Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest by Matthew Restall

Author:Matthew Restall [Restall, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2004-08-25T18:30:00+00:00

A “trick of the devil” is certainly a succinct way of explaining the spread of rumors about omens, predictions, and native deification of Spaniards. As the colonial period progressed, the subordinated status of natives in the Spanish colonies seemed to confirm that these were the kinds of people “in whose minds superstition and credulity go hand in hand,” as a governor of Yucatan in the 1840s described the Mayas. The supposed substitution of sympathy for prejudice has not stopped modern-day commentators from likewise seeing natives as likely to have been “paralyzed by terror” as the invaders approached, and desperately hoping “for support from the ‘gods’ or ‘divine emissaries.’”51

Two brief examples illustrate the state of the myth by the eighteenth century. One is the following comment by Ilarione da Bergamo, an Italian friar who learned of Mexican history from local Spanish settlers while traveling in the colony in the eighteenth century: “At the beginning of the war, that race [the Spaniards] had the reputation of being immortal, because they [the Indians] had not seen a single dead Spaniard, whether from natural or violent causes. They also said that Spaniards were children of the sun, and they thought the cavalryman was a single body of both horse and rider.”52 Eighteenth-century Spanish notions of the sixteenth-century native mentality cannot be taken as good evidence of that mentality. It seems unlikely for natives to assume that men on horses were a new type of creature when the riders were accompanied by other men who looked the same but were on foot. Indeed, Mesoamericans had never seen horses, but they had seen deer, and indeed immediately began to call horses a type of deer.53 Delight, not fear, was the reaction of the Chontal Maya king, Paxbolonacha, when invited by Cortés on the occasion of their initial meeting to ride for the first time on horseback into the Chontal capital.54

Similarly, it seems unlikely that natives would assume a man was a god pending his death as evidence of his mortality. The human experience leads us to assume, from a very young age, that people (in fact, all living creatures) are mortal, an assumption that would only logically be overturned by repeated acts of invincibility or resurrection. But the myth has no tales of such acts. Nor can we speculate on some sort of cultural exceptionalism on the part of Mesoamericans. There is plenty of evidence that they took death for granted much as other cultures do. One of the most important deities in Mesoamerica, the rain god and Earth god called Tlaloc by the Nahuas, was also a death god.55 Furthermore, deification in Mesoamerica was postmortem, not premortem. The ruler Quetzalcoatl became a god, or became associated with the god of the same name, only after he died.56 Finally, there are many more logical explanations for Spaniards being called “children of the sun.” For example, a lieutenant of Cortés, Pedro de Alvarado, was nicknamed Tonatiuh, “the sun,” by the Mexica because of his shock of blonde hair—no doubt his most notable feature from the perspective of the dark-haired natives.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.