by Peter Watson
‘TECTONIC RELIGION’ IN THE NEW WORLD
Ideological life in the Americas was very different. For a start, there were no domesticated mammals, save for the llama, vicuña and guanaco in South America. One effect of this absence of domesticated mammals was to make vegetal life far more salient in the Americas, and this brought with it certain ideas.
The simple, the most obvious, and the most powerful, is that plants need to be planted underground, where they undergo a transformation from seed into shoot. This, combined with hallucinogenic experiences, helps explain why, for the ancient Americans, the cosmos was divided vividly into three zones – the Upper, Middle and Underworld. It was convincingly reinforced by the experiences of the shaman who, in trance, underwent soul flight, in order to consult the gods and/or the ancestors, and who used hallucinogenic plants to achieve these feats. Fertility was an issue in the New World but, in the tropical rainforests, teeming with life and with plants growing in profusion all through the year (as manioc did, for example), and where the seasons hardly varied, it was never the overwhelming issue it was in the temperate Old World.
Much more important in the New World mindset were the feared and admired jaguar, and the weather gods – gods of lightning, rain and hail or violent winds, of thunderstorms, erupting volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis, ‘dangerous weather’, as Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell put it.8 Moreover, volcanic activity, ‘tectonic religion’, as they also say, comprise evidence of ‘humanity’s closeness to the underworld in general’ and its sheer power in particular.9 With the enso increasing in frequency, at least during the last 5,800 years (chapter five) the gods, far from smiling on humankind in the New World, have been getting angrier.
This outline is further supported by a third factor: copious evidence of violence inherent in ancient Meso- and South American religions generally. In chapter twelve we saw that the Cashinahua, under the influence of hallucinogens, saw snakes, falling trees, terrifying jaguars, anacondas and alligators. We saw that the Mayans dreaded the mushroom of the underworld and at other times worshipped storm gods. We saw that cacao was linked to volcanoes, sacred vessels being made of volcanic ash. In chapter fourteen, we saw that the jaguar was linked to lightning and thunder, how it was invariably depicted with its fangs showing, and snarling, its claws exposed as it raped or attacked or ate human hearts. We saw how, in some Mesoamerican cities, obsidian blades, used for ripping out the hearts of sacrificial victims, were metaphors for jaguar teeth. In chapter seventeen we noticed that the Olmec faced the problem of too much water, that they had ‘inundation’ cults, Lords of the Storms, Masters of Lightning, and that their shamans were known as ‘men of hail’. We noted that the Chavín, though not a rainforest people, nonetheless depicted snarling jaguars in their art, that their architecture, as Richard Burger says, acted as a focus for ‘dangerous supernatural forces’. In chapter twenty we recorded how volcanoes were treated as gods, the impact of earthquakes on the Chavín, the devastation that El Niños caused the Moche. We saw that the mountains were gods to the Mayans, that the Zapotec and Mixtec worshipped natural forces, rain and lightning respectively. And in chapter twenty-one we explored the concept of ‘dark shamanism’, the manipulation of threat, that negative events, events that need to be averted, were of immense importance in these New World societies.
In chapter twenty-one, Steve Bourget’s work was discussed, in which he showed a direct association between sacrifice and torrential rain on the north coast of Peru, which he says may have been El Niño events. Children sacrificed nearby on mountain tops had zigzag decorations, as if they were dedicated to lightning. The very existence of weather shamans, as also discussed in chapter twenty-one, shows how important weather was, and the equation of weather with illness, as was also noted in that chapter, implies that it was the negative aspects of weather that were paramount. Among the Toltecs, Tezcatlipoca was a malevolent god – ‘he caused plagues, droughts, frosts, food poisoning, starvation, the appearance of monsters and collective massacres’.10 Enrique Florescano informed us in chapter twenty-three that, judging by the iconographic evidence, ‘In the most ancient times, the important gods of Mesoamerica were those of the netherworld. These powers managed the forces of destruction, decadence and death . . .’. We also noted in chapter twenty-one the description by Arthur Demarest and Geoffrey Conrad of the Aztec gods as ‘ever-threatening’.11 (Moctezuma Ilhuicamina was ‘the angry lord, the archer of the skies’ – aggression was built in.) As we saw in chapter twenty-three, each age of the Aztec cosmological system takes its name and character from its destructive elements, not from its creations. ‘Each beginning is sure to result in a catastrophe and there appears to be no end in sight to this divine antagonism, these rains of fire, vigilante jaguars, deluges and hurricanes . . . One cannot help but be impressed by the persistence of the motif of change, sacrifice, death and destruction . . . ’12 And we noted in the same chapter that the second part of the name of the god Xipe Totec means ‘dread’. Finally, the very fact that the Aztecs and other cultures featured jaguar warriors, that boxers wore jaguar masks, and that in the Aztec mythology the jaguar cult beat the eagle cult, all underline what was said earlier, that fear of the jaguar was the dominant emotion.
Put all this together and you have a crucial difference between New World and Old World gods.
If you worship angry gods, whether they be tsunamis or earthquakes, volcanoes or jaguars, your worship essentially takes the form of propitiation, of asking – petitioning – those gods not to do something, not to erupt if the god is a volcano, not to fall in torrents if the god is rain, not to produce destructive tsunamis and winds if the god is an enso event, not to attack humans if the god is a jaguar. In the New World – in Central and South America certainly – the predominant form of worship was directed towards making unpleasant things not happen.
And here is the crucial point: that form of worship doesn’t work. That is to say, it didn’t/doesn’t work all the time, or to anything like the extent that fertility worship works. It no doubt works for some of the time: no one in the village is carried off by a jaguar for a certain number of weeks; there is no tsunami for a few years, or even decades; a volcano dies down, as the Icelandic ones did in 2010 and 2011. But, and it is again an important but, the angry gods are never totally appeased. Sooner or later, their wrath recurs. (There is some evidence that a raft of earthquakes, circa AD 1300, had an effect on what remained of the Mayan civilisation.)
We also know that, in the case of enso episodes, they have been getting more common, quite a lot more common, in fact. Looked at from the point of view of an Olmec or Mayan or Toltec or Aztec shaman, with their extremely accurate calendar, it would have seemed to them that worship wasn’t working, that whatever traditional level of ritual had been practised in the past, it wasn’t enough. This, after all, is why the Mixtec ritual specialists sponsored war, to manufacture threats that they could control.
In such circumstances, religious specialists would have decided that, if the current level of worship wasn’t working, they must either manipulate threats they could control, war, or, they must redouble their efforts. And this is why the most profound and revealing difference between the Old World and the New occurs in the realm of human sacrifice. In the Old World, thanks to the proximity of domestic mammals, human sacrifice was gradually replaced by animal sacrifice and then, after AD 70, thanks again to the close similarity of domestic mammals to humans, blood sacrifice was abolished altogether. In the New World, however, far from being abolished, human sacrifice became more and more widespread, until in the fifteenth century tens of thousands of Aztec victims were being sacrificed each year. Inca sacrifice was not quite so numerous, but there were still hundreds of mountain huacas where people were sacrificed and, according to some accounts, hundreds of children were killed at a time. We are now in a position to explain this striking anomaly and to discuss its central relevance to our story.
EVER-ANGRIER GODS
In South America there was a further factor, the idea that death – at least for some people – was not the end, that there was a form of continued existence midway between life and death, founded on the naturally occurring mummified remains that comprised part of the ritual life of the earliest inhabitants, and which found its fullest expression in the Inca system of split inheritance and panaqa, whereby dead kings were treated as, to all intents and purposes, still living.
In such an environment, where death was apparently not always so ‘final’ as it is for us today, sacrifice would not have been seen as so terrible. This is not to say that it wouldn’t have been without pain or suffering, but it is to say that it would not have been quite so terrible as it now sounds. We are reminded that, as discussed in chapter twenty-one, attitudes to death were different in the New World, where parents would give or sell their children as sacrificial victims, where gamblers at the ball game would wager their own lives on the result, where the victors in ball games were sometimes sacrificed (who in the modern world would ‘win’ under such circumstances?), or where the Inca parents who donated their children as sacrificial victims were not allowed to show any negative feelings. The inscriptions showing people with tears in their eyes do seem to suggest that, despite the possibility that the psychoactive plants of the New World could help stupefy potential victims, pain was nevertheless very real in the sacrificial ceremonies. But it is probably wrong to see the pain of the victims in sacrificial rituals as separate from the pain of the captors and rulers who led the rituals, whose own auto-sacrifice was crucial. Pain had religious meaning.
One explanation we can give for this, though it perhaps betrays a modern, Western, post-Christian bias, is to say that asceticism, stoicism and fortitude were admired and valued in the New World civilisations. A better explanation, more functional, at least in this author’s view, is that it reflected a subtle but marked change in ideology. Blood was important in the New World rituals and bloodletting, as discussed in chapter twenty-one, was an evolution of the shamanistic system. Traditional shamans, entering trance via hallucinogens, had dominated small-scale societies, consisting of tens, or at most hundreds of people in villages. In the later great urban centres, with populations in the thousands, or tens of thousands, more theatre was needed, and the leaders needed to adopt a system that didn’t break with tradition, not totally, but extended and improved it, which awed the larger populations and at the same time under-girded the shaman-kings’ unique link to the gods. The deliberate shedding of their own blood in copious quantities, amid much self-inflicted pain, which produced trance – the traditional device of the shaman – was such a system. Pain, and the fear associated with it, became a form of authority – the worse the pain, the more blood that was shed, the more authority someone had. Sacrifice, self-sacrifice, even death itself, was in this scheme of things the ultimate form of power, in the Inca world as much as in the Aztec. Shamanism, and the vivid other worlds encountered in trance, convinced people of these other worlds much more than did the rituals of the Old World. Amid such a set of beliefs, one can see how attitudes to sacrifice would have been different: the more you are convinced that other worlds exist, the easier it is to forgo this one.
We don’t know how this system came about and probably never shall. However, given that at least some New World wars were fought for captives, rather than for territory, and given that some rulers or nobles were tortured for considerable periods of time before being sacrificed – months or even years – it is at least possible, even likely one might think, that a small number of noble warriors was captured, tortured, during which time they lost so much blood that they entered trance, and were then rescued. Such individuals would have been able to recall their experiences once back in their own villages or towns and would have incorporated them as a feature of their own rituals.
We need to address the question as to why sacrifice was so strong in both Mesoamerica and the Andes. After all, we saw earlier that many ideas and practices did not travel easily (or at all) between the two regions (writing and the llama are two examples). This would seem to support the argument that sacrifice has its origins in catastrophe. Both Mesoamerica and the Andes, as is all too clear by now, were and are volcanically active, situated along the same tectonic rim, and both at the eastern end of the El Niño configuration. The practice of sacrifice grew up independently in the two regions, as it did in the Old World.
The fact that (animal) sacrifice effectively ended in the Old World in AD 70, while human sacrifice (and many other forms of painful violence) continued to grow in frequency in the Americas, is a salutary reminder of how environment and ideology can interact to produce marked differences in human behaviour, in the very meaning of humanity.
We shouldn’t overlook the role of accident in history. This book has been about the systematic differences across the globe that account for the separate trajectories of the Old World and the New. But accident surely played a part too. A good example of this is provided by a comparison between the Aztecs and the Incas, on the one hand, and pastoral nomads on the other. As described in chapter twenty-three, both the Aztec and Inca societies were inherently unstable, the practice of securing ever-increasing numbers of captives for sacrifice, and worshipping dead kings who kept hold of their land, being ultimately maladaptive. We don’t know where these maladaptive strategies would have led had not the Conquest intervened in either case, but the omens were not good.
On the other side of the world, the way of life of pastoral nomads was equally maladaptive – in the long run they could not continue to survive in their traditional lifestyle and this is why they were continually breaking out of the steppes. But they had somewhere to go, more settled societies to attack or trade with and make the most of. Their shortcomings, as it turned out, were in the long run productive. But there was nothing inevitable about it.
This book has been primarily about civilisations (not entirely, but mainly). Many groups of people, in both hemispheres, never developed into civilisations but this does not necessarily imply that those societies were failures in any way. To the contrary, such lifestyles as those of the Plains Indians in North America, whose coexistence with the bison endured for millennia, or the Native Americans of the north-west Pacific coast, who lived alongside rivers teeming with salmon for just as long, must be regarded as successful communities, thanks to the sheer abundance of food which surrounded them. The same may be said about the inhabitants of Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia and Africa, who also never developed ‘high’ civilisations. The people living in Australia in the seventeenth century, for example, when Europeans first arrived, had a Stone Age culture (with their own form of shamanism).13 In his book, Man’s Conquest of the Pacific (1979), the Australian archaeologist Peter Bellwood concludes that, though the South East Asia mainland did not develop an urbanised civilisation until the period of intensive Indian and Chinese influence, at about the time of Christ, that New Guinea had no sizeable animals – mammals or otherwise – and that Polynesia had only a ‘half-civilisation’, nevertheless ‘the quality of life for the prehistoric South East Asian villager was probably no worse and perhaps much better than that of his Chinese, Sumerian or Egyptian urbanized counterpart’.14 They had adapted: that is what people do. Civilisation is but one form of adaptation, as should be clear from this book.
We can now see that the main difference between the Old and the New World civilisations (leaving the smaller polities to one side) is in their patterns of adaptation to different environmental circumstances, and that the Old World ideologies changed more often and more radically than did the ideologies of the Americas. And that while this was due to some extent to differences in climate and geography – the weakening monsoon in the Old World and the increasing frequency of El Niño in the New World – it also had a great deal to do with the role in the Old World of domesticated mammals and in the New World of hallucinogenic plants. We may therefore say – exaggerating only slightly – that the core of Old Wo
rld history was defined largely by the role of the shepherd, whereas in the New World an equivalent role was fulfilled by the shaman. As late as 1972, in Trujillo, Peru, there was an outdoor shamans’ market, where folk medicines were traded.15 The shaman and the shepherd epitomise the great divide.
In the Old World, the existence of domesticated mammals released humans from place and that mobility, in conjunction with the pattern of fertility, associated with the weakening monsoon, favoured the development of several ideologies, culminating in the Christian/Greek idea of an abstract but rational god, with ideas of linear time and ‘progress’. In the New World, in Latin America at least, where civilisations appeared, the great violence and destructive capacity of the weather, indeed its increasing frequency of destruction, combined with the essentially vivid characteristics of trance-inducted shamanism, was much more difficult to cope with in a rational way. The gods of the New World were not as manageable, or anywhere near as friendly, as cooperative, as understandable, as those in the Old World. All these factors made the New World a harder place to adapt to than the Old World.
