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90 When a people is subjugated, it is relatively easy for the conquerors to impose new art, new industries, new customs, and other manifestations of culture. But it is very difficult and time-consuming to make the conquered accept new religious ideas. Since its origins on the arid hill of Calvary, Christianity was imposed on paganism and Judaism at the cost of torrents of blood. The reformist sects achieved triumph after running through many thorny paths and leaving a trail of martyrs behind them. Almost all religious transitions have had some bloody Saint Bartholomew as their price. Why was the transition from indigenouspaganismtoSpanishCatholicisminthesixteenthcenturyrelatively easy? How is it that only Catholicism has been implanted among us, in spite of active—if pointless—attempts to introduce Protestantism? The transition from indigenous paganism to Catholicism found no obstacles because the two religions shared certain elements that were propitious to their fusion. In contrast, paganism and Protestantism are dissimilar in essence and form. Catholicism was not imposed by the biting scourge, or by the Sacred Office, or by the charity of the missions. Had it been, rivers of blood would have flowed in Mexico as well. It is well-known that attempts at rebellion during the Colonial period were fights brought on by hunger, lack of land, oppression , and a thousand other causes, but almost never by struggles over religion. The soul of the indigene was gently occupied by Catholicism. The old pagan myths fused with the faith of the Roman Church, were transformed by it, or died quietly. The religious ideas of the pre-Hispanic groups of Mexico differ from one another in terms of their external modalities but were similar 19 Our Religious Transition 91 O u r R e l i g i o u s T r a n s i t i o n enough to make some generalizations. To prove my previous assertions about our religious transition, one can choose any of those religions, such as the Azteco-Teotihuacán, which has interesting historical antecedents and profuse representations in the archaeological record. The indigenous deities had an abstract origin; they were fabulous and humanly inexplicable. However, their means of manifesting themselves to humans was very objective, as they are always shown in the form of persons or diverse animals and objects. Each of those gods reigned over a clearly delimited range of intellectual and material activities. Worship and ritual were symbolic, eye-catching, and complex. Thus, the Aztec god of war was symbolized by a bundle of hummingbird feathers that fell into the breast of his mother, a pious woman of Coatlán, as she was sweeping the temple. The prodigious infant had human form but wore a beautiful headdress of hummingbird feathers on his left leg and the beak of the same bird upon his face. His worship was bloody, with anthropophagic communion; dances and songs; the use of blood and burning copal, mica, and charcoal; maguey paper; and rubber. This god was the tutelary deity of war, so that good harvests, rains, and other gifts were not sought from him. These attributions of divinity were extremely diverse. There were 400 gods of pulque (so we should not be scandalized by the number of pulquerias nowadays ). Chaste and lustful love, death, maternity, and old age were each presided over or depended upon one or more deities. So did air, fire, water, the stars, the months, and all that was tangible to the senses and intelligence in the physical and psychic world. The limitless number of gods consecrated in the Valley of Mexico becomes clear in a mythological fable, probably of Teotihuacán origin, that tells of their birth. The original couple of gods, denizens of the seventeenth heaven, conceived an obsidian knife rather than a divine offspring as their last child. Disgusted, its siblings threw it to the earth, where it shattered into a thousand pieces, each of which gave birth to a flaming god. Let us now see how Catholicism was presented to and taken up by the Aztecs. The Indian saw in the Mother of God the quintessential synthesis of feminine deities and considered her a major goddess. Jesus Christ entered the pre-Hispanic Olympus as the first of the gods. However, God the Father was not comprehensible to those iconolophiles, because of his abstract conception and lack of a material representation. The Aztecs accepted the Roman calendar with all of its saints, because these seemed few in contrast to their own gods. The Indians...

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