Both Christians, Aztecs and Incas envisioned a divine creation, but they had different notions of the time for the creation. From the Bible, Christians knew that the creation had lasted six days. Irish Archbishop James Ussher would argue rationally for the Bible and calculated the first day of creation to have been on Sunday, October…
Tag: God
INCAWORSHIP OF ANCESTORS AND SPLIT INHERITANCE
The people of the Andes knew that a lightning in the sky could spread death just as a crashing tree could do, but they also knew that without rain that followed the lightning and without food growing on the ground, no one could survive. Life and death were connected. It was discovered that seeds could…
AZTECS FAITH OF PRE-DETERMINATION AND GROWTH
The Aztecs shared the divine world with other Mesoamerican civilizations. In common, there was only one god, Ometeotl, in the beginning, but this god was both male and female, who were called Tonacatecli and Tonacaçiguatl, ie. a duality. The two aspects of the deity had created themselves and had given birth to four gods: Tlaclau…
MY COMPARISONS – LONG LINES THROUGH THE COUNTRIES
Some hundreds Spanish conquistadors had faced many thousands of Indian warriors in 1519 in what we today call Mexico and in 1532 in what we call Peru. Initially 617 Spaniards in Mexico and 176 in Peru. Immediately an unequal fight in which the counterparts had different motivation, but where both parties fought fiercely; of course,…
PERU: MISSION AND RESISTANCE
I have told about many Incas and Spaniards, about what motivated them and how they clashed bloodyly. Small stories that I hope have drawn an outline of the great. Now I would like to end with a story of a single mestizo – son of an Inca woman and a Spanish man – for what…
PERU: ATAHUALPA SENTENCED TO DEATH
The sun is setting on July 26, 1533 while Spanish soldiers led Sapa Inca Atahualpa with iron around the neck into the square where he had been captured eight months earlier. A blast on a trumpet opens the show trial with Pizarro and Almagro as judges, Sancho de Cuellar as clerk and Filipillo as interpreter….
PERU: ATAHUALPA IS BORNE IN
Saturday, November 16, the sun rises on an almost cloudless sky. No one knows when Inca will come, no one can know if he will come and if then how. Chaskis are announcing that he will come armed, and that’s what Pizarro expects, but answers that he would be received by him as a friend…
MEXICO: MOCTEZUMA AT THE SPANIARDS – ACCORDING TO INDIANS
At the end of the year 1519, Moctezuma was held hostage in a golden cage. The Aztec population felt that new masters had come to the country, and two generations later, Sahagún in Codex Florentino wrote what he had heard Indians tell about the Spaniards first time in Tenochtitlán: And when the morning came, some…
MEXICO: WAS CORTES RECOGNIZED AS GOD?
Next chapter of Codex Florentino: And after they had arrived at the palace, had walked into it, they immediately grabbed him, put him under guard, didn’t fail to watch Moctezuma carefully, and with him also Itzquauhtzin. But the others just fled. Apparently, Moctezuma has only been seized inside the palace! So anyway not on the…
MEXICO: WHAT DID AZTECS TELL ABOUT QUETZALCOATL?
Aztecs imagined that there had been five processes of creation and that after each of the first four, the world had collapsed and a new one had been created. Therefore, the Aztecs called their own age The Fifth Sun, which they also assumed would end violently. Presumably there would follow a Sixth Sun – but…
MEXICO: WHERE GODS ARE BORN
Teotihuacán was a civilization that became crucial to the development in Mexico. People not only built the Pyramid of the Sun – which you may have long dreamed of after you started planning your trip to Mexico – but established two thousand years ago a vast empire with the largest capital of America before the…
MIKAEL WITTE 