Aztec Human Sacrifice – a Detached View

In searching for a thesis for this paper, I was faced with a singular problem. With the ghastly subject of compassionate render, what could possibly be argued and defended? During my reading and research, the grievous and horrible reality of a only whenche rosy, battered, or burned hu reality beingness off in whatever grisly, weird ceremonial occasion for some equally weird gargoyle-like perfection n ahead of time caused me to choose a nonher subject.Yet, solar mean solar days ago, when I read Gary Jennings novel Aztec, I was fascinated with his explanation of the Aztecs forfeit of pris whizzrs during the commit handst of the great pyramid in Tenochitlan The police van of perhaps the first deuce nose candy of them, were ceremoniously ladled into the mouths of Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli until the statues hol lower-ranking in arrays could hold no more, and the gemst sensation lips of the two gods drooled and dribbled breed Those who reserve read Jennings novel kno w that the previous is but a mild grammatical case of some of the graphic atrociousness he describes. During my first reading of that novel, I would expect never believed that I could come to the finis of my thesis. My thesis is this on that point appears to be an unacceptable problem betwixt the barbarous sacred influenceouts and the rather high state of coating in the primordial vale of Mexico.This paradox undoubtedly led the early Spanish missionaries to regard the conquered Indians as devil worshipers. However, I believe that it is possible to regard the Aztecs as civilized people who also happened to commit homophile sacrifice. They per dusted tender-hearted sacrifice in reaction to their mickle of the ball and how they organise do within it. Maintaining those two opposing aspect implys requires an taking into custody and a detached view which whitethorn take more to do with the turn over of history than the study of kind-hearted sacrifice.The Aztecs, of course, had no monopoly on the practice of homophile sacrifice. prior cultures (the Maya, the Toltecs and others) provided the cultural base for human sacrifice upon which the Aztecs took to new heights. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, excavations in Egypt and elsewhere in the ancient snapper East bring on revealed that numerous servants were at prison terms interred with the rest of the funerary equipment of a member of the royal family in order to provide that person with a retinue in the next lifetime.The ardent of children seems to grow occurred in Assyrian and Canaanite trusts and at unhomogeneous times among the Israelites. Rites among the ancient Greeks and Romans that knobbed the putting to death of animals may boast originally involved human victims. The Aztecs, as previously stated, took the practice to new heights. In 1487 (five geezerhood out front Columbus arrived to the East and two years after Henry VII began the Tudor dynasty in England) the greatest orgy of battue of human sacrifice occurred during the tearing radiation pattern of Ahuizotl.I have already quoted Gary Jennings verbal description of the carnage, and I will quote one more passage to illustrate how the Aztecs in a ceremony lasting tetrad days sacrificed at least 20,000 prisoners to their unsatiated god Huitzilopochtli The prisoners endlessly ascended the right side of the pyramids staircase, man the gashed bodies of their predecessors tumbled and rolled d consume the left(a) side, kicked along by junior priests stationed at intervals, and while the gutter between the stairs carried a continuous stream of blood which puddled out among the feet of the crowd in the core 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 fall out of the dedication, the clotheds stood in two rows, and (they) began the grisly work of t earing out the victims hearts return to my thesis, how could the practice of human sacrifice be looked upon as whatsoeverthing less than barbaric, even to the signalise where Aztecs could be regarded as uncivilized?The answer, in my opinion, arises from their view of their creation, their position in the world, their relational importance therein, and how they were only holding on by a thread. If the Judeo-Christian god took only six days to ready the heavens and earth (and rested on the seventh day), the Meso-American deity took awhile semipermanent to get it right. The Aztecs believed that the sun conflagrate and earth had been unmake in a cataclysm and were regenerated quaternity times.They believed that they were living in the one-fifth, and final, stage of creation, and (according to Meyer and Shermans The score of Mexican fib) that in their age of their fifth sun, final destruction was imminent. Meyer and Sherman also point out another interesting (and revealing ) chance of how the Aztecs regarded themselves in the cycle of their cosmology. The evaluate view of a natural cycle was that earth occupied a rather belt down(p) position in the food mountain chain of the gods.The cycle held that since the sun and rainwater supply plant life and sustained man, man should give sustenance to the sun and rain gods. One mogul infer from the antecede view that the Aztecs browsed a low value on human life. To give to the paradox of sacrifice versus civilization, the evidence is that the Aztecs regarded the private human as a just about significant locus of the meditation of the human and divine. In Aztecs An Interpretation by Inga Clendenin, the germ focuses in on the actual importation of the word sacrifice. In her analysis of the Nahuatl lingual iterations covering the separate meanings of death and sacrifice, she (gradually) comes to the shutting that Aztecs regarded sacrifice as a defrayment of the debt incurred and only fully exti nguished by death, when the earth lords would feed upon the bodies of men, as men had perforce fed upon them. What I care about about Inga Clennindens writings on the Aztec was her mixture of sometimes excruciating circumstantial scholarship (I had to have a mental lexicon handy at all times) along with her eventual arrival at the swell truth of the affaire.Concerning debt of humans to the gods she states the truth of the matter in two exquisitely knowing sentences .. (T)he Mexica knew that all humans, unequal as they might be in human arrangements, commenceicipated in the same desperate plight an unwilled debt to the earthly deities, contracted through the use of the fruits of the earth It is that divine hunger which appears to carpet pad the gross feedings of undifferentiated mass dash offings. art object everyone in Aztec society had the same debt, Aztec religion and its black-robed, blood-caked priests served to pay everyones daily dues for continuation in humanitys last Tonatiuh yet a while longer. Through obeisance and observance of the necessitate of the pantheon of gods and with the complicity of the Aztec society at large (and ofttimes even with the active cooperation of the victims), the priests performed their killings, according to Clendinnen, openly and everywhere not only in the main temple precinct, but in the neighborhood 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 way across the sky. This rather rum and naive belief was supported by a mythology in which Huitzilopochitli, their uncultivated bloody-minded god played a telephone exchange part. But first, an explanation of the Aztecs beliefs regarding the creation of their sure age does shed some light on the role of sacrifice and Huitzilopochitlis cult, which subsequently ran rampant and reached its zenith in the sacrifice of 20,000 at the dedication of the temple in 1487.A succinct description of Meso-American mythology appears in The chance(a) Life of the Aztecs by Jacques Soustelle. The ancient Mexicans believed that the two parent gods lived at the summit of the world. Their undying fruitfulness produced all the gods, and from it all populace was born. The sun was born when the gods gathered in the twilight at Teotihuacan and a scant(p) leprous god covered with boils, threw himself into a huge brazier as a sacrifice and rose from the blazing coals changed into a sun This sun was motionless and it involve blood to move.So the gods immolated themselves, and the sun, drawing life from their death began its course across the sky. To withstand the sun moving on its course, so that the darkness should not overwhelm the world forever, it was necessary to feed it every day with its food, the precious water human blood. Every time a priest fed the gods at the top of a pyramid, or in the local temple , the disaster that always endanger to fall upon the world was postponed once more. close 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 success W. Vonhagen in his The Aztec Man and population gave the Aztecs some rather sound advice wander, look for lands, bend any large-scale fighting, send pioneers ahead, have them plant 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 torn from the recently sacrificed. all of which the Aztecs did. The mythology meet Huitzilopochitlis origins was also revealing.The Aztecs believed themselves to be the people of the sun. This gods fierce preeminence is surpassed only by the Aztec view of his mother Coatlicue. Victor Von Hagen describes the Aztec sculpture of this fibrous and awesome goddess her head of twin serpents, her neckl ace of human hands 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 mother to vanquish his brothers, the stars, and his sister, the moon who had conspired to kill his mother.Coatlique, an earth goddess, conceived him after having kept in her bosom a ball of hummingbird feathers (i. e. , the someone 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 prevailing culture of a civilization that by the time Cortes and his group of scruffy adventurers come in 1517 beed in the millions.It is unwieldy to speak out an ancient, complex civilization like the Aztecs with a daily life that centered just about the grisly practice of human sacrifice. The honest Aztec only had to loo k at the stone idol of household god to be reminded of what nourished that particular deity. Deities other than Huitzilopochitli had their own feast 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 attached hashish and thrown into the blaze.Those who represented the god Xipe Totec were fastened to a frame, shot with arrows, and past had their corpse flayed (the priests dressed themselves in the cutis representing the new skin of spring). Here we have the phenomenon of how the person being sacrificed was symbolically transfigured into the kitchen range 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. Just as the gods of old had accepted death, the person reenacted and became that sacrifice.Moreover, according to Jaques Soustelle in The periodical Life of the Aztecs, when ritual cannibali sm was practiced on certain occasions, it was the gods own flesh that the crease ate in their bloody communion. As the Aztec cycle continued and a famine of god food occurred, the Aztec Flowery Wars replenished that supply. Militarism, sumptuous to a virtue, became ever intertwined with Aztec society. In fact, a warriors status was determined by the number of captives he delivered to the sacrificial altar.Whether as a battlefield casualty or closure up as a captive on the altar of an enemy tribe, this ornate death was desirable and noble, and a place in the clouds was reticent 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 Huitzilopochitli any prisoners, however complacently they came to their fate, involuntarily emptied their bladders or bowels at the moment lyi ng down under the knife. The priests who had been clad in their ordinary vulturine black of robes, lank hair, and uncouth skin had become moving clots of red and brown, or coagulated blood, dried mucus, and a plaster of excrement It is indeed difficult to read of such gore and barbarism without relegating the Aztecs to the level normally reserved for far less developed and unionized societies.Although the Aztec period 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 some as 30 million inhabitants of that commonwealth (although some scholars believe that count is close to exaggerated), and the breathtaking sight of Tenochtitlan must have impressed Cortes beyond words. The question system Does existence and abhorrent (to us) practice of human sacrifice disqualify the Aztecs from full social statu s in the club of civilizations?Apparently, the Spanish tangle that the answer to the question was an unequivocal yes. The hatred and disgust that newcomers must have entangle may have helped the Spanish bring over themselves that the native religion was another form of devil worship and provided subsequent defense for destroying their culture. Jaques Soustelle gets to the heart of the matter in The occasional Life of the Aztecs. He says that the Aztec practice of human sacrifice was a great performer 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 particularly remorseless attitude on each side of the struggle between the Aztecs and the Spanish invaders. If we can understand the motives and the apparitional and cultural sight of the Spanish, who massacred, burnt, mutilated and tortured their conquered native s, 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 finale TO THE TIME OF THE SPANISH CONQUEST Aztec religion. Britannica Online gentle SACRIFICE Britannica Online XIPE TOTEC Britannica Online Tlaloc Britannica Online.