Posted on 04/12/2017 5:27:22 PM PDT by SteveH
The candidate for political office stood in a plaza, naked, bracing himself against the punches and kicks. The crowd roared, pulsing around him like a beating heart. People for whom he had risked his life in war after war hurled blows and insults from all directions. The candidate breathed deeply. Trained as a warrior, he knew he had to stay calm to reach the next phase of his candidacy.
This ordeal, documented by a Spanish priest in the 1500s, was merely the beginning of the long process of joining the government of the Mesoamerican city of Tlaxcallan, built around 1250 C.E. in the hills surrounding the modern city of Tlaxcala, Mexico. After this trial ended, the candidate would enter the temple on the edge of the plaza and stay for up to 2 years, while priests drilled him in Tlaxcallan's moral and legal code. He would be starved, beaten with spiked whips when he fell asleep, and required to cut himself in bloodletting rituals. But when he walked out of the temple, he would be more than a warrior: He would be a member of Tlaxcallan's senate, one of the 100 or so men who made the city's most important military and economic decisions.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencemag.org ...
Sound like a plan to whip Republicans into shape.
lol. Cripes, yes.
Cannibalism too?
“...archaeologists now say these “collective societies” left telltale traces in their material culture, such as repetitive architecture, an emphasis on public space over palaces, reliance on local production over exotic trade goods, and a narrowing of wealth gaps between elites and commoners.”
I’m glad we cleared that up. Here I was thinking that the aztecs and incas were just human-sacrifice demon-worshipping pagans; when in fact they lived all the main agenda items of college campus “progressivism”.
The United States is an exception in history.
Without our country the world would be a very brutal place.
I’ve noticed that revisionists try to insert PC nonsense into any analysis of primitive cultures (that left no written records); they’d have you believe they all held women in the highest regard, when Europeans earliest interactions with them clearly indicate that most (if not all) treated women as little more than beasts of burden. Regardless of whether it was in the Americas, Africa, or some Pacific island (where there may have been queens but certainly nothing that improved the lots of the females in general), as long as there is no written record they can just make up whatever they want. I had a sexual deviant describe how the whole idea of homosexuality as a “universal taboo” had been debunked, that early cultures regarded them as a “third gender” - but only early cultures that left no written records, of course...
We all need to get with the program, LOL!
There does not seem anything new about proven warriors joining an aristocracy. Despite their alliance with the Spanish against Aztecs, Tlaxcallan culture died anyway.
Academic speculative B.S.
There is no evidence of any “democratic” process to who chose the individual that went through the torture & rituals of the elites to become one of them.
I remember commercials for that (I don’t even know the movie’s name); did it have a ‘mo as a main character?
Oh and look, they were localvores too.
I bet they wore skinny jeans and had stupid neck beards. Yeah, that’s it.
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