28 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
ditches and canals to the rhythms between temples and the
surrounding landscape of volcanic mountains. The Mexica
identified the sacred quality of the natural world as teotl,
a word that expresses, as Richard Townsend put it, “the
notion of a sacred quality, but with the idea that it could
be physically manifested in some specific presence—a rain-
storm, a lake, or a majestic mountain.” Teotl was a central
concept of the belief system shared by a broad spectrum of
the people of central Mexico, wherein natural forces and
presences were manifestations of the sacred world; the
concept of teotl (often compared to the Polynesian concept
of mana) expresses this view of the world as a hierophany,
“perceived as being magically charged, inherently alive in
greater or lesser idea with this vital force.” 7 The sacredness
of the world could be expressed in many forms, and thus
teotl and teo- are frequent components of the names and
terms that the Mexica, like other Nahuatl-speaking peo-
ples of central Mexico, used for deities and sacred places,
like Tlazolteotl, for a female deity, or teocalli (calli means
“house”), for “temple.” 8
Covarrubias’s twentieth-century image drew on a rep-
resentation from the European-made map accompanying
Cortés’s account of the city (see figure 1.11), but inflecting
that original map was a Mexica understanding of this city.
We can never aspire to capture the intimacy with which
residents knew this city through practice as they trekked
out in ritual pilgrimages toward the sacred shrines that
lay on the peaks or in the folds of the surrounding ranges
or dredged out island soil to allow the insistent water to
pass. But we find its representation in the poetry written
in the sixteenth century in Nahuatl, a heavily metaphoric
language, where the water and the lakes are a central figure.
The poet of one work included in a compilation known as
the Cantares Mexicanos seems to anticipate the blue-green
expanse that Corrarubias’s brush would produce centuries
thence: “Creating circles of emerald, the city stretches out:
/ radiating brillance like the quetzal feather, here Mexico
extends outward.” 9 And yet another captures the wonders
of this watery paradise at ground level:
Mexico Tenochtitlan Atlitic
Among the rushes and the reeds
Where the rock cactus stands
Where the eagle stops and rests
Where the eagle shrieks and pipes
Where the eagle relaxes and takes pleasure
Where the eagle dines and gorges itselfWhere the snake hisses
And the fish glides
Where the blue-green and yellow waters
Merge and seethe
At the water’s center
Where the waters enter.
Where the rushes and the reeds whisper
Where the white water-snakes
And the white frogs dwell
Where the white cypress
And the white leafy willow stand
There it is declared
That sweat and toil have come to be known. 10In its tranquil disposition, the picture by Covarrubias
masks the lurking ecological violence in the valley, but it
is there in the landscape of the poem: the lake that could
seethe and swallow the city during the rainy season, the
volcanoes, hissing like snakes, whose steamy plumes could
erupt in molten lava, the ground itself that could buckle
and rupture during earthquakes. Even the sun was incon-
sistent, a vagrant wandering from north to south along the
horizon during the course of the year—indeed, the Me xica
held that this era, the fifth “sun,” or epoch of creation,
nahui olin, 4 Movement, would end as the earth seized up
in a cataclysm of seismic violence, much like the one that
today’s city, Mexico City, experienced in 1985. The natural
world was an alternately wonderful and fearsome place,
and the residents of Tenochtitlan knew it.sPaTiaL modeLs of The cosmos
Representations of space, as Henri Lefebvre anticipated,
are modeled on foundational beliefs or worldview, which
scholars of Mesoamerica have termed “cosmovision.”
Alfredo López Austin has argued that a shared cosmo-
vision has deep historic roots and extended widely across
Mesoamerica, a geographic region extending from mod-
ern Mexico through Central America whose inhabitants
shared common cultural traits across millennia. In a recent
encyclopedia entry on the topic, he defined the term as a
“hard nucleus” existing from the beginnings of civilization
in Mesoamerica. At the core of this nucleus, “a complex
of fundamental ideas was integrated to form the core of a
common body of thought shared by many different ethnic
g r o u p s .” 11 The main element of this “common body” was
a “cosmos shaped by complementary opposites,” overseen