The movie, Apocalypto, was a pretty savage interpretation of the Aztec culture. People would wait in line and process up as a 4 people & a priest were at the top.

First of all, we have prehispanic codices that have survived. However, last semester I took a class on religion and culture (ANP 422 which I suggest to anyone interested in how theories of how religion interacts with culture have evolved over time or who has an interest in how culture and religion influence each other). In the Aztec world, everybody was involved in bloodletting. Near the end, he was taken out of the island city and led to climb a small pyramid, breaking his flutes on the ascent and then he was sacrificed. You’re right when you say that the goals of these rituals were to appease the gods, largely. It’s a particularly effective method of intimidating rivals and keeping your own people in line. Just look at the gladiator battles of Imperial Rome or the mass burials of servants and captives alongside Egyptian pharaohs and Chinese kings. Ritual human sacrifices were practiced well before the Aztecs came into the valley of Mexico in the first part of the 14th century. The practice of Aztec human sacrifice was not invented by the Aztecs but also existed in the previous Mesoamerican cultures. What we call the Aztecs only existed between 1325 and 1525. I remember learning extensively about the Aztecs in second grade. With the Aztecs perhaps being one of the most interesting groups of people I have had the opportunity to learn about. We do not know exactly who invented human sacrifice, but in Mesoamerican records before the Aztecs we have the Toltecs. Art historian Jeffrey Taylor on the documentation techniques in art forensics, types of paints and how can we use spectrum analysis to detect art forgeries, Meteorologist Chris Brierley on the Southern Oscillation, the background state of the Pacific Ocean and why it’s so hard to model El Niño, Professor of Philosophy of Science John Worrall on the scientific revolutions, falsifiability and what are the main features of a scientific hypothesis, Psychologist Lauren Stewart on congenital amusia, earworms and how music affects mental and physical health, Physicist Marzena Szymanska on the properties of photons, fluids of light and whether it’s possible to make a solid light, Historian Mark Jarzombek on the notion of seemingly primitive, worldwide evolution of the housing, and the fate of native populations in modern environment, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor for the Study of Latin America in the Faculty of Divinity and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University.

While it was long theorized that Aztecs only engaged in ritual cannibalism during times of famine, another explanation is that consuming the flesh of a person offered to the gods was like communing with the gods, themselves. That’s the reason why I think our generation is obsessed with zombies. Our coverage was extensive, we spent probably a month and a half discussing their culture, religion, technology, architecture, and of course the Spanish conquest.

For some reason whenever the topic of human sacrifice comes up, I always think of the movie El Dorado. The history of human sacrifice in Aztec culture. That is the period of time that we are talking about today. The Aztec believed that they owed everything to the gods who created themselves as well as the world around them. Never the less this was an interesting juxtaposition given the fact that most of the Aztec sacrifices were indeed captured warriors from neighboring tribes.

Overall, I thought this to be a very interesting and insightful post. That is the historic period of Aztec sacrifices. It is crazy to think that people were brainwashed to the point that they would give up their own life just to please an imaginary god.

It is gruesome to think of ancient Aztec kings ripping out the still beating heart of a prisoner and pushing them down the pyramid, but we still do it now.

According to Aztec cosmology, the sun god Huitzilopochtli was waging a constant war against darkness, and if the darkness won, the world would end.
Thirdly, we have eyewitnesses’ accounts of the Spaniards who saw the sacrifices taking place, sometimes sacrifices of Spaniards by Aztecs.

The only nearby analogue I can think of to this sort of ritual is the public hangings of the old west, but even that is not nearly as graphic in its depictions of human frailty and anatomy. From previous classes and independent research, I’ve come to understand that the sacrifices were performed in order to please the gods, and that there was great reverence and respect for any individual sacrificed, excluding slaves, prisoners, and criminals. Tribes were always competing with each other and each tribe needed to do what was best in order to survive and intimidate other tribes.

They surely must’ve been greatly feared by the surrounding civilizations, as it must have been well known that you would be sacrificed if you had gotten captured by the Aztecs. Moreover, we have sculptures that show sacrifice, and we have other kinds of ritual objects used in sacrifice. In seconds, a priest with an obsidian knife broke open his chest and ripped out his still beating heart, dashing it against the sacrificial stone.” (pg. He reigned for many years, and during his time the empire expanded. To give your heart to Huitzilopochtli was a tremendous honor and a guaranteed ticket to a blessed afterlife fighting in the sun god’s army against the forces of darkness. This is a very interesting and well written post!

So, the only choice they had was to sacrifice the humans for him.

Reading these accounts hundreds of years later, many historians dismissed the 16th-century reports as wildly exaggerated propaganda meant to justify the murder of Aztec emperor Moctezuma, the ruthless destruction of Tenochtitlán and the enslavement of its people. Once they reached the top, the priest would cut open their stomach from throat to stomach. It was a part of their religion and a way to please the gods so the Aztecs would avoid disaster. But in 2015 and 2018, archeologists working at the Templo Mayor excavation site in Mexico City discovered proof of widespread human sacrifice among the Aztecs—none other than the very skull towers and skull racks that conquistadors had described in their accounts. The Aztec sacrifice rituals are a great topic of interest to Archaeologists, especially when one considers how in an empire of such magnificence, such acts of barbarism occurred. Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. No amount of human sacrifice could have stopped their collapse at the hands of the Spaniards. There are some records of a few sacrifices taking place after the Spaniards arrive, but the state sponsored ritual sacrifices end in the first ten years after the arrival of the Spaniards. An Aztec priest removing a man's heart during a sacrificial ritual, offering it to the god Huitzilopochtli.

I just love the idea that the roads weren’t pave with anything more substantial than water.

Human sacrifice also served another purpose in the expanding Aztec empire of the 15th and 16th century: intimidation. Then the Spaniards replaced it with their own kind of violence. “The victim was stretched out over the sacrificial stone.
They did this to any random person. Human sacrifice as shown in the Codex Magliabechiano (wikipeadia.org). At a first glance, it seems like such a distant ritual compared to how we behave in the modern world, but I believe that it is still very real. Perhaps archaic acts like mass sacrifice were a contributing factor to the civilizations eventual collapse. You are forced to look at other examples in history. The would perform sacrifices in order for a good crop yield or good weather among other things.

In the diary, there’s a drawing of a skull rack holding the heads of women, heavily bearded men, and horses. This process is appalling by today’s standards. Even though all of the people that they were sacrificing were prisoners, it seemed that the Aztecs put a relatively low value on human life in comparison to that of the gods. In addition to slicing out the hearts of victims and spilling their blood on the temple altar, it’s believed that the Aztecs also practiced a form of ritual cannibalism. There were many different civilizations in ancient times that would use the act of sacrifice, but the Aztecs were by far the most extreme case. Chapter 13 of the assigned readings talks about the Aztec and how they came to power and their collapse. They chose a person whom they considered to be the most handsome male. More than 650 skulls and thousands of fragments found near Templo Mayor. One interesting parallel is that as the empire expands, the size of the Great Aztec Temple also expands and human sacrifice increases.

Whichever team ended up being sacrificed supposedly viewed this decision as one of the most important and respected ways to die, besides dying in battle. Verano says that these battles provided an important venue for young Aztec warriors to gain social status by bringing home a gaggle of captives, some of whom would ultimately be sacrificed. Aztec warriors as shown in the Florentine Codex (wikipedia.org). In one ritual, the prisoners were forced to walk up the many stairs of the temple. The rationale for Aztec human sacrifice was, first and foremost, a matter of survival. I all of the assigned readings in the textbook, but really didn’t give that part of the reading much thought. It happened all over the world in several different cultures. By the late 15th century, the Aztecs had won control over large swaths of central and southern Mexico. However, the sight of human sacrifice quickly made Spanish conquerors view the Aztecs as nothing more than devil worshiping savages. Obviously, being in second grade required a skirting around many of the more brutal elements of the religious ritual. The Aztec theology justified ritual human sacrifice in the following terms. This huge amount of sacrifices really shows how massive of a civilization the Aztecs used to be. For one year he lived in the Aztec city as a god. One reason to look at Aztec sacrifices is to see if there are any keys to the human proclivity for ritual violence, repeated wars, to violence against people of colour, to the way women are often treated violently. Before they got word from Cortes, however, they were ambushed in the night by an elite group of Aztec warriors. So human sacrifice was a widespread practice in Mesoamerica from very early on in the rise of urban civilization.

Why did they carry out such brutal ceremonies? Some offerings weren’t outright killings as well. They had a formula on this month of what the male sacrificial victim would look like. Similar to many of the previous comments I have always been interested in the rituals observed by ancient people.

We do not call them “gods” and in most cases, these killings are distanced from religious ritual, but they still happen! When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his men arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1521, they described witnessing a grisly ceremony. All of these things did happen but it is important to remember that for the Aztecs the act of sacrifice - of which human sacrifice was only a part - was a strictly … Human bodies had two selves: there were a shell and a divine spark which was deposited by divinities at the time of conception. An Atztec human sacrifice atop the Mesoamerican temple pyramid.