Two Books About the Aztecs: Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend and The Mexican Dream by J. M. G. LeClezio

Many years later, it would become an accepted fact that the indigenous people of Mexico believed Hernando Cortes to be a god, arriving in their land in the year 1519 to satisfy an ancient prophecy. It was understood that Moctezuma, at heart a coward, trembled in his sandals and quickly despaired of victory. He immediately asked to turn his kingdom over to the divine newcomers, and naturally, the Spaniards happily acquiesced. Eventually, this story was repeated so many times, in so many reputable sources, that the whole world came to believe it. Moctezuma was not known for his cheerful disposition. Even he, however, had he known what people would someday say, would certainly have laughed, albeit with some bitterness, for the story was, in fact, preposterous.

The word "advanced," like the word "primitive," is a word that's slung around too often without being questioned. Yet, by any metric, the Aztec civilizations that the Spanish conquerors encountered were the most "advanced" of North American peoples. They planned and lived in great urban cities; they had complex systems of trade and technology; they had spectator sports and libraries. In many ways, they are more recognizable to us as "modern" than, say, the nomadic tribes of the U.S. plains. And yet, they found themselves quickly subdued by a small group of Spaniards. Why? Answers to this question have often relied on the Aztecs' religion. I remember learning in school that the Aztecs believed that the Spaniard and the horse were a single, frightening creature, and that they saw in Cortes the return of the god Quetzacoatl. Camilla Townsend's award-winning history of the Aztecs, Fifth Sun, calls bullshit.

The problem with these accounts, as Townsend describes it, is that they rely too heavily on Spanish language accounts of the conquest. This, despite the fact that several accounts written in the indigenous Nahautl language survive, and present a very different story. Townsend's history--she implies, and I'm ready to believe--is the first account of the Aztecs to prioritize indigenous sources. And what those sources, like several "annals"--basically Aztec accounts of what happened each year--and the history of the Indigenous historian Don Domingo Chimalpahin, tell is a different story. In this story, the Aztecs quickly understood the military superiority of the Spanish, predicated on "the Spaniards' use of metal, and their extraordinary communication apparatus." "What is striking," Townsend writes about the Aztec reaction to the Spaniards' military advantages, was not that they interpreted them as divine, but "how quickly they realized that these issues were at the heart of the matter." The choices made by Moctezuma and his allies, as well as those who allied with the Spaniards like the Maya woman historically known as Malinche, begin to make sense as pragmatic and political acts. 

Townsend's history is split basically into thirds: Aztec life before the conquest, the conquest, and the aftermath. I really enjoyed reading the first part, about the Aztec world pre-Cortes, which is something about which I knew very little. I was especially eager to hear what Townsend had to say about human sacrifice, which, if you've ever had the misfortune of interacting with a Twitter racist, you might know is used to justify the brutal colonial practices of not just the Spanish but all European colonizers of the new world. Townsend notes that the scale of human sacrifice is, first and foremost, much smaller than formerly assumed--she estimates it at perhaps two thousand sacrifices over a hundred year period. For the Aztecs, sacrifice was connected to stories in which a god allowed themselves to be destroyed so that a new world might be born; they themselves believed the universe had exploded four times and they were living in the "fifth sun."

But Townsend makes it clear that, during the rise of the Mexica Empire centered on Tenochtitlan, sacrifice took on a practical and military aspect as well, punishing cities that refused to pay homage and allegiance. Fascinatingly, the Mexica engaged in "Flower Wars" with their most entrenched enemies like the city of Tlaxcala: a type of ritualized, less lethal warfare, which maintained the status quo between rivals who would otherwise attack one another. The Spaniards, who attacked and then allied with the Tlaxcala against their Mexica rivals, actually managed to explode a stable political detente into the violence that had long been avoided.

The "after," too, is fascinating for its glimpse into the processes which transformed a nation of conqueror and conquered into the Mexico of today: the beginning of the encomienda system, which supplanted and extended the Aztec system of imperial tribute, the brutality of forced labor, the subsummation of Aztec identity into a Spanish identity that evolved into the mestizaje ideology of Mexican "mixedness," etc. I was surprised to hear that much of the instability of early colonial Mexico fell not just on the Indigenous but on Black slaves imported from Africa. It's in the midst of this world that writers like Don Chimalpahin wrote their own accounts of the conquest in their own language, and knowing the circumstances they were writing under makes their resolve in recording their story for future generations all the more impressive.

Thus began the True Story, with that meeting of two dreams. There was the Spanish dream of gold, a devouring, pitiless dream, which sometimes reached the heights of cruelty; it was an absolute dream, as if there were something at stake entirely different from the acquisition of wealth and power; a regeneration in violence and blood to live the myth of Eldorado, when everything would be eternally new.

On the other side was the ancient dream of the Mexicans, a long-awaited dream, when from the east, from the other side of the ocean, those bearded men guided by the Feathered Serpent Quetzalcoatl would come to rule over them once again. Thus, when the two dreams and the two peoples met, the one demanded gold and riches, where as the other wanted only a helmet to show the high priests and the king of Mexico, since, as the Indians said, it resembled those once worn by their ancestors, before they disappeared.

After reading Towsend's history, it's hard to turn to Nobel winner J. M. G. LeClezio's account of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico and not think bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. All the myths Townsend identifies are here: the single creature made of horse and rider, the reincarnation of Quetzalcoatl in the form of Cortes. The Aztecs' fall to the Spanish can be explained, for LeClezio, by the intensity of their apocalyptic religious beliefs, by the power of prophecy and visions that foretold the coming of the conquerors. It's no surprise that LeClezio, writing in the mid-60s, draws entirely on the True History of Spanish evangelist Bernardino de Sagahun that Townsend identifies as the source of many of these self-serving stories.

To his credit, LeClezio seems to really know a great deal about Indigenous Mexican religion, not just that of the Mexica and other Aztecs, but the Maya and the Purepecha, who were and are centered in the western region of Michoacan. I have no way of knowing how accurate he is--I have a general sense that Indigenous Mexican religion is often misread, that some figures are falsely conflated and figures who really are avatars of one another are often missed--but LeClezio's account of the three main religious systems in rich and detailed. For LeClezio, these are "barbarian" religions, a term used more with admiration than disgust: he believes that the immanence of their religion made them closer to both nature and the divine, which is supposedly in contrast to European Christianity, which is less an animating force for the Spaniards than a quasi-religious "dream" of riches and gold. LeClezio's interlude about Antonin Artaud, who went to Mexico in search of a pre-European way of being only to come back a mental and physical wreck, make the stakes of The Mexican Dream clear: LeClezio is less interested in understanding Aztec religion than he is in using it as a kind of mirror held up to European degradation.

In this one respect, I do agree with LeClezio: the conquest of Indigenous America interrupted a process of historical development that might have served us better than the European colonial project did. LeClezio asks: "How might those civilizations, those religions have evolved? What philosophy might have developed in the New World if the destruction of the Conquest had not taken place?" In one way, this is a silly question; Indigenous civilizations did not disappear; they're still with us, and they have evolved. Mexico is home to two million Nahuatl speakers. But in another way, I think LeClezio is plainly right. He writes about an Indigenous belief in that "equilibrium was the very expression of divine creation," that we have a divine mandate to live in reciprocal relationships with places and resources. I often wonder what our world would be like today if it were this ideology that had taken root around the world, rather than one predicated on resource extraction and economic development at all costs. When LeClezio writes that Western man has "put himself in a position of disequilibrium, because he has let himself be carried away by his own violence," it's hard to disagree.