Human Sacrifice as the Epitome of Barbarity

The Greeks and Romans considered human sacrifice xénos, the epitome of barbarity and consequently the object of a double repudiation: spatial (of the barbarian periphery) and temporal (of the earliest times and the Golden Age, now superseded by historical times). While for the barbarians their practice of human sacrifice was inherent to local customs and standard practice, legal and even sacred, integrated into their political systems and ancestral traditions, in the Hellenic world it had always been presented as an extreme solution of the past, when the polis’s institutions stopped functioning and when the Greeks faced total elimination. Since the Greeks could not recall that their forebears had resorted to human sacrifice without aversion, they inevitably justified it as a result of oracular instruction. A pattern thus arose which would remain widespread until the Hellenistic-Roman period: fault → calamity → oracle → human sacrifice as a last resort to try to overcome an extreme situation (Bonnechere, 1994). Be that as it may, the historian observes in the ancient Greek world a marked disparity between the scarcity of human sacrifices in ritual and their proliferation in myth and iconography (Hughes, 1991).4

Of the seventeen passages from Herodotus on human sacrifice, only one (Hdt. 7.197: Athamas of Thessaly) concerns Greece. Even this case, however, discusses a rather marginal space in Greek civilization, Thessaly, a world significantly associated with magical practices. The wealth of detail provided in the foreign examples—Scythian, Egyptian, Punic—contrasts, furthermore, with the brevity of the passage about Greece. As Henrichs (1980, p. 197) points out, the well-known descriptions, despite their heterogeneity, have one thing in common: their extent and the degree of detail are in inverse proportion to their reality and historical credibility.5

The Greek literary sources present a dominant paradigm: that of the sacrifice and offering of the parthenos [virgin]. Loraux (1982) has indicated that the women were given a “sacrificial death” (figure 3.1), in counterpoint to the masculine death on the field of battle.6 In this respect, the contrast could not be clearer with human sacrifices in the Mesoamerican world, where the typical victim was male rather than female, although rituals where women were sacrificed are known as īīxiptlah [divine image] of the goddesses Toci and Chicomecoatl, which we know from Friar Diego Durán (Chávez Balderas 2010, p. 319).

The Greek sources, then, present human sacrifice as the inverse of their normative system, something ánomos, illegal. The picture is relatively similar in the Roman world. Here, the texts contain mythical sacrifices to Saturn (Dion. Hal. 1.38.2), Vulcan (Fest. 274L; Varro Ling. 6.20), and Mania, mother of the Lares (Macrob. Sat. 1.7.34). The dialogue that Ovid relates between Numa and Jupiter (Arn. Adv. nat. 5.1; Ov. Fast. 3; Plut. Num. 15.14) reflects both the cruelty of the Romans’ supreme god and the magistrate’s wish to exercise his liberty as the representative of the community overcoming the practice of human sacrifice. There are also traditions such as that of the sexagenarii de ponte: each year a sixty-year-old man was thrown from the bridge into the Tiber (Cic. Rosc. Am., 35.100; Fest. 66L) as a victim of Dis Pater (Fest. 450L), a tradition that was said to have been subdued by Herakles when he passed through Rome and of which an echo remained in the ceremony of the Argei (Marcos Casquero, 1987).

Hellenistic works like those by Istros and Monimus that contained information about human sacrifices have not been preserved, but among all the references to human sacrifice as the systematic mark of barbarity, a few well-known cases stand out in the information provided by Cicero on the Tauri from Pontus, Busiris in Egypt, the Gauls, and the Carthaginians (Cic. Rep. 3.13–15); Plutarch on the Gauls, the Scythians, and the Carthaginians (Plut. De superst. 13.171 B–D); and other late antique authors like Porphyry (Abst. 2.53, 3–56, 10) and the Christian authors Clemens Alexandrinus (Clem. Al. Protr. 3.42), Athenagoras (Leg. 26.2), Tertullian (Tert. Apol. 9.5), Minucius Felix (Min. Fel. Oct. 6.1), Origen (C. Cels. 5.27), and Lactantius (Lactant. Div. inst., 1.21.2). The Lemnians, Cypriots, Cimbri, Lusitanians, and Albanoi complete the list of the barbarians practicing human sacrifice, as well as the nomadic outlaws of Greek novels (Frankfurter, 2011, p. 77, note 11, with references).

Thus, the Greco-Latin authors present these practices of human sacrifice as typical of the barbarian peoples, or, when found in their own world, belonging to past times (although in Cyprus they persisted until Hadrian’s rule). In any case, these savage rites would have been eradicated by the civilizing actions of Rome, which, we are told, suppressed the human sacrifices performed by the Druids (figure 3.2) in the times of Augustus, Tiberius, and Claudius (Plin. NH, 30.13; Suet. Claud. 25). In contrast with this picture painted by the Greco-Latin sources, however, the reality is very different. Not only did human sacrifice not constitute the cornerstone of the Celts’ religious systems, but it was instead an exceptional recourse in situations of extreme distress (Aldhouse-Green, 2018; Marco Simón, 1999). Human sacrifice happened among the Romans themselves, who were willing to sacrifice a pair of Greeks and another of Gauls by burying them alive in the Forum Boarium in crisis situations in 228, 216, and 114–113 BCE, in practices that I have interpreted in terms of piaculum [expiatory offering], devotio hostium [devotion to the enemy], and obligamentum magicum [magical obligation] (Marco Simón, 2019).

In contrast to the story of the apotheosis of Romulus (Enn. Ann. 112–116; Livy 1.16, etc.), other versions speak of his death and dismemberment by the senators (Dion. Hal. 2.56; Flor. 1.1.17; Plut. Rom. 27; Val. Max. 5.3.1), giving a mythical sociogenic slant to the mytheme of cosmogonic sacrifice of a primordial being present in other Indo-European spheres in the figures of Ymir, Tuisto, and Yama (Puhvel, 1987, pp. 284–290). Various sources also transmit the murder of Remus at the hands of his brother, in what undoubtedly constitutes an example of foundational sacrifice (Bauopfer) (Wiseman, 1995). The embarrassment that this ritual death caused the Romans, by contrast, gave the Christians an opportunity to attack. Justin Martyr (Justin. Apol. 28.2.8) describes the reaction of the Aetolians in 293 BCE: “What kind of people are the Romans? . . . they even founded their city with the death of one of their own, and drenched the foundation of their walls with the blood of a brother.” This text is practically identical to Lucan’s passage “fraterno primi maduerunt sanguine muri” [the first walls were impregnated with fraternal blood] (Luc. Phars. 1.95), as well as Propertius’s “caeso moenis firma Remo” [the firm walls with the dead/fallen Remus] (Prop. 3.9.50) and Florus’s “Prima certe victima fuit munitionemque urbis novae sanguine suo consecravit” [The first victim fortified the new city with his blood] (Flor. 1.1.8), which demonstrates the consistency of the historiographic tradition that presents the death of Remus as a foundational sacrifice.

A coalition of Samnites, Etruscans, and Gauls caused terror in Rome in 296 BCE, and the bad omens prompted the “seers” to advocate a human sacrifice (Zonar. 8.1). After the triumph at Sentinum the following year, a temple was consecrated to Victory. This temple, identified in 1981 on the western part of the Palatine and excavated by Patrizio Pensabene, included a tomb alongside the city wall which has been interpreted as a foundational human sacrifice (Wiseman, 1995, p. 124). This indicates that these extraordinary practices were not alien in the history of Rome. Archaeology also confirms the interment of human victims in the foundations of buildings in Britannia in the second century CE, for example in Verulamium (Aldhouse-Green, 2018, pp. 17–18, 81; Wiseman, 1995, p. 207, note 110). Although a senatus consultu [decree of the senate] banned human sacrifices in Rome in 97 BCE, in the year 46 Caesar sacrificed one of the mutinying soldiers, according to Cassius Dio (43.24.3), and in 40 BCE Octavian sacrificed captives from Perusia on Julius Caesar’s altar (Cass. Dio 48.14.4; Sen. Clem. 1.11.1, Suet. Aug. 15).7

It should also not be forgotten that pagan historiography itself made human sacrifice a typical feature of the cruel behavior of anti-senatorial emperors as well as particular Greek tyrants, such as Apollodorus of Cassandreia (Diod. Sic. 22.5.1) and schemers like Caligula (Cass. Dio 37.30.3; Flor. 2.12.4; Plut. Cic. 10.4; Sall. Cat. 22.1–2). Christian authors recycled these examples of internal “barbarization” to characterize the emperors most hostile to Christians, as they did with Valerian (Euseb. Hist. eccl. 7.10.4), Maxentius (Euseb. Hist. eccl., 8.14.1–5, Vit. Const. 1.36) or Julian (Theod. Cyr. HE 3.21–22) (Rives, 1995, pp. 72, 79, note 67).

Paganism and Human Sacrifice

“Sacrificiorum aboleatur insania” [Let the insanity of sacrifices be abolished] (Cod. Theod. 16.10.2) is the regulation that tried to eradicate the centrality of the institution of sacrifice in ancient cultures. The debate, however, had already arisen in Hellenic thought as early as Theophrastus, in a line that would continue to Lucian of Samosata and Porphyry (Stroumsa, 2005, pp. 108–110), and also emerged in Judaism, which increasingly tended to substitute sacrifice with prayer in a ritual without priests and without blood sacrifices (Stroumsa, 2005, pp. 116–117). This was a tendency that, from the late second century into the third, was also shared by Mithraism, Neoplatonism, and Christianity (Elsner, 1995, pp. 157 and following).

From the Christian perspective, human sacrifice constituted the best example of the cruelty and monstrosity of pagan divinities, who demanded these practices from their worshippers. The differences established by Greco-Latin sources between barbarians and civilized peoples dissolved in the writings of Christian apologists, who used the theme of human sacrifice as an element that defined “paganism” as a whole,8 abolishing the chronological and spatial distance that had characterized traditional perspectives on barbarians.

For the Christians, the offerer became the offering: martyrs and virgins were the sacrifice. The conception of martyrdom as (human) sacrifice is already depicted in Ignatius of Antioch who, in the first two decades of the second century, expounded that their flesh, devoured by the wild beasts, was transformed into “pure bread of Christ” (Romans 2). The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity preserves an exceptional account of the perception of martyrdom as sacrifice for both pagans and Christians. Prudentius (Prudent. Perist. 4.9–72) also conceived of the death of a martyr as a sacrifice (Petruccione, 1995). In asceticism and martyrdom narratives, bodies are transformed on one hand into supernatural mediators with a certain celestial status and, on the other, into sacred remnants for generations of future worshippers (relics and substances of “blessing”) (Frankfurter, 2004). This is documented both in early Christianity and in what we know of the Mesoamerican indigenous rituals, as we shall see.

The case of a certain group of Jews can be helpful for understanding the evolution in the conceptualization of human sacrifice, because it provides an example of a description of a ritual considered heinous by the writer and practiced by inhabitants of the Roman Empire under the cover of secrecy. As Josephus points out, the grammarian Apion had accused the Jews of sacrificing foreign victims, whom they purportedly cannibalized after holding them sequestered in the Temple of Jerusalem (Joseph. Ap. 2.8.92–96, 10.121).9 Regardless of the reasons for these accusations, there is little doubt that they reflect xenophobia by Apion.

Secretiveness in rituals of human sacrifice was a characteristic imputed not only to Jews, but also to heterodox Christian movements in the post-Constantine era: this was the case with the Cataphrygians and the Montanists (Alonso Venero, 2015, p. 90, note 115). In fact, while the sources that allude to these rumors against the Christians (Tertullian, Minucius Felix, and Justin) describe them as accusations by pagan outsiders, there is no evidence of such accusations in the pagan sources, while there are many attestations of their use by Christians to demonize rival groups (Frankfurter, 2011, p. 81; Roig Lanzillotta, 2007). This is the case with Epiphanius (Epiph. Adv. haeres 26) on the “gnostic” liturgies of infant cannibalism and sacraments with sexual fluids, and with the apocryphal Gospel of Judas (38–40) on proto-Orthodox Christians who killed women and children on the altar. The emphasis on the secret character of these rituals is in line with the growing importance of the private sphere as a ritual space, something that is recognized in the Codex Theodosianus and in episcopal sermons, which emphasize the house as a space of magic and subversive practices (Frankfurter, 2011, p. 82; Rives, 1995).

For the Christian sources, therefore, human sacrifice moves from being understood as a cultural distinction,10 or an example of the moral degradation of the tyrant or political conspirator, to constituting a practice that was widespread among pagans (Alonso Venero, 2015, p. 91), whose religious systems included it more or less habitually, whether in the festivals of Jupiter Latiaris (the Feriae Latinae or Latin Festival), in sacrifices to Saturn, or in the interments themselves in the Forum Boarium (Marco Simón, 2019), identifying the gods receiving such abominable victims as demons (Clem. Al. Protr. 3.42.1, 8). When Lactantius indicates that human sacrifices persisted among Romans of his time (Lactant. Div. inst. 1.21.3), he is making a retorsio by attributing the same to pagan accusers as they attributed to the Christians (McGowan, 1994; Rives, 1995, pp. 74–75).

The fundamental depravity of paganism implied by the practice of human sacrifice culminates in the sacrifice of children, traditionally associated with the cult of Cronos (the Punic Baal Hammon and Latin Saturn), whose sacrifices took place in a tophet.11 Of greater interest for this paper is the connection Justin Martyr (Justin. Apol. 2.12.5) draws between the “Mysteries of Cronos” and the rituals of Jupiter Latiaris celebrated in circus games with gladiators, and Tertullian’s indication (Tert. Apol. 9.2.4) that children continued to be immolated to Saturn in North Africa until the proconsulate of Tiberius (Rives, 1994, pp. 54–55).

In fact, the paradigmatic element in these cases is the parricide and fratricide of the pagan gods themselves, well known through mythology in the figures of Cronos-Saturn and Zeus-Jupiter (figure 3.3), which explained the essence of the heinous ritual of human sacrifice and cannibalism on the part of its followers, as well as the deification of historical figures based precisely on the murders committed, in a line which culminates in Romulus and Caesar, metaphorical slayer of Rome (Alonso Venero, 2015, pp. 103 and following). Indeed, Lactantius writes that identifying murderers with gods is a widespread tendency in pagan society (Lactant. Div. inst. 1.18.10). How can the faithful fail to imitate the homicidal behavior of their gods?

Another interesting point is the connection Christian authors draw between the practice of human sacrifice and other moral transgressions supposedly characteristic of the pagans, such as homosexuality or incest. The latter imitates the paradigmatic behavior of the gods, starting with Zeus, in another clear example of retorsio of the accusations that various pagan authors made toward Christians themselves.

The American Alterity

Dominican Friar Francisco de Aguilar (1977, p. 102), in his account of his experiences of the conquest of central Mexico by Cortés in 1521, was fascinated by the customs of the Aztecs and especially by human sacrifice:

Digo, pues, que yo desde muchacho y niño me ocupé en leer y pasar muchas historias persas, griegas, romanas; también he leído los ritos que había en la India de Portugal, y digo cierto que en ninguna de éstas he leído ni visto tan abominable modo y manera de servicio y adoración como era el que éstos hacían al demonio, y para mí tengo que no hubo reino en el mundo donde Dios nuestro Señor fuese tan deservido, y donde más se ofendiese que en esta tierra, y a donde el demonio fuese más reverenciado y honrado

[I say, then, that since my youth and childhood I have occupied myself with reading and going through many Persian, Greek, and Roman histories; I have also read the rites that existed in Portuguese India, and I say for certain that in none of these have I read or seen such an abominable way and manner of serving and worshipping as that which these people offered to the Devil, and I am convinced that there is no realm on Earth where our Lord God would be as well served, nor where so much offence is committed against him, as in this land, nor anywhere where the Devil is more reverenced and honored].12

According to the chronicler Juan Suárez de Peralta (1990, p. 51), whose father was among the companions of Cortés during the conquest of Mexico, the rites and customs of the Indians could be compared not only to those of the Moors but also to those of the ancient nations (antiguos gentiles):

sacrificar ombres, tener templos y estatuas de ydolos, y sacrifiçios de sangre, ser supersticiosos en mirar ahueros y tenerlos casi todos los que los antiguos escriuen

[human sacrifice, having temples and statues of idols, worshipping animals, honoring them in processions, fasts, and bloody sacrifices, (the Indians) have almost everything that is written with regard to the ancients].

The comparison drawn by Aguilar and Suárez de Peralta, between the alterity of the ancient Mediterranean and that which they discovered themselves, results in an even more negative judgment of the indigenous Mexicans: in later paragraphs he describes in horror how the Aztec priests used stone knives to cut out the hearts of victims, who were later dismembered and cannibalized (Aguilar, 1977, pp. 202–203; Klein, 2016, p. 257).13 From the beginning, blood sacrifice occupied a fundamental place in the colonial imagination about Mexico. In the map of the city Mexico Tenochtitlan, sent by Cortés to Charles V (figure 3.4), sacrifice already stands out noticeably in the center of the conquered city (Jáuregui, 2003, figure 2; Nebenzahl, 1990, pp. 73–74).

Human sacrifices and anthropophagy are also prominent ritual elements in the relaciones geográficas [geographic relations], the responses of Hispanic colonial authorities compiled between 1578 and 1586 to a standardized questionnaire sent in 1577: the cardiectomy of prisoners of war was followed by selective anthropophagy, but also children were condemned, in this case to obtain water or to seek success in war (Isaac, 2002; Peperstraete, 2018). The practice of human sacrifice among the indigenous Americans is well corroborated by many types of evidence.14 It seems that there is a contrast between the representations in pre-Hispanic codices (with many blood rituals and few blood sacrifices, in an atmosphere that was above all metaphorical) and postconquest representations emphasizing the spectacular aspects of the sacrifices (Klein, 2016, pp. 258–259; Paradis, 2013). The minimal presence of bloodshed in the oldest codices recalls the sacrificial scenes on Greek pottery, which rarely depict the moment in which the victim (human or, much more commonly, animal) is sacrificed and its blood spilt, since imagery usually focuses on the scenes before or after the death.15

In contrast, however, to the difficulty in finding archaeological evidence in the Greek and Roman world, Mesoamerican archaeology has in recent years provided more than obvious evidence of the structural nature that human sacrifice had among the indigenous peoples.16 Authors such as Mendoza (2007) have analyzed the surviving archaeological and osteological remains and concluded that they confirm the ethnohistorical descriptions of ritual violence and anthropophagy in Mesoamerica, refuting the revisionist interpretations that deny that these practices occurred.

The functions and meanings of sacrifice are many, depending on the myths that explain them and their ritual contexts (enthronement, foundations of buildings, floods, droughts, famines, eclipses, etc.). Likewise, these sacrifices took place with many variations: decapitation, drowning, burning, extracting the victim’s heart, shooting victims with arrows, throwing them off temples, and sealing them in caves and leaving them to starve (González Torres, 2003, p. 22). There are two main variations in the use of the human body as a privileged instrument of communication with the gods: diurnal sacrifices to the Sun17 of warriors captured alive in the “flowery wars”—xōchiyāōyōtl in Nahuatl—whose hearts were extracted with a flint knife, and the nocturnal decapitation with an obsidian knife of previously purified slaves and women who were sacrificed to the chthonic deities of the Earth and Maize, in which the victim (īīxiptlah) personifies the god and willingly dies to benefit the community (Graulich, 2005, p. 320; Rival, 2013, pp. 164, 167, 170). All this only serves to underscore the polysemy inherent in human sacrifice in Mesoamerica (Graulich, 2005; López Luján & Olivier, 2010; Peperstraete, 2012, p. 8), in keeping with its enormous socio-cultural importance. In few places in the world is “sacrificial crisis” better attested than in Mesoamerica, as endemic violence in a society for which the effectiveness of the ritual serves to achieve group unity as well as its purification and renewal (Eagleton, 2018; Girard, 1983).18

The escalation in human sacrifices in the middle of the fifteenth century has been interpreted on one hand as a response to historically documented crises (repeated earthquakes, famines, and big floods) and on the other as a corollary of the conquests and exaction of tribute on the part of the Aztecs of Mexico Tenochtitlan (Rival, 2013, p. 165), a cosmopolitan city which had reached some 200,000 inhabitants by the time of the conquest, having increased tenfold since the year 1200 (Wolf, 1999, p. 157). From the mid-fifteenth century, religious ceremonies constituted permanent theaters in which human sacrifices were an integral element that ritually enacted the mythical sacrifice of the deities who had made creation possible by throwing themselves into a great primordial fire to give rise to the Moon and the Fifth Sun. The continuous renewal of the cosmos—with the rebirth of the Sun and of the human race—required blood offerings and human hearts to avoid a new cycle of decadence and destruction. These ideas were an essential part of Aztec imperial ideology (Duverger, 1979; Wolf, 1999, p. 165).19

Frederick Streng (1982, pp. 2–8) wrote that every culture has “problematic states” that it tries to remedy by establishing channels to an “ultimate transformation.” For the Aztecs, human sacrifice was the channel to this ultimate transformation, as Kerkhove (2004) pointed out. The oldest sources (Cortés [1985], Díaz del Castillo [2004], Durán [1980], and Sahagún [1988, 2000]) provide very similar figures: every Aztec temple complex dispatched between two and six victims every twenty days; every Aztec city made between 40 and 120 ritual killings a year and, for special occasions such as centenaries or royal funerals, the number rose to hundreds or thousands (Kerkhove, 2004, pp. 136–137).

A considerable section of historiography has considered these figures exaggerated.20 In any case, the omnipresence of human sacrifice in Aztec and Maya ritual is undeniable, as the evidence from archaeological excavations reveals. The ritual decapitations at the Templo Mayor, the Great Temple of Mexico Tenochtitlan, have recently been studied by Chávez Balderas (2010), who analyzed the remains of seventy-two people, mostly male, and concluded that there was also a priestly class specializing in working with cadavers. Forty-two children were sacrificed at the temple of Tlaloc and especially at the temple of Huitzilopochtli, corroborating the information in the sixteenth-century documentary sources, which indicate that the majority of child sacrifices in moments of crisis sought favors from aquatic and fertility gods (López Luján et al., 2010, p. 368). Likewise, in 2015 the Tower of Skulls was discovered, a cylindrical wall the preserved part of which is six meters in diameter and almost two meters high, formed by hundreds of human crania, not only of young men but also of women and children from various parts of Mesoamerica. The skulls were amalgamated with a mortar of lime, sand, and pumice gravel and situated at the northeast corner of the platform of the Huēi Tzompantli, the Great Skull Rack, in the sacred precinct of the Templo Mayor; surprisingly, it fits with the description by Andrés de Tapia (1866, pp. 578–591), Cortés’s right-hand man and witness to this structure, who describes it thus:

Estaban frontero de esta torre [se refiere al Templo Mayor] sesanta o setenta vigas muy altas cuanto un tiro de ballesta, puestas sobre teatro [sic] grande hecho de cal y piedra, e por las gradas dél muchas cabezas de muertos pegadas con cal, e los dientes hacia afuera . . . e las vigas apartadas unas de otras poco menos de una vara de medir, e desde lo alto dellos fasta abajo puestos palos cuan espesos cabien, e en cada palo cinco cabezas de muerto ensartadas por las sienes en el dicho polo . . . e quien esto escribe, y un Gonzalo de Umbría, contaron los polos que habie, e multiplicando cinco cabezas cada palo de los que entre viga y viga estaban, como dicho he, hallamos haber ciento treinta y seis mil cabezas, sin las de las torres

[In front of this tower (referring to the Templo Mayor) there were sixty or seventy very high posts, as high as a shot from a crossbow, placed on a large stage (sic) made of lime and stone, and on the steps thereof were many heads of the dead affixed with lime with their teeth facing outwards . . . and the posts were little more than a yardstick apart, and from the top of them to the bottom there were attached crossbeams as closely as possible, and on each crossbeam were five heads of the dead strung by the temples onto that said crossbeam . . . and he who writes this, and one Gonzalo de Umbría, counted how many crossbeams there were, and multiplying five heads per crossbeam by the number of crossbeams which were between the posts, as I have said, we found there to be 136,000 heads, excluding those on the towers].

The structures discovered belong to the years before the arrival of the Spaniards, between 1486 and 1502, and all the skulls analyzed present marks of having been pierced through the temples, and indeed of having been outdoors on the platform of the Huēi Tzompantli (Wade, 2018).21

Although much more common than in other cultures, human sacrifice was also in Mesoamerica a recourse to try to alleviate an extreme situation: this seems to be clearly expressed in a scene from the Madrid Codex in which the god of death and the god Q attend a sacrifice taking place to the north of the earthly plane, an area associated with plagues, famine, disease, and death. The purpose of the sacrificial ritual was to ensure communication between men and gods by offering a life, attempting to renew divine energy to guarantee cosmic regeneration and preservation. Several scenes illustrate these concepts persuasively. For example, a classic Maya vase represents a muan, a celestial messenger bird belonging to the gods of the underworld, on the body of a sacrificed individual (Nájera Coronado, 2003, pp. 65–66).

According to various evidence, death was a theosis, a conversion into a god (teō-ti), a mystic state of “twinship”—to borrow a term from León-Portilla (1984, p. 184)—with the Sun god: “It is not true, no it is not true / That we came to live on the Earth / We came here only to dream / We came here only to sleep” (Kherkove, 2004, p. 145). This can explain why the victims liberated by Cortés and Alvarado “indignantly rejected [the] offer of release and demanded to be sacrificed,” according to Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Hernán Cortés wrote that the Aztecs “seemed determined to perish more than any race of man known before,” and Bernal Díaz del Castillo that they “cared nothing for death in battle and came to us like mad dogs” (as quoted in Kherkove, 2004, p. 142).22 This passage recalls the descriptions of the ancient Celts, who entered into combat singing, since for them death was only halfway through a long life (Luc. Phars. 1.468). The bodies of Celtiberian and Vacceian Hispanian warriors were abandoned on the battlefield to be devoured by vultures, psychopompic birds which transported their souls to the heavens in a ritual sacrifice (Marco Simón, 2008; Sopeña Genzor, 1995). This is a variation of the “noble death” that is also attested among the Aztecs.

Various texts refer to the sacrifice as neteōtoquiliztli [the desire to be considered a god]: the victims are īīxiptlah: “All the native and Spanish sources on Aztec human sacrifice make it clear that victims were believed to attain full identity with the gods by dying as gods. . . . Posthumously, their remains were treated as actual relics of the gods, which explains why victims’ skulls, bones, and skin were often painted, bleached, stored and displayed, or else used as ritual masks and oracles” (Kerkhove, 2004, pp. 155–156). The similarity with the treatment of martyrs’ relics seems clear. In both cases, “the theatre of sacrifice intensifies to the limits of the possible the productivity of the human body by decomposing its energy and multiplying it through ritual action” (Rival, 2013, p. 170).

Sacrificial death was also conceived as an opening or portal to the highest reality, hidden by an impenetrable wall (Kerkhove, 2004, p. 146). When the priest performed the cardiectomy with a flint knife [tecpatl], holding the victim’s still-beating heart, he shouted, “precious fruit of the nopal and the eagle,” and then deposited it in a round stone recipient called cuāuhxīcalli (“eagle’s bowl”) (Carrasco, 1996, p. 64). As in the case of the psychopompic vultures with respect to the Celtic warriors fallen in combat, who by consuming their limbs turned them into sacred matter and raised their souls to the heavens, these Nahua texts seem to document a similar psychopompic function for the eagle, whose stone urn contains the hearts of sacrificial victims. The soul of the heart [tōna] was considered the seat of the individual as well as a fragment of the Sun’s heat [istli], which in turn was a heart-soul, “round, hot, pulsating.” A scene from the Codex Tudela (figure 3.5) represents the heart of a victim flying toward the Sun on a path of blood, and a fragment from the Madrid Codex perfectly illuminates this image: “My heart rises: / I fix my eyes upon You, / next to You, beside You, / O Giver of Life!” (Kerkhove, 2004, p. 148).

Another well-known feature in Aztec sacrifice, the “necessary humiliation” of the victim, may be understood in terms of the mythical variants on the death of Quetzalcoatl to allow the Morning Star to rise (Kerkhove, 2004, p. 153). This idea is related to that of sacrifice as expiation (Graulich, 2000), which enables the victims to liberate themselves from the original transgression contained in the myths and enter a happier beyond (Ragot, 2000). According to the mythical accounts, men were indebted to their creators, who sacrificed themselves to create the cosmos and to bring men to life. For this reason, there was another term for blood sacrifice, nextlāhualli, “the payment of a debt,” and the Nahuatl word nextlāhualtin, “payments,” refers to the sacrificial victims (Duverger, 1979; Graulich, 1994, p. 245, 2000; López Austin, 1980, Vol. 1, p. 434; Olivier, 2016, pp. 224–225).

Divine Self-Sacrifice, Cannibalism, and the Eucharist

With the introduction of Christianity following conquest and colonization, some indigenous Mesoamericans adopted crucifixion as a ritual preceding the death of the victim: the symbol of the cross was identified with the corn plant and became an agricultural deity to whom fertility petitions were made.23

An image from the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer (p. 37) shows Yacateuctli, god of the pōchtēcah [traders], carrying a cross-like motif (which in reality is a crossroads, as indicated by four footprints indicating two paths).24 Just as the blood shed by Christ watered Adam’s skull in Golgotha, bringing about humanity’s redemption, the blood shed from Quetzalcoatl’s self-mutilated phallus upon the human bones and ashes in Mictlan (the underworld) would bring about the re-creation of humankind.25 The similarities between the two religious systems embarrassed the evangelizers, who favored images such as that of the cross in the atrium of the church of San Juan Bautista in Coyoacán, which was mounted (without portraying the crucified Christ) on a pedestal formed by a sculpture of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent (López Luján, 2016, figures 16 and 20), symbolizing the triumph over sin.

Associated with human sacrifice, cannibalism has been a central presence in debates around alterity and identity (Arens, 1979; Chicangana-Bayona, 2008; Nagy, 2009; Obeyesekere, 2005). In the sixteenth century, America was constructed culturally, religiously, and geographically as a kind of Canibalia (Isaac, 2002; Jáuregui, 2003, note 2), based on information such as that of Bernal Díaz del Castillo regarding the Indians who used to

comer carne humana, así como nosotros traemos vaca de las carnicerías, y tenían en todos los pueblos cárceles de madera gruesa hechas a manera de casas, como jaulas, y en ellas metían a engordar muchas indias e indios y muchachos, y estando gordos los sacrificaban y comían

[eat human meat, just like we take cow meat from the butcher’s shops, and in all their towns they had jailhouses made from thick wood, like cages, and in them they put many Indian women, men, and boys, and when fat they were sacrificed and eaten]. (Díaz del Castillo, 1632/2004, p. 579)26

American anthropophagy was a mark simultaneously of similarity and difference between Europe and America, between Christianity and the indigenous religions, and between the metropolis and the imperial periphery (Jáuregui, 2003, p. 201). It is clear that this treatment is not new, because representations of the cannibal have recurred in European imagination since classical antiquity and have been used to justify imperial aggression.

In the rhetoric of alterity, relationships of continuity and contiguity are formulated. The former (the continuity of the European Christian in the New World) imply a process of relative identification. Alterity is marked but leads to similarity: the other (with a small o) is a particular feature within the continual and the universal (of humanity, Christianity, and the empire). Relationships of contiguity, in contrast, define the Other (with a capital O) as liminal; their alterity is irreducible and threatening. As Hayden White (1976, p. 129) states, these two types of relationship engender different possibilities of praxis: missionary and conversion activity on one hand and on the other, war and extermination.27 In contrast with this solution, argued by authors like Sepúlveda, the former attitude to religious alterity (a relationship of continuity with the other) is argued by Bartolomé de Las Casas on the basis of cultural comparativism.28 He establishes the long tradition of paganism and human sacrifices among the Greeks, Romans, Jews, Babylonians, and so forth, and recalls that cannibalism was not unknown in antiquity among the barbarian peoples of the West or the Scythians, in practices which seemed to him crueler that American cannibalism (Las Casas, 1967, Vol. 2, pp. 354–356). His hypothesis is that famine must have been the origin of the practice, and he would even say, in his dispute with Ginés de Sepúlveda (Capdevila, 2007), that sacrifices, although reprehensible, proved the great religiosity of the infidels:

La carne . . . de los sacrificados la cocían y aderezaban y la comían como cosa sanctísima y a los dioses consagrada, . . . que por religión y no por otra razón hacían

[The flesh . . . of the sacrificed they cooked and dressed and ate as the holiest thing, consecrated to the gods . . . which they did for religion and no other reason]. (Las Casas, 1967, Vol. 2, p. 22)

The central ritual of Catholicism was a theophagic act, an anthropophagic sacrifice in which God, incarnated in man (Christ) was both host and guest (Jáuregui, 2003, p. 202).29 But the evangelists who defended the reality of the Eucharist in Europe fought similar ideas in Amerindian religions. Toribio de Benavente (Motolinía) indicated around 1541 that the Mexicans made maize tamales and that these rolls, transformed into the flesh of Tezcatlipoca, were eaten instead of communion (in a festival embarrassingly close in the calendar to the Christian Easter) (Motolinía, 1988, p. 64). Likewise, Sahagún (1988, Vol. 1, pp. 37, 94, 161) and Durán (1980, pp. 85–86) indicate that in the twenty-day ritual period called in Nahuatl “Panquetzaliztli” [el levantamiento de banderas] dedicated to Huitzilopochtli, the body of the god made out of seeds was eaten; this was done, according to Acosta (1590/1987, pp. 363–364 [5.25]),

A modo de comunión a todo el pueblo . . . [y] recibíanlo con tanta reverencia, temor y lágrimas, que podía admiración diciendo que comían carne y los huesos del dios

[Like communion to all the people . . . and they received it with such reverence, fear, and tears, that it moved one to admiration, saying that they ate the flesh and bones of the god].

In Mesoamerican ritual cannibalism and in the Christian Eucharist, “the idea of sacrifice broods among other things on the mystery by which life springs from death. . . . One’s identity is not one’s own, but lies in the keeping of the gods” (Eagleton 2018, pp. 8, 12).30

From the sixteenth century, missionaries observed that the sacrifice of Christ and his later ingestion in the form of bread and wine (the Eucharist) had been assimilated by the indigenous peoples, and discovered to their horror that Christianized Maya populations around 1560 were sacrificing children and youths by hanging them on crosses. This prompted the prohibition on introducing or making crucifixes in New Spain in that century: surviving atrial crosses are only adorned with flowers and plants, omitting any allusion to the body of Christ (Lazcarro Salgado, 2013, p. 1). Christ on the cross was the manifestation of the ultimate human sacrifice for the redemption of humanity. After that, no further human sacrifice would be needed or permitted and whenever it occurred, it was considered the work of the Devil. In fact, various conventual complexes bear scenes which include demons carrying out tortures which recall pre-Hispanic practices of human sacrifice: this is the case in the murals in Xoxoteco, Hidalgo, from the sixteenth century, with scenes depicting flayed victims hung on wooden structures (Pastor, 2003, p. 59).

The similarity, therefore, between these rituals of theophagy and the Christian Eucharist caused great embarrassment to the colonizers, which was resolved through the idea of “diabolical mimicry.” A fragment of a lunette by Paolo Farinati—datable to 1595—in Villa della Torre, Mezzane di Sotto, Verona, expresses this idea of correspondence and replacement between cannibalism and communion: an allegorical indigenous American turns his back on a cannibalistic feast depicted on his left—wherein a spit skewers a human torso and arm—and takes a crucifix which is on his right (Jáuregui, 2003, p. 209).

Indigenous sacrifice in pre-Hispanic Mexico not only codified the places, times, and manner of death, but also considered the body of the victim to be a compendium of cosmic forces (López Austin, 1988), which separated or united according to the participants’ interests. Sahagún (1988) indicates that

El señor del cautivo no comía de la carne, porque hacía de cuenta que aquella era su misma carne, porque desde la hora que le cautivó le tenía por hijo, y el cautivo su señor por padre. Y por esta razón no quería comer de aquella carne, empero comía de la carne de los otros cautivos que se habían muerto

[The captive’s lord did not eat the flesh because he pretended that it was his own flesh, because from the moment of capture he considered him a son, and the captive considered his lord a father, and for this reason he did not want to eat of that flesh. He did, however, eat of the flesh of other captives who had died]. (Vol. 2, p. 21)31

The lord could not eat the captive’s flesh because he would thereby commit an incestuous act. As a result of ferocious combat, captor and captive became close, establishing a relationship that identified them commensurately with their growing distance from who each was before. They each became the other.

A similarity exists between third- and fourth-century Christian authors’ descriptions of human sacrifices (as essential to traditional religion, which was described in denigratory terms as “paganism”) and those by the Spanish chroniclers of the pre-Hispanic rituals. In both cases, the primary reason to censure the customs of these communities was human sacrifice and anthropophagy; the second was adultery and sexual perversion. In the texts by Ginés de Sepúlveda, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Francisco López de Gómara, and other chroniclers, therefore, as well as in those by the first Christians, they pass from shock generated by blood sacrifices and anthropophagy to outrage spawned by sodomy, promiscuity, adultery, and incest (Pastor, 2003, p. 60).

The Aztecs’ sacrifice of children was invoked by Spanish sources as justification for the conquest and conversion of the indigenous peoples, in the same way as the topic had been used by the early Christian sources to emphasize the essential evil of paganism. In 1529, Pedro de Gante wrote that the Aztecs sacrificed and mutilated their children and that their priests survived solely on the flesh and blood of their infant victims. Ruiz Medrano (2007, p. 106) gathers information on child sacrifice in colonial Mexico including in the seventeenth century, although the theme is ignored by colonial artists who worked in Mexico after the death of Sahagún. The oldest chronicles, however, also agree that almost all the children sacrificed were locals of noble lineage, offered by their own parents, and that sacrificial death constituted a glorious end.

An excavation in 2005 in the Templo Mayor uncovered the skeleton of a five-year-old child sacrificed in the middle of the fifteenth century (figure 3.6), with the wings of a sparrow hawk, whose tiny heart had been extracted and who had shells around his ankles (see López Luján et al., 2010, p. 388, figure 15), which is precisely what Bernardino de Sahagún’s text documents about one of the slaves sacrificed by cardiectomy in honor of Huitzilopochtli.

According to Sahagún (2000, Vol. 2, pp. 834–835),

En las gargantas de los pies unos caracolitos mariscos injeridos en unas tiras de cuero tigres, como calzuelas, los cuales caracolillos colgaban de las calzuelas . . . En los hombros unas alas de cavilanes que llamaban tlóhmaitl, Estaban las alas revueltas con papel los cabos dellas, y asidas a la xaqueta. Estaba pintado aquel papel de diversos colores entrepuestas, colorado y negro, revuelto con marcaxita

[Between (the victim’s) ankles (they put) small shellfish shells inserted into straps made of jaguar skin, used as hose, and the shells hung from the hose. . . . From the shoulders, wings of sparrow hawks which they called tlohmaitl. The tips of the wings were wrapped with paper and tied to the jacket. This paper was painted with many interposing colors, red and black, sprinkled with marcasite].

The archaeological corroboration of the report by Friar Bernardino de Sahagún is remarkable.

Conclusion

Human sacrifice has always been a fundamental marker of religious alterity. The Greco-Latin sources considered human sacrifice to be xénos and ánomos to their own culture and therefore rejected it in space, as an essential mark of barbarity and a “savage mirror on the edge of the known world” (Taussig, 1993, pp. 78–79), as well as in time, as a cruel time with cruel practices, now transcended by historical time. In both cases, however, a critical analysis of the literary sources and, above all, contrasting them with information from archaeology allows us to question—to at least some degree—this holistic construction of radical inversion between civilized and barbarian poles.

Christian authors chose not to understand human sacrifice as a cultural difference or an example of the moral depravity of tyrant or conspirator, instead converting it into the mainstay of “pagan” religious practices. The parricide and fratricide of their demonized gods became the explanatory paradigm of their adherents’ heinous rituals, and the secretive character of those practices—already associated with peoples like the Jews—was extended to Christian denominations themselves considered heterodox, in step with the growing importance of the private sphere as ritual space in late antiquity.

These characterizations of others’ religions by those who depicted barbarians or pagans in antiquity would be reiterated in the images portrayed by evangelizing Christians of the religious practices of indigenous Mesoamericans, with child sacrifice, cannibalism, and sexual degeneracy comprising significant components. Archaeology certainly confirms differences in ritual praxis between the ancient world and Mesoamerica: human sacrifice had a structural nature in precolonial Mesoamerica in contrast with its elusiveness in the archaeological record of the Greco-Roman world and its manifestation in myth and iconography. But analysis of certain emic elements, both in the Mesoamerican indigenous world as well as in the Greco-Latin and early Christian ones, suggests the existence of some shared semantic—and potentially embarrassing—spaces. This occurs in the conceptualization of human (self) sacrifice as a gateway to a higher reality and a route to renewing cosmic energies, in the concomitances in rituals of symbolic theophagy, and in the treatment of the relics of Christian martyrs and some Mesoamerican sacrificial victims.

Notes

References