Emiliano Gallaga M. and Mark G. Blainey (Eds.), “Manufactured Light: Mirrors in the Mesoamerican Realm.” Sixteenth Century Journal XLVIII(3):860–862.

This book was edited by Emiliano Gallaga and Marc G. Blainey. A 324-page hardcover edition was published by University Press of Colorado, Boulder in 2016. The review appears in Vol. 59 "Technology and Culture" 2018:473-475.

In broad terms, a shaman is a religious specialist who communicates with spirits on the behalf of individuals and the larger society. In Mesoamerican cultures the elite rulers were also shamans. This was a privileged position in the society and rulers would enter into an altered state of consciousness, or trance, in order to communicate with the spirit world. The trance could be brought on in a variety of ways including ingesting hallucinogens, rhythmic drumming, chanting, or blood loss. While in the trance, the shaman would transform themselves into a powerful animal spirit, or nagual, in order to dominate the spirits, like a predator dominates it’s pray (Saunders 30). In this paper I will demonstrate how Mesoamerican people used their natural resources to produce mirrors that help us to understand how they viewed their relationship to the natural and supernatural world.

The political relevance of celestial imagery and astronomically-derived concepts in ancient Mesoamerica is evidenced in a wide variety of sources. Prehispanic codices often contain astronomical tables used by priesthood intimately connected with the governing class, and early colonial documents allude to the astronomical expertise of particular Contact-period rulers. The iconography of sculpted monuments and decorative elements associated with elite residences and administrative buildings discloses a close relationship between rulers and certain celestial bodies, whose orderly behavior was believed to be responsible for a proper course of cyclical changes in the natural environment. Mythological narratives and, particularly, the Maya hieroglyphic texts and the accompanying iconography reveal that the kings personified not only the most important deities but also their celestial avatars. And finally, the architectural orientations, largely intended to pinpoint seasonal astronomical phenomena whose relevance can be understood in terms of their concomitance with agriculturally important moments of the tropical year, are most prominently and consistently incorporated in monumental buildings of civic and ceremonial cores of ancient cities throughout Mesoamerica.

This is a preliminary report of a project that focused on three major issues, (a) investigation of the symbolic nature of the Late Postclassic Central Mexican deity Tezcatlipoca, (b) re-evaluation of his role during the Spanish conquest A.D. 1519-21 and into the early colonial period, and (c) charting the symbolic dimensions of obsidian per se, and particularly as colonial period ’mirrors’ and church ’decoration’ associated with post-conquest continuations of Pre-Columbian beliefs and worship of deities, perhaps specifically of Tezcatlipoca. This project built on earlier work carried out with FAMSI assistance at Dumbarton Oaks in 1996, and involved extensive library and museum research in Europe and the USA, and fieldwork in México. While the project as planned was uncompleted, much of the research has been published in various forms, though not necessarily with the titles originally envisaged and present in this report.