In Tlamacazqueh, In Tlenamacaqueh: Refiguring the Mexica Priesthood

Anthony Meyer, PhD, Dumbarton Oaks, Pre-Columbian Studies

In the Mexica Empire (c. 1325 – 1521), state ceremonies dominated the landscape with their visual performances, booming sounds, and fragrant smells. Behind these arresting displays were a group of trained religious leaders who made the many sacred works that filled them. To transform and shape materials such as fig bark, amaranth seed, and feathers into artworks, religious leaders required a great depth of artistic skill. Though scholars have positioned religious leaders as imperial agents with sacred knowledge, argues in this presentation, that we also need to situate them as key makers in the Mexica world. Seeing religious leaders as deft makers in their own right forces us to “re-figure” their roles and flesh out the broad applicability of artistry in the Mexica Empire, which goes beyond our current scope of state artisans and elite artworks.

 Dr. Meyer will unpack the historiography on religious leaders in the Mexica Empire, tracing how colonial texts have influenced scholars to position these figures outside of art historical categories. Then, he will explore titles for these leaders that evince the special relationships they had with materials; namely, the two that are used in conjunction to refer to the religious body as a whole: the tlamacazqueh, who were offerers or “givers of things,” and the tlenamacaqueh, who were trained in forms of incensing and sacrifice. Part of this lexical plunge will be to untangle the problems and frameworks that scholarship has placed on these figures in referring to them as “priests,” and Dr. Meyer will argue for a switch to the term “religious leader” to work against these interpretive biases. Finally, he will examine some of the artistic practices and skills that religious leaders were engaged with in the Mexica world, showing how they made things in relational ways that imbued materials with sacred energies while, at the same time, infusing their own bodies with sacredness.

Anthony Meyer holds a PhD in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a focus in the Indigenous Americas. His research, broadly speaking, explores the crossroads between Nahua art, language, and religion in the Mexica Empire (1325–1521 C.E.) and the transatlantic world of colonial New Spain. He is currently working on his first book project, The Givers of Things: Religious Leaders and Sacred Making in the Nahua World, which examines how Nahua religious leaders used artistic skill and knowledge to make and animate sacred artworks in the Mexica Empire and New Spain. For his research, he has received support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Dumbarton Oaks, the Fulbright Association, the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Renaissance Society of America, the Society for Architectural Historians, and the Social Science Research Council.

The February 2024 monthly lecture will be hosted in person as well as virtually. The meeting will be held in the lecture theatre of the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, located at M and 17th Streets, NW, Washington, D.C. Photo ID is required to enter the building. Doors to the in-person meeting will open around 6:30 PM and light refreshments will be available before the lecture. For those of you who cannot make it to the Sumner School in person, the lecture will be live streamed via Zoom but you must pre-register to attend virtually.

The registration link for this meeting is https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_fUBFPklYTCKfqxwWHIrYKQ  

All monthly lecture meetings of the Pre-Columbian Society are free and open to the public.