Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World

by David Keys

  The kami were regarded as having no shape of their own and had to be summoned by a shaman (priest) to enter an object whose form they could then adopt. It was generally believed that the spirits preferred long thin vessels to inhabit—magic wands, banners, long stones, trees, specially made dolls, and even living human beings. These humans—mediums—tended to be women and allowed their bodies and their voices to be literally taken over by the gods. The king himself may even have been seen as a rare male medium whose body was permanently “borrowed” by his divine ancestor, the sun goddess. Thus, the king was seen as a receptacle, a vehicle of the divine.

  As the smallpox epidemic devastated Japan, the Mononobe and Nakatomi clan heads are said in the Nihon shoki to have implored their king to get rid of the Soga leader’s Buddha statue: “It was because thy servants’ advice on a former day was not accepted, that the people are dying thus of disease. If thou dost now retrace thy steps before matters have gone too far, joy will surely be the result! It will be well promptly to fling [the statue] away and diligently to seek happiness in the future.”

  The king had little option but to agree. In a sense, the Buddha had indeed been responsible for the epidemic, for the disease had arrived from Korea as an unwelcome part of the package of “things foreign” that the Soga had been enthusing about.

  “Let it be done as you advise,” the Nihon shoki says the king told his critics. “Accordingly,” the chronicle continues, “officials took the image of the Buddha and abandoned it to the current of the canal of Naniha. They also set fire to the [Soga leader’s Buddhist] temple, and burned it so that nothing was left.”

  The row over Buddhism and the smallpox catastrophe must have opened up a vast political rift within the body politic of Japan, for in the midst of the epidemic and the religious recriminations (or immediately after them) the king was assassinated. It was the first known royal assassination in Japanese history. It is likely that the slaying of King Senka was carried out by the Soga clan, presumably angry at the way in which the monarch had capitulated to Mononobe and Nakatomi demands in the Buddhism row.4 Certainly the next king, Kimmei, was backed by the Soga clan, and Soga notables became his key advisors, ministers, and affines. The Buddhism row and opposition to the Soga and their foreign friends and ideas forced the clan to push ruthlessly for a stronger monarchy over which they alone could have control. The rest of the aristocracy experienced a comparative decline in power.

  The king was a vehicle through which the Soga, with their ideas of Chinese and Korean origin, reconditioned and transformed Japan. It was important, therefore, from their perspective to build up the status of the king vis-à-vis the rest of the non-Soga elite. When Kimmei died in 571, he (in contrast to everyone else) appears to have been buried in a huge moated tomb over a thousand feet long—the Mise Maru Yama, near the ancient city of Nara. In traditional Japanese elite style, it was built as a vast keyhole-shaped step pyramid, its sides bedecked with ritual vessels and parasols protected by life-size ceramic guardsmen, its summit topped by an elaborate replica palace. It was the last giant tomb of its type ever constructed.

  The Soga appear to have soon tried once again to introduce Buddhism. In 584, apparently in an attempt to use Buddhist prayer to defeat another smallpox outbreak (of which there had been several since the disease’s initial incursion in the 530s), they set up a temple and had it consecrated by a Korean Buddhist priest. But the anti-Buddhist (and anti-Soga) political elements seized on the opportunity to revive the objections that had been raised four and a half decades earlier.5 The new generation’s Mononobe and Nakatomi clan leaders are said in the Nihon shoki to have chastised the new emperor, Bidatsu, for allowing the Soga to build a temple: “Why hast thou not consented to follow thy servant’s counsel? Is not the prevalence of disease from the reign of [the old king] down to thine, so that the nation is in danger of extinction, owing absolutely to the establishment of the exercise of the Buddhist religion by [the] Soga [leader].” The king replied: “Manifestly so: let Buddhism be discontinued.”6

  The Soga had misjudged the situation. Power was visibly slipping from their grasp as their archrivals, the Mononobe clan, demolished the temple and burned it together with the Soga’s cult statue of Lord Buddha. The Nihon shoki even describes how child Buddhist nuns of the Soga clan were imprisoned and flogged.

  The very outbreak of smallpox that had encouraged the Soga to call for the Buddha’s help in 584 and which had rekindled the religious hostilities now spread to the royal palace, and the king himself died of it.

  “The land was filled with those who were attacked with sores and died thereof. The persons thus afflicted said: ‘Our bodies are as if they were burned, as if they were beaten, as if they were broken.’ ” The words do accurately describe the experience of having smallpox, especially during the second week of the disease, but the phrases were also no doubt meant to reflect the notion of divine vengeance upon those who attacked Buddhism, its practitioners, and its houses of worship. After all, the Nihon shoki was written by the eventual victors in this long process—the Buddhists.

  The Soga clan soon saw the need for ruthless action to regain political control after this debacle. So when the next emperor, Yomei, contracted smallpox in 587, and when his wish to seek Buddha’s help in saving him from death was thwarted by the opposition, a pro-Soga royal prince murdered a key member of the opposition, the Nakatomi clan leader.7 The murder may have helped bring life to Japanese Buddhism, but it certainly did not save the king, whose “sores became worse and worse” before he finally expired.

  Soon the Soga discovered that the main remaining anti-Buddhist opposition element, the Mononobe clan, was planning a coup, so in a ruthless preemptive strike, the Soga and elements of the royal family massacred the Mononobe. Some were killed in battle, while others appear to have been rounded up and executed. At one execution site, a dried-up riverbed, hundreds lay dead. “Their corpses had become so rotten that their identities could not be ascertained, but by the color of their clothing their bodies were identified for burial by their friends,” says the Nihon shoki.

  By 590 numerous Buddhist temples were being built, and it seemed that with the anti-Buddhist opposition liquidated, the Soga position was secure. But the new king, Sujun, seems to have wanted a greater degree of independence from his Soga minders and was reportedly gathering armaments in his palace. So once again the Soga launched a preemptive strike, this time murdering the king himself. He was the clan’s second royal victim, the first having been Senka, half a century earlier.

  With King Sujun disposed of, a pro-Soga monarch and enthusiastic Buddhist—a powerful lady called Suiko—was placed on the throne.8 She had much experience of power politics, being the daughter of King Kimmei by a Soga wife and having been married to the former King Bidatsu. Her nephew—a prince called Mumayado (later, posthumously, known as Shotoku)—was also pro-Buddhist and pro-Soga.

  The great ideological and political conflict for the soul of Japan, which had begun in the 530s, was now almost over. The traditionalists and isolationists had lost and the pro-Buddhist, pro-foreign reformers had won. Over the next twenty years, religious, political, economic, administrative, fiscal, artistic, and calendrical ideas were imported wholesale from the Asian continent, mainly from China. In 603 a more meritocratic system replaced the traditional hereditary hierarchy at court. In 604 Chinese Confucian principles of harmony, duty, and decorum were introduced. In 607 the first Japanese embassy was sent to China. Soon students were going to China to study. Deliberately copying the Chinese emperor, Queen Suiko even styled herself the “heir of heaven.”

  In a sense, Buddhism had been merely the Trojan horse within which all these other changes were waiting to enter Japan. The process that had been kicked into motion by the climatic and epidemiological events of the 530s had been completed by the early seventh century, and Japan was an utterly different place from what it had been in the early sixth. Ancient Japan had died, and protomodern Japan had been conceive
d. Today’s Japanese nation-state has its distant yet essential origins in the tragic yet catalytic sixth century.

  PART EIGHT

  CHANGING THE

  AMERICAS

  23

  C O L L A P S E O F T H E

  P Y R A M I D E M P I R E

  Just as Europe, the Middle East, and the Orient had experienced massive geopolitical change in the century following the climatic disasters of the 530s, so too did the Americas. Both in Mesoamerica and the Andes, there was a total geopolitical realignment, driven ultimately by the engine of climatic change. In North America and in non-Andean South America, the sixth century was also one of transformation—an era of new beginnings.

  When the Spanish, under the conquistador Hernán Cortéz, conquered Mexico between 1519 and 1521, they stumbled upon the deserted ruins of a vast city with wide avenues, great plazas, and huge pyramids—the largest of which was almost as big in terms of volume as Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Cheops. The Spanish conquerors asked the defeated Aztecs to tell them who had constructed such magnificent buildings. The Aztecs replied that the deserted city had been the Place of the Gods (Teotihuacan in Nahuatl, the local language), and that it had been built long ago by a race of giants. To prove the truth of this latter assertion, they produced what they claimed were massive thighbones of these gigantic supermen. However, unbeknownst to both the Spanish and the Aztecs, the giant thighbones were in fact those of an extinct species of prehistoric elephant.

  But it was an understandable error, given the sheer scale of the pyramids and the ruined city they lay at the heart of. The largest building was the vast Pyramid of the Sun—a towering 215-foot-high mass of over 1.2 million tons of rubble and sun-dried mud bricks. The city itself covered eight and a half square miles, and modern archaeologists now estimate that it must have been home to between 125,000 and 200,000 inhabitants.

  The Spanish account of what the Aztecs told them about the Place of the Gods is the earliest historical information that exists about Teotihuacan. And yet archaeological investigations of the site have now revealed that the city had been deserted almost a thousand years earlier—at virtually the same time that saw population collapse in so many places in the Old World.

  In the early sixth century Teotihuacan was at its peak—a flourishing metropolis, the heart of an economic, ideological, and probably partially military empire that had as its sphere of influence the southern half of Mexico and much of what is now Guatemala and Belize. It was a heterogeneous empire of different peoples, tribes, and states. Some were conquered tributaries, while others were long-term allies or client states who probably would never have dared defy the hegemony of Teotihuacan.

  The empire was bound together by religious ideology and by trade. With its huge number of inhabitants, the city was by far the largest population center in the Americas. Indeed, at the time, Teotihuacan was the sixth largest metropolis on earth. It must have sucked in vast quantities of imports from all over Mesoamerica. And it must also have pumped out substantial quantities of exports and reexports.

  The livelihoods and economic survival of several million Mexicans and Maya depended on the maintenance of Teotihuacan and its power. The city was the heart of ancient Mesoamerica’s equivalent of today’s steel industry—the mass manufacture of millions of artifacts made of volcanic glass (obsidian). Artisans in dozens of workshops worked in what was probably a partially state-controlled industry to produce a wide range of obsidian items—everything from spearheads and blowpipe darts to knife blades and exquisitely made human figurines. Hundreds of other workshops specialized in making baskets, mats, pottery, and textiles, as well as jewelry made out of imported seashells and sculptures made out of basalt.

  The construction industry must also have been substantial. To provide the raw materials for dwellings for up to two hundred thousand people, let alone the specialist skills to repair and intermittently replace them, and to build and maintain dozens of often vast public buildings, would have required a large workforce to extract and make lime, make bricks, cut stone, obtain and work wood, and paint the frescoes that adorned the interior walls of so many houses in the city.

  Other industries that would also have flourished—albeit on a smaller scale—must have included mica and feather working and papermaking. Although no actual paper has survived in Teotihuacan, the technology for manufacturing it did exist in Mexico at the time, and stone paper beaters have been unearthed on the site. Made from the pounded inner bark of particular types of trees, paper would have been used not just for writing on, but also for making ritual clothes and jewelry and as an easily inflammable base on which to daub incense, rubber, and blood to be burned as offerings.

  There was also a large merchant community in the metropolis; archaeological evidence suggests that entire suburbs of foreign merchants and artisans existed. The import business was on a truly massive scale—a remarkable feat bearing in mind the substantial distances involved and the complete absence of wheeled vehicles or even pack animals.

  Seashells (for making jewelry) had to be imported from the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific coast, 150 and 180 miles away, respectively. Rubber (for balls) had to be obtained from Veracruz, on the Gulf coast—and Guatemala, 500 miles to the east. Much of the cotton textile needed to manufacture clothes also probably came from the Maya regions far to the east, and from the Oaxaca and Veracruz areas, respectively 270 and 150 miles from Teotihuacan. Feathers—including those of the green-blue quetzal—had to be traded from the jungle areas in or near what is now Yucatán and Guatemala. And minerals used for making paint pigments were obtained from the north; some cinnabar, hematite, and malachite came from mines, probably controlled by Teotihuacan, hundreds of miles away from the capital. But the most exotic of all imports, turquoise, had to be obtained from what is now the northern part of New Mexico, 1,200 miles away.

  Although a good 30 percent of the population was probably involved in craft or manufacturing activities, most of the remainder, the great majority, would have been agricultural workers. Whether agricultural land was owned by individual families, larger kinship groups, or by the state itself is not known. However, archaeological survey work has yielded settlement data that suggests that the population was concentrated in the metropolis as a matter of deliberate political policy.¹ In the countryside for miles and miles around Teotihuacan and its immediate vicinity, there were very few settlements. It appears that almost the entire population of the surrounding two hundred square miles had at some point been forced to live in the city, thus preventing the development of any potential rival population centers. This politically induced phenomenon of rural depopulation must have led not only to overintensive use of farmland within walking distance of the metropolis, but also to underuse of potential farmland beyond the city’s immediate environs.

  Agricultural prosperity was not only at the heart of the city’s—and the empire’s—survival; it also lay at the core of Teotihuacano religion. The most important deity was almost certainly the rain god Tlaloc, who not only was seen as the power behind rain, thunder, and lightning but was also closely associated with the staple food (maize) and aspects of creation itself. He was believed to take the form of a fanged animal, perhaps a roaring jaguar or raging crocodile, who lived in a deep cave inside a sacred mountain. Yet he was also seen as being immanent within the clouds themselves.

  It’s not known for sure which temple at Teotihuacan belonged to Tlaloc, but the prime candidate is probably the vast Pyramid of the Sun—the largest structure in the city. In 1971, almost twenty feet beneath the 215-foot-high pyramid, archaeologists discovered a man-made passageway over three hundred feet long leading to a mysterious cloverleaf formation of four subterranean caves. There they found ducts for channeling water through the caverns and evidence of ritual activities, some of which even predated the building of the pyramid itself. The known primacy of Tlaloc at Teotihuacan, the caves underneath the pyramid, and the presence of channels to carry water combine to suggest tha
t Tlaloc was probably the deity to which this huge structure was dedicated.

  Water lay at the heart of Teotihuacan’s politico-religious and economic systems. Indeed, the Nahuatl words for “water mountain” (referring to the extinct volcano that dominates Teotihuacan and which still gurgles with the sound of water trapped inside it) and “community/city” are one and the same, altepetl. The three most important deities, Tlaloc (the rain god), the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl (also linked with rain and water), and the Mother of Stone (the personification of the water mountain) were all associated with life-giving water.² The link between rain and agricultural fecundity was symbolized by Tlaloc’s association with corn, the city’s staple food, while Quetzalcoatl’s traditional association with the ideology of divinely sanctioned rulership underpinned the political aspect of Teotihuacano religion.

  The city (and the empire) was a religious state to the extent that the rulers no doubt saw their power as divinely derived, and probably identified themselves and the metropolis with the birth of humanity and the beginning of time itself, which is how the later Aztecs saw Teotihuacan. In an uncanny New World equivalent of Christian divine sacrifice theology—evidence, if ever there was, of the global commonality of the human psyche—Teotihuacan was seen, at least by later cultures, as a sort of Mesoamerican Jerusalem where the gods had sacrificed themselves so that humanity might live.