People of the Sun Part I: The Chavín

Welcome to the People of the Sun posts.  I'm pretty excited about them, it's really my area of the globe, but it is also shrouded in mystery, so the three questions of a good researcher have to be applied:

1. What do I think?
2. What do I know?
3. What can I prove?

 Keep them in mind, because from here on out, even the truly academic are walking that thin line between history & conjuncture.

Moving on:

I'm a big fan of Latino's because they are hot.  Beautiful skin, brown eyes, they are, well, they are:

Tall & tan & young & lovely 

And when she passes each one she passes goes "Aaah."

When she walks, she’s like a samba
That swings so cool & sways so gently
That when she passes, each one she passes goes, “Aaah"

And of course we are talking the Astrud Gilberto, João Gilberto, & Stan Getz version.  You know, the absolute best version.

And even when they are not hot, even before they cleaned up & became hot, they were into some very kinky shit.  I mean, pre-Columbian Latin America was honestly one horrible drug induced nightmare.

It's really not a place that you would want to ever experience.  Not even if you were king.  It's not like you are dealing with the civilizations that most people think of when they hear the words "pre-Columbian America."

These aren't the people that helped the Separatists live through their first Thanksgiving & they are not the people that Andrew Jackson forced to march down the Trail of Tears. 

Those Native Americans lived in the north & they were a civilized race that had no real writing system, but still pulled off the "civilized" better than most Europeans.

Those Indians lived north of the Rio Grande.  That river separated sanity from insanity.  We have horror stories about ritual cannibalism & human sacrifice in Stone Age Europe.  There are Bog Men that we still pull out of the moors & the peat fields today & we think that it was horribly uncivilized of our European ancestors.

But they grew out of it after a few hundred years.  It wasn't something that they embraced.

Here there be monsters.  This is going to be a game of blood.

The man you see in the above picture is named Hernán Cortés & if you are in Mexico, he was a real sonuvabitch.  He's kinda sorta the villain because of what he did to the Aztecs.


 He sorta kinda wiped them off of the face of the earth, & to be fair to history, he came to Mexico, illegally, with the intent of conquest.

That is until he saw Tenochtitlan, current Mexico City, & the capital of the Aztec Empire.

At the time London was the largest & most populated city on Earth & Tenochtitlan was twice as big, twice as populated & far, far cleaner.

In his journal he wrote about how civilized the Aztecs were.  he wrote about how much Europe could benefit form trade with them.  The architecture surpassed anything he had seen in Spain.  They were cleaner & healthier than even the Arabs.  All thoughts of conquest faded & instead he wanted Europe to learn from them.  He idolized them as the perfect civilization.



And then the next day they took him to the temples.

And he climbed stairs that were coated in human blood to reach the temple itself that was painted in human blood.

And he saw the pyramid of skulls & the bodies of a mass sacrifice.

All thoughts of learning from the Aztecs instantly disappeared.  All thoughts of conquest disappeared.  Hernán Cortés, in his next journal entry, concluded that the Aztecs needed to be exterminated for the good of the world.

He was no longer as interested in conquest as he was righteous genocide.  Mind you, this is Hernán Cortés, the man that saw the racism in the English colonies & concluded that Mexico had to breed the races together to be more civilized with the native populations.

But we aren't going to talk about Mexico or the Aztec's today.  They are just a flash in the pan & a more modern example of the blood lust that gripped the people south of the Rio Grande.  Today we are going to talk about a people far older & a lot further south.

But don't worry, it's still a game of blood.

So today we are going to talk about the Chavín, a civilization that controlled their people through the clever use of Hallucinogenic drugs & religion, & not through violence & force of arms.


The Chavíns?

I know, I know, you're an American & as such everything South of the Rio Grande with the exception of Club Med is a blank spot on the map.  I know, I know, you're not an American, you're not from the Americas & everything South of the Río Bravo del Norte is a blank spot on the map.

For those of you that know fuck all of the things south of Mexico, we're talking about a people from here.

For those of you that do not know where Peru is, we're talking right here.

Yes, there really is a South America, it's not just Texas.

No, it's not the Incas, the Incas were here:

Wait, that over laps, right?  I swear to God that over laps.

You're right, it does.

The Incas were an Empire that lasted from roughly 1438 to 1533 in the present era.  A fucking flash in the pan, right?

But we all know who the Incas are because of their beautiful ruins:

Their brightly colored hats:

Their terrifyingly erotic statues:

And the fact that they invented the soft drink:

But that is all in recent antiquity.  The Chavín people we are talking about date from between 900-200 BC, so they were long dead by the time the Incas started their rise to power.

To put it into perspective, The Bronze Age was coming to an end, Classical Greece was entering a dark age & Solomon became king of the Israelites.  This is much older than the pre-Columbian history you learned in high school.

And that leads us to a rather pressing question about their culture:

What do a jaguar, an anaconda, chili peppers, peanuts, & a black caiman have to do with the Andes?

If you can honestly answer that, well, congratulations, you have solved one of the greatest pre-Columbian mysteries out there.

All of those feature prominently on the Tello Oblisk, which was one of the center pieces, if not the centerpiece of the drug-induced Chavín religion.

I know, you are an American & that doesn't seem like too much of a mystery.  They are all native to South America, right?

Well, yeah, they are all native to the Amazon Jungle.

They are all native to right about here:

And the Chavín civilization was right here:

And between them are the Andes Mountains & they are enormous & extremely hard to cross, especially if you are trying to cross them 3,000 years ago.

There are two white things in that picture, the first is snow which caps most of the Andes & below the snow are clouds.

This is where the Chavíns lived, only a little further to the east & at a little lower altitudes.  Which means that jaguars, anacondas, chili peppers, peanuts, & black caimans were nowhere near their civilization &  something that they really never had any contact with.  Certainly not any regular contact.

Like you, most of them have probably never even seen an anaconda in the wild or even know what a black caiman is.

There you go, now when was the last time you heard about a mountain alligator?

Why they worshiped those animals is mystery #1.

Misterio número uno.

Mystery #2 is what happened to them.  We don't know.  They clearly left a written record, but we can't read it.

That is the Raimondi Stela.

That is the Lanzón Stela.

And we know fuck all what they say.  I mean, we don't really have a South American Rosetta Stone...the actual Rosetta Stone, not the over-priced software

And even if we did, we'd need to have languages we could actually read to connect them to & the Spanish did a pretty good job, along with the Catholic Church, of destroying all hopes of that.

We really don't even know what language they spoke or what they called themselves.

But we do know that they had no military to control their people & this makes them very unique for an ancient civilization.  The fact that they never really bothered to fortify their shit really makes them stand out.

It also leads us to a former mystery.

Mystery #3: how did the rulers keep control without a military?

That one we can answer:

Drugs & human sacrifice.

Seriously, drugs & human sacrifice.  You see that building?  It was their religious center, it was entirely underground, had a massive man-made waterfall, no real light source & they would give their people powerful hallucinogenics walk them into the pitch darkness, where they heard the noice of the waterfall echoing off the stone walls, & would preform a ritual human sacrifice to prevent the end of the world.

Killing people to prevent the end of the world was a very common thing south of the Rio Grande.  It's like the two things that links all the different civilizations together.

1. Human Sacrifice
2. Belief that the End is Nigh

When they killed you, sometimes it was to ensure a harvest, sometimes it was to win a battle or thank the gods, & most of the times it was to prevent a cataclysmic destruction that we hear about in every culture & that historians & geologists call the "end of an ice age."

But wait, you said it was pitch black?  How did they find their way through a maze of pitch black stone?

Because, you know, there is no evidence that they used torches...the same thing goes with Egyptian tombs.

I know what you are thinking, giant reflective mirrors like in The Mummy movies.

Nope.  For starters, there is zero evidence of that, even in Egypt & after testing it out Archeologists found that it did NOT work at all.

Wiffer!  But an "A" for effort.

The answer is actually really easy.  I'll give you a moment to think about it....

Tick...Tock...Tick...Tock.

You have it yet?

 I'll give you a hint:

Now please, don't take my word for it.  I want you to do a little experiment & find out on your own.  It will only take a few hours of your time & as an adult really you should be open to new worlds & experimentation.

First you will need to call up your dealer & pick up some LSD.

Or, if you want to go all natural, peyote will work just as well.

You got the shit man?

Great, now I want you to drop it, lock yourself in a room, turn off all the lights & make it as dark as possible.

Trust me, you'll be able to see just fine.

You're not just seeing shit, you are really seeing shit...& you are probably also seeing shit.  Good  hallucinogenics sorta kinda give you night vision.  Anyone that went through college & some people that dropped out of high school can tell you that.

You can see a lot better in the dark when you are tripping balls than you can when you are dead sober.  That's just how it works.

Your pupils are really dilated a lot more than is normal at night.  That's how cops know you're tripping, you look like fucking Bambi.

And anyone that has gone through college knows that you can trip balls & write a turn paper, finish an art project, whatever, it's really not as incapacitating as the straight-edge people will tell you it is.

It also was a part of EVERY ancient culture across the globe had in common.  It's the one thing that ALL ancient cultures had in common from the Flintstones straight through the Romans & it only started to die with Christianity.

They were all tripping balls & all sorta kinda drunk & we're already covered why.  Come to think of it, we've briefly covered why they all used drugs too.

Here is what we can prove:

1. They had a small group of elites
2. Everyone else was in the lower classes
3. The elites got their power from a divine connection.
4. They changed their traditions to remain in power...like ALL religions once they become institutionalized
5. They used a lot of psychotropic drugs as a medium for manipulation

You don't believe point number 4?  Read your Bible, or your Torah, David wouldn't be a Jew today, Bathsheba wouldn't be a Jew today, & neither would Uriah, who fought for David, was considered in his inner circle, & got killed so his buddy could doink Bathsheba.

Big fucking change for the Jews to adopt a policy that makes David a gentile. 

That shit is done so someone will stay in power.

None of that is unusual.

Not even the drugs & the human sacrifice.  The only difference is is that the Chavín killed their people underground & the civilizations that followed them killed them all above ground.

Here is what we know:

1. The Chavín's worshiped multiple Gods, including jaguars, anacondas, & black caiman, at least that is what the Tello suggests & from the looks of it, that obelisk was a focal point.
2. Chili peppers, peanuts, & some of the other food were not grown by the Chavín's & none of the evidence suggests that they traded for or even eaten.
3. They used religion & drugs & not military force to control their population.

Now, to be fair, point 3 is speculation based on the fact that there doesn't seem to be any military contact between the Chavín people & any other culture that might have existed in the area at the time.

That & it's also based on the fact that the only real weapons that anyone found were intended for human sacrifice & not warfare.

It is also based off the belief that, with the exception of the Aztecs, most of the time, the human sacrifices were done to the most respected non elite people in the community.

Here is what we think:

1. They originated in the Amazon jungle & moved their entire civilization into the Andes keeping their old gods & traditions.
2. Through trade, they learned that the Amazon river was a giant Anaconda & started worshiping it like most of the other cultures.
3. There was a new wave of settlement that brought gods that the people gradually used to replace their old gods
4. They were an isolated civilization that weren't fortunate enough to research any of the techs first & thus had to wait for discovery before they could found a religion, like sometimes happens with the Americas if you play the Earth 18 Civs scenario on Civilizations V.

And that is that.  No point here, it's hard to draw conclusions about civilizations that we know extremely little about.

Pre-Columbian America is a fucking mystery.

A mystery wrapped in an enigma.

And an enigma with a chocolate flavored peyote coating.

But I figured, we'll start with them because you might be able to figure some of that shit out & it leaves us open to move gradually through the civilizations that we know a lot more about.

Wait until we get to the male genital mutilation. 

I'll leave you with this: