This is what Mexico City looked like before the arrival of the Spaniards: the lake city of the Aztecs.
A commenter on this site has visited me in Mexico City. This day I showed him the Museum of Anthropology, where we saw the pre-Hispanic art and artefacts of Mesoamerica: the Indian civilisation of serial killers that inhabited the continent before the arrival of the white man.
Many entries appear on this site under the heading of ‘Pre-Columbian America’. To avoid overwhelming the reader with so much information, I suggest reading the central part of my book Day of Wrath starting on page 63, where I deal with this culture. Here I would like to post the pictures that the commenter took today:
This image requires an explanation. The Mesoamerican Amerindians were obsessed with human sacrifice, blood and beheadings. Here we see a freshly beheaded victim. The pre-Hispanic artist depicted the blood gushing from the beheaded body like snakes.
This other image is the reproduction in the museum of what the skirts of the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan looked like: one of the major archaeological centres of Mesoamerica, which flourished between 100 b.c.e. and 650 c.e. Tomorrow the commenter and I will visit this pyramid, although erosion has erased the colour.
Whoever believes in the holy words and would like me to give him or her a tour of these sights, let me know. In what is now the United States, the Amerindians never established great civilisations, though they were as cruel as the Mesoamericans. For this reason, Mexico and Peru may be of particular interest to tourists who want to visit the site of an exotic culture that no longer exists. The large museum that contains the pictures above and the pyramids we will visit tomorrow are not far from the US (unlike the archaeological sites of the pre-Columbian Peruvian culture).
2 replies on “Ancient Mexico”
CT,
I have not read you book yet. But have you dealt with the concept of the “psycho-class”? I’m thinking here of Julian Jaynes book “The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.” That book was very influential on me. I don’t know if his thesis, ie that the voices in the heads of ancient man were biologically mediated and are vestiges of the “god-brain” and thus the origins of religious belief in humans, has been disproven but I found it brilliant.
The Meso-Americans were not only low in IQ (typical for equatorial people) but existed in a different psychological space were such atrocities (as depicted in those images you just posted and in Mel Gibson’s movie “Apocolypto”) were considered normal. My god, what an evolutionary breakthrough the ancient Nordics were. And what a sin the modern Europeans are committing.
One can argue that the egalitarian paradigms that dominate today’s secular and traditional Christians are representative of a primitive psycho-class just as evil and barbaric as that of the ancient amerindians.
Of course, I mention Julian Jaynes’ book, The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in my Day of Wrath precisely to illustrate what psychoclasses are.