Astral Codex Ten

Aztecs

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Aztecs

Article

Aztecs is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between June 17, 2021 and July 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “the Spanish decimated the Aztecs and Mayans with help of smallpox”; “While the Aztecs were sacrificing prisoners to the gods”; “We think that with time, the Aztecs would have expanded into North America”. It most often appears alongside America, Australia, China.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: June 17, 2021
  • Last seen: July 15, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: Plagues And Peoples
June 17, 2021 · Original source
Yellow River Basin The Han Dynasty never made it very far south towards the Yangtze. Political and military obstacles were relatively unimportant, and the climate and land meant longer and more productive growing seasons for agriculture. The Yangtze also has more predictable and manageable flood plains. Yangtze Valley is prettier too. Why not extend civilization southward? In McNeill’s words “for in moving southward and into better farming regions, Chinese pioneers were also climbing a rather steep disease gradient!” The climatic gradient is steep, like New England to Florida, in a shorter geographic distance. For a Chinese peasant, the mutually tolerable accommodation with the state and with the microparasites of the Yellow River Valley was maintainable. But more microparasitic intensity made the balance unmaintainable. The Han Dynasty and Confucianism really only worked at a certain latitude. By the way, guess which major Chinese city is on the Yangtze? (You can look back at the map.) In contrast to the Ganges Valley in India, with a civilization and farming starting around 600 BC but remained unstable and never consolidated. The Ganges Valley is hugely productive agriculturally but also warmer and wetter than China’s southern Yangtze Valley. “Classical Indian civilization thus took form under climatic and (presumed) disease conditions that the early Chinese found too much to bear.” It took a long time for China to populate the Yangtze River basin- biological accommodation to a microparasitic climate will take a long time. By that time, around 1200 AD, there is also evidence the Sung Dynasty was a less powerful and less demanding macroparasite. “To achieve such a mass population [100 million by A.D.1200] two things were needed: a suitable microparasistic accommodation to the ecological conditions of the Yangtze Valley and regions farther south, and a regulated macroparasitism that left enough of their product with the Chinese peasants so that they could sustain a substantial rate of natural increase over several generations.” Epistemic Status: A convincing narrative with zero evidence McNeill explicitly and regularly reminds the reader that this overarching thesis has little to no evidence. But it does have lots of examples. It’s the same problem that most overarching histories of humanity face: lack of documentation. Except this time it’s lack of documentation 10,000 years ago of something we discovered existed 300 years ago and is invisible without a microscope. In some way, though, this complete lack of documentation makes his case stronger- the invisible forces are stronger than the visible ones. We all kind of knew the narrative that the Spanish decimated the Aztecs and Mayans with help of smallpox. I just never extended that logic towards humanity’s escape from Africa, the march of civilizations into the countryside, and what type of social structures worked best at certain ‘disease gradient’ latitudes. The documentation of the conquistadors was almost adequate to infer disease as a massive influence. But earlier medical records and writings lack such detail. When McNeill contrasts this force of microparasitism balancing with and against the adequately vague force of macroparasitism, it’s hard not to nod your head and agree. McNeill provides as much detail and admits lack of detail as possible. The book is about on fifth footnotes. But the most convincing arguments for his narrative is the sum of parts that make up the narrative. I’m going to just list a few more examples that fit his framework because they are all interesting and also paint a more convincing picture of the importance microparasitism played in human history. The way that Europeans decimated Native Americans with smallpox blankets has been a key driver in ancient civilization expansion. The moment the city folk come in contact with tribes, smaller towns, anyone in the countryside they also bring the city folk diseases. This makes civilization expansion fundamentally easier.
Inline links: Yangtze Valley is prettier too
Links For September
September 20, 2021 · Original source
3: While the Aztecs were sacrificing prisoners to the gods, their neighbors in the Tlaxcala were “a republic ruled by an assembly of commoners and nobles”.
Inline links: “a republic ruled by an assembly of commoners and nobles”
Every Bay Area House Party
May 04, 2022 · Original source
“Some parts would be surprisingly similar! You take your basic taco, and you can keep the tortilla - corn, of course - the tomato salsa, the beans, and the guac. But the cheese and sour cream have got to go - that’s an import from cultures with lactase-persistence. And you can’t have beef or chicken - the typical Aztec meats were rabbit, lizard, and - if you can believe it - axolotl. A common spice was culantro, which is actually noticeably different from Old World cilantro. We think that with time, the Aztecs would have expanded into North America and added bison, and established trade routes with the Inca and gotten potatoes. The conditions in the Mexican Plateau were almost ideal for…sorry, I’m quoting our literature. All our dishes came with a pamphlet explaining when the world-branch it came from diverged from our own and how it differed.”
A Columbian Exchange
October 07, 2022 · Original source
Beroe: But surely you can sketch it out. Many indigenous peoples practiced forms of hereditary slavery, usually of war captives from other tribes. Some of them tortured slaves pretty atrociously; others ceremonially killed them as a spectacular show of wealth. There’s genetic and archaeological evidence of entire lost native tribes, most likely massacred by more warlike ones long before European contact. Some historians think that the Aztecs may have ritually murdered between 0.1% and 1% of their empire’s population every year, although as always other historians disagree. I refuse to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day, because I think we need to question holidays dedicated to mass murderers even when they’re “traditional” or “help connect people to their history”.
Adraste: Maybe? I’m not sure I think about it in quite those terms. To me it just feels like your objection is an annoying motivated fake argument that you’re coming up with to mock Indigenous People’s Day because you don’t want to celebrate it, rather than genuine concern that it’s offensive to the descendants of the Aztecs’ victims. Or are you really worried that if we normalize the Aztecs’ misdeeds, then the youth might start sacrificing people with obsidian daggers on top of giant pyramids?
Adraste: Maybe those people would have been right! Maybe the point of holidays is to teach people lessons, and which holidays are good or bad depends on what lessons need to be taught. If the big conflict in society is about whether or not to accept Italians, and nobody is thinking about Native Americans either way, then maybe it’s correct to honor a famous Italian, so as to emphasize our support for Italians’ rights. And a hundred years later, when nobody worries about Italians anymore, but lots of people worry about Native Americans, then honoring an Italian who killed lots of Native Americans sends the wrong message, and so we deprecate the pro-Italian holiday in favor of a pro-Native-American one. In the very unlikely chance that, a hundred years from now, the descendants of Aztecs are powerful and privileged, but the descendants of their sacrificial victims are marginalized and there’s a debate about whether or not to accept them - then we should scrap or re-work Indigenous People’s Day to emphasize that we support the victims’ descendants. Until and unless that happens, why bother?
My 2024 Presidential Debate
June 27, 2024 · Original source
Trump: I’m against wokeness. I believe in Western values. I believe in the heritage of Greece and Rome - but Rome more than Greece, because it was further west. But most of all, I believe in the values of the Aztecs, because they were most western of all. I believe that in 959 AD Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, insulted Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of water, who cried blood for the next fifty-two years. Her tears extinguished the sun and killed everyone on Earth. In his mercy, Quetzalcoatl the Winged Serpent descended to the Underworld, where he stole the bones of the last men, and dipped them in his blood to create a new human race, and Huitzilopochtli, the Left-Handed Hummingbird, ascended into heaven to became the new sun. But his sisters the moon and stars grew jealous of his light, and they launched attacks upon him nightly. Only the nourishing blood of men gives Huitzilopochtli the strength to resist their assaults and shine anew each morn. Should the fountain of sacrifice ever go dry, the sun will go black, and the stars will fall upon the world and consume it. Callouts on social media are a form of flower war, and its losers are therefore set aside for sacrifice. In this, I agree with Joe Biden. But we cannot merely consign fallen celebrities to shame and penury. We must give them to the Sun. We must place them atop the mounds of Cahokia, atop the Luxor in Las Vegas, yea, even atop the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid in Memphis, and plunge obsidian daggers into their still-beating hearts, that the dawn may come anew.
Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines
July 15, 2025 · Original source
The former chronicles the wonders of cultural evolution. Seemingly “primitive” societies’ seemingly “barbaric” practices turn out to be brilliant beyond “civilized” man’s ability to comprehend. For example, the Montagnais-Naskapi tribe performs a divination ritual using an animal’s shoulder bones to decide where to hunt. This sounds stupid, but Henrich chronicles how the divination ritual actually has useful mathematics-of-randomness properties that makes it more likely to generate efficient hunting patterns than the tribesmen would get through normal decision procedures. The Aztecs performed a complicated series of rituals to corn before they ate it, mixing it with powdered shells; only in the 1900s did Westerners realize that this process activates vitamins; without it, anyone who eats too much corn risks dying of niacin deficiency. Henrich’s conclusion is that primitive tradition is a repository of wondrous practices selected by millennia of trial-and-error, and we pooh-pooh it at our peril.