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.
While people who died of natural causes had only the gloomy under- world to look forward to, men who died in war, as well as women who died in childbirth producing warriors and even sacrificial victims tak- en in battle, had the promise of a glorious afterlife in the entourage of the sun Berdan — But we also know that sacrifice was based on a sympathetic magic. The children were supposed to cry, and people were supposed to cry about them dying.
These tears would bring the rain. You wonder whether people would have been prepared to watch that spectacle in quite the same way. There was an acceptance that as a warrior, if you were captured by another city, you could be sacrificed. It was a shared belief that dying as a sacrifice or in battle was one of the very few ways you could get a privileged afterlife.
The closest parallel is something like martyrdom, where you die for the gods and gain a privilege as a result. The vast majority of people were destined for a place called Mictlan after they died, which is not exactly hell, but is a nonetheless dark, damp and unpleasant place, where you would have to endure low-grade suffering for eternity.
But if you were a man who died in sacrifice, first you would accompany the sun for four years, leading and heralding the gods in a glorious way. Then, you would go off to become a hummingbird or a butterfly that dances in the sun and sips nectar. The sources suggest that in paradise, you would live drunk, oblivious to the cares of the world. You can see why that might seem an appealing option.
In reality, the likelihood is that while some people faced the prospect of being sacrificed by exalting their cities, praising the gods and bravely accepting their fate as a warrior, other people were dragged kicking and screaming. Sign in. Researchers studying human bones found in Tenochtitlan found that the individuals had been decapitated and dismembered.
The analysis suggested that the victims that been butchered and consumed, and that their flesh was removed immediately after immolation. Illustrations in temple murals and stone carvings have also been found to depict scenes of ritual human sacrifice. According to Aztec mythology, the sun god Huitzilopochtli required constant nourishment in the form of human blood to prevent the rise of darkness and the end of the world. The serpentine fertility god Quetzalcoatl and the jaguar god Tezcatlipoca both also required human sacrifice.
Aztec ideology dictated that how an individual fared in the afterlife depended on them being either sacrificed to the gods or killed in battle.
In contrast, a person who died of disease went to the lowest level of the underworld, Mictlan. Difficult as it might be to imagine, the Aztecs would volunteer to be sacrificed, believing it to be the pinnacle of nobility and honour. Prisoners of war were also favoured as victims — the expanding Aztec Empire of the 15th and 16th centuries saw human sacrifice as an act of intimidation.
Illustration of Aztec human sacrifice from a 16th century codex Credit: Public domain. In , a group of Spanish conquistadors , women, children and horses were captured by local people, known as the Acolhauas, near the major Aztec city of Tetzcoco. The prisoners were kept in ad hoc cells and, over the course of the following weeks, killed and cannibalised in ritual ceremonies. DNA tests of victims from the Templo Mayor site indicated that the majority were outsiders, most likely captured enemy soldiers or slaves.
Historians generally believe that cannibalism was not practised by commoners and was not part of the regular Aztec diet. After they were decapitated, the bodies of the victims would be gifted to noblemen and important members of the community.
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