Mesoamerican Art: Mayan, Aztec, Olmec, Toltec etc

Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
sus said:
I almost think the graphic sensibility of Mesoamerica exceeds that of Egypt: more animated, overgrown, rounded, jungle-like, serpentine (many Celtic knot-like figures). Foreground and background bleeding into each other, intertwining, knotting.
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I remember getting all of this sort of imagery very strongly the first few times I did mushrooms. I recall at the time thinking "Wow, if this is what it looks like when you're tripping, then this must be where Mesoamerican art comes." But in reality I expect I already knew at that point that people in those civilizations made use of lots of different natural drugs in a ritual context, including mushrooms, so I was probably subconsciously primed to see that sort of stuff when tripping on them.
 
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sus

sus

Moderator
Mr. Tea said:
Not read the book, but I've heard of it and the general hypothesis. I wouldn't say I think it is "true", as such, but it's intriguing and not inherently implausible.
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Yeah that's my impression too.

I was really floored by the costume design in Apocalypto, which I understand to be fairly well-researched

MV5BZTQ5YWNkNTctOWI1MS00NTJhLTg3YWEtMzYwOWQ1ZDlhYTdiXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyODQ4NDAyNzc@._V1_.jpg


apocalypto-priest.jpg


1706395240641.png
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Christianity in theory is perhaps opposed to imperial logic. In practice it consistently ends up empire's lackey
 
HMGovt’s Glorious Return!

HMGovt’s Glorious Return!

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sus said:
Christianity in theory is perhaps opposed to imperial logic. In practice it consistently ends up empire's lackey
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It's Christianity in righteous propagation mode. Which, when faced with mesoamerican death cults, genital mutilation, cannibalism, sutti, and all the other various inhumanities around the world can hardly be considered a failure mode

Surveying the world in 1500: "you don't know how bad it really is"
 
sus

sus

Moderator
HMGovt’s Glorious Return! said:
It's Christianity in righteous propagation mode. Which, when faced with mesoamerican death cults, genital mutilation, cannibalism, sutti, and all the other various inhumanities around the world can hardly be considered a failure mode

Surveying the world in 1500: "you don't know how bad it really is"
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Genital mutilation is pretty widespread in Abrahamic cultures?

Mesoamerican death cults = two empires in early stages of civilizing?
 
sus

sus

Moderator
I'm a realist in the sense that I attribute Western moral progress to the realization that greater economic power could be obtained by cooperation than defection. The values of state sanctioned religion are largely epiphenomena, they're not usually necessary to explain why a state behaves the way it behaves, and are in fact quite flexible to interpretation depending on the economic demands of an empire at a given moment.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Islamic culture had a cosmopolitan golden age while a Christian Europe was in the dark ages. Tolerance is far from an exclusively Abrahamic value, let alone exclusively Christian value.

I think it's much more clearly a normal part of civilizational development arcs than a unique property of one particular religious sect. The ideology may help scaffold what we call moral progress, but the economics of power have far more often dictated historical actions than abstract theological commitments.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
HMGovt’s Glorious Return! said:
Mesoameroca weights its civilizational model on a pluripotential amoral force, teotl, which is orthogonal to Christianity. the two could not coexist. QED
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Well that's bollocks for a start. The Mexica people ('Aztecs') readily adopted Christianity since the doctrine of a incarnate man-god who allowed himself to be sacrificed and then rose again after conquering death aligned so well their original beliefs, which were full of such myths.

Folk Christianity in Mexico today is a syncretism between the Catholic cult of saints and what remains of their indigenous religions.
 
V

version

Well-known member
sus said:
Christianity in theory is perhaps opposed to imperial logic. In practice it consistently ends up empire's lackey
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"The church is perfectly pleased to be treated as an ideology. This can be argued; it feeds ecumenism. But Christianity has never been an ideology; it's a very original, very specific organization of power that has assumed diverse forms since the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, and which was able to invent the idea of international power. It's far more important than ideology."
 
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WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Was Atlantic travel impossible pre European invasion? Possibly not but the evidence is more a correlation of forms - glyphs, monumental building projects, god pantheons etc

Fine irrigators. We marvel at their respective art forms and cosmology yet their engineers and design abilities to live ‘well’ in mosquito ridden jungle and swamplands is epically staggering

Burroughs writes and lectures succinctly on the god of corn and Bishop de Landa, the latter one of history’s biggest cunts. What I find unique within his position are the levels of destruction wrought on indigenous libraries, like Romans heading for Anglesey 1500 years preciously to behead living libraries. Only 4 texts survived. 4. Imagine 4 books surviving of all the works created since the printing press and then trying to reconstruct such societies from said paucity of evidence


Beefy Olmec head post
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
WashYourHands said:
Was Atlantic travel impossible pre European invasion? Possibly not but the evidence is more a correlation of forms - glyphs, monumental building projects, god pantheons etc

Fine irrigators. We marvel at their respective art forms and cosmology yet their engineers and design abilities to live ‘well’ in mosquito ridden jungle and swamplands is epically staggering

Burroughs writes and lectures succinctly on the god of corn and Bishop de Landa, the latter one of history’s biggest cunts. What I find unique within his position are the levels of destruction wrought on indigenous libraries, like Romans heading for Anglesey 1500 years preciously to behead living libraries. Only 4 texts survived. 4. Imagine 4 books surviving of all the works created since the printing press and then trying to reconstruct such societies from said paucity of evidence


Beefy Olmec head post
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What good is the survival of these books if the ruling culture confidently consigns their contents to the status of 'myth' @Mr. Tea. That, in effect, is a greater violence as it assumes the conquered culture has no chance to fight back cf decolonisation.
 
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
they weren’t the status of ‘myth’

all knowledge is the product of history and if we address the extent of destruction would you assume those texts deemed too informative or too liable in creating sedition among indigenous people by de Landa were colouring books with crayons? Tea could help with the final section

they were destroyed by de Landa’s minions for specifically clear reasons - cultural genocide, control, power and income streams ie gold destined for the Spanish crown

if you listen to Burroughs you’ll hear how subsequent interpretations failed to address key concepts, eg the death of the corn god, its place in a broader cultural pantheon of belief, cosmology, death and some fictional yank div’s search for immortality
 
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
The other angle when considering migration is the possible influence of southern pacific traders reaching South America but until genetic analysis gains more granular resolution, we can only guess
 
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