Aztec Human Sacrifice – a Detached View

In searching for a dissertation for this paper, I was faced with a ridiculous problem. With the ghastly subject of gentlemans gentleman turn over, what could possibly be argued and defended? During my admiting and research, the stark and fearful reality of a exclusively whenchered, battered, or burnt- disclose homosexual being slain in well-nigh black, weird ceremony for nearly equ from each oney weird gargoyle-like nonpareil more(prenominal) or less caused me to choose other subject.Yet, years ago, when I acquire Gary Jennings novel Aztec, I was transfixed with his description of the Aztecs throw of prisoners during the loyalty of the peachy gain in Tenochitlan The perfumes of whitethornhap the prime(prenominal) two hundred of them, were ceremoniously ladled into the m protrudehs of Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli until the statues hollow insides could hold no more, and the loved stone lips of the two perfections drooled and dribbled course Those who befu ddle read Jennings novel know that the foregoing is but a mild example of rough of the graphic barbarism he describes. During my first reading of that novel, I would live with neer imagined that I could come to the conclusion of my dissertation. My thesis is this There appears to be an intolerable puzzle between the barbarous religious closures and the or else high st ingest of civilization in the Central vale of Mexico.This problem doubtless led the early Spanish missionaries to sham the conquered Indians as annoy worshipers. However, I believe that it is manageable to regard the Aztecs as fine-tune people who to a fault happened to perform man forfeiture. They performed military individualnel fall in in reply to their soak up of the world and how they cope at heart it. Maintaining those two opposing facetpoints requires an on a lower floorstanding and a detached view which may have more to do with the study of write up than the study of humans sacrifice. The Aztecs, of course, had no monopoly on the practice of human sacrifice. Earlier civilisations (the Maya, the Toltecs and others) provided the pagan base for human sacrifice upon which the Aztecs took to spic-and-span high gear. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, excavations in Egypt and elsewhere in the ancient Middle eastside have revealed that numerous servants were at quantify interred with the rest of the funerary equipment of a member of the royal family in orderliness to provide that psyche with a cortege in the next life.The burning of children seems to have occurred in Assyrian and Canaanite religions and at various quantify among the Israelites. Rites among the ancient Greeks and Romans that involved the killing of animals may have originally involved human victims. The Aztecs, as previously stated, took the practice to cutting-made heights. In 1487 (five years before capital of Ohio arrived to the East and two years later Henry VII began the Tudor dyna sty in England) the greatest orgy of bloodletting of human sacrifice occurred during the fierce rule of Ahuizotl.I have already quoted Gary Jennings description of the carn get on, and I will quote one more passage to illustrate how the Aztecs in a ceremony in the ending four years sacrificed at least 20,000 prisoners to their insatiable matinee idol Huitzilopochtli The prisoners endlessly ascended the right side of the pyramids staircase, epoch the gashed bodies of their predecessors tumbled and rolled dget the left side, kicked on by junior priests stationed at intervals, and turn the gutter between the stairs carried a continuous stream of blood which puddled out among the feet of the crowd in the plaza Although Jennings Aztec is, admittedly, a work of fiction, I have seen his descriptions corroborated elsewhere for example, G. C. Vaillants The Aztecs of Mexico describes the scene At the start of the dedication, the captives stood in two rows, and (they) began the grisly w ork of vehement out the victims hearts Returning to my thesis, how could the practice of human sacrifice be looked upon as both subject less than barbaric, until now to the point where Aztecs could be regarded as uncivilized?The answer, in my opinion, arises from their view of their creation, their office staff in the world, their relative splendour therein, and how they were still holding on by a thread. If the Judeo-Christian God took unaccompanied six days to create the area and acres (and rested on the seventh day), the Meso-American deity took awhile longer to waste ones eon it right. The Aztecs believed that the cheer and humankind had been destroyed in a cataclysm and were regenerated four snips.They believed that they were nutriment in the fifth, and closing, stage of creation, and (according to Meyer and Shermans The Course of Mexican History) that in their age of their fifth sunbathe, final destruction was imminent. Meyer and Sherman also point out ano ther interesting (and revealing) aspect of how the Aztecs regarded themselves in the turn of their cosmology. The accepted view of a natural roulette wheel was that humans active a or else lowly position in the food chain of the paragons.The cycle held that since the sun and rainwater supply constitute life and sustained man, man should develop sustenance to the sun and rain deitys. unmatchable exponent infer from the foregoing view that the Aztecs placed a low harbor on human life. To add to the paradox of sacrifice versus civilization, the evidence is that the Aztecs regarded the individual human as a most crucial locus of the meditation of the human and divine. In Aztecs An recitation by Inga Clendenin, the author focuses in on the actual meaning of the leger sacrifice. In her analysis of the Nahuatl linguistic iterations concealment the separate meanings of goal and sacrifice, she (gradually) comes to the conclusion that Aztecs regarded sacrifice as a reachmen t of the debt incurred and only fully extinguished by ending, when the macrocosm lords would go upon the bodies of men, as men had perforce fed upon them. What I liked most about Inga Clennindens writings on the Aztec was her categorisation of aroundtimes excruciating detailed recognition (I had to have a dictionary practised at all times) along with her eventual(prenominal) arrival at the exquisite fair play of the matter.Concerning debt of humans to the gods she states the truth of the matter in two exquisitely perspicacious sentences .. (T)he Mexica knew that all humans, unequal as they might be in human arrangements, participated in the like desperate plight an involuntary debt to the sublunary deities, contracted through the ingestion of the fruits of the earth It is that divine hunger which appears to underlay the unadulterated feedings of undifferentiated fold killings. While everyone in Aztec golf club had the same debt, Aztec religion and its black-robed, blo od-caked priests served to pay everyones workaday dues for continuation in humanitys brook Tonatiuh yet a while longer. by dint of obeisance and observance of the needs of the pantheon of gods and with the complicity of the Aztec society at large (and often even with the active cooperation of the victims), the priests performed their killings, according to Clendinnen, openly and everywhere not only in the briny temple precinct, but in the approach temples and on the streets. The Aztecs believed that without human sacrifice and the oblation of the most precious and sacred thing the human possessed (blood), the sun might not rise to make its elbow room across the sky. This rather weird and unenlightened belief was supported by a mythology in which Huitzilopochitli, their fierce bloodthirsty god played a central part. except first, an explanation of the Aztecs beliefs regarding the creation of their current age does shed some light on the role of sacrifice and Huitzilopochit lis cult, which later ran uncontrolled and reached its zenith in the sacrifice of 20,000 at the dedication of the temple in 1487.A pithy description of Meso-American mythology appears in The Daily animation of the Aztecs by Jacques Soustelle. The ancient Mexicans believed that the two upraise gods lived at the summit of the world. Their unending fruitfulness produced all the gods, and from it all mankind was born. The sun was born when the gods gathered in the downslope at Teotihuacan and a little leprous god covered with boils, threw himself into a gigantic brazier as a sacrifice and rose from the blazing coals changed into a sun This sun was motionless and it needed blood to move.So the gods immolated themselves, and the sun, drawing life from their death began its course across the sky. To persist the sun moving on its course, so that the night should not overwhelm the world forever, it was needed to feed it every day with its food, the precious water human blood. Ev ery time a priest fed the gods at the buy the farthermostm of a pyramid, or in the local anaesthetic temple, the disaster that always threatened to eliminate upon the world was postponed once more. About the time of the Crusades in Europe, the Aztecs migrated from the west into the Valley of Mexico.They brought with them their strange hummingbird god Huitzilopochitli, who, according to Victor W. Vonhagen in his The Aztec Man and Tribe gave the Aztecs some rather sound advice wander, look for lands, avoid any large-scale fighting, send pioneers ahead, have them engraft maize, when the harvest is ready, move up to it keep me, always with you, carrying me like a banner, feed me on human hearts divide from the recently sacrificed. all of which the Aztecs did. The mythology surrounding Huitzilopochitlis origins was also revealing.The Aztecs believed themselves to be the people of the sun. This gods fierce greenback is surpassed only by the Aztec view of his drive Coatlicue. V ictor Von Hagen describes the Aztec sculpture of this powerful and awe-inspiring goddess her head of twin serpents, her necklace of human workforce and hearts, her arms claw-handed, and her skirt a mass of writhing serpents The Aztecs believed that Huitzilopochitli sprang alive and fierce from his incur to vanquish his brothers, the stars, and his sister, the slug who had conspired to kill his mother.Coatlique, an earth goddess, conceived him after having kept in her squash a ball of hummingbird feathers (i. e. , the soul of a warrior) that fell from the sky. His brothers, the stars of the southern sky, and his sister, a moon goddess, decided to kill him, but he exterminated them with his weapon, the turquoise snake. The Aztecs followed the hummingbirds twittering and became the dominant culture of a civilization that by the time Cortes and his group of scruffy adventurers landed in 1517 numbered in the millions.It is difficult to imagine an ancient, Gordian civilization lik e the Aztecs with a daily life that centered around the grisly practice of human sacrifice. The average Aztec only had to look at the stone idol of household god to be reminded of what nourished that particular deity. Deities other than Huitzilopochitli had their own bedspread days in the Aztec calendar and, accordingly, demanded their own sustenance. Slave children were drowned as an offering to the rain god Tlaloc. The fire gods victims were given hash and thrown into the blaze.Those who represented the god Xipe Totec were tied(p) to a frame, shot with arrows, and then had their ashes flayed (the priests dressed themselves in the scrape up representing the new skin of spring). Here we have the phenomenon of how the person being sacrificed was symbolically transfigured into the image of the god and his own temple. In most cases the victim was dressed up so as to represent the god who was being worshiped. retributive as the gods of old had accepted death, the person reenacted and became that sacrifice.Moreover, according to Jaques Soustelle in The Daily brio of the Aztecs, when ritual cannibalism was practiced on trusted occasions, it was the gods own flesh that the faithful ate in their bloody communion. As the Aztec cycle continued and a shortage of god food occurred, the Aztec Flowery Wars replenished that supply. Militarism, elevated to a virtue, became ever intertwined with Aztec society. In fact, a warriors precondition was determined by the number of captives he delivered to the sacrificial altar.Whether as a field of operations casualty or ending up as a captive on the altar of an enemy tribe, this flowery death was desirable and noble, and a place in the clouds was reserved for that warrior. Returning one last time to Gary Jennings graphic description of the prisoner sacrifice on that day in 1487, when long lines of captives shuffled along the avenues toward Tenochitlan up the pyramid staircase towards the twin temples of Tlaloc and Huitzil opochitli any prisoners, however complacently they came to their fate, involuntarily emptied their bladders or bowels at the moment lying down under the knife. The priests who had been clad in their usual rapacious black of robes, lank hair, and unwashed skin had become moving clots of red and brown, or coagulated blood, dried mucus, and a affix of excrement It is indeed difficult to read of such gore and barbarism without delegacy the Aztecs to the level normally reserved for far less developed and organized societies.Although the Aztec layover is considered by historians as not having reached the heights of civilizations of the classic period, it is clear that the Aztecs and the cultures of the Central Valley were sophisticated and well organized. There may have been as many as 30 million inhabitants of that area (although some scholars believe that count is somewhat exaggerated), and the dyspnoeal sight of Tenochtitlan must have impress Cortes beyond words. The questio n remains Does founding and abhorrent (to us) practice of human sacrifice disqualify the Aztecs from full membership in the club of civilizations?Apparently, the Spanish felt that the answer to the question was an unequivocal yes. The horror and execration that newcomers must have felt may have helped the Spanish convince themselves that the native Australian religion was another form of devil worship and provided subsequent justification for destroying their culture. Jaques Soustelle gets to the heart of the matter in The Daily living of the Aztecs. He says that the Aztec practice of human sacrifice was a great factor in making the two religions which confronted one another totally irreconcilable.In the early battles, some conquistadores ended up as captives and sacrificial victims of the Aztecs themselves, and this practice lent a oddly remorseless attitude on each side of the struggle between the Aztecs and the Spanish invaders. If we can understand the motives and the relig ious and heathenish perspective of the Spanish, who massacred, burnt, mutilated and tortured their conquered natives, it is likely that the definition of cruelty differs from culture to culture. It follows, therefore, that it is possible to use the same perspective towards human sacrifice on the part of the Aztecs. works cited Jennings, Gary, 1980, Aztec Von Hagen, Victor W. , 1958, The Aztec, Man and Tribe Vaillant, G. C. , 1944, The Aztecs of Mexico Clendinnen, Inga, 1991, Aztecs An Interpretation Meyer, Michael C. , and Sherman, William L. , 1995, The Course of Mexican History pre-Columbian Civilizations MESO-AMERICAN CIVILIZATION Postclassic Period (900-1519) AZTEC CULTURE TO THE sequence OF THE SPANISH CONQUEST Aztec religion. Britannica Online HUMAN let go Britannica Online XIPE TOTEC Britannica Online Tlaloc Britannica Online.