Conquest of Mexico—Ordered by Providence - Hubert_Luns

8/6/2019 Conquest of MexicoOrdered by Providence - Hubert_Luns

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The Conquest of Mexico

Teotihuacan (Mexico), the pyramid of the sun, taken by B. de Baca

1 The origin of the Meso-American culture

Langers Encyclopedia of World History states: Over two thousand years ago in the highland

region of Central America and Mexico grew up a high civilization, centered around the metro- polis of Teotihuacan, that was parallel in many striking ways to that of the Old World, but

probably entirely 'independent' of it. I doubt its entirely independent status. At the time there

were some revealing finds at the Monte Albn site in Mexico, not far from Teotihuacan. They

seem to indicate that the earliest phase of the Meso-American culture received an impulse from

some strangers from the Old World who, in the first millennium before Christ, must have arrived

on the Mexican shores. At the Albn pyramids, which belong to the earliest phase of the Meso-

American culture, we find several large, well-preserved statues with a disconcerting resemblance

to the ancient statutes of the bearded seafaring people of the Ancient Near-East. (see appendix)

We would expect them in the Mediterranean world, but not here! They have nothing in common

with the indigenous artefacts nor with the outward appearance of the local peoples, normally

shown.


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I now quote from the Phoenician Encyclopedia, from its article Phoenicians in Brazil:

The Maya, the Toltec and the Aztec civilizations predominated all over the American

continent. Those populations did not spring from the ground and only two other peoples

could be their ancestors: the Phoenicians or the Chinese. From the Phoenicians, because

they dominated the western seas, and from the Chinese because they dominated the Far

East seas. However, as of yet these assumptions have to be substantiated but they probablynever will be, because any evidence, if available, must not only be scant but also buried at

the dawn of time.

Teotihuacan, which predates the Aztec civilization, bears a resemblance to the Old World city-

state of Babylon, as it seems to have existed in Abrahams time. As regards the Spanish conquest

of the Aztec Empire, we may compare it to the conquest of the Promised Land of Canaan, now

called Israel. Remarkably, the Aztec Empire (as an empire) lasted a mere hundred years, until

their chapter was closed upon the arrival of Cortez in 1519, twenty years after the discovery of

the Americas by Christopher Columbus.

2 To retrieve the nations sitting in darkness

The adoption in 1512 of the Laws of Burgos offered the

rationale for the conquest of the Americas. The most

important provision in it was that the Indians were to be

made Christians and treated as ordinary human beings

(no slavery). (1) A provision in this document was that

the Pope would subsequently hand over the lands to the

king of Spain, but this was without substance because the

Pope could not give away what did not belong to him;

the comparison with Canaan fails as far as property rights

are concerned.

William Hickling Prescott, one of Americas great histo-rians, has written the classic work on Cortez, published

in 1843, called History of the Conquest of Mexico. He

says:

With the right of conquest, thus conferred, came

also the obligation, on which it may be said to have

been founded, to retrieve the nations sitting in

darkness from eternal perdition. () however much

it may have been debased, () it was still active in the mind of the Christian conqueror.

(Thus, Cortez told Montezuma:) Then we shall be obliged to take the temple by force and to

roll down the images of the false deities in the face of the city. (And he added:) We fear not

for our lives, for, though our numbers are few, the arm of the true God is over us.

The conquest was accompanied by many ostensibly heavenly interventions, too many to mention.

To give one example: during the siege of the capital, the flesh of the captured Christians tasted

intolerably bitter and could not be eaten, although there was great famine.

3 Many died of disease

In some general history book I read the following: In the subsequent years more than 90% of the

indigenous population died by the conquistadors' doing, of a population that in 1518 counted

thirty million. The carnage must have been terrible! This is not factual. To begin with: it is

impossible to estimate precisely the size of the initial population. Nearly all the experts agree on

an initial population in Central America, before the arrival of Cortez, of between 9 and 25million. Which one is correct, the upper or lower limit, remains unsettled in spite of many


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scholarly efforts. We know for a fact that in 1568 the

population of Central Mexico was about 2.6 million.

What happened between 1518 and 1568?

Corts and his small band of men, that numbered

300 Spaniards, with later reinforcements no more

than 2,000 men, could never - in mathematical terms

- have killed such colossal numbers, even if we agree

on an initial population of only nine million. He was

accompanied by confederates, a few thousand and

later tens of thousand, who consisted of native Indi-

ans, who hated the tyrannic Aztecs, but even then it

remains a mathematically impossible task.

Prescotts comment is interesting in this respect:

And yet, taken as a whole, the invasion, up

to the capture of the capital, was conducted on

principles less revolting to humanity than most,perhaps than any, of the other conquests of the

Castillian crown in the New World. () their swords were rarely stained in blood unless it

was indispensable to the success of their enterprise.

The solution to the problem of why so many died is: disease. Frederick F. Cartwright, from the

Department of the History of Medicine from Kings College Hospital in London, wrote:

There is no doubt that imported disease played as great a part as the Spanish conquerors

in the destruction of the Aztec race, if not a greater one. () It has been estimated that

nearly half of the native population died in the first epidemic.

He mentions a second outbreak in 1531, a third in 1545 and a fourth in 1564. He concludes thatan unexpected change of the milder form of smallpox at the time (alastrim variola minor) re-

sulted in a virulent type, to which the Spaniards were relatively immune because of previous ex-

posure to the alastrim virus. The results were so devastating, that we can hardly imagine what

happened. The Indians also had no natural immunity to measles, typhoid, chicken pox, yellow

fever or mumps (parotitis), but smallpox was the most vicious of all. The epidemics were often

followed by famine because so few people were left to work the fields. By 1630 the Central Me-

xican population counted less than one million souls. Not until 1650 did the size of the native

population begin to increase again.

Petrarch, writing about the horrors of the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the 14th

century,

said that future generations would be unable to imagine the empty houses, the abandoned towns,

the squalid countryside, the fields littered with dead, the dreadful silent solitude that seemed to

hang over the whole world. Petrarch questioned whether posterity could possibly believe such

things, when those who had actually seen them could hardly believe them themselves. (The

Petrarch quote is from Cartwrights book.)

No doubt, the epidemic that ravaged the country greatly facilitated the enterprise, but that only

partially explains the case. To use Prescotts words:

The whole story has the air of fable, rather than of history! a legend of romance, a tale

of the genii! () that all this should have been so effected by a mere handful of diligent

adventurers is a fact little short of miraculous too startling for the probabilities demanded

by fiction, and without a parallel in the pages of history.


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ed. 16: For thy power is the beginning of righteousness, and because thou art the Lord of all, it

maketh thee to be gracious unto all. 17: For when men will not believe that thou art of a full po-

wer, thou shewest thy strength, and among them that know it thou makest their boldness mani-

fest. 18: But thou, mastering thy power, judgest with equity, and orderest us with great favour: for

thou mayest use power when thou wilt. 19: But by such works hast thou taught thy people that the

just man should be merciful, and hast made thy children to be of a good hope that thou givest

repentance for sins. 20: For if thou didst punish the enemies of thy children, and the condemned

to death, with such deliberation, giving them time and place, whereby they might be delivered

from their malice: 21: With how great circumspection didst thou judge thine own sons, unto

whose fathers thou hast sworn, and made covenants of good promises? 22: Therefore, whereas

thou dost chasten us, thou scourgest our enemies a thousand times more, to the intent that, when

we judge, we should carefully think of thy goodness, and when we ourselves are judged, we

should look for mercy. 23: Wherefore, whereas men have lived dissolutely and unrighteously,

thou hast tormented them with their own abominations. 24: For they went astray very far in the

ways of error, and held them for gods, which even among the beasts of their enemies were

despised, being deceived, as children of no understanding. 25: Therefore unto them, as to children

without the use of reason, thou didst send a judgment to mock them. 26: But they that would not

be reformed by that correction, wherein he dallied with them, shall feel a judgment worthy ofGod. 27: For, look, for what things they grudged, when they were punished, that is, for them

whom they thought to be gods; [now] being punished in them, when they saw it, they acknow-

ledged him to be the true God, whom before they denied to know: and therefore came extreme

damnation.

6 - Brutish it was!

The Aztec experience proves that the God of the New Testament is the same one as the God of

the Old Testament. At present, however, we have the good fortune to put His unique sacrifice to

use. Again I cannot resist quoting Prescott:

In this state of things, it was beneficently ordered by Providence that the land should be

delivered over to another race, who would rescue it from the brutish superstitions that daily

extended wider and wider, with extent of empire.

Indeed brutish. It is a word not found in the vocabulary of modern anthropologists. There is

nowadays an unfortunate tendency to withhold moral judgement on the cultures that are the ob-


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ject of study. Hugh Thomas in the Preface of his: Conquest: Montezuma, Cortez and the fall of

old Mexico, uses a distorted remark from Edward Gibbon. He writes:

Different modes of worship seem to most of us as equally true, to our philosophers as

equally false, and to our anthropologists as equally interesting. () Every people, it is now

generally supposed, has the right to conduct itself as its rational customs provide.

And brutish it was! In course of time the practice of human sacrifice had degenerated into a daily

routine for the sole convenience of Tezcatlipoca, the main Aztec god, whose name appropriately

means smoking mirror. For instance, the freshly stripped-off skin of a human sacrifice was glued

(inside-out) to the face of a priest, who with bare hands ripped out the next heart, still pulsing and

gushing blood! (2) Huge numbers of people where thus sacrificed. At least 20,000 were sacrificed

anually in this way. After a series of killings some of the victims were cannibalised in the course

of exquisite banquets. This horror culminated in the year 1486 when, at the dedication of the great

temple of Huitzilpochtli, 70,000 captives are said to have perished. No wonder that Corts and his

men felt divinely inspired.

7 The Ten Commandments

Well, the Bible teaches something different then what Hugh Thomas tried to tell us: Every

people, it is now generally supposed, has the right to conduct itself as its rational customs pro-

vide. We should keep in mind that the Ten Commandments given at Mount Horeb are an appal-

lingly crude approximation of what moral law should be. It is a shame that God was forced to put

the Ten Commandments in script, the second part in particular. A culture that is not up to the

natural law as expressed in the Decalogue, is in a miserable state. Cain, who killed Abel, did not

reply to God, who reproached him for what he had done, in order to defend himself: I am not

punishable for killing my brother because You never told me not to do so. Of course, Thou

should not kill is one of the Ten Commandments that was given thousands of years later. This

excuse Cain could not use, because the law of not killing thy brother is in the natural law that is

inscribed in each ones hearts. And we are all brothers and sisters because we all are children ofOne and the same heavenly Father, who loves us all.

Hubert Luns

The photographs of people are from Mel Gibsons film Apocalypse.

Footnotes:

The possible existence of cannibalism in the New World

(1) Pierre Clastres writes:

The conquistadors chief ambition was to strike it rich in this world and the sooner thebetter. To that end, the Indians had to be exploited and enslaved. The problem was, once thetheologians, after long and patient debates, decided that the inhabitants of the New Worldwere creatures of God, it was impossible both to evangelise them and reduce them to slavery.War against the tribes was made illegal, except when it was considered justified: when theIndians were cannibals. Against them, it was permissible to wage brutal and pitiless war. Thedilemma was thus resolved: claiming that a tribe practiced cannibalism was enough to justifyexpeditions against it. The accusations were almost always false, but numerous tribesperished on plantations and in mines owned by the Europeans, whose only concern was tohave a free hand to build their fiefdoms and increase their profits. In short, the list ofcannibal peoples grew in proportion to the colonialists need for slaves.

This sounds much fairer than the assertion by William Arens, who high-handedly dismisses allthe transcripts or copied transcripts of the first explorers of the New World, whose motives were


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APPENDIX - 1

Mexicos Golden Age of Christianity

During the sixteenth century the Administra-

tion of the Crown and the clergy tried to pro-tect the Indians to the best of their ability,

except for the awful period of 1528 to 1531

when the terrible Don Nune de Guzman was

in charge. It was in the year 1531 that the

blessed mother of Jesus Christ appeared under

the name of Tecoatlaxopeuh, meaning the

stone that crushes the serpent Coatl. Under

that title she is commonly venerated as the

Virgen (Virgin) de Guadalupe (the Aztec

and Spanish names sound similar). Soon after

the apparition followed the miraculous mass-

conversion of the native tribes, who at the time

must have ranged in between 4.5 to 8.5

million people.

Nowadays, Anno 2010, the Basilica of Gua-

dalupe, built to commemorate the event, is the

most visited Roman Catholic sanctuary in the

world, with up to twenty million pilgrims each

year. See: (www.virgendeguadalupe.org.mx).

In what has been called the golden age of Christianity, the sixteenth century was a time of

unprecedented cooperation between the indigenous people and the colonists. Thus it happenedthat the very first Bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumr-

raga, carried the title of Protector of the Indians and

that the second Viceroy Luis de Velasco became

known as Father of the Indians. Only at the end of

the sixteenth century did the merciless and often fatal

exploitation of the Indians begin. As pointed out by

George Vaillant in his Aztecs of Mexico, the deci-

sive factor in this shift to serfdom was the destruction

of the Spanish Armada in 1588. With the much

weakened Spanish empire, the communication be-

tween the mother country and the colonies became

increasingly difficult. Control was now desultory andthe laws for the benefit of the Indians, already loosely

observed, were completely ignored. The Indians be-

came indeed an inferior majority, labouring as peons

without hope of legal or social justice.


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APPENDIX - 2

Long-distance seafaring in theAncient Near-East

Taken from the Phoenician Encyclopedia


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References:

William Hickling Prescott: History of the Conquest of Mexico - The Modern Library,Random House, New York # 1998 (one of the many reprints of this classic) # 1843. Quotes from:Book 3 Ch. 7; Book 4 Ch. 5; Book 6 Ch. 8; Book 6 Ch. 8; Book 1 Ch. 3 (in this sequence).

Frederick F. Cartwright, in collaboration with Michael D. Biddiss: Disease and History -Barnes & Noble Books, New York # 1991. Quote from p. 120.

Hugh Thomas: Conquest: Montezuma, Cortez, and the Fall of Old Mexico - Hutchingson,London # 1993.

Warren H. Carroll: Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness - ChristendomPress, Front Royal, Virginia, USA # 2004.

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Conquest of Mexico—Ordered by Providence - Hubert_Luns