Luke Caverns
speaker
1,858 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 27 May
Luke Caverns’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This didn't happen. But. Montezuma gets stoned by the by the mob. They just throw stones and kill him up on top of the building. So now they've got dead Montezuma and there's nothing stopping the Aztecs from coming in and killing him because they were they were being polite because he was their hostage. But now he's dead. Wow. That's what triggers the noche triste.
They're like, oh, shit, get the gold and let's get out of here. But they're on an island in the middle of a lake and there's only causeways. And the Aztecs smartly break the causeways in various places. There are places where boats can pass through that are wooden bridges, and they break those so the horses can't get out.
The first wave of horses get out with Cortez, but the other ones that stayed behind and tried to load up their bags with gold... they found the bridges destroyed and just fell right into the lake or were killed there. So the ones that weren't quick enough, that's actually a cool piece of archeology.
I would love to make an overlay over Mexico City of where the city was and where the causeways are and track the causeways, because there's almost certainly somewhere under the streets of Mexico City, a skeleton of a horse piled with gold. It would be hard as hell to find it, like a needle in a haystack.
But if the stories are true, there's a couple of horses covered in gold laying under the streets of Mexico City.
You know, one of the things with the Spaniards having such vicious battles with these Aztecs, and then, you know, And really using and possibly exaggerating, or the Aztecs are exaggerating how many people they're sacrificing to impress the Spanish. One way or another, it affects our perception of them. We see them as very brutal, savage, warrior people.
But at the same time, in so many ways, with people in the ancient Americas, like the Fang deity, you know, cutting all these people's heads off, but he has his puppy with him everywhere he goes. He loves his puppy. They have this really funny – it's in these depictions in South America. You can see this warrior god going throughout South America and just slaughtering all these people.
They call him the decapitator deity. This is the fang deity? Yeah.
But he always has a little puppy with him. But that's South America. But it's just some cute like dichotomy of ancient Americans. But going back to the Aztecs, you know, they love flowers. They love poems. They love their natural world. They love collecting, capturing animals and making zoos. You know, they had astronomical observatories and they had their own archaeological department as well.
And they'd bring monuments from around Mesoamerica and study them, you know. And they're really, actually, this surprised me. I would think the best sculptors and mover of megaliths in the entire... The Aztecs. Yeah, yeah. Maybe more. Huge stones and beautiful work. Maybe... Maybe more impressive or just right there with the Olmecs.
When you go to Mexico City's museum and you walk into the Aztec exhibit, you will be blown away. The size of the monuments there carved out of this black basalt and the polish that's on them is really otherworldly. It's really amazing. Probably the most impressive thing that I have seen as far as sculpture work in all of the Americas. And another interesting part of who these people were is...
So, when you went up to the emperor of Montezuma's temple or Montezuma's temple, when the Spaniards get up to the top of it, think about the famous story of the Spartans who had all these strange deformed people with them, but they're kind of pushed off to the side.
In the classical world, you kind of ignore people who have deformities and people who don't have this perfect, picturesque, idealistic form, I guess. But in Mesoamerica, they venerated these people. And in the emperor's palace in Tenochtitlan, he would have these deformed people living with him and he would be pampering them. So it's just like... you're living in a totally different world, right?
These very, very violent people who do things and sacrifice so many people that we see as so barbaric, but then, you know, they, they venerate and take care of them.
They weren't like caring for them, like, like special needs school.
Sure. Exactly. Yeah.
They were, they were, they were seen as, no, they were seen as touched by the gods. Deformity, dwarfism was seen as an obvious that God has touched this person. And so from a young age, those people would be told, uh, Look, you're a vessel of the gods. You are born and destined to be a liaison between us and the gods, and we're going to keep you close.
And those people probably from an early age said, well, that sounds good. I'm in on that.
Was there a lot of incest? Inca, a lot. Maya, I don't think we have much evidence of it. Though, much in the way of Europe's royal development, there came a point where it was inbred. I mean, it's just because there was a limited amount of royal families who wanted to keep their bloodline pure. For the Maya, even more so, because it wasn't just a bloodline.
It was a conduit to the ancestors who had influence on the gods. Right.
Showing 1701–1720 of 1,858 · page 86 of 93
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