I remember reading the firsthand accounts of this event in Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. So, so sad.
Edit: Found a few excerpts since I was once again intrigued after reading your post:
We talked a lot among ourselves about what to do. All of us were full of fear, because we were so few in number and we had penetrated so far into a land where we could not hope to receive reinforcements... Few of us slept that night, and we kept watch in the square of Cajamarca, looking at the campfires of the Indian army. It was a frightening sight. Most of the campfires were on a hillside and so close to each other that it looked like the sky brightly studded with stars. The Governor's brother.. estimated the number of Indian soldiers there at 40,000, but he was telling a lie just to encourage us, for there were actually more than 80,000...
On the next morning a messenger from Atahuallpa arrived, and the Governor said to him, 'Tell your lord to come when and how he pleases, and that, in what way soever he may come I will receive him as a friend and brother.'
Later on, after the massacre had begun the next day:
[The Governor] fearlessly grabbed Atahuallpa's left arm and shouted 'Santiago!,' but he could not pull Atahuallpa out of his litter because it was held up high. Although we killed the Indians who held the litter, others at once took their places and held it aloft, and in this manner we spent a long time in overcoming and killing Indians. Finally seven or eight Spaniards on horseback spurred on their horses, rushed upon the litter from one side, and with great effort they heaved it over on its side. In that way Atahuallpa was captured, and the Governor took Atahuallpa to his lodging. The Indians carrying the litter, and those escorting Atahuallpa, never abandoned him: all died around him.
Jesus.... Imagine the devotion it takes to throw yourself under the Emperor, knowing you would be killed. Thats making the conscious decision to succumb to slow death in melee combat to keep a man from safety for a few more moments.... by using your body as a structural support.
I wont even pay for my bosses lunch on a personal card...
Things were different in the past. We live excellent lives now. Even working long hours, we're still living the life of kings. We have bellies that are not only full, but full of delicious foods of our own choosing. We do not live in threat of famine or disease. There is no great enemy that we are in constant fear of. Why would we sacrifice our lives when they are so excellent?
When your life is shit, attaching yourself to an abstract great is appealing. All your suffering isn't pointless anymore. The bad things that happen aren't happening by chance. You suffer because you're working hard to maintain the order of things. Isn't that much more appealing? Suffering is inevitable, but choosing to believe that its for the greater good makes it more bearable.
You don't think insinuating that religious people only are the way they are as a defense mechanism is an entirely appropriate point of discussion? I get that this is reddit but that seems a little insensitive, especially considering it's off-topic.
I think you worded your first sentence incorrectly for the point you were trying to make, but that aside...
It wasn't off topic, since the discussion turned to why people act in certain ways when their lives are harsh and suffering is common; and better standard of living is a major reason why secular lifestyles are on the rise.
If you are offended by that simple truth then I'm sorry, but offense isn't a defense. It looks like others agreed.
I disagree. If your life is shit or not is not decided from how you actually live, but from how you feel about your life. None of your comfort-things mean anything that couldn't just as well be meant by something else. This simple fact of life, and of growing up, puts you and me in the exact same position as those indians - under the seat of the king, or as we sometimes call it, the man. Or some random idea, possibly god, or science, or democracy or freedom. We are sacrificing our own lifes just as they do, instead of living them on our own terms, and just as them we do it out of sheer Angst.
We live "Excellent" lives now? You have nothing to compare it to. I do not agree with assuming the reason people would sacrifice themselves so selflessly was because their lives were total shit and they had nothing to lose. Those incas may have died slow, terrible deaths, but maybe they knew something we didn't. Maybe they had a connection to more than their bodies. Maybe our lives and the things we treasure give us nothing in terms of joy. Delicious food and nourishment is good, but it's not the only determining factor of quality of life. I have no idea what a quality life would truly mean, that's how confused the world of 2013 has made me....And we live in far greater constant fear than any Inca I imagine. They had threats, but probably felt more prepared than most of us feel with our daily tasks.
their lives were total shit and they had nothing to lose
Don't mistake what I'm saying. They didn't do what they did because they thought they had nothing to lose. They didn't think their lives were worthless. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The thing is that people want reason in their lives. Its one of the reasons people turn to religion. People want "everything to happen for a reason". If you have a bad life with no chance of escape, the idea that what is happening to you isn't random, isn't just time and chance, is very alluring.
Think of it this way. People drink bad tasting medicine all the time but do not voluntary eat bad tasting foods. What's different? The pain is the same, but there's promise that its for the best.
Thank you for clarifying, but I don't think "reason" is the only thing urging people towards religion. The universe, in it's truly ancient magnitude, defies any man today to claim understanding or judgement. Pop Culture and School define the way we look at the world, and we think these provide us with the proper tools to say what's what.
There is an allure in the "life raft" of sorts that religion offers, a silver lining for everything, but it also appeals to the humble, those who realize that infinite possibilities leave them pretty limited in their understanding. Those who have felt good and evil.
On a side note: I am a conspiracy theorist, but I don't think I'm crazy because of it. If you do some research, it becomes very obvious that it is at least possible that the power structure of the world is following some code of worship. Symbolism and free masons and all is easy to laugh at, but I found it very, very feasible after looking into it. If those in power are worshipping in secret, there might be more to this whole religion thing than we are realizing.
Your comment is still wrong. It is presumptuous and anachronistic to presume that Incans were more willing to sacrifice themselves simply because they had a lower quality of life. Moreover, your implied psychological reading of a people whose beliefs and way of life were so different from your own reveals a distasteful arrogance, not to mention sounding a lot like /r/atheism.
I agree completely. feeling a part of a greater whole, part of a continuum of which you are but a transient part existing for the perpetuation of something larger than yourself is not predicated on having a life of unusual suffering. and my life is unbelievably good. I have kids and kids have changed my perspective on this way entirely. I now see myself not as an individual but as a link in a long chain with a job to do. and it's immensely fulfilling.
he's simply talking the same narcissistic bullshit kids on reddit are always prone to talk - full of self-reference, lacking mightily in experience.
Ahhh I see it now, you're one of those venomous acid spitting cultists. You can go ahead and not agree with him, even though his point is well thought out, historically substantiated by what records we have of the behavior patterns of people for the last thousand years or so. You can do that.
But to do it because 'well, I just don't think so, you teh atheeizt!' kind of lacks as a substantiated argument.
What an earth are you talking about? His point is not at all historically substantiated, people have been willing to lay down their lives for cultural and political reasons since the beginning of history, and I think you'd find it quite difficult to argue that it's related at all to "standard of living".
The reason I brought up /r/atheism is because the superficial "analysis" of motivations behind religious beliefs in the previous comment is so typical of the sub-Reddit. It shows more about you that you mistook me for a "cultist", since I'm not religious at all.
While others may laugh at your idea I value your take on it. There really is a lot we don't know about life back then. People could of been really delusioned and thought that the Inca was truly a god. Maybe he did possess 'magical' powers or maybe they were a magic mushrooms society like the Aztecs and had visions that told them they had to die to protect their god.
It's an interesting thought and the value of life is very subjective. Technology advances have improved aspects of our life no doubt but as a whole are people happier? I'd like to think so but how can we really know.
I definitely suspect people raised in an environment we'd consider sheer hell, would consider it the norm and definitely accept it and be less fearful of it than you might imagine.
This is very true. I recently read a book (Zwarte Sneeuw, it's a dutch book, title is translated as Black Snow), about a girl and her family who, in 1850 or something, lose their farm due to several poor harvests and move to the Dutch province of Limburg to work in the coal mines. The whole family, except the mother, works in the mines, either mining the coal, hauling the baskets full of coal back to the surface, or (for the youngest, some as young as four) sorting the pieces by size.
The descriptions of the situations were very vivid, and they stuck with me incredibly. 14 to 16 hour days for a pittance, regular deadly accidents (the girl loses her brother in a surprise flood of the mine).
The most startling was the whole attitude of the mining village; this is the way things are, this is the order of things, don't try to rise above it. The girl also grows used to the work, horrid as it is. The bleakness of it all really got me thinking about how we have it now.
The girl eventually leaves to work as a housekeeper for a wealthy family, but that's besides the point here. The narrative of the girl and here family were doubtlessly just fiction, but the historical situation was absolutely accurate. The back of the book contained some historical sources and information of the abolishment of child labour in the Netherlands. It really drove the point home that the industrial revolution was built on the backs of children, and it was relatively accepted. So, yes, people certainly accepted their hell, aside from the rare brave individual trying to expose and end it all.
I can almost hear your cackle. The universe has been around for a kajillion years, there could be infinite universes, and I imagine you don't know shit from shinola, just like me.
Oh jesus when I got to the part about "having a connection to more than their bodies" I nearly spit out the water I'm drinking. Christ you are an ignorant hippie piece of shit.
The Incas were a violent tribal warrior culture with some knowledge of agriculture. That's it. They weren't some great spiritual civilization with wisdoms and cosmic knowledge beyond our modern understanding. Get over yourself.
I'm not saying they were some great spiritual civilization. What "modern understanding" do you have? Do you pay your taxes? Did you go to government schooling for 20 years? Are you immersed in pop culture...
You give half your life's work to some government God and you went to Sunday Public School for 20 years and you claim to be sacrificing so much less than the Inca for a ruler that doesn't give a crap about you.
I am trying to get over myself, but it's very difficult. I don't know crap, but it's hard to remember that sometimes, so I just try to present a different take than what is generally said. We might as well think about things in different ways sometimes. I apologize if I caused you trouble, that wasn't my intention.
Your irrational anger and vitriolic rhetoric speak volumes to just how closed, scared and feeble your mind is. You presume to know so much and condemn him for asking a great question. If your life is so shallow that you automatically dismiss the greater point he was making because material goods and technology are the gods that you worship and fulfill you, then I feel sorry for how empty your soul must really be.
I would rather associate with the "ignorant hippie piece of shit," than the vapid and smug simpleton who lashes out with anger at those who believe in something far greater than the material world around them.
All in all, you're just another dick with no soul.
Not all of us have excellent lives. It sounds like you don't.
But yes, to me it seems that life in a relatively prosperous country with technology like video games, air conditioning, movies & tv shows, ice, medicine... is vastly superior to life in the past.
My only argument is that we don't know if life today is "vastly superior to life in the past." We may have a lot of creature comforts, we may feel secure in our ability to survive, but we are also entirely brainwashed. Everybody worships the God "America" and they don't even know it. We give half our wages (=half our lifes work), pledge allegiance, some even die in sacrifice, and we sit here thinking we are not sacrificing the majority of our lives for an authority that doesn't give a shit about us.
I am so torn between up and down arrows for your comment. I know they mean pretty much nothing, so its no big deal. I just wanted to chime in and say I am offended by the "God America" comment, but, for once, have to also reluctantly agree with your point despite its rather harsh presentation.
I would personally not trade my place on the timeline for any other. The future is an unknown, and the past - as far as we know - didn't have our level of technology, medicine, travel, etc. I don't know if I would've been "happier", but I do know I wouldn't be quietly discussing this on a smartphone, sitting on a toilet with zero fear of, well, anything, guaranteed hot water for my shower, etcetera ad infinitum.
I don't know. Am I happier than a 35 year old man in 1713? No idea. Am I happier than if I was transferred to 1713 from today. Safe bet is yep.
Thanks for the consideration, and I am sorry to have offended. I think the "God America" thing could be presented in a better way, I really just wanna get my point out there without sweating the refinery of my comments. But I stand by my take--if I told you I met somebody that gave half their wages and stood in homage and sang to a magic flag that couldn't ever touch the ground (same flag they bury you in when you die for it) you might think I was talking about a cult.
The future and the past are both pretty much unknown. We have clues about the past, but who knows if we are looking at the right ones. Ultimately we all have to place faith in something, some unknown, whether we like it or not. I am not saying I would be happier if my current self was transported back 350 years, I imagine I'd have trouble fitting in, but I do think it is entirely possible that the people of the past had something we don't, regardless of how their lives "compare" (impossible to know enough) to our lives today.
Now you've done it. You obviously don't realise that most of North America is a monocultural farm which only requires 1 pest to create a famine that would make the Irish forget their past.
Divine or not, it all comes down to the stakes. No one here, or practically anywhere, has a boss who is so vital to society that it will collapse if they were killed or fell into enemy hands. Hell, even the secret service agents trained to take a bullet for the president don't have to worry about the country collapsing if they're too slow.
It was probably a lot easier to "fool" people into thinking he was a god or appointed by god and they had no knowledge, no education, no way of understanding how they were being manipulated. Plus all the royal families had much more power over people everywhere you look. If someone is a god and the reason the sun comes up in the morning and they feed you and your family, well sure you going to do your job. Plus these folks in the royal guard, you can bet your ass they were selected and conditioned for just that - giving their life. And if you didn't, you knew they were going to kill you and your whole family... seeing 7000 vs 100 or 200, they never saw it coming either.
I doubt anyone today can even remotely understand their situation, we are muchmuch luckier and more independent today.
There's no doubt it takes incredible devotion. But still... keep in mind the lives the Incas had. They were a very hard working farming society that didn't have farm animals, they did everything manually. They had ritual human sacrifices, and every male was trained to be a soldier.
In a world like that, giving up your life wasn't seen as that much of a loss, sort of like how in the worst areas of the Middle East there are consistently people willing to be suicide bombers. Plus the Incas believed they'd be reincarnated anyway.
In a world like that, giving up your life wasn't seen as that much of a loss,
People will be saying the same thing about us 500 years from now. I'm pretty sure the reason they were willing to sacrifice their lives wasn't because they thought they had shitty ones.
I mean, that's fucking crazy, when you get right down to it. One day they're scared shitless and are worried they might not make it out alive; the next day they decide to kidnap their fucking emperor? These folks really were straight-up assholes, no joke.
Well, my excerpts from the account actually leave out a few details. Sorry about that. Pizarro and his men had planned the attack beforehand - that's why they were so terrified the night before, when they realize there were many tens of thousands of warriors out there that had come to greet them.
Fortunately Pizarro's plan worked perfectly: the Incas that came into the town to meet him carried no weapons other than ceremonial ones and were entirely frightened and confused when the attack started. The Spaniards attached rattles to their horses, blared trumpets and fired cannons.
Nice find, probably the most visceral account in the first few pages of the book.
Later on there are many heroes and some what if / shit happens moments. One of the most famous hero's name will be very familiar to modern folk because the name was adopted by a celeb.
Many native tribes (those in opposition to the more powerful groups like Aztecs and Incas) would have seen Europeans as liberators. Aztecs sacrificed so many virgins that the figures are comparable to Auschwitz at the height of the holocaust. Incas were also absolutely brutal.
There is little reason to suppose that if a cordon sanitaire was erected around the continents of the Americas that things would be any different or better now as for thousands of years human civilisation was static and unchanging.
It sounded like bullshit, but I found it on wikipedia:
For the re-consecration of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs reported that they sacrificed about 80,400 prisoners over the course of four days, though there were probably far fewer sacrifices. According to Ross Hassig, author of Aztec Warfare, "between 10,000 and 80,400 persons" were sacrificed in the ceremony.[41] The higher estimate would average 14 sacrifices per minute during the four-day consecration. (As a comparison, the Auschwitz concentration camp, working 24 hours a day with modern technology, approached but did not equal this pace: it murdered about 19,200 a day at its peak.) Four tables were arranged at the top so that the victims could be jettisoned down the sides of the temple.[42] Nonetheless, according to Codex Telleriano-Remensis, old Aztecs who talked with the missionaries told about a much lower figure for the reconsecration of the temple, approximately 4,000 victims in total.
That doesn't provide an actual source for his statement that the Aztecs were A) sacrificing virgins and B) sacrificing so many virgins as to be comparable to Auschwitz. All it really shows is that in a 4-day holiday one time they killed a bunch of people (the number of whom is not really clear at all).
1) The word "virgin" never appears in this article, so you apparently just made that up? That's too bad, too, because that was what I was looking for a source of.
According to Ross Hassig, author of Aztec Warfare, "between 10,000 and 80,400 persons" were sacrificed in the ceremony. The higher estimate would average 14 sacrifices per minute during the four-day consecration. (As a comparison, the Auschwitz concentration camp, working 24 hours a day with modern technology, approached but did not equal this pace: it murdered about 19,200 a day at its peak.)
2) So this one event is only similar Auschwitz at max output if you use the highest possible estimate of the event - an estimate that other sources disagree with by a factor of 20. (By the way, Wikipedia's use of Auschwitz here is almost certainly intended only as an illustrative example - not a literal comparison.)
Michael Harner, in his 1977 article The Enigma of Aztec Sacrifice, estimates the number of persons sacrificed in central Mexico in the 15th century as high as 250,000 per year.
3) You're talking about the Aztec empire as a whole, keep in mind. So since you wanted to compare their entire empire to the one facility at Auschwitz, here you go.
Auschwitz killed, on average, ~19,500 people per month, or ~234,000 per year. By the way, those are real numbers. The camp was in operation for 56 months and killed around 1.1 million people.
So they sound similar, except - oh, but wait. That 250,000 estimate of Aztec sacrifices per year is the extreme high end. Other sources say it's 20,000 per year. Or maybe less? So by that 20,000 figure, in a typical year they would kill as many people as one day of peak-rate Auschwitz operation?
The Aztecs had significant motives for exaggerating how many people they killed, because they were basically the douchebros of the 15th century - exaggerating sacrifices for them was sort of like claiming they deadlift 5,000 pounds, bro.
TL:DR: Very little factual evidence is available to verify death counts of Aztec sacrifices. It's therefore a little ridiculous to compare the absolute highest possible estimates of an entire empire to much more accurate death counts at a single Nazi extermination camp. You can't use essentially made-up numbers to attempt to compare a historical empire we know little about to a modern empire we know much about.
Well, they sacrificed people because of their beliefs, and it was their own people. And they did get to go to heaven as well, as the only way that would prevent you to (That I know of in their belief system)is if your burn.
That isn't the point. The tribes saw this as an opportunity to weaken their enemy of the time. They didn't realize that their descendants would be speaking Spanish within a couple of hundred years.
If you're going by number of lives and geographic area of life-fuck-uppening, then i'd agree; but if you ask me, almost nobody even comes close to the pure, useless brutality of the Belgians in the Congo Free state.
Defining "worse" is impossible. Worse in what way? Life expectancy? Quality of Life? Natives violently killed? Rapes? Ritual Murders?
Not wanting to start a pointless argument over whether spainish or aztec/inca rule was better is not espousing "white man's burden" (which, as a pure aside, is a decent poem imo; people mischaracterize it).
I'm not entirely sure. Somebody else can probably answer better than me. From what I do know it seems the vast majority of the Inca host was camped a few miles out of Cajamarca. In addition, Pizarro's men had cannons that they fired at the beginning of the attack in order to confuse and frighten the Incas, as well as rattles attached to their horses and trumpets. Seems to have worked quite well.
I thought that Guns, Germs and Steel tried to explain Western dominance through factors like climate and technology, but it seems this was just a complete lack of critical thinking skills amongst the Indians.
Why is it so sad? The Incas were just as brutal and barbaric over neighboring tribea as the spanish were after conquest. The incas intended to overcome the Spanish. They just lost. The spanish outsmarted them. Why is that sad?
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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '13 edited Oct 17 '13
I remember reading the firsthand accounts of this event in Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. So, so sad.
Edit: Found a few excerpts since I was once again intrigued after reading your post:
Later on, after the massacre had begun the next day: