Mind Frozen by Fright and Make-Believe (13)
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| Black John is danced/sung into becoming green. |
If a stick cannot be pushed into the ground by hand, it can be driven into the ground with a malet. This is an apt description of how Aztecs persuaded their society to accept sacrificial violence and through it become a “cultured” Aztec.
When such violence becames accepted by a large group of people (best in an urban or semi-urban setting), it soon becomea a social compulsion. Another analogy of similar aculturation is that of a young man turned into a hunter. Once the young man is persuaded to release the arrow or squeeze the trigger, he is more than half-way to overcoming his trepidations, and is henceforth ready to to attack and kill Mother Earth if ordered. With ever more practice, the young man may become a master of destruction, and a teacher of other young men through games and rituals, i.e., acts of forced mimesis, i.e. killing animals and humans.
As nightmarish as miming and/or enacting violence may be, and as insecure as a society may result from it, once violence is learned and becomes a tradition, a society comes to depend on it (mind frozen by make-believe) for temporary “stability”. Generally, it may take a greater catastrophe to break the mold of the catastrophe imposed earlier on.
Once the Aztec men (Gods)—were familiar with night-time violence—they were better able to steel their emotions and accept violence as a “normal” way to influence reality on behalf of whoever was able to be more violent and unmerciful. The “greater catastrophe” for Aztec men became a reality when their earlier culture became boring or tedious to them (as ours is becoming to us), once they had accepted the catastrophe/violence as a permanent condition of "cultured" life. This is when it occurred to them to create a new God. They called the new God Huitzilopochtli.
The manner of creating the “new” God of Violence was by inseminating Mother Earth (who hid inside the Serpent- or Moon-Mountain) with a ball of feathers (possibly the rib cage of a dead snake). The idea for the ball of feathers may have presented itself from seeing tumble weeds rolling across a desert landscape. The chief of the earlier proto-Aztec Gods had been Quetzalcoatl, who could also disguise himself as wind. Because wind may be imagined as a feathered serpent, his resemblance to tumble weed or a tumble of feathers stuck to a tumble of human ribs is not difficult to imagine.
When the feathered ribs germinated, Hitzilopochtli sprang from his mother’s womb and not only killed Mother Earth (probably as a result of a breech birth), but his older siblings too, all four hundred of them.
The logic of whoever practices violence does not accept rivals, be they Gods, men, women, or children. The warriors try to persuade themselves that when there is no one left to kill, and when history and violence (object and act) are seen become as one, they can make-believe that they have reached a time were history ceases—as one Harvard professor recently insisted was the nature of our own times. The place this takes place in our time is not Earth, but planet Virtual Ideal.
After his birth, Huitzilopochtli came to stand for the spirit of men, especially warriors. To keep the lofty status, the male warrior had to also learn to become an actor. The acting took place not only through the application of body paint and strutting before an audience of women and children, but through engaging in violent rituals, because only pain, violence, and death inhibit the individual from taking his-her subjective self as real and worth realizing.
Professor Michael Taussig describes how the men of Tierra del Fuego, knew of a mythical story that told, how their forebears had killed their women. The explanation why this had occurred was that the men had caught the women trying to fool them by pretending that they were Goddesses.
* * *
Though the Aztecs lived in the area that is now Mexico City and the Ona tribe lived at the far end of the South America, we cannot discount the possibility that the traditions may come by way of the same ancient root. For example, this writer was stunned when on a travel show aired on local television in Latvia, a group of travelers visiting with nomadic people east of Lake Baikal showed the nomads killing a sheep for their guests by making an incision (as four men turned the animal over and held its legs spread) in the skin near what appeared to be the urinary sack, and the butcher (the fifth man) pushed his hand through the perforation up to the animal’s heart, and killing it by apparently squeezing shut the blood flow to the heart.
Following the murder of Ona women, it became the custom among Ona men that no women or children were allowed to enter the men’s ceremonial house, where they would see their Gods as mere men. To transgress against the custom meant death or severe punishment. One punishment (used by Amazon tribes) was gang rape of the guilty woman, another (by the Arunta in Australia) was to blind with a firestick.
The secret of the Ona or Selk’nam men was very plain: during the rites of initiation, everyone (the young initiates including) who watched the ceremonies enacted by the initiators had to be scared to death.
Such make-believe is not surprising to “modern” man. We recently saw such belief (on pain of punishment by imprisonment) enacted by the North Koreans, during the funeral of their leader Kim Jong II. The American government, too, now claims for itself the right to arrest and assassinate any American citizen without a trial.
When such violence becames accepted by a large group of people (best in an urban or semi-urban setting), it soon becomea a social compulsion. Another analogy of similar aculturation is that of a young man turned into a hunter. Once the young man is persuaded to release the arrow or squeeze the trigger, he is more than half-way to overcoming his trepidations, and is henceforth ready to to attack and kill Mother Earth if ordered. With ever more practice, the young man may become a master of destruction, and a teacher of other young men through games and rituals, i.e., acts of forced mimesis, i.e. killing animals and humans.
As nightmarish as miming and/or enacting violence may be, and as insecure as a society may result from it, once violence is learned and becomes a tradition, a society comes to depend on it (mind frozen by make-believe) for temporary “stability”. Generally, it may take a greater catastrophe to break the mold of the catastrophe imposed earlier on.
Once the Aztec men (Gods)—were familiar with night-time violence—they were better able to steel their emotions and accept violence as a “normal” way to influence reality on behalf of whoever was able to be more violent and unmerciful. The “greater catastrophe” for Aztec men became a reality when their earlier culture became boring or tedious to them (as ours is becoming to us), once they had accepted the catastrophe/violence as a permanent condition of "cultured" life. This is when it occurred to them to create a new God. They called the new God Huitzilopochtli.
The manner of creating the “new” God of Violence was by inseminating Mother Earth (who hid inside the Serpent- or Moon-Mountain) with a ball of feathers (possibly the rib cage of a dead snake). The idea for the ball of feathers may have presented itself from seeing tumble weeds rolling across a desert landscape. The chief of the earlier proto-Aztec Gods had been Quetzalcoatl, who could also disguise himself as wind. Because wind may be imagined as a feathered serpent, his resemblance to tumble weed or a tumble of feathers stuck to a tumble of human ribs is not difficult to imagine.
When the feathered ribs germinated, Hitzilopochtli sprang from his mother’s womb and not only killed Mother Earth (probably as a result of a breech birth), but his older siblings too, all four hundred of them.
The logic of whoever practices violence does not accept rivals, be they Gods, men, women, or children. The warriors try to persuade themselves that when there is no one left to kill, and when history and violence (object and act) are seen become as one, they can make-believe that they have reached a time were history ceases—as one Harvard professor recently insisted was the nature of our own times. The place this takes place in our time is not Earth, but planet Virtual Ideal.
After his birth, Huitzilopochtli came to stand for the spirit of men, especially warriors. To keep the lofty status, the male warrior had to also learn to become an actor. The acting took place not only through the application of body paint and strutting before an audience of women and children, but through engaging in violent rituals, because only pain, violence, and death inhibit the individual from taking his-her subjective self as real and worth realizing.
Professor Michael Taussig describes how the men of Tierra del Fuego, knew of a mythical story that told, how their forebears had killed their women. The explanation why this had occurred was that the men had caught the women trying to fool them by pretending that they were Goddesses.
* * *
Though the Aztecs lived in the area that is now Mexico City and the Ona tribe lived at the far end of the South America, we cannot discount the possibility that the traditions may come by way of the same ancient root. For example, this writer was stunned when on a travel show aired on local television in Latvia, a group of travelers visiting with nomadic people east of Lake Baikal showed the nomads killing a sheep for their guests by making an incision (as four men turned the animal over and held its legs spread) in the skin near what appeared to be the urinary sack, and the butcher (the fifth man) pushed his hand through the perforation up to the animal’s heart, and killing it by apparently squeezing shut the blood flow to the heart.
Following the murder of Ona women, it became the custom among Ona men that no women or children were allowed to enter the men’s ceremonial house, where they would see their Gods as mere men. To transgress against the custom meant death or severe punishment. One punishment (used by Amazon tribes) was gang rape of the guilty woman, another (by the Arunta in Australia) was to blind with a firestick.
The secret of the Ona or Selk’nam men was very plain: during the rites of initiation, everyone (the young initiates including) who watched the ceremonies enacted by the initiators had to be scared to death.
Such make-believe is not surprising to “modern” man. We recently saw such belief (on pain of punishment by imprisonment) enacted by the North Koreans, during the funeral of their leader Kim Jong II. The American government, too, now claims for itself the right to arrest and assassinate any American citizen without a trial.
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