“The bones likely belong to people sacrificed during the reign of Ahuízotl, eighth king of the Aztecs. The dead included men, women and children alike.* — l Courtesy of INAH. Smithsonian Magazine.
“Archaeologists excavating a famed Aztec “tower of skulls” in Mexico City have uncovered a new section featuring 119 human skulls. The find brings the total number of skulls featured in the late 15th-century structure, known as Huey Tzompantli, to more than 600, reports Hollie Silverman for CNN.
The tower, first discovered five years ago (2015) by archaeologists with Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), is believed to be one of seven that once stood in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. It’s located near the ruins of the Templo Mayor, a 14th- and 15th-century religious center dedicated to the war god Huitzilopochtli and the rain god Tlaloc.
Found in the eastern section of the tower, the new skulls include at least three children’s craniums. Archaeologists identified the remains based on their size and the development of their teeth. Researchers had previously thought that the skulls in the structure belonged to defeated male warriors, but recent analysis suggests that some belonged to women and children, as Reuters reported in 2017.
Although we cannot determine how many of these individuals were warriors, perhaps some were captives destined for sacrificial ceremonies,” says archaeologist Barrera Rodríguez in an INAH statement. “We do know that they were all made sacred, that is, they were turned into gifts for the gods or even personifications of the deities themselves, for which they were dressed and treated as such.”
As J. Weston Phippen wrote for the Atlantic in 2017, the Aztecs displayed victims’ skulls in smaller racks around Tenochtitlán before transferring them to the larger Huey Tzompantli structure. Bonded together with lime, the bones were organized into a “large inner-circle that raise[d] and widen[ed] in a succession of rings.”
The dead included men, women and children alike….
While the tower may seem grisly to modern eyes, INAH notes that Mesoamericans viewed the ritual sacrifice that produced it as a means of keeping the gods alive and preventing the destruction of the universe.
“This vision, incomprehensible to our belief system, makes the Huey Tzompantli a building of life rather than death,” the statement says.
Archaeologists say the tower—which measures approximately 16.4 feet in diameter—was built in three stages, likely dating to the time of the Tlatoani Ahuízotl government(1) between 1486 and 1502. Ahuízotl, the eighth king of the Aztecs, led the empire in conquering parts of modern-day Guatemala, as well as areas along the Gulf of Mexico. During his reign, the Aztecs’ territory reached its largest size yet, with Tenochtitlán also growing significantly. Ahuízotl built the great temple of Malinalco, added a new aqueduct to serve the city and instituted a strong bureaucracy. Accounts describe the sacrifice of as many as 20,000 prisoners of war during the dedication of the new temple in 1487, though that number is disputed.
Spanish conquistadors Hernán Cortés, Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Andrés de Tapia described the Aztecs’ skull racks in writings about their conquest of the region. As J. Francisco De Anda Corral reported for El Economista in 2017, de Tapia said the Aztecs placed tens of thousands of skulls “on a very large theater made of lime and stone, and on the steps of it were many heads of the dead stuck in the lime with the teeth facing outward” …More
Review of context: Mel Gibson’s film about this and previous periods;
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(1) Ahuitzotl is known primarily for having occasioned the greatest orgy of human sacrifice in Aztec history. In 1487 he decided to dedicate his new temple at Tenochtitlán. The ceremonies, lasting four days, consisted of prisoners of war forming four lines, each one extending over three miles. As the captives were marched up to the altar, priests and Aztec nobles, including Ahuitzotl, had the honour of cutting open their chests and tearing out their hearts. Although actual numbers remain in dispute, as many as 20,000 prisoners (and many others) may have been killed this way, while guests from the conquered provinces were asked to watch. — Encyclopedia Britannica
Apocalypto: the Context
Slavery, alas, was / is as old as the world in almost all cultures…It is almost a subject too painful to think about. But since many warn of globalism’s (Read: the New World Order’s) new forms of ‘serfdom’ or ‘enslavement’ and human sacrifice (e.g., abortion, euthanasia, eugenics, usury and debt bondage), I think the subject cannot be avoided precisely because we do not want the world, not any peoples, to revert to anything near the global “plantation,” whether of the “hard” or “soft” variety of bondage. Servitude is servitude. Vigilance is always required.
If nations and peoples cannot opt out at any time of the so-called New World Order once they have been persuaded, bribed, betrayed or tricked into it, then we certainly do have a new form of servitude on the horizon.
Once Considered Ordinary
Almost all peoples were involved in one way or another in forms of slavery ranging from very harsh shackled servitude, of and within many peoples, to indentured “servitude” and debtors prisons, etc.; (Google or search Amazon.com books for subjects like England’s Irish Slaves / indentured servitude, debtors prisons, etc.).
Slavery was once considered “normal” booty, the spoils taken from war and conquered peoples. It breaks the heart to contemplate any of it.
Who suffered more? Who suffered less? The question is a marvelous futility. What matters is what we all learn from hard history.
In my files I found this quote from a source I forget,
“Slaves have been resisting capture and revolting against their masters for millennia and slavery continued. Remember Spartacus? He led the famous (white) slave revolt against the ancient Romans who enslaved almost anyone.
…Let’s be clear about this, slavery is not a black and white issue. There are many bloodstained black hands in the history of slavery too. Africans had been trading and owning slaves for millennia. These were black men owning black men and women. There were also freed slaves in America who went on to own slaves in their own right. Joseph Cinque, ringleader of the mutiny on the slave ship La Amistad after being exonerated by the US Supreme Court returned to Africa and became a slave trader.”
We tend to forget this. Those who profit from conflict, whether in academia or “simply” the internationalist ideologues and bankers (because it increases their capacity to enforce pernicious forms of “order”) have left much out of the history books. And “editing” history is a very current form of social engineering. But unless we reform, forgive and let the past be the past it will be an endless “eye for an eye until the whole world is blind”.
There is another truth that historians have noted. And it is often forgotten:
“White men did not start slavery, but they ended it, not through revolt but through legislation” (from the same notes).
Apocalypto
When the movie Apocalypto first came out, I wrote: “One must choose, Mel Gibson is either a sadist or he is a keen and compelling observer of the times with a prophetic eye on our choices for the future.”
It is obvious to me Gibson is no sadist, but a teacher in this instance with film as his medium.
The movie, Apocalypto, is absolutely brutal from start to finish and very hard to watch (warning about appropriateness for young children).
The radio ranter Alex Jones, in his review wrote this much that is true:
Set in Mesoamerica just before Spanish contact, the film illustrates the decline of the Maya civilization. The plot revolves around brutal Aztec warrior armies being sent on missions to capture and enslave neighboring tribes and bring them back to be used as fodder for human sacrifice and slavery.
Gibson again sets the tyrannical power of the state against the family and the rag-tag bands, it’s what we witnessed in The Patriot and Braveheart but the message is driven home even more authoritatively in Apocalypto.
Well, yes. But most importantly—and Jones doesn’t quite get this, I fear— it’s about a lot more than the politics of tyranny. The greater truth hits us in the face, if we have eyes to see, and it is this: If we continue to devolve away from the Commandments, the Law of God, and the teachings of Jesus Christ who set the prisoners free, we fall back into mankind’s default pagan position: the Jungle of nihilism, the sheer will to power, a world of predator and prey where human beings are meat for the taking and for, potentially, the slaughter. The poison is already in us and the hour is late. Consider the horrors of 20th century wars and totalitarianism alone! Hundreds of millions dead. This is civilization?
So Gibson is firing over the bow of our generation as few can. Yes, tyranny could return, but present day evils are already more perverse and in many ways deeper than the merely political.
It is the tyranny of the apostasy of the nations, and we are reaping the apocalyptic consequences. The movie opens with this quote (warning) from the famous historian, Will Durant:
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
To be sure, the Christian civilization which replaced the Mayans and Aztecs certainly fell into inexcusable brutality at times too; but that’s just it, they fell into it; we Christians can see their sins as sin, their backsliding as backsliding, their contradictions as contradictions, their greed (wherever it existed) as something truly awry.
The Jungle, however, knows no such principles by which mens actions can and must be judged. In the Jungle one is at the merciless whim of those who think they embody all there is to know about reality and power, especially the sacred power over life and death.
And let’s not even talk about how many Christian peoples were enslaved by Muslims through many centuries.
So, considering what Thomas Storck calls “the reciprocal influence of cultures,” we must acknowledge that it is not all pillage and exploitation which is the legacy of, say, Spanish, French, English or Dutch colonialism, but also eventually a respect for law, equity, mercy, practical technologies, more science, and the civilizing influence of Christic teachings which—when those Christians lived up to their beliefs—freed so many of the poor “Indians” in the Americas from abject fear, slavery, illiteracy, poverty, Shamanism, human sacrifice etc., just as we Christians are still learning new lessons of ecology, respect for nature, ancient remedies…
But very many of us descended from moral barbarians, and our ancestors were hardly better than the “savages” in this movie—whatever the kooky radical feminist revisionists fabricate about some imagined pristine past of a (fictional) goddess eden:
This was largely before our own forebears heard the “Good News” from the missionaries who taught the new possibility of love, forgiveness, nonviolence, and searching for better ways.
My own Druid ancestors practiced human sacrifice before St. Patrick drove out those “snakes” among others. And I am very grateful he did.
The film Apocalypto is not about race, it is about the conflict between good and evil which begins in every human soul. Hitler and Stalin were more pagan than the most ancient of “pagans,” because they sought horror consciously (in the specious name of “Enlightenment”) as their pet ideologies (and what was America’s role in Hitler’s thinking?
See Hitler’s debt to America…)
Surely new idolatries and new forms of human sacrifice (abortion, war, euthanasia, etc.) exist even in our time by new elites who would subjugate the herd again and again, yet few of us will ever want to return to the “law of the [moral] jungle,” which is, as Nietzsche knew and Gibson shows, where we are surely heading if we return to Self (the ideological will to power) to being the measure of all things.
Yes, even Jones gets it right when he says, “Mel Gibson is Stanley Kubrick on steroids and Apocalypto elevates him to the position of the greatest living director in the world today. He is the standard of casting, cinematography and research. Apocalypto is avant garde, state of the art and evergreen at every step of the way.”
When man casts off God, the Commandments and the teachings of Christ he risks the moral jungle, or being overtaken by alien nations which serve as the LORDS’s agents of judgement. This truth is as old as the promises and warnings of the ancient Prophets.
What follows seldom makes it into the history books either and shows the continued progression away from servitude; not that Rome was always obeyed (it is pure unhistorical bunkthat Catholics always did as they were “ordered” by the Pope in Rome. History tells a very different story, that very often just the opposite was the case).
Sublimis Deus, (The Sublime God), issued in 1537
Pope Paul III, forbidding slavery and all mistreatment, etc:
“To all faithful Christians to whom this writing may come, health in Christ our Lord and the apostolic benediction.
The sublime God so loved the human race that He created man in such wise that he might participate, not only in the good that other creatures enjoy, but endowed him with capacity to attain to the inaccessible and invisible Supreme Good and behold it face to face; and since man, according to the testimony of the sacred scriptures, has been created to enjoy eternal life and happiness, which none may obtain save through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, it is necessary that he should possess the nature and faculties enabling him to receive that faith; and that whoever is thus endowed should be capable of receiving that same faith. Nor is it credible that any one should possess so little understanding as to desire the faith and yet be destitute of the most necessary faculty to enable him to receive it. Hence Christ, who is the Truth itself, that has never failed and can never fail, said to the preachers of the faith whom He chose for that office ‘Go ye and teach all nations.’ He said all, without exception, for all are capable of receiving the doctrines of the faith.
The enemy of the human race, who opposes all good deeds in order to bring men to destruction, beholding and envying this, invented a means never before heard of, by which he might hinder the preaching of God’s word of Salvation to the people: he inspired his satellites who, to please him, have not hesitated to publish abroad that the Indians of the West and the South, and other people of whom We have recent knowledge should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, pretending that they are incapable of receiving the Catholic Faith.
We, who, though unworthy, exercise on earth the power of our Lord and seek with all our might to bring those sheep of His flock who are outside into the fold committed to our charge, consider, however, that the Indians are truly men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it. Desiring to provide ample remedy for these evils, We define and declare by these Our letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, to which the same credit shall be given as to the originals, that, notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.
By virtue of Our apostolic authority We define and declare by these present letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, which shall thus command the same obedience as the originals, that the said Indians and other peoples should be converted to the faith of Jesus Christ by preaching the word of God and by the example of good and holy living.”
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SH: As a side note, I think again it is critically important to appreciate what Thomas Storck has called the “reciprocity of cultures” as they encountered one another. There were, for example, different concepts of property which led to confusions when Europeans came to the Americas and saw indigenous peoples moving constantly, nomadically, across lands. Since the Europeans saw little signs of staked out indigenous property, i.e., permanently settled property in the European sense, across very large tracts of land, but nomadic-like peoples constantly moving across very wide tracts, individuals and groups made European-style contracts with consideration (value $$$) for the ‘Indians,’ or through bartering etc., and so there was this reciprocity. And of course others abused it over time and then there were fights and wrongs on all sides, needless and wrong.
Whites, Blacks, Native Americans, peoples in every culture and time…there has been too much war and slavery for all of us. We can do better—and must.
—updated July 2017
