"Priests worshipped Xipe Totec by skinning human victims and then donning their skins. The ritual was seen as a way to ensure fertility and regeneration"... The temple was recently uncovered in excavated ruins of the Popoloca Indians in the state of Puebla in central Mexico.... Authorities believe the victims who lost their skin were involved in gladiator-style combat and were later flayed.
January 4, 2019
Archaeologists find the temple of the Flayed Lord — Xipe Totec.
NPR reports.
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These ancient Mexican civilizations were cults of death and violence, until Spanish Christians put a stop to it.
No - it was a religion of peace. All that flaying stuff should be taken allegorically.
These are peaceful Native Americans, right?
Had they used the wheel or written word yet?
They used the swastika as a good luck symbol too.
Lovely people. So in touch with nature.
as Caroline points out....
Christianity is THE TRUE EVIL! If we get back to where we were before, all evil will cease
I say we allow their descendants free entry to our country. We need their kind. Great culture.
Can we time machine some modern whiny SJW Trump haters back to the temple? Be a good leaning/comparison experience.
From the article -
"Mexican archaeologists have discovered what they say is the first temple of a pre-Hispanic fertility god known as the Flayed Lord who is depicted as a skinned human corpse.
The discovery is being hailed as significant by authorities at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History because it is a whole temple, not merely depictions of the deity, which have been found in other cultures."
From the looks of the accompanying photograph, that's an interesting use of the word discover. Must have been hiding in plain sight. Perhaps "identified" would be more appropriate.
Priests worshipped Xipe Totec by skinning human victims and then donning their skins.
Pretty much what NPR wants to do to Republicans.
My wife and I went to Chichen Itza just before Christmas on our honeymoon. The tour guide seemed like a nice guy but his spiel was contemptible - all about how the evil Spaniards destroyed a great culture. "And what about the human sacrifice?" "They considered it an honor to die for their gods!" Yeah, that's why it was the captain of the losing team that got his head cut off, they were playing to lose so they could receive great honor. I just looked at my wife and /facepalmed.
Read a bit deeper in the NYT, the NPR article is shit:
At the temple, which the institute said was probably built between A.D. 1000 and 1260, the archaeologists found artifacts related to the god, Xipe Tótec, including two stone skulls and a stone torso that had an extra hand hanging off its left arm. Scientists said the extra hand suggested the god was wearing the remains of a sacrificial victim.
Noemí Castillo Tejero, the archaeologist who led the project, was not available for an interview, but the institute said that the excavation at the complex, called Ndachjian-Tehuacan, had also uncovered two altars nearby, in a layout that appeared to match Aztec accounts of rituals associated with the cult of Xipe Tótec.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/world/americas/xipe-totec-flayed-lord.html
gilbar said...
Christianity is THE TRUE EVIL!
Man, some people are so thin-skinned.
*ducks*
Related, this is now a cuck-triggering one-man-show on Netflix:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/theater/latin-history-for-morons-review-john-leguizamo.html
Selective-child and clinical cannibalism have diverse precedents.
According to the Left-wing book "1493", the Aztec's propensity for Human sacrifice has been overblown as was their enslavement of the local tribes and love of war and brutality.
They were actually *Better* than the Spanish Catholics, because they were deep philosophers and were into astronomy.
Really.
They had a lot of faith that sacrificing and then flaying other people accomplished something.
Christianity is THE TRUE EVIL!
Faith - supersition - is the true evil. Well, except for your particular faith, which is correct and completely wonderful, of course, except for the parts about enslaving Indians and burning "crypto jews" alive to save their souls or whatever the fuck.
rcocean: Yeah, that was pretty much the tone of our Chichen Itza tour guide (who was at least mostly Spaniard himself, as am I). It was nauseating.
Some of these pre-columbian cultures were like something out of a Clive Barker story. Although to be fair, bizarre and monstrous religious practices are hardly unique in human history.
As David Burge aka Iowahawk said,
1. Identify a respected institution.
2. kill it.
3. gut it.
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
#lefties
Basically Aztecs were lefties. Got it.
Howard,
An excavation so recent that they had time to relevel and smooth the ground, pour concrete to replace missing sections, and paint them yellow.
Fern - your source for 5he "crypto Jew" thing is a wiki article that says "Records are incomplete, but ONE historian says..." that 29 Jews were killed? Over an almost 200 year period? And you expect this to delegitimize a faith made up of a billion members today? Seriously?
I'm agnostic, and I see that as fucking bullshit you wouldn't tolerate against anything you like.
CWJ: They dug up artifacts, not the structure. Also, there is a potential time lapse between excavation and analysis, paper writing publishing and press release. Are you searching for a conspiracy here? Seems very unlikely since it reflects poorly on the natives.
False. Native peoples were peaceful and in tune with nature and one another before the arrival of white colonizers and oppressors. Have these "scientists" not seen Disney's Pocahontas??
I don't understand why the god was flayed and had a scar like his heart was cut out. I thought they did that to the victims.
I'm so confused
Basically Aztecs were lefties.
More specifically, they were the NAZIs of Meso-America.
The Spanish Catholics were capable of inflicting great atrocities. I would guess being flayed alive is worse than being burned alive, but tastes vary. Give Spanish culture credit for producing a man like Las Casas. He was the Dominican friar who reported on Spanish atrocities and worked to outlaw them. So far as is known, there were no Mayan, Olmec or Aztec clergy who preached against the atrocities of their native religions.......Over a period of centuries, the Spanish Inquisition killed about five thousand people tops. When Napoleon invaded Spain, he outlawed the Inquisition. On the down side, the French troops confiscated the crops, raped the women, and sparked a rebellion that caused tens of thousands to perish. Both Spanish partisans and French troops showed remarkable ingenuity in torturing their prisoners. Far more imaginative than those Inquisition bureaucrats......But, of course, if you want to inflict real pain there's nothing like sawing off one or two limbs without anesthesia and then letting the patient die slowly of septicemia. I'm not sure, but I bet that's worse than flaying or being burnt alive.
Noble savages.
"They considered it an honor to die for their gods!"
From what I've read, the Aztecs usually sacrificed people from other tribes that they'd enslaved.
Cortes only succeeded because the other tribes in Mexico hated the Aztecs and wanted to overthrow them.
"Yeah, that was pretty much the tone of our Chichen Itza tour guide (who was at least mostly Spaniard himself, as am I). It was nauseating."
I've met white Mexicans, who will go on rants about Cortes and his "Butchers". I held my tongue but wanted to say, "Dude you look like a Conquistador"
Howard, Not at all. All I questioned was the use of the word. I still think "identified" is the appropriate choice. You're reading far too much into a simple comment.
You know you can see this kind of thing at the Chicago Art Institute. You don't have to go all the way to Mexico.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/opacity/14404684069
So if you won the fight you would be skinned alive? Better to be killed by the sword or lion or whatever.
So if you won the fight you would be skinned alive?
Not sure if it was the loser or winner who was skinned. Either way, it seems like they weren't alive when they were skinned... at least I hope not.
This case, it should be noted, is of a non-Aztec culture.
The whole human sacrifice-cannibalism-mutilation complex of cultural practices is common across all the Central American peoples, for at least a period of a thousand years, that we know of.
The Aztecs had their own flaying and skin-wearing customs in the service of a different god.
rcocean said, "From what I've read, the Aztecs usually sacrificed people from other tribes that they'd enslaved.
Cortes only succeeded because the other tribes in Mexico hated the Aztecs and wanted to overthrow them."
This is true. Both before and after the Noche Triste almost 90% of Cortez's army were native Mexicas, basically Aztec tributaries whose tribute included victims for human sacrifice.
For those with a moribund curiosity, read the letters of the conquistador Antonio de Mendoza, commissioner of the Codex Mendoza. His account is mostly accepted as the most factual of the eye witness accounts. He wrote of Montezuma's introduction between Cortez and his men and their god effigies in the Templo Mayor, whose plaza, walls, statues and ceilings were daily painted with the gore and blood of sacrificial victims. As he put it, "an ocean of blood and savagery". Hearts, blood, flayed skins, skulls used as offering vessels and cups...beyond belief.
I don't know why Hollywood hasn't done an epic treatment of this story considering it is in fact historically epic, especially when you consider the visuals you could get from an accurate depiction. But I think I know why.
The book "Aztec" by Gary Jennings is kinda interesting.
lucid,
I was going to quote IowaHawk but you beat me to it.
I was thinking of it in the contest of the Boy Scouts of America.
The American fascists (progressives) have basically killed it, gutted it and are wearing its carcass as a skin suit.
John Henry
Re Leguizamo and etc. -
It should be noted, but is rarely mentioned, that the conquistadors of the age of the European explosion, whether they were Spanish or Portuguese or French or English, were badass.
These were overwhelming people. A few hundred or a few dozen, in some cases, even just one man, could bring sophisticated cultures with populations of hundreds of thousands or millions into subjection, and it took just a relative handful of these Europeans to keep millions in a subservient state for hundreds of years. And this was the case all over the world, not just the Americas.
Technological superiority does not explain much. Tech is easily copied, usually, and workarounds are easily available. The truth is that the Spaniards under Cortez, for the most part, won their fights with their swords alone, face to face with the enemy warriors. Even their dress and armor were identical, the Spaniards having abandoned metal armor, or never having armor in the first place, as the expeditions were all very ill-equipped by the standards of European warfare.
All these empires were won man to man, and often hand to hand, but usually the main method was persuasion.
Kiplings "The Man who would be King" is a parable of the how and why of the entire age of empires, everything in it has direct parallels to what happened in every case of conquest over 400 years. Kipling rewards close reading. But this is art, not science.
The mechanics, social and otherwise, of this power, is poorly understood. This is not a popular academic subject, to say the least. Academics generally limit themselves to documenting the grievances and the ongoing troubles of the defeated, not the most useful mechanics of the conquest. One would think it is much more important to know how to conquer, or to avoid conquest, than to whine about it.
Just in time for the 116th congress. The old ones are returning.
Lucid-Ideas said "I don't know why Hollywood hasn't done an epic treatment of this story."
They did: Apocalypto (2006)
"I don't know why Hollywood hasn't done an epic treatment of this story"
"Captain from Castile", 1947, is the best Hollywood attempt at a spectacle on this theme. Notable for Newmans "Conquest" orchestral piece which he gave to USC. But the conquest part is just background for the personal melodrama, and it ends just as the adventure truly begins.
There hasn't really been anything since. Mel Gibsons "Apocalypto" is a worthy piece on a related subject. He could have kept the sets, costumes and extras and done a truly apocalyptic siege of Tenochtitlan perhaps. "Royal Hunt of the Sun", 1969, is a very imperfect treatment of the confrontation of Pizarro and Atahualpa. People tend to forget that other conquest, also loaded with drama and spectacle.
It is curious isn't it? It is a spectacular scenario just crying out for a theatrical treatment. And its not the only one from that age.
This is the account of Bernal Diaz. Considered less authoritative overall, but revealing.
http://chnm.gmu.edu/worldhistorysources/sources/conquestofnewspain.html
Ctrl+F "sacrifice"
"They had offered to this Idol five hearts from that day’s sacrifices. In the highest part of the Cue there was a recess of which the woodwork was very richly worked, and in it was another image half man and half lizard, with precious stones all over it, and half the body was covered with a mantle. They say that the body of this figure is full of all the seeds that there are in the world, and they say that it is the god of seed time and harvest, but I do not remember its name, and everything was covered with blood, both walls and altar, and the stench was such that we could hardly wait the moment to get out of it.
They had an exceedingly large drum there, and when they beat it the sound of it was so dismal and like, so to say, an instrument of the infernal regions, that one could hear it a distance of two leagues, and they said that the skins it was covered with were those of great snakes. In that small place there were many diabolical things to be seen, bugles and trumpets and knives, and many hearts of Indians that they had burned in fumigating their idols, and everything was so clotted with blood, and there was so much of it, that I curse the whole of it, and as it stank like a slaughter house we hastened to clear out of such a bad stench and worse sight. Our Captain said to Montezuma through our interpreter, half laughing: “Senor Montezuma, l do not understand how such a great Prince and wise man as you are has not come to the conclusion, in your mind, that these idols of yours are not gods, but evil things that are called devils, and so that you may know it and all your priests may see it clearly, do me the favour to approve of my placing a cross here on the top of this lower, and that in one part of these oratories where your Huichilobos and Tezcatepuca stand we may divide off a space where we can set up an image of Our lady (an image which Montezuma had already seen) and you will see by the fear in which these Idols hold it that they are deceiving you.” Montezuma replied half angrily, (and the two priests who were with him showed great annoyance,) and said: “Señor Malinche, if I had known that you would have said such defamatory things I would not have shown you my gods, we consider them to be very good, for they give us health and rains and good seed times and seasons and as many victories as we desire, and we are obliged to worship them and make sacrifices, and I pray you not to say another word to their dishonour.”
@Lucid,
In reading your excerpt I see confirmed what was my first thought -- that in the tropical heat of what was to be the modern Mexico City, the result of such a gore-fest was a horrible stench of decomposition.
One wonders how the Aztecs, Popoloca, etc themselves could stomach it.
@buwaya,
Good to see you back again, BP!
The mechanics, social and otherwise, of this power, is poorly understood. This is not a popular academic subject, to say the least
True dat, but the answer, while politically incorrect, is in outline fairly obvious: the foreign invaders were no worse, & in many cases, better & kinder rulers than the native regimes they replaced. Not always true, of course (e.g. the Belgian Congo!).
Think of the British Ray replacing the decaying Moghul Empire. The Moghuls were not at that time engaged in any systematic brutality upon the majority Hindu population, but the Muslim Moghuls certainly didn't hide the fact that the Hindu faith was the worst sort of idolatry possible & that if they wished to advance, conversion was necessary.
Life for the average Hindu probably improved under the British Raj, whose, by that time, gentle Anglicanism saw both Hindu & Muslim as pagans in need of Christ's ministrations.
"Think of the British Ray replacing the decaying Moghul Empire."
An excellent example. But the Hindu issue there does not seem very relevant, or at least not its main mechanism.
Consider the Battle of Plassey as an example. Clive induced a purely Muslim-Mogul feudatory system to fracture through his political maneuvers, such that on the field of battle the enormous army of the Nawab of Bengal avoided battle or turned on itself. Critical players came to see Clive, and the British, as better options, as overlords, than their legitimate rulers.
In the annals of history, the Aztecs rank pretty high up on the "evil society which needed destruction" list. The Nazis were evil, yes, but it's probably highly likely the Aztecs were worse... it wasn't Nazi policy as a general rule to kill and eat people.
Japanese Kamikazi society needed to be removed. The Aztecs, and various Islamic Caliphates also were pretty evil. Who knows what lurked in Africa, and the stories out of Central Asia are pretty horrifying too.
Good Thing Christianity came along to end human sacrifice across the world, for the most part.
Now, of course, the left wants to go back to the "good old days"
--Vance
Its also interesting to consider that nearly all of these conquests were accomplished on a shoestring, by what should seem an absurdly small number of men. And these men were usually gangs of poorly funded desperados, outcasts, second sons, exiles, adventurers by circumstance not choice. They usually had no official backing, or if they did it was only marginal and grudgingly allocated. Often these conquests happened without the knowledge and against the policy of the imperial officials.
The various imperial courts were generally happy to collect the fruits of the conquests, later, but the conquistadors themselves were generally not given much credit.
Kipling puts it very well of course. His Danny Dravot and Peachy Carnahan were just the sorts that did the conquering, and they knew it.
@Buwaya
Victor Davis Hanson, Ian Hogg, and several military historians have been on record as saying - acceding to a specific occurrence related to your point - that Pizarro's conquest of Peru is quite possibly the most amazing military victory of all time, in addition to possibly also being the most unlikely (long odds) event that has ever occurred.
Specifically the Battle of Cajamarca, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cajamarca
I recall reading somewhere that Pizarro and his men and his indian allies were outnumbered somewhere around 10,000:1. They really didn't even have guns (4 cannon and 6 harquebusiers)...it was mostly just melee weapons. Pizarro had the blessing of the King, but received no funding. His expedition was largely self-financed in addition to funds from direct deputies. His men were the lowest of the low, mostly criminals and exiles.
People just don't appreciate how amazing a blip that 60 years was between 1492 and 1552.
Nothing like it politically and militarily is likely to ever occur again, short of mankind's civilizational expansion exo-terra. I have always enjoyed reading about it.
"Nothing like it politically and militarily is likely to ever occur again"
It almost did, recently - Mosul, 2014
Less than 1000 ISIS fighters took over territories with a population of over 5 million, against odds of 20-30:1
And then they slaughtered thousands of the captured Iraqi soldiers like sheep.
The moral is to the material, etc., as per Napoleon's maxim.
Note also that it took odds of at least 5:1, if not more, in a campaign of a year or more, to take Mosul back from ISIS.
documenting the grievances and the ongoing troubles of the defeated, not the most useful mechanics of the conquest
Then and now, both measures are complementary, and insidious.
At least they weren't racist.
hey buwaya, welcome back, yes by comparison, the small cohort of soldiers, in Mogadishu in 93, wracked perhaps 100/1 casualty ratio,
I second @FullMoon's recommendation of Gary Jenning's "Aztec". I don't want to be a spoiler, but the skin suit bit is included.
I recently did some research on the Aztec Empire. The problem with Aztec history is much of the native record is lost and the history we do have is what we can put together from the Spanish accounts and the oral history provided by the surviving natives. There is also the matter that one of the Mexica rulers had the historical records destroyed, apparently as a sort of starting over: eliminate any histories that would conflict with the new official history.
To illustrate all this, there was nothing called "The Aztec Empire" before the Spanish arrived. What exactly they would have referred to the empire in central Mexico is not entirely clear, but it definitely was not called that. The problem was the empire was formed out of a Triple Alliance of three city states, each city with a different primary tribe represented. All three tribes were part of a larger identity of the Aztecs, which means all three tribes claimed to originate from a possibly mythical place called Aztlan. For historians that wanted to call it something quick and easy this worked well enough. For the record, by the time the Spanish showed up the Triple Alliance had become Tenochtitlan and those other two cities that we still pretend are important. Tenochtitlan was the home of the Mexica so the empire could be the Mexican Empire, but that was already taken.
Anyway, to the point, according to the history we do have, the early Mexica settlers in central Mexico became mercenaries for the city-state of Culhuacan. The Mexica asked Culhuacan to send someone to rule over them, which was granted in the person of a princess. In keeping with Xipe Totec, they had the princess killed and flayed, followed by one of the priests wearing her skin like a Halloween costume. (Apparently, this was supposed to elevate her to a god.) The ruler of Culhuacan first learned about this at the celebration. He was not happy....
the british ease in conquering Egypt and subjugating the likes of the sudan, is chalked up to the maxim machine gun, like the cannon with the conquistadors, but I would doubt that would be the lead factor,
I wonder why the Vikings who settled Greenland got their asses kicked by the Amerindians they ran into in (probably) Newfoundland. I mean the Vikings who were such tough guys that all of England and coastal Europe peeed their pants when the Viking raiders came around. And in Canada the Vikings had steel (or at least iron) weapons against stone age natives. Why didn't the Vikings do what the Spaniards did half a millenium later in Mexico and Peru?
The Vikings didn't have guns, horses, or cannons.
They were just a bunch of Scandinavians with swords and a bad attitude.
Plus, there was disease and weren't very many of them.
People forget the Pilgrims almost got wiped out by disease and starvation and it was only by the Indians helping they survived the first winter. Maybe, the Vikings didn't find any helpful Indians.
To me the great mystery is why Greenland was called "Greenland"
Were the Vikings known for sarcasm?
Apocalypto (2006)
I LOVE this movie because it is filled with IMAGINATION. The whole thing is done in subtitles, and is interesting from start to finish. If Hollywood didn't hate Mel Gibson, it would've been nominated for "Best Director".
The silliest criticism of the movie is that it shows the Catholic Church as the savior at the end. It doesn't. Our small village heroes, after escaping from the horrible "big city" Aztecs, see the Spanish ship and go "Here, we go again..lets go back into the jungle". IOW, another big "Civilization" is coming to oppress them.
Its a marvelous ending.
History continually repeats itself.
True to form, when politicians and high priests say they “have skin in the game,” it’s usually somebody else’s.
First things first:
YoungHegelian said...
@buwaya,
Good to see you back again, BP!
"o
Long time no post. Missed you. And Doc K out there too, welcome back.
"Good to see you back again, BP!
Long time no post. Missed you. And Doc K out there too, welcome back."
Hear Hear!
I scanned this post and thought, at first, that they found the temple of Pink Floyd, Dyslexic?.
In my experience, in Mexico, Puebla is the most effective and civilized place in the country, less is bad there than in the rest of the place, and with the best food. Almost French in orientation, but they would deny it, (Cinco de Mayo is a uniquely Puebla thing). There is a large Arab population in Puebla.
In the US today politicians are involved in gladiatorial combat and the republicans are later flayed... by the Press/Priests, who use the skin for Pulitzer prize parchment.
The name "Greenland" was a dishonest sales pitch by Eric the Red. Eric had found a couple of places on the island that were reasonably habitable but he needed lots of settlers to make this work. "Freezetodeathland" was not exactly going to bring the crowds.
As for Vinland, the problem with the settlement was always going to be that it was hard to externally supply. Greenland's population at its height was probably in the two thousand range and Iceland was not a whole lot larger. (Iceland's population in the early 19th century was around 70,000.) Vinland was going to need to be mostly self-sufficient to succeed and apparently it was not worth the effort. There simply was not enough cool stuff to force it to work.
I'll add here that one of the reasons Cortes was able to defeat the "Aztecs" (really, "Mexicas") is the Mexicas had spent the past century going to great efforts to alienate everyone around them, both to their profit and to their gods' steady supply of human sacrifices. By the end, even Texcoco, which was one of the three cities in the Triple Alliance, had defected. If the Spanish allies knew what was to come they may have reconsidered their positions, but perhaps only to use the Spanish to overthrow the Mexica and then murder the Spanish.
the british ease in conquering Egypt and subjugating the likes of the sudan, is chalked up to the maxim machine gun, like the cannon with the conquistadors, but I would doubt that would be the lead factor,
I never shall forget the way
That Blood upon this awful day
Preserved us all from death.
He stood upon a little mound,
Cast his lethargic eyes around,
And said beneath his breath:
"Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not."
-- Hilaire Belloc, "The Modern Traveller"
The British took Egypt with a large modern army (modern as of 1882 anyway), this army won in a fair fight against a similarly modern Egyptian army. Even the numbers were even.
Look up the battle of Tel El Kebir, 1882.
There was nothing to distinguish the armies in terms of technology. The Egyptians had current-tech Remington rifles and Krupp breechloading field guns, against British Martinis and muzzle-loading rifled field artillery. Both sides had Gatlings, Gardners and other early machine guns, but do not seem to have used them in these operations.
The Egyptian Army was not only well armed, but even in 1882 it was already long established as a European-style institution. Its organization, training and doctrine were current. It also had combat experience against European opponents, having supplied an expeditionary force to aid the Turks against the Russians in 1877, which apparently performed creditably.
The differences between the two sides were entirely in the human factors, leadership and morale.
If the Indians in Vinland had had gold, things would have turned out differently with the Vikings.
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