20 January 2021

Aztecs galore

Much talk in the public presses here about Mr Biden's ancestry! God bless him on this auspicious day!

Apparently, he has a narrative that he is descended from a Captain George Biden of the Honble East India Company who went to India (surprise surprise) and married (how very politically correct) an Indian woman. The problem is that the achives of the Company know nothing of any such person, There was a Captain Christopher Biden, but he had an English wife. Of course, he may have been into bigamy, but would that not turn him into a colonial predator and imperialist exploiter of defenceless indigenous womanhood? Wrong message.

The passion of North American presidents for genealogy reminds me of our own Tudor period ... once described by Dom Gregory Dix as the closest England ever came to the rule of the Gestapo. Tudor England was awash with New Men; and many of them were not averse to coming to an arrangement with members of the College of Heralds to ... er ... demonstrate their descent from great but by then extinct medieval families. Take the Spencers ... most famous modern member: the widely-loved Diana. As they gradually ascended the social and financial ladder, the Tudor Spencers were granted a first Coat of Arms ... which made no explicit or implicit assertion of nobility. But when they had ascended even further, they persuaded Clarenceux King of Arms to 'demonstrate' their descent from the mighty medieval Despencer family ... and to grant them a a new Coat implying their 'rediscovered' identity as a cadet branch of that familiy.

Genealogists and antiquaries, I fear, were in Tudor (and Stuart) days no less corruptible than ordinary, common men. Next time you find yourself at a party where a member of the College of Heralds is also present, try creeping up behind him and gently murmuring "Garter Dethick". You will find it makes him go all limp and twitchy. And one Tudor antiquary (Leland) went round Cornwall hoovering up nice books from suppressed monastic houses, and gathering local historical information. Medieval Catholic Cornish legend had had a fair bit to say about an immensely tyrannous and odious King Tudor. Happily, Leland's more profound and balanced researches showed Tudor to have been a pious and benevolent monarch. Even in murderous Tudor England, Leland, unlike others, lived long enough to go mad.

The genealogical ambitions of American presidents lack, in my view, any real imagination. Why doesn't this nice old gentleman employ someone to establish his descent from the Emperor Montezuma? This would give him an enviable First Nation family history ... and it would enable him to explain that his attitude towards the killing of babies is a cultural reflection of the simple, uncontaminated, indigenous  North America which existed before the colonising Spaniards and their pro-life clergy spoiled all the fun.

I believe Montezuma once sacrificed some 80,000 human beings in one single day. I know this falls short of today's Abortion statistics (in Britain as well as in America), but it indicates a striking combination of logistical skills and ideological determination which even the purposive Kamala might envy.

Biden will not wish to fail the tests set before him by History.

What would be the Aztec for "Long Live the President"?

9 comments:

coradcorloquitur said...

The Aztec reference is simply brilliant. At times, it would seem, actions and mental dispositions are stronger, clearer antecedents than blood itself---if not genealogically valid. Pray for poor, demented America, now, more than ever, in the hands of the worst elements of our society. Kyrie Eleison.

William Tighe said...

Montezuma's direct descendants might well object to a parvenu's assertion of kinship:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Moctezuma_de_Tultengo

I suppose there must be descendants of the Inca Emperors as well, but they do not appear to have had the same good fortune as Montezuma's descendants.

Joshua said...

There is a handy online Nahuatl Dictionary (Nahuatl being the language of the Aztecs):

https://nahuatl.uoregon.edu/

And one can cross-check with Wiktionary:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Main_Page

Then consult the portion about verbs in the relevant Wikipedia article about classical Nahuatl grammar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Nahuatl_grammar#Verbs

President = tepachoani (technically, governor)
to live (verb) = yōli
xi- = imperative singular

Hence, "Live, President!" would be something like:

Xiyōli Tepachoani!

Pelerin said...

Amusingly our local paper has 'discovered' that Biden's ancestors came from Sussex!

Gregory said...

I watched the first Biden admin press briefing last night and the reporter from EWTN asked the new Biden press secretary about plans to reinstate abortion-favorable policies. Said secretary dodged the question and reminded the reporter that Mr. Biden is a faithful Catholic who regularly attends church with his family.

Tamquam Leo Rugiens said...

The Aztecs spoke the Nahuatl language. Perhaps there is a Nahuatl Studies chair in some Bitter Victim Studies Department?

Arthur Gallagher said...

Joseph Biden is always attempting to establish how very IRISH he is. Yet, such a claim is largely fictitious, and as best as I can figure, he could honestly claim to be about 1/16th Irish. Yet all of his relatives going back gererations have been distinctly upper middle class, and some of them have been wealthy businessmen and socialites.

He has paterned his life as an immitation of the Kennedy's, including acquiring a preposterously large Douai-Reheims Bible, to which someone has added hinges. The Kenedy's had a much more convincing copy, which I believe to have been authentic, so Joe has one too.

In actual fact, Biden is primarily of English and French heritage, and his family lived mainly in Maryland, where his grandfather owned an oil company, and was only in Scranton for a limited, before his father bought a commercial airport in New York.

Frankly, his family has been in America for so long, that the whole thing is pretty silly. As a friend put it to me, who the hell ever met an Irish Catholic with two sons named Beau and Hunter, and had the middle name of Robinette?

There is nothing wrong with having a family that traces their lineage to County Suffolk, so why doesn't Biden just be honest about it?

Scribe said...

Dear Father, That enormous Douay Rheims Bible looked suspiciously like a stage prop. A more “Bible sized” version from the Baronius Press is readily available in the U.K. and USA, and that would have done nicely.

Banshee said...

Biden hates being honest about stuff. He prefers to make things up, and it used to happen every time he opened his mouth. Now that he's got dementia, he actually sticks closer to the truth.