Thursday, August 6, 2020

Yes, lizard people are Mayincatec

TV Tropes is one of those sites where it's very hard to keep from just clicking and clicking and ending up very, very far from whichever page you started with. Thus it happened that the other night I found myself perusing the article on Lizard Folk, with no very clear memory of the trail of links that had led me there. (Do not click that link unless you have a few hours to kill!) The article was illustrated with the following picture and caption.


Naturally, I had to click on Mayincatec, too (don't do this!); the word is a portmanteau of Maya, Inca, and Aztec and refers to the lumping together of the various ancient civilizations of Mexico and Central and South America. The caption is apparently referring to the serrated weapon one of the lizard blokes is holding, which looks a bit like an Aztec macuahuitl -- though the latter weapon was lined with rectangular obsidian blades rather than spikes.


The next day I was reading Whitley Strieber's 2007 novel 2012: The War for Souls (bizarre, disjointed, and not particularly recommended; reading this stuff is just one of those things I have to do), which features evil shapeshifting reptilian aliens à la David Icke. The character Wylie Dale (a badassified version of Strieber himself) visits the parallel universe where these lizard folk come from and observes some of them walking down the street:

One had a New Sex Pistols T-shirt obviously from home, another a shirt with a big green fruit on it in the shape of a bitten apple, and in the bite an image of a squeezed human face. This one carried a brutal weapon, an Aztec sword made of steel with obsidian blades jutting out of it. The squeezed face was instantly familiar. It was Adolf Hitler.

They watched him with their brilliant, dead eyes, their heads moving with the clipped jerks of lizards. As he walked, he saw that the street was made of wood -- in fact, of cut tree trunks fitted together with an Inca's skill.

("New Sex Pistols"! And an evil reptilian alien with one of their T-shirts! This is the sort of inspired lunacy that keeps me coming back to Strieber.)

So here's another lizard man with a macuahuitl. (Fitting obsidian blades to a steel sword seems odd, but in fact, according to this site, an obsidian blade can be made 500 times as sharp as a steel one.) The Mayincatec concept -- the smooshing together of various ancient American cultures -- is also present, with both "an Aztec sword" and streets made "with an Inca's skill." The Maya are implicitly present as well, since the whole idea of a 2012 apocalypse comes from the Maya calendar.

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