Black legends

This is a year of centennials. The anti-American Left has struck first, by casting the first English colonies (they weren't "British" yet) as illegitimate - the "1619 Project", so called. Ben "Augustine" Domenech's flagship The Federalist has responded with several articles; of which, his personal Transom newsletter links to five. Instapundit has linked several more.

What is at stake here is nothing less than the right of Europeans to live in the United States; and, by extension, any part of the Western Hemisphere excepting maybe Greenland (the Inuits got there late too). This is why the pseudonymous "Adam Mill" mooted a "1519 Project".

For some, the whole question is pointless. Some say that "whites" don't even exist; that the whole concept is artificial. Others - I am thinking of the Patriot Front lately - just state because we live here. For them, there is no point arguing for the morality of white existence or white settlement; they're white, and they seek to secure the existence of their people and a future for white children. The 1519 Project is not for either. Both sides have made up their minds already.

The 1519 Project is to argue for "Western Civilisation" and its essential goodness. Race, to Domenech, doesn't matter; being pro-West is good enough (and if his cheques clear from their Malay bank-account).

[Disclosure: I would support a 1519 Project - because the antiAmericans are going to be doing such a project next, so if nothing else we need to anticipate it. Also because I enjoy a historical challenge.]

The 1519 Project runs up against the concurrent Anti-1619 Project somewhat. Anti-1619 Project says, yay West, we ended slavery. 1519 Project has to admit that the Conquistadors were in it in the first place because of slavery; Restall's When Montezuma Met Cortes documents Conquistador slavery of the natives, extensively. In fact New World slavery outstripped African slavery from 1500ish-1600ish; there was more "raw material" in the New World itself. Until there wasn't, and ship technology improved, so the Europeans (by then Spain was joined by others) went back to Africa.

"Mill"'s article demands a response, but it touches on many points, so I'll be running a series on this today.

The Popol Vuh is a Quiché Postclassic text

... and that should be remembered by anyone studying Choltal Classic texts where they deal with the underworld. Those texts would be the writings on funerary vases as summarised Michael Coe, Breaking the Maya Code. Which admittedly is a 1993 text itself; it's been well over a vigintuple since then.

Coe, like Schele and Freidel a couple years prior, related the Mayanists' observation that, in vases found in tombs, motifs of the grave abounded (Coe, 221). This induced Mayanists to look at whatever records of the Maya underworld survived for later Maya to record through Christendom. The best record, all agree, is that of the Popul Vuh. In it is a cycle of several sets of twins, who enter Maya Sheol.

Let's evaluate, here, to what degree the Popol Vuh - which is I concede a great text - is also a useful text, in the narrow context of the Choltal Classic mythology.

The Popol Vuh is in a language closely related to Classical Choltal (so to Tzeltal also: chart in Coe, 48). It is, however, not descended from Choltal or Tzeltal. It is Kʼicheʼ. (Their circumlocution for the underworld is The Dread Land, Xibalba.) The Popol Vuh also was not written in a codex of 9.18.10.0.0 / 13 August AD 800. It perhaps was done from a codex but if so, from one of the 1400s (11.9.x.x.x).

The Kʼicheʼ myth starts with two twin ballplayers who play ball with the devil, so to speak. The demons duly drag them down to Xibalba. There, 1 Ahau (well, the disembodied head of this rex primus, because Maya) impregnates one of the local demonesses. There are rules to this particular ballgame: the land of the dead is no place to give birth to life. So she must flee back up here. Her children are, also, twins. These demi-demons grow to become great tricksters; they are able to defeat Xibalba directly where their father and uncle must settle for posthumous revenge (Coe, 220).

They were all Maya here and the old hieroglyphic script, non unlike our Chinese, could be adapted across "dialect" borders. The lords of Palenque had no problem taking on Yucatec Maya names for themselves whilst they wrote their genealogies in Choltal (Coe, 286 n.14). On the other side of the Peten the Kʼicheʼs own brothers the Qʼeqchiʼ borrowed many neolithic terms from old Choltal and perhaps chalcolithic terms from their Chʼolʼti offspring (pdf). So Choltal cast a shadow up the hills to the south - if I may twist that metaphor.

The Popol Vuh populates The Dread Land with many dreadful horrors. For the Choltal, hell is ruled by twins of its own. One such is named: Pauahtun. His aspect survived among the Yucatec Maya (God N in the Dresden Codex: Coe, 222) as presiding over the five unlucky days at the end of their 360-day calendar. I don't know that Pauahtun entered the Popol Vuh.

The Choltal on the other hand didn't talk much about the demi-demon "hero twins", that second generation. They did, however, portray much about the first generation. Rex Primus was the maize god (Coe, 222). Here is the god who dies, and by dying gives life. We Catholics experience such a figure at the Mass every Sunday.

I wonder if the Kʼicheʼ, barbarian successor-race to their Choltal cousins, composed the Popol Vuh as a counter-story to the Choltal Official Narrative.

If I am right, the Kʼicheʼ heard all about Pauahtun and left him where he belongs, in hell. The twins' foil is rather The Dread Land itself, which the Kʼicheʼ cautiously refused to name directly. The first twins, like Rex Primus, remained important; but they weren't worth worshipping as Maize Gods. And why would the Kʼicheʼ care; milpa / chol was drudgework for the cityfolk, the elder ones whose cities were left to ruin. The Kʼicheʼ chose instead to foist their trickster stories upon Rex Primus' children up here on Earth. The Popol Vuh comes from the Maya world's "culture of critique" ASSMANN 2/23/24 - as its "normative inversion".

So - again, if I am right - for direct parallels to Choltal worship, I'd look to the also-civilised Yucatec Maya first. If the Classic Choltal are Canaan, and the Kʼicheʼ their Israel; the Yucatec are Ugarit.

This vast revisionist epic, like our Old World revisionist Iliad, and Prager would argue like the Bible, had the literary merit, and the relevance to Postclassic Maya life, that it survived. It survived even the Inquisition. Perhaps the Inquisition saw in the Popol Vuh something they could use against the still-surviving Cholti.

Poseidon's cave

Latest news from Thera: tephra found in an east Crete cave, dubbed "Pelekita". Tephra means ash.

Thera's tephra has been found all over the place but not, yet, in a cave. That's helpful for constraining how the ash moved across the eastern Med; also, that the wind blew from the north, implies what time of year the mountain blew its top. That wind would be the Meltimi, the summer wind.

Earlier this year Jonny McAneney and Mike Baillie had related (doi 10.15184/aqy.2018.165) a 1627 BC climate downturn to Aniakchak, and not to Thera. It may be of interest, to some, that someone burned a log in Pelekita after the eruption. That log's wood is dated to the earlier 1600s: 1687-1627 cal BCE for the 1σ range (68.2%).

The article must admit that the calibration is "IntCal13" and that an IntCal19 is forthcoming. IntCal19 stands to adjust radiocarbon dates up and down the Mediterranean Bronze Age.

INTCAL 8/12: It's IntCal20.

Old Spain, New Spain

A couple years back I leafed through Matthew Restall's When Montezuma Met Cortés at a Barnes & Noble. Restall aimed to debunk a host of myths about that fabled encounter. Unfortunately one of those "myths", which featured in the first few chapters, concerned the "Aztec" Mexica love of human-sacrifice and cannibalism; Restall thought the Mexica fully comparable to fifteenth-century Spain and the Habsburgs. I suspected Restall of political-correctness (see, now, also here) so I didn't purchase the book; soon afterward, my suspicions were dramatically justified [MOAR 1/1/2021: and it's never going to look better]. On that much.

So today I found the book again in the Estes Park library. Not having aught better to do, I continued where I left off. On this much, Restall seemed more credible. To sum up: Gary Jennings (reliant on Prestcott, Díaz, and de las Casas) may have been right about the Tlatoani regime; but he was wrong about Montezuma and Cortés.

They all were.

"The Conquest of New Spain" happened during pleine histoire, to borrow a Renan-ism; but not quite en it. The Gulf of Mexico was not yet well-mapped; so to get to the Mexica, the Spaniard - based in Cuba and Hispaniola - had to sail to Yucatan and to hug the coast. And to get to Spain required a run through an already pirate-infested Caribbean. Meanwhile the king of Spain was a Habsburg also concerned with his holdings elsewhere in Europe [UPDATE 1/1/2021: if we're to believe this dickhead, we can almost delete the "also"]. So if a ship did land in a friendly Iberian port (that is, not a Portuguese port) it was even money if the king's court was even on the peninsula at the time.

The conquest itself, says Restall, was protracted and chaotic. At first, says Restall, it wasn't a conquest. The Cuban governor Diego Velázquez (later appended, "of Cuellar", because there's been an artist of that same name since then) commissioned a colonising expedition but that ... didn't go as planned. Velázquez chose Cortés to lead the force not because Cortés was the best man for it; but because he was a beta male nonentity who - Velázquez figured - could never earn the trust of the captains under him. In that much, Velázquez had the example of Columbus' failed governorship before him; and Velázquez turned out to have pegged Cortés pretty much right. Where Velázquez erred was in his assumption that the captains - with Cortés or without - could control their own situation, on that side of the Gulf.

The captains and their troops and horses swiftly became pawns in the Mesoamerican "game of thrones"; Cortés, their leader, had to follow them. First the coastal Totonacs launched the Spaniards against Tlaxcala; then, when the Spaniards didn't surrender or flee (because they couldn't) Tlaxcala sicced them on Chololan / Cholula. Next, Tlaxcala dragged them to Tenochtitlan where the latter's tlatoani ("amir" is the best translation) basically put them in his zoo. (To give Jennings due credit here, he related that the Tlatoani had a zoo where the Serious Historians have denied it.)

I am inclined to believe Restall on account of the curiosity that nobody in this Mexica menagerie was sending messages back to Cuba. Not boasts of victory; not pleas for help - nothing. The Spaniards were incommunicado.

Skipping ahead to Mexico City's fall, this opened central Mexico to Spanish immigration of course. But there weren't enough to shift Mesoamerican demographics. Several Nahua-speaking nobles under the Mexica continued on as bilingual nobles under the Spaniards. The demographics, I think, shift in earnest only after the cocoliztli.

As to why the farrago of legend [REMINDER 9/22- it wasn't all legend]: first, the Cortés family put out a self-serving story about the Don's heroics. Second, the locals damned the memory of the tlatoani whose miscalculations led to the disaster. Later, as Spanish Catholic overlordship became more and more entrenched, several major Mesoamerican cities promoted stories that they had served Spain (and/or embraced Catholicism) first and most loyally; by which, they hoped to improve their position relative to other cities.

...

Anyone think that parallels might be drawn with the accounts of the conquests which Islam had made against Spain beforehand...? I mean, besides Chase Robinson.

Top Kek

I attended Royal Shrewsbury School in the late 1980s. My father mentioned a teacher Frank McEachran, known as Kek to that generation. The school was AngloWelsh if anything; McEachran, a grammar-school boy from Wolverhampton, was probably a Scot by ancestry. Kek semi-retired in 1960 but continued to teach and to live near the school, until he passed in 1975.

One "Moonraker" (not me) typed up the Frank McEachran Wiki page in 2012 and, somehow, convinced Wikipedia that the man mattered. Some of McEachran's students went commie - and traitor. I concede that counts as mattering.

Notwithstanding, my dad loved McEachran. So did several of Kek's colleagues at the school, still teaching there in my day: Charlesworth, Holgate, LeQuesne. Those colleagues re-edited McEachran's books of "spells" and published a new version in 1992ish, which my dad duly bought.

McEachran - arrogantly - had published a work on The Civilized Man when he was in his late 20s; then, in 1932, The Destiny of Europe. (He was born in 1900 so converting age to year, and back again, is easy.) Those books made precisely the impact they deserved to make: the man was no Hilaire Belloc (UPDATE 10/19 - who was himself an economic crank). Not in 1930...

...and not in 1970. McEachran in the mid-1930s was a disciple of one Henry George of New York City. George was one of those thinkers who crop up now and again, not Socialist, more of a policy-wonk (UPDATE 7/4/25, the Land Value Tax). The Italians had their fascists; certain AngloCatholics came up with "Distributism". Georgism looks like Distributism for nonobservant Anglicans.

On The Site, as a teacher, McEachran was a Dead Poets Society figure. Kek was tolerated in Salopia where he might not be so tolerated in other schools. Among McEachran's chosen pericopae - he called them "Spells" - was Auden's jaundiced look at examinamania. And yes, Shrewsbury did screen DPS at us soon after it came out.

We did not have Kek when we were there, nor a teacher like Kek; but the school honoured his memory. Even the Tory teachers like Charlesworth honoured him.

So: let's talk about the legacy of McEachran. Let's decide if Kek is worth the honour.

That McEachran promoted a Third Way economics, Georgism, hints at an idealism coupled with deep naïveté. Third Way theories in a society tend to fascism or socialism. Kek's classroom even provides a laboratory for how Third Way theories work on a young brain.

What teenagers hear, from Dead Poets Society type teachers, is Question Authority; and - in a "Royal" school - they associate Authority with the Throne and the Altar. The problem is the problem of Chaotic Good: it doesn't exist. The kids just gravitate to the most-coherent alternative authority. It might be some Christian cult, or a hippie commune, or a Right militia. But, against our Modern World, the most-coherent alternative authority is Marxism. At least, so it was in the 1940s; over 1995-2015 the alternative was arguably Islam, but I suspect Marxism is back again, or worse than Marxism.

Kek wasn't a Marxist but he induced many students toward Marxism. He gave his students the metaphysical HIV which opened them up to the Marxist disease.

Kek was a Bad Thing.

BACKDATING 8/18

Dennis Prager is not to be trusted

I read through Dennis Prager's commentary on Exodus and then I read Darío Fernández.

Prager claimed there was no record of a Jew - outside the Bible - being executed according to the laws of Torah. This didn't pass the smell test. If God's Law says "if X happens, do Y" and human nature is constant; then somewhere somehow, Y will happen.

Fernández's book was mostly against the Islamic regime in Andalus, but the text also made some observations about Sephardic Jewish life in the ghetto. If you were a Jew and you broke the Sephardic law, you got killed.

Exile was a tool in the toolbox; a Jew getting exiled for blasphemy against the prophets might well be blaspheming against Muslim prophets too which meant death. But such events might not count for Prager.

Fernández documents that Jews got stoned for apostasy in Spain as well - directly.

Fernández notes a law in the Constantine code forbidding Jews from stoning apostates [n. 79]; the Visigoths in Spain enacted the same law. The monarchs wouldn't have had to forbid that law if nobody was enforcing it. Note also that Jewish law associates apostasy with adultery and, I surmise, some Francescas and Paolos likely got the rock as well.

When Vox Day calls Dennis Prager a liar - that's a reason why.

BACKDATE 8/18.

Why Malik?

I found a used copy of Darío Fernández-Morera's The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise.

(Myth is an ISI book, like Spencer's Did Muhammad Exist? and - more to the point - Reilly's The Closing of the Muslim Mind (which sucks of course). It cites Emmet Scott's Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited; which was NERP, not ISI, but both books are of the same stripe. UPDATE 8/18: the terlit review.)

Somewhere in all such books are perhaps-shorter books explaining how the relevant Islamic concepts took shape, and where and when. In Fernández's case, we're looking at extreme Malikite Islam from the end of the 700s AD to the fall of the Almoravids.

Fernández documents that for half a millennium or more, Imam Malik (d. 795 AD) through his pupil Yaḥya bin Yaḥya Ibn Kathir al-Laythi (d. 848 AD) ruled al-Andalus with a heavy, dead hand. Although Fernández doesn't get into this (it doesn't matter much), Laythi was indeed a faithful transmitter of Malik's muwatta, as can be seen by comparison with Abu Muṣʿab's recension [UPDATE 7/19/21: er... upon seeing that comparison . . .]. Malik himself was an adherent of the Madina fiqh, which he believed superior over other schools' fiqh; Laythi and his successors argued for that madhhab against the (later) pure ḥadith-based legal schools, purportedly "Muhammadan". When Malikites came to Sicily, they brought the Warsh Qurân with them; this is now dominant in the Maghreb. It was said that the Maghreb had Hamza's qirâ', from al-Kufa, before that.

That Malikism isn't ḥadith-fundamentalist does not mean that the Spanish Malikites were tolerant. Fernández, 128 notes how amir-turned-caliph ʿAbd al-Raḥman III (r. 912–61 AD) mandated that only Maliki judges rule on Islamic law. In fact, when the amir executed his son, it may have been because his son was deviating too far into "Shafi'ism" - that is, into the ahl al-ḥadith. Mostly Shafi'ites got exiled (p. 99).

There were Muslims in Spain who weren't Maliki. The whole of Valencia was "qabayli berber" and, as fremen do, thumbed its nose at the Umayyad emirs until the Caliphate restoration. Ibn Hazm is a later case in point... but he got exiled (p. 97). [UPDATE 1/8/2022: ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Ismāīl ibn Badr too.] I get the impression that Ibn 'Abd Rabbih (d. 940 AD) wasn't interested in sectarian debates; given that he (famously) collected Syrian and Iraqi "merchandise" (not Madinese nor even Spanish) which he "sold back to them"; one suspects this one, at least, could appreciate the Hamza Qurân. The Baqi recension of Ibn Khayyat's chronograph also survives among the Andalusis. The Spanish Umayyads, I take it, tolerated non-Maliki literature as long as it was at least not anti-Umayyad, and if the Malikite wasn't sitting at the bench.

Fernández glides over the rise of the Maliki madhhab; it wasn't born in Spain nor even in Africa, and it wasn't brought there by the first conquerors. Al-Hakam I and especially 'Abd al-Rahman II (r. 822-52 AD) seem to have taken it from Laythi. As to why: pending more investigation (and evidence) I suspect the natural tendency of Sunni amirates to cede more power to God... which meant, to God's jurists. Also the 'Abbasids were succumbing to the ahl al-ḥadith over the 800s; Malikites, especially if given inquisitorial power, could arrest that, at least.