[Aztlan] Hard evidence of Maya human sacrifice

[Michael Finley]

I think it was Erich Fromm who  wrote that a society is often most 
critical of  things in other societies that  reflect  unconscious fears 
about their own.  Human sacrifice is socially sanctioned taking of life 
in what is believed to be society's interest.  Someday,  the ways we do 
this now --- capital punishment,   military posturing etc.,  will 
probably look pretty gruesome and incomprehensible.

If Gibson does, as someone on the list suggested,  portray Maya 
sacrifices as evidence of moral collapse in a decadent civilization, he 
almost certainly misunderstands it as a cultural phenomenon (though the 
escalation of violence in the Late Classic --  which despite the 
missionaries seems to be Gibson's main inspiration -- just might  be an 
example of the kind of  dysfunction that does seem to infect 
civilizations in deep trouble).   But  I  think  it has to be kept in 
mind that historical fiction  usually conflates and distorts cultural 
and historical facts.  Anyone who knows to much  is apt to be 
disappointed; suspension of disbelief is required. 

Film epics like Apocalypto  are modern myth-making, and like all myth, 
they are as much about present hopes and fears as about the material 
they rework and retell.  I haven't seen the film (it hasn't played in 
Canada yet), but from what I've heard, it reminds me of another recent 
epic I enjoyed,  Gladiator.  As history, it got at least as much wrong 
as Apocalypto seem to, and its portrayal of gladiatorial contests  
(another state-sanctioned form of killing) was extremely violent and 
gory. But  I still liked it as fiction, and my ability to empathize with 
the "good guys" was almost certainly heightened by the fact that the 
theme of the decline of Rome at the end of the Antonnine era was a 
metaphor for fears about our own future. And despite  historical 
errors,  the recreation of the Roman forum in all its glory was worth 
the price of admission.  

In a way, I  guess I'm pleased that the Maya have become a legitimate 
source of material for modern myth makers. The fact that we seem ready 
to embrace the Maya in stories we tell ourselves about ourselves --- 
that the Maya collapse has joined the fall of Rome as a cautionary tale 
--- suggests we are making them our cultural ancestors.  Of course, I 
reserve the right to despise Gibson's myth ---  For example, if the 
message is that the decline of  civilizations is due to  moral decadence 
that can only be reversed by adopting  a  narrow version of Christian 
morals, I want no part of it, for us any more than for the Pre-conquest 
Maya.

Michael Finley 


Jorge Pérez de Lara wrote:

>The need that many listeros appear to feel to "hide under the rug" the 
>reality of human sacrifice among the Maya smacks me as an attempt to 
>"sanitize" the Maya and their culture for modern Western consumption. 
>Regardless of whether the volumes of sacrifices were large of small, it 
>is clear from much evidence that the Maya (as indeed most if not all 
>Mesoamerican peoples) regularly practiced it. Personally, this does not 
>bother me one bit, as it in no way detracts from achievements such as 
>their independent invention of writing, of zero and of positional 
>notation or from their great advances in astronomy, mathematics and art. 
>Human sacrifice was equally practiced among the ancient Chinese, the 
>Egyptians, the Celts and among many other (if indeed not all) ancient 
>civilizations. Didn't the Romans go through sprees of mass crucifixions?
>
>So why has the West's fascination/revulsion towards the gory aspects of 
>human sacrifice appears to have morbidly stuck with regard to 
>Mesoamerican cultures? Could there be no more to this than the needs of 
>cultural arrogance to assert a very debatable moral superiority? We 
>should strive to comprehend what the belief contexts were in which 
>certain practices happened and abstain from emitting moral judgments of 
>them: we are far too removed in time and culture to apply our own 
>criteria of what is acceptable or not based upon a poor and fragmentary 
>understanding of the mores of people who lived in a radically different 
>perception of reality. Ultimately, condemning or absolving an ancient 
>civilization is an exercise in futility. What we owe them is an 
>intellectually honest effort to try to understand them.
>
>Sorry for the rant.
>
>Jorge
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