Word: aztecs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ultimate spiritual experience, no site could surpass the ancient Olmec pyramids at Cacaxtla, southeast of Mexico City. There a pallid re- enactment of Aztec dances failed to stir the crowd of 3,000, but the sun's pas de deux with the moon, lasting nearly six minutes -- a minute and a half short of the maximum duration possible -- led many to fall to their knees. With Mars, Mercury, Venus and Jupiter suddenly bursting into view in the afternoon, what else could they do but give thanks to the gods, ancient and modern, and pray for the opportunity to view...
...even Truettner pushes too far. For instance, he sees Emanuel Leutze's The Storming of the Teocalli by Cortez and His Troops, 1848, as a celebration of Christian virtue conquering Aztec barbarism. But the image is far more melancholy and ambiguous than that: the Spanish conquistadors are presented as brutes, one flinging a baby from the temple top, another tearing loot from a corpse; and Leutze's intent to provoke pity for the Aztecs is summed up in an upside-down torch, nearly out, which lies on the steps in the foreground, an adaptation of the classic funerary image...
...good history calls for careful distinctions. In the Jesuit weekly America, Rutgers Professor James Muldoon has argued that the National Council of Churches' resolution is unhistorical. The council blamed Europeans for introducing slavery into the various new worlds they encountered, ignoring evidence that the Aztec and Inca empires were also based on forced servitude. The resolution virtually ignores a reality highlighted by the Catholic bishops' pastoral: that the evils condemned by the council were first noted, in angry detail, by early Spanish defenders of Indian rights like the Dominican friar Bartoleme de Las Casas...
...when it is fashionable to bash Western culture and exaggerate the traditions of the southern and eastern hemispheres, Paz's work is a reminder that no part of the contemporary world is free of profound influences from another. His best-known poem, Sun Stone (1957), casts ancient Aztec symbolism in a modern mold. As a critic, he broke ground with The Labyrinth of Solitude, a study of Mexico as a New World nation improvising its future from indigenous traditions as well as revolutionary ideals from Europe and North America...
...kill in battle. Leadership too in a warrior culture is typically contingent on military prowess and wrapped in the mystique of death. In the Solomon Islands a chief's importance could be reckoned by the number of skulls posted around his door, and it was the duty of the Aztec kings to nourish the gods with the hearts of human captives...