by Peter Watson
The point is well made, therefore, that, overall, Latin America is and has been by far the most volcanically active mainland area of the world where ancient civilisations have existed. For human beings in antiquity, these events were mysterious and potentially very dangerous and fearsome, obscuring the sun and bringing darkness, showering wide areas with hot ash, triggering earthquakes, sending vast plumes of hot molten lava over wide areas, devastating the landscape, destroying crops and houses and at times killing many people.
Volcanoes are not all bad. Eruptions contain potassium and phosphorus, needed by plants, and the weathering of volcanic rocks releases other nutrients.26 Obsidian is a volcanic glass valued in many early cultures, partly for its properties – it is shiny and produces very sharp blades – but also for the fact that it is associated with the mysterious and threatening behaviour of volcanoes. Yet it is not hard to see how such phenomena could affect the beliefs and behaviour of people living nearby. (In February 1943 a Mexican farmer, Dionisius Palido, watched the birth of a volcano in his cornfield, as a slight depression rose thirty feet in one day, 550 feet in a week, and over a thousand feet in a year. Inside nine years it grew to 6,800 feet and its lava flow destroyed several towns.)27
Ancient peoples would have been hyper-conscious, anxious even, about living in a potentially hostile landscape, where the gods were never quiet for very long, where they seemed to be often angry, insofar as volcanic activity and its associated phenomena, such as earthquakes, seemed like punishment, where material was periodically thrown up from the underworld by enormous unknown forces, or the ground shook and trembled without warning. Today there are between 200 and 300 active volcanoes in the Andes. In the roughly 500 eruptions since 1532 an estimated 25,000 people have been killed. Both Mexico and Peru are prone to earthquakes, with Arequipa in Peru averaging one quake per century and Mexico’s southern coast being most at risk: in 1985 a quake off Acapulco killed more than 4,000 people in Mexico City, some 300 kilometres away. Popacatépetl showed renewed activity in 1995 and 1996.
These phenomena comprised a central ideological/psychological predicament in pre-Columbia Latin America, the consequences of which are explored throughout the rest of the book.
SKIES ON FIRE
The second climatological factor that affected disproportionately the areas of the New World where civilisations developed was the hurricane. These violent windstorms, which may precipitate dense rain, can comprise cyclones with diameters extending anywhere from 50 to 1,000 miles and generate winds of from 80 to 130 miles per hour. The very name, hurricane – which occur in the east Pacific, the north Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico – is derived from huracán, a Tain or Carib god, and/or from hunraken, the Mayan storm god. According to Taino legend, Guacar was one of two sons of the creator god who was jealous of his brother’s success in creating plants and animals, and so changed his name to Juracan and became the evil god of destruction.28
Early post-Conquest accounts described how much native Indians feared these winds, and the associated rains, in which lightning flashes came so quickly ‘the sky seemed to be completely full of fire’ and the next minute ‘a thick and dreadful darkness descended’. The ‘strong and frightful’ wind ripped large trees out of the ground and collapsed cliffs.29
Map 9 shows that hurricanes originate over open water, occur only in the tropics and subtropics, and mainly die out once they reach land. The greatest wind speeds are achieved in Mesoamerica, north Australia and south India. Mesoamerica, being a narrow isthmus, suffers more than most and gets hit from both sides (as do Australia and India but they are much bigger landmasses). In some areas of Mesoamerica rainforest hurricanes are so common that the trees have adapted in an evolutionary sense: they snap off their crowns at about thirty feet above the ground. Once the storm has died down, the trees begin to re-sprout from the remaining part of the trunk.30
A final factor on the subject of winds is that North America is shaped, as Timothy Flannery puts it, like ‘a great thermal trumpet’. What he means by this is that North America ‘is a unique place and that one of its main distinctive features is its climate’, determined by its shape, ‘a great inverted wedge’ with a 6,500-kilometre-wide base deep in the sub-Arctic, narrowing to the south until it is just a peninsula sixty kilometres wide, eight degrees north of the equator in a narrow isthmus abutting South America. On its eastern side the wedge is limited by the Appalachian Mountains, on the west by the Rockies. To this unique configuration may be added the fact that land cools and heats more rapidly than water, meaning that temperatures there are more varied than at sea. In winter, super-chilled air that forms over the continent’s northern expanses surges south, funnelled by the north-south mountain ranges. In the summer a huge pool of air that is warmed over the Gulf of Mexico surges in the opposite direction ‘bringing the tropics to the far north’. This has had a ‘prodigious’ effect on North America, Flannery says, and means that temperatures in the continent can vary incredibly over a brief period and where the turbulent cool air from the north encounters the breezes of the hot south tornadoes are spawned. ‘Ninety per cent of the world’s tornadoes occur in North America – most originating between the Rockies and the Mississippi River.’ This has two effects that concern us. One is that the ‘climatic trumpet’ adds to the violence and unpredictability of the winds abutting the Gulf of Mexico: coming on top of the volcanoes, hurricanes and El Niño phenomenon, this makes Mesoamerica one of the most challenging areas in the world, climatologically. Second, the very varied conditions of North America favour the evolution of cactuses. Cactuses are unique to the New World and we shall see in a later chapter what the significance of this is.31
Then there is the configuration of the Pacific Ocean itself. As map 8 confirms, the Pacific (tectonic) Plate is nearly entirely covered by the Pacific Ocean. While the plate itself is only a little more than six miles thick, it has an average of 2.5 miles average depth of water resting on it. As the sun and moon appear to rise in the east, large volumes of water are pulled by gravitation against the American coast. As the sun and moon appear to set in the west, large amounts of water are likewise pulled against the south Pacific islands and Asian countries, this regular movement of a massive body of water causing a repetitious pulsing and stretching of the Pacific Plate. More than that, the western Pacific Plate is being forced under the Asian continent, and the Nazca Plate (in the eastern Pacific) is being forced under the South American continent by these daily movements. The Nazca and Pacific Plates are in fact the fastest-spreading sea floors on Earth.
This area is thus the most unstable configuration anywhere in the world, with more seismic and volcanic activity than any other mainland area.
We may conclude this section, therefore, by emphasising that the area where the New World civilisations developed occupied the region in which, to a ‘primitive’ mind, the gods were more violent, more destructive, far angrier than anywhere else on Earth. Although the early inhabitants of South and Central America were in no position to make this comparison, their experiences of natural calamities and disasters were quite enough to colour their religion and give it a unique stamp, as we shall see in due course.
MONSOON AND RELIGION
There is more to say about climate and the gods around the world. For instance, worshipping gods to bring rain, to sustain crops and livestock, is by no means unique to Asia, but it is only in Asia (and one small region of the Euphrates) that the rains and the great rivers have become gods.32 This is especially true now of the Ganges, a monsoon-fed river which the Hindus consider to be holy, a place of pilgrimage, where their ashes are scattered. The Ganges is personified by the Goddess Ganga, a beautiful woman often shown with a fish’s tail instead of legs, and riding the Makara, a crocodile-like water monster (a folk memory, perhaps, of the plague of crocodiles referred to in an earlier chapter).33 There are several legends about the origin of Ganga, including one that she was the daughter of Himavan, king of the mountains.
In general the great monsoon-fed rivers (which, of course, have their origins in the mountains) are regarded as purifying streams for the souls of the departed. The greatest religious ceremony on the Ganges is made during the Kumbh Mela, a ritual bath held every three years or so and attended by between 50 and 70 million people each time, even today.
Another river goddess is Sarasvati, also mentioned in a previous chapter. She was and is regarded as the goddess of learning, education, arts and skill. She is the consort of Brahma, the source of all knowledge, her name meaning ‘the one who flows’.34
The Indian year is divided into the cold months, the hot months and the rainy months, Hindus using the monsoon (the caturmasa or ‘four months’) to explain various aspects of their belief-system. For example, the monsoon season is associated with Vishnu’s Sleep (Vishnu, from the verb ‘Vis’, ‘to pervade’, being the Hindus’ supreme deity). During the monsoon, Vishnu is believed to have retired below the ocean for a four months’ sleep, so that the caturmasa is a time when the Earth is without its protector and at the mercy of demonic powers. This legend clearly reflects the fact that the monsoon represents a threat as well as a life-giving opportunity for so many farmers. For that reason, the end of the monsoon season is also celebrated (the RamaLilas).
This may not be all there is to the link between climate and religion. The greater variability of the monsoon after ~8000 BP may have meant there was more need for worship. And various authors have suggested that the (rain)forested areas, which have evolved under the monsoon system, where life is everywhere and abundant, should favour polytheism. ‘Tropical forests teem with life and the cycle of birth, life and death are endlessly replayed.’ This contrasts with the monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam which evolved in the deserts of the Middle East. In the wilderness of the desert, where life struggles to survive, it is only logical for a deity to create life out of nothing. In the tropical forest, humans form a small part of a teeming world, giving a deeper respect for nature, while in the desert the mastery over nature is what counts. (In Genesis, in the bible, God gives man ‘dominion’ over the animals.)35
If there is something to this, it may be that the gradual drying of the Eurasian climate since ~8000 BP has also had religious consequences, in that there has been a long-term shift from shamanism to polytheism to monotheism as forests receded. This deforestation was especially true of the Mediterranean region, say Clift and Plumb, where, to begin with, the rain gods or storm gods were the pre-eminent deities. Hadad and Ba’al were important Semitic storm gods, related to the Akkadian god, Adad. The Anatolian storm god Teshub, the Egyptian god Set, the Greek god Zeus and the Roman god Jupiter were all important sky gods and/or rain/storm gods. The progression from an all-important sky god to monotheism seems a shorter route than from the full-blown polytheism of, say, Hinduism, though even there Varuna is lord of the sky, ocean and rain, both all-powerful and, should he so wish, destructive.36 This confused trajectory will be clarified somewhat later on.
EAST-WEST IS BEST
Besides the very great importance of weather, there were several other systematic differences between the Old World and the New that had a profound effect on the development of their inhabitants. Some were geographical, others biological.
In order to make a start, even if it means jumping ahead of ourselves, let us first consider other features displayed in the maps. These show first of all, as José de Acosta, Wilhelm Hegel and, most recently and in most detail, Jared Diamond have pointed out, that the Americas are essentially a north-south landmass, as is true, though to a lesser extent, of Africa, whereas Eurasia in marked contrast is essentially east-west. Now, jumping even further ahead of ourselves, let us examine the geographical spread of the major civilisations that developed across the world before modern times, before 1492. Consulting the maps, the following observations stand out:
The spread of these major civilisations was far from random. The impressive civilisations of the Old World all extended, roughly speaking, between latitudes seven degrees north and fifty degrees north, both tropical and temperate zones. Against that, the main ancient American civilisations – Chavín, Moche, Olmec, Maya, Toltec, Inca, Aztec and so on – all occurred between eighteen degrees south and twenty-five degrees north. The overall north-south spread of early civilisations is pretty much the same in both hemispheres – about forty-three degrees of latitude in each case – but the American civilisations are entirely within the tropics. We shall see what this implies shortly. Furthermore, the overall extent of the Old World civilisations is much, much greater than those in the New World – 8,500 miles from east to west, and 3,000 miles north to south, or 25.5 million square miles, compared with 1,250 miles east-west and 3,000 miles north-south in the Americas, or just 3.75 million square miles. The sheer size of Eurasia gave it an inbuilt ‘advantage’ over the New World.
When we use the word ‘civilisation’ in this particular context, we are using it to refer not so much to the emergence of great public buildings, monumental arts, or advanced irrigation systems so much as the fact that these were, essentially, the areas of primary food production, which arose independently across the world. Food production soon spread but these are the areas where domestication, of plants and animals, was independently conceived. The main spreads of food production were: from South West Asia to Europe, Egypt and North Africa and to Central Asia and the Indus Valley; from the Sahel and West Africa to East and Southern Africa; from China to tropical South East Asia, Indonesia, Korea and Japan; and from Mesoamerica to North America.37
This spread around the world was not, however, uniform. To put the matter plainly, north-south spread is far more difficult, far slower, than east-west spread. This is because, obviously enough, as you travel north to south, or vice versa, there is a much greater difference in the weather, in mean temperatures, in hours of daylight, and soil conditions, as compared with travelling east-west. The most conspicuous failures in this regard, according to Jared Diamond, are: the failure of both farming and herding to reach Native North American California from the US south-west; the failure of farming and herding to reach Australia from New Guinea and Indonesia; the failure of farming to spread from South Africa’s Natal Province to the Cape.
These are by no means the only examples. There is no shortage of evidence showing that, because of its basic north-south configuration, there have been greater difficulties as regards both agricultural and cultural diffusion in the New World. For example, because the llama, guinea pig and potato of the Andean highlands never reached the Mexican highlands, Mesoamerica and North America went without domesticated mammals save for dogs. The domestic turkey of Mesoamerica never reached South America, or the eastern United States. While alphabets of Middle Eastern origin eventually spread out across the Old World, as far as Indonesia, the writing systems of Mesoamerica never reached the Andes. Most important of all, perhaps, ‘The wheels invented in Mesoamerica as parts of toys never met the llamas domesticated in the Andes.’38 The Romans grew peach and citrus fruits from China, cucumbers and sesame from India, hemp and onions from Central Asia, while in the New World the sunflowers of North America never spread to the Andes.39
Other examples include the habit of tobacco smoking, which was first developed in Mexico and carried across the Mississippi and the Appalachians in the first millennium AD (and then on of course to Europe), but never spread back to Peru, whose inhabitants were still using tobacco as snuff in 1532. The invention of hieroglyphic writing and numerals (including the zero) and a marvellously complex and precise calendar conceived by the Maya priesthood, had still not reached the Peruvian empire a thousand years later.40
Jared Diamond and his colleagues have gone so far as to calculate the rate of spread of some of the ancient food production techniques in different areas of the globe. From south-west Asia west to Europe and east to the Indus Valley, domesticated crops spread at the rate of about 0.7 miles a year. From the Philippines east to Polynesia the spread appears to
have been much faster, at 3.2 miles a year (perhaps because so much of the distance was open sea). The earliest dates for cultivated maize in the New World are in Mesoamerica and in the Andes and Amazonia at ~5500 BP. Maize travelled to the south-western United States at less than 0.5 miles a year, while the llama spread from Peru to Ecuador at an even slower 0.2 miles a year.41
The profusion of so many separate languages in the Americas supports the same general picture. In 1492, the New World peoples were speaking an estimated 2,000 languages, grouped into perhaps thirty families. This very great diversity (there are approximately 6,000 languages in the world today), which must have evolved in a mere 15,000 years from a restricted racial stock that populated the New World from somewhere in eastern Asia, reflects the fact that there was not, in the development of New World societies, as there were in the Old World, great ‘linguistic expansions’, as we know occurred with the Aryan and Semitic, the Bantu and the Chinese languages, which in the course of time extinguished many smaller, less powerful language families in the Old World. We shall see why this happened in a later chapter, and why it didn’t happen in the New World, and that it is consistent with other developments.42
The very great language diversity of the New World in itself supports the idea of many small, relatively isolated societies, presumably each with a restricted geographical terrain. It also implies relatively little history of warfare and imperial-style campaigns of conquest which would have changed this linguistic mosaic (though the Incas are an exception). In a remarkably short time, these isolated societies will have developed different dialects, then different, mutually incomprehensible tongues, further reinforcing their isolation.