What the Witnesses Said He Did

The depositions describe a working practice rather than a doctrine. Ocelotl is a tlaciuhqui, a term the Spanish translated as sorcerer and which covers divination, weather work and the reading of signs. He forecasts rain and drought, and is paid for it. He heals, and is paid for that too. He advises on when to plant. He is prosperous, lends at interest, has land and dependants, and travels the highlands as a merchant, which is how his reputation moves. He is also political.

Witnesses report him telling people that the friars were not what they claimed, that the world was near a turn, and that those who had adopted Spanish ways would suffer for it. He is said to have advised storing food against a coming famine, which in a Nahua frame is prophecy and in a Spanish frame is sedition. He had been baptised in 1525 and did not deny it; the charge was that he had gone back. All of this comes from people answering questions put by a court that had already decided what it was looking for, and the vocabulary in which it reaches us is Spanish, so a category like sorcery is doing work in the file that it was never doing in Nahuatl. Read with that allowance, it is still the closest thing there is to a portrait of an early colonial Nahua religious specialist at work.