Deconstructing the Aztec human sacrifice

Jansen, M.E.R.G.N.; Pérez Jiménez, G.A.; Innemée, K.C.

This paper argues that the term ‘human sacrifice’ in the case of Ancient Mexican cultures is a tendentious colonial misnomer, which has become an automatic description for any act of killing in ancient Mesoamerica and still haunts the studies of Indigenous religions. Tracing its origin in the early colonial accounts one finds that this denomination (as ‘sacrifice-to-the-devil’ in combination with cannibalism) was used by the Spaniards in a systematic propagandistic fasion as part of the demonisation of the Aztec and other Mesoamerican cultures with the aim of justifying the colonial invasion.

Many descriptions are evidently no eye-witness testimonies but based on hearsay and imagination. In a number of cases it is even doubtful that people were killed. In other cases, the killings, though maybe caried out in a ritualised context, seem not to have been actually first and foremost ‘sacrifices’, but rather forms of death penalty, execution, political murder or other instances...

This paper argues that the term ‘human sacrifice’ in the case of Ancient Mexican cultures is a tendentious colonial misnomer, which has become an automatic description for any act of killing in ancient Mesoamerica and still haunts the studies of Indigenous religions. Tracing its origin in the early colonial accounts one finds that this denomination (as ‘sacrifice-to-the-devil’ in combination with cannibalism) was used by the Spaniards in a systematic propagandistic fasion as part of the demonisation of the Aztec and other Mesoamerican cultures with the aim of justifying the colonial invasion.

Many descriptions are evidently no eye-witness testimonies but based on hearsay and imagination. In a number of cases it is even doubtful that people were killed. In other cases, the killings, though maybe caried out in a ritualised context, seem not to have been actually first and foremost ‘sacrifices’, but rather forms of death penalty, execution, political murder or other instances of (in principle secular) homicide.

In order to construct this hostile image, the colonial accounts misrepresented socially sanctioned killings, confusing them with religious acts such as ancestor worship and specific funerary customs, as well as with the frequent self sacrifice (bloodletting).

There is an important though often overlooked parallel with the contemporaneous accusations of “witchcraft” against innocent women in European societies. But where modern scholarly consensus holds that the allegations of the witch craze were unwaranted, in the case of the “human sacrifice’ contemporary studies (also our own) have often still reproduced the terminology of the colonial demonisation. After 500 years it is time for a decolonial historical critique.

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