Lecture | The Magical and the Everyday, or How the Aztecs Represented Plants

In the Aztec world, plants were medicine and food. They were symbols of origin stories and places of sacrifice. The sting of a cactus was the omen that led the Aztecs to found their imperial capital. Cacti also made great fences. Corn was made into tortillas, an Aztec dietary staple that was packed with nutrition. In one version of Aztec mythohistory, corn was also made into people. Squashes, pumpkins, and gourds were sacrificed to the gods. They also were eaten. Cacao beans were money. And cacao beans were also used to make an elite drink used at feasts and ritual. Plants were sometimes everyday beings. And sometimes they were purveyors of magic.

Before and after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan in 1519, the Aztecs obsessively created painstakingly detailed representations of plants. Some of these depictions were in hard, difficult-to-carve stone sculpture and many of them were in early colonial-period manuscripts that retained the visual properties of a now-extinct Pre-hispanic art form. In manuscripts and stone sculpture, plants were often obviously symbolic, used as name signs for important peoples, place glyphs, and representations of important events. Just as frequently, plants were just plants. Sometimes, plants were symbols and plants, leading dual lives in the Aztec world and visual culture. By exploring Aztec images of plants in both sculpture and painted books, we can come to a better understanding of how the magic and the everyday were intertwined.

Renee McGarry is a PhD candidate in Pre-columbian art at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation, “Exotic Contact: Flora and Fauna in Mexica (Aztec) Visual Culture,” considers Mexica plant and animal imagery in the context of the Mexica natural environment and the experiences of the plants and animals that are depicted. All of her work is greatly influenced by the fields of animal and plant studies, as well as the time she ordered a quesadilla sin queso in Oaxaca City and had the request denied.