The Fall of the Aztec Empire: What Really Happened in the Battle of Tenochtitlan?

Without question the Spaniards succeeded in deposing the present regime.  That regime was an imposed confederation lending itself to easy assimulation to a Spanish confederation.  Actual cultural change took time and really centuries.  

The real killer for this polity was the massive die off but most still worked to provide cultural continuity.

Mastery of Mexico did require a working alliance with the majority of the tribes.  This meant that the slave trade had to be largely externalized.  That nuance is not obvious in the tasles passed down but shows up in continuing cultural presence.  Those allied tribes did not disappear even after been reduced.  As allies they were not slaved out unlike much of the southern USA then.

The Fall of the Aztec Empire: What Really Happened in the Battle of Tenochtitlan?

On August 13, 1521, the capital city of Tenochtitlan fell after a two-month siege — a victory that marked the end of an empire. But five hundred years later, researchers are giving stories surrounding the events another look.

By Joshua Rapp LearnAug 13, 2021 6:00 AM

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-fall-of-the-aztec-empire-what-really-happened-in-the-battle-of

A painting representing the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Artist unknown, dated to the 17th century. (Credit: Public domain/Wikimedia Commons)

In 1521, Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés completed the invasion of Mexico’s most powerful empire. His glorified tale starts out with just a few hundred Spaniards landing near Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico, and includes everything from the supposed betrayal of a Nahua women against her own people to the Spanish overcoming a vastly larger Aztec army in one of the biggest cities of the world at the time.

The problem is, five centuries after the Aztec capital toppled, researchers are reexamining the narrative of Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan that comes mostly to us through the eyewitness accounts of Cortés’ soldiers, an account by historian Francisco López de Gómara based on interviews with Cortés, and the latter’s own letters.

“All of this is really just Spanish men aggrandizing their own story,” says David Carballo, an archaeologist at Boston University who studies the Aztecs.

A combination of Indigenous accounts preserved in various codices and reading between the lines of the Spanish accounts is revealing a more nuanced story in which the Spanish heavily depended on Indigenous allies like the Tlaxcalans and the Texcocans who were also searching for an opportunity to put an end to Aztec hegemony in the region.

“It was always about Cortés building alliances,” Carballo says.

Veracruz and La Malinche

Cortés first landed near Veracruz on April 22, 1519—Good Friday—with a force of a few hundred Spaniards. Shortly before his arrival there, he had landed and fought against Indigenous Maya to the southeast of Veracruz, resulting in a truce. The Maya presented slaves to Cortés, including a woman named Malintzin, sometimes known as Marina or La Malinche in Spanish—a Nahua woman that could speak the Aztec language as well as some Maya languages. “She knew courtly Nahuatl, the language of diplomacy,” Carballo says.

Geronimo de Aguilar, a Franciscan friar that got shipwrecked and captured by Maya years before, had also joined Cortés. The Franciscan had lived for years among the Maya as a slave and eventually as a warrior, and could speak some of the Yucatec Mayan languages, translating between Malintzin and Cortés.

Shortly after they landed, Cortés scuttled his boats. Diego Velasquez, the governor of Cuba, tried to stop Cortés’ expedition as he coveted the glory of conquering the purported wealthy kingdom to the west for himself, and had approval from the Spanish crown to do so. Velasquez had initially ordered Cortés only to explore and trade on the mainland, which was still suspected of being an island at that point anyway. When Cortés’ intentions became clear, he scuttled the ships to stop any of the troops he had loyal to Velasquez from escaping back to Cuba.

The Enemies of My Enemy

Malintzin and Aguilar quickly went to work translating with some of the local Totonac people, who were happy to rebel against Aztec tax collectors in the area. The Totonac also informed him about the Tlaxcalans—enemies of the Aztecs who might serve as potential allies, Carballo says. Some Totonac also joined the Spanish as scouts, leading the otherwise clueless Spanish through the unknown geopolitical landscape of early 16th century Mexico.

“[Cortés] was being coached all the time by Native peoples themselves,” Carballo says.

Nonetheless, the Tlaxcalans weren’t initially convinced. In 1519 they fought against the Spanish for about 20 days before coming to a truce in the interest of overcoming their Aztec enemies and elevating their own kingdom.

Carballo notes that the Indigenous people at this time had a vastly different understanding of war. Despite the portrayal of Aztecs as bloody conquerors who sacrificed huge masses of people, most battles had low casualties when compared to European wars with thousands, or tens of thousands of deaths. Mesoamerican empires were mostly about indirect political control. They would tax subjects but mostly leave them to their own devices as opposed to the European method of religious conversion and colonization.

“They weren’t trying to micromanage other cultures,” Carballo says.

So when the Tlaxcalans allied with the Spanish, they likely just saw the Europeans as another force on the landscape that could help them achieve their own goals, rather than a force seeking total domination over the region.

Tlaxcalan forces added about 10,000 to 20,000 warriors to the roughly 500 Spaniards at this time. They tested their alliance initially against Cholula, a large Aztec-controlled city-state with one of the two largest pyramids in the whole region and an enemy of the Tlaxcalans, burning and razing the city and massacring thousands of people.

First Visit to Tenochtitlan

After the massacre of Cholula, Cortés and the Tlaxcalans made their way to the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan—the site of modern-day Mexico City. Some sources claim that the Aztec leader, Moctezuma II, was someone ineffective at dealing with the situation. He invited the Spanish in as part of a peace offering, though there is a lot of debate over why the Aztecs welcomed Cortés and the Spanish in, Carballo says.

The Europeans remained there for about eight months. “Things go south in many different ways,” Carballo says. Cortés kidnaps Moctezuma II and keeps him in his own quarters well into 1520. Carballo says that some sources consider him becoming something of a Spanish puppet at this point, though others believe that he was still trying to control the situation, as the Spanish concept of domination and empire building didn’t really match well with his Mesoamerican understanding of politics.

Spanish vs. Spanish

Cortés left to fight a force sent by Velasquez from Cuba to stop him, ambushing them then recruiting the survivors to their cause with promises of riches and land in the region. By the time Cortés and a force of several thousand Spaniards and Tlaxcalans returned to the capital, the situation has deteriorated even more. Sources vary greatly on what happened in this period, but some Aztec leaders begin to rebel against the Spanish control of their capital after the Spanish massacred Aztec nobles in the city’s Great Temple. Moctezuma II is killed shortly after—the Spanish sources claim a crowd stoned him as he spoke while the Aztecs point the finger at the Spanish.

In any case, the Spanish and Tlaxcalans retreated from Tenochtitlan as the whole city rose against them. Hundreds were killed in their escape through the narrow causeways through Lake Texcoco that surrounded the city, and many more were wounded by the time they reached Tlaxcala.

Invasion

The second Spanish force Velasquez sent at this point did its true damage. Small pox began to tear through the region, eventually claiming the life of Moctezuma II’s successor, Cuitláhuac.

“Now the native population was being devastated by disease,” Carballo says.

Cuauhtémoc ascends to the Aztec throne and puts up a much stronger resistance than his cousin Moctezuma II had, as the Spanish and more than 10,000 Tlaxcalans begin to conquer or ally with various Aztec-controlled cities. Cortés then took the canons, masts and rigging from the boats they had scuttled in the Gulf, and created new ships to launch against Tenochtitlan from Texcoco, an Aztec city they had allied with. This alliance was key, since without Texcoco’s cooperation, the Spanish couldn’t have brought the unheard of European-style naval warfare and siege weapons against the Aztecs, Carballo says.

By August 13, 1521, the Tlaxcalans and Spanish finally succeeded in toppling Tenochtitlan and the neighboring Aztec city of Tlatelolco.

But the Spanish had a long struggle ahead of them. While many erroneously consider the fall of Tenochtitlan as the end of the Mesoamerican invasion, the Spanish’s struggle in the Americas was really just beginning. It took them decades to beat the Chichimecs around the Zacatecas region, and they didn’t conquer some of the Maya city states until the end of the 17th century.

The alliance ended up working for the Tlaxcalans for a while, as they were relatively insulated from colonial interference. They enjoyed autonomy within the new Spanish colony for some time—the modern day state of Tlaxcala still maintains the general borders of this historic region, Carballo says. Tlaxcalans even accompanied the Spanish in their war to conquer parts of what is now the U.S. Southwest and even as far as Philippines in Asia. “They continued to be key allies,” Carballo says.

Figures like Cortés were once glorified, but Mexican national identity has progressively trended towards a contrasting perspective since independence from Spanish rule. As we hit the 500th year anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan, more researchers are starting to question the old narratives of the conquest. Malintzin, for example, has gone from Doña Marina, a Spanish rendering of the indigenous name of the hero that helped the glorious Spanish conquest, to La Malinche, the traitor that sold out the Indigenous people. The latter incarnation of her name still carries an insulting connotation in Mexico today. But Carballo notes that all of these approaches tend to ignore the fact that the Indigenous woman was gifted as a sexual slave with limited options in her life.

Other historians no longer speak of the conquest of the Aztecs, but rather the Spanish invasion. Millions of people today still speak Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica, or Aztec. “Conquest implies finality,” Carballo says. “We need to recognize the resilience of Native peoples today as well as the harm brought to their ancestors through European invasions of their lands.”

Honey's Eternal Shelf Life, Explained

It is astonishing that honey has survived for thousands of years.  Or perhaps not when you recall trree rings also in deserts.  Neither is actually living and is then well protected.

It also informs us that all forms of living tissue can be fully dehydrated, then encased in honey and sealed away safely. Rehydration is then a problem but always demands water and honey qjuickly dissolves away leaving hydrating tissue behind.

This is important and promising storage tech that deserves much closer work

Honey's Eternal Shelf Life, Explained

That honey found stored in an ancient Egyptian tomb? Yeah, it's still good to eat.

By Darren IncorvaiaAug 15, 2021 8:00 AM

(Credit: StudioSmart/Shutterstock)

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/honeys-eternal-shelf-life-explained?

People have found honey useful for thousands of years. In fact, modern beekeeping was born from our long-held desire to harvest massive quantities of it. Cave paintings in Spain dated to 8,000 years ago depict humans gathering honey from wild honey bee colonies; the fact that they collected it without the protection offered by beekeeping suits goes to show just how irresistible honey was, even in antiquity. But what exactly is this sweet, golden liquid — and how do bees make it?

As their name suggests, honey production is a hallmark of the species of bee we call honey bees (members of the genus Apis). Some of their close relatives, like stingless bees and bumble bees, make similar honey substances as well. However, honey bee honey stands out for one remarkable reason: it never spoils.

“Honey is hygroscopic, it draws water out of the air,” says Lewis Bartlett, a postdoctoral associate at the University of Georgia who studies honey bee diseases and evolution. “If that happens, eventually the water level will rise to a point where yeast starts growing, which makes [the honey] ferment and go rancid.” The natural process by which honey bees produce honey drastically reduces its water content, he says, to the point that nothing (not even yeast) can survive long enough within it to go rancid. As long as your honey is sitting sealed on a shelf, it can stay good forever — which explains how scientists have found honey in dry Egyptian tombs that is still good to eat!

There are several factors at play that give honey this unique — and delicious — chemical make-up. Honey is made of nectar that worker bees collect from flowers, with the primary ingredients being the sugars sucrose, glucose and fructose. Once the nectar is brought back to the hive, bees pass it back and forth between one another’s mouths in a process called trophallaxis that helps get that water concentration down. The workers then store soon-to-be honey in the hive’s honeycomb storage cells, where evaporation (thanks to the hive’s high temperature) contributes to water loss even further. Once the water content is low enough, the bees cap the honey with beeswax. The whole process can be quick, “less than a week, potentially,” Bartlett says. “But it really depends on what’s going on biologically in the colony.”

Speaking of biological goings-on within the colony, there’s plenty of ways the bees themselves influence the chemistry of their honey. Bee digestion breaks down the sucrose within nectar into glucose and fructose, which are an excellent food source for microbes like yeast that could foul up the honey stores. These microbes are indeed held at bay by the low water content of honey, but only partially. Bees must add an enzyme to the honey to help fight microbes further: glucose oxidase. This enzyme facilitates the oxidation of glucose to produce hydrogen peroxide — a compound with strong antimicrobial properties.

All told, honey bees use a combination of biochemistry and behavior to turn nectar into honey. But why do they do it? It turns out, honey bees like honey for the same reason we do: It’s a long-lasting food source packed with sugars. Large amounts of honey are needed to help honey bee colonies survive the winter, when there are no flowers for them to visit for food and it’s too cold for them to fly.

Some beekeepers attempt to take over honey production steps usually performed by the bees, occasionally out of necessity. For example, if the weather is too humid, the bees may struggle to lower the water content of their honey sufficiently and a beekeeper may decide to remove it to try evaporating the remaining water themself. However, some consider the resulting product inadequate. “I don’t like it as much,” Bartlett says. “I don’t think it’s got the same flavor.”

With climate change set to alter global temperatures and humidity levels, it will only become more difficult for honey bees and their keepers to make the honey that they both love. But, given how far beekeeping has come since the days of those 8,000-year-old Spanish cave paintings, there’s every reason to believe human ingenuity and climate action will produce a solution as sweet as honey.

Vaccine ingredients

What is completely lacking is an authoratative explanation of just why these items are aboard.  I do not get upset when i find such items in a Vaccine because I expect to see the science behind each inclusion to be trotted out in support of their inclusion.  Yet we have had crikets for years.

Are those paranoid questions vaslid?  Better yet, most of us survive a dose yet this stuff is cumulative,  Doubling down is contra intuitive for all potentially toxic adjuvants.  Yet we are out there doing exactly that every flu season

An elementary review of all our COV 19 Stats describe a massive data switch loaded with false test results as well.  A year later the bad data is switched back out because even crooks need correct numbers.  

Vaccine ingredients 

by Iris Figueroa: 

https://t.me/worlddoctorsalliance/1719 https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/appendices/b/excipient-table-2.pdf

You can view all of the below ingredients on the CDCs website. I encourage everyone to do their own research. Look up the MSDS on these chemicals. Read the thousands of peer reviewed studies that have evaluated the biological consequences these chemicals can have on the body, especially when being injected.

“I gathered all vaccine ingredients into a list and contacted Poison Control. After intros and such, and asking to speak with someone tenured and knowledgeable, this is the gist of that conversation.

Me: My question to you is how are these ingredients categorized? As benign or poison? (I ran a few ingredients, formaldehyde, Tween 80, mercury, aluminum, phenoxyethanol, potassium phosphate, sodium phosphate, sorbitol, etc.)

He: Well, that’s quite a list… But I’d have to easily say that they’re all toxic to humans… Used in fertilizers… Pesticides… To stop the heart… To preserve a dead body… They’re registered with us in different categories, but pretty much poisons. Why?

Me: If I were deliberately to feed or inject my child with these ingredients often, as a schedule, obviously I’d put my daughter in harm’s way… But what would legally happen to me?

He: Odd question… But you’d likely be charged with criminal negligence… perhaps with intent to kill… and of course child abuse… Your child would be taken away from you… Do you know of someone’s who’s doing this to their child? This is criminal…

Me: An industry… These are the ingredients used in vaccines… With binding agents to make sure the body won’t flush these out… To keep the antibody levels up indefinitely…

He: WHAT?! The man was beside himself. He asked if I would email him all this information. He wanted to share it with his adult kids who are parents. He was horrified and felt awful he didn’t know… his kids are vaccinated and they have health issues…”

INGREDIENTS TO VACCINES – You CANNOT make an educated decision without being educated. Here are just SOME vaccine ingredients. These are being INJECTED into your kids:

Formaldehyde/Formalin – Highly toxic systematic poison and carcinogen.

Betapropiolactone – Toxic chemical and carcinogen. May cause death/permanant injury after very short exposure to small quantities. Corrosive chemical.

Hexadecyltrimethylammonium bromide – May cause damage to the liver, cardiovascular system, and central nervous system. May cause reproductive effects and birth defects.

Aluminum hydroxide, aluminum phosphate, and aluminum salts – Neurotoxin. Carries risk for long term brain inflammation/swelling, neurological disorders, autoimmune disease, Alzheimer’s, dementia, and autism. It penetrates the brain where it persists indefinitely.

Thimerosal (mercury) – Neurotoxin. Induces cellular damage, reduces oxidation-reduction activity, cellular degeneration, and cell death. Linked to neurological disorders, Alzheimer’s, dementia, and autism.

Polysorbate 80 & 20 – Trespasses the Blood-Brain Barrier and carries with it aluminum, thimerosal, and viruses; allowing it to enter the brain.

Glutaraldehyde – Toxic chemical used as a disinfectant for heat sensitive medical equipment.

Fetal Bovine Serum – Harvested from bovine (cow) fetuses taken from pregnant cows before slaughter.

Human Diploid Fibroblast Cells – aborted fetal cells. Foreign DNA has the ability to interact with our own.

African Green Monkey Kidney Cells – Can carry the SV-40 cancer-causing virus that has already tainted about 30 million Americans.

Acetone – Can cause kidney, liver, and nerve damage.

E.Coli – Yes, you read that right.

DNA from porcine (pig) Circovirus type-1

Human embryonic lung cell cultures (from aborted fetuses)

Exclusive: Samples From Early Wuhan COVID Patients Had Genetically Modified Henipah, One of Two Types of Viruses Sent From Canadian Lab

We picked up this trail early on.  Now we have an identified agent showing up in Wuhan victims.  The COV 19 event is now a deliberate or non deliberate release of Lab specimens into the local community.  No other explanation is admissible.

It also coincided publically with the unwilling siugning of an USA China trade agreement.  I really do think thgat the CCP chose to take the gloves of in their ongoing stealth War with the USA abnd the world.

They really are batshit crazy.  Do not think for a second that this has not been counter ten fold.

Exclusive: Samples From Early Wuhan COVID Patients Had Genetically Modified Henipah, One of Two Types of Viruses Sent From Canadian Lab

By Omid Ghoreishi

August 25, 2021 Updated: August 25, 2021

Samples from early Wuhan COVID-19 patients show the presence of genetically modified Henipah virus, an American scientist has found.

Henipah was one of the two types of viruses sent to China by Chinese-born scientists from a Canadian laboratory at the centre of a controversy over the firing of the scientists and collaboration with Chinese military researchers. It is not clear whether the virus found in the Chinese samples is related to the virus samples sent by the Canadian lab, which were shipped in late March 2019.

The finding was confirmed for The Epoch Times by another qualified scientist.

The evidence was first found by Dr. Steven Quay, a Seattle-based physician-scientist and former faculty member at the Stanford University School of Medicine, who looked at early COVID-19 samples uploaded by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) shortly after China informed the World Health Organization about the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.

Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli is seen inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 23, 2017. (Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images)

The samples from the patients, who reportedly were found to have an “unidentified pneumonia disease” in December 2019, were uploaded to the genetic sequence database, GenBank, on the website of the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH).

Quay says that while other scientists around the world were mostly interested in examining the genome of SARS-CoV-2 in the samples uploaded by the WIV scientists, he wanted to see what else was in the samples collected from the patients.

So he collaborated with a few other scientists to analyze sequences from the samples.

“We started fishing inside for weird things,” Quay told The Epoch Times.

What they found, he says, are the results of what could likely be contamination from different experiments in the lab making their way into the samples, as well as evidence of Henipah virus.

“We found genetic manipulation of the Nipah virus, which is more lethal than Ebola.” Nipah is a type of Henipah virus.

The Epoch Times asked Joe Wang, PhD, who formerly spearheaded a vaccine development program for SARS in Canada with one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, to verify the finding. Wang is currently the president of NTD Television Canada, the sister company of The Epoch Times in Canada.

After examining the evidence, Wang said he was able to replicate Quay’s findings on the Henipah virus. He explains that the genetic manipulation of the virus was likely for the purposes of vaccine development.

Documents released by the Canadian government state that the WIV’s intended use of the virus samples sent by Canada was “stock virus culturing,” which in simpler terms means storing the viruses while keeping them alive. Genetic manipulation would not be within the scope of this description.

Winnipeg Lab

The firing of Chinese-born scientist Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, from the National Microbiology laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg has been the subject of much controversy in Canada, with opposition parties pressing the government for more details on the case, and the government refusing to release information citing national security and privacy concerns.

Qiu and Cheng along with several Chinese students were escorted out of the NML, Canada’s only lab designated at containment level 4—or P4, the highest level of biosafety—amid a police investigation in July 2019. The two scientists were formally fired in January 2021.

The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), which is in charge of the NML, said the termination was the result of an “administrative matter” and “possible breaches of security protocols,” but has declined to provide further details, citing security and privacy concerns.

House Speaker Anthony Rota admonishes Public Health Agency of Canada President Iain Stewart in the House of Commons on June 21, 2021, for failing to provide documents related to the firing of two scientists from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)

During her time at the NML, Qiu travelled several times to the WIV in an official capacity, helping train personnel on level 4 safety. The Globe and Mail later reported that scientists at the NML have been collaborating with Chinese military researchers on deadly pathogens, and that one of the Chinese military researchers worked at the high-security Winnipeg lab for a period of time.

Documents and emails released by PHAC show that the shipment of Henipah and Ebola samples was done with the permission of NML authorities.

In one of the emails sent in September 2018, David Safronetz, chief of special pathogens at PHAC, informs then-head of NML Matthew Gilmour and other lab administrators about the request from the WIV for the shipment of the samples, saying “I trust the lab.”

In response, Gilmour asks about the nature of the work that will be done at the Wuhan lab, and why the lab doesn’t get the material from “other, more local labs.” He also tells Safronetz that it’s “good to know that you trust this group,” asking how the NML was connected with the group.

In his reply, Safronetz doesn’t specifically say what the samples will be used for in China, but notes that they will only be sent once all paperwork and certification are completed. He also says the WIV is requesting the material from NML “due to collaboration” with Qiu.

He adds, “Historically, it’s also been easier to obtain material from us as opposed to US labs. I don’t think other, closer labs have the ability to ship these materials.”

Gilmour resigned from his position at the NML in May 2020 and joined a UK-based bioresearch company.

MPs have asked NML management why shipment of the samples was allowed and whether they knew if China performs any gain-of-function (GoF) research at the WIV. GoF research involves increasing either the lethal level (virulence) or the transmissibility of pathogens or both.

The NML’s acting scientific director general Guillaume Poliquin told MPs during a parliamentary committee meeting on March 22 that the lab only sent the samples to the WIV after receiving assurance that no GoF research would take place.

Conservative MP John Williamson pressed for more answers, saying the word of the state-run Chinese lab can’t be trusted as the Chinese regime “has a history of theft and lies.”

The issue of GoF research at WIV has been a point of contention in the United States between lawmakers and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the NIH’s head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci’s organization has funded research (through EcoHealth Alliance) on coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab. U.S. Sen. Rand Paul says published work from WIV on coronaviruses shows the lab is conducting GoF research, a charge that Fauci denies

.

The P4 laboratory on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, on May 13, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

The Epoch Times sought comment from PHAC, including a response as to how the agency addressed issues of intellectual property and collaboration of the development of any products such as vaccines with WIV, but didn’t hear back by time of publication.

Despite repeated requests by the opposition parties for more details related to the firing of the two NML scientists, the Liberal government has refused to provide records, saying there are national security and privacy concerns.

After the House of Commons issued an order requiring the government to disclose the information, the government took the Speaker of the House to court to obtain confirmation from a judge that it can withhold the documents. The government later dropped its court case once Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called an election and Parliament was dissolved.

Mysteries of the Magi

With all due respect, it is convenient to think of the magi and their equivalent world wide as the PHDs of their day.  Mostly because, even with our proliferation of pseudo PHDs they remain thin on the ground.

We are describing preternaturally gifted individuals, usually identified young and then progressing from master to master in order to scale intellectual heights.  Think Jesus.

There are always a handful out there often isolated from each other.  Otherwise they typically journied to the local of other known masters.  Thus we hear traditions that inform us that jesus went to egypt, to Gasconbury, and to Kasmir.   That he taught in Northern India.  All this is the path of a Magi.

In the case of the Jesus story the gifts were all appropriate to Palistine and could easily have been acquired enroute.

what i am saying is that Magi were few and they constantly traveled to locate fellow master of knowledge.  They are always one in thousands and certainly no national priestly class.

Mysteries of the Magi

“When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem” (Matt. 2:1).

“Wise men” is a common translation in English Bibles, but it doesn’t give us a good idea who they were.

The Greek word used here is magoi—the plural of magos. These terms may be more familiar from their Latin equivalents: In St. Jerome’s Vulgate, we read that magi came from the east, and an individual member of the group would thus be a magus.

https://jimmyakin.com/2019/11/mysteries-of-the-magi.html

Who Were the Magi?

Originally, the term magi referred to a group of people in Persia (modern Iran). Around 440 B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus listed the Magi as one of the six tribes of the Medes (Histories 1:101:1).

Apparently, they were like the Jewish tribe of Levi, for they exercised priestly functions. Herodotus says that, whenever a Persian wanted to sacrifice an animal to the gods, he would cut it up and then “a magus comes near and chants over it the song of the birth of the gods, as the Persian tradition relates it; for no sacrifice can be offered without a magus” (Histories 1:132:3).

In the book of Daniel, magi are also called upon to interpret dreams (1:20; 2:2, 10, 27).

Magi were also called upon to interpret heavenly omens. Consider the case of the Persian king Xerxes I (also known as Ahasuerus, who married the biblical Esther). In 480 B.C., he asked the magi to tell him the meaning of a solar eclipse that occurred as he was about to do battle with Greeks.

They said that the sun was special to Greeks, so when it abandoned its place in the daytime, the god was showing the Greeks that they would have to abandon their cities. This greatly encouraged Xerxes (Histories 7:37:4).

However, things didn’t work out well. His expedition against Greece ended up failing, but this does show the original magi were interpreters of portents in the sky—as later magi would be for the star of Bethlehem.

With time, the term magi ceased to refer exclusively to members of the Persian priestly caste. The skills they practiced became known as mageia, from which we get “magic” in English, and by the first century, anybody who practiced magic could be called a magos.

Thus in Acts 8, we meet a man named Simon, who was a Samaritan—meaning he had mixed Jewish ancestry. Simon practiced mageia (8:9, 11), and so he became known as Simon Magus.

Full Jews also could be magi, and in Acts 13 we meet a Jewish man named Bar-Jesus, who is described both as a magus and a false prophet (13:6).

This means that, in Jesus’ day, the term magus was flexible, so we need to ask another question.

Who Were These Magi?

Matthew’s magi were clearly dignitaries of some kind, as shown by the facts that they (1) saw themselves as worthy to congratulate a distant royal house on a new birth, (2) had the resources and leisure to undertake such a lengthy journey, (3) could offer costly gifts, and (4) received a royal audience with King Herod the Great.

Matthew says that they came “from the East,” which from the perspective of Jerusalem would point to locations like Arabia, Babylonia, and Persia.

There were Jews in all of these regions. Consequently, some interpreters have proposed that the magi who visited Jesus were Jews, who would naturally be interested in the newborn king of the Jews.

However, most scholars have concluded this is unlikely. If they were visiting Jewish dignitaries, Matthew would have identified them as co-religionists. The fact he merely describes them as being “from the East,” suggests that they were Gentiles who came from a distant, eastern land.

Matthew also says that they went back “to their own country” (2:12), suggesting they were among its native inhabitants rather than Jews living in exile.

In fact, there is a pattern in Matthew’s Gospel of Gentiles who respond to the true God. Matthew uses it to show his Jewish readers that Gentiles can be Christians. The pattern culminates in the Great Commission, when Jesus tells the apostles to “make disciples of all nations” (alternate translation: “make disciples of all the Gentiles”; 28:19).

The magi are part of this pattern: They are Gentile dignitaries who represent an early response to God’s Messiah, in contrast to the Jewish king, Herod, who seeks to kill him. This prefigures how the Jewish authorities will later kill Jesus, but Gentiles will embrace his gospel.

Scholars have thus concluded that Matthew’s magi were Gentile astrologers from an eastern land, though we can’t be sure which one (see Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, 168-170).

The earliest discussion we have is found in St. Justin Martyr, who around A.D. 160 said that they came from Arabia (Dialogue with Trypho 78:1), and around A.D. 210 Tertullian deduced that this is where they came from based on the gifts they offered (Against Marcion 3:13). In the ancient world, gold and frankincense were associated with Arabia, though this isn’t conclusive since they were widely traded in the region.

Many scholars have seen Babylon as a possibility, and the Jewish readers of Matthew would have been familiar with the book of Daniel, which associates magi with Babylonia. It’s also been argued that the major Jewish colony there could have given the magi a special interest in the Jewish Messiah, though this was also a common expectation of Jews in other lands.

Most Church Fathers concluded that the magi were from Persia. Just after A.D. 200, Clement of Alexandria identified them as coming from there (Stromata 1:15), and they were commonly depicted in early Christian art wearing Persian clothing. They thus may have been members of the original class of magi.

How Did They Know?

In popular accounts, the magi are depicted as following the star, which led them to Bethlehem. That has led many to see the star as a supernatural manifestation that moved around in the sky in a way stars don’t.

However, this isn’t what Matthew says. He never claims they were following the star, only that it was ahead of them as they went to Bethlehem and that it stood over the house (2:9). This was a providential coincidence.

They weren’t being led by the star for, as Benedict XVI points out, they initially went to Herod’s palace in Jerusalem—the natural place to find a newborn prince (Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, ch. 4). They assumed that Herod the Great or one of his sons had just had a baby boy who would grow up to be king.

When they learned there was no new prince at the palace, a consultation had to be held with the chief priests and scribes to learn where the magi really needed to go: Bethlehem (2:4).

The fact that the chief priests and scribes looked to a well-known prophecy of the birth of the Messiah (Micah 5:2; cf. Matt. 2:6) suggests the magi could have seen the appearance of the star as signaling not just the birth of an ordinary king but of a particularly great one—the predicted Messiah.

While magi weren’t following the star, it did tell them when he was born, for they said, “We have seen his star in the East” (2:2).

Recently, scholars have argued that this is a mistranslation and that the Greek phrase rendered “in the East” (en tê anatolê) should instead be “at its rising”—that is, when it rose over the eastern horizon as the Earth turns. Some have argued that this is a technical term for what is known as a star’s “heliacal” rising, which occurs when it briefly rises above the horizon just before sunrise.

The real question is what told them the star was significant and why they linked it to a king of the Jews. Here we can only speculate.

The system of constellations in use at the time, which includes our own zodiac, was developed in northern Mesopotamia around 1130 B.C, and it was used by Babylonian and Persian astrologers.

It’s not surprising that they would associate a particular star with the birth of a king, because at this time astrology was used to forecast national affairs. Horoscopes weren’t normally done for ordinary people.

Heavenly signs were interpreted as having to do with things of national importance, like relations between nations, wars and rebellions, whether the crops would be good or bad, epidemics, and kings.

It’s thus not a surprise that the magi would be looking for signs dealing with the births of kings.

What the star they saw might have been is difficult to determine, but one possibility is Jupiter. At this time Jupiter and the other planets were considered “wandering” stars since they moved against the background of “fixed” stars.

Unlike some later Greeks, Mesopotamian astrologers didn’t see the stars as controlling events on Earth. Instead, they thought the gods made their wills known through celestial phenomena—so it was a form of divine revelation.

Jupiter was associated with Marduk, the king of the Babylonian pantheon, and it was often involved in signs associated with kings.

For example, one Babylonian text says that if Jupiter remains in the sky in the morning, enemy kings will be reconciled with each other.

An Assyrian text indicates that if a lunar eclipse takes place and Jupiter is not in the sky then the king will die. To protect the king, the Assyrians came up with an ingenious solution: They took a condemned criminal and made him a temporary, substitute “king” who could then be executed to save the life of the real king!

Whether Jupiter was the star the magi saw will depend on when Jesus was born, and that’s something scholars debate.

When Was Jesus Born?

According to the most common account you hear today, Herod the Great died in 4 B.C., so Jesus would have to have been born before this.

In Matthew 2:7, Herod secretly learns from the magi when the star appeared, and in 2:16, he kills “all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men.”

This indicates the star was understood as appearing at Jesus’ birth, which is to be expected since such portents were associated with births (as opposed to conceptions).

It also indicates Jesus was born up to two years before the magi arrived, though it may not have been a full two years, since Herod may have added a “safety” margin to his execution order.

Many scholars have thus proposed that Jesus was born around 7-6 B.C., and this is the date you commonly hear.

However, other scholars have argued that this calculation is wrong. A better case can be made that Herod died in 1 B.C. (see Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology, 2nd ed., and Andrew Steinmann, From Abraham to Paul).

This likely would put Jesus’ birth in 3/2 B.C., which is the year identified by the Church Fathers as the correct one.

It also fits with Luke’s statement that Jesus was “about thirty years old” when he began his ministry (3:23), shortly after John the Baptist began his in “the fifteenth year of the reign Tiberius Caesar” (3:1)—i.e., A.D. 29. Subtracting 30 from A.D. 29, we land in the year 2 B.C. (bearing in mind that there is no “Year 0” between 1 B.C. and A.D. 1).

What Was in the Sky?

Regardless of which view of Jesus’ birth is correct, it occurred in the first decade B.C. So what notable astronomical events took place then that could have served as the star of Bethlehem?

A large number have been proposed. The following list contains only some:

7 B.C.

1: Jupiter and Saturn in conjunction

6 B.C.

April 17: Jupiter has its heliacal rising in Ares (a constellation associated with Judaea), with several other significant features in the sky

May 27: Jupiter and Saturn in conjunction

6: Jupiter and Saturn in conjunction

5 B.C.

March: A comet in Capricorn

4 B.C.

April: A comet or nova (which one is unclear) in Aquilea

3 B.C.

August 12: Jupiter and Venus rise in the east, in conjunction with each other, in Leo, near Regulus

11: The sun in mid-Virgo, with the moon at the feet of Virgo

14: Jupiter in conjunction with Regulus

2 B.C.

17: Jupiter in conjunction with Regulus

May 8: Jupiter in conjunction with Regulus

June 17: Jupiter in conjunction with Venus

One of the most interesting of these events is the rising of Jupiter and Venus on August 12, 3 B.C. Since Babylonian times, Jupiter was seen as a heavenly king, and Venus was seen as a heavenly queen, suggesting a birth. Further, the Babylonians named Regulus (the brightest star in Leo) “the king,” and the lion was a traditional symbol of the tribe of Judah (cf. Gen. 49:9).

Also very interesting is what happened on September 11th, 3 B.C. In Revelation, John says, “A great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (12:1). This woman then gives birth to Jesus (12:5). Some have proposed that this encodes information about when he was born: When the sun was in the middle of Virgo (“the virgin”) and thus “clothing” it, with the moon at her feet.

Unfortunately, we can’t say which—if any—of these events corresponds to the star of Bethlehem without knowing precisely when Jesus was born. That’s something the Bible never tells us, and the Church Fathers had different opinions, with only some proposing December 25th.

What Was the Role of Jewish Thought?

Thus far we’ve looked at how the magi would have interpreted celestial events largely in terms of establish, Mesopotamian astrology.

This association with paganism gives rise to questions, such as, “Would God really use pagan astrology to signal the birth of his Son?”

That’s a matter for God to decide. Scripture indicates God cares for all people and makes himself known to them in various ways (cf. Rom. 1:19-20). It wouldn’t be so much God using pagan astrology to mark the birth of his Son as choosing to preserve certain true ideas among Gentiles to point to this event.

Also, if the magi were Persians, they wouldn’t have been polytheists. By this period, the Persians did not believe in the old gods, and their dominant religion was Zoroastrianism.

This faith teaches the existence of a single, great, all-good Creator God who they refer to as “the Wise Lord” and who will vanquish evil in the end. They believe in the renovation of the world, the final judgment, and the resurrection of the dead.

If the magi were Persians, they could have seen themselves as spiritual kin to the Jews and as worshipping the same God—the only true God—using their own term for him.

Finally, they may well have had contact with Jews living in their own land, and thus come into contact with biblical revelation that could have influenced their perception of the star.

They could have learned, for example, of the lion as a symbol of Judah, and they could have associated the coming Jewish Messiah with a star.

One of the most famous messianic prophecies is “a star shall come forth out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel” (Num. 24:17).

This prophecy was already associated with the Messiah, which is why in the A.D. 130s the messianic pretender Simon bar Kosiba was hailed as “Simon bar Kokhba” (Aramaic, “Simon, son of the Star”).

What About Astrology?

What about the role of astrology itself in this account? While astrology was popular among Gentiles, it wasn’t as popular among Jews, who often looked down on it.

This is itself a sign that Matthew’s tradition about the magi is historically accurate. It’s not the kind of thing that Jewish Christians would tend to make up.

However, while astrology wasn’t as popular among Jews as among Gentiles, it did exist.

Genesis says that God made the sun, moon, and stars “to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years” (1:14). This could mean that they are simply to be time keeping markers.

But some Jews thought that their function as “signs” went beyond this and included information about future events. Thus, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain astrological texts.

In the ancient world, there was no rigid distinction between astronomy and astrology. It’s only in the last few centuries that the two have been disentangled. This happened as scientists learned more about the effects the sun, moon, and stars do and don’t have on life here on Earth.

Even Thomas Aquinas, based on the science of his day, thought that the heavenly bodies had an influence on the passions and could, for example, make a man prone to anger—but not in such a way that it would overwhelm his free will (Commentary on Matthew 2:1-2, ST I:115:4, II-II:95:5).

Subsequent scientific research showed they don’t have this kind of effect, and consulting the stars for these purposes is superstition. Thus the Catechism today warns against consulting horoscopes (CCC 2116).

While the stars don’t have the kind of influence many once thought, that doesn’t mean God can’t use them to signal major events in his plan of the ages. The fact he signaled the birth of his Son with a star shows he can. This isn’t what people think of as astrology, but it’s part of divine providence.

In fact, this doesn’t appear to be the only time God did something like that. On the day of Pentecost, Peter cited the prophet Joel’s prediction that the moon would be turned to blood as fulfilled in their own day (Joel 2:31-32; Acts 2:20-21).

It so happens, on the night of the Crucifixion (April 3, A.D. 33), there was a lunar eclipse visible from Jerusalem. The moon did turn to blood.

Retreating East Greenland Glaciers Uncover Plantis Dating To The 16th – 17th Centuries

This is pretty much conforming to the having the Little Ice Age glacier growth retreating back to where it started.

This is pretty reasonable in light of how much gross sea ice we have lost without really noticing.

The final collapse of the excess sea Ice back to Pre Little Ice Age levels should establish a much better Northern biome.

Retreating East Greenland Glaciers Uncover Plantis Dating To The 16th – 17th Centuries

By Kenneth Richard on 19. August 2021

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Exposed moss and willow shrubs buried beneath today’s receding East Greenland glaciers can be dated to 400 to 500 years ago, suggesting this period (the early Little Ice Age) was as-warm or warmer than today.

It is widely accepted that Greenland’s surface temperatures were several degrees warmer (McFarlin et al., 2018, Axford et al., 2021) and ice volume and extent much smaller (Nielsen et al., 2018, Weiser et al., 2021), throughout nearly all of the last 8,000 to 10,000 years.

Image Source: Weiser et al., 2021

What may not yet be widely accepted is the conclusion that the modern temperatures and ice extent still fall within the range of a Holocene “cold stage” rather than a warm stage.

A new study documents a much warmer-than-today Early and Middle Holocene in East Greenland, a time when ice caps were “absent” or far less extensive than they are presently. Plant remains buried under retreating glaciers in East Greenland affirm these locations were not covered in glaciers as recently as 400 to 500 years ago.

But the authors also report there were occasionally brief “cold stages” during the Holocene when Greenland’s glacier extent advanced to today’s levels.

“…Renland Ice Cap briefly reach[ed] extents during cold phases that may have been similar to today.”

This suggests that the modern temperatures and ice volumes fall within the range of a “cold stage” too.

Image Source: Medford et al., 2021

Health authorities are pushing booster shot extermination plans

As we have noted the DEEP STATE comprising now of the CCP and CCP money used to compromise all sources of influence within every government on the globe...  The CCP has empowered the original banking cabal to do its bidding.

They were put under pressure so much has been accelerated including the stealth pandemic without  having a true Clinton white house to run interferance.

All through this the silence has  been deepening.  The enemy is now mostly making cameo appearences.  The rolodex is becoming a ghost town.

Health authorities are pushing booster shot extermination plans to hurry and kill the masses before they fully awaken to the covid scam

Friday, August 20, 2021 by: Mike Adams

Tags: awakening, badhealth, badmedicine, booster shots, COVID, depopulation, genocide, immunity, pandemic, spike protein, vaccine wars, vaccines

(Natural News) For anyone paying attention, it’s abundantly obvious now that the entire covid “plandemic” scam is a global depopulation scheme to scare people into taking spike protein bioweapons shots (“vaccines”) that will kill them over time. What the globalists didn’t anticipate, however, is the rapid awakening to the truth that’s now spreading like wildfire across the landscape of medicine and science. With more doctors, PhDs, nurses and health care workers waking up and blowing the whistle every day, the globalists are in a panic to hurry up and kill the masses before the “normies” catch on to the vaccine depopulation scam.

Hence the mad rush into a so-called “booster” shot which of course contains yet more spike protein bioweapons to accelerate mass death across the planet.

The globalists are so desperate to scare people into taking booster shots that they’re now openly admitting the existing covid vaccines are failing and simply don’t provide lasting protection at all.

In a truly astonishing admission of all this, the New York Times ran an article yesterday entitled, “Israel, Once the Model for Beating Covid, Faces New Surge of Infections.”

The article openly admits that covid vaccines given to 2.5 billion people around the world no longer work very well, and that the people who took those vaccines are now the ones getting sick and dying. 

From the story:

One of the most vaccinated societies, Israel now has one of the highest infection rates in the world, raising questions about the vaccine’s efficacy.

A fourth wave of infections is rapidly approaching the levels of Israel’s worst days of the pandemic last winter. The daily rate of confirmed new virus cases has more than doubled in the last two weeks, making Israel a rising hot spot on the international charts.

The vast majority of Israel’s older population had received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine by the end of February, and by now about 78 percent of the population 12 and older are fully vaccinated.

But some experts fear that Israel’s high rate of infections among early vaccine recipients may indicate a waning of the vaccine’s protections over time, a finding that contributed to a U.S. decision Wednesday to begin offering booster shots to Americans starting next month.

And among the fully inoculated, Israeli scientists have found growing evidence of waning immunity, particularly among the older population who were vaccinated first.

Data published by Israel’s Ministry of Health in late July suggested that the Pfizer shot was just 39 percent effective against preventing infection in the country in late June and early July, compared with 95 percent from January to early April… this scourge primarily took hold in well-vaccinated, middle-class suburbs.

Even the CDC director has now abandoned the original promise of covid vaccines

Remember the original narrative about how vaccines would provide absolute, permanent immunity and protection against covid? That narrative has now collapsed. Even the NYT is no longer claiming the vaccine provides lasting immunity of any kind.

But it gets worse: The CDC’s director, Dr. Walenksy, is now openly admitting that vaccines increase the risk of sickness. They not only don’t work, they actually make sickness worse. Here’s nine seconds of Walenksy admitting this:

This means that as the initial wave of vaccines inflicts accelerated sickness and death among the 2.5 billion world citizens who have already been jabbed, we’re going to see a wave of hospitalization and fatalities among the vaccinated. (The world’s hospitals will be overwhelmed.)

Dubbed “breakthrough” cases by the fraudulent mainstream media, these are really the result of vaccine “kill shots” that are designed to reduce the human population.

But people are waking up to the scam, so they’re hurrying their push for booster shots to kill off the masses before they revolt

Because of all the deaths, injuries and outright fraud committed via PCR-diagnosed “cases,” the people of the world are rapidly awakening to the astonishing truth of all this: It’s a scam to achieve global depopulation and authoritarian control over humanity.

As the lockdowns intensify, the people are taking to the streets and demanding an end to the scam. With hundreds of thousands now protesting in France, the establishment there is locking unvaccinated people out of grocery stores, seeking to literally starve out the unvaccinated. This will only serve to wake up the people even faster, adding to the levels of discontent that are now exploding across the planet.

We have arrived at a tipping point. Humanity is awakening at an accelerating rate, so now the globalists are trying to exterminate people as rapidly as possible to stop the spread of truth. Get full details in today’s Situation Update podcast, which also covers “no-tech” preparedness using bows and blades, along with news about the government-initiated nursing shortage that’s already worsening.