Fire & Blood: A History of Mexico

PART ONE

The Tyranny of Circumstance: The Amerindians

Chapter 1

THE OLD ONES

The forces of the past still live on and exert their influence on us, though we may not be consciously aware of this. It is frightening to realize in full depth what it means to be a human being: that is, to realize that we are all imbedded in the flux of generations, whose legacy of thought and feeling we irrevocably carry along with us.

—Kurt W. Marek (C. W. Ceram), Gods, Graves, and Scholars

The rise of man in ancient Mexico is shrouded in mystery.

For that matter, no one knows for certain where or when the human race began, or how it became differentiated and scattered across the globe. Scientists have deduced from the study of skeletal fragments that the genus Homo appeared in Africa during the late Pleistocene era some hundred thousand years ago, with perhaps a half million or more years of cultural evolution already in his past. Bones also indicate that Homo sapiens, true man, the symbol-drawer and weapon-maker, the hunter and killer, began forging into a still subarctic Europe out of Asia about 30,000 b.c. And about the same time, as prehistory goes, human beings also entered the Americas.

The old bones of possible human ancestors—larger apes, pithecanthropi, or hominids such as Neanderthal men have never been found in the Western Hemisphere. The first Americans, tall, erect, gregarious, using fire, wearing animal skins, and armed with flint-tipped spears, arrived from the Eastern Hemisphere.

Thirty to forty thousand years ago, during the last great Ice Age, from which the earth is still emerging, huge areas of the northern hemisphere were covered with glaciers. Ice gripped much of what is now the United States. Southwestern North America, however, was fertile. The high plateaus of these southlands were rich savannahs of waving grasses, dotted with trees and sweetwater lakes. They teemed with mammalian life, and these regions, if not man's cradle, were certainly vast nurseries for the species.

When much of the earth's water supply was locked in glacial ice, the oceans shrank and land bridges rose. One of these connected Asia and Alaska across the Bering Strait. Even during the last Ice Age ice-free valleys and corridors led north and south through Siberia and Alaska. It was through these valleys and across the ephemeral land bridge that the first Americans almost certainly came. They were adventurous and incredibly tough, enduring enormous hardships and traveling thousands of miles.

In relatively recent times ancient human campsites have been found over much of the southwestern United States and the country that is now Mexico. These campsites, the remains of ages-extinct fires, have revealed the bones of Pleistocene animals, artifacts, and tools. The modern carbon-14 dating process exploded many theories by proving that some of these fire-sites are much, much older than previously believed—some dating back approximately thirty thousand years. The animal bones found come from species like the American camel and the woolly mammoth, which have been extinct for thousands of years.

In central Mexico, on the banks of the Rio Atoyac, a mastodon bone has been found that bears unmistakably human carvings—symbols from the brain and hand of man. Nearby, the skulls of other vanished animals have been uncovered, some imbedded with flint points. This same region has revealed hundreds of stone and bone artifacts, abandoned or buried beside the bones of mastodons, elephants, and the small Pleistocene ancestor of the horse. A rock showing the impression of a human hand and containing the skull of a saber-toothed tiger and the femur from a human skeleton which must have stood eight feet tall has been unearthed.

Who were these people? It is impossible to answer dogmatically, because their skeletal characteristics do not seem to resemble any surviving human stock. They had massive teeth set in strong jaws, and curved, flat leg bones. The bones they left behind in limestone and calcified rock are as different from those of later American Indians as the skeletons of modern Frenchmen are from Chinese. This ancient, longheaded people may have been a precursor of the Mongoloid branch of mankind, or they may have been a Caucasoid ancestor.

The few relics these old Americans left tell a great deal: that they were true Homo sapiens, not half-men, that they made weapons and knew fire and used symbols, and that they were the most formidable predators the world had yet evolved.

At that time huge beasts roamed over the high plains of the American Southwest and Mexico. There was the enormous imperial mammoth, and the awe-inspiring American elephant. Mastodons, ground sloths, giant armadillos, and a bison four times the weight of the modern North American buffalo grazed the lush meadows. There were antelope, camels, miniature horses, various cats, snakes, wolves, birds, and bears. Modern men would feel immensely courageous hunting most of these beasts with high-powered rifles; the first Americans killed all of them with flimsy, flint-tipped spears.

The large, curving horn of Middle America was rich, varied, mysterious, and geologically new, with two great mountain ranges thrown up no more than fifty million years before. The mountain chains, or Cordilleras, generally rose from north to south, one on the east facing the green Gulf, the other sloping westward to the blue Pacific. Between these mountain ranges a broad, high central plateau, called the meseta, also rose from north to south, tapering with the horn of Mexico. The center of this plateau, eons ago, was crossed with a smoking volcanic strike, leaving it cut up into countless jumbled valleys.

The rugged cordilleras and the rising volcanoes left Mexico one vast mountain, rising from the surrounding seas, pocked with valleys at varying altitudes. The eastern coastal plains, extending inward about sixty miles—though covering the whole peninsula of Yucatán—were humid, tropical, or subtropical, sometimes lush jungles, sometimes miasmic swamps. The western mountains went down precipitously to the Pacific; their bones baked dry under the tropic sun. But the central plateau, with its valleys, green forests, and brimming lakes, had a climate of eternal spring and was eminently fit for man.

This great plateau was very different then. It had not been despoiled. The air was much more humid then than now. Vast stands of pine, oak, fir, and alder trees covered the mountainsides. Rich volcanic, alluvial soils were washed down to surround the numerous lakes; broad, wet meadows of sedge and grass grew around the water. Millions upon millions of birds flocked about the lakes, and their waters teemed with freshwater fish; the forests and meadows were filled with grazing herbivores.

Like the animals, men sought the lakes and marshes where there was water, grass, and salt. In these places, also, the gigantic, dangerous beasts could be more easily trapped and killed. The first Americans lived on fresh meat; they knew the sharp thrills of the chase, the fierce joy of the kill, the exultation of the triumphant hunters' safe return, and the satiety of the communal feast.

They roasted their bloody meat in huge kitchen middens in the rock. They flaked keen flints around glowing coals. They must have shivered in the ice-age night-wind, and roared songs of worship or defiance at the cold, high moon. They took shelter in caves, and they may have chanted paeans of thanksgiving to the returning sun. Like most primitive men, they probably prayed to the spirits of the animals they killed. They may have had drums and flutes and made music. They surely wondered about the meaning of life and worried about the future of the dead, because they were men, with the conscious and subconscious minds of men.

They lived short, strenuous, terrible, brutal, and exhilarating lives, but for all their nakedness and crude techniques they had the brains, sensibilities, and perceptions of modern men.

How many millennia this race wandered over the southwestern United States and parts of Mexico is unknown. These people never became separated or culturally varied; the relics they left are always identical. Over thousands of miles and thousands of years, this people made their spear points and artifacts in exactly the same way.

They lived together in small hunting societies ranging from about twenty to sixty members. Everyone had kinship and a place. Territorial arrangements were probably carved out with neighboring bands, and very early, man learned the necessity of exogamous mating relationships. At any one time the total population of these people was probably no more than a few thousand. They had a precarious dominion over the beasts, but none over nature, and for thousands of years they failed to progress or change.

But the earth changed and warmed. The glaciers shrank northward, the oceans rose, the land bridges sank, the sun burned away the mists and fresh inland seas. The winds blew more fiercely, drying the earth. In Middle America, the rivers dug deeper into the ground, now slicing down mountainsides; the broad waters of the meseta shrank into still wide, but more marshy, lakes. To the north of the central highlands, where the plateau widened and flattened out between the cordilleras, the trees died and the landscape dried into semideserts. And though the inner valley between the southern mountains remained still fresh and green, the great Pleistocene mammals began to disappear.

Climatic change probably killed off the mammoth, the camel, the mastodon, and the elephant, but their extinction may have been hastened by Paleolithic spears. And when the Pleistocene animals were gone, the first Americans had vanished with them.

The race may have simply died out, unable to adapt, it may have been exterminated by a newer race; or the stock may have changed or interbred with fresh waves of invaders so much over generations as to become unrecognizable. At any rate, after some millennia, the old ones vanished.

But a second invasion had already taken the land; these new people must have crossed the northern land bridge before it finally disappeared, sometime before 7000 b.c. Later peoples, however, could have passed through the Aleutian island chain. This later immigration, however, apparently either spanned many centuries, possibly millennia, or else the invaders arrived in small, fragmented streams. Unlike the earliest American culture, the newcomers were or became extremely varied culturally.

As the small bands spread across the cold northlands, reaching each ocean, they must have become isolated and inbred. These people made their Stone Age artifacts in countless distinctive styles; within a broad genetic Mongoloid framework, they also differentiated widely in skin color, bone structure, and height. The most important indicator of long periods of relative isolation was their linguistic development, which grew amazingly complex: 140 different stocks, divided into about 1200 mutually incomprehensible languages and dialects.

Although some Negroid characteristics appeared occasionally among these people, their mainstream was definitely Asian. They were Mongoloid in skin shade, ranging from yellowish to copper to dark brown, in head shape, and in hair-color and form. Some had the characteristic Asian eye fold.

Spreading across all North America and Middle America, some invaders did not stop until they climbed the Andean peaks of the southern continent. They made their homes in the highlands, on the coastlines, and on the islands of the Caribbean. They deposited small numbers of people all across the hemisphere. Some folk never left the far northwest, but there was a general pattern of restless migration from north to south.

Columbus, thinking he had reached India in 1492, called the people he found in the New World indios. The descendants of this race, including modern Mexicans, prefer to think of themselves as indigenous rather than wanderers out of prehistoric Asia. Anthropologists assigned them to the Mongoloid branch of human stock and called them Amerindians, or American Indians.

Like all men of the eighth millennium b.c., the Amerindians were Stone Age hunters and gatherers. They ate wild fruits, seeds, and berries, but the staple of their diet was meat and fish. They hunted bear, rabbits, and a variety of deer, as well as a smaller bison and a great proliferation of native birds. Depending on their habitat, Amerinds ate insects, shellfish, turkey, and even snakes.

Many Amerinds, especially in the uplands, followed the game herds across the plains and high plateaus. The best hunting was still around the waterholes in the forested country; here men could more easily trap or kill elusive animals on foot. Many Amerindians congregated in the hospitable region of the meseta.

As the kinship bands grew larger, they developed into clans, phratries of clans, and tribes, which were no longer united by direct blood ties, but which retained a common spirit due to territoriality, common language, and common ways. But blood and community was always more important to the Amerindian than ties of place; his organization remained social rather than territorial in concept and scope.

The Amerinds brought with them out of Asia a great bag of Stone Age flint, obsidian, or bone artifacts and tools: knives, scrapers, drills, axes, picks. They wore skin garments and wove crude baskets out of reeds. Their principal weapon was the ubiquitous spear, but they soon discovered the throwing stick, or atlatl, which gave their darts more range. They also brought domesticated dogs from Asia.

Soon after the Amerind migrations began, the earth assumed its present form. The rising oceans now completely isolated the Amerindians from further human currents from the Old World.

The Amerindians were racially similar, though not identical, but they were fantastically varied culturally. Every kinship band spoke a different dialect and made its artifacts in different styles. These nomadic, hunting bands and clans constantly impinged on each other as the land became more populated. They followed what seems to have the oldest collective human logic: they made war on everyone outside the immediate tribe or clan. Whether such conflict arose from the instinctive desire to seize or hold good hunting lands or from the early-realized need for exogamous mating, which led to raiding and counter-raiding for females between bands; or whether warfare arises from some other instinct or need is so far undetermined. What is inarguable is that warfare became deeply imbedded in the Amerind heart and mind. All Amerindians were warlike, though some were vastly more aggressive than others. War was not just practiced; it was socialized. In most Amerindian tongues the words male and warrior became synonymous.

In a pattern that was generally true everywhere, the more successful tribes also tended to be most warlike. Which came first is immaterial; the peoples who succeeded in holding the best ground grew in numbers, and also became more adept and powerful. The clans who were reduced to marginal territories tended to appear more peaceful; that is, they acted as fearful skulkers rather than imperious warriors. The actual practice of war varied enormously. Some Amerind violence was carried to the point of dispersion or extermination of enemies; more often, however, violence took on a ceremonial tone. It was beyond the capacity, and perhaps the vision, of primitive peoples to destroy an enemy; raids and expeditions were carried out more to seize loot, women, or to prove manhood, leadership, or skill at war.

The powerful or lucky warrior came to be the most respected member of the tribe. He was the best provider for his immediate clan, and also their best defender in constant peril from outside. It was inevitable that the warrior-male became utterly dominant within the family group. Women did his bidding, as well as all menial work; the social specialization biology required between the sexes in a hunting society made any other course impossible. The male who was not aggressive in hunt or war was not just a personal failure; he was a social disaster. But except on mass hunts, or in war, the only genuinely socializing acts, in which leadership devolved upon exceptionally capable men, all warriors lived within their tribes as peers. This was logical, also: the duties, and therefore the rights, of all warrior males were identical.

There was no place for the man who could not kill animals or fight. Probably, the widespread custom of torturing captive males that arose among many Amerind tribes (women and children when captured were normally adopted without prejudice within the clan) originated as a courage rite, merely reinforced by a primordial human love of inflicting pain. Such torture was also ritualized and socialized. The victim had to prove his manhood to the last; the tormentors had to assert their moral superiority by breaking the victim's courage and will. It was considered very bad luck to fail. The manner of a man's dying, in most Amerindian eyes, came to be as important, in fact more important, than the way in which he lived.

There was no real notion of social purpose beyond holding the clan together through the hunt or war. The rudiments of government—as everywhere on the globe—rose from the concept of chieftainship in war. Since all Amerinds were originally nomadic, and many peoples never ceased to be so, they never developed a strong sense of property beyond the communal concept of a tribal hunting ground.

The ties within the social organization were and had to be immensely close. Widows or young orphans were immediately adopted into an existing family. Responsibility—and power—went from brother to brother, rather than directly from father to son. But if the warrior was the most important and dominant person within the family and tribe, there was no person without function or place. Everyone had important duties: to hunt, to fight, to skin and cook meat, to make garments and chip flints, to bear burdens, to instruct the young. So long as they could function, all people were caught up in an endless chain of circumstance and duty. The concept of the autonomous individual did not and could not exist. No clan member could be free from sexual, communal, and kinship ties. Outcasts and renegades faced early death.

The majority of Amerind peoples never rose above this primitive hunting/warrior culture. They made only one technical innovation, the bow and arrow. This weapon may have been brought in from Asia, but its use diffused into Middle America so late that it probably was reinvented in North America. The bow made no real change except to give both hunting and warfare greater scope.

These Amerindian cultures were ingenious and valiant in their struggles against the environment. Hunters learned to use almost everything from the animals they killed: meat, eating the whole animal for a vital diet; hides for garments and shelter; horn and bone for tools. But men's powers over the environment were very small. They had no control over food supply, nor any way to store it. Animal life waxed and waned in cycles; there were good years and lean. In bad times children died; in fact, most tribes regularly practiced infanticide. Population remained sparse and thin.

These nomads did not make permanent shelters nor were they able to accumulate burdensome artifacts. The only beast of burden in North or Middle America was the dog.

The hunting cultures were successful, because they survived. Men passed on their courage and their customs with their seed. The short, sturdy, dark-eyed peoples of the Americas were engaged in an endless fight for life in which individuals rarely lived beyond thirty years, but they rarely despaired. They were children of the sun and wind, as much a part of nature as the animals they killed. They grew up attuned to their world; they knew how it had been, was now, and always would be.

Chapter 2

FARMERS AND MAGICIANS

The two-edged nature of power is nothing new in human affairs. All important new inventions have both freed men from former weakness and deficiency and enslaved them to a new regimen. The hardy hunter surely despised the first farmers, bowed down by the heavy labor of the fields; and through subsequent centuries barbarian freemen regularly scorned the servile habits of their civilized neighbors. Yet these repugnances never for long arrested the spread of agriculture or of civilization. Civilized history. . . may be understood as a series of breakthroughs toward the realization of greater and greater power—including. . . the delicate but altogether real power in art and thought as well as power's cruder, ruder forms.

—William H. McNeill, TheRise of the West

Nine thousand years ago there was no essential difference in the way men lived anywhere in the world, although they had long begun culturally to differentiate. But during the seventh millennium b.c., somewhere in the Middle East, people learned to plant and harvest hoarded seeds from wild cereal grains. Agriculture was a simple invention, but it marked the most fundamental revolution in human history, changing man from a highly successful predator of other animal life to a manipulator and shaper of the earth, and life itself.

Previous technologies, such as weapons, did not change lifestyles; agriculture did. It assured a vastly increased, dependable food supply and brought about a population explosion and the concentration of large numbers of people in a single area. This in turn led to social specialization and leisure, which in turn led some men to learning, rational philosophy, organized religion, and high art. All human civilization rests on the cultivation of cereal grains.

The inhabitants of the naturally watered uplands of the eastern Mediterranean region domesticated wild wheat and barley seeds sometime during the seventh millennium. Agricultural villages have been discovered in this area which can be radiocarbon-dated to plus-or-minus 6250 b.c. Once learned, the technique spread rapidly. Rice agriculture seems to have been discovered independently in monsoon Asia not long afterward. By about 4000 b.c. farming technology and village lifestyles had diffused over most of Eurasia.

This chronology is important to the history of the New World, where the breakthrough came much later. Although some authorities have claimed that squash was planted in Middle America by 6000 b.c. and that farming began two thousand years later, there is no hard evidence of this. The oldest carbon-dated grain seeds found in Middle America go back only to about 2500 b.c., and the oldest village sites, to the second millennium. Beans and squash were no doubt harvested before maize, or Indian corn, was developed from the wild plant later Amerindians called teocintli. The evidence suggests a development gap of four thousand years between American and Eurasian agriculture—a time gulf with enormous repercussions.

The first native corn sprouted in Middle America between the Rio Pánuco and the borders of Costa Rica, the area where teocintli was found. Wild corn may have first been domesticated in the tangled vegetation of the hot, humid eastern coastal plain, on the lower slopes of the great cordillera, or even on the high, cool, sunny central plateau. Corn had reached its geographical limits in North America when white men arrived.

There is no evidence that agriculture was in any way diffused into the Americas. The Amerinds probably invented agriculture twice in the New World, just as the technique was developed more than once in Eurasia.

The peoples of the coast and thick southern jungles practiced a slash-and-burn type of maize farming, and maize also grew well up in the highlands, even up to ten thousand feet, but it did best of all in the temperate valleys of the meseta, where the altitude ranged from about thirty-five hundred to eight thousand feet above sea level and the soils were the most well watered and arable in Middle America. The ancient Valley of Mexico was still extremely hospitable to man. The old Pleistocene forests still stood, as they would stand until men cut them down and denuded the earth; the lakes were yet blue and broad; rain fell steadily from May into October.

Only a small percentage of Mexico however, was really suitable for natural farming, and this geographic fact was always to limit man's advance.

Amerind peoples began to congregate in the meseta valleys by at least 8000 b.c. Large concentrations of them settled to farm between the Rio Pánuco and Sinaloa on the north southward into the isthmus of Tehuantepec. Clusters of people filtered through the valleys in the modern state of Veracruz, and all across the immense, cut-up Oaxaca plateau. These regions, with the Valley of Mexico, were soon dotted with scattered, greening milpas or cornfields, which the Amerinds cleared by burning, then scratched out with digging sticks.

These milpas were the nuclei of farming villages. People with food ripening on the earth became affixed to the spot. They erected permanent shelters out of mud, thatch, reeds, and wattle and made clay or stone pottery in order to store, prepare, and cook their corn and beans.

More infants lived or were allowed to live; older people lived longer, perhaps by several years. Within a short time, villages numbered up to several hundred souls, and more and more villages sprouted across the land.

The new numbers could not be supported by hunting alone; men now had to shape the earth and vegetable life for survival. Thus the new powers of environment that came with a steady food supply were very much a two-edged blade. Men had gained one sort of power only by surrendering another. When both men and women took up incessant toil in the fields, it marked a fundamental change in human affairs: men were no longer quite so much a part of nature as they had been.

Life in these ugly, growing, mud-walled villages was a blend of old forms and new. The houses were haphazardly scattered about without design or plan, but the people in them were still kin; farming populations lost none of their old concern with consanguinity and descent. But a small, increasingly important territorial factor undoubtedly was added. Men saw the earth they were manipulating in a slightly different light; the vicinity, or place where the village clan or tribe lived took on new meaning.

The farming way of life also caused a radical decline, at least at first, in warfare. Diggers in the soil were by necessity more peaceable than nomadic hunters or gatherers; longer-settled agricultural folk seem to have been less warlike than tribes still on the move. But violence was continually infused or reinfused into the farmers by nomadic invaders; when warlike societies settled down into older communities, they revived the spirit of conflict throughout the whole community.

There remained no basis for social differentiation beyond the demands of age and sex. Every family head was a farming peasant; every man duplicated every other man's toil. All adult males were equals in an association of peers. The norm—which was the pattern for mankind almost everywhere in this stage—was a communal, tribal democracy of working farmers, each of whom had no social purpose except to feed his family. The decline of warfare actually caused a decline in the practice of government. There were civil elders, but chieftainship was a part-time job. Such men were more arbiters in disputes than rulers. Without social purpose, and without socializing acts, men had no need for government.

Organization revolved around kinship instead of property or office. Farmland was held in common by the tribe, just as the hunting grounds had been. Since the society was really an extended family, the concept of individual ownership could not easily arise. Further, in kinship societies, as in families, individualism was and had to be subdued. The individual was important only through what he contributed. The margin of survival, within the family and without, within the clan, was very thin. There was no surplus to support any kind of life outside the family circle.

The ancient Middle American villages, crude, unsanitary, with a constant high death rate, were much like similar agricultural villages everywhere as they have survived today. They were cribbed, communal, caked by custom, circumscribed by circumstance. Men were tyrannized by the eternal agricultural cycle. Life was hard, but not unbearable within its limited horizons. The material and psychic needs of people were satisfied—and actually, the vast majority of men who have ever lived on earth have followed this lifestyle.

Farming man had more time, and perhaps more need, to sophisticate his primordial religious concepts. Human beings were never able to conceive of nonexistence easily; though their constant awareness of physical death was real enough. The oldest grave sites reveal artifacts and offerings buried with the dead and burial rites that strongly indicate a belief in afterlife. Farmers remade the earlier, animal-centered cults of their ancestors. They were subject to cosmic forces—rain, hail, sun, fertility—which they saw daily influence their lives, but could not understand. They began to deify the powerful elements and to express anthropomorphic conceptions of these gods in art. The highland farmers of Mexico made clay figurines, which they often buried with the dead. Many of these figurines, fecund, peaceful, and with exaggerated female characteristics, seem to represent an earth-mother, the universal deity among primitive farming man.

They also indicate what the farming folk of ancient Mexico looked like: they went naked, with tattooed or painted bodies, but they wore a sort of turban made of maguey fibers, and also an assortment of necklaces and ornaments of stone and seeds. They daubed their hair with crimson substances, and plugged their earlobes and nasal septums with stone jewelry.

This culture exploded over the highlands about 1500 b.c. and lasted about five centuries, during which many of the fundamental folkways of Amerindian Middle America were established. The people of the small, scattered, communal kinship villages throughout the remote mountain valleys turned the earth with digging sticks, planting corn seeds when the rains came; they watched the plants sprout and grow tasseled ears under the broiling sun. They gathered the ripened grain in baskets, singing. Wives and mothers ground the maize to make a pasty dough, which was patted into cakes and baked over charcoal fires.

About 1000 b.c., a new, strange, and ultimately terrible people pushed in among the highland farmer folk. These invaders may have originated,—or at least their culture germinated—in the eastern coastal jungle plains. Some historians once called them Olmecs, from a later Amerindian term meaning, from where rubber grows. Olmec, however, came to be applied so indiscriminately for so long that as a cultural term it became meaningless. A more modern, better name for the people who brought a new culture into Mexico is the Magicians.

These people were shamans, or dominated by shamans, and their entire life-view was based on magic.

There were cogent reasons why magic was to take such an enormous hold on the Meso-American heart and soul. When the farming populations began to explode, latent disaster always lay over the land and people. Even the deep and sheltered valleys of central Mexico were subject to sudden killing frosts, unseasonal snows, and prolonged, disastrous droughts. These freakish events came at irregular times. And the ancient volcanoes erupted without warning, darkening the skies and destroying whole mountainsides with spectacular lava flows.

The primitive mind could not accept such events as random, accidental, without human meaning. History shows that in areas of irregular weather or rainfall natural forces have made men more concerned with invisible, omnipotent cosmic powers than with the reality they perceived on earth. Meso-American man devoted tremendous effort to trying to understand why some years it failed to rain on schedule, withering his cornfields and threatening him with starvation and extinction.

Like most primitive agriculturists, the highland farmers had come to venerate fire, water, the sun, and the concept of fertility. They were already making these forces into gods when the Magicians arrived with strange new ideas and practices.

The Magicians claimed they could control the rainfall by rituals. They carried a jaguar-toothed rain god with them and gave it orders through magical ceremonies and ritual dances. It should be understood that the Magicians did not practice magic in the modern sense—their magic was entirely practical in their eyes, confused with methodology.

The masks and carved figurines the Magicians left behind give some notion of their rituals. Shamans or witch doctors daubed their faces in black or white. They put on masks made out of clay or green stone, some representing deformed men, the jaguar god, or carnivorous beasts with birds' heads. They wore high, triple-tiered hats and long ocelot-skin robes. The Magicians carried rattles and made faces; their masks are usually shown with snarling mouths. They performed mystic dances, making noise and shrieking commands to the rain god.

This magic, which was merely a variant of a common manifestation among many primitive peoples, was convincing. The Magicians grew in numbers, created whole new communities, and apparently even dominated the separate farming culture of the highlands for many years. Magician congregations and influence spread from southern Veracruz into Puebia, Morelos, Tabasco, the Oaxaca valley, and even southwest into Guerrero. Over all this area the shamans brought the fang-mouthed rain god and inculcated a belief in mystic-magical rites to manipulate natural phenomena.

Magician artifacts and artwork show that their vision was strangely distorted. They were obsessed with monsters in human form. Their figurines portray men with genital or glandular deformities, with pointed Mongoloid heads, with cleft skulls, and with animal mouths. They appear to have believed such persons holy. The skeletal remains of the Magician folk perhaps indicate an origin for such visions. These people had a congenital adenoidism of the mouth, low, squat, obese frames with short legs. The male skeletons show surprising feminine characteristics. And if the Magicians derived, possibly as mutations, from the generic Amerind stock, they were divergent in several puzzling ways. Their bones reveal Negroid characteristics. This has led some anthropologists to insist that there must have been African immigration into Middle America at one time.

The Magicians also practiced self-mutilation, possibly in emulation of some historic deformed births. Children's heads were deformed by elongating the soft skull backward to a point, and Magicians mutilated their teeth.

But the Magician vision was also dual. Some of their figurines were of lovely young girls, with almond eyes and wasp waists, exquisitely carved.

This strange people were something much more than a race of fat-faced, squatty shamans who terrorized the south-central highlands. For all their preoccupation with magic—or perhaps because of it—they were also the developers and transmitters of a remarkable cultural advance. They were expert at carving and shaping stone. Their work was incomparably more sophisticated than the crude farmer art, and also the best of it was charming, judged by any taste or style.

Magicians made axes out of green jadeite and mirrors from polished pyrites; they fashioned necklaces and ornaments from several varieties of polished stones. They especially valued green substances, such as the native jade and serpentine. Magicians left artifacts made from these materials hundreds of miles from where they were naturally found, indicating that they initiated or practiced long-range trade.

The Magicians developed rubber-making and learned to weave cotton fiber into thread for cloth. They shaped rubber into balls and, wearing kneepads and gloves, played a sort of ritual game in a ball court. Magicians smoked tobacco in stone pipes.

The Magician era was a time of progress and expansion; villages grew, some to several hundred people. The Magician centers themselves became semiurban enclaves. The largest of these were clustered on the semitropical cordillera slopes. In these centers, Magicians left a number of carved stone bench-thrones. They also left representations of these thrones, on which sit fat, helmeted, Buddha-like shamans, or possibly, gods.

The magician shamanate also infused something terrible into Meso-America. The burial sites dating from this time have yielded up countless mutilated skeletons: decapitated, with smashed skulls, amputated arms or legs, and the remains of children put to a violent death. At some period the Magicians came to believe that dances and imprecations and rituals did not command or placate the powerful cosmic forces, and they instituted ceremonies considered far more potent: human sacrifice.

Near the middle of the first millennium b.c. the Magicians either became absorbed into the surrounding populations, or were destroyed when their magic failed during a period of prolonged drought. But the notion that men could and must control the cosmic forces of nature through magical rites was too pervasive to die completely. The Magicians' work lived after them.

It is difficult to make direct links with the prehistoric Magician-Olmec age and the Meso-American culture that came afterward. But it seems certain that the Magicians developed much, if not all, of the cultural patina that overlaid the basic maize-culture. This era was a great turning point for Meso-American man.

Magical influences continued in Meso-American civilization; green jade was valued above all other substances, including gold; its peoples played ceremonial handball games; they carved stone with exquisite skill; they all practiced human sacrifice. They all suffered from a surrealistic rather than natural vision in art, and, until the Spanish toppled the last idols, all the rain gods of the highlands were portrayed with jaguar teeth.

The Magicians, migrants or mutants, vanished, but they had laid the groundwork for and started the stirrings toward a colorful civilization whose fallen splendors, and whose overtones of psychic horror, haunt men yet.

Chapter 3

BUILDERS AND PRIESTS

I have seen him that is beaten, him that is beaten. . . and I have seen him that is set free from forced labor. Every artisan that wieldeth the chisel, he is wearier than him who delveth. The stonemason seeketh for work in all manner of hard stone; when he has finished his arms are destroyed and he is weary. The field worker, his reckoning endureth forever. The weaver in his workshop, he fareth more ill than any woman; his thighs are upon his belly and he breatheth no air. . . I tell thee, the fisherman's work is upon the river, where it is mixed with crocodiles. Behold, there is no calling that is without a director, except the scribe, and he is the director. . . Thou art to set thine heart on learning.

—From the Egyptiac Instruction of Duauf, Son of Khety

There has been, and always will be barring some definitive discovery, a dispute over the origins of Meso- or Middle American civilization. The Amerindian civilizations of both South and Middle America resembled certain cultures in the Old World in striking ways: artwork, seals, tombs, pyramids, and corbelled arches. Amerindian calendars, social organization, symbols such as the swastika, and zodiacal signs were startlingly similar to those once used in the Eurasian Middle East. The art of the ancient Egyptians and the Mayas, particularly, was much alike, and some Amerindian pottery decoration resembles the Chinese. All this evidence—and it is impressive—has made perhaps a majority of archeologists and historians, above all those of the Old World, think there must have been a diffusion of civilization into America out of Eurasia in prehistoric times.

It is now known that it was possible for men to have crossed the Pacific thousands of years ago, following the trade winds from the Orient. Despite its greater length, such a Pacific passage was far more feasible than a crossing of the rougher, contrary-winded Atlantic. Some plant life probably reached South America in this way, though not necessarily on boats or rafts manned by early sailors. But there is no evidence of an actual voyage at any time.

There is no evidence that any civilized techniques crossed over the Bering Strait. The only high cultures in America appeared near the Tropic of Cancer and again on the Andean plateau, a long way from the far northwest. Also, Amerindian civilizations rose millennia after the land bridges sank, far too many years afterward for a landborne diffusion to have effect.

The enormous time gulf between the Old World civilizations the American cultures resemble and their counterparts in the Western Hemisphere, more than anything else, severely questions the diffusion theory. While culture-bearing Mesopotamian or Egyptian seamen could have strayed across the Pacific, there is no way such men could possibly have sailed across a time gap of at least three thousand years. When the Mayas did their Egyptiac artwork, and Amerindians erected new pyramids, the ancient civilizations of the Middle East had long been dust.

However popular the diffusion theory is, it has to fall back on speculations or fantasies: strayed sailors from the Persian Gulf, sunken Atlantis, wandering Phoenicians, Scandinavian giants, brave Irish missionaries with more zeal than geographic sense, or lost tribes of Israel. All of these hypotheses have been proposed, but no direct link has ever been proved.

Dominant American opinion, unlike European, holds that the growth of civilization was spontaneous on American soil. Modern Mexicans believe this, not so much as a scientific hypothesis as a xenophobic dogma.

While there is no demonstrated psychic unity among civilized men, human invention has tended to follow a common path, indicating that there must once have been a certain psychic unity among primitive man. Most primitive art shows a vital unity, wherever it is found. The evidence seems to indicate, not that ancient Sumerians visited the Americas, but that the first temple builders in Mesopotamia and along the Nile saw the world with very similar eyes. Modern archeology is tending to reinforce this view.

What is clear, however, is that a distinctive, separate civilization did rise in Middle America in the first millennium b.c. Attempts to date this civilization earlier—and until recently, it was dated much later—are still speculative. This high culture did not spring up overnight; it was the work of many generations of men. The cornfields were its base; the Magician cults gave it a certain orientation. In fact, it began to coalesce rapidly about the time the Magicians disappeared. It seems to have begun first on the lower mountain slopes, perhaps in the state of Veracruz, sometime after 650 b.c. But it spread very widely until it covered the entire region known today as Middle America, from Costa Rica in Central America to the Pánuco River in Mexico. It was halted by rain forests on the south, deserts to the north.

The barbaric, agricultural Meso-Americans were quite varied culturally. Villagers spoke different languages, had different legends, and different physical shapes. To lump all these people together as Amerindians is ethnically correct, but it is also as definitive as describing as Europeans Frenchmen, Britons, Prussians, and Danes. But with the growth of an indigenous civilization something occurred that was like the growth of the Western civilization in medieval Europe. All the differentiated peoples within one broad geographic area by a process of diffusion came to have one single basic culture, though there were distinct regional styles.

There was never really a separate Mexic, Yucatec, Aztec, or Maya civilization in Middle America; there was simply a unitary civilization developing local variations on a common theme. The common thread of this civilization ran from the Pánuco River to Guatemala, and from the state of Sinaloa to Costa Rica, through many peoples who continued to speak distinct languages and to differ in countless minor ways.

Nor was this Meso- or Middle American civilization made by the proprietors Europeans found in the sixteenth century. The Mexica or Aztecs, the Maya, Tarasca, Tlaxcalteca, Mixteca, and Zapotec peoples were all inheritors rather than creators.

The great pyramids Cortés passed north of the City of Mexico were not built by the contemporary Aztecs, but by some vanished race. A great series of peoples rose and fell over many centuries in south-central Mexico.

The origins and formative years of this civilization have always been frustrating to explore, because while it left some five thousand archeological sites behind it passed down no records. The earliest civilized Amerindians drew pictographs on pressed figbark, quickly destroyed; or else, like the Maya culture, they carved on stone walls and stelae in hieroglyphs whose Rosetta Stone has not yet been found. This civilization can be approached only through architecture and art, and reconstructed from its fallen walls and idols, which fortunately, by their size, styles, and profusion, tell a great deal about the men who made them.

The phases of this civilization can, then, only be given a complex, bewildering, and—for anyone except specialists—a totally unsatisfactory breakdown into periods of different building styles. Inevitably, because most archeologists came from a Western background, these periods became defined in Western terms. Further, the excavation work has always been uneven, with some minor sites exhaustively uncovered and more important ones scarcely touched. Far too little correlation between sites and periods has been done. All of this has made Mexican archeology a jumble.

Historians have tended to avoid the archeological mazes and to divide the whole vanished civilization into three broad archeological-historic phases: the Preclassic, the Classic, and the Historic. Certain subclassifications are needed within these; the Classic period is usually divided into Transitional, Classic, Baroque, and Terminal. These terms always refer to art and architectural styles, but such styles tend to show the true course of events.

With the Preclassic era, beginning about 650 b.c., a recognizably common culture had spread from the borders of Costa Rica northward as far as the Pánuco River, westward along the fringes of Sinaloa, and southward across the central highlands to the Pacific. This culture had a large number of distinctive common characteristics before anything that might be called a genuine civilization began.

The agriculture of all Meso-American peoples, who never invented the plow, was laborious and small-scale, carried out on countless tiny plots, often reclaimed from marshes or lakes. During this period a prolonged drought shrank or dried up the mountain lakes.

All Meso-Americans fermented juice from the maguey plant and they used its leaves for fiber. They all valued cacao beans, both as chocolate and as counters—a sort of money surrogate. They learned to polish obsidian and other stones, and used obsidian chips to provide a cutting edge for their flat wooden clubs and swords. They all grew cotton and made cotton-padded body armor. They wore turban-type headdresses and heeled sandals.

Though at different times and places, every people erected temple-pyramids with steps, laid stucco floors, and built ball courts. They all did fresco work and painted colored murals. This architecture and art varied enormously in size, perfection, and style, but all of it is immediately unmistakable as Meso-American.

All the different peoples gradually developed a form of writing, usually a combination of hieroglyphs and stylized drawings, or pictographs. The written language, like the spoken, varied greatly from place to place, and one people could not decipher another's markings. All drew maps and kept historical accounts and chronicles, although they could not reduce their poetry, without phonetics, to writing. The common form of written record was a sort of folding picture book made of bark and now called a codex.

The Meso-Americans' single greatest achievement was their superb calendar which featured a year of eighteen months, each divided into twenty days. Five useless days were left over, and these were considered dangerously unlucky. The entire calendar recycled every fifty-two years; and although the Meso-Americans thought of time as cyclical rather than linear, with the universe repeating endless cycles, the end of a cycle was considered a portentous or ominous time. The calendar was more in consonance with the true movement of the earth against the stars than either the Julian or the modern Gregorian. But because each separate subculture began its calendar at a different time, it has been almost impossible for archeologists to correlate the whole.

All Middle Americans developed naming rites and pole dancing, and they all began to use the specialized marketplace for barter.

By 650 b.c. every people also employed human sacrifice to propitiate a growing pantheon of demon-forces, which had different names in different areas.

Finally, all the people were warlike. Though bellicosity receded as tribes developed permanent agriculture, there was invariably a later resurgence, either through the infusion of new, savage, nomadic stock, or the development of new quarrels between more civilized men. The old idea that the Maya subculture was pacifistic, or at least more peaceable than the Mexic, is a fiction. The Maya peoples were as hostile toward each other as the highland tribes; in fact, they carried on their conflicts more tenaciously and bitterly than other Amerindians, especially in the subculture's declining years. However, at certain periods the Maya cities employed Mexic mercenaries, and this may have given root to the rumor. Maya wars may have had ideological causes, but back of them lay the eternal reason—the struggle for power.

The influence of Meso-American civilization seems to have radiated far beyond Middle America. Farming, irrigation techniques, building with stone, metallurgy, and some military techniques spread far north of the Pánuco. The Caddoan tribes of the Mississippi basin and the Pueblo peoples of the North American Southwest reflected certain traits of the southern culture.

The Preclassic era is sometimes called the Age of the First Builders, or the Age of the First Priests. Between 650 b.c. and 150 b.c. on the Christian calendar, certain trends coalesced to transform the face of ancient Mexico.

The burgeoning populations of Middle America did not shed the vanished magicians' mystical-magical visions and practices; instead, they formalized them into a ceremonial religion. Now, the amorphous forces of fire, sun, rain, earth, and fertility appeared as distinct personalities, each with its peculiar form, idiosyncrasies, and demands. Each form collected its devotees, priests, and rituals. The surrealistic vision of gods as monsters, nourished by human blood, was retained. It was, however, this syncretism of a series of random superstitions into a powerful, ritualized, awesome mass cult that spurred the Amerindians to civilization.

The peoples began to erect cult centers across the land. From these came the first Meso-American cities—the creators and sustainers of a civilized lifestyle.

Unlike Greco-Roman and Western European cities, which grew from a political and commercial base, the isolated Meso-American were founded on religious mysticism, much like the first temple communities of the Middle East. It has been said that the fuel of this civilization was maize or Indian corn. But its spark was the Amerindians' fear of the unknown and uncertain forces which made corn grow—the still unexplained miracle of regenerative life on earth.

The more populated the inhospitable regions of Mexico became, the more vulnerable men became to their ecology. The original hunting nomads could always migrate in bad years—but for large, settled populations life was now a constant battle for sufficient food. Any kind of natural accident, any freakish weather, wreaked enormous tragedy on men and women who were no longer used to going hungry, slaying their infants, or dying young. In fact, the evidence is strong that every major turning point in human development in Middle America was closely connected with a natural disaster of some sort.

This concern with and dependency upon natural forces like the sun and rain surely led to the culture's finest accomplishment, the calendar, and its finest efforts, expressed in enormous, decorated edifices. But it also brought on the Meso-American civilization's ineradicable gangrene of the soul: sacrificial bloodshed. Fear of the gods led men to erect great temple pyramids in their cult centers, but it also caused them to substitute magic, savage rituals, and symbolic destruction for a more rational philosophy or the beginnings of natural science.

The great problem was the cyclical climate; rains fell across the highlands only part of the year, and sometimes they did not fall at all. Arrival of the rainy period was often erratic; a premature shower might easily cause hungry farmers to plant too soon, only to see their precious hoarded seeds sprout and die in the burning ground. When this happened whole villages died off. The farmers had to have some way to measure the moons between the rains; they could tell the seasons accurately only by measuring the movements of the earth against the constant stars.

At a very early period some unknown genius devised such a calendar, and it was perfected gradually over many years.

Thus, the Meso-Americans came to have a haunting sense of being ruled inexorably by time. They were engaged in a desperate race against its passage, and came to have a profound feeling that time was circular. They lived in endless cycles, always judging the future against the past. They developed an enormous historical sense, but they also lived in a captive universe, with no real concept of linear progress. Their calendar only measured centuries, endlessly repeated. Some peoples even believed in destroying their possessions and starting anew, at a cycle's end.

The calendar's invention created an order of priests and gave them enormous power. The calendar could only be kept by a specialized, preferably hereditary elite, which acquired, husbanded, and transmitted knowledge beyond the understanding of any toiling villager. The calendar began and sustained specialization and social differentiation. The creation of a skilled elite, freed from all primary labor, was a necessary first step toward what we call civilization—city life, organized around the performance of specialized tasks, and the enhancement of powers over nature from such organization. Only a skilled, intelligent elite, relieved from food production, could have the leisure to create craftsmanship, philosophy, architecture, or high art.

By the time a calendar was in use, some men, possibly the same priests, had grasped the principles of erecting stone on stone. Now the knowledge gap between a calendar-keeper, who must measure and keep records, and a priest-engineer or architect, and an ordinary farmer or laborer was as great as that between a nuclear physicist and a workingman today. It was inevitable that such men, possessing skills essential to society, and with no other counterbalancing aristocracy or elite, should begin to direct society.

The technical perfection of the calendar and the massive engineering accomplishments of the first center-builders show clearly that the early priests and engineers could grasp much of their environment empirically. Such people must have determined a great deal about the world from rational, pragmatic observation and experimentation. But this original creativity and empiricism only reached a certain level of expertise and never afterward advanced. The directing classes developed a peculiar dualism of mind and vision that they could never destroy.

Out of their past, and out of the mysterious subconscious, the autochthons of Meso-America made a universe that was both impressive and appalling. The priests and builders could not really distinguish between the physical forces they shaped and measured and the apparently supernatural events that ruled their lives. The real world of the grass, the maize, the rain, the moon, and the sun was mixed inextricably with the mystic dreads and visions that lie close to all human consciousness. All primitive peoples have tended to see natural forces as gods, or like more sophisticated folk, ruled by gods. But the great peculiarity of the Meso-American mind, so great a difference that it was almost one of kind, was that the precariousness of life caused these men to see their gods mostly as monsters.

The Mexic gods were capricious, willful, cruel, lustful and in need of human blood to sustain them. Other gods have been similarly characterized—but probably never to such an extreme degree. The Greeks also carved out mutated demons and things part-beast, part-men, things that never were. The oldest Egyptians suffered from a somewhat similar vision, but these cultures never chose the path of symbolic destruction to assuage their monsters.

Virtually all cultures have believed their gods or God could be affronted and propitiated. Most cultures have devoted at least part of their energies and substance to discovering what their gods desired, by supporting interpretive priests, or in other ways. And sacrifice is obviously an ancient instinct that lies very close to the human heart. The surrender of something of value, real or symbolic, is part of all great religions and philosophies.

But the Meso-American vision failed to see the general in the particular and carried its worship to extremes. The main manifestation was not just the institutionalization of human sacrifice in the Preclassic period—human sacrifice had been widely practiced by Mesopotamians, Phoenicians, Indo-Europeans. But the ancient Meso-Americans were not really religious in the Judaic, Hellenic, Christian, or Islamic sense of the term. Their practice of human sacrifice was a perversion of practical methodology. Like other peoples, the Meso-Americans hit upon the use of magical and mystical means rather than mechanical or philosophical ways of coping with fundamental human fears and problems, but unlike other peoples, they never relinquished such ideas. Their magic was a surrogate for science.

The spilling of blood on stone altars, or the hurling of virgins into deep wells, was more than a perversion of the symbology of water and the seed. These acts were seen as entirely practical. Because the gods had made man from their own bodies, they were nourished by human blood; in fact, they required it as corn required periodic waterings. A regular harvest of human flayings, burnings, beheadings, and cardiectomies was necessary to make the sun rise and the plants bear fruit. Taught by the first priests, who derived the vision from vanished shamans, the Meso-Americans made this methodology into a vast, driving force, which brought them together, put them to work erecting cult centers, allowed priest-engineers to direct their lives and labor, and permeated every segment of their culture.

During the first millennium b.c. the most advanced Meso-Americans formed theocratic societies, dominated by religious elites. They were deeply fatalistic, since disaster, despite magic, was really beyond human control at times. Society was also grotesquely moral, in modern terms, because the monster-gods were too fearful to be defied. Meanwhile, society remained tribal and communal in organization.

During these centuries people came to believe their collective duty was to understand and honor and propitiate their god-visions. This infused the whole developing society with exotic ideals. And in this service, the tribes began to expend what might be called their gross national product on massive pyramids, huge temples, and increasingly more fantastic art.

The new cult centers that rose at Cuicuilco, Tlapacoya, and Cholula were built by thousands of straining men, but they were not for the use of men. They were intended to be religious foci—monuments to the gods where magic rites would take place. But since such centers inevitably became the focal points of human congregation and activity—every tribesman had to help erect them, and sustain the priesthood, and to come regularly to worship—they inevitably performed the role of the poleis in Meso-American culture, drawing skilled elites and artisan-engineers who gradually became the sustainers of a genuinely civilized way of life.

This peculiar origin also assured that the Meso-American civilization would rise along two entirely separate planes. In the service of the demonic deities, men crafted manifestations of higher culture and mechanical skill, raised immense temples and carved brilliant artwork—while the purpose of all this civilized effort remained bloody-minded and mystical at the core.

When the first cult centers rose in the Preclassic age, from Veracruz northwestward to Guanajuato and Nayarit, and south down the highlands into Oaxaca and beyond, the village farmers had obviously come under the disciplined direction of a ruling class—the priestly elite, which had become largely hereditary. It was established and reverenced for its knowledge, and above all for its supposed ability to interpret the will of the gods. It was the priesthood that ordered the stone cult centers built, by commanding the labor of thousands of men.

And though the priesthood may have driven men to enormous efforts and sacrifices through superstition and fear, as a body it was entirely creative in these dawn years. Priests formed a creative, as well as a dominant, elite. They not only discovered principles of building with stone, but they also experimented successfully with irrigation techniques. The breakthrough to irrigation was enormously beneficial: it increased the small area of arable land in south-central Mexico, and, as a result, agricultural wealth and population. Thousands of farmers now lived where there had only been hundreds in the centuries before.

Those who lived around Cuicuilco put together a crude but distinctive stepped pyramid, with a vast, flat, altar-temple at the top. The Preclassic pyramid-temple at Cholula was even more