So sort of like sacrificing the deplorable many to the god that is the State/Corporation/Science Matrix? Get thee vaccinated or we shall turn away while you are sacrificed to ventilators and remdesivir? You who complain about globalization, AI, automation and open borders destroying your culture and prospects, let your streets be awash in fentanyl/meth/crack? You who question instituitions corporate, State and Education, may you be cast out, starve and freeze?
I imagine if malnutrition rises again in north America, because of food shortages due to inflation, supply chain collapse and Climate dictates, the Professional class and Woke will treat it like safe and effective Covid Policy saving so many lives, and anyone who complains will be a right wing terrorist spreading lies and malinformation?
On the day that the CDC recognized natural immunity, I was in a brewpub describing natural immunity compared to vaxxmunity, and was *asked to leave.* I am still so upset that I had to give myself therapy by writing about it on my substack. It was awful. And I used to visit there once a week before the dread set in.
I used to lament that there is so little organic singing in brewpubs like in more traditional pubs. At least then I could go for a laugh and maybe a decent conversation. Now many a brewpub is full of insufferably humorless wokehipsters.
It’s unbelievable. You have to go a significant distance outside. Ground zero woke to have anything approaching a good time. Everyone walks on eggshells in the city.
Kill some, train the rest to terrorize the community. It's all good from the technocratic globalist point of view, attempting to destroy the promise of America.
It may be worth pointing out that Mesoamerican religion was very big on drug ingestion, especially entheogens. Drugs pretty much incapacitate the frontal neo-cortex (responsible for empathy and rationality) and would, I assume, assist with the emotional preparation for participating in human sacrifice. It worked for Charles Manson. I expect that the Aztec priests could well have been stoned when they danced around wearing the flayed skins of sacrificial victims.
I have heard it said by people I respect that the wave of mdma/ecstacy came just in time to quieten the UK population after the anti-Thatcher poll-tax riots showed how vulnerable the establishment was to mass unrest. No question in my mind that drug abuse en masse is a tool of control.
I was in London when the poll tax riots started. It was serious. We got caught in one of the worst on a tony street in London. Cars turned over, shops busted out, screaming and violence, we were literally in the way and ducked into St. Paul’s near trafalgar. It was quite a feeling of refuge as the mob stormed by. in retrospect, the rioters were echoing that line by Jefferson that the UK system’s redeeming qualities stemmed from it’s tiny embrace of representation.
The poll tax riots killed Thatcher's prime ministership. The one thing that the UK system cannot tolerate is a leader who puts the system at risk. It really rattled them. Things are way more fragile now and energy prices are skyrocketing. If events in the Low Countries (the violent protests over covid shutdowns and now the farmers in the Netherlands) and France (the Gilet Jaunes) are any indication Europe may be about to explode.
Catherine Fitts developed a computer system in the 1990’s that showed how federal money affected communities. Almost always it was the following process: inject federal money, inject drugs, destroy communities and families, put the kids in private prisons, drive down asset prices and get them sold to private equity. Her software was good enough that the Beast System spent ten years going after her, tried twice to poison her, and she prevailed by joing a gospel church and ultimately forcing the Beast System to concede.
There are interesting parallels between east and west on this topic. And thank you for pointing out that the Aztec elite had decayed somehow into a river of death. While I too hold a fascination for what lost thoughts and forms and goodness too were lost in their Armageddon, the circumstances suggested make a lot of sense.
The connections run deep and hint at a civilization long past. It appears from the record that Quetzecotyl, the plumed serpent, was an office title, and at some point, there was a coup, and the human sacrificers came to power. But it was not just a coup in MesoAmerica. It was more likely a global coup.
Here is a quote from “Grid of The Gods” by Farrell and deHart: “We now come to confront the issue of human sacrifice in Aztec culture, as it is recounted in the Codex Chimalpopoca, directly. In one place, the account states that in the year 1487, or the year 8 Reed as the Aztecs called it, some 80,400 prisoners were sacrificed on the top of the pyramid at Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital.
“Indeed, the numbers are so staggering that one begins to wonder if the whole vast program of Aztec conquest was really driven by a perceived “need” for a constant supply of sacrificial victims.
“However, that same Codex makes it very clear that the god who was considered by the Aztecs themselves to have founded their civilization, Quetzlcoatl, forbade it. The following story of its origins is told, and with it, one has a further insight into the Aztec version of the Masonic ritual and dedication of the Temple: The Toltecs were engaged (in battle) at a place called Netlalpan. And when they had taken captives, human sacrifice also got started, as Toltecs sacrificed their prisoners.
“Among them and in their midst the devil Yaotl followed along. Right on the spot he kept inciting them to make human sacrifices. And then, too, he started and began the practice of flaying humans… Then he made one of the Toltecs named Ziuhcozcatl wear the skin, and he was the first to war a totec skin. Indeed, every kind of human sacrifice that there used to be got started then. For it is told and related that during his time and under his authority, the first Quetzlcoatl, whose name was Ce Acatl, absolutely refused to perform human sacrifice.
“It was precisely when Huemac was ruler that all those things that used to be done got started. It was the devils who started them. But this has been put on paper and written down elsewhere….There are three things to notice here: 1) Sacrifice is considered a payment, i.e., something that is owed, and hence, the implied concept is that there is a debt to be paid, for whatever reason; 2) Sacrifice was not the original order of society, but was instituted at some later period by devils; and, 3) it was instituted by one devil in particular, someone named Yaotl, whose name contains the root “Ya” and who both in name and in character sounds more than a little like the “Yahweh” of the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, who takes such delight in smelling the aroma of sacrificed animals.”
Indeed, I'd read that the Feathered Serpent forbade, or at any rate discouraged, human sacrifice; I believe the center of his cult was not Tenochtitlan, but elsewhere. And there are intriguing clues that the worship of Quetzalcoatl goes back a very long time.
I wonder if the materialist metaphysics of the Mexican wasn't a perversion of some earlier doctrine, which in contrast acknowledged the primacy of consciousness. Our own society has gone through just such a devolution.
And if we consider the ending of healthy human life for prosaic reasons a sacrifice, or bringing organized harm to human health, the practice is all around us.
Gives some credence to the suggestion of pre-Columbian intercontinental trade, such as the cocaine mummy. Yes, debt-sacrifice (at root, sacrifice - zebach זבח - means "slaughter to eat") is diabolical, even if the neutral term יהוה (He is) was substituted for devil. Ahriman or Angra Meinhu (Angry spirit); שֵׁד - shade, because it "shades" evil-doers from the consequences of their wickedness, is a poor substitute.
I think the evidence for pre-Colombian trade is very compelling at this point. The deep past is a foreign but very large country that we delude ourselves we've fully explored.
This reminds me of the classic pickup line: "Are you an Aztec? Because you just stole my heart."
On energy (or prana, or teotl, or chi) as the irreducible material of reality: well, yes, duh. Transformation of energy is something a slime mold can accomplish. But it is the toddler's answer to the question, and is damned to the same childlike. solipsistic errors. When magnified on a civilizational scale, of course it results in rivers of blood and mountains of skulls, because the adult answer -- consciousness -- is embedded in the human form, waiting to be discovered by the worst and best of us as we advance through life. It's all about who gets there first, and what they decide to do with that knowledge.
How much tail could the average Aztec priest shag in a weekend, even before he washed his bloody hands? What dark fantasies was he free to explore with his flock, while frightening them half to death with apocalyptic prophesy? These seem like the more pertinent questions, if we are to understand them. That is the greatest tragedy of their extinction to me; we can't really know what their Saturday nights looked like.
The Spaniards were out manned 10,000 to one. The Aztecs had pissed off all their neighbors by engaging in stupid ethnic preference policies and not bothering to ingratiate themselves to the surrounding peoples. The conquista was by no means as simple as the stupid revisionist historians make it out to be. It certainly wasn't purely "the mass enslavement of an entire people, the systematic extermination of a culture, and... a genocide."
No worries on that score. The caveats you point out are entirely valid, and I bring them up briefly later on.
I'm of the opinion that the conquest of the Aztec empire was one of the most remarkable military feats ever performed. For all that, it remains the case that a great number were killed, and the survivors largely reduced to servitude. It was far from morally pure; little in history is, especially in warfare. But that Cortes and his men are not celebrated as heroes is criminal.
Thanks for investing (sharing) your "talents" in this very interesting article. It brought me to thinking about the wetiko, Satan, what I call the Alien Mind, and how it works slowly over time to destroy a people. Evil has its own built-in self-destruct mechanism and once it gets going like it has in our nation, it keeps going until it collapses.
The Bible states that the sins of the father continues for several generations. What does this mean exactly? An empath I met explained that we humans should have a veil covering our mind which protects us from the worst of the Alien Mind, but when a father sins, any offspring will lose their "veil" and be more subject to the machinations of the Alien Mind depending on the sin. The wedding veil is probably an understanding of this "purity." If a father who has sinned has several children, then they will not have this veil and without proper upbringing may become victim of Satan and err also. And so it goes with the next generation until all goes to hell, or someone gets smart and turns to God and stops committing sins as outlined in the Ten Commandments.
This is why our nation is failing. We lost God's blessing in 2003 when we let Bush drop tons of Depleted Uranium on Iraq when they were not guilty of any crimes against us. We committed a very grievous sin of adultery. The empath said God would bring the ungodly against us because we failed to watch our nation. When asked how we could atone, he said we needed to bring home all of our military and intelligence people from around the world and put them to growing food for ourselves and others. He was a prophet and warned us of the Oligarchy, too. Fat chance the hawks in our nation would allow that. However, we must if we want to keep our nation.
Boy, that was interesting. You’re such a compelling writer that I end up always reading the whole thing—even when I start out thinking, “ Surely I’m not interested in ~that~.”
Hey, John Carter's writings may be somewhat long, but nothing like A Midwestern Doctor's tomes! But yes, I'm remiss on the 3(?) previous. Hard to follow long writings about Romans, however inherently interesting they may be.
Can you elaborate a little on how pure materialism would naturally culminate in death and murder? I’m not a philosopher, so I’m not entirely sure what materialism ~is~. I’m guessing it’s “the physical/tangible is all there is.”
Great question. Yes, materialism is essentially the doctrine that the base of reality is physical stuff - matter or energy. Crucially, matter devoid of consciousness; rather, consciousness arises from particular arrangements of matter. Since only consciousness can have morality, but at the most basic level consciousness doesn't really exist - it's just an epiphenomenon - there's also no such thing as objective morality. Morality is simply an illusion created by consciousness, and is ultimately arbitrary. This leads directly to the revocation of moral value from everything, human life included.
They do not. And he understood the fundamentals. He starts with what the Aztecs claimed to take their bearings by--namely, the gods. From what I read, he seemed like a Fustel de Coulanges plus a Gibbon for Aztec (et al.) studies.
Similar stuff was going on in Hawaii. For them it wasn't teotl but mana. Human sacrifice and religious ritual kept the chief-king well supplied with the share he needed to uphold the cosmic order.
Searching through on Amazon, it looks like they had a system of gods and ancestors, but I'd be surprised if there was much of a moral component. That's an "axial age" type of trait not found in archaic states.
By far the best book I've read on the conquest of the Americas was Fernando Cervantes' Conquistadores : a new history of Spanish discovery and conquest. While he doesn't delve too much into the worldview of the indigenous people, focusing more on the complicated political situations that the Spanish stepped into, he tells the reader about the cultural and religious background that produced the conquerors and missionaries, including a couple of meandering discourses on philosophical and religious movements that impacted the conquest. Absolutely shockingly balanced (no caricatures or plaster saints) and well worth checking out.
Before writing this essay, I'd just read Hugh Thomas' "Conquest: Cortes, Montezuma, and the Fall of Old Mexico", which I found to be generally excellent.
"Few would argue the world would be better were waterfalls of blood to still pour down the steps of stone pyramids."
I must be one of the few, then.
Waterfalls of blood flowing down the steps of a stone pyramid is vastly more artistic and esthetically pleasing than thugs shooting each other on WorldStar.
I wonder if Mexican culture, left to its own nihilistic devices and not tempted by the adjoining empty prosperity of the U.S., might not actually be a pleasing place to be.
Your post reminded me of a conclusion I'd reached with regard to the conquistadors. Modern just war theory provides that you may go to war to defend other's lives. But to a Christian, what is the life next to the soul? If you can go to war to defend other's, you surely must be able to go to war to defend their souls. Yet outside of your post, I cannot think of a single writer who has made this justification for any Christian war in...decades?
It isn't in fashion to credit the existence of the soul, therefore war for souls strikes the modern mind as at best a cynical excuse. That men could simultaneously fight for gold, glory, and God, and find no contradiction in these things, is not something secular man can wrap his head around.
It has always amazed me how some of our great civilizations could have such beauty and be filled with such violence from within at the same time. And not just the Aztecs, although they are a good example, The Spaniards and Cortez weren't perfect by any means.
I think that it all goes back to what is deemed as the original sin of Cain killing Able or that there is an inherent evil in the world and that we are constantly in a war between good and evil. I know many believe in other viewpoints that aren't biblical in nature, but basically, all religions have the view of good vs. evil. There is a lot of vagueness in the Cain and Able story and I'll just leave it at that.
And maybe in the end the Anunnaki are just sitting back laughing at the crazed world they created in this mixed up bowl of soup!
My take is that a thing cannot exist without its opposite. Thus beauty and ugliness, pleasure and pain, peace and war presuppose one another's existence. To try and have only the one has three perverse effect of making the other even more inevitable ... and probably making it worse.
What made the Aztec so horrific wasn't that they fought war, everyone does that ... it was the torture. There's something uniquely awful about human sacrifice.
Yes human sacrifice is awful, and not defending the Aztecs, but everyone I am sure at the time, knew that it was being done if they lived among the Aztecs, they could have revolted. Why didn't they? Afraid to go against the powers that be, much as today!
No less horrific would be the Europeans who stretched people apart on a rack slowly, or the French and their guillotines.
John, brilliant stuff and very satisfying on several levels. I especially like your take on the metaphysical underpinnings of Aztec savagery. The extraordinary thing about human sacrifice is how lucky we are as a culture to have moved sway from it in the first place. Remove one or two taboos and we too would end up killing as casually, and with as much conviction, as the Aztecs.
Cortes has been a hero of mine since my teenage years, when I read a fair bit about the conquest of Mexico. Of all the heroic figures of the era of conquest and exploration, he was the gold standard. It is a relief to see someone writing sympathetically and respectfully about a man like that. Who needs Marvel 'superheroes' when we have real life historical characters like that? Pre-Columbian religion is disturbing...if you think the Aztecs were bad, the Maya were worse (fewer victims, more sadism).
Re human sacrifice, don't want to quibble and it is many years since I read about anything like this but, if I remember correctly, there are some indications that the very early Romans may indeed have practiced human sacrifice on the q.t. as part of the state cult. They would take a male and female slave of a nation that they aimed to conquer and kill them...dedicating the victims to either Jupiter or Mars or maybe the entire pantheon. Not sure when the practice died out but the latter Romans were certainly very deeply embarrassed about it. It is an obscure subject and, frankly, given the abysmal quality of scholarship today I am not sure who to consult. The pre-Roman Italic cults certainly had elements of human sacrifice (ie the priesthood at the grove at Nemi), gladiatoral games grew out of a form of human sacrifice in the region just south of Rome, and the Eastern Greeks retained something close to it in the human-scapegoating cult of the pharmakos which interested Rene Girard so much. As a rule the Romans suppressed the wilder aspects of religion in the Balkans, Anatolia and North Africa not out of humanity as such but because they were seriously freaked out by the behaviour of the congregants/participants (think voodoo style orgies with extremes of violence).
Cortes is fascinating and really should be more widely celebrated. I found out yesterday - after writing this - that Amazon apparently has a high-budget drama about him, Hernán, filmed in Spanish and Nahuatl, which is available everywhere ... except the US.
Interesting stuff about human sacrifice in the pre-Christian era. Indeed that was a thing in the very early Roman kingdom, however one of the kings (Numa?) strictly forbade it. I alluded to that in a footnote.
Regarding the wild shit people used to do at those mystery rites, yep. Bacchanals were nuts. The Greeks were pretty horrified by Dionysian revels, too. There's a definite similarity between those cults and some of the crazier stuff that happens at raves. If there's one thing Nietzsche got right about the twentieth century, it was the eclipse of the Apollonian by the Dionysian.
Your comments re raves are spot on. As I see it, the great problem is that while ancient cultures utilised ecstatic or sub-rational experience they did so only on an occasional basis and it was all heavily socialised and practiced in a way that was fortified by very long-developed taboo and ritual. Today by contrast, it is the entertainment industry that offers such release and for many it is a frequent experience undertaken without any of the institutional or cultural restraints that our ancestiors would have considered essential. To make it even worse, it is essentially a public affair so that ecstatic experience has the potential to both generate and direct collective emotion. This is truly playing with fire.
So sort of like sacrificing the deplorable many to the god that is the State/Corporation/Science Matrix? Get thee vaccinated or we shall turn away while you are sacrificed to ventilators and remdesivir? You who complain about globalization, AI, automation and open borders destroying your culture and prospects, let your streets be awash in fentanyl/meth/crack? You who question instituitions corporate, State and Education, may you be cast out, starve and freeze?
Yes. All of that and more.
I imagine if malnutrition rises again in north America, because of food shortages due to inflation, supply chain collapse and Climate dictates, the Professional class and Woke will treat it like safe and effective Covid Policy saving so many lives, and anyone who complains will be a right wing terrorist spreading lies and malinformation?
Not "collapse", but intentional destruction. E.g., https://www.bitchute.com/video/7XMdcnavjhZ7/
On the day that the CDC recognized natural immunity, I was in a brewpub describing natural immunity compared to vaxxmunity, and was *asked to leave.* I am still so upset that I had to give myself therapy by writing about it on my substack. It was awful. And I used to visit there once a week before the dread set in.
I used to lament that there is so little organic singing in brewpubs like in more traditional pubs. At least then I could go for a laugh and maybe a decent conversation. Now many a brewpub is full of insufferably humorless wokehipsters.
It’s unbelievable. You have to go a significant distance outside. Ground zero woke to have anything approaching a good time. Everyone walks on eggshells in the city.
Fentanyl good; kills abusers with ODs. Meth/crack not so much; give them the drive to steal and otherwise victimize.
Kill some, train the rest to terrorize the community. It's all good from the technocratic globalist point of view, attempting to destroy the promise of America.
And both reduce a human being below the level of a dumb animal. Psychopharmaceutical warfare is a helluva thing.
It may be worth pointing out that Mesoamerican religion was very big on drug ingestion, especially entheogens. Drugs pretty much incapacitate the frontal neo-cortex (responsible for empathy and rationality) and would, I assume, assist with the emotional preparation for participating in human sacrifice. It worked for Charles Manson. I expect that the Aztec priests could well have been stoned when they danced around wearing the flayed skins of sacrificial victims.
They almost certainly were. Priests and sorcerers spent most of their time whacked to the gills, I think.
I have heard it said by people I respect that the wave of mdma/ecstacy came just in time to quieten the UK population after the anti-Thatcher poll-tax riots showed how vulnerable the establishment was to mass unrest. No question in my mind that drug abuse en masse is a tool of control.
I was in London when the poll tax riots started. It was serious. We got caught in one of the worst on a tony street in London. Cars turned over, shops busted out, screaming and violence, we were literally in the way and ducked into St. Paul’s near trafalgar. It was quite a feeling of refuge as the mob stormed by. in retrospect, the rioters were echoing that line by Jefferson that the UK system’s redeeming qualities stemmed from it’s tiny embrace of representation.
The poll tax riots killed Thatcher's prime ministership. The one thing that the UK system cannot tolerate is a leader who puts the system at risk. It really rattled them. Things are way more fragile now and energy prices are skyrocketing. If events in the Low Countries (the violent protests over covid shutdowns and now the farmers in the Netherlands) and France (the Gilet Jaunes) are any indication Europe may be about to explode.
It's an old tactic. Traders in the New World with firewater. British in China with opium.
Even if most people have the sense to stay away, communities are still wrecked. A few junkies really stink up the place.
Damn, dude, benzos? Heard the withdrawal is all kinds of nasty.
Catherine Fitts developed a computer system in the 1990’s that showed how federal money affected communities. Almost always it was the following process: inject federal money, inject drugs, destroy communities and families, put the kids in private prisons, drive down asset prices and get them sold to private equity. Her software was good enough that the Beast System spent ten years going after her, tried twice to poison her, and she prevailed by joing a gospel church and ultimately forcing the Beast System to concede.
There are interesting parallels between east and west on this topic. And thank you for pointing out that the Aztec elite had decayed somehow into a river of death. While I too hold a fascination for what lost thoughts and forms and goodness too were lost in their Armageddon, the circumstances suggested make a lot of sense.
The connections run deep and hint at a civilization long past. It appears from the record that Quetzecotyl, the plumed serpent, was an office title, and at some point, there was a coup, and the human sacrificers came to power. But it was not just a coup in MesoAmerica. It was more likely a global coup.
Here is a quote from “Grid of The Gods” by Farrell and deHart: “We now come to confront the issue of human sacrifice in Aztec culture, as it is recounted in the Codex Chimalpopoca, directly. In one place, the account states that in the year 1487, or the year 8 Reed as the Aztecs called it, some 80,400 prisoners were sacrificed on the top of the pyramid at Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital.
“Indeed, the numbers are so staggering that one begins to wonder if the whole vast program of Aztec conquest was really driven by a perceived “need” for a constant supply of sacrificial victims.
“However, that same Codex makes it very clear that the god who was considered by the Aztecs themselves to have founded their civilization, Quetzlcoatl, forbade it. The following story of its origins is told, and with it, one has a further insight into the Aztec version of the Masonic ritual and dedication of the Temple: The Toltecs were engaged (in battle) at a place called Netlalpan. And when they had taken captives, human sacrifice also got started, as Toltecs sacrificed their prisoners.
“Among them and in their midst the devil Yaotl followed along. Right on the spot he kept inciting them to make human sacrifices. And then, too, he started and began the practice of flaying humans… Then he made one of the Toltecs named Ziuhcozcatl wear the skin, and he was the first to war a totec skin. Indeed, every kind of human sacrifice that there used to be got started then. For it is told and related that during his time and under his authority, the first Quetzlcoatl, whose name was Ce Acatl, absolutely refused to perform human sacrifice.
“It was precisely when Huemac was ruler that all those things that used to be done got started. It was the devils who started them. But this has been put on paper and written down elsewhere….There are three things to notice here: 1) Sacrifice is considered a payment, i.e., something that is owed, and hence, the implied concept is that there is a debt to be paid, for whatever reason; 2) Sacrifice was not the original order of society, but was instituted at some later period by devils; and, 3) it was instituted by one devil in particular, someone named Yaotl, whose name contains the root “Ya” and who both in name and in character sounds more than a little like the “Yahweh” of the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, who takes such delight in smelling the aroma of sacrificed animals.”
Very interesting.
Indeed, I'd read that the Feathered Serpent forbade, or at any rate discouraged, human sacrifice; I believe the center of his cult was not Tenochtitlan, but elsewhere. And there are intriguing clues that the worship of Quetzalcoatl goes back a very long time.
I wonder if the materialist metaphysics of the Mexican wasn't a perversion of some earlier doctrine, which in contrast acknowledged the primacy of consciousness. Our own society has gone through just such a devolution.
And if we consider the ending of healthy human life for prosaic reasons a sacrifice, or bringing organized harm to human health, the practice is all around us.
Gives some credence to the suggestion of pre-Columbian intercontinental trade, such as the cocaine mummy. Yes, debt-sacrifice (at root, sacrifice - zebach זבח - means "slaughter to eat") is diabolical, even if the neutral term יהוה (He is) was substituted for devil. Ahriman or Angra Meinhu (Angry spirit); שֵׁד - shade, because it "shades" evil-doers from the consequences of their wickedness, is a poor substitute.
I think the evidence for pre-Colombian trade is very compelling at this point. The deep past is a foreign but very large country that we delude ourselves we've fully explored.
This reminds me of the classic pickup line: "Are you an Aztec? Because you just stole my heart."
On energy (or prana, or teotl, or chi) as the irreducible material of reality: well, yes, duh. Transformation of energy is something a slime mold can accomplish. But it is the toddler's answer to the question, and is damned to the same childlike. solipsistic errors. When magnified on a civilizational scale, of course it results in rivers of blood and mountains of skulls, because the adult answer -- consciousness -- is embedded in the human form, waiting to be discovered by the worst and best of us as we advance through life. It's all about who gets there first, and what they decide to do with that knowledge.
How much tail could the average Aztec priest shag in a weekend, even before he washed his bloody hands? What dark fantasies was he free to explore with his flock, while frightening them half to death with apocalyptic prophesy? These seem like the more pertinent questions, if we are to understand them. That is the greatest tragedy of their extinction to me; we can't really know what their Saturday nights looked like.
The Spaniards were out manned 10,000 to one. The Aztecs had pissed off all their neighbors by engaging in stupid ethnic preference policies and not bothering to ingratiate themselves to the surrounding peoples. The conquista was by no means as simple as the stupid revisionist historians make it out to be. It certainly wasn't purely "the mass enslavement of an entire people, the systematic extermination of a culture, and... a genocide."
But your article was otherwise excellent. Sorry for appearing to have leapt to a conclusion too early.
No worries on that score. The caveats you point out are entirely valid, and I bring them up briefly later on.
I'm of the opinion that the conquest of the Aztec empire was one of the most remarkable military feats ever performed. For all that, it remains the case that a great number were killed, and the survivors largely reduced to servitude. It was far from morally pure; little in history is, especially in warfare. But that Cortes and his men are not celebrated as heroes is criminal.
Have you read Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico?
No, but I read Hugh Thomas's 'Conquest' not so long ago.
Thanks for investing (sharing) your "talents" in this very interesting article. It brought me to thinking about the wetiko, Satan, what I call the Alien Mind, and how it works slowly over time to destroy a people. Evil has its own built-in self-destruct mechanism and once it gets going like it has in our nation, it keeps going until it collapses.
The Bible states that the sins of the father continues for several generations. What does this mean exactly? An empath I met explained that we humans should have a veil covering our mind which protects us from the worst of the Alien Mind, but when a father sins, any offspring will lose their "veil" and be more subject to the machinations of the Alien Mind depending on the sin. The wedding veil is probably an understanding of this "purity." If a father who has sinned has several children, then they will not have this veil and without proper upbringing may become victim of Satan and err also. And so it goes with the next generation until all goes to hell, or someone gets smart and turns to God and stops committing sins as outlined in the Ten Commandments.
This is why our nation is failing. We lost God's blessing in 2003 when we let Bush drop tons of Depleted Uranium on Iraq when they were not guilty of any crimes against us. We committed a very grievous sin of adultery. The empath said God would bring the ungodly against us because we failed to watch our nation. When asked how we could atone, he said we needed to bring home all of our military and intelligence people from around the world and put them to growing food for ourselves and others. He was a prophet and warned us of the Oligarchy, too. Fat chance the hawks in our nation would allow that. However, we must if we want to keep our nation.
Boy, that was interesting. You’re such a compelling writer that I end up always reading the whole thing—even when I start out thinking, “ Surely I’m not interested in ~that~.”
I only write about interesting things.
Hey, John Carter's writings may be somewhat long, but nothing like A Midwestern Doctor's tomes! But yes, I'm remiss on the 3(?) previous. Hard to follow long writings about Romans, however inherently interesting they may be.
That Jesus may be modeled on Julius Cesear blew my mind.
That was my reaction.
*CLICK*
Oh? Oh! Oh, shit!
whatever you do - do not click on this link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynCHa4l5yaE&t=1181s
lol....this is what I heard. Short paraphrase....
Something from something is something. Nothing from nothing is nothing.
Nothing before something is nothing until something is nothing....but there has to be something for nothing to exist...
I made this shit up. Just like I thought I heard it... ;)
you have one of the finest minds of the generation hands down :)
Can you elaborate a little on how pure materialism would naturally culminate in death and murder? I’m not a philosopher, so I’m not entirely sure what materialism ~is~. I’m guessing it’s “the physical/tangible is all there is.”
Great question. Yes, materialism is essentially the doctrine that the base of reality is physical stuff - matter or energy. Crucially, matter devoid of consciousness; rather, consciousness arises from particular arrangements of matter. Since only consciousness can have morality, but at the most basic level consciousness doesn't really exist - it's just an epiphenomenon - there's also no such thing as objective morality. Morality is simply an illusion created by consciousness, and is ultimately arbitrary. This leads directly to the revocation of moral value from everything, human life included.
Nice. I haven't read all of Prescott but mean to. He's an old-fashioned historian and so is a Nazi or decent and highly sensible by today's standards.
Just looked him up. They don't make historians like that anymore.
They do not. And he understood the fundamentals. He starts with what the Aztecs claimed to take their bearings by--namely, the gods. From what I read, he seemed like a Fustel de Coulanges plus a Gibbon for Aztec (et al.) studies.
High praise. I'll have to check him out at some point.
http://library.lol/main/32F0176E96789D974E01F2B4994A8E4C
Died while writing his history of conquest of Peru.
Sublime.
Similar stuff was going on in Hawaii. For them it wasn't teotl but mana. Human sacrifice and religious ritual kept the chief-king well supplied with the share he needed to uphold the cosmic order.
I've heard some pretty awful things about the Hawaiian theocracy, but don't know a lot about it. Was their metaphysics similarly materialistic?
Don't know enough about it to say one way or the other - just the bits Turchin included in Ultrasociety. His source was this one: https://smile.amazon.com/How-Chiefs-Became-Kings-Kingship/dp/0520303393/
Searching through on Amazon, it looks like they had a system of gods and ancestors, but I'd be surprised if there was much of a moral component. That's an "axial age" type of trait not found in archaic states.
By far the best book I've read on the conquest of the Americas was Fernando Cervantes' Conquistadores : a new history of Spanish discovery and conquest. While he doesn't delve too much into the worldview of the indigenous people, focusing more on the complicated political situations that the Spanish stepped into, he tells the reader about the cultural and religious background that produced the conquerors and missionaries, including a couple of meandering discourses on philosophical and religious movements that impacted the conquest. Absolutely shockingly balanced (no caricatures or plaster saints) and well worth checking out.
Thank you for the recommendation; it looks great.
Before writing this essay, I'd just read Hugh Thomas' "Conquest: Cortes, Montezuma, and the Fall of Old Mexico", which I found to be generally excellent.
"Few would argue the world would be better were waterfalls of blood to still pour down the steps of stone pyramids."
I must be one of the few, then.
Waterfalls of blood flowing down the steps of a stone pyramid is vastly more artistic and esthetically pleasing than thugs shooting each other on WorldStar.
I wonder if Mexican culture, left to its own nihilistic devices and not tempted by the adjoining empty prosperity of the U.S., might not actually be a pleasing place to be.
"...so far from God"
Now there's a spicy take.
Your post reminded me of a conclusion I'd reached with regard to the conquistadors. Modern just war theory provides that you may go to war to defend other's lives. But to a Christian, what is the life next to the soul? If you can go to war to defend other's, you surely must be able to go to war to defend their souls. Yet outside of your post, I cannot think of a single writer who has made this justification for any Christian war in...decades?
It isn't in fashion to credit the existence of the soul, therefore war for souls strikes the modern mind as at best a cynical excuse. That men could simultaneously fight for gold, glory, and God, and find no contradiction in these things, is not something secular man can wrap his head around.
Wow! One of your most chilling and beautifully written pieces yet.
I will have to read the comments and re-read it another time.
This piece offers much to think about.
Interesting read, once again, Will be linking today @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
It has always amazed me how some of our great civilizations could have such beauty and be filled with such violence from within at the same time. And not just the Aztecs, although they are a good example, The Spaniards and Cortez weren't perfect by any means.
I think that it all goes back to what is deemed as the original sin of Cain killing Able or that there is an inherent evil in the world and that we are constantly in a war between good and evil. I know many believe in other viewpoints that aren't biblical in nature, but basically, all religions have the view of good vs. evil. There is a lot of vagueness in the Cain and Able story and I'll just leave it at that.
And maybe in the end the Anunnaki are just sitting back laughing at the crazed world they created in this mixed up bowl of soup!
My take is that a thing cannot exist without its opposite. Thus beauty and ugliness, pleasure and pain, peace and war presuppose one another's existence. To try and have only the one has three perverse effect of making the other even more inevitable ... and probably making it worse.
What made the Aztec so horrific wasn't that they fought war, everyone does that ... it was the torture. There's something uniquely awful about human sacrifice.
Along the way, i have discovered a simple rule: human sacrifice is moral, so long as the human you sacrifice is yourself.
Yes human sacrifice is awful, and not defending the Aztecs, but everyone I am sure at the time, knew that it was being done if they lived among the Aztecs, they could have revolted. Why didn't they? Afraid to go against the powers that be, much as today!
No less horrific would be the Europeans who stretched people apart on a rack slowly, or the French and their guillotines.
John, brilliant stuff and very satisfying on several levels. I especially like your take on the metaphysical underpinnings of Aztec savagery. The extraordinary thing about human sacrifice is how lucky we are as a culture to have moved sway from it in the first place. Remove one or two taboos and we too would end up killing as casually, and with as much conviction, as the Aztecs.
Cortes has been a hero of mine since my teenage years, when I read a fair bit about the conquest of Mexico. Of all the heroic figures of the era of conquest and exploration, he was the gold standard. It is a relief to see someone writing sympathetically and respectfully about a man like that. Who needs Marvel 'superheroes' when we have real life historical characters like that? Pre-Columbian religion is disturbing...if you think the Aztecs were bad, the Maya were worse (fewer victims, more sadism).
Re human sacrifice, don't want to quibble and it is many years since I read about anything like this but, if I remember correctly, there are some indications that the very early Romans may indeed have practiced human sacrifice on the q.t. as part of the state cult. They would take a male and female slave of a nation that they aimed to conquer and kill them...dedicating the victims to either Jupiter or Mars or maybe the entire pantheon. Not sure when the practice died out but the latter Romans were certainly very deeply embarrassed about it. It is an obscure subject and, frankly, given the abysmal quality of scholarship today I am not sure who to consult. The pre-Roman Italic cults certainly had elements of human sacrifice (ie the priesthood at the grove at Nemi), gladiatoral games grew out of a form of human sacrifice in the region just south of Rome, and the Eastern Greeks retained something close to it in the human-scapegoating cult of the pharmakos which interested Rene Girard so much. As a rule the Romans suppressed the wilder aspects of religion in the Balkans, Anatolia and North Africa not out of humanity as such but because they were seriously freaked out by the behaviour of the congregants/participants (think voodoo style orgies with extremes of violence).
Cortes is fascinating and really should be more widely celebrated. I found out yesterday - after writing this - that Amazon apparently has a high-budget drama about him, Hernán, filmed in Spanish and Nahuatl, which is available everywhere ... except the US.
Interesting stuff about human sacrifice in the pre-Christian era. Indeed that was a thing in the very early Roman kingdom, however one of the kings (Numa?) strictly forbade it. I alluded to that in a footnote.
Regarding the wild shit people used to do at those mystery rites, yep. Bacchanals were nuts. The Greeks were pretty horrified by Dionysian revels, too. There's a definite similarity between those cults and some of the crazier stuff that happens at raves. If there's one thing Nietzsche got right about the twentieth century, it was the eclipse of the Apollonian by the Dionysian.
Your comments re raves are spot on. As I see it, the great problem is that while ancient cultures utilised ecstatic or sub-rational experience they did so only on an occasional basis and it was all heavily socialised and practiced in a way that was fortified by very long-developed taboo and ritual. Today by contrast, it is the entertainment industry that offers such release and for many it is a frequent experience undertaken without any of the institutional or cultural restraints that our ancestiors would have considered essential. To make it even worse, it is essentially a public affair so that ecstatic experience has the potential to both generate and direct collective emotion. This is truly playing with fire.
Yep. That said, the Greeks were pretty leary of Dionysian revels. The tension between Apollonian and Dionysian is very old.