Editor's note: As the internet became our primary medium of communication, society gradually came to resemble our new technology — the Clown World, we call it, which fundamentally altered our historical record keeping. In the first place, our history rapidly vanishes. But maybe even more pernicious, it has never been so easy to re-write the past, or to construct a worldview entirely of soothing lies.

The noble savage, or the notion Europeans have always been evil, while primitive man has always been peaceful, beautiful, and spiritually ascended, has never been more popular. But where the internet takes, it also gives, and as well-constructed as our false histories have become, it has likewise never been so easy, or so inexpensive, to combat delusion with a meme.

Today, it’s the ‘noble Aztec empire’ vs. reality, as presented by a small gang of shitposting historians. River Page explores in this gripping mid-week read.

-Solana

---

Last week, the video game and entertainment website IGN posted an announcement trailer for Ecumene Aztec, an upcoming third-person survival RPG where you play as an Aztec warrior “trying to withstand the assault of Spanish conquistadors.” The memes people are posting about it are hilarious and poignant: “Oh look! Here comes the far right…” says an Aztec, blood from the heart of a human sacrifice victim dripping down his arms, when he notices that the Spanish have arrived. In another, the “chad” conquistador declares, “SORRY BUT THE HUMAN SACRIFICES WILL STOP,” as seething Aztec and libtard wojacks weep in the pyramid-covered background. 

In the prevailing cultural narrative, instilled in Americans from childhood, Europeans are bloodthirsty murderers in an Edenic pre-Columbian paradise: Pocahontas villains disrupting the peaceful lives of buckskin-clad Indians frolicking through the forest, singing to raccoons, and soliciting the advice of matronly willow trees.

It’s a comfortable narrative for many. “The comments section is how I learned (yet should’ve expected) some people are really pro-colonizers when anything features an indigenous lead,” says one Twitter user, even though the Spanish conquest is best characterized as a colonizer-on-colonizer crime, as the Aztecs were themselves running a rapidly expanding empire. Pointing out Aztec brutality is Hitlerian, suggests another tweet with over 2,000 likes. Another says the replies to IGN’s tweet “are the reason we need a gamer genocide,” adding, “Imagine simping for a destructive colonialism that’s not even successful by most accounts.” It’s unclear what these “accounts” are, given that Mexico today is a largely Catholic and Spanish-speaking country that no longer engages in state-sponsored human sacrifice to keep the wheel of time turning. In any case, the use of “destructive” here gives away the game. What the Aztec meme posters are willing to acknowledge, and their critics aren’t, is that Aztec society was uniquely evil and deserving of destruction. 

People who defend Aztec culture like to point out that other historical civilizations engaged in an array of brutality, including human sacrifice. This is true, but what makes Aztec society unique is not the presence of human sacrifice, but its centrality. An analog can be found in the institution of slavery. Historically speaking, slavery has been found in almost every complex civilization. However, historians often distinguish societies with slaves from slave societies. Antebellum Mississippi, for example, was not merely a society with slaves, it was a slave society: slaves formed the majority of the population, making it the dominant labor relationship and, therefore, the center of the society’s economic and social order.

An analogous characterization can be made about human sacrifice in societies. Societies that performed human sacrifice as part of elite funerary practices or holiday festivities, or in response to natural disasters, can be said to be societies with human sacrifice. But Mesoamerican cultures were unique in that human sacrifice was a prerequisite to state survival. They were human sacrifice societies: without it, the sun would cease to rise, the world would end, the forward motion of time itself would halt. Human sacrifice informed every aspect of life, even war, where they captured the enemy to use as sacrificial stock, rather than killing him on the battlefield. Recent archaeological excavations have uncovered tzompantli, skull racks used to display the heads of sacrificial victims, large enough to hold thousands of skulls. Science called it a “testimony to an industry of human sacrifice unlike any other in the world.” 

Imagine the public theater productions we see today, already upsetting, but they’re reenacting scenes from SAW, and they’re every day, with real people, on the government dime. For the Aztecs, human sacrifice appears to have been a daily practice, but the number of victims is a matter of debate. Estimates of 10,000 to 20,000 per year are common, but some researchers have placed the number as high as 250,000 people per year. And victims of sacrifice were not limited to prisoners of war, or even men. Solana — a noted member of the conquistador race — recently wrote about “our haunted transsexual internet,” but that’s got nothing on the haunted transsexual streets of Tenochtitlan. During the annual festival of Ochpaniztli (the eleventh month), which commemorated the misanthropic mother goddess Toci, the Aztecs would choose a young slave woman to be sacrificed. After her head was slowly sawed off with an obsidian knife, she would be skinned. Then, like an impatient Buffalo Bill, a priest would parade around in her still-bloody flesh, followed by four big-cocked young men in tight loincloths carrying spindles adorned with symbols of Aztec femininity. This was to commemorate the ability of gods to change their gender depending on the circumstance.

If this debauched gender-goblin pride parade wasn’t bad enough, consider that the Aztecs also sacrificed children to the god Tlaloc, who was pleased by their tears because they resembled the rain he controlled. Archeological evidence suggests that, on the way to execution, children were tortured and maimed to this end. Virtually the entire Aztec calendar was marked by these “special” sacrifices, meant to tell old myths or symbolize on-the-nose ritualized requests. This is all on top of the 20 or so run-of-the-mill human sacrifices which were performed each day, just so the next would come. Today, we know that children who witness domestic violence, which normally doesn’t end with human skin suits, can have their brain structure negatively altered by PTSD. It’s difficult to imagine how irreparably damaged the brains of children who grew up in the midst of daily ritualistic mass murder would be. We should thank the Spanish — and their Indian allies who aligned with the Aztecs — for depriving us of the ability to do a study. 

We should also thank the neighboring Tlaxcalans, whose alliance with the Spanish was crucial in defeating the Aztecs. This, too, complicates the narrative, but nothing I’ve written here will ever be the narrative ‘bomb’ the Aztec memes were. Because as a result, shortly after the controversy, Ecumene Aztec’s developer announced that the option “to join [the] conquistadors and fight the caste of sacrifice-making priests” would be added to the game. In just a few images, like landmines, the Aztec memes blew up the narrative on a game trailer with 45 million views and six thousand comments, and they did it without any caveats whatsoever.

But I have to caveat, as a writer. I have to say that of course many millions of Indians died of disease unintentionally introduced by the Spanish. Of course, the Spanish rape and enslavement of Indians was horrific. It’s also worth mentioning that most of what we know about the grisly details of daily Aztec life comes from Spaniards like Bartolomé de las Casas, who dedicated his life to ending the horrors he witnessed and documented. And I must also say that, yes, Columbus sold children into sexual slavery and committed atrocities, but after Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand learned of them, he was hauled back to Spain in chains and stripped of his titles. The rape, murder, and mutilation of slaves was a byproduct of Spanish colonialism — one that, if taken too far, resulted in outrage and social sanction. In Aztec society, the rape, murder, mutilation, and literal consumption of slaves was a religious sacrament, and facilitating it was a primary and explicit objective of the state. While both would seem barbaric by modern standards, one of these societies is clearly morally superior to the other. It isn't the latter.

But this meme says it better than I ever could —

-River Page