirits then ‘order them to call the deer, shouting and yelling to the four winds and imitating wild beasts, and to try to do this very well. Then begins the casting of a spell on the deer, in the style of a debate, beginning with the phrase -
’Priest 7 Flower, Lord of the Desert [Deer],
Suddenly you have been caught by night...’
And ending with -
’Priest 7 Flower, Lord of the Desert.
Soon he will come forth here;
Here you will take hold of him.
You will seize him.’
The invocations conclude with more calling to the four quarters, and with the hunters believing ‘that the deer will come to their call so blindly that they will enter their nets with as much speed as if they would jump into the water when wounded.’

Main source:-
• Aztec Sorcerers in Seventeenth Century Mexico: The Treatise on Superstitions by Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón by Michael D. Coe and Gordon Whittaker, Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany Publication no. 7, 1982
In addition -
• ‘The Sacred Landscape of Aztec Calendar Festivals: Myth, Nature and Society’ by Johanna Broda in To Change Place: Aztec Ceremonial Landscapes edited by David Carrasco, University Press of Colorado, 1991, pp. 74-120.

Picture sources:-
• Main pic: image scanned from our own copy of Primeros Memoriales by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Facsimile Edition, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 1993
• Image scanned from our own copy of Códice Durán - Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e Islas de Tierra Firme, Arrendedora Internacional, Mexico City, 1990
• Image from the Florentine Codex (original in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence) scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994
• B/W illustration by David Kiphuth scanned from Aztec Sorcerers in Seventeenth Century Mexico (see above)
• Photo of deer imitator by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore.

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Did the Mexica have prayers they said before or after a hunt?

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