this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
493 points (88.1% liked)
A Comm for Historymemes
2895 readers
1615 users here now
A place to share history memes!
Rules:
-
No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, assorted bigotry, etc.
-
No fascism, atrocity denial, etc.
-
Tag NSFW pics as NSFW.
-
Follow all Lemmy.world rules.
Banner courtesy of @setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Wait, if Aztecs thought white people are gods (unless it's a "Television would never lie" moment), do we have records of how they treated albinos born in their countries?
The Aztecs did not view the white men as gods. Depictions of Quetzalcoatl that make him look like a white man/the claim that they confused Cortes for him is pseudohistory based on Spanish depictions and lies.
Here’s an interesting thing I found on ancient Mexican albinism.
Glad you have a resource to refute this colonial era drivel / brain rot.
It’s something that Frank Dibble talked about in the Rogan debate. (The entire situation was a shitshow, but I learned a lot from listening to him dribble Hancock around like a basketball, and Professor Dave/Miniminutemen’s coverage of it)
Aztec and Mayan history tends to attract a lot of bullshit (and tend to be treated as interchangeable 😔). The Spaniards burned so much of pre Colombian primary texts that most information is filtered through people who wanted to portray those people as stupid primitive murderous psychopaths to justify their own primitive murderous psychopathy.
Ooh, nice find!
It wasn't just pale skin. Honestly look at a picture of a Spaniard, and then look at a picture of a Mesoamerican. It's not exactly night and day, is it?
"The Spanish showed up and the natives thought they were gods." So, the natives had myths and folklore about their gods going away across the sea and would someday come back from across the sea. And then one day these big boats show up and what wades ashore but a man with strangely pale skin and strange colored eyes and a big bushy beard wearing metal armor and carrying metal weapons riding some kind of big hoofed animal. He's speaking a weird language you don't understand and HOLY SHIT did he just shoot thunder from that metal stick? Something like eighteen things you haven't seen before just happened.
What do you think was their first hypothesis?
How long do you think it took for them to test that hypothesis?
The veneration was severely overblown. They heeded them as gods in the same way that I heeded my abusive father as a god. And albinos probably just kinda died to the Central American UV. They might have been perceived as cursed.