Questioning the Validity of Aztec Sacrifices: A Mini-Essay

     In December of 2007, historian Ocelocoatl Ramírez conducted a lecture titled El mito del sacrificio humano at the Center for Training and Careers in San José.[1] In his presentation, Ramírez, building on the theories of Fernández Gatica, Meza Gutiérrez, and Lira Montes de Oca, proposes the human sacrifices related by Hernán Cortés and other Spanish conquistadors were merely fabricated propaganda used to vilify the Mexica and encourage government-sanctioned enslavement and eradication of these people.[2] Although the concept of Ramírez and his fellow scholars provide an intriguing stance on human sacrifices among the Mexica (and hold parallels to Roman preoccupation with Celtic sacrifices), surviving Mexica art and literature, coupled with archeological evidence, attest to sacrifices done daily to Huitzilopochtli, the god of the sun and warfare, to protect the civilization from darkness and famine.[3] Typically war captives, victims were either drugged on peyote or intoxicated with pulque at dawn on the day of their execution. Dragged up the steps of the Tenochtitlán temples, including the two-hundred-foot-tall Pyramid of the Sun, those meant for sacrifice were stretched across a stone block, held down by four priests, and had their still-beating hearts ripped out of their chests by a fifth priest yielding an obsidian blade.[4] After the heart, which the priests referred to as a cactus flower, was offered to keep the darkness away, it was ceremoniously burned, the body was dismantled (the torso was fed to dogs and the appendages were ritualistically eaten with chili and maize), and the blood was sprinkled throughout the city to ward off evil entities.[5]

Works Referenced

Colín, Ernesto. Indigenous Education through Dance and Ceremony: A Mexica Palimpsest. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Cummins, Joseph. The World’s Bloodiest History: Massacre, Genocide, and the Scars They Left on Civilization. New York: Crestline, 2013.
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[1] Colín, 206-217.
[2] Colín, 206-217.
[3] Cummins, 27.
[4] Cummins, 27.
[5] Cummins, 27.