The Aztecs - their culture and human sacrafice to their Gods

I'm studying Architecture in Los Angeles, and despite the Aztecs being architecturally advanced they believed in an array of Gods, and that these Gods required human sacrafice. To date, historically, we know that the Aztecs sacraficed 20,000 people per year so that the sun would continue to function, and for their crops to grow. This society thrived for many, many years, centuries even, and until Cortez from Spain and Spain itself dominated the Aztec Empire, human sacrafice was at the gist of Aztec religion and culture. Aztec royalty also ate the bodies of those sacraficed as livestock was sparse in what is called Mexico today. Any thoughts on the subject?

 

What kind of thoughts are you looking for?

 

It just goes to show that despite no matter how technologically advanced your society is, barbarism is still quite acceptable.

 

Sure, I saw Apocalypto! 20,000 people a year seems a trifle unnecessary. I have a hard time imagining how murdering this many people every year could in any way benefit the society. But it must have, otherwise the tool of religion would not have been brought into play to provide context and justification for it. Perhaps their reproductive rates far outweighed the resources they had to feed, clothe and shelter everyone who was born: Hence, they killed off a certain percentage of the population every year, similar to current views on culling deer in order to save the species as a whole.

 

It's one of those "you say tomato" deals. What's the difference between "human sacrifice" and "public execution," or for that matter between "human sacrifice" and the "death penalty?"

I think "human sacrifice" is a bogus term that modern civilization imposes on past civilizations to make them seem quaint.

 

Find something better to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon?

What are we supposed to discuss here?

 

They made war on their neighbors for the sacrifices for the most part. A way of dominating the region and getting rid of their enemies at the same time.

Jabba - I guess it depends on your take on 'human sacrifice'. I don't think the death penalty is used to placate the gods - last time I checked.

 

What do these two have to do with each other?

 

Now, I think that's going a bit far. The death penalty and and public execution are at least considered to based in the rule of law and the fair and reasonable exercise of justice. Human sacrifice as practiced by the Aztecs, and some other Central and South American cultures, was clearly inspired by religious zealotry. There's a big difference between finding someone guilty of a crime and deciding the fair punishment is death, and lining up a bunch of people and marching them ony by one through a temply to have their hearts ripped out through their chest, as depicted in various murals.

I do agree that there has been a trend in European archeology to portray all non-Western cultures as inferior, but I also think that some people are too quick to be apologists about certain things.

 

I'd invoke absolute morality in this case. We should leave other cultures alone in most instances, but if mass human sacrifice were to happen tommorrow....yeah, time for regime change.

 

I'd question the assumption that the Aztec Empire had no "rule of law" concerning the use of human sacrifice. My understanding was that it was their standard practice for prisoners of war.

The difference between a state-sponsored execution as punishment for a crime vs. a state-sponsored execution with religious overtones as punishment for being caught warring against the state seems negligible to me.

 

There are lots of things wrong with this thread, all of which I won't bother to innumerate. But, to deal with the present discussion, Jabba, no one is claiming that there weren't rules governing human sacrifice. And, indeed, prisoners of war were sacrificed. However, other sacrifices were made beyond prisoners of war or those that might be conventionally called "criminals." Moreover, sometimes war was waged to obtain human sacrifices. A good analogy would be considering the slave trade. It's one thing to point out that using prisoners of war as a source of cheap labor is not that unusual in history. It's quite another thing to pretend that some of the military campaigns waged in Africa to feed the slave trade were somehow equivalent to this.

We should be careful of trying assert cultural superiority. However, it can be just as bad to deliberately misunderstand the point of another culture's practices as we try to shoehorn it into a meaning that we are more comfortable with. Human sacrifice was not simply capital punishment with religious overtones.

 

We should be careful of trying assert cultural superiority. However, it can be just as bad to deliberately misunderstand the point of another culture's practices as we try to shoehorn it into a meaning that we are more comfortable with. Human sacrifice was not simply capital punishment with religious overtones.

Well, personally, I'm not any more comfortable with capital punishment than with human sacrifice. Second, you're giving me too much credit for deliberately misunderstanding Aztec culture. Any misunderstanding is inadvertent and the result of my own ignorance.