Warning: This column pokes around in the alt-left's belfry. Beware of bats.
Don’t you hate it when we view the charming customs of indigenous peoples through our “Western colonial gaze.” Take for example the Aztec ritual of ripping out the still-beating hearts of thousands of victims before decapitating them and removing the flesh from their skulls. Then they’d hang the skulls on racks the way college kids stack empty beer cans. We may see it all as “weird and violent and gruesome,” but Lizzy Wade wants us to know that's not “the only way to see it, or the ‘right’ way to see it.”
Lizzy Wade -- no relation to Lizzy Borden, beyond perhaps a shared appreciation for serious carnage -- is a “science journalist covering archaeology, anthropology, and Latin America” for Science Magazine. She (and I use that pronoun with confidence, since Lizzy thoughtfully includes preferred pronouns -- “She/her” -- on her Twitter bio) recently published a piece on the discovery in Mexico City of “Tenochtitlan's tzompantli, the rack where the skulls of the sacrificed were displayed.”
Apparently, some readers didn’t approach the subject with their multicultural, pre-colonial thinking caps on and got all judgy on the Aztecs. Lizzy took to Twitter to take them to the woodshed (incidentally, the Bordens kept their axe in a woodshed). “[I]t’s time for a discussion on why this practice was not ‘horrific’ or ‘loaded [with] evil,’ as some of you have said.”
The Aztecs “believed that without human sacrifice, the sun would stop rising and the world would end. They saw the skulls on the tzompantli as seeds they planted to insure the existence of future generations of people.”
Put that way, it’s kind of beautiful, really. The skull seeds would then be watered by blood of the next few thousand victims, whose skulls would then join them on the big Aztec abacus, and so on. It’s the circle of life, Simba!
Besides, the victims liked it. Really. They got to go to a better afterlife than everybody else -- presumably one where your organs weren’t torn from your living body and your head made into a lawn ornament. Wade knows this is a tough sell,
Wow, she goes from zero to self-loathing in well under 140 characters. Impressive. It would suffice to say “Aztec culture was almost unimaginable different than ours.” Full stop. But Wade’s got virtue to signal and she’s not leaving anything to chance.
In Wade’s Science article, she writes,
For [the Spanish], the skulls—and the entire practice of human sacrifice—evinced the Mexica's barbarism and justified laying waste to the city in 1521 ... Some conquistadors wrote about the tzompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls. But historians and archaeologists knew the conquistadors were prone to exaggerating the horrors of human sacrifice to demonize the Mexica culture.
Well, what do you expect of people whose only contribution to history is “centuries of colonial oppression and destruction?”
The Aztecs get a pass for the industrial-scale slaughter of innocents because it was their religion, and who are we to judge? It wasn’t “evil.” It wasn’t even “horrific.” But the Spanish Christians who abhorred the mass murder and ended it -- and the entire civilization that produced them -- is irredeemably guilty of a litany of crimes.
Ain’t progressive morality a hoot?
And now, more mental guano from the left.
The (Lousy) Luck of the Irish. You know who’s not paying attention? The leftist former president of Ireland, Mary McAleese. She’s worried that infant baptism as practiced by the Catholic Church creates “infant conscripts who are held to lifelong obligations of obedience.” If only. Her “Catholic” nation just voted to legalize the murder of children in the womb. Nobody in the land of St. Patrick seems obligated to much of anything.
McAleese, who was president of the Irish Republic from 1997 - 2011 -- long enough to do some serious damage to its culture -- told The Irish Times that:
You can’t impose, really, obligations on people who are only two weeks old and you can’t say to them at seven or eight or 14 or 19 ‘here is what you contracted, here is what you signed up to’ because the truth is they didn’t.
This isn’t far removed from the radical assertion that parents should treat their infants as neither boy nor girl but let them choose their own genders. Heck, some are even reluctant to say what the kid’s plumbing looks like.
I’m sure a good progressive like McAleese would prefer that children were brought up without religion, or maybe with just a smattering of Wicca and some light crystal worship. But Catholics gonna Catholic, and the Catechism describes baptism as “the basis of the whole Christian life, the gateway to life in the Spirit (vitae spiritualis ianua), and the door which gives access to the other sacraments.” To the faithful, that’s all good stuff, so why wait?
Because McAleese is so much smarter than all the smelly peasants who didn’t know any better. “The current model of Baptism ‘worked for many centuries because people didn’t understand that they had the right to say no, the right to walk away,’ she declared.” Tradition -- to say nothing of divine revelation -- has nothing to teach a modern lefty.
“But you and I know, we live now in times where we have the right to freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, freedom of opinion, freedom of religion and freedom to change religion. The Catholic Church yet has to fully embrace that thinking,” she told The Irish Times.
And we fervently pray it never will.
By the way, Dublin is hosting a Church event called the “World Meeting of Families” in August. McAleese is giving it a miss. Asked why, she sniffed that it had “become a political rally rather than a religious and spiritual experience.” And with super-hardliner traditionalist Pope Francis attending, the meeting just be rah-rah “for the reinforcement of orthodoxy.”
According to the Irish Times, “She will, however, be taking part in the Dublin Pride Parade next Saturday ‘under the BeLongTo banner’ and with ‘the members of our own family, straight and gay, young and old, we’ll all be there.’”
There's another one born every day. Give it up for Vice. The website found the most alt-left of lefties -- the moonbat’s moonbat! Just look at this headline: “How Queer Heavy Metal Magick Saved Me.”
The author, Natali Gonzalez, is an “openly queer human” who “exist[s] somewhere between the masculine and the feminine.” She’s Chicano and learned “about the indigenous concept of Two Spiritedness” from her Hopi ancestors. That’s the sweet spot of lefty victim iconography right there.
And it apparently merits what amounts to a 1,600-word disquisition on all things Natali Gonzalez, and an advertisement for her business, “Firme Arte, an online spiritual bodega and Instagram community.” (I saw Spiritual Bodega open for Los Lobos in ‘89!)
Firme Arte is a combination of Native American spirituality, earth magick mixed with Mexican folk magick, and brujeria(witchcraft) blended with the concept of using self-care as an act of political and personal resistance.
Gonzalez helpfully notes that “There is no real life equivalent to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.” So her dark arts “have been passed down by local healers, and I dedicate a lot of my time to learning new forms of self care through reading and from the internet.”
Same. Dr. Eskes was my local healer growing up. He was a member of the indigenous Pediatrician tribe. And who among us hasn’t turned to WebMD to find out why the hell adults still get pimples?
By the way, Gonzalez’ doesn’t sell unicorn farts magick simply for crass commercial gain. (What’s with the spelling? Is it like “Add a K and Save!”?) “I wanted to represent strong, empowered witchy humans dedicated to the pursuit of truth, self-care, growth, and divine connection to the universe. Firme Arte celebrates queer indigenous alchemy by hand making an array of creative products that mesh together a love of magick and culture, like ritual oils, herbal teas, candles for good intentions, and soap bars for self-celebration. Each product is made for positive spiritual energy.” (Queer Indigenous Alchemy is my favorite early Bowie album.)
I don’t know about “witchy,” but much of Gonzalez’s article makes her seem anything but strong and empowered: “I wasn’t safe in heterosexual relationships, and I didn't feel supported or accepted in communities of queer women.” “Firme Arte evolved into the safe space that I’d always been looking for.” “We all deserve to be loved and exist in a place that allows personal expression. When one person heals, the collective heals.”
It’s not just her woes she feels -- she’s experiencing the suffering of people she never met.
These traumas were ancestrally inherited into us. As a sensitive, a person who is in tune to the energies around them, I feel the residual pain from those deep-rooted traumas that exist in the body and spirit.
(Hey, I saw the Deep-Rooted Traumas back in … oh forget it.)
But she does get feisty, declaring “Marginalized groups deserve safety, love, sex, money, property, capital, and the right to exist in a space that allows radical self-expression and protection from ignorance, bigotry, and fascism.”
And you know what’ll help them get there? “Heavy Healer” Organic Energy Totems -- a steal at $30 on Firme Arte. Or a Natural Self-Healed Citrine Cathedral Cluster for just $266. The Even Flow (Gender Gradient Moon Ease) Herbal Beverage Brew is $10.00.
Actually, good on Gonzales for making a little scratch off her and her customers’ delusions. And we should encourage her to continue to view her self-obsession as “resistance.” Hard to imagine a more ineffective political posture.
