by Faun Rice
(1976, 1985, 1987). Still, these excellent studies are also relevant to Mexica his-
tory and culture in a way that is not usually envisioned, for, like the Banyoro, we
are here considering a stranger-kingdom established by a peripheral, relatively
undeveloped society over the legendary “high culture” core of a galactic polity.
Although such takeovers of dominant centers by hinterland peoples are not all
that unusual, everything thus happens in reverse of the ideal-typical case where
foreign kings from legendary homelands subjugate uncultured aboriginals. The
THE STRANGER-KINGSHIP OF THE MEXICA
227
structural permutations and contradictions that ensue from this reversal—Mex-
ica who proudly know themselves at once as Toltecs and Chichimecs, for exam-
ple—make up the main subject matter of this essay.
STRANGER-KINGS, GALACTIC POLITIES
To make these points, I will need some further preliminary discussion of stran-
ger-king formations and a summary of the dynamics of galactic polities.
In the prototypical stranger-king traditions, the heroic founder of the dy-
nasty comes from some fabled homeland, terrestrial or celestial, actual or leg-
endary. Commonly, he is the son of a powerful king in a realm of great repute
who failed to succeed his father, perhaps because he was bested by a fraternal
rival, perhaps for some fault that led to his banishment. Or in a higher register,
the dynastic founder is the offspring of the gods, perhaps expelled from their
presence by some similar conflict or offencs, who descends upon an autochtho-
nous people from the heavens—always a good address for persons with royal
ambitions. In a common topos, the hero undertakes an arduous journey to his
future kingdom, mastering both natural and human forces along the way, thus
demonstrating his transcendent powers and prefiguring the royal gifts of fertil-
ity and victory he will bring to his native subjects. As has been said of certain
African kings, their powers of destruction were powers of creation. The hero is
often known as well for more sinister exploits such as fratricide, parricide, incest,
or other crimes against common morality, which likewise puts him above and
beyond ordinary society and proves he is stronger than it. Both Quetzalcoatl
and Huitzilopochtli were notorious for betraying or slaying close kinsmen--
sisters, paternal uncles, brothers, and sisters’ sons among them—on the way
to their respective kingdoms. They were something else, not like the kinship-
ordered peoples they were destined to rule.
Endowed with cosmic potency and stronger than society, the stranger-king
is in a position to reorganize it. The advent of the foreign hero is a civilizing mis-
sion, bringing the aboriginal people out of their original state of naked savagery.
Such was the condition of the primordial Chichimecs: a people without idols or
storehouses, living in straw huts, subsisting on game that was not always cooked,
as well as wild roots, fruits, and herbs—“in short, they lived like brute ani-
mals” (Motolinia 1951: 27). In the paradigmatic Mesoamerican tradition, the
Chichimecs were delivered from this primitive condition by “advanced” peoples
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such as the Toltecs, and in particular by Quetzalcoatl (or Kukulkan), who intro-
duced marvelous crafts, precious goods of various kinds, houses and temples of
stone, clothing of cotton, and a lot more. But not necessarily by conquest.
Stranger-kingdoms may be established by conquest, and the kings are typi-
cally ferocious by nature, but notwithstanding certain popular nineteenth-cen-
tury theories of state formation to that effect, conquest is often overrated as the
source of foreign dynasties. Noticing the prevalence of an ethnic distinction
between rulers and ruled in premodern states, Ludwig Gumplowicz (1899) fa-
mously concluded that might must have made right in all such cases. While
this ethnic divide does indeed suggest the ubiquity of stranger-kingdoms, in the
traditions at issue the dominance of the foreign ruler is not necessarily gener-
ated by forcefully overcoming the autochthonous people, since his superiority is
an original condition. Arriving from an exalted realm, his power derived from
gods of universal scope; the stranger-king is a ruler a priori, whereas the native
people, insofar as they approximated an Aristotelian definition of barbarism,
would be subjects if not slaves by nature. In the charter traditions at issue, the
rule of the foreign hero is often peacefully accepted for a variety of divine or po-
litical benefits, ranging from bringing rain to suppressing feuds and protecting
the native communities against even worse regimes in the neighborhood. Fre-
quently enough, for some such reason, an indigenous group will actively solicit
a ruler of their own from a more powerful king: just as the Mexica elders did
from the king of Culhuacan, himself of Toltec heritage. There will be more to
say of this in the context of Mesoamerican galactic polities, but for the present
note that the Mexica had good precedent in certain traditions of Quetzalcoatl
that tell of how the Toltecs brought him from Cuextlan to install as their king
in Tollan. According to The annals of Cuauhtitlan. 5 House (ad 873) was the year
“the Toltecs went to get Quetzalcoatl to make him their ruler in Tollan, and in
addition he was their priest” (Bierhorst 1992: 29).
As Rousseau famously argued in The social contract, force alone is not enough
to make a society. The strongest, he said, will never be strong enough to rule un-
less he turns might into right and obedience into duty; for “to yield to force is an
act of necessity, not of will—at the most, an act of prudence. In what sense can
it be a duty?” (1997: I.3, 44). Just so, conquest or not, the kingdom is established
by contract: the aforementioned union of the immigrant prince with a high-
ranking woman of the land. So far as I can make out, marriage of this kind is a
condition of the formation of stranger-kingdoms everywhere, notably including
the Indo-European ancients, as in the origin traditions of Greek city-states,
THE STRANGER-KINGSHIP OF THE MEXICA
229
whose ruling lines were established by unions of the daughters of autochtho-
nous kings with strangers fathered by Zeus (on human women, another union
of the same kind). The eponymous Pelops (namesake of the Peloponnesus), also
of Zeussian descent, became ruler of Pisa when he conspired with the king’s
daughter, Hippodamia, to win her hand in a chariot race with her royal father.
Marseille (Masila) was founded when the local Celtic princess chose to give
the drink of sovereignty to a handsome Greek immigrant youth from Phocaea.
Again, sovereignty is embodied and transmitted in the women—whose marital
congress with the stranger is a replication in miniature of the celestial royal’s
appropriation of the bearing earth. Marriage makes a structurally analogous
pair with the kingship by virtue of the common feature of an outsider (as by
the incest taboo) who fertilizes the land. Speaking of a number of such Indo-
European kingdom origins, J. G. Preaux (1962: 112) wri
tes:
Every foundation of a city, every conquest of royal power becomes effective the
moment the stranger, charged with sacredness of the gods or the fates, endowed
moreover with the force of the warrior, symbolically gains possession of a new
land either by receiving peacefully, or by conquering valorously or by ruse, the
daughter of the king of the land.1
Yet everything in the Valley of Mexico is by all appearances the inverse of clas-
sical stranger-kingdoms, since here the foreign rulers are the barbarians. They
are Chichimecs by origin, and although they indeed founded their dynasties
through marriages with the daughters of autochthonous leaders, the latter were
Culhhuacan kings of sacred Toltec descent.2 In the event, it was the primitive
foreigners who were civilized by the highly cultured aborigines. And this would
not only be true of the Mexica, but also of the Acolhua, the Tepaneca, and
others of Chichimec or Otomi origins whose rulers ennobled themselves with
Toltec affiliations. In some respects, the prototypical sequence is reinstated by a
compensatory story alleging that the Chichimec invaders were the autochthons
of the Valley who had early on left it and latterly returned. But more particularly,
it is the stranger-king system of society that is turned around and restored by
1. For these Indo-European and other such stranger-king formations, see Sahlins
(1981b, 2010, 2011a, 2011b, 2014).
2. This was also true at the divine level: the Mexica tutelary deity Huitzilopochtli
married the goddess of the Culhuacan, the earth goddess Tuci (Gillespie 1989: 55).
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these hypogamous marriages of Toltec royal women with Chichimec leaders.
For insofar as the Chichimec rulers have been differentiated and elevated by
their Toltec affiliations, the polity assumes the classic form of a late-coming civ-
ilized aristocracy of glorious ancestry imposed upon a stratum of primitive first
settlers. The effect is a recuperation of the paradigmatic structure of stranger-
kingship that leaves a permanent residue of ambiguity: a Chichimeca-Tolteca
aristocracy (cf. Clendinnen 1991; Nicholson 2001).
But then, the paradigmatic structure of stranger-kingship is everywhere inher-
ently ambiguous by virtue of the residual authority retained by the underlying
native people as the original settlers and owners of the country. It is a general rule
of stranger-king formations that even as the foreign rulers impose their author-
ity on a subjugated native people, they are in turn domesticated in the process. In
critical respects, the stranger-kingdom is a system of dual sovereignties in which
the immigrant rulers and their indigenous subjects reciprocal y encompass one
another. Having transformed the country into habitable and productive space in
the first place, the native people are already practiced in taming the wild. They do
something similar in taking charge of the instal ation rites of their rulers of foreign
derivation—who come out of an uncontrolled outside world with antisocial dispo-
sitions as wel as beneficial powers. The successors of the indigenous chieftains—or
of the previous dynasty, in the case of successive stranger-king formations—are the
constituted kingmakers, who in legitimating the royal heir demonstrate their own
residual sovereignty. It is not unusual in the royal instal ation rites for the king-
elect to suffer a symbolic death as an outsider at the hands of the native authorities,
who then preside over his rebirth and maturation as their own sacred child.3
Something quite similar occurs in the instal ation of the Mexica king when
he is seized by the kingmaker-priests, evidently the successors of the teomama,
the four native bearers of the tutelary god Huitzilopochtli who led the migration
to Tenochtitlan (Sahagún 1953–82, 8:18; Townsend 1987). Brought before the
assembled leading lords and warriors by these priests, the heir to the kingship is
stripped naked, hence deprived of al signs of rank, status, and property and placed
in a state of weakness. Thereupon, the upper part of his body is stained black by the
chief priest, and he is dressed in a black cape decorated with skull and crossbones.
“The attire symbolized death,” Richard Townsend observes (ibid.: 392), as would
the subsequent self-sacrificial bloodlettings of the king before Huitzilopochtli.
3. For much more on the nature and implications of the juvenile status of the king, see
David Graeber’s discussion in chapter 5.
THE STRANGER-KINGSHIP OF THE MEXICA
231
Probably, then, the ensuing four-day seclusion of the king-elect with his entou-
rage involved a ritual rebirth and maturation; as indeed the god being supplicated
here was Tezcatlipoca, who, beside being regarded of Toltec origin, “was identified
with the life force that animates all beings and things” (ibid.: 393). Subsequently,
the new king moved to the palace for the spectacular sacrifices and bril iant rites
of his investiture. Everything thus happens as if the heir to the kingship goes
through a symbolic death, rebirth, and growth to maturity—which is also a do-
mestication of the foreign prince by the indigenous authorities.
Nor do the powers and privileges of the native notables end in stranger-
kingdoms when the foreign regime begins. Speaking again in ideal-typical
terms, the native chieftains, beside maintaining control of their own communi-
ties, are often titled councilors of an outsider king who has reason to fear the
ambitions of his own kinsmen. Noteworthy in this connection are the diarchies
of various forms involving queen mothers who represent the indigenous powers
or second kings whose affiliation with the indigenous population gives them
the active leadership in temporal affairs. Most significantly, as just said of the
Mexica, the leaders of the ancient regime become the principal priests of a
country whose enshrined ancestors and gods are their own rightful heritage—
which makes the health of the bearing earth their responsibility. Even the king’s
own cosmic powers of prospering and protecting the people, as by the rain he
brings to fertilize their earth, may only become effective when mediated by the
sacrificial offices of the indigenous priesthood.
As mentioned earlier, because the external sources of the stranger-king’s
power, including his privileged relations to his own ancestral gods, are signifi-
cant means and necessary conditions of his authority, the kingship is perpetually
foreign to its own realm. Even where the immigrant aristocracy is acculturated
by the native population, which is usually the case, “the king comes from else-
where” (de Heusch 1991).4 By contrast, in many parts of Africa, Oceania, and
Southeast Asia, the autochthons are explicitly known as “the owners” of the
land.”5 We shall see similar notices of the Mexica. Likewise certain passages of
4. “The king comes from elsewhere” is the title of an illuminating article by Luc de
Heusch (1991), commenting on a study of the Mundang kingship of Chad, studied
by Alfred Adler (1982). See the discussion in chapter 6.
5. The autochthonous clans in Fijian chiefdoms are designated by a term ( i taukei) th
at
at once means “owners” and “first settlers.” They are likewise the “land people” ( kai
vanua) or “the land” ( na vanua). Similarly the Nyakyusa common people are “the
earth.”
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ON KINGS
the Codex Chimalpopoca, for example, identify the “landowners or founders” with
the Chichimeca (Bierhorst 1992: 46; cf. ibid.: 117). Accordingly, the people
of the Valley of Mexico as a whole are in certain contexts “Chichimeca”: the
totality is known by its underlying native inhabitants. What the Banyoro say
in such regards holds for many a stranger-kingdom: “the Mukama [the King]
rules the people, the clans rule the land” (Beattie 1971: 169). Or again, as it is
said of the Kongo king of old: in relation to “those who are there,” who hold
the land, “he remains a stranger” (Balandier 1968b: 38). Historical materialism
notwithstanding, in the premodern states of this description, the subordinate
class controls the means of production in the primary sector of subsistence.6
By contrast, “the king rules the people”: the economic powers of the rul-
ing class are a function of their politico-religious domination of the produc-
ing people; hence they mainly take the form of taxation or pillage as opposed
to the control of capital and the productive process as such. The economy has
something of the same dual structure as the polity, divided between a native
sphere primarily concerned with subsistence production and an aristocratic
sphere critically concerned with the acquisition of wealth from abroad. The na-
tive economy is based in real property, organized largely by kinship, and ori-
ented to domestic consumption. The relation of the ruling class to the native
sphere—apart from their ritual access to the divine sources of prosperity—is
for the most part extractive rather than productive: they appear on the scene
post messem, after the harvest, to take a toll on people’s products and manpower.
But as Mary Helms has shown in a series of remarkable works (1988, 1993,
1998), the aristocratic economy, likewise by means of its powers over people,
is primarily oriented to the acquisition of moveable valuables from abroad by
raid, trade, and/or tribute: the accumulation of riches whose value objectifies the
life-and-death potencies of the realms from which they come, as well as exotica