What Day of the Dead tells us about the Aztec philosophy of happiness

https://theconversation.com/what-day-of-the-dead-tells-us-about-the-aztec-philosophy-of-happiness-147552

by pepys • 6 years ago

97 74 6 years ago

h0l0cube6• 6 years ago

The Fall of Civilizations podcast does a very good long-form story-telling about the invasion and collapse of the Aztec empire. I really do recommend it and the rest in the series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56WPMRERgxg

dbspin• 6 years ago

Second this, Fall of Civilisations is outstanding, and easily the most beautifully produced and impeccably researched history / prehistory podcast that's out there. It's BBC radio quality. Just astonishing that it's free to download.

stareatgoats• 6 years ago

I am actually currently near the end of the second video about the Aztecs. Well researched, well narrated and accompanied by memorable pictures and captivating film/animation-sequences just like the rest of the series.

Had to pause it yesterday though. The depiction of a depressed Moctezuma before the final collapse got to me. Both he and we know how it is going to end.

daodedickinson• 6 years ago

We never know how it's going to end.

JoeDaDude• 6 years ago

Good podcast! The Aztecs (or Mexica) also have a written history from before the Europeans came. See great summaries in the two books below:

A Rain of Darts: The Mexica Aztecs by Burr Cartwright Brundage

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend

Thuggery2• 6 years ago

The Aztecs (or Mexica) also have a written history from before the Europeans came.

This might come off as a dick reply, but I kind of doubt that seeing as how, as far as I know, the Aztecs were an illiterate civilization.

andi9993• 6 years ago

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

h0l0cube6• 6 years 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_cultu...

poisonarena2• 6 years ago

What does Cortes have to do with their practice of human sacrifice?

oh_sigh• 6 years 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.

tyingq• 6 years 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-hundred...

s5300• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

This kind of moral equivocation is why our society is so divided.

watwut2• 6 years 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.

andi9993• 6 years 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.

0_____0• 6 years 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.

h0l0cube6• 6 years 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_cultu...

edmundsauto2• 6 years 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.

whatshisface6• 6 years 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.

hutzlibu4• 6 years ago

"I think medieval European justice is probably not much better. "

I also rarely hear people suggesting to learn from medieval europe.

But there is still respect, for example it does bother me, that all those kings still have a "great" in their name, when what it was what they were good at, was large scale slaughtering. King Karl the great? Not for me. By that standards Hitler would be a "Great", too.

And that our awesome justice system roots in ancient rome. Which was mainly a empire. Conquering the world to steal riches and slaves.

blacksmith_tb• 6 years ago

That seems like a fair comparison, though the scale of Aztec sacrifice was pretty remarkable[1]. I would say in either case that it's incredible to me to think of societies where people were more valuable dead than alive - I suppose it suggests they were flourishing, to be able to afford it, but it's hard to imagine.

1: https://phys.org/news/2018-06-skull-tower-rack-evidence-azte...

pharke• 6 years ago

Did the Aztecs execute criminals in similar proportion to Europeans?

jcranmer2• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

drummer• 6 years 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.

bigbubba3• 6 years 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.

octabond• 6 years ago

Many writers get lost in wanting to attribute a deist philosophy to the Náhuatl race, when their cosmogony tells us otherwise.

They understood a creative being, Ometecuhtli, but that creator was the element of fire (matter), and the creation occurred by the fact of omeycualiztli (matter). The cretaor was the eternal (Ayamictlán), but the imperishable continued to be fire (matter). The gods are the four material beings, the four stars: Tonacatecuhtli, Tonacacíhuatl, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca. They deified the rains in Tlaloc and the sea in Chalchiuhtlicue, these deities also being material. To explain the appearance of men, they resorted to the action of fire on earth (matter again), the marriage between Tonacatecuhtli and Tonacacíhuatl. The idea of a spiritual being was not perceived.

The Nahuas were not deists, nor can it be said that their philosophy was Asian-pantheism. It was materialism based on the eternity of matter. Their religion was the Sabaeism of the four stars, and like their philosophy, it was also materialistic.

What Day of the Dead tells us about the Aztec philosophy of happiness

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