“There is no such thing as ‘Human Sacrifice’”
This thought-provoking article has kindly been specially written for us by Dr. Elizabeth Graham, Senior Lecturer in the Archaeology of Latin America, Institute of Archaeology, University College London. We welcome feedback and further contributions on this most controversial of topics...
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| ‘Human sacrifice’, Codex Laud folio 8 (Click on image to enlarge) |
People take it for granted that the Aztecs practiced something called human sacrifice. But what, exactly, is ‘human sacrifice’? What people mean by using this term is that humans are killed to satisfy the needs of a god or gods. We assume that this was true about the Aztecs, but a closer look reveals more about us than about the Aztecs.
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| Two Aztec conquest scenes, each including captor with captive and a toppled/burning pyramid temple, Codex Mendoza folio 2r (detail) (Click on image to enlarge) |
War
First of all, the people who were killed were men who fought in various battles. Aztec warriors tried to capture other warriors, not kill them. In our warfare, we encourage soliders to kill other soldiers on the battlefield itself, but in some cultures, such as that of the Aztecs or Maya, this was dishonourable. The rule was to engage in hand-to-hand combat with another warrior and defeat him by capturing him. Some, and only some, of these men captured in battle were later killed in the setting of a temple. But the rationale for the killing – and by this I mean the ‘excuse’ for the killing in the Aztecs’ minds, was war. This is no different from modern wars or medieval wars in which men killed other men, and sometimes women and children, with the excuse that it was part of WAR.
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| The Aztecs vanquish the mighty city of Tlatelolco - its twin temple is in flames, and the dead leader Moquihuix tumbles from the temple, wearing the full regalia of his position - Codex Mendoza folio 10r (Click on image to enlarge) |
How to kill people and get away with it
In all civilizations, the best-accepted excuse for killing people - for defense, economics, oil, power, resources - is WAR. What makes this different from murder? There are some kinds of killing that societies allow without punishing the killer or killers. These kinds of killing (archaeologists call this socially sanctioned killing) are legalized in a number of countries, and examples would be capital punishment, euthanasia, or even abortion. But the most common excuse for killing people (without being arrested for murder) is WAR.
What I am saying is that Aztec society justified having captured warriors killed in temples as WAR and not as ‘human sacrifice’. I doubt that they even had a concept of ‘human sacrifice’ before the arrival of the Spaniards. It seems to have been the Spanish friars who interpreted such killing as ‘human sacrifice’ but the term ‘sacrifice’ or ‘human sacrifice’ does not exist in the Nahuatl language at all.
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| A symbolic skull rack beside the city emblem of Tenochtitlan, Codex Mendoza folio 2r (detail) - one of the very few images in this Codex that acknowledges the Aztecs’ practice of ‘human sacrifice’ (Click on image to enlarge) |
And as for killing in temples, all societies explain wars in ways that call on God or some abstract concept such as truth or justice even if the war involves economic gain, which it almost always does. The Iraq war was said by the Americans to be a fight against the Axis of Evil. English colonial wars were fought for God and the queen. But what was to be gained by these wars? Resources such as oil Wealth? Power?
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| 4 conquered towns under the rule of the emperor Tizoc, Codex Mendoza folio 12r (detail) (Click on image to enlarge) |
The bloodthirsty Aztecs
Why have the Aztecs come to be portrayed as so bloodthirsty then? This is a good question. The answer is complicated. But here are some points.
• If you compared Aztec wars with European wars even in medieval times, a far fewer proportion of people (men or women or children) wound up dead in Aztec battles than in European battles.
• Why, then, do we see the Aztecs as so bloody? The ‘horribleness’ seems to come from the fact that the Aztecs delayed killing their enemies. Even though they wound up killing very few of their enemies compared to all the people who actually fought in the war, we think of them as more bloodthirsty than we are.
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| A youth capturing a warrior was given a flower-style ‘manta’ (cloak) as a sign of his bravery; he would don this emblem of honour on ritual occasions (Codex Mendoza folio 64r, detail) (Click on image to enlarge) |
• Scholars say that Aztec warriors fought specifically to capture other warriors to offer them to the gods and that this gave them prestige. But this interpretation has come down to us largely from Spanish friars and the Aztecs they educated. In real life, no civilization has ever endorsed killing on such a massive scale, and repeatedly, only to please gods! The gods, however, always provide a nice handy excuse for killing that is motivated by other things.
• What other things?
• Same as in our wars: resources, wealth, power.
• Think about it. Why would a young man repeatedly go into battle and risk his life just to drag his opponent off to a priest? Warriors’ wives alone would start a revolution. This scenario is about as likely as telling young men in Britain to fight in Iraq without paying them a salary or benefits. No one would fight!
• Far more likely is that warriors sought to capture other warriors not to have them killed for their hearts but to put them in a position in which the captor, by right of capturing his opponent, could take away some of his opponent’s tribute rights (resources, money, power). This makes a lot more sense, and puts the Aztecs well within the range of all civilizations. In fact, if you count all the so-called ‘sacrifice’ victims as war victims, it makes the Aztecs look downright peaceful compared to us...
Picture sources:-
• ‘Human sacrifice’, Codex Laud folio 8 (scanned from our copy of the facsimile edition by ADEVA, Austria, 1966)
• Images from the Codex Mendoza scanned from our copy of the James Cooper Clark facsimile edition, London, 1938
Here's what others have said:
9 At 7.53am on Tuesday August 10 2010, Jack wrote:
This conveniently overlooks the textual and archaeological evidence for child sacrifice - such as the sacrifice of 48 children placed in a box in the Templo Mayor!
Mexicolore replies: What’s ‘convenient’ about it? The article discusses ‘human sacrifice’ in broad terms. We hope to cover child sacrifice among the Mexica in a forthcoming piece. There’s no ‘hidden agenda’ here...!
8 At 6.07pm on Friday June 25 2010, aslana wrote:
i am researching for a paper, and know that the first one to interpret the symbols were Christianized folks that were decedents of the conquistadors or the converted mexica Indians. blood thirsty i don’t know but what i wonder is why is many god and goddess represent the same ones in Tibet and India, but they did not interpret that culture wrong, so why are they getting it wrong? the god of war, hustilapostle (excuse the spelling) is actually a name for a time of the sun, which there are i believe four stations of the sun in aztec culture, he is the morning sun represented by the humming bird, why are hummingbirds represented by war here? because the ones interpreting them were under the higher influence of whomever was paying them, any other reasons? id like more information on.
Mexicolore replies: The name of the Aztecs’ tribal/war god, Huitzilopochtli, means ‘Hummingbird of the Left, Hummingbird of the South’. Blue/green hummingbird feathers were almost as precious as quetzal feathers, and feathers generally were - according to Fray Diego Durán - considered to be the ‘shadows of the gods’ by the Aztecs. The hummingbird is a surprisingly fearless and aggressive little creature - a fitting representative of Huitzilopochtli, who was the ‘Blue Tezcatlipoca’. He is depicted in codices wearing a blue-green hummingbird headdress and carrying a fire serpent weapon. He was the patron Mexica deity of the sun, fire and war...
7 At 11.29am on Friday January 1 2010, dylan wrote:
great article and does not go far enough. As i’ve said in another comment, there is no clear evidence that there were human sacrifices happening. The explanation from the people who still carry on the tradition is that these glyphs are of surgery. Just because one western scholar has quoted a spanish account of sacrifice and it’s made it into history books does not make it fact. Just because we misinterpret glyphs does not mean they show bloodshed. So much of mexhika culture has been misinterpreted.. Anyone who studies archaeology will know it’s about who shouts their theory the loudest who gets heard..
i would challenge the authors of this site to print an article from a mexhika scholar such as arturo mesa to show another side to this story...
Mexicolore replies: Actually, Dylan, we feel there’s plenty of evidence from researchers - many of them Mexicans - from many traditions and backgrounds that points to Mexica ritual killings. The question raised in this article is what to CALL these practices. Codex glyphs certainly do show bloodshed: if they depict surgery, it certainly wasn’t of the life-saving kind...!
6 At 8.32am on Tuesday October 27 2009, Dr. Mariella Remund wrote:
Refreshing thinking, a total paradigm shift to encourage us to really understand what is behind associations such as Aztec culture = human sacrifice. Bravo!
Mexicolore replies: Thanks for this positive feedback, Mariella.
5 At 9.51pm on Tuesday September 1 2009, Michael E. Smith wrote:
I ‘m having trouble grasping the point of this post. The title seems misleading, because the Aztecs clearly practiced some kind of ritualized killing, as we know from archaeological remains (not to mention codices and the chroniclers, whose bias must be taken into account). If this wasn’t “human sacrifice,” then what was it? The final paragraph suggests that the captors obtained some kind of economic resources from their captives. I am aware of no documentary support for such a notion. If this really happened, we would expect at least some hints of this practice in the sources, if not outright descriptions of it. There are a number of reasons why this scenario is unlikely (e.g., resources were locally based, and a captive in Tenochtitlan could not transfer his wealth from back in the provinces to a Mexica captor. Similarly tribute rights were locally based and not transferable.) But most of all, I dislike the title of this post, since it plays into the “new age” revisionist view that the Aztecs were peaceful crystal-gazers, not warriors who practiced bloody rituals of sacrifice.
Mexicolore replies: Point well taken, Michael, and the last thing we want to do is give support for the revisionist approach that you rightly decry; the author is NOT denying the killings, simply questioning the use of the term ‘human sacrifice’ to refer to them. How do others feel?
4 At 3.00pm on Tuesday September 1 2009, John Whittaker wrote:
It’s silly to say the Aztec did not engage in human sacrifice. Of course they did, as Aztec art and archaeology shows, not just biased Spanish testimony. See Pic 6 in my Atlatl article. Although war was part of the context, children were often sacrificed as well as men captured in war. As for the motivation of warriors, all too many people fight for “God and Country” today; religious belief worked then too. True, warriors also had “practical” motives then and now - success in war meant prestige, tribute, or today medals, officer status, career in politics - how to rise in power and position whether you are an Aztec or a modern American.
Instead of whitewashing the Aztecs, perhaps Graham would do better to turn the issue around. The European cultures of the time also engaged in human sacrifice, although they would have hotly denied it. The Inquisition and similar organizations, and crusades against non-Christians and Christian heretics can be seen as war and politics, but they were also seen as pleasing to God and necessary for religious reasons. Burning a heretic in front of the church was human sacrifice just as cutting out a captive’s heart at the Sun Temple.
3 At 5.39pm on Thursday August 20 2009, milinda banerjee wrote:
absolutely fabulous article...changed my whole perspective on mexican history...and as a practitioner of history, i must heartily congratulate the author for her analytical skills:)
2 At 6.03pm on Tuesday August 18 2009, Martin wrote:
Rubbish. Ignores Diaz and the testimony of the Aztrecs themselves, the Tlaxcalans and the other members of the triple alliance. Ignores the skull racks and the sensations of the conquistadores when they entered the temple precinct of Tenochtitlan. It ignores the cynical and effectively fake war of the flowers that was designed solely to enable the capture of warriors for sacrifice and prevented Tlaxcala from developing into it’s own state. The Aztecs displayed skulls in their temples, worshipped as two of their principle gods the gods of war and death, and their own historical fables centre around how tough they were and that they succeeded because they were more cruel than all the cruel tribes which surrounded them - a fact that the Aztecs themselves were intensely proud of. It is only modern day Euro-centric historical revisionism that has started to paint the Aztecs as some sort of hippie commune that only went to war when all else failed. They were a warrior race in a stone age culture surrounded by tribes that wanted to kill them - if they had truly been a ‘Switzerland of the Americas’ as this article suggests and only went to war and made sacrifices after much tear-jerking and soul-searching there would be no Aztec culture...and no Mexico...
Mexicolore replies: Thanks for writing in, Martin. We can understand your gut reaction, but please note: Dr. Graham is NOT saying the killings didn’t take place, she’s discussing how we should refer to the killings...
1 At 11.58am on Monday May 11 2009, Tecpaocelotl wrote:
Great article.
