The Aztecs

By -
I spent an hour yesterday looking at artifacts from the very, very bloody Aztec empire. How to make sense of their passion for human sacrifice?

It seems to me they were coping with same problem as Anaximander; what the cosmos gives with one hand, it takes away with the other: "The origin of things is the Apeiron [unlimited]... It is necessary for things to perish into that from which they were born; for they pay one another penalty for their injustice according to the ordinance of Time."

I think the Aztec solution to the sense of tragedy this realization produces was to eagerly participate in the process themselves.




Comments

  1. Keshav Srinivasan3:11 PM

    I don't think they were trying to participate in the Universe's destruction of all things. I think the explanation is simpler: they were showing that they were willing to give up that which was dear to them for the sake of something which transcends the material world. And nothing in the material world was more dear to them than their fellow human beings.

    It's similar to how Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia so that the gods would allow his ships to get back home to Greece. He was showing he had such faith in that which he could not see that he was willing to sacrifice everything around him that he could see.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ken B3:50 PM

      Simpler still isn't it? A belief in false gods.

      Delete
  2. Matt2:44 PM

    Tangentially, I spent five minutes on Wikipedia and came across this:

    > The Aztec priests defended themselves as follows:
    > "Life is because of the gods; with their sacrifice they gave us life.... They produce our sustenance... which nourishes life."
    > What the Aztec priests were referring to was a central Mesoamerican belief: that a great, on-going sacrifice sustains the Universe.

    To me, that has some eerie parallels with a certain timeless understanding of Jesus' crucifixion (not extending as far as salvation though).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah11:16 PM

      1) Keshav, see Matt's comment. I am no Aztec expert, but this quote suggests my interpretation is perhaps on target.
      2) Yes, Matt, the cosmic myths of the "cosmological empires" are compact versions of the more differentiated symbolisms of the universal religions.

      Delete
  3. Unknown1:52 PM

    Gene, having finished 'The New Science of Politics', do you have any recommendations for philosophy and/or history of religious thought? I will be buying the Ecumenic Age by Voegelin (along with some secondary literature from contemporary Voegelin scholars like Eugene Webb), but I am interested in hearing any and all books that have given you insight into religions and transcendence.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more