The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  Many images of contestants or sacrificial victims do not show suffering – at the most they perhaps show people in a state of stupor. But other images do show people in pain, with contorted facial features, pear-shaped tears on their cheeks or cries emanating in scrolls from their mouths (see figure 16).

  Fig. 18 A wounded ball player lying outside the playing field, crying (tear) and moaning (scroll).

  This has all led Jane Stevenson Day, among others, to conclude that, ‘Rather than destroying a community, violence actually bound its members together as co-actors in a bloody ritual performance – bloodshed, pain and death were one side of the coin, and sustenance, regeneration and life the other . . . Repetitive dramatic performances of decapitation may have reduced sensitivity to its horror and engendered a fatalistic acceptance . . . The presence of organised violence and the use of blood sacrifices for the benefit of an entire community are basic to the world view of most cultures in the pre-Columbian Americas.’42

  THE GREAT STAR AND THE WASP STAR

  Throughout Mesoamerica, as we have seen, there developed sophisticated calendrical systems, certain elements of which were probably inherited from the Olmec and Zapotec civilisations. This was discussed in the previous chapter but not mentioned there was the ‘long count’, the date that was always given at the beginning of an inscription, which usually consisted of five parts: baktun, katun, tun, uinal and kin. Kin stood for ‘1’, the day (kin also means ‘sun’), the actual unique date, reached by counting the total number of days that had passed since the date the Maya considered their ‘zero year’. Under this system a uinal was a month of twenty kin,a tun was eighteen months, 360 kin,a katun was twenty tun and a baktun was twenty katun or 144,000 kin. Apart from the kin, the basic unit may have been the katun, 7,200 kin or roughly twenty years. This was not far off the length of a generation, close to the limit of individual memory and, perhaps, an average time between natural disasters – earthquakes, El Niños, volcanic eruptions.

  On the basis of the kin-baktun system, the Mayan ‘zero hour’ has been calculated, as mentioned earlier, as 2 August, 3114 BC. The choice of this date is still a mystery but it may have a propaganda value, stressing that the Mayan rulers could identify their ancestry a long way back into the remote past, adding to their authority. This date may also have served to separate what we might call historic time – the time of real people – from mythic time. Mayan mathematics envisaged other units of counting – the pictun, for example, was twenty baktun – and extended, theoretically, millions of years into the past. Such devices may have helped link the rulers of Classic Maya Mesoamerica with the gods who inhabited mythic time in the remote past and, again, cemented their authority.

  Another aspect of the Mayan understanding of time concerned the role and behaviour of the planet Venus. We have already seen, in chapter twenty, that the Maya attached particular importance to the Milky Way, seeing in its broad shape the World Tree which, in the course of the night, rotated, becoming the canoe in which the first individuals were created. The Mesoamericans were fascinated by transformations of this kind, perhaps as a result of the transformations shamans underwent during trance.

  The attention the Maya gave to Venus may well have stemmed from its prominence in the night sky and its habit of appearing and disappearing – just as the moon waxed and waned – in a regular cycle. The Mayans knew that Noh Ek, the ‘Great Star’, or Xuc Ek, the ‘Wasp Star’, as it was variously called, operated on a synodic revolution (its apparent ‘year’) of 584 days (the current measurement being 583.92 days), divided into four periods. The first period lasts 240 days, during which time Venus is the Morning Star. The second period corresponds to the superior conjunction, when the star disappears for approximately three months. In the third period it reappears as the Evening Star, for another 240 days. Finally, there is the inferior conjunction, when it again disappears, this time for two weeks. The Mayans knew that five Venus‘years’ corresponded to eight solar ones, and they knew that their calculations, which were extremely complex, needed to be corrected every so often.

  The significance of Venus, for the Mayans, was that it was associated with war. The glyph for ‘war’ was usually the sign for Venus plus the name of the city they were planning to subdue. Perhaps the fact that Venus reappeared so consistently, after periods of ‘defeat’ (when it vanished), accounts for this warlike association. In any event, murals painted at Bonampak (in Chiapas, Mexico) and elsewhere show victorious warriors, dressed in robes studded with symbols of Venus, beheading captives and offering their remains to the gods.43 Copán (north-western Honduras) had a Venus temple with a slit window, through which the court astronomers could time the appearance of the Evening Star. Bathed in the light of the Morning Star (before the sun rose), Maya kings would carry out sacrifices, in so doing cementing and renewing their power by aligning themselves with the order of the heavens, which their astronomer/astrologists could predict.

  The difficult-to-calculate cycle of Venus, its disappearance and reappearance, would have appeared magical to the uninitiated, maybe even more so than the behaviour of the sun and the moon (and which might account for its prominence in the records). The astronomers’ – and their rulers’ – ability to foretell the disappearance and subsequent reappearance of Venus, would have been an impressive demonstration of shamanic predictive/divinatory power. According to other Mesoamerican traditions, Quetzalcoatl – the Toltec and Aztec god whom the Maya knew as Kukulkan – was transformed into the Morning Star after being expelled from Earth. Nor did it go unnoticed that Venus, in its Morning Star period, rises just before the sun, as if announcing its arrival.

  In fact, in Mesoamerica entire cities were oriented astronomically. Tenochtitlán is a good example, where excavations have shown that the Templo Mayor, the Great Temple, was situated so that the rising equinox sun shone its light into a notch between the twin summits of the main building. Once the sun had arrived, the town crier would signal the time to begin the first rituals of sacrifice that accompanied the start of each of the eighteen months of the year. Many animal victims, in wooden cages, together with human sacrificial victims, often bound or wearing goggle masks associated with the storm deities, were found in the excavations, laid out in an east-west direction.44 These were complicated rituals, incompletely understood by archaeologists, but they seem to link fertility, maize symbolism, warfare and sacrifice in a sacred landscape, of which the Mesoamerican city was fully a part. The calendar was central to these rituals.

  WRITING AS PROPAGANDA

  Research into the writing systems of the New World now recognises that there were four civilisations in which some form of script developed – the Zapotec, the Mixtec, the Maya and the Aztec. In all cases, these writing systems were essentially hieroglyphic: nowhere in the New World did writing similar or equivalent to cuneiform develop, nor was an alphabet ever introduced in pre-Columbian America. As we shall see, this was because the purpose of hieroglyphic writing is, in general, different from that of other forms.

  We cannot be certain that Mayan writing – the best understood – developed from earlier forms, Olmec or Zapotec, but it seems likely, if only on the grounds that some of the symbols overlap and that writing emerged nowhere else in the New World.

  In general, Mesoamerican scripts are written in vertical columns and are meant to be read from left to right and top to bottom. Symbols are known as glyphs, from the Greek gliphein, to engrave or carve. Each glyph has a central element, surrounded by qualifiers. The system proved difficult to decipher partly because epigraphers and linguists were more used to deciphering Indo-European languages, which those of Mesoamerica are not, and partly because it took a while to realise that the script was ‘mixed’ – that is, some glyphs were logograms (where each symbol expresses a complete word), some are ideograms (where each symbol expresses a thing or an idea), and still other glyphs are syllabic. In addition to this, the Mesoamericans liked to express each word in more than one way.

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sp; Maria Longhena, for example, explains how the glyph for ‘jaguar’ (balam in Maya) may be represented either by a drawing of the head of a jaguar, or even the whole silhouette, or by writing the three syllables, ba-la-ma (in which, just to confuse matters, the last ‘a’ was silent).45 A further possibility was to place the jaguar’s head between the glyphs for ‘ba’ and ‘ma’. Still other complications arose because some words had quite different meanings in different contexts – chan, for instance, could mean ‘snake’, ‘sky’, or ‘4’.

  At the present stage of research (this is also a relatively new field) logographic syllables seem to be more common than syllabic-phonetic symbols. Maya word order was also slightly different: ‘He captured – Jewelled Skull – Bird Jaguar’ would be, in English: ‘Bird Jaguar captured Jewelled Skull.’ With these provisos, however, the Mesoamerican hieroglyphs, in having a main idea surrounded by various qualifiers, were not at all dissimilar in principle from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

  Where the differences arose were in the uses to which writing was put in these areas of the New World, which set them quite apart from cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia which, as we have seen, began for economic/trade-related reasons.

  Joyce Marcus, in her recent magisterial survey of four Mesoamerican writing systems, shows that our understanding of the inscriptions has gone through several phases.46 At one time, when decipherment was in its early stages, researchers were impressed by the large number of calendrical dates (see above), leading some to think the Mesoamericans worshipped time. Then, around 1949, it was realised that many of the personages referred to in the writing systems were real people – rulers, not gods – and so the prospect of a proper Mesoamerican history was opened up. But Marcus’s message is: ‘not so fast.’ Her view is that Mesoamerican societies were not really literate at all, not in the modern Western sense. Instead, her argument is that in the four Mesoamerican cultures she studied, the rulers had a monopoly on truth, they made a distinction between ‘noble speech’ and ‘commoner speech’ and literacy helped distinguish the ruling class from commoners.

  She says that from the moment rank societies or chiefdoms arose, there was ‘intense competition between elites . . . Reinforced by mythologies that provide separate origins for low-status and high-status individuals, such competition led to endemic raiding between villages, and even to conflict among members of the same high-status families . . . Mesoamerican hieroglyphic writing grew out of this competition for prestige and leadership, and almost immediately became one of the vehicles by which competition escalated . . . Mesoamerican writing did not appear until societies with leadership based on hereditary inequality already existed . . . ’47 She says this explains why the earliest texts show slain enemies, why place names do not appear until there were actual states. She says, plainly, that writing in Mesoamerica was devised as a form of propaganda, in a society where myth, history and propaganda were more or less the same thing, much as had been the case in ancient Egypt, but was much less true in Mesopotamia.

  She distinguished two types of propaganda – vertical and horizontal. Vertical propaganda was contained on major public monuments, in which the elite sought to convince the commoners of their legitimacy to rule (details of battles with many captive being taken and sacrificed, skull racks showing the price to be paid for not accepting the legitimacy of the elite). Horizontal propaganda, on the other hand, was directed from elite to elite and was much more intimate in nature – codices, for example, and genealogies, designed to impress on others a particular family’s claim to succession, many examples of which, Marcus shows, contained falsifications designed to improve the status of the people who commissioned the inscriptions.

  In addition there was agitation propaganda, designed to destabilise the claims of the current incumbents in a society, and integration propaganda, with the opposite intent, designed to increase the stability of the regime.

  Overall, Marcus concludes, there were eight themes most often addressed by pre-Hispanic texts across the four cultures with this form of writing: identifying vanquished rivals; identifying the limits of the ruler’s political territory; identifying the conquered places paying tribute; the genealogical right of the ruler to rule; the date of their inauguration; their marriages to important spouses; the birth of their heirs; and the various honorific titles they could claim. On top of this, Marcus shows the systematic nature of the falsifications in the texts: one ruler of Palenque claimed to be the descendant of a woman who took office when she was 800 years old, and who had given birth when she was over 700 years old; Aztec documents show that Xolotl ruled for 117 years and Tezozomoc for 180 years.48 A statistical analysis of 1,661 Mixtec male nobles’ names shows that they deviate significantly from the pattern that would be obtained if every one was named after the day of their birth, as nobles were supposed to have been. This suggests that their birth dates were deliberately falsified to coincide with what were felt to be propitious dates.49

  Mesoamerican societies were not literate, Marcus concludes, ‘because literacy was not the goal’. The important distinction in Mesoamerica was not between myth, history and propaganda but between noble speech and commoner speech. ‘Noble speech, like the ma’at of the Egyptian pharaoh, was by definition true no matter how improbable. Commoner speech was confused, uninformed, full of falsehoods. Hieroglyphic writing, therefore, was the visible form of noble speech.’ Put another way, writing was a skill used to maintain the gulf between ruler and ruled – this was accomplished by a myth of separate origins. It was broadly similar to the Egyptian idea of ‘a great culture’, a court-created tradition that ‘became the instrument of royal rule’. And there is a strong echo here, of course, with the Mixtec elitists’ linking of war and religion, as outlined in the previous chapter.50

  This puts into context the Mesoamerican calendar. Scholars, Marcus says, should acknowledge the potential accuracy of dates in the Long Count system ‘without claiming that the system’s goal was accuracy.* After all, accuracy could hardly be the goal of a calendar that had someone giving birth at 754 years of age and of royal ancestors taking office at 815.’ She quotes one telling example where the age of a ruler, determined osteologically, differed markedly from what the written record claimed. In still other cases, rulers took office before humans were known to have entered the New World.

  Marcus’s work is a salutary reminder that New World epigraphic research is still a relatively new field. But her analysis does suggest that the phenomenon of writing in Mesoamerica was somewhat different from what occurred in Mesopotamia and which led eventually to alphabetic script. Both share the term ‘writing’, which is accurate enough as far as it goes. But the difference it conceals is, arguably, more revealing.

  FIGHTING WITH FOOD

  Outside Mesoamerica, in what is now the continental United States, there is one other institution unique to the New World that we need to consider: potlatch. We need to be particularly careful what we say here because a similar institution has existed at times in Oceania and, moreover, potlatch appears to have been confined to a relatively small area – the north-west Pacific coast – before European contact, which helped it spread quickly into some other adjacent areas.

  Potlatch is a Chinook jargon term meaning ‘give’. In a potlatch, hosts give gifts of wealth to formally invited guests in amounts that, to many early (European) observers and missionaries, seemed wasteful or even economically harmful. Archaeological evidence shows that the ceremonies may have begun as early as 1500 BC in the Strait of Georgia region, between Vancouver Island and mainland Canada, with the practice originally extending along the north-west coast from the Eyak, near the Copper River in Alaska, to the Chinook, near the Columbia River in Oregon, and among many tribes in the adjacent parts of the Arctic, sub-Arctic and plateau (see frontispiece map in the following reference).52

  Early on, Franz Boas, the famous early twentieth-century anthropologist, working with the Kwakiutl on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, described potlatch as a
way to acquire rank and as an investment which produced interest because potlatchers knew that the recipients of their largesse would, at a later date, have to repay their hospitality with even more largesse. But this seems to have confused two processes. In planning for potlatch, the hosts might borrow gifts, which had to be repaid with interest, but the potlatch itself did not need to be repaid with interest, or even repaid at all. On this basis, others disputed Boas’s conclusion, arguing instead that potlatchers gave out of pride, not greed or in an attempt to ‘break’ their rivals through increasing amounts of giving.53

  In The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1967), Marcel Mauss concluded that potlatch was a stage in the evolution of society, in effect an aberration, ‘the monster child of the gift system’, in which, as Ruth Benedict put it, the societies were dominated by a single ‘megalomaniac’ idea, with groups trying to outdo each other in the giving and even the destruction of ever-larger amounts of property. It was, in some ways, a very unusual form of conspicuous consumption.54

  Most anthropologists now seem to accept that potlatch is related to rank, that it is a way for individuals to express their status and self-esteem, emphasising social and economic hierarchy, and at the same time helping in the distribution (and redistribution) of goods. There is also some evidence that potlatch was related to the decline of warfare, a substitute for physical conflict, a case of ‘fighting with property’. The more considered view now (although the practice varies from tribe to tribe) is that potlatch serves to identify publicly the membership of a group and, within that, the status of its leading members. ‘Competitive potlatching’ does occur but only when two clan members claim the same social rank. The practice has more recently been found to extend outside the Pacific north-west coast area, even to circum-Pacific rim areas, but whether this spread post-dates the Conquest isn’t certain.55