Spanish only, unfortunately. Video shows the ruins of Zultepec / Tecoaque (see below).
"New research suggests an Aztec-allied town ceremonially disfigured the bodies of captive Spaniards during one of the worst defeats in the Spanish Conquest of 1519-21, experts said Wednesday." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"The heads of the captive Spanish women were strung up on skull racks alongside those of men. An analysis of the bones revealed the women were pregnant, and in pre-Hispanic practice that may have qualified them as “warriors.” Another sacrificial offering included one woman’s body that was cut in half near the remains of a dsimembered child of 3 or 4."
Note: "The National Institute of Anthropology and History said the offerings were excavated at the Zultepec-Tecoaque site just east of Mexico City. Zultepec was an Aztec-allied town that in 1520 captured a convoy of about 15 male Spaniards, 50 women and 10 children, 45 foot soldiers who included Cubans of African and indigenous descent, and about 350 allies from indigenous groups in what is now Mexico. All were apparently sacrificed over the space of months."
Comment: The Eucharist or Holy Communion is clearly an act of symbolic cannibalism, so it's not too surprising that the Romans, acting on vague reports of Christian rituals, would have accused the new cult of practicing actual cannibalism.
The negative Roman view of the early Christians was partly based on distorted rumors about their practices. For instance, the Christians were accused of incest because they called each other "brother and sister." And the charges of cannibalism were especially repulsive.
The Romans would have associated the stories of how Christians ate the flesh and drank the blood of their god with sieges, barbaric eastern cults and legends from Greek mythology: the Thyestean Feast, for instance, in which Atreus killed Thyestes' sons, cooked them and served them to their unknowing father. The stories aren't the same, of course, but the difference between the Communion and real cannibalism would have been lost on the practical-minded Romans.
In this case, it's hard to blame the Romans because the new religion did practice cannibalism. Symbolic cannibalism. And it still does.
Christians do what they can to obfuscate this strange practice, but it's hard to explain away the real significance of what they're doing. When Christians take communion, they are participating in an act of ritual magic in which the bread and wine are miraculously transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ. If that isn't symbolic cannibalism, I don't know what is.
Ritual cannibalism, whether it's symbolic or real, is designed to produce a spiritual transformation. For example, warrior societies often believed -- and some still believe -- that they could absorb the power of their enemies by eating them. In the same way, the follower of a god could literally absorb the spirit and power of the god through an act of sacred cannibalism.
The Communion, a ritual with ancient pagan roots, is surrounded by a fog of mystery and mystical jargon designed to obscure its real meaning, and some theologians, in typical fashion, defend it by claiming that it simply can't be understood. According to New Advent, for instance, "the Church honors the Eucharist as one of her most exalted mysteries, since for sublimity and incomprehensibility it yields in nothing to the allied mysteries of the Trinity and incarnation." [Emphasis added]
In other words, Christianity is a mystery religion.
The connection between the Eucharist and cannibalism is so clear that theologians are compelled to try to explain it away using doubletalk, hairsplitting and paradox to deny the obvious:
"If Catholics believe the Eucharist really is the body and blood of Christ, then they believe they are eating human flesh and drinking human blood," according to The Catholic Thing (2011). "But while holy Communion does involve eating human flesh and blood, it is not true that it is cannibalistic."
In other words, cannibalism is not cannibalism, which, by definition, is the eating of human flesh by another human being.
The article goes on to make several arguments against the idea that the Communion is actually a form of ritual or symbolic cannibalism, but none of them are very convincing. For instance, cannibals supposedly only eat the dead, but "the Eucharist is life." Therefore, the Communion can't be cannibalistic. Likewise, "the Eucharist is the whole body and blood of Jesus Christ [but] cannibals only take part of their victims." Apparently, you're not a cannibal if you eat the living and clean your plate.
Most of the arguments here are based on mysticism. For example, the Communion isn't cannibalistic because "when a Catholic receives the Eucharist, he is receiving not just flesh but glorified flesh, a resurrected and transfigured 'super body' that foreshadows the new reality of a new Heaven and a new earth." I'm not sure that this is much of an argument, though. It makes it sound like the Eucharist isn't just cannibalism, but the glorified cannibalism of a super-body with transcendental powers.
I could go on with this, but why bother? Eating human flesh and drinking human blood is obviously cannibalistic even if the flesh and blood are purely symbolic. The truth is that the Eucharist is an act of theophagy -- "feeding on a god" -- with roots in very ancient, pre-Christian fertility rituals. Theophagy is "the act of eating one's god, either literally or symbolically," according to the Free Dictionary. And millions of Christians eat their god on a regular basis around the world.
It's not surprising to find a ritual like this at the very heart of a religion which originated as a mystery cult in Hellenized Israel.
Notes: "Around a hundred bodies have been found in ... Irish bogs to date, some male, some female, and those of children too. Some were thought to be there by accident, perhaps as a result of falling into the bog and drowning. Others were considered to be formal (and some not so formal) burials, and others appear to be rather more sinister." Source: Irish Central.
The ritual sacrifice dramatized in this video shows the execution of Old Croghnan Man, a bog body currently on display in the National Museum of Ireland, which, among other things, has an exhibit called Kingship & Sacrifice. According to the museum's website, "The exhibition is centred on a new theory that connects human sacrifice with sovereignty and kingship rituals during the Iron Age. Research has indicated that other material connected with these rituals include: items of regalia; items associated with equestrian [horse] procession; weapons; feasting utensils; boundary markers; items associated with corn and milk production, such as quern stones and butter deposits known as ‘bog butter’."
One possible human sacrifice from this period is known as Tollund Man, "a naturally mummified corpse of a man who lived during the 4th century BC, during the period characterised in Scandinavia as the Pre-Roman Iron Age. He was found in 1950, preserved as a bog body, on the Jutland peninsula. The man's physical features were so well-preserved that he was mistaken at the time of discovery for a recent murder victim. Twelve years before Tollund Man's discovery, another bog body, Elling Woman, had been found in the same bog." (Wikipedia)
I think this describes Tollund Man, but I'm not sure.
"Scholars tend to agree that Tollund Man’s killing was some kind of ritual sacrifice to the gods—perhaps a fertility offering. To the people who put him there, a bog was a special place. While most of Northern Europe lay under a thick canopy of forest, bogs did not. Half earth, half water and open to the heavens, they were borderlands to the beyond. To these people, will-o’-the-wisps—flickering ghostly lights that recede when approached—weren’t the effects of swamp gas caused by rotting vegetation. They were fairies. The thinking goes that Tollund Man’s tomb may have been meant to ensure a kind of soggy immortality for the sacrificial object." Source: Smithsonian.
"'At an appointed time all tribes meet ….. in a forest consecrated by their ancestors, surrounded by fear, sacred from the dawn of time. There, on behalf of those assembled, they celebrate the commencement of their barbaric cult with a human sacrifice.'
"This is how the Roman historian Tacitus described the situation among the Semnones, a Germanic tribe, in the 1st century AD. This could provide the explanation of what happened to the woman from Huldremose, Tollund Man and Grauballe Man. More than a hundred bog bodies have been found in Denmark, which date from the period 800 BC to 200 AD. The cause of death has only been established in a small number of cases, where people have been strangled, hung or had their throats cut. Like the woman from Huldremose, the bodies were carefully placed in a bog afterwards, which points toward a sacrifice or another ritual act rather than an attack." Source: National Museum of Denmark.
Closed captions helpful.
"For Europeans dating as far back as the Neolithic period 6,000 years ago, bogs were both resources and possibly ominous supernatural portals, according to Ulla Mannering, an expert in ancient textiles at the National Museum of Denmark." Source: National Geographic (2014).
"The bogs' peat, which could be burned for heating homes, was valuable in tree-scarce Denmark, and an ore called bog iron was made into tools and weapons.
"Among prehistoric people, 'when you take things, you also offer things,' said Mannering.
"This may be why the Danish villagers would deposit 'gifts' of clothes, old shoes, slaughtered animals, battered weapons, and, for a period of 500 years, people into the black abyss of the bogs. (Related: 'Medieval Christian Book Discovered in Ireland Bog.')"
"One hundred ritually sacrificed guinea pigs dressed up in jewellery have been discovered at an Inca archaeological site in Peru. The rodents were found to have been adorned with earrings and necklaces, and some of them wrapped up in tiny rugs—the first time such a find has been made." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"A mass sacrifice at a 15th century archaeological site in Peru saw the ritual killing of over 140 children and over 200 llamas, according to a new study. This is the largest known mass sacrifice of children -- and of llamas -- in the New World." Source: Science Daily.
"...This study reports the findings of excavations between 2011 and 2016 that revealed hundreds of bodies buried in an area of approximately 700 square meters. The human remains were almost entirely children, and the animal remains, all juvenile, were identified as most likely llamas, but possibly alpacas. Anatomical and genetic evidence indicates the children included boys and girls between 5 and 14 years old. Cut marks transecting the sternums and displaced ribs suggest both the children and llamas may have had their chests cut open, possibly during ritual removal of the heart."
According to National Geographic, "[t]he investigators believe all of the human and animal victims were ritually killed in a single event, based on evidence from a dried mud layer found in the eastern, least disturbed part of the 7,500-square-foot site. They believe the mud layer once covered the entire sandy dune where the ritual took place, and it was disturbed during the preparation of the burial pits and the subsequent sacrifice event."
Researchers believe that this sacrifice, conducted by the pre-Inca Chimu people, may have been conducted in a response to an "El Nino event." (New York Times)
According to Live Science, "... heavy rainfall and flooding from that year's El Niño weather pattern may have prompted Chimú leaders to order the sacrifice, but without more evidence, we'll likely never know the real reason, said study co-researcher John Verano, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans."
Video from 2018. As for the music, there's nothing like soft jazz to accompany photos of ancient skeletons.
"Dozens of 'very unique' ancient burials have been discovered on the northern Peruvian coast, many of which appear to contain valuable metal objects, whimsical ceramic pots, and—in some cases—additional human limbs." Source: National Geographic (2018).
"According to Victor Campaña, current director of the Las Lomas Rescue Project, more than 50 burials belonging to the [pre-Inca] Virú culture have been discovered in the town of Huanchaco, seven miles north of the regional capital of Trujillo."
Note: These people were probably sacrificial victims. "...a preliminary study indicates that many sets of remains show evidence of trauma, including cut marks and blunt-force injury ... At this time, the archaeologists can only speculate about the motivation behind the unusual Virú burials."
"The blood eagle is a ritualized method of execution, detailed in late skaldic poetry. According to the two instances mentioned in the Sagas, the victim (in both cases a member of a royal family) was placed prone, the ribs severed from the spine with a sharp tool and the lungs pulled through the opening to create a pair of 'wings'. There is a continuing debate about whether the ritual was a literary invention, a mistranslation of the original texts or an authentic historical practice." Source: Wikipedia.
The Blood Eagle was a particularly nasty form of sacrificial execution, but did the Vikings actually put people to death this way? As far as I can tell, the only primary documentary evidence for the practice comes from sources such as the Orkneyinga Saga, the Heimskringla, the Tale of Ragnar's Sons, and a handful of references in other texts.
Note: The Tale of Ragnar's Sons describes (among other things) the execution of King Aella of Northumbria, a scene also depicted in Vikings.
Jarl Borg in Vikings is an entirely fictional character, I believe. Aella, on the other hand, was apparently a real king, though the sources for his life are limited and very little is known about his reign. According to some accounts, he was executed by the Vikings after they invaded Northumbria following the king's execution of the legendary Ragnar Lodbrok, another figure who may or may not have actually existed. How Aella died is a matter of conjecture, though, because the sources contradict each other:
"While Norse sources claim that Ragnar's sons tortured Ælla to death with a blood eagle, Anglo-Saxon accounts maintain that he died in battle, at York, on 21 March 867." (Wikipedia)
"Well into the last century, most historians of the Vikings accepted that the blood eagle was deeply unpleasant but very real. According to the eminent medievalist J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, its possible victims were not only Ælla of Northumbria but also Halfdán, the son of Harald Finehair (or Fairhair), king of Norway, and the Irish King Maelgualai [Mael Gualae] of Munster; in some interpretations, it is supposed that even Edmund the Martyr may have suffered the same fate."
One possibility is that the Blood Eagle was a real execution method sensationalized by later writers. For instance, the Welsh scholar and translator, Gwyn Jones, argues in A History of the Vikings (1968) that this "inhuman rite" was "unhappily no fiction ... but owes its eminence in pseudo-lore almost entirely to fiction ..." (footnote pp 119-220, 1968 edition)
It's also possible that the Blood Eagle is entirely fictitious. This seems to be the current consensus, but there's a lot of disagreement. Revisionist historians have challenged the idea that the Vikings were just a mob of cruel barbarians wearing horned helmets, but their depictions of "cuddly" Vikings went too far in the other direction. One of the main problems with our picture of the Vikings is that much of what we know about them was written by their enemies.
If the Blood Eagle is a literary invention, there's a good chance that this grisly method of execution was dreamed up by Christian writers trying to demonize the pagan Vikings. According to Wikipedia, "[t]here is debate about whether the blood eagle was historically practiced, or whether it was a literary device invented by the authors who transcribed the sagas. No contemporary accounts of the ritual exist, and the scant references in the sagas are several hundred years after the Christianization of Scandinavia." Considering the Christians' history of inventing martyr stories set in the Roman Empire, I wouldn't be surprised if they concocted similar atrocity stories about the Vikings.
Video from 2010.
When I first started to research this subject, I assumed there was a high probability that the Blood Eagle was a real thing because the Vikings are thought to have conducted human sacrifices and the Blood Eagle is, in a way, just another form of ritual sacrifice. As it turns out, though, the question of whether the Vikings killed people for religious purposes isn't all that straightforward.
There is some archaeological evidence that the Vikings may have sacrificed humans. For instance, "[a]t Trelleborg [Sweden] a sacrificial site was found from the time before the Viking fortress was erected in 980-81. In five c. 3 metre-deep wells human and animal skeletons were found, together with jewellery and tools. Of the total of five human sacrifices, four were young children aged between 4 and 7. " Source: National Museum of Denmark.
Blood sacrifice, including human sacrifice, was an intrinsic part of pagan religions. The historical sources for Viking human sacrifice are questionable, though, because they all seem to come, once again, from Christian accounts:
According to the National Museum of Denmark, "[t]here are several horrifying accounts of human sacrifices from the Viking period. The German bishop, Thietmar of Merseburg, describes how the Vikings met every nine years at Lejre on Zealand [Denmark] in January 'and offer to their gods 99 people and just as many horses, dogs and hens or hawks, for these should serve them in the kingdom of the dead and atone for their evil deeds.'"
A similar ritual (at a different location) is also depicted in Vikings.
"The German monk Adam of Bremen wrote a similar account in 1072 about the sacrificial tradition at [Gamla Uppsala] in Sweden, where the temple was devoted to Thor, Odin and Frey. Here the Vikings also met every 9 years to ensure the goodwill of the gods. 9 males of all kinds of living creatures were sacrificed in a holy grove nearby. According to Adam of Bremen dogs, horses and humans hung from the trees. The number 9 was apparently of magical significance to the Vikings and was involved in a number of rituals." (National Museum of Denmark)
"There has been extensive debate over whether these accounts were real or simply Christian propaganda."
I wouldn't be shocked to learn that the Vikings actually executed royal prisoners using the Blood Eagle. Even if the descriptions in the sagas were written for entertainment, they may have had some basis in fact. At this point, however, it looks like this particular form of execution was a literary invention derived from the skaldic poems and embellished by later Christian writers in yet another attempt to make the pagans look like cruel and bloodthirsty savages:
"One of the features of a skaldic poem is that it’s incredibly convoluted, like a cryptic crossword puzzle. If you have a reference to what appears to be the Blood Eagle in a skaldic verse, it’s quite likely this is a poetic conceit. Roberta Frank, at Yale, argues that the Blood Eagle is just the idea of a carrion bird scratching at the back of the dead. If you create lots of corpses, you are a very good warrior. That’s what is being referred to. But when later writers made prose stories around these skaldic verses, they seem to have interpreted it literally. So it’s quite likely that there was no such thing as this horrible form of torture, but it grew in the telling." Source: National Geographic (2017).
"For a long time, it was commonly held by Mayanist experts that the 'pacific' Maya of Central America and southern Mexico did not practice human sacrifice. However, as more images and glyphs have come to light and been translated, it appears that the Maya frequently practiced human sacrifice in religious and political contexts." Source: Thought Company.
"...Far to the north, the Aztecs would become famous for holding their victims down on top of temples and cutting out their hearts, offering the still-beating organs to their gods. The Maya did cut the hearts out of their victims, as can be seen in certain images surviving at the Piedras Negras historical site. However, it was much more common for them to decapitate or disembowel their sacrificial victims, or else tie them up and push them down the stone stairs of their temples."
"A tower of human skulls unearthed beneath the heart of Mexico City has raised new questions about the culture of sacrifice in the Aztec Empire after crania of women and children surfaced among the hundreds embedded in the forbidding structure." Source: Reuters (July 2017).
"Archaeologists have found more than 650 skulls caked in lime and thousands of fragments in the cylindrical edifice near the site of the Templo Mayor, one of the main temples in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which later became Mexico City."
Next video shows some of the ruins and artifacts of Templo Mayor. Several documentaries about the temple can be found on YouTube, but most of them are only available in Spanish.
The Aztecs weren't the first MesoAmerican civilization to practice human sacrifice -- the earlier Olmecs are also thought to have butchered people on top of pyramids -- but the Aztecs took the practice to "an unprecedented scale," according to the Ancient History Encyclopedia, which goes on to point out that the early stories about Aztec bloodthirstiness were probably exaggerated by the Spanish in an attempt to justify their own brutality against the natives.
"Blood-Drenched Altars will be a surprising, if not indeed a shocking, revelation to modern readers. For here is contained the key to understanding Mexico. Tracing the history of Mexico from its very beginnings, the author outlines the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Indians under Montezuma and exposes the lie that the Spanish destroyed a flourishing Indian civilization. Rather, this book shows how they ended an Aztec reign of terror over the other Indian tribes, highlighted by human sacrifice and cannibalism on an unprecedented scale--some estimates being 80,000 a year sacrificed and as many as 20,000 at one festival." -- from the back cover of Blood-Drenched Altars.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested not only in getting both sides of the story but in reading history as it was written before political correctness polluted our entire culture. Whether you accept the Catholic version of events or not, there's no doubt that the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice on a massive scale:
"Conducted at specially dedicated temples on the top of large pyramids such as at Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, sacrifices were most often carried out by stretching the victim over a special stone, cutting open the chest and removing the heart using an obsidian or flint knife." (Ancient History Encyclopedia) Next video demonstrates how this could have been done.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the conquistadors and the priests who followed them exaggerated the numbers of Aztec sacrificial victims. After all, it's unlikely that the Spanish actually counted the people being led to the tops of pyramids to have their hearts torn out. But if archaeologists are still digging up "towers of human skulls" in Mexico City, it's obvious that the Aztecs were killing a lot of people. Their brutality against their neighbors was one of the main reasons the Spanish had no trouble defeating the Aztec Empire.
This latest discovery doesn't "cast new light" on the Aztecs. Rather, it confirms once again what we already know about them.
"Buluc Chabtan was the Mayan god [of] war, violence, and sudden death (not to be confused with regular death which had its own deity). People prayed to him for success in war, to avoid sudden death, and just on general principles because you don't want to be on his bad side. Blood was seen as nourishment for the gods and a human life was the ultimate gift to a deity." Source: Thought Company.
"...In Mayan art, Buluc Chabtan is usually portrayed with a thick black line around his eyes and down one cheek. It's also common for him to be in images where he's setting fire to buildings and stabbing people. Sometimes, he is shown stabbing people with a spit which he uses to roast them over a fire. He's often pictured with Ah Puch the Mayan god of Death."
The Eucharist & Cannibalism
Comment: The Eucharist or Holy Communion is clearly an act of symbolic cannibalism, so it's not too surprising that the Romans, acting on vague reports of Christian rituals, would have accused the new cult of practicing actual cannibalism.
The negative Roman view of the early Christians was partly based on distorted rumors about their practices. For instance, the Christians were accused of incest because they called each other "brother and sister." And the charges of cannibalism were especially repulsive.
The Romans would have associated the stories of how Christians ate the flesh and drank the blood of their god with sieges, barbaric eastern cults and legends from Greek mythology: the Thyestean Feast, for instance, in which Atreus killed Thyestes' sons, cooked them and served them to their unknowing father. The stories aren't the same, of course, but the difference between the Communion and real cannibalism would have been lost on the practical-minded Romans.
In this case, it's hard to blame the Romans because the new religion did practice cannibalism. Symbolic cannibalism. And it still does.
Christians do what they can to obfuscate this strange practice, but it's hard to explain away the real significance of what they're doing. When Christians take communion, they are participating in an act of ritual magic in which the bread and wine are miraculously transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ. If that isn't symbolic cannibalism, I don't know what is.
Ritual cannibalism, whether it's symbolic or real, is designed to produce a spiritual transformation. For example, warrior societies often believed -- and some still believe -- that they could absorb the power of their enemies by eating them. In the same way, the follower of a god could literally absorb the spirit and power of the god through an act of sacred cannibalism.
The Communion, a ritual with ancient pagan roots, is surrounded by a fog of mystery and mystical jargon designed to obscure its real meaning, and some theologians, in typical fashion, defend it by claiming that it simply can't be understood. According to New Advent, for instance, "the Church honors the Eucharist as one of her most exalted mysteries, since for sublimity and incomprehensibility it yields in nothing to the allied mysteries of the Trinity and incarnation." [Emphasis added]
In other words, Christianity is a mystery religion.
The connection between the Eucharist and cannibalism is so clear that theologians are compelled to try to explain it away using doubletalk, hairsplitting and paradox to deny the obvious:
"If Catholics believe the Eucharist really is the body and blood of Christ, then they believe they are eating human flesh and drinking human blood," according to The Catholic Thing (2011). "But while holy Communion does involve eating human flesh and blood, it is not true that it is cannibalistic."
In other words, cannibalism is not cannibalism, which, by definition, is the eating of human flesh by another human being.
The article goes on to make several arguments against the idea that the Communion is actually a form of ritual or symbolic cannibalism, but none of them are very convincing. For instance, cannibals supposedly only eat the dead, but "the Eucharist is life." Therefore, the Communion can't be cannibalistic. Likewise, "the Eucharist is the whole body and blood of Jesus Christ [but] cannibals only take part of their victims." Apparently, you're not a cannibal if you eat the living and clean your plate.
Most of the arguments here are based on mysticism. For example, the Communion isn't cannibalistic because "when a Catholic receives the Eucharist, he is receiving not just flesh but glorified flesh, a resurrected and transfigured 'super body' that foreshadows the new reality of a new Heaven and a new earth." I'm not sure that this is much of an argument, though. It makes it sound like the Eucharist isn't just cannibalism, but the glorified cannibalism of a super-body with transcendental powers.
I could go on with this, but why bother? Eating human flesh and drinking human blood is obviously cannibalistic even if the flesh and blood are purely symbolic. The truth is that the Eucharist is an act of theophagy -- "feeding on a god" -- with roots in very ancient, pre-Christian fertility rituals. Theophagy is "the act of eating one's god, either literally or symbolically," according to the Free Dictionary. And millions of Christians eat their god on a regular basis around the world.
It's not surprising to find a ritual like this at the very heart of a religion which originated as a mystery cult in Hellenized Israel.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Catholic Church, Christianity, Commentary, Religion, Ritual Sacrifice, Videos | Permalink