Accounting for strange phenomena without resorting to religious exegesis

From Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson. Page 205.

The legacy of Cortés’s men and of men like them was brilliant military conquest—and the decimation of the indigenous population of the Caribbean and Mexico in a mere thirty years through military conquest, the destruction of native agricultural practice, and the inadvertent importation of smallpox, measles, and influenza. Like the “Hellene” Alexander the Great, the “Christian” Cortés slaughtered thousands, looted imperial treasuries, destroyed and founded cities, tortured and murdered—and claimed he had done it all for the betterment of mankind. His letters to Charles V proclaiming interest in establishing a brotherhood among all natives and Spaniards read a great deal like Alexander’s oath at Opis (324 B.C.), in which he proclaimed a new world embracing all races and religions. In both cases the body count told a different tale.

The conquistadors were far from ignorant fanatics. For all their religious devoutness, they did not live in the mythic world of the Mexicas— Montezuma sent an array of wizards and necromancers to hex and bewitch the approaching Castilians—but in a romantic cosmos that, ultimately despite its wild tales and improbable rumors, ceded to sensory perception and hard data. The Spaniards, for all their bluster, did not believe that the Mexicas were superhuman agents of the devil, but sophisticated indigenous tribes, who could be met, thwarted, and conquered through a combination of political intrigue and Castilian arms. The Mexicas were as unfamiliar to the Spaniards as the Spaniards were to the Mexicas, but the difference—besides the obvious fact that the Spaniards, not the Mexicas, had sailed halfway around the world to conquer an unknown people—was that Cortés’s men drew on a 2,000-year-old tradition that might account for strange phenomena without resorting to religious exegesis. Through sense perception, reliance on a prior body of abstract knowledge, and inductive reasoning, the Castilians quickly sized up the political organization of Tenochtitlán, the military capability of its army, and the general religion of the Mexica nation.

They had never seen anything like the Mexica priests with their matted hair, caked blood, and cloaks of human skins, nor mass sacrifices or the rites of tearing bleeding hearts from drugged victims. But they soon surmised that these Indian holy men were no gods. For all the rhetoric of the Catholic church, they were not even devils, but humans, conducting some sort of bizarre religious rites which might logically incur the hatred of their subjugated allies. Christianity told them the Aztec religion was evil; but the European intellectual tradition gave them the tools to investigate it, probe its weakness, and eventually destroy it. In contrast, the Aztecs for weeks after the entry of the Castilians were still baffled as to whether they were up against men or demigods, centaurs or horses, ships or floating mountains, foreign or domestic deities, thunder or guns, emissaries or enemies.