A local xi'paal asked a very difficult question: Did the Mayas or their neighbors practice human sacrifice? The question is difficult because the opinions of scholars are clouded by their emotional investment in the culture being studied, and many times that is based in politics. It is a fair question, so I have researched, and what follows is what we absolutely know. Yes, there were some human sacrifices, and as far as anyone can tell, there were no hearts chopped out, (at least in any quantity), and many times symbolism is confused with reality. Mel Gibson will have to return to the Passion for his masturbatory fantasies now.
The first discussion of human sacrifice in MesoAmerica comes in Jesuit Diego Duran' 1550 tome Relaciones de Nueva Espana- Relations of New Spain. In it, Duran tells tales of “demon gods who demand human blood to keep themselves alive”. He also claims “over 20,000 sacrifices a month took place in Mexico City alone, double that in Chichen Itza.” (Duran also claims the sides and steps of the pyramids were red, thick in the blood of sacrificed victims. This claim doesn't hold up, as blood, being iron-hemoglobin based, browns or blackens when exposed to the air. We also now know from analysis of paint remnants that a cinnabar-based red paint was used to color the pyramids, so they would be visible for some distance in the verdant green landscape they were in.) With the population of all of Mexico at the time being around a million or so, in less than five years they would be harvesting from other places with an even less population density. In truth, the numbers don't hold up to population realities, or the time it would take to excarnate someone with an obsidian blade. Duran's numbers are propaganda designed to make the brutal Castillians feel more at peace with being cruel and violent with the Natives. Similar tactics would be employed in North America, where Jesuits spread entirely false stories about the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) League being cannibals and rabid scalpers. In fact, the first scalps taken in North America were at the insistence and payoff by French Jesuits. Before that, prisoners were adopted in and used as replacements for those killed in battle, as evidenced by the Mid-Winter Bear Ceremonies. Even deadly skirmishes were replaced before the invasion by what is now called LaCrosse, the “little brother of war”. People were obviously too precious to waste on pissing contests, so they played sports, just like the Central American and Caribbean ballgame. It was a ritual representing war and death, not death itself. The ballcourts were heavily decorated with skulls and other underworld and violent imagery, as it was a replacement for the carnage. Academia falsely spread that the losing team of the ballgame lost it's heads, and their supporters were robbed and raped. No such dice, and only an ignorant fool would suggest that now.
Similar problems with interpretation occur on the pyramid temples and Chac-mools. (Chac-mools are large sculpted reclining male figures who have bowls in their bellies, where offerings or incense were placed. Many of them were censers used for burning fragrant copal resin, as evidenced by the traces of it still in the bowls. Again, in the fertile and twisted minds of the monotheists, this is where hearts were placed, freshly cut from the chest of some poor victim, and still beating. Instead of reality, it becomes a deep blood-fetish fantasy, as is the rest of Christianity - “purified by the blood of a sacrificed Christ”). We do have many architectural panels and pages in gatefold books representing auto-sacrifice, self-bloodletting as offering. These show a spine (stingray or porcupine) needle, with a cord or string after it (to absorb the blood) being used to pierce and collect blood from tongues, earlobes, penises, and foreskins. We have more details on this from the Mexican story of the human King Quetzalcoatl, who bloodlets and scars himself so severely, everyone is afraid of him. There are images of deities beheading themselves (as in one of the Sun gods during and eclipse), and the stories of Xibalba (the underworld) are filled with stories of cutting peoples hearts out and heads off. Both of these stories are part of mythologized depictions of natural and cosmic cycles, and are clearly not instructions for humans.We also have the initiatory sacrificial process of semen being offered willingly or by force. We are told in the Popol Vuh and Amatl Turey,a s well as in other historical sources, that an offering of semen was the best a human could offer, as well as a way to allow tribes to no longer be enemies. It is recorded that in the mid-1300s, a military struggle ensued between Yucatec and Nahuatl groups over the control of Hacavitz, a mountain that contains much flint on the border area of the two groups. Flint is important if you want to carve it ceremonially, or if you are trying to make fire in a rainforest environment. Flint was a major trade good. The Yucatec groups finally got control of the mountain and it's flint, as the Nahuatl soldiers, weary of continual war and the brutal austere life they led, allowed themselves to be “captured” by the Yucatec patrols. They were then brought to a pyramid temple as prisoners, and “sacrificed up” to the gods. This was the “give your armpits and waists over willingly” line we see in the Popol Vuh and Amatl Turey. The “sacrificed” (they were brought to orgasm, and their semen was offered up as their life-force. We also see this in the Amatl Turey and Popol Vuh, where prisoners in Xibalba have their life offered up, and the Lords of Xibalba drink from it, and then the prisoner is restored and released. Orgasm is equated with death, as the French do when they say “Le Petit Mort”.), having given of their lives, were now Yucatecean team members. In short time, the Yucatecs had more personnel soldiers, and the Nahuatl group was outnumbered by their own defectors.
We also have the murals at Bonampak, in which the battered, bruised, and exhausted captives are shown bleeding, but from their fingertips and earlobes. For all the beheading regalia and such in the murals, there is no sign these captives are to be decapitated or disemboweled. There are several similar scenes in vases throughout Central America, where a naked, bound captive is brought before an overlord, but there are no scenes of ordinary humans (again, many images exist in the mythological realm, of deities, monsters, and even Hunahpu and Xbalanque) being sacrificed until after the Castillian invasion. After the invasion, these images proliferate, filling a deep need in the Eurasian invaders. Besides any Christian iconography, it is easy to demonize people you are trying to conquer or enslave if you can “prove” they do human sacrifice or cannibalism. We see this not only among the Eurasian invaders, but everywhere, even among tribal societies. There is always some evil, cannibal tribe “over there” somewhere, who kill people as ritual, and eat babies, etc. This mythological realm (and that's exactly what it is for the cannibalism part- no tribe has ever been found to hunt and eat humans as a matter of course outside of dire emergency situations like the Andean plane crash or the Donner Party) is deep seated somewhere in the human psyche.
Before the Native Americans, Christianity leveled these charges against other monotheists, most famously by creating a Jewish blood libel. Chrisitanity needs to look at itself closely, to see why it is obsessed with blood, human sacrifice, and cannibalism- not only is their boy-god sacrificed (they even lance him to let out “blood and water”, and of course the bloody Crown of Thorns, still on display in Notre Dame in Paris), their ritual of communion is a symbolic act of cannibalism: “this is my body, this is my blood”. Who are the real human sacrificing cannibals? The endless wars today and throughout history where the monotheist god is invoked and millions upon millions die- isn't that a ritualized human sacrifice on a massive level as well? It is time we looked in a mirror before we project our pathologies onto other cultures, past, present, or future.
So let us look at the few actual examples of human sacrifice in Ancient Tropical America.
Among the entrenched imperial Aztecs, the ritual of Xipe Totec occurred. Xipe Totec is the “Flayed Lord”, the depiction of a xi'paal deity who to renew himself each year, would take the skin of a sacrificed victim and wear it over his own body. The Aztecs would chose a victim to sacrifice, and then they would skin him, and the skin was worn by another chosen Xipe Totec priest, who would then bless the people and the land so they would be fertile, and then he, too, would be sacrificed. That is still only two people per major city, not the 20,000 a month, and no one gets their hearts cut out.
We have bound and strangled bodies or skeletons as offerings throughout the Americas (as we do in Europe and Asia as well). In Chichen Itza, several skeletons have been pulled from the cenotes, apparently sacrifices so it would rain during a drought. (We see similar frozen sacrifices in the Andes as well, which are much better preserved than just skeletons.) The Yucatan has no surface waters, and the rain and cistern-like cenotes are what sustains life. The stories of throwing young virgins into the cenote (or the volcano in the Pacific) are again the sexual fetish fantasies of the missionaries. We do have records of several people being thrown into the cenotes to trigger rain when there were heavy low clouds but no precipitation, but we are also told how they were chosen as “brave divers”, and there was every expectation they were to jump in to tickle Chac (the rain-god), and then climb back out again, quite well, intact, and alive.
Now in all of this, I have yet to mention the Caribbean island-dwelling Yucatec cousins the Taino. I can explain the Taino viewpoint by sharing two rules: if you kill something, you have to eat it, and eating human flesh is absolutely forbidden. So, cannibalism and human sacrifice is out of the question for an observant Taino.
I want to deeply thank Brendan for challenging me with the inquiry, I have to admit my first reaction was “nope, never happened”, based on a defensive gut reaction. Truth is awkward and uncomfortable at times, and it is best to face it. If anyone finds out any more hard data on any of this, I will be willing to look.
- Joaquin 2 Cacimarex, Sewaornock, Manahatouac
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