The Smoking Mirror is the supreme inversion and strife of the human experience that can never be escaped, can never be pulled from the chest with an obsidian knife and offered away in sacrifice. The black and fragmented reflection of our every action- how life begets death and death begets life, how kings must have slaves, how sun must descend into night, how the illusion of safety and order of civilization must be secured through the brutality and chaos of violence against the other in war and violence against kin in hierarchy. He is the Jaguar God, and that animal's name was never spoken in the woods by the Mexica, who feared it invited the attention of the predator when in its home - he is who hunts and tears apart hunters. The Mexica called him "He To Whom We Are Slaves". I'm hugely moved by podcaster Darryl Cooper's take on the prevalence of sacrifice and cannibalism in Mexica culture, which (in a summary doing his work little true justice for its brevity) he characterizes as a ritual cultural acknowledgement of the violence inherent to all organic life. "The Martyr Made" is a fantastic contribution to the amazing conversations about our species' history and culture that you can find in this crazy new genre of the podcast, and I absolutely cannot recommend it enough.
Man, I am so glad the Spaniards exterminated the Aztecs.
James Fisher
Man I fucking love aztec mythology so much. I've been working on a setting where I kind of loosely mash up Tezcatlipoca and the concept of Naguals with Borges' Fauna of Mirrors and it's been a blast.
After all, if some call the Fish of the Mirror a Tiger, could they not also call it a Jaguar?
Evan Sullivan
Would all Aztec magic be... considered evil blood sorcery?
Connor Price
Cooper makes the argument that the utterly basal and primal need of all animal life to consume is experienced first in humans by the Freudian oral complex, and is sublimated in increasingly abstracted means of oral violence - first in ritual cannibalism, and that cannibalism becoming increasingly abstractualized - in one form the urge being sublimated in the highly abstractualized yet still near-literal cannibalism of the Eucharist.
Cooper argues that rather than redirecting this urge through symbolic sublimation, the Mexica leaned in - that their cannibalism and sacrifice was an acknowledgment of the basic struggle of consumption that is the existence of all animal life.
Or, rather, this is what the grand idiot I am pieces together in a couple sentences what I, the grand idiot, have picked up from nearly 6 hours of verbal presentation.
Andrew Price
Smoking Mirror is the baddest shit i love it
Ryan Peterson
I mean, by their standards it's technically good blood sorcery. It's using blood magic to prevent the moon and stars from eating the sun. The sacrifices are to keep Huitzilopotchtli alive as he races eternally from the severed head of his mother Coatlicue the moon and his hundreds of banished siblings the stars, for if he is not kept strong then Coatlicue will slay him and end the world by casting it into infinite night. She's also a primordial earth goddess, but in the Australia sense, not the friendly Mother Nature sense.
Additionally, the guy you posted Xipe Totec is a farming god. You flay people for him so that he can use their skins to make sure that your crops have nice thick husks and shells, so that pestilence can't harm them and you can eat.
Ethan Price
The majority of Mexica ritual behaviour does seem to involve violence in some form or another.
The Mexica conception would not be that the violence is done out of malice (or rather, any sadistic enjoyment would likely be secondary), but of necessity, and in keeping with the self-evident principles up on which their worldview was built.
I struggle with whether I believe cultural values can be truly relative - I don't think I could witness a Mexica ritual involving sacrifice (gory as they were) without feeling as though it was evil. I struggle to decide whether he ideas held by the priest performing the act, the victim, and those surrounding can makethe act anything less than evil.
I'm in a lecture right now and also phoneposting, but a lot of factors weigh heavily on my mind in either side of the cultural relativity argument. I think I tend to take a soft view of the Aztecs because I like them so much - I'm less generous to groups that I'm less enthusiastic about - generally I shittalk Muslims for their barbarity, but learning about the Mexica recently has been fascinating - cannibalism and human sacrifice is a subject that's fascinated me since I was a kid.
Henry Watson
I've also seen agricultural rituals involving sacrifice in Aztec cultures being drawn in connection to the near universal Persephone archetype - an agricultural divine figure descends into a death state, explaining the non-growing season, whose return from death-state symbolizes the returning of the growing season. The agricultural deity I heard referenced was female, and associated with maize. Do you recall her name? In the Aztec ritual, young girl meant to symbolize her was beheaded and flayed, and her skin worn by the priest. The raising of corn stalks from her place of sacrifice was involved.
Wyatt Nelson
Probably Chicomecoatl, though she's more of the female equivalent of Centeotl and are considered gods of Agriculture and Subsistence respectively, so it might have just been a female-equivalent variation of Xipe Totec, since his origins are pretty foggy and unknown. In either way, Xipe Totec is definitely the god who deals in life-death-rebirth agriculture. As the myth goes, he flayed himself to give crops to humanity like how a maize seeds lose their outer layer pre-germination.
I think it felt less like good act in a way and more like a necessary one. With how fatalistic aztec myth and culture is, sacrifices might have been celebrated but their entirely mythological background is one of grim and terrible desire to keep the world alive. Each of the gods needed sacrifices to use their powers and without them their gifts would cease to exist in the world. I like to think that many of these sacrifices were solemn affairs to the priest caste and likely much of the population.
Also what evidence is there for the victim selection process being manipulated?
Chase Rogers
That honestly I think heavily depended on the nature of the particular sacrifice. A lot of the time sacrifices were culled from captured prisoners, which is why aztec field promotions worked the way they did. Killing or capturing three people would net you a promotion to field command no matter your background, though only nobles or priests could make it farther. Depending on the particular sacrifice, the victim could be anything from calmly resigned to terrified and agonized, to drunk and oversexed like in the festival of Xochipilli.
As for manipulation, it probably happened but we don't have enough records to know exactly how far it went or if it worked.
Gabriel Cruz
Aztec armor looks really comfy.
Daniel Walker
It really does, looks like fighting in footie pajamas.
Charles Morales
I look at that last warrior on the right and all I can think of is that it looks really costume-y.
Ethan Wood
That hat/parasoll thing is kinda awesome
Ian Murphy
...
Benjamin Rodriguez
>aztec thread Good shit. I'll hit up that podcast.
Robert Nguyen
That's half the reason you want to become a captain. Not only is it a mere three bodies/captures away, but you get a sick giant hat that keeps the sun out your face.
Ryder Carter
It's done to complement Danielle Bollelli's History On Fire Podcast series on the Spanish conquest, and you've probably heard of Dan Carlin, but his latest episode of Hardcore history on the experience and perception of public execution and execution by torture is, like any instalment of HH, fucking monumental (something like 5 hours?), but also highly relevant.
Dylan Richardson
>speak of the jaguar We don't actually know the finno-ugric root for "Bear", because they used a kenning and called it "Brown" instead. It was just "That brown thing out in the woods that fucks people up".
Separately, I think it was farther east, but there was this whole rigamarole whenever the tribe actually managed to kill a bear- see, if they're threatening ALIVE, imagine how terrifying they are as a spirit. So whenever they killed a bear, they threw this whole giant funeral with wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth and crying to the heavens about how terrible it was that random mischance and totally not twenty dudes with spears killed this bear, oh, the ursanity, etc. etc. in hopes that the ghost bear would get confused and misremember how it died.
For a lot of human history, "Good" and "Necessary" have been synonyms.
Chase Russell
Ah yeah, that's the Ainu way of appeasing(confusing) the bear spirit.
Similarly in several parts of Indonesia, traditionally you don't say the Tiger out loud. In Java it is referred to as 'Eyang' (lit. grandpa/grandma, elder) or 'Simbah' (same as before), although some parts also call it 'Singa' (lion) or 'Macan' (tiger, but could also refer to leopards).
Daniel Morris
Good thread OP. Any recs for some books on Aztec mythology? Trying to make a jungle hexcrawl and since mythology is often directly inspired by environment figured I'd go to the source.
Leo Young
Aztec myths are hardcore
Ian Reed
How did they make the connection between human sacrifice and the gods derping around?
Kayden Long
>We don't actually know the finno-ugric root for "Bear", because they used a kenning and called it "Brown" instead. That's actually true for pretty much all European languages. "Bear" is derived from old Germanic word for brown. And Latin ursus I think is derived from the word for horrible. The bear-cult is probably the oldest and once most widespread religion in Europe.
And karhunpeijaiset (bear wake) you described was a Finnish tradition. Probably practiced elsewhere as well. Finns also believed the bear was a demigod and an ancestor of humans, and after killing a bear its skull would be placed on top of a tall tree so the bear-spirit would find it and be reborn with a new body.
