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The Knowers

The Indigenous knowledge of the Americas reaches us through texts written after the conquest: Nahuatl testimony gathered from Sahagún’s informants, the K’iche’ Popol Vuh set down in Latin letters in the 1550s, and the Andean chronicles of Garcilaso de la Vega and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. Each has its own words for it.

The Nahua sage is the tlamatini, “the one who knows something”, and his knowledge tlamatiliztli. The Nahuatl text describes him: “una luz, una tea, una gruesa tea que no ahúma. Un espejo horadado … Suya es la tinta negra y roja, de él son los códices … Es camino, guía veraz para otros” (in Miguel León-Portilla’s Spanish): a light, a thick torch that does not smoke, a mirror pierced through; his are the black and red ink and the codices; he is a road, a true guide for others. He “hace sabios los rostros ajenos, hace a los otros tomar una cara”, makes the faces of others wise and makes them take on a face. Sahagún wrote “sabios o philosophos”, wise men or philosophers, in the margin beside it. León-Portilla titled his study La filosofía náhuatl (1956), and in a later preface (2006) named the equation outright: what they “llamaron tlamatiliztli y nosotros filosofía”, called tlamatiliztli and we call philosophy. He read their poems, “flower and song” (in xochitl in cuicatl), as a theory of knowing: despite the passing of all things, “hay un modo de conocer lo verdadero: la poesía (flor y canto)”, there is a way of knowing the true, poetry.

The K’iche’ authors of the Popol Vuh, writing between 1554 and 1558, say why they write. “We shall bring it forth because there is no longer the means whereby the Popol Vuh may be seen, the means of seeing clearly that had come from across the sea—the account of our obscurity, and the means of seeing life clearly, as it is said” (tr. Christenson). The old book was an ilb’al, an “instrument of sight”, the word K’iche’ priests still use for the crystals they divine with. What it gave was foresight for the rulers: “They knew if there would be war. It was clear before their faces. They saw if there would be death, if there would be hunger … There was an instrument of sight. There was a book. Popol Vuh was their name for it.” They write it again “under the law of God and Christianity”, because it “is now lost”.

In the Andes, Garcilaso de la Vega wrote in his Comentarios reales (1609), from the papers of the Jesuit Blas Valera, that the Inca Roca founded schools in Cuzco “para que los amautas enseñasen las ciencias”, so that the amautas might teach the sciences: “A los maestros llamaban amautas, que es tanto como filósofos y sabios”, the masters they called amautas, which is as much as to say philosophers and wise men. They taught “no por enseñanza de letras, que no las tuvieron sino por práctica y por uso cotidiano, y por esperiencia”, not by teaching letters, which they did not have, but by practice, daily use and experience, so that the nobles would understand their laws “y alcanzasen el dón de saber gobernar”, and gain the gift of knowing how to govern, keep the count of time and history by the knotted cords, and speak with elegance. The poets, haravec, “que en propia significación quiere decir inventador”, which properly means inventor, put the deeds of the kings into verse, and “los versos eran pocos porque la memoria los guardase”, the verses were few so that memory could keep them. The same law kept the sciences from the common people, “porque no se ensoberbeciesen”, lest they grow proud. Moral philosophy, Garcilaso wrote, the Incas left “escrita en sus leyes, vida y costumbres”, written in their laws, life and customs.

Guaman Poma, an Andean author writing his own Spanish around 1615, used the word himself: “los yndios filósofos, astrólogos que sauen las oras y domingos y días y meses, año, para senbrar y rrecoger las comidas de cada año”, the Indian philosophers and astrologers who know the hours, weeks, days, months and year, for sowing and gathering each year’s food. One of them, Juan Yunpa of Lucanas, “tenía el horden de filusufía y conocía de las estrellas y del rruedo del andar del sol”, had the order of philosophy and knew the stars and the round of the sun’s course. The astrologers watched the sun’s ray through a window or against a hill, “que allí no hierra el punto y camino del sol”, for there the point and path of the sun does not err. His own book he made from “quipos y rrelaciones de muchas lenguaxes”, knotted cords and accounts in many languages, Quechua, Aymara and the other tongues of the land.