Pre/Post-Conquest Religion

Paper Summary:

The paper focuses on the following questions: to what extent, and how, did pre-Conquest native religion survive into the seventeenth century; and to what extent, and how, was Christianity transformed in the process of being assimilated by native societies? The paper looks first at pre-Conquest religion in these societies in order to reinforce the comparisons with post-Conquest religious practices.

From the Paper:

"The native populations of the Andes and Mesoamerica (the Incas and the Aztecs respectively) were very religious people, with their religion guiding the path of their lives on a daily, but also lifetime, basis. The Aztecs believed in polytheism, with a complex mix of many gods and goddesses; the cult of Huitzilopochtli followed the most important tribal god, and led to the creation of a tribal empire, that hosted daily human sacrifices, in order to pacify the gods and goddesses, and to maintain the Earth's equilibrium (Burkholder and Johnson, 2003)."

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