The Great Chain Of Being Analysis

In the age of Atlantic exploration, the great cultural empire of Christendom feels a discomfort and fear of being wiped out, thanks to the anxieties brought on by the spread and success of the Islamic Empire. Many feared that the very institution of Christianity stood in great danger against the economic trade machine of the Ottoman Empire, and many Europeans began to feel “a powerful sense of geographic and religious claustrophobia.” Therefore men, filled with ambition and a desire to achieve greatness in order to break rank within what is known as The Great Chain of Being, set sail to the great unknown that lies upon the horizon of the Atlantic, and devastated a massive group of unknowing Native Americans. Through means of diseases, religious
Their belief in a natural order aids in the thinking that they are far superior to the Natives they encounter, as the Natives appear to be “heathens.” A heathen is, to put it simply, a person who is not a Christian. “They generally regarded the Indians’ beliefs as dictated by the devil and considered their shamans to be witches, possessed of an evil power to inflict harm on other Indians but not on European Christians.” Therefore, the notion of the Native People being heathens, leads the European conquistadors to consider them on the lower rung of this Great Chain of Being. In his Journal of the First Voyage, Christopher Columbus notes about the Natives he first encounters, “they should be good servants and intelligent, for I observed that they quickly took in what was said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, as it appeared to me that they had no religion.” Columbus, being one of the very first recorded Europeans to interact with and see Native Americans, creates this assumption form the very beginning that they are an inferior people because of their simple nature and lack of a recognizable religion. An ambitious man, “Columbus hoped to convert the Asians to Christianity and to recruit their bodies and their wealth to assist Europeans in a final crusade to crush Islam and reclaim Jerusalem.” In his mind,
The true success of the subjugation of the Native groups relies heavily upon the presence of new and dangerous diseases, and the sheer luck the conquistadores faced when arriving in the New World in the midst of or after Native civil wars. Further, the strategy of “divide and conquer” appears as a relevant way in which the Europeans (with what appears to be great ease) subjugated the massive populations of the tribal groups that surround them. This tactic focused upon finding the main rivals of an area, and then creating alliances with smaller tribes that shared a dissatisfaction or hatred for a larger one. The alliances would then easily attack the large tribes, and the Europeans “conquer” them in the name of the English or Spanish. This combination of tribal alliance, mixed with complicated cocktail of disease and fresh tribal warfare, opens the door for the Europeans to quickly take advantage of the New World