On Lies of Aztec Human Sacrifice

First off.

Hear me out before you jump in and ruin my Cheerios.

The Aztec sacrificed their vanquished enemies to their Gods for various reasons. Chief among them was their gratitude for the victory. Sometimes, They would sacrifice a select few from their own people if it was a perceived necessity, One has to get into the mind of the Aztecs at the time. They had a different set of perceptions of the world and their place in it. Different than the Spaniards and way different than we in the 21st Century.

Were they blood thirsty savages because of this?

Hell NO!

Their Cities, Cultural development, Mathematics, Astronomy etc etc etc were amazingly sophisticated and fairly advanced considering they had no known contact with the Western world of their period. Developed all on their own as far as we know.

The Spaniards were all about Gold, Conquest and plunder. Hell. Translate the word Conquistador.

Conqueror

The Spanish were known for being meticulous record keepers. What they recorded and described about Human sacrifice is accurate but their perception and understanding of the reasons behind why the Aztec carried out such activities were all skewed by an overly conservative Catholic point of view. This has apparently become a moral debate that is attempting to apply a modern set of morals to a people who did things their way for their reasons..

Did the Spaniard take advantage of this practice to further their agenda?

Hell YES.

They knew full well that when the Church and State heard of such practices that would open the flood gates for further plunder. Because it would be justified on several fronts. 1. The Church would come in to SAVE the savages and while that was going on. 2. The State would move in and rob them blind of all their Gold and Silver. Which backfired on the Spanish economy soon after. [That's a topic of another thread]

Meanwhile and this is undeniable.
The vast majority were wiped out by the plague...

reply to post by Harte


Those urns were used for blood letting. Aztecs like Mayans would pour blood onto paper and into an urn, burn it, and have a vision of an ancestor.

I'll give you S&F for this

There is definately something to what you say, although I'd dig a little deeper into it. But without question, the Spaniards used an opportonity to kill the Aztecs, to get at their Gold. Eldorado ...

But the blanket thing, the one cortes took from his sick and threw amongst the indians. Isn't anything unique, Gengis Kahn when he ventured into the middle-east. His troops got sick, and before he left he did the same thing ... which gave birth to the black plague. In neither case, it's actually intentional ... cortes had no idea, that his sick comrades blanket would cause such disaster. The disease was an annoiance in Europe, but not much else ... we were already immune to it. Well, more or less ... people can die from a common cold, if they don't take care. But in both cases, cortez and kahn, neither did it intentionally. They just "stumbled" on biological-warfare. If kahn had known before hand, he'd have returned later ... victorious, he didn't.

But I definately think you have something there, about the Church and King of Spain exagerating things to justify war.

Not the first time, though ... nor the last.

Originally posted by randyvs
reply to post by Alexander2533

 

OP Mel Gibson, from what I understand had a lot of research done for this movie.

Mel Gibson and his father are Opus Dei. Please research this Catholic cult before responding........Gibson's reputation as a spokesman for the elite follows him. His movie about the so-called life of "The" Christ is a pure macabre fabrication as was the movie that supposedly is an accurate portrayal of the Mayan culture of death (not Aztecs) - APOCALYPTO ....... but still produced with the power elite's agenda in mind nonetheless.......Mel Gibson is a story teller for the power behind the power elite.........he's not much different than Oliver Stone and his phoney version of 9/11 (and JFK) which was also perfectly suited to the needs of the power elite.

en.wikipedia.org...

[edit] TlalocMain article: Child sacrifice in pre-Columbian cultures
Tlaloc was the god of rain. The Aztecs believed that if sacrifices weren't supplied for Tlaloc, rain wouldn't come and their crops wouldn't flourish. Leprosy and rheumatism, diseases caused by Tlaloc, would infest the village. Tlaloc required the tears of the young as part of the sacrifice. The priests made the children cry during their way to immolation: a good omen that Tlaloc would wet the earth in the raining season. In the Florentine Codex, also known as General History of the Things of New Spain, Sahagún wrote:

“ They offered them as sacrifices to [Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue] so that they would give them water.[30] ”


The table below shows the festivals of the 18-month year of the Aztec calendar and the deities with which the festivals were associated. In History of the Things of New Spain Sahagún confesses he was aghast at the fact that, during the first month of the year, the child sacrifices were approved by their own parents, who also ate their children.[31]

Not just soldiers. Setting children on fire. hmmmmm.....

gallery.sjsu.edu...

Incan

Other young girls who were sacrificed included the "Chosen Women" or the "Virgins of the Sun". These were beautiful young girls, between 8 and 10 years old, chosen by the Inca officials throughout the vast empire. They were taken into a temple, for example in Machu Picchu, (were several corpses of young women were found), and were forbidden to leave for six to seven years. Their duties included keeping a fire always burning (does this remind us of the vestal priestesses of Rome?), making weavings used for ceremonial rituals. Although they were considered to be virgins, they were available for the pleasure of the Inca ruler or his nobles. At the end of their stay at the temple, they were either released, turned into concubines, or married into nobility. These young women were sometimes chosen as sacrificial victims. It is said that some of the Virgins of the Sun in the Cuzco temple of Coricancha were killed along with llamas, their blood painted on the Inca nobles by the leading Inca ruler.

books.google.ca...=onepage &q=women&f=false

Page 188 or so:

It is the ritual killing of females where we gain unique information about Aztec ritual sacrifice, social order, and, to some extent, gender relations. The This statement may come as somewhat of a surpirse because the enemy male warriors has traditionally been the focus of study. However, a closer reading of hte ritual performances as described by Sahagun and others shows that women were ritutally slaughtered in one-third of the yearly festivals.

Page 193

Perhaps Jay, like many of us, is struck dumb, hermeneutically speaking, in the face of the direct, sustained, vivid descriptionso f the preparations of the young women's bodies for sacrifice, the ritual deceptions and masquerades they were led throught, the occasional sexual use of the young women by warriors and rules, and the brutal ways they were stretched out on sacrificial stones by male preiests who beheaded them with the beaks of swordfish, extracted their hearts, and sometimes wore their skins.

Women were sacrificed at about 1/3 of these ceremonies, and there were festivals/ceremonies just for sacrificing women and children.

There were no women soldiers in this culture. As a matter of fact, women were not supposed to look into the eyes of men and could have their eye put out for doing so.

reply to post by Vitruvian


Conversation Barred

Originally posted by randyvs
reply to post by Vitruvian

 

Conversation Barred

Regarding this post by Vitruvian:

Mel Gibson and his father are Opus Dei. Please research this Catholic cult before responding........Gibson's reputation as a spokesman for the elite follows him. His movie about the so-called life of "The" Christ is a pure macabre fabrication as was the movie that supposedly is an accurate portrayal of the Mayan culture of death (not Aztecs) - APOCALYPTO ....... but still produced with the power elite's agenda in mind nonetheless.......Mel Gibson is a story teller for the power behind the power elite.........he's not much different than Oliver Stone and his phoney version of 9/11 (and JFK) which was also perfectly suited to the needs of the power elite.

Conversation might be barred on it for you maybe, but not for this poster...........Now, if a Mod says so then so be it .....OP's are not necessarily Mods

reply to post by SibylofErythrae


Haha! Again!

Florentine Codex written in latin script in colonial period is another propaganda nonsence. You can surely throw it out the window, because you are showing nothing to confirm human sacrifice, you just keep hitting into a wall.

reply to post by SLAYER69


No, sir. Human sacrifice is their propaganda record.

I'll tell you, all post colonial documents are written as propaganda. Can you give me a pre colonial document that verifies human sacrifice. Give it a try... in vain though, because you wont find it...

That's some damn complicated propaganda, when the Spaniards didn't need to have any propaganda at all to get people on that side of the pond on board.

articles.latimes.com...

In 2002, government archeologist Juan Alberto Roman Berrelleza announced the results of forensic testing on the bones of 42 children, mostly boys around age 6, sacrificed at Mexico City's Templo Mayor, the Aztecs' main religious site, during a drought.

All shared one feature: serious cavities, abscesses or bone infections painful enough to make them cry.

"It was considered a good omen if they cried a lot at the time of sacrifice," which was probably done by slitting their throats, Roman Berrelleza said.

www.jstor.org...

Forensic analysis of sacrificed children. Including their torture until they were set on fire.

reply to post by SibylofErythrae


Firstly, dating is HORRIBLE. Those people were either victims of illness or Spanish soldiers killed them. Today's companies still are trying to keep that theory how Aztecs were maniacs who sacrificed children. Another thing contradicting this is that Aztecs believed that if a child is killed, that the child's death will bring grand disaster upon the city. Those idiots who wrote the article did not describe the way they died. The great famine is another Spanish documentation. Wonder how they knew it? They killed them!

The other link is also misleading cause it shows clear propaganda, and child's death was surely caused by the Spanish, as Spanish were quite known to kill young children, in order to kill the devil before it even awakes, as the catholic lunatic priests were saying.

That pre aztec culture with butchering marks on skeletons, were clear marks of battle, nothing else.

That Templo Mayor "sacrifices" you mention are clear plague deaths, which confirms my theory, and contradicts you even more.

You can not win. keep trying. Still waiting for more results from you, they will be as this one, hammered into the ground. When Spanish mean famine or drought, they mean killin' and cleanin'! WHICH THEY TRULY ENJOYED!

Giving me results of forensic analysis done by the same idiots who conquered the natives is the same as giving me a Spanish book. No authenticity whaaaaaaatsooooeeeveeeer

reply to post by Alexander2533


That's it?

That's your big rebuttal?

To flail about in denial and not provide one solitary bit of evidence to support your claim?


Meh...

journals.cambridge.org...;jsessionid=DB7463DD9A3DEC4032CD5C07D6599C17.journals?fromPage=online&aid=1233408

Decapitations at the Moon Temple. Where it looks like they decanted their brains.

www.pbs.org...



figurine found with sacrificed children in their tombs.

Okay - that's enough for me today. I hate this subject and now need to go scrub my brains out.

Originally posted by Alexander2533
reply to post by Harte

 

Those urns were used for blood letting. Aztecs like Mayans would pour blood onto paper and into an urn, burn it, and have a vision of an ancestor.

I thought you couldn't trust the devious Spanish Propaganda?

I'm going to mirror your own deductive process and simply decide what the truth is and say that these are vile lies propagated by lying Spainards trying to justify their barbarous acts an ocean away (why again do they need to justify their actions in a land where they basically have complete autonomy?)

reply to post by mikegrouchy


Ummm dude, the Popol Vuh is not even Aztec. I find it so funny that typical americans haven't even a clue about the damn cultures a few hundred miles to the south. Not to mention as OP already stated, it was post invasion!

OP's right. Europeans used human sacrifice myth to discredit culture. Much the same way media uses it against the muslim world today.

It is amazing how much of Aztec history is fabricated. The Conquistadors made up some great stories. Even today there are people making up stories about the Aztecs. One could do some research into groups that splintered off from the Aztecs and find out why they did so. They might have had enough blood. Those people are still bloodthirsty today.

i'm with you on this! the only 'proof' comes from catholic 'experts'
for such an advanced society,are we expected to believe that these people we're barbarians?!
(catholics please refrain from making 'roman advances' of technology,because you stole and murdered every thing you obtained!)
modern thought is always trying to make us think we evolved from cavemen! this is not true at all!!!
'sacrificial' graves around stone henge,mass graves in south america,etc...
what about the mass graves found in europe? CAUSED BY THE PLAGUE!!! maybe we can misinterpretate that as human sacrifice!!! the mayans we're just as advanced as we are now,as well as many,many ancient cultures around the world were. we know that they knew the pith of the branch of a willow tree had pain relieving properties,now we call it asa, and aspirin is the #1 selling drug on the market in the world!!! (backwards natives!!!)
good post friend,people gotta wake up to whats real,and if our world does end as we know it,where does every one think we'll end up? right back to learning all the stuff our ancestors already knew before the 'END TIMES!!!'

Op is right. Why cant anyone come up with evidence that isnt written in the colonial period, and why do people keep claiming the colonial writings as evidence. wtf?

www.youtube.com...
Watch this movie, historically accurate or not, it is great. Warning, violence and blood. Mayan, not Aztec. More south. The Incas had a rope language, some of the records may be of human sacrifice. Where are our resident experts? They are the ones that will be hard to sway in the debate over how much blood spilled on the altars of the Aztecs. My own religion is not without blood on the altar, in the Old Testament.