Indigenous Cosmogony and Values Prior to Contact With the West, Essay Example

Contrary to popular belief, indigenous peoples possessed a developed belief system rooted in spirituality  saturated with customs that were wholly foreign and strange to Westerners. These belief systems were embedded in the lives of the indigenous for thousands of years prior to the arrival of the Christian missionaries. The term indigenous translates into “relating to a land or area,” and those described as indigenous peoples have been rendered in western discourses barbaric and savage because westerns misunderstand certain customs such as human sacrifice and viewed them as inhumane and unnatural. Latent implications of this term are manifold, as all indigenous peoples are characterized as native to a region that was later conquered and inhabited by a hegemonic or invading culture. The Aztecs—who occupied modern-day Mexico–are among the most famous indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica who had a very well developed culture and society prior to the arrival of Hernan Cortes, the renowned Spanish conqueror. The majority of the information known about indigenous peoples is from accounts penned by westerners, so it is difficult to ascertain any objective information about the customs and culture of the indigenous societies prior to the arrival of missionaries or hegemonic culture because the narratives in the corpus of literature are filtered through a western prism. The letter of Hernan Cortes to the Spanish Crown elucidates how westerners misunderstood the culture and customs of indigenous peoples.  Ultimately, conflicting worldviews and cultural value systems resulted in clashes out of which the Europeans prevailed.

In Mesoamerica, the so-called “Spirit of Place” which germinated out of a profound interconnection between the built environment, rituals performed on certain dates on their religious cycle, landscape, and pilgrimage. This complex undergirded the worldview of the indigenous, who viewed land as sacred, and they buried their ancestors in their sacred lands for generations. There was no concept of individualism and private property, as Mesoamericans framed the natural environment as the realm of the divine, which governed where they built their urban settlements and formed their public buildings, which were aligned with the primary topographic features and thus fomented a strong nexus between the two. The indigenous thus imbued the natural environment with symbolic currency as it was interlocked with their settlements. The indigenous had in place this semiotic system and code that linked the divine with human experience via various cultural manifestations (Carrasco 4). Mesoamerican indigenous peoples viewed this connection as the very essence of their cosmogony “Spirit of Place.” The principles employed therein included astronomical observation, a rendering of the universe, the materialization of power, and a recreation of the environment, all of which set the physical foundation for humans to participate via rituals within this semiotic system (Vit 1). The “Spirit of Place” was fomented therein.

There are a litany of barriers to comprehending the rituals and sacred ways of the indigenous peoples from a western perspective because of the dearth of written sources from an indigenous point of view. Cultural anthropologists have struggled to ferret out sources on indigenous spirituality because the corpus of literature is dominated by the perspective of western non-spiritual authors. They thus read those sources with the knowledge that the chroniclers did not accept the veracity of indigenous practices and beliefs. Indigenous peoples sought to safeguard the sacrosanct nature of their cultural customs from outsiders who eschewed pagan religions by practicing them underground. In Mesoamerica, the indigenous peoples hid their ancient teachings for over half a millennium upon coming into contact with Spanish conquerors. When Spanish missionaries arrived, indigenous peoples were ordered by their elders to be hospitable, respectful, and obedient, in addition to acquiescing their orders to attend church and Sunday school (Acuna 38). However, they were also ordered not to adopt Christianity as their religion because doing so detracts from their spiritual and cultural beliefs. Another barrier to understanding indigenous practices is that they unknowingly exercised their public agency through the dissemination of false information to outsiders inquiring about them. As such, it is clear that the majority of indigenous religions evolved in private circles that were insulated from outsiders and thus out of the purview of the westerners.

The scholarly literature on indigenous religions thus has been challenging to procure due to the fact that the indigenous peoples feared that they would be repressed, misunderstood, and misinterpreted by outsiders studying their culture. It should be noted that indigenous religions and sacred customs were preserved and passed down as oral narratives that were not preserved in written sources. Oral transmissions are almost impossible for westerns to access and study because they are far more difficult to examine than religious writings were (Acuna 24). This dearth of written sources calls for anthropologists to interview tribe elders and storytellers in order to understand native religious and ascertain information about the traditions and myths that formed the basis of indigenous ways of sacred knowing.

During 1400s and 1500s, European explorers and conquerors visited the so-called New World and provided valuable accounts and letters about their first encounters that conveyed their predetermined attitudes and perceptions of the cultural, political, and economic contingencies they encountered. These narratives often exhibited a heightened cognizance of the vested interests of their enterprises because they needed to procure the legitimacy and financial backing from powerful patrons, such as the Spanish Crown. Hernan Cortes penned a compendium of letters from what is now modern-day Mexico in order to legitimate his conquest of the Aztecs, which was an arduous task because the governor of Hispanola never approved of this endeavor. As such, Cortes’ expedition was rendered a deliberate act of defiance. Cortes thus wrote a series of letters to the most powerful European ruler during the early modern era, Charles the V, and he drew on biblical and chivalric imagery in addition to historical tradition to construct his endeavor as profitable and legitimate. The letter is extensive and limns his achievements in a very positive light, thereby eliding particular details and skewing in his letter about what actually transpired. In the letter, Cortes described the city of Tenochtitlan, praising its grand sculpture and architecture and marveling about strange animal practices he witnessed the Aztecs engaging in. Cortes even characterized the city as “noble” with “magnificent houses” everywhere. He even argues that Tenochtitlan more magnificent, impressive, and grand than cities in Spain and all of Europe (Cortes). Through such praise, it is clear that Cortes wanted to convey to Charles V that a brutal conquest of the Aztecs was justified because he viewed it as worthy and necessary for Spanish colonization.

It is clear in the letter that Cortes penned his narrative of the Aztecs through a Eurocentric filter through which Europeans assumed their superiority over indigenous peoples. Tainted by notions of European superiority and imperialist lexicon, Cortes’ letter presents to the Spanish Crown and the Holy Roman Emperor “a tale of unmitigated disaster” perpetrated by the aggression of the indigenous Aztecs. Although he praised the workmanship of the idols that were kept in the various temples, Cortes evinced his antipathy for the pagan nature of indigenous religions, noting that the chapels were all “polluted with human blood, shed in sacrifice.” As a result, Cortes took the initiative to replace the idols with Christian iconography despite the fact that Monteczuma, the leader of the Aztecs, rendered such actions blaphemous and threatened mutiny if Cortes did so (Acuna 59). In response, Cortes argued that the Aztecs have been deceived by idolizing false icons, and to save their souls, they need to accept Christianity. Regardless of how hospitable and civil the Aztecs treated the western explorers, the colonists perceived them as “irrevocably inferior.” Moreover, the Spanish posited that the Aztec religion was abominable and a “filthy mixture of superstition and devil worship.” As a result, Cortes and his army exacted extreme violence and brutality, which was documented by local chroniclers. Cortes and his men not only sadistically murdered and raped the indigenous Aztecs, they also effaced all evidence of pagan religious practices. While the Aztecs were praised for their architectural achievements, Cortes constructs than as inferior, barbaric, and backwards peoples, which their heinous religious practices evince. As such, he conveys the pervasive notion that the Europeans retained the duty and obligation to “civilize” the savage indigenous peoples vis-a-vis the spread of Christianity.

Works Cited

Acuna, Rodolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. New York: Longman, 2007. Print.

Carrasco, David. Religions of Mesoamerica. United States: Waveland Press, 2013, Print.

Clendinnen, Inga. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Print.

Cortes, Hernan. Letters From Mexico. Trans. Anthony Pagden. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916. 102-112.

Mancall, Peter C.. Travel Narratives From the Age of Discovery: an Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print.

Ringrose, David R.. Expansion and Global Interaction, 1200-1700. New York: Longman, 2001. Print.

Vit, Ilan. “Principios de urbanismo en Mesoamérica.” Revista de la Universidad de México 22(2005): 74-85. Print.

Wolf, Eric R.. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Print.