Blindfolds and the Eternal Return in Late Postclassic Central Mexico

Summary

Scholars have invariably interpreted the blindfolds worn by certain figures in Aztec painted manuscripts as a sign of—in their words—"transgression," "sin," and "punishment." This talk challenges the simplicity and inherent Eurocentrism of that reading. It is true that the Aztecs perceived a person’s mistakes to plunge him into darkness and chaos, and that blindfolds, at one level, symbolized that disorder. The cause of a moral error, however, was embodied by certain objects and substances that also contained the power to cure the damage caused—and thus to restore order and wholeness to the social fabric. For the Aztecs the blindfold enabled this reversal. It did so, I argue, because, by blocking vision and light, it symbolically returned the wearer to the primordial darkness of the earliest years of the Creation when, sources tell us, "it had always been night." Blindfolds allowed their wearer to tap into the creative energy of this darkness, thereby undoing the damage caused. This new understanding of blindfolds as having ambivalent meaning for the Aztecs therefore resonates with Mircea Eliade’s concept of the "Eternal Return," in which people the world over symbolically return to the distant past in order to restart the present.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Night and Darkness in Precolulmbian Mexico and Central America   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15589