What Day of the Dead tells us about the Aztec philosophy of happiness
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Had to pause it yesterday though. The depiction of a depressed Moctezuma before the final collapse got to me. Both he and we know how it is going to end.
A Rain of Darts: The Mexica Aztecs by Burr Cartwright Brundage
Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend
This might come off as a dick reply, but I kind of doubt that seeing as how, as far as I know, the Aztecs were an illiterate civilization.
Was a bit of a dick reply. You instead might have done a cursory google search, and found that there were not written but pictorial records, which I think is more interesting to the discussion than shutting down someone's comment.
Maybe the masses, but not their priesthood, elites, or such. Similar to ancient egypt, I think. You don't say they were illiterate just because they used cuneiform, or do you?
I'm no linguist, but every time I've looked into this the answer has been yes. Though there is this weird trend to heavily suggest otherwise even in supposed serious sources, which has given me a major chip on my shoulder on this issue.
What they have is proto-writing. The Mayans have full writing, supposedly, and Aztec "script" seems to look like the Mayan's so many assume it must be the same, when it is not at all. Proto-writing pictograms are not at all like cuneiform or Chinese characters. There's no word, for example, for the to be verb in any Aztec script/pictogram. What nouns you can say exist are only what any picture anywhere would have. You can't say "Tototl was feeling despondent on the rainy day of 5th reed" and have someone else read that thought a century later because there are no words to construct a spoken sentence like such. The best you could do is draw a mural with a guy, with rebus device to suggest his name, surrounded by rain, hoping to convey such a sentence. But at that point you're just guessing.
It changes things a lot. I was reading the blurb on that Fifth Sun book and they were getting quite romantic suggesting a narrative of the true forgotten story of the Aztec in their own words the Spanish conquerors didn't want you to know! That's so dishonest to a naive audience. Whatever scholarship they are doing it has to be a combination of post-colonial recordings of oral history, post-colonial Spanish or Spanish influenced contemporary writings, and archeology. There is no other way.
They understood a creative being, Ometecuhtli, but that creator was the element of fire (matter), and the creation occurred by the fact of omeycualiztli (matter). The cretaor was the eternal (Ayamictlán), but the imperishable continued to be fire (matter). The gods are the four material beings, the four stars: Tonacatecuhtli, Tonacacíhuatl, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca. They deified the rains in Tlaloc and the sea in Chalchiuhtlicue, these deities also being material. To explain the appearance of men, they resorted to the action of fire on earth (matter again), the marriage between Tonacatecuhtli and Tonacacíhuatl. The idea of a spiritual being was not perceived.
The Nahuas were not deists, nor can it be said that their philosophy was Asian-pantheism. It was materialism based on the eternity of matter. Their religion was the Sabaeism of the four stars, and like their philosophy, it was also materialistic.
Edit:
A cursory wiki search leads to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cultu...
I say we can all appreciate the good without embracing the bad.
But yes, not excusing a brutal tradition of sacrifice. I think my argument stands, though, that you can learn positive things from any population/civilization that has cruel actors (or cruel traditions) within it. Be it the Spaniards, despite the conquistadors, or the Aztecs, because of the warrior elite.
AFAIK, the aztecs at least thought they were appeasing all powerful gods when doing it. Don't think the same could be said of us...
Well, and more recently...for example, just a few years ago on a huge scale in Iraq. (Not to mention ongoing birth defects)
Some dominant groups are more appaling then others - nazi and Stalin come to mind. But we are not throwing away everything German or Russian either. Nor we are throwing away everything Sparta despite them being literally violent totalitarian state.
Adressing your first point, I really think that human (including children) sacrifice is quite unique and not present in the cultures you mentioned.
No, we did not. To large extend, people don't even know what Nazi ideology and goals actually were except that they killed most Jews. But first here, you would have to show they were overall like Nazi.
> Adressing your first point, I really think that human (including children) sacrifice is quite unique and not present in the cultures you mentioned.
Soldiers working for colonial Britain would cut kids hands if parents did not worked fast enough. Columbus did cut peoples hands too, I think that including children hands if locals did not produced as much as he wanted. He also took kids as sexual slaves for his men. Cortes behavior was not normal either. Hunting witches and torturing old people assumed is not generally normal either.
American slavery routinely involved kids being sold away from parents before age of 10 .. and quite a lot of them died.
None of it is exactly same as human sacrifice, but not much better either.
"Columbus's forced labour system was described by his son Ferdinand: "In the Cibao, where the gold mines were, every person of fourteen years of age or upward was to pay a large hawk's bell of gold dust; all others were each to pay twenty-five pounds of cotton. Whenever an Indian delivered his tribute, he was to receive a brass or copper token which he must wear about his neck as proof that he had made his payment; any Indian found without such a token was to be punished." The monarchs, who suggested the tokens, called for a light punishment, but any Indian found without a copper token had their hands cut off, which was a likely death sentence.[118] Since there was no abundance of gold on the island, the natives had no chance of meeting Columbus' quota and thousands are reported to have committed suicide."
Edit: The wiki article states around 20k prisoners per year were captured for sacrifice, though perhaps the number might have been inflated to intimidate their enemies.
> Every Aztec warrior would have to provide at least one prisoner for sacrifice. All the male population was trained to be warriors, but only the few who succeeded in providing captives could become full-time members of the warrior elite. Accounts also state that several young warriors could unite to capture a single prisoner, which suggests that capturing prisoners for sacrifice was challenging
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cultu...
Who knew... mortal combat was challenging?
The initial horror at the Aztec using innocents is tempered when you think about the crimes that many in Europe would likely have committed. I think medieval European justice is probably not much better.
Are you suggesting that it doesn't make a difference whether you're executing people for crimes or for fun? Yes, the medieval European justice system was far from perfect, yes, it was so imperfect that people now call things "medieval" when they're cruel and stupid, but surely there is something to be said for the fact that the people being executed in Europe had sometimes done something wrong to get there.
That's no different from human sacrifice to a god.
Tenochtitlán is said to have been a beautiful city of floating gardens. In Madrid, shit flowed in open sewers on sidewalks.
This doesnt make it morally more excusable, but it tempers your point as not everyone was a potential target of sacrifice.
Also you managed to miss the (in my mind) legitimate criticism of your characterization of their sacrifices as being 'for fun'.
I think the European criminal system was far more widespread than Aztec sacrifices, so net net maybe it would be similar. It’s also probably worth noting the religious aspect of it - people in religions sometimes seem willing to sacrifice their life for their gods, so I’m not 100% sure that the sacrifice victims or society didn’t get something out of it. In fact, they got the same thing as Europe - a tighter societal bond.
That being said, we know so little about the Aztecs compared to Europe that it would be impossible to make an informed if absurd decision as to which way I would want to be executed.
You have to evaluate ideological systems by their net good/evil per follower, otherwise their relative scales would dominate any comparison. For example, medical malpractice has killed unimaginably more people than any suicidal cult ever has. Still, that does not mean it's better to join a suicidal cult than it is to visit the doctor's office.
>we know so little about the Aztecs compared to Europe that it would be impossible to make an informed if absurd decision as to which way I would want to be executed.
The reason you'd want to pick the justice system is that justice systems, even when imperfect, can still declare innocent people innocent. A justice system sometimes makes mistakes, the Aztec temple only made mistakes.
It's plausible, in my opinion, that evaluating the Aztecs' ritual sacrifice practice in terms of the modern scientific POV leads to a categorically incorrect analysis. I.e. the questions--whether the Aztec gods exist, whether unfalsifiable claims "make sense" or can be operative, etc--might not be relevant or interesting.
I.e. the function describing the relationship between how closely our actions align with true facts as we understand them intellectually and broad outcomes in quality of life (defined however you want) is almost certainly not monotonic.
I guess in short all I'm saying is that our conscious, intellectual understanding of the world is not the only useful motivator. And I don't mean this in some sort of supernatural, metaphysical, spiritual way: I mean that objectively rational behavior sometimes results from subjectively irrational behavior.
> Prosecutions for the crime of witchcraft reached a highpoint from 1580 to 1630 during the Counter-Reformation and the European wars of religion, when an estimated 50,000 people were burned at the stake, of which roughly 80% were women, and most often over the age of 40.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_early_mode...
Edit I'm seeing 6 figure conquistador estimates and a 3 figure number acquired so far? Do you have a cite for 50k? Seems like a likely enough number just curious if anything has been refined since this https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5893933/The-...
the six figure estimate provided by the conquistador was written off as fabricated or exaggerated, unti the skull towers were discovered by archaeologists, and a few years later were discovered to roughly match the dimensions provided by the conquistador. i gave half his number as a conservative hedge.
the aztecs are believed to sacrificed tens of thousands of people a year; i do not think it is as outlandish as it may sound.
the aztecs were a truly, historically, uniquely bloodthirsty people.
this was a traditional rite; the skin would then be placed in a clay vessel underneath a temple or shrine alongside many others
I also rarely hear people suggesting to learn from medieval europe.
But there is still respect, for example it does bother me, that all those kings still have a "great" in their name, when what it was what they were good at, was large scale slaughtering. King Karl the great? Not for me. By that standards Hitler would be a "Great", too.
And that our awesome justice system roots in ancient rome. Which was mainly a empire. Conquering the world to steal riches and slaves.
The word 'great' is not simply a more emphatic word for 'good', though in some contexts it might mean that. Great Britain isn't great because it's better than the other Britains, but because it encompasses all of the British Isles. I think it may also be the case that people are called great when their impact on history seems to have a great scale. For instance I think Catherine the Great is called great not because she was particularly benevolent (she personally owned half a million people), but because Russia became more powerful and expansive during her reign.
Yes, I am aware of that. But in classic history this seems to be the same. Good and great is having conquered much. And also in the general perception. The hollywood movies of Caesar or Alexander? Pure admiration. No serious criticism(or any at all), I remember of. Nothing against presenting history as it was. But there is still lots of glorification going on.
My school history classes were also speaking mainly great of the "great" people. Even though we would call them brutal dictators and barbaric enslavers if they would exist today.
"World's [blankiest] [blank]" is generally a pretty popular genre, regardless of the subject. Whether it's the tallest mountain, most venomous snake, longest railroad or fastest plane, people are fascinated with extremes. I think the obsession with the world's 'great' leaders like Genghis Khan or Alexander is just another manifestation of this.
It is, but would you not object to calling "Hitler the great"? Even though he was great by standards of conquering and slaughtering?
1: https://phys.org/news/2018-06-skull-tower-rack-evidence-azte...
A more important thing to consider is the actual context of sacrifice in Aztec religion. Their mythology held that the gods literally sacrificed themselves to bring the (current) world into existence, and they recreated these sacrifices both as a means of honoring their gods as well as ensuring the continuation of the effects of that sacrifice. This isn't actually all that far off from Christianity, which recreates the sacrifice of Jesus in the form of the Eucharist, which can (and historically was!) be seen as a form of human sacrifice. Indeed, in broader theological terms, Aztecs need to undergo personal sacrifice of their own flesh and blood, while Christians make do with merely sacrificing personal possessions or (more commonly) abstract desires.
Such hard evidence has been found, in the form of human remains mutilated in the manner described by contemporary sources.