ββ¦ we went to the orchard and garden, which was such a wonderful thing to see and to pass through that I never grew tired of experiencing the variety of trees and the scent each one had, the terraces full of roses and flowers, the many fruit trees and native rose gardens, a pond of fresh water, and something else worth seeing: that, through an opening they had made, large canoes could enter the garden from the lake without landing, everything very whitened and bright with all kinds of stone and pictures on it that gave much to ponder, and birds of many kinds and species that came into the pond. I say again that I was there looking at it, and I believed that never in the world had lands like these been discovered, because at that time there was no Peru, nor any idea of it. Now all this is fallen down, ruined; there is nothing.β
-Bernal Diaz del Castilo, the True History of New Spain
This is Bernal Diaz writing about an orchard in Itzpalapa, which he saw on his journey with Cortez into Mexico. Itβs all gone and itβs never coming back
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I read this a couple months ago
Parts of the book I really liked: where he mentions that Giants lived on some Caribbean islands, where he talks about everyone in MesoAmerica (not just the Aztecs) practiced cannibalism and sodomy, where he mentions that one of his men practiced witchcraft and made dildos out of pig's flesh, where he describes St. Paul apparitioning into battle and helping turn the tide of War. Where he constantly talks about the Aztecs' gods as real beings who were terrified of the cross/the virgin mary and who prophesied that beardless white men from the east would come and destroy them.
This book is a great example for why it's better to just straight up read source material most of the time. All the good shit gets cleaned up by pozzed historians. We literally have tens of thousands of historical documents systematically documenting the truth that magic and the divine exist. But enlightenment libtards decide that that can't have happened and should be censored because magic isn't real which we know because we have no evidence of it. Social "scientists" don't know how to use anything other than circular reasoning.
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Oh definitely this is killer source material, so many times I have been surprised and touched by the humanity from this book which I had no idea was missing or reduced in many historical versions. The whole reason I am interested in this topic is because when I was taking history in high school, my teacher took the muh colonialism position on anything natives versus Euros and would tell me that the cannibalism and human sacrifice were all exaggerated accounts from the euros point of view because they were racists. She would seriously try to tell me that Aztecs didnβt do human sacrifice, and if they did it was all blown out of proportion by colonialist propaganda and our systemic bias. I thought that was pretty fricked, that these awesome stories of bloody knives and gods eating hearts must have been based on something so I decided to learn about it for myself. This is how I realized that social βscientistsβ donβt know half of anything.
Gods and magic do exist. People did, and do worship their gods, and this causes bloodshed and sacrifices. But as secular, modern advanced enlightenment humans I think we push that idea away too often as only relevant to the religious. Never mind that a large, important area of our mental health care field operates entirely on the basis of our beliefs and superstitions. Social scientists donβt think the divine can be real because Nietzsche killed God once and for all in 1882.
Godly book for anyone interested in the colonialism story and how things change over time.
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That's great and all, but I asked for my burger without cheese.
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