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Originally posted by burntheships
reply to post by foood4thought
September 11, 2001.
Blood letting and sacrifice.
Need I say more?
In his Durán Codex, Diego Durán states that the Flower wars were instigated by the Aztec Cihuacoatl,[1] Tlacaelel, because of a great famine that occurred during the reign of Moctezuma I, which could only be assuaged through the means of human sacrifice. As a result, a treaty was signed between Tenochtitlan (the Aztec capital), Texcoco, Tlaxcala and Huejotzingo, to engage in ritual battles which would provide fresh victims. However another source, noble historian Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, mentions an earlier Flower War between Mexica and the Chalca.
The sixteenth century chronicle a History of Tlaxcala, by Tlaxcalan Diego Muñoz Camargo contains a legend of a powerful Tlaxcalteca warrior called Tlahuiçole, who was captured, but because of his fame as a warrior he was freed and then fought with the Aztecs against the Tarascans in Michoacán. He received honors, but instead of returning to Tlaxcala he chose to die in sacrifice. There were eight days of celebrations in his honor, and then he killed the first eight warriors. Still insisting on being sacrificed, he fought and wounded 20 more warriors before being defeated and sacrificed.
[edit] Discussion
The exact nature of the Flower Wars is not well determined but a number of different interpretations of the concept exist. One popular idea of the Flower Wars is that it was a special institutionalized kind of warfare where two enemy states would plan battles through mutual arrangement in order to satisfy the religious needs of both combatants for war captives to use in sacrificial rituals, but also, possibly, to train young warriors and enable social mobility which for the lower classes was primarily possible through military service. This view is based on a number of quotes from early chroniclers and also from the letters of Hernán Cortés. However in recent years this interpretation has been doubted by scholars such as Nigel Davies[2] and Ross Hassig,[3] who argues that "the mutual arrangement" of the flower war institution is dubious, and suggest that the Flower War was in fact a low-intensity, sustained conflict with the Aztec side trying to wear down the Tlaxcalteca in order to later conquer them entirely.
Though Hassig suggests that interpretations of the Flower Wars have been exaggerated, he accepts that captives of these wars were in fact sacrificed. Hassig believes that captives of the Flower Wars were not the only sacrificial victims, that such captives were involved in only some Aztec rites, and that they were not involved in the ostentatious 1487 ceremony dedicating the last form of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan.
If you do the Amazon book search for "sacrifice," the part I believe Alex is talking about starts at the last paragraph of page 765 and continues onto page 766. They don't say "bring back human sacrifice," of course, but instead that human sacrifice is one thing, along with infanticide, slavery, and murder, that indigenous cultures have done, which is bad, but is a way of "adapting" to their environment to maintain biodiversity. The writers of this report seem to feel that, whether or not these indigenous populations engage in these practices for purposes of conservation or not, that was the ultimate outcome, and therefore such people are living more in harmony with the environment than the western industrialized world.
Originally posted by DerepentLEstranger
wars nowadays are holocausts in which lives and resources are destroyed
and Santa Muerte en.wikipedia.org...
very popular with some of the beneficiaries of fast and furious