Silver, Sword, and Stone by Marie Arana

Author:Marie Arana
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

THE FOUNDATION OF HEAVEN

Who could conquer Tenochtitlán? Who could shake the foundation of heaven?

—“Cantares Mexicanos,” Aztec songs, ca. 1560.

Xavier found very quickly that, despite the half millennium that had passed, the spirituality he was discovering in Bolivia was probably somewhat like the one his priestly forebears had encountered in the time of Pizarro. From what he could observe, the faithful of this “New World” were vastly more attuned to nature, their cosmic orientation tied keenly to the land beneath their feet, the sun overhead, the rains in between. When Spanish conquistadors and their priests had burst into these remote lands, they had come with lessons about sins and saints, abstract notions of redemption, and a ritual that demanded strict adherence to a written text. It had been a strange, asymmetrical junction. Deities in the New World were explanations, not questions—concrete correspondents to life on earth. The God of the conquistadors was something else entirely—a proposition, a puzzle, recorded in incomprehensible code. Cortés himself had reported that the universe he had entered was “so wondrous as not to be believed.” The sprawling metropolis of Tenochtitlán had been filled with such mind-boggling novelties that “we here who saw them with our own eyes could not understand them with our minds.”

It is not surprising, then, how difficult it was for Xavier—as it had been for Cortés and continues to be for us—to fathom the contours of indigenous faith in its pure, aboriginal form. What stands as recorded history, after all, isn’t history at all. Written after the conquest and heavily influenced by European prejudices, Spanish chronicles are filled with the firm conviction that the American Indian was, at best, ignorant and, at worst, diabolical. The writings of Columbus, Cortés, Pedro Pizarro, and others are filled with hyperbole and outright lies for obvious reasons: theirs was a mission to persuade, subjugate, and rule. Their accounts were addressed to the Crown as propaganda or justification, not as history. But even the most detailed journals by well-meaning, extraordinarily astute and observant priests are skewed by pronounced Christian doctrine. The view, every way we look—and absent any comprehensive documentation by the indigenous themselves—is warped by the eye of the beholder.

When it comes to matters of the spirit, the task of understanding the past is even more complicated. What little we have been able to deduce about the various tribal faiths, from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Grande—from the Guaraní to the Aztecs—we have had to glean from artifacts that are frustratingly difficult to decode much less comprehend with any depth or certitude. Relics can tell us a great deal about burial practices or prevailing deities, or the heroics of war, or the state of scientific progress, or the geography of a people, or even the centrality of the natural world, but they don’t reveal much about the essential soul. Nor do they tell us about the beliefs that inform the fears and hopes of an ancient and inscrutable people.

Here is what we do know: long before

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