Yes, the meeting of two conflicting cultures, where the only common ground is that you are human beings and equally predisposed towards cruelty, barbarism and bloodlust. So it was when the early Spanish Consquistadores first encountered the Aztec of Mexico. They encountered cities of temples, pyramids and palaces of a beauty and organization they had never seen in Toledo nor in Sevilla. The buildings were very strange to their eyes, beautifully painted, and the streets were wide and clean. There were flowers everywhere and teeming open air markets.
I often think of my own contact with this meeting of cultures, and religions. This, of course, occurred during my first and subsequent visits to Mexico City. I would from time to time visit the Centro Historico, or the Historic Centre, where it all began, which is to say, the modern state of Mexico and its colonial antecedent, New Spain. In the heart of the Historic Centre, near the enormous zocalo, or central square, is the Metropolitan Cathedral, or, la Catedral Metropolitana, the largest church in Latin America. And it is huge. The original structure and foundations were built of the stones of the Aztec temple, el Templo Mayor, the ruins of which were actually discovered, just next door to the cathedral in 1978, while workers were excavating to build a new subway station. I have been to visit this archeological wonder. It is not huge. Just the foundations and a bit of what was on top remain, with amazing carvings of plumed serpents and other deities.
I am also reminded of how difficult I it is for me to visit this most essential part of Mexico City, not only because it is crowded and not particularly friendly towards relaxation, but for something that is very difficult to name, but nonetheless, palpable, at least in the intuitive sense. It is as though I am being hit afresh by the combined violence of the Catholic Spanish and the Pagan Aztecs, and that the torrents of innocent blood shed by both cultures have somehow combined and flow now as an underground river that haunts, touches and fills the souls and lives of the people who live there. It is a most unsettling experience and often I just want to sit down and weep whenever I go there, which is, I suppose, why I seldom go there.
Two religions of violence, met, did battle and clashed. The invaders won. They claimed to be righteously appalled and horrified at the human sacrifice practiced with absolute ease by the Aztec priesthood. Somehow it must never have entered their minds that they also practiced a religion of human sacrifice, beginning with God as Jesus Christ sacrificing himself for the world and then this most beautiful of religions being degraded and perverted into a quasi-political feudal empire, more engrossed in controlling and dominating its subjects than in living out the truths of the gospel of the God of love. The damage and havoc they wreaked upon the Christian faith and upon the faithful they ruled culminated in the brutal farce of the Spanish Inquisition as well as the other cruel and inhuman acts of persecution and vengeance against heretics and alleged witches throughout the Holy Roman Empire.
By default of accepting the humility of love, and the Divine call to absolute surrender to the God of love, they mutated the Christian faith into a foul and gaping maw, swallowing alive the souls of the vulnerable and innocent, and embarking on their own diabolical practice of human sacrifice: the burning alive and other forms of systematic murder and torture of alleged witches, heretics, pagans, Jews, Muslims and anybody else they didn't happen to like.
In Tenochtitlan, the island in the lake that was eventually drained and developed into Mexico City, one of the world's largest metropolises, like met like and religious brutality clashed with religious brutality. Aztecs traumatized by generations of cruelty and barbarism from their own priests and rulers did battle with invading Spaniards, in their own way also traumatized by generations of cruelty and barbarism in their homeland. Spanish blood mingled with Aztec blood, whether it flowed down the steps of the temple, in the streets of Tenochtitlan or eventually in the mixed heritage of the Mestizos, the sad, vulnerable and innocent children of mass rape, who were to become the seed from which sprang to life the vital and dynamic cultures of Mexico and Central and South America, a proud and resilient people, but nonetheless hobbled by generation upon generation of collective trauma.
One nightmare embraced and conquered another nightmare and ever since the two realities have absorbed, co-existed and resisted each other. And now we have one of the richest, most beautiful and most tragic cultures ever to bless our broken and troubled humanity.
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