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‘The Conquest of Mexico’

Teotihuacan (Mexico), the pyramid of the sun, taken by B. de Baca

1 – The origin of the Meso-American culture

Langer’s “Encyclopedia of World History” states: “Over two thousand years ago in the highland
region of Central America and Mexico grew up a high civilization, centered around the metro-
polis of Teotihuacan, that was parallel in many striking ways to that of the Old World, but
probably entirely 'independent' of it.” I doubt its entirely independent status. At the time there
were some revealing finds at the Monte Albán site in Mexico, not far from Teotihuacan. They
seem to indicate that the earliest phase of the Meso-American culture received an impulse from
some strangers from the Old World who, in the first millennium before Christ, must have arrived
on the Mexican shores. At the Albán pyramids, which belong to the earliest phase of the Meso-
American culture, we find several large, well-preserved statues with a disconcerting resemblance
to the ancient statutes of the bearded seafaring people of the Ancient Near-East. (see appendix)
We would expect them in the Mediterranean world, but not here! They have nothing in common
with the indigenous artefacts nor with the outward appearance of the local peoples, normally
shown.
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I now quote from the “Phoenician Encyclopedia”, from its article “Phoenicians in Brazil”:
«« The Maya, the Toltec and the Aztec civilizations predominated all over the American
continent. Those populations did not spring from the ground and only two other peoples
could be their ancestors: the Phoenicians or the Chinese. From the Phoenicians, because
they dominated the western seas, and from the Chinese because they dominated the Far
East seas. However, as of yet these assumptions have to be substantiated but they probably
never will be, because any evidence, if available, must not only be scant but also buried at
the dawn of time. »»

The Teotihuacan community, which predates the Aztec civilization, bears a resemblance to the
Old World city-state of Babylon, as it seems to have existed in Abraham’s time. As regards the
Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, we may compare it to the conquest of the Promised Land
of Canaan, now called Israel. Remarkably, the Aztec Empire (as an empire) lasted a mere
hundred years, until their chapter was closed upon the arrival of Hernán Cortés in 1519, twenty
years after the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus.

2 – To retrieve the nations sitting in darkness

The adoption in 1512 of the Laws of Burgos offered the
rationale for the conquest of the Americas. The most
important provision in it was that the Indians were to be
made Christians and treated as ordinary human beings
(no slavery). (1) A provision in this document was that
the Pope would subsequently hand over the lands to the
king of Spain, but this was without substance because the
Pope could not give away what did not belong to him; the
comparison with Canaan fails as far as property rights are
concerned.

William Hickling Prescott, one of America’s great histo-

rians, has written the classic work on Cortez, published in
1843, called “History of the Conquest of Mexico”. He
says:
«« With the right of conquest, thus conferred,
came also the obligation, on which it may be said to
have been founded, to retrieve the nations sitting in
darkness from eternal perdition. (…) however much it may have been debased, (…) it was
still active in the mind of the Christian conqueror.” Thus, Cortez told Montezuma: “Then we
shall be obliged to take the temple by force and to roll down the images of the false deities in
the face of the city.” And he added: “We fear not for our lives, for, though our numbers are
few, the arm of the true God is over us.” »»

The conquest was accompanied by many ostensibly heavenly interventions, too many to mention.
To give one example: during the siege of the capital, the flesh of the captured Christians tasted
intolerably bitter and could not be eaten, although there was great famine.

3 – Many died of disease

In some general history book I read the following: “In the subsequent years more than 90% of the
indigenous population died by the conquistadors' doing, of a population that in 1518 counted
thirty million. The carnage must have been terrible!” This is not factual. To begin with: it is
impossible to estimate precisely the size of the initial population. Nearly all the experts agree on
an initial population in Central America, before the arrival of Cortez, of between 9 and 25
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million. Which one is correct, the upper or lower

limit, remains unsettled in spite of many scholarly
efforts. We know for a fact that in 1568 the
population of Central Mexico was about 2.6 million.
What happened between 1518 and 1568?

Cortés and his small band of men, that numbered

300 Spaniards, with later reinforcements no more
than 2,000 men, could never - in mathematical terms
- have murdered such colossal numbers, even if we
agree on an initial population of only nine million.
He was accompanied by confederates, a few thou-
sand and later tens of thousands, who consisted of
native Indians, who hated the tyrannic Aztecs, but
even then it remains a mathematical impossibility.
Prescott’s comment is interesting in this respect:
«« And yet, taken as a whole, the invasion, up
to the capture of the capital, was conducted on
principles less revolting to humanity than most,
perhaps than any, of the other conquests of the Castillian crown in the New World. (…)
Their swords were rarely stained in blood unless it was indispensable to the success of their
enterprise. »»

The solution to the problem of why so many died is: disease. Frederick F. Cartwright, from the
Department of the History of Medicine from King’s College Hospital in London, wrote:
«« There is no doubt that imported disease played as great a part as the Spanish conquerors
in the destruction of the Aztec race, if not a greater one. (…) It has been estimated that
nearly half of the native population died in the first epidemic. »»

He mentions a second outbreak in 1531, a third in 1545 and a fourth in 1564. He concludes that
an unexpected change of the milder form of smallpox at the time (alastrim – variola minor) re-
sulted in a virulent type, to which the Spaniards were relatively immune because of previous ex-
posure to the alastrim virus. The results were so devastating, that we can hardly imagine what
happened. The Indians also had no natural immunity to measles, typhoid, chicken pox, yellow
fever or mumps (parotitis), but smallpox was the most vicious of all. The epidemics were often
followed by famine because so few people were left to work the fields. By 1630 the Central Me-
xican population counted less than one million souls. Not until 1650 did the size of the native
population begin to increase again.

Petrarch, writing about the horrors of the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the 14th century,
said that future generations would be unable to imagine the empty houses, the abandoned towns,
the squalid countryside, the fields littered with dead, the dreadful silent solitude that seemed to
hang over the whole world. Petrarch questioned whether posterity could possibly believe such
things, when those who had actually seen them could hardly believe them themselves. (The
Petrarch quote is from Cartwright’s book.)

No doubt, the epidemic that ravaged the country greatly facilitated the enterprise, but that only
partially explains the case. To use Prescott’s words:
«« The whole story has the air of fable, rather than of history! – a legend of romance, a tale
of the genii! (…) That all this should have been so effected by a mere handful of diligent
adventurers is a fact little short of miraculous – too startling for the probabilities demanded
by fiction, and without a parallel in the pages of history. »»
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4 – Judgement day
Yet this had been exactly foretold by
Aztec priests and was confirmed by
many portents in heaven and on earth.
(Amos 3:7-11, Is. 13:9-13; 19) In the
previous decade, for instance, a comet
appeared, apocalyptic storms raged
across the country and the temple of
Tezcatlipoca mysteriously caught fire.
The most important miracle was the
resurrection of Montezuma’s sister,
Papantzin, four days after her burial,
to warn the monarch of the approa-
ching ruin of his empire, to which I
give credence as a sign of God’s bene-
volence who wants all men to repent. Later, after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Papantzin was
one of the first Aztecs to convert to Christianity. Cortés set foot on land in the year, the month
and the day predicted by the snake-god Quetzalcoatl. Their measure of injustice was overflowing
and there was apparently no other way out in order to restore justice and peace.

The God of the Old Testament looks like a cruel God. (Numb.33: 52; Deut.7: 1-5; Josh. 11:11-
15, and its ch. 23) But do we fully realise the ghastliness of the Canaanite peoples, whom God
wanted to destroy, and the enormity of their crimes? I have some idea of what people are ca-
pable of and it fills me with nausea to think about it. The Bible speaks only in general terms
about the Canaanite misdeeds. No doubt with reason: it would even be a scandal to talk about
it. Sources are scarce, like “Wisdom of Solomon” chapter 12. Several of the Canaanite peoples
must have been on a par in evil-doing with the Aztecs, whose ghastliness has been put on
record. Yet the Aztec civilization had an amazing refinement, to be compared with that of
ancient Greece. Civilization, yes, but what is the definition of civilization?

5 - Wisdom of Solomon (apocryphal), Ch. 12

1: For thine incorruptible Spirit is in all things. 2: Therefore chastenest thou them by little and
little that offend, and warnest them by putting them in remembrance wherein they have offended,
that leaving their wickedness they may believe on thee, O Lord. 3: For it was thy will to destroy
by the hands of our fathers both those old inhabitants of thy holy land, 4: Whom thou hatedst for
doing most odious works of witchcrafts, and wicked sacrifices; 5: And also those merciless mur-
derers of children, and devourers of man’s flesh, and the feasts of blood, 6: With their priests out
of the midst of their idolatrous crew, and the parents, that killed with their own hands souls des-
titute of help: 7: That the land, which thou esteemedst above all other, might receive a worthy
colony of God's children. 8: Nevertheless even those thou sparedst as men, and didst send wasps,
forerunners of thine host, to destroy them by little and little. 9: Not that thou wast unable to bring
the ungodly under the hand of the righteous in battle, or to destroy them at once with cruel beasts,
or with one rough word: 10: But executing thy judgments upon them by little and little, thou ga-
vest them place of repentance, not being ignorant that they were a naughty generation, and that
their malice was bred in them, and that their cogitation would never be changed. 11: For it was a
cursed seed from the beginning; neither didst thou for fear of any man give them pardon for those
things wherein they sinned. 12: For who shall say, What hast thou done? or who shall withstand
thy judgment? or who shall accuse thee for the nations that perish, whom thou made? or who
shall come to stand against thee, to be revenged for the unrighteous men? 13: For neither is there
any God but thou that careth for all, to whom thou mightest shew that thy judgement is not un-
right. 14: Neither shall king or tyrant be able to set his face against thee for any whom thou hast
punished. 15: Forsomuch then as thou art righteous thyself, thou orderest all things righteously:
thinking it not agreeable with thy power to condemn him that hath not deserved to be punish-
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ed. 16: For thy power is the beginning of righteousness, and because thou art the Lord of all, it
maketh thee to be gracious unto all. 17: For when men will not believe that thou art of a full po-
wer, thou shewest thy strength, and among them that know it thou makest their boldness mani-
fest. 18: But thou, mastering thy power, judgest with equity, and orderest us with great favour: for
thou mayest use power when thou wilt. 19: But by such works hast thou taught thy people that the
just man should be merciful, and hast made thy children to be of a good hope that thou givest
repentance for sins. 20: For if thou didst punish the enemies of thy children, and the condemned
to death, with such deliberation, giving them time and place, whereby they might be delivered
from their malice: 21: With how great circumspection didst thou judge thine own sons, unto
whose fathers thou hast sworn, and made covenants of good promises? 22: Therefore, whereas
thou dost chasten us, thou scourgest our enemies a thousand times more, to the intent that, when
we judge, we should carefully think of thy goodness, and when we ourselves are judged, we
should look for mercy. 23: Wherefore, whereas men have lived dissolutely and unrighteously,
thou hast tormented them with their own abominations. 24: For they went astray very far in the
ways of error, and held them for gods, which even among the beasts of their enemies were
despised, being deceived, as children of no understanding. 25: Therefore unto them, as to children
without the use of reason, thou didst send a judgment to mock them. 26: But they that would not
be reformed by that correction, wherein he dallied with them, shall feel a judgment worthy of
God. 27: For, look, for what things they grudged, when they were punished, that is, for them
whom they thought to be gods; [now] being punished in them, when they saw it, they acknow-
ledged him to be the true God, whom before they denied to know: and therefore came extreme
damnation.

6 - Brutish it was!
The Aztec experience proves that the God of the New Testament is the same one as the God of
the Old Testament. At present, however, after Calvary, we can put to use His unique sacrifice to
contain evil and beg grace. Again I cannot resist quoting Prescott:
«« In this state of things, it was beneficently ordered by Providence that the land should be
delivered over to another race, who would rescue it from the brutish superstitions that daily
extended wider and wider, with extent of empire. »»

Indeed ‘brutish’. It is a word not found in the vocabulary of modern anthropologists. There is
nowadays an unfortunate tendency to withhold moral judgement on the cultures that are the ob-
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ject of study. Hugh Thomas in the Preface of his: “Conquest: Montezuma, Cortez and the fall of
old Mexico”, uses a distorted remark from Edward Gibbon. He writes:
«« Different modes of worship seem to most of us as equally true, to our philosophers as
equally false, and to our anthropologists as equally interesting. (…) Every people, it is now
generally supposed, has the right to conduct itself as its rational customs provide. »»

And brutish it was! In course of time the practice of human sacrifice had degenerated into a daily
routine for the sole convenience of Tezcatlipoca, the main Aztec god, whose name appropriately
means smoking mirror, which points at the numbing drowsiness of their blood orgies. For
instance, the freshly stripped-off skin of a human sacrifice was glued (inside-out) to the face of a
priest, who with bare hands ripped out the next heart, still pulsing and gushing blood! (2) Huge
numbers of people where thus sacrificed. At least 20,000 were sacrificed anually in this way.
After a series of killings some of the victims were cannibalised in the course of exquisite ban-
quets. This horror culminated in the year 1486 when, at the dedication of the great temple of
Huitzilpochtli, 70,000 captives are said to have perished. No wonder that Cortés and his men felt
divinely inspired to stop this horror.

7 – The Ten Commandments

Well, the Bible teaches something different then what Hugh Thomas tried to tell us: “Every
people, it is now generally supposed, has the right to conduct itself as its rational customs pro-
vide.” We should keep in mind that the Ten Commandments given at Mount Horeb are an appal-
lingly crude approximation of what moral law should be. It is a shame that God was forced to put
the Ten Commandments in script, the second part in particular. A culture that is not up to the
natural law as expressed in the Decalogue, is in a miserable state. Cain, who killed Abel, did not
reply to God, who reproached him for what he had done, in order to defend himself: “I am not
punishable for killing my brother because You never told me not to do so.” Of course, ‘Thou
should not kill’ is one of the Ten Commandments that was given thousands of years later. This
excuse Cain could not use, because the law of not killing thy brother is in the natural law that is
inscribed in each one’s hearts. And we are all brothers and sisters because we all are children of
One and the same heavenly Father, who loves us all.

Hubert Luns
The photographs of people are from Mel Gibson’s film “Apocalypse”.

Footnotes

The possible existence of cannibalism in the ‘New World’

(1) Pierre Clastres writes:
«« The conquistadors’ chief ambition was to strike it rich in this world — and the sooner the
better. To that end, the Indians had to be exploited and enslaved. The problem was, once the
theologians, after long and patient debates, decided that the inhabitants of the New World
were creatures of God, it was impossible both to evangelise them and reduce them to slavery.
War against the tribes was made illegal, except when it was considered justified: when the
Indians were cannibals. Against them, it was permissible to wage brutal and pitiless war.
The dilemma was thus resolved: claiming that a tribe practiced cannibalism was enough to
justify expeditions against it. The accusations were almost always false, but numerous tribes
perished on plantations and in mines owned by the Europeans, whose only concern was to
have a free hand to build their fiefdoms and increase their profits. In short, the list of
cannibal peoples grew in proportion to the colonialists’ need for slaves. »»

This sounds much fairer than the assertion by William Arens, who high-handedly dismisses all
the transcripts or copied transcripts of the ‘first’ explorers of the New World, whose motives were
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different indeed. In “The Man-Eating Myth” he states that “the entire ethnographic literature
does not include a single satisfactory firsthand ac-count of cannibalism”. That might be so, but
this does not prove the non-existence of cannibalism, because the lack of foolproof scientific
methods has to be placed within the constraints of the field and the accepted way of fact gathering
at the time. It should always be judged within “der Sitz im Leben” or its interrelatedness.

The quote is taken from the 1998 June issue of “The Sciences” that published excerpts from the work of the
late French anthropologist Pierre Clastres († 1977). Incidentally, this was the same issue that broke the
chilling news of the Russians making smallpox the number one strategic weapon in biological warfare, years
after the 1980 triumphant declaration of the World Health Organization that the virus had been eradicated
from the human population. (See also “Once Were Cannibals” by professor Tim D. White, Scientific Ame-
rican - August 2001. It summarized: “Clear evidence of cannibalism in the human fossil record has been
rare, but it is now becoming apparent that the practice is deeply rooted in our history”.)

To have my breast torn open…

(2) The Freemasons found it expedient to have the horrible practice of the Aztec human sacrifice
inspire one of their most important initiation rites. Ever since, they have kept it as a revered
tradition, in the following formula:
«« I most solemnly and sincerely promise and swear without the least hesitation, mental
reservation or self-evasion of mind in me whatever, binding myself under no less penalty
than to have my breast torn open and my heart and vitals taken from thence and thrown over
my left shoulder and carried into the valley of Josaphat, etc. (A variation says:) No less penal-
ty than having my breast torn open, my heart plucked out and placed on the highest pinnacle
of the temple. »»

Of course, this kind of retribution is never used but it remains loathsome all the same. Indeed, the
leaders appear to have other means of avenging dissidents, as explained in “The Brotherhood” by
Stephen Knight under chapter 16, called: “The Dissidents”.

Monte Albán (Mexico), the pyramid of the sun

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.APPENDIX 1.

Mexico’s Golden Age of Christianity

During the sixteenth century the Administra-

tion of the Crown and the clergy tried to pro-
tect the Indians to the best of their ability,
except for the awful period of 1528 to 1531
when the terrible Don Nune de Guzman was
in charge. It was in the year 1531 that the
blessed mother of Jesus Christ appeared under
the name of Tecoatlaxopeuh, meaning “the
stone that crushes the serpent Coatl”. Under
that title she is commonly venerated as the
Virgen (Virgin) “de Guadalupe” (the Aztec
and Spanish names sound similar). Soon after
the apparition followed the miraculous mass-
conversion of the native tribes, who at the time
must have ranged in between 4.5 to 8.5
million people.

Nowadays, Anno 2010, the Basilica of Gua-

dalupe, built to commemorate the event, is one
of the most visited Roman Catholic sanctua-
ries in the world.

In what has been called the “golden age of Christianity”, the sixteenth century was a time of
unprecedented cooperation between the indigenous people and the colonists. Thus it happened
that the very first Bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumár-
raga, carried the title of “Protector of the Indians” and
that the second Viceroy Luis de Velasco became
known as “Father of the Indians”. Only at the end of
the sixteenth century did the merciless and often fatal
exploitation of the Indians begin. As pointed out by
George Vaillant in his “Aztecs of Mexico”, the deci-
sive factor in this shift to serfdom was the destruction
of the Spanish Armada in 1588. With the much
weakened Spanish empire, the communication be-
tween the mother country and the colonies became
increasingly difficult. Control was now desultory and
the laws for the benefit of the Indians, already loosely
observed, were completely ignored. The Indians be-
came indeed an inferior majority, labouring as peons
without hope of legal or social justice.

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.APPENDIX 2.

Long-distance seafaring in the

Ancient Near-East

Taken from the Phoenician Encyclopedia

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References

William Hickling Prescott: “History of the Conquest of Mexico” - The Modern Library,
Random House, New York # 1998 (one of the many reprints of this ‘classic’) # 1843. Quotes from:
Book 3 Ch. 7; Book 4 Ch. 5; Book 6 Ch. 8; Book 6 Ch. 8; Book 1 Ch. 3 (in this sequence).

Frederick F. Cartwright, in collaboration with Michael D. Biddiss: “Disease and History” -

Barnes & Noble Books, New York # 1991. Quote from p. 120.

Hugh Thomas: “Conquest: Montezuma, Cortez, and the Fall of Old Mexico” - Hutchingson,
London # 1993.

Warren H. Carroll: “Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness” - Christendom
Press, Front Royal, Virginia, USA # 2004.