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:

Family History

My family has been pushing me to write a post about a certain member of the family, which is great.  It's one of those non-paying commissions that it doesn't matter what I write about him, no one but my brother-in-law is going to actually be supportive enough to read it.  If they did dad would clearly be mad about the post I wrote about having to use the bathroom after him, mom would be pissed about the duck-walker post & my sister would be enraged about the post describing how she snorts when she laughs.

Makes her sound kinda sorta like a donkey.

What I'm trying to say is that I have never been a fan of Country music...well, most Country music.  Some of it is okay in my book & the stuff that is usually comes with the label "Americana" not "Country."

Which means that it is really a closely kept secret that my family is at least partially responsible for the popularization of Country music as we know it today.  Both the good shit like Tod Snider & the shit that is really, well, just pure shit.

You know, shit.  Like Billy & Garth & who knows who the fuck else,  You know, shit country:

Because most of that shit is flag waving pro-war neo-conservative rah-rah bull shit that is really just horribly bad rock & roll & nothing like Johnny Cash, who was really very liberal & the Americana country that comes with people like Woody Guthrie that is really very extremely socialist.

But then, to be fair, the family member that helped popularize it was, well, really pretty far from the whole pro-War Americana bull shit, even though he was also kinda sorta famous for fighting in a war among other things.  But then he saw what happened after said war & listed it in his book as one of his deepest regrets.

But the family is still really proud of that whole San Juan thing & that's mainly because, like my blog, I am really the only one that has read his journal.

I suppose what I am trying to say is that my mother wants me to write a post about her great grandfather & that's all well & good because no one in my family, aside from my brother-in-law actually bothers to read anything that I write.

Thank you Jeff.

So his name is Billy McGinty & he is a famous Scottish Rugby player.

I'm just joking.

His name is Billy McGinty & he's actually very Catholic Irish & has roots in Derry from the Provence of Ulster & came from a clan that was famous as being the brutish thugs of Ulster, until they allied themselves with the O'Neil's & became the brutish thugs that was really the military branch of the king of Ireland...for the brief time that Ireland was actually unified.

You know, those whole 3 seconds in Irish history.

Originally they were the O'Fionnachta Clan until they started killing exclusively for the king & became gentlemen & the clan changed it's name to McGinty to reflect this new found, & short lived status.

They even adopted a coat of arms with the motto Felis demulcata mitis, a "stroked cat is gentle."

And they were living the high life until Ireland became a colony of England & things sort of went south, they stayed Catholic which didn't win them any favors & for centuries they took their oath to the O'Neil's so seriously that Oliver Cromwell targeted the entire clan for extinction...warts & all.

Which brings us to the 1750s when a couple of McGinty's were arrested for instigating a revolution & as punishment they were sent to Boston to work as slave labor only to, well, to do the exact same thing the British kicked them out of Ulster for doing, only this time, you know, successfully.

Fast-forward about a century, they seemed to take Horace Greeley seriously, & Billy McGinty was born in St. Louis in 1871 & he's the person that my mommy wants me to write about because she doesn't really get that we make fun of the history in the blog & don't really celebrate it.

That's Billy & his wife & the picture doesn't do justice to how short he was.

They call him an Oklahoma cowboy because that's where he was from & sort of what made him famous.

He did have a couple of run-ins, both friendly & not so friendly, with the Dalton gang.

And if it seems like everyone out west knew everyone else out west...that's because they did.  They seriously did, there were that few people out there & that's sorta kinda the exact reason why you have to roll your eyes when the pro-gun crowd compares the violence of the Wild West with the violence of today as a reason to roll back the open carry laws that were put into place to stop the violence back then.

Those four dead Dalton gang-bangers were like a third of the population.

And that actually works out great for Billy McGinty, because he kept a journal of his exploits, especially with Teddy Roosevelt which you can actually buy on Amazon & like me, he really thought that the most embarrassing facts were really the best ones to tell.

And don't worry the royalties go to someone that is not at all related to the family.

But in either case, it turns out that I am really the only person in the family that has actually bothered to read the book that Billy McGinty wrote & since he has my sense of humor, we're going to focus on the really embarrassing parts of his adventures with Teddy.

And Billy is really easy to find in the picture, because he's the one that is wearing the yellow hat.

His story starts when he was training with Seth Bullock & preparing to get shipped out to Cuba during the Spanish-American War, which took place neither in Spain nor America as we have pointed out in a previous post.

For those of you that don't know, Seth Bullock is better known as Raylan Givens on the FX show Justified.

He went into a little detail about the training, about befriending Teddy Roosevelt & breaking in what would later become Teddy's favorite horse & yadda, yadda, yadda.

But he went into astounding detail about the episode regarding his pants.

That's right, his pants.  Like I said, he spends more time with the embarrassing parts of his story than he does the parts he should be egotistical about.  This might be a product of his humility, or it could just be that he figured you'd rather hear about the funny shit than the daring-do, so out of respect for his journal, mom, we're going to focus on what were clearly his favorite stories.

 The thing about the pants is that they only gave him a single pair.

And he was a poor Irish cowboy & he was really proud of his uniform & really proud of his relationship with Teddy & they made him wear the same pants all through his training in Louisiana with Seth Bullock & the other Rough Riders, up until he got transferred to Teddy's unit after the thing with the horse.

And those pants they gave him were filthy by the time he boarded the Seneca on his way to Cuba.

So to clean them, he tied them to a rope & threw them over the front of the ship with the belief that the salt-water would clean them.

So, he sorta kinda keel-hauled his pants.

And yeah, they got ripped to shit.

To be fair, he was a cowboy from Oklahoma that was used to riding the Great Planes between the Mississippi & the Rocky Mountains so what the fuck did he know about keel-hauling?

So he sorta kinda went from dirty pants to no pants.

Now if you've seen the relatives on mom's side of the family, you would understand that at just 6 feet I am freakishly tall.  Six feet kinda sorta makes you a giant among them.

So when he did get a new pair of pants, he got them from a man about my size & that sorta kinda became a running gag for the entirety of his stay in Cuba.

He got off the boat in pants that were a few sizes too big & held on by a rope that he constantly had to tie & retie.

He was pinned down by machine gun fire in pants that were a few sizes too big.

He made friends with his first Black man in pants that were three-sizes to big.

And he captured a machine gun & charged up San Juan Hill in pants that were several sizes too big & held to his waist by a rope that didn't do too good of a job of actually keeping them around his waist.

So you know, he sorta kinda fought a war like this:

Because he keel-hauled his pants.

And that sort of self-made problem should be evidence enough that I am related to him.

And then the war was over & he stuck around for some of the occupation & yes, he got a new pair of pants that actually fit.

And the town he was stationed outside of was strictly off limits.

Mind you this is seemed to be his absolute favorite story about his time in Cuba.

Everyone else was allowed to go into their towns, but the town that he was told to secure after the war was off limits to all American soldiers.

So he sort of took it upon himself to plot with a couple of his buddies to preform a clandestine mission to sneak into town, find the first bar & brothel they could, drink & gamble away what little money they had with them & make it back to camp without being caught.

So a lot of this happened:

And a lot of this happened:

And according to my great-great-grandfather, when you have as much to drink as he did, you forget that you are supposed to sneak back into camp.

Everything else worked out fine & they would have gotten away with it had they not stumbled drunkenly back to camp being as loud as humanly possibly.

At what point they were promptly put into quarantine. 

Because the town they sneaked into & were forbidden to enter was suffering an epidemic of smallpox.

And his good friend Teddy came to personally bitch him out from a very safe distance.  According to Billy, he had never seen Teddy that mad in his entire life & it didn't help that they were still drunk enough to laugh.

And by the time they all sobered up it turned out that they were all smallpox free & about ready to return to the United States & get mustered out.

And that is where his journal ends.

It was just a war journal.

If you read the book, the part about working for Buffalo Bill in his Wild West Show.

And the part about Annie Oakley

And his performance at the Chicago World's Fair

His deathbed visit to Teddy

And his later efforts to popularize early Country music were all recorded by historians & not by Billy himself, meaning that all the embarrassing moments were completely ignored, meaning I'm not going to cover them here, I'll leave that for mom to read on her own.

But Billy did say that he went to Cuba under the impression that he was going to liberate the Cubans from the oppressing rule of Spain.

He was, in the end, extremely vocally upset about the fact that Cuba went from a Spanish colony to an American Colony & not a free country.  Despite the keel-hauled pants & the drunken smallpox, the colonization of Cuba became the real point of his journal.

I'll leave you with this: