The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (29 page)

AZTEC HUMAN SACRIFICE

Death toll:
1.2 million

Rank:
45

Type:
human sacrifice

Broad dividing line:
priests vs. prisoners

Time frame:
ca. 1440–1521

Location:
Mexico

Who usually gets the most blame:
Aztecs

The unanswerable question everyone asks:
Didn’t they notice that the sun came up every morning even if they didn’t sacrifice to it?

I
N 1521, BEATEN BY AN UPRISING OF AZTECS, RETREATING FROM TENOCHTITLAN
(today’s Mexico City) in a panic, the Spaniards under Cortés watched helplessly from a distance as natives killed their captured comrades:

There was sounded the dismal drum of [Huitzilopochtli] and many other shells and horns and things like trumpets and the sound of them all was terrifying, and we all looked toward the lofty pyramid . . . and saw that our comrades . . . were being carried by force up the steps . . .

We saw them place plumes on the heads of many of them and with things like fans in their hands they forced them to dance before [Huitzilopochtli] and after they had danced they immediately placed them on their backs on some rather narrow stones . . . and with some knives they sawed open their chests and drew out their palpitating hearts and offered them to their idols.

They kicked the bodies down the steps, and the Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off the arms and feet and flayed the skin off the faces and prepared it afterward like glove leather with the beards on . . . and the flesh they ate in
chilmole
.
¹

Human sacrifice is a worldwide phenomenon, but nowhere else has it eve
r been recorded on the vast scale that was found among the Aztecs of central Mexico. In Aztec myth, the sun, Huitzilopochtli, was born when one of the gods leapt into a fire; afterward the other gods gave their blood to heal and feed this burning god. Aztec sacrifice reenacted the original sacrifice of the gods, and without new blood, the sun would die. In fact, most of the gods in the Aztec pantheon lived on human blood. Only Queztalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, opposed human sacrifice, but the other gods had forced him into exile.

The Aztecs were a warrior people above all else. They had emerged as a small tribe surrounded by hostile neighbors, but they fought their way outward and forged an empire stretching from sea to sea in central Mexico. To thank the gods for their good fortune, and to bribe them into continuing their favors, the Aztecs offered the blood of prisoners taken in battle.

In fact, the capture of sacrificial victims was so important that Aztec battle soon bent to that purpose. In these Flower Wars, Aztecs followed strict rules when attacking their neighbors, beginning by pleasantly negotiating with their enemies a time and place for the battle. Combat followed ancient rituals—a bonfire, music, dancing, and finally a massed charge. Fighting was face to face, hand to hand, with mostly nonlethal weapons because Aztecs preferred not to damage the merchandise. Enemies were pulled out of the line, bound, and dragged back to Tenochtitlan. Aztec warriors worked their way up the social hierarchy by capturing prisoners alive to be sacrificed.
²

The largest number of sacrifices took place in Tenochtitlan, a city built on islands in a lake, at the Great Temple dedicated to Huitzilopochtli, the god of the sun and war. Doped prisoners by the dozens or hundreds were marched up to the top of the pyramid. At the top, in view of the gods and the city, a team of priests each grabbed a limb or head and pulled the victim down. The sacrificial priest sawed out the prisoner’s beating heart with an obsidian knife and then burned it on the altar.
³

The priest then pushed the body down the stairs, where it was dismantled, jointed, cooked, and carved. The owner of the sacrificed prisoner got the choicest cuts of meat to be served at a family banquet, while a stew made from the leftovers fed the masses. Pumas, wolves, and jaguars in the zoo gnawed the bones.

Another ritual known as the Flaying of Men was held in honor of the god Xipe Totec. It began with an ordinary day of cutting out hearts atop a pyramid, after which the bodies were butchered for a family feast. The next day, an honored prisoner was tethered to a stone and given blunt weapons with which he would fight four Eagle and Jaguar Knights, who had sharp weapons so the outcome of the battle was never in doubt. After the prisoner was killed, the priests cut him open, and the celebrants ate him. His sponsor took a bowl of blood to all of the temples to paint the mouths of the idols. He would then wear the skin of the dead man for twenty days as it rotted away. Finally, the skin was ritually discarded in a cave at the temple and the celebrant was cleansed.

Children were sacrificed to Tl
aloc, the rain god. Babies born with certain physical characteristics on astrologically significant days were especially prized, but any child would do. Their throats were slit after the priest made them cry and collected their tears. Unlike other sacrifices, which were considered festive occasions, the Aztecs accompanied the killing of children with loud wailing, and the priests considered it a grim, dirty business. Aztecs avoided the places of child sacrifice whenever they could.
⁴

Women were sacrificed to the mothe
r goddess, Xilonen. The central woman in the ritual became the goddess and was beheaded as she danced. She was then skinned. Her heart was extracted and burned. A favored warrior wore her skin throughout the next year, and he became the goddess.
⁵

Victims dedicated to the Fire God, Xuihtecuhutli, were sedated and cast into a fire. Priests then hooked them—scorched but still alive—and hauled them out so their beating hearts could be excised.

If we’re looking for a single person to blame for the scale of Aztec sacrifice, a candidate would be Tlacaelel, chief adviser to three successive rulers. A Spanish chronicler reported that he “invented devilish, cruel and frightful sacrifices.”
⁶

Tlacaelel supervised the rededication of the Grand Temple for King Ahuitzotl in 1487 during which sacrificial victims lined up in four queues stretching out along the causeways that bound together the islands of Tenochtitlan. It took four teams four days to kill all of the prisoners as the blood pooled and clotted at the base of the pyramid. Later historians tried to turn these clues into an actu
al number, first arriving at some 80,000 victims, but nowadays calculated as 14,000 to 20,000.
⁷

Why So Many?

Aztec human sacrifice is so completely unfathomable that most scholars don’t even try to explain it. The Aztecs sacrificed people for religious reasons and that’s that. Among the few who try to find a secular cause for it, most prefer something similar to the reason for Roman gladiatorial games—a warrior people toughening themselves up while dehumanizing and demoralizing their enemies.

Every now and then, someone will try to connect Aztec sacrifice to the lack of domesticated food anima
ls in pre-Colombian America,
*
which would have sent the natives scrounging for an alternative source of protein. Small populations could hunt and fish wild animals, but in a region as densely populated as central Mexico, the only large animals in abundance were other people. To get to this protein, the Mexicans needed their gods’ permission to kill and eat their neighbors, so the Aztecs shared the hearts and blood with their gods and got to keep the meat for themselves.
⁸

This is the most sensible explanation for Aztec sacrifice and also the least popular. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find any authority anywhere who believes this theory.
⁹
But the so-called cannibal kingdom hypothesis has a good deal in its favor. For starters, why was history’s only urban culture without large food animals also the only urban culture that regularly ate human flesh? Why did history never produce rampant cannibalism in any urban culture that has goats, sheep, cattle, or pigs? Is this a mere coincidence?

Most scholars say yes and offer up numerous counter-arguments. They accuse the Spaniards of lying in order to justify conquering the savage heathens. They accuse Westerners of being unable to understand mysterious native folkways and explain that it was considered an honor to be given to the gods. They treat the statement that the Aztecs had no food animals as an insult to a perfectly nutritious cuisine that included bugs, lizards, and snails. Both anthropologists and vegetarians point out that meat is unnecessary for healthy living. Then everyone reminds us that the Spanish Inquisition killed people too, so who are
we
to condemn the Aztecs?
¹⁰

Why do so few writers look beyond “religious reasons” for a cause? I suspect that
trying
to explain Aztec sacrifice means that we
need
to explain it, which would imply that it is somehow abnormal, which might upset widely held views about native cultures. This might then lead us to accept outdated Eurocentric notions about heathen savages and the superiority of Western Christendom. It’s a slippery slope many scholars want to avoid.

However, the scale of Aztec human sacrifice was so far beyond most religious killings that it probably requires a special explanation. The Spanish Inquisition (32,000 killed)
¹¹
and the witch hunts (60,000 killed)
¹²
simply can’t compare to the Aztec sacrifice. Those European atrocities killed only enough enemies to make their point. The Aztecs went into overdrive. Even gladiatorial combat among the Romans killed at around half the annual rate as the Aztecs—and that was spread across a much larger area, among a population at least four times larger. Although human sacrifice was common in tribes and villages worldwide, most societies kept the numbers small and outgrew it as soon as they were forced to live close together in cities. The Chinese of the Shang dynasty, for example, sacrificed a mere 13,000 humans in 250 years (1300–1050 BCE).
¹³

Homicide tends to disrupt the cooperative and orderly behavior that society needs to function. Although I hesitate to generalize about
all
of the atrocities in this book, I’ve noticed that most mass killings either occur after societies break down or are directed against specific enemies on behalf of someone in power. Unnecessarily killing hundreds of thousands of random neighbors on the whim of invisible beings will rip a society apart, unless someone important is getting something very tangible out of it. I think it was meat.

Death Toll

The extent of human sacrifice under the Aztecs is the subject of rancorous debate, and many scholars contend that the whole thing has been exaggerated—no more than a handful they say, and only on big holidays.
¹⁴
But the evidence remains. The Aztecs proudly displayed the heads of their victims on public skull racks with neatly arranged and easily counted rows. The skull rack in Tenochtitlan held 136,000 skulls according to Spanish eyewitness Andres de Tapia. The skull rack in Xocotlan had over 100,000 skulls according to Spanish eyewitness Bernal Díaz. That’s almost a quarter of a million right there.
¹⁵