The newly Islamic rulers seem to have gone along with this – they actively patronized the Theatre of Shadows and its Hindu stories, which remained as popular as ever. The audience, then as now, would immediately recognize the Bima puppet. In the Mahabharata, Bima is one of five heroic brothers (you can follow their exploits today in animations on the internet) and the great warrior among them – noble, plain-speaking and superhumanly strong, equal to 10,000 elephants, but also with a very good line in banter and something of a celebrity cook. One touch of his claw-like nails means death to his enemies.
The Bima puppet’s black face expresses inner calm and serenity, unlike depictions of the ‘bad guys’ in the Theatre of Shadows, who are often coloured red for vindictiveness and cruelty. But his shape also tells us that an Islamic influence has found its way into this traditional Hindu art. This becomes obvious if we compare our Javanese puppet of Bima, with its caricature nose and claw hands, and another puppet of Bima made on the nearby island of Bali, which remained Hindu. The figure from Bali has rounded, more natural facial features, and his arms and legs are in more normal proportions to his body. Many in Java today would argue that these differences are explained by religion; and that the traditional Hindu puppets were deliberately reshaped by their Javanese Muslim makers in order to avoid the Islamic prohibition on creating images of humans and gods. Stories are told of attempts in the sixteenth or seventeenth century to ban the Theatre of Shadows; others tell of Sunan Giri, a noted Muslim saint, who ingeniously came up with the idea of distorting the features of the puppets in order to get around the prohibition – a happy compromise that may explain our Bima’s odd appearance.
A puppet of Bima from Bali shows more naturalistic features
Today Indonesia, with 245 million inhabitants, is the world’s most populous Islamic nation, and the Theatre of Shadows is still very much alive. The Malaysian-born author Tash Aw describes the continuing role of shadow theatre:
Even today there is a great consciousness of what goes on in the realms of shadow theatre. It’s an art form that is constantly being refreshed, that’s constantly being put to new and very exciting use. And, although the body of the works are drawn largely still from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, younger puppeteers are constantly using the shadow theatre to inject life and humour and a sort of bawdy commentary on Indonesian politics, which is difficult to replicate elsewhere. Just after the financial crisis in 1997, I remember a virtuoso monologue in Jakarta which roughly translates as ‘The tongue is still comatose’ or ‘The tongue is still mute’, in which the current President Habibie was cast as a ridiculous character called Gareng, who is short with beady eyes, incredibly earnest, but very inefficient. So, in many ways shadow theatre has become a source of social and political satire in a way that is difficult for TV, radio and newspapers to do, because those are much more easily censored; the shadow theatre is much more malleable, much more in touch with the grass roots and therefore much more difficult to control.
But it’s not just the opposition who make use of the Theatre of Shadows. The former president Sukarno, the first president after Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch following the Second World War, liked to identify himself with shadow-puppet characters, and especially with Bima – a righteous, mighty fighter, speaking like the common man rather than in elite language. Sukarno was often referred to as the dalang, the puppet master, of the Indonesian people – the one to give them voice and direct them in their new state, leading them in their national epic, as indeed he did for twenty years before being ousted in 1967.
But why is this Bima now in the British Museum? The answer, as so often, lies in European politics. For five years between 1811 and 1816, as part of the worldwide struggle against Napoleonic France, Britain occupied Java. The new British governor, Thomas Stamford Raffles, who would later found Singapore (see Chapter 59), was a serious scholar and a great admirer of Javanese culture of every period and, like all rulers of Java, he patronized the Theatre of Shadows and collected puppets. Our Bima comes from him. That short period of British rule explains something else – why the car from which the young Barack Obama saw a Hindu god in the streets of Muslim Jakarta was driving on the left-hand side of the road.
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Mexican Codex Map
Map painted on bark, made in Tlaxcala, Mexico
AD 1550–1600
The Shi’a ‘alam, Mughal miniature and Javanese shadow puppet represent cultures in which different faiths have managed to find reasonably positive ways of living together – in India, Iran and Indonesia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries religious tolerance was a hallmark of effective statecraft. But in Mexico around that time Christianity came as an instrument of conquest and was only slowly absorbed by the indigenous population. Now, 500 years later, more than 80 per cent of the population of Mexico is Catholic. In the process the physical landscape changed too: the invaders crushed temples and raised churches all over the Aztec Empire. It looks today like the most brutal and most complete replacement imaginable of one culture by another.
In the Zócalo, the main square of Mexico City, the palace of the Spanish viceroy stands on the very site of the demolished palace of Moctezuma. Nearby are the ruins of what was once the Aztec temple, whose sacred precinct is now largely taken up by the huge Spanish Baroque cathedral dedicated to the Virgin Mary. From the Zócalo, it looks as if the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1521 was in every way cataclysmic for indigenous traditions, and that is how the story has generally been told. The reality, however, was more gradual and perhaps more interesting. The local people kept their own languages – and, for the most part, their own land, although the fatal diseases which the Spanish had unwittingly brought with them meant that much land was freed up for the new settlers from Spain. The object in this chapter shows us something of how the complex amalgamation of faiths took place, and in it we can see both Spanish imperial methods and the resilience of local traditions.
It is an annotated map about 75 centimetres (30 inches) wide and 50 centimetres (20 inches) tall, painted on very rough paper, in fact Mexican bark that has been beaten into a sheet. On the map are geometrically drawn lines indicating, presumably, divisions of fields, with names written into them to show the owners, a small blue river with wavy lines, and a forking road, with feet on it showing that it is a thoroughfare. Then on top of this diagram are painted images – in the middle a tree, and under it three figures wearing European dress, and then two large churches with bell towers, painted in bright colours of blue, pink and yellow, the principal features of the map. One of them is named Santa Barbara, the other Santa Ana.
The map represents an area in the province of Tlaxcala, to the east of Mexico City, a region whose people had bitterly resented Aztec rule and who had enthusiastically joined the Spaniards in defeating them (see Chapter 78). This may explain why so many of the names of land holders on the map show marriages between Spanish settlers and native Indian aristocrats, evidence of a remarkable fusion between the two peoples and the emergence of a new, mixed, ruling class. More surprisingly, a similar fusion took place in the church. For example, many communities in the Tlaxcala area had been protected by the indigenous Toci, grandmother of the Mexican gods, who after the conquest was replaced as local patroness by St Anne (Santa Ana), in Catholic tradition the grandmother of Christ. The grandmother may have changed her name, but it is unlikely that for the local worshippers she had in any serious way changed her nature.
Apart from disease, religion was the most significant new aspect of Mexican life under the Spanish. Catholic missionaries came with the conquerors in the 1520s and transformed the spiritual landscape. While in many places the conquest was violent, the conversion of local people to Catholicism was not usually forced: the missionaries were genuinely intent on instilling the true faith, so regarded compulsory conversion as worthless. Even if many Indians willingly converted, it is hard to believe they would have welcomed the destruction of their previous places of wo
rship, yet this was a key part of Spanish policy. A Franciscan friar writing ten years after the conquest boasts of the achievements of this new, Mexican, church triumphant:
More than 250,000 men have been baptized, 500 temples have been destroyed and more than 26,000 figures of demons, which the Indians worshipped, have been demolished and burned.
The churches of Santa Barbara and Santa Ana dominate the landscape on our map; one has clearly been built on top of a destroyed native temple. The art historian Samuel Edgerton describes the technique:
Many of these Mexican churches are built on the platforms of old pagan temples. It’s a very clever ruse to help the Indians feel comfortable in the new churches, which were literally on top of the old church or temples. The central church has in front of it a large courtyard, what is today called an atrio or a patio. This was an innovation that the friars introduced to the buildings of these churches in Mexico because in the beginning the churches were often small, and you could not crowd in all the Indians who were being brought in here to be converted. So you had them stand in this large courtyard, and there they were preached to from an open chapel – it was easier for the church then to work as a ‘theatre for conversion’.
The churches on our map – these theatres of conversion – were built within an existing landscape of roads, watercourses and houses. Names and places are given in a mixture of Spanish and the local Nahuatl language: for example, the church of Santa Barbara is in a village called Santa Barbara Tamasolco. Tamasolco means place of the toad, which almost certainly had a pre-Christian religious significance, now lost. The artist has painted a toad on the map, and the two religious traditions live on in the eccentric place-name ‘Santa Barbara at the Place of the Toad’.
They also clearly lived on in the minds of the converted. An inscription on the map tells us: ‘Juan Bernabe said to his wife: “Sister of mine, let us give soul to our offspring, let us plant the willows that shall be our memory.” ’ In this lyrical glimpse of private faith, Juan Bernabe, despite bearing two Christian saints’ names, obviously still believes that his children’s salvation will be achieved in communion with the natural world of native tradition, rather than, or at least as well as, inside the Catholic church down the road.
The babies of this ‘New Spain’, as the invaders called it, were, like Juan Bernabe, given new Christian names at baptism, but, again like Juan Bernabe, this didn’t necessarily make them good Catholics. Later reformers would crack down on continuing pre-Christian practices and old rituals – incantations, divination and mask-wearing were punished as sorcery or idolatry. But many ceremonies survived through the sheer tenacity of the indigenous people. The most striking modern example is perhaps the way pre-Christian ancestor veneration has merged with the Christian All Souls’ Day to create the Day of the Dead, an entirely Mexican celebration, still vigorously alive, in which on 2 November every year the living remember their dead, with skulls and skeletons in colourful costumes, festive music, special offerings and food – a celebration that owes as much or more to native Indian religious practices as to Catholic piety.
The Nahuatl language that appears on our map has just about survived. A census carried out in 2000 revealed that only 1.49 per cent of the population could still speak it. Recently, however, the mayor of Mexico City has said he wants all city employees to learn Nahuatl, in an effort to revive the ancient tongue. Quite a few Nahuatl words do in fact survive today – although probably few of us realize we are using Nahuatl when we talk about tomato, chocolate or avocado. Significantly, but not surprisingly, no religious Nahuatl words have stayed with us – the missionaries’ teaching saw to that.
Five centuries after the conquest, the Mexican people today are increasingly eager to revive their pre-Hispanic past as a defining element of their national identity. But in the realm of faith, the legacy of the Christian conversion is still overwhelming. In spite of the great communist anti-clerical revolutions of the twentieth century, as the Mexican-born historian Dr Fernando Cervantes emphasizes, Mexico remains inextricably linked to the Catholic faith:
There is a very strong anti-religious, anti-clerical nationalist ideology in Mexico, but it’s very ambivalent because even the most atheistic Mexicans will never deny that they are devoted to the Virgin of Guadalupe, for instance. This is where the Catholic substratum comes through very strongly. You can’t really square the circle of being Mexican and not being in some senses Catholic. So I think that this is where you can see how strong the early evangelization was and how alive it still is.
Crowds flood to the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe
Everything that Dr Cervantes is talking about, indeed everything that our little map reveals about the Christianization of Mexico, is summed up on a colossal scale at the shrine of Guadalupe in the suburbs of Mexico City. After the Vatican, it is now the most visited Catholic shrine in the world. It was there, on the site of an Aztec shrine, that in December 1531, just ten years after the conquest, the Virgin Mary appeared to a young Aztec man whom the Spaniards called Juan Diego. She asked him to trust in her and she miraculously imprinted her image on his cloak. A church was built on the site of Juan Diego’s vision, the image on the cloak produced miracles, and conversions followed in huge numbers. The crowds flooded into Guadalupe. For a long time the Catholic clergy were worried that this was in fact the worship of an Aztec goddess being continued where there had once been an Aztec shrine; but the combined forces of the two religious traditions have over the centuries proved irresistible. There are now so many visitors to Guadalupe that you have to move in front of the miraculous image on a conveyer belt. In 1737 the Virgin of Guadalupe was declared patroness of Mexico, and in 2002 Pope John-Paul II declared Juan Diego, the young Aztec born under Moctezuma, a saint of the universal Catholic Church.
85
Reformation Centenary Broadsheet
Woodblock print, from Leipzig, Germany
AD 1617
You can hardly turn on the radio or open a newspaper these days without being bombarded by yet another anniversary – a hundred years since this, two hundred years since that. Our popular history seems to be written increasingly in centenaries, all generating books and exhibitions, T-shirts and special souvenir issues, in a frenzy of commemoration. Where did this habit of anniversary festivities begin? The answer takes us to the great struggle for religious freedoms played out across northern Europe in the seventeenth century. The first of all these modern centenary celebrations seems to have been organized in Germany, in Saxony in 1617; the event it was commemorating had taken place a hundred years earlier. In 1517, the story goes, Martin Luther picked up a hammer and nailed what was effectively his religious manifesto – his ninety-five theses – to a church door; in doing so he triggered the religious turmoil that would become the Protestant Reformation. The object in this chapter is a souvenir poster showing Luther’s famous act, on a large single sheet of paper called a broadsheet, made for the centenary. And it isn’t just a celebration, it’s about getting ready for war.
In 1617, when this broadsheet was made, European Protestants were facing an uncertain and dangerous future. The New Year had opened with public prayers by the Pope in Rome calling for the reunion of Christendom and the eradication of heresy. He was effectively calling the Catholic Church to arms against the Reformation. It was clear to many that a terrible religious war was about to break out. In response the Protestants tried to find a way of rallying their supporters for the fight, but unlike the Catholic Church they had no central authority to issue directions to the faithful. Protestants had to find other ways of insisting that the Reformation had been part of God’s plan for the world, that individuals had no need of priests to gain access to God’s mercy, that the Roman church was corrupt, and that Luther’s Reformation was essential to the salvation of every living soul. Above all, they needed a view of their past that would give all Protestants strength to face the terrifying future.
Before this point, no particular day or momen
t had been identified as the beginning of the Reformation. But leading Protestants in Saxony realized that it was now a hundred years since the heroic moment when, on 31 October 1517, Luther had first publicly challenged the authority of the Pope, so it was said, by nailing his ninety-five theses on to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg in Saxony. So, with a masterly sense of media management, they launched the first centenary celebration in the modern sense. All the familiar razzmatazz was there: ceremonies and processions, souvenirs, medals, paintings, printed sermons, and the broadsheet – a woodblock print which illustrates the critical day that Protestants now saw as the beginning of the first step on their radical religious journey.
The broadsheet is a crowded composition, but the message is quite clear: in a dream, God is revealing to the elector of Saxony the historic role of Martin Luther. We see the elector asleep. Below him, Luther reads the Bible in a great shaft of light coming down from heaven, where the Trinity is blessing him. As Luther looks up, light pours down on to the page in front of him: here, scripture is the word of God, and to read the scripture is to encounter God – and this is not happening inside a church. You could not have a simpler statement that for Protestants, Bible-reading is the foundation of faith, a foundation which, thanks to the new technology of printing, was now available to all believers in their own homes.
A History of the World in 100 Objects Page 47
