The Canaanites, Christopher Columbus, and Modern Native peoples: When did the Gospel become a gospel of Accommodation, and when did Christians Surrender the Power of the Gospel in Indian Country? (Part IV). Take a step back in time with me to the mid-1500’s. From ancient Cahokia, to Moundville, to Etowah, to Natchez, to the Calusa Indians of what is now Florida, there existed Mississippian cultures that flourished for a thousand years (750-1600 AD.), and these built great earthen mounds known as Temples of the Sun. Great Chiefs ruled these peoples and were shown a deference usually associated with Meso-American monarchs. Mississippian Chiefs drew their power from close association with the sacred, and the spiritual power thought to derive from that association legitimized their social and political authority. Agrarian societies like the Mississippians depended on these spiritually powerful Chiefs to bring rain, nourish the corn, and feed the people. The Great Sun donned regalia that they believed connected them to the Upper and Lower worlds. This crown of feathers was evidence of his intimate relationship with sacred birds and an oral tradition states “they could transform into a thunder deity and travel between this world and the Upper World”. As with all Native cultures, the Mississippian cultures had polytheistic beliefs combined with an animistic view of all creation. Not only did their outward adornments (clothing, jewelry, paint and tattooing), identify them with a certain chiefdom, there was also a particular connection with the spirit world and symbols connected them to that sacred power. The Natchez Chief, or “Great Sun”, like other Mississippian Chiefs was at the same time chief priest, and sovereign of the nation. The Great Sun claimed descent from the Sun, a celestial deity of great importance for these agricultural people. According to the Natchez, the first Great Sun descended from the sky, and was so powerful that he could kill men merely by looking at them. The first Sun ordered that a Temple be built for him to better contain his power. Upon his death, the Sun transformed into a stone and was housed inside this Temple as a symbol of the ruling lineage’s divine ancestry. The Temple was thought to contain powerful, and dangerous “sacred objects”, and only those with requisite knowledge and training could enter. Elevated above the rest, the Chiefs lived in houses atop platform mounds and the raised mound was thought to bring the chief closer to the Sun so that the two could more easily communicate. Across the plaza from the chief’s residence was the village temple, which only elites and religious specialist could access. Since the Chiefs were thought of as Deity, their subjects never came into their presence without saluting them thrice, and always retire going backwards. Through ritual and ceremony, the Great Sun attempted to control the weather, events, and people. In and during times of inter-tribal warfare, captives were vanquished enemies, torn from their own chiefdoms and clans, and were used by chiefs to demonstrate their mastery over foreign places, and external forces. Chiefs may ritually kill captives, retain them as slaves or laborers, or give them away to supporters. Native peoples were ethnocentric and each tended to see itself as the one “true people”, and not all people were endowed with human rights, and therefore taking slaves was a natural part of warfare. Thousands of captives were taken during inter-tribal across the southeast and were either killed, adopted, enslaved, traded, and yes, many were used as victims of unthinkable vengeance, and sacrifice. Bands of Natchez warriors were known to capture a victim, bring him back to the village, strip him naked, scalp him, and then string him up on a sacrificial altar. The victim was then tortured to death with fire, hot nails and irons, and this sometimes for 3 days until he dies. Some captives were ritually sacrificed to the Sun God, and the Temple dedicated to the Sun God was enclosed in a mud brick wall with sharpened wood spikes that bore the decaying heads of enemies that had been sacrificed. Infant sacrifice was also common amongst the tribes living along the Gulf Coast to appease a deity, funeral rites, or even to raise one’s social status in the tribe. Upon the death and funerary of a Great Sun, several infants, young women, slaves, wives, and pipe-bearers were strangled to serve the Sun, or Tattooed Serpent in the spirit world. One such example is Mound 72 in Cahokia, Illinois. It is a “10-foot (3-meter) high structure located less than a half-mile south of Monks Mound. It dates between 1050 and 1150 and holds the remains of 272 people, many of them sacrificed — the largest number of sacrificial victims ever found north of Mexico. In one case 39 men and women were executed “on the spot”. It seemed likely the victims had been lined up on the edge of the pit... and clubbed one by one so that their bodies fell sequentially into it. In another episode of sacrifice, 52 malnourished women between the ages of 18 and 23 appear to have been sacrificed at the same time, along with a woman in her 30s. In another burial episode, 15 corpses, a mix of men, women and children, were found on wooden stretchers. Curiously, this burial mound also has the remains of two men who were found buried with 20,000 shell beads, likely the remains of a garment(s). Analysis of their remains indicates that they consumed a large amount of meat, suggesting that they were elite members of Cahokia’s society, the human sacrifices at the mound possibly dedicated to them in some way.” This is but a brief exposit on the pre-Columbus Mississippian cultures that flourished here in America. Much of the “sacred power” bestowed on Chiefs such as the Great Sun was cloaked in spirituality. With this perceived power and authority, these Chiefs were able to wield absolute authority over their people for a thousand years that resulted in human sacrifice, slavery, and all sorts of spiritual abuse. As I have stated many times over, the accusations of wholesale “spiritual abuse” at the hands of the earliest Christian missionaries to Native Americans is not only untrue, but the isolated instances of abuse pale in comparison to the centuries of abuse at the hands of Native chiefs, sachems, deified men/women, the ruling elite, medicine men, or spiritual leaders.
Posted on: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 14:54:19 +0000
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