Aztec And Inca Quotes

Ask the Aztecs and the Incas whether or not they would have liked to have access to vaccines. Oh, wait, you can't. They're dead. Vaccination is one of the best things that has happened to civilization. Empires toppled like sandcastles in the wake of diseases we do not give a second thought to today. If taking a moment to elaborate on that point will make this book unpopular with a large group of antivaxxers, that’s okay. This feels like a good hill to die on. It’s surely a better one than the Incas got.

Societies may die a violent death, like the Inca and Aztec societies which the Spaniards destroyed with gunpowder in the sixteenth century; and it is sometimes thought by people who have been reading historical thrillers that the Roman Empire died in the same way, at the hands of barbarian invaders. That theory is amusing but untrue. It died of disease, not of violence, and the disease was a long-growing and deep-seated conviction that its own way of life was not worth preserving.

There is no greater motor for architecture than religious fervor. Ancient examples include the Inca, Aztec Egyptian civilizations. In more recent times, Christianity gave rise to the Gothic and Romanesque architecture of the European middle ages and Islam produced the wonders of the Ottoman Empire.

India and China, or, for that matter, the Aztec and Inca empires, had not even come close to such global dominance, and even less so to reinventing how people produced things in the far-flung corners of the globe. And yet starting in the sixteenth century, armed European capitalists and capital-rich European states reorganized the world’s cotton industry.

I see clearly what colonization has destroyed: the wonderful Indian civilizations - and neither Deterding nor Royal Dutch nor Standard Oil will ever console me for the Aztecs and the Incas.

The magnitude of these shattering changes can perhaps be grasped by imagining that the invasion had been in the reverse direction and that the Aztecs or Incas had arrived suddenly in Europe, imposed their culture and calendar, outlawed Christianity, set up sacrificial altars for thousands of victims in Madrid and Amsterdam, unwittingly spread disease on a scale that virtually matched the Black Death, melted down the golden images of Christ and the saints, threw stones at the stained-glass windows and converted the cathedral aisles into arms or food warehouses, toppled unfamiliar Greek statues and Roman columns, and carried home to the Mexican and Peruvian highlands their loot in precious metals along with slaves, indentured servants and other human trophies.

Had the Aztecs and Incas shown a bit more interest in the world surrounding them – and had they known what the Spaniards had done to their neighbours – they might have resisted the Spanish conquest more keenly and successfully.

But even among the great traditional peoples, the situation is not different: from China to Greece, from Rome to the primordial Nordic groups, then up to Aztecs and the Incas, nobility was not characterised by the simple fact of having ancestors, but by the fact that the ancestors of the nobility were divine, unlike those of plebeians and to which it can remain faithful, also through the integrity of blood. The nobles originated from 'demigods', that is to say, from beings who had actually followed a transcendent form of life, forming the origin of tradition in the higher sense, transmitting to their lineage a blood made divine, and, along with it, rites, that is, determinate operations, whose secret every noble family preserved, which allowed their descendants to continue the spiritual conquest from where it had previously reached, and to lead it from the virtual to the actual.

When the British invaders confronted the Iroquois on the east coast of North America, the British were able to draw upon technology, science, and other cultural developments from China, India, and Egypt, not to mention various other peoples from continental Europe. But the Iroquois could not draw upon the cultural developments of the Aztecs or Incas, who remained unknown to them, though located only a fraction of the distance away as China is from Britain. While the immediate confrontation was between the British settlers and the Iroquois, the cultural resources mobilized on one side represented many more cultures from many more societies around the world. It was by no means a question of the genetic or even cultural superiority of the British by themselves, as compared to the Iroquois, for the British were by no means by themselves. They had the advantage of centuries of cultural diffusion from numerous sources, scattered over thousands of miles.

Patriarchy has been the normal in almost all agricultural and industrial societies. ...If patriarchy in Afro-Asia resulted from some chance occurrence, why were the Aztecs and Incas patriarchal? It is far more likely that even though the precise definition of man and woman varies between cultures, there is some universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued manhood over womanhood. We do not know what this reason is; there are plenty of theories, none of the convincing.

Our Indians did not have a significant culture like those of the Aztec, Maya, or Inca empires; they were rough, primitive, bad tempered, and small in number, but so brave that they were in a state of war for three hundred years, first against the Spanish colonizers, then against the republic. They were pacified in 1880, and not much was heard from them for more than a century, but now the Mapuches—“people of the earth”—have again taken up the fight because what little land is still theirs is threatened by construction of a dam on the Bío Bío River.

Thus, as far as the destiny of the soul after death is concerned, there are two opposite paths. The first is the "path of the gods," also known as the "solar path" or Zeus's path, which leads to the bright dwellings of the immortals. This dwelling was variously represented as a height, heaven, or an island, from the Nordic Valhalla and Asgard to the Aztec-Inca "House of the Sun" that was reserved for kings, heroes, and nobles. The other path is that trodden by those who do not survive in a real way, and who slowly yet inexorably dissolve back into their original stocks, into the "totems" that unlike single individuals, never die; this is the life of Hades, of the "infernals," of Niflheim, of the chthonic deities.

You know those short, brown-toned South American immigrants that pick your fruit, slaughter your meat, and bus your tables? Would you—a respectable person with a middle-class upbringing—ever consider going on a date with one of them? It's a rude question, because it affects to inquire into what everyone gets to know at the cost of forever leaving it unspoken. But if you were to put your unspoken thoughts into words, they might sound something like this: Not only are these people busing the tables, slaughtering the meat, and picking the fruit; they are the descendants of the people who bused the tables, slaughtered the meat, and picked the fruit of the Aztecs and Incas. The Spanish colonisers slaughtered or mixed their blood with the princes, priests, scholars, artisans, warriors, and beautiful women of the indigenous Americas, leaving untouched a class of Morlocks bred for good-natured servility and thus now tailor-made to the demands of an increasingly feudal postindustrial America. That's, by the way, part of the undertow of the immigration debate, the thing that makes an honest appraisal of the issue impossible, because you can never put anything right without first admitting you're in the wrong.

Over the next 300 years, the Afro-Asian giant swallowed up all the other worlds. It consumed the Mesoamerican World in 1521, when the Spanish conquered the Aztec Empire. It took its first bite out of the Oceanic World at the same time, during Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, and soon after that completed its conquest. The Andean World collapsed in 1532, when Spanish conquistadors crushed the Inca Empire. The first European landed on the Australian continent in 1606, and that pristine world came to an end when British colonisation began in earnest in 1788. Fifteen years later the Britons established their first settlement in Tasmania, thus bringing the last autonomous human world into the Afro-Asian sphere of influence. It took the Afro-Asian giant several centuries to digest all that it had swallowed, but the process was irreversible. Today almost all humans share the same geopolitical system (the entire planet is divided into internationally recognised states); the same economic system (capitalist market forces shape even the remotest corners of the globe); the same legal system (human rights and international law are valid everywhere, at least theoretically); and the same scientific system (experts in Iran, Israel, Australia and Argentina have exactly the same views about the structure of atoms or the treatment of tuberculosis). The single global culture is not homogeneous. Just as a single organic body contains many different kinds of organs and cells, so our single global culture contains many different types of lifestyles and people, from New York stockbrokers to Afghan shepherds. Yet they are all closely connected and they influence one another in myriad ways. They still argue and fight, but they argue using the same concepts and fight using the same weapons. A real ‘clash of civilisations’ is like the proverbial dialogue of the deaf. Nobody can grasp what the other is saying. Today when Iran and the United States rattle swords at one another, they both speak the language of nation states, capitalist economies, international rights and nuclear physics.

trajectory, culminating in the Industrial Revolution.8 In their terms, England was the first country to move to having ‘inclusive’ or ‘pluralistic’ rather than ‘extractive’ political institutions. Note that other West European societies – for instance, Spain – failed to do this. As a result, the outcomes of European colonization in North and South America were radically different. The English exported inclusive institutions; the Spaniards were content to superimpose their extractive ones on top of those they took over from the Aztecs and Incas.

Among the Inca, as among the Aztec, dreams were considered to be true voyages of the soul outside the body, during which men could know the future and receive divine warnings . . . Dreams and visions affirmed a relationship between the divinity and man which was absolutely contrary to the strongly hierarchical structures of the Church of the first Christian missionaries. Shamanic ecstasy signified the individuality of faith, revelation, and immediate relationship with the forces of the beyond. It was upon that ecstatic relationship with the divine world that the identity of the barbarian peoples was built, where each man could, thanks to the gift of his dreams, merge into the other world.

According to Laura Betzig, in the first civilizations (ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Aztec, the Inca, imperial India, and China), “powerful men mate with hundreds of women, pass their power on to a son by one legitimate wife, and take the lives of men who get in their way.” As I explained earlier, these men may have been powerful because they were good systemizers. The fact that they eliminated those who stood up to them implies that they were also low empathizers. And they certainly seemed to have an efficient means of disseminating their genes (polygyny). So we can envision how the genotype for brain type S might have spread widely throughout a male population.

Bolívar was one of the shapers of the modern world, leading his ragged band of followers to take on what was then the longest enduring empire, that of Spain, which disposed of some 36,000 troops and 44,000 seamen to preserve an entire continent in its iron grip. He liberated no fewer than six modern countries from the Spanish stranglehold – Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Panama – in a series of astonishing marches that led his army across Amazonian rainforests, sodden marshes, dizzying mountains, parched outbacks and prosperous highlands to exceed the achievements of the conquistadors, Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro (because the Spanish empire was so much better armed than the Aztecs and the Incas).

You have to understand the history of the people,' he said. 'I do not consider the Latins to be fundamentally a brutal people. The brutality which they exhibit is a brutality they learned from the Europeans, going back to the Inquisition. The Latins didn't know how to torture people. They killed people—the Aztecs and the Incas did—as part of sacrificial religious rites, but they didn't torture them. They learned that from the Inquisitors. Now it's been developed over centuries, and it's become a way of life. As has the corruption, which also was taught to them be Europeans.

Fractal shapes were being expressed intuitively by artists long before they were recognized in science. Self-similar patterns appear in Celtic artefacts, like the spirals and circles within circles of the exquisitely crafted illuminated pages of the early 9th-century Book of Kells and the Densborough mirror made in the 1st century A.C. Mathematical awareness, particularly fractal awareness, reveals itself in the art of the Romans and the Egyptians, and in the work of the Aztec, Inca and Mayan civilizations of Central and South America. Shapes highly reminiscent of the Koch curve were used to depict waves by the Hellenic artist in a frieze in the ancient Greek town of Akrotiri.

Ask the Aztecs and Incas whether or not they would have liked to have vaccines available to the. Oh, wait--you can't. They're dead. Vaccination is one of the best things that has happened to civilization. Empires toppled like sand castles in the wake of diseases we do not give a second thought to today. If taking a moment to elaborate on that point will make this book unpopular with a large group of anti-vaxxers, that's ok. This feels like a good hill to die on. It's surely a better one than the Incas got.

Ask the Aztecs and Incas whether or not they would have liked to have vaccines available to them. Oh, wait, you can’t, they’re dead. Vaccination is one of the best things that has happened to civilization. Empires toppled like sandcastles in the wake of diseases we do not give a second thought to today. If taking a moment to elaborate on that point will make this book unpopular with a large group of antivaxxers, that’s okay. This feels like a good hill to die on. It’s surely a better one than the Incas got.

Outbreaks forced empires to change course – like the Byzantine Empire when struck by the Plague of Justinian in 541-542 – and some even to disappear altogether – when Aztec and Inca emperors died with most of their subjects from European germs. Also, authoritative measures to attempt to contain them have always been part of the policy arsenal. Thus, there is nothing new about the confinement and lockdowns imposed upon much of the world to manage COVID-19. They have been common practice for centuries. The earliest forms of confinement came with the quarantines instituted in an effort to contain the Black Death that between 1347 and 1351 killed about a third of all Europeans. Coming from the word quaranta (which means “forty” in Italian), the idea of confining people for 40 days originated without the authorities really understanding what they wanted to contain, but the measures were one of the first forms of “institutionalized public health” that helped legitimatize the “accretion of power” by the modern state.[1] The period of 40 days has no medical foundation; it was chosen for symbolic and religious reasons: both the Old and New Testaments often refer to the number 40 in the context of purification – in particular the 40 days of Lent and the 40 days of flood in Genesis.

You see, the ancestral horse died out here—well, in the ‘here’ that is my real-life home, but not in the world of Temilún. When the great empires of the Americas arose in the real world—the Toltec, Aztec, Mayan, Inca, our own Muisca—they had several handicaps the civilizations of the Tigris Valley or the Mediterranean did not have—slower communications, no large wagons or sledges since there were no animals capable of hauling them, less need for broad flat roads, hence less pressure to develop the wheel, and so on.” He began pacing again, but this time with an air of happy energy. “In the real world, the Spanish came to the Americas and discovered them ripe for plucking. Only a few hundred men with guns and horses subjugated two continents. Think of that! So I built America again. But this time the horse did not die out.” He took off his feathered crown and set

Maya were early scientists, for they discovered quickly that a trio of vegetables that later became known as “the three sisters” grew very well together.

The Maya found that these three plants, when grown together, would help each other develop. Tall and viny, beans climbed up the maize stalks. The squash, in turn, helped to reduce soil erosion.

in 7000 BC a new shift began—the hunter-gatherers who lived in Mesoamerica discovered something that would change their region forever. They began planting crops.

if you were born with a very small organism in the Olmec or the later Maya culture, you’d be seen as a magical being, touched by the gods. You’d be enjoying all kinds of luxuries, often appearing in the king’s court. This may be something to do with their belief that the sky was held up by four dwarves, and so they gave them special treatment.

Maya were largely farmers, growing domesticated crops, such as maize, all kinds of exotic fruits, cacao, and root crops. But their diet (one of the healthiest diets you could have in the ancient world) still depended largely on hunting and fishing in the lush fields and waters that surrounded them.

glimpse

The Maya saw life as a continuum—a series of birth and death cycles.

The Inca referred to these rebel Seraphim as Amaru; the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl; and the Maya as Kukulkán

David Landes, the distinguished economic historian, has even seen in the political fragmentation of the Old Continent one of the roots of its later global dominance. By decentralizing authority, fragmentation made Europe safe from single-stroke conquest – the fate of many empires of the past, from Persia after Issus (333 BC) and Rome after the sack of Alaric (410 AD) to Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru. The American historian concludes his argument with a citation from Patricia Crone’s Pre-Industrial Societies: ‘Far from being stultified by imperial government, Europe was to be propelled forward by constant competition between its component parts’ (Landes 1998: 528). These and other scholars stressing the importance of inter-state competition in European history have been inspired by the arguments advanced by Eric Jones in his well-known book The European Miracle. The miracle the British historian wished to explain is the fact that one thousand years ago, more or less, nobody would have thought possible that Europe could ever be able to challenge the great empires of the East, but five hundred years later European global dominance was already becoming a reality. According to Jones the essence of this ‘European miracle’ lies in politics rather than in economics: in its long-lasting system of competing but also cooperating states. Considered as a group, the members of the European states system realized the benefits of competitive decision-making but also some of the economies of scale expected of an empire: ‘Unity in diversity gave Europe some of the best of both worlds, albeit in a somewhat ragged and untidy way’ (Jones 1987: 110).

Man and the rat are utterly destructive. All that nature offers is taken for their own purposes, plant or beast. Gradually these two have spread across the earth, keeping pace with each other and unable to destroy each other, though continually hostile. They have wandered from East to West, driven by their physical needs, and—unlike any other species of living things—have made war upon their own kind. The gradual, relentless, progressive extermination of the black rat by the brown has no parallel in nature so close as that of the similar extermination of one race of man by another. Did the Danes conquer England; or the Normans the Saxon-Danes; or the Normans the Sicillian-Mohammedans; or the Moors the Latin-Iberians; or the Franks the Moors; or the Spanish the Aztecs and the Incas; or the Europeans in general the aborigines of the world by qualities other than those by which Mus decumanus has driven out Mus rattus? In both species, the battle has been pitilessly to the strong. And the strong have been pitiless. The physically weak have been driven before the strong—annihilated, or constrained to the slavery of doing without the bounties which were provided for all equally. Isolated colonies of black rats survive, as weaker nations survive until the stronger ones desire the little they still possess. The rat has an excuse. As far as we know, it does not appear to have developed a soul, or that intangible quality of justice, mercy, and reason that psychic evolution has bestowed upon man. We must not expect too much.

Since patriarchy is so universal, it cannot be the product of some vicious circle that was kick-started by a chance occurrence. It is particularly noteworthy that even before 1492, most societies in both America and Afro-Asia were patriarchal, even though they had been out of contact for thousands of years. If patriarchy in Afro-Asia resulted from some chance occurrence, why were the Aztecs and Incas patriarchal? It is far more likely that even though the precise definition of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ varies between cultures, there is some universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued manhood over womanhood. We do not know what this reason is. There are plenty of theories, none of them convincing.