ans to the great land mass of continental America. The year
was 1519 and the Spanish conquest of Mexico had begun.
At that time the Totonac occupied a strip of land flanked by
the Atlantic Ocean and the Sierra Madre Oriental, between
the Cazones River in the north and La Antigua River near
the present port of Veracruz. Two important Totonac cere-
monial centers existed in this territory. The first, El Tajín,
was located in the north and had ceased to function before
the arrival of the Spanish. The second, Zempoala, is reputed
to have been populous when the Spanish arrived; soon after,
it witnessed the collapse of its idols and their replacement
with the Christian cross.
Well before the Conquest, the Totonac people had ex-
tended even farther south, to the margins of the Papaloapan
River. The Nahuatl-speaking Aztec had, however, reduced
the extent of the Totonac’s southern territories, and at the
time of the Spanish arrival Zempoala, the Totonac capital,
was paying tribute to its Aztec rulers. By this time Nahuatl
was the lingua franca in the region, and thus the Spanish
priests used Nahuatl terms to describe Totonac religion, a
practice still common among scholars today.
At present some one hundred thousand Totonac-
speaking people survive in the northern part of their original
territory between the states of Puebla and Veracruz. Linguis-
tically, the Totonac are related to the Zoqueano- and
Mayan-speaking peoples. However, there is no evidence con-
necting the religion and culture of the Totonac to those of
the Maya and the Zoqueano. Our understanding of the To-
tonac religion is based upon archaeological evidence primari-
ly from Zempoala, El Tajín, and Puebla, and upon analysis
of early descriptions provided by Fray Bartolomé de Las
Casas and Fray Andrés de Olmos.
EVIDENCE FROM ZEMPOALA. According to Las Casas, who
relied on information supplied by a young page of Cortés,
daily homage was paid in Zempoala to the Sun (Chichiní in
Totonac), who was the creator of all other gods. Early in the
morning seven priests would attend the temple. One of the
priests would gaze skyward, paying reverence to the Sun be-
fore bathing the Sun’s image, as well as the images of other
gods, in incense. On ceremonial occasions nobles and offi-
cials would go to the temple to worship. According to Las
Casas, every Saturday everyone was obliged to gather in the
atrium of the temple to pray. Scholars now believe that this
took place every fifth day. There, the nobles and principal
dignitaries mutilated themselves before their gods by passing
numerous straws through incisions made in various parts of
their bodies. Las Casas mentions in particular tongues,
thighs, and ears. The act of bleeding was a mechanism of pu-
rification.
At the winter solstice an important festival was celebrat-
ed during which eighteen people, men and women, were sac-
rificed. Eighteen is also the number of veintenas (Span., “set
of twenty,” i.e., “months” composed of twenty days each)
into which the Mesoamerican year was divided. The human
sacrifice took place at midnight; the hearts of the victims
were ground into the mouths of the principal idols. Blood
was the food of the Sun. The persons sacrificed were messen-
gers sent to plead with the Sun to send his son to liberate
the Totonac from the practices imposed on them by the
Aztec. (Fine illustrations of human sacrifice are to be found
in the reliefs at El Tajín.) Similar practices were followed at
Zempoala for at least two other important festivals. The flesh
of the victims was eaten by dignitaries and a few other influ-
ential people. Besides this elitist communion, there existed
a practice popular among men who were more than twenty-
six years of age: every six months they consumed a paste pre-
pared from the blood of infants’ hearts, seeds from plants
grown in the temples, and a milky latex from the Castilla
elastica tree. This sacrament was called yoliaimtlaqualoz, a
Nahuatl word meaning “food for the soul.”
Another regular custom was a confession of sins, called
maiolcuita in Nahuatl. A person would retire to some isolat-
ed spot and confess his wrongdoings aloud. According to Las
Casas, penitents would often wring their hands and cry out
in anguish with such conviction that it was, in his words, a
custom “well worth consideration.”
The Totonac had a goddess, the consort of the sun god,
whose temple was high in the sierra. She received sacrifices
of decapitated animals and birds as well as offerings of herbs
and flowers. Her name was Tonacayohua, which means
“preserver of the flesh” in Nahuatl. In contrast to many other
Mesoamerican cultures, the Totonac did not believe the
Sun’s consort to be the Moon, since Totonac tradition con-
sidered both the Sun and the Moon to be male deities. The
Totonac’s hope, reported by Las Casas, that the sun god
would intercede by sending his son to liberate them from ser-
vitude to the Aztec’s gods, who required human sacrifice,
may well have been a Christian interpretation of Totonac be-
lief. Similarly, although the Sun, the Moon, and the planet
Venus together figure prominently in the paintings in the
temple of Las Caritas in Zempoala, it is improbable that the
Totonac viewed these three celestial deities as forming a uni-
fied Trinity.
In the same city a temple was dedicated to Xolotl, the
twin brother of Quetzalcoatl. These brothers were personifi-
cations of the different manifestations of the planet Venus
as Morning Star and Evening Star.
To the south of Zempoala, large sculptures were erected
of women who had died during their first childbirth. Such
women were venerated, their deaths being seen as equivalent
to the deaths of soldiers killed while taking prisoners (new
servants for the Sun). Called cihuateteo (Nah., “deified
women”) by the Aztec, they were responsible for transport-
ing the Sun on his course across the sky. Statuettes from the
same area provide evidence that human beings were flayed
in homage to a god similar to the Aztec deity Xipe Totec;
the sacrifice was made to ensure a bountiful harvest.
EVIDENCE FROM EL TAJÍN AND PUEBLA. The relief sculp-
tures among the archaeological remains of El Tajín reveal the9254 TOTONAC RELIGION