...continued from The Empress of the USA : Part II
The Plumed Serpent
The history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and its impact upon Mesoamerican religion and culture is a vastly complex subject so we will just touch upon it briefly.
In 1519 the Spaniard Hernán Cortés arrived at the gates of Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Aztec Empire, with three interconnected dreams in his heart: expanding the Spanish empire, expanding Catholicism, and expanding his pockets with gold.
One of the chief deities of the Aztecs was Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent.
According to Robert D Kaplan,*
"According to Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, a Franciscan friar and the first great ethnologist of the New World, Quetzalcoatl ''was the wind . . . the guide, the roadsweeper of the rain gods,'' who restored humanity in the ''Time Before Time.''
Baldwin explains how the abandonment of the great city of Teotihuacan in the eighth century A.D., as well as the fall of the Toltec empire in the 13th, ''signaled the beginning of a sense of history in Mesoamerica,'' that is, ''reverence for the sacred past.'' This new historical sensibility embellished the myth of Quetzalcoatl. Henceforth, the Plumed Serpent was said to re-enter the world at intervals of 52 years, returning in different forms.
"So it was that the Aztec monarch Moctezuma II imagined Cortes as the returning Quetzalcoatl. Such fatalism abetted Cortes's conquest of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec Venice, upon whose ruins Mexico City was later built.
"Since the Aztecs had never before seen horses or Europeans, Moctezuma's creduluity was understandable. Indeed, the first encounter between great civilizations of the Old and New World was like a nightmarish fantasy in which the Spaniards marched into a white city rising from a blue lake -- Tenochtitlan -- and witnessed a drumroll of human sacrifices: Aztec priests plucking still-beating hearts from their victims' chests with obsidian knives before tossing the bodies down pyramidal steps.
"The horrified Spaniards eventually responded with an even bloodier slaughter. They also brought smallpox. Baldwin notes that in 1519, when Cortes landed, Mexico's population was 25 million; in 1600 it was one million.
"The Spanish missionaries who infiltrated Mexico after the conquest did not obliterate the pagan pantheon. ''The old ways reappeared,'' Baldwin writes, ''in the faces of ancient gods incised into church niches; behind altars consecrated to the body and blood of Christ, where little idols lay buried.''
"The Plumed Serpent hid beneath the mask of St. Thomas. The story of the Virgin of Guadalupe, seen hovering above a cactus by an Indian peasant just north of Mexico City, conflates the tale of Tonantzin, the ''snake-Earth Mother-goddess'' and the wife of Quetzalcoatl."*
The view expressed by Baldwin that the Aztecs believed Cortés to be the returning Quetzalcoatl has been challenged by a number of Mesoamericanist scholars.
to be continued...
* Robert D Kaplan, New York Times Review of Books, Legends of the Plumed Serpent : Biography of a Mexican God, Neil Baldwin, Public Affairs, 1998
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