ABSTRACT
In the post-invasion history of religion in Las Américas, there are many things that might be analyzed as “hyperobjects”; objects of immense size, acutely felt but so massive in scale as to be never fully accessible. One hyperobject looms largest and most terribly: the sixteenth-century demographic cataclysm, what Spanish witnesses termed the mortandad, or death event. In the mortandad disease pathogens ravaged Indigenous bodies and lives, not once but many times over: more than six periods of epidemic crisis scarred the century. As hyperobject, the mortandad bears down upon us in history, through time and space, both constraining and refracting religious experience. This interpretation does not simply test the potency of environmental theorist Timothy Morton’s idea of hyperobject against the mortandad, but more importantly coaxes the concept into a critical analytic useful for the study of religious experience in times of extremity, one that perhaps helps us reckon with the American death event more deeply. The Mexican mortandad is, in fact, the original hyperobject.
