by Peter Watson
The natural experiment that has been the subject of this book enables us to say that the evidence presented here shows that religions, and worship, are entirely natural responses to the predicaments in which early peoples found themselves. Beliefs and practices such as sham-anism, animal sacrifice, human sacrifice, bloodletting and the consumption of mind-altering drugs are clearly linked – and linked intimately – to the immediate landscape in which early peoples were located. Judaism, Christianity and Islam may be more ‘developed’ religions than most but, nevertheless, they are no exception to this general rule. Religion (or ‘ideology’, a better term) is therefore most fruitfully understood in an anthropological sense, as part of humankind’s attempts to interpret his/her world and the enormous, mysterious forces that shape history, and account for the great divide.
APPENDICES
• Appendix 1 •
THE (NEVER-ENDING) DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD
In the introduction, it was noted that, to an extent, people still wrangle over the relative merits of the Old and New Worlds in pre-Columbian times – which hemispheres had the biggest cities, and when, which civilisations were the most ‘evil’, whose shoes were the most comfortable. It has been the aim of this book to put these anecdotal and AD hoc observations and comparisons into a meaningful context. In this appendix, we describe the history of the ‘dispute’ about the New World. While it is not directly relevant to our main story, the chronology of the dispute does show how attitudes to the New World have themselves evolved over the centuries, often revealing more about the people making the comparisons than the civilisations that were the subject of their often very strongly held views.
Right from the word go, the Old World had a problem assimilating the New World – its history, its psychology, its very meaning. At first the rewards of empire were disappointing, just as that first momentous encounter on Guanahaní had been disappointing. Columbus’s voyages sparked the spread of the Christian religion, the language and the culture of Spain, and initiated a transformative exchange of plants, animals and microbes, whose implications are still being unravelled.1As is now well known, Eurasian diseases such as smallpox and influenza, carried by colonists, ravaged American populations who lacked the immune systems that had been built up in the Old World over millennia. Syphilis appears to have gone the other way, though the latest evidence contradicts this.
Some measure of the initial impact of Columbus’s discoveries can be had from the fact that his first letter was printed nine times in 1493, and reached twenty editions by the end of the century. The Frenchman Louis Le Roy wrote, ‘Do not believe that there exists anything more honourable . . . than the invention of the printing press and the discovery of the new world; two things which I always thought could be compared, not only to antiquity but to immortality.’2 Yet John Elliott rightly warns us that there was another side, that many sixteenth-century writers had a problem seeing Columbus’s achievement in its proper historical perspective. For example, when Columbus died in Valladolid, the city chronicle failed to mention his passing. Only slowly did Columbus begin to attract the status of a hero. A number of Italian poems were written about him but not until a hundred years after his death, and it was not until 1614 that he featured as the hero of a Spanish drama – this was Lope de Vega’s El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón.3
To begin with, interest in the New World was confined to the gold that might be found there and the availability of vast numbers of new souls for conversion to the Christian faith. The actual phrase, ‘the Black Legend’ wasn’t used until 1912 by the Spanish journalist, Julián Juderiás, in La leyenda negra, a publication in which he protested the ‘easy characterisation’ of Spain by other European nations ‘as a backward country of ignorance, superstition and religious fanaticism’.4 The Spanish case is not so much that the Spanish colonists were not brutal – the evidence is just too overwhelming that they were – but that they were not uniquely so and that other European countries were envious of Spain’s early successes in the New World and sought to spread the ‘black legend’ for their own purposes.
It is certainly true that the first condemnation of Spanish practices in the New World came from its own citizens, mainly missionaries, and of whom the most famous was the Dominican priest and bishop of Chiapas (in Mexico), Bartolomé de las Casas who, after the failure of his legal arguments against the encomienda system of slave labour, decided to publish his A Very Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Seville, 1552). ‘This volume would quickly become a cornerstone of the Black Legend, to be translated and republished over the centuries with each new conflict involving Spain and its European rivals or American colonies.’5
The evidence is too well known to need any detailed rehearsing and reheating here – accounts of people being slowly roasted above a gibbet, on Hispaniola, women on Higuey being given only grass to eat, so that their milk dried up and they were unable to nourish their children, while in Florida, to coerce the ‘natives’ into obedience, their noses, lips and chins were ‘sliced from their faces’.
Many contemporary historians now prefer to situate the Black Legend as part of the general rise of racism in the Renaissance, having to do with the discovery of many new parts of the world, and their inhabitants, as a result of the age of exploration, the re-conquest of Spain from the Arabs, and a militant form of Christianity that viewed itself as the one true faith, with all other religions being seen as inferior.
THE MORAL HISTORY OF THE INDIES
The discovery of America was important intellectually for Europeans because the new lands and peoples challenged traditional ideas about geography, history, theology, even about the nature of man. Insofar as America proved to be a source of supply for goods for which there was a demand in Europe, it had an economic and therefore a political significance. ‘It is a striking fact,’ wrote the Parisian lawyer, Etienne Pasquier, in the early 1560s, ‘that our classical authors had no knowledge of all this America, which we call New Lands.’6 ‘This America’ was not only outside the range of Europe’s experience but was beyond expectation. Africa and Asia, though distant and unfamiliar for most people, had always been known about. America was entirely unexpected and this helps explain why Europe was so slow in adjusting to the news. Anthony Pagden has said that it wasn’t until the beginning of the eighteenth century that Europeans really began to get to grips with what the existence of the New World implied, or to consider the American Indian as a less developed form of life, like women or children.7 There were constant battles over whether there were three or four or more stages of ‘barbarianism’ and where the various Indian polities existed on this progression.
There were people like Hernán de Santillán who thought the Incas had forms of government so good that they deserved to be imitated,8 and Francisco de Vitoria who maintained that, since God would create nothing useless, efforts must be made to understand the Indian way of life.9
As the sixteenth century passed, Las Casas and José de Acosta insisted that empirical knowledge was essential if the Indians were ever to be understood, the former stressing the unique status of his voice, the primacy of his eye, the latter author dividing his Historia into two parts, the first dealing with ‘works of nature’ and the second with ‘things of the free will’ – normative behaviour, patterns of belief and the past history of the American man.10 It was Acosta who surmised that the Indian could never have sailed to America, taking with him such fierce animals as the jaguar and the puma, and concluding therefore that he must have arrived via the Bering Strait. His astuteness was confirmed when he also observed that the Indians ‘lived in fear of their gods’, an important difference, he said, between them and Christians.11
There was a dispute within the dispute as to whether New World languages – of which there were many – were lexically as strong as Old World tongues, and capable of abstractions sufficient to describe the philosophical and theological concepts of Christianity. John Locke thought the Indian had
no need of such words as ‘treason’, ‘law’ or ‘faith’ and could not count above a thousand because Amerindian languages were ‘accommodated only to the few necessities of a simple and needy life unacquainted with Trade or Mathematics’.12 Anthony Pagden attributes a watershed to the work of Joseph-François Lafiteau (d. 1740), the first man to pay full attention to Indian kinship terms and burial customs. This was a replacement of a psychological approach to the Indian (as we would say now) with a sociological one, a change in epistemology which represented a modest but decisive advance.13
If the problem of fitting the New World into the scheme of history as outlined in the scriptures was the most intractable of matters, explorers and missionaries alike found that, if evangelisation were to proceed, some understanding of the customs and traditions of the native peoples was required. Thus began their often-elaborate inquiries into Indian history, land tenure and inheritance laws, in a sense the beginning of applied anthropology.14
The fact that there was this need was brought about, of course, by the extensive destruction by the Spaniards of the Native American written sources wherever they were found. Any study of this period of history has to contend with the fact that, according to David Carrasco, the Princeton historian of religion introduced in the main text, only sixteen indigenous written (or painted) works have survived the destruction, perpetrated as often as not by friars intent on the extirpation of ‘paganism’ and the very people who, later on and realising the enormity of what they had done, did their best to rescue what knowledge they could. These sixteen documents are not the only material we can use to recreate pre-Columbian life in the Americas – Carrasco recognises another six types of entity more or less useful. These are: storybooks (i.e., with paintings) generated through Spanish patronage or written independently by Indians, with Spanish glosses; early prose works in Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs) and Spanish, largely anonymous; prose writings of descendants of Indian elites; letters and histories by Spanish witnesses to the Conquest and its aftermath; priestly writings such as Sahagún’s; the archaeological evidence. The Handbook of Middle American Indians contains four entire volumes (volumes 12–15, 1972–1975) providing a guide to ethnohistorical sources, which includes censuses of the prose, pictorial, and priestly writings and paintings, and text on a number of maps which were also compiled.15 Gordon Brotherston, in his Book of the Fourth World, an attempt to recreate pre-Columbian history and understanding, lists some 163 sources of this kind.16
And even these, as Carrasco also points out, have to be treated with suspicion because of translation errors, the prejudices or beliefs of their European authors or editors, the hidden agendas of people who produced glosses to suit their own ends. Some were hidden in Indian communities or elsewhere and did not emerge into the full light of public scrutiny until much later. This applies, for example, to the Codex Borgia, the existence of which was not known about until 1792–97, or the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, not rediscovered until 1829. All of which has made the whole enterprise of recreation of the pre-Columbian Indian world fraught with difficulties.
The early missionaries, fortified by a naïve belief in the natural goodness of man, assumed that native minds were ‘simple, meek, vulnerable and virtuous’ or, in the words of Las Casas himself, tablas rasas, blank slates, ‘on which the true faith could easily be inscribed’. The missionaries were to be disappointed. In his History of the Indies of the New Spain (1581), the Dominican Fray Diego Durán argued that the Indian mind could not be changed or corrected ‘unless we are informed about all the kinds of religion which they practised . . . And therefore a great mistake was made by those who, with much zeal but little prudence, burnt and destroyed at the beginning all their ancient pictures. This left us so much in the dark that they can practise idolatry before our very eyes.’ Such a view became the justification for the detailed surveys of pre-Conquest history, religion and society undertaken by clerics in the later sixteenth century.17
The Spanish Crown was intimately involved and in the process introduced the questionnaire, bombarding their officials in the Indies with this new tool of government. The most famous were those drafted in the 1570s at the behest of the president of the Council of the Indies, Juan de Ovando. This was a time when the urge to classify was beginning to grow in every field of knowledge and knowledge about America was part of the trend. In 1565, Nicolás Monardes, a doctor from Seville, wrote his famous study of the medicinal plants of America, which appeared in John Frampton’s English translation of 1577 under the title, Joyfull Newes out of the New Founde Worlde.18 In 1571, Philip ii sent an expedition to America under the leadership of the Spanish naturalist and physician Dr Francisco Hernández, to collect botanical specimens in a systematic way (but also to assess the capacity of the Indians to be converted). In the same year, the Spanish Crown created a new post, that of ‘Cosmographer and Official Chronicler of the Indies’, though there was a political as well as a scientific reason for this initiative: the political motive was to provide a detailed account of Spanish achievements in the New World, to counteract foreign criticisms, and at the same time it was felt that the science was necessary to reduce the widespread ignorance among the councillors of the Indies about the territory they had responsibility for.19
But it was not until 1590, a full century after Columbus’s discovery, and the publication in Spanish of José de Acosta’s great Natural and Moral History of the Indies, that the integration of the New World into the framework of Old World thought was finally cemented. This synthesis was itself the crowning achievement of a century of intellectual transformation, in which three very different aspects of the New World were incorporated into the European mindset. There was first the American landmass, as a totally unexpected addition to the natural world. There was the American Indian, who had to be incorporated into the European/Christian understanding of humanity. And there was America as an entity in time, whose very existence transformed Europe’s understanding of the historical process.20All this was, first and foremost, a challenge to classical learning. According to the bible, and to experience, there were three landmasses in the world – Europe, Asia and Africa – and to change this idea was as fundamental a break with tradition as the idea that there wasn’t a torrid zone in the southern hemisphere. Moreover, until the Bering Strait was discovered in 1728, it was not clear whether America formed part of Asia or not. When, in 1535, Jacques Cartier encountered rapids in the St Lawrence River above the site of what would become Montreal, he named them ‘Sault La Chine’, the Chinese Rapids. A century later, in 1634, Jean Nicolet, a French adventurer, was sent west to investigate rumours of a great inland sea, which led to Asia. When he reached Lake Michigan and saw ahead of him the cliffs of Green Bay he thought he had reached China and put on a robe of Chinese silk in their honour.21
One of the most powerful – if implicit – ideas at the time of the discovery of America was the dual classification of mankind, whereby peoples were judged in accordance with their religious affiliation ( Judaeo-Christian, or pagan) or their degree of civility or barbarity.22 Just how rational the Indians were was, however, open to doubt. Fernández de Oviedo was convinced the Indians were an inferior form of being, ‘naturally idle and inclined to vice’. He discovered signs of their inferiority, he thought, in the size and thickness of their skulls, which he felt implied a deformation in a part of the body associated with a man’s rational powers.23 Fray Tomás de Mercado, in the 1560s, classified Negroes and Indians likewise as ‘barbarians’ because ‘they are never moved by reason, but only by passion’. It was not far from there to the notorious theory of ‘natural slavery’. This too was a major issue of the time. Pagans in the sixteenth century were divided into two, the ‘vincibly ignorant’ ( Jews and Muslims, who had heard the true word, and turned away from it), and the ‘invincibly ignorant’, those like the Indians who had never had the opportunity to hear the word of God, and therefore couldn’t be blamed. This soon became corrupted, however, as people like the Sco
ttish theologian, John Mair, argued that some people were by nature slaves, and some by nature free.24 In 1512 Ferdinand summoned a junta to discuss the legitimacy of employing native labour. Such documentation as has survived shows that many at the time argued that the Indians were barbarians and therefore ‘natural slaves’. This was refined around 1530, by what came to be known as the ‘School of Salamanca’, a group of theologians that included Francisco Vitoria and Luis de Molina. They developed the view that if the Indians were not natural slaves then they were ‘nature’s children’, a less developed form of humanity. In his treatise, De Indis, Vitoria argued that American Indians were a third species of animal between man and monkey, ‘created by God for the better service of man’.25
Not everyone shared these views, however, and others, more sympathetic to the Indian, sought signs of his talent. The most accurate account of this clash of civilisations, on either side, says Ronald Wright, was written by some Aztecs for Friar Bernardino de Sahagún in the 1550s, and is now known as Book 12 of the Florentine Codex. The authors were anonymous, possibly to shield them from the Inquisition. However, the very search for these signs of Indian virtue and talent, says John Elliott, helped to shape the sixteenth-century idea of what constituted a civilised man. Bartolomé de las Casas, for instance, pointed out that God works through nature, and on these grounds alone Indians were God’s creatures, ‘men like us’, and therefore available to receive the faith. He drew attention to Mexican architecture – ‘the very ancient vaulted and primitive-like buildings’ – as ‘no small index of their prudence and good polity’. This was roundly rejected by Sepúlveda who pointed out that bees and spiders produced artefacts that no man could emulate.26 But there were many other aspects of Indian social and political life which impressed European observers. ‘There is,’ wrote Francisco de Vitoria in the 1530s, ‘a certain method in their affairs, for they have polities which are orderly arranged and they have definite marriage and magistrates and overlords, laws, and workshops, and a system of exchange, all of which call for the use of reason; and they also have a kind of religion.’27