Salvador,
I would never suggest to you that I know more about where you live than you
do, however, just as Chris and Keith propose some disturbing scenarios about
the US with little actual experience here I would say the same about the
Aztecs. Decadent is not a term I would describe for a group so young in
their society.
Huitchilopochtli was an adolescent God not a decadent one. His was the God
of the rage and certainty of the young culture that makes mistakes. All
cultures including America, the Soviet Union and others have done no less.
In fact it is my work as an opera director that has drawn me to these
conclusions. The sheer numbers killed in battles in Europe are
overwhelming for not so large populations. While the human sacrifice in
Tenochtitlan was one a day per temple. The Europeans proposed that there
were festivals where ten thousand captives were slaughtered. Just think
about that. Blood is slippery. Those steps are narrow and high. How
many priests would it take killing one person at a time taking out their
beating heart and doing the ritual to accomplish ten thousand? That is
romance and stupid besides. Remember the Spaniards were enamored of
numbers and had just learned the Arabic numerals from robbing the Moorish
libraries. It makes no sense. In fact the scenario is impossible.
Six thousand deaths when the soldiers destroyed the Smallpox sick warriors
ran the streets in blood several inches deep. Such a scene of carnage
would in a couple of days destroyed the city if they did it just for
religious holidays.
Better to read the accounts of the Spanish on Hispanola where they fed
Indian babies to their hunting dogs and cooked the Indian patriots for food
for their animals. In one hundred years they reduced and Island population
of 8 million to 100.
You didn't screw around with the Aztecs, they had the brutality of the young
and when they were "crossed" as with the prior people who inhabited their
Island they wiped them from the earth. But they were farmers who rose
to become great writers, artists and scholars in a very short time. If
time had allowed they would also have grown more temperate as all people's
do but that was not allowed. But decadent is the wrong word.
Aztec battles were not fought for blood but for captives although they were
terminal. The armor was paper. The wooden swords were edged with
obsidian glass. They were the root of the surgical techniques developed by
the Aztecs for the healing of wounds that we use today in eye surgery.
Such precision was necessary with Indian people because unlike Europeans we
suffer Cheloid scars that can destroy our lives if the knives are rough as
in swords. Knowing all of the data is important if you are to uncover the
truth beneath the historic distortions. These are just afew of the little
things. There are also big things like the agriculture, the schooling, the
handling of children recorded by even the enemy priests who hated them, and
the amazing recycling process for sewage that made it possible for a large
population to live in an inclosed environment. Don't just look at their
gargoyles without knowing the artistic style or the myths. The educational
theory is impressive even today and the awareness of the importance of
self-sacrifice in human discipline is simply realistic even if it was taken
to a fundamentalist idiotic extreme. We don't blame the Elizbethans for
their idiocies we admire Shakespeare and Dickens can tell you about when the
Thames ran brown from sewage that only the fires of London extinguished.
The Europeans surrounded the reason for their destructiveness with ample
excuses but that is propaganda and to be taken in by it at this time is not
logical. Cortez was a pig a brute and he destroyed a world center with
disease and barbaric brutality. He burned the libraries and destroyed the
culture and burned the feet off of Cauhtemoc in a vain pursuit of treasure
until the old Tlamatanime had to crawl across Mexico on stubs telling the
people that the books were being destroyed and they must hide them in the
churches and in their hearts. Today the old codexs extant are found by
post conquest Aztec scholars and artists in the Vatican. And there are
less than thirty out of thousands of volumes. In my little apartment I
have six thousand books. That is not a big library. The library of hand
painted texts an Tenochtitlan was said to be immense. For the Mayans
there are only three books out of whole libraries.
The point is that we Indian people are fighting for our culture and our
lives and the old stores still come back to haunt us. If Hitler had won
the war he would have been known as the hero that Cortez is today. We do
not preach romance but cold hard truth and logic. We admit the religious
fundamentalism and its brutality but we also admit the glory and grace and
awareness of the meaning of life that has escaped those who raped, pillaged
and destroyed the crops and soil of Mexico with their wheels and hooves.
Where are the great gardens? Where are the great libraries the arts, the
exceptional beauty that was remarked by the European artists before the
melted down the sculptures for the gold? What about the feather art which
was equal to European painting? Just a few examples in the museums here.
When you see the exceptional work it is amazing. So as an opera director
when I read things like priests never washing in a culture that valued
cleanliness and I have the medical knowledge of bacteria, common sense
betrays the texts. It was the Europeans who carried the germs and who
didn't was, not the reverse. Anything else is just hokum.
Sorry, no disrespect meant, it is your country. I just ask questions from
a distance and I cannot go around one of those sites of carnage without
becoming sick myself. Even when I don't know they are there and wander
into one, I come down with a flu-like illness that takes several days for me
to recover. It makes travel sometimes very difficult. The point is not to
be romantic but to ask questions, seek the truth always and be coldly
logical subject to revision when new data comes to light. That is all that
I am trying to do. My data comes from doing art works about that time and
from my teaching our children about our culture and the interconnections
that our people here had with the mound culture of Mexico. We too are
people of the Sacred Fire and Mound. We are often asked to forgive the
Christian culture its excesses for the ideals. All we ask is the same type
of compassion and care for the great advances that we too achieved in our
time prior to the bringing of disease and pestilence that killed 92 out of
every 100 people who lived here.
REH
----- Original Message -----
From: "Salvador Sánchez" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2003 9:16 AM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] FT PR vs. Historical Facts
> Ray:
> Yours is only one perspective of mexican history, quite similar to the
> official history. Noy everybody among the most respected historians
> (scholars) agree with the bucolic, romantic, version of the aztec society.
> In the time the spaniards came to Mexico ("Cortes -with S- the brute", you
> wrote) they were cruel, bloodthirsty people who terrorized their
neighbours,
> a decadent society with few to offer, except war and domination. Very
> violent people, no doubt. Nowadays their descendants still are.
> Hernan Cortes is the most important person in Mexico's history, and of the
> few gratest men of all times. Because of my national and cultural roots,
and
> because of the respect I feel por this brave man, I rather to construct my
> mexican identity based on Cortes figure and not in the idealized and
irreal
> figure of "the aztecs". Salvador
>
> From: "Ray Evans Harrell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2003 9:38 PM
>
>
> > Perhaps you know little about the Aztecs. They loved their children.
> Had
> > no crime rate and had the first public schools in the world. They were
> > fierce to their enemies and proud of their nation. Their cities were
> the
> > most beautiful in the world according to Cortez and his men and they
were
> > the world's greatest farmers. They were great singers and poets.
They
> > chose the direct method to human sacrifice rather than creating
situations
> > where people were worked to death or allowed to die to satisfy an
> invisible
> > hand. You didn't screw around with them and they had public works
> projects
> > for the poor and free food along the road planted every year for the
poor
> > and in case of drought. They also had the most efficient sewage system
> on
> > the planet when Europe was killing itself in filth and plague and the
> > world's largest city at the time. With every man woman and child
sick
> > from the Smallpox they still fought the Spanirds to a standstill and did
> not
> > give up the city until there was no more city. I don't find them
> > particularly more violent than senators who would vote to raise the
speed
> > limit in a highway system that would kill 10,000 more people a year just
> to
> > satisfy the Green God. In fact their sacrifices were organized. One a
> day.
> > That is 365. And no accident lottery to blame it on God. They took
> > responsibility. Of course it was brutal and had nothing to do with
> > justice but frighteningly little in this society has to do with justice
> > either, when it comes to who lives and who dies. Nothing is just
about
> > environmentally caused cancer or heart disease caused by pollution or
> brain
> > tumors caused by lead. The Gods of industry won't produce without
their
> > kill off of human souls. Today they even threaten the planet with their
> > environmental chaos. Europeans spoke in terms of the deaths of
thousands
> > when the Aztecs fought wars of roses for captives to sacrifice the one
or
> > two a day. Death is death and numbers are numbers. Everything else
is
> > just excuses. So if you don't like the Aztecs. Sorry, I though I was
> > making a compliment. Perhaps you don't like that they were religious
> > fundamentalists?
> >
> > REH
>
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