/lit/ - Literature

>>19558051
Thanks anon I have got that recommendation from you because you posted same pic related

I am looking for native American/Aztec pessimistic wisdom. Do you have any suggestions? I have pic related but it isn't enough

>>16786444
I am Mesoanon

>>16786406
>>16786439
Nah, you're both just ignorant.

The Aztec had a class of theologian poets called Tlamatinime who basically practiced philosophy. It wasn't quite Greciean philosophy, in that a Tlamatini would have also been a practicing priest and would have had various official duties generally, but they had intellectual circles where poems and theology and the like were exchanged, and taught at elite schools for nobility and skilled commoners where they taught religion, poetry, oratorical skills, ethics, etc. Pic related has some examples of Aztec poetry and explains some of the lyrical symbolism.

The theme of the transience of all things and life being beutiful because of it's temporary nature is a common motif, that ties into wider themes of life and death being two parts of a greater whole and the importance of cycles to the natural order, with the Aztec creation myth involving the world being cyclically created and destroyed and the gods giving up their own lives or effort to recreate it and humanity; and in turn this ties into the cosmological justification for sacrifice, which is that much how the gods were consumed to make the woirld and the sun, rain, etc; animals and plants consume the sun's rays and the rainfall, people consume animals and plants, and then the gods consume people via sacrifice in a cycle. Likewise a big theme in both poetry and moral adages is that the world is inherently cruel and shitty and the best thing you can do is to accept that and your inevitable imperfection, but do your best to help others through it's pitfalls and live a self-sacrificing (both litterally and metaphorically) life.

Also, in the excerpt I posted, one of the poems is from Nezahualcoyotl: He wasn't just a king and a poet, but also an engineer: He designed a dike to seperate the largest lake in the Valley of Mexico into a brackish and freshwater side, as well as redesigned Tenochtitlan's main aquaduct which sourced water from Chapultepec to have two pipes and a switching mechanism so one side could run while the other side could be cleaned (the Aztec were extremely autistic about hygine and sanitation; Tenochtitlan had a fleet of civil servents which washed and swept streets and buildings daily and also collected waste every day from the city's toilets to be recycled into dyes, fertliizer, etc).

1/?

>posted a Mesoamerican fresco

I don't know, OP, how about Nahuatl, a Maya language, Mixtec, Zapotec, or Purepecha

Literature and intellectualism from it's native civilizations deserve vastly more attention and apperciation, there's some really cool shit.

>>14784895
Keep in mind, as I say, maffie and leon-portilla's work isn't without criticism: A lot of leon-portilla's work argued for the existence of a god called ometeotl which probably never actually existed as we now know, and Maffie going even further into process metaphysics then leon-portilla did is criticized as well.

I'm admittedly not informed enough to give a full explanation of the controversery, but it's probably best to think of this stuff less as a definetitive "This is what Aztec philsophers thought" (unforantely, while we have some surviving poetry, moral adages, and know that said philosophers existed, it's not like we have long surviving philsophical treatsies) much less the average Aztec person, and moreso just a specific extrapolative lense to view what material we do have through: Sort of like how a modern analsysi of American culture might reveal some concepts which might describe broad trends in the American socio[political landscape, but isn't nessscarily indicative of any indivual American's views; or like how Feminist philosophy can describe some useful ideas about gender relations, but isn't "objectively true" and is just a potential lense to view these issues through and often has it's own failings (as we see these days) etc

Of course, you can always view primary sources yourself, but that becomes difficult if you don't know Spanish since a lot is untranslated, and there's some that's straight up only in Nahuatl or where the symbolism is really only apparent if you know the language's symbolic/metaphiscal conventions, pic related being a good example of this. Another is that I personally own a copy of book 6 of the florentine codex, but a lot of the adages go over my head because what I have is just a literal translation and without knowing nahuatl I can't really get the actual ethical notions or symbolsim it's trying to get across.

Anyways, you can see my suggestions on Mesoamerican literature https://desuarchive.org/his/thread/7803078/#7805378 and my general post of resources on Mesoamerican stuff here https://desuarchive.org/his/thread/8131157/#8136024

>>14784794
Yeah, sorry, sometimes I can be overzealous with trying to entice people with Mesoamerican stuff when tangentially related stuff comes up; since it's such a niche topic and making whole threads on it will just lead to them dying as a result.

I won't reply further since i've already linked my resoure collections unless somebody else really wants me to

OP, I'm interested in Mesoamerican history and literature. Be thankful for what you have, at least most people realize Chinese literature and intellectualism exists.

>>13833347
cont:

>>13815773
There's some interesting parallels in how Samsara and the cyclical nature of existence is viewed in Buddhism and how existence is viewed in Nahua/Aztec thought: While reincarnation of individuals isn't as much a theme (it sort of is as well but moreso in the context of the following), the cylical nature of the world itself is with it being re-created and destroyed and the the cyclical nature of time, events, themes, and natural processes (the cyclical nature of life and death and living things needing to consume others in particular is a big deal) very much is

There's likewise a similar acknowledgement that life is filled with suffering and hardships (look up Aeo.co 's articles on Aztec moral philsophy), but rather then trying to escsape the cycle, they accepted and embrace that suffering and death and consuming others is a part of life and the cylical nature of the world and it's best to simply do what one can to make the process easier for others and faclitate it, and living self-sacricing lives, both figuratively (putting others above oneself) and litterally (giving onself up to be fed to the sun or other gods and processes much like how the gods gave themselves up to make and sustain the world; the world and it's plants and animals are consumed by people to sustain themselves, etc)

>>13833130
>>13832213
>>13833224
>>13833296
>As far as I recall buddhism seems to say everything is a process, and people are just bundles of processes with no essence/soul

This is also pretty similar to James Maffie's proposed interpretations of Aztec cosmology and metaphyiscs though his findings are somewhat controversial for being perhaps overly extrapolative, in the same way that say an analysis of american cultural trends and philsophy wouldn't be describing the actual conscious views/frameworks of most americans; though what he describes might be an actual metaphysical framework some aztec philsophers had, but even that's somewhat iffy

>There exists at bottom just one thing: dynamic, vivifying, eternally self-generating and self-regenerating sacred power, force, or energy... “teotl.” Reality, cosmos, and all existing things consist of teotl and are ultimately identical with teotl

>Process, becoming, change, and transformation define teotl... Reality is characterized by becoming — not by being or “is-ness.” To exist — to be real – is to become, to move, to change. Teotl and hence reality, cosmos, and all existing things are defined in terms of becoming. They are essentially dynamic: always moving, always changing... Everything that exists constitutes a single, all-inclusive and interrelated sacred unity. This single all-encompassing unity is substantively constituted by teotl and ontologically identical with teotl...Teotl does not create the cosmos ex nihilo; rather, the cosmos emerges from teotl...The history of the cosmos is nothing more than the self-unfolding and self-presenting of teotl

2/?, need more posts

Here's a poem from Nezahualcoyotl, the most famous king of the Aztec city-state of Texcoco and who was an intellectual polymath, both desinging aquaduct and dike systems and writing poetry and being a patron of the arts.

This is basically what James Maffie did

>Be philsophy PHD
>Be interested in relating epistemology to anthropology
>Ends up reaading Leon-Portilla's Aztec Thought and Culture
>Gets so into it he stops studying western Philsophy and learns Nahuatl just so he can read Aztec poetry and other 16th century sources in their original language

http://dailynous.com/2014/05/20/pip-1-huebner-interviews-maffie/

Plebian: Western Philsophy
Contrarian: Eastern Philsophy
Patrician: Precolumbian Philsophy

>When looking at the Aztec religion, one needs to look at the Lay Religion and the Priestly Religion. The Lay Religion saw the world as being very similar to Greek Paganism (Not Roman or Greco-Roman, but Ancient Greek): The world is run fickle, capricious, occasionally cruel gods that play favorites and hand out unreasonably retributive punishments for acts that, in many cases, aren't actually harmful to people who often were not acting with any kind of malice or immorality.

>The Priestly Religion, however, saw that because of the constitutional monism of the world, there were no gods. There were no priests, either, or worshipers, or temples, or anything: There is just Teotl. The gods themselves were really just clusters of processes. The god of war is not just a glowy dude who goes around fighting: He literally is war as a concept. The god of love is not just a glowy lady that goes around playing matchmaker: He literally is love as a concept. The god of rot and decay is not just an ugly guy who goes around wallowing in shit: He literally is rot and decay.

>The question of the sentience of these processes comes up. If the gods are just clusters of processes, are they really gods at all? The answer is: since people are clusters of processes, are they people at all? The answer to both is yes. Rather than sentience being some property of abstractable reason as it is in the West, under this process philosophy/theology the gods just have a different kind of intelligence than humans. So does your chair, however. These intelligences can be incredible (gods), quite good (human), poor (cows), to basically non-existent (your chair) because intelligence is not the ability to "reason" as it is in the West but is instead a property of processes' capacity to interact with other processes because of processes, via the observation of patterns and the repetition of patterns when engaging in processes.

>All processes, then, are really just zooming in on an arbitrary closeup of Teotl. A single leaf is a process; so is the branch, and the tree, and the grove, and the forest, and the ecosystem, and the world, and the solar system, and the galaxy, and the galactic cluster, and the universe, and all of reality. We, for our human purposes, just zoom in on specific parts of it.

>>/lit/thread/S11670156
https://desuarchive.org/his/thread/5495687/#5510689
http://dailynous.com/2014/05/20/pip-1-huebner-interviews-maffie/

Read "Aztec Philsophy: Understanding a world in motion" and "Aztec Thought and culture" if this interests you. There's some stuff about the Maya and other Mesoamerican civilizations like the Mixtec, Zapotec etc, or Andean ones like the Inca, but there's less sources to work with, thank Spain for that.

Desuarchive link in particular gives a very laymen-readable explaination of how this ties into sacrifice and their ethical/moral framework.

>>11779765
>>11778952
>>11778952
>>11777981
With that in mind, you need to understand that most versions of the Nahua creation myths involved the world having been already created 4 times, each having been eventually destroyed, and that they lived in the 5th incarnation of the world. Each particular version of the world was overseen by a particular god rising up to fill the role of the sun (Not as the sun god, mind you. but as the sun itself). The specific circumstances of the creation of each world and why it fells varies depending on the specific version of the myth, but the core takeaway here is that in most, and in the primary version pushed by the Mexica/Tenochtitlan's goverment (more on that later), the current, 5th version of the world was made due to Quetzalcoatl needing to undergo trails and give his own blood to create humanity, though the god that would rise up to be the sun was Huitzilopotchli.

Huitzilopotchli was said to be under assault by demons known as Tzitzimimeh/Tzitzimime (Nahuatl words don't have consistent english spellings, singular was Tzitzimitl; these were hilarious basically futnari skeleton demons with rattlesnakes for pensises), who would attempt to devour him during the night and during eclipses, and they were represnative of stars in the sky; and Huitzilopotchli needed nourishment to keep the fight up.

You can probably see where this is going between both Quetzalcoatl's trials/giving his blood and Huitzilopotchli fighting off the Tzitzimeme: To the Nahuas, sacrifice was giving the gods back the blood and life force it took them to create the universe and sustain it. Without it, the world would come to an end due to impossibly more powerful cosmic forces that not even the gods could stave off forever, even with humanity's blood. The destruction of the 5th world was unavoidable (you are probably aware of this if you have even a passing awareness of Mesoamerican culture, but time was viewed as cyclical). This also ties into two key points which are what the actual answer to your question is.

The first is that the Nahuas, while having an afterlife, were sort of nihilists: Much of our remaining Nahua poetry, such as the few remaining poems we have from the aforementioned Netzahualcoyotl, have to do with how all things fade away and the inevitability of death. Pic related. The second is that duality was a big theme in their worldview and philsophy, which you can also see somewhat in pic related: In both religion and worldview as well as just lingusitically, they would often pair two seemingly opposing concepts that were ironically synergistic.

3/4