Daily Inspiration Quote by Hernando Cortes

Cortes writes with the calm certainty of a man translating conquest into paperwork. The line sounds like neutral ethnography, but its real function is political: it renders Aztec religious life legible to a Spanish court primed to judge cultures by their sexual discipline. “Debarred,” “permitted,” “religious houses” are administrative words, not curious ones. They smuggle a verdict inside a description, turning an unfamiliar system into something that can be weighed against Christian monastic norms.

The specific intent is twofold. First, Cortes is signaling order. A priesthood separated from “female society” reads, to European ears, as hierarchy and control rather than chaos; it’s an argument that these societies are organized enough to be governed, taxed, converted. Second, he’s mapping Indigenous institutions onto Spanish categories. By calling temples “religious houses,” he frames them as equivalents to monasteries, inviting the Crown to imagine takeover: seize the buildings, replace the rituals, keep the infrastructure.

The subtext is gender as a diagnostic tool of civilization. Cortes isn’t praising women’s exclusion so much as using it to cue a familiar moral universe: sexuality managed, access regulated, spaces policed. That matters because his larger project depends on a paradox. He must portray the Mexica as sophisticated enough to make conquest profitable, yet alien enough to make conquest righteous. This sentence threads that needle: it offers discipline without dignity, structure without sovereignty. It’s not just an observation; it’s a template for how to dominate.