On Blood Libel In The Yucatan
Pigs, Diego de Landa and the Anxiety of Influence
“As I do not know what to call these things, I cannot express them.”
– Hernàn Cortez, Second Letter to Emperor Charles V (1520)
In 1984, the Australian anthropologist Michael Taussig wrote the pathbreaking essay ‘Culture of Terror—Space of Death.’ The work is about many things but one of its biggest concerns is how so few Europeans were able to control so many indigenous peoples in the Americas. According to him, they did so by cultivating a climate of ‘magical realism,’ a ‘space of death’ that worked by “creating an uncertain reality out of fiction, a nightmarish reality in which the unstable interplay of truth and illusion becomes a social force of horrendous and phantasmic dimensions.”
In other words, a lurid form of collage. Atrocities real and imagined were inlaid next to old and new frames of reference, distorting them to stupendous proportions while consolidating colonial power by giving it a purpose. This diabolical struggle against barbarism was animated by “metamorphosing images of evil and the underworld: in the Western tradition, Homer, Virgil, the Bible, Dante, Bosch, the Inquisition, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Heart of Darkness.” Taussig is saying we bring our imaginations wherever we go and that they can run riot when language and verisimilitude seem at odds.
This is as true of (Joseph Conrad’s) Kurtz as it was of the Conquistadors. The above epigraph comes from Hernàn Cortez’s Letter to Emperor Charles V about the conquest of the Aztecs. He wasn’t as tongue-tied as he claims because what follows is a sprawlingly effervescent account of his victory over Moctezuma and the ways of his subjects. When Cortez couldn’t find the words describe what he saw, he fell back on the casuistry of the familiar. Hence, Aztec customs are described as Moorish, their temples called mosques and their practice of human sacrifice testament to their similarly ‘barbarous’ ways. Off the back of his writings (and those of his companions), some historians have claimed the Aztecs sacrificed anywhere between 20,000-250,000 people per year , which must have been used to construct all those towers of skulls they describe. Even though as of 2020, only 606 such skulls have been recovered by archeologists throughout Mexico.
Something doesn’t add up here—and maybe that’s because when faced with a new, pockmarked reality, people tend to fill in the blanks with older, tried and tested formulations. It’s how we make the world legible. But when it comes to human sacrifice in the Americas, we should think twice about what we’re using to smooth things over. Cortez’s talk of mosques is one example of the resulting distortions but there are others a good deal more uncanny.
At the end of my last post, I talked about the orthographic similarity between ‘Indio’ and ‘Iudio’ in Spanish and how easy it would be to mistake one for the other. That’s precisely what happened with the Mayans of the Yucatan.
A Lost Tribe
Whether it was their rejection of pork in some quarters or their supposed practice of circumcision in others, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas weren’t just thought to resemble Jews, many Spaniards thought they were descended from one of Israel’s long-lost Tribes. “Some men of Yucatan say that they have heard from their ancestors that this country was peopled by a certain race who came from the East, whom God delivered by opening for them twelve roads through the sea,” wrote the Friar Diego de Landa in 1547. “If this is true, all of the inhabitants of the Indies must be of Jewish descent.” De Landa’s theory became wildly popular in the ensuing years, inspiring countless other Spanish clergymen and later, their anglophone counterparts to try and account for how they lost their way. That’s how we got the first theory around the indigenous Americans crossing the Bering Strait. Even Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon religion expounded a version of it that is still defended by some of his adherents today.
But back to de Landa. This was no innocent supposition on his part and becomes darker still when we consider his background. Born to a noble family of old Christians in Cifuentes, the town in which he was raised also hosted large converso communities of both Jewish and Muslim descent whose piety was very much in doubt. He started his career as a royal notary and quickly had two sons, but upon the death of his wife, he dawned the cassock and joined the same Franciscan brotherhood as two of the monumental figures in Spanish Church history. The first is Cardinal Cisneros, former confessor to Queen Isabel of Spain and later, perhaps the most rapacious Grand Inquisitor the Iberian Peninsula had ever seen. The second is Alonso de Espina, often credited as the father of the Spanish Inquisition and the author of the polemical Fortilium Fidei, which contains within its pages one of the most comprehensive lists of Jewish and Muslim perfidy ever compiled. Among these supposed crimes were scores of blood libel accusations, some of which involved very particular invocations of pigs.
For instance, the first recorded Spanish case of blood libel (c.1250). It’s the story of Dominguito de Val, it comes to us courtesy of the king of Aragon, Alfonso X and goes like this—the Jews of Zaragoza kidnap a choirboy to perform blood magic rites on him. The idea was to crucify him, cut out his heart then mix it with a consecrated host, a sip of which would spell the demise of the town’s Christian inhabitants. They lose their nerve the first time around and cut out a pig's heart instead, then throw it in the river. But when the town’s pigs all die upon drinking from its streams, they proceed to do the same to Dominguito after crucifying him. Their plan is foiled right before they profane the host, their wickedness is revealed, and they’re summarily executed. Two centuries later, the same tropes crop up with Alonso de Espina’s ‘Pig Libel’ (also see Misgav Har-Peled), who advocated expelling Spain’s Jews off the back of similarly apocryphal misdeeds’ (featuring pig hearts) in France. When Spain finally did expel their Jews in 1492, it was the Holy Child of Laguardia that would make the case (supposedly, he was crucified and hidden in a cave) with the canonical version from 1544 citing it all as a rematch following said French attempt with the pig heart.
De Landa would have known these stories. When he arrived in the Yucatan in 1549, he was 25 years old, had left behind his two sons and was severely asthmatic in one of the worst places you could have asthma. But he took to his missionary work with gusto and at least the way he tells it, things were peaceable enough at the beginning. That changed in 1562 when one of his Franciscan brothers called for help having uncovered a case of idolatry. The problem wasn’t just the recidivism. While concerning, it wasn’t exactly a surprise—the crown had already banned forced conversions, thinking it unrealistic to expect the Mayans to embrace Christian doctrine in so little time. The problem was a year earlier, this same Friar Rodrigo had been shown the corpse of a dead child with strange markings around his temple, wrists and ankles. Rodrigo must have dismissed it as smallpox because he told his congregants not to worry. But later, upon stumbling across ‘pagan rites’ in the forest, he looked back at those markings and thought he recognised stigmata and the imprint of a crown of thorns. He had seen this kind of thing before—or at least heard of it, and promptly called his Diego de Landa to his side. They immediately went about setting up the first Inquisition tribunal in the Americas.
Magical Realism And The Inquisition
Like his Franciscan forebears, de Landa would quickly become synonymous with the Inquisition’s excesses, only this time it wasn’t crypto-Jews and Muslims he was looking to expose, it was the Mayans. His methods were officially banned by the Council of the Indies 1543, but de Landa argued such exceptional cases of idolatry, human and animal sacrifice demanded exceptional measures. Take the case of Francisco Chuc, a Mayan convert. On August 11, 1562, he admitted to Franciscan priests that he and four other community members sacrificed a pig inside the village church, crucified it, then plunged another burning cross into its stomach to extinguish the flames. They soon moved on to sacrificing children from adjacent villages, removing their hearts and offering them up to their gods. The account is one of many that detail similar animal and human sacrifices, host desecration as well as the crucifixion of children, the removal of their hearts and the disposal of their bodies in caves (cẽnotes). Which rather pivotally meant you needn’t link an actual corpse to said sacrilegious crime.
Pigs as a prep run before humans, mock crucifixions of children, the desecration of the Eucharist, even the caves—these themes all crop up in Spanish blood libel tales from Dominguito de Val to El Santo Nĩno de La Guardia. Every single confession relating to human and animal sacrifice de Landa recorded was obtained through torture. When his inquisition was halted by the Bishop of Yucatan on account of its brutality, almost all of them were recanted and de Landa was recalled to Spain to answer for his crimes. During its three-month run, de Landa and his Inquisitors tortured some 4500 people, killing at least 157 of them and maiming countless others.
What’s baffling about this particularly sinister episode of colonial history isn’t just the sheer extent of violence, but also how it influenced the way we look at Mayan society. Not many scholars dispute that in very particular ritual contexts, the Mayans sacrificed both animals and humans (while sparse, there is archeological evidence to support these claims, although nowhere near at the frequency attributed to the Aztecs). The point is that almost all of our actual surviving accounts of both come directly from de Landa himself because he burnt most of the Mayan sacred texts and scrolls in one of his inquisitorial auto-de-fes.
De Landa’s comprehensive account of Mayan life, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán (1566), was written after he was shipped back to Spain and is more than a little exculpatory. The codices he burnt didn’t just record the lineage of notables but also detailed their possessions, rights and properties. Some scholars think the five thousand or so ‘idols’ that also went up in flames fulfilled a similar function by linking people to particular lineages and their entitlements. For de Landa, these artefacts “contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil,” which is why he was befuddled that burning them all “caused them much affliction.” Little wonder—aside from the sacrilegious affront, he destroyed their claims to both possessions and status, making them all the more dependent upon the Franciscans and the Spanish Crown for both.
On The Anxiety of Influence
Most scholars have taken de Landa at his word since his writings were uncovered in the 19th century. We shouldn’t blindly follow suit. The Franciscans had a habit of kidnapping the children of Mayan nobles and raising them in the ways of the faith (even ordaining some) and then sending them back out to enforce orthodoxy over their indigenous, now nominally Christian brethren. Is it not too much to suggest that some may have been familiar with blood libel or at least its imagery? That perhaps the anxiety of influence weighed heavily on de Landa’s shoulders and during his interrogations, he was searching for a very particular smattering of tropes and motifs? And that with sufficient time and the egregious methods at his disposal, he found what he was looking for? I’d like to suggest something different—that in the phantasmagoria of the surrounding forest, Diego de Landa found himself staring at an image of home turned upside down. Face to face with the uncanny itself, he groped in the dark for a set of explanations to steady his feet and settled on something equally familiar.
That may seem like a stretch on his part, but the human imagination is a capacious thing. As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, “Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.”
Next week, we’ll chart this kind of thing on display with Alexander Von Humboldt and his impressions of the Mexican Casta system.