Mexico Rebarbarizes

And: Jeff Kripal's Oddness; Enchanted Charlton; Mrs. Jellyby At Prayer; Neoliberalism

That’s popular Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum participating recently in some kind of ceremony meant to honor indigenous women. When she was inaugurated last year, she held a public ritual in which indigenous women “cleansed” her. A friend from Central America told me on Friday that based on what his Mexican relatives tell him, he would not be at all surprised if Mexico City reverted to Tenochtitlán, its Aztec name. If that happens, it will be because of the broader de-Christianization and re-indigenization of the country.

Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who defeated the Aztec Empire, is buried in Mexico City, in a small, austere tomb located inside a church. The church discourages photographing the tomb, owing to the sensitivity of Cortés’s legacy. In contemporary Mexico, Cortés is widely despised as the chief villain behind colonialism. AMLO, Sheinbaum’s predecessor in office (they are members of the same left-wing party), heavily leaned in to demonizing Cortés and promoting pre-Christian indigenous culture. This is about left-wing populism.

We should not forget that whatever evils the conquistadores wreaked on the indigenous Mexicans, their defeat of the Aztecs stopped a satanic empire that engaged in ritual human sacrifices in massive numbers. The machinery of systematic mass murder defeated by Cortés and his men was such that humanity would not see anything like it again until the Holocaust.

Last year, I wrote here about a new book by the US journalist Randall Sullivan, who wrote about evil — especially spiritual evil. These are quotes from his book about the existence of the occult within contemporary Mexican society:

I repeated what I had heard from Antonio Zavaleta, a professor of anthropology in the University of Texas system and the closest thing to an authority on the subject of Mexican witchcraft as exists in American academia. Zavaleta, half Mexican and half Irish, told me that he had struggled for decades with what for him was still an unresolved dichotomy: “In the Mexican culture, things that would be seen by you and me as clearly defined evil aren’t seen that way at all. For instance, the use of a supernatural medium to accomplish someone’s death would clearly be considered evil by American standards. But here at the border [Zavaleta was living in Brownsville, Texas] it is part of everyday life. People don’t see it as evil, or in terms of right or wrong. They don’t understand it in those terms. It’s just part of their cultural reality. If you’re able to manipulate the spiritual or supernatural world, then you have a right to. This is a power you possess and you can use it if you want.”

More:

The Spaniards’ new residence was directly across from the spectacular pyramidal temple of the Hummingbird Wizard. The temple had been dedicated just thirty-two years earlier by the man regarded as the architect of the Aztec Empire, Tlacaelel. The highlight of the ceremony was the greatest human slaughter in the history of the Mexica—eighty thousand sacrificed, according to a sixteenth-century Aztec historian; the lines of those who would die stretched for miles, he recalled, and the killing went on without interruption for four days and nights. The Aztec nobility were provided with seats in boxes covered with rose blossoms intended to mask the smell of drying blood and rotting flesh. The stench was overwhelming, though, before even a thousand were dead, and by the second day nearly every one of the boxes was empty.

Yet the eighty-nine-year-old Tlacaelel remained the entire time, personally observing each and every sacrifice. It was Tlacaelel who had instituted Aztec worship of Huitzilopchtli, the Spaniards would learn, and who had invented the “Flower Wars”—contrived conflicts with neighboring tribes that were intended only to take prisoners for sacrifice to the Lover of Hearts and Drinker of Blood.

One more quote from Sullivan’s book:

For Christians, Catholics in particular, it was for hundreds of years an article of faith that what Cortés and his men confronted at Tenochtitlan had been the Devil’s own empire. As the Catholic writer Warren H. Carroll observed of fifteenth-century Mexico, “Nowhere else in human history has Satan so formalized and institutionalized his worship with so many of his own actual rites and symbols.”

The killing went on for four days and four nights. And now, Mexico is regressing to barbarism. Its political elites, enamored of leftist pieties about the sanctity of the Other, are leading the way. This will not end well. Not all re-enchantment is to be welcomed. The Guadalupana was God’s instrument in delivering the Indians of Mexico from that evil; may she do so again.

You might wince at the comparison, but reading that Yale Press history book Hitler’s Monsters, about the role the supernatural and the occult played in the rise and practice of Nazism, I am not sanguine about what can happen when a nation goes in search of identity and authenticity by re-embracing en masse its pre-Christian gods.