CHAPTER 14 THE RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS OF MESOAMERICA 527IS THERE A COMMON CORE
OF MESOAMERICAN SPIRITUALITY?
Although it is relatively easy to speak of certain themes that unify Mesoamerican spir-
ituality, one is confounded at every turn by millions of people for whom the gener-
alization does not hold true. If the Virgin of Guadalupe is called the Patron of Mexico,
and indeed the Queen of America, about whom is one speaking in terms of believ-
ers? Mexico’s approximately 11 million Indians and several million Protestants can-
not be said to “revere” the Virgin of Guadalupe as the soul of their belief. She is
often relegated to the status of a minor, though duly recognized and respected, deity
in Mesoamerican Indian communities that practice variants of Indian Christianity.
She is a neutral, secular symbol, sometimes even a threatening pagan icon, to millions
of Protestants, Indian and mestizo. Guatemalan and Salvadoran Catholics may or
may not take her seriously as a powerful intermediary with God. Many Afro-Caribbean
religious practitioners on the Gulf Coast rimland have never heard of her. To com-
plicate things even further, there are, as of 2005, several communities of recently
converted Mayan Muslims in Chiapas who are the product of Spanish Muslim mis-
sionary activity in the last decade. As for the Virgin of Guadalupe, they regard her as
a pagan symbol that is best forgotten. Where, then, does one turn for generalization?
All of this said, we feel that generalization is possible about a relatively circum-
scribed segment of Indian Mesoamerica that has been the primary focus of this text.
If the limitations are clearly stated, we think that the following sketch of core features
of Mesoamerican Indian religions, past and present, will be useful. What we assert
here is that these spiritual concerns have dramatic temporal and spatial persistence
in Mesoamerican thought, so much perhaps that some of these ideas may be found
to color the tone of other traditions found in the area.The Concept of Individual Coessences
Perhaps linked to a deep shamanic past, Mesoamerican spiritual traditions through-
out the region carry a fundamental commitment to the idea that each individual
carries a predestined fate that is expressed by a coessence that is given at the time of
conception. Sometimes merely an abstract “destiny,” but more often embodied in the
person of a deity or an animal or a spirit companion, this coessence experiences the
life journey of the human counterpart through good and ill, often determining, in
the supernatural world, what will befall the individual: power or wealth, sickness or
health, early death or a fulfilled life, humility or power. The documentation of this
spiritual idea dates now (on the basis of hieroglyphic texts) from at least A.D. 150
and has been recently asserted to be the fundamental principle underlying
Mesoamerican Classic period rulers’ claim to power (on the hieroglyphic text, see
Chapter 11).
Known as the tonalliin the Mexican Central Valley (see the discussion earlier in this
chapter), past and present, and as the nagual, chanul,or wayelin the Mayan area, this
coessence of the individual plays a powerful role in both affirmative and therapeutic
rituals—as in curing—and in negative and aggressive transactions—as in witchcraft