The Great Divide
Page 57
Later, in 1529, a young Franciscan missionary, Bernardino de Sahagún, stepped off the boat on the Gulf of Mexico, set about learning Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, and consulted with prominent elders to compile a history of this strange people. The elders made available to him a number of codices – birch-bark books – that they had hidden from others and, over the next two-to-three decades, Sahagún compiled his famous twelve-volume compendium, General History of the Things of New Spain. Given how much of the original indigenous material of the Americas was destroyed, we are fortunate that he did.
One of the many things that Sahagún observed early on was that most of the great Aztec families claimed to be descended from Toltec lineages, though the Toltecs had long disappeared as a political or ethnic or cultural entity. These ancestors were regarded as great warriors, heroes whose ideal society had served as a blueprint for the Mexica state. As Sahagún put it, ‘The Tolteca were wise. Their works were all good, all perfect, all marvelous . . . in truth they invented all the wonderful, precious, and marvelous things which they made.’2 By Aztec accounts (mainly oral, it is true) the Toltecs were tall, good-looking, artistic and talented people who invented the calendar and were ‘extremely righteous’.
Everyone likes to come from a fine lineage and the Aztecs were no different but modern archaeology has confirmed that this glowing picture of the Toltecs is, to put it mildly, something of an exaggeration. Since the time of the Second World War, excavations have shown that Tula, in Hidalgo Province, fifty miles north of Mexico City, is in fact Tollan, the Toltec capital and that it was, by Mesoamerican standards, nothing to write home about: at its peak the city could boast a population of 60,000 at most, and so was dwarfed by both Teotihuácan and Tenochtitlán.
There had been a small village at Tula since about AD 650, but it didn’t achieve any prominence until around 900, its prosperity based on its access to the prized green obsidian deposits once in the control of Teotihuácan. Tollan/Tula also achieved lasting fame as the place where the cult of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent god, blossomed, this deity becoming a powerful religious and political force – in fact, probably the most enduring religious-political force in Mesoamerica.* It was here that the ‘I’-shaped ball court evolved, skull racks, and elaborate serpent-shaped columns decorating doorways.
Geoffrey Conrad and Arthur Demarest remind us that ‘Mesoamerican religion is exasperatingly complex’, and so it is. Moreover, as Conrad and Demarest also say, Mesoamerican gods were not really deities in the Western sense: ‘Rather they were divine complexes that could unfold into myriad aspects depending on specific temporal and spatial associations.’ Finally, and an equally important point, they were ‘ever-threatening’.3
Quetzalcoatl stands out in Mesoamerican history for several reasons. His name means ‘Feathered Serpent’ (see figure 17).
Coatl means serpent while the quetzal was – and is – probably the most colourful bird of the rainforest. Some scholars, such as Nicholas J. Saunders, say that this deity was originally an amalgam of three animals – the jaguar, the serpent and the quetzal. As such it was a manifestation of creatures which between them inhabited the three realms of the Mesoamerican cosmos – the Sky Upper World (the quetzal), the Middle World (the jaguar), and the watery Underworld (the serpent). Whether or not it was there to begin with, the jaguar appears to have dropped out of the iconography later on, perhaps because it was worshipped on its own so strongly elsewhere and perhaps because, as we shall see, the green feathers of the quetzal were adapted parsimoniously to stand also for the leaves of the maize plant, as organised agriculture became an ever more important feature of the middle realm of the Mesoamerican cosmos. Quetzalcoatl also acquired an association with Venus, possibly because the disappearance and reappearance of the planet at one point during its complex cycle lasted eight days, more or less the same interval as between the planting of maize seeds and the first appearance of green shoots.
Fig. 19 Images of Quetzalcoatl. (a) Performance of a sacrifice under the Emblem of the Plumed Serpent; (b) Quetzalcoatl sacrificing his own blood; (c) Quetzalcoatl as the first inventor of the sacrifices of human blood.
David Carrasco, professor of the history of religions at Princeton University, has described temples to Quetzalcoatl in at least six Mesoamerican cities – Teotihuácan, Cholollan, Tula itself, Xochicalco, Chichén Itźá, and Tenochtitlán. This underlies that Quetzalcoatl was an urban deity and that it sometimes had different names – the Maya, for example, called it Cuculcán and among the Quichés of Guatemala he/it was known as Gucumatz (Gux=green feathers; Cumatz=serpent). Now that we know maize was domesticated as a foodstuff much later than used to be thought, the stability of Quetzalcoatl among the Maya in classic times (AD 200–900) suggests that their long-term prosperity, and the flourishing of their culture, was due as much to domestication of the maize plant as anything else.4
But there is more to say about Quetzalcoatl than this. Possibly, there is a link between the serpent qualities of Quetzalcoatl and the Vision Serpent of the Maya shaman-kings, evoked through trance via blood-letting. But the advent of maize worship was a step – probably tentative at first – beyond shamanism, towards a priesthood. Priests of the Quetzalcoatl cult were not judged by their access to other worlds, which only they could visit and see, but by their ability to ensure a good harvest, which everyone could see for themselves. Catastrophes still occurred from time to time, of course, which could be attributed to dark shamanism. So shamanism continued but it now existed alongside a powerful priesthood.
And this is where Tula comes in. As has been mentioned before, Mesoamerica in the eighth and ninth centuries was disfigured by constant warfare, perhaps brought about by climate change, either catastrophic or more gradual, which provoked straitened economic times across the region. This was the period when, among other things, the classic Maya culture collapsed and when, after AD 750, Tula itself was responsible for the demise of Teotihuácan. It is tantalising to note, therefore, that in the wake of these troubles, at the beginning of the post-classical period (AD 900–1000), something new occurred in Mesoamerica. This was the advent of a cultural hero, what many scholars think was a ‘flesh-and-bones’ figure, an actual real-life ruler who also adopted the name and identity of Quetzalcoatl. He was known to his contemporaries as Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl and in Mesoamerican legend he was awarded all sorts of qualities: he was a charismatic lawgiver, a creator of the cosmos, a founder of the ideal kingdom, a bringer of wisdom and civilisation.
This is noteworthy above all because of the timing. Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, to give him his convenient shorthand name, and to distinguish him from the deity, ruled (if indeed he did rule), beginning around AD ~968 – that is, soon after the terrible eighth and ninth centuries, when certain accounts say he emerged as a forceful leader able to help regenerate civilisation following a series of cataclysms, perhaps brought on by natural disasters wreaking devastation (the wrath of the gods), but provoking in turn widespread fighting and man-made destruction. If this is what happened (and so far what is offered here is speculation, though it fits the facts as we know them), then the next development is doubly fascinating.
We know that at Xochicalco, for example, there is a glyph showing a hand which is gripping a rope attached to a calendrical sign which is being pulled out of one position and into another.5 This suggests an attempt to resynchronise the calendar, which would have been a major event, brought about perhaps because a natural catastrophe, or a series of them, had caused a seeming change in the natural rhythms that had hitherto been observed. Moreover, the ancient sources of Mesoamerican history describe a set of episodes – widely known to the Aztecs, for instance – in which Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, while still being a cultural hero of great importance, did fail in his aims in one important respect. During his reign a religious controversy broke out concerning the appropriate victims for sacrifice. Quetzalcoatl had turned against human sacrifice and instead proposed that quail, butterflies,
snakes and large grasshoppers be substituted. But the warrior classes, who had their own god, the bloodthirsty god of war – Tezcatlipoca, ‘Lord of the Smoking Mirror’ – objected. According to legend, Smoking Mirror got Topiltzin so inebriated that he slept with his sister and in disgrace was forced to flee Tula with his followers.
According to one version of the legend, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl reached the Gulf of Mexico, where he sailed away on a raft of serpents, vowing to return (a vow which was to have fateful consequences). In another version, he decamped to another city, possibly Chichén Itźá where, again according to the indigenous histories, we see ‘the forceful appearance . . . of human sacrifice under the patronage of the feathered serpent’.6 In this version, Quetzalcoatl, having failed in Tula and been forced to flee, has completely reversed his position, and adopted the new aggression which characterised the Toltecs and that the Aztecs were to emulate.
There are two points to make about these events, always acknowledging of course that they are sketchy and distant in the extreme. The first is that, if Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl was a historical figure, then this set of events offers a parallel of sorts with what happened in the Old World at the end of the Bronze Age. Was the widespread fighting, and the associated killing in Mesoamerica in the eighth and ninth centuries, so bloody, so awful, that Topiltzin became convinced that enough was enough? Why else would he propose that animals be substituted for humans in the sacrificial rites? His ideas went against centuries of New World traditional practices. However, whereas in the Old World such abolitionist thinking helped give rise eventually to the Axial Age, in Mesoamerica Topiltzin failed: he lost the argument and he lost his position.
Second, if this set of events is anywhere near what happened, then the Toltec civilisation that the Aztecs so admired was born out of catastrophe, possibly both natural and man-made. As we shall see in just a moment, Aztec cosmology envisaged history as a set of repeated catastrophes bringing one age after another to a cataclysmic end. The rupture which provoked the religious controversy in Tula seems to have been a major event, remembered and enshrined in Aztec cosmology. Perhaps they idealised the Toltecs because of the new beginning that they represented after the disasters of the eighth and ninth centuries.
Quetzalcoatl was not the only god of the Aztecs, and not always even the most important. But his durability, his ability to stay the same and change all at the same time, the fact that he incorporated so many aspects of Mesoamerican cosmology and history – agriculture, Venus, actual people, sacrifice and its meaning – meant that his power only increased as time passed and the priesthood arrogated to itself greater privileges. Quetzalcoatl’s many qualities meant that priests had to undergo a long and austere training even before they were allowed to indulge in shamanistic rituals. Throughout the classical and post-classical eras, and thanks to Quetzalcoatl (but not only to him), priest-shamans became a class, an important estate within the society. As we saw with the Mixtecs, the elite controlled access to the gods, jealously preserving their privilege.
With Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl gone, the warrior elite now controlled Tula and, via a number of campaigns, they expanded north. They maintained extensive trade networks and irrigated much new land, settling their people in garrisons which extracted tribute from subject peoples. This too was an approach adopted subsequently by the Aztecs.
Even archaeologists who specialise in Mesoamerican societies have termed the Toltecs ‘grim’, as unashamedly militaristic. For example, everywhere in their ceremonial architecture, ‘Fierce Toltec warriors strut, men carrying feather-decorated atlatls (spear throwers) in their right hands, bundles of darts in the other. They wore quilted armour, round shields on their backs, hats topped by quetzal feather plumes. Great stone warriors stand atop a six-stepped pyramid.’ In several places, chacmools adorn the temples – these are reclining figures with round bowls sunk into their bellies, receptacles for the hearts ripped out of sacrificial victims captured in war. An enormous, 131-feet ‘Serpent Wall’ on the north side of the pyramid at Tula adds to the grim picture – it shows serpents consuming humans ‘in a bizarre danse macabre, their heads reduced to a skull, the flesh partially removed from the limb bones’. Elsewhere on the temple there are carvings of jaguars and coyotes, eagles are shown devouring human hearts, while the effigy of a god, Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, another deity associated with the planet Venus, is shown emerging ‘from the fangs of a crouched jaguar adorned with feathers and equipped with a forked serpent’s tongue’. These ‘ardently militaristic’ inscriptions at Tula are new, says Brian Fagan, their brutality perhaps indicating an especially intense competition for land and natural resources that may have erupted due to frequent droughts or crop failures, bringing about political uncertainty.7
This is supported by the fact that Tula appears to have suffered a violent end during the reign of a ruler named Huemac, in the late twelfth century. The pyramid dedicated to Quetzalcoatl was brutally dismantled, the city torched and the population driven into the surrounding countryside. But the Toltec legacy was kept alive among the nomadic Chichimec in particular, a people who struggled to maintain supremacy over the fertile lakeside territory of the Valley of Mexico. The Aztecs themselves were to begin with a small group of nomads who wandered into this valley. Because the best land in the area had already been settled, in about 1325, more than a century after Tula fell, they chose a tiny hamlet in the swamps of Lake Texcoco as their unpromising foundation. Within a hundred and fifty years, they had transformed it.
RAINS OF FIRE, VIGILANTE JAGUARS, DELUGES AND HURRICANES
Brutal and militaristic as the Toltecs were, the Aztecs were quite possibly more so. Bernal Díaz, who served as a rodolero (a ‘shield’ man) under Cortés and claimed to have been in 119 battles, and who wrote his own, very famous account of the invasion, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, was appalled as much as his colleagues were by the extent of human sacrifice among the Aztec. He recorded their priests had many ways of carrying out sacrifice: by shooting the victims with arrows, by burning or beheading them, by drowning them, by throwing them from a great height on to a bed of stones, by skinning them alive or crushing their heads. But the most common method was to rip out the victim’s heart (figure 12). Their gods, such as Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and the sun god, and Xipe Totec, the planting god, were seemingly insatiable. ‘In honour of Xipe Totec young men would don the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim, and wear it until it rotted off. A new, clean youth emerged, a symbolic emergence of a fresh sprout from an old maize husk.’
In the actual sacrifice itself, the priests painted the victims with red and white stripes, then reddened their mouths and glued white feather-down to their heads. Dressed in this way, the victims were lined up at the foot of the pyramid steps, before being led up one by one, symbolic of the rising sun. Four priests held the victim down over the sacrificial stone while a fifth pressed hard on his (or her) neck, causing the chest to stand out. The leading priest thrust his obsidian knife swiftly through the rib cage and tore out the heart while it was still beating. Figures are hard to be sure of. Two Conquistadores say they saw 136,000 skulls on a rack but most scholars believe this to be a gross exaggeration.8
Although these are practices we may find abhorrent today, there was – as should now be clear – a traditional coherence to Aztec beliefs. In whatever way the idea of sacrifice was conceived, by the time of the Aztecs the practice reflected the notion that the sun god, in his daily passage across the heavens, had to be sustained by the nourishment of human hearts. (If a volcano had erupted in the remembered past, killing many people and blotting out the sun, which then gradually reappeared, one can see how such beliefs may have arisen.)
At the time the Europeans discovered the Aztecs, its king/emperor, Moctezuma ii, ruled an empire of at least five – and perhaps fifteen – million souls, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific and from northern Mexico to Guatemala (see Appendix 1 for a discussion of pre-Columbian population leve
ls). And although, in the early Conquest, Aztec books had been burned, because the European Christians believed the Aztecs to be pagans and heathens, later on some hidden codices were found and the systematic study of Aztec culture was belatedly begun. The codices were not written in the modern sense; they were, rather, aides-mémoires, prompt books for the elite members of Aztec society who had been entrusted with preserving oral traditions. On the basis of this, Bernardino de Sahagún and other friars collected an amalgam of legend and historical fact, ‘a jumble of officially sanctioned genealogies and blatant political propaganda that confuse scholars to this day’.9
The first we hear of the people who would become the Aztecs is as a small tribe probably living under the rule of the Toltecs on a mythical island in a lake named Aztlan, from which they took their name. They were then ‘semi-civilised’ farmers who, some time in the twelfth century AD, migrated for reasons unknown southwards into the Valley of Mexico. At least seven clans formed this early group, who wandered for some years in the mountains and woods and encountered other groups in a succession of small wars. From time to time they stopped at places with strong Toltec associations.10