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An examination of the importance of Nahua sacred bundles, emphasizing their impact on power dynamics, language, and culture in the Nahua religious tradition.

The Bundle is a deep scholarly meditation on tlaquimilolli, key religious objects of Mexico’s Indigenous Nahua, formerly “Aztec,” people. These sacred bundles, depicted across Nahua iconography, contained objects associated with the gods and their deeds and were believed to be their embodiments. Drawing on Indigenous sources, Molly Bassett tells the story of the tlaquimilolli’s origins and significance, critically examines previous interpretations, and argues that the form of the tlaquimilolli—not just their contents—is a key to understanding Nahua cosmology.

Bassett turns to Indigenous scholarship to interrogate and “unwrap” accepted narratives, taking the sacred bundle itself as a model for theorizing the world. She attends to tlaquimilolli in the context of glyphs and poetry, ritual and ordinary activity, and ceremonial structures. In revealing ways, the material properties of tlaquimilolli were reflected in the architecture of major temples and key cities, like Tenochtitlan. Bundling was also closely entwined with relationships between caretakers and their dependents. These prosaic attachments cast both sacred objects and Nahua sociability in a new light, challenging existing interpretations of Nahua religious traditions.

Following their first contact in 1519, accounts of Aztecs identifying Spaniards as gods proliferated. But what exactly did the Aztecs mean by a “god” (teotl), and how could human beings become gods or take on godlike properties? This sophisticated, interdisciplinary study analyzes three concepts that are foundational to Aztec religion—teotl (god), teixiptla (localized embodiment of a god), and tlaquimilolli (sacred bundles containing precious objects)—to shed new light on the Aztec understanding of how spiritual beings take on form and agency in the material world.

In The Fate of Earthly Things, Molly Bassett draws on ethnographic fieldwork, linguistic analyses, visual culture, and ritual studies to explore what ritual practices such as human sacrifice and the manufacture of deity embodiments (including humans who became gods), material effigies, and sacred bundles meant to the Aztecs. She analyzes the Aztec belief that wearing the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim during a sacred rite could transform a priest into an embodiment of a god or goddess, as well as how figurines and sacred bundles could become localized embodiments of gods. Without arguing for unbroken continuity between the Aztecs and modern speakers of Nahuatl, Bassett also describes contemporary rituals in which indigenous Mexicans who preserve costumbres (traditions) incorporate totiotzin (gods) made from paper into their daily lives. This research allows us to understand a religious imagination that found life in death and believed that deity embodiments became animate through the ritual binding of blood, skin, and bone.