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Day of Wrath, 19

The infanticidal psychoclass: references

Wikipedia has the problem that many of its editors and administrators are either white traitors to the West or Jews like those of deMause’s journal. Although some scholars contribute to editing it, there is always an anti-westerner who censures the passages opposing the anti-white zeitgeist. For example, regarding the articles on infanticide I edited in 2008, a couple of Australian administrators from the English Wikipedia abused their powers. Not only did they eliminate most of the section on Australia within the article “Infanticide.” They went so far as to erase, from that online encyclopedia, an entire article that another editor had started. This last article focused on expanding the subject of the infanticide committed by aboriginal Australians. (Part of what was censored by Wikipedia is covered in this chapter, in the section on Australia.) Almost a decade later I learned that, since the 1970s, it has been a common practice in that continent to censor studies on infanticide, insofar as the aborigines have been idealized. Rewriting the history of the natives by vaporizing, in Stalin’s style, part of the collective memory of a nation misinforms visitors to the encyclopedia. But not all Wikipedia editors have behaved like that pair of administrators, so zealous in idealizing the natives in their country. In the archived Wikipedia talk page of Psychohistory, Loren Cobb said:

In my view, the psychohistory of Lloyd deMause is indeed a notable approach to history, in the sense in which Wikipedia uses the term “notability.” I am not personally involved in psychohistory—I am a mathematical sociologist—but here are some thoughts for your consideration.

Psychohistory as put forth by deMause and his many followers attempts to explain the pattern of changes in the incidence of child abuse in history. This is a perfectly respectable and non-fringe domain of scientific research. They argue that the incidence was much higher in the past, and that there has been an irregular history of improvement. This is a hypothesis that could just as easily have been framed by an epidemiologist as a psychologist. DeMause proposes a theory that society has gone through a series of stages in its treatment and discipline of children.

Again, this is well within the bounds of social science. None of these questions are pseudoscientific. Even the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, a bastion of scientific epidemiology, is interested in these kinds of hypotheses.1

I exchanged a few e-mails with Cobb, who like me is very critical of the psychoanalytic tail in deMausean legacy, and his position piqued my interest.

This chapter summarizes the data collected in the first exhaustive study on infanticide: a book by Larry Milner, Hardness of Heart, published in the last year of the 20th century. That so many researchers have produced astronomical figures on the extent of infanticide moves me to think that Milner’s initiative to devote ten years of his life researching the topic should be undertaken by others. Only then can we be sure if such large numbers are accurate.

Joseph Birdsell believes in infanticide rates of 15-50 percent of the total number of births in prehistoric times.2 Laila Williamson estimated a lower rate ranging from 15-20 percent.3 Both believe that high rates of infanticide persisted until the development of agriculture.4 Some comparative anthropologists have estimated that 50 percent of female newborn babies were killed by their parents in the Paleolithic.5 These figures appear over and over in the research of other scholars.

 

Paleolithic and Neolithic

Decapitated skeletons of hominid children have been found with evidence of cannibalism. Neanderthal man performed ritual sacrifices of children. As shown in the bas-reliefs of a Laussel cave, a menstruating goddess is appeased only by the sacrifice of infants.6

Marvin Harris, the creator of the anthropological movement called cultural materialism, estimated that in the Stone Age up to 23-50 percent of newborns were put to death. However, Harris conceived a rational explanation. In his book Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures, published in 1977, he says that the goal was to preserve the population growth to 0.001 percent. This explanation of more “civilized” cavemen than us has not been taken seriously among other scholars. But the renowned geneticist James Neel surpasses him. Through a retroactive model to study the customs of contemporary Yanomami Indians he estimated that in prehistoric times the infanticidal rate was 15-20 percent. However, Neel wrote: “I find it increasingly difficult to see in the recent reproductive history of the civilized world a greater respect for the quality of human existence than was manifested by our remote ‘primitive’ ancestors.” Ark would have scoffed at this claim. The fact that Neel published such praise for the infanticidal cavemen in Science,7 one of the most prestigious scientific journals, shows the levels of psychogenic regression that we suffer in our times.

 

Ancient World

As we have seen, the sacrifice of children was much more common in the Ancient World than in present times. Three thousand bones of young children, with evidence of sacrificial rituals, have been found in Sardinia. Infants were offered to the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. Pelasgians offered a sacrifice of every tenth child during difficult times. Syrians sacrificed children to Jupiter and Juno. Many remains of children have been found in Gezer excavations with signs of sacrifice. Child skeletons with the marks of sacrifice have been found also in Egypt dating 950-720 B.C. In Carthage “[child] sacrifice in the ancient world reached its infamous zenith.”8 Besides the Carthaginians, other Phoenicians, and the Canaanites, Moabites and Sepharvites offered their first-born as a sacrifice to their gods.

Carthage. Charred bones of thousands of infants have been found in Carthaginian archaeological sites in modern times. One such area harbored as many as 20,000 burial urns. It is estimated that child sacrifice was practiced for centuries in the region. Plutarch (ca. 46-120 AD) mentions the practice, as do Tertullian, Orosius, Diodorus Siculus and Philo. The Hebrew Bible also mentions what appears to be child sacrifice practiced at a place called the Tophet (from the Hebrew taph or toph, to burn) by the Canaanites, ancestors of the Carthaginians, and by some Israelites. Writing in the 3rd century B.C., Kleitarchos, one of the historians of Alexander the Great, described that the infants rolled into the flaming pit. Diodorus Siculus wrote that babies were roasted to death inside the burning pit of the god Baal Hamon, a bronze statue.9

Greece and Rome. In the Persian mythology of Zoroastrianism, at birth some children are devoured by their parents: a fable reminiscent of Cronus. Rhea hid Zeus and presented a stone wrapped in strips, which Cronus took as a swaddled baby and ate it. Cronus represents the archaic Hellas.

The historical Greeks considered barbarous the practice of adult and child sacrifice.10 It is interesting to note how conquerors like Alexander are diminished under the new psychohistorical perspective. If we give credence to the assertion that Thebes, the largest city in the region of Boeotia, had lower rates of exposure than other Greek cities, its destruction by Alexander was a fatal blow to the advanced psychoclass in Greece. A few centuries later, between 150 and 50 B.C. an Alexandrian Jew wrote Wisdom of Solomon, which contains a diatribe against the Canaanites whom he calls perpetrators of “ruthless murders of their children.” (Note how the biblical classics, the 16th-century chroniclers, and the 19th-century anthropologists wield value judgments, something banned in an academy under the shadow of Franz Boas.)

In The Histories Polybius was already complaining in the 2nd century B.C. that parents severely inhibited reproduction, and by the 1st century there were several thinkers who spoke out against the exposure of babies. Epictetus wondered “A sheep does not abandon its own offspring, nor a wolf; and yet does a man abandon his?” In the Preface we saw that in the same century Philo was the first philosopher to speak out against exposure.11

“The greatest respect is owed to a child,” wrote Juvenal, born in 55 AD. His contemporary Josephus, a Romanized Jew, also condemned exposure. And in Heroides, an elegiac poem that he wrote before his exile, Ovid asked, “What did the child commit, in so few hours of life?” However, two centuries after Augustus, in times of Constantine Rome struggled with a decreased population due to exposure. The legend of Romulus and Remus is also revealing: two brothers had been exposed to die but a she-wolf saved them. Romulus forced the Romans to bring up all males and the first female and forbade killing them after a certain age. As Rhea saving his son Zeus, this legend portrays the psychogenic landmark of classical culture compared with other cultures of the Ancient World. But even so, exposure was practiced. A letter from a Roman citizen to his wife, dating from 1 B.C., demonstrates the casual nature with which infanticide was often viewed:

Know that I am still in Alexandria. […] I ask and beg you to take good care of our baby son, and as soon as I received payment I shall send it up to you. If you are delivered, if it is a boy, keep it, if a girl, discard it.12

In some periods of Roman history it was traditional for a newborn to be brought to the pater familias, the family patriarch, who would then decide whether the child was to be kept and raised, or left to death by exposure. The Twelve Tablets of Roman law obliged him to put to death a child that was visibly deformed. Infanticide became a capital offense in Roman law in 374 AD but offenders were rarely if ever prosecuted.13

Hebrew people. Although the Bible says many Hebrews sacrificed their children to pagan gods, Judaism prohibits infanticide (I will approach the subject of the recent studies on the Israelites in the last chapter). Tacitus recorded that the Jews “regard it as a crime to kill any late-born children.”14 Josephus, whose works give an important insight into first-century Judaism, wrote that God “forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward.”15

Pagan European tribes. John Boswell believed that in ancient Germanic tribes unwanted children were exposed, usually in the forest. “It was the custom of the pagans that if they wanted to kill a son or daughter, they would be killed before they had been given any food.”16 In the most influential archeological book of the 19th century, Prehistoric Times, John Lubbock invented the terms Paleolithic and Neolithic. He described that burnt bones indicated the practice of child sacrifice in pagan Britain.17

 

The Christian Era

Something goes completely unnoticed for the modern mind. In a world plagued by sacrifices like the Old World, the innocent son has to die ordered by his father: a well-known practice. It is impossible to understand the psychoclass that gave rise to Christianity by overlooking this reality converted into a powerful symbol. This is true despite, as I have stated in the previous pages, that forms of upbringing should have suffered, in general terms, a regression throughout the Middle Ages. The Teachings of the Apostles or Didache said: “You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born.”18 The Epistle of Barnabas stated an identical command.19 So widely accepted was this teaching in Christendom that apologists Tertullian, Athenagoras, Minucius Felix, Justin Martyr and Lactantius also maintained that exposing a baby to death was a wicked act. In 318 AD Constantine considered infanticide a crime but reinstated the practice of selling one’s own children. The West took its time to consider criminal the late forms of infanticide. The author of the Codex Theodosianus complained in 322 AD:

We have learned that in provinces where there are shortages of food and lack of livelihood, parents are selling or pledging their children. Such an ignominious act is repugnant to our customs.

Towards 340 AD Lactantius argued that strangling newborns was sinful. Already within the historical period known as Christendom, infanticide was not officially banned in Roman criminal law until 374 AD when Valentinian I mandated to rear all children (exposing babies, especially girls, was still common). However, both exposure and child abandonment continued in Europe.

Middle Ages. The practice was so entrenched, as well as the sale of children, that it had been futile to decree the abolition of such customs. Until 500 AD it could not be said that a baby’s life was secure. The Council of Constantinople declared that infanticide was a homicide, and in 589 AD the Third Council of Toledo took measures against the Spanish custom of killing their own children.20 Whereas theologians and clerics preached to spare their lives, newborn abandonment continued as registered in both the literature record and in legal documents.21 More archaic forms of infanticide, such as sacrifice, were practiced by the Gauls, Celts and the Irish. “They would kill their piteous wretched offspring with much wailing and peril, to pour their blood around Crom Cruaich,” a deity of pre-Christian Ireland.22 Unlike other European regions, in the Middle Ages the German mother had the right to expose the newborn.23 In Gotland, Sweden, children were also sacrificed.24 According to William Langer, exposure in the Middle Ages “was practiced on a gigantic scale with absolute impunity, noticed by writers with most frigid indifference.”25 By the end of the 12th century, notes Richard Trexler, Roman women threw their newborns into the Tiber River even in daylight.26 In Russia, peasants sacrificed their sons and daughters to the pagan god Perun. Some residents of rural areas got rid of their babies by throwing them to the hogs. In Medieval Russia secular laws did not deal with what, for the church, was a crime.27 The Svans killed the newborn females by filling their mouths with hot ashes. In Kamchatka, babies were killed and thrown to wild dogs.28

The darkness of Europe would begin to fade in the 12th century. As explained above, the “little Renaissance” of that century reminds me the famous series of Kenneth Clark, the first of its kind that showed us the personal view of an intellectual in a television series. Other cultures would be arrested in their ways of treatment of women and children.

China and Japan. The American explorer George Kennan noted that among the Koryaks, a Mongoloid people of north-eastern Siberia, infanticide was still common in the 19th century. One of the twins was always sacrificed.29 Since the 17th century Jesuit missionaries had found thousands of babies, mostly women, abandoned on the streets of China. Marco Polo, the famed explorer, saw newborns exposed in Manzi.30 China’s society promoted gendercide. The philosopher Han Fei Tzu, a member of the ruling aristocracy of the 3rd century B.C., who developed a school of law, wrote: “As to children, a father and mother when they produce a boy congratulate one another, but when they produce a girl they put it to death.”31 Among the Hakka people, and in Yunnan, Anhwei, Szechwan, Jiangxi and Fukien a method of killing the baby was to put her into a bucket of cold water, which was called “baby water.” 32 Even before feudal Japan infanticide was performed. The common slang for infanticide was mabiki which means to pull plants from an overcrowded garden. It has been estimated that 40 percent of newborn babies were killed in Kyushu.33 A typical method in Japan was smothering through wet paper on the baby’s mouth and nose.34 Mabiki persisted in the 19th and early 20th centuries.35

India and Pakistan. Female infanticide of newborn girls was systematic in feudatory Rajputs in India. According to Firishta (approx. 1560-1620), as soon as a female child was born she was holding “in one hand, and a knife in the other, that any person who wanted a wife might take her now, otherwise she was immediately put to death.”36 The practice of female infanticide was also common among the inhabitants of Kutch, Kehtri, Nagar, Gujarat, Miazed, Kalowries and also among the Sind in Pakistan.37 It was not uncommon that parents threw a child to the crocodiles in the Ganges River as a sacrificial offering. The British colonists were unable to outlaw the custom until the beginnings of the 19th century.38

Arabia and Islam. Female infanticide was common all over Arabia during pre-Islamic Arabia, especially by burying alive the newborn female.39 Later it would be explicitly prohibited by the Koran: “And do not kill your children for fear of poverty; We give them sustenance and yourselves too; Surely to kill them is a great wrong.”40 However, in spite of this emergent psychoclass, if compared with their infanticidal neighbors of the Arabian peninsula, the forms of childcare and the treatment of women in Islam would be stagnant for centuries.

 

Tribes

Infanticide in tribal societies was, and in some tribes still is, more frequent than infanticide in both Western and Eastern civilizations.

Africa. In this continent newborns were killed because of fear that they were an evil omen or because they were considered unlucky. Twins were usually put to death in Arebo; as well as by the Nama Hottentots of South West Africa; in the Lake Victoria Nyanza region; by the Tswana in Portuguese East Africa; among the Ilso and Ibo people of Nigeria; and by the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert.41 The Kikuyu, Kenya’s most populous ethnic group, practiced ritual killing of twins.42 Lucien Lévy-Brühl noted that, as a result of fearing a drought, if a baby was born feet first in British East Africa, she or he was smothered.43 The Tswana people did the same since they feared the newborn would bring ill fortune to the parents.44 Similarly, William Sumner noted that the Vadshagga killed children whose upper incisors came first.45 If a mother died in childbirth among the Ibo people of Nigeria, the newborn was buried alive. It suffered a similar fate if the father died.46 In The Child in Primitive Society, Nathan Miller wrote in the 1920s that among the Kuni tribe every mother had killed at least one of her children.47 Child sacrifice was practiced as late as 1929 in Zimbabwe, where a daughter of the tribal chief used to be sacrificed as a petition of rain.48

Oceania and the Pacific Islands. Infanticide among the autochthon people in the Oceania islands is widespread. In some areas of the Fiji islands up to 50 percent of newborn infants were killed.49 In the 19th-century Ugi, in the Solomon Islands almost 75 percent of the indigenous children had been brought from adjoining tribes due to the high incidence rate of infanticide, a unique feature of these tribal societies.50 In another Solomon island, San Cristóbal, the firstborn was considered ahubweu and often buried alive.51 As a rationale for their behavior, some parents in British New Guinea complained: “Girls […] don’t become warriors, and they don’t stay to look for us in our old age.”52

Australia. According to Bronislaw Malinowski, who wrote a book on indigenous Australians in the early 1960s, “infanticide is practiced among all Australian natives.”53 The practice has been reported in Tasmania, Western Australia, Central Australia, South Australia, in the Northern Territory, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Anthropologist Géza Róheim wrote:

When the Yumu, Pindupi, Ngali, or Nambutji were hungry, they ate small children with neither ceremonial nor animistic motives. Among the southern tribes, the Matuntara, Mularatara, or Pitjentara, every second child was eaten in the belief that the strength of the first child would be doubled by such a procedure.54

Family units usually consisted of three children. Brough Smyth, a 19th century researcher, estimated that in Victoria about 30 percent of the births resulted in infanticide.55 Mildred Dickeman concurs that the figure is accurate in other Australia tribes as a result of a surplus of the birthrate.56 Cannibalism was observed in Victoria at the beginning of the 20th century. The Wotjo tribe, as well as the tribes of the lower Murray River, sometimes killed a newborn to feed an older sibling.57 Thomas Robert Malthus said that, in the New South Wales region when the mother died sucking infants were buried alive with her.58 In the Darling River region, infanticide was practiced “by a blow on the back of the head, by strangling with a rope, or chocking with sand.”59 In Queensland a tribal woman only could have children after the age of thirty. Otherwise babies would be killed.60 The Australian Aranda tribes in the Northern Territory used the method of choking the newborn with coal, sand or kill her with a stick.61 According to James George Frazer, in the Beltana tribes in South Australia it was customary to kill the first-born.62 Twins were always killed by the Arrernte in central Australia.63 In the Luritcha tribe occasional cannibalism of young children occurred.64 Aram Yengoyan calculated that, in Western Australia, the Pitjandjara people killed 19 percent of their newborns.65 In the 19th century the native Tasmanians were exterminated by the colonists, who regarded them as a degenerate race. Richard H. Davies (fl. 1830s-1887), a brother of Archdeacon Davies, wrote that Tasmanian “females have been known to desert their infants for the sake of suckling the puppies,” which were later used for hunting.66 Like other tribal Australians, when the mother died the child was buried as well.67

Polynesia. In ancient Polynesian societies infanticide was fairly common.68 Families were supposed to rear no more than two children. Writing about the natives Raymond Firth noted: “If another child is born, it is buried in the earth and covered with stones.”69 In Hawaii infanticide was a socially sanctioned practice before the Christian missions.70 Infanticidal methods included strangling the children or, more frequently, burying them alive.71 Infanticide was quite intense in Tahiti.72 Methods included suffocation, neck breaking and strangulation.73

North America. Infanticide and child sacrifice was practiced in the New World at times when in Western Europe it had been largely abandoned. There is no agreement about the actual estimates of the frequency of newborn female infanticide in the Eskimo population. Carmel Schrire mentions diverse studies ranging from 15-50 percent to 80 percent.74 Polar Eskimos killed the child by throwing him or her into the sea.75 There is even a legend in Eskimo folklore, “The Unwanted Child,” where a mother throws her child into the fjord. The Yukon and the Mahlemuit tribes of Alaska exposed the female newborns by stuffing their mouths with grass before leaving them to die.76 In Arctic Canada the Eskimos exposed their babies on the ice and left them to die.77 Female Eskimo infanticide disappeared in the 1930s and 1940s after contact with the Western cultures of the South.78 The Handbook of North American Indians reports infanticide and cannibalism among the Dene Indians and those of the Mackenzie Mountains.79 In the Eastern Shoshone there was a scarcity of Indian women as a result of female infanticide.80 For the Maidu Native Americans in the United States twins were so dangerous that they not only killed them, but the mother as well.81 In the region known today as southern Texas, the Mariame Indians practiced infanticide of females on a large scale. Wives had to be obtained from neighboring groups.82

South American tribes. Although data of infanticides among the indigenous people in South America is not as abundant as data from North America, the estimates seem to be similar. The Tapirapé indigenous people of Brazil allowed no more than three children per woman, and no more than two had to be of the same sex. If the rule was broken infanticide was practiced.83 The people in the Bororo tribe killed all the newborns that did not appear healthy enough. Infanticide is also documented in the case of the Korubo people in the Amazon.84

While Capacocha sacrifice was practiced in the Peruvian large cities, child sacrifice in the pre-Columbian tribes of the region is less documented. However, even today studies on the Aymara Indians reveal high incidences of mortality among the newborn, especially female deaths, suggesting infanticide.85 Infanticide among the Chaco in Paraguay was estimated as high as 50 percent of all newborns in that tribe, who were usually buried.86 The infanticidal custom had such roots among the Ayoreo in Bolivia and Paraguay that it persisted until the late 20th century.87

 

Conclusion

As can be gathered from the above data, it is possible to support psychohistory’s cornerstone, the idea of an infanticidal psychoclass, with sources other than those used by deMause. The main criticism of historian Julie Hofmann Kemp to the deMausean model has, therefore, been solved.

 

References

1 Loren Cobb signs under a penname in Wikipedia. His post appeared in the talk page of Psychohistory (03:41, April 3, 2008).

2 Birdsell, Joseph, B. (1986), “Some predictions for the Pleistocene based on equilibrium systems among recent hunter-gatherers,” in Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, Man the Hunter, Aldine Publishing Co., p. 239.

3 Williamson, Laila (1978), “Infanticide: an anthropological analysis,” in Kohl, Marvin, Infanticide and the Value of Life, New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 61-75.

4 Milner, Larry S. (2000). Hardness of Heart / Hardness of Life: The Stain of Human Infanticide. Lanham/New York/Oxford: University Press of America, p. 19.

5 Hoffer, Peter, N.E.H. Hull (1981). Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and America, 1558-1803. New York University Press, p. 3.

6 Simons, E. L. (1989). “Human origins.” Science, 245: p. 1344.

7 Neel, James. (1970). “Lessons from a ‘primitive’ people.” Science, 1: p. 816.

8 Milner: Hardness of Heart (op. cit.) p. 324.

9 Brown, Shelby (1991). Late Carthaginian Child Sacrifice and Sacrificial Monuments in their Mediterranean Context. Sheffield Academic Press, pp. 22s. See also: Stager, Lawrence, Samuel R. Wolff (1984). “Child sacrifice at Carthage—religious rite or population control?” Biblical Archaeology Review 10: pp. 31-51.

10 Hughes, Dennis D. (1991). Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece. Routledge, p. 187.

11 Philo (1950). The Special Laws. Harvard University Press, Vol. VII, pp. 117s, 551, 549.

12 Naphtali, Lewis, ed. (1985), “Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 744,” Life in Egypt Under Roman Rule, Oxford University Press, p. 54.

13 Radville, Samuel X. (1974), “A history of child abuse and infanticide,” in Steinmetz, Suzanne K. and Murray A. Strauss, Violence in the Family, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., pp. 173-179.

14 Tacitus (1931). The Histories. London: William Heinemann, Vol. II, p. 183.

15 Josephus (1976). The Works of Flavius Josephus, “Against Apion.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press, II.25, p. 597.

16 John Boswell (1988). The Kindness of Strangers. New York: Vintage Books, p. 211.

17 Lubbock, John (1865). Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages. London: Williams and Norgate, p. 176.

18 Robinson, J. Armitage (translator) (1920), “Didache,” Barnabas, Hermar and the Didache, Vol. D.ii.2c, New York: The MacMillan Co., p. 112.

19 Ibid., Epistle of Barnabas, xix. 5d.

20 Radbill, Samuel X. (1974), “A history of child abuse and infanticide,” in Steinmetz, Suzanne K. and Murray A. Straus, Violence in the Family, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., pp. 173-179.

21 John Boswell (1984). “Exposition and oblation: the abandonment of children and the ancient and medieval family.” American Historical Review 89: pp. 10-33.

22 Dorson, Richard (1968). Peasant Customs and Savage Myths: Selections from the British Folklorists. University of Chicago Press, p. 351.

23 Westrup, C.W. (1944). Introduction to Roman Law. Oxford University Press, p. 249.

24 Turville-Petre, Gabriel (1964). Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, p. 253.

25 Langer, William L. (1974). “Infanticide: a historical survey.” History of Childhood Quarterly, 1, pp. 353-366.

26 Trexler, Richard (1973). “Infanticide in Florence: new sources and first results.” History of Childhood Quarterly, 1: p. 99.

27 Ransel, David (1988). Mothers of Misery. Princeton University Press, pp. 10-12.

28 McLennan: Studies in Ancient History (op. cit.), pp. 105s.

29 Kennan, George (1986 [originally published in 1871]). Tent Life in Siberia. New York: Gibbs Smith.

30 Polo, Marco (1965). The Travels. Middlesex: Penguin Books, p. 174.

31 Yu-Lan, Fung (1952). A History of Chinese Philosophy. Princeton University Press, p. 327.

32 Yao, Esther S. Lee (1983). Chinese Women: Past and Present. Mesquite: Ide House, p. 75.

33 Kushe, Helga and Peter Singer (1985). Should the Baby Live? Oxford University Press, p. 106.

34 Shiono, Hiroshi and Atoyo Maya, Noriko Tabata, Masataka Fujiwara, Junich Azumi and Mashahiko Morita (1986). “Medico-legal aspects of infanticide in Hokkaido District, Japan.” American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, 7: p. 104.

35 Vaux, Kenneth (1989). Birth Ethics. New York: Crossroad, p. 12.

36 Westermarck, Edward (1968). A Short History of Marriage. New York: Humanities Press, Vol. III, p. 162.

37 Panigrahi, Lalita (1972). British Social Policy and Female Infanticide in India. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, p. 18.

38 Davies, Nigel (1981). Human Sacrifice. New York: William Morrow & Co, p. 18.

39 Milner: Hardness of Heart, (op. cit.), p. 59. See also: Smith, William Robertson (1903). Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia. London: Adam & Charles Block, p. 293.

40 The Koran, XVII:31. See also LXXXI:8-9, XVI:60-62, XVII:42 and XLII:48.

41 Milner: Hardness of Heart (op. cit.) pp. 160s.

42 LeVine, Sarah and Robert LeVine (1981), “Child abuse and neglect in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Korbin, Jill, Child Abuse and Neglect, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 39.

43 Lévy-Brühl, Lucien (1923). Primitive Mentality. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., p. 150.

44 Schapera, I.A. (1955). A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom. Oxford University Press, p. 261.

45 Sumner, William (1956 [originally published in 1906). Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals. Oxford University Press, p. 274.

46 Basden, G.T. (1996). Niger Ibos. New York: Barnes & Noble, pp. 180-184, 262s.

47 Miller, Nathan (1928). The Child in Primitive Society. New York: Bretano’s, p. 37.

48 Davies: Human Sacrifice (op. cit.), p. 143.

49 McLennan, J.F. (1886). Studies in Ancient History, The Second Series. New York: MacMillan & Co., Ltd., pp. 90s.

50 Guppy, H.B. (1887). The Solomon Islands and Their Natives. London: Swan Sonnenschein, p. 42.

51 Frazer, J.G. (1935). The Golden Bough. New York: MacMillan Co., pp. 332s.

52 Langness, L.L. (1984), “Child abuse and cultural values: the case of New Guinea,” in Korbin, Jill, Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 15.

53 Malinowski, Bronislaw (1963). The Family Among the Australian Aborigines. New York: Scocken Books, p. 235.

54 Róheim, Géza (1962). “The Western tribes of Central Australia: childhood.” The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, 2: p. 200.

55 Smyth, Brough (1878). The Aborigines of Australia. London: John Ferres, p. 52.

56 Dickeman, Mildred (1975). “Demographic consequences of infanticide in man.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 6: p. 121.

57 Howitt, A.W. (1904). The Native Tribes of South-East Australia. MacMillan & Co., Ltd., pp. 749s.

58 Malthus, Thomas Robert (1963). On Population. New York: The Modern Library, I.III, p. 170.

59 Bonney, Frederic (1884). “On some customs of the aborigines of the River Darling.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 13: p. 125.

60 Cowlishaw, Gillian (1978). “Infanticide in aboriginal Australia.” Oceania, 48: p. 267.

61 Murdock, G.P. (1971). Our Primitive Contemporaries. New York: Macmillan, p. 34.

62 Frazer, James George (1963). The Dying God. New York: Macmillan, p. 180.

63 Murdock: Our Primitive Contemporaries (op. cit.), p. 34.

64 Spencer, Baldwin, F.J. Gillen (1904). The Northern Tribes of Central Australia. London: MacMillan & Co., p. 475.

65 Yengoyan, Aram (1972). “Biological and demographic components in aboriginal Australian socio-economic organization.” Oceania, 43: p. 88.

66 Roth, H. Ling (1899). The Aborigines of Tasmania. Halifax: King & Sons, pp. 162s.

67 Murdock: Our Primitive Contemporaries (op. cit.), p. 7.

68 Ritchie, Jane and James Ritchie (1979). Growing Up in Polynesia. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, p. 39.

69 Firth, Raymond (1983). Primitive Polynesian Economy. London: Routledge, p. 44.

70 Dibble, Sheldon (1839). History and General Views of the Sandwich Islands Mission. New York: Taylor & Dodd, p. 123.

71 Handy, E.S. and Mary Kawena Pukui (1958). The Polynesian Family System in Ka-’U, Hawaii. New Plymouth, New Zealand: Avery Press, p. 327.

72 Ritchie: Growing Up in Polynesia (op. cit.), p. 189.

73 Oliver, Douglas (1974). Ancient Tahitan Society. Honolulu: University Press of Hawii, Vol. I, p. 425.

74 Schrire, Carmel and William Lee Steiger (1974). “A matter of life and death: an investigation into the practice of female infanticide in the Artic.” Man: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, 9: p. 162.

75 Fridtjof, Nansen (1894). Eskimo Life. London: Longmans, Green & Co., p. 152.

76 Garber, Clark (1947). “Eskimo Infanticide.” Scientific monthly, 64: p. 98.

77 Langer: “Infanticide: a historical survey” (op. cit.), p. 354.

78 Balikci, Asen (1984), “Netslik,” in Damas, David, Handbook of North American Indians (Arctic), Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, p. 427.

79 Savishinsky, Joel and Hiroko Sue Hara (1981), “Hare,” in Helm, June, Handbook of North American Indians (Subarctic). Smithsonian Institution, p. 322. See also: Gillespie, Beryl (1981), “Mountain Indians,” in Helm, June, Handbook of North American Indians (Subarctic). Smithsonian Institution, p. 331.

80 Shimkin, Demitri, B. (1986), “Eastern Shoshone,” in D’Azevedo, Warren L., Handbook of North American Indians (Great Basin). Smithsonian Institution, p. 330.

81 Riddell, Francis (1978), “Maidu and Konkow,” in Heizer, Robert F., Handbook of North American Indians (California). Smithsonian Institution, p. 381.

82 Campbell, T.N. (1983), “Coahuitlecans and their neighbors,” in Ortiz, Alonso, Handbook of North American Indians (Southwest). Smithsonian Institution, p. 352.

83 Johnson, Orna (1981), “The socioeconomic context of child abuse and neglect in native South America,” in Korbin, Jill, Child Abuse and Neglect, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 63.

84 Cotlow, Lewis (1971). The Twilight of the Primitive. New York: Macmillan, p. 65.

85 de Meer, Kees, Roland Bergman and John S. Kushner (1993). “Socio-cultural determinations of child mortality in Southern Peru: including some methodological considerations.” Social Science and Medicine, 36: pp. 323, 328.

86 Hastings, James (1955). Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. NY: Scribner’s Sons, Vol. I, p. 6.

87 Bugos, Paul E. and Lorraine M. McCarthy (1984), “Ayoreo infanticide: a case study,” in Hausfater, Glenn and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Infanticide, Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives, New York: Aldine, p. 510.

 

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The objective of Day of Wrath is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next time I will reproduce the penultimate chapter. Day of Wrath will be available again in printed form.

Categories
Ancient Greece Child abuse Civilisation (TV series) Day of Wrath (book) Emigration / immigration Human sacrifice Infanticide Psychohistory Wikipedia

Day of Wrath, 18

What is redeemable in psychohistory?

The best introduction to the sane side of the deMausean thought available on the internet appears in the third part of the book The Emotional Life of Nations, especially in the final chapters: “The Evolution of Childrearing” and “The Evolution of Psyche and Society.” However, even in the following pages, where I would like to spare the salvageable part of deMause’s legacy, I will continue the criticism of his psychohistory.
 
Pseudoscientific charts
DeMause likes to interpolate ever-ascending charts on the historical treatment of children in his books, and even once he wrote that primitive humans treated their children better than our ape ancestors. I do not think that is true. The most terrible form of interactions between parents and children is the ritual sacrifice and cannibalism of one’s own children: a level of cruelty that has not been observed in primates other than man. Also, deMause assumes a gradual improvement in child treatment from 460 AD to approximately 1100 AD: an impossibility if we consider that we have no childrearing data around 8th century Europe. This mistake does not invalidate the salvageable part of deMause’s model: only the dogmatic idea that the treatment of children was always from worst to least bad.
In The History of Childhood deMause writes: “The image of Medea hovers over childhood in antiquity.” But in post-Homeric Greece it was already unusual to kill grown-up children as Medea did. The insistence on denigrating the Classical World is derived from the deMause’s dogma that childcare has always gone from worse to less bad, from major to minor abuse: the eternal upward charts in deMausean psychohistory. The prolific Jewish psychohistorian Robert Godwin, for example, emphatically dispatches the Greco-Roman world as barbarian in terms of upbringing. Once again: regarding the Jewish narrative versus the Aryan, in the next chapters we will see who were really the most barbaric.
One of the things that piqued my interest when I first encountered psychohistory was the secularized Judeo-Christian spirit breathed in it. DeMause and Godwin seem to reject the vision of the Enlightenment: to consider the Middle Ages darker than the most lucid moments of Greece and Rome. In contrast to deMause’s claims it does not seem likely at all that the Middle Ages was better as childrearing methods are concerned, or that Christendom was better compared to Pericles’ Athens or Republican Rome. In my own version of psychohistory, the Athenians should have treated the children well enough to allow the explosion of arts, philosophies and politics that we have inherited. However, due to the tenet that “the further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care,” deMause has blinded himself to see the obvious. True, an archaic ritual performed at Knossos by the non-Aryan natives included the cooking and eating of children as part of the fertility celebration (see the history on the white race by William Pierce in Who We Are). But as Ramón Xirau writes at the beginning of his Introducción a la Historia de la Filosofía, the Greece that we know is great precisely because it gave up such practices: something I’ve always related to the Hebrew story of Abraham, who at the last moment changed his mind as to sacrifice his child. The veracity of Xirau’s opening paragraph can be substantiated in the final chapter of the most erudite contemporary study on the subject, Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece by Dennis Hughes. To the Greeks of the time of Plato and Theophrastus, says Hughes, human sacrifice was a thing of the past; what was left in their time were isolated cases “and the custom is particularly associated with non-Greeks.”
Not only does the classical world refutes deMause. Julian Jaynes, the author of the book that could be classified as a different kind of psychohistory, implied that the cruel Assyrian law contrasted sharply with the Code of Hammurabi, written six centuries earlier. However, deMause might not err in his assessment of the West from the 12th century AD onward. One of my most memorable readings, based on the captivating television series by Kenneth Clark, was the second chapter of Civilisation about the “The Great Thaw” of Europe at the beginning of the 12th century, as well as the next chapter on courtly love: the West had invented love. The thaw was nothing other than the beginning to treat European women better than what non-westerners did in the rest of the world; hence the treatment of these women to their children changed. From the late 13th century begins the historical record of the death penalty in cases of voluntary infanticide. In addition to their relatively high IQ, psychogenically speaking the people of Europe would evolve more than the rest of the world.
But the white man of the present is suffering the worst psychosis in the history of the West. When by the end of 2008 I called deMause’s attention on the issue of the betrayal that the white man inflicts on himself with mass migration, I realized he knew nothing about the subject. This has led me to think that his chart that appears in his texts about the evolving historic personalities is flawed. DeMause puts there as inferior the psychoclass that has as its model the “patriotic” man compared to the “activist.” The truth is that patriots are precisely the ones who defend their nations against the greatest evil of our times: race replacement. Unlike the ivory tower where both deMause and the academics live, it appears that the recent Western self-treason represents the most serious, plummeting drop in psychogenesis since prehistory.
The case of deMause is aggravated by his Jewish colleagues who abhor not only the Classical World but the West in general: a position that has infected and corrupted his school of psychohistory since its inception. I have not been able to corroborate that deMause himself comes from a Jewish family, although the names he gave to his children, as well as his extreme aversion for the Third Reich, would seem to suggest it.
 
Shoddy scholarship
DeMause’s mistakes do not end with the discussion in previous pages. Since he sometimes uses his sources very loosely, the possibility exists that his psychohistory could consist of assumptions based on little, if any, evidence. I have found that occasionally deMause takes his data out of context, and that some of his pronouncements on subjects I know better contain serious errors. (For example, instead of the Mexica patron god, Huitzilopochtli, in his books he writes of him as an “Aztec goddess.”) Although such errors do not invalidate his theory, deMause could have used his sources more carefully.
So far the only interesting discussion about psychohistory I am aware of can be read in several discussion pages of Wikipedia. After Ark insulted the editors of the article mentioned above, he returned for a brief time to edit and discuss in the article “Infanticide.” In the discussion page Julie Hofmann Kemp, the editor whom Ark had insulted, responded to him and the other Wikipedia editors in a reasonable manner:

Problems with this. You’re using shoddy scholarship to try to back up an unprovable claim. DeMause provides no analysis or discussion of his sources, merely a catalog of horrific quotes. We cannot tell the context, nor can we take them as representative.

What Julie told Ark next is more substantial:

Anybody can go through books and pick out quotes to make an argument. Since deMause’s work is criminally lax in scholarship, I suggest you try to use better sources. I just reread “A Modest Proposal,” and could see absolutely nothing that referred to rotting corpses of babies in the streets. The only reference was to children accompanying their mothers begging. This certainly makes me question the veracity of other statements in this article.

Ark angrily replied that she could not accept the reality of infanticide because it was very uncomfortable for her. Julie responded:

No, Ark—I am fully aware that we live in a society where people do horrible things to children. I am also aware that this has long been the case. There are plenty of records out there for at least the Victorian area on things like the treatment of children in workhouses, and they clearly indicate widespread abuse of minors and women. I removed what I did [from the Wikipedia article] because I reread Swift and the deMause article you used as sources. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a lot of stuff quoted out of context. Some of the sources, like Philippe Ariès, I’ve read. If you want things to stay unchallenged, you’ve got to make sure they have recognizable merit. This is why I think we need to look beyond deMause. DeMause is only one of thousands of people writing on child abuse and infanticide. As a historian, I can see great gaping holes in deMause’s use of sources. It doesn’t make him wrong, but it certainly sets off warning bells—if the scholarship doesn’t stand up, then are the conclusions he draws really proven?

After further critical responses from other editors, quite reasonable and civic, Ark quit editing Wikipedia, and this time definitely, on my birthday of 2002. I agree that the way deMause has used the sources lacks academic rigor. However, if as Julie and others advised, it could be possible to source deMause’s model with non-deMausean references, the psychohistorical structure would be supported upon a new sort of column.
That is exactly what I did. In March and April of 2008 I massively edited “Infanticide,” the same article where years before Julie and Ark had discussed, adding a hundred references that I did not read in deMausean texts, but in a voluminous treatise of Larry S. Milner published in 2000. The model of the breakdown of the bicameral mind by surpassing the infanticidal psychoclass, is the cornerstone on which rests what remained of the psychohistorical building after my critique. Therefore, I will reproduce here what I added to that article, which I also translated for Wikipedia in Spanish. In my second book the critique of psychiatry contained such incredible facts that, unlike the other books, I was forced to include bibliographical notes. For the same reasons here I will do the same.
 
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The objective of Day of Wrath is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next month I will reproduce another chapter. Day of Wrath is available: here.

Categories
Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) Human sacrifice Latin America Mexico City Pre-Columbian America

Day of Wrath, 16

The Boasian regression

Human beings tend to idealize their parents and carry the burden of the sins of the world: Passover lambs for the unrecognized ills of the parent. This self-reproach for supposed wrongdoing is due to the perennial problem, still unresolved in our species, of the attachment to the perpetrator. The mantras the cultural relativist uses arguing with the psychohistorian is that it is unfair to judge an ancient culture with contemporary standards, or that in those times not even the sacrifice of infants was considered wicked. As Ark pointed out above, this standpoint rationalizes the perpetrator’s behavior at the expense of the victim. It is a no-brainer that it must have been as infernal for a historic boy that his father delivered him to the priests to be incinerated alive, as a parent who burns his child’s face to the point of completely disfiguring him, as we read in the most alarming paper news. In other words, psychohistory is based upon the empathy to the children of all times. The unconscious motivation of many anthropologists, on the other hand, has been to exonerate both the parents of former ages and the non-western cultures of today.
Anthropologists defend the validity of any culture and negate an absolute evaluation unless it is done within the standards of that culture. It was not always so. In the nineteenth century the opposite school dominated British anthropology. Anthropologists argued, in a similar vein to contemporary psychohistorians, that all societies passed through the same evolutionary process, and that non-Europeans were living fossils that could be studied to understand Europe’s past, categorizing the diverse cultures in a progressive set of values from savage, barbarian to civilized. Universal progress was postulated: a sort of unilineal set of values where religion and paleologic thought gave up ground to Aristotelian logic and rational thought, with the subsequent development of social institutions. The difference of this model with psychohistory is that these first anthropologists did not use childrearing as a parameter, but technology from the Stone Age to the modern age, passing through the Iron and Bronze Ages.
The Jewish-German immigrant Franz Boas, the “father” of American anthropology, managed to shift the paradigm. Boasian anthropology considered erroneous the premise that religion had to be defined, historically, more primitive than reason (the opposite to what Arieti says about his schizophrenic patients: that paleologic thought should be considered inferior to the Aristotelian). Boasian relativism resists universal judgments of any kind. All of the work by Boas and his disciples began as a direct opposition to the evolutionary perspective, and with time it became an orthodoxy. Although in the United States there was an attempt to revive the evolutionist ideas in the 1950s and 60s, eventually anthropologists subscribed the ideology of cultural relativism: a school that in the academy became, more than an orthodoxy, axiomatic; and its proponents, staunch supporters of non-western cultures. This relativism, with its vehement phobia to “western ethnocentrism” did not only become the most influential anthropology school originated in the United States, but the dogmatic principle of this international discipline.
In its most extreme version it even considers legitimate, say, the cutting of the clitoris in Africa. A principle that, for the popular mind, apparently originated as a tolerant attitude is being used to find excuses for intolerance. In fact, since the declarations of the anthropologist Melville Jean Herskovits by the end of the 1940s, his colleagues left the political debates of human rights. The anthropologist has great difficulties to fight for the rights of, say, the black women in South Africa. The 1996 team-work Growing Up: A Cross-cultural Encyclopedia, where dozens of anthropologists offered their studies about eighty-seven cultures, is symptomatic. Although they admit that sexual contacts between adults and children are common, including those of the incestuous mothers, they declare that it “would not constitute ‘abuse’ if in that society the behavior was not proscribed.” However, as the academic who sympathized with Ark said, not all anthropologists agree with Boas. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban confessed that, after twenty-five years of having conducted ethnological research in Sudan, she betrayed her profession by siding those who fight against female genital cutting. She mentioned the case of a Nigerian woman who was granted asylum in the United States since her daughter would have been subjected to involuntary cutting if returning home. The compulsion to recreate on the next generation the wounds received in infancy is such that in our times genital mutilation continues. Despite their theoretical statements to the public, in practice many ethnologists, anthropologists and indigenistas still cling to the Boasian paradigm.
A single example will illustrate it. Keep in mind “A reliable source” published some pages ago. In September of 2007 the Museo del Templo Mayor, a subsidiary of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, organized a seminary in Mexico under the name “New Perspectives on Human Sacrifice Among the Mexicas.” Twenty-eight specialists were invited. According to the national press the Mexican archeologist Leonardo López Luján, who would coordinate the proceedings book of the papers (reviewed in the 2017 “A reliable source”), stated that it was advisable to distance ourselves “from the Hispanists who consider bloody and savage” the sacrificial practice. López Luján presented the paper “Huitzilopochtli and the Sacrifice of Children in Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor” (the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan). Among the professionals from abroad who participated were institutions such as Cambridge and the French National Center for Scientific Research. The Mexican Juan Alberto Román presented the conference, “The Role of Infants in the Mexica Sacrificial Practices,” and in a pseudo-eugenicist discourse López Luján stated: “Undernourished children [my emphasis] were sacrificed to eliminate the population that was a burden for the society.” (Cf. what Ark responded to the historian about administering pap to the child: a slow form of infanticide that suggest they were not undernourished accidentally.) Marie-Areti Hers, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico— a campus that the UNESCO declared a World Heritage Site the very week that the symposium was celebrated—, stated that human sacrifice was everything except “an exotic curiosity of backward peoples.”
I contacted Julieta Riveroll, the reporter who covered the event for Reforma and author of the article “Human Sacrifice Prejudices—Demolished.” I asked her if among the speakers of the conferences she attended someone condemned the deadly ritual. Emphatically she responded “No,” that they were “objective experts.” I mention the anecdote because that word, “objective” is the most abused word in academic circles, as we already saw in one of the answers of the academics to Ark. Let us imagine that, among the reporters of the Gulag, to keep objectivity they must refrain from condemning genocide. This does not happen: Stalin’s regime is broadly condemned. But the double standard of allowing condemnation of the white man and virtually forbidding condemning non-whites, is brazen. The month that followed the symposium, in the same Mexico City where the symposium was celebrated the police caught the serial killer José Luis Calva, the “cannibal poet” that horrified the Mexican citizenry. In one of his poems Calva wrote to one of his victims a poem worthy of the ancient Mexicans:
You handed over your parts to me
Your breath, your nails and your longings.
You dressed me of you and I was your bird,
Sing your song that never quiets.

Naturally, unlike the Mexicas who did exactly the same, this man was condemned by the elites.
On the other side of the Atlantic the Europeans deform reality too. In 2008 I visited the museum and archaeological park Cueva Pintada in the town Gáldar of Gran Canaria. The screened documental in the museum denoted the purest Manichaeism. Despite recognizing the widespread infanticide of girls among the tribes, the conquerors appear as the bad guys and the inhabitants of the troglodyte settlement as the noble savages victimized by the sixteenth-century Europeans. Similarly, in another museum, El Museo Canario, the following year I looked up through an academic text the subject of infanticide of these pre-Hispanic white people (curiously, they were blonder than the Spanish but they were barely leaving behind the Neolithic stage). Just as the mentioned María Alba Pastor who saw in the Mexican sacrifices “a reaction to the Conquest,” three Spanish academics postulated that the Canary sacrifice could have been the consequence “of the ongoing military, religious and cultural aggression” inflicted by the conquerors.[1] This interpretation ignores the fact that the practice predated the arrival of the Spaniards.
Unlike these documentaries and academic papers that blame westerners for the sins of non-westerners, I will quote one of the first letters written about the practice of infanticide in the seven Canary Islands. The following description comes from Diego Gómez de Cintra, a Portuguese navigator that wrote what he saw in La Palma:

The father and the mother grab the child and put the head on a rock and take another rock and hit the child on the head shattering the skull, and thus they kill the child, his eyes and brains scattered on the soil, which is a great cruelty of the parents.

Conversely, on page 166 of the mentioned article contemporary academics side the parents by claiming, “The adoption of such an extreme measure is fully justified.”
As Terry Deary put it, “History can be horrible, but historians can sometimes be horribler.” Once the new generations break away from this immoral anthropology, the slaughtering of children will be seen, again, with due compassion as felt by the first chroniclers.
In the case of Mestizo America (and this is important to understand the organizers of the 2007 symposium), the “Latin” American anthropologists were the first ones to embrace the cause of cultural relativism. In fact, the anthropologists have influenced more the society in “Latin” America than in other societies. This is partly explained by the ethnological tradition of Bernardino de Sahagún and Bartolomé de Las Casas. In the twentieth century the study and the glorification of the Indian cultures, called indigenismo, has been the predominant framework of anthropological studies in so-called Latin America. In the particular case of Mexico, since 1917 the government was the first one to recognize the utility of anthropology. Subsequently, and working for the government, anthropologists have tried to implement their policies on the Indian population.
No doubt, deMause and Ark are right about the intellectual charlatanry that represents social anthropology.
NOTE:
[1] Julio Cuenca Sanabria, Antonio Betancor Rodríguez & Guillermo Rivero López: “La práctica del infanticidio femenino como método de control natal entre los aborígenes canarios: las evidencias arqueológicas en Cendro, Telde, Gran Canaria,” El Museo Canario, LI, 1996, p. 124. Fifty pages later the authors repeat this interpretation. In spite of the fact that the long title takes for granted that the etiology of the practice was “birth control,” the same article publishes sentences from some authors who cast doubts about the validity of that explanation.
 

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The objective of Day of Wrath is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next month I will reproduce another chapter. Day of Wrath is available: here.

Categories
Day of Wrath (book) Human sacrifice Infanticide Lloyd deMause Philosophy of history Psychology

Day of Wrath, 14

Psychohistory

 

Perspective
Lloyd deMause has written that his scholarly life brought him to one conclusion: the history of mankind is founded in the abuse of children. His greater finding is that the central force of change in history is not the economy, but the psychogenic changes that occur due to the parental-filial interactions in successive generations. These changes are the result of the parents’ capabilities, especially the mothers, to experience inwardly previous traumas and sparing the next generation of children. The process ensues in an evolutive mutation of the inner space of human groups. DeMause goes as far as claiming that most forms of violence, from crime to mental disorders, are ultimately the consequence of abuses during childhood. In the article “The evolution of childhood reconsidered” Henry Ebel wrote:

DeMause’s argument had a breath-taking sweep and grandeur such as we associate with the work of Hegel, Darwin and Marx. Moreover, it seemed to be a valid response and interpretation of a series of gruesome facts that had been consistently understated or suppressed by conventional historians… “The Evolution of Childhood” has proved a morsel too large, too complete, too assertive, and in many ways too grim for the historical profession to digest… Since adult styles and roles, including the academic and professional, are mainly denial-systems erected against those early needs and terrors, the academic consideration of deMause’s argument has been, understandably enough, of less than earthshaking intelligence.

As terrible as being prisoner in a concentration camp may be, it cannot be compared to seeing that our parents themselves, with whom we are infinitely attached, destroy the head of one of our siblings, as did the tribes of the Canary Islands before they were conquered (as we will see). Throughout prehistory and history parents have committed more injurious crimes for the health of the human soul than the crimes committed during the genocides of the 20th century. But the current zeitgeist only allows us to judge the West. In a TV documentary I watched how a black tribesman grabbed a boy to sacrifice him. The anthropologist that studied the tribe did not intervene. Had this happened in the West, it would have raised indignation. For example, a pervert that was about to rape a little girl before his internet audience was detected through his I.P. address and the police rescued the girl. On the other hand, in the case of the tribes the anthropologists never rescue the children during passage rituals such as the Sambia, where New Guinea boys have to fellate the adults.
When we think about the implications of psychohistory we should bear in mind that the cannibalism of the bone and stone ages was much more common than previously thought. Also, from 3000 to 2500 B.C., before the psychogenic mutation that gradually left bicameralism behind, the people of the Mediterranean Basin and of Finland ate the flesh of the deceased. Moreover, the Mesoamerican mythology of the great transgression by some gods to create life without parental consent exemplifies what Ivan Strenski has pointed out in his book Contesting Sacrifice: originally all cultures had at its basis universal guilt, and thus require of purification rituals to repair the broken bond with the divinity.
For identical psychological impairments of the Amerindians, a huge quantity of human sacrifices was perpetrated at the other side of the Atlantic: in China, Chad, Egypt, Tahiti and even in the Greco-Roman world. Diverse societies in India, Indonesia, Melanesia, Filipinas, the Amazons and many others continued with their terrible practices before they were colonized. During the pre-classic times of Mesoamerica the ancient Spartans offered sacrifices to Agrotera. Rome practiced several forms of human sacrifice until they were abolished by senatorial decree. The circus races of the Coliseum represented a less barbarous form of sacrifice since, unlike their neighbors, it was not done with one’s own children. The Romans spearheaded the most advanced psychoclass of their times. When Scipio Africanus took Numantia, the Romans found mothers with half-devoured bodies of their children. Celts and Druids also practiced human sacrifices. The Gauls built hollow figures that, with people alive, were burnt. Gaul was conquered by Caesar. Rome’s victory over the Carthaginians in the Punic Wars was a milestone of a superior psychoclass over the inferior one. The sacrifices to the Phrygian god Attis consisted in choosing a young man who was treated like a king for a year only to be sacrificed. Were it not for the fact that the Mexica sacrifice was so splendorous, I would say that the young man who immolated himself for Tezcatlipoca was identical to the Phrygian sacrifice. In our times, among the forms that arguably could be described as sacrificial we could include rituals such as Cuban santería or Indian tantrism. More shocking is the sacrifice known as sati in the most retrograde areas of India, where the custom dictates that the widow throws herself to the funeral pyre of her deceased husband. At the moment of writing, the last of these cases was reported in October of 2008 in Kasdol in the district of Raipur.
The culture that the Europeans brought included family violence. But unlike them, in the conquered people the anxieties that the children arose, based in turn on the abuses the natives had suffered as children, were enough to kill the source that triggered the anxiety. Children have been the garbage bin where the adults dump the unrecognized parts of their psyches. It is expected that the child bin will absorb the ill moods of his custodians to prevent that the adult feels overwhelmed by her anxieties. If I kill the soul of my daughter I thus kill the naughty girl that once inhabited me.
It is interesting to note that according to deMause it is the mother, with her own hands, the perpetrator of most cases of infanticide: be by strangulation or by physical punishment. In this book I wrote about my female ancestors [omitted in this translation]. For deMause the crucial relationship in psychogenic evolution is the relationship between mother and daughter. If the girls are abused without helping witnesses, they will grow as adults incapable of feeling their pain. Since trauma demands repetition, they will traumatize the next generation, stalling all potential for psychogenic growth. DeMause exemplifies it with the mistreatment of women in Islamic countries and in China.
Since 1974, the year of deMause’s seminal essay, a fair amount of academic material about infanticide has been published. According to Larry Milner, since pre-history thousands of millions of infants have been killed by their parents (the bibliographical references on these incredible claims appear by the end of this chapter). Likewise, Joseph B. Birdsell estimates infanticidal rates between 15-50 percent of the total number of children born since prehistoric times. Laila Williamson’s estimates are lower: 15-20 percent. As we shall see, this kind of statistics appears time and again in the writings of other researchers. Although Milner is not a psycho-historian, he wonders why such data have not received its due place in the departments of history, anthropology and sociology.
This is a blindspot that will be studied in the rest of the book.
 
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The objective of Day of Wrath is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next month I will reproduce another chapter. Day of Wrath is available: here.

Categories
Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) Evil Human sacrifice Mayas Pre-Columbian America

Day of Wrath, 13


A reliable source

El Sacrificio Humano en la Tradición Religiosa Mesoamericana [Human Sacrifice in the Mesoamerican Religious Tradition]. Mexico City, Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia & Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas. ISBN 978-607-484-076-6. OCLC 667990552. (Spanish)

In the previous section, written in 2007, I did not include academic references so that I would have a more lyrical text. However, on November 26, 2013, those in charge of the library at Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology (MNA) allowed me to take out from the library, and photocopy on the street, a sold-out book in the market that I had tried for years to get. Even before it was published, since 2007 I had made constant telephone inquiries, to the people in charge of the Museo del Templo Mayor, about the manuscript that would be published.
El Sacrificio Humano en la Tradición Religiosa Mesoamericana is an academic treatise authored by 28 scholars on the subject of pre-Columbian sacrifice: Mexican, European and American archeologists, historians and anthropologists. Finally published in 2010, it is a reliable source to validate what I wrote in the previous pages. In addition to the sources I already knew, El Sacrificio Humano includes some new archeological and taphonomic evidence to corroborate the 16th century claims of the Spaniards about Amerind infanticide, sacrifice and cannibalism. (Taphonomy is the study of decaying organisms over time, including fossil bones.)
Of course: the Mexicans who coordinated the publishing of this major work are politically-correct scholars. There is nothing remotely comparable to “Sahagún’s exclamation” in any of the 598 pages of their treatise. The rationale for the omission can be gathered from the three prefaces to this collaborative work by the director of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (“Accepting the reality of the sacrificial practices in ancient Mexico does not mean to rule in favor or against them”); those who coordinate the MNA (“…the Hispanist fundamentalism that sees only the most barbaric aspects of this practice”), and the director of the Institute of Historical Research of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (“…among the non-specialist public often circulates reductionist ideas about it [the Mesoamerican sacrifice]… the papers presented here allow a more accurate and nuanced approach” —this, and the other translations, are mine). Take note that these three persons and the Mexican and non-Mexican anthropologists and historians that contributed with academic papers to El Sacrificio Humano don’t deny the facts about what the pre-Hispanic Amerinds did. What contemporary academics do is abstaining from value judgments about such practices, a subject analyzed in the next section.
In one of the first chapters after the above-mentioned prefaces of the book, the archeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma presents the archeological evidence of sacrificial rituals: skeleton remains of the victims, stony bases for the sacrifice, the instruments used in the immolations, and more. About it, Leonardo López Luján, the main coordinator of the book, acknowledges in the very first chapter as “having their referents in the historical sources from the 16th century.” This scholar is thus acknowledging that what the Spanish chroniclers saw and recorded in the 16th century is now being corroborated by taphonomy and archeology. López Luján of course uses an artificial passive voice, “fueron muertos” instead of the natural “los mataron” (they killed them) in that introductory chapter when writing about the sacrificial victims.
In this postscript of the second chapter, I will summarize some of the facts that the scholars of the treatise offer about how the natives behaved before any substantial contact with the Europeans.
El Sacrificio Humano sheds light on the remains photographed by Héctor Montaño (see the photo in “Sahagún’s exclamation” in this book): a child offering to Huitzilopochtli that Montaño kindly sent me. The piece “Huitzilopochtli and child sacrifice in the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan” by López Luján, Ximena Chávez Balderas, Norma Valentín and Aurora Montúfar (pages 367-394) contains a fascinating section under the heading “Huitzilopochtli: an infant deity?” Elsewhere in the same article the authors say:

Everything indicates that this deposit is the material expression of a mass sacrificial ceremony motivated by the devastating drought of year 1 Tochli, corresponding to our 1454 C.E. and reported in a number of Indian annals. The presence of the Offering 48 in the northwest corner of the Temple fully corresponds with the documentary sources of the 16th century [pages 367-368].

Then he corroborates something I have already said in previous chapters:

During such ceremonies [to Tláloc], subject to the calendar or performed in times of crisis, children were symbolically similar to the dwarfs and deformed assistants of rain, as their profuse tears shed when immolated served as a hopeful omen of abundant precipitation. The careful study recently published by Michel Graulich about human sacrifice among the Mexicas indicates that, usually, the chosen children were given away or sold by their parents,

I interrupt the sentence and added italics because this passage refutes very directly the plot of La Santa Furia of my father, as we will see in more detail in ¿Me Ayudarás?, the next book of this trilogy.

little slaves offered by the lords and wealthy people; infants purchased out of town, or children of prisoners of war. There are indications, moreover, that the kings and lords to some extent responsible for the smooth running of the meteors destined their own offspring to the téhcatl during droughts or floods, or to get rich harvests [pages 368 & 370].

The article includes taphonomic analysis on numerous cut marks on the ribs of both sides of the rib cage, as well as perimortem fractures produced by the same cutting action on the child’s body.

In our view, this body of evidence is sufficient to conclude that the child of Offering 111 died during a sacrificial ceremony in which his tiny heart was extracted [page 378].

Once again, the following passage gives the lie to the plot of the musical oratorio of my father in honor of Las Casas, which is based on a historical inversion of the parental-filial relations before the arrival of the Spaniards:

Not all child sacrifices were linked to the gods of rain and fertility. Some historical documents reveal that people who were in situations of adversity, or had lost their freedom, or had been suffering a terrible disease, promised to give their children in exchange for their salvation. In other cases, the life of infants was claimed just before the military confrontations [pages 381-382].

In the following pages of the treatise the authors mention the Spanish chroniclers as complementary sources of what recent archeology has discovered, for example the texts by Francisco López de Gómara, Antonio Tello, Diego Durán, and Bernardino de Sahagún. And on page 345 another scholar lets us know that some children’s remains of sacrificial offerings have been recently excavated in what is left of the Great Pyramid; in other sacred edifices, and even beneath Mexico City’s cathedral.
In their article, “El Sacrificio Humano en la Parte Central del Área Maya,” pages 169-193 of El Sacrificio Humano, Stephen Houston and Andrew Scherer write:

Both supplicants offer the enthroned figures an object named “his foot,” yook, perhaps referring to the wooden scaffolding that stands in the stele of Yaxhá. The link to the fires is made clear with the presence of the inflammatory base behind the scaffold. Unlike other sacrificed children, the infant appears to be alive.

In addition to the image reproduced in El Sacrificio Humano, see also the illustration at the [top of this blog entry].

As in several Mesoamerican societies, the image of a supernatural act can function as a basic model for the dynastic rituals. There is a parallel in the evidence of the sacrifice by fire, a torture with fatal goals, applied by a god on the back of another…
The presence of infants over the plates, especially in contexts of way [Mayan word] or co-essences of Maya rulers, indicates that this is a special “food.” Usually, the way was very different food from the food of human beings with emphasis on hands, eyes, bones, and in this case, the soft bodies of children.

On page 182 the authors discuss other Maya sacrifices:

The presence of women and children indicates that these individuals were not enemy combatants and strongly suggests a sacrificial context, perhaps a sacrifice of wider political significance.
Several skulls of Colhá show marks of sharp and unhealed cuts, particularly around the eye sockets, which suggests that some of these individuals were flayed, either shortly before or after death. The skinning of the face supports the iconographic images of beheading showing substantial mutilation, particularly of the eyes. Although it is likely that much of this occurred post-mortem, we must ask whether at least some of these traumas were inflicted before death to maximize the suffering of those about to be executed.

The Mayas were not the only serial killers of children in Mesoamerica. In the opening paragraph of “El Sacrificio Humano en el Michoacán Antiguo” Grégory Pereira says that Tariácuri, the founder of the empire of the Purépecha culture that flourished in the Postclassic period, congratulates destiny when learning that his own son would be sacrificed (page 247). This of course reminds me what Nezahualcóyotl did, recounted above. Pereira cites the Spanish Relación de Michoacán as a credible source about how the Michoaque people behaved before the arrival of the Spaniards.
The Relación states that part of the captives such as old people and children were sacrificed by extraction of the heart right on the spot of the battle, and that “the bodies of these victims were cooked and consumed at the same place.”
El Sacrificio Humano is a large book, 27 x 21 centimeters in order to provide a very comfortable view of the many images it contains. On page 254 Pereira reproduces a diagram showing a skeleton with points showing the impact of the rib cut to reach the heart during those sacrifices, and he adds that those who performed the ritual were called opítiecha or “holders” who grabbed the extremities of the victim. He adds:

Once slaughtered and decapitated, the dismembered body was in the house of the priests and the various parts offered up to the gods and eaten by the priests and lords. Those who were killed at the scene of the conflict were eaten by the victors… After the cannibal feast, the bones of the slaughtered apparently were gathered and preserved in the house of the priests.

On the next page Pereira includes an illustration of the Relación depicting the consumption of human flesh. Later, on page 262, the author reveals that Tariácuri also ordered the killing of another of his sons, Tamapucheca, as punishment for having escaped being sacrificed. Then Pereira recounts that on the day following the sacrifice, they “wore the skin of the slaughtered in a dance, and for five days got drunk.” That is, the cadavers were skinned so that the priests could wear the skin as clothes. About the symbolism of the sacrificial institution, on page 466 Guilhelm Oliver corroborates what I said many pages ago:

In describing these ceremonies, Sahagún’s informants (Florentine Codex, II-54) provide us with an extremely important piece of information: “Whoever has a captive cannot eat the flesh of his captive. He said, how could I eat myself? When capturing a captive he said my dear son and the captive said, my dear father.” This fundamental text expresses the identity between the warrior and his captive…

Once this important work is printed again, those who are skeptical about the factual accuracy of what I said in the previous chapters could obtain a copy of the book. As I said, it is heavily illustrated and has the imprimatur of the most respected historical institutions of Mexico.
 
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The objective of Day of Wrath is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next month I will reproduce another chapter. Day of Wrath is available: here.

Categories
Amerindians Aztecs Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) Evil Human sacrifice Incas Mayas Psychohistory Spain

Day of Wrath, 12

The return of Quetzalcoatl

If until recently westerners represented the zenith of civilization in the world, presently New Guineans and the headhunters of Munduruku in Brazil represent the nadir. The psychoclass of the poorest strata of Latin America lies at the middle of both extremes.
In contrast to most nations, Mexico City gave her name to the modern country. It was founded by the Tenochcas when a voice ordered them to establish themselves on the lake that they had arrived, “as the unembodied bicameral voices led Moses zigzagging across the Sinai desert.” It cannot be more symbolic that the Coat of Arms of Mexico, which they so much shoved under my nose at school, is an eagle perched upon a prickly pear cactus devouring a snake in one of the lake islets that the ancient Tenochcas recognized. It was an odd place to found a city, but the punishing voices had to be obeyed. We can deduce from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind that the buildings erected at the center of a community, such as the temple of Huitzilopochtli on the Texcoco Lake, were located where the guides listened the damned voices. (The etymology of the island of Mexico on the lake would be “navel of the maguey” or “of the Moon.”) If we now relate not only Jaynes to Arieti but also a passage of my first book about a patient diagnosed with schizophrenia, the puzzle starts to take shape. I have in mind a woman [Maya Abbott] that, because her parents always tried to think for her, suffered from auditory hallucinations and confessed to Laing: “I don’t think, the voices think.” Unlike this sort of psychological analyzing—God forbid!—, some historians try to make amends for the pre-Columbian Indians. More disturbing is to see a friend taking offence about our compassion. The psychoanalyst Jenny Pavisic once addressed me severely: “And who are you to condemn the sacrifices?” referring to child sacrifices in Mesoamerica.
The Tlatelolcan ceremonial show-ground and its surrounding neighborhoods have been excavated for archeological purposes. I have seen photographs of bone fragments of 41 sacrificed victims in the excavation of the terraces of the Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl temple, of which 30 were little children. Just as Pavisic, many people are capable of condemning the 1968 massacre of students in Tlatelolco, but never the child sacrifices perpetrated exactly on the same place. In April of 2007 bones were found of twenty-four sacrificed children to Tláloc in Tula, the capital of the Toltec civilization, dated 950-1150 AD according to a newspaper report that circulated the world. The children had been decapitated. If we remember that the intention was to avert an environmental crisis in that way, it should not surprise us that Mesoamerican civilizations disappeared even before the conquest. The sacrifices represented the distaff that moved the fabric of that culture, and a society as psychologically dissociated that had sacrifices on its basis was condemned to random disappearance. It is as if a civilization was composed of the self-harming women in the Colin Ross clinic and of male serial killers.
The iconic example of civilization disappearance is the abandonment by the Mesoamericans of their great cities, as is the case of the Mayas of the ninth century AD. From the climatic register, ice analysis in Greenland and mud of the subsoil of a lagoon in Maya areas it can be deduced that they suffered a serious draught. To deal with the draughts, just as their Mexica successors sacrificed the flower of their youth in face of external crises, from the bone register of about thirty sacrificed men, women and children it is deduced that the Mayas tried to appease the gods that had betrayed them. Had they arrived to the level of Aristotelian thought they would not have attempted to solve the problem by killing even more of their folk, and hardly would the draughts had been so apocalyptic for their civilization. Let us not forget that sudden desertion of the cities also occurred in Teotihuacan and Tula. Julian Jaynes comments:

I also think that the curious inhospitable sites on which Maya cities were often built and their sudden appearance and disappearance [my emphasis] can best be explained on the basis that such sites and movements were commanded by hallucinations which in certain periods could be not only irrational but downright punishing.

The whys of the periodic collapse of the Mesoamerican civilizations starts to be discerned if we consider that the demographic load of a prosperous Indian city sooner or later enters a critical phase that confronts the bicameral Diktat of the dominant theocracy. It is illustrative that when Egypt suffered a draught around 2100 B.C. absolutely all authority collapsed: the Egyptian people fled the towns and the literary sources of the time remind me the apocalyptic passages of a synoptic gospel. While Egyptologists struggle to explain the “why,” Jaynes compares it with the Maya catastrophe. The Mayas suffered a massive civilizational regression by going back to the jungle. He also compares it with the collapse of Assyria in 1700 B.C. that lasted two hundred years and that no historian quite understands. Jaynes also argues that the mystery is dissipated if we see it as a psychogenic leap. The bicameral societies are more susceptible to collapse once the gods refuse to talk; this is to say, once man overcomes his schizophrenic stage, so overwhelmed with auditory hallucinations. The collapse of the bicameral society is but the resulting chaos of the transit to consciousness. In Egypt, Assyria and other cultures of the Ancient World the birth of a schizoid psychoclass out of a schizophrenic one (Laing magnificently describes the difference between schizoid and schizophrenic in The Divided Self) represented a formidable threat for the status quo. “Disorders and social chaos had of course happened before,” writes Jaynes, “but such a premeditated mutiny and parricide of a king is impossible to imagine in the god-obedient hierarchies of the bicameral age.”
 
Political correctness
The rupture of the bicameral age resulted in the greatest collision of consciousness that a society could endure. But unlike the people in the Old World, those in the New World were incapable of carrying out such intrapsychic metamorphosis. The reading of Jaynes’ book seems to suggest that the Mesoamerican world of the sixteenth-century still was bicameralized in a way that had already been overcome at the other side of the ocean. In other words, the Mesoamericans suffered from the stagnation that in psychohistory is called psychogenic arrest.
The Amerindians got what they deserved. But presently, who condemns the ancient dwellers of the Americas? In a politically correct world it cannot be said that the infanticidal pre-Hispanics were psychologically dissociated; that the military theocracy was composed of serial killers, or that they were morally inferior to us. But the moralists were not always muzzled. In the colorful Spanish of his time, Bernal wrote a chapter, “How the Indians of all New Spain had many Sacrifices and Clumsiness that We Took Them Away and Imposed on Them the Saintly Things of Good Doctrine.” Bernal’s cheekiness does not cease to fascinate me: and it is pathetic that, half a millennium later, compared to those soldiers the historians, ethnologists and anthropologists of today have psychogenically regressed. I will illustrate it with the other pre-Hispanic empire.
Communication between Mesoamericans and the Andean people was sporadic. Just as the Mayas, the Incas deformed the craniums of the babies; some scholars believe to demarcate different ethnic groups of the Inca empire. The torments on childhood started since the first day. The newborn was washed with cold water, covered and placed in a hole made in the ground that would be used as a simple playpen. At five the child was nationalized by a theocratic state that, like the Mexica, was governed by strict hierarchies. And just as in Mesoamerica, the ritual murder of children was carried out in several Andean societies.
In November of 1999 National Geographic published an article with several photographs of mummies perfectly preserved at 6,700 meters above the sea level: the highest archaeological site of the world. Those were children that had been voluntarily given by their parents to be killed: an eight-year-old boy and two girls. “The Inca,” says the article, “obtained children from throughout the empire [for sacrifice] and rewarded their families with positions or goods.” In some cases the parents themselves accompanied the child in her journey to immolation. In conjunction with other barbaric forms of childrearing, the practice formed the bicameral minds that would be an all-too-easy prey for Pizarro (who in Spain had been a swineherd). The chroniclers wrote about those sacrifices. Nevertheless, with the perennial excuse that “Winners write history” in some Latin American circles the myth was created that the chroniclers’ stories were mythical. The discovery of the mummies by the end of the century confirmed the authenticity of the Spanish stories that the children were buried alive, or killed by a blow to the head, which is how according to the autopsy they killed one of the girls.
However, just as Bolivian nationalists such as Pavisic angrily ask “And who are you to condemn the sacrifices?,” the National Geographic article is a disgrace. The author, Johan Reinhard, is afraid to judge the parents and the society that produced them. He idealizes them in the most servile way, thus betraying the memory of the children. Reinhard wrote overt falsehoods about the Amerindians, for example, “the Inca were not the brutal conquerors the Spaniards were.” He writes that on the same page in which he asserted that the Inca rewarded the parents who offered their children for sacrifice. Reinhard also wrote, euphemistically, “right after she died” referring to one of the sacrificed girls instead of the natural “right after they killed her.” And when he mentions that the chroniclers reported that others were buried alive, he hastened to add: “The Llullaillaco children, however, have benign expressions.” More offensive are the photograph headings at the beginning and the end of the article: “Go Gently” referring to the pubescent girl that was found in fetal position buried in a hole, and “Eternity Bound” referring to the sacrifice of the three children in general. And the fact that the sacrificial site was found at the top of the mountain makes Reinhard exclaim: “The conditions only increased my respect for what the Inca had accomplished.”
In the next chapter I will approach the subject of the intellectual aberration known as cultural relativism, of which Reinhard and many other academics are distinguished exponents. Suffice it to say that the ethnologists and anthropologists are a lost cause. Our only hope lies in that another generation replaces those who presently occupy academic chairs. How I wish that the younger minds learned something about psychohistory; for example, that they became interested in the greatest adventure of the world by reading the Bernal Díaz story up to the arrival of the Spaniards to Tenochtitlan.

And I must tell how in this town of Tlaxcala we found wooden houses furnished with gratins, full of Indian men and women imprisoned in them, being fed up until they were fat enough to be sacrificed and eaten. The prisons we broke open and destroyed and set free the prisoners who were in them, and these poor Indians did not dare to go to any direction, only to stay there with us and thus escape with their lives. From now on, in all the towns that we entered, the first thing our Captain ordered us was to break open these prisons and set free the prisoners.
These prisons are common throughout the land and when Cortés and all of us saw such great cruelty he was very angry with the Caciques of Tlaxcala, and they promised that from that time forth they would not eat and kill any more Indians in that way. I said of what benefit were all those promises, for as soon as we turned our heads they would commit the same cruelties. And let us leave it like that and tell how we were ordered to go to Mexico.

The indigenistas are dishonest people. In the book Toltecayotl Miguel León Portilla accepts that indigenous families usually abuse contemporary Indian women. But in that book León Portilla blames, incredibly, the Conquest for the current abuses by the male Indian to the female Indian. He then writes that “the situation of the pre-Hispanic Nahua woman highly differed from his condition today,” and to support his claim a few pages later he quotes a passage from those Nahua homiletics that León Portilla is so fond: “The little girl: little creature, little lovebird, oh so little, so tender, so well fed…” But in the same Toltecayotl chapter León Portilla also published an illustration of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis of a Mexica housewife that looks anything but happy. In absolute contrast to León Portilla, the Anonymous Conqueror wrote that there were no people in the world who had women in less esteem than the Mesoamericans. And in his most recent book, The Origins of War in Child Abuse, deMause wrote: “Aztec females were treated even worse than Islamic females.” It is indeed preposterous that the Spanish soldiers of the sixteenth century manifested better empathy for the victims of that culture than the scholars of today. But to understand the mestizo León Portilla it is pertinent to note that in Apologética Historia, written at the middle of the sixteenth century, Las Casas praised the Indian reprimands of parents to their children by calling them “sane, prudent and rational.” Las Casas even located such poisonous pedagogy above the teachings of Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras and even Aristotle.
The most recent treatise about the encounter between the Spanish and Mexican empires is Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés and the Fall of Old Mexico by Hugh Thomas. It catches the attention that, as a typical bienpensant, in the preface’s first paragraph Thomas candidly talks about the members of the two cultures without realizing that they belong to very distinct psychoclasses. On the next page Thomas writes about “compassion” as one of the virtues of the Mexica in spite of the fact that on the next line he sates that even the babies in arms were made to cry with brutality before sacrificing them! As to the treatment of women Thomas writes, dishonestly, that their position was at lest as comparable to the female Europeans of that age, although we perfectly know that European women were not deceived to be sacrificed, decapitated and skinned punctually according to rituals of the Aztec calendar. And the women who would not be sacrificed were not allowed to wear sandals, unlike their husbands. In the codexes the Indian females appear generally on their knees while the males are on sitting facilities (This reminds me that when visiting Chiapas in his youth, it shocked my father that Indian women wore obscure clothing: their humblest figures could not contrast more with the very colorful garments of the male Indians.) And we must remember the Indian costume of selling, and even giving as presents, their daughters. The same Malinali, later called equivocally Marina or “La Malinche,” Cortés’ right hand, had been sold by her mother to some traders from Xicallanco, who in turn had sold her to some Mayas who sold her to some Chontales, who offered her as a present to Cortés. Thomas even takes as historical the words of the chronicler in regard to Xicoténcatl II’s delegation when, after Xicoténcatl’s people suffered crushing defeats, he went into the Spanish camp with words that portray the treatment of the Indian woman by their own: “And if you want sacrifices, take these four women that you may sacrifice, and you can eat their flesh and their hearts. Since we don’t know how you do it we have not sacrificed them before you.” The study of Salvador de Madariaga about the conquest, published under the title Hernán Cortés (Macmillan, NY, 1941), precedes half a century Thomas’ study. Without the ominous clouds of cultural relativism that cover the skies of our times, in Madariaga’s study it is valid to advance value judgments.
Fortunately, not all of our contemporaries live under a clouded sky. In 2003 El País Semanal published a translation of an article by Matthias Schulz that described as “demonic” and “brutal” the Mesoamerican practice of human sacrifice. Schulz also called the Mexicas “bloodthirsty.” The politically-correct Mexican indigenistas rendered their garments. In July of that year the farthest leftist of the Mexican newspapers, La Jornada, jointly published a response. Eduardo Matos-Moctezuma blurted out that “mentalities such as Schulz’s are the ones who lend themselves, because of their closed mind, to slaughtering.” But Matos-Moctezuma did not deny the historicity of the Indians slaughtering their own folks. Professor María Alba Pastor, also quoted in La Jornada, offered an absolutely psychotic and dishonest explanation for the sacrifices: “Perhaps they were a reaction to the Conquest.” For Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Talking about cannibalism, Yólotl González, author of a book on Mesoamerican sacrifices, was not left behind: “Thus they gave a practical use to the dead bodies.” Take note that González does not deny the historicity of cannibalism. Her nonsense consists in her interpretation. The historian Guillermo Tovar manifested that Schulz’s text was “a Taliban Occidentalism, deprecating and oblivious of other traditions.” Mónica Villar, the director of Arqueología Mexicana, criticized what she called “disinformation” referring to Schulz’s statement that “no peoples had practiced human sacrifices in such dimensions.” Nevertheless, when the next issue of Arqueología Mexicana came out, the journal’s scholars did not refute Schulz. León Portilla responded with his favorite argument: that the Christianity that the Spaniards brought also had as its basis the sacrifice of a son, Jesus Christ. The veteran indigenista ignored the fact that precisely such theology represented a deflection from the filicide drive to a symbolic sublimation of it; and that the Roman Christian emperors and the Church’s fathers fought to banish the late forms of infanticide in the Early Middle Ages with the same zeal that conservatives fight abortion today. DeMause has profusely written on this transition and it is unnecessary to elaborate his ideas here. This is something so obvious that, in contrast to the sophisticated indigenistas, any child could understand: in Christendom parents did not sacrifice and cannibalize their children, and León Portilla’s argument is gross sophistry.
While Jacques Soustelle’s panegyric of the ancient Mexicans is stunning from the lyrical viewpoint, a closer reading of Daily Life of the Aztecs reveals its trappings. Soustelle wants us to believe that the lowest social strata of the Mexica civilization was represented by the slave, who according to him was highly more privileged than the European slave. The fallacy of his presentation consists in the fact that the Mexica slave could be sold and sacrificed. In the Tlatelolco market, the largest market of the Americas, slaves were sold tied by the neck to big sticks (as in the film Apocalypto). Moreover: the slave was not actually at the bottom of the social strata. Down there were the captives who, whether fatten for consumption or not, awaited their turn on the sacrificial stone.
But moralists like Schulz are not alone. In his post-scriptum to The Labyrinth of Solitude Octavio Paz wrote these words that I translate now:

Like those torture wheels that appear in Sade’s novels, the Aztec year was a circle of eighteenth months soaked wet with blood; eighteenth ways to die by being killed by arrows or by immersion in water or by cutting the throat or by flaying […]. On which religious and social aberration could a city of the beauty of Mexico-Tenochtitlan be the theater of water, stone and sky for a hallucinating funeral ballet? And for which obfuscation of the spirit nobody among us—I don’t have in mind the outworn nationalists but the scholars, the historians, the artists and the poets—want to see and accept that the Aztec World is one of the aberrations in history?

Bernal talks even more directly than Paz, more rosy-cheeked I would dare to say. The sacrifices he simply labels as “wicked things,” “great cruelties,” and the self-harming, “clumsiness.” The original Spanish prose is delicious when Bernal writes, for example, that Mesoamericans “had the habit of sacrificing their foreheads and the ears, tongues and lips, breasts and arms and their fleshy parts, and the legs and even their natural parts,” the genitals. Conversely, when Hugh Thomas mentions the cannibalism he does it cautiously, as if he does not want to cause any offence. Yet, the erudite and refined Sahagún, considered by León Portilla the first ethnologist of history, concurs with the soldier, as we saw with his exclamation (there are other exclamations of this sort in his encyclopedic work).
 
The feathered serpent
If the pre-Hispanic world was an aberration, as Paz says, that does not demerit their findings in mathematics and astronomy.
Although Quetzalcoatl harmed his leg and sprinkled blood out of his penis, he was the most humanitarian of the gods in the pre-Columbian pantheon. He never offered human blood to the gods. According to the legend, Tezcatlipoca counteracted Quetzalcoatl’s influence and regained social control by means of the dark side of the force, thus reestablishing the sacrifices in the great Toltec city. Quetzalcoatl fled away toward the East, from which the ulterior legend emerged that he would return from the Orient.
In 1978 I went once more to live some months to the house of my grandmother [this is related to my first book]: a very numinous and even happy stage that I would like to recount in another place. I became wrapped in Jung’s Man and his Symbols and some nights I walked to the park called Parque Hundido, which contains exact replicas of pre-Hispanic statuary. One night, alone and immersed in my thoughts as always during my adolescence, the pair of enormous replicas of feathered serpents at the park’s entrance caught my attention. It stroke me as an extraordinary intuition or divination from the collective unconscious, the fact that long before paleontology pre-Hispanics could have bequeathed us the perfect symbol of the missing link between the reptile and the bird. The two great feathered serpents of stone that I contemplated that fresh night in the park, way taller than me, were the same symbol of the caduceus: two serpents that long for their wings. Quetzal is feather in Nahua, and cóatl serpent, feathered serpent: symbol par excellence of transcendence. However hard I struggled those days to transcend myself it was impossible to arrive to my present psychogenic state, even though the unconscious drive was formidable.
That night I did not understand how come the symbol of quetzal-cóatl could be so clairvoyant, so accurate to describe human emergency in such an oneiric and perceptive way. Now, exactly thirty years later, I ask myself: Hadn’t the Europeans existed how long would have taken these people to give up their practices and pass on to a later form of infanticide (say, the exposure in Rome)?

The legend of Quetzalcoatl, that in its latest incarnation appears as a god of white skin, makes me think that the very first feathers for a psychogenic leap were already present in the New World before the arrival of the white man.
 
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The objective of the book is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next time I will reproduce another chapter. Those interested in obtaining a copy of Day of Wrath may visit: this artcle.

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Evropa Soberana (webzine) Human sacrifice Judaism Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site)

Apocalypse for whites • IV

by Evropa Soberana

 
Judea
The Jews, in many ways, were the exact antithesis of the Romans, but they had something in common with them: ritual rigidity and loyalty to customs. In the Jewish case, the character was tinged with certain fanaticism, dogmatism and intransigence. The Romans considered such religiosity sinister: the Biblical religious background, which is the matrix of Judaism—also of Christianity and Islam—, comes from an ancient Syrian-Phoenician-Canaanite-Semitic tradition, which among other things sanctioned human sacrifice, including the one of first-born children.
Jewry, which had a long record of nomadism, slavery, persecutions and expulsions from Egypt and the Mesopotamian civilisations, had maintained, despite its great swings through a thousand deserts and a thousand foreign cities, its essentially undisturbed idiosyncrasy.
From the remotest antiquity, the Jews proved to be an unassimilable and highly conflictive people, endowed with an unprecedented ability to climb the social positions of other civilisations, undermine their institutions and destroy their traditions and customs from a parasitic and advantaged position; enrich themselves in the process, take whatever was useful, become increasingly sophisticated and, finally, survive the fall of the civilisation they devoured, taking a baggage of experience and symbols stolen to the next civilisation destined to suffer the repetition of the cycle.
In all the countries that welcomed them, the Jews were accused of appropriating the riches of others without working (usury), of exercising vampirism over the economy, of being sycophants with the nobility and openly hostile to the people, of indebting the States and to mortally hate, in secret, all the non-Jewish humanity.
Those who held power among the Jews were the rabbis: priests who had spent their lives learning the Torah and exercised firm psychological control over their people by threatening the wrath of Yahweh and manipulating the individual’s fears and feelings such as guilt or sin. The Greek historian Strabo would end up describing the Jewish priests as ‘superstitious and with the temperament of tyrants’.

This is the first temple in Jerusalem, also called the temple of Solomon or Zion, built on the esplanade of Mount Moriah, around the year 960 BCE. It was razed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and rebuilt seventy years later by those Jews who, led by Zerubbabel, Ezra and Nehemiah, returned from the deportation of the so-called ‘Babylonian captivity’. It is a rather modest structure and, of course, following the fundamentalist Semitic tradition, lacked images or representations of the human figure: literally, Judaism was a religion without idols. The Carthaginians, associated with the presence of haplogroups J and who had been crushed by Rome in the course of the Punic wars, had also been heirs of the Phoenician tradition of child sacrifice.
But to be a ‘barbarian’ and ‘third-world’ people, despised and considered destined for slavery, the Jews had a very high literacy rate and, because of their experience, they handled themselves extremely well in urban environments, since from all over the world they were the people that had lived the longest in civilised conditions.
There were also among them, without any doubt, extremely smart and astute men, good doctors, accountants, fortune tellers, merchants and scribes; and their radical monotheism, almost sophisticated in its total rupture with everything else, differentiated them well from any another people.

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Aztecs Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) Human sacrifice Psychohistory

Day of Wrath, 11

An encounter of psychoclasses

Julian Jaynes wrote:

I have endeavored in these two chapters to examine the record of a huge time span to reveal the plausibility that man and his early civilizations had a profoundly different mentality from our own, that in fact men an women were not conscious as we are, were not responsible for their actions, and therefore cannot be given credit or blame for anything that was done over these vast millennia of time.

In his book Jaynes complains that the translators of the texts of the Ancient World color their translations with abstract words absolutely incompressible for the bicameral mentality of other times. Personally, once I realized that psychoclasses exist, the Hollywood movies that retroproject our modern psyche onto epic adventures of the historical past look rather silly, as if man had always been the same.
The indigenistas talk wonders of the Mexica herbalist medicine in spite of the fact that it was impregnated with paleologic thinking. Most of the cures were oriented to expel the evil spirits. If the ailment was “the cold disease,” offerings were performed on the particular mount that aroused special devotion. The diagnosis did not rely on empirical observation, but on divination; and if a god had sent the disease offerings to that deity had to be performed. As Silvano Arieti wrote, his schizophrenic patients interpreted everything that occurred as wished by external agents. Far more disturbing was the propensity of Mesoamericans to perform trepanations to let the evil spirits go. The record of this practice on trepanated skulls is an Indian skull with five large holes.
Most interesting is the first act coming from a frightened Moctezuma when learning about the arriving of strangers: he dispatched a delegation offering fresh human flesh to them. When the Spaniards still were in the Veracruz shore, Moctezuma’s representatives visited Cortés; killed the captives they had brought with them, and began to prepare their bodies for a cannibal feast. The Spanish did not believe what they had before their eyes. “When they saw it, it made them feel sick, they spit out, they rubbed their eyes,” wrote Bernal Díaz. It is true that in a disobedient plot Cortés ordered to cut the feet’s fingers of the pilot Gonzalo de Umbría. The Spanish captain was capable of attacking a village of unarmed Tlaxcallans and commiting a massacre, as well as amputating the right hands of the Indian spies. He ordered the killing of defenseless men, women and children during the siege of Tenochtitlan, “one of the most shameful scenes that the life of that man registers,” wrote his biographer Salvador de Madariaga. It is also true that he ordered that Qualpopoca and his sons be burned alive for having killed a rearguard of Spaniards. He even ordered the hanging of two of his own, and in another plot where he feared for his life he hanged Cuauhtémoc himself. But Cortés did not indulge himself in self-harming practices. Nor did he sacrifice children. Compared to the Amerindians, the rustic soldiers belonged to a completely new dimension of the evolution of the human psyche, as distinct from the infanticidal psychoclass as a butterfly from the worm.
Those who, through history and prehistory, have belonged to the infanticidal psychoclass invariably get schizophrenized: be Indians, Caucasians, Africans or Orientals. A noise coming from Nature or an animal that passes on the way is interpreted as an omen. For these people there is no individuation, free will in the broadest sense, and much less cognition or Aristotelian thought process. In the case of the Mexicas, destiny was determined by the birth date and escaped the will of the individual. The psychic climate was charged of pessimism and threatened with annihilation. The Amerindians protected themselves by making offerings to their demonic gods. When Mesoamericans felt threatened by something they punctually offered blood and hearts as an attempt to placate what, in fact, were their inner demons.
In Cempoala, writes Bernal Díaz, frightened by the bearded teules (a corrupted word from teteuh, gods) that came from the East, “each day they sacrificed in front of us three or four or five Indians.” When Cortés begins his resolute advance to the great Mexican capital Moctezuma fell seized with panic. “And they sacrificed each day two boys so that [the gods] answered what to do with us.” When they arrived to Cholula “we knew that [Moctezuma] was shut away with his devotions and sacrifices for two days, together with ten principal papas [high priests].” A little after that page there appears something unbelievable in Bernal’s story. The response of the high priests was that the emperor should “let us in.”
Take note that, analogously to the magical thinking of pre-Hispanic medicine, the emperor or Huey Tlatoani did not think in Aristotelian logic. It is true that, just as Ahuítzotl, before becoming monarch Moctezuma had been high priest. But he also had been a successful general. Despite of it, in the crucial year of his reign he did not ask advice from his military chiefs but from his priests, and what is worse: he let the Spanish enter knowing that they had just perpetrated the massacre of Cholula; the city being plundered by the Spanish allies, the Tlaxcallans, and the temple of Huitzilopochtli burnt for two days, in addition that Cortés ordered the destruction of all effigies of worship. Tenochtitlan was not Cholula. Located as the only lacustrine city of the continent, it was well protected. The Mexicas could easily have lifted the bridges that led to the empire’s capital. Instead, they let enter not a mere Cortés delegation, but the captain along with all of his army (including the horses, never seen before)!
If this is not suicidal magical thinking coming from bicameral minds, what is it? The conquest of America is the chapter of history that catches the attention as no other conquest of the history of mankind. Although Carthage suffered a similar fate of Tenochtitlan, the Romans had to fight through three very costly Punic wars throughout 120 years before razing the city. It took Cortés a tiny fraction of that time to do the feat: he initiated his campaign in 1519 and by 1521 he had taken the double city of Tlatelolco-Tenochtitlan. Jaynes’ observation quoted above about Pizarro, “How could an empire whose armies had triumphed over the civilizations of half a continent be captured by a small band of 150 Spaniards in the early evening of November 16, 1532?” may be said about Cortés too.
“Never did a captain with such a small army perform such a feat, nor achieved so many victories or hold a grip of such a great empire,” commented the chronicler Francisco López de Gómara. If there is something apparent in Bernal’s story it is that the captain wanted to bring to an end the practice of sacrifice in each town he passed through in route to Tenochtitlan. A semi-Indian friend of mine who has read the chroniclers commented that the historicity of their stories is way above the excuse that, mantra-like, we have heard a thousand times from other Mexicans: “Winners write history.” What actually happened is that the Tlaxcallans hated the Mexicas, who through a century had been raiding them to obtain captives for the sacrifice. Had the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan been popular in the so-called Aztec Empire the Spanish would have been repelled in Mexico. A pitiful sensation produces in the reader an illustration of the book by Diego Durán with humble Indians carrying, on their bended backs, the backpacks of the newcomers in their advance to Tenochtitlan while a Spaniard appears comfortably on his horse. The same can be said of another illustration of Indians building brigantines that would be decisively used in the battle of the Lake Texcoco. Obviously, the conquest of Mexico was also a civil war.
As implied above, my father feels an excessive admiration for the Indian world. On several occasions he has argued that the fact that the poetry of Nezahualcóyotl, the most refined representative of the Nahua culture, is so humane that it refutes the vision of the culture as barbaric. But poetry is no reliable standard. The basic, fundamental principle in psychohistory has childrearing as the relevant factor, and from this point of view even the refined monarch of Texcoco was a barbarian.
In a courtier intrigue Nezahualcóyotl consented using garrote to execute his favorite son, the prince Tetzauhpilzintli. The Nahua characters were seized with fratricide fits. Moctezuma I (not the one who received Cortés) ordered the killing of his brother and something similar did Nezahualcóyotl’s heir, Nezahualpilli: who also used capital punishment with his first born son and heir. Soustelle says that this family tragedy was one of the causes of the fall of the Mexican empire since the blood brothers that rose to the throne flipped to the Spanish side. But Soustelle’s blindness about what he has in front of his nose is amazing. Like León Portilla, for Soustelle “there is no doubt that the Mexicans loved their children very much.” But that is not love. Nezahualcóyotl’s mourning after letting his son be killed reminds me the “Pietà” of my first book, my mother, who suffered for seeing me in wretched conditions when she did nothing but escalate her abusive behavior against me. More disturbing is that some upper-class Mexicas delivered their little children to the Tláloc priests to be sacrificed. This piece of data demonstrates that motivation was more than mere economics, as rich people are not desperate for money.

The above image of the chronicler Diego Durán, which shows the tláloques, is in the Library of Madrid. Note the child in the water with the chest opened.
From a considerable distance the Spanish soldiers saw how their companions were sacrificed at the top of the pyramid of Tenochtitlan, whose heads would later be found impaled in a tzompantli together with the decapitated heads of the captured horses. When I mentioned for the first time the tzompantlis I omitted to say that they were structures on parallel crossbeams. Through holes on the temples, the stakes supported the enormous files of decapitated human heads, one after another. (Only in Tenochtitlan there were seven tzompantlis; the Spaniards had seen a tzompantli in Cempoala, not very far from the Veracruz shore, and some time after in their journey another one in Zautla, which also contained femurs and other parts of human bodies.) Bernal Díaz writes: “In that state of affairs, very frightened and wounded, we did not know about Cortés or Sandoval, nor of their armies, if they had been killed and broken down [chopped into pieces], as the Mexicans told us when they threw into our camp the five heads they grasped by the hair and beards.” The demoralized soldiers wanted to flee to Cuba after the battle of La Noche Triste, when most of the Spaniards died: a great defeat for the Spanish arms on Mexican soil.
I the middle of a skirmish the Indians captured Cortés himself, but they did not kill him. When taking him over to be sacrificed their men rescued him. From the military viewpoint, this magical thinking of not killing the fallen captain but attempting to take him to the pyramid was a gross blunder: Cortés would be the man who harangued the Spanish not to flee to Cuba after the catastrophic Noche Triste. Thereafter, with the Tlaxcallan support, the war turned over and the Mexica capital was lost. Cuauhtémoc, the last Huey Tlatoani rejected the peace proposals that, day after day, Cortés offered the Mexicas. (Cuauhtémoc had been the same noble who led the signal to stone Moctezuma after the massacre ordered by Pedro de Alvarado, inspired by the massacre of Cholula ordered by Cortés.)
It is not my intention to vituperate the Mexicans of my childhood. As I revealed in my previous book, the memories of Mexico City’s beautiful neighborhoods where I lived in the 1960s, before the city disintegrated, still feed my deepest nostalgias. Nor is it my intention to vituperate the ancient Mexicans. As I have also said, the psychoclass of the Mexicas was far more evolved than the Chichimeca: the Nomads from the north who still ate raw meat because they could not use fire; could not build houses, and lived in the caves. The Amerindian hunter-gatherers were in a more dissociated state of mind than the inhabitants of the big cities, like the refined Nahuas. And taking into account the inconceivable sadism of the Mayas with the prisoners, undistinguishable from that of the cruelest serial killers of today I have not the slightest doubt that, even though the pictographic form of Mexica writing before the syllabic Mayan represents a technical regression, the psychoclass of the ancient Mexicans marks a psychogenic advance compared to their southern neighbors.
Gotten to this point I must confess that it is painful to read almost anything related to Moctezuma. And it is painful in spite of the fact that Bernal Díaz says that the Huey Tlatoani himself shared the cannibalism of his age. “I heard them say that they used to cook for him the flesh of small boys,” and on the same page it can be read that “our captain reprimanded him the sacrifice and the eating of human flesh, and Moctezuma ordered that that delicatessen be not cooked for him anymore.” Despite of his culinary habits, the reading of the Bernaldine pages is painful because we can see a very human Moctezuma. Both Bernal Díaz and Cortés were fond of Moctezuma; and his candid, fearful and superstitious personality moves the reader to sympathize with him too. It is very difficult not to feel a particular affection for Moctezuma. It is true that before Cortés and the Spanish the Huey Tlatoani behaved like a güey (a Mexicanism that when I was a boy meant stupid). Today’s Mexicans are not as güeyes as the Mexicas. But even after almost five hundred years it is a disturbing experience to discover how the historical Moctezuma behaved.
Before the Spanish expedition reached Tenochtitlan, the most powerful man of the empire had clung to his papas of long, tangled and gluey hair with blood scabs. We can imagine the mental state of those who, time after time, stuck their hand in living bodies digging through the vital organ. They had ash-colored faces because they too had to bleed themselves once a day. When Moctezuma fell seized with panic as the alien expedition was in route to the empire’s capital, besides the priests he also consulted fortune-tellers and sorcerers. Once the Spaniards arrived it is disturbing to learn how these men, who represented a more integrated psychoclass, took over the empire from Moctezuma: like an adult snatching the ice cream from a little boy, who had been a magnificent host for Cortés and his enormous military escort.
The common people were as psychologically dissociated as their governor. During the long period of time that goes from the Moctezuma kidnapping by Cortés to the massacre perpetrated by Alvarado, with the exception of Cacama and a few nobles the Mexicans did not rebel against the invasion. They did not even react when Cortés ordered that Qualpopoca, his sons and fifteen chiefs be burned alive at the stake, humiliating the emperor who, with chains, had to witness the execution in the plaza of the Great Pyramid. Moctezuma was even taught to learn, in Latin, prayers like Our Father and the Hail Mary. Cortés left temporarily Tenochtitlan to stop Pánfilo Narváez in Cempoala. Narváez arrived from Cuba with a great army; he wanted to place Cortés under arrest and liberate Moctezuma. Only the massacre of Mexico where the blond Alvarado (nicknamed Tonatiuh, the sun) slaughtered the flower of the Mexican aristocracy during the “Aztec Easter” made the Mexicas wake up. Their long lethargy reminds me an eighteenth-century observation by a Jesuit that Amerindians were grownup children, “bambini with beards.”
Unlike the Peruvians, who constantly clean the great statue of Pizarro—who behaved worse with Atahualpa than Cortés with Moctezuma—, in half a century of living in the Mexican capital I have not seen a single statue of Cortés, his Indian wife, or Moctezuma. So deep did the trauma of the conquest impregnate the Mexicans’ psyche that its tail can be felt half a millennium later. It is true that, after the Alvarado massacre, what had been a sort of picaresque conquering story turned into an apparent infamy, although Salvador de Madariaga qualifies the Nahua vision of the conquest by pointing out that Alvarado “was right in thinking that there existed a conspiracy” from the Mexica to attack the Spaniards after the holyday. On the other hand, through a sense of black humor even a dark-skinned Mexican has dared to see the cruelties committed by his ancestors. In An Autobiography the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco wrote:

According to them [the indigenistas] the Conquest ought not to have taken place as it did. Instead of sending cruel and ambitious captains, Spain should have sent a great delegation of ethnologists, anthropologists, archeologists, civil engineers […]. Very tactfully it might have been suggested to great Moctezuma that he should establish democracy for the lower orders, while preserving the privileges of aristocracy, thus pleasing everyone. In this way the three abhorrent centuries of Colonial Period could have been side-stepped, and the Great Teocalli would still be standing, though thoroughly disinfected to keep the blood of sacrifices from going bad, and to enable us to turn it into blood pudding—in a factory standing where, for want of it, the National Pawnshop inadequately serves.

History did not occur that way. The soldiers razed Tenochtitlan and a clergy coming out directly from the Counter-Reformation and the Reconquista took care of the statues and the codexes. A melancholic Mexica poem says: “Our lifestyle, our city, is lost and dead.” The infamous pyramid that enclosed the remains of the boy whose photo I included way above was blown up with 500 barrels of powder. Conversely, in the sarcastic scenario by Orozco, in the world’s most beautiful city the tourists would utter wonders when escalating the Teocalli to see the great Uichilobos without any knowledge of the sacrificed child and his remains, still enclosed under the rock, dozens of meters below their feet.
After the fall of Tenochtitlan Bernal Díaz tells us that “land, lagoon and bargekennings were full of dead bodies, and it stank so much that there was no man who could endure it.” In contrast to the Manichaeism of contemporary Mexicans, whether hispanophiles or indigenistas, Martin Brown drew some irreverent cartoons published in Terry Deary’s pamphlet The Angry Aztecs. One of them illustrates the stone blocks of the recently destroyed city: colored stones of the temples that would be used for the construction of the Christian buildings. In Brown’s cartoon there is a dialogue between two pubescent Nahuas, a boy and a girl sitting in the great city on ruins:
Boy: The Aztecs killed my mum.
Girl: The Spanish killed mine.
Boy: I wonder who is deader?
But Brown omitted the crux: Moctezuma and his folk ate the kids of that age, something that the Spaniards never did. What destroys the mind to the point of making an entire continent inhabited by easy-to-conquer güeyes is to carry the burden, in the innermost corner of the soul, that our beloved totatzin sacrificed one of our siblings; or that this happened in the families of friends and acquaintances and that nobody condemned it. Using the language of my previous book, since the sacrifices were part of the social tissue nobody counted with an “enlightened witness,” let alone a “helping witness” when the poisonous pedagogy was being inculcated. Let us remember the ethnologic study of the twentieth century about the New Guinea tribes. The children avoided their parents when they ate one of their little siblings. The rates of child suicide among such peoples, a more disturbed society than the Mexica, were very high.
The Spanish destruction may be compared in some way to the destruction by king Josiah in 641 B.C. according to II Chronicles 34, about which Jaynes comments that had it not occurred more archaeological evidence of the ancient Hebrews’ speaking idols could have been found. Though objectionable for the standards of our time, such measures of cultural extermination were necessary during the attempts of the superior psychoclass to eliminate the sacrifices: be them sacrifices of children to Baal or to Tláloc.
 
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The objective of the book is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering.
If life allows, next time I will reproduce another chapter. Those interested in obtaining a copy of Day of Wrath may visit: this artcle.

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Alice Miller Aztecs Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) Human sacrifice Mayas Pedagogy Psychology

Day of Wrath, 10


“The best education of the world”
In each Maya city there were two wells: one for drinking water and the other as an oracle to throw the girls almost twenty meters below. When brought out at noon, if they had not died in the cold water they were asked: “What did the gods say to you?” The Maya girls got back at their babies by tying their feet and hands up. And they did something else. Artificial cranial deformation had been practiced since prehistory, with Greek physicians mentioning the practice in some towns. The Mayas placed boards at the sides of the newborn’s cranium to mold it, when it is still plastic, to form the egg-shaped heads that the archeologists have found. Furthermore, the parents also placed objects between their baby’s eyes to make them cross-eyed. Just as the elongated heads, this was a sign of beauty. (When Hernández de Córdova ventured in the Yucatán coast in 1517 he took with himself two cross-eyed Indians he thought could be useful as interpreters.) Once grown, the children had to sacrifice their own blood: the boys had to bleed their penises and the girls their tongues. Some Mayas even sacrificed their children by delivering them alive to the jaguars.
Without specifically referring to Mesoamerican childrearing, deMause has talked about what he calls “projective care.” During the fearful nemotemi, the five nefarious days for the Mexicans, parents did not allow their children sleep “so that they would not turn into rats.” Let us remember the psychodrama of the self-harmer girl in Ross’ paradigm and take one step forward. Let us imagine that, once married, she projected on her own child the self-hatred. Such “care” of not letting the children to sleep was, actually, a case of dissociation with the adult projecting onto the child the part of her self that she was taught to self-hate. Another example: In the world of the Mexica the first uttered words addressing the newborn told him that he was a captive. Just like the shrieks that made the chroniclers shudder, the midwife shouted since it was believed that childbirth was a combat and, by being born, the child a seized warrior. The newborn was swaddled and kindly told: “My son, so loved, you shall know and comprehend that your home is not here. Your office is giving the sun the blood of the enemies to drink.” The creature has barely come to the world and it already has enemies. The newborn is not born with rights but with duties: he is not told that he will be cared for, but that he is destined to feed the great heavenly body. (DeMause has written about this inversion of the parental-filial roles in his studies about western babies in more recent centuries.) In the Mexica admonition the shadow of infanticide by negligence is also cast. “We do not know if you will live much,” the newborn was told in another exhortation.
Tlazolteotl, goddess of infancy, grabbing a child by the hair.
In the illustration can be noted the similarity of Tlazolteotl with the image of the warrior and his captive in the previous chapter. Just like that image, the goddess grabs the hair as a symbol of dominion. One of the few true things that Elsié Méndez told me, a woman so much criticized in my previous book, were certain words she pronounced that I remember verbatim: “La mamá lo pepena” [The mom grabs him] referring to those mothers of our times that choose one of their children to control him to the point of psychic strangulation.
In May of 1998 I listened in Mexican television Miguel León Portilla, the best-known indigenista scholar in Mexico, saying that the Mexica education was “the best education of the world.” Almost a decade later I purchased a copy of the Huehuetlatolli that León-Portilla commented, which includes one page in Nahuatl. The Huehuetlatolli were the moralizing homilies in the first years of the children: ubiquitous advices in Nahua pedagogy. They were not taught in the temples but from the parents to their children, even among the most humble workers, within the privacy of the home. In the words of León-Portilla: “Fathers and mothers, male teachers and female teachers, to educate their children and pupils they transmitted these messages of wisdom.” The exordiums were done in an elegant and educated language, the model of expression that would be used at school. A passage from the Huehuetlatolli of a father to his son that Andrés de Olmos transcribed to Spanish says:

We are still here—we, your parents—who have put you here to suffer, because with this the world is preserved.

This absolute gem depicts in a couple of lines the Mexica education. Paying no attention to these kind of words, on the next page León-Portilla comments: “Words speak now very high of its [the Mexica’s] moral and intellectual level.” Later, in the splendid edition of the Huehuetlatolli that I possess, commented by the indigenista, the sermon says: “Do not make of your heart your father, your mother.”
This advice is the perfect antithesis to Pindar’s “Become what you are!” which summarizes the infinitely more advanced Greek culture of two thousand years before. While León-Portilla describes the Nahua exordiums as highly wise and moral, they actually represent a typical case of poisonous pedagogy [a term explained in my previous book]. If there is something clear after reading the Huehuetlatolli is that that education produced no individuals whatsoever: other people lived the lives of the children, adolescents and youths who are exhorted interminably. What is worse: while León-Portilla praised the education of the ancient Mexicans on national television, at the same time the program displayed codex images depicting pubescent children tied up on their wrists and ankles, with thorns sank into their bodies and tears on their faces. The indigenista had omitted to say that “the punishments rain over the child” as Jacques Soustelle wrote in Daily Life of the Aztecs. The Mexica parents scratched their children with maguey thorns. They also burned red chili peppers and placed their child over the acrid smoke.

Codex Mendoza, page 60: Punishes to children ages 11 to 14.
Note the tears of the child and the sign of admonition
near the father’s mouth.

Another punishment mentioned in the codex was the beating of the child with sticks. Motolinía, Juan de Torquemada, Durán and Sahagún corroborated that the education was fairly severe. It is germane to note that in the mode of childrearing that deMause calls “intrusive,” the striking with objects is considered more prejudicial for the self-image of the child than the spanking of the psychoclass he calls “socializing.” It is also important to note that the parents were the ones who physically abused the children. It is true that the language of the Huehuetlatolli is very sweet: “Oh my little daughter of mine, little dove! These words I have spoken so that you may make efforts to…” But in the first book of this series I demonstrated the short circuit that produces in a child’s mentality this sort of “Jekyll-Hyde” alternation in the parental dynamics with their child.
The Mexicas copied from the Mayas the custom of selling their children. The sold out children had to work hard or they would be punished. A poor family could sell their child as a slave to get out from a financial problem. This still happened in the times when the Spaniards arrived. The noble that stole his father could be punished with death, and it is worth saying that the great draughts of 1450-1454 were dealt with the massive sacrifice of children to the water deities.
Which was the attitude that the child had to had toward such parents? In Nahuatl the suffix -tzin was aggregated to the persons that would be honored. Totatzin is our respected father. In previous pages I noted that the frenetic dances discharged the affects contained in the Mexica psyche. Taking into account that in such education the child was not allowed to live his or her feelings—as it is clearly inferred from the texts cited by León-Portilla (not only the Huehuetlatolli but educational texts in general)—, the silhouette of what had to be discharged starts to be outlined.
In Izcalli, the last month of the Mexica calendar, the children were punctured on the ears and the blood was thrown to the fire. As I said, at ten the boy’s hair was cut leaving a lock that would not be cut until, already grown, he would take a prisoner. In one way or the other every Mexica male had to participate in the seizure of victims for the serial killing. Those who could not make prisoners had to renounce the military theocracy and resign themselves with being macehuallis: workers or plebeians attached to their fields who, under the penalty of death, were forbidden to usurp the honorific symbols of feathers, boarded dresses and jewels. The macehuallis formed the bulk of the society. On the other hand, he who captured four prisoners arrived with a single jump at the upper layer of society. To excel in the seizure of men for the serial killing was so relevant that “he who was born noble could die slave.”
Both on national television and in his writings, León-Portilla is filled with pride that the ancient Mexicans were the only peoples in the world that counted with obligatory schooling in the 16th century. The indigenista belongs to the generation of my father, when children’s rights were unheard as a subject, let alone parental abuse. The form in which the Nahuas treated their children, that presently would be considered abusive, was continued at school. The school education to harden the soul of the elite, the Calmécac (“house of tears”) consisted of penances and self-harming with maguey thorns. Another case of the father’s projective care was the advice to his son about the ultra-Spartan education he would be exposed in the boarding school:

Look, son: you have to be humble and looked down on and downhearted […], you shall take out blood from your body with the maguey thorn, and take night baths even though it is too cold […]. Don’t take it as a burden, grin and bear it the fasting and the penance.

“Don’t take it as a burden” means do not feel your feelings. According to Motolinía, this most beloved practice of homiletic admonitions was even longer for the girls. In the boarding school the boy had to abandon the bed to take a bath in the cold water of the lake or a fountain. As young as seven-year-olds were encouraged to break from the affective attachment at home: “And don’t think, son, inside of you ‘my mother and my father live’. Don’t remember any of these things.”
Because the child was consecrated for war since birth, the education at schools was basically military. The strictly hierarchical system promised the striving young to escalate to the level of tequiuaque and even higher if possible. If the boy of upper classes did not want to become a warrior he had another option: priesthood. About his twentieth year he had to make a choice: a military life or a celibate and austere life, starting with playing the drum or helping the priest with the sacrifices. Severity was extreme: one of Netzahualcoyotl’s laws punished by death the drunk or lusty priest. No society, not even the Islamic, has been so severe with adultery and alcoholism: crimes where the capital punishment was applied both for the male and the female. The macehuallis who got drunk were killed in front of the adolescents. (The equivalent today would be that American schoolchildren were required to witness the executions of the pot addicts in the electric chair, as a warning.) The Calmécac were both schools and monasteries ruled by priests in black clothes. In the Florentine Codex an image can be seen of adolescents wearing dresses made of fresh human skins. We can imagine the emotional after-effects that such practice, fostered by the adult world, caused in the boys.
In the Nahua world it was frowned upon that the youth expressed his grudges and it was considered acceptable that he restrained and controlled himself. No insolent individual, Soustelle tells us, “no one who talked what came to his mouth was placed in the real throne,” and the elite were the first ones to submit to the phlegmatic code. And it was not merely a matter of concealing the grudges when, say, a boy or a girl learnt that their own parents had offered a little sister as sacrificial payment. The parents advised them in the ubiquitous sermons: “Look that your humility not be feigned, because then it will be told of you titoloxochton, which means hypocrite.” In the Nahua world the child was manipulated through the combination of sweet and kind expressions with the most heinous adultism. The parents continued to sermon all of them, even “the experienced, the fully grown youth.”
 
An unquenchable sun
Tell me who are your gods and I will tell you who you are. The myth of the earth-goddess Tlaltecuhtli, who cried because she wanted to eat human hearts, cannot be more symbolic. Just as the father-sun would not move without sacrifices, the mother-earth would not give fruits if she was not irrigated with blood. Closely related to Tlaltecuhtli, Coatlicue, was also the goddess of the great destruction that devours everything living.
Sacrifices were performed in front of her; vicious rumors circulated around about “juicy babies” for the insatiable devourer. In the houses the common people always had an altar with figurines of a deity, generally the Coatlicue. (In our western mind one would expect to find the male god of the ancient Mexicans, Huitzilopochtli.) The terrible goddess demanded:

And the payment of your chests and your hearts would be that you will be conquering, you will be attacking and devastating all macehuallis, the villagers that are over there, in all places through which you pass. And to your war prisoners, which you will make captives, you will open their chest on a sacrificial stone, with the flint of an obsidian knife. And you will do offerings of their hearts and will eat their flesh without salt; only very little of it in the pot where the corn is cooked.

Of the Mexica I only have a few culinary roots, such as eating tortillas. Culturally speaking, the educated middle and high classes in Latin America are basically European, of the type of Spain or Portugal. If we compare the above passage with our authentic roots, say, the Christianized exordiums of Numbers or Leviticus against cannibalism and other practices, the difference cannot be greater. Likewise, the Mexica mythology cannot contrast more with the superior psychoclass of Greece: where Zeus opens the belly of his father, Cronus, who had swallowed his siblings establishing thus a new order in the cosmos.
The papas punctured their limbs as an act of penance for the gods. These gods were a split-off, dissociated or internalized images of the parents. Even the emperor frequently abandoned the bed at midnight to offer his blood with praying. The Anonymous Conqueror was amazed by the fact that, among all of the Earth’s creatures, the Americans were the most devoted to their religion; so much so that the common Indian offered himself by taking out blood from his body to offer it to the statues. The 16th century chronicler tells us that on the roads there were many shrines where the travelers poured their blood. If we remember the scene of the Mexican film El Apando, based on the homonym book by José Revueltas where a convicted offender in the Lecumberri penitentiary bled himself while the other prisoners told him that he was crazy, we can imagine the leap in psychogenesis. What was considered normal in the highest and most refined strata of the Mesoamerican world is abnormal even in the snake pits of modern Mexico. The most terrible form of Mexica self-harming that I have seen in the codexes appears on page 10 of the Codex Borgia: a youth pulling out his eye as symbol of penitence. This was like taking the disturbing Colin Ross paradigm about the little girl to its ultimate expression.
At the bottom of the Mesoamerican worldview it always appears the notion that the creature owes his life, and everything that exists, to his creators: paradigm of the blackest of pedagogies that we can imagine. [Schwarze Pädagogik, literally black pedagogy, is a term popularized by Alice Miller. English publishing houses translate it as “poisonous pedagogy.”] The Mesoamerican mythology speaks of the transgression of some gods to create life without their parents’ permission, thus making themselves equals with them. In the Maya texts it is said that these children “made themselves haughty” and that what they did was “against the will of the father and the mother.” The transgressors were expelled from heaven and to come back they had to sacrifice themselves. Two of them threw themselves alive into the bonfire and were welcomed by their pleased parents. The resonances of this myth appear in the practice of throwing the captives to the bonfire. We should remember Baudez’s analysis: Mesoamerican sacrifice replaces self-sacrifice. It is merely a substitute sacrifice “as it is shown in the first place by the primeval myths that precede self-sacrifice.” This original sin condemned human beings to the sacrificial institution since “they could not recognize their creators.” (When I reached this passage in Arqueología Mexicana I could not fail but remember my father’s phrase that injured me so badly, as recounted in my previous book, when he referred to the damned “because they didn’t recognize their Creator.”) The sacrificial institution thus understood was a score settling, a vendetta. Moreover, in some versions of the Mesoamerican cosmogony the sun gives weapons to the siblings faithful to their parents to kill the 400 unfaithful children. The faithful execute the bidding and thus feed their demanding parents: once more, the cultural antithesis of the successful rebellion by Zeus, who had rescued their siblings from the tyrannical parent.
The connection of childrearing with the sacrificial institution is so obvious that when the warrior made a captive he had it as his son—which explains why he could not participate in the post-sacrificial feast—and the captive had him as his lord father. Some historians even talk about dialogues. When making a prisoner, the capturer said: “Behold my beloved son,” and the prisoner responded: “Behold my honored father.” In one of the water holydays of the Tota forest, which means “Our Father,” a girl was taken beside the highest tree to be sacrificed. Each time that the priest lifted a heart toward the sky as a sun offering the catastrophe that threatens the universe was, once more, postponed because “without the red and warm elixir of the sacrificed victims the universe was doomed to freeze.” As modern schizophrenics reason, the universe of the common Mesoamerican, just as the bicameral minds of other cultures, was constantly threatened and exposed to a catastrophe. The primordial function of the human race was to feed their parents, intonan intota Tlaltecuhtli Tonatiuh, “to our mother and our father, the earth and the sun.” The elegance of these four Nahua words evokes the compact Latin.
In the Mexica world destiny was predetermined by the tonalpohualli, “the count of the days” of the calendar where an individual’s birth by astrological sign was his fate. If León-Portilla had in mind the pre-Columbian cultures, he erred in his article “Identidad y crisis” published in July of 2008 in Reforma, by concluding that in antiquity the sun was seen as the “provider of life.” Duverger makes the keen observation that the solar deity, which appears at the center of the calendar, was so distant that it was not even worshipped directly. Instead of providing life the insatiable deity demanded energy, under the penalty of freezing the world (“We are still here—we, your parents—who have put you here to suffer, because with this the world is preserved”). The noonday heavenly body is not a provider of energy: it demands it. The thirsty tongue that appears at the very center of the Stone of the Sun (also called Aztec Calendar) looks like a dagger: it represents the knife used during the sacrifices. The solar calendar with Tonatiuh at the center of the cosmos was an absolute destiny: he could not even be implored. It is important to mention the psychohistorical studies about the diverse deities of the most archaic form of infanticidal cultures: according to deMause, they were all too remote to be approached.
When I think of the musician that sacrificed himself voluntarily to Tezcatlipoca in the holyday of the month Tóxcatl, which according to Sahagún was a holiday as sacred to the Mexicas as Easter to Christians, I see the culture of the ancient Mexicans under all of its sun. (Pedro de Alvarado would perpetrate the massacre in the main temple when he feared he would be sacrificed after that holiday.) Baudez’s self-sacrificial observation deserves to be mentioned again. Like the martyr of Golgotha who had to drink from the calyx that deep down he wanted to take away from himself, only if the young Indian submitted voluntarily to the horrifying death he earned the inscrutable love of the father. This is identical to the most dissociated families in the Islamist world, as can be gathered from deMause’s article “If I blow myself up and become a martyr, I’ll finally be loved.” But unlike Alvarado and the conquerors’ metaphorical Easter (and even contemporary Islamists), the Mexicas literally killed their beloved one before decapitating him and showing off his head in the tzompantli.
Just as the mentality of the Ancient World’s most primitive cultures, in the Mesoamerican world, where the solar cycle reigned since the Mayas and perhaps before, “the sacrifice was performed to feed the parent with food (hearts) and drinking (blood).” I had said that the priests’ helpers gave the captive’s “father” a pumpkin full of warm blood of his “son.” With this blood he dampened the lips of the statues, the introjected and demanding “shadows” of their own parents, to feed them. The priests smeared their idols with fresh blood and, as Bernal Díaz told us, the principal shrines were soaked with stench scabs, including the pinnacle of the Great Teocalli.
In our times, the ones who belong to this psychoclass are those who show off their acts by smearing the walls with their victims’ blood: people who have suffered a much more regressive mode of childrearing than the average westerner. Richard Rhodes explains in Why they Kill that Lonnie Athens, the Darwin of postmodern criminology, discovered that those who commit violent crimes were horribly subjected to violence as children. One hundred percent of the criminals that Athens interviewed in the Iowa and California prisons had been brutalized in their tender years. Abby Stein has confirmed these findings (Journal of Psychohistory, 36,4, 320-27). It is worth saying that, due to the foundational taboo of the human mind, when in January of 2008 I edited the Wikipedia article “Criminology” it surprised me to find, in the section where I added mention to Athens, only the pseudoscientific biological theories about the etiology of the criminal mind.
An extreme case at the other side of the Atlantic was that of a serial killer of children, Jürgen Bartsch, analyzed by Alice Miller in For Your Own Good. Bartsch had been martyred at home in a far more horrific way than I was. Miller believes that Bartsch gloated over by seeing the panic-stricken looks in the children’s eyes; the children that he mutilated in order to see the martyred child that inhabited in Bartsch himself.
 
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The objective of the book is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next time I will reproduce here the section on the encounter of the Spaniards with the American natives. Those interested in obtaining a copy of Day of Wrath can request it: here.

Categories
Aztecs Day of Wrath (book) Evil Human sacrifice Mayas

Day of Wrath, 9

The Bernaldine pages

 
La Santa Furia by C.T. Sr., my father, is a music composition in honor to Bartolomé de Las Casas for an orator, a soprano, three tenors, baritone, mixed chorus and orchestra, which at the moment of my writing still has to be premiered. Las Casas, whom my father greatly admires, wrote:

Into these meek sheep herd [the Amerindians], and of the aforesaid qualities by their Maker and Creator thus endoweth, there came the Spaniards who soon after behaved like cruel wolves, tigers and lions that had been starved for many days.

Las Casas is considered the champion of the indigenous cause before the Spanish crown. Those who condemn the Conquest take note of the investigation conducted against Antonio de Mendoza, the first viceroy of New Spain, accused of having lined up several Indians during the Mixtón War and smashing them with cannon fire. As a child, an illustration piqued my interest in a Mexican comic, about some Indians attacked by the fearful dogs that the Spaniards had brought (there were no large dogs in pre-Columbian America). Motolinía reported that innumerable Indians entered healthy the mines only to come out as wrecked bodies. The slave work in the mines, the Franciscan tells us in Historia de los Indios de Nueva España, killed so many that the birds that fed from the human carrion “darkened the skies,” and let us not talk about the slavery in the Caribbean islands with which, originally, Las Casas had so intimate contact. In La Española (Santo Domingo), Cuba and other islands the native population was virtually exterminated, especially due to the epidemics the conquerors had brought. These and many other facts appalled Las Casas, and in his vast literary corpus the tireless friar always tried to expose the excesses of the Spanish conquest.
English- and Spanish-speaking liberals are fond of quoting Las Casas. But was he right? In contrast to another friar, Diego de Landa, Las Casas always omitted speaking out about the cruelties that the Indians committed against themselves. In fact, Las Casas is often accused for having originated the Black Legend. For example, his quotation cited above is a lie: the Mesoamericans were everything except “meek sheep.” While the conquest was a calamity for many Indians, it benefited many others. Only thanks to it the children would not receive anymore the schizogenic shock of learning that their folk had sacrificed, and sometimes eaten in a glamorous party, one of their little siblings. In his role of spiritual adviser, Las Casas wrote a biased and polemical sermon, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, as well as more scholarly texts, to force Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, to take the necessary measures in favor of the natives. His goal was to protect them before the trendy scholastic doctrine that they were born slaves.
In the 1930s and ’40s Harvard historian Lewis Hanke found as fascinating the figure of Las Casas as my father would do in more recent times. After reading a magnificent book by Hanke, that my father himself lent me from his library, I could not avoid comparing Las Casas to the anthropologists who have kept secret the cruelty of the aboriginals in their eagerness to protect them. A single example will illustrate it. Las Casas went so far as defending the indigenous cannibalism with the pretext that it was a religious custom, which Las Casas compared to the Christian communion. It seems strange to tell it, but the first seeds of cultural relativism, an ideology that would cover the West since the last decades of the twentieth century, had been sown in the sixteenth century.
The Mexicas had only been the last Mesoamericans providers of an immense teoatl: a divine sea, an ocean of poured-out blood for the gods. Just as the pre-Hispanic aboriginals of the Canary Islands, the Olmecs performed sacrifices with a fatal whack on the head. Of the Mayas, so idealized when I was a boy, it is known much more. They were the ones who initiated the practice of caging the condemned before sacrificing them and, after the killing, throwing the bodies down from the pyramids. In 1696, with the eighteenth century coming up, the Mayas sacrificed some unwary missionaries who dared to incursion into a still unconquered region. When I visited the ruins of Palenque I went up its pyramid and down through the internal steps surrounded by a warm and humid weather, to the tomb of the famous sarcophagus of stone. I felt such place gloomy and inconceivable. I now remember an archaeologist in television talking about a drawing in a Maya enclosure: a hanged prisoner maintained alive in state of torment.
The Mayas treated more sadistically the prisoners than the Mexicas. Diego de Landa recounts that they went as far as torturing the captive kings by gouging their eyes out, chopping off their ears and noses and eating up their fingers. They maintained the poor captive alive for years before killing him, and the classic The Blood of the Kings tells us that the Mayas tore the jaw out from some prisoners still alive. Once more, not even Mel Gibson dared to film these atrocities, although he mentioned them during an interview when defending his film before the criticism of politically-correct reporters and academics. Unlike them, I agree with Gibson that the disappearance of such culture should not sadden us but rather revalue the European culture. And I would add that, when I see in a well-known television program a native English speaker rationalizing the Maya sacrifices, it is clear to me that political correctness in our times exemplifies what in psychology is known as “identification with the perpetrator.”
Both the Teotihuacans and the Tolteca-Chichimecas were bloodthirsty. The Tenochcas, who greatly admired them, killed and flayed a princess in the year 1300: an outrage that the indigenistas sweep under the rug since this and similar murders are related to the stories of the foundation of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Like their ancestors, the Mexicas established wars which only purpose was to facilitate captives for the killing.
Let us tell the truth guilelessly: Mesoamerica was the place of a culture of serial killers. In the raids launched into foreign territory, sometimes called Flower Wars like the one seen in Apocalypto, the principal activity was oriented toward the sacrifice. In fact, it was impossible to obtain political power in that society without passing first through the business of the sacrifice. Preventing adolescents from cutting their nape hairlock unless they captured a victim for sacrifice conveyed a message: If you don’t collaborate with the serial killing you won’t climb up the social hierarchy.
An explosive catharsis and real furor was freed in the outbreak of war as the Amerindians sheltered something recondite that had to be discharged at all costs. In 1585 Diego Muñoz Camargo wrote in History of Tlaxcala that, accompanied by the immense shouting when rushing into combat, the warriors played “drums and caracoles [percussion sticks] and trumpets that made a strange noise and roar, and more than a little dreadfulness in fragile hearts.” The Anonymous Conqueror adds that during the fighting they vociferated the eeriest shrieks and whistling, and that after winning the war only the young women were spared. To contribute with live bodies for the thirsty gods, not the killing in situ, was the objective. Behind there came the specialized warriors who tied up the captives and transferred them to the stone altars.
With a stabbing which purpose was not to kill the victim, the sacrificer, usually the high priest of one of the innumerable temples, opened the victim’s body: a dull blow at the diaphragm level or on the chest. The sacrificer then stuck the hand into the viscera poking until finding the heart. Grabbed and still beating, he tore it out with a strong pull. This eventration and ablation of the heart is the form in which the sacrifice was practiced, in identical mode, thousands upon thousands of times in Mesoamerica. The last thing that the victim saw in the instant before losing consciousness were his executioners. By tearing out the heart in such a way the body poured out virtually all of its blood, from five to six liters: the strongest hemorrhage of all conceivable forms.
Diego Durán was startled that, according to his estimates, in the pre-Hispanic world more people died in the sacrifices than from natural death. In contrast to how the Second World War is taught to us, academics are reluctant to point out that the sacrificial institution in Mesoamerica was a true Holocaust. The year 1487 signaled the climax of the sacrificial thirst. In four consecutive days the ancient Mexicans indulged themselves in an orgy of blood. The warriors had taken men from entire tribes to be sacrificed during the festivities of the reconsecration of the last layer of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan. Through four days the priests, their assistants and the common citizens uninterruptedly tore out hearts on fourteen pyramids. The poured-out blood stained of red the plaza and the stone ramps that were constructed to throw the bodies down. The exact figure is unknown but the Codex Telleriano-Remensis tells that the old people spoke of 4000 sacrificed humans. It is probable that the propaganda of Mexica terror inflated the official figure to 84,400 sacrificed victims to frighten their rivals.
The 1487 reconsecration aside, we should not forget the perpetuity of the sacrificial Mexican holyday, except the feared five days at the end of the year. The blood of the victims was spilled like holy water (something of this can be seen beside Gibson’s vertical tzompantli). The reverberation of such a butchery reached the unconscious of the youth I was centuries after it. I will never forget a dream I had many years ago in which I saw myself transported to the gloomiest moment of a night in the center of the old Tenochtitlan. I remember the atmosphere of the dream: something told me, in that dense night, that there was an odor and a deposit of bodies that made my flesh creep for the inconceivable amount of human remains: a very close place where my soul wandered around. The horror of the culture was captured in the oneiric taste that is impossible to describe in words. The filthy stench of the place was something I knew existed, though I do not remember having smelled anything during the dream.
The second month of the Mexica calendar was called Tlacaxipehualiztli, literally “the flaying of the men,” during which only in Tenochtitlan at least seventy people were killed. Sometimes the condemned to be sacrificed were led naked covered with white chalk. The victims of Xippe Tótec, an imported god from the Yopi region of Guerrero-Oaxaca, had been presented to the public the previous month of the sacrifice. In Mesoamerican statuary Our Lord the Flayed One is always represented covered with the skin of a sacrificed victim, whose features can be guessed on Xippe’s skin. In that holiday, writes Duverger, the beggars were allowed to dress with the skins “still greasy with the victim’s blood” and they begged at the homes of Tenochtitlan “with that terrifying tunic.” According to the Florentine Codex, those who had captured the victims also wore the skins. After several days of using them “the stench was so terrible that everybody turned their heads; it was repulsive: people that encountered them covered their noses, and the skins already dry became crumbly.”
These offering acts were the opposite of the Hollywood images of a secret cult that, clandestinely, sacrifices a young woman. Mesoamerica was the theatre of the most public of the cruelties. In contrast to the Christian cathedrals which spirituality lies in a sensation of privacy and inwardness, the Mesoamerican temple showed off the sacrifice at the universal sight of the sun, and the average people participated in a communal event. In the holiday called Panquetzaliztli the dancers “ran at the top of their speed, jumped and shook until left breathless and the old people of the neighborhoods played music and sang for them.” The exhausting marathon was a hallucinating spectacle and the ritual murders marked the height of the Mexican party. In another of their celebrations, Xócotl huetzi, the celebration of the fire god, the victims were thrown over an immense brazier while the crowd contemplated speechless. Sahagún informs us that the Mexicans took them out of the brazier with their fleshes burnt and swollen, and that after their hearts were torn out “the people dispersed and everybody went to their homes to celebrate, since it was a day of great rejoicing.”
All sacrifice was surrounded by popular parties. Personally, what shocks me the most is the second month of the Mexica calendar, the month that I most relate to my dream, because in real life those who would be killed and skinned fainted, and in this panic-stricken state they were dragged by the hair to the sacrificial stone.
The priests also dressed themselves with the yellow-painted skins of the victims; the skin’s exterior turned inwards like a sock. Our Lord the Flayed One was invoked with these words: “Oh my god, why do you play too hard to get it? Put your golden vestments on, put them on!” The body of the flayed victim was cooked and shared out for its consumption. The Florentine Codex has illustrations of these forms of sacrifice, including an illustration of five Indians skinning a dead body. The xixipeme were the men who dressed themselves with the skin of the victims personifying the deity.
The evidence in both the codexes and on the mural paintings, steles, graffiti and pots are witness of the gamut of the human sacrifices. Even zealous indigenistas like Eduardo Matos Moctezuma and Leonardo López Luján have stated publicly that there is iconographic evidence of the sacrifices in Teotihuacan, Bonampak, Tikal, Piedras Negras and on the codexes Borgia, Selden and Magliabechiano, as well as irrefutable physical evidence in the form of blood particles extracted from the sacrificial daggers.
A warrior and his captive, grabbed by the hair and crying (note the tears on the face). In addition to the extraction of the heart, in the last incarnation of this culture of serial killers the victims were locked up in a cave where they would die of thirst and starvation; or were decapitated, drowned, riddled with arrows, thrown from the precipices, beaten to death, hanged, stoned or burned alive. In the ritual called mitote, the still alive victims were bled while a group of dancers bit their bodies. The mitote culminated with the cooking and communal consumption of the victims in a stew similar to the pozole. In the sacrifice performed by the Matlazinca the victim was seized in a net and the bones slowly crushed by means of twisting the net. The ballgame, performed from the gulf’s coast and that aroused enormous passions among the spectators, culminated in the dragging of the decapitated body so that its blood stained the sand with a frieze of skulls “watching” the sport.
There is no point in making a scholarly, Sahagunesque encyclopedia list, about the names of the gods or the months of the calendar that corresponded to each kind of these sacrifices. Suffice it to say that at the top of the pyramids the idols were of the size of a man and even larger, composed by a paste of floured seeds mixed with the blood of the sacrifices. The figures were sitting on chairs with a sword on one hand and a shield on the other. What I said above of the great Uichilobos could be told once more: how I would like to contemplate the figures of the so-called Aztec Pantheon. Sacrifices were performed to gods whose names are familiar for us who attended the Mexican schools: from the agrarian, war, water and vegetation deities to the gods of the death, fire and lust. Most of the time the sacrifices were performed on the temples, but they could be done in the imperial palace too. We already saw that children were sacrificed on mounts and in the lake. Now I must say something about the sacrifices of women. According to the Florentine Codex, during the rituals of the months Huey tecuíhuitl (from June 22 to July 11) and Ochpaniztli (from August 21 to September 9) women were deceived with these words:

Be merry my daughter, very soon you will share the bed of emperor Motecuhzoma. He will sleep with you, oh blessed one!

The Indian girl voluntarily walked up the temple’s steps but when she arrived she was decapitated by surprise. In similar sacrifices at the arranged time and date according to the calendar’s holiday, women were decapitated, flayed and their skins used like a trophy. Besides men, women, children and occasionally old people, the Mexicas sacrificed dogs, coyotes, deer, eagles and jaguars. The Florentine codex informs us that sometimes they went up the pyramid with the human victim tied up by the four extremities, “meaning they were like the deer.”
The writer who best transports us into this unheard-of world and who most reaches my dream of “machines to see the past” is Bernal Díaz del Castillo and his The Truthful History of the Conquest of New Spain. The spontaneous testimony of the infantry soldier differs from the dry reports by Cortés. It also differs, as a memorialist work, from the treatise that Hugh Thomas wrote half a millennium later, considered a standard reference about the conquest. It tells a lot about our primitive era to focus on the literary form of the Quixote, which is fiction, instead of the real facts that Bernal recounts: extraordinary experiences where he often was very close of losing his life. (The attitude of the people of letters reminds me precisely a passage of Cervantes’ novel: the hidalgo only lost his nerve when he run into the only real adventure he encountered, in contrast to his windmills.) The discovery of the Bernal chronicle impressed me considerably. His work was an eye-opener about the charlatanry in the Mexican schools with all of its silences, blindness and taboos about cannibalism and the cruelty and magnitude of the pre-Columbian sacrificial institution. It seemed inconceivable that I had to wait so long to discover an author that speaks like no other about the distant past of Mexico, someone whose writing I should have met in my adolescence. I am increasingly convinced that the true university are the books; and the voice of one’s own conscience, more than the voice of the academics, the lighthouse that guides us in the seas of the world.
Humboldt said that the joy experienced by the adventurer facing the newly discovered world was better transmitted by the chronicler than by the poets. In 1545 Bernal moved to the Old Guatemala, where he lived the rest of his life, although he would not write down his memories until he was close seventy. The Guatemalan poet Luis Cardoza y Aragón said that Bernal’s chronicle is the most important work about the conquest. He considers it superior to the chronicles of the military campaigns in Peru or the campaigns against Turkey, Flanders or Italy. Those who in more recent times have read Bernal in translations tell similar things. In an online book-review it can be read: “In every page of this book lies the plots and the characters for [every] single Spielberg movie. But no movie, no adventure, no science fiction, and no Goth novel can even come close to Bernal Diaz’s first-hand account of the initial defeat [of the Spaniards] and final conquest of New Spain.” And Christopher Bonn Jonnes, author of Wake up Dead, wrote: “This story might have been rejected as too far-fetched if it were offered as fiction, but it is history.”
Unlike the soporific scholarly treatises, in the Bernaldine pages one really feels how pre-Hispanic Mexico was. The narrative about the shock that the Europeans felt when running for the very first time in history with the sacrificial institution is very illustrative. It happened in an island near Veracruz. Due to the novelty that the ritual represented for Bernal and his comrades they baptized it Island of the Sacrifice.

And we found a worship house with a large and very ugly idol, called Tezcatepuca [Tezcatlipoca], with four Indians with very large dark cassocks as its companions, with capes like the ones of the Dominicans or the cannons. And they were the priests of that idol, commonly called in New Spain [the Aztec Empire] papas, as I have already mentioned. And that day they had sacrificed two boys with their opened chest, and their hearts and blood offered to that cursed idol. And we did not consent they gave us that odorous [offering] smoke; instead we felt great pity to see those two boys dead, and such a gigantic cruelty. And the general asked the Indian Francisco, already mentioned by me, whom we brought to the Banderas River and who seemed to know something, why they did it, and only by means of gestures, since by then we didn’t have any translator, as again I have said.

Those were the times before the Cortés expedition. In the Grijalva expedition, Bernal and his comrades had been the first Europeans to notice that beyond Cuba and La Española there were no more islands but immense lands. In the expedition after Gijalva’s, now way inland into the continent in what today is the state of Veracruz, Bernal tells us:

Pedro de Alvarado said they had found every dead body without arms and legs, and other Indians said that [the arms and legs] had been taken as food, about which our soldiers were amazed at such great cruelties. And let us stop talking of so many sacrifices, since from that town on we did not find anything else.

Let us also take a leap forward on the Bernaldine route to Tenochtitlan where they did not find anything else, Tlaxcala included. When they reached Cholula, a religious city of pilgrimage with a hundred of temples and the highest pyramid of the empire, dedicated to Quetzalcóatl, the Cholulans told Cortés:

“Look, Malinche [Marina’s master], this city is in bad mood. We know that this night they have sacrificed to their idol, which is the war idol, seven people and five of them were children, so that they give victory against you.”

For the ancient Mesoamericans everything was resolved through the killing of children and adults. Once the Spaniards reached the great capital of the empire, and after Moctezuma and his retinue conducted them in grand tour through the beautiful Tenochtitlan and having seen the impressive Uichilobos at the pyramid’s top, Bernal tells us:

A little way apart from the great Cue [pyramid] there was another small tower which was also an idol house or a true hell, for it had at the opening of one gate a most terrible mouth such as they depict, saying that such there are in hell. The mouth was open with great fangs to devour souls, and here too were some shapes of devils and bodies of serpents close to the door, and a little way off was a place of sacrifice all blood-stained and black with smoke, and encrusted with blood, and there were many great ollas and pitchers and large earthenware jars of water, for it was here that they cooked the flesh of the unfortunate Indians who were sacrificed, which was eaten by the papas. There were also near the place of sacrifice many large knives and chopping blocks, such as those on which they cut up meat in the slaughter-houses. […] I always called that place the house of hell.

Sahagún and Durán corroborate Bernal’s testimony about cannibalism. As we already saw, not even Bartolomé de Las Casas denied it. In History of Tlaxcala Diego Muñoz wrote:

Thus there were public butcher’s shops of human flesh, as if it were of cow or sheep like the ones we have today.

In the chapter XXIV authored by the Anonymous Conqueror it can be read that throughout Mesoamerica the natives ate human flesh that, the chronicler adds, they liked more than any other food. It is noteworthy that in this occasion the Mexicans did not use chili peppers, only salt: which according to the scholars suggest that they had it as precious delicatessen. Human flesh, which tasted like pig, was not roasted but served as pozole. In Tenochtitlan the bodies were taken to the neighborhoods for consumption. (Likewise, there were human flesh remnants in the markets of Batak in Sumatra before the Dutch conquest.) The one who made the capture during the war was the owner of the body when it reached the bottom steps of the pyramid. The priest’s assistants gave the owner a pumpkin full of warm blood of the victim. With the blood the owner made offerings to the diverse statues. The house of the capturer was the eating-place, but according to the etiquette he could not join the banquet.
I have mentioned the festivities of the month Panquetzaliztli but did not said that, according to Sahagún, in that festivity the Mexicas bought slaves, “washed them up and gave them as gifts to be fed upon, so that their flesh was tasty when they were killed and eaten.” Even the contemporary writers who admire the Mexica world agree with Sahagún. For Duverger, cannibalism should not be disguised as a symbolic part of an ancient ritual: “No! Cannibalism forms part of the Aztec reality and its practice was much more widespread and considerably more natural than what it is sometimes presented.” He adds: “Let us open the codexes: arms and legs emerge from a pitcher placed on fire with curled up Indians who devour, by hand, the arms and legs of a sacrificed victim.”
(A scene of communal cannibalism: Codex Magliabechiano.) When the Tlaxcallans took the dead Tepeacas to the Tlaxcala butcher’s shops after the flight from Tenochtitlan, it is clear that the objective was not ritual cannibalism but the most pragmatic anthropophagy (this shows that Las Casas’s claim mentioned above that anthropophagy was a religious custom is simply untrue). Miguel Botella from the University of Granada explains that Mesoamerican cannibalism had been “like today’s bull fighting, where everything follows a ritual, but once the animal dies it is meat.” Botella points out that the chroniclers’ descriptions have been corroborated by examining more than twenty thousand bone-remains throughout the continent, some of them with unequivocal signs of culinary manipulation. Among the very diverse recipes of the ancient Mexicans, the one that I found most disgusting to imagine was an immense tamale they did with a dead Indian by grinding the remains—after a year of his death and burial!
After the massacre of Cholula the Spaniards liberated the captives from the wooden, cage-like jails that included children fed for consumption. Not even Hugh Thomas denies this. But the politically correct establishment always depicts the massacre of Cholula as one of the meanest acts by the Spaniards. They never mention the cages or how the captives were liberated thanks to the conquerors, sparing them from being eaten by the Cholulans.
However hard the nationalist Mexicans may try to palm this matter off from the school textbooks, and however hard it may seem to imagine it for those of us who were educated to idealize that culture, the ineludible fact is that only thirteen or fourteen generations ago the Mexicans consumed human flesh as part of their food chain.
 
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The objective of the book is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next time I will reproduce here the section on Aztec childrearing. Those interested in obtaining a copy of Day of Wrath can request it: here.