WHEN THE GODS DIE. CONQUEST OF AMERICA IN THE LIGHT OF THE CONFLICT OF RATIONALITIES
One of the reasons contributing to the “instant” (according to historical standards) conquest, subjugation and actual destruction of the multimillion civilizations of the New World was the extermination of the rational basis of civilization, understood as a complex of religious, cosmological, philosophical views and educational structures, which provided their maintenance. The most illustrative example is the civilization, traditionally called the Aztec Empire. It was the first on the path of the conquerors and the most “alive”, developed and numerous at that time. Paradoxically, that nowadays we can judge the existence of the Aztecs' complex system of the world perception and religious-philosophical thinking that united all spheres of human life and society in integrity by texts in the Nahuatl language (common to the population of Central Mexico), which did not have alphabetic script. We have the opportunity to assess the role of the rational worldview in the lives of the peoples who inhabited Central America on the eve of the conquest by testimonies and stories of the conquistadors about the ancient knowledge transmitted by the oral tradition and the pictorial “books” that survived in the first years of the conquest. All these texts were recorded in the Nahuatl language (in the Latin script), or in the Spanish language. The task of this work is to identify the points of conflict between the two civilizations in the rational-philosophical aspect. One of the parties has already stepped on the path of the anthropogenic development, armed with «advanced» weapons and a militant monotheistic religion, with pronounced missionary aspirations. The other is a traditional society characterized by a pronounced «national idea» based on the religious cosmological worldview, a strict social organization, a universal education system, the existence of clear laws regulating all spheres of everyday life and an astronomically verified system of calculating the years and human destinies. It can be concluded that the strength of civilization i.e. its organization and established order, turned out to be a weak link, the destruction of which led to the disintegration of integrity. The destruction of the basis, the loss of the higher meaning, the core of this well-functioning effective mechanism, caused the collapse of the whole system: religious rituals, economic organization, administrative structures, education, upbringing and everyday life.