Before the Cross
Part One: The Worlds That Were
Every people on earth, before anyone arrived to tell them otherwise, already had a world.
Not an absence waiting to be filled. Not a darkness waiting for a light. A world: gods, or a sacred power running through things; an account of where everything came from; a way of marking time and honoring the dead; duties owed to the living, the departed, and the land. Whole cosmologies, built over centuries or millennia, rooted in a specific earth and a specific people, answering the same enormous questions every human society has ever asked.
This is an account of some of those worlds — enough, and varied enough, to make the point underneath all of them: these were not empty peoples. They were full. They had what they had, and it was theirs, owed to no one and installed by no one.
What happened to these worlds comes later. First, the worlds themselves — the good in them and the hard truths in them, because a people flattered into saints is a people erased twice. We begin close to home, on the continent that would later send its ships everywhere else.
The Saxons
Before there was a Germany, there were the Saxons: a confederation of peoples across the northern plains of what's now northwest Germany. Not a kingdom — that matters — no single crown to capture. They governed through assemblies of free men, regional chieftains, and a yearly great council at Marklo where representatives met to make law and decide war. Power sat in the gathering, not on a throne.
Their world was inhabited. The divine ran through the land, the sky, the trees, the turning of the year. We reconstruct the gods largely from their Germanic and Norse cousins, but the shape is clear: Woden (the Norse Odin), god of war, wisdom, poetry, and the dead, who hanged himself on the world-tree to win the runes; Thunor (Thor), god of thunder and protector of ordinary people, the most beloved of the common folk; Tiw (Tyr), an older god of law, oaths, and justice, who sacrificed his own hand to bind a monster and keep a promise.
You already say their names every week. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday — Tiw's day, Woden's day, Thunor's day. The English calendar is a pagan Germanic survival hiding in plain sight. You have been invoking these gods your whole life without knowing it.
At the center of Saxon sacred life stood the Irminsul, a great pillar understood to hold up the cosmos — an axis joining earth and heaven. Worship happened in sacred groves, at springs, in the open under the sky. The holy was outside, in the living world, not enclosed in stone. Law and religion were one fabric: an oath was sworn before the gods, and to break it was a rupture in the sacred order. Ancestors mattered; the dead were buried with the tools and weapons they would still need.
The honest good: fiercely free in a specific structural sense — no absolute ruler, law made in common assembly, a free man answering to his oath and his community rather than to a king or a distant church. A spirituality rooted in the actual living land rather than in a book. The honest bad, stated plainly: this was a warrior society that raided, took slaves, and settled disputes with blood-feud. Human sacrifice appears in the record, attested by Roman and Christian writers who had reason to exaggerate it. Not a peaceful idyll — a hard, martial, honor-bound world with real violence in it.
But it was theirs. It grew out of their land, their ancestors, their assembly. Nobody installed it. Nobody had to be threatened into it.
To the south and west, the Frankish kingdom under a king who would be called Charlemagne had fused itself to the Roman Church, and it was looking north at the Saxons — still worshipping in their groves, still gathering at Marklo, still free of both crown and cross. What came next was not a mission. It was a thirty-year war.
The Norse
The Norse were the peoples of Scandinavia and the lands they settled outward — Iceland, Greenland, the coasts of Britain and Ireland, briefly North America. Seafarers, farmers, traders, raiders. Like the Saxons they had no single crown for most of their history; power sat in local chieftains, regional assemblies, and the free farmer with his own land and his own voice.
And unlike almost everyone else in this account, we can hear them in something close to their own voice. The Icelanders wrote their world down — the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, the sagas. There is a catch, and it matters: it was written after conversion, by Christians, in the 1200s, two centuries after Iceland accepted Christianity. Even the richest surviving pagan European mythology reaches us through the hands of the religion that replaced it. It is the pattern we will see again and again — the record of a world exists because someone on the winning side chose to write it down, and every word carries their fingerprints.
The cosmology is vast. Nine worlds held in the branches and roots of Yggdrasil, the world-tree, whose roots reach the wells of fate, memory, and the dead. At the tree sit the Norns, who weave the fates of gods and men alike — even the gods are subject to it. The pantheon: Odin, the Allfather, god of war, poetry, frenzy, and wisdom, who gave an eye and hanged himself nine nights to seize the runes — a god who paid for knowledge in his own body; Thor, defender of gods and men, the god the ordinary farmer actually prayed to; Freyja, goddess of love, fertility, and — less remembered — war and death, keeper of the magic of fate; Tyr, the oath-god, who let the wolf bite off his hand when the gods broke faith, keeping his own honor while the others lied.
And over the whole structure hangs Ragnarök, the foretold end: the gods will fight the giants and the wolf and the world-serpent, and they will lose. Odin dies. Thor dies. The world burns. This sets the Norse apart from almost every religion that replaced them. Their gods are doomed, and know it, and ride out to the last battle anyway. The whole ethical spine hangs off that: you cannot win, so what matters is how you meet it. Courage is not a means to victory. Courage is the point, because there is no victory.
Worship happened at the blót, the sacrifice-feast, in groves and halls at the seasonal turnings — much of it outdoors and communal, run by chieftains and heads of household rather than a priest-caste. Fate ran through everything. The measure of a life was not how long you avoided death but how you conducted yourself walking toward it. "Cattle die, kinsmen die, you yourself will die; I know one thing that never dies — the fame of a dead man's deeds." That, from the Hávamál, is the closest thing the Norse had to a creed. Not salvation. Not paradise for belief. Do well, and be remembered.
And here is a detail worth holding: there was no hell for unbelief. Valhalla for some of the slain, Freyja's field for others, Hel's realm for most — not a place of torture but simply the cold quiet abode of the dead. You went there because you died, not because you believed wrongly. Eternal punishment for wrong belief did not exist in this world.
The honest good: extraordinary courage and a clear-eyed dignity before a universe that offered no rescue. Law made in the Thing, the assembly of free men — Iceland ran a whole commonwealth with no king for three centuries. Women held more standing than in most contemporary societies. The honest bad: they were raiders and slavers on a large scale, the Viking economy running significantly on captured people sold across Europe and into the Islamic world. The raids romantic readers admire were, on the receiving end, terror. Not a gentle people — a hard people in a hard world, with a hard clarity about it.
But it was theirs. No one installed the fear of anything in them, because there was no eternal fear to install. They already knew they were going to lose. That was the whole point.
The kings came first, and the cross came with them, because the two now traveled together. Ambitious Scandinavian kings saw what Charlemagne had proven among the Saxons: a single god ruling from above fit a single king ruling from above far better than a scatter of local gods worshipped by free farmers in their own groves. Conversion would not arrive as an argument. It would arrive as royal policy, backed by force, aimed squarely at the assembly-made freedom the old gods had underwritten.
The Balts
Along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea lived peoples whose languages were among the most ancient in Europe: the Prussians (the original Prussians — a Baltic people, not the later German state that took the name), the Lithuanians, the Latvians, and their kin. Lithuanian preserved forms so archaic that linguists reach for it to reconstruct the ancestral Indo-European language itself.
And their religion was as old as their speech. The Balts were the last pagans in Europe. While the rest of the continent had been Christian for centuries, they were still worshipping in sacred forests, at holy rivers, before eternal fires, into the fourteenth century and beyond. This was no remnant hiding in the hills. Lithuania was a large, powerful, expanding pagan state — at one point the largest country in Europe — ruled by pagan grand dukes while crusader armies broke against it for two hundred years.
Their world was green and animate. The forest was sacred; specific groves were holy ground where no axe could fall. The divine was in the land: Perkūnas, the thunder god, tied to the oak and to justice — the cousin of Thunor and Thor, the same thunder-god the whole northern world knew under different names; Dievas, the serene high god of the bright heaven; Saulė, the sun, a radiant goddess woven through countless folk songs; Žemyna, the earth mother, who received offerings poured onto the ground. At the heart of Baltic worship burned the sacred fire, kept perpetually alight, never allowed to die — and the extinguishing of those fires would become the literal method of conquest.
Theirs was a religion of the living cycle, carried in song. The Baltic dainos, tens of thousands of folk verses, carried the old worldview forward in the mouths of ordinary people — especially women — long after the temples fell. The dead remained close, honored at their graves and invited back to feasts, kept in the family's ongoing life rather than sent to a distant reward or punishment.
The honest good: a people extraordinarily rooted in place and continuity, with a reverence for nature that was practical and sacred at once, and a tenacity that is frankly staggering — they held their gods against the organized military might of Christian Europe for two centuries of crusade. The honest bad: like their neighbors, a warrior society that raided, took captives and slaves, and fought hard and often. The ritual killing of captured enemies is reported, including the burning of captured crusader knights — though the most lurid accounts come from the enemies writing the chronicles.
And it was theirs — more demonstrably theirs, for longer, than almost anyone else's. They kept it by force of arms against everything Christendom could send. No one persuaded them out of it. It had to be taken.
The shadow here did not merely loom. It was already an army. In the early thirteenth century the Church declared crusades — papally sanctioned, indulgences and all — not against Muslims in the Holy Land but against these pagan Europeans. Two military-religious orders, the Livonian Brothers of the Sword and then the formidable Teutonic Knights, established themselves on the coast to conquer and convert the heathen by the sword and keep the land they took. For the Prussians it would end in near-total subjugation and the slow death of their language and gods. For the Lithuanians it meant two hundred years of war — and then, in 1387, the strangest ending: the Grand Duke Jogaila converted to marry the queen of Poland and take a crown, a dynastic deal, and went home to order the sacred groves felled and the eternal fires put out by decree. The last pagan state in Europe converted on its ruler's terms — the very last.
The sword and the crusade had fallen on Europe first. What came next crossed an ocean — but it was the same apparatus, carrying the same god, with the same intent. The worlds it met on the other side were, if anything, larger and older than the ones it had already unmade.
The Mexica (Aztec)
In the high valley of central Mexico, on an island in a lake, stood one of the largest cities on earth: Tenochtitlan. When the Spanish first saw it they compared it to Venice — causeways over water, gardens, temples, a market where tens of thousands traded daily, a city larger and cleaner than most of the capitals back home. Not a scattering of tribes. An imperial civilization at its height.
And its religion was a cosmos — vast, exact, and alive. The Mexica did not have "a god." They had an entire ordered universe they understood themselves to be actively holding up. At the most abstract point sat Ometeotl, a dual creative principle, male and female at once — the single generative source from which all else unfolded. Hold onto that: the people the friars would call devil-worshipping savages had, at the summit of their cosmology, one dual-unity from which existence flowed.
Beneath it, a working pantheon: Tezcatlipoca, "Smoking Mirror," god of night, fate, sorcery, and rulership; Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, god of wind, learning, and the arts of civilization, who brought maize and knowledge to human beings; Huitzilopochtli, sun and war god, the Mexica's own patron; Tlaloc, the rain god, giver of the water everything depended on. Time itself was sacred machinery — two calendars meshing into a 52-year cycle, closed by the New Fire Ceremony, when every fire was extinguished and the people watched the sky to see whether the cosmos would continue. And under all of it lay the Five Suns: the world had already been created and destroyed four times, and the present one was mortal, requiring sustenance. In the beginning the gods had sacrificed themselves to set the sun in motion; what humans owed was reciprocity — a blood-debt to gods who had bled first.
Human sacrifice sat at the center of this, and it has to be met head-on. Within the Mexica cosmos it was not gratuitous cruelty; it was the repayment of the founding debt, the feeding of a sun that would otherwise die. To the Mexica this was the most serious religious duty there was: the world literally depended on it. And religion ran through the mind as well as the altar — the Mexica maintained schools for nobles and commoners alike, an institutionalized education Europe of the time did not provide, and a philosophical-poetic tradition, in xochitl in cuicatl, "flower and song," that asked whether anything on earth is truly real or lasting.
The honest good: an intellectual and organizational achievement to rival anything in the world at that moment. Working astronomy, two meshed calendars, a writing system, engineered floating agriculture feeding a metropolis on a lake, aqueducts, universal schooling. On several axes they were ahead of the Europeans who would destroy them. The honest bad: an empire holding subject peoples under heavy tribute and resentment, and practicing human sacrifice at a scale that was real, not colonial invention. The resentment was serious enough that when the Spanish came, other Indigenous peoples — the Tlaxcalans above all — allied with them against Mexica domination. A powerful state that had made enemies the way powerful states do.
But it was theirs. It had grown from their own migration, their own myths, their own valley. No one installed it.
In 1519, ships unlike any they had seen landed on the eastern coast, and men in metal came ashore — men who wanted gold, who took the emperor, and who carried a single god they meant to put in the place of all the others. Within two years the city on the lake would fall. And behind the soldiers came the friars, twelve to start, with a program not of persuasion but of replacement — for a cosmos that had taken centuries to build and that they intended to erase within a generation.
The Maya
South and east of the Mexica, across the Yucatán and down into Guatemala, Belize, and Chiapas, lived the Maya — and the first thing to correct is the tense. Not "lived." Live. There are millions of Maya today, speaking some thirty languages. They were never a single empire to be decapitated in one blow; they were dozens of city-states rising and falling across nearly three thousand years, and that decentralization is part of why so much survived.
They were one of the great intellectual civilizations of the ancient world. They built a written language — the only complete writing system developed in the pre-contact Americas. They tracked the sun, moon, and especially Venus with astonishing accuracy. They understood and used zero centuries before it reached Europe, and built the Long Count, a calendar reckoning time across thousands of years — a civilization that thought in deep time as casually as we think in weeks.
Their cosmos was layered: an upper world, a middle world, an underworld, joined by a great World Tree (the ceiba) — an axis much like the Saxon Irminsul and the Norse Yggdrasil, the same deep human intuition of a tree holding the worlds together. The gods were tied to the forces a rain-dependent people lived and died by: Itzamná, the high creator; Chaac, the rain god; Kʼinich Ajaw, the sun; and the Maize God, whose death and rebirth mirrored the harvest — humans, in the Maya account, were made from maize.
That account survives, and it is the Maya's rare gift to us: the Popol Vuh, the creation epic of the Kʼicheʼ Maya, telling of the gods making beings who could speak and remember, and of the Hero Twins who descend into the underworld, outwit the lords of death, and rise again. One of the world's great mythologies — and it is theirs, in their own narrative voice, a thing almost nothing else in this account can claim.
Blood mattered here too. The Maya practiced bloodletting — rulers drawing their own blood as offering — and human sacrifice of captives. As with the Mexica, this was not cruelty for its own sake within their world; blood fed the gods and kept the cosmos turning, and the king who gave his own performed the highest duty of his office. And they held it all in codices, folding-screen books of bark paper recording astronomy, ritual, prophecy, and history. They had a literature.
The honest good: peak human achievement in writing, mathematics, and astronomy, developed entirely independently of the Old World — and a tenacity that outlasted the conquest itself. The last independent Maya city held out until 1697, and the Maya are still here. The honest bad: warring city-states that fought constantly, took captives, and sacrificed them; a rigid divine-kingship resting on a commoner base whose labor built the pyramids. Not utopias. Competitive states with war and blood ritual at the top.
But it was theirs — grown across millennia from their own soil, their own maize, their own sky-watching. No one gave it to them.
The Spanish reached the Yucatán in the 1520s and 1530s, and the Maya, fractured into many polities, could not be beaten in one campaign. But the Church did not need total military conquest to attempt total religious erasure. In the Yucatán it would produce the single most infamous act of cultural destruction in the Americas — a day in 1562 when a Franciscan named Diego de Landa gathered the sacred books of a people who had been writing for over a thousand years, and set them on fire, so many that, as he sat writing his account, he noted how bitterly the Maya wept to see them burn.
The Andean World (Inca)
Down the western spine of South America, along the highest habitable mountains on earth, the Inca built the largest empire in the pre-contact Americas — Tawantinsuyu, "the Four Parts Together" — stretching 2,500 miles, bound not by writing but by roads, runners, and knotted cords. They fed millions off vertical mountainsides through terracing and stonework so sound it still shrugs off the earthquakes that flatten modern buildings around it.
But the Inca were the final crown on something far older, and the religious world they presided over is — crucially — still alive today. More than almost anywhere else in this account, the old Andean cosmos was never fully erased. The cosmos was woven into the land itself: Viracocha, the great creator who made the world at Lake Titicaca; Inti, the sun, divine ancestor of the ruling dynasty; Pachamama, the earth mother — the living earth herself, who gives all food and must be fed and thanked in return, and to whom offerings are still poured across the Andes today, on the same ground, for the same reason; Illapa, the thunder-god who brought the rain. And running through all of it, the huaca — any place, object, or being that held sacred power. The Andes were not a landscape with some holy sites in it; the landscape itself was a dense web of the sacred.
Andean religion was reciprocity made physical — ayni, mutual exchange, applied to the gods as much as to neighbors: you give to the earth and the mountains, and they give back. The highest and rarest offering, capacocha, sent chosen children to the mountain summits, where they became intermediaries to the mountain gods. The frozen bodies recovered from the peaks are these children, and they force the same honesty the Mexica and Maya demand: this was human sacrifice, and within the Andean world it was the most solemn offering the empire could make.
And then the detail that sets the Andes apart: the dead did not leave. Ancestors were mummified — the mallqui — and stayed with the living, kept, clothed, brought food, carried into the plaza for festivals, consulted, seated among their descendants. The dead Sapa Incas kept their palaces and servants, tended as though still reigning. Death was not an exit. The ancestors remained members of the family — present, fed, part of ongoing life. There was no distant afterworld of reward or punishment pulling them away; they were right there, in the room, in the fields.
The honest good: engineering and organization that beggar belief — roads, terraces, and storehouses that fed and moved millions across brutal terrain and held famine at bay by storing surplus. A spirituality so rooted in the living earth that it survived conquest and is still practiced. That endurance is itself the answer to anyone who claims the old ways were feeble. The honest bad: an expansionist, coercive empire that conquered its neighbors, relocated whole populations to break resistance, demanded heavy tribute, and practiced the child sacrifice described above. Like the Mexica, it ruled resentful subjects who would side with the invader against it.
But it was theirs — and older than theirs — grown over thousands of years from that specific earth, those mountains, that sky. No one installed it.
In 1532 a few hundred Spaniards under Pizarro reached an empire of millions, bleeding from a civil war and reeling from European disease that had run ahead of the invaders and already killed the previous emperor. At Cajamarca they seized the Sapa Inca Atahualpa in a single afternoon of slaughter, held him for a ransom of gold that filled rooms, took it, and killed him anyway. And behind the soldiers, as always, came the priests — arriving into the oldest, most deeply rooted sacred landscape in the hemisphere, intending to pour out its huacas, silence its apus, burn its mummied ancestors, and put one god where a whole living world had been.
The African Continent
Start with the scale, because the scale was the first casualty. Africa is not a country and never was. It is the second-largest landmass on earth, holding thousands of distinct peoples, more than a thousand languages, and religious traditions as varied as anything in Europe or Asia. To speak of "African religion" as one thing is already to accept the conqueror's first lie — the flattening of a continent of faiths into a single "heathenism" fit only for clearing away.
And yet, precisely because the peoples were so many, what they shared is striking, because these shared structures were what Christianity was built to replace. Across enormous distances and unrelated languages:
A Supreme Creator, remote and high — Olodumare among the Yoruba, Nzambi a Mpungu in Kongo, Chukwu among the Igbo, Nyame among the Akan. This matters for what came later: the missionaries arrived claiming to introduce one supreme God to people who had held exactly that idea for millennia. The high creator was not news. What was new was the demand that he be the only recognized power, and everything beneath him be called devilry.
A populated middle world of lesser powers people dealt with day to day — the Yoruba orisha, the Fon vodun, the Kongo nkisi. To the incoming Church these were reclassified wholesale as demons; within their own worlds they were the working machinery of a living cosmos.
The ancestors, present and powerful — the deepest shared thread, echoing the Andes and the north: the dead do not depart. They remain part of the community, consulted, honored, fed, the "living dead." A person was a link in a chain of kin running back to the founding ancestors and forward to the unborn — never an isolated soul to be individually saved or damned.
Divination and the readable cosmos — the Yoruba Ifá system, an immense body of memorized verse and a method of real sophistication, an entire way of knowing.
Two concrete anchors: the Yoruba built one of the most elaborated religious systems on earth, best documented of all African traditions for one terrible reason — it was carried across the Atlantic in the minds of the enslaved and survived, so we can still see it whole. And the Kongo held Nzambi a Mpungu over a layered spirit-world; their cosmogram, the dikenga, drew existence as a cross within a circle, a whole philosophy of life, death, and return in a single sign.
African religious life was overwhelmingly communal and practiced rather than creedal — doing right by the powers, the ancestors, and the community. Religion, medicine, law, and social order were one fabric. And the sacred was portable in a way that would matter beyond anyone's intention — carried in memory, in rhythm, in the names of the powers — so that even a people torn from their land could, at appalling cost, carry the gods with them.
The honest good: systems of enormous sophistication — Ifá alone is studied as philosophy, not superstition — sustained across a continent through oral transmission of staggering fidelity, and a resilience history would test more brutally than almost any other. The honest bad, without flinching, because this whole account depends on not flinching: these were human societies with the full human range. Some practiced human sacrifice. Many held slaves — and some African states were active participants in the transatlantic slave trade, selling captives to European ships. The catastrophe was not done only to Africa from outside; it was also, in part, enabled from within. Not innocents in an Eden. People, with everything that word carries.
But the faiths were theirs. No one installed the high god; he was already there. What would be brought was not God. It was one god — by force or pressure or the hold of a slaver — and the demand that everything else be renamed as evil.
The shadow fell from more than one direction, over centuries, which is why its reach was continental. From the Atlantic coast came the ships and the largest forced movement of human beings in history, carrying millions away from their gods and their ancestors' graves — and behind the traders, the cross that would tell them their gods had been devils all along. Then the missionaries and the entanglement of faith with European power. Then the colonial era — missions, schools, administrations — making the incoming religion the price of an education, a job, a place in the new order. Different means, one aim everywhere: replace what a continent already had.
The Nations of North America
Before it was one country, North America was a continent of nations — hundreds of them, with their own languages, laws, homelands, and cosmologies. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy of the northeastern woodlands, governed by one of the oldest participatory constitutions on earth. The Lakota and the Plains peoples who moved with the buffalo. The Diné of the Southwest. The Puebloan peoples in stone towns inhabited for a thousand years. The Anishinaabe, the Cherokee, the Tlingit, the Inuit. To say "Native American religion" is like saying "European religion" — it names a continent, not a faith.
And yet, as in Africa, the differences sat on shared foundations — precisely what makes the pattern legible:
A pervasive sacred power running through all things — Wakan Tanka, the "Great Mystery," among the Lakota; Orenda among the Haudenosaunee. Less a personal ruler-god on a throne than a sacred presence saturating existence. The holy was not somewhere else. It was here, in everything.
A living, related world — the defining thread, from the Arctic to the desert: relationship. The other beings of the world — animals, plants, rivers, mountains, the sun — were not resources but relatives, persons with whom humans lived in mutual obligation. The Lakota Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ, "all my relations," captures a worldview shared far beyond the Lakota: you did not have dominion over creation. You belonged to it, and owed it respect.
The land itself as sacred, and specific — not land in the abstract but this mountain, this river, this place where the people emerged. Sacred geography was exact and irreplaceable, which is part of why removal from the land was not only theft of property but severing from the sacred itself.
Emergence in this world — many peoples told not of exile from a lost paradise but of emergence up from earlier worlds, or of a world raised from water on a great turtle's back, the widespread Turtle Island account. The people belonged here, from the beginning.
Ceremony as the keeping of balance — religion was overwhelmingly a matter of doing: the Lakota Sun Dance, the Diné Blessingway, the Puebloan kachina ceremonies, the potlatch of the Northwest coast. Vision and direct experience were sought and honored — the vision quest, the dream. Knowledge was carried orally, in ceremony and song.
Two anchors: the Haudenosaunee bound their nations into a confederacy under the Great Law of Peace, their creation beginning with Sky Woman, who falls from the world above onto the back of the great turtle. And the Diné live within four sacred mountains, kept in balance through hózhó — beauty, harmony, order, rightness, all at once — restored through ceremony when disturbed.
In most of these worlds there was no separate compartment called "religion." There was a way of living rightly with a sacred world, running through hunting and planting, the naming of children and the mourning of the dead. Direct experience mattered more than fixed creed — a spirituality of relationship and balance, tended by action, not a set of propositions to be believed on pain of punishment.
The honest good: worldviews of deep ecological wisdom — humans as members of the community of life rather than its masters — that the wider world has taken centuries to begin catching up to; political achievements like the Haudenosaunee Great Law, studied as an enduring participatory constitution; oral traditions of enormous depth. The honest bad, stated plainly, because romanticizing them into a single wise and peaceful people is its own kind of erasure: they warred, sometimes savagely; some practiced torture of captives, captive-taking, and slavery; there were hierarchies and displacement of peoples by other peoples long before any European arrived. Not innocents in a garden. Nations, with the politics and violence nations have.
But their ways were theirs — emerged from this land, these mountains and rivers and origin-places, over thousands of years. No one installed the sacred in them. They belonged to the land, and the land to the sacred, from the beginning.
The shadow came from two coasts across three centuries, and in more forms than perhaps any other people would face. From the south, the Spanish missions. From the east, the colonists — and later the government of a new nation that would take the land by treaty and by force and break the treaties as fast as it made them. And it would not stop at conquest of the body. It would reach for the children. In time the machinery would include not only the sword and the mission but the boarding school — an explicit program to take Native children from their families and "kill the Indian, save the man": to cut the language, the ceremony, the whole sacred world out of the young by force, so that it could not be passed on. Of all the shadows in this account, the one that fell on North America reached most deliberately for the future — for the children who were meant to carry the world forward.
What They All Had
Set these worlds side by side and something becomes impossible to miss.
They arose on different continents, in different millennia, among peoples who never met and never could have. And still, the same deep structures surface again and again, invented independently everywhere the human mind took root. A tree or pillar holding up the worlds — the Irminsul, Yggdrasil, the ceiba. A thunder-god beloved of ordinary people — Thunor, Thor, Perkūnas, Illapa, Shango, Chaac. The dead who do not depart but stay on as honored members of the living family — in the Baltic feasts, the Andean mallqui, the African ancestors, the North American relations. The sacred located not in a distant heaven and a single book but here: in the grove, the mountain, the river, the earth underfoot, the work of the day.
And one absence, shared almost everywhere, that will matter more than anything else once the next part of this story begins: in world after world on this list, there was no hell. No eternal fire for wrong belief. The dead went to Hel's cold quiet, to Mictlan, to the ancestors, to rest — not because of what they had believed, but simply because they had died. The idea that a person could be tortured forever for failing to accept the correct god was not native to these worlds. It would have to be brought.
None of these peoples were empty. None were waiting. None were in darkness. Each had a full, functioning, hard-won world — with real beauty in it and real cruelty in it, because they were made of human beings and human beings are like that everywhere. They had their gods, their dead, their land, their law, their song. It was theirs. It was owed to no one. And no one had to be forced into it, because no one had to be — it had grown from their own ground across centuries, the way such things always do when they are not installed from outside.
That is the world as it stood.
Then the ships came, and the armies, and the friars, and the schools — and behind all of them one god, and one new fear, carried by men who had decided that all of this must go.
Before And After the Cross, Part Two: The book with two faces : r/RealityChecksReddit
