I mentioned in yesterday's post that human sacrifice was the one common denominator that the Catholic Spaniards shared with the pagan Aztecs. For the Spaniards, the degraded and corrupted Christianity that they purported involved not only the sacrificial death of their founder, Jesus, on the cross, but the continued systematic slaughter of witches, heretics, Muslims, Jews, and anyone else they didn't happen to like.
In the case of the Aztecs, their core belief involved the gods continually sacrificing themselves to sustain the universe and the practice of human sacrifice became a way of repaying the gods. I imagine they assumed that a human life would carry greater value than a few ears of maize and thus the gods would continue assuring good weather, good crops and not let the sun ever stop shining or the rain from falling. Christianity also comes from out of a culture of sacrifice. The ancient Jews, while not practicing human sacrifice, were always slaughtering lambs, rams, bulls and cows to keep Yahweh, or Jehovah, well fed, placated and not likely to hurl lightening bolts. Jesus came as the Lamb of God, or one could say that God was born in humble circumstances as a lowly human being offering his life, the life of God, as the ultimate blood offering for the sins of the world.
The Aztecs were perpetually bound and obligated to offer perpetual human sacrifice to their implacable gods. Thousands upon thousands being slaughtered on top of pyramid temples and their bodies thrown down the stairs stained red with the torrents of their shed blood. The Christians had lost contact with their God, accepting a political and militaristic farce as a cheap and insulting substitute for the God of love who gave his life for us. Unable and unwilling to truly devote themselves to God, given that they had lost the connection of love, they offered instead of their lives and will, the lives of the vulnerable, the marginalized, the wounded and helpless in their towns and cities. With the Inquisition inciting and inundating the people with terror, thousands and thousands of innocent lives were lost in the fires of the autos de fe as they were burned alive or murdered in other ignominious ways. The lives of the innocents replaced the lambs, rams, cows and bulls of ancient Jewish ritual, and could never placate the God of love who had already given his best in sacrifice on the cross, his own self, as his Son, Jesus Christ.
They didn't realize, nor would ever be capable of understanding, just how much they were really alike, the Spaniards and the Aztecs, even though they served different gods under vastly different belief systems. They held in common their devouring religious devotion and zealotry. There was absolutely no love there, on either side, simply a blind, clinging adherence and attachment to imaginary gods who didn't love them, that only demanded the most cruel and inhuman sacrifices of them, and burning with their zealotry they could only turn against each other in brutal and murderous conflict.
It is incredibly difficult for us in our lovely liberal postmodern universe to imagine such a collective and wholesale devotion to religion and ritual, especially to such degraded forms of worship that sanction the absolute destruction of human life to appease angry and vengeful deities. But religious faith, spiritual faith, and spiritual experience have long been a vital factor in our human history and experience. The concept of the secular came only following the French Revolution, just over two hundred years ago, and this is but a tiny blip on our five hundred thousand year history as a species. The separation of church and state is a relatively recent innovation.
For much of our history, we have been inundated with the sacred. Every tree and rock, the water flowing down the mountainsides and the mountains themselves, with the oceans, the creatures of earth, air and water, the sun, the moon, the heavenly bodies, all has until only recently been so imbued with the sacred as to be absolutely indistinguishable from the divine presence. Various peoples throughout the ages have responded in various ways to this numinous reality of the human experience. Now, in our secular conceit, we can scarcely imagine anything so quaint and primitive.
But this is what led and drove the Spaniards and the Aztecs as they took up arms against each other, and this very inclination towards the sacred remains in us still, as a banked fire that will one day emerge and devour us.
If we are to understand the trauma that misapplied and abused concepts of religion, faith and spirituality visited on the Spanish and the Mejica, the Aztec people, that this is but the shadow side of the light of love, compassion, peace, mercy and justice that springs out of true religion, the spirituality of love that proceeds from the throne of God and that alone can satisfy the longings of the human soul and to inspire us towards works of love and justice. Had they approached each other in a spirit of humility then they might have recognized themselves in each other and the huge and grave injustices that both were wreaking in the name of their religion. But both parties were already traumatized, their human development stymied by generations of living in terror, and all they had to offer each other was the murderous death that long had been inflicted upon them by their ancestors.
And then, flowed the mingled blood, Aztec and Spaniard to spawn and fructify a new people, the wounded and traumatized people of Latin America, who even to this day live and act out the generations of this trauma of their inheritance.
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