[« Another Alzheimer's poster boy....] [It wouldn't be the first.... »]
07/05/2004: Thought for the Day:
From a mailing list I'm on about gods and mythology:
The Aztec people had some interesting Gods & Goddesses. Like other people who had large pantheons, such as the Chinese, Greeks, Celts or Hindus, they had the deities of things you would expect there to be Gods and Goddesses for. The Sun, Moon, Sea, Birds etc.
However they also has some that I think were pretty unique, such as:
Tzapatlan Tenen the Goddess of Turpentine.
Tzinteotl the Goddess of the Rump. And today Jennifer Lopez is her only begotten daughter.
Techalotl the Squirrel God,
Ixtab the Goddess of Suicide, who by the way was an important deity due to the fact that about the only dead in Aztec culture who ended up in the afterlife of Spring were suicides, and people who died in natural disasters.
The rest had a pretty rough time of it. I have to say that their views on life after death seem to me very odd. How do you motivate a young soldier when you tell him that warriors go to a specially horrid place, and what kind of inspiration is it for women to be brave when they are told that women who die in childbirth aren't taken care of but go to a place where they will be become night monsters. While the land of forever Spring is reserved ether for people who just happened to have a volcano kill them or they killed themselves?
Itzipaplotl, Obsidian Knife Butterfly who was said to be a beautiful woman with symbols of death scrawled on her cheeks, and was a Goddess of sensuality and death. I'm sorry, I know I am putting my own cultural ideas on all this, but that just strikes me as more than a tad twisted.
And my favorite
Ixquitecatl the God of sorcerers and popcorn. Orville Redenbacher Master of the Mystic Arts. Sure.... Why not?
--Terry McCombs [God of the Month mailing list]
Len on 07.05.04 @ 08:23 AM CST
