Nahuatl, Peyote and Two Kinds of Survival

Classical Nahuatl is the language of the largest body of indigenous religious material recorded anywhere in the Americas. Almost all of it was written down after the conquest, in the Latin alphabet, largely under the direction of Franciscan friars, and the greatest of those compilations is the Florentine Codex assembled by Bernardino de Sahagun with Nahua collaborators over decades. That provenance has to be stated with every use of it: the material is genuinely Nahua in language and in informant, and it was collected by a missionary order in order to understand a religion it intended to replace. Both things are true at once, and reading it well means holding both. Nahuatl is still spoken by well over a million people.

Further north in the same family, the Wixarika and the Raramuri maintain ceremonial life centred in part on peyote, and the Wixarika pilgrimage to Wirikuta is a living practice with its own custodians rather than a survival of anything. Peyote religion also reached Uto-Aztecan speakers of the United States and became part of the Native American Church. These are living traditions with people responsible for them, and the atlas describes them rather than instructing anyone in them.

Sources Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New SpainBernardino de Sahagun; translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble with Peyote Religion: A HistoryOmer C. Stewart