Mexican religion is basically the closest thing we will ever get to Warhammer 40k in real life. How many pulques spiked with psychedelic mushrooms did it take the Olmecs to come up with this nightmare religion. Worse than the Phoenicians
Warhammer hasn’t got shit on how grimdark reality is
>>18581639>Worse than the PhoeniciansRomans did the same things, arguably even worse at the time.
>>18581670bloodsport and crucifixion is not the same as ritualized human sacrifice though
>>18581670>>18581686Yeah I don’t think the Romans ate people all that often either
>>18581639>Mexican religion [...] [SIC]YOU MEAN: «THE MEXICA PAGANICAL CULT».
>>18581686The romans had several forms of execution with ritualistic and religious undertones that were objectively human sacrifice, even if they themselves tried to reason otherwise.And is it really? Most mesoamerican human sacrifice was also effectively just a flashy way of executing enemy captives. How does doing it for a spiritual reason make it magically worse?
>>18581708If your religion and gods are so motivated by bloodthirsty cruelty then it means that such behavior is sanctified and desirous. We fall short of our religious motivations to be good and merciful. They fell short of their religious motivations to slaughter and kill on behalf of god. Sacrifice elsewhere appears more as a moment of severity or seriousness with the quality forbidding quantity. Aztecs viewed it as quantity and quality and with an almost industrial focus.The problem is ultimately the Aztecs did not do what everyone else did which is mature out of human sacrifice. They did the opposite and doubled down on it. Even their own story about a chieftain giving his daughter to them for marriage and finding her flayed points out how fucked their policy was relative to others in the area.
>>18581726You haven't read a word about the topic, have you?
>>18581731not him but are you the spamming mesoweirdo
>>18581726>If your religion and gods are so motivated by bloodthirsty cruelty then it means that such behavior is sanctified and desirousThe Mesoamerican view on why human sacrifice was necessary had less to do with the gods being cruel and more to do with a belief that humanity had a duty giving back to the universe what it had provided to them, thus doing their end of a holy bargain of sorts.And i disagree with your latter point. If you read the accounts of what their daily lives were like, you'd see that they really weren't all that much different from most other large scale militaristic societies at all. They weren't really berserking khornates constantly murdering flaying each other or anything like that, they were just people.>Aztecs viewed it as quantity and quality and with an almost industrial focus.The way sacrifice manifested itself in the Aztec Empire was more than anything a result of their imperialistic ambitions and the way their military worked rather than the other way around; capturing captives for sacrifice became prestigious and was a ticket with which a soldier could go up in life and militarily. The idea that the Aztec state had the unique authority of ordering the universe better than everybody else justified expansion in moral and religious terms everybody around them understood well. And finally, the sheer quantity of sacrifices (which wasn't quite as large as you probably think) was indeed an effective form of intimidation.What I'm trying to get at is, there was actually a fairly valid material background behind the intensification of sacrifice among the Aztecs, it wasn't a matter of them just being crazed fanatics who decided built an empire because they wanted to sacrifice a lot of people really really badly...
>>18581639Quetzalcoatl wanted them to sacrifice birds, butterflies, and flowers; instead of people. He gave them their architecture, science, astronomy, corn, and everything they hold dear. Then Quetzalcoatl vanished across the sea and Tezcatlipoca brought an era of darkness, war, and human sacrifice. They all eagerly awaited Quetzalcoatl's return to usher in another peaceful utopia.The tragic irony is they thought Hernan Cortez was Quetzalcoatl. They gleefully celebrated Quetzalcoatl's return and got massacred for it.
...continuing>>18581726>>18581751>Even their own story about a chieftain giving his daughter to them for marriage and finding her flayed points out how fucked their policy was relative to others in the area.Everybody in the area shared the same general worldview as the Aztecs. The thing that made Aztec sacrifice unique was the scale, and i doubt the average Mesoamerican king particularly cared if more soldiers than usual were getting sacrificed.Also the point of the marriage story isn't really to say "everybody hated us because of our disgusting practices", since again, everyone in the region practiced human sacrifice and what was effectively one single religion, rather it was to signal a point in their history when they felt they were ready to become independent; they flayed the princess in question because they wanted to declare war against the state they were dealing with, not because of some silly culture shock where they naïvely believed brides should be flayed alive. You also shouldn't exactly take these stories too literally in the first place since they were written down in early colonial times, when the ruling families of different city-states were giving contradicting accounts of their pre-columbian while already under the influence of Christianity AND after deliberate rewritings of history that the Aztecs themselves claimed took place even before the conquest.Also, the mods should really consider increasing the character limit on this board at least a little bit, to at least 3000 like /lit/.
>>18581639the codices really do look like something youd expect from some edgelord >blood drenched shroom addicts in half-rotted fursuits forcibly dosing women and kids with datura before slowly torturing them to death in chambers designed to amplify screams >make towers of moldering bones secured with bloodsoaked sticks>skull totems are painted to look like theyre still fleshy with eyes included >animals fed the meat of sacrificed captives alternate between blind rage and insensate stupors The more you read the more understandable it is that Tlaxcalla never turned on Spain
>>18581757Not at all. There is no evidence whatsoever that the pre-columbian cult of the feathered serpent or the deity it was associated with ever included an aversion to human sacrifice. Indeed, the earliest definitive version of the deity at Teotihuacan was associated with war and several human sacrificial remains were found inside its very distinctive temple. The idea that Quetzalcoatl the deity abhorred human sacrifice is likely largely colonial or late postclassic in nature, and even if it was present in pre-columbian times it definitely did not have the same connotations you think it does, since we are quite simply dealing with a culture that very clearly not think human sacrifice was a bad thing.Likewise, they did not believe Hernan Cortes was Quetzalcoatl, nor did they believe Quetzalcoatl's return would usher "another peaceful utopia", since again, they did not think human sacrifice was bad very much the opposite in fact, and i don't think such a thing is even possible within mesoamerican thought.>>18581759The Tlaxcaltecs did all that as well. They were devout Tezcatlipoca worshippers after all, and Cortez even allowed them to continue practicing human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism throughout most of the conquest according to some accounts.
>>18581766Thank you. That's precisely why I posted my History 101 knowledge of Aztecs here. I was wanting a better more knowledgeable take. Was what I said, a misinterpretation of events from the Spanish historians afterwards?
>>18581757>>18581766Oh and also, your claim that Quetzalcoatl "wanted them to sacrifice birds, butterflies, and flowers instead of people" isn't really true either. Quetzalcoatl was the patron of the priesthood and was by extension heavily associated with the practice of "self-sacrifice" by ritual bloodletting, i.e non-lethal human sacrifice, in virtue of the fact he does it himself in the famous five suns myth.
>>18581770It's kinda complicated and hard to explain, but I'll try:You see, "Quetzalcoatl" wasn't really just one thing, it was after all just a word that meant "precious feather serpent". It was of course a deity, but it was also the name of the highest office of the priesthood, a personal name, etc. It was also a legendary and maybe semi-historical king named Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, who, in true Mesoamerican religious fashion, would sometimes "bleed" into the god as an aspect.When the Spanish came around, they wanted to both convert the indians and make sense of their existence within their own worldview, since an entire continent worth of people never mentioned in the Bible is kinda troubling, so they latched onto the figure of Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl and the god Quetzalcoatl he was associated with. They talked about him as if he were St. Thomas, who was the root of all things good about the local civilization and who preached to its people in ancient times, only to have his message distorted by the devil or some such. As time went on, this interpretation got secularized at the hands of northern europeans who turned Quetzalcoatl into an ancient viking or atlantean, etc.As for the opposition to human sacrifice thing, it's hard to tell. Like i said, it was definitely not an original, universal, or even common aspect of the deity Quetzalcoatl, but it might have been a genuinely belief associated with the semi-historical king Quetzalcoatl. If so, the moral of the story might actually be the exact opposite from what most people assume: The Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl story was perhaps actually meant to show that daring to stop practicing human sacrifice will just piss off the gods like Tezcatlipoca (a very popular and important god) and make them destroy you and your kingdom. In other words, it was actually meant to show that human sacrifice was a good thing.
>Human sacrifice is baaaad>continue to sacrifice 1.2 million people every year to the gods of Velocity and Speed. We are no better.
>>18581639If the Aztecs were still around and immigrated to the US, would they be allowed to do human sacrifices? I mean, the Constitution guarantees Freedom of Religion and all that shit…
>>18581686Your priest-administrators set up ritualized human and animal sacrifices during high religious holidays? How barbaric.
>>18581799The sacrifices would have to be performed by elected judges and sheriffs and/or police officers, one would assume.
>>18581799given that white southerners were allowed to practise ritualized human sacrifise of black Americans in Jim Crow south, I can see the precedent
>>18581639Are we supposed to belive mexians only 500 years removed from this are a civilized people
>>18582003Yes? It’s not like they’d worship spooky skeletal death gods anymore.
>>18582003mexicans are less civilized today then they were back then. back then they obeyed the law and their lord now theres no such thing as rule of law in mexico
>>18581748No. He is just showing a very poor understanding of the topic. Like sub 1930s pulp fiction. Like they vaguely absorbed 1/8th of Frazer's view of Meso-American human sacrifice through osmosis, then watched apocalypto, and that was it.
>>18581706>Implying paganism is wrong
>>18582343Don't respond to tripfags
>>18581799Human sacrifice got progressively more organized and ritualized as time went on in Mesoamerica. I'd imagine the modern day version of the practice would basically just be them applying ritualistic practices to capital punishment. A lot of places do actually let people choose special religious execution methods in America, that's why firing squad executions are on the rise, it's the growing Mormon population that's asking for it. I feel like it would be normalized enough that "let my country send me some death priest guy to give me drugs and stick me with a fancy knife" wouldn't be too unreasonable a request.>>18582072I also agree with this. By all accounts day to day life in Aztec cities was actually extremely pleasant, they had next to no crime, good food security, public schools, public sanitation workers, government work programs, and their leaders were culturally and politically pressured to pamper them, so they were constantly getting festivals and gifts. the crime especially is noteworthy here, Spanish chroniclers were shocked at how safe and clean everything was. They were only really cruel towards criminals and enemy citizens. While that's still pretty bad, I can confidently say that if modern Mexico was fighting their neighbors they'd be committing horrible war crimes as well.
>>18582164>Frazer>Frazer believed that magic and science were similar because both shared an emphasis on experimentation and practicality; [...] In contrast to both magic and science, Frazer defined religion in terms of belief in personal, supernatural forces and attempts to appease them.Either Wikipedia completely miss-represents his position or he only took maybe one minute of his lifetime to actually study magic.
>>18582385It's par for the course with 19th century founder figures like this.>>18582378In fairness I think the brutality of Mexicans is a little over-stated, considering the country has been in an artificial state of never-ending warfare between factions of organized crime for several decades and terror tactics transcend cultural barriers.
>>18581784The whole white quetzalcoatl myth is basically europeans desperately trying to make sense of a small scale existential crisis caused by utter bewilderment at how a society could simultaneously be so relatively advanced while doing things that so utterly contradict their definition of what civilization is, by literally self-inserting into the indigenous mythological figure they think gets the closest to having european values (even though he didn't when you look closely)
>>18581686>Highly ritualised funerary gamesJust because they decoupled from the "religious" element doesn't make them not "human sacrifice", maybe worse, though I do ultimately agree that the Phoenicians etc were worse (if the attestations are taken as true)
>>18581686human sacrifice is fucking badass and you know itwe should straight up bring it back, I'm sick of you pearl clutching faggots in this secular age
>>18581639Judaism is worse.
>>18582579I'm pretty sure it was at least partially a psy-op to get the natives to become Christian faster.
>>18582585That too early on of course, but there's a reason it got secularized and integrated into 19th and 20th century race science shit instead of remaining some obscure missionary strategy
>>18581757This is a colonial folk story. There's no precolumbian myth of a benevolent "King Quetzalcoatl" opposing sacrifice.
>>18581757Also, the concept of the Aztecs thinking Cortez was a god is also colonial propaganda trying to idolize Cortez. In fact, early native sources collected by the spanish themselves depict the aztecs and other rival natives as just thinking the spanish were weird dangerous foreigners with supernatural weapons who could become useful allies if bribed and treated well enough.
>>18581639This is what I call woke right, where a certain subsect of the "right wing", in an attempt to cleanse their own guilt, unintentionally and unknowingly exhaults the primitive cultures some special attribute of "badassery", rather than being quaint and pathetic.
>>18582663The white men of the West were also exceedingly brutal, the difference was in the outcomes.
>>18581639They were never Olmecs, the Aztecs were the descendants of a smaller warrior tribe who were driven to exile for asking a Culhuacan princess in marriage for their king, only to skin her alive and have their priest dance wearing her skin in front of the Culhuacan king. They were always a particularly brutal and violent tribe who consolidated power by being more violent than everyone around them.
>>18581706race traitor
>>18582689OP is correct and is clearly talking about mesoamericans in general, not the Aztecs in particular. The Olmecs were indeed the originators of mesoamerican religion and they did practice human sacrifice, as did all their cultural descendants.>They were always a particularly brutal and violent tribe who consolidated power by being more violent than everyone around them.They consolidated power by exploiting the close relationship they had with their tepanec predecessors.
>>18581785topkek
>>18582548mexico already had really high murder rates before the war on drugs of the 70s though (altho im not sure how they compare to america or europe at the time)
>>18581757That's ironic because Cortes did bring peace, prosperity, and new technology
>>18582785He didn't bring either of the first two, thoughie. Technically he brought about mass death.
>>18582584based
>>18581639They did it because they were the short sighted of the global south and did as what you would predict.
You know what you know, but they know how to keep the thing alive, which they were selected like princes for knowing. So they will keep it alive a bit longer while the dumb old men complain. I wish I had never got involved in the world like this but whatever.
When I was a pale skinned child from Europe they made me miserable over their nonsense but whatever. I hated the brown people as I should have.
>>18583537Maybe not as much as I should have, but whatever.
