| Sacred Hearts |
by Gregg Thompson
Setting out to conquer Mexico in 1519 Hernando Cortés was prepared for almost anything, but what he saw as he approached the Aztec capital stunned the Spanish captain: 100,000 human skulls symmetrically arranged on poles, gruesome testament to the Aztec practice of human sacrifice.
Gazing out like “infernal dice,” the skulls´ sinister grins and hollow eye sockets left many of Cortés´ 500 conquistadors in a state of bewildered terror. Imagining their own heads mounted there, they wondered: Had they come too far?
Cortés and his band of adventurers had arrived in the land of Montezuma in search of gold, glory and Christian converts. But the skulls´ deathly stares now told them they had found something else: an empire so fearsome and so powerful it could command sacrificial death at will.
For the devoutly Catholic Spaniards the reality of human sacrifice was an incomparable outrage. “To my manner of thinking, there is no other kingdom on earth…where the devil has been
so honoured,” wrote one conquistador, while Cortés, in a letter to King Charles V suggested that “Your Royal Highness consider… whether (he) should not put an end to such evil practices, for certainly Our Lord God would be well pleased if…these people were initiated and instructed in our Holy Catholic Faith.”
Cortés didn’t´t wait for a response from his sovereign before taking action. In a 21-month military campaign that on two occasions he nearly lost, Cortés conquered the Aztecs and shredded the social and religious fabric of their civilisation. Stone-by-stone he levelled the Aztec capital, especially targeting religious temples; Cortés knew Aztec religion was the motivating force behind human sacrifice .
Dominated by haunting superstitions and dark phobias, Aztec religion was perceived as a creed “born not of hope but of anxiety.” The Aztecs believed that for the universe to survive human beings had to die, sacrificed so that others might live. Their religion was a function of that belief — the spiritual reflection of a society that viewed itself on the eve of extinction. Ancient religious belief held that the Aztec world passed through five ages, or Suns. The gods had already ordained the destruction of the first four Suns by means of natural disasters; each Sun was named after the cataclysm that had destroyed it. The Fifth Sun, governing the Aztec universe at the time of the Spanish Conquest, was named World of Motion. Aztec prophesy revealed that the Fifth Sun – enveloping the entire Aztec universe — would disappear in the near future, demolished by an earthquake.
Forestalling the collapse of the Fifth Sun was the critical mission of a powerful corps of Aztec priests, whose task it was to placate the gods and stave off the apocalypse. Appeasing the gods entailed the giving of gifts, and the ultimate gift was the gift of human life itself, represented literally by the heart of a living human being, “in an act recognising that blood is the sacred life-force” of humankind.
The 13 major deities of the Aztec pantheon were ever demanding, their appetite for sacred hearts insatiable. Most exacting of all were the god-figures Huitzilopochtli, omnipotent god of War; Tlaloc, all-important Rain god, and the Sun god Tonatiuh. (Tonatiuh is the figure centering the 10-peso coin, his extended tongue represented by the obsidian knife used for sacrifices; on either side of his face are claws clutching human hearts.)
Death on an Aztec sacrificial altar was a brutal affair, according to the conquistadors who witnessed it. In his letter to King Charles V, Cortés described how victims of sacrifice met their end: “…they (Aztec priests) open their chests (of victims) while they are still alive and take out their hearts…and burn them before the idols… Some of us have seen this, and…it is the most terrible and frightful thing…ever witnessed.”
The victim, adorned in the insignia of the god for whom he was to die, was marched to the top of a pyramidal temple where Aztec priests, with uncut fingernails and hair matted in blood, stretched him over a convex stone altar. Accompanied by the shrill hoots of conch-shell trumpets and the booming of drums, the chief priest cut open the victim´s chest with a decorated obsidian knife and removed the still-throbbing heart. After offering it to the sun the heart was placed in a smouldering brazier. The corpse was beheaded and the remains tossed down the steep sides of the temple. On some occasions portions of the bodies were consumed in acts of ritual cannibalism. Worshippers chanted hymns and swayed through it all; sacrifices were very public events.
Victims were usually men, but women and even children were sent as tribute payments by tribes subject to the Aztecs. Preferred victims, however, were prisoners-of-war, taken not only in Aztec wars of conquest but also in “flower wars,” ceremonial military contests fought between tribes. In a flower war, the intent was to capture the enemy rather than kill him; the captives were then used for later sacrifice. The number and military rank of prisoners captured in battle by an Aztec warrior, not his number of kills, determined his standing within the tribe. (This tactic of capture proved disastrous for the Aztecs in their battles with the conquistadors, who fought to kill, and for whom prisoners were a burden.) Flower wars assured the tribe a steady supply of prisoners for sacrifice, while avoiding the dislocating chaos of formal warfare.
The Aztec practice of sacrifice was not new to human experience – sacrificial rites can be traced far back in history, from India through Mesopotamia to ancient Greece, Rome and parts of Europe. Most North American Indian tribes practised the rite, as had the peoples of earlier “Mexican” empires, including the Toltecs and the Maya. But nowhere, some scholars claim, was human sacrifice as organised and as culturally entrenched as with the Aztecs. Historian Hugh Thomas notes that “…in numbers, in the elevated sense of ceremony which accompanied the theatrical shows involved, as in its significance in the official religion, human sacrifice in Mexico was unique.”
Surprisingly, the concept of sacrifice was widely accepted in Amerindian culture. Despite its cruel practice there were no malicious or hateful notions attached to the rite (unlike the Christian practice of burning “heretics” at the stake). Victims went to their deaths, if not willingly, with dignity intact; panic and loss of control before the knife was rare. The Amerindian world view held that an individual´s life on earth was of little consequence — his final contribution to the greater society counted most. To die for the tribe, in battle or by sacrifice, was a singular honour; how a man died mattered more than how he lived.
For the Aztecs, the means of human sacrifice were clearly justified by the ends achieved. Its purpose – the preservation of society — was well served. The gods, obviously pleased by their received heart offerings, allowed in their benevolence for the Aztec empire to not only survive but thrive. Driven by the beat of human sacrifice, the Fifth Sun burned on, fuelled by the blood of thousands.
February 2004 |
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