"Were not the immortal gods the same everywhere?" Not in Mexico or Peru. The discovery of the New World brought the discovery of new and often freakish gods
The Spanish humanist clerics rose to the occasion with ingenuity. Fray Berhardo Sahagun, Vitoria's contemporary, ministering in God's maguey fields, compiled a massive sociological study of Aztec society, customs and religion. Aztec society and morals, he pronounced, were superior to Europe's and all but equaled Plato's Republic. How then was it they worshipped such freakish and cruel gods? Sahagun answered that the Devil had deceived the Indian with "false images" of the true god. Absent such diabolical distortions, God and Man were, in their truth, the same everywhere.
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