Pacal Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You say:
>
Quote:We will just have to disagree. Miguel Leon
> Portilla, the top Mexican scholar on the Aztecs,
> supports my position in his book Broken Spears. My
> mentor, Charles Dibble, the translator of the
> Florentine Codex and a pre-eminent Aztec scholar
> published The Conquest through Spanish eyes Salt
> Lake City: University of Utah Press (1978){the
> 41st Annual Frederick William Reynolds Lecture}.
> As far as I'm concerned, his evidence, consisting
> of many direct quotes from the Nahuatl text of the
> Florentine Codex, is clear and convincing. The
> Mexica (the ones that count) did not try to kill
> the Spanish before the "Noche Triste incident."
> The Spanish did fight and slaughter a number of
> different ethnic groups such as the inhabitants of
> Cempoala.
>
> I have read the Florentine Codex codex also and in
> it I read a lot that could be read has thinking
> the spanish were "gods", and a lot of post
> conquest rationlization, esspecially the "mind
> reading" of Montazuma. I frankly find the notion
> very hard to take. I suppose the Mexica would not
> have noticed, the spanish break wind, go to the
> washroom, spit etc., fornicate and engage in all
> sorts of rather mundane ordinary behavior and most
> esspecially why wouild a "god" need translators?
> I suspect the Mexica could observe these things
> and draw certain conclusions. That some of the
> Mexica may have thought the spanish were "gods"
> for a time is a possibility that they all did so
> is remote. I further allow the possibility that
> the Spanish were thought to have "supernatural
> powers", which did not require belief that they
> were "gods".

As I said, we will just have to disagree. The question is whether one tries to think like an Aztec based on what we know and read in texts like the Florentine Codex (the Dibble, Leon Portilla aproach, i.e. an emic approach in anthropological terms) or whether you impose your own idea of what is logical in a particular situation,, i.e. an etic approach in anthropological terms. BTW there is no disrespect in an emic approach. In a more neutral example from my approach to studying Aztec medicine-- The Aztec believed that fevers were caused by "hot" phlegms in the body and that appropriate remedies wooulkd involve substances that would be purgative, diaphoretic, emetic, or diuretic. It actually turns out that their remedies DID possess these actions and thus, emically, I rated these uses as effective (by Aztec standards), However, we now know that these remedies would not be effective febrifuges and, etically, I would rate these remedies as ineffective.
>
> Regarding the "Noche Triste", I am a little aghast
> that you seem to have forgotten the fighting in
> Tenotichlan that preceeded that night in which
> Spaniards were killed. I frankly suspect at least
> some of the Mexica would have known about the
> horse and human deaths among the spanish when they
> fought the Talaxans.
>
> Sorry I just can't take the idea that all or most
> of the Mexica were both unobservent and not
> particularily bright.
>
> I frankly think the Indians of Mexico were to a
> large extent taken aback by the arrival of the
> spanish and didn't know quite what to make of
> them. But the idea that they universaily took them
> to be gods in just sere hokum and a particular
> legend that became very popular in Europe in the
> 19th century when it became a standard fantasy
> that the natives (of whatever stripe) would take
> Europeans for "gods".
>
> Regarding Cempoala I think you mean Cholua.

You are right- Cholula.
Bernard
>
> Pierre
>
> P.S. Montazuma's alleged involvement with a plot
> to capture / kill cortez and his men in Cholua is
> rather a problem if you he really took them to be
> gods.