The Great Divide

also discussed in chapter twenty-one, shows how important weather was, and the equation of weather with illness, as was also noted in that chapter, implies that it was the negative aspects of weather that were paramount. Among the Toltecs, Tezcatlipoca was a malevolent god – ‘he caused plagues, droughts, frosts, food poisoning, starvation, the appearance of monsters and collective massacres’. 10 Enrique Florescano informed us in chapter twenty-three that, judging by the iconographic evidence, ‘In the most ancient times, the important gods of Mesoamerica were those of the netherworld. These powers managed the forces of destruction, decadence and death . . .’. We also noted in chapter twenty-one the description by Arthur Demarest and Geoffrey Conrad of the Aztec gods as ‘ever-threatening’. 11 (Moctezuma Ilhuicamina was ‘the angry lord, the archer of the skies’ – aggression was built in.) As we saw in chapter twenty-three, each age of the Aztec cosmological system takes its name and character from its destructive elements, not from its creations. ‘Each beginning is sure to result in a catastrophe and there appears to be no end in sight to this divine antagonism, these rains of fire, vigilante jaguars, deluges and hurricanes . . . One cannot help but be impressed by the persistence of the motif of change, sacrifice, death and destruction . . . ’ 12 And we noted in the same chapter that the second part of the name of the god Xipe Totec means ‘dread’. Finally, the very fact that the Aztecs and other cultures featured jaguar warriors, that boxers wore jaguar masks, and that in the Aztec mythology the jaguar cult beat the eagle cult, all underline what was said earlier, that fear of the jaguar was the dominant emotion.
    Put all this together and you have a crucial difference between New World and Old World gods.
    If you worship angry gods, whether they be tsunamis or earthquakes, volcanoes or jaguars, your worship essentially takes the form of propitiation, of asking – petitioning – those gods not to do something, not to erupt if the god is a volcano, not to fall in torrents if the god is rain, not to produce destructive tsunamis and winds if the god is an enso event, not to attack humans if the god is a jaguar. In the New World – in Central and South America certainly – the predominant form of worship was directed towards making unpleasant things not happen .
    And here is the crucial point: that form of worship doesn’t work. That is to say, it didn’t/doesn’t work all the time, or to anything like the extent that fertility worship works. It no doubt works for some of the time: no one in the village is carried off by a jaguar for a certain number of weeks; there is no tsunami for a few years, or even decades; a volcano dies down, as the Icelandic ones did in 2010 and 2011. But, and it is again an important but, the angry gods are never totally appeased. Sooner or later, their wrath recurs. (There is some evidence that a raft of earthquakes, circa AD 1300, had an effect on what remained of the Mayan civilisation.)
    We also know that, in the case of enso episodes, they have been getting more common, quite a lot more common, in fact. Looked at from the point of view of an Olmec or Mayan or Toltec or Aztec shaman, with their extremely accurate calendar, it would have seemed to them that worship wasn’t working, that whatever traditional level of ritual had been practised in the past, it wasn’t enough. This, after all, is why the Mixtec ritual specialists sponsored war, to manufacture threats that they could control.
    In such circumstances, religious specialists would have decided that, if the current level of worship wasn’t working, they must either manipulate threats they could control, war, or , they must redouble their efforts. And this is why the most profound and revealing difference between the Old World and the New occurs in the realm of human sacrifice. In the Old World, thanks to the proximity of domestic mammals, human sacrifice was gradually replaced by animal sacrifice and then, after AD 70, thanks again to the close similarity of domestic mammals to humans, blood sacrifice was abolished altogether. In the New World, however, far from being abolished, human sacrifice became more and more widespread, until in the fifteenth century tens of thousands of Aztec victims were being sacrificed each year. Inca sacrifice was not quite so numerous, but there were still hundreds of