Materials
The Aztecs inhabited a world where everything in nature was infused with and shared a spirit that gave it life. From this worldview resulted two important ideas. First, there existed for the Aztecs a network of invisible links between themselves and other natural beings that demanded acknowledgment [1]. Second, the difference between beings sharing this one spirit was expressed and defined by the body—the material layer that covered the essence [2]. For both of these reasons, the Aztecs needed to approach their depiction of plants and animals with a clear knowledge of the correct way to use and the meaning of the material resources from which they made such depictions. They also needed an awareness of the fact that they were dealing with another animated individual [3]. One can see the result of this worldview in the proliferation of natural imagery in Aztec art that possesses a distinctive realism.
While these images of nature are sometimes stamped onto pottery, stone carving was the Aztecs’ preferred medium for portraying plants and animals [4]. That this was the favored medium makes the intense liveliness found in these natural depictions that much more notable. In the Coiled Serpent, the artist manages to carve in stone a serpent’s dynamic movement, rendering the animal mysterious and organic all at once. The artist turns a block of hard material into a seemingly infinite writhing knot.
Beyond the artist’s thoughtful carving of the snake in stone, artist’s particular choice of stone for the Coiled Serpent lends it a natural quality. The snake is carved out of ruddy-brown stone, which is also quite granular. Small particles and flecks of other grains freckle and mottle the exterior of the stone. In addition to this coloring, the texture of the snake is quite earthy because the stone used to make the animal has been left unpolished. Therefore, the exterior of the sculpture remains unrefined, coarse and uneven to the touch. Allowing the surface of the sculpture to retain an unfinished and rough quality, the artist uses stone to imbue the serpent with an earthiness and an organic nature.
Looking at the impossible posture carved for the serpent, one finds that the artist has given the reptile the qualities of the material of rubber in the medium of stone. Using a toy snake, a snake that one can manipulate by twisting and stretching, one can approximate the densely tangled pose of the Coiled Serpent. With an easily manipulated length, unlike stone, the bendable serpent can be formed by knotting it over and over again into a tight ball of an animal that engulfs itself. In knotting the body thus, the head naturally thrusts out of the top of the mass–– just as it does in the Coiled Serpent. The position of the stone snake, impossible in nature, is possible when the animal is of rubber.
The notion of rubber’s influence on this work is lent credence by Bernardo de Sahagún writing in the Florentine Codex. He identifies one kind of snake, the Coatatapayolli, as "a massing together or serpents. Sometimes all are massed together, gathered in a ball. Nowhere does its tail appear; only its head goes showing. They become rounded." He continues, "And they call it olcoatl. [Its name] comes from olli because it is round [and black]; then coatl, because it has its head and tail" [5]. In this quote, Sahagún describes a rounded mass of snake with a head emerging from the top, a description that fits the Coiled Serpent. He then goes on to name it as a rubber serpent, olli referring to the elastic gum or sap of a rubber tree.
Imbuing this snake in stone with rubber qualities is significant for rubber is a material that generates movement. Rubber bounces. In its bouncing and shaking, rubber throws off energy. It is, in other words, a material with a great amount of tonalli. Tonalli, literally “the warmth of the sun,” is the energy source connected exclusively with the sun [6]. It was the energy source that descended from the sun, partaking of the solar force and demonstrating some of its qualities. The covering of this snake, which expresses the snake’s identity, is as much rubber as it is stone. Accordingly the snake is emanating tonalli, throwing off energy and heat, even though it is in cool, unreflective, and not iridescent stone. The artist’s choice to create rubber from stone and do so in the form of a snake is to highlight in these natural elements the shared essence and spirit amongst them.
This way, the Coiled Serpent could function through its materials as an ixiptlah. The Nahuatl concept of ixiptlah, or teixiptlah, is connected to the notion of unique identities as created through the beings’ coverings. It is the complex concept that refers to physical objects or persons as representations or substitutes for someone or something, such as a god [7]. The ixiptlah adopts the identity of the divine by donning its covering, which animated it with a hot, luminous energy befitting the resplendent divine. The ixiptlah has been posited to always be the product of human creation, which therefore encompasses sculptures in stone. Thus, the inanimate sculpture becomes animate, a subject activated by the covering act of sculpting. In particular, by rendering the Coiled Serpent’s material covering as tonalli-laden rubber, not just stone, the work is charged with a brilliant energy.
Beyond this, the invocation of rubber in the Coiled Serpent is meaningful because it connects the work to the Aztec notion of the five “Suns,” or world-eras. Believing themselves to be in the Fifth Sun, the Aztecs held that their present world was preceded by four earlier worlds that were destroyed by specific natural forces after which the era was then named. The Fifth Sun was Nahui-Ollin, which means 4-Movement [8]. Accordingly, the Fifth Sun was believed to end in earthquakes. This is significant for a discussion of the rubber quality of the Coiled Serpent because rubber is associated with earthquakes. Rubber and earthquakes are connected as sources of bounce, sharing the ability to generate movement in and of themselves. In tying the stone serpent to rubber and, by extension, to earthquakes and the end of the world, the artist creates through the use of specific materials a depiction of both the energy and mystery of the cosmos in the snake.
[1] Eduardo Matos Moctezuma and Felipe Solís, Aztecs (New-York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 141.
[2] Diana Magaloni Kerpel, The Colors of the New World: Artists, Materials, and the Creation of the Florentine codex (Los Angeles, L.A.: Getty Research Institute, 2014), 13.
[4] Ibid., 142.
[5] Bernardino De Sahagún, "Earthly Things," trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, in Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 1970), 86.
[6] Christian Duverger, Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone, 1989), 367.
[7] Magaloni Kerpel, The Colors of the New World, 12.
[8] Matos Moctezuma and Solís, Aztecs, 414.