Throughout prehistory and history, religion has been a
major source of human misery. Since the beginning of our species, religion has
allowed some members of a society, and some societies, to dominate others,
because they claim the authority of their god to do so. Most, if not all,
religion is a delusion, but cultural selection (the social equivalent of
natural selection) has favored it not because it was true but because it
provided fitness benefits to its practitioners.
This delusion has been prevalent in the human species
since the beginning. Civilization developed independently and differently in
the Old World and the New World, but in both cases religion allowed powerful
people in the cities to dominate masses of teeming poor and miserable victims.
The list of atrocities carried out by the world’s first kings—who ruled more
than just their village or small confederation of villages—is impossible for
any sane human to comprehend all at once. Babylonian kings flayed their victims
alive. Even the reputedly moral Israelites put whole cities to the sword.
Chinese emperors carried out mass executions. African kings made some of their
armies march into the sea and drown. And in America? More presently.
Peter Watson wrote The
Great Divide back in 2011. This book is a quixotic quest to make sense out
of all human history. This prolific writer must be a genius but his task was
impossible. However, his book did help me understand one thing a little better.
What caused history to take a different trajectory in the Old World from the
New?
The major answers to these questions were, to my
understanding, not very different in Watson’s book than in the more famous
books (Guns Germs and Steel and Collapse) by Jared Diamond. The Old
World had wild plants that could easily be bred into crops; wild animals that
could easily be bred into livestock; and a geography that allowed easy movement
of technologies and people east and west along latitudinal lines. North and
south movement was more difficult because of climatic differences, something
that was particularly important for crops. Agricultural civilization developed
in both hemispheres, but much later in America, which is much narrower,
especially in tropical Mesoamerica. New technologies diffused very slowly from
one part of the New World to another.
But Watson also wrote about something I’d not considered:
religion. He gave examples, just a few from countless ones, of the cruelties
imposed in the name of religion. But something happened in the Old World that
was different from the New.
All religions, Watson explains, began as shamanistic
religions, in which a religious cult leader would go into a trance and believe
himself or herself to be transformed into a spirit animal, or at least convince
others of it.
In the Old World, this gradually transformed into
religions in which there were fewer and fewer, and more powerful, gods, with
priests who were not shamans. This was associated with the rise of agricultural
civilizations, in which kings, standing in for gods, imposed order.
But in the New World, there were fewer agricultural
civilizations, and they rose later: the Mound Builders, the civilizations of
Mexico and of Peru. And, something I’d not considered, the New World has far
more species of hallucinogenic plants. Priests continued to be ceremonial
shamans using hallucinogens to connect with the spirit world in America long
after it had mostly stopped in the Old World. (Indeed, in the Old World,
starting in several places independently about 500 BCE, many people began
challenging religious tradition with demands for justice and morality, examples
being the Old Testament prophets, Buddhism, and Taoism.) I’d also not
considered that Old World people could not get stoned as much—they preferred
mild drugs like alcohol—because if they did it would be dangerous for them to
handle large livestock animals, animals that the New World inhabitants did not
have.
And it wasn’t just hallucinogens; in the Native American
civilizations, people induced a trance state by self-brutalization. The Spanish
conquistadors saw a king and queen come out and, in public, lacerate
themselves: he drew a rope through his own penis, she through her tongue. Once
there was a contest to see how many sticks a man could run through his tongue;
the winner pierced his tongue with 405 sticks. In Mexico at the time of the
Spanish Conquest, there were 1500 ball courts. In these games, the losing team
was sacrificed, and sometimes the winning team also. Archaeological evidence
indicates that at the major city in North America before the European invasion,
Cahokia (in modern Illinois), when one of the chiefs died, his relatives were
killed also, as well as fifty women aged 15 to 18 years of age.
Some of what we know about the extremes of religion in
ancient America come from their own records (those that the earliest Spaniards
did not burn); but it is also based on historical observation, and not just by
the conquistadors. In 1720, a French explorer, Le Page du Pratz, was visiting a
Natchez village, when the chief died. At his funeral, the chief’s two wives and
six concubines were stupefied then strangled. At least, in North America, the
cruelties were less extreme than those I describe below.
Much has been written about the cruelty of the
conquistadors who massacred and enslaved the Native Americans, starting with
Columbus’s expedition. I have written a lot of it myself. I have repeatedly
called for the elimination of Columbus Day. This is all true. But the Aztecs
and Incas were not peaceful civilizations hacked to pieces by demonic
Europeans. If anything, the Native American civilizations had continued the self-feeding
spiral of religious cruelty far beyond anything that had evolved in the Old
World. In the Old World, human sacrifice stopped. Had it continued, and had it
undergone an autocatalytic explosion, it would have produced something like
what the Aztecs and Incas had.
Aztec warriors would raid more and more distant towns and
bring the captives to Tenochtitlán. Some warriors would flay the skin from the
victims and then wear it until it rotted away, which was a religious display of
renewal and resurrection after death. Warriors were given the flayed skin of
girls to wear. Every student of history has learned about the Aztec sacrifices
in which the priests cut out the still-beating hearts of victims, eviscerated
them, rolled their bodies down the pyramid steps, then cut off and made stew
out of the limbs. This was often after pulling out the teeth and fingernails of
the captives. Hundreds of children were sacrificed, particularly by the Incas,
after cutting their ears off.
Both the Aztecs and the Incas had to keep expanding their
territories not because they needed food for an expanding population, or
because of the desire to rule larger empires. Indeed, with no horses or wheeled
vehicles, a central priestly government simply could not control a large
empire, nor could they import heavy tributes or perishable food. (Old World
agriculture produced mostly grains, while New World agriculture produced mostly
perishable products, except dried corn, which was actually a late product.)
Almost all that they wanted was sacrificial victims with which to feed their
ravenous, unpredictable, and horrible gods. Sacrifices intensified, starting
about 1440 CE (by the Mayan calendar) and continuing until the conquest in
1521. By the time of conquest, the Aztecs were processing twenty thousand
victims a year. It was a spiral of cosmic paranoia. They were worried that
their sun good, Huitzilopochtli, might run out of food; this was at a time when
the sun was, in fact, getting dimmer because of eruptions of volcanoes such as
Popo (Popocateptl) not far away from the Aztec capital city. There was no
American equivalent of a supreme God who could be satisfied with prescribed
animal sacrifices. While the Old World had storms and droughts and volcanoes,
the New World was rife with them. The Native Americans were much more afraid of
their gods than the Eurasians had ever been of theirs.
Some Pre-Columbians could see that human sacrifice was
becoming crazily excessive. The Toltec leader Topiltzin tried to stop human
sacrifice, but failed.
Their only desperate hope to escape from this cycle of
bloodshed appeared to be that the god Quetzalcoatl would come from oversees and
rescue them. Cortez came, and the Aztecs thought that he must be Quetzalcoatl.
Meanwhile, the conquerors from the Old World were just as
evil, with the exception of not having human sacrifice. The Spaniards roasted
their captives alive, or cut off their noses, lips, or chins. Many European
scholars of many lands (Juan Sepúlveda, Cornelius de Pauw, Oliver Goldsmith,
etc. etc.) wrote that Native Americans were little more than animals and had no
right to not be killed. A few, like Bartholomé de las Casas, stood up for the
humanity of the natives.
When the Old World met the new, religiously-inspired
massacre met religiously-inspired human sacrifice. Not only in society after
society, but by entirely separate evolutionary development in the two
hemispheres, religion facilitated, even demanded, the greatest cruelties the
human mind could devise.
What do we do about it? Do we give up religion? Can we?
Would it change anything? I do not have time to write, nor you to read, any
attempt at answering that question right now.
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