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Sacred Consumption: Food and Ritual in Aztec Art and Culture

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Description

Aztec painted manuscripts and sculptural works, in addition to indigenous and Spanish sixteenth-century texts, were filled with images of foodstuffs and food processing and consumption. Both gods and humans were depicted feasting, and food and eating clearly played a pervasive, integral role in Aztec rituals. Basic foods were transformed into sacred elements within particular rituals, at the same time as food in turn gave meaning to the ritual performance.

This pioneering book offers the first integrated study of food and ritual in Aztec art. Elizabeth Morán asserts that at the same time as feasting and consumption are regularly seen as a secondary aspect of ritual performance, a close examination of images of food rites in Aztec ceremonies demonstrates that the presence—or, in some cases, the absence—of food in the rituals gave them significance. She traces the ritual use of food from the beginning of Aztec mythic history through contact with Europeans, demonstrating how food and ritual activity, the on a regular basis and the sacred, blended in ceremonies that ranged from observances of births, marriages, and deaths to sacrificial offerings of human hearts and blood to feed the gods and deal with the cosmic order. Morán also briefly considers continuities in the usage of pre-Hispanic foods in the day-to-day life and ritual practices of up to date Mexico. Bringing together two domain names that have prior to now been studied in isolation, Sacred Consumption promises to be a foundational work in Mesoamerican studies.

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