This special issue gathers scholars from Religious Studies, Anthropology, Art History, and the study of the Americas to reconsider the academic categories we use to connect the cultures we study. In individually authored mini essays and more sprawling group conversations, contributors examine four key categories: “Material,” “Economies,” “Religion,” and “America(s).” Readers of this issue will find the data described in these pages to be wide-ranging—chronologically, traditionally, geographically, and otherwise. But we are not only interested in variety. We also ask after data’s organization, quantification, and regulation. Taken together, this special issue asks how to characterize these categories. The ambition is that our collective inquiries into such varied interpretive histories and genealogical fragments can offer ways to better understand their assorted conveyances, as well as the powerful grip of their critical conjunction.  

The particular case studies, object narratives, and casting calls that individual participants chose to enter into this endeavor include First Nations commemorative medals and biblical translations, spirit-guided Swedish temple designs, the global industry of Kim Kardashian, and Cuban musicians and Moroccan artists in New York. And that’s just a few of the provocative projects featured in these pages. There’s much more: from grapefruit-scented candles in SoulCycle Studios to autopsy photographs rendered in poem and prose; Sondheim musical at Carnegie Hall and the monetized infrastructure of biblical womanhood blogs. Readers of this special issue will glimpse Fijian tabua and scrimshaw collections on Long Island, bus station clocks in Montreal, felled California redwoods, and documents of extractive industry in Canada, Burma, and Brazil. So too you’ll find discussion of seventeenth-century documents and woodcut images exchanged among confraternity members in Lima, waterproof socks engineered for the twenty-first-century American Muslim market, a mid-twentieth-century professional wrestler cast as Mormon, and a Catholic icon commissioned in 2016 for the Archdiocese of Denver.

Akin to the simultaneously succinct and varied things included in this special issue, the life of this project has also been both meandering and socially abbreviated. It began in 2017 through our participation as fellows in “Material Economies of Religion in the Americas: Arts, Objects, Spaces, Mediations,” a project cycle of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (MAVCOR) at Yale University and funded in part by The Henry Luce Foundation. The thematic and theoretical concerns of the MAVCOR project cycle structured the terms and conditions out of which this special issue grew. The contributions gathered in this issue draw readily and advisedly upon key themes of the MAVCOR grant project, as it has been directed by Sally Promey and Sarah Rivett. After meeting for two annual conferences as part of the project cycle, we invited other fellows to participate in an experimental roundtable at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). Eager to continue the work begun at the AAR, we then met for continued collaboration in a Zoom salon during the pandemic summer of 2020. In an effort to formalize and expand those conversations into new publics, our thinking has since morphed into the twenty-one individual essays and six collaborative conversations that are included here. 

We initially asked each contributor to submit a single image file, gif, or short video and an accompanying text, limited to 2200 characters. The provocation was to experiment with processes of thinking—individually and collaboratively, in small cohorts and amid tight parameters, as well as part of more open-ended conversations. We sought to play seriously with emerging practices of how writing is reckoned. Ever since Twitter and Instagram started determining discourse in character counts, less likely platforms have followed. For instance, in 2020 the American Academy of Religion instructed that proposals for its annual meeting be 7,500 characters including spaces. Is this new metric simply an alternate calculation to adjust to? Or does something more substantial happen as we move from page counts to word counts to character counts? What is lost? What is urged forward or recovered, even in brief? 

As curators of this project, we emphasize character(s) and characterizing as a way to reapproach these questions and connect them with a critique of our present, especially in so far as “character” is an increasingly demanding measure of work and social life. To our minds, the interpretive openness of these terms prompts thinking not only about social media-driven modes of public discourse but also about archival nomination, definitional approach, descriptive technique, discursive valuation, and the apportioning measures of feedback loops. If “characterizing” could be understood as asking after essential features, it could likewise provide a space for pointed criticism of substantive or phenomenological approaches to any one of the terms conjoined here (“material,” “economy,” “religion,” “Americas”). Hillary Kaell’s study of bus station clocks occasions her proposal of “material economies” as “systems of managed resources,” which assemble component parts and human labor as well as feelings of utopian interconnectedness and the fleeting intensities of globalism in everyday spaces and times. Richard Callahan’s correspondence with Judith Brunton and Alex Kaloyanides about their respective studies of whales, oil, and teak similarly addresses practices of managing resources. Callahan proposes that we should consider the agency of “basic, fundamental ‘natural resources’ out of which the ‘human’ world is built” and how the “work of transforming them sets up basic relations to matter and the possibilities and limits of what it means to exist.” For Laura Levitt, David Walker, and Sally Promey, “the key economic actor and material is the human body, in literal and figurative manifestations.” This special issue, then, does not propose new definitions for each of our four key terms. It offers a framework for their equivocal reconsideration and conjunctive interrogation.

The experiment we set out in our initial call among MAVCOR project fellows revealed the appeal of short writing assignments, especially in the midst of an emerging pandemic. We were happily surprised that so many fellows from the project cycle accepted our invitation. We were less surprised when many of us found that 2200 characters were too few. Each individual mini essay published in this issue includes a calculation of its character count (including spaces). Careful readers will notice that not all scholars adhered to the character conventions we sought to establish at the outset. We are glad for these scholar’s protests—however subtle, however intentional—and find in their variously reckoned rebellions not accruals to be corrected but rather material for continued thought. They ask how counting characters shapes the practices of precision. Conversations and email exchanges with contributors again attested to participants’ diverging responses. Some found the strict parameters creatively appealing (“Love it. Everything should be short,” one participant wrote. “One of the biggest things is I am left wanting more, whereas a longer paper is tiring.”). For others, it was an interpretive battle (“the character count seems to be at war with trying to offer qualitative assessments of material economies,” another contributor countered). What for some was a freeing permission to share a bit of new research turned for others into a futile constriction. Throughout the process we wondered if we were: watering down or distilling? offering propositions for further thought and deeper discussion? amplifying the seemingly endless echo chambers and hot takes of an online economy ever aiming after virality? To our mind, the answer is: yes, somehow, to all of this. Perhaps, reader, you are less ambivalent and more ready to align your response with one or another of these conclusions. We welcome this and invite your own replies, rejections, and rebellions.

In Zoom rooms and in the margins of shared Google Docs, we asked participants to couple their individualized practices of paring down with exercises in collective elaboration. Once each contributor shared a media nomination and mini essay, we all gathered in an online salon to discuss them as a whole before breaking off yet again—this time into small cohorts to correspond in greater depth about one another’s work as well as to address the project’s central question about how to characterize material economies of religion in the Americas. Using the newly proliferating pandemic vocabulary of “synchronous” and “asynchronous,” groups then arranged further meetings over email or Zoom. 

This special issue is not just a multi-disciplinary consideration of American religions. It is also a call for expansive conversations about what counts, and how and why we count. In crafting something meaningful within and against the relatively novel metric of character counts, contributors have thought creatively about refinement and sacrifice, accumulation and concentration, gathering and extracting, congregating and keening. What does it mean to adhere to these limiting parameters? How and why might one reform, resist, or rebel against these (seemingly micro) demands? How much space do we need to follow an idea or an analysis through? What genres—of writing and conversation, scholarship and public discourse–do we need to characterize material economies of religion in the Americas, including our own labors amid them? We hope this special issue challenges readers of MAVCOR Journal to ask such questions and experiment with related approaches in their own work—in the archives and the field, in classroom pedagogy and public conversation, online and off—and to continue to reflect upon the rituals of labor that underwrite the study of religion, its character(s), and the mechanics of its characterization.

Thumbnail image: Sculpture at Frederik Meijer Gardens, Grand Rapids, MI. Photograph © wsilver via Flickr. CC BY 2.0

This Essay is in complement to Cécile Fromont’s Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022). Clicking on the figures in this article will bring readers to galleries containing further images from the works in which they feature. 

In my book, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Central Africa, I study for the first time the visual project that Capuchin Franciscan friars devised and implemented in and about central Africa between 1650 and 1750.1 As part of their activities in Kongo and Angola, the friars created dozens of images and wrote hundreds of pages of text in works that they called "practical guides."2  The visual or textual compendia were meant to teach the missionaries that would follow in the veterans’ footsteps about the specificities of central Africa, from its natural environment to its political landscape, to the range of its religious practices from Roman Catholicism to what the friars perceived as heathenry and idolatry.

In Images on a Mission, I discuss how the Capuchin didactic images form a unique and exceptionally important corpus that enriches our knowledge of central Africa and dramatically multiplies the European-format visual record about the African continent before 1800. I also demonstrate that the corpus transforms our understanding of early modern global interactions in several ways. First, it brings to the fore the Capuchin missionary project of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that has remained largely unstudied, although it was every bit as broad and ambitious as the contemporaneous, robustly investigated Jesuit and Franciscan apostolic ventures. Further, it highlights a set of spiritual and epistemological interactions between Africans and Europeans unfolding outside of a colonial context. The Capuchins worked in the already Christian kingdom of Kongo as well as in many, for the most part independent, polities such as Matamba, Ndongo, or the Ndembo area in Angola, a toponym the Portuguese coined in the sixteenth century from a local royal title that referred to a region extending over the northern two-thirds of the modern namesake country (Fig. 1).3

• 1
  Cécile Fromont, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (Penn State University Press, 2022).
• 2
  About these practical guides see Cécile Fromont, “Nature, Culture, and Faith in Seventeenth-Century Kongo and Angola: The Parma Watercolors Texts,” MAVCOR Journal 6, no. 1 (2022).
• 3
  About the geography and history of the region see John K. Thornton, A History of West Central Africa to 1850, vol. 14 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), introduction.

Far from acting as the religious arm of a colonial project, except in the thin enclave of Portuguese Angola, the friars operated in this geography at the demand, and under the supervision of local powers. They had to adhere to the pre-existing organization, rituals, and tenets of the more than century-old church of the Kongo, and worked in both Kongo and Angola alongside central African scholars and specialists who were essential, and in some cases principal, actors leading the knowledge-making and knowledge-gathering enterprise at the core of the corpus they assembled.

The Capuchin central African vignettes are thus expressions of a discourse about nature, culture, and faith that friars and the people of Kongo and Angola co-constructed in the course of their interactions. They are, in this view, not European conceived and executed pictures of the region and its inhabitants, but pictures from central Africa, molded in the dialogue that unfolded between the friars and central Africans. In analyzing the unique, fraught yet collaborative relationship between friars and central Africans from which the Capuchin images and texts emerged, Images on a Mission probes the mechanics of cross-cultural religious change and knowledge-creation in the early modern period. It analyses the nature, process, and limits of Catholic conversion and the fluid contours of orthodoxy drawn in the confrontations and negotiations unfolding among a heterogeneous cast of European and African priests, local church leaders, devout Christians, apostates, heathens, and cynics. It also enriches our grasp of the cross-cultural dimension of early modern (visual) natural history in offering examples of knowledge honed in the meeting and integration of classical, biblical, and other European written and oral sources with African ideas and modes of experimentation. The page of the Parma Watercolors holding the fantastical manatee pictured as a woman-fish after its Portuguese name and fame of peixe-mulher also recorded, for instance, the anti-hemorrhagic use of the animal’s ribs that friars learned from central African “surgeons” (Fig. 2). 

A primary goal of Images on a Mission is to reveal and emphasize the cross-cultural dimension of images such as the Capuchins’ that, though concerned with the extra-European world, are of European form, created for European viewers, and, at least nominally, by European image-makers. To do so, it takes an approach that considers the circumstances of the images’ creation, i.e. the cross-cultural encounters, broadly defined, from which they emerged, as their actual author. This method sheds long overdue light on visual productions such as the Capuchin central African images whose cross-cultural dimension has otherwise remained all but invisible to their original viewers as well as to later scholars. In the Capuchin corpus, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century image-makers did not name or mention the local scholars and interlocutors who shaped the content of their compositions, in effect silencing their contributions. In turn, twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars have been poorly equipped to recognize and acknowledge cross-cultural interventions in visual documents when their traces are not visible at the level of form or documented in the biography of their maker, or when it has been naturalized to the point of becoming invisible.4 Considering the circumstances of the images’ creation as holding authorial agency allows to lift this double veil. It points to the cross-cultural dialogues that underlay their making and it invites analyses that see them no longer as wholly European images of central Africa, but as images from central Africa and molded by central Africans in dialogue with Europeans.   

Most of the watercolors and ink drawings that emerged from the Capuchin central African missions have confounded interpretation and remained unpublished in their own times as well as in ours. Images on a Mission analyzes the reasons these images have been so baffling and the consequences of the challenges they posed to viewers, censors, and editors in the seventeenth century as well as to scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first century. This Essay, however, focuses on the limited number of prints linked to the Capuchin central African images that did see the printing press, principally as part of Friar Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo’s Istorica Descrizione de’ tre regni Congo, Matamba et Angola. Published in Bologna in 1687 after a long and complex publication process, this book remains the most important source for central African history to this day.5  This Essay also addresses related imagery published shortly after in another publication, Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento’s Breve, e svccinta relatione del viaggio nel regno di Congo nell’ Africa meridionale (Napoli, 1692).6

• 4
  Cécile Fromont, “Penned by Encounter: Visibility and Invisibility of the Cross-Cultural in Images from Early Modern Franciscan Missions in Central Africa and Central México,” Renaissance Quarterly 75, no. 4 (2022): 1221-1265; Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (2003): 5-35.
• 5
  Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi and Fortunato Alamandini, Istorica descrizione de’ tre regni Congo, Matamba et Angola sitvati nell' Etiopia inferiore occidentale e delle missioni apostoliche esercitateui da religiosi Capuccini (Bologna: Giacomo Monti, 1687). About the publication process see Francisco Leite de Faria, “João António Cavazzi: a sua obra e a sua vida,” in Descrição histórica dos três reinos do Congo, Matamba e Angola, ed. Graciano Maria de Leguzzano (Lisboa: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1965).
• 6
  Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento and Angelo Piccardo, Breve, e svccinta relatione del viaggio nel regno di Congo nell’ Africa meridionale, fatto dal P. Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento . . . Continente variati clima, arie, animali, fiumi, frutti, vestimenti con proprie figure, diuersita di costumi, e di viueri per l’vso humano (Napoli: Per F. Mollo, 1692).

Friar Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, a native of the region of Modena, served as a missionary in central Africa, principally in the lands of queen Njinga, between 1654 and 1667. He had just returned to Italy after a long journey through Brazil when, in 1669, the cardinals of the Propaganda Fide, the papal institution for the propagation of the faith, commissioned from him a history of the Capuchin mission to central Africa. His long experience in the region and his reputation as a prolific writer and image-maker made him a good candidate for the task. He immediately set to work. In addition to the documents he had brought back with him from Angola, he consulted the Roman archives, the meager published material on the region, and the writings of his fellow friars.7 He soon produced a manuscript that, in 1671, failed to obtain the Propaganda Fide’s approval for its publication due to the cost of printing such a lengthy book. When Cavazzi set off for his second stay in central Africa in 1673, he left his book in the hands of his brother in religion, Bonaventura da Montecuccolo, who was to pursue printing in Bologna with an alternate source of funding. The project moved forward until the text and images that Cavazzi had commissioned from friar Paolo da Lorena met the opposition of the censors because of the miracles they described. The manuscript was eventually entrusted to Fortunato Alamandini da Bologna, a Capuchin who never travelled to central Africa, for editing in 1678. After years of revision and further review the book was approved for publication in 1684 and finally published in 1687.8

• 7
  Texts published before Cavazzi’s writing of the Istorica descrizione include the Capuchin volumes Antonio da Gaeta and Francesco Maria Gioia, La maravigliosa conversione alla santa fede di Cristo della regina Singa e del svo regno di Matamba nell’Africa meridionale, descritta con historico stile (Napoli: G. Passaro, 1669); Dionigi de Carli da Piacenza and Michael Angelo de Guattini Reggio, Viaggio del P. Dionigi de’ Carli da Piacenza e del P. Michel Angelo De’Guattini da Reggio Capuccini, Predicatori e missionari Apostolici nel Regno del Congo (Reggio: Prospero Vedrotti, 1671); and Duarte Lopes and Filippo Pigafetta, Relatione del reame di Congo et delle circonvicine contrade, tratta dalli scritti & ragionamenti di Odoardo Lopez, Portoghese (Roma: Appresso B. Grassi, 1591).
• 8
  About the history of publication of the book see Faria, “João António Cavazzi,” xxv-xxxi.

The final version of the book includes fifty-one copper plate engravings and etchings. Most of the prints are the creation of Paolo da Lorena from Cavazzi’s commission of the early 1670s, including the frontispiece signed “F. Paul.s a Lothar.a Cap. Sculp” (Fig. 3). Fortunato Alamandini conceived and proudly signed eight others “F. Fort°. f.f.” as corrective to what he deemed the “weak” images of friar Paolo, which he had hoped to replace altogether, but was not able to do so for lack of funds (see for example Fig. 4).9

• 9
  Cavazzi and Alamandini, Istorica descrizione de' tre regni Congo, Matamba et Angola sitvati nell’ Etiopia inferiore occidentale e delle missioni apostoliche esercitateui da religiosi Capuccini, n.p., 3rd page of foreword. See table in Fromont, Images on a Mission, 26.

Most of the images in Cavazzi’s Istorica descrizione, whether designed by Paolo da Lorena and Cavazzi, or recreated by Alamandini, have deep roots in the corpus of didactic Capuchin manuscripts, whose format and style many of them share. Only fifteen derive entirely or in part from paintings that Cavazzi composed in the 1660s for an earlier work which was not one of the practical guides, the Missione Evangelica also known as the Araldi Manuscript, covering similar topics as the Istorica descrizione (compare for instance Fig. 5 & Fig. 6).10

• 10
  Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, Missione Evangelica al Regno del Congo: Araldi Manuscript, Biblioteca Estense (Modena, 1665-1668). About the Araldi manuscript see Giuseppe Pistoni, “I manoscritti ‘Araldi’ di padre Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo,” Atti e momorie della Academia Nazionale di Scienze, Leterre e Arti di Modena 6, no. 11 (1969); Ezio Bassani and Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, Un Cappuccino nell'Africa nera del Seicento: i disegni dei Manoscritti Araldi del Padre Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo, Quaderni Poro, 4 (Milano: Associazione “Poro,” 1987), John Kelly Thornton, “Translation of the Araldi Manuscript,” (n.d.).

Thirty-three, however, are especially close to one of the didactic manuscripts, the Parma Watercolors created circa 1663-1690.11  The relationship between the two is not directly that of original and copy, but rather one of belonging to a common visual milieu, likely through the existence of a third, common source, until now unidentified and likely no longer extant. The prints and watercolors present to their viewers almost identical scenes, such as that of a funeral ceremony (Figs. 7 & 8) or a manatee, the latter also featuring in Merolla’s Breve . . . relatione, discussed below (Figs. 2, 9-11).12

• 11
  Fromont, “Nature, Culture, and Faith.”
• 12
  For a longer discussion of this see Fromont, Images on a Mission, chapter 1 and 2.

The image network in which Cavazzi’s Istorica Descrizione participated also included visual material outside of the Capuchin orbit. Seven of the designs are connected to Duarte Lopes and Filippo Pigafetta’s earlier and very successful volume on central Africa, the 1591 Relatione del reame del Congo et delle circonvicine contrade. The Relatione was an edition by Italian cosmographer Pigafetta of the eyewitness testimony about central Africa of Duarte Lopes, a Portuguese merchant whom the king of Kongo made his ambassador to the papacy in the late sixteenth century (Figs. 12 & 13).13  The richly illustrated volume received much attention from contemporary viewers and was translated by the de Bry family of publishers and engravers into Latin and German later in the decade, with additional prints.14  Copies of the de Bry volumes were in Luanda at the time Cavazzi worked on his manuscripts.15

• 13
  Lopes and Pigafetta, Relatione del reame di Congo.
• 14
  Duarte Lopes, and Filippo Pigafetta, Regnvm Congo hoc est Warhaffte vnd Eigentliche Beschreibung deß Königreichs Congo in Africa, vnd deren angrentzenden Länder darinnen der Inwohner Glaub, Leben, Sitten vnd Kleydung . . . angezeigt wirdt (Frankfurt am Main: de Bry, 1597); Duarte Lopes, Regnvm Congo, hoc est, Vera descriptio regni Africani: qvod tam ab incolis qvam Lvsitanis Congus appellatur, trans. Filippo Pigafetta (Frankfurt am Main: Excudebat Wolffgangus Richter, 1598).
• 15
  Fromont, Images on a Mission, 445.

The relation of Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento’s travels to central Africa published in Naples in 1692 belongs to the same visual milieu that produced the prints in the Istorica descrizione. Its nineteen copper plates parallel and complement the prints and paintings in the Istorica descrizione and the Parma Watercolors. The volume, titled Breve, e Succinta Relatione del Viaggio nel Regno di Congo retells Merolla’s activities and experiences in Kongo and Angola between 1683 and 1688 as collected and written down by Angelo Piccardo da Napoli from oral interviews with the missionary after his return to Naples in 1689.16 No information about the commission and production of the copper plates included in the rapidly published volume has emerged so far. It is clear, however, that they share strong kinship with both the Istorica Descrizione and the Parma Watercolors. Merolla’s plates would have been created shortly after the publication of the former and the composition of the latter. The text, moreover, makes many direct or indirect references to the Istorica Descrizione, the publication of which received much attention. In 1690, a second edition of the Istorica descrizione, first published in Bologna in 1687, appeared in Milan, with copper plates copied closely from the first edition. This later, more modest version presented the vignettes bound between pages of text on short strips of paper. The rectangular illustrations were etched several to one large sheet of paper, and then cut into individual images.17  This was the first of many reeditions in several languages.18

• 16
  José Sarzi Amade, “Réédition, contextualisation et analyse de la Breve e Succinta Relatione del Viaggio nel Regno di Congo [. . .](1692) de Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento,” (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Aix-Marseille, 2016).
• 17
  Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi et al., Istorica descrittione de’ tre regni Congo, Matamba, et Angola: situati nell’Etiopia inferiore occidentale e delle missioni apostoliche esercitateui da religiosi Capuccini (Milan: Nelle Stampe dell’Agnelli, 1690).
• 18
  See Edouard d'Alençon, “Essai de Bibliographie Capucino-Congolaise,” Neerlandia Franciscana 1, no. 1 (1914): 262-265.

As outlined in table 2, some of the prints in Merolla have precedents in both the Cavazzi prints and the Parma Watercolors. Others have links to only one or the other of the works. Consider for example the scene of justice under the tree in Merolla’s plate 12 (Fig. 14) alongside the Istorica descrizione’s plate 24 (Fig. 15) , or the Parma Watercolors 27 (Fig. 16) While the three scenes of justice closely mirror one another, the tapping of palm wine in  number 17 in the sequence (Fig. 17), is echoed, distantly, in the Parma Watercolors 44 (Fig. 18) but does not feature in the Istorica descrizione. 

Others still have parallels in neither. Some have sources outside of the Capuchin central African realm, such as the banana tree in plate 3 (Fig. 19), which is close to the one in Lopes and Pigafetta(Fig. 20). Most of the vignettes without direct comparanda, however, follow templates that would easily fit within the missing pages of the Parma Watercolors, which, in their current state of conservation include 67 folios labelled from numbers 2 to 104, with lacunae. For example, the depiction of blacksmithing at the top of print 16 (Fig. 21) would have found its place alongside the Parma Watercolors depicting work and craft such as agriculture, folio 76r, cooking, folio 77r, or weaving, folio 79r. The compound at the top of print 14 (Fig. 22) would fit alongside the series on architecture starting with folios 23r and 24r, but missing two folios, numbers 25 and 26. The aristocratic man and woman at the bottom of the same print in Merolla, in turn, would insert itself well as the missing folio 69r preceding a similar representation of dress in folio 70r.

Notably, none of the prints in Merolla are linked to the Araldi manuscript or to vignettes in the Istorica descrizione inspired by it. This is a telling detail that suggests that Merolla or his editor Piccardo did not rely only or even principally on Cavazzi’s published tome in the creation of the prints. Rather, Merolla’s illustration program points to its origins in another set of visual models, linked to the Parma Watercolors. It thus stands as a significant piece in the visual jigsaw puzzle of the Capuchin visual production linked to their missions in Kongo and Angola.

The two tables below describe the interconnections between Cavazzi’s Istorica descrizione, Merolla’s Relatione, and other visual sources in the Capuchin visual corpus and beyond. Visual comparisons can be accessed by clicking on the image number. The images presented in this Essay are the best available at the time of publication, though not always completely satisfactory. The binding for Merolla’s Relatione is particularly tight in most extant copies, which makes scans or photographs of its illustrations challenging to produce. This issue has been compounded by the ongoing limitations on new imaging due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Essay assembled nonetheless serves its purpose of assembling, presenting, organizing, and inviting further attention to this important and understudied corpus of images.

In August 2020, Zoom was still something of a strange place. Like the gender performances we summoned as we spoke—the wife and the wifey, the artist and the influencer—Zoom evokes intimacy as well as expanse. Our contributions took us from the familiarity of scent to the spread of colonial space/time, pulling us into Black vernacular culture and “linking” us to divine power through the digital. As we saw our heads appearing side by side, Toronto (Suzanne van Geuns), New Haven (Dustin Gavin), and Hamilton (Ellen Amster) suddenly close enough to touch, we were struck by the ironies that stack up in the gender performances we discussed. Continually drawing in and refusing their audiences, they never quite stay fixed in the frame.

Gender performances as openings or windows—into colonial space/time, into Black vernacular culture, into divine power

Intimacy—of the body, its smells and familiarities, of affiliation and connection as gendered performances

Space—as calling on religious histories, gendered embodiment as enmeshment with space, as existing online in dynamics of perusing/browsing, as circulation in or out of control

Irony—gender performance and irony as something they become possible by taking on the perspective of the watching audience, humor as happening through being a gender and not being it, performances that are always removed from their audience, performances that are always already refusing any other perspective

Suus: [00:00:07] All right, go. We can start shining!

Ellen: [00:00:13] I can start. 

Suus: [00:00:15] Sure. 

Dustin: [00:00:16] Sure.

Ellen: [00:00:17] So my slide is about Lalla Essaydi, who is a Moroccan visual artist. Her name means Madam Sir, and she says explicitly in her artist’s statement that she draws on male languages of Orientalist painting and Islamic calligraphy in order to create women-centered art. I didn’t emphasize that in the slide because there wasn’t enough space. For religious studies, I focus on another aspect of her work, which is the ways in which she creates place. She calls her body a converging territory between east and west and between past and present. In her images, like the ones I showed you, the woman becomes part of the house: her clothing looks like the fabrics or the tile work in the house, so that she literally becomes part of the place. This is a realization of an Islamic concept, also demonstrated in Sufi shrines, in which a person becomes an opening to God in the world when they are buried. 

In terms of the ways in which I see our pieces fitting together, I see the common theme that the material of religion is about the body, representation of the body, the body and space. Suus has Bible hair accessories, Dustin has Wifey—a physical fragrance. Dustin also has a picture of Kim Kardashian’s body. And there’s an allusion to food with this little candy that she’s sitting on. In all these ways, the body or the processes of the body are being referred to through the rendering of the female body. The author is trying to define womanhood and women’s identity, getting to Suus’s point, but the author or artist is also translating a religious concept to the contemporary world through the body—making the abstract concrete. 

The themes I saw were biblical womanhood and the wifey: both a wife as a good wife and then also this different and somewhat historical concept of the wifey. And then the third theme is this idea of Sufi Islamic sacred. What is the sacred space? That’s it for me.

Suus: [00:03:12] That’s great, thank you. I’ll jump in here, because I see an interesting connection to what you wrote in your piece about the dead bodies of holy people as openings to God. The women I study will often say that their goal is for the blog to be less of them and more of Jesus, emphasizing that they are making themselves into a channel for divine power. When they pass on that divine power to other people, that’s a really good thing—the more they can make themselves into that kind of opening, the better. I think we can think about this in general terms. What sort of power comes from being a transmitter or a “link” to something else? A media question that is interesting in relation to Kim Kardashian, too. Is the wifey someone who gains power, or even just proximity to power, by being its window or its channel? 

Ellen: [00:04:43] Did you want to say a bit more about your piece?

Suus: [00:04:47] Oh, yeah, sure. I’m really interested in this idea of stickiness and affiliation, and the Internet as a place where that can be monetized and rewarded. These women fuse together and affiliate these different systems of circulation. One is the Internet economy, which works by installing cookies on a particular user and then those cookies will kind of survey the user as they browse online, bringing in money by following their movements. But there’s also religious circulation happening, with these women working to model and pass around something other than themselves. Their blog posts always repeat: “I find it actually very hard to smile at my husband, I need divine grace and intervention to be able to summon or model Christ for my husband in how I smile at him.” 

My interest is in how the coded layer of cookies fuses with the theological layer of saying this is how women should be. People often think that influencers are selling themselves. For the women I study, it’s very clear that they’re actually not selling the self so much as they’re selling their ability to be a link, their ability to affiliate. And I think that is a relevant distinction in religious economies, too. 

Dustin: [00:06:58] The one word that I think runs through all of our topics is intimacy. I’m thinking of what to do with how intimacy is gendered, and what religion may have to do with this gendered nature of being intimate. The choice to do Kim and the fragrance comes from how I think personally about fragrances and how important fragrances are to me. That is mostly about some intimacy with my own body, but also the bodies that I come in contact with. What does it mean to be an intimate body and to engage with other bodies? 

With Kim Kardashian in particular, what does it mean when all your engagement is your body? This is the example of smell, but what does it mean when you’re a body in constant engagement, the body as the pieces of your life? What does it mean to move through life and being this idea of a fleshy sort of body? I was also thinking about space and how we craft and mesh with spaces, how we become different spaces, how we become a space in between our different projects. In my mind, that flows through all of the projects, this idea of engaging with and becoming or being one with a space, and what that has to do with holiness and sacredness. What is sacred when you’re claiming a space?

Suus: [00:09:19] Yeah, that is really interesting. I am thinking now of the way these blogs are always saying “welcome and settle down with a cup of tea, come sit on my porch.” The blog is ostensibly a diary, a story of the self. Yet it also becomes a place where we go as we’re “surfing.” That is very thought-provoking for me—while blogs feel less physical, we do actually move from place to place online, and they are bounded sites in a network. 

Ellen: [00:09:55] Dustin, can you talk a little bit about your project? Why did you choose that particular image and that particular thing?

Dustin: [00:10:15] I picked the thing and the image as a nod to different ideas of nostalgia and memory. The heart candy—I’m also thinking about production and consumption and capitalism, and the heart candy taps into nostalgia. I have also been thinking a lot about intimacy and smell. A lot of my work is in reality TV. I deal with the Housewives franchise, and I’m always asking: What does it mean in the contemporary world to be a housewife? What is that role? How is that defined? 

The contrast between the housewife as an idea from Protestant Christianity and her claim to the role of wifey, in relation to how I came to understand the term “wifey,” is really interesting to me. I think she does embody that role, this idea and aesthetic of the ride-or-die chick. I wanted to play with the fact that this demarcation of the wifey is very much still wife, but remixed. It’s the colors of a wife, maybe with a different sort of texture. I wanted to play with whatever that texture is—what is it? What happens when we add that “y” at the end? Why does it change when the form is still the same? A lot of what Kim Kardashian does—she is a cultural reset sort of person, someone who does things that make you question the nature of terms. I wanted to question the term that she claimed, wifey, from a completely different sort of realm and world.

Suus: [00:13:02] The super white conservative Christian bloggers in my research would be upset at the “y” being necessary.

Dustin: [00:13:30] I think it’s also interesting to me precisely because the wifey is not a wife. Wifey is an attitude, it’s an idea. Your girlfriend can be wifey. I wanted to play with that a bit. She’s not exactly a wife, necessarily. I think her categorization is a bit broader than wife; she’s the person that you can depend on almost. Wifey’s almost like having your cake and eating it, too.

Ellen: [00:14:13] Is she part of the Kardashian appropriation of Black culture?

Dustin: [00:14:18] Oh definitely. The heart candies are now all words like bae; bae is something that was completely co-opted. I don’t remember a time I did not say bae. In the same way, I’ve never not known about having a squad. When it became a thing around early 2010 I was like, oh, that’s a thing now? To have a squad? I think it’s definitely a part of that conversation, a sort of sanitisation or a selling of Black popular vernacular culture. She’s definitely in that. 

But that’s also her engine—that's how she makes money. She does it so well, never saying too much. It’s always just a tag, it’s the wifey. Everything we’re doing with the term I’m making up, and she knows that we can do that. I think that’s what gives her space. She can just throw something out there and if she steps back from the crowd far enough—she’s always far enough from it that there’s nothing that happens with it.

Suus: [00:15:47] It’s an Internet thing, too, right? It’s not just Kim. It’s also that Black vernacular is a particular currency online. There’s this really cool book by André Brock, Distributed Blackness, about Black Twitter and Black Internet cultures and how they spread out. Maybe Kim as the influencer of all influencers has her own role in that ecosystem.

Ellen: [00:16:36] One last thought and then, unfortunately, I have to run to my student. In both of your projects, femininity or feminine identity is developed in relation to a man. This Lalla Essaydi character is part of a larger project on transvestism. I found that in colonial North Africa, there are all these transvestites, people dressing up as other genders, as other races. 

And then there’s all these postcolonial artists that use transvestism to deconstruct the category itself. On the one hand, Lalla Essaydi appropriates aspects of what has traditionally been male for a performance. That’s the thing about drag. It’s a performative identity, in which you, the viewer, know what’s supposed to be feminine and what’s supposed to be masculine and see that it’s all mashed up. Each of your projects relates to a man or the masculine, and involves performance. They’re all performing this gendered identity.

Suus: [00:18:47] What are responses to this artist’s work?

Ellen: [00:18:57] I think there are a lot of people who like it. I didn’t put this in my piece, but she’ll take a really famous painting, like the Odalisque, and restage it but with a real woman. The woman is wearing a white drape, so she doesn’t have her boobs hanging out, which is what the French painters always have. On the fabric, she writes pages of her own diary and calligraphy, in Arabic. And then the woman is just like looking at you, right? So instead of these drugged, blissed-out European paintings, you have this woman who is looking right in your soul, staring right at you. So there are some people that say, oh, you’re just repackaging this Orientalist stuff to make a buck. And she says no, I’m trying to use it to subvert it. But I think there are some people who will say that she’s just making pretty pictures, and making people feel comfy, seeing the harem all over again.

Suus: [00:20:16] That’s interesting—the performance can’t be too close to some presumed original or it becomes problematic and fraught. 

Ellen: [00:20:26] Or they don’t think it’s ironic or that it has to do with camp or irony around what’s straight and what’s not.

Suus: [00:20:38] Oh I think that’s really interesting: is the wifey an ironic wife?

Dustin: [00:20:43] What does it mean to try to subvert an original? What sort of problems do you get into when you do that? It’s always about the audience. Subversion is just difficult in general, because it’s so dependent on a sort of original document. 

Suus: [00:21:10] That arises especially once things start traveling, of course. If you do something, everyone in the audience knows the context and it’s situated. But if you become somebody like Kim Kardashian, it’s massive circulation either way, and you can’t control whether the audience will see irony or not. I can definitely say that for most of the women I study, there is very little irony going on. There’s a rather extreme earnestness, which is the other side of the coin—a particular gender performance where there can be no irony. It can’t come in because it would be dangerous.

Ellen: [00:21:58] Is there any humor? 

Suus: [00:22:04] Maybe I’m just not enlightened enough to grasp it. There’s lots of “the kids were being so funny,” but very little ironizing, where people say “I know what this looks like and I’m joking with you about it.” There’s almost none of that. Nah. They’ll sometimes say that they get approached in supermarkets for having many kids, and then they will take on the perspective of the audience—I know what this looks like to you. But it always pivots to actually, you are wrong for seeing this, for seeing something strange instead of seeing the way things should be. So even when that shift of perspective happens, it doesn’t actually. It can only strengthen the idea of being the true remnant, the last people still standing, holding on to what’s right. A lot of that type of language.

Ellen: [00:23:06] I’m so sorry I have to run to my student, because you’re helping me think! These different figures in the colonial context are appropriating what they are appropriating for a performance, riffing on this past in a way that is sometimes humorous or takes power. It has to do with this sense of “I’m me and not me at the same time.” And you can see both of those realities. Whereas these women say there’s one way that’s right and everything else is wrong, and I’m at war with the world. This is my worldview and everything has to be in it. Anything that’s not is a threat or bad or whatever. There can be no humor then. 

There’s another artist that I’m really interested in, a comedian called Gad Elmaleh. He has this stand-up called “The Other is Me,” and in part of it, he dresses as his own Moroccan grandma. He’s a Moroccan, Jewish, French Canadian comic. And he wears a headscarf and he’s shouting, he’s pretending to be his grandma. He wears fuzzy slippers, hairy legs, and an apron, yelling and jumping between French and Arabic. So, you know, he’s not really his grandma—he sort of is, but he also isn’t. By doing this at the same time, it’s funny. 

Achille Mbembe talks about humor as the way to get one up on power, to bust down power. If you can make fun of it, if you can twist it, if you can ironize it, you can master it a little bit. So there’s something about the presence and the absence of humor—I haven’t figured out what it is or what it means, but it seems to carry weight here. I’ll let you guys go. Thank you so much for organizing, I’m just under such a tsunami of stuff that it’s been bananas. 

Suus: [00:25:40] Honestly, I feel like we killed it, in a very short time frame.

Dustin: [00:25:46] I think so, too. We got everything in and it’s probably better that we were rushed, almost, because things are probably quite tight.

Suus: [00:25:56] Getting down to business!

This conversation relates to Ellen Amster’s study into "Lalla Essaydi," Dusty Gavin’s examination of KKKW Beauty's Fragrance Wifey, and Suzanne van Geuns’ research into biblical womanhood blogs.

An African ruler dressed in the finery of a cosmopolitan, fashionable man of the late seventeenth-century welcomes a Capuchin friar to his town.1  (PW092) A man and two attendants worship a live goat standing on a pedestal. (PW083) Eight carefully depicted birds occupy a spare landscape. (PW047) Early modern central Africa comes to life in the images that Capuchin friars—veterans of the Kongo and Angola missions—composed between 1650 and 1750 for the guidance of future missionaries. Their vivid full-page paintings, glossed with a few lines of text, present the intricacies of the natural, social, and religious landscape of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century west central Africa, a region in today’s western Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Angola (Fig. 1). In vignettes emulating the format of scientific illustrations, costume books, and even map cartouches, the friars depicted animals and plants, described central African cultural and religious practices, and detailed the primarily visual catechization methods they created for the parishes and new missions of a region whose inhabitants, at the time of the paintings, had already engaged of the paintings had engaged with the visual and material culture of Europe and Christianity for more than one hundred and fifty years.

• 1
  Research and writing for this Essay have been supported by a Berenson Fellowship from I Tatti – The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, an American Academy Rome Prize, a Yale Institute for Sacred Music Fellowship, and a Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellowship from the Renaissance Society of America. Support for the digital format of the essay comes from the Yale Faculty of Arts and Sciences. I am grateful for the support and encouragement from the Virgili and Araldi families over the years in my study of the manuscripts in their collections. Gaston Javier Basile, Giacomo Berchi, Veronica Copello, Erin Griffin, Katharina Natalia Piechocki have helped me in small and big ways with the paleography and translation. Thank you to John Thornton for his positive review of the essay. David C. Recksieck and Jim DeGrand are to be credited for the line art and the map, respectively. Sophia Kitlinski, Nathalie Miraval, Bennett Harrison, and Vu Horwitz, offered key research assistance at different stages of the project. Ruby Anderson expertly and patiently took care of the digital upload and formatting of the essay. Still, all errors are mine. Finally my thanks to Emily Floyd for her unwavering support for the project and for her editorial engagement and guidance throughout the process.

Since the late fifteenth century, west central Africans, first the inhabitants of the kingdoms of Kongo, then those of Matamba, Ndongo, and people living under the purview of the Portuguese Conquista of Angola, participated in the commercial and diplomatic networks of the Atlantic World.2  Through trade, diplomatic gifts, and the travels of emissaries from and to the region, central Africans became familiar with, adopted, rejected, or adapted elements of the religious, political, visual, and material culture of Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Elite insignia and personal luxuries included imported fineries such as the showy beaver felt hat worn by the Ndembu ruler in PW092, or the colorful printed cottons draped around men and women of the Kongo and Angola as seen in PW007, PW070, PW098. 

When Capuchin friars arrived in the region in 1645 as part of a newly formed mission, they did not find themselves in the distant, foreign land wholly opposite to theirs that they expected to find. They landed instead in a cosmopolitan environment that deeply challenged their preconceptions about Africa and Africans. It was, in fact, the kings of Kongo themselves who had asked the Pope to send the Franciscan clerics, with the aim to ensure their realm’s independence in spiritual but also temporal affairs from the increasingly expansionist Portuguese colonial foothold of Angola, at its southern border. For historical reasons, Portugal claimed control over the Church of the Kongo through the rights of patronage.3  The African crown disagreed and turned directly to Rome to seek clerics outside of the Iberian realm’s control. The Capuchin central African mission emerged from these negotiations. Once in central Africa, the Capuchins not only worked at the demand of the local powers, but they also remained firmly under their control and dependent on their support in all aspects of their mission, from food and shelter to free passage and liturgical practice. 

This political context was unusual for an early modern European Catholic mission, which more often functioned within projects of colonial or imperial imposition than at the behest of local powers. This situation often created perplexing social interactions for the friars, in addition to the myriad, unexpected encounters, mediated or unmediated, that they faced with an endlessly surprising array of tropical flora and fauna. In response, they would turn to images to make sense of the wondrous novelties they encountered and the baffling situations they faced, as well as to document the responses they devised to them, in order to educate the friars who would follow them about the proper conduct of the mission in Kongo and Angola. The result of this decades-long reflection, operated collaboratively by a number of friars who often did not wish to be named, following the modesty of their vows, is a set of images that formed a coherent corpus from its first work created in the 1650s, to its last known manuscript penned around 1750. 

Today, this Capuchin central African corpus consists of four extant manuscripts connected by form and content. Chronologically, the first is a panel now in the Museo Francescano in Rome (MF00) dated to the 1650s. The second is a set of sixty-seven images that I call the Parma Watercolors likely created circa 1663-1690 (PW002 to PW102). Neither of these two manuscripts have identified authors. Decades later, around 1750, friar Bernardino d’Asti composed two versions of an illustrated manual he titled Missione in Prattica, one of which is today in the Biblioteca Civica di Torino, the other in the Vatican Library.4  The Turin library offers an online version of the manuscript.5  I made available for the first time the integrality of the images from the Vatican Library and the Parma Watercolors in my book Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola, published in 2022 with Penn State University Press.6

The present Essay complements the book, in conjunction with a Collection also in this issue of the MAVCOR Journal placing the images in their broader visual context and laying out points of comparisons between the different works.7  It offers additional visual material from the corpus by featuring details of each individual vignette of the 1650s poster as well as the unpublished versos of the Parma Watercolors that feature text. My 2007 photographs of the Museo Francescano drawing precede its latest conservation and retain parts of images and texts that have since been lost. My 2015 photographs of the Parma Watercolors also document the manuscript in a state of conservation that includes some edges and areas now eroded from the pages. 

Readers should turn to Images on a Mission for a discussion of the conception and execution of the Capuchin central African corpus, as well as for an analysis of their projects and of the stakes of their study. In the present essay, they will find my transcription and translation of the images’ text. I present this work not as a translator or a scholar of seventeenth-century Italian language, but as a specialist in the cross-cultural environment of early modern central Africa. Reading these documents in fact demands a particular set of skills that do not pertain wholly to language proficiency. Linguistically, they ebb and flow fluidly between Italian, Portuguese, Latin, Kikongo, and Kimbundu. Intellectually, they draw from and rely on ideas, practices, and political positions that are idiosyncratic to the Capuchin central African mission. Visually, they call upon genres, iconographies, and motifs rooted in early modern European visual culture, to depict objects, practices, and forms of knowledge with deep central African significance. Having researched, written about, and conceptualized the cross-cultural religious, visual, and political environment of central Africa in the early modern period for nearly two decades, with, what is more, special attention to the Capuchin presence and activities in the region, I am uniquely positioned to disentangle the difficulties presented by, and offer insight on, the texts and images. The number and complexity of both images and texts however greatly surpass anyone’s single abilities to make sense of them and note all their multifaceted connections. I have thus collaborated with MAVCOR Journal to include in this essay a comment section for each vignette where insights from readers about the texts and images will, over time, increase understanding of the corpus and its multifaceted contributions to knowledge. I hope that this space will allow for corrections to the transcriptions and translations, paleographic suggestions, object identifications, and complementary citations of primary or secondary sources, in a collaborative, cumulative, publicly available study of this material. 

• 2
  About the term “Conquista” to refer to Portuguese overseas colonial endeavors see Charles Ralph Boxer, Race relations in the Portuguese colonial empire, 1415-1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 2; Josiah Blackmore, Moorings: Portuguese expansion and the writing of Africa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xxii. For an overview of the history of the region see John K Thornton, A History of West Central Africa to 1850, vol. 14 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
• 3
  About the patronage rights see António da Silva Rego, Le patronage portugais de l'orient: aperçu historique (Lisbon: Agencia Geral do Ultramar, 1957); Isabel dos Guimarães Sá, "Ecclesiastical structures and religious action," in Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800, ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• 4
  Bernardino Ignazio da Vezza d'Asti, Missione in prattica. Padri Cappuccini ne' regni di Congo, Angola, et adiacenti., ca 1750, Biblioteca Civica Centrale di Torino, MS 457: 29, Turin; Bernardino Ignazio da Vezza d'Asti, Missione in prattica de RP cappuccini italiani ne regni di Congo, Angola, et adiacenti, ca. 1750, Biblioteca Vaticana, MS Borg. Lat. 316: Vatican Another, non illustrated version of is in Lisbon. Bernardino Ignazio da Vezza d'Asti and Guiseppe Rabagliati, Missione in Pratica de PP. Cappuccini Italiani ne Regni di Congo, Angola, e adiacenti brevemente esposta p: lume, e guida de Missionari a quelle Sante Missioni destinati, ca. 1750, Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, MS 1432 FG: Lisboa. About the story of these manuscripts see Cécile Fromont, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022), 41-62.
• 5
  “Missione in Prattica,” Biblioteche Civiche Torinesi, accessed January 9, 2023, available here.
• 6
  Fromont, Images on a Mission.
• 7
  Cécile Fromont, "Depicting Kongo and Angola in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," MAVCOR Journal 6, no. 1 (2022), available here.

 “Of the People, Victuals, Customs, Animals, and Fruits of the Kingdoms of Africa penetrated to preach the Gospel by order of the Sacred Congregation for Propaganda Fide by Capuchins in the year of 1644. Congo, Angola, Dongo or Njinga, and Embaca” labels the top of a large-format, ink on paper drawing measuring 73 by 40 cm, inventory number MF 1370 in the Museo Francescano of the Capuchin order’s Historical Institute at the Convent of San Lorenzo da Brindisi in Roma-Bravetta. Capuchin historian Édouard d’Alençon first reported the drawing’s purchase on the Roman antiquarian market around 1900 and its entrance into the collection of what was then the Missions Museum of the San Lorenzo da Brindisi Convent.1  No further mention of the piece exists to my knowledge, until 2011, when I first discussed it in print.9

The page, once folded, perhaps to travel from central Africa to Europe, presents on a single surface 35 individual vignettes of unequal size rendered in black ink to which short textual glosses were added subsequently. Stamped acanthus leaves frame the page with a border of a lighter hue than the drawings. The verso is blank. Images and texts work in concert to offer an ordered compendium of information about Kongo and Angola, from courtly life, to mores and customs, flora and fauna, and missionary prowess. Though not dated, it postdates the depicted violent death of Friar Joris van Gheel in 1652 and predates the death of Queen Njinga of Matamba in 1663, who it discusses as alive.10

A few notes on the following transcription and translation. To facilitate reading, I have labelled each vignette on the page individually with a number from 1 to 35. Each section includes my transcription of the Italian text with original orthography and punctuation, followed by my English translation which I kept purposely close to the source. Missing words or uncertain readings are indicated between brackets. Footnotes inserted in the Italian transcription give further information on particular terms.

• 1
  Edouard d'Alençon, "Essai de Bibliographie Capucino-Congolaise," Neerlandia Franciscana 1, no. 1 (1914): 261-62.
• 9
  Cécile Fromont, "Collecting and Translating Knowledge Across Cultures: Capuchin Missionary Images of Early modern Central Africa," in Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, ed. Daniela Bleichmar and Peter Mancall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
• 10
  Hildebrandus ab Hooglede, “Le père Georges de Gheel (+1652): Missionnaire, philologue et martyr,“ Études Franciscaines 42, no. 238 (1930). See also biographical information in Graziano M. da Leguzzano Saccardo, Congo e Angola con la storia dell'Antica missione dei Cappuccini, 3 vols. (Venice-Mestre: Curia Povinciale dei Cappuccini, 1982-1983), 1:489-90.

The Parma Watercolors are a set of 67 watercolors on paper measuring 24 by 34 cm, once bound together as a codex as indicated by the stitch marks on their left edge. The general template of the pages consists of a main landscape-oriented image covering most of its surface accompanied by a short text at the bottom occasionally continuing into the verso of the page. A black box frames the designs. The numbering at the top of the watercolors runs from 2 to 104 with several gaps. It orders the vignettes thematically: colonial Angola (2, 7), aquatic animals (12 to 22), architecture (23 to 27), fruits and vegetables (29 to 36), trees (37 to 46), birds (47 to 53), land animals (56 to 68), mores and customs (70 to 81), superstitions and idolatry (83 to 89), missionary work (90 to 101), funerary practices (102, 104). Though unsigned and undated, their format and contents firmly place them within the Capuchin central African corpus of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, alongside the better known Missione in Prattica manuscripts and the explicitly labelled Museo Francescano drawing (MF00).1  Specific points of comparison include the juxtaposition of image and text, and the similarities in composition and subject matter. The depiction of a Mass performed in the outdoors in the Torino manuscript using a decorated portable altar echoes, for instance, that of a similar occasion in the Parma Watercolors (MIPT01 and PW098).

In addition, as many as 21 of the Parma Watercolors images closely match the designs of the prints that appeared in the most widely circulated publication to emerge from the Capuchin early modern mission to Kongo and Angola, friar Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi’s 1687 Istorica descrizione.2  The Parma text, in turn, which postdates the images, also shares key formulations and observations with this publication. The two works are closely related, but the nature of their relationship remains difficult to define. In the current state of knowledge about the two projects, it is best not to think of them as copy and prototype stricto sensu. Rather their connections are most productively considered as the reflection of their makers’ belonging in a common Capuchin visual and epistemic milieu within which images, writings, and information circulated fluidly both in central Africa and in Europe.3

The date of production of the vignettes’ images and later text is not elucidated beyond several anchor points. One is a terminus post quem for the images in the depiction of the capture of friars Buenaventura de Corella and Francisco de Veas by queen Njinga of Matamba in 1648, depicted on PW101. A timeframe for the texts, in turn, derives from the description on the same page of the current state of Christianity in Matamba as lapsing since the death of the queen, which occurred in 1663. The role the vignettes played directly or indirectly in the production of the prints in the Istorica descrizione in the 1670s further suggests that either they, or the template from which they and the prints both derive, already existed, and was made available to the printmaker.4  The fashions the two Portuguese elite men wear in vignette number 2 (PW002) fit with this timeline.5  They wear wigs of high, loose curls with a part in the middle, white cravats and lace cuffs, metallic trim on large-cuffed colorful coats, low-crown, upturned-brim hats meant to be carried rather than worn, walking sticks, and high-heeled boots that are in keeping with European aristocratic male fashion from the 1670s and 1680s. 

A few notes on the following translation. Each image, and its verso when including text, is followed by my transcription of the Italian text with original orthography and punctuation, and my English translation which I kept purposely close to the source. Missing words or uncertain readings are indicated between brackets. Footnotes inserted in the Italian transcription give information on particular terms. 

• 1
  See the Vatican and the Turin versions of the manuscripts, Bernardino da Vezza d’Asti, Missione in prattica (Turin); Bernardino da Vezza d’Asti, Missione in prattica (Vatican).
• 2
  Cavazzi and Alamandini, Istorica descrizione. For a full table of correspondence see Fromont, “Depicting Kongo and Angola,” available here.
• 3
  For a longer discussion of the corpus see Fromont, Images on a Mission, chapter 1 and 2.
• 4
  About the production history of the Istorica Descrizione prints see Fromont, Images on a Mission, chapter 1; Graciano Maria de Leguzzano and Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, Descrição histórica dos três reinos do Congo, Matamba e Angola, Estudos de Cartografia Antiga. Série Memórias. Publicações 2-3, (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1965), Introduction.
• 5
  Justine De Young, “1680-1689, 17th century, decade overview,” Fashion History Timeline, June 20, 2020, available here. Justine De Young, “1670-1679, 17th century, decade overview,” Fashion History Timeline, June 14, 2020, available here.

During the Aztec month and festival season of Huey Tozoztli, four local rulers departed the inner Basin of Mexico and began their annual pilgrimage to the top of Mount Tlaloc.1  Gathering at Tetzcoco, the tlahtoque—the Nahuatl term for rulers of city-states, here referring to the polities of Tenochtitlan, Tlacopan, Xochimilco, and Tetzcoco—departed to the east (Fig. 1). The trek undertaken by the allied sovereigns coincided with the height of the dry season. They ascended the treacherous mountain slope to petition for rain, part of a larger effort to initiate a renewal of nature for a successful upcoming agricultural season. This specific pilgrimage was enacted sometime in late April to early May, during the Late Postclassic period (1250 - 1519 CE), to fulfill a religious obligation and usher in a season of rebirth.2

• 1
  This essay was written during my time as the 2020-2022 Ittleson Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. I thank the Center for their generous support. I also wish to thank Matthew H. Robb, Amara Solari, Kendyll Gross, Theresa A. Cunningham, and Donato Loia for their insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this project. I am indebted to Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry and Elliot Lopez-Finn for sharing their valuable insight on the religion of Postclassic Central Mexico. Elliot and Josefrayn workshopped several of these ideas with me and provided much feedback on earlier versions of this essay; I thank them for their generous comments, especially regarding the Nahuatl-language material. Megan McDonie and I have had many conversations about mountains over the years and I thank her for inspiring some of the ideas presented here and for directing my attention to a handful of the cited sources. Lastly, I warmly thank the article’s two anonymous reviewers as well as the Special Issue Editors for their thoughtful feedback. Any errors are my own.
• 2
  Richard F. Townsend, “The Renewal of Nature at the Temple of Tlaloc,” in The Ancient Americas: Art from Sacred Landscapes, ed. Richard F. Townsend (Chicago: The Art Institute, 1992), 173-174; Diego Durán, The Book of the Gods and the Rites of the Ancient Calendar, trans. and eds., Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 156-157. In this work, I take Townsend’s foundational understanding of “nature renewal” ceremonies and advance this interpretation, illuminating how the mountain slope was a crucial component of the pilgrimage and integral to this interpretation.

Most scholars considering the rituals at Mount Tlaloc have focused their interpretations to the mountain’s summit, assessing its physical placement in larger cosmological schema and reconstructing ceremonial experience from the archeological record. Writing in the late-twentieth century, Richard F. Townsend mainly emphasized the physical and metaphysical role of Mount Tlaloc’s peak in agricultural renewal ceremonies of the Postclassic period, primarily of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Townsend noted the special qualities of human experience in Mount Tlaloc, calling attention to the chilly winds that swirl around the mountain’s high altitude peak.1  In line with Townsend and building off of his work, I turn my attention to the mountain slope and the surface experience of this historic ritual ascension. Bridging ecology, ethnohistory, linguistics, and art historical inquiry, I argue that the various forms of vegetation encountered along the mountain slope by the tlahtoque during their ritual journey conveyed notions of agricultural fertility and were of ritual significance within Nahua worldview.2  In placing emphasis on this particular mountain slope, I contend that ritual ascension of the mountain was also of importance, preparing the rulers for veneration of Tlaloc atop the summit. The surface ecology of the slope, I suggest, corresponds to Tlalocan, an earthly paradise within Nahua worldview. The identification of landscapes, including that of Mount Tlaloc, as the manifestation of Tlalocan was primarily elucidated by Alfredo López Austin in the late-twentieth century.3  My interpretation of Mount Tlaloc builds upon this argument, relying upon López Austin’s foundational discussion of the earthly and mythical manifestations of Tlalocan.4  In the case of Mount Tlaloc, the ascension of the slope contributed to the experience of the overall pilgrimage undertaken by the tlahtoque as they sought to renew nature during the dry season. 

• 1
  Townsend, “The Renewal of Nature at the Temple of Tlaloc,” 173.
• 2
  In this piece, I utilize the term “Aztec” to refer to the individuals living in Postclassic central Mexico. Nahua references the speakers of Nahuatl and related languages of the region regardless of temporal frame. I also use the terms to correspond to Aztec state religion and Nahua ethnic religious expression. Additionally, while the evidence I utilize in this essay speaks to a specific elite, historical pilgrimage, Mount Tlaloc was a component of religious practice for other sects of society as well, see Garagarza, “The 1539 Trial of Don Carlos Ometochtli.”
• 3
  Alfredo López Austin, Tamoanchan, Tlalocan: Places of Mist, trans. Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano and Thelma Ortiz de Montellano (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1997), 225. Likewise, my discussion about Mount Tlaloc and Tlalocan has benefited from an exchange with Elliot López-Finn and Julia Guernsey and the sharing of their forthcoming manuscript: Elliot López-Finn and Julia Guernsey, “Chalcatzingo and the Persistence of Sacred Space and Place,” in From Ch’een to Waka, eds. Jon Spenard and Jonathan Dubois (Forthcoming).
• 4
  López Austin, Tamoanchan, Tlalocan, 214-229. I also follow López Austin’s statement that various manifestations of these locales retained local meaning. Alfredo López Austin, The Myths of the Opossum: Pathways of Mesoamerican Mythology, trans. Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano and Thelma Ortiz de Montellano (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 15.

After departing their respective cities, the tlahtoque began their pilgrimage to the summit of Mount Tlaloc.1 The group moved through the highland plateau to the eastern fringe of the valley. As the foursome walked accompanied by their retinues, the surrounding landscape slowly morphed from urban centers to villages to mountainous terrain. The local ecology, as well, noticeably shifted as the tlahtoque continued eastward. Mount Tlaloc, unlike the center of the valley, physically straddles two distinct ecological zones: subalpine forest and alpine meadow.2  The uninhabited and rural environment in which the mountain resides marked the location as ecologically distinct from the rest of the region.

A potential point of access to Mount Tlaloc’s slope was through the town of Coatlinchan. Early colonial pictorial evidence substantiates that it is the mountain’s western side that intersected with local footpaths. The Mapa de Coatlinchan (1579), initially created to aid in sixteenth-century land tenure disputes, indicates that access to Mount Tlaloc was achieved via the town of Coatlinchan.3  As illustrated in the map, various trails from Coatlinchan lead to and from the mountain’s slope, providing access to both the valley below as well as the summit. It is the mountain’s western slope that the artists of the Mapa de Coatlinchan depicted. Informed by his archaeological work and own ascent, Townsend suggested that the best path to the mountain slope was through the modern village of Tequexquinahuac, a municipality just north of Coatlinchan. Once in Tequexquinahuac, Towsend suggests that the four nobles continued “east by a dirt road winding up into the forested ravines of the rugged mountain massif.”4  Regardless of their exact point of interception, the tlahtoque began their ascent of Mount Tlaloc along its western slope. 

• 1
  Townsend, “The Renewal of Nature at the Temple of Tlaloc,” 173-174.
• 2
  Stainsław Iwaniszewski, “Archaeology and Archaeoastronomy of Mount Tlaloc, Mexico: A Reconsideration,” Latin American Antiquity 5, no. 2 (1994): 159-160.
• 3
  Ana Pulido Rull, Mapping Indigenous Land: Native Land Grants in Colonial New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), 119.
• 4
  Townsend, “The Mt. Tlaloc Project,” 27.

The very moment in which the tlahtoque reached the base of Mount Tlaloc is depicted in the Codex Borbonicus. Two illustrations from this sixteenth-century regional manuscript recalibrate the spatial focus of the pilgrimage by shifting attention to the mountain’s slope. The codex’s chapter describing the festivals of the Nahua twenty-day “veintenas,” or months, illustrates the Huey Tozoztli ceremony.1  Following the Indigenous cartographic convention of depicting multiple perspectives and views, pages 24 and 25 illustrate pilgrimages to and up Mount Tlaloc (Figs. 4 and 5).2  In both, and in other renderings of the mountain in the codex’s later illustrations, Mount Tlaloc is illustrated with a level summit, in washes of green, topped with a temple shrine housing its patron deity wielding a lightning bolt. The individual depicted is clearly identified as Tlaloc, as the deity is shown with his characteristic goggle eyes and fanged teeth. The spatial organization of the page encapsulates numerous moments in one. Without the viewer reorienting or moving the pages, the ritual specialists and attendants of the tlahtoque are depicted as processing horizontally across the plate. Page 24 depicts a child being presented to a ritual specialist, to be transported up the mountain as an offering to Tlaloc, while page 25 depicts the moment before the procession to the mountain’s summit, right as the human actors reach the mountain’s base. Baskets of food and ritual paraphernalia are depicted, indicating the ceremonies that would soon take place to inaugurate the rainy season. Mount Tlaloc is depicted on its side at a ninety-degree angle, but when the viewer rotates the plate ninety degrees, the figures are oriented as if ascending the mountain slope towards the summit shrine. 

• 1
  Intriguingly, most recorded festivals during the month of Huey Tozoztli are dedicated to the veneration of Chicomecoatl, the female deity of maize and sustenance, and are not mountain-centric ceremonies. It is possible, then, that the ceremonies on Mount Tlaloc are not the principal festival of Huey Tozoztli but a concurrent ritual act. Catherine R. DiCesare, “Tlaloc Rites and the Huey Tozotli Festival in the Mexican Codex Borbonicus,” Ethnohistory 62, no. 4 (2015): 693, 697.
• 2
  Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry first pointed out to me that whoever glossed the Codex Borbonicus with alphabetic text labels the figure on page 25 as “el gran díos y principal llamado tezcatepoca” (the great and principal god named Tezcatepoca). While Tezcatlipoca (modern orthography) was a prominent deity in the region, the individual depicted is surely Tlaloc based on his trademark attributes. Even though Tlaloc was known to inhabit numerous mountains in the region, plates 24 and 25 clearly depict the Huey Tozoztli ceremony to Mount Tlaloc, as corroborated by Durán. Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry, personal communication to author, 2021.

As illustrated in the Codex Borbonicus, the tlahtoque then commenced their climb of Mount Tlaloc (Fig. 6). This specific act of walking upwards and ascending a trail is identifiable in Nahuatl texts. Book 11 of the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, more popularly known as the Florentine Codex, captures individual experience and the components of physical movement as dictated by different types of trails and paths. Written between 1575 and 1577 by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún alongside a cohort of native Nahuatl speakers, including Antonio Valeriano, Alonso Vegerano, Martín Jacobita, and Pedro de San Buenaventura, the codex is an important source for understanding Nahua culture.1  In Book 11, the definition for trail, or pitzactli, reveals the strenuous nature of walking upwards. The latter part of the definition translates as “it is ascending it is ascending in different places; it is ever meandering; it is choked with weeds, choked with trees, full of rocks.”2  As defined by Karttunen, the word pitzactli is derived from the adjective pitzāhuac, meaning “something thin, slender.”3  Kartunnen elaborates with an example, providing the context: “the road, the thin and subtle wind.”4  Pitzāhuac and its derivative pitzactli invoke the overgrown and uncultivated characterization of ascending mountain trails.

Surrounding the tlahtoque as they ascended the slope of Mount Tlaloc were unique ecological characteristics. In Nahua natural history and worldview, the mountain slope was a distinct geological domain: the upper slope contained its own soil chemistry and a discrete type of agricultural production. Book 11 of Florentine Codex, classifies more many varieties of soil that characterize the upper layer of the earth. In outlining the extensive and taxonomic Nahuatl nomenclature for describing the earth, the content of Book 11 meticulously distinguishes between color, fertility, location, moisture retention, and texture. 

Relevant within the context of mountain ecology writ large is the Nahuatl word tetlalli, a soil type found on mountains. Tetlalli describes the overall physical and visual properties of mountain terrain. Tetlalli encompasses dualities; the codex indicates that tetlalli ground can be rough but also agriculturally productive. The Florentine Codex states: 

It is land on the mountain—rocky, gravelly, loose-graveled. It is very rocky, gravelly, rough, dry, dry deep down; a productive place, the growing place of tecintli maize. It is dry deep down; it is dry. It hardens; it becomes wet; it produces.5

Corresponding to a broader Nahua attitude toward mountains, this definition encompasses the mountain surface as part of a greater agricultural cycle. Ground can be dry and unyielding. However, with the onset of rain, the soil can transform into the ideal surface environment for seeds to germinate. The duality of this description may also indicate a broader attitude toward mountains. Certainly, mountains were aquatic sources. They provided necessary sustenance to the valleys below. The authors of the Florentine Codex write that mountains were filled to the brim with water, comparable to ollas, or ceramic vessels.6  But mountains, especially those that could also be characterized as volcanos, were dangerous and part of the wilderness.7  Mountain soil was so physically and chemically separate from other locations in the valley that it required its own distinction as dictated by Nahua speakers.

• 1
  Kevin Terraciano, “Introduction” in The Florentine Codex: An Encyclopedia of the Nahua World in Sixteenth-Century Mexico, eds. Jeanette Favrot Peterson and Kevin Terraciano,  (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019), 13.
• 2
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 11, Chapter 12, 267. I utilize the translation provided by Arthur J. O Anderson and Charles Dibble. At times, and within the essay’s prose, I opine on the translation and meanings as informed by Nahuatl analytical dictionaries and contemporary grammatical understandings of the language.
• 3
  Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 197.
• 4
  Ibid.
• 5
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 11, Chapter 12, 253.
• 6
  Ibid., 247.
• 7
  Mountains also occupied the urban outskirts and represented densely forested space; wilderness abounded within this terrain. Frances Kartunnen translates cuauhtlah as “mountain, wilderness, forest,” combining the landform with its ecological properties and characteristics. Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl, 64.

While in the Codex Borbonicus Mount Tlaloc was rendered in line with the Nahua visual convention of depicting a green mountain glyph, other evidence refers to the botanical qualities of the mountain slope. Scholars have long identified Mount Tlaloc, and the neighboring landscape, as a microcosm of Tlalocan.1  Some analyses have interpreted the actual mountain as a “point of access” to Tlalocan.2  Tlalocan was chiefly accessed through supernatural apertures as the mythical locale was understood to reside within the earth. Scholars have yet to connect the local ecology to Tlalocan, enriching the ethnohistoric record that recounts the pilgrimage undertaken by the tlahtoque to the mountain’s peak. The Florentine Codex offers insight into how Nahuas conceived of Tlalocan. In Book 6, devoted to Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy, the authors write that Tlalocan was an “earthly paradise,” ruled by Tlaloc.3  They explain:

And then those who have been drowned, those struck by lightning: the old men went saying that they who are good of heart are struck by lightning because the Tlaloque desire them; they long for them. They take them there to their home, Tlalocan. They live by the master, Xoxouhqui, he who is provided with rubber, with incense, Tlamacazqui, lord of Tlalocan. For verily in Tlalocan those who enter, those taken, those struck are submerged there. They live in eternal spring; never is there withering; forever there is sprouting, there is verdure; it is eternally green.4

Tlalocan was an un-earthly domain that was forever sprouting. This mythic, misty locale was ruled by Tlaloc and the Tlaloque (not to be confused with tlahtoque). The Tlaloque, named in the above passage as Xoxouhqui and Tlamacazqui, are chief deities associated with Tlalocan and attendants of Tlaloc. While Tlalocan was Tlaloc’s plane of existence, other deities simultaneously and similarly controlled the un-earthly paradise. 

In naming human sacrifice and offerings, the description of Tlalocan links itself to known rituals associated with Mount Tlaloc. The ethnohistoric account of sixteenth-century chronicler Juan Bautista Pomar (ca. 1535 – 1601) complements the Florentine Codex’s description. In his recording of the rituals that took place on Mount Tlaloc’s summit, Pomar describes a white human-shaped stone statue of Tlaloc. Carved out of the spherical shape of the figure’s head was a vessel where white, black, red, and yellow kernels of corn were deposited.5  Into this receptacle, white, black, red, and yellow kernels of corn were also deposited.6  Pomar further elaborates on the offering of children to Tlaloc, stating that after their ritual purpose had been served and their sacrifice complete, they were given to the mountain via a natural cavern at the summit.7  This act was viewed as regenerative, as the bodies of the children were transformed into maize kernels, ensuring the fruitful harvest during the next rainy season.8  Here, this exchange consists of ritual offerings for upcoming rain to fertilize the local soils.

Within Nahua worldview, Tlalocan was not only an un-earthly domain but it was also the repository for human offerings. Those who had been killed by lightning were taken “home” to Tlalocan because Tlaloc longed for them to be within his territory.46  In Tlalocan there is only one type of climate: misty and perpetually rainy.47  In this paradise that characterized Tlaloc’s realm the environment was overflowing with abundance. Maize, gourds, squash blossoms, amaranth, tomatoes, and green beans abounded.48  Mount Tlaloc was the ideal, ever-verdant location from which to successfully petition for rain to effect agricultural renewal.

López Austin suggests Tlalocan was “replicated” within the mountain range and that Tlalocan was a distinct sacred geographical zone.49  Additionally, mountains were more than a simple reflection of this perpetually fertile locale. Mount Tlaloc manifested the agricultural and ecological properties of Tlalocan. Properties, or components, of the natural world were integrated into the larger Nahua cosmovision. Otherworldly and un-earthly locales and domains were not cleanly separated from the terrestrial plane of the known earth. Molly Bassett eloquently teases out the nuances of this larger worldview, especially as cosmovision relates to elements of the natural world. In her weaving of the sacred and the quotidian components of Aztec and Nahua life and experience, Bassett concludes that there are few concrete distinctions. She writes that Aztec religion acknowledged many “animate entities” including parts of the natural world.50  This specific cosmovision “wove the this-worldly and the otherworldly into the tangible and observable environment.”51  The Nahua understood the otherworldly and the earthly to be intertwined. For the Postclassic peoples of Central Mexico, there was no physical distinction between supernatural and natural. Rather the lived world was a complex web that seamlessly wove together physical experience and greater divine understandings. In this way, the surface ecology of Mount Tlaloc’s slope experienced by the tlahtoque was of this earthly domain but also encompassed connotations to the otherworldly lush vegetation of Tlalocan, aiding in the tlahtoque’s pilgrimage. 

Durán establishes the relationship between trees, Tlaloc, and Tlalocan. The forest that Tlaloc ruled over could be replicated in urban spaces, acting as a manifestation of Tlalocan.52  While the fir forest that characterizes the mountain’s mid-slope was an ecological indication that the tlahtoque had reached a certain altitude, and completed a certain leg of their pilgrimage, it was also a tree species that was ritually prominent in venerations of Tlaloc. In the Primeros Memoriales, a sixteenth-century Nahuatl text compiled by Sahagún and a Nahua cohort, fir trees and their branches are synonymous with venerations of Tlaloc and the replication of Tlalocan.53

• 1
  López Austin, Tlalocan y Tamoanchan, 51, 227-228. Osvaldo Roberto Murillo, “Antecedentes históricos y arqueológicos del Monte Tláloc,” in Páginas en la nieve: Estudios sobre la montaña en México, eds. Margarita Loera Chávez y Peniche, Stanislaw Iwaniszewski, and Ricardo Cabrera (Mexico City: INAH-ENAH/CNCA, 2007), 60, 62, 69, 72.
• 2
  Phillip P. Arnold, Eating Landscape: Aztec and European Occupation of Tlalocan (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1999), 87.
• 3
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 6, Chapter 8, 35.
• 4
  Ibid., Book 6, Chapter 21, 114.
• 5
  Juan Bautista Pomar, Relación de Texcoco, in Nueva Colección de Documentos para la Historia de México: Relaciones de Texcoco y de la Nueva España, eds. Joaquín García Icazbalceta and Alonso de Zurita (México, D.C.: Editorial Salvador Chávez Hayhoe, 1941), 14.
• 6
  Pomar, Relación de Texcoco, 18; Johanna Broda, “Ritos mexicas en los cerros de la cuenca: Los sacrificios de niños,” in La Montaña en el Paisaje Ritual, ed. Johanna Broda, Stainsław Iwaniszewski, and Ismael Arturo Montero García (México: Conaculta e INAH, 2001), 299.
• 7
  Ibid., 18; Johanna Broda, “Ritos mexicas en los cerros de la cuenca: Los sacrificios de niños,” in La Montaña en el Paisaje Ritual, ed. Johanna Broda, Stainsław Iwaniszewski, and Ismael Arturo Montero García (México: Conaculta e INAH, 2001), 299; also discussed in Joyce Marcus, “Rethinking Ritual,” in The Archaeology of Ritual, ed. Evangelos Kyriakidis (Los Angeles: Costen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, 2007), 52-53.
• 8
  Broda, “Ritos mexicas en los cerros de la cuenca,” 299.
• 46
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 6, Chapter 8, 35.
• 47
  López Austin, Tlalocan y Tamoanchan, 216.
• 48
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 3, Chapter 2 Appendix, 45.
• 49
  López Austin, Tamoanchan, Tlalocan, 227-228.
• 50
  Bassett, The Fate of Earthly Things, 196.
• 51
  Ibid.
• 52
  While the tlahtoque undertook their pilgrimage to Mount Tlaloc, ritual activity was underway within the ceremonial precinct of Tenochtitlan. In the plaza opposite the shrine to Tlaloc that was part of the twin-temple construction of the Templo Mayor, the Aztec’s main temple, a miniature forest landscape was created within the massive urban center. The plaza was adorned with trees, bushes, and rocks to emulate the surrounding world and connect the ceremonial precinct to the rainmaking rites undertaken by the ruler. In the center a large tree was erected and connected to four smaller trees via ropes. Durán, The Book of the Gods, 163; López Austin, Tamoanchan, Tlalocan, 223.
• 53
  While this text was recorded and compiled in the sixteenth century, the Song of Tlaloc hosts numerous pre-Hispanic associations.

The fir trees encountered along Mount Tlaloc’s slope by the tlahtoque were characteristically distinguished within the Central Mexican high-altitude landscape and within Nahua natural history (Fig. 9).1  In Book 11 of the Florentine Codex, the authors classify numerous tree species. Fir trees (oiametl) are “slender, straight” and “like turquoise” while pine trees (ocotl) are “verdant, very verdant” and “a provider of light, a means of seeing, a resinous torch.”2  The caption for the Florentine Codex’s description of fir trees labels the trees as “very precious, very medicinal,” indicating their revered properties in Nahua natural history. Through associations between fir forests and the color turquoise, the authors of the Florentine Codex link the tree species to the deity of rain.

As the nobility ascended the mountain they moved physically and ceremonially through the fir forest to their mountaintop veneration.3  The correlation of Tlalocan and “house[s] of fir” in the Tlalloc ycuje suggests the ruler’s movement up the mountain slope was akin to moving through a region that had ecological associations to Tlalocan. Certainly, and at minimum, the trees were acknowledged for their ceremonial role and the importance of their branches during other rituals. But the physicality of the forest likely figured into the sensorial experience imparted on those moving through the area. Bassett notes that modern speakers of Nahuatl understand plant growth, and physical changes, as a sign of animacy.4  In Mesoamerican visual culture and worldview, the environment was a model with which to clarify and shape the immediate world. The symbolism of the surrounding flora was a profound way in which Nahua peoples experienced and organized the sacred spaces of their world.5  As distilled by López Austin, spaces could manifest as a Tlalocan through ritual activity.  In our case, this manifested by the tlahtoque’s peregrination of Mount Tlaloc’s slope.6  Spaces occupied by humans could function as and relate to Tlalocan (the nearby constructed Aztec botanical space of Tetzcotzingo serves as a neighboring example of this earthly manifestation).7  The ecological components of Mount Tlaloc’s slope were simultaneously both real and mythical landscape. 

Additionally, the fir trees encountered by the tlahtoque upon the mountain slope created a distinct microclimate. The altitudinal gradient of the mountain’s western slope angles the vegetation away from harsh winds and damaging UV radiation, protecting the trees from the meteorological elements.8  This ecological characterization, among other associations, echoed the eternal verdant lushness associated with Tlalocan. It is possible that the ecology of this specific slope was one of the factors that lead to the mountain’s characterization as Tlaloc’s dwelling place. The botanical weaving of Tlalocan and Mount Tlaloc meant that those ascending the mountain experienced the mythical Tlalocan through an identifiable and proximate space.

• 1
  Figure 9 (as well as Figure 6) are contemporary photographs of Mount Tlaloc. In utilizing these images to illustrate this essay’s argument, I acknowledge the disjunction between the depicted forested terrain versus ancient forests of the past. The ancient forests of Mount Tlaloc were likely cut down during massive deforestation efforts of the sixteenth century. I use these photographs cautiously balancing them against primary Indigenous sources.
• 2
  Ibid., Book 11, Chapter 6, 107-108.
• 3
  As recorded in the early colonial documentary record, fir branches were a component of physical offerings in a Catholic context. Translated by Frances Karttunen, the Nahuatl noun acxoyatl is understood as the fir branches used specifically in penitential offerings. In Book 8 of the Florentine Codex 8, devoted to kings and lords, the authors state “They constrained him to do the penances, setting fir branches [on the city altars] at night, or there where they went to place the fir branches on mountain tops—there were sacrifices were made at midnight.” While this specific ritual does not directly correlate to ceremonies at Mount Tlaloc, the relationship of fir branches to mountaintop ceremonies is of note. Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl, 3; Sahagún, Primeros Memoriales, 74, 126; Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 8, Chapter 20, 72.
• 4
  Bassett, The Fate of Earthly Things, 11-14.
• 5
  Jeanette Favrot Peterson, “Flora and Fauna as Metaphor in Precolumbian Mesoamerica,” in Precolumbian Flora and Fauna: Continuity of Plans and Animal Themes in Mesoamerican Art (San Diego: Mingei International Museum, 1990), 10.
• 6
  López Austin, Tamoanchan, Tlalocan, 227-228.
• 7
  Paul Avilés, “Seven Ways of Looking at a Mountain: Tetzcotzingo and the Aztec Garden Tradition,” Landscape Journal 25, no. 2 (2006): 143-157.
• 8
  Jimenez-Noriega, et al., “Anatomical Variation of Five Plant Species,” 2194, citing Juan A. Encina-Dominquez, Francisco J. Encina-Dominguez, Efrén Mata-Rocha, and Jesús Valdes- Reyna, “Aspectos Estructurales, Composición Florística y Caracterización Ecológica del Bosque de Oyamel de la Sierra de Zapalinamé, Coahuila, México,” Boletín de la Sociedad Botánica de México 83 (2008): 13-24.

Once the tlahtoque moved through the fir tree region of Mount Tlaloc’s slope the foursome next encountered pine trees. Recall that scientific surveys place pine forest at 3,815 meters, after the zone of fir trees. Pine forest, much like fir but a distinct type of tree, had distinct ritual connotations.1  Pine resin certainly had practical uses, it could be made into rubber or chewing gum, but it was also revered as a religious offering and valued for its medicinal use.2  The entry for pine in the Florentine Codex places emphasis on the usage of the wood as a catalyst for vision. It reads, “[t]he pine is embracing. It is a provider of light, a means of seeing, a resinous torch.”3  Pine wood was used for torches and the resin as fuel for the flame, especially during pre-contact ceremonial feasts.4  Durán noted that “even the bark of resinous trees was revered so that it could create a good fire,” indicating that resinous trees, like pine, were crucial to effective ceremonies.5  In conjunction, this upper piedmont area is an ideal habitat for whitetail deer, a common food source in the region.6  Pine forest fostered a “precocious habitat for white-tailed deer” and represented the fertile and life-giving environment that Tlaloc was capable of providing.7  The ecology of the upper slope of Mount Tlaloc right before the timberline is replete with agricultural and ritual significance. 

After moving through the pine forest, the tlahtoque’s path to the summit becomes increasingly difficult to navigate as the mountain surface turns jagged due to ancient lava flow.8  Townsend suggests that the tlahtoque climbed the mountain guided by a fifteenth-century aqueduct, after moving through the highly forested area of the mountain’s slope.9  Considering that this aqueduct provided water to the eastern valley of Mexico, Townsend argues that the ritual climb to the summit of Mount Tlaloc ensured essential water was continuously provided to the valley below, thus marking the kings who conducted this ritual as life giving themselves.10

Although Nahua artists rendered the mountains of this region with their icy snow-capped peaks, the physical perception of temperature along Mount Tlaloc’s slope likely differed from our twenty-first century physical understanding.11  Tlalocan, as an eternal springtime and fertile environment, projected warmth, even when meteorological conditions indicated otherwise. Within Nahua worldview, the entirety of the earth’s surface encompassed a radiating, warm energy.12  This energy, or tonalli, is best understood as an animating quality garnered from the sun’s rays.13  Tonalli could also relate to the seasons; its warming quality specifically aligned with the temperate climate of late spring and summer.14  Plants could absorb and capture tonalli.15  Tlalocan was a warm spring where plants possessed the heat-like quality of tonalli. 

• 1
  While fir and pine trees are both classified as conifers and belong to the same plant family, their plant group names are different. Fir trees are categorized as Abies while pine trees are members of the genus Pinus.
• 2
  James Maffie, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion (Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2014), 187.
• 3
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 11, Chapter 6, 107-108.
• 4
  Pine torches are illustrated in Primeros Memoriales fol. 252v, Codex Telleriano- Remensis fol. 29r, and the Codex Vaticanus A fol. 84v.
• 5
  Durán, Ancient Gods and Rites, 290.
• 6
  William T. Sanders, Jeffrey R. Parsons, and Robert S. Santley, The Basin of Mexico: Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 88, 282, 476, 479.
• 7
  Ibid., 479.
• 8
  Townsend, “The Mt. Tlaloc Project,” 27.
• 9
  Townsend, “The Renewal of Nature at the Temple of Tlaloc,” 173.
• 10
  Ibid., 182.
• 11
  The Codex Nuttall notably features mountains with their snow-capped peaks, including that of Mount Tlaloc. Ferdinand Anders, Maarten Jansen, and Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez, El rey 8 Venado, Garra de Jaguar, y la dinastía de Teozacualco-Zaachila: Libro explicativo del llamado Códice Zouche-Nuttall(Madrid: Sociedad Estatal Quinto Centenario, 1992), 114-115.
• 12
  Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 271.
• 13
  Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl, 245-246.
• 14
  Sahagún, Primeros Memoriales, 224, note 13.
• 15
  Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 272. Allison Caplan has explored the relationship between tonalli and Nahua featherwork. Allison Caplan, “The Living Feather: Tonalli in Nahua Feather Production,” Ethnohistory 67, no. 3 (2020): 383-406.

Once at the top the rulers processed around the enclosed courtyard at the summit (Fig. 10).1  Surrounding the effigy of Tlaloc were smaller effigy figures, likely representations of the Tlaloque. Together, the figures replicated the deities of Tlaloc’s domain.2  Townsend describes how, one by one, and in order of rank, the kings presented elaborate gifts—textiles, headdresses composed of fine feathers, jewelry made of precious stones—to Tlaloc and the smaller figures.3  Sumptuous feasts then commenced and the blood of sacrificed children was sprinkled upon the worshipped figures.4  After the offerings on the mountaintop had concluded, the tlahtoque then descended the mountain in celebration.5  In his work on the archaeology of Mount Tlaloc’s summit, Townsend unites Durán’s account with the archaeological record. The summit of Mount Tlaloc was outfitted with a prominent ritual stage; Durán writes of a “large, square courtyard, surrounded by a well-built fence” that was  “whitewashed”  and “could be seen from many leagues away.”6  This construction in concert with the performed ritual labor created an opening to the “womb of the mountain” below.7  Townsend proposes, in connecting the ethnohistoric accounts to the archaeological record, that the offerings of blood at the mountaintop enclosure were akin to a ritualized fertilization within the womb shape resting on top of the mountain.8  The historic rituals of the mountain summit, as distilled by ethnohistoric and archaeological sources, were made possible only after the tlahtoque physically ascended the mountain slope. 

• 1
  Archaeological evidence corroborates much of Durán’s accounts. However, the material record also illuminates additional aspects of this pilgrimage and ceremony. As suggested by Johanna Broda, the 125-meter processional causeway, attached to the courtyard, was oriented to the east so that those journeying to the shrine were also simultaneously processing towards the sunrise. Anthony F. Aveni, Edward E. Calnek, and Horst Hartung proposed that Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor was oriented to align with the eastern summit of Mount Tlaloc. Similarly, Stainsław Iwaniszewski exposed the numerous astronomically aligned sightlines of Mount Tlaloc to the neighboring landforms of Malinche and Pico de Orizaba. Johanna Broda, “Processions and Aztec State Rituals in the Landscape of the Valley of Mexico,” in Processions in the Ancient Americas, ed. Susan Toby Evans (University Park: Penn State University Occasional Papers in Anthropology no. 33, 2016), 189; Anthony F. Aveni, Edward E. Calnek, and Horst Hartung, “Myth, Environment, and the Orientation of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan,” American Antiquity 53 (1988): 287-309; Iwaniszewski, “Archaeology and Archaeoastronomy of Mount Tlaloc, Mexico,” 158-176.
• 2
  Durán also reported that around the center sculpture of Tlaloc were smaller figures, thought to represent the neighboring mountains. These smaller figures “accompanied Tlaloc, as the other hills accompanied the mountains.” These miniature mountains relate to a similar practice detailed in the Florentine Codex, in which figurines of mountains were molded from amaranth seed dough and represented the landforms of the valley of Mexico, including that of Mount Tlaloc. It is more than likely that the figures represented both adjacent mountains as well as the tlaloque. Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España, 82, my translation.
• 3
  Durán, The Book of the Gods, 156; Townsend, “The Renewal of Nature at the Temple of Tlaloc,” 176-178.
• 4
  Durán, The Book of the Gods, 157-58.
• 5
  Ibid., 160.
• 6
  Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España, 82, my translation.
• 7
  Townsend connects this constructed courtyard as an opening to the mountain’s cave/womb relying upon an illustration from the Codex Borbonicus as evidence. In this illustration, the creator gods are sitting within a rectangular enclosure as water flows from the courtyard enclosure’s opening. Townsend, “The Renewal of Nature at the Temple of Tlaloc,” 179.
• 8
  Ibid., 182.

Within the context of Late Postclassic Central Mexico a ritual of high-altitude pilgrimage was undertaken by four rulers. Not only did this pilgrimage inaugurate the rainy season, it also corresponded to the pan-Mesoamerican concept that pilgrimage and concurrent ritual acts were part of a larger effort to maintain balance and continuity within the world.1  In their trek horizontally across the Basin of Mexico and then vertically up the slope of Mount Tlaloc, the tlahtoque were actively involved in veneration of the rain deity even before reaching the mountain’s summit. A reevaluation of this ritual indicates that the ascension of the mountain slope was itself important for local rulers. The ecological context of Mount Tlaloc’s slope was grafted onto the physical experience of pilgrimage, contributing to an all-encompassing journey of renewal. The mountain slope possessed the physical and ecological capacity to render it as a localized Tlalocan, made manifest by the rulers’ interaction with and understanding of the space as they moved through it. Ascension through this earthly paradise further enhanced the rain renewal ceremonies that would continue on the mountain’s summit. This distinct ecological discourse shifts our perception of the mountain’s overall physical role in rain renewal ceremonies. A consideration of the mountain slope highlights how the totality of its steep sides and exposed bedrock contributed to pilgrimage experiences. Even today, the legacy of Postclassic and Late Postclassic conceptions of Mount Tlaloc resonate as it is still venerated as a sacred location. Numerous pilgrims continue to ascend the slope to worship on its peak.2

• 1
  For a discussion on pan-Mesoamerican ritual, see Jeremy D. Coltman and John M.D. Pohl, ed., Sorcery in Mesoamerica (Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2020). For a Maya comparison, see Joel Palka, Maya Pilgrimage to Ritual Landscapes: Insights from Archaeology, History, and Ethnography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014).
• 2
  Iwaniszewski, “Archaeology and Archaeoastronomy of Mount Tlaloc, Mexico,” 162. Iwaniszewski writes of a “modern shrine” and “six wooden crosses inserted into a wall,” indicating the presence of modern ceremonies. While Iwaniszewski’s report is from 1994, the mountain peak is still thought of as a revered location in the twenty-first century.