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, and otherwise to agree with everything that Cortez ever said or thought, 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.
“Hey, we’ve got a god who loves you and only demands obedience, not torrents of blood” probably sounded like a better deal than living under the fear that Tezcatlipoca’s wrathful attention would land on you.
Well, these are Spanish Catholics we are talking about, so perhaps it was more like "Our God is so powerful we can eat his blood and flesh using only bread and wine, and to feel the power of his violent, agonizing, humiliating death we need only words, pictures, mortification of the flesh, the odd spot of auto-flagellation....".
Oh yeah, there's huge thematic overlap. Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca both sacrifice of themselves in the mythology to bring life to humanity and/or render the earth habitable for human life. Not so big on the turning-the-other-cheek thing, though.
Aztec death and gore stuff + Spanish Catholic death and gore stuff is a potent combo. I’m told the book on this (which I have not read) is “Death and the Idea of Mexico.”
There were plenty of other tribes/nations/city-states en route to the Anahuac Valley who hated the Mexica's guts, sure, but this didn't mean they weren't equally attached to the practice of human sacrifice. Cortez had to slaughter a large chunk of Xicomecoatl's nobles/retinue to stamp out the practice in Cempoala, IIRC.
> "The Mexica had projectile weapons, but specifically designed them to be non-lethal and only employed them for demoralization"
This is also probably exaggerated, by the way. The aztec armies were perfectly willing to inflict mass casualties when it was tactically expedient, and actually adapted rapidly to the use of spanish weaponry. It was just too late by then.
Actually, my mistake- there were threats of serious violence but going off the wiki Cortez narrowly managed to avoid actual large-scale killing within Cempoala despite ordering their idols to be torn down.
Mexica weapons were the best that can be made with obsidian and wood with no metals. The idea that they are made to be less lethal is groundless. Large obsidian blades are fragile the macuahuitl is the closest you can get to a sword with the materials available. Iron age and mediaeval spearpoints and arrowpoints are small too they penetrate deep, are light and manoeuvrable. You are not going to make a hewing pole arm such as a glaive or halberd out of obsidian its too fragile and a tied on spearhead is only good for thrusting. Thrusts are usually considered more lethal than cuts anyway, and are best done with a small spearhead.
I only know as much about the Chichemec as what I just read on the Wiki, but less organised tribes often rely on skirmishers and bowmen a lot. There seems to be a lot of overinterpretation of typical neolithic weapons going around.
Even if they were fighting ritualized battles for victims they presumably still wanted to win the battles.
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."
"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?"
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.
«you then have to sort of invent the whole Western Tradition to figure out the issue of a Good God when Bad Shit happens.»
In a recent discussion someone argued that the ancients did not have a concept of human free will and indeed the common opinion is that it was invented by Augustine to explain why his deity, omnipotent and perfectly good, still allows evil to happen.
But I pointed out that free will as agency as moral responsibility was well known to the ancients, from early egyptian, sumerian, chinese (etc.) onwards; what they had was a concept of gods as immortal superhumans but the usual supreme deity was "fate" or "heaven" or "dao" or "brahman" which was omnipotent but not even conscious.
What Augustine invented was indeed free will but not for humans, but for the omnipotent deity: it is because Augustine's deity has free will that that deity can choose to let them decide between good and bad acts instead of ensuring that only good things happen.
I do think that there's a difference in kind as well as of degree, though, between, "the gods like smoked meat, because who doesn't love a good barbecue," and "Tlaloc loves the tears of children."
Chinese and hebrews both did mass human sacrifice or ritual torture. Antisocial behaviors are an unfortunate adaptation of the human species to complex society. roll the dice enough times and someone will codify these behaviors and take them to the extreme.
Well often times after the gods took their cut of the sacrificed animals the rest was a feast for the priests, so in that case animal sacrifice is not that strange.
A lot of the sacrifices in the Hebrew Old Testament were doves and pigeons. And sheep aren't really much more dignified than a llama, and they got to be the Passover sacrifice.
No offence but it does kind of sound like you're grasping for excuses that will let you avoid the full acceptance of how different the society really was.
There's a related theory that this was all about protein deficiencies, but the aztec diet was actually pretty well-rounded, between the three sisters, turkey pens, dogs and hunting. Sacrifice did intensify during periods of drought/flooding/locusts leading to famine, so maybe it was just the zero-sum nature of the local ecology.
Scott Alexander himself provides something of an answer here (https://archive.fo/NmRLA) as to why Aztecs saw so much violence in the nature of the world:
> Why do the Aztecs need such a horrible mythology with so many apocalypses? One of my sources suggests it was a natural reaction to living in Mesoamerica, an area that combined an impossibly ancient history - three thousand years of civilization by the time the Aztecs came around - with a total failure to invent written history. The Aztecs were surrounded by the ruins of colossal cities - Tula, San Lorenzo, and most of all titanic Teotihuacan. An Aztec warrior in the 15th century couldn't fling a stone from an atl-atl without hitting a godlike ancient city that had been mysteriously destroyed. Eventually you just start thinking in terms of civilizations arising and then being destroyed by angry gods leaving only mysterious stone ziggurats as a fact of nature.
> Or imagine you're a medieval European, and you suddenly stumble across the ruins of Rome, having only the barest of legends that such a place even existed. Your first thought might be something like "What happened to them? And how many people do I have to kill to make sure it doesn't happen to me?"
The hypothetical is "what if Europeans had never invented written records, and had abandoned the site of Rome and forgotten the Roman Empire ever existed, then centuries later stumbled upon its ruins having no idea what they were or how they got there."
21st century? In what way? I'd say the contrary, that there haven't been any civilisations (that we know of) that got to a state similar to ours... which can be scary in its own way, but not *this way*.
Neil Gaiman had a note in American Gods where he said that the car gods had been recipients of human sacrifices as great or greater than that of Mexican gods. The sheer amount of distortion of the human environment for the car including the number of victims of automobile accidents kinda makes this statement true.
That's true in a poetic sense, but when you think about it for 10 seconds it's kind of silly.
We use cars. And they result in deaths. We don't hold struggling victims down and cut their hearts out for the god of cars. Human sacrifice appalls us because it's pointless and it's directly, intentionally violent and murderous. People dying as a result of a utilization of a technology (cars, factories, farm equipment...) is also bad of course but it's not remotely in the same category.
You didn't understand the point of the article. In their own worldview, the Aztecs were as reasonable to themselves as we are to our worldview, which is an economic way of thinking, accepting the sacrifice of these lives in service of a higher god, economic efficiency.
Agreed, there's a difference between unfortunate side effects and intentional goals. If we intentionally wanted to make cars more fatal, they would be a lot different.
The US population is currently about 20x larger than pre-columbian Mexico, but with 4 million traffic-accident-related deaths over the last century, I mean... yeah, that's plausibly comparable to the low-end frequency estimates for deaths by sacrifice.
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)
I like the interpretation that LeGuin is parodying hack sci fi writers who only introduce utopias to set up a twist ending where they are secretly evil. Basically the beginning sets the reader up to dismiss Omelas as implausibly perfect, then she introduces an even more implausible detail which nevertheless convinces the reader to take it seriously. Omelas needs to sacrifice the child to forestall other, more sinister dooms that the reader's imagination would otherwise conjure up for it. Maybe we do all believe deep down that suffering is necessary.
No, I meant Omelas. I understood this review to be about the question of sacrificing individuals, as __browsing aptly put it (although I am not a utilitarian).
Omelas doesn't really make any particular effort to explain *why* the neglected child in the basement living in pain and squalor is critical to the bliss and rapture of the wider society, though. The "everyone has to shock eachother, or die" society feels more grounded, but I suppose heaven has always been harder to describe than hell.
I would submit that at some point the theology was germinated through actual contact with entities who suggested and/or guided it. It’s the simplest explanation after all.
This sentence provokes two comments from me, one more serious, the other with great entertainment value: "Barring a few exceptional cases (priestesses of female deities, the state-sanctioned guild of prostitutes, and female sacrificial victims) the life and training of a Mexica girl was oriented towards marriage." What some historical novelists seem not to have realized is that in many respects Aztec society was highly puritanical--yes, they loved color and insisted upon tributes like quetzal feathers from the Maya that were distributed to especially accomplished warriors (another form of reward was being paired with a courtesan of a particular level; courtesan better reflects the reality than prostitute, I think, unless I'm thinking of something different from what Clendinnen is discussing), but they were a society organized for war, and indulgence in pleasure was contrary to that.
Back in grad school I took a summer intensive course on classical Nahuatl (with some study of the current dialects at the end), the language of the Aztecs, as well as some of their bitterest enemies like the Tlaxcalans. There were five of us in the class, all grad students, all with professional interest in the language: me the linguist, one historian, one anthropologist, and two ethnobotanists, and it was one of the best classes I had. Amusingly, I took it essentially because of clerical error and incompetence in the university administration. (In short, the university lost proof I had proficient reading knowledge in French, so I had to take a speaking course that summer, and some nitwit in the financial sections of Leviathan's twisty innards decided I was required under regulations to also take four hours the first summer session, which I fulfilled with Nahuatl and one hour of readings on Aztec history/culture, then a week after the class started I got an email saying, oops, sorry, not necessary, but I was enjoying the class so much I went ahead and remained in it. I joked to a couple of my profs later that few people realize how many great scholarly achievements are due to scribal error...) We read many interesting texts (how the Aztecs obtained pet monkeys, for example), with a focus upon the professional interests of the students, so lots of sociohistorical material and materia medica. At one point we read a bit about ceremonies for warriors, and a term came up that the teacher couldn't identify (he specialized in modern Nahuatl studies), and I said, "Wait a minute, that's a courtesan of some sort," referred to Soustelle, and identified the level of courtesan and the accomplishment of the warrior who, shall we say, was awarded access to her charms. Our teacher chuckled and said, "What I love about this class is that all of you contribute so much in accordance with your personal interests." Ha!
And two more general notes: First, one of the texts we read was an early letter (1530s, I think) from Tlaxcala written in Nahuatl in Latin script. Because Tlaxcala supported the Spaniards and converted to Catholicism, their elites remained in power and quickly adopted literacy, which means that there is an unbroken chain of native writing in Nahuatl over almost five centuries, quite rare in American linguistics (by which I mean the linguistics of the Amerindian languages); I think James Lockhart is one of the scholars who has worked on that, though most of the documents are in private archives and haven't been published.
Second, Nahuatl did end up having some professional interest for me as a non-anthropologist and non-ethnobotanist. Several of the modern dialects have developed so that they have both stress and pitch accent as distinctive. There are many examples of one of the two developing into the other (it's a big big big topic in Balto-Slavic historical linguistics, for example, never mind such developments in both Greek and Latin), but examples of change in progress from one to the other are rare.
The Aztecs were a highly Apollonian society, which is all the stranger given that Tezcatlipoca was arguably a god of darkness/chaos/revolution. My guess is that they felt a debt to Him after being the underdogs for so long.
In Albert Speer’s biography there is a picture of him showing Hitler a large scale model of the new Berlin that Speer planned to build for him. Enormous temples and plazas. I saw an echo of Aztec urban design, and recalled that the Nazi plans to conquer and enslave their neighbors were an echo of the Aztec relations with their neighboring cultures during the growth phase of their empire.
In a visit to Mexico in 1974 I saw in a newspaper a photo of a man who had been arrested in a street brawl. He was sitting, handcuffed, in the back of a police car, with both eyeballs torn out and blood running down his face. My surprise was not that such a thing might happen, but that it was normal to put it on the front page of a mass-market newspaper. It seemed bizarrely different from conventional european ideas about what is permitted in public display. The readers of that newspaper were only about thirty generations away from the Mexica described here.
On the point you just mentioned about modern Mexico - when you read a laundry list of the horrors perpetrated by the horrorshow that was Mexica, it’s hard to not notice how similar they are to the horrors perpetrated by the horrorshows that are the modern cartels. Such as:
I won’t belabor the point because it’s gross, but one really does wonder how much of this is a legacy of Mexica’s obsession with blatant, performative sadism. If you have ever read Garth Ennis’ Crossed (this is an “*un*-recommendation”, I regret reading it, and its main effect was to make me not want to read any of his more famous series, like what is sometimes considered the definitive Punisher series. I’m trying very hard to not Streisand-recommend Crossed here), reading about cartels (or Mexica) reminds me of nothing quite so much as how Garth Ennis wrote Crossed.
But you see it any time you’re chatting with somebody about the interesting historical fact that some people had savage custom X, and they nervously interject, “well, of course we also do Y.” The odd thing is that people do it even when X and Y are very different things, which would seem to undercut their argument, but they say it anyway because they are so desperate to restore some sort of karmic balance.
In the vein of this quote from the piece, I want to emphasize in particular how what Mexican cartels do is comparable only to what Mexica did, and not to other organized crime groups. The American and Italian Mafias, the Russian Mafiya, the Japanese Yakuza, and the Chinese Triads are all criminal groups that do criminal things. However, what they do usually tops out to “kneecap or shoot informants and recalcitrant victims, possibly many victims”. Though the Yakuza do practice cutting off a finger to signal membership or stigmatize victims, and the Italian Mafia did practice the dissolving in acid vats thing. In the annals of their activities, you will not find something along the order of “a dozen industrial-grade kitchens that existed for the primary purpose of kidnapping thousands of rivals from other cartels, police informants, or random people off the street, to turn into pozole.” The cartels are X. Mexica is X. The American Mafia, Italian Mafia, Russian Mafiya, Japanese Yakuza, and Chinese Triads are Y. I don’t think “they’re criminals, what do you expect” is especially explanatory here.
Crossed is Ennis at maximum edginess, you're not going to get quite the same level of performative hyperviolence in Punisher Max. It's definitely very far from Ennis' best work. I'm a big Ennishead though so all the comedy murder stuff doesn't really bother me, it just appeals to the inner thirteen-year-old boy reading Preacher for the first time.
I think that's a fair point, and like I mentioned, Crossed is the only one of his works that I've read (obviously, I didn't like it). And mostly I just mean "Mexican cartels' default behavior is on the same level as Ennis's Crossed", which is pretty insane when you think about it. They don't even have the excuse of being afflicted with Rage-like virus!
On the subject of Crossed, actually - the other thing that genuinely creeped me out reading about the Mexica in the article, is just how much their society resembles the Blood Men civilization from Homo Tortor, with its gratuitous, spectacle like, communal violence and sadism and cannibalism - and Ennis made that fiction within a fictional story! Reality is stranger than fiction.
My first substantial exposure to Punisher was actually only a few weeks ago, watching Brand New Day, where he comes off as a basically sympathetic and rational character who battles his own personal demons. I confess I don't know how well that maps to Ennis's Punisher.
The Homo Tortor story is by Kieron Gillen I think - recall it being the most interesting thing in that whole collection.
I'm thinking about the Psmiths' Sick Societies review when I read this stuff, as well as Pekko Hamalainen's The Comanche Empire - another polity that loved organised torture and had zero qualms about using it to enforce a sort of state power. The slave states of the American South seem like another clear example. It's pretty clear that societies can just casually lapse into this completely amoral "let's torture everyone" mode with disconcerting ease. If only there was some kind of major religious figure who was tortured to death by the government and then came back to life who could show us the way out...
Anyway, Ennis' Punisher rules, you should read it if you're interested. His Frank Castle is for sure a lot more sympathetic and well-characterised than anyone you're going to find in Crossed. Ennis sort of has two modes, sometimes he does insightful character studies of modern masculinity and sometimes he just makes God and the Devil suck each other off.
> "I won’t belabor the point because it’s gross, but one really does wonder how much of this is a legacy of Mexica’s obsession with blatant, performative sadism"
I'm not sure if it qualifies as torture as if you flay the victim *after* they're dead? I mean, the auto-sacrificial rituals sound rather uncomfortable, but the actual temple-rituals killed the victim pretty quickly. We're not talking about the Comanche here.
The flaying might have been post-death, but I'm pretty sure the heart cutting out thing was while the victim was alive (until he passed out from pain)?
Yeah, but I mean that cutting the victim's chest open couldn't take more than a minute or so and once the heart is removed, you're dead (I vaguely recall that victims were sometimes drugged beforehand, though I couldn't swear to it.) My point is that inflicting maximum agony on the victim wasn't generally the purpose of the exercise per se, in contrast to the habits of other native americans one could name.
I do recall reading about skeletal evidence that children sacrificed to Tlaloc invariably had some form of painful bone or tooth infection, though I'm not sure if that was inflicted *by* the priests or if the victims were selected *after* they suffered infection from some other source. And certain offerings to Xipe Totec were shot to death with arrows, which I guess you could call torture of a sort?
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.
I recall an exceptionally stupid article in "The American Conservative" to the effect that "America Must Reclaim Its Spartan Heritage!"
So, are we just talking about the pedophilia, or are throwing in the slavery, the periodic massacres of helots and the exposure of infants as well? The article was so pompous and asinine, it might as well have been penned by "Sam The American Eagle" from "The Muppet Show".
One thing I *did* appreciate about TAC is that their comments section allowed harsh, even scathing criticism of the articles.
Ah yes, no freeloaders, except that Spartan citizens were prohibited from debasing themselves by engaging in productive labor like farming, trade, craftsmanship, or other manual labor. Those were for slaves to do.
This is downstream from bad history education. People associate the Spartans with Thermopylae and don't realize that their overall military record was quite average for the Greek standards. The Spartans lost as many battles as they won.
Is this before or after the Peloponnesian War? After the Lycurgan reforms (granted, unclear as to when they became universal) no Spartiate army (not naval battles) composed primarily of hoplite citizens lost a pitched battle to an opponent until the Thebans and the Battle of Leuctra (371 BC) with the notable exception of Thermopylae (and that was not the full citizen army, either). You could call Sphacteria (425 BC) a defeat, but that’s a stretch as it was an isolated splinter (a hundred or so hoplites) that got trapped on an island and subjected to missile fire until they capitulated because of food shortages. That’s roughly 5+ centuries undefeated.
The Spartans, much like any other hoplites, didn't have any choice but to cooperate. Their battle formation either held or cracked, and a single man failing could have catastrophic consequences for everyone else.
The Spartans also had some rituals to build the necessary cohesion, like the syssitia (eating together at the same table).
This gets at an interesting question that I'm not sure has been studied. If you follow Hanson's Western way of war, which I do not, then you divide societies into awesome Western ones with close order infantry battle tactics with high body counts and wicked Eastern ones that fight mock battles and kill a smaller number of people in cruel ritualized ways.
But this is an obvious black and white dichotomy that is unlikely to be true. If there are any societies with purely ritualized warfare then the Aztecs would be a strong candidate. The question then, is how does such ritualized warfare evolve? Obviously it is suicide to fight in a ritualized way when your enemies have armored hoplites, but rituals can coevolve when groups of states share similar religious beliefs.
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?
I read the book last year, and its description of battle (dis)order strongly reminded me of the Iliad and Bronze Age battles. They were missing only spears and chariots. It's all individual heroic man-on-man battles. Ganging up on a single opponent was strictly forbidden - with the sole exception of the very first battle of a new cohort.
It's interesting, because New Guinean tribal warfare being Neolithic/Stone Age (with some metal "cargo" helpfully supplied by Europeans much later, as the Psmiths describe here: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-road-belong-cargo-by-peter), and not Bronze Age, because New Guinea never had easy access to copper or any other exploitable metal before the colonial era, provides an interesting look at how the Bronze Age transformed warfare wherever it arrived.
I understand that historians of ancient warfare believe that the transition from Stone to Bronze really does matter in terms of how warfare will "look", because the Stone -> Bronze transition means that equipping an effective warrior now requires a lot of expensive metal, because the "meta" is now metal armor, not just metal weapons (and even metal weapons alone cost more than flint weapons). It's the metal ages, the late Copper Age and Bronze Age, which inaugurate the palace and temple economies, and the first states, because effectively exploiting ore reserves and smelting metal requires a level of organization - mining, taxation, managed trade, division of labor - that Neolithic societies simply never had or needed. Indeed, I think part of the PSmiths' point in their review of Road Belong Cargo is that the apparently strange beliefs the New Guineans have about the world are in large part attributable to societies which never acquired the assumptions that undergird a society that has learned to mine and smelt metal ores and acquired all the other attendant complexity.
Thus, one of the important factors here is that the appearance of metal smelting, and then the first states, also inaugurates the first *warrior classes*, which are also the first *aristocratic classes*, who have distinctive prestige modes of warfare. Many of these classes, some famous ones including the noble classes of Mycenae, Egypt, Sumer, the Hittite Empire, and the Shang Dynasty of China, originated as the organizers of the bronze smelting industry, who in turn acquired preferential access to still scarce bronze armor and weaponry. First as armored infantry, and later as charioteers (it is striking how *every* single one of the early civilizations I mentioned developed the chariot as a prestige vehicle for the nobility, invariably ridden by a bronze-armored and equipped charioteer noble. There's a reason the oral tradition Homer draws on is full of bronze and chariots). So we can see, the Bronze Age inaugurates an era of heroic and aristocrat-centric warfare, carried out by the early states. The Bronze Age, however, is emphatically not a phalanx mode of warfare, the phalanx is an Iron Age invention. Bronze Age warfare is individualized and heroic, due to the combination of metal availability and metal scarcity, and the phalanx is nothing like that. And neither is that what Stone Age warfare is like. As you note, in New Guinea, it's very heavily ritualized, and not very lethal. It's also very egalitarian and driven by glory-seeking individuals who are fighting for the right to distribute goods (plunder) to their fellows for prestige.
Aztec warfare may be more similar to New Guinean warfare, but there's still the slight problem in that the Aztecs clearly did develop priestly and noble classes, and a complex state, while retaining many Stone Age individualized warfare characteristics. It's possible that the Aztecs just by their existence break the Stone Age model of state development. But I think it's also possible that the Aztec era might reflect an acquisition of some facets of post-Neolithic society without the acquisition of metalworking.
Enjoyed this comment. I thought you’d also enjoy that the Iliad started being sung before chariots existed. That’s why some books mention it, others don’t, and if I recall correctly some blunt chariot references are worked back in to some older parts of the story
That is interesting! Though it would also surprise me, because AIUI, the historical events that inspired the Trojan War postdate the arrival of chariots in Greece by hundreds of years. Google says that chariots arrive in Mycenae in the 16th century BC, the Trojan War likely occurs somewhere from the 13th to 12th centuries BC (which potentially places the Trojan War right in the middle of the 12th century Late Bronze Age Collapse), and Homer compiles the Iliad based on old oral traditions extant in the 8th century BC, hundreds of years after the LBAC and Greek Dark Ages erase chariots from Greek society. Of course, the Iliadic tradition cannot predate the historic Trojan War, for obvious reasons.
If so, that might actually imply that it's the other way around - the historical Trojan War must have had chariots, and immediate early Iliadic traditions too, but with the decline of chariots in Greek society, the presence of chariots in some oral Iliadic traditions disappeared too - but not all. Others, the ones that Homer drew on, preserved an echo of the ancient heroes hundreds of years after the fact, a surviving window into the lost Age of Heroes.
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.
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."
Just too add a Materialist explanation for their religion, I read a few years ago a theory that Aztec mass sacrifice was primarily caused by the lack of livestock for protein so the primary source of meat for elites was sacrifice victims.
They had too much population density for game to be a practical source of meat, even for elites, so the highly ritualized, industrialized sacrificial death cult served as a way to provide a steady supply of human meat to Aztec elites without destroying society. Most plausible theory I've heard for such a system developing.
This was debunked a while back, IIRC. Isotope analysis of skeletal remains doesn't show evidence of protein deficiency, and aside from maize/beans/squash being nutritionally complete there was actually pretty good supplementation of protein from turkeys, dogs, and game hunting.
If your point is just there were other sources of protein point taken, but people like meat. The fact beans were a staple of the diet does not discount the possibility extreme measures were taken to ensure elites could access meat.
The elites would have had no shortage regardless. Game wouldn't be exhausted in the region for centuries and they'd have had the pick of domesticated animals to eat.
I do not think you have put much thought into this. You cannot feed tens of thousands of people in highly concentrated urban centers on game. Hunting rights are highly regulated across all urban societies for this exact reason.
To your second point the Aztecs quite famously had very few domesticated animals and those they did have were small. The introduction of cattle and especially the pig completely changed the Native diet and agriculture in much of Latin America for this very reason.
I was waiting for this comment. Anyone with personal experience associating with vegans will immediately recognize in the Aztecs the sort of hyperviolent tendencies that develop from lack of animal protein.
"[This video] imagines the Mexica, as the victors, adopting our worldview and norms whole-cloth"
Is this not what happened with Japan or Kerala, or for that matter modern Mexico City, or Scandinavia 500 years ago (adapting normative Christian culture)? Each of these places kept its local identity while discarding its less cosmopolitan beliefs over time.
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?”
Honestly, I question whether the Aztecs were as advanced as we are now told and if their cities were as superior to European cities as we are led to believe. I have no record to cite, but I have a hard time believing Constantinople and Vienna and Paris were inferior to MesoAmerican cities.
The European cities were far older, it makes sense that they were dirtier and more chaotic than the recently planned city built around a temple complex, and even if they had individual building that were more magnificant the overall effect would probably be weaker.
I'm not sure about Paris, but Constantinople would have been built on roman foundations, so I imagine it was pretty sanitary. If they called Tenochtitlan "the Venice of the Americas" then presumably Venice was at least similarly impressive.
Paris probably was not very sanitary—London certainly was not. But I also believe there were European cities that would have had beautiful architecture and art and sophisticated administrative features that we take for granted but alien cultures would not have had the historical roles been reversed.
Probably more as a reference point (city, built into a lake – well, in Venice it’s a lagoon). Venice hardly seems sanitary _even now_ TBH, with the colour/texture and occasionally the smell of the canals.
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 relatively detailed contemporary anthropology on the Aztecs but not the Toltecs or Chichimecs.
You can get a good overview of the pan-Mexico cultural background from the second chapter, "The Mexico that Spain Encountered" by Susan Schroeder, of Beezley and Meyer's The Oxford History of Mexico. Many of the individual strands appear in earlier and other contemporary cultures, but the Mexica were peculiarly bloody within that matrix--for example, "Subscribing to the popular myth of Toltec supremacy, the Mexica aspired to try to establish an ancestral affiliation with them through a marital alliance of one of their young men with the daughter of the king of Culhuacan, only to sacrifice the bride-princess, flay her, and have one of their deity-impersonator priests don her skin and display himself before her terrified father at a ceremony in honor of Xipe Totec. Of course, all the Mexica were banished from Culhuacan." (From that chapter; the event was I think in the 1300s.) Oh, and here is a comment I might have misremembered in another post here (or that might be a misremembering of a distinct quote): "Mexica society had benefited extraordinarily from the political collaboration of King Itzcoatl and his half-brother Tlacaelel, a wizard of sorts when it came to setting the altepetl [state] on course for greater expansion. Tlacaelel quickly earned the ominous title Cihuacoatl (woman snake), because he helped mastermind the interplay of Mexica theology, economics, and warfare to generate unheard of wealth and prestige..." Itzcoatl died in 1440, while Tlacaelel lived until 1487, continuing to have great influence until his death.
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.
Aliette de Bodard wrote the "Obsidian and Blood" trilogy, and was able to get it published. These days I think being accused of "Cultural Appropriaton" would doom such a project.
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, and otherwise to agree with everything that Cortez ever said or thought, 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.
“Hey, we’ve got a god who loves you and only demands obedience, not torrents of blood” probably sounded like a better deal than living under the fear that Tezcatlipoca’s wrathful attention would land on you.
Well, these are Spanish Catholics we are talking about, so perhaps it was more like "Our God is so powerful we can eat his blood and flesh using only bread and wine, and to feel the power of his violent, agonizing, humiliating death we need only words, pictures, mortification of the flesh, the odd spot of auto-flagellation....".
Oh yeah, there's huge thematic overlap. Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca both sacrifice of themselves in the mythology to bring life to humanity and/or render the earth habitable for human life. Not so big on the turning-the-other-cheek thing, though.
Aztec death and gore stuff + Spanish Catholic death and gore stuff is a potent combo. I’m told the book on this (which I have not read) is “Death and the Idea of Mexico.”
Not to mention a God willing to overlook the occasional lapse.
There were plenty of other tribes/nations/city-states en route to the Anahuac Valley who hated the Mexica's guts, sure, but this didn't mean they weren't equally attached to the practice of human sacrifice. Cortez had to slaughter a large chunk of Xicomecoatl's nobles/retinue to stamp out the practice in Cempoala, IIRC.
> "The Mexica had projectile weapons, but specifically designed them to be non-lethal and only employed them for demoralization"
This is also probably exaggerated, by the way. The aztec armies were perfectly willing to inflict mass casualties when it was tactically expedient, and actually adapted rapidly to the use of spanish weaponry. It was just too late by then.
Actually, my mistake- there were threats of serious violence but going off the wiki Cortez narrowly managed to avoid actual large-scale killing within Cempoala despite ordering their idols to be torn down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xicomecoatl#Desecration_of_the_temples
Apparently those other city states weren't so attached to human sacrifice that they weren't willing to side with Cortez.
Well, he was gonna kill them otherwise, and the world didn't immediately end when they stopped, so... whatcha gonna do?
Mexica weapons were the best that can be made with obsidian and wood with no metals. The idea that they are made to be less lethal is groundless. Large obsidian blades are fragile the macuahuitl is the closest you can get to a sword with the materials available. Iron age and mediaeval spearpoints and arrowpoints are small too they penetrate deep, are light and manoeuvrable. You are not going to make a hewing pole arm such as a glaive or halberd out of obsidian its too fragile and a tied on spearhead is only good for thrusting. Thrusts are usually considered more lethal than cuts anyway, and are best done with a small spearhead.
I wasn't just talking about weapons but the goal in warfare. This is why, for instance, the Chichimec relied so much on archery.
I only know as much about the Chichemec as what I just read on the Wiki, but less organised tribes often rely on skirmishers and bowmen a lot. There seems to be a lot of overinterpretation of typical neolithic weapons going around.
Even if they were fighting ritualized battles for victims they presumably still wanted to win the battles.
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."
"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?"
Look to the Cat, consider her ways, and be wise.
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.
«you then have to sort of invent the whole Western Tradition to figure out the issue of a Good God when Bad Shit happens.»
In a recent discussion someone argued that the ancients did not have a concept of human free will and indeed the common opinion is that it was invented by Augustine to explain why his deity, omnipotent and perfectly good, still allows evil to happen.
But I pointed out that free will as agency as moral responsibility was well known to the ancients, from early egyptian, sumerian, chinese (etc.) onwards; what they had was a concept of gods as immortal superhumans but the usual supreme deity was "fate" or "heaven" or "dao" or "brahman" which was omnipotent but not even conscious.
What Augustine invented was indeed free will but not for humans, but for the omnipotent deity: it is because Augustine's deity has free will that that deity can choose to let them decide between good and bad acts instead of ensuring that only good things happen.
Polytheism is in many ways easier to reconcile with the problem of evil.
I do think that there's a difference in kind as well as of degree, though, between, "the gods like smoked meat, because who doesn't love a good barbecue," and "Tlaloc loves the tears of children."
Chinese and hebrews both did mass human sacrifice or ritual torture. Antisocial behaviors are an unfortunate adaptation of the human species to complex society. roll the dice enough times and someone will codify these behaviors and take them to the extreme.
Well often times after the gods took their cut of the sacrificed animals the rest was a feast for the priests, so in that case animal sacrifice is not that strange.
A lot of the sacrifices in the Hebrew Old Testament were doves and pigeons. And sheep aren't really much more dignified than a llama, and they got to be the Passover sacrifice.
No offence but it does kind of sound like you're grasping for excuses that will let you avoid the full acceptance of how different the society really was.
There's a related theory that this was all about protein deficiencies, but the aztec diet was actually pretty well-rounded, between the three sisters, turkey pens, dogs and hunting. Sacrifice did intensify during periods of drought/flooding/locusts leading to famine, so maybe it was just the zero-sum nature of the local ecology.
Scott Alexander himself provides something of an answer here (https://archive.fo/NmRLA) as to why Aztecs saw so much violence in the nature of the world:
> Why do the Aztecs need such a horrible mythology with so many apocalypses? One of my sources suggests it was a natural reaction to living in Mesoamerica, an area that combined an impossibly ancient history - three thousand years of civilization by the time the Aztecs came around - with a total failure to invent written history. The Aztecs were surrounded by the ruins of colossal cities - Tula, San Lorenzo, and most of all titanic Teotihuacan. An Aztec warrior in the 15th century couldn't fling a stone from an atl-atl without hitting a godlike ancient city that had been mysteriously destroyed. Eventually you just start thinking in terms of civilizations arising and then being destroyed by angry gods leaving only mysterious stone ziggurats as a fact of nature.
> Or imagine you're a medieval European, and you suddenly stumble across the ruins of Rome, having only the barest of legends that such a place even existed. Your first thought might be something like "What happened to them? And how many people do I have to kill to make sure it doesn't happen to me?"
But Europeans DID live among the ruins of the Romans. Why is it phrased like a hypothetical?
The Middle East even more so, you can't throw a brick without hitting some structure from a long-collapsed empire.
The hypothetical is "what if Europeans had never invented written records, and had abandoned the site of Rome and forgotten the Roman Empire ever existed, then centuries later stumbled upon its ruins having no idea what they were or how they got there."
That's a nice theory for how similar it is to Three-Body Problem. Very much in tune with the 21st century Zeitgeist.
21st century? In what way? I'd say the contrary, that there haven't been any civilisations (that we know of) that got to a state similar to ours... which can be scary in its own way, but not *this way*.
Neil Gaiman had a note in American Gods where he said that the car gods had been recipients of human sacrifices as great or greater than that of Mexican gods. The sheer amount of distortion of the human environment for the car including the number of victims of automobile accidents kinda makes this statement true.
That's true in a poetic sense, but when you think about it for 10 seconds it's kind of silly.
We use cars. And they result in deaths. We don't hold struggling victims down and cut their hearts out for the god of cars. Human sacrifice appalls us because it's pointless and it's directly, intentionally violent and murderous. People dying as a result of a utilization of a technology (cars, factories, farm equipment...) is also bad of course but it's not remotely in the same category.
You didn't understand the point of the article. In their own worldview, the Aztecs were as reasonable to themselves as we are to our worldview, which is an economic way of thinking, accepting the sacrifice of these lives in service of a higher god, economic efficiency.
Agreed, there's a difference between unfortunate side effects and intentional goals. If we intentionally wanted to make cars more fatal, they would be a lot different.
The US population is currently about 20x larger than pre-columbian Mexico, but with 4 million traffic-accident-related deaths over the last century, I mean... yeah, that's plausibly comparable to the low-end frequency estimates for deaths by sacrifice.
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)
I like the interpretation that LeGuin is parodying hack sci fi writers who only introduce utopias to set up a twist ending where they are secretly evil. Basically the beginning sets the reader up to dismiss Omelas as implausibly perfect, then she introduces an even more implausible detail which nevertheless convinces the reader to take it seriously. Omelas needs to sacrifice the child to forestall other, more sinister dooms that the reader's imagination would otherwise conjure up for it. Maybe we do all believe deep down that suffering is necessary.
Omelas seems totally unrelated, so maybe OP meant something else by Le Guin?
No, I meant Omelas. I understood this review to be about the question of sacrificing individuals, as __browsing aptly put it (although I am not a utilitarian).
Omelas doesn't really make any particular effort to explain *why* the neglected child in the basement living in pain and squalor is critical to the bliss and rapture of the wider society, though. The "everyone has to shock eachother, or die" society feels more grounded, but I suppose heaven has always been harder to describe than hell.
Yes the review is about that, and so is Omelas, but not really Alexander's thing, so can't see how Alexander cribbed from Le Guin?
In fairness, Le Guin cribbed her thought experiment from Dostoevsky.
"The Grand Inquistor" chapter.
Spawned, at least, Omelas, L'Etranger, and many other midrashim.
Where did Dostoevsky write it down, if I can ask?
The Brothers Karamazov, about how it is impossible to build a perfect world at the cost of even a single child's tear.
This'd read better if you reworked it to refer to Alexander's other famous essay, Meditations on Moloch.
I would submit that at some point the theology was germinated through actual contact with entities who suggested and/or guided it. It’s the simplest explanation after all.
This sentence provokes two comments from me, one more serious, the other with great entertainment value: "Barring a few exceptional cases (priestesses of female deities, the state-sanctioned guild of prostitutes, and female sacrificial victims) the life and training of a Mexica girl was oriented towards marriage." What some historical novelists seem not to have realized is that in many respects Aztec society was highly puritanical--yes, they loved color and insisted upon tributes like quetzal feathers from the Maya that were distributed to especially accomplished warriors (another form of reward was being paired with a courtesan of a particular level; courtesan better reflects the reality than prostitute, I think, unless I'm thinking of something different from what Clendinnen is discussing), but they were a society organized for war, and indulgence in pleasure was contrary to that.
Back in grad school I took a summer intensive course on classical Nahuatl (with some study of the current dialects at the end), the language of the Aztecs, as well as some of their bitterest enemies like the Tlaxcalans. There were five of us in the class, all grad students, all with professional interest in the language: me the linguist, one historian, one anthropologist, and two ethnobotanists, and it was one of the best classes I had. Amusingly, I took it essentially because of clerical error and incompetence in the university administration. (In short, the university lost proof I had proficient reading knowledge in French, so I had to take a speaking course that summer, and some nitwit in the financial sections of Leviathan's twisty innards decided I was required under regulations to also take four hours the first summer session, which I fulfilled with Nahuatl and one hour of readings on Aztec history/culture, then a week after the class started I got an email saying, oops, sorry, not necessary, but I was enjoying the class so much I went ahead and remained in it. I joked to a couple of my profs later that few people realize how many great scholarly achievements are due to scribal error...) We read many interesting texts (how the Aztecs obtained pet monkeys, for example), with a focus upon the professional interests of the students, so lots of sociohistorical material and materia medica. At one point we read a bit about ceremonies for warriors, and a term came up that the teacher couldn't identify (he specialized in modern Nahuatl studies), and I said, "Wait a minute, that's a courtesan of some sort," referred to Soustelle, and identified the level of courtesan and the accomplishment of the warrior who, shall we say, was awarded access to her charms. Our teacher chuckled and said, "What I love about this class is that all of you contribute so much in accordance with your personal interests." Ha!
And two more general notes: First, one of the texts we read was an early letter (1530s, I think) from Tlaxcala written in Nahuatl in Latin script. Because Tlaxcala supported the Spaniards and converted to Catholicism, their elites remained in power and quickly adopted literacy, which means that there is an unbroken chain of native writing in Nahuatl over almost five centuries, quite rare in American linguistics (by which I mean the linguistics of the Amerindian languages); I think James Lockhart is one of the scholars who has worked on that, though most of the documents are in private archives and haven't been published.
Second, Nahuatl did end up having some professional interest for me as a non-anthropologist and non-ethnobotanist. Several of the modern dialects have developed so that they have both stress and pitch accent as distinctive. There are many examples of one of the two developing into the other (it's a big big big topic in Balto-Slavic historical linguistics, for example, never mind such developments in both Greek and Latin), but examples of change in progress from one to the other are rare.
The Aztecs were a highly Apollonian society, which is all the stranger given that Tezcatlipoca was arguably a god of darkness/chaos/revolution. My guess is that they felt a debt to Him after being the underdogs for so long.
In Albert Speer’s biography there is a picture of him showing Hitler a large scale model of the new Berlin that Speer planned to build for him. Enormous temples and plazas. I saw an echo of Aztec urban design, and recalled that the Nazi plans to conquer and enslave their neighbors were an echo of the Aztec relations with their neighboring cultures during the growth phase of their empire.
In a visit to Mexico in 1974 I saw in a newspaper a photo of a man who had been arrested in a street brawl. He was sitting, handcuffed, in the back of a police car, with both eyeballs torn out and blood running down his face. My surprise was not that such a thing might happen, but that it was normal to put it on the front page of a mass-market newspaper. It seemed bizarrely different from conventional european ideas about what is permitted in public display. The readers of that newspaper were only about thirty generations away from the Mexica described here.
On the point you just mentioned about modern Mexico - when you read a laundry list of the horrors perpetrated by the horrorshow that was Mexica, it’s hard to not notice how similar they are to the horrors perpetrated by the horrorshows that are the modern cartels. Such as:
Cutting off a cartel rival’s face and wrapping it around a soccer ball (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/mexico/6962500/Murder-victim-has-face-stitched-on-football.html)
Hacking off people’s heads and chucking them into crowded discos (https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/sep/07/what-will-it-take-to-end-the-pornography-of-videoed-torture)
Burning people alive with diesel instead of petrol because it “burns slower” (https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/sep/07/what-will-it-take-to-end-the-pornography-of-videoed-torture)
Flaying people alive and putting the video on social media (https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/sep/07/what-will-it-take-to-end-the-pornography-of-videoed-torture)
Dissolving informants’ bodies in vats of industrial grade acid to make “stew” (https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna28868152)
Making actual “stew” from informants or other people who happen to have crossed the cartels (https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/worse-than-any-horror-film-inside-a-los-zetas-cartel-kitchen-1.4225436)
Other instances of cannibalism, forced or otherwise as an entry ticket (https://www.reuters.com/article/world/cartel-cannibalism-mexico-says-drug-gang-members-ate-human-hearts-idUSKBN0KF1IV/)
I won’t belabor the point because it’s gross, but one really does wonder how much of this is a legacy of Mexica’s obsession with blatant, performative sadism. If you have ever read Garth Ennis’ Crossed (this is an “*un*-recommendation”, I regret reading it, and its main effect was to make me not want to read any of his more famous series, like what is sometimes considered the definitive Punisher series. I’m trying very hard to not Streisand-recommend Crossed here), reading about cartels (or Mexica) reminds me of nothing quite so much as how Garth Ennis wrote Crossed.
But you see it any time you’re chatting with somebody about the interesting historical fact that some people had savage custom X, and they nervously interject, “well, of course we also do Y.” The odd thing is that people do it even when X and Y are very different things, which would seem to undercut their argument, but they say it anyway because they are so desperate to restore some sort of karmic balance.
In the vein of this quote from the piece, I want to emphasize in particular how what Mexican cartels do is comparable only to what Mexica did, and not to other organized crime groups. The American and Italian Mafias, the Russian Mafiya, the Japanese Yakuza, and the Chinese Triads are all criminal groups that do criminal things. However, what they do usually tops out to “kneecap or shoot informants and recalcitrant victims, possibly many victims”. Though the Yakuza do practice cutting off a finger to signal membership or stigmatize victims, and the Italian Mafia did practice the dissolving in acid vats thing. In the annals of their activities, you will not find something along the order of “a dozen industrial-grade kitchens that existed for the primary purpose of kidnapping thousands of rivals from other cartels, police informants, or random people off the street, to turn into pozole.” The cartels are X. Mexica is X. The American Mafia, Italian Mafia, Russian Mafiya, Japanese Yakuza, and Chinese Triads are Y. I don’t think “they’re criminals, what do you expect” is especially explanatory here.
Crossed is Ennis at maximum edginess, you're not going to get quite the same level of performative hyperviolence in Punisher Max. It's definitely very far from Ennis' best work. I'm a big Ennishead though so all the comedy murder stuff doesn't really bother me, it just appeals to the inner thirteen-year-old boy reading Preacher for the first time.
I think that's a fair point, and like I mentioned, Crossed is the only one of his works that I've read (obviously, I didn't like it). And mostly I just mean "Mexican cartels' default behavior is on the same level as Ennis's Crossed", which is pretty insane when you think about it. They don't even have the excuse of being afflicted with Rage-like virus!
On the subject of Crossed, actually - the other thing that genuinely creeped me out reading about the Mexica in the article, is just how much their society resembles the Blood Men civilization from Homo Tortor, with its gratuitous, spectacle like, communal violence and sadism and cannibalism - and Ennis made that fiction within a fictional story! Reality is stranger than fiction.
My first substantial exposure to Punisher was actually only a few weeks ago, watching Brand New Day, where he comes off as a basically sympathetic and rational character who battles his own personal demons. I confess I don't know how well that maps to Ennis's Punisher.
The Homo Tortor story is by Kieron Gillen I think - recall it being the most interesting thing in that whole collection.
I'm thinking about the Psmiths' Sick Societies review when I read this stuff, as well as Pekko Hamalainen's The Comanche Empire - another polity that loved organised torture and had zero qualms about using it to enforce a sort of state power. The slave states of the American South seem like another clear example. It's pretty clear that societies can just casually lapse into this completely amoral "let's torture everyone" mode with disconcerting ease. If only there was some kind of major religious figure who was tortured to death by the government and then came back to life who could show us the way out...
Anyway, Ennis' Punisher rules, you should read it if you're interested. His Frank Castle is for sure a lot more sympathetic and well-characterised than anyone you're going to find in Crossed. Ennis sort of has two modes, sometimes he does insightful character studies of modern masculinity and sometimes he just makes God and the Devil suck each other off.
> "I won’t belabor the point because it’s gross, but one really does wonder how much of this is a legacy of Mexica’s obsession with blatant, performative sadism"
I'm not sure if it qualifies as torture as if you flay the victim *after* they're dead? I mean, the auto-sacrificial rituals sound rather uncomfortable, but the actual temple-rituals killed the victim pretty quickly. We're not talking about the Comanche here.
The flaying might have been post-death, but I'm pretty sure the heart cutting out thing was while the victim was alive (until he passed out from pain)?
Yeah, but I mean that cutting the victim's chest open couldn't take more than a minute or so and once the heart is removed, you're dead (I vaguely recall that victims were sometimes drugged beforehand, though I couldn't swear to it.) My point is that inflicting maximum agony on the victim wasn't generally the purpose of the exercise per se, in contrast to the habits of other native americans one could name.
I do recall reading about skeletal evidence that children sacrificed to Tlaloc invariably had some form of painful bone or tooth infection, though I'm not sure if that was inflicted *by* the priests or if the victims were selected *after* they suffered infection from some other source. And certain offerings to Xipe Totec were shot to death with arrows, which I guess you could call torture of a sort?
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.
Yes, I shudder every time I see the sports mascot of a school is "The Spartans."
I recall an exceptionally stupid article in "The American Conservative" to the effect that "America Must Reclaim Its Spartan Heritage!"
So, are we just talking about the pedophilia, or are throwing in the slavery, the periodic massacres of helots and the exposure of infants as well? The article was so pompous and asinine, it might as well have been penned by "Sam The American Eagle" from "The Muppet Show".
One thing I *did* appreciate about TAC is that their comments section allowed harsh, even scathing criticism of the articles.
I don't think that the author had anything quite so noble in mind, but a rather more aggressively militarized version.
Still, I knew more about Real Sparta than the halfwit author, and I'm a cat!
Ah yes, no freeloaders, except that Spartan citizens were prohibited from debasing themselves by engaging in productive labor like farming, trade, craftsmanship, or other manual labor. Those were for slaves to do.
This is downstream from bad history education. People associate the Spartans with Thermopylae and don't realize that their overall military record was quite average for the Greek standards. The Spartans lost as many battles as they won.
Is this before or after the Peloponnesian War? After the Lycurgan reforms (granted, unclear as to when they became universal) no Spartiate army (not naval battles) composed primarily of hoplite citizens lost a pitched battle to an opponent until the Thebans and the Battle of Leuctra (371 BC) with the notable exception of Thermopylae (and that was not the full citizen army, either). You could call Sphacteria (425 BC) a defeat, but that’s a stretch as it was an isolated splinter (a hundred or so hoplites) that got trapped on an island and subjected to missile fire until they capitulated because of food shortages. That’s roughly 5+ centuries undefeated.
The Spartans, much like any other hoplites, didn't have any choice but to cooperate. Their battle formation either held or cracked, and a single man failing could have catastrophic consequences for everyone else.
The Spartans also had some rituals to build the necessary cohesion, like the syssitia (eating together at the same table).
This gets at an interesting question that I'm not sure has been studied. If you follow Hanson's Western way of war, which I do not, then you divide societies into awesome Western ones with close order infantry battle tactics with high body counts and wicked Eastern ones that fight mock battles and kill a smaller number of people in cruel ritualized ways.
But this is an obvious black and white dichotomy that is unlikely to be true. If there are any societies with purely ritualized warfare then the Aztecs would be a strong candidate. The question then, is how does such ritualized warfare evolve? Obviously it is suicide to fight in a ritualized way when your enemies have armored hoplites, but rituals can coevolve when groups of states share similar religious beliefs.
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?
I read the book last year, and its description of battle (dis)order strongly reminded me of the Iliad and Bronze Age battles. They were missing only spears and chariots. It's all individual heroic man-on-man battles. Ganging up on a single opponent was strictly forbidden - with the sole exception of the very first battle of a new cohort.
It's interesting, because New Guinean tribal warfare being Neolithic/Stone Age (with some metal "cargo" helpfully supplied by Europeans much later, as the Psmiths describe here: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-road-belong-cargo-by-peter), and not Bronze Age, because New Guinea never had easy access to copper or any other exploitable metal before the colonial era, provides an interesting look at how the Bronze Age transformed warfare wherever it arrived.
I understand that historians of ancient warfare believe that the transition from Stone to Bronze really does matter in terms of how warfare will "look", because the Stone -> Bronze transition means that equipping an effective warrior now requires a lot of expensive metal, because the "meta" is now metal armor, not just metal weapons (and even metal weapons alone cost more than flint weapons). It's the metal ages, the late Copper Age and Bronze Age, which inaugurate the palace and temple economies, and the first states, because effectively exploiting ore reserves and smelting metal requires a level of organization - mining, taxation, managed trade, division of labor - that Neolithic societies simply never had or needed. Indeed, I think part of the PSmiths' point in their review of Road Belong Cargo is that the apparently strange beliefs the New Guineans have about the world are in large part attributable to societies which never acquired the assumptions that undergird a society that has learned to mine and smelt metal ores and acquired all the other attendant complexity.
Thus, one of the important factors here is that the appearance of metal smelting, and then the first states, also inaugurates the first *warrior classes*, which are also the first *aristocratic classes*, who have distinctive prestige modes of warfare. Many of these classes, some famous ones including the noble classes of Mycenae, Egypt, Sumer, the Hittite Empire, and the Shang Dynasty of China, originated as the organizers of the bronze smelting industry, who in turn acquired preferential access to still scarce bronze armor and weaponry. First as armored infantry, and later as charioteers (it is striking how *every* single one of the early civilizations I mentioned developed the chariot as a prestige vehicle for the nobility, invariably ridden by a bronze-armored and equipped charioteer noble. There's a reason the oral tradition Homer draws on is full of bronze and chariots). So we can see, the Bronze Age inaugurates an era of heroic and aristocrat-centric warfare, carried out by the early states. The Bronze Age, however, is emphatically not a phalanx mode of warfare, the phalanx is an Iron Age invention. Bronze Age warfare is individualized and heroic, due to the combination of metal availability and metal scarcity, and the phalanx is nothing like that. And neither is that what Stone Age warfare is like. As you note, in New Guinea, it's very heavily ritualized, and not very lethal. It's also very egalitarian and driven by glory-seeking individuals who are fighting for the right to distribute goods (plunder) to their fellows for prestige.
Aztec warfare may be more similar to New Guinean warfare, but there's still the slight problem in that the Aztecs clearly did develop priestly and noble classes, and a complex state, while retaining many Stone Age individualized warfare characteristics. It's possible that the Aztecs just by their existence break the Stone Age model of state development. But I think it's also possible that the Aztec era might reflect an acquisition of some facets of post-Neolithic society without the acquisition of metalworking.
Enjoyed this comment. I thought you’d also enjoy that the Iliad started being sung before chariots existed. That’s why some books mention it, others don’t, and if I recall correctly some blunt chariot references are worked back in to some older parts of the story
That is interesting! Though it would also surprise me, because AIUI, the historical events that inspired the Trojan War postdate the arrival of chariots in Greece by hundreds of years. Google says that chariots arrive in Mycenae in the 16th century BC, the Trojan War likely occurs somewhere from the 13th to 12th centuries BC (which potentially places the Trojan War right in the middle of the 12th century Late Bronze Age Collapse), and Homer compiles the Iliad based on old oral traditions extant in the 8th century BC, hundreds of years after the LBAC and Greek Dark Ages erase chariots from Greek society. Of course, the Iliadic tradition cannot predate the historic Trojan War, for obvious reasons.
If so, that might actually imply that it's the other way around - the historical Trojan War must have had chariots, and immediate early Iliadic traditions too, but with the decline of chariots in Greek society, the presence of chariots in some oral Iliadic traditions disappeared too - but not all. Others, the ones that Homer drew on, preserved an echo of the ancient heroes hundreds of years after the fact, a surviving window into the lost Age of Heroes.
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.
Trigger's book is phenomenal. The key book to understand the literal bronze age mindset.
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.
Yeah, that last sentence in that footnote might be the most chilling part of the whole article lol
Just too add a Materialist explanation for their religion, I read a few years ago a theory that Aztec mass sacrifice was primarily caused by the lack of livestock for protein so the primary source of meat for elites was sacrifice victims.
They had too much population density for game to be a practical source of meat, even for elites, so the highly ritualized, industrialized sacrificial death cult served as a way to provide a steady supply of human meat to Aztec elites without destroying society. Most plausible theory I've heard for such a system developing.
This was debunked a while back, IIRC. Isotope analysis of skeletal remains doesn't show evidence of protein deficiency, and aside from maize/beans/squash being nutritionally complete there was actually pretty good supplementation of protein from turkeys, dogs, and game hunting.
If your point is just there were other sources of protein point taken, but people like meat. The fact beans were a staple of the diet does not discount the possibility extreme measures were taken to ensure elites could access meat.
The elites would have had no shortage regardless. Game wouldn't be exhausted in the region for centuries and they'd have had the pick of domesticated animals to eat.
I do not think you have put much thought into this. You cannot feed tens of thousands of people in highly concentrated urban centers on game. Hunting rights are highly regulated across all urban societies for this exact reason.
To your second point the Aztecs quite famously had very few domesticated animals and those they did have were small. The introduction of cattle and especially the pig completely changed the Native diet and agriculture in much of Latin America for this very reason.
Cannibalism to get protein wouldn't work for the same reason plugging an extension cord into itself doesn't.
I was waiting for this comment. Anyone with personal experience associating with vegans will immediately recognize in the Aztecs the sort of hyperviolent tendencies that develop from lack of animal protein.
Uh, tell us more? I've not noticed vegans or vegetarians being violent.
That was a joke.
oooops ... :)
That sounds like Marvin Harris's Cannibals and Kings.
"[This video] imagines the Mexica, as the victors, adopting our worldview and norms whole-cloth"
Is this not what happened with Japan or Kerala, or for that matter modern Mexico City, or Scandinavia 500 years ago (adapting normative Christian culture)? Each of these places kept its local identity while discarding its less cosmopolitan beliefs over time.
Of course, much of that had happened through colonialism, that noted efficient conduit of cosmopolitan beliefs! It just happened to go out of fashion.
Even places that were never colonized, like Thailand, also adopted cosmopolitan beliefs, to about the same extent.
Thailand does have unusually vigorous monarchy, with famous abundance of lese-majesty incidents.
That's becoming increasingly less true over time.
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.
There's a reason Tom Lehrer's nuclear proliferation song "Who's Next" is on my AI doom playlist.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6O1dPXFehJ1otP8WWE0kSR
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.
Perhaps the strong association of fumigation with religious rituals has originated from this practical consideration.
huh, interesting thought
Honestly, I question whether the Aztecs were as advanced as we are now told and if their cities were as superior to European cities as we are led to believe. I have no record to cite, but I have a hard time believing Constantinople and Vienna and Paris were inferior to MesoAmerican cities.
The European cities were far older, it makes sense that they were dirtier and more chaotic than the recently planned city built around a temple complex, and even if they had individual building that were more magnificant the overall effect would probably be weaker.
Excellent point
I'm not sure about Paris, but Constantinople would have been built on roman foundations, so I imagine it was pretty sanitary. If they called Tenochtitlan "the Venice of the Americas" then presumably Venice was at least similarly impressive.
Paris probably was not very sanitary—London certainly was not. But I also believe there were European cities that would have had beautiful architecture and art and sophisticated administrative features that we take for granted but alien cultures would not have had the historical roles been reversed.
Probably more as a reference point (city, built into a lake – well, in Venice it’s a lagoon). Venice hardly seems sanitary _even now_ TBH, with the colour/texture and occasionally the smell of the canals.
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 relatively detailed contemporary anthropology on the Aztecs but not the Toltecs or Chichimecs.
You can get a good overview of the pan-Mexico cultural background from the second chapter, "The Mexico that Spain Encountered" by Susan Schroeder, of Beezley and Meyer's The Oxford History of Mexico. Many of the individual strands appear in earlier and other contemporary cultures, but the Mexica were peculiarly bloody within that matrix--for example, "Subscribing to the popular myth of Toltec supremacy, the Mexica aspired to try to establish an ancestral affiliation with them through a marital alliance of one of their young men with the daughter of the king of Culhuacan, only to sacrifice the bride-princess, flay her, and have one of their deity-impersonator priests don her skin and display himself before her terrified father at a ceremony in honor of Xipe Totec. Of course, all the Mexica were banished from Culhuacan." (From that chapter; the event was I think in the 1300s.) Oh, and here is a comment I might have misremembered in another post here (or that might be a misremembering of a distinct quote): "Mexica society had benefited extraordinarily from the political collaboration of King Itzcoatl and his half-brother Tlacaelel, a wizard of sorts when it came to setting the altepetl [state] on course for greater expansion. Tlacaelel quickly earned the ominous title Cihuacoatl (woman snake), because he helped mastermind the interplay of Mexica theology, economics, and warfare to generate unheard of wealth and prestige..." Itzcoatl died in 1440, while Tlacaelel lived until 1487, continuing to have great influence until his death.
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.
Aliette de Bodard wrote the "Obsidian and Blood" trilogy, and was able to get it published. These days I think being accused of "Cultural Appropriaton" would doom such a project.
In the end, the crucified god proved more powerful than the flayed god.
"My yoke is easy and my burden is light."