11.11 — The Americas and the Pacific

A caution first, and it is heavier here than anywhere else in this Part.

Most of the written record was destroyed.

The Spanish burned the Maya codices systematically — a bishop in Yucatán in 1562 records burning a large number of books in a single ceremony, and four Maya codices survive out of what must have been thousands. Aztec records were burned too, both by the Spanish and, earlier, by an Aztec ruler rewriting his own dynasty's history.

And North American and Pacific traditions were oral, and were recorded mostly by outsiders, after enormous population loss.

So what follows is a fragment, and it is worth knowing that it is a fragment.

Mesoamerica

Quetzalcoatl

The feathered serpent — quetzal is a bird with brilliant green tail feathers, coatl is serpent. A creature of the sky and the earth combined.

He is associated with wind, learning, writing, the calendar, and the priesthood.

And two stories matter.

He went to the underworld to retrieve the bones of the previous humanity, tricked the lord of the dead, was pursued, dropped and broke the bones, and gathered the pieces anyway — which is why humans are different sizes. He then ground the bones and mixed them with his own blood to make people.

A creator who bleeds into the mixture.

And he is associated with a refusal of human sacrifice. The tradition holds that his offerings were butterflies, snakes and flowers, and that he opposed the practice — which put him in opposition to the war gods, and in one version he was disgraced by a rival, got drunk, committed some shameful act, and left in shame, sailing east on a raft of serpents, promising to return.

And the story that Moctezuma took Cortés for the returning Quetzalcoatl is almost certainly a later invention — probably Spanish, probably to make the conquest look providential — and it is not supported by the earliest evidence. Volume VIII covers what actually happened.

Human sacrifice, stated honestly

Because the topic cannot be avoided and both the sensationalised and the sanitised versions are wrong.

It happened, at scale, and it was central to Aztec state religion. The archaeology confirms it: skull racks have been excavated with hundreds of skulls, of men, women and children.

The theology behind it: the sun requires blood to continue moving. The gods gave their own blood to set the world in motion, and the debt is repaid continuously. The universe is in deficit and must be fed.

And it was also a political instrument — the wars fought specifically to take captives, the public spectacle, and the terror it produced in subject peoples, which is a substantial part of why so many of those peoples allied with Cortés.

Both things are true, and neither justifies what the Spanish did afterwards.

The Popol Vuh

The Maya book that survived, and it is one of the great works of world literature.

Written down in the K'iche' language in the sixteenth century, after the conquest, by somebody preserving what was being destroyed.

The creation: the gods make humans three times and fail twice.

First from mud, which dissolves.

Then from wood, which walks and talks and has no memory and no gratitude and does not honour the gods — and is destroyed by a flood, and by their own tools and animals turning on them. The surviving wooden people are the monkeys.

And finally from maize, ground and mixed with water, and these work.

Two things in that. The gods make mistakes and iterate, which is unusual. And what disqualifies the wooden people is not stupidity but the absence of memory and gratitude — they had speech and no inner life.

And then the Hero Twins.

Their father was killed by the lords of the underworld after being summoned to play a ball game.

The twins, grown, are summoned in turn, and they survive a sequence of houses designed to kill them — the house of darkness, the house of knives, the house of cold, the house of jaguars, the house of fire, and the house of bats, where one of them loses his head.

And they defeat the lords not by strength but by a trick. They perform a spectacle: they sacrifice one another and come back to life, repeatedly, and the lords of death are so delighted that they demand to be sacrificed too.

And the twins do it and do not bring them back.

Death is defeated by its own appetite for spectacle.

North America

Hundreds of distinct traditions, and two figures recur widely enough to be worth having.

Coyote, across the western and plains peoples. A trickster (11.10), who brings fire, arranges death, creates and ruins, is greedy and lecherous and clever and frequently destroyed by his own schemes.

And in one very widespread type of story, Coyote is the reason death is permanent. The arrangement was that people would return, and Coyote argued against it — usually saying the world would become too crowded — and then his own child died, and he asked to have the rule changed back, and was told no.

A person who established a rule and then had to live under it.

Raven, on the north-west coast, who stole the sun. It was kept in a box by a chief; Raven transformed himself into a pine needle, was swallowed by the chief's daughter in a drink of water, was born as her child, was indulged as a grandchild, cried for the box until he was given it, and flew out through the smoke hole with the sun in his beak.

And the tricksters' typical target is worth noticing: something hoarded.

And a genuinely different idea, from the Haudenosaunee — the Iroquois Confederacy — which is not a myth but a governing principle recorded in their tradition: decisions should be considered in terms of their effect on the seventh generation to come.

Whatever its exact history, it is a better formulation of long-term thinking than anything produced in the European tradition before the twentieth century.

The Pacific

And the achievement first, because it dwarfs the mythology.

Polynesian voyagers settled an area of ocean larger than any land empire, in double-hulled canoes, navigating by stars, swells, cloud formations, bird behaviour and the feel of the water — with no instruments.

They reached Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island, thousands of kilometres apart, and maintained contact. The techniques were nearly lost and have been reconstructed and demonstrated in the last fifty years.

That is one of the great feats in human history and it is not mythology.

Maui

And the figure whose stories are told across the whole region.

He fished up islands from the sea with a magic hook — New Zealand's North Island is his fish.

He stole fire from the fire goddess.

And he slowed the sun.

The days were too short. His mother could not dry her cloth; there was not enough time to do anything. So Maui and his brothers made ropes, went to the pit where the sun rises, snared it as it came up, and beat it until it agreed to move more slowly.

A hero whose great deed is making the day longer for his mother's work.

And his death. He tried to defeat death itself by entering the body of the goddess Hine-nui-te-pō while she slept, intending to pass through and reverse mortality.

His companions were told not to laugh.

A small bird laughed.

She woke, and he was killed, and death remained permanent for everybody.

The most consequential failure in Polynesian myth is caused by somebody laughing at the wrong moment — which is either absurd or exactly right about how large things fail.

What to carry from this page

Most of the record was burned, and what survives is what somebody chose to preserve while it was being destroyed. The Popol Vuh exists because one person wrote it down after the conquest.

The gods iterated and failed twice, and what disqualified the wooden people was the absence of memory and gratitude rather than the absence of intelligence.

Death was defeated by its own appetite for spectacle, which is the best trick in this Part.

Consider the seventh generation.

And the thing that stops the great attempt is somebody laughing at the wrong moment. Not a flaw in the plan. A small bird.

Next: 11.12 — the last of the myths, and what a whole Part of them adds up to.