Laurette Séjourné
Encyclopedia
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
and ethnologist
Ethnology
Ethnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.-Scientific discipline:Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct...
best known for her study of the civilizations of Teotihuacan
Teotihuacan
Teotihuacan – also written Teotihuacán, with a Spanish orthographic accent on the last syllable – is an enormous archaeological site in the Basin of Mexico, just 30 miles northeast of Mexico City, containing some of the largest pyramidal structures built in the pre-Columbian Americas...
and the Aztecs and her theories concerning the Mesoamerican culture hero, Quetzalcoatl.
Laurette Séjourné was born in Perugia
Perugia
Perugia is the capital city of the region of Umbria in central Italy, near the River Tiber, and the capital of the province of Perugia. The city is located about north of Rome. It covers a high hilltop and part of the valleys around the area....
, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, as Laura Valentini Corsa, although one also finds her mentioned as Laura Bianchi. Little is known about her early years; even her precise birth date is rarely mentioned. In her prime youth, she appears to have moved to France; in later life, she still wrote in French. She married a Frenchman, Séjourné, and participated in cultural life and the world of the cinema, meeting such figures as André Breton
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
and Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
. Strongly politicized like many others at the times, she divorced her husband, and left occupied France in exile for Mexico, in 1941. There, she became a naturalized Mexican
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
citizen and married another exile, the Russian novelist and revolutionary known as Victor Serge
Victor Serge
Victor Serge , born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich , was a Russian revolutionary and writer. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919 and later worked for the Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator...
(Viktor Kibalchich or Kibaltchitch, 1890-1947). Soon after his death, she joined the Mexican Communist Party. Later, she remarried with Arnaldo Orfila, director of the Fondo de Cultura Económica
Fondo de Cultura Económica
Fondo de Cultura Económica is the most important publishing house in Mexico and one of the most important ones in Latin America. It was originally established in 1934 by Daniel Cosío Villegas as a way to provide students of economics with books in Spanish on the subject...
and founder of Siglo XXI Editores.
Séjourné's militant spirit can be captured from a passage like the following one:
Later, her focus came to rest more and more on what to her was the embodiment of this Prehispanic 'utopia', Quetzalcoatl.
During the 1950s, Séjourné worked for Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History
National Institute of Anthropology and History
The Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia is a Mexican federal government bureau established in 1939 to guarantee the research, preservation, protection, and promotion of the prehistoric, archaeological, anthropological, historical, and paleontological heritage of Mexico...
(INAH). She did anthropological fieldwork in Oaxaca, but then changed to the field of archaeology, excavating at the pre-Spanish metropolis of Teotihuacan
Teotihuacan
Teotihuacan – also written Teotihuacán, with a Spanish orthographic accent on the last syllable – is an enormous archaeological site in the Basin of Mexico, just 30 miles northeast of Mexico City, containing some of the largest pyramidal structures built in the pre-Columbian Americas...
, which she believed was the legendary Tollan
Tollan
Tollan, Tolan, or Tolán is a name used for the capital cities of two empires of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica; first for Teotihuacan, and later for the Toltec capital, Tula-Hidalgo, both in Mexico...
. She published several beautifully illustrated books on the art and architecture of Teotihuacan.
To a wider public she became known through her 1957 publication on the cosmology and religion of the Toltec
Toltec
The Toltec culture is an archaeological Mesoamerican culture that dominated a state centered in Tula, Hidalgo in the early post-classic period of Mesoamerican chronology...
s and Aztecs, translated into English as Burning Water: Thought and Religion in Ancient Mexico. While betraying the influence of the historian of religion, Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day...
, with whom Séjourné maintained a correspondence, the book's main focus is the figure of Tollan's priestly king, Quetzalcoatl
Quetzalcoatl
Quetzalcoatl is a Mesoamerican deity whose name comes from the Nahuatl language and has the meaning of "feathered serpent". The worship of a feathered serpent deity is first documented in Teotihuacan in the first century BCE or first century CE...
, and his teachings. Five years later, there was a follow-up in "Quetzalcoatls' Universe" (El Universo de Quetzalcoatl, 1962). These books sketch a rather spiritualized image of king Quetzalcoatl and his legendary reign, referring to 'laws of interior preparation' supposedly left by the Toltec king and to advances 'along the road to spirituality' made possible by these.
Laurette Séjourné's final years were dedicated to bringing education to the Indian
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
peoples of the south of Mexico. Her work is still valued by specialists.