Old World Confronts New World: Europe is Faced with Reminders of its Primitive Past

Old World Confronts New World: Europe is Faced with Reminders of its Primitive Past

The nature of the cultural confrontation that took place between Old and New World cultures was profoundly shaped by the condition of fifteenth century Christian Europe at the moment of contact. Recent scholarship demonstrating parallels between New World and Old World paganism(1) raises the question of whether the reactions of fifteenth century Europeans to the native American cultures were conditioned by their own subconscious awareness of such cultural similarities. Given their history of suppression of their own primitive past, Europeans responded to the New World in the only way they knew how. Everywhere they turned they encountered alien cultural traditions exhibiting characteristics that reminded them of their own subconscious dragons. Acceptance of the Indian cultures on their own terms would have threatened the very catholic social order that had been the sole unifying force in Europe since the disintegration of the Roman Empire. The European predisposition to denigrate everything outside Christian experience was further accentuated by deep internal divisions within Europe that began to rend Christendom asunder in the sixteenth century.

If the permanent opening of the Americas had occurred twelve centuries earlier under the Roman Empire, the nature of the transatlantic cultural exchange might have been dramatically different. For all of their military expansionism and enslavement of conquered enemies, the Romans were remarkably tolerant of cultural and religious diversity. Indeed, their conquest of Germanic tribes along their northern frontier did not prevent them from incorporating Germanic ideas and peoples into their own...

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47 Graves, p. 201.

48 Kerenyi, C., Eleusis: Archetypal Images of Mother and

Daughter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), pp. 177-180.

49 Givry, Emile Grillot de, Picture Museum of Sorcery, Magic,

and Alchemy (New York: University Books, 1929), p. 70.

50 Mattingly, H., Tacitus on Britain and Germany (Baltimore:

Penguin Books, 1967), pp. 106-107.

51 Campbell, The Way of the Seeded Earth, p. 132.

52 Sauer, Carl O., Seeds, Spades, Hearths, and Herds

(Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press,

1969), p. 28.

53 Chiapelli, Fred, First Images of America, Vol. I (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1976), pp. 12-26.

54 Axtell, p. 72.

55 Ibid., p. 131.

56 Diaz, Bernal, The Conquest of New Spain, trans. by J.M.

Cohen (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), pp. 60-61.

57 Axtell, p. 48.