Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [210]
To some degree, myth may have helped make that destruction possible. While some scholars now question the notion, many historians have long held that one reason a fairly small group of Spaniards was able to subjugate populations numbering in the millions lay in the story of an Aztec god named Quetzalcoatl. According to Aztec myth, Quetzalcoatl had departed from the Aztec people with the messianic promise of returning to usher in a new Golden Age. Supposedly, the notion that these white Spanish explorers might be the returning Aztec messiah helped win the Aztecs’ initial welcome, if not their hearts and minds. The Spanish then used treachery, technology, and brutality as the real means to conquest. European diseases, against which these Native Americans had no natural immunities, did the rest of the dirty work.
Far more significant, myth played a role in crushing religious traditions, which contained striking similarities to Catholicism. Powerful images of death, penitence, self-mortification, blood sacrifice, and a dying-and-reborn god—many of them central to Catholicism—pervaded the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan traditions. These parallels were not lost on the Spanish soldiers and the priests who followed them. Professing concern for the Mesoamerican soul, the Spanish co-opted native beliefs and set about their real goal—acquiring massive tracts of land and seizing as much gold and silver as they could for Spain’s royal coffers.
The path to exploitation in North America was a variation on a theme. Unlike the fairly swift, relentless Spanish conquest of the natives of Mexico and South America, the Europeans moved more slowly in North America. They had to. First, there were hundreds of tribes and groups to conquer, across a huge and largely uncharted space. While some of these people lived in sophisticated, organized settlements, others occupied remote places or were on the move, following the buffalo and better weather. The Europeans had to work longer at dropping a moving target that quickly learned the value of fighting back and was often quite good at it.
But in the end, the song remained the same. What took place all over North America was a grotesque Groundhog Day, in which identical awful things happened over and over, minus a happy ending. The pattern was this simple: The Europeans arrived and were welcomed and often aided by the natives. Once the conquerors had promised to keep the peace, they aggressively expanded, broke treaties, declared war, pitted one tribe against another, and unwittingly (for the most part) introduced diseases that nearly exterminated the native people, along with their language, mythic traditions, and sacred beliefs. In the four hundred years between Columbus’s arrival and the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, upward of 90 percent of an estimated 40 to 100 million people were wiped out in one of the largest “ethnic cleansings” the world has ever witnessed—all in the name of progress, “civilization,” and the God of Christianity.
The story of what was lost is still being written as new discoveries are made each day. A palace with a Mayan princess is found. Sacrificial victims in an ancient tomb are unearthed. The skeletal remains of an early man are opened up for study. And a new generation of scholars, eager to retell this tale from the “loser’s” point of view, continues to stir up the long-accepted histories and theories of what happened to the “primitive” people of the New World. As a result, each day new light is shed on the vibrant mythic traditions of the Americas.
MYTHIC