During the ceremonies held to honor the Aztec deity Xipe Totec, the officiating priests donned the following garb: “butterfly nets, fish banners, clusters of ear[s] [of] maize, coyote heads made of a paste of amaranth seeds, S-shaped tortillas, thick rolls covered with a dough of amaranth seeds, which they covered on top with toasted maize … and maize stalks with ears of green or tender maize” (41–42). Foodstuffs, from tortillas to tiny amaranth seeds, feature prominently in this extravagant getup. Sacred Consumption, a concise study based on Elizabeth Morán’s doctoral dissertation, examines the place of food within Aztec ritual and so helps explain the priests’ attire. Foods such as the maize and amaranth that adorned Xipe Totec’s priests formed part of the everyday dietary of ordinary people in the Aztec world. They also played an important role in household and state-sponsored ritual, in Aztec accounts of their own history, and in their broader cosmology. Sacred Consumption documents the ways in which food, and its transformative powers, structured the relationship between individuals, the divine, and the natural world. Morán argues in essence that the efficacy of Aztec religious rituals derived in part from their use of food. The Aztecs (Morán prefers this term to the more fashionable Mexica) were in no way unusual in according a special status to their staple foods. As the historian Felipe Fernández Armesto observed, “staples are almost always sacred” (4). Nor were they unique in consuming special foods on ritual occasions, or marking such occasions with particular consumption practices. All these are common features of human culture. Sacred Consumption explores the specific ways in which Aztecs used food to structure personal and public rituals, and to link themselves to the cosmos.

As a number of scholars have noted, food and food metaphors played a central role in Aztec cosmology. Morán provides fascinating examples of how foods both real and metaphorical enabled profound transformations, which demonstrated that people, plants, and gods were interconnected. In one ritual small boys were “cooked” by being passed over a fire, to both symbolize and effect their transformation into full members of society. In another, the young participants were bedecked with maize because through their ritualized activities they had in fact become one with this fundamental foodstuff. Tortillas destined for the gods were shaped like human hands and feet. Morán, an art historian, is particularly illuminating in her analysis of images and artworks, which she places in effective dialogue with early colonial chronicles and other written sources. Her visual literacy, for instance, helps reveal the importance of food to Aztec stories of ethnogenesis; she spots grinding stones and other cooking accoutrements hiding in plain sight in some of the well-known codices recounting the epic migration of the Aztec peoples to their eventual home in Tenochtitlan. For the Aztecs, she argues, their ritual food practices were thus “intertwined with their rise to power” (95).

While foods provided a robust framework for organizing Aztec cosmology, they have not performed quite the same service for Sacred Consumption. The book’s expository structure is somewhat confusing. Discussion of specific themes is scattered bewilderingly across the book’s four chapters; explanation of the close identification between cacao pods, hearts, and blood is dispersed across pages 46, 89, and 93, for example. The practice of blowing on kernels of maize prior to cooking, the use of amaranth in ritual figures, and a number of other topics are repeatedly introduced as if they had not previously been discussed. There are also some indications that the text itself has not undergone a complete transformation of the sort that food enabled within Aztec systems. Morán refers on several occasions to “my manuscript,” as if the published volume were still a work in progress, and there are confusing mismatches (a detail that appears clearly in figure 1.2 is, for instance, described in the text as “not shown”). Such editorial infelicities notwithstanding, the book provides an immensely useful resource. It contains a wealth of information about the myriad ways that food served “as a catalyst for transforming time, space, gods, and the Aztec people” (78). And I’m tempted to re-create the “lobster with red chil[l]i, tomatoes and ground squash seeds” (47) enjoyed by the lords of Tenochtitlan in their heyday, before the deluge.