Cross-Cultural Trends of Religious Sacrifice

In our previous blog posts we have specifically focused on the Capac Hucha ritual in the Inka empire. However, in order to fully understand the Capac Hucha ceremony that the Inkas held, we felt that it was necessary to investigate religious sacrifice on a more global scale.  By looking at other cases, we hope to add to our knowledge of ritualistic religious ceremonies. This investigation of human sacrifice in other cultures will allow us to understand the religious connotations better because often there are common patterns in a culture’s belief system that justify such an act.  In this blog post we will be focusing on the religious sacrifice in the Aztec Empire, as it is a widely discussed subject and is a good source of information.  However, steps must be taken to analyze the articles carefully as some scholars have romanticized the descriptions, even exaggerating it as an attempt to come to terms with it’s cultural significance. 

Our knowledge of the Aztec Empire is derived from the multiple ethnohistoric volumes of the Spanish conquistadors and friars, accounting through Indian informants how the dynamics of the Aztec empire functioned.  The rest is found solely through archaeological remains. Teotihuacan, Mesoamerica’s first truly urban center, was a center for economic and cultural exchange throughout the empire.  At Teotihuacan there were massive ceremonial constructions, intricate and esoteric murals, and industries engaged in mass-production of religious objects, allowing scholars to conclude that religion and ideology were highly enforced and believed by the inhabitants. (1)
Scholars have long known that human sacrifice was practiced in Mesoamerica.  When discussing the topic of human sacrifice often the conflict of the indigenous peoples as either noble savages or primitive barbarians is brought up. However, this is a imperialistic western approach to understanding the Aztecs; to truly comprehend such practices, bias must be left behind. 

A picture taken from the Codex Mendoza,

created by native scribes for the Spanish in 1541-1542,

showing a ritual Aztec sacrifice.

The Aztecs believed in a concept of "tonalli" or the "animating spirit". Tonalli was believed to be held in the blood, and since blood flowed from the heart, this was the organ that was offered up to satisfy  the god's appetite. It was believed that without these sacrifices, all motion would stop, including the movement of the sun. Therefor the Aztecs’ practice of human sacrifices were intended to keep the sun from halting its orbit.(2)

Every 18 months the Aztecs held a cycle, and within each of the 18 months there was ritual sacrifice.  The victim would be displayed as part of the ritual, they would then be laid on a slab where their heart would be removed and held up to the sun. Upon the retrieval of the heart the body would be thrown down the stairs of the temple/pyramid. In order to dispose of the body remains, the bodies would be given to animals or put on display (the heads). Some scholars even mentioned that cannibalism was also a method used of  to dispose of the bodies. The idea of cannibalism was mentioned because the citizens were going through a famine. However, if cannibalism had been practiced as part of the ceremony, the eating of humans would not have been from the result of hunger or shortage of food, but rather as a way to connect with the Gods. 

Though the Aztecs often abducted sacrificial victims from the surrounding areas, they never fully conquered the surrounding states because they needed a continual supply of sacrifices for Huitzilpochtli.(3)

 “In City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization, David Carrasco addresses the personal bias issues that are presented when dealing with trying to understand the cultural significance of human sacrifice. His reaction upon seeing the site of child sacrifice was such:

“I remember the day my academic deadpan about cities and sacrifice cracked into a tight grimace. I had just looked down into the offering cache at the Great Aztec Temple in Mexico City where the skeletal remains of forty-two children lay as a messy remnant of a fifteenth-century, precious offering to the rain gods. The Mexican archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma was giving me a tour of the site, which was under intense excavation, and said, pointing, “Here is something beautiful and profound in its terror.” Peering down into the ritual receptacle where children’s skulls and infants’ bones lay strewn and tangled in what looked like a chaotic, even wild, arrangement, I could see greenstone beads near several mouths, flakes of blue pigment that had been sprinkled on the bodies, necklaces of greenstone, and several disks with appliquéd turquoise mosaics and turtle shell.  I knew from my study of Aztec cosmology that this spot might be one of the entrances to Tlaloc’s paradise, the rain god’s aquatic afterlife. I felt a visceral response that relocated my attention from ideas to feelings, from my head to my stomach and heart, for I was a father of a young child and I wondered what possible creative hermeneutic turn I could spin onto this scene…it was evident that violence against humans was a profound human necessity and practice for the Aztecs in their Capital City.”(4)

There were other methods to human sacrifice including being shot with an arrow, drowned, burned, or otherwise mutilated. As to why these sacrifices took place is still debatable. Some  critics argue that it was for  the overwhelming aspect of Aztec religious life in the imaginations of non-Aztecs. Along with religious reasoning it was also argued that it was ritualistic violence. This had been practiced all throughout the Mesoamerican world, but the Tenochca practiced it on a larger  scale, never seen before.  We don't know a great deal about the details, but we have a fairly good idea of its general character and justification. Throughout Mesoamerica, the theology involved the concept that the gods gave things to human beings only if they were nourished by human beings. Among the Maya, for instance, the priests would nourish the gods by drawing their own blood by piercing their tongues, ears, extremities, or genitals. Other sacrifices involved prayer, offerings of food, sports, and even dramas. The Aztecs practiced all of these sacrifices, including blood-letting. But the Aztec theologians also developed the notion that the gods are best nourished by the living hearts of sacrificed captives; the braver the captive, the more nourishing the sacrifice. This theology led to widespread wars of conquest in search of sacrificial victims both captured in war and paid as tribute by a conquered people.
View the Video below to get a better understanding of Aztec Religion and Culture

Interesting Discoveries!

Check out these videos to see some of the discoveries archaeologists have made in digs.

The skull was intentionally reshaped when the child was alive- broadening of the skull front. There was a flattening in the back and front of the head.More clues, tells that the child died in the pre-hispanic time when the ritual was manifest, this was also a period when ritual sacrifice was common, so could this child have been the victim of Aztec sacrifice?

For information on new discoveries made on this subject visit these webcites:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Mass-Child-Sacrifice-Executed-by-the-Aztecs-039-Predecessors-57263.shtml

Footnotes:

1) Conrad, Geoffrey W., and Arthur A. Demarest. Religion and Empire the Dynamics of Aztec and Inca Expansionism. Cambridge [u.a.: Cambridge Univ., 1995. Print.

2)http://www.ambergriscaye.com/pages/mayan/azteccannibalism.html

3) Carrasco, David. City of Sacrifice: the Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization. Boston: Beacon, 1999. Print.1,23-24.

4)  Carrasco, David. City of Sacrifice: the Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization. Boston: Beacon, 1999. Print