On Ritual Human Sacrifice
Ritual human sacrifice in Mesoamerica
Last month I visited Monte Alban, a stunning Zapotec archeological site in Oaxaca, Mexico. The elaborate organization of the city, the geometry of the ruins reflecting Zapotec cosmology, or the stunning views from the top of the mountain were not what I thought about the most. I was thinking about the fact that their societies prominently featured ceremonial and religious killings of humans, a practice widespread in the Mesoamerican region for thousands of years before the Europeans colonized the region. Climbing the stairs of the steep pyramids at Monte Alban, I could not stop thinking about Los Danzantes, the “dancing” men carved in stone, believed to be leaders of conquered regions that were sacrificed ritually. Bent over backward like wet noodles, occasional sprinkles of blood carved in the stone to make it clear why their faces seem in such agony. These elaborate rituals involved cleaning and “beautifying” the victims, before killing and carving their hearts out to present them to the Gods. Eating the flesh of the sacrificed humans was also common. Crowds gathered to sing songs and dance, as priests and elites at the top of the pyramids carved out hearts and threw what remained of the bodies down the pyramids.
Monte Alban
My own cultural competencies allow me to relate to such narratives in two ways. Conjuring images of Mel Gibson’s Apocalipto, my first reaction is moral indignation — this a savage brutality! How could they kill people like this? Don’t they feel bad for the victims? The second reaction is to find it… kinda funny. You know, like Quentin Tarantino or Marquis de Sade are funny. Like the Bride chopping 88 people down with a Hatori Hanzo sword is funny, or like using a crucifix as a dildo while moaning obcenities is funny. It’s funny because it is wrong, because it is transgressive. But neither helps me understand — it’s either bad and wrong, or kinda funny because it is bad and wrong. Neither takes me closer to understanding why human ritual sacrifice was so normalized in Mesoamerican cultures?
I’m no expert. I’ve seen a few YouTube videos (here, here, and here), read a few Wikipedia pages, and I think I’m getting the gist on the main explanations out there. It’s all very rational. It’s all very functionalist. The main explanation is religion. Mesoamerican cultures had creation myths which portrayed their Gods as having sacrificed themselves, or their blood, to create the world and humans, and that humans are in turn indebted to sacrifice themselves to the Gods. To give blood debts. Otherwise, the world may be destroyed — in fact human sacrifice is the only thing that keeps the world spinning! Ok, brainwashed cult-type of explanation… maybe true? But I don’t buy it. Religion may explain what sustains the practice, a “sacrifice a few so the rest don’t die“ logic. But it cannot explain why it is that such practice came to dominate these regions so prominently! Not every religion mandates human sacrifices — why did this one have it as a central tenant?
Few other explanations have to do with other practical reasons, like population control or supplementing for lack of proteins in their diet by ritualistic cannibalism, the latter of which has been largely rejected nowadays. And then there is the political explanation. The Aztecs were known for their particular penchant for human sacrifices, which was getting to grand proportions as they were conquering the region. In this case, human sacrifice is seen as a tool of war, an imagined deal with the Gods that escalates in sacrifices, or as a scare tactic to shock enemies into submission. Ok, also possible, all of these, but still…my itch is not scratched. I still don’t know what allows someone to stand at the bottom of that pyramid and sing songs and celebrate in joy every warm heart carved out someone’s body. Why? What sort of social and psychological needs are being fulfilled with these rituals?
These mainstream explanations are complicated by many not-so-known facts. I was surprised to learn that many people who were sacrificed were willing and happy to do so! Most of them died in celebration! Of course, there were prisoners of war and slaves bought specifically for the sacrifice — these were inglorious deaths, perhaps even barbaric considering the violence involved. But for most it was an honor! There are stories of disappointed and distressed people when the colonizing Spaniards “saved“ them from ritual sacrifice. Many families enjoyed an higher status after a member was sacrificed. Moreover, the spectators at these rituals were not idle, but engaged in a self-harming ritual called blood letting. This involved stabbing your ears, tongue, and even genitals, to please the Gods. Collective self-harming was central in these rituals. Such details are largely missing in popular depictions of these rituals.
My favorite ritual has to be the incarnation and killing of the God Tezcatlipoca. Every year, a young man of a low status (slave or prisoner of war) was chosen to be the incarnation of the God Tezcatlipoca. He would then spend a year living among the people, treated as the literal Tezcatlipoca, with a personal harem of four women, trained in the high arts and playing the flute. From slave to God, with an platform to speak truth to power as someone with a lived experience of the oppressed. At the end of the year, the man-God would climb the pyramid, break his flute, and give his body up for sacrifice. Then, a new Tezcatlipoca would be chosen, and the cycle repeats. What a life!
Depiction of blood letting
Los Danzantes at Monte Alban are a great canvas to play out some explanations of this practice. The main interpretation of Los Danzantes is that they were enemy leaders, captured and sacrificed to the Gods. It is an interpretation that maintains the brutality of the practice, and depicts it as outwardly directed (to a conquered enemy) rather than inwardly directed (as is the case with bloodletting). Archeologist Javier Urcid has an alternative explanation. He think that Los Danzantes are actually elites from Monte Alban, depicted in blood letting, as they pierce their ears, tongues, and penises. Now we’re talking! This makes so much more sense to me, and probably to anyone who for a second tries to put themselves in the position of these people. Every civilization glorifies itself, and while power is something to take pride in, depicting your hurt enemy in your temples seems kind of weird and definitely gauche. What are the monuments with which the USA glorifies itself? Is it the dead body of Osama bin Laden, floating in the sea for the fish to eat? The sodomized dead body of Muammar Gaddafi in the desert? Or hung Saddam Hussein? No! It is the presidents on Mount Rushmore, it is the Lincoln Memorial! Why would the people of Monte Alban depict conquered and enemies in their temples? It seem to me that this is nothing but European projections, who could perhaps easily comprehend why one might sacrifice an enemy, but not why one might self-harm or sacrifice themselves.
Before we get closer to an understanding of human sacrifice rituals we need to abandon moralizations of the practice. We may also do good to abandon functionalist explanations. I believe I have an alternative explanation, which hopefully does both, and hopefully gets closer to an empathetic understanding of ritual human sacrifice. One that transforms the inhumane into humane.
A reinterpretation: Death and Love
I think that this practice is an extreme manifestation of the Death Drive. In an earlier blog, I explored the idea that the drive to community, the drive towards Love, expresses itself psychologically as a desire for death, i.e. the Death Drive. Psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein theorizes of two opposing psychological drives. The first is the Ego Drive, the urge to differentiate ourselves, to self-preservation and the maintaining of the ego. The second tendency is one to assimilate or dissolve, a Death Drive which opposes the Ego Drive:
The instinct for preservation of the species, a reproductive drive, expresses itself psychologically in the tendency to dissolve and assimilate (transformation of the I to the We)… ‘Where love reigns, the ego, the ominous despot, dies’. When one is in love, the blending of the ego in the beloved is the strongest affirmation of the self.
- Spielrein, Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being, 1994, p.174
The Death Drive is not a drive toward death — it is a drive to an Eternal Self. This drive expresses itself biologically, in the drive to reproduce (eternal biological self), as well as socially, in ritual practices and cultural production (eternal social self). In my old blog, I applied this framework to explain Yugoslav labor camps, Macedonian wedding rituals, and the horny voraphilic-adjacent thoughts of French writer Annie Ernaux. Here, I want to use it to explain ritual human sacrifice in Mesoamerica.
Love and Death are dangerously close to each other. Self-harming is a common way to show love and allegiance to a community, like kamikaze pilots or suicide bombers, who will die in service of their community. Many religions practice self-harming, like the Christian self-flagellation or like the Bekteshi Muslim community in the Balkans, which welcomes spring by piercing their cheeks. These Love-Death urges manifest in individuals that are outside some religion or ideology, so we cannot simply handwave them as “brainwashing.” Serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer claimed that he never killed the victims “for reasons of hate” and that he ”hated no one.“ He said that he found them “physically attractive”, and wanted to control and “possess them permanently.“ He claimed that the killing was never the point, and he found it the least satisfactory part, but that it was a means to an end. The end being an eternal unification with a beloved. Similar is the case of German cannibal Armin Meiwes who killed and devoured the flesh of Bernd Brandes, who agreed (!) to be voluntarily eaten by Meiwes. This cannibalistic urge, so adjacent to Love, can often be directed inwards too, like one unnamed Toronto man who checked himself into a psychiatric hospital because he was getting sexually aroused by “fantasizing about being consumed and destroyed by a very large, dominating woman.”
It is easy to dismiss these people as insane, to pathologize them and handwave uncomfortable thoughts. To think of them as brutal and barbaric, just like we do to the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations. But nothing human is alien to me! When I encounter some shocking or extremely insane behavior, I like to ask myself: how does this exist in myself, even if so moderate that it cannot be recognized as the same behavior? I think many others will recognize themselves in the following urge I have: when I see a cute puppy or baby, that lovely feeling can often turn into a semi-aggressive desire to squeeze-hug or pinch them. This past December I went to my friend Ray’s wedding in San Diego, where for the first time I saw his baby boy, no more than 2 years old. He was so cute that a sudden urge to bite his cute little calf came over me. The root of this urge was not a wish to harm him, but an extreme manifestation of love. Perhaps what can explain the repugnant stories of Jeffrey Dahmer and Armin Meiwes is an extreme manifestation of this Love urge, accompanied by some true pathology of psychopathic lack of empathy, that allows it to escalate to actual Death.
“Who am I for my community?“ by Adriana de la Rosa, Museum of Contemporary Arts, Oaxaca
I invite the reader to see ritual human sacrifice in Mesoamerica as an extreme manifestation of this Death Drive, and a celebration of Communal Love. A ritualization of the Urge to Merge that results in a rave of Love and Death, with shrieks echoing as the crowd erupts in song and pain, dying a little by stabbing their own bodies, as they celebrate the literal swallowing of individual members into their collective. Spielrein says the Death Drive is toward a dissolution into a community. I think the Native Mesoamericans institutionalized rituals that very literally did this, with blood gushing everywhere, connecting everyone into one Big Us. And blood is liminal, we are born in blood and we die in blood, it is the perfect medium to dissolve individual boundaries and transform them into a collective. Buddhism teaches us that the self is an illusion, that individuals are nothing but a temporary drop of water, accidentally leaving the ocean before falling down into the Primordial Oneness once again. The rituals of these civilizations taught people this lesson very literally and viscerally. This was a nation not of Armin Meiweses, but of Bernd Brandeses!
“Where love reigns, the ego, the ominous despot, dies.“ says Spielrein. In light of this, ritual human sacrifice cannot be interpreted as barbaric and brutal, at least not from the perspective of the participants in these rituals. To them, it is a release from that Ominous Despot, a release from the illusion of the self. Dying for Love! During my visit in Oaxaca’s Museum of Contemporary Arts, I saw a work by Adriana de la Rosa which asks: “who am I for my community”?
For the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations I guess the answer is: anything and everything!
