Slight nitpick–Aztecs didn’t really have what we’d consider to be a written language enough to support documents. Maya did and the Spanish destroyed nearly every bit of it they could find. (The Maya buried whatever they could, but guess what happens to parchment when you bury it…)
I recall reading that about a tribe in the New Guinea part of the world, in The Power of Myth.
Not sure if I still have a copy.
Thanks for the links. It just sounds so fantastic-can you imagine holding somebody down, and slicing him open with stone knives? Blood spurting everywhere, with the victim screaming his head off-and ripping a still beating heart out?
The whole thing would make me sick-and these priests did it daily?
I suppose humans are capable of such cruelty-but this sounds over the top.
There is no over-the-top when it comes to human cruelty.
I know - it does sound fantastic!
Actually - many, many, many times an hour, not just daily. It was assembly-line human butchery.
Most victims did not scream or flail about. From Wiki:
Being a sacrificial victim was considered an honorable way to die, and a death that was a quick way to heaven:
As has been mentioned, they sometimes did it many times a day:
However, even the lowest figure means victims were sacrificed at a rate of better than one every minute and a half over the course of the four days, assuming they continued day and night.
On ritual days, though; I don’t think even the Aztecs were guilty of around the clock, 365-days-a-year sacrifices.
On the other hand, the beating-heart sacrifice with obsidian knives to the Sun God thing wasn’t the only thing they had going on. Nor to Tlaloc the Rain God they sacrificed with fire… Living children. Who were made to cry first, as their tears were considered propitious. As gruesome as stabbing and removing the beating heart of a criminal or defeated warrior, I have to say that this seems worse.
As for the “wear the skin of a flayed man” ritual, it was in honor of the Flayed God, Xipe Totec. The Wikipedia article I linked to there has a picture of a statue of the god in his flayed form which is kinda stomach churning. The religious story is that he flayed himself to bring agriculture to humans. (It doesn’t appear that the victims were flayed alive, but were sacrificed first in other ritual ways, and then the skin used for the Xipe Totec rituals.)
Assuming there are Neo-Pagan revivals of the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican religions, I wonder how far they go to recreate some of these rituals… I know Asatru revivalists of Old Norse gods are known to do animal sacrifices.
I remember reading my high school’s AP World History book that basically said that many of the Aztecs’ human sacrifices actually WERE voluntary. Their religious beliefs told of the Sun god and other various gods occasionally sacrificing themselves for the Aztecs, so the Aztecs in turn sacrificed themselves to give more energy, blood, and life to the gods. In this way the Aztecs found it a HUGE honor to be sacrificed for the gods in this way. I remember the book mentioning instances in which Aztecs who were designated to be sacrificed actually willingly walked up the pyramid steps by themselves all the way to the altar where they would shortly have their hearts cut out and have their bodies pushed down the side of the pyramid. This is similar to how the winning teams of their ball game, ullamaliztli, were sacrificed also. The members of the winning team were sacrificed in honor to the gods. Both were believed to be honorable deaths.
Of course there were many other rituals during the year where people were forced to be sacrificed completely unwillingly. For example, the daily sacrifice to the sun god (for the sun to come up the next day) always used captured peoples. The Aztecs and surrounding city states and empires that shared the same culture and religious beliefs actually left certain villages and cities undefended for “flower wars” where the empires’ armies would go and steal hundreds of people to be sacrificed over time. This book also mentioned certain holidays that occurred annually or every couple of years where literally dozens or in some cases, several hundred people would be sacrificed over the span of a day or a few days in the celebrations.
Has no-one seen **Apocalypto ** ?
Of course the sacrifices were real, movies never lie 
You may wish to check this out; it also airs tonight on PBS’s Secrets of the Dead (check local listings): Aztec Massacre | About the Episode | Secrets of the Dead | PBS
What a spectacle! Imagine the horror.
I still can’t imagine reaching in to someone’s innards, and ripping out the heart!
I would say that in 2010 we can all look around and find plenty of evidence that some people will willingly and eagerly die, and even go to great patient lengths to do so, if they’re offered a profound religious motivation for doing so.
I remember reading that when the first crusade took Jerusalem they slaughtered pretty much the entire population, blood ran ankle deep in the gutters.
These days we have humans choosing to sacrifice themselves for religion on the news almost every fuckin’ night. What’s so hard to believe
And that there are even more people willing and eager to kill, if they’re offered a patriotic motivation for doing so.
[Moderating]
Let’s stick to the question in the OP, please, and not extend this to current events. If you want to explore that, please open a thread in GD.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
One method sacrifice was used on enemy warriors captured in battle. The captive was dressed up as an Aztec mythical character (I forget which) and then led out to a fighting area. There, one of his feet was secured to the ground, but otherwise left free. He was given a club covered with bright feathers and had to fight a local warrior. If he dispatched his foe, another was brought up and the fight continued until the captive was dead. The Aztecs believed that the more guys he beat before dying, the better the sacrifice.
The stone knives thing conjures up a pretty gruesome and ineffective “hacking and stabbing” image, but if the Aztecs used obsidian for the knifes, as robardin claims, keep in mind that obsidian can be used to make very very sharp knives indeed, even with extremely primitive technology (and a lot of skill). according to Wiki, it’s being used today for surgical scalpels.
Quite so; obsidian produces edges down to one molecule thick at the edge, around 200 times as sharp as the finest surgical steel. That edge doesn’t last long under use, but for instruments used during a single surgery and then discarded that’s not an obstacle.
(I’ve knapped stone tools myself, and can speak from bloody personal experience on how terribly sharp stone flakes can be.)
While Aztecs may have been willing to die, I highly doubt the many captives conquered in the various Feather Wars were so pleased. Aside from the fact that many came from distinct cultures and societies, IIRC their leadership was extremely anti-Aztec.