John Verano , an anthropology professor at Tulane University, explains the practice held spiritual significance for the Aztecs. Large and small human sacrifices would be made throughout the year to coincide with important calendar dates, he explains, to dedicate temples, to reverse drought and famine, and more.
The rationale for Aztec human sacrifice was, first and foremost, a matter of survival. According to Aztec cosmology, the sun god Huitzilopochtli was waging a constant war against darkness, and if the darkness won, the world would end. The keep the sun moving across the sky and preserve their very lives, the Aztecs had to feed Huitzilopochtli with human hearts and blood.
More than skulls and thousands of fragments found near Templo Mayor. Human sacrifice also served another purpose in the expanding Aztec empire of the 15th and 16th century: intimidation. The ritual killing of war captives and the large-scale displaying of skulls were visceral reminders of the strength of the empire and the extent of its dominion. DNA tests of recovered victims from the Templo Mayor site show that the vast majority of those sacrificed were outsiders, likely enemy soldiers or slaves.
Verano says that across history and cultures, the rise of ritual human sacrifice often coincides with the emergence of complex societies and social stratification. The theoretical underpinning of this new program of mass sacri- fice lay in the need to feed the sun with human bodies and thus ensure the stability of the cosmos. According to the version of the creation myth that the hierarchy told during the imperial era, the world was in darkness for 52 years following the destruction of the previous fourth age.
The gods then gathered around a fire to determine which of them would perform the necessary act of self-sacrifice in order to create the fifth sun, the beginning of our present fifth age.
One god volunteered, throwing himself into the fire. Thus the wind god sacrificed all the others and then violently blew on the sun, setting it in motion along a straight path. Because the gods sacrificed themselves to give strength to the sun, humans are eternally indebted to the gods and must keep the sun-god alive by continually feeding it with human blood. It is especially significant here that all of the gods in the story sacrifice themselves, suggesting that there is no limit on how much sacrifice from which the sun can benefit Carrasco 79— A more explicitly militaristic myth explains the origin of the patron deity of the Aztecs, Huitzilopochtli.
This news worries Coatlicue, but the child she is carrying as a result of this divine conception, Huitzilopochtli, comforts her with the as-surance that he knows what to do. He dresses as a warrior and then decapitates Coyolxauhqui, sending her body rolling down the hill, and finishes the job by chasing down and destroying the other four hundred gods Carrasco 60— Just as their patron deity defeated his multitudinous foes gathered from neighboring lands by dismembering them upon the hill Coatepec, the Aztecs sought victory by taking captives from enemy city-states to sacrifice on top of the Templo Mayor.
To the side of the priests at the bottom lay a stone greater than ten feet in diameter depicting the dismembered body of Coyolxauhqui, serving as a symbol of the divine play they were reenacting Carrasco 63— As Rappaport argues in his work on ritual theory, Ritual and Reli- gion in the Making of Humanity , creation myths are not so much about the production of substance as they are about the informing of substance We see this clearly in our present discussion: the Aztec creation myths ignore questions such as the origin of matter or how Huitzilopochtli happened to be born as a physically mature man, and instead generate powerful relationships between the gods and the Aztecs whom the gods created and favored.
Their myths make it clear that they must imitate the actions of the gods and reciprocate in the life-giving act of human sacrifice. Thus, by turning unlimited human sacrifice into a cosmological imperative, the Aztec elite not only legitimized but also drove their agenda of imperial expansion.
In order to fuel nationalism even further, they elevated Huitzilopochtli, previously a relatively minor figure, to a central position of the Aztec pantheon and associated him primarily with war and the sun, claiming themselves as the chosen people who honored and fed their god through warfare and sacrifice Conrad and Demarest The codices even go to the point of indicating that sac- rifice also nourished the king Wolf Imperialism not only directly expanded the power of the state, but also fed the economy through the increasing influx of tribute into the city.
In fact, tribute was a crucial element of the Aztec economy that greatly influenced patterns of imperial expansion. Military expeditions targeted resource-heavy regions Wolf , and religious leaders con- sidered members of the ethnic groups inhabiting those regions to be especially desirable for sacrifice, while other ethnic groups were wholly unfit Wolf One might object that the goals of feeding the sun and glorifying the state are too abstract to serve by themselves as sufficient motivation for individual warriors.
The warriors personally handed over their captives when the day for sacrifice came, and after the captive was slain, the captor took part of the body for a ceremonial feast in which family and friends celebrated his rise in social status Conrad and Demarest Correspondingly, given such a militaris- tic ideology, a warrior had little incentive to restrain himself in battle.
The Aztecs believed that up to this point there had been five ages of the world and that they were living in the fifth age, and that is how this incarnation of humanity came to be. Human sacrifice was intended to pay back the debt that was formed when the gods let blood from themselves to create the world.
It was kind of like feeding the gods. Essentially, it was an altruistic act — human sacrifice was necessary for all of humanity. This was a communal response to a collective debt. A: In theory, there were some voluntary victims of human sacrifice. The majority of victims were people mostly men, but sometimes women and children captured in war.
Some of them were sacrificed as generic victims — if they needed to sacrifice say five people. Some were sacrificed as impersonators of the gods, known as ixiptla ; they took on the mantle of a god and were killed in honour of the gods they were impersonating. These ixiptla formed a prominent part of the regular festivals. Children were sacrificed in particular for Tlaloc, the rain god. These children were mostly from within the Aztec group — they came from Tenochtitlan , the ancient capital of the Aztec empire.
We know that if you were born with a double cowlick — those flicks that make your hair go in the wrong direction — then you were destined to become a sacrificial victim. There is some talk about whether if, when a child like this was born, especially in a culture with a high infant-mortality rate, you might have been able to kind of mentally distance from them.
0コメント