In this extensive and complete study, David Tavárez analyses an exceptional source, the 102 divinatory manuals and musical scores contained in a trial for idolatry, finalized in 1702 against the Zapotecs of the northern highlands of Oaxaca. This source was first partially published by Alcina Franch, but it is through the meticulous study of Tavárez that we are more deeply able to enter this fascinating world of traditional Indigenous devotions. Thus, these manuals, in the words of the author, condense encyclopedic information about festivals, ancestors, offerings, rites, as well as astronomical observations, cosmological theories, cycles of time, information about the ancient Zapotec pantheon, and especially the theories of this people about the structures of time and space, the origin of the universe and the cycles of ritual obligations to preserve these sacred books. Each of these complex themes is developed throughout the eight fascinating chapters of the book and a unique appendix. The first chapter is a complete introduction to the subject; in the second chapter, the author focuses on offering an analytical reworking of the Zapotec and Nahua calendars. The third and fourth chapters are dedicated, respectively, to the writing in colonial Zapotec society and the theories of time and space within this same society. Chapters five, six and seven are devoted to the analysis of the festivities celebrated for the deities and sacred entities, the songs dedicated to the ancestors and the forms of adaptation, reception, and resistance of the Zapotecs with respect to Christianity. Finally, the book is accompanied by an extremely important appendix, a long translation from colonial Zapotec into English of the chants included in two of the manuals, which represents—as a primary source—the most detailed Indigenous sacred history from colonial America.
Thanks to his unique work, Tavárez explains in detail the ritual and divinatory tradition contained in the Villa Alta manuals, which goes back to a deep Mesoamerican past, as the author points out; he also offers a substantial comparison between the Zapotec and colonial Nahua years. Based on the Zapotec language, as well as numerous sources such as the Codex Borbonicus and classical specialists such as Alfonso Caso, the author demonstrates how the calendrical stability among the cultures of central Mexico is a fallacy, since, although the temporal cycles of festivals and about the destiny of an individual are similar among Mesoamerican societies, there were local theories about the cosmos and its cycles, so that the 260- and 364-day calendars were open and could be recalibrated if necessary.
Tavárez also analyzes important aspects of the written variants of colonial Zapotec; for example, he compares the singular originality of the rhetorical uses of sacred and mundane texts in Zapotec, finding similarities between the celebrated corpus of Los Cantares Mexicanos in Nahuatl with sacred texts of the colonial Zapotecs. As can be observed, Tavárez is not satisfied with giving us a vision of the regional Indigenous cult, which would have been enough, but complements his analysis by contrasting the information in these manuals with numerous colonial sources in indigenous languages and with ancient precolonial calendrical codices, such as the Borgia codex and the Fejérváry-Mayer codex, finding an extraordinary linguistic, semantic, and semasiographic convergence in cosmogonic sequences that entail acts of creation.
Undoubtedly this book is a unique compendium of the religious culture and theogony of America's native peoples, I have no doubt that it will become obligatory consultation for specialists of various disciplines and graduate students interested in this subject and in the Indigenous colonial world in general.
