An aura of lurid
fascination surrounds our interest in the Aztecs, the people
who, at the beginning of the 16th century, inhabited one of the
largest cities of the world: Tenochtitlan. In 1521, this
metropolis was erased from the face of the Earth by the Spanish
conquerors under Hernando Cortes and his Indian allies. As a
justification for their destructive acts, the conquistadors
generated propaganda designed to offend the sensibilities of
their Christian audience: They described the Aztec practice of
human sacrifice. Later chronicles by Spanish writers,
missionaries, and even Indian converts also told repeatedly of
this cult. Even when scientists called these reports grossly
exaggerated, the fact that the Aztecs sacrificed humans remained
undisputed. Cutting out the victim's heart with an obsidian
knife [fashioned from volcanic glass] was supposedly the most
common method of sacrifice, although other forms were practiced
as well. These included beheading, piercing with spears or
arrows, and setting victims against each other in unequal duels.
We are also told that some victims were literally skinned alive;
a priest then donned this macabre "skin suit" to perform a
ritual dance.
There has been no shortage of theories and explanations
for what lay behind these archaic cults. Some researchers have
deemed them religious rituals. Others have called them displays
of repressed aggression and even a method of regulating
population. Although human sacrifice has been the subject of
much writing, there has been almost no critical examination of
the sources of information about it. A critical review is
urgently needed.
Bernal Diaz del Castillo is the classic source of
information about mass sacrifice by the Aztecs. A literate
soldier in Cortes' company, Diaz claimed to have witnessed such
a ritual. "We looked over toward the Great Pyramids and watched
as [the Aztecs] ... dragged [our comrades] up the steps and
prepared to sacrifice them," he wrote in his Historia Verdadera
de la Conquista de la Nueva Espana (The True History of the
Conquest of New Spain), published posthumously in 1632. "After
they danced, they placed our comrades face up atop square,
narrow stones erected for the sacrifices. Then, with obsidian
knives, they sawed their breasts open, pulled out their
still-beating hearts, and offered these to their idols."
The scene of these sacrificial rituals was the main
temple in the island-city of Tenochtitlan. The observers,
however, were watching from their camp on the shore of a lake
three or four miles away. From that point, Diaz could have
neither seen nor heard anything. To follow the action at the
foot of the pyramid, he would have to have been inside the
temple grounds. But this would have been impossible: The Aztecs
had just beaten back the Spanish and their allies, who had been
besieging the city from all sides.
But Diaz is not the inventor of the legend of ritual
murder. Cortes fathered the lie in 1522, when he wrote a shorter
version of the tale to Emperor Charles V. He would have been
confident that his reports would find ready ears, for in the
15th and 16th centuries many lies were being spread in Spain
about ritual murders carried out by the Jews, who were being
expelled from the Iberian peninsula along with the Moors.
Cortes' lies were a tremendous success: They have endured for
almost 500 years without challenge. Along with the lies of the
conquistadors, there also have been secondhand reports--what
could be called "hearsay evidence"--in the writings of Spanish
missionaries and their Indian converts, who, in their new-found
zeal, scorned their old religion. The accounts are filled with
vague and banal phrases such as, "And thus they sacrificed,"
which indicates that the writers cannot have witnessed a real
human sacrifice.
The only concrete evidence comes to us not from the
Aztecs but from the Mayan civilization of the Yucatan. These
depictions are found in the records of trials conducted during
the Inquisition, between 1561 and 1565. These supposed
testimonies about human sacrifice, however, were coerced from
the Indians under torture and have been judged worthless as
ethnographic evidence.
Along with the written accounts, many archeological
finds--sculptures, frescoes, wall paintings, and
pictographs--have been declared by the Spanish, their Indian
converts, and later anthropologists to be connected to human
sacrifice. Yet these images are in no way proof that humans were
in fact sacrificed.
Until now, scientists have started from a position of
believing the lies and hearsay reports and interpreting the
archeological evidence accordingly. The circularity of such
reasoning is obvious. There are plenty of possible
interpretations of the images of hearts and even killings in
these artifacts. They could depict myths or legends. They could
present narrative images--allegories, symbols, and metaphors.
They could even be images of ordinary executions or murders.
Human bones that appear to have been cut also do not serve as
evidence of human sacrifice. In tantric Buddhism, skulls and leg
bones are used to make musical instruments used in religious
rituals; this is in no way connected to human sacrifice.
Leslie J. Furst, a student of symbols used by the
Aztecs, has seen depictions of magic where others have seen
tales of human sacrifice. For example, one image shows the
incarnation of a female god "beheaded" in the same way that a
plant's blossom is removed in the ritual connected to the making
of pulque, an alcoholic drink. Why scholars have interpreted
images of self-beheadings and other things that depart from
physical reality as evidence of human sacrifice will puzzle
future generations.
There is another important symbolic background for
images of killing in Aztec artifacts: the initiation ceremony,
whose central event is the mystical death. The candidate "dies"
in order to be reborn. This "death" in imaginary or symbolic
forms often takes on a dramatic shape in imagery--such as being
chopped to pieces or swallowed by a monster. There has been no
research into the symbolism of death in the high culture of the
Indians of Mesoamerica, however, even though there were many
reincarnation myths among these peoples.
The ritual of "human skinning" surely belongs in this
same category. In our depictions, we see the skin removed
quickly from the victim, with a single cut along the spine, and
coming off the body in a single piece. This is scarcely
practicable. This "human skin suit" may be nothing but a
metaphorical-symbolic representation, as indeed is appropriate
for the image-rich Aztec language. And all of the heart and
blood symbolism may be just a metaphor for one of the Aztecs'
favorite drinks, made from cacao.
The heart is a symbolically important organ in more
than just European cultures. In the Indian languages, as well,
it is a symbol of courage and the soul. And "cutting the soul
from the body," after all, is not a surgical operation. This may
explain why no massive catacombs with what would have been the
bones of sacrifice victims have ever been found in Mesoamerica.
After careful and systematic study of the sources, I
find no sign of evidence of institutionalized mass human
sacrifice among the Aztecs. The phenomenon to be studied,
therefore, may be not these supposed sacrifices but the deeply
rooted belief that they occurred.
Copyright World
Press Review Dec 1992
From the liberal weekly "Die Zeit" of Hamburg. Peter Hassler, an
ethnologist at the University of Zurich, is the author of "Human
Sacrifice Among the Aztecs? A Critical Study", published in
Switzerland.
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