other civilizations, as the complex product of boththe political and economic means
to form larger, integrated polities andthe symbolic forms that rationalized and le-
gitimated the existence of these greater units of integration. To borrow Clifford
Geertz’s well-known paraphrase of Max Weber, Mesoamericans, past and present,
have lived in webs of significance they themselves have spun. Religion clearly ranked
as a major political and ideological force in this “created” universe of meaning in an-
cient Mesoamerica.
Here, then, we will synthesize some of the templates by whose agency life and
death, well-being and suffering, plenty and poverty, continuity and destruction of
life, moral authority and corruption, were understood. We begin with informed spec-
ulation about the spiritual traditions of the earliest period of human occupation of
the region and then trace patterns in Mesoamerican religious traditions that continue
into the present.Shamanic Roots
The earliest Americans arrived on the continent as fishers, hunters, and gatherers.
They lived in small nomadic bands, and it is assumed that they had spiritual beliefs506 UNIT 4 MESOAMERICAN CULTURAL FEATURES
Figure 14.1 A jade effigy axe (the
“Kunz Axe”) in the Olmec style.
Provenance and date unknown, though
central Tabasco, Mexico, circa fifth
century B.C. is plausible. Drawing by Ellen
Cesarski from a photograph of the
original piece in the American Museum of
Natural History, New York.