Article suitable for older students

The myth of the omens

29th May 2023

The Aztecs get their first glimpse of the arriving Spanish invasion force; Codex Duran

It’s salutary to think that just less than two decades ago as a teaching team we helped promote the idea that the Mexica (Aztecs) were fatalistic in their belief in a returning bearded god (Quetzalcóatl) appearing from the East the same year (One-Reed, 1519) as Hernán Cortés appeared. We now know that the same Franciscan friars and chroniclers who created this myth also imported from Classical Europe the notion of omens foretelling the defeat of the Aztecs, to portray the ‘Conquest’ as providential... (Compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

Here we bring together the conclusions of several heavyweight scholars who have in recent years debunked the long-held notion that the Spaniards brought a ‘superior’ god to Mexico, introducing him to a people - and an emperor - paralysed by fear and superstition brought on by a series of auguries supposed to have occurred in the decade prior to the invasion.

Camilla Townsend (2019) sets the scene:-
’The students of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, author of the Florentine Codex, beginning in the 1560s and ‘70s, wrote down what no indigenous person had ever said before - namely, that their forefathers had been paralysed even before 1519 by the appearance of terrifying omens. Interestingly, the stories they told bore a distinct resemblance to the narrations in certain Greek and Latin texts that were in the Franciscan school library [according to inventories dating from the 1570s].’
In a detailed study, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (1992) traces all the omens to precedents in three Greek and Latin books, by Plutarch, Josephus and Lucan, as well as the Bible, and explains that the ‘relatively small and unrepresentative circle of... pupils signalled out for special attention in the Franciscans’ school [Colegio de Santa Cruz] at Tlatelolco, with its quasi-humanist curriculum and its ability to turn Aztec youths into consummate Latinists, would also have been exposed to classical writings on auguries and to the traditional technique of classical poets and historians of prefacing great events with catalogues of omens.’

The omens, with supporting illustrations, are numbered and spelt out - indeed, repeated, strangely - in four different parts of the Florentine Codex, in chapters 1, 3 and 6 of Book 8 and again in chapter 1 of Book 12. In the Nahuatl text ‘they sound plausibly exotic, thanks to the repetitive, rhythmical, incantatory language’ (ibid). The twelfth book was written, significantly, some 35 years after Moctezuma II’s death. Matthew Restall (2003) points out that ‘the informants were from Tlatelolco, the original Mexico island city that in the fifteenth century had become subsumed into Tenochtitlan but retained some semblance of separate identity. Its people usually called themselves Tlatelolca, rarely Mexica, and as Tlatelolco was the last part of the island to fall to the Spaniards, Tlatelolcans blamed the Mexica-Tenochca for the defeat. As a result, Moctezuma receives harsh treatment in the Codex, which portrays him as vacillating, inert with anxiety, terrorised by omens predicting his downfall, and ingratiating to the Spaniards.’

Despite being repeated several times, there are odd discrepancies in the (Nahuatl) text: In Book VIII the first omen, a ‘tongue of fire’ (see pic 4) is first described as being seen during the rule of Moctezuma II: ‘For four years this always was to be seen at night. And when it disappeared, it was still four years before the Spaniards came to arrive.’ In chapter 3, it is referred to during the rule of Nezahualpilli in Texcoco, again eight years prior to the arrival of Spaniards. Yet in the opening lines of chapter 1, Book XII, the text reads ‘Ten years before the Spaniards arrived here, an omen of evil appeared in the heavens... it was there to the east when it thus came forth at midnight... For a full year [the sign] came forth... and when it appeared, there was shouting... there was fear; there was inactivity.’

It would surely raise questions in any careful reader’s mind as to why, just a handful of years before the momentous arrival of the invaders, the Nahua informants of Sahagún should mix up not only the (presumably memorable, to say the least) year the first omen featured but also the length of its stay in the sky. Celestial manifestations - including a blazing comet - feature in three of the portents, oddly reminiscent, incidentally, of biblical accounts relating to the fate of Jerusalem. Fernández-Armesto, having demolished the myth of the omens being pre-invasion constructs, adds a delightful word of advice: ‘The tails of those pre-conquest comets need to be liberally sprinkled with grains of salt...’

We leave the last word to leading Nahuatl scholar James Lockhart (1993):-
’In my view, they [the omens] are the typical attempt of a vanquished group to explain, after the fact, what has happened, saying that the gods were against us, we should have seen what was coming, instead of evidence of fatalism and undue superstition on the part of the indigenous people who were actually living the experience...’

Sources:-
• Fernández-Arresto, Felipe (1992) ‘”Aztec” auguries and memories of the conquest of Mexico’, Renaissance Studies vol. 6, no. 3-4, 287-305
• Florentine Codex - General History of the Things of New Spain by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún in Thirteen Parts, translated by Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, published by the School of American Research and the University of Utah, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1953-1982; Books VIII and XII
• Lockhart, James (1993) (editor & translator) We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico, University of California Press
• Restall, Matthew (2003) Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, Oxford University Press
• Townsend, Camilla (2019) Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, Oxford University Press.

Picture sources:-
• Main & pic 5: images 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
• Animation by Mexicolore based on a detail from a mural by Antonio González Orozco, Hospital de Jesús Nazareno, Mexico City
• Pix 2, 3, 4 & 6: images 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.

‘Bad omens!’ - download our teaching resource on the omens ‘How long did it take the Aztecs to realise that Cortés was not a god? ‘