Traditional View of Human Sacrifice

¶ … traditional view of human sacrifice in the Aztec culture has been one that associates the practice almost exclusively with religion. In a contrary ethnographic paper, published in 1975, Michael Harner demonstrates that the development of wide scale human sacrifice, as compared to other Mesoamerican cultures, i.e. The Inca demonstrates that it is entirely possible that human sacrifice in the name of faith could have been a limited guise for the fact that the Aztec culture developed in an area that had comparatively fewer sources of protein, both domestic and wild, based on rapid population overgrowth and limited regional sources to begin with. "It is the thesis of this paper that large-scale cannibalism, disguised as sacrifice, was the natural consequences of this situation." (119) "This situation" meaning a severely limited opportunity for the development of domesticated or wild protein sources.

As a first bit of evidence Harner discusses the varied numbers of historical estimates of the number and scale of annual sacrificial events. Harner concludes that though the Spanish conquest writers may have exaggerated the number of human sacrificial victims at 20,000 per year based on witnessing such events and/or hearing about them the real estimate may be more like 250,000 per year, or about 1% of the total population. This later estimate is based on the work of a previous ethnographer, who developed his theory based on the number of regional temples, i.e. sights of sacrifice. (117-119) "The comparable number for Incas was in the hundreds; in the Inca empire, the other major political entity in the New World as the time of the conquest, annual human sacrifice could, at most, apparently be measured in the hundreds." (119)

Harner goes on to discuss the fact that in most cases there were few exceptions as to which sacrificial victims were consumed and which were not. According to Harner, "While some sacrificial victims, such as children sacrificed to Tlaloc by drowning or persons suffering from skin diseases were not eaten, the overwhelming majority of the sacrificed captives appear to have been consumed." (119-120) it is again this evidence that suggests that such a practice may well have developed as an aspect of faith and then escalated as greater pressures were exerted by the population and the unsustainable regional food supplies.

Harner quotes from Spanish sources on the witnessing of acts of human sacrifice and cannibalism, among the peoples of the Aztec culture. "Moreover every day they sacrificed before our eyes three, four, or five indians, whose hearts were offered to those idols and whose blood was plastered on the walls. The feet, arms, and legs of their victims were cut off and eaten, just as we east beef from the butcher's in our country." (120) This evidence may be compelling but like numerical estimates must be taken with a grain of salt as interpretive conquest literature is frequently peppered with "evidence" of the need to civilize and convert natives to Christianity. Harner relies heavily upon these sources and sites many such dialogues and diaries of the conquest population as reasonable evidence that such events were at the very least logical and frequent.