Aztec Sacrifice Quotes

Of course, even without my help, other forces would keep the cosmos chugging along. Many different belief systems powered the revolution of the planets and stars. Wolves would still chase Sol across the sky. Ra would continue his daily journey in his sun barque. Tonatiuh would keep running on his surplus blood from human sacrifices back in the Aztec days. And that other thing—science— would still generate gravity and quantum physics or whatever.

There were car gods there: a powerful, serious-faced contingent, with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs.

Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And who of Huitzilopochtli? In one year - and it is no more than five hundred years ago - 50,000 youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest. Huitzilopochtli, like many other gods, had no human father; his mother was a virtuous widow; he was born of an apparently innocent flirtation that she carried out with the sun. When he frowned, his father, the sun, stood still. When he roared with rage, earthquakes engulfed whole cities. When he thirsted he was watered with 10,000 gallons of human blood. But today Huitzilopochtli is as magnificently forgotten as Allen G. Thurman. Once the peer of Allah, Buddha and Wotan, he is now the peer of Richmond P. Hobson, Alton B. Parker, Adelina Patti, General Weyler and Tom Sharkey. Speaking of Huitzilopochtli recalls his brother Tezcatlipoca. Tezcatlipoca was almost as powerful; he consumed 25,000 virgins a year. Lead me to his tomb: I would weep, and hang a couronne des perles. But who knows where it is? Or where the grave of Quetzalcoatl is? Or Xiuhtecuhtli? Or Centeotl, that sweet one? Or Tlazolteotl, the goddess of love? Of Mictlan? Or Xipe? Or all the host of Tzitzimitl? Where are their bones? Where is the willow on which they hung their harps? In what forlorn and unheard-of Hell do they await their resurrection morn? Who enjoys their residuary estates? Or that of Dis, whom Caesar found to be the chief god of the Celts? Of that of Tarves, the bull? Or that of Moccos, the pig? Or that of Epona, the mare? Or that of Mullo, the celestial jackass? There was a time when the Irish revered all these gods, but today even the drunkest Irishman laughs at them. But they have company in oblivion: the Hell of dead gods is as crowded as the Presbyterian Hell for babies. Damona is there, and Esus, and Drunemeton, and Silvana, and Dervones, and Adsullata, and Deva, and Bellisima, and Uxellimus, and Borvo, and Grannos, and Mogons. All mighty gods in their day, worshipped by millions, full of demands and impositions, able to bind and loose - all gods of the first class. Men labored for generations to build vast temples to them - temples with stones as large as hay-wagons. The business of interpreting their whims occupied thousands of priests, bishops, archbishops. To doubt them was to die, usually at the stake. Armies took to the field to defend them against infidels; villages were burned, women and children butchered, cattle were driven off. Yet in the end they all withered and died, and today there is none so poor to do them reverence. What has become of Sutekh, once the high god of the whole Nile Valley? What has become of: Resheph Anath Ashtoreth El Nergal Nebo Ninib Melek Ahijah Isis Ptah Anubis Baal Astarte Hadad Addu Shalem Dagon Sharaab Yau Amon-Re Osiris Sebek Molech? All there were gods of the highest eminence. Many of them are mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament. They ranked, five or six thousand years ago, with Yahweh Himself; the worst of them stood far higher than Thor. Yet they have all gone down the chute, and with them the following: Bilé Ler Arianrhod Morrigu Govannon Gunfled Sokk-mimi Nemetona Dagda Robigus Pluto Ops Meditrina Vesta You may think I spoof. That I invent the names. I do not. Ask the rector to lend you any good treatise on comparative religion: You will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest standing and dignity-gods of civilized peoples-worshiped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead.

I asked him once what he believed to be the basic flaw in the character of Germans, and he replied “obedience.” When I consider the ghastly orders obeyed by underlings of Columbus, or of Aztec priests supervising human sacrifices, or of senile Chinese bureaucrats wishing to silence unarmed, peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square only three years ago as I write, I have to wonder if obedience isn’t the basic flaw in most of humankind.

The Aztecs, so the story goes, routinely disemboweled eight thousand faithful a week in their temples of the sun, a sacrifice to the god of the clouds to make him send them rain. Such things are hard to believe until you get mixed up in a war. Once you’re in a war, you see how it is: the Aztecs’ contempt for other people’s bodies was the same as my humble viscera must have inspired in our above-mentioned General Celadon des Entrayes, who, thanks to a series of promotions, had become a kind of chickenshit god, an abominably exigent little sun.

The junk virus is public health problem number one of the world today. Since Naked Lunch treats this health problem, it is necessarily brutal, obscene and disgusting. . . . As always the lunch is naked. If civilized countries want to return to Druid Hanging Rites in the Sacred Grove or to drink blood with the Aztecs and feed their Gods with blood of human sacrifice, let them see what they actually eat and drink. Let them see what is on the end of that long newspaper spoon.

He probably didn’t know Aztecs from Mayans. None of the gods, none of the mythology, none of the names she’d learned since childhood. There had been vampires in America before the Aztecs rose to power, and they had interacted with humans, of course. But the Tlahuelpocmimi had blended so seamlessly into Aztec culture it was difficult to determine who had influenced whom, whether the emphasis on blood and sacrifice had come from exposure to the vampires or whether the vampires had gravitated toward this tribe because it meshed with their worldviews.

Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day where their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses — the days of interviews — are over. And still they say yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.

The wind was fair, and the small fleet hugged the shore, sailing past the Alvarado and the Banderas rivers, where Grijalva had traded beads for gold, past the Island of Sacrifices, where Grijalva’s men had seen the bloody altars, and finally anchored off the island of San Juan de Ulúa, in the harbor of present-day Veracruz, on Holy Thursday, 1519. On Good Friday, Cortés and his expedition disembarked, built a small camp, and made contact with the local Indians, members of a powerful nation called the Aztecs.

Cultural relativists prefer to wrap the issue of sharia in the intellectual equivalent of a black jilbab or blue burqa and intone the old platitudes that we should be nonjudgmental about the religious practices of others. Why? The ancient Aztecs and other peoples practiced human sacrifice, tearing the still-beating hearts out of their sacrificial victims. We teach our children that this happened five hundred years ago, but we don't condone it -- and wouldn't if the practice were suddenly revived in Mexico today. So why do we condone the 'sacrifice' of women or homosexuals or lapsed Muslims for 'crimes' such as apostasy, adultery, blasphemy, marrying outside of their faith, or simply wishing to marry the partner of their choice? Why, aside from the publication of reports by human rights organizations, is there no discernible reaction? In the twenty-first century, I believe that all decent human beings can agree that such barbarous acts should not be tolerated. They can and must be condemned and prosecuted as crimes, not accepted as legitimate punishments. The abuses carried out under sharia are irrefutable. If we are to have any hope for a more peaceful, more stable planet, these punishments must be set aside.

Cultural relativists prefer to wrap the issue of sharia in the intellectual equivalent of a black jilbab or blue burqa and intone the old platitudes that we should be nonjudgmental about the religious practices of others. Why? The ancient Aztecs and other peoples practiced human sacrifice, tearing the still-beating hearts out of their sacrificial victims. We teach our children that this happened five hundred years ago, but we don’t condone it—and wouldn’t if the practice were suddenly revived in Mexico today. So why do we condone the “sacrifice” of women or homosexuals or lapsed Muslims for “crimes” such as apostasy, adultery, blasphemy, marrying outside of their faith, or simply wishing to marry the partner of their choice? Why, aside from the publication of reports by human rights organizations, is there no discernible reaction? In

Death is a huge cliff and when you are about to be thrown off it, like an Aztec sacrifice, other problems on the valley floor look very small, but once on the ground with the rest of the world they become again of dominating proportions.

Frazer further recounts that, according to the Franciscan monk Sahagun, who was "our best authority on the Aztec religion," another human sacrifice was committed at the vernal equinox, i.e., Easter, the precise time when the archetypical Christian Son of God was put to death in an expiatory sacrifice. 119 As it was in so many places, the Mexican Easter ritual was practiced for the purpose of fertility and the resurrection of life during the spring.

been unimaginable to folks a century ago.” “Real socialism has never been tried,” Abby asserted. “Those were unsuccessful and flawed attempts.” “Would you say the Aztecs never practiced real human sacrifice,” Dad asked dryly, “because they never did get their crops to grow reliably no matter how much blood they shed?

To my friend, the anthropologist, it was a sacrifice, but to me it was the burial of a very important child. The totonalcayos are also called cuecueyos in Náhuatl. A cuey is something curved in the shape of a half-moon which goes in and out. To put a cuey in the seven totonalcayos is a very advanced technique of taking out the soul, a technique which nowadays even the most advanced spiritual practitioners don’t know. The shedding of the skin represents the removal of the old energy. It is the symbol of the second Tezcatlipoca, the red one, Xipe Totec. It was clear to me that the cuecueyos had been inserted after this boy had died, and that he had been flayed to make his energy change so that he wouldn’t come back ever again. It’s a matter of common sense: if you sacrifice someone you don’t worry about his chakras, or his skin, and you don’t bother putting him in the foetal position, which is related to the way consciousness comes in and out of the body. So this proved something else that the guardians of the oral tradition had stated: that there had never been any human sacrifices in the Aztec Empire. When I realized this, I understood the extent to which the Aztec people been slandered. It was lack of understanding and a series of lies that had led to the slaughter in which 90 per cent of the native population of Mexico had perished. I was seeing this injustice now with my own eyes, and my heart sank in sadness for the ancient people of Mexico. Their throne had a cross on top of it; their dead were thought to have been sacrificed. I didn’t want to see anything else, not even the sun temple — I just wanted to get out of there.

The oikophobe does not want sharia or Aztec human sacrifice, or any other foreign custom, in his own country. What he wants is power within it, and oikophobia is an instrument to achieve it by delegitimizing those he thinks already have it. He wants to replace one ruling class, as he sees it, with another – his own.

The Aztecs had asked their host, the lord of Culhuacán, whether he would give his daughter as a bride for their chief. He agreed, believing she would be greatly honored as queen; however, to his horror they killed and flayed her as a sacrifice to their deity Xipe Totec.

Aztec religion practiced human sacrifice, understanding it to be both a form of oblation to the gods and a means of deification for the victims. The crucifixion therefore made a certain kind of sense by analogy and the cross was thus incorporated into this sacrificial narrative. Nahua (Aztec) converts could comprehend a crucified god, self-offered to a yet-higher deity.

The Aztecs were right to believe the gods must be appeased, to offer them human blood every day in order to keep the universe from sinking back into chaos. We long since ceased to believe in the gods, and we no longer offer them sacrifices. Yet the world is still here. No doubt. Only we no longer have the good luck to know why it does not collapse on the spot.

In pursuit of this goal, the state curriculum encouraged teachers to lead their students in a series of indigenous songs, chants, and affirmations, including the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” which appealed directly to the Aztec gods. Students clapped and chanted to the deity Tezkatlipoka—whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism—asking him for the power to become “warriors” for “social justice.” As the chant came to a climax, students performed a supplication for “liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization,” after which they asked the gods for the power of “critical consciousness.”30

In pursuit of this goal, the state curriculum encouraged teachers to lead their students in a series of indigenous songs, chants, and affirmations, including the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” which appealed directly to the Aztec gods. Students clapped and chanted to the deity Tezkatlipoka—whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism—asking him for the power to become “warriors” for “social justice.” As the chant came to a climax, students performed a supplication for “liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization,” after which they asked the gods for the power of “critical consciousness.

But an even more tragic paradox sullied the New World dream and made it impossible to begin life afresh under a new sky. For the high cultures that were already established in Mexico, Central America, and the Andes were not in any sense primitive or new, still less did they represent more acceptable human ideals than those the Old World cultures had put forward. The conquistadors of Mexico and Peru found a native population so rigidly regimented, so completely deprived of initiative, that in Mexico, as soon as their king, Montezuma, was captured and unable to give orders they offered little or no overt resistance to the invaders. Here, in short, in the 'New' world was the same institutional complex that had shackled civilization since its beginnings in Mesopotamia and Egypt: slavery, caste, war, divine kingship, and even the religious sacrifice of human victims on altars-sometimes as with the Aztecs on an appalling scale. Politically speaking, Western imperialism was carrying coals to Newcastle.

War for the Aztecs was thus not a description of a situation in which there were only two opposites but was the one and eternal order itself, supremely right and supremely acceptable because it carried no possibility of a negation. A people with this belief will readily accept human sacrifice as the end for which all wars are waged. They can even be led, through deepening piety and the increase of superstitious terrors, to draw out the drama of human sacrifice until, in its acceleration, it could become self-sustaining.

Aztecs had not only failed to repress the eating of enemy dead, they were practicing a state-sponsored form of human sacrifice and cannibalism on a scale never rivaled before or since.

The Vikings of Trelleborg, the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan, and the Benin of West Africa are separated by great expanses of time and geography. They share almost nothing in common except a particularly bloody form of paganism—a willingness to sacrifice fellow human beings, even children, not just to appease their gods but also to maintain a social order through the control of anxiety and the deployment of ritual violence. But they also had this in common: their encounters with Christianity eventually brought an end to their pagan religions, and in this they were not unique.

As Cortés soon discovered, the extreme violence and depravity of Aztec civilization was based on a cosmology that demanded ritual human sacrifice and cannibalism on a massive scale.

Cortés was the product of a European civilization that had, by virtue of its ancient Christian faith, long ago eradicated the kind of barbaric human sacrifices he found right at the center of Aztec imperial power,

You’re implying Christianity is just some kind of . . . repackaged sun worship!” “Not at all. Christianity did not borrow only from sun worship. The ritual of Christian canonization is taken from the ancient ‘god-making’ rite of Euhemerus. The practice of ‘god-eating’—that is, Holy Communion—was borrowed from the Aztecs. Even the concept of Christ dying for our sins is arguably not exclusively Christian; the self-sacrifice of a young man to absolve the sins of his people appears in the earliest tradition of the Quetzalcoatl.

To show how wide-spread was the custom of human sacrifices, we may quote the list of nations adopting it, as given in the work Indo-Aryans, by Rajendralala Mitra. This includes the "Phœnicians, Carthaginians, Druids, Scythians, Greeks, Trojans, Romans, Cyclops, Lamiæ, Sestrygons, Syrens, Cretans, Cyprians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Jews, Aztecs, Khonds, Toltecs, Tezcaucans, Sucas, Peruvians, Africans, Mongols, Dyaks, Chinese, Japanese, Ashantis, Yucatans, Hindus." He adds--"The Persians were, perhaps, the only nation of ancient times that did not indulge in human sacrifices.

Brilliant. And how do you know he’s a saint?” “He’s got a halo?” “Excellent, and does that golden halo remind you of anything?” Hitzrot broke into a smile. “Yeah! Those Egyptian things we studied last term. Those . . . um . . . sun disks!” “Thank you, Hitzrot. Go back to sleep.” Langdon turned back to the class. “Halos, like much of Christian symbology, were borrowed from the ancient Egyptian religion of sun worship. Christianity is filled with examples of sun worship.” “Excuse me?” the girl in front said. “I go to church all the time, and I don’t see much sun worshiping going on!” “Really? What do you celebrate on December twenty-fifth?” “Christmas. The birth of Jesus Christ.” “And yet according to the Bible, Christ was born in March, so what are we doing celebrating in late December?” Silence. Langdon smiled. “December twenty-fifth, my friends, is the ancient pagan holiday of sol invictus—Unconquered Sun—coinciding with the winter solstice. It’s that wonderful time of year when the sun returns, and the days start getting longer.” Langdon took another bite of apple. “Conquering religions,” he continued, “often adopt existing holidays to make conversion less shocking. It’s called transmutation. It helps people acclimatize to the new faith. Worshipers keep the same holy dates, pray in the same sacred locations, use a similar symbology . . . and they simply substitute a different god.” Now the girl in front looked furious. “You’re implying Christianity is just some kind of . . . repackaged sun worship!” “Not at all. Christianity did not borrow only from sun worship. The ritual of Christian canonization is taken from the ancient ‘god-making’ rite of Euhemerus. The practice of ‘god-eating’—that is, Holy Communion—was borrowed from the Aztecs. Even the concept of Christ dying for our sins is arguably not exclusively Christian; the self-sacrifice of a young man to absolve the sins of his people appears in the earliest tradition of the Quetzalcoatl.” The girl glared. “So, is anything in Christianity original?” “Very little in any organized faith is truly original. Religions are not born from scratch. They grow from one another. Modern religion is a collage . . . an assimilated historical record of man’s quest to understand the divine.

The Aztecs, it is often alluded and condemned, sacrificed human bodies to keep the Sun ongoing. Western modernity sacrifices (and it is accepted) whatever is needed to keep Civilization ongoing.

It is quite likely that a medieval European would decry our own culture in such terms for its failure to venerate the Blessed Virgin with sufficient fervor. Indeed, a wellbred Aztec would doubtless find us odd and emotionally stunted in our deplorable lack of enthusiasm for massive orgies of human sacrifice. We must therefore ask, in good cultural relativist fashion, whether Kellert is merely glorifying his own intense prejudices by describing them as human universals.

Fortunately for readers and writers alike, human nature guarantees that willing subjects will never be in short supply. Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day when their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses-- the days of the interviews-- are over. And still they say yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.

When I consider the ghastly orders obeyed by underlings of Columbus, or of Aztec priests supervising human sacrifices, or of senile Chinese bureaucrats wishing to silence unarmed, peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square only three years ago as I write, I have to wonder if obedience isn’t the basic flaw in most of humankind.

Another native German Heinrich, Heinrich Böll, a great writer, and I became friends even though we had once been corporals in opposing armies. I asked him once what he believed to be the basic flaw in the character of Germans, and he replied “obedience.” When I consider the ghastly orders obeyed by underlings of Columbus, or of Aztec priests supervising human sacrifices, or of senile Chinese bureaucrats wishing to silence unarmed, peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square only three years ago as I write, I have to wonder if obedience isn’t the basic flaw in most of humankind.