The Precious Eagle-Cactus Fruit - Explained and Discussed

[Dan de Broccoli]

The Precious Eagle-Cactus Fruit - Explained and Discussed

Hi,

This is a post where I discuss a very interesting clue and riddle in the game, so expect a few spoilers. I haven't played too much of the game yet, so I might miss important things that could contribute to this story. Anyhow, this is the beginning:

As you may have noticed, at the very beginning of the game you hear a strange phone caller telling you "Precious eagle cactus fruit...help us". When I played this part myself, I wasn't really thinking about the contents of such a statement, or if it really was a statement at all. I just thought of it as completely random tasty words, but coming back to it: why the hell would the developers of Amnesia create such a stupid and non-senseless sentence in the first telephone dialogue?

A friend of mine is recording a play-through of the game, and when I looked at it I noticed a note I had already seen, but I had completely ignored the hidden contents of it. The first part of the series he is making is here, but if you skip to around 3:20, you can see the letter. Most of it is just "useless" thoughts coming from the main character, but the two first very sentences where he describes his dream are vital clues. The first two say "In my dreams, I see a man, dressed in jaguar skins and feathered like a blooded saint. What came from the heart lubricated us, it crushed evil under its tread and liberated us all."

If you skip to around, 9:08, you will find that the man speaking in the telephone says "Precious eagle cactus fruit". This is related to the note that was discussed in the previous paragraph, and it is something that is very interesting.
I did some further research with these clues, and I found out that Precious Eagle Cactus Fruit is a part of an Aztec sacrificial rite. According to Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System [books.google.no] and 8 - Precious eagle-cactus fruit: Aztec human sacrifice pp. 169-195 [ebooks.cambridge.org] (same book, but a chapter extract), the rite is bloody. It tells that captives were made to arrive at the top of a pyramid, before the sancuary of the war god Uitzilopochtli. One by one, they put the captives on the sacrificial stone. From then on, they delivered them into the hands of six offering priests that stretched the captives upon their back and cut their breasts open with flint knives. The hearts of the captives were named "precious eagle-cactus fruit[/i]".
These were then raised in dedication to the sun and offered the innards to it. they cannibalized on the human remains. Once the heart had become the offering, the captives (now dead) were called eagle men. After the rite was done, the captor ate the organs of the captives.

During the first part of the game, coming back to the note, our character mentions a man in jaguar skin and being feathered in his dreams. This would indeed refer to an Aztec warrior, a warrior who is either dressed in a jaguar skin or is wearing an eagle mask (pig mask instead of eagle? You seem them lying around everywhere). This type of Aztec warrior was the most feared and respected, and they could only become such a warrior once they had fought bravely; and captured 4 captives (we are only introduced to 4 living characters in the house as far as I know, (his wife died during childbirth of Enoch or something along those lines (go to the main characters bedroom and analyze the monologue))). The warrior is pictured like this[en.wikipedia.org] on Wikipedia.

On a side note, a eagle-cactus fruit is a glyph used in Aztec on folio 65r LINK[books.google.no].

After researching this, I started wondering: what does this tell us about the story of the protagonist (the main character) and the possible antagonist (the man on the phone)? Does this mean that the character you are playing are being led onto a path that continues on to a sacrificial rite? Is the main character's children the captives in this sense? These are questions that I will ask myself until I dare to play further into the game.

I hope you found this interesting, and it would be amazing if you have something to contribute! :D

PRE-UPDATE:

I will update this once I continue and figure out things that are related to this :D

UPDATE 1:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=177955274
This is the stained glass at the back of church representing the Aztec warrior holding up the Precious Eagle-Cactus Fruit from one of his captives.

UPDATE 2:

I found a couple of interesting models in the start of the game:
Aztec Pyramid:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=178830716
Some map:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=178830700

[My name is Jonas ツ]

That's actually pretty cool. Thanks for posting this!

[Stu]

yep, keep going with it, im following this thread. once you are done with the game have a look at http://steamcommunity.com/app/239200/discussions/0/864978110256751612/
careful, MAJOR SPOILERS!

[Dan de Broccoli]

Alright, thanks. I will have a look at it once I finish the game!

[Ǵ̶͓̂͑lí̴̤̀̄́tcĥ̸]

There're a lot of references to a trip to Mexico by the protagonist, and I'm sure while there he learned the ritualistic means to perform the stuff he did, through various types of voodoos and such (like bringing a severed head to life and having it ask him where its body is).

This is the sort of thing that makes the game great, and why I consider people that hate the story and say ♥♥♥♥ like "it could be written by a 12 year old" are straight up simpletons to whom every reference and metaphor was so far over their heads that they just didn't understand the story.

Nowadays anything that possibly requires a little bit of pre-knowledge or studying to enjoy as thoroughly as intended is immediately scoffed at for being over-convoluted and presented badly. Sad that people are so lazy that they assume knowledge should just be handed to them while they do nothing to attain it.

Nice find OP.

[thomasnb2]

Just finished the game and DAMN there are a lot of references in the end of the game about this Aztec stuff.
There will be spoilers in the following text...

What I didn't realize until later was that when you're in the church in the beginning of the game, the big picture-window behind the alter is actually a jaguar, standing on a pig with a heart held high. This is of course a really close resemblance to what yourcrazyfriend talked about in the post!
When you "meet your kids" for the first time as well, in the big open room where you are pulling the two levers and you think you are destroying the machine, and suddenly have your kids in front of you, they pull out their own hearts. Again, this is just like what is mentioned where the hearts are offered to the God of war.
Closing up to the end, Mandus has a flashback moment where he says "I am the jaguar-faced man.I am the feathered serpent. This priest-hood is mine." All of this again can be connected with the Aztec ritual. I personally find this pretty mindblowing.
When you get to the room with the heart held up by the fork-spikes-thingies, it reminds me a lot of the heart being held up to the sun as an offering. There are 7 spikes going into the heart, and I would have thought it would have been 6 (as there were 6 priests), but for some reason this is not the case. I don't know if the one extra is supposed to symbolize something. Likewise, I'm not sure if the one missing gap around the heart symbolizes something either.
The we of course have the end-scene, where you walk up to the top of a huge pyramid, and we know from the post that at the top there will be an offering. You sit down in the chair and the arms come in to rip out your heart (or so it looks like, at least (the screen cuts to black just as they strike in)). This means you offer yourself! Now, there has been a lot of talk about how the protagonist has been to the future and seen the evil that mankind will commit and withstand, and how this is a much greater slaughtering than what happens there in the game. The offering that the Aztecs made was to the war god Uitzilopochtli. I'm not sure what the purpose of the offering was (whether the Aztecs offered to the war god to prevent war, or to give them advantage in war etc...), but there must be some connection between you offering yourself to a war god and a lot of talk being made about the wars that would take place in the 20th century (WW1, WW2 and the cold war, mainly).
Also, the Aztec offering included the captives being eaten, and the whole machine being for making humans into food, again, a connection.

The amount of connections you find between this Aztec offering and the game are stunning and I love that unless you actually go and research these things, all this stuff passes you by and you have no idea about all the work that went into "hiding" this information!
I'd love to see others find more connections, as I bet there are more. I did find some letters that did talk about Mexico, and of course including some more references, but these are to me the most stunning connections of them all :)

[Dan de Broccoli]

I just updated the post, I am currently in the church and I found something amazing support my theory! (I'm slow cause I'm a chicken, deal with it ;))

[Lone Wolf]

Very interesting! Thanks for sharing.

[Snake]

This is all fascinating but this doesn't really enrich my experience with the game in any way. I'm not trolling or beind annoying when I say this is fascinating, it really is and I didn't lnow it. The question is so what if there's a ton of parallels between the game's locales and plot and Aztec rituals and rites? How does that benefit the experience? Creating overly elaborate, veiled connections between an ingame entity X and abstract / historical / scientific entity Y does not constitute a benefit or a strong point in its own right, it HAS to serve a greater purpose, even if it's still as vague as a metaphor or an inference.

And even with the added explanation of the Aztec connection in the thread, I just don't see how that augments the experience in a meaningful way.

[Lone Wolf]

Some of the stuff i find interesting, thus it makes the game more 'interesting' for me. Like when the game references TDD several times, with the chemical, orb etc.

[NuclearTomb]

very interesting ! Thank you for this!

[dafaq?!]

I loved the Aztec approach and reinterpretation and now as you share this it makes even more sense. Finish the game and you will understand ;)

Btw a great documentary about aztecs here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JVoJ3YeZhY

[Dan de Broccoli]

Wow thanks! I'll watch that :D

[Secunda]

Thanks so much for writing this! I was wondering what the term meant myself, and I had a feeling it would be important.