Theological Knots
It’s late, I just got off of a 12 hour shift and I have another tomorrow, but fuck it, I feel like posting as I finally figured out how I wanted to write this particular article on my way home from work and I didn’t get to update on my regular days due to RCN kindly deciding I needed a break from Teh Intarwebs. Freaking cable companies… It’ll just be an extra caffeine day later.
Anyway, enough preliminary bitching for now, time to get to the meat of the matter – the theological knots I was tied into for a month or so that prompted me to take a sabbatical.
The Problem of Evil/Suffering, Pagan-Style - Probably the most immortal problem of theology throughout history. If the gods are real, intelligent, powerful, personal beings, why does so much shit happen? Or more precisely, why does so much shit happen to people who are trusting and begging their deities to help them?
Aztec Reconstructionism isn’t hit quite as hard by this as most flavors of the Abrahamic monotheisms that posit the classic “tri-omni” or “omnimax” god, a god that’s all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving. The gods of Mesoamerica aren’t morally black and white, they’re all shades of grey, sometimes helping, sometimes harming, and certainly capable of hating. For example, Tlaloc waters the earth and feeds the land, yet He is also depicted as greedy, moody, and jealous, prone to striking the people with drought and famine if not placated. Quetzalcoatl is the patron of learning and wisdom, yet He has a darker face as the Evening Star and the first wielder of the sacrificial blade. This pattern is universal among the Teteo.
So the Teteo aren’t purely benevolent beings, meaning we shouldn’t expect this world to be free from suffering and disaster at times. Still… why do They let Their own worshippers suffer and die? Most significantly, why did They seem to abandon the Aztecs and their kin to near-extermination at the hands of the Conquistadores? Especially when it meant that Their own names would nearly be wiped from history as the Jesuits and Inquisition did its damnedest to convert the Nahuas to Catholicism?
Under circumstances that extreme, one would think that the Teteo would have roused Themselves to protect Their people, assuming that They are powerful, personal intelligences. Trying to square history with that type of theology is like slamming my head against a brick wall — I get nowhere, and a nasty headache.
But at least I’m not alone in that frustration — the Aztecs were trying to make sense out of the whole thing right after the Conquest. I’ve come across several myths that developed immediately post-Conquest in an attempt to answer “Why?” and will be sharing them in my next couple of updates as companion pieces to this article.
What Are The Gods, Anyway? – This one ties in with the first broad question above. What are the gods? Are they sentient, individual, personal beings wielding power on a cosmic scale? Or are They impersonal forces, trends, or core concepts inherent in the Universe that humans have fashioned masks for in an attempt to comprehend the nearly-incomprehensible?
If They are personal beings, then one is stuck trying to answer Question 1 above. Why does the world as it is not seem to match how it theoretically should look? Why is it so notoriously difficult to prove the effectiveness of prayer? And how do you reconcile all the incompatible theistic religions of the world? They can’t all be 100% right. And if you claim the religion you adhere to just happens to be the One True Religion, how do you explain the experiences people have in different religions? Christianity and Islam tend to say that everyone else is merely being deceived by demons (classical Judaism doesn’t say this, technically, it’s traditionally more henotheistic than purely monotheistic). I’ll be blunt — this is ridiculously, laughably lame. And arrogantly lazy. I don’t buy it.
If They aren’t personal beings, but are something more abstract and impersonal, then why do billions of people seem to experience Them as personal entities? And on a daily practice level, why bother with any rituals or worship if no one is paying attention anyway? This seems like a major issue in a religion as sacrifice-oriented as that of the Aztecs.
Buddhism and Confucianism try to answer that one by saying that it develops charity, reverence, and compassion in the worshipper, and brings order and stability to the larger community. Perhaps, but why bother with the label of religion then? In the Aztec Reconstructionist context, are there historical grounds for supporting traditional ritual if the gods are impersonal? Everything I’ve read seems to point towards a view of Them as personal beings, and the reasoning behind why a worshipper should and shouldn’t do certain things all hinges on the gods being sentient individuals.
I don’t have any answers to this one either at this time. I can’t deny that I’ve experienced Huitzilopochtli and others with all the trappings of a personal, intelligent entity in the past, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to fit this in with all the other stuff about the world in a harmonious way, let alone the crap that this raises with regards to the classic Problem of Evil. Basically, I have no fucking clue what’s going on, but I stay here in the Aztec Recon camp because it’s by far the most starkly beautiful and satisfying system I’ve ever come across. It’s already become home to me. As such, I can live with ambiguity and uncertainty while I continue to chew on these problems. Plus, I feel that it’s right and proper — I had asked for a revelation from Whoever wanted to give me one, no matter what form it took or Who it came from, and I got what I asked for. It would be bad faith to bail just because I don’t have it all figured out.
The Point — Ok, so what’s the point of this long, tail-chasing ramble? Mainly, that the circle goes round and round, and doesn’t seem to lend itself to definite answers. Despite that, however, I think it’s important that the Pagan community, no matter what tradition you follow, starts to address this stuff more in-depth. If we want to be taken seriously, we need to prove that we have depth of thought as well as vitality of practice. And frankly, I think it’s important at the individual. Don’t we want to know what we believe, why we believe it, and how it all hangs together? I know I do.
As as result, I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is and start writing about some of my own thoughts on these subjects, in addition to presenting the usual historical material, myths, and ritual “how to” guides. These will be categorized with the additional new category of “Cehualli’s View” to distinguish them clearly from more historically-oriented info. You don’t have to agree with me, but I’d like you to take a moment to think about why you don’t – or do, for that matter – and develop your own theological understanding.
Stay tuned for some of the Post-Conquest myths I mentioned above that give us a glimpse into how the Aztecs themselves tried to answer some of these questions in the wake of the holocaust in Mexico.
IDk how much you know about Buddhism, but I find the philsophy of it enlightening. One of the priary focuses is suffering:
http://buddhism.kalachakranet.org/4_noble_truths.html
Theres different philosphies of Buddhism. I found Mahayana and its thoughts on suffering and Ego to be very useful in my life. Believe it or not, Buddhism and suffering isn’t all this karma shit that many in the West believe it to be.
I also like Heather’s word in the Silent Hill 3 video game:
“Listen. Suffering is a fact of life.
Either you learn to deal with that or you
go under.”
As for the conquest. I can’t help that the Aztecs refused to listen to their gods, specifically Tezcatlipoca. But I do know how much suffering the Aztec gods caused the Toltecs if you read up on the fall of Tula. Sometimes I think the gods get pissed and let everything go to hell. Like how the Chichimecs, those wandering nomadic people, actually beat the Toltecs. The Teteo are also partily responsble for the destruction. This may not be especially Aztec, but in Mesoamerica, many civs raised and fell like the tide of the ocean.
Another key in Teteo thinking is actually something I got from Judaism. God lefts his hand of protection on Israel when they sin. Because the sin, God allows other people to conqour them, such as the Romans. Not saying that the Aztecs were sinners, saying that I feel the Teteo “left their hand of protection” so to speak when they are not very amused by people. Plus the Aztecs had fair warning and were told specifically not to allow the Spaniards in.
But in this destruction, i believe that the gods also helped perserve alot of the Mexica’s culture. Especially Quetzalcoatl, after the conquest. After all I am still amazed that the Borgia made its way to Rome, and into servants quarters for the kids to play with, but some how miraclesly managed to survive eventually. Yeah, the Teteo made sure they weren’t going to be “forgotten”.
Hi Xuchil,
I studied Chan Buddhism (a major Chinese Mahayana sect) intensively for over a year, supported by my existing foundation on the Daoist and Confucian heavyweights. I was reading the major sutras, Nagarjuna, Hui Neng, etc. and was at the point of needing to make the decision whether I was going to formally commit to Buddhism by taking refuge in the Triple Gem.
Much of the philosophy is razor-sharp, particularly dependent origination, annicca, and annatta, but it is plagued by a tendency towards life-denial and idealistic devaluation of the so-called “darker” half of nature. This is ultimately what caused me to decline to commit to Buddhism permanently and prompted me to continue searching for a more balanced system of thought and spirituality — and then Huitzil made His move, and the rest is history.
So, in a roundabout way of saying it, I don’t fear suffering and I don’t consider it a sign of a fall from Edennic grace or a deviation from “how the world SHOULD be” like the various soteriological religions do. Death, decay, and chaos are as natural and necessary to existence as life, growth, and order. It’s the *illogical* suffering that gets me, the stuff that points either at personal gods who are inactive – or breathtakingly callous towards their worshippers who trust in them, or else impersonal, abstract gods.
Granted, there *is* another option, though it requires positing the existence of something like “Fate.” The gods didn’t intervene because they *couldn’t* do so effectively. In the example of the Conquest I gave in the article, it was simply and inexorably time for the Empire to die, regardless of its effect on the people involved, and nothing the gods could do could avert it. Given the traditional emphasis on the interpretation of the tonalpohualli and its influence, I think there’s solid ground to support the view that the Aztecs did believe in Fate. Whether or not Fate actually objectively exists is another question, of course, but I doubt it can be dispensed with if we want to try to make sense of events from the perspective of their religion.
There’s a parallel in Buddhism — the devas, bodhisattvas, and buddhas can’t singlehandedly wipe out the effects of karma upon a person, they just don’t have that power. No one does. You sow, you reap, end of story. All supernatural beings can do is to try to cushion the blow and help you pick up the pieces afterwards. The problem comes in when you hit people suffering for no fault of their own — which is where rebirth comes in to solve the problem in Buddhism, but the Aztecs lacked this “out.” Why not help those innocents out?
I’d have to say that the Buddhist logic also applies well in this case from a big-picture perspective — it was the combined consequences of the actions of several generations of the Aztec people during the heydey of the Empire that planted and watered the seeds of their own demise. The Tlaxcalans and other tribes had a pretty legitimate beef with the Empire after the way they’d been treated for decades. I doubt the decadence and extreme social inequality that was developing within helped the situation any. If the Spaniards hadn’t shown up, they still were dead men walking, so to speak, just like the Toltecs. All things are born, and all things die.
These angles seem to pose fewer problems than assuming straightforward divine punishment. Old Testament/Tula-style smackdown opens the door to theology that can become monstrous — it legitimates the concept of collective punishment, of kids paying for the sins of their parents, and, crucial to the point of whether the gods are worth worshipping, it gives the gods a free pass to do things like that and then calls it “holy.” I’ve witnessed countless Calvinist Christians justify the Holocaust with that kind of “hand of protection” theology. I find it abominable, and consider any god that’s ok with such a practice as to be unworthy of worship, even if it were proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to exist.
I can’t say anything about whether the Aztecs had fair warning or not, and whether they refused to obey the Teteo, as all we have on that point are scattered legends from the Conquest era filtered through the pens of the victors. I’m not inclined to interpret them as literal history, same for the classic Tula cycle.
As for the role of the Teteo in preservation of the Aztec culture, I can’t say, as I’d have to have the question about what is the nature of the gods cleared up first before I could even decide whether it was a possibility for such intervention, no matter how subtle.
Thank you for your comment, Xuchil, batting this kind of stuff around out loud is extremely helpful for trying to make progress on working these issues out, particularly when the other party has a knack for provoking thought.
>It’s the *illogical* suffering that gets me, the stuff that points either at personal gods who are inactive – or breathtakingly callous towards their worshippers who trust in them, or else impersonal, abstract gods.
Theres gods like that. Kali is said to deprive her “children” of earthly desires. This is a chapter on Kali from Kinsley’s book of Hindu goddesses. You may take inspiration from Ramprasad Sen, there and his poems about and to Kali.
We had a discussion about fate before, and Yehecatl posted something in his blog about it. The Aztecs, if a child was born with a ill sign, would try to “defy” fate, by naming the kid after a more lucky sign. It seems alot of cultures from around the world do rituals that are similar to defy fate. Theres also Tezcatlipoca, whose the god of fate. This would be a part of the Aztecs daily lives.
> I’ve witnessed countless Calvinist Christians justify the Holocaust with that kind of “hand of protection” theology. I find it abominable, and consider any god that’s ok with such a practice as to be unworthy of worship, even if it were proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to exist.
I don’t think the Holocust was God’s doing. But I do know that God is supposed to be the most evil and good thing in their universe, at least within Judaism. However, I find Tezcatlipoca’s endeavours to be quite “evil”. And IDk if I would consider malevolent deities, to be unworthy of devotion, since I am oddly attracted to those types and I do think some people deserve it. Xolotl is a god that if you’ve me Him before, (don’t know if you have) you can see just how wicked Teteo can really be. Also, Tez, because of my bad experiences with Him when you piss Him off. *note: Don’t try to intenially piss Him off. He’ll become Yaotl to you. There was name for Tezcatlipoca in Aztec history, where people called Him the English equilivent of a “fag” (any thing about calling Him a homo pisses Him off tho) to piss Him if they were sick. This was done so that He’d either have mercy on them, or kill them because of their suffering.
I like the Buddhist motto of not giving respect to those who don’t deserve it, only respect things that are respectiable. When the Teteo let shit happen, abnormal suffering that is, or do something malevolent to people like cause the destruction of a empire, I stay out of it. I believe that they are doing what they know best. And personally I have seen instances in history where the exetremly bad things like the black death for example actually ended up helping the economy etc when they had to pick up the pieces and rebuild.
I also take the Buddhist and realistic perspective, that some suffering is just people. It all has to do with them. And not divine crap.