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Somehow it doesnt feel good for me to try to learn from Aztec philosophy, werent these the guys with the appaling human sacrifices?

h0l0cube 6y ago
I only know as much from the podcast I mentioned in the sibling comment, but it seem they were somewhat caricaturized. If you listen to the Podcast you learn the other side of how they were massacred by Cortes, which doesn't really cast the Spanish in a good light. (But surely we can learn from the Spanish despite the acts of Cortes?) Edit: A cursory wiki search leads to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture#Scope_of_Human_Sacrifice_In_Aztec_Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cultu...
- poisonarena 6y ago
  What does Cortes have to do with their practice of human sacrifice?
  - belval 6y ago
    Nothing, he's simply drawing the parallel that the Spanish did atrocities as well and that did not stop us from learning "from" them. I say we can all appreciate the good without embracing the bad.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  By "massacred by Cortes", surely you mean "Massacred by 700 Spanish people, and 90,000 natives who were really pissed at the Aztecs and wanted revenge". Sources indicate(if you can trust them) that the Spanish tried to stop some of the widespread atrocities that the allied natives were doing to the Aztecs, but were powerless against a group 100x their size.
  - h0l0cube 6y ago
    Supplying the armor and weapons necessary to an army that size, knowing the likely outcome, makes Cortes culpable. And the outcome is exactly what he intended, and enabled. This could be said of any of the proxy wars fought around the world today. But yes, not excusing a brutal tradition of sacrifice. I think my argument stands, though, that you can learn positive things from any population/civilization that has cruel actors (or cruel traditions) within it. Be it the Spaniards, despite the conquistadors, or the Aztecs, because of the warrior elite.
- tyingq 6y ago
  Not excusing any behavior by Cortes. However, the sacrifices seem to have been as gruesome as typically depicted. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/feeding-gods-hundreds-skulls-reveal-massive-scale-human-sacrifice-aztec-capital https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/feeding-gods-hundred...
s5300 6y ago
Ehh, not even trying to be snarky - the US was basically sacrificing children during the industrial revolution, purely in the name of profit. AFAIK, the aztecs at least thought they were appeasing all powerful gods when doing it. Don't think the same could be said of us...
- rtkaratekid 6y ago
  You could probably argue that the US children were also sacrificed to gods... they just happened to be represented by money rather than some metaphysical beliefs.
- yesenadam 6y ago
  > the US was basically sacrificing children during the industrial revolution Well, and more recently...for example, just a few years ago on a huge scale in Iraq. (Not to mention ongoing birth defects)
- tathougies 6y ago
  This kind of moral equivocation is why our society is so divided.
watwut 6y ago
Were they worst then Ancient Greecks, Romans, Sparta, whatever church done in European history, genocide of native Americans called for by American founding fathers? Human sacrifice was a real thing and Aztecs were cruel toward those they dominated. So were those above mentioned - and many colorful reports of human sacrifice are result of torture and paranoid imagination. Some dominant groups are more appaling then others - nazi and Stalin come to mind. But we are not throwing away everything German or Russian either. Nor we are throwing away everything Sparta despite them being literally violent totalitarian state.
- andi999 6y ago
  Good question, but to counter: we do not throw away everything German, but everything in the Nazi ideology, dont we? It is not that I say we shouldnt learn from the successors of the culture, but isnt this post saying we should learn from that culture itself? To me (bringing back in the German example) it sounds like (trying to transfer the example) 'learn how to get organized with nazi ideology'. Adressing your first point, I really think that human (including children) sacrifice is quite unique and not present in the cultures you mentioned.
  - watwut 6y ago
    > we do not throw away everything German, but everything in the Nazi ideology, dont we? No, we did not. To large extend, people don't even know what Nazi ideology and goals actually were except that they killed most Jews. But first here, you would have to show they were overall like Nazi. > Adressing your first point, I really think that human (including children) sacrifice is quite unique and not present in the cultures you mentioned. Soldiers working for colonial Britain would cut kids hands if parents did not worked fast enough. Columbus did cut peoples hands too, I think that including children hands if locals did not produced as much as he wanted. He also took kids as sexual slaves for his men. Cortes behavior was not normal either. Hunting witches and torturing old people assumed is not generally normal either. American slavery routinely involved kids being sold away from parents before age of 10 .. and quite a lot of them died. None of it is exactly same as human sacrifice, but not much better either.
0_____0 6y ago
Not sure where I came across this info but there's a theory that observations of sacrifices may have been at a time of great despair for Aztec society, sacrifice being an act of desperation.
- h0l0cube 6y ago
  Yeah, I vaguely recollected (again that podcast I linked) while their civilization was under siege by Cortes, they wondered why the gods had forsaken them. The whole thing is really tragic. Edit: The wiki article states around 20k prisoners per year were captured for sacrifice, though perhaps the number might have been inflated to intimidate their enemies. > Every Aztec warrior would have to provide at least one prisoner for sacrifice. All the male population was trained to be warriors, but only the few who succeeded in providing captives could become full-time members of the warrior elite. Accounts also state that several young warriors could unite to capture a single prisoner, which suggests that capturing prisoners for sacrifice was challenging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture#Scope_of_Human_Sacrifice_In_Aztec_Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cultu...
  - engineer_22 6y ago
    > which suggests that capturing prisoners for sacrifice was challenging Who knew... mortal combat was challenging?
    - throwawayay02 6y ago
      The prisoner did not have to be a warrior or adult.
      - hutzlibu 6y ago
        I don't know exactly of the aztecs, but in general the harder to get the sacrifice, the bigger the gods favour. So they probably wanted the biggest warriors, but took children as well, if possible.
edmundsauto 6y ago
In 1491, Charles Mann makes the case that the number of ritual sacrifices was far fewer than the number of public executions in European countries during these times. In both cases, people were killed in an effort to bind the citizenry together in the shared belief in the leadership. The initial horror at the Aztec using innocents is tempered when you think about the crimes that many in Europe would likely have committed. I think medieval European justice is probably not much better.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  >In both cases, people were killed in an effort to bind the citizenry together in the shared belief in the leadership. Are you suggesting that it doesn't make a difference whether you're executing people for crimes or for fun? Yes, the medieval European justice system was far from perfect, yes, it was so imperfect that people now call things "medieval" when they're cruel and stupid, but surely there is something to be said for the fact that the people being executed in Europe had sometimes done something wrong to get there.
  - pavlov 6y ago
    Thomas More, author of "Utopia", had six people burned at the stake for heresy when he was Lord Chancellor of England in 1529-32. That's no different from human sacrifice to a god.
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      It's difficult to weigh the difference between two extreme bads, so I understand how you could come to that conclusion. However "don't say anything on this list of things not to say" is an order that could at least by choice be complied with. Imagine yourself in Europe and also in Central America. Would you rather live under the fear of heresy laws or under the fear of human sacrifice? In the former case you could choose between complying with the unjust ruler or standing up to them, in the latter, you just die.
      - 6y ago
jcranmer 6y ago
It's not quite so black-and-white. Most of our historical sources are people who definitely want to play up the human sacrifice aspect. The Europeans would do so in order to justify the genocide they would commit; the Aztecs themselves to demonstrate their legitimacy to power. So the extent to which Aztecs did human sacrifice is probably exaggerated, although most historians would agree that Aztecs were the most prolific practitioners we know of nonetheless. A more important thing to consider is the actual context of sacrifice in Aztec religion. Their mythology held that the gods literally sacrificed themselves to bring the (current) world into existence, and they recreated these sacrifices both as a means of honoring their gods as well as ensuring the continuation of the effects of that sacrifice. This isn't actually all that far off from Christianity, which recreates the sacrifice of Jesus in the form of the Eucharist, which can (and historically was!) be seen as a form of human sacrifice. Indeed, in broader theological terms, Aztecs need to undergo personal sacrifice of their own flesh and blood, while Christians make do with merely sacrificing personal possessions or (more commonly) abstract desires.
- merpnderp 6y ago
  The Aztecs had made so many enemies from slavery and sacrificing children in their rise to power, the Spanish had a broad choice of allies. Even if the Aztecs had instead sacrificed those 20k warriors on Spanish swords instead of the priest's knives, they still would have lost.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
drummer 6y ago
History is written by the victors. It would be in their interests to demonize the Aztecs as much as possible. Stories about sacrifices should be taken with a grain of salt unless there is hard evidence. Even if there were sacrifices, it would be good to find the exact reasons and circumstances for why that occured.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  > Stories about sacrifices should be taken with a grain of salt unless there is hard evidence Such hard evidence has been found, in the form of human remains mutilated in the manner described by contemporary sources.

h0l0cube 6y ago

I only know as much from the podcast I mentioned in the sibling comment, but it seem they were somewhat caricaturized. If you listen to the Podcast you learn the other side of how they were massacred by Cortes, which doesn't really cast the Spanish in a good light. (But surely we can learn from the Spanish despite the acts of Cortes?) Edit: A cursory wiki search leads to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture#Scope_of_Human_Sacrifice_In_Aztec_Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cultu...

poisonarena 6y ago
What does Cortes have to do with their practice of human sacrifice?
- belval 6y ago
  Nothing, he's simply drawing the parallel that the Spanish did atrocities as well and that did not stop us from learning "from" them. I say we can all appreciate the good without embracing the bad.
oh_sigh 6y ago
By "massacred by Cortes", surely you mean "Massacred by 700 Spanish people, and 90,000 natives who were really pissed at the Aztecs and wanted revenge". Sources indicate(if you can trust them) that the Spanish tried to stop some of the widespread atrocities that the allied natives were doing to the Aztecs, but were powerless against a group 100x their size.
- h0l0cube 6y ago
  Supplying the armor and weapons necessary to an army that size, knowing the likely outcome, makes Cortes culpable. And the outcome is exactly what he intended, and enabled. This could be said of any of the proxy wars fought around the world today. But yes, not excusing a brutal tradition of sacrifice. I think my argument stands, though, that you can learn positive things from any population/civilization that has cruel actors (or cruel traditions) within it. Be it the Spaniards, despite the conquistadors, or the Aztecs, because of the warrior elite.
tyingq 6y ago
Not excusing any behavior by Cortes. However, the sacrifices seem to have been as gruesome as typically depicted. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/feeding-gods-hundreds-skulls-reveal-massive-scale-human-sacrifice-aztec-capital https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/feeding-gods-hundred...

s5300 6y ago

Ehh, not even trying to be snarky - the US was basically sacrificing children during the industrial revolution, purely in the name of profit. AFAIK, the aztecs at least thought they were appeasing all powerful gods when doing it. Don't think the same could be said of us...

rtkaratekid 6y ago
You could probably argue that the US children were also sacrificed to gods... they just happened to be represented by money rather than some metaphysical beliefs.
yesenadam 6y ago
> the US was basically sacrificing children during the industrial revolution Well, and more recently...for example, just a few years ago on a huge scale in Iraq. (Not to mention ongoing birth defects)
tathougies 6y ago
This kind of moral equivocation is why our society is so divided.

watwut 6y ago

Were they worst then Ancient Greecks, Romans, Sparta, whatever church done in European history, genocide of native Americans called for by American founding fathers? Human sacrifice was a real thing and Aztecs were cruel toward those they dominated. So were those above mentioned - and many colorful reports of human sacrifice are result of torture and paranoid imagination. Some dominant groups are more appaling then others - nazi and Stalin come to mind. But we are not throwing away everything German or Russian either. Nor we are throwing away everything Sparta despite them being literally violent totalitarian state.

andi999 6y ago
Good question, but to counter: we do not throw away everything German, but everything in the Nazi ideology, dont we? It is not that I say we shouldnt learn from the successors of the culture, but isnt this post saying we should learn from that culture itself? To me (bringing back in the German example) it sounds like (trying to transfer the example) 'learn how to get organized with nazi ideology'. Adressing your first point, I really think that human (including children) sacrifice is quite unique and not present in the cultures you mentioned.
- watwut 6y ago
  > we do not throw away everything German, but everything in the Nazi ideology, dont we? No, we did not. To large extend, people don't even know what Nazi ideology and goals actually were except that they killed most Jews. But first here, you would have to show they were overall like Nazi. > Adressing your first point, I really think that human (including children) sacrifice is quite unique and not present in the cultures you mentioned. Soldiers working for colonial Britain would cut kids hands if parents did not worked fast enough. Columbus did cut peoples hands too, I think that including children hands if locals did not produced as much as he wanted. He also took kids as sexual slaves for his men. Cortes behavior was not normal either. Hunting witches and torturing old people assumed is not generally normal either. American slavery routinely involved kids being sold away from parents before age of 10 .. and quite a lot of them died. None of it is exactly same as human sacrifice, but not much better either.

0_____0 6y ago

Not sure where I came across this info but there's a theory that observations of sacrifices may have been at a time of great despair for Aztec society, sacrifice being an act of desperation.

h0l0cube 6y ago
Yeah, I vaguely recollected (again that podcast I linked) while their civilization was under siege by Cortes, they wondered why the gods had forsaken them. The whole thing is really tragic. Edit: The wiki article states around 20k prisoners per year were captured for sacrifice, though perhaps the number might have been inflated to intimidate their enemies. > Every Aztec warrior would have to provide at least one prisoner for sacrifice. All the male population was trained to be warriors, but only the few who succeeded in providing captives could become full-time members of the warrior elite. Accounts also state that several young warriors could unite to capture a single prisoner, which suggests that capturing prisoners for sacrifice was challenging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture#Scope_of_Human_Sacrifice_In_Aztec_Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cultu...
- engineer_22 6y ago
  > which suggests that capturing prisoners for sacrifice was challenging Who knew... mortal combat was challenging?
  - throwawayay02 6y ago
    The prisoner did not have to be a warrior or adult.
    - hutzlibu 6y ago
      I don't know exactly of the aztecs, but in general the harder to get the sacrifice, the bigger the gods favour. So they probably wanted the biggest warriors, but took children as well, if possible.

edmundsauto 6y ago

In 1491, Charles Mann makes the case that the number of ritual sacrifices was far fewer than the number of public executions in European countries during these times. In both cases, people were killed in an effort to bind the citizenry together in the shared belief in the leadership. The initial horror at the Aztec using innocents is tempered when you think about the crimes that many in Europe would likely have committed. I think medieval European justice is probably not much better.

whatshisface 6y ago
>In both cases, people were killed in an effort to bind the citizenry together in the shared belief in the leadership. Are you suggesting that it doesn't make a difference whether you're executing people for crimes or for fun? Yes, the medieval European justice system was far from perfect, yes, it was so imperfect that people now call things "medieval" when they're cruel and stupid, but surely there is something to be said for the fact that the people being executed in Europe had sometimes done something wrong to get there.
- pavlov 6y ago
  Thomas More, author of "Utopia", had six people burned at the stake for heresy when he was Lord Chancellor of England in 1529-32. That's no different from human sacrifice to a god.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    It's difficult to weigh the difference between two extreme bads, so I understand how you could come to that conclusion. However "don't say anything on this list of things not to say" is an order that could at least by choice be complied with. Imagine yourself in Europe and also in Central America. Would you rather live under the fear of heresy laws or under the fear of human sacrifice? In the former case you could choose between complying with the unjust ruler or standing up to them, in the latter, you just die.
    - 6y ago

jcranmer 6y ago

It's not quite so black-and-white. Most of our historical sources are people who definitely want to play up the human sacrifice aspect. The Europeans would do so in order to justify the genocide they would commit; the Aztecs themselves to demonstrate their legitimacy to power. So the extent to which Aztecs did human sacrifice is probably exaggerated, although most historians would agree that Aztecs were the most prolific practitioners we know of nonetheless. A more important thing to consider is the actual context of sacrifice in Aztec religion. Their mythology held that the gods literally sacrificed themselves to bring the (current) world into existence, and they recreated these sacrifices both as a means of honoring their gods as well as ensuring the continuation of the effects of that sacrifice. This isn't actually all that far off from Christianity, which recreates the sacrifice of Jesus in the form of the Eucharist, which can (and historically was!) be seen as a form of human sacrifice. Indeed, in broader theological terms, Aztecs need to undergo personal sacrifice of their own flesh and blood, while Christians make do with merely sacrificing personal possessions or (more commonly) abstract desires.

merpnderp 6y ago
The Aztecs had made so many enemies from slavery and sacrificing children in their rise to power, the Spanish had a broad choice of allies. Even if the Aztecs had instead sacrificed those 20k warriors on Spanish swords instead of the priest's knives, they still would have lost.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

drummer 6y ago

History is written by the victors. It would be in their interests to demonize the Aztecs as much as possible. Stories about sacrifices should be taken with a grain of salt unless there is hard evidence. Even if there were sacrifices, it would be good to find the exact reasons and circumstances for why that occured.

bigbubba 6y ago
> Stories about sacrifices should be taken with a grain of salt unless there is hard evidence Such hard evidence has been found, in the form of human remains mutilated in the manner described by contemporary sources.