Thoughts on California’s deranged revival of them.
30 thoughts on “The Aztec Gods”
That’s okay. When the stars are right and Cthulhu rises from his watery tomb to reclaim his world, mankind will breathe a sigh of relief as its works are swept aside. At least it’ll end the insanity. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
“Liberals”–is there no stupidity they can’t embrace?
They’re not liberals. They are Marxist/Fascists. Liberals believe in and know science. As a TEA party conservative, I am actually a true liberal.
They’re not even Marxists. At least Marxists believed in math and science, which is why they could beat us into space, whereas the current crop of progressive Democrats think logic and math is racist.
Where are all the militant, evangelical atheists when you need them? They’ll make fun of you because you “believe in that big guy in the sky”. But, they never seem be around to inform everyone of their superior rationality when it comes time to take on Allah, or Gaia, or this nonsense, or magickal thinking in general.
Where are they? Preparing the blade and cleansing the altar.
Because militant, evangelical atheists can mostly be more accurately described as anti-Christians, based on what religions they do and don’t oppose.
The militant, evangelical atheists are only around to take on the worshippers that are safe to challenge. The ones that defend their believes with force and violence? Don’t screw with them….
This is horrifying.
I’m thinking there’s little difference between chanting and doxology. I would instruct my child not to participate in the state sponsored religious indoctrination that is a clear violation of their First Amendment Rights.
I am old enough to remember when they started deciphering the Mayan writings and discovered that instead of “mellow pot smoking pyramid building mathematicians” they were just as bloodthirsty as their neighbors. Some religious practices need to be fully acknowledges and then promptly returned to History’s dustbin.
Still, it brings back memories of Heavy Metal(1981) and Den saving the girl from being sacrificed to Uhluhtc.
You are talking about a civilization that used to wear the skins of slain enemies. These are not tree hugging granola eaters. The Spanish were only able to defeat them with the help of all their neighbors who were victims of their cruelty. But by all means, let us worship the “gods” who sanctioned such behavior.
I can only image how the Tlaxcalans felt when Cortez showed up with horses and guns, heading for Tenochtitlan with a gleam of gold in his eyes. The Aztecs left Tlaxcala independent so they could be raided for sacrificial victims. “The Martians have come, and they’re here to kill the Nazis!”
Unrelated to this topic, but I noticed, Rand, that the bottom of your sidebar has a link to “Mother, May I Sleep With Treacher.” You should probably remove the link, because it looks like the site got taken over by an SEO spammer at some point. (Unless it’s not the same Jim Treacher as the one stinking up PJ Media, in which case, never mind, although the site doesn’t exactly look like a humor site, either, so it is probably miscategorized at best. I mean, the content of this article https://jimtreacher.com/jim-treacher-blog/the-message-trumps-presence/ doesn’t seem particularly humorous except for the, uh, ad, I guess, for another site right in the middle of an article about the Indian government.)
Looks like someone is experiencing the modern equivalent of a prankster ordering them gay porn subscriptions.
When do we go after the Romans for theocide of the Greek Gods? Or does that not count since they just adopted them under a new name?
Note, I’m glad that Edge still recognizes that theocide is not a word that can be spelled correctly.
“It was long thought by historians of an anticolonial bent that the conquistadors greatly exaggerated their accounts of Aztec cruelty for polemical purposes. ”
We can suffer from a powerful normalcy bias when confronted with atrocities, particularly when that particular practice has been wiped out from your culture for over a thousand years.
These are the same historians that claim the Tophet Cult was a lie made up by the enemies of Carthage to use as propaganda…
The Aztecs made the NAZIs and Imperial Japan look like boy scouts and Care Bears in comparison, their culture was pure evil.
There culture was not evil. They knew how important bloody human sacrifice was to maintaining the mild climate of the interglacial period. Sure, the Spanish killed quite a lot of them, but without all the skinning and heart-ripping, and that probably plunged us into the mini ice-age. But since then temperatures have been going up and up, threatening billions with starvation, disease, drowning, heat stroke, frost bite, parasitic worms, skin cancer, vaginal herpes, and Covid-19.
Probably the only thing even slowing the looming climate catastrophe is that enough parents are having their kid’s wee-wees and boobs cut off that the Aztec gods are mildly amused, but we don’t know how long that amusement will last.
It’s possible that the sacrifices (as well as many other aspects like the “Flower Wars”, the perpetual ritual warfare that was also a part of the sacrifice system, was in response to the stress of a million people living in a small area in central Mexico at the time (and if Wikipedia can be believed, was started in response to severe drought).
I think a lesson of oh, late environmentalism, is that just because you can identify environmental problems, doesn’t mean that you can come up with good solutions to those problems. The Aztec system of sacrifice and warfare was a bad solution. Let’s not be dumb enough to create similar bad solutions to our environmental problems today.
Back in the 1980s, anthropologists writing about the Mayan Venus-Tlaloc Wars started referring to them as “Star Wars,” a harbinger of things to come. A lot if us seem to have forgotten that journalists are the ones who called SDI “Star Wars” at around the same time.
The Aztecs weren’t all that different from ancient Babylon or the Shang dynasty in China with their blood sacrifices. For whatever reason it happened a lot with early Bronze Age agrarian societies all over the globe.
Which does not make it any less evil.
Most countries have restrictions on certain kinds of worship and I doubt the US doesn’t have those as well. Which makes Tlaloc worship being made legal all the more puzzling.
I think we should adopt certain aspects of Aztec government. The king was required to prove his courage once a year by shoving thorns through his penis. Biden? I bet Kamala would be willing to hold him down for it…
Paywalled for me. I hope Huitzilopochtli was mentioned. When I was a kid, there was a long series of commissioned historicals called “We Were There…” about teenagers living through various historical events. One of my favorites was “We Were There with Cortez and Montezuma,” which is where I first heard of Huitzilopochtli. Another favorite was “We Were There with Caesar’s Legions,” about the 44BC Roman invasion of Trinovantia (SE Britain).
The Hummingbird Wizard! Or Left-handed Hummingbird [the association of left handedness with magic seems a human universal]. My favourite of the Aztec deity-concepts.
My favorite Mesoamerican mythological figure was a character named Smoking Mirror. A name to conjur with!
I appreciated one article that mentioned Tezcatlipoca as the god of both slaves [as in worshipped by them] and the institution of slavery itself, venerated by all because he embodied the power of the gods to reduce any man to the most abject of conditions arbitrarily and without mercy.
Those guys were not messing around with their cosmology.
Years ago I enjoyed the novel “King of the Wood” by John Maddox Roberts- an alternate historical fantasy featuring Norse kingdoms in the pre-Columbian new world, and one Norseman’s adventures across the continent.
Spoiler alert- he and some others end up hooked up with a vast Mongol army that destroys the Aztecs. Not for moral reasons, to be sure, although the Mongols were a bit disapproving of mass slaughter when not for military, judicial, or sporting reasons. Our hero had spent some time living among the Aztecs earlier in the book. It gives a both empathetic and realistically grisly take on Aztec culture.
One character explains to one of the Norsemen that to the Aztecs this invasion might as well have been from another world, so alien was it and so isolated had they been. The enthusiastic hearer replies, “I’ve never destroyed a world before. It’s like Ragnarok!”
One of the stories about Kukulkan is, captured, his enemies loaded him down with gold and threw him in a cenote, then were amazed to see him float. I bet a nice, fat, pork-fed Norseman could swim nicely wearing a hundred pounds of gold chains…
That’s okay. When the stars are right and Cthulhu rises from his watery tomb to reclaim his world, mankind will breathe a sigh of relief as its works are swept aside. At least it’ll end the insanity. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
“Liberals”–is there no stupidity they can’t embrace?
They’re not liberals. They are Marxist/Fascists. Liberals believe in and know science. As a TEA party conservative, I am actually a true liberal.
They’re not even Marxists. At least Marxists believed in math and science, which is why they could beat us into space, whereas the current crop of progressive Democrats think logic and math is racist.
Where are all the militant, evangelical atheists when you need them? They’ll make fun of you because you “believe in that big guy in the sky”. But, they never seem be around to inform everyone of their superior rationality when it comes time to take on Allah, or Gaia, or this nonsense, or magickal thinking in general.
Where are they? Preparing the blade and cleansing the altar.
Because militant, evangelical atheists can mostly be more accurately described as anti-Christians, based on what religions they do and don’t oppose.
The militant, evangelical atheists are only around to take on the worshippers that are safe to challenge. The ones that defend their believes with force and violence? Don’t screw with them….
This is horrifying.
I’m thinking there’s little difference between chanting and doxology. I would instruct my child not to participate in the state sponsored religious indoctrination that is a clear violation of their First Amendment Rights.
I am old enough to remember when they started deciphering the Mayan writings and discovered that instead of “mellow pot smoking pyramid building mathematicians” they were just as bloodthirsty as their neighbors. Some religious practices need to be fully acknowledges and then promptly returned to History’s dustbin.
Still, it brings back memories of Heavy Metal(1981) and Den saving the girl from being sacrificed to Uhluhtc.
You are talking about a civilization that used to wear the skins of slain enemies. These are not tree hugging granola eaters. The Spanish were only able to defeat them with the help of all their neighbors who were victims of their cruelty. But by all means, let us worship the “gods” who sanctioned such behavior.
I can only image how the Tlaxcalans felt when Cortez showed up with horses and guns, heading for Tenochtitlan with a gleam of gold in his eyes. The Aztecs left Tlaxcala independent so they could be raided for sacrificial victims. “The Martians have come, and they’re here to kill the Nazis!”
Unrelated to this topic, but I noticed, Rand, that the bottom of your sidebar has a link to “Mother, May I Sleep With Treacher.” You should probably remove the link, because it looks like the site got taken over by an SEO spammer at some point. (Unless it’s not the same Jim Treacher as the one stinking up PJ Media, in which case, never mind, although the site doesn’t exactly look like a humor site, either, so it is probably miscategorized at best. I mean, the content of this article https://jimtreacher.com/jim-treacher-blog/the-message-trumps-presence/ doesn’t seem particularly humorous except for the, uh, ad, I guess, for another site right in the middle of an article about the Indian government.)
Looks like someone is experiencing the modern equivalent of a prankster ordering them gay porn subscriptions.
When do we go after the Romans for theocide of the Greek Gods? Or does that not count since they just adopted them under a new name?
Note, I’m glad that Edge still recognizes that theocide is not a word that can be spelled correctly.
“It was long thought by historians of an anticolonial bent that the conquistadors greatly exaggerated their accounts of Aztec cruelty for polemical purposes. ”
We can suffer from a powerful normalcy bias when confronted with atrocities, particularly when that particular practice has been wiped out from your culture for over a thousand years.
These are the same historians that claim the Tophet Cult was a lie made up by the enemies of Carthage to use as propaganda…
The Aztecs made the NAZIs and Imperial Japan look like boy scouts and Care Bears in comparison, their culture was pure evil.
There culture was not evil. They knew how important bloody human sacrifice was to maintaining the mild climate of the interglacial period. Sure, the Spanish killed quite a lot of them, but without all the skinning and heart-ripping, and that probably plunged us into the mini ice-age. But since then temperatures have been going up and up, threatening billions with starvation, disease, drowning, heat stroke, frost bite, parasitic worms, skin cancer, vaginal herpes, and Covid-19.
Probably the only thing even slowing the looming climate catastrophe is that enough parents are having their kid’s wee-wees and boobs cut off that the Aztec gods are mildly amused, but we don’t know how long that amusement will last.
It’s possible that the sacrifices (as well as many other aspects like the “Flower Wars”, the perpetual ritual warfare that was also a part of the sacrifice system, was in response to the stress of a million people living in a small area in central Mexico at the time (and if Wikipedia can be believed, was started in response to severe drought).
I think a lesson of oh, late environmentalism, is that just because you can identify environmental problems, doesn’t mean that you can come up with good solutions to those problems. The Aztec system of sacrifice and warfare was a bad solution. Let’s not be dumb enough to create similar bad solutions to our environmental problems today.
Back in the 1980s, anthropologists writing about the Mayan Venus-Tlaloc Wars started referring to them as “Star Wars,” a harbinger of things to come. A lot if us seem to have forgotten that journalists are the ones who called SDI “Star Wars” at around the same time.
The Aztecs weren’t all that different from ancient Babylon or the Shang dynasty in China with their blood sacrifices. For whatever reason it happened a lot with early Bronze Age agrarian societies all over the globe.
Which does not make it any less evil.
Most countries have restrictions on certain kinds of worship and I doubt the US doesn’t have those as well. Which makes Tlaloc worship being made legal all the more puzzling.
I think we should adopt certain aspects of Aztec government. The king was required to prove his courage once a year by shoving thorns through his penis. Biden? I bet Kamala would be willing to hold him down for it…
Paywalled for me. I hope Huitzilopochtli was mentioned. When I was a kid, there was a long series of commissioned historicals called “We Were There…” about teenagers living through various historical events. One of my favorites was “We Were There with Cortez and Montezuma,” which is where I first heard of Huitzilopochtli. Another favorite was “We Were There with Caesar’s Legions,” about the 44BC Roman invasion of Trinovantia (SE Britain).
The Hummingbird Wizard! Or Left-handed Hummingbird [the association of left handedness with magic seems a human universal]. My favourite of the Aztec deity-concepts.
My favorite Mesoamerican mythological figure was a character named Smoking Mirror. A name to conjur with!
I appreciated one article that mentioned Tezcatlipoca as the god of both slaves [as in worshipped by them] and the institution of slavery itself, venerated by all because he embodied the power of the gods to reduce any man to the most abject of conditions arbitrarily and without mercy.
Those guys were not messing around with their cosmology.
Years ago I enjoyed the novel “King of the Wood” by John Maddox Roberts- an alternate historical fantasy featuring Norse kingdoms in the pre-Columbian new world, and one Norseman’s adventures across the continent.
Spoiler alert- he and some others end up hooked up with a vast Mongol army that destroys the Aztecs. Not for moral reasons, to be sure, although the Mongols were a bit disapproving of mass slaughter when not for military, judicial, or sporting reasons. Our hero had spent some time living among the Aztecs earlier in the book. It gives a both empathetic and realistically grisly take on Aztec culture.
One character explains to one of the Norsemen that to the Aztecs this invasion might as well have been from another world, so alien was it and so isolated had they been. The enthusiastic hearer replies, “I’ve never destroyed a world before. It’s like Ragnarok!”
One of the stories about Kukulkan is, captured, his enemies loaded him down with gold and threw him in a cenote, then were amazed to see him float. I bet a nice, fat, pork-fed Norseman could swim nicely wearing a hundred pounds of gold chains…