[Rob Instigator]

in high school it sucked becauyse reference books could only be checked out of library overnight, and had to be back by the morning first period. what a pain in the ass!

[SONIC GAIL]

That's how it was here. It was such a pain when I needed those for research papers.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

I don't necessarily buy into the whole "maya/azteca" human sacrifice thing.. I think it is a gross exageration on the part of anglo/western/spanish sources..

after all, imagine you walked into a Catholic/Orthodox church hundreds of years after they are abandoned and left in ruin, and you have to construct a scenario to their use and the people who used them based upon a few bits of evidence and what you see.. well shit, you might hear people saying things like, "Drinking Jesus blood and eating His flesh" and all the graphic imagery of crucified Jesus icons and statutes.. shit you might speculate that they actually killed someone every sunday if you didn't know any better..

 

essentially I believe the 'sacrifices' of the meso-americans were like the sacrifices in a catholic church, they were spiritual, symbolic. I do not trust the word of spaniards from the 16th century, and there is not much factual evidence aside from their written accounts..

[Rob Instigator]

"buy into" whatever you want. Their own records and those of their neighboring people's detail in FULL their immensely bloddy sacrifice schedule, from neonatal sacrifices to old people, to humpbacks, etc. they were a blood cult the likes of which we need not see again.

[Rob Instigator]

the original sacrifices of the hebrew faith were NOT symbolic in any way, they were actual animal sacrifices. judge not the maya by the symbolic ritual of the catholics.

[Rob Instigator]

and if you are catholic, of any persuasion (roman, greek orthodox, ethiopian, etc) you are supposed to believe that the wine is TRANSUBSTANTIATED into actual blood of jesus, and that the host is tranmsubstantiated into the actual body of jesus. so therefore you are actually eating blood and drinking flesh.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

and if you are catholic, of any persuasion (roman, greek orthodox, ethiopian, etc) you are supposed to believe that the wine is TRANSUBSTANTIATED into actual blood of jesus, and that the host is tranmsubstantiated into the actual body of jesus. so therefore you are actually eating blood and drinking flesh.

I do by the way, but that is a far stretch from actually bringing in somebody and killing them on the altar.. I would assume that indians would be as theologically advanced as christianity to be able to conceive of a spiritual sacrifice that can be physical without having to physically kill anyone after the fact..

I just am highly suspicious of human sacrifice in the Americas, the evidence is hardly conclusive and is mostly speculation.

[Rob Instigator]

that is wrong. just flat out man. they have been digiing up corpse pits of sacrifice victims at Chicke Pizza (chicehn itza ) as well as various other sites. CORPSE PITS.
they had to feed this blood clut with an extensive network of pillaging and slave gathering. check it out. the spaniards may have been asshole conquerors but they were not exagerating, according to the latest reserach into the scant literature left behiond, the codexes,.

massive killin.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

"buy into" whatever you want. Their own records and those of their neighboring people's detail in FULL their immensely bloddy sacrifice schedule, from neonatal sacrifices to old people, to humpbacks, etc. they were a blood cult the likes of which we need not see again.

which records are those Rob? The indians didn't leave a fucking library of Alexandria.. the only written records are accounts by spanish priests with an agenda to demonize the indians. the physical records that archaeologists use to corroborate the spanish accounts are things like statutes, paintings and carvings (ie, images that portray sacrifice) but that is why I brought up Christianity. In the orthodox Church I go into every sunday there are several icons of a crucified Jesus, one of Abaraham about to slay Isaac, one of Saint Stephen being martyred, Moses crossing the Red Sea with all the Egyptians dying in the water,, Saint Tekle Haymanot missing a leg with the bloody stump on the floor next to him, and Shedrach Mechrach and Abednego in the fiery furnace. If all you had to go on with the physical remains in the Church, you would probably believe we were rather violent in our religious services, especially if someone misunderstood a Catechism text and swore they became an expert and claimed we killed jesus every sunday or even every day when there is a Mass.

My point is that there is little evidence, the evidence there is is strictly circumstantial.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

that is wrong. just flat out man. they have been digiing up corpse pits of sacrifice victims at Chicke Pizza (chicehn itza ) as well as various other sites. CORPSE PITS.
they had to feed this blood clut with an extensive network of pillaging and slave gathering. check it out. the spaniards may have been asshole conquerors but they were not exagerating, according to the latest reserach into the scant literature left behiond, the codexes,.

massive killin.

There are some bodies, true, but no where near the piles they speculate and further finding bodies does not imply sacrifice. what about all the crypts in European churches?

In European churches you find 'sacred' bodies all around the altar, relics and kings and all kinds of creepy shit.

 

[sonicpixie]

Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous

I do not trust the word of spaniards from the 16th century, and there is not much factual evidence aside from their written accounts..

some of the old spanish friars who lived in the times just after the settlement of the country could read and even write the maya script but they regarded it as evil or as being a native tongue of no value and so didn't preserve it.
in 1575 Bishop Landa attempted to write down the Maya alphabet through finding out from the natives, but he was highly unpopular with them as he had almost completely destroyed all their literary treasures, so in revenge they misled him as to the true meanings of the various symbols.

so as we have no mayan writing we can only hazard a guess at what the spaniards might have twisted to suit their own ends.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by sonicpixie

some of the old spanish friars who lived in the times just after the settlement of the country could read and even write the maya script but they regarded it as evil or as being a native tongue of no value and so didn't preserve it.
in 1575 Bishop Landa attempted to write down the Maya alphabet through finding out from the natives, but he was highly unpopular with them as he had almost completely destroyed all their literary treasures, so in revenge they misled him as to the true meanings of the various symbols.

so as we have no mayan writing we can only hazard a guess at what the spaniards might have twisted to suit their own ends.

thank you, my point exactly. There are to my understanding four mayan "codices" but they have yet to be properly translated by actual mayans, just a bunch of over-excited american scholars (who have a similar agenda as the spanish). Further, the pictographs which cover most of the buildings have never been translated, they are an educated guess at best, there is no rosetta stone.

[sonicpixie]

Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous

thank you, my point exactly. There are to my understanding four mayan "codices" but they have yet to be properly translated by actual mayans, just a bunch of over-excited american scholars (who have a similar agenda as the spanish). Further, the pictographs which cover most of the buildings have never been translated, they are an educated guess at best, there is no rosetta stone.

yes without such a key the work of any scholars on this is purely guesswork, apparently they have made some progress but it seems to me that if you study something in such detail for long enough of course you will find links that COULD mean seem something and seem to fit together in a way... for example going back to the equinox apparently they traced the symbol for the spring equinox.. 'because of its obvious representation of a cloud from which three streams of water are falling upon the earth. the square at the top represents heaven. the obsidian knife underneath denotes a division or period of time cut off, as it were, from other periods of the year. that the sign means "spring" is verified by its position among the other signs of the seasons.'
could be i guess, but arent they just looking too hard and wanting to see things?

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by sonicpixie

could be i guess, but arent they just looking too hard and wanting to see things?

thats how I feel about sacrifice. Our Judeo-Christian Euro-Western-American backgrounds are biased. We learn in school from 5 years old this kind of lies and exaggerations, then we go to college and become archaeological grad students, we go do a dig with some professors who think they know everything, and we carry their assumptions. We look so hard for sacrifice, we think we find it, but why are we looking in the first place? Because the SPANISH said so, and the academic world trusts the racist, imperialists, murderous spaniards over the indigenous folks everytime!

take an example from this recent article:

"This new discovery at Tula is of a tomb containing two dozen sacrificed children. They appear to have been sacrificed between AD 950 and 1150, during the Toltec Golden Age. Apparently all but one of them were between the ages of five and 15.
Why do archaeologists think they were sacrificed? For one thing, the ritualistic manner in which the skeletons are placed together indicates sacrifice, plus cut marks on their bones are consistent with it. And within the tomb an idol of Tlaloc, worshipped as a rain god, was found, which could provide motive for the sacrifice."


Really? Why do the bodies have to be sacrificed? couldn't they be ceremonious without having to have been killed? perhaps they all died in a accident together? perhaps they are the childern who died of natural causes over a period of time and were ceremoniously burried together in memoriam. why do the cuts have to be in relation to sacrifice? Couldn't they simply be funerary? BIAS BIAS BIAS. My bias is that I don't trust the spanish or the establishment.

[Keeping It Simple]

I've been lead to believe that archaeological records have disproved the claims coming from some quarters that the sacrifices are an invention of Western historians to paint the Mayans and Aztecs as savage races deserved of their eventual downfall rather than them being advanced civilizations.

I suspect the issue has been politicized by the Left's obsession with political correctness. Even going so far as to alter historical facts to tie in with it's political dogmas.

[Kloriel]

bla bla bla let's just keep brushing the anasazi under the rug. maybe they'll just go away. have you done your duty today? hang a nazi!

[sonicpixie]

yes they do seem to make sweeping statements without any apparent evidence, just a 'reason' for their guess displayed as 'fact'.
perhaps subconciously it is still hard to admit that we destroyed something amazing, that something actually important was lost.

[Keeping It Simple]

Originally Posted by Kloriel

bla bla bla let's just keep brushing the anasazi under the rug. maybe they'll just go away. have you done your duty today? hang a nazi!

I'm waiting for the claim from the Left that stone age man was a herbivore and never dreamt of killing and eating an animal.

[Kloriel]

Originally Posted by Keeping It Simple

I'm waiting for the claim from the Left that stone age man was a herbivore and never dreamt of killing and eating an animal.

what do you mean from the Left? Like maybe a whole poopulation than only types with their left hand? The shadowy gates for THAT membership are quite beyond my ken. And by ken I mean http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPHXJ9NPmuI..

[Keeping It Simple]

Originally Posted by Kloriel

what do you mean from the Left? Like maybe a whole poopulation than only types with their left hand? The shadowy gates for THAT membership are quite beyond my ken. And by ken I mean http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPHXJ9NPmuI..

It's a common term describing the positions and ideologies of the left-wing.