1. It is politically incorrect to say this, but there is a reason that the bulk of Cortez' army were Indians. Those Indians in fact were happy to profess a profound and undying faith in Catholicism, Their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella, or anything else Cortez could think of, just make that bang stick thing go off again and promise to use that boom boom thing on those Mexica assholes and straighten their shit out, once and for all.
2. "The Mexica had projectile weapons, but specifically designed them to be non-lethal and only employed them for demoralization. The Mexica wielded long, shallow obsidian blades and flint-studded clubs that were designed to incapacitate by cutting a hamstring or crushing a knee, rather than to kill."
I understand that this is one of the reason that the Mexica were never able to subdue their less settled Chichimec cousins was that the principal goal of Mexica warfare was to secure live male warrior captives for sacrifice, while the Chichimec were mostly into winning by any means necessary.
This is also why the Spaniards found the Chichimec such difficult opponents, until the Dominicans figured out that buying the Chichimec off by dangling out the goodies was easier and more effective than beating them.
If I may, I'd like to push back on the conclusion that Aztec society was a wholly parsable ritual like Scott Alexander's thought experiment (or, like, the more famous one of Ursula K le Guin whom he seems to have cribbed it from). There is a sense in which the idea of living alongside evil gods with an insatiable hunger for blood is comprehensible to our modern, rationalist minds and something which can be visualized. But it's also incomprehensible in a sense. I don't think the Aztec got together and agreed, like a social contract, that this was the most noble thing to believe in. In some way, there must have been a germinal belief in this cosmic violence before there was an Aztec empire in the first place. Why? The question of where such basic social ideas came from in the first place plagued the early anthropologists like Frazer, Coulanges, and Jane Harrison, and drove the later currents of structuralism, post structuralism etc. There is much to be said for reminding ourselves of the strange way in which the sheer brutality of Aztec ritual both created stability through fear and hastened its collapse when a less brutal ideal came along.
I sort of think that when humans really take time to *think* about nature, they pretty quickly realize that she's a merciless bitch who grinds all things in her teeth. The question then is... how do you live with that?
And what's fascinating is that you have differing ways of coping. The Mexica way of coping is that, got it, this is the world, you go along with the horror because the gods are the gods and we're not, so what can you do?
But then, weirdly, you get folks like the Indo-Europeans or Israelites who will also resort to stories, but for whatever reason will say, "You hear the roar of the thunderbolt, see the crash of lightning that splits the rocks and the trees? Yeah, it may be a brutal universe, but the Thunderer is on our side."
So it gets weirder and trickier to deal with if God's omnipotent. If he's just Very Strong and fights with us it's much easier to process. But then once you get to omnipotence, well, you then have to sort of invent the whole Western Tradition to figure out the issue of a Good God when Bad Shit happens.
I'd say Omelas is a thought experiment on the utilitarian calculus (what if we could maximise social utility by sacrificing an individual), which is different from the "torture by peer pressure" thought experiment, (what if we could minimise utility because everyone's chicken)
Bruce Trigger's "Understanding Early Civilizations" might be a way to better understand the Aztecs in context. He compares them (as part of the broader set of city-states in the Valley of Mexico) to Old Kingdom Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Shang among more familiar classic civilizations, along with the Yoruba, Inka, and Classic Maya.
You recently noted in your review of "Ka" just how unfamiliar pre-Axial religion was, and this is certainly another example, though much one of the few for which we have good historical evidence. The Shang are probably a good comparison point here for human sacrifice (though Trigger taxonomizes them as a territorial civilization as compared to the city-state civilization of the Valley of Mexico), but worse documentation makes it less visceral, and anyway the human sacrifices were over by Zhou times.
There are similarities and differences with the Agoge system of child rearing in Ancient Sparta. Both systems prepare children for war, but the Spartans were more cooperative at least some of the time. Only one Spartan could win the test of who survived being whipped the longest, but the Spartans clearly cooperated in battle at a high level and did not focus on single combat and personal glory.
The Greek and Roman practice of child exposure also has a strong military component. It was driven by the expectation that children needed to be strong enough to carry the family into the next generation, and not by service to the state. But every Greek and Roman citizen male trained for war and considered themselves liable for military service whenever their city was threatened, so exposure does have a strong military component.
A close friend of mine worked in a major city emergency room for his medical residency. This city has large black and Mexican populations. He saw a great deal of trauma from gang violence. He once told me that black gang bangers killed each other with gunshots, but Mexican gangbangers were a totally different and higher form of violence - they would torture their victims, beat them to death with bats, etc. The victims of Mexican (or Mexican-American) gang violence made the victims of African American gang violence look fortunate in comparison.
I can't speak to this but I will observe that here in Los Angeles the brown on black violence far outnumbers the black on brown violence. Mostly everybody gets along here (really and truly) but the gangs are another world entirely and when you read of gang members assaulting or killing an innocent, and the demographics are brown and black, it's almost always Latin gang members jumping a black person. Because the overwhelming majority of Latinos I've encountered here personally (family members, neighbors, church members) and professionally (retired lawyer - worked in a legal aid agency in ELA for years) are kindly - I don't think there is any residue of this Aztec evil lingering in the culture - Christian for far too long and it is a sincere devoutness. My theory is it's mostly a kind of colonizing of neighborhoods that used to be black but are increasingly Latino - an intentional attempt to push blacks out to make space primarily for the gang members and their families and not really an attempt to "benefit" (in a sick sense) the Latin community as a whole (Compton being a prime example - originally white, then it became mostly black, and now I believe it's about 80% Latin). Returning to the article - what a horror show. Worse than I had ever read or imagined.
There does seem to be a minor resurgence of Aztec/Mexica imagery every once in a while. E.g., the current MORENA government of Mexico City had a big project where they'd project images of Mexica gods in the Zocalo, including across the face of the Metropolitan Cathedral (itself built from the stones of the Templo Mayor).
I have ordered this so I'll learn myself in a few weeks, but does she attempt to give any explanation of how the Aztecs were militarily successful despite a state ideology and training regimen that seems on it's face contrary to everything we think of as sound military principles- including such seemingly basic things as cooperation and espirit de corps?
This article reminds me of the thought experiment "Would you rather have your leg blown off in the heat of battle, or would you rather be abducted, sedated, your leg carefully sawed off while unconscious in a hospital room and then bandaged, all the while unconscious and unwilling?"
There is more horror with the second, more cruelty. If only the Aztecs had been savages, that would excuse them partially at least.
Footnote 11 deserves to be an article all on its own. And it's not something I could write, but a horror story about what an AI invented by a culture like this could do would be particularly disturbing.
I am not saying this to cast doubt on Clendinnen’s account but I had the same question when I read Old Testament accounts of all the different varieties of ruminant blood to be smeared on the tabernacle: what about the smell and the flies in hot climates? Even if you grew up with the smell wouldn’t the flies sort of ruin the dramatic staging of it all?
“I am the glorious incarnation of Somebody Poxli will one of youse do me a solid and wave those flies off my face?”
Thank you for this extremely interesting review. I look forward to reading this book.
Something I would like to understand is how this terrifying Aztec cosmology fit into the broader context of central Mexico. I gather the Aztecs originated as a northern barbarian people, coming out of the periphery and adopting agricultural civilization. Did they acquire their worldview from the Toltecs they supplanted? Was it an inheritance from their barbarian ancestors? Did they share their outlook with their neighboring enemies like Tlaxcala?
Maybe this is not too knowable, since we have books of detailed contemporary anthropology on the Aztecs but not the Toltecs or Chichimecs.
Great review. Why do I think if you wrote a high fantasy novel and based one of your factions off the Aztecs, your publisher would probably tell you it was too over the top and unrealistic.
I'm still not convinced that the high-end sacrificial death toll estimates are plausible- 250,000 per year would imply 25 million per century, which is more than the entire population of the empire.
I hadn't heard about the tongue-slitting-and-rod-passing exercises, though. That's almost more disturbing.
There are some apocryphal stories about Ce Acatl Topiltzin as an incarnation of Quetzalcoatl putting a halt to human sacrifice, although there's a good chance this was invented to mollify Christian missionaries in the post-colonial period.
> "I couldn’t have said it better myself, Fable. This book review is dedicated to you."
1. It is politically incorrect to say this, but there is a reason that the bulk of Cortez' army were Indians. Those Indians in fact were happy to profess a profound and undying faith in Catholicism, Their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella, or anything else Cortez could think of, just make that bang stick thing go off again and promise to use that boom boom thing on those Mexica assholes and straighten their shit out, once and for all.
2. "The Mexica had projectile weapons, but specifically designed them to be non-lethal and only employed them for demoralization. The Mexica wielded long, shallow obsidian blades and flint-studded clubs that were designed to incapacitate by cutting a hamstring or crushing a knee, rather than to kill."
I understand that this is one of the reason that the Mexica were never able to subdue their less settled Chichimec cousins was that the principal goal of Mexica warfare was to secure live male warrior captives for sacrifice, while the Chichimec were mostly into winning by any means necessary.
This is also why the Spaniards found the Chichimec such difficult opponents, until the Dominicans figured out that buying the Chichimec off by dangling out the goodies was easier and more effective than beating them.
If I may, I'd like to push back on the conclusion that Aztec society was a wholly parsable ritual like Scott Alexander's thought experiment (or, like, the more famous one of Ursula K le Guin whom he seems to have cribbed it from). There is a sense in which the idea of living alongside evil gods with an insatiable hunger for blood is comprehensible to our modern, rationalist minds and something which can be visualized. But it's also incomprehensible in a sense. I don't think the Aztec got together and agreed, like a social contract, that this was the most noble thing to believe in. In some way, there must have been a germinal belief in this cosmic violence before there was an Aztec empire in the first place. Why? The question of where such basic social ideas came from in the first place plagued the early anthropologists like Frazer, Coulanges, and Jane Harrison, and drove the later currents of structuralism, post structuralism etc. There is much to be said for reminding ourselves of the strange way in which the sheer brutality of Aztec ritual both created stability through fear and hastened its collapse when a less brutal ideal came along.
I sort of think that when humans really take time to *think* about nature, they pretty quickly realize that she's a merciless bitch who grinds all things in her teeth. The question then is... how do you live with that?
And what's fascinating is that you have differing ways of coping. The Mexica way of coping is that, got it, this is the world, you go along with the horror because the gods are the gods and we're not, so what can you do?
But then, weirdly, you get folks like the Indo-Europeans or Israelites who will also resort to stories, but for whatever reason will say, "You hear the roar of the thunderbolt, see the crash of lightning that splits the rocks and the trees? Yeah, it may be a brutal universe, but the Thunderer is on our side."
He moves in a mysterious way, and all that.
So it gets weirder and trickier to deal with if God's omnipotent. If he's just Very Strong and fights with us it's much easier to process. But then once you get to omnipotence, well, you then have to sort of invent the whole Western Tradition to figure out the issue of a Good God when Bad Shit happens.
I'd say Omelas is a thought experiment on the utilitarian calculus (what if we could maximise social utility by sacrificing an individual), which is different from the "torture by peer pressure" thought experiment, (what if we could minimise utility because everyone's chicken)
Bruce Trigger's "Understanding Early Civilizations" might be a way to better understand the Aztecs in context. He compares them (as part of the broader set of city-states in the Valley of Mexico) to Old Kingdom Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Shang among more familiar classic civilizations, along with the Yoruba, Inka, and Classic Maya.
You recently noted in your review of "Ka" just how unfamiliar pre-Axial religion was, and this is certainly another example, though much one of the few for which we have good historical evidence. The Shang are probably a good comparison point here for human sacrifice (though Trigger taxonomizes them as a territorial civilization as compared to the city-state civilization of the Valley of Mexico), but worse documentation makes it less visceral, and anyway the human sacrifices were over by Zhou times.
There are similarities and differences with the Agoge system of child rearing in Ancient Sparta. Both systems prepare children for war, but the Spartans were more cooperative at least some of the time. Only one Spartan could win the test of who survived being whipped the longest, but the Spartans clearly cooperated in battle at a high level and did not focus on single combat and personal glory.
The Greek and Roman practice of child exposure also has a strong military component. It was driven by the expectation that children needed to be strong enough to carry the family into the next generation, and not by service to the state. But every Greek and Roman citizen male trained for war and considered themselves liable for military service whenever their city was threatened, so exposure does have a strong military component.
A close friend of mine worked in a major city emergency room for his medical residency. This city has large black and Mexican populations. He saw a great deal of trauma from gang violence. He once told me that black gang bangers killed each other with gunshots, but Mexican gangbangers were a totally different and higher form of violence - they would torture their victims, beat them to death with bats, etc. The victims of Mexican (or Mexican-American) gang violence made the victims of African American gang violence look fortunate in comparison.
I can't speak to this but I will observe that here in Los Angeles the brown on black violence far outnumbers the black on brown violence. Mostly everybody gets along here (really and truly) but the gangs are another world entirely and when you read of gang members assaulting or killing an innocent, and the demographics are brown and black, it's almost always Latin gang members jumping a black person. Because the overwhelming majority of Latinos I've encountered here personally (family members, neighbors, church members) and professionally (retired lawyer - worked in a legal aid agency in ELA for years) are kindly - I don't think there is any residue of this Aztec evil lingering in the culture - Christian for far too long and it is a sincere devoutness. My theory is it's mostly a kind of colonizing of neighborhoods that used to be black but are increasingly Latino - an intentional attempt to push blacks out to make space primarily for the gang members and their families and not really an attempt to "benefit" (in a sick sense) the Latin community as a whole (Compton being a prime example - originally white, then it became mostly black, and now I believe it's about 80% Latin). Returning to the article - what a horror show. Worse than I had ever read or imagined.
There does seem to be a minor resurgence of Aztec/Mexica imagery every once in a while. E.g., the current MORENA government of Mexico City had a big project where they'd project images of Mexica gods in the Zocalo, including across the face of the Metropolitan Cathedral (itself built from the stones of the Templo Mayor).
I have ordered this so I'll learn myself in a few weeks, but does she attempt to give any explanation of how the Aztecs were militarily successful despite a state ideology and training regimen that seems on it's face contrary to everything we think of as sound military principles- including such seemingly basic things as cooperation and espirit de corps?
Garry Hogg, Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice. Check it out, you will thank me later. Skip to Fiji.
This article reminds me of the thought experiment "Would you rather have your leg blown off in the heat of battle, or would you rather be abducted, sedated, your leg carefully sawed off while unconscious in a hospital room and then bandaged, all the while unconscious and unwilling?"
There is more horror with the second, more cruelty. If only the Aztecs had been savages, that would excuse them partially at least.
Footnote 11 deserves to be an article all on its own. And it's not something I could write, but a horror story about what an AI invented by a culture like this could do would be particularly disturbing.
I am not saying this to cast doubt on Clendinnen’s account but I had the same question when I read Old Testament accounts of all the different varieties of ruminant blood to be smeared on the tabernacle: what about the smell and the flies in hot climates? Even if you grew up with the smell wouldn’t the flies sort of ruin the dramatic staging of it all?
“I am the glorious incarnation of Somebody Poxli will one of youse do me a solid and wave those flies off my face?”
I genuinely wonder about this.
I don't know if I'm being a false equivalence lib here or a cultural chauvinist, but surely Augustine beat these guys to the punch on cosmic horror.
Thank you for this extremely interesting review. I look forward to reading this book.
Something I would like to understand is how this terrifying Aztec cosmology fit into the broader context of central Mexico. I gather the Aztecs originated as a northern barbarian people, coming out of the periphery and adopting agricultural civilization. Did they acquire their worldview from the Toltecs they supplanted? Was it an inheritance from their barbarian ancestors? Did they share their outlook with their neighboring enemies like Tlaxcala?
Maybe this is not too knowable, since we have books of detailed contemporary anthropology on the Aztecs but not the Toltecs or Chichimecs.
Great review. Why do I think if you wrote a high fantasy novel and based one of your factions off the Aztecs, your publisher would probably tell you it was too over the top and unrealistic.
I'm still not convinced that the high-end sacrificial death toll estimates are plausible- 250,000 per year would imply 25 million per century, which is more than the entire population of the empire.
https://www.historyonthenet.com/aztec-culture-how-many-were-killed-as-human-sacrifices
I hadn't heard about the tongue-slitting-and-rod-passing exercises, though. That's almost more disturbing.
There are some apocryphal stories about Ce Acatl Topiltzin as an incarnation of Quetzalcoatl putting a halt to human sacrifice, although there's a good chance this was invented to mollify Christian missionaries in the post-colonial period.
> "I couldn’t have said it better myself, Fable. This book review is dedicated to you."
Well, that's terrifying.