Play Ball

Question: Okay, this one's for Anne - What can you tell us about those rivals to the Aztecs, the Tarascans? What were their gods/goddesses like?

Cue Mesoamerica again!

The people of the Tarascan empire are more properly the Purhepecha, people of Michoacan, the second-largest empire in Mexico at the time of the European invasion and the only real rival to the power of the Mexica-controlled Aztec empire, with which they maintained a sometimes-hot, sometimes-cold war for most of their existence. Michoacan fell only shortly after Tenochtitlan, ransacked by the Spanish as soon as they had finished allying with the Tarascans against the Aztecs, and the name today survives as one of the states of the modern country of Mexico.

We don't know as much about these guys' religion as some of the other peoples in the area, unfortunately; their records were preserved even less well than those of some of their neighbors, and our only really good remaining source of information about their ancient culture is the Chronicle of Michoacan, which was written by Spanish priests based on what the locals told them in order to be sent back to Europe as a curiosity. It's by far the closest to original we've got, with a section dedicated to describing the gods and festivals of the Tarascans, but it's also secondhand through a Christian writer, and in this case we lack any pre-Conquest documents to try to show where biases or editorializing might have occurred, so we pretty much have to take it on faith.

So we do know the names and even some of the customs (lots of blood sacrifice, as you do in Mexico) surrounding Tarascan gods, but don't have as firm a view of exactly what they were all about as we do for folks with better-preserved folklore like the Maya or Mexica. We know they had several major gods of their own, including the shapeshifting fertility goddess Xaratanga, who transformed into a serpent to hide from her enemies and a wizened old crone to trick her worshipers into revealing their ungenerous natures, Querenda Angapeti, an underworld-connected god who could be called upon to grant prophetic visions, Curicaueri, a culture-hero god who led the Tarascans to found their empire, and Hacuizecatapeme, the major ruling god of the pantheon to whom most sacrifices were dedicated.

Neat names for neat gods, or so we must assume despite not knowing a whole lot about them. There's definitely also some of the typical cultural borrowing in the area going on; the story of Curicaueri helping to found Michoacan is very similar in spirit to the tale of Huitzilopochtli helping to found Tenochtitlan, despite the general hostility between the two peoples, and indeed the Tarascans do mention a Zinzuviquixo as the god of the Mexica, probably referring to Huitzilopochtli by their own name for him (both mean "hummingbird" in their respective languages). The tale of the gods Cupanzieeri and Achuri Hirepe playing a ball game that ends in one of them losing and being sacrificed, after which his as-yet-unborn son Siratatapezi must discover his birthright with the help of friendly animals and defeat his father's murderer, is an obvious parallel to the Maya story of the Hero Twins, although in this case there is only one son to carry on his father's ball-playing legacy. And we have some great sculptures of a guy that looks suspiciously like Tlaloc, teeth and all, although of course the googly-eyed rain god is a pretty widespread phenomenon in Mesoamerica and needn't necessarily be referring to the same dude.

Unfortunately, almost all our Tarascan mythology is firmly post-Conquest, meaning we don't know how their stories might have played out before the intrusion of European influences. Some tales have had origin myths tacked onto them, such as the ball-playing myth now incorporating an explanation of where horses came from (the corpse of Cupanzieeri, once rescued by his son), while quite of few of the others are involved with explaining the Spanish invasion from the point of view of the Tarascans, who have a story somewhat akin to a council of their gods trying to explain what was going on and give them advice about how to deal with the newcomers. We really don't know a lot about what they were doing before then, though of course archaeological evidence is always fun to speculate over.

Unless we manage to unearth an awesome Tarascan codex or an unknown archaeological site full of relevant paintings soon, we'll probably remain on tenuous ground with this particular mythology. But, like all of Scion's gods, they're out there, and they definitely know the Teotl. Anything could happen.