Aztec Antichrist: Performing the Apocalypse in Early Colonial Mexico

It is impossible to visit every archive and master all tongues. For these reasons, scholars turn to the transcription or translation of important texts, especially those written in Indigenous languages. Ben Leeming offers both in Aztec Antichrist: Performing the Apocalypse in Early Colonial Mexico for an unedited notebook from the Hispanic Society of America (HSA). This manuscript contains two Antichrist plays in Nahuatl that Leeming argues were most likely written by an Indigenous author, possibly Fabián de Aquino. The sixteenth-century plays probably contain the earliest reference to the medieval legend of the Antichrist in the Americas. In the Mesoamerican context, however, the Antichrist is distinctly Indigenous, a Nahuatl-speaking and mendicant-hating archenemy of Christ bent on foiling the missionary efforts of the Franciscans.Aztec Antichrist has all the major parts one would expect—norms of transcription, notes on translation, a scholarly introduction, helpful references—but with one important addition. Leeming includes a unique prologue capturing the difficulties and thrills of archival work. In contrast to most transcriptions of colonial documents, he describes the steps—what he calls “ritual preparations”—researchers take to access colonial documents in reading rooms like the HSA (p. xx). He also focuses on the physical aspects of the manuscript and its provenance, interrogating bookseller descriptions in nineteenth-century auction catalogs. Leeming brings to life the seemingly mundane task of paleography by demonstrating that the colonial archive—specifically the corpus of texts in Nahuatl—is not fully accessible despite our advances in digital technologies.In his introduction, Leeming establishes the necessary philological and historical context to interpret the life of Aquino and his signed 300-folio notebook. He labels Aquino as a “Nahua apocalypticist,” but not merely as a passive collaborator with the Franciscans (p. 118). Aquino emerges as a Nahua intellectual in Aztec Antichrist, a cultural broker who independently selected the plays to be included in his notebook. He was one of many Indigenous scholars who reworked Christian ideas—whether as a translator, adapter, or author—to make them intelligible for an Indigenous audience, thus adding to the list of works from the so-called golden age of Nahuatl literary production (1540s–1640s). Leeming also provides an overview of Nahuatl theater and the mendicant war on “idolatry.” Nahua nobles and ritual specialists resisted Christianity by convincing commoners to return to their old ways, actions that Leeming claims were the “collective inspiration” for the Aztec Antichrist (p. 30).Following Leeming's introduction is a side-by-side Nahuatl transcription and English translation of the two plays in Aquino's notebook, entitled “Antichrist and the Final Judgment” and “Antichrist and the Hermit.” These are useful texts for university classrooms because they highlight various aspects of cross-cultural encounters in mission contexts. One can see the struggles that Nahuas and friars faced when translating concepts across cultures, something evident in Spanish loanwords in Nahuatl like diabrome (devils), apostolome (apostles), and ermitano (hermit). Demons appear with the names of Nahua deities like Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli, and the Antichrist references cultural practices like human sacrifice, bloodletting, polygamy, face painting, and the use of feathers. Given that the Franciscans sought to purge this type of information from their writings in Indigenous languages, Leeming suggests that these plays are “autoethnographic works of Indigenous American literature” (p. 91).These two Antichrist plays also teach students about the ways that both Franciscan friars and Nahua neophytes communicated Christian doctrine to Indigenous peoples in central Mexico. The martyrs mirror moralistic and soteriological elements of missionary preaching: belief in one god, baptism, penance, confession, and eternal life in heaven. When the hermit speaks with 18 different sinners burning in Mictlan (the Nahua underworld that missionaries translated as “hell”), it becomes apparent which vices are being targeted: greed, adultery, thievery, incest, and prostitution, to name but a few. Leeming refers to the rhetorical strategies in Nahuatl theater as forms of “epistemic violence” and “didactic terror” (p. 96). Franciscans demonized Indigenous cultures, a practice that Aquino adapted but still contested in subtle ways. As Leeming suggests, the presence of Indigenous martyrs in Aquino's notebook suggests his desire to prove that Nahua neophytes were not fickle Catholics, a belief held by many Spaniards.Aztec Antichrist forms part of a growing corpus of English translations of theatrical works, wills, testaments, annals, and religious texts in Nahuatl. Readers will appreciate Leeming's humility as a linguist as he includes tentative translations of tricky passages with informative explanations in the notes. More importantly, they finally have the tools to move beyond John Leddy Phelan's classic study of Franciscan millenarianism for a look at apocalypticism from an Indigenous perspective. We may never be able to reveal the personal thoughts of sixteenth-century Nahuas, but Aquino's notebook is a fascinating entry point into the strategies that they developed to deal with the traumatic events that unfolded in Mexico in the wake of the Spanish invasion.

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