The Native World, Part Two

We broke off yesterday’s narrative at the year 1531, which ends with the conquest of Peru and the apparition of the Virgin Mary in Mexico. We shall go back to the year of 1398, one hundred and thirty years before the Virgin’s apparition on Tepeyac Hill. In that particular year, two children were born who were to be prominent in the history of the Aztecs. One of them was Moctezuma, the last emperor, and the other one, little known to many of us but no less important: Tlecaellel, the architect of the Aztec empire. The Aztec historian Quauhtlehuanitzin says about him:

There were many great, awe-inspiring kings and warriors among those peoples, near and far and all over the world. But the most courageous and distinguished of them all in the nation was the great captain, the great warrior Tlecaellel. It was he who ordered the worship of the demon Huitzilopochti, the God of the Mexicas.

Tlecaellel was the organizer and founder of the Aztec empire that Cortez would discover a hundred years later. Tlecaellel lived for almost a century and during that period of time he implemented a master plan to strengthen the power of the Aztec emperors among the peoples in the region. He himself refused to be an emperor and chose instead to be the power behind the throne. He turned down the proposal to be a crowned king by saying: “I am already a king”. In promoting a large number of sacrifices to the demon Huitzipochtli, he set off a series of regional wars with the only purpose of capturing victims for the sacrifices he would offer up “like hot bread fresh from the oven, soft and delicious.” At the age of thirty-one in 1429, he emerged as a mighty military leader and appointed the three kings of the Triple Alliance by his own power. Indeed, he was the empire’s true ruler for seventy-seven years.

Unimaginable Horror

“Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil!” — Genesis 4: 10.

Perhaps the most macabre time in the macabre life of Tlecaellel occurred in 1487 when he was eighty-nine years old. In that year, the great pyramidal temple of Huitzipochtli was built right in central Tenochtitlan, a striking one- hundred ft. high building, containing a large complex full of apartments, corridors and sanctuaries where the god’s priests lived and worked. The two main “gods” in the Aztec pantheon — to whom most human sacrifices were made — were Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca. Its priests would paint their bodies black; their permanently uncut hair was always plastered with dry blood. Their sharp teeth tapered to a point. The new temple was erected and dedicated by order of Tlecaellel who decided, for that special event, to offer up the greatest sacrifice of human lives ever made in the empire’s history. Summing up the various accounts of that sad day, historian R. C. Padden described it as follows:

Well before daybreak, legionnaires prepared the victims, who were put in close single file down the steps of the great pyramid, through the city, out over the causeways, and as far as the eye could see. For the average person viewing the spectacle from his rooftop, it would appear that the victims stretched in lines to the ends of the earth. The bulk of the unfortunates were from hostile provinces and the swollen ranks of slavery. On the pyramid summit four slabs had been set up, one at the head of each staircase, for Tlecaellel and the three kings of the Aztec Triple Alliance, all of them were to begin the affair as sacrificial priests. All were in readiness; the lines of victims were strung out for miles, milling about like cattle, waiting their turn in the line that was about to move. Suddenly, the brilliantly arrayed kings appeared on the platform and silence fell all over the city. Together they approached Huitzipochtli’s chapel and made reverent obeisance. As they turned to join their aides at the four slabs, great snakeskin drums began to throb, announcing that the lines could now begin to move.

The victims were readily arranged on the altar where the priest would tear their hearts out by quickly striking them with a huge obsidian knife. The operation was quick and accurate. Once the victims were sacrificed, they were sent tumbling down the steps where the assistants would quarter the bodies that would be cooked and eaten later. The ceremony went on for four days and we know that at least 80,000 individuals were sacrificed. Tlecaellel ordered that the event should be seen by all of the noblemen and their families. Horrified by that sight, most of them ran away in terror but although they could escape such horror, they could not escape the nauseating smell of human blood engulfing the entire city. The 1487 massacre is one of the most appalling chapters in the long list of horrors in the history of man.

What the participants and the hopeless victims in that massacre did not know was that that evil social order was soon to change forever. Before that sad generation was gone, the whole nation would be rescued by Christ’s love in a series of unprecedented,  very amazing events.

Save Us from Those Who Devour Us

Will these evildoers never learn? They devour my people as they devour bread; they do not call upon the LORD.

The phrase taken from Psalm 14 can be used to understand how God dealt with the anguish of the poor and downtrodden American peoples. God’s grace was to be dispensed to them in a way never seen before. Such grace came down especially on the poor Mexican natives truly like a refreshing rain. In those days, in the small town of Cusutitlan, not so very far from Tenochtitlan there lived a little boy of about thirteen years of age. By then, he was an apprentice tilma weaver, the traditional fiber ponchos that are typical among the Nahuatl people. He was a Macehualtin, that is, a low-class poor boy. He is likely to have attended the sacrifices on that horrible day, maybe out of curiosity. His name was Cuauhtlatouac, “the one who speaks like an eagle”.

Some forty years later, Cuauhtlatouac was baptized with the Christian name of Juan Diego and it was to him that the Mother of God appeared on the Tepeyac Hill right where the Aztec goddess Toniatzin was worshipped in the old days. In another of those remarkable coincidences in history, the apparition gave rise to the advocation of the Virgin who was called Our Lady of Guadalupe, just like the Virgin Mary was once called in Extremadura, Spain. Columbus had already given this name to one of the Caribbean islands, in appreciation of Our Lady for having helped him survive a shipwreck. That name is, like “Fatima,” derived from an Arabic word. In this case “wadi-al-loub”, Guadalupe, that is, “the river of the wolves”. It is quite possible, in the words of the historian Becerra Tanco (1666), that Our Lady had used the Nahuatl name “tequantlaxopeuh”, meaning literally “she who saves us from those who devour us.” Oddly enough, both etymologies show clearly mystical coincidences that San Juan Diego would have understood perfectly well.

The Old Testament contains a passage that could be applicable to this part in the American history.

“God comes … Before him goes pestilence, and the plague follows in his steps. He pauses to survey the earth; his look makes the nations tremble. The eternal mountains are shattered, the age-old hills bow low along his ancient ways … In wrath you bestride the earth, in fury you trample the nations. You come forth to save your people, to save your anointed one. You crush the heads of the wicked, you lay bare their bases at the neck. You pierce with your shafts the heads of their princes whose boast would be of devouring the wretched in their lair. You tread the sea with your steeds amid the churning of the deep waters … (Habakkuk 3).

While the Tlecaellel generation was exceedingly bloodthirsty, the Aztecs were not the only ones that made use of human sacrifices to terrify people and to worship their gods. Evidence of human sacrifices among the cultures of the high Andean plateau has been found also. Other peoples on the continent practiced cannibalism and ritual homosexuality at different times in history. In my view, the horror of the poor slaves and prisoners is unimaginable. The remains of sacrificed children in the Inca Empire fill us with sadness and indignation and we agree to the divine punishment that fell upon these peoples when least expected. God stepped into the Americas as described by prophet Habakkuk, preceded by pestilence and death, melting the mountains with his might. We feel justified in thinking that today the continent is living its Christian destiny in us, its new inhabitants. Will God agree with us in fact, that better times have come for this continent?

The Same Old Abominations in Our Times

It is nearly impossible to figure the exact number of people who were sacrificed by the predecessors and followers of Tlecaellel. It would be still harder if we attempted to estimate the number of human sacrifices perpetrated before the discovery. The truth is that the arrival of the Europeans in America did not put an end to exterminations or oppression. Many saints such as Bishop Zumárraga or San Francisco Solano, preached against the unfair practices to which some natives were subjected in the past five centuries. In recent years, one could affirm there has been a resurgence of ideas and practices so bloody, cruel and demonic as those of Tlecaellel — and even more vicious. Pro-abortion organizations have managed to alter the legal traditions and laws of many countries and in such places as the United States over forty-eight million abortions have been performed so far. Infanticide and euthanasia are already practiced silently among us. Some people are working to legalize these practices and have succeeded in some states. This seems to be just the tip of the iceberg in a series of abominations, some of which are inconceivably inhuman and satanic.

One cannot help asking in earnest: what is God going to do to stop this new generation of murderers? Truly, the infamous record of Tlecaellel and his cronies has been more than exceeded. It should not come as a surprise if the divine punishment for such crimes is greater than that received by our pre-Columbian forefathers. This is a sobering thought that should motivate faithful Catholics to evangelize the New World once again. Evangelization is — as it always has been — not a matter of choice but a matter of life and death both for nations and individuals. It is up to us to choose life for the future of all of the Americas before we run out of time.

If I close heaven so that there is no rain, if I command the locust to devour the land, if I send pestilence among my people, and if my people, upon whom my name has been pronounced, humble themselves and pray, and seek my presence and turn from their evil ways, I will hear them from heaven and pardon their sins and revive their land — 2 Chronicles 7, 14.

May God find us worthy and heal our land.

Bibliography

The Wonder of Guadalupe, by Francis Johnston, TAN books, Rockford, Illinois, 1981.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, by Warren H. Carroll, Christendom Press, Front Royal, Virginia, 1983.

1491, by Charles C. Mann, Vintage Books/Random House, New York, 2006.