Two-Sided Mirrors: Nahua Truths and Solomonic Wisdom in Colonial Mexico

In Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica (Aztec) Empire, the notion of "wisdom" was conveyed by the phrase coyauac tezcatl necoc xapo, "the broad mirror polished on two sides," both a metaphor and a reference to the forecasting powers of Tezcatlipoca, a deity of creation and divination. This presentation examines the fracture points of a process that should also be understood, metaphorically, as a two-sided mirror: the dialogues and scholarly cooperation between Nahua intellectuals and Franciscan authors that unfolded around Scripture. I examine two of the most remarkable texts produced through Nahua and Franciscan partnerships:

a translation of and commentary on the Proverbs of Solomon, which survives in a sixteenth-century manuscript and later copies, and Ecclesiastes, preserved in a seventeenth-century text. According to Franciscan authors, these works were drafted before 1562 by Luis Rodríguez and several Nahua scholars from the Colegio de Santa Cruz, founded by Franciscans in 1536. These works are not mere translations, but magnificent scholarly commentaries on Biblical texts that employed approaches similar to those pioneered by theologians and church fathers Thomas Aquinas and Denys the Carthusian, carefully articulated through the use of Nahua linguistic and cultural frameworks.

The Nahua Proverbs also features citations drawn from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, from Ovid’s poem Remedia amoris (The Remedy for Love), and from works by Publius Syrius and other classical authors. It was confiscated by the Mexican Inquisition in 1577, along with a Nahuatl version of Ecclesiastes also attributed to Rodríguez, due to stringent policies that made all vernacular translations of the Bible unavailable in the Spanish Empire after 1559. This presentation explores the multiple resonances of an intellectual project whose ambition and daring made it a target for suppression by the advancing tides of the Counter-Reformation.