Chapter 09: Nepantla

Nepantla is, again, an Aztec word.

Those fucking Aztecs.

Journey to Mexico City, as my wife just did, and you find yourself in a basin at 5,000 feet, surrounded by mountain peaks in all directions, the valley in which Cortez and his soldiers came to after their grueling and murderous eight month trek inland on 8 November 1519. On this day, Cortez, mounted on horseback, is permitted to enter into the capital city of Tenochtitlan, and does so upon one its primary causeways, with the entire retinue of Aztec royalty in attendance.

This arrival, which is attested to in numerous source documents, including some written by those within Cortez’ retinue, has a sort of hallucinatory intensity as its primary emotional spectra. It hovers for both sides in a liminality, adjacent to the real, yet humming with overtones of the surreal, the dreamlike, the absurd, the apocalyptic, the monumental, the mythological, the messianic.

A doomsday kaleidoscope for all.

The Spaniards–disgusting, malarial, unshaven, not having bathed properly for months, reeking of sweat and urine and defecation, their boots polished with the rendered fat of indigenous royalty they have slaughtered on the ascent–are mounted on horses, creatures that the Aztecs have previously considered mythological. There are some reports from the Indigenous side that, on arrival, Indigenous coastal dwellers could not see the Spanish galleons arriving, that they were literally invisible to them, because they could not conceive that these vessels existed.

As Wittgenstein has reminded us already, the limits of our language can be the limits of our world: this can be literally perceptually true. Invisible Spanish galleons arrive on the shore of the New World, suddenly appearing as though they are alien craft that have apparated into place, disgorging creatures of mythical status, minotaurs, four-legged, fire-breathing (their guns), possibly incarnations of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl.

The reports that reach Moctezuma II initially are of these godmen, the Indigenous scouts seeing them do not realize that the horses and men are not one but two distinct creatures. They have no idea what they are dealing with, or how these Beings appeared. You can understand why their first impulse might have been to bow. Cortez’ men, presented with bowing Aztec warriors, promptly shot them.