by Marie Arana
It is not surprising, then, how difficult it was for Xavier—as it had been for Cortés and continues to be for us—to fathom the contours of indigenous faith in its pure, aboriginal form. What stands as recorded history, after all, isn’t history at all. Written after the conquest and heavily influenced by European prejudices, Spanish chronicles are filled with the firm conviction that the American Indian was, at best, ignorant and, at worst, diabolical. The writings of Columbus, Cortés, Pedro Pizarro, and others are filled with hyperbole and outright lies for obvious reasons: theirs was a mission to persuade, subjugate, and rule. Their accounts were addressed to the Crown as propaganda or justification, not as history. But even the most detailed journals by well-meaning, extraordinarily astute and observant priests are skewed by pronounced Christian doctrine. The view, every way we look—and absent any comprehensive documentation by the indigenous themselves—is warped by the eye of the beholder.
When it comes to matters of the spirit, the task of understanding the past is even more complicated. What little we have been able to deduce about the various tribal faiths, from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Grande—from the Guaraní to the Aztecs—we have had to glean from artifacts that are frustratingly difficult to decode much less comprehend with any depth or certitude. Relics can tell us a great deal about burial practices or prevailing deities, or the heroics of war, or the state of scientific progress, or the geography of a people, or even the centrality of the natural world, but they don’t reveal much about the essential soul. Nor do they tell us about the beliefs that inform the fears and hopes of an ancient and inscrutable people.
Here is what we do know: long before the Incas built their colossal temples in Cuzco, Sacsayhuaman, or Machu Picchu—long before the Mayans built Chichén Itzá, or Tikal, or Uxmal—the Waris and the Olmecs built sacred leviathans of stone, often perched on beds of rock. Sacred places in the indigenous Americas have been shown to hold a natural magnetism; a physical traction that suggests a deep understanding of the geology of stone. Indeed, the sanctity of stone seems to have united the spiritual life of the indigenous throughout the hemisphere. Creation myths, whether or not they have been embellished one way or another in the course of time, seem to share this commonality: they begin with a search for an ideal landform—a lake, a rock, a promontory—from which a strong faith might radiate. Often it is charged with telluric power. The heavens above, whether it was the North Star crossing the night sky, or the sun as it mounts the vaulting dome of day, might further inform the placement of a temple.
The Incas, who were the most impressive empire builders of their day, were all too aware of the concrete, physical nature of things. They had fashioned a muscular religion around it. Establishing the sun as their supreme god, they divided their empire into four quarters to reflect the four seasons, and split it in half (north, south) to represent the dry and wet halves of the year. The transition between seasons—when the Milky Way streamed from northeast to southwest—was precisely the moment when the skies rained life-giving water on the Earth Mother, Pachamama. A firm logic ruled their science even as it ruled their faith. The Aztecs, too, worshiped the sun above all, divided their universe into four, not only to mirror the seasons but also to correspond to the four successive suns, or periods, their civilization had experienced, and the four great catastrophes that had undone them. The cosmos was divided into four “directions”; the city of Tenochtitlán, into four campans.
Perhaps the most famous relic we have from the Aztecs is their stone calendar, a round disk depicting the great god Sun at the center, surrounded by the four iterations of civilization that went before. According to the calendar, the first Aztecs had been devoured by tigers; the second, overpowered by hurricanes; the third, obliterated by rains; the fourth, washed away in a great flood. The Aztecs whom Cortés would encounter were living under the Fifth Sun, and they understood that they would prevail only as long as they pleased the gods. This they could achieve only through human sacrifice. The period of the Fifth Sun, as legend went, had been born of sacrifice—indeed, humanity owed its very life’s breath to it. According to the story, the forces that rule the cosmos had met at the dawn of creation and gathered around a blazing fire. They asked that one stand forth and show his loyalty by leaping bravely into the inferno. The most beautiful among them, handsome of face and encrusted with jewels, hesitated. The ugliest, a dwarfish creature pocked with ulcers, plunged in and was promptly reborn as the mighty sun. Mortified, the beautiful one leapt in and rose to the skies as the moon.
Clearly, if gods had sacrificed themselves to create the universe as we know it, the people of the Fifth Sun would need to pay down sacrifices in order to perdure. Human sacrifice was as obvious a necessity to the Aztecs as the sun above and the maize below. The logic was simple: the earth goddess, Coatlicue, needed to be fed in order to feed the rest of us. Human blood would need to water her loam. Beating hearts needed to be ripped from chests and held aloft, shown to her consort, the Sun. So it was that the Aztecs’ faith mirrored the world around them. As seasons came and went, they were reminded of their fragility: How long would they last? How to prevail? How to fend off the dark forces that might swallow them again? Religion is a useful mirror on its followers’ preoccupations. From it, we learn that the central preoccupation of the Mesoamerican Indians was that nature had to be loved and feared at once if they were to survive it. The ancients lived their beliefs, understood profoundly the connections. And because they were creatures of nature, dependent on its realities for both mortal and spiritual existence, they strove to adapt to the physical world, not alter it.
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The worship of stones, and all that emerged from stone—gold, silver, copper, cinnabar, salt, gemstone—had a conspicuous role in the ancient Americas, as indeed it continues to have today. Mines in the time of the Incas were considered sacred, a gift from the earth, much as plants, crops, and all else that sprang from the land were considered hallowed and divine. These earthly things were constituents of a greater ambit, cogs in a larger wheelwork, in which humans played an integral part. Stones were where we were all headed—the realm of the hard, the calcified, the long dead—the great accumulation of animal and plant energy. Great piles of rock and towering mountains were our natural fathers, our spirit apus, who lived long before us and held ancient wisdom. The Sun was the great giver of being, the life force that sparked creation. Earth was his natural mate, his lover, the womb from which all the living sprang and the tomb to which we would all go. Water was the animating medium that flowed through nature and maintained it, even as veins flow through leaves and flesh. Most important in indigenous thinking—the indisputable germ at the heart of the logic—was the interconnectedness of life: the intrinsic interdependence, the breath, the air, the matrix we all share. This was as present and easily understood by ancient Americans as the global movement of money and commerce might be to us today: a grand, protean web that connected the world.
Confounding our ability to truly comprehend all this—given the paucity of indigenous accounts untainted by Spanish interpretation—there is the rudimentary problem of language. Western words simply cannot convey the significance that the natural world held for the Indian. It is an inadequacy that begins with the way we perceive the most fundamental aspects of our shared world. As Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, once pointed out, although “the form is constant, the interpretation is variable,” which is to say that if you put a tube in front of a contemporary European and an exact replica before an Alaskan Indian, the European may see it as a cylindrical object, a concrete object that happens to be hollow, whereas the Inuit whaler might focus on the emptiness within. Where words may be understood, on the other hand, the meaning may not: The Florentine Codex, the sixteenth-century record of Mesoamerican history, states that when emissaries of Montezuma rowed out with treasures to meet a wary Cortés, they “ate the earth” until he let them board his ship. What was meant was that they kowtowed and groveled. Th
ere is little doubt: language is a formidable wall against our understanding the ancient indigenous mind. Add to the myriad linguistic discordances our starkly differing mythologies, our attitudes about human relations, our uses of memory, the way we observe our physical surroundings—and you have a potential sea of misapprehension. If we perceive shapes as intrinsically different from the way an Andean might perceive them, how can we hope to understand the spiritual significance of stones?
And yet, from all evidence, stones were and continue to be essential to the culture. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, a Spanish explorer who was commissioned to write a history of the Incas in 1572—when Spain had already destroyed the empire and the conquistadors held Tahuantinsuyu in their grip—described an origin myth that was striking in its difference from the prevailing legend put forward by the mestizo El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega a few decades later. In Inca Garcilaso’s version—written in Spain in the 1600s, more than fifty years after he had left Peru—the Adam and Eve of the Incas, Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo, set out to find their land, holding a precious rod of gold. When that rod leapt from their hands and sank deep into the earth, they would know they had reached the umbilicus of their universe, the sacred Cuzco. It was a pretty tale, sure to interest Spaniards by virtue of that provocative, golden flourish. But the descendants of the Incas interviewed by Gamboa in the mountain aeries surrounding Cuzco had a very different story. In their version, four brothers—Ayar Uchu, Ayar Cachi, Ayar Mango, and Ayar Auca—set out from a cave at the very dawn of civilization and headed out to establish an empire. They wandered the land, sowing seeds in promising places, gathering harvests where they could. They were farmers at heart, and their trip was markedly ordinary, lasting for many years. They did, however, eliminate a pesky brother by trapping him in a cave; and they transformed a favored brother into a great rock—a sacred huaca—which they continued to consult. Eventually their grandmother, Mama Huaco, a fierce, feisty woman who had her fill of wandering, hurled two sticks toward the north. One fell in Colcabamba and bounced, inhospitably, from the desiccated earth. The other sank comfortably into Cuzco. When the brothers stepped onto the exact location where the stick had disappeared, the earth had turned to stone.
Stone, to the ancient indigenous of the Americas, was transubstantial, mutable, as dynamic a concept as—in the Christian context—wine is to the blood of Christ. Its physicality was patent, but its significance was not. Petrification was but a brief suspension, a temporary immobilization from which life might spring anew. Just as mummies of the Lords Inca were meant to be preserved, fed, and consulted because they would live on in another dimension, stones, too, were living things—powerful, sentient, spiritually animate—whose specters could be summoned to teach us a thing or two. It is a starkly un-Western idea, one that sits more comfortably in an Oriental mind: the Ojibwe of North America, for instance, believed stones housed vital energies. So did the Cherokee, the Sioux, the Iroquois. In ancient China and Japan, rocks were valued for their telluric powers. The ancient druids of the Celtics who inhabited the British Isles were also worshipers of stone with strong notions about human sacrifice and distinct theories about the transmutability of souls, but—as would later befall the American indigenous—they were spurned as barbarians and eccentrics by their Roman conquerors, and rejected as pagans by the Christians who followed.
A thrall in stone was deeply embedded in the spiritual life of ancient Mesoamericans, whose culture dominated the funnel of land that runs up the hemisphere from Panama to Colorado, and across from the Caribbean to the Pacific. The Mayans, so populous in that verdant, rain-rich terrain, made stone images of the dead and believed their souls inhabited them. The rock itself was possessed of a life force that transcended physicality and confounded time. So intrinsic to the Mayans was the connection between stone and everlasting life that their word for stone, tun, also means “time.” The passing years—the raveling of history itself—were counted in tun. Like the Quechua word pacha, which in the Andes connotes the earth beneath our feet as well as the progress of time (a word impossible to translate accurately into English), these concepts suggest something beyond a physical presence: a promise; perhaps even a moral order. Through a constant communication with stone, humans could thwart mortality, talk to the dead, even manipulate events in the future. Stones had authority, agency—the ability to represent us to a higher power. Eventually, and for obvious reasons, human sacrifice came to be tied with stone worship. Blood was spilled on stone; human offerings were made on thick slabs of it so that rewards could be extracted from gods, and the living could coerce the spirits.
This romance with stone had many cultural ramifications. The Mayans would sculpt rock into great pyramids that marked the days of the year, the movement of the sun, and the time to plant, as well as the time to reap. The ancestors of the Guaraní, who lived two thousand years ago in the jungle that surrounds Paraguay’s Amambay Hills, decorated massive rock ledges with abstract symbols of earth and sky. The Diquís, who inhabited Panama and Costa Rica eight hundred years before Columbus’s arrival, carved great bolas, perfectly round fifteen-ton spheres of igneous rock that were scattered through jungle and field to mark the approach to a great man’s house—perhaps a temple—although the true significance of bolas still remains a mystery. Another mystery resides in the cyclopean, fifty-ton stone heads left behind by the Olmecs, commemorating the strong, proud features of their race.
And then, of course, there are the magnificent edifices of the Incas, who were so aware of the spirituality of magnetic rock that they searched out natural outcroppings of it on which to build their temples. Where there were insufficient lodes, they forced armies of thousands to dig out and drag colossal, one-hundred-ton boulders from quarries more than twenty miles away. Stones were placed on the graves of great Inca leaders so that their spirits would live on in the stelae—their grave markers—and speak to us, the living. Like the cairns of Scotland, or the mani in Tibet, or the ovoo in Mongolia, piles of rock in the Andes were signals of good luck, and travelers would stack them, add to them—stone on stone—as they passed. Abandoned ruins were revered for their ability to connect to other worlds, other dimensions. These were the huacas, for which we also have no adequate word: they were not sacred in any abstract sense, not deities, not supernatural as we know it. They were powerful precisely because they reflected an earthly vitality. “Huacas are made of energized matter,” just as everything else on this earth is, one scholar suggests, “and they act within nature, not over and outside it, as Western supernaturals do.” They may look ordinary enough—craggy promontories, still lifes, silent bystanders—but they are as keenly aware of us as we are of them. This notion of the manifest sacredness all around us was, and still is, mirrored in the beliefs of rain forest Indians throughout the hemisphere. As one historian describes them, “Jungle dwellers live in a forest of eyes. A person moving through nature is never truly alone.” Which is to say that the trees, the stones, the very earth—the whole material universe—is alive, catalytic, and flush with the clear potential to feed our souls.
That stones could be simultaneously holy and utilitarian was only logical to the ancients. Bartolomé de las Casas, a historian and Dominican friar who devoted himself to defending the rights of the indigenous against the depredations of the Spanish, told of Mesoamerican and Caribbean Indians who used precious stones to capture the breath of dying chieftains so that their spirits would live on and their wisdom continue to guide them. Like the little round Andean stone that sits at the head of Leonor Gonzáles’s bed and houses the eternal soul of her husband, stones not only represented the dead, they became their vital personifications—they would see and speak for them—and they would accompany the living. Whole delegations of officials would form to guard these rock-hard avatars of the Lords Inca, guarantee sacrifices on their behalf, and promote their durability. Such rituals were available not only to the powerful. Even the most common among us might release her last breath to a stone—a simple,
ordinary pebble plucked from the ground—and be immortalized forever.
As history wore on, many of these commemorative stone structures (whether they be monuments, statues, or stelae) were obliterated by Spanish missionaries intent on ridding the colonies of what they considered superstition, devilry, and the “black arts.” But even as Spanish priests and conquistadors reduced evidence of huaca to rubble, they couldn’t destroy it in the people. In the Andes—whether among Quechua, Huanca, or Aymara people—that reverence for spirited stone continues: in their awe at the beauty and power of jutting rock; or their sympathy for a random piedra cansada, a “tired stone,” an abandoned hulk that never made it to the Herculean structure for which it was meant; or even their delight in small, perfectly shaped or unusually colored rocks they carve or choose to represent a loved one. In Central America, shamans treat sick children by taking a natural, unblemished stone that personifies a child’s soul and burying it in a secret place by a spring or a river until the Earth Mother nurses the child back to health. Such are the ways the ancient lessons prevail.
The most commanding glories of the Mayans—the manses, the temples, the great pyramids of stone—were tucked away in jungles and, so, were eventually overtaken by boscage, lost to humanity for a thousand years. Many of them, discovered only in the last two centuries, were stumbled upon by hazard, as fearless explorers hacked through the tangle to be met with a multitude of elegant structures. Strangely enough, many of them shared a common trait: three mighty rocks at their foundation. The towering red sandstone monoliths at Quiriguá, found in the thickets of Guatemala’s jungle, tell us why. According to their inscriptions, the three original stones that marked the beginning of time had been planted by the gods in 3114 BC—at approximately the same time as the birth of the Egyptian dynasty. Which is to say that the age-old practice of “sowing the stones”—installing three rocks as fundament and anchor—has been part of the culture for millennia. The monoliths at Quiriguá also tell us that each rock had its purpose and meaning: the first represents the throne of the jaguar, lord of the fertile earth; the second, the water throne, where sharks coexist with lilies; the third, the throne of the flying snake, emperor of the skies. Curiously enough, with slight variations, that trinity mirrors the beliefs of the Incas, who lived two thousand miles away and four millennia later. Like the Mayans, the Incas revered three spirit animals above all: the puma, the snake, and the condor—masters, respectively, of earth, water, and sky. It is a sensible enough worship: these are the only three habitats this planet offers its living beings.
