Xochipilli The Mexica Flowery Universe
María del Pilar Cuairán ChavarríaBertina Olmedo VeraAurora Montúfar López
In all cultures nature is an essential part of worldview, values, and the imagery of its men and women as the expression of the universe, the origin of life, and its endurance. Within its enormity, flowers play a prominent role for diverse and at times contradictory or incomprehensible reasons. However, the high esteem for flowers as one of the central elements in worldview, artistic representation, religious practices and beliefs, social interactions, attire, language, and life itself has remained intact since antiquity to the present.
For this third temporary exhibition in the series One Piece, One Culture, where Xochipilli, Lord of Flowers, is presented as a masterpiece and representative of Mexica culture, it was imperative to address flowers as natural and symbolic entities to understand the meaning and messages of the flowers on the sculpture of Xochipilli by the culture that created them. At the same time, this thirst for knowledge became a quest to unravel some essential notions of Mexica worldview in all its diversity and polyvalence through these flowers on stone, their contours and their expressiveness, their beauty and their ambiguity, their naturalism and their mystery.
One way to revise knowledge and ideas involving Xochipilli and his flowers was to reassess efforts to identify each of them in nature, to update them, and to consider them as part of the living, immediate, and known environment around us that has witnessed history and the rise and fall of cultures through time.
It was a difficult path that, deep down, was also simple. Sometimes it was impossible and at others arbitrary to make an irrefutable identification of the image captured in stone employing aesthetic canons from more than five hundred years ago with what is found in nature today. But this path became a bit clearer by referring to the observation, comparison, contextualization, and exploration of historical sources, nature, and Mexica worldview.
However, the corollary of this proposed "naturalistic" reading of Xochipilli’s flowers, which requires ongoing research and revision from different perspectives, as in all studies of ancient cultural patrimony, was not the greatest revelation. It was the path of inquiry to reach this proposal that was illuminating, because it invited us to read all the dimensions of humanity as an essential entity in the cultural universe that gave life to Xochipilli. It offered insight into how Chalco artists carved a few lines evoking botanical attributes in stone to embody a complex universe of ideas. In this way, the sculpture invites us to revisit it time and again with a humanistic outlook integrating all the values of that society today known as "the ancient Mexicans."
Only in this way can the fragrance of flowers be understood as food for the gods; or incense made from them as a purifying bath, at the same time as a weapon to defend crops. Their morphological structure was also a sensual instrument, as well as a map of the universe; the color of their petals a sign of sacrifice; or their center as the very heart of man.
Visiting and revisiting these ideas always implies a discovery. This is how the reading of signs opens doors. However, the path to these interpretations must be precise and although now always linear, in all cases the same components have been used.
Observation focused on nature, the flowers on Xochipilli, on many other flowers depicted in the aesthetic universe of the time. This naturally led to comparisons forming a network of references. The latter provided an iconographic and historical context, based on sources to understand the natural, medicinal, ornamental, symbolic, ritual, and divine meaning of each of the plant elements in the sculpture.
The vast universe of sources had to be verified with the following: the account of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún,1 a pioneering anthropologist in these lands, influenced and informed by the experience and the knowledge of his informants, invaluable voices who interwove their system of beliefs and that of their ancestors into expressions in their language;2 the account of Fray Diego Durán when he contributed a view or nuance in addition to that of Sahagún; the herbal treatise by Martín de la Cruz and Juan Badiano as pictographic and written testimony of the presence of so many flowers in the sophisticated practice of indigenous medicine; the report by Francisco Hernández, both scientific and intuitive as typical of his times, as the author of the first comprehensive compilation on the natural universe of New Spain, with the reservations of what his European vision reinterpreted of indigenous knowledge; some references from Alvarado Tezozómoc that add embellishment by bringing to bear events that contextualize the presence of flowers; finally, a variety of codices such as the Tudela, Magliabecchi, Mendoza and Borbonicus and a number of archaeological pieces where flowers are depicted, not only as iconographic references, but as sources that speak of contexts, symbols, and many other signs.
This path effectively led to an updated proposal for the identification of the botanical elements on Xochipilli. At the same time it highlighted the predicament of the limitations of the small number of examples that could be cited with a fair degree of security to understand the sculpture and the god’s attributes, as well as the culture that gave rise to it. The sculpture includes clear depictions, some naturalistic, others archetypical, and some almost tentative. Although none of the lines were carved in vain, a definitive interpretation was not possible in all cases.
And it is precisely this ambiguity where the artistic and symbolic richness of this sculpture resides. Its semantics appeals to the meaning of flowers in their most universal aspects for Nahua culture, more than to the particularities of certain species. Xochipilli, that masterpiece from the fertile chinampa region in the southeastern Basin of Mexico, is the Lord of All Flowers. He evokes the most enduring values of flowers as symbolic entities of the highest importance.
In this context, the diverse features in the representations of flowers suggest the variety of species and nature itself. These characteristics, although they might not indisputably correspond to one botanical species over another, are inspired and based on nature. It would be impossible to imagine that expression and artistic representation would be alien to specific references from daily life and ritual. The historiographic context, historical sources, and all artistic representations as a whole reinforce the continuous presence of flowers in Mexica culture and deepen the significance and use of certain favored varieties.
Consequently, this interpretation offers a wider range of what the species depicted on Xochipilli might suggest; a group of meaningful flowers, symbolically confirmed, emblematic, and preferred by the ancient Mexicans to paint a portrait of the most representative entities in their flowery universe.
As the study and interest in flowers grows, additional species will be added to the list. A more ambitious future revision should include, for example, the cacahuaxochitl, "cacao flower", and the izquixochitl, "popcorn flower", a pair of flowers reiterated in Nahuatl poetry and rhetoric, and each one in particular, powerful metaphors of their own complex universes.
This idea is intended to be a starting point and an invitation. It is an open reading that seeks to understand the Mexicas from the point of view of their flowers. Among its many wonders, Mexica culture created a prestigious social rank known as "officers of flowers", and constructed a corpus of myths in which flowers died and were reborn in Mictlan, the place of the dead, to return as fragrant and exquisite. It is a tantalizing starting point and an endpoint full of light and color.
[1]Sahagún’s work contains two columns of text—in Spanish and in Nahuatl—which are not entirely the same. Whenever Sahagún is mentioned, he is referred to as the author and compiler, so references specifically to Nahuatl texts indicate the voice of his informants.
[2]In the compilation of references to each flower in the Florentine Codex it is specified when they appear in the Nahuatl texts by Sahagún’s informants. If no indication is given, it is in the Spanish text.
