How Some Horny, Bird-Brained Priests Utterly Failed to Colonize the Americas for Persia

Let’s get one thing straight: the Magi of the Achaemenid Empire were, by and large, a bunch of mystics so high on their own sacred hooch (shout-out to Haoma, the OG party-starter) that they could barely tell a Tuesday from the apocalypse. So around 480-something BC — a date I pulled directly from my ass, but it feels right — a few of these stargazing weirdos at Persepolis started staring a little too hard at the friezes.

Now, these carvings showed griffins, lions, and a whole menagerie of mythological beasts. But one priest, let’s call him Spitama because that’s a real Zoroastrian name and it sounds funny, became convinced that a particular row of badly-carved ducks was actually a divine map. “Behold!” he probably slurred, spilling fermented mare’s milk all over his sacred jimmy-jams. “Ahura Mazda has shown us the bird-road to the Western Paradise!” Was it a faster route to the Americas? Hell no. It was a depiction of the royal poultry budget. But King Xerxes I, a man whose primary hobbies were losing wars to a bunch of oiled-up Greeks and maintaining a harem so vast it had its own internal weather system, was bored. “Fine,” he sighed, “Take three boats. If you find this paradise, send back some new girls for the weekend. And for the love of my divine rod, don’t fuck it up like I did at Salamis.”

So off they went! A crew of zealots, debtors, and at least one Greek guy named Testicles (according to a papyrus fragment found in a dumpster behind the Library of Alexandria) who just wanted to get away from his ex-wife. They followed the “prophetic” Gulf Stream, which they mistook for the breath of God himself giving their sails a celestial blowjob. After weeks of sanctified constipation and arguing about whose turn it was to feed the holy fire, they slammed right into the Yucatán Peninsula. They expected Eden. They found the Maya.

The Magi, bless their fire-addled hearts, stumbled out onto the beach expecting houris and eternal bliss. Instead, they got a welcoming party of dudes with obsidian-bladed clubs, facial piercings the size of dinner plates, and a deeply unsettling enthusiasm for ripping a guy’s still-beating heart out. According to the apocryphal *Diary of Testicles*, Spitama tried to explain the dualistic nature of cosmic truth to a Mayan lord, who just stared at him for a solid minute before asking—via a very confused translator—if the Persians’ magnificent beards were good for riding. The whole diplomatic effort collapsed when the Magi saw their first human sacrifice and collectively shat their white robes. Their attempt to establish a sacred fire temple on top of a pyramid decorated with screaming skulls ended in what can only be described as a bloody, farcical mess.

They didn’t last long. Most of the Persians were sacrificed, enslaved, or simply died from drinking the water after trying to “purify” it with chants. A handful managed to limp back home a decade later, having completely forgotten the route, with nothing to show for their trouble but a crippling fear of feathered serpents, a few bags of weirdly delicious chili peppers, and a strain of syphilis so potent it made Xerxes’s balls retreat into his torso. And that, history fans, is probably why your favorite curry is spicier than it has any right to be.