Free The Great Divide by Peter Watson Page A

THE N EW W ORLD
    Ideological life in the Americas was very different. For a start, there were no domesticated mammals, save for the llama, vicuña and guanaco in South America. One effect of this absence of domesticated mammals was to make vegetal life far more salient in the Americas, and this brought with it certain ideas.
    The simple, the most obvious, and the most powerful, is that plants need to be planted underground , where they undergo a transformation from seed into shoot. This, combined with hallucinogenic experiences, helps explain why, for the ancient Americans, the cosmos was divided vividly into three zones – the Upper, Middle and Underworld. It was convincingly reinforced by the experiences of the shaman who, in trance, underwent soul flight, in order to consult the gods and/or the ancestors, and who used hallucinogenic plants to achieve these feats. Fertility was an issue in the New World but, in the tropical rainforests, teeming with life and with plants growing in profusion all through the year (as manioc did, for example), and where the seasons hardly varied, it was never the overwhelming issue it was in the temperate Old World.
    Much more important in the New World mindset were the feared and admired jaguar, and the weather gods – gods of lightning, rain and hail or violent winds, of thunderstorms, erupting volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis, ‘dangerous weather’, as Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell put it. 8 Moreover, volcanic activity, ‘tectonic religion’, as they also say, comprise evidence of ‘humanity’s closeness to the underworld in general’ and its sheer power in particular. 9 With the enso increasing in frequency, at least during the last 5,800 years (chapter five) the gods, far from smiling on humankind in the New World, have been getting angrier.
    This outline is further supported by a third factor: copious evidence of violence inherent in ancient Meso- and South American religions generally. In chapter twelve we saw that the Cashinahua, under the influence of hallucinogens, saw snakes, falling trees, terrifying jaguars, anacondas and alligators. We saw that the Mayans dreaded the mushroom of the underworld and at other times worshipped storm gods. We saw that cacao was linked to volcanoes, sacred vessels being made of volcanic ash. In chapter fourteen, we saw that the jaguar was linked to lightning and thunder, how it was invariably depicted with its fangs showing, and snarling, its claws exposed as it raped or attacked or ate human hearts. We saw how, in some Mesoamerican cities, obsidian blades, used for ripping out the hearts of sacrificial victims, were metaphors for jaguar teeth. In chapter seventeen we noticed that the Olmec faced the problem of too much water, that they had ‘inundation’ cults, Lords of the Storms, Masters of Lightning, and that their shamans were known as ‘men of hail’. We noted that the Chavín, though not a rainforest people, nonetheless depicted snarling jaguars in their art, that their architecture, as Richard Burger says, acted as a focus for ‘dangerous supernatural forces’. In chapter twenty we recorded how volcanoes were treated as gods, the impact of earthquakes on the Chavín, the devastation that El Niños caused the Moche. We saw that the mountains were gods to the Mayans, that the Zapotec and Mixtec worshipped natural forces, rain and lightning respectively. And in chapter twenty-one we explored the concept of ‘dark shamanism’, the manipulation of threat, that negative events, events that need to be averted, were of immense importance in these New World societies.
    In chapter twenty-one, Steve Bourget’s work was discussed, in which he showed a direct association between sacrifice and torrential rain on the north coast of Peru, which he says may have been El Niño events. Children sacrificed nearby on mountain tops had zigzag decorations, as if they were dedicated to lightning. The very existence of weather shamans, as