Some people mourn the loss of the Inca and Aztec empires. Obviously, the loss of life was horrible. However, would you rather be having your heart cut out to the Sun god, or attending mass?

Those were the Mayans

OMG, I just googled it, and it turns out the Aztecs were pretty blood-thirsty; so I was wrong.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/16/Mendoza_HumanSacrifice.jpg

The Aztec method of performing human sacrifice was to take a sharpened stone and cut the person's heart out while it was still beating. They continued by taking the heart and the blood and mixing it with a potion of peanuts, chocolate, hot peppers and other spices and eating it.http://www.advocate611.com/Aztecs.htm

The higher loss we got from this conquest was that of Astrology & commune with nature

I always wondered how a religion like that starts? How do they decide gutting is good and pleases the gods?

I always wondered how a religion like that starts? How do they decide gutting is good and pleases the gods?

They revered the sacred in human blood, but I think they carried that a little too far.

A number of mummies of sacrificed children have been recovered in the Inca regions of South America, an ancient practice known as capacocha.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice#Inca_empire

Astrology appears to be from Babylon - not the American Indians.The origins of much of the astrological doctrine and method that would later develop in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East are found among the ancient Babylonians and their system of celestial omens that began to be compiled around the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrology

I'll take mass over commune in nature, especially if I get to keep my heart without someone eating it.

How does one please the Gods? This is how gutting people starts. What can we humans do for the Gods? Let's kill someone to show how important you Gods are to us. In other words, we will even kill our own children to show you Gods how important you are.

Some people mourn the loss of the Inca and Aztec empires. Obviously, the loss of life was horrible. However, would you rather be having your heart cut out to the Sun god, or attending mass?

Heart cut out. They preferred virgins, so I'm safe. At least it wouldn't be boring.

There is another side to the coin.

A) The History comes down to us from the Spanish and is surely biased.
B) Romans paraded the leaders of their enemy's armies (dressed in their finest native attire) through Rome. The Romans asked for blessings and gave official gifts to their Gods and in the end, when the pomp and ceremony was done, strangled the enemy and tossed his body into a pit.
C) The Catholics used round up "barbarians" force them in a river or lake, shoot arrows over their heads so they would duck under the water, give a blessing so their soul was "saved" and murder them.
D) Allahu Akba .. .. .. boom!
E) You see, the Spanish came and used their guns and murdered people whose land they were stealing and left them to rot on the ground. The English and French came, used their guns and murdered people (and also used disease infested cloth to murder people) and steal their land and left their bodies to rot. The Aztecs actually considered their form of killing rivals much MORE civilized. The Aztecs went to war using their hand-held weapons and, similar to the Romans, considered hand to hand combat an honor. Instead of killing and leaving the bodies of their opponents on the ground to rot they took them back to their God and scarified them because this gave honor to both the conquered and to the conquerer.

Just to put things in perspective,
Michael

They revered the sacred in human blood....

why was blood sacred?

Some people mourn the loss of the Inca and Aztec empires. Obviously, the loss of life was horrible. However, would you rather be having your heart cut out to the Sun god, or attending mass?



I'd rather be living without any religion to keep me doing only what they think is right.

why was blood sacred?
It was the life-water that kept people alive, and people were considered the mortal descendants of the divine, in some ways.
So, they thought "the stuff that keeps us alive is sacred, because we are sacred". They just took it too far, I guess.

Well, at least their religious gatherings weren't boring. :D

It was the life-water that kept people alive...
Well, at least their religious gatherings weren't boring. :D

Imagine if they thought it was semen. That's a religious gathering that wouldn't be boring either. Messy and sticky, but not boring.

Imagine if they thought it was semen. That's a religious gathering that wouldn't be boring either. Messy and sticky, but not boring.

Semen is revered by Buddhist, Daoist, Hindu and Gnostic traditions and it is mentioned in the Bible as "Dew".

Sacred_semen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semen#Sacred_semen)

There is an ancient Chinese saying that goes: "One drop of semen equals a hundred drops of blood". They were not that far after all, Semen contains 100 times more Zinc than the blood.

Semen is revered by Buddhist, Daoist, Hindu and Gnostic traditions and it is mentioned in the Bible as "Dew".....

?? Where?
And I'll never drink Mountain Dew the same way again.

?? Where?
And I'll never drink Mountain Dew the same way again.

From Wiki (the link I pasted):

"Dew was once thought to be a sort of rain that fertilized the earth and, in time, became a metaphor for semen. The Bible employs the term “dew” in this sense in such verses as Song of Solomon 5:2 and Psalm 110:3, declaring, in the latter verse, for example, that the people should follow only a king who was virile enough to be full of the “dew” of youth."

(Songs of Solomon 5:2)
"I was asleep but my heart was awake. A voice! My beloved was knocking: 'Open to me, my sister, my darling, My dove, my perfect one! For my head is drenched with dew, My locks with the damp of the night.'

(Psalm 110:3)
"Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power, in the beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning: thou hast the dew of thy youth."

That verse from the Songs of Solomon is cool, it mentions that Solomon had dreadlocks, so cool. The first Rastafari

These civilizations serve as an example of why you shouldn't let religion and superstition run day-to-day operations...

There is another side to the coin. The History comes down to us from the Spanish and is surely biased...Thank you! We're talking about a civilization that was still in the Bronze Age, about 2500 years behind ours. Remember that the aboriginal Americans got a late start because they didn't even arrive here until around 15000BCE. Our ancestors lived in Eurasia for about 60,000 years before they got around to inventing civilization, so I think the Incas and the Olmec/Maya/Aztecs did themselves proud. I get pretty impatient with Christians who criticize the Amerinds but conveniently ignore the atrocities their own people were engaged in during the same era. You don't even have to go back that far: During my own lifetime one of Europe's proudest Christian nations made a concerted effort to kill off every single Jew they could get their hands on, in particularly gruesome ways that would surely have impressed the Aztecs.Astrology appears to be from Babylon - not the American Indians.The origins of much of the astrological doctrine and method that would later develop in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East are found among the ancient Babylonians and their system of celestial omens that began to be compiled around the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AstrologyYou're taking a Eurocentric perspective and talking about our astrology. Astronomy was arguably the first science. It was invented independently in many regions and quickly put to work promoting or explaining their religions. Astronomy and its dark side, astrology, not only predates written language, which one might reasonably assume is essential to science, but it even predates civilization itself. Look at Stonehenge.These civilizations serve as an example of why you shouldn't let religion and superstition run day-to-day operations...We don't need to look at someone else's civilization to see religion for what it is: a force holding back civilization. Look at Europe during the period when the Christian church had unrivaled power in all aspects of life: the millennium of ignorance and squalor known as the Dark Ages. They actually preached that bathing was a sin!What good were the Inca or Aztec religions?Every religion is a collection of metaphors. It is the stories a people tells about themselves, their history and their world. Religion is the oldest form of literature and it tells us much about the lives of our distant ancestors: their philosophy, their dreams, their children's fairytales, their social customs, even their politics and economics.

When the Christian armies obliterated the Aztec and Inca civilizations, including the written works in the Aztec libraries and most of the art in both nations, they destroyed a precious and irreplaceable trove of ideas. For a civilized people like we claim to be, there can be no greater "sin" than the destruction of an entire civilization, much less two of them. Christianity will forever be irredeemable and unforgivable. As will Islam, for having done the same thing to the civilization of Egypt.

The Aztecs had essentially no large animal sources of protein. So the fact that they ate their sacrificed enemies is worht noting.

The priests got dibs, naturally.

But compared with the persecution of, say, Dutch heretics by the Roman Church (the one that always got me was the technique of tying peoples' heads between their knees and drowning them at night in barrels of water - the Church was squeamish about blood ). the Aztecs were humane about their religious needs for slaughter.

I mean, stay away from religions on the warpath, but which would you rather?

I don't think many people deny that religion in the West has a bloodythirsty history, one as violent as anything practised by the Incas and Aztecs.

What I do object to is how some people portray the West - Americas relationship. As if big bad whitey stomped in and abused the poor innocent Incas and Aztecs. When one realizes that these people subjugated and slaughtered rivalling civilizations and nomads (why do you think so many of the natives allied themselves with the Spanish?), and used them as human sacrifices, it becomes clear that what goes around, comes around.

I always wondered how a religion like that starts? How do they decide gutting is good and pleases the gods?

when something bad happened and people didn't know why, they thought the gods were punishing them. they drew the conclusion that gods are evil and they want to kill people. so they thought that if they sacrificed people, gods would be pleased and wouldn't feel the need to kill people.

..so they thought that if they sacrificed people, gods would be pleased and wouldn't feel the need to kill people.

see, my brain would never make that leap. At least not the way they did it.

I can see giving your most valuable items (food, animals, virgins) to a volcano, but the ripping out hearts thing...no.

Fraggle Rocker. Blaming Islam for the downfall of Egypt is fiction. The Greeks and Romans destroyed Egypt. Also, blaming Christianity for the fall of the Incas and Aztecs is simply ignoring the role of the Spanish King in the destruction of those civilizations brought about mainly to fuel the Spanish Empire with gold. Where do you get your unsupported assertions anyway?

see, my brain would never make that leap.

they had very small brains back then.

I can see giving your most valuable items (food, animals, virgins) to a volcano, but the ripping out hearts thing...no.

a volcano can do much worse things than ripping out hearts.

they had very small brains back then..,.

No they didn't. They were smart.

No they didn't. They were smart.

only a few were smart. and those people were much smarter than we are today. but the others were much more stupid than we are today. the smart taught the stupid...

no. We aren't smarter. We aren't even better educated. They were just educated differently. I can't survive in a jungle. I can't make gold jewelry. I can't make pottery. I can't hunt jaguars. I can't even grind corn and make a damn tortilla!

Why make tortillas when you can buy them at the Super Wal-Mart, which by the way was the invention of a desendant of Europeans.

...which is a stupid invention.

...which is a stupid invention.

tortillas or Wal-Mart (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20056614/site/newsweek/)? ;)
I am really starting to rethink shopping there :mad:

Wal-Mart.

no. We aren't smarter. We aren't even better educated. They were just educated differently. I can't survive in a jungle. I can't make gold jewelry. I can't make pottery. I can't hunt jaguars. I can't even grind corn and make a damn tortilla!

you can if you have the knowledge. knowledge is not intelligence. educated people are often not smarter than parrots.

if the incas were not more stupid than us, does it mean that parrots are not more stupid than us either? they're just educated differently?

each generation of humans is smarter than the last. intelligence evolves.

...each generation of humans is smarter than the last. intelligence evolves.

you have lost your mind.
We build bigger badder deadlier weapons every year. Doesn't make us smarter.

Why make tortillas when you can buy them at the Super Wal-Mart, which by the way was the invention of a descendant of Europeans.
Because hand-made things are more personal, and of better quality than commercialized, standardized, and industrialized crap products.
And you speak of Wal-Mart is if were a good thing.

The point Orleander made still stands: we have the same potential for intellect. We are just are educated in different manners in accordance to our cultural specialities. Indo-Europeans, Altaics, and East Asians concentrated on critical-thinking and other things in their education because their geographical locations allowed for them vast natural resources and farming lands, meaning they didn't have to worry about scrounging a hunter-gatherer existence.
People in Africa and South America were largely cut off due to geography, that is why they did not have the same technology as the invaders. And it is because of geography that their education concentrated on survival in the wild scrublands and rainforests of their continent.

You really should read "Guns, Germs, and Steel".

The Aztecs went to war using their hand-held weapons and, similar to the Romans, considered hand to hand combat an honor. Instead of killing and leaving the bodies of their opponents on the ground to rot they took them back to their God and scarified them because this gave honor to both the conquered and to the conquerer.

Just to put things in perspective,
Being bad at killing is no virtue. If you could go back in time and hand the Aztecs automatic weapons to defend themselves with, do you think they'd turn them down? Of course not.

They were bloody handed savages. The Conquistadors were also savages by modern standards, but were better at it.

Blaming Islam for the downfall of Egypt is fiction. The Greeks and Romans destroyed Egypt.We have been through this before. The civilization of Egypt was obliterated by the armies of Caliph Omar of Baghdad because the Egyptians were "infidels." Their libraries were burned because their contents were "heretical." After destroying their culture, the Arabs marginalized the Egyptian people, occupied their land, filled it with immigrants, superimposed their own culture, and took their name, similar to what the Anglo-Saxons did to the original Celtic "Britons." The Greeks and Romans weakened Egypt politically and militarily, but they did not destroy their culture as the Muslims did.Also, blaming Christianity for the fall of the Incas and Aztecs is simply ignoring the role of the Spanish King in the destruction of those civilizations brought about mainly to fuel the Spanish Empire with gold. Where do you get your unsupported assertions anyway?I have also responded to this apologist argument in another thread. The Spanish king may have been greedy for gold and power, but it was the pope who "blessed" him with the deed to all of Latin America west of Brazil, which he deeded to the king of Portugal. If the people living in those regions had been Christians instead of "heathens," they would have been considered nations instead of territories up for grabs. If the Europeans had encountered Christian culture instead of other religions they would have gone to war but not methodically stamped out their history and literature; they would have stolen their treasures but kept them as precious art objects instead of melting them down.

The treatment of the Aztecs and Incas was part of Catholic Europe's effort to rid the world of competing religions, a manifestation of the spirit of the Inquisition, and integral to the dominant but threatened Christian culture of the day.

Being bad at killing is no virtue. If you could go back in time and hand the Aztecs automatic weapons to defend themselves with, do you think they'd turn them down? Of course not.

They were bloody handed savages. The Conquistadors were also savages by modern standards, but were better at it.Haaa, and what if we had handed the medieval Europeans modern weapons, would they not have stopped until every culture was crushed under the weight of such an onslaught?

Well with the religion of the Aztecs and Incas, you did not have over population.

If you could go back in time and hand the Aztecs automatic weapons to defend themselves with, do you think they'd turn them down? Of course not.Actually, the Aztecs' own religion was a major ingredient in their downfall. The landing of Córtez appeared to fulfill their prophesy of the return of a god. Some historians say that to a people who were culturally desensitized to ritual murder, his depradations no doubt were interpreted as the right of an angry deity.Well with the religion of the Aztecs and Incas, you did not have over population.I don't know much about the Incas but the continuum of Olmec/Maya/Aztec civilization was in fact a textbook example of stress on the ecosystem. The Mayans clear-cut forests in an ever-widening radius for building materials for their cities, until they destroyed the ability of the land to support them. Under the successor regime of the Aztecs the boundary of the Sonora Desert crept southward due to unsustainable agriculture. (Just as the Gobi Desert is inching its way toward Beijing at a measurable velocity.)

"Overpopulation" is a relative term, but the civilization of Mexico and Guatemala had clearly achieved a population level that its unscientific agricultural technology could not sustain. It's been argued that this is the real reason that the United States was able to overachieve in contrast to its southern neighbors. Civilization had never quite crossed the Rio Grande so it was still the Mesolithic or even the Neolithic Era up here. Timber, topsoil, game, fuel, minerals, clean water--everything that Europe had depleted itself of long ago was found in incredible abundance because no cities had yet been built to exploit it.

We think it was the cultural superiority of the original colonists that made America great. In fact it is quite likely that it was simply their good luck to be the first city-builders to set foot in the region. Good luck that is rapidly running out.

We think it was the cultural superiority of the original colonists that made America great. In fact it is quite likely that it was simply their good luck to be the first city-builders to set foot in the region. Good luck that is rapidly running out.

That they were disease carriers and were also welcomed, supported, trained and taught by natives also help foothold incursions maintain themselves. Metal based weapon systems and total conversion or destroy intercultural strategies (similar to the larger empires already in placed in the New World) also aided them in relation to smaller New World societies not accustomed to thinking in terms of wiping out competitors or culturel based warfare - conversion to christianity, banning of language, dress etc. They were sadly outclassed in terms of cynical views of other cultures. (None of this is news to you, I am sure, but I wanted to add to your post)

I would not say the Eurpoeans were culturally superior. That is I think debatable. However, there is no doubt the Europeans were technologically superior to the native peoples. Does that justify what the Europeans did to the native peoples, I think not. But hopefully, we as a unified people can learn from our history and do better when we have the opportunity.
Also the advanced technology of the Europeans did not and does not make them any smarter than any other race or people. Time, environment, culture, and circumstance allowed Europeans to obtan advanced technology.

...disease carriers...metal based weapon systemsThese were also part of the baggage of being a civilized people (which merely means "the building of cities" and not necessarily "good and noble" as it is commonly but incorrectly used) rather than a Neolithic people (living in villages and having invented the technology of farming, which go together) or a Mesolithic people (small groups of nomadic hunter gatherers who have known each other intimately since birth). Epidemics come with the population density and poor sanitation of city life. The Plague was transmitted by fleas, which were carried by rats, which congregate in cities, with their bountiful supply of groceries and garbage. And metallurgy is too complex a technology to be invented by villagers. Bronze is made of tin and copper, which rarely occur in proximity, and require a sophisticated level of culture, in which two cities that are not close neighbors cooperate for the common good. You can't even describe these things without a lot of commas, a hallmark of civilization. :)

Ironically, when the city folks pushed the limits of metallurgy and discovered how to work iron, it backfired on them. Iron ore is fairly common and once the nice city folk teach you how to find it, it's all you need to make iron tools and weapons. That and a really hot fire, another technology which the city folk graciously share with their backwoods neighbors. (In their defense, it's very difficult to protect an asset that consists only of knowledge, as we are rediscovering in the Computer Age.) Suddenly every barbarian tribe for hundreds of miles around became a "kingdom" and armed itself with metal weapons.

If the ancient Greeks or Romans had discovered the New World, or even Córtez's Chinese contemporaries who had not invented explosive weapons, the rich lodes of untapped iron ore would have been discovered by the natives instead of the occupying forces, and the last five hundred years of history might have been entirely different. Recall that the Germanic "barbarian" tribes like the Vandals and Lombards beat the Romans on their own turf using their own technology!

The transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age is not generally identified by historians as a "Paradigm Shift" like agriculture, city building, industry and computers, but I think it comes pretty close. It changed the nature of civilization from a network of cities with established cultures who had a vested interest in harmony, to a collection of smaller communities only a generation or two out of the Stone Age who could be seduced by the selfish advantage of overrunning each other.

I would not say the Eurpoeans were culturally superior. That is I think debatable.

Cultural superiority...what is that exactly?
Asians had their culture long before Europeans.

Asians had their culture long before Europeans.Indeed. AFAIK the Greeks established the first outpost of civilization in Europe, in the late second millennium BCE. The Greeks themselves have questionable credentials to qualify as a "European" people since they were an Indo-European tribe that migrated from western Asia and only arrived around 2000BCE. "Greek civilization" itself is but an offshoot of the far more ancient Mesopotamian civilization, which had spread to Phoenicia and other regions from which the Greeks could simply borrow and build upon it.

"Western civilization" is just part of the continuum of widly successful Mesopotamian civilization. All three of the world's surviving civilizations (Chinese, Indian and Mesopotamian) arose in Asia, long before the first Greek tribesman set foot in Europe. The three that did not survive because they were obliterated by the sons of Mesopotamia arose in Africa (Egyptian), South America (Inca) and North America (Aztec). No civilization was ever developed independently and spontaneously in Europe.

These were also part of the baggage of being a civilized people (which merely means "the building of cities" and not necessarily "good and noble" as it is commonly but incorrectly used) rather than a Neolithic people (living in villages and having invented the technology of farming, which go together) or a Mesolithic people (small groups of nomadic hunter gatherers who have known each other intimately since birth).

I've often thought it was sadly ironic that the Native Americans had such strong 'family values' despite the way Christians now and after first contact tended to view them. Strong family ties, charitable relations to neighbors, close relations with children through extended families...their way of life in moral terms probably was more similar to early christian communities than 'modern' Christian ones. Even in their dealings with whites there was a greater tendency to turn the other cheek and see if the whites improved their behavior than the 'superior' monotheists had a tendency in relation to them. (with exceptions of course).

We also got some of our democratic ideas from eastern tribe formats and for damn sure the natives were not secular people. Nevertheless the monotheists have never looked back. Manifest destiny while 'obvious' to everyone has later seemed less obvious to secular Americans.

Their architecture was more precise than we could ever dream of although not on the same scale of the Egyptians..both combined astrology with architecture.

We couldn't hope to reproduce such technical expertise and its extremely unlikely that we shall do so in the future. One may as well ask Tracey Emin to paint like Leonardo Da Vinci.. the skills, patience, schooling and most importantly the sense of the Spiritual are now sadly lacking.

Still theres always Rap music and Paris Hilton to divert us. Thank you, America.

Their architecture was more precise than we could ever dream of although not on the same scale of the Egyptians..both combined astrology with architecture.

We couldn't hope to reproduce such technical expertise and its extremely unlikely that we shall do so in the future. One may as well ask Tracey Emin to paint like Leonardo Da Vinci.. the skills, patience, schooling and most importantly the sense of the Spiritual are now sadly lacking.

Still theres always Rap music and Paris Hilton to divert us. Thank you, America.

Don´t forget Mac Donalds

Still theres always Rap music and Paris Hilton to divert us. Thank you, America.

You might want to try avoiding the culture-based feelings of superiority Europeans had in relation to native cultures by not making similar assumptions about rap music. One specific not very talented, very rich person and rap music, which has a huge variety of musical variations and artistic abilities under its category, seem an odd pair in that sentence. For a moment consider that you may have been trained (note that, trained) in how to listen to other forms of music with other aesthetic priorities. If it was rock, you are talking about specific, generally repetitive rhythms, with the focus of variation and play on melody against harmonic structures. With rap and hip hop you are dealing with an emphasis on rhythmic variation and repeating melodic riffs. If only the Europeans had said: these people are different, I wonder what we can learn from them, and spent time acculturating themselves to native aesthetics, spiritual practices, societal organization, leadership styles, healing techniques and, as you said, architecture. If only those who encounter music essentially or literally from other cultures allowed themselves to be trained to get it, rather than assuming that one can lump the whole thing together negatively and assume that the people who are listening have poor aesthetics or are dupes of some kind. Hell, with the help of one music teacher I even came to enjoy one Opera. I don't listen to more on my own. But I could after a while come to understand its (peculiar to me) aesthetics and pleasures.

I keep living in hope that curiosity will overcome knee-jerk belittling of different aesthetics.

I don't think many people deny that religion in the West has a bloodythirsty history, one as violent as anything practised by the Incas and Aztecs.

What I do object to is how some people portray the West - Americas relationship. As if big bad whitey stomped in and abused the poor innocent Incas and Aztecs. When one realizes that these people subjugated and slaughtered rivalling civilizations and nomads (why do you think so many of the natives allied themselves with the Spanish?), and used them as human sacrifices, it becomes clear that what goes around, comes around.

Ah yes...those nasty Red Indians fighting one another and causing mayhem.

If I'm wrong..Sioux me! :rolleyes:

Billy,
Mountainhare was talking about the Aztecs and Incas in Central America, not North American natives.

What about the Mayans and Toltecs?

What I do object to is how some people portray the West - Americas relationship. As if big bad whitey stomped in and abused the poor innocent Incas and Aztecs. When one realizes that these people subjugated and slaughtered rivalling civilizations and nomads (why do you think so many of the natives allied themselves with the Spanish?), and used them as human sacrifices, it becomes clear that what goes around, comes around.

Yes, some tribal people aligned themselves with the Europeans. And those who survived I am quite sure found the new boss the same or worse as the old boss.

When do you think what goes around, comes around will start to take effect in relation to the horrible abuses and genocidal activites of Europeans in relations to native tribes IN GENERAL?

The Maya and Toltec civilization faced a crisis not unlike that which we face today. It will be interesting to see how we maneuver through this situation or if we follow in their foot steps. The Maya faced a situation in which the noble class out grew and mismanaged and overstretched their resources in pursuits of personal pleasure and power. When faced with a natural disaster – a drought, they crumbled.

hmmm ritualized murder, not exactly my cup-of-tea....

I'd rather be living without any religion to keep me doing only what they think is right.

The problem with that is people like Stalin and Chairman Mao...

The problem with that is people like Stalin and Chairman Mao...Communism was an outgrowth of Christian morality.

when something bad happened and people didn't know why, they thought the gods were punishing them. they drew the conclusion that gods are evil and they want to kill people. so they thought that if they sacrificed people, gods would be pleased and wouldn't feel the need to kill people.

This is an extremely ethnocentric view, and inaccurate.


The world in which the Aztecs lived was not the first in their cosmology. After the last four (IIRC) worlds were were destroyed (the last one in a flood after the gods realized that the people were very greedy). The Gods then decided to create a new world, the fifth world, this time being very careful about how everything was created.
In order to create the new sun for this fifth world, the Gods needed two things: material from the people they had created, and the blood of a god to provide the power.

IIRC Ant agreed to sacrifice himself to be that source, but then became afraid, and ran. The other gods chased him down and sacrificed him. Once released, he was happy to be the sun, and was no longer scared.

As such, the Aztec considered it to be an honor to be sacrificed, to join Ant in keeping the sun and this fifth world alive. Also, to be sacrificed was to feed the water goddess who had destroyed the third world and liked to eat people (she was ripped in half to create the earth and sky). To sustain the earth as she sustained the people.*

The *winners* of the ball games at the annual festivals were the ones sacrificed, not the losers. Slaves and prisoners were only sacrificed to pad the offering - they were considered of lesser value; just like how Cain's offering of burnt vegetables was considered by God to be of less value than Able's offering of burnt meat.


And no, I don't understand it either. Though assuredly, they wouldn't understand the things that I feel are important. Individualism in place of the honor of sacrificing for the society as a whole? How foolish and wasteful!!



* all this comes from my undergrad class on Central and South American cultures, which was about 10 years ago, so I might be a bot off in some details.

They revered the sacred in human blood, but I think they carried that a little too far.

Umm, the god of the Bible old testament also required a blood sacrifice to 'cleanse one's sins'. Even Abraham was about to sacrifice his son Isaac.
Aside from the actual cutting out a beating heart, I see few differences.

It may have been good for the Aztecs but bad for their neighbors. I seem to remember that it was the people they conquered that ended up on the chopping block. So it certainly helped them control the population of their neighbors/enemies, provided a good spectacle to unit thier own people, and allowed them to work out personal trauma on a collective scale. There's also a theory that they practiced cannablism and that it was an important source of protein.

No civilization was ever developed independently and spontaneously in Europe.
Celts, maybe? Etruscans, perhaps?

Indo-Europeans, as were the Greeks. But, they came into Europe quite a bit before the Dorian Greeks did, and started their own native civilizations. The Celtic people especially, were widespread.

Although, to what extent the common Celtic culture could be considered a civilization is up to debate.:shrug:

Etruscans, perhaps?The Etruscans were a pre-Indo-European people but their civilization arose at a time when the civilizations of Asia Minor had routine contact with the Neolithic Europeans. The technology of civilization consists primarily of ideas, which are difficult to keep from being "borrowed." AFAIK anthropologists do not count the Etruscan as an independently developed civilization, but rather assume it was built on what was learned from the Phoenicians and others.The Celtic people especially, were widespread.
The Celts were the first Indo-European tribe to set foot in sub-Scandinavian Europe. Except for the Etruscans, they encountered cultures less advanced than their own because of their acquaintance with the Bronze Age civilization in the region they migrated from. For many centuries, Europe was The Land Of The Celts. This came to an ignominious end when the Roman legions started pushing from the south, the Germanic tribes from Scandinavia, and the Slavic tribes from the east.Although, to what extent the common Celtic culture could be considered a civilization is up to debate.Civilization is the building of cities and the Celts did not have it. The Celts were a Neolithic people, living in agricultural villages. Civilization was the next stage after the Neolithic.Mesolithic: Nomadic hunter-gatherers. Extended family units of people who knew each other intimately from birth. Harmony and cooperation occurring naturally due to the pack-social instinct. Neolithic: The technology of agriculture (farming and animal husbandry), which both required and made possible permanent settlements. Several family units living in a village, people who all knew each other but not necessarily very well. Harmony and cooperation with mere acquaintances was a strain on the pack-social instinct, which was adapted and partially overridden by reason and learning, made possible by the uniquely massive human forebrain's power to dominate the animal midbrain. Division of labor and economy of scale result in creation of surplus wealth. Civilization: The technology of highly organized life with a hierarchy of leadership. Complete strangers living together in a city. Harmony and cooperation with strangers was a further strain on the pack-social instinct and represents a triumph of the human species over its nature.

True, the Celts didn't have a full civilization in the socio-economic sense.

However, they did have some form of general social structure, fairly consistent throughout all of the Celtic tribes across Europe. The threefold division of society into the warrior Aristocracy, the unique Druid caste, and the common people. This attests to at least a general cultural standard which the majority of Celts adhered to.

And, as you said, they did have access to bronze tools, and they were able to produce their own. This means that they were in a copper-and-bronze age, which is straddling the line between neolithic and agricultural society.

And, as you said, they did have access to bronze tools, and they were able to produce their own. This means that they were in a copper-and-bronze age, which is straddling the line between neolithic and agricultural society.No, metallurgy is an advanced stage of civilization. The first cities were built with stone and wood. Bronze required a sophisticated trading network between cities, since nickel ore and copper ore are almost never found in close proximity. It also required really hot fires to melt the ore. Neither of these could have been developed/discovered by pre-civilized people.

The first agriculture marked the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic Era around 9000BCE. (The oldest cultivated crop we have evidence of is the fig tree.) The dawn of civilization came about 1000 years later. The Bronze Age did not begin until around 3000BCE. (All dates for the Middle East. The Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, Olmec and Inca civilizations arose independently at later dates.)

Of course Neolithic tribes traded with the cities nearby and were able to acquire metal technology that way. That pattern was repeated under the European occupation of the Neolithic region of North America. Much European technology was adopted by the American Indians, without changing their basic village society, yet became so ingrained that today it is thought of as "native culture," e.g. silversmithing and domesticated horses without saddles. The same was surely true of the Celts.

The second wave of metal technology, the Iron Age, starting around 1100BCE, caused a social upheaval. Iron ore requires hotter fires to smelt than copper and nickel, but it is fairly easy to find and requires no trading network. Once the Neolithic people on the fringes of civilization learned how to mine, refine and smith their own iron, every "barbarian" tribe suddenly became a kingdom armed with state-of-the-art weapons.

I just came across this horrific description of Aztec "civilization":
In the thirteenth century, the Aztecs had begun conquering Mexico, and by the fifteenth century they had brought most of central Mexico
under their control.
OK. That doesn't sound like a big deal.
Rather than assimilating the conquered tribes into a unified empire, as the ancient Romans had done, the Aztecs used the other tribes as “human stockyards.”What?
The conquered tribes were required to supply, collectively, between 20,000 and 200,000
victims for human sacrifice every year. Aztecs were not sacrificed.:eek:
The Aztec priests, often wearing flayed human skins, skillfully cut out the hearts of living victims. Their favorite victims were children, whose tears were supposed to be a special source of pleasure to the Aztec gods. The dead bodies were then eaten by the Aztec upper class, who used cannibalism as their major source of protein.Holy shit. If this is true, those bastards deserved everything they got from the Spaniards. Ironically, it was this inhuman treatment that led to the Aztec's downfall:
Hernando de Cortes landed in Mexico with 508 soldiers, 100 sailors, sixteen horses, and firearms. Although the Aztecs had neither firearms nor horses, it would have been impossible for Cortes to conquer the Aztecs if not for the alliances Cortes formed with other Indian tribes, who contributed 200,000 fighters to his cause.
Here are some of the references cited for this article:
92 VICTORIA, at 160 (book 1, § 3, item 17).
93 Roger McGrath, Atrocities Azteca, CHRONICLES, Oct. 2006, 13.
94 McGrath. See also Ross Hassig, Aztecs, in ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION AND WAR 30 (Gabriel Palmer-Fernandez ed., 2004)(During the 1487 rededication of the Great Temple in Tenochtitlan, 80,400 victims were slaughtered in human sacrifice).
95 McGrath.
96 “Cortés, Hernán, Marqués Del Valle De Oaxaca,” in ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA (2002 DVD edition).
See generally, BURR CARTWRIGHT, EMPIRE
OF THE INCA (1985).
http://www.davekopel.com/2A/LawRev/The-Human-Right-of-Self-Defense.pdf
I can't attest to the veracity of this. But I have certainly heard that human sacrifice was a part of the Aztec Religion. I wasn't aware of canibalism.

Holy shit. If this is true, those bastards deserved everything they got from the Spaniards.Christendom in the sixteenth century was at its nadir, with Inquisitors running rampant. Jews, Muslims and even Protestants were "sacrificed" for their beliefs. It's a challenge to see how any civilization, no matter how vile, could be considered morally inferior to Christian Europe at the time of the "discovery" of the Americas.Ironically, it was this inhuman treatment that led to the Aztec's downfall. I can't attest to the veracity of this. But I have certainly heard that human sacrifice was a part of the Aztec religion. I wasn't aware of cannibalism.The Aztecs have been sensationalized, most notably by themselves. Many contemporary accounts are taken as valid with little reality testing. Wikipedia warns:[Abstracted. . .]For most people today, human sacrifice was the most striking feature of Aztec civilization. The Aztecs, if their own accounts are to be believed, brought this practice to an unprecedented level. For example, for the reconsecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlán in 1487, the Aztecs reported that they sacrificed 84,400 prisoners over the course of four days.

However, most experts consider these numbers to be overstated. For example, the sheer logistics associated with sacrificing 84,000 victims would be overwhelming. A similar consensus has developed on reports of cannibalism among the Aztecs.For perspective, it must be remembered that the two halves of the United States of America "sacrificed" three percent of their population--one million victims--during their Civil War. A mere three generations later, the human race "sacrificed" two percent of the population of the entire planet--sixty million victims--in World War Two. With that perspective firmly in mind:Aztecs defended the practice of human sacrifice by asserting that it was not very different from the European way of waging warfare: Europeans killed the warriors in battle, Aztecs killed the warriors after the battle.

Accounts by the Tlaxcaltecas, the primary enemy of the Aztecs at the time of the Spanish Conquest, show that at least some of them considered it an honor to be sacrificed. In one legend, their archetypal warrior Tlahuicole was freed by the Aztecs but eventually returned of his own volition to die in ritual sacrifice. The practice may have been endemic to the culture of the region as a whole and not an indictment of the Aztecs in particular, since the Tlaxcaltecas also practiced the human sacrifice of captured Aztec warriors.

Some people mourn the loss of the Inca and Aztec empires. Obviously, the loss of life was horrible. However, would you rather be having your heart cut out to the Sun god, or attending mass?

I'd rather not be doing any of those things.

Some people mourn the loss of the Inca and Aztec empires. Obviously, the loss of life was horrible. However, would you rather be having your heart cut out to the Sun god, or attending mass?In the fifteenth century, the parallel would have been to be burned at the stake.

The cannabilism as a source of protein is worth paying attention to.

As a general rule people make virtues of their necessities, and religions make ritual of the virtues. IIRC one of the Aztecs' major sources of meat aside from humans beings was worms sifted from the mud of lakes and ponds. They had essentially no large domesticated animals, no game worth mentioning, no large scale source of meat at all.

The Aztecs ate people on a much larger scale than most cultures. But so did the Donner Party, trapped and starving, so did the soccer team in that Peruvian airliner crash, so have widely scattered tribes in protein-restricted environments such as rain forests and isolated island valleys, so have others driven by necessity.

What good were such religions, to us (the unstated premise)? As fantastic rituals and object lessons, they remain without peer.

As a general rule people make virtues of their necessities, and religions make ritual of the virtues. IIRC one of the Aztecs' major sources of meat aside from humans beings was worms sifted from the mud of lakes and ponds. They had essentially no large domesticated animals, no game worth mentioning, no large scale source of meat at all.


Can you provide a link as to where this information can be found? Thank you.

Can you provide a link as to where this information can be found? Thank you. A quick Google search yields dozens.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0014-1828%28199822%2937%3A3%3C285%3AAHSCAO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z&size=LARGE&origin=JSTOR-enlargePage

If you have access, that article will lay out the general scene - and the author disagrees with my assertions (on bad argument, IMHO) so you can get another take.

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/aztecs/sacrifice.htm A general article, from 1977. All of the numbers in it are in serious dispute, but details such as this one are not: Another Aztec dietary problem was the paucity of fats, which were so scarce in central Mexico that the Spaniards resorted to boiling down the bodies of Indians killed in battle in order to obtain fat for dressing wounds and tallow for caulking boats.
The Aztecs were eating insects and pond scum and worms. Starvation food, in most cultures - carefully harvested staples, among the Aztecs. They were creating artificial islands for more garden land, and fertilizing it with lake mud and human waste for lack of manure. Even the Spanish were resorting to human bodies for fat and other meat-animal byproducts, in the Central Mexican Valley.

Can you provide a link as to where this information can be found? Thank you.It's well known that there were no large domesticated animals in the Americas except the camelids of the Incas. The largest domesticated animal anywhere else was the turkey.

The north-south geography of the Western Hemisphere was a major impediment to the development of agriculture and, ultimately, civilization, just as it was in Africa. It's easy to trade crops and farm animals with the tribes east and west of you, but much more difficult to take them to a latitude that they're not adapted to.

Add to that the low biodiversity of the Americas. Asia and even Africa had many species of huge herbivores suitable for eating and draft, so finding one that was relatively tractable in domestication was not an insurmountable challenge. In South America there is the llama and three other closely related camel species, and that's about it. Nothing bigger than the tapir and the javelina, until you get north of the Rio Grande where there were finally some deer and antelope playing. Oh yeah, and The 4-H Project From Hell: the bison.

Edible plants were just as big a problem as edible animals. The Old World had rice, wheat, rye, barley, a cornucopia of highly nutritous grasses. The New World just had the corn without the -copia, and corn is a perfectly wretched source of nutrition.

It's a testament to the ingenuity of Homo sapiens that agriculture was invented here at all and the Neolithic Revolution was launched in spite of the north-south axis. There's no shame in the fact that these people were only able to start building civilizations in the First Millennium BCE, thousands of years later than those of Asia and Egypt with their east-west axis.

When the first Europeans landed here, the Mesopotamian civilization that was carried on by Greece and Rome was three times as old as those of the Aztecs and Incas. I think we can forgive them for not being as "modern" and "enlightened" as their conquerors.

Some people mourn the loss of the Inca and Aztec empires. Obviously, the loss of life was horrible. However, would you rather be having your heart cut out to the Sun god, or attending mass?

Don't Christians symbolically eat the flesh and drink the blood of their god?

The higher loss we got from this conquest was that of Astrology & commune with nature

Yes, in a sense. One account is that the Aztecs believed they had to cut out human hearts on the temple each day in order for the sun to return the next morning. That is REALLY communing with nature!

charles, http://humanpurpose.simplenet.com