Human sacrifice was a common practice in many parts of Mesoamerica. The rite was not new to the Aztecs when they arrived at the Valley of Mexico, nor was it something unique to pre-Columbian Mexico. Other Mesoamerican cultures, such as the Purépechas, the Toltecs, and the Maya performed sacrifices as well, and from archaeological evidence, this ritual probably existed since the time of the Olmecs (1200–400 BC), and perhaps even throughout the early farming cultures of the region. However, the extent of human sacrifice is unknown among several Mesoamerican civilizations. What distinguished Aztec practice from Maya human sacrifice was the way in which it was embedded in everyday life.
Around 1521, when the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan fell to Hernán Cortés's troops, Cortés and other European explorers and conquistadores made observations of and wrote reports about the practice of human sacrifice. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who participated in the Cortés expedition, made frequent mention of human sacrifice in his memoir True History of the Conquest of New Spain. There are a number of second-hand accounts of human sacrifices written by Spanish friars that relate to the testimonies of native eyewitnesses. The literary accounts have been supported by archeological research.
Since the late 1970s, excavations of the offerings in the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan, and other archaeological sites, have provided physical evidence of human sacrifice among the Mesoamerican peoples."Evidence May Back Human Sacrifice Claims" By Mark Stevenson"Grisly Sacrifices Found in Pyramid of the Moon" By LiveScience Staff. As of 2020, archaeologists have found 603 human skulls at the Hueyi Tzompantli in the archeological zone of the Templo Mayor.
A wide variety of interpretations of the Aztec practice of human sacrifice have been proposed by modern scholars. Many scholars now believe that Aztec human sacrifice, especially during troubled times like pandemic or other crises, was performed in honor of the gods. Most scholars of Pre-Columbian civilization see human sacrifice among the Aztecs as a part of the long cultural tradition of human sacrifice in Mesoamerica.
Role of sacrifice in Aztec culture
Sacrifice was a common theme in the Aztec culture. In the legend of the "Five Suns", all the gods sacrificed themselves so that mankind could live. Some years after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, a body of the Franciscans confronted the remaining Aztec priesthood and demanded, under threat of death, that they desist from this traditional practice. The Aztec priests justified their acts as follows: "Life is because of the gods; with their sacrifice, they gave us life ... They produce our sustenance ... which nourishes life."
What the Aztec priests were referring to was a cardinal Mesoamerican belief: that a great and continuing sacrifice by the gods sustains the Universe. A strong sense of indebtedness was connected with this worldview. Indeed, nextlahualli (debt-payment) was a commonly used metaphor for human sacrifice, and, as Bernardino de Sahagún reported, it was said that the victim was someone who "gave his service".
Human sacrifice was in this sense the highest level of an entire panoply of offerings through which the Aztecs sought to repay their debt to the gods. Both Sahagún and Toribio de Benavente (also called "Motolinía") observed that the Aztecs gladly parted with everything. Even the "stage" for human sacrifice, the massive temple-pyramids, was an offering mound: crammed with the land's finest art, treasure and victims; they were then buried underneath for the deities.
Additionally, the sacrifice of animals was a common practice, for which the Aztecs bred dogs, eagles, jaguars and deer. The cult of Quetzalcoatl required the sacrifice of butterflies and hummingbirds.
Limited forms of self-sacrifice were also quite common: people would offer maguey thorns, tainted with their own blood, using blood from their tongues, ear lobes, or genitals. Blood held a central place in Mesoamerican cultures. The 16th-century Florentine Codex by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún reports that in one of the creation myths, Quetzalcóatl offered blood extracted from a wound in his own penis to give life to humanity. There are several other myths in which Nahua gods offer their blood to help humanity.
The meaning of sacrifice in Aztec society is debated. Some scholars argue that its purpose was to assist the gods in maintaining the cosmos. Another, very controversial, theory is that human sacrifice served to supply protein and vital nutrients in the absence of large animals, since the victims were often eaten.
In any case the sacrificial role entailed a great deal of social expectation and a certain degree of acquiescence.
Flower wars
According to Diego Durán's History of the Indies of New Spain (and a few other sources that are believed to be based on the Crónica X), the flower wars were a ritual among the cities of Aztec Triple Alliance and Tlaxcala, Huexotzingo and Cholula. This form of ritual was introduced probably after the mid-1450s following droughts, as famine caused many deaths in the Mexican highlands. The droughts and damage to crops were believed to be punishment by gods who felt unappreciated and improperly honored. Therefore, the flower wars provided victims for human sacrificial offerings in a highly structured and ceremonial manner.
This type of warfare differed from regular political warfare, as the flower wars were also an opportunity for combat training and as first exposure to combat for new soldiers. In addition, regular warfare included the use of long range weapons such as atlatl darts, stones, and slings to damage the enemy from afar. During the flower wars, warriors were expected to fight up close and exhibit their combat abilities while aiming to injure the enemy, rather than kill them. The main objective of Aztec flower warfare was to capture victims alive for later ritual execution, and offerings to the gods. Being killed in the flower wars, which was considered much more noble than dying in a regular military battle, was religiously more prestigious, as these dead were given the privilege to live in heaven with the war god, Huitzilopochtli.
Sacrifice ritual Human sacrifice rituals were performed at the appropriate times each month or festival with the appropriate number of living bodies and other goods. These individuals were previously chosen to be sacrificed, as was the case for people embodying the gods themselves, or members of an enemy party which had been captured and prepared to be sacrificed. Even enemies of the Aztecs understood their roles as sacrifices to the gods since many also practiced the same type of religion. For many rites, the victims were expected to bless children, greet and cheer passers-by, hear people's petitions to the gods, visit people in their homes, give discourses and lead sacred songs, processions and dances.Sahagun Bk 5: 8; Bk 2: 5:9; Bk 2:24:68–69
A great deal of cosmological thought seems to have underlain each of the Aztec sacrificial rites. Most of the sacrificial rituals took more than two people to perform. In the usual procedure of the ritual, the victim would be taken to the top of the temple. The victim would then be laid on a stone slab, a chacmool, by four priests, and their abdomen would be sliced open by a fifth priest with a ceremonial knife made of flint. The most common form of human sacrifice was heart-extraction. The Aztec believed that the heart (tona) was both the seat of the individual and a fragment of the Sun's heat (istli). The chacmool was a very important religious tool used during sacrifices. The cut was made in the abdomen and went through the diaphragm. The priest would rip out the heart and it would then be placed in a bowl held by a statue of the honored god, and the body would then be thrown down the temple's stairs. The body would land on a terrace at the base of the pyramid called an apetlatl.
Before and during the killing, priests and audience gathered in the plaza below, stabbed, pierced and bled themselves as auto-sacrifice. Hymns, whistles, spectacular costumed dances and percussive music marked different phases of the rite.
The body parts would then be disposed of, the viscera fed to the animals in the zoo, and the bleeding head was placed on display in the tzompantli or the skull rack. When the consumption of individuals was involved, the warrior who captured the enemy was given the meaty limbs while the most important flesh, the stomach and chest, were offerings to the gods.
Other types of human sacrifice, which paid tribute to various deities, killed the victims differently. The victim could be shot with arrows, die in gladiatorial style fighting, be sacrificed as a result of the Mesoamerican ballgame, burned, flayed after being sacrificed, or drowned.
Those individuals who were unable to complete their ritual duties were disposed of in a much less honorary manner. This "insult to the gods" needed to be atoned, therefore the sacrifice was slain while being chastised instead of revered. The conquistadors Cortés and Alvarado found that some of the sacrificial victims they freed "indignantly rejected [the] offer of release and demanded to be sacrificed".
Scope of human sacrifice in Aztec culture
Some post-conquest sources report that at the re-consecration of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs sacrificed about 80,400 prisoners over the course of four days. This number is considered by Ross Hassig, author of Aztec Warfare, to be an exaggeration. Hassig states "between 10,000 and 80,400 persons" were sacrificed in the ceremony. The higher estimate would average 15 sacrifices per minute during the four-day consecration. Four tables were arranged at the top so that the victims could be jettisoned down the sides of the temple. Additionally, some historians argue that these numbers were inaccurate as most written account of Aztec sacrifices were made by Spanish sources to justify Spain's conquest. Nonetheless, according to Codex Telleriano-Remensis, old Aztecs who talked with the missionaries told about a much lower figure for the reconsecration of the temple, approximately 4,000 victims in total.
Michael Harner, in his 1977 article The Enigma of Aztec Sacrifice, cites an estimate by Woodrow Borah, according to which about one percent of the population was sacrificed annually in the early 15th century. Borah calculated that about 250,000 persons were sacrificed every year, assuming a total population of the Aztec Empire of roughly 25 million. Others have rejected this estimate as implausibly high, arguing chiefly that the actual population was likely lower, implying that the victim count must have been lower too. Borah's method of calculating the number of sacrificed as a percentage of the population was also criticized as inappropriate. Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl, a Mexica descendant and the author of Codex Ixtlilxochitl, states that one in five children of the Mexica tributaries was killed annually, without translating this into an absolute number. He likely referred to sacrifices occurring throughout all of Central Mexico and might have meant that 20% of the children of subject people were sacrificed before growing up.