by Marie Arana
Indeed, from the northermost reaches of Mexica rule to the southernmost forests of the Guaraní, religion and tribal ritual had often demanded the ultimate sacrifice: offering up human lives to appease the gods. Faith had asked more than good acts and prayer from its followers. It had asked for life itself.
In the ancient Americas, human sacrifice was a test of religious conviction. Gods needed to be mollified. Bodies were required. Blood needed to be drawn. Rather than yielding their own to the sacrificial stone, the pre-Columbians, especially Mesoamericans, often provoked wars to gain victims. They went so far as to adapt rules of warfare to the task: warriors would only wound their enemies in battle so that they could take them prisoner and kill them—even eat them—in ritual sacrifice. Aztec codices describe these religious rites, performed in elaborate ceremonies atop great pyramid temples. High priests would choose the most virile among the captives; four lesser priests would wrestle the live victim to the ritual slab; and a fifth would cut open his thorax with a sharp obsidian knife, reach under his sternum, and rip out the still-beating heart. The victim’s body would then be flung down the temple steps, spraying blood as it caromed down the barbed declivity, and then his heart would be burned, sending its smoke to a hungry god.
In Peru, during Inti Raymi celebrations for the winter solstice, human sacrifices were made with great pomp and ceremony, overseen by high priests of the Inca. But warriors and captives were not considered the highest blood tributes to a supreme god. The Incas sacrificed prepubescent children of both sexes, chosen for their innocence as well as their beauty, offered up in an effort to win the Sun’s favor and ensure a bountiful harvest. They called it capacocha, and the sacrifice of a beautiful, virginal child would be called for whenever good fortune was needed: when an emperor was ill, or had celebrated the birth of a son, or had set out to war, or had died, or had just been succeeded. The diminutive victims were prepared in elaborate rituals, dressed, drugged, and then led up mountains to icy promontories where their skulls were crushed or throats strangled in solemn observances. Blood was never shed in these sacrifices: a victim who had been cut or bled would have been deemed imperfect, incomplete, unacceptable to the Lord Sun. In 1892 an excavation on Ecuador’s Isla de la Plata produced the grisly remains of two such children, adorned with precious artifacts, killed without any evidence of blood, and buried in precisely the way that Inca emperors mandated such rituals to take place. One hundred years later, in 1995, the remains of a twelve-year-old mummified Inca girl were dug from the snows of Mount Ampato in southern Peru, along with a trove of gold and silver ornaments. “Juanita,” she was subsequently called, the Ice Maiden, and she was wrapped in an exquisitely woven tapestry of bright colors and a shawl of the finest alpaca—with a silver clasp at her breast and a cap of red feathers on her brow. Her right eye socket bore a visible crack and, above it, a massive fracture: evidence that she had been dispatched by a brutal blow to the head. In the glacial heights of Chile and northwest Argentina, frozen for all time in the perpetual snows of Aconcagua, an assortment of mummified children was found—sometimes alone, sometimes in clusters, always exquisitely dressed, always bludgeoned or asphyxiated—anywhere from six to fifteen years old. In 2018, the skull of a boy—less than ten-years-old—was found in a sacrificial pit in the ruins of the Aztec Templo Mayor, under the very heart of Mexico City.
As gruesome as these child murders were, they were perceived as having great agency. In the way, perhaps, that we believe that sacrificing soldiers to war—ceding our youngest and strongest to the mayhem of battle—will bring us progress, the ancient Andeans believed that sacrificial ceremonies, meticulously planned and spiritedly offered, would go a long way to paying down sins and bringing good fortune. More important, they reckoned they had good evidence for their efficacy: when Arequipa’s volcano Misti erupted in the early fifteenth century, and the surrounding area was razed by a tsunami of molten lava, the queen wife of Pachacutec Inca Yupanqui called for a flurry of sacrifices in Cuzco to mitigate the apu’s divine fury. But the volcano’s fulminations did not cease until Pachacutec himself visited the mountain with his entourage of high priests and made the sacrificial offerings that eventually calmed its fiery depths. When the most sacred building in Cuzco, the Temple of the Sun, was constructed, a number of children were buried alive in the sanctuary’s foundation, ensuring the requisite potency and energy that the holy space would have for all generations to come. So convinced were the Incas that there was a strong causality between the sacrifice of children and the benefits to empire, that fathers would offer up their daughters to the ritual of capacocha, believing that great favors would be won for the good of the people, and their “chosen” child would live on in eternal honor among the celestial deities.
In Paraguay and Uruguay, the Guaraní, an otherwise gentle and spiritual people who believed in one God as well as the Word—the knowledge that lived deep within and was passed on to unborn children—were also reputed to be cannibals. For all their poetry and sensibility, there was also this. We don’t know whether they consumed the flesh of their enemies or, more likely—as some Amazon Indians still do—ate their dead in the clear conviction that it was abhorrent to leave their remains to the despoliations of the wild. Far better to take in a loved one’s ashes, ingest his essence, incorporate him to an everlasting life than abandon his body to harsh fortune. Whatever their calculus, the Guaraní, whom Christian conquistadors may have accused falsely in order to vilify and vanquish them, became renowned the world over for the cruelties of their religion. In Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Comentarios, published in 1542, the explorer told of the Guaraní custom to follow wars with sacred rituals. These occasions began innocently enough with singing and dancing, and they invited their prisoners to join them. They prepared the captives for weeks by fattening them, giving them all they desired, even allowing their wives and daughters to pleasure them. In the end, when the victims were sufficiently plump and content, shamans and children were sent to hack them to pieces. The butchered corpses would be cooked in large pots, the flesh devoured and savored, and the great Father thanked for this opportunity to settle scores.
Whether or not this was true about the Guaraní, there is good, concrete evidence that human sacrifice and cannibalism were practiced elsewhere in the New World. Historians recount the discovery of child sacrifices, live burials found under the walls of structures throughout the Andes—quite obviously a building-dedication rite. This is certainly nothing the pre-Columbians invented: decapitated infants used for the same purpose are on display in the Museum of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, in Jerusalem. According to that particular exhibit, they were found in towns near the Dead Sea, “invariably under house floors, and they were quite possibly foundation sacrifices, as encountered elsewhere in the Near East.” The difference is that the Andean children sacrifices were common many thousands of years later, right up to the time of the conquest—and, some say, years after. At Ancón, along the Peruvian coast where I used to play as a little girl, a child was found interred beneath the corner of a stone house. In place of her eyes were brilliant little squares of mica; her stomach was replaced by a gourd; and where her heart should have been, there was a shimmering rock crystal. Sacred hearths needed to be fed with sacrifices such as these.
In such ways did violence and faith join hands in the pre-Columbian past, much as it had joined hands in Spain’s fierce expulsion of its Jews, its autos-da-fé, and the Crusades it had mounted against Europe’s conquering Muslim armies. Yet for all the bloodlust that had consumed Spain for centuries, the Spanish would claim indigenous “barbarism” and “profanity” as reason enough to enslave a hemisphere. To the Catholic Crown, ritual human sacrifice and cannibalism were untenable, diabolical heresies that needed to be purged unilaterally. So it was that the violence of Latin America’s religious past became the perfect justification to impose a violent religious future. Seizing the opportunity that indigenous “blasphemies” offered, Spain moved quick
ly to grant the Church a firm toehold in its campaign of subjugation. Never had Scripture been so useful in the rout of a vast, unknown territory. Conquistadors, bishops, merchants, bankers all endorsed the calumniation, weighing in on the inherent savagery of all New World Indians, no matter how great the civilization, no matter how developed the religion. Now, as a perceptive, compassionate young Jesuit novitiate was beginning to see it, it was precisely to keep a firm dominion on the population five hundred years later that he had been sent to that far, mountain hinterland of America.
CHAPTER 11
STONE TRUMPS STONE
The sword and the cross marched together in the conquest and plunder of Latin America, and captains and bishops, knights and evangelists, soldiers and monks joined forces to help themselves to its silver.
—Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America
From the moment the Old World met the New, it wanted to evangelize it: plant a cross in all its public places, pile stone on its sacred stone. In Montezuma’s first meeting with Cortés, the Spaniard warned the emperor about the supremacy of the Spanish God and the sacrilege of worshiping idols in His place. This was not surprising, neither for the man who said it nor for he who heard it. Cortés and Montezuma both inhabited worlds defined by faith. For Cortés, the cross was synonymous with patriotism, righteousness, manliness—intrinsic to his identity. The patron saint of Spain is Saint James—Santiago “Matamoros,” the Moor Slayer—after all, and Santiago’s name had been invoked for centuries in every show of swords, every charge against an enemy, every venture into the unknown.
For the Mexicas, too, and especially for the Aztecs who lorded over them, their gods, which numbered into the dozens, were as natural and present as the air they breathed, the blood that coursed through their veins. There were thirteen levels of heaven, nine layers of underworld in the Aztec pantheon, each stratum inhabited by its respective deities and celestial bodies. Gods were invoked for the growing of maize, the fermentation of liquor, the defeat of a foe, the birth of a child, the pleasures of sex. What was different, perhaps, was that the Aztecs did not impose their gods unilaterally. High priests understood that other cultures might have potent, useful faiths of their own. The Aztec god of fertility—Xipe Totec—had been adopted from the Yopi people. The god of the night sky or high wind—Tezcatlipoca, ruler of the underworld—central to the religion, had once been worshiped by Toltecs.
One of the first edicts Cortés proclaimed after conquering Tenochtitlán was that its temples were not to be torn down immediately—they might prove advantageous as fortresses—but the idols in them were to be ripped from their shrines and smashed to rubble. That, too, was not surprising in the long history of things. Since time immemorial, Christians had been vandalizing the temples of the vanquished. When Rome, perhaps the most militaristic of empires the world has ever known, decided to champion Christianity, its decrees about conquering “barbarians” became a ready manual for carnage. The primary targets—the first to be eliminated in any conquest—were the idols. When Christians took over Athens, a mob of looters tore down a statue of the goddess Athena, decapitated her, and hacked her to pieces; her head was installed, upside down, as a stepping-stone to a Christian home. When monks took over the Temple of Serapis in Alexandria, they ordered it to be leveled on the spot: thousands of books were destroyed, and the colossal statue of the deity was dismembered, paraded around the city, and burned in a mighty pyre. Gold-plated walls were carried away; silver and bronze ripped from the arches. When the looters were finished, only the stone of the temple floor remained; a church dedicated to Saint John the Baptist was built on it.
Later, during the Byzantine era, when the Parthenon—the apotheosis of Greek civilization—was seized and used as a church, two imperious bishops carved their names into its massive columns. It mattered not that they were defacing a sacred monument that predated them by a millennium. They were merely following suit: less than four hundred years after the birth of Christ, a law had gone into effect, declaring that those who rejected the cross would “pay with their life and blood.” And pay with their lives they did. By the time Cortés set foot on the shores of Veracruz, that mind-set had been in place for more than a thousand years.
So it was that Cortés and his cohort felt no compunction about destroying a religion and inflicting their faith by force. The conquistadors had indicated from the very start that this would be the case. Within days of his arrival in Tenochtitlán, Cortés had asked to see one of Montezuma’s great temples of worship. The emperor obliged, taking him on a personal tour to the sacred site of Huei Teocalli, showing him the soaring tower, the great hall, the blood-stained altars, the sacrificial knives, the enormous snakeskin drum, the dragon plinth, the cyclopean, bejeweled figures of Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca—gods of war and the underworld. Cortés was repelled: he turned to his host and expressed surprise at how so wise a man could worship such absurd and wicked idols. He proposed to erect a cross on top of it all and install an image of Virgin Mary in the very heart of the hall. Montezuma was stung, furious, and snapped back that he would not have admitted Cortés to his temple had he known he would insult his gods.
But religion wasn’t the immediate order of business after the conquest: gold was. At first, when Cortés imprisoned Montezuma, shackled him, and declared Tenochtitlán for the Spanish Crown, he ordered his soldiers to ferret out all the precious loot they could find. In that frenzied aftermath, Montezuma’s high priests were lulled into believing that, for all Cortés’s initial talk about God, the son, the Virgin, and the Holy Spirit, his true gods were gold and silver. They believed they would be able to carry on their faith—reshape it at most, with an extra god here, a trifling ritual there, as they themselves had done with faiths of the conquered. They did not imagine the ferocity with which the Spanish would eventually inflict their worship. Aztec gods might have been demanding, ravenous, fastidious, but the priests never assumed they were the only gods. The empire had been built on diversity, with the presumption that religion among its ever-expanding subjects might actually be a matter of choice.
As time wore on, the Aztec priests understood that the Spaniards and their marauding cohort, the Tlaxcalans, would kill, maim, and destroy whatever stood between them and their supremacy. They also deduced that, as holy men, they stood a good chance of surviving. Given the conquerors’ one-track minds about “the yellow metal and the white” and Spain’s palpable disgust with human sacrifice, the priests were reasonably sure they weren’t going to be butchered in rituals. Somehow, despite the mayhem that was occurring around them daily, they assumed that the faith itself would be safe. Especially since their own Supreme Creator—Ometeotl, Life Giver—did not appear to be all that different from the conquistadors’ Dios. A cross here, a shrine there, did not necessarily mean that their fundamental beliefs, on which the very business of life rested, were in peril. They were soon disabused of that notion.
In 1524, after three years of decimating disease, rampant butchery, and wholesale pillage, twelve Franciscan monks arrived from Spain to do what Cortés in all his pugnacity had not: replace the Aztec priests and transform the pagan masses into Christian believers. By then, it was growing increasingly clear to the Mexicans that the Spaniards would not tolerate the old ways. On the contrary: they had stripped their temples, burned their idols, killed and enslaved thousands. They would now raze their culture to the ground, weed out the doubters, and erect crosses and virgins on their most holy of grounds.
The little band of Franciscans entrusted with the formidable task of evangelizing an entire civilization walked the full distance—two hundred miles of sand, silt, and volcanic rock—from Veracruz to Mexico City. History would remember them as “the Twelve” and, indeed, theirs was a deliberate number, meant to echo the Twelve Apostles who had carried Christ’s Gospel to a wider world. Unshaven, exhausted after a month at sea, shuffling through the unfamiliar terrain in their battered sandals and tattered robes, the priests looked like a s
orry lot, and the Indians who gathered to watch them pass whispered “motolinia”—the Nahuatl word for “beggars”—which one of the Spaniards overheard and eventually adopted as his name. From that day forward the Franciscan was simply known as Motolinía, the “poor one.” When the shabby little delegation finally trooped into the capital, the Mexicans were stunned to see Cortés and his henchmen rush to greet them, fall to their knees, and kiss the hems of their mud-crusted habits. And yet, the Indians had witnessed so much that was strange and bewildering by now: their great metropolis was in the tumult of unimaginable change. The destruction of their physical world was evident everywhere. What they had not factored entirely was that, with the advent of twelve humble men, the last shred of their civilization would be taken from them. The spiritual conquest of Mexico had begun.
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We would do well at this point in the crusade to recall the state of the Catholic enterprise at the time of “Discovery.” Pope Alexander VI, as rapacious in his appetites as in his worldly ambitions, needed money; the entire Church was an institution in turmoil. Europe itself was in flux. It was certainly far less stable, far less unified as an economy or society than the ruling cultures of Mesoamerica or the Andes, where religion had served as a great integrating force. As one historian put it, Europe had become dangerously off kilter, contentious, a time bomb of animus. Its religion had not done the job of forging a sense of political purpose or fiscal unity, as the Aztec and Inca spiritual systems had done. Christianity hadn’t been born to do those things. But what it had been born to do went seriously off track a millennium and a half into its history.