World Mythology Dictionary:
America
North America, Central America, South America
Men entered the American continents from Siberia over a temporary land link during the final stages of glaciation. If it is accepted that East Africa was the place where our ancestors first became differentiated from their cousins the great apes, and this view of the family tree of man appears to be the correct one, then it makes the trek on foot from there to Tierra del Fuego a journey of epic proportions. The Indian tribes living on the bleak and rocky tip of South America are among the most primitive people on the planet. They survive and in their folklore survive traces of the mythology that the first settlers brought into this part of the world so many millennia ago. The Yahgan and Ona tribesmen of Tierra del Fuego, fishermen and hunters respectively, have maintained an initiation ceremony remarkable for its anti-feminine character. Although there is disagreement about the origin of this curious attitude, a primitive parallel of the Fall, the ascendancy of the male is unquestioned and reflected in the sex of the creator deity. Their text might well be the words of Yahweh to Eve: ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.’
The warrior was the central figure in the majority of pre-Columbian societies. The Aztecs, the dominant people of Central America on the arrival of Hernando Cortés and his Spanish soldiers in 1519, were excessively puritanical. It was evil for a warrior to exhibit any interest in women, since a diversion of attention from the practice of arms might have weakened the Aztec supremacy. Adultery was a shameful crime punishable by death: yet to die in battle was the supreme purification. While other tribes did not share the rigour of the Aztecs, the importance of the brave cannot be gainsaid. The Plains Indians of North America, for example, insisted upon both fasting and sexual continence before a band of warriors set out for either hunting or war.
In the seventeenth century, when the systematic settlement of North America from Europe was beginning, there existed more than 2,000 independent Indian tribes. Many of these people were sworn enemies, a state of affairs the European immigrants turned to their own advantage, so that no effective resistance could be organized. The Plains Indians took readily to horses and guns, but the diversity of the Indian peoples themselves precluded a grand alliance. The scattered tribes had reached stages of civilization ranging from simple hunters and fishermen to advanced town-dwellers with elaborate social divisions. The humble Menomini on the shores of the Great Lakes, a tribe which subsisted by gathering wild rice, had little in common with their maize-growing Iroquois neighbours: yet both these peoples appear nomadic in comparison with the Pueblo in Colorado, where the cultivation of maize sustained large hilltop settlements and perhaps the most developed mythology in North America. Today the 300 surviving Indian tribes live on reserves. The process of concentration and betrayal started in earnest during the nineteenth century, when railways linked the coast of the Atlantic Ocean with that of the Pacific and farmers destroyed the natural flora and fauna of the Great Plains. The tribes which were not farmers have seen the greatest changes in their way of life: just as the buffalo no longer roams beyond the pen of the zoological gardens, so the Indian hunting party now tracks little more than the route to the reservation supermarket.
Before the Indian tribes of North America became the object of tourist curiosity that they are today, they possessed a remarkable variety of mythologies. Most fascinating are the beliefs of the peoples living along the northern coast of the Pacific Ocean. Renowned for their predilection towards tribal rivalry, whether it took the form of kidnapping raids or ceremonial display, the Haida, Snohomish, or Quinault tribes also surprised the first Europeans with the range of their cosmological ideas. The mysterious Coyote falls into perspective when it is remembered that these people believed that animals were the original inhabitants of the land, and that they were exactly like men except in two instances. They were much bigger and they could put on and take off their fur like clothes. When human beings were created by the changer god Kwatee, he turned these colossal animal people into the ancestors of present-day animals, birds, and fish. The Quinaults say that he changed things in order to prepare the world for the men he was to make from his own sweat and from dogs. Although potent deities such as Kwatee approach the status of a supreme being, there is no tendency towards monotheism outside the traditions of the Maidu in California, the Algonquins of the Middle West, and the Selish in Canada. These tribes, however, would seem to be of great antiquity.
Even older civilizations existed in Central and South America. When for some unknown reason the aggressive Olmecs abandoned their settlements on the Gulf of Mexico about 400 BC, this represented the end of an occupation lasting nearly 1,000 years. Meanwhile the Mayas of the great peninsula, the Yucatan, had started to build with stone, under the influence of the Olmecs, and soon to arise were their extensive ceremonial centres: the complexes of courtyards, pyramids, and temples, all richly decorated. Somewhat remote from the centre of cultural development, which was situated on the high Mexican plateau, the Mayas evolved a distinct civilization of their own, though in the tenth century either refugees or adventurers from the Toltec city of Tollan appear to have founded a new state in north-west Yucatan. The fall of the Toltecs about 980 was due to a dynastic dispute and the insurrection of subject tribes. The Toltec nobles seem to have retreated from Tollan with their last ruler, Quetzalcoatl, and taken ship to Mayan territory, where they built the city of Chichen Itza. After its overthrow in the thirteenth century, and a period of complicated political strife, the Toltec and Maya nobility combined to set up another capital at Mayapan, the first walled city in that area. In terms of religion, the coming of the Toltecs meant the introduction of new deities, beliefs, and ceremonies, especially the large-scale practice of human sacrifice. Antonio de Herrera, the official historian of the Indies for the King of Spain, wrote in 1598 that ‘the number of people sacrificed was great. And this custom was brought into Yucatan by the Mexicans.’
Of the Olmec religion we know very little. There is no firm evidence to suggest that human sacrifices were made to the earth goddess, even in her terrifying alligator form, nor are the jaguar masks of her consort proof of ritual killing. Sacrifices may have taken place in this ancient, and almost lost, civilization but, on surviving data, the first people to institutionalize the practice were the Toltecs, who dominated the high plateau from about 750 till 980. Yet the Toltecs seem lukewarm in comparison with the fierce Aztecs, when the annals tell us proudly of the tens of thousands of victims whose hearts were torn out on solemn occasions. In Tenochtitlan, the amazing island-city the Aztecs created on floating rafts in Lake Texococo, human sacrifice formed an integral part of daily life. The origin of the builders of Tenochtitlan, ‘cactus rock’, which had a million inhabitants, remains obscure, but their impact upon Central America in the century of their ascendancy was profound. Wars against rival cities had the objective of providing captives for sacrifice: they were known as ‘flower wars’. The ‘blossoming heart’ and blood of the victim had to be offered to the gods, in particular the sun god Tonatiuh, who needed all the strength that men could give him. According to the Aztecs, man was responsible for the maintenance of the cosmos—by feeding the gods with blood and by observing a strictness bordering on madness in social behaviour. A primitive people when they arrived on the Mexican plateau, the Aztecs exaggerated the brutality in the indigenous religion they inherited and submerged the spiritual striving that so patently disdained the flesh. Nevertheless, a deep sense of unfitness pervaded Tenochtitlan, whose inhabitants inflicted upon themselves severe punishments: bodies were lacerated with cactus thorns, ears and tongues pierced with osiers, and hearts cut out of not unwilling victims. Compulsion and fear sustained the despotic Montezuma, the Aztec Emperor, on the landing of Hernando Cortés, but so did the fanatical belief of his own people. The swift collapse of the empire, and the virtual annihilation of the Aztecs, were connected as much with fatalism as fire-arms. Cortes was divine Quetzalcoatl returned to claim his own.
At the same time as the Aztecs commenced the series of campaigns that laid the foundation of their power, high in the Andes the Incas were putting together a state which in area was comparable with the Roman Empire. About 1438 the city of Cuzco was nearly sacked by a rival people: desperate street fighting ensued, and the man of the hour, Pachacuti, a young prince, assumed the Inca crown. He set out to conquer and annex not only the territory of the defeated attackers, but the whole of the rest of the Pacific coast. Under his vigorous direction, and that of his son Topa Inca Yupanqui, who ruled from 1471 to 1493, Cuzco was transformed into the capital city of a far-flung empire. In spite of their ignorance of the wheel and an elementary script the Incas succeeded in the administration of numerous provinces and peoples. The nobility was expanded by the incorporation of noble families belonging to conquered tribes so as to provide additional officials and military officers, while the Inca army received into its ranks defeated warriors and fresh recruits. A policy of population removal did much to diminish old antagonisms and foster new loyalties.
The origin of the Inca dynasty is wreathed uncertainly in the mists of legend. At the end of the eleventh century it is said that three men and a woman came into the mountains, climbing up the steep slope from the jungles of the Amazon. Arriving in the hills above Cuzco, this small group camped and placed on the ground a wedge of gold, which they claimed had been entrusted to them by their father, the sun. They had been told that where the wedge sank into the ground was the place for them to live. This happened in Cuzco itself. Two of the brothers then transformed themselves into sacred rocks and for several generations of brother-sister marriage, the Inca family ruled as a petty dynasty. The assault on the city occurred when the other tribes living in the vicinity appreciated the growing pretensions of the Incas. The consequence of the struggle was establishment of Inca authority throughout the Andes mountains.
Archaeology has made it apparent that the Incas were late comers in the history of pre-Columbian Peru. For two millennia before their seizure of Cuzco, Indian peoples had been farming, weaving cloth, worshipping in impressive temples, making elaborate pottery, and working metal. The Mochica culture, whose main sites are situated near the Ecuadorian border, flourished between 100 BC and AD 800. It has bequeathed a startling array of artefacts to museums, but the absence of a native record of historical events leaves the mythologer with scant information concerning beliefs. For this reason the pre-Columbian civilizations of South America are inevitably represented by Inca religion.
Our knowledge of the Incas derives from Spanish observers of Francisco Pizarro's conquest, which was complete in 1525. Only remnants of the Inca army held out for another fifty years on the Atlantic slope of the Andes, where the tropical forest aided guerrilla warfare. Their last refuge, the abandoned city of Machu Picchu, was not discovered till 1911. What stands out in the account of Inca religion is the divine mission of the ruler. Both his person and his authority were manifestations of the beneficent sun god Inti. From pity of men's poverty and backwardness Inti had sent down to earth his children, the Incas.
Just as the dense forest of the Amazon basin provided natural cover for the Inca refugees in the sixteenth century, so it has offered protection to the indigenous Indian tribes till the last few decades of our time. The movement into the interior of Brazil is a recent event. Little was known about the Amazonian peoples before the 1940s, and these tribesmen knew even less about modern civilization. The arrival of prospectors, settlers, and anthropologists has changed much, but even today there remain bands that have only the slightest contact with outsiders. Brazil's drive westwards encountered a strange and significant set-back in the conversion of the Villas Boas brothers to the Indian way of life. These three adventurers were overwhelmed by the beauty and cultural richness of the tribes of the Xingu River. They stayed in the jungle, lived with the Indians, and did their utmost to protect them from speculators, politicians, missionaries, and disease. They argued that until ‘civilized’ people created conditions among themselves for the integration of the Indians, any attempt to integrate them would be the same as introducing a plan for their destruction. Whether or not the work of the Villas Boas brothers will appear to future generations as a useless gesture remains to be seen, but from the point of view of the mythologer it is exemplary. This respect for the values and ideas of the Indian has stimulated at least the collection of folklore and myth.
In 1540 the voyage of Francisco Orellana up the ‘river of the Amazons’ had confirmed earlier rumours of an island inhabited by rich and warlike women, who permitted occasional visits from men, but endured no permanent residence of males among them. The Spaniards found themselves under attack from groups in which woman acted as leaders and took the foremost place in the fight. These Amazons were ‘very tall, robust, fair, with long hair twisted over their heads, skins round their loins, and bows and arrows in their hands’. Although the skirmish was enough to give the longest river in the world its name, there can be little doubt that the myth had no firmer basis than the practice of certain tribes whose women bore arms. Even in the Caribbean Sea the landing parties from the ships of Christopher Columbus had met female islanders who fought bravely alongside their husbands and brothers.
Today the islands of the Caribbean are populated by peoples of European and African descent. The massive transportation of black slaves to the New World in order to work on plantations and the reckless use of the native Indians by the conquistadores in their pursuit of riches has brought about this great change. The original Caribs appear to have possessed traditions like those of the Arawak tribes of South America—their supreme being was a remote sky god who ‘lived in the sun’—but for the mythologer these poorly recorded legends of the past are less significant than the living cults of the ex-slaves, the best known of which is the Voodoo of Haiti. Zombi, a soulless body, has passed into the English language, yet till the last few decades it was the custom to dismiss Haitian beliefs as a species of degenerate magic, especially as its deities appear in living form by taking possession of devotees. Thanks to the labours of one or two scholars we can now appreciate that Voodoo, primarily an African faith in origin, has absorbed diverse elements without loss of its own inner consistency. Saints and symbols have been fused with Voodoo mythology to such an extent that Christian missionaries are helpless. This remarkable occurrence may have been due to the capture and transportation of hougans, ‘spirit masters’, the priests and adepts of West African religion. They would have provided the continuity of doctrine that otherwise a mixture of displaced persons, thrown into a new environment, must have forfeited.
