‘We are all fruits of the earth...’

Ritual circle of maize cobs

Inga Clendinnen, in her now classic book Aztecs: An Interpretation (1991) ends her chapter on The Sacred with the following: ‘The Mexica genius, deployed across an astonishing stretch of their ceremonial life, was to figure a human stance within the inhuman conditions of existence... Something like the same understandings (without the desperate urgency which drove the Mexica) still appears to animate the contemporary Nahua of San Miguel, in the Sierra de Puebla, who sing a song as recorded by the anthropologist Tim Knab:-