Comparison Of Human Sacrifices In Ancient Maya And Aztec Civilizations
Many ancient cultures strongly believed that the Gods wanted people to shed blood for them. They understood it as a way to alienate disastrous situations they may have faced if they did not offer the Gods human life. This dark side of their religion in which they practiced ritual murders had an outcome of thousands of the bloodshed victims. Bearing in mind that the life of ancient people was already severe due to numerous diseases, wars, extreme weather conditions, and starvation, they managed to practice human sacrifices as a way to avoid further catastrophes. There were several techniques to perform human sacrifices in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations including decapitation, heart removal, and many more.
The ritual murder was a significant part of Mayan culture The Mayans worshipped over 250 various Gods, including Chaac one of the important Gods to the Mayans because of the ability to bring rain and Cizin, the God of death. According to the Mayan culture, their Gods needed them to perform ritual bloodshed otherwise they would send disasters in a form of plagues, droughts and many more.
Ancient Maya society practiced human sacrifice in the form of a ball game or as the Mayan would call it the “Pok-a-tok”. For Maya people, the game was not just a sports game it was directly connected to their religion. According to Miller and Houstin in their article “The Classic Maya Ballgame and Its Architectural Setting”, the players used their hips to pass a ball among each other, the aim was to score a goal by hitting a ball through the stone ring on a particular area. There is no precise information about all the rules of a ball game, however, it is well-known that the outcome was a human sacrifice. Like many civilizations, the Mayans also experienced foreign attacks which would eventually turn into wars. The captives from battles were extremely tortured and some of the captured soldiers, especially the ones of higher rank, were sent to be one of the players in the ballgame. The human sacrifice that was the result of the game was associated as a victory over death. Also, the victims of the ritual accepted their death with honor since this is an exchange of their life with the prosper life of many people.
There are clear pieces of evidence of extreme violence in the form of human sacrifice illustrated by Mayans in the city of Chichen Itza, which is located in Mexico. One of the images shows the beheaded soldier and his blood that was spread all over the illustration, the image also suggests that there are snakes over his head serving as a symbol of the victim becoming a God. The sacrifice made after winning a ballgame was considered as an honorable act to the point where the Mayans believed that the murdered person would rise and be accepted by Gods.
Apart from sacrificing human bodies as an end result of a religious game, the Mayans sacrificed humans, including children, for the God Chaac, the rain-giver. Due to the fragile resources, the Mayans were highly dependent on weather conditions, hence performed constant ritual murders for the abundance of the rain. The Sacred Cenote is well at the Chichen Itza, where a lot of Mayan human sacrifices were practiced. Some experts suggest that the well was the only source of drinking water, therefore the Mayans believed that the God Chaac located in the cenote, so all the rains, thunders, and clouds were sent from there. The sacred watery caves served as temples since the Mayans assumed that those cenotes were gates to the underworld, this way of thinking contributed to a large number of offerings, especially human children. Recent discoveries show that children were sent into the cave colored in blue, the color of water, and hold under the lake inside the cave until they were drowned and the sacrifice is fully performed. The infanticide, the killing of children, was proven to be practiced a lot due to the scientific conclusion that was derived from the archaeological excavations.
The Aztec Empire is a Mesoamerican civilization which was located in Mexico, and, as many researchers suggest, also practiced extreme violence in a form of human sacrifices. Ritual sacrifices were significant to Aztec people, as they assumed that they owned eternal debt to the Gods, and they kept paying the debt every day, otherwise, the sun would not rise. They strongly believed that the Gods sacrificed themselves to the fire which birthed the sun which moves around the sky to sustain the lives of people on Earth, hence the Aztecs must give blood and sacrifice to keep the world in balance. Although the Aztecs were polytheistic society, their main God was Huitzilopochtli, the God of Sun and War. It was believed that the God of Sun and War demanded blood and sacrifice which will serve as a reversion of possible catastrophes.
Individual bloodletting was commonly practiced among citizens of Aztec society on a daily basis, without any differences in age, gender, or social status. However, large-scale public human sacrifice was common as well. The Aztecs considered death as a sacrifice as one of the three most honorable ways to die. Sacrificial victims, as well as, Aztec warriors and Aztec women who died of childbirth went to the world of the Gods into paradise. On the other hand, Patricia R. Anawalt in her study “Understanding Aztec Human Sacrifice” emphasizes that very often prisoners of wars also were sacrificed in a ritual performed by the high priest. She indicates the specific relationship between the captive and captor in her writing: “When the prisoner was first taken, the captor uttered the traditional words, 'He is as my beloved son. ' The captive then replied, 'He is as my beloved father. '
From that moment the die was cast; the prisoner accepted his fate and saw himself as being apart, the god's elect. His sacrifice then became merely the climax of a fateful chain of events”. Some scholars point out that the Aztecs sacrificed from 1000 to 25 000 humans per year. Aztec warriors mostly did not kill but wounded the enemy for the upcoming sacrifice for sustaining and nourishing the Gods.
The most common method of ritual murder was heart removal. The high priest would either take out the heart and place it in a stone jar or take it out and it the organ himself. Often the sacrificial victims would dress up as they impersonated the Gods that at their time sacrificed themselves. They were treated by people very highly because the execution for the Gods was considered an honorable act. After the ceremony, the victims’ body parts were eaten by the people, often by those who belonged to a higher class. Besides, their skins were flayed from their dead bodies and worn by priests as a costume. Most ritual bloodshed performed by Aztecs were on the temples which were located on the top of the massive pyramid with two sections, one for the God of rain and the other for the God of sun. The ongoing human sacrifices were practiced in front of the citizens of the capital city of Aztecs the Tenochtitlan. The procedure started with ripping out the heart of the honored victim, then the high priest beheaded the victim through the body down the pyramid and kept the head for the wall. The Aztecs performed infanticide due to the reason that the tears of children were supposed to please Tlaloc, the God of rain.
In conclusion, although, these two ancient civilizations practiced human sacrifice, the Mayans performed human sacrifice because of the fear of disasters, while the Aztecs had the spiritual burden to appease the Gods for the rising sun and overall life on Earth. In both societies, the victims of ritual bloodshed were treated honorably. Due to the reason that there are more records consisting of information regarding the Aztecs and their sacrificial rituals, the Mayan cities were destroyed and very few remains were comprehensive for scientists to gather more accurate information about the ancient Mayans.
