Portals to the Gods: Reciprocity, Sacrifice, and Warfare in the Northern Mixteca

Ritualized violence in the Late Postclassic Northern Mixteca of Oaxaca is explored via artifacts, pictograms, and field identifications of landforms within the territory of the highland seigneury of Coixtlahuaca. The landforms, believed to have been the place where the gods convened and then sacrificed themselves, are depicted on colonial period painted maps and described in documents written in alphabetic script. Several ancient cosmogonic myths were projected onto the landscape of the Coixtlahuaca Basin and memorialized through the production of luxury material artifacts. Rulers and other high-status nobles, entrusted with maintaining sacred traditions and receptive to messages from the sacred sphere, patronized local artisans to produce works that perpetuated the memory of these creation narratives. Replicated in different media and codified as having occurred within the bounds of the seigneury’s lands, these artifacts exalt the supreme sacrifice of the patron deities described in the narratives. They provide tangible evidence of events that took place in primeval times around which a bonding, religious understanding, devotion, and sense of identity for this area’s inhabitants developed. Reciprocating the sacrifice of the patron gods, humans were sacrificed during the observance of feasts cued to the agricultural cycle and warfare. The underlying structure of the relationship with the sacred reveals a concern with war and human sacrifice borne of a long-standing obligatory tradition of ritual petitioning and invocation of sacred forces consonant with the wider Mesoamerican worldview. Blood-letting rituals were aimed at maintaining balance and assurance that sustenance would be provided for and properly reciprocated. This treatment advances an enriched perspective that emerges by contextualizing the origin myths within the frameworks of regional archaeology, ethnohistory, and ethnographic accounts.