REVIEW: Aztecs, by Inga Clendinnen
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
When Hernán Cortés landed in the New World, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was one of the greatest cities anywhere on earth. It had more than twice the population of Seville, and was (as my grade school history textbooks always nervously assured me) cleaner, more orderly, and more magnificent than any contemporaneous European city. Its ochre towers and pyramids rose like a dream from the shimmering waters of Lake Texcoco. Unlike the organic maze of alleyways that characterized most Spanish cities, Tenochtitlan’s public gardens and temple districts and grand processional ways were a product of the sort of high modernist urban planning that Europe wouldn’t really see until Haussmann’s Paris in the 19th century. The walls of the city shone with lime and were decorated with paintings, so it glimmered like a bauble in the Mexican sun. The soldiers who followed Cortés on the one hand described it as so ethereal it seemed the three causeways joining it to the mainland were anchors without which it might float away, but on the other hand were overawed by the towering height and hallucinatory bulk of the Great Pyramid topped with its twin temples to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc....
The ancestors of the Mexica wandered into the fertile basin that was to become their empire sometime in the late 1200s or early 1300s. They found it already settled with a mosaic of mostly Nahuatl-speaking city-states, and spent a few decades as mercenaries or tributaries for various stronger powers. One of those petty wars went badly, and they finally settled down as bedraggled refugees on the muck-covered islands that were to be the site of their future glory. Within a hundred years they were the most powerful city in the valley. Fifty years after that they were the unquestioned hegemon and begin to launch wars of imperial expansion towards the Pacific and Caribbean coasts. Another fifty years of imperial glory, and then they were destroyed utterly. Or as Clendinnen puts it, “a man whose grandfather had fought as a hireling in another city’s wars in the Mexica’s early days in the valley would himself have seen the glory of their achieved empire, and his son watched its destruction.”
None of this would have come as a surprise to the Mexica. 1 Their entire cosmology revolved around the absolute precarity of the world, and they believed that all earthly things were balanced on a knife’s edge between ravenous abyssal powers on one side and the emptiness of the void on the other. Every fifty-two years the entire nation waited breathlessly at the ceremony of the New Fire to see whether the world would continue or not. On a lonely hill outside of the city, senior priests feverishly worked a hand drill upon the naked breast of a bound captive. If the gods sent fire, it meant the world was saved, and the victim’s chest was immediately torn open so that the flame could be fed with his heart and flesh, bubbling and growing within the chest cavity to the relieved cheers of the populace before being carried to the major temples of the city. Everybody knew that if the fire did not come, the world would slip into nothingness and stop existing. Before we are tempted to roll our eyes at this and ask how suspenseful it really could have been, remember that they only got to do it three or four times between the foundation of their empire and its extinction.
That empire was not gentle. Few empires are, but even by the sad standards of human history, the Mexica were extreme. I’m not speaking here about their legendarily creative and inventive ways of humiliating subject peoples, 2 I’m speaking about the human sacrifices. No, these were not exaggerated by the colonizers, as some revisionist historians would have you believe. 3 If anything, the Spaniards lacked the conceptual framework to fully comprehend the industrial-scale, ever-so-civilized and bureaucratic evil of the Mexica, and so they inadvertently downplayed it. The reality, as Clendinnen brilliantly documents, is that human sacrifice was not an occasional or incidental religious custom for the Mexica, like an extra-spicy church service for the people who only show up on Christmas or Easter. No, the mass-butchery of wailing, pleading captives of both sexes and all ages was the core activity around which their entire civilization and society revolved. Their art, their music, their poetry, their approach to warfare, their entire economic system, their kaleidoscopic array of holidays and festivals, all were singularly dedicated to the killing (often preceded by inventive torture) of helpless human beings. And everybody had their role to play:
The killings were not remote top-of-the pyramid affairs. If only high priests and rulers killed, they carried out most of their butchers’ work en plein air , and not only in the main temple precinct, but in the neighborhood temples and on the streets. The people were implicated in the care and preparation of the victims, their delivery to the place of death, and then in the elaborate processing of the bodies: the dismemberment and distribution of heads and limbs, flesh and blood and flayed skins. On high occasions warriors carrying gourds of human blood or wearing the dripping skins of their captives ran through the streets, to be ceremoniously welcomed into the dwellings; the flesh of their victims seethed in domestic cooking pots; human thighbones, scraped and dried, were set up in the courtyards of households — and all this among a people notable for a precisely ordered polity, a grave formality of manner, and a developed regard for beauty.
The scale of it boggles the mind. The Mexica record with pride a single festal occasion on which over twenty thousand victims were sacrificed, the blood rolling in a slow curtain down the steps of the pyramids as four lines of manacled slaves trudged along the great processional ways towards their doom. It was the job of special priests to greet the captives as they entered the city and to explain in detail the honor that was to await them. And it was always human beings. Many primitive cultures have practiced forms of animal sacrifice. The Mexica were neither primitive, nor interested in animals. There was also no “othering” at work here. The Mexica knew that they were killing people who thought and felt and dreamed and loved as they did. Indeed, that was the entire point of it . They constructed an efficient and well-run machine that had as its sole purpose delivering living, breathing, conscious and informed human beings to the killing-stone or the furnace. A whole battery of sophisticated psychological techniques were employed to ensure the compliance of the victims to the end. 4 Yes, the Spaniards lacked the vocabulary to describe it, but we who live in the aftermath of the twentieth century do not.
Clendinnen writes: “It is the combination of violence with apparent impersonality, the bureaucratic calculation of these elaborated Mexica brutalities, together with their habituated and apparently casual incorporation into the world of the everyday, which chills.” And it’s obvious that she’s thinking of the Holocaust. Indeed, of all the twentieth-century genocides that one still holds a special horror because its perpetrators were not uneducated peasants and yokels but mannered men with a taste for Beethoven and Brahms. Reading Clendinnen’s descriptions of the Mexica — their beautiful art, their subtle religious debates, their gleaming city — gives one much the same feeling. Indeed, Clendinnen herself is simultaneously won over by their charms and also a little bit horrified at her own response. She writes like one of those women who fall in love with serial killers. And come to think of it, the Mexica are a little bit like a serial killer in societal form, with the full panoply of Dark Triad personality characteristics on display: witty, charming, charismatic, sadistic, utterly devoid of empathy. They are so far out of distribution, I had no idea a culture like this could exist. How did they get this way?...
Imagine a god like Tlaloc, who brought the rains. Tlaloc’s moods were impossible to predict, but if he decided to be somewhere else for a while the result would be a devastating drought. No, it was important to be very certain that Tlaloc could hear you:
…small children [were] offered to Tlaloc over the first months of the ritual calendar… The children were kept by the priests for some weeks before their deaths (those kindergartens of doomed infants are difficult to contemplate). Then, as the appropriate festivals arrived, they were magnificently dressed, paraded in litters, and, as they wept, their throats were slit: gifted to Tlaloc the Rain God… The pathos of their fate as they were paraded moved the watchers to tears, while their own tears were thought to augur rain… the onlookers wept as the children destined for Tlaloc… were carried weeping in their litters, and wept as the terrified wailing choked and stopped.
The reader may note, perhaps with growing alarm, that we have not yet even gotten to the step pyramids, the mass sacrifices of captives, the heart excisions, and the towering racks of skulls. No, this is what you have to understand: that particular grotesque mass-butchery, which has come to dominate Aztec representations in popular culture, was actually just one narrow dimension of Mexica religion and culture. But they’re all like that, or somehow worse. Clendinnen will be describing some totally random aspect of life among the Mexica, like the salt-gatherers say, and then casually note in passing that “the death of ‘Salt Lady’ graphically represented the work of the salt-farmers who offered her: bent sharply backwards over the stone, a swordfish blade at her throat so that her body was tensely arched, her breast struck open so that the blood jetted and boiled up like their boiling vats.” Every bit of their society was like this, combining brutal killing with a certain showiness and flair for the dramatic. Their nicest gods had names like “the Flayed Lord” and countless gruesome rituals were performed to keep him away. 7 There was nothing special about the mass sacrifices atop the pyramids, they were just one of the gaudiest and costliest outgrowths of a sensibility that pervaded Mexica society.
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Destroying the Aztecs might rank with destroying the Nazis in accomplishments that benefited humanity.
Possibly the worst civilization to have ever existed. Wonder what the multiculturalists would have to say about them. Some cultures are objectively worse than others.
Some cultures are objectively worse than others
it’s a good litmus test for someone’s basic ability to think rationally and not just repeat slogans. Because anyone exposed to Aztec culture cannot possibly argue that its no worse than Australian.
The Aztecs were monstrous,
Incidentally, there's absolutely no truth to the rumor that the Aztecs invented Vegemite.
Nor is there any truth to the legend that the Aztecs had been in contact with the ancient Egyptians (and had learned to build pyramids via that contact)
That is certainly what the white Catholic colonizers from Spain and those who have benefited from their actions would love to have the world believe. I think the fact that so much of the Aztec history and documents were destroyed is what allows the critics of today feel better about the deaths of millions of humans which isn't such a burden to carry for these colonizer apologists as long as they convince themselves that they're the righteous ones while actively obfuscating any other possible narrative.
While I am in no way defending the religion of the Aztecs, to claim they did things way worse than Christians or Muslims and deserved to be wiped out is to be wholly ignorant of world history. Religion of every stripe has an uncountable amount of blood on their hands, the Aztec faith is no different and yes, I wish all these disgusting religions using stupid people's gullibility and fear to control them would disappear just like the Aztecs.
Lol. The "I'm going to dismiss all the evidence because it doesn't fit the narrative my political religion's unquestioned dogma demands argument" Good one.
s of today feel better about the deaths of millions of humans which isn't suc
Odd that you quite seem fine with a society organized around industrial slaughter of humans but think somehow the inevitable deaths caused by disease are somehow something to cast blame over. If the American natives had reached Europe before the New World had been discovered the results would have been the same as soon as the natives returned from Europe. Your beef is with the vagaries of immunity to disease.
I'm not dismissing any evidence, I am not sad that the Aztec religion was stopped, I'm merely pointing out the hypocrisy of those casting stones. It's not lost on me what this tired seed is about and it's not some rational debate about the Aztec people. It's a one-sided attempt to justify their massacre at the hands of white Christian Europeans AND confirm the biases of dumb fuck bigots who sit around thinking their white race and their white Jesus is superior to all, especially the immigrants still carrying supposed "Aztec" blood coming across our southern borders.
Where do I say in my comment I'm fine with the practices of the Aztecs? But I'm not surprised at the lame retort trying to claim I said things I never said.
I did not cast any blame for the deaths caused by disease; I merely pointed out how some dick holes like to " feel better about the deaths of millions of humans" by villainizing ALL those indigenous people. Weak pathetic assholes love to justify their hate of other cultures by retelling anecdotal narratives that only show their side of the story and make those they hate look bad. Did the Aztec leaders do terrible things? Yes, from the evidence we have their religious rituals and wars for land and resources was as brutal and violent as the histories of many other cultures from China, Japan, Greece, Rome, and while some cultures dominated areas for millennia and evolved, to try and claim the violent rituals some Aztec priest or king might have performed are worse than the violence seen during Caligula's reign or just about any of the Ceasars filling the colosseum with violence and death for the cheers of the crowd is just silly.
So again, stating it twice because apparently reading comprehension isn't a strong suit of some, I am not in ANY WAY justifying Aztec ritual sacrifice or the violence in their culture. I am simply pointing out the glaring hypocrisy coming from some who turn a blind eye to their own cultures history while casting stones at others.
The “Rome was violent too, therefore you don't get to condemn mass Aztec human sacrifice” routine is precisely the dishonest false equivalence I'm talking about.
Nobody said Europeans were perfectly virtuous. And nobody needs to pretend that European conquest was perfectly humane in order to acknowledge that mass ritual human sacrifice is an exceptionally depraved practice. Aztec civilization was monstrous. It's destruction was a good thing.
You keep lumping mass human sacrifice with “war,” “violence,” the Colosseum and most bizarrely the spread of disease in a land with no natural immunity, as though all killing are morally interchangeable. It isn't. War is horrific, but killing in war and deliberately selecting human beings to be butchered as religious offerings are not morally equivalent acts. And the endless parade of “BUT ROME! BUT "WHITE CHRISTIANS” is not an argument. It's simple whataboutism.
Nor is acknowledging the depravity of the Aztec culture “villainizing ALL indigenous people,” as you keep pretending. That's another ridiculous conflation. And the most intellectually dishonest part is just the ongoing and repetive insinuation that anyone who points out facts you don't like must a white supremacist, racist etc etc trying to justify genocide. It's not an argument. It's just a simplistic way of poisoning the well to avoid dealing with the actual historical facts thats are inconvenient to your jihad against western civilization.
I can condemn European massacres, dispossession, forced labor and everything else you want to condemn and say that a society organized around mass ritual human sacrifice is an appalling evil. There is no contradiction whatsoever. And all you ever do is offer whataboutisms to excuse the cultures your politics/religion hold sacred: "the colonized". When your response to the topic of Aztec atrocities is to return, as always, to a long invective filled exercise in name calling and obsessing over how terrible white Christian Europeans are (and it's always White Christian Europeans with you ), you are literal making my point for me.
You trying to reduce an entire people with a long rich history that was intentionally destroyed so we'll never get to know what it was really like, just the caricature of it painted by the conquerors, to "a society organized around mass ritual human sacrifice" just shows how basic and poor your understanding of Aztec culture apparently is. The fall of Tenochtitlan and the subsequent destruction of Aztec codices and libraries means we may never get a full picture of those people, but they were certainly more than the garish picture some tired useless bigots today try to paint them as.
Pointing out facts does not make one a useless, dumb fuck bigot. Taking isolated facts and building a straw man narrative to attack some other culture in an effort to make one feel better about their own history of imperialism and violence does.
revising mackerel snapper church sponsored genocide in the new world was the next step in progression, sandwiched between torching the library in alexandria egypt and facilitating nazi atrocities during WWII and helping some of them escape ...
Except that Aztec society wasn't based on mass ritual sacrifice. Their culture centered on advanced agriculture, massive trade routes and massive pyramids and temples. The Aztecs numbered between 6 and 16 million.
The major Temples have yielded fewer than a couple hundred skulls per major site.
The Aztecs were skilled metropolitan builders with an accurate 365 day calendar and yet undiscovered knowledge of the stars and planets. The Aztec culture lives on in everyday modern Mexico's food and music...it's culture.
The Spaniards and the Pope were well known to exaggerate wildly for different reasons.
Meanwhile in more recent memory Caucasians and Asians elevated mass murder to new heights never seen or dreamed of by the lowly Aztecs those poor godless savages you look down yer nose at.
And yet the poor Aztecs are stuck with this flaming hot exaggeration and legends of wanton killing... but scant evidence.
What would you have the world believe about the Aztecs?
What other possible narrative are you suggesting?
Here's one concerning the narrative you seem to object to. Cortes could not have conquered the Aztecs with just the men he brought. He had, what? Around 1,000 men? In fact, Cortes basically inserted himself into what was already an ongoing, disorganized resistance by other peoples, basically tipping the scale, so to speak. His tactics, tech, leadership and diplomacy organized various people groups who were resisting Aztec imperialism and brutality into an effective resistance. Tens of thousands, perhaps as many as 150,000 warriors could not possibly be forced to fight for Cortes by a few hundred Spaniards. They wanted to and it was they who did the lions share of the fighting. And, understandably, were extraordinarily brutal in bringing the Aztec down.
While I think Psmith takes certain liberties in describing the culture of the Aztecs, he certainly wasn't wildly exaggerating, either. I feel absolutely nothing negative in the destruction of them. That doesn't mean that, by extension, I approve of all that Cortes did. I don't, although I am probably far less critical of him than you likely are.
if we take the number of deaths of people due directly to religious imperatives of any religion over the last 2,000 years and compared them to deaths caused by communism, socialism and Nazism, who killed the most? Just taking Communism alone, it's Communism by far. Nazism increases it dramatically.
That is not said in order to point out Communism or Nazism as special. They are simply the easiest, most concise examples. The fact is mankind has so much blood on its hands for far, far more than religious reasons. Far more people have been killed by cultures and civilizations for reasons not religious. Expansion of territory, acquisition of resources, ethnic disputes, state-building and so on. Religion has been the least of it.
And the reality.....
The reality, as Clendinnen brilliantly documents, is that human sacrifice was not an occasional or incidental religious custom for the Mexica, like an extra-spicy church service for the people who only show up on Christmas or Easter. No, the mass-butchery of wailing, pleading captives of both sexes and all ages was the core activity around which their entire civilization and society revolved. Their art, their music, their poetry, their approach to warfare, their entire economic system, their kaleidoscopic array of holidays and festivals, all were singularly dedicated to the killing (often preceded by inventive torture) of helpless human beings. And everybody had their role to play:
The scale of it boggles the mind. The Mexica record with pride a single festal occasion on which over twenty thousand victims were sacrificed, the blood rolling in a slow curtain down the steps of the pyramids as four lines of manacled slaves trudged along the great processional ways towards their doom..
.ztecs are stuck with this flaming hot exaggeration and legends of wanton killing... but scant evidence
You sound like a Holocaust denier, ignoring all the evidence to the contrary seize upon some silly thing that doesn't withstand the slightest bit of rational scrutiny. How many skulls are going to be found at Auschwitz in 500 years. If there aren't a million skulls, does that mean there weren't a million victims?
So does the Wizard of Oz.
Is there any reason why Inga was the only academic anthropologist who wrote this paper in 1991, followed by more emotional essays in 2010 about the Aztecs?
The Spaniards burned the libraries of the heretic Aztecs, so there's only the Spaniards excuses to rely upon and the Papal permission to kill all infidels.
Inga never visited Mexico. She simply studied the work of others
Why did they only find 200 skulls and skeletons at Tzompatli instead of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands?
Didi you even read the whole seed?
Control was well established by not fighting other tribes to the death, but to expertly maim them for sacrifice.
It was very efficient at keeping law & order, according to Inga when she was extrapolating that into fantastical numbers unsupported by mainstream anthropology.
Your meaningless words based on hers written 1,600 years after the fact. Emotional, dramatic words with no scientific proof. No one qutes her or uses her as a source. Most of her awards were for her work on the Holocaust.
The Holocaust has ample scientific proof in spite of the ovens used to destroy our ancestors' bones;
the bins of eyeglasses, dentures, gold teeth, train loads of shoes, the meticulous records of the many layers of German government and military officials who tattooed my uncles, aunts and cousins before they gassed them or tried to work them to death.
How dare you compare Aztec legend to the facts about the millions of Jews, gays, scholars, gypsies and political prisoners the SS Nazi's disposed of without another thought.
if you told the truth about your own uncle being Jewish, you bring shame on your own family.
Your argument is "I don't like the evidence that exists, so I'll imagine that other evidence exists that says the opposite and I choose to believe the imaginary evidence"
Yes, and I actually understood it. Thanks for demonstrating that mass sacrifice was the point of their warfare. As she wrote the mass-butchery of wailing, pleading captives of both sexes and all ages was the core activity around which their entire civilization and society revolved. Their art, their music, their poetry, their approach to warfare..... Thanks for emphasizing the point, I guess.
mpare Aztec legend t
"Legend" Lol.
What do you think they fertilized the fields with? They had to do something with all the bodies that would be piling up and spreading disease.
There was a huge number of people to be fed and the crops had to be productive.
Waste not, want not.
I think they know the answer to that but simply don't want to admit it or will make up some dumb shit with no evidence.
The real answer is, of course, that claiming the Aztec are somehow worse than the Nazi's who murdered 7 million people is fucking insane and only something really basic low IQ dipshits desperate to divert attention from their white supremacist Nazi hero's and eager to malign brown immigrants among us would claim.
And just in case someone thinks I'm defending the Aztecs, they were clearly a violent culture no one should want to emulate, just like so many ancient cultures that celebrated violence and slaughter and performed ritual human sacrifice.
And I would argue white conservative Christians were one of the last to give up the practice.
The Quakers? Bahai? The Jains? Sufism? Zoroastrians? Buddhism? Taoism?
Those are just a few that first come to mind . . . /