Sunday, March 21, 2010

The Return of Quetzalcoatl - Chapter 10

All chapters of this book have been moved: here.

1 comment:

Chechar said...

“And taking into account the inconceivable sadism of the Mayans with the prisoners, undistinguishable from that of the cruelest serial killers of today…”, I wrote above.

Page 228 of the classic The Blood of the Kings contains this description: “This Jaina figurine, a living nightmare of torture, opens his mouth in a great howl of pain. His face is swollen and bloodied, and his scalp hangs down from his head, still attached to the nape of the neck. Evidence of this degree of torture among the Maya is not unknown.”

While the authors of The Blood of the Kings don’t attempt to explain the cultural practices they meticulously report (the budshit so common in today’s cultural relativist Zeitgeist), psycho-historian Heny Ebel comments in one of his books that the statuette had been created with deliberate artistry that communicates both the approval of the sculptor’s customers and the fact that they, in turn, received the approval of their fellow Mayans. A couple of pages later Ebel adds: “We shudder backward only to be forced to contemplate the fact that those who participated in or encouraged these behaviors were the creators of a major world culture”.