[one of the dumbest papers I've ever written.]
HST 103
16 September 2010
----
*. Despite its autochthonous appearance, this word is a modern acronym for The End Of The World As We Know It.
----
In the literature of conquest, prophecies from indigenous cultures often serve multiple functions. They simultaneously display the native people as exotic and mysterious but also simplistic and primitive for believing in such things. Of course, the belief system inherent in Christianity is never scrutinized nor subjected by the same methodology by those who adhere to it as divine truth, lest it be judged just as barbaric and superstitious as those from the “primitive” cultures. Perspective in this, as in most everything, determines the measurements of modern judgment.
The first three texts of Victors and Vanquished present a trio of different perspectives relating to omens seen as foretelling the invasion of the Aztec empire by the Spaniards. Through these three different viewpoints, the importance auguries to the indigenous culture can be more readily seen, as well as how such portents could be used by the conquerers to further justify their actions as being ordained by God. Even if such superstitions are considered beyond the pale of true faith, fortune-telling is vindicated when it becomes a harbinger of one’s own victory. By examining several smaller perspectives of a subject, a deeper understanding of the whole can be reached.
Fray Bernardio de Sahgún records eight omens from the Nahua people in the twelfth book of his Florentine Codex. These omens were said to have begun a decade before Cortés arrived, and although most of them can be reduced in modern terms as natural phenomena, others range from the merely curious to the outright baffling. For instance, in the first omen, when “a flame or tongue of fire, like the light of dawn” (31) is described, it, like the fourth omen—“looking as if it were sprinkling glowing coals” with “a long tail, which reached a great distance” (32)—can be scientifically seen as the description of a comet. Given the geology of central Mexico, when the second omen describes a mountain that “burned and flared up … it just took fire itself” (32), it can be deduced that this is an account of an erupting volcano. The lighting strike of the third omen is, despite the consideration that it “was not raining hard” and the “sun was shining” (32), would not be considered unusual in a modern context. The imagery, however, is almost archetypal when compared to the lightning struck tower in medieval tarot cards (an iconography which were certainly not unknown in 16th century Spain). The boiling lake of the fifth omen might seem curious at first, but again a comparison with modern geological studies of a seismically active region, such as Yellowstone Park in the United States, reveals that earthquakes below bodies of water can cause the lake to bubble and make “exploding sounds” (32). It is the latter three omens which seem to range from perplexing to stupefying, and can possibly attributed to mere superstition, or possibly apocryphal stories. A woman who goes along “weeping and shouting” ominous questions about children going to “forever” (32) can be attributed to almost anything. The final two omens involve highly exotic tellings which involve the subject of the amazement to vanish when subjected to scrutiny. An ash-colored crane caught in fishing nets that has “something like a mirror” on its head that “perforated, where the sky, the stars, and the Fire Drill [constellation] could be seen.” Yet when Moteucçoma had his advisors examine it, the bird disappeared. This vanishing act was also the end result of the eighth omen’s two-headed “thistle-people” (33). When the human oddities were taken to the royal court, they too, disappeared without further comment on the part of the Codex.
Fray Martín de Jesús de la Coruña’s Popular Auguries and Prophetic Dreams recounts prophecies from the Tarascan people, a traditional enemy of the Aztec empire. Most of these omens involved destruction or defilement of Tarascan temples. In one, the temples were “burned from top to bottom” then “burned again” (33). Another omen tells of how a priest of the Tarascan dreams that people came “bringing strange animals” and who “soiled the temples” (33). These people turned out to be the Spaniards with their horses who, a few years after felling the Aztecs, would annihilate the Tarascan state. The excerpt from Coruña’s account ends with a brief debate as to when the outbreak of smallpox and measles began. The text states that the Spaniards were “unanimous … that this disease was general throughout New Spain,” but that the Tarascan contended that the diseases were “unknown until the Spaniards brought them” (34). The tone of this excerpt and the after-the-fact debate indicates that, although the document is invaluable for the viewpoint it presents from an enemy of the Aztecs, the authenticity of the dream as related to Coruña is questionable. This is evidenced in the telling of how the Tarascans would be “given food and … marry … Christian girls,” but they “dared not tell [this dream prophecy] to the Cazonci” (33-34). This sounds distinctively like a retroactive appeasement story on the part of the Tarascans to the Spaniards.
Appeasement is not necessary in Diego Durán’s record of indigenous culture, The History of the Indies of New Spain. It presents a unique perspective as being both a Nahuatl viewpoint, but also an examination of pictorial record-keeping habits of the Aztecs. This excerpt details repeated ominous warnings of danger and destruction at the hands of coming strangers, and the fall of Aztec temples. When the prophecies became such that they reveal threats to Moteczoma’s life and sovereignty, he imprisoned the oneiromancers and ordered that they “be given food in small measures until they starved to death. After this,” Durán states, “no one wished to tell his dreams to Moteczoma” (36).
It was when Moteczoma had “the best artist of Mexico” (37) brought to him that the pictorial record-keeping comes to bear in this record of Nahuatl history. Wishing to understand the nature of the strangers invading his lands, Moteczoma ordered the artist to paint what he knew of them. The artist visually depicted the Spaniards and their ships, their colorful clothing, helmets, and belted swords. Documenting something unknown and beyond one’s own culture is a remarkable difficulty. The Nahuatl lacked a vocabulary to describe certain aspects of the Spaniards which had not previously been encountered in their realm, and so it was only via painting them that any kind of understanding be determined. In modern terms, this could be equated to spy satellite technology. What is revealed with a photograph may not be immediately comprehendible, but it is a static image which can be studied and compared to others. In manner more specific to the 16th century encounter between the Spaniards and the Aztecs, an image that could be studied to prepare them for eventually seeing with their own eyes the actual thing the depiction represented. Moteczoma wished to have as many paintings as possible created for him of the strange invaders so that he could best formulate a plan of action should they arrive at his palace. These painters became his intelligence agency. Through visual documentation, prophecy had become the seed of strategic planning.
With a colorful tapestry of words, the Spaniard Francisco López de Gómara painted an apologetic picture of Hernán Cortés in Istoria de la conquista de Mexico. From the Spaniard perspective, the rational and reasoning of how events transpired between Conquistadors and the Aztec people was, of course, considerably different from the indigenous vantage point. Gómara’s work in particular is notable for this. Although he was a writer of incredible talent, who used some of the most vivid language in the canon of Spanish conquest literature, his bias in favor of Cortés was nothing short of hero-worship. His work sanitized the bloodshed inflicted upon the Aztecs and absolved Cortés of any possible wrong-doing. So powerfully did he aggrandize Cortés and the conquest of Mexico that, by the 1550s, even in his own country, his work had been banned by royal degree. A clear example of the absolution of Cortés in Gómara’s accounts can be seen in his simple statement that “the Captain entered in [the Aztec Temple] with fifty men, and without any Christian respect slew and murdered [the Aztecs] and took from them all their treasure.” Gómara continued this description with what is almost an aside to ensure the beneficent light in which Cortés should be seen. “Although this fact seemed odious to Cortés,” Gómara wrote, that Cortés did nothing to stop his men from their actions because “he might have need of them” and certainly needed “to avoid contention amoung his company” (162). Thus, in such accounts of Gómara, Hernán Cortés had no blood on his hands in the felling of the Aztec empire. Within a generation of the violent events, the whitewashing of genocidal history had already found a powerful voice.
Standing in slight counterpoint to Gómara—although far from being sympathetic to the Aztec—is Bernal Díaz’s seminal work, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. Even though, as the editor Stuart B. Schwartz relates, “Díaz was often candid about his desire for wealth and women, he … sought to justify his actions by … spreading Christianity” (217), the Spanish historical writer did not present the antiseptic version of conquest that Gómara did.
In the aftermath of Montezuma’s death and the decimation of his empire, Díaz wrote about how the native people got “rid of the idolatries and all the evil vices they practised … [the native people] were baptized” (218). He extolled the virtues of the many churches built in New Spain, detailing their fineries, their “patens and silver plates … and censers all worked in silver.” The pueblo churches had “chasubles, and fontals … of velvet, damask and satin, and of taffeta of various colours … embroidered with gold and silk.” He proudly told of how there are more trumpets in “this province of Guatemala” than there are in his own country of Old Castile (218). He, of course, bragged about the speed with which the Spaniards eliminated the indigenous culture, and is just as haughty in his tone concerning the native people quickly taking to the only true religion, Christianity: “[B]oth men, women and children … know all the holy prayers in their own languages … they bow their heads with humility, bend their knees, and say the Prayer ‘Our Father,’” which, of course, they were taught by their conquerers in order to save their souls from “Infernal regions” (218-219). This point is especially crucial to the historical document Díaz recorded, for the bodily slaughter of a entire people means nothing if those surviving cannot have their souls saved by “the holy passion of our Lord Redeemer and Saviour Jesus Christ” (219).
After waxing poetic on the new churches and converts to his religion, Díaz marked his account with a few examples of how some of the “Mexican Indians” had learned to read and write. Since it is not stated what language they have learned to read and write, the implication is clear that Spanish is, like the country’s religion, the only true language to learn; the Mexican Indians were illiterate when they knew only their native tongue. Along with a new language, the people of Mexico and Guatemala learned new crafts, trades, and laws by which they might cease being such vile, ignorant, evil heathens Concluding the excerpt of this account, Díaz stated, “Not to waste more words … I will tell of many other grandeurs which, through us, there … are in New Spain” (221). He is saying that all old traditions—arts, crafts, and trades—were worthless, and that it is only through the civilized manners and knowledge of the Spaniards that these native people have finally come to know what true culture is.
The old Tarascan prophecies of local temples being burned and strangers coming to defile them had come to pass. Once those temples were erased from the land they existed only in the documents which mentioned them as mere footnotes of history. A new God had arrived and His agents sacrificed the worshipers of the old gods in the name of power and glory to a distant ruler. As distant to the native people of Mexico as their time is to our own.
Despite modern explanations which drain mystery from omens and portents of past civilizations, it is the perspective from within those eras which viewed the powerful forces of nature with curiosity, fear, and wonderment. Careful consideration of such viewpoints is sometimes lost when examining events from the safety and security of 500 years of compiled scientific knowledge. But no less an amazement is expressed when a modern-age viewer experiences an absence of electrical power and, enveloped in the complete darkness of night, the nocturnal heavens stretch out to an expansive unknown depth. To ancient people, such a sight would have been commonplace. What is a comforting ubiquity to one culture may be uniquely foreboding to another. It is accounting for this difference in perspective which creates the possibility for understanding. And understanding the wonders and fears of past cultures is a crucial purpose for the study of history.
~•~
HST 103
16 September 2010
Teotwawki*
----
*. Despite its autochthonous appearance, this word is a modern acronym for The End Of The World As We Know It.
----
In the literature of conquest, prophecies from indigenous cultures often serve multiple functions. They simultaneously display the native people as exotic and mysterious but also simplistic and primitive for believing in such things. Of course, the belief system inherent in Christianity is never scrutinized nor subjected by the same methodology by those who adhere to it as divine truth, lest it be judged just as barbaric and superstitious as those from the “primitive” cultures. Perspective in this, as in most everything, determines the measurements of modern judgment.
The first three texts of Victors and Vanquished present a trio of different perspectives relating to omens seen as foretelling the invasion of the Aztec empire by the Spaniards. Through these three different viewpoints, the importance auguries to the indigenous culture can be more readily seen, as well as how such portents could be used by the conquerers to further justify their actions as being ordained by God. Even if such superstitions are considered beyond the pale of true faith, fortune-telling is vindicated when it becomes a harbinger of one’s own victory. By examining several smaller perspectives of a subject, a deeper understanding of the whole can be reached.
Fray Bernardio de Sahgún records eight omens from the Nahua people in the twelfth book of his Florentine Codex. These omens were said to have begun a decade before Cortés arrived, and although most of them can be reduced in modern terms as natural phenomena, others range from the merely curious to the outright baffling. For instance, in the first omen, when “a flame or tongue of fire, like the light of dawn” (31) is described, it, like the fourth omen—“looking as if it were sprinkling glowing coals” with “a long tail, which reached a great distance” (32)—can be scientifically seen as the description of a comet. Given the geology of central Mexico, when the second omen describes a mountain that “burned and flared up … it just took fire itself” (32), it can be deduced that this is an account of an erupting volcano. The lighting strike of the third omen is, despite the consideration that it “was not raining hard” and the “sun was shining” (32), would not be considered unusual in a modern context. The imagery, however, is almost archetypal when compared to the lightning struck tower in medieval tarot cards (an iconography which were certainly not unknown in 16th century Spain). The boiling lake of the fifth omen might seem curious at first, but again a comparison with modern geological studies of a seismically active region, such as Yellowstone Park in the United States, reveals that earthquakes below bodies of water can cause the lake to bubble and make “exploding sounds” (32). It is the latter three omens which seem to range from perplexing to stupefying, and can possibly attributed to mere superstition, or possibly apocryphal stories. A woman who goes along “weeping and shouting” ominous questions about children going to “forever” (32) can be attributed to almost anything. The final two omens involve highly exotic tellings which involve the subject of the amazement to vanish when subjected to scrutiny. An ash-colored crane caught in fishing nets that has “something like a mirror” on its head that “perforated, where the sky, the stars, and the Fire Drill [constellation] could be seen.” Yet when Moteucçoma had his advisors examine it, the bird disappeared. This vanishing act was also the end result of the eighth omen’s two-headed “thistle-people” (33). When the human oddities were taken to the royal court, they too, disappeared without further comment on the part of the Codex.
Fray Martín de Jesús de la Coruña’s Popular Auguries and Prophetic Dreams recounts prophecies from the Tarascan people, a traditional enemy of the Aztec empire. Most of these omens involved destruction or defilement of Tarascan temples. In one, the temples were “burned from top to bottom” then “burned again” (33). Another omen tells of how a priest of the Tarascan dreams that people came “bringing strange animals” and who “soiled the temples” (33). These people turned out to be the Spaniards with their horses who, a few years after felling the Aztecs, would annihilate the Tarascan state. The excerpt from Coruña’s account ends with a brief debate as to when the outbreak of smallpox and measles began. The text states that the Spaniards were “unanimous … that this disease was general throughout New Spain,” but that the Tarascan contended that the diseases were “unknown until the Spaniards brought them” (34). The tone of this excerpt and the after-the-fact debate indicates that, although the document is invaluable for the viewpoint it presents from an enemy of the Aztecs, the authenticity of the dream as related to Coruña is questionable. This is evidenced in the telling of how the Tarascans would be “given food and … marry … Christian girls,” but they “dared not tell [this dream prophecy] to the Cazonci” (33-34). This sounds distinctively like a retroactive appeasement story on the part of the Tarascans to the Spaniards.
Appeasement is not necessary in Diego Durán’s record of indigenous culture, The History of the Indies of New Spain. It presents a unique perspective as being both a Nahuatl viewpoint, but also an examination of pictorial record-keeping habits of the Aztecs. This excerpt details repeated ominous warnings of danger and destruction at the hands of coming strangers, and the fall of Aztec temples. When the prophecies became such that they reveal threats to Moteczoma’s life and sovereignty, he imprisoned the oneiromancers and ordered that they “be given food in small measures until they starved to death. After this,” Durán states, “no one wished to tell his dreams to Moteczoma” (36).
It was when Moteczoma had “the best artist of Mexico” (37) brought to him that the pictorial record-keeping comes to bear in this record of Nahuatl history. Wishing to understand the nature of the strangers invading his lands, Moteczoma ordered the artist to paint what he knew of them. The artist visually depicted the Spaniards and their ships, their colorful clothing, helmets, and belted swords. Documenting something unknown and beyond one’s own culture is a remarkable difficulty. The Nahuatl lacked a vocabulary to describe certain aspects of the Spaniards which had not previously been encountered in their realm, and so it was only via painting them that any kind of understanding be determined. In modern terms, this could be equated to spy satellite technology. What is revealed with a photograph may not be immediately comprehendible, but it is a static image which can be studied and compared to others. In manner more specific to the 16th century encounter between the Spaniards and the Aztecs, an image that could be studied to prepare them for eventually seeing with their own eyes the actual thing the depiction represented. Moteczoma wished to have as many paintings as possible created for him of the strange invaders so that he could best formulate a plan of action should they arrive at his palace. These painters became his intelligence agency. Through visual documentation, prophecy had become the seed of strategic planning.
With a colorful tapestry of words, the Spaniard Francisco López de Gómara painted an apologetic picture of Hernán Cortés in Istoria de la conquista de Mexico. From the Spaniard perspective, the rational and reasoning of how events transpired between Conquistadors and the Aztec people was, of course, considerably different from the indigenous vantage point. Gómara’s work in particular is notable for this. Although he was a writer of incredible talent, who used some of the most vivid language in the canon of Spanish conquest literature, his bias in favor of Cortés was nothing short of hero-worship. His work sanitized the bloodshed inflicted upon the Aztecs and absolved Cortés of any possible wrong-doing. So powerfully did he aggrandize Cortés and the conquest of Mexico that, by the 1550s, even in his own country, his work had been banned by royal degree. A clear example of the absolution of Cortés in Gómara’s accounts can be seen in his simple statement that “the Captain entered in [the Aztec Temple] with fifty men, and without any Christian respect slew and murdered [the Aztecs] and took from them all their treasure.” Gómara continued this description with what is almost an aside to ensure the beneficent light in which Cortés should be seen. “Although this fact seemed odious to Cortés,” Gómara wrote, that Cortés did nothing to stop his men from their actions because “he might have need of them” and certainly needed “to avoid contention amoung his company” (162). Thus, in such accounts of Gómara, Hernán Cortés had no blood on his hands in the felling of the Aztec empire. Within a generation of the violent events, the whitewashing of genocidal history had already found a powerful voice.
Standing in slight counterpoint to Gómara—although far from being sympathetic to the Aztec—is Bernal Díaz’s seminal work, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. Even though, as the editor Stuart B. Schwartz relates, “Díaz was often candid about his desire for wealth and women, he … sought to justify his actions by … spreading Christianity” (217), the Spanish historical writer did not present the antiseptic version of conquest that Gómara did.
In the aftermath of Montezuma’s death and the decimation of his empire, Díaz wrote about how the native people got “rid of the idolatries and all the evil vices they practised … [the native people] were baptized” (218). He extolled the virtues of the many churches built in New Spain, detailing their fineries, their “patens and silver plates … and censers all worked in silver.” The pueblo churches had “chasubles, and fontals … of velvet, damask and satin, and of taffeta of various colours … embroidered with gold and silk.” He proudly told of how there are more trumpets in “this province of Guatemala” than there are in his own country of Old Castile (218). He, of course, bragged about the speed with which the Spaniards eliminated the indigenous culture, and is just as haughty in his tone concerning the native people quickly taking to the only true religion, Christianity: “[B]oth men, women and children … know all the holy prayers in their own languages … they bow their heads with humility, bend their knees, and say the Prayer ‘Our Father,’” which, of course, they were taught by their conquerers in order to save their souls from “Infernal regions” (218-219). This point is especially crucial to the historical document Díaz recorded, for the bodily slaughter of a entire people means nothing if those surviving cannot have their souls saved by “the holy passion of our Lord Redeemer and Saviour Jesus Christ” (219).
After waxing poetic on the new churches and converts to his religion, Díaz marked his account with a few examples of how some of the “Mexican Indians” had learned to read and write. Since it is not stated what language they have learned to read and write, the implication is clear that Spanish is, like the country’s religion, the only true language to learn; the Mexican Indians were illiterate when they knew only their native tongue. Along with a new language, the people of Mexico and Guatemala learned new crafts, trades, and laws by which they might cease being such vile, ignorant, evil heathens Concluding the excerpt of this account, Díaz stated, “Not to waste more words … I will tell of many other grandeurs which, through us, there … are in New Spain” (221). He is saying that all old traditions—arts, crafts, and trades—were worthless, and that it is only through the civilized manners and knowledge of the Spaniards that these native people have finally come to know what true culture is.
The old Tarascan prophecies of local temples being burned and strangers coming to defile them had come to pass. Once those temples were erased from the land they existed only in the documents which mentioned them as mere footnotes of history. A new God had arrived and His agents sacrificed the worshipers of the old gods in the name of power and glory to a distant ruler. As distant to the native people of Mexico as their time is to our own.
Despite modern explanations which drain mystery from omens and portents of past civilizations, it is the perspective from within those eras which viewed the powerful forces of nature with curiosity, fear, and wonderment. Careful consideration of such viewpoints is sometimes lost when examining events from the safety and security of 500 years of compiled scientific knowledge. But no less an amazement is expressed when a modern-age viewer experiences an absence of electrical power and, enveloped in the complete darkness of night, the nocturnal heavens stretch out to an expansive unknown depth. To ancient people, such a sight would have been commonplace. What is a comforting ubiquity to one culture may be uniquely foreboding to another. It is accounting for this difference in perspective which creates the possibility for understanding. And understanding the wonders and fears of past cultures is a crucial purpose for the study of history.
~•~
No comments:
Post a Comment