The following are excerpts from an excellent essay that I read today:
Rob
Fergus, “Abinadi Unplugged: The Messiah of Mosiah 15 in a Mesoamerican Milieu,”
in God Himself Shall Come Down: Reading Mosiah 15, ed. Andrew Smith and
Joseph M. Spencer (Latter-day Saint Theology Seminar; 2023), 91-118.
For the Maya and other Mesoamerican
cultures, gods were real divine inhabitants of the heavens, earth, and
underworld. It is hard to fully reconstruct ancient Maya theological systems,
which varied in some particulars from city to city and through the course of
time. But we know that they recognized and interacted with a large number of
named deities, each with their own recognizable forms and functions. Known by
the collective name of k’uh or ch’uh (“divine beings”), their exploits
and activities are commonly depicted in iconography and texts displaying a bewildering
profundity of beings and divine roles. Individual gods can be shown in many different
forms, and beings that are often depicted separately are sometimes shown to be
manifestations of a single deity or, as scholars sometimes refer to them, god
complexes.
In Mesoamerican cultures, gods that
are sometimes depicted as separate, or in separate manifestations, are given
collective names or theonyms. It has recently been argued that what were once
seen as three different Classic Maya gods—referred to by scholars as God N, God
D, and God L based on their separate depictions—should be seen as different
manifestations of the same supreme god, a wrinkled aged deity who created the Maya
heaven and earth. (Martin, “The Old Man of the Maya Universe”) While we do not
fully know his Classic Maya or earlier names, many texts refer to his numerous
manifestations with a variation of the name Itzam. (Martin, “The Old Man
of the Maya Universe”) It has been shown that these manifestations of the old
Maya gods were at times known by the collective theonym Chan Tunun Itzam.
(As argued in Boot, “The Chan Tunun Itzam”) (Rob Fergus, “Abinadi Unplugged:
The Messiah of Mosiah 15 in a Mesoamerican Milieu,” in God Himself Shall Come
Down: Reading Mosiah 15, ed. Andrew Smith and Joseph M. Spencer [Latter-day
Saint Theology Seminar; 2023], 104-5)
When the Sun God descended each day into the underworld, he was commonly depicted as a Baby Jaguar God, to be reborn
each day as a young Sun God in the east. Just as the Sun God is regularly
resurrected and raised into the sky, Classic Maya rulers aspired to be exalted
after death as heirs to his kingdom and share in his glory. Several Classic
Maya vases depict the Flower Mountain created by God N as “a place of
resurrection and ascent out of the underworld. (Taube, “Flower Mountain”) As
such, the Flower Mountain was particularly associated with the dying and
Resurrected Maize God and the daily rebirth of the Sun God. Sometimes the Sun
God is shown within the eyes of the witz [sacred mountain or hill] as a
cosmic monster.
MESOAMERICAN MOSIAH 15
It would be within this typically Mesoamerican
cosmology that Noah and Abinadi faced off with their competing claims about the
connection between rulers, gods, creation, and the possibility of resurrection.
As a typical Late Preclassic Mesoamerican king, Noah would have seen himself as
a divine figure, whose ritual performances unite heaven and earth and maintain
order in the cosmos. He would expect to be resurrected and deified after death,
as do all kings and those of noble birth. But Abinadi makes other claims.
When Abinadi says that “God himself
shall come down among the children of men, and shall redeem his people” (Mosiah
15:1), he is not making a blasphemous statement—Mesoamerican gods come down
from the divine realm all the time. But what he is saying that this “God
himself” will redeem the people, not the rituals of the divine king or kuhul
ajaw. Abinadi will not be killed for blasphemy, but for challenging the
redemptive ritual functions of divine kings and the established order of
Mesoamerican society. (Ibid., 110-11)
In the early twentieth century, many
LDS readers were puzzled by Abinadi’s claim that “God himself” is both the
Father and the Son, leading the first presidency to issue a statement outlining
three ways that Christ can be considered the Father. (“The Father and the Son”)
But Abinadi’s Mesoamerican audience, with a more fluid understanding of divine
roles and identities, may have heard these teachings differently. Rather than trying
to shoehorn Abinadi’s statements int our own LDS preconceptions, we should be
open to finding other ways to read his claims.
Perhaps Abinadi is using “One God” as
a title or collective theological synonym linking separate deities or aspects
of deity otherwise referred to as father and son. Alternatively, Mesoamerican
deities and people are often named after days in their 260-day sacred calendar,
in which each day consists of a number and a day name—and One Ajaw (One Lord,
or perhaps One God) is one of those calendrical day names. In fact, among the Classic
Maya, One Lord (Junn Ajaw) was the name of an important god, the model for
earthly kingship, one of the Hero Twins who descends to the underworld to
defeat a council of Death Gods and avenge the death of their father. (The best
known account of the Hero Twins story comes from the early colonial K’iche May Popol
Vuh, see Christenson, The Popol Vuh. Many Classic Maya ceramics depict
similar stories of the Hero Twins, as do Preclassic carvings dating to the near
the time of Abinadi from Izapa in modern Chiapas, Mexico) It is fascinating to
speculate on how a Preclassic Maya audience would understand Abinadi’s
teachings about One God breaking the bands of death and gaining victory over
death (Mosiah 15:8) in light of contemporaneous stories about One Lord (Junn
Ajaw) and his brother descending into the underworld to defeat the gods of
death. (Ibid., 111-12)
In describing the toils of the One
God, Abinadi mentions “the flesh becoming subject to the Spirit” (Mosiah 15:5).
Modern readers immediately read this in light of thousands of years of debate
about the nature and relationship between spirit and matter. Leaving western philosophy
aside, this statement might have many different meanings for a Mesoamerican audience,
where flesh and spirit may have different connotations. For instance, many Mesoamerican
cultures consider each person to have a spirt companion (Such as nawal or
way in some cultures) or personification of their will. These companions
or spirit essences of gods and sorcerers are often depicted as stylized,
mythic, hybrid creatures or monsters, such as the square-eyed Principal Bird
Deity associated with the supreme May god Itzamnaaj (Figure 12). A Mesoamerican
audience listening to Abinadi may have envisioned the son becoming subject to
the powerful spirit companion or essence of the father. While it might be unclear
how exactly Abinadi’s original audience or culture would have artistically
rendered the will or spirit essence of the Son “being swallowed up” by the will
of the father (v. 7), it would certainly not be the same way we do. (Ibid.,
113-14)
